Encounters and germinating ideas

I've always had some ideas about the world, how things are. But maybe they shouldn't be called ideas, they were rather seeds of ideas, not fully understood by me in the first place. Nevertheless,I was operating on them.

There is this weird thing. Every passing day, every time I learn something (real learning is changing) I find my little seeds germinating as if they were waiting me to see the sunlight. I had to go this direction, to read that book for them to grow, to make themselves apparent. Every time my thinking changes by some beautiful concept or argument, it finds itself in the depth of my mind.

My little seeds were for example:
If I loved somebody, they would love me back. Unrequited love was impossible. Because it was impossible to stand in the way of real affirmation. Love was the affirmation of difference. Not uniting but being multiple. Now I read Nietzsche more deeply than I've did too immaturely when I was 14, I come to understand why I was thinking such a thing. Because only real affirmation returns. Don't think that I was somehow effected by Nietzsche's books, unconsciously. No, this idea was there before I met him, even before every possible memory.
Isn't this magical!

The other idea was about reality. What is real and what is not? This question really didn't concern me. For me the dreams I've had or the books I've read which effected me was as real as the concrete reality (I still don't know what they call as concrete reality). When people interrogated me about the reality of some story I've told, my answer was always "does it matter?". I couldn't really understand how its reality (realy happened in the concrete) would have an effect on its beauty.

For example there was this story in a book about Hegel. The philosopher Hegel had a professor friend. This friend encountered a butcher in a village in one of his travels. The butcher had the exact same name as the philosopher Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. And better, this Hegel was writing for the monthly butcher magazine about butchering, how it should be and stuff. It is already funny... So the professor friend, eager to amuse himself with a joke, told Hegel the butcher that he was writing so beautifully, that he impressed him with his talent, that he could become a philosopher and took him to the university where the real (!) Hegel was. Hegel (he is Hegel afterall) had a few years of philosophy courses and finally graduated and started to teach there. But all was too much for him that finally he had a nervous breakdown in one of the lectures he gave. After that it becomes a little sad. Hegel could never recover.

Anyway, there is something there that amuses me, but I don't know what. Maybe it is the fact that Hegel couldn't take too much Hegel himself. Or maybe it is the fact that Hegel made it to the university in the first place because he was made believe by the professor friend that he was talented. Believing to the admiration of people more than yourself could be really harmful.

I tell this story to people sometimes, I tell it in an effort to understand what amuses me there. Maybe their perspective would give me a clue to understand what is going on in this story, what was I effected by. But of course most of them cannot go that far. They become stuck from the beginning. They usually ask "did this really happened?" What is the difference, really? I am asking because I don't know what difference would it make if it really happened or not. I never asked myself this question. For me it was as real as the person who is asking me if it was real, and maybe even more so because the story effected my thinking more than this little mind in front of me asking stupid questions.

Now I read Bergson more deeply, I understand that this kind of questioning reality doesn't make sense. The significance of things are not, could not and definitely should not measured by the concrete. Real "what is real" question is actually about significance. Beautiful!

So how can I have these seeds of ideas if I don't know them? Why I am operating on them rather than taking the already known ideas, the rational ones? And how does it happen these encounters with Nietzsche, Bergson and more? The encounters that would make the seeds grow, bring them forth, make them intelligible. How do I go towards them?

And why on the earth people resist so much? How are they content to share the generally known ideas? Because if I have such seeds, they must have some too. Do they have different seeds which, by chance, happens to be the same in everyone? Am I one of the few who has such things in her mind? No. That would be ridiculous. But what is more ridiculous is that how all this happens. How they close themselves to themselves, running away instead of following the traces of their own ideas. How to follow the traces, that, I don't know, but it seems that I am doing it. Weirdly so.

Blocking the way instead of blocks of sensation

What if we were to take Merleau-Ponty as a creative writer rather than a philosopher? Would we be able to analyse his texts in line of Bergson-Deleuze line of affective intuition? I think yes, of course...

Intuition is a method originally developped by Bergson. It means that we are able to connect with (if we make an effort, be attentive enough)what we normally, in the spacial time dimension, don't see. What we don't see, according to Bergson, is the world in the state of becoming, an image movement, in the form of an already passed away and not yet happened.

