The Slope to Life and Entropy. Or the Homeless Mind and Purpose.

Snow

Let's talk about another Frenchman called Paul Ricœur. We have to because he writes about Narrative Identity and the continuous work of bridging the gap between sameness and change in us people. And yes, of course we're not going to call it sameness and change, that would be sad and pathetic like playing the Guitar in church or attempting to modernize Lutheranism.

The two new words are not big words but they share a quality found in the word entropy that makes it difficult to remember the difference between an increase of entropy from a decrease of entropy. With entropy the effort to visualize the distinction, i.e. whether a decrease in entropy means more chaos or less, might not be worth it. But in understanding Paul Ricœur and Arendt's understanding of the role narrative and story-making play in the building of structure in us people the difference between idem-identity and ipse-identity is a useful one.

Ipse is Latin, it means "himself," "herself" or "itself." And we are going to light a candle, ignore the sneers and within the context of Narrative Identity, we're going to call ipse-identity, Selfdom. It's the place we are at the moment in the present. It's not where we have been, and while selfdom might contain where we are thinking of going or where we might want to be going, it's not actually where we are going because fortune telling is a sin and people have been burned at the stake because of it.

Idem is Latin. Lawyers use it a lot when they write confusing documents, it means "the same." As idem-identity, it means your identity in terms of everything that came before.

In Arendt and Ricœur's story of a self there's a slope between the sameness of a past that can only be reinterpreted or reinforced and the selfdom of the present. A challenge to unity or a challenge to the cohesion of the narrative such as "I thought you told me you went to the doctor yesterday" creates tension on this slope. These challenges can sometimes persuade a person to get off the skis walk back uphill in search of a reinterpretation. If that looks like effort, they can plain make stuff up, which is easier to do when the idem is shall we say less well documented. 

However, tread warily grasshopper as you pad around in this swamp of what Paul Ricœur called Selfdom and which one of Arendt's lovers had called The Dasein, the being there which over time engages in the creative process of making its own meaning.

Yes! In our day and age we people as sources of milkable data might well become a bundle of data points who pay the bills. But Creative Is. We make our own meaning, or if you prefer this bundle of data points confronts it's environment, it remains unpredictable, it's an authentic contribution, irrational, emotion driven, disordered and unreasonable yet it's everything entropy can't help but run toward.

What's Ricœur and or Arendt's definition of freedom?

Is it: "Yes avoid the shortcuts in case you stop bothering to think." Or is it: "Staying true to one's unique, usually unlikable, possibilities." Or could it be a mixture of both.  

The Error of Not Thinking and the Banality of Lies

 La Chatte ne dorm pas

The words: "reflecting on unified self-hood over time" would I believe evince negative reactions in the ranks of the heathen. It's that whole business of "Where was I on February 7th 1958?" A narrative that bridges sameness and self. The argument for such a narrative is a tension between things that change (self) and things that don't change (sameness).

This tension between self and sameness, like everything else we people have to struggle with hour by endless hour on a daily basis, produces a life that can be thought of as a bunch of organs and tissues wholly devoted to an organism comprised of a series of choices made by a continuous, unified self. These choices can be judged and recorded, and compared to the choices of other unfortunates who enter the public square, which used to be where you went to get groceries, get your pork chops, they had a stocks for village miscreants, you could get beer, share opinions, layout your choices and so on.

In the good old days we just had memory, then came writing and the awfulness that is record keeping. Nowadays we have digital devices that spend a lot of time recording our choices so that we can be turned into milkable data. And! Our "unified self hood over time" now has to contend with an expanded public space that includes the Tar Pits of Facebook, unless you too are lucky enough to have been banned, tweeting which under the new owner is called something else and a wealth of Bobby's other friends and relatives, far too numerous to mention or even begin to understand, like Substack which seductively describes itself as "a new economic engine for culture," a coyness that makes a person inclined to invest in wrist slitting razor blades. 

The narrative, or tension, in us people that bridges sameness and self, which for so long had found a cohesion in the judge and jury of the face to face of a public square, now includes invisible spaces where the self can be be anything it wants as long as it maintains a sameness by getting enough praise and adoration through likes, algorithmic caresses or clicks or whatever.

