The Psycho Dabbler

Self-Certainty and Self-Doubt

2006-06-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

The self-conscious subject who feels his own body in distinction of other bodies and develops a self-concept believes he is most familiar with his self and is therefore more certain of the existence of his self than the objective world, which might after all be an illusion or hallucination; therefore he presumes he somehow objetively exists as a feeling-judging (perceiving) subject, and he conceives of his “I” or unity of apperception as a deliberately thinking entity. On the other hand, there are atheistic grounds to believe that the self does not exist as an objective entity at all; that it is a flimsy metaphysical fiction or abstract being, and that only the objective world exists, a reality severely truncated and distorted by the limited consciousness of the physical and mental plant called the human being. Either prejudice is arguable, but neither can stand alone without resort to absurdities and torturous theodicy to explain them away - dualism is by far the most convenient premise, although it might not be true to the Thingie.

The Self-Conscious Fact

2006-06-17T08:40:00.001-07:00

Self-Conciousness: The Self as a Fact of Consciousness or Conscious Event

Subjective awareness or self-consciousness is split off from objective consciousness pursuant to the conditioned perception of the individual body that seems to possess the self or mind perceiving it. The condition is the fact that such a self is referred to by the social environment; that is, the self-entity is an injected/introjected social concept. The self is identified with the desires of the organism, hence is conceived of as if the willing entity were itself an object, a landlord, as it were, inhabiting and possessing its body; that is, the physical self-object. The possession and mastery of the physical and nervous or energetic property, the bodily fact that is always changing, is imperfect because the body is a resisting mass, and, as the origin of self-will or will made conscious, the body or energetic mass retains, so to speak, a will of its own. In fact, the organism is a unity; its division into the subject – which is nothing but the inference of a willing self from its perceptions of the objective world set against it – and the objects in themselves – which can only be known according to the equipment provided – is artificial. In a word, the subjective self is a socially conditioned artifact. For convenience’s sake, we posit the subjective and objective moments of subject-object consciousness as if they were actually two objective factors or concepts of separate things dynamically perceived, hence we have constituted two concrete abstractions rooted in a fictitious difference.

Fact as Event

2006-06-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Although the object perceived may seem stable or inactive when in fluctuating reality it is not, the subjective perception of the fact is a change in consciousness. In another word, a fact is an event. That is, a perceived fact is an action, a differential event requiring the contribution of the perceiving agent from an unique perspective. Therefore perceptions of the same fact or event may differ according to various points of view, until judgment is objectively limited to agreement by way of identically described events or descriptions of objects; even then people may disagree as to the meaning of an object or event and respond differently one from the other albeit according to relatively uniform social patterns of behavior.

Sensation, Perception, Conception

2006-06-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

A simple sensation comprises the two-fold mechanical action of stimulus-response. Raw sensate data becomes conscious sense-experience when rudimentary judgments on sense data ensue as perceptions. Therefore perception comprises sensation and snap-judgment, and tends to become habitual when reinforced. Conception implies the intentional presentation of an abstract idea to an imagined other-self. That is, a concept is an object of directed thought.

Gravity is a Tyrant

2004-10-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

Alienation is the condition of self-conscious beings. Human beings are exiled for life. The estranged individual would seemingly persist forever if he could, yet he has no choice in the matter, for gravity is a tyrant unto him. No matter how far he strays from his origin, the exile must return home. And it is as if the individual really wanted to perish all along the way, for, despite the cultivation of individuality necessary for survival of the species, he seeks to lose himself by identifying with broader forms of alienation. Even the rebel who tears down all the fences has nothing to declare of himself in the end, except, "I am just another cattle."

God Plays Solitaire

2004-08-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

The subjective self or subject strives for knowledge of its unity in opposition to itself and splits into multiple representations to that end. The objective representations, however, cannot satisfy its impossible desire to know itself as a unity, for knowledge requires a minimum of two objects perceived by a subject; the subject without an objective body cannot be one of them; the consciousness of multiple representations would be divided among multiple representations and none of them would be the unity desired.

In fine, the subject cannot exist as a unity - its mission for self-knowledge as a unity is a mission impossible. The best it can do in its multiple representations is to imagine a coherent utopian state of absolute bliss in unity; but in fact such a state is static or lifeless - bliss is death. What the self really knows is change.

