Friday, August 18, 2023
whose mind am i reading?
In the beginning, there were no words, but we know now that there was caring: good enough attachment of infant to mother…In the beginning, there was no other, just the caring, so-called “relationality,” primal inter-ing. Everything was interal—unrepresentable interality, what Antonio Damasio, decades ago, called “the feeling of what happens” (though he wasn’t primarily oriented by relating-ness).
Then, one day—or gradually emerging from all nebulosity—there was an other: mother, which is first primal personification.
One, two, three,…infinity: Everything is personified.
If it moves, it’s alive; and if it’s alive, it intends.
The wind through the trees “proves” a spirit that children need not fear.
The sun gives us life because it intends that.
There are gods, dear, because everything has its place. As Leibniz assured us, “nothing is without reason” (Heidegger, The Principle of Reason).
feeling, belonging, intending—and representation!: cognition with conation with feeling with belonging.
But mentability conceals itself by giving prevailing value to cognition, because caring made possible belonging, which made possible importance, which kept interesting whatever: others, events, things.
Before so-called “mindreading,” there was mind ascribing: personifying.
Toys that move have intentions (batteries not imputed). Barbie and Ken need each other, because children are gods of ensuring that mommy and daddy will stay true to each other. And a girl can become anyone. Somewhere, there is the boy of one’s dreams.
Talk to your teddy bear. Talk to your dog.
Says Woody Allen: “When I pray to ‘God’ I’m talking to myself.”
Don’t look at the Sun, but never cease to hold holy awe for the power of intending light in all which matters.
I’m enthralled, yet haunted, by the spirit of personification: Biologists readily say cells “communicate.”
The deathly storm was “an act of God” for some hidden sin “we“ must have overlooked.
The power of myth is to prove that the gods are watching, like viewers through the camera that dwells with characters’ privacy as not there to them at all; or
the reader of omniscient narratability thrills to personify godly access to minds
of others, there through ascribing, like any text presumed to have an author
(not ChatGPT!), authoriality ascribed—and no one “reads” the same author of
a given text—as if there is one text which is the same for any two readers,
let alone matching senses of authorial implicature.
So, Derrida got enthralled with writing in speech: One is always appropriating oneself, as if there’s one self being “here,” there: a mindfulness (or -lessness) made for you to incarnate, as if merely read.
Drama, drama everywhere: Everybody’s an actor in ever-incomplete plays, impersonating whom one is, who “you” are (to be “witnessed”), personifying advents, objectifying misread intents, pretending, pretensing, fabulating—mygod, what’s not partly fiction?
So, Literature tropes all being. Everything’s phenomenology, which “cognitive” science barely discerns.
Feeling in belonging with intending representations is all we care about and for: purpose which we create, otherwise no point at all.
Endless ending is The End, thank goodness (not that one knows that thanks is heard).
We live in mirrorplays of ascribed and discerned intending, “bearing” and “granting,” Heidegger said of “The Thing.”
The presence of presencing lives in the interality of there being the medial text (“Da-sein”), whose presence is by godknows who’s presencing, echoed in specific coherings.
