Macrocosmic Absurdism

A Maxim (i.e. shut your fucking mouth)

2011-07-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

Hyperreality, simulacra: in which our digital copies—seemingly existing “beyond” the form of circuit, wire, electric current, motherboard, flashing screen—hold more detail and articulation than the physical movements of our lives, or even more shockingly: they hold more meaning, effect than our lives in reality do (because, for one, there are so many more eyes to see. . . ). We could call this the ultimate delusion. Our extensions have become essence and any essence has become an incessantly necessary extension to our digital copies (for now)—no longer do our actions speak for themselves (in secret or to a grand audience) but “speaking” is action

Kant argued that we should never treat a person as a means to an end, only as an end in themselves. What do we say of a person who only treats themselves as means towards fantasy-expression, a mock-social-being? Have they betrayed Kant, against themselves?

In truth though: the problem was already manifest, and still manifests itself, outside of the digital, for hyperreality is not confined to this area alone (Facebook, twitter et al.). The modern phenomenon is but an exaggeration of a previously existing one. Any excess of egocentric symbolism, sans honest humility, is the human condition as fraud par excellence. To speak, to advertise oneself as action (qua social being) without thought for objectivity (where the universal overrides the parochial) is the exemplum of narcissism. To turn oneself into a “hero” is simply to avoid death, to ignore the animalist defecation of one’s own mortal body. It is just that today, in the age of information technology, the “low” heroics of work, basic character, myopic relationships (i.e. mediocrity) have surpassed all “high” heroics and fables. To accept death, the abyss, is of course a high task for any human—to relegate human existence to the loud mouths of the self-centred “me-generation” was the coward’s choice, the lowest of courses, that our times have taken (perhaps an inevitable conclusion of late capitalism).

Let us not be fooled, this is what happens today, as we “express” ourselves digitally, with care to spend more time shouting, screaming our statuses, updates etc. than involving ourselves in the activities per se. in truth we all know that if our existence were truly important/meaningful, then we would have no need to prove them socially (though at times, one may have to accept, actions are to be proffered to the public gaze). As with love, life in its magnanimous form/manifestation would be passed in silence. . .

Instead we have hyperreality, hours and years of our lives spent telling the next person in line what we are doing, what we were doing and what we will be doing. This is why I propose an ethical conclusion to Hume’s claim that we are “bundles of ideas”: never mind the metaphysical difficulties of the statement, the implications of acting in a world in which the development of idea is a primary concern is astounding—all other expression is just a propagation of zero upon zero upon zero, ad infinitum: the sum is still nought. Cannot we be silent, admit our animalistic, meaningless existences, resist the buzzing of our immortality in our chests and speak only of the abstracts that exist in the ethereal space above our heads? We are, after all, acephalous cohabiters of pure reason’s dialectical sphere . . . idea has no application without extant observance and we nothing to observe beyond it. The public space should not be for trivial talk and dramatics (this has always been the burden of domestic life). And if we must pander to our feelings of immortality, why not be brave enough to do something grand, with vision, instead of “fluffing up our feathers”?

As much as we try to escape it, this is how society is fashioned today: meritocratic in a false sense, where the measure of achievement and success is based upon our own ability to advertise (without much objectivity placed into the process). Whilst thinking about this, I, by chance, came across the following passage written by Alain de Botton: “one’s status might now well be determined by one’s confidence, imagination and ability to convince others of one’s dues—a possibility of achievement which [shines] a less flattering light on philosophies of stoicism and resignation [. . . o]ne might be doomed not by a lack of talent, but by a species of pessimistic pride.” In a sense: only the sell-out is a capable member of society today—the rest are the uncounted majority, that have no say in altering the hegemonic standard, or even shaping it.

I will not venture to speak of business, or of its culture, but the issue is more pronounced in how sales & marketing has somehow infiltrated each stratum of society (this is commodity fetishism par excellence). We are nothing more than replicas of ourselves, purely symbolic as parts of a system of exchange and spurious values—it is from this perspective, this vantage point, that I can appreciate those that live “off the grid”, though I have always had an issue with the idea of personal escape, of “washing ones hands” of a social problem. The only solution is within the problem, involved: to proudly wear an alternate perspective, a slight twist, off the grid but visible. Here is the revolution, freedom that means something, ipso facto: to admit, openly, “yes, I have no value to you or to your game . . .” Many of us do this, to the dismay (and jealousy) of those in it (the game). This upsets the whole order, which somehow cannot ignore the free few, instead bombarding them with insults and penalties (which should say something in-itself).

Even Kierkegaard saw the value of man in the age of capital, the consumer turned commodity: “he recognises himself only by his dress.” To this phrase Ernest Becker comments: “This is a perfect description of the ‘automatic cultural man’—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium”. This is our modern-day “freedom”: to speak and scream; to SPAM; to update, update, update (even emotion is better expressed by the retarded presence of an on-screen icon)—continuously proving the vacuity within us, being Protean in our weekly, daily, hourly lives and acting as if it meant anything at all. Lacan once said: “in a country where you can say anything, even the truth, the outcome is that, no matter what they say, it has no kind of effect whatsoever”. To this, however, I would add that whilst what we say has no meaning or effect, we do however infuse power into it by the manner in which we say it, by how often we say it and how loudly. In place of content we position noticeability, self-as-propaganda (this is what talking about oneself truly is). We no longer speak of anything, we just flap our lips, roll our tongues and tap our keys . . .

Neurosis as the Language of (Self-Indulged) Oppression

2011-03-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

[Disclaimer:

This was written a year ago, during a very violent time (apropos my intellectual opinion towards my own neuroticism). It is not intended polemically against anyone but myself, and even then parts do shift into vulgar, abusive absurdity. It is to be taken seriously but not personally; as a reflection of my own evolution not as a serious psychological evaluation. It signified a great turning point in my life and many of its tenets still hold true for me but do not hold for others. I request that no one takes offense on their own part, but I suppose I cannot preemptively barricade against such a reaction from taking place.

Lastly: the awful attempt at creating a topological map of the depressive's various parts, towards the end of the piece, should be disregarded as little else but experimental bullshit.]

Life as a polemic. Madness as a course of action. To be bold in one’s proliferation against the fatuity of life. To relegate all hubris to disgrace, yet to alleviate fascistic nay-saying with arduous affirmation. To laugh openly but sincerely, with all snorts telic in nature. To write a foolish statement (there’ll be a lot forthcoming), incorrigible in print, for the sake of dialogue, disjunction, in short: a didactive cacophony (viz. the very thing that the shift from Master Discourse to University Discourse was meant to engender, instead of dancing behind a nebulous show of hegemonic multiplicities, in which we can all choose our personal ‘masters’). To see that everyday Lacan’s “Il n’y a pas de Grand Autre” is written in ink but forgotten in practice - praxis now tripping up in its acephalous state. To realise that there is little that is protean in humanity, throughout history, but in its language and semblance. And in that last statement, the truth of which can only lead one, inescapably, to an urge to defecate upon the universal sense of ‘Man’, to fall into despondency, to wish to tear what is “All Too Human” from within you - in a sense to be anti-homo - only then, in that state, to turn one’s eye to the world with a new voice, a brash and unreasonable one, petulant in humour, tenebrous in tone, vulgar in its love, and incisive in its supervention: that is what is necessary of us; that is the price we have to pay.

*****

Neurosis as the Language of (Self-Indulged) Oppression

‘I’ vs. “I am - ‘I’ as the subjective point as such, infinitely small, and “I am” as the panoply of egotistical classifications and referential facts (the ‘hooks‘, once could say, that connect us to the contemporary flow of language, the sociological corpus).

Of the latter we could say: in which Sartre’s principle of “Bad Faith” serves as a paradigmatic evaluation of all that alienates pure subjectivity from itself, man from man. It is neurosis, a narcissistic one at that, the illness of our myopic standing par excellence, now so brilliantly embellished with the quasi-truths of positive science, that continues to haunt us (and we are all willing in its endeavour).This is not the ‘ego’ per se (fear not, we are not moving into the asinine realm of the New Age), but a lack of distantation from it, a lack of humour, an obsession with its faults and tics. This is to say that its purpose has been forgotten: the ego as the finite emergence, a vessel from the infinity of nonsensical formlessness to the finite nature of experience, each individual’s unique form of Kenosis (the meat on the cross as the exemplum of our nature as it should be, the active “guide to life” that we have so long repressed).

Neurosis, and the physician that aids us to indulge in it as nothing but a symptom that encompasses and circumscribes the entire ‘I‘, treated by ego-affirmation and/or various medication that moves us further from all visceral evaluations into the realm of arbitrary and physical pathology, is the blind spot, the complete removal of negation between Subject(ivity) and Ego. Of course, the neurotic, the narcissist (which we all are), is incapable of measuring or grasping anything in a fair light, of expanding upon the world of ideas; he is incapable, dilapidating with his face pressed against ‘himself‘ - and it is here that we can extrapolate the individual symptom onto our contemporary world as a whole, to realise neurosis as another method of suppression, a sort of necessary factor to the current state of globalised capitalism. The subject, the anonymous power of voice as such, has been castrated, duped into taking his place at the riverbank, either ecstatic or disembowelled by the reflection that greets him, whilst history and politics rages in the heavens above - what better way to keep each world citizen in his place, to mute him, than to have him entangled in the realm of doubt, despair and despondence, always measuring his life by idiotic standards and relations, always of the same popular vein (when even the act of measuring is ridiculous) - what better way to shun revolutionary potential, than to turn him into a neurotic consumer, to avert the danger. For what is revolutionary potential but subjectivity proper?:

“Is […] a radical gesture of striking at oneself not constitutive of subjectivity as such? And does this not imply that the time of subjectivity is a priori the time of a state of emergency: being a subject means that things can never ‘return to normal‘? In every ‘normal run of things‘, the subject who participates in it escapes the traumatic abyss that lies at the heart of subjectivity and ‘regresses‘ to a substantial mode of being, that is, reduces itself to a subordinated moment of a higher substantial order.”
- Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p.398,
ISBN: 978-1-84467-598-2

What is neurosis (at least in its primary state, before it is perpetuated by narcissistic attention) but a natural fit, a burp in the machine that we so quickly wish to transform, through a clever twist of hermeneutics, into the ghost in the machine, as if the mistake itself was proof of, or the spirit itself. It is to be so terribly fixated on an ‘undesirable’ aspect of our own being, whether Imaginary or Symbolic, a form of desperate cathexis - in a sense, isn’t a neurotic the embodiment of desire, caught up on itself: Lacan’s drive that perpetually circles the phantasm of objet petit a, knowing it as shit, in truth, oneself as shit, but caught in the pleasure of misery?

The original neurotic break, the spark of emotion, the traumatic encounter, the occurrence of memento mori as event, the intellect’s revelation of life’s asinine and oppressive truths . . . all these things are something outside of the formation of a neurotic process, a process that dirties the original purity of these events, yet they are directly involved. If perpetuated-neurosis is a crime against life, a cowardice, then how else are we to react to the ‘break’, what path do we follow and where does it lay? Perhaps it is a neighbouring path, close to that of the neurotic, or perhaps one that shoots off obliquely from any that we know. . .

Deleuze and Guattari write that “Desiring machines work only when they break down, and by continuously breaking down.” (Anti-Oedipus, p.8). Our moments of “breaking down”, our spurts, false-starts, stalled engines, are but elements of the process of living, creating (and let us be careful here to separate ‘process’ from ‘system’ for the time being).

What is a break in conscience, in spirit, in strength, in confidence, but an opportunity to freshen and reappraise? Here production splits, attempts to ostracise itself from the slowly petrifying self, tries to continue (in a Deleuze/Guatarri-esque “flow”). Obsessive reactions to these events are but frightened gropes in the dark (and even more so are obsessions that need no event, no excuse nor reason to begin) - they are attempts to keep. When a machine breaks, it, unless wrapped in the shroud of final-death, comes to continue its flow, modified or not, similar or no . . . The broken down machine is but a failure in a concatenation of necessary, live failures. It is not the truth of the self, not something to be focused on as a possession nor as a characteristic (as I wrote before: this is not the ghost in the machine), but a heuristic progress (perhaps not directly telic, but by no means hermetic). It is at the moment that the engine stalls that the ego fits itself perfectly over all production, labelling all perspectives as “I am” and claims all to be a process of itself - it forgets its form to be, merely, an epiphenomenon of what came before, and instead turns everything into a tautological process of self-reference, immediate identity (here we once again find a lack of humorous distantation). Neurosis, narcissism: in essence a killing of all life (behold, the Zombie!). The many lines of action, of living, burn into an infinite loop of questioning. Idle we become . . . and “idleness is the beginning of psychology” (Nietzsche). Here: neurosis (perpetuated), as an idiotic detour.

