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Languages

Both abstract ideas and emotions have their own languages.  And I think it is important to understand that the answer to a question which is expressed in emotional language may never satisfy those who want it expressed in abstract language.

Specifically, a sense of meaning is exactly that: a felt sense, an emotional state, and way of being in your body and interacting with the world.  What is the meaning of life?  This.  This is how you do it.  Do you understand?

I am strongly tempted to say that the purpose of all human activity is emotion, either freedom from “negative” emotions or the enjoyment of positive ones.  Our minds are harnessed to that end, when usefully employed, and it seems one of the precise defects of Western culture that we have pursued abstraction as an end in itself; that we have supposed that all “true” philosophical premises must exist in the intellect.

Deconstruction can be seen as a reaction to excessive intellectualism, but it merely substitutes an incoherent intellectualism for a previously coherent, even if unsatisfying, intellectualism.

Universities pay people to at least pretend they are doing something, and sitting around feeling, as useful as it may be in reality, does not lead to words, and the production of words is the task of people in the Humanities.

Most of our wisdom is in the body.  That is where we find truth.  That is where we experience states we cannot talk about, and which cannot thus be thrust into the philosophical realm, but which are nonetheless both real and relevant.