Individual-Personhood

On Individual Personhood

So as I have written, healthy culture (which is a sort of "tentative universal") involves a definition of culture as comprising Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure. When a given culture is healthy (is healing), then the accent is on versions of these four things that privilege togetherness over apartness. An Identity-Politics of Togetherness for example would be an "Us and Us" identity politics rather than any of the current factional and alienating "identity-uniforms" based on race, class, gender, nationality, or even species.

So my Name I-P (Its really intended to be more of a generically egalitarian "title"--or "anti-title", ultimately replacing Mr, Mrs, Sir, etc...), means "Individual-Person" and Individual-Personhood is my suggestion for what would constitute a non-factional Identity-Politics consistent with the Cosmology, Ritual, and Infrastructure of a healthy culture. Identifying as an individual person probably sounds so self-evident as to be hardly necessary to mention, but of course I mean something very specific (though I think very defensible and non-arbitrary) by the term.

Individual (Inner Relationship)	Person (Outer Relationship)	Time Orientation
Mind	Citizen-of-the-World	Future
Heart	Neighbor	Past
Body	Family-Member	Present
Intuition	Soul	Eternity

The preceding table (which will probably appear in the same or more elaborate form through-out this blog, is supposed to more or less say it all (and so save me from a long explanation) but I think it will probably need at least a little elaboration. What follows then is the major part of an old post of mine explaining individual-personhood in the context of my decision to change my name and call myself I-P. There is much more to it than what I say below but it seems like as good an introduction as I am up to right now. more later of course:

I-P (Name-Change)

If anybody reads my profile they will know that I am trying to transcend factional Identity politics such as race and gender, religion, among other things. For a long time now I have been dissatisfied both with my birth names and with the ones i have chosen for myself since. If anyone goes to my lifedancelog.motime.com blog and scrolls down to the post entitled “a vision of names” they will read a story in which I asked “Spirit” for a new name and actually received 3. Unfortunately I haven't had inner consensus to use them openly, wanting to make the sharing of such a names a sort of mark of bonding between myself and others who have received names in a similar way.

I still don't have inner consensus (of mind, heart, body, and soul) to share my new names but I do have it, after another “Vision Dance” (the particular kind of ritual at which I received the names alluded to) to replace, where ever I can, the various faction-connoting names I have chosen for myself in the past.

I-P stands for “Individual-Person” and perhaps is more like a title such as “Mr” or “Mrs”, than an actual name. But as such it is a very different kind of title (almost an “anti-title) in that it affirms an identity and an Identity politics that Transcends race, gender, even species, together with any other kind of factional identification of Class or Profession or anything else. It is an identity politics that, among other things, affirms the paradoxical equality and primary togetherness of all Beings.

The “individual” part of individual personhood represents the “vertical”, “self-directed” aspect of the Identity; it relates roughly to ones own experience of ones self in terms of ones own “thinking (mind), Feeling(heart) , sensation( body), and intuition (“soul” in a certain sense) to use a somewhat Jungian vocabulary.

The “Person” part of individual-personhood relates to the “horizontal”, “Other-directed” aspect of Identity in terms of the generic archetypal “social roles” that I affirm to be inherent in anyones Existence at all. These roles (which also constitute four venues of social interaction) are four fold: Family-member (the Familial venue), Neighbor (the neighborly venue), Citizen-of-the-World (the Civil venue) and “Soul” (for lack of a better word, the Religious/Philosophical/Metaphysical venue).

These two identities (the individual and the personal) are related paradoxically in the same way that the vertical and horizontal of spacial orientation (and so the five directions) are related. This means that they are not really two separate identities at all but one five-fold identity. in a same way that horizontal “north, south, east, and west” (the 4 “horizontal” directions) imply and involve “up-and-down” (what I am calling the vertical 5th direction) of spacial orientation, so the “Personal” implies the “Individual” and visa versa, and fulling ones potential as one involves fulfilling it as the other at the same time. Of course having a been initiated by default into the one-sided, paradox and Life-denying logic and sensibility of the present and historical cultures of apartness, we all tend to take for granted and for real and experience of that corresponds to this alienation of inner and outer social existence and so must of us have fallen prey to political implications (basically war in one form or another) that proceed from such false dichotomy and false consciousness.

