…we are unable to have
directly complete knowledge of reality,
there is nothing for us but
arbitrarily to construct a reality,
to suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion.

This provides us with an outline,
a concept or framework of concepts.
With this, as through a “sight,”
we then look at the actual reality and it is only then
that we obtain an approximate vision of it.

…we see our friend Peter coming up the garden path,
the plain truth is that, at times, our friend Peter is not in the least
like the concept “our friend Peter.”

Every concept, the simplest and the most technical
is framed in its own irony
as the geometrically cut diamond is held
In its setting of gold.
[when we are told] quite seriously:
“This thing is A, that thing is B”

…the seriousness is that of a man who is playing a joke on you,
the unstable seriousness of one who is swallowing a laugh,
which burst out if he does not keep his lips tight-closed.

Life is a struggle with things
to maintain itself among them.
Concepts are the strategic plan we form
in answer to the attack.

Hence, if we penetrate
to the true inwardness of a concept,
we find that it tells us nothing of the thing itself,
but only sums up what one can do with it.
                               or what it can do to one.

-excerpt The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset p. 131-132

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Sentences, each so important, that there’s no defined line of thought that deserves more emphasis than any other.  I feel the impossibility of selection, of emphasizing a certain pivot point, that one idea upon which all else rests…

The writer, Ortega says that an idea is “as” a gun sight, which enables you to make a kill-shot.  Concurrently an idea also is “as if” you or I were dead center, in the cross-hairs of that self same gun-sight…

Does this not put the rhetorical war-of-words between the social and political divide in our country, — in an entirely new light?

Excuse me, while I die laughing…