Conventional wisdom declares that there inheres in every man a female and in every woman a male.
This leads to a strange paradox: The necessary condition of being conventionally male consists in submission to his inner female - she must direct the man - this is the secret of his flourishing "manhood". Conversely, the well-developed woman submits to the direction of her inner male.
In a man, the female finds the reasons; the man acts. In a woman, the male is directionless: it needs reasons from which to act, but the reasons in their substance cannot reflect the ones for which man has created for his female from which to act.
Man is, in teleological essence, female - the man is merely compensation for the essentially female character he is at core - at the level of fundamental beliefs and drives - at the level of the substance of ideas. Conversely, the woman is, in teleological essence, male - the female is compensation for the essentially male person she is at core.
Therefore man is the means to the female - in allocating to the man male-as-such, we have confounded means and ends, and so vice-versa.
Now a problem rears its head:
Man is unable, due to his male-as-means deficiency with feelings, to represent to himself the female form that directs him.
Woman is unable to represent to herself, due to her female-as-means deficiency with Ideas, the male that directs her.
Attempts on the man's part to masculinize, or take over reins of his inner female will lead to dissolution of character and sexual deficiency, and attempts on the woman's part to feminize her inner male (usually due, again, to social pressures) - will lead to the careless stupidity that characterizes the combination of female direction and instrumentality.
So its highly important in this respect not to misinterpret society's signals.
Now, is this the 'greatest myth of the woman', that she is directed by emotions rather than by Ideas? Is she, in essence, directed by the emotion or, as her male dictates, an Idea of it? But we cannot ask her: her female-as-means has no positive conception of the inner male, or what it thinks. Nevertheless, she is directed by the Idea and misattributes this source to the consciously represented emotional reaction to its content - for this reason, it characterizes her absolute morality, even though, to repeat, in attributing the corresponding emotionality as the cause, an error has been made.
Here, a problem arises: in what sense can we say that she acts 'according' to principle, if she is unable to represent the content of the principle by which she acts? (Very often, its projected: she wants her mate to act in service of ideals because she will not, as a suppressed man.)
I don't know, and in a certain sense, it is a mechanism that has no proper discourse to represent it, for obvious reasons.
So the male of the woman might be one of the most left-unsaid things in the world, despite its very real impact.
However, its ridiculous impotence in the conscious world means that the woman must fall back on a man-constructed image of the male. Therefore, the female-as-means consequently falls back on a male-constructed image of female. (More should be said though.)
So we arrive at the brand of feminism that advocates an independent woman-constructed image of male, which faces all the well-known problems.
In solution, women in general have chosen the indirect route to greater power by serving as the controlling feature of the female directing the male.
Do we reach a stasis, where women perform the role of channeling male desire, but men perform the role of setting the course? Given that patterns of division of labor are changing, what approach and attitude do we take to the charge of female inauthenticity, and to what end? The question for true equality turns on the ability and desire on the part of women to re-characterize Enlightenment forms in their image in a compatibilist way. (I would think that a good start would be for womenkind to respect their priestly or mannish types: cultural differences are obvious here.) Is this possible/desirable, or does its impossibility pave descents into fantasy - of the "autonomy of the sexes"?
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Note 25
So there is something deeply wretched about this country, a hopeless yearning. Is this a residue of Christ without an object? Or a projection - mine?
The average Briton wraps his world in optimistic garbs and images to protect himself from the collapsing world of paternal institutions and maternal faith.
Economy, beer, and the collective spirit of reasonableness - culture as morality, the wreck bending in upon itself.
How can Europe live without Christ? A return to Rousseau's ideas, reformed and repackaged in hedonist covering, but in an inevitably perverted form? (ie, the development of neoliberalism as a possible branch of this general direction.) Note that this actively destroys, if slowly but surely, the substance of the ideal, which remains a guard against the basest submission. The danger of mouthing words without knowing their meanings may therefore threaten.
More likely outcome: The continuation of the dialectic between ?
The average Briton wraps his world in optimistic garbs and images to protect himself from the collapsing world of paternal institutions and maternal faith.
Economy, beer, and the collective spirit of reasonableness - culture as morality, the wreck bending in upon itself.
How can Europe live without Christ? A return to Rousseau's ideas, reformed and repackaged in hedonist covering, but in an inevitably perverted form? (ie, the development of neoliberalism as a possible branch of this general direction.) Note that this actively destroys, if slowly but surely, the substance of the ideal, which remains a guard against the basest submission. The danger of mouthing words without knowing their meanings may therefore threaten.
More likely outcome: The continuation of the dialectic between ?
Note 24
Selling yourself on a dime
So the fences to the world are craved to brokenness, and beds are filled with homeless houses of men, pouring forth to the cycle of dreams that are made stone, gliding with a skinless breath, taped to the sound of your name, your stage.
So the fences to the world are craved to brokenness, and beds are filled with homeless houses of men, pouring forth to the cycle of dreams that are made stone, gliding with a skinless breath, taped to the sound of your name, your stage.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Note 22
Chase the resident gulls of Lanyard Common, or lift the chains of dog-bound men. Seek the treasury of the earth, or loop forwards in uncertain ends. Trace the steak-filled wooden coffin or the scar round your twisting back. Stave the bleeding from sanctity of life, or pervade through the empty fields of forgetting, unknown men.
The insanity of the springtime sunshine falls across the jutted walls, brick upon brick yielding to the yellow beam that drapes its endless sparkling cloth over the mold of the pondering, retreated earth.
I walk with my head axially lowered from the gravity of time, that rushes up to meet and consume us all. So the past peels like a layer of rotten fruit, revealing the kernel underneath as less is extracted from more, little by little, and the swirling deception of images, like a protective bark of a trunkless tree, falls into the nothingness that presses the material chains, which clink loudly with the sounds of society's bells, keeping time till the soul drifts upward, inward, into crypts and into the falling trellises of loved time.
