The Changing of the Same (In the Second of Two Senses)

Even more than was true of my previous post — “The Changing of the Same (In the First of Two Senses),”[1] the first of the two posts that constitute this current short series — to a very large extent this post consists of quotations from various sources. What is more, similarly to how the first section of that preceding post contained three citations from the Online Etymology Dictionary, so will I just below in this first section of today’s post give one such citation.

same (adj.): "identical, equal; unchanging; one in substance or general character," from Proto-Germanic [1]samaz" same" (source also of Old Saxon, Old High German, Gothic sama, Old High German samant, German samt "together, with," Gothic samana “togeth-er," Dutch zamelen "to collect," German zusammen "together"), from PIE samos "same," from suffixed form of root [1]sem (1) “one; as one, together with.”                                                                                        

That citation captures the rich ambiguity of the term same, such that it can be used to capture various meanings, including especially the two that are at issue in the two posts of this current series. In the very next section below, I will begin with a quotation from one of my own earlier posts, this one from a bit more than two years ago, put up on May 13, 2024.

*     *     *

A saying that is sometimes to be heard in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous is that for alcoholics to give up drinking what is needed is not a change of anything, but rather a change of everything. That is, to recover from alcoholism, alcoholics must change their lives as a whole — their whole orientation toward and within their lives, affecting how they approach each and every new day, and make each and every new decision they are faced with making throughout every new day.

                     — “Changing Times, Changing Lives”

A change of everything in the sense at issue in the above quotation is very different from an exchange of one accumulation of things for another. It is not the replacement of a totality of objects for a different but “equivalent” totality of objects, in which all Lincolns  become Cadillacs for example.

Rather, when an addict finally “bottoms out” in that addict’s addictive usage of some substance or process and finds an entirely new, “sober” way of life, no single thing or relationship is exchanged for any other “equivalent” thing or relationship, nor any collection of things and relationships exchanged for any other such collection. The addict “in recovery,” to use the standard phrase, does not have a new life. Rather each addict has exactly the same life that addict had all along, both before and after finding the way to recovery from addiction. Rather, the difference is that the addict in recovery has, in effect, been given at last eyes that can see that addict’s own life as such.  And once that life has been at last thus experienced in its fullness, the addict in recovery can say joyfully say, along with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

“Was that life?  Well, then, once more!” [2]                

Friedrich Nietzsche 

*     *     *

All those who have been thus given at last the eyes to see constitute, not only in all such so-called “Twelve Step Groups” as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and so on, but also beyond all such groups and extending to the worldwide community of human beings as such.[3] Confining our attention to all human beings as such, we can truly say the  worldwide and to-all-times-extending community of all humans is one in which no one can claim precedence over anyone else, but in which all are truly and radically equal in their absolutely and ineradicably individuality. Each one is just that one being each is, not interchangeable with any other just as radically individualized being, and all are the same in being utterly and eternally  irreducible one to another.

Consequently, in that worldwide and time-wide community of all human beings no one anywhere ever will have the right — nor even the desire — to claim “ownership” over any “property” whatsoever. That world- and time-wide community of all human beings whatsoever will indeed share all things in common, just as the following passage from Christian Scripture[4] proclaims:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had

                                — Acts of the Apostles 4:32 (NIV)

Some eighteen-hundred year after that passage from the Acts of the Apostles was written, the following remarks appeared from a very different source, but also condemning the institution of “private property”:

With the abolition of private property [. . .] we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.                                                                                                            — Oscar Wilde[5]         

Oscar Wilde

*     *     *

The sun is new every day. 

                                                — Heraclitus (6th-5th century BCE)

This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.

— Commonly attributed to Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

                                           Maya Angelou

To be sure, as the above two quotes, this time separated by more than two millennia, attest no two days are ever the same, and each day it a gift to be gratefully accepted. May we all heed the wisdom of Heraclitus and Maya Angelou and live to the full each day anew.

[1] Posted on Monday, August 3, of this year, 2026.

[2] From Also sprach Zarathustra, “Dritte Teil“ (originally published in 1844).

[3] And even beyond humanity as such, to encompass all sentient beings as such, and even all non-sentient beings such as plants and extending, indeed, to everything whatsoever what “is” in any sense at all!

[4] I.e., the so-called New Testament.

[5]In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (originally published in 1891).

The Changing of the Same (In the First of Two Senses)

This is the first of a two-part post-series to each part of which I have given the above main title: “The Changing of the Same.” In today’s post I will examine one of two radically[1] different senses of that phrase with which I have entitled both posts, then in my next post I will examine the second sense.

The first sense of that main title, the sense at issue in this present post, is precisely the sense having to do with bartering. To begin addressing that first sense of “the changing of the same,” I will give immediately below three relevant citations from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which I’ve listed in alphabetical order:[2]

barter (v.): "to traffic or trade by exchanging one commodity for another," mid-15c., apparently from Old French barater "to barter, cheat, deceive, haggle", 12c., which is of uncertain origin, perhaps from a Celtic language (compare Iris brath "treachery"). The connection between "trading" and "cheating" exists in several languages. 

change (v): c. 1200, chaugen, “to alter, make different, change” (transitive); early 13c. as “to substitute one for another;” mid-13c. as “to make (something) other than what it was, cause to turn or pass from one state to another;” from late 13c. as “to become different, be altered” (intransitive), from Old French changier, “to change, alter; exchange, switch,” from Late Latin cambiare, “to barter, exchange,” extended form of Latin cambire “to exchange, barter.”

exchange (v.): late 15c. (Caxton), in commerce, "to part with in return for some equivalent, transfer for a recompense, barter," from Old French eschangier  "ex-change, barter" (Modern French échanger), from Vulgar Latin *excamiare. Non-commercial sense of "to give and receive reciprocally" is from c. 1600. 

I will continue today’s post in the section just below, starting with three other citations.