Here is the trick of our self-subjugation; here is our willing movement into slavery: to create the inner domain, an incredible, personal and stubborn topology of psychological being. This is far from condemning psychology as a whole, but instead to attack the individual elevation of our caricatured spirits into spurious existences, that which we can spit out in ridiculously self-indulgent sentences (our pedantic ‘feelings‘) which the psychiatrist/therapist validates with his pen and paper (audience), a nod of his head (affirmation/conformation), his time (capitalist interest): “Yes, yes, all feelings and opinions are valid.” These ridiculous feelings, once healed by the natural dialectics of social existence (cf. the fact that various studies in the last few decades have consistently confirmed that cases of mental illness (especially those of schizophrenia) are rarer and last for shorter periods of time in third-world countries), is now turned into the possession of a newly created demographic, boxed, eventually a part of the capitalist market which (as with many other processes) feeds and strengthens it, giving the neurotic a place in the mythos of our time (the neurotic/narcissist as a member of an established Zeitgeist).

A neurotic seeks pleasure in security, of which can be said:

“. . . there is none. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.”
- Henry Miller, Sexus, quoted from p.xvi of Mark Seem’s Introduction, Anti-Oedipus, ISBN: 978-0-14-310582-4

‘Perpetuated’-neuroticism is here an eternal escape from the world, a buffering and defensive construction between our miniscule desires and the traumatic world. Bluntly put: it is cowardice.

*****

To digress, let me ask: what, specifically, of the depressive?

If we are to declare a perpetuated-neurosis as a fault, an oppression/self-suppression of subjective force, then is the depressive anything but a farce, a romantic - a failure? No. To claim such a thing would relegate the importance of position, a sort of intrinsic element in the idea of the depressive, but in a sense directly external from his psychological ‘essence‘ - something who’s potentiality we must not refuse. The fault to be found in the depressive is in his inability to see himself as a symptom embodied (a symptom of ‘political’ or ‘social’ truths, or perhaps even simply as a symptom of himself: personality as proof/symptom of man’s original failure (read “Sin”, if you are so inclined)); instead, he is focused on his own symptoms. A depressive in-action, his fists raised against oppression (or the establishment) is a tank, a stick of dynamite that feeds off personal pathology instead of feeding into it, as a Subject. Unfortunately, such depressives are few and far between. The average depressive is far too busy raising his fists against himself and his own phantoms. He says: “I know I must do A, but in fear I focus my attention on its shadows . . . A1, A2, A3, A4,” ad infinitum. Here is where the ‘language’ of the depressive and the methods of psychology must be altered.

Let us be careful though, or more precisely let us be distinct. The great danger of pursuing this theme (the subject as depressive tank) is to find oneself reversing the circular motion of a depressive’s psychic neurosis, its repetitive distancing from Action, and to lead it instead towards blind Réssentiment. To take Nietzsche’s words to heart, we must not create false morals in reaction to oppression, but move into the space beyond, as a conquering of oppression. In short, the lesson can be encapsulated by Žižek’s disagreement with how we commonly blame capitalist crime on “greedy individuals” - no, it is not in them that we must find our blame, but within the fabric of the system (in Žižek’s example: capitalism itself).

The depressive as subject can thus be split into three positions, or elements, points of a moving triangle that are unfortunately lost in an imbroglio of undecided and unfocused lines. They can be shown as being point a: Subject(ivity); point b: Subject (as-Identified-by-“Position”); and point c: Subject (as-Identified-in-Neurosis).

All three parts are infinitely shifting, lost to each other by a lack of immobile coordinates. They can be described as three dancers: the idle one that observes and lives vicariously through the others, as if the audience member somehow appearing on-stage (this is a); the one that shifts his feet in awkward discomfort, a shameful despair upon the stage (caught up in the glare of the Big Other), because the floor is continuously moving from his feet (and was never there to begin with) (this is b); and the one of energy, the maelstrom that has no eyes to look out of its own, but eyes on-itself as it were, in-loop, all-ignorant (a kind of false being-in-itself) (this is c). As these pieces, the dancers, eternally shift, it is important to note that this is only in relation to each other - the stage remains the same, unmoved by these meretricious dramatics.

It doesn’t take much to understand why a would take shelter in c, as an avoidance, a way of refusing to be identified with the devastating truth of b. “I am” does not wish to entertain the element of death, of abyss (and here is where Heidegger is right in pointing our that life is inauthentic without the admittance, constant knowledge, or mortality).

Freud talked, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of a child’s repetition of a traumatic experience in an effort to master them (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.13, ISBN: 978-0-393-00769-5) - here is perpetuated-neurosis! For is not neurotic behaviour this attempt, an untenable one (yet we persevere in it nonetheless), to master fate itself; is it not some bastardised notion, a nihilistic and antagonistic attempt against amor fati. Horse-blinders, myopia, parochialism, a case of idiotic nystagmus in the soul, a smoke-screen against truth. A perpetuated-neurosis is nothing but defence; any pain that is perceived or experienced within the bounds of such an illness is ultimately requested (“Victims be clear/You’re all volunteers”) - there is a protective pleasure in it, albeit an artificial one.

Here we can point at the neurotic, the Subject-as-Identified-in-Neurosis (c) and say, nay shout: “Now I have you, nihilist!”-

But once again, let us be careful where we tread. The dance consists of the three elements, c must be unmasked of its content but not eradicated in its form. Whilst such neurosis is the denial of a (the) traumatic situation and responsibility of living (a fear of action, cf. the Henry Miller quote above) it is also a source of energy per se. Although a chooses to lose itself in c’s movement (and isn’t that what c is in essence?), this is only because it is first confronted by the truth of b, before cowardly picking the shelter of neurosis, before, in a sense, adjusting the shape of c to fit the defensive narcissism of its fear. b is the mediator and c is the conclusion, the retroactive warning signal, a violent reaction in the ripples of b’s movements . . . a is nothing but the referential point of ‘vision’ that loses itself in a Symbolic position (or more precisely a lack of one, a fear of it. . . b) and the Imaginary volatility of c.

c is on a circular path, acting as a spurious “solid ground”, b is in free fall (this is according to the depressive - it is possible to imagine this formula reverses in the case of the “well-adjusted individual”).

The depressive here has a choice between two distinct positions: the Existentialist-Depressive-Identified-within-(THE LACK OF)-Position (in vivo) or the Self-Preserved-Depressive-Identified-within-Neurosis (in vitro).

This is the important factor, the choice, why the depressive cannot be rejected as a “ridiculous neurotic”. As a depressive, one should have the advantage of being able to become aware, and to commit to b’s freefall - others are potentially blind, lost, with a a joining the flow of c’s rotary motion but with b as the basis for its (still, but not acknowledged as being, spurious) ground - the distinctions blurring, lost in circular reasoning, immediate-identity, infinite stupidity, with no mediation truth (a neurotic that is not avoiding a traumatic truth, who is narcissistic for no ‘cause’ nor ‘reason’, is an ordinary, well-adjusted human being: a machine).

All the depressive must do, is to turn his position into an advantage, a process of truth, instead of being immobilised by what he sees.

“For the depressive, the habits of the former life world seem to be, precisely, a mode of play acting, a series of pantomime gestures (“a circus complete with all fools”), which they are no longer capable of performing, and which they no longer wish to perform. There’s no point, everything is a sham.”
- John Los

Here is a perspicuous summary of the subject confronted with the traumatic truth . . . Step two: Embrace it.

*****

So what is the answer to neurotic behaviour? Action. Volatile expression. The violence of the absurd. A commitment to one’s social and historical standing (fate) no-matter for any cynical analyses of the “concept” of society itself. . . .

Nothing can come from a sedentary life (nothing begets nothing), but only from the walking fire of liberated subjectivity. We must not fall short, and if one does so, we must pick ourselves up again.

As Jöns masterfully proclaims towards the end of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in his commentary of Antonius Bloc’s pleas for salvation, the knight’s neurosis:

“In the darkness where you say you are, there is none to listen to your lament. You are reflected in your own indifference.” [italics/emphasis added]

Jöns proliferates to the final moment (and even then muted only “under protest”) whilst Antonius was dead long before, unfecund, already at the moment he began his game with Death (and is this not another way of naming the moment in which he became aware of himself, identified in his words, in his ultimate position: I am mortal?) . . . What is painfully true, is that many of us do not even shift our wills, observe the truth, even in our dénouement. . . .

*****

In the spirit of proliferation (and as mentioned above: “foolish statements”, because there’s always room for more), here follows a list, a manifesto:

to be at war against anything that supports idleness.
to be at war against “scientific positivism” as an ideology (which, I must clarify, is far removed from scientific thought, method, and the scientist as individual as it can be - perhaps one could say: to clarify between the Versuch that is a healthy scientific sense of adventure or the Wissenscaft that is scientific progress, and the flagrant bullshit that is the public opinion and use of scientific theory).
to be at war against the world of “opinion” (where all attempts at truth, the dialectics of progress, the creation of new ideas, has been relegated to the field of the meretricious attachments, the ownership of past truth-processes already validated and integrated into the world of “opinion”).
to be at war against repressive psychology.
to be at war, period.
to be militant in action and word, in vivo, not only in the scholar’s test tube (defended, in its imaginary state, by all manners of scholastic and historic quotes).
to be without criticism, leaving that to the dilettanti of “opinion”, whilst instead bringing critical-analysis to the foreground.
to be able to see ego only as the epiphenomenon of the subject’s process - once again to treat all engine farts as part of this process.
to be able to refuse Homo Natura as an a priori category, or nature itself as a pre-existing condition - there is but movement and reaction (Nature’s balance has always been constitutive of its reactive element).
to . . . ah yes, to fuck!

- Amor Fati.

The Pervert at the Centre of Democracy

2009-09-27T18:07:00.000-07:00

(Subjective-Objective as antagonism, and the Cynical glare of Audience)

There is a problem with democracy today. There has always been a problem. It has always declared itself the voice of the people (as have Dictators and Socialists); it has always acted systematically, against the idea of a revolutionary event, in an apparently objective motion, but by the whims of subjective individuals; it has always projected itself into an objective reality, from the subjective safety of power (the Oval Office, Downing St. etc.); but what it has never done, is to exist in practice as its theory claimed.

In the (post)modern West, Democracy has become the trump card of moral goodness, the epitome of an ethical-political system. Even though Churchill himself, faced with the onslaught of drastic Fascism, admitted that Democracy was in-fact a terrible system (although it was the best one we had/have), we still refuse to move past it, or to even question it ideologically. As if we have reached the very end, or Absolute (In a pseudo-Hegelian sense), of ethical-political history, we refuse to see past the mask of Democracy.

Much like the inner workings of a capitalistic/corporate world, in which the monetary and ethical value of an action is read from a strict, objective perspective, but acted upon from a subjective voice to a (faked)subjective employee/customer, the actions of democracy itself contradict each other in the very clash of the Subjective-Objective. Whereas the idea of democracy is to allow the mass of subjects (proletariat & bourgeoisie, master & slave) to act decisively on a level playing field, it is easy to see the inconsistency of the act.

Even if we are to take away the “unfair” notions of the majority being right, or the repression of the proletariat/slave/ethnically unwanted, Democracy still fails. In-fact, even in perfect conditions democracy is intolerable for the simple fact that it attempts to act upon a single level of Objectivity whilst always referring to the autonomy of the Subject.

For example, in the voting process a leader is objectively chosen—the very numbers of the (hopefully unaltered) votes, in-themselves, give an irrefutable result. The subjective wishes of the many are washed into the simple clarity of Yes or No. This leap from subjective to objective, from individual action to national (Universal) voice, is not ridiculous at all—in choosing this system for themselves, the masses claim to “take history into their own hands”. On a pure level of mathematics, nothing here is false or incorrect. The inconsistency comes into play when the leader, mathematically elected, turns out to be a Subject in-him(or her)self, not the Objective principle that was voted upon When the Objective Will of the many suddenly needs to jump back down into a subjective position, it crashes, bleeds, dies, empties of all its truth (pragmatically speaking), and ends with a false position (this is why modern democracies have to defend themselves from the terrifying centre of the Other (in this case: Mr. President) by constricting his freedom, and sharing his autonomy of power with many others, thinning out the force of action from the tight point of a stiletto shoe, to the flat foot of an elephant (aka the yap-yap of Capitol Hill)). When every action that is taken—in the name of democracy, morality or nationalism—is taken by the individual will of the elected leader, Objectivity quickly collapses, somehow taking a backstage place, almost like a faint outline of the Law, whilst the Subject stands bright within the spotlight.

