Unconforming, Unindifferent Thinking & Acting for yourself & other beings

People have a deep, ancient, and long ingrained shame of appearing in the public world. I got this insight, which I think is intended by religion in order to keep people oppressed and controlled, from a sentence in “This is not Sufficient, An Essay in Animality and Human Nature in Derrida”, by Leonard Lawlor on page 107:

“Echoing Heidegger, who appropriates Holderlin, we can say that “the animals are signs deprived of sense,” meaning that they are without direction, without destination, without “sens” or “Sinn” in the literal sense.”

Upon contemplating this sentence, I realized that “Sinn” or Sin could be interpreted as having been originally linked to sense, in other words, not only does religion teach that we are in original sin, and our nature is to sin, but our senses themselves are sinful. Or, I could say that, as soon as I discovered the etymological connection between sense and sin it, to me, became immediately obvious that the idea of sin is a man made construct based on the fundamental basic constitution of man. So to even be in the world physically, and to perceive the world is sinful. Of course, it is then concomitantly true that to be perceived is sinful for someone else who is seeing a shameful being. How could we not want to avoid ourselves and all others.

There is another dominating closely following logic here: because our sense of need and fulfillment is primarily experienced and actualized through each of our senses, our very motivation and acting becomes inextricably tied to sin. We have no hope than to become legalistic since the entire idea invalidates and idealizes the practical reality of the human condition; it inverts (reverses) and subjugates the very will and impetus of the human; and it divides us from any chance of unity. So instead of initiating new thoughts and actions (let alone coming together with others (the sinful other) and actualizing these ideas through the power of plurality (remember the other undermining un-truth–> ‘power corrupts’), we are lead by a ‘dead’ system of rules of behavior; we follow this written and socially propagated system that is repeated ad infinitum with banality; we emptily and painfully fluctuate between a sense of meaningless powerlessness and dutiful conservative politically-correct patriotism (or what ever is the current political line, e.g., nationalism…); we never create our own unique, distinct community public space where we often get together, find local solutions to local real problems, and experience ongoing, fulfilling, satisfying and fun connections that last, give us a sense of permanence, being accepted, liked and loved–a sense of home–saying, telling and doing things that are creative, vibrant, alive and powerful and meaningful.

How can the origins and linkage of this insidious conceptualization and oppressive, civilization wide and historically long tradition be countered and can we be freed from this self-perpetuating trap? Our whole understanding, conceptualization, analysis, judgment of the world is colored by our belief in a defective perspective that originates within this sin based constellation of the world and us and we conclude can only, always lead us to a sinful achievement or product and this, inevitably can only cause reluctance, passivity, self-alienation, deficit assessment, avoidance, suspicion, hate and often times leads to harm and injury (it automatically predisposes one to look for an enemy outside of oneself as the self cannot be comfortably seen or tolerated, and concurrently, avoiding oneself causes us to want to reject others which we do by projecting upon others this sinful archetype which can never be disproved because no human eye can see the motivations of a human heart, ’suspicious minds’ as a phenomenon, relies upon a typical ideological circular logic that presupposes a truth and then evaluates the truth of the premise based on interpreting behavior to fit the premise, all in a realm that cannot be disproved, such as in the future, or in a part of the human realm that cannot be objectively known–e.g., the heart); possibly worse, it invalidates and makes unnecessary, in our understanding, any development and inclusion of ethics and morality, since the whole realm and consideration of good and bad is super-circumscribed by bad; our framework, our hermeneutic, has been too deeply and inexorably concretized by this original association in Western Civilization.  In this paradigm our very existence and any action we initiate would be violating ourselves and all others. We are unknowingly and unconsciously paralyzed.

Well seeing the connection is wonderful.

~ by hoorob24 on August 13, 2009.