The insanity of the springtime sunshine falls across the jutted walls, brick upon brick yielding to the yellow beam that drapes its endless sparkling cloth over the mold of the pondering, retreated earth.
I walk with my head axially lowered from the gravity of time, that rushes up to meet and consume us all. So the past peels like a layer of rotten fruit, revealing the kernel underneath as less is extracted from more, little by little, and the swirling deception of images, like a protective bark of a trunkless tree, falls into the nothingness that presses the material chains, which clink loudly with the sounds of society's bells, keeping time till the soul drifts upward, inward, into crypts and into the falling trellises of loved time.
Note 21
What if the constitutive powers to execute the action of the right is dependent on the individual and the social resources which establish the condition and the rules for the exercise of the rights. Think of a traffic light system where the arbitrary rules of the game allow for the constitutive configuration through which the possibility of orderly movement through the space of concepts is enabled, with the coordinates of actuality as it is reinterpreted by the concept in societal forms being the specific rules as actualized in the operation of the traffic lights.
In this case, the potentiality of individual man itself serves as an underlying factor which gives substance and meaning to the operation of the rules, but which remains dependent, causally and cognitively, on the resources of established concepts, associations and rules. If one then applies Paine’s method of establishing criteria of distinguishing between natural and civil liberties, one asks, simultaneously, a few key questions. In what way is the establishment of the toolkit and the content of the concept as a resource constitutive of the powers which are enabled and expressed through individual initiative? What is the set of criteria for determining, in this situation of reciprocally-conditioning dependence, the kind of capacities and therefore abilities that are crucial for the actual operation of the concept, or the aspects of the concept that are deemed to be productive of claims to right? This itself necessitates a series of value judgements that allow us to interpret what the action is for, and what it is, and therefore what is important in it. Therefore the competing accounts of the nature and ends of human agency come into play. (Or rather, the ends and therefore the nature of agency.)
In this case, the potentiality of individual man itself serves as an underlying factor which gives substance and meaning to the operation of the rules, but which remains dependent, causally and cognitively, on the resources of established concepts, associations and rules. If one then applies Paine’s method of establishing criteria of distinguishing between natural and civil liberties, one asks, simultaneously, a few key questions. In what way is the establishment of the toolkit and the content of the concept as a resource constitutive of the powers which are enabled and expressed through individual initiative? What is the set of criteria for determining, in this situation of reciprocally-conditioning dependence, the kind of capacities and therefore abilities that are crucial for the actual operation of the concept, or the aspects of the concept that are deemed to be productive of claims to right? This itself necessitates a series of value judgements that allow us to interpret what the action is for, and what it is, and therefore what is important in it. Therefore the competing accounts of the nature and ends of human agency come into play. (Or rather, the ends and therefore the nature of agency.)
Friday, January 20, 2012
Note 20
I think a developing understanding of the meaning of the term mental health is the starting point of selfconstruction.
What is the concept of mental health in society?
Why are some forms of mental health encouraged, promoted over others, and what are the levers of its promotion?
What opportunities do immense interpretive/cognitive wealth of society bring?
Real? There is no Real. The concepts that create arbitrary order. But also mental health.
What reflexivity? How does the belief in the true create illusions?
I believe in the Real, and the real has existence. But the existence of the Real has no extension beyond my existence.
Theres the nub - the narrative Real as transcendent, and the "I think, therefore I am" point as the precondition, the existence of the concept as the prerequisite for the thinking state of my existence.
But my existence is itself a meta-real.
Real is used in contradistinction to what is, in the use of concepts. What is, is , but isness is structured; always existing in ordered relations to other possibilities.
Kant: What is, must. But does the mustness constitute isness? Is Being constituted by a form of all possible "mustness", Being as necessity referring to itself?
Is all language the possibility of its necessity?
But that means that its necessity is redefined by their individual Being. Language contains the collective experience of the past in dealing with conditions shared among previous peoples.
(Unoriginal language is therefore the failure to fully interpret the significance of the present moment, but the nature of the associative set...)
Of course, individual psychologies use language differently to interpret different states, and the collective state of a group or crowd is the necessary condition of the applicability of language...It is the modality of translation of concept into existence that is shared yet subjective that constitutes a group.
What are the constituents of this modality of interpretation?
Well, first, it is precisely the ability of the group leader to appreciate the collective modality of interpretation and to adopt the responsibility of developing its substantive content.
"This is absurd. How could you call this responsibility?"
What is the meaning of a word?
It is its difference from its similarities, and the word...it does not need family resemblance, its the resemblance of collective experiences that form complexes of associations which are tied to the negotiative pillars of taboo, excitement, reality-function, to inform the purpose of conversation.
Feeling-toned complexes and their significations, when tied to underlying narratives and meanings - yes, there are master narratives, narratives of the order of mental health - ...
Know these narratives, subvert the tragedy inherent in them by re-expressing them in perverted form, ie. reflect how much we actually desire them, make fun of it in any way you can, preferably by conjuring circumstances that turn its aspects against itself, through the incongruity of the simultaneous application of two tragic values - this is the work of the comedian.
So wherefore the specific horror of a failed joke, which sounds like a bad lie, all-too-earnestly told? Are all jokes clownish masquerade of the truth-complex? The belief in the joke is the essential condition of its success. So a joke obviously has a shadow in a tragic truth.
"Laughter is freedom from order - it shows us how much we secretly want to be mad."
What is the concept of mental health in society?
Why are some forms of mental health encouraged, promoted over others, and what are the levers of its promotion?
What opportunities do immense interpretive/cognitive wealth of society bring?
Real? There is no Real. The concepts that create arbitrary order. But also mental health.
What reflexivity? How does the belief in the true create illusions?
