Studying Ourselves

I ask: What is the best question?

I answer: What am I?

Glancing back at Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I read Suzuki claiming that we study Zen not simply to study Zen, but to study ourselves.

I think that philosophy of mind should be striving for a similar goal.

This is one of the practical implications of the characterization of mind that I am working towards.

Mind as pure process, knowledge of mind as historical.

Parrhesia and Antifragility

A mere note.

I'm currently reading Foucault's lectures from 1982-83 'The Government of the Self and Others'.

Parrhesia, the ancient Greek concept of truth speaking, fearless speech, however we translate it, is the central concept.

50 pages in Foucault has clarified its meaning to the point that I grasp it as a telling of the truth undertaken despite unpredictable risks that accompany it.

It is only logical, then, that the notion of parrhesia have something to do with the notion of antifragility.

Taleb's notion of antifragility is a way of mitigating the shortcomings of predictive knowledge.

Parrhesia has no need for prediction. We speak the truth because we know it to be true, not because we know what it means, what it will do, what its implications are.

We speak the truth so we can walk that path of truth, not because we can see where that path leads.

The true path may turn out to be nothing more than the speaking of the truth.

Aha. Right.

Parrhesia, antifragility, and aesthetics of existence as ethics. The task is only to care for yourself by expressing what we know to be true, which puts us in a position, gives us an attitude, that will benefit from anything that happens.

Dat Image

'Tis Love and nothing
More that drives me.

I am not a clean child,
I am a misguided Human.

Groping for soft things
I lose myself in their images.

Yet I know gold exists
beyond the image.