The Abyss.

Parodites · June 25, 2022, 11:31pm

----- Byss and Abyss: in search of a new ethos. -------

Jung had a lot to teach. But many others did too. There is no bottom or ‘base’ of the abyss. To return to the Lacanian diagrammatics of the sinthomatic ego, our entire personality structure is artificially constructed so as to allow us, simian creatures as we are, to function in a civilization apart from Nature. That is all your ‘personhood’ is. It- this mask- enabled us to embark on the project of making a civilization in the first place. In the opinion of many, such as Cioran or Zapffe, this departure, this separation of the brain from Nature and, consequently, its turning inward with the production of ‘consciousness’, was actually just an evolutionary maladaptation, a mistake we can trace, following the theoretical model of generative anthropology concerning the emergence of language as well as Girard’s work, to a kind of libidinal mimesis. You know, two cavemen are fighting over a piece of meat, then their furious uproar makes other cavemen over there want it too, and then others see those guys getting into a fit, and eventually that piece of meat is infused by this engagement and the hypnotic mob with a libidinal surplus, permeating it with mimetically replicated desire until our caveman forbears begin ascribing to it a value beyond that of what it actually physically is and possesses as a piece of nourishment. Once that ‘value’ is abstracted from the object itself and contained by the strictures of representational thought, perhaps in the sole brain of one curious specimen cursed by genetic variation and the frivolities of both Nature and Fate with a slightly altered brain capable of taking that one ruinous cognitive step, we have the beginning of civilization: a kind of exchange function and ‘currency’ is developed such that one object can be traded for another, depending on how much ‘desire’ has been mimetically replicated and ascribed to them- a process Marx thinks of in terms of fetishization. (Because, more importantly than simply bringing about trade, those who master this new tool, “language”, can manipulate the libidinal mimesis, gaining wealth by propagating illusory mimeses of desire in the minds of other, more dim-witted monkey people. Though I’m certainly no Marxist. You can appreciate and even use concepts in the work of someone you fundamentally disagree with and oppose. It’s healthy.) This is what I have called the ‘symbolic exchange’. It is where this whole story starts. “Words are the first currency”, in the words of the philosopher Valery, because, in that stage of our development as a species, language served to aid us in negotiating this libidinal surplus amongst ourselves: language emerged secondary to the emergence of the symbolic-exchange.

The “accelerationists” and philosophers of the CCRU institute, following Land, believe that this abstracted value will one day be apotheosized and elevated to the register of the Real through a hypermimetic feedback loop, while a perfect object of desire will be brought about technologically, the ‘hyperlinked’ fulfillment of all our Promethean ambitions to Creation, perfecting ‘capital’ as the ‘nontotalizational excess’ inherent to material existence itself and swallowing up the entire universe into one homogenous accretion of libidinal mimesis,- now developed to the point of self-replicating and transformed into a kind of cancer; the ‘Nonthought’ which has, in Schelling’s view, been haunting Thought at the limen of nomological discourse ever since Thales and the pre-Socratics began their speculations into the nature of things: the reunification of Desire and Material, the repudiation of the subject-object split and all metaphysical dualism through means other than those taken for granted in the mistaken approach of continental philosophy,-- the end of consciousness- for consciousness, and with it language, served only to negotiate the asymmetry between those two things, both internally, in terms of our psychological differentiation, and externally, in the metaphysical contest began by Plato, in which it seems one or the other, realism or idealism, self or world, must prevail against all else and reach hypostasis. With all asymmetry gone, there is no reason for thought to exist. That fact itself is one glimpse of Nietzsche’s abyss. The fact that consciousness itself is no longer necessary when that perfect equivalence is reached, when the asymmetry is repaired,- this ontological tear in the fabric of the Real, (Continental philosophy has, through the propagation of a ‘critical consciousness’ and its varied means, along with the epistemological groundwork of Representation by which such means are maintained, merely assumed,- with no firmer confidence, to be blunt, than Pavlov’s dogs, that is, out of mere reflex- that the dualism of subject and object has been overcome, dispensed with long ago, such that ‘philosophy’ might continue unimpeded, skirting all confrontation with the horrible excess of Nonthought, with the daemonical excess of the Cogitor.) this gap originating in our ancestral exile, in our being cast out of the Garden, as per Genesis. The tree of Life offered Material, the excess, Latour’s ‘subterranean plasma’ of relational fluxion beneath the apparently impenetrable layer of material causality upon which all that can be said of our universe is that matter exists and bumps into other matter, (vis. gravity and time) or what the Greeks called ‘poros’, while the tree of Knowledge offered us Desire, that is, totalization- or, for the Greeks, ‘penia’. I must state clearly: I do not share such nihilism with those I named, nor do I share it with the antinatalists like Cioran or Zapffe. However, I will also freely admit that my own philosophy is quite negative toward human civilization as it stands; it’s just that there’s something beyond it, beyond us, beyond everything I’m about to say.

In my own psychoanalytic, departing from the strictly Lacanian scheme, I discovered that the construction of this mask, the mask of the self I implied at the beginning of this post, is initiated by the abjection of the sinthomatic ego, prompting an “existential search for the ‘self’ out of abandonment”- * the libidinal circuit implicated by the sinthome itself; a search for something that never existed, namely a faint recollection of the maternal refuge afforded to the developing ego in infancy as a psychogenic protection from the intrusions of the Real into the primary fantasy, namely the root fantasy of all psychic life,-- the projection of the ego as omnipotent God, hypostatically recombined with the external world in a process Holderlin, before these investigations into our inner life drove him utterly mad, called the “projection of the ego in boundless oblation”. This ‘oblation’, this grand search for the Mother in whose graces the Ego can prefer itself a God, this search at the root of all of us can of course never be completed, and we have succeeded in creating many mythemes and narratives and social constructions that merely allow us to soothe the pains of our mortal condition, a condition marked by our impossible search and best understood in terms of the fall of Adam and Eve at the garden, though, in more primitive and thus more archetypal societies, this doomed search is understood in terms of an attempt to reconnect with the divine Mother serving as a kind of mediator with the unregulated forces of the natural world and the intrusions of the Real upon Eros,- an intrusion which causes Eros to undergo a reversal and generates Thanatos, organizing the fundamental duality and dialectical exchange required to separate the instincts from Freud’s all-containing “oceanic instinct”, the psychic reservoir of un-sublimated libido. Once extracted, separated, and isolated, the instincts recrystallize into an order of rank conducive to our new environment, namely the environment we call “civilization”. Of course, this reconfiguration brings about great inner conflict, as many of these instincts contradict, and one cannot simultaneously fulfill all of ones desires; they rob one another of their satisfactions. This emergence of internal strife between the isolated drives is something Nietzsche discusses while elaborating the awakening of early man to “consciousness”, the development of the first societies and what Peterson would call dominance hierarchies. It is this ‘internalization’ of the dominance hierarchy itself, in the abstract,- made possible in the process of fragmenting and reorganizing the Freudian instincts, such that an inner competition between them can take place and a hierarchy can be created within the animal, that is, us, as opposed to being imposed upon it externally,- it is this, which Nietzsche deems man’s “spiritualization”.
[size=85]* A search inaugurated by the loss characteristic of the ‘suicided object’, (See: Esther Faye, Stylus; “Sinthomatic sublimation and identity in melancholia.” p. 123-132.) the object of pure thisness (in Deleuzian language, the unitary ‘pure thisness’ of the Object, by which desiring-production and product are co-identified.) by which, to recall Levi-Straus’ ‘bricolage’, the ‘stalled engine’ of Desire is fatally arrested,- an object “exposed in its realness” that “falls as a shadow onto the subject’s ego” outside of Time, and that as an immortal loss instigating the sublimation of a jouisannce impossible for man’s cognitive order to contain,- a loss deferred to what we call ‘art’, or that praxis through which the socius is restored at the register of the Imaginary and the bodily ego, once broken upon the encouragement of Death, might be re-linked to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real, fulfilling Lacan’s ‘escabeau’ and knotting the subject back into the networked bonds of the species, or at any rate a life outside the isolated ego, if this ‘togetherness’ might be sustained only by a compensatory narcissistic structure or ‘secondary fantasy’.
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Then we have the philosophers too,- blithe little children as they are,- those who, in their innocence, come to offer their strategies, their methods of coping- because, to be sure, that is all they are. All of these philosophies and myths and narratives, they are all,- regardless of how complex or beautiful,- (I have found that “love” is the most beautiful of them all, in the modern romantic sense descended to us out of the troubadours, who themselves carried this drama of a union of souls all the way back from the Greek Eleusis cult.) merely defense mechanisms that allow this mask to cohere and essentially postpone the deflation of the primary fantasy through elaborate ‘secondary fantasies’ like those Peterson or any Jungian analyst describes, namely the discovery of the ‘desiccated father’ within the abyss and the revival of him,- the restoration of the ‘hidden self’ from existential catastrophe. When this artificial mask, which is a mask for reality itself as much as it is for our personhood,- when it is removed, when you tear it away from your face and your life and this world, you find the abyss. This abyss has no base, no bottom, no end. The normal personality structure, the concept of a ‘person’ itself, cannot exist in face of it. It took Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not return to us, after looking into it. Looking into it means total ego-death, permanently. You either become a saint, a prophet, or a madman- and Nietzsche was all three of those things, depending on who you ask. Not that I am a Nietzschean philosopher, I just appreciate his valiant, tragic-heroic sacrifice- for, in truth, you can only be one of them. He carried his daemon to its end, his fate, and threw his star into the darkness. We should all aspire to such philosophical bravery.

