I Blog Because You Say I Haven't Lately
I blog at personal request these days only because I have nothing worthy of blogging. All around me, all of the deepest currents of human life are moving around me and it is entirely too invasive to report them.
amo et amo et excrucior ...
At the moment, I lack much of my intellectual drive. It hit home for me today in HIPS when I realized that I was being too full of the agnostic model of the intellect that says that since no supreme truths can be directly proven, they cannot even be the motivation for argument. Add this to the fact that my professor never seems to understand what I am saying though I remain sure that it would be to both our goods that she did.
Later in the day, I proceeded to discourse upon the Eumenides and the entire Oresteia I managed to get some needful sections of my exegesis out in dialogue but when one's interlocutor may be a better dialogist or philosopher than you are, it is hard to get the right words in edgewise. I am glad that I go to school with such exciting minds, though I wish all of us would learn certain disciplines in argument such as attempting to grasp one's opponent's argument before attacking it. This was once the discipline of Paris, Pisa, Bologna, and Heidelberg. Where has it gone?
Throughout the day, I also have been resolving the direction of Aubade . I am looking forward to next year, but I am faced with the problem of working on a res gravis with a person who I do not know and who does not know me well enough yet. She however appears sweet, sincere, and more intellectually deep than the mean at Chicago. Few better things can be said.
What is a sign of intellectual deepness though? As strange as it sounds, I think it still lies in the Socratic witticism/ laconic pronouncement/ nostrum, "I know nothing, yet I am the smartest there is for at least I know that I know nothing" (Plato, Apology passim ). The recognition of not knowing is the fastest path to the known, for it produces the right kind of dissatisfaction in the soul with the present order of things in the broadest sense of the word. Most before me have had it wrong when they have imagined that knowing, certainty, and stability are in conflict. Knowing even more fully why you are certain keeps you on an even keel. Not knowing what you are certain anymore is the sting of the ray, but it only need to be as brief as the time (an investment certainly) necessary for intellectual reflection (rustication).
Aristotle was right to desire eutaxia and to connect it with eudaimonia . We do gain flourishing from ordering, but it is active rather than a passive ordering (or even a reconcilation to an evil choice with the recognition that all will be well whatever the outcome). More specifically, dynamic equilibrium is the model. Homeostasis is the model. As John Light said, "If we were at equilibrium, we would be dead, " I think he meant some sort of chemically static equilibrium like when a reaction goes to completion or a battery runs down.
Hence, it is certain that the only necessary certainties are birds such as law of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics that keep condensation and evaporation or a hundred other balancing mysteries on a straight line path to the good. And with all else uncertain, "I just want to fix the world" is as good a start as any. As Nietzsche might say, I am writing like the Ganges flows rather as the turtle walks or the frog hops to tell you what of value may have filled my head today.
amo et amo et amo, quae sunt tormenta?
ESA (20030506.1)
I blog at personal request these days only because I have nothing worthy of blogging. All around me, all of the deepest currents of human life are moving around me and it is entirely too invasive to report them.
amo et amo et excrucior ...
At the moment, I lack much of my intellectual drive. It hit home for me today in HIPS when I realized that I was being too full of the agnostic model of the intellect that says that since no supreme truths can be directly proven, they cannot even be the motivation for argument. Add this to the fact that my professor never seems to understand what I am saying though I remain sure that it would be to both our goods that she did.
Later in the day, I proceeded to discourse upon the Eumenides and the entire Oresteia I managed to get some needful sections of my exegesis out in dialogue but when one's interlocutor may be a better dialogist or philosopher than you are, it is hard to get the right words in edgewise. I am glad that I go to school with such exciting minds, though I wish all of us would learn certain disciplines in argument such as attempting to grasp one's opponent's argument before attacking it. This was once the discipline of Paris, Pisa, Bologna, and Heidelberg. Where has it gone?
Throughout the day, I also have been resolving the direction of Aubade . I am looking forward to next year, but I am faced with the problem of working on a res gravis with a person who I do not know and who does not know me well enough yet. She however appears sweet, sincere, and more intellectually deep than the mean at Chicago. Few better things can be said.
What is a sign of intellectual deepness though? As strange as it sounds, I think it still lies in the Socratic witticism/ laconic pronouncement/ nostrum, "I know nothing, yet I am the smartest there is for at least I know that I know nothing" (Plato, Apology passim ). The recognition of not knowing is the fastest path to the known, for it produces the right kind of dissatisfaction in the soul with the present order of things in the broadest sense of the word. Most before me have had it wrong when they have imagined that knowing, certainty, and stability are in conflict. Knowing even more fully why you are certain keeps you on an even keel. Not knowing what you are certain anymore is the sting of the ray, but it only need to be as brief as the time (an investment certainly) necessary for intellectual reflection (rustication).
Aristotle was right to desire eutaxia and to connect it with eudaimonia . We do gain flourishing from ordering, but it is active rather than a passive ordering (or even a reconcilation to an evil choice with the recognition that all will be well whatever the outcome). More specifically, dynamic equilibrium is the model. Homeostasis is the model. As John Light said, "If we were at equilibrium, we would be dead, " I think he meant some sort of chemically static equilibrium like when a reaction goes to completion or a battery runs down.
Hence, it is certain that the only necessary certainties are birds such as law of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics that keep condensation and evaporation or a hundred other balancing mysteries on a straight line path to the good. And with all else uncertain, "I just want to fix the world" is as good a start as any. As Nietzsche might say, I am writing like the Ganges flows rather as the turtle walks or the frog hops to tell you what of value may have filled my head today.
amo et amo et amo, quae sunt tormenta?
ESA (20030506.1)
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