Objectivated Spirit (Objektive Geist)

have found, in developing this website, that an interesting interaction has developed between my thought and its objectivation herein. Whenever I think of something, I want to add it to this ever-growing "semiotic net". Conversely and correlatively, things I add to this aggregation of symbols sometimes lead me to new ideas (in the broadest sense, including images, etc.), and to new "things to pursue", and, hopefully and most importantly, to seeing already included material in new ways -- for new things are just more of the same [kinds of things as one could already conceive of], whereas seeing previously known things in new ways is a higher-order enrichment of one's "world", in a way perhaps similar to the difference, in mathematics, between (a) adding more elements to an already generated infinite set and (b) constructing sets-of-sets....

I never had any interest in taking notes, or keeping a diary, etc. -- probably because they seemed such futilely private activities (as Hannah Arendt says in The Human Condition, in classical Greece, the "private sphere" was considered: deprived). And, in school, I could not see the point in my repeating [copying] what was already written or said ("Leave the dead to bury the dead", etc.).

No later than late June 1989 -- before I absorbed the idea of "computer hyperlinking" --, however, I had elaborated a discipline of annotating books I read, not just with underlining and comments, but also by noting in the margin references to other pages in the book (or, occasionally, in other books...) which I found relevant, and also placing references on the "target" pages back to the sources -- thus constructing ever-growing [I don't think I gave them a specific name at the time, although now I might call them:] networks, or "referential spaces" of two-way many-to-many associations. Sometimes, I would "chain" these references, from one page to another to another to yet another.... --I see the development of the present website as a similar activity of correlating and connecting meanings. (As of ~~October 1999~~ 19 December 2011, this site had over ~~2,750~~ 11,689 links in ~~129~~ 478 HTML pages, mostly internal, but also including about ~~250~~ 932 external sites -- an average of approx. 25.5 hyperlinks per page.[fn.57] ~ Note: I consider links-per-page a rough, albeit not "intelligent", metric of information density, i.e., I hope: depth and intensity.)

Consequently, I think I can, with some appositeness, say that this web site has become an important part of my "objectivated mind" (Objektive Geist) [also: "noetic economy"]. I strongly believe, however, as Husserl said, that transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity (structurally, even if there happen to be no accessible factically existing other interlocutors...). Therefore, I invite you, my reader, to join this "conversational space", by engaging in your own mind with what you find here, and sharing your thoughts with me:

[ Thomas Jefferson's home: Monticello. A place for leisured study and delectation.... ]

Welcome

enius loci. (Orientation note: if you click any of the following links, you will need to use your web browser Back button to return to this... place.) I understand this phrase: "the spirit of a place", and I respect it. Happy the person who comes from a happy home! My provenance was not that way. I have, however, been able to construct around myself "spaces" which I have felt "resonated" with me: physical settings [my little "Merzbau"s...] decorated with found and made (by others and by myself...) images and objects, an unpublished text (on which I worked intensively, for over three years, 1980-84): "The Gift From the Machine", my dissertation, and the present "virtual" space of this website.

Consequently, I would apply the quote which appears below, and the thesis elaborated above concerning the objectivation of spirit [living / lived experience] to this concept also: Genius loci -- the spirit of any place -- is the creative (creating!...) human spirit which makes place [in a normative sense] from "stuff" [in a factical / taxonomic sense], by "taking place" [acting into the world...]. But this is not an individual ["private" / solipsistic...] activity. It is necessarily social (intersubjective -- see above).

As with persons' first great attempt to make an emphatically human[e] place for themselves: The Tower of Babel, I invite you to join with me in ongoing construction (and re-new-al):

"For the spirit alone lives; all else dies."

(--Jean de Coras, inquisitor of Martin Guerre)