Nietzsche Tells A Truth ...

 Nietzsche being both a truth-teller and depressing ...

" ... ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family, groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches), and always very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command - considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practised and cultivated among men better or longer than OBEDIENCE, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of FORMAL CONSCIENCE which commands: 'Thou shalt not unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that, in short 'Thou shalt''.

" This need seeks to be satisfied and to fill out its forms with a content: in doing so it grasps about wildly, according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts what any commander - parent, teacher, law, class prejudice, public opinion - shouts in its ears."

From Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Reflections on Personal Identity

The common Western idea of personal identity has depended on continuity of memory since John Locke and is a central element in English individualism. This was contrasted with ‘mere’ bodily continuity, with mind and body firmly separated, which was assisted by another notion – that mind was associated with a ‘soul’ which had some being or continuity beyond the body after it had died (or even outside the body, while the latter was still functioning separately, in some schools of thought).

This idea of a continuity beyond death, based on a separation of body and mind, is still held by many people as a matter of faith. It gives psychological comfort to some but it has not been demonstrated as ‘true’ (scientifically probable). It is a possibilian concept. Continuity of memory, however, is a different kettle of fish. Since Locke’s day, we have seen ‘scientific’, certainly suggestive theoretical, evidence that conscious memory, accumulated in layers of perception and constantly constructing the ‘self’, is only a small part of the story.

We have Freud’s postulate of the unconscious to contend with but also growing evidence that the historic genetically constructed structures of the brain construct both our perceptions and the selection and holding of those perceptions in such a way that memory becomes a very slippery matter in its relation to what actually happened even in the moments before it is formed. Memory is not just the accumulation of perceptions into a form of identity but the unwitting selection of perceptions, one that relies on discontinuities, redrafts and revisions that are built-in to the ‘person’ by their genetic and experiential history.

There may be an inability to perceive some things or a determination to forget in the context of trauma or some other need. If personal identity is memory then that personal identity is not smoothly constructed in many cases but is a partly wilful and partly unconscious creation which involves as much forgetting as remembering. This is not incompatible with, say, the metaphysics of Nietzsche to the effect that we can be nothing other than we are and that we are doomed to repeat ourselves eternally.

The ‘will to power’ (in his sense) of an organism that integrates body and mind into a being that is also integrated into raw existence can easily accommodate the idea that we are not conscious of the discontinuities as well as conscious of the apparent continuities in our identity. Indeed, the mix of conscious and wilful (or apparently so) change in ourselves with part-conscious (or illusory) and with unconscious (or biological or environmental) changes to the forms by which our perception is structured is in greater accord with Nietzsche’s existentialism than with Locke’s gentlemanly English liberalism.

Modern psychologists are only the professional end of a truth universally recognised by most of us who can see the world in a critical way – that memory is as often false as not and so, by extension, that our personal identities are ‘false’ constructions that: a) depend on our body’s and earlier mind’s determination of what should be perceived and then held for future use; and b) are what that same mind should unconsciously choose to forget or bury deep in the process of creating the present which we can then call our ‘self’ at any one time.

Memory, in short, is not all that personal identity is but is only its expression to our consciousness. Placing the possibility of existence beyond the body to one side, our personal identity may be a memory at each point in our life but that memory is possibly false and our personal identity is probably false if we believe it to be true without further questioning. By a paradox, if we know and believe our memory and identity to be ‘false’, it becomes more ‘true’ (yes, truth can be relative here) because the entry of the thought of a false memory as possibility, even probability under certain conditions, gives us the opportunity to choose to be ‘critical’, that is either to accept our personal identity as ‘true’ for us in its falsity as an act of will and freedom (insofar as we can ever be free) or to investigate, critically, what may be false in order to make ourselves more ‘true’.

We are not valuing the ‘true’ here as the ‘good’ – being ‘true’ is merely defined as according with objective or at least scientifically validated reality. Being in accord with objective reality has no necessary relationship in itself with the value of ‘good’ but that is another debate.  Personal identity, in fact, is never anything other than ‘true’ in value terms because it is ‘true’ to the person that has that identity. The ‘falsity’ arises only when the person perceives a ‘falsity’ themselves in what they had held to be true, hence the argument in this note – that realisation of ‘falsity’ requires a new ‘truth’ or new identity formulation even if this is a reaffirmation of the ‘falsity’ as ‘truth’. In this way, once we understand that Locke’s assertion that personal identity is memory is to be taken as a truism of sorts, but one without much relationship to the objective truth of our condition in the world – that is, that ‘false memory’ means ‘false identity’ in any terms that are not totally subjective to the person and so represents more or less of a disconnect between persons and their world – then we can rethink that position in the world

This must generally result in one of three responses – denial, conscious reaffirmation of the given or critical investigation of the self.  Let us pause here and say that no value judgement can be ascribed to any of these responses. The denial that a person is anything other than memory, even if the memory (say) includes the assertion that the person was once Emperor of France when all the external evidence points to this not being case, is a legitimate human response to their condition in the world.

The assertion that the historic world leader and this person who believes themselves to be (wrongly) that past world leader are different in personal identity terms just because one accords with objective reality and one does not is merely a matter of the degree by which the identity is practically adaptive to the world. All those unaware of their ‘falsity’ have more in common, mad or not, than any of them do with those who are aware of it. Madness and 'inauthenticity' (to use an older and rather value-ridden existentialist term) are far from identical however. 'Inauthenticity' may be a necessary condition for personal survival in the world as it is constructed. Madness is a poor way of physically surviving in the world outside the most caring of welfare states, communities, tribes or families.

Each personal identity in its particular case of unawareness has been constructed to function for that person but both cases, madness and 'inauthenticity', have in common the fact that neither is aware of their condition or, until having become or made aware of it, are able to treat that condition critically. The thought experiment here is of the man who chooses madness in response to conditions and becomes mad - is this possible?  Did Nietzsche do this? Was this his genius? Human society, on the other hand, could probably not function easily without the vast majority of persons not questioning their condition for most of the time. Unquestioning is a necessary element in the construction of the social.

Left critics of the workings of society have been fully aware of this for some time, hence their frustrated assertion of the need to act to raise consciousness in order to effect change because, left to themselves, most people would accept existing conditions as true and construct their personal identities precisely to fit their environment. These people become their world – cogs perhaps but also able to survive where those who question might end up in camps or penury. It is the source of the instinctive conservatism of the mass of the population and the difficulty behind attempts to effect change even when all logic points to it.

But being or becoming aware of the fact that our personal identities are ‘false’ to the degree that our memories are false because we are our memories (albeit embedded first in a body with its memory and a society with its collective memory) creates only persons who are different not better and the uncovering of this truth about identity does not necessarily result in more than marginal change. The conservatism of society is often very logical – just as are the narratives of the great movements that challenge this conservatism.

