X-ray vision

I often think that it would be nice if there were something that one could do in order to determine the deep-most truth of the matter about oneself. The true reading. I suppose that's what psychoanalysis is supposed to be, and also what skilled tarot readers value in their cards. But the former hangs on too many a priori assumptions to be substantively correct, it seems to me, and the latter requires a leap of faith. I wish you could just know. Like an x-ray or an MRI. Then at least you would know what you're dealing with.

Fonts

I love fonts, and was just this morning extolling the pleasures to be had from appreciating the fact that every little change in lettering changes the implicit meaning communicated by a text. That this is so is obvious, of course. But ... when you stop and think about it, it's sort of amazing that humans are such that the presence or absence of a serif can change everything. Being able to think symbolically is, well, a little astonishing. Anyway, I'm curious to hear others' favorite fonts, if there are any Others around. Also ones for which you have disdain or otherwise disapprove.

Utilitarians and love

I have been thinking about how when you miss someone, I mean for real, it's not that you feel some generic emotion - missing - and that the person is the object thereof. No. When you really miss someone, what you experience is the absence of them, in their very own constitutive particularity. Missing a person you love is nothing at all like missing some other person you love; it just doesn't work that way. This gets us to utilitarianism because even Mill (J.S.), who wants to, can't - within the categories available to him given his ontological commitments - actually differentiate qualitatively between the pleasure of this and the pleasure of that. Why are the higher pleasures higher? Because they are more pleasurable. MacIntyre pointed out a long time ago that there is no pleasure-substratum; rather, pleasures are all different. (Though, for the record, we could have learnt this from Plato.) It is a failing of utilitarianism, it seems to me, that it can't make good on this. And it's an implication of not being able to make good on this, I think, that utilitarianism can't make sense of what it is to miss someone -- or, by extension, what it is to love someone. This seems a fatal flaw for an account of the moral, though I appreciate that the Kantians in the crowd will beg to differ. Don't get me started on them, though. No offense to my favorite K's.