On the Relationship betwixt Conviction and Consideration.

It may be that Consideration is the Objective of the two functions whilst Conviction is emotive. Yet it is also conceivable that they rest on a Continuum.

The facts of the matter would usually be Unconscious, and Inquiry offers us the only measuring rope by which to fathom them.*

The Fanatical rejection of Inquiry as the 'work of Satan' thus presdisposes us to absurdly neurotic Conscious Cramp.

dm.A.A.

*The measurement itself, in its distinction betwixt a continuum and a confluence of Opposing and Cooperating Forces, may be arbitrary.

On the Fallacy of the Open Mind.

Whilst it is indispensable that one should entertain many possibilities and walk down many avenues of thought, one should be guarded against redundancy, and most of these explorations should be done in Solitude. To entertain 'another's point of view' is dangerous where it involves this a priori concession: That there 'may be a possible Truth' to what the Other is saying. The affirmation of this 'Truth' is in fact indispensable to the Inquiry. A Truth of this nature may amount to little more than a construct. By 'considering' it, one affirms this Construct. This predisposes one to plant evidence for one's self; one paints the tree red to prove that it is red. If the Truth being sold is nothing more than a figment of the Imagination. Imagining it becomes indistinct from Believing it. An Open Mind is indistinct here from a gullible one; Consideration is indistinct from Belief.

dm.A.A.

On the Fanatical Mindset.

1. One presumes, at the Outset, that one has 'The Truth'.
2. All of one's beliefs are adopted in a Spirit of Compulsion.
3. They are valued above Reason. They are believed because of Conviction.
4. One's beliefs are challenged by Dissent.
5. One fails to maintain muscular tension of making a futile effort to Believe ensues.
6. This tension is familiar because it is learned in the self-defense of stage 4. One identifies the tension with the sense of self-righteousness (and Rightness) that occurs simultaneously during Stage 7. It is a token of the Self-convinced Ego that only shines in preaching.
8. From the confusion at Stage 7, one re-gains Conviction. One is self-assured again because the tension is (falsely) justified and the Other 'defeated'. The Cycle repeats.

dm.A.

On Science and the Unconscious.

 

Empiricism cannot account for nearly all phenomena. I may begin to imagine: What is it like to be possessed if a Conviction? Could it be possible that one might confuse the sense of tension that comes about from the futility of trying to prove one’s own self right with the frustration of failing to prove another wrong? If the tension is experienced simultaneously with the argument, one may easily make that error.

Yet how am I to test such a hypothesis? I should have to be possessed of such a Fanaticism, in which case I would lack the Reasoning faculties necessary to observe myself objectively in the process of delusion. I cannot stage an experiment because I have no more control of the Unconscious Complexes that would produce such a neurosis than I do over my own hart or liver; each functions Involuntarily; my only hope at changing their behavior would be by a series of fruitless decisions that would ultimately so impair my judgement that I would be unsuccessful, again, in making an objective observation.

Thankfully, I am NOT a fanatic, so I cannot know what the mind of one is except secondarily. Alan Watts was right: The Ego cannot be held onto. It dies when the Unconscious necessitates it, though perhaps not by the ‘command’of the Unconscious so much as its withdrawal of support for the Ego. The sense of tension identified with clinging to an obsolete self-conception is futile and unnecessary; it has nothing to do with the magical and mysterious interplay of psychic forces. Yet one attempts to salvage this naïve self-conception when one feels it slipping away.

At times, such an enterprise is necessary to prevent psychosis. Yet in the functioning of a healthy mind during a Transitional Period, such clinging is ridiculous.

Is it not possible that my recent interest in it stems from a self-defensiveness? What if all egoic tension is in self-defense, with the intent to prove oneself ‘Right’ and another ‘Wrong’?

It is conceivable, however Universalised.

This all seems to serve as a reminder that the mind, like the body, is largely outside of our control. What would we be otherwise? Power Gods.

