Repeating some of what others said, but want to take a stab at it. I think about this a lot and can never quite satisfactorily say what I want to so here’s another go:


The only way to make sense of ‘absolute death’ is to set up a soul/matter distinction where you blipped into the material world and so can blip out.

If you don’t accept a soul, you’re more like a part of the world (a contortion of the material world) that felt separate for a time.

What dies is the contortion of matter that felt separate, and over time built up a structure of self-sense around that, but everything else continues.

Matter contorted itself into a sense of self, and can do so again.

What allows the boundless to feel bounded and separate is a mystery, but if it happened before, it can happen again.

(I think panpsychism, but that’s controversial and not needed for the above)

We are in one kind of thermodynamic regime - powerlaw - and not in another - Gaussian. As an example that makes one of the things we view as a big problem - gaping inequality - just a natural part of what is going on. Therefore eliminating that inequality is going to be hard as it is basically swimming against the tide.

So contra your pigheadedness, my point is that understanding the actual thermodynamical flow that entrains humanity is the only thing that actually could create a “choice” - ethical or pragmatic.

If we want to resist the “is”, and construct out own “ought”, one needs an understanding of history a lot more sophisticated than thinking it is one damn thing after another.

History has a Hegelian structure. It is a dissipative flow. We now have a science of all that. Time to leave your metaphysical nonsense questions in the past where they belong. — apokrisis

I agree that a choice is not a real choice if it is uninformed by how things actually are. As far as I can tell, you’re using ‘hegelian’ simply to mean that history has a direction -& while I think it’s a confusing word-choice (‘Hegelian’ carries a lot of meaning) I agree that history has a direction.

If ‘ought’ is taken to mean a suprahistorical (platonic) set of norms that can be applied indifferently to any situation, I also agree that it is mistaken lens through which to view things.

But I can’t understand your above post without some wedge between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ - if, as you say, It is by understanding how things are that we become able to make a choice and ‘resist’, then there is a space in which to choose that isn’t inevitable. There’s a ‘gap’ in the ‘is.’

Well, maybe not. Is it the commanding aspect of ‘ought’ ( that there is a ‘correct’ choice) that you are most objecting to? If so, I agree (& not as an anything-goes relativist.)

For a while I’ve felt that if ‘free will’ means anything, it involves learning to observe patterns and cycles, including the weak/unstable points that would allow for the disruption of the whole, thereby allowing actual change. and then to ‘wait’ for that moment or part of the cycle to come around again, and act (with and against the pattern.) I have a sense that this is probably a cumulative thing that finally (as Hegel would say: quantity becoming quality) leads to kind of phase change, but one you’ve nudged in the right direction. (The ‘ought’ that leads to nudging in this direction organically bubbles up as discontent before finding this means of finding a way forward.)

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose. It is what is
Sequestered. Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers...
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of a mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"
Chiefly his reflection once removed.
The glass chose to reflect only what he saw
Which was enough for his purpose : his image
Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle.
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.
---
Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied"
By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission
That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible. That is what the portrait says.
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.
One would like to stick one's hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension,
What carries it, will not allow it.
No doubt it is this, not the reflex
To hide something, which makes the hand loom large
As it retreats slightly. There is no way
To build it flat like a section of wall :
IT must join the segment of a circle,
Roving back to the body of which it seems
So unlikely a part, to fence in and shore up the face
---
On which the effort of this condition reads
Like a pinpoint of a smile, a spark
Or star one is not sure of having seen
As darkness resumes. A perverse light whose
Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its
Conceit to light up: unimportant but meant.
Francesco, your hand is big enough
To wreck the sphere, and too big,
One would think, to weave delicate meshes
That only argue its further detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
Follows a course wherein changes are merely
Features of the whole. The whole is stable within
Instability, a globe like ours, resting
On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
Secure on its jet of water.
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.

New (& final) poem: Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

The stanzas are enormous, so I'll use a " ---" to indicate page breaks within stanzas. The poem takes its theme and title from this painting by the Italian late Renaissance artist Parmigianino

[end of poem]

Until everybody
Gets some advantage, big or little
Some reason for having come
So far
Without dog or woman
So far alone, unasked.

