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Greatest insight

Imagine something too hot to handle. A hot potato. Now, try imagining something too cold to touch. They freeze the handler by draining away all vitality. Perhaps some insights are far too cold to be adequately handled enough to be understood. Unlike most insights that enlighten, these cold insights carry a sense of danger - even potentially harmful for many who deceive themselves. Contra the dogma of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer realized that reason is not the basic essence of man. The impact of such realization does not depend on what is substituted in the place of “reason,” for this actually clear the horizon of thought and allow for new ways of thinking. These sort of cold insights is enough to place the thinker among the very greatest ever. Just what is this insight, specifically? That the very content of an idea and the logical connection of ideas presuppose a force,, which exists beyond the ideal or logical relation to contents. This force is the interpretation of being as an eternally frustrated and directionless energy, represented as an entity, a being. Reason is but an aftereffect of the metaphysical principle of existence. The deduction of a conclusion from particular propositions implies a necessary conceptual relation, where an ideally inherent requirement is being fulfilled. However, the conclusion is not identical with the contents and the correlation of concepts. Even the most logical statement requires a person who participates in language games in order to become reality. The physical existence of this person has nothing to do with the ideal constructions of logic. It is true that the process where the person articulates logical and factually necessary contents is rational. But this has nothing to do with existence, which is above and beyond the dialectical opposition of reason and madness, of logic and contradiction. Existence is arational. Man is alogon. Therefore, Schopenhauer's wille is outside rationality and beyond contradiction. If rationality is derivative of the actual process of existence, then it is merely a tool of the intellect that is used or discarded. The 19th century thought nurtured a radical shift in epistemology where human existence, as the very essence of life, is accidentally and imperfectly, as well as insincerely, expressed in human ideas and human consciousness. This shift was instituted by Immanuel Kant who confined the empirical ego (the total sum of ideas in consciousness) to the phenomenon of the thing in itself, which is the transcendent and unknowable substratum of existence. Kant was careful to consider the world of empirical consciousness as real and solid, while the thing in itself behind phenomena is merely an idea. But Kant determined reason as the final and essential substrate in his search for the positive content of the thing in itself. After the hubris of the 18th century rationalism and its infatuation with consciousness, the 19th century determined existence to be the sole true reality while consciousness was demoted as something accidental, an inconstant flame that cannot even indicate anything about existence. First, Kant ejected rationalism from the realm of epistemology, and replaced it with experience as the sole arbiter of the possibility of cognizing reality. Reason, in Kantian terms, is the principle of intellect that abstracts from the abstraction, continually until it arrives at the ultimate abstraction, which is beyond the bounds of experience. Second Schopenhauer abolished rationalism's total view of man. Reason, in Schopenhauerian terms, is but a function of the brain that compares concepts to one another. Thanks to the Germans, the notion of man as a rational being has now become romantic. The moments of consciousness that highlight empirical life do not divulge the secret reality of existence, because there is no common essence between being and the consciousness. A formal difference delineates a metaphysical principle, a “dark concupiscence” of universal essence, which leaves behind an abyss between reality and the brief and inconsistent images of consciousness. If life cannot be characterized as rational then it is based on something older, more primal, a universal energy, or the force from physics. Man is considered as a rational being only when he expresses values and pursues goals, which are determined to be ends in themselves. But Schopenhauer knew the purposes and the ends all human being intentionally aspire to, are actually, at bottom, based on the primordial force of the universe. You have goals, not according to the values and goals determined by reason, but because you are impelled continuously and ceaselessly from the depths of your essence. Oftentimes purpose is the expression of intentional events. As long we understand desire as the sole way of achieving values posited by reason, then we grant purpose as the ultimate standard of the rationality of existence. Schopenhauer destroys that standard and renders the intellect as the impotent reflection of the intentional process, hardwired deeply in the brain. The intellect, at best, can illuminate the dark and deep desires only at the surface. That accounts for why we know what we desire, or which purposes we aspire to, or what goals we have in life. Henceforth, rationalism lost its privileged status and metaphysics has been dehumanized. No longer can metaphysics be a safe vault for the human desires of understanding, and legalizing human action with the sanctity of rationalism. The entirety of life, more so than the sum of its singular parts, is the unity we realize as the universal substance of the particular instances, and behind this entirety lies the dark fate of life.

