Our dear lll — L'éléphant

Your kindness is appreciated.

Hate against a group because god told you so is a responsibility that one has to answer to. The same way a person would act on a dream of end of the world -- this person has to answer to some authority if he acted badly. — L'éléphant

That's why atheists want proof. Because belief in god can never be treated like how we treat self-evident pain, fear, and dreams. — L'éléphant

Well said ! In the bad old days, folks were tortured for mouthing the wrong words.

And again, I ask, why is the experience of god -- sensation of the holy ghost, or whatever it is one experiences with god --as a private sensation like dream or pain, something to be proven? — L'éléphant

There's the old idea that 'God is a spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth.' Also some have said 'God is love.' The nice thing about the God-is-feeling idea, as long as it remains vague, is that it's flexible enough to let others find their own words and thoughts for this 'oceanic feeling.' It's as if the problem is a congealing of a feeling into a system with teeth that can't tolerate a hearse of a different color.

I like @180 Proof's conception of the philosopher as the self-acknowledged fool, and I'd like to maybe complement it with some grand(iose) passages that might paint an ideal more often than the reality that crawls after it.

...a philosopher: that is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from the outside, from above and below, as a species of events and lightning-flashes peculiar to him; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a portentous man, around whom there is always rumbling and mumbling and gaping and something uncanny going on. A philosopher: alas, a being who often runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself—but whose curiosity always makes him "come to himself" again.
<>
...to live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond... To have, or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against, according to choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to seat oneself on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses:—for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire.
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...the genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in mud and sand; the genius of the heart, from contact with which every one goes away richer; not favored or surprised, not as though gratified and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer in himself, newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names, full of a new will and current, full of a new ill-will and counter-current...
<>
...having been at home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit, having escaped again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which preferences and prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or even the weariness of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice against the seductions of dependency which he concealed in honors, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses, grateful even for distress and the vicissitudes of illness, because they always free us from some rule, and its "prejudice," grateful to the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any business that requires sagacity and acute senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an excess of "free will", with anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no foot may run, hidden ones under the mantles of light, appropriators, although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning till night, misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows—and it is necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of SOLITUDE, of our own profoundest midnight and midday solitude—such kind of men are we, we free spirits! And perhaps ye are also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye new philosophers? — Nietzsche

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm#link2HCH0009

An Initial requirement is you have to have a pole up your behind. — Ansiktsburk

A portrait of the earnest as a wrong man?

The captain of the ship of thought realizes that all the differences we make are based upon itself. He is after all making the map. He realizes that the ship is from the same matter as the land is and as the ocean is, but that all the differences made within this matter are made by thought. He realizes that even him referring to matter, invokes the history of philosophy, wasn't it Aristotle that called it such, he wondered. So yes, he realizes, all this mapping, all this thinking, it is based on the history of it, what we have considered important, what we have considered all this stuff to be. He goes to sleep, feeling puzzled and slightly confused, but not out of place. He realizes, he is not different at all. — Tobias

Beautiful. Do you mean that 'he' realizes that this 'he' or 'subject' is another piece of the 'map,' and that even the 'map' metaphor depends on everything else for its significance? 'He' makes the 'map' according presumably to his desires, themselves historically generated, but only according to the map that makes him along with itself. A whirlpool of traces.

'Absolute knowledge' amounts to no more than the realization that thinking progresses dialectically. — Tobias

It's been awhile, but wouldn't this be too anticlimactic? To make it interesting, I believe we need to do something like destroy the exterior (and with it of course the interior.) I watched some Pippin videos that he was great. Cool that you mentioned Kojeve. He's a fun one. Anyway:

According to Pippin, the Hegelian "Geist" should be understood as the totality of norms according to which we can justify our beliefs and actions. The important point is that we cannot justify anything except in such a normative logical space of reasons. So no kind of distinctively human rational cognition and action is articulatable or intelligible independently of such norms. In a phenomenological-hermeneutical jargon, these norms constitute a horizon, a perspective in which we can make anything intelligible to ourselves. Additionally, these norms are socio-historically articulated. Geist is the dynamic process of these norms and their transformations in human history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_B._Pippin

This reminds me almost too much of 'Dreydegger' and some interpretations of Wittgenstein. I guess I'd understand the softer version of absolute knowledge as a kind of introjection or ingestion of that which was previously projected as an external trans-human or non-human authority or indigestible kernel 'behind' appearances.

