1 "And Then, Noticing this Madness, Becoming Madder": Thoughts on Thinking Through Regret and How Afflictions can be Teachers David W. Jardine Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary On Philosophy and Abstention Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought to be entirely simple. Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that we have, in a senseless way, put there [or, as hermeneutics would have it, that we have unwittingly been delivered over to by being born into a language, tradition, culture, family, circumstance and so on. As Heidegger (1962) put it, we "find ourselves" thrown into these circumstances, feeling pushes and pulls that aren't necessary understood, but sometimes only felt, or nebulously glimpsed or inferred or suspected]. To do this it must make movements as complicated as these knots are. Although the results of philosophy are simple, its method cannot be, if it is to succeed. The complexity of philosophy is not its subject matter, but our knotted understanding. (Ludwig Wittgenstein cited in Brunnholzl, 2010, p. 112‐3). [This "perfection," i.e., way of "going beyond" (Sanskrit paramita) the tangles and knots of our living] is called ethical discipline because it does not acquiesce in the afflictions, because it is coolness since it quells the fire of regret. It is characterized by . . . abstention. (Tsong‐kha‐pa 2004, p. 144). Instead of being " . . . lost in the performance of acts" [Husserl 1970, p. 255] . . . we should rather [practice] "abstention" [Husserl 1970a, p. 19]. [This does] not mean that we turn our attention "away" from the world, but rather that our "attention" has been "freed" from the naiveté of presupposing the world, so that that very world (and the . . . belief in that world) may now be seen. "When I turn away from a naive exploration of the world . . . I do not turn my back on the world to retreat to an unworldly, and, therefore, uninteresting special field of theoretical study. On the contrary [this abstention] enables me to explore the world radically [Husserl 1960. p. 141]." (Jardine, 1976, p. 76, 80‐1). Afflictions Can Teach, With a Side‐Glance to the Will to Power Properly considered‐‐without acquiescence‐‐afflictions can teach. They can, but there is nothing necessary about this. I know from repeated experience that this is a terrible risk, maintaining proximity to an arising affliction without falling for it. Recently I have been writing about waking in the morning, 5:00 AM, with the dogs and first light, one Robin already warbling, and feeling full of regret regarding my upcoming retirement and whether "it" was all "worth it," and so on. Of course, such awakenings are geared to and ripe for a whole series of possible awakenings if one does not "abstain": anger, mulling over past events, summoning up arguments pro and con, blaming, emotional turmoils, making grotesqueries of this or that person, self‐admonishments for real or imagined past sins and complicities, attempts at self‐justification and moral superiority and aggrandizements, growling