But from a pragmatic perspective–and I certainly identify with the tradition of philosophical pragmatism–there is clear utility to thinking through the consequences of differing patterns of behavior, on the self, on the society, and on the world.
Can I posit that post-modernism/”multi-culturalism” (a misnomer, since monoculturalism is the tacit assumption and goal)/the fetishization of “tolerance” (again a misnomer, since such people are quite willing to judge the ideological tardy and overly non-compliant) is a psychologically poor adaptation to the ubiquity of the primal shame most of us come into adulthood with? As I have said often, intellectuals become such, in my view, in almost all cases due to unresolved emotional conflicts. They seek shelter from their emotions in the illusion of reason.
Can we not speak of the fetishization of the book–of the text–as pseudo-transcendent reality, and then usefully speak of this practice as psychodynamic dysfunction? Certainly one can see this in the modern French and Germans and their proselytes.
When I look at my hand, I see my hand. In what respect is it not useful to see this as a small truth?
Whenever I attempt to enter a circle, I always seem to begin with a line.
What I started to say is that symbols have their own logic. The body has its own logic. Emotions have their own logic.
We speak of reason. All educated people will know about syllogisms, and most will have encountered geometric proofs, and the practices of mathematicians.
But in life, most such “proofs” begin at the END of a long series of “logical” assumptions that begin in the body, in myth, in emotion. All life begins with life, and life is in the felt sense of the body. Only in the body can true truths begin. Only in the body can we encounter our own existences, our own agency, to use a term preferred by the NARM theorists and practitioners.
We want people to behave in our worlds. All of us have our own version of evil, and all of us want to pursue the good, however we conceive it. Cultural Sadeists merely invert conventional norms, but they, too, have a good and a bad. They have a free and a contained.
This is all very abstract, and I am using multiple logical types here. My hope is that there is deep structure which will become more clear to me as I try to clear my head, and listen over some period of time to my body, both my physical body, and to that more real emergence in spacetime which both exists, and unwinds in an infinity far beyond my mind.