Worthless

After years of exposure to university exams I think I may have developed an immunity to them. I am test-proof. It speaks a great deal to how stupid it is to give graduate students exams. After eight years of university education at a fairly high level it may well be the case that I have learned absolutely nothing except how to do well on exams...so why keep making me do them? Especially since I have been studying philosophy...I can take an essay exam on anything and if the person grading the exam is not a philistine or a lawyer then I can make an issue of it metaphysically and write a fine essay about it.

I have a good, but spotty memory. So if you ask me about what Iris Marion-Young thinks if the link between individualism and autonomy in liberalism then I will remember the essay and a few quotes. I will put those quotes in there and a few sentences about them...then I will take a bow, turn around, and whistle for the cavalry. At this point everyone from Heraclitus to the Supreme Court of the United States will fire a round into the essay if need be.

What is that you ask, should group rights be protected over individual rights or the other way around? Well, I do not know much about all that practical mumbo-jumbo, but I can tell you a little bit about significance, consciousness, the self and possibility. Does she suffer from "false consciousness," and is this why she submits to oppressive treatment? Enough about her, let me tell you what I think about consciousness and why it is so hard to say whether or not someone's consciousness is "true" or "false."

First of all, it is not quite clear what model of truth you are working in (and it does not matter cause I am equipped to complicate everyone one of them), but I am prepared to suggest that consciousness itself is false or un-natural. Because we are a fallen creature, we are conscious...to become conscious, aware, is to fall from grace. This is why Adam and Eve covered themselves when they partook of "knowing ." To clothe one's self, to be clothed in a self, to be a self, the first falseness and now we are dealing with a new level of verity that deals in "significance."

As Aristotle says, we percieve particular things sensually, we know the generalities we derive inductively after retaining sense perceptions and recognizing likeness. The first order ability of the conscious-knower is an artistic rendition of the known, then we interpret this and we know. Furthermore, this happens in society, in liguistic communities, and outside of society man is "either beast or god, but no man." So we false animals, can we have a "true consciousness?"

When someone suggests that someone is falsely conscious they are speaking more about the motivation of actions than consciousness. To adopt a common term, they are suggesting that, rather than acting according to their own will, they are taking over the directive of a more dominating will (best illustration of "false consciousness" is Sartrean "bad faith"...real false consciousness is the Marxian idea of consciousness being superstructural epiphenomena that does not accurately reflect awareness of the real structural existence). What does it mean to have a will in this sense? Again, we are working in consciousness, that realm of signification the fallen beast has given to the world he dwells within, to have a will it would seem is to press into possibility a choice made available by the various significances that make up your world. You can never have your own meaning (Wittgenstein--"private language"), hence you cannot have your own transcendental will that presses its own spontaneous meaning into possibility...such is, quite literally, incoherent.

What does it mean for her to be falsely conscious? It means she is conscious...she is human...and she is in existential need of redemption like all of us.