Daily Quote, Wednesday September 2, 2009.
Good morning everyone,
No need to tell you how bright and sunny it is!
Here is today's quote:
Why do we give importance to thought?
Why has humanity given such extraordinary importance to thought? Is it because it is the only thing we have, even though it is activated through the senses? Is it because thought has been able to dominate nature, dominate its surroundings, has brought about some physical security? Is it because it is the greatest instrument through which man operates, lives and benefits? Is it because thought has made the gods, the saviours, the super-consciousness, forgetting the anxiety, the fear, the sorrow, the envy, the guilt? Is it because it holds people together as a nation, as a group, as a sect? It is because it offers hope to a dark life? Is it because it gives an opening to escape from the daily boring ways of our life? Is it because not knowing what the future is, it offers the security of the past, its arrogance, its insistence on experience? Is it because in knowledge there is stability, the avoidance of fear in the certainty of the known? Is it because thought in itself has assumed an invulnerable position, taken a stand against the unknown?
Letters to the Schools, p 43
Here are my reflections.
It seems to become clear, as we look into thought more and more, that it is its psychological role more than anything else that is important. This means how it works as a way of adapting, compensating, and coping with life in all its uncertain and confusing aspects. All of this centres on the question of knowing. As soon as we know something, give a name to it, pin it down as this or that, then we have used the past to adapt to the present, compensated for our finitude, and coped with the boredom of life in an entertaining comparison of then and now - without seeing that the then has created the now.
It is the feeling of power that thought gives us that sustains it, not because thought is true but because in the thought of the other we also create the self. Thought is invulnerable because it always puts us at the centre of the world; it is dominant because it allows us to dominate, for to know is also to dominate. We are never really all that clear on how we depend upon thought for our existence.
Derrida talks a lot about how action first needs to be legitimated in representation. How a person is represented then justifies the action towards them. Of course, the action and the representation are inseparable; to act in a certain ways towards someone is to represent them. So often we assume that the representation, the knowing, comes first, and the action follows, as if we can't act until we know. But this is just the power of thought. What we consistently fail to see is how the representation is always past representation, recycled experience, which only makes it appear that the thought and the knowing is first.
The tragedy of all this is the way that fixing a representation in the past (or presenting from the past, which is what representation actually is) means that we keep looking at someone in the same way. No matter how much they change with passing years and experience, we keep looking through the lens of the past. We might have one or two things that represent a person for us and we keep looking in the same way. It's tragic partly because it is just to allow us to know ourselves. So fear and uncertainty around being leads to all kinds of conditioning. It's like poison in our relationships.
Best wishes
Robert
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Hi Robert, I'm not sure I understand your comment about how looking in the same way allows us to know ourselves. Wouldn't representing people keep us more conditioned? Maybe I'm just reading it wrong!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reflections!
Yes thank you Robert and Jackie - I'm considering them as well.
ReplyDeleteMy read of what you're saying, Robert, is that in order to feel secure in our relation to another person, we crave something "fixed". So we pile up the knowledge we have of another person and cement that into a fixed image. We might feel destabilised in the encounter with the 'otherness' of another person and yearn to feel okay in their company; thought lends us a means of constructing a model or image of the other person, against which we can clearly delineate ourselves. Making conclusions about another person, we can then feel secure in how we do or don't resemble that person, a poor substitute for empathy or understanding, but one that banks up our own feeble sense of self. That's the tragedy - the wondrous encounter with another person gets subsumed by our own desperate desire to fix and know ourselves.
ReplyDeleteHi Jackie,
ReplyDeleteI should have clarified that in knowing ourselves I mean fixing our identity as we fix the other's. If it were Derrida speaking here, he'd likely say that in representing the other we present ourselves. The other becomes the place of sending, which is a phrase that Heidegger uses. We are not present, and so we have to be represented. We can't represent ourselves because we can't see ourselves. All we do is see outwards, and so we need to create a reference point, somewhere that we can be presented from, a mirror that will represent us, or send our image to us.
So it's not about knowing our 'true' self or anything like that. Representation does, indeed, make us conditioned. And the more we repeat our representation the more sedimented it becomes and the more attached we get to it. We can also call this creating karma.
Nicole, I think you're right on the mark in terms of what I'm saying. To feel the 'otherness' of the other is to pay 'total attention' in Krishnamurti's terms; it is to just look, to look without the past and see the singularity of the other. This is beauty or love for Krishnamurti - but our desire to fix our sense of self destroys this.