Most college-age openmindedness seems merely to be flattery in an anti-intellectual or pseudointellectual environment. I have seen the most brilliant of my peers fall into this trap as a part of their lifestyle. Dostoyevsky was right when he said that nothing is easier than flattery nor harder than the utterance of truth. I would be entirely naiive, in my insecurity, to simply entertain all points of view equally. At one point, in order to move forward, one must learn not only to take a position but to recognise which points of view are merely repetitions of old, familiar dogmas. The temptation towards the Old is so great in a society wherein one does not have the privilege of being exposed to novel ideas. Were I to live in Berkeley, I should probably have better luck than in suburban San Diego, where opinions are so homogenous and utilitarian that several people may hold an identical one and only corroborate it by their own homogeny -- an Appeal to Mass Opinion.
When Kresten said that I have trouble listening, he knew nothing of the arduous climb that brought me here. I could site two examples of people who had at one point or another challenged my most basic of assumptions, just within the past year. In each of those instances, I rebelled against them with all of the devices of my intellect, and it took a considerable while for me to see the merit of what they had said.
One was John the Hitch-hiker, who in fact taught me to distinguish an informed opinion from an uninformed one. The other was Ali, who taught me that there is no such thing as a truth*, a point of view that has brought me into closer agreement with the existentialists. And another was Kresten himself, coupled with Andrew, who helped to revive my faith in the Uncertainty of all phenomena.
In the past few months, I have gone from being a Spiritualist to an Agnostic to a Believer to an Agnostic to an Atheist to an Agnostic. I have gone from an outright rejection of Existentialism to a deep love for it, and then a skepticism of it so deep that I tried militantly to shed all prior pretensions to Meaning, and then finally to an appraisal of Existentialism again. My mind is now a sort of suspension of these disparate and contradictory ideas that refuse to settle.
Because thought is not a mere pastime for me, and because Action is essential, mere sophistry or Socratic exercises will not do. I cannot accept another's point of view without first of all exhausting every resource with which to attack it. Only after I have done this can I accept. Most of the arguments I am charged with are either naiive generalisations that experience itself negates and that empiricism could not prove. When Michael told me that he felt that "any relationship between a guy and a girl is sexual", how could I bring myself to believe that? If I chose to entertain the belief, it would be as though I were painting the tree red to prove the next day that the tree was red; "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves". Michael provided little in the way of a groundbreaking argument or exercise of Reason that I could use to justify such a claim.
Has anyone I know amongst my peers been more committed to the Truth than I have been? Have people really exhausted the Hours trying to disarm their own conditioning, not just to attain social status but to recover what they had lost from the tenderness of unconditioned youth?
Would it not be merely to humour someone else that I would knod in agreement or consideration of something so radical and dangerous as Determinism, or Scientism, especially when I have all ready spent years pledging my faith to each of these fairly childish** beliefs and seen them totally collapse?
It is true that I can site only a few examples of people having truly changed my mind. For the most part, I still maintain that I was right. Yet this is more tragic to me than to anyone else; I constantly bemoan the fact that so rarely do I have an actual Conversation with someone else: Something that Challenges and leaves one totally Speechless once all the words have been exhausted. I blame the trends and dogmas which I try to disarm at every corner. I am tired of flattering them. They are everywhere! A truly novel idea is not met with counterargument, for one has not yet even thought of it. So much of our short and precious lives is wasted on semantics and hearing the same errors and fallacies over and over. I tire even of knowledge as a battle. As I have said before: Lines of "right and wrong" -- this "side" or that -- do not exist in the natural topography of truth. Must my life be a constant war game? Or can it be a Quest where I find items of Truth that I can marvel at, but which cannot be taken away from me***?
Another's Opinion will always be secondary to my own because one only really has one's own opinion; to simply follow another's opinion is to deliberately soften one's own mind, because one represents the other's "truth" in a way that may be totally distinct from how the other perceives it.
Usually, if one is commited enough as an intellectual, one will find the answers for one's own self, and the questions will not be the ones from outside but the ones swarming up from within. The philosopher needs not to please others but to beat away one's own private intellectual woes like flies. One who does not know what it means to suffer for the Truth is not qualified to as open a mind as one who truly beats his head against the glass hoping to break through. If I stand alone in a crowd and refuse to yield to common agreement, and if common agreement is all that would assuage me and is probably the underlying motive for whatever it is that I am expected to believe against my better knowledge, then perhaps even if I simply persist, defending myself even to ears that have turned away from me, I may have, for one fleeting moment, a break-through that goes entirely unnoticed. It had been about a year and a half since I had penetrated the calcified haze of familiarity, and no one thought better of me for it. Can I be accused, though, of a fascistic commitment to my own Truth when the Truth that I have broken through to has, for once, the freshness that all dogmas are devoid of? And if this gasp of breath is so rare to me, can I be condemned for usually maintaining my position, taking it not for granted but with all the resources of Reason and the visceral convictions of Passion corroborating my view? Maybe I AM right in most cases and most others are wrong; my commitment to the quest for Truth seems so tiring to people because they do not have it, though I would love for them to. Yet again: The people who have opened my eyes to new ideas, including Kresten, leant me something that I could take to heart. Kresten forgets that usually I have no counterargument to his findings, for they are so novel. Bickering and arguments wherever one has to "listen to the other side" tend most often to occur in the presence of ignorance; wherever Truth is available and Communication truly possible between two people, there ar no "sides" to be taken. Yet if intellectual warfare is necessary, then we must treat it as such, and as such the participant will always be one-sided.
* At this point, I have refined my point of view of what "truth" is, and I can distinguish the false, constructed "truths" that Ali had taught me to deconstruct from profound Truths. Heidegger, Ali's favourite philosopher, may have helped to arrive at this point.
** Justifiable when the responsibility of Action is not a burden to oneself (i.e. in childhood).
*** Perchance they cannot be taken away from me Precisely Because they are my own constructs.
dm.A.A.
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