Friday, April 29, 2011

Riemann Sphere

My last post on constitutive exceptions made me think (again) of the Riemann Sphere (it's been at my elbow for a couple of weeks now).  The Riemann Sphere maps the Complex Plane (x,y) onto a sphere of unit diameter with its center on the z axis.  Every point in every direction maps via a straight line to the 'north pole' of the sphere to a single point on its surface. 0,0 on the plane is touching 0,0,0 on the sphere. As the points go to Infinity, their mapping on the surface forms an ever-decreasing horizon around the north pole.

The Riemann Sphere is (maybe) an interesting illustration of the power of a king, or of God.  Or maybe I am about to succumb to theosophism and pieces of my brain are falling away like a wet cake (to quote Bernard Black).  The Riemann Sphere is definitely like something about my previous post, but what?

The complex plain, stretching to infinity in every direction, is where we naturally are, stuck all on the same level, with no meaningful orientation possible, and the infinite always infinitely far away in every direction.  On the sphere though, by recognizing a third dimension, the infinite becomes a specific locus. It becomes knowable.  The infinite plain is now visible and transformed into a finitude that is no smaller.  Similarly polities, by the addition of an existence out of the plane, become comprehensible while retaining their complexity.  Similarly ourselves, by the addition of an existence out of plane, become comprehensible while retaining our complexity.

So a reader poll: is it this just a bad case of wet cake?
And who doesn't wish they were a mathematician after reading about the Riemann sphere at wikipedia?  It's a pretty great sphere.

(All this in turn reminds me of my interest in dimension vs degree, about how new dimensions are the richer way to grow a model, and every connection between two neurons in the brain is a dimension, a degree of freedom.  Which in turn reminds me of the cybernetic principle of requisite variety - that a control system must have more degrees of freedom, more options, than the system it controls - only variety can destroy variety. It always seems to me that a group of people actually has less requisite variety than any individual, and hence that no individual should be governed by any other, and especially not by a parliament of them.  But that, I think, is untrue stated so baldly.  It depends on the group culture - a strongly norming culture does destroy variety. A more permissive one enjoys and uses the variety of each. We western democracies are, I suspect, the nearest approach by far to optimal government. But the constitutional monarchy may be better than direct democracy)

Constitutive Exceptions

Giorgio Agamben has caused some excitement with his political theory of the exception.  The political world is one of bio-power - of cooperation and competition among persons.  But underlying that world is the real world in which a person is also just an intelligent animal.  This is the condition of bare life, and Agamben ties it to homo sacer , a special class of condemned person in ancient Rome.  The conditions on homo sacer were rather like those on Cain after he killed Abel - no longer part of society, yet unable to be killed, living a-politically.  (Cain of course, marries a woman from another city, in a verse that has caused a lot of literalist christian fibonacci calculations.)  Agamben's framework can be interestingly applied to Guantanamo Bay and my wife tells me of some work applying it to elite cyclists, where their rights are almost completely surrendered to training, anti-doping rules and competing.

I have been interested in the other end of the scale.  Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan argue that there is something healthy about having a human being as your constitutive exception - that humans need to honor political power, and that it is safest to reserve the greatest honour for unweilded, unweildable power like that of a constitutional monarch and leave those responsible for actually getting things done trying to earn glory by getting things done.

I'm sure this is not a very original connection, but the Queen of England is something of a homo sacer, especially in relation to the machinery of government.  Being England, she is not ever permitted in the House of Representatives - practically, to prevent her or her heirs from taking over power.  But more importantly, to prevent a breakdown of the symbolism of the throne.

