There are philosophical ideas you want to approach but cannot come near to, perhaps out of fear, or because you have no way of articulating them. Maybe they are just extraordinary feelings or experiences interpreted as philosophical.

Philosophical ideas are always out of range of a given person at a given time. Aristotle, for instance, could not think of despair at the world, or hope in the future of the world, and perhaps had no notion of the world in the way which is required to have such hope or despair at all. For all of these ideas rely, I think, on a monotheism of a particular kind, which had nothing to do with his way of thinking. A way of thinking that wouldn’t, for instance, have been able to understand Bach.

The paranoid world is a world in which everything has a moral character; specifically, everything is against you. In any moral idea of the world, there are forces pitted against you, and in this way, all morality has an element of paranoia (under the guise, for instance, of legitimate punishment). How much paranoia depends, as it were, on the proportion of angels to devils in the world, seen through the eyes of that morality.

Were you to live in such a moral-paranoid world, it would be refreshing to discover an authoritative kind of thought according to which there are no such moral forces in the world, none against you and none for you either. (It would be tempting to read this new kind of thought as also moral, as either for or against you, there to free you or to further entrap you.) According to this line of thought, no one and nothing would be morally good or morally evil. It would be refreshing too if, nonetheless, there was still a structure of action which bears an analogy to morality. In which, for instance, there was a way of bettering oneself, through a non-moral conception of the good.

Aristotle’s ethics is like this. In it there is no God who can see and judge us, no absolute good or evil, nor the possibility of guilt or hope or despair. His ethics existed before humans became ‘interesting animals’, before the great Christian theological drama of life and sin and death could make sense.

He nonetheless has an idea of a good person, but not an idea of an absolutely morally good person. His idea is that being a good person is like being a good carpenter, something you can excel at. However, his ethics is not prefaced by a should. There is no absolute should. Rather it is as if he says: if you wish to be a good person, to lead a happier life, it would look like what I describe in my book.

The morally hygienic person doesn’t want to incorporate that which they morally oppose. (They certainly won’t eat or drink it.) They prevent any of the bad substance outside from them entering into them, and want to see themself as pure and morally uncorrupted, untouched by this bad substance. Being pure, they are always fearful of contamination, and so must stay far from that which is evil.

Their most prized objective is to see themselves as good. And so they edge further and further away from the world – people and things in the world – wanting to disentangle themselves from all evil, which increasingly becomes a matter of disentangling themselves from anything they are not. For they have identified themselves with what they imagine to be their inner goodness, and this idea of themselves is defined through opposition to the outer evil of the world.

They take their idea of a good person to be one who does no harm, forgetting that the other side of this idea is one who does good. For the reason you would want to do no harm is the same reason that you would want to do good; the idea of good, like that of justice, must concern our relations to others, and our relations to others cannot stop at refraining from directly harming them.

The reality is that the morally hygienic person is concerned with a relation but it is the pure reflexive self-relation. And through this, they produce an entirely negative self-centred doctrine of ‘the good’.

What does it mean to see yourself as good? Perhaps it means to think of yourself as doing the right things in the right way at the right time (and similarly, not doing the wrong things in the wrong way at the wrong time). It is similar to thinking of yourself as beautiful: walking and talking with grace etc. Each one is a pose for yourself, a way of looking at yourself which relates to the way you think others might see you.

In both cases, the person walks on a tightrope, and is constantly worried that they might slip. For the good and the beautiful are thin lines, and hard to attain and sustain. (They are lines, whereas what is not good or beautiful are large areas.)

Each more or less thinks of themselves according to this idea, which you can read in their eyes, full of conceit; thinking of themselves as good or beautiful to elevate themselves as somehow special. Or perhaps, they start from the idea that they are special, and therefore latch onto these notions. A dichotomy or hierarchy is constantly before their mind, and they must be on the right side, or rank, or else they have failed, and will unbearably find themselves just one amongst others.

One morality now relies on our doing things for ourselves which are unarguably good: exercise, good food etc. This is now the good person, who faithfully fulfils all of their obligations to their body, as if their body were another person.

Another morality appears to be a show for others, in which the badges they wear, the brand of their bags, their haircut etc. are all part of this morality. We think they are victims of fashion, including certain trends of thought, but all this is subsumed under the desire for the person to think of themself as a good person, and it is in pursuit of this morality that they use others as a mirror.

Confessions are typically sins of commission – I have sinned, I have acted, forgive me for what I have done. But we are enmeshed with the world through doing and not doing alike, and there is no way out by simply not doing what you take to be wrong. For some of the things you have left undone, are surely just as good or bad as some of the things you have done. You can imagine a perfectly legitimate confession consisting of all thing things that a person has not done.

The morally good person is not the person who doesn’t do evil, or is not complicit in a world in which evil is done. If this were the case, then the dead would be best of all. It must then be the way you handle living in such a world which matters.

When we say the world is full of evil, it is interesting that it always excludes the speaker: the world outside of me is full of evil. And in this moral sense, when I speak as a moral person, I always position myself outside of the world. This position cannot be logically correct: for if all of us do this, who in the world is left to do the evil which the world is claimed to be full of?

‘Complicity’ itself is tricky, and often a trick. For it is often used to mean that by being part of a group who produces some result, you bear some guilt or responsibility for it, or for allowing that it was done ‘in your name’. But we are far too quick to say ‘We have done this’. A ‘we’ doesn’t exist just because a group or a nation is named. And to say that we have done something is even harder to establish. (Think of the case when the ‘we’ is used universally, for instance: ‘We have walked on the moon’. A universal humanity is invoked, but to what end? It doesn’t distribute here, for I haven’t walked on the moon, not even a small amount.) The charge of complicity of a citizen in the apparent crimes of their state requires a lot of theory to support it, explaining what their relation to the state is and their obligations to contribute towards altering its actions.

Whatever the truth about complicity is, it is clear that the idea is used by some to inflame and control. For you may think you have done nothing wrong, but complicity teaches you to think that, without knowing it or doing anything, you have done something wrong; that even a beneficiary of a crime committed long ago is complicit in that crime. In this way, complicity serves to extend responsibility, and to encourage self-accusations of guilt; and your guilt can then be preyed upon to draw you into a certain course of action advocated by those who are determined to convince you that you are complicit. They will claim that we live in a false consciousness of innocence and the truth is that we are guilty – because it is our tendency to think we are guilty, we are easy work for them.

A new form of behaviour exists in which people cease looking at one another in the eye, and I suppose they think that if they do not recognise the other person, they will not have to negotiate with them, and so can do what they like, and get what they want. They must think that they would fail in a negotiation with someone, that they would be the losing party in any actual negotiation or conflict.

But this – thought of as a strategy, which it isn’t – could surely have only limited success for the petty little which can be taken from another by ignoring them. Anything beyond this requires cooperation, and recognition, and so looking at them in the eye. But because we are now unpractised, we won’t be able to do this when call to.

It is an important fact about us that we were born helpless. On occasion we remember or feel this utter helplessness, as if we were falling. In the brief gap between the helplessness of childhood and that of senescence, in which we enjoy voluntary action, for a brief moment, we carry with us at all times this complete experience of helplessness. This memory is the background of our whole life, and religion finds it important to honour it and make it holy. For it is this sense of helplessness which is taken up and given meaning as helplessness before God. Relations to the divine are understood through analogy with infant and parent. According to this idea, pride is when we pretend that we were never were infants, and are not ever helpless; while the possibility of relating to God relies on recalling our helplessness and seeing it as our fundamental, actual and constant state.

It is very convenient for us to say that the root of a person’s failures in the world has medical grounds. In this way, a deterministic – often psychological – answer is given, and everyone is absolved of responsibility. Another response might be that it is because they had not been courageous in the face of great difficulty that they failed in their tasks. We refuse this, in favour of medical determinism, in which we say that due to their fears or desires, or some other factor, they cannot or could not do such and such. This explanation reassures them and everyone connected to them. No one is to blame, or rather, mute nature is to blame for everything. Of course the cost of this innocence is alienation, for if we are not free, then what are we?

This psychological determinism is now so woven into our explanations of ourselves that we can hardly see it. We say that people do what they do because of their bad experiences or their traumas or etc. In this way we remove any autonomy from them and from ourselves. Of course, different lives will produce different desires and fears, and these are an element in understanding a life. But it is how you, the free individual, handle yourself that matters. And that element is denied when you think you are being charitable to someone by citing their past to explain their present. If this is how we are treated and come to see ourselves – as victims of the past, as unable to control ourselves – we could end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy, looking at ourselves as without responsibility, as slaves to our desires and fears manufactured in childhood, which fully determine our actions. We know too much Freud, and not enough Aristotle.

In violence, all attention is on the fist coming your way, and you forget about the person who throws the punch; that is, who they are, what is in their mind, who they think you are etc. Violence and war mean we no longer try to understand or relate to or think of why, but we defend, avoid, strike back. It is said that things are invented in war, but in war no real thinking occurs, only calculations, tactics, strategies. After the war, I suppose it is hard to remember what thinking was, and easy to mistake what was successful in the war – calculation, tactics, strategy – for thinking.

What do we speak of? Of what we have already spoken of, of what it is easy to speak of, of what we already have words for, of what has made itself available to be spoken of.

Because we think of all things in terms of good and evil, we think someone is being kind to us (they are good) when they are just deferring gratification. Similarly, we think someone is being unkind to us (they are bad) when they are merely securing their own needs, as they must. In our systematic misinterpretations, we decide in advance that they are either good and are being kind to us, or are bad and are attacking us. What we cannot get our heads around is that they are, for the most part, indifferent to us.

Game theory and other such theories are important to sustaining the fixed idea that people are essentially self-interested. When we cannot explain an apparently non-self-interested action, we can reassure ourselves that the mathematicians have, or will have, a ready explanation in terms of utility maximisation over time, or some such. We have faith that there is a matrix that will describe every action as self-interested.

The question is: what drives our belief in a theory of human nature according to which we are necessarily self-interested? We are wedded to this theory, and we find the mathematics to fit it – but why are we committed to it?

Perhaps we find it reassuring, for it appears to absolve us of all responsibility towards anyone other than ourselves; if that is our nature, then we cannot do otherwise. It is a dreary picture of predictable, colourless, lonely individuals. And the more we believe this is who we are, the more like this we will become.

We have two ideas about responsibility: that each is responsible for themself, and that each is responsible for the other. The first idea draws lines around the self and says that each must be responsible for their own life. The second idea says that we are bound in relationships and are in the hands of others, just as they are in ours, in webs not only of dependency, but of ethical demands and responses.

Perhaps we all know the second idea is correct, but to live it is overwhelming, as the burden of responsibility appears too great. So we retreat into the first idea, a pleasant illusion of sharp boundaries and individual responsibility, which is the prevailing view; as it were, the contractual, legally correct view of things.

But what is overwhelming about the second idea of responsibility? Perhaps part of it is that we take metaphysical, not ethical, fright at the ethical demands of the other. For they show our individualist ideas of an impermeable barrier between one another to be false. Absolute ethical demands gesture towards a metaphysics of unity. According to this metaphysics, we come to see that the other is oneself; not like oneself, but the very same being. Were this metaphysics true, the two views of responsibility would coincide; for were we to think that there is but a single human individual, then responsibility for the self and other would amount to responsibility for the same being.

But as soon as we are really presented with this metaphysics of unity, we reject it, and retreat into individualism and our impermeable barriers behind which others’ demands cannot reach us, and according to which the individual is the basic unit of reality.

But having retreated and affirmed ourselves as individuals, we find ourselves again terrified and alone in our heads, cut off from one another and the world, having no responsibilities in the world and no anchor in it. And so we again look favourably on the metaphysics of unity and its ethical demands. (Nietzsche’s analysis of Apollo and Dionysus describes an oscillation of this sort.)

If this metaphysics of unity were correct, and humans were parts of the very same being – the human being – would we still think of the world in terms of various different beings, such as cats and dogs and tables and chairs? That is to say, would we be able to sustain a new set of boundary lines between humans and other living beings, and then between living beings and non-living beings? Or does the metaphysics of unity end up in the idea that there is only one thing?

Interfaith dialogue is pointless when it is based on the claim, ‘Because our faiths are really one and the same, we can get along’. For surely we need to get along even if our faiths are not one and the same. Why, in any case, create this hostage to fortune?

But perhaps this is not the right way of looking at such claims. Perhaps the point is that by emphasising similarity over difference, the intention to manifest a break with the past, in which differences were emphasised over similarities.

That is fine, so long as you do not distort your faith. But maybe, even the distortion is the point: it is the sacrifice which shows your willingness to commit to peace over your own faith’s dogmas. The problem is that you stand at some risk of creating a new interfaith faith, which subordinates everything to this single goal.

I would say that if there is any point to such dialogue, it must be that each side are who they are, and still find a way to get along. Dialogue requires understanding differences, not ‘bridging’ them, or ‘overcoming’ them through becoming one and the same. Doing that, in fact, makes dialogue impossible, for then there would be only one thing, and dialogue requires that there are at least two, in relationship.

‘Peace’ always has the ring of the good. But when it is called for by one party in a dispute, it is usually to consolidate their gains, to settle the current advantageous situation as the new status quo. Peace can, of course, also be used to describe an end state in which the strong do not impose on the weak, nor the winner on the loser.

Claiming, in the course of the dispute, that you are the one on the side of peace, is using the word in its first sense, but cynically borrowing the rhetorical force from its universal second sense.

The problem with doing so is that your opponent is now your enemy, for you have cast them not only as your opponent, but as the opponent of the universal Peace; which means they are also evil – which makes the chance of Peace that much more remote.

We need a mental structure to decide. Something on which to hang a decision, something to rely on, and to guide us. Knowledge appears to be the best and most ideal structure. For what is known is true, and what better basis to decide than what is true.

But knowledge creates a decision trap. It can always be doubted that something is known, even when it is. Its standards keep rising the closer we get to it. And in any case, knowledge doesn’t decide for us, for even if we knew that we knew, the facts alone wouldn’t be enough to know what to do. We would, in addition, need a judgement, and what mental structure would support that?

With the knowledge mindset, even if you said, ‘Let’s rely on probability in an uncertain world’, you would then want knowledge of the probabilities; probable probabilities probably wouldn’t suffice.

Knowledge, used as an ideal for action – ‘I will not act until I know’ – is a recipe for inertia. It is the ideal of the comfort seeker for whom it is a perfect shield for indecision. It makes him appear to himself to be a seeker of knowledge, and so someone virtuous, aspiring to something higher. But the reality is that he is using the knowledge ideal as a place to hide without taking risks.

Put out as a necessary condition of action, it ensures you do not move at all. It is the epistemology of the sloth. It is a luxury of those who are not compelled to act, who can observe the passing scene.

Think of mental structures other than knowledge: ideas, beliefs, theories, intuitions, voices, daimonia, trust in others etc. Each has its advantages and costs. Some are too unreliable to depend on, but allow for great risks to be taken. Others are more reliable, but tend to close off risk-taking. Which structure you use depends on what you are trying to do by doing a given activity, and more broadly, how that activity fits into your life.

The Torah, or rather, the Talmud, can be considered among the greatest mental structures. It is great, in part, because it covers everything, and great also because it doesn’t decide on anything, giving only conflicting authoritative opinions. Compare its richness to our own hedonic system of decision, according to which we do what gives us the most comfort, optimising for a long and dull life. The Talmud is not a structure of knowledge, but of thought, and as a stimulus to thought, it is an interesting structure. It is also interesting that despite not being knowledge, it is used to produce reliable judgements which govern a whole people.

We think that if we found what is really good, it wouldn't be double-edged. But it would.

This is the case, for instance, with all utopias. They will become problems too. Some think of this lack of finality as a defect of utopias. They search for what is final, and once they realise the hopelessness of finding a resolution of historical problems in a utopia, they turn backwards, hoping for the return the prehistoric, which is timeless and changeless.

I would say that the real problem with this line of thinking is the assumption that there is a good which is not double-edged. Or its real problem is the idea of finality, of a point after which nothing substantially changes, or after which there is nothing that can be done to substantially improve it.

To sustain this idea, you have to conceive of the human being as looking for something definite, and then when it has found it, it stops. This is not my idea of the human being, who I think of as restlessly seeking. Even if it had everything it needed, it would make sure to think that it does not. We could even be in this situation right now, and not be able to recognise it, or not want to.

Does someone who knows they will soon die revalue their values? Does a dying good person become dangerous, beyond good and evil, released from the bounds of morality? Does everything become permitted, free from the fear of worldly punishment? Or perhaps instead they see their lives in a higher light? Perhaps there is an interesting relation between how people think of their mortality and of their morality, such that you could infer facts about the one from the other?

Philosophy often appears to be peddling lines, different philosophers peddling different lines. (Think e.g. of how Russell represents philosophy in his History of Western Philosophy.) We think of these lines as beliefs, and philosophers as believers, their statements fundamentally expressions of belief.

But perhaps right at the start, among the pre-Socratics, they were playing games of position not belief; so that when Thales said All is water, he wasn’t expressing his belief but was taking a position in a speculative game. It was, we can imagine, a contest men engaged in, opening up thought and debate. They enjoyed conversing and thinking without concluding – in fact, it was essential not to conclude, for then the game would be over. How, in any case, could there have been conclusions before Aristotle and logic?

If this is right, it is ironic that all we are left with of their thought is presented as a set of conclusions without arguments, which, on the current theory, was not their wish to produce. Their wish instead was to enjoy their own minds at the dawn of thought. They took delight in philosophical play and provocation which nothing hung on.

The pre-Socratics were, in this version, more Socratic than we usually think of them as being, insofar as their thinking didn’t end, or aim, at concluding.

You might wonder what they would think of our own late philosophical games of position, dressed up as sincere belief, drained of joy?

There are two late traditions in philosophy to which this relates. Philosophy as a method for establishing belief, and philosophy as a tool for enlivening the mind. (This is similar to the distinction between thinking for the sake of believing, and thinking for the sake of thinking or the pleasure of thinking.)

The first tradition developed after revealed truth evaporated among post-Christian thinkers, who wanted to replace religious systems based on revelation with philosophical systems based on reason. The second tradition developed when thinking became disciplined and stale, when to get to philosophy, you were forced to first master a whole field of settled thought.

You can see in Descartes or Montaigne the attempt to refresh thought. But this tradition of philosophy as enlivening is even already there in Socrates, in fact Socrates seems to take his role to be that of stimulating thought, or trying to find it behind a screen of verbiage. And this suggests that the dawn of thought ended at the start of philosophy.

At the beginning, according to this idea of the dawn of thought, thinking was carried out for the pleasure of doing so; it was not fraught, nor burdened with the idea of consequence; it didn’t even know what it was, and did not have a name.

So philosophy ‘for the sake of thinking or the pleasure of thinking’ was not, after all, the same as ‘philosophy as a tool for enlivening the mind’. Philosophy as a tool became possible only later, when the mind had become dry and dusty, and wanted to stimulate itself, and so was conscious of itself.

Reason used to be bounded by a source of truth it couldn’t justify, access or ground. This revealed Christian truth put philosophy – the discipline which gave voice to, or represented, reason – in its place. It was capable of grasping but a part of the whole, a subordinate part. It could intervene in theology – the discipline of revealed truth – only to the extent to which it could show logical connections or disconnections within its expression; it could not touch the source of the expression. So you could say that there were two kinds of thinking, each of which respected the domain of the other.

After the decline of our faith in faith, reason can now go everywhere and into everything. It is no longer represented by philosophy, but by science; it has no outside to it, it has no place, and is subordinate to nothing. It has a kind of hegemony which allows for no other kind of thinking, in which reason lays claim to the whole of truth.

I wonder how this difference has changed us, whether its single way of thinking, and single access to the whole truth has impoverished us through its apparent reach and power, now everything is effectively an equation away from an ‘answer’. I wonder if we no longer even know that we are thinking when we think. For thinking needs comparing and contrasting to see itself as thinking rather than perceiving; it needs another way of thinking to see itself as such.

This can be compared to the situation in which there was only one language. For then, you wouldn’t know that you were speaking a language, or would think of your language as the one and only, pure and natural way to express thought.

Montaigne speaks of a Renaissance practice of solitude, in which you live as though always in the presence of a great figure. Their company should raise your thoughts, and keep the bad ones in check, as you are ashamed to have certain thoughts in their presence.

We could not carry out this practice, for we hardly have any idea of a great figure any longer. Anyone held up as great we hope to scandalise, and shove to the ground; we relish the cynicism of ‘human all too human’. But if the idea of a great figure is not available to us, it means that they, or our idea of them, cannot serve to raise us up; it means that their company would be no better than the company of ourselves, and likely worse.

What is this loss? It is, I think, the loss of a kind of generosity of seeing, and finding, what is admirable in someone. We reject the idea of anything higher in every sense; it smacks of hierarchy, even when it doesn’t imply any. If this is right, what will raise us as adults, when our parents can no longer? We have lost a tool in the toolbox.

If you think of real understanding as always peeling away conspiracy, you think like a child, or like Plato: the real world has been kept away from us, we have been deceived! And it is interesting that Plato of the reality conspiracy, was also Plato of the Noble Lie. Which makes you wonder: is the conspiracist the flip side of the liar?

We see something apparently static. How do we know whether it is not moving due to the lack of forces in it and operating on it, or whether it is the result of contrary forces holding it in place? A bridge, for instance, as an interplay of forces.

Suppose someone appears passive, and we interpret them as lacking energy. It could just as easily be that they appear passive as the result of an unseen expenditure of energy directed only towards maintaining their position. For instance, someone finds themselves both driven in a given direction and also repressing that drive. This means they are in an equilibrium which, to an external observer, appears as if they are going nowhere because nothing is happening in them, to them or through them.

What could it mean to want to be a philosopher? It is ambiguous: it could mean you want to be recognised as being one, or it could mean that you just want to be one. Is a philosopher the sort of thing that one can be without being recognised for being it?

It is tricky, because the desire to be a philosopher is usually the desire to be a good philosopher, but that is something we seem unable to judge for ourselves, which means that anyone who wants to be a philosopher is at the mercy of others who judge them to be good or not.

Could a philosopher want to be a philosopher? Yes, if they don’t recognise themselves as being one, and philosophers have a tendency to scepticism. If they don’t recognise themself as a philosopher because they are sceptics, then they have set for themselves a sceptical trap from which there may be no escape. For no recognition in the eyes of others will help, as they would, no doubt, be as sceptical of others’ appraisal of them, as they are of themselves.

We tend to conflate having a plan carefully implemented, with being a rational actor. Killing large numbers of civilians, however well planned, usually undermines the case for someone being a rational actor. Yet people continue to use this language of ‘state-actors’ and ‘realism’ and ‘rationality’ even when thousands are killed. You wonder what it would take for them to be regarded as irrational. Is everything short of destroying the world compatible with being a rational state actor? (And even that too has been rationalised, and was part of the point of civil defence programmes during the Cold War, as thinking turned to relative advantage after the apocalypse.)

It seems that if you can attribute to an actor a strategy which sounds like chess, then anything can be called rational. This seems to show that we understand rationality to be detached from any idea of the good, as a machine which calculates and implements any goal whatsoever. It is topic-neutral. According to this idea, you cannot fault someone for irrationality purely on the basis of an end goal, however perverse.

But of course, this is absurd, and we do so fault them: if someone perfectly implements an absurd or horrific goal, we say they are mad. So it seems that we have two notions of, or ways of thinking of, rationality: one linked to the question of the goodness of the objective, and one delinked from it.

How many of the great geopolitical theorists, who claim to work only through open sources and their own theories, in fact, like hedge-fund men, actually rely on a network of insider sources? When they pull their rabbits from their theoretical hats, we believe them, and think that it has come out of their head and their theories, not a good contact list.