There is nothing Democratic about any Presidential action. Saying that a president or prime minister (or whomever) takes an action democratically, is like saying that a young child in a playground Acts democratically because of the shouting and screaming of the children behind him (that may or may not affect him in his choice). There is no escaping the abyssal nature of the Leader's subjectivity: the action comes from he/she, and relies in no-way upon the democratic mass. The very notion of Democracy is a falsification; claiming Democracy because of an election in the U.S.A is much the same as claiming the current leadership (Hugo Chávez) of Venezuela as being “Democratic” simply because it was reached by election. The systematic string of various elected leaders, apparently all speaking for the people, culminating in the peak of the pyramid, is one of the most laughable monstrosities of truth in our present age. At least dictators, communists and fascists don't have to hide their true faces.

But Democracy isn't the primary problem (and we can fall back to Churchill once again). The corruption of the west really falls in the realm of the Audience, and how the masses react and view the world around them (or more specifically: the world they live in and alter). The problem today lies in the idle nature of the people. The End of History has been claimed—lazily. Intellectuals spend their times defending the present state against the revolutionary minority, instead of trying to move forwards (take for example Peter Berger's latest book, a monstrosity of horse-blinded Death: In Praise of Doubt (ISBN: 978-0-06-177816-2)). Time seems to continue on in a tightly closed circle (one that even the events of 9/11 were not able to disturb or shake). What is needed is the Act, or to put it as Badiou would: an Event. Enough of mere Being, of continuing “living” in a basic state, in homoeostasis:

“The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength.”

—G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ISBN: 0-19-824597-1, p.19.

What we need is this negative, this “death” of our current mode of life, of the still-safety of things as they have-been and are. The antagonism between the subject and the objective law of democracy-capitalism, like the cog that believes its own autonomy as a piece in the machine, but refuses to prove it (in a revolutionary sense), is a sickening trap, a false-livelihood that knows not the true meaning of life. Life comes in the excess, the sprouting from and evolution—life is the faithful crawl of mutated sea-creatures onto the beach, breathing freely. It does not come in stabilising the present condition, in staying still (like death).

In moving on, it is clear that the main threat to this attempt, or any urge to revolutionise, is not in the hands of the Leader, nor the Master, nor the Bourgeoisie, but in-fact, in the hands of the Audience: the masses, those that watch (and minimally act) within the political/ethical/social field. What hinders any realisation of democratic (and capitalistic) failure, is the lack if integrity in the every-day Joe. In the absurd cynical-distancing of the Audience (for that is what they are, those that watch in “physical silence” whilst abusing the air blue with verbal “acts” of disapproval) there is a lack of attachment or responsibility.

Take for example the voices of the Right after a (black, charismatic, press-baby) Leftist/Socialist victory: “I didn't vote for him”, “It's their [the Others] fault”, etc. Or the same problem vice-versa: “I didn't want the war, They did”, which is bipartisanship at is worst . . . (And is it not interesting to point out that George W. Bush's actions apropos the War on Terror, in which the watering-down of the Senate and various other powers were ignored for direct Subjective Will (in the name of the country, of the party, of Freedom etc.) is in-fact the very embodiment of true democracy and its frailties. It is as if the very King of Democracy (the elected leader par excellence) becomes the terrifying pit of negativity at the centre of the democratic system: he becomes the perversion, the very contradiction of political democracy (no wonder that we try so hard to humanise our leaders)).

The two directions one can take from this problem, or what we could perhaps call the two direct-answers, are either to take a leap (in a Kierkegaardian sense) of faith, so that the democratic system, and its Leader's actions, always conform to the will of the Audience by the simple fact that the People say: “Yes, you are the embodiment of our will, and hence, act for us” (which is what dictatorial and fascist regimes impose upon their followers), or the Audience can finally clear themselves of doubt, distance, cynicism and blindness, for the Event, the very negative act of Absolute eternity penetrating into the self-enclosed circle of the present State.

The revolutionary act does not necessarily have to come physically—perhaps all we need is the open discussion of intellectual movement. Perhaps a new vocabulary simply has to be placed within the (apparently) complete language of our lives.

September 27^th 2009

Sacramento

A Clarification

2009-08-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

(on the Levels of Abstraction, the Immortality of Subjectivity,
& the Honesty of Contradiction)

This piece is designed to clarify certain ideas that compose the framework of my current metaphysics and general philosophical beliefs. In clarifying the meaning of these three terms, I hope to make further discussions and writings on various subjects more accommodating to the general reader—the piece is aimed at creating the foundations of my terminology.

In realising that the use of language (no matter for the objective standards that are printed in dictionaries, encyclopaedias or expressed by college professors) generally falls upon its own subjective use. Whether from a conditioned or artistically contracted source, the subject signifies the meaning (or at least attempts to) trying to capture the very essence of a feeling, sensation or expression. It would be easy to argue that this fails on most levels, and in most cases, and as Lacan realised: this is the torment of man, within his ability to express himself, he is only increasingly frustrated by the limits of his own tongue.

Bearing this in mind, this clarification of terminology falls into subjective obscurity itself. But this does not hinder my attempt. Language will always flow, frail and fragile, manipulated in the receiver's ears or eyes by his or her own subjective stance.

(1) The Levels of Abstraction

This is an important concept to the very fabric of my own reality, whether or not it is active in my thought in every living moment or not—it signifies the basis for my moral outlook on life (in relation to my actions against others, in judging other people's actions, and most importantly: in how I view the vitality of my life and its position in “the cosmos”).

To help clarify it I wish to begin with the very analogy that sprouted its origins.

Let us imagine a tree, or what is conjured from the word “tree” itself. The tree is a total of many parts, contracted into one by various concepts (some aesthetic, some scientific, some simply from conditioned reflex: from the nature of the space around it the separates, or the unifying concepts of living connection, as an organism living as a whole, to the way in which we are taught “tree” by small images in a picture book). What must be realised however, is that in a certain sense, the tree does not exist. As a total of parts it is simply that: a fabricated fiction, a mixture of other things. Nothing in a tree is a tree in itself. The leaves, rustling, living and dying within themselves, may affect the unified organism “tree”, and the tree as a whole may affect them, but they are not “tree” in their singularity. The notion of the tree comes to life only when we come to perceive it from the perception of a certain size, stance and knowledge. To the ant crawling along the bark, there is not a tree, but bark, wood, and leaves above (perhaps each branch that sprouted out of the central trunk was a tree in-itself to him. And these words too—bark, leaf, wood, etc.—in themselves can be split into a smaller portion, viewed from a more microscopic standpoint (is an atom within a tree, let us say an atom of what is referred to as “nitrogen”, a tree, a piece of bark, a leaf?).

This same manipulation of perspective can be taken in the opposite direction. Is the tree not a part of a larger eco-system, which in itself is part of a larger planet, which is part of . . . and so forth. Does a God playing with the Universe in his palm perceive The Universe, and does he pay any attention to the tree or ant from this Universal perspective? Is it actually possible from a single perspective to view the parts at the exact moment that you are admiring the whole?

The point of this is that the nature of things (subjectively based) lays completely in the very nature of the observer. Objective realities are a blend of these subjective views, and the contradictions they entail are born from these differences of perspective, and often from the Levels of Abstraction, the point in which the subject is viewing a certain thing (whether it be a physical thing, a moral point, a metaphysical claim). One man may say: I see a tree; another may say: I see many leaves, and many trunks . . . one many may say: I see a People; the other may say: I see a series of feet, smiles and eyes. When a politician takes an action, he sees a Nation, and those that are effected by such actions react on a personal and subjective basis, seeing not a Nation, but a person, or people within that grander concept, that grander level of Abstraction.

Now, one part of the definition of abstract, or abstraction, is that it can simplify, often to a point of losing its inherent meaning. But is not the word “tree” a simplifying and brutal disregarding of all its parts? Is the word “nation” not the same . . . “people” etc.. Language in itself is an abstraction, whether we will it or not. Even the nature of the subject is lost to this abstraction (and hence the Lacanian frustration): is my name, “Dylan”, not a monstrous fiction, something that attempts to clarify my many parts, my many thoughts and feelings into a single, senseless and shapeless abstraction? Is this not a Level of Abstraction that is necessary for everyday communication and action, but totally inadequate in the eyes of intra-personal awareness, even intimate inter-personal awareness?

Is language not vulgar in this? And from this, does it not lose all of its truth?

(2) The Immortality of Subjectivity

This realisation of this daily notion, this daily use, of abstraction, as the essence of life in-fact, may seem terrible and lonesome. But it has its uses, and in its truth, relinquishes the confines of pseudo-Knowledge, taking the weight off the shoulders of Truth itself, bringing forth the truths of the Many. What it gives birth to is the realisation of Life itself, in its brutal entirety . . . :

If nothing “exists” in a significant sense without the subjective view (from whatever point, level, abstraction etc.), then surely the very act of signifying, the subjective utterance from a certain Level of Abstraction in Infinity, is the very act of creation and birth of Life itself! Not to say that nothing exists in a physical sense without the act of observance or signifying: but it might as well not. The “tree” exists only as pointless matter, uncollected or recognised, without the voice or eye that says that it is . . . Without the subjective viewpoint, the Universe becomes a collection of space and matter, like the binary 1s and 0s, and infernal Nothingness (was not the first work of creation The Word?).

“The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters man's identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal [. . .] subjectivication is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a 'biped without feathers', who's charms are not obvious.” —Alain Badiou, Ethics, p. 12, ISBN: 978-1-85984-435-9

From this willing of signification, the naming action, the very act of observance and standing as a subject, we can see the very sprouting of Godliness, the bright light of living itself. The soul is not a metaphysical abundance but a simple trickery of awareness, that fickle thing known as consciousness. Language spawns this. When we grow as a child and learn to look at ourselves and conjure the meaning of “I”, we are born fully . . . beyond what was our base, biological birth from the womb. In willing our existence we come to fully exist. In embracing the objective fiction of ourselves, we come to exist (which could be deemed contradictory, and it is, but it is from this contradiction that our lives sprout, our notions of emotion and expression emerge: there is no real “I”, there is no real “man” or “woman” or “lover” or “father”, only our attempts to attach fictional works of language to the material binary code of the world around us—an act of immortality). This is Man.

All that is deemed beautiful in man, whether rightly or not, bears no reality outside of the subjective core—objectivity sees none of this, which is why the machines of Hollywood movies fail to recognise humanity: not for their strict logic, but the simple inability to perceive past the mechanist notion of the Whole. This absurd realisation will strike to some as a heavy weight, a final clarity and the meaningless quality of existence . . . its fickle breath. But these thoughts miss the mark. In searching for his objective meaning, man has missed the very truth of existential fright, living upon the meaningless space of existence in a Nietzschean roar of life: meaning can only be brought forth form its contradiction, life can only come from End & Death, and creation itself from the destructive ebb of Nothingness. . . .

To clarify:

Who holds the vitality of life? An immortal gnat that feels nought, names nothing, and fails to feel the hum of existence within him—or the mortal man who creates the existence of things around him with the use of fiction, sprouts meaning (however short-lived) into himself, and burns with the humming of existence? Is not the subjective shout of “I am a mortal man, who grows old and sick and finally dies” an act of immortality over the shining stars that simply go on forever (well, almost).

And let us not forget Kant's realisation of man's transcendence through Space & Time—it is in man's ability to turn the shapeless into the finite, to be able to perceive an object due to its position in space and also its position in a chronological line, that allows him to transcend over the base notion of the world and to a point in which one is able to see various objects, to come to create an understanding of what there is—man's immortality is in being able to subjectivize the world around him so that it is His. It does not matter that time is relative, nor that objects in space are perceived differently depending on the position in which they are viewed from—this is the act of creation, to make “something” out of “nothing”.

In essence, man is brought to his place by speaking as a Subject and viewing the world from whichever frame and Level of Abstraction that suits (the Ethics of this shall have to be left for another time).

(3) The Honesty of Contradiction

As with all good things, complete awareness of one's own existence and the existence of the world around oneself, comes not only from naming & signifying, but also from asking: why? in realising the contradiction beneath the idea, the abyss that language is suspended over, the negativity that surrounds the abstraction of the positivity you utter: when you speak Yes into the Abyss, it is formed by the Nay of the negativity it resounds within . . . In a sense a positive creation is as much that as a negation of everything else—

When man signifies, or when man makes any sort of claim, stretching out into the world to create a truth, he has two choices: (a) to signify or reason without any consequence, to deny its opposite or even the possibility of its opposite, in a blind Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a diabolically inhuman act of dishonest fiction; or (b) to only make actions of reason, language or belief upon the grounds of uncertainty, upon the very contradiction of their negativity, to be a Subject whilst realising the absurdity of the world around them, and still making the decision whilst realising the absurdity and fragility of their attempt!

