Hannah Arendt's totally lonely stupidity

 Samantha Hill writes in Aeon about 'where loneliness can lead'. Apparently, if you are lonely you might become susceptible to totalitarianism. This is nonsense. If you are very lonely, you might become a catitarian- i.e. your cat takes over your life. On the other hand, a totalitarian regime- to reduce the cost of surveillance- might insist that life be lived as communally as possible and moreover, by reason of collective punishment, everyone will have a strong incentive to keep tabs on everybody else. 

Hannah's Aunt, in her origins of totalitarianism, wrote

'What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is

existential threats to the polity- e.g. danger of invasion, large scale famine, a terrible epidemic etc. To fight a 'total war', totalitarian methods may be necessary more particularly if Judicial and other institutions, or a  portion of the citizenry is oblivious of the seriousness of the threat. 

the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience

fuck off! In primitive pastoral societies, shepherds were as lonely as fuck as were the guys who had to sleep in the fields so as to be ready to drive off animals which might trample the crop. Women might have a baby or two to look after, but once they went to sleep, Mum was lonely. She didn't know how to read and, anyway, she couldn't afford a candle. Loneliness was worst where populations were low and scattered.  

usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age,

most people, nowadays, expect to live at least ten or twenty years after retirement. If they have put by money, they can expect to have a better, not a worse, social life than they did when they were shackled to a desk.  

has become an everyday experience …

Once a society achieves a degree of affluence, more and more people can live alone. Moreover, as technology improves, they can cook for themselves rather than dining with others. They can watch movies on a big screen TV at home rather than at the Cinema. They can listen to music on their Music system rather than go to the concert hall.  

‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’.

Because she needed money and had taken a teaching gig.  

After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere.

California has something better than intellectual atmosphere. She should have taken up surfing.  

Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour,

If she'd had a sense of humor she'd have laughed at Heidegger instead of fucking him.  

and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life.

Why didn't she fuck off to East Germany? Oh. Proper German pedants thought her ignorant and stupid.  

She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. 

She didn't like teaching worthless shite. Good for her.  

She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself.’

She knew she was a charlatan. It wasn't as though she was helping her students to find the cure for cancer.  

The one oasis she found was in a dockworker-turned-philosopher from San Francisco, Eric Hoffer – but she wasn’t sure about him either: she told her friend Karl Jaspers that Hoffer was ‘the best thing this country has to offer’; she told her husband Heinrich Blücher that Hoffer was ‘very charming, but not bright’.

Jaspers was a fucking cretin. He thought all democracies would insist on a common public education. None do.  

Arendt was no stranger to bouts of loneliness.

No. What she experienced was periods when she felt she didn't have smart or stimulating enough interlocutors. We don't say that a guy who is disgruntled by the fact that he isn't porking lots of super-models is lonely. We say he is dissatisfied with his sex life. A person who is missing their soul mate may be lonely if they remain solitary. But if they are hardly ever alone, they aren't lonely. They are simply yearning for the company of a person who is inaccessible.  

From an early age, she had a keen sense that she was different, an outsider, a pariah, and often preferred to be on her own.

In which case, if her theory were correct, she'd have gravitated to Stalinism rather than slyly fucked off to affluent America.  

Her father died of syphilis when she was seven; she faked all manner of illnesses to avoid going to school as a child so she could stay at home;

later she'd fake being smart to earn money writing or teaching nonsense. Nothing wrong with that. Capitalism means there are markets even for the most egregious shite.  

her first husband left her in Berlin after the burning of the Reichstag;

both had the sense to run away from Germany. They divorced amicably enough in France in 1937. 

she was stateless for nearly 20 years.

13 years. But the last 9 of those years were spent in the US whose citizenship she finally took. I suppose her husband's Communist views might have posed a problem.  

But, as Arendt knew, loneliness is a part of the human condition.

or the animal condition.  

Everybody feels lonely from time to time.

More particularly when they are alone.  

Writing on loneliness often falls into one of two camps: the overindulgent memoir, or the rational medicalisation that treats loneliness as something to be cured. Both approaches leave the reader a bit cold.

Whereas accounts of orgies tends to heat them up.  

As a word, ‘loneliness’ is relatively new to the English language.

'elenge' was the older world. It conveys the wretchedness and tedium and irksomeness of a solitary existence.  

One of the first uses was in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, which was written around 1600. Polonius beseeches Ophelia: ‘Read on this book, that show of such an exercise may colour your loneliness.’ (He is counselling her to read from a prayer book, so no one will be suspicious of her being alone – here the connotation is of not being with others rather than any feeling of wishing that she was.)

She gains a reputation for piety and not being a social butterfly. People will think better of her and se will make an advantageous marriage.  

Throughout the 16th century, loneliness was often evoked in sermons to frighten churchgoers from sin – people were asked to imagine themselves in lonely places such as hell or the grave.

Being alone meant being vulnerable to rapists and cut-throats not to mention gagaga ghosts!  

But well into the 17th century, the word was still rarely used.

Solitary sounded posher. A solitarian was a hermit or recluse. Medieval England had rather a high proportion of eremites probably because one soon gets fed up  

In 1674, the English naturalist John Ray included ‘loneliness’ in a list of infrequently used words, and defined it as a term to describe places and people ‘far from neighbours’. A century later, the word hadn’t changed much. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), he described the adjective ‘lonely’ solely in terms of the state of being alone (the ‘lonely fox’), or a deserted place (‘lonely rocks’) – much as Shakespeare used the term in the example from Hamlet above.

That's all the word means even now.  True me may elide the phrase 'I'm feeling lonely' and just say 'I'm lonely.' 

Until the 19th century, loneliness referred to an action

nonsense! 

– crossing a threshold, or journeying to a place outside a city –

this simply isn't true 

and had less to do with feeling.

Because people would say 'I feel lonely' rather than 'I'm lonely'.  

Descriptions of loneliness and abandonment were used to rouse the terror of

being abandoned and left all on your lonesome not 

nonexistence within men, to get them to imagine absolute isolation, cut off from the world and God’s love.

Alternatively, a demon would be shoving a pitchfork up your bum while your mother-in-law looked on laughing her fucking head off.  

And in a certain way, this makes sense. The first negative word spoken by God about his creation in the Bible comes in Genesis after he made Adam: ‘And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man is alone; I shall make him a helpmate opposite him.”’

Previously, Gods were killed by their sons who then fucked their Mum's. This was not good at all- for God. Anyway, if you have a ram, it occurs to you that buying a ewe might be a good idea.  

In the 19th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation.

Nonsense! Romanticism, which had a notion of a Noble Savage, not Modernism, valorized loneliness and associated solitude with sublimity. You should be as lonely as a cloud when alone amidst of grand mountains and dark forests. The notion of alienation does have Romantic roots as in Rousseau. At a later point there was the notion that mass man was lonely in a crowd. Society had been atomized. The solution, obviously, was to do stupid shite or study nonsense at Uni. 

The use of the term began to increase sharply after 1800 with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and continued to climb until the 1990s until it levelled off, rising again during the first decades of the 21st century.

Why? The answer is obvious. People started spending more time on-line. Also 'Bowling alone' was a big seller in 2000. The irony here is that the internet cold take the place of 'social capital'. Then came the smartphone and everybody started hooking up like crazy.  

Loneliness took up character and cause in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ (1853),

Poe's 'man in the crowd' came first. Hawthorne's Wakefeld came 5 years later. I suppose Americans were used to smaller towns and pictured life in London. Barteleby's problem isn't loneliness. It is futility. He reacts by 'preferring not to' do anything required to hold a job or, in prison, even avert starvation by eating his porridge.  

the realist paintings of Edward Hopper,

which had glamour at a time when most of the people who bought fancy magazines lived in small towns. 

and T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922).

Which is actually the diary of lonely teenage Valley girl whose parents divorced and she had to move to a cow town where the other kids think Taylor Swift is still cool. 

 But in the middle of the 20th century, Arendt approached loneliness differently.

Why did German peeps follow the Fuhrer. It's coz they were lonely. Hitler would get them together to listen to his speeches. They enjoyed that.  

