Characteristics of Dionysus...
God of...celebration, dance, impulse, sensuality, sexuality, body movement, flirtation, seduction, hedonism...
As Perls would say...emulating the dionysian -- and Nietzschean -- spirit...'Get out of your head and come to your senses'...Let go of your 'ultra-brain-control'...
Weaknesses of The Dionysian Lifestyle: too impulsive, too spontaneous, changing with the wind...no plans..or planning...no rational thought...too much partying...alchohol, drugs, gambling, sex, addiction, too self-destructive stemming from living life in the fast lane and partying too much...'oral consumptive', sensually and sexually obsessive-compulsive/addicted...'functioning from the neck down'...
..........................................................................
Characteristics of Apollo:
God of... reason, rationality, logic, justice, truth, fairness, equal rights, democracy...functioning 'from the neck up'...
Weaknesses of The Apollonian Lifestyle: Too self-restrained, too self-controlled, wants everything planned ahead of time, wants the details, reluctant to emotionally and/or physically 'let loose', too much thinking, too much time going over things again and again and again...'anal retentive', schizoid, distancing....
3. Integrating (Synthesizing) The Dialectic Engagement Between Dionysus and Apollo
That is how I distinguish between the two polarities in each of our characters...Dionsysus and Apollo....A good working balance of both sets of characteristics generally tends to lend itself to a 'healthy lifestyle' -- not too impulsive, yet not too self-restrained and overly self-controlled...Similarily, not overly controlling with others but not totally undependable and 'laizzez-faire' as well...Not so many boundaries and rules that you kill the spontaneity in a relationship or encounter but also not completely 'boundary-less' either...ready to go off the deep end into a bottomless abyss and take anybody and/or everybody with you...
-- dgb, April 29th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
On Transference Complexes, Scripts, Games...Tragedies.and Creative Projections...
If you accept such under-utilized ideas as 'transference complexes', 'transference scripts', and 'transference games', then a whole host of inter-connected distinctions can be made that start with 'transference-projection', and progress (and/or regress) to 'the re-creation/repetition compulsion', 'transference identification', 'transference compensation', 'transference-reversal', and what may amount to be an 'egotistical-existential playoff' between life and death forces.
Transference-Projection: A form of interpretive perception that may be distorted but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes transference-projection as interpretive-perception may show an extra amount of interpretive intuition and/or awareness. These are cases where the pot can see that the kettle is also black, or worded otherwise, we can see that someone outside of ourselves shares some portion of our inner 'transference complex and chemistry'.
It usually (but not always) takes two to tango (sometimes one, sometimes three depending on the particular script...) in any particular type of transference game stemming from the neurotic element in our childhood background -- usually a particularly ego-traumatic and/or otherwise 'fixated memory' (or series of memories) -- being 'metaphorically/symbolically re-visited, re-created, and replayed again in some similar and/or different rendition/edition of it in our adult life.
This memory we carry around with us subconsciously as adults -- almost like the 'script of a movie' -- and subjectively perceived as needing to be 'acted out again' (our 're-creation/repetition compulsion') for 'egotistical purposes' -- where we also need one or more actors to play in this script with us.
This whole script may become highly eroticized as a 'transference game', thus becoming a 'sexual transference game'. A 'neurotic' element of our distant past becomes both a neurotic and an erotic sexual transference game in our adult present. Furthermore, this game becomes 'serialized' as we come back to it again and again and again in similar and different encounters, in similar and different relationships.
This is how 'sex' and 'ego' often get 'married together' in our same movie-memory-fantasy script, the same transference script. There is definitely an Adlerian spin to this movie script. 'Inferiority feelings' or 'low self-esteem' (from an egotistically traumatic memory) stimulate 'an upward movement' which Adler called 'superiority striving' with a strong drive towards what might also be called a 'mastery compulsion'. (Here I am mixing Freudian and Adlerian language.)
Or if the 'egotistic success and mastery feeling ' is existent in the original childhood memory, we may just want to keep repeating this feeling of success, superiority, and mastery over and over again. Call this a 'mastery fixation' -- or a return to doing over and over again in different renditions/editions as an adult what we once also did extremely well as a child.
To give you an example from my own life (you can perhaps fill in an example from your own life), I am told by my dad that when I was a small child of 5 or 6, I stood up in front of a Church congregation and when someone -- probably my dad -- pointed to country after country on a globe, I named them all and got them all right -- a feat I could not come close to doing today without some significant practice. However, I have taken the same skill -- knowing the geographical names and relationships between different places -- and turned it into a decent middle class career of scheduling and dispatching taxis and wheelchair vehicles throughout the Greater Toronto Area. One could further argue that what I am doing here -- 'mapping out the different areas of the mind with all of their different inter-relationships with each other' is only a further extrapolation of what I was doing when I was 5 or 6 years old.
Let the drama -- the same essential drama and/or soap opera that we bring with us from our childhood into our adulthood --
replay itself again -- and again, and again, and again.
Only this time -- at least in those cases involving 'negative' (confidence shattering as opposed to confidence-enhancing childhood memories -- generally we are looking for a much better ending, a more 'ego-satisfying' ending to our usually much less satisfying neurotic childhood memory-movie.
The question then might be asked: 'Why is love, lust, passion, and sex often so 'neurotic'? Or alternatively -- why is the neurotically compulsive often so erotically compulsive as well?
For one simple reason. We are trying to 'undo' and/or 're-do' our childhood neurotic transference scripts and resulting 'low self-esteem complex' based on the ego-traumatizing memory(or memories) that led to these partly deterministic, partly existential scripts -- and turn them into something much more ego-satisfying, a 'transference will to power and/or self-empowerment' if you wish.
Sometimes we end up with a more 'satisfying adult movie' -- or worded otherwise -- a more satisfying ending to our unsatisfying and therefore 'perpetually unfinished and unsatisfied' childhood script movie.
Often we don't.
As stated earlier, it often depends if we are starting from a position of a low or high childhood self-esteem movie -- which creates a type of 'transference self-fulfilling prophecy' for us as adults.
In low self-esteem memory movies, our 'transference game' is to move from a position of low self-esteem to a position of much higher self-esteem as we hopefully begin to 'master the movie-fantasy-memory-fixation' -- with 'constant repetition' (which still can bring the same bad ending).
Worst case scenario: The 'transference-villain or culprit' who 'traumatized our ego' in childhood comes back to life again in another associated
'projective-form', and traumatizes us all over again in adulthood too!' We metaphorically return to the scene of our own childhood self-esteem victimization.
Our transference self-fulfilling prophecy at its worst often results in a complete crash into emotional/egotistic despair. A nightmarish return to the scene of our childhood crime and to a replaying of an egotistical and emotional disaster scene!
If you want to play with 'transference-fire', then you risk the very real possibility of getting severely burnt again -- particularly if you take on a very strong projective rendition of your childhood transference rejector (and exciter at the same time). See the Object Relations work of Ronald Fairbairn.
This is how the neurotic becomes the erotic -- like silly fools we often take on formidable adult lover-renditions of our childhood rejector only to end up right back at square one again. Looking up from the mat at this newest edition of our oldest significant rejector, still we often get up off the mat and want more. We both 'idolize' and 'idealize' our projected transference rejector, sometimes even more so, the more they reject us! As long as they at least seem to 'love' us a little too!
Such folly in the minds of men and women!! Transference rejection becomes our biggest sexual aphrodisiac! As long as we eventually think that we can win him or her over. And/or eventually come out on top. Reject our rejector.
Our transference scripts and games can have a number of different endings -- including our doing a 'complete role reversal' and rejecting our 'transference rejector' in the same way that he or she rejects us!!! Vanity, your name is man. And woman!! This is 'transference vanity'.
This is what Freud called the 'repetition compulsion' which he connected with the 'death instinct' or sometimes worded differently as a 'death wish'.
When things go wrong -- so very wrong -- in the deepest, darkest throes of of 'the return of our worst childhood ego nightmare', the return of the suppressed or the repressed, the return of our deepest, darkest childhood transference neurosis, it may feel indeed, very much like we are in an 'egotistic-existential death spiral'.
This may result in a spiral into self-destruction.
And/or a trip to the psychotherapist.
Or our best friend.
Or our family.
Or jail.
Or the hospital.
Or the morgue.
One never really knows which way our transference neurosis is going to take us -- to the gates of heaven, or the gates of hell -- and beyond. Or both.
Indeed, usually it is both.
That is what a 'transference-complex-script-and-game' is.
Sometimes -- oftentimes -- it is simply better to get off the merry-go-round, off the transference-ride before we do ourselves in -- again.
The biggest problem is that it is highly addictive, highly obsessive-compulsive -- and worst of all perhaps, highly emotionally, romantically, and sexually exciting.
Who wants to get off that type of ride?
This is equally true for the 'normal neurotics' amongst us and for the more 'extreme neurotics' that may or may not make the newspapers for greater or lesser reasons, from different types of manipulations and 'control fetishes', sado-masochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, to all of the different 'serial crimes': serial fraud, serial assaults, serial arson, serial rape, serial killings...
These are all generally fantasy and/or behavioral demonstrations of extremely serious and pathological underlying transference complexes.
However, on the other side of things, so too are all 'creative projections' of the most individually and culturally brilliant types. The longer and more persistently a person is working on a creative project, the more likely there is to be the underlying 'drive' of a transference complex at work.
Freud called these types of creative and/or work transferences -- 'sublimation' -- which may or may not contain underlying subconscious sexual components.
Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Kohut, Berne, Perls -- they all captured essential elements of the underlying dynamics of the transference, even as they sometimes gave them other names such as 'lifestyle', 'projection', 'complexes', 'scripts', 'games'...
The creatively brilliant and/or the devastatingly destructive elements of transference complexes at work cannot be understated by anyone who has seriously studied this phenomenon.
Quite simply put, transference by whatever name we choose to use to study and describe this phenomenon -- for example, 'transference' (Freud), 'lifestyle' (Adler), 'complex' (Jung), 'script' (Berne), 'projection' (Gestalt Therapy) -- is the most important motivational force -- or network of forces -- in the study and the understanding of human behavior.
Here is a quote from the highly esteemed psychoanalyst, Brian Bird from his classic 1972 essay on transference -- Notes on Transference: Universal Phenomenon and Hardest Part of Analysis:
'Transference, in my view, is a very special mental quality that has never been satisfactorily explained. I am not satisfied, for instance, either with what has been written about it or with its use in analysis. To me, our knowledge seems slight, and our use limited. This view, admittedly extreme, is possible only because transference is such a very remarkable phenomenon, with a great and largely undeveloped potential. I am particularly taken with the as yet unexplored idea that transference is a universal mental function which may well be the basis of all human relationships. I even suspect it of being one of the mind's main agencies for giving birth to new ideas, and new life to old ones. In these several respects, transference would seem to me to assume characteristics of a major ego function.'
Quoted from the book, 'Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique, Robert Langs, Editor, 1981, 1990.
I would like to think that my work from the 'shadows of academia' through the 1980s, the 1990s, and now the 2000s, will add some new light to the phenomenon of transference with an 'integrative, cross-school' approach.
One can see just from my short essay above, that I have both re-emphasized Bird's comments and taken them a few steps further with:
1. My statement regarding the inter-relationship between creativity, transference and sublimation;
2. My statement regarding the inter-relationship between projection and transference;
3. My statement -- only lightly hinted at here -- regarding the inter-relationship between 'identification with the aggressor', identification with the rejector', 'identification with the abandoner', 'identification with the victimizer', 'identification with the violent and the violator' -- and transference.
This, in my own terminology, I started calling 'transference-reversal' in my unpublished writing in the 1980s;
4. My statement -- only lightly hinted at here -- regarding the inter-relationship between 'ego-splitting', 'ego-states', and transference. That goes back to my studies in Object Relations in the 1980s (Fairbairn, Guntrip), as well as Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne, 'The Games People Play');
5. My statement -- to be developed later -- on the inter-relationship between 'conscious early memories' (Adler), 'lifestyle' (Adler), and 'transference. (That goes back to my studies at The Adlerian Institute in 1980,81, and my general influence from Adlerian psychology ('ego-traumacy' from Freud's traumacy-seduction theory; 'inferiority-feelings', 'superiority striving' from Adler, and the 'mastery compulsion', Freud, 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle');
6. My statement -- to be developed later and showing my influence by Perls and Gestalt Therapy, including my involvement at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto from 1979-1991 -- on the inter-relationship between transference, projection, and 'the unfinished situation'. Also, on the inter-connection between 'ego-splitting' and 'topdog-righteousness' vs. 'underdog approval-seeking' or 'underdog-rebelliosness', all as products of transference-serial behavior patterns;
7. My statement -- just hinted at here -- on the inter-relationship between 'narcissistic transference complexes, scripts, and games' -- and 'serial crimes' of every type that can be seen to have 'an individual memory signature' that is metaphorically and/or symbolically similar to the 'essence' and/or 'nature' -- the 'Method of Operation or MO' if you will -- of the 'serial crimes'. In particular, much more can be said about the inter-connection between 'serial rapes', 'serial killings' -- and transference -- usually through a process of either 'identification with the paternal or maternal aggressor, victimizer, rejector, abandoner... from the internalized 'narcissistic-violent topdog ego-state' and/or through a process of 'compensatory, narcissistic rage' (transference-reversal) from the internalized 'narcissistic-violent underdog' ego-state position. While I was working in this particular direction in the 1980s and/or early 1990s, I found the Psychoanalytic work of Heinz Kohut and saw that I was simply developing his idea of 'narcissistic transference' -- in contra-distinction to Freud who believed basically that narcissistic personalities could not develop transference relationships because they were too absorbed in themselves. I preferred Kohut's way of looking at things when he argued essentially -- and I am paraphrasing from the commonality in our perspectives -- that 'narcissistic transferences' and 'narcissistic transference relationships' do indeed exist and can essentially be described and defined by their 'narcissistic' -- meaning 'self-infatuated' or 'self-absorbed' (and lack of social empathy, lack of social sensitivity, lack of social conscience, lack of moral-ethics) component.
8. Freud once wrote something to the extent that 'we are all psychotic (or schizophrenic) when we dream. In a similar fashion, we are all walking, talking 'serial rejectors' in a clone-like fashion to the way that we can remember our earliest rejections...
That is enough for tonight.
-- dgb, originally written, April 27th-29th, 2009; edited, modified, July 5th, 2009.
Transference-Projection: A form of interpretive perception that may be distorted but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes transference-projection as interpretive-perception may show an extra amount of interpretive intuition and/or awareness. These are cases where the pot can see that the kettle is also black, or worded otherwise, we can see that someone outside of ourselves shares some portion of our inner 'transference complex and chemistry'.
It usually (but not always) takes two to tango (sometimes one, sometimes three depending on the particular script...) in any particular type of transference game stemming from the neurotic element in our childhood background -- usually a particularly ego-traumatic and/or otherwise 'fixated memory' (or series of memories) -- being 'metaphorically/symbolically re-visited, re-created, and replayed again in some similar and/or different rendition/edition of it in our adult life.
This memory we carry around with us subconsciously as adults -- almost like the 'script of a movie' -- and subjectively perceived as needing to be 'acted out again' (our 're-creation/repetition compulsion') for 'egotistical purposes' -- where we also need one or more actors to play in this script with us.
This whole script may become highly eroticized as a 'transference game', thus becoming a 'sexual transference game'. A 'neurotic' element of our distant past becomes both a neurotic and an erotic sexual transference game in our adult present. Furthermore, this game becomes 'serialized' as we come back to it again and again and again in similar and different encounters, in similar and different relationships.
This is how 'sex' and 'ego' often get 'married together' in our same movie-memory-fantasy script, the same transference script. There is definitely an Adlerian spin to this movie script. 'Inferiority feelings' or 'low self-esteem' (from an egotistically traumatic memory) stimulate 'an upward movement' which Adler called 'superiority striving' with a strong drive towards what might also be called a 'mastery compulsion'. (Here I am mixing Freudian and Adlerian language.)
Or if the 'egotistic success and mastery feeling ' is existent in the original childhood memory, we may just want to keep repeating this feeling of success, superiority, and mastery over and over again. Call this a 'mastery fixation' -- or a return to doing over and over again in different renditions/editions as an adult what we once also did extremely well as a child.
To give you an example from my own life (you can perhaps fill in an example from your own life), I am told by my dad that when I was a small child of 5 or 6, I stood up in front of a Church congregation and when someone -- probably my dad -- pointed to country after country on a globe, I named them all and got them all right -- a feat I could not come close to doing today without some significant practice. However, I have taken the same skill -- knowing the geographical names and relationships between different places -- and turned it into a decent middle class career of scheduling and dispatching taxis and wheelchair vehicles throughout the Greater Toronto Area. One could further argue that what I am doing here -- 'mapping out the different areas of the mind with all of their different inter-relationships with each other' is only a further extrapolation of what I was doing when I was 5 or 6 years old.
Let the drama -- the same essential drama and/or soap opera that we bring with us from our childhood into our adulthood --
replay itself again -- and again, and again, and again.
Only this time -- at least in those cases involving 'negative' (confidence shattering as opposed to confidence-enhancing childhood memories -- generally we are looking for a much better ending, a more 'ego-satisfying' ending to our usually much less satisfying neurotic childhood memory-movie.
The question then might be asked: 'Why is love, lust, passion, and sex often so 'neurotic'? Or alternatively -- why is the neurotically compulsive often so erotically compulsive as well?
For one simple reason. We are trying to 'undo' and/or 're-do' our childhood neurotic transference scripts and resulting 'low self-esteem complex' based on the ego-traumatizing memory(or memories) that led to these partly deterministic, partly existential scripts -- and turn them into something much more ego-satisfying, a 'transference will to power and/or self-empowerment' if you wish.
Sometimes we end up with a more 'satisfying adult movie' -- or worded otherwise -- a more satisfying ending to our unsatisfying and therefore 'perpetually unfinished and unsatisfied' childhood script movie.
Often we don't.
As stated earlier, it often depends if we are starting from a position of a low or high childhood self-esteem movie -- which creates a type of 'transference self-fulfilling prophecy' for us as adults.
In low self-esteem memory movies, our 'transference game' is to move from a position of low self-esteem to a position of much higher self-esteem as we hopefully begin to 'master the movie-fantasy-memory-fixation' -- with 'constant repetition' (which still can bring the same bad ending).
Worst case scenario: The 'transference-villain or culprit' who 'traumatized our ego' in childhood comes back to life again in another associated
'projective-form', and traumatizes us all over again in adulthood too!' We metaphorically return to the scene of our own childhood self-esteem victimization.
Our transference self-fulfilling prophecy at its worst often results in a complete crash into emotional/egotistic despair. A nightmarish return to the scene of our childhood crime and to a replaying of an egotistical and emotional disaster scene!
If you want to play with 'transference-fire', then you risk the very real possibility of getting severely burnt again -- particularly if you take on a very strong projective rendition of your childhood transference rejector (and exciter at the same time). See the Object Relations work of Ronald Fairbairn.
This is how the neurotic becomes the erotic -- like silly fools we often take on formidable adult lover-renditions of our childhood rejector only to end up right back at square one again. Looking up from the mat at this newest edition of our oldest significant rejector, still we often get up off the mat and want more. We both 'idolize' and 'idealize' our projected transference rejector, sometimes even more so, the more they reject us! As long as they at least seem to 'love' us a little too!
Such folly in the minds of men and women!! Transference rejection becomes our biggest sexual aphrodisiac! As long as we eventually think that we can win him or her over. And/or eventually come out on top. Reject our rejector.
Our transference scripts and games can have a number of different endings -- including our doing a 'complete role reversal' and rejecting our 'transference rejector' in the same way that he or she rejects us!!! Vanity, your name is man. And woman!! This is 'transference vanity'.
This is what Freud called the 'repetition compulsion' which he connected with the 'death instinct' or sometimes worded differently as a 'death wish'.
When things go wrong -- so very wrong -- in the deepest, darkest throes of of 'the return of our worst childhood ego nightmare', the return of the suppressed or the repressed, the return of our deepest, darkest childhood transference neurosis, it may feel indeed, very much like we are in an 'egotistic-existential death spiral'.