Our bodies, meanwhile, are repositories of unconscious material memory. Their genetic component (without going down the route of the collective unconscious) means that a proportion of that memory exists from before the actual creation of that body. Societies too are repositories of collective memory. The habits and instincts of persons are easy to transfer from one community to another (certainly under conditions of modernisation) but also respond (without further self-questioning thought) to the ‘norms’ of a particular time and place which then impact on the formation of memory and so identity. Memory is constructed out of continuous socialisation and the relationship between memory and social identity is at the heart of 'tradition'.

To challenge one’s own personal identity may often involve challenging one’s own body image and capabilities, the ‘norms’ of society and the representation of oneself in society – it might even suggest radical action: gender change, migration, abandonment of tribe or faith (or acquisition of one).  The point is that knowing that one’s personal identity as a construct of false memory does not necessarily predispose someone to radical rather than conservative actions.

It enables radical choice, that is true, but radical choices, if based on unconscious reaction to the tension between society and material circumstances and ‘true will’ can be far from conscious. They may derive from a reaction to memory that makes them no more authentic than those of the conservative mind set who determines on full acceptance of his or her condition without further thought. Awareness that memory and so identity can be explored and reconfigured is a-political and even a-social.

The only virtue of awareness is that it does not rely on an unconscious balancing of mind, body and society (which clearly creates contentment for some but not others) but recognises that, where the mind is not in accord with body or society and where personal identity is not in line with something approaching ‘true will’, the person, in that moment of recognition, can make choices and that those choices involve the management of perceptions and the investigation of memory (or the abandonment of acceptance of memories as valid in the rejection of beliefs) in order to realign a person and the conditions of their existence.

In the case of beliefs, memory is certainly slippery. To believe something is a core element in personal identity and the shift of a belief from a present state to a memory of what was once believed represents a major shift of identity in itself. Chaos Magicians exploit this in order to play with their own identities in a way that strikes the vast majority of humanity as wasteful and absurd but these are not idle thought experiments in coming to a view on the stability of identity in our species.

So Locke is, of course, correct that our identity does rely on memory but we must recognise now that memory is constructed and false more often than not so that our personal identities are as much constructs of our bodies and society as of our conscious will and actual experience. Although this is true, this is not an excuse for a valuation of some minds as better than others just because of their awareness of this falseness of identity because no identity can ever be anything but false in an absolute sense. Nor can we necessarily draw the extreme conclusion that we have no selves (which is an entirely different argument, if currently fashionable one, to criticise another day).

Having an identity that is true to itself is still having an identity that is constructed or that has been constructed out of perceptions that can never tell the whole story about external reality (not to mention our ignorance of other minds and the workings of a society where so little can be observed directly by the subject).  An identity expresses the needs at any one time of a person who is made up of a mind set in a body constrained by social and technological reality. Thus, there is never any absolute freedom but nor is there any requirement for total determination of circumstances.

Liberation is merely a cast of mind, a calibration of society, body and mind and so a calibration of perception, of memory and of identity. The constant struggle between the psychological and physical continuity theories of identity thus rather misses the point. What might be better considered is a theory of constant discontinuities in which a body (and a society) and a mind with only apparent continuity are both required but in which the ‘normal’ integration of the two can be discontinued without either mind or body ceasing to have some ‘memory’ of itself.

A body without a mind is still the body of the person and can be reactivated as such under certain conditions (as after a coma) and that body would influence a new mind that entered it through its biology and brain structure. Perceptions and capabilities would change identity – we only have to consider the male/female difference and the effects on a mind with memories of another gender in a body swap to know how identity would adjust with biology. Continuity perhaps but also a recasting of memory to fit biology would be likely.

A mind might be reloaded or transferred or duplicated in a machine or another body but, from that point, the new material conditions would create new ways of perceiving and thought that would create a separate identity from any identical mental clone in another body, whilst still showing continuities with the past through inherited shared memory. In the memory clone case, each ‘person’ has a separate identity based on possibly small changes in material circumstance despite shared memories – reproducing the ‘I’m Sharon but a different Sharon’ problem of Battlestar Galactica.

Identity is not fixed but changes and shifts in relation to the environment. It is fraught with discontinuities even when simplified down to one mind in one body. The recognition of this complexity should make the psychological-physical debate redundant. It should also help us to be suspicious of the truth-claims made about ourselves by ourselves and by all other persons of themselves and create a scepticism about claims that any single mind can have the answer to any social problem without the help of other minds or that any person can have the ultimate solution, if there is one, to one’s own problems except oneself.

Psychopathy, Good and Evil - A Primer

The psychologist James Fallon's account of his self proclaimed psychopathy in this article (October 6th, 2014) is highly plausible. We can summarise its content by reproducing one paragraph although I recommend that you read the full interview for yourself:

In 2006, Fallon was studying the brain scans of psychopathic killers when he happened to compare them to a scan of his own brain. The characteristic deactivation of emotional regions was unmistakable. He discovered for himself what friends and family had been insisting for years: Fallon was a psychopath—albeit a “pro-social” one, as he likes to say. The 66-year-old father of three is happily married, highly successful in his field, and has no criminal record

His Buddhist comment is suggestive, sounds intuitively right and rather chimes with our own criticism of the creed with its detachment and 'death instinct'. The path to zen/chan thinking has many of the attributes of what the Western liberal mind might call 'psychopathy':

You know, there’s one psychiatrist I spent time with in India. She goes, “Jim, you’re actually a natural Buddhist. The type of empathy you have is not for people, but for mankind. That’s very Buddhist.” I think if I had been brought up in the Buddhist system, it might’ve been even easier.

Despite the obviously and possibly deliberately manipulative aspects of an interview designed to sell a book, there is the meat of some important thinking in here about our species, about the balance of skills within the species necessary for survival and about empathy as equal to and not superior to psychopathy in that context.

There is also some reason to think further here about the mis-diagnosing of Hitler and the SS as psychopaths and of Gandhi and Mandela as empaths (because it suits the liberal mind to have false links between good and evil on the one hand and these diagnostic attributes on the other) and about the 'feminisation' (I refer to cultural norms of the feminine and not actual female behaviour here and the distinction is important) of the West.

And about how moral codes are inculcated and chosen - his remnant catholicism is familiar to me as a 'recovering Catholic' as is the idea that a strict code can switch into a denial of the source and meaning of the code and yet become, nevertheless, existentially central to the person and about the importance to this sort of mind of manipulative intention and dislike of illusion, and of the dangers (in my view) of becoming lost in unnecessary intellectual mind games just for the sport of it.

In his case, this competitve sporting aspect is perhaps most interesting. Fallon has denied himself and others free will because he seems to be driven by the need to play a game within codes he likes to think are absolute. This need for the absolute is perhaps a hidden need for absolution for simply being alive and this has led him to see that this is formally 'psychopathic' (I think he is right). Psychopathy in his case may simply be a despairing death instinct, a form of hidden depression about life.

Nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil' is thus not psychopathic but the possible cure for both psychopathy and dysfunctional empathy insofar as it is also 'beyond the necessity to play a game' - and beyond the need for absolutes and so beyond the need for absolution. Fallon has not escaped the game and so he has not worked or cannot work through his apparent psychopathy to where it should lead - that point most liberal minds are terrified of, incorrectly in my opinion, despite the fact that it results in a more functional inability to do evil.

Ceasing to play the game on terms that loosen all the structures that seem both to hold the alleged psychopath to account and to institutionalise the language (though less certainly the practice) of empathy is not merely a potential liberation but a potential exorcism of the 'evil' associated with the sociopathic and a stripping away of the illusory good that lies in the pain and presumption of the self declared 'empath'.

The outrage and irrationalities of the empath and the encoded gaming mentality of the psychopath remain anxious, either willing the world to be not what it is and descending into fantasy or accepting what is given too readily in order to 'game it'. This is a point beyond the Christ or the Buddha where the zen or chan master may also lead but to which there are many other paths.

'Beyond good and evil' is thus being beyond both the wilful denial of the brute nature of men and the enforced cultural codes of the empath, certainly beyond the exploitative game-playing without real purpose except the game (the mentality of the football fan), into something where the world is taken as it is - not as it must be - and as it could be through effective positive manipulation.

The world 'as it must be' is always a dynamic projection of the individual with all his or her anxieties and insecurities. The individual is better off dealing with the world 'as it is' on their own terms and not on the terms of some inherited and habituated absurd game. Such an attitude is beyond empathy and psychopathy but contains elements of both. It has to see into the souls of others and read the signs in order to truly understand the world yet become detached in relation to the ebb and flow of neuroses and hysteria that is at the core of the world of souls.

Detachment is thus recovered as a 'good' but is redirected from the Buddhist 'death instinct' to the flow of life in the world and with a decent mindfulness of the likeness and well as difference of others from oneself, the desire to 'do no evil' simply emerges, not from some anxious troubled empathy but from the facts of the matter. The 'doing of no evil' soon becomes the 'doing of sufficient good'.

A Response to Tim Pendry’s Review of The Treadwell’s Papers, Vols. I & II

By Guest Contributor - Stephen Alexander

[Editorial Introduction - I am honoured by Stephen Alexander's agreement to provide a response to a somewhat old (2010) review of his Treadwell's Papers. Although there are places where he encourages a further response, I think it more honourable just to let his opinion stand and let the reader come to a view. It has been unedited by me but I have added a factual note for clarification. To permit a personal note, I rather liked this riposte - it scored some hits.] 

Firstly, I’d like to thank you Tim both for the review and for affording me an opportunity to make a few comments in response.

Perhaps I may begin by providing a brief contextual history to the series of talks given at Treadwell’s in 2005 and 2006. Back then, Christina [1] was still making a concerted effort to appeal to a spectrum of people and not just occultists and those of an esoteric bent. Philosophers, poets and intellectual provocateurs from a wide range of backgrounds and with a broad range of interests were made welcome and whilst the shop always had the look of an enchanted grotto, it never felt like a magical ghetto
  
I had previously given a six-part series of papers at Treadwell’s in 2004, entitled ‘Visions of Excess’, which traced out a libidinally material tradition of philosophy running from Sade and Nietzsche to Bataille and Foucault. ‘Sex/Magic’ was, however, the first series written specifically for Treadwell’s and attempted, as you rightly say, to bridge the worlds of modern European philosophy and modern pagan witchcraft. I now recognise this project to be in vain: ultimately, philosophy (like science) only begins where all religious superstition and stupidity ends. However, at the time, I naively hoped that the interesting practice of witchcraft could be divorced from its untenable (and conservative) metaphysics and coupled to a more radical politics of desire.

It’s already apparent, I think, that by the time I came to give the ‘Thanatology’ series, just twelve months later, I had pretty much abandoned any hope of this and my own brand of literary-philosophical paganism (informed by D. H. Lawrence and Nietzsche) was being replaced with a more sceptical form of nihilism as my hostility towards those who sacrificed intellectual integrity on the altar of romantic religious fantasy intensified. Things reached a breaking point in 2008, when I gave my final six-part series of talks at the store entitled ‘Reflections beneath a Black Sun’. This not only effectively marked the end of my relationship with Treadwell’s, but also a decisive move away from my own youthful follies in the dangerous zone where politics meets paganism; i.e. half-a-dozen nails in the kind of thinking that can quickly become fascistic and lead to terror.
 
Having said this, I can now turn directly to your remarks and comment on one or two specific issues. Firstly, let me explain why D. H. Lawrence was so central to my thinking in The Treadwell’s Papers (and has remained an important reference and point of departure). For one thing, it needs to be understood that I am primarily a Lawrence scholar – and not a philosopher. So, for example, whilst my Ph. D. was on Nietzsche’s project of revaluation, it was nevertheless mediated via the poetry and prose of Lawrence.

Secondly, I still think that Lawrence forms the perfect point of interface not only between English literature and European philosophy (Deleuze describes him as one of the four great heirs to Spinoza – the other three being Nietzsche, Kafka and Artaud), but also between philosophically-informed literature and paganism. For Lawrence was a profoundly religious writer familiar with occult works by the likes of Mme. Blavatsky, James Pryce, and Frederick Carter.
  
Thirdly, my thinking at the time was that more of the Treadwell’s audience might be familiar with Lawrence’s work (or able to get hold of it from the library or in cheap Penguin editions) than they would be familiar with works by Heidegger or Deleuze (available only in more expensive academic editions). Indeed, Christina stocked many of Lawrence’s books at Treadwell’s, as she was herself a great Lawrence devotee.
 
Looking back, there was doubtless an overreliance on Lawrence and the reading I gave of him was far too generous and uncritical. Ironically, these days some members of the Lawrence Society regard me as a renegade or traitor.

As to your contention that ‘Sex/Magic’ was far superior to ‘Thanatology’, I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but, yes, maybe you’re right: this is just a matter of preference really. I certainly don’t think the latter series lacks the intellectual vigour or interest of the former, though it is rather different in tone and subject. That said, an argument could be made that all the papers presented at Treadwell’s are attempting to do the same thing; namely, deconstruct metaphysical dualism and the binaries it erects.

Thus, in ‘Sex/Magic’, I was trying to dissolve gender distinctions (as well as genre distinctions). In ‘Thanatology’, on the other hand, I was more interested in interrogating the categorical distinction made between life and death (arguing that the former is only a rare and unusual form of the latter). In the ‘Zoophilia’ series that followed in 2007 – the most successful series I think, certainly the one I enjoyed writing and presenting the most – the goal was to dissolve the distinction between human and animal.

