Philosophy should be sprouting from the pain of being. Like a fragile plant. What am I saying here? A plant? Pain of being? I am dwelling in Buenos Aires these days, feel like I have to move on because I already feel too much at home here. It gets a little bit aburrido. But of boredom I already had enough back in Berlin. I had my share, like Baudelaire had his. Now I want something more. And I should stop talking about the pain of being. It’s so hysterical.
I had lunch with the woman who was not Sara. Lunch with a lot of carne: cuadril. Big chunks of Argentinian red meat. I loved it. We had a decent wine too. I joked that I would transfer into a lobo, a wolf, so she better not be around by midnight. That was, to my misfortune, indeed not the case. But other things matter more. Do you know what I used to call Nietzsche when I was young and craved for reading every letter of the philosophers? I used to call him lupus significae, wolf of meaning, because that is the way I perceived his writings. The meaning of his writing is so densely distributed along the lines he writes. Where others alude with played subtlety to some chunk of meaning somewhere, Nietzsche hits the bull on its head and spoils the meaning all over the place. Meaning is not something we should anxiously try to hold in our hands, but something we should try to spout out of us as long as we are alive. Something like that. The meat tasted really good.
The woman who is not Sara told me this very significant thing. “I don’t want to be the pensamiento of anybody else.” That struck me, since I use to transform you into a thought.
Again, put off. another one bites the dust. I want to be accepted. We all want to be accepted. But as what? I guess we all have some vague ideas about this in mind. And they better remain vague. What has to become clearer in our minds is: what is acceptation? We have a romantic idea of acceptation. That it’s some kind of deliverance. Once the Other, a school teacher, a girlfriend, some colleagues that used to be mobbing, a postman, a democrat, a masseur, one they’ve cast this magic spell of acceptance, once they DID this weightless and purely noumenal deed, once they’ve triggered the mental fireworks of acceptance, everything will be rosy and good.
See? Acceptance ist yet another language game. We have to study its rules. There are certain sentences we want to hear, and as appendices to those sentences, certain acts like the reception of a present and sharing time together. We are tuned to recognize those sentences and this behaviour. In this sense, acceptance can be reduced to self-acceptance. And don’t you dare mixing this up with the common cliché (my thoughts are always mistaken for clichés and I detest that), with the cliché that you have to accept yourself before others will accept you. I am talking about something else, something more fundamental as you might. I know very, very few people who would not react to an average reflection like this with a meek shrug and say well that’s what I’ve always said or no no I know it better. It seems so hard for people to just read and listen and try to extract something new from what you throw at them. They read this and say yeah acceptance is very important, they don’t even try to ask the type of questions I’m asking here. They take everything for granted except when they can add in their own thoughts. God how closed they all are. So here, it’s about acceptance as a language game with certain expectations that are of course always individual. And that also means that we can train them. I can, to give you an example, try to refrase your ignorance in my head, try to feel accepted just because you’ve read this, not because you understood it.
My hobby is making my character, making it more and more interesting. It is a hobby that is intrinsically tragic. If you (I switch from “me” to “you” don’t forget to notice!) try to make your character more interesting you can never succeed. You will end up with a boring simplistic character, a character that is aligned precisely to that one goal. So you have the tragic in your boat. Still want to skipper? It might be the best narcist treatment.