28 February 2009: "I love my dog"

This post is about species being. The concept of species being, an inheritance from German idealist philosophy, is controversial for its explicit and uncompromising humanism. It implies the world as we experience it already has built into our perceptions the bias of human utility, that is, we can only apprehend the world in terms of transforming it for explicitly human use. We cannot comprehend nature from the point of view of nature, nor does it make sense to regard ourselves as an undifferentiated part of nature.

This is what Carles is suggesting with his postulate that "Dogs are meaningful bc no1 understands ur relaish with them." The relationship is wholly imaginary, an aspect of the individual's unique reconciliation of mental and material substance. A relationship with a pet is one iteration of the attempt to reorganize the whole of the material world around one's thinking subjectivity, to recreate a perfect integration to heal the alienation incipient in the gap between thought and material limitations on the action thought prompts.

As such, the relationship takes on a special significance to our existential condition, being fundamental to both our realization of our species being, our inalienable subjectivity in relation to the objectivity of a material world without will, and to our realization of our uniqueness within that species, given to contingencies that make our subjectivity wholly singular. As Carles explains, "there is a trivial yet meaningful connection with ur pet. When ur pet passes away, while it ‘meant a lot to you’, it’s more comfortable than losing something ‘real’, like a parent, sibling, or child. So while ur ’sad’, u also kinda get to pretend that ur ‘rlly sad.’" This relation to a pet represents the fictitious sense of our own singularity above our species, which "means a lot to us" but is not in fact "real" and is actually a crushing burden to the ego if held too closely. So the severance of a particular human-pet relationship is a termination of a false positionality of transcendence. In the returning rush of immanence, we perceive our own mortality afresh, as well as the links in the reproductive chain that bind us to the historical destiny of the species.

Carles announces that "the only authentic sadness might come when u lose ur parent who loved u." This radical position rejects the fundamental weltschmertz of alienated existence, suggesting that failures to reclaim a unity of the dualisms upon which consciousness is founded -- that of mind and body, of being and the world, of subjectivity and objectivity -- are strictly personal failures and not universal philosophical dilemmas. The potentialities within species being are there for us to seize and are limited only by the "authentic" sadness inherent in the mortality of that which created our being. But this sadness too is a reminder of a larger unity within history, a holistic subjective position from which loss itself is impossible to conceive.

But Carles himself sense his failure to achieve this exalted level of transcendence, the state of oneness with the created world that is the end of all meditative contemplation and all mystical investigations in to metaphysics. Having touched on the edge of such ecstasy, Carles must back away with the honest recognition of his own limited mortal being and his own awareness of his capacity for loss: "miss yall."