Fish In the Afternoon

It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight’s sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

You can never trust a moral coward, because taking another as fully human is itself an act of courage. Risk is the heart of the good. Painwork. The knight of the good is a brute. Brut. Coarse, rough, raw, like unhewn stone. Brutus. Without-reason, without-sense, heavy like the earth. Irrationally dedicated to the good.

The exemplar of capitalism is the philanthropist. A master of trade flush with wealth but also manners, an industrialist turning shyly away from their billions. The philanthropist is the bawling child of the noblesse oblige, the gentle gentry who care oh so tenderly for the dull peasantry. The action of each is the giving of alms, a portion of tithes set-aside for the poor to wash-away one’s sins. The philanthropist remains an industrialist; the noble remains a warlord. Charity blurs the reality that the money given to the poor is the same money created by the poor. It is a check given-back, a percentage of your exploitation. The appearance hides the content.

But exemplar they remain – not only for hiding their power, but for patterning this same obscuring for others, a model for manners. Never be ostentatious; the WASP elite remain hidden. Bourgeois stuffiness is for the sake of never-sneezing, never letting one’s guard down when the brutes are at the gate. Stuffiness is piety; one is only saved from the masses by tithing. The rulers are forced into a cosmic ritual with the oppressed, the Great Beast of hungry mouths that must be ever-fed. Only in crisis does the noblesse oblige collapse, many-times spurred on by the popular libido, the shattering-violence of populist rage that turns Louis into Napoleon. Showing-fangs, the bourgeoisie erupt into terror and this terror is reflected-back, an all-consuming fire, the fasces alight – Caesar.

The knight is not a praetorian. Not all kings are Caesars. The praetorian guard are professionals, trained imperial mercenaries, closer to SEALs than paladins. The knight is a brute mythologized into romance. The reality of the historical knight is one of soldiers tied to warlords, using religion as a cover for a system of landed hierarchy. But, this reality manifested a myth – like the bushido of samurai, which kept them both fierce and subordinated to an ethic of honor, the chivalry of Christian knights both tamed and unleashed the mythos of what were before soldiers of enforcement. The myth of the knight eclipses the knight and inaugurates a role. The role of the knight is painwork.

The virtues of the knight are loyalty, honor, piety, courage, and ferocity. The knight affirms, becomes subject to the object(s) of loyalty, the truths that animate the heart and point to desired possible futures. The knight holds-close the truth-event to which they hold loyalty, displaying honor in commitment. This honoring is a form of piety, a loyalty to God-in-the-world, to the romance of the real. Committing to these truths requires courage, taking-up the commitment again and again even in strife and struggle, and this courage is ferocious, manifesting in painwork, in taking-on necessary-pain and inflicting that same necessary-pain when others can’t, defense and offense.

The historical knight is long gone and good riddance, but the knight of the good still whispers in the heart of the world. The knight is a brute, a barbarian, the virtuous warrior of love who leaves the gates of the city, becoming a myth in the cause of the proletariat. This is not the myth of Sorel, who jettisons love and the good for the apocalyptic violence of propaganda of the deed. The soul of the knight is romance, a romance that holds the good tenderly and fiercly like a mountain range around a valley. The knight is a brute for forsaking the noblesse and making pact with the barbarian; the knight’s brutishness is an anti-violence, which only wields the sword to turn-away oppression and achieve the peace of loving-dwelling. Sometimes the most peaceful act is punching a Nazi in the face, but it is peace that blunts their cheek, not war. The knight is a protector and attacks to protect.

As the Time-Machine grinds down the almsgivers and unleashes the fasces against the people, the knight emerges again, an anti-Caesar, proletarian chivalry. Loyalty to the good is loyalty to the oppressed and loyalty to the oppressed is loyalty to the good. The knight kneels before the dying and offers her cloak to the naked. She gives of her flesh to the hungry and the warmth of her heart to the despairing.

To you, the scared, I offer my life, even as I fear. To you, the hurting, I offer my painwork.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

William Faulkner, The Bear

Image: The Warrior by Jean Dubuffet (1958)

What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 226e

Deep within the Cave, the shadows on the wall take the form of words, words grouping into ideas, ideas into concepts, concepts into habits, and habits into forms of life.