It has no taste
and though it refreshes absolutely
It is a cup that must also pass

But this was a moment
Under the most cheerful sun.
In poorer lands
No one touches the water of life.

So lucky
Now we really know
It all happened by chance:
A chance encounter
The dwarf led you to to the end of a street
And pointed flapping his arms in two directions
You forgot to misprize him
But after a series of interludes
In furnished rooms (describe wallpaper)
Transient hotels (mention sink and cockroaches)
And spending the night with a beautiful married woman
Whose husband was away in Centerville on business
(Mention this wallpaper: the purest roses
Though the creamiest and how
Her smile lightens the ordeal
Of the last 500 pages
Though you never knew her last name
Only her first: Dorothy)
You got hold of the water of life
Rescued your two wicked brothers Cash and Jethro
Who promptly stole the water of life
After which you got it back, got safely home,
Saved the old man's life
And inherited the kingdom.

Quick dicing & splicing for the basic idea: (it mirrors the Atlantic article from the OP in a lot of places):

Over the past few centuries, changes in the international order have often been the result of a great war. Examples include the Westphalian System which followed Europe’s Thirty-Year War, the Versailles-Washington system which followed WWI, and the Yalta system which followed WWII. The basic outline of the current international order is more or less the result of WWII. But after more than 70 years, the existing order is beginning to waver as a result of multiple shocks, beginning with the end of the Cold War in 1991, and including the 9-11 incident in 2001, the financial crisis in 2008, and Trump’s election in 2016.

While its structure remains intact, the role of the United Nations is limited, the capacity of the WTO has been diminished, the resources of the IMF and the World Bank are stretched thin, the authority of the WHO is inadequate, the global arms control regime is on the verge of collapse, international standards are frequently ignored, American leadership and will have declined together, the mechanisms facilitating great power cooperation are in disorder, and the international order is hanging by a thread.

The outbreak and spread of the coronavirus pandemic has plunged the entire world into mourning, as countries locked down and borders closed, economies ground to a halt, stock markets plunged, oil prices collapsed, exchanges were broken off, insults were traded and rumors proliferated. The shock of the impact has been in no way less than a World War, which is yet another attack on the existing international order. The old order is perhaps unsustainable, but a new order has yet to be built, which is the basic feature of a once-in-a-century great change, and is also the root cause of the crisis roiling the contemporary international scene

[...]

The 2020 election will be a fight between Trump’s “keeping America great” and Biden’s “let America lead again,” but even if Biden wins, internal political handicaps and changes in the external environment suggest that America will have a hard time reassuming its role as a world leader. But just like Britain in the post-WWI period, the United States still has enough power to prevent other countries from taking her place, and America’s China policy will only get increasingly hyper-sensitive, unyielding, and arrogant as they double down on containment and suppression. Strategic competition between China and the US will become all the more fierce.

At the end of the pandemic, the existing order of “one superpower and many great powers” will change. America may remain “the superpower” but will have a hard time maintaining its hegemonic domination. China is rising fast, but faces obstacles in its drive to surpass the US. Europe’s star is fading, its future development course unclear. Russia plots its future moves in the chaos, and its position has perhaps risen somewhat. India’s weaknesses and shortcomings have been exposed, blunting the momentum of its rise. After having to postpone the Tokyo Olympics, Japan seems lost.

[...]

Since the 18th National Congress of the CCP [in November 2012], China has chosen cooperation and a win-win posture as its ideological foundation, and peaceful development as its strategic priority. It has adopted One Belt-One Road as its primary policy stance, and the construction of a new type of international relations as its immediate objective. Its ultimate goal is the creation of a community of mankind’s shared destiny, through the “five in one” general framework[10] and the “close links between peoples of the world 环环相扣,” forming a set of new international strategic frameworks that both respect the past and innovate for the future, so that the relationship between China and the world enters a new historical phase.

