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