A commentary on Bach's Goldberg Variation 27

It is commonly believed that variation 25 is the emotional and spiritual center of Bach's Goldberg variations. In the course of learning to play the Goldberg Variations in it's entirety, I believe that a case can be made that variation 27 is in fact the spiritual culmination of the Goldbergs. 

Sequentially, it is the final canon of the Goldbergs which form the consistent thread of the progression of the Goldbergs in groups of 3. It is the final canon of the series.

More importantly, the 25th is a message of the perception or experience of suffering in it's unmitigated clarity. The essence of life is suffering and this experienced knowledge is expressed in the 25th. But that is not the end of the matter because life is not purely object. It is not merely an "is", however described. Therefore the 25th cannot be the culmination of existence which is not purely objective. It still leads up to something else.

Agency is ineffable. It is not a thing. There is no object to which it can be absolutely bound or explained, neither meaning or ethics despite being the subject of those. The 27th, which in my view is about agency in it's entirety (encompassing the object) and therefore the unique nature of human experience, is not about a thing, even though it integrates all that comes before it. It could only arrive in authenticity after the 25th, which like all the variations and canons prior, leads up to it.

The absence of objecthood is signified by the absence of ground in the third voice in the bass, unique among the canons. The structural removal of the ground signifies that agency is without object or reference point, such as an externalized purpose or even an identifiable self (in the Humean/ Buddhist sense). Without object, one cannot posit a soul or a God. Guidance cannot be external, or oriented towards an object - the reference point or pole star is absent. The haunting interval of the 9th is the breadth of the existential gap. This gives it a specific kind of absence.

Peter Williams points out the seemingly redundant and isolated nature of the 27th, in that it is a second canon with the second interval and there is no further second canon in the third. In this regard, the numerical significance of the canon should be noted. There is a sense in which Bach had extended the canons to include one in the cube of 3, a reference to ninth hour of Christ, the moment of a perceived abandonment by God. This is the moment of existential crisis (as a kind of self-consciousness) itself percolating through the cosmos. But that is precisely the significance of Jesus as the creation principle, which must face the absence of that out of which it creates, as the ground of agency.

The 27th is fairly earnest, particularly the parallel ascending/descending patterns in the left and right hand. This is not innocence. There is a knowledge of tragedy expressed but a drive to move forward which reflects not hope but the curative nature of agency which is essentially pure and childlike, and is this untouched (if not unaffected) by the immense suffering before it. This makes agency possible, and is the gift of God which Bach expresses. The spiritual nature of the message is underlaid by the following left or right hand after the note on the first beat, a common figure in sacred music.

The second section proceeds to an exploration of ineffable and unknowable nature of agency, which brings uncertainty and the unexpected. This is received in an ambiguous manner, corresponding to the descending guiding bass notes. As it were, one has to be on one's guard. This allows for a degree of open-endedness to the interpretation not found in the first section. 

Commentators have pointed out the grounded and human nature of the Quodlibet which is again a departure from the canons. Following from the 27th, the work is no longer at the level of structure but of agency, and is this understandably expressed in humanly grounded rather than abstract works.

The 28th to the 30th is much lighter than the rest of the Goldbergs. The spiritual work is done. The need for teleological resolution has been encountered in it's entirety, even if not resolved or removed. Levity after consciousness is permitted and the weird and wonderful is indicated, before the final return home.

The Self 2 (Control)

The Self includes within it a theory of control. When one does something or thinks something, and that thing appears to be caused by a preceding thought, or it appears that the preceding thought or will to do that thing then leads to that thing being done, we attribute the cause of that thought or act to the preceding state. 

Phenomenologically speaking, that preceding state is still a drive, which is neither internal nor external. It is neither me nor not me. 

So is the state which is apparently caused. Consciousness does not distinguish them as being me or not me. Again, it is comparatively, that the thought is private in character, and no other private thought or thing in the world (other than the brain) appearing to correspond to a cause of the thought or act, that gives rise to a retroactive attribution of both states to the person. 