For her, it was both something that could be done

I suppose loneliness can be done the same way that cuteness can be done. But if you are a fat, elderly, Tamil man, rather than a winsome slip of a girl, don't fucking do it. 

and something that was experienced.

if you are alone- sure.  

In the 1950s, as she was trying to write a book about Karl Marx at the height of McCarthyism, she came to think about loneliness in relationship to ideology and terror.

An ideology is something you have so as to join a party- not the cool type of party but the boring sort. This may have something to do with loneliness. But terror is something which costs money to do on any substantial scale. Saying 'look behind you, There's a gagaga ghost!' only gets you so far. 

Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being.

No. In a totalitarian society, if you feel lonely chances are others will twig that you haven't gotten with the program and so your life is likely to be very fucking short.  

Through the use of isolation and terror,

Nope. Collectivization, mutual surveillance, and cruel and unusual punishment is the way to go. 

totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness,

but Hannah's Aunt said loneliness created the conditions for totalitarianism. Oh. Right. The fact that I'm not currently pleasuring three super-models shows I'm lonely and that means.... Rishi Sunak is Hitler!  

and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda.

England and France had even more ideological propaganda because they were richer. But they didn't become totalitarian. Still, everything comes back to Hitler. Are you feeling lonely coz your significant other had to work late? This is a sign of the second coming of Hitler! Did you stub your toe? That is terrorism- a sure sign that Hitlerism is on the rise.  

Before Arendt left to teach at Berkeley, she’d published an essay on ‘Ideology and Terror’ (1953) dealing with isolation, loneliness and solitude in a Festschrift for Jaspers’s 70th birthday.

What he really wanted was a cake. If a stripper came bursting out of it, so much the better.  

This essay, alongside her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, became the foundation for her oversubscribed course at Berkeley, ‘Totalitarianism’.

Her students were actually stupider than her.  

The class was divided into four parts: the decay of political institutions,

which hadn't occurred anywhere for five decades.  

the growth of the masses,

which had grown more in places without any fucking totalitarianism 

imperialism,

which was over 

and the emergence of political parties as interest-group ideologies.

which had occurred in the eighteenth century.  

In her opening lecture, she framed the course by reflecting on how the relationship between political theory and politics has become doubtful in the modern age.

Because the former was and is stupid shit.  

She argued that there was an increasing, general willingness to do away with theory in favour of mere opinions and ideologies.

Nobody ever gave a shit about theory though some Bolsheviks pretended this wasn't the case.  

‘Many,’ she said, ‘think they can dispense with theory altogether, which of course only means that they want their own theory, underlying their own statements, to be accepted as gospel truth.’

No. Nobody gives a shit about whether people think they are lying. They just want people to do what they want them to do.  

Arendt was referring to the way in which ‘ideology’ had been used as a desire to divorce thinking from action

which has never been the case 

– ‘ideology’ comes from the French idéologie, and was first used during the French Revolution,

which featured 'Terror' which is how come the words ideology and terror go together. The notion is that doctrinaire shitheads are bound to start guillotining random dudes the moment they got a bit of power.  

but didn’t become popularised until the publication of Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology (written in 1846) and later Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929), which she reviewed for Die Gesellschaft in 1930.

Napoleon was important. He used the word in a pejorative sense to attack his enemies. Marx and Engels were useless tossers, though the latter did make some money.  

In 1958, a revised version of ‘Ideology and Terror’ was added as a new conclusion to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Hannah's Aunt was thrifty. She recycled her own shit.  

Origins is a 600-page work divided into three sections on antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism.

In other words, it is totes random.  

As Arendt worked on it, the text changed over time, to incorporate new information about Hitler and Stalin as it emerged from Europe. The initial conclusion, published in 1951, reflected on the fact that, even if totalitarian regimes disappeared from the world, the elements of totalitarianism would remain. ‘Totalitarian solutions,’ she wrote, ‘may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’

This was deeply silly. America had seen plenty of economic misery during the Depression. But it hadn't become totalitarian.  

When Arendt added ‘Ideology and Terror’ to Origins in 1958, the tenor of the work changed. The elements of totalitarianism were numerous, but in loneliness she found the essence of totalitarian government, and the common ground of terror.

Because she was as daft as a brush. Affluent countries with advanced technology and very strong individualism and rule of law may have a lot of loneliness simply because people can afford to be more picky and the opportunity cost of shared pleasure is higher. Totalitarian government has an incentive to keep people in groups to reduce surveillance and punishment costs. But its 'essence' is that it is not 'limited' by the Rule of Law such that Hohfeldian immunities arise and a 'private sector' can exist independently.  

Why loneliness is not obvious.

Arendt’s answer was: because loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection.

It doesn't. Solitary confinement may do so. Being stuck on a desert island may do so. But loneliness is something your Mummy can help you with by getting you to join a Church choir or bowling team or whatever.  

She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others.

because she is a very precious little snow-flake. Also hubby doesn't understand me and my PA is useless and all my so called friends are basic bitches- anyway, that's why I'm fucking the pool-boy.  

The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness.

If Mummy doesn't bring me pancakes in bed I complain of abandonment and threaten to call Child Services.  

Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’,

It is nothing compared to getting the trots. To be frank, ennui is worse than abandonment. It's just that you get more sympathy if you say you are lonely- nobody understands you- rather than that you are bored with the incessant chatter of others of your own class. Also, saying you are lonely coz your high pressure job takes up so much of your time may get invited to pool parties. Complaining of chronic diarrhoea, not so much. 

because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings.

Whereas chronic diarrhoea makes for high productivity and living your best life. 

When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else;

No. That's why cutting off your own leg when you are lonely hurts like hell.  

and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.

We can make new beginnings on books like Finnegan's Wake or Infinite Jest. Then we give up and have a wank.  

In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity.

Equally, it may hinder it.  

Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation.

For some, not others. 

One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude

One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of taking a big stinky shit. On the other hand, you may experience solitude because you fell asleep on the night bus and ended up having to walk home across Hampstead heath at four o'clock in the morning.  

but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:

Not if you get marooned on a desert island.  

'Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me

you can act on your own. Indeed you can even have sex with yourself.  

– without being lonely;

because your wife is a sheep and your best friends are dolphins.  

and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated.'

only in the sense that I can be lovely- that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself desired by all- while remaining as ugly as shit.  

Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship,

No. Prisons in any type of regime might use solitary confinement to break a prisoner, but Totalitarianism can be a bit more direct in its methods.  

making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude.

America has 80,000 people in solitary confinement. This proves it is totes totalitarian.  

The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think,

No. Totalitarian states may be better able to mobilize resources for war or to provide the sinews of war. This is because people retain the ability to move and to act and to think no matter what the political regime.  

while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself.

Very true. Biden has turned Mummy against me. Every time I threaten to call Child Services, she tells me to move out and get a fucking job you fat sack of shit.  

Totalitarian movements use ideology to isolate individuals.

No. They beat people and put them in solitary confinement.  

Isolate means ‘to cause a person to be or remain alone or apart from others’.

COVID isolation was totes Fascist- right? Biden had to isolate for that reason. This shows his regime is not just Totalitarian, it is also solitarily confining its own Fuhrer!  

Arendt spends the first part of ‘Ideology and Terror’ breaking down the ‘recipes of ideologies’ into their basic ingredients to show how this is done:

The basic ingredients of ideologies are ideas.  

ideologies are divorced from the world of lived experience,

They may be. An ideology may be wholly theological and concerned with the life to come.  

and foreclose the possibility of new experience;

Nope. Plenty of politicians start off 'ideological' but become pragmatic on the basis of experience 

ideologies are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history;

they may be historicist. But then again, they may not.  

ideologies do not explain what is, they explain what becomes;

No. They may do neither or both or who gives a flying fuck.  

ideologies rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality;

Nope. That is logic. An ideology may be wholly anti-rational. 'Counter-culture' ideology could take the form of advocating putting LSD in the water supply. 

ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.

That is mysticism or neo-Platonism or some such shit. 

The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves.

Unless it doesn't at all.  

By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power.

Fuck that! Once you get power, you kick away the fucking ladder. What Stalin and Hitler and Mao figured out was that 'totalitarianism' means is 'gangsterism'. Being the cappo dei tutti i capi means periodically slaughtering not just your rivals but your lieutenants who might become rivals. As for ideology, what everybody should understand is any shite you say is fucking Gospel mate. Everybody else is a right deviationist or left adventurist or crypto-Jew. 

