On Plotted LIfe (a la Ricoeur)

On Mimesis_{1, 2 and 3:} Life is preplotted—i.e. plotted before it happens by those who live it (cf. Barth and Kundera et al.). Because we live in a world of signs to which we ascribe meanings—though their meaning varies from degree to kind from person to person, moment to moment, ever threatened, ever shifting—we “always already” exist in an unfolding, unstable plot (Mimesis₁), which we make (if we are active and to any degree free) in cooperation with the available narrative materials. The writing of our life (Mimesis ₂)i—.e. the telling of our story—functions to stabilize, or, better said, to reduce the play of our lives. We use in fact all stories to reduce this play—other people’s stories, fictions or nonfictions, (it doesn’t really matter) as well as our own. We use other people’s stories to become better equipped to tell (i.e. to construct) our own (Mimesis₃). 

Spreading sand

Young Apple Tree

More sand

Salt 'n' Pepper

Garden 2012

Where it starts...

Sand and stone to come

Distant forsythia arch 

Stumping

Earth yawns 

The Limit of Human Happiness

A thought experiment.

I do not know how we would measure the upper limit of human happiness or even how we could determine from signs who is most happy—and that’s not because, as Hamlet knew, signs can be faked but because different people express their happiness in different ways. His smile may for all I know mean so much more than her laughter. I do know that there is an upper limit to human happiness. I like the expression “totally happy.” If you are totally happy, you are as happy as you can be. Anyone can be totally happy. No one can be totally happy all the time—or even most of the time. Some people can be happy to have a strip of bacon on their cheese and tomato sandwich. Some people cannot be happy with a 100 foot yacht on the dock of their Mediterranean villa. It seems to me that the former are the luckier.

Emily Dickinson observed,

Could themself have peeped –

And seen my Brain – go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason – in the Pound –

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down upon Captivity –

And laugh

There is a conspiracy not just in our culture but in our genes to make us discontent with our lives. As yawns and laughter are contagious, desire and all emotions, stances, points of view are contagious. There’s nothing more natural than jealousy—biblical covetousness. Like everything else, it is in itself morally neutral. Like alcohol, surrender to it leads to unhappiness. The realization of this leads to religious renunciation or Nietzschean sublimation.  It is hard to be content with one’s life when both the culture and the DNA work against us, and when death keeps reminding us it’s drumming its fingers and holding the door. But it is possible. One can be on the constant lookout for new and more. One can spend one’s limited time piling up more unique experiences and more things. The action in itself is morally neutral. It may make one person fuller and more content; it may make another person emptier and more desperate. One can also understand that every moment is infinite. One can go deeper and deeper into being in the cloister. For one person the neck of a guitar is too big to ever hope to fully understand; for another the whole world and all its riches are too flat and too shallow. It seems to me the former is the luckier. It seems to me that the mind is infinite and deep or trivial and shallow. 

A Swan

Or was it that the boy was so beautiful

she called him a swan

though he really was not a swan

as she’d made them

as they were willing

to believe. He wasn’t

a swan and he wasn’t

a boy. He just looked like a boy

innocent and harmless, someone

you could handle if you had to.

It was just better to say that something divine

entered an innocently beautiful creature grazing

the tender shoots of soft grass on the banks

of the infinitely flowing river, better to believe

a curious deity knowing she would come this way

violated an innocent beast and that

the violated beast raised its head

with double seeing

and drove this god curious for beauty before he knew

it was happening to the crest of the hill until

even a god
became victim

of a swan’s
desire.

Winning

He pulls a card from the stack.

Without looking at it he slides it into an envelope

seals it

puts it back.

They know the rules.

They play the game as well as they can

scoring as many points as possible

until time runs out.

He unseals the envelope

to reveal the criteria that will be used

to declare a winner.

It may be the points.

It may be who scored the most before time ran out.

Or it may be who had the lead for the greatest number of minutes

or plays

or who ran the most plays

or who had the ball the longest.

It may be any number of other things too.

Someone objects:

We should always use the same criteria for deciding who wins.

We could do that, he says,

but then we’d start to think we know

what winning is.

The Necessity of Regulation for a Robust Culture and Economy--The Case of Copyright

Copyright is a form of regulation. If I spent five years  and a million dollars whittling a tree into a toothpick, that toothpick won’t be worth a penny more for all my work than any other toothpick. But if I spend five years and a hundred million making a movie, that movie, says the law, should be protected. According to the market, it should be worth what you can get for it—which is nothing. It’s easy to copy and distribute for free. You’re spending a fortune to create an object which in the free market is worthless. Only regulation gives it any value. This falsification of the real market value of a movie is necessary however. Without it, no one would make movies. And movies are valuable to the culture in ways that have nothing to do with money.

