Christmas Spirit, part 6 || New Years Eve Prologue
Now is the time for me to engage in the time honored masculine tradition of anesthetizing myself to otherwise painful realities in my personal life by focusing on my work. Unfortunately, it's an endless winter break and so the incentives to actually do work are very thin.
Which means I'm back to writing inaccessible and underinformed philosophy posts. If you're lucky, I may break down mid-paragraph and start emoting again.
Where we left off (cutting some corners and qualifications, for the sake...speed, I guess): If we are nominalists and hold a correspondence theory of truth, then we find that virtually all of our concepts are without referents. Our concepts are all simulacra, and our world is the hyperreal.
And yet, we have intuitions that there is something even more unreal than this. "Ho ho ho! You will be a-simulated..."--the simulcrum of the "traditional" Christmas, with all its trappings laid out specifically in carols. Or, to cite Wikipedia more, "a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry")." I hesitate to clump in other things into this category that may in fact just be fakeness (the inauthentic emulation of an existing thing) rather than simulation (the reproduction from a blueprint without referent--Eco's "authentic fake"), but when I went shopping for pants (I mentioned this before), I came upon, for the first time, the brand Wearfirst. Don't be fooled by their awesome website on which the models are having so much fun or by their vague mission statement. Check out their products: an entire row of pants in which each had been identically torn down the right pant leg.
Katie (oh, Katie...) told me that this is not a new thing at all, and that clearly I hadn't gone clothes shopping in a while. Once again, pointing out my naivete--my assumptions of a static world which detiorates around me whenever I remove myself from it for long enough to think.
There I go again. You know, I had been doing fine since my last conversation with Katie until just now, when my stomach just sank a couple inches down and now hangs there, heavy and tense.
But that's off topic! My point is...where was I? That I'm not sure whether these pants qualify as simulacra, or just fakes. Maybe at the point where we are no longer able to understand what those torn pants were trying to emulate--clothing that's been worn, but not worn-first--the concept will transcend any sort of connection to reality and lose its referent.
But wait--wasn't I just saying that no expressions have referents? Aren't we forced into the hyperreal anyway?
I'm trying to illustrate that they're different--that we have a legitimate, applicable concept of the real which is not the hyperreal--that we should take a lack of referents as a condemnation of the available conceptual world.
So where did the problem come from (I'm skipping things, I'm avoiding logical structure, because as I write this I am talking to several people over the internet about things that matter more to me, now, really)?
Let me hazard a guess. It was the fucking correspondence theory of truth, with its intuitive plausibility but eventual untenability, that falsified the world-as-we-know-it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ok, that didn't go as planned. I was writing this all this afternoon. Then I got into a long conversation with Smiles-by about Katie that was...to be honest, I don't really remember right now what it was. I can't really think of anything.
Tomorrow, New Years Eve, promises to be a very interesting day. I'm going to Providence to a party with mostly strangers. I'm going there, really, to spend time with Katie. Why? Work things out? Break things down? Fire things up? I don't think either of us knows what will happen. I'm feeling more optimistic now than I was earlier this afternoon, when I was thinking it was the beginning of the end. But now I'm just brain-dead: the time I should have spent mentally preparing for tomorrow was spent being roped into a never-ending game of Settlers of Catan with my family. It just sucked hours and hours up into nowhere.
Now I feel like I'm about to go into a big test for which I haven't studied. I will need to make decisions tomorrow that affect my future a great deal. And I'm going to have to navigate a totally new physical space on top of a still unfamiliar social space.
Weird.
Thanks to Smiles-by, though, I think I at least know what it is that I want. It's so obvious, but it's a start. Now I'm just terrified that it's unattainable--I ought to believe it is so. What then? What are the second bests?
If I had had my druthers, I would have done something like read up on Camus before going--prepare myself to stand, like Sisyphus, at the top of the hill as the stone rolls down, laughing at the absurdity of life, triumphing over it in that moment. I apprehensive about tomorrow. When I successfully shout down my dangerous hopes of harmony, I predict absurdity. I suppose that when I pick my prayers tonight I can ask for at least a sustained good humor throughout it all--since I don't know what it is right to ask for, otherwise.
I hope to bring back a good story for you. I want to tell you about it, but I'm afraid that out there there's still somebody prowling around like a ravenous fox, scratching away at the lid to the dumpster of my life to devour it--why I don't know. Shoo!