This reminds me of something from Lacan that was covered in Tim Morton's lectures - that we all have a store of imaginary dreads stored up from the terrible time of total vulnerability in our infancy - and that what is so destructive about torture or sexual abuse is not that they make real what is supposed to function symbolically in imagination.  Similarly, pure, directly elected democracy is a recipe for mania and despair, for unjust meritocracy, while the constitutive exception of a monarch at once enlarges and bounds the world.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Supernormal Stimulus

-edited to increase number of sequiturs -


The question of an R18 classifications for videogames is wandering the ether in Australia.  There is a distinction being drawn between violent media and interactive violence, so R18 content can appear in films, but if a game uses the same event involving the player, then it is refused classification.  Some gamers say that the net result is that a lot of material that is not bad enough for a Refused Classification is released at M15+, the unintended consequences being that teenagers get access to what should be R18.


I think the interactivity question is actually secondary, because people consume so much of their media from the internet, which is always interactive.  We are all in some control of and choose the imagery we consume. 


Some psychological research into images of violence shows that we automatically identify with the dominant party in a violent act, so that it is almost impossible to show violence in story, moving image, without causing identification with the strong.  It is obviously an adaptive trait to admire and side with the powerful. The brain is always interacting, and the parts that take action are busily calculating what they would do, will do if called on. In watching violence, we see ourselves, and usually we see ourselves committing it.


I think what frightens people about these games is that otherwise healthy, normal people are powerfully engaged by them, and don't behave the way we might wish at other times. Games become interests that powerfully draw attention from people.  And attention = care = love.


Brains are built to be sensitive to some things - food, sex and violence most obviously in humans.  In nature, the vulnerability to stimuli is a vital survival trait - birds are addicted to feeding their young, and that's a good thing (this much is borne out by science) - but it's surely not unreasonable to think that most animals would be similar.  But it is possible to hack that addiction for benefit.  





This reed warbler (I think?) has what it thinks is the biggest, hungriest reed warbler chick in the world.  And long after the cuckoo chick's appetites have outstripped the hunger of a nest of young reed warblers, the parents will continue to work harder, exhausting themselves to the point that they are less likely to survive another winter. 


This is supernormal stimulus - it's when your brain has a monotonic valuation function for certain stimuli* - the more it goes up, the better your brain tells you it is, the more it absorbs your attention and overwhelms the other things you should consider.  Supernormal stimulus is too much of a good thing. Your anime girlfriend has eyes the size of her breasts and both are three times the size of her mouth and waist, better than any real girlfriend, or physically possible human. Even though she only interacts with you through your phone.  And of course, pornography.  And opera.


Is there a defence against supernormal stimulus?  I'm not sure. Controls of context are good, but the vulnerability itself can only be undone if you can stop the consciousness capture, stopping it being monotonic, by plumbing in all of life.  If the reed warbler could see the possibility of fledging next season's nestlings, this season's monster child would appear for what it is.


For further reading, you could maybe try Harvard psychologist Diedre Kemp's Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. 


Related subject - a guy called Arch Hart has some books advocating against sensation-seeking as a way of life - he wants to help people with exciting jobs, exciting hobbies, exciting lives who are exhausted and dejected take pleasure in a simple stroll through a place of their own. This is all very well, Arch, but can't we find a way to have our cake and eat it?


*By this, I mean it just keeps going up and up and up.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Short note

Bookish has the lovely poem from a nineteen year old fighter pilot in World War II Britain, which begins:


    'Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
     And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.'


Go read the whole poem - magical, wonderful words, especially if you know your Spitfires and Hurricanes.


You may be surprised as I was to find that 'To fly, the dream of man and flightless bird alike' is not part of it.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Absurdest Project

Arguing in the comments of ABC religion online with atheist philosophical naifs.  It's hideously fruitless, yet I can't look away.

My Perfect Manhattan @ My House

3 bourbon, 1 sweet vermouth, 1 dry vermouth, bitters & orange bitters, glace cherry.
Good, simple luxury.
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Monday, April 25, 2011

Sketchup is better, much better than I realised

Another plug for Google's Sketchup - it turns out that I was wrong about its limits.  It is able to do very precise dimensioning. I should remember to check out instructions next time, before concluding this or that can't be done.  Desktertainment V2 is on the way.

(New problems for it though - printer?  charging post for phones etc?)

