I only consented to thinking…I think

 

Somebody set me off thinking. By uttering the words : Silence is consent… Although meant jokingly, because he is overall a nice person, it still set me off into a thinking about what I experience multiple times a day. 

 

Once in a while and for certain people it can be the same people that very often interpret my silence as me giving consent. 

 

They rarely wonder if I am really consenting to something let alone what I am consenting too.

 

In interaction with others I can get really overwhelmed. Sometimes by their smell, sometimes by the way they gesticulate. But mostly by their words. Their words can make a world appear that does not seem to be the same world I live in.

 

Words evoke images , sounds, colours, tastes even. Words can literally grip me and suffocated me or make me nauseous. Sometimes I can get infatuated by the sheer beauty of one of their spoken words. Because the way it sounds or the inner vision it creates.

 

Sometimes words uttered are so vague that it takes me a while to figure out what the other exactly means. Not only semantically but I have to get through the sensory effect scattered through my brain first. 

Then I need to go through the vast amount of colourful lucid greyness in order to be able to see their word.

Meanwhile the world itself produces all sorts of sounds, smells and movements. Words do not come alone. They come in strings, words stitched to one another by their perlocutionary meaning, interrupted by either meaningful or meaningless ‘ay’s’ or ‘ooo’s’ or silences.

So I have to take the ‘word-embroidery’ of the other into account as well. 

 

No wonder I go silent. But where in this story did you read that I have given any consent ?

Thanks to @philmageo for setting me of thinking

Original picture ‘Going Through all these Books’ by timtom – adapted by @lampadedromy

Humanising

Philosophy makes us more of a human being than neurosciences do

How can it be that neuroscience, of all sciences,  who has the human being as the subject of their studies, dehumanises this same human being by describing all the deficits they can possibly find and so place a lot of human beings outside the larger group ?

Why is it that they are so explicitly and exclusively looking for everything that is dissimilar instead of looking for what makes us all ‘human being’ and therefor an essential part of the larger group ?

Will neuroscience keep on individualising her own subject of study in a way that the subject as ‘the human being’ in fact seizes to exist ? Or is it because ‘the human being’ does not exist that they keep on discovering all those exceptions to the rule ? 

What makes us a human being is perhaps and foremost the potentiality to ask the question what makes us a human being and by being able to do so ties us to what it essentially means being a human being.

 

 

 De filosofie maakt meer mens-zijn dan de neurowetenschap

Hoe kan het, dat net zíj, de neurowetenschap, die de mens als centraal studieobject hebben, diezelfde mens dehumaniseert door zoveel afwijkingen te definiëren en op die manier mensen buiten de groep te plaatsen ? Hoe komt het dat ze zo exclusief zoekt naar wat anders is dan zoekt naar wat ons allen tot mens maakt en deel van de groep?

Gaat ze op die manier haar eigen studieobject dan niet in zoverre individualiseren dat ‘ de mens’ ophoudt te bestaan? Of is het net omdat ‘de mens’ niet bestaat dat ze steeds meer uitzonderingen op de regel ontdekt ?

Wat ons tot mens maakt,  is mogelijk wel net de potentie om de vraag ‘wat ons tot mens maakt’ te kunnen stellen en ons daardoor verbindt aan wat essentieel menszijn is. 

 

 

Original picture by: Fran Simó 

I sea Q