Belly Button Lint

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Category: Culture

  • Theme:

    splitting your soul to survive

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    1–2 minutes

    Freud observes that the invention of the “soul” is an attempt to live forever: we declare an unseen part of ourselves everlasting.

    He compares the splitting of the self into some intangible “other” (it is us, but it’s not all of us, but it’s also not fully known to us) as drawing from the tradition of the spirit animal, or the shadow.

    The attempt to defy death leads us to partner and externalize a vital component of ourselves.

    In Harry Potter the Horcrux Voldemort uses is a soul-fragment reliquary, but its existence outside of his body is a perversion. The soul must remain in the vessel of the body.

    Conversely, in His Dark Materials each child has a natural external other, a daemon as embodied reflection or external soul partner.

    Leaving fiction, we have the literal and metaphorical shadow, which operates as an alternate self. It is attached but can be relegated to being separate; an oddly unknown dark mirror that is present when we are in the light.

    When the shadow self acts we are aghast, as if an external entity has momentarily triumphed and must be relegated outside once again. So, we demote a portion of our soul to live underneath us, behind us, attached to us but ignored so that we maintain interior purity.

  • Theme:

    naivety as virtue

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    1–2 minutes

    Our naivety can be a virtue.

    When wisdom accepts brutality and evil out of an overly weary and worldly common sense, aspirational hope is patronized.

    This brand of wisdom accepts the unacceptable, promoting a moral deficiency of stagnation.

  • Theme:

    The blame game

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    1–2 minutes

    When we excessively shift fault to the negligence of others (by insisting they should’ve thought more of us or prevented hardship from happening to us), we create a space that disincentivizes responsibility and creativity.

    For example, automakers who fail to recall vehicles often intentionally mask profiteering as accidental negligence expecting only a harsh rebuke. Yet, the victim deserves total remuneration, and the false practice must be deterred.

    However, if we redefine “victimization” to a scale beyond any reasonable foresight and then punish makers for lacking Nostradamus-like predictive capacity, any intelligent creator will realize success makes you a target.

    If you are inventive, perhaps create, then take the money and run. There will no longer be responsible oversight or incremental advancement, but instead hit-and-run creativity to avoid a victimization mob.

  • Theme:

    Morality vs Metaphysics; classical vs modern

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    1–2 minutes

    Modern sensibility is metaphysical, while classical is moral, according to Albert Camus.

    Metaphysics is asking “what is” – such as what is being, or perception- while morality is the ethical consideration of the right or good. Modernity is a recursive evaluative question rather than a value judgement.

    All of that confusion to say: we value the question over values.

  • Theme:

    leisure: the highest human virtue

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    1–2 minutes

    Aristotle suggests the highest human virtue is leisure.
    Not producing (or consuming) is when you can self-reflect and pontificate.
    Every other action, such as war, politics, or vacation, serves some other function.

    The real question is: if we have forgotten how to serve ourselves, we must always serve a function.

    {from Oliver Burkeman, “4,000 weeks” }

  • Theme:

    Truth is at hand

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    1–2 minutes

    Camus says churches, political or religious, care not for the truth. They establish doctrines, which declare eternal aims, which never last.

    The truth is at hand: touchable.

    Even if you claim it does not last, at least it makes no false declarations of eternity.

  • Theme:

    Art reveals the lie and saves us from the real.

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    1–2 minutes

    Picasso says, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”

    Nietzsche says, “we have art in order not to die of the truth.” Or, the creative act saves us from the truth (reality).

    In one view, the world is hidden and must be revealed through the “lie of art.”
    On the other, the world’s reality of brutality requires transcendent imagining.

  • Theme:

    Entelechey: realization of potential

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    1–2 minutes

    Aristotle says there is a core principle within that shapes outcomes into reality.

    The “entelechey” is a motivating force that organizes potential into actuality; that is, it directs potential into the real instead of mere theory or form.

    A fundamental seed, like a crystalline DNA, expresses its shape (ideas and form) and its will to expand into an organized realization (matter).

  • Theme:

    Wrong in the name of right

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    1–2 minutes

    Doing wrong in the name of right seems obviously wrong. Virtue can shift into justice, and shade into justification.

    But how do you know what is right?

    The right is known because it endures, while means/ends instrumentalization contradicts itself.

  • Theme:

    Actions follow being, or not

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    1–2 minutes

    “Actions follow being,” wrote Aristotle twenty-three centuries ago. He meant that a thing can only act according to what it is. (Luke Burgis, Wanting)

    If your “being” is set, this smacks of determinism, yet it also feels true that one cannot act out of character.

    We must ask: what if the truth is the opposite? There is no being without first acting.