*     *     *

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

                             — Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-1890)[3]

Same old, same old.

                                      — A common idiom

     “The  humble corruption” is an admirable expression, because it points out to us that there is also, to be sure, the grandiose corruption, the spectacular corruption, the chic banditry of our masters, the omnipresent corruption that offers to us from time to time a spectacle in the form of a scandal. But that is not the most important thing. What counts most, what rules the whole world of subjects, is the general consent that that’s just “how it is.” And the fact that ultimately the whole world thinks more or less that what is important is to have all the money one needs to buy whatever one wants, and that that is the unshakeable foundation of the world as it is — just that is the humble corruption. That is what we all more or less share, and to which the scandal of a memorable corruption is no more than an exception that claims to be salvific.

       — Alain Badiou[4]

The three quotations above all point in the same direction concerning how a changing of the same can — and by far most often does — occur.[5]

In our present global economic system, all that ever counts as “change” is really nothing more or other than the substitution of one entity or set entities for another, as one might exchange a Ford for a Chevrolet, one lover for another, Republicans for Democrats, one law for another, or public for private ownership of some enterprise, to offer a few examples. However much all such things may change, they all remains the very same thing at bottom.[6]

*     *     *

However, if that is all there is to change, then in the final analysis there is no real change at all. It’s always just more of the same old same old, as the above common saying has it. All that differs are at most the costumes with which what’s ex-changed  is covered over. But if that’s all there is, then no one should ever buy it. Rather, as the following old song so loudly sings, each of us may as well just roll “myself up in a big ball and die.”

*     *     *

That's life (that's life)
That's what all the people say
You're riding high in April, shot down in May
But I know I'm gonna change that tune
When I'm back on top, back on top in June

I said that's life (that's life)
And as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks
Stomping on a dream
But I don't let it, let it get me down
'Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin' around

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet
A pawn and a king
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing
Each time I find myself
Flat on my face
I pick myself up and get
Back in the race

That's life (that's life)
I tell you, I can't deny it
I thought of quitting, baby
But my heart just ain't gonna buy it
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet
A pawn and a king
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing
Each time I find myself layin'
Flat on my face
I just pick myself up and get
Back in the race

That's life (that's life)
That's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out, but my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothing shaking, come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up
In a big ball and die

My, my

                        — “That’s Life”[7]

*     *     *

Indeed, if that’s all there is, then each and all of us is already dead anyway, so what’s the difference?

Fortunately, however, that’s not “all there is.” Nor is such mere exchanging of one worthless pile of junk for another the only sense of “changing the same.” There is, rather, an altogether different sense of that same phrase, one I will explore in my next post, which I have scheduled to go up one month from now, on the first Monday of September this year[8]  entitled “Changing the Same (In the Second of Two Senses).”

[1] Which word, radically, heard and used all the way down into its own etymological roots, means precisely “originating in the root or ground.”

[2] In large part, both today’s post and its sequel will consist of just such citations — from a variety of sources, not just the OED.

[3]  Published by Karr in 1849 in Les Guêpes, a monthly journal he founded. The original French line is “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” the most common translation is what I cite above.

[4] Alain Badiou, À la recherche du réel perdu (© Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2015), p. 47, in my own freely interpretive translation. For an earlier citation from this book, see my preceding blogpost “Finding the Real,” which I posted on Monday, July 6, of this year of 2026.

[5] That is to say — if we hear the word ‘occur’ all the way down into its own etymological roots — how such a purported changing can, and so often does, “run toward” us.

[6] Namely, just more ultimately worthless junk.

[7] A popular song from the 1960s, written by Dean Kay and Kelly Godron, made most famous in a 1966 recording by Frank Sinatra.

[8] That is, on September 7, 2026.

Finding the Real

I shall borrow a quote from one of my masters, Jacques Lacan, who — never one to beat around the bush — offered a direct definition of the real, a bit of a sly one, which is: the real is the dead-end of formalization.                                                                                                                                                —  Alain Badiou[*] 

The above citation is the opening paragraph of the second of three parts of a very short book the important contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (born 1937) first published just eleven years ago and entitled À la recherche du réel perdu. That title itself alludes to the title of the famous seven-volume magnum opus by Marcel Proust (1871-1922), À la recherche du temps perdu. The most read English translation of Proust’s great work is called In Search of Lost Time, in resonance with which I will translate the title of Badiou’s as In Search of Lost Reality.  

Throughout his entire career as a philosopher, Badiou has self-identified as a Platonist, and as a Platonist he frequently makes use of Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” in Book 7 of  The Republic, Plato’s most widely read Socratic dialogue. In his allegory, Plato has Socrates depict humanity as lost amidst illusions. In fact, the dialogue depicts all us humans as lost in what are in truth no more than illusions of the second order, as it were:   illusions of illusions,  mere images of images.  If we use the definition of “reality” that Badiou cites from Lacan in the lines with which I began this post, we could well say that Plato depicts us all as lost amidst mere “formalizations of formalizations.”  

Alain Badiou 

*     *     *

What is more, as Badiou himself discusses in a number of his own works, our contemporary hierarchical global techno-scientific capitalist pseudo-society casts us ever deeper and deeper into a cave such as Plato depicts in his allegory.  Indeed, our false simulacrum of a society more and more tightly wraps us all in chains, not allowing us any freedom to cast our eyes around us. We are all thus cast, just as are the prisoners at the bottom of Plato’s cave, in chains in such a way that we cannot look anywhere but straight ahead — that is, toward the mere images of images that the forces which enchain us present to us as reality itself.

In such chains our global techno-scientific, capitalist, false society ever more tightly enchains us all, including those within that same pseudo-society who are assigned the task of further enchaining the rest of us. By all its techno-scientific inventions such as “Artificial Intelligence”[†] and the very computers that use AI, our global system today enchains us all — including all the inventors of such inventions — ever more tightly. By constantly casting and recasting illusory formalizations of formalizations around us all, our current pseudo-society in truth distances us all ever further from reality itself.

