fragments

This may initially go against an initial reading of Weil who seems to write about attention toward an unmediated reality but her idea of decreation is about being purified of the ego and the projective tendencies that it brings about, not the elimination of mediation as a necessary process. The mindset of Romanticism by contrast often revels in sentiment and fantasy in its access to an experience. With an epistemic foundation that filters the experience and creates a distance or a buffer, the very same songs I listened to with the sincere intensity of my inner being can now be appreciated and even more empathetically inhabited without sacrificing a steady and purified sense of abiding by the real, which may be a more truthful orientation to art as a medium and expression of embodied meaning in the human condition.

Although he does not formulate his project in this way, his book seems to largely dwell on the matter of historicity and contingency, in arguing that humans experienced reality in a fundamentally different way on the basis of neuroscience and the body of evidence coming from archaeological and literary records of ancient cultures. Before the emergence of how we moderns conceive of the mind was its precedent human condition of inhabiting a bicameral mind. In a bicameral mind, humans would act from what Jaynes regards as hallucinated voices, stemming primarily from the right hemisphere of the brain in a socially normative way that made humans before the second millennium BC experience reality in a radically different way. This claim would go to the extent that there was no introspective consciousness in the Cartesian sense which can spatialize time and form a coherent narrative and identity out of memories.

Among his examples that caught my attention was the illustration of two historical currents that, according to Jaynes, most vividly demonstrate his thesis: the intellectual consciousness of the ancient Greeks and the Hebrews as exemplified by their body of literature. He first analyzes and compares the literary qualities of The Iliad and The Odyssey, arguing that their most visible contrasts illuminate such a process of transformation and the break with the bicameral mind toward human consciousness. This is illustrated by the fact that volitions directly come from bodily functions and the literal commands of gods in the Iliad compared to the more psychologized and internalized actions in the Odyssey. Paralleling this is the story of the Hebrews, as once desert nomads who were biacamerally led by signs of God as shown throughout its varied collection of literary expressions in the Pentateuch, but later exhibited a more visible form of subjective consciousness in books like Ecclesiastes.

Following the philosophical problem of other minds, if we can never truly know the mind of others' qualia or the phenomenology of what it's like to be them, then we have to construct models of the their minds to fill that gap of understanding based on the most immediate and direct access of consciousness—through one's own experience. This isn't a moral or intellectual failing but the very human condition of our limited capacity to understand the world. So when someone claims everyone wants to be in love or everyone's somehow not OK, these generalizations are sincere attempts to understand the world and reality by construing one's phenomenological state as an interpretation of others' thoughts and behaviors.

Even if there's a shared understanding in what is collectively deemed valuable in social existence—and most are socialized to believe that things like more money means higher status and more worth—not all are intrinsically and objectively grounded on what is real in the human condition. I think what may actually be considered objective goods are what leads to human flourishing in the Aristotelian sense, things that perfect innate and unique human capacity or nature such as virtue, truth, and love (not in the romantic sense), just as a watch is considered good by the watchmaker if it tends to its intended telos of being a device that can accurately measure and track the passage of time. Others are cultural telos conditioned and constructed by one's social milieu.

In a way that is both provocative and morally complex and ambiguous, Barnes narrates stories akin to the recurring themes in precedent nineteenth-century novels like Madame Bovary—stories of breaking the rules when it comes to sexual ethics and the institution of marriage. He does it with a sense of detached irony that doesn't glorify it but neither explicitly condemn it, which grants it an air of modern sophistication with a hint of cautionary tale. Though presenting transgression as a broader dramatic and artistic theme is not necessarily advocating it, there is a tendency in the broader stream of culture that veers toward celebrating transgression as an act of liberation. I question whether such a stance can cultivate a healthier and better moral imagination or horizon of meaning in the audience of the public, especially in the ordinary lives of ordinary people who might consume such material as an unexamined formation of moral intuition. I'm all for the freedom of thought and by all means, no stories should be prohibited from the public discourse and imagination, but I think there needs to be a critical check and distance that mediates our understanding and interpretation in culture, recognizing the genuine worth and value in tradition such as marital fidelity instead of treating transgression as a marker of modern expression in authenticity and empowerment, like the youthful and naive attitude of the protagonist of Barnes' story The Only Story who brazenly has a decades-long affair with a married woman twice his age in the midst of societal transformation in postwar Britain, only to later bear the process of relational and psychological breakdown in a tragic way.

