A reading of Schopenhauer, inspires a different view of old Nietzsche.

Every single thought, idea, concept, image, symbol, representation, are fundamentally distractions in themselves that prevent people from looking all the way down the rabbit hole, into the heart of the black hole, the bottomless chasm, the very abyss in itself. Ideas and images constantly flicker to and fro, unceasingly, incessantly, always coming and going, for the consciousness is a vaporous quicksilver that is essentially preoccupied with mental activity, in a permanent state of distraction. Yet, reflection has a strange function that quells this constant activity, and peels the layers away, resulting in the realization of the true essence of reality that is both beyond all temporary illusions and in between all those artifacts of consciousness….

Schopenhauer himself teetered on the brink with his philosophy when he attempted to articulate the unsayable, homogenize the unnamable incarnate and I must say, much better than any other thinker of modernity. Our slavery to our distractions obscure Schopenhauer’s insightful revelations, preventing us from ever coming to terms with them. We are reminded of Nietzsche’s chilling reminder: Lest not look into the abyss, cause the abyss peers back…

However, perhaps Nietzsche himself did not look deeply into the abyss long enough because he tiptoed back into the warm crevasses of his own illusory phantasms, the “eternal recurrence,” the “will to power,” and the “Ubermensch,” thereby restricting his understanding of Schopenhauer.

What Schopenhauer calls wille, a visceral articulation of that subterranean energy, a demonic ur-force, I call the abyss, a bottomless gulf, completely vacant of meaning, the unfathomable void. If the abyss is unknowable in any direct way, then we experience it only indirectly, through representations, concepts. In the medieval age, the abyss was chaos - that which lies beyond the edge of the world, beyond creation. Here, there be monsters!

For Nietzsche, the abyss is nihilism - the awesome consequences when foundations of civilization collapse and the bottom of culture falls out from under it. With the existentialist’s mask Nietzsche accepts the all-too-early message that God is dead and peers into the abyss of nothingness, only to find meaninglessness and valuelessness. The hope of redemption, afterworld, salvation are empty concepts or fictions that conceal the ugly realization that existence is pointless. All our greatest values – truth, enlightenment, wisdom, knowledge, progress – lose their moorings, as hollow as the hollowest idols. We end up walking up and down the cliffs aimlessly, without direction, in the grips of uncertainty.

Zarathustra is the tightrope walker who was ideally the courageous hero, for he not only look deep into the abyss, but cross it… Yet… alas, Nietzsche always slips and falls headlong into the void. The yawning black hole of nihilism is infinite… He falls for an eternity, for time always recurs eternally. However……. beyond the death of God… possibly lies redemption…

Bruno Latour has an interesting take with regards to modernity. In his book, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour claims that modernity emerged from two rigid absolutisms – the division of human culture from nonhuman nature, or the difference between the soft sciences and the hard sciences and the distinction between the present and the past.

The Modern Constitution, Latour’s term for modernity, is born from the dichotomy of nature and culture, and their associated forms of knowledge. From nature, we have the sciences (knowledge of how things are in themselves) and from culture (language, society, politics) we have the discourses of morality (sociology, psychology, etcetera).

It is the essence of modernity to take these two kinds of knowledge as separate and distinct, and that they ought to be kept separate. Latour argues that the modern condition entails the invention of “a separation between the scientific power charged with representing things and the political power charged with representing subjects.” (p. 29)

At the very moment this invention is upheld, which was established during the scientific revolution in the 17th century, it is also the same moment the middle ground begins to proliferate. There is a gradual increase of objects or things being ‘drawn to social life,’ while at the same time it becomes more and more dependent upon what it draws from nature. The distinction of modernity is exactly where the problem lies, for Latour means to focus on the ‘quasi-objects’ that emerges from the space between non-human nature and human culture.

The first distinction of modernity leads to the second absolute division, that of temporality. The separation of culture from nature is then mapped onto the division of the present from the past: “the asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and future. The past was the confusion of things and men; the future is what will no longer confuse them.” (p. 71) In other words, modernization presupposes the uniform nature of time as something that progresses in a teleological fashion and the homogeneity of the present moment.