I address just that issue in the citation below, with which I will end this current section of today’s post. That citation comes from After Postmodernity : The Impotence of the Modern[‡] a book of my own that I published at the beginning of the current century, the main contents of which are the original English versions of four lectures on “postmodern” philosophy that I gave by invitation at Renmin University (Peoples University) in Beijing, China, in the fall of 1998.

After my fourth and final lecture I delivered what I entitled “Concluding Remarks to the Series of Four Lectures: Writing the Rules for ‘What Will Have Been Done’,” the first  paragraph of which follows immediately below. With that paragraph I will now conclude this section of today’s post.  

     Especially as it has come to be today, at the end of the twentieth century by Western reckoning, the story Western modernity is inseparable from the story of the rise to hegemony of science and technology. The modern West, which is to say Western modernity, was born of the compulsion to establish man's ([…]I use the masculine form intentionally) dominion and control over nature. As is the way of compulsions, that compulsion progressively drove out or marginalized all other concerns, until today it stands as the singularly definitive drive and desire of the entire West, even if the West at issue now extends to cover the entire globe, including us here this afternoon at the People's University in Beijing. Today, the compulsion to dominate and control nature has become the dominant compulsion of the global market, as it is called. The "technological imperative" of “performativity" […] has become the despotic rule to which human life everywhere is in process of being subjected. In short, the compulsive desire to dominate and control nature, an in principle insatiable desire (that's what makes it compulsive, of course), has replaced nature itself as what dominates and controls human existence.[§]

*     *     *[**]

The truth is that we are all radically dispossessed of any true contact with genuine reality. However, it should never be forgotten that such common human dispossession weighs more heavily on some of us than on others. It weighs — still  even after years of feminist protest and action — more heavily on women in our society than it does on men, for example. It also weighs far more heavily on members of ethnic minorities of human populations than it does on members of the dominant majorities. So, too, does it weigh far more heavily on gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersexual, queer, asexual, and transgender individuals than it does on those who are cisgender.

The daily suffering of all of those subsections of societies today is far greater than that of those in dominant classes. Nevertheless, it is not only oppressed minorities in our pseudo-society who are dispossessed. So, too, are the majorities who oppress those minorities. All of us alike are dispossessed, regardless whether we belong to some oppressed segment of the population or to the oppressive segment thereof  — as I, a white cisgender male, do.

Marx and Engels long ago realized the essence of that point clearly when they argued that the oppressed, by their own liberation, would also effect the liberation of the oppressors. That is true only because we all — oppressed and oppressors alike — share the same underlying common human dispossession. That is also why psychoanalysts such as Eric Fromm and, above all, Frantz Fanon — both of whom belonged among the oppressed, Fromm as a Jew and Fanon as a Black — argued that universal human liberation can only occur with the help such aid as psychoanalysis or its equivalents provide, both at the level of the individual and at the level of society.

It is not the truth of our universally shared human dispossession that is new today. That truth is not itself new at all.  It is an ancient truth, indeed, an archaic one, in the original sense of archaic.

The originary underlying truth of our universally common human dispossession is, in fact, the truth that we must first be sprung free from the illusions that blind us, before we can at last for the very first time truly be given ourselves to be.[††] The originary underlying truth is that we are all, without exception, finally fully born only through a sort of re-birth, as Christianity puts it.

*     *     * 

Nor is it only Christianity that acknowledges that originary underlying truth. So does Buddhism, as exemplified in the teaching from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition that "Nirvana,"  the goal of all our striving, whether we know it or not, is "Samsara," the ever-on-rolling wheel of aversion and, above all, of ignorance. Nor is that originary underlying truth unacknowledged in Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, Confucianism, or "animistic" religions. What is more, it is also to be found in teachings throughout the Western philosophical tradition — seminally, precisely, in Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.”

The truth so universally if hiddenly acknowledged is, to repeat it again, that to be born human — understood "archaically," in the sense that I am using that term — is to be born enchained within delusion, and dependent on someone or something carrying to us the message that escape from our chains is possible, and showing us how to seize that possibility and actualize it.

*     *     *

To be born human is to be born archaically dispossessed of our very selves. It is in that sense always to start off as self-dispossessed. That is so even, and perhaps especially, if we are "self-dispossessed" in a second sense, namely, in the sense that it is we ourselves who effect the dispossession. When that is so, then we are “self-dispossessed” in a doublesense.

At any rate, whether we are dispossessed of by others or by our own selves, the first step toward overcoming our common human dispossession and acquiring thereby the possibility of finally becoming who we really are, is becoming aware of our dispossession itself. To overcome that dispossession, we must unchain ourselves.

*     *     *

Either we humans may arrive at a place where what is more essentially reveals itself to us, but at first we are not yet capable of comprehending what thus reveals itself; or we may fall away from the stance of such essential knowledge and be cast back into the domain of common actuality, but without being able to accept what is customary and practiced therein as the truly real.                                — Martin Heidegger[‡‡]

The citation just above from Heidegger strikes me as an appropriate way to bring this entire post, which I’ve entitled “Finding the Real,” to a conclusion. Therefore, I hereby end today’s so-entitled post.

[*] Alain Badiou, À la recherche du réel perdu (© Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2015), p. 28, in my own free translation.

[†] To use that oxymoron!

[‡] (© Frank Seeburger, 2021). Those lectures were originally published as a book in Chinese a few months after I first delivered them.

[§] Ibid., p. 138.

[**] This entire preceding section as well as the following one of today’s post are slightly edited versions of part of what I wrote in 2020 as an “Afterword” for a new publication of the Chinese version of my Beijing lectures, and which I then included in my own 2021 English publication of those same lectures (ibid.).

