Thursday, May 5, 2011

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.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

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"...