The increasingly proliferation of ‘quasi-objects’ problematizes the distinction of modernity, and a quote from Latour illustrates this: “no one can now categorize actors that belong to the ’same time’ in a single coherent group. no one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labor unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent…” (p. 74)

The argument is as follows: Since modernity has not in fact purified itself of nature, but implicated itself ever more deeply within it, there is no distinction to be made between modern and premodern cultures. Nor is there a clear and distinct ‘culture’ because “the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Culture (different or universal) do not exist any more than nature does. There are only nature-cultures.” (p. 104) therefore, since the idea of the modern entails the assertion that we have freed ourselves or will free ourselves from nature, we have never been modern.

The very issue I was hoping to drive at and leave the obvious inference to the reader. Some may grasp it and immediately realize why postmodernism is not an irrefutable doctrine since it depends on the presumption of modernism itself.

One common strand in postmodern writings is a general apprehension of the unevenness of the times, the mixture of the old and the new that belonged to different times. However, postmodernism still retains many habits of modern thinking that entails the view that it itself is a new development, a new ‘now.’

Latour does admit that his (amodernist attitudes) observations do overlap the other ‘postmodernists,’ but he does not identify with them:
“The postmoderns are right about the dispersion; every contemporary assembly is polytemporal. But they are wrong to retain the framework and keep on believing in the requirement of continual novelty that modernism demanded. By mixing elements of the past together in the form of collages and citations, the postmoderns recognize to what extend these citations are truly outdated. Moreover, it is because they are outmoded that the postmoderns dig them up, in order to shock the former ‘modernist’ avant-gardes who no longer know at what altar to worship. but it is a long way from a provocative quotation extracted out of a truly finished past to reprise, repetition or revisiting of a past that has never disappeared.” (p. 74)

In Latin that spells “nothing is without reason.” We often say “everything has a reason” when we are trying to explain something, an object or an event. The appropriate philosophical terminology is a bit more technical: the principle of sufficient reason, (PSR) which means all contingent facts have an explanation. Schopenhauer pointed out the PSR is the fundamental principle of all knowledge, as well as the foundation of science. Good philosophy consists of competent explanations, and generally, there are at least four explanations: causation, judgment, transcendental, and motivation.

In this blog I will focus on judgment, or how we explain with concepts. Concepts are a certain class of representations we often use in our language as abstract generalizations. We should be careful not to mistake concepts with “real” objects as in images or words, which are actually concrete. As generalizations, concepts subsume innumerable particulars under them. Concepts are dependent on the everyday world, as well as partially constitutive of it. They’re abstracted from perceptible particulars, and the faculty of reason that creates those abstractions is a function of the brain. Since the original objects from which they’re abstracted are already representations of perception, concepts are “representations of representations.”

Concepts and the faculty of reason are crucial because they enable people to make judgments, formulate propositions, plan the future, construct scientific theories, act purposively and cooperate with others. Yet, despite all that, reason does not provide any knowledge of reality. “All that is material in our knowledge - that is, all that cannot be reduced to subjective form - comes from without, and thus ultimately from the objective perception of the corporeal world, a perception that has its origin in sensation” (Fourfold Principle of Sufficient Reason, p. 170)

All primary knowledge of reality is gained by the understanding alone. The understanding is another brain function of the brain where the human nervous system processes and interprets the data from the senses. With the assistance of perception, the understanding renders “real” objects (representations) and produces experiential knowledge. All apprehensions of causality and all great discoveries belong to the understanding, without the use of concepts. Thus, reason functions by creating concepts and provides secondary knowledge; a second-order knowledge of truths through concepts and words. “Every simpleton has the faculty of reason, give him the premises, and he will draw the conclusion. But the understanding supplies primary and therefore intuitive knowledge.” (Fourfold, p. 113)

This explains Schopenhauer’s contempt of the other philosophers when they claim reason does transcend experience and is capable of intuiting things in themselves. All metaphysicians who grant reason an intuitive role are mistaken, which means all ontological arguments are fallacious. They attempt to move from concept to concept in order to arrive at reality by the inferences of reason alone.

Concepts are useless in isolation, but when they are combined to make true judgments, they do express knowledge. Judgments themselves cannot provide any knowledge, for no judgment is intrinsically true. Truth is a relational property. If a judgment is true, it is based on something other than itself, an external ground. Therefore, every true judgment has a ground that is external to it and constitutes its reason. If this reason is a sufficient one, then necessarily, the truth of the judgment follows.