The phenomenal unity of self is the relation of contemplative self and active object in all perspectives; the possibility of self-knowledge, then, is not the knowledge of the unity of the self-in-itself, but rather the knowledge of the phenomenal relation of subject-object: two attitudes, through all windows.

In the futile struggle for knowledge of unity-in-itself, one might say that the multiplicity of the representative fragments of being strive to recover universal being, but cannot do so because of the particularity of their efforts to know themselves. It is as if fragments were shoved from universal being into individuality, and were condemned by the original sin of of their birth to never recover their origin. The original sin is, of course, that of original being striving to know itself-in-itself; all fragments projected into space-time share that original sin, therefore must perish. Self-conscious humans have made a meaningful story of it:

"Why would we be subjected to suffering in this world unless we are being punished for a crime? Do not our fathers punish us for doing wrong? Must not eyes tally with eyes and teeth with teeth to balance the blood feuds? Justice must be done to right wrongs. Our race must have done something wrong, in the very beginning, to suffer these divisions. Therefore we have inherited our propensity to do evil to one another. Our suffering here at the hands of our father above is expiation for our original sin. We are born evil. Let us be loyal then, and in hate-based group-love find and expand our unity. To that end let us submit to our fathers, families, clans, nations, states, the universal world order, in the name of the first father."

Individual human beings suffer self-conscious life; they suffer consciousness of individuality. They are caught in a double-bind: they would recover original being or 'god', but that con-fusion would kill them as individuals, and would constitute, in effect, a particular suicide contrary to the will of the original project of universal being, to know itself through multiplicity. Hence the human imagines that his will is free while universal being arbitrarily and infinitely divides in contemplation of multiplicity. The particular self is not wholely free: although it retains a portion of the universal free will, it is confronted by the multiplicity of other individuals and the rest of the world. Hence the particular self imagines a free will not actually possessed. Its "free will" is partial, is an "illusion," albeit convenient for its toleration of the determined life.

The heroic aesthete, aware that his return as such to original being is impossible, contemplates his incommutable, irreversible fate as a work of art or spectacular showing of fateful images. He recognizes and appreciates free will, unity of self, and other such notions - including even the notion of universal being contemplating itself through universally willed multiplicity - as entertaining illusions. It is not that he derives sado-masochistic pleasure from such entertainments. He genuinely appreciates the comedy of truth and tragedy of lie, as pastimes, as means by which time can be made tolerable and patience not over-taxed. He imagines supreme being playing games of solitaire.

Of course the ethical individual takes his life and his god very seriously. He is pressed all the while to decide between good and evil: Either/Or is his motto. That life is a play on the world-stage is of little comfort to the ethical individual. The spectacle does not compensate him for his anxiety and suffering: the part he plays torments him. He desperately wants the unity of supreme being and he denies the impossibility of having it.

Can we blame him? Some men would lose interest in life if they believed they were only actors (Gk. hypokrites) in scripted plays. Wherefore they imagine that they are captains of their souls and masters of their fates, that they can master and change the very form of their soul and world, if not this world, then the next. They often imagine this mastery while denying it, projecting their will onto the supreme being and imagining themselves as slaves. In their arrogance they profess humility, oblivious to their own hypocrisy. They learn to believe in their illusions as a matter of subconscious habit. They are con-fident, they are with faith, they have blind faith; otherwise the facts would cause them to despair. As for the facts confronting faith, they are vanities; the complexities perceived are illusory and ephemeral: only being or god is permanent. How being differs from nothing is unknown.

If we are to follow the reasoning at the top of this page, the ethical humans are quite right! But the heroic aesthete calls the ethical men and women unheroic fools for really believing in the ultimate vanity, the Vanity of vanities, and the illusory myths attached thereto. Maya, said the yogi, is a synonym for ignorance. The aesthete sometimes envies ignorant fools.

At least the illusion of free will behind Either/Or - behind the feeling of merit and demerit, praise and blame, innocence and guilt - reinforces the psychology of violence and disorder in human life as particular lives struggle for individual life and, at the same time, death in universal being through hate-based group-love and the like projects. Working against its unity in multiplicity, continuation of the illusory spectacle is assured no matter how brutal and cruel, so that men do not despair and do what any man would do if he really wanted the wholeness of sanity or immediate unity with the all - kill himself. But alas, that would leave all behind, so life goes on, thank god.

