Society wraps us in swaddling clothes out of the womb and nails in a coffin when we’re dead. From beginning to end, we are encircled in society. One argument is that culture, all that sweetness and light jazz, is the high point of civilization. However, is society beneficial if man has to toil away as a drywaller all their days, as a plumber, as a teacher, for as Rousseau says, as soon as one professionalized their passion, all sweet charms fade away. We’re so engulfed in making a living that we forget how to live! Where in Rousseau’s natural man, or the noble savage, we find a state of man more in tune with nature, and maybe more authentic to ourselves.
Is society beneficial on a whole, or detrimental? In the big picture of things, global warming is a cause of society so there’s that whopper.
You shall address me, first, as Your Highness and kneel.
Then I will disclose the first secret.
Well okay fuck that.
Mastery, is really not describable in words. It cant be represented.
You see, words and representation are what the chains are made of.
We can blabber here and form nice sentences but only when we manage to truly contradict the structure of language within language (such as value ontology does) do we gain access to freedom.
Freedom is clarity before ones valuing. No excuses.
FUCK now I gave away free fucking teaching.
Meaning, it wont be heard.
I - just - um - just imagine you paid me and kissed my feet.
“Words and representation are what the chains are made of”
Words are what we do, it’s humanities idiom ergon (Aristotle’s psychological term for unique task.) Words are what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. I don’t think there is a way to get past that and representation other than while having sex, or in mass, or in concerts, or in confession, in funerals. It takes immense connections for us to break that barrier, maybe it’s not breakable though, maybe my examples are just scratching the surface.
When we read, we are essentially hallucinating ideas, feelings, peoples and places. We are masters of words.
This i do not understand. Wittgenstein said that the limits of our language is the limits of our world. To contradict language might start to confusion and make us troubled and lost. How would it lead to freedom? I don’t understand this sentence.
Only the very best poetic creator is a master of words and indeed, s/he is in control of he chains.
That words are our task (it befits the fucking douchebag Aristotle to think he knows so much about other animals precisely because he cant understand them, kek) doesn’t mean we are masters of words or up to that task.
Our current world proves that the vast majority of humans are completely bewildered by words, and thus, slaves.
For example, people read “the news”. They think because there are words there, that there are facts there. That is how very far humans are from setting even the first baby steps toward mastery.
If they would see their own automatic responses, they would realize the massive power the word has over them and they would realize perhaps even that this probably means someone is consciously using the word to acquire its power.
Wittgenstein retracted everything he said about that when he realized that words are as arbitrary and essentially disjunct as they are powerful, do not form some kind of cosmos as he thought before. I presume this dawned on him when he learned some French or some language that has completely different kinds of terms than German and English have.
When W did realize the truth, he spent the rest of his career writing as confusedly as possible in order to escape the chains of language.
Quoting young Wittgenstein on philosophy is very popular these days, which is deeply ironic. His work stands only and purely as an example of what is absolutely completely misguided and naive. Thats his own opinion as well as mine.
The irony is perfect because his later work is so confused and French-ish that no one ever read it. I did read it though, because I admire his recantation of his errors. Not a lot of people have that integrity.
I do not think you paint the picture as black as it ought to be painted. The current structure of society is detrimental. In fact, it is far worse than you suggest. What you have described above is a slave society. Do you enjoy being a slave? Does anyone seriously believe that slavery is beneficial?
April was the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath……“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself”.
We are always at the most technologically advanced stage of our existence but we can never truly free ourselves from the constraints of the human condition
But if this limitation is just accepted one can then focus their energy on what can be done as an individual and not worry about anything beyond their control
Technology declined in the late Roman Empire. Compare craft from Caesars years to that from under Constantine and beyond.
You can also look at the average known age attained by ancient Greeks and people living a thousand years later; the Greeks were on par with present France, over 2 times the average lifespan of a Medieval person.
To extend the argument; our current scientific means do not seem to compare to those that built the Great Pyramid.
A loss of science can mean a liberation from conditioning, but usually means the opposite.
Having read some critics of romanticism, Isaiah Berlin, he claims that natural man was just something to long for, not something to actually be. That natural man and the very opposite, the expressive fop of society share the same goal, to destroy the given, destroy the structure of society, rebell against it, at the very least laugh about it as i believe Schlegel put it. regardless, I think natural man is a good thought experiment about the artificial chains we throw on ourselves as we pay our taxes, but on uniforms, as we use past traditions as our instruments to trying to find some way to live in some kind of “harmony”. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but society needs to communicate, they need some common values to function, they need words, they need a flexible structure.
Im wondering sincerely, the natural man, does he wear clothes? Does he speak language conveying abstractions, objectifications?
Given what Pederson says here, I must presume he would not.
So he would be a naked mute, or well, a naked grunter.
Indeed this does seem unattainable, not for it being so very ideal, but for it being very much undesirable.
The dichotomy seems false, in short. Of ‘natural man’ vs ‘society’. These French dudes hadn’t really thought it through like say, Mark Twain did.
Shirley, what you say is true. We could sum up a decent critique of Rupert’s naivety in the same way N critiqued Rousseau… that romantic and sentimental regression into symbolizing… really as a form of longing… the primitive man as the ideal. Transcendentalist share this same innocent naivety. And a perfect antithetical ideal to all this might be the futurist movement… man as machine, no more distinction between organic and synthetic, nature as fully subsumed and controlled by man. This is radically anti-traditionalist and encourages experimental risks. Remember art before politics.
Yes, I just don’t psychologize it - though I agree it is a longing that is expressed.
Its merely the observation of how unappealing a completely “un-artificial” human would be.
Nature itself is, as Rousseau was so stupidly unaware of, a constant dressing-up to draw attention.
Did he not know about the birds and the bees?
Now it must be conceded, the French language is of itself a kind of a noble grunting. So maybe Rousseau gets some penalty reduction there.
Which leads to your next point; futuristic transhumanism – nature subsumed by man.
First I want to see how far man would theoretically be able to take this, and what the ground is to this power to subsume nature, to usurp its laws and place them under the human will.
I think that the idea of a society in which we can all be individualists and only do our thing is as erroneous as it can be. Our present situation is caused by everybody waiting for someone else to sort things out. Rousseau was, by the way, a huge disappointment as a human being. Look it up.
A real society is an organized group of persons who are connected together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. That means living as members of a community. They normally share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage. We have ceased to be that kind of community, whether it was our individual fault or not.
Also individuality happily expresses itself in relation to others, and does so best in the performance of a work that claims some kind of value with respect to society. Good farmers, good artists, good craftsmen, even good garbagemen are likely to be strong individuals. As are inventors of actual things, and philosophers who know their purpose, workers of certain future merit.
Whereas people who have no use for society, to put it bluntly, find it very hard to know who they even are.