This is not a post

You are not connected to the internet. Well, duh. We already talked about this a bit. There is a dramatic and fun distance between signified and signifier. When we say, 'tree' the thing said is not the tree itself.

This is the Magritte problem, among perhaps other problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

The wikipedia page should take you to the Treachery of Images painting. This painting is of a pipe, and it is realistically rendered. Underneath the pipe, it says, "This is not a pipe." (only in French).

Here is the wikipedia page about self-reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference

This all seems similar to Russell's paradox, which I'll explain as soon as I figure it out....



Where do we go wrong if at all?


Well one answer is that we never go wrong. Just to jazzersize for a bit; Spinoza's theory of wrong seems not to account for falsity. Everything that is wrong to Spinoza seems to be just a small part of the answer. All you have to do is zoom out. (I'm using Thomson again here.) I empathize with him. This is an extrapolation of neutral monism, which I am totally grabbing for easy and sloppy reference right now.

Ariel Levy in her manifesto Female Chauvinist Pigs, decries that when women act like pornstars or imitate pleasure, there's a difference between that and actually feeling pleasure. There's a problem from imitating pleasure and actually feeling it. People in our society, Levy argues, follow wave upon wave of mainstream culture trying to fit into these molds that mainstream culture builds. The end of the cycle is when we as consumers tell them to stop.

That is, Levy thinks that when we lose consciousness of how our actions have greater moral significance to truth; and when the relationship between reality and imitation are tainted (in this case hijacked by mainstream culture and ignorant media culture, and permutations of the four), that's when we go wrong and awry.

These are two takes on the same sort of feeling I think. The feeling is that this world is hostile to us as individuals. Spinoza's answer seems to always be: trust nature; you can always trust nature. Levy's is: yes there is a mistake, and we go wrong where we actually believe in the imitations and what we pretend to do and be.

There is a correct answer. I don't think that Spinoza was always right. He is a successful runner-up to Immanuel Kant (the namesake of this blog). Meanwhile, Levy does present something pressing and important to the discussion: it is factually a problem when it is virtually untrue or when that connection is false; when the relationship between facade and substance is false.