[††] Concerning which see my preceding two-part post: “The Call to Become Ourselves.”

[‡‡] Heidegger, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit,“ a lecture-series first delivered in 1931-32, and later included as one of the pieces in Wegmarken, available as vol. 9 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (© Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), p. 216 (in my own free and interpretive translation.)

Hiking the Trail Home

     [. . .]It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.    

How wild it was, to let it be. [*]

Those are the closing lines of Wild, an autobiographical book by Cheryl Strayed that I read earlier this year. First published in 2012, that book rose to the number 1 status on the New York Times best-seller list, and was also chosen as the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.

The story Strayed tells in Wild details how in 1995 she hiked alone along the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert in southern California, all the way north to the Bridge of the Gods in Cascade Locks, Oregon. That is a total distance of approximately 1,100 miles.

She began her walk in early June of that year, shortly after she had divorced her first husband — Marco Littig, whom she married in 1988 — and changed her last name to “Strayed,” the sound and sense of which she liked and identified with herself. Her long hike did not end until mid-September of 1995, 94 days after it had begun.

Strayed was born on September 17, 1968, so she was 26 during her long and arduous walk of such great distance along the Pacific Coast Trail. Four years earlier, when Strayed was 22, her mother, Bobbi Lambrecht, had died of lung cancer.  As Cheryl walked the PCT she carried along with her all of her own trauma surrounding her mother’s death, her divorce from Marco Littig, and other troubling events in her life from her birth on. She recounts that entire story of her confrontation with her own trauma in Wild.  

Cheryl Strayed in 2012

*     *     *

Christian scripture’s Gospel According to John, chapter 20, versus 24-29, recounts how “Doubting Thomas” had his doubt about the resurrection of Jesus removed, not by denying or rejecting that doubt, but by following Jesus’ directions and putting his hand in the open wound in Christ’s own traumatized side. Only because that wound remained open was it able to serve in that way to remove all of Thomas’s doubt.

That Biblical story long ago taught me the truth about trauma as such.  That truth is  that one recovers from trauma not by running from it and repressing it. Rather, one recovers from trauma by facing it squarely, and letting one’s traumatic wound remain open until it closes truly and fully by itself.

Accordingly, I gave a book of my own about trauma that I published over fourteen years ago the main title of The Open Wound.[†]

*     *     *

     [. . .] Ever since the idea of living in Portland had settled in my mind, I’d spent hours imagining how it would feel to be back in the world where food and music, wine and coffee could be had.

Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I didn’t want it. Maybe I never really had. I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.                                                                                                      

That citation is from the second page of the penultimate chapter of Wild.[‡] It describes what Cheryl Strayed experienced as she neared the end of her long hike along the Pacific Crest Trail  on the northern edge of Oregon, not far from Portland, where she soon thereafter went to live. As her journey itself made clear to her, and as she expresses directly in the citation above, what she had all along truly, without realizing it until the very end of her journey, been searching for throughout her long, 1,100 mile hike was not “a way out.” As she says above, the truth that eventually came to her was that in her long walk she was not in search of “a way out” as heroin or other such addictive substances appear to offer, but rather of “a way in.”

A way out of what, as opposed to a way in, to what? Wild as a whole makes clear to me that the answer to that question is “a way out” of the pseudo-life that our global capitalist techno-scientific system keeps telling us is “all there is,”[§] and “a way in” to a real, authentic life at last.  

[*] Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (©Cheryl Strayed, 2012) p. 311. In 2014 the book was also made into the movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, which I watched while I was still reading Strayed’s book.

[†] Frank Seeburger, The Open Wound: Trauma, Identity, and Community (© Frank Seeburger, 2012).

[‡]Ibid., p. 290.

[§] To borrow a line from the old song “Is That All There Is?”

The Call to Become Ourselves (Part Two)

If at the end of the week the worker had enough left to enable him to forget the hell he lived in for a few hours by getting drunk on bad liquor, it was the most he could achieve. The inevitable consequence of such a state of affairs was an enormous increase in prostitution, drunkenness and crime. The utter wretchedness of mankind dawns on one when he reads of the spiritual degradation and moral depravity of those masses whom no one pitied.

                                                                     — Rudolf Rocker[1]

Rudolf Rocker was born in Germany in 1873 and grew up to become an anarcho-syndicalist, as indicated by the man title of the famous short work from which I have taken the above citation. When the Nazis came to power early in the 1930s, he wisely moved from Germany to the United States. He eventually died in Mohegan Colony,[2]New York, in 1958 at the age of 85.

What Rocker says in the above citation concerns the “wage-slavery”[3] that began to characterize workers — and to terrorize them, to put the point very appropriately — according to the dictates of the corporate capitalism that arose with the coming of the so-called First Industrial Revolution, which took place from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries CE. Just such terrorizing and enslaving confinement to industrial labor was eventually globalized and — despite the proliferation of superficial appearances to the contrary — greatly worsened with the coming and spread of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, from roughly 1870 to 1914. That second “revolution” is also, and indeed far more accurately, known as the Technological Revolution, since it was precisely the development and proliferation of varied forms of technology that engendered and sustained it.

When faced with what faces us today in the present age, when the Technological Revolution continues all too much to revolve, it is no wonder that ever-growing numbers of people become addicts. After all, as the famous song of the 1960s “Is That All There Is?” attests, if that’s all there is, then we all just may as well stay addicted, if we already are, or get addicted, if we’re not yet.  

  *     *     *

     [. . .] I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to the increased enjoyment of life.       Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

                                                         — William S. Burroughs[4]

The American author and artist William S. Burroughs was one of the three founders of the Beat Generation, the other two being the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack Kerouac. Burroughs was heavily addicted to heroin, which is colloquially known as “junk.” In the same way that, as Burroughs observes in the above lines, “junk” is not, for “junkies,”  just a “kick,” but is instead an entire “way of life,” just so is that true for all addicts. Whatever one becomes addicted to — or, to speak more properly and truly, to which one addicts oneself — indulging in that to which one is addicted is not for addict the pursuit of any mere “kick,” but is instead the addict’s very “way of life.”

