“Cause” and “effect” is what one says;
but we have merely perfected the image of becoming
without reaching beyond the image
or behind it.
In every case the series of “causes”
confronts us much more completely,
and we infer: first, this and that has to precede
in order that this or that may then follow
–but this does not involve any comprehension.

In every chemical process, for example,
quality appears as a “miracle,” as ever;
also, every locomotion;
nobody has “explained” a push.
But how could we
possibly explain anything?

We operate
only with things
that do not exist:
lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisib1e spaces.

How should explanations be at all possible
when we first turn everything
into an image, our image!

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 112

Americans by and large have been emigres from Europe, sub-groups regarded as excess, ill adapted to roles in our mother countries because of dissident religious convictions.  The thought that divinity coincided with state power repulsed them.  My progenitors were resistant to any church. I mean an institution with specialists in divinity, the priesthood, all males of course. They thought personal piety, the individual’s direct communion with ‘the ineffable’ was the only reasonable religion… So our predecessors crossed the Atlantic ocean, as outcasts from their Mother Countries to make a more agreeable place to live here.  As is well known the ingress of these new comers increased exponentially.  And they took as much land as they wanted from the indigenous inhabitants.  How was this possible?  1. They possessed the notion of a divine mandate.  2. They had sufficiently perfected the art of metal work, and the art of chemical reaction energy (gunpowder) to kill at a distance.

As you read what I have written perhaps you feel the off center, weirdness of this description of our beginnings as a nation.  Most would know this account is not one of the sanitized, majority approved vignettes that you’d find in a high school history textbook.  My story points to the irrational, pig-headed tenacity of my ancestors, such that they were quite willing to kill those who viewed reality through a different set of lens.  The story is ignoble.

What does my story, or any story explain?  Nothing at all.  Because the description necessarily uses conceptual categories, lego-like ideas which have no existence.

Perhaps the most obvious artifice-of-idea, is “religion.” An overarching divine canopy is what we desire to mean by the term.  Certainly this thought has been the foundation stone for community building, the ultimate justification for who has the right to rule, for our laws, for the “order” of things.

Nietzsche correctly observes that we have descriptions some of which are better than those possessed by our ancestors.  Still all are mere descriptions.

Our fatal flaw is our proclivity to believe that we have explained things with the description that we prefer.  Every description, even those of the greatest exactitude propounded by science, amount to terms we have made up, because they serve our purposes.  The mind constructs ideas which are reflections of the particular mammal that we happen to be.  In every description the outline of ourselves is reflected.

We “fall” for our own image.  There is nothing else that we desire to see…

As has always been, like Pygmalion we fall in love with our own story.