If we put aside all the philosophical evidence against it (including the arguments he himself made), I think Merleau-Ponty was already seeing that, or more appropriately, intuiting that. As if he was an artist trapped in a philosophers mind, he was putting forth his intuition that forced limits of sense for him, right after this going forward, he was using his own philosophical device to get back on the line of thought that blocked the way through which his intuition wants to go. This must be the reason for the difficulty of reading him, although I don't see any but academics say so. They are having difficulty to make sense of him because of this intuition / reason intertwining. And they are happy to be limited to the arguments he made in the formal way, discarding his intuitive movements. Can it get more dry than this?

And what would have happened if, from the beginning, he was identified not as a philosopher but an artist? Would he be still discarded as hard to read and ambigious? Don't think so. He would be praised I believe, as being a creative artist.

More important question: since he would not have the philosophical device that made him stumble and retreat, blocking the way which his intuition directs him to, would he be a better artist than the philosopher he was? Well, this is a hard and speculative question, but I will go with "yes"...

For a subject outside of dichotomy Part 1

Parodi: "I would be tempted to say that the body is much more essential for sensation than it is for perception."
Merleau-Ponty: "Can they be distinguished?"

In this beautiful answer lies the whole essence of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. The philosophical assumption that leads to separate understandings of sensation and perception is that there is a subject and an object. It is commonly assumed that in perception, subject is the one who acts towards the passive object. There is an act of subject and it happens outside. In sensation, there is an internal state of affairs of the one who has been stimulated by something. These two conceptualizations complete each other in the same plane of dichotomy of subject and object. What Merleau-Ponty says brilliantly, is that perception happens both outside and inside. More correctly, the distinction of outside and inside, which refers to two different orders of being, happens to be a false distinction that originates from the doubt of senses. For what is seen is simply not true just because it does not cover all the perspectives that it can be seen and it does not correspond to the thing itself properly. For example, I only see the front of a house if I am standing in front of it and another pair of eyes which are situated at the backyard of the house would see the back of the house. So what enables me to think that what we both see is the same house? It sure looks different. For Merleau-Ponty, the assurance in me that me and my friend are seeing the same house and if I move to the backyard I would see what he is seeing now, is the assurance of perception being of this world. The house would assure the perception of itself by simply being there. In other words, different perceptions of things could not be a reason to doubt perception's adequateness in regard to reality, if we do not will for a reality that is absolute, timeless and unchangeable. On the contrary it would be an evidence to trust the perceptions, because they are the possibilities of things themselves. The possibilities of the world we live in. The character of reality which is in time. The subject-object dichotomy of which the distinction between perception and sensation originates, is based on the will of something fixed, eternal, unchangeable. So it creates these two different orders: one of which is in action reaching out of its cage called body. The other is the one which is being acted on, the body that the acting figure eludes in order to know, to organize, to classify the bodies just like it. How these two orders relate to each other in the first place, is an enigma. And what is it like to have such a view of reality which is so different from perceived world that does not have anything to do with one's own experience?

This will of two different orders of subject and object, is doing injustice to the inexhaustible character of reality as well as inexhaustible possibilities of experience. And more importantly it seems to me that maintaining subject-object distinction in such a way, is working at cross purposes with the salvation of subject herself. For placed on this insufficiently objective as well as insufficiently subjective plane, subject could only be a shadow of what she could become. If we want to save the subject and not a dummy of her, we must first give her the freedom to live in the world and the means to trust her perceptions as if they are the perceptions of the world perceiving itself. Only a moving together with the world could open up the possibility for the subject to create her own style, thus her subjectivity.

Final words from the man himself:

"By these words, the “primacy of perception,” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of being present at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of nonhuman nature." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

I am the truth! Irresistible and unbearable...

Ok, I know that was too much promising for everybody. Give it to my old journalism carrier. I like punch lines. That was all journalism had to offer for creativity anyway. So...
I think that I have the right as everybody to say that I am the truth in person..

