if there's a point that serves as a core of motivation it's a flashing moment of some soho/midtown/ues (like in the 90s)/wall street buildings, old cast-iron buildings standing tall, ghostly empty streets, maybe it's sometime in the am, a car passing by here or there.
there is a core that I want to probe, which is the carpeted room in which someone finds his motivation, sticky, wet, tangible.
there, there, there--. motivation differing from internal logic? perhaps.
here's a fitting and timely quote, for when I go back and try to match up private dates with public occurrences:
"The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty. ... I'm reminded that deliberations and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable - in other words, the absolutists - that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can't summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today - the antiabortion activist who picket my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory - no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty - for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute."
Obama, The Audacity of Hope
and then remaining is? the uncertainty of uncertainty, meta-foundations crumbled, but only so for the pursuit of another meta-moral.
it's always good to see other's words resonate with what I was thinking:
"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. "
Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
yes yes yes. correllating question -- to what degree is symbolic logic a fitting system for analytic philosophy? I know too little to answer this. yet, that is.