0.
Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.
1.
Thinking consists of discrimination and generalization. So both are illegal, naturally.
2.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” At least whoever wrote the gospel of John attributed word-like powers to God, on some level casting words and language as the fundament of all existence, a facet of the divine, identical to the divine.
From such a teaching arises the Kabbalistic heresy, a belief that magic powers inhere in sacred words, powers that become available to the initiate who learns the many secret names of God.
All other discourses seek to transform semantics by means of semantics, but qabbalah performs its hermeneutics at the level of syntax, transforming semantics by means of a cipher, and this is an eternal hypercosmic delight.
3.
Shakespeare told us that words are more like persons than they are like things, and Nietzsche taught us that we find words only for what is already dead in our hearts, so that there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. This makes every discourse a kind of eulogy.
Deleuze said that thinking is a violent confrontation with concepts. The act of thinking is an attempt to destroy a part of your interior self, and to replace it with something better.
4.
Words are not concepts; they are names for concepts. The concept itself is a physical configuration of matter in your head (as is the name.) The name we share, but the concept in my head and the concept in yours may be different.
5.
When I say a word, I intend my concept, and when you hear my word, you evoke yours. If our concepts are not the same, then communication is merely sound and fury.
6.
We fabricate the greater part of our experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some event as its `inventor'. All this means: we are from the very heart and from the very first — accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.
7.
Blindsight is a kind of anosognosia, in which damage to the primary visual cortex causes the afflicted to believe he is blind. The surprising thing about this kind of injury is that brain-damaged individual still retains many faculties of sight, and in medical tests will exhibit behaviors that would only be possible if he still had the use of his eyes.
As a case study in self-perception, the possibility of anosognosia reveals that both sight and meta-sight are physiological mechanisms, and that they can fail independently, i.e., the ability to see is distinct from the belief that one can see.
More generally, the pathological case invites us to suspect that, even in the normative case, some divergence between the self and the map of the self is possible, and where desynchrony is possible, it is a foregone conclusion.
8.
That you can be mistaken about what you have seen is not surprising, but that you can be mistaken and even adamant, about your very ability to see, should cause you to doubt even the foundations of your understanding of the world.
Inside your eye there is a 1.5mm oval where you have no photoreceptors, because the head of your optic nerve overlays a part of your retina. You cannot see this blind spot, because you (probably) have two eyes and your brain is able to interpolate the signals into a single coherent continuous visual awareness. Far from being an aberration, we should consider the ecosystem of flawed perceptions, subconscious interpolation, and naive realism as the paradigm case for cognition.
9.
It is by means of something like blindsight that we apprehend all truths. We see them without seeing, digging down into that granite stratum of spiritual fate that lies at the bottom of each of us. Education, the vicissitudes of life—which are the best teachers—only serve to whittle away at those parts of us which are most contingent. In the case of every cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable “this is I.”
10.
In the name of such pretentious farces as “rationality,” “objectivity,” and “logic,” men have perpetrated more foolishness tenfold over than they ever did in the name of sentimentality or spiritual conviction. The fallacy of “objectivity” is to apply the models built at one level of abstraction to the percepts at a different level, and to expect a coherent output.
The opposition of logic and emotion is a false dichotomy because “cold and dispassionate” is also a feeling, and a mood, and an affectation. “I’m so logical I can’t even relate to you” is also an attempt to relate, I mean socially, it’s a show you put in so people will think you are smart, and it often consists of acting stupid. What could be more emotional than that!
If you want to see this in action, just watch how Mr. Rational will sulk and seethe if you point this out to him.
11.
A common refrain these days is that we need to act in order to eliminate or overcome bias, and this of course means that we need to develop a specific set of socially prescribed biases.
But even if that weren’t so, eliminating bias is eliminating all individuality, all personality, all difference. To be objective is to have no perspective; a bias is a subjectivity, and subjectivity is bias; it’s a history of your own personal experiences, abstracted into a series of moods and tendencies, and we call this amalgamation “you.”
