In Reeducation, the correct response to it all would have been to ask myself what I had done to deserve these people's meanness
This is a big one — because it plays upon the naive idea that most people have (including intellectuals when they forget who and what they are, and so revert to ‘common sensical’ thinking) that the universe is inherently just. Oh! This is such a big one! It is such a big source of error (and of course this inherently “just universe” concept is linked to the idea of democracy as it conforms to ideas about social darwinism, that the best results for humanity are achieved by forgetting your ethics and behaving randomly according to “instinct”). This is supposed to induce justice to appear automatically out of the chaos of everyday life, in order to give you your verdict of whether you are a worthy humanbeing or not. And, if you are not a worthy humanbeing according to these pronouncements from out of the belly of chaos, then you had better darn well do some soul-searching, to find out why the justice that was percolated in the belly of the laissez-faire de-ethicisation of human relations happened to disapprove of you so.
“Why, why, oh Lord, does chaos reject me in this way? I always submitted myself absolutely to his commands. I tried to embrace chaos in every possible way, in order to reveal to all in a definitive modality that I was not uppity or arrogant, but somehow my need for depth of soul got the better of me! No wonder chaos cast the final judgment against me that it did!”
2 comments:
I don't know about this, because I take much pleasure in causing things -- although I suspect many people do not. To me the world is an unfinished and incomplete project without a lot of human intervention. To others, it would seem, to act upon the world is to leave a mark upon what was once pristine. It is to reveal oneself as a sinner. To act = to condemn oneself. On the other hand, certain very narrow ways of 'acting' are mightily revered in present culture. The capitalist tycoon who acts on behalf of all of us, presumably, is deeply revered. His kind of action is acceptable at the cost of all other kinds of action.
--
I'm not sure what being totally responsible for your feelings means, either, as its meaning could vary widely depending on context. I could understand and accept it in a narrow phenomenological way -- that we biologically produce our feelings and that we are therefore responsible for them. They are our phenomena, and we can often regulate those phenomena as such.
However, I believe we are talking about the alternative hubris, that it is necessary to be the sole originator of oneself, and pull oneself out of one's own head by parthenogenesis if one is to have any claim to moral ground at all.
Post a Comment