"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance.

The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at."

--Simone Weil

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.

-- Anatole France

Most of us think that freedom means to keep our options open...Eventually though, keeping your options endlessly open becomes its own prison. You can never choose. You can never fall in love. You can never marry. You can never take the job. You can never really discover your destiny because you are afraid to commit fully.

If you look back on the experience of freedom in your life, chances are that it wasn't when you were measuring the options against one another, or making sure you weren't getting stuck with a decision. It was when you were fully expressed, playing full out. It was when you chose fully and completely, when you knew you were in the place you were meant to be in.

Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.

We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air.

1. Nietzsche   (100%)  
2. David Hume   (87%)  
3. Thomas Hobbes   (86%) 
4. Jean-Paul Sartre   (80%)  
5. Stoics   (75%)  
6. Epicureans   (70%)  
7. Ayn Rand   (63%)  
8. Spinoza   (56%)  
9. Cynics   (54%)  
10. Aristotle   (46%)  
11. John Stuart Mill   (38%)  
12. Plato   (38%)  
13. Aquinas   (38%)  
14. Kant   (38%)  
15. Prescriptivism   (36%)  
16. Nel Noddings   (32%) 
17. Jeremy Bentham   (32%)  
18. Ockham   (19%)  
19. St. Augustine   (17%)

A water bearer in China had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole  which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water to his house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do.

After 2 years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. "I am ashamed of myself, and because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house."

The bearer said to the pot, "Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side? That's because I have always known about your flaw, and I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you've watered them.

For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.

The writer who keeps a journal is one who cannot give up happiness or the satisfaction derived from days that are really days and really succeed one another.

This has nothing to do with so called romantic self-indulgence. The journal is not necessarily confession or personal outpouring. It is a memorial. And what the author has to remember is himself, who he is when he is not a writer, when he leads an ordinary life, when he is alive and real, not dying and unreal; though strangely enough the medium in which he recalls himself is the medium of oblivion: writing. This is precisely why the journal's reality does not reside in the interesting literary observations it may include, but in the insignificant details which reflect everyday life.

What exactly Foucault did in San Francisco in the fall of 1983 -- and why -- may never be known. The evidence currently available is incomplete and sometimes contested. Daniel Defert, for one, sharply disputes the general impression left by Hervé Guibert, dismissing his novel as a vicious fantasy. Sstill, there seems little doubt that Foucalt on his last visit to San Francisco was preoccupied with AIDS, and by his own possible death from it -- as Defert himself stresses. "He took AIDS very seriously," says Defert: "When he went to San Francisco for the last time, he took it as a limit-experience."

An ambiguous word, "experience" -- but also crucial for understanding the "enigmatic stitching" that ties together Foucault's death, life, and work. Near the end of his life, he briefly defined "experience" in this way: it was, he explained, a form of being "that can and must be thought," a form "historically constituted" through "games of truth".

In the spirit of Kant, Foucault sometimes analyzed these "games" in their "positivity". By "positivity" he seems to have had in mind how certain ways of thinking, by embodying a certain style of reasoning, ordered some aspect of existence or defined some field of knowledge. A system of thought acquires "positivity" in this sense when its propositions become open to scrutiny in terms of their truth or falsity. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things, Foucault showed, for example, how in the nineteenth century, clinical anatomy, economics, zoology, botany, and linguistics each crystallized as internally coherent "discourses", thereby constituting new disciplines of understanding, and regulating the conduct of inquiry in each of these branches of "positive" (or "scientific") knowledge. And at the end of his life in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault investigated how classical thinkers from Socrates to Seneca had elaborated their own, more personal regimens of "truth", trying to bring a measure of reason and just proportion to their existence, regulating the conduct of life in an effort to shape oneself into something "positive" (or "good").

As a connoisseur of literature and art, by contrast, Foucault, in the spirit of Nietzsche and the French philosophe maudit Georges Bataille, was also interested in exploring experience in what he someti8mes called its "negativity", probing into aspects of human existence that seemed to defy rational understanding. In Madness and Civilization, for example, he took away from his encounter with the tormented vision of Goya, the cruel erotic fantasies od Sade, and the insane glossolalia of Artaud, "something that can and must be thought", something that startles and disconcerts -- a mystical kind of experience that "you come out of changed".