This may result in a spiral into self-destruction.
And/or a trip to the psychotherapist.
Or our best friend.
Or our family.
Or jail.
Or the hospital.
Or the morgue.
One never really knows which way our transference neurosis is going to take us -- to the gates of heaven, or the gates of hell -- and beyond. Or both.
Indeed, usually it is both.
That is what a 'transference-complex-script-and-game' is.
Sometimes -- oftentimes -- it is simply better to get off the merry-go-round, off the transference-ride before we do ourselves in -- again.
The biggest problem is that it is highly addictive, highly obsessive-compulsive -- and worst of all perhaps, highly emotionally, romantically, and sexually exciting.
Who wants to get off that type of ride?
This is equally true for the 'normal neurotics' amongst us and for the more 'extreme neurotics' that may or may not make the newspapers for greater or lesser reasons, from different types of manipulations and 'control fetishes', sado-masochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, to all of the different 'serial crimes': serial fraud, serial assaults, serial arson, serial rape, serial killings...
These are all generally fantasy and/or behavioral demonstrations of extremely serious and pathological underlying transference complexes.
However, on the other side of things, so too are all 'creative projections' of the most individually and culturally brilliant types. The longer and more persistently a person is working on a creative project, the more likely there is to be the underlying 'drive' of a transference complex at work.
Freud called these types of creative and/or work transferences -- 'sublimation' -- which may or may not contain underlying subconscious sexual components.
Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Kohut, Berne, Perls -- they all captured essential elements of the underlying dynamics of the transference, even as they sometimes gave them other names such as 'lifestyle', 'projection', 'complexes', 'scripts', 'games'...
The creatively brilliant and/or the devastatingly destructive elements of transference complexes at work cannot be understated by anyone who has seriously studied this phenomenon.
Quite simply put, transference by whatever name we choose to use to study and describe this phenomenon -- for example, 'transference' (Freud), 'lifestyle' (Adler), 'complex' (Jung), 'script' (Berne), 'projection' (Gestalt Therapy) -- is the most important motivational force -- or network of forces -- in the study and the understanding of human behavior.
Here is a quote from the highly esteemed psychoanalyst, Brian Bird from his classic 1972 essay on transference -- Notes on Transference: Universal Phenomenon and Hardest Part of Analysis:
'Transference, in my view, is a very special mental quality that has never been satisfactorily explained. I am not satisfied, for instance, either with what has been written about it or with its use in analysis. To me, our knowledge seems slight, and our use limited. This view, admittedly extreme, is possible only because transference is such a very remarkable phenomenon, with a great and largely undeveloped potential. I am particularly taken with the as yet unexplored idea that transference is a universal mental function which may well be the basis of all human relationships. I even suspect it of being one of the mind's main agencies for giving birth to new ideas, and new life to old ones. In these several respects, transference would seem to me to assume characteristics of a major ego function.'
Quoted from the book, 'Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique, Robert Langs, Editor, 1981, 1990.
I would like to think that my work from the 'shadows of academia' through the 1980s, the 1990s, and now the 2000s, will add some new light to the phenomenon of transference with an 'integrative, cross-school' approach.
One can see just from my short essay above, that I have both re-emphasized Bird's comments and taken them a few steps further with:
1. My statement regarding the inter-relationship between creativity, transference and sublimation;
2. My statement regarding the inter-relationship between projection and transference;
3. My statement -- only lightly hinted at here -- regarding the inter-relationship between 'identification with the aggressor', identification with the rejector', 'identification with the abandoner', 'identification with the victimizer', 'identification with the violent and the violator' -- and transference.
This, in my own terminology, I started calling 'transference-reversal' in my unpublished writing in the 1980s;
4. My statement -- only lightly hinted at here -- regarding the inter-relationship between 'ego-splitting', 'ego-states', and transference. That goes back to my studies in Object Relations in the 1980s (Fairbairn, Guntrip), as well as Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne, 'The Games People Play');
5. My statement -- to be developed later -- on the inter-relationship between 'conscious early memories' (Adler), 'lifestyle' (Adler), and 'transference. (That goes back to my studies at The Adlerian Institute in 1980,81, and my general influence from Adlerian psychology ('ego-traumacy' from Freud's traumacy-seduction theory; 'inferiority-feelings', 'superiority striving' from Adler, and the 'mastery compulsion', Freud, 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle');
6. My statement -- to be developed later and showing my influence by Perls and Gestalt Therapy, including my involvement at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto from 1979-1991 -- on the inter-relationship between transference, projection, and 'the unfinished situation'. Also, on the inter-connection between 'ego-splitting' and 'topdog-righteousness' vs. 'underdog approval-seeking' or 'underdog-rebelliosness', all as products of transference-serial behavior patterns;
7. My statement -- just hinted at here -- on the inter-relationship between 'narcissistic transference complexes, scripts, and games' -- and 'serial crimes' of every type that can be seen to have 'an individual memory signature' that is metaphorically and/or symbolically similar to the 'essence' and/or 'nature' -- the 'Method of Operation or MO' if you will -- of the 'serial crimes'. In particular, much more can be said about the inter-connection between 'serial rapes', 'serial killings' -- and transference -- usually through a process of either 'identification with the paternal or maternal aggressor, victimizer, rejector, abandoner... from the internalized 'narcissistic-violent topdog ego-state' and/or through a process of 'compensatory, narcissistic rage' (transference-reversal) from the internalized 'narcissistic-violent underdog' ego-state position. While I was working in this particular direction in the 1980s and/or early 1990s, I found the Psychoanalytic work of Heinz Kohut and saw that I was simply developing his idea of 'narcissistic transference' -- in contra-distinction to Freud who believed basically that narcissistic personalities could not develop transference relationships because they were too absorbed in themselves. I preferred Kohut's way of looking at things when he argued essentially -- and I am paraphrasing from the commonality in our perspectives -- that 'narcissistic transferences' and 'narcissistic transference relationships' do indeed exist and can essentially be described and defined by their 'narcissistic' -- meaning 'self-infatuated' or 'self-absorbed' (and lack of social empathy, lack of social sensitivity, lack of social conscience, lack of moral-ethics) component.
8. Freud once wrote something to the extent that 'we are all psychotic (or schizophrenic) when we dream. In a similar fashion, we are all walking, talking 'serial rejectors' in a clone-like fashion to the way that we can remember our earliest rejections...
That is enough for tonight.
-- dgb, originally written, April 27th-29th, 2009; edited, modified, July 5th, 2009.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Beware of Truth! -- Peter Benson
DGB Introduction and Editorial Comments:
I like this essay a lot. However, I have a philosophical 'love-hate' relationship with Derrida and his philosophy for some of the same -- or at least similar -- reasons that this author here -- Peter Benson -- is protesting against.
Thus, I will aim to advance my own more 'integrative or synthetic arguments' as opposed to Benson's 'anti-thesis' arguments against what Benson calls 'The Cambridge Affair' and I will call the attempted 'Cambridge Academic Deconstruction of Derrida and his Philosophy'.
................................................................
Beware of Truth!
Peter Benson tries to clear Jacques Derrida’s unjustly infamous name, and shows how memes spread in modern academia.
The doorbell rings. I hurry to answer it and find, standing on the doorstep, a man and woman dressed in dark clothes, with bright smiles on their faces. “Good Morning!” they greet me, boundlessly cheerful, “We are visiting people in this area to bring you a copy of our magazine.” And they triumphantly hold aloft a flimsy publication entitled THE TRUTH! in large strident lettering.
I am immediately seized by panic. “I’m terribly sorry,” I hurriedly say, “I haven’t time to talk. I’m just in the middle of sacrificing a goat.” And I quickly close the door in their astonished faces.
I suspect that most readers of Philosophy Now would react in a similar way. Anyone who, out of the blue, wants to bring the Truth to me (or to bring me to the Truth) should be viewed with suspicion. I have got along just fine without this Truth of theirs, and I’m not so sure that I need it now. This cannot be attributed to a lack of curiosity. I am fascinated by facts of many kinds – scientific facts, historical facts, biographical facts – and I am well aware that I still have much to learn. Numerous truths, of various varieties, await my discovery. It is only when I am offered The Truth (with a capital ‘T’), singular and domineering, that I become wary.
I feel equally suspicious when a book of philosophy sets out to tell me Why Truth Matters(Continuum, 2006). On the face of it, this is not a mysterious puzzle. When we ask a question (such as “Where is the nearest railway station?”) we would generally prefer a true answer to a false one. The reasons are fairly obvious! But the authors of this book (Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom) are convinced that Truth is under siege, that its importance is widely denied, and that they need to come to its aid. Ought we perhaps to regard them with the same caution as we would bring to our pair of doorstep preachers?
The aims of the book may seem admirable enough, as the authors catalogue various examples of ideological prejudice and political correctness overriding established facts. These examples are mostly drawn from such fields as sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Yet the authors clearly believe that the original well-spring of such challenges to truth lies within philosophy. They declare their principal targets to be “Postmodernism, epistemic relativism, anti-realism…. And so on.” (p.18) And they later suggest that the origin of these fashionable ideas may have been, in part, “just a brain wave in the head of Jacques Derrida” (p.167) They may be surprised, therefore, to learn that in the book he wrote in collaboration with Catherine Malabou ( ‘Counterpath’, Stanford University Press, 2004) Derrida speaks of attending “a meeting on ‘Postmodernism and Religion’ – two things which are foreign to me.” (p.95). Many similar disavowals can be found in his works.
Many books and articles in recent years have announced a desire to defend Truth against Postmodern attack. But who exactly are these postmodern philosophers, who treat Truth so lightly? And what exactly is postmodernism?
Postmodernism – What is it?
This question is complicated by the use of the term ‘Postmodern’ in various different areas of study, where its multiple meanings do not always coincide. Probably its most straightforward use is in the Arts, where there are distinctive architectural, literary, and painterly styles known as ‘postmodernist’. In each case, this is because there was a previous style, dating from the early 20th Century, known as ‘modernist’ (exemplified by Picasso for painting, Joyce for literature, Le Corbusier for architecture). In the field of philosophy, it is much less clear what ‘postmodern philosophy’ could be defined in contrast to.
University courses usually classify ‘modern’ philosophy as beginning with Descartes, in contrast to Ancient (Greek and Roman) and Medieval philosophies. Of course, many thinkers have reacted against Descartes, beginning with his close contemporary Pascal. That is in the very nature of philosophical debate. It is less obvious whether there has ever been a specific reaction against all modern philosophy and, if so, when this took place. The timescale is clearly very different from that in the field of the arts. Descartes (the first ‘modern’ philosopher) lived from 1596 to1650; Manet (whom we might reasonably consider the first modern artist) lived from 1832 to 1883. If the ‘modern’ periods are so different in each case, we could expect any ‘postmodern’ periods to be equally different.
Even more significantly, hardly any philosopher has ever described themself as a ‘postmodernist’. It is a term almost exclusively used by their critics. It is true that Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote a book in 1979 called The Postmodern Condition, which has been very widely read. He did not, in fact, consider it to be one of his strictly philosophical works (which are far more technical, and thus much less widely read). Its only philosophical content is the application of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games’ to the field of sociology. It was commissioned by the Canadian government as a report on contemporary attitudes towards knowledge. Lyotard concluded that there was a widespread collapse of belief in grand narratives of progress in human knowledge. His predictions about the consequent changes that would result in universities, and in other institutes of higher education, have proved to be largely accurate. He was not saying that there ought to be such a loss of faith, but merely reporting a sociological fact.
In the same way, the social commentator Jean Baudrillard (also often characterized as a ‘postmodernist’) describes aspects of the contemporary world which he finds troubling. Conservative by temperament, he bewails the way we increasingly live inside a virtual reality, disconnected from any identifiable anchoring points. He is certainly not saying that this is a Good Thing.
To describe Lyotard or Baudrillard as ‘postmodernists’ is akin to describing Karl Marx as a capitalist because he wrote analyses of capitalist society. They are notadvocates of something called ‘postmodernism’.
In fact, I do not believe there is any identifiable movement or school of thought which we could accurately call ‘postmodern philosophy’. The philosophers who are usually grouped under this term are too diverse to constitute a school, nor did they ever claim adherence to such a group identity.
This makes me suspicious of writers who avidly wish to protect us from the alleged dangers of ‘postmodern philosophy’. Imaginary enemies can easily be used to generate a paranoid state of mind which is far from conducive to rational thought (think, for example, of America during the McCarthy era).
Lest it be thought that I am exaggerating this situation, consider the paranoid tone adopted by Simon Blackburn, usually a very sober writer, in his Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2005):
“There is something diabolical in the region of relativism, multiculturalism or postmodernism, something which corrupts and corrodes the universities and public culture, that sweeps away moral standards, lays waste young people’s minds, and rots our precious civilization from within.” (p. xv)
Blackburn associates postmodernism particularly with the work of Jacques Derrida (p.170). Derrida is also the first name mentioned by Benson & Stangroom as they begin their attack on postmodernism (p.19). But if we look at what they have to say about his work, we find that they defer the task of authoritative criticism to the American logician W.V. Quine (p.168).
Derrida – The Cambridge Affair
Quine was the most well-known of a group of 19 academics from around the world who signed a letter to The Times in 1992, protesting against the nomination of Derrida for an honorary degree from Cambridge University. Benson and Stangroom quote this passage: “In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.” Quine and his colleagues concluded that he was therefore not worthy of such an honour.
This affair caught the temporary attention of the world’s media, which do not generally take much notice of disagreements among academics. It had been 30 years since any proposed award of a Cambridge honorary degree had been challenged. In accordance with traditional procedures, a vote of the entire academic staff of the University was taken, and a clear majority were found to be in favour of the award (the vote was 336 to 204). Nevertheless, the protest, by members of the Cambridge philosophy faculty led by D.H. Mellor, and by other philosophers including Quine, had been widely reported.
Derrida responded in an interview first published in The Cambridge Review, and reprinted in his collection of interviews Points… (1995). It is a devastating critique of the methods used by his opponents to disparage his work, and should be read by anyone who is inclined towards the widespread dismissal of Derrida’s philosophy.
Quine and his colleagues were certainly outspoken in their views. They declared that Derrida’s work: “seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth and scholarship… His works employ a written style that defies comprehension… When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, when coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.” To this, Derrida replied: “How can they say that what I write ‘defies comprehension’ when they are denouncing its excessive influence and end up by saying that they themselves have very well understood that there is nothing to understand in my work except the false and the trivial?”
The letter in The Times gives no examples of what these false or trivial assertions might be. In fact, the only phrase they quote, supposedly to illustrate Derrida’s use of puns, is a phrase that does not appear in any of his writings! It is no surprise when Derrida asserts that their letter: “violates the very principles in whose name these academics pretend to speak (‘reason, truth and scholarship’)… Nothing means that I am right, or that I should be believed merely because I say so, but let those who want to criticise take the trouble to do so; let them read, quote, demonstrate, and so on.”
None of those who criticized Derrida at the time have ever responded to this challenge. In an interview published the following year (1993) in Cogito, Vol 7, D.H. Mellor remained unrepentant about the attack he had launched and repeated his attribution to Derrida of the belief “that writings have no intrinsic meaning… [and] are open to endless and arbitrary reinterpretation by their readers.” Once again, no reference is given to where Derrida is supposed to have said such a thing. Anyone who has read the passionate exchange of views between Derrida and Foucault about the interpretation of a particular passage in Descartes’ writings (complete with references to the original Latin text) could not possibly think that either of these philosophers believes texts can be interpreted in any way one wants. Yet, together with the claim that he is “denying the distinction between fact and fiction” (Mellor et al, Cambridge University Reporter, 20/5/92) these are the two doctrines most frequently attributed to Derrida by his opponents, always without any reference to where he is alleged to have asserted them.
It is therefore worth quoting a passage where he explicitly denies such claims. In an interview published in the book Life.After.Theory (ed Payne and Schad, 2003) Derrida states, “There are, of course, types of narrative by historians which I would never try to reduce to literature – that would be silly.” (p.27). He thus explicitly upholds the distinction between fact and fiction. Some pages later he explains that, in his view:
“To have the possibility of the authentic, sincere and full meaning of what one says, the possibility of the failure, or the lie, or of something else, must remain open. That’s the structure of language. There would be no truth otherwise. I insist on this because if I didn’t say this I would be considered someone who is opposed to truth or simply doesn’t believe in truth. No, I am attached to truth.”
None of these views are new to him. They do not represent a change of heart, and will not surprise any careful reader of his earlier works. The book containing this interview is actually mentioned in passing by Benson and Stangroom (p.153) though they do not appear to have read its contents. Do they consider it of no importance that Derrida denied holding the very views they attribute to him? Ironically, their own book is explicitly dedicated to espousing the value of “reasoned argument and the requirement of reference to evidence” (p.17), criteria they themselves disregard in their characterization of Derrida’s work.
The trial of Jacques Derrida before the tribunal of British and American academics resembles nothing so much as the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. The condemnation was presented without bothering to provide any evidence, and when the accused spoke in his own defence, his comments were ignored. Since his accusers are defending Truth (along with Reason, and Scholarship) they feel relieved of any need for factual accuracy. Any small specific truths (quotations, with references and dates, such as I have given here) can be ignored.
It is therefore startling to find the following passage in Quine’s autobiography, published seven years before the Derrida controversy (pp.478-479): “My doctrines have suffered stubborn misrepresentations which, if I shared them, would impel me to join my critics in lashing out against my doctrines in no uncertain terms… There is a premium on controversy, fruitful or otherwise, and hence on misinterpretation.” It is a shame (it is, indeed, shameful) that Quine did not bear this in mind before signing a collective denunciation of a fellow philosopher.
Factoids
If these characterizations of the philosophy of Derrida (and others) are false, why are they so often repeated? This question is often asked in the spirit of ‘There’s no smoke without fire, you know!’ Underlying it is that Theory of Truth which underlies propaganda and advertising, that if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true. The theory of ‘memes’, introduced by Richard Dawkins, can help us to understand how this works. Lies propagate (duplicate themselves, spread, proliferate) in a similar way to a virus, often more quickly than facts. They become established in the ‘meme pool’ of society (analogous to the ‘gene pool’ of genetics), which is embodied in newspapers, books, and daily chatter. Attempts to stamp them out can never catch up with all the reappearances they make. There is even a word for these viral entities: factoids.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘factoid’ as “something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true.” The earliest published use of the word is from 1973 (in a book by Norman Mailer). So it is a word of fairly recent invention. This is not surprising. The proliferation of the media, and the exponential expansion of the Internet, has vastly multiplied the channels through which factoids can spread.
Here is an example of a factoid: “Tracey Emin won the Turner Prize with her unmade bed.” In reality, Emin was shortlisted for the prize, but has never won it; and her shortlisting was for a substantial group of works, including drawings and videos, not just for the bed piece. But the factoid is repeated often enough to operate as if it were true. It would be easy enough to check the facts, but journalists prefer to copy factoids from other journalists. It is particularly sad to find the same procedures operating in the field of philosophy, because this contradicts the very foundation of the subject.
Philosophy began when it separated itself from sophistry. The Sophists (at least as they are presented by Plato) were concerned with how to spread ideas, how to make them take root in people’s minds, by the use of rhetoric. Socrates, by contrast, was seeking ways to discover if those ideas were actually true or not, by challenging and checking them.
The Sophists resembled our contemporary doorstep preachers, smoothly eloquent, fitting together all their thoughts in a rounded globe of glib perfection – the one and only Truth, available at a special discount price. (Unlike Socrates, the Sophists charged for their services.) Any descent of philosophy into the ways of Sophistry should be regretted. Yet in his Cambridge Review interview, Derrida noted that: “Most of the distorting, reductive, and ridiculous talk circulating in the newspapers, on the radio or the television on this occasion [regarding his honorary degree] was first shaped in the academic arena, through a sort of public opinion transmitted ‘on the inside’, so to speak, of the university.”
