…All knowledge is sustained by a ‘ground’ of postulates and finally by our communication with the world as primary embodiment of rationality. Philosophy, as radical reflection, dispenses in principle with this resource. As, however, it too is in history, it too exploits the world and constituted reason. It too must put to itself the question which it puts to all branches of knowledge, and so duplicate itself infinitely, being, as Husserl says, a dialogue or infinite meditation, and, in so far as it remains faithful to its intention, never knowing where it is going…

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

The philosopher necessarily requires an individual resolve which, originally and as such, makes him a philosopher, an original self-causation, as it were, which is an original act of self-creation. No one can simply fall into philosophy.

Edmund Husserl, quoted in 
Conversations with Husserl and Fink by Dorian Cairns

§0. Haunted by a sentence

There is a sentence that has followed me for as long as I have been doing this. Maybe it has followed me the way a dog follows, not aggressively, not demanding anything immediately, but present, patient, entirely unwilling to be left behind. Augustine of Hippo writes, near the opening of the Confessions, that long prayer of shared self-reflection addressed ostensibly to God but actually to every human being who has ever found themselves seething after the wrong things: fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. (“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”)

I want to be honest with you about what that sentence does to me, Diego. I do not read it as a piece of Christian theology first. I read it as an existential investigation that possibly reveals the most compressed and accurate phenomenological report in the Western tradition. Not because I am interested in smuggling Augustine into a secular framework and calling it philosophy (that would be sloppy in both directions), but because what he is describing is a structural feature of human desiring that Husserl will not get around to naming with comparable precision until fifteen hundred years later, and even then, only in fragments. The heart is restless. Not occasionally restless. Not restless until it is sufficiently distracted. Structurally, constitutively, ontologically restless until something happens that is not a further object of desire but a transformation of the how to desire itself.

Notice what Merleau-Ponty says philosophy is doing when it is faithful to its intention: duplicating itself infinitely, never knowing where it is going. Augustine’s cor inquietum is the living of that condition before it becomes a philosophical thesis. The restlessness is not the problem to be solved. It is the infinite meditation already underway in every human heart that has not yet been fully anesthetized. The previous note traced the shape of diligo: the deliberate, discerning love as reading^[1] that Augustine names as the ground of genuine action. 

Herein I want to trace the path that makes that love possible. Because dilige is not the starting point. The starting point is always already the restlessness. The starting point is always already the seething.

I. Cupiditas

Call the seething by its right name: Cupiditas. From cupere (to desire, to long for)  from the root that gives us vapor, the word for what rises when something is heated from beneath. The contemporary form of cupiditas is not dramatic. It does not announce itself as avarice or lust. It is quieter than that and therefore more thoroughgoing: the ambient assumption that more is better, that the next acquisition will complete what the last one promised and failed to deliver, that the self is a project of optimization rather than a site of encounter. This is the particular pathology of the age into which we find ourselves thrown. Not the flamboyant greed of obvious villains, but the low-grade, normalized, algorithmically-reinforced conviction that desire is for having, for possessing.

Augustine knew something about this. He spent considerable years in this having, and he was by his own account very good at it. The Confessions are not the testimony of someone who found crass materialism unsatisfying from the outside. They are the testimony of someone who pursued it with full commitment and found it unsatisfying from within; then, the adult man had the philosophical honesty to ask what that dissatisfaction was actually pointing toward. The restlessness, he discovered, is not a symptom of insufficient accumulation. The restlessness is a direction. It is the heart’s constitutive orientation toward something that no finite object can fully house.

This is philosophy as Merleau-Ponty describes it: already in history, already exploiting the world and constituted reason, unable to stand outside the ground it is questioning. Augustine cannot step outside his cupiditas to examine it from a position of pure detachment. Neither can you. Neither can I. The examination happens from within the condition, which is why Husserl’s demand for resolve is so precise and so demanding: the original act of self-creation is not performed from neutral ground. It is performed from inside the seething. The resolve is not to stop wanting. The resolve is to begin reading what the wanting is actually after.

That turning is where the path begins.

§2. Diligence of Communication

The first movement is not inward in the simple sense. Or rather, it is inward only insofar as the inward and outward movements turn out, under examination, to be variations of the same gesture. 

