On the Existence of the Human Body

Merleau-Ponty makes a big deal out of the supposed fact that all of our perceptions are wrapped up in the interaction of our bodies in a world, indeed, that the being-in-the-world is therefore the essence of perception. To be in the world is to be perceiving and to be perceiving is to be located in the world, in a body, more specifically. And to be located in a body is to be essentially concerned with the body itself, e.g. the hunger of the body or the sexuality of the body, or it's pains and pleasures in general. The idea of perceiving outside of the context of involvement with the perceived is therefore, for MP a dysfunctional phenomenon to be explained. The famous example of the man for whom the world is non-sexual, who has no interest in sexual contact or sexual activity, but who nevertheless has functioning sexual apparatus, has to be regarded as the abnormal limit case which proves the basic rule, e.g. that we humans are involved sexually in our world. We have to agree that sexual involvement in the world is a core way of being for us humans, but that we could be non-sexual and normal we have to reject. It is this holding the non-sexual perception as the abnormal that we want to examine as a clue to a better understanding of perception than MP's preliminary investigation.

Consider again the case, there is a man who is capable of having an erection, who's erection occasionally is available after being stimulated, but for whom the desire to have the erection or a subsequent orgasm is missing. He neither pursues sexual contact nor rejects it, and does not regard it with either disgust or longing. The asexual nature of the man's perceptions should be clear enough to "us other men" for whom in some ways sexual perception is obvious. We regard sexual situations as fundamentally desirable, as worthy of fulfillment. We conclude from this that there is a "sexual framework" by which we have an option to regard the world (this conclusion is different from MP's). That is, a group of sexual ideas, attitudes, desires, thoughts, etc., which combine to make a sexually-perceived world different from a non-sexually perceived world. Both worlds are equally valid - we can not say that the sexual world is more real than the world devoid of sexual perception, nor can we say that sexual perception is an illusion. Both are genuine perceptions which are unavailable to their perceptive opposites. We can even imagine correctly explaining to both participants how their worlds are different and yet their perceptions remain the same.

This is rather like a wolf being able to perceive ultraviolet light while humans can not. We can understand what it is like to have more colors available to us because we have seen the world at twilight when our color-perception is dimmed, we can extrapolate and imagine a world more vibrant than even our vibrant world. However, we may not be able to imagine a color we can't actually see. These are physiological and psycho-physiological features of our existence that are integrated with us as possibilities for judgements - we can judge the colordness or sexiness of a thing because our bodies are color-aware and sex-aware. If we weren't thusly aware, the world could have no color for us, or no sexiness.

Nevertheless, this color-possibility and sex-possibility is not merely physiological. We can imagine a person who's cones work but who nevertheless cannot distinguish between several colors, nor remember them as different just as we can imagine a man with a working sex organ but no sex drive. This is because it is our entire psychological makeup that is involved in perceiving as well as our physical makeup, and our psychological makeup can contain our social makeup as well. In particular, our language clearly affects our ability to make judgements in a given realm. We hear of aleuts that distinguish among 70 different kinds of snow, whereas I might be able to think of 20 at the most, and likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them by perception unaided by further tutelage on the matter. Students of music often learn to distinguish tones after they know of the existence of intervals and their ordering. Similarly with many other matters, our ability to grasp a matter intellectually often is a requirement for being able to perceive examples of it in our world. This is not evidence of error, necessarily, but rather evidence that our thoughts are equally important with our perceptive mechanisms (if there be such things) in generating our actual perceptions.

The body is thought of as the perceptive mechanism - the thing that without bias, in a sense, reports data to our minds for processing. This picture of the matter is almost certainly false. MP would have us believe that the mind extends to the body itself. Alternatively we might think of the mind as constituting the body as its perceptive tool. Either would adequately represent our feelings in the matter. In the second way of conceiving the matter, however, the body as constructed, thus also becomes flexible, bendable to our wills. And this tends to represent reality best. There is no dualism between wishing to type a word and that wish being fulfilled, in general. It is only in the odd-cases when we think of disembodied minds or dreams that the typing and the intent to type don't match up. Our body is an extension of our own wills, in the same way that our culture is.

