On love, sex and fleeting moments

There are many thinkers that consider sex to be the coming together of self and other. I disagree. There is never any coming together of self and other, but sometimes we forget about ourselves. This is love. That moment when we no longer matter, and the only thing that does matter is an other. This other can take on many forms, it may be the subliminal, as in the humility we face when we stare nature squarely in the face, or it may be another human, when we care so passionately about them and their welfare that we forget our own needs and wants. Traditionally we recognize the love between the parent and its offspring as among the strongest. It is easy to draw out the selflessness that occurs in such cases.

Sex on the other hand is generally about power. The goal of sex, is for most, your orgasm, your climax. Orgasm feels good, so does heroin, so does a hot shower, and so does a long piss. Often there is a satisfying of the ego involved. You get what you want, you manipulate another into playing along, maybe there’s an exchange and you both, in a rational way, get what you want. There is a mastery of one over nature, and one over an other at play.

You think I’m nuts. What is this “love” you speak of. Sex is great and I feel like a king when I do it. Anyone that has ever had really good casual sex and really good caring sex won’t disagree. The latter is ineffably better. Try it sometime; find someone you care so deeply about that during sex all you can focus on is your partner’s health and orgasm. Ideally, if the love is mutual, all they’ll be worrying about is yours. I assure you it’s worth it. Most interestingly, you’ll cherish this person with or without the sex, and the moments of ecstasy and ‘happiness’ won’t begin and end with a strange expression on your face, and a release of bodily fluids. Just looking into their eyes should do the trick, and there won’t be a mess to clean up afterwards.

(This was brief, but I’m pretty sure I’m onto something here. But there is a problem: What of submission? Is this healthy? Or is this something else?)

More post-pubescentality

Last night I was reflecting on the meaning of life, something I hadn’t done in quite awhile, as I walked along the railroad tracks (Seriously, I was walking along railroad tracks thinking about the meaning of life – go figure). It’s amazing how much things can make sense in retrospect, and how little things seem to ever make sense in the present. Those that know me, know I like to philosophize, but I generally try and avoid making any general existential claims. In fact, I’ve been living according to the same basic assumption since early junior high. Those that knew me then may even remember it: “Life sux. Live with it.” In recent years I’ve refrained from bringing it up, I’m quite a bit more positive than I used to be; nonetheless, whenever things get tough and I start reminiscing, my mind wonders back to that foundation and it cheers me up, if only for its naivity. The statement originates from my former reasoning that there was little reason to exist, but you’d might as well not kill yourself – everyone wanted to kill themselves in junior high. By itself, it only makes sense intuitively, but yesterday I think I finally articulated it to myself logically. Basically there is no obvious, concrete, universal, objective reason to go on living – we all had this much figured out then – but likewise, there’s no obvious, concrete, universal, objective reason to kill yourself either. It’s kind of an absurd situation, life that is. I’m not saying this sorts anything out, I’m just saying I’ve made sense of something I thought once. Where do I go from here? It follows that I should probably go on living, but unafraid of death. Existence is… well… it’s existing. Nothing more, nothing less.

On dichotomy

I think philosophers can be a little too keen to dichotomize. I agree with Putnam in his essay, “Pagmatic Realism,” when I he calls for a review, and even a rejection of age-old dichotomies. I was particularly impressed by his criticism of the objective/subjective distinction. It seems to me these models are sometimes taken for granted. Often the concepts dichotomized tend to be better treated with regards to a gradient than classified as bipolar. On my walk home from class this morning I chuckled to myself as I played out in my head the dichotomy of black and white. I imagined some eager classic philosophers arguing over in which camp the shade of grey stands.