Yet just as China increases its participation in the world, just as China assumes world leadership, America chooses “strategic contraction” and “America first,” and the trend in Sino-American relations, which is going against the trend of development in relations throughout the world, will earn the contempt of history. The result is that the United States is not looking at China’s relations with the world from a progressive historical perspective, but instead is scrutinizing Chinese intentions through a lens of strategic caution, and using high-pressure tactics to carry out blockage and containment.


[...]

The coronavirus pandemic has not changed the fact that the world is experiencing a once-in-a-century change, but has simply made that change a bit quicker and a bit more abrupt. It has not changed the basic shape of China’s relations with the world, but instead has made these relations more complex and multi-faceted. Nor has it changed the basic judgment that China is currently in a period of strategic opportunities, a posture that will continue. After all, China led the way out of the most difficult moment of the pandemic, and began planning to return to work and production; marked by the convening of the "Two Sessions,"[12] the strategic deployment China established is still proceeding in an orderly manner.

However, it will become increasingly difficult for China to seize the opportunity, and the risk challenge will surely multiply. In this extraordinary moment when countries face the disaster of the pandemic and the entire world fights the virus, the crux of the issue is whether China be able manage its own affairs well at the same time that it assumes it role as a great power and does its utmost to supply public health goods to the world. This is both a prerequisite for restarting China’s relationship with the world as well as the foundation for the great revival of the Chinese nation.

To ensure that the restart will proceed smoothly and extend into the future, we must begin by looking back on the path we have travelled, and must unwaveringly push forward the new age of reform and opening. On this front, we must bravely advance, and cannot be satisfied with half-measures. Next, we must settle our minds and proceed calmly with the task at hand. As the goal of the “first one hundred years” approaches conclusion, we should pause for a moment, sum up our experiences and lessons learned, and look for laws and patterns that will create the conditions as we take up the sprint toward the “second hundred years.”

— Yuan Peng

I can't tell (no background knoweldge) if the 'first [ & second] hundred years' way of framing is better read as a somewhat-scary expression of authentic Long Term, Big Picture Planning or as a rhetorical way of evoking (for self & others) the power that comes with having Long Term, Big Picture Planning.

It’s a really interesting time to be alive, if nothing else good. This is a good resource for China's perspective on the whole thing. (Especially, this essay )

But the real story, the one
They tell us we shall probably never know
Drifts back in bits and pieces
All of them, it turns out

And meanwhile my story goes well
The first chapter
endeth

Yeah! I’ve used the metaphor of an airlock before (I suppose it’s just a way of saying a fly at the bottleneck) but the doing is what shows, and if you’ve carved out a good saying-routine it’s a tricky thing to transition to doing. I think the podcast is right to focus on trust: maybe the least sayable, most showable, thing there is. Not my strength, but it seems like the right tack.

It has to be read out loud, during a solstice. Please do not read otherwise.

I’m trying to think of how to respond without speaking in recidivist Cartesian poetry but it seems I can’t, so here is one, called ‘Protect Brittania’s Vales’

Matter: dirty, dank and brown.
And logic: what a joke!
O waterfalls and rainbows bright!
Now that’s our only hope.

Speak softly now of mother’s tears
And laundry hung to dry
Of feelings gentle as the rain
The angels learn to cry.

There’s nothing that is good but poems
All semiotics lie
What matters is to hug your friends
And see through Pierce’s lie.

I'm not sure what you would consider a coherent argument, but I suspect it would be something like 'set forth in such a way that it is already anticipated and comprehended by my approach'; the only argument that would satisfy would have to have a form such that, in satisfying, it would dismantle itself. Just as one might say that Kierkegaard, in criticizing Hegel, simply recapitulates the 'Unhappy Consciousness' phase of the Phenomenology of Spirit, thereby performatively proving Hegel correct in his very (attempt at a) refutation.

I thought my argument was pretty simple and very direct : Your approach appears to be alienating, and so is worth avoiding (or disentangling oneself from). I base that on empirical evidence. You tend to enter a thread, perform the same formal operation on whatever's being discussed, ignore people's protests that you're misunderstanding what they're saying, then treat them as whatever thought-functions are most crisply convenient. I observe that you seem decidedly insensitive and unaware, especially when you're at your most totalizing.

