Sunday, January 24, 2010

Long, Unorganized Tangents

Recently, I have been slightly preoccupied by playing with this human predisposition . . . desperation sometimes . . . for order. How is it that we order own heads? Why? Are we active participants, and since it is highly likely that we always aren’t: Is it possible to construct an awareness of all our unextended constituents at one conscious moment?— reveal the macro-paradigmatic self to itself?—or is it better to get at ourselves by examining our constituents in their origins, piecemeal? Is there such a significant difference between what we know and what we only think we know? There is such a gap in all of us—but enough to warp a given perception of ourselves and what of our-self actually does show up in contribution(s) to society, to the culture? Here, I would love to spend time defining contribution. But I won’t. I have also leapt through the questions which entertain me—arriving at the end— without spending much time exhausting those things (research, introspection and experience) which make me certain that they are the most important questions.
I’ll make no assumptions here about whether you agree or disagree that knowing ourselves in this way, through this derived Socratic method I have sloppily presented, is the most important thing we must do before we begin to ‘order,’ or re-order our culture. However, we may all agree that in order for our minds to have the “spare time” and biological capacity for such concerns, if we ever wanted them, we must have certain basic, and then egoistic, needs met. Whether or not we are to be agitators in the spirit Dr. King likens himself to Socrates in his letter, or whether there is a more fluid method for human progress waiting to be discovered within the individual consciousness—destined and determined to infect us all—we must eat. We must sleep. We must all have the opportunities to freely associate our minds. We all must have access to the most accurate histories and evolutions and wisdoms of the ages to best make decisions for our-self. We must rid our-selfs of those things choking our individual cognitive growth: our self-indicting inferiorities, prejudices, lack of self-awareness, those thrones we adore—teachers and teachings we allow to set up barricades in our heads. So we are predisposed to order. I am still torn away sometimes, and will always commit time here and there to the ‘why’ of this, but whether Descartes has it right in that it indicates a Creator or a naturalistic reading of Nietzsche emphasizes the primacy of science—We all have this need for order in us. It persists. It will out. It tends to find things to define you if you do not take study of it.

3 comments:

  1. Well,

    There is a lot here that I just do not follow. But I do have one comment to make. You seem to query whether or not self-knowledge is a precondition for ordering ourselves and our world.

    I guess I'm just wondering, what exactly do you mean by order? In one place you seem to take it as a way of changing or influencing things in the world, while elsewhere you treat it as a kind of sense-making, both of self and world. Then again, you also imply that it is a form of self or world regimentation.

    So, which of these are you referring to when you talk about our need for order? Then, how does the process of self-knowledge relate to this need? If the process is never completed, as you may be suggesting, does the need for order remain perpetually unsatisfied?

    There is some good food for philosophical thought here, but more clarity is needed...

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  3. In short, the need for 'order' is the result of dynamic identities. We cannot even conceive of static identities other than they must contain the complete satisfaction of want-- no space available for migration (within infinite space). -----> think of an identity that is perfectly reconciled to "The Theory of Everything."

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