There are certain judgments that are transcendental, where the truth of a judgment depends on the necessary presuppositions of experience. Judgments about space, time, mathematics and causation are all transcendental truths. Time and space are grounds of being, for they are the presuppositions of experience. Transcendental truths are “prior” to experience, because they are the conditions that make experience possible, allowing for an “inner” temporal sense, and an “outer” spatial sense. Time makes arithmetic possible, while space does the same for geometry. They are particulars, not concepts. As particulars, time and space make up parts and the systematic interrelatedness of these parts constitute the root of the third form of the principle of sufficient reason. Time is made up an infinite number of ordered moments, and each moment has a determinate position in relation to and dependent upon the others. Likewise, space is made up of an infinite number of ordered points (which form lines, angles, areas and volumes). The geometric properties of any part of space have another part or parts of space as their sufficient reason, which is neither causal nor conceptual, but ontological. If we ask why any part of space is as it is, we find the answer in terms of how the other parts of space are as they are. I.e., the angles of a given triangle are as they are because the sides of the triangle are as they are. The combination of time and space makes perception possible for a subject.

The existence of numbers (and arithmetic) depend on the possibility of counting in time, and this proves that arithmetic is an intuitive and systematic grasp of temporal relations, just as much spatial relations are attained in geometry. Geometry, for Schopenhauer, is a direct non-empirical perception of the parts of space and their relations. Euclid’s proofs are not what geometry ought to be, for they are mere conceptual exercises that relate judgments to judgments, a mere exercise of reason. Schopenhauer dismisses the proofs as “a brilliant piece of perversity,” (World as Will and Representation I p. 70) for they do not offer an insight into the reality of space and its properties. The judgments of Euclid’s conclusions are true, but this truth is logical, which depends on the truth of its premises, and consequently these proofs are concerned with concepts, rather than space.

So much for rationalism, and so much for mathematics!

Previously, I discussed the concept of metaphor here, and I thought a lot was left unsaid.

All philosophical concepts are interdependent; they depend on other concepts, which means they cannot be analyzed in isolation. There are no precise definitions for philosophical concepts, because they institute a new way of thinking. For instance, the concept of love does not refer to a particular example, but rather, it “enacts” or “creates” a new possibility or a new thought of love. Not only are dictionary definitions superficial and shallow, they are also restrictive, whereas the philosophical concept is open and expansive. Therefore, to understand a concept philosophically is to find the new connections and new possibilities they reveal.

For Nietzsche, when thoughts and concepts are superimposed on the flux of reality, they dissect it into convenient units. In other words, to think is to substitute a fixed image in the place of fluid reality. This leads to the conclusion that all thoughts are metaphorical.

We have been trained to understand a noun, say, the “pig,” must refer to the animal in the farm, gorging from the trough. When we choose to use that word metaphorically (He’s a pig! ) we are referring to someone who acts greedily, eats too much or noisily. Yet, the word ‘pig’ is arbitrary, whether it refers to an animal or something else. In both cases, in the face of infinitely different reality - each pig, razorback, Miss Piggy, Francis the Pig, Babe, Piglet - we affix some word that will apply in all cases. This practice inspires an illusion that there is a general type, a “pigness” and it refers to something; a fixed form for our labels of convenience.

Nonetheless: if language creates concepts, then, language, as well as thoughts, is metaphorical. I perceive a concrete and physical reality and refer to it with something else: the sign or the concept. However, the illusion that there is a “truth” behind language remains, and moreover, we also believe in the illusion that there are methods of speaking or writing that will escape metaphor and refer to the “true” world behind appearances. Nietzsche is consistent here - there is no “true world” but merely appearances behind appearances. It is interpretation all the way down!

This is problematic, though. If one truly grasp the implications, then despair looms because of convenient illusions, where we project a fictional “true world” beyond language and appearances, and this “promised land” always remains eternally unapproachable, unattainable. After such illusions are shattered and we finally give up our addiction to truth, we have no choice but be resigned to welcome nihilism as our final guest.

“..engrossing…”

“…keeps the suspense mounting and the pages turning..”

“…delicious witty and gossipy…”

Alas - any of these blurbs still would sell this novel short, for it has all the virtues of your garden variety bestseller du jour – gripping plot, memorable characters, unconventional ending - and far more.