You seem to think that any objection to what you're doing has to define itself in terms of what you're doing. For example you say this 'Note how you then launch into a long defence of the subjectivist life as the unalienated and colourful alternative. Who would not choose that over the alienated, monochrome, etc, objectivist you ask?' in near-hallucinatory response, describing something that did not happen. Seriously! Read back my posts and your response - I quite literally never did this. Still, you believed, it appears very confidentally, that I did. This does not seem like heightened sensitivity and awareness..

Now, listen, I'm not saying my shit doesn't stink. I'm also very often alienating, repetitive, hijacking, angry (as you say), insensitive and so on. I'm sure a lot of people here think I'm a pain or a bore. I'm pretty sure that a big part of poking at you was to try to get a well-landed poke back at me, but unfortunately you keep poking the subjectivist.

It has shut itself out
And in doing so shut us accidentally in

I beg you to listen
You are already listening

Afterwards when I tell you
It's as though it all only happened
As siding of my story

You really believe your own bullshit don't you. You haven't produced a coherent argument as yet. But you want to make that problem mine. — apokrisis

Christ, apo, if one were to read just your half of the exchange, they'd think I only said things like 'science can't explain feelings.' I half-think you do think that's all I've said.

Look, I'm not against learning patterns & I'm not saying one should gear one's life toward maximizing surprise. It would be a poor carpenter who met each new board by being awestruck by the singular intricacies of its whorls. Of course it's good to learn. I'm saying there is a particular kind of total-surprise-avoidance that I think it best to avoid. You may disagree, and if so we can discuss, but we need to connect in this debate on the particulars rather than framing it in terms of 'poles' or the ultimate twin poles of 'resolution vs clinging-to-a-pole.' I'm aware of these things and I'm taking good care to avoid them. But if you want to fight 'subjectivists', here's some red meat:

In a sordid hour, I went and got drinks with a subjectivist and, as you'd expect from a subjectivist, he wanted to talk about literature. After saying 'fuck science' and showing me his grateful dead tattoo, he told me the story of Henry James' Beast in the Jungle. The protagonist, the subjectivist told me, spent his whole life waiting for his apotheosis - for the 'beast' to pop out in a single epic moment. The beast does pop up, toward the end, when the protagonist realizes that in focusing all his energy on this apotheosis, organzing his life around this moment, he's become absent to his actual life. This recognition is the beast, of course, what can you expect? 'Away with you, subjectivist' I yelled, 'this oatmeal-mush displays only your watery will!'

In all seriousness, though, I've met you in every way, while you've failed to meet me. If you don't respect me enough to engage with what I actually say, and want to reduce me to a type, that's your prerogative. I believe our exchange today speaks for itself, and I am satisfied with my half of it, though I would have preferred the surprise of an actual dialogue.

I have to push back here. I took great pains to explain my position and how it is neither 'subjectivist' or 'objectivist' (your terms). I don't have much to say, because you've failed to respond to me. If your true interlocutor is 'a subjectivist' (what is this figure? I have some hunches) who you've developed a way to responding to, and if its more convenient to respond to this 'subjectivist', no matter what I actually say, how can we have a discussion? I am struggling to think you are not just doing an impoverished hippies vs rationalists thing, and I am giving you every opportunity to show that you're not. That you can't make use of these opportunities to elaborate anything other than a stark dichotomy of this ilk - it's not surprising, but it is a bit disappointing. Did you read my posts?

I just found it funny that I had paid some special attention to exactly that as a historical dynamic. Hegel is (in)famous for his dialectical claims about the German state representing an end to history to the degree that it had achieved a natural rational order - a state of Enlightened self-governing.

Neoliberalism felt it had achieved the same natural enlightened state of arriving at the end of history - at least according to Fukuyama.

So the question arises what is the true dichotomy that human history keeps trying to resolve in a synergistically valuable fashion? That was my research topic.

Clearly it is in some sense the balance between the forces of labour and capital - to follow the Marxist analysis. Or free competitive action within the cooperative space of a collective market - the neoliberal story perhaps.

