Tuesday 21 April 2009

More of the Previous- Beckett Again

I wrote in the last piece that since the implications of a false position's own falseness must ultimately be included within the internal logic of itself- though that was far more in the way of an intuitively produced notion than analytically so, and may itself be nonsense- but anyway, with that line as an entry-point, taking another quick look at Beckett's description of self as "one's ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness," and also of the capacity for a 'genius' for inhabiting an error and this single-minded devotion comprising much of his alleged genius, though even there this fleshing out of the error is only partially done or else the internal logic of the error would have revealed to him its falseness.

A look at a definition of inorganic:

1. not having the structure or organization characteristic of living bodies.
2. not characterized by vital processes.

Beckett's view of human existence, this line that strives to be a meaningful linguistic structure, as an emanation of a living being possessed of vital processes within a living body cannot, by any sane logic, make sense. The fact that a living being produced the line contradicts the line's notion that one is not a living being, regardless of whether one describes this human state of oneself as an ultimate position.

And so the reasonable response for the thinker of the thought should be that the language process has betrayed itself, shown itself to be false, and that the self who thinks itself to be, or is proclaimed to be, this inorganic singleness is simply a matter of false language. This should be perfectly self-evident, particularly for a genius, else the type of people permitted into the enclosure of Genius renders the word almost useless, since what then denotes the being that doesn't fall prey to such obvious error- and about the very essence of life. But to repeat what I wrote yesterday:

Though since the implications of a false position's own falseness must ultimately be included within the internal logic of itself, he happily stops well short of this final implication, or even, such is his devotion to the error, he will be willing to shift the implied falseness onto life itself, if it suffices to keep his 'truth' intact.

So Beckett- not particularly meaning to pick on Beckett but he is almost archetypally useful here- rather than make the obvious deduction that it is his language that is false and producing the false sense of self, shifts onto poor life, and all of it, the implications of falseness, deadness; not done disingenuously but simply because of the narrow capacity to dwell within self-conceived error. Though one could also argue that it is the false sense of self that calls forth the false language that produces and justifies the false sense of self in the first place! A genius, or one who dwells in truth, should immediately have seen the falseness of the idea or philosophy the moment it appeared (and the line is ultimately for such as Beckett an over-arching idea, the hierarchical notion within which all else stands in relation), but then again, one who is in truth wouldn't have produced the line in the first place.

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