What I'd like to restore in myself is the pleasure that comes in being alone and thinking alone and spending a night alone, quiet, to yourself. I've taken the internet out of my apartment and I feel like I want to go further. I'd like to spend summer nights walking around New York without any connection to anyone. I used to do that and I want to do it again. I'd like to spend summer nights walking around New York without any connection to anyone. I'd like to spend summer nights walking around New York without any connection to anyone.
Reason is a guide, but it is not in itself an engine or fuel. The purely reasonable thing has no reason to live. It is the kind of boundary that the life force itself, the free energy, finds useful. Rational freedom means nothing to the animal; animal freedom is an experience, an embodied essence, that we know that we have, or know that we're seeking or moderating something divine, a gift. This is where I disagree with Kant—and this is where Hegel comes in: freedom is in dialogue with something else, and the individual spirit has to bump up against a boundary (history, state, the absolute). Your freedom, the freedom that you're experiencing, is rational, contextual, ever-evolving.
I’m reading about the Shepherd’s Crusades of the early 14th century; shepherds and swineherds roamed the countryside, pillaging villages and killing Jews, whom they blamed for crop failures and famine, striking fear in the hands of the nobles, who closed their gates against them. Eventually, towns closed their gates to the crusade, and they starved to death out in the open country.