dagblog - Comments for "Remembering Professor Sugar"

Thank you for the excellent

moat — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:56:18 +0000

In reply to To sum it up, I would say he

Thank you for the excellent response. The balancing act between trying to accurately relate another person's idea while keeping in tune with why it still is important to you is a tricky business.

Perhaps the distance I was emphasizing between Hegel and Jung points to a language they would both like to cohabit; a talk about an end of history.

There are a lot of observations made by Hegel that express a "psychological" sensibility and psychological pronouncements made by Jung that smack of a philosophy of history. A corollary of this notion would be the way Marxists bracket the bourgeoisie view of the real as a state of mind. Another could be Strauss resisting the "psychological" because it wasn't psychological enough to be "accurate"; depicting humans as human.

There is something about care of the self that creates all kinds of divisions between people. So when you say there could be less nostalgia involved in our thinking about ourselves and attached to the engines forming policy, maybe a collective non-identity could be a beneficial logic of history working in reverse to the more commonly received idea.

To sum it up, I would say he

Elusive Trope — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 04:35:17 +0000

In reply to I have written a number of

To sum it up, I would say he described a "nation" as a group of people who had shared sense of identity. There are many "things" that constitute or facilitate that sense. A shared history is one thing. Language. Religion. Government. and so on. None are in and of themselves necessary. There are the diasporic nations such as Jews and Gypsies. India is a nation made of a many religions, although there may be some whose identity is not as an Indian but of one of the sub-groups within India. Many of those in the tribes that crisscross the arbitrary boundaries in Africa set up by the colonial empires, are themselves "nations" - the allegiance is to the nation/tribe not the state whose boundaries they find themselves in.

Because it is a sense of identity is very difficult to destroy, basically impossible in the short-term. No matter what someone does, I will probably always consider myself an American. No matter where I choose to live, or what citizenships I might obtain in the future, I will probably always consider myself an American. Even if the United States as a state ceases to exist, replaced by some other country with new boundaries and a new constitution.

Because it is a sense of identity is not something someone can build. (I have always been irritated with the phrase "community building" - one can facilitate the sense of a shared identity, but one cannot build it). The issue with the African states attempting to facilitate their citizens to see themselves as part of a nation based on the colonial boundaries instead of their traditional nation-tribes is an example of the hurdles.

Because it a sense of collective identity it does stretch back into the past before a particular person emerges into the world and is enmeshed into the culture/society that fosters this sense, in the language that has unfolded over time, carrying with it the past.

I have written a number of

moat — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:19:21 +0000

In reply to Taking responsibility for

I have written a number of replies to your reply that I abandoned because the scope of the discussion encompassed more than I could wrap my mind around. It is very hard to move from a personal conviction that my comment expressed to a general statement about what will happen in the world. So I figure I would talk about that gap in honor of your remembering Professor Sugar.

Towards the end of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel cautioned that individuals should not expect too much from themselves measured against the enormity of the historical processes each generation must play a part in. Jung's confidence that the rational exploration of the Psyche would lead to a similar call for a sense of proportion in the progression of generations is not based upon the engine of historical necessity that Hegel invokes. The difference is greater than the language expressing their points of view may represent.

Comparing one thing to another is where all the problems start. For instance, Pascal said that Christianity was the best explanation of human nature because its internal contradictions matched the absurdity of our experience. If one were to disagree, would that be an objection to the answer or to the question?

So when Professor Sugar talked about what made a "nation", how did he describe it? Were they building something that others would be hard put to destroy?

Taking responsibility for

Elusive Trope — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 02:54:15 +0000

In reply to What stops History from being

Taking responsibility for one's existence requires starting over a lot.

How true. The barrier: There is something in us - part of that amorphous phenomena we label human nature - that wants to have arrived. We want what we want, and we want it now (the only difference with society today as in the distance past is that technology and other innovations have created a greater expectation that this instantaneous gratification is possible). Sometimes we want to have had it already.

Starting over means a journey, a path stretches out before us. One of my favorite lines from a film is in Ulysses' Gaze, when the old man tells the protagonist played by Harvey Keitel: "In the beginning God created the journey. Then he created doubt and nostalgia."

The path seems unclear. Maybe if when one starts taking care of one self, and we can see "all the other things connected to ourselves stretching out beyond the horizon of perception, the way forward is a bit more clear. Tapping into the collective unconscious makes the next step forward possible with a little less doubt, a little less nostalgia. The past enabling us to let go of the past, letting it be what it is - history.

If only as shadows projected

jollyroger — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 02:02:36 +0000

In reply to and since true closure was an

If only as shadows projected on a wall...(ed. note: I'm gonna hurl...)

What stops History from being

moat — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:41:27 +0000

In reply to Remembering Professor Sugar

What stops History from being a march is that people receive the transmission from one generation to the next and want to be somebody other than what they have been given to be.

Being different isn't an obliteration of the past within oneself but the clearing of a personal space where something new can be nurtured.

Taking responsibility for one's existence requires starting over a lot. That is like being a good parent to oneself; a parent who doesn't want to design the child.

When one starts taking care of one self that way, all the other things connected to ourselves stretch out beyond the horizon of perception. I think that is what Jung meant by the collective unconsciousness: The multiplicity of an experience that cannot be shared directly the way a meal or a comment in a conversation may be.

and since true closure was an

Elusive Trope — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:23:35 +0000

In reply to allusive puck. The hockey

and since true closure was an impossibility because of the play within structure of the playing itself, the game continues to this day

allusive puck. The hockey

jollyroger — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:20:08 +0000

In reply to Remembering Professor Sugar

allusive puck.

The hockey game was terminally disrupted when a boyish figure with wings zoomed down over the ice, confusing the players with obscure references to semiotics and heuristics. As they furrowed their rather prominent brows, trying to tease out the meaning of his remarks, the fairy zoomed out of the arena, and visible on his back, stitched in rhinestones, his name "Puck".

The crowd knew that this was, truly, post modern hockey...