The flurry of bad-tempered argument that resulted may seem a trivial incident. After all, Derrida was finally awarded the honour, which in any case had no direct impact upon his career. But the incident helped to put into circulation various factoids which have subsequently been widely disseminated with no possibility, it seems, of stopping their spread (I have no illusions that this article of mine will have any great effect in this respect). At the time of his death in 2004 almost every obituary in the British press mentioned the Cambridge incident. In Benson and Stangroom’s book the unsubstantiated views expressed by Quine et al in their letter to The Times are quoted, relying on the fame of Quine, as their only direct criticism of Derrida’s work. And yet, reviewing Why Truth Matters in The Independent on Sunday (14/05/06) the journalist Johann Hari concludes “there should be a law demanding every purchase of a Jacques Derrida ‘book’ be accompanied with a free copy of this shimmering, glimmering answer.” In this way, the factoids continue to circulate.
Hari had already attacked Derrida in an astonishing tirade of abuse published in The Independent on 13/10/04, only a few days after Derrida’s death, under the heading ‘Why I Won’t be Mourning Derrida’. Ignoring any etiquette of respectful courtesy towards the recently deceased, Hari indulged in descriptions of Derrida’s ideas which were incorrect in every respect, sometimes attributing to him the exact opposite of the views he actually held. The familiarity of these falsities appears to have absolved the newspaper from checking their accuracy. The laws of libel, after all, do not apply once someone has died, even if they are only a few days dead.
It is true that Derrida’s work is difficult and requires careful reading if it is to be properly understood. But the same could be said of other important figures in the history of philosophy (such as Spinoza, Kant, or Hegel). Why do people assume they should be able to read any work of philosophy easily, though they wouldn’t expect to read a text book on advanced physics without knowledge or guidance? But Hari, like Quine, asserts that “once you learn how to boil down [Derrida’s] prose, his ideas are fairly simple – and pernicious.” Hari’s ‘boiled down’ version, however, bears no relation to Derrida’s actual thought. Here is a sample from Hari’s summary:
“All we can hope for is to establish a ‘metaphysics of presence’, where we try to clear the clutter of language from our minds and experience a few things directly and purely. Derrida’s method for destroying language is deconstruction.”
This is total rubbish! Derrida thought that we could never “clear the clutter of language from our minds”. It was, indeed, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (a phrase Hari had obviously stumbled on in his flicking through Derrida’s writings, for he uses it twice, without understanding it once) that he was seeking to ‘deconstruct’. For those familiar with analytic philosophy ‘the metaphysics of presence’ is roughly equivalent to the ‘Myth of the Given’ analysed and (one could say) ‘deconstructed’ by Wilfrid Sellars in the 1950s. Sellars was reacting against the logical positivists influential in Anglo-American philosophy at that time, in the same way that Derrida was reacting against the phenomenology which predominated in France when he began his career.
From these concerns, Derrida ultimately derived political consequences. The ‘metaphysics of presence’ promotes the idea that democracy, or any other such ideal can be fully achieved and instituted rather than (as Derrida suggests) be recognized as an endless trajectory towards a ‘democracy to come’, always to be spoken of in the future tense.
I am not, of course, going to attempt a full elucidation of Derrida’s philosophy here. That would take time, and space, and patience. All I ask, of any reader who feels drawn to investigate Derrida’s work, is that they should first set aside all of the widely circulating factoids such as ‘Derrida does not believe in truth’ or ‘Derrida thinks that texts can mean whatever we wish them to’. These statements remain untrue, no matter how often they are repeated.
Conclusion
Finally, I would like to refer to two earlier events in Derrida’s life with which the Cambridge incident has alarming affinities. He grew up in Algeria. When the Vichy regime took control of France and its colonies during the Second World War, he was expelled from the school he had been attending because he was a Jew, a fact which had previously had little influence on his life. He experienced exclusion from an educational establishment, with no right of appeal, just as the Cambridge philosophers tried to exclude him from their elite group.
Much later, when he was already a famous philosopher, he visited Communist Prague to attend a meeting of dissident writers. As he was leaving Czechoslovakia, he was abruptly arrested at the airport and taken to prison. The Czech secret police had planted a packet of drugs in his luggage. Diplomatic negotiations led fairly swiftly to his release, but the incident undoubtedly frightened him. Thinking back, he realized that the only time the drugs could have been planted was when he was out of his hotel paying a respectful visit to the grave of Franz Kafka! The opening words of Kafka’s novel The Trial are: “Someone had been spreading lies about Joseph K.” In much the same way, Derrida’s philosophical enemies repeatedly spread demonstrably false accounts of his ideas.
These three incidents, in Algeria, Prague, and Cambridge, are united by their disregard for treating Derrida fairly. If the Cambridge incident seems the least serious of the three, we should remember that Derrida had not sought the honorary degree. He had barely been notified of his nomination before being told that it would be disputed and that this was likely to generate publicity. This publicity gave his opponents an opportunity to disseminate false accounts of his work which continue to this day to influence the popular perception of his philosophy. Derrida’s criticism of his philosophical opponents was not that they disagreed with him (disagreements are part of the normal process of philosophy), but that they misrepresented his work, and ignored the defences he repeatedly put forward against such criticisms. Derrida’s protests, on this issue, were on the grounds of justice. It is, perhaps, not surprising that a central concern of his later work would be the nature of justice.
The aim of this article is both modest and Socratic. Socrates questioned people to see if they had any basis for the various ‘truths’ they thought they knew. In the same way, I suggest one should always question whether writers have sufficient knowledge of their subject to ground the opinions they express. One should never adopt those opinions as one’s own without first checking the various ‘truths’ to which they refer. Benson and Stangroom assert “It is surely in the nature of truth that it has to be all of a piece. Its norms have to apply here as well as there.” (p.17.) This is plausible but false. The truths of moral propositions, for example, are of a quite different nature from those of empirical propositions. Truth has differentiated regions. One should be particularly wary of anyone who declares that they are defending Truth, with a capital ‘T’, their passion for which may have led them to be casual about the accuracy of specific, small scale, multiple truths which could be checked and contested. Such checking and Socratic quibbling can all too easily be treated as a trivial matter when the Juggernaut of Truth is busily rolling along, crushing its alleged opponents into the dust.
© Peter Benson 2009
Peter Benson studied philosophy at Cambridge University, where his tutor was D.H. Mellor, later a principal instigator of the campaign against Derrida.
I like this essay a lot. However, I have a philosophical 'love-hate' relationship with Derrida and his philosophy for some of the same -- or at least similar -- reasons that this author here -- Peter Benson -- is protesting against.
Thus, I will aim to advance my own more 'integrative or synthetic arguments' as opposed to Benson's 'anti-thesis' arguments against what Benson calls 'The Cambridge Affair' and I will call the attempted 'Cambridge Academic Deconstruction of Derrida and his Philosophy'.
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Beware of Truth!
Peter Benson tries to clear Jacques Derrida’s unjustly infamous name, and shows how memes spread in modern academia.
The doorbell rings. I hurry to answer it and find, standing on the doorstep, a man and woman dressed in dark clothes, with bright smiles on their faces. “Good Morning!” they greet me, boundlessly cheerful, “We are visiting people in this area to bring you a copy of our magazine.” And they triumphantly hold aloft a flimsy publication entitled THE TRUTH! in large strident lettering.
I am immediately seized by panic. “I’m terribly sorry,” I hurriedly say, “I haven’t time to talk. I’m just in the middle of sacrificing a goat.” And I quickly close the door in their astonished faces.
I suspect that most readers of Philosophy Now would react in a similar way. Anyone who, out of the blue, wants to bring the Truth to me (or to bring me to the Truth) should be viewed with suspicion. I have got along just fine without this Truth of theirs, and I’m not so sure that I need it now. This cannot be attributed to a lack of curiosity. I am fascinated by facts of many kinds – scientific facts, historical facts, biographical facts – and I am well aware that I still have much to learn. Numerous truths, of various varieties, await my discovery. It is only when I am offered The Truth (with a capital ‘T’), singular and domineering, that I become wary.
I feel equally suspicious when a book of philosophy sets out to tell me Why Truth Matters(Continuum, 2006). On the face of it, this is not a mysterious puzzle. When we ask a question (such as “Where is the nearest railway station?”) we would generally prefer a true answer to a false one. The reasons are fairly obvious! But the authors of this book (Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom) are convinced that Truth is under siege, that its importance is widely denied, and that they need to come to its aid. Ought we perhaps to regard them with the same caution as we would bring to our pair of doorstep preachers?
The aims of the book may seem admirable enough, as the authors catalogue various examples of ideological prejudice and political correctness overriding established facts. These examples are mostly drawn from such fields as sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Yet the authors clearly believe that the original well-spring of such challenges to truth lies within philosophy. They declare their principal targets to be “Postmodernism, epistemic relativism, anti-realism…. And so on.” (p.18) And they later suggest that the origin of these fashionable ideas may have been, in part, “just a brain wave in the head of Jacques Derrida” (p.167) They may be surprised, therefore, to learn that in the book he wrote in collaboration with Catherine Malabou ( ‘Counterpath’, Stanford University Press, 2004) Derrida speaks of attending “a meeting on ‘Postmodernism and Religion’ – two things which are foreign to me.” (p.95). Many similar disavowals can be found in his works.
Many books and articles in recent years have announced a desire to defend Truth against Postmodern attack. But who exactly are these postmodern philosophers, who treat Truth so lightly? And what exactly is postmodernism?
Postmodernism – What is it?
This question is complicated by the use of the term ‘Postmodern’ in various different areas of study, where its multiple meanings do not always coincide. Probably its most straightforward use is in the Arts, where there are distinctive architectural, literary, and painterly styles known as ‘postmodernist’. In each case, this is because there was a previous style, dating from the early 20th Century, known as ‘modernist’ (exemplified by Picasso for painting, Joyce for literature, Le Corbusier for architecture). In the field of philosophy, it is much less clear what ‘postmodern philosophy’ could be defined in contrast to.
University courses usually classify ‘modern’ philosophy as beginning with Descartes, in contrast to Ancient (Greek and Roman) and Medieval philosophies. Of course, many thinkers have reacted against Descartes, beginning with his close contemporary Pascal. That is in the very nature of philosophical debate. It is less obvious whether there has ever been a specific reaction against all modern philosophy and, if so, when this took place. The timescale is clearly very different from that in the field of the arts. Descartes (the first ‘modern’ philosopher) lived from 1596 to1650; Manet (whom we might reasonably consider the first modern artist) lived from 1832 to 1883. If the ‘modern’ periods are so different in each case, we could expect any ‘postmodern’ periods to be equally different.
Even more significantly, hardly any philosopher has ever described themself as a ‘postmodernist’. It is a term almost exclusively used by their critics. It is true that Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote a book in 1979 called The Postmodern Condition, which has been very widely read. He did not, in fact, consider it to be one of his strictly philosophical works (which are far more technical, and thus much less widely read). Its only philosophical content is the application of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games’ to the field of sociology. It was commissioned by the Canadian government as a report on contemporary attitudes towards knowledge. Lyotard concluded that there was a widespread collapse of belief in grand narratives of progress in human knowledge. His predictions about the consequent changes that would result in universities, and in other institutes of higher education, have proved to be largely accurate. He was not saying that there ought to be such a loss of faith, but merely reporting a sociological fact.
In the same way, the social commentator Jean Baudrillard (also often characterized as a ‘postmodernist’) describes aspects of the contemporary world which he finds troubling. Conservative by temperament, he bewails the way we increasingly live inside a virtual reality, disconnected from any identifiable anchoring points. He is certainly not saying that this is a Good Thing.
To describe Lyotard or Baudrillard as ‘postmodernists’ is akin to describing Karl Marx as a capitalist because he wrote analyses of capitalist society. They are notadvocates of something called ‘postmodernism’.
In fact, I do not believe there is any identifiable movement or school of thought which we could accurately call ‘postmodern philosophy’. The philosophers who are usually grouped under this term are too diverse to constitute a school, nor did they ever claim adherence to such a group identity.
This makes me suspicious of writers who avidly wish to protect us from the alleged dangers of ‘postmodern philosophy’. Imaginary enemies can easily be used to generate a paranoid state of mind which is far from conducive to rational thought (think, for example, of America during the McCarthy era).
Lest it be thought that I am exaggerating this situation, consider the paranoid tone adopted by Simon Blackburn, usually a very sober writer, in his Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2005):
“There is something diabolical in the region of relativism, multiculturalism or postmodernism, something which corrupts and corrodes the universities and public culture, that sweeps away moral standards, lays waste young people’s minds, and rots our precious civilization from within.” (p. xv)
Blackburn associates postmodernism particularly with the work of Jacques Derrida (p.170). Derrida is also the first name mentioned by Benson & Stangroom as they begin their attack on postmodernism (p.19). But if we look at what they have to say about his work, we find that they defer the task of authoritative criticism to the American logician W.V. Quine (p.168).
Derrida – The Cambridge Affair
Quine was the most well-known of a group of 19 academics from around the world who signed a letter to The Times in 1992, protesting against the nomination of Derrida for an honorary degree from Cambridge University. Benson and Stangroom quote this passage: “In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.” Quine and his colleagues concluded that he was therefore not worthy of such an honour.
This affair caught the temporary attention of the world’s media, which do not generally take much notice of disagreements among academics. It had been 30 years since any proposed award of a Cambridge honorary degree had been challenged. In accordance with traditional procedures, a vote of the entire academic staff of the University was taken, and a clear majority were found to be in favour of the award (the vote was 336 to 204). Nevertheless, the protest, by members of the Cambridge philosophy faculty led by D.H. Mellor, and by other philosophers including Quine, had been widely reported.
Derrida responded in an interview first published in The Cambridge Review, and reprinted in his collection of interviews Points… (1995). It is a devastating critique of the methods used by his opponents to disparage his work, and should be read by anyone who is inclined towards the widespread dismissal of Derrida’s philosophy.
Quine and his colleagues were certainly outspoken in their views. They declared that Derrida’s work: “seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth and scholarship… His works employ a written style that defies comprehension… When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, when coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.” To this, Derrida replied: “How can they say that what I write ‘defies comprehension’ when they are denouncing its excessive influence and end up by saying that they themselves have very well understood that there is nothing to understand in my work except the false and the trivial?”
The letter in The Times gives no examples of what these false or trivial assertions might be. In fact, the only phrase they quote, supposedly to illustrate Derrida’s use of puns, is a phrase that does not appear in any of his writings! It is no surprise when Derrida asserts that their letter: “violates the very principles in whose name these academics pretend to speak (‘reason, truth and scholarship’)… Nothing means that I am right, or that I should be believed merely because I say so, but let those who want to criticise take the trouble to do so; let them read, quote, demonstrate, and so on.”
None of those who criticized Derrida at the time have ever responded to this challenge. In an interview published the following year (1993) in Cogito, Vol 7, D.H. Mellor remained unrepentant about the attack he had launched and repeated his attribution to Derrida of the belief “that writings have no intrinsic meaning… [and] are open to endless and arbitrary reinterpretation by their readers.” Once again, no reference is given to where Derrida is supposed to have said such a thing. Anyone who has read the passionate exchange of views between Derrida and Foucault about the interpretation of a particular passage in Descartes’ writings (complete with references to the original Latin text) could not possibly think that either of these philosophers believes texts can be interpreted in any way one wants. Yet, together with the claim that he is “denying the distinction between fact and fiction” (Mellor et al, Cambridge University Reporter, 20/5/92) these are the two doctrines most frequently attributed to Derrida by his opponents, always without any reference to where he is alleged to have asserted them.
It is therefore worth quoting a passage where he explicitly denies such claims. In an interview published in the book Life.After.Theory (ed Payne and Schad, 2003) Derrida states, “There are, of course, types of narrative by historians which I would never try to reduce to literature – that would be silly.” (p.27). He thus explicitly upholds the distinction between fact and fiction. Some pages later he explains that, in his view:
“To have the possibility of the authentic, sincere and full meaning of what one says, the possibility of the failure, or the lie, or of something else, must remain open. That’s the structure of language. There would be no truth otherwise. I insist on this because if I didn’t say this I would be considered someone who is opposed to truth or simply doesn’t believe in truth. No, I am attached to truth.”
None of these views are new to him. They do not represent a change of heart, and will not surprise any careful reader of his earlier works. The book containing this interview is actually mentioned in passing by Benson and Stangroom (p.153) though they do not appear to have read its contents. Do they consider it of no importance that Derrida denied holding the very views they attribute to him? Ironically, their own book is explicitly dedicated to espousing the value of “reasoned argument and the requirement of reference to evidence” (p.17), criteria they themselves disregard in their characterization of Derrida’s work.
The trial of Jacques Derrida before the tribunal of British and American academics resembles nothing so much as the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. The condemnation was presented without bothering to provide any evidence, and when the accused spoke in his own defence, his comments were ignored. Since his accusers are defending Truth (along with Reason, and Scholarship) they feel relieved of any need for factual accuracy. Any small specific truths (quotations, with references and dates, such as I have given here) can be ignored.
It is therefore startling to find the following passage in Quine’s autobiography, published seven years before the Derrida controversy (pp.478-479): “My doctrines have suffered stubborn misrepresentations which, if I shared them, would impel me to join my critics in lashing out against my doctrines in no uncertain terms… There is a premium on controversy, fruitful or otherwise, and hence on misinterpretation.” It is a shame (it is, indeed, shameful) that Quine did not bear this in mind before signing a collective denunciation of a fellow philosopher.
Factoids
If these characterizations of the philosophy of Derrida (and others) are false, why are they so often repeated? This question is often asked in the spirit of ‘There’s no smoke without fire, you know!’ Underlying it is that Theory of Truth which underlies propaganda and advertising, that if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true. The theory of ‘memes’, introduced by Richard Dawkins, can help us to understand how this works. Lies propagate (duplicate themselves, spread, proliferate) in a similar way to a virus, often more quickly than facts. They become established in the ‘meme pool’ of society (analogous to the ‘gene pool’ of genetics), which is embodied in newspapers, books, and daily chatter. Attempts to stamp them out can never catch up with all the reappearances they make. There is even a word for these viral entities: factoids.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘factoid’ as “something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true.” The earliest published use of the word is from 1973 (in a book by Norman Mailer). So it is a word of fairly recent invention. This is not surprising. The proliferation of the media, and the exponential expansion of the Internet, has vastly multiplied the channels through which factoids can spread.
Here is an example of a factoid: “Tracey Emin won the Turner Prize with her unmade bed.” In reality, Emin was shortlisted for the prize, but has never won it; and her shortlisting was for a substantial group of works, including drawings and videos, not just for the bed piece. But the factoid is repeated often enough to operate as if it were true. It would be easy enough to check the facts, but journalists prefer to copy factoids from other journalists. It is particularly sad to find the same procedures operating in the field of philosophy, because this contradicts the very foundation of the subject.
Philosophy began when it separated itself from sophistry. The Sophists (at least as they are presented by Plato) were concerned with how to spread ideas, how to make them take root in people’s minds, by the use of rhetoric. Socrates, by contrast, was seeking ways to discover if those ideas were actually true or not, by challenging and checking them.
The Sophists resembled our contemporary doorstep preachers, smoothly eloquent, fitting together all their thoughts in a rounded globe of glib perfection – the one and only Truth, available at a special discount price. (Unlike Socrates, the Sophists charged for their services.) Any descent of philosophy into the ways of Sophistry should be regretted. Yet in his Cambridge Review interview, Derrida noted that: “Most of the distorting, reductive, and ridiculous talk circulating in the newspapers, on the radio or the television on this occasion [regarding his honorary degree] was first shaped in the academic arena, through a sort of public opinion transmitted ‘on the inside’, so to speak, of the university.”
The flurry of bad-tempered argument that resulted may seem a trivial incident. After all, Derrida was finally awarded the honour, which in any case had no direct impact upon his career. But the incident helped to put into circulation various factoids which have subsequently been widely disseminated with no possibility, it seems, of stopping their spread (I have no illusions that this article of mine will have any great effect in this respect). At the time of his death in 2004 almost every obituary in the British press mentioned the Cambridge incident. In Benson and Stangroom’s book the unsubstantiated views expressed by Quine et al in their letter to The Times are quoted, relying on the fame of Quine, as their only direct criticism of Derrida’s work. And yet, reviewing Why Truth Matters in The Independent on Sunday (14/05/06) the journalist Johann Hari concludes “there should be a law demanding every purchase of a Jacques Derrida ‘book’ be accompanied with a free copy of this shimmering, glimmering answer.” In this way, the factoids continue to circulate.
