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A Stranger In The House : the website of Alan Hubbard
BITS various
2/5/03“...when I first put on the hijab it felt I was doing something right. It says to people, deal with my intellect, not my body." (Shagufta Yaqub. Ed. Q-News) And of course it is true - the overt sexuality of western dress obtrudes it into the consciousness. If Harry fancies (can move into lust for) Sally and vice-versa, however garbed ( and the reticence of coverage in such a situation can be aphrodisiac!) they will rise from the conversational cafe table when that lust overwhelms the intellect (and it is that combination which can mean ‘love’) and move into the privacy of the bed and bedroom. But only when and if that physical desire overwhelms everything. In the West we almost make it a sin not to be so overwhelmed - the thigh, the breast, the codpiece force themselves to the front, when if lust is real they have no need to. So, often, it isn’t, but is the assumed necessary, the assumed point of meeting, the only thing between man and woman.
9/4/03 In the defence of Evolutionary Psychology against Rose etc, it is now accepted that its crude identification with an ideology inseparable from capitalism was/is specific to the individuals who made/make it, etc, and that in (the usual, and still arguable) scientific sense it is value ‘neutral’. Among its protagonists have been/are marxists, the religieuse, marketeers, environmentalists, etc etc. But it is possible to believe that Darwin revealed our world and the limiting and limited extent of it, the limit of our knowledge itself. That we have been naturally selected to need to know, but cannot ever. That any assumption of value is assertion. We choose ‘meaning’ because we have been selected to. Meaning has no intrinisic meaning unless you choose to believe it has, which is faith. Naturally selected consciousness, self-consciousness, resulting epistemolog(y)ies, have continued our species - so far. Science rests on no other foundation than its selection within (self) consciousness for its survival value. Truth is a concept, no more - its reality, if it exists, is beyond us.
With homo sapiens Natural Selection has arrived at self-consciousness, the interface to negation within evolution. Our reflexivity has introduced us to unbearable mortality and finally forced a majority of us to abandon our gods. We, who were a toy, a know-nothing now Know. We are faced by not simply individual mortality, but by the knowledge that when consciousness ceases to exist it will never have existed. To choose ethical behaviour is to choose one rationalisation among the many which will allow us to avoid this confrontation and to serve out our lifetimes. Of course there are still those who choose to 'believe'.
Those who think this negates active thought and thoughtful action don't understand that there is nothing to understand or do but everything.
There can be no Guernica today.
Art howling from the gut of commodity
has been reduced to absurd pomposity
or pretty play.
Mostly, that is... clause@christmas.com
“Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on, but war only.” William Blake
“Fame is like a river, that bears up things light and swollen, and draws down things weighty and solid.” Sir Francis Bacon.
“The only way to keep power on a tight leash is to oppose it, never to seek to own it or have it. Opposition is permanent.” Arundhati Roy. Gdn interview. 28.7.01
“If people did not sometimes do silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.” Wittgenstein.
“Good taste pops up when imagination dies.” Frank McCourt, Author of Angela’s Ashes
“Memo to the Chancellor. There is no way you can deliver equality of opportunity, but you can deliver equality of outcome.” Anon
“Nothing is my last word about anything.” Henry James
“A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.” Oscar Wilde
“Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.” Susan Sontag.
“Self-consciousness is the acknowledgement of extinction.” AH “All shall be catered for so that none can escape.” AdornoThe Philosophy of the Opto-pessimist Encapsulated
Attempt 1) NOT I know THEREFORE ‘I am’ BUT ‘Something’ knows THEREFORE ‘Something Is’
(I not necessarily being ‘me’ but ‘something’ that I don’t/can’t ‘know’ but that ‘knows’ - the exact statement written within the inexactitude of language.)
Ignoring this after knowing it is the only way back and forward to the grace of childhood.
Attempt 2) “It’s a two stage pessimism (scepticism?), man!”
A) WE CANNOT ‘KNOW’ ANYTHING.*
B) BUT WHAT IF WHAT ‘I’ THINK ‘I’ KNOW IS THE TRUTH? AND** THERE IS BOTH ‘I’ AND ‘WE’ (INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY)
THEN
C) EVOLUTION AND OUR OWN NATURALLY SELECTED ARRIVAL AT COMPREHENSION OF IT (THE KNOWLEDGE ‘WE’ NOW HAVE OF ‘OUR’ HISTORY) DECREES THE ABSURDITY OF SELF-IMPORTANCE (BOTH INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIFIC), AND INDICATES THAT THE IRRATIONAL (THAT IS NON LOGIC BASED) ASSERTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL AND ‘COLLECTIVE’ CONSCIOUSNESS ARE THE RESULTS OF A NATURALLY SELECTED PROCESS ALLOWING US TO DEAL WITH THE REVELATION OF OUR OWN MORTALITY BROUGHT TO US BY OUR NATURALLY-SELECTED SELF-AWARENESS. THIS MECHANISM - DEVELOPED PRIOR TO DARWIN’S (OUR) ‘REVELATION’ OF OUR OWN ‘ACCIDENTAL’HISTORY AND CERTAIN FUTURE OBLIVION - EFFECTIVELY SUBSTITUTED GOD (‘OUTSIDE US’ OMNIPOTENCE AND ACCOMPANYING MORAL IMPERATIVES) FOR THE OTHERWISE UNBEARABLE ADMISSION OF THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF INDIVIDUAL AND EVEN SPECIFIC SURVIVAL. NOW, HOWEVER, GOD IS DEAD - HIS MEANING AT THE VERY LEAST BEING KILLED BY DARWIN - AND WE CANNOT ESCAPE THE (TECHNICALLY) ‘MEANINGLESSNESS’ OF LIFE, AND THE KNOWLEDGE THAT WITH THE DISSAPPEARANCE OF OUR SPECIES AND ITS CONSCIOUSNESS WE WILL NOT EVER HAVE EXISTED.
D) THE FUTURE (HAPPINESS, HARMONY, WHATEVER?) OF HOMO SAPIENS DEPENDS NOW*** THEREFORE ON GETTING RID OF THE CLINGING ECTOPLASM OF INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIFIC SELF-IMPORTANCE **** AND ACCEPTING THE ‘GRACE’ OF CYCLICAL EXISTENCE, AND THE LOVE OF OURSELVES AND OTHERS AND LIFE.
*(Except in our own terms of ‘knowing’ which canot be ‘known’ as knowable, and leads round an endless loop. In this sense we can only assert.)
** See page 43 et seq - Robin Dunbar’s The `Human Story: A new History of Mankind’s Evolution.
***Now. The rise of fundamentalist terrorism in Islam is a last gasp of the old god - a desperate nihilism in the face of the new nihilism of the market - and will surely finally succumb to coca-cola and Sky however unpleasant for the West it may make the interim.
****Economically and politically ( or the other way round) exemplified in the presently propagated values of Capitalism and its hubristic contempt for other individuals and for other species.
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