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.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
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.
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