All things seem mention of themselves
And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.
Hugely, spring exists again. The weigela does its dusty thing
In fire-hammered air. And garbage cans are heaved against
The railing as the tulips yawn and crack open and fall apart.
And today is Monday. Today's lunch is: Spanish omelet, lettuce and
tomato salad,
Jello, milk and cookies. Tomorrow's: sloppy joe on bun,
Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.
The names we stole don't remove us:
We have moved on a little ahead of them
And now it is time to wait again.
Only waiting, the waiting: what fills up the time between?
It is another kind of wait, waiting for the wait to be ended.
Nothing takes up its fair share of time,
The wait is built into the things just coming into their own.
Nothing is partially incomplete, but the wait
Invests everything like a climate.
What time of day is it?
Does anything matter?
Yes, for you must wait to see what it is really like,
This event rounding the corner
Which will be unlike anything else and really
Cause no surprise: it's too ample.

Back to it. New poem, much longer stanzas. Called: Grand Galop

The better Nietzscheans here can answer your questions better. Until they do:

One thing I can say confidentally: Nietzsche wasn't looking to supplant one (Apollonian) with the other Dionysian). He thought both were necessary.

He also, definitely, didn't think we should create new values from scratch. He didn't want us to repeat old values, sure, but the process of creating new values isn't sketching on a blank canvas.

From here I defer to the resident Nietzscheans.

Can anyone who knows more about markets break down why and how and what it means when the stock market plunges so precipitously? I hate to kvetch about markets when lives are at stake, but I just signed on with a company whose voracious hirings were based on glowing rosy growth over a few years, and that has now lost 42%(!) of their stock value in less than two months.. I'm a little anxious.

if you like my posts, you'll love my new patreon. exclusive content, some skin pics. Affordable monthly costs. Sometimes I'll post my roommate's netflix password on an exclusive snapchat.

@Pfhorrest I don't think I've met anyone here who has the same global system as me (probably because I'm a little volatile and can't put one together) I've met a lot of people whose sensibilities I feel in tune with. @Baden @fdrake @unenlightenedcome to mind. There was also someone here I vibed with a lot who isn't here any more, 'tgw'. These are the posters whose way of thinking I trust - and when they venture out and follow their train of thought wherever it goes, I'm eager to follow. I might agree or disagree, but I trust them to weigh those disagreements and respond thoughtfully, and vice versa.@Molierehelped me understand Kant. @StreetlightXcomes to mind too. He helped me understand a lot when I was cutting my teeth and, though we've since come to disagree on some things, I really enjoy sparring with him, or discussing what we still agree on.

The Big Problem Of Suffering is just the town bully who messes with people who try to leave town, to attempt something better. That's a threat to him. His power only ranges over the small region he stalks.

You don't like him because he's the bully - but at least, in roughing you up, he throws you back into town, his town, where you can lick your wounds safely. You don't like him - but - he crystallizes everything perfectly. And that's a comfort.

It's a commensal , co-dependent relationship. And, like most abusive relationships, it repeats the same patterns, endlessly, while the participants speak endlessly about why it isn't abusive. It's actually so purely real, they say, you can't even understand.

Listen, I dated the same guy. It doesn't get better. Get out while you can. He's telling you what you want to hear, because it keeps you passive, and prevents you from developing an actual self. The more your autonomy wanes, the more you justify him to others. Eventually, it's compulsive. But you can still leave, any time.

The coronavirus isn't about The Big Problem of Suffering. Most things aren't!

or the next two seasons! thats a list. i feel like thousand plateaus is a boss in an rpg you fight too early and only confront prepared later on.

my call center job's requiring me to work from home for two weeks because my roommate came home from a vacation to Japan. This virus sucks, but that's my silver-lining. I'd never worked from home before - it's great.

Just checking in to say - heading out to vote for Bernie now!

(end of poem)

Teasing the blowing light
With its ultimate assurance
Severity of its curved smile
"Like the eagle
That hangs and hangs, then drops."

"I put away childish things.
It was for this I came to Riverside
And lived here for three years
Now coming to a not uncertain
Ending or flowering as some would call it."

Until a room in some town
The result of a meeting therein
Clasping, unclasping
Toward the flustered look
Of toys one day put away for the last time.