Dm.A.A.

On Conviction.

 

Conviction is Loss Prevention. It is the tendency to cling to existing Prejudices despite overwhelming evidence of equally sensible Ways. It belongs pitifully to those who see all the doors to all the rooms of Possibility they have never been in*. It is the amplifier to a misguided voice which has no ear for Reason. It is the clinging to a truism like the pinching of a penny-pincher.

It is the focus upon a solid, sordid path with no mindfulness of peripheral Vision.

 

Any intrusion from the Unconscious is believed to belong to the Devil, because one is insecure in that land and wants only to protect one’s home for within. It is the echo of countless repetitions – an erected Idol in the mind that one does not dare to pass even though it cannot truly See.

 

It is madness that leads others to madness. It most fears that rarest of Beasts: The Question.

 

*, but do not enter.

 

Dm.A.A.

 

 

On Certainty.

 

Certainty: The tendency to over-look one’s own fallibility.

Certainty is a mood. Just as I can feel emphatically the paranoia of a meth addict, I can feel the overwhelming Certainty of this young, portly lady who is my sister. It is usually the result of not having thought things through.

The mood is entirely arbitrary. It is available irrespective of any kind of validity. The tests of Reason, if employed, would totally dispel it as hubris. Yet one will always find evidence for any conviction. The later in life the Doubt, the harder it is for the Conscious to struggle with Disbelief.

 

dm.A.A.

Conclusions Regarding the Mind.

1. I will never know with certainty what I had just thought and that it was what I THINK it was.
2. I will never know that I have exhausted all conceivable possibilities, because the more enduring and fruitful the Inquiry the more possibilities appear available for consideration.
3. I will never know that I have exhausted all Plausible possibilities, because at a certain point plausibility is seen to be entirely arbitrary.
4. All memories of the Past are Constructs.
5. All projections of 'familiar' situations onto the future course of events are constructs.
6. 'Familiarity' is arbitrary and independent from objective facts.
7. Facts may be solely mental.
8. The line between what is probable and what is possible is illusory.
9. If I can conceive of it, it is possible.
10. There is no less merit in projecting one possible out-come onto the future than another.
11. Nothing that we remember really happened that way.
12. History does not repeat itself; it only lies.
13. 'Something that we've seen before' is therefore no more likely than something we imagine.
14. Common Sense is an illusory entity.
15. I may feel as though I have overlooked something even if I had taken it into consideration.
16. I will never know that I took it into consideration.
17. I may feel as though I've overlooked things even if there was nothing to overlook.
18. 17 and 15 are inter-changeable.
19. To avoid overlooking something, I have to investigate something I have all ready thought.
This is called Repetition.
20. No repetition can ever be successful, because if it were successful the memory of it would be indistinguishable from the original event, and something cannot be a success if we cannot judge it to be a success.

dm.A.A.

Damn you, Camus. Stop looking over my shoulder.

Dear Mother,

 

                I still think that having the shoes in plain sight is aesthetically preferable because I like to look at them. It reminds me of Van Gogh’s shoes and Heidegger’s shoes. Please be more respectful of other people’s tastes. They are a part of a person’s individuality, and it is humiliating to be told they’re ‘wrong’. Father convinced me that the shoes were a health hazard, and I accepted the rationale although I am still skeptical. Personally, if left to me own devices, I would move all the shoes in order to clean and then put them back. There are many things that you would find I could do well if entrusted with the responsibility. Just know, though, that it’s never going to be perfect and that there are too many things to worry about at any moment to allow oneself to be bound to fairly arbitrary dogmas.

                I grew up watching you and Dad arguing about absurdly menial stuff, and I have had to work hard to overcome my own perfectionism and see the bigger picture. Hopefully you can do the same and revise your opinion of what ‘Normalcy’ is, because it IS a fallacy (you can look up ‘Normalcy bias’) and many of my friends, as well as my ex-girlfriend, have criticized you, and being around them has shown me how relative things are, how diverse people’s customs are in America, how Universal to them is the notion of Respect, how vague the word ‘normal’ is even to them, how nice things can be when people compromise, and how there is a range of responses to conflicts of interest.

