The more we employ metasystems as mediating arbitor to our experiences the more limiting the potential impact of those experiences becomes. Both the limitations of possible experience and our sense of these limitations defines our real boundaries as selves. Actual openness to the unknown is anathema to the functional metasystematic platform, which employs methods of actual and possible closure and control to sustain a pseudo-universal and hegemonic status. As example think moralisms, ideology, dogmatism, “positive belief” of any kind.
Consequences of this method: 1) Imposition of content is a crude graffiti upon the raw imminence of actual experience, 2) realizing the possible only within a field of enclosed prior imposition only serves to murder possibility and an emancipatory pathos. Both 1 and 2 are manifest forms of what we might call fascism. Some of this methodology will always be called for, but the difference between an organically emerging form of subjective local unifications subservient to a ‘negative (empty) image of holistic solidarity’ and the militant homogenity of a forced top-down totalizing structure is the difference between growth and stagnation, between new life and an old death. Poetic metaphors, such as Nietzsche’s “Be true to the earth.”, may be used here where conceptualizing at first proves inadequate.
Being far subtler in nature, what we might call the spiritual is easily obscured by the projected constructions of what we might call the intellectual. The deployment of metaphysical objects often serves at this juncture to keep the stability of the metasystematic ethos intact. We observe the possibility of a rupture in the sense of a Badiouian ‘Event’ unfold in the space where such deployments become most necessary. This is our starting place, where, when we apply the briefest touch, the whole clockwork starts to resonate with structural stress and shock. This is the very chasm, the point of rupture which appears to us as an abyss, that all objective experience organizes to conceal and secret away. Any and every method will be brought to bear to keep the truth of the essential wound hidden from sight. First pride, then doubt, then cynicism, scepticism and nihilism, then humility, then rarified emotionalism and esoterica.
There is no objective experience, I think to that your post is slightly misguided by in essence, not really wrong either. Your reasons behind it though I question. Unless by objective experience you mean something else.
I was just wondering if you were specifically aiming this at a certain type of metaphysical system or if not, could you provide some more specific type(s) of metaphysical system that you would see as something you might find would fit your critique of as you stated in the OP.
I am aiming at not just metaphysical systems but all systems generally that enforce a hegemonic sort of over-control and closure, making use of rigid boundaries and fixed points of reference. These are systems that intentionally prevent radically open positions or an emancipatory potential. This sort of fascism can manifest politically, economically and socially just as it can manifest mentally and emotionally. Philosophy can be a way of replacing closure with openness and possibility or it can be a way of further refining methods of control. The difference appears to hinge on one’s attitude toward the unknown and, perhaps even more so, the unknowable. Because this sort of control makes use of deliberate moments of exception and ignorance it is associated with false or untruth; openness is then associated with truth, a truth that seeks to become comprehensive and consummate. It is in this sense that Derrida’s method of deconstruction works to expose these hidden ‘spaces of deliberate exclusion and exception’ upon which these systems and their objects are built. Deconstructing these “metasystems” is one of my goals here. Another goal is to explore the idea that ‘spirit’ is that which resists all attempts at this sort of self-closure and conservative “will to ignorance”, that even the most solid or dead system can be blown up by exposure to spirit. Spirit so far here is just a word for the most delicate and minute sort of experiences, those sensations most escaping capture in the form of concepts, stereotypes or prefabricated memes. Spiritual experience would therefore be the most wholly personal sort of experience, and also therefore the most difficult to communicate about.
Forgive me if I’m making false conclusions from what you said earlier (“As example think moralisms, ideology, dogmatism, “positive belief” of any kind”) - since your critique is of metasystems as a whole, you’re saying that emancipation only comes where morality and ideology are absent?
I would not say only where these are absent, which would probably be impossible; but there is an inverse relationship between level of closure/dogma and emancipatory potential. I think the point to be aimed for is to minimize the amount of dogmatism and falsity to the greatest degree possible given that our practical needs are still being met. Most people get on just fine with ideologies and moralisms and the like, but ultimately these do pose problems for humanity as a whole (think inability to communicate and near-sightedness, hatred and greed, war and slavery). As philosophers we would be concerned not only with these arising practical problems in the broader social and historical context but also with the essence of the problem itself, regardless how or even if it manifests concretely as problematic for some/many/most/all people.