The concept of control is therefore a pragmatic construct, while the concept of I stemming from control a social comparative one. Pragmatic in the sense that for the purposes of acting, it distinguishes between different types of causes, one which appears to stem from the externally observable world, and another which appears to stem from what is not the externally observable world, although the latter is indefinable not being observable. It is a residual. 

This theory of the internal and external in terms of cause inductively attributes causation and control to the preceding drive or state, and is an attribution based on a manner of acting in the world. 

It is a relative concept in relation to the interaction with the physical environment due to action. It is then the social comparative aspect that gives the "not external" residual category flesh or substance.

This means that comparatively, society attributes those "not external" states to have the closest causal connection with the subsequent state or act. This construct of the internal person makes sense of the phenomenological experience, by attributing casual relation between the preceding drives and post states or acts, and attributing a unity or identity of being, represented by the external social identity, on that person to which the effective causal states are attributed. 

This ontological I construct, whether called the individualised soul or something else, has both social and cosmic connotations. 

In the realm of social control, causal mechanisms, reasons and responsibilities of various kinds are placed on this residual. This may be linked to religious concepts of soul, which explains the responsibilities or ethical obligations of the individual in society. 

The "I" may also have communitarian connotations, which give rise to obligations to family or clan which is tied up with the interiority of the causally acting "I". That is, the ancestors also act through the I, it is not merely the autonomous soul that does everything. 

The point is that because the casual mechanisms and the "not external" causing subject is essentially undefined and amorphous, this is a container to which social or theoretical constructs can fill the gap. In other words, religious or social development (in the broadest sense) is in large part, the development of the language game of the missing "I". This is the history of the world.

The ineffable "I" is objectified and instrumentalised for the purposes of a social or theological ideology to express the being of the objectives of such ideology into the world.

The human collective exists in a Matrix-machine like relationship to such ideology, instrumentalising themselves to feed its objective, while benefiting from it in the form of better material standards and potentialities for self-development, and at a micro-level, the purported benefits of relative status markers which are essentially comparative constructs within a language game, the carrots and sticks to subtly enforce compliance. 

More prosaically, the objectification of the I is also a pragmatic form of social control, to make the I responsible for his acts in the world. For example, as in Foucault, reason and rationality, the interiority of the "reasonable man" is a deemed to be an effective cause of human action that justifies a construct of legality as social control.

The Self 1

The self is a manner of demarcation of private and public, or control or beyond control. It is thus an organising principle of social and physical life. The political and legal conception of the self entails the identification of the entity conferred volition,rights, responsibilities, obligations, and liability.

The modern conception of the self is of an autonomous individual human. This is the starting point of the allocation of the roles and responsibilities of the individual agent in modern capitalist life. This conception of the self is a social construct. However, such a model which organises social life, as well as the person's subjective conception of their role and agency in the world, is not a coherent conception of subjective experience. It has shoehorned an inconsistent subjective experience of being into alignment with a social organizing principle, thus distorting the interpretation of subjective experience. 

From a phenomenological point of view, the world is a series of interacting drives. By drives I mean forces with a life of their own. By forces I mean any object, or mental state which is irreducible to another in the sense of containing the causal potential to change a physical or mental fact of the world from one to another over a period of time.

What is deemed "internal" is no less a perceived fact, albeit one that is perceived in privacy and in the immediacy of one's perception. The reaction to perceived mental facts are also perceived mental facts. 

What is termed the self is just the subject to which the perceived fact of drives which are private in nature are attributed. However properly speaking these drives are just equally things out there beyond one's control. There isn't anything beyond perception of drives. The self is thus constructed out of the comparative concept of privacy and the retroactive attribution of control to certain drives. The Self allows the attribution of drives to a thing. But it is not properly speaking anything to which drives can be attributed. It is an attributive fiction.

From a practical standpoint, this means that life is just about the harmonisation of drives. There is no distinction between what is self and not self because the objective of the self which reaches over the whole of the experience of drives, whether or not private or public, or in one's control or not, that is, whether "internal" or "external", is to harmonize such drives. 

