On knowing

The old planetary temperaments (mercurial, saturnine, jovial, martial, venusian) name something that modern words can’t reach. “Warm,” “intellectual,” “morose,” “caring”: each of these names a part of a part of a part. The celestial vocabulary names the whole disposition at once, and I can’t tell whether that’s because the ancients saw more clearly or because a scheme that hands everything to seven gods is bound to feel complete.

Do I experience memory the way Proust describes because that’s how memory works, or because I read Proust? More generally: how much of inner life is downstream of the books that claim to describe it?

Reason works vertically, by forks: this or that, true or false, the branching of a tree. Analogy works sideways, by resemblance, and it is the only tool that can hold a fact against a fiction. Myth, value, and most of what we actually live by are built the second way, which the first refuses to call thinking.

Some ideas may not survive translation at all. The Logos of Heraclitus is not the Logos of John, and neither one is “the Word.” How much of Western philosophy is an artifact of Greek passing through Latin?

Philosophy is a hammer. It is the best instrument ever made for breaking a thing down to see what it was made of, and it offers nothing at all for putting it back together. We keep handing the demolition crew the blueprints.

How much conceptual slippage lives inside the verb “to be”? Nothing is anything else. This tree is not that tree; both are trees, but they aren’t equivalent, and the tree itself may not be a thing so much as a meeting of branches, roots, and light that we’ve agreed to call one. The most basic word in the language might be the most dishonest.