Please welcome to the Blog Roll...

Professor Tim Morton, of UCLA Davis, Professor of English (Literature and the Environment).  I highly recommend his course on Romanticism (available in iTunes).  I have already posted a discussion of this course here.

Farewell Tom Scocca, following appointment as managing editor at Deadspin, what I suppose must be or become the sharpest-written sports web-site in the world.

Nothingness

The hardest part of Metanoetics (Tanabe) is his use of 'nothingness'. The thinker and his thought must be reduced to nothingness by other power acting through absolute critique. This 'absolute critique' is like the judgment of God, and repentance is submitting to it 'now'. But in the place of God, Tanabe talks about Nothingness, and Absolute Nothingness.

Andrew at Divine Trauma has posted about specifity of absence - black coffee without cream, vs black coffee without milk. Injuries without care vs injuries without malice. One thinks of the atheist in Catch-22 who doesn't believe in a god of Love, and is appalled by the idea that the God she doesn't believe in might just be a spiteful sadist. I can't take this absence non-being very seriously. It seems like it is very apparent in jokes.

The nothingness I can conceptualise is 'being' with dimensions that no one can relate to - overwhelming infinities of infinities, something that has to be invisible and unthought for the mind to hold onto itself. Mathematically, these invisible monsters are the high cardinals, used, I believe in resolving Fermat's last theorem. But higher maths is very far country, and this news was translated before it reached me.

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The Ideal Consumer Journey

Chatting with a woman at a party, my wife's research on the mission stations set up for aboriginal people came up. 'Oh' she said, 'I think that's terrible.' 'What?' 'The work missionaries do.' Certainly there are some terrible accounts of missionary behaviour and principles, but she objected to the very idea of going to another people with the intention of introducing them to Christianity.

What did she do? She worked in marketing for supermarkets - specifically designing the 'ideal consumer journey'. She or someone like her puts the milk in the corner diagonally opposite the entrance, puts the displays of kids treats at kids eye level, and ranges all the other attacks on the subconscious motivation system that can be discovered, with the goal of turning us into ideal consumers. We begin the journey as human beings, but finish as ideal consumers.

Is there a difference? The missionaries aim to share the best thing they have for free. The marketer gets paid a lot to lead the consumer cattle right up to the stun-bolt unafraid, even eager.

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Why am I so excited about resolution?

Basically, because I have always been the most irresolute person you can imagine:

• I misapprehend things in real life.  I accidentally bought a two-door car two years ago and didn't realise it was two-door until a friend asked 'Oh, I thought you weren't going to get a two-door car.'  Also I am always misreading situations as the perfect opportunity to trot out some philosophical wisdom.  Very often, I do this conscious that it is discontinuous with the conversation and will be difficult for people to relate to. (challenges to recognition)
• I refuse to recognize that things are as good as they are going to get, and be happy and knuckle down and rock on.  I spend a lot of my day looking for something even more interesting than what I'm doing now, or more enjoyable than what I should be doing.  (challenges to courage)
• I refuse to resolve tensions.  Since my post 'Belly' some months ago, I've been doing a lot of exercise and wishing I weren't so fat.  Yet faced with biscuits, or, as I was on Thursday night, 3/4 of a brie, I treat them as food, not as treats with a big downside.  Then I sit around thinking 'I can't  believe I ate the whole thing.'  Existing trapped between two conflicting desires is burdensome.  (problem solving)

I remember reading a lot of books as a teenager about lone-wolf assassins living by the creed from Heat 'Have nothing in your life you can't walk away from in 30 seconds.' They often did immoral things, but they were always on the side of the angels in the end (and very often they died of doing right).  Honestly, I would have been better to read Ayn Rand - at least her sociopaths are socially useful constructors who enjoy life.  What I took was the conviction that a sort of Nietzschean 'brief habit' - identity of convenience - would be all the resoluteness I would muster, and that faced with danger or opposition I would fold my principles away into those invisible dimensions and do what I needed to to survive. Given the extremely mild moral challenges I confronted myself with, this boiled down to resisting 'everything, except temptation' - being lazy, timid, distant in relation to social life and work, while being floridly self-indulgent in private.  

The problem I have now is how to develop a power of resolution - by making a resolution?

What do I mean by Resolution?

My idea of 'resolution' is a corruption of some words of Heidegger's.  The kind of being that we are, dasein, being-in-the-world, is always already in a world.  It has its features because they fit the world - and given the fact that the world too, has virtually 'always' had our presence, it is fitted to us.  Heidegger expresses this inextricable intimacy most quickly when he says 'we are our world existingly.' (He get's it so short by cramming a lot into world, and existing.)  Heidegger describes dasein as 'a being for which being is an issue.'  We humans don't just exist - we know we exist, and we can make it mean something.  Heidegger suggests that we can be 'resolute' - always taking a stand on our being which fits us to the actually existing world authentically. There is something of consistency in this idea, something of authenticity.  'Resolute' dasein sees the present situation including who it is, the stands it takes, and takes them again in the new situation creatively, courageously.  Best of all is to take a stand that is solid enough to answer your 'who am I?' until death.  This is 'anticipatory resoluteness' and to live in anticipatory resoluteness is something he describes as 'dying.'  You arrive at each day, each hour, freighted with history and obligations and experiences and are faced with circumstances you never asked for and problems you can only nudge, not solve, and to go forward, being who you will be, involves resignation or faith, because it is dying.  This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.

