What is an identity?: On Shadows within the Moment

alt title: What does it mean to experience know?: On Particularities and Universals

My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume

• CS Peirce

If I am right and speak in accordance with the faith, I pray you to confirm me. But if you are in any point of another opinion, examine carefully what I have said, and if possible, join faith and reason

• Boëthius

Outside dogma, identity is a feeling. Within dogma, identity is a rule of law.

Conflicted, the reader may feel a criminal.

The dark forces of ignorance are kept at bay through a strong will that accommodates them for our own comfort and, where possible, for their comfort, as well.

Can a feeling be ignorant or just careless? Does carelessness come from a lack of structure or a lack of fear?

Does dancing on the grave of dogma create a new identity or does it just sully an old one?

An identity must be self-evident. Once proven, an identity is identical with the proof. The proof is identical with our self.

The stories we tell are not identities but rest on them. The identities we rest on don’t capture our sleep. They capture our actions.

The self becomes a proof for the identities. The dogma encircles the free will of the self. The self restricts its feeling for order. The order creates an identity.

In the moment, the actors and audience unfurl a story.

The story becomes structured. Care must tend to it. A feeling becomes part of a proof. A feeling becomes a variable inside a calculation.

In the shadow, the careless feel without proof. The structure of the shadow holds no form. The shadow is perpetually changing as much as the scene but without an identity.

The ignorance is kept at bay. Not because it is ignorant in itself, but it’s ignorant to the play.

In the play, emotions are wrought. Building and constructing. Scheming and gaming. All the fun is had.

In the shadows, malleability creates an endless rainbow. All the colors everywhere at the same time.

In the play, the rainbow has structure. Blue on the shirt, in the bed sheets, in the sky. Red on the hair, in the trees.

The colors go into the shadow and come out different but soon they find their place. Wrought they have become.

The self goes into the shadows and loses an identity. Or rather, loses its wroughtness.

Formless self infinite. Back into the audience, the act wroughts.

Pretensive expectations create peer pressure, the faith.

Reason reads the play, and maps the movements.

An interpretive reception closes out the act and comes to a conclusion.

The new conclusion moves the stage and the self gets left behind, in the shadow.

The infinite always at our foot, somehow it is always a stage for something at the edge of nothing.

An identity captures it all. An identity is reciprocal. A conclusion as much as a beginning. A mirror into another world that will always mirror ours, as far as the mirror can see.

The shadows always contain something else and always contains the mirror.