                Really, everyone simply wants to be ‘me’ in his or her own way, and their preferences are a part of that. One person’s ‘mess’ is another’s order, because these are not ‘things out there’ but internal attitudes and reactions.

                When you say ‘normal’ and negate my experience, it is naturally depressing.

                You could be more Open like other people and try to see the Beauty of another’s totally unique world-view, aesthetic and otherwise.

                Conflicts are inevitable; the price of eliminating such tensions is a loss of that Beauty. Try to handle them with a cool head, (like most of the people I have met) and see if maybe any part of it is your fault. You’ll notice that, except where the safety of someone other than myself is concerned, I never tell you what to do. I do think you should try living it up more, since you seem fascinated by glamorous lifestyles and Art, but I do not probe you routinely about that. I’m glad that you clean up for me if you enjoy it, but I cannot condone it if you do not.

                Being happy is what is most important. For all I know, the shoes might gather fungi in the dark of the closet, and that would be more of a hygienic risk than the dirt we could easily clean up anyway and that we never step in anyway (as opposed to our shoes, which obviously make immediate contact with our feet). If we do not Treat the shoes as a liability, handling them ceases to be a problem and becomes fun. They cease to be ‘base’; this is the same reason I love seeing them, like an old favourite toy. And yet notice again that I am not telling you to do these things. I wouldn’t ever ‘make’ someone do something I did not myself enjoy. If I don’t feel some sense of purpose to doing something, I know it to be utterly unimportant, and if I feel compulsive about it I try to ignore it. This is why also I never let someone tell me to do something that is meaningless to me; if it is meaningful TO THEM, they can do it, and if not, they shouldn’t. Notice that, left to my own devices, I walk the dog daily feed him, and check regularly that he is safe. You never see me complain except where his safety and health are at stake. I do not regard these things as ‘chores’ because I find them meaningful rather than menial. You probably notice that I enjoy it, as Father enjoys providing for us.

                Yet if you think that ‘real work’ must be dreadful, I totally disagree with you. Quite on the contrary, I think that enjoying the ardour of it is a sign of health. Monks are good at doing this, so I note the different and lack of compulsiveness. Like I said: Left to my own devices, if you were to go on a trip for a week or something, you would see a semblance of workable order upon return.

                But I am not going to become restless just because you may be, because internal balance must come first; things seem much worse than they are when we are restless. I learned in one of the first few classes I took at Palomar how to stop making evaluative judgements and how to look at things objectively. It was sobering and I wish I’d stuck with it earlier. If you need to express yourself aesthetically, I still suggest you consider taking up painting or skating. It can be Fun, and you don’t need to wait for me to become financially independent to enjoy yourself. Kresten’s mom still enjoys herself, and I’ve seen it help her relationship with her son. It’s not perfect, but it’s sweet and preferable to some totally fake perfection. If you took some time off, you’d see that things fall into place. This may sound naive, but it’s an experience I have had numerous times by letting things be and resisting the overwhelming urge to interfere.

 

Sincerely, your son,

Dmitry.

 

