Saturday, April 30, 2016

Will to Live and Death Drive

One of Freud's innovations is one of his subsidiary concepts.  One of Spinoza's under-appreciated insights is that entailed in the concept of a Will to Live is the impossibility of self-destruction, i. e. the destruction of a Mode can come only from without, of which an apparent 'suicidal' thought is merely an inadequate idea.  Similarly misinterpreted is Schopenhauer's denial of the Will to Live, which can be diagnosed as merely a vital attempt to escape pain, just as Nietzsche detects in apparent Nihilism a Will to continue to Will.  So, in sharp contrast, Freud's Death Drive, later aka the Thanatos Principle, which attributes to humans an impulse to self-annihilation without ulterior motive, e. g. going to Heaven, challenges the well-established Psychological principle.  Now, that attribution is in accord with popular images of self-destructive behavior, but among those images is the false one associated with lemmings, plus, Freud is rarely nearly as methodologically rigorous as is Spinoza.  So, his Death Drive remains a provocative though not well-grounded hypothesis.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Repression, Diagnosis, Theory

Freud's Psychological model, constituted by Id, Ego, and Superego, is primarily designed as a diagnostic tool for the treatment of a specific disorder, which can be summarized as Repression.  Early in his career, the disorder is specific to a given patient, while later, he considers the extension of the diagnosis to repressive societies in general.  Accordingly, the criterion for evaluating the model is curative success.  However, the further extension of the model, to a general Psychological theory, rivaling e. g. Aristotle's, exposes its inadequacies.  For example, its sharp Id-Ego contrast cannot accommodate the difference of degree that, as Leibniz shows, obtains between them.  Furthermore, the Ego-Superego distinction is one of antagonism, thus leaving the model inadequate to ordinary conviviality.  And, most immediately, it seems to offer no explanation of Freud's own work, either as a doctor or as a writer, especially insofar as each has been in defiance of social norms.  So, his diagnostic tools should not be taken as a Philosophical theory.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Id and It

The Latin 'id' means 'it'.  It thus signifies a singular, non-human entity.  But, Freud uses it mean an unorganized manifold of drives.  Furthermore, one of those drives is that of reproduction, a process which is hardly non-human, and which is the ground of a multiplicity for which the most apt pronoun is 'we'.  So, one of his diagnostic tools, by means of which psychological disorders are to be cured, treats a fundamental vital process in a human organism as if it were an inhuman alien force, thus raising the question of its own soundness, a methodological problem that Freud does not seem to address.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Superego, Supererogatory, Superliminal

Freud explains Morality as the functioning of the Superego, which internalizes social standards as a constraint on the pleasure-seeking impulses of the Id.  In other words, his concept of Morality is essentially similar to Kant's.  It, thus, also, is beset by some of the same weaknesses of the latter.  For example, it cannot account for Supererogatory action, which does not involve constraint, and cannot be the content of a general mandate.  Rather, the functioning of the Superego and the structure of Supererogatory action are inverses--the former internalizes society, while the latter externalizes the agent.  It is such entry into society, into a We, activated by Will, that can be characterized as Superliminal.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Perception, Difference, Will

Leibniz' distinction of "minute" from "noticeable" perception is one of degree, not of kind.  Thus, the distinction of kind that he draws between the corresponding "unconscious" and "conscious" perception is problematic, if not inconsistent.  Likewise, the assumption of the latter distinction in contemporary Psychology uncritically ignores the former, potentially undermining the Id-Ego disjunction, for example.  Now, Kant's concept of 'absolute largeness' also conflates the two distinctions, i. e. Totality differs from the Indefinitely Large in both kind and degree.  In contrast, the Will that applies that concept of Totality to conduct is Superliminal, or what he calls Sublime, i. e. is an experiential factor that is, with respect to Perception, different in kind only.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Reason, Nothingness, Motion

Leibniz conceives Experience to be a Continuum, in which Minute Perceptions function as transitional elements.  Plainly, the concept entails an infinite regress, since any two such moments requires a third to mediate them.  So, at the limit of the regress is instantaneous differentiation, just as it is for Newton, in his effort to quantify motion.  Thus, the absolutely small, i. e. the correlate of the absolutely large that constitutes Kant's Sublime, is, perhaps, not, as has been previously suggested, Nothingness, but pure Motion.  But, these are not necessarily alternatives--from a Parmenidean perspective, Motion is Nothingness, to each of which Kantian Reason is inadequate.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Subliminal, Nothingness, Reason

