John Lysaker

The ongoing task of self-discovery, which I figure as self-finding, following Emerson, is integral to the human condition. While its results are always fragmentary, self-finding also conducts the currents of life in ways that establish conditions for our lives and those of others. This activity is mistakenly constrained by Charles Taylor, who argues that it remains tied to moral space. Charles Scott’s work shows how moral space can be found in a manner that suspends the necessity of moral space and generates new possibilities.

It is in large part according to the sound people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be brutal.The orator must ever stand with forward foot, in the attitude of advancing. His speech must be just ahead of the assembly,—ahead of the whole human race,—or it is superfluous. His speech is not to be distinguished from action. It is the electricity of action.Philosophy has never settled upon a genre. One finds provocative dialogues such as Plato’s Crito. Performatively rich, the dialogue shows Socrates offering Crito, one ..

We are inquiring [into] what virtue is, not in order just to know it, but in order to become good.It seems, reading them [Heidegger and Wittgenstein], . . . that some moral claim upon us is levied by the act of philosophizing itself, a claim that no separate subject of ethics would serve to study. . . . [W]hat needs attention from philosophy, is our life as a whole.What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. Whether amazed, curious, angered, or beset by gnawing doubts, philosophy finds itself with something like Emerson's query, "Where do we find ourselves?" Recoiling even as it relies upon a given, philosophy is always orienting or, rather, reorienting ..