I find this tangentially illustrative of the point made by the passage below that I read a while ago:

"…this is for Heidegger the moment that dwelling is inscribed in place through building.

A picnic in a park might serve as an example of the identification of place (Unwin 1997, 15). Picnickers will look for a good place to sit. If it’s a fine day, they might want to sit in the sun or prefer a patch of shade. They might want to look at other people in the park: in the hope of seeing friends; to idly watch a game of sport; or from sheer nosiness. They might want an expansive view, or choose a more secluded spot. The picnickers will dither and debate until they find somewhere which serves everyone’s whims. An identification of place thus occurs. If they’re well prepared, our picnickers may next lay out a picnic blanket.

There may be a debate about how to arrange the blanket—long side to the view or to the road?—and with agreement another identification of place is made. Then people will choose where to sit: the nosiest might choose the best corner for people-watching; acquaintances who dislike each other will choose opposite ends of the blanket; someone might hurry to sit next to someone else. Each of these choices also involves identifying a place. Last, our picnickers will lay out their food: the hamper in the middle, maybe; the hard-boiled eggs in easy reach of the egg lover; a drinker hoarding the beer. The organisation of the picnic is a choreography of small-scale place identifications. In Heideggerian terms a site has been gathered; the picnic has been placed.

Numerous places have come into existence by virtue of the picnic.

When the meal is packed away and gone, the place of the picnic might live on in the minds of the picnickers. If lovers first kindled their interest in one another at the picnic, perhaps, or if a memorable announcement was made, or if something especially funny or unusual happened, then those involved would never look at the same corner of the park in the same way. The site of the picnic wouldn’t be just ground; it would be remembered as where that picnic took place. The memory might last for many years. It could even be passed down between generations: ‘that was where Grandma …’ In Heideggerian terms, the place wasn’t there before the picnic was. But for those on whose minds the picnic became imprinted, it would always be identified as the place of the picnic. Others, who maybe have cause to identify instead with other places in the park, could pass it every day with no appreciation of the picnic and the place that other people recognise.

For Heidegger, this example wouldn’t be trivial. It illustrates activities of place identification which, to him, remained constantly in play, shaping the organisation of rooms, buildings, towns and cities. In this Heideggerian scheme, the choices which locate a house in a landscape are not so different to those involved in arranging a picnic blanket in a park. If a house is located and built in such a landscape, outbuildings might later be configured around it, involving other identifications of place. In time, a neighbouring house might be added, then another house, a street, another street, then a village and over time a town or even a city. Cities, especially if not planned, might be said to record many millions of place identifications in their layout, most of them long forgotten like the people who made them and the reasons for which they were made.

The world, for Heidegger, is parcelled up into intersecting places of many sorts, sizes, shapes and scales; identified by individuals and kept to themselves or shared. Gloriously, according to the philosopher’s outlook, activities involving the identification of place are neither logical nor systematic; remaining subjective, tentative, shifting and contingent.

For Heidegger, the intellectual demarcation of somewhere ‘admitted’ the fourfold:

The bridge is a thing; it [places] the fourfold, but in such a way as it allows a site for the fourfold. By this site are determined the [places] and ways by which a space is provided for. (1971:154)

For the philosopher, the demarcation of somewhere for a specific purpose—the identification of a place—marked out a particular human alignment with earth, sky, divinities and mortals. Intellectual demarcation could be fulfilled by physical demarcation: construction. To Heidegger, construction—as making a building or just as the arrangement of a picnic blanket or a dining table—installs the fourfold by giving it presence. The place identified by one person can also become a place for others because of its physical incarnation. The existence of the identifier is reflected in their act of bringing a place into existence. Moreover, the act of construction arranges earth and sky (from which those materials are derived), mortals (whom the building allows to occupy the world in new ways) and divinities (upon whom mortals might reflect) as they weren’t arranged before. For Heidegger, an individual understands building and dwelling through a matrix of place perceptions: ‘Building thus characterised is a distinctive letting-dwell.’"