Pursuing the accepted meaning of 'sublime', Kant arrives at Reason, the source of the concept of the 'absolutely great', i. e. Totality.  In contrast, unexplored is the converse, the Subliminal, with which he is surely familiar, since Leibniz considers it in several places, under the rubric 'minute perceptions'.  Now, the corresponding 'absolutely small' can mean only one thing--Nothingness, which is represented as a quantity in the Calculus that Leibniz designs to examine the role of minute perceptions in Physics.  But, while Totality can be ascribed to Reason, Nothingness seems to elude the latter, as subsequent Existentialists have asserted as a cardinal principle.  So, a study of the Subliminal seems to lead to e. g. a Dread from which Kantian Reason offers no escape.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Superliminal and Species

A widely-held, rarely challenged thesis is that the individual human can transcend the species in at least some respect, e. g. the concept of a Soul that can be saved from a curse of 'original sin', Spinoza's concept of a Mode that can have an immediate relation with God/Nature, etc.  But, that thesis is implicitly challenged by Darwinism, according to which an Individual is a part of a Species, and, hence, can in no way be independent of it.  Now, because ordinary Perception is a product of the senses, it is within the experience of an Individual.  Hence, any Species-principle is Superliminal, i. e. because it absolutely surpasses the Individual.  So, for example, Kant's 'Sublime' is Superliminal, since its ultimate object is Reason, his Species-principle.  Likewise, Nietzsche's Dionysian is his Species-principle, and, hence, too, is Superliminal, but it can be directly engaged in singing and dancing.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Sublimity, Superlimity, Will

If 'subliminal' means 'below the threshold of consciousness', 'superliminal' can mean 'above the threshold of consciousness'.  Accordingly,  'superlimity' expresses the latter better than does the common 'sublimity'.  Now, operations typically classified as 'intellectual' can be conceived as functioning to extend the range of consciousness via generalizations.  Unfortunately, that function is lost in both the Empiricist interpretation of those operations as mere abstractions, and the Rationalist ontologization of them, each of which severs them from immediate perception.  The result is a Dualism to which corresponds the combination of Pain and Pleasure in Kant's concept of Sublimity--Pain in the immediate awareness of the immensity of size and power of environing Nature, Pleasure in the rational idea of a Totality that is greater than that immensity.  But, restoring the original function of the Intellect re-establishes a continuity between Particularity and Totality, thereby eliminating the painful component of Sublimity.  At the same time, what is truly Superliminal in any experience can emerge--Will, which surpasses, and is absolutely incommensurate with, even any mere idea of a Totality, at, for example, the Dionysian events described in Birth of Tragedy, the participatory essence that Kant, as a detached observer, misses.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Sublime, Subliminal, Subconscious

The peculiarity of the common use of the word 'sublime' can be easily gleaned from comparing it with the nearly identical 'subliminal'.  For, while the latter accurately parses as 'beneath the threshold of consciousness', the former, including Kant's use of it, means 'above the threshold of consciousness', for no obvious good reason.  Now, Nietzsche's Dionysian principle is the precursor of Freud's Id, and, hence, of the Subconscious.  So, insofar as the Dionysian experience can be characterized as "sublime", the latter is more etymologically accurate than is Kant's and the common use of the term.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Sublimity, Reason, Dance

For Kant,  Sublimity is constituted by Fear, and Reason qua Will controlling that Fear.  But, that control only constrains flight, i. e. it does not initiate any counter-action.  Accordingly, Mind and Body remain split.  In contrast, in the concept of Sublimity that can be attributed to Birth of Tragedy, as has been previously discussed, Will generates physical motion, i. e. dance, in which the dancer is expressed as a whole of parts.  Furthermore, that Will is common to all of the celebrants, in whom is, therefore, expressed a We.  So, in comparison with a concept of Sublimity that can be attibuted to Nietzsche, Kant's is underdeveloped, limited by a shortcoming of his concept of Reason.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Sublimity and Universality

Kant's treatment of Sublimity is peripheral to his main ambition in the Critique of Judgment, probably no more than a nod to Burke, with attention to its occurrence in Nature, but not in Art.  Now, though Nietzsche does not explicitly characterize it as such, Dionysian Music, Greek Tragedy, and Wagner's Dissonance, the primary examples of Art in Birth of Tragedy, can each be classified as Sublime, thereby establishing a sharp contrast with Kant's study of Aesthetics.  One notable element in the contrast is whereas for Kant, the scope of Universality is Individuals, in Nietzsche's examples, as a result of ego-shattering Sublimity, one finds oneself as a "member of a higher community".  In other words, a We, as opposed to a mere collection of Is, emerges in Nietzsche's study as a Sublime Universal.

