alfred responds -
>Only Diane of the present discussants kept responsibility together
>with freedom and blamed Nate for having it left out. I must confess
>the latter made me a bit sad, doubts about my capability of
>communicating, of peoples' competence in reading, of how hard it is
>to exit the rails of thought habits, of the way academic discussions
>so often stick to keywords and their precast meaning rather than
>listen to what is said
first, i'd like to offer a position here, that i wasn't' "blaming" nate,
but asking for his thoughts on the interconnection of freedom and
responsibility.
the issues of language, across English-dominated boundaries, is clearly
problematic and i think there is moment every day when i wished i
understood German, Italian, Spanish, so that i could reach more of the
texts that i want to read, so that i wouldn't have to depend upon one
person's translation in order to find out what someone has written in
their own tongue - (there are, for example, many different translations of
Rainer Maria Rilke, where the poetry can be so fumbled in the translation
that i feel _pained_ to read it -
and then there are translations that produce the poetic of Rilke so well
that i am moved by the English enough to
read the original German, struggling to understand) -
i think you communicate quite well, alfred, but as you note, and as others
have, too, these terms "freedom" and "responsibility" are so often
positioned as distinct,
that when we do bring them together, as indispensable characteristics of
the other, it is still dangerous to assume the
relation is obvious -
>Diane touched the poetical in connection with my remark that I
>believed freedom and responsibility to be more at the heart of a
>pertinent understanding of the human condition than "consciousness".
>What you say about the role of the heart or the poetic, the
>emotional, the subtleness of understanding etc. I can agree very
>much. Yet I would try to be careful of how to distinguish and combine
>head and heart and as subtly as possible to avoid simply mixing the
>two. The "two", I say, because of linguistic coercions -- there is no
>real or concrete cognition without emotional and valuational parts,
>there is no emotion or valuation without cognitional moment.
i agree completely here, i have never really been able to understand the
difference between affect and cognition, thinking and feeling, and have
written often of the "feeling of thoughts," the thoughts of feeling, the
"feeling-thought" that is ineffable and yet understood on some
inexpressible level of experience - actually, the philosopher-poet i
mention, Lucretius, was proposing that the location of the "mind" was in
the chest, because of the powerful affective sensations that occur with
"understanding" - that we do "feel" those moments of thinking so deeply in
our chests, that surely the mind is not in our heads,
but in our hearts.
it is a relation i have considered for many years now,
that the heart-as-metaphor reaches much further than love, or loss, but
into the
sites of thought, listening, understanding, and so on.
i wrote
>>here, i think it is a mistake to assume that if a 19thC thinker had been
>>taken to task, this world would be different, because even Herder
>composed
>>in a context of kinds of ignorance enabled by his own historical
>>situation.
and alfred responded
>Sure, Herder as much as anybody thought in context. I am a fan of his
>not because i think he tells the truth or anything alike, but because
>he pointed out a very serious mistake in the understanding the course
>of human history, including history of ideas, the human condition
>altogether: the preference for the fixed, the eternal, the truth
>tel-quel; or simply for the neglect of the becoming and demise of
>everything.
,<snip>
>No, Diane, I
>do not "lift text out of history and plant it into a different
>context". What I try to do is to use Herder's abstractions about the
>course of the world and use them as tools to research and conceive of
>the human condition on various horizons.
yes, this is something we have talked about, the ways a writer inspires us
to
think/project a thought from a poetic or abstract context as a tool for
re-thinking
ourselves historically, - these are not literal translations or material
contingencies, but the sites of transgression, when an inspiration moves
us to
move ourselves to a different space for thinking about something
like the human condition.
i truly appreciate the work you are trying to complete, alfred, - there is
an aspect of humanity in the ways you use words, one which is often
missing from the theoretical discussions
that dominate here at times,
there is something quite cold about theory-for-theory's sake, and
something rather different about theory for the sake of change, giving up
certain beliefs in order to recognize how they
fail to account for something like
the human condition - i do sincerely believe in such a thing, (though i've
been criticized often for it, it isn't very critically-correct for a
lesbian-feminist to speak of a human condition!)
and i often feel a pressure to
speak of everything and everyone in contexts of gender,
and sex,
since these are my teachings, the politics of dominance and oppression,
the absence of women in history and
the absence of their writings in theoretical traditions,
but still, i have also reached a point where it is their silence that
speaks volumes to me,
that speaks of a human condition,
that silence and oppression occur as much today as they have for centuries,
and that these are so systemically wired into practice that
to mention these aspects of society can so easily produce the flurry of
furious sparks from one shorted circuit -
it is still forbidden to speak of women and silence,
of oppression and difference,
no matter how this is structured into the human condition, no matter how
deeply these operate as a global system of controlling communities, there
is still a persistent desire to pretend that these don't matter... of
course, and sadly, i think, this is how change mutates into reproduction.
the repetition of self-protection and innocence over the possibility of
culpability and accountability...
when we speak of freedom and responsibility, i think of the choices i make
to speak up,
knowing the wrath and ignorance that can be incurred;
when i choose the be silent, i recognize the responsibility i assume for
not speaking,
and similarly, when others are silent, i try to respect that in the same
ways - when women don't speak here, for example,
i recognize the silence, and recognize it as a choice -
and when others make the choice to speak here, in the midst of the
dominating discourse,
i recognize the freedom that we have to speak when we choose _here_
and how culturally-specific that choice is - i mean,
in other places, that choice is not available to women, the silence brings
a different
responsibility, towards the culture, towards the children
and so on.
these same conditions may be completely different in other countries,
where men who speak up and oppressions and authoritarian regimes can
easily disappear from the community, be imprisoned and tortured to death
-
of course, that we have to support organizations such as Amnesty
International is both appalling and potentially generative -
but in terms of there _being_ a human condition wherein the qualities of
freedom and responsibility need to be spoken about and understood as
integral to the socialty of being human, i have no doubts.
what i do doubt is the possibility of change in my lifetime.
i do doubt that the few of us who comprehend these aspects of being human
will effect any impact in the institutions who have depended upon the
abstractions of "human being" for so many centuries, that to let these
historical
concepts go as useless fictions is akin to dismemberment - it cannot, it
will not be done easily.
but i am glad you persist, i am glad you are writing, and posting your
papers on the web,
and i hope that you will continue to share your thoughts here - i for one
am relieved to read you.
i understand you are going away for the month,
i hope it goes well,
and i look forward to more in the fall.
be well,
diane
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 01 2000 - 01:00:50 PDT