There is another way too: when your theory, which may really be pure, is taken up by one of the actors you are studying. Then, when you are right, you are right not because you are predicting correctly, but because your theory is being read and implemented.

I suppose this is rather sad for the theorist as theorist, as they can never know whether their theories would have been true of the world had they not been made true by the world. But for the theorist as a person, they now have power, which few do not enjoy.

You say: I put other people’s shoulds before my eyes, and I attack myself with their shoulds. (You almost say that I shouldn’t be doing that.)

I say: It is as if you think any should is a bad thing. But I believe in these things. Suppose I steal, and I think I should not have. We don’t doubt the should in cases like these, we don’t say: this is someone else’s should. We say, this is mine, or rather, ours, and it is a rare person who steals and doesn’t feel the force of that should – and this is how it should be!

The synthesis of the two – bringing together the most popular aspects of both, and completing, in a sense, the law of nations concept – is national socialism, something we haven’t here let ourselves think of. But we are drifting there, even if we don’t know we are; even with the best of intentions. For it is the natural development, or logical synthesis, of our own left and right, who are unknowingly uniting over their joint obsession with Jews, the middle term in their sick political syllogism.

Thinking that what happens to you is due to your own actions is a more useful way of thinking than blaming someone or something, such as your past, or someone else, or nature. It seems cruel to think that every bad thing that happens is a punishment – some things should surely not be explained at all, and certainly not as something you are responsible for.

But if we were forced to choose full responsibility or none, full would be better, for you would have to think that what happens to you is a result of your own actions, which would lead you to look inwards, to take responsibility, and change. And for the most part, things which we relate to and go awry, go awry because our relation to them was faulty, which is because our relation to ourselves was faulty.

If we instead blame the past, or others, or an unchangeable part of ourselves, or nature, we condemn ourselves to repeated action. Because of this, Maimonides saw this approach, according to which you are not responsible and not guilty, as a “cruel conception of things”.

Everyone keeps the story of the other to themselves. (We fear it would hurt them if we told them: we have it, but do not say it.) But it would be fruitful to tell them the whole story of their life, as we see it. Not the factual details, but what is really going on, as if it were a fairy story. We cannot easily see this whole for ourselves, but can recognise it if it were told to us, which of course would hurt us.

Each year in the sun, you think there is a way to escape your thinking and enter a completely different level of thinking altogether, like a holiday of thought and feeling. In this is the idea that you don’t have to go through the problems of your life, but can skip over them, or go parallel to them, side-stepping them altogether, all with the help of the sun. And then, by autumn, we rubbish this idea as merely the delirious effects of the sun.

But it is not clear what is and is not possible, and so it is unclear what are the delusions caused by the sun, and what can really be done with its help. Perhaps those who always live in the sun see what we think of as sunlit dreams as reality, and perhaps they see what we think of as reality, in our own dark country, as the delusions caused by lack of sun.

If you are prepared to call someone sweet, you are well on the way to calling them anything whatsoever, such as angel or devil. Reduced to sweet, you have shown they are there for you to make them into whatever you wish them to be; they have slipped away from you altogether, all because of your sweet.

It is a frightening thought that you reveal yourself and cannot help revealing yourself in everything you say and do. For instance, if you criticise someone for not being courageous about x, you reveal yourself as someone who values being courageous about x, as someone, perhaps, who needs to prove to themselves that they can do x, or at least as someone who wants to show themselves to be courageous or value courage. You haven’t, in a sense, said anything about the world outside of you.

Likewise, if you want to slip away and hide yourself, you reveal yourself as someone who wants to hide away – the exact opposite of what you wanted to do, the very point of slipping away being not to reveal anything to anyone.

In tolerant, liberal, open society, if you are attached to taboo or shame, you are shamed. This form of shaming is not only allowed, it appears to be necessary as a punitive measure against anyone reactionary enough not to think that everything is permitted. I, on the other hand, do not want to relinquish shame, and I have a taboo on the revocation of taboo. Shame can only be tolerated by progressives through pity: you are not quite there yet, in the promised land of openness and transparency. If accepting shame as a legitimate way of being would violate the progressiveness of progressivism, this suggests that such progress is founded on intolerance.

When you hear someone’s voice and the way they speak to you, you hear their parents, and the way they were treated and spoken to by their parents. Your voice is an outgrowth, not your own; in a single voice, there are many voices, yet we pretend that the speaker is a singular person, just as if we would pretend they had no parents or ancestors and they arose ex nihilo, fully responsible for being the way they are. And perhaps we want to think that of others and of their voices, because we want to think this way about ourselves and our own, for this is our individualism, our ‘I’.

‘Responsible’ is ambiguous. It has a causal meaning: the burst pipe is responsible for the leak. And an ethical one: you are responsible for the crime. In this way, you can say that someone is not responsible for their life in the first sense, but even despite that, they are responsible for it (no one else is) in the second sense. The two senses are not only ambiguous, but together seem to be contradictory as applied to humans.

We see the real costs of the status quo, so want to change it for x. But we do not see the costs of x, for x is so far just an idea, and so it has no real costs. It may well be that the status quo is better than x, but who will defend the status quo with its real costs, when you can advocate for x, which is an idea, and so cost-free. All this will change when x is realised, but then it will be too late to defend the status quo.

The way you walk together is an expression of yourself and the relationship with the one you walk with. E.g one walks on a difficult area, so the other has an easy walk. Or: each walks their own way, only rarely walking in step. Or: one systematically walks ahead of the other, and one systematically walks behind the other. Or: each try to walk the easiest route for themselves, and come into conflict with one another over smooth and dry ground.

You should be able to tell everything about someone from the smallest thing, as the smallest action is done by the whole person – not a part of them, as we are fond of thinking – and so as it contains the whole person, who can be read off of the action.

The one behind the leader, at the front of the hike, thought the leader was trying to prove themselves. The one behind number two, thought the same about number two. The one who stayed at home, thinking of them all, thought the hikers were all trying to prove themselves by hiking.

He had the edge, the upper hand, as he was, he thought, outside of all competition. But yet, thinking of the hikers, setting himself outside all competition, he was competing harder than them all, and he saw himself – sitting in front of the telly while the others were out hiking – as the real number one.

If you’re not giving to life, you are taking, and so feel miserable and guilty. Some will tell you to ‘re-program’ yourself, they will say that you can think about anything any way you like. Which is true, logically, and untrue psychologically.

Everything flows from the self relation, the I-I relation. Compare two ways of thinking of your life: as having parts which can be worked on, which are lacking or satisfied (friends, work, relationship etc.). Or you can think of it (as I do) as fundamentally a single thing, which through its relation to itself, manifests itself in healthy or sick relations to all other things.

On the first conception, you take responsibility, though it is grounded in false distinctions between parts, and is concerned with symptoms, not the fundamental cause. In the second, you see what is true, but because the problem is so vast – one’s relation to oneself – there is nothing tractable, no discrete problem to work on (such as a part), and so you might give up, and so fail to take responsibility for the whole. As is often the case, the more useful the idea, the more it is divorced from reality.

‘If you want to see and feel things you must constantly resist trying to explain them.’ Possibly, if explaining is a mental action in competition for attention with seeing and feeling. But even if this were true, there is a danger that without explaining we fall into mystery and stupidity, and risk confusing the blatantly idiotic and surreal with the profound.

I replaced her with the sun. Went to a hot country where the sun would burn so brightly I could not even think. Where she used to be, it was; thoughts of her were replaced by it. That I could replace her so easily with the sun – what did this say about me? Did it undermine her, or did it elevate the sun? One was gas, the other not; one had a spirit, the other not. They were entirely different kinds of thing, yet seemed, in my mind, interchangeable; each filled my mind up in their own way, leaving no room for the other.

It seemed that all the words had been used up, and now when something significant happened, it could no longer be historic or landmark or game-changing – but then how could its significance be announced or announce itself? Capitalisation was tried, but when imitated, it soon fell short. Was it now impossible to register what was important and what was not, because we had used up all the words, in all their combinations? I cannot believe this. I think rather that we have reached the limit of brash outer language; we haven’t even given inner language a chance yet.

“If you remain indifferent to Me, I will be indifferent to you with a vengeance.” (Leviticus 26:21) The only theology that makes sense to me is the abandoning theology, the God who has left us, who appears indifferent. It is God as cat, who goes off alone, whom we call but only comes when he likes, bidden or unbidden. It is a much more powerful theology than atheism, which lacks all pathos. But this God, of Leviticus, on second thought, is not the abandoning God; his threat of indifference is a threat of punishment (or a punishment itself), and so he takes a great interest in us, threatening abandonment with a vengeance. It is God acting like a child who pretends to ignore his mother, punishing her; not at all the God of traditional theism, or of the critique of that, the projection of our good qualities into the sky. This is an instance of the difference between what you think God is, and what he (at least in the book) actually is.

We allow that if you fall under a certain identity, you can claim it, be it, perform it. While if you claim an identity which you are not, you violate some social rule. But it would be more interesting if you reject even the identity that you are, or are allowed to be. More interesting if you see even that as false and merely a socially acceptable performance.

We all like to fall under an identity (national, religious, ethnic, political etc.). It puts ground under our feet. But precisely because it does, we should be suspicious of it, and should reject it as false. The ground makes us feel secure, but now we cannot move, we are limited and stuck. We want this sort of limitation, it gives us a structure and through it we obtain social rewards. But they are based on this identity, which is false. For I am not identical with the category with which I identify myself.

You can read ethical demands in two ways, as demands to live better, or as choices between life and death. And they are presented in both ways in the holy books. Often with the idea that you will be punished if you don’t do them, and rewarded if you do. But we can see many such rules as ways of saying: this is good for you (and society), and if you (and society) fail to implement it, you will suffer. If you strip out God, you can see these as suggestions for a good life and society, based on the empirical claim that outside of the path of a good life in society, there are not alternative lifestyles, but suffering and death.

There is a certain kind of person who wants to take from you in bad faith what you would freely give to them in good faith. It is the act of robbing you that they enjoy, not the thing taken; it’s the way it is obtained by them without you wanting to part with it that matters to them.

I find it remarkable that men could voice the voice of God in holy books. That anyone could have the chutzpah to say: I am God, these are my commands. You can think of it even as some kind of miracle, perhaps even a proof of God; if no one can, psychologically, do this, but someone has done this, then something impossible has occurred – a miracle!

But, no, in every hundred people there is always someone like this, and usually the worst one of the hundred, usually an absolute charlatan who will believe that because they think something, it is God-ordained. It is because they are so absurd that we don’t give any thought to the fact that there are such people, even today. But how did any one of them become so revered? Because (maybe) very occasionally, one will be an original, and of those, one in every thousand will be worth listening to. And these are the writers of the holy books. Perhaps they understood that the audacity of claiming to voice God itself convinces people that they voice God, for there must be something behind them (or else they are mad).

In the gym, she pulled a metal cord out from inside of a machine, which then pulled itself back in, producing a gesture in which she appeared to be waving to the man in front of her, as if greeting him or saying goodbye. The man in front of her, oblivious, crouched on his mat, and constantly bowed down before her, as if worshipping her.

What I saw was this: as he bowed down, worshipping her, she said hi, and then as she said bye, he rose up, and so they went on, bowing and waving to one another. Neither of them noticed this farce or ritual they were enacting, nor did anyone else around them, all of whom appeared, without making eye contact, to float around the gym in time to the beat of whatever content was filling their minds. They were there and not there at all, like wraiths trying to prove their existence by body work.

The world isn’t what you think. I was amazed to learn recently that my close and long-standing friend Hillel ben Reuben Bernstsein, wasn’t Jewish, while another close and long-standing friend, John Temple St. John, was. For the longest time, I had miscategorised them and was cautious around each of them, thinking I ought to be careful over certain topics to sustain our important friendships. But it seems that I had been cautious over exactly the opposite topics, and incautious over exactly the topics I should have been cautious over. For instance, with Hillel ben Reuben Bernstsein, I had been cautious over everything connected with the Old Testament and incautious with everything connected to the New. While with John Temple St. John, it was the exact opposite. It is a testament to the strength and depth of our friendships that this didn’t matter.

In his application form for research funding, he wrote

I am a solipsist philosopher, part of an active and vigorous collective research program investigating solipsism and everything connected to solipsism, with a team of international solipsism collaborators.

But it wasn’t true about the international team of collaborators.

As one self-torturing self-diagnosed tormented genius writer left Thomas Bernhard’s spot, another took his place. The Café Bräunerhof waiters were gracious in escorting each to their seat, and were accepting of their tortured expressions and manners over the following hour in which these geniuses frowned, clenching their teeth and clutching their temples in their hands, displaying various other gestures connected with the expression of being tortured, in just the spot in which Bernhard once sat.

The waiters understood that these men needed to carry out their torment performances, and needed to sit where Bernhard sat so as to channel Bernhard’s torment or to feel that their own was justified by Bernhard’s (or something). They, the waiters, knew from personal acquaintance that Bernhard was actually rather cheerful, and had in fact pulled none of these tortured expressions as he sat reading newspapers, chuckling over, for instance, Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

They, the waiters, patiently watched these self-diagnosed self-tormented genius writers – their notepad, fountain pen and mobile phone laid out before them – as they ate their incomparable Sackertorte (awful) and drank their delicious Melange (terrible), while they were really going through it.

I myself tried to reach Thomas Bernhard’s seat in Café Bräunerhof, but it is currently closed for renovation.

He said I was misguided. He was of the view that you could only think differently from him if you came under bad influences. I replied that I took his ‘misguided’ comment as an insult and said that I was not guided at all, that what I say is what I think, and what I think is the result of my own reasoning process. It is even, perhaps, I said to him, precisely my very problem that I have not been guided enough.

We laughed together, which felt good. But it seemed to me that our jokes and laughter were a wall we built around us against reality – or a little holiday from the world – and so it seemed to me that we were laughing at the world, pretending we weren’t in it, laughing especially at the worst things around us, sustaining each other’s illusion that each of us, and both together, were ok, and safe against these depredations. We were like world kvetchers, complaining of the world as if it had nothing to do with us, as if it wasn’t all a reflection of our own minds. (It is interesting, I thought later, that I consider the world as something without laughter, and laughter as a form of exit.)

As a mother and child sit on the front seats of the bus, she describes the world they see, painting a picture of a beautiful world to her child. He will somewhere carry this picture with him all his life, the world consisting of beautiful dogs, and colourful people, of diggers, and in general, of one good thing after another, and of a mother describing it exclusively to him, in the absolute safety of her voice and gestures. There was nothing dark in her picture, no misery, no evil, no suffering. It was as if she were laying the foundation for a way of seeing the world, one in which the world didn’t contain intentions to harm, in which everything was good and beautiful and safe.

This picture was destined to remain a constant background to the boy’s (and then the man’s) life, which would unfold against it. Perhaps she was letting him enjoy this half-truth about the world. Her description was not supposed to be complete, not aimed at letting him see everything. And maybe she was right: if you aren’t given this half-truth, you won’t find it yourself; and if you aren’t given this half as foundation, then the other dark half might sink you.

The picture of a good and pleasant world would eventually face the test of reality and inevitably come apart by itself (as the whole truth). The gift of the picture at the same time then stored up a contradiction for the boy, and then the man, in which he would eventually have to develop, consciously or not, a personal theodicy to bear the conflict. One in which he could reconcile foreground (evil) and background (good), perhaps by thinking that the world is fundamentally good, even if it can appear evil. Or, worse, that the world is fundamentally evil, all foreground, and that he was lied to by his mother about the background.

Because there is no objective way to ‘resolve’ the conflict, how he projected himself into it and lived it would show who he was.

She was going to be operated on, and was telling her father, in a loud voice, how when she went under, she didn’t want her dad to embarrass her, and she told him not to say anything to anyone in the hospital when she went under, and not to wait in the hospital but to go to her flat to wait, and certainly not to talk to any doctors or nurses in hospital, so as not to embarrass her. He was silent, containing, I imagined, his offence with dignity. What was interesting was that it was she who embarrassed herself before me, a stranger sitting next to her, by treating her father like this in public. I thought: you don’t need to worry about your father embarrassing you, you are perfectly capable of doing it yourself, as you have just demonstrated. Likely, I continued, your real worry is that under general anaesthetic, when you can’t constantly speak in a loud voice and control all that is said around you, your father would be allowed for the first time to speak and his voice would be allowed to be heard, and by contrast with his kind and reasonable manner, you would be shown up to be the obnoxious person you appear to be.

There is nothing wrong with seeing politics and the world in terms of good and evil (though it is dangerous for us all). What is unacceptable is not recognising that it is psycho-theology, not ordinary politics. One of the many things unifying the far right and left is their psycho-theological visions and their failure to recognise that they are visions, not actual reality. Psycho-theology is the replacement of a robust sense of reality with a simple moral division of people into the good (usually the speaker) against the rest. So, according to psycho-theology, the speaker is good, and everything that doesn’t conform to how they think the world should be is due to a given group of evil people – the rich, the immigrants, the oil companies, the ‘Epstein Class’ etc. – who are scapegoated as controlling (or desecrating) the world, or, in the case of Jewish immigrants, both. Their psycho-theology then promises removal or punishment of that group, by means of which the world will be restored.

To see this, take the propaganda of the left or right. You can permute the scapegoats and see that the structure of blame and redemption is the same. That structure of thought is psycho-theology, in which we have left reality behind and where (a nice dream) the bond markets don’t matter.

He, the cat, seemed fine alone, and we had sayings to justify his being fine alone, ‘The cat who walks by himself’, ‘They spend most of their time asleep anyway’ etc. Only when I saw two cats together playing did I think that it was utterly intolerable for there to be one cat alone. Only in contrast to seeing the two cats playing together did I realise that it is really a kind of torture for a cat to be alone, but one that he and I have got so used to, it is not noticed by me nor felt by him, and that this unawareness of the reality of what it could be with two cats is itself part of the torture.

It is now a source of some regret that I ever saw those two cats together, a sight which has damaged what used to be the excellent relationship I believed my cat and I enjoyed.

The film was about the relationship of daughter and mother, it was made by the daughter about her mother. And part of the point of the film was that the mother was mainly interested in herself, that the child was abandoned by the mother, and the daughter’s attempts to bridge the gap were batted away. Part of the interest of the film is that the film itself – knowingly? – remained true to this pattern, and each time we thought we were coming close to the person the mother was, the film would be diverted by an interest of the mother (her work, her ideas) as if the film itself was seduced by the mother in just the way the child had been, and perhaps still is; the film cannot decide if it is there to celebrate the mother’s work, or to attack her, or to just cling onto her coattails as she presses on with her work. The film, in this way, cannot decide if it is still a child, or if it can overcome the child-relation with the mother, and redefine it, as you imagine the filmmaker wanted the film to do or be part of doing. (And to redefine it, doesn’t that require the mother’s co-operation? Or is it just something done in the head of the child?)

It was interesting that the mother had a theory of death according to which the ones you love are never away from you, just physically away, so death is nothing. And it was hard to tell whether this account of death was just how she thought about human relations, or whether she had made a world to live in, of which this theory was an expression, in which her abandonment of her children was ok, because it was merely a physical separation. (The fact that she had an account of death at all was, I thought, telling.)

Her idea of love seemed to be non-relational. I love you wherever you are, even whether you are, just by my inner intention of love for you. It doesn’t matter if it reaches you, or whether it could. It is a self-centred understanding of love, which doesn’t reach out and touch the beloved, in which the intention towards them suffices. You could think of it as a limited kind of love, hemmed in perhaps by the fear that the object it reaches out for rejects it, or is simply not there, which you can imagine was the mother’s experience when she herself was a child.

We have to act with justification, so for each action, there is a mental structure justifying that course of action. Every action requires a mental structure to lean on. The limit cases of that structure are revealing, where ridiculous beliefs such as astrology suffice to guide action. This appears to show that what is essential for action is the structure itself, irrespective of its content. It’s something to psychologically support you so as to confidently act.

The reasonable and scientific structures work the same way. We take them to raise the probability of the success of the action, the way a trader assures themselves they are not gambling through seeing patterns in the charts. Or the way a political adviser uses polls to shape the policies and colour of a campaign. Or the way an activist uses a theory of change. In the rational case, we provide, or suppose there to be, evidential links between the structure and the action (unlike astrology).

But in many cases, the link is so thin it doesn’t appear to support the action that is carried out on the basis of it. While it is true that in many cases a structure can rule out certain courses of action, it almost never provides enough support to determine the action we take it to justify. Many courses of action are compatible with a given structure. In the end, the evidential link is usually a leap of faith, dressed up as an ‘evidence-based’ decision or policy. This is what happens in a regime of justification: everything will purport to be justified in the terms the regime demands.

Would it be more honest to meet the uncertainty of the world with a structure as uncertain as the world? How would that help us, given that what we want to do is to make, in this uncertain world, a determinate decision to produce a determinate action to generate a given result? We want determinate things in an indeterminate (or uncertain) world. To meet the uncertainty of the world, mental uncertainty won’t help.

If we want to act with confidence, we need a rigid structure representing the world to be as rigid as the structure is, and this must mean that such a structure is a means of tricking ourselves into thinking that the world is more or less as the structure depicts it to be. And so, in general, the thinking which action requires is by and large illusory.

He said he was ok, but he immediately realised it was the sun.

I asked him, a Nietzsche scholar: What is the point of the dionysio-appollonian experience, which Nietzsche speaks of in his Birth of Tragedy? Suppose, I asked, the Greek man goes to a festival and attends the tragic theatre in which he has this experience – so what? Isn’t it like when people now claim to have transformative experiences on drugs at festivals, and then…nothing happens, and they return to their lives, apparently unchanged? So how, I asked, does this inner experience change the life of the Greek, and if it doesn’t, of what interest is it to us?

He said that I had “entirely missed” the point. He said that I was thinking of culture instrumentally, whereas Nietzsche thought that the very possibility of tragic theatre – and of this dionysio-appollonian experience in tragic theatre – is expressive or symptomatic of the culture that produced it. Nietzsche saw Greek culture in the time of tragic theatre as a vital culture, in which there existed the desire, courage and strength to come face to face with life (as the Greek saw it), its suffering and everything in it. This desire became formalised in tragic theatre, and individualised in this dionysio-appollonian experience. Our own festivals and our own experiences are symptomatic of our own culture, which, he, the Nietzsche scholar, said Nietzsche would likely diagnose as narcotic and escapist, not vital.

From the Nietzsche scholar’s discourse, I understood the following: that Nietzsche is not suggesting that we, in our own dark times, adopt the Greek way. He is not interested in a course of action to obtain a result. Rather, he is describing how to read a culture, in this case a vital one, from tragic theatre. He is not interested in what the Greek theatre did for the Greek man when he left the theatre – whether or not it ‘changed his life’ – but in what that theatre says about the culture of which it was a part. And there are, I understand him to be saying, multiple internal relations between the culture, the theatre and the Greek.

In our rooms, as decorations, we keep reminders of our humanity. Coloured pencils, family memorabilia, books, and such like. They remain, by and large, untouched, as our lives are consumed by forms of work. These decorations in our rooms take on a melancholy aspect, static reminders of what we could be or have been, or what we have lost, or left behind, or not cultivated, and what perhaps has withered. It seems important for us not to forget them, not to deny them, so we put them all around us as symbols.

It is left for the next generation to cultivate themselves; they will really live, we will just survive – for them. In this way, we rob ourselves of our promise, or make of it an obligation falling on the future (as it did on us, for which we feel guilty).

‘Life is suffering,’ it is said, and the common way out is through the production of more life. So now there is more life....which, given that life is suffering, must now do the same…. This is life as a Ponzi scheme. If it is like this, with whom or what does the buck stop?

