This post is not to be taken overly seriously. It is an over-simplified approach to Lacanian thought. I take him as the 'other' against whom I measure my argument but it does no justice to the complexity of his performance. I write performance because I cannot take him seriously as a formal thinker but only as a poet or life-dramatist arising out of the surrealist tradition. My contribution is thus necessarily merely playful and provocative despite its formalism.
Are we captured by our environment? Do we create an image of ourselves designed to allow us to operate in the world? This is Lacan's early insight - that, whether he is precisely right about its origins in our condition of coming into the world, persons construct imaginary selves to navigate reality.
The Invention of Reality
The imagined self is to all intents and purposes our reality - it is our operating system. Our self-constructed imagination of the world merely gives us imaginary selves to test out new ways of dealing with our environment. The imagined self may be functionally and pragmatically 'real' but it is not the whole story of our body's relationship to reality.
Freud and Lacan, by observation and experimentation, saw that this imagined self would see reality as material or social fact at one level but then re-interpret it with narratives that were somewhat false. The conclusion drawn was that persons need coherence and completeness in preference to truth whenever the truth is neither coherent or complete.
Falsehoods to oneself and others are thus the very stuff of humanity. It is the imagined self of the other that is the person that we will have deal with. No imagined self is a reliable guide to the world or to its own full self - Anton Wilson's biogram. It is a projection, a performance, an actor or actress.
We can re-interpret this eighty years on by considering the piecemeal nature of our sensory inputs (as increasingly revealed by neuro-science) and the instant subconscious choices that create coherence out of fragmented reality as we create our own sense of 'reality'. The self is building an interpretation of reality out of its own expectations and templated choices.
Becoming Paranoid
Barriers to reality (what actually exists 'out there') are thus two-fold - the choices made by sensory inputs (which may have strong genetic elements) and the construction of reality out of the sensory inputs (which is redraft of a previous mental draft and so dependent upon its own past). Without a conscious redraft, our mental text originates from the one with which we were born and which has had overlaid upon it all the cultural and social habits that Anton Wilson calls the logogram.
Paranoia arises when our mental text (and our description of the world is linguistic and not merely experienced) begins to redraft sensory inputs in a radical way to avoid any creative redrafting that would return us back to a right understanding of both ourselves and the world. Investment in the original mental text has become so great that reality must now change to save the text - the imagined self spins off into insanity.
In the most extreme cases, the mental text becomes the world - which perhaps is analogous to those social insanities where texts become the world for whole societies. Personal madness is the ideology of an imagined self taking charge of reality dysfunctionally just as social madness is ideology dictating social action, perhaps in excess of invented functionality. This will be dealt with below.
Lacan suggested that human knowledge itself was 'paranoiac'. He was sociologically right insofar as defining existence imposes boundaries on existence, an ordering of existence, that detaches the knower from existence itself. However, this is not a value judgement just an observation.
The Rationality of Madness
Lacan's greatest insight was perhaps to point out that madness is perfectly rational once certain understandings are in place, much as ideology is perfectly rational once you accept certain initial absurdities (such as God or scientific materialism or the 'war on women') and then link real phenomena to what is presented in the world in the light of these absurdities.
Madness is always logical in this sense. The relationship between the body (which is detached from the imagined self or ego) and the sub-conscious - an insight of Reich in his work on body armour - brings the body back into consideration as a sign and signal of not only physical but mental pain. The logic is far more hidden in neurosis than psychosis but it is there.
A physical pain might be interpreted as a mental signal that is seeking from the imagined self some reconsideration of its own mental drafting. The conditions of such a pain (if not organic) give profound clues to the nature of any redrafting of reality that is required to bring the body back into line with a workable imagined self.
Language in this respect is a mediator so that physical pain and the subconscious use of language are all appeals to the desire that the 'text' refuses to recognise. These are words that are demanding to be included in our text instead of being left to the side unused.