And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world.

If you were foolish enough to quit America for some Commie or Caliphate Utopia- maybe. But otherwise, all we are speaking of is gangsterism. The Boss is handsome, virile, and his jokes are so fucking hilarious you literally shit yourself.  

Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.

That a cult, dude. Totalitarianism is about exercising total power, not fleecing Dental Hygienists or people who might otherwise invested in an Applebee's franchise.  

But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology,

why bother? There's a sucker born every minute. Just recruit from existing fringe groups till you manage to land a whale- i.e. a really wealthy sucker. 

you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical,

Fuck off! Skeptical and cynical people won't join your cult unless they get money up-front and an assured share of the profits. Why bother with them? Like I said, there's a sucker born every minute. True, you do need to tell kids that their Mum is totes Hitler coz otherwise they won't understand why they have to fuck a lot of ugly dudes so as to make money for the cause.  

so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment:

e.g. thinking it yucky to suck off ugly dudes.  

'Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men,

unless they have teamed up to kill the tyrant and his minions 

so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality.

Nope. The only self-compulsion has to do with really having money and power. The only self-compulsion which ruins our relationship with reality is the compulsion to continually take a lot of drugs or alcohol.

The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought.

Thus Hitler and Stalin and Mao were geniuses who first cut off their fellow men from reality by making them real lonely coz they were missing their teddy bear's imaginary friends, and then killed their rivals and gained total power.  

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.

No. Such people would be useless. You say to one such- 'get me a sandwich' and he comes back with a walrus which he thinks is a sandwich. Also if you ask 'What is your name?' they will think they are giving a truthful answer when they say 'last Saturday at three p.m.'  

Organised loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments.

Which is why everybody in solitary confinement is bound to become prey to 'tyrannical thought'. Also they won't be able to distinguish between Harry Potter and a ham sandwich.  

In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself,

No. You can talk to yourself just fine. It is when you are teaching Econ 101 that you keep getting interrupted any time you start really getting into the issue of your poor masturbatory technique by questions about whether this will be on the test?  

because one’s ability to think is compromised.

Arendt had no ability to think. Still, she made a bit of money by playing the 'I fled Hitler' card. Also she'd fucked Heidegger. For some reason, that was a big deal back then. 

Ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience,

Stupid thinking- like Arendt's- does that. There were plenty of economists of a highly ideological type who did empirical research of a pathbreaking type back in the Fifties. Indeed, even when I was young, studying under a Marxist econometrician was considered advantageous. Sadly, almost all econometrics is shit.  

starves the imagination, denies plurality,

shits its pants while masturbating 

and destroys the space between men

by pushing them against each other 

that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways.

Very true. Humanity can't relate to itself meaningfully if all human beings are forced into the same pair of underpants. 

And once ideological thinking has taken root, experience and reality no longer bear upon thinking.

Arendt's experience had taught her that if she didn't want to end up working for a Jewish Charity, she needed to write shitty books and pretend to be a philosopher of some sort. Americans were plenty stupid and vast hordes of them were being given sheepskins. There was no such thing as academic standards any more. To be fair, though prewar savants did know Greek and Latin, they were equally stupid.  

Instead, experience conforms to ideology in thinking.

It can conform to anything at all- in stupidity.  

Which is why when Arendt talks about loneliness, she is not just talking

nonsense 

about the affective experience of loneliness: she is talking about a way of thinking.

a nonsensical way of thinking.  

Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality,

In which case maybe you are surrounded by your pals from the Legion of Super Heroes.  

when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.

Shit would that dim bint know about what logic demands?

We think from experience, and when we no longer have new experiences in the world to think from, we

do what physicists do- i.e. build mathematical models which make different predictions which a crucial experiment will decide between.  

lose the standards of thought that guide us in thinking about the world.

Arendt studied stupid shit probably because she was as stupid as shit. Grete Hermann was a few years older than Arendt. She studied under Emmy Noether rather than the shithead Heidegger. In 1935, she spotted the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variable' theorem. True, that sort of stuff would only be empirically verifiable many decades later, but it shows what genuine thought looks like. Incidentally Hermann was an excellent neo-Kantian philosopher and, after returning to Germany, contributed to the Socialist Party's Bad Godesberg program.  

And when one submits to the self-compulsion of ideological thinking, one surrenders one’s inner freedom to think.

No. Gentzen was a dyed in the wool Nazi. Still a great logician. Sadly, the craziest nutters can think better than stupid peeps like me and Arendt.  

It is this submission to the force of logical deduction that ‘prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others’ for tyranny.

That's why Bertrand Russell became a Nazi, or proto-Nazi- like Frege.  

Free movement in thinking is replaced by the propulsive, singular current of ideological thought.

No. A smart guy may have an ideological or theological or occultic bee in his bonnet without ceasing to be smart. As for the rest of us, even if we are as stupid shit, so long as we- like Arendt- run the fuck away from places taken over by violent nutters, we are safe enough from totalitarianism.  

In one of her thinking journals, Arendt asks: ‘Gibt es ein Denken das nicht Tyrannisches ist?’ (Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?)

Yes. Don't be silly. Useful thinking is not tyrannical.  

She follows the question with the statement that the point is to resist being swept up in the tide at all.

Run the fuck away from a place taken over by thugs or cut-throats.  

What allows men to be carried away?

Not running away. Either run or you may end up being carried.  

Arendt argues that the underlying fear that attracts one to ideology is the fear of self-contradiction.

Arendt wasn't afraid of self-contradiction. She would chase it and bite it and then force it to do really demeaning sexual things.  

This fear of self-contradiction is why thinking itself is dangerous – because thinking has the power to uproot all of our beliefs and opinions about the world.

No it doesn't. Don't be silly.  

Thinking can unsettle our faith, our beliefs, our sense of self-knowledge.

Nope. It can cause you to understand that maybe the Church doesn't have the keys to Heaven if it devotes itself so entirely to fucking little boys in the ass. 

Thinking can strip away everything that we hold dear, rely upon, take for granted day-to-day. Thinking has the power to make us come undone.

No. Thinking isn't enough. You actually have to do stupid shit.  

But life is messy.

So is sodomy.  

Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence,

is stupidity- e.g. people who say  

we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots.

Which is cool if you are in a halfway house and have to listen to such sermons as a condition of your parole.  

And ideologies, like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, appeal to us.

No. The Sirens are far away. Ideologies are like junk food. They are near at hand. 

But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking,

This lady has succumbed to the sophomore temptation to mention 'siren songs'. What's next? Scylla & Charybides? Ossa & fucking Pelion?  

must turn away from the world of lived experience.

Because that's easy to do. It often happens, when I head down to the fridge to get a cold one, that I get turned around and end up in the world of undead experience. 

In doing so, they can’t confront themselves in thinking because, if they do, they risk undermining the ideological beliefs that have given them a sense of purpose and place.

This is true of any sort of belief. You wife might be cheating on you. The cat may be a Ninja assassin. Talking about these possibilities might confirm your worst fears. The cat is a Ninja assassin and is porking your wife. Sadly your buddies at the bar try to change the subject of conversation any time you talk to them about this. 

Put very simply: people who subscribe to ideology have thoughts, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves.

So, nobody has ever subscribed to an ideology. This is why the way people react to your telling them about the Ninja assassin that is porking your wife but who is actually a cat, they tend to, quite independently, think to themselves that you are drunk off your head.  

And it is this inability to think, to keep one’s self company, to make meaning from one’s experiences in the world, that makes them lonely.

But, since they can't think for themselves, they can't think they are lonely. But if they don't think they are lonely then they aren't lonely. True, we can say to them 'you don't know you are lonely' but this is like saying 'you don't know you want to suck my dick but you really really do.' 

Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow,

because it is shit.  

because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought. You will be susceptible to organised loneliness.

If you aren't sucking my dick, you don't know how lonely you are and how you've been totes seduced by a Nazi ideology. Did you know the Nazi's killed cock suckers? If you weren't a fucking brainwashed Hitlerite you'd be on your knees gobbling away right now and thus safe from 'organized loneliness' & totalitarian ideology.  

