(A.J.)

“We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. [...] we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Humans. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.”

Solaris comes as a mirror of humanity in two ways: on the one hand, reflecting human inability to understand The Alien, to grasp its life-form. If (in Wittgensteinian terms) language is a form of life, and if communication comes according to rules humans can hardly interpret, then this lack of communication shows the lack of understanding the life form of the other. The only language, the only life form present is the one humans see, the one humans always already see as. And the only kind of understanding emerging from it is the one which tells us something about ourselves and our understanding and our own mind. One the other hand, Solaris reproduces beings kept deep in our psyche, hidden in the deepest parts of our mind. In so far, it reflects human psyche in its entirety. Reflection of Solaris’ reflection is a reflection of ourselves. And the Kantian project comes here in the form: to understand Solaris and its life-form is to understand the condition of possibility of this understanding, that is, to understand ourselves, while the object of thought, the Ocean-in-itself, remains beyond our reach.

“[...] humanity now had to acknowledge the neighborhood, which even though being a billion miles of emptiness away, divided from us by  a whole space of light years, still stands on the paths of its expansion, the neighborhood harder to grasp than the whole rest of the Universe.” (my translation)

Solaristics – a scientific discipline devoted to the research of Solaris has come to substantial problems. For (just as Laudan says), in order for a research question to become a recognized scientific problem, the possibility of its solution has to be granted: it has to be a solvable problem. The golden age of Solaristics was over once the possility of answering the crucial questions regarding Solaris started fading away. Mainly the possibility of the Contact. And when an empirical problem looses its status, it becomes a philosophical problem. Solaristics has accordingly become a degenerating research tradition, which bounces science back to epistemology, back to Kant. Something like a punch into the face of naive analytic philosophy?

Ray Hsu (Concordance, in “Anthropy”)

***

(T.S.Eliot)

***

What an idiot do you have too be to humiliate yourself, accept thise rotten hierarchical system, accept that you are doing this ONLY because you are a *new member*, so that you can become one of THEM, so that next year you can be just the same asshole, just the same pathetic mind, without any critical thinking, the mind which gave up morality, which follows the rules, which had a its chance to become moral, which was moral in one tiny second throughout which it said Yes, thus accepting the rules of the group pressure and its “collective will”…

I can see them replying “ahh, you don’t understand, this is only fun!” – but no, poor minds, there is nothing not to understand, you don’t live in a different language game, you don’t belong to a long forgotten tribe or some lost part of civilization with its own rituals which we first need to understand before being able to speak of it. No, you live in this society which knows for racism, which knows for the notion of human rights, of the notion of humiliation and moral consciousness. But you still say yes for the sake of being part of the group, for the sake of benefits which the group will give you, and you don’t wonder if maybe you should once in your life question the “authority” (hahaha, how crazy ridiculous it sounds to create an authority out of some pathetic small minds who are the members BECAUSE they are the members!) … Opportunism as a ticket to ride… DISGUSTING.

(It’s funny that we came to this topic by discussing how to clean all the dirty dishes in our new kitchen which has no cupboards nor a dishwasher, and Christian said that maybe we should just skip the cleaning part cause, after all, it’s not impossible that our dishes might decompose into a perfectly clean kitchen :) Well, it really isn’t impossible, but it’s zillion times less probable than winning in lottery five times in a row. But then comes an interesting point: if we extend the time to some extremely high measures, it all gets more probable, and not only that but also for example, the possibility that our kitchen turns into a dog or a bear :) It’s interesting that everyday language often deals with various (not very probable) possibilities as complete impossibilities – we need to protect our minds from being overwhelmed by an uncontrollable world; we need to set reference-pillars, “hinge-propositions” that will give us coordinates so we don’t feel completely lost… we need to squeeze the universe into a ball although that won’t be it, that won’t be it, at all…)

Your body spilt over my body

Brings reality to seeing

...the unreality of the seen

transparency is all that remains

Your footsteps in the next room...

…

Was L. B. only a faker, a lost personality, stretched between different cultures and demands of society… or was he driven by the realization of the value of moments and their disappearance once they are prolonged, shaped into a socially acceptable form, extended into what we are or what we become once we let it all roll down… or was he someone who couldn’t accept the fact that he wasn’t what he hoped he’d be or maybe he just wanted to watch himself from a distance, leaving things as they were and himself involved in them as it all was… a bit like Orasio Oliveira from Cortazar’s Hopscotch… home – away – back home, but home isn’t home anymore, and you are not you and it’s all good as long as it remains untouched, just a trace laying in a snow, until it melts or the new snow falls over it.

Today Christian and I concluded that nowadays philosophy is so messy, people are trying to publish as much as possible and as a result, we get bunch of texts based on insufficient education or insufficiently read literature. But nobody complains, cause the more slippery articles we have, the more room for the criticism of them, hence more publishing.

Another thing you get in nowadays (mainly anglosaxon) philosophy is such an ignorance towards traditional philosophical terms (but that’s nothing new, right…). Terms like transcedent and transcendental or ontic and ontological are so often used either interchangeably… bah

Divertimento, the first novel of Julio Cortazar.

When we were still playing life… that’s what Divertimento is about. This playing of life which comes to the point of “growing up”, growing out, the life awaits, and the games should be left behind. But the notion of game is ambiguous here… Playing because of playing, playing because one needs to remain detached from reality bares a risky path to the vanity. Not a vanity towards reality (reality – one of the most abused words ever) or “real life”… no, not that. This is a vanity which comes from isolating art from everything. (I’d say a vanity of trying to be a-political, in the broadest sense of this word… but I won’t go into that now).
The story is circular, almost like in this great movie Doni Darko. It’s the search for knots only in order to have something to unknot, creating them even there where there are no knots, just to prolong the game, while the game prolongs itself towards its end, as the string has an end, even when it’s rolled in a ball… I guess some of us love to search for the knots… it’s the feeling of complexity of reality, of its details and beauty (-> knitted scarf) But they were creating them so that they could search for them, leading themselves to the realization of this fact, painting a sword, which will cut the string… Pity noone realized that sword-fight could be a game too…

What do you think? I had left?

You’re mistaken.

I was only standing out at the gate
– with a golden grin –
waiting to hear your laughter
at my assumed departure.

No, I cannot leave –
howsoever much “you and I” may grieve –
for I’m your conscience that’s asleep
“Asleep…tired…or it malingers”!

And if that’s a joke, you see, it was TSE –
or, to be more precise, his compound ghost –
who implored me not to leave, saying:
“There will be time, there will be time…”

And yes, I agreed.
Indeed, there will be time
to leave.

~ CR