October 2024
A view (60)
3 October 2024, around 9.53.
scattered leaves
13 October 2024, around 19.23.
Hic sine dubio lectores hærebunt multaque comminiscentur quæ moram injiciant et hac de causa ipsos rogo ut lento gradu mecum pergant nec de his judicium ferant donec omnia perlegerint.
Here, doubtless, readers will hesitate, and will urge many objections; and for this reason I beg of them to proceed with me by slow steps, and not to pronounce a judgement on this point until they have read the whole.
The shadow of winter stalks through the trees, slinks through the underbrush, guile apace, as the silence of the wind lifts the fallen leaves in a rolling hush that stammers across the clearing. The lingering tail of summer is a flash of wild brightness in the cloud-spattered sun, a moment of warmth that steps carefully, cautiously, through the tendrils of cold that creep down from the foothills with the dusk. A second’s distraction, caught in the quotidian – a rake’s progress of listless tasks – and one would miss it: the sempiternal substance of the moment’s spell, broken in each instant as soon as it appears. The scrape of rusty tines on gravel binds nature’s notebook in red and gold, while down the street, the blatt-blatt-blättering of a leaf blower holds the winter at bay.
21.x.2024
21 October 2024, around 18.51.
‘Sane sicut lux seipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic veritas norma sui et falsi est.’ —Spinoza (IIP43S)
verba usitata
21 October 2024, around 19.15.
Atque hinc porro clare intelligimus cur mens ex cogitatione unius rei statim in alterius rei cogitationem incidat quæ nullam cum priore habet similitudinem; ut exempli gratia ex cogitatione vocis pomi homo romanus statim in cogitationem fructus incidet qui nullam cum articulato illo sono habet similitudinem nec aliquid commune nisi quod ejusdem hominis corpus ab his duobus affectum sæpe fuit hoc est quod ipse homo sæpe vocem pomum audivit dum ipsum fructum videret et sic unusquisque ex una in aliam cogitationem incidet prout rerum imagines uniuscujusque consuetudo in corpore ordinavit.
And hence we further clearly understand why the mind passes instantaneously from the idea of one thing to that of another which has no resemblance to the former; as, for example, on thinking of the word pomum a Roman immediately thought of a fruit, which has no resemblance to that articulate sound, nor anything in common with it, except that the body of the same man was often simultaneously affected by these two things, i.e., that the same man often heard the word pomum when he saw the fruit; and thus each man passes from one thought to another, according to the order which habit has given to the images of things in his body.
* * *
Zu zagen “Ich habe Lust auf einen Apfel” heißt nichts: Ich glaube, ein Apfel wird mein Gefühl der Unbefriedigung stillen. Dieser Satz ist keine Äußerung des Wunsches, sondern der Unbefriedigung.
Saying “I’d like an apple” does not mean: I belive an apple will quell my feeling of non-satisfaction. This utterance is an expression not of a wish but of non-satisfaction.
Adversaria (19)
31 October 2024, around 4.46.
‘Spinoza does not believe in the sufficiency of clarity and directness, because he doesn’t believe there is any satisfactory way of proceeding from the knowledge of an effect to a knowledge of its cause’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 157)
‘…do not place a false value on tears. Crying is not completion. One of you make a commitment to supply tissues’ —John W. James and Russell Friedman (The Grief Recovery Handbook, p. 70)
‘A man who is to become reasonable, strong and free, begins by doing all in his power to experience joyful passions. He then strives to extricate himself from chance encounters and the concatenation of sad passions, to organize good encounters, combine his relation with relations that combine directly with it, united with what agrees in nature with him, and form a reasonable association between men; all this in such a way as to be affected with joy’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 262)
‘The person being forgiven need never know that it has happened. Remember, never forgive anyone directly to their face’ —John W. James and Russell Friedman (The Grief Recovery Handbook, p. 140)
‘And the world is defined not just by the places and peoples in it, but also by the passage of time as it is experienced by those places and peoples’ —Christopher Rowe (The Navigating Fox, 27%)
‘Soldiers, merchants, priests, consuls, ambassadors, politicians of every kind, and even scholars and philosophers happily fed at the trough filled by lack. Lack of leadership? Perhaps. But it could hardly be said the common citizen or subject was particularly wanting for leadership. Most would say they could get along very well without the regulations and taxes that leadership seemed inevitably to impose. How roads and sewers would miraculously spring into existence, to say nothing of trade networks and currency, literacy or public safety, those were questions that went unanswered because they generally went unasked’ —Christopher Rowe (The Navigating Fox, 52%)
‘A clear and distinct idea does not in itself constitute real knowledge, any more than it contains in its own ground within itself: the sufficient reason of clarity and distinctness is to be found only in adequacy, and a clear and distinct idea constitutes real knowledge only to the extent that it follows from an idea that is itself adequate’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 152)