This remains, it seems to me, a crucial project; but one which very few of the Treadwellsians dared to take seriously or carry forward. You say I was a bit cruel on them, but, actually, I was far too kind and generous and because I said things with a smile they mostly thought the work could be considered humourous (and that I was basically just a clown there to amuse them). When I did tighten and harden things up a bit all that happened was that people would shake their heads, wag their fingers, or leave and then email Christina demanding their money back. As one greatly offended early leaver told Christina: ‘The talks are neither about sex nor magic and the speaker is an idiot.’
 
It’s not a case of my wanting the people who come along to the talks to believe the things I tell them; it’s not even relevant to wonder whether I believe the stuff or not. I don’t believe in belief and sometimes I say things not because they are what I think, but so as not to have to think them any longer. Further – at all times – I insist on my right to be transpositional; that is to say, to move between ideas wilfully and whimsically, paradoxically and perversely. I don’t care about the spectre of logical consistency any more than I care about building consensus.

I’m not sure this betrays philosophical confusion, however, as you claim, or that it means I allow personal factors to dictate and determine what I say. I would be particularly disappointed if the latter were true, as I strive hard to eliminate all personal qualities and to effectively disappear within the text (to become-anonymous and clandestine).

Sorry you didn’t much like ‘Thanatology’. But, Tim, you’re a bit of a vitalist and full of a certain (I won’t say put on) joie de vivre so I don’t imagine topics such as suicide, deicide, and necrophilia will hold much appeal.

Too much Lawrence, you say, well, I’ve addressed (and conceded) this. Too assertive, you say, well, that’s an unusual criticism as often people complain I’m vague, ambiguous, and always slightly hesitant about saying anything (thus fond of using terms like ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ to constantly qualify statements).

I don’t think the opening to ‘Thanatology’ – in which I simply presented the facts of life and death – was dark; or that we can (or should) move on from these facts. On the contrary, I very much think people should remind themselves of these on a daily basis and never seek any kind of false comfort in fantasies of a personal survival of death or immortality. Where, pray, have you moved on to? And do tell me where (and how) you imagine Nietzsche’s Übermensch comes into this. I mention the overman as the one who can teach Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence in the final paper of the series; how exactly do I misuse or misunderstand things? I also develop a practice of joy in the fourth essay, so things aren’t really quite so bleak or joyless as you suggest.

If Heidegger’s thought of Dasein as a being-towards-death [Sein-zum-Tode] is also too dark for your tastes it’s hardly my fault. But again, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could indicate why my reading of this is so poor. It’s obviously somewhat compromised by the limitations of both paper and audience, but I don’t think it is bad (in terms of being mistaken) even if a bit banal.
 
You’re right to find the Aztec stuff disconcerting; particularly Bataille’s and Lawrence’s ‘sulphurous-politico-theological’ speculations to do with human sacrifice and the need for cruelty etc. I don’t, in fact, advocate Nazi neo-paganism or even Nietzschean Dionysianism, but, yes, I probably could have and should have offered more of an objection to this kind of thinking. In fact, this comes in volume IV of Book II of The Treadwell’s Papers – ‘Reflections beneath a Black Sun’ – which I mentioned earlier.

I agree (and it was Lawrence’s position post-Plumed Serpent) that there has to be more than merely sensational blood lust and a desire to palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape, for these things result at last only in complete inertia and a reactionary form of nihilism. Still, in order to better counter these things we need to understand them. Further, it’s important I think to show the pagan-minded where their romantic celebration of irrationalism and primitivism and noble savagery etc might lead them. It irritates me when they tell me about the ancient Egyptians, or Native Americans, and don’t also talk about female genital mutilation or a whole range of other forms of religious cruelty and cultural violence.
   
Moving on ... I know that the actual dead do not actually resurrect. I was clearly talking about ‘symbolic’ death and resurrection in the final paper (virtual, but nonetheless real). Obviously, I’m performing a philosophical reading of novels and poems – but not sure I share your ever-so-slight (but always evident) contempt for literature as for other forms of intellectual labour. And I certainly don’t subscribe to the dualist notion of theory/praxis, as if thinking were not itself a form of action and a very important form at that!
  
A world that is more-true-to-itself, you say, as if there ever could be such a thing (and as if ever there were such a world it wouldn’t be a form of hell). It is in the closing paragraphs of your remarks, Tim, where you disappoint: it’s you (not me) who suddenly lurches into the most depressing idealism and becomes a defender of Truth – the true world, the truly transhuman, the truly Real, etc. You even start to talk about love! Don’t you see, after 2000 years of this, that love is simply hate on the recoil?

One might politely suggest you return to volume one, page one and start again ... 

Stephen Alexander (11 April 2014)
torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk

Editorial Notes
[1] Christina Oakley-Harrington, owner of Treadwell's, now in Store Street, London. Treadwell's is the centre of a vibrant community of neo-pagans, magicians, esotericists, academics, collectors, artists and intellectuals, offering a certain equidistance between the practice of beliefs and the study of beliefs with respect to the core values of both. The lecture programme she organises is one of the treasures of London intellectual life.

Stephen Alexander on Sex and Death - The Treadwell's Papers I & II (2010)

[This was privately circulated in late November 2010. Some of the (unattributed) comments are added below. There have been some marginal editorial changes. Stephen Alexander has since become a friend but I think it would lack integrity to change the text for that reason. For his own view on things go to his regular blog at Torpedo the Ark ]

I put my book reviews up on GoodReads - www.GoodReads.com - but, sometimes, I find that a book is not there, usually because the publisher is small and specialist and has not entered into that great marketing machine known as the Internet. In this case, there was no entry but it seemed a shame not to comment.

Small publishing enterprises should be encouraged especially if they are experimental. That is not to stay that their works should not receive the same level of rigorous criticism as bigger publishers but it is better to be criticised and noticed than just be ignored.

Treadwells is a bookshop and esoteric salon, with a well attended lecture series, in London's Covent Garden [now moved to Store Street]. It is not a publisher. However, in 2005 and in 2006, it invited Stephen Alexander to give two sets of lectures, first on sex and then on death, in an attempt to build a bridge between the hard edge of continental philosophy and neo-paganism.

These papers were edited and then published as The Treadwell's Papers Volumes I and II (in fact, one paperback) earlier this year by Blind Cupid Press.

The experiment is not a complete success as we will see but it was an important and worthy attempt to bring some intellectual rigour to the consideration of what is going on in the world of the new religions and a chance for that world to hear from one intellectual engaged deeply with the likes of Nietzsche and Foucault.

The two sets of lectures must be treated separately because sexuality is far more central (even when some practitioners go into a state of denial about this) to most neo-pagan lives than death - although the idea of natural cycles and (in some traditions) return is a powerful theme in pagan thought.