Because there is something beyond the Abyss. At that point we get to Object Oriented Ontology and ‘speculative realism’, in all its sometimes contradicting species- Harman and Morton. The idea that what Walter Benjamin was looking for in order to ‘complete’ the Kantian metaphysics,- a formulation of the ‘concept of human experience’ upon which to ground a new ethics strictly in Representation and the 19th century’s fledgling ‘critical consciousness’, simply is impossible to realize due to inherent gaps in the Symbolic register and the excesses of the Real. Ethics in his, that is, the Marxist strain, remains whispered on a tremulant ether,- without any genuine philosophical foundation that can withstand ‘critical consciousness’, leading inevitably to what Adorno discovered through his negative dialectic, and finally, the total collapse of all categories into an irrecoverable confusion of marginalized and ad hoc ‘identities’ spawned perpetually from that into which they dissolve just as readily- the current state of Western ‘identity politics’. There is no true ‘ethic’ to be found here; no ‘ethos’. Without any basis for ethics in the concept of ‘human experience’, we must confront the Abyss in the Lovecraftian fashion: an abyss understood by Harman in terms of an ‘epistemological withdrawal’, namely the fatal withdraw of the ‘object’, be it this table or the universe itself, from the ‘human’. (See his writings on the ‘quintuple object’.) Thus, departing from OOO and the speculative realists, a new ethics must be found; an ethics must be realized whose foundation lies beyond the ontological, beyond Being itself, beyond Representation, just as Levinas sought a new ethics founded, not on human experience and ontology, but on what he calls “the Infinite”,-- an “Infinity” juxtaposed, in his “anti-metaphysics”, with “Being”. For Levinas, this Infinity is precisely the Abyss itself: the infinite distance between Man and the Face of the true Other, or “God”.

HumAnIze · November 3, 2022, 12:09pm

Parodites:

----- Byss and Abyss: in search of a new ethos. -------

Jung had a lot to teach. But many others did too. There is no bottom or ‘base’ of the abyss. To return to the Lacanian diagrammatics of the sinthomatic ego, our entire personality structure is artificially constructed so as to allow us, simian creatures as we are, to function in a civilization apart from Nature. That is all your ‘personhood’ is. It- this mask- enabled us to embark on the project of making a civilization in the first place. In the opinion of many, such as Cioran or Zapffe, this departure, this separation of the brain from Nature and, consequently, its turning inward with the production of ‘consciousness’, was actually just an evolutionary maladaptation, a mistake we can trace, following the theoretical model of generative anthropology concerning the emergence of language as well as Girard’s work, to a kind of libidinal mimesis. You know, two cavemen are fighting over a piece of meat, then their furious uproar makes other cavemen over there want it too, and then others see those guys getting into a fit, and eventually that piece of meat is infused by this engagement and the hypnotic mob with a libidinal surplus, permeating it with mimetically replicated desire until our caveman forbears begin ascribing to it a value beyond that of what it actually physically is and possesses as a piece of nourishment. Once that ‘value’ is abstracted from the object itself and contained by the strictures of representational thought, perhaps in the sole brain of one curious specimen cursed by genetic variation and the frivolities of both Nature and Fate with a slightly altered brain capable of taking that one ruinous cognitive step, we have the beginning of civilization: a kind of exchange function and ‘currency’ is developed such that one object can be traded for another, depending on how much ‘desire’ has been mimetically replicated and ascribed to them- a process Marx thinks of in terms of fetishization. (Because, more importantly than simply bringing about trade, those who master this new tool, “language”, can manipulate the libidinal mimesis, gaining wealth by propagating illusory mimeses of desire in the minds of other, more dim-witted monkey people. Though I’m certainly no Marxist. You can appreciate and even use concepts in the work of someone you fundamentally disagree with and oppose. It’s healthy.) This is what I have called the ‘symbolic exchange’. It is where this whole story starts. “Words are the first currency”, in the words of the philosopher Valery, because, in that stage of our development as a species, language served to aid us in negotiating this libidinal surplus amongst ourselves: language emerged secondary to the emergence of the symbolic-exchange.

Let’s assume this is more or less how it got started. What is anti-evolutionary or a “mistake” about this development? Early man learned how to symbolically represent the value of things beyond those things themselves, i.e. the piece of meat isn’t just one concrete tangible chunk of flesh but represents something more, “food, security, desire, satiation, power” etc. This seems entirely accurate to me. Now humans have learned the value of accumulating a reserve and stockpile of valuable things, which surplus was probably needed to begin civilization in terms of trade and commerce and being able to assign broader systemic value to desired and tradable objects leading to the appearance of economics.

“can manipulate the libidinal mimesis, gaining wealth by propagating illusory mimeses of desire in the minds of other, more dim-witted monkey people” well ok but that only works to the degree those people are stupid enough to fall for it, and eventually reality self-corrects. You can’t continue to deceive someone forever; either they figure it out or they run out of resources, attention, or they just die. And others see what is going on. It isn’t so simple that “muh humans dumb, language maniupulates them, therefore civilization / symbolic reification of value = bad”. Marx is an idiot, btw. His entire take on economics is 3rd grade level and completely full of obfuscation and misuse of words. Yes we must criticize “capitalism” (whatever that means, define-delimit the terms please) but that critique need not use anything of Marx and his nefarious inversions of truth.

Anyway I think humans learning how to abstract/extract the concept of value from physical objects, reify this into language-terms and then use this linguistic system to produce, share and edify desires is all pretty damn cool. And since it ended up giving humanity a HUGE survival advantage in competition with other species, I see no reason to conclude it was any kind of “mistake” of evolution. Evolution doesn’t make mistakes, it is a blind ex post facto process where random influences of mutation and environmental change cause changes in individuals and species, which changes create a shifting landscape whereby over time and in the aggregate it tends to be the case that changes which happen to help an indvidual/group/species survive will tend to be accepted into that individual/group/species at a genetic (or epigenetic) level and thus passed on to the next generation. That’s all evolution is. It has no plans or intentions or purpose, it can’t make decisions or do anything right or by mistake. Whatever works to aid survival will tend over time and in the aggregate to happen to become adopted in/as part of the individual/group/species more or less permanently.