Resolution in my thinking is like this, only for a simpler brain like mine.  Resolution is a great word, because its picked up a few meanings:

• Sharpness of image, clarity of perception.
• Firmness of purpose.
• Peacemaking, removal of tension, satisfaction.

The world challenges us with:

• confusing, unrecognisable situations, or situations that seem familiar but are hiding depths and dangers.
• difficult, frightening situations.
• problems, gaps between how the world is and who we want to be in it.

At the moment, I am thinking of the human being as predominantly living by recognising and responding automatically, and then consciousness rationalising behavior afterward.  Resolution is your chance to be free.  It is your chance to tinker with your recognition/automaticity patterns. It is your chance to take a stand on your being that will bring the world into focus, you into focus, and help you act in a way that has a future.

Resolution is about consciousness doing what it is responsible for: preventing the human being from getting stuck in confusion, fear and trouble, by articulating ways through.  The resolutions are in the form of declarations: this is that.  But they're thoughts.  Decisions, except decisions often work by lopping off important reality to enable some action, any action - some self, any self. Resolution makes the world, existingly, come to peace.

This is ideal resolution: rarely do we take our positions firmly enough that we don't relapse into older patterns;   even when we take a position, it is seldom right enough to do us for life.

State of Repentance

You will recall Gen Liu Yuan's statement (surely picking up some top-spin in translation) that 'a nation-state is a power machine, made of violence.' And von Clausewitz's 'War is a continuation of policy by other means' is quoted so often it has almost lost its impact. The two are not so far apart.

A nation is 'an imagined community' in the words of ... Benedict Anderson. It is a group of people holding together by a mental image of what 'we' are like, an imagining that is more for our own comfort than a way of truly recognising / handling the multitude. In the hayday (heighday? Hey?) of the Labour Movement, this thin social fabric was challenged: 'workers of the world , unite!'


A state is the institution a nation clothes / shapes itself with - a manifold of laws, customs, authorities, disciplines - all the institutions.


All the foregoing applies pretty well regardless of the national character or the type of state instituted. I am interested, though, in the chafing I and many others feel in applying these definitions to western democracies. All nation-states, of course, evidently possess these attributes, and have picked up a good deal of speed and power, often through violence. The chafing is that, at heart, we think the nation-states we're part of aim to embiggen the smallest man, that they (the states) have been humbled again and again since magna carter, cromwell and restoration, glorious revolution until stable constitutional democracy is left.


Liberal means not putting too much weight on our personal definition of nation - in fact, being so sceptical that everyone in your land is a neighbour, however different.  Democracy means not putting too much weight on the state - in fact throwing the bums out regularly. Australia, as a liberal democracy, is a repentant state, the best kind.

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This is that too

What was the point of all that in my last post? I finishes a little lamely because I wasn't sure where to go.

Resolutions should (ideally) change how you see. A lot of the Proverbs are directed to getting young men to see that not investing chastely in their marriage, work and wisdom was not a short road to delight, but rather a short road to ignominy and death. The wise are those with the larger scope, the wider, higher-definition vision. (A digression on the lameness of big tvs wants to come here, but I will hold it off.)

What brings people into church is the unrecognisable or unresolvable, thick and dreadful darkness. What keeps them there is the light of truth. Preaching and teaching should offer solid resolutions to problems. I am relatively 'pro' positive-thinking, which often mimics christian teaching without offering any validation or limitation, or even any motivation. I think what we now see as 'positive thinking', worldly, selfish and flawed, is really much of what Christianity used to (and still does in some communities) offer. It is one part of the way preaching, teaching and communicating the faith is essentially aimed at helping people. I am impatient with churches that aren't willing to say they have answers for living.

There are two reasons this is out of fashion with the more thoughtful christians of today. First, the problems faced in daily life are complex, and a finite list of answers will be exhausted by the manifold of reality. Second, the examples of people giving terrible answers that satisfy the base passions but do nothing to solve real problems: scientific racism, militant creationism, biblical literalism, bad fundamentalism.

The reason Christians follow Jesus is that he declares resolutions that work better than our own. To accept them changes who you are, indeed it involves giving up on the dream of who you are and swallowing the ugly truth.

The christian community, like the christian, needs to hear declarations that make experience intelligible. But the gospel teaches that the hearing requires transformation, the opening up of new intentional territory and a new place to stand.

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