Diligence carries legere in its body; to read, to gather, to select from marks on a surface. Diligence of communication is the practice of reading carefully the discourse that constitutes and discloses the self: the discourse with others through every channel of genuine expression, and the discourse with the ownmost self through what Jaspers calls Existenzerhellung, or existential elucidation: the brightening of the situation, the throwing of light on what is actually happening within.

Communicare: to make common, to enter the gift-structure of shared obligation. The root munus gives us community, communion, and also immune: the one exempted from the munus, who has stepped outside the gift-economy, who neither gives nor receives. Cupiditas in its contemporary form is a structure of immunity. The consumer is the immune self: taking without entering the relation of mutual obligation, accumulating without the binding that genuine communication requires. Diligence of communication is the first transistance away from that immunity — the re-entry into the munus, the willingness to be bound by the exchange.

This is also, notice, the condition Merleau-Ponty names as philosophy’s own ground: communication with the world as primary embodiment of rationality. The very resource philosophy formally dispenses with is the resource it cannot actually do without. And neither can the path. You cannot read the restlessness in isolation. The interior discloses itself only in and through the communicative relation with others who genuinely encounter you, with texts that genuinely resist you, with the ownmost self attended to as if it were also, in some sense, an-other. The dialogue is not preliminary to the philosophical work. The dialogue is the philosophical work. Husserl knows this. Augustine’s Confessions(addressed outward, disclosing inward), enacts it on every page.

§3. Discernment of Need

Finding the means of making distinctions that clarify but do not objectify life into possessioins makes another move toward authentic discovery through judgment.  

Discernere: to sift, to separate, to perceive by distinguishing. Cernere abides at the root from whence crisis, criterion, and the Greek krinein, to judge, also arise. Discernment of need is the sifting that sustained diligent communication makes possible. The question it addresses is precise: beneath the accumulated wants, the optimized preferences, the consumable experiences—what is actually needed?

Need is a harder word than desire. Desire is easy to name because the market has already named it for us, packaged it, delivered it to our door. Need resists that packaging. Need has to do with what the Encompassing One has made us for, to put it in language that risks theology but cannot quite avoid it. Or, in the more cautious language of Jaspers: what Existenz requires in order to be genuinely transparent to itself. To discern need is to pass through the layer of cupiditasto something underneath; yet, again, not to annihilate desire but to locate its actual vector.

The crisis relation within discernment is not incidental. Every genuine discernment involves a moment of separation: the want from the need, the finite object from the infinite orientation it was mistaken for, the self-project from the becoming that was trying to happen beneath it. Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty tells us, must put to itself the question it puts to all branches of knowledge. This is that question, aimed inward: by what ground am I sustaining this particular wanting? What postulate am I refusing to examine? The sifting happens in the depths, and the depths are not comfortable. They were never meant to be.

§4. Dissolution of Attachments

Going deeper while connected to material conditions is where the need to distinguish comes to bear on the self. We are not dissolving the “ego” or the “self” per se. We seek detachment from what the having has confused for our needing. 

Dissolvere: to loosen, to release, to unbind. Not to destroy. This is critical and I want to be slow about it. Dissolution of attachments is not the elimination of caring. It is the loosening of the grip that transforms caring into clinging, love into possession, appreciation into need-for-ownership. The attachment is not the object. The attachment is the hardened structure through which the object is held.

What loosens, when attachments dissolve, is the grip of the finite object on the infinite orientation. The wanting does not stop. It clarifies. Augustine’s cor inquietum does not become placid; rather, it becomes oriented. The restlessness finds its actual direction because the false directions have been, one by one, seen through. And here is where the path performs what Merleau-Ponty describes from outside: it duplicates itself. Each attachment dissolved reveals another layer, another postulate, another constituted certainty that had been mistaken for bedrock. The dissolution is not accomplished once. It is practiced, repeatedly, along the whole length of a life — which is to say, it is itself an infinite meditation, never quite arriving at the bottom of what it is loosening. Thus, the need for resolve.