Post-scriptum: One time, at a McDonald’s, I was accidentally given two plastic trays instead of one. This was a joy to me I could not begin to describe; it would take me years to relate it. I sat there, reading a book of collected verse and prose by Rilke, and then a woman who worked there (poor thing), middle-aged and middle-eastern, rapidly yanked the bottom tray away from me. She practically wrestled it from my hand within a single second; I had all ready told her I wasn’t finished using it. (I wanted it near me.) It crushed me. You understand, surely. My only consolation was in recognizing the functionalism prevalent in our society. It is not unlike what Marcel called the Problematic. In fact, it is probably precisely that. On the subject of eating, I can understand, in the context of this sort of functionalistic aesthetic, that many Americans would insist on removing their trays and forks as soon as possible as though to hide evidence of any sort of dinner having transpired. For me, it would be a vice, because these plates are my companions and it is one of the great joys of the world (you understand) to see them still there, waiting for me as a reminder of the prior meal. This joy also extends to dish-washing, but it always has to be at a proper time when nothing else is on my mind. Otherwise I feel unbearably ashamed. I do agree with Rilke that Things have indispensable things to teach us, and we are to apt to treat them like technology. (Which, as Heidegger pointed out, means that we are not really treating them as Things.) To me, when I see a cluster of “used” dishes, (though I loathe that term in context) I see a miniature city, and a “sullied” dish with two pieces of silverware atop it is reminiscent maddeningly of a clock. You understand. I even felt similar to that yesterday after Kresten and I ate; there was a bit of jam that had formed a delicate crust on the semi-transparent plate with its coarse visible interior and its smooth exterior. It was made the topic of a very congenial joke. Watts was probably right about Western anti-materialism, but I think that society might be improving from the time he was writing in. At any rate, you get it; you read Salinger novels and Rilkean poetry, and you like Art so I know you do. I myself have written many poems about clutter and dishes which I might show you when they are ready.

SYNCHRONICITY.

Today, exactly five years to the day I met my first girlfriend, I have found out the meaning of Jonathan Blow's Braid.

I have posted an interpretation to youtube.com. It is entitled BRAID: Deconstruction, Science, Delusion.

You'll see the literally miraculous relevance of this coincidence when you watch the video. (I hope.) The maddening synchronicities I had experienced over the course of that relationship and after it got me into a lot of trouble, even prompting people to think I had bipolar disorder. I have not been this obsessively, rapturously excited in years.

Dmitry.

On a Potential Fallacy in Deconstructionism.

On a Potential Fallacy in Deconstructionism.

 

The deconstruction of the Directed Process (Language) is itself a function of the Directed Process. It may have its origin in the Unconscious; it would be conceivable that this would be so, because how else could one break with the structuralism of a one-sided ego? (A structuralism that seems, at least in the case of this writer, to be represented by the Unconscious as a series of buildings.)

There may be a fallacy, however, in taking things apart to the point that one thinks that they were “never there”. One might know the functioning of a time-piece through immediate experience; one knows the magic of watching its mysterious functioning. One also knows the functional efficiency of such a time-piece and knows also the meaning that one has ascribed to it. By taking it apart, is one not naive to say that none of these observable phenomena ever occurred?

Language “trips over” those wires that trigger the ascent of a Truth from the Unconscious. Its function is to awaken an a priori fact; inviting the Non-directed process to Reveal itself through the ritualistic enactment of the Directed process.

To repeat the same Directed Process twice is to fail; one cannot trigger the same Revelation twice if the Unconscious judges it to be unfeasible. This Revelation might include the awareness of the efficiency of the Directed Process. For this reason, amongst others, Repetition fails. We can never know if we have successfully repeated ourselves because there is no Unconscious Affirmation coming up to Consciousness – no Assuredness.

Simply because one has “deconstructed” a set of words and found no Truth underlying them does not mean that the Truth that was originally summoned by those words was merely arbitrary. That Truth may simply have chosen to withdraw into its burrows, hiding from the surface as a mole hides from the surface when it is being ravaged by so many of Steinbeck’s phallus-shaped apparati.

 

Furthermore, because Repetition is necessary to test this hypothesis, it is intrinsically flawed.

 

Event 1: The phrase triggers a Truth.

Event 2: An attempted repetition on the part of the deconstructionist produces no Truth.

Event 3: The deconstructionist takes the absence of a Truth to mean that:

a.        the phrase itself was meaningless. (And therefore useless.)

b.      The Truth never existed.

 

Problems:

Event 2 involved a Repetition, which cannot be perceived successfully.