As an example of this, I want to go a little bit here into one of the effects sick culture has on Identity-politics in our modern version of the culture of apartness. This is that, since the kind of paradoxical togetherness involved in Individual-Personhood is (like paradox in general) hard to even understand in a sick culture let alone live out, what has happened in our politics is that an experience of ourselves that is essentially a paradoxical “both/and” sort of thing vis-a-vis the individual and the “community” (self and other), has been broken apart, dichotomised and so treated as if it were essentially “either/or”.

In our time the Capitalist side of such dichotomization is the ideological mythology about some one-sided and dissociated and atomized conception of “the individual” that is in almost complete denial of the relationships and responsibilities inherent in anyones existing at all (i.e. of what i am calling the four roles/ venues of “personhood”). Even internally (and not coincidentally) the capitalist idea of an “individual” is dissociated, since it involves the priviledging of the “Thinking function” (over feeling, sensing, intuiting) within the the whole of our subjective individual experience. This of course lead to endless alienation, anxiety, lonilness, competition, etc... and ultimate individual and collective suicide.

On the other hand, more traditional, “socialistic” or “communistic” (but equally one-sided) forms of Identity go to the opposite extreme in enslaving the real whole “Individual” to some equally distorted conception of “personal” (social) relationships and responsibilities. These can be anything from Kinship or Gender roles, to the roles of “citizens” (narrowly and nationalistically defined), to various career or employment roles, all of which inevitably demand that the “individual” suppress or distort aspects of their individuality to fit such factional and misconceived and one-sided identity-uniforms. Of course this, via in a way that is only superficially different, also leads to endless alienation, anxiety, loneliness, competition, etc... and ultimate individual and collective suicide.

Anyway, what it means to actually and fully live the paradoxical relatively “themless” identity politics an individual-person within the context of the assumptions of a healthy culture is some thing that I'd have no time to describe here even if I was not still in the process of learning this myself, but I do know and have time to say that “coming-out” as an “individual-person” involves an implicit and explicit renunciation of the kind of false solidarity that comes from the normal “us-and-them” way of bonding (that is of “us” bonding against “them”, whether the “thems” are other creatures, other genders, or other so-called “classes” of any kind. It also involves a conscious acceptance of the implicit responsibility of healthy coming-together, not only outwardly with others (as a responsible “Family-member”, “Neighbor”, “Citizen-of-the-World” and “Soul”) but also inwardly as an authentic Individual.

Of course I'm not likely to ever be permanently cured from “back-sliding” into old, alienated, ways of thinking and feeling, about myself and others since the habits of forty years cannot be expected to change overnight even when there are some new habits to exchange them for (as is the case here). My name change here is just an affirmation and reminder of my intention to go in this direction and of my commitment to it .

Finally, as I said, I currently regard “I-P” as a kind of “title”. If, in the future I do get inner consensus to share the three names I was given. Then I will formally adopt them and be “I-P so-and so”. For now, I will just be “I-P”.

PS,

There is some insight into all of this kind of factional identity politics from the song “uniforms” which is among my myspace blogs. So I quote the text of it here:

Uniforms
By I-P

You wear a uniform of a woman
You wear a uniform of a man
You wear a uniform of an employee
Or a Jew or a Mexican
You wear a uniform of a soldier boy
A uniform of a civilian too
And when you play the game of “me or them”
You wear a uniform of you!

Chorus:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

You wear a uniform of a bourgeoisie
A uniform of a working class
You wear a uniform of Humanity
When the Martians come at last
You wear a uniform of your politics,
Your race and your religion too,
But if you want peace in the world my friend
This is my advice to you:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

Well I'm talkin' about your identity
I'm talkin bout your foolish pride
And the fear and insecurity
That scares you into takin' sides
'cause everybody is the same and different,
Butt-ugly and beautiful as any star,
And if you take off all of them uniforms
Maybe you'll find out who the hell you are!

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

You wear a uniform of an anarchist
You wear a uniform of a wife
You wear a uniform for every thing you do
And for every part of your life
But there's no uniform for Personhood
Or for authenticity
So if you're uptight and uncomfortable
Take this advice from me:

Chorus:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

It's us it's us it all of us so please come off of it
It's us is us its all of us; this is “Themless” politics
It's us it's us it's all of us good-and-evil, healthy-and-sick
It's us it's us it's all of us: this is “Themless Politics”!