Simply put, Les Liaisons Dangereuses raised the bar of the epistolary novel so high it no longer exists. The subtitle, “Letters gathered in a Society” indicates a collection of the correspondence has been arranged by a “fictional” editor. The distinctive styles and view presented in each letter creates a polyphonic effect, where the reader is always better informed about the relevant situation than the authors of the letters themselves. The authors are not merely reporting events, they write in order to present themselves the way they intend to appear to their correspondents.

The nature of the composition of the novel has disposed of the “normative position” of the author, Choderlos de Laclos and preempted the moral imperative. The absence of a narrator or an authoritative narrative voice makes it impossible to locate the intentions of the author. As a result, moral ambiguity is the book’s greatest charm. Its depiction of the base motives of the aristocracy was shocking, controversial and scandalous, for its authenticity in certain spots implied it was a roman a clef. The first edition sold out within days, nonetheless.

The Marquise de Merteil and Vicomte de Valmont are two letter writers who shrewdly and ruthlessly play a game where seduction is the name; psychological methods, the rules; erotic pleasure, the prize. They are the dangerous liaisons of the painfully naïve young girl, Cecile Volanges. She and the other authors, the Chevalier de Chanceny, Presidente del Tourvel, and Madam Volanges are pawns in the game of seduction. The twist is that the game backfires on the puppeteers of the drama and everyone else.

I thought the sweetest morsels were the scattered psychological insights: on people in general, the distinction between men and women and their socially appropriate relations to pleasure, the incompatibility between vanity and love. They painted a clever and cynical portrait of human nature, challenging the pretensions of society, the resonant echo of the maxims of the moralist La Rochefoucauld.

Some readers have proposed tragedy as the appropriate category for Les Liaisons, where fate is exceedingly brutal to the protagonists and shatters all possibility of redemption of life. In classic tragedies, the protagonist(s) are virtuous, yet that makes no difference as they are destroyed by external forces or by themselves. Both Marquise de Merteil and the Valmont are exceedingly vain, and this is their virtue of excellence as well as their fatal flaw. “Strong swimmers always drown.” Because of the way novel depicts human society as something permanent, there are no apocalyptic overtones. The tragic end of the characters are somewhat absolved when society continues on, surviving their destruction. It could be argued that the excessive portrayal of the vain aristocrats was a condemnation of the aristocracy itself, which was thoroughly corrupt to the bone, a decadent society in its death throes where the Revolution was right around the corner.

During my college career I have had to struggle against a stereotype about deaf people in general, fight against the common assumptions about a group of disabled people and constantly prove myself capable by shattering unfair but understandable generalizations. After blazing a trial in my own limited time (by breaking the prejudices of others) it did became tiresome and repetitive, exceedingly redundant that I have nothing to fight but the extremely low expectations and that whatever I do already clears the embarrasingly low bar is simply taken as brilliant, impressive, wonderful, amazing, or [insert any superlative here]. This is not a cry for a universal standard, fairness, but that the concept of low expectations does result in low results. It is somewhat a self-defeating prophecy, if you look at the results without any preconceived notions.

The unexamined prejudice, or stereotype I am talking about is that because of common connotations about the disability, a deaf person should not be able to articulate speech consistently well, even write eloquently in English, and/or specialize in non-visual training (i.e. abstract studies such as that of mathematics or philosophy).

The first stereotype is not too much of a problem. Once I open my mouth and ask for something in the public arena, say, ordering food, sometimes I’m taken for a hearing person pretending to be deaf in order to get away with things. Other times incredulity is written allover their faces that a deaf person can speak at all is embarrasing to the degree that those preconceived notions are just exactly what we all are guilty of when we meet the strange or the rare, or the different, those of unlike bent - whatever it is, disability, cultural differences, or social classes - whichever we have limited experience of we unfairly make quick judgments and assessments that are actually a short cut for true knowledge and understanding. Is it human nature to make shortcuts with stereotypes so we don’t have to waste time in the future?