At Event 3 the Truth is merely hiding, like a mole. The phrase was only judged to be meaningless because it had no use after Event 1. [At Event 2, it could not trigger the dormant Truth. Event 3 takes place entirely in the abstract realm.]

 

Dm.A.A.

On Equations, Disequations, and Uncertainty in Linguistics.

On Equations, Disequations, and Uncertainty in Linguistics.

 

Language is a series of equations and disequations. We relate concepts that had hitherto been unrelated by one of two connections: Is and Is not. If something Is something else, then the two are equated. If something is NOT, then they are disequated. Yet at any point in the process of inquiry some invisible rascal might come along and flip the switch. What “had been” an equation becomes a disequation. The connection remains, but “A is B” becomes “A is not B”. This means that we are always prone to error, confusion, inconsistency, and uncertainty in any language game.

 

Dm.A.A.

On Sitting Still as a Problem.

When we are taught in school to sit still, we tend to yield to this arbitrary principle and develop in ourselves another one: An excessively Apollonian aesthetic -- an excessively somber tone underlying and overlying all our language. We become monochromatic, like so many Picasso's paintings from his Blue period. Lost for colour, we lost a range of language with which to express ourselves.

Dm.A.A.

Where I Agree with Sartre.

Sartre seems to have been right, however, in these respects:

* People do tend to label one's self and to pigeonhole one, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

* People allow themselves to be pigeonholed.

* People want you to behave a certain way, or otherwise they become offended.

My experiences with the Gavrilovs and Mother's ex post facto criticism of my 'behavior' is evidence of this.

Did I create the nausea?
Probably not; I only sought to understand Sartre and to be solitary as I would usually be.
That was why I did not want to tell Leonid what 'kind' of philosophy I enjoyed.

I can also find admiration in him for his nerve to acknowledge the Sinking House and the fallacy of history.

Although I do delight in history at times. As a protest.

dm.A.A.



Another peculiarly endearing aspect of Sartre is his notion of the Gaze. To me, I can speak from experience in having been caught in the Gaze of another. It is a perpetual Appeal to Authority. Where convincing one's self in the absence of others and in Solitude has the qualities of Rapture and Novelty, to project onto the Other one's own personal source of Authority does have a quality of dryness and futility, marked by an arid tension in the throat, a dryness of the skin, and a depressive mood and bearing upon the eyes in general.

One feels cut off from Being, because what had been Being in its Openness takes on the quality of a mental figure: The Authority projected outwards. In this sense, Sartre speaks of what Jung calls participation mistique and subjectivisation of the Object.

dm.A.A.

One becomes encapsulated in the artifice of the agreed-upon World and is severred from the rapturous Joy of Solitude and Truth.

dm.A.A.


In this situation, the Sinking House becomes a problem often, and so does the Perpetuation of the Old and Subversion of the New. There is also the sense of division betwixt Internal Monologue and Speech, suggesting the Questioner-Questioned dialectic.

dm.A.A.

Hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy.

It was only when I tried to pride myself in my own work in the public eye that I felt compeled to change it and to justify it. Sartre's self-conviction made the revision appear imperative. That was ironic; would I change something blindly? No. But to self-justify is not Sartrean.

dm.A.A.

Where I Depart from Sartre.

Sartre's NAUSEA seems, from what I have heard in lecture (though not yet read), to be a depiction, amongst other things, of a protagonist, Sartre-like, coming to terms with what I have called the Sinking House problem. The chief distinction betwixt me and Sartre seems to be that, whilst Sartre seems to find the predicament of Uncertainty confining and unsettling, I find it liberating and empowering in a near- (and no less than) divine way.

I have written hitherto that the Negative Anima impresses upon the individual the same truthsd that the Constructive Anima does. the critical distinction is that, whereas the former will castigate for your innate ineptitude, the latter will console you for your understandably Human weakness.

