Subject: Lord Auch's Utterance(s)
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 1998 19:55:03 PDT




The most ancient, _primal_, moment is that of our meeting with the 
world.  We are given (to) this moment by the awakened Mind.  But there 
is an event that already stands before this most primal of moments: the 
awakening of the Mind to Thought.  This event stands, then, outside 
Time, and receives its power not from the world but ... .

Since there is no reason for us to believe that our emergence into the 
world is given to us or caused by the world, we must turn to the idea of 
the primal moment and the anterior event.  But the question must be 
asked: What turns us to the question(s) of our emergence?  Does a 
perceived inherent lack in/of the world become manifest, and then drive 
our Thought(s) to anguish?  What makes the idea or belief that our Mind 
grew and developed with us, beginning in the womb, as the product of the 
world, of nature, seem inadequate -- at least to some of us 
_pneumatikoi_?  

Perhaps because, even as we experience the world, we feel ourselves 
apart from it, standing _before_ it only, as a viewer.  This feeling, as 
Merleau-Ponty stated, arises only from _reflection_, not from the 
immediate experience of the "brute world" (see _The Visible & the 
Invisible_, 1968 tr.).  But why grant to the unmediated experience of 
the "brute world" a primacy or purity that it may not possess -- even by 
virute of its (possible) status as 'absolute other' in relation to the 
Self?  I am not begging the question, but merely precipitating a 
formulation ... _provoking_ the reversal instead of describing it ... 
allowing the reflective faculty of my _hearer_ to take control and 
experience (a paradox!) the brute sense of alienation ... to stand 
before being -- even "wild" being, the "brute world" -- as an 
_Auslander_.

If our thoughts are given to us by the world, then the question 
inevitably arises: By what faculty are we given to think?  And many 
answer: By consciousness, the mind, which is a product of evolution.  
And one may then ask: What event caused the mutation that gave us a 
mind, a consciousness?  Here one is bordering on the spiritual -- even 
the mythological.

There is an interesting exercise in _hylicism_ to be found in Julian 
Jaynes' book _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the 
Bicameral Mind_ (1976), where he develops the thesis that our 
consciousness arose, essentially, from our acquisition of language.  
Even the gods themselves, he states, owe their (imaginary) existence to 
our development of a language system.  How's that for a dependence on 
words?!! [laugher]

This derivation of Thought from a purely physical, _hylic_, process: 
evolution, nevertheless allows for a concept or narrative of a 
mo(ve)ment of alienation that drew the human species away from this 
world.  A nice question to ask, then, would be whether or not the 
acquisition of language was truly beneficial.  But not now.

So -- it remains that an essential 'alienation' is part and parcel of 
human existence, as a result of the primal sense of 'thrownness' 
preceding the appropriative act of the meeting, when Thought was 
sundered from the Mind, due to the exigency of external 
(re-)presentation of the I(nner Self).

Therefore, regardless of the actual origin of the human mind -- as an 
evolutionary moment or a divine bestowal -- there remains the 
relationship of the Mind to the World as 'Other', and Thought as 
something not necessarily derived from a physical experience of the 
world.

     *    *    *    *    *

Thought gives itself to the world, feeling exquisitely its lack -- and 
the world extends unto Thought its solidity, its system(s) ... The Mind 
benefits from this, insofar as it requires fulfillment ... However, when 
the Mind abandons the wish to be, and questions itself -- the shit hits 
the fan.


~~ Edward











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