However, we must make one criticism from the beginning that applies to both books - Stephen Alexander's not entirely explained obsession with DH Lawrence whose writings he privileges in a way that they simply cannot bear.

DH Lawrence is an important figure in English literary history and in understanding English culture but he was not a philosopher. In fact, he was often a hysteric - much like Bataille, another writer referred to by Alexander, or Artaud - and his own thinking on sex and death is of merely antiquarian interest, much like that of, say, HG Wells on society.

This obsession with Lawrence and his works is a barrier to understanding because, too often, especially in the second volume on death, this paragon of highly intelligent male sexual hysteria is taken not as an example (rightly in some places) but as a guide. He is not. This detracts from the books.

Sex/Magic

The Sex/Magic Volume is much superior to the succeeding one on death, in part because Alexander really does contest with vigour some of the wishy-washy aspects of neo-pagan mentality on the latter's ground.

He is devastatingly right about the capture of a part of witchcraft by the Jewish matriarchalism of Starhawk and the turning of sexuality into that sort of tolerance that tut-tuts sexual beings into traditional monogamy and right behaviour by the back door. Starhawk clearly fulfils some social need but whatever she claims to be, she is not truly 'paganus'.

I have decided not to waste time on the distracting Laurentian arguments but what Alexander does with some success is point to the tendency of paganism to owe too much to the culture from which it is seeking to rebel, especially in regard to that culture's dualism, especially male/female dualism.

The history of the modern pagan revolt against Judaeo-Christianity is not a simple break but a series of shuddering lurches where the advanced guard leaves a substantial conservative force behind.

Crowley now looks increasingly nineteenth century and Thelema reaches a Typhonian high point in a man, Kenneth Grant, whose attitude to the sexual is still secretive and dualist. Gardner too increasingly appears to be carrying out in ritual the coded sexual tensions of the first half of the twentieth century.

Alexander's service is a cruel one here but a necessary one. Using Nietzsche as his type-philosopher (a philosopher scarcely considered by the 'greats' of the neo-pagan revolution though much earlier than they), he shows that a great deal of popular neo-paganism is not as liberatory as it thinks it is - it has revolted against one form of essentialism only to create new forms that have not moved very far from Plato.

Of course, existentialism is a damned hard school and it seems unfair to deprive neo-pagans, in their own heartland, of solace in the essential. This is an argument that applies equally to the Christian who may be embedded in philosophical nonsense but who gains such solace that only the hardest curmudgeon would deny their faith, hope and charity when they are not persecuting others.

But if you ask a continental philosopher into your inner sanctum, don't expect him to be anything other than he is. The removal of the binary approach to constructing our social reality has been revolutionary to the point that, now, anyone who persists in binary thought is either a 'fool' (in fact, simply uneducated) or a 'knave' (wilfully authoritarian or manipulative of the dead weight of binary thinking at the heart of our current social reality).

Good/evil, male/female, nature/nurture, mind/body, black/white and so on have been embedded in our thinking as much as top/down - that there is good, evil, male, female, mind, body etcet. is unanswerable but that there is some clear dividing line between categories that is not contingent and circumstantial is now very contestable.

The tradition within neo-paganism (though gnosticism too is fundamentally essentialist) that comes closest to this thinking is the gnostic while neo-paganism still moves closer towards continental philosophy than any other Western religion (the Eastern religions actually influenced continental philosophy and are a different kettle of fish).

Shorn of Lawrence, Alexander is definitely worth reading and insightful on sex and the magical, relying on Foucault as much as Nietzsche. On sex, he offers a short intellectual boot camp for neo-pagans that they will either get or not get and, if they get it, will move them sharply on from many traditional reconstructionist forms.

There is not space here to critique all six lectures but, after the introductory talk, Alexander goes on to cover masturbatory fantasy (where he falls into his own traditionalist trap in the end), the positive liberatory idea of 'cunt' (where he provides a devastating account of the evil of female genital mutilation that, in itself, rather knocks sideways any romantic view of indigenous cultures), the meaning of anal sex, a subversive view of nakedness in witchcraft (which is worth reading alongside Carr-Gomm's recent review of nakedness in our culture) and an interesting view of the masochistic and fetishistic aspects of ritual in Wicca.

I do not always agree with his analyses. Alexander gets so bound up with his argument that he comes out as a sort of moraliser for a particular model of Foucauldian anarchy that subverts itself into a surprising acceptance of a certain balance in favour of order.

Indeed, he is often philosophically confused and the personal does seem to take over ... he plays the magus to a vulnerable audience at such times, less here than in the second book, in a way that I find just a tad suspicious. Does he really believe all this or is he just playing?

However, the manipulation and absurdities of his position are tolerable because his insights are good. If you keep your wits about you and read him without allowing the magician's misdirection and sleight of mind to glamour you into futile shock or absurd acceptance, you will get a great deal out of this series of lectures.

In summary, his critique of modern neo-paganism stands up and is well-argued - even if I, for one, see no reason why the kinder and more tolerant delusions of these new religions should not continue to be encouraged as far more beneficent than Judaeo-Christian miserabilism.

However, it is this kindness and tolerance that, towards the end, Alexander seems to want (or perhaps not want but be led by his logic) to undermine with an attitude to the sexual that will appear not liberatory but nihilistic. Some kind of implied psychic anger starts to appear that obviates the claim to philosophy and this becomes more obvious in the second volume.

Thanatology

This second volume, on the other hand, was a disappointing series of lectures not only because of the constant references to Lawrence (which became simply tiresome after a while) but because it just did not work philosophically - so much of it was blind assertion with very little connection to specific neo-pagan concerns (quite unlike the 2005 series).

At the end of the 2005 Papers, Alexander seemed to be particularly concerned to attack religious fascism, indeed the fascistic mentality altogether, but in 2006, his ruminations on death contain all the hysterical despair of the sort of late nineteenth century or early twentieth century intellectual ripe for the blood lust of ... yes, fascism.

Thanatology starts with a remarkably black (to most people) vision of existence. Personally, I not only get this but have written on it and have moved on from it but Alexander does not seem to be able to move on at all.

His brilliant (at this point) account of our place in Existence reminds one of Thomas Ligotti's stories, which are one up in existential darkness from HP Lovecraft, and the actual existential joy in the Nietzschean 'ubermensch' is often expressed as if he does not fully understand it himself.

He sounds so black (not entirely without philosophical justification) that you wonder whether it was an act of cruelty to perpetrate this 'dark night of the soul' on a bunch of pagan innocents at the first lecture. Still, it is smart stuff and the book really only declines after this point.

Thanatology goes on to cover Heidegger's concept of 'Da-Sein' (badly, I think, with the same obsessive darkness of the introductory lecture), an unpersuasive but genuinely stimulating discussion of the relationship between sex and death (though he can sound a bit like Baudelaire after a particularly rough night out), a view on suicide that goes beyond private rights (where I stand) to such an espousal of the death instinct that even I might have him removed from society for fear of his effect on the temporarily disturbed young - and a section on human sacrifice which takes him into the realm of nihilistic evil.

