Thinking is a struggle. First, and unsurprisingly, a struggle against the self, needing every single bit of breath one can give to insuflate and build ideas that are, if not new, articulated in simpler words. It is also, and I join here Gilles Deleuze's conclusions, a struggle against stupidity and those who seek the death of philosophy, who can bloody well be philosophers and "fine spirits". I do not wish to think and amuse myself, this is a crucial idea, I am fighting, every single second of my life, against a stupidity that can be the one of the times, of the world, of someone, of everyone, but, more importantly, of myself. And in myself I am not fighting natural or given behaviors, but constructed mindsets and laziness, that have been incorporated there by the outside world. Here, it is important to bring two other nuances: it does not mean that the truth is in me and the outside world is lying to me, the platonician inspiration and essence are not at stake in my discourse, nothing is there, something has to come up from nothing. You can argue that it is impossible, I would reply that here lies the complete mean and goal of philosophy beyond fighting non-thinking. From Descartes' doubt, stemming from a question (can I find any assumption that does not rely on any other assumption?Giving the: I know that I doubt, therefore I know that I think, therefore I know that I am an object that is thinking), to Sartre's Being and Nothingness (which point is precisely to show that the relation between the nothing and the something is the point of philosophy, namely create something out of nothing), the objective has been to unlearn, doubt, unthink in the process we are used to, to therefore think. I could quote the Buddha, Jesus Christ, some Renaissance thinkers there, and some Gandhi here, but the point is made, and frankly it does not appear as the most original idea you ever read, so let's move on.
Hence I unthink, and have been unthinking for quite some time. One does not understand a concept as the platonician "I know that I know not" until experiencing it in the deepest and the fullest of her or his own experience ("experiments with truth" I could say, these words being music and in the best form to make complicated ideas sing, which by the way I think is one of the most crucial teachings of the Man, that one has to make ideas sing, and that their strength lies in the form, if not that the form is all, poetry as the only language there is). One has to go all the way to the best understanding, or better "compréhension" (Latin giving the French word a physical notion, but also the idea that one needs to make a voice her or his before any kind of praise or critic of an idea). It is only when my mind, as if it was driven by inspiration, formulates "on its own" the terms of an idea that I can assume I have understood a part of it, the mirage of spontaneity being only the point when our mind reaches an understanding of concepts that were already heard, and why most of the time, every creator will realise that the idea s/he just got comes from something s/he has already seen drawn by other hands, or even come across a book that s/he could swear has never read but could have written, in this case it is only that the ideas have travelled by other means and have impregnated the world in which the creator lives that s/he could reformulate them from their reflections without seeing the primary source. But is not the experiment of one with such an understanding as important as its creation? I think it is. Therefore, the words, the form, matter (see? I just came back to Bapu on my own). Intelligence does not lie in avoiding such "repetitions" but recognising them, and therefore humility rejoices thinking.
Unthinking is struggling. But why do we want to struggle? One could say that my vision of philosophy is to fight windmills. It is not so. We are born, we could say "we were thrown into", a world excusively made of conflicts. How we deal with them is but life. For what is there but conflicts, from politics to logic (a thought, a theory, is at first a conflict, an alternative in which we choose to posit 2+2=4 as the correct one, and in such a move, reject any other proposition, hence put an end to an earlier conflict between 2+2=4 and every other proposition, even if we do not have to , and even cannot, go through all the other propositions which are infinite). Nowhere can be found absence of conflict, or something else than a conflict, and still we will go through them, try and solve them, creating new conflicts, closing ourselves in a cyclical time of two steps, from peception of the conflict to trial to solve it. Everything nothing, being and nothingness, true false... We realise that the whole existence lies but in the alternative, and a choice that is only the passage to a new one.
So why cannot we stop this? What is the strength that pushes us to join Sisyphe on the steep of the mountain and be eternally in a state of unrest and disappointment?