There is nothing special about a word. Like all things, it is a form of repetition and transformation, an echo. A signer signs a sign through a locution, forms a relationship through illocution, and oceans into becoming through the perlocution. The locution yelps, the illocution dances, and the perlocution wanders. Waterfalling down, the tools of logic structure our echoing, providing move-sets for our illocuting. There is nothing that grounds the rules but the echoes themselves and we only logic while dwelling in our form of life. We move to D4 through the conditional, but only on the board of our inhabiting, which frames our becoming-together.

Becoming is an echoing, a disco of possibility, the modal waltz. In doing through being, the one kaleidoscopes into the many. From one, each successor both mimics and morphs, ontological sublimation tapping history. This history or histories, the echoic ocean of becoming-together, is what we divide into patterns, or categories. A sign is a conceptual unit of a stream of patterned echoes, these patternings splitting off into languages, boards for our forms of life that weave together through the spiraling of history. Words have meaning through their position in the pattern, the way they connect to the whole, defined through how it echoes its surroundings. Communicating is being rocked by the waves.

The unity of science is metaphysically possible but linguistically impossible. The all grows out of the same ground, breath inhaling electron clouds and exhaling time. However, we are not solely beings of breath, but beings whose breath breathes meaning. A quark never intends, but its arrangements experience and in this experiencing intention, attention, and meaning arise, becoming fundamental components of being. We do and we intend to do and our doing is a meaningful attending, but this attending flows through the forms of life that we inhabit. This inhabiting seeps into description, the tools for understanding the world being the same tools that are born from our forms of life. Our descriptions thus justify, through emanating the form of life that it echoes. But by this meaning and justifying, the unity of science collapses into the sea of being.

Our being is an echo of the all but the air that echoes it vibrates history. History means when the all dwells in silence. We sit in our aporia and as we sit the world appears already-here and already-having-been. Time lights a candle in the Cave.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Image: Time Before History by Sam Gilliam (2012)

Ὣς οὐκ ἔστι Διὸς κλέψαι νόον οὐδὲ παρελθεῖν. – Hesiod, Theogony

Before Thales, Hesiod teaches his son how to farm. In the beginning, Earth and Sky meet in intimate union, Eros peering from the clouds. The Titans emerge from a dirt-womb and sever the authority of the Sky. Ruling over the before, the Harvest wields its sickle, swallowing its stone children before being gutted by the Law. The Law hiding in the mountains, early humans wade through the forests before receiving Fire from Thought. In fear, the Hearth creates the All-Giver, suffering escaping just as hope remains. Metals cascade down into human hierarchies, the union of Earth and Sky melting into social order. From these myths, a way-to-be is born, and through these myths Hesiod teaches his son to be a farmer and a man.

Myths are both descriptive and justificatory: they both how the world is and why it is that way. The stories form an image of the real and through appealing to this real the human-made realm below is reproduced, social order mimicking the stories that have been told to enforce it. Myth pervades meaning, the descriptive and justificatory overlapping in our tellings, transforming into art, science, literature, work, home, and palace. Are the constellations a myth? The stars exist, but the patterns between them are imposed by us, human myths granting meaning to the arrangements of celestial bodies. These patterns create cosmic coherence, Sky and Earth joined together again, grounding and transcending human life. They both give and take away.

The danger of these myths is mything the real: imagining that what is presents itself immediately without the interference of our myths, allowing the myth to pervade life. We sense a world, presented to us as a collection of atoms bouncing off the perceptual systems of our body and coalescing into sounds and smells and images and feelings and tastes and emotions and textures and fractals. These sense impressions are formed-together into maps of the external, our inherited concepts giving meaning to the flux of the is. The world we experience is a world of values, spatiotemporal dreamscapes imbued with do’s and don’ts, and this and thats to be treated in a this and that sorta way. On and on into the whole of “common sense,” a sense of the stories common to an imagined us. The is hides behind the image.

Trapped in the cave, it is unclear where our myths end and the real begins. Aporia dances the unthought-between: the dialectic.

An entire mythology is stored within our language. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions

“The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.”

Denis Diderot, Last Conversation

All philosophy is performance. It is a thing that we do – an action, a motion, a riff, a rhythm. Philosophy is movement.

Long ago, Thales looked into the sky and fell into a well. The stars are there, but what are the patterns between them? Egyptian priests devised equations to graph their movements, celestial bodies rotating in the night, but what stories do these movements tell? Looking above, the below projects its stories onto nature, balls of ionized gas becoming loops in a god’s belt. The world becomes conceptualized, forms springing from form.

