Kudos for seizing upon a trinity (red existentialism, black nihilism, white absurdism)! I can’t say they’re more “stable” than binaries, but trinities are more open and playful (and probably less treacherous) than dichotomous thinking. I’ll share one that I’ve been playing with after expressing my major misgiving with your schema which arises when you characterize it as offering ways to deal with “reality.”
One of the potential tragic benefits of the fascist upsurge coursing so boldly through world culture in these times is how it compels us to interrogate naive (comforting, romantic, or self abnegating) notions of “reality” including the idea that some small sliver of our experiences might merit the label of “objective” reality (that which can be tested and affirmed across multiple points in time and space by various subjectivities). When careless, brutish, predatory, and slavish personages crow about their ability to generate their own facts and therefore bend reality to their will, a reaction is provoked. (Notice how I might be tripping into a dichotomy here?). But the reaction probably should not be that there are facts and realities that cannot be bent to the will of tyrants whether or not such an assertion is true. (It is, to a point.) A better reaction might be that *IF* tyrants can (and they DO, it’s just that webs of institutions do it better) distort or create new realities, then so can those who oppose them. Of course, the biggest pitfall for those who imagine themselves to oppose tyranny, predatory behavior, exploitation etc is that tyrannical seductions, predatory impulses, and exploitative tendencies lurk in all of us. (Did I just manage to temporarily extricate myself the Scylla and Charybdis of binary oppositions — or am I deceiving myself again?) Depending upon any questionable notion of an intangible “objective reality” seems to me to be rather lazy as well as being an abdication of our responsibility to participate in the heartbreaking, frustrating, treacherous, but very human challenge of forging new intersubjective “realities” that might allow us to ennoble ourselves somehow without denigrating, exploiting, tyrannizing, or oppressing others.
Now of course a fascist (a species of nihilist?) would hotly (smugly?) deny that a human (a party, a race, a class, a cult, a culture) can thrive without dominating, exploiting, or destroying others. Even (they would say) *IF* humanity realized its unity as a biological species and “man” somehow ceased to be “wolf to man,” we would be forced by “nature” to dominate and exploit vulnerable animals, plants, minerals, and other resources for our own bloody, grubby, or exalted purposes. He or she would then press on (sadly, condescendingly, imperiously, contemptuously, compassionately) to chide me for being unrealistic, idealistic, naive, or cowardly for not accepting ‘reality’ as it is.
This brings me to a different trinity. But first (in a bathetic attempt to gin up fake fellow feeling and sympathetic pathos among a select cartel of unusual susceptibles) let me invoke the grapefruit licking, dream weaving, Walrus (“the dwarf”) McDougal (10/09/40-12/08/80) who in the coarse of inhuman events was oft noted to declaim that “imagination” is nothing to get hung about. Yes, what sometimes appears to be the “reality” (within me and without me) is larded with ugliness, emptiness, and horrors as well as epiphanies, mercies, and mysteries. But somewhere amidst the plaguing reveries of revenge and titillating fantasies of escape that typically captivate me, are also certain strange stirrings of imagination that I, you, and “reality” could somehow be butter.
Here’s the trinity: Physical, Metaphysical, and ‘Pataphysical.
Whatever “reality” is… the vast bulk of what I think I know comes from faulty and unreliable sense impressions (this includes all the crap I read, listen to and watch as a consumer of culture). This is the “Physical” (remember that this word comes from a Greek one meaning “nature”) but almost everything we know about “nature” (another word for reality) comes from our sense impressions. (One of the arguments for a theistic “God” is that only such a creator could allow our minds to utilize our sense impressions to generate a world that is as “intelligible” as we imagine it to be.) Without going off on tangents and falling into rabbit holes involving reflective (mimetic) self consciousness, I would agree with those who point out that almost everything our mind does to interpret, explain, rationalize, or integrate our sense impressions is, by definition, “metaphysical” whether “meta” is defined as “after” (it’s original meaning in Greek) or carries connotations of being “above” or “transcendent” by virtue of its “power” to confer (or contrive) meaning to experiences, facts, inklings, inspirations, visions, epiphanies, delusions, and insights. But these interpretations are (through barely understood relations) entangled with our capacity to use language (and language’s capacities to use us). And language is uncertainly connected other symbolic and meaning making process that our flesh is heir to (or that might raise the hair on our flesh) involving our abilities to create (or participate in) art, tool use and tool making, rituals, music, dance, and mathematics. And this is culture, an intersubjective, ‘Pataphysical manifold.