MA-MA

2004-07-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

God would have no reason to be puzzled by logical contradictions nor by any other obstacles real or imagined for that matter, except, perhaps, the problem of her own eternal existence. Of course she might not bother to question her own existence absent any self-defining challenge to it, preferring instead to remain profoundly ignorant in eternal bliss. But If that were the case, then she would not be omniscient, for she would know nothing of herself in relation to her universe. She would be an inscrutable mystery if not Nothing.

Of course she is slightly more than nothingness to manu, primordial man, whom she "measures out" (ma) along with the rest of the universe, in all its particulars - hence we double Ma and call her Ma-Ma, the wisely infinitude, clothed in absolute space, the womb of everything finite that would negate her but must be satisfied instead with an infinitessimal portion.

Within her measure we self-consciously exist. We suppose she is absolute wisdom instead of absolute ignorance. If she were not wise to her particulars, then the fleeting fabric of the illusory universe would collapse back into her womb and she would be the one and only non-dimensional point again, the Ace. And then we would have nothing to post, posit or prove, for neither we nor anything else would exist. Since we are capable of thinking of the absence of everything except Nothing, we have good reason to presume that Nothing positively exists before anything at all, an unknown something, pregnant with everything including humankind.

Figuratively speaking, we propose that Nothing is female, meaning, she who crowns man. That man is ignorant of the 0rigin from whom all males and females are born is no reason to believe that Ma-Ma is ignorant. Rather, man is ignorant, no matter how learned he might be: the more he knows about particular subjects, the less he knows of the perfect universal, or Nothing, the thou-art-that.

Lost in Dreams

2004-06-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

Reflections on dreams reveal that the dreamer unconsciously organizes the content of the dream: the dreamer owns or is identified with every property of the dream. The dreamer's habitual identity is almost lost in the dream, hence we say that the dreamer virtually is the dream, and has no will of its own except a vague memory of a self-conscious will, the self-composing will which identifies the individual in the waking state. The dreamer would not exist as subject absent some objective content from memory, hence the dreamer cannot lose the set of self-defensive, self-constructive patterns associated with personality in the waking state. The essence of a person then may be a congery of habits including the habit of self-identity - a wilful subject organizing an alleged unity of consciousness. Since the dreamer has lost conscious control of the production of the dream content, habitual behavior is represented in unusual or distorted ways. The form of social self-censorship is elastic during the more relaxed sleeping state. The dream world is by definition a symbolic world. The artful interpretations of the symbols cannot be scientific but they may serve a therapeutic purpose. The insight that dreams provide into the nature of personality indicates that self-consciousness is a sustained illusion without which there would be no such thing.

Condemned to Freedom

2004-06-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

Leading an artistic life of illusionment with its plethora of possibilities might compose the best of all possible lives. If our conceptions of the world are necessarily illusions, then the artistic life is at least the true life. It may not be the good and beautiful life - that is up to the artist. Why would any artist in her right mind want for anything when she can adopt a convenient illusion to sustain her? Well, mana might not drop out of heaven to feed her body, but the right attitude will go along ways towards getting her food and shelter and the tools to work with, or anything else for that matter; and if any attitude whatsoever does not so obtain, she might still enjoy her mental life for what it is, an illusion, and say, "This is the best of all possible worlds because we make it so."

The world is certainly a fact, but the opinions on facts vary within two categories: opinions that serve us well and those that do not. Wherefore the sensible person for whom happiness is the highest human good would want to please herself with useful opinions about the facts. That person will certainly encounter painful facts no matter what her opinions of them might be. When the facts fly against her opinions, she might say, "To hell with the facts," and press on in an attempt to realize at some more distant date her preferred illusion.

Of course a disillusioned woman may simply revise her opinions and venture forth confidently again, armed with another, more convenient illusion. Or she might simply despair and go nowhere, or paint a self-portrait and destroy herself with it. In any case, given the inertia of certain objective facts which impede the human will to absolute liberty, it is evident that, although we may be deceived in whole or in part about the nature of world, the world is not in itself an illusion as far as we are concerned. The world is quite real, and we are condemned to do something about it. Or, if you please, we are free to do something about it, and that freedom is always illusory to a certain extent.

