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Begin and end with a "that's enough" which would have nothing to do with the sufficing or self-sufficing of sufficiency, nothing to do with satisfaction. Reconsider. Further on, the whole syntax of these untranslatable locutions, the with of the nothing to do. Write, if possible, finally, without with, not without but without with, finally, not even oneself. Opening with the satis, the enough (inside and outside, above and below, to left and right, satire, farce on the edge of excess.

Metaphor of the circle of circles, of training as philosophical encyclopedia. Organic metaphor, finalized as a whole whose parts conspire. Biological metaphor too. But it is also a metaphor, if it is a metaphor, for art and for the work of art. The totality of philosophy, the encyclopedic corpus is described as a living organism or as a work of art. It is represented on the model of one of its parts, which thus becomes greater than the whole of which it forms part, which it makes into a part. As always, the communication between the problem of aesthetic judgment and that of organic finality is internal.

If it occurred to man to create his own images, it's because he discovered them all around him, almost formed, already within his grasp. He saw them in a bone, in the irregular surfaces of cavern walls, in a piece of wood. One form might suggest a woman, another a bison, and still another the head of a demon. He came this route by perception of meta-patterns, those circles, spheres, borders, and centers, binaries, layers, cycles, breaks, and other geometric configurations that occur repeatedly in nature and provide easily recognized clues to the identity of more complicated objects.

Today when labored symbolic cryptograms, romantic effusions of beautiful words, or anguished, contorted faces outside the church's gate seem to be the only marketable alternatives, the option of a concrete form must also be put forward. Its starting point is: everything that can be expressed in language and every linguistic expression in itself has equal status in any context if it enhances the value of that context. To endow form again with its own system of values, the possibility of several interpretations corresponding to the free movement of the eyes.

There is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly untrained perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of the application of a preliminary criterion. A 'system of elements' -- a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude -- is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order. Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.

Now, the same order reigns over wills as reigns in biology. The same random and automatic regulation applies to will in our operational universe as applies in the distribution of sexes at birth or in the freely expressed opinions of millions of citizens, which produces the same statistical outcome as would be achieved by consulting monkeys.

For the world does not seek to exist more, nor to persist in existing. It seeks, rather the wittiest way to escape reality. It seeks, by way of thought, what can lead to its doom. The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us: unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.

Before material 'objectivity' there is the primal void, which is defined as a space without any real particles. Not nothingness but an ocean of virtual particles, which give it an energy of its own, a potential energy, which is nothing, but can transform itself into everything that is. A capricious energy, from before the precipitation of matter into the cycle of causes and effects. Such is the Nothing, the Void, primal scene of the material illusion, and continuation of the Nothing as perpetuation of that state. This enables us to sketch out what illusion is, as opposed to the real. Illusion is the quality of a world which, by the antinomic structure of matter, retains the potentiality of the nullification and immaterial return of energy. Illusion is the characteristic of what retains the possibility of wiping itself out by a violent reversion (matter/anti-matter abreaction) and, therefore, of passing beyond 'material' objectivity (matter and anti-matter are indistinguishable in the absolute; they shine with the same light; they are distinct, linked to each other, only by virtue of the possibility of cancelling each other out). Only energy bound to restricted materiality -- to our materiality -- is doomed to dissipation and entropy.

To think extreme phenomena, thought must itself become an extreme phenomena; it must abandon any critical pretensions, any dialectical illusions, any rational hope, and move, like the world, into a paradoxical phase, an ironic and paroxystic phase. One has to be even more positive than the positive to take in both the total positivity of the world and the illusion of that pure positivity.

When, in the wrong place, there is something, that's disorder.

When, in the right place, there is nothing, that's order.

The question is, where do we want to go? And, do we want to take our baggage with us or travel light? The answer to the second question is contained in the first. Wherever we go, we must go naked and alone. We must each of us learn what no other can teach us. We must do the ridiculous in order to touch the sublime.

Intelligence becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human life-world, an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it, a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form. To deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle, to privilege informational patterns over material instantiation, consciousness regarded as the seat of human identity, as an epiphenomenon, to view the body as the original prosthesis we call learn to manipulate. The subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.

Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates, and tends notoriously towards infinite regress. The observer of systems can himself be constituted as a system to be observed. Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organization. Their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as systems. Hence, they not only are self-organizing but also are autopoietic, or self-making. In the autopoietic view, no information crosses the boundary separating the system from its environment. We do not see a world "out there" that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organization allows us to see. The emphasis now is on the mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system rather than on message, signal, or information. Indeed, one could say either that information does not exist in this paradigm or that it has sunk so deeply into the system as to become indistinguishable from the organizational properties defining the system as such. A cosmic computer running a universal informational code underlies the structure of matter, energy, spacetime -- everything that exists.

People have a need of something more than merely to live and enjoy themselves; they are called to more than simply grasping the phenomena surrounding them. It is precisely the utter lack of connection among phenomena that makes them an all the more accurate sensuous image of pure reason. If one removes from a series of things every manner of connection among them, then one has a concept of independence that is in surprising agreement with pure reason's concept of freedom. Under this idea of freedom that it derives from itself, reason thus encompasses a unity that is known. Through this idea reason subjects the endless play of phenomena to itself and thus at the same time asserts its power over the understanding as a faculty conditioned by senses.

The world as a historical object is at bottom nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with human freedom. Viewed as a whole, nature flaunts all the rules prescribed to it by our understanding; going its own willful, uninhibited way, it tramples into the dust the creations of both wisdom and chance with the same indifference; it sweeps away the important as well as the trivial, bringing the noble as well as the ordinary down with it in the same demise. The supreme ideal we strive after is to remain on friendly terms with the physical world as the guardian of our happiness without on that account being required to break with the moral world that determines our dignity. The capacity to feel the sublime is thus one of the most glorious dispositions in human nature, deserving our respect due to its origin in a self-sufficient capacity to think and will; because of its influence on moral human beings, it deserves as well to be developed in the most complete possible manner. Without sublime things, beauty would make us forget our dignity.

Like the analytical chemist, the philosopher can only discover how things are combined by analyzing them, only lay bare the workings of spontaneous nature by subjecting them to the torment of his own techniqus. I hope to convince you that the theme I have chosen is far less alien to the needs of our age than to its taste. More than this: if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom. It would, therefore, be a question of abstracting from man's physical character its arbitrariness, and from his moral character its freedom; of making the first conformable to laws, and the second dependent upon sense impressions; of removing the former somewhat further from matter, and bringing the latter somewhat closer to it; and all this with the aim of bringing into being a third character that, kin to both the others, might prepare the way for a transition from the rule of mere force to the rule of law, and that, without in any way impeding the development of moral character, might on the contrary serve as a pledge in the sensible world of a morality as yet unseen. Every individual human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal (wo)man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life's task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal.

Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, make sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of state necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdraw in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in the one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, (wo)man herself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in her ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that she turns, she never develops the harmony of her being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon her own nature, she becomes nothing more than the imprint of her occupation or of her specialized knowledge. If the manifold potentialities in (wo)man were ever to be developed, there was no other way but to pit them one against the other. Driven to despair by a pedantic tutelage, silently projecting into the infinity of time. In the eyes of a reason that knows no limits, the direction is at once the destination, and the way is completed from the moment it is trodden. This changing material within her is accompanied by her never-changing "I" -- and to remain perpetually herself throughout all change, to convert all that she apprehends into experience, i.e., to organize it into a unity that has significance, and to transform all her modes of existence in time into a law for all times: this is the injunction laid upon her by her rational nature. Only inasmuch as she changes does she EXIST; only inasmuch as she remains unchangeable does SHE exist. (Wo)man, imagined in her perfection, would therefore be the constant unity that remains eternally itself amidst the floods of change.

We did not make either the world or ourselves; we live by using life, not by creating it.

The use of phase patterns and tape loops in this context could be said to be only a mechanical approximation of the barely imperceptible shifts in improvisation that occur within a West African drum-choir playing continually over a long period.

A piece of improvisation is done, and after it's done, there's nothing to be said about it because it affects your life whether you like it or not.

In the next period of music, the musicians will make their own instruments. Those instruments developed for today relate to the system of music they were designed for, and the music that will happen in the future has nothing to do with that outside of acknowledging the systems that are happening now. We don't need NOTES anymore. I'm looking for instruments that are not concerned with actual fixed pitches, instruments with WHIRLS OF SOUND in them.