This connects to our sense of guilt towards those with whom we cannot reciprocate what is given to us; gifts like those between parent and child – of life and love – which, because they are impossible to repay, become loyalty or guilt. It is said that because such gifts cannot be reciprocated, all that can be done is to recreate a mirror of the same situation, in which the gift can be given again, through the production of more life and more love.

But what accumulated guilt would fall on the last man in the chain, or would it not work like this?

Lucian Freud said something like: that you can depict someone else directly, whereas with oneself, you work only with an image, that is to say, a mirror image. This painter’s thought could be extrapolated: you can know others better than yourself, for with yourself, you have indirect knowledge, while with others, it is direct. (He thought that to see yourself as someone else, that is, to see yourself as you see someone else, is how we obtain a richer self-conception, which the mirror helps, showing us not as we want, or are used to.)

Contrast with Descartes, for whom self-knowledge is direct, while knowledge of the outside world, including others, is indirect, as it is essentially inferred, and consists of images, and is as doubtful as images are. To reconcile the two views, you could say that Descartes and Freud are speaking of different objects of knowledge: one of the external, of the outside of bodies, and one of the internal, of the mind. But this seems too easy.

Both, after all, want to know who we are and what our predicament here is. Clearly, Freud believes he is working towards knowledge of the human being, not merely towards the image of one; he wants to know and depict the soul of the person. He is not interested in a reductive idea of the body or in the image of it alone. Likewise, Descartes thinks that what he can grasp through a priori thought is the human being, which he characterises as an essentially thinking thing. So there appears to be a genuine conflict.

Freud’s paintings can be seen (not correctly) as portraits of his own relation to his mother; a relation in which he is her, violating the private world of his sitters beyond what they could want or imagine; noticing everything, not only on their skin but under it, and whatever is inside it too. You can also think of the sitter as him in relation to his mother, who (he thought) did this to him. Each sitter turning away, averting their eyes, covering their face from this penetrating scrutiny. (The sitters often roll over and open their legs before him, like dogs (and also the dogs).) In the paintings of his mother, she also looks away from him, and in these paintings, he can penetrate her soul as she did his, and he could find her privacy as she found his; he could be her, and she could be him in this painting theatre, in which he could invert and play with these roles. So it can’t be said of him exactly that all his portraits are self-portraits.

We cannot see a nude without thinking of Eden. They point back there (or to Greece, but in Freud, it seems to be Eden). Even Freud, in his godlessness, paints the dignity of the human being. Though here it is revealed through (or despite) the flesh and what is inside of it. It is not God but Freud who sees and knows all. His paintings can be seen as an argument with God, a rebuke to the God who created us corporeally – that we possess this dignity despite this. Or that we can give ourselves our own dignity by a choice to see things in this way.

But if his sarcastic thought were: Could this body be the image of God?, his own paintings and capacity to reveal (or decide on) this dignity itself can cut the other way, and turn into an argument for the very God he doesn’t think he needs. For if this dignity exists through (or despite) the body, or in our capacity to choose it, how deep it must be – and so perhaps it really is the image of God.

We suppose that nature has a nature, that the differences between willows and oaks, or dogs and cats are explained by the different things having different natures. As parts of nature, it would follow that we too have a nature, presumably, a human nature. But what it is no one seems to know, either because there are no such facts, or because we haven’t yet discovered them, or because any facts we can point to don’t appear to be determinate. An unclear picture of ourselves presents itself, and we fill it with our ideas. Unlike our ideas of the nature of other animals – perhaps because we can look at them with detachment, without the hope we invest in ourselves, or shame for not being the way we wish to be – our ideas of our own nature reflect how we think we are, or believe we are, or want to be, or some other purely psychological relation we have to ourselves. You could write a history of human nature, which would consist in the various changing ideas of who we are, a history of the various ways we posed for ourselves in the mirror.

I said that I cannot help being this way. She said: The most you can say is that you are this way, the cannot is a theory you apply to yourself, for some purpose – a mental addition to an unprejudiced description of yourself. She said: You choose to think of yourself as determined. She said: And once you think of yourself this way, there is no need for you to take responsibility for yourself, so it is useful to you, you don’t have to change. I said: It doesn’t seem like that to me at all, it seems to me that I recognise limits, and see what I can and cannot do. She said: Your mind is not a machine, it can do more or less anything, there are no broken pumps or levers in your mind; it is fluid, and light, but you think of it as hard and fast.

Her choice system was total; her idea that you are free to choose all things was a total idea in the sense that any idea you offer to the contrary is taken as itself an instance of a choice. You cannot argue with a total system, which is why we don’t argue with totalitarians and fanatics.

But what is the meaning of saying everything is a choice when it seems that not everything is a choice? And what metaphysical or psychological basis is there to support her choice ideology? It seems to be a dogma of a particular line of thought, just as it is a dogma of the opposite line of thought that we are essentially determined, and so have no choice.

Connected to her choice ideology, she believed that whatever happened in the mind could be attributed to a secret reason, to a purpose or a function. This made the mind out to be some kind of functional conspiracy, in which everything has a secret purpose beyond our ken, appearing at times to work against us, at times in our favour, and we never know which it is. Left out of this theory – purposefully excluded from it? – was the idea that some things might happen for no reason.

But I believe that, in the end, she found it useful to think that everything is a choice and that everything in the mind is there for a sufficient reason. She found it more useful than any other way to think. Perhaps she found that it helped to push against our natural tendency to think that the limits of our world – that is, our interpretation of the world – is the world. And to think of our world as a choice is a more fruitful idea than to think of it as determined and unchangeable.

Each extreme position falsifies reality, but as we anyway tend towards extremism in our thinking, she thought that the choice ideology was best, and chose to interpret things in this way.

I, on the other hand, believe the so-called choice of her choice ideology is the result of her prior experiences and character, that it is something received or inherited, or is a reaction against this. And I don’t choose to believe this, I happen to believe this.

False inference: from x is an interpretation to You can interpret it differently and choose how you interpret the world. This Victor-Frankl-school-idea trades on an ambiguity about possibility. Just because it is logically necessary that a given interpretation implies there are other interpretations, this doesn’t mean that it is psychologically possible to change your interpretation. We may even be able to see that there are a variety of available interpretations on the menu, but be unable to choose any but one.

Not seeing what is false about this line of thinking can lead you to think that you are guilty for not altering your way of thinking of your life (or of life) to a better (by some standard) interpretation.

He, the performer, explained to the audience before the performance of how he found a note of hope at the end of the rather sombre piece he was about to perform, which was the composer’s final piece. This performer went on about hope, and of how it was of great importance that this piece, the composer’s last, whose final note he wrote as he was dying (literally!), contained as its final note – so the very last note the composer wrote – a note of hope. Even if the instruction for the performance of this final note was morendo, with the o trailing off as he died composing.

But why did it matter to the performer that the composer deposited a lump of hope at the end of this piece, and so of both his composing and human life? He seemed to think that it mattered that the piece ends on a major note, but why? Would this mean, for the performer, that the composer believed there to be life after death? Or did it mean to him that the composer took this life to be redeemed or at least redeemable? It said a lot about the performer that he was on the hunt for notes of hope, and believed we would share this with him. Why did he think it would matter to us, in the audience, that he thought this composer wanted to communicate a note of hope as his final note? It reminds me of the comfort some devotees of Wittgenstein find in his last words, in which he said that he had had a wonderful life.

I suppose we tell these stories because we are looking for comfort in the fact that these men, who publicised their tortured lives, could say at the end of them that life was good. And perhaps this gives us hope that we might one day be able to say the same of ourselves. Or perhaps it is that we think the judgment of these greats on their lives is also at once a judgement on life as such, and so also on our lives too, something which, in the midst of them, we cannot see. We want, then, to fall in with their judgement, and so we think that because they think that their lives contain this note of hope, we don’t have to determine if such a note exists in our own lives.

Clearly, we care not mainly about them, nor about the end of our lives, but about our lives now. And any importance we give to the composer’s or philosopher’s judgement is something that we make use of here and now. For there must be other greats who have the opposite judgement, but we select these ones for our comfort.

The advantage of expressing a character in writing means that you don’t have to live it in life. It is like attacking a therapist, so you don’t have to attack your wife or mother. Dostoevsky could be the underground man in words, so he didn’t have to be it in life. His underground man might have otherwise wormed his way into his life. This can be a way of separating oneself out and living multiple lives in a single life, or appearing to.

Like an actor, the writer’s thinking is preoccupied with the lines of others. Often so occupied with these others, the writer doesn’t have to think of their own life. But of course these characters are the writer’s own characters; they reflect their life, or their own thinking about it, for it all comes from the same source. An attempt to get out of your own head and into another life is just a way of seeing, or enlarging, your own thinking.

He said to me: Look at the state of your life! I replied: But look at the state of my mind! He thought my life was in poor shape, but I saw my real life as my mind – ‘The life of my mind is my life,’ I protested – and my outer life, which he was looking at, as secondary at best. Who was right? Is there a right? People would say, I think, that the outer life was the real one, and that to say otherwise is self-deceptive. But I – my thinking mind – am not so sure.

Is it that no bird can resist the tree-top singing stage in the morning? Or is it that the only ones we hear are the ones who love the performance, and that in the bushes and the undergrowth are all those who do not, and who we never hear for they sing so softly? And what of those who do not sing at all?

One announced to all who would listen, his militant atheism. Another spoke of how there is no hope, of how reality bends towards no direction (that if we are to change, it must come from us, and that is 50/50). Like bitter prayers, their avowals of pessimism or atheism were love tests: calling out so as to be shown to be wrong by the very thing or force that they purport not to believe in.

He said he liked nothing that I wrote. I said: do not read it, it is not for you. But he kept reading it, and not liking it. He reminded me of a scene in which on the left is misery and fighting and abuse, and on the right is calm, peace, and tranquillity. He moves instinctively to the left. Why? Is it that he doesn’t even believe that the right exists? Or that he believes it exists but prefers or is drawn to the left? Perhaps the left is the familiar and by habit, he goes towards the familiar? There must be more to it. In a certain sense, there is nothing on the right, nothing of interest, nothing to write about, nothing dramatic, no strong and stimulating emotion, and you could put yourself in a frame of mind in which the right is synonymous with death (and hence the left is life). Or maybe the right is just boring?

I cared less that they were anti-semitic – which went without saying – but more that they were anti-semantic: that they didn’t care about meaning. And perhaps the one ultimately led to the other.

X. We wanted to study x to know x, to know what x was and what it was like. We didn’t primarily want to know how x was thought of – though this was of interest – but our real interest lay in the thing x which we wanted to study, and by studying, to know. And it was exactly this which was denied us.

We were promised knowledge of x – the prospectus promised this – but once admitted into the course of study purportedly concerned with x, we were permitted only knowledge of ‘the construction of x’, ‘the genealogy of x’, the ‘deconstruction of x’ etc. They ridiculed x, made x out to be something, at best, which a naive person wants, a person not versed in power, capital, ego and their proper theoretical study, and at worst, something a bad person wants, someone mired in power, capital, ego.

But what even did this rejection of x mean if we didn’t know what x was, especially if x didn’t exist and so especially if we had no acquaintance with it in the first place? And what did it mean that all we were allowed to study, and so to know, was thought about x when x itself was never given – when x itself was disallowed? And if they were never going to even try to give us knowledge of x, why was the course called x, why did they lyingly appear to promise it?

They trounced on x as a real thing, and presented it only as an unreal thing for which it was foolish – or frowned upon, or mocked – to think existed. Perhaps, we wondered, this vitroil against x was a mask. Perhaps, we thought, x was being deliberately hidden from us, obscured by all this high academic meta-level discourse about x. Perhaps, we thought, they were keeping x for themselves, and in the staff rooms, in the breaks, they would discuss x and laugh, or that they would even not discuss x, but glance at one another in recognition that they each knew what x was, and would smile at one another, and in smiling and glancing they would, as it were, present x to one another.

Or, conversely, we considered, could this resistance to giving us x on a plate be part of their methods of imparting knowledge of x after all? Could it be that all this elaborate refusal to provide x, or knowledge of x, was itself a way of delivering x through a paradoxical ladder to x?

Our teachers were, we ended up concluding, never intending to give us x but to take us down a path to show us how our desire for x was an illusion to begin with, and they used our desire for x as a hook by which they drew us to their institutions and courses, to be educated, which meant for them, to be disabused of illusions.

I suppose now, as adults looking back, that even this explanation was probably too charitable, too clever. The reality was, I now think, that they themselves were confused; that there was no clever didactic plan; that they had lost x but had to speak of it due to the nature of our schooling, and so spoke and taught in the way they did about x. So its not so much that they believed in what they taught – I would now say that there was a collective disbelief in it for the most part – but just didn’t any longer believe in x. They were like jaded theologians, who could now only think of the Bible as a literary text, and all they could teach about it was its history and human construction, but could no longer teach, as they did not know, why it was of interest in the first place. I no longer blame them but feel sorry that they were lost in their own words and thoughts of x and that the story of x is all they had left to pass on.

I believed that when they showed their cheerful face to me it was because they were cheerful. I later understood, through third parties, that they were not cheerful, but put on cheerfulness for me because they saw, they thought, that I needed them to be cheerful for me, and so they were cheerful for me, or made as if to be.

I had believed that I was cheerful to them and they were to me – but it turned out that their natural state was not being cheerful and they were only cheerful, as they saw it, to support me, as they saw that I needed, more than anything, to be in a cheerful atmosphere. They had understood that I feign cheerfulness to produce cheerful responses and a cheerful atmosphere, and they had seen that need to be around cheerfulness as an inverse reflection of my mental state.

I had completely misunderstood them and misread them. I realise now that what I had taken to be their natural cheerfulness was in fact a form of charity, given by them, who I thought of as having nothing, to me, who I thought of as having much. I had established this hierarchy in my mind – of me over them – but the fact that they could offer me this charity, the fact that I was a charity case for them when I thought that they were the charity case, changed my whole understanding of who each of us was, what we had and had not, and of our relations.

The trader. It was only money when he lost it, but it was Money! when he made it.

He played what he thought of as a parlour game: infer the news about x from the price, or price fluctuation, of x. But he also inferred the price of x from the news of x – and this was his mistake.

His thinking conformed to his open positions. If he was long, he thought only of things which would drive the price up, and not at all of things which would suppress it. If short, he thought only of things that would drive it down, and not at all of what would raise it. When long his mind was long, when short his mind was short. His positions became his positions.

He knew that price is an array but couldn’t help thinking of it as a single number – the price – and then couldn’t help but think of the single numbers as forming a line or a curve. And in this way, he resembles us all, our minds elaborating much further than what reality offers. This imaginative capacity is how we can do many things, or anything really, in which we project into a future state. Without it, there would be no building anything, and no language learning from, it is said, a paucity of inputs.

He took views about things which he shouldn’t have views on, just so as to buy or sell. But: just as he was neither theist, nor atheist, nor agnostic, so he had nothing to do with those topics on which he took positions. He made an opinion so as to take up a position.

He identified market patterns, thinking that everyone else will identify these patterns, thinking that everyone else will treat these patterns as natural laws of price. But of course he didn’t believe in them and nor did anyone else, but everyone thought everyone else did – it was a form of collective madness.

Unknowlingly, their array of buys and sells created Rorschach-like diagrams, which had fractal-like dimensions; and they each interpreted these as they wished, seeing in them portents of future prices.

And they needed some portent, for prices floated in the void of the graph, with nothing metaphysical to support them, possibly collapsing or accelerating in unpredictable ways at any moment.

He, the trader, thought and analysed all things in his life through trading. Take friendships. He thought that whatever achievement it is to leave friendships when they are unsatisfying, it cannot be a real achievement in the long run if this is iterated, and one’s friends end up numbering zero. This would exhibit a certain kind of problem in which the importance of self-protection is so great that you destroy the relationship. He analysed this as follows: the stop-loss for relationships was being set too narrowly, without enough tolerance to cope with the inevitable ups and downs. (He also had a theory of relationships as leverage and of leverage in relationships.)

When things went bad he got trader’s belly – this is when he knew he was a pro, and began to think like a pro and speak like a pro, and began to say ‘as a professional trader’ in his speech, and began to identify with whichever commodity he was currently trading: sometimes it was coffee in his belly, sometimes cattle, sometimes light crude, sometimes sweet and sour crude, sometimes heavy crude.

War. Those who see themselves as weak use morality in lieu of power, or use morality as their last power, in which they disguise morality as law and human rights. Those who see themselves as strong have no need for morality, for they can impose their will, so do not have to petition others for their rights. The irony is that the strong cover every action in morality, and seem to need it just as much as those whose only weapon it is. The difference is that the morality of the strong is expressed through the language of retribution and punishment, without any need to disguise it as law. And though they do not disguise their claims as rights in law, the rhetorical position they occupy is as judge – but not as judge of the law, but moral judge, the decider of what is and is not moral – and executioner.

The strong use morality as a justification for the use of force without recourse to law; the weak plead before the law which they cannot enforce. They, the weak, want to claim that the use of force itself is illegal – but there is no hearing for them. Hence the pitiable state of their plea. They speak as if there were a higher law that could judge and then enforce what they take to be their violated rights. We hear them. And their plea, in its impossibility and desperation, carries force with us, and in our eyes, but not in the eyes of states.

The war would appear to be sheer madness – but could there be a logic to it? Not a strategic one, so a psychological one. Perhaps it is all for a man to see his effects in the world, to turn the world upside down? Global peace or war is the same insofar as effects are concerned, for him. And in this way, it has been a great success. But even this logic seems too logical. The reality is, I think, that there is no reason at all, no logic. We cannot seem to comprehend, or accept, that such devastation can occur on a whim, or follow an instinct. A logic, even a devastating or evil one, would seem preferable to a whim, to a war de trop.

The war shows the limits of force and, by juxtaposition, the immense power of words and speaking to unlock (and unblock) that which bombs cannot. Or perhaps it shows the limits of a misapplication of force, that is to say, force used to solve problems which only speaking can.

The humiliation of the strong (now, only the apparently strong) is to be forced to sit down and speak with those whom they see as weak and below them and whom the strong thought could be controlled through force alone. The victory of the weak (now, the apparently weak) is to force the strong to sit down with them, to use their words and to sign a treaty with those whom they thought were below them.

Is it possible to at the same time reject your country’s internal repression but admire and be proud of its warlike virtues and conduct as part of the history of war – as it were, that repressive strength turned outwards?

Bruce Mazlish wrote (on a separate topic): men are being told how they should be in the guise of a mere description of how they are.

When presented with the Rorschach test, I told the psychologist the most amazing things. She couldn’t have known if I really saw what I said I saw in Rorschach’s patterns. She couldn’t have known that I made up these visions because I couldn’t stand just saying the same things about eyes and faces as, I imagined, her other patients did. I compared myself with them, and competed against them in her eyes (so I thought). I wanted her to think I was interesting and special; not merely a high IQ individual but a creative individual – so I excelled, I believed, in my Rorschach tests.


Part of our problem lies in characterising what we lack. We say we are tired or without energy or such like, when what we really lack is meaning or destination or whatever it is which would give us energy from an endless found source. Instead, we think of energy as the temporary output of an input we give ourselves, through e.g. exercise or calories or drugs.

Energy is only symptomatic. But it is convenient to think of it as that which we lack, for then we don’t have to think of the intractable human situation which lies behind it.

Thinking you have overcome suffering, or have solved the problem of life, shows you are very much in the midst of suffering and the problem of life. For to think you can solve it, or move apart from it, and escape it, or find an exit, is itself a sublime part of it.

He put himself at the service of someone – anyone – so he didn’t have to choose. He served others so he didn’t have to reckon with his own life. He could disappear into their approval, and a knowledge that he was, above all, useful. Everyone saw him as sacrificing himself, as good – a mensch. But of course: what he did was useful for them, so they celebrated him as good. In this way, he became their fungible asset – and when they said that they loved him, it was his function that they loved. Being so useful to them, they egged him on, ensuring that he’d always be a mensch – their mensch.


We’d just met, and he said, right at the outset, “I’m a diasporic Jew”. I interjected: “Why bring Israel into it already?”

He asked what I would think of wearing a Magen David. I replied: “What would it say that this face doesn't already say?”

They said to reassure me, “The pendulum will swing back”. But I thought: Yes, the pendulum may swing back – but I am here now. And whenever they said “Don’t worry, everything will be ok,” I thought of them as anti-, or at least, ignoro-semitic. I thought: Had they not heard – or did they not care to know – that there is hope, but not for us? But it was often about an entirely unrelated topic they were speaking, such as work life or personal life. They could not possibly comprehend that I could interpret their innocuous or inane words – “Don’t worry, everything will be ok” – in this way, and it was unfair for me to do so. Yet I continued to do so.


“I support the pure intellect without any agenda, only holding to the truth. Everything else is uninteresting, everything else is uncurious and sterile, everything else begins with the conclusion or a position, but the point of the intellect is to submit yourself to the neutral reality outside of it, whatever that may be – however distasteful, amoral etc. This is our idea of the intellect’s role in relation to reality; its point is not to advance an agenda, but to hold to reality.”

But if truth can be a guide, which is a metaphysical hope, it can only do so when we have selected what to investigate and how. And what determines that? Not the pure intellect.

But the fact that the pure intellect doesn’t determine everything, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that it should be minimised or mocked. Without it, we would form ideas only on the basis of interests and passions, and the truth outside of us would have no say, and so we would live inside ourselves.

Suppose we do see the intellect as intent on reality. Would it be so in a Dionysian way, which would mean: to meld into it, and so not know it as a subject knows an object? Or would it be intent on reality in an Apollonian way, which would mean: to contemplate it, but to stand apart from it? The former would sacrifice the knowing subject as such, for they would be too involved in reality to know it; while the latter would sacrifice the subject’s involvement in reality.


The fewer principles we have, and the fewer ideas in general, the more freely we can think. More free to investigate and follow curiosities, and so also free to inquire into ourselves through examining the subject matters that draw us. What passes for thinking is so often going down tracks taken and set down and agreed upon by one’s peers. (Thinking is replaced by so much agreement and smiling and laughing, i.e., comfort.) Not indifference, but not yet taking a position, would make the individual possible.

We often agree with a general statement – about the good, or justice or happiness, or freedom etc. But any way of going beyond the general formulation towards a more precise statement appears arbitrary or counterproductive. Attempting to produce the abstract thing often produces its opposite.

What does this mean about the good, or justice etc.? That they are nothing? That they are meaningless? Or dreams? That they exist in another world? Or as pure ideas? That our world – we ourselves – resist them? And if so, why would this be? Or is it that we don’t agree enough to formulate them together? Or is it that we have never really tried to make them real? Or that we don’t really want them? Or that the very idea of implementing pure ideas is as incoherent as trying to construct pure geometrical figures in the world?

The response might be: “But can’t the abstraction guide us in making our world, even if it would, in the world, be impure?” Perhaps, but for it to guide us, it would have to be made tractable, and that is where all the disagreement lies. What is attractive in these ideas is, in part, that we can all see them as good – it seems absurd to refuse the good as good. But as soon as they become tractable, they become disputatious, and so lose their appeal.

Sub-groups come to define these ideas, which define their group. And each group conflicts with the others, who define the same universal ideas in different, even contradictory, ways. It seems that they simply hang their particular ideas on these universal ones, using their universality as their appeal, and so betraying and distorting the pure ideas.

It was said that various famous names staged a protest. Each famous name was tired of being brought up constantly by living thinkers. These living thinkers would constantly use their great names to position themselves and their own ideas in the great tradition of philosophy and thought; constantly putting their own ideas into the mouths of a great philosopher, and so using their great name to advance something entirely unrelated to them. But this named philosopher couldn’t protest or resist because they were dead. (This is why the names had to take things into their own hands.) The name was shamelessly used to advance any – often contradictory – idea anyone happened to want to hang on it. Plato was tired, Aristotle was tired, Bacon was tired, Newton was tired.

