Just a quick and kinda weird post. In all the philosophy and theology I've been encountering, we've talked about how we are in a state a becoming, rather than that we are beings. The self has been deconstructed and dispersed in postmodern philosophy and psychology, so that there is not a essence to me, the 'real me' that lies behind what I do.
So maybe, instead of thinking of myself as 'Stuart', as a solid identity, I should think of myself as 'Stuarting', as living out what it means (for me) to be Stuart in each moment of becoming. Maybe. (Note: this post hasn't been written carefully, so I've probably been sloppy throwing around language of 'myself' and stuff. Just ignore it. Or whatever.)
I quite like this idea... lets take it further and see what comes out. Two things come to mind.
ReplyDeleteOne is a reminder of a thought experiment, it goes a little like this: picture an event from your childhood you have a very vivid memory of. It could be getting into a fight, or the first time you kissed a girl/boy or just a summer holiday. Put the memory in your mind very strongly, so you can remember what it was like to be in that situation, the images, your thoughts etc. Now consider this --- not one atom in your body is the same now as it is then. You have regrown yourself many times, like a broom that has had both the handle and the brush changed multiple times. Every atom. Your physical self is not the same, not even your mental physical self, as the atoms that make up your neurons have also all be recycled. So in what sense are you the same now as you were then?
The second thing is a quote from the Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Apologise if the language offends you...
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[i]This gives Bobby Shaftoe [a marine] the opportunity to strike up a few conversations with Enoch Root [a mysterious computer hacker], just for the hell of it.
"I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
"So what’s the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that’s not Root’s agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.[/i]
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So there is a point to that, that we can take this one step further than addiction and leaky roofs and take it to Stuart. If there is no such thing as the eternal-self, the fixed notion of the mind, there is only a mapping between self and time. There is no Mind_Of_Stuart object fixed, there is only an infinite number [Mind_Of_Stuart x Time] objects as Stuarts mind (and thus his Self) changes over time.
If we accept that Stuart's body is just a vassel for his Self (his Mind) and if his Mind is constantly changing then there isn't such a thing as Stuart either. Your are mearly Stuarty, loosely connected to the Stuarts of the close past and close present, and even more loosely connected to the Stuarts of distant past and present.
-Iain
You are a freaking nut! If you are going to be stuarting (even I know that is not a word)~~~ Then I will be Robbing.....lololol...get it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced this works.. in that “Stuarting”, as a present participle explicitly refers back to “Stuart” to derive its meaning.
ReplyDeleteIt’s merely the objective notion of a “Stuart” gerund-ised: the act of “being a Stuart” as it were.
If you’re looking for a language that can provide words avoiding iron clad notions of objectivity, then English isn’t going to help much. European languages depend on them.
It’s why WE got the Enlightenment :)
(will answer the last post's question at some point, not had time to do it in a worthwhile fashion)
(meant to say)
ReplyDeleteAnd nor would "Stuarty": The quality of being similar to a "Stuart""
Just because there isn't an adequade word for it, doesnt invalidate the concept. To recap, the concept is there being no objective Stuart, mearly a Stuart over Time series, ie, the notion of Stuart's Self is relative to his position in time.
ReplyDeleteI agree though, Stuarting is not the best word, and as you say, English may not be the best language to discuss the concept.
While we are here, do you agree with "Cogito, ergo sum" ?
-Iain
Yes it does.
ReplyDeleteThe entire argument is a linguistic one: the attempt to validate a concept through its precise definition in natural language.
He has already outlined the concept of the fluctuating subjective self in his many posts and conversations on being a "being in a state of becoming", in addition to metaphors, analogies, narratives (such as the one you posted Iain) etc
This was an attempt to refine it, and pin it down more precisely into a regularly workable form in everyday understanding (as far as I see it).
It failed.
I, and more significantly Wittgenstein, would heavily contest the idea that being bereft of a fitting word doesn’t invalidate the concept. Human thought takes place in language. Its possibilities and limitations define the content of our thought and, ultimately, any attempts at philosophy are just playing with words in the attempt to extend the frames of reference possible without our (natural) language.
As Wittgenstein would say, "Wherefore we cannot speak, there we must remain silent".
Actually, that was imprecise: no it doesn't invalidate the concept.
ReplyDeleteIt merely invalidates this particular attempt to refine it.
1. Somebody read the Tractatus.
ReplyDelete2. Are we using descriptive grammar or prescriptive grammar? It would seem that Wittgenstein would be more akin to the former because, for Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is its use in the particular language game in which it is being used.