Is it possible that Sartre suffered from a Negative Anima? From my past experience with his philosophy and what I have read and heard of his own Life, it seems more than likely so. From the troubled view of women to the 'clutched', 'clutching' style of his prose, it seems no great stretch of the imagination to say he suffered from Conscious Cramp. He WAS, according to some speculation, a Judging type rather than a Perceiving type, after all. Judgers will tend to side with their conscious prejudices more than with their Unconscious Depths, which we may only be able to truly fathom  by that imagination that he seems to condemn.

Is he not, though, possessed by it? The projection of hostility onto the impersonal Universe souns like an issuer of Subjectivising the Object. Why does he commit the Heidegerrean error of allowing Beings to Impose themselves onto him? Is it out of courage that he finds his experiences with others to be Hell? Or is it out of cowardice, too scared to either tolerate them, at risk of being asked to change, or too proud to admit one's own feebleness* in needing to distance himself in Solitude?

A profound Hypocrisy seems to run through his work. NAUSEA has him categorise every man he meets as either this form of Bad Faith or that. Yet what is the crime he charges them with? Categorisation: Labeling. His own vice.

* Not that this human feebleness should be condemned for even a moment.

Sartre claims to be a Marxist but his characters loathe people. An amateur student might find hope in finding, in the truly Authentic Life, some sense of solidarity or respect. Years after having first encountered his work, I am disappointed.

dm.A.A.

Cont.:

Sartre seems to pride himself in his own hard-nosed Realism, yet he subtly hides a nonetheless very thinly veiled Hope, as Camus had observed, Why bother to dispossess one's self of abstractions? What is to be gained by foregoing Bad Faith? If not the attainment of a future, the perpetuation of an impoverished and constricted Present.

If it is true that Martin Heidegger never read Being and Nothingness beyond a superficial glance, it makes sense. For a prophet of Human Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre has always seemed, to me, to be a dogmatic metaphysician who did not probe the depths beyond the peculiarities of his own somewhat neurotic consciousness. A Sartrean world is one not merely godless but abounding in rules and limitations, any 'Exit' from his Hell would be an act of 'Bad Faith'.

Camus acknowledged Absurdity just as if not more proficiently. His idea of Revolt meant that one ought N*ot* to try to escape the Human Condition that is the knob at the fret-head of which the body of the guitar is the World and the taut string id the Absurd. In Absurdism, one should keep that string taut; by dehumanising the human, Sartre seems to loosen it.

dm.A.A.

Sure: In our World, Certainty may be impossible. Yet must we forego Imagination and Logic like ascetics?
Sure: Each line of Directed Thought over time may collapse as though we were video game protagonists hopping from platform to platform across a chasm, and with each leap the platform we stood upon moments before falls into the chasm as though it had never been there.
Yet it is only cowardice of becoming Stranded that would lead us to forego all such traversals as though they never led to new places.

Why not protest Absurdity like humans rather than accepting it like machines?
Even if the Directed process falls apart, it may be necessary to summon forth Novelty and Inspiration from the Non-directed Depths. So long as our thoughts are Fresh, we are qualified to think them. Our thoughts, expectations, and memories are on loan from the Unconscious. Logic may collape over time, but Novelty is instantaneous. There are never fixed facts, only fleeting moments of discovery, like ulsive Muses. I ask: Who could ask for a more perfect situation?

dm.A.A.

Post-scriptum: Sartre seems also to regard himself as an iconoclast, yet whether he is Conscious of the fact or not, his works seems to be a product of its time and the cynicism of the Herd.

dm.A.A.

Sartre seems to have been right, however, in these respects:

* People do tend to label one's self and to pigeonhole one, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

* People allow themselves to be pigeonholed.

* People want you to behave a certain way, or otherwise they become offended.

My experiences with the Gavrilovs and Mother's ex post facto criticism of my 'behavior' is evidence of this.

