My name is John. England is mine and it owes me a living, etc. — expect sibylline, marmoreal sentences ranging over metaphysics, logic, and logical truth, exclamations of beauty to be found in the quotidian, a celebration of sempiternal simple objects, of unbound variables, the nature of representation in general and of propositional representation in particular, the status of mathematics, human athletic achievement, the many gods and their jealous votaries, a monitoring of the bounds of sense, of philosophy and scientific theory, solipsism and the self, ethics and the mystical, aesthetics and the religiose, the several smutty moments in great literature. some lies, many rumours, lots of calumny.
📻 here we are kind to snails
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But Cordelia is the quiet absolute; her very silence is the still centre of the turning world.
— Ann Pasternak Slater
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Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
— T. S. Eliot, from Burnt Norton ii, Four Quartets
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Have I been understood? — Dionysos against the Crucified . . .
— Friedrich Nietzsche, the final line in Ecce Homo
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… and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris,
1914-1921.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
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// Spotify 🎧🌻
:: sensibilities ::
• Comitting to intellectual freedom, while disavowing and attacking ideology:
To be clear, an ideology is by definition a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality, and therefore always vulnerable to the recourse of violence (verbal and/or physical) whenever it is moved to defend itself, especially when those areas of reality-inadequacy are being highlighted. Furthermore, an ideology is in the business of aggrandising those who subscribe to it, and by definition demonising those who do not.
Solzhenitsyn wrote,
‘Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life, but just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.’ He went on to say: … ‘The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, because they had no ideology.’
Ideology, along with organised religion, bring about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and self-righteousness; this allows for a savagery without stain. It provides in humans an inbuilt circuit-breaker for recognising the threshold magnitude of an evil.
• Judging or interacting with the individual on merit alone. I could not care less about your perceived (actual or imaginary) disadvantages or sufferings (of an associated group or you as an individual). That’s not my problem, nor should mine be yours; to expect preferment due to them is inherently perverse and dangerous.
To be clear: I’m talking individually here, not nationally / economically; the state has certain responsibilities to all its citizens, each to their needs; this responsibility is derived from both the taxes and the social contract a polity obliges from its people.
• A disavowal of the reflexive notion that our basic sense of what is Good and Evil is reduced to the following myopic formula:
Good people or ideas = (come from) the powerless.
Bad people or ideas = (come from) the necessarily powerful.
This ought to be seen as self-evidently pernicious and inimical to any notion of development on both a personal and societal level, but somehow today is the default in western mainstream discourse. I reject it wholly and am repelled by those who promote it.
• A disavowal of race obsession. Society should endeavour to be by default colourblind, while maintaining and celebrating without prejudice the multiform cultures and traditions that embody the said society, within the laws of that said same. Promoting preferment or demotion or the throttling of opportunity due to race is inherently perverse, retrograde and dangerous.
• A refusal to replace personality with identity. Your ‘identity’ is not a catch-all accessory that inures you from your actions or your espoused ideas; it is not a shield, yet it can often be a marker for your obvious subservience to an ideology, and due to past enormities of said ideology you shouldn’t be surprised if people, and myself, don’t want anything to do with you. You’re a human being, and an individual, not a capriciously customisable gnostic mannequin connected to a morally insuperable hive-mind.
• Debate over denunciation, persuasion over mere public shaming. Do not presume to tell me how I should think and feel about a person or idea. Ex cathedra positions are hard-won and earned; presuming this position without merit is absurd and should be exposed, and furthermore, if you’re able to and in the mood: mocked, whenever encountered.
• The rule of law over the self-righteous fury of the mob. History teaches that the mob is capable of all and any depravity, and always feels justified in the act, however obscene.
• That said, it is vital to understand that an uninformed majority will always lose a battle for information against an informed minority. It’s important to notice when a manipulative minority is holding an unaware majority to ransom. This is, again, particularly prevalent when dealing with ideologues.
I’m always open to respectful criticism or debate, or even just discussion, about these views : feel free
note. pfp me a year ago. n. tags image & text are my own and saved against all commercial copyright (you’re welcome to reblog those still)
“I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.”
Tell me what infinity attracts you, and I will know the meaning of your world. Is it the infinity of the sea, or the sky, or the depths of the earth, or the one found in the pyre?
