Floor 3: The Mezzanine
In the beginning there is 'existence'.
Or is there 'essence' in the beginning?
Hegel's Hotel pursues the idea of an 'essence-existence duality and dialectic'.
Meaning in the beginning there is both essence and existence -- a chicken and egg conundrum.
In Part 1, we will explore and classify the different elements of the 'existence and consciousness' part of this puzzle called 'man'.
In Part 2, we will explore the 'essence and unconsciousness' part of the same puzzle.
Room 300: Sensuality, Perception, Narcissism, Attention, Interest -- and Subjective Bias
Sensuality is the bridge between our internal-subjective and external-objective world.
The two worlds -- our internal and external -- are 'dialectically connected' by a combination of our senses and our actions.
Our senses are our first bridge to both our outside and inside world. Without our senses their would be no 'consciousness'....no sense of 'being alive'....
Our senses take us on a teeter totter -- or even a roller coaster -- ride through life.
Up, down, and back up again, or back down again. Like the thermostat in our house or a pendulum swinging. Stopping at a point of 'evaluative indifference' -- which is not likely to last very long -- before the teeter totter-roller coaster- pendulum starts to swing 'up' or 'down' again... 'up' in our more pleasurable moments' and 'down' in our more 'unpleasurable' moments...
Our senses are the 'thermostat of our life experience' from moment to moment throughout the day and night...
Our senses are 'dialectically charged'. By this, I mean that they are the bridges to both our external (objective) and our internal (subjective ) world. They are the bridge between our 'existence' and our 'essence'. They are the bridge to what is happening around us and what 'catches our interest' amongst the myriad of things and processes that are happening around us at any moment of the day or night.
But at the same time, our senses are the bridge to our thoughts, our beliefs, our assumptions, our opinions, our theories, our values, our feelings...all the way down into our our 'unconsciousness' through our multitude of 'transferences' and 'memories' and 'fantasies' and 'archetypes' and 'symbols' and 'myths' and 'Gods' to our very 'spirit and soul'
Our senses -- and feelings -- can be partly 'pathologized' by what we 'program' into them. But at the same time, our sense are our 'key' to 're-finding ourselves and our lives' when we have gone astray, become 'alienated' from ourselves -- meaning acting in a way that defies our senses and feelings, ignores them, disowns them, suppresses them, represses them, disavows them, dissociates them, betrays them, abandons them...Abandon our senses and feelings and we abandon ourselves; we alienate ourselves from our selves... Thus, our senses and feelings become our 'roadmap', our 'key', to re-discovering our selves...who we are, and what we need to be and become...
The difference between our 'senses' and our 'feelings' is that our senses operate mostly at a 'skin level' whereas our 'feelings' are connected to the 'pounding or not pounding of our heart' and how we interpret the activity or lack of activity of our heart as 'joy', 'anger', 'rage', 'love', 'hate', 'attraction', 'repulsion', 'anxiety', 'fear', 'sadness', 'grief', 'depression'...and so on...
Our feelings are generally more susceptible to 'pathology' than our senses are because our feelings are greatly affected by our thoughts, interpretations, generalizations, associations, discriminations, and judgements -- all of which can easily become 'pathologized' if we take our thoughts down a 'bad path'...
Connected to our 'senses' is the role of 'perception' in our 'Central Ego Functioning and Dysfunctioning', as we journey through the cognitive-emotional processes of 'interest', 'attention', 'narcissism', 'epistemology', 'ethics', 'impulse', 'memory', 'association', 'fantasy', 'choosing', and the 'final path to behavioral action'...
The close attachment between our senses and our perception leads to the dilalectic idea of 'sensory perception'...where 'recognition' factors from past experience -- and associative connections to these past experiences -- are 'fitted onto' what we believe we are presently 'seeing', 'hearing', 'reading', 'smelling'...
In its most general sense, this is the meaning of the concept of 'transference' where a 'scene from our past' is associatively connected to a 'scene that we are living through right now in our present'...