Monday, April 18, 2016

Art, Evolution, Sublimity

Not every ape has become a human.  Thus, while, for Kant, Originality is not a necessary condition of Beauty, Universality is not a necessary condition of Evolution.  However, he privileges not only Universality over Originality, but Beauty over Sublimity, as well.  Now, ego-shattering Sublimity both expresses the effect of Genius on the Artist, and corresponds to the transcendence with respect to the given of the Evolutionary step.  So, while, for Kant, Beauty is the symbol of Morality, Sublimity in Art is a manifestation of Evolution.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Art and Evolution

A cardinal principle of Kant's Aesthetic Theory is that Taste, i. e. Universality, is more important than Genius, i. e. Originality.  However, if there is a demonstration that the two are incompatible, he does not offer one.  Now, plainly, a work that is both Universal and Original is superior to one that is lacking in either respect.  So, his theory is based on an inferior example of Art.  As an alternative, founded on the optimum possibilty, the presentation of an original work, followed by the universal reception of it, can be recognized as that of Mutation-Integration, i. e. the emergence of some new characteristic, followed by the incorporation of it into given behavior.  In other words, such an Aesthetic event constitutes a type of Evolutionary step.  Accordingly, the criterion for Aesthetic Judgment is the promotion of the growth of the Species, a principle that is implicit in Kant's system, but remains undeveloped, for reasons that probably have more to do with his Theological commitments than with Art per se.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Art, Species, Creatvity

In cultures such as that of contemporary America, 'Art', of any sort, is a commodity, functioning as a temporary diversion for an individual from business-as-usual, the highest honor for which is an industry award.  In contrast, Wagner presents new sounds, Picasso develops unprecedented sights, and Joyce re-invents everyday experience, stimulating unprecedented ways of listening, seeing, and describing, for all.  It is only in such salient examples that the creative function of Art as Species-progress can be clearly discerned and fully appreciated.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Art and Species

For Nietzsche, as for Schopenhauer, Music is distinguished from others Arts as non-representational, though, as Painting merely a few decades later proves, the distinction is not permanent.  Another contrast is between Art as process vs. Art as product--Music, Dance, and Theater are the former, Painting and Sculpture, the latter, and any book is a product, the reading of which is a process.  A third ground of classification is the relation between Artist and audience: mediated, as in the case of books, or immediate, as in the case of a musical performance, though the composer-audience is mediated.  So, though Nietzsche does not focus on it, common to Music and Tragedy are that they are immediately communicated communal creative processes, crystallizing how Art is an essentially Species event, even in its less immediate, more dispersed modes.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Creativity, Art, Sexuality

The confluence of fertility and music in the Dionysian festival is no coincidence--each is a type of social Creativity.  Prior to Nietzsche, the types are significantly distinguished.  For centuries, under the influence of the predominant Theological tradition, the creator of human beings is a super-natural deity, whereas the creator of art is super-human, but not supernatural, i. e. genius.  Schopenhauer inverts that contrast, with a naturalistic Will to Live as the progenitor of human beings, and super-natural Platonic Forms as the impetus of Art.  In contemporary American culture, the similarity of the two has continued insofar as the status of each of the two forces has been trivialized in the same way--privatized as a property possessed by an individual, i. e. as is expressed by e. g.  "X is a genius", or by "X has sexual prowess".  Lost in such locutions is Nietzsche's briefly entertained insight that Creativity, of either type, is fundamentally a Species event, experienced as exuberance, as has been previously discussed.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Exuberance and Vitalism

'Exuberance' connotes 'superabundant fecundity'.  So, since Dionysus is also the god of fertility, the term might better characterize the Dionysian experience than "joy", "enchantment", and "ecstasy", which Nietzsche uses.  This celebration of human reproduction thus contrasts diametrically with the representation of it as a divine curse, in Genesis 3, and as an imposition, by Schopenhauer.  And, as connoting creativity beyond itself, it also diverges from Spinoza's "bliss", which is a merely self-contained peak moment.  Furthermore, the image of superabundance anticipates the fundamental pattern of the Will to Power, which can, accordingly, be recognized as prefigured in the opening sections of Birth of Tragedy.  So, though Nietzsche himself does not use "exuberance", it illuminates how, in several respects, his Vitalism is a pivotal principle.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Dionysus and Will to Live

