Crazyfinger

(C) "In praise of the parasitic blogger"

If blogging to you then was "a new and still embryonic literary form," then in acknowledging the parasitic nature of your avocation now, you not only endorse the dilution of such a literary form, but, in doing so, I believe you give in, rather without a fight, the hijacking of this blogging medium by "journalism," and "news/views and opinion making."

Come to think of it, if blogging these days is anything, it is an exercise in a convenient and repeated conflating of such a "literary form" with the nearly form-less act of opinion-making, by the acknowledged shit-collectors.

(C) "Demand and Supply"

Believe it or not, most of what goes on in corporations that people think as bad ethics, is really simply a poor understanding of their own markets and a poor execution of the business itself. Any smart business person will look at your statement: "the need for different sizes to suit different shapes," and see nothing but an opportunity to make more money (by tailoring different sized products for different shapes). If this business person is not doing that, then it is simply a matter of him/her not being a slick one. I don't think ethics comes into picture here.

(C) "A response to crazyfinger"

Who are these people for whose beckon and call you are awaiting, fuming that they should call you earlier rather than later? Are these men and women an exclusive club exclusivelyauthorized to cure developmental ailments of the country? Were they awarded a patented monopoly on solving people's problems? Why should anyone look up to them while the people in need are down below? They are not like telecom service providers in U.S. with blanket ownership to airwaves which rightfully belong to people, are they?

(C) "'young, educated, energetic, and frustratingly under-utilized'"

If I were you, I'd instead ask myself: "What can I do with Akili Dada that perks up the imagination of these world-movers and shakers and they come seeking me, curious why Akili Dada is working when their efforts failed, eager to learn if they can take Akili Dada model and scale it up, and ready to even steal some of Akili Dada's thunder?" That would be something, isn't it?

(C) "Indibloggies 2006"

During my initiation phase into Indian blogosphere, I was kindled and run over – gladly – by an almost Pushkin-line simplicity, directness and power of emotions, the getting right down to it quality that I found rampant in the expressions of Indian female bloggers. Anything they touch, they do it with refreshing callouts to that nearly-forgotten syntax and the grammar of life. It may be that the unforgivable self-obsession of men, the Indian kind, that goes back to centuries has smothered these voices until now, or that there is really a new birth, a new reproduction – this time without the awkward and the necessary prodding from the other kind – that we are witnessing, or so I thought.

Of the Sense of Propriety - 3

In this post I will blog the complete Chapter 2, "Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy."

Having developed the notion of sympathy and of the fellow-feeling, Smith now answers a question that naturally arises.  For example, someone like me may put it this way: "Well, I can explain why this fellow-feeling seems to exist that way.  You see, man has this need for the assistance of others and because he wants to make sure that this assistance is available to him, he exhibits this so called fellow-feeling.  So there's really nothing mysterious about that at all." 

Not quite so, Smith says.  Though we all have this inherent need for the assistance of the others, that need is not the reason for the existence of the mutual sympathy because, "both the pleasure and the pain are always felt so instantaneously, and often upon such frivolous occasions, that it seems evident that neither of them can be derived from any such self-interested consideration." (paragraph 1)

In other words, self-interest is not the reason why sympathy and fellow-feeling exists between you and me.  Instead Smith develops an interesting case for the presence of mutual sympathy.  This he does it by refining and expanding the meaning of the phrase, "mutual sympathy."

We know that "sympathy" arises out of our faculty of imagination that makes us put ourself in other person's shoes and experience what he or she is experiencing: his grief, her joy etc.  So, whatever you feel, I too feel it, in a sort of resonating manner, right? 

Yes, but there's more to it, according to Smith.  I think here Smith refines the term "sympathy" when he says that sympathy is not just a "correspondence of the sentiments of others with our own."   It is not all that clean, he says.   

And it gets really interesting as Smith expands the notion of sympathy and says the following: we feel united, you and I feel like brothers that we do, more in moments when we share our grief, than when we share our joy. So here we have one more distinction in front of us.  Grief and joy are no longer the equal contributors to the fellow-feeling.  That sympathy, that fellow-feeling, is no longer that symmetrical as it appeared in the beginning.  It's not that simple as, you feel joyful whenever I feel joyful and so on, so to speak.

