Started on Sept. 11th and finished on Sept. 12th, 2010....
On the anniversary of 9/11, may the more rational, humanistic side of human thinking, feeling, and doing prevail...
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1A. Introduction: On The Evolutionary Interconnection Between Rational-Empiricism and Dialectic Thinking
Philosophy is inseparable from history, and history is inseparable from philosophy. The two are dialectically entwined. On this matter, I am in full agreement with Hegel. -- dgb.
This has been a slow train coming...a very slow train coming...
Do I start in the past and work forward?
Or do I start in the present -- my present -- and work back to the past?
How do you negotiate your past with your present?
Are you the same person? Or someone else? Are you a mixture of who you were, what you used to think and feel and want, combined with something new -- a 'mutation' spinning off of what you were, and/or a 'compensation' built off of, or onto, whatever the 'old you' was driving towards, and was all about?
This is part of what I personally have had to reconcile...indeed, I have actually been trying to reconcile it for about two years or so now with much resistance and 'go and stop' starts, relative to my own writing today compared to what I was writing about 30 years ago in my Honours Thesis, in Psychology when I directly or indirectly started the project of what today I am calling 'Hegel's Hotel'.
Except back in 1979, I barely knew who Hegel was, and what he stood for....I heard the expression 'dialectic thinking' primarily in relation to a particular professor teaching the philosophy of Marx and Social(ist) Activism...
And somehow it rattled in and out of my brain that Hegel influenced Marx relative to this matter of whatever 'dialectic thinking' was...even though it didn't really soak into me that there was a world of difference between Hegel and Marx, that Marx basically turned Hegel's philosophy upside down, stood Hegel's philosophy on its 'head' if you will, and in this regard, Hegel and his philosophy was essentially 'split into two halves' -- a 'right wing' faction of Hegelian philosophy that tended to be more 'conservative and status-quo based', and a much more radical, 'left wing' faction of Hegelian philosophy led ultimately by Marx and Engels who revolutionized in both good and bad ways the future history, socio-economics, politics and culture of both Eastern and Western thinking...
The paradoxical, ironic thing about Hegel and his philosophy as it became associated with 1. 'German Idealism, then Imperialism, and ultimately, Nazism on the one hand: and 2. Marxism, and the deviations of Marxism into Leninism, and Soviet Communism as well as Mao Tse Tung and Chinese Communism on the other hand -- was and is that Hegelian Dialectic Philosophy first and foremost is a philosophy that is designed to 'negotiatie and integrate opposing perspectives', and in this regard, 'bridge the gap between opposing philosophical, political, psychological, artisitic, religious, and/or cultural forces...
So how is it that a philosophy that was designed to 'integrate opposites' became, from all outward appearances, inherently contradictory -- 'self-split' and 'schizoid' -- within itself? What happened? And where was the resolution in this apparent split?
Firstly, Hegelian philosophy was built on 'the reality of internal contradiction'...According to Hegel, all things, processes, qualities, characteristics, ideas, theories, ideologies, philosophies, religions, political parties, relationships...are built from a foundation of 'internal contradiction'.
What unites us, divides us...and what divides us, unites us...
Hegelian Dialectic Philosophy is built upon the principle of 'dialectic unity, harmony, wholism, and/or monism'...
This is how you can distinguish the difference between the ultimate 'singular wholism and/or monism' of Baruch Spinoza vs. the 'dialectic monism' of say, Heraclitus ('the balance of opposites'), Lao Tse ('yin' and 'yang' need to harmonize together...), and The German Idealists, primarily, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel who were each in their own respective way trying to 'heal the dualistic schizoid split' asserted by Kant between 'subject' and 'object' and between 'epistemology' and 'metaphysics'...
Most of the little I have read about Fichte's philosophy I don't like. You don't 'heal a split' by pretending that the split is not there -- when it is. The 'subject-object split' will always be with us -- 'The Great Kantian Divide' -- and Fichte trying to 'do away' with the 'object' didn't -- and still doesn't -- solve the problem of this 'Great Subjective-Objective Divide'.
Without getting in over my head here -- because to repeat my knowledge of Fichte's philosophy is very shallow and introductory -- Fichte seems to have at least partly tried to do what the British Empiricist, George Berkeley tried to do: specifically, 'get rid' of the 'can of worms' called the 'object' and base all philosophy on 'subjectivism'... in Berkeley's case 'subjective empiricism'....If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to see or hear it fall, did the tree make a 'sound'? Berkeley's answer to this epistemological problem was: 'No the tree didn't make a sound, and indeed, the tree never fell if there was no one there to witness it!! Does a squirrel count as a 'witness'? And what if someone finds the tree lying on the ground in the forest afterwards? What about this, Professor Berkeley? Are you still going to say that the tree 'never made a sound and/or never fell'?
Fichte's 'subjectivism' was more of a 'Cosmic Subjectivism'....and this ultimately became more dangerous...indeed, one of the philosophical foundations of Nazism....This requires a little explaining...
Historically, let us briefly go back to the traumatic influence of Napoleon on the national evolution of Germany. Napoleon's conquering Germany and Prussia fairly easily created a hugely 'traumatic ego blow to the collective German Psyche'. And Napoleon's essentially 'walking over Germany' created the beginning of what might be called a 'Traumatic-Transference Complex' in the National German Psyche. Why did it happen? And how could Germany 'compensate' and 'evolve' to make sure that this type of 'National Ego Humiliation' didn't happen again?
The answer was simple. At the time of Napoleon's conquest of Germany, Germany was divided into a whole network of 'city-states' that were not ultimately 'united'....So Napoleon just drove his army through the divided 'pre-Germany' and what at that time was Prussia -- and conquered a divided Germany fairly easily...