Unearned neat fits

We are using the long weekend to tidy up - and I got the job of finding a winter home for our cheap electric fan, a wobbly, stiff, fragile insectoid thing that was irritating to put together and even if taken apart would still be awkward to store.

I was delighted to find that there is room on the built-ins in our bedroom.  The cross-shaped feet wrap neatly around the chimney dent. It is within an inch of the ceiling.  The span of the feet is just short of the depth of the space its in.

At such times of glorious unearned neatness, when things are fitting real nice and kentucky*, I am wont to launch into 'Surely the Lord has regarded the estate of his handmaiden...'  It seems fitting somehow.


*Douglas Adams reference.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Beauty, Truth, Goodness

To an extent I find surprising, philosophical interest in goodness, truth and beauty is widespread.  Most recently I was listening to a talk and a philosopher explained CS Lewis' atheism quoting his autobiography. Everything he loved - myths, poetry, ancient civility and humanity and ideals - he believed to be REALLY false, just a local pocket of evolved mental machinery functioning as it should in its particular contingent circumstances, not expressing any durable or universal reality; whereas the truth was a prosaic, storyless, universe careering very slowly into a heat-death ditch. Even the story of that death gets sexed up by telling it.  Even the 'So what?' question makes an error of category, that the question and questioner are somehow independent of the meaninglessness of the universe.

I must preface what follows by saying that I have yet to read a lot of Kierkegaard, so this is a survey of questionable value. Don't use this in arguments about Kierkegaard.  I hope, readership, you don't find yourself in those too often, and that what follows is interesting, illuminating...

Kierkegaard parallels beauty, truth and goodness with three stages of self-hood: the aesthetic, the rational and the religious.  Each has its own self-contained universe of values.  Hence the great evil to be shunned by someone living in the aesthetic is boredom, the great good is pleasing aesthetic experience.  To the aesthete, the bible is at best, interesting, often beautiful, strange, sentimentally inspiring, rich with visions.

The rational is the space of the philosophers, and the greatest value is truth. The philosophical mind can still see beauty and enjoy it, but also asks whether this beauty affirms anything true or is a lie.  Kierkegaard says, in Fear and Trembling, that 'The philosopher makes the movement of infinity - he goes up and up, he goes down and down...' The philosopher has set his sights on understanding everything, taking it all into his rational system. If the philosopher looks at his place, his finiteness, his localness, he is stuck with a problem. In reading the bible, the philosopher wants to understand and systematise the nature of God using the text as evidence. He is stuck with the view from somewhere, rather than the view from nowhere/everywhere - the objective view.  A rational philosopher would despair.

Kierkegaard thought almost everyone was in despair whether we know it or not - that we are each a disordered, competing, bundle of tensions, with no hope of overall satisfaction. The philosopher, by his superior maturity, is more aware of it than most, but not able to get out of it, not able to resolve the tensions.

The way through, for Kierkegaard, is in maturing into the religious phase.  In this phase, one develops a defining commitment.  I would say that one makes it, but the truth is almost the reverse - it makes one.  Out of the confusion of the community of mind, a single resolve becomes possible.  Something outside suddenly takes all one's commitment.  This, I think, is the transition through 'Absolute Critique' that Hajime Tanabe advocates as the way forward for philosophy, to repentance, and finding the Other power*.  There is this knot to tie in  one's life, in maturing into the religious commitment to the Good.  Finding the Good outside the self is something which, in this bad and bloody world, seems to require an extraordinary interruption of the normal course of events.

* I am not sure how much Kierkegaard Tanabe was across. I would be surprised if there was much, but they are on the same page.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Inwardness

As it is Good Friday, I was thinking of posting something about Christianity, but I think you would all be better served to go to ABC Religion Online.  An astonishing volume of excellent columns have gone up in the last 48hrs.

