stray reflections

for roxana:

a new category that is not a category.

Kierkegaard, Genius and Apostle:

The former is an individual genius who expresses or articulates a truth that is greater than himself, his spiritual substance; the Apostle is a function of the Truth, someone who bears witness to an impersonal, transcendental Truth and is chosen by grace. The relation to the self-to our eyes-is contingent. A circle, rather than a diamond.

Appearance and Reality.
...


For what may I hope? (J.Lear):

Radical hope is radical because it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. When the cultural world around us collapses, when all that made sense now seems irrelevant, how do we survive, how do we carry on? How do we take forward what we are, what we know, into those unchartered waters? We need to dig deep to find courage , but the very framework that elucidates what is meant by 'courage' has itself been dismantled...

Steadfastness. Latching on to a path, a way, even though unusual in all respects. How can one even imagine such a possibility? Doesn't hope depend on some determinate end, some picture of how things will turn out? This is the problem faced by the Red Man with the destruction of his way of life.

Courage. We are finite -and recognize ourselves as such- but still we reach out to the world in yearning, longing, admiration and desire for that which we take to be valuable, beautiful, and good. This is the world we inhabit.

Socrates. Every soul perceives that the good is some thing but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things.

We reach out for sustenance, to a source of goodness that is beyond us. It was there before we came.

Commitment. The ability to face up to reality . This, only a true individual can do. What resources can one draw on, what experiences when experience itself is empty? How do we go on? But at the same time, new limits to the possibility of experience are opening up.

And yet the Crow remains assured, his dream-vision vouchsafes the possibility that though human beings may be overwhelmed by cultural destruction, the fundamental goodness of the world is secure. Fidelity to his dream would ensure that his people would come through what was the destruction of a telos , the radical discontinuity that announced itself with the coming of the white man. To stray is to lose all...

Only thus could he out-stare the nothingness, face the destruction ahead of him and walk towards it, courageously.