Value is not limited to economic value—that’s merely the simple metaphor by which we understand (imprecisely) the notion of value. Regulation may sometimes stifle the market. At other times regulation creates and releases value. The value it creates may be frankly economic—as in copyright. The value it releases transcends the whole economic paradigm. 

The Constructed Self (a post enlightenment idea)

"I achieve self-consciousness; I become myself only by revealing myself to another, through another and with another’s help. The most important acts, constitutive of self-consciousness, are determined by their relation to another consciousness (a “thou”). Cutting oneself off, isolating oneself, closing oneself off, those are the basic reasons for loss of self….. It turns out that every internal experience occurs on the border, it comes across another, and this essence resides in this intense encounter…. The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to communicate….. To be means to be for the other, and through him, for oneself, man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking with himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other….. I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception). Justification cannot be justification of oneself; confession cannot be confession of oneself. I receive my name from the other, and this name exists for the other (to name oneself is to engage in usurpation). Self-love is equally impossible."                                                        --Mikhail Bakhtin                                                                                                      

Groping Toward Nietzsche I

Tentative initial remarks after a great deal of reading:

Walter Kauffman won’t allow me to suggest that Nietzsche was toying with insanity when he composed his Genealogy of Morals, and Walter Kauffman is much smarter and more knowledgeable than I, and do make this suggestion would only serve to avoid the text that must be engaged, so I will not make it. At the same time, I do hold in the back of my mind the feeling that if I’m taking seriously the words of a madman, I may not be putting my time to its best use.

                Well, there are all sorts of reasons for taking Nietzsche seriously even if he was pulling the wool over our eyes by imitating sanity so convincingly.

                Still, if we allow ourselves at least a little of the irony, just a little of the sarcasm that Nietzsche allowed himself, what defense does he have? I am in a bad position. If I reply mock for mock, I will be accused of disengagement, of private ire, in short of resentiment.  But if I respond with good sense and sober judgment to the man who mocks me, I run the risk of looking all the more worthy of mockery.

                Despite his mockery, despite his sarcasm and his own blinding resentiment, one cannot help but have great respect for Nietzsche, even great sympathy. (Nietzsche noted that “true Christians” always read him with sympathy.) His insights were profound and important, and he did work out real cracks in the foundation of his opposition. He found real fault lines, and these made his job possible. Christianity’s real shame made him possible. If we see this, we can move forward. If we do not, we are stuck with the same duplicitous, the same two-sided agony that is the cornerstone of our shame.

                Nietzsche asks the essential question: “What light does linguistics and especially the study of etymology throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?”

                The answer is, not much. Linguistics can reveal the moment at which such concepts entered language and the development of our understanding of these concepts (“development” is an apter word than “evolution”), but it cannot say a thing about the viability—in brief, the truth—of such concepts. “Evil,” “good,” and “bad” have histories. Those histories are either histories of understanding or histories of establishment and adornment—or they are, as I believe they are, a single history of a non-Hegelian dialectic of tension and struggle. In short the words either apply to “real” things unrelated to contingent history OR they are human inventions, created and developed to serve specific historical purposes and no more. The fact that they arose in history does not of itself prove that they are confined to history.

                By way of analogy: A small child learns the word “fair” before she develops a concept of fairness (as either each according to his deserts or equal shares for all). In her first deployment of the word “fair” means only “good for me.” “That’s not fair,” means “I didn’t get what I want.” (You can all come up with your own examples.) Later, when the child is matured and corrected, she comes to understand and, we hope, accept the notion that fair means that you may have to give up some or all of what you have and want and that not just to keep the peace, not just to avoid the war of all against all, but because it is fair. And on an even higher moral plane, she might even want to give up her excess because she desires fairness above her hoarding personal benefit.

              The concept “fair” arose in this child’s history as “good for me” but developed into an abstraction that means “best for all.” Etymology may likewise tell us that “good” comes from a concept of “good for me” and “evil” as “bad for me,” but that while it is certainly history working on these concepts, so sanded out “good for me” (or “good for the king”), being “bad for you” (or, or “good for the people” or “bad for the king”) to “best for all.” But this does not mean that the concepts “fair” and “just” are stuck in history. They may be. But the judgment is based on the a priori judgment regarding history, not on observation derived from history.

                The question had to be asked, and its answers are of some value, but are not of the value Nietzsche suggests. 

Emergence

Most people don’t want it
Most who want it never get it
Most who get it don’t deserve it

Many who deserve it get it

Many who deserve it don’t.
--Anonymous

Sinkorswim

Let us use another name. Let’s not say spirit. Let’s change the metaphor from Air to Water. In the dream of life you are in the water. You cannot ask the water to teach you to swim. But you do not need to do so. You know in the code of your flesh just enough about water to keep yourself at the surface. But you cannot stay where you are. You can dip your nose in the air to stay alive. It’s in your DNA. If only like an infant you had no fear, you would do more than drift on the waves. You would swim. You must not ask the water to teach you to swim. Your infant body will teach you to swim. You will teach your body to swim. You will cooperate with the water. You and your body, which are neither two nor one will, one-like, ease you to land. 

