It's impossible to explain to a blind man by reason, argument, or comparison what light, color, and sight really are. There is nothing beyond the senses which can supply evidence of them. We do find people who are born blind expressing a wish to see. That does not mean that they know what they are asking for, for they have learned from us that they lack something which we have and that they wish they had it.
I found my complete essays of Montaigne,1 which had gone missing for a few months this afternoon, and I felt intellectually giddy.
Montaigne, going back to when I was 19 and started to work my way through the canon, has meant sanity, mental peace. A friend with whom one can have a conversation.
The basis of Montaigne's essays is our uncertainty, what we'd now call metacognition, which he called the faculty of knowledge. How do we acquire ideas, Montaigne wondered, how do we acquire customs? What is the basis of our virtues? The truth that Montaigne was willing to live with is that there is no truth, there is no perfect basis at least.
For Montaigne, everything is a source of curiosity, skepticism. Every experience is a starting point for an intellectual journey—journeys that have no real end. His essays, like Plato’s dialogues, simply end—aporia.
All the philosophical routes are re-routed back to the central path of experience (which is to say the ordinary animal experiences of uncertainty, instability, fear, death).
Rationality is just a spur into the human animal to try to keep it from running off a cliff or into a thorny thicket or into a desert, far from water.
Basically, in the American arts, there's typically an inversion of aesthetic morality, which is to say an inversion of talent: the talentless develop rules and ideas for why the talented should be passed over.
I suspect even culture leaders secretly loathe what they’ve created—because what they’ve created is predicted on wrong kind of virtues produce success, disassembly, obsequiousness. One-dimensionality.