When you are absolutely sure and certain, it is because you are using a system, and your confidence in yourself and your view is only as secure as that system. But the system must have axioms, and these cannot ultimately be secured. So the whole thing floats in the air, and your certainty can continue to exist only so long as you can keep yourself from investigating its foundations, or can convince yourself that your axioms are different, special, self-evident. (The need for Socrates to have a daemon is perhaps a mockery of this.)

We ultimately have to accept that there is no such thing as rooting ourselves or our ideas in the world. And that even the so-called rooting in the body is absurd. For the body walks on a world which is unrooted in a universe, a universe which itself is unrooted.

We use the term ‘natural’ (and its cognates) now as the religious used the term ‘divine’ (and its cognates). Which is to say, so as to preempt or decide in advance on certain questions such that no argument about them is possible. x is natural means: no dispute about the validity of x is so much as possible.


The metaphysical subject. We think, and for good reason, that our minds could not be a product of evolution, as they are not a product at all. We appear to ourselves as eternal or sempiternal, that is, not something historical. The problem then of evolution would not be that we came from an ape, but that we cannot come from anything at all. When we think like this, we think of ourselves as metaphysical subjects – or as a certain version of a metaphysical subject, which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. We think of ourselves then as a substance which cannot be created or destroyed. And this may be as an individual mind, or as the universal mind.

“I am 40,” he said, and it was true. “I am not 40,” he also said, and it was also true. The first was spoken by the empirical self, which was in space and time. The second was spoken by the metaphysical self, which was not. Our mistake was to think that just because the same physical mouth uttered the two sentences, the same subject said them.

I knew their location in the world: but where was he? and where was she? I didn’t know.


The worse the world was, the more mathematics became important. It offered a haven from the world. As mathematicians assumed power and influence in this world they hated, they re-made the social and economic order on the model of their mental mathematical retreat from the world. Eventually, we all lived in their simulation or version of the world; and we eventually preferred the predictable sounds and images of the simulation to the dangerous unmade world. In this way, the world became the Pythagorean world in which all is number. They made our world conform to an ancient metaphysical speculation; as it were, confusing this metaphysical description of the world with an injunction to make the world accord with it.

It is interesting that some proponents of the idea that we actually do live in a simulation – that what we take for reality is itself a computer simulation – are those very people who are trying to get us to live in their simulations. As if to say: our digital platforms are not fundamentally different from what reality is anyway, relax!

If a computer can do what a human can do, or if you believe that the human mind really is a computer, we seem forced to take a position: to downgrade humans (as mere machines) or to upgrade computers (as sentient). The first seems, absurdly, to undermine our dignity and put us on the level of our tools; the second seems, absurdly, to give our tools the same dignity as we currently think of ourselves as deserving.

But if you really think of it, this formulation is not obvious at all, and it can be negotiated and can be refused. The self which states I am stuck in a pattern appears to be passive, finding itself in a prison (a pattern). It is a dark picture. The only crack of light is that the prison would appear to be of my own making, and so, presumably, I can unmake it too.

But another way, among the many other ways of understanding lamentable repetition, is that one part of me – the unconscious? – is trying to show something to another part of me. So what I think of as passive stuckness could in fact be my active attempt to wake myself up. I am ‘stuck’ only in the sense that I have – so far – failed to pay sufficient attention to that inexorable part of me which is trying to show me something.

You could think of Nietzsche’s eternal return as expressing the endlessness of this unconscious attempt to wake oneself up; and you can think of his affirmation of the eternal return as the recognition that this is an uncompletable activity.


We confuse ourselves with opinions and beliefs. Putting so much store by them – identifying ourselves with them – we confuse agreement in opinion with commonality, and disagreement with difference. We like democracy, but only at a distance or abstractly. In our own orbit, we neutralise the range and plurality of opinion. The closer someone is to us, the less difference we can tolerate; we try to convince them of our own views, and if that fails, we bully them into saying they agree with us; and if all else fails, we rid ourselves of them.

By and large, a person’s beliefs get in the way of them. I want the person without the belief. This is why a deeper friendship can exist between people who do not share a language, for they aren’t diverted by the divisiveness of belief, and so it’s possible to find our feet with them in ways that go beyond belief. And perhaps this is also why the relationship between man and animal is so special; and why too that it is better that a lion doesn’t speak; for if a lion could speak, we would get into intractable disagreements with them.

What is it then to wear opinions lightly, in such a way that we don’t come into pointless conflict, but also in such a way that we do not give up on what matters to us for the sake of harmony? Perhaps this has to do with the way our seriousness of opinion is tied up with thinking of ourselves as if we were universal legislators. To remedy this, we must constantly remember that we are not universal legislators; that it is a kind of make-believe we engage in so as to take our opinions about the world seriously. Objectively, however, each person’s beliefs – which we can devote so much to cultivating – matter very little to anyone other than them.

Having said that, not all such conflict is pointless, and sometimes an opinion is so vile that it does too much credit to the person whose opinion it is to be charitable enough to take it seriously and to dispute it as if it were a reasonable position. Instead, we treat such an opinion as a natural fact, and try to defeat not the opinion, but the person who holds it.

This connects to a monological fantasy. Nietzsche thought of the poet as someone who sees multiple spirits around them, and thought of the actor as someone who inhabits multiple bodies. We, on the other hand, think of ourselves as singular, and we try to establish our singularity through sustaining a single point of view, and a set of consistent and correct opinions. But perhaps something like what Nietzsche thought was true of the poet or actor is true of us too, and that what efforts at singularity mask is that our minds are like stages on which many characters converse amongst themselves. I (the metaphysical subject) could say, equivalently: I am not a character, I'm a platform.


He presented himself as an enigma, but then felt alone when others were interested in him merely as an enigma, and were drawn to him merely as an enigma. He didn’t want to be known as he was, perhaps ashamed of who he thought he was, but he wanted to be known nonetheless – so as an enigma was the compromise. To be known as an enigma was not to be known as no one or as nothing, but to be known specifically as the person wearing a mask or the person who doesn’t want to be known as such. Did this amount to his being known as he was – for after all, he did wear a mask – or known as he wasn’t – for after all, he wasn’t the person and the mask, just the person?

Of course, it wasn’t enough for him to be known as the person wearing the mask. Something compelled him to want to be known without the mask. And in fact, being known as an enigma, wearing a mask, was taken as a provocation to unmask him. We wanted to know who it was that wants to be known as an enigma, and why they don’t allow themselves to be known without the mask; that is to say, we wanted to know what secret he was hiding. But as we moved towards him, wanting to unmask him, he moved away from us. He danced, moving between wanting to be known and wanting to control how much he was known, and how he was known. And he saw the paradox in this: if you control how you are known, and how much you are known, then the essential thing – this controlling element, the controlling self – is always left out as unknown.

But was this right? Was this controlling ‘I’ the essential thing, who he really was? Surely it was only who he thought he was, only a fearful part of him. As we kept moving towards him, hoping to remove his masks, and as he kept moving away, replacing one mask with another, we became tired of the pursuit, and started to wonder if who he was really was the man with the masks, and we wondered if indeed there was anyone behind them. In any case, and more truthfully, we were tired, and began speaking of respecting his privacy and of his autonomy to choose not to be known, and such like; slowly, we stopped chasing him, and eventually lost all interest.

And he saw us as we retreated from him and turned our backs on him, and he, bereft, finally lifted his mask, exposing a hollow darkness, this void which he had been hiding, his secret – but our backs were turned, and we were retreating from him, and would never see what it was he was showing us.


My mistake. The time to listen to the birdsong is when the birds are still singing, not when I want to listen to them, for when I want to listen, they have already stopped.


When it is said that music is the pure expression of will – primordial, before all words and conceptualisations – how do we account for song, which is articulate and contains thoughts and meanings? Surely the human voice playing with sound-words – words becoming sounds, and sounds, words – in something like the way a child does with language, constituted early song, which was among the earliest forms of music, along with clapping and banging things – that is, music which can be made with the body and the things around it.


On holiday. In a foreign country, you don’t care about why things happen, and who people are, and how they are. They are in your life only for a moment, and they are not your people, so you cannot be proud of them or ashamed of them, and cannot expect them to differ from how they are and who they are, so you accept them and their ways, and can even marvel at how they can do things in ways which in your home country you would find repulsive; here, in the sun, in the sea air, we can accept anything (everything perhaps). And like the people, you accept the dog barking outside your window in the morning – in the Mediterranean morning – and you accept its owner who lets it out in the morning, and lets its bark wake you up in the Mediterranean heat from which there is no going back to sleep. And you do not think of blame nor of their inconsiderateness nor of their irresponsibility; and you do not think of the unreasonable hour, for this is their way, and you are on holiday in their country, and so you accept this and them as part of your holiday experience. You even smile at their absurdity and foolishness and childlikeness, for anything is permitted on this holiday island and in this holiday mind.

But compare: at home, you know whose dog it is that wakes you up, and at home, you think and dwell on them and their inconsiderateness; you think of how it is possible that they cannot think of their neighbours, and such like. At home, you expect things from people, you are disappointed by them, you find their indecency a failing. In this way, you do not accept anything happening around you, and do not accept people for how they are and who they are. You live in your head, in the sense that you constantly have in mind a set of standards and expectations of civilised people, which they constantly fail to meet. And so you live, at home – the home in which you should be safe – in disappointment, darkness, resentment and dejection.

If we could only think of our home with our holiday minds – our truly Christian accepting, unjudging holiday minds – we would become peaceful and totally accepting of our country and the people in it. But this would be altogether wrong, amounting to not facing reality and its conflicts; it would be sheer childishness to accept everything around us. Is it then only when we feel no part of a community that we can totally accept? Perhaps what would be ideal would be to fuse our home and holiday minds, and so to meet our home conflicts with a holiday irony, remembering that, in some sense, our lives at home are themselves holidays from eternity, and that in our conflicts our seriousness is misplaced, and acts as a mask of this unpalatable fact.


He tried to explain how, in our theories, we oversimplify, losing all nuance, lumping together as the same what is in fact different. And I agreed. But to explain this, he lumped together what was in fact different, and oversimplified all the theories he discussed, losing all nuance. I thought: if even he, who wants to make this case whose conclusion I agree with, cannot do so without falling into error, then what hope remains for us?


At the therapist: I can see the therapist trying to fit me into their scheme and experience – he is this, or he is like that, or he is like him or like her – and I resist such moves, and I might even change my story just to ensure that it does not fit into a familiar pattern. I must complicate myself for the therapist. But why? It isn’t simply that I am recalcitrant or oppositional, or contrary, and nor is it that I am merely resistant, for that matter. There is a logic to what I do. I fight the therapist’s categories because I want to be seen, and that means to be seen directly for who I am, not through a category or a system or a theory, nor through ideas or intermediaries or stories. If I disappear into the therapist’s interpretation and categorisation, I am not seen, and so am not helped; it is only as someone unique that I can be seen, and so helped.

Of course, it goes without saying that my refusal to accept being therapeutically categorised, and likewise, my compulsion with being seen directly, will be taken by some to express what my real need is in therapy, which relates to the root of my problem – and indeed, they would say, this need (to be seen to be different or unique) can best be understood according to certain classical theories and classical therapeutic categories which they are too discreet to mention to my face.

I suppose, on reflection, that to think that I cannot be categorised, or do not want to be, is to think that I am fundamentally different from any other person, such that what is true for them is not true of me – and this, to feel that I am special, is precisely what I want from being directly seen by the therapist.


Is it possible that a man drops a bomb in a city to produce the image of that bomb being dropped in that city? Could it be that he finds it clever to drop a bomb in a city to produce the image of a thick smog, which is the image of people suffocating in that city? He gives an order which returns an image. He creates fires for the image of fires. But would it have been better had he loved the fire itself? Would this have made him more or less mad, or more or less obscene? On TV, the military experts assured us that the bombs are strategic – dropped in order to force an agreement. But ‘forcing an agreement’ only sounds like an agreement insofar as a confession extracted by torture is a confession.

The reverse architecture – or the reverse of architecture – in war produces a new structure, or rather the opposite of a structure, a pile of rubble, expressing the asymmetry in the universe, that it is easier to destroy material things than to give form to them. We, looking on, are shaken too by seeing this and seeing how the industrial and political system that sustains us is held up by a thread, not by metaphysical rules, but just conventions and promises. Now these agreements too are in rubble, and a new architecture will emerge, and this is the creativity of war, which doesn’t lie in the visible side of explosions, but in the recalibration of all forms, in particular in the invisible relationships.


She said that I needed to be renewed. She said, in the same breath, that my poor old hems and cuffs and tatty shoes needed to be renewed. It’s not so much that she thought that I would be renewed in virtue of the renewal of my wardrobe, but they came to the same thing for her. Or at least: she didn’t disentangle them in her thinking of me. I explained to her that what she sought for me could only be obtained by me myself wanting the new wardrobe and new clothes; that is, the transformation she hoped to see in me would already have taken place (or would already be in the process of taking place) were I to be concerned with my poor old hems and cuffs and tatty shoes and were I to want to seek a new wardrobe to replace them. I tried to make the case that the renewal would already have to exist inside of me, and for the renewal of clothes and shoes to be an expression of the inner renewal; that the outer renewal could only be the expression of the inner renewal – and were I to impose it from the outside, then it would be only the image of a renewal. In short, she mistook cause and effect.

Because I cannot get outside of my experience to see the causes of what is passively taken in, if I want to disentangle my world – to find out what is dream and what is not – I can only work from the inside. This means I must find what in my experience is me-like, that is, what has the hallmarks of my mind’s activity, and what is, as it were, alien to me, bearing the hallmarks of the mind’s passivity, and so of the world.

“I have had the support of a story of my own victimhood all my life. It has oriented me. Now that I can see it, however, I believe I can attend to those things in my life which tell a contrary story, one which I usually suppress – the story of the good things that have happened to me. And I know that even this story of what has happened to me is a story of passivity and victimhood. But perhaps from there I can work up to the story of the good that I have done and do. And I foresee that one day I will just feel ok, and will not need the support of any sustaining story.” Having heard this, I thought: an experience, for instance, of pain, is not optional; but the mental theme of the experience, e.g. victimhood due to the pain, is. But ‘optional’ sounds like choosing among different meals on a menu; whereas the option I mean is a strange one, which you might not know in advance of having it, and it might have to present itself to you, by dawning on you, or striking you, and you might have listen carefully to notice such options.

Contrastive thinking – thinking which is oppositional, antagonistic, agonistic etc. – always seems to express a lack of assurance: I am x, not y. Why not just: I am x? But even here there is good and evil, or better and worse. For I am x always implies what I am not – y, z etc. It expresses an identity which is defined in moral opposition to others. But why do we feel the need to tie ourselves to a category to be something? For after all, we existed without a category for the very early part of our lives. What is the need to say I am anything at all? Could we instead shed identity? Is that what being really human amounts to? But ‘human’ is yet another identity – if we are shedding, why stop there?

Our options with respect to loss appear to be: accept loss, or suffer delusion. We want to think there is a third way through philosophy, but this is simply part of delusion. Think, for instance, of the old who suddenly discover that death or time is unreal. Or of the wasted who say life is a dream. Or the demoralised who say there is no self. Or the flounderers who say nothing matters. This is philosophy as the handmaiden of delusion. Each may be right by luck, but this is irrelevant, for they love consolation, not truth.

‘Never again’ has at least two readings. The humanistic version, ‘never will we humans accept such slaughter again’, and a particular Jewish one, ‘Never will we Jews let ourselves be victims of such a slaughter again’. Very different evaluations, and differences of standpoint, which lead to different actions – for instance, intervention in the name of humanity, or action to preserve the survival of a people. Each imperative pulls in its own direction, and not necessarily the same one. But without understanding this difference, we suppose that there is only the humanistic ‘never again’, and so wrongly accuse of hypocrisy those who use ‘never again’ to support their particular cause. Of course, you may be guilty of hypocrisy if you trade on the ambiguity of the two meanings, cloaking the latter meaning with the former etc. – but this is a specific charge.

Is it true that to will to be a saviour I must, logically, will for there to be some evil which I can save someone from, and so I, representing myself as good, must also will the existence of evil? I tell myself, no: I can want to be a saviour, given the circumstances, but I would prefer the circumstances to be different, and not to have to be a saviour. Now that is all very logical, but is it the whole truth of the person who clearly wants to play the role of the saviour, and so who needs all the staging and props to do so?

He was making the case for some philosophical point and he laughed in a knowing way. It sounded to me that his laughs went in lieu of a good argument; or rather, it seemed to me that in the course of making his case, his laughs were an attempt to bolster his case, expressing his recognition or worry that he hadn’t made his case well enough. When someone laughs like that, they want you to laugh along with them, to go along with them; and appealing to our innate tendency to want to please, to smile or laugh along with someone smiling or laughing, we think that even if their laugh or smile is not done with intent – and it is usually not – they are appealing to our base elements. And not only do we resent them for trying to, as it were, cut us (the thinking mind) out of the picture by seducing our unconscious or our bodies, we also resent them for reminding us of these aspects of ourselves which we would prefer not to consider, reminding us of how fragile our nous is, and how it rests on this more powerful, stupid, uncontrollable irresistible impulse. (Just as the sun affects our whole outlook.) As it was, his reasoning was fine, but his laugh put me off entirely; he shouldn’t have laughed, and then I might have believed him.

‘No to imperialistic war!’ I read on a poster in North London. I saw the point, but in thinking about what was jarring in it, the trade-off became clear. The adjective – ‘imperialistic’ – is the radical explanatory category which draws attention; the more radical, the more attention. It makes perfect sense to use the most dramatic terms to draw a crowd, but there is a cost. The more narrowly defined this category is from the outset, the more limited will be the understanding of the phenomena, and the poorer (on its own terms) will be any demand or action that results from it. The slogan seems to take the primary problem of the war not to be the war itself, or the pain the war has inflicted etc., but imperialism. (I assume ‘No to anti-imperialistic war!’ could not be a possible slogan.) But is ‘imperialistic’ the optimal category to characterise the war? Is it an imperialistic war? And even if it is, it is other things besides, so the question remains: is this the best way of describing it to advance the cause of the protesters, and so to end the war? But to get into these questions is to get into the factual and moral questions about war and intervention – and no such questions are permitted in the imperative world of the sloganisers. They might reply: ‘It is obviously an imperialistic war, and in any case, there is no time to interpret and question: stop interpreting, act!’ (Another slogan.) But they are, I think, making an error on their own terms, for if you make the wrong diagnosis, any action based on it will likely be wrong, and go wrong too. (Which is much the same criticism levelled at those conducting the war.)

God is designed to be disappointing. We pray to him only in the time of deepest need, the very time in which the likelihood that things will go our way is negligible; only then, when things are utterly desperate, do we call out to him. Only in the last resort, do we shamefully call to this thing we don’t believe in – but now, we might? We are bound to be disappointed, guaranteed to be. And in our real need, of course, he is not there, or rather, he doesn’t do what we ask him to do, he fails to be the instrument of our desires, and so we are disappointed with him. (When we are not desperate, we have no need of him; we don’t, for instance, call on him to sustain the good things, and then praise him when they are sustained; just as we don’t want what we have. If we were to do so, we would find a constant positive answer to prayer.) He comes into view when we are desperate, and we believe in him just enough to blame things on him, and then, when our pain subsides, he fades out. And perhaps, a believer would say, that his being there for us to accuse and blame is how he gives to us in ways we cannot see.

A case of badly written dialogue: one speaks, the other listens, and then the other speaks, and the first listens. But this is an ideal type, based on mathematical ideas of reciprocity that rarely exist on earth. In fact, often enough, one speaks, and then the other speaks – no one listens; or, one listens and then when he tries to speak, the other ignores what he says and makes his own speech regardless, concerned only with his ideas, using the other as an audience. We can use this ideal of dialogic symmetry to measure deviations from it: the greater the deviation, the more interesting the case is. For instance, we can ask: why does the one who speaks and doesn’t listen need an audience? Is it like a play, where he acts as if what he says is worthwhile, while his captive plays the part of audience? And how does the speaker then feel? Does he, as he plays his role, forget the theatrics, and feel for a moment what it’s like to be sure of himself and to have an interest taken in him? Does he then, in this performance, take from the other what he doubts he can earn in ordinary life? But after all, it is not the same thing that is taken and earned: for what he takes is the attention of a captive audience, while it is freely given genuine interest that would be earned. To think he is satisfied by this simulated interest you would have to believe he could forget a lot, and live in the dream of his theatrics. It is also, however, possible that he cannot forget, and that as he speaks, he is aware that this is theatre not life, aware that he is extracting something from his interlocutor that they do not want to give. In fact, as he speaks, he may remember more than at any other time how he is a victim of a society which fails to take the interest in him which he thinks he deserves. In such a case, we must imagine that he feels quite terrible about himself for taking his revenge on society like this – and that it is just for this reason that he does it.

The swimmers. He entered the pool and observed the lanes of the pool. Not finding a lane to fit his speed, he reluctantly joined a slower lane, and resigned himself to swimming against the speed of the lane. Another entered the pool, and not finding a lane to fit his speed, also joined a slower lane. But rather than resign himself to another bad swim, he resolved to determine the speed of that lane himself and make it comfortable. By swimming at times fast and at times slow, others left the lane, and he found himself in the lane alone – and he was pleased. The first swimmer would never have even thought of doing such a thing. He would have pre-empted that thought before it was formed; he would have blocked it by the thought that one oughtn’t to upset the other swimmers, or one oughtn’t to inconvenience them, and such like. In this way, and in general, he justified never intervening in the world to make it comfortable for himself; which, put another way, is the same as saying that he made it such that he always had to fit into a world he had not contributed towards making; as if the world were like a room which he believed he could never decorate to his taste, or hadn’t been given permission to; and in this way he lived in an uncomfortable world. (Even in describing this, I side with the first swimmer: for I make the second swimmer out as selfish, and so sustain the first swimmer’s idea that his discomfort is connected to his meekness, and his meekness connected to his goodness – and conversely, to be comfortable you must be selfish or unscrupulous.)

It has likely been said: “I cannot help but wonder: if the Shoah happened today – would there be anti-Shoah merch? And would I buy it? And would that be the appropriate response to the Shoah?”

I look but am not really looking, I am thinking instead. So I chastise myself for not being aware. I am now looking and not thinking, but now I chastise myself, asking: why this dumb outward looking, why am I not inward, thinking, examining?

‘My misery is my joy’. I think this, but is this right? And even if it is, do I think it because it’s right, or because it puts my misery into a formula which appears to justify it, which would make altering it seem pointless, and would make the risk of trying to alter it, because I have tied it to my joy, appear to risk the removal of my joy? But even if I do use this formula to justify my status quo, it might nonetheless be true; for my misery might really be my joy – and everyone after all seems to agree that there is some internal relation between them. And it is possibly because it is true that its use goes unnoticed.

What is the opposite of ‘I’m not OK’? I thought it was ‘I’m OK’. But what if the person who is really OK does not think to judge their state? This would make the opposite of ‘I’m not OK’, nothing. These statements to oneself – ‘I’m OK’ or ‘I’m not OK’ – are like spells, but in what conditions do I feel the need to tell myself that I am OK or not OK? Both presuppose the need to narrate oneself to oneself, to tell a story and interpret one’s feelings according to: OK, not OK. But whose OK is this? Is it my own, and if not, whose standard am I applying, and by what criteria do I judge whether it applies? What might it be like to be the person who does not see the need to register their inner state and represent it to themself – that is, interpret themself – in this way?

