On the Self

It is what happens around and to my body that creates the sense of there being an inner self. We would be wrong to claim there is such a thing, and definitely in no way does an 'inner' or 'core' self (aka a soul) precede embodiment and real world interacation. The inner self is made what it is from the outer.

In this way it is true, consciousness must always be consciousness of something: it is not a static but a process. Identity is not a static but is based on meaning, consistency and presence. We learn about and create our own natures by our responses to the situations we find ourselves in. It is not an independent nature which finds expression through the body and its situations, but is a nature brought into being by those situations.

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it seems wrong in some way to say "I have a body". I would prefer to say "I have a mind". 'I' seems to be a much larger concept than the mind, which is the mere tip of the iceberg (although it claims rulership for itself). The mind, the self-conscious ego, is merely the most focussed part of the web of interactions, process and environmental interchange that makes up 'me'.

I think Wittgenstein said it better than most have understood: I am my world. I am not present 'in' the world any more than the eye is in the visual field. How sublime is this statement, how awe-inspiring the intellect that could produce it?

A moot point

Sometimes, I lie awake at night wondering exactly what 'ineffable' means.

A vs B theism

Both the atheist and the theist are correct. The theist is correct metaphorically, the atheist is correct once they change their focus from what they are denying to what they are affirming.

A Hypothetical Answer to the Question, "Does Reality Have a Logical Structure?"

http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

Free Will Thought Experiment

Imagine awaking to find yourself in your body a year, two years, or five years in your past. Only your awareness is there, an observer to your actions - you have no control over your body or the choices you had then made - these are already set and determined. Although terrifying, this experience would at first also be fascinating - with the element of choice removed, you would be a static bystander, fulfilling absolutely the role of observer. After some time, your consciousness would drift, but unable to remove itself from the physical sensations aroused by the body's motion would soon fall into a state of identification with the experience, accepting the moment as its own.

The sense of boundary between the mind which experiences and the body which acts would blur. Subdued by its impotence, the mind would assure itself that the sense of control was unimportant - simply the experiences generated by the predetermined actions were the whole of its reality. As the moment of removal, the time when the consciousness was taken back into the past, approached and passed, the mind would feel no difference, still actions happened and the mind experiences. Its understanding of 'choice' has atrophied to nothing. Is there any difference at all? How can one tell?

If one analyses the psychological events surrounding an action outside of temporal awareness, they seem to ripple in both direction: prior, the coalescing of desire from nothing into the moment of electrical impulse, from brain to muscle. After, the fading of the memory from the moment of the experience to nothing - perhaps a trace remains, still gradually fading, etiolated and remoulded by contemplation.

The experience of motive and initiation is not necessarily any more important than the experience of memory. It need exercise no more definition than the memory over the actuality of the event. Physical laws retain their integrity when the direction of time is hypothetically reversed - could the same not be true of psychological laws?

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I found this entry in my journal from 2002. It's an interesting thought experiment and demonstrates how the mind can assume the freedom of will. Many modern psychologists and neuroscientists argue that much of conscious thought happens after the decisions are made: that is, we create our motives after watching ourselves act. We delude ourselves that we are in control, while the subconscious and biological processes determine our response to our environments.

As Wittgenstein made clear, the self is not an epistemologically isolated entity, revealed through deliberate (consciously enacted) action. Consciousness comes to a belief/formulation of the self through watching one's own actions just as much as other people do. And, just as we perceive others and understand/postulate a 'self' encompassing these actions, as we know there is amind involved there that we can interact with, so we come to a belief about ourselves through perception of our own actions. We postulate agency, and a coherent single 'self' or 'nature' on our own behalf just as we do to others. But there is no single 'self'. There is no single 'me'. We are all a vague collection of actions, impulses and thoughts bagged together in the illusion of an identity. 'Self' is just a linguistic game. We should not be fooled by the pragmatic tools of our language into thinking there is some essential nature or object that they represent.

In Honour of Claude McKay

For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.
I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.
Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man's menace, out of time.

Outcast, by Claude McKay

I picked up second hand a copy of Fox&Kloppenberg's Companion to American Thought. The first entry I opened to was Claude McKay, a poet and novellist I had never heard of before. I found his story particularly fascinating. The following is edited from that entry.

McKay, Claude (b. Clarendon, Jamaica, 1890; d. Chicago 1948). McKay was born to a farm family and educated primarily by his brother, a free thinking school teacher. McKay served as part of the Kingston constabulary, however he found life there oppressive and felt himself increasingly alienated by this location between the urban elite and the great mass of the urban poor. He emigrated to the USA in 1912 to attend the Tuskegee Institute but he soon moved to Kansas State University, shocked by the shocked by the intense racism he encountered in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. He also cited the "semi-military, machinelike existence there" as motive for leaving. Most of his poetry was written after this, while he was working menial positions in Harlem.

The political and racial sensibilities of McKay's writing quickly gained him a reputation as a protest poet. However, this focus has often served to obscure his identity as a poet of exile.The sense of rupture between the poem's narrator and an organic community is at the root of the speaker's anger. This opposition is also posed structurally with the black intellectual-artist-speaker anxiously mediating between the representation of the black subject and the received poetic forms of the metropole.

McKay joined the staff of Slyvia Pankhurt's Workers Dreadnought in 1919 upon his move to London. His engagement with the communist movement can be seen as an attempt to mediate the identity crisis of the black intellectual which McKay perceived acutely: that of alienation from the black community. McKay saw an alternative way of life in in the communists, who promoted a vision of a world in which distinctions of nation, class and race would become less important as markers of power and in which black intellectuals would have an organic relationship to society. McKay's address to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1992 prompted the Congress to declare African Americans to be "in the vanguard of the African struggle against oppression". McKay therefore had a hand in moving the struggles of African Americans from a relatively peripheral issue for the Communist Party of the USA to becoming the party's preeminent concern by the early 1930s. McKay however became disenchanted with the CPUSA for what he saw as it frustration of initiatives that arose from within the black community itself, such as cooperative movements and demands for jobs for African Americans in white-owned Harlem businesses.

His novels question notions of race and class within a world divided up by European and American capitalism. Home to Harlem explores the polarity of the implicitly effeminate black intellectual Ray, agonised by his alientation from black community and absorption in European "high" culture, and the virilely masculine Jake who is spontaneous and direct, acting without reflection or self-doubt. The books thus posits a new type of intellectual, not unlike Gramsci's notion of the "organic intellectual". This intellectual would be produced by and remain a part of the black masses rather than attempting either rise above or lead them from above.

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McKay made one of the earliest attempts to articulate the problems of race and class in a global society. His struggle with his own identity and his sense of alienation from the very people he was trying to help speaks some tragically ineffable truth about modern life and the difficulty anyone attempting an intellectual challenge to the problems of the world faces.

Claude McKay's poems

More info on McKay

Medusa

I wonder if, as science explains more and more of physical reality and reduces it into unambiguity, we will reach a point where the entire course of history will be explained as a single line - and thereby the "now" of subjectivity which has been gradually shrinking, withering as humanity objectified life, would disappear - the fluid, "now" world of pre-rational thinking would be set in stone, dead, given a solid concrete narrative, perceived by the intellect and therefore made real; annihilated. The universe, no more based around consciousness, would abort itself, its lifeforce having committed suicide by self-autopsy.

Let's hope not, eh?