Lived and Known

Knowing comes at the cost of living. Living is overcoming knowing. This is the clash from which the paper begins. Human beings are tempted to-settle. They want settled living. They want life fully lived and fully settled at once. That fantasy is impossible. Settlement requires stability. Stability is won through retelling and placing. These are the axes by which life becomes knowable. What gets drained in that very process is the living of life. From this follows a stronger claim. Being is the retelling of the settled. Time is the placing of the settled. They are not first. They are late forms of settlement. No philosophy can name what is first without already making it late. Naming settles it into the knowable. First philosophy must therefore begin not from any named first principle but from the split by which named first principles become possible at all. It must begin from the split between the unsettled and the settled.