Language
Words and images provide a data bank for analogy - much as magical thinking uses language and imagery analogically to build alternate realities where people have more control, at least imaginatively, of their lives. This data bank can be plundered to hold the line against internal rigidities and stop the march to full paranoid detachment.
Whenever external texts are used - whether for the person or the society - we are seeing the half-way house of near-madness that we referred to in a previous posting, that point where texts and words are used both to protect society or the individual from their own true nature and to suggest adaptations to make things tolerable but not 'true to themselves'.
The words are thus never the thing, never the person and never representative of the human condition, but the free play of words permits an entity the opportunity to assert some value that is more in accord with reality (as society or person) than the imagined and constructed self of ego or ideology.
Words, gestures and images are our first line of defence (if they are our words and not the words of others) but they are also a 'false friend' because they compromise from the start with the very nature of ideology to set terms on the permissibility of our language and with the imagined self whose adaptations are to be constructed almost entirely out of inherited words and images - references back to something 'golden' that should have have been rather than what is if we were only to look and see.
Alienation
Language is at the heart of our alienation as persons. Language gets in the way of us being who we are even as it is the most effective tool for our being able to function in the world with and against others. Every time we are defined by ourselves or others, we lose something of our complex selves. Every time we define, we insult the complexity of the other person and mislead ourselves about the nature of social reality. The social sciences are the sciences of misleading ourselves in a disciplined way.
Nevertheless, the point about words is that they are not a simple matter of relationship between signifier and signified but that each word is a connection to other words which connect ad infinitum into the past. The tension between the ego-draft (or social-draft or ideology) and the alternate possible draft that each use of language implies is profound.
Every dissident thought within a society that is expressed in words has revolutionary potential because it offers an alternate reality to the 'given' draft. Every imaginative rethinking of reality has the same potential for the liberation of the individual. Reality is symbolic. Art and magic are ways in which people attempt to circumvent language but even they are, like poetry, evasions, failures to look language in the eye and challenge its domination of us.
But, and this is where madness comes into the frame, a dissident thought or imaginative rethinking of reality that is not in accord with objective physical and relational reality beyond the social and beyond the individual is in danger of replacing the 'zombie' conditions of the ideological-social or the socialised person with a form of madness. Which makes us ask - what is madness under such conditions?
What is Madness?
The reality of madness as a biological and so physical reality, making people dysfunctional in the world and often deeply frightened and miserable, cannot be dismissed. In the individual, such madness debilitates and destroys but, in a society, it creates either an alternate ideological 'reality' (a false reality) or a form of free-floating paranoia which is where we may be heading in a rootless cosmopolitan globalised society where the ideology is to have no ideology other than distrust.
In 1968, Lacan famously said to the students: "I won't mince my words. What you want is another master". Perhaps he remembered Kojeve's lectures on Hegel and the master-slave dialectic but the point is well taken. To remove one ideological framework is to imply its replacement or collapse rather than paradise - to be liberated from a thesis, the ideologue feels he must enslave himself to the antithesis. This is no liberation, just a swapping of seats.
This gives us a clue to how we may handle symbolic reality whether as persons or as a society. The answer is a somewhat trans-human one because it suggests a conscious awareness of one's symbolic history and an active acceptance or rejection of its components rather than the assumption of it as a whole that is intrinsically right and proper.
If we learn who we are because of the defining of oneself in language by others, then, if we become that definition, we are no longer who we are to ourselves but a creation of history and the social. If we are not comfortable with this then, despite the claims of the Hegelian 'realists', we have a choice to rewrite history, redraw social relations and redefine ourselves. Our future is not cast in stone - we can re-make it through resistance to the texts that define us.
The Hidden 'Other'
This may involve asking whether significant others are oppressive or supportive and ruthlessly rejecting those who stereotype or define us to meet their own needs and not ours. The same culling may take place in the acceptance or rejection of ideas or pleasures. Why do we go to Church if it gives us nothing? Why vote if it changes nothing?
