Corporal: On Bodies and Egos in the Age of PostModern War

Some politician cited “lieutenant corporal” as a rank in the military. That rank doesn’t exist. They were just trying to practice rhetoric, they were trying to persuade the audience.

Citing a rank that doesn’t exist is bad rhetorics because it puts into question your authority as a speaker.

A speaker is a strange phenomena. From this fork, we get the first true human discipline, philosophy. Language as a tool is paradoxical because it references an object (speaker) that is contingently “speaking” in a way that brings order to the chaos outside speech.

Within speech, our ego lives. Some think that ego death is a thing and that our speech can shed our ego and live as speech alone. I personally believe that, although it’s a believe that begs the question: How can we ensure that the speech is hollow and egoless?

Why does it beg the question? Because the state of affairs are such, the world is such, that the fork that makes speech contingent (speech is about something objective but speech itself is not objective) makes the contingency a matter of faith.

There’s a fork in existence with speech where our subjectivity is superimposed on the objective world. Imagine a room full of people watching an orange. Each person’s sight differs just a little bit but enough to reach an agreement.

Objectivity seems to exist in the communal agreement but the communal agreement doesn’t exist without the superimposed subjectivity.

How can you account for the subjectivity of others? Ironically, the subjectivity of others make our own subjectivity obvious. This in part is the journey towards ego death.

Our own subjectivity captured in speech is a meta-speech. The subjectivity of meta-speech persist; meta-speech is not anymore objective than speech. Meta-speech, however, has an objective that speech doesn’t. Meta-speech aims to capture the subjectivity of speech as an object.

This becomes psychological. Math with mental states. Logic with drama. White water deductive reasoning with rivers of tears.

Back to the fork, we reach the fork. We exist with an objective conclusion in our mind that is captured by speech. This mysterious, mythical “objective conclusion” can be approached with words up to a point of division.

At the point of division, of the fork, we follow our own Will through an epistemic maze where we avoid paths that never end, but rather look for paths that continue the road.

The road is paved by objectivity and speech. By dogma and our interpretation of dogma.The paving is done with our faith. The actions we take knowing that we don’t know of contingent factors hidden in speech; delusions, deception, faulty logic.

Corporal — The fork is commandeer by the radical dogmatists, by the positivists. The body are reduced to their body. The soldiers’ lowest rank is that of a living thing. From there, the dogma shapes the rank based on how the soldier follows the contingent road.