In Freudian conceptuology, 'transference' usually refers to a 'false connection' between a particular 'early childhood experience' (or 'fantasy' as developed in later Freudian theory after 1896) -- and/or an 'associatively connected set of experiences and/or fantasies' -- and what we are going through now in the 'experience of the present moment'.
However, as noted in later Psychoanalytic literature, 'transferences' are not always completely false -- many times there may be an 'associative relevance and meaningful connection' between what we have experienced in the past and what we are experiencing now; and secondly, this 'true' or 'false' connection between our past and present experience does not always have to be connected to 'childhood'....often these 'associative connections' are built on top of either very good or very bad personal experiences, in the latter case a 'trauma' or 'tragedy' that again does not always have to be connected back to childhood, instead, perhaps the associative connection may stem back to say, for example, a former 'lover'...or perhaps an 'assault' that occurs during our teenage or adult years...
Usually, however, the most profoundly influential 'transferences' in our character structure can be traced back to early childhood, before the age of about 7 years old....when our character structure is still in its most formative years...
Transferences stem from our inner unconscious world and become connected to many of our thoughts, feelings and senses...and in this sense -- i.e., the sense that man is not always a 'perfectly good thinker' -- can 'pathologize' them...if the whole 'transference complex' has been sufficiently 'warped' and become sufficiently 'neurotic' as is very often the case... No one gets out of childhood 'scott-free'...
And no one's thinking is always perfectly rational and 'rational-empirical' in the 'immediacy and concreteness of the moment'...especially, when we start to get frustrated, anxious, angry, and/or enraged by things, people and/or processes that just do not seem to be falling into line with what we want...
Personal narcissism can easily upset the 'objectivity' of our senses...indeed, will upset the objectivity of our senses, giving us 'information' that is 'uniquely construed', 'subjectively biased', even 'subjectively distorted by our unique individual narcissistic bias'...
This is what makes us 'human....all too human'...
Still, our senses -- and our sensory-perceptions that result from them -- represent the life-blood of our existence -- and our essence -- our dialectically connected 'existence-essence'. They represent one of the two gateways or bridges between our inner and outer world -- our 'actions' representing the other gateway or bridge between our inner and outer world...
Our senses represent our first 'subjective map' of what's going on in both our internal and external world. All other information in our cognitive system -- and particularly in what I am calling here our 'Central Ego' -- is built from the right or wrong (or partly both) sensory maps that give us a cognitive-evaluative reflection of what is happening in our external world, our internal world -- and between them.
Our Central Ego is our 'Self' at our most 'conscious, subjective' level, but, in this regard, certainly capable of epistemological error and 'narcissistic-ethical transgressions', capable of keeping the rest of our conscious and unconscious Self 'under control' at least up to some threshold of tolerance depending on the individual person and the unique context of every 'here and now' and/or 'there and then' situation...
Our Central Ego can be in control of the rest of our personality or conversely bombarded and overwhelmed by other conscious and/or unconscious elements of our 'Larger Entire Self'...
Our 'Wholistic Self' comprises our 'Central Ego' as one major portion of it, but also includes our various 'Specialized, Split Off Ego States' which we can turn into as many 'compartmentalized squares' as is convenient and functional to talk about, the Gestalt 'topdog/underdog' model representing the most simple '2 compartment model', and the Freudian 'superego', 'id', 'ego' model representing a post-Hegelian triadic (3 compartment) model -- 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', and 'synthesis'.
If you follow what I do in a more Jungian fashion, and start connecting 'Greek-Roman mythological Gods' with 'projected internal split-off ego states', then you could/can go up to significantly more 'ego-archetype compartments', again depending on the limits of convenience, simplicity, and functionality for teaching and learning purposes... for example, the 'Apollo/Dionysus' split, the 'Zeus/Hera' split, the 'Apollo/Eros' split...and so on...