The polarities of order and chaos come into all questions. Everything – mental and material – is seemingly analysable by their interrelation. For instance, genetic stability versus mutation in evolutionary theory, or states of matter/thermodynamics, or any of the fundamental psychoanalytic notions. If it is true that this is a sort of universal explanation (at some very general level), what is it about reality that makes it possible?

To articulate is to straighten things out which are out of order, but in a way which doesn’t distort their sense of being out of order and project into them a false coherence; but then again, an articulation must not be too out of order, for what is said should be understood by someone who is not me, which means it must be ordered enough for linguistic comprehension. So perhaps a rider should be added to anything we say that matters, to the effect that what is expressed is not as ordered as language makes it seem.

I, looking out of the window, look at the people walking past as if at a moving picture; they, I think, see me as someone staring at them, for I am static and they are not, and see only that they are looked at. But you don’t need a window, you can do this with your own eyes too; and if you look out of them as if at a moving picture, a similar response follows.

A difference between the mindset of the philosopher versus that of the therapist is that when the philosopher asks ‘What do you mean?’ they ask for you to meet a standard of clarity, to think properly about what you say, to make it as coherent as possible, to be your best rational self. While when the therapist asks ‘What do you mean?’ their concern is altogether different, almost opposite. They are prompting you to reveal your own reality, which means not asking for any rational or other standard to be met in the content of what you say, only truthfulness in your saying it.

The earlier classical tradition considers what we want and then gives it to us: melody, sensuousness etc. It likes to please us and flatter us. While in the later part of that tradition we are given less of what we want, and now, rather than being given what we want, we must accept what we are given, as if there were an independent thing there, which no longer wants to please us but wants to be recognised as such. It wants us to see that we are in a relationship, and so it resists giving us what we want, and sometimes gives us what we don’t want. People may reject it, saying they don’t like it. But what if it is not intended to be liked, what if it does not want to please, but instead, for instance, to test?

Even if there were an objective hierarchy of goods or people, or a moral order or real obligations, you would still have to accept or acknowledge them as such for them to matter to you. And even if a rational order was attached to this moral order, which bound us rationally to accept the evaluations of the moral order – you could still just ignore those demands, and, as it were, walk past them as we do paintings in a gallery that have taken lifetimes to make.

Physicalism in the philosophy of mind is a theory connecting, it is said, the mental and the physical. But however robustly ‘physical’ the theory is, what it actually connects is ideas and ideas: ideas of the mental and ideas of the physical. For a theory is a mental phenomenon. The physicalists – at least the non-reluctant ones – hope that their theory is true, and so hope the things the theory is about are connected in the way the theory states, but this hope lies outside of the theory.

We know there is more to life and thought than the schemas we impose on it. To honour that, we theorise about the unconscious, or theorise about God and such like. But these are ways of bringing the big uncontrollable thing back into the categories of thought and back into theory. Even if that thought or theory says it is setting the limits of thought, it always has the last word. For the theory brings the uncontrollable thing which is outside of our schemas, into the thinking which it is meant to disturb. By the very fact of mentioning it, the theory appears to provide some grip on it (even if that grip is negative or boundary setting), and so tame it.

As a child, we think there are people who know and run the world – and it is true that the world around us as a child is often like that. As an adult, we learn that while there are people who influence the world, it is not run at all. When, as adults, we reflexively blame a group for running things badly, we usually behave like children, who need to think of the world as guided by powerful authorities, whom we can blame. We all know, as adults, that the world is really a spinning top, that it floats like the prices in the market, tied down by nothing. But this knowledge is unpleasant, and we do not want to dwell on it.

She said something to me about a contemporary political topic, and I thought to myself that I will not consider it, nor reply to her, because my mind has bigger fish to fry. And I thought of myself at this moment, thinking that what is going on in my mind, which contains these supposedly bigger fish, is more important than replying to what she – a flesh and blood person in the real world outside of my mind – has to say.

It doesn’t follow that the worst thing we see (and perhaps have ever seen) is the worst thing that is happening. It’s just the worst thing, passive as we are, presented to us. But if we are not interested in this fact, we cannot really be as interested and concerned as we claim to be about the world and the people in it.

He found everything interesting. But what then was he curious about? Was it, as he said, ‘the world’ itself, or was it himself in the world, or the world through his own self, in the way, for instance, that for Kant, an interest in the world cannot not also be an interest in oneself?

You make the routine, and it seems to hold you, and give you comfort – you disappear into its pure soporific comfort – and that comfort you then despise because it seems to hold you too tight; you resent the routine (and yourself), feeling a victim of its power, a power which you have given it and established only because you wanted to hide from something, such as your thoughts of your life as such. Everything seems then to shrink to the size of the routine, or the routine expands its grip over the whole of your life, and the two become indistinguishable.

There are, I think, also routines that allow life to flourish within them, the way that a sleeping routine allows dream life to flourish, the way a parent’s routine allows their children’s lives to flourish, or the way an artist’s discipline is that inside of which their art can be made. The rigidity of such routines might even be a condition of something living growing inside of it.

We need artistic works which are performed over and over in their long history, and which are open enough to be read in many ways. Then, in times of tyranny, such works will still be performed – and must be – and will take on meanings which weren’t imagined before and wouldn’t now be commissioned or performed if the work were contemporary, for it wouldn’t be allowed. But its status, and so its ongoing repeated performances, means that were the tyrant to prevent its performance, he would accuse himself, and so he is forced into a dilemma.

The rules were ridiculous, but I was nonetheless outraged by the audacity of those who thought they did not apply to them. Or: the rules were ridiculous, but we resented how they excluded us, and we wanted not to be left out of the scope of these ridiculous rules.

Similar concerns existed when Jewish law was being codified. One of the great codifiers of law, Rabbi Joseph Karo, produced the Shulchan Aruch (1565), which set out what he took to be the Jewish legal (halakhic) consensus. (Rabbi Moshe Isserles’ glosses extended the rulings from Karo’s Ashkenazi tradition to include the Sephardi tradition.) The work became a standard halakhic reference, and is extensively consulted to this day.

This legal codification was a matter of presenting rulings without setting out their justifications, that is, without providing their sources in the law. It presented the law as standardised, simplified, as pre-interpreted, or without requiring interpretation. It made law appear to be something immediately available, clear, understandable, decidable and implementable.

*

Rabbi Karo, in the introduction to his book, writes:

I saw in my heart that it would be good to gather the sapphire lilies of its sayings [that is, of the law, or of the law as expounded in his comprehensive previous book Beit Yosef] in a concise manner and with clear, comprehensive, beautiful and pleasant language, so that the perfect Torah of the Lord might be fluent in the mouth of every Israelite. Thus, when a Torah scholar is asked a matter of law, he will not stammer, but will say to wisdom: “You are my sister!” Just as it is clear to him that his sister is forbidden to him, so will every law be clear to him when he is asked about practical application, since he will have this book fluent on his lips, built as a stronghold that all turn to.

And:

I have called this book Shulchan Aruch (‘Set Table’), for in it the student will find all kinds of delicacies, properly arranged and preserved, orderly and clear. I am confident, through the grace of the Most High, that through this book the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord—the small as well as the great, the student as well as the learned, the skilled craftsman as well as the one who understands whispers. Therefore, I spread my hands to the Lord, may He help me for the sake of His name’s honour, to be among those who bring righteousness to the many, and may He grant me the merit to begin and complete it, so that it may be arranged according to His law, correct, accepted, good, and beautiful.

*

Though there had been previous codifications – such as Maimonides’, Mishneh Torah – Karo’s proved the most popular and controversial, giving rise to a number of criticisms. For instance, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel:

To decide halakhic questions from the codes without knowing the source of the ruling was not the intent of these authors [that is, of Karo and Isserles]. Had they known that their works would lead to the abandonment of Talmud, they would not have written them. It is better for one to decide on the basis of the Talmud even though he might err, for a scholar must depend solely on his understanding. As such, he is beloved of God, and preferable to the one who rules from a code but does not know the reason for the ruling; such a one walks like a blind person.

Rabbi Samuel Eidels went further than ‘abandonment’ and ‘blindness’:

In these generations, those who rule from the Shulchan Aruch without knowing the reasoning and Talmudic basis ... are among the ‘destroyers of the world’ and should be protested.

The thrust of the rabbis’ objection to the Shulchan Aruch was that the existence of such codes leads to the abandonment of Talmud, the study of which is essential to understanding the basis and the meaning of law. Given the importance of this knowledge to Jewish life, its abandonment would have (or has had) devastating consequences.

*

Such rabbis believed that the world sustained by Talmud was in danger of collapse; the mere introduction of a book could achieve this. We can see some of their fears as relating specifically to how their peers would engage with the codified form of the Shulchan Aruch. Specifically, they were concerned with the severing of legal rulings from their basis in the Talmud, presenting these rulings without the sources by which they might be understood as valid, or contested. Their fears, outlined below, can be understood to relate not to the codification in itself, but to how this form interacts with human weakness and temptation.

(A) the codified form encourages acceptance of a given ruling, rather than intellectual engagement with it. As there is no source text in the Shulchan Aruch, one can be confident that the interpretive work has been done for you, and there is no need to search for the original source of the law and to validate the ruling for oneself. In fact, the code can itself now be used as the standard for validating (or contesting) other rulings. Its effortlessness and simplicity can lead us to accept it without having to worry about what it halakhically stands on. Our acceptance of it as authoritative is the flip-side of not wanting to take responsibility for the law, and not wanting to do the work to establish a living consensus, founded on understanding the sources of the law.

(B) without the human process of debate and discussion of the law and its sources, a legal individualism can set in: people can think they know what the law is just through having access to this legal code. But historically, the law is formed and developed through discussion and debate; a we decides the law, not any I. The Talmud is communal knowledge, whereas by contrast, the Shulchan Aruch presents this, in essence, as knowledge which any individual can possess. The fear is that this apparent knowledge – and apparent power – are solipsistic illusions, encouraged by the apparent transparency of the law in the Shulchan Aruch.

(C) in any case, the attempt to set the law down in any final form undermines what the law is: a moving consensus. This movement has value for the community which is alive to its responsibility for determining the law through consensus at a given time and place. The fear is that treating a codification as final will make the law stale or dead. To set down the final consensus doesn’t take account of the fact that there are a plurality of consensuses, different legal equilibria at different times and places reflecting a variety of understandings of halakha; nor does it take account of the fact that there are grades of consensus, with some rulings more widely agreed upon than others. Presenting the set of rulings as the distilled consensus without debate is misleading as to the nature of law, which evolves through debate and discussion of Talmud.

(D) presenting the law as settled is itself consensus-forming. But rather than consensus emerging from debate and discussion of Talmud, it is settled due to the perceived authority of the individual author of the Shulchan Aruch (Karo). An element of its persuasiveness is due to the voice of the Shulchan Aruch being singular, presenting itself as the end of the conversation, as its non-negotiable conclusion. In this way, the Shulchan Aruch would seem to narrow the range of acceptable opinion, leaving out every interpretation but one, and so excluding any dissenting opinion. If legal creativity and the conversational determination of the law are suppressed, then the consensus hardens. In other words, if the code discourages legal discussion and comprehension, its rulings might become standardised, resulting in an ever-narrowing consensus – achieved not through debate, but through a particularly persuasive presentation of the legal consensus. The fear attached to this is that it may be easier to aggregate authority to rulings through codification than through argument.

This singular voice of the Shulchan Aruch – purporting to be the voice of consensus, that is, the law itself – is to be contrasted with the tradition, in which Talmud and Jewish law is a plurality of voices, and is usually presented as such, and usually hailed as a strength.

Part of the persuasive power of the single voice may be that it appears to present rulings as pre-interpreted, or as the final interpretation, or perhaps, the truth without need for interpretation. This gives the impression that all that is left for the rabbi to do is to read and rule – the table is set, after all. The law appears as something available, as something already settled, established, clear and implementable. (And, it could be argued, that one might gain an increase in efficiency, making legal decisions quicker, with a higher rate of success than before the codification became available.) Whereas, the law as traditionally regarded is something which, for us, is often unclear and uncertain, and which is availablem to a limited extent, to the finite human mind, only after extensive study. The fear is that if the law as code is taken to be pre-interpreted, it may be forgotten that the code is already an interpretation of the law – it is, in a sense, but one translation of the law – not the law itself. The fear is then that due to its form, the Shulchan Aruch will be taken not to be but a human interpretation of the law, but rather as the final and decisive law itself, and so, almost divine.

*

These points concern the effect of the form of the Shulchan Aruch on its reception, and how this form – a single authoritative voice, stating the whole content of the whole law – was feared to have a profoundly negative, perhaps destructive, effect on Jewish life. I will next turn to the centre of the rabbis’ inditement of the Shulchan Aruch, which is that it produces in us a kind of blindness.

Were this point of view available, we would discover a whole new standpoint on the world, with a whole new way of regarding familiar things. Before, we could only focus on the colour of things, or the solidity of things, or the various other material qualities of things. Now, we would be able to attend to existence, and to appreciate all things in this new light, in which we can notice that we ourselves, the outside world and the whole are bound together by being.

For someone who hadn’t considered this before, it would be like becoming aware of a new sense, or awakening a dormant sense – the sense of existence – which opens up a new region or dimension of reality.

*

It seems obvious that we can become aware of something’s existence. That is to say, aware not merely of the qualities of a thing, but of the fact it exists, or its existence as such. For example, I look at a table, and I can attend to various of its properties: its colour, its size etc. I can also attend to its existence.

The same applies to my own existence. I know many things about myself – that I am such-and-such age, that I am hungry, that I am sitting in such-and-such place etc. I can also attend to my own existence. Descartes’ Meditations contains a method to become aware of one’s own existence. By doubting the existence of everything else, the world is quieted, and I become aware that I exist.

This awareness can be extended to the world as a whole. It disturbs or disorients, or can be seen as wonderful or miraculous. We can think: why should I be part of reality, and why should there be a reality at all? In thinking this, we contrast what is with what could be, which includes nothing. So in thinking about the existence of everything, we immediately also think of everything’s possible non-existence. (Sophocles’ wisdom – that it is better not to be – depends on our awareness of our own existence and of our ability to grasp the contrast case.) These are dizzying thoughts, in which we seem lost in reality; no longer thinking of ourselves according to our ordinary frame of reference, as located in space and time, but as dislocated being among other being.

*

Given that I can be aware of existence, by what means can I do so?1 I can become aware of existence either directly or indirectly. If I am indirectly aware, it means that the awareness is obtained through inference. If I am directly aware, it means that the awareness is non-inferential. So indirect awareness is awareness through a theory or thinking process, while direct awareness is awareness without a thinking process (in the way in which we imagine an amoeba is aware of the light).

For us to have any awareness of existence, we must, I argue, have some direct awareness of existence. For it to be possible to be indirectly aware of the existence of x, there must be some y such that we are directly aware of the existence of y. So not all awareness of existence can be inferential.

Suppose I am aware of the existence of a distant planet. I am aware of it because my true theory of the heavens postulates the existence of this planet on the basis of my accurate astronomic observations. This is indirect awareness of existence. But I can surely also become aware of the existence of my observations – as I look through the telescope, I attend to the existence of my observations as such. Is this direct or indirect awareness of existence? If it is indirect, if, that is, I infer the existence of my observations of the heavens from something else – for instance, the raw sense-data in my visual field – then I can, in turn, become aware of the existence of the raw sense-data. And this awareness is either direct or indirect. On pain of regress, at some point the chain will terminate in something whose existence I am aware of, which is not an inference. And so it follows that if I am aware of the existence of anything inferentially, I must also be aware of the existence of something else directly.

*

It is debatable which items we can have direct existential awareness – the whole world, the external world, some objects within it, the self, perceptions, thoughts etc.? In many cases it is controversial whether the awareness is direct or indirect. For instance, does Descartes’ Cogito provide inferential or direct awareness of one’s own existence? But that we have some direct awareness of existence is not, I think, debatable. If this is right, then the question is: how can we be directly aware of something’s existence?

It would seem that if we can become directly aware of the existence of something, there should be a corresponding sense of existence. My sense of hearing would, for instance, deliver the sound of the dog barking, my sense of sight would show me what the dog looks like, and my sense of existence would pick up on the existence of the dog. Like the other senses, it would not be infallible – it would sometimes present existence when there is none.

It would be a strange kind of sense, for unlike the others, which bring into awareness a unique field – of sight, or sound etc. – and which apply only to some objects, the sense of existence would range over anything and everything, from objects in the world, to oneself, to thoughts, to the whole.2

There is another difference from the other senses. The other senses deliver us information by which we predicate properties of a thing. While the sense of existence presents the thing which we predicate properties of. Existence, once we are aware of it, seems to be a property like any other, but it cannot be, for it must somehow be prior to the properties. The sense of existence would then present that which can be attributed properties.

[1] “I shall consider”, [Descartes] writes in the First Meditation, “that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams. ... I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things.” (Meditations VII, 22 f.)

[2] No reasonable man, says Descartes, doubts in ordinary life everything I am now going to doubt. (VII, 16, 350 f.) The doubt is only for the seeker of truth. (VI, 31; VII 350.) As a maxim for action Descartes formulates a principle incompatible with the attitude of the doubter: “to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could be and not to follow less faithfully opinions the most dubious, when my mind was once made up regarding them, than if these had been beyond doubt”. (VI, 24.)1

Descartes’ philosophical quest in his Meditations aimed at setting his knowledge on stable, rational foundations. His negative method for doing so was through subjecting the totality of his beliefs to radical doubt – radical in that any belief that could be doubted was rejected. Any beliefs remaining after this onslaught might serve as foundations upon which knowledge could be reconstituted. If successful, much of what the doubter ordinarily believed about the external world – such as that I have hands and eyes and flesh and blood etc. – would be preserved, now on a stable epistemic footing.

But it might not go like this. If philosophy is worth doing, it must be an adventure, and if it is an adventure, there must be risk of loss to the philosopher, that is, a risk of it all going wrong. Descartes’ Meditations present a paradox: at the same time as offering one of the great adventures in philosophy ([1] above), he undermines the importance of its results, not only by saying that life will go on regardless, but advising that its results should as a matter of principle be ignored (the ‘maxim for action’ in [2] above). As such, the maxim deprives the adventure of its danger, and therefore of its interest; so philosophy, in Descartes’ hands, cannot be courageous, but appears to be an idle thing, failing to interact with the life of which it is a part.

However, the serious reader of the Meditations surely thinks that we should be disoriented by radical doubt, and should object to it becoming mere philosophy. Indeed, it is a puzzle and a problem for those who have had disturbing inner experiences – such as psychedelic, religious or near-death experience – that they can go on living afterwards as if nothing happened. They might lament the fact that the experience can be ignored, that this opening does not somehow change the rest of their life, but stands outside it, as an anomaly or a trauma. What is perhaps surprising here is that Descartes advocates such a dis-integration of thinking and being.

*

The ‘maxim for action’ counsels ignoring the results of radical doubt in one’s daily life and actions. This might be understood as nothing more than advice to keep your head above water when engaging in something as arduous as radical doubt.

More interestingly, it might be that Descartes had complete faith in the outcome of this process, because he had complete faith. We can think of the maxim as Descartes’ instruction to himself to stay the course in the light of the fact that God will surely guide him through the doubt and return him to (a transfigured) ordinary life. His thinking mind must however reach this destination using only its rational resources, as if it were unsupported by God’s guidance. We could then see radical doubt as a test of faith, which Descartes indulges in precisely because he has, ironically, no doubts about its success.

This reading has two problems. First, as the radical doubt begins in Meditation I, there may, for all the doubter knows, be no God. God must be established, not assumed, and so He cannot be taken to secure the outcome of radical doubt. This, however, might be a matter of timing: if the maxim were justified through faith before the doubt commenced, it would nonetheless be operative during the period of doubt, even if its justification could no longer be available to the doubter. The second problem is that if this really were a test of faith, why not bet everything on it? A test which allows ordinary life to continue regardless of its results would seem a less serious test than one which would devastate the life of the doubter if it went awry.

*

Another way to read Descartes’ maxim is as a harm mitigation policy, put in place in case things go horribly wrong over the course of the Meditations. Descartes would then be saying: if things go right, then ordinary life is redeemed, and if things go wrong, it doesn’t matter, because ordinary life will (and ought to) go on as if there were no philosophy. The aim would be to introduce a practical schism between ordinary life and philosophy such that any possible damage caused by intellectual life to ordinary life would be minimised by undermining the significance of the results of intellectual life. So while the impact of ordinary life on the intellect is limited by the radical doubt of its content, the impact of the results of the doubt on ordinary life is limited by the maxim.

To see this, suppose that one enters into the doubt and does not emerge from it. What is left is a timeless and spaceless thinker who thinks the Cogito. This thinker is unable to rely on the truth of any belief about the world, and so, to understate the case, has some problems. Perhaps because we now read philosophy as a historical curiosity, it can seem strange to think it could have real costs. But if one seriously enters into radical doubt, one might well “feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neither stand on the bottom nor swim to the top.” (Meditation II.) Through radical doubt, the self becomes dangerous to itself, inviting into the mind various suspicions, nightmares of humans replaced by machines “whose motions might be determined by springs”, evil demons etc. If this self-attack could not be withstood, or if there were no route through it, then we would fear its consequences for ourselves: solitude, madness, nihilism etc.2

We might even think of Camus’ only one really serious philosophical problem as lying here at the heart of the Meditations.3 As the thinking subject becomes everything to itself, and the external world recedes, the subject – this spaceless, timeless I – wants everything to stop, and to annihilate itself. It is, on this reading, Descartes’ perceptive understanding of where his philosophical adventure might end up, that leads him to propose his maxim as a harm mitigation measure.

His maxim then encourages us to think that the results of philosophy don’t matter to ordinary life; that they are relevant, if at all, only in a separate sphere. We can see the purpose of attempting such a separation from two perspectives.

(a) From the perspective of ordinary life, preventing any philosophical results and disturbances from seeping into it, and treating them as idle and without consequence, serves to limit the costs to life of doing philosophy. This requires a psychic split, or at least a psychic one-way valve: while life can still bodily affect the radical doubt – you will, even if you doubt your experience, still get tired and need to sleep, or hungry and need to eat –, the maxim aims to prevent what happens over the course of the doubt from affecting ordinary life of action.

(b) But this separation, which from the side of ordinary life can be seen as preserving it, can also be seen from the side of the intellect as facilitating the continuation of philosophy. From the intellectual side, the lack of consequence for ordinary life does not undermine the value of philosophy but is a condition of serious philosophy. Ordinary life would then continue for the sake of intellectual life. It would be, from the standpoint of the intellectual side, as if it were being taken care of completely.4

Descartes’ maxim then seems to require, acknowledge or encourage a psychic split in the life of a person between a thinking and doubting intellectual self, and an ordinary life of action. It is unclear to me if this is best understood in terms of a split in the self – between an intellectual and non-intellectual self – or a split in the life of the person, or simply of their activity, intellectual and non-intellectual. It is also unclear to me from what side this separation is built: whether it is ordinary life, which wants to defend itself against the results of philosophy so it can go on unhindered by them, or whether it is philosophy which wants to be sustained by ordinary life, or whether it is built collaboratively.

*

There are several problems with this approach to the maxim, which might be seen as problems which flow from Descartes’ fundamental distinction between the mental and the corporeal.

(1) The very fact that Descartes took his maxim to be needed at all, suggests that he believed that thought and life – mind and body – are naturally bound together in a form of interaction in which what goes on in one sphere matters to what goes on in the other.

