Sunday, 21 October 2018
This ragged and ramshackle psychological self only seems so real because everyone talks about something like it, mostly their own, or that of third-persons, sometimes your own. It's so persistently put forward but only in talk. It's a collection of symptoms or traces - it doesn't actually produce the thoughts, the mental chatter, la folle du logis, but is in their echo, the way they are responded to, like the way that hearing sounds in the dark can give you a sense of the kind of room or landscape you are in. Apart from such edge effects there really isn't anything to distinguish inside from outside. The conviction that such a distinction rules ontologically over phenomena is surely the greatest and most groundless of self-confirming fictions. It seems to explain so much, but the puzzling constancies that it orders are only its own consequences. Thought is like a detective that has to invent the crime that is there to solve, otherwise how could it justify being what it claims to be? The inside is only ever some arrangement of what it pretends to distinguish itself from, what it calls outsides, surfaces, appearances. There is, of course, a peculiar and rich pathos of the inside, but what else could you expect from something as imaginative as thought? Rejoice in that creativity, enjoy it, but don't for a minute take it seriously.
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