Finished....Sunday May 6th, 2012...dgb
I feel myself entangled in a part of Kierkegaard's spirit -- one of his more morbid ones. Consequently, the perceived need to write this essay and to differentiate the area or areas where I feel common philosophical and/or existential ground with Kierkegaard vs. our areas of philosophical -- and consequently psychological -- difference.
Now, I could write for a week or a month on Kierkegaard's various philosophical perspective -- indeed, I already partly have. The 'God, Abraham, and Isaac parable' has intrigued me for quite a while, I have written previous essays on it, and no doubt I shall return to it at least one more time in the future. A new essay in this regard has already formulated in my mind.
One idea of interest that has captured the focus of my attention recently is the idea of 'triangulation'.
Triangulation can be 'the servant' of either our 'life' or 'death instinct (impulse, wish, force). It can be either a 'predatory' force or it can be a 'self-healing, spiritual' force' -- it all depends on what forces are 'triangulating'.
For example, in the 'God, Abraham, and Isaac parable', we can view a particular 'triangulation of forces' playing themselves out where one force was obviously 'dominant' (God), and the other two forces playing out the 'dichotomy or bipolarity of 'subservience' vs. 'rebellion' with subservience winning until God finally 'relented' and stopped what would have otherwise been a very 'savage, uncivil, immoral -- unGodly act'.... Would Jesus Christ have even thought of instigating such an unGodly act -- the slaying and sacrificing of Isaac? I think the answer is clearly 'no'. Which sets up a 'bipolarity that we need to understand better between 'God' -- the 'alpha male' -- and 'Jesus Christ' -- the 'all-loving, healing, more feminine-like male'. A kind of 'yin' and 'yang' (mythological) phenomenon going on between Jesus Christ and God... It's funny....we all can look back at Ancient Greece and view 'Zeus' and 'Apollo' and 'Dionysus' and 'Narcissus' and 'Ares' and 'Aphrodite' all as different 'mythological gods' ...and the same goes for Roman mythology....and yet millions of people today cannot fathom the idea of viewing their own religion as 'a present-day mythological paradigm, created by man, and projected by man, from the inner workings of his deepest psyche to the contents and the 'mythological figures' of the particular religion... And quite frankly, that can get pretty scary -- actually probably equally scary when you start to see the powers of Wall Street and the powers of The Church both converge in their own separate ways into the way politicians think (or profess to think) -- at least partly, if not more than partly -- to 'please' their 'monetary' campaign 'beneficieries'. As an aside here, didn't Obama campaign that he was going to stand up against 'monetary, special interest, lobbyist groups'?
Probably won't happen in a million years unless or until the voting public demands that politicians address the problem of 'all special interest groups that donate money -- and expect something back for their contributions. In the taxi business, we used to call that 'feeding'. Or worded otherwise, collusion on the foundation of 'kickbacks'.
Ahe death of ethics in poitics and business...in the spirit of human greed and narcissism....Something I can at least give the Church the credit for at least partly doing ethical and altruistic battle against...
I got partly waylaid by religion and politics above but much of it comes together like a jig-saw puzzle.
This essay was partly 'inspired' -- in a partly negative, Schopenhauerian sense -- by a television program that I have been watching the last two days on 'apex predators' and 'pack predators'. From which arose partly the idea of 'triangulation' -- or at least the 'death instinct' side of triangulation.
A great white shark 'triangulates' its intended prey.
World War 11 fighter pilots used to 'triangulate' their intended targets.
We have two sets of eyes and ears in order to 'triangulate'.
I said that I was going to take this down a partly morbid, Kierkgaardian path...
Before we talk about our Phoenix rising from the ashes....(another mythological parable which does not mean that it doesn't have something intensely meaningful to say to us....depending on how we interpret the parable...
'Predatory pack hunters.'
Wolves, lions, dingos, painted dogs, hyenas, even chimpanzees...
Chimpanzees -- they share 98 percent of our human DNA...