"Man" is a recent invention on the verge of its expiration date

"....as the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared... as the ground of classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." (Order of Things, p. 387)

Man is an epistemological concept that did not exist during or before the Classical age, because "there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such." (p. 309)

In the 16th century, the category of human sciences did not contain the concepts of life or labor, nor language as a signifying system or medium - but merely "one of the figurations of the world," (p. 56) just one of the objects of nature like air or water. However, Michel Foucault isn't content to point out that there were missing categories in the past, but to infer that there was no conception of Man or humanity at all back then. What we now call "humanity" was not conceptualized its distinctiveness until the 19th century. "Natural history" in the 17th and 18th centuries was fundamentally descriptive and taxonomic - a taxonomy of a table of types of life-forms. The scientists of those days collected, described and tabulated species and types, but did not form overall theories of life-in-general, not like Darwin did in the 19th century (see Descent of Man). The forms of thought weren't available. The same goes for labor and language. The analysis of wealth was basically the examination of the forms of exchange and trade, where commodities were taken as "natural things" to be bought and sold. The discourse of language was merely "general grammar," where language was broken down to noun and verbs. In the 19th century, after Kant's three great Critiques and the age of Enlightenment, those discourses grew in sophistication and developed distinctiveness into separate sciences (biology, economics, and linguistics). The crucial thing is the three new disciplines shared a previously unforeseen object: Man, as both the very subject that knows and is the object of knowledge. Thus, man lived, man works, and man spoke. This in turn generated the human sciences where new objects required new analyses: psychology (human life), sociology (human labor) and studies of literature and myth (human signification). In the 20th century, structuralism abolished the truth of man, leaving behind the rubble of fiction, always absent, and consequently reduced humanity to a false construct. Psychology became psychoanalysis, where the uniform structure of the unconscious inhabit us all in similar ways. Sociology as labor is also deconstructed into ethnology where the structural conditions place human societies as the responses to universal conditions and needs. Philological linguistics, too, was transformed into structural linguistics where universals, beneath the specific and particular bits of language that are written and spoken, were analyzed. All these contemporary discourses became historical, relativized or pluralized so there is no longer a "pure access" to the truth. What truth becomes is a function of what can be said, written or thought. That was Foucault's project, the exposure of historical specificity, how things could have been otherwise, of what we think we know with certainty.

After Foucault and other poststructuralists, I find the concept of "man" in Enlightenment and classical liberalist philosophy to be questionable. Their conception of man as individuals - sacred, separate and intact - where the mind is the sole source of meaning and value, and the rights of the individual necessarily independent and inalienable, because the individual's value lies in a transcendental and universal essence. That paints a flattering metaphysical portrait of human essence - but the cracks and the fissures of such portrait betray the culturally and discursively structured composition, arranged by interacting as situated and symbolic beings. In poststructuralist thought, "man" becomes the "subject" of analysis, and decentered, contra the fulcrum of Enlightenment. The subject is constituted by cultural meanings and practice, and reside within a variety of culturally-based locale of meaning (as family members, as occupationally and economically and regionally determined constructs, as gendered and sexual oriented beings, as members of other social groups). The subject is a material being, totally embodied and present within the physical world and entrenched in the material practice and structure of its society. The subject is constituted by social forces; the source of the meaning and value and self-image of the subject comes from identity groups, from social activities, from intimate relations, from the various overlapping of common meanings and symbols and practices where the subject interact with subcultural groups and society as a global unit. Contra the humanist notion that people are independent individuals and make up a transcendent, universal and unchanging humanity, this is antihumanism, not anti-humane, but the new philosophical understanding of the nature of the self, of the individual, of man, of humanity, of homo sapiens sapiens, to be a social construct. The structuralists and French poststructuralist insist the subject is dead because it is the dispersion or byproduct of language. Since it is a functional placeholder of language, and no longer the source of language, posited by that language, a fragmented product of dispersed discourses, the subject is void of its ontological status. To recap: posthumanism is borne out of the skepticism of the subject. Philosophical modernity began with Descartes' emphasis of consciousness as the fulcrum for knowledge of the world - cogito ergo sum - ergo, a unified subject became an obsession for subsequent thinkers (Kant, Husserl). This is not to be confused with the claim that the postmodernists have erased the subject, but rather they decentered it and resituated, replaced it in light of discourse/desire/power. Maurice Blanchott, for instance, lost the ability to say 'I.' Something much older than the Cogito, not an act of cogitation, but a perpetual whisper of language missing a vortex of consciousness. For Derrida, the I is never completely self-present for it always presupposes a relation to its general absence (death). For Foucault, the privilege of the "I think" depends on the privilege of the "I speak," for speech/writing will disperse the 'I' rather than bring it into relief. Moreover, thanks to technology, the biological form of man was different in the past and will be radically different in the future. The cyborg will be the next step. Therefore technological posthumanism will extend the I rather than disperse it, and reduce temporal flux.

