Strange Thought

What was the point of the thrifty compass?
He spun in the northern tiers
directionlessly faithful, focused
or was it distraction that bred the cause,
a failed thought that derailed at high speed
a poor driver, a poor train,
of indian construction, or difficult terrain.
One that stalled when over its speed limit.

But we were always delayed
the trains at coventry were always late
and standing in the open cold talking about life
we would speak of photographs
of making memories of forgotten things
and knowing, if we looked hard enough
we stood a chance of remembering.

There was always the big city
The signboards that changed at every quarter hour
telling of delays,
and as you walked past frustrated faces
or acquaintances in the hundreds
as you walked past the station
towards the mall, the church, the row of shops
as lamplight pooled our gaze at stunted spires
as the columns rose and crammed and slid by
you felt that this was all he had, and you were all he needed.

***

Note 30

the flower king

sandbeds and the third eye
romping through the countryside
a taken beast, a fleeting touch,
and lilting eyes, as the sun blazed golden on
the waves drowned as they pulled ashore

fishes crammed into the sides of tanks
like sharks in the fleshy deep
but you turned left
and the curtain rose to meet the sun
but you turned again
and the corridors led to dead ends

we stood in the room of mirrors
staring at the sunlight through the window
reflecting on the dusky floor
on the images of days
there shone a blueprint
it was the bounds of sense
like a child grasping at light
you reached for the image in the mirror
but all you saw was your reaching
all you touched was the light

Intuitive Knowing as a Prelude

For Nietzsche the primary lesson and the framework within which his philosophy operated was Schopenhauerian in the sense that intuitive knowing was the object and aim of his philosophy.

The subject of his philosophy was the content and constitutive aspects of this form of knowing, and its approach is premised on the value of rending the veil of abstraction between theoretical and intuitively felt and performed knowledge, knowledge that was significant insofar as it was constitutive of the orientations that produced a sense of identity and meaningfulness of acts in the highly intuitive run of daily existence.

It asserts the primacy of practical reason as the starting point of philosophy.

The primacy of practical reason includes, as its most important end-goal, the rationalization of the intuitive features of daily life from a subjective viewpoint, one that is adequately informed by institutional instruction while able, insofar as it is the ground of independent and subjective fields of experience and correctly judges itself to be so, a independent adopter of reasoned beliefs.

It therefore hopes to train good judgement and a moral sense of responsibility and accountability for the beliefs which underlie, both intuitively and rationally, both individually and collectively our acts. It translates discpline, coercion and punishment into accountability, reason, and choice-based submission.

This ideal level of intersubjectively accomodating, individuating responsibility, coupled with a recognition and acknowledgement, and provisions for the essential animality, anti-rational, anti-truthfulness, and anti-idealistic, and destructive creative capacities of man, is the ONLY definition of Enlightenement progress, and its furtherance is the sole meaining of the half-meaningless life of the word 'civilisation'.

This is also the necessary precondition of a free society.

Note 28

The dualism between existence and essence is essentially characterized by the different modalities involved in what exists and what can be said. This dualism is the reason for the mischaracterization of the relations within the real by corresponding propositions which aim at truth, and on the other hand, the misapplication of the notion of truth of assertions into the real, which remain problematic, and which are mostly held for good reasons that when looked into, cannot be adequately unpacked, nor fully justified.

It is when these reasons lay claim to assertoric truths about the real that motivations for belief-systems merge with present utility to create the image of fact, which forms part of a mediated and coherant system of myths. This is not to deny the underlying Real: it denies in principle the conceivability of truthfulness of that Real to cognizable facts. This is also not to deny the possibility of the correspondence of the Real to those facts, that is, correspondence within the bounds of all possible evidence, since it must necessarily affirm that minimal possiblity as a condition of validity of any statement at all about what is real.

The core myth of which we are concerned is the myth of individualized objectified-subjectivity, which forms the core assumption of the core value - self-development - of the Enlightenment myth.

Note 27

Man as functional item.

All individuals are created with a unique psychological profile.

This unique profile is manifest in personal preference, personal interpretative outcomes, and personal needs.

The genetic pool of the being is evolutionarily tested by the conditions which impinge on the individual as mediated by the demands of environment, by the demands of society.

Society is a collection of individuals and their interactions with one another, reflecting both the living forces within the individuals that constantly actualize, that is, that serve as the bridge between past fact and the arbitrariness of present force, and the historical institutional agreements and unagreed coercive structures that have formed the ground on which one functions, on which one understands one's own functioning, and on which the re-interpretation of the present by living force always receives form from which to alter the present while preserving it.

Society functions as an organizational construct based on the possibility of rationalized social interactions that have been tested by the factors of power, of order, of satisfaction of mutually agreed and of granted rights.

Social constructs are innately unstable if not based on a certain set of real needs and the common interpretation of those needs. It is the commonness of the need, and the commonness of the belief system which re-interprets these needs without removing them, but securing and re-inforcing them instead, that forces the individual to define his role in terms of the functions he can play with regards to the Other. He conceives of his needs socially, and not only that, the solution is social - he has no sustainance from the environment itself.

That is, all thought is functional by working through intersubjectivities to create an interpretation of needs that functionalizes the individual, that applies his understanding and his capacities, and shapes his development, for the purpose of fulfilling common needs.

We interpret things in our ways, and the contrast in interpretations correspond to the needs that exist and want to be felt within the society that nurtures a sensitivity to those needs in the first place.

