Some people require more security, stability, and routine than others do. This is not totally a bad thing. I long for that right now as I thrash around in economic and financial border-line panic. A bad recession might not be the right time to plunge into a new job or career. Unless you are forced to by a recent job loss. It is always nice to have a back-up plan, a life-boat, or life-preserver if, all of a sudden, you are thrown overboard.
Self-confidence and good self-marketing skills may be the difference between turning lemon into lemonade -- or not. Personally, I haven't quite got to the lemonade yet as I am engorged by 'bitter lemons'. Don't misread that. I am not bitter. I just haven't got to the point where I can say that my life has turned into something 'sweet' yet -- or stated otherwise -- evolved into something better than what I had four months ago. Stability. Security. The flipside of taking a Nietzschean risk. I have taken a few Nietzschean risks lately but in the wrong place (a gambling casino). Although, overall, I have been very lucky over the last two or three months, a gambling casino is the wrong place to look for financial security. That is like looking for a polar bear at the equator.
I will get back to you when I can say I have found security and stability again. Until then, I have to be very careful about what kind of Nietzschean risks I decide to take here. There is not much room for error. At the same time, the ship I am on feels like the Titanic. Any new ships in the vicinity? I feel like I am pacing back and forth on the Titanic as I see an approaching iceberg... The water looks awfully cold to swim in at this time of year...There aren't enough lifeboats for everyone and even the life preservers are going fast....This doesn't seem to be the time to write other than to satisfy some grossly inappropriate, morbid, twisted sense of humor and self-deprecation...
Rome is burning...and i am writing...
I criticise Plato, Spinoza, Fichte, and even Hegel for having their heads too high in the sky...
And how am I any different?
Hegel watching out his window as Napoleon is storming into Jena...
And Hegel is trying furiously to finish the final few pages of his manuscript for what was to become perhaps the finest Western philosophical treatise of all all time -- 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'.
Unbelievable...But at least he had something to show for what might otherwise be viewed as his 'pragmatic stupidity'...
Hegel's Hotel has a very, very long way to go to approach anywhere near that type of standard...
Hegel had many criticizers -- Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche...to name a few -- mainly for the 'high falutin' extent of his 'Grandest of all Grand Narratives'...
I have no problems with 'Grand Narratives' (like Nietzsche and the rest of the Post-Modernists do...).
I just want my Grand Narrative to be grounded on earth; not hanging from 'Never Never Land'.
I fully concur with most of Hegel's critics...
I abhor the full extent of his abstractness, his vaguery, and his concept of 'Absolute Knowledge'...
Still I rank Hegel as the finest of all Western philosophers...Because he revolutionized philosophy and foreshadowed most of Western Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy...not to mention Existentialism...and the philosophy of 'Deconstruction' and 'Marginalization'...
Everyone after Hegel loved to pick Hegel apart...bit by bit...grand abstraction by grand abstraction...
And yet Hegel's 'Phememonology of Spirit' became the focal point by which all 19th and 20th and 21st century philosophy took off...as well as aptly summarizing much of what came before it...
And like Hegel told us all to do -- indirectly, at least -- I seek to 'sublate' (subsume, include) elements of Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kant, Sartre, Foucualt, Derrida, Locke, Bacon, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ocaam, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Lao tse, Freud, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, Rank, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Berne, Fromm, Perls, Rand, Branden, Korzybski, Hayakawa...and others...into my own work here...
Into the centrepiece -- the North Star, the shining light, the sun and the moon -- that was Hegel's 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'...
And which I am seeking to retain here in Hegel's Hotel...
His Phenomenology of Spirit...
Has been translated -- or sublated or subsumed or included -- into my own phenomenology of spirit...
However far that may take me...
Inside 'Hegel's Hotel'....
In the meantime,
As therapeutic as this little piece may have been for me,
I need to go out and find either a new job, or another job,
Something that will stabilize my life again,
I partly like what I have here,
It is just that the transportation business,
Just like the hotel business, the entertainment business,
Many, many businesses these days,
Is hurting,
Leaving less business, cutbacks, less revenue,
For both businesses and many employees in these businesses
I simply need something more stable,
So that I will quit howling at the moon...
And to you, my most appreciated readers....
-- dgb, Nov. 6th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
-- dgb
Nov. 6th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