Let us take belief, or faith, in God, as the most obvious and easily explained of examples. Is not a man who claims God, even shouts knowledge of it, but leaves no space in his life for its opposite, completely devoid of the claim? How can the claim, even linguistically, live without its fragile edge that mutters affirmation against the negation of its opposite, or lack-of? Is not the true notion of faith, of human adherence to God, the very act of questioning Him and laying in a pool of uncertainty (which was why news of Mother Teresa's journals, and their apparent dictation of lost faith or questioning, were the true signs of her religious being).

If we were to imagine a single spot of paint that we are define as “red”, can we contemplate it in its singularity without respecting the negating field of otherness that surrounds it: all that is not it. Does not a complete disregard for anything else than that which we are trying to perceive, or describe, or experience relegate the aim itself to Eternity and thus to Emptiness and Formlessness? Is the basis of human life and experience not that justification of all that is not just as much as what is—in the sense that we cannot appreciate or even acknowledge one thing without seeing the space between It and “Other” and Everything Else itself?

In contradiction is reality.

In calling something by one name, we negate all other things in eternity, including the parts that make the whole of which we just named. This is not always a downfall, nor a negative thing, but should be realised whilst in-action as means to perceive reality as whole. Some fail in this: Politics, in its apparent reach for “ethical universality”, fails man on his own level (of abstraction) for it disregards him as a significant individual, instead abstracting him into a named collective (that truly does not exist in any sense): The People, or The Universal; the educational and philosopik fail to pertain to the individual situation whilst aiming at the universal mind . . .

*****

Let us be clear, in no means do I want to say: everything is Relative. What I do wish to say, is that: the subject, in an infernal act of apparent God-hood, in his subjectivication, is the starting point for all notions of life and “humanity” (and I do not mean humanity in the collective, but in the singular, as an adjective not as a noun).

Creation spawns from The Word.

Further reading (for non of this has been original, but it has been poorly realised):

Ethics, Alain Badiou.

Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre.

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Friedrich Nietzsche.

August 19^th 2009, Santa Rosa

The Break, Fidelity & "The Adversary"

2009-07-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

(Badiou and the Personal)

The Break (or The Event):

What is the break but the moment in which the very norm, the common (of society, history, psychology, fashion, art, science, knowledge etc.) is broken by a turning away from itself into a new space. Whether it is a creation or discovery of a new place is of little importance; its affect on the commonality of what came before it is where the importance lies.

These “breaks” can be ultimately large in universal scale or simply vast in a subjective dimension. The Break is Einstein against Newton, Tesla and the coil, The Communist Manifesto against Capitol (which re-enacts the break perpetually throughout the last hundred years of history, it seems); or it is making a decision against your own past, flying like Jonathan Livingston Seagull into the air, marrying yourself to a cause, falling in love . . . The break is a moment in which one's gaze is taken from its fixed position and shone out into the darkness of the unknown. That which it was fixed on before-hand is the common, it is “Knowledge” itself, where opinions vary but the expanse of information fails to. The break gives an opportunity to revalue all that is within this common space, even if it does not necessarily bring anything new.

The Break (Event) is like a birthplace for a new perspective. And in being a birth, it is life itself.

Fidelity (the ethic of the Break):

Fidelity, as an ethic, is adhering to this new perspective and continuing as far out of the common as one possibly can. Fidelity is living a truth, preserving it (without delusion) until the time comes to return it to the common of Knowledge. If we were to imagine the space of human knowledge, Geist, spirituality etc. as a globe with its own gravitational pull, then Fidelity would be the force that drove wandering objects from its surface, into unknown space, and thus capturing a new realm for the globe to expand into.

But the size of the globe is irrelevant, there must be no thought of a final “Absolute”. Death is the absolute, the space outside of the common is the absolute, and the space that is the common is, in a sense, absolute: for it is dead-still, unchanging without the spark of The Event. The only thing that lives is this excess from the norm, the flying arc of life, this Break that must perpetuate itself. On a base level, Existence itself is a break from the norm of non-existence, and thus living itself is an ethical act. But on a “human” level (a personal level) life is more than mere existence, and thus Life as an ethical act must be more than simply eating, breathing and shitting. Life Must Be The Break In-Itself and the perpetuation in action.

The Adversary (or why we must be our own Anti-Thesis, Anti-Christ, Anti . . . ):

The Ego-Ideal (the part of ourselves that we compare to, feel judged by, like the voice of complete undermining) is a necessary adversary. The imbalance and insecurity of human existence is like the fragile movement of petals opening at the dawn. A secure movement, a secure change, as if a result known in advance, is nothing but a robotic thread of in-action. An insecure growth, whether positive or negative, is the human Break.

On a vary basic level, I would ask: what gives any thesis, action, thought, life, word its insecure purity? Is it anything but its opposite, or the threat of it—the antithesis, the anti . . . What is life without the thought of death, but emptiness? What is love without the thought of hate, or apathy? What is a belief, an act of faith, without its Devilish opponent, its Adversary par excellence? Is not the very foundation of any event the combination of combating forces, like a synthesis of frictions, a duality that acts in One.

Are not all memories, words & dreams but stepping stones onto themselves that act as birth and death in the same instantaneous moment.

In thinking this, should we not accept the Adversary of anything that we consider to be beautiful, profound, moral or necessary, as the very whore-mother-origin of all that is wanted. The Adversary is the freedom of space and the willingness to step out of bounds. To oppose knowledge is to redirect to new thought, and this (albeit meaningless in-itself) action is the very nature of life itself, the profound act of faith that perpetuates nature from worm, tree, horse to man—but this is not simply the will to live, or the survival instinct in its basic and disgusting simplicity: it is a step beyond the realms of the necessary or the comfortable, like an artist's faith in new-discovery, a continuous proof of life and existence against the void of 0+0+0+0+0 that constitutes basic living.

The Break is the moment in which a new digit appears, and the Fidelity is the willingness to continue in its tracks . . . but the Adversary is the continuous friction of Fidelity against its Anti-, or perhaps Fidelity is the Anti- itself. Bravery and recklessness are not enough without the conscious recognition of one's own frailties, fears, insecurities, and failings.

Betrayal (in an honest form) is the most profound expression of love. A student who betrays his teacher for the evolution of Ideas; a child who becomes his own before being able to love his parent outside of the reality of childhood—these are the frictions of difference, the adoptions of opposition that give birth to life.

Judas gave birth to the world as he hung from his tree.

David Foster Wallace, Slavoj Žižek & The Monstrosity of “Zen” Cynicism

2009-06-01T01:48:00.000-07:00

Reading through Wallace's essay “E UNIBUS PLURAM – television and fiction” (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, ISBN: 0-316-925284) I've come to realise the truly malignant notion of “postmodern” cynicism that has already been touched upon in Žižek's work. What both Wallace's critique on television and Žižek's insight into modern ideology hold in common is the very concept that we, in a fit of liberal education, are aware of the very systematic ideology that confronts us on a day to day basis; but, through our cynical adaptation of our daily lies, through a comical irony, we have convinced ourselves of our innocence and inculpability in relation to this “system”--in a truly cynical sense, we have convinced ourself of a lack of guilt even in our own actions. This cynicism comes with an unhealthy dose of zen-like apathy in which the inner journey of meditation and peace is justified by the refutation of “actual” actions through a mental distancing—in an absurd reversal of Sartre's citation of the waiter and his “bad faith”, modern cynicism seems to have eradicated any notion of freedom or choice at all, but not in a deterministic sense, simply in a nihilistic sense: almost as if the mind has given up to the corporate nature of reality, playing along with it . . . but when the cynicism is obvious (take Sartre's waiter or Wallace's example of TV viewer “Joe Briefcase” who sees the falsity of a commercial, feels rewarded for realising the irony of it, but still ACTS as Audience) we are culpable, guilty of “Bad Faith” at a far worse level than our parents and grandparents who may have been excused to a more “provincial” viewpoint (not yet cynical, but in Direct Belief) in Modern and Pre-Modern periods.

This is why Žižek spends so much time pointing out the ideology of our times when we seem to claim on a daily basis that we are “post-ideological”; this (latter) claim is a contrived piece of drivel seemingly spawned from a disillusionment with The Dream itself (in an American and international sense), or perhaps, as Wallace discusses, the rise of television's voyeuristic perversity into the realms of politics, social life and so forth, gave birth to the claim. When television broadcasting and mass-media allowed the everyday Joe to see the false-face of ideology itself, and even his/her own simple actions, is it not this cynicism itself that provided a means to escape the disillusionment—in this sense, and I'm sorry to say, shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, are the best examples of postmodern distancing and aloof commentating in which fun is made but every day life continues as usual (this is why I was disappointed in how Jon Stewart rebuked his own actions on the show Crossfire: the power behind one of the most powerful comedic actions of our times, rumoured to be the cause of the show's cancellation itself, expresses regret for stepping “out of bounds” . . . and isn't this a problem in-itself, as if the cynical eye is the “personal mind” that still refuses to act within the mass-system itself as a free-agent).

I never intended to write this piece in relation to an existential sense of freedom, but it's what it comes down to: act-freedom itself has been replaced by the “safe”-freedom of cynical distancing. Like a series of Zen drones acting out their every-day, ideological responsibilities (Heinrich Himmler always carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him) we, as a post-modern, cynical society, act out our duties whilst claiming that they are not our duties or actions at all. And technology really has made it worse, (or our irresponsibility in the face of technology has); this is what Wallace's piece confronts. The “pseudo”-narcissistic nature of our times (we can carry multiple personalities on the internet, through our correlation with TV shoes, our romantic interests in pop icons, movie stars and so forth) has allowed us to escape even further—but not into ourselves, or any “romantic” ideal as such. Instead, we have lost ourselves in a terrible noise, a White Noise (Don Delillo) of MySpace pictures, favourite TV shows, blogs, internet communities—in which our freedom in any given situation is relegated because we are justified by some “other image” of ourselves, or the world. The Individual is considered to be more and more aware of himself, but in-fact seems less and less separate from the “Other” of the Masses, or “Audience”. This is so wonderfully demonstrated by Wallace in the whole self-referential irony of modern TV commercials; it says to us: we know that you know that we are trying to manipulate you like some ordinary Joe, and we're going to reward you for your individual observation by being blatantly obvious about it—in this sense the TV becomes a caricature of itself, cynical before-the-fact, and treats everyone like an individual (i.e. telling us that so-and-so product makes us a highly-valued individual just like everyone else that consumes/uses/wears so-and-so product), an individual that is part of a Mass of individuals. In acting along with this, we become the culprits in the most widespread, communal act of “Bad Faith” that the the times know.

The greatest example of this distancing (blanketed by some idealist impression) is the character Kessler in the Lars von Trier's Europa. Unfortunately, in reality, such mentalities are not so well punished—there is no drowning train car for us millions and billions staring at the TV set, spouting cynical judgements at the screen, acting our daily lives with the pretence that we are “somewhere else, someone else, incorruptible and blameless”.

God In the “Forsaken” Distance

2009-05-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

A reading of Bergman's "Trilogy of Faith"

As with most things religious, the last words of Christ are disputed in various circles; however, for the sake of this piece we are to assume the following as the last spoken words of Christ (before his death upon the cross). On the ninth hour, he spoke:

“Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani” (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?)

The earthly incarnation of God, faced with the imminence of death, questions the Absolute version of Himself. This moment of doubt can easily be interpreted in all its negativity, as a complete negation of the Promise and the Absolute (Eternity), and has been so referred to in popular art and literature as a seed for the atheistic spirit. In opposition, the positive interpretation often reads as a testament for the embodiment of sin: as Christ takes the “weight of the world” upon his shoulders, engulfed in the Sins that he dies for, he feels his separation from God—not of his own fault or doubt but as the consequence for his earthly tasks: for us. But both interpretations miss the truly positive formation of Christ's words and final actions. Is not Christ's last moment, on the verge of an atheistic fall, in fact the moment of true Godliness? Just as the presence of the Tree of Knowledge inevitably led to The Fall and, more importantly, a separation from God, an awareness of oneself (symbolised in God's question: “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11)) does the manifestation of God on earth, and his consumption of Sin, not signify God ridding himself of the confines of Eternity and formlessness for the finitude of Sin itself (of what is referred to in India as Maya—the illusion) for a constricted and human existence. In a sense, God did not give His (one and only) son for humankind, but he gave Himself, and through it learnt love in a real sense: that which is constricted, limited, futile and stuck in time: Humanity itself.