Did I create the nausea?
Probably not; I only sought to understand Sartre and to be solitary as I would usually be.
That was why I did not want to tell Leonid what 'kind' of philosophy I enjoyed.

I can also find admiration in him for his nerve to acknowledge the Sinking House and the fallacy of history.

Although I do delight in history at times. As a protest.

dm.A.A.



Another peculiarly endearing aspect of Sartre is his notion of the Gaze. To me, I can speak from experience in having been caught in the Gaze of another. It is a perpetual Appeal to Authority. Where convincing one's self in the absence of others and in Solitude has the qualities of Rapture and Novelty, to project onto the Other one's own personal source of Authority does have a quality of dryness and futility, marked by an arid tension in the throat, a dryness of the skin, and a depressive mood and bearing upon the eyes in general.

One feels cut off from Being, because what had been Being in its Openness takes on the quality of a mental figure: The Authority projected outwards. In this sense, Sartre speaks of what Jung calls participation mistique and subjectivisation of the Object.

dm.A.A.

In this situation, the Sinking House becomes a problem often, and so does the Perpetuation of the Old and Subversion of the New. There is also the sense of division betwixt Internal Monologue and Speech, suggesting the Questioner-Questioned dialectic.

dm.A.A.

One becomes encapsulated in the artifice of the agreed-upon World and is severred from the rapturous Joy of Solitude and Truth.

dm.A.A.



Hypocrisy.

It was only when I tried to pride myself in my own work in the public eye that I felt compeled to change it and to justify it. Sartre's self-conviction made the revision appear imperative. That was ironic; would I change something blindly? No. But to self-justify is not Sartrean.

dm.A.A.

On the Relationship between the It-It and the Sinking House.

The It-It relationship produces the Sinking House Problem. In the Absence of an I grounded in the Unconscious, Assuredness is absent. Certainty is Impossible, in the absence of a Thou. All abstractions are prone to error and are therefore at best Guesses.

The fallacy of Painting the Tree Red underlies all attempts at Repetition. There is no Truth which is not a feeble, Directed Construct. The inquiry lends itself to Madness: Repetition in pursuit of illusory success.

It is the Socratic appeal: The Barbarism of a trivial pursuit.

One can never trust such reasoning in fairness. The confederacy of intersubjectivity that is the It-It crowd cannot by its mutual agreement be trusted, whatever its numbers, if madness proliferates. Even the people in the I-It mode cannot be trusted, for they only have Assuredness. Certainty belongs to the I-Thou crowd, who cannot comprehend an It as an It and therefore cannot be certain of the integrity of the It-It. There can be no right answer if it is of equal value to a wrong answer, and because things are only true in so far as they are useful, since Madness is the origin of the Inquiry, the inquiry can never yield "truth".

Dm.A.A.

On Why Science cannot Prove a GIven Part of the Brain to be the Origin of Identity.