Howl

The boy who cried wolf
got eaten.
The boy who didn't cry wolf
also got eaten.

Someone Else's I

And now we only talk

Through other people’s poems

Whose I we deign to inhabit a minute

And doff

Polish or Polish

Polish or

Polish 

Bass or

Bass

I can never tell

Exactly what I mean.

I know you can

Polish the

Bass

But can you also

Polish the

Bass?

Time is a field; it is not a line. We understood this before Proust, before we had the words to compel us to the deception of the short-lived linear metaphor, before Einstein’s mathematical confirmation. The present is a vast accumulation—of history and the future. If you want to raise your knowledge of time to words, if you want to be able to talk about the lived experience of the abstraction, talk about love, its waxing and waning, its accumulations, pulsations, and losses.

"Beyond God and Nietzsche" ch. 7

The signs in a language system refer only to other signs in it, but discourse “refers to a world that it claims to describe, to express, or to represent” (Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 145, as cited http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur). This would be the piece not, to my understanding found in Derrida or admitted by Derrida.

Now and then we have to return to politics, though we'd rather stay in the garden

It is as I predicted. Obama has offered the GOP their own proposals and they are lining up to reject them, not because they don’t like them, but because Obama offered them, and, as they have not been shy about stating, their main objective is to get him out of office. Anything that helps the country increases the difficulty of that objective, and so to help their cause, they cannot do what they are paid to do, which is serve the country.  That is the broad effect of the power politics in which party needs trump public needs. We can still hope there are enough sincere, honest, moral, patriotic republicans in congress who do not subscribe to the party-first philosophy so clearly manifest at this moment.

`               Perhaps the Democrats on the whole are no better. The party-first mentality seems endemic in Washington. But as for Obama himself, the critics cannot have it both ways. If he does not put party above the public need, if he assumes goodwill on the other side and seeks compromise, he is called naive. He is said to be “way over his head.” If he does not do these things, he is said to be catering to political interests—putting party above country. Damned either way when in fact he is either (as he is) a man willing to reach out to either party or annoy both parties in order to weave a mutually acceptable solution to intractable problems, or he is (as he is not) a typical politician.

It may be naïve to believe there is enough goodwill on the other side to get work done. But is there any other way to avoid the trap of party-first politics? I submit that there is not. It is cynical, illogical (and if you do it consciously and politically it is hypocritical) to criticize the president whether attempts compromise or whether he refuses to do so.

                In his attempt to compromise, he puts himself in a position in which, because the other side will not compromise, he is forced to cave in to their position or do nothing. Boehner boasts he received 98% of what he asked for in the debt-ceiling circus. If he can have such success with Obama, why would he not support him in 2012? Would he get as much from a Republican president?

                Obama needs to fight harder, to assume less goodwill on the part of the opposition, which has so blatantly asserted that it has no goodwill, no interest in goodwill, no interest in compromise, no interest in helping the country if that includes making the president look good to any voter. At the same time he cannot give up and retreat into party-first politics. That sort or cynicism would only further decay our already badly decayed political process. Every honest politician on either side has to assume goodwill on the other side even when it is naïve to do so, even when the other side has none to offer. Every true patriot has to back away from ideologically driven refusals to compromise. People who don’t believe in tax hikes must be willing to vote for them anyway. People who don’t wish to cut essential spending programs must be willing to cut them anyway.

The hurting family may have to choose between the air conditioner and the TV. 

The Garden Groweth

The Garden House Inches Onward

On Language and Disciplines

All disciplines are false in that they cordon off and divide that which is unified, whole, and indivisible. But it is only by this cordoning off, this bringing to systems of language, that the reality can be known.

That statement is true insofar as language can state what is true, but also either redundant or nonsensical.

"Known" can only mean "put into a system of language." "Reality" here is not being "known" except insofar as it is expressed. If you measure a length of stem, you know the length of stem because you can express it in a number. You don't know the stem. If you say, "the stem of that plant is nine inches long" you come away knowing more about the length of nine inches than you know about the stem.

Disciplines are nonetheless necessary because measurements must be taken. This is among our most profound ways of knowing, despite its limitations. A bottle of soap is mostly water. But you need the water.

The main function of all disciplines, from math to music to poetry to philosophy, you might say, is to improve and refine language: to find a better way to speak the world. And though they hide in exact proportion to what they make known, they repeat (thus) the fundamental creative gesture, God's gesture, "let there be....and there was."