As I personally have often enough explicitly pointed out,[5] the very word addicted, heard down into its etymological roots, means “spoken over to.” Ultimately, the English word addicted derives from the Latin addictus, which was a legal term from the days of the Roman Republic referring to a debtor formally spoken over to their creditor.[6] During the days of the ancient Roman Republic in the 5th to 1st centuries BCE, “addicts” were people who, by formal judgment of a duly constituted legal authority, had been  so spoken-over to the jurisdiction of some other person, such as a Lord or other member of the royal class.

Once such formal legal indenturing processes had ceased, however, addiction itself continued. At that point, however, addiction became a matter of one speaking oneself over to some substance or process, just as the quotation from Rudolf Rocker with which I began this current post articulates. Indeed, after the coming of the First Industrial Revolution in the 18th-19th centuries CE, those who had no other option for survival than to become what Marxists have long called “wage-slaves,” were often reduced, for sheer relief, to addicting themselves to a variety of what I myself have long called “objects of addiction.” By that phrase I mean whatever it is to which addicts have spoken themselves over — regardless of whether those “objects” be substances of one sort or another, such as alcohol, heroin, marijuana, or the like, or practices of some sort, such as engaging in sex, over-eating, swearing, jaywalking,[7] or whatever.  

‍ ‍ William S. Burroughs, 1983

*     *     *

     His craving for alcohol was an equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. 

                                                                       — Carl G. Jung[8]

What all addictions without exception offer to those who become addicted is a way out, a way of escape — escape from the mere pseudo-life that our modern global capitalist system presents to us all as though it were “the real thing.” In truth, however, what our current global system presents to us as life is in reality nothing but a sort of walking-death.

What addicting oneself to some substance or process ultimately expresses is the yearning for a genuine way of entry into full and genuine life itself at last. Addiction, when understood properly, expresses the addict’s yearning to become  genuinely alive — the yearning to come at last to live life authentically, and in doing so to at last heed the call Nietzsche attributes to conscience in the lines with which I opened the first part of this two-part blogpost, the call to “become who you are.”

Once one does at long last become who one authentically is, all sense of need to escape the pseudo-life of the false, egoistic, in-authentic self — which our dominant coercive power system falsely presents us as being who and all we ever are — vanishes. Along with that vanishing of all such sense of a need to escape, so too vanishes the appeal of addiction, the appeal of offering one to just such an escape.

When that occurs, addiction itself at last reveals its own fullest and profoundest truth — the truth that every addict’s addiction itself is a wandering in the wilderness as the Israelites did. Addicts so wander until they finally reach addiction’s own ultimate goal: the break-down point of inauthentic life, the very point where a break-through into authentic existence at last becomes truly possible.

Thus does the addict heed the call that Nietzsche presents as the call of conscience.

*     *     * 

Addiction is one way of wandering in heed of that call, but it is not the only way. One can be given eyes to see by wandering along other paths than that of addiction. What counts is simply to keep on wandering, going in whichever direction of hears oneself called to go, step by step, moment to moment. So heeding conscience’s call, each one of us thus wandering along the way that each of us is individually given, eventually brings each and all of us at last to becoming whoever we truly are.  

*     *     *

In turn, in making just that very observation, I find myself brought at last almost to the end of this current wandering post — 

But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:
     Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
     "To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth ——
     "— Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, towards which the conscience of the world is tending — a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”

                                                     ― Thomas Wolfe[9]

[1] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice, trans. Ray E. Chase (London: Seeker and Warburg Ltd., 1938;  reprint Cleveland, OH, 2026), p. 25, describing conditions in Europe after the Industrial Revolution.

[2] An intentionally formed community based at Lake Mohegan in Westchester County, New York, that lasted from its foundation in 1923 to the 1950s.

[3] To borrow a term from Marx and Engels.

[4] William S. Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin Book, 1953), p. xvi.

[5] Most especially in Addiction and Responsibility: An Inquiry Into the Addictive Mind   (©Francis F. Seeburger, 1993), the second book I ever published.

[6] The Latin term addictus is derived from ad-, “to, or toward,” plus dictus, the perfect passive participle form of the verb dicere, “to speak.”

[7] I have borrowed the idea of an addiction to jaywalking from a passage in the book Alcoholics Anonymous (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1939, 1955, 1976, 2001), a passage to be found on pp. 37-38 in all four of the editions to date of that book, which in AA is usually referred to simply as The Big Book — the reason for which I will let my readers themselves inquire online or of AA sources in their area.

[8] From a letter Jung wrote to Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, in 1961, in response to a letter Wilson had written to him. In the lines above Jung is speaking of one of his patients who was addicted to alcohol. Jung’s letter can be found on pages 280-281 of The Language of the Heart: Bill W.’s Grapevine Writings (New York: AA Grapevine, Inc., 1988).

[9] Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (© New York and London: Harper and Row, 1940), the closing lines of the book.

The Call to Become Ourselves (Part One)

NOTE TO MY READERS: This is my first post in a year. At the bottom of that previous post, which went up on Monday, April 28, 2025, I wrote I’d no longer put up posts at regular intervals, but only “if and when time and the sprit move me to do so.” Since then, I’ve been busy for the last year writing a book I’ve entitled Answering the Call of Thought: A Memoir of My Vocation Into and Beyond Philosophy, which is currently being professionally edited for publication. Now that I have finished writing that memoir, I do finally have the time to write a new post — and the spirit has indeed moved me to write a two-parter, with ”Part One” posted today and “Part Two” to be posted next Monday, May 4, 2026.