The private or public nature of the drives, or whether they are within our "control", has no bearing on whether these relate to the self as phenomenologically conceived. There is no especial urgency to exercise the "internal" drives over the "external" drives as they react with each other. This is because there is (absent an internalised social construct of the self) no particular identity or thing for the drives to attach, internal or external. 

The construct of the individual concerns attribution and agency. Agency is the creation of objective responsibility over the mediation of the "internal" and "external" drives. This presupposes a theory of agency, that is, that one thing is a representative of another thing in a given context of a relationship between things. 

In a modern social context, one is a representative of one's "internal" drives across many attributive social contexts. This construct arose relationally and comparatively as one is placed in relationships that required the attribution of private drives to that person who has sole access to them. The comparison of drives across certain specific types of transactions and relationships gives rise to the attribution of those drives to an entity which is "me" (as defined by the other person) and "not me", as defined by my perspective. This correspondence of cross-definition, based on comparative privacy, and which allows for mutual communication, defines the self-understanding of the Self. 

However, this is not the original pre-social conception. The relationship with people is not the relationship of things or drives, and should not be conflated. The Self is therefore constructed out of the series and patterns of transactions to which the society puts the overall phenomenological economy of drives, within the framework of drives that are distinguished by privacy and control. 

The Self as social construct thereupon provides an organising principle to structure the drives. What is attributed to, and represented by the self, the capacities it adopts and what is accorded to it in society and in transactions, reinforce the self-understanding of the Self as an identity that is tied to the logic of those relationships, as a cognitive presumption. When that identity is identified with, it can itself become a source (not just a structure) of drives and forms an ontological just-so story about "me" and other. That is, what is called ego is a feedback loop between the identification of the self as object in the world and the private drives of the person.

When the social object of the individual is thus created by such categorisation of drives, drives which may not be private or controlled may be attributed to that social object. For example, an individual may take on a representative capacity for collective drives, as when a director of a company acts on the behalf of a majority vote of the board of that company, or a President of a country signs an executive order. 

In the next post, one may add the definition of control, which forms a justification of society's creation of self and the attribution of representative capacities to the self.

God as Consciousness

If consciousness is God, in that all that exists exists through consciousness, then we partake of God through consciousness. God is everyone of us, not as the thing in the world, but as consciousness of the things in the world (including our individuated selves). Our selves belong to us, but consciousness does not. Of course, this consciousness is casually actuated through our physical selves - brains. But structurally, consciousness in being is not actuated, but a prerequisite of being. That is what God is, our way of expressing a subject noun that is conscious.

Will to Consciousness

The single principle of all that exists: To raise its consciousness. Life is the will to consciousness. Everything one does is an opportunity to a) lower one's consciousness, b) stay in one's consciousness, or c) raise one's consciousness. All problems and their nature are merely a result of the choice of one of the above. Problems may appear insoluble because one is not raising one's consciousness, or the parties involved are stuck in the same consciousness. In the long run, consciousness MUST be raised.

Note 179

If one knows that there is in reality no free will, then liberalism's elevation of the individual is but another form of social control, based on the illusion of free will.

Note 178

God: to search for the structure of all structures, the form in all forms.

Note 176

There is an inherent instability within democracy in one country as centrifugal forces pull it apart.

Therefore seperate nations, institutionally constituted as states at war with each other, is the neccessary complement.

Global or regional cooperation forces countries to break apart.

This drives the push to either conservative conflicts, or progressive conflicts.

Progressive conflicts lead to smaller entities and the expansion of individual freedoms.

Conservative conflicts lead to preservation of existing orders and stability.

Progressive conflicts come at a cost of inherent and prolonged instability and death, because a new basis for a new social contract has to be found, as a foundation for order.

In other words, a modification of the modern conception of state will result, as another intermediate equilibrium that balances the internal values, and the external relations, of order-providing entities.

What is the principal contradiction? Generally, that between the individual and the collective.

In this case, individual identities revolving around markets, and social collectives up to the national level. Collective identities revolving around state and global institutions, including global markets. A reordering of these relationships in a Socially Darwinistic way may be what true war (a state of nature) is about.