Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Queen Elizabeth II: A Tribute From the New Culture Forum" video.

  1. Thank you for your comment it is much appreciated. It has also inspired me to comment here and to post it also in the man comments section if I may. Yes very sad news yesterday. At the time I had had the BBC on i player on pause for an hour, and so was watching it with about an hour delay. So I heard the announcement about an hour later. Just as I heard the announcement my dad phoned me up. It was good to talk to my dad, who in his 80's is someone who is of that generation, and who has lived through and lives in a memory of a longer historical understanding than most people do today. I am in my late 50's and have that too but only really as stories to try and share. Thoughts do turn to World War Two, and World War One as my grandfather was at the Battle of Jutland. I think it is true that she embodied that longer historical sense of things that we might express, with her, as an inner sense of duty that cares and holds a longer outer sense of continuity. It's difficult to say more because I grew up in the punk era of 1977 but was also sorting out Silver Jubilee China for selling in the south of England at the time. i perhaps belong to the generations that thought we could escape this past, and so set about tearing down many of its concepts and replacing them with the self, utility functions and positive rules. It requires perhaps to make a journey back though historical memory to try and find them, and see if they can find a place, a dwelling, a home, and a family, and the world of the 21st century. I talk about politics with my dad all the time, and the knee jerk reaction is to ask: What does this mean politically? and: How ought I to express this, through what concepts to get the desired political spin on an event like any other world event. To try and avoid these kinds of tactical manoeuvrings, of trying to find the right orientation for putting the "event" to use is very difficult since we have eroded and even defaced the use of a recognisable private moral vocabulary in the public sphere. I agree that we might begin with her expressions and actions of duty and a life of continuity. I feel these are not firstly institutional notions just as a family is not firstly a kind of institutional utility and right. I am and will continue to be inspired to think about your kind and wise words in the coming days. As perhaps a start, I think Queen Elizabeth II did not embody a strange left over from the past, an anachronism though, rather a kind of paradoxical positions of being the public expression or symbol for private unique and particular human connections and relations. The best expression of this was perhaps at The Platinum Jubilee when Rod Stewart chose to perform Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. It brought to mind seeing on You tube, it must be over 10 years ago, a mobile phone video of the Fenway Park Stadium supporters singing it at one of the games. This video was linked to another one of Neil Diamond in a record shop being asked why he doesn’t do spontaneous street singing anymore. So, he goes outside and starts singing in the street, and instead of people joining in, they all get their phones out to film it. It’s paradoxical because without those phone video’s we wouldn’t even know this anyway and might have forgotten Sweet Caroline: “hands touching hands”. Anyways, one of my heroes Rod Stewart kept another group of my heroes off of the number one spot in the UK back in 1977. Thankyou Tabitha Dorcas for your inspiring comment.
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  2. ​ @christinerussell113  Your comment here strikes a chord with me. You express in a way i agree with and privately feel: that of personal fears for the future, that seem also to be generally expressed by people, communities and public officials all over the world, this morning on TV. I am not sure though that the outer public world has changed beyond all recognition. I wrote a reply to Tabitha Dorcas here earlier, where i tried to find adequate concepts appropriate for the late Queen Elizabeth II. I drew on the works of the 18th Century German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, who was also concerned about the future, particularly with the power of science and reason to both drive progress, but also to reduce man entirely to its own mechanical image. Kant opens up on a Critique of Pure Reason form criticisms of Berkely Hume and Descartes subjectivity. Kant talks about the role and nature of our inner sense and views our inner subjective lives as requiring an unchanging outer object in experience for even our inner lives to have self-expression self-reference and reflection. this "refutation of idealism" is very contested by philosophers to the present day. One view from Johnathan Bennett is that we need an uninterpretable real fact in the past in which to agree "in". This fact becomes a condition for the possibility of time and so links "inner sense" to moral and ethical terms like integrity and the virtues of character and personality. This moral and ethical view of Kant's inner sense and virtue and the body is taken up by Susan Meld Shell, in "The Embodiment of Reason" in