General Reflections on Emotional Responses to Idea Exchange (I)

A general reflection on emotional responses to conversation, or on a class of conversations which I refer to as genuine opportunities for “idea exchange” . . .

I was caused to reflect on my latent conception of this phenomenon when Dr. Marina Berzins McCoy came to campus and presented her notion of Vulnerability both in the context of her philosophy of community/society and as she interprets the function of vulnerability in two specific works by Sophocles. Though I plan to directly respond to both her in-class and out-of-class lectures in a later blog (objecting specifically to her polis-centric valuation of catharsis and vulnerability), here I will post some entries from my diary from when I first started grappling at this idea of vulnerability. Also, traveling with Plato through his delineated “love assent” in Symposium, immediately made my latent experiences resonate at the frequency of pure truth-- as best as I can recognize it in a feeling. In my diary, I like to let my mind flow with minimal restrictions, so following I will try to update these entries with a more structured commentary. ***It is not necessary to read the diary entries to join what I am getting at . . . this posting is long enough without them, so feel free to skip if you find yourself in a rush . . . though a life that is always rushing tends to be incapable of absorbing the finer disposition of vulnerability . . .

25 Dec, 2007 7:54am

genuine expression creates a vulnerable moment between author and reader. the will to dawn another's vulnerability and to share that with them can only happen in a person who has first had some sort of a model for self-honesty. The result being that the seekers and practitioners of honest accounts find themselves oneday magically in the business of inspiring others. still others become convinced that happiness will come once they are living squarely, and untouchably, within the stackings of their own inhibitions to risk knowing themselves, much less another. This is only an honest way to sustain a taste for dishonesty. There can be no other human endeavor that produces such a knowledgeable symbiot than two hearts made vulnerable by a receptiveness to truth . . . try it. And actually, I know of no other profession that even makes sense being that- from scientist to poet- our best conclusions in, of, and about life will always hinge where understandings between hearts and minds are made. 7:59am

5 July, 2008 11:04pm

Someone has stopped living when they are at a stand-still with how to express the resonant truth of their own story— has stopped telling their story as a truth— has represented themselves to others as copies of a copy. These types live in and for results. Abstractions have no value to these, and they can only value you for your tangible products. These value themselves as a copy with identities composed only by relationships with the apparent status of other lives, value of another's store, other's words. A person who knows that they only demonstrate what they are unaware of by speaking a truth they have lived-- and has the courage to speak anyway-- this is a person who is at peace with the questions that are still open in their heart. These living persons love the value of abstractions and will hold you open and suspended with them always because of this. You may go on to learn something more from this person, but these things you may know of them for certain: they realize that the answer is having a question, that there is no fear worth certainty and that certainty itself is an illusion which worships ignorance. Someone has truly stopped living when they f e e l to have more answers than they can s e e questions. Here there is seen a real difference between the identity built around a need for answers and those who have found an indefatigable delight in the daily surprise of assailing questions leading to a journey. And here some want to assume a destination, or the expectation of a discovery, and they ask the question: To discover "what?" The need of a known destination before movement can be authorized is for those who suffer journeys. Absorbing the journey imparts a crucial, emotional, vulnerable relationship with a destination/stopping-point; A fixed cognitive eye wanders nowhere, rushes past surprise, undervalues the great education to be discovered behind simplicity, learns very little that is new, chases after and practices only the most extant variety of inheritance, migrates from one indoctrination to the next. We are interested in the earnest journey-woman who is lost and can never arrive whose movements take her up and around and through all of the entrenched identities of the stale and dead; we want her ability to sustain life, how she came to choose this existence, why?, and how such a life can succeed in making the best of all possible contributions to this world.

It is true that the most genuine, and paradoxically complex, of ways that a person can offer themselves to you is by beginning with questions which hold only the promise of an uncommon transparency. Such an uncommon transparency, to this day, remains so uncommon in any host or potential counterpart due to the fact that a low natured identity is so commonly preferred, imparted, inherited and practiced. Our tiny details, given time, become strange again-- an education we lose, or synonymously, habitually revisit-- delivering us to mimicries of strength. They must be mimicries, for those distasteful of abstractions and lovers of destinations can only tell you where they are and not how or why they got there. The journey is erased in the mind’s relevance, and so integral pieces of the destination are removed. The destination/truth/etc. becomes warped this way. So, it is BOTH conversationalists who must be able to recognize/want/exhibit the signs of self-ease/transparency/maneuvered vulnerability to share their respective journeys, to whatever degree their respective educations allow, in order to plunge through this rare window of unabashed wisdom-exchange when it has the opportunity to exist. 12:12am

12 August, 2008 7:37pm

. . . We throw out nothing. We keep everything. We trade in acts; that is all. We re-familiarize and switch our practices when we are seeking comfort. Lies or truths, either could be our composition now. This is how the truth of our multiple faces is revealed to be so funny and so horrible and so strange and so familiar. This is how an act, when practiced enough, becomes a life and a life an act. Dear Truth! Let me be alone with you to act and to live; to scream when struggling with discovery and not with familiarities. I am becoming too full wishing I were somewhere I could be emptier.