Chorus:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

{comment: of course there is certainly a sense in which Individual-Personhood can be regarded as itself an "Identity-uniform" if something that is so inherently inclusive, paradoxical, and "Themless" can be so described. If so, so be it; let us call it a "uniform of togetherness"; an affirmation an intrinsically shared theme admitting of endless variation but, nevertheless as with all uniforms or identities, implying equally shared and intrinsic relationships and responsibilities. As I will elaborate elsewhere, these relationships and responsibilities all have to do with Cointregration, Conference and Communion.

Also I want to at least mention here that to identify as a recovering "Alienated-Phony" (or to be more parallel since "Phoniness" is the opposite of authentic Individuality and "Alienation" is the opposite of Personhood, a "Phony-Alien") goes hand in had with identifying as an individual-person. That is, to affirm Individual-Personhood is only to become an "Alienated-Phony in Recovery" rather than being such in Denial. It is to acknowledge both the sick culture one continues to suffer from as well as the healthy culture one is trying to cultivate. But more of this is an forthcoming post.--I-P}

Healthy Culture: Cointegrative Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Further Introduction

Because of Blogger's build-in space limitations, I had to keep whittling down my usual "about me" section, almost to the point of misleading over simplification. In this post I am publishing the full text of what I wanted to put in that space:

About me 1:

“Truth is the First casualty of War. It is also the first condition of Peace”

“Everybody has a piece of the Truth and every body has a piece of the Lie.”

—I-P Kerren Odori

We all live in, are infected by, and suffer from, a sick Culture of Apart-ness, of Alienation. This culture, like all culture is comprised of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure. In the case of the dominant culture this means; a Cosmology of Apart-ness, an Identity-Politics of Apart-ness, Rituals of (inner and outer) Apart- ness, and Infrastructures of Apart-ness. Education (formal and informal) is the transmission of culture, and in our case it is the transmission of this sick culture. The factional political paradigms or our time (including those based on race, gender, class, political party, nationality, even species) are all symptoms of, rather than cures for, this condition of sick culture. As such, none of them have any potential at all for changing anything that matters in any sustainable way. We have no time for this.

Since sick culture is the problem, it follows that Healthy Culture is the solution. So what is Healthy Culture and how does it manifest on the collective, political Level? Glad you asked. This question is explored on my two blogs: Healthy Culture: Cointegrative Science (cointegrative.blogspot.com) and Lifedancelog (lifedancelog.blogspot.com). There I write of an extremely small, but vital and replicable, Cultural Pilot Project that is currently being attempted (unsuccessfully so far) in the cultural microclimate of Twin Oaks Intentional community in Virginia involving the practice of Healthy Culture; its cosmology of Togetherness (Cointegrative Science), its Identity-Politics of Togetherness (Individual-Personhood), it’s Rituals of Togetherness (Life-Dance rituals) and its Infrastructure of Togetherness.

About Me 2:

I suppose the most salient thing I could say about me as an individual is the following: For me, being in this world has always been like coming into a restaurant and discovering gang rape happening in the middle of the room, and then looking around and discovering further that all the other customers seem to be still trying to “make the best of things” and “enjoy their evening” (if this simile fails it is mostly because what is happening in the world is, for the most part more, rather than less criminally stupid and obscene than a gang rape).

Later on I realized that the “rape” only seems to me to be happening in the middle of the room. Evidently, for most people the scene is really going on off in a corner somewhere shielded both by a circle of Guards with sunglasses and prominently displayed weapons as well as by a screen put up by the restaurant owner to protect the sensibilities of his customers. I guess most people can barely hear the screams over the conversation and loud music. Nevertheless, this rape has always been for me the main and most obvious thing that was happening in the room and the whole idea of “making the best of it” and “enjoying my evening” has always seemed to me obscenely crass, even somewhat ghoulish, and at any rate basically impossible for me. There is no “best” to make of such a situation. The only decent and sensible thing has always seemed to me to be to consider that ones evening is simply “ruined” for the purposes of “private enjoyment” and resolve to spend the time (the rest of ones life i mean) trying to figure out what is really going on and how to stop it.

Now this is not to say that I have not been (and continue to be) temporarily distracted. Its just that the various mechanisms of “distraction maintenance” (drugs, alcohol, entertainment, consumption,”art” competition,”work”, the soap opera of “relationships” etc) have never caught on with me in such a way as to keep my mind and heart away from the main thing that is happening for very long at all. I suppose one or more of them might have done so if I'd “applied myself” but I have never been able to see the point in any of that, even from a purely selfish point of view. I mean to me, being fully alive means being fully responsive to what is really happening both inside and outside oneself, not being numb to it.