What does your conscience say? “You should become who you are.”                                                                   — Friedrich Nietzsche[*]

In the citation from Nietzsche above, that author himself cites conscience. Conscience, as Nietzsche thus tellingly cites it, calls us all to become our very selves.

It makes no sense to issue such a call unless we are not always already whoever we are. If the call of our consciences to become who we are does make sense, it is only because we don’t start out already being whoever we are. Rather, we must expend great time and effort to heed conscience’s call, and by so heeding that call eventually succeed in our ever-ongoing effort to reach that very goal and thereby at last for the very first time come truly and fully to be whoever we are.

Truly to discover who we really are, and then to lay claim to ownership of our own very selves, we must put forth and sustain a long and arduous effort to find those very selves. Till we make such a search, our very selves themselves remain altogether hidden from us.

To accomplish that very task, the task of finding out at last just who we really are, takes a long time, and requires lengthy wandering along the pathways of the lives we find ourselves living — those lives we, each and every one of us, have been given to live, as fully,  deeply, and authentically as we are all able to live them. It is conscience’s call upon us to become ourselves, that first and last gives us that ability. Put just a bit differently, it is hearing and heeding, as best we can moment by moment, that very call itself that en-ables — from en-  "make, put in" + able “capable, fitting, apt” — truly and fully to “become ourselves” at long last.

So becoming ourselves is no simple matter. Not is it something that any of us can possibly fully accomplish, to be honest, in any amount of time short of an entire life-time. We cannot accomplish it in any time short of a life-time, no matter how hard we try to accomplish it. It is in that sense altogether beyond our own power to accomplish it at all.

In those very ways, we are just like the ancient Israelites, as I will explore in more detail in the immediately following section of today’s post.

Friedrich Nietzsche

*     *     *

Human beings wander. Human beings don’t at some point first begin to wander. They are always already wandering […].                                                — Martin Heidegger[†]

According to Hebraic scriptures, it took the ancient Israelites a full forty years of aimless wandering in the desert wastelands of the Near East before they at last found their way home, to the place where they had always belonged, and in  coming to which at last they could finally and fully become themselves. Their story[‡] speaks the truth of how anyone and everyone must answer the call that conscience — at least according to Nietzsche, as I cited him writing at the very beginning of this post — addresses to us all, the very call to become who we are.

We are all, without exception, born wandering, just as Heidegger remarks in the citation from him with which I opened this present section of today’s post. In that sense, we are all no different from the Biblical Israelites, regardless of our specific nationality, our religious heritage, or in what region of the earth we find ourselves wandering, always  underway to ourselves.

What is more, so long as we continue to wander in search of our own “promised land,” we are also just like the Israelites of Hebrew scripture in another way. That is, we will all eventually, no matter how long our own “forty years” may take to expire, find our way home, to where we have always belonged.

Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness are traditionally given as occurring sometime around the 15th to 13th centuries BCE. Thousands of years later, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the great British 19th century CE poet, wrote these wonderful, wonder-filled lines in one of her poems:

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, — The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, And daub their natural faces unaware.[§]

Let us all pray, both together and separately,  that we may all, each and every one of us, be given eyes to see the truth that all bushes are always burning, and may we all thereby be given at last sense enough to take off our shoes. After all, when our prayer is answered, we will at last see and understand that all along we have indeed been standing — and walking — on holy ground!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[*]Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Aphorismus 270 (my translation).

[†] Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit“ (“On the Essence of Truth”) in Wegmarken: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), p. 196, my translation.

[‡] And it is just that, a “story,” precisely in the sense of being a “fiction” — which is to say something “made up,” given that the word fiction is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *dheigh- “to form, build.” As William Faukner knew and said, a well-crafted “fiction,” a made-up story of the very sort that is the telling of Israel’s wandering in the desert for forty-years before coming to “the promised land,” speaks more genuine truth than does even the most accurate “journalistic account.”

[§] Aurora Leigh, Book Seven (1856).

Choosing to Wait (My Delayed Response to a Friend)

A bit over half a year ago now, on October 14 of 2024, I put up on this blog-site my post “The Choice to Choose.” Once he had read that post, a friend of mine asked me a question about it. He asked me if what I said in that post entailed that it was always the case that one should make a choice immediately when one is faced with options. I replied that there were often cases in which one needed to wait until the right way to go became clear, before one chose to go any given way.

That is, my reply to my friend’s question was that there were often moments in one’s life when precisely the right choice to make at that very moment was the choice to wait for the situation further to clarity itself.  In other words, I replied to him that there were times when choosing to wait was precisely the right choice for one to make at that time.

Hence the first, main part of the title I have chosen to give today’s post: “Choosing to Wait.”

As for the parenthetical subtitle I have chosen to give this same post, what I have to say in the next section of this current post will explain that, as readers patient enough to wait until they have read that section attentively will eventually discern.

*     *     *

Two weeks and six days after my post “The Choice to Choose” first went up on this blog-site, I was taking my normal early-morning shower when, unexpectedly, my friend’s question about that post and my response came back into my mind. Immediately thereafter the thought came to me that I might want to write a post entitled something such as “Waiting to Choose.”

I heard and harkened to the voice of that thought. Accordingly, after I finished my shower, followed right after by my regular breakfast, I began to compose this current post. As I was doing that, another thought soon came to me. This time it was the thought to dedicate this very post to that friend the thought of whose question and my response to it had come to my mind during my shower. And then the further thought came to my mind that I could simply indicate that dedication by way of a parenthetical subtitle to the post I had just begun to write.

With no wait at all, I did just that. The situation demanded no further clarification.

 *     *     *

Nor did I have the slightest hesitancy about deciding just when I should put up this current blogpost. I knew immediately that I should post it on today’s date of April 28, 2025, which is a bit more than six months delay from when the idea for this post first came to me during my morning shower.

