There goes another fallow period, fallow for various reasons I don't really want to get into. Let's get back to it.
In the interest of getting ahead of the heaps of theoretical and speculative material I have coming together in future posts - which I've been repeatedly promising I know - I wanted to do a couple of the usual metacognitive pieces to preemptively pump the brakes a bit.
Part of this is attributable to my affinity for sweeping narratives and analytical syntheses across many disciplines, all of which I put together in an unprofessional and "homegrown" manner. I intend to get further into this issue in another post.
For now though, every realm of the intellect (and body and spirit for that matter) has its share of character-specific strengths and pitfalls: philosophy, the sciences, history, myth, the arts, mysticism, occultism, political economy, the material trades and crafts, etc. And I try to synthesize those realms on the cheap, hopefully while making use of their various strengths and insights while avoiding their weaknesses and traps; that is, when the realms aren't bleeding into one another naturally.
With mixed results I know. And I've talked about homegrown craft before, which can have some interesting products of its own, and from my unique position straddling all of these disparate traditions in a somewhat unique stance, I think it is possible to produce something useful and illuminating in this way, and which accords with certain appropriate practical and material realities.
If anything, it seems easier than ever to do something like this. Through internet technologies and powerful means of data storage and distribution, generation upon generation of accumulated knowledge and technique and tradition, and an incomprehensible array of historical developments and accumulated strata of tradition and wealth and resources, I personally have access to bottomless stores of data and powerful ideas without too much inconvenience.
One corollary to this though is the analogous circumstance in which any yahoo with a quantitatively appropriate collection of social wealth can stroll into a hardware store and purchase a chainsaw - an incredible and powerful machine - and take it home, which can result in anything from vastly improved productivity working with timber to complete bodily ruin, depending on how the thing is used, which I've talked about before as well.
Now, symbolic expressions - which can help shape our thoughts and guide our actions - can be quite dangerous themselves, though maybe not as immediately or materially as a chainsaw can be. But they can do plenty of damage in longer timeframes, and damage like that can really sneak up on you, whereas with the chainsaw that trench you just cut into your leg speaks for itself. Just as certain operational protocols can make a huge difference in how a chainsaw is used - and what results it achieves - I think there are plenty of methods to make use of when it comes to thinking about thinking, and thinking about how those thoughts are used.
I suppose that for any kind of thinking, one of the more important methods consists of making one's thoughts fit as much to the real as possible. Naturally, what the real really is can be quite difficult if not impossible to describe, and that is part of the point here: part of the process is constantly engaging in the process itself. Once one begins to assume eternal solid ground and a fully intelligible (and capturable) reality, the trouble begins.
There are so many distorting layers of basic perception and observation, personal and biological interest, historical distance, fragmentation of viewpoints, and the evolution and transformation of ideology, among many other factors, that from the get-go are wont to impose barriers to a seamless apprehension of what is "real," the pure concept of which could be written off as a theoretical placeholder for what really exists outside of our limited experience.
That being said though, there is a fundamental way in which we emerge as individuals from the cosmos in time and space, and then are steadily transformed by it as we transform it in turn, subsisting in it for a period of time as something distinct from it, and there are certain parameters within which this process must be sustained, as a general necessity for all living things, and I might say that the whole of this could be approximated as reality.
Since thoughts are part of and interact with the real, one way to do this is to deconstruct them and see where they go and where they are landing, where the anchor points are and what can safely be assumed to be bedrock, and therefore, axiomatic. But then the deconstructed thoughts eventually have to be put back together, at least if you don't want to just be an annoying gadfly, though admittedly there is a time and a place for those too.
Easier said than done, and always done imperfectly perhaps. But worth keeping in mind certainly.
I say easier said than done because all of us are regularly talking about reality and the real and etc. while what we are often referring to is a landscape filtered through that thought which is conventionally successful and/or stable. One's stable worldview is usually the real, accurate, objective truth, and while one is successfully living and breathing, everyone else's is potentially misguided.
This is a common artifact of the way that we think, which is attributable to our nature as warm bodies that think as part of daily subsistence. You "throw" your thoughts back into the world that gave rise to them, as a means to act on that world to shape it ever-so-slightly to become more amenable to yourself, a process that is tethered to your self as successfully subsisting on this earthly realm. And then of course the pressure for this success grows exponentially as others and then wealth get involved, among other things.
One of the more general pitfalls here is that there is so much knowledge and information out there, that one is constantly coming across ready-made ideas and worldviews, that by virtue of their visibility and durability are ready to be plucked up and made use of, and which ideas are picked up and used can have consequences not only for one's immediate life, but also one's station in the world.
This offers an easy way out of the deconstruction and reconstruction phase. If you can reject some bit of failing conventional knowledge, and adopt something leaner and meaner, well then it seems you've got it.