I believe in the Real, and the real has existence. But the existence of the Real has no extension beyond my existence.
Theres the nub - the narrative Real as transcendent, and the "I think, therefore I am" point as the precondition, the existence of the concept as the prerequisite for the thinking state of my existence.
But my existence is itself a meta-real.
Real is used in contradistinction to what is, in the use of concepts. What is, is , but isness is structured; always existing in ordered relations to other possibilities.
Kant: What is, must. But does the mustness constitute isness? Is Being constituted by a form of all possible "mustness", Being as necessity referring to itself?
Is all language the possibility of its necessity?
But that means that its necessity is redefined by their individual Being. Language contains the collective experience of the past in dealing with conditions shared among previous peoples.
(Unoriginal language is therefore the failure to fully interpret the significance of the present moment, but the nature of the associative set...)
Of course, individual psychologies use language differently to interpret different states, and the collective state of a group or crowd is the necessary condition of the applicability of language...It is the modality of translation of concept into existence that is shared yet subjective that constitutes a group.
What are the constituents of this modality of interpretation?
Well, first, it is precisely the ability of the group leader to appreciate the collective modality of interpretation and to adopt the responsibility of developing its substantive content.
"This is absurd. How could you call this responsibility?"
What is the meaning of a word?
It is its difference from its similarities, and the word...it does not need family resemblance, its the resemblance of collective experiences that form complexes of associations which are tied to the negotiative pillars of taboo, excitement, reality-function, to inform the purpose of conversation.
Feeling-toned complexes and their significations, when tied to underlying narratives and meanings - yes, there are master narratives, narratives of the order of mental health - ...
Know these narratives, subvert the tragedy inherent in them by re-expressing them in perverted form, ie. reflect how much we actually desire them, make fun of it in any way you can, preferably by conjuring circumstances that turn its aspects against itself, through the incongruity of the simultaneous application of two tragic values - this is the work of the comedian.
So wherefore the specific horror of a failed joke, which sounds like a bad lie, all-too-earnestly told? Are all jokes clownish masquerade of the truth-complex? The belief in the joke is the essential condition of its success. So a joke obviously has a shadow in a tragic truth.
"Laughter is freedom from order - it shows us how much we secretly want to be mad."
Note 19
Institutions as systems of reproduction of process: material process factorized - ?
The analogy to self-interest, with need as base but in a purely functional immanent sense.
Post-material process. Institutionalized symbolic order as the facilitating process, the shortcut of agreements in matters pertaining to societal-individual scope.
We are actors in society's endless cinema that's the definition of our existing but existence is empty without reference.
What about the fundamentalization of functionalism?
Access breeds utility precisely because increasing areas and aspects of our experience can be categorized in relation to the externalized function-form - a form that commodotizes experience and consciousness-time by increasing its productivity and profit per minute.
The individual as the crucial myth, Real, and necessity that holds up the form.
The analogy to self-interest, with need as base but in a purely functional immanent sense.
Post-material process. Institutionalized symbolic order as the facilitating process, the shortcut of agreements in matters pertaining to societal-individual scope.
We are actors in society's endless cinema that's the definition of our existing but existence is empty without reference.
What about the fundamentalization of functionalism?
Access breeds utility precisely because increasing areas and aspects of our experience can be categorized in relation to the externalized function-form - a form that commodotizes experience and consciousness-time by increasing its productivity and profit per minute.
The individual as the crucial myth, Real, and necessity that holds up the form.
Meaning: Random Points
When we need meaning what we want is a perspective that objectifies our relation to the world. (Is it a self-referring perspective? In being said, it is NOT you that's saying it; but in your saying it, we infer that you are saying it.)
Necessity of being in all its forms cannot constitute truth.
Truth like all concepts are innately self-referring in their content and cannot be shown to reflect being.
Meaning is the object of the sign but meaning is itself indefinite without a picture of meaning, a relation to a web of meanings.
Truth is a certain set of accepted forms of webs of meaning regulated in part by necessity in being.
Understanding proceeds on the ability to perceive possibilities of meanings.
Necessity of being in all its forms cannot constitute truth.
Truth like all concepts are innately self-referring in their content and cannot be shown to reflect being.
Meaning is the object of the sign but meaning is itself indefinite without a picture of meaning, a relation to a web of meanings.
Truth is a certain set of accepted forms of webs of meaning regulated in part by necessity in being.
Understanding proceeds on the ability to perceive possibilities of meanings.
Note 18
Jung 98: The individual as a resource-based ordering concept. It redirects the problem of subjectivity into a duality that can be reconfigured and understood reflectively in terms that are continuous with the recognition of other individualities existing in the world. It deproblematicizes and justifies interpretation of morality and existence. The subject as myth based on the standpoint of the Real: subjectivised affectivity.
Note 17
Individual as a set of enabled conventionalized intersubjective experiences, given arbitrariness.
Order becomes an important resource: individual as an ordering resource-concept.
What is the economy of concepts?
As opposed to their theoretical reason?
That is almost THE question.
Order becomes an important resource: individual as an ordering resource-concept.
What is the economy of concepts?
As opposed to their theoretical reason?
That is almost THE question.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Amor Fati (Nietzsche)
The person in the modern world is thrown back into a mode of existence corresponding to a rung of collective culture - in having to abandon the systematic misinterpretation of experience that is the condition of self-contained philosophizing, he lives within a socio-culturally embedded interpretation of existence which he is fundamental conflict with precisely because it functions as a complement, as a facilitation, and a support to the fundamentally life-affirming, life-sanctifying orientations and capacities of individuals who have been able to act upon the world to create effective mechanisms which reflect their preferences in the conditions of their flourishing. (This sanctification is a precondition of all postconscious acting.)