When Arendt wrote to her husband: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself,’ she wasn’t vainly complaining about the limelight.

She was complaining about having to teach Americans- i.e. imbeciles.  

The constant exposure to a public audience made it impossible for her to keep company with herself.

She couldn't even fist herself in class. Sad.  

She was unable to find the private, self-reflective space necessary for thinking.

There was plenty of empty space between her ears 

She was unable to people her solitude.

She had no kids. I believe her second marriage way 'polyamory'.  

This is one of the paradoxes of loneliness.

Which is like the paradox that you aren't sucking my cock right now even though, deep down, that's what you really really want to do.  

Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness is felt most sharply in the company of others.

No. Loneliness is felt most sharply when everybody is very fucking far away. You may feel 'this party sucks. It's like nobody here understands that what they really want to do is not challenge me to beer pong but just suck my cock already. 

Just as much as we rely upon the public world of appearances for recognition,

fuck recognition. Most people would settle for a beejay.  

we need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think.

No. We need a brain. That's all.  

And this is what Arendt was stripped of when she lost the space to be alone with herself.

The Fascists at Berkely made her give five classes a week. The inhumanity! Why can't Americans just hand over lots of dollars and then fuck off so you can be alone with your beautiful thoughts.  

‘What makes loneliness so unbearable,’

is that there's someone you love whom you really really want to be with. If you are away from your hubby, it is a good idea to suggest that you feel very lonely rather than that you are greatly chuffed thats every single one of your orifices is currently occupied by a throbbing dick. 

she said ‘is the loss of one’s own self which can be realised in solitude …’

Or the recovery of one's own self or the fact that one's own self was borrowed by your cousin who has move to Atlanta.  

In solitude, one is able to keep oneself company,

more particularly if you have lost your freakin' mind and are married to a log of wood whose name is Brenda and who went Bryn Mawr.  

to engage in a conversation with oneself. In solitude, one doesn’t lose contact with the world, because the world of experience is ever-present in our thinking.

Unless you are smart enough to be working on proving the Reimann hypothesis 

To quote Arendt, quoting Cicero: ‘Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.’

This was Stoicism for Dummies.  

This is what ideological thinking and tyrannical thinking destroy – our ability to think with and for ourselves.

Sadly our ability to think depends on how smart we are. Smart peeps do STEM subjects. Stupid people pretend Hannah's Aunt was smart.  

This is the root of organised loneliness

but only because it is the fruit of messy silliness which is itself the anal toot toot of syndicated sodomy.  

 

Quine as empiricist

Some 75 years ago Quine said-  

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.

Quine was lying. Moreover, his was a stupid lie. The 'conceptual scheme of science' hadn't enabled him or anybody else to predict Pearl Harbor or the Wall Street Crash or anything else which had actually affected that cunt. 

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.

No. Physical objects, like Pizza or Coffee are imported by paying for them. That's why, cunts like Quine were making a bit of money by writing this shite.  

Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist,

which is like being a laid eunuch 

believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods;

who were as physical as he was and were better defined. Quine gave an argument for why he couldn't exist for us- we can think of his as both fat and bald even if he was neither and thus 'Quine' is an entity without an identity. The same is not true of Zeus or Athena. 

and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise.

Coz scientific errors typically involve confusing the detection of trace amounts of mercury with getting on the trail of some fucking god.  

But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.

Because 'epistemology' means 'stupid worthless shit'. Knowledge is knowledge. Theories about knowledge are ignorant shite.  

Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.

Unless we tell those entities to go fuck themselves because they don't fucking exist.  

The myth of physical objects

is like the myth that Quine's ginormous erection did not knock the Moon out of its orbit 

is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience

Quine's 'flux of experience' involved not getting the fucking sack for being a useless, worthless, tosser who wrote garbage about the garbage other shitheads had written. The joke is he didn't get that Universities had always been adversely selective of shit as subject matter and shitheads as teachers and apple polishing students. 

Sadly for him, neither Niggers not White boys who didn't want to get killed by brown peeps in Vietnam, gave two shit about Quine and other such qunts. 

Contra Quine, no entity we can name has identity. The thing is epistemic. It depends on our knowledge base. It does not coincide with itself from moment to moment. At the end of the day, it is unlikely to exist in any independent or categorical form. 

Why do people still quote Quine? Is it coz of lack of quinine and they suffer from cerebral malaria? 

Why Quine's two dogmas were stupid lies

Empiricism has no dogmas. Saying it does is like saying the invisible has two visible aspects- one is that some of us can see stuff, because we aren't blind, and secondly that we can see that something isn't there and thus must be fucking invisible if it actually is there. But this is simply a manner of speaking. The invisible has no visible aspects because it is fucking invisible mate. Empiricism has no dogmas because empiricism aint dogmatic in any way.

Quine pretended otherwise

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas.

Empiricism means something which aint fucking conditioned by any dogma whatsoever. One may say 'modern empiricism isn't empirical. It got hooked on drugs in High Skool and then joined a cult. Also it smells bad.' But anybody can bad mouth anybody.  

One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.

That's Kantian shite. It aint empiricism which is the name you give to people who look at evidence and say 'on the basis of this clinching piece of evidence I think x is true beyond reasonable doubt.' 

The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.

That is logical atomism or some such stupid shit. Meaningful statements feature high degrees to impredicativity or other types of recursion. In any case they feature 'epistemic' objects such that 'intensions' have no non-arbitrary extensions. Thus, empiricists don't believe this 'dogma'. If it were true, we would have a flawless universal translator on our smart phone.

To be fair to Quine, back in the Fifties, it wasn't obvious that 'i-languages' don't exist.  

Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded.

Which is why empiricism refused to have anything to do with them.  

One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.

Nope. Speculative metaphysics is just random shite peeps talk. True if they are actual natural scientists or poets or math mavens or serial killers, that random shite might be worth looking at to discover their motivation or to predict what they might do next.  

Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.

Actual pragmatists move to Florida. Seriously, there is little point being a pragmatist if your balls are freezing off.  

1. BACKGROUND FOR ANALYTICITY Kant's cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz's distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact.

Or the distinction between stuff you can work out without looking at the evidence and stuff where must do so. Thus you can safely assume that a small baby is not the mastermind behind a complex financial fraud. You don't need to secure exculpatory evidence.  

Leibniz spoke of the truths of reason as true in all possible worlds.

i.e. stuff we can't currently imagine could be the case. Then we discover that the baby is way smarter than us. Also, if anybody should go to jail for fraud, it should be the baby. How bad could baby jail be? 

Picturesqueness aside, this is to say that the truths of reason are those which could not possibly be false.

Fuck we know about what is possible?  

In the same vein we hear analytic statements defined as statements whose denials are self-contradictory.

It is self-contradictory for you to say I farted. This is because you are a dog. Dogs say woof woof. Thus you can't possibly have ever told me that the next time I farted you would divorce me and marry Camilla.  

But this definition has small explanatory value;

no definition explains anything. Anyway, 'explanatory' is itself a Tarskian primitive. It is undefined.  

for the notion of self-contradictoriness, in the quite broad sense needed for this definition of analyticity, stands in exactly the same need of clarification as does the notion of analyticity itself.

and the need for clarification needs clarification as does the need for that need and so forth. 

The two notions are the two sides of a single dubious coin.

There are no a priori synthetic truths. People thought maybe 'incongruent counterparts', which is Kantian, was kosher, but than the Wu experiment showed this wasn't so.  

 We must observe to begin with that meaning is not to be identified with naming or reference.

Why observe any such thing? Neither names nor references convey any meaning. That is why when I say 'James Armstrong' nobody understands that I am trying to order a pepperoni pizza. This is also the reason that my dissertation was rejected. Apparently not all your references can be to stuff up your supervisor's rectum.  

...the Evening Star is the planet Venus, and the Morning Star is the same. The two singular terms name the same thing. But the meanings must be treated as distinct, since the identity 'Evening Star = Morning Star' is a statement of fact established by astronomical observation.

No. It is a matter of convention or convenience. In some cultures, morning star does not mean Venus and, in our own, Venus isn't a star. It is a planet 

If 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' were alike in meaning,

Some people are referring to the same thing when they use these terms. Others are not. Thi 

the identity 'Evening Star = Morning Star' would be analytic.