However, you might wonder whether a maxim for action is needed at all, given that nature usually sorts things out. We don’t not eat because of our dreams or nightmares. The surviving human societies are those which continue acting in the world regardless of what happens in their inner world. Hume, finding himself in the “most deplorable condition imaginable” through excess philosophical reflection, famously wrote, in his Treatise of Human Nature:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I woud return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Serious philosophical reflection is, in the end, unsustainable for long periods, Hume seems to be saying. Perhaps Descartes didn’t have the same belief in nature or capacity for diversions as Hume, and so saw the maxim as needed for the doubter to get on with their lives as if there were no doubts about it at all and irrespective of the results of philosophical inquiry.

(2) The risk mitigation interpretation seems too easy. Surely you cannot have it both ways: win if things go well, and win if they don’t. Dividing life from philosophy deprives philosophy of any bite, redemptive or otherwise; if there can be no real loss, then there can be no real gain either. Things cannot not matter only if they go wrong: either they matter or they don’t, and if they don’t, then it doesn’t matter if they go right either. Were Descartes’ maxim understood as a harm mitigation measure, the point of radical doubt, which was to set knowledge on a stable foundation, would also be undermined – for this wouldn’t matter either.

To pursue philosophy and then to disavow its results appears to be a form of bad faith, self-deception or compartmentalisation, and none of these is to be desired.

(3) Suppose the maxim is implementable, and that the spheres of intellectual and ordinary life can, in some sense, be separated. While Descartes hopes this division is merely temporary and practical – helping prevent or mitigate the psychological and metaphysical ruptures which he fears might disturb the life of the doubter – it could have the unintended consequence of itself generating psychic disintegration and loss of contact with reality.

On this view, ordinary life from the perspective of intellectual life is downgraded and separated from its source of meaning which is intellectual life (the life not sustained by thought would be unexamined), and conversely, from the point of view of ordinary life, the intellectual life is downgraded and separated from its source of meaning in ordinary life (the life not sustained by the living body in a world of others would be unlived). On this view, you cannot devalue philosophy without devaluing life, and likewise, you cannot devalue life without devaluing philosophy, for each is only significant together with the other.

The same point can be put this way. Philosophy, in Descartes’ quest, concerns meaning – the question of what I am and the nature of reality. So he is saying that whatever we think about the meaning of life, our lives can, and should, for the period of radical doubt, go on as if the doubt made no difference. And this seems to imply that the meaning of my life is unnecessary to the continuation of my life and what happens in it. Thinking and being have come apart, despite the fact that it was the point of the Cogito to unite them; for in it, thought can determine that something exists, viz. the thinker.

But if life doesn’t need thought/philosophy to go on, it still needs it for it to have significance. Can we envisage what it would be for life to go on without significance? Jonathan Lear, in Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, investigated a kind of bare existence which he believed could occasion cultural devastation of the sort the Crow nation suffered. Lear quotes its last great chief, Plenty Coups, in an interview he gave to the ethnographer Linderman:

“But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides,” he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.”

This nothing happened might also be a way of characterising the situation of someone who cannot escape radical doubt, and who separates philosophy from life in accordance with Descartes’ maxim. Their life goes on, but in a thinned out way, without the significance it might have been given from thought and philosophy, and, conversely, their thinking mind is cut off, through doubt, from the significance that might be derived from being in the world.

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He had the word ‘love’ tattooed on his neck, and it seemed to be a reminder to himself – but how could he read it? – rather than an expression of love, and so it didn’t provide the reader any reassurance of his character.

He said he had withdrawn support from their friendship and intelligence-sharing arrangement, and said he would only resume when security guarantees were in place.

*

Professor X. He is a professor who makes himself rare. He works both on his study of Frege and on making himself rare. He justifies the latter by the former, but he was doing the latter before the former, so it cannot possibly be due to the former that he makes himself rare. What is true is that his book takes priority, and given that his book takes priority, he can use the statement <I am working on my study of Frege> to justify his making himself rare to those to whom he has obligations which he does not want to meet. And so he mentions working on his book at every opportunity, so that when he doesn’t want to meet his obligations, all he has to do is drop his book into the conversation, and it is understood immediately that he is shedding his obligations due to his book taking priority, and it is understood that he will soon make himself rare again.

*

Performance Piece: Man’s phone goes off in a piano concert. Pianist stops, pulls out a gun, shoots him dead, and continues where he left off.

*

I was in the aeroplane and my seat companion was very distressed. She was consuming content, mainly short video clips, until take-off and then – there was no in-flight internet. Her operating assumption must have been that there was going to be in-flight internet. I asked her what was wrong, and she, unable to speak, pointed to her phone and tapped it repeatedly, drooling slightly, indicating, I believe, that there was no in-flight internet. I had seen similar behaviour on previous flights and knew what to do. I asked the flight attendant if there was any emergency internet so that my seat companion could catch some clips mid-flight, even just a few clips to keep her going, simply to prevent her from getting worse. The flight attendant said that, unfortunately, there was no in-flight internet. So I had to sit patiently by my drooling seat companion, as she pitifully and desperately touched her phone throughout the flight, perhaps hoping that by touching it, the internet would miraculously return. She continued until touchdown, when I could tell by her squeal of delight that her mobile data had kicked in, and she resumed her content consumption and smiled and giggled as it bubbled up in her head.

*

The Woman Who Could No Longer Smile

I saw her from a window, through a window, and she sat as if pinned to her chair, and in front of her, this man was speaking animatedly, and her face was stretched like elastic into what looked like a smile.

Later she took a driverless car so she could be alone with her thoughts. But when she entered the driverless car, it determined that she was a woman – and immediately tried to chat her up.

There was a woman who used to smile. Now she cannot.

*

On Monday, they complained that it is Monday. On Tuesday they complained that it is Tuesday. Wednesday was the cruelest day. Thursday was almost the weekend: no complaints. And Friday did not really exist, being the eve of The Weekend: no complaints. On The Weekend they did not complain that it was The Weekend – though on Sunday, past noon, they complained that tomorrow will be Monday.

Given how unpopular Monday was, as their first measure in government, they banned Monday. The opposition supported the bill and also proposed banning Tuesday, which they called “the new Monday”. Some conjectured: this will end badly.

*

I met him and he told me he was disappointed in (or was it with?) me. I took this as a compliment, echoing my own teachers’ disappointments. He explained that he had thought I would go somewhere in the mind, but he saw, or thought he saw, that I had gone nowhere in the mind. He had wanted, as it were, mental proof of travel in the form of a book, as if to show the mental distance I had travelled, the mental places I had been. And I had no book, and so he was disappointed, taking, I suppose, there being no book to mean that there had been no travel. I explained to him that my thought process had become stuck in loops; specifically, that my thought had recoiled from the fear of nihilism into analytic epicycles, and so it was true that there had been no further travel (and no book) and that this was because my thought hadn’t gone through nihilism, but had avoided nihilism in these analytic epicycles. He explained that he was disappointed that I had given up on philosophy, given up on myself as a philosopher, and he said that without this badge, I did not even try to philosophise, but instead only turned thoughts over, without direction.

*

Her therapist was a zionist, mine an anti-zionist. Hers wore a magen david, mine a watermelon. Everything she said to me I now took to be a magen david point – a point, I assumed, she had taken directly from her therapist – and everything I said to her she now took to be a watermelon point – which, she believed, I had taken from my therapist. She mistrusted everything I said to her, just as I mistrusted everything she said to me. Through us, our therapists were carrying on a battle with one another, and nothing we now said to one another could escape our suspicion that our therapists’ political positions were running through us, advancing through us.

*

Proposal for New AI App MoBa for the enhanced mediation of communication between mother and baby. Mother and baby each, respectively, wear an earbud and babybud, and the New AI App MoBa facilitates seamless communication between them. The New AI App MoBa interprets for the mother the cries of the baby, and for the baby the words of the mother. The mother now hears her baby’s inarticulate cries and gurgles as articulate words, and the baby now hears its mother’s articulate words as inarticulate cries and gurgles. One advantage of this cryptographic solution is not merely that communication is more accurate and efficient, but that both mother and baby can continuously consume noise-cancelled content without interruption from the other’s words or cries.

Toy case: mother can listen to the latest Sally Rooney novel without being interrupted by baby’s cries, and baby can listen to Mozart for Babies without being interrupted by adult speech. Each can increase their range of knowledge and efficiency of content consumption while at the same being fully attuned to the needs of the other.

*

A man is confident, but more confident than anyone understands or can explain or allow for: he is unremarkable in every obvious way, physically, mentally etc. But I know why he is confident. I saw him in the swimming pool, and he is the best swimmer by a mile, and we all stay out of his way and admire his elegance and speed and power. I conjecture that he is confident because he knows that in the pool, he is the best. So it can be said that his confidence in all things is rooted in his swimming prowess, or perhaps: he generalises his confidence beyond his swimming and into all things. We find his confidence mysterious only because we see and examine him out of the water, instead of examining him both out of the water and at the same time in the water.

*

Where there was death, now there are flowers. The flowers went proxy for the life, or perhaps they were there to mask the death, or distract from it, so that instead of being full of death, our senses were full of flowers and their scent, and we can now pretend there has been and is no death – or perhaps the flowers do not mask or distract but symbolise the transition from life to death, and that there is value in seeing the transition again in miniature.

*

He, a politician capable of rallying the masses, was advised by his team to remove all the unnecessary ums and ahs from his speech. But having done so, everything interesting about his speech was lost, and he no longer had any personality. It seemed, counter-intuitively, that the ums and ahs contained the whole of his personality; that by purging the ums and ahs from his speech, everything essential was lost and all that remained was information. In rejection of the rejection of his ums and ahs, he now sometimes communicates exclusively in ums and ahs – which in focus groups, voters found refreshing.

*

I thought I would give him my English smile, but then I thought I would refrain from giving him my English smile, as he would likely misunderstand or misinterpret my English smile. It would be wasted on him, so I gave him a scowl instead, in the universal language.

*

I called and asked him what he was doing, and he said liaising. He said he’d been liaising all morning, and would be liaising all afternoon, and was currently, as we spoke, liaising, and so he had to go. I was none the wiser. Before he left, I asked him how he was, and he said he was fine. He said he’d been low, but now he was fine, and he was expecting, after a while, to be much better. Just as before, I was none the wiser. It was as if everything he said was filler: filler words in filler sentences without real cognitive content. He was trying to deceive me with these wicked words, to make me think he had said something when he hadn’t; or else he was relying on my understanding of the subtle implicature of the filler; or else he was hiding behind politeness, knowing that I would not ask him any more than he wished to impart. But I could do nothing with his fillers, and I had to base everything with him on his presence and his gestures, which themselves were almost as cagey as his words; but in an animal way, they communicated much more, and more than he would have liked.

*

He was a wonderful concert musician, and before you met him, you thought: there must be something there, something inside, something different. For he possesses a rare and extraordinary musical sensitivity and musical maturity, and all of the practical virtues necessary to be this good. And it seems obvious that there is something special in him, as people say. But now having met him, I can say categorically: there is nothing extraordinary there, nothing special whatsoever, and he is entirely run-of-the-mill, which is a mystery of the goose-who-lays-the-golden-egg variety.

*

She missed the major events of her own life – and national and world events – because she had to go to the toilet all the time. She was on a “trip to the lav” when it was announced that her country had won Eurovision. She was on a “visit to the bathroom” when it was announced that her country was at war. And she was “powdering her nose” when it was announced that it was at peace again.

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*

He was a Wittgenstein imitator. He wanted to be as Wittgenstein was, or as he thought Wittgenstein was. So he imitated him. For instance, he ate only cheese and bread for lunch, just as Wittgenstein had only eaten cheese and bread for lunch. But if this was an imitation, it was only an exterior one. For Wittgenstein, the aristocrat, ate cheese and bread for lunch in rejection of everything he was brought up to be. Wittgenstein ate cheese and bread for lunch so as to eat the way he thought a simple, pious peasant would eat. Whereas the Wittgenstein imitator ate cheese and bread for lunch only to imitate the exterior pattern of Wittgenstein’s life, not out of any desire to imitate Wittgenstein’s own intention in eating cheese and bread for lunch. If he had been an interior imitator and not merely an exterior imitator, he would have read Tolstoy and learnt of the origins of Wittgenstein’s idea of the simple Christian peasant, and would thereby have tried to work his way into Wittgenstein’s inner intention in eating cheese and bread for lunch. As it was, he was only a superficial Wittgenstein imitator, and so was doing something entirely different from Wittgenstein when he ate cheese and bread for lunch.

It could be said that he and Wittgenstein were alike in that they each ate cheese and bread for lunch in imitation of someone, or some type of person, but were unalike insofar as while Wittgenstein imitated the simple pious peasant, the Wittgenstein imitator imitated Wittgenstein imitating the simple pious peasant.

*

The rabbi’s mother was a great traveller, and travelled anywhere and everywhere, but especially to Asia. Her son, the rabbi, found nothing in travel, and lived only in the one or two places that were necessary for his study of Talmud. It would seem they were chalk and cheese, having entirely different ideas about what life is about and what gives it meaning: for him, it was about pursuing what he loved (the Talmud-life, as he called it), while for her, it was about taking in as much of the world as possible (the travel-art-life, as she called it). But perhaps mother and son did not differ as much as one might first think. For the way he saw it, the Talmud was a microcosm of the world, and so his study of Talmud was the study of the world in microcosm. While the way she saw it, she was only pursuing what she loved – the experience of travelling through the world.

He, this scholar of Talmud and son of this great traveller of Asia, overheard someone say ‘millions and millions’ but misheard it as ‘minyans and minyans’. This is an example of how he misinterpreted all things as signs of what he was most concerned with viz. Talmud and everything connected with Talmud. Perhaps in this way it could be said that he had a compulsive relation to Talmud, and that it absorbed him just as much as he absorbed it. And though it is true that it contains all of life in words, he was hiding in the words from the life it depicted. It was a clever hiding place, for he could always say that Talmud is life, and that he is choosing life – and he could not possibly be accused of hiding in life from life.

Of course, within the Talmud, there are figures exactly similar to him, who pursue the study of Talmud (arguably) as a hiding place from life. And a number of rabbis have, in the Talmud, commented on such figures, dissenting from the position that a life of Talmud study cannot be regarded as hiding from life. Their line of dissent from this view makes the case that it is precisely due to its microcosmic structure that the Talmud provides a classical hiding place from life for scholars who tend towards the mental, intellectual and verbal.

Of course, there other rabbis cited in the Talmud who dissent from this dissenting position, and take the view that it is not possible for studying the Talmud to become a hiding place from life, but, they importantly add, only so long as the correct pure intention is preserved at all times. However, within this group – the intentionalists – it is contested as to whether it is humanly possible to maintain such an intention at all times. Some hold that while it is in principle possible for a being to study the Talmud with a pure intention at all times, the point is that such a pure intention is practically impossible for man, and is instead to be held up as a pure ideal. The majority of the intentionalists take the view that unless, per impossible, a constant and pure intention is maintained, the study of Talmud, precisely because it is a microcosm of life, can indeed become a treacherous hiding place from life.

Our rabbi, this scholar of Talmud and son of the great traveller of Asia, leans towards supporting the thrust of the majority line of the group who dissent from the dissenting view, but he contests their majority position that pure intention is impossible for man. More specifically, he takes the view that while it is impossible to hold the pure intention at all times, it can be held for long enough such that talmudic work can be conducted within this time – and so it suffices. His own rabbi takes the same view, and he follows him on this point, as he does on most others.

*

I ask an older man if I can sit down at his table in a busy cafe. He is prickly and doesn’t want me to, but after a moment of hesitation and inner resistance he relents, and offers me a seat. After some time, sitting at his table, he coughs. I think I must offer him water. Then I think that if I offer him water, I will have given in to my desire to make him like me, for he was not kind when I asked to sit at his table in the busy cafe, and I want him to like me – but I do not want to act on this motive. And I think that if I were to offer him water, I would be trying to care for him, and I do not want this to be the basis of my action either. I think that I don’t have to care whether he has water or not, and that he can get his own water, or not, and that everything I am thinking is de trop. I think that, fundamentally, I do not want to relate to him as I related to my father, and these ways of relating – wanting to be liked, or caring for _ relate to my father. They would be ways of relating to him through my father, and this would, I think, not be ways of me as such relating to him as such. And now I think of him as sitting here at the table entirely alone, and I think how nice it would be for a man as alone as he is to have an offer of water, especially if you are prickly and especially if you don’t want people near you, as he didn’t want people near him in the cafe. And then I think that perhaps now I can get him water, for now it is not about my father or a false morality, because now it is about just doing something nice for a man, recognising that it’s just a nice thing to be offered water by someone, and there is no depth analysis or back-thinking to doing something just nice. I think that the simplicity of simple kindness cuts through all these complex psychological motivations, and finally presents a simple motive. Though, of course, I would have to make the offer of water in such a way that I wouldn’t patronise him; I would have to ensure that it was done in such a way that I wasn’t presenting myself as trying to get something over on him – such as healthy over sick, young over old – and most importantly, that it wasn’t seen as a revenge for his early prickliness. But I think that yes, I can do this now, now that it is coming out of this simple kindness intention, and I feel that the right intention is now in place, and I turn to him ready to be absolutely and straightforwardly kind, one man to another in a direct relation, and as I turn to make the offer of water, all I see is his empty coffee cup, and behind it, an empty chair, and I realise he has left without having had the opportunity of being kindly offered water by me.

*

In their house, the two of them would take the stage and lock horns, while the third observed. And the third – the other, the observer – thought she was outside of these arguments, and as such, was innocent. But her being there, present, observing, spectating, changed the arguments of the two. It could be said that her attention provided the very stage on which the arguments occurred, and that her presence provided the audience, without which none of these terrifying arguments would have been possible. And so it seems too neat and tidy for her to think of herself as innocent of what others so close to her have done to one another.

*

He denounced all writing that did not hasten the revolution – all non-dialectical writing, that is – as bourgeois writing. I asked him if he applies the same logic to sitting and standing, and walking and talking, and eating and drinking. He said yes absolutely. And it dawned on me that being a marxist is the closest one can get to being a Hasid, who is always only ever one mitzvah away from the messiah.

*

He believed in a dogma, a political article of faith, and he didn’t want ever to speak against it, and so he resolved never to even think of it, let alone speak against it, as if thinking of it would reveal its absurdity, which would be so devastating that he could not continue onward forward, and so somehow sensing this, he actively resisted reflection on it, and this was a great success – he never thought of it or spoke of it, and while its internal absurdities inflicted themselves on everyone around him, he, as an individual, remained entirely unscathed by them.

*

It was quiet enough, and I was standing by her, and speaking at a reasonable volume, and her ears were fine, but she couldn’t understand what I was saying. It was as if we were in different worlds, and I raised my voice and she still couldn’t hear. I don’t know what was happening, and I don’t think she knew what was happening either, and then we walked away from one another, neither understanding what had happened.

*

I sat across from them on the train, and examined them as they, strangers to one another, sat heads bowed, touching their phones in unison, ears full of earbuds, sniffing in sync. I thought of how they are so absorbed in their private worlds that they do not see the comedy of their twinship. I thought that in their self-retardation, and despite the thin smiles on their lips, they cannot see the humour of their situation, which would require the activation of the minimal animal instinct of examining their place in their surroundings, glancing around with their eyes etc; but they have numbed themselves, drowned out the given world around them by the images and voices they have chosen.

Were they to hear what I was thinking I suppose they would think: through this technology I am entering a portal to another world or another part of the world, and so it is not that I am setting reality aside, as you seem to suggest, but rather it is as if I had other eyes and other ears and these other senses were accessing other parts of the world far from the proximal stimuli surrounding me. And they would think about me: why the concern with the proximal when we can now access the distal? Why this prejudice in favour of the proximal and the given? Why remain in the brute human animal when we can extend what the animal can do and see and hear? These would be good reasons, and I would be surprised that they could think them, given how weightless and lost they seem.

If we were to continue to converse in our thoughts, I would provide evolutionary considerations to support my position that we are limited and dependent animals, and I would stress what is unchanging in our nature, as against what they think of as an indefinitely flexible nature, unconstrained by our animal portion. But this mental discussion of human nature would, I suppose, terminate, as all such abstract discussions do, in a difference of standpoint. Neither would be able to convince the other, and at some point, each would just assert which world they want to be part of and can tolerate, and which they want no part of. They, I suppose, would affirm their own techno-optimism, and I would affirm what they would think of as my limited and hopeless picture of human nature, which I, in turn, would think of as neither hopeful nor hopeless, but merely as a recognition of certain unchanging facts about us.

*

She learnt various things in her undergraduate course and took these things to be true, which is a shame. For had she stayed on to the next level, she would have learnt that most of what was propounded in the undergraduate course would then be overturned, revealed to be false dogmas, given to console the youth. At the next level, however, it was rumoured that there was a higher level still, in which level two scholars were revealed to be as deluded as level one scholars. And this indeed was the case: second-level scholarship was another fence around the True Scholarship. One had to embark, it was said, on the third level to attain it. But by this point most were tired of the false promises and lies, and wished for the Truth Scholarship to be revealed to them directly, not through further study which was assumed to be yet another fence.

Instead of studying the texts, they now examined their teachers, and tried to determine which of them had access only to the fences, and which had access to the Truth. And as there were no criteria for this, one had to use one’s intuition to determine the answer. And it was said that this was the real test: for if one could intuit who the real masters were, one already had – and had always had – access to the Truth; and if one could not, one would never have access to the Truth, and would only ever have access to the fences guarding it.

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*

This man had no private life to speak of but made a name for himself with his political opinions, of which he had many, and was glad to speak of. So in demand was he that it seemed, or so he wished to think, that his public political life eclipsed his private unpolitical life. He made as if he were sacrificing his private life for his public political work, but this was not quite believable. It could rather be said that his public self, which gave him an audience and provided him with his purpose, no longer had any need for this private self, and in many ways it was getting in the way. And so it was not so much that his public life had eclipsed his private self, but rather that the public self had submerged or rather drowned the private one.

*

I related to my pet as if it were a purely self-interested agent, only interested in maximising his gains and realising his desires. She, on the other hand, understood her pet entirely as an altruist. His licking her feet was emotional support, his sitting by the door of the bathroom was a defence (“he would go first if we were attacked”) etc. While I, for instance, had to feed my pet in response to his dance in which he manipulated me into feeding him, even against my will, her pet would let her feed him out of consideration for the fact that she loves giving, and her pet would provide an occasion for her to give, viz. dinner. She saw her pet in entirely sacrificial terms, whereas I saw mine in entirely opportunistic terms. And this difference was not simply a matter of wish-fulfilment, at least not on my part, for it’s not as if I wished to have a purely self-interested agent as a pet.

But perhaps thinking of him like this was comfortable for me, giving me a frame to see him in, making him a predictable it, which I could understand, and whom I wouldn’t have to feel guilt for – and in this way, I never got to know who he really was. And perhaps her opposed way of thinking provided her nonetheless with a similar hiding place. For she wanted a protector and a carer and found these roles in her pet. And so she, too, never got to see him for who he really was.

*

He is a Frenchman, a disgruntled worker, who thinks he shouldn’t be working in a cafe, but is working in a cafe – as a ‘barista’, in London. While he works, at every opportunity he takes voice notes. These barbs and arrows against the world, in the form of aphorisms, in French, will be released at some point onto the world (against the world) in revenge for how he has been treated by the world. On his phone, he rages against the city, against his plumbing conditions, his living conditions, against migration, against the train drivers who “just press buttons” and go on strike in order that “they will have to press fewer buttons”. He rages and rages these French aphorisms into his phone, which will one day become perhaps his novel or graphic novel or his blog, and he will finally express himself in the world, and leave humanity with his great bilious legacy.