That is, collective cultures reflect the conflict of interpretations - they are its products, and the process and product of interpretation are themselves based upon the makeup of individual psychologies.
That is the role of social and genealogical critique in Nietzsche: to reveal, by example, the underlying mechanisms through which culture is disseminated and reinforced: he envisages a larger, unified social science which can reveal how conditions of need (psychology, biology) create conditions of interaction (ideologies, philosophy, beliefs), through facilitating mechanisms and factors (politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, social psychology) to condition and guide the existing actualities within lived experience, bearing in mind that the reflexively conditioned historian at bottom always contradicts.
***
Love of fate is a transition back to a starting point of an approach to the world that embraces lived experience as the object of our investments of emotional and intellectual attention.
The individual has transcended lived experience, he is situating himself behind a skeptical veil of abstraction, of concepts and ideas, from which to organize and explain away the inherent unpleasantness of lived experience.
He structures lived experience according to these ideas, ordering his thoughts, creating moral systems, and approaching life from the lens of these ideas, acting in accordance to the totality of the thought out ideal as applied to the substantive content of the lived experience.
That is the equilibrium of the philosophical type - one who throws the net over the motley whirl of the senses, and seeking to distance himself from the nature of existing as the fundamental condition, the primary mode of living which the mob instinctively pursues and excels in.
However it is the failure of these ascetic ideals which throws the philosopher back into the world in which living as others do is a requirement which he is in some way maladapted to. It is the tension of the failure of the ascetic ideal which is instinctively, and intuitively felt, and the essential hatred of existence which is the chief motivating force of one who constructs philosophical systems, which drives the post-Romantic philosopher into explicitly pessimistic hatred and denial of the will-to-live, which, when deprived of the metaphysical narrative of the truthfulness of salvation, and therefore its accordant prescriptive mode of life, collapses into a denial of the validity of the conditions of existence, and its contents, with the absolute skeptical hypothesis as its epistemic creed.
The love of fate is explicitly addressed to the types who are unable to live without justification, whether metaphorically-speaking, of God's guilt, or of one's own, for the suffering one has inflicted upon the world.
***
Why love fate?
Fate refers to a series of circumstances which are predetermined in some way and in which essential characteristics one observes and lives through but cannot change. There are several possible candidates for this series of circumstances which can be construed as ‘fate’. First, the claim of ‘Character is Fate’, which significantly structures and limits the ways one lives or can choose to live, second, the aspects of the external environment which one is unable to control, and third, the kinds of experiences and situations generated when these given irreversible conditions come into contact with each other.
At the outset, we can pose an essential problem of definition: how does love of fate differ from pure resignation, or fatalism? The love of fate and fatalism share in the acknowledgement of the significance of our failure to control the conditions in our lives that do cause displeasure or suffering. This obstruction of the will toward attaining a desired state has swelled to such a point of concern that an ostensive approach has to be taken towards dealing with it, in the form of therapy, as it were. However, the love of fate preserves an active form of directedness towards the world, re-channelling the desires for the unobtainable state toward the conditions of that unobtainability. It reinterprets the failure or inability to achieve a certain object as a cause not for regret, misery or guilt, but as a condition of one’s life that is to be embraced and affirmed. Conversely, fatalism creates and breeds a passive form of hopelessness towards the task of attaining the desired object without specifying the attitudes which are directed towards the object of desire, or the situation of hopelessness. Insofar as the agent is unable to relieve himself of the desire, the situation descends to a state of pessimism or despair, and one that drains individual health.
But of course, in order to love fate, one has to believe in fate and in the lack of ability, despite our best efforts, to improve the given situation to our satisfaction, in the first place. Given that Nietzsche views the truth of this claim to be inconclusive, why affirm the lack of free will in this regard – don’t we want to affirm or assert the presence of free will instead? We may reply that Nietzsche tires of the intellectual dishonesty of metaphysicians of free will, who attempt to establish the dogmatic belief in the fact through arguments, when it remains essentially unknown. But this fails to account for the converse danger of believing in fate where it does not exist. The practical effects of misdirected belief in either may be equally damaging. While a belief in absolute free will breeds a sense of responsibility and guilt for all our acts, which becomes a cause for unjustified unhappiness and unhealthy inhibitions, a belief in fate may lead to indolence, or pessimistic fatalism, or lowered ambition, and wasted opportunities for individual, or world-development. And if we acknowledge the possibility of a reflexively conditioning power of this belief, it might seem that the price of believing in unavoidable fate is too high.
An answer may be suggested: if we take Nietzsche's aim in the denial of free will to be primarily one of the eradication of guilt, then amor fati might be interpreted as a solution to the problem of guilt: the agent adopts a sense of responsibility for the present and future, but is absolved of the past. The past belongs to the circumstances classed under ‘Fate’- its only relation to the living present existing as a cause - and we are to accept it without guilt or regret; as a given. We do not allow the past to colour the present moment in which we act. This requires a “form of robust health”, an ability defined as “forgetfulness”, or a good “digestive system”, as its precondition. But this solution does not eliminate the problem of the need for a degree of responsibility in the present as an intuitively forceful guide to action. The inhibitive power of a sense of responsibility in the present implies the ability to make and keep promises by definition – ie, to create fixed identities over time through which to structure our approach to the world – and this ability of the “protracted will” to extend projects over long periods of time is crucial to the development advocated by Nietzsche. So Nietzsche attempts to remove the phenomena of guilt as a stain on mankind while retaining the notion of responsibility. This is possible insofar as a sense of responsibility is not to be defined as a fear of guilt, but either as a love of honour, or genuine generosity of spirit, or a commitment to an ideal of virtue.
