Zizek: Troubles with Identity

You're implying that there are flattering pictures of Zizek

he meant a pair of ovaries

There are feminine testicles you know

Okay, back to the discussion we had about gender, I guess (I think that was with you, at least).

I strongly doubt this point, that 'specific' experience is so strongly conditioned by language. I'm gonna bitch about animals again, but animals themselves understand specific concepts pretty damn well without having a language. They 'get' objects without having a linguistic concept of them.

Of course, you'll reply that humans are different, that we have a language and that we are simply qualitatively different in how we perceive. But I'd wonder how much difference there is, really. A dog knows a bone is a bone. We know a bone is a bone. We just happen to have a word for it. Tbh I think this way of approaching the problem (which I wager you'll also find in the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty who believed we understand the concept before the parts) is more intuitive.

It also makes temporal sense. I think you're putting the cart before the horse if you say language universalizes sense, instead of the other way around. The fact is how language could ever arise, be created, if not as a way to give a lasting sign to an object all potential speakers could already understand as being signified. If I started calling something a chair while everyone had a different specific sense experience, it would make sense to no one.

I think it is more logical and scientific to keep evolution in mind, and to claim that animals had a benefit in developing specific understandings of concepts as a species (prey, group, friendly, angry, submissive, etc) without knowing these linguistically (but just intuitively). In this way, the concept comes strongly before the sign (the word), and language developed out of already established specific sensual concepts (grass, anger, or more basically, red, high, thick, etc). I might very well be wrong ofc, but imo you should still consider whether you don't give language a bit too much importance.

Doubtful imo. That would assume that biologically, every single person has the same symptoms, but then somehow linked to a different feeling. Think of evolution. Is there a real reason that happiness would feel different for different people? There's not benefit that we could think of. So then there is no reward for genetic variation here. Then it makes sense that the conduits that we see (smiling, narrowing the eyes) lead back to a common denominator, a simple expression of the same genetics.

But I digress.

As an aside, those ideas will be nonsense because happiness is an intuitive concept that you cannot analyze (deconstrue in to 'parts'), just associate. You can literally say nothing about the essence of happiness, just that you 'want' it, that it feels 'good', that you see it here and there, etc, but that associative. Analytically, the concept is empty, just an indescribably feeling that we match with other concepts synthetically to give ourselves the illusion of being able to describe it, when we only 'get' it intuitively. Same with pleasure, anger, etc, which we can only associate but not dissect- we can perceive no parts, only a whole.

I strongly disagree that the feeling 'is' what we have witnessed, like I said above, I claim that a feeling cannot be described, just associated. While thinking in of itself is a hard subject, I agree ofc that insofar we can think linguistically we use universalized signs.

Probably.

I wouldn't say a dog has anything more than sensational awareness, some memory of those sensations, and habit; these hardly constitute knowledge. A dog knows what it might like to eat or chew on and some memory of its shape and taste, but it has no necessary or even coherent association that the particular thing is part of the structure of any animal. We often give them pieces of plastic that resemble bones which provoke similar responses. A dog's knowledge of bones is zero. I would grant that what dogs do have would be the prehistory (and some of the preconditions) of understanding and knowledge proper, but they aren't either as such.

Language universalizes individual sensuous experience, i.e. sense-experience as taken as an individual is universalized out of its specificity to me alone; as I mentioned in this and the last post, having sensational awareness constitutes a precondition and necessity of understanding.

It is doubtful, but it's not impossible. It isn't important for the overall point, since I was only using the extreme case as an example.

Insofar as the immediate experience is concerned, I do: variations in brain chemistry (whether one generates more of this or that neurochemical due to one's genetics or environmental effects) and aberrant neuronal connections. These would create variations in individual experiences of happiness.

Nonsense or not, people inquire as to the meaning of happiness, how best to achieve it, whether it's the most worthy goal in life, whether happiness should feel this way or should feel better (whether we're "truly" happy as compared to some outward or internalized standard), and whether happiness exists in that moment of expression of the internal feeling or in hindsight as reflection. We analyze happiness constantly.

Note that I'm not speaking of a division of happiness's pure emotional experience into parts but whether other's ideas about happiness come to influence my reflections and understanding of my own happiness. I would agree that associativity is basally necessary, though.

It very much is, otherwise we would have no idea what to call our own experience. The feeling is witnessed by its outward physical signs and given the word "happiness," and the word in turn is applied to us ourselves when we demonstrate those outward signs to others. It doesn't matter whether the internal emotional experience of an individual varies in certain ways; language universalizes that particular experience.