I you choose to ignore this suggestion, I offer the following.  The only thought I've had today as we enacted a communal remembrance of the crucifixion, was that it is easy to do the actions and not be in them. Kierkegaard was fiercely committed to the importance of inwardness, but it is all too easy to think of looking into one's self and tending to it. But this is something in which it is easy to self deceive.  Corruption and pride take refuge with one as one stands apart from one's self and criticise it.  Past actions are regretted, desires for better desires are imagined, and we think we have stepped ahead into the light. But, (I think Hegel says) the darkness was still in the gaze  like the inky black of your pupil, your subjectivity remains a problem.

Kierkegaard believes that the solution comes when we make a defining commitment, when we let a commitment to another become the unifying principle for our divided self.  The inwardness of this commitment comes as more and more elements of outerness are accepted into the self.  The defining commitment means that the self critique is a complete, undistanced 'ownership' of the self, a recognition that, disgusting though it was, it was and still is me, through and through. Inwardness is not at bottom a direction of attention, but rather an openness to oneself, to welcoming all the fractured and bruised little pieces of your personality into fellowship.  Inwardness is related, I think, to my earlier theme of liability (here and here) - to saying 'This is me, right here.'  To doing things, and being in them.

The Fortress of Solitude

Well a 'human' 'interest' item for today:

In my back yard I have built a roof on legs over my exercise gear, because there is no room in the shed.

Free Weights in Tool Box
Shown here are my 2 x 10kg, 2 x 5kg, 4 x 2.5kg weights and two dumbells.  The toolbox is lockable but astonishingly non-waterproof.  If it rains, water gets in. I am buying weight from K-mart: 5kg = $13, 10kg = $25, 20kg = $39.  This is close to the floor price for weight, and they have nice handles inset.  They rust very readily, though.  I am hoping to add 2 x 20kg next.  I have a straight bar and the wiggly one (good for biceps and triceps) (the wiggly one was $25 from KMart).  With a collection of low-ish weight and not much safety equipment I am working in the higher rep range, primarily derived from a Pump-style circuit demo-ed by Simone R from Another Something.  I am starting to branch out - I added Hack Squats today, to try to balance a weak VMO (the quad muscle inside the knee).


A basic 'power tower'
This picture shows my 'Power Tower' and my bike, and you may be able to discern the shape of the Fortress - four pillars, a plastic roof, fence on one side, shed on another and open on the remaining sides.  The power tower lets you try to do a variety of chinups, whole body-weight dips, leg raises, and push-ups on handles, so that you can extend the range of motion by lowering your body between your hands.  I have some shoulder posture issues to work on that are still making a full wide-grip chinup a problem.

The bike I use almost exclusively for riding to work - about 16km, largely cycle path.  I recently broke the handle bars by pulling on them too hard trying to accelerate (weird eh?), but show here with the new ones.

I lack:  larger weights, and the ability to safely handle them.  If I ever want to squat anything like a 5-8RM squat, I need to work out how to get the bar on and off my shoulders safely.  I'm not going to be able to overhead press that.  But with VMO -> kneecap tracking problems, that'd be a nice problem to have.

How much has all this cost?

  • $450 - the fortress itself (surprisingly much for a pretty flimsy bit of structure)
  • $120 - via ebay, the power tower. There are better ones available - this is a little low and a little narrow for my size, I think.
  • Weight ~ $105.
  • Bars ~ $50
  • Tool chest - $67
  • Bike - $500 (but every time I ride I save probably $5 of petrol so it has probably paid for itself since I bought it in 2007)
So far, the cost for weights is well below a year's subscription to a local gym.  And the freedom to go out there and exercise as hard or as light as I feel like or as novelly as I wish is terrific.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Stanley Hauerwas

If anyone in the readership was feeling troubled by George Orwell's novel 1984's critique of God (admittedly more troubling was my obvious descent into madness in one overlong run-together paragraph), Stanley Hauerwas' article at religion online answers it beautifully (with reference to Foucault and the Panopticon).

