Aporetic universalism

Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism has said that those who have lost their place in a community - politically or legally - can only articulate themselves in the private sphere and are at the mercy of friendship, sympathy and the "great and incalculable grace of love" which says "I want you to be". When I feel at a loss I to turn to my friends and those friends, who are sometimes also my enemies, are my books. Yet strangely, rather than encouraging me to withdraw further into myself - with the attendant danger of becoming Hegel's 'beautiful soul' - who is not beautiful at all - I find myself again.

TBC

Anomie

TBC

"Keep your mind in hell and despair not"

Several days ago, while I was looking for a notepad in which to write, I stumbled across an entry that I had written on a day in a June of over six years ago. For no particular reason that I can remember I read that I was feeling especially down. It occurred to me, as I was reading my observations, that, while now I very rarely sink to such depths, now instead I feel permanently low but without however recognising that I feel persistently misreable. And as I write this I am reminded of a very brief exchange I had with someone when I attempted to explain what it was - and, implicitly, why -I was intending to study by pursuing a PhD: the only answer I could give at the time was that I was intending to study Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness. As for 'why', I can only say that I had no choice. The answer was perhaps just as imcomprehensible to my inquisitor as the question was to me but not at all ironically it was noted that I had said this with a smile on my face: not a smug, knowing smile but a smile that arises out of pure happiness. The prospect of studying Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness filled me with a joy not unlike the joy I felt when I was first introduced to the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance - or the joy that I feel when I listen to a musical note that somehow sounds out of tune.

TBC

"Unutterable and nameless..."

Ironic, perhaps, that I should quote Nietzsche but still publicise myself on the world-wide web: "Unutterable and nameless is that which torments and delights my soul and is also the hunger of my belly...be too exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you have to speak of it, do not be ashamed to stammer". And a variation on the theme by Rose: "If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless". Ironic, perhaps, too, that I should spend years struggling against academia and eventually reject it because "we do not have enough command of each other's language for the exchange to be fruitful", yet return to the very discipline against which I had struggled for so long. And yet, perhaps, not so ironic at all for I was neither in nor out of academia for me to have joined it initially only to have either escaped or re-joined it later: I did not return to it for I was already there, only I didn't call it academia then and I don't have a name for it now.