This is where Lacanian insights are useful when the question is asked to whom you are appealing when you act in a such-and-such way. If you go to church, who are you going to church for? If you vote, who are you voting for (not in terms of the candidate but the 'hidden watcher' who helped create your symbolic universe)? What are these habits and what secret anxieties to they hide?
It cuts both ways. If you ostentatiously do not go to Church or vote, who are you ostentatiously trying to tell that you do not go to church or vote? Language as change presupposes some 'other' to which talk or speech is directed. How to stop speaking to the other and engage in a conversation with your secret self does not say you will or should go to church or vote or not but it will bring the decisons into line with who you are and should be to yourself. For the record, I don't go to church and only intermittently vote when I feel it is important.
The paradox in personal and political language is that language as ego-construction and ideology blocks off reality but linguistic expression appears to be the only means of effecting any change to social conditions or to the person. We cannot live without language but the world in which it is our master and the world in which it is consciously used as our tool or weapon are very different.
The Intellectual and the Other
This applies as much to culture and politics as personal relations. One speaks if not to an identifiable other then to an 'other' who serves as reason for speech. The radical intellectual is speaking to no one that he sees while writing his article nor to every person who may read it but is speaking to an imaginary interlocutor who is a projection of himself. He is trying to order the world because he feels the need for order in himself.
After a while, the functional nature of the intellectual, as of the person, coalesces around this symbolic other who is really an avatar of himself. Indeed, with modern communications technology, we have avatars of the self speaking to yet other avatars of the self in order to communicate with the wider universe. The multiplication of self-avatars represents the very essence of a new phenomenon - the virtual society mediated by the internet.
Beyond all this lies the 'real' which might be confused with the existentialists' Existence but which is really that which lies between Existence and our own symbolic and imagined personal or social realities. It is that which is there, including the material effects of other men's dreamings, but which is not articulated to be there - it is the dark matter of being and it comprises most of our world.
We only know it is there when we consider the possibility of its being there or notice the lack behind what we see or experience as there. Perhaps its non-existence in our minds is what makes us into zombies because only non-zombies can see what exists as a function of what is not there (as a 'lack').
The Ineluctability of Political Persons
The Lacanian distrust of the 'I' statement is critical here. When someone says that they approve or disapprove of military action against (say) Syria (under conditions where their opinion matters not one jot to the action itself), then the assertion is an expression not so much of the 'I' but of something behind the 'I'.
This helps to explain one of the great truths of Facebook - no matter how much reasoning is employed, most persons most of the time 'stick with their position'. The 'position' is derived from something beyond access to new reasoning and that derivation is almost certainly embedded in some 'other' that is being identified as essential to identity.
To some extent social intelligence can be defined by the looseness of this identity - we have all seen the 'vulnerable' personality who scuttles from a robust Facebook Group debate because they think a critique of the existence of God or a questioning of the existence of patriarchy is a personal attack on them. They feel bullied because they have weak identities while their opponents are often just secure in their ability not only to challenge but to be challenged.
These 'weak identities' are matched by weak identities who are bullies - people who cannot argue through the logosphere but must attack the person. Both types - the weak and the bullies - tend to get exuded by the strong in free debate and, as in 'real life', the weak seek protective regulation to buttress their weak identities and the bullies seek regulation to enforce their world view on others.
Persons and societies will always be divided in these ways in all possible human worlds because persons and societies not only have multiple perspectives in themselves but societies have the multiple perspectives of multiple persons. The person who is militaristic may live inside a person who is socialist without any awareness of the rational problem of both existing together. Almost any set of rationalising variations is possible even if the vast majority fall into easy to accept categories that make life easier for themselves.
The ego will readily rationalise all this into something that passes for reasonable but, in doing so, it will redefine its terms to allow it to undertake this mental legerdemain and, in doing so, become more resistant than ever to reasonable criticism - precisely because the structure they have created is a paradigm that cannot afford any cracks. Like madness - as we have seen - political ideologies are always perfectly logical in their absurdities.
