This week I had the pleasure of finishing my second reading of Roberto Ungers The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. The first time, I pretty much highlighted the entire book-- lol, not the point of highlighting! The second time, I took 30 pages of notes (256 page book). There is still more in it than I have completely gotten my mind around! I decided to distill it into a smaller group of starting ideas-- this is by no means the full Monty, and it is not even exactly what he said. Ive put my own take in there-- I dont think Ive done any violence to his ideas though. 1. The nature of humans-- we are REAL, specific, unrepeatable-- what Ive called ineffable-- impossible to contain within an abstraction. We are not a surface manifestation or reflection of some deeper universal consciousness. We cannot fit completely into anything smaller than our entire selves. What doesnt fit is the MOST important. 2. The nature of social structures/ cultures-- although the apparent constraints on what we can do are partly real, they are not as real as we make them out to be-- they are not as fully real as the humans that create them. Social laws are not like mathematical rules-- they dont have to be stuck the way they are and there is not a limited, preset range of possible actions we can take. What we have now is frozen will and interrupted conflict. We are mistaken to take things in such big chunks, as if they have to belong together that way-- political parties, ideologies, etc. There are actually infinite ways all the ideas within them could be recombined plus infinite new ideas we havent even thought of. We need to avoid the idea of democratic perfectionism-- the idea that there is a possible perfect system such that once we get it in place and maintain it, it wont need tinkering with and it will meet the needs of every human. Instead, we will always need to go looking for trouble-- finding new practices to experiment with. This makes the idea of utopia a problem not just because it is unrealistic but because it is threat to our continued development. Humanity will never be fully contained, either as individuals or as a group, within the confines of one unchanging structure. 3. We have gotten into a bad habit of valuing the objective over the subjective, the impersonal over the personal-- this has gotten into religion, especially those which have let go of anthropomorphic gods. It has become part of atheism in some cases. We have thus devalued ourselves-- we are saying we will never measure up to our concepts instead of the truth, that they will never measure up to us. Without returning to old ideas of religion, we can flip this. We can choose the personal over the impersonal, and it doesnt really matter that we have no objective proof for our decision-- because that would put us back into hegemony of the abstract over us. Unger has a complex way of supporting this which is marvelous and mind-bending to read-- Im not even going to try and explain it and not sure I can or need to. 4. Practicing experimental living, personally and politically, and involving ourselves in subject-subject, I-Thou relationships, is the most important way we can experience what we truly are, during our time-limited lives. We need to learn to change our actual frameworks, not just minor tweaking to the contents of our social structures. Only by actually ACTING on the systems we have created will we wake up to our possibilities. This is the embodied practice of placing the personal over the impersonal, by acting on it. It requires a willingness to engage in conflict with these frameworks-- government, social traditions, etc-- not with the idea that one day such conflict will stop but with the understanding that we will always need to wrestle with what we make to keep it from taking control of us. 5. We need to incorporate the means to change our systems INTO the systems themselves, so that we dont have to depend on crises and catastrophes to engage in conflict with the systems. Part of this involves increasing opportunity for all humans to engage in the systems they live in. The social supports needed to create freedom for engagement are not important mainly because of the comfort/ ease they could provide but because they allow us to participate in our lives. Every part of what we have set up needs to be up for grabs, and change needs to be able to happen more quickly so we can experience our capabilities directly. By picking the general direction of change that makes more change possible, we can seek out next steps in that general direction instead of making grand blueprints. He says music, not architecture. Now! I want to figure out what to do with that, on a practical basis.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 13:02:44 +0000
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