Logos shapes belief. (Logos is the form of belief.)
Pathos hones desire. (Pathos is the edge of desire.)

Keep your beliefs strong and your desires sharp.

We are inclined to think that history is either dialectical or diabolical, that it is either the ongoing resolution of tensions between impersonal forces or an occult conspiracy of highly motivated people. Given the evidence, we are not able to decide among these theories. It is even possible that there is some truth in both. What does not occur to us, however, is the possibility that history is divine, providential: that it expresses perfectly God's vision of his creation, his curiosity about what he has made. He, too, is waiting to see what happens next.

It is important, afterall,
that knowledge isn't merely
of accidental facts,
and power isn't just
for necessary acts.

Science tells us what is
actually the case, what
must be so. And politics
transforms the possible,
nowhere to otherwise.

No heart is left untouched
nor is the mind unchanged.

Nothing hinges on the philosopher's wisdom,
just as nothing hinges on the poet's love.

Beliefs are states of mind,
desires
              changes
                            of the heart,
and the body is a place
in which to find a moment
wherein this wherewithal
we call the self compounds
whatever we already are
with what we can become.

In intuition, a belief forms immediately,
in institution, a desire. Science shapes
our intuitions, as politics, our institutions.
Philosophy and poetry give them presence,
as concepts in thought, emotions in feeling,
each remark, each strophe, on the imagination.

Let us imagine the sage, whose concepts
are clear, the lover, whose emotions are
always taut. Let us imagine a mind
stilled by wisdom, and a heart moved
by love. Let us imagine a body
whose flesh and bones are strong,
a soul whose suffering is pure.
Let us imagine a passion that is
general, and one specific reason
to believe that all that we desire
can be made small and (imagine this!)
put within the nutshell of a dream.
Imagination backs thought with feeling,
brings appearance to the surfaces.

We can no more tell someone to do something
than we can tell them to see something.

But we can get them to desire something
and we can get them to believe something.

My commands must reach your passions.
My statements must engage your reasons.

Morals are to people
as causes to things.

At these lattitudes, we don't get up
before the dawn, or after it;
rather, it arrives before we rise
or after, depending on the season.

To rise is all the same to us.
In the dark or in the morning light,
we open our eyes and, each in our
way, begin to feel our needs.

Our bodies don't resent the change.
Spring to summer, fall to winter,
we understand the process must unfold,
indifferent and cold to our business.

Nor do we care what forces move the sun
or keep us here beneath its wobbly run.

Without reason and passion
our lives become frantic gesticulations
of reference and deference
without sense or motive, no indication
of inference and preference.

Concepts are to reason
as emotions to passion.

As the elements of structure
to the fibres of texture,
as the grids of logic
to the strings of pathos,

certainty is of the order
as pleasure, of the moment.

Emotions are to obedience
as concepts to understanding.

Concepts are to reference
as emotions to deference.

Power is to feeling
as knowledge to thought.

(for David Hoinski)

Philosophy implies poetry.
As in "involves", "entwines",
"entangles", "embraces".

Poetry implicates philosophy.
As in a crime.

Disobedience is like misunderstanding
but begins with a command
instead of a statement.

Some statements are difficult
to understand, and
some commands are hard to obey.

Our obedience, like our understanding,
sometimes demands art.
And our failures, too, may be artful.

Reason predicts the causal order.
Passion recalls the moral.

Rationality is
to reason
as hilarity
to passion.

It is
what
it is.

You are
who
you become.

Statements indicate facts and we try to understand them.

Commands indicate acts and we must try to obey them.

A Supplement to Brandom

Inference and reference are to reason and our concepts
as
preference and deference are to passion and our emotions.

We think a proposition is true or not.
We feel a proposal is just or not.

The thought conflates our inferences with our references.
The feeling conflates our preferences with our deferences.

Philosophy extricates our concepts from our reasons.
Poetry extricates our emotions from our passions.

They extricate us from the world and the history in which we are implicated.

Thus we make ourselves explicit.