The second stereotype is even more troubling, because my major requires that I write a lot of papers, essays, summations, reports, analyses, critiques, and etcetera. I remember my first semester at the local college, I was enrolled in a course on Folklore & Mythology. During lecture I had been constantly keeping my arm up and answering the posed questions or adding extra information, but alas! That was not sufficient grounds to keep the professor from doubting the true authorship of my papers. He even had the audacity to ask whether I did write my essay! At first I wasn’t too worried because I assumed that the professor was concerned about the quoted material or sources I had worked with. But it slowly dawned upon me that he was laboring with assumptions that I could not have written that paper precisely because of my disability. Not that he came out and said it, for he was too smart to paint himself in a corner like that. My interpreter found this so insulting that during the interrogation she broke down and cried like a baby. The professor defended his charges by saying that in 35 years of teaching he had never came across a paper that technical, so he had grounds to doubt the abilities of a lowly freshman. More similar incidents followed, until I built a reputation of producing well-written papers in the philosophy department was I able to dispell that sort of low expectations. About time!

To this day I keep surprising people on the internet with the admittance that I am hearing impaired. Sometimes I can interpret that as a compliment. For example there is this intelligent, talented thinker who frequents over at darwinawards.org I have had the courtesy of befriending. After I informed him of my disability, he exclaimed that he would have never guessed! Sort of nice, but at the same time, also, damning.

The third stereotype is the choice of major- since the most common major for the deaf student at schools like Gallaudet, NTID, or CSUN is ‘deaf studies,’ it stands to reason that there are exceptions who do not fall into any homogenized categories. However, the assumption that a deaf person is exceeding expectations if he focuses on something not necessarily visually aided (technican, auto mechanic, art) he is bound to fail or be doomed to a life of misery or frustration is unfounded.

Perhaps this is a matter of semantics, that the people who happen to be deaf is actually a microcosm of the population at large, that the ratio stays fixed, that the majority of the people are not devoted to high-brow intellectual pursuits, but in more practical matters, and that the categorization of deaf/hearing is spurrious and unnecessary.

For subjective purposes, I do not find my disability a source of pride because I did not chose to be deaf. That may be a fundamental problem of my own, that I refuse to participate in a social thing that stems from an accident of nature (that translates as well to other elements such as those of racial origins, cultural background, social status). If I didn’t choose my ethnicity, my parents, my social class, my history, how can I take the credit for any of those?

Is the word ‘deaf’ a label? How does it denote a person? Today, in this post-structural age, labels are everything. We use labels everyday, speak in labels, and we encounter labels everywhere. Sometimes we use labels for convenience, as shorthand for complicated concepts. Other times labels are used in technical vocabulary, to marginalize error. So, we identify ourselves with labels. Hence, the word “deaf” is a label that connotes a particular characteristic of a person. The dictionary explicitly signifies a person who is not physically able to hear, and that definition is derived from the norm of a society of peers who can. The identification of a person as deaf is a discursive product, because it is relevant only within a set of classification that is established by a particular discourse of deafness.

In the Norma Groce’s book Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, a description of an independent community isolated on the small island Martha’s Vineyard, which was rife with a genetic predisposition to hearing loss, serves as an example where “deafness” was not a label of disability. Disability in this sense doesn’t necessarily result from a handicap, but rather is manifested through a society that devalues and segregates people who deviate from the physical norms. Consequently, any label that connotes disability is a socioeconomic passport for institutionalization.

However, this marginalization as a disability is a negative concept and does not satisfactorily answer the question - what is ‘deafness?’ Is there an alternative, more positive, definition?

One possible candidate is a social explanation, which is a departure from biological or existential explanations. As a label, deafness functions as a discursive formation that is socially constructed by discourse. The phrase ‘social construct’ is a celebrated description those radical freethinkers use to question the ideological beliefs of a modernist (that reality is a homogeneous entity, that knowledge is the sole result of a pure, sincere will to truth, and the meaning of anything is disinterestedly given).

Discursive formations are derivatives of discourse, which is the semiotic structuring of all social phenomena as codes and rules. This is practiced by a unity of discourse, by consensual agreement. Discourse defines identity and describes what characteristics are possible for a person. A discursive formation constitutes its object and generates knowledge about these objects. That means our knowledge is discursively determined, and the world is constituted in this way by discourse. However, nobody writes a discursive formation. There are no authors of discursive formations because they are constituted by archives, or anonymous collections of text.

These archives is the sustained recording of the history of the individual, and in doing so, the person has a place, a name, a number, a task, a credit history, etc., and never stray from the steady observation of authorities. This constant observation of behavior leads to a certain discipline: the person behaves as if they were under sustained surveillance. In the deaf person’s situation, especially in the USA, his life is observed, recorded, and probed under a microscope by a collaborative and cooperative effort of specialists (deaf teachers, guidance officers, speech language pathologists, interpreters or notetakers, and audiologists): a continuum of psychological profiles, aptitude test placements, audiograms, educational performance, objectives and other documented efforts.