For those of us who are old enough, we think of the chimpanzee from the old Tarzan movies....Or we think of chimpanzees as largely if not wholly 'vegetarian'....
They're not. They are serious, predatory pack hunters -- surrounding smaller monkeys in the trees, and bringing them down...
It's hard to view this and not to think about soldiers marching off to war...some police getting out of control in the handling of protesters...urban street gangs...bully gangs -- both boy and girl gangs -- at school taking down a solitary child...
And this brings me to the point of this essay...
Kierkegaard begins the book 'The Sickness Unto Death' (1849) with the series of lines:
'Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the Self. But what is the Self? The Self is a relation which relates itself to its own Self...' (Donald Palmer, Kierkegaard For Beginners, 1996, p. 65)
And I have to stop Kierkegaard right there before he goes any further.
Because Kierkegaard asked the wrong first question.
Where Kierkegaard asks the initial question, 'What is Spirit'?, I ask the counter question: What Spirit? Our Apollonian Spirit for law and order and justice? Our Dionysian Spirit? Our Narcissistic Spirit for Greed? Our Jesus Christ, Altruistic Spirit? Our 'Enlightenment, Democratic Spirit'? Our 'Our Aphroditian or Rousseauian or Goethean, Romantic Spirit'? Our Ares Spirit for War? Our sadistic spirit for cruelty and the desire for causing pain? Our 'predatory pack hunter' spirit? Our 'authoritarian spirit'? Our 'submissive' spirit?
When we look at man's Self....and man's Spirit...the first thing that we have to acknowledge is how deeply divided and conflicted this 'Spirit' can be...We are not talking about just 'One Spirit' -- although usually when we talk about man, we talk about the 'best of man's spirit', not the worst...We talk about man's 'religious spirit' or 'Christian Spirit' or 'Altruistic Spirit' or 'Democratic Spirit' or 'Egalitarian Spirit'....We don't talk about man's 'spirit for power, greed, revenge, cruelty...and even potential death wishes...whether child or adult, aimed at another, or aimed at ourselves....We don't talk about our 'Schoepenhaurean, 'Lord of The Flies', Spirit'....
And here we come back to Kierkegaard and 'The Sickness Unto Death'...
And to the idea of 'self-triangulation'...
For man is the only animal to my knowledge that can 'bury himself in self-condemnation and self-hatred'....And that process occurs -- ironically and paradoxically -- in the same 'mode of operation' as 'self-psychotherapy' and 'spiritual healing' -- through the process of self-triangulation...
I cannot help but visualize the scene I witnessed on tv tonight with a pride of lions taking down an elephant -- surrounding and jumping on it from all sides -- without envisioning the same type of scene, metaphorically speaking, happening inside the human psyche when 'Our Central Ego' is triangulated and taken down from all sides by a harshly cruel and righteously rejecting 'Superego', and by one, two, or all three of our 'Underdog egos' or 'Underegos' -- our Righteous, Rejecting Underego, our Narcissistic-Hedonististic Underego, and even our Co-operative-Compliant Underego -- our Central Ego -- and with it our Wholistic Self -- becomes ravaged and eaten alive like by a pride of hungry lions...this, in my opinion, is what makes up Kierkegaard's 'Sickness Unto Death'...
We plunge into an existential abyss....
Can we rise from the abyss? Can we rise from the ashes...like The Phoenix...
There is only one way to go about this...
We need a more encouraging, caring Internal Support System...'A United, Forward-Moving, Internal Parliament or Senate'...that surrounds our Central Ego...not a 'psyche full of hungry, predatory lions'....
In order to bring back the confidence and self-esteem...
Of our previously self-triangulated, eaten alive, Central Ego...
To bring us back from our 'Sickness Unto Death'...
-- dgb, May 6th, 2012...
-- David Gordon Bain....
-- Dialectic-Gap-Bridging-Negotiations, Integrations, and New Creations...
-- Are Still in Process...
