On Sun, 15 Oct 2000 19:05:59 -0400 Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> People who failed to do this -- because, for example, they grew up under
conditions of slavery -- might require masters. I regard that requirement as a
pathology.
Errr... you've smuggled in autonomy (?) as the telos of what it means to be human. This might be desirable, it probably won't make us happy, and it is certainy a requirement for politics... but... I reserve to make an absolute wasteland of my life. On another note, I see nothing non-pathological about waking up in the morning, brewing a cup of coffee and sitting at a plastic desk that looks like wood, fingering another plastic toy called a mouse while looking into a shiny screen that is connected by a plug in the wall to who the hell knows what - all the while worrying about whether the local transit system, which runs on rails, will move me from one place to another where I can meet with people and talk about my other plastic toys and some tree products that have been mashed real thin with ink spilled on them.
> And as I've said I think the crushing business is reaching the limits of what
the earth can successfully tolerate.
No disagreement here.
> I don't think what you're saying is complete hocus-pocus, but
> it seems overly cosmogonical. That is, if we imagine the
> universe coming into being in a sort of Genesis 1 manner, an
> incomprehensible God wills it into existence, for no reason,
> out of absolutely nothing; so this will, this desire, begins
> for no reason and with no object but its own existence. And
> something of this spontaneity is retained in the notion and
> common experience of will.
Well, I don't think I was saying that. But I'm fascinated by the 'fact' of consciousness, and I really don't think that it is fully explainable outside of some sort of mythology... now this, I'm sure, will lend itself to vast misundertanding... but I quite honestly think there is something fundamentally strange about consciousness. I like Castoriadis's take on the matter: we put the world into categories through, in part, our imagination - without knowing whether or not the world is an appropriate subject for categorization... but we can't just impose anything, there is resistance...
> But the creation is at the extreme of existence. Most of us
> experience desires which generally arise out of our biology
> and social arrangements, targeted if not toward known entities,
> then toward known categories of entities.
Of course. But experience isn't epistemology. The unconscious knows things in a way that the conscious self does not...
> Also, most of us experience life as beings having a single unitary
consciousness, so that theories of an active, ego-like (agential?) unconscious
and multiple speakers within the self may be suspected to be artifacts of
analysis rather than theories based firmly in the empirical.
Well, if you're saying that psychobabble simply makes things up... there is a tremendous amount of clinical evidence that points to the contrary...
> >If I might dare, if you owned a company the size of Microsoft or GM or
> >something, what would you do? I mean, knowing that the current state of affairs
> >would lead to annihilation.
> I would sell (almost) all I had, give to the poor, and take up my oatmeal
cookies. If my understanding is right, then there's nothing any corporation or
other organ of the State can do to help human beings deal with their
predicament. If it's wrong, my governance of a large institution would be
random and probably futile or even destructive (although possibly rather
entertaining). Of course I would skim off enough to give me and my friends
some really good parties before I dumped it all.
Well, you're probably more honest than I am. I'd likely turn the whole thing into a co-op and go from there. In any event, my Super7 lotto ticket didn't win me the $20M so I guess my dreams will have to be shelved for the moment.
Some polling service called me the other day and asked me what I thought the most pressing problem facing Canada was. It took me a good two or three minutes to answer and I think I kind of sputtered out... "democracy... or at least the lack of it." I was kind of disappointed with my answer and felt like I should say something like "poverty" or "violence." The rest of the questions were equally vague... except for the one asking, "Do you have any children under the age of 18?" to which I responded, "I hope not." "Good answer" followed by gails of broken laughter. Then we started talking freely about education and employment... breaking out of the script. For some reason this made me feel better. I guess this might be the best we can hope for at the moment, findings ways of breaking out the script we've been handed.
Back to a biography on Locke.
ken