Secularity

ABC Religion Online has had a number of articles debating the value of chaplains in schools and special religious education in schools. Generally they either argue that 'Secular means separate from religious content' or 'Secular can include religious content'.  Most recently, the editor Scott Stephens (SS) has posted to say that he thinks that the church is compromised when funded by the state, and suggested that we should be weaning off this particular teat.  I am inclined to agree, to some extent, but I think there is a problem with imagining that a line drawn between sacred and secular could be drawn justly by the non-believing part of the community alone. Part of the problem is atheism not being properly thought through and each atheist thinking that since he or she and all his or her friends assume the same value system, it is the 'natural one' which cursed stupid Christians deny.

Secularism assumes that if you strip away the religious layers, you can regain and share a common humanity, that there is a grounded human ethic to be found. It sees secular space not as a worthwhile but procrustean compromise to help us live together, but as the dominant, positive ethic of our society.

Funny old fellow that I am, I think secular space needs to be humble space - our community includes a lot of people who believe that the real answers of life are 'religious' and the secular part of our life needs to be modest enough to allow those answers.  The Secular is a great invention ( Jesus endorsed it when he said 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar and to God that which is God's).  Secularism can become an ideology that would exclude religion from every part of public life if it could.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Broken Window

Derek Thomson blogs at The Atlantic, and this post got picked up by Andrew Sullivan.  It is a rough breakdown profiling the average male consumer, based on a variety of sources comparing the size of various industry sectors.  The part that got my goat was when he said 'Buying a $2 bottle of water in a cafe doesn't seem much, but it contributes $15B to the economy.'

Bottles are a contribution.  Water is a contribution.  Bottling water for sale from locations with potable tap water (which is often not accessible to the customer to increase sales) is not a contribution.  It is a parisitism.  A $15B chunk of the economy that is taking time from workers at all levels, money from consumers and creating work for garbage men that works through advertising and restrictive mall contracts so that people have to buy disposable bottles of water instead of filling from the tap.  (Water, though, is probably the least undeserving cold drink available.  I have no blessing for you, Coke.)

Calling this a contribution is falling prey to the Broken Windows Fallacy.  There is a lot of the economy that doesn't pass this test. We are slapping each other on the back for wasting each others time, because we think calling it work and getting paid dignifies it.  It doesn't help prostitutes and it doesn't help you.

Monday, April 11, 2011

George Orwell - 1984

Christopher Hitchen's mentions George Orwell in a new essay in Vanity Fair, and argues that 1984 references the totalitarianism of the Catholic church, finally disrupted by James I authorisation of the King James Version.  I am not erudite enough to get into that particular debate - it interests me though.

When I first read 1984 in my teens, I read it as a straightforward attack on Christianity. In Christianity there was the control of history in the canon and acceptable doctrine drawn from it, the assertion of the power of miracle (as claimed by O'Brien later in the novel) in the teeth of reality, the inverting worldview in which the perfect love of God becomes a perfect hate of everything weak, unbalanced, selfish or distorted about you.  The Ministry of Peace is responsible for maintaining permanent war at the borders, in a perfect sectarianism,  like the militant creationism and uniform critique and condemnation of everything in society - things I thought defined Christian thinking.  Minitru has its unquestionable story which has always to shift to accommodate the present, and yet claim to always stay the same. Miniplenty promises all we can ask or imagine, and indeed reports that we have already received it. In Miniluv society is held together as the nonconformist is punished forever. In Miniluv there is no darkness at all, just the exhausting beat of light, light, light, and never a moment's rest.  (CS Lewis has a poem about the beating of the gaze of God that is not dissimilar.)  Even Big Brother is an apt name for Christ, the 'firstborn of many brothers' - 'the unseen listener at every conversation' as a piece of terrifying Christian Kitsch has it.

The final lesson of the mutual betrayal between Winston and Julia engineered by the Party, is that perfect fear casts out love.  And it is at that point that I think I depart from finding this novel a convincing work of art.  The truth may be that there is a lot more imperfect love than perfect fear.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Learning about Leadership

For the last few years, I have internally enjoyed an imagined notoriety by secretly holding the belief that 'Leadership Is Wrong'.  In my experience, people self-consciously doing big L Leadership have an institutions good in mind and are engaged in coaxing that good from people who have their own goals for themselves. I was recently challenged to think this through again, by the real seriousness with which many sensible people have taken up the concept. I spent a few days in a confusion of trying to think what the Zizekian ethical treatment of leadership might be - abandonment of a false belief in a Big (Institutional) Other? Or a Heideggerian treatment of Leadership as some kind of Phronemos-ity... 