I get spooked too, for sure. I like unenlightened and alcontail's suggestions. Prayer and art - not necessarily saying 'what's up, dark thing, let's tango' but maybe making a calm or creative space where it can come out and express itself safely. In terms of letting it be, maybe, but it seems sort of like I've let someone into my house, and I'm doing a thing where I allow it to hang out and do whatever, while also pretending that isn't happening. How long can you do that? If I push him outside, he might start forcing the doors. The only option I can see is slow integration.

Serious question : Is it possible that the CDC is intentionally limiting the amount of testing to conceal the extent of the virus's spread? The UK (population 66.4 milliion, and 16 known cases) has performed over 7000 tests so far, while the US (population 327.2 million, 14 known non-cruise-ship cases) has only performed 445. (Could part of this be that Americans are less likely to seek medical treatment for non-life-threatening symptoms because of the cost of health care here?)

Apparently only 12 of >100 public health labs are able to test because of a problem with tests from the CDC. They're waiting on new ones. They are not allowed, for some bureaucratic reasons I don't understand, to make their own, though they say that they could quickly do so if allowed.

I don't want to sound too conspiratorial, but what the heck is going on here? None of the other affected countries seem to be having any trouble at all administering tests.

(related: My roommate just arrived home yesterday from his vacation in Hokkaido, which has recently become a major nexus of transmission. :-/ )

How it would be clearer
Just to loaf, imagining little
(The fur of a cat in the sun):
Let the column of figures
Shift, add and subtract itself
(Sticks, numbers, letters)
And so on to median depth...

I wish you well and hate to hear you're having a difficult time. — Hanover

Thank you, I appreciate that a lot. & I agree with your post

Those're the lines along which I've been thinking of it recently. I did give psychiatry a fair shake, but didn't seem to respond to anything, and I'm not currently taking any medications. Most of my symptoms, while still present, have ebbed (some significantly) - except this one.

I've been meditating recently, which helps a lot. There's something about it that feels a little like a prayer. You're not exactly communicating with God, but the feeling of gently holding your awareness, gently bringing it back, doesn't feel navel-gazing. It seems like it has the opposite effect - it calms you down enough to begin to take in a little of the outside world. There's an afterglow afterward too, where you're more present, but for me it's a little like carrying a candle into a breeze and it only lasts so long, much less if I'm around people (who I get anxious around.

I agree with this

As unbelievers often prefer to keep suffering, they probably should.

though I do feel that the preference for suffering divides along lines other than believers/nonbelievers. I do think militant unbelief is usually correlated with a preference for suffering, but maybe because that's a way-of-being that falls along that other line. (If I had to venture into what the line is, I'm not totally sure, but it has something to do with being injured, and then counterbalancing with a certain kind-of self-dominance that makes you in charge of inflicting your own suffering, so you won't get hurt worse by the outside. If that is the case, there's something of that in me, even if no longer manifests along belief/nonbelief lines. You can feel unworthy of prayer, in the same way you can feel unworthy of sex, or artistic creation, or social inclusion. That's a hard thing to work on, I'm trying gropingly to understand it better.

@unenlightened I think you're right - where I get cautious is I suspect that part of me is resentful and destructive and I'm wary of it. But I've also been thinking something like : even if it is, it's already working a destructive spell in the way it dissociates me. That's painful for the people that care about me, and who would like to feel my care back. It might be that that's the whole purpose - to be destructive in that way, unless I can find some better way to understand it. It seems really delicate though. Sometimes I think, its just some kind of grief or sadness or frustration that has to be processed with someone else there. The therapy I've tried, so far, has too much talking, and talking in a face to face way which, for me, triggers a reflex of hiding in myself, and letting myself carry on an auto-conversation. Stupidly (but I don't know how to stop it) it often turns into, with male therapists a pissing contest over who can interpret me better. WIth female therapists, it turns into a pose of woundedness. I recognize these are very unhelpful ways of doing therapy, but I haven't been able to figure a way around them, so I stopped trying. If there was a therapy where you could just name one or two themes or thoughts or emotions, to set a tonic, and then sit with the other person in silence - I really think that could be helpful.

Thank you for all the suggestions, everyone. First thing: I do not plan on taking acid in order confront actual demons. I may seem a little lax in my relationship to LSD, but I have the clarity to recognize that to drop with a mindset of ' there are actual malevolent entities after me' is to chart a clear course for disaster. (I do appreciate the sincere sentiment behind the suggestion.)

