Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 16:48:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Embodied Being In Time ("l.e.", end of section V)


FROM DESTINING NATALITY THROUGH AUTHORIAL HISTORICITY (74-79)
["Liberal Eugenics," section V, latter 6 paragraphs]

Part 3 of 3 (was to be 6 parts, but earlier postings covered multiple
paragraphs)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
FREEDOM OF SELF-FORMATIVE CONTINUITY SLIPS AWAY WITHOUT
EMBODIED REFERENCE TO NATURAL DESTINING? [78]

(Remember the kinds of titles Husserl & Heidegger used to give their
sections....)

Paragraph 78 (next to last in section V) is lovely--largely.  It
expresses an appreciation for life-historical self-identification
that is absent at earlier points where it's more important to the
issues. This paragraph shows a distinction between socialization and
individuation--at first (soon lost)--that should have been effective
all along. 

The appreciation is one-sided. You find socialization fate within
individuated life history (such that I can assume a reflective
attitude toward it), but you don't find the sense of embodiment
within that individuation, and individuation is assimilated back into
socialization relative to "bodily existence". Just the phrase,
"bodily existence" should be a tip-off, in a paragraph largely about
existence. 

The notion of bodily existence is a representation of the lived sense
of being in the world; it's not a natural category of understanding
(cf. earlier long discussion of I/me difference in identity
formation). Even representational senses of my holistic embodiment
(feeling "at one" with life, like being in love with Nature) are not
the "only because" by which "[w]e can achieve continuity in the
vicissitudes of a life history...." (sure, this is
*necessary*--embodiment wholly lived--but, at this point in the
discussion, senses of what's *sufficient*, senses of the *whole*
holism should be keynotes). 

The notion of "a natural fate going back beyond the socialization
process" is a reconstructive notion that occludes the existential
reality (in the flow, so to speak) of feeling what has happened or
being a past (fruition of time gone, thriving in the trace of the
present, this gift). The notion of natural fate and represented
bodily existence is not "essential for the capacity, as such, of
being oneself[.]" *Actively embodied* self-understanding is essential
(as discussed earlier). 

But alas...

----------------------------------------------------------------------
ARENDT DOESN'T ACTUALLY ENTAIL THE LOSS OF BEING MYSELF / BEGINNING
VIA THE INVISIBLE PROGRAMMER [79]

In your essay so far, having taken the reader through chimeras and
thought experiments, through alienated views of self-understanding
unrelatable to probable enhancements and socialization fates
split-off from a nature that belongs primarily to discourse, there's
no basis for "a discernible intrusion of the intentions of third
persons"; so we can't suppose that birth "no longer constitutes a
beginning." There is no "programmed person" to credibly consider
"questionable in a moral sense." 


Next: beginning of section VI: MORAL MISGIVINGS RELATIVE TO LOSS OF
FREEDOM TO APPROPRIATE EXTERNAL EXPECTATIONS AS MY OWN? [80]



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