Of course, the point is that the individual is a means to a single end, the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective. The subjective need is a seperate existence for which all else is means. The outer always exists as a canvas for something to exist in terms of the inner. Insofar as the outer has been manipulated, has been made the object of attention, and the object of agency, the outer exists as an extension of the inner, and the advance of power consists in shaping, re-distorting, and increasing the variety of configurations of symbols of power to allow for the flourishing of individuals over the scarcity of bounded objectivity. Of course, the democracy of human needs provides an ample, and a sure insurance, for the satisfaction of absolute power over many human lives - but humans have thrived precisely because of the variety of powers which they have been able to pursue. In fact, it is precisely the creativeness of man that is required and has allowed for the flourishing of power over things that are mental, over conditions that are constructed and over tastes and nuances which have been trained so as to allow for the increasing complexity of the conditions which will generate outlets where none in fact is needed. Opinion leaders will continue to spur development: it is by defintion a competitive exercise. This understanding within a paradigm of power.

But what about the notion of a society with needs of its own? That is, the reverse view, where intersubjectivity is not only a fog of opinion, but is in fact, a living force which shapes the individual and gives him bearing? Here we have the picture of man as society - the tribal man - here we conduct an exercise of anthropology of oneself, at least within the limits of our understanding, on the basic premise that the living force of the meanings through which man exists in relation to his self-understanding is based on his relation to his external environment, and by definition, the living force of society.

Facebook Thoughts 1

What is Facebook for? Its for connecting with people you know on the web.

Its for turning the web and internet surfing, which has taken a life of its own as a lifestyle trend, as something you must do because it fills a need in real life, into something more familiar. It humanizes the web.

The web is a confusing, repetitive, boring, place. It is an essentially boring and inhuman place. Yes, it interests you, but it interests you only within the context of your boredom and frustration in real life. You wouldn't be on the internet if you had real stuff to do, or if the world was in your control. You'd be using it like a upgraded form of email, if life was swell. The internet is another medium of art, art being a re-creation of reality in higher forms to satisfy something lacking in the real. (In fact, the internet is THE medium of art of today, websites being hyper-democratic art forms: one can on this basis alone predict the drive to aesthetic complexity of website design as architectural spaces of communication.)

Virtual is an always an inferior reality, but it is a superior form to non-reality, which is its role to substitute.

Social networking works on this essential frustration - it is promise of socialist utopia in its most inferior imaginable form.

Now, you will dismiss: this is the rambling of a sad loner; one who does not realize that Facebook is the most efficient means of concerning yourself adequately intimately with the life of a large circle of busy and interesting friends, and therefore with the life of the community as a whole - it is an information bank and an actionable tool in the social arsenal. Perhaps. I concede. But it is both.

Then: A measure of the degree of social deficit and deficits in other modes of social interaction. Lovely.

Feminism seminar: Wayward thoughts

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"?

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 ?

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.

Note 23

Identity games:

a) Animal
b) Computer
c) Animal-computer
d) Computerized-animal

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.

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.)

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."

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.

Realities

Its these kinds of realities that make me sick.
Nausea nausea.

Jan 10. 2012.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

New Years Eve

A year? Its an administrative unit of measurement based on a consistent orbital period and climatic phenomena. To attribute significance as such to a year is tantamount to an astrology about units of time.

An anthropomorphism of time: we say it proceeds by ordered units of measurement, and turn that order into an absolute

Don't tell me that we do not take a year seriously - it is a fundamental and neccessary concept. The importance of the administrator, as artist.

Christmas Day Reflection on Kim Jong Il and Power

A Hitler, a Stalin, or a Kim Jong Il is NOT as pathological, in terms of drives, as we are usually led to think. Assuming a relative equality among persons, I'd like to think of us as repressed versions of them.

It is the relative order of significance to which we attribute certain aspects of our lives as they do to theirs which characterize the huge differences in consequences.

In fact, the inflation of the significance of the tiniest details and trivialities of our daily lives can be understood best as the same function acting out on a much smaller scale, but with no less absoluteness.

So it is the factors which affect the positing of significances to events which is the crucial difference here.

It is the capacity of the tyrant to overlook the factors that limit his desire for power that distinguishes him - and it is his interpretation of the world that crucially cannot be accomodated because of its real effects.

Ultimately, like us, he needs to sustain a view of the level of significance of the obstacles which lie in his path in order to locate his identity within the coordinates of control and power over significant things. But his approach differs: as we elevate the value of the smallest things, he consumes and destroys greater and greater amounts to sustain a level of said satisfaction.

Of course, the former approach is to be preferred to the latter, while 'successful people' are characterized by the enviable ability to cultivate and balance the two approaches.

Note to Self 5

The interpretation of becoming according to language, logical and narrative.

Utility as causative acknowledgement of role of praxis as inadequate because becoming cannot be reduced to notions derived from agency.

The Commercialisation of Development

Each society forges new paths through certain mediums of development searching continually for new forms, technes and technologies: gamechangers of the ways in which we perceive reality as it were in which to express our relation to the world and acts both real and perceived. New forms bring new possibilities and configurations of agency and its correspondent image of symbols. They can take on the forms of vertical product creation or facilitation of cross product exchanges. The question of the nature of evolution may be traced to the forces identifying and facilitating the creation of new forms and the consciousness that must attend it, both individual and social. Commercialisation has made it a question primarily of access with market as the dominant arbiter and referent of taste and development, although opinion leaders play major roles. Marketing has a reciprocally conditioning relation to the underlying forces, defining the imagic represented content based on the underlying forces, while modifying them also.

Note 16

I consider upon these carcass of days, of futile sunrises and dread filled mornings. Pursuing the darkness that lies beyond my curtains my eyes chance upon a golden glow of forgotten shadows brought into flesh once more. The rooms of walls fall away revealing gardens with paths we were to tread together to the sounds of the winds in the loosing trees.