Neurologist makes sense but ( and I really want to emphasize this, because its a real constraint) for someone with my yearly income and a >5k deductible, its not as easy as simply going to the doctor. If I go to the doctor for something like this, that's effectively a choice to carve out at least 1/10 of my yearly income (realistically, much more). That's a big deal. I suspect it to be psychosomatic. I may be wrong. If it was covered, there'd be no question - i'd go tonight. IF there was a good chance it was a neurological thing and, even though it was going to set me back a year or two, it was going to save me - same thing. But I don't think it is physical. I only have a couple thousands in savings - the mental/financial/psychological toll of getting MRIS I don't need could ultimately be worse, even much worse, than bracketing that possibility

I think I need to do a better job of explaining what I'm talking about, because it's really odd. I kind of sketched it, but I think I need to explain how it weaves in with various emotional things - it doesn't seem disconnected from that, it seems like a strange expression. I'll have to do that when I'm sober tho (just back from pub trivia.)

"Like an eagle that one sees always
Whether flying in the middle airs
Or alighting on some rock
Give piercing looks on all sides
To fall so surely on its prey
That one can avoid its nails
No less than its eyes."

I haven't the vaguest notion of what ails you, but for comparison: When I miss several doses of my antidepressant, I experience a feeling of pressure in my head, the sound of water sloshing around (in my skull, not in my ears), and in general feel ill. When I try to describe this to my doctor I can tell it's not registering as a sensible [something that can be sensed] description. He can't feel my pain, let alone my vague feeling of pressure or water sloshing around.

The walking wounded are of course better off than those in hospital, but at least those in hospital seem to have something that can be treated. Or maybe not.

I have no suggestions either, which is unusual for me. You are probably in some nether region of psychiatry where undiagnosable vague symptoms are the rule, and nobody ever gets much satisfaction from seeing a doctor.

Ah ha: Here's a suggestion -- I knew one would pop up. Have you been examined by a neurologist? -- just to make sure that nothing is amiss neurologically. Neurologists deal with more concrete matters than psychiatrists, it seems like.

Question: is there any time, place, or activity that seems to exaggerate or relieve these symptoms? — Bitter Crank

Neurologist is a great suggestion, I'm just in that bad zone of health insurance/income where my deductible is too high to justify a non-emergency visit. I think what you feel when you miss your antidepressant is the same 'family' of thing I"m experiencing. It's annoying and difficult to convey and overall strange. Regarding alleviation - booze definitely helps. But, then, the day after its 3x as strong (if not more.) It does seem to lessen a little if I get a really good night's sleep. And it's worse if I get very little sleep. Meditation definitely helps - it's still there, but I 'm less frustrated by it, and I can see around it a little better.

I think if the problem took the form of, say, a random stray cat that followed me around, i could deal with it better. It's sort of like that - it's not painful, or disruptive usually. It's just like, weird, and distracting( occasionally, though rarely, it shades into something a little scarier) Usually, it's the inexplicableness of it which bothers me most.

I would say if you think you have mental health issues then dropping acid probably isn't the best idea. — Pantagruel

Maybe. But I've found that acid, in reasonable doses (& with the right set & setting) is relatively gentle, sometimes even gently cathartic. Honestly, a short plane-flight does me worse. (that said, I have difficulty with even the smallest amounts of THC, while others don't blink an eye. who knows how this stuff works.)

Suffer again the light to be displaced
To go down fuming
"So much is his courage high,
So vast his intelligence,
So glorious his destines.

One can learn without being taught. One sees quite easily when one has hurt someone, and one quite naturally regrets it and seeks to comfort. This sensitivity can be seen in quite small children, and doesn't take any religious or moral training.

And that really is the beginning and end of it. How shall we live together? We need to communicate, so we need to be truthful and honest, we are vulnerable so we need to look after each other, we need to cooperate and share to survive and thrive. And these thing are such obvious truths that they are built into the genes and do not need justification from philosophers or prophets, nor do they need a special training scheme. But we have devised a whole system to convince ourselves of the opposite, and to replicate the opposite in each other. And we call that morality, and justice, and civilisation. And it is destroying us. — unenlightened

Exactly! Once you remove the (m)other who projects shame onto you, there is simply the response to the world, and the responsibility for the world.

When I talk about system, I mean really this endless projection of responsibility onto others. The child is 'naughty' because he is brought into a supermarket filled with delights and expected to understand the nonsense of property rights and so on. That is what is taught, and it drives us mad.