Hari had already attacked Derrida in an astonishing tirade of abuse published in The Independent on 13/10/04, only a few days after Derrida’s death, under the heading ‘Why I Won’t be Mourning Derrida’. Ignoring any etiquette of respectful courtesy towards the recently deceased, Hari indulged in descriptions of Derrida’s ideas which were incorrect in every respect, sometimes attributing to him the exact opposite of the views he actually held. The familiarity of these falsities appears to have absolved the newspaper from checking their accuracy. The laws of libel, after all, do not apply once someone has died, even if they are only a few days dead.
It is true that Derrida’s work is difficult and requires careful reading if it is to be properly understood. But the same could be said of other important figures in the history of philosophy (such as Spinoza, Kant, or Hegel). Why do people assume they should be able to read any work of philosophy easily, though they wouldn’t expect to read a text book on advanced physics without knowledge or guidance? But Hari, like Quine, asserts that “once you learn how to boil down [Derrida’s] prose, his ideas are fairly simple – and pernicious.” Hari’s ‘boiled down’ version, however, bears no relation to Derrida’s actual thought. Here is a sample from Hari’s summary:
“All we can hope for is to establish a ‘metaphysics of presence’, where we try to clear the clutter of language from our minds and experience a few things directly and purely. Derrida’s method for destroying language is deconstruction.”
This is total rubbish! Derrida thought that we could never “clear the clutter of language from our minds”. It was, indeed, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (a phrase Hari had obviously stumbled on in his flicking through Derrida’s writings, for he uses it twice, without understanding it once) that he was seeking to ‘deconstruct’. For those familiar with analytic philosophy ‘the metaphysics of presence’ is roughly equivalent to the ‘Myth of the Given’ analysed and (one could say) ‘deconstructed’ by Wilfrid Sellars in the 1950s. Sellars was reacting against the logical positivists influential in Anglo-American philosophy at that time, in the same way that Derrida was reacting against the phenomenology which predominated in France when he began his career.
From these concerns, Derrida ultimately derived political consequences. The ‘metaphysics of presence’ promotes the idea that democracy, or any other such ideal can be fully achieved and instituted rather than (as Derrida suggests) be recognized as an endless trajectory towards a ‘democracy to come’, always to be spoken of in the future tense.
I am not, of course, going to attempt a full elucidation of Derrida’s philosophy here. That would take time, and space, and patience. All I ask, of any reader who feels drawn to investigate Derrida’s work, is that they should first set aside all of the widely circulating factoids such as ‘Derrida does not believe in truth’ or ‘Derrida thinks that texts can mean whatever we wish them to’. These statements remain untrue, no matter how often they are repeated.
Conclusion
Finally, I would like to refer to two earlier events in Derrida’s life with which the Cambridge incident has alarming affinities. He grew up in Algeria. When the Vichy regime took control of France and its colonies during the Second World War, he was expelled from the school he had been attending because he was a Jew, a fact which had previously had little influence on his life. He experienced exclusion from an educational establishment, with no right of appeal, just as the Cambridge philosophers tried to exclude him from their elite group.
Much later, when he was already a famous philosopher, he visited Communist Prague to attend a meeting of dissident writers. As he was leaving Czechoslovakia, he was abruptly arrested at the airport and taken to prison. The Czech secret police had planted a packet of drugs in his luggage. Diplomatic negotiations led fairly swiftly to his release, but the incident undoubtedly frightened him. Thinking back, he realized that the only time the drugs could have been planted was when he was out of his hotel paying a respectful visit to the grave of Franz Kafka! The opening words of Kafka’s novel The Trial are: “Someone had been spreading lies about Joseph K.” In much the same way, Derrida’s philosophical enemies repeatedly spread demonstrably false accounts of his ideas.
These three incidents, in Algeria, Prague, and Cambridge, are united by their disregard for treating Derrida fairly. If the Cambridge incident seems the least serious of the three, we should remember that Derrida had not sought the honorary degree. He had barely been notified of his nomination before being told that it would be disputed and that this was likely to generate publicity. This publicity gave his opponents an opportunity to disseminate false accounts of his work which continue to this day to influence the popular perception of his philosophy. Derrida’s criticism of his philosophical opponents was not that they disagreed with him (disagreements are part of the normal process of philosophy), but that they misrepresented his work, and ignored the defences he repeatedly put forward against such criticisms. Derrida’s protests, on this issue, were on the grounds of justice. It is, perhaps, not surprising that a central concern of his later work would be the nature of justice.
The aim of this article is both modest and Socratic. Socrates questioned people to see if they had any basis for the various ‘truths’ they thought they knew. In the same way, I suggest one should always question whether writers have sufficient knowledge of their subject to ground the opinions they express. One should never adopt those opinions as one’s own without first checking the various ‘truths’ to which they refer. Benson and Stangroom assert “It is surely in the nature of truth that it has to be all of a piece. Its norms have to apply here as well as there.” (p.17.) This is plausible but false. The truths of moral propositions, for example, are of a quite different nature from those of empirical propositions. Truth has differentiated regions. One should be particularly wary of anyone who declares that they are defending Truth, with a capital ‘T’, their passion for which may have led them to be casual about the accuracy of specific, small scale, multiple truths which could be checked and contested. Such checking and Socratic quibbling can all too easily be treated as a trivial matter when the Juggernaut of Truth is busily rolling along, crushing its alleged opponents into the dust.
© Peter Benson 2009
Peter Benson studied philosophy at Cambridge University, where his tutor was D.H. Mellor, later a principal instigator of the campaign against Derrida.
Up and Down 'The Elevator' in Hegel's Hotel -- and Into The Psychology and Personality Theory Section of The Hotel
For distinction and clarification purposes here, let me point out that I wish to reserve at least seven floors in Hegel's Hotel for the strict study of psychology -- most notably, personality theory and its various ramifications and offshoots into psychopathology (neurosis and psychosis or sczhizophrenia); personal growth; and clinical psychology/psychotherapy.
In this regard, I wish to introduce a model of the human psyche that will take up seven floors in the 'Psychology' section of Hegel's Hotel.
This model and the 'seven different floors' are described below:
................................................................................
A Hegel's Hotel Seven Floor Model of The Human Psyche
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 1: The 'First Basement Floor' will be dedicated to studying 'The Genetic, Potential Humanistic-Existential Self' -- 'The Essence, Architectural Design, and/ or Blue Print' of The Individual Self, Psyche, and/or Personality;
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 2: The 'Second Basement Floor': The Genetic and/or Collective Unconscious' including the study of mythology, archetypes, symbolism, creativity and dream work, Freud's 'primary process'...;
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 3: The 'Third Basement Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Id' including all biological and psychiological influences on the personality, sex, violence, 'life vs. death impulses and/or wishes', fantasies, and their mythological, transference, and/or creative-destructive derivatives;
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 4: The 'Fourth Basement Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Personal Unconscious' including learning and memory theory, conscious memories, subconscious memories, screen memories, unconscious and/or repressed memories, and 'The Transference Complex Templates';
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 5: 'The Main Lobby Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Underdog Ego Functions and Agents' including: 1. 'The Co-operative (Approval-Seeking) Underdog Ego'; 2. 'The Rebellious-Righteous Underdog Ego'; 3. 'The Dionysian-Hedonistic-Narcissistic Underdog Ego'; and 4. The Schizoid (Distance-Seeking) Underdog Ego';
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 6: 'The First Mezzanine Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 1. 'The Central Mediating-Executive Ego'; and its corollorary agents 2. The Darwinian-Economic-Survival Ego'; 3. 'The Enlightenment Epistemological and Ethical Ego'; and 4. 'The Romantic-Humanistic-Existential Ego';
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 7: 'The Upper Mezzanine Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Topdog (Super) Ego Functions and Agents including: 1. 'The Nurturing-Supportive-Encouraging Topdog Ego'; 2. The Righteous-Critical-Rejecting-Exciting Topdog Ego; 3. The Dionysian-Hedonistic-Narcissistic Topdog Ego; and 4. The Schizoid (Distance-Seeking) Topdog Ego.
..............................................................................
I realize that some people -- quite possibly many people -- might view this as an over-complicated, over-compartmentalized, over-objectified model of the human psyche.
My main counter-arguments to these possible criticisms of the model are:
1. The model is a very large, comprehensive one of the personality that allows for the possibility of integrating elements of Psychoanalysis including Traumacy-Seduction Theory, Oedipal Theory, Transference Theory, Sexuality and Narcissistic Theory, Life and Death Instinct Theory, Expanded Ego-Id-Superego Theory, Central Ego Theory, Ego-Splitting Theory, Object Relations Theory, Self-Psychology (Kohut), Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Transactional Analysis, Enlightenment Epistemology and Ethics, Cognitive Therapy, General Semantics, Romantic Philosophy and Humanistic-Existentialism, Gestalt Therapy...In short, the model allows me to discuss and apply almost everything that I have learned about personality theory in the last 35 years or so.
Having said this, the model is also easy to 'reduce into the smaller relevant part(s) of the personality that we might want to work in at any particular time, and the names can be shortened as well for greater simplicity. And the model can also be easily 'subjectified' using a simple change in pronouns from third person to first person.
At this point in time, I am comfortable with this DGB model of the human psyche and will work with it in future essays to come....
-- dgb, March 26th, 2009; updated April 26th, 2009
In this regard, I wish to introduce a model of the human psyche that will take up seven floors in the 'Psychology' section of Hegel's Hotel.
This model and the 'seven different floors' are described below:
................................................................................
A Hegel's Hotel Seven Floor Model of The Human Psyche
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 1: The 'First Basement Floor' will be dedicated to studying 'The Genetic, Potential Humanistic-Existential Self' -- 'The Essence, Architectural Design, and/ or Blue Print' of The Individual Self, Psyche, and/or Personality;
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 2: The 'Second Basement Floor': The Genetic and/or Collective Unconscious' including the study of mythology, archetypes, symbolism, creativity and dream work, Freud's 'primary process'...;
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 3: The 'Third Basement Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Id' including all biological and psychiological influences on the personality, sex, violence, 'life vs. death impulses and/or wishes', fantasies, and their mythological, transference, and/or creative-destructive derivatives;
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 4: The 'Fourth Basement Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Personal Unconscious' including learning and memory theory, conscious memories, subconscious memories, screen memories, unconscious and/or repressed memories, and 'The Transference Complex Templates';
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 5: 'The Main Lobby Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Underdog Ego Functions and Agents' including: 1. 'The Co-operative (Approval-Seeking) Underdog Ego'; 2. 'The Rebellious-Righteous Underdog Ego'; 3. 'The Dionysian-Hedonistic-Narcissistic Underdog Ego'; and 4. The Schizoid (Distance-Seeking) Underdog Ego';
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 6: 'The First Mezzanine Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 1. 'The Central Mediating-Executive Ego'; and its corollorary agents 2. The Darwinian-Economic-Survival Ego'; 3. 'The Enlightenment Epistemological and Ethical Ego'; and 4. 'The Romantic-Humanistic-Existential Ego';
Hegel's Hotel Personality Theory Section -- Floor 7: 'The Upper Mezzanine Floor' will be dedicated to the study of 'The Topdog (Super) Ego Functions and Agents including: 1. 'The Nurturing-Supportive-Encouraging Topdog Ego'; 2. The Righteous-Critical-Rejecting-Exciting Topdog Ego; 3. The Dionysian-Hedonistic-Narcissistic Topdog Ego; and 4. The Schizoid (Distance-Seeking) Topdog Ego.
..............................................................................
I realize that some people -- quite possibly many people -- might view this as an over-complicated, over-compartmentalized, over-objectified model of the human psyche.
My main counter-arguments to these possible criticisms of the model are:
1. The model is a very large, comprehensive one of the personality that allows for the possibility of integrating elements of Psychoanalysis including Traumacy-Seduction Theory, Oedipal Theory, Transference Theory, Sexuality and Narcissistic Theory, Life and Death Instinct Theory, Expanded Ego-Id-Superego Theory, Central Ego Theory, Ego-Splitting Theory, Object Relations Theory, Self-Psychology (Kohut), Jungian Psychology, Adlerian Psychology, Transactional Analysis, Enlightenment Epistemology and Ethics, Cognitive Therapy, General Semantics, Romantic Philosophy and Humanistic-Existentialism, Gestalt Therapy...In short, the model allows me to discuss and apply almost everything that I have learned about personality theory in the last 35 years or so.
Having said this, the model is also easy to 'reduce into the smaller relevant part(s) of the personality that we might want to work in at any particular time, and the names can be shortened as well for greater simplicity. And the model can also be easily 'subjectified' using a simple change in pronouns from third person to first person.
At this point in time, I am comfortable with this DGB model of the human psyche and will work with it in future essays to come....
-- dgb, March 26th, 2009; updated April 26th, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
The Two Wolves
The Two Wolves
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two "wolves" inside us all..
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence,empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The grand son thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
LORI DALTON
Recruiter
IBM Finance & Operations
Learning Consultant
905-316-2868
LORID@CA.IBM.COM
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two "wolves" inside us all..
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence,empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The grand son thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
LORI DALTON
Recruiter
IBM Finance & Operations
Learning Consultant
905-316-2868
LORID@CA.IBM.COM
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
DGB Philosophy is Not 'Communitarianism' -- Nor 'Anti-Communitarianism' (Second Posting)
For the record, I am going to re-write this essay to try to obtain more clarity -- for myself, my readers, and my first full-fledged 'dialectic-democratic' adversary from 'Living Outside The Dialectic' -- Ms. Niki Raapana. (
Let's hear the criticism directed at me from Ms. Rapaana before I write my response.
...................................................................
the tent lady said...
Hi David,
Communitarianism is the synthesis in the Hegelian dialectic. You want to dispute me properly, then do your readers a favor and dispute my published antithesis to Hegel's perfect synthesis, "The Anti communitarian Manifesto." It's available free online and remains undisputed after six years and thousands of downloads.
It's hilarious that you chose to cite a passage from my blog rather than a passage from our "What is the Hegelian Dialectic?" or "The Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking," or "Communitarian Law." Even my article "Elitism is Dialectical Terrorism" would have been a more appropriate source for your complaints against my work.
No matter what you think of me and my "arrogant trash talking language," you haven't made the slightest attempt to show what my argument is, let alone rationally dispute it.
You admit you don't even know what communitarianism is, you claim it's "too abstract" for you to comprehend (yet you claim to get Hegel!) and then (and God only knows how you arrived at this conclusion) you say Etzioni and I are "basically the same people."
Can you legitimately say I am the one who makes no attempt to learn anything meaningful about the world? You spent a lot of time trashing me in this post, maybe you should spend at least as much time studying this topic you admittedly know nothing about.
"In a passage that is notable for its vagueness, Azevedo says that the CEBs should be the basis for a new communitarianism that rejects the two "bankrupt" models and systems "that are now polarizing the world," capitalism and Marxist socialism. This communitarianism is to be "a dialectical synthesis, a new creation, superimposing itself on thesis and antithesis rather than retrieving them." The passage illustrates the controversy in Latin American Catholicism between those who continue to endorse the "third-position-ism" (tercerismo) of Catholic social teaching and those (including all liberation theologians that I know of) who believe that only socialism can be in accord with Christian values." Theology Today-Basic Ecclesial Communities in Brazil: The Challenge of a New Way of Being Church By Marcello deC. Azevedo, S.J.Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1987. 304 Pp. "
April 15, 2009 1:46 AM
.................................................................................
I'm not sure that my efforts here are going to achieve anything -- you get two philosophers debating with each other who are accustomed to writing and talking in their own conceptuology and own terminology, built from the historical context of their own experiences, readings, and resulting ideas -- and its like two people trying to talk to each other in totally different languages.
Even worse sometimes when the same words are used with different implied meanings in mind. Words like 'Capitalism', 'Socialism', 'Communitarianism' and 'Anti-Communitarianism' run the risk of generating either extremely positive or extremely negative semantic and evaluative connotations without debaters making sure beforehand that they are talking, writing -- and arguing -- about the same thing.
At some point, you have to ask yourself whether the expended time and energy is worth the results -- or non-results -- two people still stuck inside their own respective philosophical worlds and not being able to find a bridge between these two worlds, and/or even wanting to. Personal narcissism and egotism reigns supreme.
'Communitarianism'. Is this even something I want to write about? It would not have normally been something high -- or even low -- on my writing priority list.
I do not mind using the word 'Centralist'. In fact, I would definitely say that DGB Philosophy is a Centralist Philosophy. For example, in ideal terms, I would consider myself to be:
1. An Integrative Socialist-Capitalist (probably not as Socialist as Obama is showing to be...I do believe in running a budget in the black, not the red...not going deeper and deeper and deeper into the red until you are at the bottom of an economic well of debt where you cannot even see sunlight anymore...);
2. An Integrative Conservative-Liberal and/or an Integrative Republican-Democrat (same idea as above...some socialist leanings in the humanistic-existential treatment of the individual worker but predominantly Capitalist in ideology. Now this is important -- I support an 'Ethical Capitalism' as laid down at least mainly by Adam Smith in 'The Wealth of Nations' and by Ayn Rand in 'The Fountainhead' and 'Atlas Shrugged' but in this regard, a type of Ethical Capitalism that includes the economic and psychological well-being of both Wall Street and Main Street, not a type of unethical, narcissistic Capitalism that allows Wall Street CEOs and top executives the opportunity to give themselves 'million dollar parachutes -- and bail' while the workers under them are left to face the music in a 'rubbish company' that has been left bankrupt with its customers out on the street because of foreclosed homes.
'DGBN' stands for:
1. Dialectic-Democratic Gap-Bridging Negotiations;
2. Dialectic-Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism.
.......................................................................
Now I have two negative images here -- or at least partly negative images (call them negative steretypes if you wish) that come to my mind when I think of 'Communitarianism' and 'Anti-Communitarianism'.
If by 'Communitarianism' the implied meaning is 'Collectivism' -- then I want to do with neither because I do not want to be associated with Collectivism which brings to mind the idea of 'Group Think' (with individual ideas and rights being wiped out of existence by the 'Collective Group' which may not even be a 'Participatory or Representative Democracy' but rather a 'Ruling Elite'). I have no interest -- DGB Philosophy has no interest -- in supporting a cause like this.
Now if by 'Anti-Communitarianism' -- and I mean no disrespect here, Ms. Niki Raapana, but what may be good, or pleasurable, for you, may not be good or pleasurable for me -- if by 'Anti-Communtiarianism', the implied meaning is living in a tent in Alaska -- particularly in the winter -- I pass. I will take my warm townhouse in Newmarket, Ontario, thank you very much. 'Anti-Communitarianism' sounds also like 'Anti-Community' which I don't think is the intent of the meaning. If by 'Anti-Communitarianism' the idea of 'Anti-Collectivism' is meant, then I would again prefer you call me an 'Anti-Collectivist' rather than an 'Anti-Communitarian'.
Now, Ms. Niki, if by 'Anti-Communitarianism' you mean some kind of return to Nature and Romantic Philosophy, I can subscribe to that ideal easily enough -- indeed, you have my full support -- just as long as I can have my warm townhouse to start from.
So what else is 'Anti-Communitarianism'? I will write again what I wrote the last time I wrote this essay.
'Anti-Communitarianism' is not 'living outside the dialectic'. It is living on one polar edge of a recently evolving dialectic. I'm going to assume, Ms. Niki, that you are critiquing the nature of our 'North American Elitist -- Run From Behind The Scenes -- Pseudo Democracy'.
Do I have it right this time, Niki?
If I am right in my interpretation here of your philosophical work, then again I support you in your cause. Just don't call it 'living outside the dialectic'. Because every time you write, you are engaging in a 'fresh, new dialectic' -- either with me, or with someone else whose philosophy you don't like, or with someone else who has critiqued your work, or with anyone out there whose philosophy you label and stereotype as 'Communitarian'.