which she links the problem to inner imaginative excess or Phantasia drawing on Kant's work on Emmanuel Swedenborg "Dreams of a Spirit Seer". The notion of a continuity here is found neither in the world alone or in our subjective inner states or our bodies alone, but in the holding together of our inner and outer world. We are rightly concerned by a world in flux, but also the world needs our inner active duty not just a passivity of subjectivity. In this activity and experience we feel a sense of community not alienation and solipsism, it has an affinity to awe, to the experiencing community, but with technology the external world can becomes a Phantasia for us a mere distant spectacle, a simulacrum, a play. We are actively a necessary player in the maintenance and care of continuity, but we also need an external nexus of rules, a single person alone cannot do this and is not alone responsible for it. it has affinity to consent of the sovereign. She was never an absolute possible anarchic sovereign as some have claimed. Service and our recognition thereof. From here Kant claims to ground faith morality and hope. For me i look forward in hope to King Charles III reign, someone who has an understanding of the modern world and in his work on the environment and nature and human nature was well ahead himself in realising that the progress of science and science of man can also be a threat. I am not an environmentalist myself but i am glad someone of both the modern age and recent past has and is thinking about such things. Thank you for your inspiring comment, that seems to have inspired me to an excessive reply, but i am of the modern world, of the internet, its normal here. God Save the King.
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  3. Thank you for your kind words, Peter. I struggle to find the right words here but looking through the comments I found one by an American Tabitha Dorcas, that helped me. Yes very sad news yesterday. At the time I had had the BBC on i player on pause for an hour, and so was watching it with about an hour delay. So I heard the announcement about an hour later. Just as I heard the announcement my dad phoned me up. It was good to talk to my dad, who in his 80's is someone who is of that generation, and who has lived through and lives in a memory of a longer historical understanding than most people do today. I am in my late 50's and have that too but only really as stories to try and share. Thoughts do turn to World War Two, and World War One as my grandfather was at the Battle of Jutland. I think it is true that she embodied that longer historical sense of things that we might express, with her, as an inner sense of duty that cares and holds a longer outer sense of continuity. It's difficult to say more because I grew up in the punk era of 1977 but was also sorting out Silver Jubilee China for selling in the south of England at the time. i perhaps belong to the generations that thought we could escape this past, and so set about tearing down many of its concepts and replacing them with the self, utility functions and positive rules. It requires perhaps to make a journey back though historical memory to try and find them, and see if they can find a place, a dwelling, a home, and a family, and the world of the 21st century. I talk about politics with my dad all the time, and the knee jerk reaction is to ask: What does this mean politically? and: How ought I to express this, through what concepts to get the desired political spin on an event like any other world event. To try and avoid these kinds of tactical manoeuvrings, of trying to find the right orientation for putting the "event" to use is very difficult since we have eroded and even defaced the use of a recognisable private moral vocabulary in the public sphere. I agree that we might begin with her expressions and actions of duty and a life of continuity. I feel these are not firstly institutional notions just as a family is not firstly a kind of institutional utility and right. I am and will continue to be inspired to think about your kind and wise words in the coming days. As perhaps a start, I think Queen Elizabeth II did not embody a strange left over from the past, an anachronism though, rather a kind of paradoxical positions of being the public expression or symbol for private unique and particular human connections and relations. The best expression of this was perhaps at The Platinum Jubilee when Rod Stewart chose to perform Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. It brought to mind seeing on You tube, it must be over 10 years ago, a mobile phone video of the Fenway Park Stadium supporters singing it at one of the games. This video was linked to another one of Neil Diamond in a record shop being asked why he doesn’t do spontaneous street singing anymore. So, he goes outside and starts singing in the street, and instead of people joining in, they all get their phones out to film it. It’s paradoxical because without those phone video’s we wouldn’t even know this anyway and might have forgotten Sweet Caroline: “hands touching hands”. Anyways, one of my heroes Rod Stewart kept another group of my heroes off of the number one spot in the UK back in 1977. Thankyou Tabitha Dorcas for your inspiring comment.
    1