Heartened by the possibility of changing himself, Foucault sought out potentially transformative "limit-experiences" on his own, deliberately pushing his mind and body to the breaking point, hazarding "a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life," as he put it in 1969, "a voluntary obliteration that does nothave to be represented in books because it takes place in the very existence of the writer."

In an unusually revealing 1981 interview, he described in some detail the appeal to him of certain extreme forms of Passion, implicitly linking a shattering type of "suffering-pleasure", the lifelong preparation for suicide -- and the ability, thanks to potentially self-destructive yet mysteriously revealing states of intense dissociateion, to see the world "completely differently". Through intoxication, reverie, the Dionysian abandon of the artist, the most punishing of ascetic practices, and an uninhibited exploration of sado-masochistic eroticism, it seemed possible to breach, however briefly, the boundaries separating the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason, pleasure and pain -- and at the ultimate limit, life and death -- thus starkly revealingt how distinctions central to the play of true and false are pliable, uncertain, contingent.

At this breaking point, "experience" becomes a zone full of turbulence, unformed energy, chaos -- "l'espace d'une extériorité sauvage," he called it in L'ordre du discours ('The Order of Discourse," 1971), "the space of an untamed exteriority". Like few thinkers before him, Foucault was at home in this no-man's-land. Sometimes he seems to have considered himself an exemplary seeker of "clandestine knowledge", a hero of truly Nietzchean stature, precariously balanced on a high wire, heralding "the dim light of dawn", fearlessly pointing the way to "a future thought".

But perhaps, as Foucault himself at other times implies, he was simply a figure of quixotic folly -- a philosophical Felix the Cat, forced to learn the laws of gravity the hard way.

"The individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex" would then, as he wrote in 1976, be "something like a nature gone awry". His own death, though revealing, might then be seen merely as "the supernatural return of the insult, a retribution thwarting the flight into counter-nature."

Under these morbid circumstances, some resolved to change their sexual practices, embracing either a terrified celibacy or a new moderation, cutting down on sexual contacts and avoiding the exchange of bodily fluids. But others, feeling confused or resigned -- or both -- expressed a defiant abandon, partying on, as one censorious eyewitness would later remark, "like the revellers in Edgar Allan Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death". (Randy Shilts)

The conditions were chilling. Still, in somne bathhouses in San Francisco in the fall of 1983, in the eyes of someone dispo9sed to see matters in this light, the scene on some nights may have strangely recalled that conjured up by Foucault 10 years earlier in his account of plagues and the macabre carnivals of death that medieval writers imagined to accompany them; "Laws suspended, prohibitions lifted, the frenzy of time that is passing away, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they were recognized, allowing an entirely different truth to appear."

As the lyrical intensity of this passage suggests, the possibility of what Foucault elsewhere called a "suicide-orgy" exerted an unusual fascination over him. Given the anxiety that AIDS continues to provoke, the singularity of Foucault's preoccupations must be stressed: most members of the gay and S/M communities would never have seen the situation in such terms. Foucault, by contrast, had long placed death -- and the preparation for suicide -- at the heart of his concerns: summoning what he once called "that courage of clandestine knowledge that endures malediction" he was evidently serious about his implicit lifelong conviction that "to comprehend life is given onlyh to a cruel, reductive and already infernal knowledge that only wishes it dead."

Dr. Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter, a mathematician who was hailed as one of the foremost geometricians of his generation and whose ideas inspired the drawings of M. C. Escher and influenced the architecture of R. Buckminster Fuller, died on March 31 in his home in Toronto. He was 96.

Dr. Coxeter, whose childhood fascination with symmetry led to his career in mathematics, was driven by the idea that beautiful explanations exist for all puzzles. Several mathematical concepts have been named for him, including Coxeter groups.

U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey ruled again this week that suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla shall be granted access to an attorney, and he invoked philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) to explain a defect in the Justice Department's argument to the contrary.

"The government's argument summons from obscurity an abstruse problem -- that because no rule can determine its own application, it may appear that there can be no binding rule -- that was picked apart on the philosophical dissecting table toward the middle of the last century by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and since has ceased to vex those inclined to contemplate such matters," Judge Mukasey wrote.

"There is a way of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation," Judge Mukasey quoted Wittgenstein, triumphantly and with thrilling erudition.

The text of Judge Mukasey's March 11 ruling in Jose Padilla v. Donald Rumsfeld is here (see footnote 5): (pdf)