metonymy4u

Kant’s life work was nothing other than a head-on confrontation with an ancient problem: is the world best described by nature or nurture? Contingency or necessity? ¹ And remember: his answer was given without the benefit of Darwin. Darwin, who gave us the most satisfying synthesis to date of this ancient dialectic, thanks –in part—to Kant’s titanic struggle with the hitherto indissoluble lexicon of western philosophy. Is it at all surprising that, following Kant, we see the birth of all that we call the social sciences? The study of nature in nurture? Contingency in necessity? That we turned our attention once again to the classic dialectic of enlightenment, calling it instead the new reason of living and of life?

¹ “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to us by nature, or in what other way?”

Read Full Post »

Why do I want readers to make connections for themselves? Why write vague and evocative poetries? Because I think the journey to yourself begins with a question seamless enough only you can afford to unthink it. The one declaration you can never begin, to unhear.

Read Full Post »

I like the way Paul Celan’s poems hit you with no introduction. I think it takes some guts to jump into a poem with no warning whatsoever.







People have been trying for countless centuries to come up with a non-contradictory, non-trivial explanation for the fact that though our thoughts are physical events, they seem to lead inextricably to an understanding of the non-physical. What shall we make of this mad mystery?

Read Full Post »

Forgiveness and letting be, are about one’s relation to pain not people.

Read Full Post »

                               The critique of real reason *



What is the significance of a word? Does it link you to something real? Does it re-present some state of affairs in a person or the world? Must a statement be “true” or “false?” The answer to these questions for much of history has been an emphatic “yes.” And yet, at very nearly the dawn of recorded time, there were dissenting voices. Voices that refused to answer the Buddha’s 16 unanswerable questions, voices that needled us with doubts about being able to step into the same river twice, voices that finally suggested that words might be less like anchors, and more like ladders to be thrown away once one has climbed them. The author who has cut herself loose from the optical theory of words (as bringing an object/subject more or less into focus) may studiously avoid the desire to explain herself because any sufficient narrative threatens to weave the web of logic even tighter. And her goal, finally, is escape. So the question becomes, will you walk with her for a time? Not to dis-cover another symbol or meaning, but merely to feel a warm hand in yours.

*With gratitude to Heraklitus, Plato, the Pali canonists, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Carol Gilligan.

Read Full Post »

…though I suspect if we problematize language too quickly, people often won’t want to talk to us.

Read Full Post »

God and the infinite sets of mathematics are the abstract limits of a set of infinitely inductive series. The question of whether they are phenomenological events depends on whether you believe the limit is a member of the infinite set. The answer to that question for me functions as an axiom, not a theorem. So the discussion really just comes down to whether one thinks that by describing the limit of an infinite set one has phenomenologically experienced the limit of the infinite set.

Pick your definition and your assumption and go from there…I see nothing to be proven…

Read Full Post »

For uncounted centuries, thinking has served the path of many a manly quest. She has been cast, variously, as the essential handmaiden either to virtue ethics, politics, theology, science or technology, and perhaps more so now than ever before. Will she ever be free, to live her own?

Read Full Post »

We are holding on to anything at all. Anything to keep us from flying off into the void.

Read Full Post »