To the extent that Hegel was a 'political collectivist', I do not support this aspect of his work. In similar fashion, I do not support this aspect of Rousseau's political philosophy. Nor Plato's. Nor any of the deeds coming out of the 'political terrorist' years of Communist China (Mao Tse Tung) and/or Russia (Lenin, Stalin). These barbaric leaders didn't support any aspect of the 'humanistic-existential' philosophy of Marx's early work before Marx himself started to become more extremist, less democratic, and less humanistic.
DGB Philosophy is a Centralist Philosophy -- in that I believe in a constantly evolving 'dialectic-democratic, homeostatic balance between individual rights and government safety networks that guard people's individual rights and protect them from economic and/or medical traumacy but it is not a 'Collectivist Philosophy' nor is it a 'Communitarian Philosophy' to the extent of 'Collectivism' being meant. (Who amongst us wants our 'individual rights' wiped out?)
DGB Philosophy may be an 'Anti-Communitarian' philosophy to the extent that it believes in 'individual rights' and the pursuit of romantic philosophy and Nature. If by 'Anti-Communitarianism' a type of 'romantic-enlightenment' philosophy is meant, then I am in. But the name 'Anti-Communitarianism' is rather politically provocative and seems to excite all sorts of 'Us vs. Them' reactions. Why not just call 'Anti-Communitarianism' -- 'Anti-Political Conspiracy Philosophy'? Or 'Anti-Collectivism'? Less confusion -- less disagreement -- more philosophical supporters. Maybe Anti-Communitarianism derives its 'philosophical energy' from fighting philosophical adversaries who may at the bottom, main common denominators, actually agree with you, Ms. Niki
But maybe 'philosophical agreement' is less challenging and less exciting for you, Ms. Niki...
Maybe, Niki, you are just one of those people who is used to -- and thrives on -- rubbing people the wrong way.
-- dgb, April 22, 2009, updated May 11th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissistic Righteousness...
..................................................................................
Let's hear the criticism directed at me from Ms. Rapaana before I write my response.
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the tent lady said...
Hi David,
Communitarianism is the synthesis in the Hegelian dialectic. You want to dispute me properly, then do your readers a favor and dispute my published antithesis to Hegel's perfect synthesis, "The Anti communitarian Manifesto." It's available free online and remains undisputed after six years and thousands of downloads.
It's hilarious that you chose to cite a passage from my blog rather than a passage from our "What is the Hegelian Dialectic?" or "The Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking," or "Communitarian Law." Even my article "Elitism is Dialectical Terrorism" would have been a more appropriate source for your complaints against my work.
No matter what you think of me and my "arrogant trash talking language," you haven't made the slightest attempt to show what my argument is, let alone rationally dispute it.
You admit you don't even know what communitarianism is, you claim it's "too abstract" for you to comprehend (yet you claim to get Hegel!) and then (and God only knows how you arrived at this conclusion) you say Etzioni and I are "basically the same people."
Can you legitimately say I am the one who makes no attempt to learn anything meaningful about the world? You spent a lot of time trashing me in this post, maybe you should spend at least as much time studying this topic you admittedly know nothing about.
"In a passage that is notable for its vagueness, Azevedo says that the CEBs should be the basis for a new communitarianism that rejects the two "bankrupt" models and systems "that are now polarizing the world," capitalism and Marxist socialism. This communitarianism is to be "a dialectical synthesis, a new creation, superimposing itself on thesis and antithesis rather than retrieving them." The passage illustrates the controversy in Latin American Catholicism between those who continue to endorse the "third-position-ism" (tercerismo) of Catholic social teaching and those (including all liberation theologians that I know of) who believe that only socialism can be in accord with Christian values." Theology Today-Basic Ecclesial Communities in Brazil: The Challenge of a New Way of Being Church By Marcello deC. Azevedo, S.J.Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1987. 304 Pp. "
April 15, 2009 1:46 AM
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I'm not sure that my efforts here are going to achieve anything -- you get two philosophers debating with each other who are accustomed to writing and talking in their own conceptuology and own terminology, built from the historical context of their own experiences, readings, and resulting ideas -- and its like two people trying to talk to each other in totally different languages.
Even worse sometimes when the same words are used with different implied meanings in mind. Words like 'Capitalism', 'Socialism', 'Communitarianism' and 'Anti-Communitarianism' run the risk of generating either extremely positive or extremely negative semantic and evaluative connotations without debaters making sure beforehand that they are talking, writing -- and arguing -- about the same thing.
At some point, you have to ask yourself whether the expended time and energy is worth the results -- or non-results -- two people still stuck inside their own respective philosophical worlds and not being able to find a bridge between these two worlds, and/or even wanting to. Personal narcissism and egotism reigns supreme.
'Communitarianism'. Is this even something I want to write about? It would not have normally been something high -- or even low -- on my writing priority list.
I do not mind using the word 'Centralist'. In fact, I would definitely say that DGB Philosophy is a Centralist Philosophy. For example, in ideal terms, I would consider myself to be:
1. An Integrative Socialist-Capitalist (probably not as Socialist as Obama is showing to be...I do believe in running a budget in the black, not the red...not going deeper and deeper and deeper into the red until you are at the bottom of an economic well of debt where you cannot even see sunlight anymore...);
2. An Integrative Conservative-Liberal and/or an Integrative Republican-Democrat (same idea as above...some socialist leanings in the humanistic-existential treatment of the individual worker but predominantly Capitalist in ideology. Now this is important -- I support an 'Ethical Capitalism' as laid down at least mainly by Adam Smith in 'The Wealth of Nations' and by Ayn Rand in 'The Fountainhead' and 'Atlas Shrugged' but in this regard, a type of Ethical Capitalism that includes the economic and psychological well-being of both Wall Street and Main Street, not a type of unethical, narcissistic Capitalism that allows Wall Street CEOs and top executives the opportunity to give themselves 'million dollar parachutes -- and bail' while the workers under them are left to face the music in a 'rubbish company' that has been left bankrupt with its customers out on the street because of foreclosed homes.
'DGBN' stands for:
1. Dialectic-Democratic Gap-Bridging Negotiations;
2. Dialectic-Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism.
.......................................................................
Now I have two negative images here -- or at least partly negative images (call them negative steretypes if you wish) that come to my mind when I think of 'Communitarianism' and 'Anti-Communitarianism'.
If by 'Communitarianism' the implied meaning is 'Collectivism' -- then I want to do with neither because I do not want to be associated with Collectivism which brings to mind the idea of 'Group Think' (with individual ideas and rights being wiped out of existence by the 'Collective Group' which may not even be a 'Participatory or Representative Democracy' but rather a 'Ruling Elite'). I have no interest -- DGB Philosophy has no interest -- in supporting a cause like this.
Now if by 'Anti-Communitarianism' -- and I mean no disrespect here, Ms. Niki Raapana, but what may be good, or pleasurable, for you, may not be good or pleasurable for me -- if by 'Anti-Communtiarianism', the implied meaning is living in a tent in Alaska -- particularly in the winter -- I pass. I will take my warm townhouse in Newmarket, Ontario, thank you very much. 'Anti-Communitarianism' sounds also like 'Anti-Community' which I don't think is the intent of the meaning. If by 'Anti-Communitarianism' the idea of 'Anti-Collectivism' is meant, then I would again prefer you call me an 'Anti-Collectivist' rather than an 'Anti-Communitarian'.
Now, Ms. Niki, if by 'Anti-Communitarianism' you mean some kind of return to Nature and Romantic Philosophy, I can subscribe to that ideal easily enough -- indeed, you have my full support -- just as long as I can have my warm townhouse to start from.
So what else is 'Anti-Communitarianism'? I will write again what I wrote the last time I wrote this essay.
'Anti-Communitarianism' is not 'living outside the dialectic'. It is living on one polar edge of a recently evolving dialectic. I'm going to assume, Ms. Niki, that you are critiquing the nature of our 'North American Elitist -- Run From Behind The Scenes -- Pseudo Democracy'.
Do I have it right this time, Niki?
If I am right in my interpretation here of your philosophical work, then again I support you in your cause. Just don't call it 'living outside the dialectic'. Because every time you write, you are engaging in a 'fresh, new dialectic' -- either with me, or with someone else whose philosophy you don't like, or with someone else who has critiqued your work, or with anyone out there whose philosophy you label and stereotype as 'Communitarian'.
To the extent that Hegel was a 'political collectivist', I do not support this aspect of his work. In similar fashion, I do not support this aspect of Rousseau's political philosophy. Nor Plato's. Nor any of the deeds coming out of the 'political terrorist' years of Communist China (Mao Tse Tung) and/or Russia (Lenin, Stalin). These barbaric leaders didn't support any aspect of the 'humanistic-existential' philosophy of Marx's early work before Marx himself started to become more extremist, less democratic, and less humanistic.
DGB Philosophy is a Centralist Philosophy -- in that I believe in a constantly evolving 'dialectic-democratic, homeostatic balance between individual rights and government safety networks that guard people's individual rights and protect them from economic and/or medical traumacy but it is not a 'Collectivist Philosophy' nor is it a 'Communitarian Philosophy' to the extent of 'Collectivism' being meant. (Who amongst us wants our 'individual rights' wiped out?)
DGB Philosophy may be an 'Anti-Communitarian' philosophy to the extent that it believes in 'individual rights' and the pursuit of romantic philosophy and Nature. If by 'Anti-Communitarianism' a type of 'romantic-enlightenment' philosophy is meant, then I am in. But the name 'Anti-Communitarianism' is rather politically provocative and seems to excite all sorts of 'Us vs. Them' reactions. Why not just call 'Anti-Communitarianism' -- 'Anti-Political Conspiracy Philosophy'? Or 'Anti-Collectivism'? Less confusion -- less disagreement -- more philosophical supporters. Maybe Anti-Communitarianism derives its 'philosophical energy' from fighting philosophical adversaries who may at the bottom, main common denominators, actually agree with you, Ms. Niki
But maybe 'philosophical agreement' is less challenging and less exciting for you, Ms. Niki...
Maybe, Niki, you are just one of those people who is used to -- and thrives on -- rubbing people the wrong way.
-- dgb, April 22, 2009, updated May 11th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissistic Righteousness...
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Our Essence and Our Wall
Our 'Essence' and our 'Wall' -- together comprising the actuality of our existence...our 'compromise-formation' between the two of them at any given moment, the one pure honesty, as honest as we can get, the other, our wall of resistance against such unbridled honesty, the content including our innermost vulnerabilities, and/or innermost narcissistic desires, the two together making up our resulting energy field -- or its absence -- as we walk into a room, noting people or individuals who make us feel more comfortable, more at home, enlarging the boundaries of our Essence -- more Essence, less Wall; or the reverse: more Wall, less Essence, as the boundaries of our Essence recede in the company of someone or someones who makes us feel less comfortable, more on top of our defenses...
And so each and every day, each and every moment, goes by with changing energy fields emulating from us, based partly on the positive and/or negative stereotypes that we bring with us, inside of us, based on relationships and encounters that we have had in the past, and also based on our changing comfort zones in the presence of individuals and/or people who stimulate us in positive and/or negative manners that influence us to share more of our Essence -- or more of our Wall.
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2009; modified and updated June 4th, 2009.
And so each and every day, each and every moment, goes by with changing energy fields emulating from us, based partly on the positive and/or negative stereotypes that we bring with us, inside of us, based on relationships and encounters that we have had in the past, and also based on our changing comfort zones in the presence of individuals and/or people who stimulate us in positive and/or negative manners that influence us to share more of our Essence -- or more of our Wall.
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2009; modified and updated June 4th, 2009.
DGB Deconstructs Schopenhauer -- and Finds A Mirror
From the internet...the philosophy of arthur schopenhauer...classic philosophers...
The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV. Life and Works
The World as Will and Idea
Pessimism
Applications of His Doctrine to Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I. Life and Works
Arthur Schopenhauer (picture) was born in Danzig in 1788, the son of a wealthy merchant. He had been educated for the business world by his father, but as soon as his father died Schopenhauer turned to the study of philosophy. He traveled extensively in Holland, England, France, Switzerland and Italy. He obtained his doctor's degree at Jena in 1813. A few years later he began to lecture at Berlin, but his attempts to stem the tide of Hegel's popularity there were unsuccessful.
He left the University and traveled again in Italy. In 1833 he retired to Frankfort on the Main, where he spent the remainder of his life writing his books in learned retirement. Always hostile to Idealism and particularly toward Hegelianism, he died in 1860, when Hegel's philosophy was already in its decline.
Schopenhauer's masterpiece of philosophical writing is The World as Will and Idea, which was published for the first time in 1818, although dated 1819. He also published Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.
II. The World as Will and Idea
Schopenhauer was an anti-Hegelian who returned to Kant with the intention of determining the nature of the "thing in itself" by analyzing experience. But Schopenhauer was a son of Idealism; consequently he conceived reality monistically. For him the world was a phenomenal representation.
Kant began with experience and remained there, declaring that it is impossible to attain knowledge of the thing in itself. Schopenhauer also began with experience, but he believed that it is possible to pass beyond experience and to know the thing in itself. According to him, if we were merely rational beings, endowed with sense and intellect but devoid of volition, we would never be able to answer the question: "What is the external cause of our representations?" The world would be for us a dream, a mere representation, a mysterious signal devoid of meaning. But each one of us is also a body, and the corporeal life reveals itself as tendency, effort, activity, or in a word, as will. Will, therefore, is our reality.
Now, because of the monistic concept of Schopenhauer, the reality which we are (will) must be extended to all things in nature. Thus the entire reality is will. The primordial will is a blind unreasoning impulse to self-preservation. In other words, primordial reality is the will to live. The blind impulse to life is the cause impelling the will to display itself in a multiplicity of natural beings, with the purpose of becoming conscious. Hence this impulse makes its appearance in natural bodies in the form of mechanical forces -- in plants as vegetative life, in animals as instinct. Finally, by constructing the brain, the will attains consciousness in man. Once consciousness is attained, knowledge appears as the representation of the world.
Schopenhauer reduces all Kantian cognitive forms to time, space and mechanical causality. The will, in so far as it is universal, is beyond all these determinations of time and space and is lacking in any other determination. When it objectivates itself, it determines itself in a series of phenomena which exist in space and time and are connected with one another by mechanical causality.
III. Pessimism
If reality is the blind will to live, and the world is the objectivation of such a blind will, life is painful misery. Schopenhauer makes a broad and acute analysis of all the various branches of existence, only to conclude that life is essentially pain and that it is a mistake to persevere in the will to live. According to him, everywhere in the world everything is desire, because all -- everywhere -- is will. To desire signifies suffering distress on account of the lack of what is desired. If the desire is not satisfied, the distress remains and increases; if it is satisfied, satiety and annoyance follow, and this in turn causes new desires and new distresses.
The will finds thousands of pretexts for perpetuating this unsatisfied hunger of the will to live. These pretexts only perpetuate the misery of life.
One such pretext and deceit is love. The will of the species masks itself under the pleasures of love with the purpose of perpetuating the desire for life in others. In so doing, it satisfies its own will to live.
Another pretext and deceit is egoism, which impels us to increase the pains of others in the hope of gaining some advantage in our own miserable life.
Still another deceit and illusion is progress which, in actuating itself, only makes more acute the sense of distress.
The Sacred Writer, in Schopenhauer's interpretation, says that increasing knowledge is only to increase distress. (Ref. Ecclesiastes 1:14, 18: I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chase after wind...For in much wisdom there is sorrow and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.)
The whole world is miserable because of the universal blind will to live. Man can avoid his share of misery by suppressing the will to live.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is the antithesis of that of Hegel. In Hegel, reality and rationality coincide. Struggle and injustice are nullified and are justified in the higher synthesis; and, finally, progress and history entirely justify evil in its extreme manifestations of war and national calamities. In Schopenhauer, on the contrary, reality is blind and therefore essentially irrational and evil. Love, progress, history do not justify and annul misery; they are deceits and illusions behind which the blind, unconscious will masks itself, for this will is never satisfied with living and suffering. The systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer represent different atheistic conceptions of the world and of life.
IV. Applications of His Doctrine to Man
In such an irrational world, however, there exists a morality which is necessarily ascetic and nullifying. In a pessimistic morality there is no glorification of life, but nullification and destruction of the will to live. Indeed, if the root of all evils is the will to live, there is no other escape, no other remedy than to suppress this will. The steps which make possible the suppression of the instinct to life are three: aesthetics, ethics, ascetics. Schopenhauer is inspired by Neo-Platonism in this regard.
Aesthetics is the activity of man, absorbed in contemplation of the idea of beauty, untroubled by any desire and, consequently, by any evil. Wrapped up in aesthetic contemplation, he is not longer a slave of the will. But aesthetics is not sufficient, for the joy which it gives is possible only for intellectuals, and even in such persons it is of short duration. Hence it is necessary to ascend to the second grade, ethics.
Ethics makes man able to acknowledge that in addition to himself there are other men endowed with an essence like his own. Hence he is forced by ethics to suppress his egoism which, because of the desire for life, is the root of every evil. The fundamental characteristic of ethics is compassion. Man is immoral when he increases the misery of another or when he remains indifferent to another's suffering. On the contrary, he is moral when he feels the distress of those who are his fellow men, and tries to mitigate their pain. Thus he feels that he is one with all men, as in truth he is, by reason of the unity of the Universal Will from which everyone proceeds. But even ethics does not succeed in completely eradicating the insidious source of all evils, and hence it is necessary to ascend still further, to the third grade, ascetics.
Asceticism consists in the constant action of nullifying the will itself. Art suspends will; ethics mortifies it; ascetics nullifies it. Only the great penitents and saints have reached this stage. Schopenhauer, by a complete misunderstanding of spiritual life, believed the penitents and saints of the Church to be absolutely indifferent and detached from all that surrounds them, mentally dead to all things, while materially they continue to live.
The moral teaching of Schopenhauer, culminating in his asceticism, the nullifier of life, is completely opposed to Hegel's morality, which glorifies life. Both, however, are atheistic on account of the immanentist prejudice which vitiates them.
In The Radical Academy
Books by and about Arthur Schopenhauer
Essay: Will and Idea, by Arthur Schopenhauer
Elsewhere On the Internet
More about Arthur Schopenhauer
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DGB...Editorial Comments on Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Part 1)
Schopenhauer is the type of philosopher who you either love, hate, or perhaps some strong feelings of both... It is hard to be noncommittal or philosophically sleepy when it comes to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer wakes us all up philosophically with the shaking jaws of a rottweiller or pitbull...even as we may hate him and/or his philosophy, we can't ignore him, we have to deal with him...I look into Schopenhauer's eyes and I see perhaps at least a part of the darker side of me -- and indeed, the darker side of all mankind. Schopenhauer is partly an idealist -- having assimilated significant elements of Plato and Kant into his own philosophy, but beyond this, the associative connection between Plato and Kant on the one side, and Schopenhauer on the other side, is about as similar as night and day.
Schopenhauer is arguably the 'greatest pessimist' in the history of Western Philosophy. You have to go back to the Sophists, Stoics and Cynics in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy to find something similar. Or maybe Thomas Hobbes. I think the closest philosopher in spirit to Schopenhauer is Hobbes although there is nothing in his usual biography to suggest that Schopenhauer was ever influenced by Hobbes. He didn't need it. There were far more than enough 'negative influences' in Schopenhauer's young life -- a marital charade between his mom and dad, his dad seemingly having committing suicide by jumping off the warehouse of what at least used to be his thriving, lucrative business, the pain and misery and war horror caused by Napoleon rampaging across Europe, his mom seemingly becoming more interested in developing her own life, her own love life, and her own writing career, while more or less 'shuffling her teenage-adult son to the side'...and not being too happy when her son 'spat back venomous poison' at her and her variety of different lovers...
Oh, yes, in Schopenhauer's world -- 'life was grand'! He needed some strong philosophical realism and Buddhist-like idealism/medicine to compensate for the 'ugliness, pain, misery, narcissism, hedonism, and egotism that made up the life that Schopenhauer both lived -- and saw around him. Schopenhauer wrote what he felt...and then sought to compensate for...