That immediate certainty was there for me because I had already written and scheduled all of the posts that have been posted on this blogsite since that morning of November 3 , 2024, when the idea for today’s post first came to me during my daily shower. The next available upcoming date for putting up this current post — if I posted it, as I fully and immediately intended to do, only after all my already written posts had gone up — was today.

*     *     *

However, there was nevertheless one uncertainty left.

That remaining uncertainty was about whether to announce that, after this current post, I would post no more in accordance with what has long been my customary schedule for posting on this blog, but rather that I would put up a new post only when time and spirit moved me to compose one and make it available.

My posting schedule for years now has been to put up a post on the second and fourth Mondays of each month between my birthday on January 1 and Memorial Day on the last Monday in May, and then again on the second and fourth Mondays between Labor Day in September and Thanksgiving Day in November.  My remaining uncertainty simply concerned whether I should continue to follow that schedule or not.

Well, that single remaining uncertainly about today’s post no longer remains. Therefore I will end this post with the following announcement:

NOTE TO MY REGULAR READERS: After today’s post, I will post again on this blog only if and when time and spirit move me to do so. Thank you all for your attentive readership over the years!  

Erotic Friendship

Eroticism is one thing. Possessiveness is another thing altogether. Any admixture of the latter utterly corrupts the former. “Possessive eroticism” is an oxymoron.

In this post, I will attempt to explain the great — indeed, defining — difference between the two, the erotic and the possessive. I may not use those exact terms in what follows, but if you as readers give the matter due thought as you read, you will discern the relevance of what I do say to that distinction.

*     *     *

In Jesus, the power of God is the power of love, of bearing fruit in another’s life. Judge them by their fruits [see Matthew 7:16-20]. That is, so far as they are fruitful they share in the power of God and the life of God. He who abides in me is the one who bears much fruit [see John 15:5]. This bearing fruit in the lives of others constitutes the essential identity and being of men in the kingdom of God. I am what I generate in another. My giving is my being. Thus arises the conflict between Jesus and the world, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil. For in this world, identity consists in being able to draw a circle around some bit of reality and possess that bit of reality as your own and no one else’s.[1] 

Arthur C. McGill was born in Canada in 1926 but became a Congregational Christian minister as well as an academic theologian and philosopher in the United States, where he died in 1980. It was only after his death that appreciation and fame for his work deepened greatly and spread widely.

The passage above is from a sermon McGill entitled “The Ascension,” which he delivered at St. John’s College in Cambridge, England on May 18, 1969. In that passage McGill points to the unbridgeable gap that separates the being of the human being who has come to dwell in  “the kingdom of God”  from the being of the same human being who has fallen into “the kingdom of evil.”  

In one line of what I’ve quoted above from McGill, he cites verse 5 of chapter 15 in the New Testament Gospel according to John. In the New International Version and various other translations that verse reads as follows: "I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing."

To expand upon what is at issue in that verse and to end this first section of today’s post I will offer another translation of something also attributed to John. This time, however, it comes from one of his  “letters” rather than from his “Gospel”:

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.                                                                          — 1 John 4:16-18 (NIV)

*     *     * 

In the ancient Greek language used by such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle who lived during the same broad era that koine (“common” Greek) was widely spoken in the lands of the Near East and used in the writing of the Christian “New Testament,” there were four different terms that are typically translated by “love.” Those four are eros, philia, storge, and agape.

Besides “love,” each of those four classical Greek terms has other common translations. Eros is commonly taken to mean “to be in love with, to desire passionately.” Philia is taken to mean “friendship or affection for.” Storge is regarded as the sort of “familial love” that parents have for their children, children for their parents, or siblings for one another. Finally, agape is taken to be “disinterested or selfless unconditional regard for.”

Commonly in occidental or “Western” literature, those are taken to be four distinct and typically incompatible sorts of love. Most pointedly, in such literature it is common to distinguish sharply between eros and the other three.

In most interpretation of Christian thought and scripture, for example, a sharp distinction is drawn between eros and agape. The former is taken to be anything but “disinterested.” Rather, is almost always equated with a love that is deeply “interested” — what is more, interested precisely in a sexual way.

That, however, is at best an arbitrary limitation. It is itself no more than a sexually fixated interpretation of the truly erotic. In truth, eros is far more than that.

The Eros Farnese, a Pompeiian marble statue thought to be a copy of the colossal Eros of Thespiae by Praxiteles, Attic sculptor of the 4th century BCE 

*     *     * 

In his dialogue The Symposium Plato depicts a banquet at which occurs a friendly exchange of extemporary addresses between a number of noted Athenians, including Plato’s great teacher, Socrates. The Greek general and statesman Alcibiades and the famous comic playwright Aristophanes both speak before Socrates, who delivers the final oration. The topic agreed upon for all the speaches is the nature of  “love” in the sense of eros.

Anyone who has not read Plato’s Symposium should read it. Anyone who has read it should read it again. Anything worth reading, after all, is worth reading over and over again and again, as time and the spirit move one.

Anyone who reads or rereads The Symposium will read how, in Plato’s rendering of Socrates’ speech, the latter attributes what he has to say about love to the woman  philosopher Diotima of Mantinea. It was she, Socrates asserts, who taught him the true nature of Eros, the god of love — most especially about the nature of the gift of love that Eros shoots into humans with his arrows from his bow.

Diotima agrees that eros is indeed a desirous striving after the beloved. What is more, says Diotima as Socrates presents her, what eros loves and stives desirously for is the beautiful.[2] More specifically, eros is that love which desires, she says, “to beget in the beautiful.”

*     *     *

I have added the emphasis to the word beget in what I have just cited at the end of the preceding section, because the crux of what I really have to say in this post myself is that the “begetting” at issue in eros may indeed be the bringing forth of physical children — as it is whenever that begetting involves sexual union — but it does not have to be so. There are, it is important to know, many, many other ways of begetting besides sexual acts, and many, many other types of what is begotten besides the children brought forth through such sexual union.