The Jasperian insistence matters here: Existenz—the actualized self, the improvised self—must remain. The irreducible selfhood that dissolution might seem to threaten is precisely what the dissolution is clearing space for. The self loosened from its cupiditas is not the self erased. It is the self available, perhaps for the first time, to genuine philosophical communication. That is, to the liebender Kampf (the loving struggle) of encounter that requires two presences fully showing-up rather than two accumulations of defended attachments talking past each other.

V. Distention of Heart

Augustine’s own word, from the eleventh book of the Confessions: distentio animi, the stretching-out of the soul across time. He means it pathologically there: the soul torn between past and future, unable to gather itself in the present, distended across the objects of its cupiditas.^[2] What I am reaching toward here is the word reclaimed, the pathology transformed: distentio not as tearing  apart but as expansion alongside.

After the grip of accumulated attachments has been loosened, something happens to the capacity for love. The heart that was clenched around its finite objects (or scattered across them, which is the same condition from the other side) opens-up. Becomes broad. Distentio in the positive register is the heart stretched wide enough to hold more than its own preoccupations, more than the self-project, more than the accumulated preferences of a consumer identity. This is what caritas produces in the one who genuinely practices it. Not romanticism. Not niceness. An actual structural enlargement of the capacity to encounter the other, the world, the Encompassing One that exceeds every finite horizon we attempt to impose on it.

The distended heart is also the heart capacious enough to live inside Merleau-Ponty’s admission without being destroyed by it. Never knowing where it is going. A contracted heart, still clutching its finite certainties, cannot bear that admission. Instead, it reads it as catastrophe, as groundlessness, as the failure of philosophy to deliver what it promised. The heart distended by caritas reads it differently: as the description of a life genuinely open to what the Encompassing One is always already doing, which is exceeding every map we draw of it. The requies Augustine finds—the rest in which the restlessness finds its home—is not the rest of having arrived. It is the rest of having become large enough to travel without needing to arrive. .

§6. Gathering the Way

Let me gather all of this, then. Not to close it; what follows is not a conclusion but a way-marker, a cairn on a path that continues past any particular essay, past any particular blog.

What I am offering to any young friend who finds themselves in possession of the restlessness and uncertain what to do with it, is this:

The resolute path of becoming throughward rambling reason:

1. Diligence of Communication.
2. Discernment of Need.
3. Dissolution of Attachments.
4. Distention of Heart.

These are not stages to be completed and left behind. They are not steps in a program. They are more like the movements of breathing: each requiring the others, each incomplete without the whole circuit. And they are resolute not in the sense of grimly determined but in the etymological sense: resolute from resolvere, to loosen again. To resolve is already to begin dissolving what was hardened. The path bears its own method in its name.

Throughward because the movement is neither transcendent escape from the world of cupiditas nor immanent capitulation to it. It passes through the fissure rather than the wall and via transistance rather than the frontal assault. You do not defeat crass materialism by renouncing the world in dramatic fashion. You move through it, reading its desires, sifting its needs, loosening its grip, expanding past its horizon.

Rambling reason because this path does not proceed by the shortest route between fixed points. It is, in Merleau-Ponty’s precise sense, faithful to its intention precisely by never knowing where it is going…  which is not the same as not knowing how to move. Vital reason, as Ortega understood it, takes its orientation from living circumstance rather than imposing a predetermined geometry on experience. The rambler finds things the straight-line traveler cannot find, because the straight-line traveler has already decided what is worth finding. Rambling reason stays open to what the path discloses. The dialogue is infinite. The meditation continues. This is not a flaw in the design. This is the design.

No one simply falls into philosophy, Husserl says. And he is right. But the resolve required is not manufactured out of nothing. It grows from the restlessness that is already there. The cor inquietum is not the obstacle to the path. It is the path’s beginning, its fuel, its most honest acknowledgment that something in us already knows we are made for more than what the market is selling.

The path is not comfortable. It was never advertised as comfortable. But it is real, and it moves, and it opens as you walk it.

And none need ever to walk it alone.

^[1] Tome et lege (“Take and read), the words Augustine heard some child saying the day of his encounter with God wherein he was overwhelmed and turned “inside out.” It very uch is all about “reading.” 

^[2] More contemporary thinkerers, like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, might identify this in the modern ailment of ressentiment, which is not mere sentiment but the capture of mind and sense by perceived slights of the past or imagined ones in the future. But the person never now, not here in the situation.