Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!

“Not to laugh, not to lament, nor to detest, but to understand”
—Tractatus Politicus by Spinoza

…what else is this intelligere
than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once?
One result of the different and mutually opposed desires
to laugh, lament, and curse?

Before knowledge is possible,
each of these instincts must first have presented
its one-sided view of the thing or event;
after this comes the fight of
these one-sided views, and occasionally
this results in a mean,
one grows calm, one finds all three sides right,
and there is a
kind of justice and a contract…

I suppose that these instincts
which are here contending against one another
understand very well
how to make themselves felt by,
and how to hurt, one another.

This may well be the source
of that sudden and violent exhaustion
that afflicts all thinkers
(it is the exhaustion on a battlefield).

Only now does the truth dawn on us
that by far the greatest part of our spirits activity
remains unconscious and unfelt.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 333 by Friedrich Nietzsche

I am reeling after reading these lines.  Conscious thought is the aftermath of a pitched battle between primal instincts, a smoking, debris strewn battlefield of mutually opposed submerged desires…  And occasionally an armistice results: an agreement, a contract, a compromise between the factions.  Nietzsche speculates this is why protracted thought results in deeply felt exhaustion.

This description of rational thought is anything but one of controlled, measured decision making.  Simply, it’s a cage-match of sorts, it mirrors the ancient tribal scrum-of-survival…

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A song !  We find solace and a refuge in music do we not !?  You Get What You Give by The New Radicals is a tune we can march to…