Anyway, time to sleep now. Big day tomorrow. Wish me luck, please. I need it.
Which means I'm back to writing inaccessible and underinformed philosophy posts. If you're lucky, I may break down mid-paragraph and start emoting again.
Where we left off (cutting some corners and qualifications, for the sake...speed, I guess): If we are nominalists and hold a correspondence theory of truth, then we find that virtually all of our concepts are without referents. Our concepts are all simulacra, and our world is the hyperreal.
And yet, we have intuitions that there is something even more unreal than this. "Ho ho ho! You will be a-simulated..."--the simulcrum of the "traditional" Christmas, with all its trappings laid out specifically in carols. Or, to cite Wikipedia more, "a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry")." I hesitate to clump in other things into this category that may in fact just be fakeness (the inauthentic emulation of an existing thing) rather than simulation (the reproduction from a blueprint without referent--Eco's "authentic fake"), but when I went shopping for pants (I mentioned this before), I came upon, for the first time, the brand Wearfirst. Don't be fooled by their awesome website on which the models are having so much fun or by their vague mission statement. Check out their products: an entire row of pants in which each had been identically torn down the right pant leg.
Katie (oh, Katie...) told me that this is not a new thing at all, and that clearly I hadn't gone clothes shopping in a while. Once again, pointing out my naivete--my assumptions of a static world which detiorates around me whenever I remove myself from it for long enough to think.
There I go again. You know, I had been doing fine since my last conversation with Katie until just now, when my stomach just sank a couple inches down and now hangs there, heavy and tense.
But that's off topic! My point is...where was I? That I'm not sure whether these pants qualify as simulacra, or just fakes. Maybe at the point where we are no longer able to understand what those torn pants were trying to emulate--clothing that's been worn, but not worn-first--the concept will transcend any sort of connection to reality and lose its referent.
But wait--wasn't I just saying that no expressions have referents? Aren't we forced into the hyperreal anyway?
I'm trying to illustrate that they're different--that we have a legitimate, applicable concept of the real which is not the hyperreal--that we should take a lack of referents as a condemnation of the available conceptual world.
So where did the problem come from (I'm skipping things, I'm avoiding logical structure, because as I write this I am talking to several people over the internet about things that matter more to me, now, really)?
Let me hazard a guess. It was the fucking correspondence theory of truth, with its intuitive plausibility but eventual untenability, that falsified the world-as-we-know-it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ok, that didn't go as planned. I was writing this all this afternoon. Then I got into a long conversation with Smiles-by about Katie that was...to be honest, I don't really remember right now what it was. I can't really think of anything.
Tomorrow, New Years Eve, promises to be a very interesting day. I'm going to Providence to a party with mostly strangers. I'm going there, really, to spend time with Katie. Why? Work things out? Break things down? Fire things up? I don't think either of us knows what will happen. I'm feeling more optimistic now than I was earlier this afternoon, when I was thinking it was the beginning of the end. But now I'm just brain-dead: the time I should have spent mentally preparing for tomorrow was spent being roped into a never-ending game of Settlers of Catan with my family. It just sucked hours and hours up into nowhere.
Now I feel like I'm about to go into a big test for which I haven't studied. I will need to make decisions tomorrow that affect my future a great deal. And I'm going to have to navigate a totally new physical space on top of a still unfamiliar social space.
Weird.
Thanks to Smiles-by, though, I think I at least know what it is that I want. It's so obvious, but it's a start. Now I'm just terrified that it's unattainable--I ought to believe it is so. What then? What are the second bests?
If I had had my druthers, I would have done something like read up on Camus before going--prepare myself to stand, like Sisyphus, at the top of the hill as the stone rolls down, laughing at the absurdity of life, triumphing over it in that moment. I apprehensive about tomorrow. When I successfully shout down my dangerous hopes of harmony, I predict absurdity. I suppose that when I pick my prayers tonight I can ask for at least a sustained good humor throughout it all--since I don't know what it is right to ask for, otherwise.
I hope to bring back a good story for you. I want to tell you about it, but I'm afraid that out there there's still somebody prowling around like a ravenous fox, scratching away at the lid to the dumpster of my life to devour it--why I don't know. Shoo!
Anyway, time to sleep now. Big day tomorrow. Wish me luck, please. I need it.