Emerson

The point is not to choose to see all as divine but to be able to see in all particulars the representations that make them so. For Nietzsche the overriding narrative of development and growth celebrates the present as a necessary and grand organic element of becoming. Hence the Emersonian vision is defined as the ability to see the future in the present and thereby elevate it into what it truly is. Therefore the paradox of eternal recurrence takes its place as the final barrier within the Nietzschean project of affirmation by subverting the illusion of progressive growth, in individual or societial consciousness. It is Nietzsche's thought experiment for the creation of a post-historical philosophizing that succeeds his historical and genealogical project - one that again reorients the interpretation of the present, within, or built upon, the wider system of consciousness that developed from the irreversible incorporation of historical reality.

Culture 1

The nature of culture as an ordering device that relates a complete system of social science as the underlying presumption functioning as praxis through its solidification as initiations, as collective protocols of normalcy.

Note to Self 4

What Nietzsche hopes to do. Whether or not science is true is besides the point; what is the psychological function that a belief in the truthfulness of science plays? A psychological inquiry into the nature of beliefs and the act of believing, as revealing the cognitive assumptions that underlie the way we think, live, and react to the conditions in the present, in our lives.

So the psychological, historical revolution hopes to overturn the conception of truth as something that belongs within the first order relation of the world to itself. Instead, from a perspective of a second-order system of truth, where all perspectives are subjectively embedded, one criticizes one's experience, and therefore all its contents, as a contingent possibility, something where practical and pure reason each have to face problems and reconcile them in possibly conflicting ways. Nietzsche builds on a system of truth to critique its presumptions and to show them to be hollow, and posits a higher order truth pertaining to the nature of perception and experience, and how it must be, to show that these are themselves functions of practical reason, qualities in actual relation to life as a problem in its broadest sense.

This itself reflects a nominal philosophical realism as against the competing propositional realism. Or does/can it?

Note to Self 3

Given the role that mentality plays in defining the ways in which we conceive of and react to conditions, it may be posited that the character of intersubjective experience consists of interlocking webs of psychologically-based interpretations. This implies that facts, symbols and truths are positive expressions of negativity with regards to agency and possibility, and are reactions to limitations conceived within that realm of possibility. But they are contingently so because only experience reveals their limitations; and because they only take on meaning in relation to what is in fact possible. Therefore, truthfulness defined as what is the case, as opposed to what might be the case, returns with a vengeance.

Puzzle 1

How can we contextualise an understanding of the critique of modernity as such if one cannot even grasp the full import and depth, and not merely in simple descriptive terms and theroretical categories, the actualized totality of the ideas endlessly replayed, reinforced and reinterpreted in connection with the world in its dynamics? How is one to begin an understanding, within understandings, of the nature of a thought-act, their embededness, their emergent meanings and consequences? What is the content of all critique?

This conditions a reminder that any act of deproblematicizing, any sitting back in the chair of imported images with a self-satisfied smile is so much religion, a slip of the mind.

In this sense, the history of the world is so much the history of praxis - as always, negatively defined? To repeat, why is utility-evolution so popular nowadays? Because its conveniently true. But then, truth didn't matter so much in the past.

Quotes 2

"Theoretical resources are always already distorted (esp. social, ie psychologically-based), and something of them fails to represent or capture adequately the world they take root in. The question is not merely how some ideas come to be possible in certain social conditions as if we were then explaining them away, but how to develop an analysis of how certains sets of concepts are put to work to grasp conditions that have reached points of impossibility, breaking points. We are really outlining the conditions of impossibility for how the theories were put together."

Note to Self 2

You know the way an idea gets into you and activates a certain form of deep concentration and connection? What if the same means by which the idea catches hold of you and allows you to run along with it mirrors the way in which ideologies catch hold of collective society and animates it?

You know the way that one attains an ideational freedom from the limits of conventional thinking in a material-form-centric existence, that is, an ideological unconscious, when one dreams, and enters into a consciousness of a slightly more independent, yet more suggestively dependent, personal unconsious? What therefore, are the layers of the unconscious as it reacts among people in society - wherefore the phenomenologically-frameworked understanding of the nature of significance of all conscious objects?

Every present is infinitely dense in teleology, reality function, psychologically layered interpretation actualized into projected significances that characterizes the force of the moment - the external is an extension of the psychological spirit - external is substantiatively underground-interpreted as the negativity of agency- limitations of agency, limited by fact - just as cause extends truth to the unobservable, truth has meaning only insofar as it extends life into the unobservable as a means to the reinterpretation of agency. The significance of truth itself integrates into a set of underlying ideological principles undergoing dynamic change at every moment. Each thing affects it in some undefinable way.

What is the symbolic function of second-order explorations, descriptions, devoid of topic but the problem of relation itself?

Real inquiry takes the form of a wrestle with personal nihilism.

Self-promotion as failure, democratization of experience of knowing is itself a reflected image in a space bound mirror, an exhausted glance.

If reality is conjoined to fact in impersonal ways, so must the recognition of the terms by which things subsist be impersonal, and the best means through which they obtain that character is through the adoption of truth through a trivialisation of its process and the idealization of its image.

The image is itself all too easily fabricated, turned, bent.

Note 15

Culture is symbolic to the extent that the terms by which its complex of meanings and ideas are made alive and binding are actualized expressions of deeper functions, cathexis of deeper routes and organizations of the psychologically-based reality functions that seem to underlie language, mimesis, knowledge, orientation, understanding, meaning.

