Solipsism advocates that it is the mind of the individual alone which perceives reality. Anything that an individual's mind observes and perceives is said to exist and anything outside of this sphere is said to be non-existant. It is the single individual's mind alone which performs this 'breath of life' because the non-existance of anything unobservered and unperceived applies not only to objects, nature, animals, but also to all other individual's aside from that single individual.
Now this is a feasible arguement, depending upon how you define what 'existence' means and how you frame human beings among all other matter in the universe. It states that humans alone produce the notion of 'existence'. Animals may know they exist but don't rationalise it as such. Why does the human being 'trump' all else when it comes to existence? Is it because we are aware that we exist, or because we talk about it, or write about it? And how are human beings any different to all other matter in the universe? Human beings occupy 'space', although space could also be perceived as matter. Humans are 'mass', just like an object. How do we know we are any different to our dog. Maybe dogs and cats are our masters and look upon us with knowing patience hoping that one day humans will learn how to relax more and how to experience the true joy of life.
Maybe the difference between humans and other 'objects' in the universe is our ability to moralise. Even if we look at 'space' as matter filled with compounds and elements, 'space' still can't moralise. I don't think my dog moralises, nor my dining room table, nor a tree. It seems to be morality which enables humans to be civilised.
Yet Solisism is one of a myriad of variations on perceiving reality from Buddhism to Hinduism to Realism and Idealism within a dialectic that spans the extemes of internality and externality, the individual and the social. Solipsism resides at one end of the internal and individual, while a Material view of the world tends closer toward the external and the social. A Material view of reality advocates that an objective reality exists independent of the individual and that individuals 'grasp' this reality. I can conceive of this way of thinking also. I don't think that people generally adhere to one way of thinking alone, I think that we perhaps alternate back and forth between internal and external, between ourselves and our surroundings continually reorientating our identity to others. And perhaps society generally also moves back and forth within a dialectic of private and public as it moves over generations and through time. In some atomic way does this process also trace the progression of an 'idea' from its inception to its materialisation?
In the more recent past, theory seems to toggle between periods of Realism and periods of Idealism, both set within the 'social'. Toward the end of the 20th century it seems the individual has fought for its own personal and private domain ie. the individual outside of what we traditionally perceive as social space. Some refer to this as Modern Idealism or the Third Culture. Why is the individual trying to escape the social as such in Western society? The invention and subsequent mainstreaming of the computer and the internet have enabled this. Have individuals always wanted to behave in this way and now technology has simply provided the means, or are individuals trying to escape the surveillance and research of Sociology. Or is society trying to escape the paradigmatic imposition of the Enlightenment Project which is again an effort to frame and measure?
Sociology I think has traditionally tried to position itself 'after' time, or after the present at least, in order to observe and measure 'trace' after the event has occurred. But I think over time this 'effect' of measuring, albeit after the event, has still caused society to embody sociology and to behave in a way which always anticipates being measured in the future - Foucault's disciplinary society. Yet at the same time, the very technology which has allowed society to resist the 'social' has also led to society becoming literally monitored and measured at every moment on a global scale - Deleuze's society of control. Is this 'inside' and 'outside' at the same time? The Hammer and Anvil of Alexander the Great? A War of Position?
Sociological theory attributes this effect to a cleavage between pedagogy and research which occurred over a large period around the middle of the 20th century. A period where social theory perceived that it had discovered the truth to the mechanics and workings of the universe and thus, in true fundamentalist style, dismissed the need for much further research. Jean Francios Lyotard wrote about this growing imbalance between teaching and researching as eventually creating a great fissure and disassociation between the social and the individual. From the perspective of surveillance though, it seems society's current resistance to the social has occurred as a result of too much research, too much measuring. Logically one wonders at this contradiction. Yet each could only be half the story, and one could have led to the other. Yet we experience in current society the effect of both simultaneously, we can evidence a social rejection of the social in one breath, yet in the next we can evidence a social embodiment of the social. How can this be both at the same time? Yet if we imagine two separate realities in two time frames travelling simultaneously through time, like an 'object' and then its 'shadow' with an external light, we could imagine that as a result of the lack of research in the former instance having led to a 'rear-end traffic incident' between two separate realities. Not only a jam, but the two realities have actually merged into one another, perhaps even the rear reality threatens to overtake the former. In this instance, the social has become aware of this second reality, aware of 'itself'. Where in the past, the second reality maintained enough distance behind the first that it had remained unnoticed. This would explain how both too little research and too much research could exist at the same time. It also explains how we can both reject the social and at the same time embody the social.
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