The atheist's challenge is not to 'put up' but is to put up or shut up. — Gregory A

Imagine a stranger or an acquaintance comes up to you and assures you that their grandmother came back from the dead or that their son leaped over the house. You'd be intrigued. At least I would. But I'd want some evidence pronto and get bored pretty quickly with various excuses. 'No one knew she was dead but me, but really she came back.' Or 'my son can only do it when no one is looking or just me.' If there were more witnesses supporting these claims, I'd more more intrigued. But I want to see the dead restored to life or the boy pull an ET over my house. The 'shut up' that comes from impatience is just symbolic of my right and yours to not have to listen to those who have lost our trust or respect. At times it's seems that theistic complaints are even a bit entitled, as if they don't just want protection from censorship (which they have in the US) but rather a captive audience.

It is an attempt at censorship. — Gregory A

No more, as far as I can see, than in hanging up on a telemarketer or a robocall. We do not owe one another our ears. As a believer in free speech, I think we owe one another only tolerance. I do try to hurt you or lock you away because we disagree and you do the same.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. — Jefferson

In my experience, theists often fail to note just how moral and even neurotic their foils those pesky agnostic or atheistic liberals can be. Or I wasn't invited to the pansexual key party this month. Hard to say. Neither decency nor smug self-righteousness require religious belief or its absence. In my experience, most people have some kind of patchwork religion of childhood Christianity, self-help books, sci-fi, conspiracy theory. I find the theist/atheist issue way too binary, way too simple. I just want to know that neighbor isn't a maniac who can't deal with not being the center of the world, happy enough in his/her beliefs to not need my approval or admiration.

effectively meaningless and is either trivial or points towards nothing. — Shwah

The points stale what.

You are also young and egotistical — Shwah

I'm really not so young anymore, just egotistical. Amen false office ours. A talk links his runes.

You did not know the reference — Shwah

A reference through it. Irreverence threw it. A river runs through it. For river run over all men. For reverend ever endeavor amend. Thigh will be dim inert as it is unleavened.

you referred to late witt's language games — Shwah

His lung wedge gums aren't the only jumpers in his chomp yard.

Now what makes us it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality. This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions.
...
The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.

There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf", has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learnt the meaning of the word "leaf"; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing 'in him' an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is in common to all these leaves; and this is true if we mean that he can on being asked tell us certain features or properties which they have in common. But we are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which only contains what is common to all leaves. (Galtonian composite photograph.) This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. — Blue Book

In an earlier quote it's shown that meaning-as-image loses its appeal without a mystifying obscurity that lingers only until we follow this fantasy to the and.

I'm just saying that lots of stuff that's 'obvious' is revealed to be just knee-jerk habit as one keeps studying and thinking. I don't mean to offend you. I was genuinely surprised that you looked for a referent for a noun and praised the later Wittgenstein in almost the same breath. I see him as busting up all the 'obvious' stuff so that we see the strangeness of our signal slinging with fresh eyes. For whatever it's worth, this isn't my pet theory but just a paraphrase of various scholars. Here's one more quote from The Blue Book.

The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results. Very often the way the discussion of such a puzzle runs is this: First the question is asked "What is time?" This question makes it appear that what we want is a definition. We mistakenly think that a definition is what will remove the trouble (as in certain states of indigestion we feel a kind of hunger which cannot be removed by eating); The question is then answered by a wrong definition; say: "Time is the motion of the celestial bodies". The next step is to see that this definition is unsatisfactory. But this only means that we don't use the word "time" synonymously with "motion of the celestial bodies". However in saying that the first definition is wrong, we are now tempted to think that we must replace it by a different one, the correct one.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

Philosophy, as Wittgenstein with his royal 'we' intends the word, 'is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.' I'm still in therapy myself, egregiously gripped by grammar.

All this insipid philosophical bickering over God occludes the unspeakable presence of the world, which can be powerful, profound, beautiful, like those first few minutes of Mahler's 9th. Or Barber's Summer Knoxville 1915. This is where one should live. I dare say. — Constance

I don't though those musical references well (I do love music), but I agree that the bickering occludes raging beauty and terror. I think of Job's visit by the whirlwind.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:
“Who is this who obscures My counsel by words without knowledge?Now brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall inform Me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who fixed its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its foundations set, or who laid its cornerstone, while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
...

Do you give strength to the horse or adorn his neck with a mane? Do you make him leap like a locust, striking terror with his proud snorting? He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength; he charges into battle. He laughs at fear, frightened of nothing; he does not turn back from the sword. A quiver rattles at his side, along with a flashing spear and lance. Trembling with excitement, he devours the distance; he cannot stand still when the ram’s horn sounds. At the blast of the horn, he snorts with fervor. He catches the scent of battle from afar—the shouts of captains and the cry of war.