Our 'Wholistic Self' also consists of all aspects of our Unconscious Personality which includes:
1. Our 'Dream-Catcher-Dream Weaver' Function;
2. Our 'Transference-Lifestyle Memory, Impulse, Defense and Compensation(Freudian-Adlerian) Complexes';
3. Our 'Mythological-Religious-Symbolic-Archetype' (Jungian) Complexes;
4. Our 'Split Unconcious Light Spirit-Soul' (Mythologically ruled by Apollo and other Greek/Roman Gods...);
5. Our 'Split Unconscious Dark Spirit-Soul' (Mythologically ruled by Dionysus/Bacchus, Narcissius, and other Greek/Roman Gods);
6 . Our 'Genetic Essence and Blueprint Self';
7. Our Undifferentiatied Apeiron or Chaotic Self (Consisting of Attrqcting and Repelling Opposite Potentials Circulating and Percolating Within Us...)
This model might be viewed as overly complicated and overly compartmentalized but it allows us the opportunity to focus in on particular Freudian and post-Freudian, Adlerian and post-Adlerian, Jungian and post-Jungian conceptual structures and dynamics that have not to this day been discussed fully in this manner before. Freud re-integrates with Adler and Jung in Hegel's Hotel, with the symbolic link between Greek, Roman, and Christian Mythology-Religion and 'internal ego states and splits' providing much of the subject matter.
What is the difference between Mythology and Religion?
In 'mythology', we do not treat 'past Gods from past cultures' seriously except in terms of their symbolic value. In 'religion' -- we treat the 'Resident Home God' attached to the particular religion that we are involved in, very seriously. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
From our senses, we move inwards deeper into our 'Central Ego Cogntive-Evaluative Processes'...and then deeper into the psycho-dynamics of our 'Wholistic Self'...
The most important point to remember here is that 'sensory perception' is not a 'passive, objective' experience but rather a 'subjective, active' experience, where our internal past experiences, our wishes, fears, beliefs and values, narcissistic biases... all colour our sensory-perceptual process and provide us with information that is far from 'purely objective', indeed never 'purely and perfectly objective'.
We all view the world through different individual coloured glasses... Sometimes our sensory-perceptions are viewed as being 'good enough' to be basically considered 'objective' or 'truthful' or 'fact' or 'knowledge' but these labels should, and usually are, considered 'conditional' based on the potential arrival of new and different information that may or may not contradict the previous information.
All knowledge is subject to potential change -- either because of the evolutionary, life process itself and its changing nature, and/or because of our changing view of things based perhaps on new and better informantion -- or alternatively, 'worse information' that we either don't know is worse, or don't care is worse. The truth is not always desired by individual and/or collective men and/or women.
Epistemology -- the study of knowledge -- becomes hardest to ascertain when individual and/or collective people -- particularly people in power -- want to keep the truth hidden under the cloak of darkness, and/or under a rhetoric of 'smoke and mirrors'...and expend a lot of energy in doing this...Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they are not. 'Scandals' break out when they are not.
And sometimes, individually and/or collectively, people simply do not want to know the truth. So the truth becomes 'buried under an individual or collective suppression and/or repression'.
An epistemological skeptic, cynic, and/or 'post-modern deconstructionist' might say that we can never know for sure what is happening in our inner or outer world.
Kant was the first epistemologist to clearly say that we 'can't/Kant know for sure what is happening in our objective (in his terminology, 'noumenal') world -- because our senses are imperfect at best, or in Nietzsche's more bombastic rhetoric, distorted by our internal wants and biases.
I say that there is such a thing as 'good enough' knowledge -- good enough to 'structually, dynamically, functionally and pragmatically fit' the life situation that we are dealing with before us, and to use these essentially 'accurate cognitive maps' in order to help us make the appropriate life and self judgements that will ideally help us in our pursuit of life, liberty, health, and happiness.
In the end, or at least first and foremost, it all depends on how badly we want the truth about the context of our life to rule our individual and collective life choices...
If we want to hide the truth, or hide from the truth, then our choices will reflect that. And reflect where our life choices take us, both in the short term and in the long term.
'The truth will set you free.' (Not that I am religious except in a mythological sense of seeking to better understand man's 'religious-psychological-projections', but that is a biblical quote...John 8:32).
Not always but usually the truth will set us free -- providing we can handle the truth when we hear it.
-- dgb, Dec. 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
