Since I have complained here (in a poem) and in the hallways (in prose, I guess) about Husserl’s writing, let me offer up the following wonderful passage, tacked onto the end of the “Noesis and Noema” chapter of Ideas.

In closing we would add the following remark.  We have expounded phenomenology as a science in its beginnings.  Only the future can teach us how many of the results of the analyses we have here attempted are destined to last.  Much of what we have described must certainly, sub specie aeterni, be otherwise described.  But we should and must strive in each step we take to describe faithfully what we really see from our own point of view and after the most earnest consideration.  Our procedure is that of a scientific traveller in an unknown part of the world who carefully describes what he finds on the trackless ways he takes–ways that will not always be the shortest.  He should be full of the sure consciousness of bringing to expression what in relation to time and circumstance is the thing that must be said, which, because it faithfully expresses what has been seen, preserves its value always–even when further research calls for new descriptions with manifold improvements.  In a similar temper we wish in what further lies before us to be loyal expounders of phenomenological formations, and for the rest to preserve the habit of inner freedom even in regard to our own descriptions.

There.  Hard to do much better than that, I think.

Off to New Orleans tomorrow.  APA Central Meeting.  Looking forward to seeing old friends.  If any readers of the blog are there, look me up.  I’m easy to spot:  just look for a pro offensive lineman gone to seed–and likely wearing some silly hat.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Cooking Diary

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

“In Ramah there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they were not.” Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:18-20.

Up this morning, before six.  A bowl of cereal while water boils, listening to Vince Dynamic’s new EP.  Then, a cup of red tea outside while my dogs, three pitbull terriers, terrorize a small ground squirrel hidden in a woodpile.  It stays put and eventually they give up the siege, falling back on a chaotic triune wresting match, disturbing the throw rugs of leaves dotting the back lawn.  Tea finished, the dogs settle down and I climb aboard my bike to ride to school, gloved and hatted and jacketed against the damp cool morning.  My breath as I pedal looks like a strange reverse exhaust from the bike.

Later, I drink coffee, thick, and hot and hot, at the local coffee house.  Feeling returns to my fingers.  I read Gass essays, his acrobatic sentences limber my mind; the coffee chases my thoughts, forcing them to run.  Yesterday’s puzzling over Marcel returns, and I work at distinguishing being from having, wondering if I can manage to get my students to see the relationship between Plotinus’ introspective understanding of embodiment and Marcel’s phenomenology of having a body.  (Is Plotinus a metaphysician or a metapsychologist–and what is either of those?)

Still later, at the department office, friends and I gather, joking about using Gmail to set up emails to be delivered after you are dead.  (Yes, they have Moses and the prophets, but what if someone sent them email from beyond the grave?  G-mail, indeed.)  Someone brings in an ancient nutcraker and matching pick–the pick to save the meat of pecans from the still co-dependent embrace of their opened shells.  (There’s been a bag of pecans on the office counter, mostly unmolested, for weeks.)  I haven’t seen a nutcraker like that since I was a boy.

One of my friends and I go out and smoke.  We talk about King James’ “Counterblaste to Tobacco”.  He tells me of missiles over Israel.  Time to go to work.