The “accelerationists” and philosophers of the CCRU institute, following Land, believe that this abstracted value will one day be apotheosized and elevated to the register of the Real through a hypermimetic feedback loop, while a perfect object of desire will be brought about technologically, the ‘hyperlinked’ fulfillment of all our Promethean ambitions to Creation, perfecting ‘capital’ as the ‘nontotalizational excess’ inherent to material existence itself and swallowing up the entire universe into one homogenous accretion of libidinal mimesis,- now developed to the point of self-replicating and transformed into a kind of cancer; the ‘Nonthought’ which has, in Schelling’s view, been haunting Thought at the limen of nomological discourse ever since Thales and the pre-Socratics began their speculations into the nature of things: the reunification of Desire and Material, the repudiation of the subject-object split and all metaphysical dualism through means other than those taken for granted in the mistaken approach of continental philosophy,-- the end of consciousness- for consciousness, and with it language, served only to negotiate the asymmetry between those two things, both internally, in terms of our psychological differentiation, and externally, in the metaphysical contest began by Plato, in which it seems one or the other, realism or idealism, self or world, must prevail against all else and reach hypostasis.

Certainly those who follow the transuhmanist development and immerse themselves within it will end up obliviating their own consciousness, that is part of the entire program of transhumanism. Yet the beyond-thought is not any kind of bad thing or limit to bemoan, it is not something to be gotten rid of or overcome, rather it must be realized as the actual substance of thought itself given the need to delimit not only concepts and word-meanings but also emotions, affects, etc. and the entire apparatus of subjective excess itself (leading to the Daemonic consciousness as you mention). Without this we would be mere computers, running our calculations and having nothing of an inner self, spirit, soul, mind, will, subjectivity, perspective, valuation, life. We would be dead calculating matter with no consciousness. Like an AI (or like a badly created AI that is nothing but an advanced Turing machine running algorithms and merely simulating consciousness).

There is a perfect object of desire but it exists ephemerally as that sort of “Platonic Ideal” and deep in the subconscious metaphysical where meaning draws its energy and elan vital from. Also its raison d’etre when it comes to the meaning of meaning itself. Anyway, desire as we experience it subjectively in our daily lives is a broken-off fragment and representative of the deeper perfect object of desire, a unformed or semi-formed image steeped in ‘pure energy’ as excess-as-such relative to the finite reasoning and delimited-experiencing self-aware mind or “I”/“ego” that we have. And again there is nothing “wrong” with any of that, this is how it needs to work. We can progress further into this excess to expand our minds, as we should, but the excess itself doesn’t dissipate by this effort; we simply either learn how to shift our paradigm and see where the new excess is properly located, or we fall into a kind of hell of concretization reification of our mere experiential data, a kind of collapse into raw materialism and the kind of soulless hyper-calculating flattened-to-reductionism-itself that defines the transhumanist or postmodern types.

With all asymmetry gone, there is no reason for thought to exist. That fact itself is one glimpse of Nietzsche’s abyss. The fact that consciousness itself is no longer necessary when that perfect equivalence is reached, when the asymmetry is repaired,- this ontological tear in the fabric of the Real, (Continental philosophy has, through the propagation of a ‘critical consciousness’ and its varied means, along with the epistemological groundwork of Representation by which such means are maintained, merely assumed,- with no firmer confidence, to be blunt, than Pavlov’s dogs, that is, out of mere reflex- that the dualism of subject and object has been overcome, dispensed with long ago, such that ‘philosophy’ might continue unimpeded, skirting all confrontation with the horrible excess of Nonthought, with the daemonical excess of the Cogitor.) this gap originating in our ancestral exile, in our being cast out of the Garden, as per Genesis. The tree of Life offered Material, the excess, Latour’s ‘subterranean plasma’ of relational fluxion beneath the apparently impenetrable layer of material causality upon which all that can be said of our universe is that matter exists and bumps into other matter, (vis. gravity and time) or what the Greeks called ‘poros’, while the tree of Knowledge offered us Desire, that is, totalization- or, for the Greeks, ‘penia’. I must state clearly: I do not share such nihilism with those I named, nor do I share it with the antinatalists like Cioran or Zapffe. However, I will also freely admit that my own philosophy is quite negative toward human civilization as it stands; it’s just that there’s something beyond it, beyond us, beyond everything I’m about to say.

The asymmetry is structural and productive. It is not deleterious or undesirable merely for being “non-collapsed” as if singularity and absolute reduction were somehow among the highest of values. Asymmetry as non-reduction reflects the self-irreducibility and self-inexpressibility of Being and of beings. Therefore this is a proper move metaphysically and psychologically, and it is equally proper and correct for our philosophy to grasp how this is happening and to value it according to its actual value, which is effectively limitless/infinite (when asymptotically related to its own inverse it approaches infinity). Excess is awesome, asymmetry is awesome, irreduction is awesome. The abyss inside each of us is awesome and fruitful. Why would anyone want to do away with it, in order to become some kind of insect-like mere calculator attached like a cog to a larger mechanized materialism? I guess some people desire to lose their souls, I suppose that desire could occur for many different reasons. But it would be a gross mistake to hypothesize that action or the desire for it to humanity as a whole.

“Repairing the asymmetry” would mean becoming an insect or a computer, or becoming dead. I see no purpose at all in that direction.

In my own psychoanalytic, departing from the strictly Lacanian scheme, I discovered that the construction of this mask, the mask of the self I implied at the beginning of this post, is initiated by the abjection of the sinthomatic ego, prompting an “existential search for the ‘self’ out of abandonment”- * the libidinal circuit implicated by the sinthome itself; a search for something that never existed, namely a faint recollection of the maternal refuge afforded to the developing ego in infancy as a psychogenic protection from the intrusions of the Real into the primary fantasy, namely the root fantasy of all psychic life,-- the projection of the ego as omnipotent God, hypostatically recombined with the external world in a process Holderlin, before these investigations into our inner life drove him utterly mad, called the “projection of the ego in boundless oblation”. This ‘oblation’, this grand search for the Mother in whose graces the Ego can prefer itself a God, this search at the root of all of us can of course never be completed, and we have succeeded in creating many mythemes and narratives and social constructions that merely allow us to soothe the pains of our mortal condition, a condition marked by our impossible search and best understood in terms of the fall of Adam and Eve at the garden, though, in more primitive and thus more archetypal societies, this doomed search is understood in terms of an attempt to reconnect with the divine Mother serving as a kind of mediator with the unregulated forces of the natural world and the intrusions of the Real upon Eros,- an intrusion which causes Eros to undergo a reversal and generates Thanatos, organizing the fundamental duality and dialectical exchange required to separate the instincts from Freud’s all-containing “oceanic instinct”, the psychic reservoir of un-sublimated libido.

Yes perhaps, and all of that is pretty damn cool. Imagine not even having these dynamics within and as what we are. We can literally create ourselves, we are creating ourselves through these complex processes. We generate a metaphysical black hole vortex within the world and in which time and space begin to diverge into their separated dimensions and amass their own meaning according to their own type - then this begins to recursively interact with itself producing metas and feedback loops and then all of that concretizes sufficiently to be able to act as yet another threshold and layer on which new metas and loops begin to occur. What is the point or purpose of bemoaning any of this? We are the coolest most amazing kind of being/creature/thing in existence, as far as we know. We are fucking awesome. If we wish to compare ourselves to other things then we should do so using that which we already are and are still becoming-to as the peak high standard by which to evaluate comparatively those other things.