But the question remains: Is the admission of fate not in contradiction to the possibility of Nietzsche’s normative calls to develop mental discipline and to pursue an individualistic programme of self-cultivation? And wouldn’t the belief in the ability to control or reshape our circumstances in this respect be an important contributory factor, and not mere epiphenomena, for this process of development? Cultivating a belief in the lack of free will sets an unhealthy precedent, and encouraging emotional attachment to their conditions could easily overwhelm the drives to self-cultivation. An obvious possible reply is that Nietzsche interprets the individual's belief in his ability to impose his will on a given set of circumstances as a symptom of strength or weakness of will rather than as effective cause, but to assert this as a blanket justification for the opening of the floodgates of fate seems to me to overestimate the sovereign power of individuals against the influence of ideas that are taken to be true. And Nietzsche clearly does not take the crude epiphenomenalist view that our conscious commitments have no effect on the development of our character or our acts, even as he develops a physiologically-grounded character typology in terms of ideal binaries such as “weak” versus “strong”, which do point to certain unchangeable aspects in a person's character: “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, a desire to overcome, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd of weakness to demand that it should express itself as strength.”. Is Nietzsche therefore suggesting that the acknowledgement of selective fatalism is a test to tempt the strong to overcome it, while it serves as justification for the weak among themselves to feel contented and unresentful at their lot? I think an answer to this question lies in understanding the larger context of amor fati, or “Dionysian pessimism”, and in exactly what it defines as fate.
We can gather certain hints about the nature of the Dionysian pessimist and his relation to fate. In GS370, he is “richest in the fullness of life...[and] cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition and negation...owing to an excess of fertilizing, procreating energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland.” So he is one who does not turn away from the sight of the ugly or the nausea-inducing, because of his ability to transfigure it into something beautiful. He wants to “learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then [he] shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” So it is firstly the change in perspective created by cultivating an eye for beauty in all things, and secondly in making things beautiful by weaving its existence as necessity into a narrative thread through actual outcomes, giving it meaning by turning it into a cause for a desirable result. Now let us pursue this further. If one adopts the view of oneself in the larger scheme of things, that is, as the living causal product of an immense and complex historical process of human ideas, events, and exchanges, great and small, stretching from the present into pre-history, then the aim of making things beautiful extends into a project of world-affirmation, incumbent upon each agent at every moment, at least insofar as the world is an idealist construct of a mind that has to be justified anew within each subject, and is intuitively felt, in isolated Being, to be so. Therefore the Dionysian adopts a growing sense of responsibility for the “universe”, and the heightened state of desire to justify all the conditions of the present, insofar as he is the world, but the pessimist must acknowledge an eventual point where one is unable to justify all existence-as-such - one of which, for example, is the failure in philosophy to provide absolute grounds for knowledge claims about existence – and therefore one must relent in one's need to justify, and to love the necessity of the meaninglessness and ugliness of existence, for its own sake. For the Dionysian pessimist who engages in these activities, dangers loom, and love of fate may be construed as an instrument, a method of mental discipline one develops to overcome the effects of one's pessimism, or as a guiding principle and an indicator of one's progress towards an affirmation of life.
A danger which amor fati seeks to prevent are the effects of Pity and Nausea. Pity refers to both self-pity and pity of others. One begins by pitying oneself, in the dissatisfaction caused by our essentially-desiring and insatiable will, which Schopenhauer sums up in a quote: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing, or which he sees near him, and sets out to run over the path.” (WWRI/380) This pity at oneself can be extended to others in a recognition of universal suffering, notwithstanding the more visible forms of mental and material suffering in the world. Nausea in turn refers to nausea at oneself, nausea at others, and nausea at existence in general. Nausea at others for the Dionysian refers to the sickness induced by the perversions of man revealed by honest intellectual inquiry, expressed forcefully by verbal gasps of “More air! More air!” that pervades Nietzsche's later texts; also the presence of others, and the “art of associating with people”, especially at table, consists in “swallowing one's nausea”, also nausea at people defined as the “weak and the hopelessly sick” – those who are full of ressentiment. Nausea at oneself consists in being “sick of [oneself]” due to envy towards others, or in disgusted loathing at one's identity and character. Nausea at existence refers to disgust at life itself, revealed in Schopenhauer's highly-charged pessimism and ideal of the elimination of the will-to-life. Nietzsche views these two tendencies as conducive to nihilism and the will to nothingness, the antithesis of his philosophy. Therefore love of fate becomes a programme of mental hygiene, a means to overcome the negative affects towards things which are necessary.
The love of fate serves another function: that of balancing the possibly ascetic tendencies of the doctrine of life-affirmation with an embrace of life-in-itself. In this sense, the tension between the normative thrust of Nietzsche’s ethics of self-development and the fatalism implied in amor fati can be directly addressed. While Nietzsche’s philosophy may be seen to advocate a form of virtue ethics that celebrates the cultivation of the drives, and the development of one’s capacities of creation, and self and world-overcoming, he takes the view that this ideal must be subordinate to the higher goal of “Life” itself, the flourishing of one’s individual and unique psychologically-conditioned Being. However, it is precisely this normative thrust of the texts, the singularity of the goal of self-overcoming, mastery of the affects, and cultivation of the drives, that threatens to become a form of morality, or an ascetic ideal, or a form of living as if it were an experiment or a craft, that “has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked.” Therefore the love of fate might be read as a counter-approach to life which the free-spirit requires to complement his vigorous self-overcoming, just as, for example, art is required to temper the immoderate effects of a fervent intellectual honesty. In GS 276, Nietzsche “permits” himself, as a form of self-indulgence justifiable during a new year, “the expression of his wish and his dearest thought”, the love of fate – as “the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth.” It is clearly espoused as a balance to the arduous tasks of his philosophical inquiry, or any creative endeavour. And it must surely serve as a great balm for one who suffers greatly from life.