As Slavoj Žižek rightly points out, “we have to get rid of the old Platonic topos of love as Eros that gradually elevates itself from love of a particular individual . . . to love for the supreme Good beyond all forms”, true love is “forsaking the promise of eternity itself for the imperfect individual.”¹ Does the Christian story itself not point to this reversal of old fashioned sensibilities? Through man(and God)'s continuous distancing from the Absolute (through the Fall, Christ's crucifixion) can we not see the true ethics of love perpetuating itself into “insignificance” and “meaninglessness” (but compared to the confines of eternity are truly significant and meaningful)? Is not the existential rebuke of Eternity for Humanity itself the only truth worth pondering?

To clarify the figure of Christ as identical to that of Man himself, let us take a look at the film Winter Lightby Ingmar Bergman. In the film, Pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) reaches the climax of his “crisis of faith”, spawned from the death of his wife and his inability to love since. Confronted with Jonas Persson (Max Von Sydow)'s own crisis, a suicidal one at that, Tomas is unable to offer any comfort, instead pointing his own tortured soul, and divulging his own miseries. The result of this outburst is Jonas' violent end as he puts a rifle to his own head in the cold snows of Swedish winter. The semblance of God that Björnstrand's character (David) managed to hold onto at the end of Bergman's previous film, Through a Glass Darkly, in referring to God as Love Itself, is now destroyed by the reality of his confrontation with God's terrible and (seemingly) everlasting silence. The film's truth however, and it's quietly realised answer, comes in-fact from one of its minor characters: Algot, the hunchbacked sexton. In the final discussion of the film, Algot asks Tomas a question that he has been withholding: why the religious emphasis on Christ's physical suffering through history (as a martyr) when his (Algot's) own suffering, through the length of his life (as a hunchback unable to sleep, steeped in pain, and so forth) is surely equal if not greater to Christ's brief suffering at the hands of the Romans and on the cross? Such a question may seem blasphemous, but as anyone who has watched the film will know: Algot is in-fact the embodiment of true Faith in the film—his question is simply one of a curious nature. And is the truth behind the question (sadly missed by Tomas himself, who sits quietly and dumbfounded) not that Algot has found the parallel between himself and Christ? The pair then discuss the true suffering of Christ: God's silence—another unification of Christ and Man.

But whereas this can be read negatively, as Christ demeaned from Spirit to simple Flesh, doubtful and meaningless, is it not in-fact God who has moved up² to the form of man, and in denying himself (in His silence) has reconciled Himself with His own creation? In this sense, the separation from the absolute, a recognition of finitude is Love itself—one can claim God is the distance between the finite form and the Absolute itself, not as the Absolute but the perversion of it.

Bergman's trilogy as a whole points to this tale from absolute to individual. In the first film, Through a Glass Darkly, there is an attempt to choose the spiritual and “Other” realm over that of the human and “here”; this is characterised by Karin (Harriet Andersson)'s schizophrenic dive into God, involving her disregard for the love of her husband and family, only to find that the God that she awaits is a spider that attempts to perversely penetrate her—the conclusion of the film negates the “Other” God for the God as love in David (Björnstrand)'s final speech to his questioning son. Of all three films, despite its weight, it is the most optimistic in its ends. The second is the darkest, starting with Faith in God and Man and ending with nothing at all but the depressive and dead soul of Pastor Ericsson's inability to love, tortured by God's silence (although momentarily liberated, in a strangely hopeful moment, by an atheistic speech). The last film, The Silence, relegates God to a minor part, a silent partner in the back-ground, and in it Bergman's transition form the monstrosity of God to the “monstrosity” of Human Love is complete (with all the complications and pains still prevalent, but not in question of God) . . . this transition can also be seen in the flux of Bergman's career as whole, from the likes of The Seventh Seal to Scenes From a Marriage, from the existential wonder of God, and terrible fear of death (think Kierkegaard) to the reduction of faith to the existential life of love and friendship and simply: existence (think Nietzsche to Camus).

To clarify again: the last words of Christ are not the last words of man, at a loss of faith, but in-fact the last words of Spirit (in the religious sense), giving up eternity for the most profound (but necessary) aspect of human life and love: Death. In God's acceptance of Humanity's “Sin” (another word for Life/Love) he Himself forfeits the “Tree of Life”.

But what of the Tree of Knowledge? Martin Hiedegger claimed death as a necessary thought as one could not live fully without realising death's claim upon life, and one's own temporality. Is this not an aspect of the Tree of Knowledge?—upon eating from it (the apple) Adam and Eve find shame, nudity, death: for years confronted as the negative downfall of humanity, but in-fact the beauty of mankind in all its painful glory. Was it not in-fact God who ate the apple, and plunged head-first into temporal existence (from the “prison” of his eternity, the stillness that is practically not existing)(think Heidegger's Being & Time)? The misconstrued nature of The Fall has always been that it was a fall from grace, from the “bliss of eternity (think Buddhism); yet it is actually a complete reversal of this: eternal “bliss” (which can be nothing but empty nihilism)is forfeited for the pains of true meaning, true life, true love, true existence. In this strict sense, Christ was an existentialist, a result of God's existential realisation—mankind is not the discarded mistake of our “forefathers”, but the improvement upon The Father's seed.

Son: My God (Father), My God, why have you forsaken me?

Father: For it is the only love I know.

As John Milton (Al Pacino), The Devil, so wonderfully puts in the film The Devil's Advocate: “I'm a humanist. Maybe the last humanist.” Where God (in Absolute form) found it impossible to love, he “gave his Son” so that he could love. Whilst Sin, the embodiment of the “forsaken distance”, has been “here on the ground with [its] nose in it since the whole thing began.” The symptom of our Fall has been life itself.

1. Thanks to Slavoj Žižek's The Puppet And The Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

2. Once again, I owe this concept to Slavoj Žižek.

A Treatise on the Underpinnings of a Closed System

2009-04-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

or why the Opening Undermines it

Sanity is the most common of madnesses and madness the rarer of sanities. This isn't a new idea, and to a point: completely unoriginal. But it seems rarely to be followed through to an end, as philosophers delve instead into the common of a system and eventually forget the individual essence that it spawned from. This is not a negative thing, it is worthwhile in its enterprise. But where do we end if we push the envelope a little further . . . is Nietzsche's madness an answer, or is a general acceptance (whilst still distant) realisation of the many around the one the answer (Foucault and his two spheres of philosophy).

Taken from History of Madness (Michel Foucault, ISBN: 0-415-27701-9): “ 'Many people, not to say all of them, fall into madness by being overly preoccupied with a single object' [Sauvages, Nosologie, vol. VII, p. 20]. Inside the imagine, trapped within it and incapable of escaping, madness is still more than the image . . . it is an act of belief, an act of affirmation and negation, a discourse that sustains the image whilst working it . . . the ultimate language of madness is that of reason [italics not in the original].” Foucault her shows the logic that is based upon the single image, the madman's fetishistic possession (unquestioned and holy), giving examples of syllogistic arguments from the mouth of the insane. One, stuck on the image of his death argues:

Dead men do not eat

I am dead

Therefore, I do not eat.

This is a simple example, and to most of us we would scoff at the misuse of reason in the hands of the, most certainly, unable. But brutal honesty shows a different side of the picture. Whereas logic (and its truths and frailties) are to be argued by better men, we can see that even if we apply an apparently truthful concept, a mathematical certainty, it makes no difference if that actual concepts and contexts of its use are not put to question. What I would argue is that logic, language, mathematics, will always be nothing but a structure of fragile webs hovering above and infinite abyss of unreason, as if the halo of purity above the actual Real of darkness. And are not all philosophical, political, religious, cultural systems all underpinned with at least one fetishistic, illogical, item of faith (an image) that all other relations, languages, logics, dynamics etc. are based upon. And if this is so, then how do we ever judge one over the other? (I can no longer respect the “easy” answer of the Correspondence Theory of Truth . . .).

A personal philosophy is just that: balanced on the image of the self, the scrutinies of opinions and “intrinsic” qualities that are generally taken for granted. The personal thought is corrupted by the fact that it is founded on the unfounded personal being, the very essence of its own opinion (we can call this the unconscious). In the sense that it is founded on a single image, a fetish (the self), it is a madness in itself, but rarely called so, for most personal philosophies do not clash (at least not on a large scale) with the general social constitution. A herd philosophy, or a social philosophy, is simply a way of life by democratic acceptance (even philosophies forced upon the unbelieving, unwilling, constitute that same thing if the majority allow it to prevail—in this sense fascism is a democratic choice on a shallow level; on an exterior, objective level). From this, any difference of opinion is reconciled (at the price of the personal more than the social) or rectified in some form of violence, alienation etc. The same with madness.

But is that really a problem? The romantics allowed the unreason of the base to come to the forefront (in the guise of the heart, the passions etc.) in an attempt to overturn the constricting natures of “rational” philosophies. Nietzsche took the same concept but added a strength of form to the passion, a well-crafted Dionysus. To many, the romantic notion is out-of-date, childish in a sense—but what I find it has that all other philosophy lacks is the honesty to accept the futile image, the primary point of all thought. Whilst the rationality of the modern era claims incorruptibility it is clear that it itself is founded upon an irrational, fetishistic primary—just as with all systems before. Even in mathematics (although not in itself a metaphysical claim, it is generally the rational language placed upon the empirical world) we come to question the incorruptibility of numbers and their relations once we have questioned the founding term of all the others: the number one. If we dissolve the “unity” of an individual thing into the abstraction it really is, then all the other multiples and divisions have to go with it. Even the number one refers to itself (1/1) for it cannot exist independent of this status (1/0 or 1/∞).

In my experience so far there has been no philosophy that abides by a system that does not balance upon the one infeasible foundation (solid in theory, but a delicate kernel to the probing mind), the infinitely irrational birth of all (the beginning of mankind, God as a moral guide, etc.). Surely a question to begin with, before delving into the ridiculous and obstructionist philosophical quests (what is mind, what is self . . .) is as to what sort of irrational base should be ethically acceptable. And is it even possible to decide this, or are we all lost to our desires, our hidden drives that only search for the rational basis upon which to argue our claim.

Does thought only work on an abstract level, as a sublimation of the animalistic Subconscious, as an Ego of symbolic justification for the unknown Real that is perpetually crushed by the Super-Ego (the restricting force that none-the-less teaches us what to desire) in a ridiculous circle of insane misunderstanding ad infinitum.

Does philosophy work as anything but a re-ordering of the symbolic network that is upheld by strings of faith?

Is the only truth the abyss—where Schopenhauer dwells as Nietzsche dances on air?

A Brief Reading (or viewing) of A Clockwork Orange

2009-03-01T00:14:00.001-08:00

or (as some of you may read this): why I think that “ultra-violence” and rape is a positive step

Throughout the making of featurette on the A Clockwork Orange DVD, I felt myself confronted by the world's conscience against my own. Surely, by now, it cannot be so provocative to refuse to dismiss Alex's character and his actions as evil, symptomatic (an excuse of what made him instead of a reason for which he made his actions). The only comment that seemed to revive any life of the proceedings only dared to venture as far as to say that the viewer is drawn to 'like' the guy, maybe even admire him, because he has the courage to enjoy life to the fullest. But even this is a short-sighted, a humbled, approach. In truth, what is Alex's (the unformulated, uncensored Dionysus' (not in the “crafted” Nietzschean sense)) presence to say about the society of the seventies—and yes, you guessed it, the present?

There are many ways in which you could dissect this film (for those of you reading this in reference to the book: I will have to admit that I have yet to read it, thus, this is solely written in reference to Kubrick's vision): firstly, and very basely, you could see it simply as a foiled, but necessary, attempt at balancing out the wrong-doing, to kill the evil that threatens to ruin all society; secondly, you could view it as a juxtaposition of two extremes: the totalitarian nature of the state versus the reckless and egotistic nature of the individual that reacts against the state (and depending on your standpoint, you could view this juxtaposition from an objective stance, or from the relativistic stance of either end); thirdly, you could view the movie as a (heavy) metaphor for how the young child/individual is brought into (all) society by what—although it is rarely ever as excessive as that which Alex has to experience—can be easily classed as a form of brainwashing . . . I, however, prefer to view the movie in the following way: where life is awarded, by its own creation, order (let us suppose for now a necessary order) is too strict, too fearful in its reaction. The problem with A Clockwork Orange is not that Alex ever existed, or that the attempt at brainwashing failed, nor that he was not allowed to do “just as he wished”—more that Alex (and his Droogs) were not integrated into a system, into The System, for the qualities they carried (even though his Droogs, in an ironic twist, do later become part of the machine). Or you could say, that the system itself (for systems fear change just as much as the individuals that are a part of it, hence the wonderful transcendental unity of the machine) failed to integrate or change itself to match the passions of rebellion and violence.

