something about a human archive

I remembered a girl who thought of herself as scribblings on scraps of paper. Notes made here and there—notes that are only briefly relevant. When those notes are rediscovered after a time, they don't make sense anymore, and it is best to throw them away.

the lyrics to Ozzy Osbourne's "Tonight"

Now I'm back out on the street again
It never rains unless it pours
Try to get back on my feet again
I hear the raging thunder as it roars

Tonight, tonight
Is it just a rhapsody
Or am I right?
Tonight, tonight
Is it all a mystery?
I just can't fight no more

I hear the questions surface in my mind
Of my mistakes that I have made
Times and places I have left behind
And am I ever gonna make the grade?

Tonight, tonight
Is it just a rhapsody
Or am I right?
Tonight, tonight
Is it all a mystery?
I just can't fight no more

As I beat my head against the wall
Running 'round in circles in vain
I'm feeling three-foot tall
You don't understand
I'm fading away

Don't want your pity or your sympathy
It isn't gonna prove a thing to me
Good intentions pave the way to hell
Don't you worry when you hear me sing

Tonight, tonight
Is it just a rhapsody
Or am I right?
Tonight, tonight
Is it all a mystery?
I just can't fight

Notes:
Song credits Daisley, Kerslake, Osbourne, and Rhoads. From the great album "Diary of a Madman."

something about "Dangling Man" by Saul Bellow

 
Our Dangling Man keeps a journal in which he agonizes over the gaps between his past and present selves. His encounters with people sound largely antagonistic.

The voice of the journal belongs to Joseph, a young man living in Chicago. At this moment in his life, Joseph is unemployed, and 1942 America is at war. Joseph's voice captures truths that are universal (or, at least national), temporal, and personal. Frustration over his compulsion to drill and drill himself for value taint Joseph's reflections. Although determined to unleash these thoughts, Joseph is an unwilling participant in a culture that increasingly casts every self in the lead role.

At the time of his writings, Joseph, Canadian by birth, has been waiting for word on his acceptance into the American army during World War II. He surrenders his personal freedom to end this suffering. He closes his journal with the words,

Hurray for regular hours!
And for the supervision of the spirit!
Long live regimentation!

Notes:
Dangling Man, written in 1944, is Saul Bellow's first published work. I thought Dangling Man had interesting moments, but I did not enjoy reading it.

about "The Concept of Anxiety" and "The Sickness Unto Death" by Søren Kierkegaard

 
Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death were published in the 1840s. The discussion of freedom and anxiety in these works laid the foundation for existentialism. Kierkegaard was the first modern philosopher and the first person to find himself in a modern age. However, his faith and spirituality make him timeless.

Philosophy departments consider The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death to be a pair.

The Concept of Anxiety explores sin, guilt, and anxiety, which is undirected fear, a general sense of dread. Kierkegaard rebuffs the idea that anxiety is caused by original sin. Rather, innocence generates the conditions for anxiety. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; recall that God forbade Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge. God's directive makes Adam aware that he has a choice. This freedom to choose causes anxiety. Furthermore, Adam could not have known he was sinning because, being the first to sin, how would he know what sin was? Sin was real only after Adam ate from the tree of knowledge. Rejoice in your freedom.

The Sickness Unto Death explores spiritual death, which is despair. Here, Kierkegaard deals with self, or the self-concept of selfhood: the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation." In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard delves into the binary concepts of the finite and the infinite and the possible and the necessary. Tension between these polarities results from not being right with God. And, thus, despair. Kierkegaard elaborates further that there are three kinds of despair. All this is not as interesting as The Concept of Anxiety, so I will not elaborate. However, my favorite passage in The Sickness Unto Death comes when Kierkegaard is describing the person who lives life in a religious mode, but who, in the process of becoming spiritual, has lost his self:

Such things do not create much of a stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed.

About self

We spoke first in terms of the soul and the vessel, then the spirit and the flesh, and then the mind and body. Now we speak in terms of identity and biology.

Psychology for clicks

This Vanity Fair article, "The Lonely Guy," makes the case that President Obama's strong inward-directedness underpins his political failures. The diagnosis:

Self-containment is not simply Obama’s political default mode. Self-possession is the core of his being, and a central part of the secret of his success. It is Obama’s unwavering discipline to keep his cool when others are losing theirs, and it seems likely that no black man who behaved otherwise could ever have won the presidency.

But this quality, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength in gaining office, is his greatest weakness in conducting it.

Obama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him?

The author would have us believe that Obama's self is the issue here. The matter is not poor leadership, carelessness, incompetence, bad delegation practices, or the simple fact that every presidency has some major failures. No, in Obama's case we find a complication of self.

The article then relates a few quotes from Obama's peers who say the man is aloof. Gradually the author shifts his thesis away from Obama's selfhood and toward his character, essentially saying the President is not a team player. "He has quietly purged from his inner circle those most likely to stand up to him." The fix? "Obama has always insisted that he is playing a long game. The problem is that when everyone else in Washington is still playing a short game, the president sometimes has to play on their board." This unsupported claim applies to the reader, too. The article's author renders a judgment that time can't bear out and the reader is supposed to click through.

something about Michel Foucault, "The Government of Self and Others"

These lectures, delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982 and 1983, meditate on the concept of truth-telling known as parresia. The bulk of these lectures have Foucault tracing the use, exercise, and implications of parresia through ancient Greek texts.

Foucault starts, however, in the Enlightenment.

What is Enlightenment? Kant asked, and Foucault restates the question: What is this present?* Foucault finds here not only the beginning of contemporary philosophy but the seed of his own brand of inquiry: a discursive practice of philosophy that collides with its own present reality. The speaker--first, Kant, now, Foucault--is no longer speaking as a member of a philosophical tradition or community, but as a part of the present. And, ever since, philosophy has continued questioning its own present reality.

In his reflections on the Enlightenment, Kant speculated that the human race was making progress. He figured that popular support abroad for the ideals propelling the French Revolution symbolized this progress. Man was leaving an era in which he was unwilling to use his reason. Now, he would reason; and, once free to exercise his reason, he could be obedient. More freedom of thought, more obedience. And this obedience requires a kind of self-governance that Foucault interrogates in much of his work.

After a brief visit with the Enlightenment, Foucault starts to dwell in the ancient texts, starting with the myth of Ion and rounding the final corner with Plato's Phaedrus. In these stories he identifies the roles and implications of courage, politics, rhetoric, and philsosophy in the practice and concept of truth-telling known as parresia.

To my mind, this was so far the least compelling of these newly published Foucault lectures. But my mind is somewhere else now, maybe.

Notes:
* Prior to the Enlightenment, people spoke of the present in terms of periods of prosperity or decadence.