Okay. There's a real out there. Try standing in front of a bus and denying the existence of either the bus or your biological body. Thinking the bus out of existence will only happen in a movie. In the real you'll be splattered across the road.
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There's a real out there - a material realm. Beyond that - it gets tricky. To make reality emerge from the real you need language - a signifying system of sorts. Language gives things form. Language though is a man-made system that predates my existence. I’m born into language – it speaks me. The essential self is dead at the moment “I” come into existence. Language always distances us from the real. Something is lost at the moment I enter language – a plenitude of self that never existed in the first instance because it arise from a place where the self in inconceivable
😕. Nevertheless, I feel this imaginary lack and it becomes the driving force for my very existence. I seek the thing I never had in the first instance and that’s why desire is always unfilled.
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🙂 or WTF! That’s all very Freudian/Lacanian/Kristevian – I’ve avoided the proper terminology and any reference to the mother. If I’m feeling particularly in line with Kristeva I’d throw in notions of the semiotic but I’m not.
I don’t have much faith in Cartesian dualism - in a mind/body split. I’m moving towards the embodied mind in line with Merleau-Ponty and others. Similarly, I’ve little patience with the idea of an ahistorical, acultural “human nature”. I don’t think of the subject or self as stable – for me it’s split – sometimes radically fissured – always fragmented.
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😡 I don’t think reality is entirely subjective because language is a shared system – if it was entirely subjective we’d live in a totally atomised world. The ideology of our particular time/space pins meaning down - Freedom in a capitalist society doesn't necessarily mean the same thing is a socialist society). I don't recall dreams but I have a healthy respect for the unconscious and that's why I have a problem with Free Will (Sartre would disagree but he's dead). I question history – I don’t think it’s as teleological as Liberal Humanism would have us believe. I'm quite interested in dialectical materialism combined with messianism. I like the idea of history as a constellation - it's in keeping with my soft Marxism.
So - I don't THINK the 'reality' I experience is the ACTUAL reality - I know it isn't. Does it keep me awake at night? No...only when the gap between the real and reality gets too big. Do I think about it a lot? No.
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God, that just reminds me of the worst dream I possibly ever had. I was a teen and I dreamt that I woke up, showered, brushed my hair and teeth, ate breakfast, got ready for school and biked to school...and then I woke up and had to do it all over again. Pretty sure I skipped that day, lol.
LOL! And had you watched Groundhog Day the previous night?
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