Thinking, Reading and the Social...
10/11/08 18:36 Filed in: Free Thinking
Habits & routines are very often, if not always, an obstacle for free thought. Only free individual thinking breaks the frontiers, because it does not imitate or repeat itself, but creates, innovates.
Society does not accept the unusual, the innovative because it challenges the rules that are intrinsically based on repetition. As such a permanent tension is built up between our individual thinking and “being” and our necessity and need for the “social”.
That is why thinking has a method but no system.
The ‘extraordinary’ however, is not necessarily exceptional, but just stands as “usual” outside the “used to”.
An individual “habit” is therefore not exactly a habit but a “behaviour” and does not fall under the social rules.
Very often personal and individual behaviour are indeed described by society as “eccentric”, being out of the centre, this meaning “creating unbalance” or disturbance of a fixed pattern.
As such “ideology” is a social way of “thinking”, and in fact counterproductive to real thought and even a contradiction in termini for thinking.
In an ideology ideas appear as social phenomena, guided by an inherent logic. But ultimately man is an individual that will not be integrated in just one system.
This is in fact the inherent problem of “social philosophy”, where the mere confrontation of the elements of “thinking” and “social” make the discipline de facto impossible.
In this context “reading” becomes an experience defined by the contingencies of the text and the reader. What one reads is always more or less a hazard and therefore hazardous.
It leaves traces, and configures in a high degree the thoughts. “We only have thoughts for which we have the words to express them” (Morgenröte)
Each time we read, we gamble.
It is a disconcerting game of worry, irritation and insult on the one side and fascination, seduction, with the ultimate reassurance of confirmation on the other.
This reflects the conflict mentioned earlier, the dilemma of thought combined with the skepticism that accompanies it and the social rule, which attracts men to the security of tradition and a majority ideology.
The apparent presence of criticism inside a system, a party, a religion or an ideology, is only an alibi for the individual to survive in his societal prison.
By totalizing criticism society neutralizes the so-called sceptic, expands criticism and scepticism to “everything” and as such simultaneously to “nothing”, reducing it to a very subtle, even subversive defence-mechanism for it’s own system and it’s survival.
Society does not accept the unusual, the innovative because it challenges the rules that are intrinsically based on repetition. As such a permanent tension is built up between our individual thinking and “being” and our necessity and need for the “social”.
That is why thinking has a method but no system.
The ‘extraordinary’ however, is not necessarily exceptional, but just stands as “usual” outside the “used to”.
An individual “habit” is therefore not exactly a habit but a “behaviour” and does not fall under the social rules.
Very often personal and individual behaviour are indeed described by society as “eccentric”, being out of the centre, this meaning “creating unbalance” or disturbance of a fixed pattern.
As such “ideology” is a social way of “thinking”, and in fact counterproductive to real thought and even a contradiction in termini for thinking.
In an ideology ideas appear as social phenomena, guided by an inherent logic. But ultimately man is an individual that will not be integrated in just one system.
This is in fact the inherent problem of “social philosophy”, where the mere confrontation of the elements of “thinking” and “social” make the discipline de facto impossible.
In this context “reading” becomes an experience defined by the contingencies of the text and the reader. What one reads is always more or less a hazard and therefore hazardous.
It leaves traces, and configures in a high degree the thoughts. “We only have thoughts for which we have the words to express them” (Morgenröte)
Each time we read, we gamble.
It is a disconcerting game of worry, irritation and insult on the one side and fascination, seduction, with the ultimate reassurance of confirmation on the other.
This reflects the conflict mentioned earlier, the dilemma of thought combined with the skepticism that accompanies it and the social rule, which attracts men to the security of tradition and a majority ideology.
The apparent presence of criticism inside a system, a party, a religion or an ideology, is only an alibi for the individual to survive in his societal prison.
By totalizing criticism society neutralizes the so-called sceptic, expands criticism and scepticism to “everything” and as such simultaneously to “nothing”, reducing it to a very subtle, even subversive defence-mechanism for it’s own system and it’s survival.