The Grand Digestion

From duty to virtue to detachment to flow to endurance to self-examination to self-creation.

The self is ātman, is an illusion, is a butterfly, is God's creature, is a mystery, is a fiction, is a leap, is a sickness, is a will, is a memory, is a heteronym. Take your pick.

Each civilization discovers a different face of the same unbearable force.

Job screams at God. The Buddha diagnoses the cause. Oedipus tears out his eyes. Dostoevsky invents the Grand Inquisitor. Kafka wakes up as a bug. Levi walks into Auschwitz. Beckett waits. Akhmatova memorizes.

Gilgamesh runs from it. The Upanishad walks toward it. Socrates drinks the hemlock. Lucretius says it's nothing. Ecclesiastes says it's everything. The Tibetan Book gives you a map. Montaigne says prepare. Pascal trembles. Tolstoy screams. Rilke transfigures it. Bashō walks the narrow road.

Each thinker demolishes the previous one's certainty. By Kant, you're rebuilding from the rubble.

Demonstration, warranted cognition, doubt, the conditions of experience, formal limits, computation, and historical change. “Knowledge” names several standards that can illuminate — or resist — one another.

Identity, correspondence, emptiness, necessary existence, divine intellect, principle, enacted knowing, sufficient reason, history, interpretation, and use. The same word does not guarantee the same problem.

Cultivation, predication, testimony, learning, perspectival trap, knowledge-in-action, public practice, measurable signal, and political representation. Meaning and information are related; they are not identical.

Self, soul as living capacity, no-self, mental events, heart-mind, thinking substance, stream, unconscious conflict, subjectivity, distributed process, hard problem. This is a map of disagreement, not a march toward consensus.

Cosmos, atoms, causes, calculation, observation, principle, laws, evolution, spacetime, paradigms, ecology. Nature changes partly because our methods and scales of description change.

From blood vengeance to social contract to the abolition of caste. Justice is the argument that never ends.

Every civilization has looked at power and tried to tell the truth about it. Most have flinched. These didn't.

From rage to dharma to realpolitik to strategy to imperial sorrow to impermanence to myth to the river of history to Stalingrad.

Every one of these is a different answer to the question: how much of yourself do you owe to others?

Asabiyyah weakens. The center cannot hold. The ceremony of innocence is drowned. Things fall apart.

The counter-canon. A genuine world canon must contain the voices that expose the canon's own exclusions.

Administration, taxation, commercial society, class, dispersed knowledge, aggregate demand, limits to industrial civilization, commons governance, distributive fairness, and capability. Every economic argument contains a model of the human being and a judgment about what institutions are for.