The rub of my ethical concern is that Leadership (as it is taught) encourages people to use their speech, behaviour, practices and commitments to influence and govern the choices of the led.  This is a significant moral burden, and the significance is never discussed.

In the end, the solution was from one of the leaders I respect the most.  Like it or not, we are always-already in leadership, always-already trade influence, practices, speech and commitments with the people in our world to influence them.  The choice is between leading others to share the Good we have or desire for ourselves, or leading them to the Bad we have, or leading them away from the Good and into the Bad for our benefit.  The choices that go with authority and leadership will sometimes be only bad.  So be it.  You can't scrape yourself clean, nor should you want to.  We are all liable to provide for others.

(The truth is that none of us are people the way we imagine people are - unified, rational, sturdy integral selves.  We rely on the appearance of that wholeness well-faked by others to motivate us to our best performances of imitation. By seeing a teacher appear to understand, I learn to pretend I understand, where in fact I 'only become familiar' (as John von Neumann put it). See C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" for a wonderful treatment of this theme.)

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Zizek on Violence

Violence, a book by Zizek, articulates a divide between subjective and objective violence. Subjective violence is felt violence intended to be felt.  Objective violence is unintended violence entailed by (in) the situation.  After this, our psyche plays tricks on us – the holocaust and 9/11  are subjective violence.  The eighty year slave trade in which slaves were collected from Africa, shipped in hellish, murderous conditions to the Sugar islands of the carribean and worked to death because it was cheaper to replace them than to feed and rest them, is objective violence produced by markets that badly wanted sugar.  In Iraq, all the collateral damage, including the descent into civil warfare, seem to be objective violence – just some bad luck, on the same level with natural disasters. The punishing lives of sweatshop workers that enable me to buy jeans that fit badly for $30 are, again, objective violence.  Zizek has no patience with this blindness to structural violence. The subjective / objective divide is just a manifestation of the Fundamental Attribution Error (my point, not his). It may be naturally occurring, but it isn’t unrecognizable, and we could always respond if we wanted.

Zizek makes a point that the relationship of sign to signified is one in which the signified is easily, even casually obliterated – an objective violence we all collude in to maintain the subject-object distinction and insulate ourselves from finitude and thingness. This practice of violence enables us to mis-recognize people as things.
The final section of this book discusses Divine violence, in dialogue with Walter Benjamin. Divine violence is unstoppable re-ordering of the real world.  I’m not sure, but it may have been developed to talk about the genocidal wars of early Israelites, and the later echoes in God’s wrath against his son.  This section is a little obscure.

In 2002 I remember arguing with some friends in church that this planned invasion of Iraq was just how things fall out when a USA is inflamed and belligerent.  I wanted to say it was objective violence, not a moral question, partly because I was in the armed forces at the time, partly because I was drinking the ‘Saddam is a very naughty man’ Kool-Aid.  This is why philosophy in the psychoanalytic tradition is worth hearing. To make you think.

I wrote a poem...

They live in our compromises,
Unconscious engines, young gods
New Molochs. Shovel and shovel
  your hours into their all-consuming furnace.
To save our lives we lose them, saying
'Let institution of collective effort
    save us.'
Let ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ stand over the gates.
(More than half of us have lost,
 by now,
 more than half of us.)

Leaders pipe to us in their piebald,
Winning our will,
To claim from us our highest good -
        in exchange: least-bad and stability.
When you speak to a leader
Put a knife to your throat -
Commitments are easy in the mouth,
They hook their flukes to the inmost parts.

