everything new ...

It’s raining here.

Here is New York and I’m trying to fulfill an expectation and a dream by way of Newark, New Jersey. I am a romantic. I just can’t bring myself to the knees of cynicism. I think I would die if I did. Ever the optimist, believing and imagining that all will be well even when I know it’s not possible.

I stand on this edge of reason, waiting to jump off.

Catch me if you can.



I am waiting for the Fall ...

can I get a witness? to lives lived with integrity -- cronkite, estemirova, politkovskaya…

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, and Jan Patocka, Heretical Essays, discuss the interior witness, the all-seeing unseen from which arises responsibility. As does the self, Culture requires a witness, a seeing eye which holds out for the conscience to see to what the Collective is complicit. The founders of the United States understood that without the un-blinkered vision of a Press there can be no accountability. Without an education of the People as to the issues of government there can be no Democracy.

Without honest and discerning witnesses how can we see? I mention here the reason for putting Cronkite in the company of Estemirova and Politkovskaya… Who presently among the media has his courage and his integrity? I am referring, of course, to his 1968 editorial on Vietnam.

Currently We, Western Culture, refrain from criticality, from hierarchy. “The World is Flat.” The audience, we all are audience – passive voyeurs waiting for our personal fifteen minutes (where do I sign up, facebook, twitter? who are my “friends”, my “fans”, who watches me?) … the audience is “free” to choose, without commentary or external valuation. We do not take responsibility for what is performed, We watch and there is no distinction between fiction and life. Our emotions, our actions are as stimulated by Harry Potter; as by Darfur; as by Rwanda; as by The Simple Life; as by Brad and Angelina; as by… it is all the same, We, the Culture, make no distinction, only individual choices. Entertainment is the opiate of the masses. As a voice we are divided, dispersed, removed, solitary, thus lacking critical mass.

The role of the witness is subverted. With a million choices, a million clicks, a million channels, a billion-plus seeking the attention of the Audience, how can the witness be heard?

How do We take responsibility? How We do justice? What is Our ethic?

Hugh Thompson, Jr.
Stephen Biko
Mahatma Gandhi
Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya
Jan Patocka
Walter Cronkite

Foreign Policy
Martin Luther King, Jr
Holocaust Resistance
Walter Cronkite (Youtube)
Enough (project to end genocide)
Glenn Thompson, Jr., Glenn Andreotta,
Lawrence Colburn


Ann Frank


For using entertainment to an end:
Stephen Colbert
Jon Stewart

et.al.

lane cooper blogs on politics, philosophy and society

A friend asked me to what end, other than the expression of my own compulsions, do I pursue “blogging” as an enterprise? He said, “How does it advance you or your position?”

In answer to that:

This blog is a space for my philosophical, political and social musings. The lack of an editor or other body to which I must answer provides a freedom in my writing. It is writing for the sake of writing; thinking for the sake of thinking; a practice that I cultivate for the ideas and the writing themselves.

I imagine an audience. I do not dissuade or forbid an audience, in fact it could be said that I wish for an audience, believing as I do the subjects that I turn my attention toward should be of broader interest. Yet it is a practice, like meditation, which I do to cultivate those faculties on which it depends.

the news that's fit to print...

women slain in New Mexico When I look at news websites or listen to the news on television these days I'm consistently surprised at it's flatness. The hierarchy of news stories seems non-existent. This story appeared in a list of headlines which included a story about a squirrel with its head stuck in a cup and Michael Jackson's abuse of sedatives. It was quickly pushed from the main page. If entertainment is constantly the focus of the news media what does that tell us about our priorities? If nothing else... bbc news frankly I first learned of the latest U.S. surge in Afghanistan from the BBC. Not perfect but a little better.

ethics...

Pictured: Caravaggio, The Raising of Lazarus, Museo Regionale, Messina, 1609


Metaphysics –
“… metaphysics was the ‘science’ that studied ‘being as such’ or ‘the first cause of things’ or ‘things that do not change.’ It is no longer possible to define metaphysics [in this way] … there are many philosophical problems… now considered … metaphysical … in no way related to first causes or unchanging things; the problem of free will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the physical.”

From a renaming of fourteen of Aristotle’s works that have been given the collective title “Metaphysics.”

• Chinese metaphysics = “that which is above matter” (the study of)

- the science of divine things.
Reference: http://plato.standford.edu/entries/metaphysics/
Viewed May 30, 2009

Metaphysics – an umbrella overarching.

I have been thinking awhile on Metaphysics and as well as on Derrida’s theology. Derrida’s is I think perhaps a purer theology than some others in that it is freed from the theos.

Also I have been thinking awhile about the nature of ethic/ethos. How does one become “ethical”? How does one know “good”? To define a “good” first one must become awake to a need to define a “good:” a conscious examination of what is a “good” and by what criteria it will be measured.

Can that definition come from the exterior? To some extent it must. It comes in part from instruction and in part, and perhaps more fully, from the observation of the consequences resulting from the choices and the acts of the individual and others. This need for study makes pre-requisite the passage of time and in some measure of awareness.

How long does it take to develop a knowing of “good”? For some a “good” is never known because it is never questioned, never consciously considered. It is for most a process of degrees that does not end until this self is ended.

“This becoming responsible… This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can become what it is only in being paralyzed [_transie_], in its very singularity, by the gaze of God. Then it [the person] sees itself seen by the gaze of another, ‘a supreme, absolute and inaccessible being who holds us in his hand not by exterior but by interior force’ (Jan Patocka, Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, 116 – quoted by Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 6, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995)

Consciousness is the waking of the interior witness. As discussed in Patocka, it is the presence of God. It, the witness, becomes the self that is aware. Without this awakened self it is impossible to take responsibility. “To take responsibility” requires a self-interrogation, an awake interior witness that holds the self accountable to a criteria. This constitutes the integrity of the self. The consistency of the logic exercised is the only means by which the ethical nature of the exterior self is manifested. The interior witness is unknowable, un-accessible to any other but the self to which it bears witness. It is a mystery. Its nature can only be imagined through the logic which is demonstrated by the actions of that external self.