I don't often dab in astrology but from time to time I do. This is one time. My dear Arthur Schopenhauer here is a fellow Pisces...born Feb 22nd, 1788, about 10 days and 167 years before me...As much as I might dislike his nastiness and his profound pessimism, still I have to look deeper for some underlying dark similarities...
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The Fishes
Febuary 20 to March 20
Traditional
Pisces Traits
Imaginative and sensitive
Compassionate and kind
Selfless and unworldly
Intuitive and sympathetic
On the dark side....
Escapist and idealistic
Secretive and vague
Weak-willed and easily led
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The Pisces Personality
The two fish represent one swiming up towards the direction of spirituality and the other swiming down to temptation. You are at the end of an evolutionary cycle, which explains a lot about what you are and how you express yourself. More
The Pisces Personality, The Sign of the Fish Feb 19th to Mar 20th
Strengths
Romance, Nurturing, Artistic, High Spiritual Strength, Psychic, Sentimental, Devoted, Receptive to New Ideas, Sacrifice.
Areas to Evolve
Low Self Esteem, Guilty Feelings, Isolation, Passive, Too in Love with Love, Dependent, Battles with Subconscious, Introverted, Unfocused, Complaining, Procrastination, Easily Hurt.
Pisces Blessings
Pisces is the last of the twelve signs of the zodiac and as a result, the universe blessed you with a little bit of all the signs in your personality. In some cases, such as psychic ability and intuition, you were a given a little bit of everyone's talent making you have the most. As the twelfth sign, it is said your soul is at the end of a spiritual journey.
Your greatest gift, your psychic ability, is also the one you are least like to rely on. Having picked up some of everything along the way can leave you often feeling confused, either in the realm of emotions or logic. Your decision making can be a little bit off at times, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. Some Pisces early in life develop an inability to organize their talents and turn towards an attitude of self-sacrifice or do things out of obligation.
Pisces are traditional romantics and obsessive daydreamers. Highly creative, you are in love with love and connect to this energy in real life or through fantasy. Either way, they will have their loving experiences.
Pisces can be nearly impossible to read or gauge. Over time, you develop these "life masks" you will wear for different occasions. You choose your words carefully and limit the amount you let out. Like the two fish swimming in circles that represent your sign, you live in two worlds, the one with other people and the one inside your soul.
Challenges for the Pisces Soul
The universal law of Yin-Yang provides you with something of value in exchange for what may seem like carrying a little baggage from all the other signs. The great value is your sixth sense. You have a little piece of everyone else inside you for a reason. No, not to make you crazy, but to give you spiritual insights none of the other signs have.
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Under construction...
DGB...Editorial Comments on Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Part 2)
I love the title of Schopenhauer's most famous book: 'The World as Will and Representation' (1818). I would love to take the title of this book -- and completely re-write it, completely revise it -- like Schopenhauer did with Kant. Kant (perhaps combined with Plato) was Schopenhauer's main philosophical mentor (or main two philosophical mentors). Plato was an epistemological dualist (the Ideal World of Forms vs. The Imperfect World of Phenomena). Kant was an epistemological dualist (the 'Phenomenal World' of our own experiences vs. 'The Noumenal World' of 'The Thing-In-Itself' beyond the world of our senses and experiences...)
Schopenhauer, by contrast, was an epistemological and an ontological monist -- or at least partly, or at least he tried to be.
For Schopenhauer, all in the universe is 'blind will' -- meaning also 'nasty will' -- based on the will to live and survive -- assumedly for Schopenhauer at the expense of any and all we need to walk over, manipulate, intimidate, circumvent, overpower... to continue our will to live and survive.
So much for love, care, and compassion....out the window in Schopenhauer's philosophy...all bogus sophism and pretentiousness
Nice world we live in, Mr. Schopenhauer! How pleased I am to meet you! Do you have anything nice to say about this world? Do you have anything nice to offer this world?
Or were you just a living, walking, breathing, biting prototype of the world you described around you -- in your own image?
Or is there more to Schopenhauer's 'very unpretty, nasty philosophy' than simply self-projection?
An article from the internet I just read a few minutes ago certainly gives some credence to a part of human experience, existence, and behavior that just cannot be overlooked. Nietzsche and Freud certainly did not overlook what Schopenhauer was writing and philosophizing about. It was certainly a stark, concrete contrast to Hegel's idealistic abstractionism....
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From the internet...
Freddie Mac's acting CFO found dead at his Virginia home
April 22nd, 2009.
WASHINGTON - David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of mortgage giant Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what police said was an apparent suicide.
Mary Ann Jennings, director of public information for the Fairfax County, Va., Police Department, said Kellermann was found dead in his Reston, Va., home. The 41-year-old Kellermann has been Freddie Mac's CFO since September.
Jennings said that a crime scene crew and homicide detectives were investigating the death, but that there didn't appear to be any sign of foul play.
McLean-based Freddie Mac has been criticized heavily for reckless business practices that some argue contributed to the housing and financial crisis. Freddic Mac is a government-controlled company that owns or guarantees about 13 million home loans. CEO David Moffett resigned last month.
Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) and sibling company Fannie Mae, which together own or back more than half of the home mortgages in the country, have been hobbled by skyrocketing loan defaults and have received about $60 billion in combined federal aid.
Kellermann was named acting chief financial officer in September 2008, after the resignation of Anthony Piszel, who stepped down after the September 2008 government takeover.
Before taking that job, Kellerman served as senior vice-president, corporate controller and principal accounting officer. He was with Freddie Mac for more than 16 years.
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Welcome to the world of Schopenhauer. A rosy, idealistic picture it is not.
Schopenhauer's World became Nietzsche's 'Birth of Tragedy' before Nietzsche walked at least partly away from both Schopenhauer and Hegel. Nietzsche didn't like Schopenhauer's philosophy of 'trying to escape from the brutality and misery of life'. For Nietzsche, the aim of life was to embrace life in all its complexities and paradoxes and tragedies -- not to run from life and seek to escape it. Schopenhauer was a philosopher who tried to escape from his 'Narcissistic-Dionysian Style of Living' by engaging or not engaging in something else.
Schopenhauer did this by encouraging people to: 1. 'find and/or lose themselves' in the arts'; 2. 'to practise ethics if and/or when you can' (obviously this strategy didn't work well for Schopenhauer); and 3. to take up a 'Buddhist-like approach to living -- by simply (or not so simply) 'not wanting', 'not desiring'...If you don't want or desire, then you can't feel pain and hurt for your unfulfilled, squashed, and/or betrayed desires and wants...
Keep your expectations low to non-existent -- and you will not be emotionally crushed.
Thus spoke Schopenhauer as Zarathrusta...
Hey, there is some wisdom behind what he is saying. It's coming from a person who should know -- diappointed and probably angry at his dad for controlling and abandoning him, disappointed and definitely angry at his mother for more or less the same thing...even as she still lived and more or less ignored him....Mindly, I could at least partly see why she didn't want to have anything to do with him. Her son was cruel and nasty! But at the same time, I am sure that the young Arthur learned a lot of his personal narcissism, dionysianism, hedonism, and egotism -- from his mother truly -- his loving, nurturing, encouraging mother...As she did her coctail parties, entertained her guests, did her writing...and played out her fascade as a mother...
Welcome to the world of Schopenhauer!
Ouch! I think I can see a little more of my own narcissistic, dionysian, hedonistic, egotistic self and world in the world described Schopenhauer. Not that bad a world to be sure -- more good things in my world to be sure -- but still -- I cannot ignore the similarities.
A man too absorbed in his own ideas and his own dionsyian and apollonian narcissism to engage other people properly with the full attention, compassion, and respect they deserve.
Was that Schophenhauer?
Or is that me?
Sometimes -- often? always? -- who and/or what we most dislike, says as much about ourselves as it does about the who or the what it is we don't like...
Enough for today....
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2209.
-- David Gordon Bain
The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV. Life and Works
The World as Will and Idea
Pessimism
Applications of His Doctrine to Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I. Life and Works
Arthur Schopenhauer (picture) was born in Danzig in 1788, the son of a wealthy merchant. He had been educated for the business world by his father, but as soon as his father died Schopenhauer turned to the study of philosophy. He traveled extensively in Holland, England, France, Switzerland and Italy. He obtained his doctor's degree at Jena in 1813. A few years later he began to lecture at Berlin, but his attempts to stem the tide of Hegel's popularity there were unsuccessful.
He left the University and traveled again in Italy. In 1833 he retired to Frankfort on the Main, where he spent the remainder of his life writing his books in learned retirement. Always hostile to Idealism and particularly toward Hegelianism, he died in 1860, when Hegel's philosophy was already in its decline.
Schopenhauer's masterpiece of philosophical writing is The World as Will and Idea, which was published for the first time in 1818, although dated 1819. He also published Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.
II. The World as Will and Idea
Schopenhauer was an anti-Hegelian who returned to Kant with the intention of determining the nature of the "thing in itself" by analyzing experience. But Schopenhauer was a son of Idealism; consequently he conceived reality monistically. For him the world was a phenomenal representation.
Kant began with experience and remained there, declaring that it is impossible to attain knowledge of the thing in itself. Schopenhauer also began with experience, but he believed that it is possible to pass beyond experience and to know the thing in itself. According to him, if we were merely rational beings, endowed with sense and intellect but devoid of volition, we would never be able to answer the question: "What is the external cause of our representations?" The world would be for us a dream, a mere representation, a mysterious signal devoid of meaning. But each one of us is also a body, and the corporeal life reveals itself as tendency, effort, activity, or in a word, as will. Will, therefore, is our reality.
Now, because of the monistic concept of Schopenhauer, the reality which we are (will) must be extended to all things in nature. Thus the entire reality is will. The primordial will is a blind unreasoning impulse to self-preservation. In other words, primordial reality is the will to live. The blind impulse to life is the cause impelling the will to display itself in a multiplicity of natural beings, with the purpose of becoming conscious. Hence this impulse makes its appearance in natural bodies in the form of mechanical forces -- in plants as vegetative life, in animals as instinct. Finally, by constructing the brain, the will attains consciousness in man. Once consciousness is attained, knowledge appears as the representation of the world.
Schopenhauer reduces all Kantian cognitive forms to time, space and mechanical causality. The will, in so far as it is universal, is beyond all these determinations of time and space and is lacking in any other determination. When it objectivates itself, it determines itself in a series of phenomena which exist in space and time and are connected with one another by mechanical causality.
III. Pessimism
If reality is the blind will to live, and the world is the objectivation of such a blind will, life is painful misery. Schopenhauer makes a broad and acute analysis of all the various branches of existence, only to conclude that life is essentially pain and that it is a mistake to persevere in the will to live. According to him, everywhere in the world everything is desire, because all -- everywhere -- is will. To desire signifies suffering distress on account of the lack of what is desired. If the desire is not satisfied, the distress remains and increases; if it is satisfied, satiety and annoyance follow, and this in turn causes new desires and new distresses.
The will finds thousands of pretexts for perpetuating this unsatisfied hunger of the will to live. These pretexts only perpetuate the misery of life.
One such pretext and deceit is love. The will of the species masks itself under the pleasures of love with the purpose of perpetuating the desire for life in others. In so doing, it satisfies its own will to live.
Another pretext and deceit is egoism, which impels us to increase the pains of others in the hope of gaining some advantage in our own miserable life.
Still another deceit and illusion is progress which, in actuating itself, only makes more acute the sense of distress.
The Sacred Writer, in Schopenhauer's interpretation, says that increasing knowledge is only to increase distress. (Ref. Ecclesiastes 1:14, 18: I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chase after wind...For in much wisdom there is sorrow and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.)
The whole world is miserable because of the universal blind will to live. Man can avoid his share of misery by suppressing the will to live.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is the antithesis of that of Hegel. In Hegel, reality and rationality coincide. Struggle and injustice are nullified and are justified in the higher synthesis; and, finally, progress and history entirely justify evil in its extreme manifestations of war and national calamities. In Schopenhauer, on the contrary, reality is blind and therefore essentially irrational and evil. Love, progress, history do not justify and annul misery; they are deceits and illusions behind which the blind, unconscious will masks itself, for this will is never satisfied with living and suffering. The systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer represent different atheistic conceptions of the world and of life.
IV. Applications of His Doctrine to Man
In such an irrational world, however, there exists a morality which is necessarily ascetic and nullifying. In a pessimistic morality there is no glorification of life, but nullification and destruction of the will to live. Indeed, if the root of all evils is the will to live, there is no other escape, no other remedy than to suppress this will. The steps which make possible the suppression of the instinct to life are three: aesthetics, ethics, ascetics. Schopenhauer is inspired by Neo-Platonism in this regard.
Aesthetics is the activity of man, absorbed in contemplation of the idea of beauty, untroubled by any desire and, consequently, by any evil. Wrapped up in aesthetic contemplation, he is not longer a slave of the will. But aesthetics is not sufficient, for the joy which it gives is possible only for intellectuals, and even in such persons it is of short duration. Hence it is necessary to ascend to the second grade, ethics.
Ethics makes man able to acknowledge that in addition to himself there are other men endowed with an essence like his own. Hence he is forced by ethics to suppress his egoism which, because of the desire for life, is the root of every evil. The fundamental characteristic of ethics is compassion. Man is immoral when he increases the misery of another or when he remains indifferent to another's suffering. On the contrary, he is moral when he feels the distress of those who are his fellow men, and tries to mitigate their pain. Thus he feels that he is one with all men, as in truth he is, by reason of the unity of the Universal Will from which everyone proceeds. But even ethics does not succeed in completely eradicating the insidious source of all evils, and hence it is necessary to ascend still further, to the third grade, ascetics.
Asceticism consists in the constant action of nullifying the will itself. Art suspends will; ethics mortifies it; ascetics nullifies it. Only the great penitents and saints have reached this stage. Schopenhauer, by a complete misunderstanding of spiritual life, believed the penitents and saints of the Church to be absolutely indifferent and detached from all that surrounds them, mentally dead to all things, while materially they continue to live.
The moral teaching of Schopenhauer, culminating in his asceticism, the nullifier of life, is completely opposed to Hegel's morality, which glorifies life. Both, however, are atheistic on account of the immanentist prejudice which vitiates them.
In The Radical Academy
Books by and about Arthur Schopenhauer
Essay: Will and Idea, by Arthur Schopenhauer
Elsewhere On the Internet
More about Arthur Schopenhauer
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DGB...Editorial Comments on Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Part 1)
Schopenhauer is the type of philosopher who you either love, hate, or perhaps some strong feelings of both... It is hard to be noncommittal or philosophically sleepy when it comes to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer wakes us all up philosophically with the shaking jaws of a rottweiller or pitbull...even as we may hate him and/or his philosophy, we can't ignore him, we have to deal with him...I look into Schopenhauer's eyes and I see perhaps at least a part of the darker side of me -- and indeed, the darker side of all mankind. Schopenhauer is partly an idealist -- having assimilated significant elements of Plato and Kant into his own philosophy, but beyond this, the associative connection between Plato and Kant on the one side, and Schopenhauer on the other side, is about as similar as night and day.
Schopenhauer is arguably the 'greatest pessimist' in the history of Western Philosophy. You have to go back to the Sophists, Stoics and Cynics in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy to find something similar. Or maybe Thomas Hobbes. I think the closest philosopher in spirit to Schopenhauer is Hobbes although there is nothing in his usual biography to suggest that Schopenhauer was ever influenced by Hobbes. He didn't need it. There were far more than enough 'negative influences' in Schopenhauer's young life -- a marital charade between his mom and dad, his dad seemingly having committing suicide by jumping off the warehouse of what at least used to be his thriving, lucrative business, the pain and misery and war horror caused by Napoleon rampaging across Europe, his mom seemingly becoming more interested in developing her own life, her own love life, and her own writing career, while more or less 'shuffling her teenage-adult son to the side'...and not being too happy when her son 'spat back venomous poison' at her and her variety of different lovers...
Oh, yes, in Schopenhauer's world -- 'life was grand'! He needed some strong philosophical realism and Buddhist-like idealism/medicine to compensate for the 'ugliness, pain, misery, narcissism, hedonism, and egotism that made up the life that Schopenhauer both lived -- and saw around him. Schopenhauer wrote what he felt...and then sought to compensate for...
I don't often dab in astrology but from time to time I do. This is one time. My dear Arthur Schopenhauer here is a fellow Pisces...born Feb 22nd, 1788, about 10 days and 167 years before me...As much as I might dislike his nastiness and his profound pessimism, still I have to look deeper for some underlying dark similarities...
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The Fishes
Febuary 20 to March 20
Traditional
Pisces Traits
Imaginative and sensitive
Compassionate and kind
Selfless and unworldly
Intuitive and sympathetic
On the dark side....
Escapist and idealistic
Secretive and vague
Weak-willed and easily led
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The Pisces Personality
The two fish represent one swiming up towards the direction of spirituality and the other swiming down to temptation. You are at the end of an evolutionary cycle, which explains a lot about what you are and how you express yourself. More
The Pisces Personality, The Sign of the Fish Feb 19th to Mar 20th
Strengths
Romance, Nurturing, Artistic, High Spiritual Strength, Psychic, Sentimental, Devoted, Receptive to New Ideas, Sacrifice.
Areas to Evolve
Low Self Esteem, Guilty Feelings, Isolation, Passive, Too in Love with Love, Dependent, Battles with Subconscious, Introverted, Unfocused, Complaining, Procrastination, Easily Hurt.
Pisces Blessings
Pisces is the last of the twelve signs of the zodiac and as a result, the universe blessed you with a little bit of all the signs in your personality. In some cases, such as psychic ability and intuition, you were a given a little bit of everyone's talent making you have the most. As the twelfth sign, it is said your soul is at the end of a spiritual journey.
Your greatest gift, your psychic ability, is also the one you are least like to rely on. Having picked up some of everything along the way can leave you often feeling confused, either in the realm of emotions or logic. Your decision making can be a little bit off at times, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. Some Pisces early in life develop an inability to organize their talents and turn towards an attitude of self-sacrifice or do things out of obligation.
Pisces are traditional romantics and obsessive daydreamers. Highly creative, you are in love with love and connect to this energy in real life or through fantasy. Either way, they will have their loving experiences.
Pisces can be nearly impossible to read or gauge. Over time, you develop these "life masks" you will wear for different occasions. You choose your words carefully and limit the amount you let out. Like the two fish swimming in circles that represent your sign, you live in two worlds, the one with other people and the one inside your soul.
Challenges for the Pisces Soul
The universal law of Yin-Yang provides you with something of value in exchange for what may seem like carrying a little baggage from all the other signs. The great value is your sixth sense. You have a little piece of everyone else inside you for a reason. No, not to make you crazy, but to give you spiritual insights none of the other signs have.
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Under construction...
DGB...Editorial Comments on Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Part 2)
I love the title of Schopenhauer's most famous book: 'The World as Will and Representation' (1818). I would love to take the title of this book -- and completely re-write it, completely revise it -- like Schopenhauer did with Kant. Kant (perhaps combined with Plato) was Schopenhauer's main philosophical mentor (or main two philosophical mentors). Plato was an epistemological dualist (the Ideal World of Forms vs. The Imperfect World of Phenomena). Kant was an epistemological dualist (the 'Phenomenal World' of our own experiences vs. 'The Noumenal World' of 'The Thing-In-Itself' beyond the world of our senses and experiences...)
Schopenhauer, by contrast, was an epistemological and an ontological monist -- or at least partly, or at least he tried to be.
For Schopenhauer, all in the universe is 'blind will' -- meaning also 'nasty will' -- based on the will to live and survive -- assumedly for Schopenhauer at the expense of any and all we need to walk over, manipulate, intimidate, circumvent, overpower... to continue our will to live and survive.
So much for love, care, and compassion....out the window in Schopenhauer's philosophy...all bogus sophism and pretentiousness
Nice world we live in, Mr. Schopenhauer! How pleased I am to meet you! Do you have anything nice to say about this world? Do you have anything nice to offer this world?
