Saturday, 24 June 2017
As a transcendental ego you would have no innate content, you would be a pure cogito that started out in perfect detachment from experience and then became embroiled in it as a result of subtle choices which cascaded you into the thick of context and particularity. To describe it this way is to give a mythological account, built up after the fact, upon the emergence of a certain kind of reflectiveness within always prior engagement. The question for this narrative is how did all this furniture get in here? There are not only desires and drives such as would seem to fit with the purposes of the embodiment you discover, but several layers of other drives and desires of a more contingent kind that are built on top of these. These include not only an intelligent network of modulations and hindrances to the first set of drives, but also a baroque superstructure of sui-generis drives, such as ego-drives spinning out sub-plots about identity and self-actualisation. Naturalistic as well as phenomenological accounts of varying degrees of ingenuity can be given of these, but these accounts and especially the very need for such accounts point back to the myth. Only a detached self can feel existence as a predicament or as a thrownness. It performs and throws itself into the role, loses itself and finds itself again but all in performance - until there is furniture piled on top of furniture. But say what you will, where there is performance there needs to be an audience, a watcher and not just a pretend one as part of the show.
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