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The moral experience of being alive is not reducible to the intellectual experience of being alive. But this isn’t an obvious conclusion. It’s easy to feel comfortable with the conflation of intellectuality and morality, to feel that thoughts are some ways, in some ways, productive of goodness — radiance. Essentially, we animals suspended in the open, suspended in the process of biological evolution, suspended in a series of overlapping systems. We are a system full of systems. At some point, our system of systems becomes aware of itself, and feels pain. This causes it to seek for a science that can deal with itself: the contemplative life — which is a way of making the tangle of systems evaporate the way a magician makes a rabbit disappear into a hat. The discourse of contemplation always gestures towards a Grand Theory of Coherence, explained, but ever-present. But there is no such thing as contemplation in the end, only the dominance of many systems by one system: a temporary taming. Dasein is terrified of the nature that passes through it — nature which it feels it must control. Ethics is, in many ways, a way of shoring up the human as a whole, as a holistic item, against the network of forces surging through it. We seek recognition for our status as individuals — as castles in a sea of chaos — to justify our own theory of ourselves, to prove the paradigm we’ve created for ourselves is True. We universalize (and now virtualize) ourselves to keep ourselves safe. The history of so called progress, or enlightenment, is therefore tacked — tracks — the coherence of individual consciousness. It is…