No. It would be hermeneutic. One linguistic term would be interpreted in the same way as another. The question then would arise whether the correct hermeneutic had been applied.  Lucifer is sometimes translated as 'morning star' but we would be wrong to translate Isaiah 14.12 as 'How are thou fallen, Venus!'  

Again there is Russell's example of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly.' Analysis of the meanings of words was by no means sufficient to reveal to George IV that the person named by these two singular terms was one and the same.

Scott had written other stuff and had some political importance. One might say, for the Prince Regent, Scott was a sound enough on the Union, Waverly's author might not.  

The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms. The terms '9' and 'the number of planets' name one and the same abstract entity

No. One is a 'buck stopped' natural number, the other is a matter of observation or custom. Pluto has been downgraded because Mickey Mouse made him his bitch. 

but presumably must be regarded as unlike in meaning; for astronomical observation was needed, and not mere reflection on meanings, to determine the sameness of the entity in question. Thus far we have been considering singular terms. 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' and Russell's of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly', illustrate that terms can name the same thing but differ in meaning.

This isn't true. 9 is not the name of the 'number of planets in a Solar system'. As for as I know there is no name given to this. But there could be. We could say 'the Copernicus number of such and such solar system is 12'. 

The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms.

But it is a distinction hunting dogs understand. They respond to their name and quickly understand the meaning of the gestures given by the hunter.  

Quine wrote well but he was rather conservative even by the standards of his time. He didn't get that the West hadn't really followed Aristotle. It had followed whatever would make it richer and more secure. Meaning- which in Sanskrit is called 'Artha'- is Economic- which is another, or the same, meaning of the word 'Artha'- or Utilitarian. 

The Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern notion of intension or meaning.

Intension is a term of art. But it isn't really meaning and, though useful enough in some contexts, it may itself not mean what it intends. 

For Aristotle it was essential in men to be rational, accidental to be two-legged.

Probably because they were plenty of one-legged peripatetic philosophers hopping around all over the place. 

Still, Aristotle was wrong. A raving lunatic isn't rational, but he is a man and fucking with him may cause you and your family to die very horrible deaths.

But there is an important difference between this attitude and the doctrine of meaning.

There is no doctrine of meaning. There are hermeneutic doctrines- i.e. doctrines of interpretation.  But interpretation isn't meaning. 

From the latter point of view it may indeed be conceded (if only for the sake of argument) that rationality is involved in the meaning of the word 'man' while two-leggedness is not;

Nonsense! From the point of  view of any doctrine of 'meaning', there is one privileged 'interpretation', though it may not be accessible. But that has nothing to do with 'conventions' or Schelling focal solutions to coordination problems for pragmatics, not semantics, such that 'man' is a movable feast. My in-laws may agree that my wife is right to say I am not a real man. But, for some other purpose, e.g. a demand for alimony, they may insist that I am a man and not a lesbian elephant as I have frequently claimed. 

but two-leggedness may at the same time be viewed as involved in the meaning of 'biped' while rationality is not.

Not really. A one legged bird is still a bird- or feathered biped- and a guy who, for some medical reason, never had legs, is still a 'featherless biped'.  

Thus from the point of view of the doctrine of meaning it makes no sense to say of the actual individual, who is at once a man and a biped, that his rationality is essential and his two-leggedness accidental or vice versa.

What makes sense to you or your fellow shitheads is generally nonsense.  

Why was 'two dogmas' considered worth reading? Why do academic  availability cascades still exist? The answer is obvious. Philosophy had regained salience as a type of ethological 'displacement activity' in the context of 'concurrency' deadlocks or livelock with respect to tackling 'open questions' in STEM subjects. Then, thanks to Djikstra &c, it became obvious that there was no 'natural' solution to concurrency or other categorical problems. 

Quine, we might say, was fighting a rearguard action against the credentialized cretinism of the post-GI Bill Academy. But he sat on a Chesterton's fence for too fucking long and thus was buggered by what he thought of as a barrier or 'cordon sanitaire' defending against the idiocy of stupid darkies like me. This is because he didn't embrace a throughly ontologically dysphoric notion of philosophy. It has no business making itself at home in a place where cunts like me can take its pants down and make fun of its puny genitals. 

.

Kathleen Wallace on why she is turning into a washing machine

There was a time when some philosophers thought that mathematics was more real than reality. Thus, if a thing existed in mathematics, it was likely that a thing which existed in reality was a sort of inferior copy of that mathematical object. Perhaps this was because real things are finite and 'contingent' (i.e. determined in an arbitrary manner) while mathematical things may be infinite and non-arbitrary- i.e. necessary or 'natural' . A particular circle drawn by a child may have a finite decimal expansion for the ratio of circumference to radius. But a perfect mathematical circle does not. Maybe, with the Platonists, we should consider the mathematical circle the real circle and actual circles as illusory. 

This seemed fine so long as all mathematical objects- but even other non-mathematical things like Justice or Beauty- appeared to have a canonical or 'natural' representation. Euclidean geometry is so perfect it must be the natural geometry of the universe. There is such a thing as 'natural law' and some 'golden ratio' which captures what makes a painting or a piece of music beautiful.

 Then it was discovered that almost all mathematical objects are not 'natural'- they are arbitrary. But fairy tales too are arbitrary. The fox turns into a beautiful girl because granny says she does. It isn't really the case that some pretty girls are foxes in disguise. Still, one might say 'that's one foxy chick'. But this is merely a manner of speaking. 

Economics was defined as the science which studies choice under scarcity. But is choice finitary or does it involve infinite series? If we assert the former, it appears as though we are limiting how we can represent choice (which may have arbitrary, 'constructive', ways of garnering intuitions from infinite series without having to represent them). What this means is that our 'map' must be less fine grained than the thing itself and, ultimately, be something we arbitrarily imposed.

 Why not implicitly assert that choice is infinite and that 'existence' can be asserted of things which can't be constructed? In this way we appear to be dealing not with an imperfect map of Human Choice, but with Rational Choice itself. Indeed, ours is the Mind of a Liebnizian God able to prescribe a 'windowless monadology' for all beings. 

This hubris misled some mathematical economists into thinking the 'axiom of choice' must arise in any set to do with preferences. Sadly, neither is there a set of preferences- the thing isn't well enough defined- nor does Zorn's lemma apply because there is no well-ordering. Still, what is cool about the 'axiom of choice' is that the Banach Tarski paradox arises. This means you can take a mathematical object and, by mathsy magic, turn it into two, three or an infinite number of identical mathematical objects. This gives rise to the notion that we can use different criteria to order the preferences of a person such that multiple identities for that person are generated- just as, by Banach-Tarski, a sphere can be reconstituted into a whole bunch of spheres equal in size and other wise identical to the original.

Consider Alice. She is a Mom. Thinking as a Mom, she may have a different set of preferences from the preferences she has an ambitious career woman. Alice is also a White Supremacist. Thinking as a White Supremacist, her preferences may be quite different. This gives rise to the notion that, mathematically speaking, we can generate a 'Mom Alice' based on Alice's Mom preferences, and a Career-Woman Alice and a White Supremacist Alice. Wouldn't that be cool? The answer is, no. It would be nonsense because there is no set and thus no topological object or graph corresponding to Alice's preferences, or Mom Alice's preferences etc. True, arbitrarily, we could stipulate what we think these would be. But in that case we can equally speak of Alice as a lesbian elephant who is slowly but inexorably turning into a washing machine. My point is that any arbitrary shite others spout can be countered by equally arbitrary shite you spout. True, the other may be able to do some useful stuff in an arbitrary manner and thus get paid some money- but that is a matter of utility. It is not 'philosophical' or 'moral' or 'ethical'. It is also the case that a bunch of people may gain political power by spouting some arbitrary shite. But a countervailing coalition based on an equally paranoid misology may prevail. 