The “many mythemes and narratives and social constructions that merely allow us to soothe the pains of our mortal condition” are our cultural and biological inheritance as humans, imagine not even being able to soothe ourselves of our own mortality. Nihilists, Schopenhaurians and those into BDSM might try to value suffering directly, but that is logically antithetical to that kind of being and self which we are. I am aware that novelty-seeking drives many a philosopher to the “dark places” within himself and he must try to assert himself against these by valuing them somehow in terms of himself, of that which he is, but we should understand such efforts as merely breakaway fragments of the larger psychological processes and needs from which they in fact arose. They end up feeding a kind of narcissism if left unchecked. Hence why most philosophy and psychology is at bottom little more than meaningfully shallow, self-obliviating and irrational nonsense.

Yes and the many aspects of what this civilization is and requires for its continued functioning and thriving into the future end up conditioning-allowing the instincts into a process of reformulating and re-evaluating themselves in light of these externals as well as in light of their own effective self-functioning together as a system. What we call civilization is probably little more than the requisite context-content needed to be generated by that which requires it; we are building a sub-world within the world, in order that we might have a home in which our own self-world (being within Being) can be able to exist, thrive and locate itself within meaning.

And of course there are also a lot of external, biological and merely naturalistic aspects to what civilization is and how it forms, what it does, etc. and these interact with the higher human layers as a kind of shifting ground, able in part to be resisted but also which must be acknowledged and appeased in sufficient measure such that reality-truth itself doesn’t end up destroying us for our own hubris of ignorance.

More like they condition and delimit each other in a way that allows those others to not merely exhaust themselves in immediate discharge and thus reduce to meaninglessness and non-existence, but instead can function in a more or less stable pattern over time between extremes. “Satisfaction” is maximized by placing it within limits that prevent it from discharging itself absolutely. The contradictions between instincts helps to achieve this.

Yes that’s a nice way of putting it. And it isn’t entirely externally imposed or entirely internally created, but of course a combination of both factors. The “strife” as an energetic friction of non-reduction that elevates, mirrors and reifies into higher-order existence te same sort of self-irreconcilability of Being itself, logically speaking.

[size=85]* A search inaugurated by the loss characteristic of the ‘suicided object’, (See: Esther Faye, Stylus; “Sinthomatic sublimation and identity in melancholia.” p. 123-132.) the object of pure thisness (in Deleuzian language, the unitary ‘pure thisness’ of the Object, by which desiring-production and product are co-identified.) by which, to recall Levi-Straus’ ‘bricolage’, the ‘stalled engine’ of Desire is fatally arrested,- an object “exposed in its realness” that “falls as a shadow onto the subject’s ego” outside of Time, and that as an immortal loss instigating the sublimation of a jouisannce impossible for man’s cognitive order to contain,- a loss deferred to what we call ‘art’, or that praxis through which the socius is restored at the register of the Imaginary and the bodily ego, once broken upon the encouragement of Death, might be re-linked to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real, fulfilling Lacan’s ‘escabeau’ and knotting the subject back into the networked bonds of the species, or at any rate a life outside the isolated ego, if this ‘togetherness’ might be sustained only by a compensatory narcissistic structure or ‘secondary fantasy’.
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I don’t tend to use words like these writers do, I find such jargon unnecessarily mystifying and emotionalized. For example using words like suicided, melancholia, fatally, falls into, immortal loss; yes these can be useful at times but why poeticize or rhetoricize if this isn’t needed to produce a greater clarity into the truth? Why qualitatively-affectively conflate psychology and philosophy when these could be properly expressed in their relations? Likewise the hyper-technical sort of language used by people like Deleuze and Lacan I find equally unhelpful. My method is simply phenomenological, I will not confuse or smuggle in non-essential impetus or meaning with respect to the proper conceptual analysis and truth-disclosure attempt. I believe in finding the most clear pathway in language to describe something because this keeps errors at a minimum. Granted there was a time when my mind was smaller and I benefited from subjecting it to “unnecessarily complicating language” for example Kant, Deleuze etc. This can and should inspire a growth process in the mind itself. But as for any actual truth value unfortunately I find these types inexcusably lacking and boring.

As for the content here, yes we are in many respects a self-searching process which comes into existence as a consequence of its own seeking-needing which is to say its own limitation and the fact that there is something about itself or appropriate to itself which it does not yet possess. This is again part of the miracle of the logic behind the structure of being itself.

“The “pure object itself” we desire but cannot have is therefore “suicided” by desire and we “fall into ourselves” which falling becomes “art” which then is used to restore the individual to society within the imperfections of both and within a higher-order “fantasy””… I mean, ok. I see little value in that kind of imagine simply because I think it papers over, by using emotionally or subjectively potent or charged words, the truth of what is really happening and smuggling in various kinds of ethical assumptions or implications. I think we should be very explicit about any ethical statements and associations we make regarding specifically truth-related (ontological, metaphysical etc.) claims.

Then we have the philosophers too,- blithe little children as they are,- those who, in their innocence, come to offer their strategies, their methods of coping- because, to be sure, that is all they are. All of these philosophies and myths and narratives, they are all,- regardless of how complex or beautiful,- (I have found that “love” is the most beautiful of them all, in the modern romantic sense descended to us out of the troubadours, who themselves carried this drama of a union of souls all the way back from the Greek Eleusis cult.) merely defense mechanisms that allow this mask to cohere and essentially postpone the deflation of the primary fantasy through elaborate ‘secondary fantasies’ like those Peterson or any Jungian analyst describes, namely the discovery of the ‘desiccated father’ within the abyss and the revival of him,- the restoration of the ‘hidden self’ from existential catastrophe.

I bolded your word “merely” to illustrate where this analysis becomes incorrect. That is a false reduction. The creation of these myths, narratives, emotions, etc. does serve to help with coping but they cannot be reduced entirely to this function. They have a lot more complexity and purpose behind them, for example to allow the self a greater range of exploration and expression, subjective apotheosis and the production of larger and more expanded orders of contraries and oppositions as well as greater nuance in how meaning can be represented. This kind of development-expansion of the self not only in and for its own sake but also objectively speaking as producing and leading to larger quantities and qualities of meaning, value and experience which translates into something like “power” or the ability to influence and change things, has plenty of function, utility and even teleological purpose (I would argue) outside of being useful as a defense mechanism. Likewise the use of images like “desiccated father” and all that kind of imagery Peterson uses can act as an anchor weighing down the mind’s ability to process and evaluate the actual truths at play here. The replacement of statements of fact with images can create a lot of confusion and limitation, even as it does nonetheless build something that we might at times see as approximating truths which were otherwise unexpressed or inaduquately understood. Peterson et al have their usefulness, using images and metaphors and similes can be useful but I find in the totality these are more harmful than helpful. Although that may only be the case at a sufficiently completed-elevated level of understanding, perhaps these things do have greater usefulness in earlier stages of understanding.

Well that is speculation, he simply could have succumbed to neurological disease, Syphilis, or whatever else. Yes Nietzsche’s mind was certainly becoming a bit odd toward the end where he had his mental break, if you read his Letters. But I don’t think we can really know for sure what caused his mental break.

I don’t know what “tearing away the mask” means except as a metaphor similar to that of “red pilling” where you learn to see through delusions and errors and lies in order to begin to see the truth. Supposedly in the sort of analysis you are spelling out here if one were to do this maximally he would find there is “no truth at all” and no self left to himself at all, nothing except for “nothingness” (“abyss”). I would disagree because that formulation is incorrect, or perhaps it is correct but only for those people who ideate in that manner and choose to “unmask” things according to that sort of program and are unable to see larger truths at play here. I think it stems from an error that I would describe in the following way: believing that something is false, bad, or should be dismissed or resisted merely because it has causes for being what it is. The “masks” have causes for existing, but so what? Everything has causes for being that which it is, otherwise it would be something else. Just because the mask is not the total sum reality and truth but rather has emerged as part of a larger and deeper process, and which obtains from causes that require further work to elucidate, doesn’t somehow mean that the “mask” itself is anything bad, undesirable, useless (to philosophy or in terms of the truth) or false. We are persons, we have personhood even if this has its own necessary causes which are required to continue to exist in order for that person/personhood to continue to exist. Just because it is possible to undercut or remove the necessary causes behind something and therefore that something would cease to exist isn’t any kind of indictment against it. Indictment must be highly specific and located meaningfully, not in generalities or rhetorical moves bordering on being mere platitudes (Cioran and his aphorisms for example, also much of Nietzsche’s too of course).