The increasingly complex and technical serialization of the disabled person is an ongoing process of a biographical production. The biographical sketch of the individual, chronicled to a greater detail than ever, results in the ‘real,’ tangible and physical snapshot of the self! Panopticism is a disciplined, rational, detailed and bureaucratic surveillance, which signifies how behavior is directed by the machinery of society- an ‘automatization’ and ‘disindividualization’ of power.

The individual actively construct their social world, as opposed to having it imposed upon them. Therefore, it seems that the concept of deafness does not necessarily signify a disability, but is contingent upon what context the individual chooses to define himself. If labels are constructs, and language is the limit of thought, then I am nothing more than a social construct, that ‘deaf guy.’ However, I do not identify myself as a deaf person because of my existential nature as a free human being. To act otherwise would be bad faith.

(Originally published by the 49er, the CSULB newspaper, February 6, 2003)

Do you think there must be a human nature? If such a thing exists, at least a relatively fixed one, then true scientific understanding is possible. Because people, with a very limited amount or set of experiences, are capable of learning their own language, as well as use it creatively, then there must be some sort of “bio-physical structure” within the mind that enables individuals to deduce a unified language from the multiplicity of individual experiences. If you agree with this conclusion then you are a typical cartesian rationalist. You will answer questions with appeals to universal human nature and reason, the standard for intellectuals to judge and rationalize a precise conceptualization for a better society and the future. Violence, injustice, falsehood, etc., must be fought for the sake of justice, because there must be a guiding principle, a fixed and rational standard for knowledge, society… Otherwise we cannot judge which actions or claims are true or correct or just or determine which actions to take.

On the other hand, if you think human nature does not exist, because “existence precedes essence,” then there are no rational principles or a priori values. No transcendent values exist prior to choice, ready-made and perfect, waiting for your consent in your choice how to live, for you are nothing else but what you choose to make of yourself. Consequently you are responsible of yourself and for everyone else. You create a certain image of a person of your choices, through your actions. In choosing yourself you choose humanity. What you do contributes to humanity in general, hence, you are responsible of all mankind. Once you become aware that your choices actually chooses for everyone else, you will experience a deep-seated anxiety. Once you realize that there is no God, nobody with infinitely perfect wisdom who knows the “Right choice,” then your choice is completely your responsibility, your creation. Your choice cannot depend on anyone else. If there is no pre-existing human configuration, no perfect society, no standard of precise justice, then you are condemned to always choose freely.

However, if you wished to avoid starting with the abstract question by starting in a different direction and pose this - how does the concept of human nature function within society - then you evade the requirement of making claims of universal truths, and instead choose to historicize grand abstractions. This method distinguishes the actual operational categories within a discipline from a broad conceptual marker, like “life,” in which themselves may have had of little import regarding the internal evolution of the scientific disciplines. Therefore, because there is no external position or universal understanding that is beyond history and society, the task is to historicize the universal categories each time they’re encountered. I.e., it was not through the study of human nature that discoveries were possible, such as linguists with “consonant mutation” or psychologists, the “principle of analysis of dreams,” or anthropologists, the “structure of myths.” This way, the “why” questions are transformed into “how.” In the attempt to answer “why,” you are restricted to models of justice, knowledge, truth, or search for general principles that evaluate the condition or situation. Perhaps you realize this attempt actually hides the concrete function of power. The notion of truth or justice or moraltiy has been concoted in order to function as an instrument of a political and economic power. For knowledge is already soaked within conflicts small and large, not external or above the disagreements, or discord.

Now that I’ve caught a couple of the exhibitions, I can comment on the team.

Chris Paul: fresh off a fantastic rookie season, possibly the best of any point guard since oscar, I was eager to see how his game meshes with top-flight athletes like LeBron and Wade. In the first game, paul seemed skittery and tried to do too much. Lob passes weren’t on target,committed offensive fouls (carrying the ball too deep into the defense)and seemed confused on defense, which contributed to the team’s slowstart. Perhaps starting for the first game got the rust out of his system, and in the 2nd game against china he found the correct pace. Even though he scored only 1 point, the team ran China into the ground with relentless fastbreaks off the turnovers.