Anyway,the upshot of this quirk in my basic personality has been a long odyssey that began with an intuitive attempt to try to stay outside of the general situation myself and figure out what was going on before I just became a part of what was going on–-or more a part than I already was (I guess another rather unusual thing about me was that I was so clear that the confusion and stupidity going on outside of me was to some extent also going on inside of me as well). I therefor tried to stay more or less on the margins,politely ignoring the people who were winking at me, haling me from their tables and offering me martinis etc…, and trying, through all the smoke and noise, to get some useful insight into what was going on.

I was 24 or so before I began arrive at what seemed to me to be some useful and real answers. In the 20 years since then, I have gotten a lot more. These days, I have taken to calling this “main thing happening in the room” (well not only the rape but the whole situation inclusive of and enabled by everybody present in it) “sick culture”, and my life is basically about the co-creation of what I call “Healthy Culture” as a kind of cultural twelve-step program that is meant to be, not only an alternative to complete capitulation to the prevailing inner and outer craziness and lose-lose stupidity, but a long term cure for it.

There is a great deal to Healthy Culture (it is as simple and as complicated as Sick Culture), but the gist of it is in the two paragraphs of “About me1”. Please contact me if you have any comments, questions, criticisms, and/or desire to participate in this experiment and adventure in inner and outer healing. I-P


About my Blog:


Healthy Culture: Cointegrative Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Cointegrative Science

Note: this blog, which has been moved to Blogger from a previous site "Splinder", used to be called "Integrative Science". Since I don't seem to be able to incorporate the copyright info in the normal way I do so here:
Healthy Culture: Cointegrative Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The following post explains the name change and, to some extent, the meaning of the new name.

About the Cointegrative:

The word "integrative", although it somewhat avoids the static association for me of the word "integral", has never been totally satisfying as a description of the theoritical/cosmological aspect of healthy culture because there is still a sort of unilateral association involved in the word. Corporate concepts such as "vertical integration" and even things like "integrative medicine" still preserve a kind of one-sided accumulative model of "A" integrates "B", "C", "D" etc, and this is not very related to what I have been meaning to convey all this time by the word "Integrative". What I have meant all along, as I described in the blog post introducing the term, is a bilateral/multilateral dynamic of Inner and Outer healing, with the root "integre" being understood in the same sense as the root "holos", which is the root of "Whole", "Holy", and (through "heal") of "Health". Thus I chose the word "Integrative" to describe the inclusive process of inner/outer healing as well as the assumption of the intrinsic primary togetherness of the inner and the outer generally.

I have recently decided that this is still too misleading, and that a better way to convey my meaning is by introducing the word "Co-integrative" (hyphen optional). I think the added prefix "co" successfully signals the primarily paradoxical, non-linear, and non-unilateral essence of the idea of inner/outer healing as an understanding, intention, and an activity, and so helps to point out the difference between this conception of wholeness and healing and other views associated with the term "integral or integrative".

Having googled the word to see if it was indeed a new coinage of mine I discovered, somewhat to my annoyance, that there is a bit of possible confusion between Cointegrative and the "Cointegration" of time series variables in, of all things, Mathematical Finance, so perhaps when I need to use that form of the word I will be careful to insert the hyphen so that it is clear what I am referring to. In most cases however I am sure context will take care of that. All in all I am quite happy with this change of name and don't expect I'll have to make such a change again, though, since the whole enterprise is intrinsically dynamic and evolving, one never knows.

I might as well take this time to express some ongoing doubts regarding the use of the word "Science" to describe the cosmology of healthy culture (as in "Cointegrative Science"). What I like about the term is its connoting of open, experiential, and critical inquiry, all of which are a part of what I have in mind. But the word "Science" ultimately has roots related (to quote an online etymology) "to scindere "to cut, divide," from PIE base *skei- (cf. Gk. skhizein "to split, rend, cleave," Goth. skaidan, O.E. sceadan "to divide, separate;" see "shed". Now the paradox involved in "Cointegrative seperation" or "Cointegrative division" is not as objectionable from the paradox-friendly point of view I am coming from as one might imagine. Such a point of view, because it is paradoxical, can integrate separation and devision when to do so can be seen to serve its Cointegrative purpose. Still, the above derivations continue to rankle somewhat, and while I have decided to keep the word "Science" as part of my description of what I think is an appropriate cosmology and epistemology of a healthy culture, this might change in the future. As it stands, to speak of "Cointegrative Philosophy", or "Cointegrative Cosmology", or some such, is just as accepatible , though these terms are both also problematic for various reasons.