What brought my thinking to this point could seem pretty unrelated and weird at first. That is unbearable lightness of being...Is it really light when it is unbearable? Well it is and that is the whole point. Let me tell you something which is one of the reasons I like languages: in Turkish the book was translated as "dayanılmaz" and that means unbearable and irresistible at the same time. It just depends where you use it, in what context. But still, that gives another point of view to Kundera. Irresistible is actually unbearable. The guy there just goes to one irresistible to the other. What life offers is irresistible as the moment itself... just because it forces itself on you. It says something else and you are the idiot that never gets it. Like the famous example of "now here" and "no where". If you could get it you would become it. There is no distance actually, we are inbetween, touching everything and that is the thing we have to understand.

Let's listen some Badiou, here we need him:

"The subject is woven out of a truth, he is what exists of truth in limited fragments."

Yes! Continue...

"A subject is what a truth transits, or this finite point through which, in its infinite being, truth itself passes or transits. This transit excludes every interior moment.

(2) The process of a truth is fidelity (to the event), i.e. the evaluation, using a specific operator (that of fidelity), of the degree of connection between the terms of the situation and the supernumerary name of the event.

A truth is (...)in substance, a procedure of post-eventual fidelity which will have been generic. In this sense, a truth (indiscernible within knowledge), is the metonymy of the situation’s very being – i.e. of a pure or unnamed multiple into which this being is resolved.

(a) A subject is not a substance. If the word substance has a meaning, it designates a multiple which is counted as one in a situation. The intrinsic indiscernibility into which a generic procedure resolves excludes a subject’s being substantial.

(b) Nor is a subject an empty point. The void, which is a proper name of being, is inhuman and a-subjective. It is an ontological concept. In addition, it is clear that a truth is realized as multiplicity and not as punctuality.

(d) A subject is not an invariant of presentation. The subject is scarce in that the generic procedure runs diagonally to the situation. One could add that each subject is rigorously singular, being the generic procedure of a situation which is itself singular. The statement “there is subject” (il y a du sujet) is uncertain or haphazard: it is not transitive with respect to being.

(e) A subject is neither a result nor an origin. He is the local status of the procedure, a configuration which exceeds the situation."
Reference: http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=331

So life's nature for us as subjects (if we are subjects of course), namely it being irresistible and unbearable simultaneously, becomes more clear as subject itself is defined with this tension, this nothing-else-than-a-rythmic-movement between infinite and finite. Like every music is true, understood in this way subject is true if not truth itself (I exaggerated there a little by saying I am the truth, actually the whole point is that I am not the truth or some other kind of thing but I am an inbetween tension).


My fundamental belief is that I am true. It is not just a belief, that's why I am adding "fundamental" there. It is the ground on which I operate.

If why is the question for an explanation, "why not?" is the interruption to causality. As a subject I don't have a cause to be, I am myself the interruption of that cause and effect. Just like the question "why not?" always searches for a hole in the meaning, I, understanding myself in this way -true to my nature as a tension between finite and infinite- become an engine of truth, tearing down the banale veil of meaning. Constantly running away from being fixed to some point or the other as in causality, but doing so very naturally as the infinite and finite are both guiding me. Where? There is no where, where is the wrong question. There is just the realization of me at every moment as an art piece: randomly taking shape but it becomes something very interesting during.

But I cannot allow myself to vibrate freely if I think that somethig's wrong with me fundamentally. Or if I fix myself just in the finite without having a concept of infinite as the most abstract and simultaneously the most concrete thing that one could ever imagine. So my thinking goes like this: trust both finite and infinite, they will make good music. Or to put another way, for music to be, we need the infinite to form a plane for it and just as we trust the ground when we walk on it, we have to trust it to be true. I imagined truth in Badiou as the very possibility of a play ground as infinite. Everyone has a tendency...

So maybe you are asking what does all this have anything to do with Kundera? Well, he was just for demonstration of simultaneity. Irresistible would be the infinite and unbearable, the finite in my case. Lightness of being comes from this lingering thinking in between.

Maybe...nevertheless it is beautiful now and here, alone with this thought. I will be here for a while.

