Some Theses on Law...

The problem of law is that we cannot trust our 'authorities' to enforce it, because we have no assurance that these authorities will themselves follow the law.

The problem of law is one of pure practicality - no one is willing to follow the law when it comes to a practical choice between following the law and doing something one perceives as good for oneself or one's loved ones. Who among us would not run a red light when it was a matter of getting our child to the hospital as quickly as possible?

The problem of law resides in its implacability, for there is no law so universal that one cannot find a situation where one could find an exception to it, and so there are no laws 'as given' or 'as such' that exist indubitably and throughout all time.

The problem of law is therefore one of recognition - how do we recognize the right thing to do, if what is right changes according to the situation? Lying is wrong UNTIL the Nazi officer comes to our door and asks if we have any Jews hiding in the house.

The problem of law resides not so much in particular actions, but in styles of living. One could never violate the laws of one's community and yet still be a bad person, for how does one know that one's whole community is violating a law greater than the laws it has created?

***

Utopians (like myself) assume that every problem has its root in psychology. Fix the conditions (poverty, war) that give rise to trauma and you will find that all other ills of society - fundamentalism, intolerance, hatred, greed, etc. - will disappear. Yet this thinking may overlook something very important - no matter how perfect you make the social conditions of life, to where there is no pain, no hunger, and no loneliness, you will still not eradicate banality or stupidity.

Is all stupidity trauma? Is all banality trauma? That would be absurd - I would be asserting that people are stupid and/or banal in proportion to the amount of suffering they have had in their lives. That is palpably not true... or is it? I would have not thought it was true until I heard the stories of many of my classmates, who I assumed were stupid (that is, unthinking) simply because that's how they were, but then I realized that the conditions of their family lives were so bad that they simply didn't have time to think, because they had to deal with other more pressing things. (I suppose this interpretation is based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs - these people are not able to achieve self-actualization because they have not had all their more basic needs fulfilled).

Let's look at what is required in order to be non-banal:

Hmmmmmmmm, is all I have to say, for now...

On the Word "Value"

The moment I come to consider something valuable is the moment when that something is lost to me.

I'm Still Alive...

Though barely.

I thought I wrote something on paper this week that I wanted to type on here, but apparently I did not.

There is more to life than this (feed me god)

(so it was this poem after all - so I will type it up after all -)

I am grateful for the life god has given me
Blesséd be the name of the Lord.
(I'll write myself into ecstasy yet!)
Let the beauty of the world not be surmounted
by its ugliness.
Blesséd be the name of the Lord.

If cataracts were furled behind my ears,
and everything became a noiseless grandeur...
what if? And what if...?
When the plaintive heart cried out,
it blew smoke into the eyes
of all carousers.
1,2,3,4,1,2,3
Blesséd be the name of the Lord.

If I could reach you here
with these small words,
let me say something that would change your life...
My father, unfortunately, groaned,
and then I had to deal with that
for he was fated to exist in a binary world
where fires were lit on one side
and testicles bit and bleeding on the other.

It was a torpid world -
culled out of nothing, remaining in duress,
with white lights hanging around the edge of it,
like Christmas lights.

If we could ever become one
(and that is the hope of our nation)
That would be a circumstance that defies
explanation, makes the world not so apparent.

In life, there are two choices,
party, or faction,
merit or commendation,
brains or betrayal,
beating or commodity,
croaking or floating,
being missed or being corrupted,
being flattered or being deposed,
hanging fires or hanging hearts,
mutilating the breeze or counselling death.

I bought my love a blood-letter,
spelling Q, E, D, F, A, K, E
musing out my heart into excess,
and dying for the fixation of it.
The problem was that we both met one another in a car crash, where either of our respective partners had died, me my boyfriend, he his girlfriend, and so we grieved and mourned and went to trial and testified against the motherfucking drunk who killed them and held the funeral and held the dinner-dance party at our houses and cried in the attic and he touched my hand and said I reminded him of her and then he kissed me and held onto my dress and I knew not what not what not what it was that was making me feel this way but that I wanted him more badly than anything and worked myself to know him better but we sang darkly and no he didn't know the same songs, but no, he couldn't see the same constellations, no

lechery lechery, let it all be known,
my sanity remains in dregs,
I worked in metals, forged them
to make clean silverware for the maidens,
for the maidens, I loved, oh...

My Heart

Terrible, terrible things we discover about the world.

I don't even know if I want to mention them - I hesitate, because I hate to destroy someone's idea of what the world is like.

Can someone live their whole lives without realizing the terrible things that happen in the world?

