If the subject is one that perceives and interprets the world, this implies distortion- distortion through language?

Apropos Rilke: A god who speaks is almost certainly not a god. Language is all-too-human.

Apropos “happiness experts”: Should happiness be the goal, or is that simply shallow? Perhaps melancholy leads to a deeper appreciation of life.

A rejection of rationalism is an embrace of life. And vice versa.

We always think we must deliver the “final word.” However, apropos Meschonnic, there is no final word, only the flow and movement of discourse, changing us, changing with us.

Everything seems to get exaggerated in our society. This is, I think, to a large degree the result of specialization. Specialization, too much focus on one thing, leads to a lack of balance, and of course one wants one’s field to be important, as important as possible.

My work: using ideas to escape from ideas.

My work: To take religious ideas, or really the religious feeling, and transform it into something intellectual. Of course this requires, primarily, negation. This is fairly easy, as the intellectual always negates itself.

Sayable truth is certainly individual and historical, but… unsayable truth?

It seems that what one learns, at least in my case, is determined by what one values, what one considers worth knowing: and what is worth knowing, for me, is that which leads us back to reality, as opposed to the mass of knowledge that is there simply because it is useful, but comes at the price of leading us farther and farther away from reality. This is why I favor the anti-philosophers, the skeptics.

As soon as one expresses something definite one creates its counterargument. This is the nature of finite human expression.

Today’s skeptics are Cartesians who forgot that Descartes needed God.

This rather astonishing and beautiful passage is from William Franke’s On What Cannot Be Said. I believe Franke is one of the most poetic academic philosophers writing today, and one of the very few who has not given up on Meaning.

“…human finitude transforms all things after its own image in an infinite process of metamorphosis. In our very evanescence is lodged our cosmic task: by saying the things that are and that vanish, we give them the present-perfect status of eternally having been, once, once and no more, never again, yet irrevocably having been.”

I am honored to announce that “Broadside For Already Sinking Ships,” a work of lyrical philosophy, has been published by EgoPhobia, a Romanian journal of literature and philosophy.

“Broadside For Already Sinking Ships” is a sort of philosophy/literature hybrid, written in the Russian Slavophile spirit. It aims to attack all rational dogmas, and the very essence of Western certainty, including the obsession with political identities, in favor of an “apotheosis through groundless,” as Lev Shestov wonderfully put it. The thinking of Western, educated people has become dogmatic, radically conformist, and hence ossified. This work aims to smash it. Call it philosophizing with a hammer.

You can read it here https://egophobia.ro/?p=16095

A friend of mine and I, in our early 20s, were obsessed with the idea of the paradox. Reading this recently from Kierkegaard makes me think we were indeed on to something:

Kierkegaard, The Absolute Paradox: “However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. … The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking.”

A lovely apophatic musing by Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”

A lovely apophatic rumination from Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”

A wonderfully succinct quote from The Destiny Of Man by Nikolai Berdyaev:

“This is the tragedy of knowledge… existence is irrational and individual, but we can only know the rational and the general.”*

I love this reply to the problem of objectification, and subject/object split, which is so fundamental to Western thinking. Berdyaev mentions Kant and critical philosophy, but really he is reaching all the way back to Descartes.

From Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man

“Knowledge for [German epistemologists] is objectification. The knowing subject is not an existent; he is an epistemological and not an ontological entity; he is the bearer of ideal logical forms which are not human at all and whose connection with man is incomprehensible. Concrete reality disappears and is replaced the ‘subject and object’. The knower is not a self, not a concrete particular person, but an epistemological subject which is not human and does not exist but is outside existence and stands over against it. And that which he knows is not an existent either, but an object correlative to him and specially constructed for knowledge. Existence slips away both from the subject and the object. The very opposition of the two does away with existence. Objectification destroys life and being. If knowledge is objectified it can never reach its goal. This is the tragedy of knowledge which many philosophers have clearly recognized and formulated as follows: existence is irrational and individual, but we can only know the rational and the general.* The object proves to be utterly alien to the subject and opposed to it. They are logically correlative and cannot be separated one from the other, and yet they are forever opposed to each other.”