Which is the unconscious more like?
- A theater
- A factory
0
voters
Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus:
Thoughts on this?
I don’t seem to have enough info. for voting. I don’t like either option. Please elabrate.
I’ll go with Fuzhi, with some provisions.
We passively recieve information from our senses. Our mind takes this information and uses it to create a pattern on what is percieved.
I would ask as Sartre asked- what does the “unconscious” signify that is not in direct consciousness itself?
In the context of the statement made by those two buffoons, what is believed to be motives are produced behind consciousness…in some kind of “subconsciousness”. Yet there is no way to reference those things which produce the motives without a direct conscious awareness of them.
For example, say a man has a foot fetish. This fetish, according to the two petty-bourgeois pseudo-philosophers (oops, sorry SIATD, I didn’t mean to call them bourgeois) is the product of developments which have happened in the “unconscious factory”. But if and when the man is questioned about the fetish, he has nothing to directly refer to as the cause which is not also in his immediate mediation; he essentially chooses to conclude that his fetish is the result of, say, over exposure to pornography or…a fantasy symbolization of some kind of metaphor.
As a consequence, the concept of the unconsciousness is a null point…it is something that cannot be verified in discourse. It remains purely theoretical, which, I might add, is the meat and potatos of ninety-five percent of the “philosophers” who write books nowadays. Taking advantage of the fact that “something could be interesting” (although nonsense) and trying to make money from publishing the material.
The short story about the theory of the subconsciousness is this: after the german determinism movement of the post-enlightenment period, psychology had to be reconciled with determinism. Freud put the icing on this cake and it remained for decades until Sartre came along and engulfed it.
The important feature of the freewill position as opposed to the determinist position is that the former is pragmatically useful while the latter remains a mysterious empty entity in philosophy and ethics.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO use in a determinist position other than as a means to try to convince oneself that they are not responsible for their actions.
“Responsible” not as in “required to endure a consequence”, which is a moral construct, but responsible as in “there is nothing else to blame your act on, such as a subconsciousness” because such a cause cannot be mediated anyway. Its a dead duck in the water.
Sorry to rain on this parade. Contingency is the absolute fact of the universe. There is no such thing as “essence” and man is only what he chooses.
Shame. A man who started as a marxist finally gave up and “if you cannot beat them, join them”. Refusing to wear green fatigues and spend weeks in the jungle…he merely bought a suit and began writing books with his buddy. He has a big idea “OMG…I could change the world through literature and write about communist principles and theories. Although I know that this will prove ineffectual, I can still pretend as if I’m helping and people will believe me. Hey, at least I’ll get paid well, especially after Deleuze and I finish the anti-oedipus book.”
“Theater” derives from a Greek verb meaning “to behold”, whereas “factory” derives from a Latin verb meaning “to do”. So the unconscious does not merely behold (like the dehin of Vedanta philosophy), but acts (like the “Self” in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra):
“The dehin [“also known in the Bhagavad Gita as atman (‘self’), purusha (literally ‘person’) and kshetrajña (‘knower of the field’)”] represents the unity of any particular sequence of lives. In each life, it witnesses whatever takes place physically within the range of the senses and sensations of a particular individual’s body. It also witnesses the mental world of that individual, its thoughts and emotions. The apparent self-consciousness of the individual is in fact the dehin’s consciousness of the individual. But the dehin only witnesses. It cannot make the individual act, think, or feel in any one way rather than another. From its point of view, all actual events, thoughts and feelings take care of themselves, as it were. They follow their own laws: they are causally related to each other, but not to dehin.”
[Simon Brodbeck, Introduction to Juan Mascaró’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita.]
Compare this to:
“Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit.
Ever hearkeneth the Self, and seeketh; it compareth, mastereth, conquereth, and destroyeth. It ruleth, and is also the ego’s ruler.
Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.
There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?
Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. “What are these prancings and flights of thought unto me?” it saith to itself. “A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.”
The Self saith unto the ego: “Feel pain!” And thereupon it suffereth, and thinketh how it may put an end thereto—and for that very purpose it is meant to think.
The Self saith unto the ego: “Feel pleasure!” Thereupon it rejoiceth, and thinketh how it may ofttimes rejoice—and for that very purpose it is meant to think.”
[Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Of the Despisers of the Body.]
So the Self can make the ego feel pain or pleasure (the Latin verb facio means “to do or make”). Anti-Oedipus is, at least implicitly, concerned with Nietzsche, as Nietzsche was himself concerned with Oedipus in The Birth of Tragedy - in chapter 9, which deals with the myths of Oedipus and Prometheus, the latter which he calls “indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races” (and, as Foucault writes in the introduction to the English edition, “Anti-Å’dipus is an introduction to the nonfascist life”). Also, one may consider the battle between the lion and the dragon in Zarathustra’s first speech, “Of the Three Metamorphoses”, to be Oedipal in the Freudian sense:
“Its last Lord it [the spirit become lion] here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.”