My own answer is thermodynamic - the basic view of natural systems. Humanity stumbled on a fossil fuel bonanza that could be harnessed by industrial age machinery. If we learnt to think like machines - form a mathematical level of semiosis with "reality" - then we could burn through this bonanza at an exponential rate. — apokrisis

Of course, both Fukuyama and Marx were influenced (to dramatically understate it) by Hegel. I suspect that the 'true dichotomy' is a certain way of mentally approaching the world. The mind, a complicated tangle of processes within the world, is adept at finding examples of other processes that exemplify the same forms as certain of its it subprocesses. I don't even doubt that, as far as they go, these big wheeling rings of dichotomies and their resolution are accurate ways of understanding the world. Again, there's plenty of background to render crisply into foreground, if you have the time and wherewithal to do so.

Still, I'm deeply skeptical of the thermodynamics-explain-everything approach, because we humans seem to have a long track record of finding new 'x-explains-everything-approaches' that are believed fervently by bright intellects, then soon supplanted by as-bright intellects. I'm quite sure you understand thermodynamics better than me, just as Fukuyama understood statecraft better than me. I've read Fukuyama, by the way, at least his early fame-winning book and the first volume of his history of state formation. I've also read a good deal of Hegel and his later expositors. You see a pattern with totalizing thinkers where, while they do great when applying a certain methodology to sifting details, they inevitably draw big conclusions that are, if not wrong, then certainly partial truths wildly incommensurate with their initial claims to holistic explanation. You (& those you draw from) may be the one(s) to break this pattern, but I doubt it. My Bayesian priors tell me otherwise.

To be clear my objection is neither 'subjectivist' not 'objectivist', but thoroughly pragmatic, though perhaps not in the way Peirce meant it. It is about avoiding something Hegel described like this:

'If the knowing subject carries round everywhere the one inert abstract form, taking up in external fashion whatever material comes his way, and dipping it into this element, then this comes about as near to fulfilling what is wanted – viz. a self-origination of the wealth of detail, and a self-determining distinction of shapes and forms – as any chance fancies about the content in question. It is rather a monochrome formalism, which only arrives at distinction in the matter it has to deal with, because this is already prepared and well known.'

And it's about avoiding this, because its a profoundly alienating way of thinking/living/discussing. I have a certain draw to this kind of thing myself and have been only slowly able to disentangle myself from it. To reiterate, the 'success' of such an approach appears to me be a 'success' at avoiding any kind of surprise or any encounter with something outside one's grasp. I think this means it serves the same function that lesser addictions do - it's a repetition which always returns to the same thing, as for a drunk any new city is quickly reduced to the familiar rhythms of the bar. This doesn't have anything to do with privileging the objective over the subjective or vice versa, and it seems very odd to me to think about feelings and poetry as occupying one side of a cartesian split. This makes sense if you think of feelings or poems as merely 'subjective' but, since they are things felt and produced by beings with objective reality, this way of approaching them doesn't make any sense.

You are against such totalising, even when it is a well proven success. You try to dismiss it as "pragmatic", as if being useful is a dirty word. You will blather on about poetry or feelings or other tribal artefacts of the anti-totalising brigade.

It's funny. Proper metaphysical strength Peircean pragmatism offends the objectivist and the subjectivist alike.

But that is because they are happiest trapped in that Cartesian dialectic. If its dichotomistic inconsistencies were resolved, they would no longer have anything to write poems about, or realist polemics about.

You are down that dark hole. I can hand you the ladder out but I can't make you climb. You have to want to leave the angry gloom that is the anti-totaliser's fate. — apokrisis

I guess I'm supposed to be a 'subjectivist' who refuses to 'escape the cartesian dialectic' because that would mean I could no longer write poems. Which is...strange. (Btw, I'm hoping you're not saying that poetry in general is an excess generated from being stuck in a 'cartesian dialectic' but it seems like you actually might be? not sure. The only way this makes sense is maybe you're specifically upset with a certain reading of Wallace Stevens? I doubt it, but I'm struggling to figure out a charitable interpretation.)

