"Playing" the resources of characterology for the sake of clarification and insight into the structures of actual existence is many times more daunting than playing a piano; it requires the thinking of chords of thoughts, not just isolated simplisms or abstracta; it demands the shaping or encompassing of morphological modes of intelligence that can comprehend gestalten, syndromes, historical and civilizational patterns in which it is not the particulars but their interactive significance (as an ensemble of actualities or principles) that is vital.

Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce.

How infinitely happier and more grateful is the whole personality or spirit when it finds something nourishing in art or writing or thinking, than the mere mind or intellect is: the kinship you celebrate in these personalities is your own dismembered Orpheus stumbling across another fine organ to rejoin to itself. I put it this way: aristic psyche loves itself enough to chasten itself, to put itself through boot camp for the sake of being competent for life, alive to life.

Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture).

The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable.

One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified "intellect" and always-growing "intelligence." This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy.

Not the least of the problems in clarifying one's consciousness is developing the stoic determination to criticize one's own softness or sentimentality toward oneself. Ego, self-solicitous about its own tenderness, is the ultimate policeman over its own false consciousness, dementedly uprooting every healthy seedling of insight into the truth. As Kierkegaard remarked, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, but the real trick and task of life is to learn to be just the very opposite.