We constantly do things before they make sense, even before we 'will' them (current studies suggests a time-lapse of around 500ms between the motor-system initiation of an action and the conscious decision to carry out the action).
We can never experience what happens in that half-a-second. This is, for us, the transcendental limit of experience, at least of sense. Except, that is (as in petit mal), as a lacuna testifying mutely to the existence of an outside with duration and substance but impenetrable to experience.
Materialism is - or should be - a rational account of the irrational logics of matter. In fact materialism, a rigorous calculus of non-sense, is our only hope of discursively spanning this gap between bodily information-processing and rational accounting, between the real and its accomodation. And even then, only discursively, only as a image of the outside. But what if this image, transmitted in multiple forms, like a virus, infecting a whole civilization, acted like an invocation, a magical symbol, slowly, progressively corrosive to sense, to the need for sense, calling to the outside...?
Posted by robin at September 11, 2004 12:04 PMsee Dream and culture, no. 12 then!
But all of us are like the savage when we dream. Faulty recognitions and mistaken equations are the basis of the poor conclusions which we are guilty of making in dreams, so that when we recollect a dream clearly, we are frightened of ourselves, because we harbor so much foolishness within.
The utter clarity of all dream-ideas, which presupposes an unconditional belief in their reality, reminds us once again of the state of earlier mankind in which hallucinations were extraordinarily frequent, and sometimes seized whole communities, whole nations simultaneously. Thus, in our sleep and dreams, we go through the work of earlier mankind once more.
The last para could almost be Freud (does he say something v.similar somewhere?)
Posted by: undercurrent at September 11, 2004 12:40 PMI'm just about to reread Julian Jaynes 'The origin of consciousness...' which if I remember rightly also says much the same thing.
Heraclitus says the opposite though (d.89): 'The world of the waking is one and shared, but the sleeping turn aside each into his private world.'
Posted by: undercurrent at September 12, 2004 06:56 PM
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