The Irony of Enlightenment, part II

For part I, go here. Why did Enlightenment fail? According to modern philosophy and modern academia the goals of Enlightenment was never realized - the foundation of god, religion, ethics, and especially, a political system, in reason. The idealist might insist that the Enlightenment isn't without its virtues - that it freed civilization from the shackles of the church, and unleashed a new age of man. However, the result is merely a new election, a new ideology. Instead of God as tyrant, we have the Rational Tyrant. The dogma changes its clothes, but the incantation retains the same syllables, and the stench of the absolutist lingers in propaganda: the "right way," the "correct method." Yet, during the baptism of reason at the Hanging Gardens, we also sacrificed subjectivity: the marginalization of the passions and the emotions and intuition. A general understanding of this topic relies on the context of the times, which was the 19th century, the subsequent era after the Enlightenment (dating from the publication of Hobbes' Leviathan in 1651 to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in 1792). Ambivalent 19th century thinkers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin and Dostoyevski abandoned the myth of the intellectual progressivism, because of the corrosive effects of rationalism, yet they retained faith in life. The results of the 19th century thought was a composite of both the dominant optimism, the result of the growth of industry and democracy, and an emerging pessimism due to the failure of rationalism in social change, whether solutions to the problems of society was possible at all. Although the next generation of thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Samuel Alexander, Edmund Husserl, and Sigmund Freud shared in the Weberian "disenchantment of the world," they also sought to save civilization from that fate. Specific instances of this disenchantment: the decline of a stable justification for life, and the resulting dispersal of meaning and inspiring despair, in the fragmentation of social cohesion, and schisms from cultural variety and disunity. This generation, initially, belonged to the progressivist camp, and within the paradigm of Darwin, they purged the remaining traces of idealism through the rubric of naturalism, realism or empiricism. Soon enough, progress itself was questioned, and once the cat escaped from the bag when objective meanings were found wanting, they realized the all-too-grave consequences for society and the individual. Of course there was a noble struggle to restore prominence and absolution to culture and society in order to return it to the Throne of Meaning. This effort ended in failure, and the result is the dispersed and specialized thought of the 20th century, where there is no longer any general discourse, but little and segregated discourses, tailor-made for the specialist. The criticism worked too well, making a reconstructive project impossible. Moreover, the modern developments in science has led to the decline of optimism in rationalism. In physics and mathematics, two of the most advanced forms of western science, have themselves become paradoxical. In other words they are now at the state where paradoxes are generated according to reason. Kant already highlighted the "ineluctable limits" of reason, but thanks to those comfortably in the grip of enlightenment, the majority of intellectuals and the masses remained positivistic. That means such aforementioned limits of reasons were immaterial until they came from the sciences. During the early 20th century paradigm shifts in science and mathematics finally caught up with Kant: Heisenberg in physics and Godel in mathematics. Heisenberg's principle of interderminacy announced the limitations of our ability to know and predict the physical state of affairs at the quantum level of reality, where chaos is the name of the game. Godel's conclusions have a greater impact, given the sacred cow status mathematics has enjoyed for the majority of the history of western philosophy. In each system of mathematics, there are statements/propositions that cannot be proven within the system, leaving us with the unacceptable flavor of incompleteness. Then our next step in thought ought lie with the recognition of the inherent paradoxial nature of reason.