This is a good point as it gets deeper into the practical side: what sort of knowledge space are we really trying to build? Objects of course require some delimitation, and a certain degree of deontological presumption is probably necessary for attachment or psychological investment. The idea is not to abandon all ideological systems or positive beliefs, but the idea is, I would argue, to make these as porous and fluid as possible without severing the real relations that bear upon these objects as true objects. And by making them porous and fluid we also bring to light these real relations themselves. We do want to keep our objects and object-systems bound to truth and to real experience - which also includes maintaining their use-value - but we also want to do our best to rid these of unnecessary and/or false limitations, unknown biases, or a satisfaction with anything less than a fully actualized attempt at comprehensivity and direct confrontation with the thing’s own limits as its own unknown or unknowable. In the same sense that all objects as objects have limits all objects are therefore bound by what they do not or will not understand; the philosophical or at least deconstructionist aim would therefore seem to be to construe the archeology and the historicity of these objective spaces so that more and more profound points of encounter with these limits might occur. This also leads to subterranean unifications which builds comprehensivity toward a fully actualized synthetic experiencing as consummate understanding. By honestly exploring these spaces we lead them into truth, often into and hopefully through their own repressed truths. If done with a careful awareness of the overall importance of these spaces individually and the sustaining connections between them this can only serve to purify whatever is already real and truthful about these spaces.
Perhaps, but to have a spiritual experience at all seems to suppose at least a minimum degree of preceptible representation and imaginability-comprehension (even if comprehension is only of the most basic sort, an “I’ve had an experience”). It is the precursor elements of these basic forms of experience that render the spiritual encounter possible to the self at all, and in the sense that humans share certain of these natural “intuitive categories” (forgive the Kantian terminology if you do not prefer it) it would seem at least possible to communicate a minimum criterion of these experiences within the bounds of the natural operations of these categories. This might require invention of new terms and ideas, or at least a deliberate attempt to shed our reliance on commonly habituated language so that we can be open to new meaning. I agree that likely there will always be a certain amount of individual spiritual “essence” or meaning that is not practically communicable no matter how metaphorically inventive and novel we are with language. But even with our acknowledging this impossibility, the lack of potential communication of all spiritual experience does not imply lack of potential communication of some or even any spiritual experience. It is hard to deny that some individual meaning will always escape the possibility of language and communication, as representation can only go so far toward rendering presence, and piercing the veil of language does not reveal “being” so much as it reveals only the being of language. But this impossibility also gives a nod to the profound depth of self from which we are proceeding and hints at the real limits of the human; if nothing else language at least shows us our own boundaries as conscious selves, and seeing the actual limits of a thing doesn’t nullify or be-little it but brings it into focus, making it more real, vibrant and alive before us. Unlike the unfortunately commonplace metaphysical presumption would have us believe, acknowledging finitude, imperfection and limit takes nothing away from us or from what we are studying.
Is emancipation itself (away from extreme cases of brainwashing or chattel slavery) something intelligible outside dogma and ideology? For example, is what you regard as emancipation from dogmatic overcertainty not the same thing that someone else could see as kicking away the crutch of faith or the enslavement of nihilism as regards truth? In short, how is emancipation not a political term?
The problems you name are moral problems. Why is slavery wrong in a non-moral sense? For example:
… should we be porous with respect to the wrongness of slavery if its use-value changes?
I’m not sure what language is, if it’s not commonly habituated. Meaning is use, no? Language is a social phenomenon, there is no personal language; we can’t explain, only show, things that transcend the public/private boundary. Make poetry and hope for the best.
It is a very political term; in a sense it touches on what is political in the nature of other “non-political” realms. Functional, differential and reciprocal determinations are key components to probably any type of system we can imagine. So the extent that external movement outside of these determining spaces is possible without provoking fatal destabilizations would mark the possibilities for a system’s own expansionary growth into capturing new objects. I would consider emancipatory potential a neo- or post-political notion, in its more abstract conceptualization a very “post-modern” idea.
What does it mean to consider slavery from a non-moral perspective? I don’t think we need to make moral concerns submissive to any extra- or non-moral concerns in order to get closer to the truth or to a better understanding of slavery; slavery is, in itself, a very moral issue. Any analysis of the other than moral components of slavery as an idea would co-occur alongside these perhaps broader or more essential moral components. In a very real way this entire issue under consideration here is an ethical one, concerns itself with what and how we value. Separating moral from less than moral components is certainly necessary in our attempt at an analysis, but this separation is never absolute or complete, nor, I would argue, should it ever be.