It is clear (from the movie at least) that there is little reaction in Alex. This is not an individual squashed, beaten or abused by society (this is not Stuart of Alexander Masters' book), but a clear and highly intelligent conscience boosted by a strong sense of passion. In a sense there is little “rebellion” (in a reactive/bitter sense) in Alex; he has, in fact, created a positive space outside of the (nihilistic) nature of his birth-society. His rebellion is not a negation of the old but a positive notion of the new. In the Nietzschean sense, this is a Yes, not a No. Yet, as Žižek would point out, he makes a positive step in the wrong direction. What is it that his actions create? Do they really do anything at all . . . (what we find in Alex may not be strictly reactive in the childish sense, but there is a great notion of tomfoolery, an enjoyment in having the upper hand against those that are in-fact meant to hold power (parent, teacher, social-worker etc.)). And here is where the system is at fault: in facing a fertile mind, it fails to give a form and purpose to it; instead, in fear of its powers and its uncontrolled outbursts, it castrates the passionate fertility itself. And here is where the film shows it's true colours, its single-minded, throbbing cock (if you will) of an idea. Yes, the penis here is the symbol of fertility, and Alex's violence is the spewing jizzum of an uncontrolled masturbating Dionysus (next time you watch the movie, see how many times you can count its on-screen appearance, from the vandal's chalk on the walls, ice-pops, the jock-straps, the long noses of the masks, the brutal “art-piece” aka murder-weapon of the film's turning point etc.―and then pay attention to how its on-screen appearance is abruptly cut after Alex himself has been “castrated”). The penis is, therefore, we live―one is tempted, in this vein, to change Descartes' Je pense donc je suis/Cogito ergo sum.

The “cat-lady” screams (as Alex nudges and see-saws the penis-monument): “Don't touch it! It's a very important work of art!” . . . because it is, there are very few of us today, or at any time, that would have scoffed at creation in any or all senses (okay, extreme religion aside―in which even God's creation seems to be squandered as false and evil); creation is the driving force of life―it creates life and its own self, itself! Here is Aristotle's first “unmoved mover”, the causa sui!

To quote Nietzsche:

“To breed an animal with the prerogative of promise―is that not precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set herself with regards to humankind? is it not the problem of humankind?” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ISBN: 978-0-521-69163-5)

So, is the answer to an over-powering fertility to cut it (at the sack, if you will)? Surely the answer lies more in direction, in the hon(or)ing of the passions, of the will―as with the Nietzschean self-crafted, self-controlled Yes-Man, his Übermensch. Yes, Alex is dangerous, but only because he puts the nihilistic stillness of the State in jeopardy, he could err the path elsewhere. Why not cultivate the passions of youth―why not cultivate the passions that lead Alex and his Droogs to “ultra-violence” and rape?

In the end of the film, Alex is “cured” (although I have the sneaking suspicion―in the shot of his eyes rolling back before we cut to the slow-motion breasts, snow and marriage―is that Alex isn't so much cured but finally killed, sent to Heaven's gate, snuffed . . . or maybe, a la Ken Kesey: mentally handicapped to the point of lobotomy). After being reconciled as a political victim (the only place for the suppressed in society―as Malcolm McDowell opens and closes his mouth like a greedy little child, hand-fed) he is finally back just were he began . . . as with all realistic endings: Nothing Has Changed, the rebellion is empty and the atrocities attributed to Alex now stand as evidence for the correct nature of what is over what is not . . . here we have another Lost Cause (once again, see: In The Defence of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek, ISBN: 978-1-84467-108-3).
When will the castrated masses of children (and is too late for the old?) be released from their blood-thinning constraints? When will the fear of the problematic creation be eradicated (as in: when will we pick long-term consequentialism versus the stumped nature of short-term (moral) pragmatism and utilitarianism) . . . ?

[to be continued. . .]

Nietzsche; 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Lacanian Real

2009-02-18T23:02:00.000-08:00

or: beginning to think about the correct attitude towards the Absurd

In one of the final shots of Kubrick's epic film, we find protagonist Dave Bowman—aged to a wrinkled, bed-ridden prune—imitating Michaelangelo's reach for the heavens, for the stars: the finger reaches forwards, only an inch (or a human eternity) away from God's reach. And so the human condition . . .

Within, the human core searches for the ultimate (and immortal) feeling it seems to encapsulate in every moment of existence—in Nietzschean terms: as though [. . .] he feels the flying center of the universe within himself” (although is it really limited to the human experience?). This is the human striving, for excellence, the non-accidental Darwinian push forwards within the very nature of life itself. To dominate life (and, more importantly, the possibility of death); to envision itself as the subjective core; to create itself against the fit of nihilism that runs through any reach into the Real. In a psychoanalytical sense, the subjective ideal, the feeling of a human core within each subject, and the striving to overcome the limitations of the unknown that we find ourselves in, is all an attempt to exclude the reality that confronts us. Materialism denounces any part of reality that cannot be expressed in symbolic and linguistical terms; but isn't Spiritualism the flip side of the very same coin? Whereas the scientific and the material may ignore the unknowable realm of the (Lacanian) Real, does the religious and the spiritual not romanticise the external, the distant, the unforeseeable? In this sense, it is not knowledge of God or a life after death that is upheld by faith, but the romanticised possibility, the wish. Where some of us have ignored the Real for the Symbolic and “knowable”, the rest of us have “leapt” (in a strong Kierkegaardian sense) over the line into the abyssal nature of unknowing. As Camus argued, this is no answer to the problem of living, or more accurately: an answer to the Absurd, the hiccups of the Real. Whereas materialism (and I am using this term in the sense that it refers to the Scientific, to Capital, to the Western-Modern way of living against the Spiritual ideas of what we consider Older, Eastern etc.) blocks itself from endless possibilities, Spiritualism locks itself into a projected idea of one possibility. In a sense, all that spirituality and religion does is to fetishise the unknowable, to make it more bearable. In this sense, both ideas are different sides of the same coin, the same problem simply answered in different ways: one faces the problem and changes its mutating face of possibilities into a solid and definable ideal, a utopia (Heaven, Reincarnation etc.) and the other faces away and focuses on the solid and definable that is already present (the Newtonian apple, solid objects etc.—but let us not forget that these still pose the threat of slipping into the Real at any point, and losing their symbolic and “solid” meanings).

But before we get too carried away, let us remind ourselves that these are not the only two possibilities.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey the materialistic viewpoint is suddenly faced with the outside, the vast space of the Real suddenly protruding into the conceptual existence of man in the form of a black-monolith, an apparent symbol for the outer or abrupt force of evolution—here, against Darwin, we have an external force (a higher alien race, God, whatever you want to think of it as etc.) that is “jumping” man from one form to the next. Just like the ape confronted with the bone (the tool/weapon) Bowman at the end of the film is faced with the next, sudden leap. A new form is given, and although the movie ends, we can imagine that this new form becomes (after a brief honeymoon period) another finite existence, another stop, simply more powerful, in the face of the Real. The honesty of the film (and I think this is why the movie never allows for more than an inference to the monolith's source) lies in the fact that it always leaves the next step just as unknowable as the last. Kubrick here blends the possibilities of the scientific viewpoint with the unknown, leaving all ideas as they truly stand: finite and pathetic as they hang over the abyss . . . the clear honesty of acknowledging your ignorance is a third option, a la Socrates.

In this third option, I find there lays a stronger fourth option. The problem with the prior three possibilities is that they lack the freedom of exploration—those that ignore the unknown are limited by what is easily grasped, stuck and conservative; those that leap into the unknown (a pseudo-leap caked in pretence) are the same but in a skewered/opposite sense; and the third, the riff-raff in-between, do not act against the conservatism of the Left & Right: the middle is like a cowardly Leopold Kessler (from Lars von Triers' Europa) apathetic (in a strong Camusian sense) towards the possibility of anything different at all—infertile once again. This may be the problem with Camus' Sisyphus: coloured by the weak and “sensible” sense of the West, he seems occupied with being happy in his absurd task, instead of creating the task into something different.

The fourth option refuses the stale-mate of absurd existence, and frees itself from the grasp of its own infertile fears. In a political sense it has always existed, for the act of rebellion, the revolutionary purity itself is the embodiment of this fourth way. And this is another idea that is expressed in 2001: A Space Odyssey that is so hard for us to accept in modern times: that the unsettled nature of war and change may just be necessary. In the film, the initial act of change, the “birth of man” comes form the discovery of the bone as a tool—but more instantaneously: as a weapon. The tool and the weapon bring change and creation: they move the malleable object into another form. Walter Kaufman, in his defence of Nietzsche (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Fourth Edition, ISBN: 0-691-01983-5), seems to miss this point. In going to the extreme in expressing Nietzsche's use of the term “war”, he has completely castrated the very essence of its spirit. And it's not that he is completely wrong—for I agree with him that in most cases Nietzsche did not mean the word in its literal sense—but to go to the extreme and to completely eradicate war itself as a possibility for progress seems like a defensive tactic in ensuring Nietzsche's complete innocence in the face of the resulting German progression—Anti-Semitism, Adolf Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust. And this is the problem with modernity itself: from a safe distance we deplore violence, aiding and applauding our “better sides” for being transfixed with notions of peace and protest, whilst ignoring the obvious need for violent shifts in change. The revolutions of the past have been neglected to the dark corners of history because of the violence they led to (see Žižek's In The Defence of Lost Causes, ISBN: 978-1-84467-108-3, for a summary of the ridiculous nature of this modern perspective). What is strange is that Liberalism literally means to be willing to bring about something new, and Conservatism to stick with the old in a resistance of the new, but it seems that in our current political standing, it is actually the latter that is willing to accept the violent implications of change (even though they are implementing change to expand old notions, making them liberal in their means, but conservative in their ends)—in a sense, the “hippy” liberalism of the last fifty-plus years has left humanity (in the west at least) with a cowardly and cloudy perspective of “loving change”, a sort of wishful thinking that is okay in the minds of those seemingly unaffected by the troubles of the world, because all that matters is the subjective feeling of the event. True liberalism is dead. Nothing could be more infertile and stale. And our culture seems to think this the correct way. When, in actuality, a well organised Chaos (in Nietzschean terms: the sculpted Dionysus) really is the stage of birth for the New and the Bright. . . .

So what is this fourth way? It is not simply the act of rebellion, and it is not a simply act of violence for the idea of change (“violence” here not just in the physical or mental form of the word, but in the broad sense of sudden and enforced change—like a black-monolith per se) but something far wider in its implication. On the foundation of free-thinking, it is the courage to attempt each and every possible possibility with no fear for the outcome; a lost cause is not necessarily lost but given up. It is the courage to stand, more than briefly, in the cold front of existence in an attempt to will something to pass—in a sense, it is the courage to stand and “step over the blood” (metaphorical or not) as Raskolnikov failed to do in the Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment. What follows is an ethical/political consequentialism (but not in the form of pragmatism, nor utilitarianism) that is treated in itself as a means to an end (but also as a liberating, pure, divine action in itself). This is a means to an end with a twist: for the sake of brute honesty, the ends are regarded as attempts, possibilities themselves, without dogmatic approach, frivolous and, in contradiction, yet more valuable than any other objective dedication (extreme religious belief). At its basic level, we find a an active apathy, a movement in the face of the Absurd, not the reactive apathy of inaction. This is basically to say that true revolution and change comes from fresh action not the reaction (ressentiment) against the Super-Ego figure (whether personal or social or political). Once again: the trick is not to beat the system, but to step away from it in the creation of a new one (or even to try an old one that failed, a la Žižek). In a world where extremist action is frowned upon due to its imbalance in the world view, we have to ask: is there any other answer but fundamental, brutal action?

Infertile

2009-02-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

(Thanks to Slavoj Žižek (In Defence of Lost Causes) and Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) for bringing these thoughts to light.)

There is a lack of fertility in modern times. No longer does creation spill from the father's loins (the father as God, (hu)man, parent, Freudian/Lacanian/Psychoanalytical idol); no longer does life itself constitute change but a constant disavowal of any attempt to do so—in fact, humanity seems more creative in its argumentation against the birth of anything new.

Democracy, Capitalism, Globalization etc. all lay unquestioned as totalitarian ideas that spread across the globe. Where we could once see the spread of a post-modernistic view of relativity (imagine Crash in real life), we now see that relativity is simply the excuse, a policy of political correctness and politeness that simply lays as the lubricative seas that span the land—above it the manufactured behemoth runs, the machine churning, guzzling at the world in the creation of wealth (but not a new wealth, not an impassioned wealth, not even an intelligent wealth, but the imagined wealth of relative value—money, figures that only exist in an economic system based upon little but faith and will, confidence in business). The aim of being polite and politically correct, its politics if you will, is homogeneity—the unifying of all under one banner, imposed from above.