Love perspectives or kaleidoscopes of sense - Part ...

How do you change your perspective? By moving to another place. Love is that movement to another place, to another point of view. But it has nothing to do with empathy. It is not pretending to be in the place of someone. Love is never "as if". It is there. It is real. It fills the atmosphere around so that you can dive into the "other". The impossible distance between becomes a sea to dive in. It necessarily connects you and it is just because of the fact that you are in the same waters. The invisible waters becomes palpable in love. You feel you are connected. You feel the existence in the most intense way possible.

When this atmosphere constitutes the relationship of a group of people, living becomes something kaleidoscopic. Constantly changing perspectives from one person to the other goes out into the open and becomes visible in the common place. The connection itself starts to shape people who are connected. In the palpability of love when everything touches everything in every way possible, identity understood as something inner to defend, dissolves. Identity becomes the movement style to the other, the very coreography of particular movements towards one another.

Love, therefore, changes, shapes, constitutes identity of those who are in love. Identity is not a given through which love is lived. On the contrary, identity is shaped through the invisible atmosphere of love which surrounds people. It affords certain kind of approaches and not others. You have to trust the other for example, not because you have to but because it is impossible to do otherwise if you are in love. To conceive this and act accordingly, you need to be able to recognize the "sense" which is always there, inside and outside at the same time, or better put always in the middle. Always generating itself with the movement of the relations and in multiple places simultaneously.

Love expresses sense as it is. That's why it is common but not always easy to call love an illusion when you fall out of it. When fallen out of love, you are fixated and imprisoned in just one perspective again: yours. That spontaneity, that undeniable presence of multiple could only be remembered in a dim light which makes it look blurry, vague and less detailed than it actually was. It is impossible to see the past experience as it is. The world around you changes because you lose the connection to the invisible, to the very relationality of the world. Then, treating the experience of love as an illusion is a sad preference. Nobody ever can talk of this subject without having the expression of melancholy in their face. There was something before that they don't have now. Calling love an illusion is a lie which people tell themselves without believing it. If they are to survive they have no other choice than to "hide behind the coward explanation of cause and effect" (L. Cohen). Retrospective corrections -such as finding reasons to justify the actions of love- are made to adjust after-love-life. It is never easy since one cannot easily deny her own experience. This is the reason of the obvious and mostly rigid changes in lifestyles or perspectives. You have to change yourself after losing that sensation of multiple in such a way that this new self would itself be a denial of the big truth, of the sense of universe which is always multiple. The logic is to justify the loss. Such a justification is very dangerous aside from being sad, because it creates resistance to the experience of multiple in the future too. Thus, weak souls once in love, become numb for now and forever.

But this is just a stupid option that most people choose without even knowing what it is. It is just like ignoring the reality because it looks ugly or it makes you feel bad. You can always be honest and say: "I have lost the big truth but I still have hope to gain it back anew". You can always choose to repeat your "mistakes" because it makes perfect sense. You can always try to be strong enough to be the living example of the absurdity of life like Kierkegaard says even if you cannot manage to do it like "knight of faith" does in such a natural way. (For more from Kierkegaard on this subject, check out Fear and Tremble.)

Love is a glimpse to the order of universe for human beings. To be able to love is an ontological decision without the deciding subject.

Finally, I want to say that love is THE will to grasp the world as it is.

Love is the real philosophy...

Living in an international commune - Part ! (not a typo, it is an exclamation mark)

Inbetween languages there is again language itself. As if it refers to itself and by doing so making itself understandable. Very simplistic way of understanding this would be repetition which is different in every movement of repeating. Experiencing this fact knowing what it is, is just wonderful.

On the other hand, sharing things, in other words living in a commune is tricky. I can say that having an international quality ease things for a commune a little bit. Everybody is curious about the other so they let each other be in order to observe the other and having a sense of the other's ways of doing things. That's why this could be called a "community of individuals" if we are willing to let go the strict sense of being an individual. Because here there is a very vague shape of being individual. It is the culture you represent, the place where you came from what counts as the reason of curiosity in the first place. But I am not willing to surrender the beauty of being let free just because the reason of it affirms representation.