I don't know how people make it through life... one really admires resilience, but perhaps resilience is made mostly up of ignorance rather than strength. We move on by ignoring... but what about those whose nature it is not to ignore, to be unable to ignore?

I was at Walgreen's today, thinking of buying some Q-tips, because I've run out. Well, I decided against it, because it seems like a waste of paper and packaging to create something that is really a luxury (and because they cost $5 that I'd rather use on food). On the way out of the store, I saw People magazine showing the picture of a girl who had been kidnapped 18 years ago and had only now been discovered.

There were many disturbing things about this story and other related stories. One thing I must mention is that I fucking hate police. In both cases that I looked at, these bastards did not follow leads that may have led to the discovery of these victims earlier. In one case, the monster who did the crime was actually on fucking parole FOR RAPE AND KIDNAPPING ALREADY.

I'm a liberal in almost every way imaginable - but I cannot help but have this lingering sense that the judicial system is ridiculous. Police seem to always hurt those who don't need to be punished and do nothing to help those who have been hurt. It's fucking ridiculous. I know there is no real solution, but it really boils my blood to see anyone (I mean lawyers) coming to the defense of people like these, while most of the help that was rallied up for the victims was done by the families and communities themselves.

Isn't there some balance between the arbitrary beheadings of Elizabethan England and the excessively long and bureaucratic trials we have today?

You know why I don't think it's worse for an innocent person to be punished than for someone who is guilty not to be punished? Because we all likely deserve punishment and because we would all be horrible if the circumstances made us ripe for it. Hamlet: "Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" Indeed. Not only that, I think it's worse to let a guilty person go free and have him commit another crime than to unjustly sentence an innocent person. Why? Because in the former case there are two or more victims, plus all the relationships of those victims.

I know this rant is being made completely out of my emotions, but it feels good to write about this in this way. These outrages of the world must have some target... so long as there are criminals out there, I can vent upon them. I hate them, hate them, hate them. I hate human nature, I hate human defectiveness.

Well, I guess I should be doing something about it rather than ranting? I could never become a prosecuting trial lawyer - I don't have the emotional stamina for that kind of thing. But I could at least work towards creating a better social world so that every single person is acknowledged and cared for, so that we look after the people who are unstable and unfit for society, but more importantly, give everyone the means to live a fulfilled life.

Oh god, how hard this world is...

And I call out because... one wants a god, one wants a solution to this. One does not want it all to be left to human hands, for then it admits of the possibility of failure, and what mind can bear that?

Perhaps I suffer unnecessarily. Perhaps the people who are victims suffer less than I do, because they are not so disposed to contemplating and internalizing. I don't think that's true. I think there are people who suffer a lot more than I... though I also don't doubt that I would suffer greatly if anything horrible ever happened to me or my loved ones...

One wants to be good, even if others are so sick and so angry.

One wants to show love, even if nothing is guaranteed.

I... I love you all. I love you all so deeply.

On a Day in Which I Would Have Preferred Not to Die

The title says all, for it was a thoughtless and meagre day, in which nothing was extraordinary. I knew when I awoke today that the day would be like this... try as I might, I could do nothing against it, until now, at 11:40 pm, when I decided to read a random Emily Dickinson poem. She's a poet who can expel you immediately away from the ordinary and into the wondrous.

The Grass so little has to do,
A Sphere of simple Green -
With only Butterflies, to brood,
And Bees, to entertain -

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The Breezes fetch along,
And hold the Sunshine, in it's lap
And bow to everything,

And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearl,
And make itself so fine
A Duchess, were too common
For such a noticing,

And even when it die, to pass
In odors so divine -
As lowly spices, laid to sleep -
Or Spikenards perishing -

And then to dwell in Sovreign Barns,
And dream the Days away,
The Grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a Hay -



A few minutes later, I read this poem, quite as perfectly relevant thematically:



Good morning - Midnight -
I'm coming Home -
Day - got tired of Me -
How could I - of Him?

Sunshine was a sweet place -
I liked to stay -
But Morn - didn't want me - now -
So - Good night - Day!

I can look - can't I -
When the East is Red?
The Hills - have a way - then -
That puts the Heart - abroad -

You - are no so fair - Midnight -
I chose - Day -
But - please take a little Girl -
He turned away!

Derrida on Ghosts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI

We have words in our language for a reason. A dangerous thing that happens to overly rationalistic minds is that we want to get rid of all words in our language that don't seem to make sense. For me, this happened once with 'god'. But the better thing to do is to think about words - their origins as well as what changes may have happened over time to these words. Derrida shows this perfectly in this clip when he is asked if he believes in ghosts. To take this question at face-value is simplistic, and I am sure that, a year or so ago, my frame of thinking was such that I would have said 'No, of course not. It's a superstition that grew out of....' and I would go into the cultural reasons why ghosts came about and why modern science has shown that such supernatural phenomena that people usually attribute to ghosts is actually explicable naturalistically.