Thus the post-Napoleon calling card of the German people based on their 'collective national humiliation' and their resulting 'compensation' towards a national 'superiority-striving' (Adlerian Psychology at work on a national, collective level) became -- 'collective national unity'... A country that is not divided in its collective, national vision and mission of being 'collectively and nationally strong' presents a much more formidable defensive and/or offensive force to any of its potential 'national enemies'...
Fichte presented such a national, collective, philosophical vision and mission to the German people. And the German people swallowed it hook, line, and sinker...Fichte's philosophy became a part of the German people's 'Collective, National Anti-Napoleon Transference Complex'....which was slowly starting to build towards Nazism and, in the end, The Third Reich...
What was lost in Fichte's 'Collective, National Philosophy' was the 'Philosophy of the Individual' and the functional necessity of the contradiction between the Individual and The State...
What was lost in Fichte's philosophy and ultimately in Nazism was the concept of 'individualism'...and the concept, process, and dynamic force of all evolving democratic governments -- specifically, the 'rational-empirical-ethical critical thinking' of The Individual vs. The State...
Between Fichte and The Third Reich, 'individual critical rational-empirical-ethical thinking became 'taboo'.
It was what eventually led Nietzsche to criticize in his own German people 'the herd mentality'...
Although Nietzsche's philosophy -- and particularly Nietzsche's concept of 'The Will to Power' -- was twisted by the Nazi regime and used for its own 'imperialistic designs'...
In the Nazi mentality -- the Nazi/German Collective Fichtean Psyche at the time -- there wouldn't be any more 'Napoleons walking over and through Germany'....because by this point in time the German army had become so formidable that it was ready 'to walk over the rest of the world just like Napoleon did to them'...
This is what I call 'transference-reversal' -- in this case, a 'Collective, National Transference-Reversal Complex' -- or 'Identification with The Aggressor' -- where Germany basically followed Kant's 'Categorical Imperative' or 'The Reverse' of it -- 'Do unto the world what the world did unto you'....
In three words, I call this phenomenon 'National (and/or Religious) Transference Revenge'...
We see it all the time operating in the world today, in America, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Afghanastan...Christians killing Muslims, Muslims killing Christians...where does it all stop?
So Fichte -- unintentionally I am sure -- and his 'Collective, National Unity Philosophy' essentially tore the shreds out of Individualism, Critical-Rational-Empirical-Ethical (Humanistic-Existential) Thinking, Feeling, and Acting...and in effect, all Enlightenment Values...
What Fichte left us with which is still valuable is almost laughably contradictory, paradoxical, and ironical -- he left us with the concept of 'The Ego' (the German word for 'I' or 'Self'...There is that dastardly 'Kantian Subjective-Objective Split' again -- 'The Active, Subjective, Creative I' vs. 'The more Passive, Objective Self'...which is in effect the 'creative or non-creative recipient' of the 'creative or non-creative choices' of our active 'I')...
Schelling will have to wait for another day. I like Schelling, in some ways, even better than Hegel...But that comparison and contrast again has to wait for another day...
Then, ever so briefly, there were the 'Post-and/or Anti-Hegelians.
Kierkegaard...who wrote so abstractly on the philosphy and the psychology of 'the concrete invidual in evolving process'...another internal philosophical and self-contradiction that will have to wait for another day...
Schopenhauer...who in both similarily and contrast to Fichte created a 'Cosmic Id' (an external 'projection' of his internal 'nasty self'...)...Another day...
Between Fichte and Schopenhauer, Freud had the essence of 'two thirds' of his much later internal model of the human psyche...from Fichte, Freud took 'The Ego'...and from Schopenhauer, Freud took 'The Id'...
Nietzsche helped Freud close most of the remaining gap in Freud's model in Nietzsche's classic first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy', in which Nietzsche introduced us to the need for 'homeostatic-dialectic bi-polar balance' between our 'Apollonian' (ethical Superego) Selves' and our more Schopenhaurian-based (and Ancient Greek Tragedy based) 'Dionysian Selves'...
Freud put all these 19th century (and mainly German Idealistic and Romantic) philosophical ideas together in the form of one burst of creative genius...in one of his most important essays...'The Ego and The Id' (1923)...
And all of these different philosophical and psychological ideas when integrated together -- with Hegel being the main integrating philosophical force -- brings us up to date in Hegel's Hotel...
These ideas can perhaps be summed up in my Post-Hegelian, Dialectic Humanistic-Existential Philosophy under the words 'Multi-Bi-Polar, Dialectic Divisionism and Wholistic Unity'...
Or ideally 'Dialectic Monism or Wholism'...
Put another way,
Man is a walking self-contradiction....
Even our self-contradictions are self-contradictory...
Because our self-contradictions can both be 'neurotic and psychopathological' on the one hand...
And inherent to our 'self-growth, self-therapy, and self-evolution' on the other hand...
The conflicting tensions within us...between our 'competing, conflicting parts' (or 'non-conflicting tensions between non-competing parts' for that matter because the latter may imply 'internal collusion' in perhaps a 'non-growthful' way...just as we have to be wary of the presence of 'external colluding' forces in our government, in our corporations, in our 'special interest lobbyists'...and between them all)...to repeat, the conflicting, competing tensions within us, drive us, or leave us stagnant, and their evolving psycho-philosophical-dynamics and outcomes define us in terms of the individuals who we are, the individuals who we aren't, and the 'gaps' left between them...
This 'Dialectic Premise' provides the driving, underlying force and broader context of what next we are about to do...i.e....study the philosophy and the psychology of 'The Central Ego'...
Enough for today..
-- dgb, Sept. 12th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