Ideologies
An ideology like Marxism, for example, might go through the process whereby a core inherited belief (say, the withering away of the State) and the actual practice of power require a rigid totalitarianism to hold them together. The personality type that holds together incompatible propositions by its nature is likely to feel happiest in an authoritarian ideology of this type.
The more internal contradictions in relation to the messiness of the real world, the more the collapse into Authority. The difference between the authoritarian and the liberated is, thus, the difference between seeing the accumulated history of one's situation as a 'given' to be managed or as an opportunity for further change and experience.
Institutionalisation, with its body of inherited codes and behaviours, represents both the paradise of the authoritarian and the hell of the libertarian. The first, desperate to extend order over reality, tries to impose church, state, party, marriage and law on the latter. The latter is often disadvantaged because there is no will to put in place the organisational structures required for their own survival.
This is not to say that institutional organisation is not necessary to undertake functional tasks (like provide clean water or get a plane to fly) but only that there is a difference between creating functionality for individual will or pleasure and creating functionality for symbolic representation. The challenge for the anarcho-libertarian is how to create sufficient organisation (an innoculation, if you like) against the virus of authoritarianism - and it is a challenge generally evaded and a fight generally lost from naivete and incompetence.
Markets & Love
The market brokers functionality for individual will or pleasure but the existence of authoritarians and libertarians alongside each other in the market makes the market problematic. Libertarians are rarely equal in political or cultural purchasing power - and so societies like persons are perpetually conflicted or else sclerotic.
Authoritarian obsessionalism in societies and persons tends to a living self-mortification just as a libertarian curiosity about the 'other' (a perpetual desire for the new) might lead to neurosis if the understanding of what is actually going on in the desire is limited.
It may seem odd to introduce the idea of love or desire into the discussion at this point but it is the relationship to desire that defines our accommodation to this world. The point about desire and love is that demand is never able to be satisfied once that path is chosen.
This is very disturbing to some people. It results in an unconscious denial of desire (the impulse of the so-called 'great religions' which are at the heart of the institutionalisation of culture) which, of course, is worse than acceptance of desire because it denies not the possibility of fulfilment of desire but the fact of desire itself - absurd because it is human to desire.
Displacement of Desire
Displacement of desire may result in fetishism in the person but it also has social effects in the displacement into an obsessive interest, without functional value in terms of direct acquisition of resources or power or participation as an individual, in politics or culture or sport. Above all, it tends to voyeurism or exhibitionism.
These are displaced desires for actual power or participation and are as absurd as fetishism - yet wholly necessary for those who have not been able to fulfil their desires 'in action' so to speak without the crutch of observing and commentating on the performance of others.
But if anything explains the persistent anxiety of the thinking person, it is this - the inability never to know what the mysterious other truly wants. Not knowing what the mysterious other - woman, self, interlocutor - wants is the source of passion and creativity but also anxiety, depression and indecision.
As Lacan pointed out in the 1950s, all desire has fetishistic qualities insofar as all attraction is to the components of the desired as much as to the whole of a person - a preference for redheads, say, over any other hair colour. The desire for love may be unconditional but love is directed very conditionally despite claims to the contrary. There is always something specific being desired whose direct expression is usually being avoided or evaded.
Sex and Existence
It is uncovering our real desires without the need for displacement which is interesting because we are all embedded in a world where there is no language and so no social order that can deal with sex or the fact of existence.
The only step we can take is to capture language for ourselves regardless of the effects on others. Take: 'I love you'. This is now so socially embedded in its multiple meanings that it is difficult to say for many people. There is an anxiety about misunderstanding. So, something important is often never expressed. Instead of taking the risk of saying it and then exploring the meaning through action in the world, it remains a phrase that festers in the hearts of the meek.