In a certain respect, this is unavoidable though. You can't take apart everything that exists and put everything back together at once because you can't be everywhere and everything at once. We rely on others (both past and present) to do some of this work, and we find people that we like and trust to do the job well, and we borrow what they have built and do something else with it. Indeed, another aspect of fitting one's thoughts to the real is identifying those one feels are also doing the work, and defer to them when appropriate.
At the moment I'm thinking here of Corey Robin's wonderful writings on political and intellectual history, or Aurelien's excellent pieces on the inner workings of international relations and geopolitics. These writers are deconstructing terms such as "political fear, conservatism, and fascism," and "empire, diplomacy, and national interest," to list (not exhaustively) particular terms the authors explore respectively, and then reconstructing them in efforts to get at what is really going on under the hood, so to speak.
There are many others that I read who are regularly doing that indispensable work in their own way, and I'll be referencing them in time, partly to show my work and partly to send the proper praise where it is due, among other reasons. Indeed, I find myself most drawn to writers such as these, as this regular bucking of convention, and a striving towards the real, tends to produce a unique and challenging language and signature, which is just so much more interesting and rewarding in the long run. One looks at the language and strains to make the connections and understand. In other words, one thinks and learns, as opposed to having one's prejudices massaged or one's sensibility entertained, though these elements can be present in moderation too; it certainly makes the reading sweeter.
So, I want to refer to two particular examples to add some specificity to the process that I'm talking about here, and then I'll wrap things up.
One thing a lot of folks like to do is reference ancient societies - or even a society in recent history, which I'll get to - to cast some light on our own. I do it myself with some regularity here. What is useful about that is that for the ancient societies we have a lot of information on - such as Rome - we can look at their evolution over time and pick up on certain discernable patterns and structures that arise in that given society's lifespan, and then compare those patterns and structures to the patterns and structures we can discern in our own society as itself passes through time, and make some guesses about where we are heading in relation to where we've been, using the full beginning-to-end account of a society like Rome as a measuring stick.
These comparisons yield a lot of wonderful insights, providing yet another reason for me personally to be so enamored with the study of history. But a couple of goofy things can happen here too. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the field of historical analysis, we have two major distortions of thought that are easy enough to identify, and which can prove instructive.
First is taking the temporal distance - not all that vast on a geological timescale we should note - of an ancient society such as Rome to relegate it to a sort of intellectual quarantine, where it stands as a fundamentally alien society which is plenty interesting to study and think about, while remaining cordoned off, like a museum exhibit that one can squint at from behind the velvet rope. Admittedly this approach seems less and less popular as world affairs in our own time become ever more unstable, which encourages a shift into the opposite second distortion: that Rome is exactly like us and we're shuffling through some preconceived sequence of archetypal events which could be identified and analyzed in the Roman case, and then placed as an overlay upon our own trajectory, revealing a hidden cartography of impending ruin.
And so the second distortion has us craning our necks and shielding our eyes, gazing out over the plains on the lookout for the approaching barbarians, while simultaneously bracing for kinetic civil war, looking for the literal signs of the encroaching End.
To strike closer to home, these distortions have their analogue in the heated discussions of the US' slide into fascism as well. Not long ago, it was fashionable to cast Hitler's Germany as an anomalous alien growth that had to be excised from the collective Western world, with the heroic victors successfully vanquishing the demon, sealing its remnants in its tomb. Now it seems that Hitler is here and the enemy is us, and soon we'll all be rounded up, and so on.
This is not to dismiss both distortions categorically and cast them away entirely. If you've read me any, you could probably guess which distortion I tend towards, though I do my best to temper the worst of that distortion's pitfalls. And both distortions contain in them certain instructive elements that can assist in guiding one's thought as they relate to one's actions and experience. But there is a general problem that I am getting at here that is common to both distortions: the tendency to place greater value in the calcified thought itself, without bothering to fit that thought to the real as one finds it.
Getting at the real involves taking apart a given object of study, ascertaining its relations and how it is actually working, and then abstracting away those relations and functions so that they can be put back together to accord with one's current state of affairs. And just as importantly, one must relate all of this to one's own positionality moving through space and time: why is one thinking this way? What is the thought accomplishing in one's time? How does the thought relate to how one moves through life?
To relate back to our examples, what were the relations and structures operant within Rome - and Nazi Germany - and how did those relations and structures relate to and operate on our own state of affairs? And why spend the time and energy studying these things, and where is it all going? For that matter, these very subjects are constantly being taken apart and put back together again for various reasons and interests, and our understanding of them is constantly changing, simultaneously as our understanding of them as relating to our own time is changing too.
All well and good, but I've only obliquely addressed the danger that I brought up earlier on in this discussion. As it happens, there is still a lot of ground to cover here; I don't think I've really adequately dealt with the issues brought up in this post, and the discussion has expanded beyond what I originally intended, so I'm going to have to flesh the rest of this out in a several separate subsequent posts in time. But hey, that's part of the point too: the process is never finished.
