Love and Women

When a man attends to his heart, he discerns only the most callous of emotions. Love, as it is, is known best and only by woman. If we are lucky, they deign to initiate us in its mysteries. If unlucky in love, our bitter ignorance curses it as illusion. And when we are caught up in love and yet find it empty, we men must hold faith in woman, for it is she who keeps and keeps watch over the substance of our hearts.

What is man without woman but a shell, and a dangerous creature? Shall we curse women for bringing out the worst in us, when it is the worst that we truly are? Love is a maddening, I once wrote. It is surrender, and to surrender without faith is to abandon oneself to madness.

There is no hope for love without faith. Perhaps this is what is unknowingly meant when people advise lovers to select their mates carefully, and according to a confluence of values. For man lacks the good-natured generosity to give himself over to a beauty unknown; he can be coaxed into submission only when he beholds himself submitting to a universal value, that is to say, only when he is permitted his illusions.

Courage and Virtue

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once."
William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

If through cowardice one evaded an ultimate death, it might be worthwhile. However, there is nothing more certain than that we are all going to die regardless of our virtue. Because of this, we ought to pursue virtue only for its own sake, and not because we think we may profit from it. In short, be virtuous if that is what pleases you, and let us define virtue as the thorough and consistent pursuit of said pleasure.

An Absurd Faith

Communication is a hope – an absurd faith that, yes, what you mean by the words you use is what others mean by the same words. This is obviously a philosophical problem. How do I know that when I say “horse”, another person is thinking of a horse and not a cow instead? How do I know when I point to something and call it “that”, that another person knows exactly what it is I'm pointing to? After all, they often don't. The “that”, and everything else about language, is vague, and that vagueness is simultaneously the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of language. It is a paradox that language is inherently vague, since it is often used as a tool for clarification. But this paradox is not a quagmire. It does not suck us under and into the muck; rather, it uproots us from our linguistic pretensions, such that we may soar.

Cares and the Carefree

You can accumulate houses and mansions and millions of dollars, but the more things you have, the more cares you have. It is no coincidence that the most carefree people are those poorest in material wealth.

However, one of the essential characteristics of the human experience is concern. One cannot live without having a stake in the world. You cannot take a stand without also taking on an interest in the goings-on of the world. To be is to be in a world, and to be in is to be involved, interested and concerned. By this reasoning, we must conclude that it is logically impossible to be "without a care in the world".

So what are we to make of those who really are without a care in the world? Is this line of reasoning to be discarded, since it seems to contradict observed phenomena? Or are the carefree in some way still involved in the goings-on of the world?

Simply because one is not materially invested in the world does not mean that one is absolutely "uninvolved". The ways in which man is bound up with the world are manifold. Some of us are bound up in personal relationships, and are therefore not entirely without care. But what about those who have truly nothing? Let us imagine a perfect ascetic - a man who has given up all possessions and all involvement in human affairs. What becomes of him? Is he free - or has he become a nothingness?

Being torn away from the particular, he surrenders to the universal. He does not care to own a thing; instead he takes pleasure in taking everything in. He does not care to bind himself to people - instead he embraces all humanity. In this way, we may reaffirm that being in the world, for human beings, necessarily entails involvement. In this way, we present the cares of the carefree. And by observing the example of the truly carefree, we may follow suit, likewise freeing ourselves from our worldly concerns and risking nothingness.

You know already that I admire this man that I have mentioned, this carefree globetrotter, this hopeless vagabond. And I know already that you envy him too. He is living the life that we are to live, if we dare. Let us risk nothingness that we may regain ourselves and with it all the world. Let us forget sensibility and remember sweet honeydew hope and naiveté. Let us forget that there is anything to lose.

Let us dare to live.

Possibility, Necessity and Contingency

Before language, reality was not conceived or considered. It was only known.

Before language, metaphysics was impossible. Without language, man is no different from anything else. It is language which creates the possibility of difference, language which actuates the disconnection of mankind from reality. But language is no merely negative force, and disconnection is not always alienation.

Language, as disconnection, opens up a space between man and reality. For this reason, man seeks to reconnect with reality by way of language. That is the purpose of metaphysics.

* * *

Language disconnects man from reality, and thereby creates the very possibility of possibility.

Before the conception of reality, it was impossible to imagine anything as contingent. It is the mark of primitive man that everything is seen as necessary and inevitable. Similarly, it is the mark the civilized, that is to say, those who have become enamored with civilization, that everything is seen as contingent.

The wiser man understands that the being of possibility is inherent to language, and the being of necessity is inherent to the world. It is only within man that any mediation between contingency and necessity is possible.

* * *

There is no longer any primitive man. To know civilization is to become civil. Even those who are at a remove from civilization are themselves civilized. We are all of us spouses trapped in a loveless marriage. Civilization has seduced us, and we have become enamored with it. We know not life without it; that is to say, we know not even that we are always already within it.