Yeah yeah yeah, all 'true' enough. But it shuts down thinking rather than opening it up. The better way to answer is the way Derrida does - to say that perhaps this idea of ghosts has been fundamental to people for so long in history not because people before were superstitious and now we are enlightened, but because the very idea of a ghost is that which haunts, and no culture, no matter how advanced, can escape being haunted, can escape distance and intangibility, and moreover, as Derrida points out, modern technology may actually be a new vehicle for the ghost, rather than a way to eliminate its presence.

Fascinating. Thinking should always be creative, or else it only serves to give us a false sense of comfort, a smug knowledgeability that is really just throwing a blanket over the peculiarities and wonders of our world.

A Sketch

Catherine had no desire to put on a 'game face', which was what her peers spoke of as the necessary prerequisite for facing the world with any chance of success. Her solution, instead, was to turn away from this farce called life and pursue her own illimitable phantasies.

I met her the other day in her closet, where she held her weekly 'moonshine gumptions', awkward flourishes of her soul that howled rhetorically and whispered conceptually, in which she claimed to slough off, through a difficult and barbaric process of re-appropriation, the casings and coils of the last seven days. This usually involved wearing several different scarves wrapped tightly about her (and not only around the neck), two or three heavily scented candles (perhaps stolen from her mother), and choosing to play eerie music that featured an emphasis on the string section of the orchestra...

[I wrote this while during an orientation for my tutoring job, at the mention of a rap song that talks about putting on one's 'game face' in order to go out in the world. Needless to say, I am inherently disgusted by the idea of any posturing, especially one necessitated by the unfair living conditions that many people in the world are subjected to...]

On Religiosity and Utopia... from Someone Else

Here is a post from Dale Carrico's blog, who is a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Rhetoric department. As you may have noticed, I was myself struggling with the same two issues of religiosity and utopia in a post earlier this month, but was much more inelegant when trying to speak of it politically...

http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-irreligiosity.html

Conquering Days

And besides, Hamlet, you had to perish. You were not for life.

You believed in crystal notions, not in human clay.

Always twitching when asleep, as if you hunted chimeras-

Wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit.

You knew no human thing; you did not know even how to breathe...

Animal Time

I don't know when I will have time to write the second part of my post on suicide, since my cold (or flu) left me rather behind in my graduate class where I have to simultaneously read both Kant and Hegel. (I'm still an undergraduate, but I decided to sign up for a graduate class my last semester as a challenge and to see if I might want to actually do this kind of thing for a Phd).

Oi.

So I may as well (since I am trying again to write every day) write out some of my thoughts on what I am studying....

Kant's main point in the critique of teleological judgment is: We humans, being the only species who can reason, are here in the world to give purpose to it. Because of this, we also have an obligation to be ethical.

(Heidegger seems to say - we don't give purpose to the world, purpose is already tied up with our being-in-the-world at all, but this seems to me to say the same thing, only swathed with mysticism. Purposiveness is just a fact of our existence, and to say that thinking of 'purpose' or 'meaning' as lost is a mistake doesn't actually help anyone who feels this way. Just like a religion, Heideggerians require that one believes their vague presuppositions about the world before one can actually be part of their 'school'.)

If everyone was like Kant, the world would be a much safer and happier place..... but that, sadly, is not the case. The next best thing is to ask - how do we secure happiness for the few who really aspire to high things?

The first step is to clean up this logic - happiness should not be the goal, but aspiration itself. A life that is dependent on external things is always subject to doom because it is based on the idea of securing happiness. A life based on high aspirations, however, always has at least the pursuit dwelling within...

Agh! Why does every philosopher always say something so unsatisfying? Perhaps I need to learn not to think on such a large scale... There are no universal solutions --- perhaps even no world-wide solutions. If there are personal solutions - do these need to be sought? One is either lucky, or unlucky.... right??

Oi! Back where we began...

Crazy Kant

The most awkward of philosophers makes me laugh out loud sometimes when he talks about emotionally serious issues with the same convoluted unevenness he uses when talking about conceptual issues:

"If the value that life has for us is assessed merely in terms of what we enjoy (i.e., happiness, the natural purpose of the sum of all our inclinations), then the answer is easy: that value falls below zero."

This is from a footnote (of course) in the Critique of Judgment, Part II (Critique of Teleological Judgment), in the section 83 titled "On the Ultimate Purpose That Nature Has as a Teleological System".

