Let’s talk about it… or not
Now that the US Presidentials are over, I can finally start thinking about blogging and writing again.
Sounds like an odd thing to say, doesn’t it? Why would the US elections keep me as a European, a writer or a philosopher from blogging my mind? The answer is easily given. There are only two ways to go about a topic that is so invasive in our everyday lives and has such a massive presence in the news: either you avoid talking about it completely, but then the avoidance will always show in your writing since it is what is on everyone’s mind after all OR you do write about it and open a can of worms that you cannot close again.
Of course I had an opinion on the votes and the elections, of course I have a personal stance and a professional one since I can rarely dissociate the one from the other. As someone trained in philosophy going about in the world, you can rarely not be influenced by the things and current topics around you and think about them with your ‘philosophical’ mind. So, even if I wasn’t to talk about the elephant in the room, I would in a way by avoiding it meticulously.
So the main question remains: why not blog about it if it’s such an important issue of our time?
Because in the myriad of comments, opinions, partisanship battles, demeaning thought processes etc. my word doesn’t count for anything. Not amongst the friends that I live around, close contacts over the internet that I’ve come to consider my friends on certain levels, not among the people that share my faith or convictions or the people I respect. Because just as the media coverage enlightens our knowledge of the world (not to be confounded with actual knowledge, I’m just referring to factual knowledge), it also taints and escalates the dialogue. There is practically no informed discussion to be had about anything in this respect. Not about the kind of dog Obama’s kids will get or the colour of Palin’s breakfast cereal.
I have in all honesty only seen ONE explame of a discussion that could be called constructive and instructive for both camps in all of over 2 years of following the whole circus called U.S. Presidential Election.
What a sad bottom line that makes.
And something I was not ready to expose myself to. There are only so many fall-outs with friends and family that you can get past and once certain things are being said… the going back is almost impossible. The Philosopher’s Attic isn’t about that. It’s about looking at the world in a different manner. It’s about getting a small spark of something else in your day and in mine. And that is what I’ll try to bring back now that this race is over.
A great weekend to all of you.
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The Word
Our worlds are made of words and meaning. Words that bother and comfort, words that build and veil, words that confuse and break open those windows to our hearts that never get used. We use them everyday to speak, relate and cover up, to dissect and inspect, to see and hear and ultimately listen. Words and the things they represent are what makes a man… or not.
There is a word in all this wordness of the wordlessness. So fine in thought and phonetics, so balanced in reason and it’s labio-dental being, so trustworthy in it’s simplicity. So empty in all it’s glory.
It is moved around the pages of numerous books, moved by unseen hands of unknown placers. Pushed to the side of a line, to the beginning, the line-up of a paragraph, the title, the end, the last, the first, the whatever. Through History, through time, on pages worth a thousand others, thought and written by men and women worthy of the meaning, and so many that never grasped it’s true colour or … future. Slipped and flipped around the edges of an inspiring text, a daring pamphlet, a burning speech, a tearing poem or a heating novel. Thus said word, made its way through the eons and ages that long passed, have made the whole structure of words we live in by the day. An architecture of meaning, of synonimical rigour, building room after room, floor after floor, high into skies that bear no limit to what only lowest spirits call culture.
And our word? Stuck somewhere between the ground floor and apartment block 2A, right beside emptiness and vigour. Moved around the great pieces of human culture, like a forgotten furniture: always there, but not really fitting. Not entirely. So, they strip it down, sand it bland, paint it anew to the current times, make it fit wherever it needs to go, make it wear whatever we need it to convey. (grind it down, construct it completely new)
We move it around between the front room, the salon and the back of the house. Once in the first spot for everyone to see when it might serve a purpose. Only to have it removed and put into storage the next day when all sense has been lost and it doesn’t even have enough substance to bear a vase of flowers on its top.
And while it ages, wastes and dies away, this word’s carapace and empty shell is still being used as a ghost, a placeholder in our minds and thoughts. By people that greater and smaller than you or me who rip it apart, move it around, walk over it, tear it apart, defile it, crush it and rape it, while the word all by itself sits in a long forgotten room in some wonderful speech that tells us of a glorious future, whips us in line behind another empty hull of another mighty word that has lost all meaning.