And it is not always the case either. I'd rather think that personal differences are recognized in a very short while. You can always see two Italians who don't like each other and rather hanging out with other nationalities. It would be logically correct to say that they are giving each other space to be free by being away of each other. But they still say hi when they see each other also. This wouldn't be happening in Italy, because they would not be obligated to live in the same environment. International student complex in which they will be living at least 5 months forces them to live in peace recognizing their differences.

Nevertheless it is a community which forces itself on individuals with its architecture. But this architecture is one of proliferation. It enables recognizing differences. Curiosity of the other becomes an expression of the architecture, through the architecture. Curiosity expresses itself much more easily.

Or all of this may be too much loaded with optimisim...

(I think it is not over yet)

Living in an international commune - Part 1

I have been doing this for a while. 8 months of living in an international student complex was the best experience for me while my life is breaking apart in every way. To come here, I had to let go all that I call myself. I had to break up with my 13 year boyfriend whom I lived with almost all my life. I ended up without a roof over my head, without a job, without any financial security. In short now I was a student without the security of a family too.

When you don't have a fixed identity -this is the definition of student, being in a constant flux, processing, being the process itself- it is very easy to make friends. Like children almost. If you have an attractive toy (a possibility of having fun, a promise), somebody definetely would come to you and say "do you wanna be my friend?" That's it! Now you have a friend with whom you can play with. Now I have 5-6 people I live with and share almost everything. But what is amazing about it, is that each of them comes from a different part of the world. They bring with them their language, in other words the atmosphere of their country. Very distinct qualities, sensations, feelings, colors... and while everybody is trying to understand each other, it is not the information about the country's ways of doings given verbally that enables feeling each other. What enables making sense of each other is the inbetween misunderstandings and jokes that come afterwards when the misunderstanding is cleared enough to see there is always something else to see. Another perspective. One that could not be thought while staying the same person, in the same identity. Constant shifting of the very grounds of understanding. Surfing in sensations. And in Holland, it is easier for the obvious reasons:)

(hopefully)To be continued...

Proposition #...

Everything happens in the middle of things, not to things or even of things... The middle is between things where we see nothing but a void separating things.

So to be able to grasp reality at its most, there should be no focus in the traditional sense of the word. The right attitude begins with a rather blurry vision.

Just like the crazy man in the movie Patch Adams - running around showing his four fingers, asking how many fingers are there and getting angry when he gets the same and sane answer which is four - we have to insist on a blurry vision in order to see the complexity of happening. At the end Patch comes up with the right answer: there are eight fingers when one is not focused on them but tries to capture the whole experience including the seeing eyes. This attitude may not be appropriate for all kinds of experience but it surely applies to some better than a focused attitude. Actually the insistence should be on seeing the complexity of happening. Blurry vision is just a consequence of it. It can be clarified. Slowly. Like a digestive process.

one must adore Douglas Adams' sense of humor

The world(s) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy creates is one that embraces all the differences of singularities by suspending fixed meanings and significations. These singularities join together in a ‘present’ moment, a ‘now’ that can not be represented. Guide’s humor distributes itself through the concrete sphere of meaning and any subjective position that holds meaning and representation dissolves. Egos are decentralized, disseminating in another sphere created by the realization of the absurdity of our commonsense which says our meanings as well as meaning giving mechanisms are fixed.

In Douglas Adams' work, humor becomes an accident machine. It produces the effect and even the event of a crash. In the crash there is nothing but the event/coincidence itself.

Best thing I learned from all the psychoanalysis lectures

Laplanche's theory of emergence of "me".

First there is the world and a relationality with regard to it, only in a second moment closure of “me” happens. This closure is originated from the relationality itself. “Me” is a surface that projects other surfaces (human beings) in itself and contructs itself with these projection images. So this theory of “me” promises a resolution to the problem of solipsism since relating to the other is considered fundamental way of being. This is a fundamentally afiirmative way of understanding limits of subject and it leads to questions such as “where does the other end and 'I' start?” From the point of view of Laplanche's theory, the notion of limit ceases to be negative, but affirmative and productive.