What is involved when I think, when you think? What does one do when one thinks? Is it possible to remember when you were a child, just learning speak words, asking and learning the names of things, …tricycle, dog, ball?

(1) There is a triple root of acts of transcendence (thought) through which the subject constitutes first of all a sensory world filled with objects,

I cannot honestly say that I remember that far back. Observing my grandchildren gives me understanding of the effort, of the total commitment involved in learning basic names of things and the grammar of language. That is how we construct a sensory world filled with objects.

(2) then an intersubjective world occupied by the other…..

Certainly the apex of my child-world were my parents and my grand mother. I was totally dependent upon their care, upon their attentiveness to my needs for nourishment, and above all for affective input. As does every child I searched for a solution to a problem. “The world” of others, is it a safe or a dangerous place? In what respects? What strategies are necessary to maintain the integrity of the self? This is just fancy, over-educated language to describe the terror felt by every child on his or her first day, left alone in a classroom full of other kids, and a stranger-adult (the teacher). Your family, your parents help you to transverse those threatening rapids or they fail to do their job—and you suffer damage.

(3) …and finally a common ideal world that will be occupied by scientific, mathematical, and logical formations.

These describe the content, the objective of a good education, the product of years required to read books, to attend lectures, or by the engagement of apprenticeship outside of the classroom. All of this is critical to absorbing the ideas and their relationships that compose our culture, our way of life. This wide and deep field of knowledge may range, by example, from an understanding of the source and composition of asphalt used in roadway construction, to an understanding of Newton’s law involved in the launch of a rocket, or the knowledge necessary to make a good living on a small farm.

“Thinking” is an expression of these acts, acts of transcendence. Included in thinking are philosophical concepts such as “being in the world,” “flesh,” “ideality,” etc.

These ideas are lived. Ideas are references to the subject (you and I), to life as lived, major functions which have their respective trajectories of truth. Concepts are related to lived experience, forming the outlines of what is possible within the whole of experience. Trajectories of truth are relative to what is possible—not vague, fuzzy options, each as good as any other. What is possible within the totality of the lived for us Americans, and for all other human subjects?

A truthful concept is a form and a force that designates our human prospects and that of the earth. Are not my prospects intertwined with yours and with that of the earth?

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And your point is……?

All of that is to say: the daily appeal-to-force by the President, and those with whom he has surrounded himself is an obscenity.

His promise-of-pain to all those who deviate from his narcissistic narrative, the drumbeat of verbal abuse of opponents, his use of economic coercion against our allies, and his opposition to the heat loading of the earth by our preferred life-style—is an immanent threat to our prospects of continued life, and that of the earth.  This disregard for truthful speech is an invitation to oblivion, to the impossible.

The substitute of violence for reason is a harbinger of disaster.

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–excerpts from What Is Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari  page 142