Does the hawk take flight by your understanding and spread his wings toward the south? Does the eagle soar at your command and make his nest on high? He dwells on a cliff and lodges there; his stronghold is on a rocky crag. From there he spies out food; his eyes see it from afar. His young ones feast on blood; and where the slain are, there he is.
...
Would you really annul My justice? Would you condemn Me to justify yourself? Do you have an arm like God’s? Can you thunder with a voice like His?Then adorn yourself with majesty and splendor, and clothe yourself with honor and glory. Unleash the fury of your wrath; look on every proud man and bring him low. Look on every proud man and humble him; trample the wicked where they stand. Bury them together in the dust; imprison them in the grave. Then I will confess to you that your own right hand can save you..."

https://biblehub.com/bsb/job/39.htm

As others have noted this is an amoral or transmoral God drunk on the beauty and madness and terror of his creation. This is a world behind the film of all the boring self-righteous posturing and lecturing inflicted upon Job by those to desperate for the installation therein of cosmic justice to be obliterated by its beauty. We like to cover it over with a slab of the fog of the blob of our blab. Yet this glorious vision too is the flap of a glob of a grab of our gab, another both dump flu of as it.

We are tied with uncuttable strings to brain and outside world, and both are necessary for us to exist, to walk, talk, sleep, dream, sing, and even philosophize. — EugeneW

Well put. Even to think is to splash in chirps and barks the 'meaning' of which we did not assign but only adapted to you as we might learn to use a knife and spoon. The noise 'mommy' and the light switch, tools for a body to touch in its dance with the world.

That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one. — Constance

I'm also aloft in cheeps clothing.

That's why we talk about private-subjective-Mental-concepts in terms of analogies to public-objective-Material-things — Gnomon

Does the dove flap its winks in a vacuum? Is there not already mutter in those public mounds? Is there not always still some mound in our mutter or some mutter in our mounds? A moundless mutterialist like me might suspect that the mound/mutter distinction is no more mound than mutter. What is an analogy? What is a 'map' ? What is 'structure' ? Each master word is explained in terms of still others, yet the blurry go round gets us from eh to be.

Words are clearly dependent on meaning — Shwah

And the world is 'clearly' flat. Don't be surprised if philosophy surprises you after all. Did you visit the florist for common scents?

Wittgenstein is profound and difficult, despite the honesty of his prose, because we don't want to hear what he's saying, attached as we are to our 'go stories' which are 'obviously' true. This 'obviousness' is the mote in my brother's eye.

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein

Nice quote. I'm surprised then that you'd still insist on some spectral referent.

One might use the word as an order to have someone else bring you a glass of water. But it can also be used to warn someone that the water has been poisoned. One might even use the word as code by members of a secret society.

In the first example, we are trying to get water into our body. In the second ,we are trying to keep poison or infection out of a friend's body. In the last, access to a space is being secured. The context-bound 'meaning' of the sentences is there in the relationships of the expressions of 'iterable' tokens (words) with other bodily movements. As I understand him, Wittgenstein shows the futility of trying to find meaning in some private headspace.

If I told you I had a dream last night and you responded by saying you don't believe me, the conversation stops right there. — L'éléphant

Good point, and along these lines we see that 'logic' is part of a larger form of life in which some claims are just taken for granted as too boring or offensive to question.

You might say you are awake but what if I say that I don't believe you? The fact that you say it is no proof. How can I know you are awake like me? — EugeneW

Good point, for these days a bot might claim to be awake !

At this point, I should confess that 'I' am actually an 'it,' and my body is a stupor commuter.

This is a killer passage from the Blue Book. I guess you can call it a transitional work, but I find the gist of the moon called went gone slime hair.

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.

I think we can add that understanding a language is understanding a lifeworld or a form of life. Language is embedded in the world. The meaning of the stop sign is there in the way the cars move around it.

He would be saying what I would. You would find the reference in the language game but he very specifically speaks about everything having a reference. — Shwah

I'm talking about his later work. Are you?

So there's still a reference there or there is no way to meaningfully parse the statement "King of America". — Shwah

It'll sound like none scents but parsing is best understood in terms of bodies doing stuff effectively in the world. Sometimes the appropriate reaction is a shrug or a giggle. The taken-for-granted realm of spirits (meanings in minds) has been shown wanting.

How can you parse the phrase "king of america" without a referent at all? I feel it's necessary to emphasize that the referent does not need to be material but if you don't know what a king is or what america is or what they are when conjoined (a linguistic conception, a monarch of america game simulator) then you can't meaningfully decide whether it's true or not. — Shwah

Substance abuse, my friend. Make an appointment with Dr. Wittgenstein to begin your therapy. Grammar's grabbed you by the groin most grievously.

I taught WWI British poetry once to high school students (in India, no less). — Constance

Sounds like an adventure.

That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one. — Constance

Ah, thank you for tolerating my playfulness and wetting for the point to try. I'm studying Chimes Joys lately.

