On Abusing Words to Make them Mean Things

We want to believe that we use our language to promote our morals or to describe our situation—we want to believe that the origin of language is a desire to know or a desire to do what is or what is right in reference to what is. But it turns out that our language, in its whole compass, exists in other ways from other causes that at best are in tension with these which we want to believe or at worst simply overwhelms them and uses them for cover, like the wolf who kills the sheep and wears its skin to kill other sheep. Nietzsche was obsessed with this other thing as power. The will to power. Instinct, the unconscious—there are various ways to formulate this (but again, we’re using the belief what we are using language to find out what is when we say this and not admitting that we too are caught in this other dynamic of language, more profound, more frightening). Our concepts are arranged to make it possible for us to do certain things, act certain ways, gather to ourselves what we are really after, be it power or security or freedom from fear or the illusion of immortality or love or meaning.

On Beauty. What is it?

If you ask, “What is beauty” you are assuming that something exists which the concept “beauty” applies to. How do you know this? Why do you assume it? Can you ask whether your assumption is true without first having an understanding of what beauty is? Are you therefore not really asking, “When I use the word beauty, what do I mean?” And if that is the question you are asking, aren’t you avoiding the question of whether “beauty” exists? Is there any way out of this closed circle? Is it actually possible to ask, on its own terms, the question, “What is beauty?”