What happens if we stop invoking the Banach-Tarski paradox and accept that people have a single identity linked to one and only one physical body, and pretend instead that people are actually 'networks' of some complex type?  The answer is that any network, however complex, must still be a graph. The very same problem arises- viz. there is no unique or non-arbitrary way to get 'ordered pairs' or whatever else is being used to define the graph or network.  We may say 'surely, by Yoneda lemma, for a fine enough mathematician, there must be some way to turn everything about a person into mathematics?' So what if what we have now is an approximation with arbitrary features? If we get funding to keep working on this, surely our approximations will become better and less arbitrary?' The problem here is that the same may be said about thinking of people as lesbian elephants who are slowly but inexorably turning into washing machines. The difference is, a mathsy guy can't point out what elementary blunder we are making as we go along, This nips the enterprise in the bud because such errors 'cascade'. However, only a lesbian elephant could point out mistaken assertions we make about Sapphic pachyderms. Happily, they tend to be thin on the ground- probably because Neo-Liberalism has been taking it up the ass from Patriarchy for many years now. On the other hand, we can show solidarity with lesbian elephants by properly deconstructing neo-liberal texts like those of  Kathleen Wallace who writes in Aeon that 'You are a network'

I suppose my mind is some sort of neural network. Since I am as stupid as shit, this network must be finite. But will savants content themselves with having a but finite representation of their own minds? No. One way or the other they will implicitly assume it is infinite. This means, by Ramsey's theorem, that the 'graph' of the network is going to have 'cliques' which are like the 'multiple identities' generated by Banach Tarski's use of the axiom of choice. 

This ignores the fact that I have a mind only because I have a particular brain located in a particular body. True, I may suffer some mental or developmental abnormality and thus have 'multiple personalities'. But this is rare, generally mischievous, and can be treated by medical science.

The other thing is, when this body dies, no 'network' known to science will preserve my identity. I will be gone. On the other hand, some function I currently perform- e.g. loading the washing machine- may be performed by somebody else. As far as the washing machine is concerned, a defective element in a network was replaced by one identical to it in other relevant respects. 

To say I am my mind which is a neural network which is a graph of a particular type is to confuse the map with the territory. If I get possession of a treasure map, this does not mean I have got possession of treasure. True, I may think of my own mind as a treasure map but maybe this is because I am a lesbian elephant who is slowly but inexorably turning into a washing machine. 

One other point, a complete graph of a person's network, though locally finite, is likely to have an infinite path. This brings in something like Konig's lemma or the bar theorem. Once again, as with the axiom of choice, you will have 'multiple identities' or, in the language of Ramsey's theorem, cliques. Welcome to schizophrenia my friends! If you think identity politics is debilitating and mischievous, wait till Kathleen Wallace has finished with you and your psyche has been splintered into a howling mob of 'woke' nutters scratching each other's eyes out while demanding reparations for historic, or other imaginary, injustices. Even so august an institution as the Institute of Socioproctology is not immune to such ructions. I was forced out of my post as President by allegations of sexual self-abuse. The current President is the Neighbor's cat. But once some lesbian elephants have enrolled (for low low fee of $9.99) , I might have the votes to put myself back in office. 

'You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity.'

There are useful purposes for which I am reduced to these things. Arguing otherwise, might have highly mischievous consequences. If we buy a car and somebody else drives away with it we are miffed. We want a highly reductionistic notion of ownership to apply to our own car or our own body. 

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it.

No we don't unless we have amnesia.  

Is my identity determined by my DNA

yes provided your body is alive. After death you may become a cockroach.  

or am I product of how I’m raised?

Up to a point- sure.  

Can I change, and if so, how much?

Yes. More particularly, you can go to the bad very fucking quickly.  

Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one?

You could become Batman and thus have two identities.  

Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us.

No. They are useless. Religion on the other hand may be useful. People may give you money if you help them remember their past life as Cleopatra or if you convince them that you can ensure their next life won't suck ass big time.  

Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others.

He was as daft as a brush. Smart peeps don't end having to drink hemlock.  

Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you.

Though having crazy delusions about such things may work even better.  

Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature.

No they are founded in being able to raise enough money in taxes to pay for defenses against insurrection or invasion.  

So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

It has none at all. Say 'I am the cat which is the dog which is also a walrus'. This will have no fucking implications whatsoever.  

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self.

They have all failed. That's why only cretins now take up Philosophy in Collidge.  

A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories.

But we don't think people with brain damage who lack this don't have a self.  

Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness.

Why not frame the self as a combination of hyperdimensional cat, dog and walrus?  

John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness.

No. It is predicated on the notion that consciousness can be detached from one body and transferred to another. If this were actually done, it would illustrate the idea that personhood is based on physical embodiment. This is because the cobbler will be treated as a cobbler- a crazy one- if he goes around insisting he is the monarch of the country.  

Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach.

All they have done is show that they have shit for brains.  

Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms.

To be fair, there was a time when it appeared obvious that some God had created us. It seemed unlikely that evolution could achieve 'by accident' what appeared to be the product of very careful design. 

(Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

Both are otiose. We show great care for our bodies. We don't give money to quacks who say they can transfer us into the body of a beautiful billionaire like Beyonce.  

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences.

If the police were as stupid as these philosophers, they would never be able to identify and arrest those responsible for various crimes.  

On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal.

'Self' is merely a word used by people to refer to the person inhabiting their one, unique, body.  

This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity.

Very true. Suppose a policeman catches you as you stab your victim. He and various other witnesses identify you and you alone as the murderer. Your lawyer may try to get you off by mentioning that your Aunt has a cat. Thus you should not be viewed simply as a murderer but also as the nephew of an estimable woman who likes cats. Surely, if anybody should go to jail, it should be your aunty who, for all we know, wears gloves. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit!. 

Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities.

Why stop there? Why not add that just as selves have different memories so too do they have different assholes from which farts are emitted? 

The latter are variable in their specificity,

some of my farts are loud. Some are silent but deadly.  

but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

not to mention farting.  

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons.

This is useful only if a murderer can be acquitted on the grounds that his aunty owns a cat. Of course, if that aunty is the head of a Drug Cartel, the Jury will understand that if they don't acquit, they will end up as kitty chow.  

The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves.

We must all understand that our true selves are totes gender fluid and non-binary. Also, maybe we are Lesbian elephants. That would be cool coz we could use our trunks in all manner of fun ways.  

Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves.

I iz bleck. My 'self' has been constituted by horrendous sexual abuse- not just fellatio but also cunnilingus- at the hands of Dead White Viceroys. Yet people expect me to work for a living! How is that just?  

Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves.

Did you know that many people who lack a dick are also bleck? How is it fair that they are expected to teach worthless shite rather than just get paid regardless?  

According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

No. That maybe important in understanding people but it isn't important in understanding that they are so and so who resides at such and such address.  

Social identities are

social roles. That's the Doctor. Standing to his right is the Vicar. The lady they are talking to is the town bicycle.  

traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political),

No. You may be a member of a professional body, but if you don't practice that profession, you lack that social role. 

or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour).

These are predicates, not traits or properties which inhere in a particular body.  

These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is.

No. Relations matter to people. Who their self is does not matter unless they have amnesia.  

What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition

why not 'ejaculatory'?  

– are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self.

Why not have a more relational, less 'container' view of buckets? Are they not, in some sense, Lesbian elephants guilty of any crime which might be ascribed to me? 

Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self.

My computer is very fucking complex. If I seek to recognize this, it stops working. On the other hand, there is nothing very complex about myself. In dreams, I am Beyonce. Then I wake up and see my big fat hairy belly and know that I am stuck being simply myself.  

The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self.

This is why, if you cut a person off from their 'networks'- e.g. if they are marooned on a desert island- they lose all bodily integrity or sense of a connected self. Their eyes merge into the light by which they see. Their ears become the winds. Their noses, however, turn into the trunks of sapphic elephants.  

The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

Only because it isn't really a network and thus can't reverse the ageing process.

How do you self-identify?

When asked by the police, or other relevant authority, I give my name, my address and maybe my NI number or date of birth.  It is a separate matter that I may identify as a lesbian elephant when of strong drink taken. 

You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics.

Or just politics. But these aren't 'identities'. They are 'classes' seeking the political equivalent of the redress achievable by 'class-action' suits.  

You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’

In these cases, you are not identifying yourself at all. You need to introduce yourself by name though you are welcome to add relevant details which signal your desire for friendly conversation.  

Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’

These statements don't identify you. They are traits you share with many other people. Identification involves unique characterization.  

Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Just as thinking of the self as a lesbian elephant is a way to conceptualize all the fun things chicks could get up to if they had trunks. The problem here is that no useful purpose is served by such fantasies. You are not an elephant and you are not a network. You are a a human being who needs to floss more often. Deal with it.  

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities.

There is only one identity- that of Lindsey. Several different predicates apply to her.  

Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits.

No. Traits are merely things upon the basis of which predicates are applied to a particular object. Some traits may be related to each other- e.g. if you describe Lindsey as tall you can't also call her short- but others aren't.  

Lindsey is an inclusive network,

only in the sense that she is a Lesbian elephant- i.e. this is merely a manner of speaking. 

a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

No! The overall integrity of a self is constituted by invisible lesbian elephants fisting each other with their ginormous trunks. Why does nobody acknowledge this? Is it because elephants have dark skins? Or is this pure misogyny and homophobia?  

We notice right away (from a crap diagram) the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others.

for example, being a mother correlates highly with being a woman. Also Irish Catholics tend to be less militant in killing their own fetuses.  

Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network.

The body is not a network. However, for a particular purpose, we can model aspects of the nervous system or the endocrine system using network analysis. But, at some point we have to drop the analogy and figure our surgical or other substantive interventions of a medical type. Even the best network engineer can't reboot your brain. 

Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster.

No. We can discern various traits in various things and, for some purpose of our own, speak of their clustering though they have no independent existence. This is like saying 'the wish is the father of the thought'. It is merely a metaphor. It isn't the case that the wish got the thought's mother pregnant even though he promised to pull out and come on her tits.  

 Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters.

What's more, the wish that fathered a particular thought may also so frequently take it up the ass from the Uncle of the thought with the result that his Aunty never gets preggers. This is a good thing because she decides to pay for her one and only nephew to go to private skool. That's the reason the thought which was fathered by a wish which continually takes it up the ass was able to go to Ivy League and become a Professor.  

For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits.

Things which are 'hereditary' are obviously related to stuff that is biological. What Kathleen forgets is that 'family' may be 'adopted family'. Social traits depend on society they do not supervene on the biological.  

If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

No. As a person changes, people observing her will give greater salience to different traits.  

Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her.

No. Her experience won't be fractured unless her skull is. It isn't really the case that I turn into a quivering mass of jelly if someone refuses to accept that I am Meghan Markle and thus a member of the Royal Family.  

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant.

The reverse may be the case if the husband is constantly sodomizing the wish which is the father to the thought which is the one beloved nephew upon which the aunty can lavish all her love, affection, and most importantly, money.  

Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.

This is also true of wholly imaginary traits. Lindsey's students may prefer to think of her as a Lesbian elephant. 

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity.

by fisting with her trunk other imaginary lesbian elephants. Failure to do so will fracture her sense of identity.  

Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender.

This will definitely cause her to turn into an invisible lesbian elephant.  

Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified.

If you say others are identifying or objectifying you in a specific way, then, it follows, you too are objectifying them. True, the rapist saw you as nothing but a vagina into which he could shove his cock. But is it fair for you to speak of him as a rapist when the fact is, he is also a prominent serial killer and, perhaps more importantly, his aunty owns a cat? Obviously, the right answer to this quandary is to acquit your rapist of all blame. It is the fundamental misogyny of this society which is to blame. Why has Biden not undergone gender reassignment surgery? How come the UN has not banned dicks? Not until the whole network is fundamentally reconstituted can a person without a dick have anything but a fractured identity which is constantly being raped, sodomized, having its eyes gouged out, getting skull fucked in its empty eye-sockets and subjected to body shaming and having to tolerate people who wear MAGA caps. 

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities.

She may feel conflict between her 'personae'. When she talks as a Mum she may say things she disapproves of as a philosopher. But personae are not identities.  

She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity.

But she does want to have one and only identity which is uniquely linked to her body. If someone else cashes her pay-check or empties her bank account, she will get very angry. This is because she and she alone is entitled to that money. If the Bank says 'how can you be sure some other identity of yours did not take the money?' She replies 'how can you be sure you won't feel pain if I kick you repeatedly in the balls?'  

She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity,

some persona. If she is hoping to get laid, it might be wise to conceal her wedding ring and the photo she carries in her wallet of her balding 40 year old son.  

as well as associated feelings and beliefs.

You have to pretend that the Boss's jokes are funny even if you are an invisible Lesbian elephant.  

She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

No Lindsey is for a biological reasons. If her head is chopped off Lindsey will cease to be for biological reasons. Networks don't matter.  

What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self?

 What about our multiple identities as Lesbian elephants? 

What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother,

but may be an invisible lesbian elephant 

and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process.

All processes are part and parcel of having the identity of an invisible lesbian elephant.  

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process.

rather than a lesbian elephant who is working as a process-server so as to put herself through Jungle Law School 

You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that.

Lesbian elephants can be very substantial.  

Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations,

though we know that we wouldn't exist if Mummy and Daddy hadn't had sexual relations and, after that, smothered us with affection and gifts and educational opportunities.  

that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you.

This is a religious idea. We feel Mummy and Daddy haven't perished though their bodies may have done so.  

You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.

Languages work on the basis of subject object predication. Aristotle thought there must be come further 'hypokeimenon' undergirding to all that is. He was wrong.  

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body,

This is contested. Plato would say the body is not a substance. Aristotle would say it has spatial extension and that's good enough. But his theory depends on all things having a 'telos' or purpose built into them which is why their actions appear coordinated or law-like.

 If this is not the case, whatever it is things appear to be isn't their substances. To give an example- I walk into your house and see a framed reproduction of a painting by Van Gogh on the wall. Later, as I leave, I glance at it again. The Van Gogh painting has gone. There is now a painting by Degas. I approach closer and realize I was deceived by a 4k TV designed to look like a framed canvas painting. I suppose, if you had programmed your TV so that it only showed Van Gogh's picture, one could say 'Mr. X has a Van Gogh painting on his wall'. The fact that it was displayed by a TV set is irrelevant. The telos of the object is to show Van Gogh's painting and no other. But, I now discover, the TV is tuned to a Hi Def Art channel. It does not show anything on its own but rather shows whatever it is that is being digitally transmitted from somewhere else. I might say, 'Mr X has a TV which shows whatever painting the Hi Def Art Channel network is transmitting.' 

Are bodies like TV sets tuned to a particular channel? Are they part of a network? No. For some specific purpose- e.g. using a Peloton exercise-bike- such may appear to be the case. But, generally speaking, bodies are not plugged into a network. 

are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive.

Networked computers don't have this feature. Thus they are not really networks. Only things which aren't networks- e.g. animals and plants- are networks. What a great discovery!  

Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux.

Whereas the programs transmitted on network TV aren't. This shows that like computer networks, TV networks aren't networks. However cats are networks as are potted plants.  

Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence.

We are sometimes happy and sometimes sad. Washing machines don't have this property. This proves we are actually washing machines and washing machines are actually cats.  

They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve.

One day, my old washing machine will evolve into a lizard. 

For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes.

So does her kitten. 

Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter.

A mother cat is related to her own past as a kitten. This is why all cats are actually networks when they are not washing machines.  

Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now.

More have not.  

New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised.

Moreover she may become a washing machine.  

There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.

Cats are projecting themselves forward through time. They may evolve into washing machines.  

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties,

e.g. being a little girl thirty years ago and being a Mum now.  

we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity.

Lindsey is sometimes a washing machine and sometimes evolves into a lizard.  

A cumulative network has structure and organisation,

Its implementation may do so.  

as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes.

or lesbian elephants which are turning into washing machines. 

Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another.

Those 'stages' are imposed by the eye of the observer. They are not intrinsic. We can equally think of Lindsey as a lesbian elephant overlapping with, or mapping into, her washing machine.  

For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage.

Just as our seeing Lindsey as a lesbian elephant overlaps with her being a washing machine.  

Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

Even if invisible lesbian elephants don't exist they can feature in my history of her.  

If the self is its history,

it can't also be its geography. History is about chaps. Geography is about maps.  

does that mean it can’t really change much?

