I keep getting the sense that I am being to serious. I mean, yes, this is for a class at least to some extent, but why can't I talk about fun topics as well?
There's no reason, except that I find being serious to be fun in its own way. I guess this points to a more general trend that might or might not relate to some of the issues that I have been bringing up. Why is it that having fun is divorced, for the most part, from the serious things that we do?
It seems that somewhere along the courses of histories that somehow the linkages between seriousness and fun were broken. Sure, we could blame it on the Church or the Puritans at least. Mr. Foucault, i agree that the Christian pastoral has contributed to the categorization of most aspects of desire as sins, but is there something else?
Why can't I just have fun and analyze the film/tv show/music that I am experiencing? There seems to have been some filtering down from the turning of sobriety and seriousness into virtues. While pleasures have been eliminated as unproductive.
Even if we assume that the Christian Church has made it unacceptable to have fun, we have two aspects or perspectives emerging. On one hand, we can look intellectually at how the Church has spread this message throughout the American culture and its institutions, but the other, and the one I am more interested in exploring, comes when we begin to look at how the interpretation of the central text of the faith changed and continues to change to maintain a particular perspective and orientation of power and knowledge.
Oh, darn! Now I've done it again. I start out with the intention of something lighthearted to talk about, and I am already embroiled in a deep cultural and theological discussion.
Well, I will put this off for the time being, just sit back and listen to the soothing tunes of Kajagoogoo. Till next time when I will try to look at some sources within hermeneutics that point to a need for balance within the Christian tradition, and then I can begin looking at how the current state of understanding of desire, pleasure, and virtue play out in a couple specific cultural arenas. So try not to get too excited.
1 comment:
In Plato's Republic Socrates comes down from a rant and says, "but wait, I forgot we were only playing." The whole Republic is an imaginatv game of sorts w/a philosophical goal. Literary critic David Haney uses Gadamer to say that all of literature is like a game, wherein, briefly, one gets out of oneself and into the world of the text, in effect subjecting oneself to its rules and to its power to act on one's self.
This latter aspect seems to support Dillon's "ideas are dangerous b/c they have real effects", but putting Haney and Socrates together one might then conclude that play can sometimes be very serious, but that it has unique features that in some ways might cause one to prefer it over the serious.
In other words, I agree that we shldn'a have to be so bloody serious all the time.
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