Conservatism defends the machine and its right whilst Liberalism pretends to beat against it, questioning policy and morality in an act of ressentiment (and I don't necessarily mean this in a negative Nietzschean sense) whilst actually contributing to it—Liberalism does not revolt or evolve, it simply allows the façade of democracy. For what is democracy without the voice against it? how can a state be considered democratic unless there is political partiality, a voice against it that acts like a moral conscience (but doesn't really change anything at all). The system itself is a flaw, a lie—democracy is a fake freedom. (Interesting, however, is to note that Conservatism and Liberalism, above, should probably be inverted in regards to the recent political shift . . . the point remains though: in-power against the voices of those not). The state is an all powerful mother figure, the Über-ich (Super Ego) so well integrated that for most there is no question of it, or even a vow to separate it from the Ich (Ego). . . The politics of modern times do not allow for radical ideas (democracy is democratic as long as you play by the rules).

Its almost as if the world has given up; and I don't pretend to understand the intricate laws of thermodynamics, but isn't this like a premature Heat Death? The complete halt of a system when entropy reaches its maximum (although here it seems to me there is still energy unaccounted for outside of the system)? There is apparently no room for development. The well-taught history of Marxist failure (the image of poor peasants under Stalin as the figure of terror, a guilty no-no swing of the finger from the Super-Ego) allows Capitalism to reign supreme and generally unquestioned (the worker's rights are extended in an attempt to halt exploitation etc. but this is simply a fine-tuning, not an honest rebuttal or dismantling).

But I didn't want to focus only on the political aspects of fertility and the lack of it. We have become so stagnant as a whole, in all aspects of living. Science has given us such “absolute” truth in regards to so many things (and we base our conceptions of reality on this as a whole) that we have forgotten what it was like to venture outside of the box. Whilst the elitists, the scientists, the intellectuals and politicians argue change and revival, venturing outside of the box on occasion, those beneath, we little faces in the “masses” seem to have forgotten how to do anything at all but to follow the carrot. Pavlov's dogs had nothing on us. Perhaps I understand Žižek now (or I suppose Lacan, since the idea would be one and the same): our desires and strivings for more are based upon the Super-Ego, or, the political and capitalistic system that runs over us. Individual growth and creativity is lost in the systematic need for conformity.

We can say, now:

Your relationship is typical, boring, because it encourages no growth (even the the typical throw away answer of a child doesn't work anymore, or so studies have said); your sex life has to compensate for the mundane existence of apparent love. Love for you is what you grew up to believe it was—you never questioned it (compare Vicky and Cristina). Your job offers no creativity (apart from pseudo-freedom when you get to organise that shelf, but of course: stick by policy). Your aim in life is happiness, in fact, happiness is the meaning of it—and you haven't seen through the emptiness of it yet, and anyway: you're rarely happy. Hobbies have become a claim to an identity more than an actual creative force.

It's as if the world is a blank canvas decorated with paraphernalia—whatever happened to the marks of paint?

But to question the values would be nihilistic. To go against convention would be pretentious . . . (“I find her contempt for normal values pretentious. It's boring, cliché.” stands a judgement against Cristina in Woody Allen's film). When once everything tasted fresh and stood as an opportunity for adventure, now everything seems stale and finished. The life of creativity and free-thinking, much like that we all experience in childhood, has been negated by a systematic and pragmatic function—once again, the Super-Ego. Pragmatism and defence (a fear of pain) are the causes of living death, a comatose state of unmoving momentum. Revolution in culture, in art, in politics, in religion, in philosophy etc. has been unjustified by the approach of pragmatism, of consequential investigations . . . but is Nietzsche really neglected because of Nazi Germany, Marx ignored because of Russian terror/the victory of capitalism, Heidegger disregarded as a Nazi? Or is revolution itself a pure act, a coming of being, the creative soul—War (in the Nietzschean sense) is surely vital for birth. Did Michaelangelo cease to paint, draw, create as a child the first time he got something wrong? And as the Orson Welles written monologue in Carol Reed's The Third Man expresses: what ever came out of peace and stillness—the cuckoo clock?

Camus said that “man must live to create; live to the point of tears.” Nietzsche that there must be chaos and war (not literally) to give “birth to a dancing star”. For millions of years life thrived, and it strived forwards (in a relative sense); now it simply sits like a dead daffodil waiting for the spinning whir of the decapitating lawnmower blades.

This is the story, or should I say the threat, of Children of Men (Dir: Alfonso Cuarón 2006; novel by P.D. James); not that the world has ceased in its ability to become pregnant with flesh and bone
(although at this rate that seems like a logical follow-up)—it simply has forgotten how to become pregnant with idea, art, philosophy, revolution.

Man (synonymous here with the Nietzschean Übermensch) is dead and he is still waiting resuscitation.

Beginning to think about the Problem of Universals

2009-01-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

Since the days of Plato the difficulty of reconciling universal words such as “animal”, or any word that deals with a group instead of an individual subject, has been an issue tangled within the framework of an already questionable language. In the end I feel that such ideas, linguistically, refer to nothing at all and are mere abstractions—tools. This can be accepted. But what about the moral implications that arise from the use of universals?

Whilst watching The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed) recently, I caught myself feeling into the circumstance unique to each of the three main characters (I refer here to Holly Martins, Harry Lime and Anna Schmidt). This isn't something that we are incapable of finding in other films, or in any other art-form for that matter, but I was struck by the grace and balance of all the contradictory visions in Reed and Greene's narrative—this is a movie possible to watch with a liking and acceptance of each of the character's positions. And why is this? Because each is treated as the individual, the personal, not really within the “grand scheme”—everything is unified by its contradiction (a philosophical theory from the likes Heraclitus). But this in itself acted only as a stepping stone in my thoughts, at least until a later scene. . . .

Whilst Harry Lime (Orson Welles) stands on the edge of a big-wheel carriage, staring down at the masses circling in Vienna below, we get to hear his the reasons for his (typically) immoral actions. Greed is, as per usual, the driving “vice”, but there's something much more interesting laying within his words that betrays what I would like to argue is the problem with the universal idea. The problem is, basely: the generalisation of parts into a whole (and it would be naïve to not take this beyond the obvious notion of the “stereotype” here, or issues of race and sex). The importance of this scene lays in Lime's reference to those bellow as mere small “dots”:

“Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money—or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.”

This reasoning (part of one of the greatest monologues ever performed) is all too common within the typical framework of the “villain”—but it never stood out so clearly to me until now. When the human idea, the constructs of identity (whether fictional or not) that we engage in in every moment of the day, are lifted (surgically if you will) to a level of abstraction where Person A is no longer but a part of the unity, no different to B, the whole, that is “humanity” . . . then of course some are going to find the ability to be unsympathetic to the simple, numerical figure of an individual. No longer is a man a whole within himself, independent, but simply a part of. This is the problem with levels of abstraction, and I would argue, that disturbing thing called the “universal”. And when you think about these ideas within the bounds of concepts that involve life and death and the possibilities of tyranny over the right to another's choice in the matter . . . you will realise that the ideas of universals, the difficulties of them, are not restricted to mere problems of “linguistics”—when the language that we use decides how a life is counted, valued, realised and judged, then it becomes a matter of great importance (implying, between the lines, that we already think that life is something of “importance” of course).

Of course, language is based upon nothing but these “universals”—the closest thing we get to a solid word is one that refers to a single individual, like a name (there may be other “Dylans” in the world but it is intended in reference to one, as a unique word, when used, unlike “dog” which refers to an entire species). By using language that actually relates to the level of abstraction that we are inclined to live within on a day to day basis, then we are aware of people at that level of abstraction (the level of abstraction in our reality and language that we perceive relate to our levels of intimacy). However, the second you elevate yourself to a different level, people become figures. A man in control of a nation is in control of that, not the individuals that make it. Now, this is, straightforwardly, “bad news” for the individual who requires sympathy from upon high for survival, that personal connection that allows for “fairness”. Yet, can we really blame world leaders for being unable to think of the rights and wills of each person that they affect? We may claim that God is able to handle such an awesome task, but it is clear that man can not—it is difficult enough for us to be aware of the people we are directly in reach of, never mind the millions that are affected by, lets say, a president. We need to understand that a politician, a king, anyone in a higher position, must refer to the “people” (and anyone who gets suckered in to believing that when a politician is referring to a “people” he is referring to them individually needs to have their optimistic ideals and delusion firmly checked)—no matter whether a man does “good” or “bad” with power, in the end he is never dealing upon the plane of abstraction we would hope for; intimacy is eradicated by the part of the figure we have been negated to—it is not, as some people think, a positive thing to be relegated to a group: within the bias of the name of a species, or genus, or affiliation, freedom is take. The Universal, ultimately, becomes a cold and undefined notion of other-worldliness that lacks any sense of human intimacy.

The strange thing with these “planes of abstraction” is that we can imagine each to co-exist with that above and below it; in fact, that which is below is wholly a part of it, and that below is partly the whole of it—these ideas, to my knowledge, are likely to go on in either way, ad infinitum. Baring this in mind it is hard to really consider any one in its righteousness or its negativity, they seem to simply exist in their own means and own realities. Judgement comes, mainly, from below and above, from the accident of difference between different planes of indifference.

The easy solution to this conundrum of “universals” would of course be to eradicate them and leave each individual person, animal, object, to its own . . . but really, this is absurd, as it is abstraction itself that simplifies the complex structures of these things into a simple and single idea. A man is, after all, not an individual but an abstraction of all his parts; if we look at what we call a “tree” we will see individual leaves, the bark, the roots etc.; if we take a look from space we see a planet of various colours moving in the emptiness of space . . . where do the abstractions end?

In language Wittgenstein showed the system in which these universals work; in ethics we have ignored these things by basing our systems upon unproven premises of right and wrong—truth it seems, has been continuously circumventing its way between the bowling balls of questioning: what exists outside of abstraction? Are we fictions based upon nothing but the experience of our psychological pasts?

Surely reality is fictitious, at least, in the way that it is perceived and diagnosed.

Why We Are Not Born Equal

2008-05-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

We hear it all around, the general need for equality, a fight it seems to balance out the imbalance of nature. We have such sayings as “Some are born Great, some have Greatness thrust upon them” . . . or from the perspective of the pessimist/realist on the same theory: “There are two kinds of people in the world: people who are destined for greatness . . . and then there’s the rest of us . . . the bungled and the botched." But what do we mean by equality? Do we mean total equality? Or does that negate any difference between people, men and women, wise and young, smart and dumb?

What I will argue here is that in many senses we are not born equal, and thus in many senses we cannot reach equality. Now, in defence of my opposition, I am not arguing a moral case of whether we should be given equal opportunity; I am simply arguing that we are not totally equal by nature, and by birth. This in itself may have implications upon the moral codes and laws of society and Humanity as a whole, for I believe that if we were to accept the nature of inequality, we might actually be able to treat each other on a more even footing—but that is for a later discussion.

The Arguments For Inequality:

I have made the claim that, in many senses, we are not born equal. The first argument to back up this notion comes in the shape of Science, Darwinism, Evolution etc. A purely Materialistic argument, but nonetheless valid in a world in which we base most of our Reality upon these laws.

The argument is fairly evident. We are taught in schools (to what can be seen as the confusion of the children, torn between religious beliefs and the cold and harsh reality of the outside world) that there is a scientific difference between us all. Our DNA is an engraving of an idea, an idea that has survived the trial & error efforts of Natural Selection. Because of a history that cannot be controlled by the mental state of a growing child or a grown adult, we find ourselves to be something not out of choice but out of natural law. We are blonde, brown, black or red in hair colour; we are blue-eyed, brown-eyed, green-eyed or hazel-eyed etc. . . . now these at first hand may not seem to be strong claims for inequality, yet (as Darwin's ideas show), these differences in man (and woman) are the basis for latter inequalities. Even such a thing as absurd as hair and eye colour can be idealised as an inequality: The Aryan race & the Nazi campaign are direct proofs of this. From the absurd chance of birth, from the very idea of where we are born and consequently who we are, it seems that a future of equality or (as I would argue) inequality is laid out.

Now one may argue that these are not inequalities, as many people do in this day and age, and that these things are only made into inequalities by the “unjust” and “unfair” systems of society that we find ourselves within—or more pin-pointedly: the acts of other men, of those in Power. Yet, are not all choices in the chain of evolutionary growth fraught with possibilities, absurd acts of randomness by nature and other species of being that judge one gene to be weaker than another, one to have a chance of survival and one not? I will not argue that the evolutionary choices (now far past a biological level, due to the discovery of medicine and so the denial of natural selection) that we allow to transform the human race are correct or for the best of the continuation of the Human Race . . . but they still fit in with the natural order of things. In the sense of evolutionary selection, from the perspective of a biological being aiming to improve / with the purpose of becoming something more: we are not equal, even if we may not be aware of our own downfalls from our births.