How do you imagine its use-value changing in such a way that the wrongness of slavery is abated or altered? One difficulty with our modern understanding of emancipation in the sociopolitical realm is where it well-meaningly manifests as liberalism or a drive for tolerance and freedom that takes an unrestrained or unmediated form: real tolerance is not tolerant of “intolerance”, it is not tolerance without borders. In this same sense that we cannot be expected to accept the utter inverse and negation of the very thing we are using to understand that which would work to negate it we must also not fall victim to hastily considered impositions of aesthetic or moral uniformity that would pretend the acts of analytical understanding and valuation are flawed right from the outset.
As philosophy we are not concerned with erecting conditions where slavery becomes useful or “good” toward some end, although the understanding of these positions does become important, as they do crop up from time to time and it is useful to have seen them already in advance. But to answer your question simply, we can recognize that slavery is the conceptual inverse and negation of emancipation, that one is the limit of the other even where their actual limits fall into confusion, indiscernability or overlap in the practical chaos of the “real world”.
It is, but use how, to whom? Meaning is not only relevant interpersonally or socially, it is firstly and perhaps most importantly applied and actualized individually, internally, personally. Common terms in language that render meaning closed to this internal personal component that I call “spiritual experience” would be examples where language closes itself, restricts itself to the most salient surface level of understanding only, where the utility of language is a death-sentence to the more transcendent imminent experiences or new open possibilities that our use of language should be helping make more accessible to us.
There is personal language, absolutely there is. Or do you think the self so simple and self-evident that it does not have many levels, hidden caverns and depths from which our self-experiences spring forth? Language plays a crucial role in self-understanding, mediating all forms of our inner expressions with each other. The common field in meaning that language levels firstly makes possible self-awareness, profound self-encounter and unification just as it provides for these possibilities between us and other people.
As for “make poetry and hope for the best”, I can’t disagree with that
Except that it predates postmodernism considerably. And for all their talk, postmodernists have emancipated comparatively little; religious ideologues do a lot more practical work.
It wasn’t until it was made to be so. Considering slavery from a functional perspective, for example, it could be an ideal solution to answer the pressing needs of a certain society with certain resources. Morality has clearly trumped functionality in the modern West, by taking that perspective out of polite discussion.
But I don’t understand your questions: weren’t you just saying that moralities are limiting, mind-closing structures?
Use-value may make slavery so appealing that political doctrines are sought to justify it. Vested interests can sway public perceptions very effectively these days. If you’re a moral realist, of course, this makes no difference; slavery is as wrong as it’s always been. But moral realists most usually postulate moral reality as more or less matching the current status quo, or the direction they’d like it to move in.
You value emancipation - does that make it morally good? For you? For everyone? Objectively?
I ask because you start off arguing for ideological flexibility/porousness, but seem to take some value judgements as patently obvious/desirable.
Common terms in language that render meaning closed to this internal personal component that I call "spiritual experience" would be examples where language closes itself, restricts itself to the most salient surface level of understanding only, where the utility of language is a death-sentence to the more transcendent imminent experiences or new open possibilities that our use of language [i]should[/i] be helping make more accessible to us.
All terms in language are common, that’s why you understand what I’m writing now. Language can’t be used to communicate the entirely personal, except in terms of the generally shared.
I think there are personal things and experiences that language can’t adequately communicate, and there are things that it can but doesn’t. For the latter, we see in practice words being adopted for things we tacitly understand but have never formulated as public experiences - Schadenfreude and l’esprit d’escalier, for example. Then you have a sort of “oh, of course, how clever that there’s a word for it” moment. But a lot of the self doesn’t occur on a linguistic level - that you can put thoughts/feelings/experiences into words doesn’t entail them being mediated by words.
This has been a stimulating conversation so far, thank you for your well thought responses.
Yes, emancipation as an idea certainly pre-dates post-modernism; but the way in which emancipation is utilized under post-modernism is different from previous usages. The post-modern perspective is one that tries to particularize everything, to expose and dissolve previously “stable” relations and replace these with new, more multiple or diverse relations “on the surface” that do not extend down into the realms of dogmatical over-certainty or historical determination. Post-modernism can be seen as an attempt to move past previous conceptual bulwarks, to expose cracks in these structures which would pretend themselves to be solidly universal-eternal. Against the “tyranny of reason” then we get a radical swing to the other side, a “tyranny against reason” of sorts. This is certainly an extreme and naive sort of over-reaction, but perhaps just as certainly it is a necessary one; post-modernism can be seen as a step toward more comprehensive ideological mediations by breaking down the old to make room for the new. Of course large cultural-social-political structures, having existed for hundreds or thousands of years, will naturally resist such an attack. And as you hint at we are seeing the limits of post-moderist critique in how these prevailing structures of authority are seemingly able to warp this radical emancipatory potential back into a structurally stabilizing force. It is true that post-modernism lends itself well to redirection of its liberating energy due to the childish or simplfied sort of spontaneous, disorganized forms this energy tends to take.