What the essential constitutive elements of these reality functions are, that is, creating phenomenologically, and hopefully physiologicaly grounded frameworks for specifying meaningful criteria for these reality functions, and to simply specify crude descriptions of the nature of their interactions: this remains the nearly impossible task for a sociological, psychoanalytic, phenomenology.

We bear in mind the assertion that actions and empirical reality are essentially unknowable - therefore progress has been, and must have been, to reshape the ways in which the unknowable revolve around a developing consciousness of consistency and order, and the descriptive apparatus that accompanies and secures this understanding - hence the

That is, we still hope to pursue new lines of inquiry through new kinds of second-order critiques that problematicizes:

a)

Note to Self 1

The next revolution in philosophy:

A transcendence of the superstitions of conceivable possibilities?

Note 14

To perceive the scientific, the causal, and the supernatural in everything at once: isn't that the goal?

Quotes 1

"The essence of the authoritarian character has been described as the simultaneous presence of sadistic and moschistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory. Both the sadistic and masochistic trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and his need for a symbiotic relationship that overcomes this aloneness."

"Let us return now to the question which led us into this psychological analysis of selfishness. We found ourselves confronted with the contradiction that modern man believes himself to be motivated by self-interest and yet that actually his life is devoted to aims which are not his own; in the same way that Calvin felt that the only purpose of man's existence was to be not himself but God's glory. We tried to show that selfishness is rooted in the lack of affirmation and love for the real self, that is, for the whole concrete human being with all his potentialities. The “self” in the interest of which modern man acts is the social self, a self which is essentially constituted by the role the individual is supposed to play and which in reality is merely the subjective disguise for the objective social function for man in society. Modern selfishness is the greed that is rooted in the frustration of the real self and whose object is the social self. While modern man seems to be characterized by utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self – intellect and willpower – to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.

Even if this is true, has not the increasing mastery over nature resulted in an increased strength of the individual self? This is true to some extent, and inasmuch as it is true it concerns the positive side of the individual development which we do not want to lose track of . But although man has reached a remarkable degree of mastery over nature, society is not in control of the very forces it has created. The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is accompanied by the irrationality of our system of production in its social aspects. Economic crisis, unemployment, war, govern man's fate. Man has built his world; he has built factories and houses, he produces cars and clothes, he grows grain and fruit. But he has become estranged from the products of his own hands, he is not really the master any more of the world he has built; on the contrary, this man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down, whom he tries to placate or manipulate as best he can. The work of his own hands has become his God. He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built. He keeps up the illusion of being the centre of the world, and yet he is pervaded by an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors once consciously felt towards God."

Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom

Guttertalk

Inspiration,
a genie whose lamp
one rubs, hoping
for a spark,
a hiss of steam,
to allay the darkness,
the death of things.

A discombobulate fruit,
to yearn in despair,
to feel in vulnerability,
absolute, eternal:
A purgatory of insight,
a corridor of punishments,
where one breathes
your faith in light; your own.

Note 13

Enough! Already it flows into a yearless stream. We stand on fortress bricks: remnants that cage the world. The terraces frown like an urban moat, but cars, like dreams, elide into tar-sown rivers, leading nowhere, but moving to the beat of an urgent tune.

The collapse of days, bound by the thoughts of a faraway field, where children once stood. The threads of meaning that bind the tightropes to a web of dreams, hissing in the background, like a modern prayer.

I was electric against the fence, epistemic against the mud, metaphysic against the wind, representationalist against illusion, hedonistic against material form; my bloodless will flows out, flows into the last springs of untapped memory.

Note 12

We conceptualize ourselves as a function of our acts, therefore we are responsible to our acts.

We conceptualize ourselves as a function of our ability to act, therefore we are responsible for our acts.

Is function a means of retaining dependence on the continuity between interiority and the objective?

Note on Nietzsche Aphorism

I suppose that some readers may find my recent assignment on Nietzsche vaguely interesting, so here it is:

Exegesis on Aphorism 335 in “The Gay Science”

The aphorism can be split into four sections.

1) The attack on conscience and the moral affects
2) The attack on duty and the categorical imperative and the unknowability and uniqueness of human action and drives
3) The irrelevance of established morality to self-creators
4) The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'

Within this aphorism, several trajectories of Nietzschean thought converge, firstly, the refutation of the metaphysical account and justification of the grounds of morality and its replacement by a genealogical and psychological critique that emphasizes its conditioned and contingent nature, second, a project to democratize morality as a set of values that must be determined largely by the individual in accordance with the specific conditions of his personal psychology and physiology, and third, the role of the sciences, self-observation, and the sceptical mode of enquiry in this process of cultivation of the drives.

This note will address the main arguments and issues Nietzsche raises for and against each of the four points. In doing so, it will address the threads raised above and hopefully cohere them into a possible interpretation of the aphorism as a whole.

Attack on Conscience and the Moral Affects

Nietzsche begins the attack on the psychology of moral motivations with two questions: first, is the act of making a moral judgement itself moral, and secondly, why is the moral affect of conscience taken as a justification for moral acts uncritically? To this, he claims that understanding the origins and psychological nature of these affects will “spoil these grand words for you!”i

Here the critique of conscience exists on two levels: first, while the conscience exists as an affect based upon, and activated in correspondence to our abstract moral principles to compel us to act in accordance with them, the reasons for which the moral affect is taken up as the overriding guide to action as opposed to our other drives are based on egoism, self-preservation, hedonism or plain ignorance and blind faith. Here Nietzsche asks: “For this faith- is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience?”ii. In other words, he questions if we adhere to our conscience with morally justified reasons, and suggests we do not. Whether it is possible or not to have these reasons may be examined later.

