Displacement

May the proliferation continue!

I have recently decided that the free OpenOffice programme, though valuable, is not sufficient to my paranoid needs. The programme was never particularly responsive but it was whilst looking into possible alternatives that I read a remark that put the Fear of God into me from the NeoOffice web site.

NeoOffice is not perfect. Although we try very hard to make NeoOffice free of bugs and crashes, our users still find new bugs and new cases that cause NeoOffice to crash. So, if you feel that you need software that has been heavily tested, we recommend that you use a commercially-supported product like Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.

If this is true of NeoOffice, I reflected, so it might be true of OpenOffice. So, with thoughts of losing my entire thesis (thus far) buzzing around in my brain, I heeded their advice. Microsoft or Apple was the choice: Protestant or Catholic? The fact that I already have a Mac, together with the very reasonable cost of iWork (with student discount), led me to choose the latter. And Pages is very nice. I especially like its full-screen feature which, theoretically at least, blacks out all distractions from the almost ritualized colour and movement of one's Mac's display.

Some might wish to accuse me of indulging in displacement activity and, of course, there would be some truth in that. When it is disagreeable to focus on bringing about the ends, why not focus on the means? Form and method instead of content; surface instead of depth.

Lethargy prevented me from going to Hatfield to hear the legendary John Cottingham speak at the University of Hertfordshire. That and the fact that I downloaded a typescript of what he was going to say (I assume this since the paper bears the same title as the talk) from his website. I was in no mood to heckle.

Next week I plan to write up my observations on Karl Jasper's periechontology with a dual focus on his notion of 'ciphers' and his views on the role of the subject-object dichotomy. His ideas on both create ambiguity: on the one hand, ciphers are the 'language of being', they embody what is beyond the subject-object dichotomy to human Existenz - a way of being that is existential, where subject is not separable from object. But he also claims that the subject-object dichotomy is essential to the existence of human consciousness. If we are not in the dichotomy, he argues, we are unconscious. This appears to place equal weight on scientific ways of engaging with the world and 'spiritual', broadly religious, ones. The question is, How do the two relate? His concept of Existenz doesn't seem adequately to bridge the other two categories of his tripartite system: ordinary consciousness (in the subject-object dichotomy) and Transcendence (or God). I hope, at any rate to draw from him a better account of the relation of human consciousness to what is beyond itself than that provided by Tillich's account of symbols which can never escape the subject-object dichotomy. Jaspers provides us with that possibility, though perhaps not without inconsistency or ambiguity.