In law as elsewhere, we can know and yet not understand. Shadows often obscure our knowledge, which not only vary in intensity but are cast by different obstacles to light. These cannot all be removed by the same methods, and till the precise character of our perplexity is determined we cannot tell what tools we shall need. – H. L. A. Hart, “Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence”
Clarifications/Reminders 2
Typically, philosophical systems are like the train I saw yesterday: Four engines, screaming whistles, a very brief while, then two trailing, rattling, empty flatcars; and then nothing but dying noise.
Clarifications/Reminders 1
The Ascension is not the Disincarnation. Christ leaves no flesh suit on the ground.
In the Meantime (from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
the meantime
n. the moment of realization that your quintessential self isn’t going to show up, which forces the role to fall upon the understudy, the gawky kid for whom nothing is easy, who spent years mouthing his/her lines in the wings before being shoved into the glare of your life, which is already well into its second act.
Helen Vendler on Poetry and Paraphrase
As is often said, but as often forgotten, poems are not their paraphrases, because the paraphrase does not represent the thinking process as it strives toward ultimate precision, but rather reduces the poem to summarized “thoughts” or “statements” or “meanings”.
What are You Looking for?
What am I looking for in philosophy? A kind of mutual involvement and correction among analytic, existential and metaphysical philosophies–a philosophy with rigor, urgency and vision.
Boldness
Perhaps the greatest lesson the [18th] century learned from its long, scrupulous, and imaginative comparison of it own experience with the larger past was the value of boldness; not the soi-disant boldness of negativism, of grudgingly withholding assent as we seek to establish our identities, prate of our integrity, or reach into our pockets for our mite of ‘originality’. None of us, as Goethe said, is really very ‘original’ anyway; one gets most of what he attains in his short life from others. The boldness desired involves directly facing up to what we admire and then trying to be like it. –Walter Jackson Bate
Anecdotal Evidence: `Now Let Us See What I Can Do’
The Art Must Enter the Body
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too. A painter cannot use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint. Anne Dillard, The Writing Life
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 