By a second argument, we could bring God into the equation: the Creator, the Order of the Universe, so to speak. In the light of the teachings of most religions, under the eyes of their respective deities, under Deus, we can see inequality in the systems that are meant to engage men as equals and to disengage the animalistic nature of Power, Hatred & Evil. At this point we are of lesser vision than our Creator, treated as pawns on a chess board, children created in love but wandering around naïve and bewildered of the rules and meanings that seem out of reach, or even worse: incomprehensible—“constructually unequal to the Creator”. Already equality is lost to those who are “purer” by a judgement system of righteousness & sinlessness. By the simple creation of good & evil and the relegation of certain types of man into each category we have inequality. In the New Testament we find Christ preaching of love and a lack of difference between people—we are told to love our neighbours and to treat them as we would wish to be treated: yet, the rich man, the one with Power in the order of society is cast as unequal, taken from his position of wealth and superiority in a system inadequate to those watching it from below, and thrown to such lines as: “It is much easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.” (New Testament, Matthew 19:24). It almost seems as if the natural system of inequality is counter-balanced with another system of inequality of inverse-proportion.

Now, the religious reaction to this interpretation would state that man has a choice in his life, to do the Right thing(s); yet, does a prince born into a rich family have a choice in the matter, does his placement into the physical world (presumably by God himself) negate him from the possibility of Heaven? Does he have to forfeit all that is rightly his to pass into Heaven when those born into rags and poverty do not? It seems that by the order of God such scenarios are selected to the dismay of the receiver and hence his abolished “right” of choice. Is that not an inequality within itself? To say that we are all born pure and sinless and that our choices effect our destinies seems unfair and unequal when we take into account the situations various people find themselves born and pushed in upon, and even worse, the sins of those that came before: The Original Sin and the “sins of my father” as is expressed in the Old Testament: “He walked in all the sins of his father which he had committed before him; and his heart was not wholly devoted to the LORD his God, like the heart of his father David.” (1 Kings 15:3). It seems that Christianity itself makes the same claims as science, that the root of one's life, the seed of one's father and the egg of one's mother lay as big a part of one's position in life as does one's own actions.

In other forms of religion, such as Calvinism for example, we hear of the “Chosen Ones”, men and women chosen over others by the Lord. It is their Fate to serve God . . . but if we bring Fate into the question, a written future known only by God Almighty, then we have already destroyed any notion of equality. Do two novels written at the same time with a difference of quality and writing and ends to which they meet mean equality? I think not, and if our lives are like that of the protagonists of novels, under the scrutiny and Choice of His pen (the author's) . . . then I would argue that equality is thrown under the bus from the very first syllable. In a sense equality discourages fate, as one needs to be born Free to stand any chance of arguing that one is born equal. But if we are all born into chains, of various lengths, strengths, worth . . . robes or rags . . . then by the simple “fate” of time and place, we have lost equality.

Which leads onto the third area, or argument for inequality. That of sociological position.

When we are born we are immediately placed within a social structure—even if we are not aware of it at first. The baby, blissful and not yet fully formed (in terms of reason, memory, intelligence, physical strength and dexterity etc.) is treated as a baby, a person related to person A and of person B's womb, close-but-not-blood-relative of C and so on. Without making a conscious choice or deciding on a structure of life, the child has already fallen into a hierarchy. This is not only typical in man but also in animal. The order of birth, the physical strength, the “whelp” of the litter . . . all these things can be seen as judgement calls by Nature, or by Man's Nature—the social structure one is “placed” within (whether by pure chance or by God's reasoning) automatically puts one to an advantage or disadvantage; as an intrinsic or naturally perpetuated inequality. Man is not exempt of the animal kingdom's structures within family, within herds and tribes; in the sense of position in relation to like-creatures, man is just as an animal in his dominance or non-dominance with others.

The Dictionary definition of Dominance includes:

“4. Animal Behaviour. high status in a social group, usually acquired as the result of aggression, that involves the tendency to take priority in access to limited resources, as food, mates or space.”

This is not much different in man, simply that aggression in a physical sense has been displaced by other forms of Power that seem more “humane” to us. Nietzsche's ideas on the Master and Slave Moralities fit in nicely here, where the physical aggression is displaced by the simple notion of thoughtful superiority or Faith, once again expressing how those in power pursue one kind of morality, and how those within within the grasp of these powers follow a morality of inverse proportion out of ressentiment or “Bad Faith”:

“It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?" then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal's establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, "We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.".

Here we have the typical social inequality, where the natural inequality of power is displaced by the opposite in religion, simple morality, the faith of the “lesser” in themselves and in their futures—the urge for equality or argument for it does not seem to include those that are naturally higher in the “food chain”. We have the aristocrats in high places claiming their snobbish superiority over the proletarians, and we have the proletarians claiming them selfish, lesser by moral standards, materialistic and lacking in spirituality and righteousness. And thus, no matter what these ideas may claim, or preach: they do not eradicate inequality or create total equality. Both extremes of the social agenda seem to be fighting fire with fire, inequality with their own ideals of superiority.

Social inequalities that are tightly wrapped against us at birth, as if symbols of “who we are”, include things such as family assets, hence our economic value, the place we are born (the Power (or education of . . . ) developed due to the situations that we encounter that allow us to reach Power or Powerlessness later on in life), the place we find ourselves in the family structure, whether or not we are born of a healthy mother or of a junky, whether or not we are handled by “proper medical attention”: all these things scream the infinite possibilities of Fate. And not fate set out by a Being or by pen, a strict fate, but the fate of inevitability, the absurd randomness that is Everything—and yet all still fitting to some sort of mathematical rhythm? Are we not all percentages, statistics, and are not all integers unequal? Is not all life an immediate contradiction, between the natural patterns and rules, mathematically and creatively, in nature, and the very freedom of consciousness; just as infinity is a contradiction, in which things repeat, patterns emerge, even though all possibilities are thoughtfully infinite? To be an integer within the pattern one would not be equal to all other integers, and yet to be conscious and free of the system, one would be unequal to the choices that were freely not made, the paths set out and chosen, leading away from those that are stronger or weaker, larger or smaller, longer or shorter. . . . whether we chose freedom or not it seems we are actually not able to find total equality. This seems only to be possible in a system of infinite “sameness”—binary code knocked down to not ones and zeros, but all zeros, or all ones.

Lastly, a side note, not an argument but an observation and a personal reason to keep away from the idea of equality of all men: if we were all truly equal, would there be anything to tell us apart? And this corresponds to race, sex, hair colour etc.. The inequality of our births makes us who we are and so colours the spectrum of humanity.

The Arguments Against Inequality (For Equality):

I can feel the world disagreeing, trying to fight against the disruption of the thought that its okay that we are all individually superior or inferior. But I'm not trying to say it is okay or that such arrays of Power should be abused . . . I simply wish to argue for how we naturally stand in the order of things, and how even our most “righteous” of beliefs do not do anything to disrupt this inequality. Arguments against the inequality of man, or more specifically, for the equality of man at birth are as follows:

The easiest argument against those that I have outlined above is that of perception, and, as is the difficulty with most concepts in the world, choosing what is worth more (another inequality here, a division between ways of living, of perspectives . . . ). It can be argued that there are different ways in which to judge whether people are brought into this world equally—other factors beside social platform, economy, genetics and religious status. Just like John Stuart Mill's argument of making Utilitarian decisions based on Quality as well as Quantity falls flat on its face when asked: “Who is the judge of this quality?”, one can ask here: “Who is judging the qualities in which make people equal or not?”

The easiest answer seems to be: The Rules of The System, i.e. Hobbes' Leviathan. The general consensus of what is better for and of the social structure is what judges each individual. This constitutes the way in which all society's work in a democratic state—in a tyrannical state, they are grossly imbalanced by the opinions of one ruling man, or group. And where do these general ideas in groups, in the opinion of the majority, come from? From various positions, some from the natural way in which animals fall into a structure, by a need and survival basis, and other's because of the ideological struggles of individuals.

In a world where natural selection seems to be nullified by the choices and wills of men around the globe—and even more powerfully: our discovery of medicine and the building of safe-guards against illness and death—we have nullified the way in which we once lived and died by circumstance and individual strength. Due to this the Quality of man has become a primarily subjective and relative idea. Society chooses what kind of man or woman is higher, of more importance, and below these general choices, we each individually have our own ideas of what Quality in man constitutes. Now, these ideas may hold with the ones argued for above, yet, do they not highlight the argument against?

If man sees worth in other men by his own subjective reasoning and the relative reasoning of the System, of Society . . . then what of the Objective Truth and True Value in man—is there one?

It seems that you could argue that by pinpointing on a certain aspect of man, you could judge equality or inequality on that aspect. By saying that all men and women are human, with no deviations from that norm, all with a basic biological structure that only deviates on a tiny scale, then have we not simply said: all man is equal? I would say not, this is an equivocation on the word “equal”, at one point meaning equality in the sense of all being equal in all senses, and then being used as equal in the sense that we are equal by a single definition, or a single sense. Yes, all 15 year-olds are 15 year olds, but does that negate that some are smarter, some stronger, some faster? No, it does not. By realising an objective equality between all humans in one aspect does not nullify all other inequalities.

In the end the argument that inequality only lies in various values due to perspective, that it is relative and subjective compared to a few tautological equalities in man fails as a fallacy of composition. Just because we are equal in one aspect does not make the whole equal. And once we accept a part of humanity being unequal, does that not already render the word equal meaningless? A single equality tips off the whole balance.

There is no a priori total equality.

Another interesting stance is of complete Nihilism: if there is no ultimate worth in the Universe then we are all ultimately worthless—thus, any sort of worth we place upon ourselves, each other, any sort of Quality (equal or not) is simply a façade and therefore meaningless. If inequality or equality are meaningless, of only minor consideration in the finite sense of a meaningless life—then we are all born just as worthless, equally worthless. It seems ironic to use Nihilism as a positive argument, but it is one way of making us all equal.

But this doesn't seem to get us out of any rut of inequality in the constant and present Reality. There are the symbolic ideals that man has created around him that insure he is of meaning and worth in relation to ideals, sometimes separated from Man. Nihilism may give reason to forfeit upon the values of society, animal dominance, spiritual purity etc., but they do not negate these things in life. In relation to the values that most of us uphold, we are still unequal, no matter if these “worths” have any ultimate worth.

This same forfeiture of economics and status is used in Christianity, Buddhism etc.. They act in ways to ignore the values that make us unequal in an effort to make us equal. If (if) there is an after-life in which the inequalities of life are cast side, a power or morality beyond that of Humanity and Earth, then an ignorance of our Earthly inequalities from birth may ultimately be justified, and through leaving the biological debris behind, we may find equality—but this still does not negate inequality in our lives, from the way we are created (by nature or Other). Hope or Faith in something better afterwards for us all seems like an attempt to bail out of the situation than actually focusing on the topic at hand—avoidance of the fact of inequality with a potential of a different Reality seems irrelevant and in ignorance. Can we not ignore all arguments by stating the possibility of something to come that we are unaware of, unable to grasp in present thought?

Conclusion:

Now, I would not argue that the ways in which people differ is of major consequence to how we should treat each other (or at least of negative consequence)—it is clear in my own opinion that this inequality is what makes each person of interest and of worth. I in fact would never want complete equality for man, for I feel that the concept is synonymous with that of being completely identical. A world in which everyone carries John Malkovich's face, body and voice, always speaking and talking from equal perspective sounds inhuman; in fact, I feel that being human is in fact only found in the realms of the unequal, beings flawed, bungled and botched, never reaching any kind of perfection but only betterment. Total equality seems like a scam to negate the differences within people that we deem to be of negative impact—but we would have to forfeit the positive to deny the negative.

Scientifically man came from inequality in nature, from inequality in chance mutation, and I feel that this inequality is in fact what makes life beautiful, or of any relevance at all. Art comes from inequality, love from inequality . . . and music. We are continuously looking for something original, away from the norm; we wish to deviate as much as possible, but then feel the pang of insecurity and fear in the realisation that such differences make us lesser in the eyes of some.

A fair price to pay—I would argue.

Equality in true terms, in the sense of Complete Equality, means only one thing to me: Absolute Zero, Ground Zero—Nothingness. Worth and meaning is everything above the 0, everything that we construct upon the ground, our Tower of Babel into the sky—in this sense Man has overcome space and time with his own Creation, and in this sense, inequality is the mother of us all—she is Mother Nature herself.