Winning Smile

Nietzsche and Tao agree that Truth is equipped with a uterus. Know the masculine (biblically?) but keep to the feminine.

Rorty reminds me of Running Water -- that's his Native American alter-ego. Is running water the same as Nietzsche's "mobile army of metaphors"? Liquid is made of molecules that hold on loosely, that are willing to recontextualize.
Pragmatism is self-consciously dynamic. If religion offers the comfort of closure, pragmatism offers the comfort of the impossibility of closure, which the wry pragmatist will admit is a form of closure. I like the term ironist myself. "Pragmatist" fits too tight. But for an ironist, "ironist" also fits too tight. The ironist is too busy being born to compose his epitaph. On his tombstone: "He Was Too Busy Being Born To Compose His Epitaph"

If a philosopher conceives of himself as an inventor rather than a discover, what then? If reality is conceived of as synthetic, what then?

Is it wrong/inefficient for a so-called philosopher to suffer the anxiety of influence. Does it betray a lack of seriousness? Does seriousness betray a lack of Wisdom?
Should the Wise Man whistle and grin?

Is self-consciousness the highway to Irony?

He thought linguistic philosophy was the shizzle, but not the boring kind best suited for churning butter. He was sick, at the moment, of case-closers. Today's game was the saluting of can-openers, presumably cans of worms.
When God closes a case he opens a can of worms.
What was all this noise about truth? He wanted to drop strong lines. That was his truth. He wanted his sentences to infiltrate. His viruses were phallogocentric. He wanted to be quoted. How like a woman, this concern with seduction. How like a man, this apparently penetrative self-consciousness. How like a comedian, this piling of reversals.

Goddess-stripping had become an addiction. At some point one ran out of Goddesses and had to strip one's stripping. Hamlet shoves his sword through the arras, a show for mom and a no for "father."

Being-toward-death: he could relate to that. Nothingness was waiting on him. It did give one a certain courage, but this courage was also a fear, the fear of not having lived as well and as beautifully as possible.

Was it wrong to value creativity? Was it an inferior state of being to concern oneself with the creation of novelty? Was the anxiety of influence the hell-hound of lesser men?

Perhaps, and then perhaps that sentence was pure hypocrisy.

Was an anatomy of self-consciousness an attempt to transcend or celebrate self-consciousness? Or both? Or neither?

He remembered his introduction to philosophy. Two phrases grabbed him right away. "Know yourself" and "define your terms."

Well, Onanismo had been knowing himself biblically for quite awhile now.

Defining one's terms boiled down to knowing one's self and knowing one's self boiled down to defining one's terms. Both projects were apparently endless.

To do foolosophy was to play both God and Adam, or should he say both God and Eve? The dirt in God's hands is better symbolized by woman.

Poetry is news that stays news. Yin and yang are poetry. Dichotomies don't die.

The One is eternal and the twins are timeless. Kant's general intention was great, to reveal the structure of revelation.

Three cheers for the advantages of misreading. Like so-and-so said: it's the thought that counts.

Names are fetishes. Fame is magic. Reputation radiates. Man is idolatrous, naturally (derived from natively) idolatrous.

Is Jung the Kant of the mystical? How is our response to magic structured?

He (our narrating hero) saw a structure in self-salesmanship. One had to sell one's self to one's self more than anyone. Sometimes winning others helped one win one's self. He was pretty sure that winning one's self helped win others. Wisdom was a twinkle in the eye. Who hasn't heard of the Winning Smile?