In the USA there is an obesity problem. People don't "work" per se in order to have food, instead we organize ourselves so that food can be expeditiously brought to us whenever we want it. Our body as "instrument for producing food for survival" is replaced by our "working" body - as a productive member of society, the body serves the purpose it is given, clerk, manager, photographer, priest, etc. Similarly, our body as fighting machine for protection, hunting, thievery and plunder is no longer a working thing as it is subject to modern deterrence in the form of the absolute violence of mechanized warfare of every kind. One can not train one's own body to be an effective weapon against an armored tank. And the drivers of the tank do not fight, they push buttons and pull levers. If we do practice combative skills, they are games, psuedo-fighting to give the body something to do so that the useless appendage feels useful again. Even sex has become a form of entertainment, rather than a sacred responsibility and continuance of the notion of divine family. So everything having to do with sex becomes also entertainment too, we play with our bodies as though they were toys. Even eating is a form of entertainment. When the need to eat for sustenance is replaced by the desire to eat for entertainment, food also becomes a kind of plaything, an unreal version of the previous real thing. Our families, food, friends, fighting, in fact all of the normal activities of body-hood have become functions that are no longer in fact fulfilled by our bodies, but rather by our societies and which are now only mimicked by our bodies - which exist apparently as reminders of our past, of how we came to be such masters of our universe.

And this leaves us with the question of the very existence of the body. If we think of our bodies in their actual function - as a reminder of a past which may or may not have felt like these currently emulated activities of eating, sleeping, drinking, copulating, hunting, etc., we also realize that those activities certainly were not at all as they are emulated now. Even worse, we have no idea what these activities were like "before", since this before is a manufactured idea itself - something we told ourselves bodies were supposed to do. In short we have no idea what our bodies are, nor do we know we "have them" nor do we know what "having a body" would be like, even if we do think we have them. What we think we have - the leftover appendages of body-hood appear to be emulations of some past functional purpose, but what purposes and how accurate the emulations are is completely beyond our ken.

The human body, then, really is nothing at all, nothing but an idea, an idea of humanity put in place by our culture which itself is not produced by our bodies, but by our refusal to be anything but Humans. But if we are humans, why are we humans at all? The idea that humans are different from apes, for instance, comes from the idea that apes don't use tools, don't think, don't calculate and plan. We can demonstrate these facts for ourselves by observing them, the barbarians. But harkening back to the conquest of the Americas and Africa, don't we remember that the "people" we encountered there were also barbarians, apes unable to use language, form tools, and without religion. Remembering that even our idea of humanity changes with time and apparently at the whim of the winds of culture - the distinction between ape and man can be easily seen to be of the same order as our distinction between races of humans. And beyond the ape, there is the distinction between man and nature, man and world, man and god, distinctions which we manufacture as a part of our culture for various reasons, some of them good, some of them not.

With that, happy new year, may this be the year in which we are able to abandon our dualities about the world and our selves and recognize that our world depends on us, and we depend on our world, and that we are therefore the same.


R

An Economic Plan for US Recovery

During the last 8 years we've heard a lot about security. Security means different things to different people.

For some, security means big weapons and lots of people actively wielding them. Our hope is that this is not what Mr. Obama thinks this word means.

For most people, security means the ability to reliably provide for themselves and their families housing, food, medical care and the more abstract notions of happiness and love.

Some of these are inscribed in our constitution. We formed this union to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

We should continue to do this - continue to promote the general welfare, continue to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. These were wise words written by wise people.

Let's make no mistake about this though, those blessings for us and our posterity are at risk today. Each day our liberty is curtailed by ongoing activist legislation not wrong because of its intent, but because of its methodology - every time we make it illegal for one Joe to do what he wants, it puts at risk the liberty of Jane to do what she wants next. If we continue to curtail our liberties based on reactionary felt needs of any given time, in time all our of liberties will be gone.

In many ways, with them so go our general welfare. As our government continues to encroach on our daily lives, the quality of those lives decrease. We've seen this happen many times - with public education's "Learn to Work" program which has significantly eroded the quality of public education today. With our current economic interventionist strategy, we are threatening to do the same with our banks. Our local governments curtail how and where we can make money with their land-use policy. Various government agencies control how and from whom we can obtain energy and food.

Curtailing our liberties is not a way to ensure the blessings of liberty. Rather, it is to destroy those opportunities.

Many people will say that the need for protecting ourselves against wrongdoers outweighs the need for liberty. But here we have to make a strong distinction between someone doing harm to another person by actively engaging them, and someone perceiving a harm done where there is none. For instance, we all can agree that inhaling second-hand smoke is harmful, but need we all agree that it is the smoker's fault that the non-smoking party is deciding to be in close proximity with them? At the very least this question is debatable. Surely someone not wishing to inhale second-hand smoke can leave or choose not to be near people that smoke. Society has built-in protections for such problems, and our mistake is to try to legislate our way out of them.