When I read a work of poetry, there is a distinctly I-Thou quality to it. I am in the presence of what Martin Buber described by this relationship; the World before me is vague, Mysterious, and hauntingly personal, vulnerable, available and Open. The Encounter of such a World stands in stark opposition to the remoteness of objects as they are experienced in the I-It mode, although alternation betwixt these two is inevitable. This dynamic alternation is essential to the Humanity of the human being, and it is clear to myself and several others that my generation of peers has little to no knowledge of the Other; it appears at best to be an abstract entity to them, with the obvious exception of a few.
In a preface to a re-publication of Martin Buber's seminal 'I and Thou', Jewish theologian Walter Kaufman pointed out that a number of people do not have an 'I' at all, but merely live as objects amidst objects in an It-It fashion. (This is miles from the Dingen of Rilke, in whose case Things are more akin to Thou's.) The people inhabiting It-It usually commit the barbaric sin that Nietzsche ascribes to Socrates of gathering information they do not intend to use. They keep the company of their fellow enthusiasts, whom they respect to the degree that they are just as devoid of a Soul -- an 'I' -- as they.
It would be unjust to suggest that the Scientific Community is any more densely populated with people of this kind than the Artistic Community, the Philosophical Community, or the Thoroughly Literate. Strictly speaking, we simply do not (and cannot) know, for one can only judge a person to be a given way one person at a time. To try to arrive at any broad knowledge of 'how many' people inhabit 'It-It' (through statistics) would require reducing everyone involved to an It, eliminating the possibility of spotting an I. As Sartre rightfully noted, one cannot comprehend the other person as a Subject if one treats that person as an Object. Such an inquiry would be entirely misleading, for although any socialised agent can fake sincerity, in theory, a genuine 'I' cannot come out of such a process. One ceases to be a true Subject once one consents towards being treated as an Object.
In light of the It-It tendency as a conceivable possibility, though, one can understand the origin of any trend in popular science which makes a claim towards having identified the 'exact part of the brain' that is responsible for individual Identity. Yet such a conjecture would tell more about our cultural biases than a 'matter of fact'; it is merely symptomatic of our naiive materialism and a Crisis in our modern conception of Identity. One cannot simply reduce Human Identity, in all seriousness, to a function of one isolated part of the brain. It is a grand pretension.
The first and most apparent reason for this is the complexity of Identity, and tied in intimately with this is the crisis of Identity in Modernity. Depending in part upon where one lives, one may be hard-pressed to find many people with whom to have a deep, vulnerable conversation that challenges and compels one to examine the Soul as an unknowable Mystery. To one who has not made such an enterprise a Goal, the description of such an encounter may appear to be 'mere words' plagiarised from out-dated texts.
Yet the few who possess what poets regard as genuine Self-Knowledge obviously inhabit an entirely different World than those who are content to 'understand each other' through small talk and common sense. Theirs is a different, if not greater, I. But if this begins to sound spiritually elitist, consider simply the basically incontrovertible fact that Identity varies from person to person and within each individual over the course of a life-time. The immediate awareness of a distinction between a superficial conception of one's self and an Authentic one should suffice to prove this.
The Scientific Process, in postulating a given lobe or gland as the 'origin' of Identity, commits its prime sin by reducing Identity to a Known It, by Analysis. Yet the Identity as it is understood in relation to Thou definitionally cannot be Known. This resolves the initial problem of a Theory of a Unconscious. How can we Know an Unconscious Mind to exist, if we would definitionally be Unconscious of such a Mind? The answer is that to be aware of the Existence of such a Mind -- a Second Subject -- is not the same as to be Knowledgeable about its Essence. If the Mind and the Identity are fundamentally Unknown, we affirm this Existence.

dm.A.A.

On the Paradox of Information Sharing and Believability.

On the Paradox of Information Sharing and Believability.

 

Every time that I perform a Google search, look at an article, or watch a video on-line, I increase, by the very design of these web-sites, the likelihood that someone else will see it. By virtue of this ideas gain in global popularity fairly rapidly in the modern age.

The fallacy of an Appeal to Mass Opinion necessitates a sort of skepticism: I do not know, simply by the popularity of a given article, for instance, whether or not it is misinformation. I must therefore take its popularity into serious consideration, and if anything I should exert more effort to question it if it is more popular, because if it IS misinformation, the burden I bear is great and the smaller the minority of skeptics the greater the responsibility for each individual skeptic.

Thus, by using Google to find information on-line*, I am actually DECREASING the believability of this “information” that I am finding SIMPLY BY CHOOSING TO SEARCH FOR IT. If I therefore hear a set of statistics by word of mouth, therefore, it would be most scholastically ethical of me NOT to verify it by using internet resources, because I would be invalidating it in the process of observation. If it was good information, I would be disrupting its credibility. If it was poor information (misinformation), I would commit the Siamese-twin sins of wasting time and spreading it.

 

*This has been called by Martin Heidegger “Standing Reserve.”

 

Dm.A.A.