Saturday, November 07, 2009
contracts of body vs. freedom of mind?
Problems associable with the difference between ethical interpersonal relations and aesthetic Self may originate in the natural difference between necessary bodily attachments and freedom of mind. I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out.
The selfish gene wants to reproduce, but evolution didn’t anticipate modernity and its lovely alternatives. (Actually, evolution doesn’t anticipate anything; it’s an incomprehensibly aggregative notion,
the upshot of millennial nature.) So we are what we are: a legacy of self-organizing iteration that happened to evince free minds.
Reproduction, though, favors attachments, lack of imagination about what to do with one’s life (as well as one’s spending), and common society that sustains the cycles, from the way we parent aspirations through the fashion industry, as if our inherent psychology is by nature meant for reproductive attachments and doesn’t often know what to do with non-reproductive attachments (e.g., love between hedonists who also responsibly sustain careers), wanderers, etc.
“Isn’t the order of nature that one cares for kids, so as to have the kids care for us when we’re old?” “Keep the population growing.” (It helps to be Catholic—or poor; the selfish gene especially favors both.)
The wanderer is an anomaly of nature. The scientist is likely doing something good for industry, but funding for too much “pure“ science is not in the social interest (let alone the arts).
The mating mind supervenes on a reproductive machine whose grand pleasure is functional. “Let us take a dim view of non-functional pleasures.”
A free mind supervenes on the mating mind, finding pleasures of imagination and body, adventure and transgression, enthralling,
which the mating mind does’t find especially valid.
This includes arts, as well as rather hedonistic leisures such as revery (better than ‘reverie’), sitting on the edge of cliffs above expansive valleys, and sexual pleasure for its own sake.
Up the road of my venture, entanglements of evolution and artfulness, eros and creativity, intellectual love and elated embodiment will find some weave.