Another way our government tends to curtail our freedoms is by actively controlling the way we citizens conduct business. By subsidizing various activities and penalizing others, the federal government significantly decides the course of the american economy. For instance, our choice to subsidize road-building rather than rail, light rail and bullet-rail has put our transportation system decades behind other modernized countries. We've subsidized that system again today by providing low-cost loans for the dying automobile industry. Similarly, our banking industry is failing, and we've subsidized that failing industry again by injecting money directly into obsolete institutions. And lastly, we've subsidized our weapons and military-consulting industries with dire consequences for us and our worldwide friends, with the result that when our war has ended (and it must end) we will have a completely valueless industry here subsidized, again, by the federal government, sucking resources daily from the public funds whose purpose is to benefit We the People.

If we are to remain free and ensure freedom in trade while simultaneously promoting growth, we can't subsidize dying industries. We must look to the future.

President Elect Obama's administration will have tough choices to make about how to steer the country, with unprecedented power in both houses of Congress, the Democratic party will have legislative and administrative freedom unparalleled in current history. This policy-making freedom must be used to ensure the blessings of liberty and to promote the general welfare for ourselves and our posterity.

How can we do that without creating another government-funded fiasco like our banking system, military system, energy system and transportation system?

I think the answer must be this - we have to get our federal-hands out of the business of deciding economic policy either directly or indirectly.

People, left to their freedoms and with their pocketbooks in tact will do what is good for themselves - we will innovate, expand, survive and prosper by the work of our own hands. In fact, the very idea of a government handout is morally appalling to anyone without a physical or mental disability and should be regarded as the very lowest of low activities for those able to contribute their own innovation and/or labor to the betterment of mankind.

We must start this process at the top, for we began it at the top.

The first industries to lose their direct and indirect subsidies must be those industries most directly benefitting them, the guilty parties are enumerated above - we must dismantle our failing banking system and build and economic system on fairness and freedom rather than centralized control and cronyism. We must replace our failing transportation system of endless road-building and endless-car-building with systems that our country can live with for generations to come - and take our money out of the eternal waste of the automobile business. We must end our de facto subsidy of the oil industry by military means worldwide and invest in renewable energy sources here at home. We must end our dependency on foreign countries for all manner of essential materials as a matter of national security - a nation that depends on other countries for food, energy or medical supplies is constantly at risk of losing those supplies and at the mercy of their providers.

How can we do this without intervening in the economic system?

The answer is actually extremely simple. We must simply put an end to government subsidies for those activities. We must stop spending money on unnecessary foreign wars. We must stop giving money wholesale to bankers. We must stop giving money to automotive industry executives. It's that simple, we must put an end to the subsidizing of the largest industries in our country and we must do it immediately.

The results some people say would be catastrophic. But catastrophic for whom? Surely they would be catastrophic for the stockholders in those industries in terms of their lost savings, but the real question is why we're rewarding them for failing!

For regular people, it would mean the following. Instead of our country depending on foreign sources for shoes and food and televisions and computers, we would more efficiently produce them locally to offset the increased cost of importing them without the de facto oil subsidy. By forcing America to rely on internal resources for energy, our tremendous think-tank of innovation would surge its activity to creating sustainable, renewable local sources of energy which would ensure that prosperity we enjoy now for generations to come. By removing the automobile subsidy, Americans would innovate in alternative forms of transportation, maybe even have the flying car we saw in the Jetsons when we were young. By removing the heavy burden of foreign wars, we would have additional human and capital resources to fulfill our needs for our people right here at home.

In short, by simply NOT engaging in these practices of subsidizing directly and indirectly the banking, oil, automotive and military industries, we would create the secure and blessed nation we know we should have.

At the same time, the risk of NOT pursuing this course of action is dire. There are really two things we might do to fail here, both of which we've done before. The first is to pursue legislative and administrative actions to directly intervene in the "fixing" of the american economy by continuing the subsidies of these industries. This would be catastrophic, creating in the United States a country permanently dependent on its ability to extend military might to acquire oil and raw goods necessary for the sustenance of human life here at home. This ongoing activity in which we are already engaged creates our enemies by giving them good reason to oppose us. Our extension of our economic influence abroad creates effective slavery worldwide, requires us to support oppressive regimes, and attracts the most radical elements of society to want to war with us and gives them the moral rational required to recruit what would normally be peaceful people to their cause which should be our shared cause - Freedom. If we stay this course, we destroy our own freedom for ourselves and diminish the likelihood of providing security for ourselves and our posterity.

