The Pangrammaticon

Wittgenstein was right. Philosophy must be composed like poetry. But, instead of extracting what Pound called "the data of ethics," emotions at their first intensity, from the vortex of history, it must arrange the propositions of science perspicuously to reveal our concepts.

Those days are over.
Others are in store.

Keep your affairs regular,
your moods, seasonal.

Concepts are to knowledge

(the hold we have on it)

what emotions are to power

(the hold they have on us).

It's a Dutch book!

Perhaps we should insist on literacy?

The president must only do things that can be explained to children by teachers.

The philosophical tradition is often presented as a series of good students who understand the ideas of great thinkers.

But you really must think for yourself.

I hope the Europeans love their children too.

Try to lose hope
one at a time.

Keep it coming.

Let poetry teach you about women
at your peril.
Let a woman teach you about poetry
at your funeral.

Learn from paintings what a woman
looks like and
let the women teach you how to draw
                  first.

The little darkness will lift by morning.

The larger darkness will pass in time.

The pangrammatical supplement (as knowledge is to power) of perception is expectation. A perception is to a fact as an expectation to an act. "We are faced with the problem of error" (Quine).

You cannot know a world you cannot change.

You cannot master a history you cannot abide.

(What we master is never the world but our history. What we know is never our history but the world.)

There is a reality
at the heart
of this thing:

a body

where the person
in the mind
becomes the ideal.

We can't just say
the silence speaks.

We have to listen.

There are no secrets in books.

Similar in being
what we have
because we have it.

Atheism is a form of prayer.

You can live through any given series of events in hope or in despair. These are not alternative hypotheses to be tested; neither hope nor despair are ever proven right by how things turn out.