Secondly, the abstract moral principles by which the conscience is conditioned are themselves products of tradition and social conditioning, which must be justified with reference to values different in nature from those which overtly motivate the conscience. As Nietzsche states in GS21:

“The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificial, the virtuous...this praise certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness. The neighbour praises selflessness because it brings him advantages. If the neighbour himself were “selfless” in his thinking, he would repudiate this diminution of strength, this mutilation for his benefit, he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would manifest his selflessness by not calling it good! This indicates a fundamental contradiction in morality nowadays: the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle.”iii

However, we may raise an objection. Given that moral affects favour a certain moral value, and given that the justification for the moral affects and the reasons for following them are themselves either instrumental upon other values based on self-interest of the individual or group, does this therefore make the outcome of the moral affects immoral, or does this make the adoption of the moral affect inconsistent in some way, morally speaking? This would be the case only if the satisfaction of the underlying value is incompatible in principle with values involved in the satisfaction of the moral outcome. However, it is seen that the (decision) situations involved in choosing to privilege the moral affect of conscience over other drives (or in adopting a moral principle for egotistical ends), where one by definition chooses between different self serving ends, is contextually different from the point where one chooses between egotistical ends and ends that consider others when one acts, before the moral act. That the latter decision situation is psychologically motivated by the former, does not entail that the principles that inform the latter are incompatible with those of the former. That second-order self-interest motivates first-order altruism does not necessarily entail that the principle of altruism has been violated, or that the agent in acting morally, is inconsistent in his virtues. This would only be the case if the self-deception on the part of the agent were complete, which is an oversimplification of agents.

However what successfully Nietzsche sought to topple was the notion that morality was universally binding in all circumstances and occasions, and that we can make clear demarcations between good virtues and evil vices; in showing that they are reciprocally conditioningiv, with the good having dark roots and depending upon the amoral drives, Nietzsche does not claim that we cannot be good, but that we do not have to be.

Attack on Duty and the Categorical Imperative

Nietzsche states in parenthesis: “The voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.”v However, one may consider a recourse from the moral affects to an ethics based on reasons.

Nietzsche attacks this dependence on the rational ethics:

“An original sin of philosophers. - Philosophers have at all times appropriated the propositions of examiners of humanity (moralists) and ruined them by taking the propositions unconditionally and wanting to demonstrate this as necessary...” [AOM 5]vi

Robert Guay, in an excellent article, interprets Nietzsche's attack on on morality as an attack on a “complex whose center is the search for a kind of normative stability” whose role is to generate “sound practical commitments”.vii The soundness of a code rests on its purity, where “morality is conceived as detached from any contingent concerns or features of the world”viii and its unconditionality; where “humanity must have something that it can obey unconditionally [D 207]ix, thereby preserving the stability and independence of its authority.x The comprehensiveness and universality of the claims of morality is explained in terms of its purity: independence of contingency ensured that no morally relevant differences between persons or suitably similar occasions obtained.xi

Nietzsche's attack on the purity, unconditionality and universality of morality takes several forms in GS335. Firstly, he cites the origins of morality, namely, its situatedness in cultural and political authorityxii and the conditional and revisable nature of the mores and traditions which they perpetuate which determine moralities [D9], secondly, the inability to specify “a universally recognized goal [which is a necessary condition before one could] propound such and such should be done” [D108], making any “unconditional feeling that here everyone must judge as I do” a “blind, petty and frugal selfishness” [GS335], third, the lack of independent and objective moral authority, given the conditionality and selfishness of the first order ethical principle of equality that underlies the “categorical imperative”, therefore opening up the danger of infinite regress when one questions the higher-order morality of morals, fourth, the uniqueness and unknowability of the psychological profile of the moral agent and his environment and therefore his act that debars any simplistic or universally meaningful application of second-order moral laws, or even any form of ethically-tinged judgement, upon acting agents, and fifth, the indemonstrability of the law of the mechanism by which our moral judgements cause our actions, thereby undermining the autonomy of the Kantian will.

The Irrelevance of Established Morality to Self-creators

Nietzsche dismisses the task of constructing a morality that lays claim to an objective ethical truth, for the reasons stated above. He proposes a more modest task: “Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the moral value of our actions!”xiii

There are two main thrusts in his argument. Firstly, for Nietzsche, morality “trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function”, for “valuations and orders of rank [of impulses] are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most- that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals.”[GS116] It turns men to creatures whose ideals do not necessarily correspond to the conditions of their individual flourishing[GS120]. In taking the individual to be an end-in-itself, “human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves”, he advocates the pursuit, or at least the equal legitimacy of the pursuit, of individually determined ends that require a freedom from the limits of morality as a contingent social construct.

Secondly, Nietzsche perceives the pervasiveness and insidiousness of moral valuations in ascribing significance and value-judgements, and therefore creating cohesive interpreted meanings, psychologically speaking, out of the contents of our experience. The pervasiveness and habituation of moral thinking, acting and evaluating [Dawn 9] is itself conditioned by existential and therefore superstitious fears - “fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the personal- there is superstition in this fear.” That is, the human fear of the essentially unknowable and therefore unconquerable aspects of becoming-as-such condition a flight to meaning based on established traditions, and propels the desire to turn oneself into a function, and creates the ascetic ideal, all of which becomes habitualized in thought and therefore renders life manageable and ordinary. However, these moral valuations “crowd out the significance of the smallest, everyday, matters [GS299]”xiv; things pertaining to lifestyle, diet and so on; in addition, adopted meanings organize life in a way over which the agent has little conscious control. Hence, for Nietzsche, self-critical observation and science plays a key role in allowing the free spirit to shape the terms by which he lives a purposive life.