Anyway, can you unpack this a bit? It seems to me I've been identified as someone who in his vagueness plays a 'crisp' role in a particular way of viewing the world.(Hegel would say 'crisp for-us' where 'us' refers to those with access to a properly contextualizing big picture) While I think you're confused in ascribing this role to me. I believe I have a good idea of what you're trying to talk about and how you understand it; still, I'm wondering if you could describe it a little more, to get a better sense of how you understand our exchange.

To rub it out, make it less virulent
And a stab too at rearranging
The whole thing from the ground up.
Yes we were waiting just now
Yes we are no longer waiting.

New poem: Oleum Misericordiae

You are against such totalising, even when it is a well proven success. You try to dismiss it as "pragmatic", as if being useful is a dirty word. You will blather on about poetry or feelings or other tribal artefacts of the anti-totalising brigade. — apokrisis

I don't think 'pragmatism' is a dirty word, Apo. I've been reading William James all week and deeply enjoy his writing. Nor did I have plans to 'blather on' about 'poetry' or feelings.'. I do like poetry and feelings -uncontroversial I hope - but 'poetry' and 'feelings' seem charged with a special sort of meaning for you. You seem quite literally disgusted with them; I'm not sure how this fits into your holistic solve-the enlightenment-split-frame, but the disdain is palpable. Almost in drag.

You seem to be very confused about what poetry is about, like you think poems are people saying 'nature' in front of a bulldozer that says 'science.' Everything you've said has no relation to anything I've said. But you really seem to think it does. You seem upset with a type. In any case, none of what you've said, characteristically, has anything to do with anything I've said. If I'm not saying 'FREE LOVE IN OPPOSITION TO THE MACHINE" you glitch out and tell me I'm saying that. It would make things easier, granted, but that's not what's happening.

respond to the rest in the morning

If so, I will respond. But I want to make sure I understand first.

That's exactly what I spent my three month lockdown sabbatical on - researching a defence of Hegelian history! — apokrisis

If someone posts a bunch of pictures of them doing skateboard tricks. And then I say, looks like you've been photographing yourself doing skateboard tricks!! And then they say: 'oh you think I've been doing skateboard tricks do you?" then my response is: yeah....? And then they say 'you think I'm doing Rodney Mullen type skateboard tricks do you?!' I'd say 'No, I never brought up Rodney Mullen, I brought up the tricks you were doing, that you posted pictures of, why are you bring up Rodney Mullen?'

But I wasn't impugning your use of time during quarantine (???) though it appears you are impugning mine. To be clear, are you responding to my post by asking if I'm having a rough go of it?

tldr; I think it's crucial to understand that, among adults, arguments are often (usually?) about different ways of synthesizing the ten thousand things (some of which fall into thought/world/self) rather than arguments about Self Vs World and so on. Going into a space, and sifting it for a dichotomy ripe for triadic resolution, is like doing marriage therapy from a textbook. You're only listening to each party for the sake of identifying the glittery points which hearken back to the book; those you respond to. You do it brilliantly, vindicating the textbook approach. You will see these things in the field; you respond thusly. Of course yours was a response to that Wittgenstein article, itself strongly dichotomizing, but your response was to oppose a correct dichotomy, the right kind, susceptible to triadic reconciliation. One would think a pragmatic approach would prevent one's chronic alienation of one's interlocutors, but maybe it's just that what works in the real world fails to work on those in the real world who just won't let themselves be worked upon in the real world. It's not pragmatism's fault if the real world isn't ideally pragmatic.

Instead, a pragmatic/semiotic view - a form of life view - would argue that both "the world" and "the self" are the two halves of a joint construction. And progress lies in constructing the better total model. They are not separate exercises. The problems of modern life lie in the way they got disconnected pretty fast after a moment of unity in the Enlightenment. Scientism and Romanticism began the business of "othering" each other in an unhelpful way.