I'm trying to fit all these things together:

Shame is necessary as a social glue. It's bad to hurt others and we know that naturally, and don't need to be taught. Kids don't know not to take whatever they want at the supermarket, and its a symptom of a broader problem that we hold them accountable for it. Shame is about taking responsibility, but we shouldn't shame people for not taking responsibility for things they don't know not to do.

At the limit, I suppose we could hold accountable the birth of agriculture which led directly to civilization and its discontents, but the birth of agriculture is well-insulated from shame.

Is 'not taking from the supermarket' really part of a system, in the sense Anscombe is describing? (it seems to me like what's she doing is reframing modern utilitarian morality as rationalization (ala Macbeth & his lady on regicide) + Insurance math. 'Not taking from the supermarket' appears to be an implicit rule of conduct (otherwise who'd set up shop?) that developed organically and was later codified in law (and law-like moral systems). Isn't it true of all humans, in all times, that we're 'thrown' into a social reality in the process of development (both based on tradition and evolving) and that shame is a way of adjusting the person to that social reality, so they won't eventually have the greater shame (and life-threatening danger) of exile?

There was an online era where atheism and anti-bushism reigned supreme. Whack-a-mole on the stupids,etc. That was the self-identification then.

When you said

"The goal", it seems, is not "to get back in the world" but rather, IMO, to engage and challenge the shallow figures & events in the foreground.'

I read that as something in this vein, brought into our current era.. It seemed like you were saying the goal is to fight the dummies, ala Jon Stewart. I may have been misreading though. What did you mean?

\ That's the thing - i know for a fact you have, and don't treat it lightly. You know your stuff. So why this blase politics filtered through bush-era blog-angst.

@180 Proof with all due respect, I think you might really need a bad guy. Someone - or something- needs to be an avatar of this lovecraftian whatever. God first, then republicans, so forth. The foreground brawl is aways easier than the aftermath. Maybe I'm wrong. But consider what channels of thoughts slick themselves for you.

I'm an epicurean (scientific) materialist, though once upon a youth ago I found gnosticism quite intriguing (my 'existentialist' phase no doubt), so transcendent notions strike me as ad hoc woo-of-the-gaps evasions (i.e. Camus's "nostalgias"). One is real which presupposes belonging to the real world so trying "to get back to the real world" makes no sense to me. — 180 Proof

I've been an existential gnostic, as a lad, but then also came back later. The Nag is rich - like most good things, it shows a different face depending on when you read it. The gospel of truth + the the origin of the world is a good one-two. I did my damnedest to show how 'getting back to the real world' can translate into something simpler, and I stand by that. That one is already real, is, of course true, and I happily fold it into what I"m trying to express. If it's youthful folly, that's what it is, but something more is needed to drive the point home.


I

"The goal", it seems, is not "to get back in the world" but rather, IMO, to engage and challenge the shallow figures & events in the foreground (like artists do) which the real world - with like veils, camouflages or mirages - conceals its absymal, chaotic depths from its real creatures who're too fragile & fleeting like us to digest (i.e. totalize, encompass). Thus, the absurd persists, even if only tenuously in momentary flashes, or strobic lucidity (Camus again) ... — 180 Proof

Yes, I think I agree. But I also think maybe 'abysmal', 'chaotic' 'fragile' 'fleeting' 'totalize' etc. are bringing everything into a comfy semantic field. It's sort of like going far out in your youth and marking spots with flags, and then retiring to the shore and talking about the flags you've set. I don't doubt for a second those flags are earned. But what are they doing here? We all set similar flags.

Artists don't challenge the shallow figures and events. Huffpost does. Jim Carrey has some vicious twitter art. If partisan politics is the endpoint of an encounter with lovecraftian horror, than that's one point against lovecraftian horror (brassier for klobuchar, or something.)

edit : link didnt work :(

The New Existentialism" is worth a read. It's short and to the point. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I read some Wilson at work today, including parts of New Existentialism, but it was only what I could shake out of Google Books' preview. He's very good. And it makes me uneasy. I found that I agreed and was excited with what he was saying. The uneasiness relates to the ego-aspect. It's like there are two things happening simultaneously : A sincere exploration of how meaning works, executed with great attentiveness and uncanny perception + another thing (cf Wilson's introduction to New Existentialism, where he self-consciously describes its value in terms of his entire ouvre) which carefully charts the progress of the former thing as a reflection on the author's importance. The uneasiness is tripled because the sincerely exploring, attentive thing seems to understand exactly how the narrow concerns of thinking importantly of oneself works. And then the self-important thing thinks more importantly of itself for recognizing how self-importance is limiting. You can see how the friction between these two things could erupt into a lifelong restlessness.