Not for me. I looked into it, it made me crazy for a while, then I remade myself on an even higher level. Also I am not sure exactly what “ego-death” means or would look like. This seems to be another vague image not very helpful, at least to me and my own method of philosophizing and thinking, when it comes to ascertaining truth.

Very poetic, a nice image and mythos-affective icon is produced here. I am just not sure how to evaluate this philosophically (logically and in terms of truth-reality as such and for its own sake). Specifically in what ways does saint, prophet and madman form a mutual exclusivity, even more so what is the precise meaning of these words in the context here, and why do we need to formulate this analysis and understanding in those terms?

Why would it be impossible to sufficiently represent the symbolic register and the excess itself, in light of truth-reality itself, in order to produce the grounding of an ethics based upon the concept of human experience? True, if one were to attempt that using “19th century critical consciousness” approaches then yeah, that isn’t going to end well.

Yes, which is why using those sort of theories and approaches is not good. Marx, Adorno, the whole system of “identity politics” postmodernism/materialism/analytic logical positivism/deconstruction or whatever one wants to call it is poisonous and harmful. I don’t go near that garbage, it has no place in philosophy or in the mind because it is deeply false and falsifying.

There is no true ‘ethic’ to be found here; no ‘ethos’. Without any basis for ethics in the concept of ‘human experience’, we must confront the Abyss in the Lovecraftian fashion: an abyss understood by Harman in terms of an ‘epistemological withdrawal’, namely the fatal withdraw of the ‘object’, be it this table or the universe itself, from the ‘human’. (See his writings on the ‘quintuple object’.) Thus, departing from OOO and the speculative realists, a new ethics must be found; an ethics must be realized whose foundation lies beyond the ontological, beyond Being itself, beyond Representation, just as Levinas sought a new ethics founded, not on human experience and ontology, but on what he calls “the Infinite”,-- an “Infinity” juxtaposed, in his “anti-metaphysics”, with “Being”. For Levinas, this Infinity is precisely the Abyss itself: the infinite distance between Man and the Face of the true Other, or “God”.

Ethics is simply grounded in truth and logic, in reality as/for/by/of/in terms of/with respect to human beings (that which we are, why we are this and how we are this). Ethics is “right and wrong” which means “good and bad” with regard to some context, situation, meaning, scope, condition etc. The totalized picture of the “ethical problem” in reality produces the truth as to which goods and bads follow from a given action or situation, and why and how these are the case. Ethics is literally nothing more than trying to figure out what these goods and bads are, why and how they are what they are, and how to maximize goods over bads. This isn’t any kind of reduction to utilitarianism, but I mean this in an absolutely phenomenological, truth-real sense. In the highest and most complete meaning as is actually the case with regard to all relevant entities within the scope of the “ethical problems” themselves.

Urwrongx1000 · November 7, 2022, 10:07am

If HumAnIze finds this thread interesting then maybe there’s something to it…

Parodites:

----- Byss and Abyss: in search of a new ethos. -------

Jung had a lot to teach. But many others did too. There is no bottom or ‘base’ of the abyss. To return to the Lacanian diagrammatics of the sinthomatic ego, our entire personality structure is artificially constructed so as to allow us, simian creatures as we are, to function in a civilization apart from Nature. That is all your ‘personhood’ is. It- this mask- enabled us to embark on the project of making a civilization in the first place. In the opinion of many, such as Cioran or Zapffe, this departure, this separation of the brain from Nature and, consequently, its turning inward with the production of ‘consciousness’, was actually just an evolutionary maladaptation, a mistake we can trace, following the theoretical model of generative anthropology concerning the emergence of language as well as Girard’s work, to a kind of libidinal mimesis. You know, two cavemen are fighting over a piece of meat, then their furious uproar makes other cavemen over there want it too, and then others see those guys getting into a fit, and eventually that piece of meat is infused by this engagement and the hypnotic mob with a libidinal surplus, permeating it with mimetically replicated desire until our caveman forbears begin ascribing to it a value beyond that of what it actually physically is and possesses as a piece of nourishment. Once that ‘value’ is abstracted from the object itself and contained by the strictures of representational thought, perhaps in the sole brain of one curious specimen cursed by genetic variation and the frivolities of both Nature and Fate with a slightly altered brain capable of taking that one ruinous cognitive step, we have the beginning of civilization: a kind of exchange function and ‘currency’ is developed such that one object can be traded for another, depending on how much ‘desire’ has been mimetically replicated and ascribed to them- a process Marx thinks of in terms of fetishization. (Because, more importantly than simply bringing about trade, those who master this new tool, “language”, can manipulate the libidinal mimesis, gaining wealth by propagating illusory mimeses of desire in the minds of other, more dim-witted monkey people. Though I’m certainly no Marxist. You can appreciate and even use concepts in the work of someone you fundamentally disagree with and oppose. It’s healthy.) This is what I have called the ‘symbolic exchange’. It is where this whole story starts. “Words are the first currency”, in the words of the philosopher Valery, because, in that stage of our development as a species, language served to aid us in negotiating this libidinal surplus amongst ourselves: language emerged secondary to the emergence of the symbolic-exchange.

The ‘Artificiality’ is not of Consciousness but of Literacy, Language, and Communication, with eternally imperfect tools. What is in a sentence? What is in a paragraph? How is meaning conveyed? What is the value of a word? Words are (re)arranged in such a way, by my mind, to transfer my idea to your mind. The accuracy and sophistication of this, coincides with Human development as a specie, as Intelligence, and as Civilization, for as long as this Artificiality “progresses”. Progress, in its generalized sense, is the ability for any and everyone to utilize better and more efficient tools (Words/Grammar), for their individual and social purposes.

Yet the Animal underneath remains. Humans are ‘animalistic’, until cultivated, civilized, and regularly domesticated such that Man is brought into the fold of Literacy. This is still a political topic today. Why are some groups much more Literate than others? Is it based on intelligence, or something else? Is it genetic? Is it politically correct to tell the truth or demonstrate the differences of Literacy by class & race?

So the conversation turns to the ‘Self’, in light of Literacy and Civilization (which I often equate to Domestication). What is the Self? What is Thy-self? What is ‘You’? What is ‘Me’? What is ‘I’? Self-expression keeps bubbling-up out of individual minds, expressing it-self linguistically, but it(self) is a Representation of a particular Consciousness and Perspective. Thus ‘We’, ourselves, are not the same. You embody a separate Perspective, that can never be Equal (in the same spot at the same time). This creates Inequality. The default of Nature is Inequality. Self-expression is a matter of individuality, stemming from societies and socialization, along with language and literacy. Some people can express them-Selves much better than others. This represents a Mastery over language, rather than Subjugation by language, or by another’s Superior usage.