7:43pm

Sept 9 2008 8:08pm

I am going to bed tonight dulled. Unsettled, unfulfilled and without perspective. And my comfort is unquestionable. There is no dis-ease in my life. There may be a disease setting though. I didn’t even want to write this, but here I am, and now I am off. I do not wrestle with abstracts or their implications, validities, plausible truths or tangential destinations/syntheses. I am comfortable. Just like those who surround me and those I work with and work for and be-friend and talk to and hike with and—But then there are those IIII engage to know. Those who want to be known, and in the grocery store for seven minutes and fifty-seconds while she scans my groceries I get to reach deep and mean something I say. Unleash me in the other chamber, hoping it hasn’t been too long since and that the compression, in relation to this other societal me that I practice most, hasn’t done a swell damage or loss to those vulnerabilities and logics and abstractions and unquenchable questions to be shown a ever-evolving synthesis in the constructs of my perspective and my heart. And I see there is no fear of this. I know the road—have traveled it to slavery and numb repetition before—for 6 years or more—and found my way here. Should I need more time in the box and more writing like this to spring me from it, I know I will succeed. Maybe I have waxed and rubbed on just enough tonight to make shine some of that inward-facing, perennially-dreaming skin. Press on. Write on. It all turns to what you practice of it. Unfortunately, for tonight, my practice is over and I must go to bed. And this will have to be enough. It is terrible, as well, that I have so much energy and just a waning perspective and the majority mood of a slave’s acquiescence to life and whatever comfort-scraps are thrown my way. Tonight, the one putting us to bed barely hears or feels the one who is sad. And this will have to be enough for now; I have never tired of dreams or dreaming. But I will only grow more uncomfortable being this comfortable, this dulled, this uninspired, this unremarkably justified and Good. Or the alarms, such as the one which put me to this, will soften, and I will have to find it all over again. And what I will have left at that point will have to be enough. Love. I love too many things to forget that Love knows how to show me the way. I will strip myself to nothing but Love if those things I practice now are all I can see when I wake from this night and all nights like this.. Then I will have my vulnerability back, my sight, and my next step will be a real unknown again, a real education.

8:31pm

With this sort of vague and prosy framework, I would like hone in on what I see vulnerability doing in an individual and between two individuals. If the entries above hold any value to you, hopefully they allow access to my style of thought, or at least convey a mood conducive for the philosophical discussion of vulnerability’s role in the exchange of ideas.

Essentially, vulnerability positions the individual to commune with truth. To relate Plato, when we reflect on the journey which delivered us to the euphoric state where we were completely dissolved in truth, we do typically see this pattern:

We love the physical as its own end; Love enough physical things for their physical ends and the saturation of physical love begins to feel mundane; This mundane feeling does not satisfy our perennial longing to love and so we are shaken free, by lack of satisfaction/entertainment/fulfillment, of the physical; Our longing causes us to search within the numerous objects of our physical love; We discover that all the varieties of objects/bodies to which we attached the fixation of our love had the ability to be loved simply because they possessed the common nature of existing; All things can be loved by the nature of existence (Plato will say b/c of the discovery of their soul); The revelation of this fundamental commonality gives birth to a desire to see all things with existence reach their maximized expression of existence; (Plato says we now become concerned with the development of the young, but his scope is limited/biased) We begin to believe in, and experiment with, ideas that we think will better all things that exist; Bringing these thoughts in meaningful contact with things that exist necessarily requires a preoccupation with the function of corresponding action and “ought” claims (laws for Plato); A preoccupation with the proper role of action and law to better all things in existence eventually makes the individual want to allow for themselves an education with an unlimited scope; Different approaches and styles and values concerning knowledge and human understanding are explored, desired, loved; The Philosopher King is born; We are dissolved within the fullness of beauty which informs all existence. This is not a selfish state of bliss for the satisfaction of the individual . . . somehow the individual’s personal, selfish interest is transformed—and forever marked—by being encompassing of the whole of existence (and I do mean existence in the sense and implications of empirical existentialism).

There is a personal story I would like to share about how this process and idea exploded with meaning into my life, and the discussion can also go further when the specific precondition of vulnerability is analyzed in this context. Ill stop for now and invite everyone's comments . . .