From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Sun 10 Nov 2002 - 10:13:15 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Grant Callaghan" <grantc4@hotmail.com>
Kenneth
> >In a sense, mine ' me' is more ' mine ', yours is more social/
> >cultural conditioned so to speak.
> >Hope you don 't get me wrong,...
Grant,
> I was just trying to point out the fact that we were talking about
different
> things. You were talking about not having a particular culture to call
your
> own and I was talking about a person who had no culture at all -- no
> language memes, no tool-making memes, no way to communicate with other
> people at all. If you knew how to make fire that's a meme unless you
found
> a way to do it without being taught by someone. Without the memes of
> society you would have to invent everything you did from finding a way to
> eat to getting in out of the heat and cold. If you didn't know how or why
> to cook your meat, you would have to eat it raw. These are the advantages
> that culture has given us. Now, instead of worrying about what to do with
> the dead animal we found, we worry about whether we should eat French,
> Italian, or Chinese food tonight.
Yes, I did understand we' re talking about different things, anyway,
I do have a culture I can call my own, but it is more a matter of
involvement.
There is a certain way in the Western culture by which we are/ can describes
ourselves as human ( values and norms), but there is still another way and
that
is MY- way. I am called upon to live my life within those fixed bounderies
of
social and cultural dispositions. That is, in my development as a human
being,
if I want to become authentic/ individualistic in the real sense of the word
I have
to drop my family, religion, society, school, the nation-state... all powers
of
convention... Taylor writes.
That is a false picture, because my identity is due by those forces, their
inner-
connections and by the people who use them and form an image of me by
using those dispositions_ for their own advantages most of the time.
The dialogue between them and me forms in the end the identity which I
do development during growing up_ the material is given to me by the
society/ family and friends.
That is what I see, in your, normal situation.
But that wasn 't my situation at all.
A part of the dialogue I lost, the supposed identity which I had to deve-
lopment was breached, the material I was bound to receive never came.
I filled up the blanks with what you could call ' instincts ' or parts of
what
is called existentalism, groundforms/ archetypes of what it is to be human.
You can make your own choises, but the possibilities where to choose
from are not yours to make, in a sense I had to do just that_ I had to
create
possibilities where, in a later stage of life, I had to choose from.
Where you we 're given all the collective possibilities I had to restrict
myself
to a few.
Regards,
Kenneth
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