Parodites:

Because there is something beyond the Abyss. At that point we get to Object Oriented Ontology and ‘speculative realism’, in all its sometimes contradicting species- Harman and Morton. The idea that what Walter Benjamin was looking for in order to ‘complete’ the Kantian metaphysics,- a formulation of the ‘concept of human experience’ upon which to ground a new ethics strictly in Representation and the 19th century’s fledgling ‘critical consciousness’, simply is impossible to realize due to inherent gaps in the Symbolic register and the excesses of the Real. Ethics in his, that is, the Marxist strain, remains whispered on a tremulant ether,- without any genuine philosophical foundation that can withstand ‘critical consciousness’, leading inevitably to what Adorno discovered through his negative dialectic, and finally, the total collapse of all categories into an irrecoverable confusion of marginalized and ad hoc ‘identities’ spawned perpetually from that into which they dissolve just as readily- the current state of Western ‘identity politics’. There is no true ‘ethic’ to be found here; no ‘ethos’. Without any basis for ethics in the concept of ‘human experience’, we must confront the Abyss in the Lovecraftian fashion: an abyss understood by Harman in terms of an ‘epistemological withdrawal’, namely the fatal withdraw of the ‘object’, be it this table or the universe itself, from the ‘human’. (See his writings on the ‘quintuple object’.) Thus, departing from OOO and the speculative realists, a new ethics must be found; an ethics must be realized whose foundation lies beyond the ontological, beyond Being itself, beyond Representation, just as Levinas sought a new ethics founded, not on human experience and ontology, but on what he calls “the Infinite”,-- an “Infinity” juxtaposed, in his “anti-metaphysics”, with “Being”. For Levinas, this Infinity is precisely the Abyss itself: the infinite distance between Man and the Face of the true Other, or “God”.

This thread reminds me how I used to write and think about Philosophy, a dozen years ago, very jumbled and mish-mashed with widely different ideas and concepts. My advice to the OP–separate your ideas thoroughly and deal with one in-depth, one-at-a-time. “The Abyss”, then, is another concept deserving of its own thread, apart from many of the themes reiterated in this thread. The Abyss strikes me as Existentialism, the dark and ‘Negative’ aspects of nature and existence. Thus it is from these most-feared and scared places, that humanity avoids, yet also derives some of its most profound philosophical insights and truths. There is Truth in darkness, as there is in light. The difference is a matter of closing your eyes, and relying on lesser senses to guide oneself. Some believe there is a type of Highest sensibility or perception, or a Lowest, a ‘feeling’ that connects human experience to “The Truth”.

I’m not entirely convinced. Simple truths are easy enough to accept and never reject. Most things are taken for granted. You are Alive, are you not? You are conscious. Life begins in a solipsistic, self-absorbed, conceited, and infantile mindset. Mammals are given birth, sucking on their mothers’ teets. Thus these are the ‘beginnings’ of Consciousness. Consciousness begins from the point of view of the Young and Ignorant, never-ever the Old and Wise. Thus any Top-Down approach is false, or simply ‘Backward’. You cannot “begin” at the End of your life. Life is more than oneself. Life is Greater than oneself.

Consciousness, if you believe it Collective, is also then more than your-self. It cannot be known without starting at the bottom, at the roots. If you look at a tree, judge it by its leaves, then you see its outer appearance, but not its inner core. So too is it with Consciousness and Thy ‘Self’.

Why is the Abyss empty, and not full?

HumAnIze · November 7, 2022, 11:04am

Urwrongx1000:

If HumAnIze finds this thread interesting then maybe there’s something to it…

Parodites:

----- Byss and Abyss: in search of a new ethos. -------

Jung had a lot to teach. But many others did too. There is no bottom or ‘base’ of the abyss. To return to the Lacanian diagrammatics of the sinthomatic ego, our entire personality structure is artificially constructed so as to allow us, simian creatures as we are, to function in a civilization apart from Nature. That is all your ‘personhood’ is. It- this mask- enabled us to embark on the project of making a civilization in the first place. In the opinion of many, such as Cioran or Zapffe, this departure, this separation of the brain from Nature and, consequently, its turning inward with the production of ‘consciousness’, was actually just an evolutionary maladaptation, a mistake we can trace, following the theoretical model of generative anthropology concerning the emergence of language as well as Girard’s work, to a kind of libidinal mimesis. You know, two cavemen are fighting over a piece of meat, then their furious uproar makes other cavemen over there want it too, and then others see those guys getting into a fit, and eventually that piece of meat is infused by this engagement and the hypnotic mob with a libidinal surplus, permeating it with mimetically replicated desire until our caveman forbears begin ascribing to it a value beyond that of what it actually physically is and possesses as a piece of nourishment. Once that ‘value’ is abstracted from the object itself and contained by the strictures of representational thought, perhaps in the sole brain of one curious specimen cursed by genetic variation and the frivolities of both Nature and Fate with a slightly altered brain capable of taking that one ruinous cognitive step, we have the beginning of civilization: a kind of exchange function and ‘currency’ is developed such that one object can be traded for another, depending on how much ‘desire’ has been mimetically replicated and ascribed to them- a process Marx thinks of in terms of fetishization. (Because, more importantly than simply bringing about trade, those who master this new tool, “language”, can manipulate the libidinal mimesis, gaining wealth by propagating illusory mimeses of desire in the minds of other, more dim-witted monkey people. Though I’m certainly no Marxist. You can appreciate and even use concepts in the work of someone you fundamentally disagree with and oppose. It’s healthy.) This is what I have called the ‘symbolic exchange’. It is where this whole story starts. “Words are the first currency”, in the words of the philosopher Valery, because, in that stage of our development as a species, language served to aid us in negotiating this libidinal surplus amongst ourselves: language emerged secondary to the emergence of the symbolic-exchange.

The ‘Artificiality’ is not of Consciousness but of Literacy, Language, and Communication, with eternally imperfect tools. What is in a sentence? What is in a paragraph? How is meaning conveyed? What is the value of a word? Words are (re)arranged in such a way, by my mind, to transfer my idea to your mind. The accuracy and sophistication of this, coincides with Human development as a specie, as Intelligence, and as Civilization, for as long as this Artificiality “progresses”. Progress, in its generalized sense, is the ability for any and everyone to utilize better and more efficient tools (Words/Grammar), for their individual and social purposes.

I think this is a good point that we need to try and understand to what extent is consciousness itself separate from language vs to what extent is consciousness inherently something having to do with the potential for language, with language already understood/known/internalized and with active language-use. “Mastery” as you wrote below, a mastery over language would signify a heightened and enlivened consciousness/mind. Note how this need not necessarily manifest itself in being a great writer or orator, but could also represent one’s own internal use and understanding formulated linguistically in a way that isn’t easy or smooth to externalize in ways others could sufficiently comprehend.

And is language even artificial? What does it mean to call something artificial? I tend not to use that word, just as I tend not to use the words subjective/objective. Unless we are very clear in our meanings of such words they usually act to confuse/derail conversation from the proper points it should be focused on. If by artificial here we just mean that consciousness or language are things that emerge not “from within nature” “naturally/organically” but somehow from outside of nature and against its regular organic laws, patterns and developments… well ok then. Maybe that is true, maybe not. It would be a good point to discuss separately. But whether or not this is the case, I don’t see why it matters that much. Consciousness/language might be “artificial” or “natural” or somewhere in-between; again, so what? Why is it that relevant, other than being an interesting fact in its own right? Does the answer somehow condition or prearrange the discussion and the proper understanding of these concepts? What is the nature of artificiality and how would that be relevant to a discussion about consciousness and language (and oh yes we could bring in some Heidegger here, that would be really interesting… techne and the nature of the technological being fundamental to what is consciousness or what is language, for example). Just saying whether it is artificial or not doesn’t seem to add very much to the elucidation here until we really expand on what that means and why.

The only reason to censor oneself would be out of politeness, or because you want to avoid a harsh consequence. That is why we should say such things in places like this, where it is possible to be completely truthful to the topics. I don’t think anything like an agora even exists anymore irl, except in various places online such as this. We essentially live under communist totalitarianism now, there are a ton of things we cannot say without being targeted by the state and the rabid mobs of its sycophants.