[there.]
Is this “God” not the Father? The imposed father-figure? The conscience?
“The great dragon, represent[s] the essential lie of conventional morality.”
[Peter Berkowitz, “Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist”, page 156.]
But let us get back to The Birth of Tragedy. Look how Nietzsche distinguishes Oedipus from Prometheus:
“Now I wish to contrast to the glory of passivity [as it is apparent in Sophocles’ Oedipus] the glory of action, as it irradiates the Prometheus of Aeschylus.”
[BT 9.]
Thus we may consider Oedipus (who is a man) to be a symbol of the Aryan ego, and Prometheus (a Titan) as a symbol of the Aryan Self.
Hail Oedipus!
Need the truth be useful?
I would think so, unless you prefer putting a pot on your foot and a shoe on the stove? At which point in your life do you not rely on your knowledge of things in the context of use?
There is no escaping me, Saully. Try as you may with your semantics and distortions and confusions…but you know that I know you cannot use the doctrine of determinism for anything.
Once again we have an event that either actually did happen, and means nothing, or was invented as a myth, and means nothing. What happens next is hundreds of years of speculation and philosophy about one such insignificant event. Philosophers just love to examine greek metaphors and myths and pretend like they have discovered some secret archetypical element of the psyche.
So a guy kills his father and fucks his mother. Excuse me while I call CNN.
It is “conclusions” such as these which degrade anything sensible you may have to say in your posts and make me despise you.
It is not more truthful to put a pot on one’s foot and a shoe on the stove rather than vice versa.
Determinism is true, but this includes the necessity of having either to believe in free will (in practice, not in theory) or to go insane (I believe “sociopath” was the word peacegirl used).
It is not a question of applying the truth to practical life (and indeed, measuring “truth” by how far it is applicable to practical life), but of applying life to the truth (value follows truth, not truth follows utility).
We are talking about “use” man. You are doing it again- evading me by scrambling the points and trying to lose me. You cannot. I’m on you.
It is not a matter of the truth “needing” to be useful. Nothing is “needed” in a contingent universe. However, it is a fact that at least believing that one’s foot will be more comfortable in a shoe as opposed to a pot is useful, and this is the “truth” if one wants to “be comfortable.”
So determinism is only true only if I believe in freewill?
Yes, détrop - you sure speak the ugly truth.
Sophocles’ work as well as Jung’s, is poetry, is art.
Hence it shows in an artful - beautiful - way what you say in so empty-souled a manner.
The man Oedipus, or the ego, is destroyed by Titanic forces, or the Self, even as you destroy the beauty of the story with your “reality tv” account of it.
Your pleasure in doing so - your “fun”, to use your own language - is precisely in your enjoyment of embodying said Titanic forces.
Ah, but you have yet to deify those forces. You still feel yourself as despicable, as banal - which for that very reason you indeed are.
The degrader has himself no dignity. But dignity is in the works of genius, not in their degradation.
All Hail the Poetic Genius!
That is a truism, not a truth.
Is the truth that nothing is “needed” in a contingent universe useful?
No, but it means that not believing in freewill (in practice) will cause you to be a sociopath.
Well as long as I get to be a Titan, I’m happy.
I’ve always wanted to be a Titan, Saully. Even since my days of jumping around on the sofa in my under-roos on Saturday mornings while watching the Fantastic Four on the cartoon network. I just knew I had special powers, and now with a mentor like you, perhaps I could develop them.
Detrop is broken, Sauwelios. I suggest you pass him by.
Imperial Warlord Titan Prometheus on the warpath:
And yet, if we ever met, I would break every bone in your body and send you to your mother in a box.
Goddamn it detrop, if you’re not going to extirpate the redneck from yourself, do us all a favor and sublimate it at all times.
Redneck sublimated:
And yet, if we ever met, I would hug you so hard, that your mother would be jealous.
This is the result of a demographic contingency. I would do quite well in New York, or even Europe. I like to think of my primitive life style as being a form of voluntary entrance into guerrilla culture, practices and standards, rather than a result of being a broke-ass hillbilly who lives in a van and refuses to keep a job.
To purge the redneck from myself would require only minimal modifications. Do not think for a moment that I have to remain in the south-eastern US. I can also talk like I’m from Philly and you would be convinced. I do a British accent quite well also.