I used to get so hard (yes, I mean “sexually aroused”) over this term when I finally started using it. It opened a whole new world of writing when I could finally start describing very concept-needing experiences. It was like finding a sword that could flip and then do like spins. Instead of saying it in a voodoo or New Age kind of way, all I needed was to meet with the “abstracters” and hang out with them, and one of them told me “but, like, the emergent properties of this universe, bro,” doing the analytical, conceptual, and academic equivalent of voodoo. Like, these logic magicians are making words out thin air and calling entire things that I have always needed the word for without knowing at all, like a man who can never see dogs because he never had the word for them, so he called all animals “monsters,” even if his body reacted differently to dogs as opposed to other animals. There was this muscle memory reaction and a particular scent of fear that accompanied it, but the phenomenological and conceptual “I get it” did not occur to me at all. Perhaps, my own mechanistic and emotional reactions are enough to be considered a phenomenological dialectical embodiment, but I feel that without the word, I am like a man staring at a darkness instead of shades of black. You can choose someone because you have the words to differentiate them, not literally in a social and romantic sense, but in a way that feels ontologically validating.
Self-Responses
- when they started using “emergent” the word? what is this? years ago?
- They sound so much like a normal person based on this.