Poetics
It has been the search for understanding that has made my life one of despair and fulfillment. My experience is that I forget the answers I have found or discard them as yesterday's news. Sometimes, after a long journey, I discover I have arrived at the same answer I did years ago. Looking back at my philosophical journeys, I find one common feature: the powerful experience of thinking and feeling my way toward some answer. For me, the ever-recurring answer to the most critical question (What makes life meaningful?) is this moving depth of consciousness that I experience in the search for understanding. I have found that as my consciousness deepens, it turns poetic. Poetry is the moving image of the depth in man.
Socratic Wisdom
Socrates says that he is wise because he at least knows that he is not wise. Likewise, when I see that I don't know and utter those three short words, I arrive at the answer I have sought. But it can't be just a pose or a simple-minded response. It must be an authentic expression of my search for understanding. If it is genuine, my experience is despair and fulfillment. I experience a depth of consciousness that is, strangely enough, both the answer and not the one I had been searching for. It is not something I know; it's a different kind of knowledge. It is as though I remember what I am from the depth of my being.
Where the argument leads, I will follow.
In The Crito, Socrates engages in a dialogue that has life-and-death consequences for him and states that he is prepared to act in accordance with the conclusions of the argument. Socrates goes to his death as the logic of the argument directs. This is the ideal conversation, one in which words mean something. And so it must be here for me now. ." What is at sake? Meaninglessness.
How do die
Socrates dies as I would, thinking and searching to the end. And death itself: simple and complete -- with a final "I don't know" that rings over the sea of my being like a bell ringing through the darkness.
How will you know the answer you have found is the answer you are searching for?
I don't know. I don't know. And that is precisely the point. If the "I don't know" is an authentic experience, it will fulfill the search at the moment of its utterance. The answer I am searching for is the search itself.
The erotic impulse
My experience is that the philosophical quest is inextricably tied up with the erotic. If it were not for the erotic, I would never begin the journey. I would never know you or myself.
The turning of the soul
The final turning of the soul occurs when the soul understands that its own activity is the good.
Nescio ergo sum
The I-don't-know is the beginning and the end and knows itself to be the answer it seeks. It experiences itself as a lack and thereby fulfills itself. It is complete in its incompleteness, final even when it knows itself to be yet in process, and fulfills itself at the moment it despairs.