Further comments on Science:

To further explain the critique of Science implied above and to further clarify the different between the assumptions informing it and the Science of Cointegrative Science, I thought I'd offer this slightly edited version of some my own remarks in a long online discussion I had a while back with someone devoted to logic and "The Scientific Method" as they are presently understood (or at least as this person understood them):

"....I gather (...) that for you the superiority of reason and the scientific method (about the nature of which, as I have said, there is already considerable philosophical disagreement) cannot be a dogma because of... what? Because of "peer review" or something? Because of the so called "success" of technology? Consider this analogy:

the Scientific method is like a method of finding out about and training dogs; science has "successfully" (by by its own criterion for success) gotten the dog "nature" to do a few tricks by its approach and its "dog-training" method and this is supposed to justify both the method itself and the world view that led to that method? I mean what if there are other and better ways to train a dog that come from a completely different approach? Ways that don't involve brutality, alienation, "adverse health side effects" etc? what if there are other and better ways to learn about a dog? What if there are better tricks to teach the dog which are not so harmful to the dog and ultimately to its trainers? What if "dog training" in general is a bad idea in the first place? You seem to be saying that somehow, through just repeating this method (whatever you think the details are) we will find out what the best attitude toward dogs is? That if we keep vivisecting the world in theory and practice for the sake of "exclusive control" over it, that sooner or later the truth about the alienation, and insanity of the whole project is going to come out of a test tube somewhere?

If your whole project is fundamentally misconceived, if sciences dictum that "Knowledge is Power" (Bacon) is just he latest version of "Right is Might" (an imminently, reversible equation both logically and psychologically), it's highly doubtful that one is going to learn otherwise by just continuing with normal science. For one thing, "Power" and "Control", act like drugs to an addict, intrinsically blinkering the individual and inhibiting his or her ability to use their critical faculties "outside the box" of the assumptions governing the addictive behavior in question. Maybe Knowledge is not Power; maybe Power as well as Exclusive Control are inwardly and outwardly harmful illusions. Maybe Knowledge is really healthy bi or multilateral Relationship ("Friendship" if you will), with nature with our bodies, with each other, and with death as a part of life. Maybe the world is better "known" in some other way than by cognitively vivisecting the living wholeness of the experienced world and then further interrogating, through experiment, the (now dying) pieces. For that matter maybe its better not to think of "Nature" or the objective world as a primarily separate thing from subjective experience; maybe there is a Shared Subjectivity or Shared Self that corresponds to the shared Objective world of Nature and maybe this shared Self is not fundamentally separate from our shared Nature any more than mind and body are fundamentally separate. After all primary experience itself consists of the togetherness of the subjective and the objective; of both the inner and the outer. Anyway, These are my views but my point here is not that they are true but that they imply a different attitude toward "the dog" and cannot be disproved by any tricks you can get the dog to do by following a method based on your own assumptions about dogs and dog training."

I hope its clear that the "Science" in "Cointegrative Science" is such a science of "Friendship/Relationship" and Inner/outer healing and not the alienated cognitively fragmented science I critique above, and that, rather than embracing the epistemological fascism of the dictum "Knowledge is Power-Over" (one might also call it a "rapist epistemology" given the the gist of other Baconian metaphors referencing Nature as feminine and considering as well the archaic meaning of the word "know" in patriarchal societies and what that must have often meant in practice*) the central dictum of Cointegrative Science might be described as "Knowledge is Power-with" ;Knowledge is co-empowerment, co-evolution, even as "friendship" in some sense.


{*footnote: It is difficult to reference political and social entities like Fascism, and Patriarchy without running the risk of strengthening someones notion that these things constitute the the whole of the disease of sick culture itself rather than being two of many other major symptoms that disease; a disease which we all suffer from, though perhaps with very different symptoms. Such a misunderstanding could only lead to the usual fragmented, dissociated, and misguided motivation and treatment regimen, the effecting of which can never have anything but temporary and unsustainable "success", even against the selected symptoms, and none at all against the underlying disease, which will only be strengthened by the whole dynamic. }