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cynosure--you seem to be one of those people who imagines that for human beings to be able to do anything beyond crawl about the ooze of perdition or whatever that they have to be able to see themselves in Lofty Terms, so free will and the soul and the Grand Drama of Really Important Stuff like Agape and related Big Loves.
but think about it. if will refers to anything, it is to your capacity to act on situations. you act on situations continually, every day. that you are reading this is a series of actions; that you are disgreeing with it a related series. how much of either process are you aware of? saying that your actions are constrained is simply to open a way to account for everyday life---it also spills into the impossibility to a total account simply demonstrates that total transparency is an illusion. to think that complete transparency was possible, you'd have to imagine that the self--the subject--and the world are entirely separate one from the other. this separation is a function of a doctrine of the soul--it has nothing to do with how human beings are. it also points to another basic fact, which is that knowing how actions are conditioned is a Problem. and that, if spinoza is right, freedom is a Problem, not a state.
what does this change really about experience? mostly the ways in which you'd imagine you could account for it, and from there the type of understanding that would provide such an account. i happen to think that most philosophical questions are also political questions as the constraints that shape how people act are socially instituted. this gives direction to the ways in which i might process particular questions, where i might appeal to for explanation or the way in which i might imagine that things, and ourselves, could be otherwise through fundamental political transformation.
but experience itself?
to say that love is a chemical reaction, for example, is a really simplistic statement. it presupposes that a human being is a thing, that the brain is a machine, that result x is a simple function of chemical releases and combinations. this seems to me the christian notion of human being stood on its head: where before you had the Soul and Body, now erasing the Soul leaves you with a meat puppet, and you have to see the meat puppet as nothing other than a hunk of meat--so an object. i don't buy it.
so can say that at some dimension love is a chemical thing. but it's also a function of the neural substructures that enable empathy it's a function of the capacity to generate and vary projections and symbols in the imagination. it's a function of the capacity to project oneself beyond the confines of one's meat palace. it's the way all these intertwine with the modes of being of another. it's also many many different states, many different types of relations, all crushed together because you call them one thing, use one word.
i can say all that quickly and still not really know what love is--what's easier to know is just that i'm pleased when it take shape and not so much when it dissolves.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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