Or were you just a living, walking, breathing, biting prototype of the world you described around you -- in your own image?
Or is there more to Schopenhauer's 'very unpretty, nasty philosophy' than simply self-projection?
An article from the internet I just read a few minutes ago certainly gives some credence to a part of human experience, existence, and behavior that just cannot be overlooked. Nietzsche and Freud certainly did not overlook what Schopenhauer was writing and philosophizing about. It was certainly a stark, concrete contrast to Hegel's idealistic abstractionism....
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From the internet...
Freddie Mac's acting CFO found dead at his Virginia home
April 22nd, 2009.
WASHINGTON - David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of mortgage giant Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what police said was an apparent suicide.
Mary Ann Jennings, director of public information for the Fairfax County, Va., Police Department, said Kellermann was found dead in his Reston, Va., home. The 41-year-old Kellermann has been Freddie Mac's CFO since September.
Jennings said that a crime scene crew and homicide detectives were investigating the death, but that there didn't appear to be any sign of foul play.
McLean-based Freddie Mac has been criticized heavily for reckless business practices that some argue contributed to the housing and financial crisis. Freddic Mac is a government-controlled company that owns or guarantees about 13 million home loans. CEO David Moffett resigned last month.
Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) and sibling company Fannie Mae, which together own or back more than half of the home mortgages in the country, have been hobbled by skyrocketing loan defaults and have received about $60 billion in combined federal aid.
Kellermann was named acting chief financial officer in September 2008, after the resignation of Anthony Piszel, who stepped down after the September 2008 government takeover.
Before taking that job, Kellerman served as senior vice-president, corporate controller and principal accounting officer. He was with Freddie Mac for more than 16 years.
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Welcome to the world of Schopenhauer. A rosy, idealistic picture it is not.
Schopenhauer's World became Nietzsche's 'Birth of Tragedy' before Nietzsche walked at least partly away from both Schopenhauer and Hegel. Nietzsche didn't like Schopenhauer's philosophy of 'trying to escape from the brutality and misery of life'. For Nietzsche, the aim of life was to embrace life in all its complexities and paradoxes and tragedies -- not to run from life and seek to escape it. Schopenhauer was a philosopher who tried to escape from his 'Narcissistic-Dionysian Style of Living' by engaging or not engaging in something else.
Schopenhauer did this by encouraging people to: 1. 'find and/or lose themselves' in the arts'; 2. 'to practise ethics if and/or when you can' (obviously this strategy didn't work well for Schopenhauer); and 3. to take up a 'Buddhist-like approach to living -- by simply (or not so simply) 'not wanting', 'not desiring'...If you don't want or desire, then you can't feel pain and hurt for your unfulfilled, squashed, and/or betrayed desires and wants...
Keep your expectations low to non-existent -- and you will not be emotionally crushed.
Thus spoke Schopenhauer as Zarathrusta...
Hey, there is some wisdom behind what he is saying. It's coming from a person who should know -- diappointed and probably angry at his dad for controlling and abandoning him, disappointed and definitely angry at his mother for more or less the same thing...even as she still lived and more or less ignored him....Mindly, I could at least partly see why she didn't want to have anything to do with him. Her son was cruel and nasty! But at the same time, I am sure that the young Arthur learned a lot of his personal narcissism, dionysianism, hedonism, and egotism -- from his mother truly -- his loving, nurturing, encouraging mother...As she did her coctail parties, entertained her guests, did her writing...and played out her fascade as a mother...
Welcome to the world of Schopenhauer!
Ouch! I think I can see a little more of my own narcissistic, dionysian, hedonistic, egotistic self and world in the world described Schopenhauer. Not that bad a world to be sure -- more good things in my world to be sure -- but still -- I cannot ignore the similarities.
A man too absorbed in his own ideas and his own dionsyian and apollonian narcissism to engage other people properly with the full attention, compassion, and respect they deserve.
Was that Schophenhauer?
Or is that me?
Sometimes -- often? always? -- who and/or what we most dislike, says as much about ourselves as it does about the who or the what it is we don't like...
Enough for today....
-- dgb, April 22nd, 2209.
-- David Gordon Bain
Saturday, April 18, 2009
DGB Personality Theory: The Potential Self -- and Other Functional 'Divisions' in The Psyche
Let us start with the concept of 'ego'. 'Ego', 'psyche', 'self', 'I',...they all mean basically the same thing with some potential variations in the range and/or focus of meaning of each. Different writers, different psychologists, different theorists may similarly change the range and/or focus of meaning for each of these related concepts.
For example, relative to the term self we can split this concept up to differentiate between:
1. The Potential Self;
2. The Actualizing Self;
3. The Actualized Self;
4. The Alienating Self;
5. The Alienated Self.
We could even add:
6. The 'Being' Self; and
7. The 'Becoming' Self.
When Carl Jung uses the term 'Self', he is referring to what we are calling here in DGB Philosophy-Psychology -- 'The Potential or Genetic Self'. Religiously and/or spiritually speaking, I have no problem calling the Potential and/or Genetic Self -- 'The Essence' or 'The Soul' of the Personality.
The Potential-Genetic Self is the container of the 'existential seeds' of the personality. Some of these 'seeds' may become -- metaphorically speaking -- 'watered' and 'nurtured'. They come alive and become 'existentialized' as active, living, breathing parts of the personality. 'Essence' turns into 'existence'. This is the counter-thesis of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous philosophical statement: 'Existence precedes essence.'
My counter-statement to Sartre then is this: 'Not always does existence precede essence.' Indeed, the two polarities -- essence and existence -- are dialectically interconnected, neither preceding the other, and/or both preceding the other, depending on how you want to look at. It is no different than the 'chicken and egg' argument. The 'egg' is the essence which precedes the 'chicken-to-come or become'. However, the 'egg' in itself has its own existence which was established by both the 'existence' and the 'essence' of a preceding chicken and rooster -- and their sexual activity together -- leading to the fertilized creation of the egg. (Do I have my chicken and rooster sex education 101 down pat, or not?)
Now I am not sure how Hegel would have answered Sartre. But this to me, what I have been describing in the paragraph above, is the logical extension of Hegelian dialectic theory. Or call it DGB Post-Hegelian Dialectic Theory.
Again the whole idea here is that rather than declaring any kind of 'causal-reductionist-unilateral-one-way' statement, we start using the words that you hear many modern-day politicians using such as 'bi-lateral' and 'multi-lateral' and 'pluralistic'.
Relative to the 'existence' vs. 'essence' argument, both 'existence' and 'essence' are viable 'bi-polarities' in the 'game of life' or 'art of living'. Essence is the 'blueprint' of life and it includes the idea of 'intelligent genetic design'; whereas 'existence' is the playing out of an organism's 'essence' and/or its 'alienation' or 'dissociation' from its essence, depending on how the 'game of life' and/or 'art of living' is played out. Do we leave our essence behind and try to be someone who we are not? Or do we play out our essence in all its potential glory (assuming that the essence of man is 'good' which it may or may not be -- or there may be the potential for both 'good' and 'bad', 'altruism' and 'narcissism', 'heroism' and 'cowardism'. Call it the 'roulette wheel' of the personality as different potentials for human action are indeed acted out or restrained, embellished and/or dissociated and suppressed.
This bring us to a 'Jungian dialectical-existential split' between the 'personna' and the 'shadow' which can be compared and contrasted with a similar but different 'Freudian dialectical-existential split' between the 'id' and the 'superego'.
In one way, the classic Freudian model is superior in that it has a third concept involved, a third 'agency' or 'compartment' in the personality -- the 'ego' -- that mediates between the 'instinctual impulses' of the id vs. the 'restraining ethical forces' of the superego. The classic Freudian model is closer than the Jungian model in structure and process to the classic Hegelian triad of: 1. 'thesis' (id), 'anti-thesis' (superego), 'synthesis' (ego creatively coming up with 'compromise-formations'). In the Jungian model, the 'mediating, central ego' is absent but seemingly implied as a synthesizing or integrating force between the shadow and the personna.
Or maybe Jung viewed himself as therapist -- as the synthesizer, or 'associative synthesizer' which, he at least partly was. However, there can be no cogntive-emotional-existential synthesis within a person -- therapist or no therapist involved -- without an 'awareness light' going on in the client/individual (specifically, inside the person's 'Central Ego' by DGB conceptuology and terminology) and then integrating and acting on this processed awareness.
However, the Freudian classic model has some problems too which is at least partly why many 'neo-Freudians', 'post-Freudians', and 'anti-Freudians' eventually abandoned the classic Freudian conceptuology and turned to other similar and/or different models of the personality/the human psyche.
For example, the Jungian concept of 'Self' is some significant ways preferrable to the Freudian concept of 'Id'. Why? Because it quickly becomes confusing what is in the 'id' and what is not. Is it just sexual impulses? Or sexual and violent impulses? By the time Freud wrote 'Beyond The Pleaure Principle' in 1920, it was apparent that both sexual and violent impulses would become included in the 'id' as Freud was in the process of moving in this direction with his polarization of the 'life' and 'death' instinct, and indeed, Freud formalized things 3 years later in his essay, 'The Ego and The Id'.
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Id, ego, and super-ego
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Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the "psychic apparatus" defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the "id"; the organized realistic part of the psyche is the "ego," and the critical and moralizing function the "super-ego." [1]
Even though the model is "structural" and makes reference to an "apparatus", the id, ego, and super-ego are functions of the mind rather than parts of the brain and do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with actual somatic structures of the kind dealt with by neuroscience.
The concepts themselves arose at a late stage in the development of Freud's thought: the structural model was first discussed in his 1920 essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and was formalized and elaborated upon three years later in his "The Ego and the Id." Freud's proposal was influenced by the ambiguity of the term "unconscious" and its many conflicting uses.
The terms "id," "ego," and "super-ego" are not Freud's own but are latinisations originating from his translator James Strachey. Freud himself wrote of "das Es," "das Ich," and "das Über-Ich"—respectively, "the It," "the I," and the "Over-I" (or "Upper-I"); thus to the German reader, Freud's original terms are more or less self-explanatory. The term "das Es" was borrowed from Georg Groddeck, a German physician to whose unconventional ideas Freud was much attracted.[2] (Groddeck's translators render the term in English as 'the It').
Contents [hide]
1 Id
2 Ego
3 Super-ego
4 Advantages of the structural model
5 In popular culture
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 See also
9.1 People
9.2 Related topics
10 External links
[edit] Id
The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as a pleasure principle: if not compelled by reality it seeks immediate enjoyment.[3] It is focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification. Personality, as Freud saw it, was produced by the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints that were internalized.[4] [5] The Id is unconscious by definition. In Freud's formulation,
“ It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.
[Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)]
”
The id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego. [6]
Developmentally, the Id is anterior to the ego; i.e. the psychic apparatus begins, at birth, as an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into a structured ego. Thus, the id:
“ contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, is laid down in the constitution -- above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate from the somatic organisation and which find a first psychical expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us" [7]. ”
The mind of a newborn child is regarded as completely "id-ridden", in the sense that it is a mass of instinctive drives and impulses, and demands immediate satisfaction. This view equates a newborn child with an id-ridden individual—often humorously—with this analogy: an alimentary tract with no sense of responsibility at either end.
The id is responsible for our basic drives such as food, water, sex, and basic impulses. It is amoral and egocentric, ruled by the pleasure–pain principle; it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, infantile in its emotional development, and will not take "no" for an answer. It is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or "instinctive drive to create".
Freud divided the id's drives and instincts into two categories: life and death instincts - the latter not so usually regarded because Freud thought of it later in his lifetime. Life instincts (Eros) are those that are crucial to pleasurable survival, such as eating and copulation. Death instincts, (Thanatos) as stated by Freud, are our unconscious wish to die, as death puts an end to the everyday struggles for happiness and survival. Freud noticed the death instinct in our desire for peace and attempts to escape reality through fiction, media, and substances such as alcohol and drugs. It also indirectly represents itself through aggression.
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DGB...cont'd...
Freud moved to the concept of 'id' to at least partly move away from the more 'ambiguous' concept of 'unconscious' which was giving him some trouble. I can certainly see this and have never liked the term 'unconscious'. I've tried to duck around this concept as much as possible by using the term 'subconscious' instead in the appropriate contexts. But the term 'id' can cause some serious semantic difficulties as well -- especially when you add the 'life' and 'death' instinct into the picture. If you say that the wish for 'peace' comes from our 'death instinct' and then you turn around and say that ther wish for 'aggression' also comes from our 'death instinct', then the bipolar contrast between the wish for 'peace' and the wish for 'aggression' has collapsed into some very hazy category in the middle -- the wish for 'death'. That, to me, doesn't make any sense, at least until you start discussing context.
If i am outside demonstrating in a civil protest rally against the American soldiers being in Iraq or the Canadian soldiers being in Afghanastan, and I am demonstrating for 'peace', then this, we could trace back to, with some degree of common sense, my 'life instinct' -- my wish to stop all the deaths over in Iraq and/or Afghanstan.
However, if I say my life is too stressful, I can't take it any more, I can't handle the rat race, and falling behind on my bills, now losing my job, and my wife leaving me, taking the kids -- I need 'peace', I need out of this life, then you could see how 'peace' might be equated with the 'death' instinct -- as a way of 'running away from the overbearing stresses of life'.
But in both these cases, we are playing a kind of 'semantic fitting' game in which we might ask ourselves: Why are we doing this? What have we gained by this? Have we gained any new insights by this activity? Or have we just gone around in circles playing mind-language-meaning-fitting games?
It was the same thing that happened earlier in his career when Freud was stating that an infant sucking on his or her mother's breast was engaging in 'the sexual instinct'. To be sure, boys and girls can start early but I don't think it's quite this early.
And before that there was the issue of what's 'conscious' vs. what's 'unconscious' vs. what's 'preconscious' -- mind-bending semantic distinctions these can be...but do they really even take us any where? It's not quite of the same material as Einstein's Theory of Relativity or Einstein 'splitting the atom'. We'll talk about 'splitting the ego' soon to come but we must remember that we are talking about models and metaphors here with more or less arbitrary boundaries that may be of more or less importance depending on what are we talking about. If we feel like we are a cat chasing its tail, words and what they mean or don't mean racing around in our heads, then we are probably better scrapping what we are doing and moving on to something else that hopefully carries greater importance relative to the existence and/or the pathology of man.
If we are going to keep using the concept of 'id' then we need to keep to its core kernel or essence of meaning. Mainly a container or 'cauldron' of potential 'boiling' biologically and psychologically influenced sexual, aggressive, and/or violent impulses of an unmistakable and uncontroversial type -- not dithering over whether an infant feeding at his or her mother's breast belongs to the class of 'hunger instincts' and/or 'sexual instincts'. Generally speaking, when we are talking about the Id -- or when I am talking about the Id -- I am referring to a more extreme class of sexual and/or aggressive fantasies/impulses than this.
If we are talking about a 'narcissistic transgression and/or neurosis' then we are talking about a narcissitic behavior -- an act of impulsive, unbridled self-assertion from deep within the Id and/or The Self that 'breaks through the floodgates' or is insufficiently restrained by normal, ethical, legal Superego and Ego activities.
If we are talking about an 'anxiety, inhibition, and/or conversion neurosis' (I don't even know how much the term 'conversion neurosis' is used anymore), then we are talking about a person with an 'overactive' Superego and/or Ego that is putting 'too heavy' restraints on the fantasies and/or impulses that are coming out of the Id/Self.
In DGB Philosophy-Psychology, I view the Freudian Id as a portion of the larger Jungian Self (meaning the Potential Self with all its different fantasies, impulses, and drives towards full self-assertion).
In classic Freudian psychology, we have to remember that Freud carried a significant part of his biology-physics background with him into the study of psychology and for Freud the study of the Id was all about the collective influence of genetics, biology, physics, and chemistry on the human psyche through the agency of the Id.
I can work with Freud's concept of the Id -- we all have unrestrained, restrained, and/or over-restrained 'Narcissistic-Dionysian' tendencies within us -- but still The Potential Self in the deepest depths of the personality is larger than the Id.
We all have deep, dark sexual and/or aggressive fantasies, impulses, secrets, possible skeletons in our closet, that can encroach upon the realm of the immoral, the unethical, and/or even the illegal if inappropriately acted upon in the past, the present, or the future. This is the realm of the Id -- or mythologically speaking -- the realm of Narcissus and/or Dionysus -- if extreme enough and evil enough, even Satan.
I keep coming back to a set of lines in a Dylan song...
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And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only. -- Bob Dylan
Copyright ©1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music
...........................................................................
But again, the realm of The Potential Self is not all about immoral, unethical, and/or illegal behavior.
It is also about innate, genetic talents, existential possibilities, romantic possibilities...
This is where Jung's concept of 'The (Suppressed) Shadow' in contradistinction to 'The (Dominant) Personna' is superior to Freud's concept of 'The Id'. Because even 'romantic' or 'affectionate' behaviors can be suppressed even though strictly speaking, they would not be considered to be a part of The Id unless they are re-interpreted and re-defined 'sexually'. In classic Freudian psychology, 'affection' becomes re-interpreted (and in my opinion over-interpreted) 'sexually'. This is where Classic Freudian Psychology is accused of being 'pansexualist' -- over-interpreting the boundaries of what is 'normally' considered to be 'sexual behavior'.
Freud wasn't the only person guilty of 'pansexualism'. Today our North American laws have become pansexualist -- overprotecting the civil rights of women at the expense of underprotecting the civil rights of men in a 21st century rendition and re-enactment of the infamous Freudian 'Seduction Theory' Controversy. And all packaged under the guise of 'equal rights'. This is a huge, huge political, legal, civil, and philosophical can of worms that for the most part is totally being avoided -- swept under the carpet -- under the name of 'political correctness'.
'Political correctness' basically means 'philosophical, democratic, political, legal, and/or civil improprieties (legal and/or ethical-moral transgressions involving, sexual, racial, and/or ethnic pampering, and reverse unequal rights...) that are 'suppressed' from political, journalist, and public scrutiny by the name of 'political correctness' and therefore fail the democratic test of 'transparency'.
Put more succintly, 'political correctness' is basically 'covert group narcissistic transgressions -- supported by the laws, and/or interpreted and applied laws, of the country -- and 'masked under the guise of equal rights'. Put even more succinctly, 'political correctness' represents failures in democracy to address issues of 'legal pathology of normalcy' because of the 'group sensitivities' at stake -- women, blacks, browns, gays, etc. In a nutshell, political correctness is philosophical -- and democratic (and legal) -- incorrectness.
This whole issue was brought back to the forefront by a very alarming and tragic episode at work this past week. I will address this particular event and at least a part of the larger hugely controversial issue in an essay soon to come.
The final point I wish to finish with here is that Jung's concept of 'Shadow' (The dissociated, the suppressed, the disowned, the marginalized...) allows a greater both the psychological theorist and the psychotherapist a greater field of range in 'suppressed' or 'marginalized' human behavior than Freud's concept of 'Id'.
For example again, a person may have no trouble expressing 'sexual feelings' -- indeed, this may be part of his or her 'personna' -- but at the same time have great trouble expressing affectionate feelings, romantic feelings, tender feelings -- that may or may not have anything to do with sexuality -- and shouldn't be 'falsely interpreted and/or categorized as such',
To summarize using a combination of Freudian, Jungian, and DGB terminology:
1. The '(Potential) Self is the 'roulette wheel' in the personality from which all potential human behaviors spring;
2. The 'Shadow' is the supressed, marginalized, dissociated, and/or disowned part of the personality that is fighting for 'freedom of speech, freedom of action, and equal rights;
3. The 'Personna' is our dominant 'style of expression', our usual 'form of presentation to the world outside ourselves;
4. The 'Id' is the caldron of boiling instincts and/or impulses within us -- a part of The Potential Self -- mainly comprised of impulses like sensuality, sexuality, aggression, and violence, but other instincts and/or impulses can be included as well such as hunger, thirst, sleep, breathing, excitement...