What it is that eros desires to beget in the beauty to which it finds itself compellingly attracted might also be no more and no less than thought for example.

*     *     *

In truth, it is in just such non-sexual cases that eros stands revealed in its relationship to philia, that “friendship towards” or “affection for” whomever or whatever one affectionately befriends. That is precisely why and how there can be, and with great frequency are, many “erotic friendships” to borrow from my title for today’s post.

*     *     *

May that thought itself beget ever more thought in you, my dearest readers and friends — toward all of whom I feel the greatest erotic attraction! 

[1] Arthur C. McGill, Theological Fascinations: Volume One, a collection of sermons by McGill edited by David Cain (Eugene: Oregon: Cascade Books, a division of Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007), p. 119.

[2] I will leave it to readers to read—or read again—the account of beauty in the Symposium. I also invite those same readers or re-readers to consider carefully what I say about beauty in my post “Dread and Astonishment,” which I posted on this site on a little less than one year ago, on April 22, 2024.

Uprooting Ourselves

Israel in exile is in statu nascendi,[1] a situation which is parallel to their wanderings in the wilderness. The Exile is the wilderness of the nations, where there is no sense of being rooted to the land or any adherence to a state. [. . .] Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, is convinced that putting down roots in the state and in the earth was misguided. Therefore, he completely uproots the tree of the nation from the old earthly kingdom and — in a monstrous inversion of the laws of natural growth — replants it with roots pointing upward. [. . .]

But it is incorrect to rank the Jewish nation in Exile as an exception. It is true that the Jews in Exile are a nation without land, but — and this is the decisive factor — they are surrounded by nations in a similar position. Exile is not just the fate of the Jews but of the whole Aramaic world. [. . .] The Aramaic nations were unable to put down earthly roots, but had to anchor themselves spiritually. The Jewish synagogue is only one of the national churches in the Aramaic region which is a home for the nation. The church-based nations of the Aramaic world are united in their faith. God is no longer revered as the Baal of a particular place; rather, everywhere that believers assemble in “synagogues” is home. In the Aramaic region, the criterion for belonging to a particular homeland is one of faith. [. . .] Apocalypticism is a phenomenon of the people and becomes in many of its features the common spiritual heritage of the whole Aramaic Orient. Apocalyptic literature is written to awaken mind and spirit, regardless of divisions. While the canonical scriptures of individual church nations are national, the apocalyptic writings are literally international. They encapsulate everything which makes feelings run high

The above passage is from Occidental Eschatology.[2] That is the title of the English translation of Abendländische Eschatologie, the doctoral dissertation of Jacob Taubes (1923-1987). Taubes was born in Vienna to a Jewish rabbinical family, and was himself ordained a Jewish rabbi in 1943, when he was only twenty. Three years later, in 1946, he earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with the full manuscript of his dissertation, a greatly shortened version of which was published in the original German version in 1947. The citation above comes from the English translation of that shortened text, which translation was published more than sixty years after the German original.

Taubes and his Jewish family themselves left Austria in 1937, in effect exiling themselves to Zurich in neighboring Switzerland, when Jacob’s father was appointed chief rabbi there. That was the year before the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria into Germany, and the Taubes’ move allowed them to survive the Nazi onslaught against the Jews.

Jacob himself was appointed a rabbi in 1943, four years before the original publication of his doctoral dissertation. A year after that publication, he moved to the United States to take up a position offered him at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He eventually also taught in Jerusalem, then back in the U.S. at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. He died in Berlin, Germany, in 1987, at 64 years of age.

The story of his life is itself a story of being uprooted, but also sending his own roots upward, above earth and into heaven, to speak as the passage above says, and as Ezekiel also already said long ago.

Jacob Tauber

*     *     *

What Taubes observes and also attributes to Ezekiel is that the members of the Jewish nation throughout their history — and, to give two other similar examples, the indigenous nations of North and South America sent into exile by the Europeans who invaded those continents, as well as all enslaved members of the diverse African nations and their descendants  — have wandered together across countless lands, and precisely in such wandering have been heralds of a genuinely universal international community of all communities, as it were. Sent into the wilderness to wander their way in exile, such nations are already now the coming of that very “eschatological” community of us all: all us humans together, each for each and all for all.

That apocalyptic — which word in its own etymological roots just means “revelatory” — moment when the time of the clock itself ends and an altogether different time begins has already happened. Indeed, it has already happened, is still happening now, and will happen again, time after time forever more. It has happened, is now happening, and will happen again to us all, which demonstrates that, whether we know it ourselves yet or not, we human beings are all exiles.

By being uprooted and living one day at a time as uprooted and in our uprootedness, all of us exiles are wandering together in the wilderness. Let us all pray to be given eyes to see that in our universally shared exile we are all rooting ourselves no longer by sending our roots to entangle with one another below ground, but rather by sending those roots up above us, into heaven, to entangle us all with one another on earth, under heaven, and before the divine (to borrow a formulation from Heidegger).

What a deal for a bunch of “us”!

*     *     *

As attentive readers of this blog will already have heard in attentively reading today’s post from its very beginning, the title of this post is ambiguous. Such attentive readers will already know very well how I like to make many of my titles ambiguous in just that way.

On the one hand, “uprooting ourselves” can mean pulling up and out our very roots. On the other hand, “uprooting ourselves” can mean rooting ourselves upward, ethereally,  into heaven.

Those same attentive readers will understand, as well, why I followed up my preceding post entitled “Resurrection Now!” with this one, entitled “Uprooting Ourselves.” They will also understand why I have entitled my next post to come “Erotic Friendship.” Indeed, they will already understand how — and where — all three posts entwine their roots together.   

[1] In statu nascendi means “in the state of being born.”

[2] Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated by David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009),  pp. 24-26.