It is his rather weak (in historical terms which seems to owe more to Frazer than any serious reading of Aztec culture) lecture on sacrifice where he lost me - and quite profoundly.

From his apparent liberatory anti-fascist stance in Book I, his desire to show off as an intellectual has had him turn topsy-turvy and, it would seem, at least implicitly (pages 279-288), to espouse mass slaughter as a possible good in itself, not the sacrifice of oneself but the sacrifice of others for some grander narrative.

Bloody hell! Literally ... or is he simply telling us what Nietzsche, Lawrence and Bataille have thought? It is not entirely clear ...

Finally, he moves on to Nietzsche's Death of God and a reinterpretation of Christ's Sacrifice which sounds all very good as a literary exercise (which is how perhaps we should see this Second Book) but which is undermined by a very simple fact on which Heidegger would have put him right - er, Stephen, we don't get up again when we die.

Neither do all those slaughtered victims ... nor the temporarily young disturbed person who kills themselves (though the case of Ellen West remains a corrective to excessive determination to deny this private right). Sex is different which is why he is on safer ground.

But even here, Foucault's death from AIDS, as much as you may try and re-clothe it in 'choice' by a man who tried to kill himself and had masochistic tendencies, the responsibility (unless you are a psychopath) for another's life if a child is born and the fact that a woman does tend to get dumped with the consequences, all suggest that the wilder shores of what I would term sub-existentialist nihilism move very close to an hysterical and disturbed attempt to acquire the attributes of psychopathy (without being psychopathic) as a form of self-death.

Logically, anyone who held many of the views in this second book for real as opposed to literary effect, who did rather than talked - and most intellectuals talk rather than do - would not only be dangerous to social order (which might be a good thing) but could be dangerous to their intimates and themselves (which is not).

Perhaps we might call this second book a prime representation of the 'Heliogabalus Complex' - the desire by troubled intellectuals who have no effect on the world to create a fantastic vision of that world in which all values are trans-valued not in order to make the world more true to itself but a reflection of their own thoughts.

It is the ultimate 'the personal is the political'. Such gloomy intellectuals always appear when things start spinning out of control and are always attracted to the esoteric and the occult precisely because these latter are often an 'absurd' attempt to re-make reality.

In fact, this elitist intellectualism is very dangerous - it is neither truly transhuman in the Nietzchean sense nor effective 'magic' (manipulation) and is only a partial description of reality.

Neo-paganism has arisen because of something greater than intellectual frustration and narcissism. It is as 'false' as every other faith-based system but it 'works' and does so under conditions of exceptional tolerance and community. It is pragmatically good until the day that it gets 'power' then it reverses its own polarity and becomes a problem. It is power, not truth (and here we are with Foucault) which is at issue.

I don't like Starhawk because she takes things too far towards the world of power (over minds). I suspect that Gardnerian and Thelemite models are already becoming sclerotic.

But the impulse to love and build community from below is an important one, one that defies Alexander's black vision of the universe, as not a truth (which it is not) but as a reality (which it is).

The value of continental philosophy lies in stripping away pretensions to truth. It is counter-productive if it positions Non-Truth, paradoxically, as Truth. We have not then progressed at all.

The fallacy of Western intellectualism is thus to seek truth when there is no truth that is not black - and to avoid dealing with realities which can never be 'truth' but which are created by ourselves out of mind and matter in different forms every second of every day in conjunction with billions of other people as useful to ourselves.

The only Truth in this context is scientific and based on pragmatic considerations of experiment and utility. The Western philosophical project should be to give up seeking truth beyond science, especially give up making the 'black' Truth into a reality as meaningless as that of religion.

The art is to know the darkness for what it is and to build pragmatic human-friendly realities regardless of this - and just see what happens.

This is exactly what real existentialism says - Nietzsche's myth of the Eternal Return as a kick up the backside to build the reality you want now, while Heidegger's engagement with Da-Sein is a positive engagement with reality without recourse to essentialist truths. You don't need a great deal more than that.

So this is the paradox of Alexander's work - he is still, despite everything, not merely trying to find out the Truth as Non-Truth but seeking to drive it outwards to others like any latter-day St. Augustine or Engels. He is in danger of being to Foucault what these gentlemen were to Christ and Marx. He should perhaps just ease up and go with the flow ...

But I am glad he wrote these lectures. I am glad they were published. Despite my criticisms, I think (if you are fairly strong-minded) you could profit greatly be reading what he has to say. It may take you to the edge but, if you do not do yourself in or leads legions to slaughter, you should come out of it a stronger person.

Comments in Response to Criticisms [November 2010]

A  

The mind that is totally dependent on language for experience is only half a mind. Just because something cannot be described or can only be approximated in language does not mean that it is not there only that a) it cannot be described or approximated and c) it can only be communicated analogically by reference to the possibility of someone else recognising that they may have had a similar non-linguistically describable experience.

This is the fundamental problem with language-based intellectualism. It is pragmatically effective in building social reality and in managing matter through technology but it is no guide to the experience of being and our raw relationship to Existence. As I say, the only binary that is not a mere contingent tool for building society is the binary between ourselves and Existence.

In ourselves, we are beyond binaries and only become binary in relation to others. The magic of love, spirituality and other raw emotions is that we move from binary into the apparently illusory state of unification.

It is illusory from the point of view of thought and society but thought is illusory from the point of view of experience so the unification is both a lie and a truth, neither one nor the other and certainly not 'binary'. Society is, similarly, both a truth and a lie and therefore not binary.

B

Even the indvidual and society are not binary (in relation to each other) because the individual is functionally constructed by society and society by the intervention by and struggle between individuals.

Ideology is the anti-human opposition to the individual at the extreme end of social reality - the creation of the half-minds of intellectuals - whereas 'unification' or the gnostic is the anti-social creation of integrated and individuated minds operating perhaps to the detriment of their own physical survival on occasions - and certainly to their wealth and status. One makes choices.

C
  
First Critic:  For starters, I dont think you can assume that your experience has any similarity to my experience without communication.

My Reply: I surmise with some small logic based on similarities not only of formal language but context and non-verbal communication - which is one of the roles of art. But I cannot 'know' anything, I can merely surmise and that surmise must be understood to be approximate only, a useful fiction based on probability, perhaps sometimes possibility.

D

I am reluctant to speak for Alexander beyond a certain point because it would be wrong to claim to express him better than himself. In essence, he appears to contrast the 'Starhawk' sexual-magical approach (as example) with Lawrence's somewhat desperately neurotic (and I think downright silly) male-hysterical objection to it in preference to straight bonking. He then surrounds this with all sorts of interpretative complexity that bears little relation to the act itself.

