Lack and "the self"

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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This powerful idea I became more intimately aware of as a consequence of something Parodites wrote. Lack here means substance as lack, positive substance that exists and is as it is only or largely because of a lack of something else.

That politics is simply a lack of “philosophy” seems evident to me. It is in part correct to see politics under the various lenses of instinct, group psychology, social cohesion, historical mandate, whatever, but ultimately these “positive” causes are themselves conditioned by the larger, overall lack which is the paltriness of the human being’s mind. Human consciousness is more lack than excess, perhaps 10% real substance is an overstatement; all of that negative lack, that void caused by an inability and unwillingness to seek truth and reality, to seek adequately into causes and that instead merely seeks the lowest energy state of convenient delusion and denial, is acting as a substance in man and world. This substantial lack creates the ripe environment for all of those other “positive” or natural causes.

I suspect each such cause is also its own particular substantial lack. This seems to be how the mind works: reality imposes, real causes are encountered and product affect and response in the mind, but a confusion sets in, a confusion of being unable to articulate these effects adequate to the reality of them, so that the self is divorced from its actual experience and consequently generates an illusion in which it’s ideas now rest, as intellectual and emotional entropy. Over time that entire glut of entropic illusion and denial becomes so large that the self experiences things largely through this unreality, and becomes entirely divorced from what it is actually experiencing in terms of the reality all around it. There is a hugely complex and subtle inter-woven state of quagmire and confusion in the human being because of this, as aspects of biology, chemistry, physiology, psychology, and mentality each form layers of cause/effect reality in our experiences and each such layer with its own degree of “necessary error”. Natural mediatings between these spheres results in further errors and “will to denial”.

If this is the basic ontoepistemic state of the human self, which in most cases it is, then what is the human world? The world is precisely an expression and manifestation of that state. Properly speaking we could include every natural force and positive substance along with this basic state of lack and confusion in order to produce a total understanding of the world, which would include all politics, religion, social morality, economics, science, pathology and cogent awareness alike. For practical purposes that would be extreme difficult to enumerate with precision, but we can be aware this is the fact and reality of these things and we can focus on the inner state of void and confusion from which so much “positive” human and world substance come.

I dare say every human reality and experience could be subjected to this sort of analysis, in order to assist revealing its hidden reality and true nature. This is philosophical articulation of substance, delimitation with recourse to truth and to a wider reality appeal than what is “typical” even for higher thinking or more profound, honest feelings.

The self is the basic historical, psychological, ideational, political category. As such a category the self is unitary, yet its parts and inner structures interact with real conditions of experience to generate “the world”, in similar manner (to apply a perhaps somewhat ill-suited or potentially misleading analogy) to how light passes through a holographic plate and a 3D image is generated as a result.

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To continue, what we call the self is the product of two opposing philosophical experiences that loosely correspond to the two ideas of ontology and epistemology: the experience of synthesizing the immediate past sensory stimuli with the present moment sensory stimuli (this includes active memory and feelings), and the experience of actually enduring across these synthetic moments as an unchanging state or perspective. The first is our “identity” and the second is how this identity is by its nature an unchanging one, at least in part. Note also the second experience of the self is also what we would call imagination or speculation/syllogistic reasoning because it involves ascending beyond the immediacy of the moment into the “actually enduring” hugely wider sum of previous experiences and “unconscious” body instincts and impulses.

When the former sphere attempts to encircle the latter, which it does because the latter, being the larger actual substance of consciousness, becomes in part constitutive of that ‘immediate moment’ to the extent that momentary consciousness is compelled for one reason or another to draw upon the wider body of our experiences, thereof are generated “ideas”- an idea is a synthetic, abstract and metaphorical object whose content is the former experience attempting to draw upon something in the latter. It is “the eternal” descending down toward the immediate, real, living ego.

Thinking constitutes the activity of working to unite the two spheres together. “Logic” is the form this “reasoning” takes place because logic is just the mental expression of natural “mathematical” constancies in existence. Thus the self is deeply grammatical as well as metaphorical and this shows up in our human language as grammar and vocabulary.

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This activity of thinking, which also includes “emotions” as any conceptually-fortified and temporally-extended state of feeling, produces a profound effect upon consciousness, changing the immediate ego self-awareness and also changing the implicit larger content of overall consciousness or what has been called the unconsciousness; thinking restructures our feelings and even the very organization of the self, changing pathways of instinctive force which we experience as growth/change in our motive, hopes, loves, despairs and interests. Beliefs themselves are merely statically reified portions of the wider activity and ferment of thinking consciousness, and are used as reference-points to orient thinking in a lowest common denominator of energy use.

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“Lack” arises because no moment is adequate to that wider body of consciousness from which it came, and each actual pathway for an emotional or cognitive-linguistic response comes at the expense of other possible responses, which we are to some degree always aware of. Quite simply it is the lowest common denominator of energy-use in the nervous system that gives rise to apathies and wills to denial, and natural selection has carved us up to prefer simple heuristics and convenient images to aspirations to a more complete action or to a deeper truth. These situations lead the self to habituate to simpler modes of thought, feeling and action than it is in fact capable of, and it is out of this substantial lack, this lack as substance that so much of what we consider our stable or essential natures, personalities, character or certainty comes. Were we instead to act from a more philosophical, less lazy, more inspired-energetic and less habituated-automatic impulse our thoughts, feelings, motives, desires, actions and reactions, in short our entire personality and ‘inner world’ would be completely different.

It is this possible higher, philosophical state that gives man his noble character, that grants him a future. Life is a negative expression of the particular states of lack or excess out of which that life lives, and this discrepancy becomes more and more pronounced the higher up the scale of being life, “consciousness” ascends.