- ALC

It is not a very good poem, but I thought I might as well write it as not.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

INTP Leadership

Mary McGuiness: "INTPs do not usually seek leadership roles. They don't like directing others and will not force people to do things. ... INTPs are more comfortable as leaders than as managers."

So how uncomfortable is that?
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Saturday, April 2, 2011

Three minutes

I went on a work workshop where people were asked to perform a three minute talk on a topic that would reveal something personal, something interesting.  One man did an moving portrait of his father, and read one of his father's poems on his wartime experience.  Another told of how he responded when terrified by a large shark while scuba diving.  Everyone revealed something interesting, something personal, something funny, and became a likeable human being for a time.  It was a very quick and effective way to build some trust, break the ice and really, one of the high points of the workshop.  

My talk was probably less personal, but it went over OK.  I toned it down a lot from this that I prepared, because the audience reaction (from a room full of middle-aged and older men) when I said 'toilet' was nervous tittering and anxious exclamations of 'ooh look out!' So I could tell they were in the picture, and didn't need or want it spelled out.

Martin Heidegger & Ontological Guilt 

I want to talk about my favourite topic (not subject), Martin Heidegger, in an example applying his philosophy to my experience.
 But first, I want to tell you about my first week in my new job. I had been very lucky to be accepted from uniform into a research organisation in July 2009. I had previously worked in uniform, outposted to the research organisation.  After appearing around the building in uniform for two and a half years, I was wearing civilian clothes.  Everyone was asking me how I was going with the change.  I was, I recall, using the urinal (holding my penis, as one does) when the Boss (about 4 rungs up from me) stepped into the neighbouring spot, and glanced over to show he'd recognized me. Wanting to welcome me, he very naturally asked, as anyone might - ‘How does it feel?’
 I’ve always been disappointed that I didn’t have the courage to subvert the big guy’s welcome, but it was very well meant and I didn’t want to be that new guy who embarrasses people.
 The second time, I used the urinal on the ground floor. The Boss’s boss came in.  Seeing me out of uniform, he very naturally, as anyone might, also asked me ‘How does it feel?’
 Why does everyone keep asking me that?
 Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher – and famously, a member of the Nazi-party who got promoted several times during his association with them, and then never talked about it after the war.  An odd man. But an important philosopher. 
 Anyway, his philosophy was trying to get away from the subject-object formulation by pointing out that every mind we’ve ever known was ‘always already’ in a world. There is no value in Descartes doubting his reality – because who he was had formed in continuous participation in that world.  For example, the idea of doubting are built up from long familiarity with the world, not independent from it.  “Not even wrong”, we might imagine Heidegger harrumphing. 
 Another ‘always-already’ is being in a community.  We have other people around us from the time we are still coming together as a person, forming in the womb.  We lever off their familiarity rather than learn by our own experience. As such, Heidegger believed our kind of being relied on what he termed ‘das Man’ – usually translated ‘One’.  As in, ‘anyone’.  One does what anyone might. As in ‘One wonders if one hasn’t overstepped the bounds of propriety with one’s anecdotes.’ 'One' in Heidegger is how we apprehend and organise an awful lot of practices and information - an absolute necessity at one level, but the very devil if you want to live authentically responding to the situation you are in, not the general or typical situation that it is like. 
 The world we are always-already in (including what one is like) is one we don’t choose. We arrived in the middle, had most of our lines shoved in our hands and got thrown on the stage. If we consider a larger stage, we only find more things that could be otherwise but aren’t.  My choices about what I’ll eat for breakfast might allow originality, but my choices about my work allow less. I have still less choice about my nationality, and less again about participating in the system of competing nations. There are a lot of things I wish were otherwise, but I can’t get there from here. This is Ontological Guilt.  Heidegger says we have some freedom, freedom to live authentically, but we have to start by acknowledging that the problem is constrained by who we are - always already committed to a lot of things we might not agree with. There are realities that mean that we might not be able to get There from Here, and never without effort.

----------
Ontological Guilt got a huge laugh.  I think because I'd strayed out of the terminology that they felt they had to take seriously.