This originally appeared in Thee Data Base,
a highly useful networking thingy from Scotland. It's basically free, but
if you want to get it send a few stamps to PO Box 1238, Glasgow, G12 8AB.
And then we won't have to come round with Our Boys. Or the old style TwinTub
Washing Machine. Or the `Special' pamphlets.
ALL THEORY IS PRACTICE
The main example of this is the way in which philosophies of of life seem
to have no actual relation to their practictioners' attitudes. We can only
assume then that they are ways of using words that signify psychological
processes which are societally based, and as language gains its meaning
publically, then in fact the way that verbal theorising is used contains
no philosophical content and in fact is only some kind of direct showing
of the psychological state of the person doing the verbalising. The real
philosophical problem is not, as Camus said, whether to commit suicide.
In fact it is whether the way you actually do your philosophising leads
you to commit suicide or not.
EG:
People attack hippies for not "being realistic" about the way
the world works. Leaving aside the objection that hippies are part of the
world in the first place (much though some people might want to change that
situation), there are various problems here.
The first one is the way in which the "realistic" people spend
most of their time either reading books or listening to records or going
to gigs of "realistic" culture. This means that for all that time
they're not actually doing anything other than reading about or listening
to music about, and in fact generally circling about actually just clearly
dealing with the "realistic" problems of the world. A punk song
might make you feel a bit angry but if no action results then it is pure
mediation. Or even meditation, of a noisy sort. Of course action can and
does result due to "educational" lyrics, but this happens with
hippies too.
It's strange to note that a lot of "hippies", e.g. crusties and
underground rave scene types, are in fact rather prominent when it comes
to getting off ones arse and doing something, especially when it comes to
environmental problems. Similarly, many people genuinely feel that it's
too late and why bother anyway - but although this attitude is found a lot
in Apocalypse Culture culture, it's found amongst "hippies" too.
It's also strange to note that people get more involved in life, for better
or worse, selfishly or selflessly, when they feel better about themselves.
Depending on the person one way in which they will feel better about themselves
might be to go to a violent death-metal gig, another one might go to the
Whirl-y-gig. The kinds of thing we should be tackling and really need to
root out are ennui and other psychological states, such as depression, that
are characterised by a profound loss of interest in the game of actually
being alive.
Therefore there is no content. We are all un-content, and this keeps life
interesting.
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