From: "John Foster" <borealis-AT-mercuryspeed.com>
Subject: Re: skepticriticizm
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 01:52:35 -0800


Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man which I read and reread some time ago came
back to me tonight. I was reading stuff on Borderline Personality Disorders,
and I had this impression regarding the Invisible Man. It is a novel with an
existential theme to it, and I would include in with other's like:

La Nausea (somewhat autobiographical of Sartre)
The Diary of Country Priest (George Bernanos)
The Bone People (Keri Hulme)
and segments of other books like:
W. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
Forgotten Title of Quebec Author about a boy who is very strange

The common theme is about maltreatment in someway.....which seems pertinent
to the list, but I don't know how. It is dialectical behaviour therapy in
reading about it; I was one who lived with a person who may have had the
disorder...uncovers there, a stair way from the bottom. Jung used the phrase
<abaisement du mental niveau> meaning 'lowering of the mental level'....all
because I was in this horrible relationship that just about buried me. There
was a very good reason for reading these books I believe, at least it
prepared me for finding dignity where there was not much to be found.

No actually that is true. If you ever read The Bone People, then you may
appreciate this because it is about being overloaded with concern for
another and for finding true intimacy, and I don't expect that true intimacy
is found in an interpersonal relationship, because you can trust too much,
and lose. (Read Beautiful Loser, Leonard Cohen; or Ballad of Stone Picker,
George Ryga). That all comes later. You see there are certain sections of
Being and Time which, when I first read it made me feel different about what
was real, especially since as I mentioned earlier much of traditional
metaphysics deals with abstractions. Moods, states of mind, are 'concrete'
reals, not simply abstractions. Emotions are abstract because they are
universals and we rarely experienc pure and primary emotions, rather we
experience feelings. In fact, let us put it this way: much is 'hypothetical'
[Kant calls some beliefs and affirmations hypothetical] and much is
'categorical'. Now I have found this expressed differently by Francis
Bradley, in his Reality and Appearance, which is a nice book, and was what
largely served as the main topic of T.S. Eliots' doctoral dissertation.

Anyway there is a feature which is not discussed at all and that is how mod
technology (and it's policies) becomes 'effacing', leaving innocent people &
landscapes maltreated. At the center there is this aggressive sense of
meaning given to family relations or being with a SO which is not well
discussed. Heidegger relates that guilt is 'wanting to have a conscience'
and that conscience is our witness, but I think he wrote that a conscience
is also anticipation, and what is that? There is something 'anticipartory'
about the conscience, the call to conscience. I forgot and will have to read
about that. This is a central theme in The Bone People...I was
there....Funny how recent psychologists have disclosed how there are 8
primary emotions, and then another groups claims there are 6 primary
emotions, and anger is not one of them. I agree on that since anger is a
response to one of the 6 primary emotions such as guilt, fear, anxiety,
shame, et cetera. Okay, and also that other emotions arise from mixtures of
these emotions, but emotions are short term physiologically felt changes,
and according to the James-Lange Theory, the actual recognition of an
emotion is via some awareness of a belief or cognitively directed thought
which is felt as movement, i.e. increased heart rate, limb movements, and
other outward physical changes. (There is a change of mood, but this does
not result in a change of emotion until after there is a bodily change,
which is what Marleau-Ponty would agree to as well). So the emotion is felt
firstly as a sensori-motor disturbance, and then the mind gives to this
change an emotion. (without a body we would feel no emotional change, and
that is why in dreams, we only feel emotions when we are aware of our body
changing, running, leaping, or flying - I used to have wonderful dreams
flying; but if I was sleeping alone, I would have horrible dreams about
people trying to take my furniture, or haul my vehicle away and my body
would be paralyzed). However sentiments, moods, states of mind, are of
longer duration than mere emotions. If the James-Lange Theory is correct
more often than not, then the Mind is more influential than we care to
claim, and the strict Idealist, Realist version is correct, not the
alternative, and Heidegger in Being and Time is pretty 'up-to-date' as a
cognitive appraisal, and his work is relevant.

Anyway you perhaps do not understand me all, so I will leave it at that. No
it is cool here, some snow, the lake is frozen over, and I heard the
neighbours out with the dogs sledding. But it was very warm in Kamloops, the
skift of snow has melted there and it looks like desert again.

chao

john foster


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Johnson" <beeso-AT-pop.charter.net>
To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 10:44 PM
Subject: Re: skepticriticizm


> >was Roquentin lead singer in La Nausea or was he Lead Criminal in Crime
and
> >Punishment?
> >
> >the blue jazz, what did I do to desire to be so black and blue (Ralph
> >Ellison, Invisible Man?) or was it Satchmo? I cannot remember, but I know
it
> >was a black man who was black and blue, or was it a battered husband (In
the
> >Velvet Touch/Underground).
>
>
> hi john, i think it was louie, or at least he was at protege spot, a
> fully either/or carnate enfillament of the more visible side of
> ellison
>
> and what the hell are you doing awake so late up there in the land of
> the midnight sun eh jean michell? - u must be the counter argument to
> mp's being up so early in sandwich
>
> g'nite n g'morning,
>
> -I
>
>
> >
> >Ir read these and others but they are all merging together in sadness and
> >bluesy realmic possibilities of my own transcendence). <=one eye & smile
&
> >scar below dimple
> >
> >a face with letters and meaning, non-effacing dermal mask
> >
> >A new meaning of transcendence. I happens once in life, when the all real
> >meets up with the Absolute ideal......does it?
> >
> >sckepterion
> >
> >jean michelle fusserl
> >
>
>
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>



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