This all produces an increased confidence in a way of viewing humanity Hannah Arendt promoted. We can add the Banality of Lies to the error of thoughtlessness Arendt suggested our collective psyche is prone to making.  Thoughtlessness, in this context, means "Not using thought to think." 

The Best we got is a Reality that "Kicks Back"

Supper

That's right! A stainless steel spoon and a modest portion of major nut-eater fare in an artisanal bowl, balanced precariously on a Sibley's Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America to protect a well-traveled Zanzibar Chest from possible dribblage. It's an identity crisis.

Praxis, means action as opposed to theory. Lexis, means the total stock of words available as opposed to grammar or syntax which is how words work when they are properly strung together on a washing line. For Hannah Arendt, one of our heroes, Praxis and Lexis, or Action and Words are how we people reveal ourselves for who we are.

But first we all just have to accept Nietzsche's comment in one of his notebooks which boldly stated: "there are no facts only interpretations." The rest of his life he spent coming to terms with this observation by trying to explain what he meant. Hence, in shorthand, Nietzsche's many books, in greater or lessor detail described the world of people as follows, and to save the washing line we're going to use colons:

A mobile army of metaphors, symbols, and anthropomorphisms: A social contract where people agree to use the same terms to avoid being misled by one another: This agreement allows society and communication to function and is a necessary life-promoting error rather than a perfect mirror of reality: This man-made fiction would have remained a fiction but for the intervention of belief.

My own crisis with truth at the moment isn't the nature of reality, it's tonight's supper. I'd prefer a ham-hock in soup, followed by a pork chop on a stick, an egg and bacon sandwich, accompanied by a fifty gallon barrel of real beer, a crate of Mount Gay, a dozen cartons of cigarettes and the Ghost of Tina Turner singing "we don't need another hero."

The Management Studies Anathema

Beech

CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to my way of thinking, is yet another manifestation of corporate mumbo-jumbo. It even sounds like something that might have emerged from Abraham Maslow just prior to his telling his disciples that Irony was a perversion that would have to be criminalized before any of us had a chance to achieve happiness by Self-Actualizing, otherwise known as working yourself into an early grave so that you can have more stuff than anyone else when you die jogging.

And yes I can be a horrible person, bound for eternal damnation who loathes the academics who chose management studies as a discipline but the fact is the Buddha makes infinitely more sense to humanity than Maslow's Psychology. Either way my fondness for the words retard and nit-wit is actualized mightily by Maslow, behaviorists in general and cognitive behaviorists in particular.  

What does Self-Actualization mean? If you cast your mind deep into the bowels of liberty as defined by post enlightenment thinking, go back to 1981, to expressions like Personal Growth, Self Esteem, you'll find a little ditty attached to visuals of girls and boys, some wearing glasses and looking very weedy, along with the lyrics: "Be all that you be, join the US Army."

Twenty years later, in 2001, The US Army wanted a change, something more in keeping with the servitude to a holism that produced Me, Me and Me to match the prevailing ethos of those sterile years. The new slogan was "Army of One." For fans of "Be all you can be," in 2023, that crap-ass, inconceivably absurd "Army of One" was disappeared and our self actualizing favorite "Be all that you can be" was returned to its rightful, possibly ironic, place in the recruiting office.

It must have been something they were eating in the 1950's, could have been sliced bread, that turned them bouncy. It was when this whole be all you can be, Chamber of Commerce in the now, gestalt therapy type vibe took on the glow of a personal responsibility with workshops, lecturers wearing tee shirts, revival meetings, homework and must read self help books. The point is I don't actually see authentic in a self-actualized individual. I don't see them as true to themselves and I'm not in the least impressed with the claim that these shin-guards who have climbed to the top of the actualization pyramid are less influenced by what others think. If anything they are more influenced.

No wonder Cognitive Behavioral Therapy took a death grip on the throat of Maslow's zoo keepers paradise of maladapted humanity. You can almost see the smile on the face of a Cognitive Therapist as he or she puts the principle tool of the Cognitive Therapy trade to work by identifying and then calmly and cooperatively reinterpreting a patient's cognitive distortions and reduces them to lightly carbonated decaffeinated fizzy drinks. "There's nothing under the bed sweetheart, a bacon and egg sandwich won't stop you from being all that you can be!"