What most people accept as being creative for the most part are standard sorts of systems either technically or conceptually. At some point these have been embraced to the degree where it's not so much about creativity any more as much as it's about fulfilling other people's ideas about form.

There's nothing like learning to play, believe me, because I stayed in the house week after week -- and week after year, as a matter of fact -- learning how to play. And what I was learning might have been old, but it made playing something else in the future much easier because I knew how to manipulate my instrument -- just some, I mean. I'm not a master yet, but that's what I'm after -- to be able to play whatever I hear at any time. Then I won't have anything to say at all; all I'll be able to do is play. I would like to get everything down that small where that is all I do. When I become my instrument and my instrument becomes me, I'm not a person any more. I would like to walk around the street looking like a trumpet if possible, because that's what I am.

There are ways but the Way is uncharted;

There are names but not nature in words:

Nameless indeed is the source of creation

But things have a mother and she has a name.

The secret waits for the insight

Of eyes unclouded by longing;

Those who are bound by desire

See only the outward container.

These two come paired but distinct

By their names.

Of all things profound,

Say that their pairing is deepest,

The gate to the root of the world.

The Way is a void,

Used but never filled:

An abyss it is,

Like an ancestor

From which all things come.

It blunts sharpness,

Resolves tangles;

It tempers light,

Subdues turmoil.

A deep pool it is,

Never to run dry!

Whose offspring it may be

I do not know:

It is like a preface to God.

Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it: but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age. I believe that all of us suffer from a consuming historical fever and should at least realize that we suffer from it. Then man says "I remember" and envies the animal which immediately forgets and sees each moment really die, sink back into deep night extinguished for ever.

The unhistorical resembles an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life is generated only to disappear again with the destruction of this atmosphere. It is true: only so far as man, by thinking, reflecting, comparing, dividing and joining, limits that unhistorical element; only so far as a bright lightning flash of light occurs within that encircling cloud of mist -- that is, only through the power to use the past for life and to refashion what has happened into history, does man become man: but with an excess of history man ceases again, and without that cloak of the unhistorical he would never have begun and dared to begin.

A historical phenomenon clearly and completely understood and reduced to an intellectual phenomenon, is for him who has understood it dead: for in it he has understood the mania, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly darkened horizon of that phenomenon, and just in this he has understood its historical power. So far as he is a knower this power has now become powerless for him: not yet perhaps so far as he is a living being.

Man excels in complexity and minuteness of differentiations. This very fact constitutes the necessity for many more comprehensive and exact relationships among the constitutents of his being.

Because perception of the relationships between that is done and what is undergone constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd. A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. To apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought.

Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist a detached and aesthetic vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the aesthetically chaotic and accidental contemplation of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and, as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm that is set up within him. Certain relations of line become for him full of meaning; he apprehends them no longer curiously but passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so clearly from the rest that he sees them more distinctly than he did at first. Similarly, colours which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him, owing to their now so necessary relation to other colors, that, if he chooses to paint his vision, the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities and to take their place as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision.

The conception that objects have fixed and unalterable values is precisely the prejudice from which art emancipates us. The intrinsic qualities of things come out with startling vigor and freshness just because conventional associations are removed.

Space thus becomes something more than a void in which to roam about, dotted here and there with dangerous things and things that satisfy appetite. It becomes a comprehensive and enclosed scene within which are ordered the multiplicity of doings and undergoings in which man engages. Time ceases to be either the endless and uniform flow or the succession of instantaneous points which some philosophers have asserted it to be. It, too, is the organized and organizing medium of the rhythmic ebb and flow of expectant impulse, forward and retracted movement, resistance and suspense, with fulfillment and consummation. Time as organization in change is growth, and growth signifies that a varied series of changes enters upon intervals of pause and rest; of completions that become the initial points of new processes of development. Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of blood ensues.

Suppose there is something which a person cannot understand. He happens to notice the similarity of this something to some other thing which he understands quite well. By comparing them he may come to understand the thing which he could not understand up to that moment. If his understanding turns out to be appropriate and nobody else has ever come to such an understanding, he can claim that his thinking was really creative.