One approach might be to recapture this and other phrases by stating them regardless of the anxiety, shifting responsibility for the anxiety to the other person. Does this seem cruel? Not at all because the other person is free to make what they wish of the language and reject or accept on their terms - and so things can move forward. The 'sayer' simply has to accept the risk of rejection and 'rejection fear' is at the very heart of human cowardice and leads directly back to the easy fall into the jackboot and the uniform. 'Belong me into order', the frightened human rabbit says.
This is a revolutionary reversal of traditional modes in society. Instead of allowing anxiety and rational argument to thwart desire out of fear of consequences, the default position becomes the expression of desire and the acceptance of consequences. Ours may be the first non-aristocratic society where that is possible - in theory.
Final Linguistic Trickery
However, desire has become associated in our culture with an authoritarian notion of 'sin' and controlling desire has come to be an 'ethical' position yet it is quite possible, indeed probable, that 'sin' actually lies in an unnecessary state of anxiety and the failure to communicate and that the relief of tension involved in expressing desire will result in ethical consequences.
Remember - this is linguistic trickery. The revealing of desire is not the acting out of desire. Saying 'I love you' or 'I hate you' is not rape ... words are not actions, a proposition very difficult for modern liberal totalitarians to understand. To say, we repeat, is not to do - words are not things in the world. Assuming consensuality, the desire might then be acted out but the consensual nature of human relations is a given here. The expression of desire must include this courage to accept rejection.
To communicate desire and accept the consequences of rejection is truly revolutionary. It enables learning - both to find new ways to express desire and to adapt to others' different ideas of desire. It stands against authority and the 'other' as arbiter of anxiety and it enables the libertarian to draw a line in the sand against both the authoritarian and the weakness of liberal fears, against both the rat and the mouse.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Libertarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Libertarianism. Show all posts
Saturday 13 December 2014
Sunday 30 November 2014
For Discussion - Ten Preliminary Propositions for Living Decently
I have never liked commandments, never accepted the claims of authority but only those of evidence-based persuasion or my own assessment of the situation but, given that we are unconsciously fixed in our social condition by commandments created in the Iron Age for an Iron Age order, what alternative suggestions might we have.
These ten suggestions are here for discussion only - not provided on high by a charismatic man with horns on his head but simply as attempts at creating codes of common decency to challenge those of inherited traditionalist oppression whether by Popes or Kings.
1. Your rights exist only to the degree that you respect the rights of others. Rights are for all or for none. Otherwise, a demand for rights is no more than a tool or a weapon in a struggle for power. The primary right is always the right to autonomy and self-determination. The good society merely attempts to give meaning to the equalisation for all of that primary right.
2. Live beyond inherited or socially given constructions of identity based on gender, sexual orientation, claimed ethnicity, social status or class. It is not that all are equal or can be made equal within the commonwealth but the first choice of who you are should be yours and not others. To accept a fixed identity that was not freely chosen by yourself with full information to hand is to oppress oneself.
3. A child is your responsibility if you make one. This means their health, their education and their happiness. If you bring a child into your household by whatever means or join a household with children, you take on this duty for them as if they were your own. This duty extends to the maintenance of the household with others with the same duty of care but it does not mean submission to them.You have not abandoned the primary right and can withdraw if your good will is abused.
4. No-one is a burden to society. Everyone is society whether they like it or not. This does not mean society cannot have some practical expectations - that it does not pay for the free rider or expect that each person does his or her utmost to be a strong and free agent - but the starting point is that a person cannot be bullied into freedom but only encouraged or even, in hard cases, managed into freedom.
5. No belief justifies violating the rights of others and if it does, then you are an enemy of the commonwealth. This applies to every organised religion, ideology or personal opinion. Since the primary right is the right to autonomy and self determination, all authoritarians are enemies of the people. This is not an argument against freely chosen traditionalism within a free society but it is an argument against imposing traditionalism on others - including and especially children.
