Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).

I think we all have great opportunities individually but collectively our unit is so much bigger. Collectively our unit is something I've never seen on television. I don't look at our show as a basketball show. I look at our show as a sports and entertainment show.

A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet. In our culture-so outer-directed, "objective" or extraverted-this is already heresy. This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties: autarkia or self-rule.

Those who have chosen the path of least resistance in life, who cannot bear to bring themselves to make a stern value-judgment in criticism of their own most intimate feelings, achieve what they deserve: not self-understanding but radical self-superficialization, not a discovered but a self-ascribed identity that explains nothing, reveals nothing, means nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing culturally or intellectually.

Ultimately, love is only possible for humans insofar as they can achieve some comprehension of their place and their duties and their values and their significance within the whole of life, of society, of spirituality, of history, of nature. In all merely partial or fragmentary perspectives, there necessarily remain undigested irrational factors, surds that one is merely tolerating and not truly respecting as essential and integral to the whole of what we are.

Human life is an extension of the principles of nature, and human civilization is a venture extrapolated out of human natures: man and his natural potential are the root of the entire human domain. The great task of all philosophizing is to become competent to interpret and steer the potential developmental forces in human natures and in the human condition, both of which are prodigiously fatalistic.

What may be the significance of so many forms of "spirituality" on this planet that are antagonistic to "life" - and Christianity at the head of that list, with its "calumny" against life, its faith that just because nothing in life is eternal therefore life itself contains no value, nothing that makes it worth living, investing our souls in, committing our consciences to?