I have an idea about this, but questions are more important than answers, because as we have seen, if we cannot get out of the cycle of alternative choice, question answer, the only way out is eventually a way in, to try and stop the process by pausing it and then slowing it down as much as we can (Kant, as every mind who has made a step in philosophy, started by telling his predecessor, Descartes, "you are going too fast"). So, why cannot we bear conflict, and yet never stop and create new ones?
We constantly divide conflicts into two categories which appear to us almost without any thinking. We are talking of "good conflicts", and "bad conflicts". An NGO trying to get rid of illiteracy in a rural part of the country is involved in a "good conflict", a robber killing a car driver to take hold of her/his car is involved in a "bad conflict" (I do expect that readers who have followed me until here are not monsters, and if they are, well, please bear with my examples and just admit for a minute the falling of each case in each category is seen as a generally followed one). The majority of us apply this distinction only by calling the latter "conflict", but never the former and likes. So far, so good. Now let's strike! A company is trying to increase its sales, is a conflict at several levels: in a non exhaustive way, we can list a conflict with other companies (competition), a conflict with the law (making the most profits without breaking it), a conflict with the workers (cost cutting and other such delicacies to maximise the profits), a conflict with the consumer (this idiot is still not buying our stuffs! We need to make him/her change his/her mind). Casualties could be enormous, from the misery of little entrepreneurs who have lost their local market to the bigger company, workers who have been fired or exploited, persons who have been made into consumers and whose free choice has been denied. Though, many will not see a "bad conflict" here, some may not see a conflict if they call as such only the conflicts they find "bad". The stroke has given us a new concept you see? Namely, legitimacy.
This legitimacy is defined by the means (and goals, but they fall into the former category, defining the means) of a conflict. We could almost say, there is no conflict but conditions of conflicts. Being a non static categorisation, the whole struggle will be for the one involved in the conflict to legitimate the conflict and its participation in it. To try and change this perception of the conflict, one will have to show a reality in which her or his involvement and means used in the conflict make sense. Building a reality or a world to make sense of our actions and environment is the most common behaviour one can witness, it occurs all the time, trust me. The destruction of the former world and the building of the new one is a constant process of change and reconstruction of history, namely creating a narrative in which what I do is right/obvious/the only choice there is. And so for every conflict we encounter, a narrative is tried and forced into our mind, so that we see such conflicts as non-conflicts. The whole purpose of conflict resolution lies therefore in the deconstruction, as in analysis, of the narratives that surround us, denotating conflicts and discourses we are parts of.
This is the major problem of the ones who try to make others admit a narrative, and therefore, this research of the narrative has to be disqualified by concepts that are their own narratives, in which the conflict participants have no say. It must appear as natural, that is independent from narratives, necessary, transcending the experience of life in every point, and mapping reality in a rigid geography. But, they remain narratives, and their deconstruction is therefore the only weapon one is left with. Though one can say that deconstruction needs a point of reference wich is the self, which is a narrative, which makes every attempt at deconstruction give a new narrative to deconstruct, and we become Sisyphe again. Well, yes. But, and this "but" is probably one of the reasons why I want to wake up every day, with trees and quiches and people, but we have to keep climbing the mountain and fall, because it is the way to destroy the legitimacy of illegitimate conflicts and by that, reduce the casualties as much as we can. We cannot stop the war against humanity, only take side.
We have seen that the whole process of the conflict is to create narratives and to make them look natural. Parsons (or Mead, can't find the reference in the perimeter my arms can reach) developped a theory in which our relation to the world is built by the discovery of the range of pronouns from I to You, S/He... Initially, I being the child, You being the mother, living in a bilateral relation of a self and an almighty parent. The S/He will be discovered later as the child learns that the behaviour of the mother and their relation is also dependent upon other persons, then They, to finally see the existence of an It, being the abstractions that rule the world in which the child lives. The point of every actor in a conflict is to make its discourse stem not from the S/He, but from the It, naturalising the narrative in which her/his behaviour is the right one. It is striking when we analyse the dominant discourse surrounding us, be it utilitarianism, communalism, science...