6. Live life to the full on this earth but with sincerity in words, deeds and love against the unwarranted claims of others so that heaven is made potential, if rarely actual, in each day of a life lived fully. Expect nothing after death.
7. Try and avoid becoming part of the mass unless for brief communal pleasures. The theatre, the football match and the orgy are one thing, immersion into movements, belief systems and totalising communities are another. Neither peers nor the deciders of fashion can tell you who you are and your uniqueness is your greatest contribution to the social.
8. Defend yourself and your property but leave justice and punishment to the commonwealth. If the commonwealth is unjust, make sure you participate in making it just by giving a strong opinion and organising to remove injustice when it becomes intolerable. The magistrates rule by no right other than our agreement to their administration of justice and may be disposed of if they fail at any time. This right of resistance is absolute no matter what the forms or claims of the governing class - the question is only whether resistance can succeed or not against often superior forces.
9. If you cannot treat the social with respect even if it is weak or inadequate, walk away from it but don't despise it. It has its reasons and its purposes - to maintain order without which freedom cannot exist, to defend against predators and so on. To despise the social is to despise humanity - which is fine except that none of us can escape being human ... tragically perhaps but that is how it is.
10. Do everything you desire but harm no-one in doing it. There is no need to be over-protective of others at one's own expense but any strategy that constrains their self-creation or takes no account of their vulnerabilities as much as your self creation and vulnerabilities is an evil strategy. All relationships are constant negotiations between free individuals so society's interest is limited to creating the conditions for freedom and restoring balance when an evident oppression takes place. Let love drive us but a love beholden to science, reason and respect for the unconscious animal within us all.
You might class this as a conservative libertarianism with social-radical characteristics in the implicit call for active social intervention to equalise the primary right to autonomy and explicit acceptance of the right of resistance to incompetent and malicious authority.
These ten suggestions are here for discussion only - not provided on high by a charismatic man with horns on his head but simply as attempts at creating codes of common decency to challenge those of inherited traditionalist oppression whether by Popes or Kings.
1. Your rights exist only to the degree that you respect the rights of others. Rights are for all or for none. Otherwise, a demand for rights is no more than a tool or a weapon in a struggle for power. The primary right is always the right to autonomy and self-determination. The good society merely attempts to give meaning to the equalisation for all of that primary right.
2. Live beyond inherited or socially given constructions of identity based on gender, sexual orientation, claimed ethnicity, social status or class. It is not that all are equal or can be made equal within the commonwealth but the first choice of who you are should be yours and not others. To accept a fixed identity that was not freely chosen by yourself with full information to hand is to oppress oneself.
3. A child is your responsibility if you make one. This means their health, their education and their happiness. If you bring a child into your household by whatever means or join a household with children, you take on this duty for them as if they were your own. This duty extends to the maintenance of the household with others with the same duty of care but it does not mean submission to them.You have not abandoned the primary right and can withdraw if your good will is abused.
4. No-one is a burden to society. Everyone is society whether they like it or not. This does not mean society cannot have some practical expectations - that it does not pay for the free rider or expect that each person does his or her utmost to be a strong and free agent - but the starting point is that a person cannot be bullied into freedom but only encouraged or even, in hard cases, managed into freedom.
5. No belief justifies violating the rights of others and if it does, then you are an enemy of the commonwealth. This applies to every organised religion, ideology or personal opinion. Since the primary right is the right to autonomy and self determination, all authoritarians are enemies of the people. This is not an argument against freely chosen traditionalism within a free society but it is an argument against imposing traditionalism on others - including and especially children.
6. Live life to the full on this earth but with sincerity in words, deeds and love against the unwarranted claims of others so that heaven is made potential, if rarely actual, in each day of a life lived fully. Expect nothing after death.
7. Try and avoid becoming part of the mass unless for brief communal pleasures. The theatre, the football match and the orgy are one thing, immersion into movements, belief systems and totalising communities are another. Neither peers nor the deciders of fashion can tell you who you are and your uniqueness is your greatest contribution to the social.
