Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXVII
Orla-O(1): “ I’m trying to put this to you directly, if not bluntly: it looks to me as if your reason for going back to the Enlightenment thinkers is to avoid thinking. Of course that’s not a reason at all…”
Carlos-O(1): “I’m turning to reason to escape reasoning?”
Orla-O(1): “ It is as if you were saying you wanted to study the Enlightenment because back then they had reasoning which really worked. You said, ‘The key concepts of the Enlightenment are critique, freedom, and experience: Enlightenment consists in the critique of institutions, practices, habits, and opinions in order to make possible a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than that currently on offer -- and this freedom is experiential, insofar as it is perceived through an enriched awareness of possible ways of experiencing. Thus there is an experience of freedom.’ (Carlos, 2/20/2006). You are saying there was a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom available then than now.”
Carlos-O(1): “ Notice, though, I do not include reason as among the key concepts of the Enlightenment.”
Orla-O(1): “ Yes, I do notice. It’s a dirty trick. At first, I thought you were substituting critique for reason—I admit this interested me—I wanted to see if you could pull it off. If you could pull it off, it’s not a dirty trick. Five years later, though, I see you had no intention of making it work, so it is just a dirty trick. I also see what you’d done is more than making critique synonymous to reason. You say there is an experience of freedom. You are saying this as if we take this notion from the Enlightenment, this period you claim offers a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than now. However, I do not think any such notion was available to the Enlightenment. I say: for the Enlightenment thinkers there was no theorized experience of freedom. For the Enlightenment thinkers, reason is freedom, and the problem they faced was the separation and opposition of rationality (reason) and empiricism (experience). POMO don’t know no such separation and opposition, and undoubtedly many a POMO will claim ‘there is an experience of reason (and if reason is freedom, thus an experience of freedom.)' This POMO stuff doesn’t work, does it. We don’t get around it not working by inserting POMO junk through an 'Enlightenment' circuit, either.”
Carlos-O(1): “I’m turning to reason to escape reasoning?”
Orla-O(1): “ It is as if you were saying you wanted to study the Enlightenment because back then they had reasoning which really worked. You said, ‘The key concepts of the Enlightenment are critique, freedom, and experience: Enlightenment consists in the critique of institutions, practices, habits, and opinions in order to make possible a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than that currently on offer -- and this freedom is experiential, insofar as it is perceived through an enriched awareness of possible ways of experiencing. Thus there is an experience of freedom.’ (Carlos, 2/20/2006). You are saying there was a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom available then than now.”
Carlos-O(1): “ Notice, though, I do not include reason as among the key concepts of the Enlightenment.”
Orla-O(1): “ Yes, I do notice. It’s a dirty trick. At first, I thought you were substituting critique for reason—I admit this interested me—I wanted to see if you could pull it off. If you could pull it off, it’s not a dirty trick. Five years later, though, I see you had no intention of making it work, so it is just a dirty trick. I also see what you’d done is more than making critique synonymous to reason. You say there is an experience of freedom. You are saying this as if we take this notion from the Enlightenment, this period you claim offers a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than now. However, I do not think any such notion was available to the Enlightenment. I say: for the Enlightenment thinkers there was no theorized experience of freedom. For the Enlightenment thinkers, reason is freedom, and the problem they faced was the separation and opposition of rationality (reason) and empiricism (experience). POMO don’t know no such separation and opposition, and undoubtedly many a POMO will claim ‘there is an experience of reason (and if reason is freedom, thus an experience of freedom.)' This POMO stuff doesn’t work, does it. We don’t get around it not working by inserting POMO junk through an 'Enlightenment' circuit, either.”
posted by Yusef Asabiyah at 1:17 PM
4 Comments:
Yusef,
"I say: for the Enlightenment thinkers there was no theorized experience of freedom."
Spot-on.
"This POMO stuff doesn’t work, does it. We don’t get around it not working by inserting POMO junk through an 'Enlightenment' circuit, either.”
Not so spot-on :)
You're doing great work, Yusef. Keep it up.
Kind of spooky, though, to read (while listening to Brice Springsteen's "Devils and Dust") your own impersonator - or devil.
Orla (without the -O(1).
Ah, BRUCE, not Brice. Forgive me.
We want an experience of freedom. We have a POMO experience of freedom, but the problem is it is an uncritical experience of freedom. We discover a dilemma when we try to make the POMO uncritical experience of freedom into a critical experience of freedom: we find we can have the critical or we can have the experience of freedom, but we can't have both. One without the other is a conduit to further imprisonment and slavery, so we must have both.
Don't you agree this is the thrust of our conversation: to find an experience of freedom which is BOTH an experience of freedom AND critical? Playful and mature? Release from self-incurred tutelage without, however, immersing in vapid, shallow, hollow,greedy narcissism?
It is the problem of Postmodernity AND the age of Enlightenment. It still isn't quite that obvious how so.
--Yusef
"This POMO stuff doesn’t work, does it. We don’t get around it not working by inserting POMO junk through an 'Enlightenment' circuit, either.”
Not so spot-on :)
Please write a post explaining this.
I'm not comfortable speaking for you and Carlos... Actually, fixing and controlling you.
The one good thing about it is that at the heart of this control is the nearly absolute surprise and discomfiture of your texts I am working off.
--Yusef
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