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I like this theory, the idea that deficiency of Self is the result of a lack of knowledge, power or superhuman will for example. Reminds me of what the forum user Satyr used to say, that everything springs from a need.

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I’m reserving this spot because I want to say something in reply to the initial posts, however, I still need time to formulate it. :-$

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Any deliberate sequential progression to the prior ‘Will to Power’ forum? Or is it a coincidence that holograms came up seemingly simultaneously? (I had not read this forum, so i had no reason to think in synch? (You really do not need to respond to this if You saw my use first, and used it consequently)

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Okay, well I can’t edit that post from before (sorry for not adding anything of value there), and I’m just going to throw my ideas out there, so this post might not make total sense, but some parts on their own might. I don’t know.

My main problem with the concept of lack is how it is used as a positive force generating entity, yet it is exactly that which doesn’t exist. That is, I don’t see the need for ‘lack’ to be posited as ‘the great first mover’ any more than just the innate (intensive) differences between different entities at any one time–that it is felt as a lack doesn’t really mean that it exists, does it?

What I mean is, that lack appears to exist, to be present, by its very absence. That is, lack is the absence of the presence of something, and in that, lack is the prime mover that generates movement towards ‘no longer lacking’. I don’t see the need to inject lack into the process of existence other than perhaps as a phenomenological entity, that is, as a conscious principle attached due to the way we perceive the world.

For example, it isn’t lack that causes lightning to strike, but an overabundance of electrical charge relative to another location (intensive difference). It isn’t lack that causes an apple to grow, but an abundance of nutrients. You don’t grow an arm because you lack one before it grows.

Or is consciousness as it is, as an emergent property, does consciousness draw more energy from the system than the system produces and this is what we discover to be lacking?

I’m not really sure I should post this in it’s current state, but I’m going to anyway, see what happens. I should probably get some sleep, I feel like I’ve been lacking sleep lately.

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Thanks for the comments, yes lack is differently seen than fullness and positive substance. However these converge on each other in a more comprehensive view.

I see “lack” not as total non-existence but as just effects that flow from states otherwise in contradiction, in “suffering”. The basic animal instinct is a state of need; it is hungry, too cold or too hot, physically weak, emotionally it needs to attain comforts and satiety. These are not givens but must be worked for and earned, that is the “mandate of nature” to which life is subject.

Life is born in pain, pain and need are its first experiences. Gasping for first breath, shoved painfully from the female, dropped to the dirt and starving for nutrient. Also of course confusion and terror, knowing yet nothing about itself or where it is. Its ignorance on these subjects does not belie the basically instinctual pressure felt in itself. I see organisms as having evolved simply because the “accidental” neurological-chemical reflex occurred to “move away” when it encountered something. The basic impulse is just a quick muscular jerk, over time as life evolved up from simplest creatures like small fish to everything else these jerks became structured into enduring patterns, “if X stimuli them move in Y way”, etc. The only reason for this was genetic mutations occurring that gave natural selection a foothold in the extra-generational shaping of organisms.

Of course this also gives the foothold to develop “pleasure” seeking, namely for food and warmth. But pleasure can only mean something in the presence of those other satiety-seeking instincts, namely our pains. What we call pleasure is just the strength of being able to fulfill our needs. If we had no need to eat then eating would produce no biological feeling of pleasure. As Nietzsche said, we do not eat because we are hungry, we are hungry because we eat. The need itself is the fundamental biological entity.

Of course pleasure instincts develop just as much as pain ones, to the point that both are quite “individual” and “primary”. Yet taking a psychological or phenomenological view of ourselves we see that everything we do stems from an out-flow of energy (potential) taking the path of least resistance, we are no different physically or naturally than anything else in that regard; the principle of sufficient reason governs everything. Humans can be seen as incredibly complex “natural ecosystems” following the same principles of physical law as everything else, albeit given a much more subtle, responsive and “deep” architecture of that ecosystem. For instance, it is only because of our memory that we have any sense of self, “identity” at all, if you knock a person’s memory off enough that sense of enduring through time as a coherent entity vanishes. This same applies to our ideas, our motivations, our feelings: the past engendering and continuing strength of these, strength given what for these happens to be a limiting, opposing force, is the impetus for however these states happen to express. Much like how the geography of a particular hill determines the route the water will travel down it-- and of course that water also acts upon the hill, the process is reflexive. Man acts also upon that physiological fundament in him from which he comes, too, and the reflexivity is so much subtler in man than say in that hill and water relationship.

So when I say “lack” I don’t simply mean some kind of reified state of non-existing that somehow exists in a void, that would be contradictory and a simplified view; I rather mean to evoke an image of the great complexities and “geographies”, especially the multi-dimensionality and self-reflexivity of these, latent to the human being, rather biologically, psychologically, or “Phenomenologically”. The beauty of philosophy is that it is able to take every such possible perspective upon the reality of the organism and its experience and synthesize these into a coherent, understandable whole.

But that process of understanding requires we abandon our naive appeals to “things in themselves” when it comes to our own nature and organism. Every thing in existence has a cause, in the case of human things there are so many countless causes ranging from gross to subtle, especially in the mind, which is why we experience our “freedom” here most of all: in that hugely vague and inexhaustible glut of subtler and subtler causal influences we feel most a threshold of possible action, of possibility as such which is just the general absence of a singularly overpowering one cause. The “lack” out of which actual behaviors, feelings or thoughts come is a lack born of the greater excessiveness and substantial self-confusion of our reflexive nature.

Whatever pathway out of the self happens to represent the least psychological expenditure of energy in any given moment is the path that our feelings, instincts and “ideas” will take. We are not immune to the law of nature in this regard, we are just incredibly more complicated iterations of it.