8. Defend yourself and your property but leave justice and punishment to the commonwealth. If the commonwealth is unjust, make sure you participate in making it just by giving a strong opinion and organising to remove injustice when it becomes intolerable. The magistrates rule by no right other than our agreement to their administration of justice and may be disposed of if they fail at any time. This right of resistance is absolute no matter what the forms or claims of the governing class - the question is only whether resistance can succeed or not against often superior forces.
9. If you cannot treat the social with respect even if it is weak or inadequate, walk away from it but don't despise it. It has its reasons and its purposes - to maintain order without which freedom cannot exist, to defend against predators and so on. To despise the social is to despise humanity - which is fine except that none of us can escape being human ... tragically perhaps but that is how it is.
10. Do everything you desire but harm no-one in doing it. There is no need to be over-protective of others at one's own expense but any strategy that constrains their self-creation or takes no account of their vulnerabilities as much as your self creation and vulnerabilities is an evil strategy. All relationships are constant negotiations between free individuals so society's interest is limited to creating the conditions for freedom and restoring balance when an evident oppression takes place. Let love drive us but a love beholden to science, reason and respect for the unconscious animal within us all.
You might class this as a conservative libertarianism with social-radical characteristics in the implicit call for active social intervention to equalise the primary right to autonomy and explicit acceptance of the right of resistance to incompetent and malicious authority.
Monday 5 May 2014
Consciousness Studies, Degenerate Liberalism & 'Libertarian Socialism'
The amount of work on consciousness in academic scientific and philosophical circles has probably never been more intense. Yet every participant in the debate on what it is and how it works agrees that nothing has been resolved. Some (such as Colin McGinn) plausibly claim that we will probably never know what it is.
Mind & Language
Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.
There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.
As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.
Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.
Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.
Convergent Theories
This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.
Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.
The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.
The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.
The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.
Cartesianism Crumbles
The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.
All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.
The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.
The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.
Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.
Monistic Dualism?
The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.
Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.
As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.
Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.
Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.
Implication
Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.
It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.
The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.
Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.
This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.
Bats & Humans
In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.
The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.
But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.
This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.
The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).
The Uniqueness of Persons
However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.
Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.
A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.
Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.
Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.
The Failure of the Enlightenment
This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.
The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.
The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.
The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system
There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).
What Not To Do
One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.
The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.
But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.
Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.
Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.
Why The Elite Cannot Cope
Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.
But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.
The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.
The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.
The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.
The Problem of the Intellectual
The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.
Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!
These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.
Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.
The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.
Being Aware of Being Aware
This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.
Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.
Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.
The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.
Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.
The Dark Side
The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.
Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.
The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.
More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.
I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.
The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'
Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.
Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).
Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.
But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Perspectives
Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]
This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives.
Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.
The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.
Conclusion
What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.
Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.
Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.
We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.
Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
Mind & Language
Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.
There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.
As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.
Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.
Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.
Convergent Theories
This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.
Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.
The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.
The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.
The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.
Cartesianism Crumbles
The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.
All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.
The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.
The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.
Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.
Monistic Dualism?
The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.
Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.
As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.
Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.
Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.
Implication
Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.
It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.
The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.
Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.
This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.
Bats & Humans
In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.
The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.
But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.
This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.
The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).
The Uniqueness of Persons
However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.
Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.
A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.
Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.
Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.
The Failure of the Enlightenment
This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.
The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.
The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.
The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system
There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).
What Not To Do
One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.
The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.
But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.
Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.
Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.
Why The Elite Cannot Cope
Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.
But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.
The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.
The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.
The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.
The Problem of the Intellectual
The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.
Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!
These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.
Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.
The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.
Being Aware of Being Aware
This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.
Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.
Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.
The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.
Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.
The Dark Side
The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.
Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.
The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.
More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.
I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.
The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'
Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.
Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).
Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.
But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Perspectives
Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]
This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives.
Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.
The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.
Conclusion
What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.
Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.
Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.
We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.
Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
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