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November 12, 2017 - January 14, 2018
philosophical anthropology.
ethics of attention
orienting response
yet one consumes a great deal of silence in the course of becoming educated.
to the omnipresent purveyors of marshmallows.
No merely local flora can compete for air
because it is convinced that rational agency is an illusion.
On this view, one shouldn’t get too invested in making distinctions between billiard balls and human beings.
The cherished “coherence” of the self is a myth we ought to grow out of anyway.
What if the coherence of a life is in some significant way a function of culture?
I suggested that genuine agency arises not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing be a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.
it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline.
“situatedness”
fundamental to what a human being is.
For several hundred years now, the ideal self of the West has been striving to secure its freedom by rendering the external world fully pliable to its will.
not “freedom” but “agency.”
It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible:
!
It stabilizes a process, and in doing so lightens the burden of care—
“Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in their toolbox.”
God had so arranged things that the status of one’s soul was visible in one’s portfolio;
The daunting complexity of the demands we have to comply with, and the opportunities for diversion that abound, add up to a pretty compelling case for just staying on the couch in a state of overstimulated avoidance.
Lord, yes.
“an interpretive effort transposes meaningless feelings into meaningful ones,
We think through the body.
“morphological computation,”
through his body to the world beyond.
(Motorcyclists become ethnographers of necessity, or rather rank stereotypers, for the same reason that cops do: they face risk. Stereotyping is efficient for snap judgments.)
you have to love the truth more than you love your own current state of understanding.
“an unstable condition, which degrades all too easily into either a complete lack of watchfulness or too much involvement.”
realm of the ideal, not the empirical.
With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration.
“Involve your ass, your mind will follow.”
Tru
Such desubjectification does look quite a bit like death.
Our founding republican spirit of “No taxation without representation” and “Don’t tread on me” is laudable, but must be directed to the proper offshore entity.
the skills one exercises in any impressive human performance are built up through submission—to “authoritative structures,”
Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument,
membership in a community is a prerequisite to creativity.
a fossilized bit of joint attention.
You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness.”
“words are, on this conception, an immensely delicate and useful way of pointing.
Work, then, is a mode of acting in the world that carries the possibility of justification through pay.
beautiful folly,
But this means that in times of cultural flux and uncertainty, when it is not clear what “our rules” are, there is a basic difficulty for individual agency understood socially.
Competence rests on an apprehension of real features of the world, as refracted through some set of human needs/desires
he is tired of having to become himself.
weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become
A.K.A living
one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
Lol
I don’t think “I am in despair because I lost my job,” I think “My serotonin levels are low, and there’s a pill for that.”
a self that is not in conflict with the world.
Bliss … lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
Scales.
it is actually I who am in HIS way.