Nietzsche is often interpreted as beginning as a follower of Schopenhauer, but eventually turning against him, by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and, perhaps, as early as Human, All Too Human.  The primary basis for that interpretation  is the enthusiasm for Music in Birth of Tragedy that he shares with his predecessor, which tends to encourage the interpretation that his Dionysian principle is his correlate of Schopenhauer's Will.  However, Dionysus is also the god of fertility, the rites of which are a dimension of the festivals in that name, whereas Schopenhauer's Will is, more precisely, the Will to Live, from which he seeks detachment.  So, not later, but at the very outset, Nietzsche opposes Life-Denial with Life-Affirmation, i. e. repudiates Schopenhauer immediately.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Deity, Perfection, Creation

Remaining unexplained in the traditional concept of a perfect creator is the process of creation beyond it.  Furthermore, insofar as, as is generally held to be the case, creatures are inferior to creator, i. e. are imperfect, the process of creation can only be one of ontological diminishment.  In contrast, though Schopenhauer appreciates it as such less than Nietzsche does, the jettisoning of that creator as a Life-Principle, and replacing it with the Species, entails a liberation from that two-fold onus of Perfection.  In other words, the creative process can henceforth be explained as the Growth of pecies, i. e. as an increase both numerically and ontologically.  Likewise, though Schopenhauer experiences that process as a depressing imposition, Nietzsche is elevated by the exuberance.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Will to Live and Principle of Individuation

According to Schopenhauer, the Will to Live is real, while the Individual is irreal in some respect--either a mere appearance, or an illusion, depending on the context.  That dichotomy leaves the status of his Principle of Individuation unsettled, i. e. Individuality may be irreal, but a Principle is real.  Now, one resolution of that antithesis is one that is occasionally implicit in some of his passages, and is sometimes made explicit by Nietzsche--the need for illusions.  Regardless, Schopenhauer does not seem to consider that a Species propagates itself by reproducing itself.  In other words, the Will to Live and the Principle of Individuation are one and the same for a Species.  So, a generally unrecognized innovation of Schopenhauer's system is that it grounds the Principle of Individuation, a difficult problem in a system the basis of which is a self-sufficient entity, e. g. Leibniz', which does not explain why there is something other than his deity, rather than nothing else.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Individual, Species, Appearance, Reality

According to Schopenhauer, the World as Will is distinct from the World as Representation, and Individuals inhabit only the latter.  It follows that descriptive Egoism is false.  For, whatever motivates an Individual is a principle that transcends Individuality, or, put otherwise, since the 'self' is a mere appearance, then so, too, is 'self'-interest.  Now, the Egoist can easily respond that Individuation, and, therefore, Selfhood, is real.  Still, that rejoinder does not consider that a clear demonstration of the mere appearance of an Egoist experience is that of any phase of any of the reproductive processes, e. g. sexual excitation, which, though localized in an Individual, is a Species-principle.  So, if one such experience is mere appearance, then, as follows from Schopenhauer's model, any might be.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Monad, Windows, Species

In another of Leibniz' famous images, he describes a Monad as having "no windows through which anything can enter or depart".  Now, just by imagistic logic alone, 'windowlessness' and 'mirror' suggest a significant inconsistency in his concept of a Monad, plus, the former seems to render his ambition of universal communication vain.  But, to be as charitable as possible, in this case, the absolute internality of the entelechy of a Monad is comparable to that of the conatus of Spinoza's Mode.  Furthermore, DNA can be similarly characterized as windowless, insofar as it sufficiently determines the development of an organism.  Still, genetic make-up is received from other organisms, and includes constituents that are common to all members of its species.  So, similarly, having "no windows" does not preclude that the Life-principle of a Monad is that of the Species.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Individual, Species, Atomism

The traditional depreciation of the human species is clearly delineated in what is perhaps the least traditional of systems--Spinoza's.  For, in the latter, the Mode, i. e. his version of an individual human, can transcend solidarity with other Modes, to a direct relation with God/Nature.  Furthermore, entailed in that relation is the possibilty of the immortality of the Idea of that Mode, i. e. of Spinoza's version of the traditional concept of the Immortality of the individual Soul, a possibilty that plainly violates his thesis of Mind-Body Parallelism.  So, the rigor of even this system is subordinated to an Atomism, in which the Individual is more fundamental than the Species.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Optimism, Pessimism, Species