Why philosophy cannot be taught

Recently a friend and i were discussing the merits of learning something substantial at the university, and of which i mentioned that he should be learning something more substantial than mere facts and formulas. He asked me to clarify, and what follows is an excerpt from the email correspondence: Interlocutor: What is far more substantial than facts and forumlae, exempli gratia? Ah, this calls for a personal rant of mine. the chief drawbacks of formal education is its reversal of experience and concept. Generally, concepts contain content and significance, in the form of facts and formulae, only as long they come from experience and may be cashed back into it. But the problem with formal education is that it displaces experience by teaching us our first knowledge of the most important aspects of life through the concepts based on other people's abstractions and generalizations, instead of the abstractions/generalizations from our own experiences. Of course some of this is necessary, granted, but not all of it. therefore, there is a great deal of our conception of real life that aren't based on anything we have personally ever observed, experienced or felt. That these facts and formulae are correct is exceedingly irrelevant, because they aren't authentic, which means that they are truly ours. This also reflects a distinction in philosophy that exists between the academic philosophers and the authentic ones. The professors meet and absorb the problems of philosophy through the concept, they study them, but the authentic ones discover them existentially, by reflection of their own lives and experiences. For the professor, philosophy is a matter of verbal gymnastics where much reading and writing and talking and listening takes place, but for the genuine article, philosophy is a profound encounter with being and living. The academician is interested and enjoys philosophy seriously, but the real McCoy cannot distinguish philosophy from life, and considers it an issue of the life or death of the human species. A scholar is a good teacher, but the true thinker makes original contributions. From this link: The modern philosopher is a professional pedant, paid to instruct the young in philosophical doctrines and to write books and articles. He is a professor of philosophy, not so very different from a professor of biology or of marketing. He need not reshape his inner being to the model of the doctrines he discusses in his classes. If pressed, he will perhaps claim that he is useful because he teaches the young to think more clearly and, less plausibly, that he forces his fellow professors in other departments to clarify their concepts. The proud cities of metaphysics were long ago abandoned as indefensible and have fallen into ruin. The philosophers have for the most part retreated to the safer territory of language and logic, creating for themselves a sort of analytical Formosa. - by John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardi and the Heritage of the Greeks

How to write a book full of cliches

"In the beginning, there was the Word. But in the end there only is Cliché." - Stanislaw Lem Writing a book full of clichés must be somewhat similar to those "worst essay" writing contests often held in English Departments in Universities everywhere, but certainly it involves a whole different level of irony! A book full of clichés is a species of kitsch, fake art. Some of the qualities of a kitsch book: it may contain disingenuous remarks and appear ostentatious, be simple enough for the unwashed masses and easily marketable. Kitsch is the byproduct of the middle class, for it highlights the sheer boredom of their lives. Unlike the masterpieces in the works of the genius, kitsch does not possess elitist qualities or appeal to snobbery.In order to establish a book riddled with clichés, some formula needs to be followed: Narration: stock phrases that don't really mean anything. i.e., have a nice day) Formulaic plot: very predictable story, often depending on a very well-known story arc Character Archetypes: they must be one-dimensional lacking anything interesting, or well-defined motivation Dialogue: consists of quotations (they cannot contain any insights, mere bromides or tired phrases often said by dullards) And this, of course, calls for a clichéd quote: "It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue." - Stephen Fry

