FWD: I really shouldn't have taken LSD as an adolescent (slightly paranoid)
wood jim
jim33wood at yahoo.com
Sat Aug 18 16:26:35 CDT 2001
>
> . James wrote:
>
> I had even argued that maybe there was no such thing
> as identity.
> I was trying to come clean and put in a good word
> for the position I had
> been arguing against --admit that while I
> entertained the "myth of
> identity" as a philosophical possibility
>
> The "myth of identity" somehow struck me in the
> moment as quite accurate. I
> wonder, at what rate does the "average" person have
> the myth of their
> identity severely and extremely challenged? For
> some reason, being the
> terminally unique person I like to think I am, I
> have this image of
> "metropolis" identities: the millions, like robots,
> going through "lives of
> quiet desperation," not knowing they don't really
> exist but somehow
> suspecting it...(mind, at some level I do know I
> *am* one of these millions
> [minions])
>
> Take any one of us; strip us of all common elements,
> place us in a
> completely foreign environment with no familiar
> reference points, at the
> same time take away any illusions that the so-called
> self as we knew
> ourselves existed...and see what happens to the
> "sense of self." Now, what
> comes to mind, perhaps, is a Vietnam vet in a POW
> camp isolated from any
> other vets....don't many turn to "God," or their
> roots or their identity as
> patriotic Americans to survive? But is that real or
> a myth that makes one
> appear to be real in order to survive?
Viktor E. Frakl has a short book on POWs, can't
remember the title, Meaning & Will or some such.
"Humility is the most difficult of all virtues
to achieve; nothing dies harder than the
desire to think well of oneself."
Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,
T.S. Eliot.
>
> Ok. Let's take away that as well...the
> subject/object of the experiment
> will be denied any familiar myths, illusions, roles,
> or beliefs. Then what?
> What remains?
>
> Perhaps, I guess, the "soul." The essence, I would
> hypothesize, of a
> "person." Which would be absent of all "identity."
> (Remember, I
> hypothesize.) Therefore, perhaps we can define
> "identity" as "context."
> And "identity" comes from "context" alone. When
> stripped of "context,"
> "identity" ceases to exist. A new possibility
> arises...does one exist
> absent of community? (No man is an island...if a
> tree falls in the forest
> and no one is there to hear it, does it make a
> sound?) But is my hypothesis
> strictly contextual? i.e. context - dependent? In
> which case, my
> hypotheses are meaningless as they do not exist
> except in ....well, ....in
> the context of culture? Where does the possibility
> of "soul" come from, if
> not culture?
>
> I really shouldn't have taken LSD as an adolescent.
>
> Kelly
>
>
> Kurt-Werner Pörtner
In Joe's Gin Mill we didn't have no
Nietzsche or LSD
Just a couple of quarts of Stoicism
So we put a sign on the back of the Bar
"Guess you only get one chance in life to play....
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