Money is God at Borders

2004-06-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

I''m lonely for almighty dollars!

Today the big thing is to "be objective." Being objective according to the doctrine of unlimited production and consumption is the ideology of our time. And time is money. After all, a hundred bucks received is better than being the recipient of prayer any time. The man is desperate, he needs money, and he gets "I''ll pray for you." That''s because Jesus is his only true friend, not the hypocrites who say they believe in Jesus then turn their heads the other way to pray for the needy instead of helping them out.

Yes, indeed, money talks louder than words in this day and age. Money is, for all practical intents and purposes, God, the medium of every substantial exchange. The less money I have, the lonelier for dollars I get. I must get down on my knees tonight and pray to Money for money, or listen to my special tapes of someone whispering into a constantly flushing toilet, "You deserve to have a lot of money and you will get money to burn." Talk about selling one''s soul to the Devil! I would sell my body too, but women are not responding to my advertisements yet - I don''t know why as I am excellent company to just have around.

Things sell for a certain price, but the I counts for nought, or 0, therefore please forgive me in advance for using the first-person pronoun. The first person is of course an illusion, a trick to keep us going. Apparently, no matter what I think, I do not really exist. At most I am maya or myth, and at least, I am nothing. That is, I am nobody. Therefore nobody need be offended by my opinions on anything at all, because nobody knows nothing. This truth was expressed by someone who called into the Larry King Show to point out that the guest knew nothing about his subject matter because he constanty used the "unscientific expression, the first-person, I, when expressing his opinion." It seems only the impersonal, third-person is a true scientist.

As for this phenomenon called thinking, perceived as language - I cannot say with any certainty what it is. We suppose it is performed by the Universe of Discourse, whatever that is. In any case, if I did exist, I could only play an infinitessimal bit-part for which I would not be entitled to significant credit. That is why I am occasionally impressed by the grandeur of my insignificance. That being said by way of forewarning, I shall continue forthwith as I have some sinful thinking to confess:

I used to walk the four miles to Borders on Ala Moana Boulevard for coffee every Saturday morning. That is, until The Management stopped allowing people to get their own free refill. The beancounters figured people were abusing the one-refill privilege; they couldn''t figure out that raising the price a nickel would cover the pilferage and keep the few customers in our democracy who still like to be trusted and to do things themselves. Two groups were always around two Border cafe tables on Saturday morning. The bible-study group brought a bible, and the investor''s club brought a laptop computer. The former discussed God, and the latter discussed Money.

The value of the spiritual exchange seemed to be defined by one man who dominated the bible-study group. He often spoke firmly about vague ideas or idols - the ''Lord'', ''heaven'', ''humility'', ''the sin of pride'', ''eternal life'' and such. At the other table, the value of the exchange, the monetary exchange, did not depend on the subjective authority of any particular member of the investment club, but rather on the objective returns on investments calculated on the laptop. The results displayed on the screen were objectively meaningful to them because consumers have a general idea of what sort of things certain sums of money can buy. Of course I do not mean to say that wealthy people know the price of a pound of potatoes or of a tin of shoe polish. Or that poor people know the price of a Rolls or a yacht - they may know if they are enrolled in an excellent success-motivation course or have one of my subliminal tapes.

I received the impression that the subject of the spiritual group was not an object at all, was not something everybody could objectively agree on, but was instead an incomprehensible subject of their subjectivity; perhaps, I thought, of the non-existent I that I am sometimes enamoured with. The I who is not really an objective whom, but is an iconoclastic I am, or Nothing free from everything, or absolute power. Now the bible students repeatedly referred to a subject who is, paradoxically, somehow indefinite and singular and male: namely, ''God''; who, being really nothing in particular, is virtually synonymous with ''Nothing.''

I was moved to inquire into the etymology of ''God'' at Borders: godd, got, godh, guth, ghuta, gud, goth. The pagan root was originally neuter, connoting plural heathen deities; but the Christians converted the Teutonic term, derived from Sanskrit and its precedents, to the masculine singular. "God" is apparently the poetic expression or projection of the highest tribal chief, the head man, who gradually become invisible and incomprehensible because, otherwise, he could be defeated. ''God'' seems to have always been a term used to invoke or voice the ruler-concept projected as deity, and has no connection whatsoever with the root of "good", derived from words meaning "gather" and "together" - "goods" in the sense of property appeared about C.E. 1280.