In a categorisation of History, we could assume that every era is characterised by a They (a ruling class) trying to disguise its narrative as an It (nature) to strengthen its domination and legitimate unequalities or conflicts. The characteristic of the dominant class being that it would be the part of the population who would understand the It, though most of the time, the ones who understand would produce a discourse that legitimates the ones who rule.
So we have the trio: ruling principle (It), interprets, and ruling class (They)
In primitive societies with nature and the deities, allegedly decoded and heard by the wizards, legitimating the chiefs
In antiquity: ideas, essence, gods, decoded by philosophers, for male urban citizens
Middle Age: God, priests, kings
Enlightment and post revolutionnary ear: Logic, scientifics, rationnal male wealthy citizens
It is a funny thing to notice that the French language does not have a pronoun for "it", preventing any coup by the simple non-existence of the neutral. The pronoun associated with he (il) and she (elle), being "on", litteraly "people", or an undetermined "we", with the connotation of rumour or word of mouth, making it all the more hard to believe every sentence beginning with such pronoun. It may be easier for a French speaker to claim that the king is naked, as we could see with the Revolution, but it also implies that the "It", though it might change easily for a French mind, alays holds the same strength on the society, the period following the revolution being but the creation of a domination by rationnality and therefore scientifics and other specialists, putting the crown on the capitalistic European man.
To explain the title of this post, I could say that the It is bound to be swallowed and digested by the commoner who will make it a part of her/his understanding of the world and act accordingly, the They became the I. This could be continued until now but it would be extremely arduous given the fact that truly yours himself swims in a sea of narratives and therefore would not be presomptuous enough to assume that he has decoded and categorised them. The past becomes the past when it appears as old fashioned, as in stupid. Though many narratives nowadays can be decoded, and this is what I meant when I was referring to a struggle in the beginning of this post, hence closing the circle (lucky for you, dear reader, I could have fallen back on my feet way later). We can understand that this fight lies in thinking because the devil is everywhere and especially in what appears as simplistic and given. So the more simplistic, the more suspicious is the motto I would like to spread, with, of course: deconstruction is the way, say I.
Hence I unthink, and have been unthinking for quite some time. One does not understand a concept as the platonician "I know that I know not" until experiencing it in the deepest and the fullest of her or his own experience ("experiments with truth" I could say, these words being music and in the best form to make complicated ideas sing, which by the way I think is one of the most crucial teachings of the Man, that one has to make ideas sing, and that their strength lies in the form, if not that the form is all, poetry as the only language there is). One has to go all the way to the best understanding, or better "compréhension" (Latin giving the French word a physical notion, but also the idea that one needs to make a voice her or his before any kind of praise or critic of an idea). It is only when my mind, as if it was driven by inspiration, formulates "on its own" the terms of an idea that I can assume I have understood a part of it, the mirage of spontaneity being only the point when our mind reaches an understanding of concepts that were already heard, and why most of the time, every creator will realise that the idea s/he just got comes from something s/he has already seen drawn by other hands, or even come across a book that s/he could swear has never read but could have written, in this case it is only that the ideas have travelled by other means and have impregnated the world in which the creator lives that s/he could reformulate them from their reflections without seeing the primary source. But is not the experiment of one with such an understanding as important as its creation? I think it is. Therefore, the words, the form, matter (see? I just came back to Bapu on my own). Intelligence does not lie in avoiding such "repetitions" but recognising them, and therefore humility rejoices thinking.
Unthinking is struggling. But why do we want to struggle? One could say that my vision of philosophy is to fight windmills. It is not so. We are born, we could say "we were thrown into", a world excusively made of conflicts. How we deal with them is but life. For what is there but conflicts, from politics to logic (a thought, a theory, is at first a conflict, an alternative in which we choose to posit 2+2=4 as the correct one, and in such a move, reject any other proposition, hence put an end to an earlier conflict between 2+2=4 and every other proposition, even if we do not have to , and even cannot, go through all the other propositions which are infinite). Nowhere can be found absence of conflict, or something else than a conflict, and still we will go through them, try and solve them, creating new conflicts, closing ourselves in a cyclical time of two steps, from peception of the conflict to trial to solve it. Everything nothing, being and nothingness, true false... We realise that the whole existence lies but in the alternative, and a choice that is only the passage to a new one.
