The Personal

It seems to me that one of the hallmarks of this culture of ours is this idea of the personal.

The personal.

In my private counseling practice there have been a number of occasions when I heard myself say to someone, "You know, regardless of how it feels to you, life simply isn't personal."

But let's not argue this point philosophically now, lest we get lost in an intellectual exercise (and I love a good intellectual exercise).

Instead, think about yourself.  Think about the people you know, the people you see, the people you interact with.  If we were somehow able to be completely honest with ourselves, how would be answer the question:  what is the greatest overall preoccupation in your life?

I would aver that the most honest response would be:  my life, how I'm doing.  When you see someone you know, and you say hello to them, how often do you say,  Hi.  How you doin'?  Or, How's it going?  (I always assume that 'it' means my life.)

Look at the words we use so routinely:  your life, my life.  Consider the very fact that the only pronoun we always capitalize is 'I.'

I think this is one of those cultural memes that is very difficult for us to get outside of.  My grasp of it feels very slippery to me even as I try to write this piece.

If we did not take life as personal, if we were not concerned with ourselves, our own lives, what would we be concerned with.

In The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, he discusses the evolution of the written alphabet, a thing we all generally take completely for granted.  I mean, what are you and I doing right now if not taking a written alphabet for granted?

Now, I'm not going to do this justice, so you'll simply have to read the book:  When humans, in our attempt to be able to write what we say, developed a system of symbols which were completely abstracted from the real, physical world, and only related to the sounds the human voice can make, our language became totally and completely human-centric.  We were not using symbols that in any way signified any real objects or natural sounds (other than the human voice).  Our written, then our oral speech became something that was only human-related.  It no longer in any way, other than by abstract reference, connected us with the rest of the world.

Moreover, our ability to write our voice meant that we could also read what we (and others) wrote, but always as a  monologue within ourselves.  Whenever we read something, we are essentially talking to ourselves, even if we 'know' that someone else wrote what we are reading.  It is our voice, inside our heads that is speaking silently what we are reading.

More than ever before, speaking, writing, and reading humans became abstract from each other and even from themselves.  There were no longer any real external reference points for our lives.  We were relative only to ourselves.

Prior to this universal abstraction of ourselves and the world we live in, our languages, our communications, our thoughts were not quite so personal, not all the time, not obsessively.  They were relative.  They related to the real, physical world in which we were inextricably embedded and at home in.