Gilbert Arenas: I haven’t seen this guy play much so my general impression of his game is a clone of allen iverson who drives less often and has a better jumpshot. In both games, he hustles more than any other star player, probably because he makes more mistakes than anyone elseand goes all out in order to make up for them. Very nice trait! He is the designated marksman from 3 point land, and shouldn’t worry aboutshit but hitting those threes cuz the stronger teams will zone the shitout of the US team. Count on it, and that’s what did in the previous two teams: lack of perimeter accuracy and substandard point guard play, which is the kiss of death in international ball.

Kirk Hinrich: another young player I hadn’t seen much of. In both games, he showed a fundamentally perfect game on both offense anddefense, a delight to watch. Makes all the textbook passes, correctpositioning on defense, doesn’t gamble on steals. Wow, I’m impressed!Hinrich plays like he has been in the league for 10 years, and doesn’t make mistakes, never get rattled, etc.

Wade: best open court player in the league. Hangtime and in-airacrobatics eeriely similar to a young michael jordan. Wade’s defense is better than I thought, and with those long arms, he keeps poking the ball away.

Joe Johnson: the most versatile player on the team. He is better than lebron from outside and passing the ball. That is why I think he should start cuz he can adapt to the pace of the game much better than Bron can or will - plus Coach K is running the phoenix suns’ offense (they have D’Antoni, the coach of the suns, running the offfense) - meaning Johnson is more comfortable out there.

Anthony: what in the sam hill has gotten into Carmelo? He has been tearing it up like he was the second coming of larry bird. Yes, you read that. Every shot he puts up, you’re convinced its going in, and you’re totally flummoxed when it doesn’t. Yes, not only that, he is also hustling on defense, something I haven’t seen in the past. Kudos to coach K, tho I think melo is just tickled pink that his old coach, Boheim is on the team. Melo will be the designated gunner, the go-to manin the clutch. Clear sign of maturity: he is not dribbling anymore, wasting time with one-on-one moves. Perhaps from this experience, melo will hit another level in the upcoming season, and if denver ever gets its act together, he will become one of the MVP candidates.

LeBron: more powerful than ever, and still deadly from outside, and unstoppable in the open court. I would put him at the 4 spot, he’s strong enough to guard the power players, and fast enough to run themragged on the breaks. Still forces shots too much, hasn’t figured it out yet. His defense still sucks, but I suspect its from a complete lack of coaching. He hasn’t had that good coach, ever since high school, who demanded him to play hard on D, much less teach him the fundamentals. But this is moot on the team, cuz coach K has everyone presssing fullcourt, which hides the deficiencies in Bron’s defensive game, opens up the fastbreak game. The more I watch him play, the less I think he is a Magic-on-steroids, but a taller and better conditioned Charles Barkley.

Bowen: I don’t think he will be useful until the team plays the tougher opponents like Argentina or Brazil so he can harrass their go-to players into 6 of 23 shooting nights.

Jamison: nice, seems like a good pick up, tho he won’t play much. His game is best in broken play situations, where the play isn’t for him, and the other team turns the ball over, bang! Instant offense.

Brand: his turnaround fallaway is buttery-smooth. If he is near a loose ball, itis automatically his, thanks to his freakish long arms. He should swing his elbows more often, take up the enforcer role, but I think he’s too nice. Of the frontcourt players, Howard doesn’t have the vet experience, and Miller is too soft, and Bosh is too thin.

Bosh: after a bad first game where he missed all his shots and got pushed around by the beefy center from Puerto Rico, he played better in the game vs China. Seems like he can play only facing the basket, and can’t guard the bulky interior players, so coach K should be selective when he plays.

Howard: lawdy lawdy lawd! I don’t think he even knows how good he is going to be. Dwight Howard grabs all the loose boards and blocks weak stuff like a young Olajuwon, only bigger. If on offense the ball is nearthe rim, he’s gonna clean house.

Miller: still can pass and still can hit the outside jumper. Still gets muscled around, though, so I don’t think he ever got the strength in his legs back from all those injuries. But when the team is on a tear, miller becomes even more effective, the ball moves much better: he’s not cloggin up the lane, making it easier for the slashers like bron bron and wade, and when they do drive inside, the defense collapses and he’s left open for the automatic 15 foot jumper. Effective in spots.

I realize it’s only the exhibition games, but what the heck.