Just because I haven't been posting lately, it doesn't mean I haven't been writing posts. It's just that I haven't been finishing them. This morning I will try to finish them, or at least recover what seems postable, and flush the rest.
Here's one from two or three weeks ago, when we went through a libertarian phase. Not libertarian in the usual sense of the word, but in the deeper context of trying -- as usual -- to figure out how this particular cosmos works. It obviously works, or we wouldn't be here. But the deeper reasons are on the metaphysical, not merely physical, plane.
Now, a key component of the cosmos is indeed liberty, which can under no circumstances be understood or even conceptualized "from the bottom up"; nor, for the same reason, can the top be reduced to the bottom without eliminating precisely what needs to be explained. If we aren't free to explain our freedom, then no explanation of anything is possible.
This is a two-way, hierarchical cosmos, and that's all there is to it. Empiricists and positivists deny one end, while idealists and many religionists deny the other, but both approaches result in an impoverished cosmos unfit for, and indeed uninhabitable by, man.
In certain emergencies or embarrassing situations I like to say to myself I'm not here and this isn't happening. But I would never dream of elevating this to a metaphysic! Rather, I'm only a situational Buddhist.
Longtime readers will recognize this as our usual approach to things: instead of beginning with, say, physics or chemistry, and trying to figure out how these can make the ontological leap to man, we begin with the most undeniable fact of all -- in my case, me -- and try to figure out what sort of cosmos must exist in order for such an unlikely fact to even be possible, let alone actual. (And we won't even get into the actualizing process, which adds another layer to the mystery of the human subject -- i.e., in what kind of orthoparadoxical cosmos is it possible to become who one is?).
Not surprisingly, it turns out that I am only possible in a very peculiar universe -- and not just because I myself am peculiar. In the grander scheme of things, everyone is peculiar, which is to say, unique, and how is this possible? In other words, what is the principle of unique personhood, its sufficient reason?
There is no such principle in, say, physics, in which things that appear diverse on the surface are reduced to (explained by) a handful of simple laws. But persons are characterized by their unrepeatable uniqueness; we might say that there's only one to a customer, notwithstanding the occasional case of multiple personality disorder on the one hand, or hivemind progressive conformist on the other.
In physics nothing is unique; rather, every event is fully reducible to more general laws. Now, it is true that humans are constrained by "human nature," otherwise we wouldn't have the word "human." And yet, the human being simultaneously belongs to a species while at the same time truly being his own species -- an oxymoronical "species of one."
So yes, not only are you weird, but I would go so far as to say that if you are not weird, then you're doing it wrong.
Nor am I talking about merely posing as a weirdo in order to get attention, nor the tiresome contemporary plague of mental illness masquerading as uniqueness. Such persons are easily lumped into their diagnostic category, which is the opposite of uniqueness. Paranoid conspiracy theorists are a dime a dozen. Or maybe you've never watched MSNBC.
Naturally, this goes to the cosmic heresy of "identity" politics, which is the systematic denial of human identity. For to reduce identity to some superficial group characteristic is to deny one's human identity, precisely. Al Sharpton, or Joy Reid, or Barack Obama, are just professional black people -- serious jokes but not serious persons.
If you are a feminist, for example, you are just a cliché, not a proper three-dimensional person (i.e., biological, psychological, and spiritual). Moreover, you are no doubt identifying with the superficial feminist cliché in order to deny some pain associated with your deeper personhood. After all, being a feminist, stupid and shallow as it is, is much easier than becoming who you actually are.
Oh, by the way, I just figured out why I'm not finishing these posts. It's due to our newfound absence of time constraints brought about by retirement. Back when I was gainfully employed, I had to wrap things up in order reenter the Conspiracy. Now I can just blah-blah-blog all day if I want to, like a song that goes on forever. The medium is the message, and now the medium is timelessness unbound instead of the bounds of temporality.
This implies that I need to set an artificial limit to my writing, like stopping at 10:30, even if
No comments:
Post a Comment