The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'

The above section opens up several ways in which Nietzsche might have thought that the “intellectual conscience” and the development of scientific methods of inquiry, as well as scientific understanding of the self and the world contribute to the project of creation of ideals and self-creation.

First, the products of scientific development, broadly understood, allows us to better manage the natural and social conditions which affect our lives, through technology, social science, policy and management practices and so on.

Second, in exhorting us to become “the best learners and discovers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world”, that is, of ourselves, he advises us to know ourselves in order to create personal virtues. This can be neatly, if crudely, explained in the chart below:

The 'Herd'

Control (Experience of free will)
↓
Meaning (Metaphysics)
↓
Function (Morality)

The 'Free-Spirit'

Control (Amor Fati, Individual virtues)
↑
Meaning (Self-knowledge from psychology, sciences)
↑
Function (Honesty, will to truth, self-experimentation scientific method)

Hence Nietzsche interprets the freedom from the possibility of a metaphysical solution to the problem of becoming-as-such as an opportunity to overcome the pessimist view of life as suffering, or as a question mark, thereby paving the way for a physics that allows us to embrace and affirm life, and to “live in the present”.

i Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
ii Ibid, p.265
iii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 21, p.94
iv Thanks to my lecturer
v Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
vi Nietzsche, Friedrich (1880), trans. Hollingdale. Human, All Too Human: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Cambridge University Press, 5, p.215
vii Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 59
viii Ibid, p.59
ix Ibid, p.59
x Ibid, p.59
xi Ibid, p.60
xii Ibid, p.61
xiii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
xiv Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 78

Note 11

Where does this form turn in its boundless craving for the recreation of reality as a kind of erotic freedom? Encapsulated in functional cages and routed into the over worn paths that break into no living future, all is withdrawn into cynical understanding that functions to protect one from the shadow in the corner, the unmet desire, the object of the unattainable Real. Transcendence, being detached from illusion as its greatest symptom, rears its hungry head in the dark still ponds of modernity, striving with immense energy towards the retreating future, stumbling into things, into furniture, into alcohol, into the waste products of the ecstasies of the past that has exhausted itself and therefore, with implacable right, fail to generate the similar terms of of fulfilment to which its role and its creation was to perform. Is there a philosophic craving in the man of action, so that this disrreality and triviality is elevated into the immense symbol of his striving made objective and therefore responsive, interesting? In that sense, a diagnosis of creeping decay is possible, as in all other over-formed ages, but the terms of renewal have yet to be conceived: the longer the lack of vision draws the bow, the more dangerous the point of release.

Note 10

How does one explain the way one views the world if the very process of that explanation presupposes that the way in which you understand that explanation fits the nature of the world as I understand it?

The difference between the external and the internal is not one primarily of organs, of thing vs thought and so on. External is to be defined, un-metaphysically, as that whose nature of the thing is to be judged by that other than yourself; internal is to be defined as that whose nature is to be judged by you.

Objectivity presupposes other perspectives from which to allocate the nature of the subjective to the other: the external is just what it is to be judged based on a perspective that is a collection of subjectives; it is a subjective which I cannot see. In that respect objectivity is an anthropomorphism, and, in agreeing into objectivity, what we really do is to agree into intersubjectivity.

Note 9

The fundamental question is:

1) How do we subjectivize the world such that it can be responded to in agency, that it can be worked upon by the understanding, that it can be used as a supplement to our need?

2) The Western liberal cultural tradition has relocated the modality of this subjectification towards the starting point of representational individualism, where subjectivity and objectivity has been narrativised through a notion of the "man as observer", as the starting point of his "idea of his life" within a society organized around that belief system. Representationalism is a neccessary postulate for intersubjective notions of objectivity, and the paradox of subjectivised intersubjectivity remains the chief philosophical paradox within this account. Life regains apparent coherance around this account, but as always, breaks down through philosophical enquiry.

3) The individual is a factually verified superstition (of course, fact as usually applied is itself a superstition), based primarily on the agential instinct for self-preservation. More than the commonality of sense perceptions, it is the drives and perspectives that condition the instinct to self-preservation that patterns the world into objectivity, becoming the common forum as it were within which differences can thrive under the banner of the subjective, or the internal. However, insofar as the conditions of actions are unprimary and complex, superstition is required for the reproduction of social values- and not only social values- as the compass towards the equilibrium to which man seeks to maintain when he acts.

4) This deadlock of habit and the superstitious frame of mind is the primary veil to which it is the goal of individuals to pierce, therefore affording second-order insights into the nature of things as they function within the acting individual. This is why we have to catch ourselves in the act of thinking: thinking must precede the act, not the other way round.

Note 8

Self-consciousness means different things in different cultures and different people because the terms by which things are understood to be living are different. Organicisticity is intepreted, processed, culturally reinforced and revitalized through behaviors, ideas, beliefs, design, interactive space and so on.

The surface beliefs condition and re-engineer the habits by which order is maintained within the individual, who consciously navigates through the coordinates of those terms, which are ideational (moral, understanding), emotional-biological (drives, emotions, sensitivity, output), and external (environment, interaction).

Function may become a possible paradox in relation to this subjectification of the world. Each has to be reintergrated into an earlier system, and the evolution of the cultural system is determined largely by the product of power interactions between competing individual visions and systems, "individual" to be understood in the most comprehensive sense.

