Recognition (or the clearing of the clearing)

“There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe."
---Saul Leiter.

Return to your pure white room, board it up, darken the windows, block out all sound, discard any memories,...and think!

What would it mean to think of other people, or think for them (as in: look out for them)?; think with other people in real time, not in an abstract way?

Everything must be doubted, the real world around you, for instance. Red is only secondary, the mind and the eye are only passive receivers of "information". Clear the ground, drum roll if you please..make way, make way for the arrival of the spectacular 'I'.

Once you start down that road then does it necessary follow that it's 'I' against the world, me against you? The beginning of the modern west, M. Sahlins says, holds this notion of conflict to be central, fundamental. 

Right from the very start there is war, us against them, a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Under such circumstances the social-which is artificial, not being part of our "nature",-is the only way to reign us in. The social, the state or the moral are all on the side of civilization against our instincts, our true despicable selves and they can only function by repressing the individual. Against this is the economics hypothesis: the pursuit of self-interest actually leads to everyone being better off and produces a kind of order or equilibrium. But both, you note, start off with the simple idea that the individual is the locus of all truth and that "the common good" is really only the convergence of private goods or interests.

Clear the ground. There are no "Palestinians" here, or if they are here then they're not really a people. There is only a wilderness here, full of savages (like the Red Man). Hell is other people. It is only our weakness that requires us to interact with others, to even think about them in our schemes. Strategic thinking requires little else than thinking of everyone else as a means to your ends.

Another person must be submit or be defeated or collaborate. 

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex. He said unless you’ve had anal sex with a girl she hasn’t really submitted to you."

de Sade. Master/Slave.

Sen and the Prisoners' Dilemma (to continue the Nash theme)...what get's us into this mess is, one might argue, the narrow definition of identity that us built into the game. If I'm always looking to be sharp, and you are too, then we can both end up in a worse situation. What is required here is something like commitment or thinking that runs along the lines: "what is good for us?".  Note: no retreat into a clearing but a recognition, an acknowledgment of the other person's goals and objectives.  The highest wisdom remains:

Amo: volo ut sis

This line from Todorov blew me away because it gets, maybe, to the heart of it:

"If the account of the origin of the species has been systematically preferred over that of the origin of the individual ..., it is without doubt in part due to to the fact that the authors of these accounts are men, not women..."

So, to take up a line of thought from Macintyre: what would mean to think of ourselves as dependent animals? Is it not possible to think of the parent/child or the mother/child relation as a loving, caring one, not tainted by "interests" or hatreds or rivalries (if that's what the view of human beings is, post-Freud, then it's a pretty crap one). In this sense 'the east' remains largely naive and, therefore, blissfully immune from such corrupting tosh (which is not the same thing as saying misogyny and abuse do not exist but only to say that self-conceptions are less mean-spirited).

~~~

But in this clearing process the 'I', too, must disappear-for what is an individual without God or other people or the world? It is not "I think, therefore..." but "it thinks,.." or "there is thinking, therefore..."

And if the slave is truly a slave then what power does the Master have? Power only resides in making someone a slave, surely?

The strange disappearance of the individual. If there is only flux, sovereign becoming, an instinctive life, or the world of facts, then what of the 'I'? This 'I' which was so dependent on the outer world, resembling only a shadow of it, was understood only vaguely, outwardly, or publicly in its behaviour and patterns.  But if that solid world has vanished in a puff of smoke and if reason, society and history are merely fictions, then is the individual only a shimmering reality as well?

Denise: we seek a witness...

There is no clear space, as if the 'I' could exist before the world, which in its turn is then supposedly constituted. Each of us is already born into a world and learns to be human. Is that really possible without other people?