488.
Being: from property to process.
In
the preceding item in this blog. I summarised Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the
transition from a social societal structurer to an economic, capitalist one. At
the same time, there was a transition from a process view of identity, life as
a process of development, advocated by Aristotle, and later Kierkegaard and
Heidegger , of being as a verb, as something one does, to being as a noun,as something one has. From
the latter is is but a small step.to identity as having sneakers of a certain
brand, in consumerist society, to the benefit of manufacturing.
As a result, one wants to cram a fnite
life full with things and experiences, as argued by Hartmut Rosa (2016, 2019,
neglecting attention and time spent on what Rosa called ‘resonance’, the maintenance of relations of mutual effort and
attention, in give and take, mutual influence, that people really want. To cram
more and more material and experiential content in our finite lives, the
efficiency and speed of production of those must continue to increase.This
leads to what hartmut Rosa called an ‘acceleration’. that crowds out resonance.
This
is related.to the idea that a person is not ready-made, acting as an outside
observer to the world, trying to come to grips with it. We come into the world
with a potential to deveop ideas, in a.process where we try to assimilate
experience in whatever cognitive frames we have at the moment, and adapt that
when experience does not fit In that way, we are not only part of the world but
the world is part of us, in our constitution in interaction.with it. People are
dissimilar because their reconstuction of the world is dependent on its
path,along an individual life.This, I think, is the meaning of Heidegger’s
notion of ‘Dasein’.
This
does not mean that all our cognitive constructions are adequately realistic.Our
mode of cognitive construction,has developed in evolution,giving priority to
what was best for survival and procreation. What was adaptive in the past, in
the long history of evolution, is not necessarily adaptive under current
conditions. In 400.000 years,society.has developed from that of
hunter-gatherers,via agricuture and indusrial society. to present digital
society.with radically changed conditions of life, relations, cognition, culture
and morality. We have adapted to that to some extent, in our cognitive
construction, but apparently.not sufficiently, when we consider the current
state of the world. Since Francis Bacon we have developed a stance of
exploiting the world to our material benefit, and this may lead to our
destruction.
I
am not pleading for a return to the past, which is impossible and undesirable,
but for learning from it to make requisite adaptations.
References
Rosa,
Hartmut 2016, Leven in tijden van versnelling, Boom
------------------2019 Resonance, Polity Press.
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