According to Leibniz, knowledge that this is the best of all possible worlds redeems human suffering.  However, he does not seem to address one the fundamental, according to the theological tradition of which he is a part, sources of suffering--the divine condemnation of the race to the process of propagation, as recounted in Genesis 3.  In contrast, Schopenhauer does address it, implicitly, at least, in his counterpoint to Leibniz' optimism.   For, the source of his Pessimism--the submission of the Individual to the reproductive Will to Live--reflects one of the consequences of the denial of the existence of Leibniz' deity--the possibility of an escape from that submission via divine salvation.  At the same time, Schopenhauer thus brings into relief that the Species is a cardinal concept even prior to the elevation of it to prominence by Marx and Darwin.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Optimism and Pessimism

Leibniz is sometimes characterized as an 'optimist' on the basis of his contention that it is possible for an individual to become happy by attaining the knowledge that, despite appearances, this is a perfect, divinely ordered, universe.  So, even though his immediate target is Hegel, by advocating Pessimism, Schopenhauer is, nominally at least, Leibniz' most prominent opponent.  However, the contrast is not quite isomorphic, and, furthermore, the labelling obscures a more significant divergence.  They do agree that there is a lot of suffering in human experience, though Schopenhauer becomes hyperbolic about its degree, whence his generalization of it as a source of Pessimism.  But, unlike Leibniz, he rejects the redeeming grounds for Optimism, since, according to him, the noumenal realm is not one of divinely rational harmony, but is the blind Will to Live.  Now, Nietzsche subsequently shows that Pessimism is not inherent in the latter, rather is merely a contingent response to it, an analysis that can be extended to Leibniz' Optimism.  So, stripped of these extrinsic judgments, the substantive distinction between the two systems is that the species has supplanted a deity as the noumenal being.

Monday, April 4, 2016

World, Species, Practice

The universe may be a creation of Leibniz' deity, but at least some of the universe of which a Monad is a mirror is not.  Rather, except in some very rare cases, at least some of the objects of a Monad's perception are products of human endeavor, maybe even that of specifically that Monad.  So, a more accurate use of 'mirror' to characterize human experience is--the World is a mirror of the Practice of the Species.  By contrast, Leibniz' formulation seems like a glorification of the passivity of the individual Monad, rather than that of the creativity of his deity, and rather than that of the creativity of both individual and deity in Spinoza's system.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Pre-Established Harmony and Division of Labor

In his denial of the existence of Innate Ideas, Locke bypasses another disputable ascription to an a prior condition by Leibniz.  For, the implicit premise of his Political Philosophy--that the organization that he advocates is beneficial to human society--rejects the thesis of a Pre-established Harmony.  Likewise, Voltaire misses part of the mark in Candide.  For, Leibniz' thesis that this is the "best of all possible worlds" presupposes that it is fundamentally harmonious, another condition to which the Lisbon earthquake can be cited as a counter-example.  But, a perhaps more focused rejoinder to Leibniz is implicit in the benefits of a Division of Labor, the devising of which would not be necessary if Leibniz were correct.  While such organization might not disprove the existence of a pre-established harmony, any need for it demonstrates the limited scope of that a priori condition, i. e. it does not extend to the human-made world.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Universe and Mirror

Perhaps anticipating Gestalt theory, according to which one constructs one's perceptual field, Kant's Copernican Revolution inverts Leibniz' thesis that one is a "mirror of the universe".  Bergson and Heidegger each develop the concept of one's world as a reflection of one in a Practical direction, i. e. one's world is "ready-to-hand", as the latter puts it, suggesting that Perception, and, hence, its objects, is conditioned by Action.  But, perhaps the most conclusive inversion of Leibniz' formulation is implicit in Hegel's concept of Recognition, in which one recognizes oneself in the accomplishments of one's Labor, a concept which very likely influences Marx.  For, any modification of one's environment is a mirror of one, and one is surrounded by such modifications in the most mundane ways.

Friday, April 1, 2016

Grasp, Mathematics, Logic

A grasp by a hand can completely contain an object.  Now, the process of Counting is not a transition from one item to another, but a cumulation.  In other words, a higher number contains a lower number.  Furthermore, a contained object can itself contain an object, in which case, the latter is also within a grasp.  So, derivable from physiological Grasp are both Mathematics, i. e. all operations are modes of Counting, and Logic, i. e. the fundamental pattern of which is: if A contains B, and B contains C, then A contains C.  Thus, what are traditionally classified as 'pure' mental processes can be derived from manual Grasp.