Popular Culture Review 30.2
who proposed that we are born alone into a state of nature where there is a “ war of all against all ,” getting together only by means of vicarious social contracts , leading lives that are ultimately “ solitary , nasty , poor , brutish , and short .” It is the worldview of twenty-first century America . Our worldview . The worldview we have under President Donald Trump . The same fundamental worldview we would still have had under President Hillary Clinton . But , thankfully , there are alternative�true and truly radical alternatives .
Communitarians view the self as constituted by roles and relationships , as finding our very being in our enmeshment with others . We are immediately born into an intricate web of interrelations , communitarians argue , that does not merely support our selves but is our selves . We live in and through one another , even the supposed flesh boundary of the body a false construct of liberalism . Intercorporeity is the norm , and “ your pain is my pain ” ( as Morton ’ s Ghost realizes in “ Beachtowel ”). Indeed , the liberal and communitarian views are struggling to claim the protagonist all throughout the album , throughout his life / death . Does he give in to the world ’ s demand that he think of himself as alone , no time , even , to love another ? Or does he embrace an identity that fixes itself only by means of the ever-changing flow of relations and communal entanglement ? The Enlightenment , again , tells us that logos ( i . e ., rationality , reason , logic ) will help us answer such questions , but its view of reason is a liberal one : a cold calculation done alone , disinterestedly , like a scientist poking without mercy at a splayed frog until it gives up the ghost , gives up some knowledge . The Greek conception of logos was not originally like that . Logos , for the Greeks , was always instantiated in a community , a polis . For Plato , it emerged dialectically , in conversation , ultimately often ending in aporia
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