This is why I would miss Dave if something ever happened to him.
I don’t get this level of conversation with anyone else.
In case you can’t tell from these first four lines, I’m going to try and write this out in a different way.
I was at the gym about two weeks ago with him. Immediately after checking in at the counter I picked a random topic of conversation I found interesting.
“Dave! You know that some astrologers up in Minnesota have decided that there are 13 astrology signs?” (link here 13 Astrology signs due to Alteration in Earths Rotation)
Dave did not say anything so I continued. (I know he does not care about astrology at all.)
“So, I told *** that according to the new astrology she’s not really a Scorpio — she’s really a Virgo. And that her kids were actually Sagittarians. She disagreed. I told her that this was a ‘typical virgo-trait’. She then told me that this new astrology sucked and that she could strangle me. Then I told **** that she that we weren’t really virgos but a leos. She said it was only for people born after 2009. Maybe that’s really true but I disagreed. Then I said it was retroactive and she called shenanigans. Then I told ***** that she wasn’t really a Capricorn, but actually a sag. And you know what she said?”
“What?”
“She said ‘ooh, so that’s why my horoscope never matched.’ Haha, it only didn’t work on *****. Astrological-trolling.”
By this time we were sitting at a chest weight machine. We put some weights on and without discussing it were starting to take turns.
Dave: “You know, Alex, this actually makes me really angry.”
“Why?”
Dave: “Because it’s so stupid. Astrology isn’t real. Why should they care about what astrological sign they have? It’s completely irrational.”
“What does it matter? It’s a filter, an arbitrary way of assigning meaning.”
“But it’s not true! Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
This is something we’ve discussed many times. “So? The meaning is what’s true, not the specificity of the actually sign-ology. You may not think that there is a God but you don’t know that. It’s what’s on South Park, that episode about Mormons. It may all be just untrue but it helps people live in a good and upstanding way.”
Dave: “You know, I used to work with a co-worker back at ********** and we would talk about this.” I got onto the machine. “I asked him once, what if you found irrefutable evidence that God was not real. No one knew you had this evidence and it was absolutely convincing. What would you do?”
“What did he say?”
Dave: “He said he would destroy the evidence. He said he would find some way to destroy it so it would be irretrievable and then he would hide the fact he ever found it.”
“He wouldn’t – He wouldn’t bring it out to other people to enlighten them? What if he was afraid of social unrest?” I got up and Dave sat in the machine.
Dave: “He said he would pretend he never found it. And I believed him. I really believed that’s what he would do.”
“Hm.” I watched Dave work the machine. While he was pumping at the machine: “But that’s what faith is.”
Dave: “But he’s being irrational. There’s no reason for him do that. Even if he didn’t want to tell anyone else, he could reform. Why believe in a myth, in an illusion?”
Dave seemed to be getting upset. I said: “There’s a fundamental flaw in what you are thinking — and it’s the opposite of what most people would think. Most people assume that there has to be a solid relationship between reality and meaning. That facts mean specific things and the presence of those items verifies a particular logic. Like everything is sensible like in CSI or in Sherlock Holmes. Most people don’t critically think either, they fit facts into a pre-ordained meaning they would like to see. For example racism as posited by Slavoj Zizek is pathological in the Kantian sense — meaning that perception and meaning tie regardless of the actuality of a situation.” I sat in the machine and in the process of pushing weights I continued to speak: “In Zizek’s example, assume that someone who was Anti-Semitic was faced with a Jew who was misery. That someone would declare, that ‘Jew is misery!’ (because he’s a Jew) and not because (he’s tight with money). You’re just taking it to the next level, that reality and meaning have to be tied together. If meaning doesn’t fit the facts then meaning should change too. The two really don’t coincide. It’s almost like saying, ‘Jews being misery is racist therefore we can never declare someone who is a Jew to also be misery… because that is also racist’.”
I was huffing when I got off and Dave sat in the seat: “There are laws to the universe. Things begin and things end.”
“Sure, so you would believe in the absent watch maker.”
Dave: “What?”
“The absent watch maker. It’s the idea from Deism in the 17th century that the universe is orderly, and that alone determines that there is a God… without religion. He set the watch rolling, disappeared and everything matched up. We all have a place in the universe, our lives have cosmological significance.”
Dave’s turn again. He increased the weights. He got back on. Dave: “This is a weighty subject matter.”
“Ha ha. Reality itself is not orderly. In fact, Lacan hit it on the head when he claimed that the Real is a miss-match of misshapen, disorderly partialities that coincide in an unrecognizable, irreconcilable manner. We each understand and attach meaning to these coincidences, create other from apparitions and claim that this has a cosmological significance that continues beyond our sight.”
Dave: “Sure reality is orderly. I like to think that the ball rolling away appears on the other side — and is the same ball.”
“Sure reality is orderly, that’s why [this gym] is playing ‘Already Gone’ by the Eagles — think that’s a coincidence? No it’s orderly! Because God is Already Gone! All we have left is a universal order WITHOUT the possibility of coincidences!
Our conversation kind of ended there because I forget what happened afterwards. But I think he got what I was saying. If you see order in some places, you might as well extend order into other areas. Without an objective measure that is universally real, there isn’t really any way of determining what should also be objective. Science is one way, but it’s based on our shared experiences, and what we can agree on as a bunch of humans.
Plus, science is out of the realm of philosophy, strictly speaking. When we start to deal with softer issues, like the indeterminateness of tribes in anthropology or ontology — items that we can’t test in an objective circumstance, we begin to lose our bearings. Never mind that science may structure technology which shapes our lives in countless fashions — for our every day human being, we exist in a personal constellation whose orientation is without any outside referents. No one knows what things mean to us, for instance. No one knows how these connections work — except for us, the subject. And so when it comes to culture we too as a society assume that certain items have a weightiness that members outside our culture would not readily attribute.
But that is how we like to fit things. We think that the role of a person in a culture is inscripted into tradition, inscripted into the universe, for time immemorial. When I got to bed in the morning, I will wake up in the same place I woke up at. And if not, then there has to be a reasonable continuity of experience that happens even if I do not directly experience it — that it is in fact experiential (by someone like me). That people are meant to be a certain way, to play certain roles. Each of us then objectively exist in universes that are incommensurably different. Descartes had this problem when he ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’med his way into two distinct substances… then was unable to not only meld the two substances of mental and physical together — but also unable to account for the fact that we while we share physical experiences with others, we don’t also share mental experiences with others in the same way as the physical realm.
If anything, what Lacan notes as being the Symbolic — that realm of meaning making — is itself the horizon of the Real, the bulwark that fends off the insecure unaccountable, ir-reasonableness of the Real. In much the same way this inability to think through facets of reality that deny cognitive metabolism can only be analogized by our continued trips to the gym… going through the pain of building up our the most ir-reasonable, silent, and unaccountable mass of dividuation1 — all for the purposes of assigning and assuring our place without the social continuity as being male, fit and buff… with all their attendant significations. — the other side of our dividuation being namely that other black mass which is our unknown inner portions of our consciousness. Our body is restless, our mind is restless. Each one prompt the other, — Act! much like the tension between personal and social determinations…
In this sense, the only universal available to us is the universal void — not the “out there” beyond the scope of our senses, but that Heideggerian “black box” of Das Sein, somewhere in the non-shape of our Cartesian soft axies of mind and body.
1 It is a split subject divided between itself and a demand that it cannot meet, a demand that makes it the subject that it is, but which it cannot entirely fulfill. From Simon Critchley
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