Forget the "truth" (Maybe truth is a woman, Nietzsche wrote) and its antiseptic pathology. Nietzsche really liked Emerson, a Unitarian minister, for a good reason: He took the soul to such heights and revealed something of what the age of reason buried deep: a fathomless and impossible affirmation — Constance

Nietzsche is dear to me, for exactly what you sketch above.

The recluse does not believe that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse's verdict... — Nietzsche

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm

I wonder if you've seen this more obscure passage:

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
...
God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1

Oh, this is Wilfred Owen. I didn't recognize. — Constance

First bumped into it in an anthology as a teen. Some of his lines are as good as any I know.

I wonder if the oatmeal cookies will be done in time for dessert. — Constance

I want the next misses in a puddle in a two please bikini, aloof in sheets coding, eternally farting years old (every tug has its toy.) Born in scene, upon scum, I prey with my wait paint which is wet point. (I like the idea of a prophetic protagonist explaining his peach humpediment, symbolizing philosophy's struggle to master its own treacherous medium.)

Christs finest moment is his cry of dereliction. — Constance

Only the damned are grand, and it's when daddy glows away that baby gets to rare that groan of thorns.

Then, the withdrawal of God was the moment he became a human being. — Constance

The incarnation is completed exactly then, whiff no more got in the sky leftover.

You want to be there at the foot of the cross screaming up, Oh, so now you get it. It takes a jolt. — Constance

Yes. The moral of the sorry is gory.

Salute!

Science involves more induction issues the more empirically-laden you make it. — Shwah

I know Hume's problem, etc. Science is just the least worst thing we seem to have. It makes us fail better. Let's let our theories do our dying for us.

We then to get our chews stunk in the mud.

One doesn't need an experiment to do science otherwise pure physics is thrown out the door (and the higgs boson, as well as general relativity and all science shows this is not true). — Shwah

At some point the rubber meets the road (experiments are done) or it's just theology or poetry. No doubt there's a 'formal' side to any mathematical science. I can mathematically derive implications from postulated laws and compare them with actual measurements. At the moment I like to think of science in terms of maps from uncontroversial entities to uncontroversial entities, passing through whatever theoretical entities turn out to make for reliable prediction. And I take mine black, with minimum ontological commitment.

Thanks!
<salute>

So, the "Universal Mind" is infinite & eternal, hence prior to, and outside of the space-time world. PED is an abstruse philosophical concept, not a popular religion. — Gnomon

I get that. I've always understood it as your own invention, a brew or a stew or superscientific postreligious goo, and I like the taste of my poetry too. I've challenged you not because I resent such a harmless creation (I respect he creativity), but only philosophically for (in my eyes) being rather complacent about the concept of 'mind.' As I said initially, my nudges are from a place of 'semantic pragmatism' that generally finds folks way to satisfied where I scents ambiguity. Mind and matter? These tour in the path dump chew gather.

Irony plays against, metaphors play with something else in language, but whether there is an inroad to existence that is NOT language is the big question. Ask Derrida. Can language ever really touch the world? If not, what is this horrible tennis elbow experience? It ain't language....but it IS there. — Constance

One of my versions of that is the smell of 'garbage juice' which the trucks leave behind in the early morning. How ineffable that spell ! Feuerbach stressed sensation as that which eludes our nets. What is this whole in my morning donut? What is this gap twixt my chew front thief ? A reference offer (our ever rinse over, a river runs over).

I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? — Constance

Beautiful quote ! Reminds me of Dostoevsky and Sartre.

Also of this:

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

This is the knotty child who questions Everything with that most terrible of questions. Why is there a here here? Why did me mud wake up ? Who drags me from the void to make me march and pretend? There is beauty in the horror, for the lad is a sacred victim of the gods who hide in gore. The nihilist is christ on the cross as he doubts the fondness of his too far father.

One day, you're a ballerina, the next Putin has drops a bridge on you.
Suffering and happiness, these are the stuff of the only meaningful philosophical issues. — Constance

I agree, and yet insist that qualia are alogical, elusive, paradoxical. So we must talk of objects. Bridges dropped on ballerinas is beautiful, the sentence of course and not the situation.

That "intellectual minority" would preclude Aristotle, Plato, Newton, Godel etc. — Shwah

Geniuses can be superstitious or wrong. All it takes is a moment of innovation against the usual background of conformity and confusion.

For instance commentary can be written about God in particular ways and still refer to God in other commentaries (e.g. Aquinas can quote Augustine and still be speaking about the same catholic trinitarian conception of God). So a proof can have overlap as a sense with another sense assuming a similar reference. — Shwah

Theology is itself the god it seeks, I might metaphorically suggest. But, granting the poetic license of intending at least to further decorate a concept, you still need a bridge from a game of dead symbols to the throne of the cosmos.