(written about a month or so ago)
i suppose that thanksgiving is when one is supposed to be reminded to be thankful. while this in principle, is the same for pilgrims as us, i don’t believe it to be the most useful of things to do with our time.
if anything we ought to be “thankful” all the time. but that’s not even a question of giving thanks… as it begs the question, thanks to who? even the universe in general isn’t good enough, because it implies that if one is thankful for one day then — you can take advantage of everything all the rest of the days?
what an utterly and ridiculous notion!
i have been trying to stay away from some of the pitfalls of philosophy. see, it’s not a matter of specific knowledge it’s more of the way in which we apply our thoughts. philosophy as an exercise isn’t the extrapolation of “key points”, that is something anyone and everyone can does — stoners especially. what makes something philosophy is the consideration of these key points within a territory of meta-physics. so while there are some artists that certainly give philosophical critiques, and i know of some, they are still not, strictly speaking, philosophers.
so for example — how the paragraph above applies to me — would go something like this… something i might’ve done (but have not, to the best of my knowledge) is approach someone who is claiming to not be a philosopher because he is proposing an anti-metaphysics and say to him loudly: THE NEGATION OF A METAPHYSICS IS A METAPHYSICS
which in a philosophical sense, is definitely be true. and is true in a heideggerian kind of way. but really is not a useful thought to anyone except philosophers.
so you get trapped, see? once you unconsciously apply that context, you’re kinda stuck addressing context, which is slippery and hard to define.
so this question of thanks, or not thanks, is really a false dichotomy. you can have a day of thanks and still be thankful. all the time.
lately though, i have been disgusted with the world we are living in. from consumerism, to everything else. it seems there is too much baggage around. and what is one to do? go to your parents or your whoever and say, look, you know and i know x y z is supposed to happen but let’s agree not to play that game and be genuine with one another… and deal with one another on the basis of a natural ethics.
even if they agree, and didn’t decide you were looney and trying to impose a crap load of your own constructions onto them, it’s almost laughable that there be some genuine authentic human being underneath all of these games. i mean, how many of you women would be willing to give up your identity and learned behaviors of womanhood? if you address the question to men it’s even stickier because most men may be aware of “being a man” of when they are to do that kind of “man thing”, but at the same time, how many of them are really willing to give it up? being a man is more socially “default” than being a woman, so it’s harder to realize when you are “being yourself” and when you are “being a man”. in fact, i would argue that its impossible for many men since we are so much “ourself” “a man”.
after all, women can wear pants and ppl don’t really care…
so its kind of like, give up what? let’s imagine i was trying to fit in. and that i am making myself miserable doing it. so i stop “fitting in”. but what does that mean? how do i earn a living? and at what point should i no longer stop giving things up, and accept that i have reached my genuine self. so.. okay, we can agree that i am not cut out to be a finance person. i admit that. i suck at it. and i get lost easily in finance (but not math)… and i don’t have patience for it. so i can stop that. but does that mean i need to stop working? if i want to stop doing sales, fine. im not an extrovert, and it drains me alot to talk to ppl. but does that mean i stop being self-employed? who am i really? that’s a really really REALLY dumb question though, because it doesn’t go anywhere. am i assuming that i have an inner fireman (or some other job) i can channel and suddenly discover that i need to reorient my life in a cosmological way and that cosmology happens to correspond to a banal everyday job THAT I CAN DO IN LA IN THE EARLY 21st CENTURY AND STILL BE “FIT IN” to the larger society? its kind of a tall order to think that ideal something would make everything “work”.
see, it’s easy to locate conflict in the local. like, oh it’s my coworker(s) that make me unhappy, or its the fact that i need to make 20k more or that my gf isn’t the right person… but it’s much harder to reasonably assume that local conflicts do not result from global fissures.
in one sense it’s easy to say, oh, everything is local. so if i have a problem with my mother, it’s not pathological — meaning it’s not a structural issue in how i make my surroundings/relationships. that if i run away from home, i won’t have a similar problem with someone else, elsewhere. so the presence of conflicts in the local do not assume that problems aren’t global too. but absence doesn’t work that way. should everything be okay locally, then we suddenly don’t care about the global… since our experience of the global is always mediated by the local.