Philosophy is the art and science of concepts, the ideas that we attach to the painterly impressions of the senses. Our concepts never emerge fully from ourselves but are born from the cauldron of history, phylogenetic structures cascading out of the self-understanding of people in community. Some of these we may call “fundamental” – what is being, what is knowing, what is God? But it is never clear where the fundamental lies, or what it is fundamental to. Do trees grow upward or do their roots tunnel down?

Philosophy is a practice of self-development, creative nothings dwelling in the anxiety of being, flapping hands towards the possibility of becoming. Philosophy is an art of love, of knowing through loving, the sincere desire to understand. Through this loving, we become better people, the desire to know folding into caring compassion. As we inhabit this love, we realize our finality, our limitedness, learning to reside in the horizon of death and humble ourselves before infinity.

This infinity is the unity of difference, the many in one within the monad, where all is found in all, mind within matter, spirit within nature. Philosophers may act as either gatekeepers or resisters of power, using their authority to protect the Academy or taking a hammer to its walls. Plato grovels before the king while Emma Goldman lights a fuse. “Question everything.” “Know thyself.” “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world… [t]he point… is to change it.”

Philosophy is polydoxy, un-doxy, a rhythm stepping-out into unknowing – aporia.

(1) Corrupting the youth.

(2) Denying the gods of the city.

The crimes of Socrates

Image: The Thought by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1904)

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. – James Joyce, Ulysses

Philosophy tends towards the abstract, the reduction of multiplicity to unity, the concrete to its form, singletons to sets. This reduction occurs through investigation and classification, through collecting life into a pantheon of categories, taken to be the things-in-themselves rather the concrete thing: the thing-itself. The world-as-it-is is turned upside-down as a world-other-than-itself. Outside the Cave, the Unique, immanent forms, the itself-in-itself as-it-is. Loving-wisdom must return to the concrete.

Borges speaks of the Library of Babel as a network of interconnected rooms containing every combination of words, every locution, every bundle of enworded meaning. The whole of language. But, outside the Library the forests run far away, language never approaching the meaning of a kiss on the cheek. The whole of philosophy is less meaningful than the dance of a firefly. The Demiurge designs a ghost of what is here, and wisdom is exorcising this ghost, to return to the is that is.

The goal is the immediate; the eternal is already here. The Three-in-One is being-itself, holding us and grounding us and comforting us and rebuking us. It moves in us, such that there is no question of eternity. The question instead is eternity’s immanence, unfolding creation. The more we move away from immanence the more we move away from the divine and make life a heresy. God does not forsake creation but gives up heaven for earth, moving and breathing, weeping and laughing, struggling and desiring, suffering, dying, rising-again. For God so loved the world. God intends and attends and the infinite descends as the finite becomes eternal.

In the Cave, thoughts and sayings are no longer those of you or I, but those of Ideas. There is no conversation, only sublation-in-motion, the other-than-us as Spirit. I want the impressions again. And the impressions must appear in silence. Silence begins and silence speaks, impressions emerging as animation. The anima animates the silence into being-with, the Gemeinwesen patterning belonging. We stretch across the earth, no loyalty to the abstract, neighbor-love a dwelling-friendship that eclipses possession. The Leviathan spiders across time, an accumulation of many-histories mythologized into fatherhood. Its webs are made of capital, quality reduced to quantity, accelerating time by machinic desire. At the end lies Tartarus, the simulation of the real and its concretization in death. The occupation bellows death while the occupiers un-soul themselves.

Will is a turning and affirming. I affirm my loyalty and defend it through courage, giving-faith to immanent possibility. Crossing the wound of separation between home and here, love emanates divine will, attending to the attender that attends to the good-in-the-world. I enact the One in unfolding the Unique, affirming the form-of-the-good, the imago Dei of myself. In faith to this good, I never bow. The fundamental sin is idolatry, to take something else as a substitute for the Unique and for the One in the Unique. There is no intermediary between us and God; leave the Cave and let the sunshine freckle your soul, the wandering heat of Sophianic bliss. In loving-wisdom Sophia appears, ensouled matter mattering souls, spiritmatters dwelling in the home-of-the-world, the doma.

After the Cave, us.

When it comes to knowledge, the form of the good is seen last, and is seen only through effort. Once seen, it is reckoned to be the actual cause of all that is beautiful and right in everything, bringing to birth light, and the lord of light, in the visible realm, and providing truth and reason in the realm known by reason, where it is lord. Anyone who is to act intelligently, either in private or in public, must have had sight of this. – Plato, Republic

Image: Ascent by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1983)