A long forgotten room, in a house full of lost and deconsidered words that have lost reality or reference, that simply have lost being.
There is a word in all this dusty lostness and we used to call it truth. It used to be the making and the destruction of kings, princes and worlds. It used to be the greatest things of all, one of the greatest words with power.
Truth dies easy in the whispers of a thousand liars.
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Solitude
In a time where every minute of every day is filled with chatter and noise, solitude and silence do seem like an endearing thing. And while silence and solitude are bound to connect us much more deeply to ourselves and the things that haunt us, work on us, make us laugh or cry, they – just as anything else – can be the most oppressive and terrible things.
Being alone, lonely… maybe it’s for that reason that these expressions have become tinged with the sense of something negative. Or maybe it’s just our society that is suggesting that the more people you have around you that keep you from being alone, the more successful, more cherished, loved and popular you are. After all, who actually likes to be alone? Isn’t it rather the mark of a socially inept person to be alone, to seek loneliness, to find silence?
Another tradition runs against this. In it men and women have chosen solitude and silence as a way to holiness. For it is in the silence and solitude that we hear our inner selves proclaimed. It is in these lonely hours between the waking and the morning that we truly have to accept our own limits, our own fear and our own hardships that do not come from the world that surrounds us, but from the world that lives in us. But if holiness is found in solitude, why do we shy away from it?
Getting to know oneself is the challenge of a lifetime and some say that you can never achieve it until you’ve drawn your last breath. Be that as it may, it still is a hard task for sure. There never is a moment where we do not either surprise ourselves or are scared by our own darkness, meanness and gratious hardness towards either ourselves or the people that depend on us. Listening, hearing and accepting those limitations of our own being, of ultimately what makes us be the humans that we are… will break us or make us.
And thus solitude becomes a catalyst, a primer, a moment of hesitations before we launch ourselves back at the world to change it.
This is a tease post in a series of short essays or meditations that will sooner or later be published alongside with my poetry.
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Decisions and moral responsibility
When is egoism permitted and when is it not? What is egoism in a relationship? And do we need to save ourselves before we can save someone else?
I am somehow not quite happy with Carry Tennis’ advice to Negotiating (a woman married to an alcoholic who has not accepted his problem as of yet) on Salon.com.
The major question is whether Negotiating should just leave or give her husband an ultimatum to get sober. Her problem is that she doesn’t know whether she can stay with him even if he gets sober:
Somehow, announcing that I am leaving unless he gets sober, then leaving even if he does, seems wrong. However, if I just announce that I am leaving because of his drinking, I don’t think he’ll have any motivation to quit. He is still the father of my children and still someone I care about even if I am having serious doubts about the marriage at this point.
Tennis advises:
The effect of your escape on this man is not something we can predict in advance. So do not premise your escape on any agreements with this man or any expectations about his future. He is not a person you can make agreements with. He is not a person whose future is predictable. He is, for the moment, a hopeless alcoholic. All you can do is save yourself.
It is a general rule that we cannot help anyone as long as they do not accept our help. In the case of addicts (psychos etc.) this means that, if the person in question has not accepted their problem and actually wants to change something, there is simply no way for external help to have any effect. In most cases it can be counter-productive even.
But isn’t it normal for a responsible person to reflect their own decisions and deliberate on the effects their actions might have on the people around them: their family, their friends? For all we know the fact of Negotiating leaving her husband and taking the kids with her, might be another notch in her husbands addiction. This does not imply any responsibility on her part. But its a fact that social isolation makes addiction even more hard to beat.
It’s normal for her not to know how she will feel about her marriage once he would be sober. How could she? If there are other doubts about the marriage and anger involved, they are clouded over by the most important problem: the addiction.
