Incoming Links

• Thread on Self and World and Exiting 2020

  but then there is also an opposite fear, if you imagine a reverse pandemic where the self and the Inner become somehow toxic, you are anti-curfewed, you must never lose contact with others, never retreat to introverted self-sufficience

  Graham Harman's work on object-oriented ontology is interesting to me because of how it relates to these two poles of existence he fundamentally criticizes the tendency to explain away the Inner reality of beings, to say we are only relational, only participatory, only enmeshed

• 📙 All Things Shining

  The Homeric Greeks were open to the world in a way that we, who are skilled at introspection and who think of moods as private experiences, can barely comprehend. Instead of understanding themselves in terms of their Inner experiences and beliefs, they saw themselves as beings swept up into public and shareable moods.

  Jesus changes the prohibition of all the outward actions mentioned in the Hebrew Law into the prohibition of the Inner thoughts of those actions.

  As described in the Gospels, Jesus is a successful reconfigurer. Like a god, he let a new world be. In that new world people are defined by their Inner desires and intentions, not their External actions.

  This valorization of the human being as an essentially Inner domain lay dormant through much of the next twelve hundred years. But Descartes picks up the Augustinian thread when he emphasizes the self-sufficient “cogito”31 whose Inner experiences are cut off from “the external world.” And one hundred fifty years after that Kant finally brings the idea to fruition when he articulates his conception of human beings as fully autonomous selves.

  The very idea of an Inner experience was surprising and bizarre to them.

• 📙 Being-In-The-World

  Heidegger questions the view that experience is always and most basically a relation between a self-contained subject with mental content (the Inner) and an independent object (the outer). Heidegger does not deny that we sometimes experience ourselves as conscious subjects relating to objects by way of intentional states such as desires, beliefs, perceptions, intentions, etc., but he thinks of this as a derivative and intermittent condition…

• 📙 Focusing

  Focusing is only a piece of an answer. It lets people find their own Inner source of direction. It can be a source of new Patterns, devised freshly by each individual.

• 📙 Hyperobjects

  The “Inner space” that Kant and others opened up in the Romantic period is only a distant and inverted caricature of the Rift, like a photographic negative.