[MD] Boromir's Journey

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

Steve said:
"Small self" can tell a story about the evolution of value 
patterns to give evidence that the world already has 
gotten better than it once was which gives me hope for 
the future, but for "Big Self" there is always only now in 
all its perfect perfectingness. 
...
For example, a mother cries with a smile on her face as 
she consoles her daughter who has just had her heart 
broken for the first time. Everything is wrong in the world, 
but will get better. Everything always is exactly as it 
should be.

Matt:
Ah--interesting.  But notice the condescension in the 
smile: "if you only understood," while all the daughter 
wants to give such knowingness is a big fuck-you.  Tell 
the people living in shit, literally in the case of Indian 
untouchables, and if they _don't_ give you a fuck-you, we 
might want to wonder why not--don't you _want_ things to 
get better?

There's not just a contradiction, but an extreme 
antagonism here.  Stanley Cavell named it the "arrogance 
of philosophy," an arrogation of voice that I think is 
unavoidable, a price paid by anyone who consoles with 
the future perfect tense of "it _will_ get better."

Will it?  What if it doesn't?  It _has_ so far, say our 
historiographers (ignoring the other historiographers who 
say it hasn't), these small selves like ourselves, but aren't 
we going to side with Hume, that just because something 
_has_ happened in repetition gives us no perfect faith in it 
_always_ happening that way.

The Big Self now appears like an old-fashioned telos, and 
our belief in it like a teleology--things _are_ going this way, 
whether you can see God's Providence or not, see the End 
of History or not (for what else would the end of small 
selves be than an end of all these stories).

But what _utililty_ is this teleology?  _Does_ it help us 
better ourselves?

I don't know.  All I can recur to is my distinction between 
faith and hope--faith that it _will_ get better vs. hope that 
it _might_, a possibility with future actuality nestled safely 
inside vs. a simple possibility--there ain't nothin' safe 
about it.

Do we need the arrogance for hope?  Or, can we lose the 
arrogance and make hope and change even easier to 
create?

Matt
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits.
http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage_062009