*

He was a Talmud scholar who had talmudic dreams in which he would argue and debate and disagree with received legal opinions on a variety of topics. He only remembered the conclusions of his positions when he woke, and would then spend his days analysing his dreams, reconstructing the arguments that had left him upon waking.

*

He invested his whole mind and body into rebellion. He filled his mind with everything that was ‘against the system’, ‘radical’, ‘critical’. Likewise, he covered his body with tattoos that effectively say, in other words and images, fuck the system. And given this Gesamtkunstwerk of mind and body, this total investment in a particular position, it became pointful to wonder what the purpose of talking to him was, given that by now he could not make any serious changes to the ideas in his mind without also changing his body. He was, in this way, locked into a stance which was practically unchangeable. No subtlety of thought or nuance was possible for a mind and body such as his.

But, it is fair to say, I suppose, that he could say the same about me: that in my middle-of-the-road blandness, there is an absence of any outer sign of commitment in my body or attire – no sacrifice, he might say. Or perhaps he would say that any sign of commitment I show demonstrates a prostrating of myself before the system, and so, he would think that there is no point talking to me either, because I am fully invested in the system, and wouldn’t be prepared to embrace the truth – the one revealed through his critical and radical and total attack on the system – which would change my life.

*

A man attempted to access Google HQ opposite St. Pancras station through the revolving door. As he entered the revolving door, he was looking at the phone in his hand. He fumbled it, and was unable to get through the revolving door – so unable to access Google HQ opposite St. Pancras station.

*

Trying to be his own voice of reason, trying to remain calm in the storm – but why? who gave him the role of the calm and unemotional one? – trying not to react to the great dramas of the day, trying to take the long view. This was his position, if it can be called a position; perhaps better, an attitude or, in bridge language, an approach. While the centre held firm, his was the right stance. But if it is now true that the centre is falling, and does fall, then this very picture which has been for him an effective bulwark against insanity, will become a form of self-comfort he won’t be able to escape – having a hold on him precisely because of its past success. His approach, in which he resisted the moment and passions of the moment, and so saw the underlying reality and underlying trend, would now blind him. Which leaves an open question: if he cannot now adapt to reality, was he just lucky before, when reality chimed with his view – and if so, was he always living in a (lucky) illusion? Or is it that he did successfully adapt to one reality, but that reality has changed, and his views are stuck? In other words: if his ideas don’t adapt to reality, were they ever in contact with it, or were they only ever there for his own comfort?

*

They said he had weird ideas because he had too much time on his hands. They thought, I suppose, that he came up with weird ideas because he wasn’t directing his thought to what they took to be legitimate activity, such as work, or something connected to money, and the ticking over of the world. Because they could not see the productive value of his ideas – and here they were probably right, there was none – they dismissed them as weird, and him as having too much time. I wonder if they were ultimately envious of his time and their sense that he was unbound by what they took to be necessary. Perhaps they saw him as free from the responsibilities that they took to constitute life, and perhaps they took him to be flouting these and flaunting his freedom through espousing what they called his weird ideas. And so they rebuked him by saying he has too much time on his hands. Perhaps what they meant was: why do you not do as we do? don’t you see that the world rests on carrying out these responsibilities, and that you are not fulfilling the commands of the world, the mandates of life itself!? What they couldn’t see, perhaps, was not that he had freed himself from these responsibilities, but just that he had never felt them, and had felt instead other kinds of demands on his life than the ones they felt and could see.

But he never asked them what they meant, so he doesn’t know what they thought, and they did not ask him what he thought either, so they do not know what he thinks either.

*

A man and woman walk and talk, and I think: I could never have such a conversation as the conversation they are having. Though I do not hear what they say, as I am watching them from the bus, the way they gesticulate makes it seem to me that I do not know the sort of things that they must know in order to carry on such a conversation. I think that they know things that I could never know, for the way they look at one another and gesticulate and care for what is happening in their lives is something unfathomable to me.

*

He didn’t commit the crime, but he served the time. He had pleaded his innocence at first, but when he lost his case, he confessed to the crime. It seemed that for him to justify the injustice done to him, he needed to step into his assigned role of serial murderer, and so take on the burden of guilt that came with the role. It was, you could say, a way he could make sense of an utterly meaningless situation: to claim that he deserved what was happening to him. But how would that wash with him internally, given that he knew it wasn’t true? It seems to me that he did what he did out of spite towards the society which had imprisoned him. Had he gone on to fight his corner, perhaps one day it would be discovered that he was telling the truth, and then the actual murderer would be hunted down, while he could be reconciled with the society that had falsely imprisoned him. But this was not his way; he was on the war path.

Admitting to the crime meant that the murderer was still at large in society. And he, the falsely imprisoned man who took on the guilt of the murderer, now avenged himself on society by letting the real murderer continue his rampage.

*

“He is lovely,” she said, as if lovely were absolute. But to whom was he lovely? And to whom was he not? She seemed, in her absoluteness, to infer from his loveliness to her, that he is lovely – just or absolutely lovely. And this hidden inference, I thought, must be resisted at all costs. For what she knows is only what he presents to her now, and she must know that at a different time he might present to her another face, and she knows that were she to look different from the way she actually does, he might not be so lovely to her. And yet she nonetheless chooses to see him as just lovely. I take objection to this self-deception, of whatever form it might be. Of course, I don’t tell her any of this, and so I thereby contribute to her living in a world in which this man here is absolutely lovely.

*

The homeless man approached him and asked him for money. But unlike the others in the carriage, he didn’t ignore the homeless man. He removed an earbud, looked the homeless man in the eye, and said in a soft low voice how sorry he was, and wished the homeless man a very good evening. Later that evening, he reflected on how well he had handled the situation, and thought of what he had given the homeless man. Yes, there had been a refusal, but it was merely the refusal of money, not the refusal of the man. He thought that by addressing the homeless man, even removing an earbud, and looking at him in the eye, and speaking with him, and saying sorry – that by this very fact of granting the homeless man the gift of his attention, he had welcomed the homeless man into the arms of humanity, and that mattered so much more than money. He slept well that night.

*

While some took off their magen david in fear, he put his on to provoke. While some kept their hair clean and short to fit in, he grew a rat tail beard to disgust. And so it went on. In these ways, he was trying to reach out to others in the only way he could understand how to, and in some sense it worked, for he was constantly discussing and conversing about exactly the topics he wanted to discuss and converse on. One only worries that given the success of these provocations, and his limitless need for an audience, he might eventually become one of those men for whom every element of their being and attire is a quest for comment and love – who forces everyone he comes across either to humour him, or else escape his orbit.

*

He was an entrepreneur and became a well-known opinion advisor. He would advise the high and mighty on which opinions they should have, which they shouldn’t have, and which opinion they should steer clear of and have no opinion about whatsoever. It was a subtle occupation. And because opinions were changing so fast and the requirement for having the correct one was increasing, the trick was to know which wave of opinion to ride, how long to ride it, and when it was going to break. It was the job of the opinion advisor to stay on top of which opinion to have or not have at any given time – relative, it goes without saying, to a given audience. In this way, the opinion advisor discovered that logic does not hold in society at large; that ‘p and not p’ was not a contradiction in the case in which p was for one audience, and not p was for another.

*

He, a runner, said he doesn’t merely want to come first in this race, or first nationally, or even internationally. He said he wants to be absolutely first. He recognises the contradiction in this, but he also recognises that it is precisely this which he most wants, and that the words ‘absolute first’ best summarise his real – and contradictory – desire.

*

I again present myself at the opera, hoping the usher doesn’t see me. I know that he sees me, and I know that year after year, my face is becoming an embarrassment, while his is, as ever, moisturised and ageless. I am contemplating not going to the opera any longer so I will not have to face him and be looked at by him, judging me and my attendance and my face. I try to tell myself that just as much as I am embarrassed to still be here, attending the same performances year after year – unchanging in my tastes, unchanging in everything other than my face – he too is perhaps embarrassed to still be here, but even more so, for while I can come and go, he is a captive of the great building and institution of the opera house, a captive of the music and song and the dream world of the opera house. And why wouldn’t he – standing at the entrance smiling, observing me enter – himself think that I will look at his face, even despite his still boyish looks and extensive use of moisturiser, and see the shame of his ageing and judge him for this? But I cannot think this thought, even if I try to. I can think only of myself being at the centre of things, and can think only of my own face and of my own ageing, and of his judgment of me, and the stasis of my life and of my opera attendance.

I try to think that perhaps we are similar, he and I, both in thrall to the same siren song, and suffering the same eventual fate. And I look around at the elderly, making their way in the for thousandth time to the same production of the same opera, who no longer know what they are doing and have no will-power of their own any longer, but will return here over and over until their last days, giving to the opera most of what they acquired throughout their life, and bequeathing, after their demise – to the chagrin of their children – the remainder to this great music cult. The wall of private donors commemorates the victims who succumbed to the seductions of this cult – and I wonder if perhaps our names will one day be inscribed alongside theirs.

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The categorical affirmations of life are mandated rituals or performances, convincing no one. But they are the only attitudes that get a hearing, while all others are pathologised, lumped together into the murky category of depression.

Something similar applies to our even deeper prejudice in favour of existence or being over non-being. It appears obscene to prefer, with Silenus, non-being. To affirm the negation seems to be a practical contradiction: the absurd idea of a living existing being, affirming non-living non-being, that is, denying the very life and being which constitutes the person. But once we reject the equation of being with good and of non-being with evil, we are able to step back and ask which of the two is better, and why.

Nietzsche compulsively exposed Christianity as (he thought) a death-cult masquerading as a life-cult. He saw life as the prime value, and saying yes to life as the prime expression of human health. He famously wrote in his notebook of his shame for not being able to say yes to his own life. But what drove him to hold himself to this terrible standard which he felt he had either to meet, or feel shame for not meeting?

*

It is much easier acting according to what we think is right, than to enter into complexity, which is the consideration of what produces the best results in a given situation. And the fact that right action is easier for the agent is a practical merit. Action based on right will, because of its simplicity, clash with the world, but will also be compensated, to some extent, by the fact that it is, for the agent, simpler, clearer, purer. For it seems easier to bring an action under a category or rule than to calculate its possible effects; for our own intention appears clearer to us than anything else.

But this simplicity is also a hiding place. To not look to consequences – to maintain our moral purity and right – is a way of hiding from the world behind an intention (and so we hide from ourselves in ourselves). Were we, by contrast, to look only to the consequences of our actions in the world, we would lose ourselves and our bearings (and so hide from ourselves in the world). So while acting from a simple principle or good intention is fleeing from the world to find comfort in moral purity, acting by looking only at consequence is an attempt to forget ourselves entirely. Each way of acting morally has its own distinctive evasions.

We pretend the other is an it so we can do what we want to them, for ourselves. It is very convenient to think that the world contains a single I – me – and everything else in it is an it. We don’t have to engage with these its, speak to them, acknowledge them, compromise or relate to them. Each it is either an opportunity or an obstacle. Convenient, perhaps, but also pointless, false and lonely. Why then do we put so much effort into making our world, and together, the world, into an it-world? – a world which we know is a pretence, and do not want to exist in.

*

There is a midrash that Abraham created a golem. This is based entirely on the passage: ‘the soul which Abraham made in Haran’. Is such a midrash intended to be believed, or is it intended to make a point? And why, in general, does the Talmud contemplate every possibility? Is it in order to test the boundaries of a concept in order to explore and expand our concepts? Or does it do so because it has a very capacious understanding of what is possible in this world, and it aims to anticipate every possibility so that nothing will be left out, or surprise us, in any future interpretation of the Law?

*

I want to disagree with the rabbi, but he is merely presenting different talmudic positions. There is little to disagree with other than perhaps his interpretation – of which I am not competent to judge. I am irritated because I want a fight, but there appears to be no opponent. I find the very fact that he is only laying out the different interpretations to be my problem with him. He now becomes my opponent not because he says anything I oppose but because, I think, he should, as a rabbi, guide us by taking a position and telling us what it is – but he is not taking a position, he is failing to stake his claim.

He says he tends towards such and such a view, but he also says that there are several dissenting positions in the tradition that dispute this view, and are each worthy of consideration. Nothing is absolute for him – even the most absolute commandments have conditions, meanings, exceptions. There are always many views to consider and many reasons for those views. And this makes me think that he doesn’t really care about his own position, that he is not invested in it, that it is like a game for him. Is it this that frustrates me? Is it that he is too distant and unemotional and unattached to any given view? Each view has been supported and each has merit, he says; each view is part of the world, each one comes from a human being, even the views that appear evil. Even an evil opinion is there for a purpose, he thinks, even if it is there precisely to see how it is wrong, so that we can see what is right more clearly by contrast with it. He is not repelled by any view; each one he takes in his stride. He has real respect for each of his predecessors, not a polite deference, but respect; and not only the ones in his line, but in any line, even his opponents and their lines; and likewise for us, his discussants, to whom he listens with interest and respect.

His reasoning is bizarre. He will say he thinks that position A is supported by a better argument and is more convincing than position B, but that his teacher supported position B, and that in most issues, including this one, he will defer to his teacher, and so he will follow him in supporting position B – which he does not agree with. You want to say: your mind is better and freer than that, that you can support the positions which your teachers, and teacher’s teachers, rejected; you don’t need this tradition and this deference, nor do you need to reference the source for each of your statements, as if you cannot walk alone, but only by holding the hand of a predecessor. But he does not think like this. It is essential to the way he thinks to find the talmudic source for each position. Any individual’s view, including his own, cannot advance his understanding of Law unless it finds its roots in the tradition which interprets the revealed Torah. What we think are his opinions when he speaks, are in fact logical constructions of prior rabbinic positions. And so what he says has a formal, or you could say, bureaucratic character, in the sense that there is a rule behind what he is saying which directs his thinking, arguing and speaking; just as this attire is not his own, but a very slight variation on, re-combination of, the attire of his ancestors.

It is, I think, because the rabbi is secure in his revealed knowledge – that we live in a world which was created for us at its centre, and in which our reason was made to help us towards the truth – that he has the confidence to listen to and fairly consider and discuss any position presented to him. He is to be contrasted with someone who deploys reason but has no security in revealed knowledge. This person’s secular reason becomes paranoid, constantly undermining itself, turning against itself, unsure if the reasoner even exists. It will try to establish its own form of security by constructing foundations, and in this way, it wants to establish for itself, inside the mind, what the rabbi knows through what is given in revelation from outside the mind. Secular reason will, even if it discovers or constructs foundations for itself, however eventually turn against itself, mistrusting its own foundations too. It will either collapse, or resort to dogmatism to assert its foundations; which is to say, unreason will lie at the base of reason, and any confidence it appears to have will be as fragile as this base.

The rabbi is rooted in a tradition which considers all options, in which nothing is excluded from discussion, in which there is no central authority which decides anything, least of all what to think or believe; it is a tradition in which there are simply many rabbis interpreting Torah, rabbis whose voices sometimes converge on a point, and often diverge. (Surprisingly, there turns out to be no orthodoxy in orthodoxy.) He knows that he is part of this great tradition, and can find allies for his views – or what he leans towards – in the past. He carries around in his mind a vast family tree of past rabbis and past positions, woven together by a great many strange and wonderful stories. And he will, despite all of his knowledge, often defer to his teacher, saying that he follows his teacher in all essential points. And perhaps it is knowing that he can revert to a line of thought which goes all the way back to the Source that allows him the spaciousness of his thinking, and the confidence I referred to.

It could be said that while his thinking is capacious, he is not free, bound as he is by the inner law of the rabbis. For he cannot seem to allow his own reason to take him alone to a new position without the support of a talmudic source. He cannot think alone; in each of his thoughts he rides on the coattails of rabbis (or rather, their tzitzit). But am I so different? I too believe that thinking should be regulated, and that reason or logic should regulate it. None of us think that free thinking is unregulated thinking, for that wouldn’t count as thinking. We all think that our freedom to think exists within a law – the question is which law regulates it or should.

*

The sense of disconnection which can lead to philosophy cannot be caused by philosophy. This first thought that something is wrong, that we are disconnected, cannot be based on a reason. Only later do we find reasons to explain this sense of disconnection. It could be said, however, that our sense of disconnection is an intellectual insight into our situation which is later developed or made articulate; and in this way, we can see the sense of disconnection as the introductory notes of philosophy. But another way to think is that what caused my sense of disconnection with the world was purely psychological – a very early failure in my relation to others, for instance. And that this psychological effect then gets framed by reason as philosophical insight, which means that I generalise my particular view into a problem for all humans. My problem then bears no specific relation to me and my own development, other than the fact that I had the thought. My sense of disconnection, when it is seen philosophically, not psychologically, can be seen as an insight into a fact that applies to all people. I can say: we are like this. And in making this move, I would have escaped any necessity to see my problem as personal or psychological, and would have transubstantiated it into the essential problem of humans in the world. The direction for my thinking would head away from myself and my psychology, and towards exclusively philosophical investigations.

But of course it may be that in philosophy we treat psychological problems at a high level of abstraction. And it could be the case that a philosophical investigation of, say, disconnection or solipsism, will be as rewarding or as therapeutic as a psychological investigation could be. It might be seen as the same mind approaching the same problem by different means; one abstract, the other emotional.

Philosophy can appear to be a desert, and you look to its horizon for what you think it must contain. You have an emotional relationship to philosophy and philosophers, but neither responds in kind; being purely intellectual, they are cold and dry and distant. And perhaps it is this, and penetrating this, which keeps you searching in it for something you can sense is real, which you sense must lie behind it. Philosophy may address the question you have, but put purely intellectually; it doesn’t fully engage with that question in you, which is not purely intellectual. You know that even the coldest philosopher, or philosophy, has a heart and it is this heart, in the form of idea, that you look for in what they present as a purely rational intellectual project.

Part of the pleasure of philosophy is its openness. Any interpretation of a text, or of reality, might, we think, be the right interpretation, and so anyone might hit upon it. Or, perhaps we think that there is no right interpretation, and anyone might hit on a surprising, novel or interesting interpretation. When you read philosophy, you can feel that it might be that you are the first one who has really understood what the philosopher meant, or what they entirely missed. It is the same appealing openness that makes it a fertile ground for quackery and quacks.

If each part of the world has its meaning due to its function for the whole, then what is the meaning of the whole? Either the whole has a function, or it doesn’t. (1) If it does, then there must be a larger whole of which it is a part – but then there must be an infinite number of worlds to sustain the meaning of the whole chain. And you could, after all, ask of the infinite chain, itself regarded as a whole, what its function is etc. For there to be a single meaningful world, it seems that there must be a multiverse whose worlds contribute towards the function of the whole. (2) On the other hand, if the world has no function, then either it has no meaning, or there is a source of meaning (at least of the whole) that is not derived from its function, contradicting our initial premise.

*

The constant advocacy for the morally right view in politics serves only to put the advocate on (they think) the right side of morality. They condemn what is happening, and condone some utterly (practically) impossible view of what ‘could’ happen; they present what they want to happen, and in doing so wash their hands of reality.

Their contribution to ‘debate’ is to paint a picture of what they think a desirable future situation looks like. But the question they should be concerned with – if they cared about their stated position – is how to practically advance it. Instead, they state and restate their position. But how do we get from here to there? Repeatedly calling for the objective doesn’t help with the means. They beg like children for politicians, whom they don’t trust, to implement a (practically) unimplementable vision.

They have a politics of grace, whereas they ought (if they cared) to have a politics of works and of advance. But this would mean going beyond slogans and hand washing, and instead entering into understanding: of how the world functions, how humans function, how politics works etc. It would mean surrendering the image of the world they want to exist, in favour of a murky compromise. It would mean to break bread with people they think of as evil, to sit with those they hate, to risk moral contamination, and the charge of complicity. And this would undermine their most cherished commodity of seeing themselves as good.

Those who claim they are the most active, the most right – those who are doing something – are in fact living a fantasy in which they attempt to remove evil through incantation. Which makes one think that despite the noise and the tears and the performance of concern, they are engaged in a sentimentality parade. Their central concern is, again, with themselves: maintaining their purity from risk of contamination. (What this tells us is that their great fear is that they are, in fact, easy to contaminate, that is to say, they cannot think their goodness is robust against this threat.)

Perhaps their lack of concern for the actual world and any attempt to advance their cause betrays an underlying nihilism, which secretly admits to itself that nothing can be done. This nihilism would make sense of the fact that their declarations are their actions. And it might be that, ironically, the pessimists, the despised ‘middle’ – who attempt to understand, engage, discuss, and eventually strike less than adequate and utterly compromised deals – are the real bearers of hope.

This almost certainly older man is sitting by the younger maestro, reading the page and turning the page. They could be father and son up there. Each one knows their place: the maestro would never deign to turn the page, and the page turner would never attempt to lay hands on the piano (polluting it). Despite their ages, the maestro is the limelight man and the page turner is, as it were, the backroom boy. While he, the latter, is on stage, he is no different from a piece of musical apparatus which no one will remember. He is a ghoul who will be edited out of our memories (if he was ever in them), excised from the write-up of the performance, he will be unnamed on the programme, considered as relevant to the production of music as the man who wheels out the piano and puts its brakes on, or as relevant as the lady who carries out the stools, and adjusts their height – which is to say: irrelevant.

Nonetheless, enormous trust and responsibility have been placed in his hands and eyes and mind. Everything rests on him: the performance will fall apart if he even for a moment fails to attend to the page, to the notes, to the maestro’s gestures – eyebrows, nods, grimaces, his very posture. The page turner is, we might say, a mindreader of the maestro; his task being to see and read his smallest gestures at the same time as giving his full attention to the page and to the notes; his full attention given all at once to the maestro, to the page full of notes and to the music of the maestro – an impossible feat, but one which the page turner must achieve. One might wonder, given this, whose art is the highest art: the mere performance of notes (maestro) or the one who holds everything together (page turner)?

*

The maestro is the one person who doesn’t underestimate the task of the page turner, whom he reveres as taking on the most significant task, a task in which a man must utterly consume himself with the maestro, be consumed by the maestro, must have nothing else in his mind but the combination of Bach and maestro, or rather, perhaps, a single Bach-maestro thought, in which he must completely know and anticipate the union of the two, and if not the union of the two, then the two serially: Bach via the maestro, or the maestro via Bach.

As we listen to the perfomance and watch the maestro, and now, ever more clearly, the page turner, we think that to understand the maestro’s mind and read his smallest gestures, to concentrate just as much on the page as on the maestro himself, to be just as competent in reading as the maestro is in playing, and trusted to disappear from view despite being on stage, sat next to the maestro for the full length of the performance, and to leave the stage (and how? No one ever saw him walk offstage) before the applause, and for his work to go unnoticed, unrecognised, unmentioned – this is the task and life (and plight?) of the page turner.

A question that keeps returning to the mind, a question we would prefer not to raise, a question we would prefer to usher offstage, keeps presenting itself despite (or because of) its vulgarity: Is the page turner paid? We think: ‘It would be enough if the page turner was paid by the privilege of proximity to the man and his music; paid in Bach, as it were. And wouldn’t this, after all, be an overpayment to the page turner, to be this close to this man and his music? To be paid any money over and above this would perhaps even be an insult.’ But then immediately we think that this thought is upside down entirely: the insult is itself our own previous thought, the insult being the very idea that one can be paid in music and proximity to the maestro, as if this priceless incommensurable thing – the maestro and his music – could be quantified and made part of a transaction and used in exchange. (Not that the page turning is unquantifiable; it is the music of the maestro and everything connected to the maestro which is.) And this means that there can be no x such that: the maestro’s music = x. We realise that to think of bartering his music for page turning is to vulgarise everything, and the very idea could only emerge from our own perverse minds. And so it became apparent that either the page turner is not paid, and carries out his task in a purely voluntary capacity, or else that he is paid in cash; and this is proper, just as it is proper for a therapist to be paid to keep the transaction straight.