If on the other hand, we attempt to subsidize OTHER forms of economic recovery - by handing out money to other businesses - we run the risk of simply missing the mark. For instance, if President Obama's administration were to subsidize the building of electric cars and those cars were not a suitable replacement for our current industry, in 10 years or less we would be in the same position we are in today - obsolete technology chasing an advancing world. If we create a comprehensive plan to create electricity cleanly today, and use that electricity efficiently for many years to come, we might still miss the mark and at the cost of, again, our freedom, as our legislation effectively legislates more and more how we can do business.

Let's imagine this scenario. Let's imagine that there were some combination of renewable clean electricity sources that could be developed with a finite cost today. And let's imagine that those electricity sources could be deployed to solve our general transportation problems in the form of trains, electric cars and publicly available air and sea-freight. Let's imagine further that we can produce all of the necessary materials and technologies here in the USA. Let's imagine that the United States becomes again the worldwide leader in energy-technology and transportation technology and because we've given up using military means to get what we need, we've gained allies and friends worldwide. And finally, let's imagine that the Federal Government subsidized this entire effort, creating millions of jobs and new companies in the next 8 years.

This sounds pretty good, right? Certainly in comparison to today, it sounds great. Idyllic even. As long as we're imagining it, we may as well all buy tickets for the maiden voyage of the Starship Enterprise.

In reality, though, our government is horrible at subsidizing innovation, terrible at creating jobs, and even worse at making us world-leaders. Look again at the military we've created, which while excellent, is based on military ideas from the previous century, incapable of winning a modern war (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) because the notion of winning is no longer ad-equated by the method of combat. We think rolling tanks over a capital city wins a war. It doesn't. We have to get used to that idea. What would work? I don't know. But I do know that what we've failed to do by pouring billions of dollars into government subsidized research is produce an army capable of defeating any modern opponent.

Similarly, look at our federally subsidized education system, which continues to be the embarrassment of our people that every other first-world country manages to educate our children better than we do. Medicaire, is failing, we can't take care of our medical needs. Social Security is failing, we can't take care of our old people. In fact, we can't name a single successful government program with the possible exception of the Internet (and I say possible because, as we see now, private concerns are attempting to restrict internet access from the people who subsidized its creation - google "NET NEUTRALITY"). In short, increasing government subsidizing of any of these programs is simply bound to failure because it's based on the mistaken idea that governments are good at solving society's problems from the top-down.

Instead, we must allow our economy to fix itself from the bottom up, by simply refraining from subsidizing the failed business models and allowing Americans to fix our economy ourselves.

filed under - libertarianism.

Why you can't have what you want.

I've said before "disambiguating between 'you' and 'you'" is tough to do. Disambiguating between you and I is even harder sometimes.

BUT - you can't have what you want for the simple reason that what you want is not a great idea.

Back up.

You can have what you want, but don't expect God to give it to you. God only wants to give you things that are good for you.

If you want something bad for you, get it yourself.

Why is everything so hard? Because you're not asking for what you should want, but for what you think you want.

Why would I want something that's not good for me? Aren't I the arbiter of what is good for me?

Unfortunately, no. If you knew everything, then you might know what was good for you, but you don't. Live with it.

Who is this who thinks they want something that they should not want?

It's the pseudo-you. The you-image that the real-you has. It is what you think of yourself, how you delude yourself about yourself, the words that you use to describe yourself all put together into a nice mental image of you.

Who is that you? Really it is nobody.

Who is the You that is putting this picture together?

THAT's a real good question. Who would you ask?

______

I say that thinking is what happens when you don't let words have their natural relationships with each other. That is, when you assume what is common sense about words is possibly false and move from there.

For instance, common sense says "There are no square circles." But there are. I would put up a picture of one but I'd rather have you get the impression of it yourself.

They say, for instance, that mathematics is the history of taking what was once considered a contradiction and assuming its truth as an axiom. That's how we got negative numbers, transcendental numbers, curved space, etc. We took the obvious and assumed it was false and followed through.

That's THINKING.

When thinking about oneself, the obvious is to think about one's thoughts. But the truth is I am not my thoughts, nor am I the string of them being put together. I am the maker of my thoughts when I am thinking, and the lazy one when I'm not.