But the fact that post-modernism lends itself well to being used by what it seeks to undermine does not imply there is no real potential for drastic liberating change within post-modernism. If only at its fringe, while barely formed, rarely conceptualized clearly and disorganized by definition, post-modernism still inserts destructive potentials for chaos into previously stable social spaces, and even by forcing systems to respond to and encompass it post-modernism may yet lead to snownballing changes within these systems. I think the real question is not whether this energy contains the strength to force the emergence of new future potentials against the old inertia and status quo, but whether in forcing modern systems to adapt to its presence post-modernism will lead to more long-term and unpredictable destabilizations and reorganizations.
These sort of historical changes occur over long periods of time and post-modernism is a relatively recent phenomenon, so we may just have to wait and see. It is true that at first glance it appears that the only accomplishment of post-modernism has been to make mankind more susceptible to mechanisms of closure and control by over-bombarding man’s senses and confusing his capacity and willingness for rational discernment. But I would caution against writing off the post-modern potential too soon. There is little telling how deeply these ideas might gather collectively in the unconscious mind.
In my topic here I have set up the situation by identifying openness with truth or spirit; the spiritual coincides with a resistance to attempts at closure and control. What motivates philosophy (in my usage of it here) is a drive for “truth”, for “the real”, for “being”; what motivates the spiritual is the very same thing, but actualized differently. Philosophy seeks intellectual-conceptual liberation as understanding; spirit seeks this same understanding and freedom in an imminent real-world sense, a unity among all inner drives and across all actions, thoughts and sentiments. What we might call self-actualization or profound inner peace and happiness. This represents an attempt at a certain type of unity, one not grounded in an imposition of a top-down hierarchy of structurally sustaining exclusions, but in an organically emerging sense of imminent being sustained by a constant contact between this fertile ground of imminent unity and our overt actions, thoughts and feelings.
I have also set up a continuum of progressive “subtlety of experiences”, moving from sensual to intellectual-emotional to spiritual. For me, philosophy and spirituality are different methods of attempting the same thing: motivating new and more profound encounters with our own actualizing and sustaining truths. And for philosophy as well as spirituality, closure and control, or slavery and ignorance, or apathy and resignation, or dogma and conservative moralism are forces that resist this attempt to push toward truth, are forces that want to keep things they way they are, close off the future as possibility and unknown, and contain man in his multitude of impulses and drives within a carefully defined space that creates ignorance of our own real inner motivations, potential and our capacity for living responsibly. Under my view here, the need for self-actualization and self-understanding, as the drive for “truth” or “spiritual understanding” is precisely what is excluded and rendered impotent by the “utility of slavery” you speak of. Slavery cannot be a real solution where the spiritual or philosophical need holds central sway in a man, because slavery is diametrically opposed to both the means and ends of this spiritual and philosophical motivation.
I differentiate between moralities as dogmatic ideological or conservatively-oriented closed systems of pre-emptive control, and morality itself as a drive for being truthful to the conditions that motivate and give rise to one’s thoughts-feelings-actions. For me, morality is simply one manifestation of the drive for truth, like philosophy, but a pre-conceptual and sentimental set of reactions that we have to certain considered situations; the “morality” is in the reaction and in what this reaction tells us about ourselves as human beings. This reaction is a more imminent or non-intellectual way of experiencing the opposition or syntheses of our inner drives within each other, by encountering these drives in moments where they meet or are in conflict. By “drives” I mean the motivating effects generated by the ideational, emotional, cognitive, instinctive or psychological spaces within us. When an experience actualizes along any of these directions or within any of these forms, a certain “action potential” or energetic effect is born from this action, which creates a certain motivating force within the mind/body. The drive would be this motivating force, born of the inner workings of mental or bodily elements in action and reaction.
In this topic I am setting up morality itself as a center of force within the human, morality as a way of touching on our motivating truths and attempting to experience the interplay of our “inner drives” with each other; a sort of synthetic self-experiencing. For me morality has nothing to do with the sort of “realism” you identify, morality is not stating what is “right and wrong” or making assumptions about “objective” ontological affairs in reality. For me, morality has to do with human nature being thrust into different situations that cast that nature in a certain new light, thus revealing something about ourselves to ourselves. This does not suppose that there is nothing “real” about morality; if human nature arose from non-human nature (we are animals, we evolved) there is certainly a real link there and solipsistic perspectives of idealism certainly fail. But neither am I taking a reductivist position and I do not think the “human” can be reduced to or mapped onto the “non-human”. Between man and nature, man and the “reality” that precedes man certain relations must obtain and there is perhaps no absolute separation, and yet it seems there must also be some separation. But all that is getting somewhat off topic here.
