Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Strawberry Moon<\/p>\n
Finally, some sun.\u00a0 That’s good for the bees, good for the veggies and good for the spirit.<\/p>\n
I collect articles on certain subjects:\u00a0 art, aesthetics, philosophy, political theory, modernism, individualism for instance.\u00a0 Over the last few months there has been an interesting increase in the number of articles I’ve found with new takes on individualism.<\/p>\n
Let me give you an example.\u00a0 You might think of the existentialist as one end of the continuum, radical individualists, almost, sometimes actually, solipsistic.\u00a0 That’s me philosophically and in terms of deep belief about matters often called religious.\u00a0 On the other end you might consider the Asian cultures in which the individual has no unique identity except as they function within the family or the state.\u00a0 You might be the second son, the first wife, a citizen of a particular city or region.\u00a0 Feudalism, too, had a class based view of the person.\u00a0 Peasants were a large, amorphous group who worked the land, did jobs like tanning, blacksmithing, weaving, but whose individual qualities were of little obvious merit.<\/p>\n
It’s not surprising that the enlightenment with its focus on reason, blended with the Renaissance emergence of the individual as a psychological reality had such a powerful and corrosive affect on feudal culture.\u00a0 It moved away from class based political and social structures toward more democratic and meritocratic ones.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, here’s the interesting piece I read the other day.\u00a0 Those of us, like me, who believe in the inviolable isolation of our Self, forever walled off from the rest by the flesh and our peculiar, ineluctably unique internal world have it wrong.\u00a0 The Self, in this view, is socially constructed.\u00a0 We are who others see us to be, or, said another way, we see ourselves in the way that others see us.\u00a0 In this perspective the political libertarian, the leave me alone and let me do it my way Rand Paul crowd, denies the very nature of the system within which they live.\u00a0 That is, at one level, it is a system made of up of intimately connected parts, parts that could not be without the other.\u00a0\u00a0 There is, from this perspective, no alone; we are always apart of, perhaps not in the more rigidly defined feudal or Asian family way, but in a manner much closer to them than to the live alone, die alone types like me.<\/p>\n
In fact, this article goes on to compare the socially constructed self and the democratic state with love, a bond in which we are only who we are in relation to each other.\u00a0 This makes us, if we deny this bond as libertarians do, jilted lovers when our dependence on the state and each other is revealed.<\/p>\n
Politically, I find this argument compelling, explaining as it does the Tea Party anger as the anger of lovers in denial.<\/p>\n
Personally, the socially constructed aspect of the self cannot be denied.\u00a0 Even the stance of the existentialist comes from reading, say, Camus or Sartre or Kierkegaard, a fellowship of lonesome strangers.\u00a0 Yes, the fingers of the other does reach into the interior, switching on certain perceptions, switching off others.\u00a0 Yet, this much is still true:\u00a0 no one knows my inner world.\u00a0 No one except me.\u00a0 No one has lived my life.\u00a0 No one but me.\u00a0 No one else will die when I wink out.\u00a0 No one.\u00a0 These radically separate realities keep me on the existentialist end of the bell curve.\u00a0 At least for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Strawberry Moon Finally, some sun.\u00a0 That’s good for the bees, good for the veggies and good for the spirit. I collect articles on certain subjects:\u00a0 art, aesthetics, philosophy, political theory, modernism, individualism for instance.\u00a0 Over the last few months there has been an interesting increase in the number of articles I’ve found with … Continue reading The Self & The Other<\/span>