In other words, that which alleviates our grief is more satisfactory than that which heightens our already joyful condition.  We feel good when we realize that we have successfully sympathized with our friends who are in grief and they know it and we know that they know it.  "To seem not to be affected with the joy of our companions is but want of politeness; but not to wear a serious countenance when they tell us their afflictions, is real and gross inhumanity."

Not only that, but our feelings towards our friends are also modulated by how they feel towards our enemies.  If you are not friends with my friend, that's ok.  But if you are friendly with my enemy, that does it! 

In any case, as I said before, all these descriptions are really only saying about our normal, day-to-day lives - about yours and mine - when we are in our unreflective moods.  In other words, we don't deliberate about these things: we just are this way.  On the other hand, the moment we begin to reflect, that is, the moment we begin to be self-conscious about the way we are, then we switch ourselves into a more judgemental, analytical mode which is a step above our unreflective state.   We are not talking about that deliberative state of being here.  Just a simple reminder because I think this point is very important!

Next post, I will start with Chapter 3: "Of the manner in which we judge of the propriety or impropriety of the affections of other men, by their concord or dissonance with our own."

Aside - 1

Before I resume my reading with Chapter 2, "Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy," I'd like to make a few side remarks.

Though Smith's language is very simple, so that there really is no need to express (re-cite) anything in my own language, I cannot help but feel the urge to give in to my involuntary recollections of similar thoughts from elsewhere in my adult life.  Related thoughts, flashes of insights, movements in my thinking that I didn't know were dormant until awakened by a sentence or two that I read in this study, are all there.  But all these I am resisting.  I do not want any of these to intrude: because if I allow all these to seep in and shape my reading, then what I am doing here will no longer be a reading for the first time, but will turn itself into a review, a commentary of sorts.  Having said that, I don't believe it is entirely possible to be so "memory-less" a channel.  Nevertheless it is easier to be such when one is reading a philosophy text, such as this.

When we began this text, how did we start?  We didn't start off with a human being as a single entity in order to analyze this being in various sorts of ways.  Nor did we take a sample case of a multitude of people in order to figure out how they behave as a group.  None of that.  Instead we began, with no prelude whatsoever, with human relatedness.  Right off the bat, we were interested in the question: "How people relate to one another?"

Without asking this question in such explicit manner, we began to wonder about how we were interested in the fortune of the others.  That lead to a distinction between two aspects that we articulated roughly like this: though we know a lot about our  fellow human being by the aid of our senses - we see them, hear  them, feel them and so forth - what really is driving this ability of ours to be able to relate to the other person is not our senses, but our imagination.  The faculty of imagination helps us experience the fellow-feeling in some yet-to-be-explored-thoroughly manner. 

Having thus put our finger on this basic way of our being, we began to plow on, to see in what various manners this imagination come into play.  Nothing in what we spoke so far is prescriptive. Smith is not saying that we ought to behave this way.  We are talking here in a descriptive manner, describing what is already in play.  The way we already are.  It is important to keep that in mind. 

Why are we talking about how we already are?  What new stuff are we to gain from all this?  Well, we are talking about how we already are because we forgot.  We forgot because we, perhaps without really intending to, sort of covered this layer of what we already are, with another layer on top.  This other layer on top spoke a different language; it fooled us into thinking that we are really this other, this top layer, and not the one beneath it.  Somehow, over all these past tens and tens of years, we managed to spread more and more layers, one layer on top of the other, so that we sort of kept on going farther and farther  away from the way we already are.  Each additional top layer fooled us into relating to one another only in the way that layer wanted us to, and then another layer came along and wanted us related to one another in the way that layer wanted.  Before we know, we are here and now, in the world of internet, in the world of blogosphere, and if we look around we will notice that all this world of internet, these groups, these blogs, all this stuff that surrounds us, is really another layer on top, which really wants us to relate to one another in its own way!  What the heck?  What just happened?  How did we get so far from the real, from the bottom-most layer of how we already are?  I am reading this text as one of my ways to get back, or to see if I can remember.  I am not running away from the world as it is now.  I simply don't want to be fooled. 

OK, that's the end of my aside.