Have I ever read Jane Austen? Nope. Regretfully no. Novels are too convoluted for me, I’d rather take it straight from philosophy or psychoanalytics.
Don’t think that I understand well enough how people, including me, live and operate from their senses and sensibilities. I, perhaps, am more of a cognitive or analytical guy and as such attracted to the scholastic approach to coping. Pros and cons, more pros and cons, what is better and what is worse, logic and reason, truth − these kinds of considerations are alive in my consciousness.
And yet, underneath it all operate my senses and my sensibilities as they are distinct from my perceptions and interpretations of ‘reality.’ Are sense and sensibilities alive in Freudian unconsciousness, churning away deep within my biology but informing nevertheless my conscious awareness and agency? Lacan, apparently, did not believe that the unconscious lies buried deep within one’s biology but rather out there in the relational non-ether.
Hegel spoke profoundly about the emergence of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit and perhaps got Lacan to consider dialectic dynamics. A. Kojève offered a good interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic in regard to human thriving.
Of course, I always believed that I understood myself well enough to be in fair control of my fate or destiny. However, I have come to sense that my certainty about myself, my perceived clarity about myself, due to conscious awareness, has betrayed me a bit.
There is more to life than a conscious awareness of, let’s say, facts and logic. There are also senses and sensibilities, that is, desires and passions.