So why cannot we stop this? What is the strength that pushes us to join Sisyphe on the steep of the mountain and be eternally in a state of unrest and disappointment?
I have an idea about this, but questions are more important than answers, because as we have seen, if we cannot get out of the cycle of alternative choice, question answer, the only way out is eventually a way in, to try and stop the process by pausing it and then slowing it down as much as we can (Kant, as every mind who has made a step in philosophy, started by telling his predecessor, Descartes, "you are going too fast"). So, why cannot we bear conflict, and yet never stop and create new ones?
We constantly divide conflicts into two categories which appear to us almost without any thinking. We are talking of "good conflicts", and "bad conflicts". An NGO trying to get rid of illiteracy in a rural part of the country is involved in a "good conflict", a robber killing a car driver to take hold of her/his car is involved in a "bad conflict" (I do expect that readers who have followed me until here are not monsters, and if they are, well, please bear with my examples and just admit for a minute the falling of each case in each category is seen as a generally followed one). The majority of us apply this distinction only by calling the latter "conflict", but never the former and likes. So far, so good. Now let's strike! A company is trying to increase its sales, is a conflict at several levels: in a non exhaustive way, we can list a conflict with other companies (competition), a conflict with the law (making the most profits without breaking it), a conflict with the workers (cost cutting and other such delicacies to maximise the profits), a conflict with the consumer (this idiot is still not buying our stuffs! We need to make him/her change his/her mind). Casualties could be enormous, from the misery of little entrepreneurs who have lost their local market to the bigger company, workers who have been fired or exploited, persons who have been made into consumers and whose free choice has been denied. Though, many will not see a "bad conflict" here, some may not see a conflict if they call as such only the conflicts they find "bad". The stroke has given us a new concept you see? Namely, legitimacy.
This legitimacy is defined by the means (and goals, but they fall into the former category, defining the means) of a conflict. We could almost say, there is no conflict but conditions of conflicts. Being a non static categorisation, the whole struggle will be for the one involved in the conflict to legitimate the conflict and its participation in it. To try and change this perception of the conflict, one will have to show a reality in which her or his involvement and means used in the conflict make sense. Building a reality or a world to make sense of our actions and environment is the most common behaviour one can witness, it occurs all the time, trust me. The destruction of the former world and the building of the new one is a constant process of change and reconstruction of history, namely creating a narrative in which what I do is right/obvious/the only choice there is. And so for every conflict we encounter, a narrative is tried and forced into our mind, so that we see such conflicts as non-conflicts. The whole purpose of conflict resolution lies therefore in the deconstruction, as in analysis, of the narratives that surround us, denotating conflicts and discourses we are parts of.
This is the major problem of the ones who try to make others admit a narrative, and therefore, this research of the narrative has to be disqualified by concepts that are their own narratives, in which the conflict participants have no say. It must appear as natural, that is independent from narratives, necessary, transcending the experience of life in every point, and mapping reality in a rigid geography. But, they remain narratives, and their deconstruction is therefore the only weapon one is left with. Though one can say that deconstruction needs a point of reference wich is the self, which is a narrative, which makes every attempt at deconstruction give a new narrative to deconstruct, and we become Sisyphe again. Well, yes. But, and this "but" is probably one of the reasons why I want to wake up every day, with trees and quiches and people, but we have to keep climbing the mountain and fall, because it is the way to destroy the legitimacy of illegitimate conflicts and by that, reduce the casualties as much as we can. We cannot stop the war against humanity, only take side.