Therefore self consciousness as nightmare, as a psychological expersion, made in universal and irrepressible terms, absorbed by all, emanating from all, the defactualized expressibility of the underground dynamic, in a state of terrible recognition, layered over by the public consciousness, by effectuality, by empiricistic gravity, formed in arts, comedy, force-interaction, in habitualized understanding.

Note 7

Let me analyse the unawakened state. its a detachment made in horror you know.
a mode of failed justification, seperation in an unkindled morning.

lets burrow. into sleep and there will the flipping deception of an uncreated mind release some insight that lives above, away from the knowing mind, like ungraspable sunlight. Yes to yearn for the frame and borders of the window to fall away, for you to fall heedlessly, endlessly into the garden, as others, as others always fall into life. But there, the things have no meaning, they have no meaning, for they never had, and they never will.

Note 6

Should i have gone for the halloween party of deprived fun mongers, a series of forgotten rituals on a misnomed Saturday night, as you put on the paper knife and the fake blood that drips from foamless lips? No, we would enter, bemused at the stupidly faithful, at those who have failed to chase and caress their fading childhood memories before finding them hollow and shrifted, like hay in a forgotten barn, as they stumble into coats too deep for tiny ribcages, into myth too hollow for parody and mockery, into attempts too forced for genuine laughter. A social or a collaboration of drunkards? Are we more honest in an otherwordly suit? With mascara so thick it shuts distempered eyes? Remember, orientals - we begin another ritual, imitation upon imitation, mockery itself a device. And so what if the wasted vampires tether, dreaming of real blood?

Note 5

Nothing aids respite from alien forms better than the stillness of winter in a British bus. The experience is unbearable for many as it is sweet liberation for me. One eavesdrops on various forms of life: in the front, bespectacled asians bunched up and huddled in coats, twittering like sparrows, in the middle czech boys and black men, middle class university types expressive of melancholy roots sitting in odd positions, weirdly incongruous and emblematic, black coats against a gentrified landscape of neat blue seats, and elsewhere the whites who seem to perform a division of labour according to time of day: nerds in the day and drunkards at night, silence and contemplation in sunlight and morning, and freedom and matehood and cunthood against the dark, streetlighted panes, while the chill of damp evenings fall around us.

The bus ambles past the Sainsburys before turning into the highway. There the factories give way to a view of the full green countryside, bound by trees shaded in green, orange and yellow, planted in neat rows set against a gently sloping valley. The golden sunlight plays upon our faces, and the dews on the windowpanes glitter. Then the factories approach again, and so the University comes into view.

Note 4

Again you recollect that chill of unsupported desolation as you picked the land that was carved and divided by the strange sounding sea.

What was it I was attempting to do? Did something or someone get in the way? I caught your glances in oblique angles, across a shelful of handphones, of antiquated, forgotten communication devices, wired and meaningless, and something broke, and I awoke with your presence all about me.

Note 3

If one is rich in the passionate flow of ideas, one cannot read or listen, and the moment itself is twisted into a confusing mix of anxiety, elation, constantly tuned and strained in its rapt channelling of spontaneous thoughts. The airless, sterile landscape of the room changes and vistas slam open; life gasps with possibility, snaking its way into secret passageways of thought.

Here is the monumental alley, the tranfiguration of the massive dreamscape that makes one feel so small. Or there the structural overview, the map of the world flashing to reveal its dynamic organization, or its endless, trapping layers of contradictory functions. Perspectives come in waves, and so does growth, deceit and misery.

Note 2

Thoughts left unwritten or words left unsaid are like residue and waste left undischarged in the body; they remain to stain and damage the organs that depend on purity to sustain the possibilty of a renewed creative union with the present.

Perhaps part of the process of the constitution of the personality lies in this: a protest of the mind against an unresolved memory, a series of problems, felt with all the intuitive force and power of a sensitive soul, left unresolved by all the cognitive solutions and rationalizations of learning and thought, left unburied by all the sandy, worthless layers of the chattering, insistent present, thereby shaping, framing, deforming it, turning perception into a prisoner's art.

And so, the tension between the forgotten future and the wasted past mixes into the visions of a damned, hapless present.

Note 1

A surprise for me again, to look upon the world with lowered eyes, to plumb the endless pipes of your thoughts, and to discover how little the world thinks, how little it wants to think, with what difficulty it ellides the whirl of the senses, or how we are but broken boats floating on the surface of the deepest sea, riding the forceful currents of the present, tiding this way and that to the tune of the loneliest stars latched in the loftless dark.

We seem to be caught in an endless seasonal drift, the constant patterns, like the soft shedding evening lights that spill around the spines of cool shaded buildings in which children play, in shadowed ruins at once homey and familiar and hallowed with sacred memory, strengthening in fleshly perfomance, against the ghost of the receding present.

So the sand recedes from beach where the lighthouse once stood, and where the calm rocks brace the winds. Where was the peak to which we clamber, caught in some essential ectasy?

Is liberty intrinsically or only instrumentally valuable?

Two definitions of freedom will be examined in relation to the above question. Firstly, it may be loosely defined as a freedom from x to do y, where x is defined as external obstructions to fulfilment of a given intention. Second, it is defined as the state of a position which one is in, determined by the number and desirability of the choices he is given. A major part of this essay will attempt to clarify the role of intention in according value to the abovementioned state of freedom.