this is still pretty mundane. on thanksgiving you can say, oh, i love you ppl! you ppl who want to spend it with me! and that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? that’s what any holiday is about, spending it with those unique others. there isn’t a magical soulmate you haven’t yet, or the perfect family you have to find and become — this is the moral conclusion of any good thanksgiving family movie. and that conclusion lends itself to supposing a radical absence of the global all together.
and this is where things get a little hairy.
because there isn’t a cosmological signifiance to the global. global is only a position we reify ourselves — through our pathology or the repetition of our situation. conflicts in the local originate from the vehicles of how we situate or deploy things that happen around us. we repeat our histories because we recreate those contexts. this is pretty plain psychoanalysis-wise but the larger situation i am attempting to express is one devoid of oedipus, symbolic regimes or other meta-physical crap. we can and should suppose the global as the vanishing mediator by which we explain and interface with our surroundings, but we should not limit our surroundings to this global mediation! (maybe zizek would say at this point, who cares about the cosmos? only global only global. but no, the property isnt transitive, there is a parallax)
but not to get side-tracked:
reality is not the pawn of ideas. reality may be a playground for ideas to find expression, but the ghost always needs a body. it’s in the body that a ghost becomes real — not the other way around. rather, ideas are the pawn of reality. we can play with them, and create them but they ultimately only remain facets of our own distinction having ‘reality’ only when we align them with the actual happenings in reality.
reality is not limited to the ideas we have in our head. i think this kind of rationalization is very very damaging. i see this happening alot in political discourse, or in social situations where 1) individuals assume others embody a principle or 2) individuals or situations are defined in terms of a principle.
both are limiting behaviors and discard the larger reality which has no principle or idea. one might as well assume there is an evil in the world, originating from a particular source. it’s like harry potter defeating whatever his face is. he removes evil from the world, so now we can never have evil ever again.
or in some other stories, where there is one good, like if some super mad scientist found where jesus lived and decided to imprision jesus. oh no, make that santa claus. now there’s no xmas.
like that.
human beings may construct for the larger society, a discourse of thanks, or political salvation or what have you, but that discourse is reality only for the people who accept the temporal context or the narrative context. this is a very powerful thing to have happen, but it’s also very damaging for us, because we become blind to what we are doing and what we are not only thinking we are doing but what else we are actually doing (to ourselves or others). i am not advocating a return to gaia or that we need to live with one with nature — or embrace our biological imperative — those discourses are also a return to the ‘true authentic self’ which are defined by anthropomorphosizing concepts. nature is a concept. biological imperatives are concepts. i don’t mean to say that concepts are not real, just that are they are not definitively real, inscribed in the cosmological void! the global exists too, but only for the one, not for the cosmos. this is what hegel means when he talks about universal vs the Notion, but that’s for a different time.
so what does it leave us? with an authentic…. what? one might as well assume that chimps have biological imperatives and study them in labs. removing one from the situation is to defamiliarize that removed one.
i kind of want to move away from this now, because i am skirting on this notion of ‘choice’ and ‘free will’ which is too much to get into right now. a good example of how discourse and pre-conceived notions comes into play is in the discursive writings of evolutionary psychologists… who presuppose natural identity for man and woman since the dawn of time. or who ‘discover’ our ‘true nature’ as some kind of social evolution concurrent with our biological evolution. for example, seeing ‘modern hunter gatherers’ as ‘a window to our prehistoric man’ is both racist and ignoring the fact that the present is not the past’s present. the present in the past is gone, and the past’s present seen today is a very different thing than the past’s past. unfortunately like all discourses, the precepts of that discourse create the conditions for fulfilling and expressing that discourse. if ‘we’, the contemporary man, are the pinnacle of evolution then we deserve what we got. those who are ‘lesser’… well, you get it. most of discourse is, is to narratively sort out other people and to tell us how to treat them and deal with them.
so we know ourselves in the process through the global mediation of the narrative about other people.
i guess i could have said all of this, after thinking about it and procrastinating on my CEU (continuing education units) by saying for this entry
1. there isn’t anything to be thankful about, except that you can be thankful
2. there is no (big Other) to be thankful to.
3. you aren’t being thankful, it’s your role in the story to be thankful… because there is no real you, only your body and your projected identity.
but look at this. haven’t i narratively told you who you are, how to deal with other people and how you can fulfill and express yourself?
i have! but only if you believe in this discourse, of course.
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