Tuesday, May 29, 2007

I saw Al Gore being interviewed by Charlie Rose yesterday. He has written, or co-written, a book titled The Assault on Reason. Well, reason is always under assault because it is always on the assault. A reasonable body is not born, it is made. The making of the reasonable man is an assault on the unreasonable body. The just born body is an unreasonable body incorporated by a body of reason. The process is imperialistic; "where there was id, ego will be." Reason is the product of repression and Freud finds in the fantasies of his patients, a continuous "slow return of the repressed." Reasoning, like therapy, is " an interminable project."

The project, or the war, has its ups and downs. Sometimes it almost appears as if the reasonable man may win the war, may incorporate the last savage and make the ideal real. But it is precisely at this time that the reasonable man is most vulnerable to unreasonable process. The repressed material does return; the reasonable man is mortal. Birth marks the beginning of the project of making a reasonable man from the raw material of an unreasonable child, and death, marks the end of that project.

In every realist there is concealed an idealist, one who wishes that the whole body be a real body, rather than perpetually becoming real in a struggle with the unreal. Unreality is a fact which the reasonable man is blind to. Al thinks we can do it, but, we will just have to wait and see.