I don't mean this as a moral criticism - I mean it as a giant frustration that I bet Wilson experienced too.

Please explain. — 180 Proof

It sounds affectedly gnomic, I'll grant. I'm not sure how to put it. One way I've thought about this is childhood memories. Things seemed much more alive and full then (so there was surely a lot of imaginative blurring going on) but I also, without a doubt, was much more in tune with the concrete aspects of the world. Having a full-throated imaginative relation with the world, maybe, allowed me to be interested in it enough to actually engage with its details. For example: playing with action figures in the woods, with the woods as setting. You attend closely to the details, when you care about playing.

I've been attracted to gnosticism for a while. I guess the DNA of gnosticism is that the real world is removed, or you're removed from it. That sounds transcendent: the goal is to get back to the real world. But I also think that you can be fallen, within the world. 'It was a great wonder they were in the father without knowing it.' A lot of the gnostic myths seem to cast the archons as having some sort of limited perception, where they mistakenly see their limited creations as the whole, while still being embedded in something that exceeds what they can allow into their awareness. Or Christ's thing in the gospels about how the kingdom of god is already present.

So something like : The world that you're fallen from is already there, and you're already in it- The fall was just forgetting how to pay attention. It's like being too drunk at a concert.

The terms I use are so often used and misused that I find most people misunderstand them at their core. I have actually thought a lot about the concepts behind these terms before settling on the terms I’m currently using, and I feel they are each still open to change. god must be atheist mentioned ‘thinking in concepts’, which I think aptly describes my approach, but I also work in communication, so it’s important for me not to just use a word that sort of fits or simply sounds good.

Integrity, patience and self-awareness, for instance, all relate to awareness before we even begin to connect or collaborate with the world. They point to our attitude towards information. In the past I’ve used ‘self-control’ instead of self-awareness (and I’m not convinced this is the right term, either), but I’ve come to understand that it isn’t so much about ‘control’ as it is about learning how we accept and integrate information before acting, and how that affects the way we respond to the world. In a way, it’s about gathering enough information so that our predictions about future interactions are more accurate. I have noticed, for instance, that hormonal cycles change my awareness of quantitative vs qualitative information - not a great deal, but enough that either my spatial or emotional intuition is affected, for instance. Knowing this enables me to factor this uncertainty into how I then interact with the world at certain times.

Integrity is being honest with ourselves - particularly with how our past impacts on our present, and our openness to information from the world based on the sum total of our past experiences. This is basically an understanding of cause and effect in relation to who I am up to this point. With self-awareness, it doesn’t have to stay this way, but we need to interact more accurately with our past in order to start somewhere.

Which brings me to patience - which is recognising that any change we want to happen requires time, effort and attention in the present that we have to find from somewhere. The brain makes predictions about the body’s energy requirements and where our attention needs to be focused every moment of our lives, to the point that we can pretty much go through the motions without conscious effort. If we’re going to adjust this in any way, there will be internal resistance from systems that are used to working autonomously. No change happens overnight, and experiences of pain, humility, loss and lack will feature in any adjustment worth the effort. We need to be aware of how much of this is tolerable at any one time, and therefore how long it’s going to be before things improve. So it’s about an accurate interaction with our present situation. — Possibility

I like self-awareness for self-control. I also have cycles, in that respect, but I don't know what causes them. When I'm low in self-awareness I overcode everything as 'hostile'. I don't have too much more to say, other than that I thought this was helpful. I have struggled a little with the confront your past vs be in the moment thing, and your way of framing that makes sense to me.

"Approach life" from within or without? (i.e. immanently or transcendently) — 180 Proof

I think these converge at the limit.

(addendum: I would completely agree that the false self is post-identification and only takes place after the thing it inverts itself against is also filtered through the identity lens)

I think I want to say that one can be shamed because one already has that capacity as it were. And that it is a capacity that develops from identification of the sort that recognises itself in an image, as in a mirror. First, I am X. Then the college says X is unclean or Mummy says X is naughty, or whatever, or perhaps even I myself say it. — unenlightened

Yes, I think that's an accurate description of how shame often (usually?) functions. I would be reluctant to say that identification underlies shame. I think shame is one of those things that gets transformed through its encounter with identification (in which case it can look just like what you describe) but can also exist in some other ways before it.