But let’s return again to the vulgar thought that the page turner could be paid in music. This idea rests on the assumption that he could listen to and enjoy the music and proximity of the maestro while fully engaged in the all-consuming task of page turning, in which everything rests on his perfect reading and perfect turning. As soon as this assumption is considered, it must be obvious that he cannot listen to and enjoy the music, for he is concerned with music in a different way from the audience, and in a different way from the maestro; in a way which is in no way pleasurable but is clearly fraught. And because of this, we can debunk the thought of his payment in music, not only as vulgar but also as senseless.

*

After the concert, we try to remember his face and despite having paid great attention to him we cannot remember anything of him. All we can think of is the maestro. Was he older or younger than the maestro? Older we think, but we are unsure. Was he tall or short, did he wear glasses, was his nose large or small, was he dark or pale, was he smart or casual, what was his hair like, did he have hair? We cannot answer any question for certain. We try to recollect him, but he is a blur, or not even a blur, an absence. All that can be said is that someone was there, turning the pages. We agreed on the following formulation: there was an x on stage who was not the maestro, and this x turned the pages. But more than this we could not say for sure, and do not recall.

After the concert, we cynically speculated about the motives and intentions of the page turner. A secret quest for glory. A boundless resentment (ex-piano player). Christian humility (this was said sarcastically). Why did we cynically speculate about him? We had already decided in advance who he was and what he was about – but what moved us to think in this way? Was it the joy in casting aspersions? Or did he elicit some anger in us, and if so, why? Could he not be entirely dedicated to page turning? And what did it say about us that we took such manual dedication to be unlikely? Did his mystery and seriousness – for no one saw him, no one remembered him, no one would recognise him, for he hid his face in plain sight – disturb us, and did we compare this theology we had constructed of him to ourselves: we who are followers of footling, gossipers, fools? We did not answer these questions.

We reflected, after the concert, on the principal danger to the life of the page turner: memorisation. And it occurred to us, in keeping with our cynicism, that the page turner could meddle with the pianist, suggest to him that a piece was far too complex to be memorised (a suggestion that would have an increasing grip on the pianist as he aged); he would get inside his head, we speculated, and encourage him not to memorise the piece, suggesting that the risk of performance was far higher than it really was – being concerned only for himself and his role as page turner. But then it occurred to us that there was no need for such meddling, for there would always be enough ageing pianists who need their pages turned; great pianists who in their heyday knew the piece off by heart, but now had to resort to paper. One thing we did not then consider was the question of the supply of page turners. For were there a glut in the supply of page turners, then they might well resort to the kind of underhanded manipulations we had previously considered.

Our post-concert reflections concluded by honouring the page turner. We compared him to those men who check the plane before take-off, ensuring that the bits and pieces of the plane are secured onto the plane; and we compared the maestro to the pilot, who, upon landing, enjoys all the glory of the success of the flight.

*

As security guards, they stood all day together. If they ever did, they no longer had words to say to one another, so as they looked and stared, everything was communicated by who came close to whom, the angle they turned towards or away from one another, and such like. Once, one of them came up to the other and stood much closer than usual. It was clear something had happened to him, as this was extraordinary. The other remembered this day, and often reflected on it, and wondered what had happened to make him want to stand so close.

*

On campus, late at night, I would see the light in his office and think: now there’s a philosopher. He must have been working hard, wrestling with philosophical problems, sacrificing all forms of pleasure in pursuit of knowledge, truth and reality. But I should have questioned my assumptions, for I saw what I wanted to see. It is only many years later, reflecting on the light in his office, that I realise this vision had more to do with me than him, representing, perhaps, how I thought I should lead my own life; the seriousness I thought I should bring to my own life. The vision was a self-instruction, not, as I thought, a depiction of reality. The reality might just as well have been: a man in an office, embarrassed to be the only one on the corridor with nowhere better to be, embarrassed to not be needed by anyone anywhere, trying to focus on a train of thought which no longer had any interest for him, frightened to go home to his empty flat, so forcing his mind down this pitiful line in which he could at least see his way to a conceptual destination – or perhaps he was playing minesweeper?

*

It was only very late in his life that Abraham Bubbe-Silverman discovered he was Jewish. Moshe Yisrael likewise only discovered late in his own life that he was a Jew.

*

A madman asked each person he came across: Why? They were bemused and said that they couldn’t understand the question. He, however, believed they could understand the question well enough, and that they were frightened by the question, which was, he believed, the only question that they ever really ask but which they do not want to think of, not wanting to confront the fact that it is their own and only real question. The madman believes that they try to constrict their thinking, thinking exclusively about the practicalities of life which they kid themselves are the primary questions and primary concerns, and the other questions, such as Why?, are of little or no concern. The madman believes that theirs is self-deceptive thinking, part of a mass self-deception, and that the reverse of their thinking is true. He thinks they have been seduced by the idea of a ‘tractable question’ and so they dismiss all the questions of Why? and all the questions which derive from Why? These tractable question advocates claim that Why? is not even a complete sentence, so it cannot be addressed. These tractable question advocates are philosophers pretending to be accountants, or accountants pretending to be philosophers. They say: focus exclusively on the tractable questions which are practical questions and are questions to which an answer can be given. (Is a question a question if it admits of no answer? they ask, rhetorically.) But the madman believes that it is only the intractable questions that cut into even their heads and hearts; he thinks it is only these intractable questions that even they care for – and it is precisely for this reason that they are set aside in favour of the tractable questions. These intractable questions are, the madman believes, like family members who we cannot help caring for even if we don’t understand them, unlike the tractable questions which are like strangers who we think we should care for (as human beings), who we might even care for in order not to engage in the real grief of caring for our own family members – but in the end, we do not much care for these strangers.

*

A man sits alone thinking, without any content. No screen, earbuds etc. to fill his mind. A suspicious scene indeed! Does he think he can produce his own content in his head? Is he not rejecting our world, our whole culture? And – should he be reported?

*

He was a connoisseur of silence. He could distinguish between a great variety of silences and had his favourites, and he could discourse freely on the relative merits of the various silences. Towards the end of his life, a great silence opened up in him, and he said that this had been, of all the silences, “the most wonderful silence”.

*

He was one of those people who enjoys the conversation when it is at its hardest. He relished those moments when it is as if you are trying to keep this thing up in the air – like in the parachute ball game – where you have to remember the script but be loose with it and improvise on it, knowing how awkward it would be if it fell to the floor, and there was nothing more to say.

*

He said that he agrees with the idea of justice: according to which, each gives back to the other what has been taken from them. In this way, the world would return to some ancient singularity just prior to the moment in which property or territory existed. But, he added, why do you think this absolute justice should begin with me? It would, he added, be very good of me if it were to begin with me. But I too have been robbed, and there is nothing in the very idea of justice that should mean it is I who must begin the great restitution. He said: if you think it must begin with me, you need another further principle – for I am not mentioned in the abstract idea of justice. You need a principle which selects me from all people as the one who must begin to implement justice – and you haven’t done this. He continued: And if it is not from a principle that you decided that it is I who must begin turning the wheel of justice, what is it about me that made you select me as its prime mover?

*

As he listened to the maestro play The Art of Fugue, the boy seated below him scrolled through images of tanks on his mother’s phone. And, he later related to me, that it appeared to him in this moment that there are only two options for the world: the world of The Art of Fugue represented by the immense, gentle, elderly man on the stage with his piano, or the tank-world represented by the boy on his phone.

*

Each of us was silent as we walked. I was thinking of how I would narrate events to my therapist. And she was thinking likewise, to hers.

*

Their protests interrupted many events in the city with the constant refrain that it is no time to be doing anything else, constantly drawing attention to themselves and their concerns, which they believed to be singular and total. But this was unsustainable, and very soon the protest turned on itself, interrupting itself, with the call that it is no time even for protest.

*

She said over and again I'm a spiritual person. She was signalling a distinction between herself, who is spiritual, and those in the audience who are not spiritual. And as ‘spiritual’ is a positive designation, she was saying something along the lines that she is good – and some of her audience drew the implications of this, and asked themselves: where do I stand in this distinction of spiritual or non-spiritual? Am I good or am I bad? And others thought: Is ‘spiritual’ a designation that you can give yourself, isn’t that for others to judge? Perhaps, however, she meant it more as a style, a preference for certain ‘spiritual’ kinds of things, such as world music or yoga, and the rejection of other kinds of things, such as suits or the stock market.

*

Her life was rubbish, so she took an interest in politics. Now her life was rubbish, with an interest in politics.

*

Her decision to sneeze loudly in public was, like all of her decisions, a result of a careful expression of her need for attention and to be taken care of. She knew how to do such things so well, and it was always a great success, obtaining everything she needed from those around her.

*

Each one was very concerned for their own well-being and health – it was the principal subject of discussion. Over breakfast they planned lunch, over lunch they planned dinner, and over dinner they discussed exercise methods to lose weight.

*

I walked up to an elderly Jewish-looking man wearing glasses – but (this time) no beard – and asked him if he could be my father. He immediately said yes, and I felt great relief for once again having a father.

I asked him: Are you happy? He, a measured man, said no, but that he has “changed the standard of assessment”, and according to the new standard, “I am fine”. But I was not asking his head, which had interpreted happiness according to the new standard, or had simply answered a separate question to which he could give an affirmative answer. I told him that I was asking his heart and I was asking it about his happiness and it must surely be that it contained unfulfilled longings and grief of the sort that all hearts contain. But his thinking mind only repeated what he had said before, viz. that he is fine.

“They walked one way taking one path, I another; they went in one direction, I the opposite direction. They looked and pointed seaward, so I looked inland. In my mind, and on this path, I thought alone.” In this and similar ways, he performs this idea of being on the outside of things. In each situation (work, relationships etc.) he finds himself outside, or rather, both inside and outside, one foot inside, one foot outside. But he identifies only with being outside, an ‘outsider’. He sees me, for instance, as a “consummate insider”, as “conventional”, “a bourgeois”, and he is angry with me for what he takes me to stand for. He thinks I judge him for not being like me, for not being “normal” – even despite the fact that all our work is directed to him accepting himself as is. He takes the work we do simply be an extension of my pervasive bourgeois condescension, which must take itself to be righteous and justified in order that it can enjoy its fruits; he thinks our work reinforces for me the validity of my own values.

He claims to be entirely unconstrained by convention in his adoption of opinions, and claims that he follows the truth wherever it takes him – and that it takes him outside, not merely of society and convention, but of the world as he knows it. I demur from his self-mythologisation. I think the reverse explanation is true: that he follows the truth just in order to be an outsider, in order to be increasingly isolated in the world. (Hypothesis: he is most uncomfortable with the human warmth that he desires.) He knows that the truth will cloak or justify his move out of the world – for everyone will accept the nobility of the pursuit of the truth. But the allure of the truth for him is that it will remove him from what is ordinary and conventional, not in the way suicide does, but in the way Goodness does. Of course he will say, quite rightly, that he is merely following the truth where it leads him; but his motive is the pursuit of the very thing which has taken him to my door feeling “outside of everything”.

Truth has this magical moral justificatory function: many other motives are hidden behind it and in it. Just as the intention to cruelly humiliate someone can be hidden behind the fact that they are genuinely to blame for some fault. Such cases have a holographic quality: you look at it from one angle and it is what it appears to be, and from another it is its opposite. Thought and intention are often holographic in this sense.

He appears to have adopted this position of ‘outsider’ long ago, a title which perhaps justified his then pathetic social position and made it livable. I conjecture that he maintains this identity so as not to see his lifetime investment in his identity as wasted. He has committed to this social identity as his real identity, even when his social position has altered. Having said this, the outsider identity must also have become useful to him as an adult: structuring and orienting him, opening some doors, closing others.

Certain tenets or identities are also hypotheses, which over the course of a life are disproved; we eventually cling onto them as delusions, or delusions described as regulatory ideals – or we face reality, and drop them. (Facing reality seems always to involve giving up something – what is supposed to go in the place of these ideas is hard to say, and perhaps nothing goes in their place, perhaps their place in ideas remains empty, and that is what the facing amounts to: setting oneself against reality without the comfort of an idea.)

One must not however be seduced by the label ‘Outsider’. It is a conveniently clubby name and identity which he gives himself; under this umbrella term, it universalises particular and peculiar features of him which have, from the outset, set him apart. The label appears to make what was not a choice into something freely chosen; and it hides the real motives for preferring to sustain such an identity rather than change course, and improve his life condition. Saying ‘this is who I am’ is a way of not being open to the possibility of life-change; and life, like time, is change.

He says he is an outsider. I said to him that this is a misnomer, for where he stands, there is no light; he hides himself away from himself, and so is, if anything, an insider.

*

No one is commanding or even directly encouraging him to do any particular thing in his life, but, and it is not an irony, out of his own mind and thought, he finds himself compelled to think he is being encouraged by all quarters to live a different life from the one he is living. He uses me as the symbol of this command and so rejects me and is angry with me. He protests against what I haven’t said. He thinks I think that he should be on the conventional, straight path, and that I reject what he is, needs and wants. Here I can see him against himself quite clearly, fighting himself in the mirror of me, or against someone whom he takes me to be. He protests that he can be as he wants to be, that he doesn’t have to be as others want him to be. He is battling and arguing with, or against, himself. He appears to be playing to the gallery, but it is the gallery of one, himself.

His problem, he says, is that he is “unconventional but wedded to convention”. This is surely a convenient high-level description. It transpired, as a result of our discussion, that he is only unconventional with respect to the conventions he does not like. For the rest, he sticks rigidly to convention – and is exceedingly polite.

We discussed the life of the mind and he said that he doesn’t want a normal life, that he is not normal, that he lives the life of the mind. He used the expression life of the mind many times. But he then immediately said: The life of the mind is not a life, it is an excuse for not having a life, for not living, it is a different sort of thing that cannot be compared with a life. He said that it is language which forces the comparisons of two unalike things because of the expression the life of…. We can see this, he said, because the comparison of the life of the mind is not to the life of the body but simply to life. And this life, he said, to which we compare the life of the mind, is the “straight life, the normal life, the life of normal people, the conventional life”. He is convinced that there is a binary opposition between the good life (which most people live), and the bad life (which he lives), which he tries to raise up and dignify by the description the life of the mind, but which he immediately sees through, and immediately turns against, seeing his need to justify his whole life through this label as itself a concession to the straight life which has no label and needs no label and justifies itself (by its fruits) or more likely needs no justification, for it is strong and stands even without feet.

He continued: “The life of the mind is not a life.” And then said: “But whose voice says this? Do I simply voice a position of the normal people, or is this voice my own voice?” He said: “The luxury of the normal life is that it doesn’t need to justify itself before anyone, because no normal person wishes to set up a tribunal to judge it, whereas the life of the mind automatically assembles before it a tribunal of normal people to judge it.” We discussed the fact that this tribunal is imagined, existing only in his head. We discussed how his repeated plea that he is different from others, and his simultaneous fear that he is different from and judged by others, is perhaps a means to think of himself as special and deserving of special forms of love. We discussed how he positions himself precisely in those contrasting tangles which allow himself to feel himself to be different and how this indicates how what he really wants may be precisely the tangle and the tension itself – for were this not the case, he could avoid the friction with which he fills his life. Instead, he puts himself in a position in which he feels called to dramatically reject the straight, normal, conventional. And in this dramatic rejection and collision with others, he protests his difference and cries, “I am not like you”, “I am special”, and claims the right to be different while also at once lamenting that he does not fit in and is all alone in the world.

He said: I wanted once to fit in, which meant: to disappear. But then, I did disappear before my family from within my family to a point where they didn’t recognise me or know me – and then I wanted more than anything for them to know me. My life is an oscillation of running towards and away from. I want to fit in, but when I see what I have to fit into, I run. But then turn back, like a coward, and want once again to join life. Not having the courage to be alone but wanting nothing else.

He then spoke of what he called the pleasures of recognition, that is to say, I think, of the pleasure of seeing what is familiar in his life. Perhaps similar to the pleasure taken in recognising the familiar forms depicted in Dutch painting. (More evidence of his utterly bourgeois sensibilities.) But I believe he also meant the pleasure of himself being recognised and known as such; the pleasure he finds in his being found as familiar and known to others in their lives.

*

He changes subject often. I suggested to him that the aim of his broken thinking and speaking is so as not to go deep, to remain on the surface of things, for below the surface is grief. He replied, “I admire only the flowers which don't seem to seek to please.” He then entered the following highly abstract train of thought: “I see things in terms of dilemmas and definitions. I want to define myself and say what I am in advance. Even if I am indeterminate, I want to say: I am determinately indeterminate.” I said to him that whatever interest such thoughts may possess – and I said that they possess great interest for me – he must come back to the rough ground. I said that when he thinks he is plumbing the depths, or limning the foundations, he is (also?) moving further from himself and the source of his real needs.

He obfuscates in the name of philosophy. Typical: “Who gets to hear my real voice?” he asks. “Do I?” he asks. He says: “In my head I ask: where are you? I am in my head. But who asks and answers here, in my head, whose voice?” He confuses himself as a matter of policy. I raised this with him and he rebuked me: “With what right do you psychologise me, by what right do you reduce a philosophical reflection to an unconscious tactical device? For one, it could be both; for another, it could just be philosophical. Would you have said to Plato ‘You use philosophy to turn away from yourself’?”

He takes the fool’s way out of each question by asking what each word means. “What do you mean?” is, he thinks, his ticket out of trouble, whereas it is the ticket to remain in the trouble that he is in.

He puts things out there as objects, and discusses those objects. To justify his lack of self-understanding, he thinks he has adopted the supposedly Christian virtue of not being turned in on himself, of not being obsessed with himself. In this way he shields himself from self-reflection as a virtue.

He asked: “Is life a matter of choosing addictions? We want to think there is an end state of peace, of overcoming, but this perhaps itself is an addiction to an idea. We possess these abstract ideas – freedom, home, happiness etc – which all crumble on inspection. We do not know what we are talking about and longing for, for we have never touched or known the reality which these ideas are ideas of.” He can extemporise endlessly on such themes. I keep having to draw him back to what we are discussing – him – away from these grand themes by means of which he wants to steal our attention.

He has many theories of how things work in the world. For instance, he said: “The mental loop and the life routine loop are connected; the idea that you can think your way out of your life routine is absurd!” Or: “I want to be liberated from my life by not caring about it, by a devaluation of all values – but I cannot do so, I have tried”. Or: “You can try to think that you don’t want the things which you want, but this does not work, because belief and desire are not under conscious control.” Or: “In order to use sin or madness you have first to say I am a sinner or I am mad. Only then can you engage in the drama of penance, or the drama of finding the cure for your madness. To get the rewards and consequences, you have to first say I am bad or I am mad or I need help etc. You must fess up and perform. If you are quiet, the world will go on and will ignore your silent plight.” Or: “The quiet person is only quiet because they expect (or expected) the world to take care of them. Their quietness is that of waiting (or having waited). The quietness is ambiguous. But we choose, because of the demands of all of those who are not quiet, to read it as self-assurance, rather than unvoiced need.” Or: “The sea is a living thing. This is a great part of our fascination with it”. He spoke of rockpools and anemones and starfish and childhood, of play and danger; that he has a sense of the sea wherever he is, a memory of the sea as it was when he was a child, in which he made contact with something wild and living, and this is still something in him, he says, which he contains, not wanting to see. Or: “My every gesture is tense and betrays my mind. I think I must gain clarity in my mind, and my body will follow the relaxation of my mind. But what if the opposite is true: what if you must first solve the body, for the mind to follow? If this is the case, everything I have invested in is fruitless.” Or: “I set up various cruel natural experiments in my home, such as placing many seeds in a small pot, and seeing which ones would thrive, taking the nutrients for themselves, away from their peers who they would effectively starve.”

He said that he wants to take positions on various things, but each time he does, all he sees are various people, family members, friends, enemies etc., each of whom represents for him a given position, and then his adopting a position is only ever adopting a view in relation to the person who he takes to represent the view, and so his own position is a matter of reaction to that person, or accommodation with them, or irritation by them etc. And not merely each one in isolation, but collectively: he must have a position that positions himself in relation to the ideas of this group of people he thinks of. Does he want to set himself outside them by a radical position, or to take sides against this one by taking up a position of another whom they detest etc. And once this accommodation with these ideas of all these people is made, he then must justify his own position as having nothing to do with them, to be presented as if it were developed out of reason, the raw facts and principles of the matter alone. It was tiring, he said, to come to any position, and it was never his own, always this hydra, this beast. He envied those who came single-handedly to their views, who simply allowed their mind to trace out the issue and follow the issue, without concern for ideas of people.

*

“All people see in me is my potential (which they define), not me.” “So,” he said, “they see themselves in me, not me in me.”

He said to me that they tell him he must communicate his needs. But, he said, that his needs are humiliating, that his needs are complex needs (he repeated this expression multiple times), they are different needs from the normal run of the mill needs, or different from what he takes the normal needs to be, and different from his image of what a normal person needs. And all this means, he said, that saying what his needs are and making them known is not as simple as it would be for someone with conventional needs, whose needs are already known to be accepted as such, whose needs are justified or justifiable needs.

He fears that the very statement of his needs exposes him to attack and humiliation and to the cruelty of having to justify them – and so the cruelty of having to justify his very self. It is easier, he said, to live as if he has no needs, to live as we imagine ascetic men did and do. He said we have been duped by the stories of those who say they are beyond the ordinary human being; he says we are all alike, like cows, no different from the difference between individual cows. I said to him that I agree, we are all, by and large, as alike as cows are alike, that we are all, by and large, the same, and that despite this, we each want to be the different cow, the cow who stands alone. So, I said, given that 99.9% of your needs are the same as everyone else’s, you need not be concerned about them being humiliating and different. He said: But what of the 0.1%? He said: Your needs are all ok until it becomes clear what they are when it comes down to the 0.1%. When it is assumed they are normal all is fine, but when this 0.1% is discovered they will reject me, and it is only this 0.1% which makes me who I am, he said, so I keep my needs to myself, I sacrifice my needs for my equanimity, I pretend they do not exist, and so I can live peacefully.

I reminded him that he said he “felt dead or unreal” and that this was connected to his denial of what he needs. He said: But I can function. He added that when he tried to communicate his needs, they replied to him: These are not your real needs, these are your desires. They tried to outwit him, he said, to play games with him, to deny him; in making this distinction they were denying him and saying to him that these things which he took to be his needs were not essential to him, and of course, they humiliated him by saying this, by implying that these are detachable from him, and even in the word desires he could smell their condemnation of him. He said that he would prefer to deny himself in dignity, than to be denied by them.

He turned his anger towards me again: he said that the therapist is very sensitive to the anger and feelings of the patient, is always lying in wait for these feelings, like a cat with closed eyes, listening and ready at all times to pounce. It is as if, he said, the therapist were themselves awaiting signs of their own significance from the patient, the therapist as the one who needs signs of hate or love from the patient – and this expression of feeling is dressed up as good for the patient, with the expression of this hate and love towards the therapist being treated as signs of the progress of the therapy. I said to him that it could be both. He said that this was a convenient move, and that I should interrogate my own understanding of why I am a therapist, and what motives I have for being one; he said that I am as needy as a comedian. I told him that I noticed that his analysis of me contained a great deal of anger directed towards me, which signalled something important in his therapy. He said that it is precisely this attitude which he rejects. But I said: you still come to me, and you will still come to me to reject me; I will never come to you, but my door is always open for you to come to me and reject me. He replied: Your door is open because you need signs of love from the world, signs you cannot manufacture yourself or in your own private life, so you have turned towards a public life to obtain it, disguising your real need in the form of a business transaction – this is your masterstroke.

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