‘Pataphysics is a playful notion born out post WWI absurdism, but one of its questionable definitions involves the capacity of metaphor to generate new realities. Here I’ll assert (with no factual basis) that one thing that gives ‘pataphysics a patina of “truth” is that it cannot be reliably instrumentalized. It’s just too obvious, too inescapable, and too pervasive. (In fact for humans the domain of ‘Pataphysics dwarfs physics, metaphysics, and even culture. It actually smothers them…) Yes, I know that midget minded fascists are intoxicated by facile notions that culture creates “reality”. But one need only contemplate, briefly and shallowly, notions like “money,” “nation states,” “national borders,” “sacred symbols, totems, and fetishes to realize that even though all such cultural artifacts (reified products of intersubjective mental processes) can be inescapably powerful, dangerous, useful, creative, or destructive, we can (to an extent) “choose” not only how we relate to them, but also how they might be modified—especially once we not that they are always unstable and in flux based on all kinds of other processes and contingencies. (Tyrants, even well meaning ones, might think this can be done with force, terror, trickery and spectacle. Others imagine it can be done through slow historical processes involving the generation of new habits of mind that in turn generate new cultural supports and realities for better habits and behaviors: a notion inherent to (or spun off from) certain strains of Christianity that focuses more on the workings of the Paraclete on single souls than on any sudden universal apocalypse.)
Red pill, black pill, or white pill? Existentialist pragmatism? Romantic or dead eyed nihilism? Irresponsible or engaged playfulness? None of those choices are simple, reliable, or particularly comforting. None of these are necessarily certain or rewarding. One of them is the most demanding. But the principle of ‘Pataphysics reminds us that our choices have consequences, not only for ourselves, but for the future of our species (if we even deserve ANY future). Our choices also (unreliably) influence who we associate with and who may associate with us. (And we all shine on.)
Interesting, though that most people (if they do) first hear of ‘Pataphysics in a silly little ditty about a serial killer.
Kudos for seizing upon a trinity (red existentialism, black nihilism, white absurdism)! I can’t say they’re more “stable” than binaries, but trinities are more open and playful (and probably less treacherous) than dichotomous thinking. I’ll share one that I’ve been playing with after expressing my major misgiving with your schema which arises when you characterize it as offering ways to deal with “reality.”
One of the potential tragic benefits of the fascist upsurge coursing so boldly through world culture in these times is how it compels us to interrogate naive (comforting, romantic, or self abnegating) notions of “reality” including the idea that some small sliver of our experiences might merit the label of “objective” reality (that which can be tested and affirmed across multiple points in time and space by various subjectivities). When careless, brutish, predatory, and slavish personages crow about their ability to generate their own facts and therefore bend reality to their will, a reaction is provoked. (Notice how I might be tripping into a dichotomy here?). But the reaction probably should not be that there are facts and realities that cannot be bent to the will of tyrants whether or not such an assertion is true. (It is, to a point.) A better reaction might be that *IF* tyrants can (and they DO, it’s just that webs of institutions do it better) distort or create new realities, then so can those who oppose them. Of course, the biggest pitfall for those who imagine themselves to oppose tyranny, predatory behavior, exploitation etc is that tyrannical seductions, predatory impulses, and exploitative tendencies lurk in all of us. (Did I just manage to temporarily extricate myself the Scylla and Charybdis of binary oppositions — or am I deceiving myself again?) Depending upon any questionable notion of an intangible “objective reality” seems to me to be rather lazy as well as being an abdication of our responsibility to participate in the heartbreaking, frustrating, treacherous, but very human challenge of forging new intersubjective “realities” that might allow us to ennoble ourselves somehow without denigrating, exploiting, tyrannizing, or oppressing others.
Now of course a fascist (a species of nihilist?) would hotly (smugly?) deny that a human (a party, a race, a class, a cult, a culture) can thrive without dominating, exploiting, or destroying others. Even (they would say) *IF* humanity realized its unity as a biological species and “man” somehow ceased to be “wolf to man,” we would be forced by “nature” to dominate and exploit vulnerable animals, plants, minerals, and other resources for our own bloody, grubby, or exalted purposes. He or she would then press on (sadly, condescendingly, imperiously, contemptuously, compassionately) to chide me for being unrealistic, idealistic, naive, or cowardly for not accepting ‘reality’ as it is.