My view is somewhat cold and analytical. Masturbation is first and foremost a pleasure without meaning. Pleasures do not have to have meaning. He is certainly right that magical masturbation appears to represent philosophical nonsense - I would go further and say that the whole performance around it by Californian Wiccans, analogous to the nonsense of Neo-Tantra, is a back-handed compliment to Judaeo-Christian sexual repression by giving it more importance than it should have.

On the other hand as a) deliberate transgression in some contexts (though it is sad that it is necessary) and b) as an element in dynamic hormonal change in appropriate contexts (where it sits with a range of means including drugs and alcohol and whatever), then it is a 'tool for use'. People really should relax more about this sort of thing and stop imbuing natural and pleasurable and harmless acts with philosophical depth that they do not have.

On female genital mutilation, some things are just absurdly wrong and this is one. Anyone who argues such things is stuck up their own intellectual orifice.

Even Alexander who is well stuck up that moral orifice in Volume 2 on suicide and human sacrifice, gets it in Volume 1 - people are not objects at the service of ideas or theory and the only person permitted to mutilate themselves (and they are) are individuals free of pressure from other individuals and choosing to do so for their own sakes, as tools of individuation.

We romanticise indigenous tribalism and primitive societies for reasons that show the moral vacuum at the heart of much New Age thinking where the image or the simulacrum or the wish has replaced the reality. Alexander does a service here.

E 

Second Critic

The thing one has to bear in mind about Stephen Alexander, other than his strange obsession with D.H. Lawrence, is that a lot of the time he is being intentionally provocative and doesn't necessarily hold with the position he is espousing. He will often take a 'stance' with the intention of upsetting the apple carts, whether or not he personally holds with said position is another matter entirely.
 
I have not read the papers, though I did attend both lecture series in entirety. The audience were not the 'usual' Treadwell's audience... there were very few neo-pagans. Most of the audience being philosophy students/graduates/teachers with a smattering of occultists and one or two neo-pagans - the latter whom worked at the shop were almost there by default, one could say.
 
2005/6 is such a long time ago that I cannot, to be honest, recall much more than the mood and taste of those lectures... the actual content long since having been dragged screaming down to the abyss of my mind where it has no doubt been lunched on by a Deep One. 
 
Perhaps, I should pop along to Treads and get a copy of the book. It would be interesting to re-visit the material.
 
As for your critique, Tim. You do seem to have hit the nail on the head in many respects, most insightful, however without the transcripts I cannot comment on particulars.

To Which I Replied:  

Thanks for that insight. I guessed he was being provocative (after all, his disquisition in implicit favour of Aztec mass human sacrifice might have been regarded as deeply disturbed and attracted the attention of the security services) but you have to take what is presented in front of you and not assume that everything is to be treated as if it was ironic - there comes a point when being ironic is ironic and that way true philosophical madness lies The book is, I think, worth reading - not as a masterpiece (it is not) but as something that, DH Lawrence aside, helps one to clarify ones own position helpfully. Good on Treadwell's for publishing it.

And My Critic Clarifies:

One must also not forget that in many ways the old skool/original punk in Stephen Alexander is still alive and well and informs, to an extent, his approach to life, the universe and writing/giving lectures. There is that sense that his lectures, much like his life, are performance art.

To Which:

Is not everything in life?

And so:

True. Though not everyone fully embraces that fact, let alone relish it.

To Which:

Perhaps there should be Oscars for best performance in life, best personal style, best use of language ...

F: 

First Critic:

On Situated Gestalts, surely given that the brain is in part a pattern recognition (and pattern creation) instrument that finds (and generates) a signal amidst noise, art, for instance, is the creation of the encounter between an artist's creation and its perciever? In that, in the absense of an artist's narrative, no two people will percieve the same work of art (with the possible exception of some explicit literary works). The same is the case when we encounter something unexplained in life, and this is what I understand to be meant by a situated gestalt. Because of this no one actually experiences existance they experience the relation between existance and their own meaning generation. A meaning that may also ontologically transform what is experienced. Given the possibility that the meaning we find may correlate partly, or even entirely, with the actual signification of the experience (as opposed to its percieved significance), we can to some extent have a shared experience, but, as you say, we cannot know which element is the shared portion until we communicate linguistically (either directly in approximate description or indirectly in poetic analogue).

When we clarify a situated gestalt with approximate description we binarize it, if it cannot be classically binarized we use poetry. But even poetic language parasites off of linguistic meaning, so in fact is still binarized at a deeper level isn't it? If I compare you to a rose, to understand that you have to have a binary 'rose / not-rose' concept, in order to know what a 'rose' is. Therefore we can't have a shared experience outside of binary language. Am not sure what you meant by context in terms of meaning, if you mean inference (as in 'as a writer he was unsurpassed in his emulation') even thats binary in the sence of it being related to what it excludes. So I would agree that anything involving another person generates duality, by virtue of our binary seperation from that which we both refer to and the parallel seperation with that person.

So perhaps only in unity can we have non-duality, but here you say we as ourselves have this inner unity, which I would question. After all we are nothing more than a bundle of sensations and desires held together by some mysterious 'I'. Internally we have many binary relations, and in part unify them and thus create ourselves as a unity through language. We only have to see how a non linguistic animal chases its own tail to realise that. You then romantically assume 'love' generates a sense of unity, when all it really involves is attachment (a binary between two subjects) and at best an imaginative identification.

So I would deny, from this perspective, that we ever experience unity and only ever experience relation. Likewise we never experience existance only our falsification (and perhaps modification) of it. All our experience of the 'ground reality' is a conceptually mediated illusion to a large extent and our concepts are based on binary language. Nothing is unmediated. 
 
Thats the view from the problem side of the hill. From the other side of the hill, I think we can be aware of unity and non-duality. But I'll return to this when I've got round the hill and rebooted my brain on a new program, in a bit.

Note, by meaning I understand X=Y, so you can have true meaning or actual signification (2+3=5) , false meaning (2+3=4) or personal meaning or significance (2+3=23).

Note 2, by love I of course mean that delusion of unity that comforts us in our essential alienation and is rooted in our self-love unconsciously transfered onto another or imagined.

After all, even on a biological level its been found that the more closely related organisms are to each other the stronger will be their desire to mate (peaking with identical twins), and its only by virtue of inverse imprinting in early development that animals don't mate with their relatives or same sex (neither of which are guaranteed :))))

 Perhaps the essence of unity is to be found in contradiction? In the previous perspective I was seeing things in terms of rational generalisation (which we need to in order to be able to live and on which language itself is based). But we also experience things in the particular. The ultimate particular being the mysterious 'I'.

Every experience arguably has its own unique particularity which can not be compared with any other element of an experience. It's unique difference. We normally ignore this in people as it only heightens the realisation of our alienation as well as in events as it detracts from our generalised sense of meaning. But really difference and uniqueness may be our our only authentic point of unity, even 'sameness'.

