Automata

“The merely animal is not truly alive.  Animals are automata.”  (Descartes held to this view.)  So what in the human being is alive, if we are to take the animal as ‘dead’?  Is it the human brain?  The pineal gland?  The locus disappears.

Walking the plank

“Something can only be dead that was alive, or that had the potential to be alive originally.”  It all seems factual.

- But there is a metaphysical aspect to this sort of statement that needs to be recollected in the context of the unfamiliar dimension to things introduced by this means: the statement that the machine on which one writes is not alive (for example) answers to an idea that no one puts forward anyway – except when they want to think ‘metaphysically’.  Because haven’t people insisted that radiator thermometers are living beings too?  The problem with all this is one of perspective.  That actually we have entirely forgotten about the concept of being alive as a reality, when we start arguing in these terms; since it is as if we are talking about some sort of simple factual confusion; the abyss, the vertigo, of life goes missing.

Everything seems clear; it all seems simple.  But we are like poor gossips who in the security of their office insist they can as easily walk the plank perched overhead on their building’s edge as what is directly in front of them on the floor.

Abstract rationality is like the plank on the floor.

The living and the dead

“The air is made up of gases.  It is not ‘living’.  It supports life but it is not in itself alive.”  So is one to conclude from that that the air is therefore dead?  ‘Inanimate’?  Is there a term for what supports life but is not itself living?  “Water is not in itself living.”  So – since I regularly fill myself with water, in some form, and fill myself with air too - breathe in the air and breathe it out again - is this act of filling and emptying to do with dead matter?    Am I like some sort of plaster image, solid and largely unliving, and conscious but except somehow not, insensate, feeling only in the nerve ends so that further in … nothing, cold, black, empty elsewhere – ?   Are only parts of me living?  If so, which parts?  My eyes but not my hair?  My fingers but not my bowels?  My finger tips but not my nails?  Do I live ’subdermally’?  Is it the raw skin that is alive and not the outer ‘dead’ surface?  How should the living be divided from the dead?  Can one speak of scientific discovery in these terms?  Suppose science were to discover that ‘categorically speaking’ “Nothing is really alive”?  “All is really dead” – ?

A Secular Religion

Overheard.  “There is such a thing as religious discovery.  In one or another form religious experience discovers something.  Its logic is therefore about that which exists and that needs to be understood and to be made secular if we are to make headway with things.  The limits of scientific knowledge need to be grasped as pragmatically real.”  I am not sure whether I would agree, but these words contain a grain of what’s needed if sense is to be made of the experience of being alive.  There is an irreducible strangeness to it.  Life is – if you like – perfectly ordinary but at the same time ‘life’ – being - is not a scientifically describable phenomenon.  But there is no alternative – for example.  It is not as if we can step outside it and take a look back at ourselves.  That can never be anything more than metaphorical – feebly, self-reflectingly, vainly, stupidly, metaphorical.  The possession of awareness can only exist as a living ongoing indefinite process, a ‘path’.  There can only be sense that is made, not sense that ought to be made, or that might be made, if there is no such thing as an other than living awareness.  Life’s condition is essentially mythic.  Even now in the modern world this is how we live; though we may not admit it, because in every circumstance we cannot but live according to the mythos that this logic produces: even if we refuse its implications it still remains.  I use these words mythic and logic because I want to emphasise the inevitability of this point.  I don’t mean for example that our understanding of things in this form derives from some sort of subjective and so marginal perceptual state (so that an objective rendering of the world can be put forward in contrast: there is no contrast).  I intend to show that there is a sense in which the concept of life has to be mythical, substantively and irreducibly thus: an imagined state if it is to be understood at all.  The apparent alternative, ”I am going to talk just about fact” does not exist where life is not a fact but a kind of judgement; something understood in an indefinite way or in the context of the infinite.   An analogy is perhaps to be found in the following idea.  “The fish is in the sea.  The fish is alive because the sea is alive.”  The fish is not alive in a dead thing, it is alive in a living thing.  The living thing, the fish, exists in a living world. The sea is living and it has to be such.  Similarly with the nature of human life – by analogy.  If we are living beings it is because we are in a living world. We are not alive but surrounded by what is dead.  Or again, living beings because made up of non-living matter.  We are living beings because made up of living matter.  As in a religious picture.  The universe is created by a living thing.  (According to the religion.)  That is, because the universe is surrounded by (is inside) the living thing that creates it even while also the universe thus created stands outside it.  The religious concept creates an image of life.  Its opposite, death, is rendered in terms that promote life.  So again, the universe is living, just as the sea is that the fishes live in: it promotes life: the dead too live on in it even if that is elsewhere – above it or below it for example.  However, modern life produces the golem, the robot, or the machine or the android – things which seem intermediate, both living and dead simultaneously.  The ‘morbidity’ is inherent.  As in Philip K Dick the fear is created, “I am not really alive!  Really, I am dead – dead matter because no different from a robot: just a configured stuff.”  But so, there can be no reductive state where the question simply goes away or becomes irrelevant.  In one form or another we have to have a picture, we must have an answer.  So, a logic.

