On Fri, 31 Mar 2000 16:51:21 -0500 Dace <edace at flinthills.com> wrote:
> Just because we generate different abstractions doesn't mean we're not doing
so from a common mental framework.
Language isn't abstract for the person using it!
> Have you noticed that all of us humans have roughly similar bodies?
I hadn't noticed that.
> Why would the mind be any different?
I suspect contingency has something to do with it.
> The reason we have the same bodies is that we share the same evolutionary
history.
Ok, what is the shared evolutionary history? And don't say anything about genetics, we've known for a long time know that physiological details override raw genetic makeup (alas, another abstraction).
> 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.
Well... what can I say. I disagree. The smallest details make all the difference in the world (a cloud is 100% water, a watermelon is 93% water, so, the difference between a cloud and a watermelon is 7%! Not that much eh? Although I'd rather walk through a cloud than have a watermelon dropped on my head. I've got no stake in defending commonality qua "nature" - since I think the argument is a red herring used to sidestep the more accute and politically relevant social and economic differences.
> We don't share opinions in common, just the capacity for making them.
Ummm... no. In psychosis, or in the subjective psychotic attitude, there is no choice, that's precisely the problem. There is a line in 'the book' that reads something like "you'll never be given more than you can chew." I disagree. Sometimes circumstances overwhelm us, and we are destroyed, paralyzed, incapacitated... In effect, we no longer "play the game" - the game "plays us." The truth of material determinism is not, as President's Choice tell us ("the way things should be"), it is, on the contrary, its all too immanent reality in the face of stiffling social conditions.
> Does that mean you don't share a common mental world with yourself from day
to day?
Good question! In fact, "I" don't. The inverted Cartesian universe reads like this: "I am not where I think." The subject is not the substance of the cogito.
> We all suffer the same.
No. We suffer, but it isn't the same. Check out Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes" in the anthology "Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism." The idea of a "common suffering" is very similiar to what she talks about in regards to victimization and the construction of categories.
> 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?
And I see that I'm starting to sound like a broken record... Descartes' "I think therefore I am" had the subject issuing from the cogito - I am / I think, as if being and thinking were identical. Lacan breakes with this tradition by inverting it. Being eclipses thinking and thinking eclipses being. When we think, we alienate our being. The enlightenment, in this sense, is structured around a narcissistic paranoia - "If I stop thinking, I shall cease to exist." This marks a substantial difference from the postmodern thinkers who do away with the subject altogether ("the death of the subject").
ken