This brings me to a different trinity. But first (in a bathetic attempt to gin up fake fellow feeling and sympathetic pathos among a select cartel of unusual susceptibles) let me invoke the grapefruit licking, dream weaving, Walrus (“the dwarf”) McDougal (10/09/40-12/08/80) who in the coarse of inhuman events was oft noted to declaim that “imagination” is nothing to get hung about. Yes, what sometimes appears to be the “reality” (within me and without me) is larded with ugliness, emptiness, and horrors as well as epiphanies, mercies, and mysteries. But somewhere amidst the plaguing reveries of revenge and titillating fantasies of escape that typically captivate me, are also certain strange stirrings of imagination that I, you, and “reality” could somehow be butter.
Here’s the trinity: Physical, Metaphysical, and ‘Pataphysical.
Whatever “reality” is… the vast bulk of what I think I know comes from faulty and unreliable sense impressions (this includes all the crap I read, listen to and watch as a consumer of culture). This is the “Physical” (remember that this word comes from a Greek one meaning “nature”) but almost everything we know about “nature” (another word for reality) comes from our sense impressions. (One of the arguments for a theistic “God” is that only such a creator could allow our minds to utilize our sense impressions to generate a world that is as “intelligible” as we imagine it to be.) Without going off on tangents and falling into rabbit holes involving reflective (mimetic) self consciousness, I would agree with those who point out that almost everything our mind does to interpret, explain, rationalize, or integrate our sense impressions is, by definition, “metaphysical” whether “meta” is defined as “after” (it’s original meaning in Greek) or carries connotations of being “above” or “transcendent” by virtue of its “power” to confer (or contrive) meaning to experiences, facts, inklings, inspirations, visions, epiphanies, delusions, and insights. But these interpretations are (through barely understood relations) entangled with our capacity to use language (and language’s capacities to use us). And language is uncertainly connected other symbolic and meaning making process that our flesh is heir to (or that might raise the hair on our flesh) involving our abilities to create (or participate in) art, tool use and tool making, rituals, music, dance, and mathematics. And this is culture, an intersubjective, ‘Pataphysical manifold.
‘Pataphysics is a playful notion born out post WWI absurdism, but one of its questionable definitions involves the capacity of metaphor to generate new realities. Here I’ll assert (with no factual basis) that one thing that gives ‘pataphysics a patina of “truth” is that it cannot be reliably instrumentalized. It’s just too obvious, too inescapable, and too pervasive. (In fact for humans the domain of ‘Pataphysics dwarfs physics, metaphysics, and even culture. It actually smothers them…) Yes, I know that midget minded fascists are intoxicated by facile notions that culture creates “reality”. But one need only contemplate, briefly and shallowly, notions like “money,” “nation states,” “national borders,” “sacred symbols, totems, and fetishes to realize that even though all such cultural artifacts (reified products of intersubjective mental processes) can be inescapably powerful, dangerous, useful, creative, or destructive, we can (to an extent) “choose” not only how we relate to them, but also how they might be modified—especially once we not that they are always unstable and in flux based on all kinds of other processes and contingencies. (Tyrants, even well meaning ones, might think this can be done with force, terror, trickery and spectacle. Others imagine it can be done through slow historical processes involving the generation of new habits of mind that in turn generate new cultural supports and realities for better habits and behaviors: a notion inherent to (or spun off from) certain strains of Christianity that focuses more on the workings of the Paraclete on single souls than on any sudden universal apocalypse.)
Red pill, black pill, or white pill? Existentialist pragmatism? Romantic or dead eyed nihilism? Irresponsible or engaged playfulness? None of those choices are simple, reliable, or particularly comforting. None of these are necessarily certain or rewarding. One of them is the most demanding. But the principle of ‘Pataphysics reminds us that our choices have consequences, not only for ourselves, but for the future of our species (if we even deserve ANY future). Our choices also (unreliably) influence who we associate with and who may associate with us. (And we all shine on.)
Interesting, though that most people (if they do) first hear of ‘Pataphysics in a silly little ditty about a serial killer.
“Joan was quizzical.”