Man: the Imaginary Animal

Only rational strategems exist.  There is no rationality.

It is not possible to predicate the logically conditional with the logically absolute; because only the circumstantial is absolute!

The strategem is to take into account one’s lack of rationality. 

One hunts the animal but that can only be as it is rather than according to a scripted (or an idealised) procedure.

This is the question: How does one hunt an imaginary animal?

Alister McGrath hunts down Dawkins pretty well (in Dawkins’ God) but does Dawkins respond?

Dawkins thinks he is not an imaginary animal!

We have the situation: “The imaginary animal thinks it is real.”

“The world consists in facts.”  “It is all that is the case.”

The Rational Being

Perhaps my most fundamental illusion is this.  That people exist in a rational state of being.  That I do too.  At base it is a political illusion that I should think this.  Indeed, because it concerns the ‘total economy’ of how one functions.

I mean something like the following.  That I tend to suppose that rationality is a state rather than what it is actually, an ideal.  It is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  What is it?  A hope, a state, a desire, a process?  With the actual rainbow things are clearer; this is the difference.  You see the wonderful rainbow.  But don’t suppose you will ever find its gold.  One could say that politics tends to make us want to think the reverse.  “There is the pot; give me the gold.” 

“Man is a rational animal.”   

One expects reasonableness, rationality, and so argues in these terms, defends, judges in ways that infer this ’state’ in a human being.    But it isn’t how the world works.  At some point the process breaks down because one fails to think strategically in this approach: according to the idea of the human race existing in its not-rational state.  All one’s thinking is backwards:  it is only within the object of a strategically understood ideal that any sense will be made. 

But then so it goes on.  Out of the failed ‘rationality’ comes a new with a different set of illusions about the human ’state’.  A new politics of hope emerges creating in its symbol what I would call a house or a home that of course sits at the end of the rainbow (the place that defines where I would like to live) but it is not a state: it doesn’t describe our condition. 

 But of course we have learned to talk of, and will only consider, the “state” and its inherited human rights exclusively.

One could say that novelists have a true advantage over philosophers, thinkers, rational idealists, in these terms, in so far as they do not presuppose the god-given dimensions of a rational context for people other than through their observed self-willed behaviour … Philosophy presupposes a ‘rational state’.  Farce ensues.  I myself possess no ’rational state’. 

Just at this point – in this vanity – death enters one’s life.

Defining terms

My life, the defining terms:

Nothing is wrong until something is wrong.

Something is wrong until nothing is wrong.

Something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Is anything wrong?

Something must be wrong! 

What, if nothing is wrong, is that something?

Did I forget about it or did it forget me?

How can something that has forgotten about me be anything that I still care about if I don’t know what it is?

I don’t know how long ago it forgot about me.  I can’t remember.  Could I remember would it matter?

If it forgot about me can I remember that it was important in a way that is important?  If it is important, that automatically disqualifies me from its knowing since everything I know is trivial.  The important thing is triviality.  One step at a time.

Card Games

The merely rational is a solution to nothing.  One has to think strategically .. To say that life is a rational wilderness identifies rationality as a small almost helpless creature living in the wild, like a mouse except that its world is imagination-derived rather than the result of any natural environment.

Life’s idiom, the biblical image of a lost Eden, recalls the wilderness we left in an unprecedented act of forgetting so long ago: home as an act of forgetting but that survives only as a vague idea of sex and silk sheets and dark nights.  As in a card-game, with human wit pitted against chance, the ‘recovery’ of that original sense is an illusion created by the game and maintained for as long as it is played so that everything accessory to it, the table one happens to be sitting at, the people and their paper party hats, the tea, the atmosphere, the season, the celebration … out of a chaos a house emerges, and it stays in memory, but a wind blows through; everything scatters; it is a house of cards.

In the random ’play’ to be found in the war’s midst: the mouse of rationality.  But politics wants to refuse it to everything.  There is a fight: bullets are fired and swords are drawn.  The idealised kingdom fades into wallpaper and the rustle of plastic sticking out of the bin in the yard.  (“Who saw me?”)  Pockets of war disrupt the righteousness of a tin can.  Dogs bark.  Owls twoo.  So what is wanted is that the rational world follow the zoid of straight line whereas the truth is a wilderness – .

Trainers (2)

One can see the popularity of wearing trainers as part of the common impulse, which we share in through a kind of cultural indavertence, and which can be seen with other things too, for getting back in touch with our instincts.  Since we seem to be ‘out of touch’ with the body ways are sought of reaffirming its importance but (and here is the difficulty) within a context that is not very real, which is dominated by televisual and magazine images and corporate iconography: identity that is quintessentially disembodied being its embodiment. 

Megalomania

It’s self-fulfilling of me isn’t it?  The human species is unique because it is stuffed with megalomaniacs.