Well.
I really haven't read as much post-1968 French theory as I let on. I am a bit of a phony, really.
So, while I intuitively understand that whole collapse of liner/meta-narrative thing, I guess I'm trying to figure out why it happened. Maybe someone has already answered. I have a book by Lyotard lying around somewhere. I'll get to it someday.
But.
My best hypothesis so far.
Well there's a few.
I mean, the rise of consumerist individualism.
But you knew that one.
Um.
More like.
That whole linear narrative thing had another thing attached, right. Progress.
Towards. The forwards that provides the past with agency.
And here's where I wonder.
What came first.
Did utopia die because the narrative died or did the narrative die because utopia died?
And why did utopia die?
The impossibility of a social subject?
The materialist conception of humanity?
Like, we're all just skin and bones and all. I mean You Only Live Once, but humans live forever?
Is our inability to "fix" the environment symptomatic with a general weariness with life?
Does that weariness come from feeling like there is nothing really to look forward to?
Why is there nothing to look forward to?
Because there is nothing to look forward to or because there is no forward?
17 hours ago
2 comments:
The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said philosopher Josiah Royce, “solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.”
from BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
I totally agree. At the end of the day, I consider myself as being a person of the Left, but I think our greatest failure is that we have been much better at tearing down false "something greaters" than building better ones.
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