I nearly *lost my mind* writing this.

I changed the title of this entry... three times. haha.


"Once extracted and named, the splenium, isthmus, midbodies, genu, and rostrum all become biological things, structures seen as real, rather than the arbitrary subdivisions they actually are." --Fausto-Sterling, 127

In a Cartesian world, subdivisions are important, and arbitrary in so far as they are not to be confused with a self conscious yearning towards 'truth'. Subdivisions are important to the art of proving hypotheses, and a self conscious voice cannot be a scientific voice (not until the "discussion" section.). You must slice up the world in order to see a small enough bit of it to prove anything at all. Slicing up the world with language and knives is what we all do best. In a pre-cartesian world, a Sarterian projection of the self makes no sense; a self whose position in the world is defined by the maths of the mind, the things that the brain holds onto (either randomly or because the conscious mind-owner decides that this memory is worth merit) - a self that obtains all meaning from the arc of progression through time and from the ways in which that self definiton changes over time, a self whose 'realism' is wholly internal; this is the freedom of the modern conception of man that we are all so loathe to relinquish, and perhaps our minds have been so changed by this way of thinking that we cannot let it go.
I wouldn't give up the chance to be the primary interpetor of my meaning for anything. As I slice up the intellectual landscape of positions that can be taken, for the sake of argument: I am a woman, I am a girl, I am glad to be young, I feel too old, because I am short I can't reach high objects, because I am short I don't fall as often - I can determine the value and the role of each of the characteristics that are within my capacity to verbalize, that are within cultural consciousness as worthy of note. I could write a book infinitely long in which I carve out my place in accordance with or in opposition to any given position presented to me. What might be said of the cartesian disposition is, flippantly, "We think too much" - but, adequately, We try to nail down everything with language. And when we contradict ourselves, this is irrelevant, because we are our Sarterian projections - we are our relative context in the moment, we get to "change our minds".
When we slice up the brain, we name the slices. They are more than subdivisions of the brain because they are now entities with definitions. They are not matter equally inhabited by the soul, but rather regions which should be associated to differences in function. When we slice up the soul or the human condition, we get the DSM - and everything in the DSM in order to be ultimately validated must also be able to be associated to some slice of brain matter, or perhaps in what I think has falsely been considered un-cartesian, in order to validate the DSM we must assume that the living, wet, non-sliced brain is the only home for the nebulous, overlapping social definitions - when we cut up the modern human experience, "Schizophrenia" and "Bipolar Disorder" and "Narccisistic Personality Disorder" are real ways of identifying ourselves, of being identified - these are the ways in which our freedoms of determining our own meaning are taken from us, and in a pre-cartesian world we would have had a prayer, a fast, we would have been outcast or worshipped, we were 'posessed', and perhaps because there was no cure, no surgical procedure or reason to believe that a pill would grant lateral transcendence towards the mean - maybe God just had to love us, or leave us.
I don't think that there is a good way to make a pre/post cartesian division intuitive or common sense. If I was born without the ability to experience anger, and then you described to me a life in which I became incensed over various offenses or sometimes for no reason at all, I would hardly come within range of grasping that life - and surely, I would probably think that the life I led was better, the life I had grown accustomed to was superior.
In a cartesian world, I think I've identified a fundamental trade-off; For every way in which I identify myself within the slices and fragments of defensible, rational truth, for every facet of myself which I am able to obtain pride in or interpret positively, there is a categorization, a medical cure, a cultural disagreement, an expert, a conflict of meaning - which would caste me negatively. And all of life is a constant social navigation of this world - being by design, I am now Descartes explaining how,while the others may be crazy, I am just a dreamer and a rational interpertor of the world. It is my individual assessment of myself, my justification of my past, present and future, my projection, my verbalizations - which position me. And unless I can convince you that I am right, or convince myself that I am right, I am relegated to existential crisis and an insufferable ambiguity.

I thought once that this piece of advice my father gave me could be pre-cartesian; "You don't have to make decisions about things that you don't understand." Suddenly, this absolved me of the individualistic, self centered position of the Cartesian academic; I could say, "I don't know." Crisis averted. God is in the "..." at the end of every question whose answer is unknown. And so there will always be god. But wait, this isn't averting Descartes at all, but merely mimicking his own feeble claim to reverence! Damn. I could write forever about my own inability to reconcile the paradox of thinking outside of the 'box' of my own paradigm.

Descartes just inhabits us all - even if I don't think I am stuck in the rut of proving the existence of the world outside of my own mind, I am stuck there - horribly, and eternally - and how could I not be? For every study that says my brain size means something, an alternative study says it does not. Information in a post-modern internet world makes "taking a firm position" on truth and sticking to it ("Don't ask me, I'm just a god-fearing farmer") about as difficult as flying.