Half-cocked: Anglo-Americans' reactions to Continental Philosophy - YouTube
Thanks from an Anglo-American subscriber.
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+Tony Hoeflinger Actually, I am now able to very clearly articulate what my goal was before, although I didn't completely understand it at the time. My problem was that I was the victim of my father's extreme rage, which he experienced due to losing the Rhodesian war. I had no access to any of my negative emotions, because to express even the smallest of these was to invoke my father's rage. I had to employ various strategies to access my emotions, which meant creeping up on them, in some instances, or using methods that would bypass my inhibitions, in other instances. A notion of transgression very similar to Bataille's came into my mind. Over a couple of decades, I have gradually been able to access more and more of my emotions.
When it comes to understanding philosophy and how that interects with psychology, we should never lose touch with the fact that one cannot be fully rational unless one has access to the irrational part and has mastery over it. The one-sided rationality that Rhodesians were brought up with was in many ways pathological, since it was too rigid, too formulistic, and did not allow any expression of spontaneous emotion. Think of the British stiff-upper lipped aristocracy, and double that. We did not cry at all. When my father's brother was killed during the war and he received the phone call, he fainted out of shock, but immediately after that we never spoke of it again. Can you imagine the bottled-up rage he had when we finally lost the war, and how this rage had nowhere to go, except inward -- into my family, and into a self-destructive implosion? My goal in seeking out the irrational side of things has been to mitigate this implosion and to make it less destructive. I have tried to save my family and myself from this ongoing and inevitable destructiveness, which comes from energy being bottled up for too long. The war was fought over 15 years and over that time a lot potentially violent reactions and destructive potential had to be kept contained. The only way to release it afterwards was by expanding one's previously non-existent opportunities to enter the subjective realm, gradually, over a long time. That was the problem that I personally had to deal with. I feel felt that I had had a bomb planted in my chest and that it would go off eventually, in a horrible way, unless I managed to defuse it. At the height of my own rage and repression I joined the Australian army and answered with cold, absolute certainty, when asked if I had the ability to kill someone, that I certainly possessed that ability. Integrating the rational with the irrational is very important. In my case, I was coming at the issue from the point of view of a hyper-rationality. The war had been fought on behalf of the principle of the Christian God, who represented a principle of transcendental order, masculine absolutism and big "R" Reason. By contrast, contemporary Westerners have immersed themselves in the opposite modality of extreme irrationalism and subjectivity. They lack the capacity to conceptualize reason as a transcendental principle over and above them. Therefore they are extremely pathological, but in precisely the opposite way to how I was pathological. I think Philosophy has to educate people as to how to integrate better their irrational and rational sides, since only a full integration is healthy.
When it comes to understanding philosophy and how that interects with psychology, we should never lose touch with the fact that one cannot be fully rational unless one has access to the irrational part and has mastery over it. The one-sided rationality that Rhodesians were brought up with was in many ways pathological, since it was too rigid, too formulistic, and did not allow any expression of spontaneous emotion. Think of the British stiff-upper lipped aristocracy, and double that. We did not cry at all. When my father's brother was killed during the war and he received the phone call, he fainted out of shock, but immediately after that we never spoke of it again. Can you imagine the bottled-up rage he had when we finally lost the war, and how this rage had nowhere to go, except inward -- into my family, and into a self-destructive implosion? My goal in seeking out the irrational side of things has been to mitigate this implosion and to make it less destructive. I have tried to save my family and myself from this ongoing and inevitable destructiveness, which comes from energy being bottled up for too long. The war was fought over 15 years and over that time a lot potentially violent reactions and destructive potential had to be kept contained. The only way to release it afterwards was by expanding one's previously non-existent opportunities to enter the subjective realm, gradually, over a long time. That was the problem that I personally had to deal with. I feel felt that I had had a bomb planted in my chest and that it would go off eventually, in a horrible way, unless I managed to defuse it. At the height of my own rage and repression I joined the Australian army and answered with cold, absolute certainty, when asked if I had the ability to kill someone, that I certainly possessed that ability. Integrating the rational with the irrational is very important. In my case, I was coming at the issue from the point of view of a hyper-rationality. The war had been fought on behalf of the principle of the Christian God, who represented a principle of transcendental order, masculine absolutism and big "R" Reason. By contrast, contemporary Westerners have immersed themselves in the opposite modality of extreme irrationalism and subjectivity. They lack the capacity to conceptualize reason as a transcendental principle over and above them. Therefore they are extremely pathological, but in precisely the opposite way to how I was pathological. I think Philosophy has to educate people as to how to integrate better their irrational and rational sides, since only a full integration is healthy.
