>On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 19:05:58 -0500 Dace <edace at flinthills.com> wrote:
>
>> We were having a good discussion, and then all of a sudden he said,
"Well,
>it'll all be over in twelve years." In other words, all the signs of
crisis
>are really just setting the stage for the return of Jesus in the year 2000.
>Right then I knew I was never going to be friends with this guy, because we
>were living in different worlds.
>
>I'm reminded of ani difanco, "and i don't blame it all on you... but i
don't
>want to be your friend..." This is precisely what I'm talking about.
Religion
>makes it obvious, but these differences include politics and so on.
>
That's all abstraction. Just because we generate different abstractions
doesn't mean we're not doing so from a common mental framework.
Have you noticed that all of us humans have roughly similar bodies? Why would the mind be any different? The reason we have the same bodies is that we share the same evolutionary history. This applies equally to the mind, which attained roughly its present state by 100,000 years ago. By then, we had a general, abstract intelligence based on language, applied equally to the social and natural worlds. All the differences we've accumulated since then, both bodily and mental, are shallow compared to our similarities.
>> But there's only one self-existent world, and this world that we all
share is
>not just made of "carbon and junk." It has a shared mental content as well
as
>a shared material content.
>
>Ok, what is this world? Who's got dibs on the commonality? If no *one*
has
>it, which *group* has it... if no *one* group... which *groups* ... and so
on
>and so on. It is nice to say that we share a common world, but if you
can't
>lean into it and say "That's it! and everyone else is wrong" then what's
the
>point? Lacan is sensitive to this, which is why he calls this "Real" - a
kind
>of breaking point for any commonality (the assumption of which is part of
our
>Imaginary significations).
>
We don't share opinions in common, just the capacity for making them.
>> Cliches are like mental gravity. Unless you exert some creativity,
you'll
>get sucked in every time to the most overused way of expressing something.
You
>get my drift? We're not simply expressing our uniqueness all the time.
There
>are certain ways we think and talk and relate to each other, and this
shared
>reality is purely mental.
>
>No, I don't go for this shared mentality. The imaginary is *absolutely*
unique
>for the subject. We share pieces of the symbolic... although this is
usually
>fragmented in the Benjaminian sense. Castoriadis talks about the social
>imaginary... the institution of which we share (like, if 30 people are on a
>bus, they share being on the bus). This makes some sense to me... but each
of
>the 30 will likely have a different reading of the situation. Think about
>this: three people talking, then two walk away and talk about the
conversation
>between each of them and the third. No two "interpretations" of the
>conversation are the same...
>
Right. We all come up with different interpretations from each other.
However, we also come up with different interpretations from *ourselves*
over time. Does that mean you don't share a common mental world with
yourself from day to day?
I used to like to say that a town with one hundred different worldviews must have ninety-nine schizophrenics. If you've got an example of not sharing a common mental world with people, this would be it. But in my experience, it doesn't matter. I feel the same bond with schizophrenic people that I feel with everyone else. We all suffer the same.
>> This Bergsonian interpretation allows us to escape Cartesian dualism
without
>trying to reduce either side to the other.
>
>Lacan is, basically, inverted Cartesianism.
>
You've mentioned this before: "I am not where I think." Could you tell me a
little more about this? How, exactly, does this invert Descartes?
Ted