Fetishising either the self or the world is the mistake. We need to be consciously engaged in a co-construction of these aspects of being alive and mindful. [Insert all the usual utopian visions of that here.] — apokrisis

It's hard to think of a more canonical 'romantic' figure than Wordsworth and his Prelude is, explicitly, a long meditation on how the world and self are inescapably intertwined and co-constructing. He isn't just saying clouds and druids are what's up - check out the poem. Sartre (oof!) described a spurious operation of thought whereby two inseparable things are separated in order that the separater can then go on - tada! - to synthesize them, and slash down the gordian knot he himself tied.

There was (a) the Enlightenment where the balance was at least close to correct, then (b) the split where there was set in opposition (i) a focus on the self vs (ii) a focus on the world... and we should then do (c) a harmonious reconciling of the two? This sounds like a cliffnotes summary of the introduction to 'History of Ideas' by Idea Historian.

Instead of seeing the world as two cosmic forces in great battle, resolved triadically, its makes good pragmatic sense, in my mind, to see that there are personality types within the world as doing a thing where they reframe it all in terms of two forces, and then resolve them triadically. Salesmen often end up talking to everyone by using their first name and identifying their interests, keeping them at arms length outside their commercial needs. Photographers see everything as potential photos. King Midas can't hug his kids, because it's gold gold gold. There're a lot of ways to develop a universal hammer for a universal nail and here is one more. (It's important to understand - I think this is the core - that finding fault with this way of framing things is not simply inhabiting its mirror image any more than playing basketball instead of painting is simply a form of 'not-painting' that requires painting as a backdrop.)

Of course, if you want to frame the world in terms of big triads, there is plenty of material to fuel your quest. Just as there is for any number of things. There's a whole sea of background you can pick from to get the right foreground.

[end of poem]

To sense this clearly is not to know it, alas -
Today the directions arrive from many separated realms
Conjoining at the place of a bare pedestal.
Too many armies, too many dreams, and that's
It. Goodbye, you say, until next time
And I build our climate until next time
But the sky frowns, and the work gets completed in a dream.

Do you remember how we used to gather
The woodruff, the woodruff? But all things
Cannot be emblazoned, but surely many
Can, and those few devoted
By a caprice beyond the majesty
Of time's maw live happy useful lives
Unaware that the universe is a vast incubator.

I'll leave you to it, Apo, happy trails.

Not trying to be funny - it's too pointed to be funny, I'd imagine - and too pointed to be properly mocking either. It's trying to understand a way-of-thinking that seems to have systematically self-mutilated its capacity for that 'aha' of rapid reorientation. The above is my best imaginative attempt at understanding what it's like to have reached that point. Not funny or mocking, but certainly intended to provoke. It seems to me you have a loud and firm internal (inescapable?) voice that quickly stifles anything approaching surprise, and the pleasure you would get from surprise is transposed into the lesser serotonin hits that attend any firm affirmation of your incapacity to be surprised. It's not funny to me; it's scary. It's like a spider in a hole.

One way to spend your Saturdays. — apokrisis

He said, knowing the right way to spend a Saturday was, of course, relieving the growing pressure of a system-in-a-vacuum, by compulsively describing it to others. Scan the available threads and choose a receptive one. Saturdays. He was on the wrong side of 1/mounting-irritability-due-to-others-incorrigibly-failing-to-properly-contextualize-according-to-the-triadic-system and the storm clouds looked real bad this time. Past memories of having the wrong vibe at barbecues howled at his heels. Could people sense it? The system shuddered in its casing 'why aren't you explaining me online!!' He imagined a gallery of Peirce and people he knew in biosemiotics being like hey man why were you in on this if you weren't ready to post about it on the forums. He looked at the rose in the glass cake-case: wilting. It was time to come back.

Thanks man.

No real reason for the form. I had some kind of writing energy that day and wrote a bunch of gibberish that kept shifting around - this came at the end of it and some of that shifting around kept happening. Also, I realized as it went on, that I was falling into a tight repetitive meter and it seemed almost like it made more sense to just break it into individual lines at that point, since it was already becoming that,

[like:

a sigil carved by railroad men
the course of rivers reaffirmed
the smoke of trains across the land
the census sent to rabbis wives
cast signals into silent space
the x ray made of angels bones
a message sent across the land

]