On the Fallacy of Intersubjectivity
I came to this realisation whilst reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I had been trying to crack that tome for months, but it was not until today that I could keep it open for more than a few mere minutes. The exception was one instance on the third floor of the Palomar College Campus Library.
With slavish fortitude of mind and what must have been an explosion of unspoken awareness, I came to understand why neither Joyce nor I was mad.
An artist can point at that object in his or her environment and say, "I prefer that." He or she may similarly look inwards at that glowing (or otherwise) Platonic image on a work that he or she has yet to bring into the material world.
The words would be the same: "I prefer that." It is not until someone else comes along and asks, "what does 'that' mean?" that one has to construct a more adequate picture, yet the aesthetic and cognitive necessities of this new construct will depend upon the audience and its denseness.
Intersubjectivity is that process of Describing something using Directed Thinking. We make a grave mistake when we confuse the World for the symbols that we use to describe it. This has been pointed out by Alan Watts.
When I have too excessive a need to justify myself, too ardent a passion to be understood, et cetera, my external monologue becomes my internal monologue, building upon past experiences and confusing my mind, for it makes impossible within the safe caverns of my own mind this simple sentence: "I prefer that." I always hear, neurotically, the voices of others asking me either to justify myself or to specify what I mean.
My father, who so often demands needless explanations for things which a little more empathy would make clear as day, haunts me in the form of a complex. His thoughts, or rather the words that I use to justify myself to him, become my "innermost" thoughts, by which I perpetuate this complex. In the process, the fluidity and ineffable freshness of my non-directed Life is totally submerged in the muck of "reason".
Joyce helped me to recall what freshness is. Any one of us can say "fresh", but how many of us can describe it as Joyce has? We too often use words such as "fresh" and abuse them when we know nothing of them.
This at least is the case with my dad.
There is something profoundly sick in the man who can no longer emote. The mechanical man becomes tyrannical because his sentiment is blocked by conditioning.
I still remember the moment I looked at my father, heard his voice, and recognised that he was Darth Vader.
Even the words I use now to justify myself are mere clots like blood coagulating.
I had arrived at a frustrating passage in my novel, the one I've been writing for months. This passage concerned a girl's relationship with her father.
I was struck, suddenly, with the complex. A dry grippingness possessed me, as though I were confronting my own father, but I did not know it.
Something again weighed down upon me: "Change the structure." It sounded like every instance wherein he told me to get off the computer because I was less welcome there than he and his work was more important than me.
I claimed not to care. Yet it was this pattern of being marginalised and told that my own emotions were illusory that gives me the feeling of being constantly haunted. Father would not leave me alone. Whenever he could learn where I was, he would be unscrupulous, however much I may have pled, to find me when it was time to go home.
Of course, his sentiment was understandable. We live with two women. His mother must have been a miserable Soviet wench, and her own blunted affect show at times in father's almost schizoid self-assuredness.
I say to my father, in my mind, not knowing that I am speaking to him: "I prefer to have the chapter on Cars follow the chapter on Stephanie's father." Yet this is of course a lie. I had chosen to have the chapter on Cars precede the chapter on Stephanie's father, but it was merely my own father that triggered the complex.
"How does a good writer organise a novel?" I think unconconsciously. "There must be a WAY THAT IT IS DONE."
And immediately a dogmatic platonism possesses my mind. Father, who can take everything from me at any instant, as the Lord God can, tells me: you need to change this. It is too informal.
He offers no justification, but I have no justification except for my own sacred, self-justifying sentiment and Intuition, neither of which amount to anything to him. The consideration of the virtues of these separate chapters is entirely lost in this mine-field of emaciated intellectual sterility.
Finally, I retort: "I choose this way." He asks, unconsciously, to the both of us, "which way?"
And I cannot point to him where it is, for he fails so pitifully to see into my mind. So I explain, to him, though thinking it is to myself, "I want to put the chapter on 'Cars' PRIOR to the chapter on 'Stephanie's Father'." Yet the very words, as they exit my imagined mouth, seem so absurd that I find myself removed from all socialised life. I am in the sinking house; I cannot even tell if what i have said makes any sense or if I had even said what I meant to, for the words have become merely identical droplets of water on the window. And it is a window that my father cannot see me through. He can only see the droplets, and the words mean little to him regardless of what I say.
Of course, all Directed Thought is directed AT someone. So in the absence of an audience, only in the absence of an audience, can there be peace. The very process of logic stems from the complex, and it is also the food that feeds it. Even when I say to myself, "I prefer this," the moment that I begin to further describe "what I mean", that same moment I am speaking again not only to my father but to my complex.
Only by looking inward, directing my eyes AT the thing and away from the judging audience, can I begin to delight in this unspoken, wordless, grammatically incorrect knowledge keeping watch over the rational, Malfoyesque "method".
Yet again, the moment I begin to justify myself, even to myself (itself an absurdly schizophrenic predicament, as Nietzsche and Watts point out), I am again feeding the demon of formal logic that only understands itself by making reference to itself. It is a troll seated upon a throne that can only live so long as someone sees it. It is constipated Rationalism that usurps the throne of an unspoken voiceless Voice that the moment it is heard disappears.
dm.A.A.
