We do weave figures toward satisfying our intuition's ache. Like music, a figure-weave will make amends with silences in ways no reason can explain. Understanding is a process of throwing out a trope into the dark, and then occupying the room by the trope's dim light until the mind's sun, convention, rises, and makes us feel at home. Makes it feel like real.
Enthymeming (I'm sorry for getting ahead of myself, for keeping the private as private still awhile longer) is not just the rhetorician's syllogism, it is the philosopher's journey into knowing. How can we progress except by this process of throwing our tropes ahead of our conventions, and following out the line they're tied to us by, into a dark world, then waiting for the sun to rise. It rises with us. The presence of the Da-sein makes the sun of being rise -- for us, that is, and who can say otherwise. I think the world remains though I am gone -- rather, I believe it -- and therefore I'm a member of the Human kind.
It is pretentious to say that last bit, and I feel sorry. There are indeed so many who've articulated the opposite. Still, I don't believe it, and I rest for now, for always?, on this fallacy of incredulity.
Follow the animal out of the grave and into the light. How many things can an image come to mean, and still be meaningful, rather than confused? I've known that when an image works, it works on all levels. It's different than a metaphor -- it's not a figure of speech, needing context within a certain speech act -- instead, it's a figure upon knowing. Even if it's not entirely public yet, if somehow one could dig into the mind of the figurerer, he'd find the ways, at least sometimes, that the figure kept on working. Rather than representing something, it's fastened to it -- rather than an image of it, a cloth thrown over the form itself.
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