NO! It means invisible lesbian elephants can change into washing machines because the cat told them to.  

What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances?

She should become a washing machine.  

Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were.

Only in the sense that people I describe as lesbian female elephants who change into washing machines don't cease being whatever it is I said they were.  

Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating.

NO! They are the experiences of washing machines which used to be lesbian elephants. One ipse dixit proposition is just as good as another.  

Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation.

I deeply regret not proving the Reimann hypothesis when I was 17 because I was too busy making love to super-models. On the other hand, I have no regrets about renouncing the British Crown because I felt it looked a bit cheap and flimsy.  

You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way.

No. We regret not doing things we couldn't have done because we were too shit.  

When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act.

No. You are pretending, against all the evidence, that you can stop being utterly shite. This is like my saying I have now renounced sex with super-models and thus will soon have a proof of the Reimann hypothesis. 

Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and, not either-or.

Precisely my point about everybody being a lesbian elephant who is turning into a washing machine.  

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen.

e.g. choosing to be a lesbian elephant who turns into a washing machine 

It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey.

This is also true of people who have not had any surgery but who I identify as lesbian elephants who are turning into washing machines.  

Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

or her having been a lesbian elephant.  

The network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self.

lesbian elephants are very good at that sort of mapping.  

Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.

It also enables us to understand why anybody I say is a lesbian elephant who is turning into a washing machine is actually a cumulative network with those features.  

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease.

This person will no longer be able to fulfil certain roles. It would be a mistake to re-elect him to the White House.  

They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor.

Not necessarily. The child may disown the parent fearing a steeply escalating financial liability for medical care. Citizenship may be stripped of a person now unable to defend himself against the charge that he had committed treason or gained naturalization by fraudulent means. A marriage may be annulled- i.e. treated as though it had never taken place. A person accused of plagiarism may have his appointment as a Professor retroactively cancelled. On the other hand, this person is still a lesbian elephant slowly but inexorably turning into a washing machine- if that is what I say he is. That's how 'ipse dixit' stipulations work.  

They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change.

Only in the sense that they are still a lesbian elephant.  

The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete.

and lesbian elephant 

The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network.

also, some other lesbian elephants are saying mean things about this parent.  

The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.

 NO! They sustain themselves as lesbian elephants so as to slowly but inexorably turn into washing machines. 

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view.

My dad may be dead but that's no reason I shouldn't continue to cash his pension cheques. You must see dad as part of my network of fraud but for which I won't be able to afford cocaine.  

The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness.

Many lesbian elephants are pretty broad in the beam. 

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother,

Why does she not have her mother live with her 

Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself.

Why not do it 24/7? 

But she’s still herself.

Plenty of people visit the graves of loved ones with some similar motivation.  

Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important?

It is very important but on in the sense that more important yet is the self-knowledge associated with actually being a lesbian elephant who is slowly but inexorably turning into a washing machine.  

Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self,

No. She is exhibiting some novel behavior and brain states and so forth.  

and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities.

Or it might not. There may be some aspects of brain-states in Alzheimer's which are 'adaptive' or which, in a different context, may improve outcomes.  

And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves.

There is no 'Momus window' into the soul. Our own preferences are opaque to us. This is necessary, otherwise we could be 'hacked' by a predator or parasite.  

This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement.

Claiming to know oneself can help you make a bit of business. Showing you can know yourself in the Biblical sense can get you arrested for indecent exposure. Yet both are a wank.  

The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

No. Our identity is fixed. How we feel about our identity or what we might want it to be changes over time. Some 40 years ago I wanted to be a homeless alcoholic. Fate was unkind to me. Now I want to be a younger, more callipygous, Beyonce. Alcoholism is boring. Twerking looks fun. I bet I could be the next TikTok twerking sensation. 

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination.

What Professors should worry about is the fact that they are trying to assign to themselves a particular characteristic- viz. being smart and knowledgeable- which they singularly lack. This can lead to great public mischief.  

Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories:

e.g. 'Professor', 'PhD student' rather than the broader category of 'stupid, useless, shitheads'.  

‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich.

People who bang on about their color or creed or political orientation are trying to gain money or power of one sort or another. But there are also plenty of people who will take a bit of cash in return for telling you about your multiple identities as lesbian elephants or dolphins or Queen Cleopatra or whatever. 

On the other hand, when priests say you have an immortal soul which can get to a real nice Heaven, maybe you should listen to them. This is because you know your body will actually die. It won't survive death under a bunch of different identities or as a 'network' or as the washing machine all lesbian elephants end up becoming. 

Seeing ourselves as a network

or a lesbian elephant 

is a fertile way to understand our complexity.

Because lesbian elephants could become the Mummies of Dumbo who has a magic feather and thus can fly.  

Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse,

But that 'discourse' is stupid, ignorant, self-serving shite. Just say so, and its hold is broken.  

and cultivate more productive communication.

By talking about things which are useful in raising productivity 

We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives.

This does not matter in the slightest. Just buy and sell stuff on open markets.  

Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial.

Only if we aren't communicating and understanding those we need to communicate with and understand. If this is the case, it may be that we aren't doing anything useful or productive. Equally, we may simply be not worthy of communicating with and everybody understands this.  

Lindsey is a white woman philosopher.

Nothing wrong with being white or a woman. Philosophy, sadly, turned out to be stupid, ignorant, shite.  

Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white).

No. That's why she objects if one of them put's their own name to a paper she wrote.  

At the same time, she might share an identity

this is a predicate 

as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women.

Your experience of shit is not shaped by the fact that you have or lack a dick. Shit simply is shit. White males produce shite philosophy. So do black women- so what? Everybody poops.  

Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground.

This is a good thing. Answer a fool according to his folly. If somebody starts banging about how horrible it is to lack a dick, get your own back by shouting loudly about Varadkar and his fucking leprechauns which have chased all the Iyers out of Iyerland. Baffle bullshit with bullshit. Counter kray kray with kray kray.  

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns?

You could make a little money writing shite like this for Aeon. Maybe some drooling imbecile will become your PhD student or else you can join a citation cartel of equally useless glorified child minders.  

One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing.

That is a purely subjective matter. Some may value being 'self-directing', others may value being a lesbian elephant turning slowly but inexorably into a washing machine. 

You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self-determining.

You might also worry that the washing machine into which you, as a lesbian elephant, are turning into way not have an extended warranty.  

The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate,

Why? No country became free and self-determining without some previous history. No child gained majority or enfranchised itself without some previous history. People who are already free aren't interested in talk of freedom. There must be some prior constraint or coercion they seek to escape for the word to be meaningful. 

with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction.

You don't need resources to give yourself a direction. True, you may not be able to follow it. That's why maybe it's a good thing you are actually a lesbian elephant who is slowly but inexorably turning into a washing machine.  

Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices.

This woman chose to study and then teach stupid shit. Perhaps she had no greater potential.  

That would be randomness, not self-determination.

Nothing wrong in choosing a random path or 'lawless choice sequence'. The problem, by Razbarov Rudich, is that there is no way of distinguishing random from pseudo random. We don't know any choice sequence is truly 'lawless'. Moreover, by the Watanabe 'ugly duckling theorem', classification without some bias is impossible. My point is Math, by the beginning of the Seventies, had shown that everything this silly woman is babbling about is a priori nonsense save in the sense that everybody is a lesbian elephant slowly but inexorably turning into a washing machine. 

In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself.

Which is why a white Professor can also claim to be an African American lesbian elephant 

Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside.

This is just standard operating procedure for lesbian elephants slowly but inexorably &c.  

Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones.

Something prevents any actual network architecture we know of doing any such thing.  True, an element of a network may cease to serve its required function and the network may reconfigure so as to exclude it. 

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be.

You soon find yourself excluded from any social or business or family network if you make a habit of knifing your interlocutor.  

That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others.

It also doesn't mean those responsibilities are themselves lesbian elephants slowly but inexorably turning into washing machines.  

Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks.

Just as kids aren't just in School, they are Schools; prisoners aren't just in prison, they are prisons, lesbian elephants aren't just into each other, they are each other in a manner which leads them to turn into washing machines.   

By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are

lesbian elephants- right?  

and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

turn into a washing machine- preferably ones with an extended warranty.