----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
>
>
> ``Why us?---the effete intellectual snobs---because it's our job.''
(CG)
>
> ``This is part and parcel of the arrogance that has gotten the human
> species into such a pickle. It has nothing to do with snobbery.
What's
> our job, to save humanity from itself?'' Ian
>
> No. The role of an intellectual class is to articulate and interpret
> current events as history, through the cultural lens of all that
class
> can bring to bare on those events---just as writers, artists,
> musicians, poets have since whenever somebody had the bright idea to
> make a mask, put it on, declare that all gods and laws are fallen,
and
> play out the tragic consequences---to sing of great events of gods
and
> men in dubious battle, far, far away. Anybody can join the play. Why
> apologize?
==========
Wasn't asking for an apology. I'm just not sure it's had a significant effect on diminishing institutionalized violence in the short, medium and long run let alone the belief systems that give rise to it. I shudder to think how many US citizens are interpreting current events through 'lens' of Lahaye & Jenkins. If the larger context is theism-secularism, I'm not sure there's been any progress.
>
> ``I think it is [aspiring to transcendence], despite its
> [postmodernist philosophy's] so-called protests to the contrary...''
>
> ``Well the burden's on 'ya. Transcendence of what? Or as Sartre
said,
> `no exit.' '' Ian
>
> The entire genre is devoted to the rescue of meta-physics, as in
> beyond-material, so it is concerned with rescuing, re-interpreting
and
> re-inventing modes of transcendence of material reality by
> definition.
==============
I don't think we can homogenize pomo; if anything it's about the play-struggle-agony of differentiation, which is not the same as transcendence.
>And of course, No Exit a play, therefore a performance
> with masks, takes place in Hell, a form of subtended or subservient
> transcendence, despite Sartre's intention to make it evident that
Hell
> is here, trapped in an endless manage a trois of mutually dependent
> objectifications. A cultural life is a mode of primary
transcendence,
> that is literally an escape from the material ground of biological
> evolution.
============
And here I thought Sartre was saying there is no escape from the human condition of antagonism, cruelty, domination and it's connection to the body. Silly me. As for the last sentence, there is no escape, as yet, from biology. The 'laws' of physics do not preclude non-biological modes of subjectivity. However, even if AI or A-Life were achievable it doesn't follow that all those behaviors we claim to deplore would be transcended.
>
> What I was trying to point out is that we are also engaged in a
> closely related reaction to many of the same material and cultural
> forces that seem to drive fundamentalism. We should be aware of that
> relation, and more of course understand it, and recognize its
> potential darkness.
>
> Chuck Grimes
============= Our species has been inventing ways of trying to understand itself for a long time. Our inability to transcend/eliminate violence is a manifest failure at the institutional scale. We either [a] already have a belief system that is sufficiently universalizable to end our warmaking ways or [b] such a belief system has yet to be invented or [c] no such belief system is possible. Any takers on which of those choices, if any, is the correct one?
Ian