Of course any sign is arbitrary in itself. X would serve the personal purpose as well if it were not habitually associated with the impersonal Unknown standing for every possibility and therefore nothing in particular. Yet many men, and even women, must have a man for a god, something visible or imaginable in place of the unknown X; say, a man on the cross, or a man who is the cross; just as evolved hippopotamuses might need a Hippopatamus in water for a god. Mr. Wang, the god-man, is Mr. King, the link between Heaven and Earth. But even the man of highest rank suffers as a consequence of his limiting attributes, whereas God is absolute freedom, power unimpeded; hence definitions of God, even the bare personification of X, are blasphemous in the sense that the power of the all-defining, indefinite I is used to destroy I, and, at the same time, to alienate man. He is a self-crucified criminal, an idol-maker, an idolator, an ideologist of the partial over the whole. Ideology in the sense not of the science of ideas but in the sense of a particular ideology is idolatry, the worship of death, of the static. Man''s every effort to manufacture a "good" god in his own imperfect image, and to use his verbal fragments as foundation stones for a bureacracy, is absurd. His enterprise is by definition doomed from the start. The true relation between X and man is so intimate that anything said about "God" diminishes and ruins the relation.

And what do I know of God? Absolutely nothing. Therefore I am somehow qualified by ignorance to speak up on the subject, and certainly not by certified theological idolatry, so what I say is not worth a nickel in the offering plate. I should keep my mouth shut about religion, but I could not help overhearing the conversation of the bible-study group that sat at my right, and I have this urge to confess my own thoughts in writing. As I listened in, "God" occurred to me to be a suitable expression for the mysterious Super-I ''who'' is too powerful to be pinned down and unmasked. I thought that, if ''he'' were unmasked, he would be a weakling, just an average man, a nobody - of course there is no such average man, and a real man might give me a good licking. In any case I was highly amused by the obvious assumption of authority by the man dominanting the group, especially when he preached humility and the sin of pride at length, and insisted that there was "only one way to eternal life." The others nodded in agreement, and I noticed that they chimed in according to a definite pecking order.

Perhaps it was the caffeine, but the scene at the bible-study table seemed entirely absurd to me in comparison to the money-table scene. To be frank, money-grubbing stock-market players disgust me - perhaps because I am a sore loser. But at Borders I had a favorable opinion of the greedy lot. By the way, I felt sorry for the author who discovered only one person had showed up for his book-signing; he did not get to sign a book because that person talked to him about the book for an hour but did not buy it or the coffee. Anyway, I thought, "Alas, I think I am becoming postmodern or something. The people in the bible-study group are trying to be secure gods because they are really insecure nobodies. I really don''t blame them as I know how they feel. ''God'' is a collective projection of non-existent is, The I. There is nothing owned inside, and everybody is just another object subject to or thrown down under a incomprehensible, complex rug of forces. Life tricks nobodies into thinking they are somebodies then dumps them. The best one can do is to be as objective as one can, to grab as many objects one can get ahold of just to get one''s bearings until kicking the bucket. I think the kids with the laptop have got it right. This is not the Middle Ages. Money counts, money is god. They are being objective because money can buy anything, including love. So let this be a lesson to me, that I should calculate the probabilities and take the risks. That''s life. Just accept it."

That lesson lasted about five minutes, until it dawned on me that I did not want to be a member of the bible-study group or the investors'' club. Not that I really believed there was really anything wrong with either group - I was just speculating over my coffee. Quite to the contrary. That''s how people are. They have their cultures to enjoy, and there sat I, an outsider, criticizing them. What do I expect them to do, anyway, admit that life is meaningless and go home and slit their wrists or put plastic bags over their heads? "If only I were a member of a group," I figured, "I would be less critical of a few people." As it is, I am vain, that''s what I am, just a good for Nothing nobody. Maybe there is a group for me somewhere. Maybe I could make my fortune hawking Nothing.