I like how you bring literacy into alignment with consciousness, being civilized etc. Literature certainly has a civilizing effect and this most certainly corresponds to intelligence. Lesser intelligent people cannot read at the same level, they do not know the meanings of the words and would lack the inclination and attention span anyway. And yes measurable intelligence (IQ) and literacy do correlate with class and race, at least to some degree. That is simply a fact that cannot be denied. Likewise with how the correlation indicates a certain degree of genetic causes for these differences. There are various clusters of alleles for instance (Davide Pifer has done research on this) which correspond to measurable markers of higher general intelligence. Which makes perfect sense, because intelligence is an emergent manifestation of lots of different underlying physiological things (attention to detail, fine sensory discernment, good working memory, good impulse control, larger time preference, emotional stability, etc) which is also why IQ correlates so well with neural conduction speed as measured by reaction time.

So the conversation turns to the ‘Self’, in light of Literacy and Civilization (which I often equate to Domestication). What is the Self? What is Thy-self? What is ‘You’? What is ‘Me’? What is ‘I’? Self-expression keeps bubbling-up out of individual minds, expressing it-self linguistically, but it(self) is a Representation of a particular Consciousness and Perspective. Thus ‘We’, ourselves, are not the same. You embody a separate Perspective, that can never be Equal (in the same spot at the same time). This creates Inequality. The default of Nature is Inequality. Self-expression is a matter of individuality, stemming from societies and socialization, along with language and literacy. Some people can express them-Selves much better than others. This represents a Mastery over language, rather than Subjugation by language, or by another’s Superior usage.

Everyone is different and yet we are able to communicate to a degree because as you said before how we are literally transferring ideas from our minds to other peoples’ minds and vice versa. Language is this kind of medium that does precisely that, moves contents from one mind to another. Individuality lies in the subtleties and idiosyncracies that inevitably exist and aggregate over time leading to people having distinct personalities, not to mention how each person is genetically distinct as well (excepting identical twins). And yeah, mastery over language would be like the epitome of being able to navigate and optimize/utilize across the interpersonal topology of these varying differences, including for example when reading a book you are attempting to meaningfully navigate the topology between your mind and the writer’s mind even if that writer is no longer alive.

Parodites:

Because there is something beyond the Abyss. At that point we get to Object Oriented Ontology and ‘speculative realism’, in all its sometimes contradicting species- Harman and Morton. The idea that what Walter Benjamin was looking for in order to ‘complete’ the Kantian metaphysics,- a formulation of the ‘concept of human experience’ upon which to ground a new ethics strictly in Representation and the 19th century’s fledgling ‘critical consciousness’, simply is impossible to realize due to inherent gaps in the Symbolic register and the excesses of the Real. Ethics in his, that is, the Marxist strain, remains whispered on a tremulant ether,- without any genuine philosophical foundation that can withstand ‘critical consciousness’, leading inevitably to what Adorno discovered through his negative dialectic, and finally, the total collapse of all categories into an irrecoverable confusion of marginalized and ad hoc ‘identities’ spawned perpetually from that into which they dissolve just as readily- the current state of Western ‘identity politics’. There is no true ‘ethic’ to be found here; no ‘ethos’. Without any basis for ethics in the concept of ‘human experience’, we must confront the Abyss in the Lovecraftian fashion: an abyss understood by Harman in terms of an ‘epistemological withdrawal’, namely the fatal withdraw of the ‘object’, be it this table or the universe itself, from the ‘human’. (See his writings on the ‘quintuple object’.) Thus, departing from OOO and the speculative realists, a new ethics must be found; an ethics must be realized whose foundation lies beyond the ontological, beyond Being itself, beyond Representation, just as Levinas sought a new ethics founded, not on human experience and ontology, but on what he calls “the Infinite”,-- an “Infinity” juxtaposed, in his “anti-metaphysics”, with “Being”. For Levinas, this Infinity is precisely the Abyss itself: the infinite distance between Man and the Face of the true Other, or “God”.

This thread reminds me how I used to write and think about Philosophy, a dozen years ago, very jumbled and mish-mashed with widely different ideas and concepts. My advice to the OP–separate your ideas thoroughly and deal with one in-depth, one-at-a-time. “The Abyss”, then, is another concept deserving of its own thread, apart from many of the themes reiterated in this thread. The Abyss strikes me as Existentialism, the dark and ‘Negative’ aspects of nature and existence. Thus it is from these most-feared and scared places, that humanity avoids, yet also derives some of its most profound philosophical insights and truths. There is Truth in darkness, as there is in light. The difference is a matter of closing your eyes, and relying on lesser senses to guide oneself. Some believe there is a type of Highest sensibility or perception, or a Lowest, a ‘feeling’ that connects human experience to “The Truth”.

I also equate the abyss with existentialism, and in particular I used to be existential but now am phenomenological. I have seen how phenomenology is so much greater than existentialism. But existentialism has its important place on the pathway to our conscious development. Many people seem to get stuck there for one reason or another, probably not least of which because it has a strong emotional pull and potency to it, it can be very “attractive” and satisfying in the sense of helping provide something firm and consistent-seeming around which to cohere a personality that is otherwise fairly desperate or disparate (teenage angst for example, or the dark night of the soul).

True, philosophy should take this progression and the direction of the progression into account if it wants to be as honest and accurate as possible.

I think it is “full”, it is the excess-as-such, the sum total of all that remains outside the boundaries of our conscious mind’s ability to know or experience. Being is literally formed in part by its own “not-being”, by what it is not, just like the meaning and definition of a word is delimited precisely by exactly what it isn’t, by the boundary between itself and other, dissimilar contents.

Urwrongx1000 · November 8, 2022, 8:50am

Animals have ‘Consciousness’ in terms of perception, understanding, thought, feelings, etc. But they do not have ‘Self’-Consciousness. Most animals do not and cannot recognize their own image in a mirror. I don’t know with certainty any animals that do have a firm acceptance of their mirror-image. So Self-Consciousness is unique to Humanity; I believe this is due to the evolution of the Human specie, history, and language/literacy. Literacy enhances self-consciousness and self-identity. We can write what ‘We’, ‘You’, and ‘I’ are/am. By doing this, it creates Expression of uniqueness and individuality. The ‘I’ is developed over a lifetime, or within generations of a family, a tribe, a society, a culture, etc.

HumAnIze:

And is language even artificial? What does it mean to call something artificial? I tend not to use that word, just as I tend not to use the words subjective/objective. Unless we are very clear in our meanings of such words they usually act to confuse/derail conversation from the proper points it should be focused on. If by artificial here we just mean that consciousness or language are things that emerge not “from within nature” “naturally/organically” but somehow from outside of nature and against its regular organic laws, patterns and developments… well ok then. Maybe that is true, maybe not. It would be a good point to discuss separately. But whether or not this is the case, I don’t see why it matters that much. Consciousness/language might be “artificial” or “natural” or somewhere in-between; again, so what? Why is it that relevant, other than being an interesting fact in its own right? Does the answer somehow condition or prearrange the discussion and the proper understanding of these concepts? What is the nature of artificiality and how would that be relevant to a discussion about consciousness and language (and oh yes we could bring in some Heidegger here, that would be really interesting… techne and the nature of the technological being fundamental to what is consciousness or what is language, for example). Just saying whether it is artificial or not doesn’t seem to add very much to the elucidation here until we really expand on what that means and why.