Kant's general point is that when we reflect on nature as a whole, we discover that humanity is the ultimate purpose for which the earth exists. Humans therefore have an obligation to live for this purposiveness and not live simply for their pleasures and their survival, as other animals do.

What is interesting about Kant's argument (so far as I understand it) is that it is not a simplistic reduction to - "God created the world for humans to fulfill a purpose in". Though it seems that Kant believed in God, he does not invoke the idea of God to explain anything in his critical system since God is a "transcendent" idea and cannot be verified by either reason or science. Rather, his understanding of our ultimate purpose has more to do with the plain (empirical) fact that people who pursue lives of pleasure inevitably get drawn down emotionally towards dissipation and ennui. Those who lead lives based on a foundation of purpose (scientists, social activists, artists, etc.) tend to have a sense of wholeness that keeps them harmonious even with the crudities of nature.

Actually, I have no idea if that is what he is saying. It makes some sense though... Our personal integrity is tied up with how we see the integrity or purposiveness of nature as a whole...

On Suicide, Part 1

I have wanted to write about this topic for a while, but it was Jane who finally gave me the impetus to do so.

But before I say anything on suicide, I feel obliged to look at one of the most famous speeches in English literature concerning the idea. It is a curious thing that this speech is so famous, considering how taboo and emotionally charged the topic is when brought up in other spheres of life. Perhaps it is so famous because it confronts the one 'unthinkable' idea and does so with beauty and eloquence, so that one's conscience is eased in knowing that 'Shakespeare himself' wrote on suicide, and did so unflinchingly....

Hamlet: To be, or not to be; that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them. (III.i 58-62)

Compare this to the first two sentences of Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus":

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Under these auspices, we ask: is suicide then primarily an emotional or an intellectual problem? We have hints in the play that Hamlet is naturally contemplative and somewhat dark in personality, notwithstanding the horror of the principle action of the play: having his father murdered by his uncle for political and marital gain.

Many of Hamlet's statements about the world exude a general kind of malaise, and even in the 'To be or not to be' speech, his frustrations are various and do not focus exclusively on the wickedness of his uncle, or even murderers in general. In fact, Hamlet already has thought of suicide before he even knew that his uncle had killed his father in Act 1 Scene 2:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fit on't, ah fie, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. (129-137)

When he wants to deride his uncle, his mother, or most anyone else (and truly, the only person in the play he speaks very well of is Horatio), he talks of disease, soil, rot, foulness, and other such metaphors for contagion. For Hamlet, the world dwells in sickness rather than in health, where things are destined to waste away before they bloom into something worth the effort of growth. To take the title of an essay by another 20th century existentialist writer (Miguel de Unamuno), Hamlet has a tragic sense of life.

Life has been many things to many different people, but it would not be difficult to argue that the natural world is unforgiving and that human society tends to be banal, stupid, and cruel. But since most people being banal and doing cruel things are not the ones reflecting sincerely on life, it is the contemplative ones that get struck (and stuck) with the overwhelming sense of life's purposelessness, of life's ultimate trajectory towards tragedy.

To answer my first question, schematically: it is the use of our intelligence, becoming attuned to facts about the world, that then begets in us an emotional state of.... despair? melancholy? malaise? Something like that. Hamlet has it. Camus had it. I probably have it as well. And so....

There grows in souls such as ours a dialectic between thought and feeling that inevitably brings up that fateful question: To be, or not to be?

It's intriguing to me that Hamlet brings up the idea of nobility in the second line of his speech. Most contemporary thought has little to do with the idea of nobility (although Nietzsche is an exception) and I have to admit that it is even somewhat foreign to me - have I ever made a choice because it was the most noble thing to do? I think contemporary discourse still talks about right and wrong, good and bad, ethical and unethical (I think Nietzsche made it impossible to speak of good vs evil in a serious context), but rarely do we think of things as 'noble' or 'ignoble'.

Another intriguing thing is that Hamlet talks of suicide as 'taking arms' and 'opposing' the troubles of existence, whereas we usually think of suicide as a quick escape that does not involve such a monumental struggle. Perhaps Hamlet is here referring to the fact that he intends to avenge his father, though he knows that doing so risks his own death. Or perhaps Hamlet is thinking of 'being' in two different ways: 1) being as merely existing, being 'present' as a fact in the world and 2) 'being' in the sense of living with fullness. In this case, the stoic stance of suffering the outrages of life would be closer to non-being, because one essentially makes oneself a stone, 'dull to all proceedings', a death-in-life. To take arms against life would then be closer to living with a purpose, but such purposiveness, for Hamlet, is what leads all the more quickly to death.

To be continued....