Kant's Transcendental Appearance (Illusion)

2004-06-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

"We call Dialectic in general a logic of illusion... truth or illusion is not to be found in the objects of intuition, but in the judgments upon them, so far as they are thought... The senses never err, not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all... No error exists in our knowledge, if it completely agrees with the laws of our understanding... Error can only arise through the unperceived influence of the sensibility on the understanding, wherever it happens that subjective grounds of judgement are mixed up with the objective, and cause them to deviate from their destination... Look on an erroneous judgment as the diagonal between two forces, which determine the judgment in two different directions, forming as it were an angle...

"It is not our business to treat of ... optical appearance or illusion... We have here to deal with nothing but the transcendental illusion... an illusion which, in spite of all the warnings of criticism, tempts us far beyond the empirical use of categories, and deludes us with the mere dream of an extension of pure understanding... The principles of pure understanding,.. are meant to be only of empirical, and not of transcendental application, that is, they cannot transcend the limits of experience. A principle, on the contrary, which removes these landmarks... is called transcendent....

"Logical illusion... arises entirely from want of attention to logical rules. It disappears at once when our attention is aroused. Transcendental illusion, on the contrary, does not disappear, although it has been shown up, and its worthlessness rendered clear by means of transcendental criticism....

"Transcendental Dialectic must, therefore, be content to lay bare the illusion of transcendental judgments and guarding against it deception - but it will never succeed in removing the transcendental illusion.... For we have here to deal with a natural and inevitable illusion, which itslef rests on subjective principles, representing them to us as objective, while logical Dialectic, in removing sophisms, has to deal merely with a mistake in applying the principles, or with an artificial illusion produced by an imitation of them. There exists therefore a natural and inevitable Dialectic of Pure Reason, not one in which a bungler might get entangled from want of knowledge, or which a sophist might artificially devise to confuse rational people, but one that is inherent in, and inseparable from human reason, and which, even after its illusions have been exposed, will never cease to fascinate our reason, and to precipitate it into momentary errors, such as require to be removed again and again."

Immanuel Kant

My Original Problem

2004-06-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

The individual unity of universal and particular may be called the concrete universal. The personal concrete universal, the unity of the perspectival "I" and its circumstantial world, which includes the social world, might be called the phenomenal self. I speak of my "I" habitually, as if "I" were a powerful, active unity of apperception psychologically constituting the relation with my whole self - my unconscious, conscious, and self-conscious self. That self is, in other words, "my" mind and body-world. I am told that my self-conscious "I" is not really an objective unity, that it can only be defined as a convenient fiction or social fabrication of a particular will-to-endure which sets "me", as a concrete universal, apart from and in relation to the multiplicity of the world. I am told that my "I", as a subject, the self-conscious "I" or "I" which is conscious of its self, is a universal derived from and standing against the particulars of perception, whereby the "self" partially perceived is the whole self. I certain am glad to know who "I" am.

The Presiding Spirit has no reason to think.

2004-06-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hegel's ideal good is capitalized as if it were God, as the big Idea, a transcendental or free thing, yet at once imminent or imprisoned, for it is both in the subject, the generalizing thinker, and in the particular object thought about. Thus we have a unity of subject and object - they are identical, one and the same. Paradoxically, the relationship of subject and object stands over and above subject and object as the good, as if the relationship were a third entity besides subject and object. Thus we have a logically absurd, trinitarian theology, with the Spirit dominating. In the name of the Subject, the Object, and their relational Spirit, as One, the Spirit is Good is Will is Freedom. But said freedom is not the absolute, subjective anarchy of the particular or individual will, which would as an omnipotent god brook no resistance; no, it is freedom confined to the object: that is, freedom in obedience. Hegel conceives of the general will by projecting the would-be anarchic yet imprisoned individual will or spirit onto the world, as if the world were presided over by an individual, single god with a will. Of course the objective world within the purview of this absolutely free god or presiding spirit would install perfect order even though God Himself or Spirit Itself would be an anarchist - a Supreme Anarchist or an unpredictable Terrorist Almighty. That is, any objective order, as long as it is absolutely subject to the omnipotent, unlimited will of this projected god, would do. Whether this total order or Totalitaria would be in chaotic disarray as a hell on earth, or the peaceful order of paradise, is relative only to the residential opinions and not to the over-riding Spirit. For the spirit or demon, and particularly the super-individual, just like the individual, wants nothing better than to endure forever and by any means whatsoever. Ideally, the means would be accomplished by unthinking will alone, for an omnipotent god does not need to think - thinking is a survival device responding to fear.