Lack of responsibility grants authority to something other than the witness/self. This “other voice”, of my mother, of my teacher, of my neighbor, of my community’s collective voice, of my political party, of my gang, of my religion, or yet some other-other; may define for me an externally determined “good” and become an internalizing of a “better than.” By employing this authority I may employ a criteria that places my performance of “goodness” as a contrast to the definitions of “goodness” held by others. This accounting to an external authority reassures me that I am better than some other and relieves me of doubt and the work of self questioning.

Eg.: the making of a bowl – clean and perfect – demonstrates to you, the external, my ability to “make good”; to follow the rules of “goodness” – those rules unto which I have been inculcated, they are second nature, an interior, yet un-interrogated voice.

This is the performance of training; doing without thinking; doing without consideration.

An individual’s ethics are played out in the performance of the good. How deeply interrogated are its conditions? How consistent is the employment of the logic extended from it? And what are the limits of that logic’s extension?

It requires the work of thinking to take responsibility. It is reasonable, and almost impossible to do otherwise, to make a formulation for what will constitutes ones ethics from other sources, but it is irresponsible to do so without an interior dialogue which questions the meanings and applications of the positions: to think closely, to take the time to denote and privilege what one values.


How do we know good?

Who is it that I want to be? How do I reconcile my failures with my ideals? When do I become awake?

coming this spring...

I will be in Banff, Alberta, Canada from May 11 to June 19... while I'm there I will be working on a video project called "Notes on Derrida" and writing. I've been neglecting this blog that I love muchly. I plan to do more justice by it while I am there. (The plans of mice and men and women.) But here are the topics I'm thinking of...


Ethics –
art as outside
lessons of a culture from an impoverished community
Commitment – what is it? How does it work?
Harry Potter and Derrida (finish)


I will be reading a lot as well. I can't wait. I want just to get lost in work. I want to get lost.

The picture is from New York. Charles Tucker took it. I love New York.

empathy

Etymology:
Greek empatheia, literally, passion, from empathēs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion — more at pathos
Date:
1850
1: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner ; also : the capacity for this

From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Empathy

*The pictures are of my mother who I will never stop missing.


I am interested in the importance of imagining. It is impossible to really know an - other. One can only imagine. I imagine the way things are... I imagine a reality. Imagining makes into the future... it creates now.

When we lose empathy... the ability to imagine into the other... we strip ourselves and our object of humanity. This is the door of evil.

We are all narcissists in this way. We can only "know" by imagining through ourselves... the line I think is when we project onto rather than imagining into...

and in other thoughts...
It is difficult now not to believe in some brighter future. Our new president seems to be moving through a series of choices driven by an ethical imagining. I cannot help but be impressed with his courage. I am hopeful. May we do well.

the self and none other...

This surviving is life beyond life, more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible. I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and joy. To feel joy and to weep over the death that awaits are for me the same thing. When I recall my life, I tend to think that I have had the good fortune to love even the unhappy moments of my life…
Derrida, Learning To Live Finally: the last Interview,
an interview with Jean Birnbaum,
translated by Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas, (page 52)


In the documentary by the same name, Derrida makes a case that we are all narcissists. He’s right to some degree we must be it is inescapable. In argument the accusation comes, “You only see things your way.” How else could it be? Even if I try to see things from the other’s point of view, it is still mine. It is my imagining of how the other sees.

So for today… a self indulgence: I will tell you about myself.

I am not who I am for you but for me. I move toward some imagined self. I falter and sometimes do not make my mark but incrementally I move closer. I do not do or say the things I say for you but for me.

I adhere to an ethic of hospitality and try to follow the logic which extends there from.

I believe that true “good” can only be done in singular secrecy. No other can know of it not even a god. To imagine a witness for that “good” is to seek reward and is therefore self-serving. I am not always “good.”

I am not always honest but I try.

I understand the nature of a secret makes the keepers of the secret close. It puts them on the same side, makes them allies. It is more intimate than intimate.

It is only in absence that longing can be felt.

I grew up in a world that believes in magic. It is not a question or a guess. The culture itself believes. It is natural to understand the world in terms of the supernatural for me. I do not believe in Heaven or Hell … that is blasphemy. Yet the supernatural… the ubernatural, the magic… that is something else.

learning to live...

“To ask me to renounce what formed me, what I’ve loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die. In this fidelity there is a sort of instinct for self-preservation. To renounce, for example, some difficult formulation, some complication, paradox, or supplementary contradiction, because it is not going to be understood,…that the reader or audience will not understand … is for me an unacceptable obscenity. It is as if I were being asked to capitulate or to subjugate myself – or else to die of stupidity.”
Jacques Derrida
Learning to Live Finally: an Interview
with Jean Birnbaum
Translated by: Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (page 30)


This past year has given me cause to take an accounting of my life, to consider its purposes and its ends. Derrida seeks “to learn to live finally”; to be “taught” the lesson of living. It is the ongoing lesson that one does not hope to end but to learn by degrees.

My lesson thus far… is but a striving … to understand at last that the only thing I can control is within me. The only choices I have are my own. Through this understanding, through this acceptance more than I desire can be accomplished. I strive to be calm; to be still; to experience this moment without hope for the next; to exercise a faith that what I do might live into the future and to be content so that to breathe this cool air; to feel the warmth of this moment; to drink the good wine is enough – to know that to feel and to allow myself to feel – sad, happy, angry, grateful, is to open the door…