Thoughts after 5 pm

1. The mark of being a great philosopher is that no thought, no sense, no nonsense, no action, should elude you. You should have surveyed the whole at that decisive moment of conception. After that, everything else is at your mercy. You are the potter who molds the clay. The world is your child, which will listen to you if you speak its dialect.
2. A scholar not only demands that you tell him something, but also that you mention to him aloud that you are telling that thing. He does not just open his eyes, but he really opens his eyes wide. He demands that you wear yourself on your sleeve.
3. In this sense, all of Western society since the beginning of its history has been 'scholarly'. The arguments, the debates, the philosophies, the archives, the psychoanalysis, the demand for freedom and individuality -- all as signs of giving to itself what it has already given to itself.
4. The non-scholarly Eastern society is for this reason not properly documented. Hence it risks losing itself to the clarity of the West.
5. The demand for scholarly clarity is ultimately a demand for completing one's death. It is a question of health - to seal this death off in order to inaugurate a new birth. But the Eastern wisdom believes that there is no death and no new birth, that in the demand for closure something vital irretrievably escapes the vicinity of the self - life. Hence the shifting and fluid individuality of the Eastern self.
6. Wittgenstein is to analytic philosophy what Christ is to Christianity. Both individuals were counter-factuals with respect to their followers.
7. It is true that the sense of what is written is not entirely at the hands of the writer. It awaits an appropriation and interpretation by its reader. This reader may be this very writer who has now dipped his pen in a different ink.