i See BGE19 (1973): “Willing seems to me above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a
word. See BGE 21: “Unfree will is a mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills...one
ought to employ cause and effect only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of
designation, mutual understanding, not explanation...In the in-itself there is nothing of causal connection, of
necessity, of psychological unfreedom, there the effect does not follow the cause, there no law rules.”
ii Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 19 p.48
iii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Second Essay, Section 1, p.58
iv ibid, p.58
v ibid, p.57
vi ibid, p.59
vii ibid, p.45
viii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 370, p.328
ix ibid, p.223
x Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 56 p.82
xi Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 360, p.324
xii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.124
xiii ibid, p.122
xiv Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation”, (Dover Publications, 1969), pg. 397
xv Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.122
xvi Sebastian Gardner , “Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious” in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.401
xvii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 366, p.322
xviii ibid, 276, p. 223
That is, collective cultures reflect the conflict of interpretations - they are its products, and the process and product of interpretation are themselves based upon the makeup of individual psychologies.
That is the role of social and genealogical critique in Nietzsche: to reveal, by example, the underlying mechanisms through which culture is disseminated and reinforced: he envisages a larger, unified social science which can reveal how conditions of need (psychology, biology) create conditions of interaction (ideologies, philosophy, beliefs), through facilitating mechanisms and factors (politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, social psychology) to condition and guide the existing actualities within lived experience, bearing in mind that the reflexively conditioned historian at bottom always contradicts.
***
Love of fate is a transition back to a starting point of an approach to the world that embraces lived experience as the object of our investments of emotional and intellectual attention.
The individual has transcended lived experience, he is situating himself behind a skeptical veil of abstraction, of concepts and ideas, from which to organize and explain away the inherent unpleasantness of lived experience.
He structures lived experience according to these ideas, ordering his thoughts, creating moral systems, and approaching life from the lens of these ideas, acting in accordance to the totality of the thought out ideal as applied to the substantive content of the lived experience.
That is the equilibrium of the philosophical type - one who throws the net over the motley whirl of the senses, and seeking to distance himself from the nature of existing as the fundamental condition, the primary mode of living which the mob instinctively pursues and excels in.
However it is the failure of these ascetic ideals which throws the philosopher back into the world in which living as others do is a requirement which he is in some way maladapted to. It is the tension of the failure of the ascetic ideal which is instinctively, and intuitively felt, and the essential hatred of existence which is the chief motivating force of one who constructs philosophical systems, which drives the post-Romantic philosopher into explicitly pessimistic hatred and denial of the will-to-live, which, when deprived of the metaphysical narrative of the truthfulness of salvation, and therefore its accordant prescriptive mode of life, collapses into a denial of the validity of the conditions of existence, and its contents, with the absolute skeptical hypothesis as its epistemic creed.
The love of fate is explicitly addressed to the types who are unable to live without justification, whether metaphorically-speaking, of God's guilt, or of one's own, for the suffering one has inflicted upon the world.
***
Why love fate?
Fate refers to a series of circumstances which are predetermined in some way and in which essential characteristics one observes and lives through but cannot change. There are several possible candidates for this series of circumstances which can be construed as ‘fate’. First, the claim of ‘Character is Fate’, which significantly structures and limits the ways one lives or can choose to live, second, the aspects of the external environment which one is unable to control, and third, the kinds of experiences and situations generated when these given irreversible conditions come into contact with each other.
At the outset, we can pose an essential problem of definition: how does love of fate differ from pure resignation, or fatalism? The love of fate and fatalism share in the acknowledgement of the significance of our failure to control the conditions in our lives that do cause displeasure or suffering. This obstruction of the will toward attaining a desired state has swelled to such a point of concern that an ostensive approach has to be taken towards dealing with it, in the form of therapy, as it were. However, the love of fate preserves an active form of directedness towards the world, re-channelling the desires for the unobtainable state toward the conditions of that unobtainability. It reinterprets the failure or inability to achieve a certain object as a cause not for regret, misery or guilt, but as a condition of one’s life that is to be embraced and affirmed. Conversely, fatalism creates and breeds a passive form of hopelessness towards the task of attaining the desired object without specifying the attitudes which are directed towards the object of desire, or the situation of hopelessness. Insofar as the agent is unable to relieve himself of the desire, the situation descends to a state of pessimism or despair, and one that drains individual health.
But of course, in order to love fate, one has to believe in fate and in the lack of ability, despite our best efforts, to improve the given situation to our satisfaction, in the first place. Given that Nietzsche views the truth of this claim to be inconclusive, why affirm the lack of free will in this regard – don’t we want to affirm or assert the presence of free will instead? We may reply that Nietzsche tires of the intellectual dishonesty of metaphysicians of free will, who attempt to establish the dogmatic belief in the fact through arguments, when it remains essentially unknown. But this fails to account for the converse danger of believing in fate where it does not exist. The practical effects of misdirected belief in either may be equally damaging. While a belief in absolute free will breeds a sense of responsibility and guilt for all our acts, which becomes a cause for unjustified unhappiness and unhealthy inhibitions, a belief in fate may lead to indolence, or pessimistic fatalism, or lowered ambition, and wasted opportunities for individual, or world-development. And if we acknowledge the possibility of a reflexively conditioning power of this belief, it might seem that the price of believing in unavoidable fate is too high.