Nor is this an exit

Bret Easton Ellis realized the apex of his writing genius within his third book, American Psycho, a truly bold attempt at a violent and shocking creation: a young American yuppie Patrick Bateman, whose solipsistic affliction cleverly exposes the putrid underbelly of consumerism. The narrative is limited to the first person, an intimate access to Patrick Bateman’s warped perspective and Ellis skillfully employs this technique to ratchet up the tension in order to convey a successful black comedy. At surface, the book is essentially a sizzling satirical deconstruction of the zeitgeist of the predominant eighties ideology: greed. The morbid fascination of trash television, the irony of call waiting, and analytic interpretation of the contemporary music phenomenon all paint the bleak world Patrick Bateman lives in. The protagonist Patrick Bateman’s narration is a constant vacillation between the obsessively detailed description of the mundane items of brand-name consumer society and the cynical and snobbish account of excruciatingly shallow and bland characters, which lack any semblance of humane depth or any distinguishing characteristics from one another. The incessant identification of brand name attire is given a much richer description than the characters who wear them, so they are all essentially interchangeable. At least outside of Patrick Bateman’s inner circle, people constantly mistake one another for someone else. Is that Luis Carruthers? Bateman said “I think a lot of snowflakes are alike… and I think a lot of people are alike too…” Their dialogues are either depressingly insipid and plain, or a complete rip off of excerpts from experts. During conversations with annoying characters, e.g. the fiancée Evelyn, Bateman’s narration drops verbs and pronouns altogether, and chooses to signify only the brand names. Patrick Bateman is an “emotional vampire” who is incapable of transcending hedonistic values of his society. He lacks any impulse control whatsoever, any resistance to indulge his basest whims, and engages in escalating acts of abhorrent violence, which is always presented in explicit detail: “The ax hits him midsentence, straight in the face, its thick blade chopping sideways into his open mouth, shutting him up.” There is no ethical principle expressed in the book, absent from the wholly existential, subjective motives that are promoted by the over-arching ideology of the wealthy class in the late eighties. However, the implicit principle of Bateman’s actions is the precise source of satire – a scathing critique of the self-centered livelihood of yuppiedom. According to Bateman, respect is a materialistic phenomena; the prestige of handling top accounts, owning the best business card, the ability to get in exclusive places. Yet respect remains something altogether elusive for Patrick Bateman. As the designated poster boy of Reagan’s ruling class, throughout the book Bateman inflicts various forms of violence against the victims of a bourgeois society - people of color, people of different social classes, minorities and women - and never had to pay for his actions, at least on the social level of justice. However, there are several victims of Bateman’s murderous rampage who fall outside of that spic and span category – the ex-girlfriend who could get into the restaurant exclusively for the upper-crust, Dorsia and his archrival Paul Allen – so Bateman does not exactly discriminate in his killing binge. Thus, labels such as racist and misogynist do not apply here. Most of the book is a disjointed, plotless, chaotic discourse about how “things fell apart and nobody paid much attention.” Once we move beyond the level of literary analysis into the vague realm of ontology and metaphysics, the book is understood as an aesthetical application of solipsistic boredom. It is solipsistic because the entire book is a soliloquy told from the first person by an unscrupulous psychopath. Boredom pervades the book because nothing truly excites Bateman, nothing ever moves him passionately. His frank admissions of his homicidal behavior to his colleagues completely fail to register anything whatsoever with them. One character exclaimed, “Bateman killing Owen and the escort girl? Oh that’s bloody marvelous!” In existential philosophy, boredom is a unique state of being. According to Sartre’s novella, Nausea, boredom is related with existence and being, not with autonomy or transcendence. Only in certain emotions does Being manifest itself to us starkly, and these emotions are boredom, or nausea. As the naked access to existence, boredom is the immediate realization that there is something rather than nothing. Bateman is not in despair, nor is he joyful, but on the other end in a deep protracted struggle with the commonplace nature of daily life so much that he no longer cares whether anything is or not. So, the experience of a phenomenon of being drenches the book, thanks to the existential vacuum that lies at the heart of the protagonist. For Soren Kierkegaard, Patrick Bateman leads an aesthetic life, a life of a devotion to immediate experience, like materialists or hedonists, and is doomed to boredom. Their repetitive life of disconnected ‘nows’ is the very source of apathy, and this is precisely the case with Bateman. The closing attempt at self-criticism, “this confession has meant absolutely nothing,” presented within the final pages of the book, truly a divine resonance of a denouement, shows how deeply central Bateman’s boredom is. Perhaps, if Albert Camus were alive today, he’d call Patrick Bateman a post-modern Sisyphus, a character who began the novel as clueless and ambiguous as he ended it. The phrase “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,” an allusion to Dante’s Divina Commedia, is the first line of the book, graffiti on a wall. That prepares the reader for a mesmeric experience into a world where nothing is ever solved. Ellis closes the book with the words of a sign: “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.”