Human experience is multifaceted; the natural objective world, the subjective experience of that world, the relationship between humans, the need for something beyond ourselves, eros and agape and everything in between. We necessarily choose a perspective, a paradigm to understand this torrent of experience because we are limited in our ability to understand it in totality. By selecting from that experience we can literally shape the world we live in and therefore we must choose well.
The descent into decadence begins when the natural loses its interest and fully blossoms into the unnatural becoming the normal; it ends in the suicide of the culture. I have often bemoaned the contemporary in these blogs, which is based on a dangerously false concept of the self. Until the late 19th Century, most people made little effort to define what we mean when we spoke about an individual person. An individual was a relatively stable being with free will to act in a conscious way, rationally or irrationally, but always internally aware of the self; the Furies were outside of us, not inside of us. From the advent of the Enlightenment, e.g., Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to the writings of Freud, to the rise of the social sciences this began to change; the Furies were us.
This shift in perspective as to the meaning of the individual reached crisis stage with the Frankfurt School and the rise of Critical Theory. The idea of a stable personality capable of individual judgment was gone, replaced by self-deluded entity that believed itself stable and with free will, but that was actually ever-changing, in the thrall of biological demands for food, sex and security, while immersed in a social network that silently dictated the thoughts of this poor deluded creature. In the first paradigm, the poet wrote words to creatively express an idea that required more than normal discourse; it required a leap of sorts. The poet intended the words to express his personal thoughts and to effect the reader accordingly. In the new paradigm, nothing of the sort happens; the first paradigm is delusional. The poet’s choices of ideas and words was determined not freely, but because of the secret agendas of the biological self as shaped by the objective outside forces of society, which is to say by power relationships. In western cultures the power is held by white males whose perspective served only to buttress white male power over those less privileged. Beauty? Purpose? Duty? Honor? Virtue? Vice? All delusions or worse, the tools of the privileged to suppress the weak aka “people of color.”
So, who are we? A free and natural people created by God with inalienable rights, free will and a love of truth or confused slaves living in a mindless world? The answer chosen determines the kind of world we live in–we build our own prisons. In the contemporary world the truncated unnatural view of the individual has become the normal and our thoughts, through the nihilism of the new paradigm, create a culture of death. Why do I hate contemporary art? It is unnatural to man who is indeed a physical being, but who is also much more than that.
Blog No. 71 What is the nature of the individual?
Human experience is multifaceted; the natural objective world, the subjective experience of that world, the relationship between humans, the need for something beyond ourselves, eros and agape and everything in between. We necessarily choose a perspective, a paradigm to understand this torrent of experience because we are limited in our ability to understand it in totality. By selecting from that experience we can literally shape the world we live in and therefore we must choose well.
The descent into decadence begins when the natural loses its interest and fully blossoms into the unnatural becoming the normal; it ends in the suicide of the culture. I have often bemoaned the contemporary in these blogs, which is based on a dangerously false concept of the self. Until the late 19th Century, most people made little effort to define what we mean when we spoke about an individual person. An individual was a relatively stable being with free will to act in a conscious way, rationally or irrationally, but always internally aware of the self; the Furies were outside of us, not inside of us. From the advent of the Enlightenment, e.g., Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to the writings of Freud, to the rise of the social sciences this began to change; the Furies were us.
This shift in perspective as to the meaning of the individual reached crisis stage with the Frankfurt School and the rise of Critical Theory. The idea of a stable personality capable of individual judgment was gone, replaced by self-deluded entity that believed itself stable and with free will, but that was actually ever-changing, in the thrall of biological demands for food, sex and security, while immersed in a social network that silently dictated the thoughts of this poor deluded creature. In the first paradigm, the poet wrote words to creatively express an idea that required more than normal discourse; it required a leap of sorts. The poet intended the words to express his personal thoughts and to effect the reader accordingly. In the new paradigm, nothing of the sort happens; the first paradigm is delusional. The poet’s choices of ideas and words was determined not freely, but because of the secret agendas of the biological self as shaped by the objective outside forces of society, which is to say by power relationships. In western cultures the power is held by white males whose perspective served only to buttress white male power over those less privileged. Beauty? Purpose? Duty? Honor? Virtue? Vice? All delusions or worse, the tools of the privileged to suppress the weak aka “people of color.”
So, who are we? A free and natural people created by God with inalienable rights, free will and a love of truth or confused slaves living in a mindless world? The answer chosen determines the kind of world we live in–we build our own prisons. In the contemporary world the truncated unnatural view of the individual has become the normal and our thoughts, through the nihilism of the new paradigm, create a culture of death. Why do I hate contemporary art? It is unnatural to man who is indeed a physical being, but who is also much more than that.