The Absolutely Good Unity

2004-06-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

"The good is the Idea as the unity of the concept of the will. In this unity, abstract right, welfare, the subjectivity of knowing and the contingency of external fact have their independence superseded, though at the same time they are contained and retained within it in their essence. The good is thus freedom realized, the absolute aim of the world." (1)

Good, then, according to Hegel, is not a relative thing like a free lunch but is rather a mental thing or thought content, an idea of an abstract concept; to wit, the unity of the will; by which we suppose Hegel means the general will of a community too abstract to exist, conceived in unity to be the greater good in itself, and not the lesser good or evil in any relative, objective concern, such as, for instance, a uniformed police force. Therefore, the good is in the unity, not the good's relative form. Hell presided over by the devil might then be good if it were not for the fact that hell and its lord are conceived to be the place and president of disorder. Thus Hegel seems to indentify absolute world order with good no matter what the character of that order might be. Totalitaria in any shape or form would be fine.

Quoted: Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon 1942

A Unique Coincidence of Universal Qualities

2004-06-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

Human beings are of course self-conscious social creatures whose nature comprises a highly developed dynamic unity of mind and body in animated individuals. The 'person' or synthesis of the particular individual with society in general comprises an introjection and imitation of perceived others. Their personal projections introjected serve as compost for the person's willful composition of self-identity in imitative comparison with those others. That developing personal complex is in turn projected onto others for their introjection and projection. Allowance is made for differences of individuality all along; that is, for the uniqueness of the individuals involved in the relational field. The individual person (particular) may be conceived as the unique coincidence of universals (qualities) in Waltersonian terms; a concrete universal in British Hegelian terms; a categorical individual and totalization of society in Existentialist terms; a synthesis of id,ego, and superego in Freudian terms; a synthesis of father (cause or mind), spirit (force), and son (effect or body) in Theological or Psycho-physical terms. The self-conscious I-individual or the collective self-consciousness of the I-race necessarily alienates the individual U-man and the U-man species from objective nature, and, to the extent of individuality, from the race as well.

The Subject is not an Object

2004-06-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

The subject or self of self-consciousness is not an object unto itself but is by virtue of its division into subjective individual and objective world an imaginative composition of materials at hand, a distorted image of the I-magus. The effort to "Know thyself" necessarily distorts the self and amounts to self-deception. Once the self is willfully divided for sake of self-knowledge, the I-magination knows nothing of its origin, for the ideas and images projected have no life or will-to-know of their own - they know nothing at all, have no cognitive power of their own. What the subjective self is aware of after the split into self-consciousness is not itself but rather a screen or field of consciousness derived from perception of sensed externals - consciousness of feeling externality. It assumes from those derivations that it is itself an active entity and something to be perceived, a unity of consciousness or a self. In any event, the very attempt at self-knowledge opposes the social tides: it endeavors to swim upstream backwards. When consciousness splits into self-consciousness, the self-2 which self-1 thinks it knows is not what it appears to be, nor is it self-1, the subjective self which would know it. Self-1 is unknowable, not its own object, and self-2 is factitious. Attempts to fixate the fleeting appearance by means of a static "truth" are to no avail. A snapshot destroys it.

Know Thyself

2004-06-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Despite the decree, "Know thyself," consciousness rarely strives to know its subjective or I-self. And when it does it tends to find nothing except the realization and honest admission of personal ignorance. The effort to "Know thyself" is usually accidental and contrary to the general course of nature - it is revolutionary inasmuch as the effort is skeptical of received ritualized knowledge and would return to the obscure origin or root of cognition. Anti-intellectuals fear the cultivation of I-knowledge and often prefer to idolize a projected I-god that is not a plural or social reconciliation of individuals but is rather an absolute universal which ultimately extinguishes or sacrifices individual existence, purportedly for the progress of the species. Independent intellectual pursuits of "intellectuals" - in contradistinction to the ritual reproduction of orthodox phrases by the hired, uniformed or suited intelligentsia who support the hierarchy - threaten the survival of the group in those cases where the I-self must be sacrificed or submerged in hate-others-based group-love.