We have seen that the whole process of the conflict is to create narratives and to make them look natural. Parsons (or Mead, can't find the reference in the perimeter my arms can reach) developped a theory in which our relation to the world is built by the discovery of the range of pronouns from I to You, S/He... Initially, I being the child, You being the mother, living in a bilateral relation of a self and an almighty parent. The S/He will be discovered later as the child learns that the behaviour of the mother and their relation is also dependent upon other persons, then They, to finally see the existence of an It, being the abstractions that rule the world in which the child lives. The point of every actor in a conflict is to make its discourse stem not from the S/He, but from the It, naturalising the narrative in which her/his behaviour is the right one. It is striking when we analyse the dominant discourse surrounding us, be it utilitarianism, communalism, science...
In a categorisation of History, we could assume that every era is characterised by a They (a ruling class) trying to disguise its narrative as an It (nature) to strengthen its domination and legitimate unequalities or conflicts. The characteristic of the dominant class being that it would be the part of the population who would understand the It, though most of the time, the ones who understand would produce a discourse that legitimates the ones who rule.
So we have the trio: ruling principle (It), interprets, and ruling class (They)
In primitive societies with nature and the deities, allegedly decoded and heard by the wizards, legitimating the chiefs
In antiquity: ideas, essence, gods, decoded by philosophers, for male urban citizens
Middle Age: God, priests, kings
Enlightment and post revolutionnary ear: Logic, scientifics, rationnal male wealthy citizens
It is a funny thing to notice that the French language does not have a pronoun for "it", preventing any coup by the simple non-existence of the neutral. The pronoun associated with he (il) and she (elle), being "on", litteraly "people", or an undetermined "we", with the connotation of rumour or word of mouth, making it all the more hard to believe every sentence beginning with such pronoun. It may be easier for a French speaker to claim that the king is naked, as we could see with the Revolution, but it also implies that the "It", though it might change easily for a French mind, alays holds the same strength on the society, the period following the revolution being but the creation of a domination by rationnality and therefore scientifics and other specialists, putting the crown on the capitalistic European man.
To explain the title of this post, I could say that the It is bound to be swallowed and digested by the commoner who will make it a part of her/his understanding of the world and act accordingly, the They became the I. This could be continued until now but it would be extremely arduous given the fact that truly yours himself swims in a sea of narratives and therefore would not be presomptuous enough to assume that he has decoded and categorised them. The past becomes the past when it appears as old fashioned, as in stupid. Though many narratives nowadays can be decoded, and this is what I meant when I was referring to a struggle in the beginning of this post, hence closing the circle (lucky for you, dear reader, I could have fallen back on my feet way later). We can understand that this fight lies in thinking because the devil is everywhere and especially in what appears as simplistic and given. So the more simplistic, the more suspicious is the motto I would like to spread, with, of course: deconstruction is the way, say I.
You really do sound like me, you know. The 'say I' and ministrations to your 'dear reader'. This is not a terrible thing, Ironman.
RépondreSupprimerThis point is well taken - Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie are saying the *exact* same thing about the hegemony of the dominant culture (and how it is exerted, created, perpetuated,needless to add) but what you say about the movement (by Mead/Parsons - fish out the source; it's the best idea in the piece) from s/he-as-figure of authority to the naturalised/nationalised/rationalised impersonal truth/truism of the 'it' is absolutely gorgeous. And therefore the title makes sense. Therefore, dear reader (for you read me yet; read me now)your dessert is your starter is your meal, and I love it.
I told thee (just leant from Claire "thou" is the informal form of "you", so it's haigh time we started to tutoyer each other no?) that the S/He - It idea was quite interesting. I'll dig the source. And thank you so much Ms. Siganporia for wearing the clothes I laid with "my dear reader". Seriously, whate'er happens, keep reading/discussing/acclaiming/destroying/teaching/singing/making sing me and my pieces. No, no, seriously.
RépondreSupprimerAnd Iron doesn't stand for Ironmna :) I'll tell you all about it one day...
RépondreSupprimer*ironmaN
RépondreSupprimer