Here, two preliminary observations are in order. It is immediately clear that the presence of choice is taken to be valuable in itself. For example, most students in this University would not even consider the possibility of choosing to be dropouts; nevertheless, the freedom to leave the University if one chooses would be considered a right valuable in itself (which, if suspended, would create protests of greater violence than those at present). (The problem of prudentiality will be addressed later.) A more general form of the above example is, doing a while one could do b, but knowing that one would have chosen a anyway, is better than not having the option of b at all. In other words, the presence of intention is not a necessary ingredient in the valuation of the choice; potentiality of intention is sufficient. The perceived value accruing the individual therefore cannot derive solely from the positive consequences of a. Second, agency is an insufficient ground for which to cite an intrinsic value for liberty. Consider an example: a random number generator. While the number generator is able to choose numbers, and potentially other numbers than the ones it has chosen, we do not value the presence of choice in the same way; that is, we do not attach to its freedom a moral value as we would to that of a living creature. Therefore the inclination to choose must contain certain characteristics before value can be accorded to its fulfilment.

Now we ask ourselves: what is the model through which one can understand the value of the presence of choice (liberty)? Three models are possible. The first one is: because the actions we are compelled to do, or the options we are given, never correspond ideally to the best possible desired outcome, a range in the quality and quantity of choices naturally means an increased probability in reaching a satisfaction-maximising point. Any value in the presence of choice is derived solely from the consequence of the best choice, that is, choice understood as a means to that end.

A second model: the value of the presence of choice accrues to the prudential accommodation of the possibility of changing needs. For example, person A is allergic to oranges while B is not. While B may choose to buy apples on a specific occasion, he values the choice that the seller provides him to get oranges in the future in a way that A does not. Of course A may value that fact of choice in recognition of different subjective preferences; the point is that the valuation of choice is a prudential means of recognizing difference over time and in individual preferences, therefore it remains an instrumental means to an end, the fulfilment of intentions which are inherently subject-determined.

The third model locates the value of choice in its being an actualization of the free will to select the preferences by which ends are deemed as good or not so good. This means that the expression of intention is deemed as good in itself. Is this a tenable claim? Why should we value the expression of free will for its own sake if free will does not generate a priori intentions towards its own satisfaction; if it does not exist as need?

A possible reply is that one requires free will to determine one’s own ends before these ends are found to have value; it is precisely through the act of choosing ends that they acquire value, which, by definition, is a conscious-realmed addendum to the primary mode of desiring an object. Therefore the crucial characteristic that distinguishes the human being from the number generator is the free will; we value liberty intrinsically because it is a prerequisite of value.

Unfortunately, this reply does not necessarily entail that liberty is valuable in itself; the defence merely claims that liberty as a state is a pre-condition of value, what is really valued is the intention, and the consequence (and perhaps, the moral faculty) that is enabled by liberty.

Therefore the definition of liberty as a relational concept remains; however, it is an error to suppose that our moral values align themselves to logical necessities. It is reasonable to claim that we value liberty for its own sake alongside the view that, factually speaking, it exists only as a condition for consequences also valued in themselves.

Sigh 3

Where lies the pad on which truth scrawls? Search in the desert; for there I will begin.

So, the crane kid said: you are nothing, not even a drop, or a cliff edge that holds summer grass and sheds love-moistened tears as it falls, scratching the terrain of my thoughts, its jagged pinnacles of anxiety, in its gullied descent into despair, its furtive snowlike hope. What?

So, having to interrupt myself, as all do, to discover who I am, I lurch forward like a detuned automaton, uttering robot sounds, cremating life in an echoing auditorium without projectors, or worse, eyeballs.

Of course, a couple of mad scientists enter. They stare hard at their invention, the reincarnated Frankenstein, who pleats his hair into complexity, into Afro.

“I told you to decommission him”, the first scientist said, “look what he has done to our reputation, especially among the bioresonance researchers in the Academy of the Arts and Sciences.”

“The president has lost faith in our latest project”, the second added.

“Yes, that’s likely”, the third scientist said, “but we have use for another nightmare tester."

Somehow I felt myself tumbling off the stage.

Sigh 2

I was full of good cheer but the situation was not to be. Favourable as truth is
to the brave, it rewards men according to their ability to take the path that violates
it in a show of impenetrable strength. How one overcomes the massive arbitrary necessity
without a need for a single whimper as if one's brain ran on something else so dependable as food or petrol...
it is indeed an academician's silo,
to live in a book and to
look at an unpaged world of grimy delight
where the lights were somehow realer so you did not have to follow them as you bathe your worldly skin in its juicy poison.

British Riots

To argue with a history student.

Yes. The nature of a narrative as an ordering of significance of variables to create intertemporal and intervariable interpretations, based on causal and systemic analysis.

Does it therefore, by definition, require a ground up assessment of the means by which systems of intercausal effects interact with contingent agential causes?

Will the determination of the event be best served by judgement of the immediate, critical contingentialities interacting?

Events as a poor indicator of the state of society.

Or do we wish to create a probabilistic time-scale in which critical causes are clearly identifiable, while causes which act on conditions are themselves ascertained by larger social indicators that flesh out the 'state of normalcy'.

Differing causal interpretations find their common ground in their assessment of this state. This dynamic state is to be seen as a foci of future potentialities, given probabilistic representation through the impacts of individual and social interaction and of established constants with novel effects of disruptive social forces.

A problem of social science is to establish a framework in which to characterise the general issues that arise in any such state which can adequately address both the nature of the present as an effect and conversely, as construct, and to recreate the probabilistic modeling based on any change in variables. Psychology and perspective of the agents must be included in the calculation, if only to support normal distribution type events.

Oh yes. Judging, as always, through intuition, I doubt if the riots are an isolated event. It just confirms my view that there is a strong thuggish, almost facist, undercurrent in Britain. Its buried under civilisational mud, but, like radioactive waste, its there.