Regarding the use-value of slavery, of course there is use-value to slavery in a political sense. People will always want to control each other, this is a very natural animalistic sort of drive for power and security. But with my coincidence here of truth with spirit, openness with philosophy this sort of use-value can never supervene upon philosophical or spiritual actualizations. The drive for maintaining an open future of possibilities oriented toward the unknown takes precedence over any practical political concerns of the moment. I think the questions we ought be asking are, What does the use-value of slavery tell us about ourselves as humans? As animals? As self-aware beings generally? Another important question: What does the use-value of slavery tell us about the long-term prospects of human survival and happiness? These are very far-reaching questions. I am trying to touch upon these questions here, to start a dialogue in this direction. I am not claiming to know the answers to these questions, but I am proceeding from a certain postulatory position in order to examine the presuppositions and consequences of this position, as well as to shed light on the nature of these above questions and what sort of picture we can paint about what the answers to these questions might look like.
The short answer is “yes and no”, but the long answer is that this is not the right question, or more specifically, this questioning makes little sense within the context of my topic here. My topic postulates emancipatory potential as a central value because I have equated openness with truth, and philosophy with spirit. This is done with an eye toward what the consequences and presuppositions of this position reveal and if/how these might motivate certain understandings or new ideas. That being said, this coincidence between truth and openness, philosophy and spirit entails an inverse relation between closure/control and truth, between slavery and philosophy/spirituality. Slavery is seen as anti-philosophy, anti-spirituality. Of course we might solve certain practical problems of “resource use” or whatever by employing forms of slavery, but that extremely limited perspective of temporary political or economic utility is encompassed by my broader “philosophico-spiritual” perspective, which is able to include and make sense of such momentary expediencies as the practical utility of slavery.
As I have set up this investigation, truth is antithetical to “slavery”, to dogmatic rigidity and to all radical closures of possibility, ideological or otherwise. To me this antithetical relation makes sense. But it remains a postulation for the purpose of philosophical inquiry. You may identify what you believe are problems with this position as you like or propose a counter position, but the idea that “ideological flexibility/porousness” ought to extend even to the very antithesis and negation of the position which seeks to understand and afford this same flexibility and porousness is something I find indefensible. Every philosophical position rests on certain presumed values; we can and should question these values, just as we can question what comes from the positions which affirm these values. We can propose new positions and values, or propose to reject certain positions and values. But the claim that we ought expect philosophical positions to include the self-negation of their own values is absurd; even the implicit expectation of such, to me, reveals only an unstated extreme skepticism regarding the possibility of philosophy generally, or a certain apathy and unwillingness to engage anything on any profound level or with a sincere attitude. Not that I am saying any of that applies to you, not at all.
This is where metaphor comes into play. Through metaphorical language we construct our own personal meaning, and as a relation of meaning this is made possible to be communicated to others. No, we can never “know another’s thoughts”, we can never get inside their minds and experience what they experience as personal meaning. But this does not mean we cannot communicate personal meaning at all. When I read a poem or an aphorism, for example, I can create a personal meaning from this, form a new idea or relation of meaning that I previously did not have. The structure of the language allows for this creation precisely because there is a similarity between the thinking/feeling structures within me and those within whoever wrote the metaphor. Meaning in language is created personally, and the common symbols and ideas used to convey these are shared. The extent to which meaning is actually contained within these mediating forms is the extent of common communication; but the extent that we share actual cognitive and emotional structures, share intellectual or spiritual possibilities, is the extent that self-created personal meaning can occur through encounter with certain metaphorical forms of language, because these forms set up a certain relation between inner experiences, the actual movement through this relation being what leads to the creation of novel personal meaning that is truly self-created but also just as truly bears similarities to the self-created meaning of others.
I agree that we can and do come up with new words for certain experiences that previously were not communicated through language. And the idea that certain thoughts/feelings/experiences can be put into words does not mean that these thoughts/feelings/experiences are themselves mediated by words; what it means, to me, is that these experiences originate on a level that is prior to language. I am not claiming that language is a common mediator of any or all experiences. But I am claiming that through usage of certain lingustic forms (metaphor, imagery relation, e.g. poetry and aphorism) we can communicate personally created experiences to other people, not by directly giving them to this experience but by giving them the basic tools and conditions needed for them to create this personal experience for themselves.