An answer may be suggested: if we take Nietzsche's aim in the denial of free will to be primarily one of the eradication of guilt, then amor fati might be interpreted as a solution to the problem of guilt: the agent adopts a sense of responsibility for the present and future, but is absolved of the past. The past belongs to the circumstances classed under ‘Fate’- its only relation to the living present existing as a cause - and we are to accept it without guilt or regret; as a given. We do not allow the past to colour the present moment in which we act. This requires a “form of robust health”, an ability defined as “forgetfulness”, or a good “digestive system”, as its precondition. But this solution does not eliminate the problem of the need for a degree of responsibility in the present as an intuitively forceful guide to action. The inhibitive power of a sense of responsibility in the present implies the ability to make and keep promises by definition – ie, to create fixed identities over time through which to structure our approach to the world – and this ability of the “protracted will” to extend projects over long periods of time is crucial to the development advocated by Nietzsche. So Nietzsche attempts to remove the phenomena of guilt as a stain on mankind while retaining the notion of responsibility. This is possible insofar as a sense of responsibility is not to be defined as a fear of guilt, but either as a love of honour, or genuine generosity of spirit, or a commitment to an ideal of virtue.
But the question remains: Is the admission of fate not in contradiction to the possibility of Nietzsche’s normative calls to develop mental discipline and to pursue an individualistic programme of self-cultivation? And wouldn’t the belief in the ability to control or reshape our circumstances in this respect be an important contributory factor, and not mere epiphenomena, for this process of development? Cultivating a belief in the lack of free will sets an unhealthy precedent, and encouraging emotional attachment to their conditions could easily overwhelm the drives to self-cultivation. An obvious possible reply is that Nietzsche interprets the individual's belief in his ability to impose his will on a given set of circumstances as a symptom of strength or weakness of will rather than as effective cause, but to assert this as a blanket justification for the opening of the floodgates of fate seems to me to overestimate the sovereign power of individuals against the influence of ideas that are taken to be true. And Nietzsche clearly does not take the crude epiphenomenalist view that our conscious commitments have no effect on the development of our character or our acts, even as he develops a physiologically-grounded character typology in terms of ideal binaries such as “weak” versus “strong”, which do point to certain unchangeable aspects in a person's character: “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, a desire to overcome, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd of weakness to demand that it should express itself as strength.”. Is Nietzsche therefore suggesting that the acknowledgement of selective fatalism is a test to tempt the strong to overcome it, while it serves as justification for the weak among themselves to feel contented and unresentful at their lot? I think an answer to this question lies in understanding the larger context of amor fati, or “Dionysian pessimism”, and in exactly what it defines as fate.
We can gather certain hints about the nature of the Dionysian pessimist and his relation to fate. In GS370, he is “richest in the fullness of life...[and] cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition and negation...owing to an excess of fertilizing, procreating energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland.” So he is one who does not turn away from the sight of the ugly or the nausea-inducing, because of his ability to transfigure it into something beautiful. He wants to “learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then [he] shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” So it is firstly the change in perspective created by cultivating an eye for beauty in all things, and secondly in making things beautiful by weaving its existence as necessity into a narrative thread through actual outcomes, giving it meaning by turning it into a cause for a desirable result. Now let us pursue this further. If one adopts the view of oneself in the larger scheme of things, that is, as the living causal product of an immense and complex historical process of human ideas, events, and exchanges, great and small, stretching from the present into pre-history, then the aim of making things beautiful extends into a project of world-affirmation, incumbent upon each agent at every moment, at least insofar as the world is an idealist construct of a mind that has to be justified anew within each subject, and is intuitively felt, in isolated Being, to be so. Therefore the Dionysian adopts a growing sense of responsibility for the “universe”, and the heightened state of desire to justify all the conditions of the present, insofar as he is the world, but the pessimist must acknowledge an eventual point where one is unable to justify all existence-as-such - one of which, for example, is the failure in philosophy to provide absolute grounds for knowledge claims about existence – and therefore one must relent in one's need to justify, and to love the necessity of the meaninglessness and ugliness of existence, for its own sake. For the Dionysian pessimist who engages in these activities, dangers loom, and love of fate may be construed as an instrument, a method of mental discipline one develops to overcome the effects of one's pessimism, or as a guiding principle and an indicator of one's progress towards an affirmation of life.
A danger which amor fati seeks to prevent are the effects of Pity and Nausea. Pity refers to both self-pity and pity of others. One begins by pitying oneself, in the dissatisfaction caused by our essentially-desiring and insatiable will, which Schopenhauer sums up in a quote: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing, or which he sees near him, and sets out to run over the path.” (WWRI/380) This pity at oneself can be extended to others in a recognition of universal suffering, notwithstanding the more visible forms of mental and material suffering in the world. Nausea in turn refers to nausea at oneself, nausea at others, and nausea at existence in general. Nausea at others for the Dionysian refers to the sickness induced by the perversions of man revealed by honest intellectual inquiry, expressed forcefully by verbal gasps of “More air! More air!” that pervades Nietzsche's later texts; also the presence of others, and the “art of associating with people”, especially at table, consists in “swallowing one's nausea”, also nausea at people defined as the “weak and the hopelessly sick” – those who are full of ressentiment. Nausea at oneself consists in being “sick of [oneself]” due to envy towards others, or in disgusted loathing at one's identity and character. Nausea at existence refers to disgust at life itself, revealed in Schopenhauer's highly-charged pessimism and ideal of the elimination of the will-to-life. Nietzsche views these two tendencies as conducive to nihilism and the will to nothingness, the antithesis of his philosophy. Therefore love of fate becomes a programme of mental hygiene, a means to overcome the negative affects towards things which are necessary.