That is, thinking is precisely what happens when words fail. When a word loses its given meaning, we start to have to think about what it means. Children do this when they learn the language - they think about something and then assign words to them. Sometimes our thinking begins with words alone - when we are given ideas that we don't originate ourselves. What do we have when these words fail? Nothing, I think.

Rambling on again.

When you ask for something you want but should not want, this just means that it is not you that's asking for it, but rather this word-constructed you put there by your socialization - your words without origination. That is, it is something OTHER than you doing the asking.

In order to be thinking, you have to be connecting words to things yourself.

What is doing the asking?

How did these words come to have the organization they do? Who invented this language stuff, and why do we use it the way we do?

Language changes over time. The question is not who invented it, really, but who is inventing it NOW?

If it is YOU inventing your language, hurray.

If it is someone ELSE inventing your language, what has that to do with you? Who is doing the inventing? How are they giving it to you?

Some people say it's the Media that is giving us our language as an expression of the capitalist society which is building our world the way it is. That's somewhat true, art and culture are defined by society in some ways. But the truth is, art and culture that have been coopted by a vague they - people we do not know and with who's words we can not connect - this "they" - the producers of culture - are not completely amorphous. They are are around us and when we let them, in us.

Sometimes we produce culture ourselves - we can do this in two ways.

We can produce culture out of ourselves or by allowing the culture that has been produced in us to reproduce.

In memetics we hear of idea-genes - the genetics of ideas.

If we make a song for production and distribution on the radio in order to make money, we are following an idea that has existed in our culture for about 100 years. That song may have value as a cultural artifact of the money-making system. But if we make a song because our heart burns to sing, that too is an old meme, many centuries older than making music for money.

Is there a way to make a song without it being the result of songs we've heard before? To actually re-invent music? Someone obviously did it.

But we will never hear those songs, the we of our "culture" for those songs will not carry our society's genes - it will not bear the mark of the beast, so to speak. In fact, "we" may not even recognize such things as songs, as music even. This goes for every other aspect of our culture. As it breeds itself, it forces acceptableness into the language, in the same way that spelling is pounded into children when they are young, and mistakes pounded out, cultural correctness is pounded out of us all the day long.

But children's spelling mistakes aren't -mistakes - really. IN fact they're following rules - just not all the rules. They learn some rules - what "t's" sound like and then when they can't spell "thought" we teach them the exception to the rule about how t's sound. But their original spelling of "thought" wasn't a mistake, it was the following of an earlier rule that we gave them.

Errors are not what we think. Errors are correct in some ways.

Are there any real errors under these "pseudo" errors?

Yes. I think that some of what our culture says is harmful to us as individuals - we are asked to drink CocaCola and eat at McDonalds. But the truth is these things are harmful to us. God rightly makes it hard for us to have them while our society tries to make it easy. That is, it's hard to be a member of our society, but once you are, having a CocaCola is easy.

Why is it hard to be a member of our society?

Because in order to do it, we must reject our own inner-selves in favor of this pseudo-self, the non-self that our society teaches us that we have.

So why can't you have what you want? Because "you" don't want it.

The Free Market

Yesterday we officially found ourselves in a recession (which we've been in for a year according to the NBER).

Meanwhile our country's inflation is running nearly DOUBLE what it was last year (according to inflationdata.com).

This combination of things is the "free market's impossibility" called "stagflation" where prices rise while income decreases.

It's impossible in a "free market" because prices are the result of demand in a free market.

Theoretically, if there's less money around, demand goes down, and prices go down.

But in this "market" prices go up while demand goes down.

How is this possible?

Our market is not free.

into the chaos

To be alive is to be moving.

To be moving is to be changing.

To be changing is to not be the same as you were before.

To be the same spirit is to be a dead spirit.

To be a changing spirit is to be a living spirit.

To fulfill one's will is to finish what has begun.

To finish what has begun is to change, but completing the same will is to be dead.

Therefore, to live is to embrace chaos, to hope for radical change and to endeavor to be the catalyst for that change yourself by being chaotic.

Our hope for a higher being is a hope that our chaos will bring us eternal life, infinite power, and infinite knowledge.

Only by embracing chaos can we hope for life - for to fail in changing is death.

Only by embracing chaos can we hope for power - for to have power is to be alive.

Only by embracing chaos can we hope for infinite knowledge - for to be aware of new things is to be renewed in oneself.