Saturday, 23 September 2017



Purposive action is a general term, it's really meant to cover everything, certainly not just your purposes, or not in a simple way. What after all are your purposes? You seemed to know, until the moment that question arose and you intended to respond. As far as you can see they are endlessly nested one within another, and those you can claim are a small sub-band of those you can name and those a small sub-band of those you can in some way sense or enter into, and outside of those are all those that you can merely acknowledge, perhaps by your awe, or by your fear, or by a sense of the sublime, or just the need to look someone in the eye and say something. This picture, more or less, this extraordinarily interwoven network, with you, your whole heart, illuminating some small part of it that recedes into shadows on all sides without any loss of relationship, of tug, (Beziehung), is the only reason for talking in the key of purpose, or purposes, or indeed of will. Before there was the sense of your own self-directed purposes (and how grateful you were in the ordinary course of things for that crystallisation) there was a world of purposes already in operation, and that is what you'll yield up the well-worn levers of will to, in time. So not just everything you do, or every action done through you, but everything you encounter is this same purposive action, deeply known. What then is it to be an end and not a means, and so to treat others?

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