Why do people expect themselves to have it all figured out all the time? Leaving to reconsider and then after reconsidering would be a perfectly possible solution for Negotiating. But Tennis simply tells her to leave, be egoistic and save herself. This advice is perfectly fine for the acute problem. But is it the best way from a moral point of view?
I very much doubt that. To shed people because of their problems, their weaknesses or their ‘incompatibility’ is the easy way out. It is much harder to stick with them, love them anyway, fight with them and for them.
Analysing one’s actions and their impact on others is not simply a way to avoid a decision, it is also a way to appreciate the people around us. But everybody has their own free will to decide what to do or not to do. So even if I am concerned by somebody else’s decision, I can decide to have it affect me or not. And if my decision could affect someone else negatively, it does not imply any responsibility per se. Of course this is only valuable in ‘normal’ cases of decisions or actions, meaning: cases where the basic principle of benevolence for another person are satisfied. If I want to hurt someone, the hurtful act is surely my responsibility.
But we choose by what we are affected.It can be painful or rewarding. Being reflective about it doesn’t make us egoists, but concerned individuals.
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Big Words from the Wise
German Sociologist and Professor at the University of Essen Harald Welzer will be issuing a call to German all German Human and Cultural Scientists to show more temerity in assuming their role as indicators of bad social influences and development. He states that:
Without an opening of their field of research and expertise… [the Human Sciences] will not be able to assume their responsible role that is assigned to them by radically new social problems appearing such as ecological change or the threat by globalised class society.1
I find that a bold thing to state for someone who is issuing this call to German academics working in the Human Sciences. Harald Welzer has been someone who has tried to address a lot of topics posed by current events and an actual need for explanation in society. Granted. I don’t see however why this call should be limited to Germany exclusively.
Galloping globalisation is a fact and although it has its downsides – especially for countries that cannot take part in this processes! – and the dangers of such a processes can only be addressed on a global scale as well. Like with any problem, you need the correct vocabulary and basic configuration to adequately describe it. Skulking protests and holding up banners “globalisation is bad” simply will not do.
It is rather obvious why Welzer’s article is coming out now. It’s WEF week in Davos. And while the Black blocks and other young anarchists start protesting around the world and especially here in Switzerland – Basel and Zürich are the official protest cities, please all tape your windows before leaving the house – and will tear the city centers apart to make a stand against globalisation, one can only wonder where Harald Welzer takes his ideas from. As someone who underlined the importance of accomplishment in public schools, rather than just pedagogical fun and pure knowledge, he seems to forget that in the real globalised world – as opposed to the secluded world of scholarly research – accomplishment is still as important as it ever was.
The opening of our field (Human Sciences) will only be accomplished trough dialogue and temerity, that much is true. When we look at the turn academic discourse has taken since a certain administration has deemed political correctness as the most important speech category or at the problems European intellectuals have with the phrase “Europe has a Christian past and culture…”, nobody can deny the need our society has for more conflictingly and more forceful dialogue. Too many things have not been addressed either by politics or academia while people are left alone with their problems and their musings. The shock of former East Germany voting a neo-nazi party back into local parliament shows how far from the needs and ideas of the polis we really are.
I share Welzer’s call. But not in the same terms. Not in the terms of a charm offensive by the Human scientists to attract more and more people to their topic or cause. The process can only be opened by accessing both ends: the polis and academia.
Like I have stated before, people need to reacquire a certain respect for the Human sciences (kind of hard when they pay for the education of the young generation and all they get is a Gender study in the Everyday Vocabulary of the ordinary working class in Moscow2 while academics have too take off their invisibility cloak and start writing in newspapers and feuilletons again to address what really is on everybody’s minds, rather than ignoring the hot irons of extremism, religious fundamentalism, terror of opinion etc.
Technorati Tags: wef, davos, germany, sociology, human sciences, harald welzer, die zeit
- Die Zeit, Nr. 5 – 25. Januar 2007
- This is not a joke. Happened in my year and I – with my The Quarrel around the Intellect in the XIIIth century: The case of the so called (non-existent) Latin Averroism – looked really nerdy alongside such a posh topic…
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