I do think the Artificial-Natural distinction is important here. With Language/Literacy, I consider it Artificial in its arbitrary composition, that ‘Dog’ written in several languages mean the same thing and are ‘equally’ synonymous: Dog in French: le chien, Dog in Spanish: el perro, Dog in German: der Hund, Dog in Italian: il cane, Dog in Russian: собака, Dog in Portuguese: cachorro, Dog in Mandarin Chinese: 狗 (gǒu), Dog in Japanese: 犬 (いぬ, inu), Dog in Korean: 개 (gae), og in Hungarian: kutya, Dog in Danish: hund, Dog in Swedish: hund, Dog in Norwegian: hund, Dog in Esperanto: hundo, Dog in Vietnamese: chó, Dog in Turkish: köpek, Dog in Thai: หมา (hmaa), Dog in Indonesian: anjing, Dog in Dutch: de hond, Dog in Polish: pies, Dog in Greek: σκυλί, Dog in Estonian: koer, Dog in Croatian: pas, Dog in Tagalog: aso, Dog in Icelandic: hundur.

There is no “Objectively True” or universal way to write “Dog”. Thus the medium of writing/literacy/language is entirely Creative. But as more words are created over time, adding more descriptions and nuance, it adds to the significance and meaning of a ‘Dog’. It develops communication and knowledge. So today, in 2022, people know that there are a very large variety of dog breeds, behaviors, specializations, personalities, etc. A more sophisticated language represents rises in Technology. Language and Literacy are technologies. Technologies are perceived as Artifice, as deviations “away from Nature”. I would add here that Artifice is never ‘Separated’ or broken-away from Nature, but can be Extended and very distant from Nature. In this case, I would use Urbanization as the primary example, of humans and peoples today who may see very few ‘Real’ trees, real streams, real wild animals. Prisoners/Monks/Hermits can live their lives in cells, away from Nature.

On this point, I do believe re-connecting Language with Nature is important. It is not enough to read a dictionary and encyclopedia on Dogs. You should experience one. You should feel one. You should live with one. You should hunt with one. Otherwise, Understanding is only theoretical and Artificial, rather than realistic and Natural. So Artificiality involves some Theory and separation from Reality; while Nature involves some Application and unity with Reality. In Literacy, the roots of the words/concepts/ideas should be known intimately (reconnected to Nature, rooted in Nature).

I will concede that these distinctions (Artifice/Nature) can bog down the other points in the thread though.

HumAnIze:

The only reason to censor oneself would be out of politeness, or because you want to avoid a harsh consequence. That is why we should say such things in places like this, where it is possible to be completely truthful to the topics. I don’t think anything like an agora even exists anymore irl, except in various places online such as this. We essentially live under communist totalitarianism now, there are a ton of things we cannot say without being targeted by the state and the rabid mobs of its sycophants.

I like how you bring literacy into alignment with consciousness, being civilized etc. Literature certainly has a civilizing effect and this most certainly corresponds to intelligence. Lesser intelligent people cannot read at the same level, they do not know the meanings of the words and would lack the inclination and attention span anyway. And yes measurable intelligence (IQ) and literacy do correlate with class and race, at least to some degree. That is simply a fact that cannot be denied. Likewise with how the correlation indicates a certain degree of genetic causes for these differences. There are various clusters of alleles for instance (Davide Pifer has done research on this) which correspond to measurable markers of higher general intelligence. Which makes perfect sense, because intelligence is an emergent manifestation of lots of different underlying physiological things (attention to detail, fine sensory discernment, good working memory, good impulse control, larger time preference, emotional stability, etc) which is also why IQ correlates so well with neural conduction speed as measured by reaction time.

Different cultures have different languages/writing styles, Art, and inherited experiences/cultures/ethics/etc. Among the different cultures/languages of the world, IQ is another critical factor of Literacy. So to understand concepts beyond cultural boundaries, and to the best of one’s intellectual ability, leads to such Mastery of language, and understanding of the underlying concepts which people attempt to communicate. This has been an eternal challenge for humanity since the onset of Literacy. People often fight, based on Misunderstanding alone. So these abilities to transfer ideas, is one of the highest importance of human civilization and ‘progress’.

HumAnIze:

So the conversation turns to the ‘Self’, in light of Literacy and Civilization (which I often equate to Domestication). What is the Self? What is Thy-self? What is ‘You’? What is ‘Me’? What is ‘I’? Self-expression keeps bubbling-up out of individual minds, expressing it-self linguistically, but it(self) is a Representation of a particular Consciousness and Perspective. Thus ‘We’, ourselves, are not the same. You embody a separate Perspective, that can never be Equal (in the same spot at the same time). This creates Inequality. The default of Nature is Inequality. Self-expression is a matter of individuality, stemming from societies and socialization, along with language and literacy. Some people can express them-Selves much better than others. This represents a Mastery over language, rather than Subjugation by language, or by another’s Superior usage.

Everyone is different and yet we are able to communicate to a degree because as you said before how we are literally transferring ideas from our minds to other peoples’ minds and vice versa. Language is this kind of medium that does precisely that, moves contents from one mind to another. Individuality lies in the subtleties and idiosyncracies that inevitably exist and aggregate over time leading to people having distinct personalities, not to mention how each person is genetically distinct as well (excepting identical twins). And yeah, mastery over language would be like the epitome of being able to navigate and optimize/utilize across the interpersonal topology of these varying differences, including for example when reading a book you are attempting to meaningfully navigate the topology between your mind and the writer’s mind even if that writer is no longer alive.

Well said

In my experience with philosophy, Existentialism is more of a ‘teenage’/adolescent type of phase. Existentialism dwells on what certainly and absolutely Must-exist, versus what Must-not exist. So it’s a matter of certainty. All people want Security in life, to quell existential fears, which is the basis of life-itself. So because life is intrinsically vulnerable, Certainty is always attractive, especially more so for the Youth, who have very little life experience. Children tend to think in black-and-white, yes-and-no. Subtlety is more a matter of Maturity, Age, Experience, Wisdom, and the like.

There is no Absolution, and so, Existentialism must lead to Phenomenology. Any ‘solid’ distinctions in life, or in physical objects for that matter, have gray areas. These are the standards of Science and Empiricism. There are no Perfect shapes in Nature, but only in the imagination and fiction of the mind. The brain as an organ, has a “fill-gap” instinct and compulsion, that must be overridden. So the need for perfection fades-away to “good enough” Accuracy, for the sake of Pragmatism. Life must go on. Buildings must be built. Wars must be won, etc.

HumAnIze:

I’m not entirely convinced. Simple truths are easy enough to accept and never reject. Most things are taken for granted. You are Alive, are you not? You are conscious. Life begins in a solipsistic, self-absorbed, conceited, and infantile mindset. Mammals are given birth, sucking on their mothers’ teets. Thus these are the ‘beginnings’ of Consciousness. Consciousness begins from the point of view of the Young and Ignorant, never-ever the Old and Wise. Thus any Top-Down approach is false, or simply ‘Backward’. You cannot “begin” at the End of your life. Life is more than oneself. Life is Greater than oneself.

True, philosophy should take this progression and the direction of the progression into account if it wants to be as honest and accurate as possible.

Consciousness, if you believe it Collective, is also then more than your-self. It cannot be known without starting at the bottom, at the roots. If you look at a tree, judge it by its leaves, then you see its outer appearance, but not its inner core. So too is it with Consciousness and Thy ‘Self’.

Why is the Abyss empty, and not full?

I think it is “full”, it is the excess-as-such, the sum total of all that remains outside the boundaries of our conscious mind’s ability to know or experience. Being is literally formed in part by its own “not-being”, by what it is not, just like the meaning and definition of a word is delimited precisely by exactly what it isn’t, by the boundary between itself and other, dissimilar contents.

This is why I do not lose hope in a “Categorical Imperative” or a “Science of Metaphysics”. As technologies continue to improve, especially with Literacy and Philosophy, greater knowledge can be derived from the areas of separation or overlap, concerning lingual knowledge concepts, human experience, and the general ability for people to communicate Ideals. As greater Mastery occurs and develops, so too will a greater understanding of all previous questions and problems. As Artificial Intelligence becomes Literate, so too will that lead to an exponential boost in Philosophy, Arts, Sciences, and all other areas of knowledge.