The love of fate serves another function: that of balancing the possibly ascetic tendencies of the doctrine of life-affirmation with an embrace of life-in-itself. In this sense, the tension between the normative thrust of Nietzsche’s ethics of self-development and the fatalism implied in amor fati can be directly addressed. While Nietzsche’s philosophy may be seen to advocate a form of virtue ethics that celebrates the cultivation of the drives, and the development of one’s capacities of creation, and self and world-overcoming, he takes the view that this ideal must be subordinate to the higher goal of “Life” itself, the flourishing of one’s individual and unique psychologically-conditioned Being. However, it is precisely this normative thrust of the texts, the singularity of the goal of self-overcoming, mastery of the affects, and cultivation of the drives, that threatens to become a form of morality, or an ascetic ideal, or a form of living as if it were an experiment or a craft, that “has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked.” Therefore the love of fate might be read as a counter-approach to life which the free-spirit requires to complement his vigorous self-overcoming, just as, for example, art is required to temper the immoderate effects of a fervent intellectual honesty. In GS 276, Nietzsche “permits” himself, as a form of self-indulgence justifiable during a new year, “the expression of his wish and his dearest thought”, the love of fate – as “the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth.” It is clearly espoused as a balance to the arduous tasks of his philosophical inquiry, or any creative endeavour. And it must surely serve as a great balm for one who suffers greatly from life.
i See BGE19 (1973): “Willing seems to me above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a
word. See BGE 21: “Unfree will is a mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills...one
ought to employ cause and effect only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of
designation, mutual understanding, not explanation...In the in-itself there is nothing of causal connection, of
necessity, of psychological unfreedom, there the effect does not follow the cause, there no law rules.”
ii Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 19 p.48
iii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Second Essay, Section 1, p.58
iv ibid, p.58
v ibid, p.57
vi ibid, p.59
vii ibid, p.45
viii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 370, p.328
ix ibid, p.223
x Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 56 p.82
xi Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 360, p.324
xii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.124
xiii ibid, p.122
xiv Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation”, (Dover Publications, 1969), pg. 397
xv Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.122
xvi Sebastian Gardner , “Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious” in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.401
xvii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 366, p.322
xviii ibid, 276, p. 223
Culture 1
Culture is a series of overlapping meanings and associations that are conditioned through the processes of habit, of institutional norms, social mores, existing in and permeating all aspects of social interaction with outside mediums of experience and in the process of introspection. It is a psychologically rooted process where all content is approached with certain norms of values, of taste, of modes of understanding and inquiry and association, which have been acquired by man's location in society.
When we speak of culture of a place, we refer to the accepted terms by which the interaction of different individuals, each with their notions and particularities, seek out markers for mutual identification through the set of habituated responses to familiar ideas, which point to a similar process of influence generated by shared conditions.
Conditions can be shared across time and places, however, the process of social interaction is the expansion of ideational associations that test the means by which ideas are related contextually to one another within the mind of interacting individuals, and therefore culture may be approximated as the maximum potential range of social influences which may bear on two interacting individuals to create the widest and deepest possible range of contextual meaning, and its effects, both externally and internally.
Therefore culture in its observable effects may be understood in terms of its location in social psychology, and the ability within the individual to play a variety of roles relating to the social environment, and by extension, within his own value system, his internal thought processes, and so on. The man who works in the office in the day and enters the bar at night adopts two different subcultures. These two subcultures reflect deeper underlying mediating effects of a culture, say, of value systems, ensuring that they reflect a level of continuity in a person's transition from one environment to another.
When I speak of a national culture, I do not refer to an aggregation of, or of a dominant culture. The distinction is invalid, and misrepresents the dynamics of its formation, and the identificatory relation of the concept to the phenomenon.
National culture refers to the essence, or fundamental constitutive set of ideas and understandings, internalized and preconscious, unwritten moral and hygienic rules of the game as it were, that underlie subcultures, or overt identifications of culture, and primarily apply, and in turn, shape the macrostructural understanding of the world, ie ideology. National culture is the intuitive application of socially conditioned and reinforced ideology.
When we speak of culture of a place, we refer to the accepted terms by which the interaction of different individuals, each with their notions and particularities, seek out markers for mutual identification through the set of habituated responses to familiar ideas, which point to a similar process of influence generated by shared conditions.
Conditions can be shared across time and places, however, the process of social interaction is the expansion of ideational associations that test the means by which ideas are related contextually to one another within the mind of interacting individuals, and therefore culture may be approximated as the maximum potential range of social influences which may bear on two interacting individuals to create the widest and deepest possible range of contextual meaning, and its effects, both externally and internally.
Therefore culture in its observable effects may be understood in terms of its location in social psychology, and the ability within the individual to play a variety of roles relating to the social environment, and by extension, within his own value system, his internal thought processes, and so on. The man who works in the office in the day and enters the bar at night adopts two different subcultures. These two subcultures reflect deeper underlying mediating effects of a culture, say, of value systems, ensuring that they reflect a level of continuity in a person's transition from one environment to another.
When I speak of a national culture, I do not refer to an aggregation of, or of a dominant culture. The distinction is invalid, and misrepresents the dynamics of its formation, and the identificatory relation of the concept to the phenomenon.
National culture refers to the essence, or fundamental constitutive set of ideas and understandings, internalized and preconscious, unwritten moral and hygienic rules of the game as it were, that underlie subcultures, or overt identifications of culture, and primarily apply, and in turn, shape the macrostructural understanding of the world, ie ideology. National culture is the intuitive application of socially conditioned and reinforced ideology.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Ideals
The applicability of political ideals for progress is dependent on the possibility of a) human perfectibility, b) the ability of institutions to sustain organizations which reproduce the constituent meaning and processes of these ideals, or c) the logic or nature of social organizations to evolve into a unity that constitutes genius in its totality: the ability to lend sustainence and closed, total, significance and meaning to every possible human need and their evolving forms in their dynamic interplay. The greater the unity of existing significances, the more difficult it is to incorporate diversity of viewpoints, peoples, and cultures. The ultimate society is one that accomodates and integrates the the totality of all possible human conditions: the utopia where the highest demands of liberalism and conservatism can be met, simultaneously. This is the precondition of the purity of an ideal in practice.
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Quotes 3
"The secret of communicating with another person, I suspect, may be in communicating with who he thinks he is. Do that, and you can kid a great man and treat an insignificant one with deep respect. They'll credit you with insight."
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
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