"Fare well!"

"A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained? - It is bound up with them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Fog

The fog has been here for almost a week now. It envelops my entire landscape. Soft edges have become my new reality, the misty air creating a chillingly warm surface. Things appear as they are only upon close proximity, and even then I cannot be certain of their contexts. My vision tapers into a washed out ambiguity that resists definition. Thus far, my journey is feeling less than profitable. I left just as the fog arrived, making travel slow and uncertain. I am forced to experience only the immediate. Where I am going I could not tell you, where I was, well that is a whole other story.

On Being

Pascal: One cannot begin to define being without falling victim to this absurdity: one cannot define a word without beginning with the term is, be it expressly stated or merely understood. To define being, therefore, you have to say is, thus using the term to be defined in the definition.

Gadamer: It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudgments that constitute our being.

Levinas: The great tradition of Western philosophy: to comprehend the particular being is to already place oneself beyond the particular. To comprehend is to be related to the particular that only exists through knowledge, which is always knowledge of the universal.

Eco: The moment we talk about being, we are still not talking about it in its all-embracing form, because the problem of being (the most immediate and natural of experiences) is the least natural of all problems, the one that common sense never poses: we begin to grope our way through being by carving entities out of it and gradually constructing ourselves a World.