To draw that out: Why does it matter what Mummy says is naughty? thats just a set of phonemes after all. How does 'naughty' (word) become [naughty] (concept)?

Say: Mummy is mad (or disgusted or something else) and that's overwhelming (and threatening). The atmosphere just vibrates with it, and thats scary and suffocating. She looks at you direclty and accuses you of being naughty. Suddenly the whole atmosphere condenses in (1) a word and (2) a source. Naughty means : the feeling of the suffocating atmosphere + mom's glance at you.

Only after 'naughty' precipitates out of something like that can it begin to function as a free-floating predicate. You can almost see the psychological system of airlocks here : Instead of mom's direct glare and the impossible atmosphere, you have a snorkel of mediation. 'Naughty' isn't something applied directly to me but to some x (first defense). Even if I'm being naughty, I ---> x & x ----> naughty gives me a little room to breathe, and space to change. (specuation: Schizophrenia might involve, at some level, having trouble developing the I that relates, at a minimal distance, to predicates, and instead leaves the self as direct rippling of what 'healthy' people experience as a conceptual web that interacts with - tho is separable from - their self.)

The price of this changing of direct shame into the shaming of some predicate is that, in the future, you can be shamed 'at a distance' through syllogistic net-casting. Mum's direct shame was right at me, but the college's 'all x's are y' is something new. It's almost like the space bought through identification, while partially protecting you, also opens you up to more distant sources of shame.

Does that make sense? It seems obfuscatory, but I was really trying not to be.

The times when a slow horse along
A canal bank seems irrelevant and the truth:
The best in its best sample
of time in relation to other time.

Yeah, question my questions sounds about right. Approach life as something to be lived rather than something to be theorized about, I think is what I'm after. I notice I usually go into these bursts of posting a whole lot and in overly flowery prose when I'm avoiding something irl. Tidy little self-defense of posting abstractly about concrete changes, probably to avoid change, it bewilders me how easily i slip back into it, even tho ive been here many times before.

I've read the introduction a million times, but haven't read the rest. Ricoeur wrote a book called Time and Narrative that begins with an analysis of Augustine's reflections on time. What Ricoeur says in the introduction is that by following Augustine's subtle lines of thought, and by seeing precisely where he brings in God as a way of settling things, we can proceed by subtracting 'god" and seeing the paradoxes his thought leads us to. And start from there. It's a nice way of looking at things. I think of it like this : Augustine had some probing thoughts about time, and his faith that an answer would eventually be provided allowed him to row a little farther out from shore than most. It's true that his trinitarian ways of resolving these questions shut down the radicality of his questions, but they still allowed him to press on to a further point than most before him

(In terms of my own ideas on faith and philosophy, I think it best to relate to God (or whatever) as radically other and alllow that to hold open a space that you can follow. (I think this is actually what Laruelle is essentially on about, but I'm nowhere near qualified to really touch on that)

because if there is an all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful being, then the answer to every philosophical question becomes "Because God Says". — Banno

I count myself as one of the religious, but I agree with you. It's a matter of recognizing what domain you're in. If you're thinking discursively and inferentially, then you have to play by discursive and inferential rules. That's not an artificial limitation - if your relation to god is a relation to an intellectual stopgap for thorny intellectual thickets, you're probably mixing up faith with something else.

The best definition of reality I know is Phillip K Dick's - "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

I see Schopenhauer & Nietzsche, among others, as creating a conceptual dollhouse of sorts, where they understand the whole thing, can look into any room, and see how it all fits together. But no matter how sophisticated they get, I still feel that they're turning away from the world as it is. ( John Ashbery: "was there turning away from the late afternoon glare/as though it too could be wished away".) Systems do this inherently;systems are inherently dollhouse-thinking.

But I don't think it's something every philosophy has to butt fatally against. It all depends on whether the philosopher is aware of the finite place their philosophy occupies within a greater whole (or, if you're hip and know that totalities are bunk, what I mean by whole is not totality but something like : outflowing expanse). Again, its something the systematizers seem to fall prey to. It seems like system, rather than philosophy, is the culprit.

In terms of the door metaphor - desperately wanting to unlock is something I relate to (I touched on this a little in a previous response talking about Colin Wilson.) I think you're right to talk about it in terms of escape. There is something fearful at the heart of a lot of philosophy.