Two long months ago....my passion for the blues fell in love with an idea, the ideal of philosophy as an engine of social criticism...of bitchin' 'bout what makes us feel down, out of sorts with the world in which we are thrown, the alienation of existential philosophy and the downhome urge to holler and moan about it. The trouble is it doesn't fit academic philosophy...the only home philosophy really knows today, despite the efforts to start up Socrates' Cafes....Christopher Phillips' bestseller was a brilliant attempt to naturalize philosophy...to once again turn its attention from from "the heavens" and back down to earth...not quite down to home, downhome style, or the home of Heidegger, but closer, our sense of homelessness, not at home-ness, alienation from the technological demands of conformity to a faceless, impersonal bureaucracy that sees us all as the same raw material of the same exploitable value of exchange. Heidegger on the right and Adorno on the left say clearly the same problems of modern existence...the blues singer felt it and expressed it in a more immediate way....they were reacting to not just to the alienation of the working class...the service worker, the factory and industrial farm worker, the migrant and the dispossessed... but the alienation of us all in the post-modern world.
Dylan, a white boy from the north, some how caught the spirit, ..without a home, no direction known, like a rollin' stone...the Rolling Stones caught it, and countless others, black and white, American and British..Marley reggae-fied it and took it even deeper into the Third World that gave it its rhythmic soul. But it deep roots come from India via Europe as well... the canto hondo of the Spanish gypsies, the deep blues of Europa's first dispossessed working class gave the strumming guitars and minor melodies to the cultural mix out of which the blues evolved. Rhythm, melody, harmony and a lament over man's fate in a world the powerful created for themselves....that is the blues for me...a world that critical philosophy seeks to understand, intellectualize in a way but still to serve the yearning to understand this ol' world that fate has thrown us into..
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