3. I think "Stuarting" works just fine. The Plaosmos dancer describes (not defines) Stuarting "as living out what it means...to be Stuart in each moment of becoming. So in a sense "Stuarting" is referring to "Stuart", but not in an objective form. It seems that in the past he was "Stuarting" and in the future he will be "Stuarting" but in the gap between past and future he is both "Stuarting" and "Stuart", but not in a metaphysical or essential sense. What it meant to be "Stuart" yesterday is different than what it means to be "Stuart" today, or what it will be to be "Stuart" tomorrow. "Stuart" -in a dynamic, non-essentialist, non-metaphyical, and non-objective sense - is "Stuarting". If we stop the continual flow of empty, homogenous time, and allow it to crystallize into a monad, then we see "Stuart" as a being that is becoming. A "Stuart" that is "Stuarting".
4. Stuart(ing), your pony tail may be essential.
Tom said
ReplyDelete"[All] human thought takes place in language
(I added the All, as I think that was implied). See, I'm not sure I agree with that statement. Certainly some human though, including this Blog does, but not all Human thought does.
Take a professional athlete (lets use Soccer). Lots of simulation games rank players on various different stats, Tacking, Speed, Stamina and so on. One stat that is usually ranked is Intelligence. But the kind of intelligence used by athletes during a game is not the language and sybol manipulation kind we are doing here. It is very sophisticated pattern recognition -- they see a situation, with certain enemy players on the left, certain enemy players on the right, and just know which players to intercept. They don't think about it, they just analyse and work out based on pattern.
The same intelligence occurs in Chess grandmasters. Lesser chess players like myself have to think and rationalise "if I move this here, then this happens..." and so on, but Grand masters simply recognise pattersn and know what the best move is without analysing it on a Language level.
This is still intelligence. So I disagree with Wittgenstien/Toms proposal that all thought and concepts have to take place within language and that "if you can't talk about it, it's not valid". And I think that just because we don't have a good word to describe a certain metaphysical property such as Stuarting, doesnt mean that it isn't necessarily a concept. Its just one we can't express very well in our symbollic domain.
Within the realm of language however Witt/Tom's arguments regarding language as a poor tool for discussing methaphorical concepts and that all philosophy using language is, as Bobby Shaftoe would say, wanking, is surprisingly convincing.
-Iain
Wow! I'm impressed by the number of comments I received from such a short post. I should keep my posts shorter in future!
ReplyDeleteChris, isn't the Tractatus very different from his later work? Didn't Witt kinda go back on himself and disagree with himself?
Altho I think I do agree with your points 3 and 4. It's not that there's an essential Stuart that I am attempting to live out, it's that I am describing what it means (for me) to be Stuart in every moment, and so the description is getting richer and richer as time goes on.
I've been told I should read Heidegger's Being and Time as this discusses such questions. The title fits at least.
Hmmm, I don't know much about Heidigger, but I thought one of his main points was a rejection of Decartian dualism - ie, the notion of the mind being seperate to the body.
ReplyDeleteSo he says that the mind cannot ask the leading questions about the existance of the outside world, and thus come to the "Cogito ergo sum" conculsion. The mind and the body are one, one being, and he pooh pooh'ed seperating them.
But given today's exporation of the concepts of Artificial Intelligence (eg, some of the stuff raised in Ghost in the Stuff and other such cyberpunk notions), doesnt the concept of an intelligence questioning the validity of its inputs hold much weight? The notion of the mind as software and the body as hardware seems a pretty convincing analogy that fits with Descartian dualism. So i'm not sure I agree with Heidigger's pooh pooh.
Be interesting to hear how he draws time into the whole story though.
-Iain
Did you mean things such as "Ghost in the Shell"? I have to admit that I'm not too familiar with it, altho I did see the movie a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have to disagree with a body/soul split (or hardware/software). These prioritise the mind, at the expense of the body, and continue to perpetrate the idea that our bodies don't matter all that much (as it's the mind that matters). There are so many issues with this that I can't mention them all here, but it has been shown to be a patriarchal suppression/forgetting of the female (who are seen less as mind-beings, being 'all emotional and hysterical'), serves to estrange us from our own bodies, can too easily be tied to a heavenly-escape idea (just download my software to the heaven-server), and ignores a lot of the good parts of evolutionary theory. Indeed, looking at the sex of computer uses can show how patriarchal the computing-world is.
I also have to disagree with Descartes' "cogito ergo sum", as this is (today used as) an attempt to find a firm foundation from which to built an universalising ontology, "the way the world is." I'm sure that when Descartes was writing, this was an extremely liberating phrase, but it has become a danger, and so (as I see it), post-structuralism and deconstructionism have had to 'undermine' it, to show that it is no foundation. On of my favourite quotations is, "Man provides a foundation for himself on the basis of reducing to nothingness that from which the foundation proceeds." (Luve Irigaray, Martin Heidegger's Forgetting of Air)