What I've noticed from reflecting on habit and formation is the related aspect of discipline, and subsequently action. It's easy to elevate thought in the realm of language and words but I think one of the highest embodiments of depth comes from action, not just physical but also volitional that gives movement and concrete existence to thought in the world and enables us, as human subjects, to directly encounter a person or an idea more faithfully.

One can preach to an audience about love with remarkable eloquence and consequently inspire them, but what does it mean to actually embody that in acts of hidden ordinariness and fidelity as a daily discipline? Acts that have an intrinsic value in and of themselves toward another as a subject to be encountered, not a public that often meld into anonymity in number. I'm picturing these hidden acts of charity almost like how a dancer would perfect a subtle move through thousands of dutiful repetitions in the studio, unseen by an audience as a performance. Or even the unspoken lives of figures like St. Paul constructing his tents with bare hands throughout the day before preaching in the synagogue and marketplace or Spinoza grinding lenses for hours almost as if those repetitions were part and parcel with their vocation in the world of ideas that would influence the western hemisphere's intellectual and moral current for millennia. The hammering of the stakes on the ground, the pressing of the lens to a grinder—these aren't extraordinary acts but rather the unrecognized background ones that helped foreground a thought slowly germinating and being cultivated in their minds.

To bring it closer to home, I'm thinking of the precise movements of the eyes and hands that make drafting possible or the menial work with reams of paperwork and documents that are often divorced from the popular conception of what it means to exercise imagination and creativity in architecture. But without them, even the apogee of thought remains a mere mental construction, and the dwelling schematized by a thoughtful architect never materializes, never manifests meaningfully as a domestic world where actual lives are lived out through play, work, and love.

What I habitually behold conditions me to a greater or lesser form of attention, which as Simon Weil claims is the highest expression of love and generosity—a form of love that suspends the ego and purifies my vision of what is real as an ethical orientation that receives rather than imposes. Contrast that with Louis Althusser's claim that ideology is inseparable from lived reality, and that I as a subject am interpellated from preceding conditions that can never get exhausted or purified in the Weilian sense of that term.

There is a quiet tension between both ways of seeing that gave me an insight about an issue in contemporary life that I've been encountering. In engaging with algorithms, what I pay attention to teaches the model to recognize a pattern and offer a vision or horizon of meaning before me in the present and the future through a recursive loop of ideological practice that further alters my perception as a subject, albeit largely unconsciously. I'm sometimes left to unnecessarily wrestle with inferred values, moments and even hours after running through a feed as if I'm lending a part of my critical capacity to interpret the world to an external process. Accordingly, instead of as explicitly stated propositions of beliefs in religion and politics, ideology functions as an inseparable mediator of lived reality that entails the significance of all the small and subtle symbolic markers that I attend to in my daily awareness. These are not illusions that can be done away with, but something to be intentionally cultivated and formed toward the kind of attention that Weil strove toward, even if Althusser would say that is not possible. I think there lies the great act of humility—not the common sense meaning of valuing yourself less in comparison to others but being more aware of what is true and real by cultivating a horizon of meaning that is worth beholding, though we can never be truly purified of willful judgment in our vision and worldview.

The algorithm and the broader social media that it serves are not evil, and we do not need to go on a "digital detox" as many claim as an escape to achieve a semblance of wholesome living in modern life. It's to recognize the Althusserian condition of how we engage with its ideological formation and modus operandi, and refuse its claim upon us by adopting the Weilian capacity of attention. It's to steward our formation of attention to receive a reality that would cultivate a good life—a life that I personally think is best encapsulated by the Nicomachean Ethics fulfilled through Christianity (a la Alasdair MacIntyre) and its broader vision of life—since we can never truly be separated from the ideological conditions that precede us.

Illumined by the morning light from the open window of a suburban Montreal bedroom with its billowing gossamer curtain, a seventeen-year-old girl clad in her father’s unbuttoned shirt stands on an unmade bed, mourning over a lost love and performing her first act of overcoming and self-realization. As her downward gaze penetrates the disheveled sheet below, time passes imperceptibly into the past where memories trickle into present awareness like painful drops of becoming in the vast interior seascape of adolescence.