The Self-Positing Ego and Dr. Ben Carson's Romanticism

The self-positing ego may easily be misunderstood. A=A probably should have a bi-conditional logic operator rather than an equal sign, or rather, it might be noted that 'I' is implicitly tautologous.

Fiche's paradigm seems incorrect, yet to various degrees those that have experienced life swimmingly without too much adversity may regard society itself as a kind of tabula rasa they can transform as readily as they might learn another language. I wrote a brief essay on a comment of Dr. Ben Carson serving in the Trump administration l will include below.

It might be useful to compare the point of view of Fichte with Bishop Berkeley and his 'ideamism'. Fichte sought to actualize his subjectivity as a transcending fact while Berkeley left it as an academic argument. In Berkeley's Matrix like paradigm the construction of reality is heterodox rather than solipsistic.

Kierkegaard was right on many or most of the topics regarding the balance required to use irony as a life-tool rather than to allow subjectivity to lead one to delusion. His 'Sickness Unto Death' can be summarized in the phrase he used that 'despair is the unwillingness to be oneself'. A clinically useful insight.

HUD Sect. Ben Carson in an interview recently said that ‘poverty is a state of mind’. Yes the remark had a context in which it appeared such as a given ‘mindset’ inertially exists as a cultural characteristic, however it is a useful comment for illustrating the point of view of certain German romantics of the mid-19th century.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/24/ben-carson-calls-poverty-a-state-of-mind-during-interview/?utm_term=.3e20a7fcad4a

Those romantics exploiting the concept of irony or subjective detachment from the objective social world-establishment to the point of abnegation and nihilism regarded social conventions as of little worth. There is another way to use the detachment or subjective perspective associated with Socrates and his saying ‘know thyself’ that isn’t nihilistic. Instead it is analytical-critical of society and culture while introspective and moving on to comprehend what is right and wrong, good or bad, true or false about society upon reflection rather than just dismissing it all.

It is somewhat ironic that the conservative Dr. Ben Carson personified the relativism vilified by conservatives who prefer objective facts and established empirical reality over subjectivity and detachment favored by the left. Obviously the truth is somewhere mid-way between the two extremes. The extreme subjectivity reaching unto solipsism favored by Schlegel and somewhat less so by Goethe can dismiss objective reality and say that for the individual everything is just a state of mind-even when it is pouring cold rain it would be nothing more than a state of mind for the romantic being drenched. The coefficient of adversity keeping one in poverty is not just one's own thought; it has reciprocals in the thought of others.

Poverty like slavery is not just a state of mind. When wealth concentrates and plutocracy controls and totalized the economy and when computer quant programs control 70% of Wall Street transactions at least in part, or when a city burns down with incendiary bombs dropping in from the sky it is more than a state of mind experienced or even constructed by an individual.

Saying that poverty is a state of mind reflects the poverty of naive realism drifting in as a cloud of optimism around the heads of those who have made it good rather easily with insufficient experience of social resistance to making things better.