5. The 'Dionysian-Narcissitic-Assertive (DNA) Ego' is the 'Agency' in 'The Splitting of The Ego' that looks after conscious (overt) expressions of the 'Id'. The DNA Ego can be divided into 'Topdog' and 'Underdog' functions in an authoritarian relationship;
6. The 'Romantic-Creative-Natural (RCN) Ego' is that part of the Actualized Potential Self and 'The Splitting of The Ego' that looks after romance, tenderness, love, affection, creativity, the arts, symbolism, mythology, and the enshrinement-engagement of nature...The Romantic Ego can be divided into 'Topdog' and 'Underdog' functions;
7. The 'Central Ego' is that central part of 'The Splitting of The Ego' that oversees all conscious expression and activity, mediating and negotiating and making 'compromise-formations between different 'Specialist Agencies' within 'The Splitting of The Ego' such as those mentioned above and below.
8. The 'Righteous Ego (Superego, Topdog, Underdog)' is the critical, judging, and rejecting element of the 'Ego', easily viewed as the 'patriarchal' and/or 'paternal' part of the personality, and potentially horizontally bipolarized against the 'Nurturing Ego' and/or vertically bipolarized against either the 'Approval-Seeking Underdog' and/or 'The Rebellious Underdog' and/or The DNA Underdog;
9. The 'Nurturing Ego' (Superego, Topdog, Underdog) is the encouraging, nourishing, supportive part of the personality easily viewed as 'matriarchal' or 'maternal' in its origin and easily bipolarized against The Righteous (Paternal) Ego, The Approval-Seeking Underdog-Ego, The Rebellious Underdog Ego, and/or the DNA Underdog Ego;
10. The 'Apollonian-Enlightenment' Ego seeks rationality, reason, truth, fairness, justice, equal rights, democracy in the bi-polarized face of the more power-oriented, authoritarian Righteous Ego;
11. The 'Darwinian-Economic' Ego seeks to economically survive, evolve, and flourish;
12. The Humanistic-Existential Ego seeks to find meaning in a potentially meaningless, alienated, and alienating world;
13. The 'Creative-Dynamic Unconcious' integrates and sends all symbolic-creative-mythological messages up to The Central Ego;
14. The Personal Memory and Transference-Lifestyle Template
15. The Symbolic-Mythological Genetic-Memory Template.
That is enough for tonight.
April 18th-19th, 2009
For example, relative to the term self we can split this concept up to differentiate between:
1. The Potential Self;
2. The Actualizing Self;
3. The Actualized Self;
4. The Alienating Self;
5. The Alienated Self.
We could even add:
6. The 'Being' Self; and
7. The 'Becoming' Self.
When Carl Jung uses the term 'Self', he is referring to what we are calling here in DGB Philosophy-Psychology -- 'The Potential or Genetic Self'. Religiously and/or spiritually speaking, I have no problem calling the Potential and/or Genetic Self -- 'The Essence' or 'The Soul' of the Personality.
The Potential-Genetic Self is the container of the 'existential seeds' of the personality. Some of these 'seeds' may become -- metaphorically speaking -- 'watered' and 'nurtured'. They come alive and become 'existentialized' as active, living, breathing parts of the personality. 'Essence' turns into 'existence'. This is the counter-thesis of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous philosophical statement: 'Existence precedes essence.'
My counter-statement to Sartre then is this: 'Not always does existence precede essence.' Indeed, the two polarities -- essence and existence -- are dialectically interconnected, neither preceding the other, and/or both preceding the other, depending on how you want to look at. It is no different than the 'chicken and egg' argument. The 'egg' is the essence which precedes the 'chicken-to-come or become'. However, the 'egg' in itself has its own existence which was established by both the 'existence' and the 'essence' of a preceding chicken and rooster -- and their sexual activity together -- leading to the fertilized creation of the egg. (Do I have my chicken and rooster sex education 101 down pat, or not?)
Now I am not sure how Hegel would have answered Sartre. But this to me, what I have been describing in the paragraph above, is the logical extension of Hegelian dialectic theory. Or call it DGB Post-Hegelian Dialectic Theory.
Again the whole idea here is that rather than declaring any kind of 'causal-reductionist-unilateral-one-way' statement, we start using the words that you hear many modern-day politicians using such as 'bi-lateral' and 'multi-lateral' and 'pluralistic'.
Relative to the 'existence' vs. 'essence' argument, both 'existence' and 'essence' are viable 'bi-polarities' in the 'game of life' or 'art of living'. Essence is the 'blueprint' of life and it includes the idea of 'intelligent genetic design'; whereas 'existence' is the playing out of an organism's 'essence' and/or its 'alienation' or 'dissociation' from its essence, depending on how the 'game of life' and/or 'art of living' is played out. Do we leave our essence behind and try to be someone who we are not? Or do we play out our essence in all its potential glory (assuming that the essence of man is 'good' which it may or may not be -- or there may be the potential for both 'good' and 'bad', 'altruism' and 'narcissism', 'heroism' and 'cowardism'. Call it the 'roulette wheel' of the personality as different potentials for human action are indeed acted out or restrained, embellished and/or dissociated and suppressed.
This bring us to a 'Jungian dialectical-existential split' between the 'personna' and the 'shadow' which can be compared and contrasted with a similar but different 'Freudian dialectical-existential split' between the 'id' and the 'superego'.
In one way, the classic Freudian model is superior in that it has a third concept involved, a third 'agency' or 'compartment' in the personality -- the 'ego' -- that mediates between the 'instinctual impulses' of the id vs. the 'restraining ethical forces' of the superego. The classic Freudian model is closer than the Jungian model in structure and process to the classic Hegelian triad of: 1. 'thesis' (id), 'anti-thesis' (superego), 'synthesis' (ego creatively coming up with 'compromise-formations'). In the Jungian model, the 'mediating, central ego' is absent but seemingly implied as a synthesizing or integrating force between the shadow and the personna.
Or maybe Jung viewed himself as therapist -- as the synthesizer, or 'associative synthesizer' which, he at least partly was. However, there can be no cogntive-emotional-existential synthesis within a person -- therapist or no therapist involved -- without an 'awareness light' going on in the client/individual (specifically, inside the person's 'Central Ego' by DGB conceptuology and terminology) and then integrating and acting on this processed awareness.
However, the Freudian classic model has some problems too which is at least partly why many 'neo-Freudians', 'post-Freudians', and 'anti-Freudians' eventually abandoned the classic Freudian conceptuology and turned to other similar and/or different models of the personality/the human psyche.
For example, the Jungian concept of 'Self' is some significant ways preferrable to the Freudian concept of 'Id'. Why? Because it quickly becomes confusing what is in the 'id' and what is not. Is it just sexual impulses? Or sexual and violent impulses? By the time Freud wrote 'Beyond The Pleaure Principle' in 1920, it was apparent that both sexual and violent impulses would become included in the 'id' as Freud was in the process of moving in this direction with his polarization of the 'life' and 'death' instinct, and indeed, Freud formalized things 3 years later in his essay, 'The Ego and The Id'.
....................................................................................
Id, ego, and super-ego
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Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the "psychic apparatus" defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the "id"; the organized realistic part of the psyche is the "ego," and the critical and moralizing function the "super-ego." [1]
Even though the model is "structural" and makes reference to an "apparatus", the id, ego, and super-ego are functions of the mind rather than parts of the brain and do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with actual somatic structures of the kind dealt with by neuroscience.
The concepts themselves arose at a late stage in the development of Freud's thought: the structural model was first discussed in his 1920 essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and was formalized and elaborated upon three years later in his "The Ego and the Id." Freud's proposal was influenced by the ambiguity of the term "unconscious" and its many conflicting uses.
The terms "id," "ego," and "super-ego" are not Freud's own but are latinisations originating from his translator James Strachey. Freud himself wrote of "das Es," "das Ich," and "das Über-Ich"—respectively, "the It," "the I," and the "Over-I" (or "Upper-I"); thus to the German reader, Freud's original terms are more or less self-explanatory. The term "das Es" was borrowed from Georg Groddeck, a German physician to whose unconventional ideas Freud was much attracted.[2] (Groddeck's translators render the term in English as 'the It').
Contents [hide]
1 Id
2 Ego
3 Super-ego
4 Advantages of the structural model
5 In popular culture
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 See also
9.1 People
9.2 Related topics
10 External links
[edit] Id
The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as a pleasure principle: if not compelled by reality it seeks immediate enjoyment.[3] It is focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification. Personality, as Freud saw it, was produced by the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints that were internalized.[4] [5] The Id is unconscious by definition. In Freud's formulation,
“ It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.
[Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)]
”
The id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego. [6]
Developmentally, the Id is anterior to the ego; i.e. the psychic apparatus begins, at birth, as an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into a structured ego. Thus, the id:
“ contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, is laid down in the constitution -- above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate from the somatic organisation and which find a first psychical expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us" [7]. ”
The mind of a newborn child is regarded as completely "id-ridden", in the sense that it is a mass of instinctive drives and impulses, and demands immediate satisfaction. This view equates a newborn child with an id-ridden individual—often humorously—with this analogy: an alimentary tract with no sense of responsibility at either end.
The id is responsible for our basic drives such as food, water, sex, and basic impulses. It is amoral and egocentric, ruled by the pleasure–pain principle; it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, infantile in its emotional development, and will not take "no" for an answer. It is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or "instinctive drive to create".
Freud divided the id's drives and instincts into two categories: life and death instincts - the latter not so usually regarded because Freud thought of it later in his lifetime. Life instincts (Eros) are those that are crucial to pleasurable survival, such as eating and copulation. Death instincts, (Thanatos) as stated by Freud, are our unconscious wish to die, as death puts an end to the everyday struggles for happiness and survival. Freud noticed the death instinct in our desire for peace and attempts to escape reality through fiction, media, and substances such as alcohol and drugs. It also indirectly represents itself through aggression.
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DGB...cont'd...
Freud moved to the concept of 'id' to at least partly move away from the more 'ambiguous' concept of 'unconscious' which was giving him some trouble. I can certainly see this and have never liked the term 'unconscious'. I've tried to duck around this concept as much as possible by using the term 'subconscious' instead in the appropriate contexts. But the term 'id' can cause some serious semantic difficulties as well -- especially when you add the 'life' and 'death' instinct into the picture. If you say that the wish for 'peace' comes from our 'death instinct' and then you turn around and say that ther wish for 'aggression' also comes from our 'death instinct', then the bipolar contrast between the wish for 'peace' and the wish for 'aggression' has collapsed into some very hazy category in the middle -- the wish for 'death'. That, to me, doesn't make any sense, at least until you start discussing context.
If i am outside demonstrating in a civil protest rally against the American soldiers being in Iraq or the Canadian soldiers being in Afghanastan, and I am demonstrating for 'peace', then this, we could trace back to, with some degree of common sense, my 'life instinct' -- my wish to stop all the deaths over in Iraq and/or Afghanstan.
However, if I say my life is too stressful, I can't take it any more, I can't handle the rat race, and falling behind on my bills, now losing my job, and my wife leaving me, taking the kids -- I need 'peace', I need out of this life, then you could see how 'peace' might be equated with the 'death' instinct -- as a way of 'running away from the overbearing stresses of life'.
But in both these cases, we are playing a kind of 'semantic fitting' game in which we might ask ourselves: Why are we doing this? What have we gained by this? Have we gained any new insights by this activity? Or have we just gone around in circles playing mind-language-meaning-fitting games?
It was the same thing that happened earlier in his career when Freud was stating that an infant sucking on his or her mother's breast was engaging in 'the sexual instinct'. To be sure, boys and girls can start early but I don't think it's quite this early.
And before that there was the issue of what's 'conscious' vs. what's 'unconscious' vs. what's 'preconscious' -- mind-bending semantic distinctions these can be...but do they really even take us any where? It's not quite of the same material as Einstein's Theory of Relativity or Einstein 'splitting the atom'. We'll talk about 'splitting the ego' soon to come but we must remember that we are talking about models and metaphors here with more or less arbitrary boundaries that may be of more or less importance depending on what are we talking about. If we feel like we are a cat chasing its tail, words and what they mean or don't mean racing around in our heads, then we are probably better scrapping what we are doing and moving on to something else that hopefully carries greater importance relative to the existence and/or the pathology of man.
If we are going to keep using the concept of 'id' then we need to keep to its core kernel or essence of meaning. Mainly a container or 'cauldron' of potential 'boiling' biologically and psychologically influenced sexual, aggressive, and/or violent impulses of an unmistakable and uncontroversial type -- not dithering over whether an infant feeding at his or her mother's breast belongs to the class of 'hunger instincts' and/or 'sexual instincts'. Generally speaking, when we are talking about the Id -- or when I am talking about the Id -- I am referring to a more extreme class of sexual and/or aggressive fantasies/impulses than this.
If we are talking about a 'narcissistic transgression and/or neurosis' then we are talking about a narcissitic behavior -- an act of impulsive, unbridled self-assertion from deep within the Id and/or The Self that 'breaks through the floodgates' or is insufficiently restrained by normal, ethical, legal Superego and Ego activities.
If we are talking about an 'anxiety, inhibition, and/or conversion neurosis' (I don't even know how much the term 'conversion neurosis' is used anymore), then we are talking about a person with an 'overactive' Superego and/or Ego that is putting 'too heavy' restraints on the fantasies and/or impulses that are coming out of the Id/Self.
In DGB Philosophy-Psychology, I view the Freudian Id as a portion of the larger Jungian Self (meaning the Potential Self with all its different fantasies, impulses, and drives towards full self-assertion).
In classic Freudian psychology, we have to remember that Freud carried a significant part of his biology-physics background with him into the study of psychology and for Freud the study of the Id was all about the collective influence of genetics, biology, physics, and chemistry on the human psyche through the agency of the Id.
I can work with Freud's concept of the Id -- we all have unrestrained, restrained, and/or over-restrained 'Narcissistic-Dionysian' tendencies within us -- but still The Potential Self in the deepest depths of the personality is larger than the Id.
We all have deep, dark sexual and/or aggressive fantasies, impulses, secrets, possible skeletons in our closet, that can encroach upon the realm of the immoral, the unethical, and/or even the illegal if inappropriately acted upon in the past, the present, or the future. This is the realm of the Id -- or mythologically speaking -- the realm of Narcissus and/or Dionysus -- if extreme enough and evil enough, even Satan.
I keep coming back to a set of lines in a Dylan song...
...............................................................................
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only. -- Bob Dylan
Copyright ©1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music
...........................................................................
But again, the realm of The Potential Self is not all about immoral, unethical, and/or illegal behavior.
It is also about innate, genetic talents, existential possibilities, romantic possibilities...
This is where Jung's concept of 'The (Suppressed) Shadow' in contradistinction to 'The (Dominant) Personna' is superior to Freud's concept of 'The Id'. Because even 'romantic' or 'affectionate' behaviors can be suppressed even though strictly speaking, they would not be considered to be a part of The Id unless they are re-interpreted and re-defined 'sexually'. In classic Freudian psychology, 'affection' becomes re-interpreted (and in my opinion over-interpreted) 'sexually'. This is where Classic Freudian Psychology is accused of being 'pansexualist' -- over-interpreting the boundaries of what is 'normally' considered to be 'sexual behavior'.
Freud wasn't the only person guilty of 'pansexualism'. Today our North American laws have become pansexualist -- overprotecting the civil rights of women at the expense of underprotecting the civil rights of men in a 21st century rendition and re-enactment of the infamous Freudian 'Seduction Theory' Controversy. And all packaged under the guise of 'equal rights'. This is a huge, huge political, legal, civil, and philosophical can of worms that for the most part is totally being avoided -- swept under the carpet -- under the name of 'political correctness'.
'Political correctness' basically means 'philosophical, democratic, political, legal, and/or civil improprieties (legal and/or ethical-moral transgressions involving, sexual, racial, and/or ethnic pampering, and reverse unequal rights...) that are 'suppressed' from political, journalist, and public scrutiny by the name of 'political correctness' and therefore fail the democratic test of 'transparency'.
Put more succintly, 'political correctness' is basically 'covert group narcissistic transgressions -- supported by the laws, and/or interpreted and applied laws, of the country -- and 'masked under the guise of equal rights'. Put even more succinctly, 'political correctness' represents failures in democracy to address issues of 'legal pathology of normalcy' because of the 'group sensitivities' at stake -- women, blacks, browns, gays, etc. In a nutshell, political correctness is philosophical -- and democratic (and legal) -- incorrectness.
This whole issue was brought back to the forefront by a very alarming and tragic episode at work this past week. I will address this particular event and at least a part of the larger hugely controversial issue in an essay soon to come.
The final point I wish to finish with here is that Jung's concept of 'Shadow' (The dissociated, the suppressed, the disowned, the marginalized...) allows a greater both the psychological theorist and the psychotherapist a greater field of range in 'suppressed' or 'marginalized' human behavior than Freud's concept of 'Id'.
For example again, a person may have no trouble expressing 'sexual feelings' -- indeed, this may be part of his or her 'personna' -- but at the same time have great trouble expressing affectionate feelings, romantic feelings, tender feelings -- that may or may not have anything to do with sexuality -- and shouldn't be 'falsely interpreted and/or categorized as such',
To summarize using a combination of Freudian, Jungian, and DGB terminology:
1. The '(Potential) Self is the 'roulette wheel' in the personality from which all potential human behaviors spring;
2. The 'Shadow' is the supressed, marginalized, dissociated, and/or disowned part of the personality that is fighting for 'freedom of speech, freedom of action, and equal rights;
3. The 'Personna' is our dominant 'style of expression', our usual 'form of presentation to the world outside ourselves;
4. The 'Id' is the caldron of boiling instincts and/or impulses within us -- a part of The Potential Self -- mainly comprised of impulses like sensuality, sexuality, aggression, and violence, but other instincts and/or impulses can be included as well such as hunger, thirst, sleep, breathing, excitement...
5. The 'Dionysian-Narcissitic-Assertive (DNA) Ego' is the 'Agency' in 'The Splitting of The Ego' that looks after conscious (overt) expressions of the 'Id'. The DNA Ego can be divided into 'Topdog' and 'Underdog' functions in an authoritarian relationship;
6. The 'Romantic-Creative-Natural (RCN) Ego' is that part of the Actualized Potential Self and 'The Splitting of The Ego' that looks after romance, tenderness, love, affection, creativity, the arts, symbolism, mythology, and the enshrinement-engagement of nature...The Romantic Ego can be divided into 'Topdog' and 'Underdog' functions;
7. The 'Central Ego' is that central part of 'The Splitting of The Ego' that oversees all conscious expression and activity, mediating and negotiating and making 'compromise-formations between different 'Specialist Agencies' within 'The Splitting of The Ego' such as those mentioned above and below.
8. The 'Righteous Ego (Superego, Topdog, Underdog)' is the critical, judging, and rejecting element of the 'Ego', easily viewed as the 'patriarchal' and/or 'paternal' part of the personality, and potentially horizontally bipolarized against the 'Nurturing Ego' and/or vertically bipolarized against either the 'Approval-Seeking Underdog' and/or 'The Rebellious Underdog' and/or The DNA Underdog;
9. The 'Nurturing Ego' (Superego, Topdog, Underdog) is the encouraging, nourishing, supportive part of the personality easily viewed as 'matriarchal' or 'maternal' in its origin and easily bipolarized against The Righteous (Paternal) Ego, The Approval-Seeking Underdog-Ego, The Rebellious Underdog Ego, and/or the DNA Underdog Ego;
10. The 'Apollonian-Enlightenment' Ego seeks rationality, reason, truth, fairness, justice, equal rights, democracy in the bi-polarized face of the more power-oriented, authoritarian Righteous Ego;
11. The 'Darwinian-Economic' Ego seeks to economically survive, evolve, and flourish;
12. The Humanistic-Existential Ego seeks to find meaning in a potentially meaningless, alienated, and alienating world;
13. The 'Creative-Dynamic Unconcious' integrates and sends all symbolic-creative-mythological messages up to The Central Ego;
14. The Personal Memory and Transference-Lifestyle Template
15. The Symbolic-Mythological Genetic-Memory Template.
That is enough for tonight.
April 18th-19th, 2009
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