Perhaps we can't truely love someone unless we can percieve their uniqueness, and can't achieve this till we have accepted out own uniqueness and existential isolation.

If we focus on the uniqueness of things instead of their generality we begin to see the world in a different way. While we can never escape the way language and thought generalizes the world for us, we can bracket that off to some extent and narrow in on the particular, which we can concieve of in virtue of relation to the 'I'.

In this particularizing view of the world we lose all sense of generalisation and logic. We can say that X = Y in terms of unique situation A and X = Z in terms of unique situation B, but also that Y does not eqaul Z in any general terms. We thus open up a para-logical realm in which contradictions and not 'realisations' are the essence of experience. Not that everything is contradictory and irrational, as that would be to return to generalisation, just that some things apply in the context of a particular and others don't. Thus in these terms everything possible (the universe) includes a full range of contradictions that in general rational terms would negate each other to nothing. Everything possible as they say really is Nothing. So my last statement above 'Nothing is unmediated' may be doubly true!
 
The particular is also unmediated because that is what stands out in experience, it only takes a single experience to experience the novel, but sameness requires an indefinite ammount of experience to affirm true identity (even though 'novelty' may constantly change). That is your awareness of particularity and novelty is constantly affirmed (and modified) where as generality and conclusive identity is always infinitely deferred till everything has been sampled (more experience may clarify the differentiation, you can experience red for the first time, then a second time, but eventually you may discover a finer differentiation of shades of red and so a new uniqueness which disrupts the sameness).

From this perspective we can say the 'ground reality' reference is he mysterious 'I' and novelty in experience, or difference. Which when generalised paralogically leads to the conclusion that 'ground reality' is Nothingness. Which may be why we ourselves experience the 'I' as a 'creative nothingness', because that's what everything is.

That's as far as I can go from this side of the hill, hampered as I am with the binaries of language and conceptual thought....

... note, a lot of delusional mysticism is based on the Platonic error of projecting generalised abstractions of illusory sameness, into some higher realm. Or by regarding the general rational view of the world is the reality instead of an illusion.

This doesn't deter from the instrumental value of reason of course nor the generation of approximate maps or models of reality, just our mistaking them for reality.

Second Critic 

 "... leads to the conclusion that 'ground reality' is Nothingness. Which may be why we ourselves experience the 'I' as a 'creative nothingness', because that's what everything is." Did you really have to jump through all those hoops to reach this conclusion? lol


My Reply

Well you were on a roll there with, in your customary fashion, the ability to hold contradictory ideas in seeming balance without turning a hair ...

... the duality you refer to is simply the fact that the 'other' (the person) is part of the Existence into which we are thrust and it is tautologous to create further binaries than the core one that I postulated (Da-Sein/Existence). These latter are illusory binaries in that they are simply constructed by Da-Sein (oneself thrust into a relationship with Existence) and the essential unknowability of Existence (which does not exist except in a relationship of Meaning to us and which only comes into Existence from Non-Existence as we engage with it).

The 'situated gestalt' is merely an attempt to give a linguistic explanation for this tension between the two categories in the original binary opposition where, though we can imagine half-states (hence our historical interest in after-lives and cosmic narratives and our current cultural fascination with zombies, vampires, frankensteinian monster and even sentient robots and aliens and so on), we find ourselves back to the point made in my review - that death is final and we are all on a road towards it.

Thus, Existence paradoxically also loses in its final victory over us by asserting its Non-Existence for us at the point of death. At that point, we do not exist and it does not exist either. The finality is not our loss only but the loss of everything.

The 'situated gestalt' is a very useful explanatory tool but it is the point at which thinking begins to embed itself in the human mind as binary thinking - the attempt to extend the original binary opposition so that the world might be manipulated until it goes too far and becomes, first, analytical philosophy and then, second, ideology, the degeneration of philosophy into a form of false socialised matter, the construction of this social reality as 'real' and, worse (since real is arguable, given the accepted working reality of Existence as science and shared manipulable reality), 'true' and even, in the most insane development of all, 'beautiful' and 'good'.

The unity exists in the original binary opposition and is momentary and fluid - a succession of unities - defined as unities against Existence where Existence is, ultimately, its own negation. Our unified moments exist within our consciousness where nothing else exists if it is outside that unitary moment. Existence is thus, as I have suggested, Non-Existence except where it is pragmatically used as techne or symbol by the unified moment that is the momentary Self in relation to the Existence that is Non-Existence, its own contradiction.

Thus 'love' is only a delusion when observed from outside in the world of Existence (which is Non-Existence so that any observed love cannot be existent) whereas it is not a delusion when experienced in the momentary unified moment that defies Existence. The momentary experience of unification at certain points in life are thus points that humanity both seeks out and fears because such points are necessarily denied by the social out of 'ressentiment' and fears of its disruptive effect on the stability of the 'fake' Existence we call 'society'.

Yet, those who have experienced such moments which are promiscuous in their subjects and situations are fully aware that the claim that such moments are illusory comes only from persons who live in a different type of illusion under conditions where the term illusory is so general as to define Existence itself - and so Non-Existence so that all is real and all is illusion and the terms are utterly meaningless. The moment is all ...

First Critic

Well, yes thats Heideggar's view, but it doesnt actually make sense particularly because its full of unwarranted assumptions.

For one it seems to be assuming unity of existance, which is probably not the case according to Physics, and it may be assuming unity of Self, depending how he defines Dasein (if he means the Subject its certainly not unified, if he just means the bare 'I' its unified in an odd way as there's nothing there to unify, just bare perception, and its also difficult to see how it does anything). But I'd say the notion that the Dasein creates Existance by engaging with Non-Existance is a bit odd, Physics has certainly shown otherwise (our engagement with the world does seem to create the phenomenal world of classical physics, but it doesnt create the underlying quantum reality, which certainly exists in the normal sense of the word), though I suppose if you swap 'Manifest' for 'Existance' it does make some sence, perhaps.

Likewise in this context 'death' can only be seen as transitional, a becoming unmanifest, what ever thats like, and what ever is unmanifest can become manifest in the same form within Physics, so I don't see it as final, critically transformative perhaps and final to a life if you give it any meaning or goal (which I don't). I think H gets really flaky when he starts talking about Existance in this way its a bit like some religious nut talking about 'heaven' only in reverse (the faith based postulation of a fundamental non-existance, rather than of some fundamental higher existance) and seems worse to me.

Everything else stated makes no sense in concrete terms, I suspect H was more than a little insane It even seems to be implying a kind of ontological Idealism which has long been refuted.

To Which I Replied

It does not assume unity of Existence (which is unknowable). It simply assumes the unity of unknowability in its aspect of all that is unknowable that we come up against as beings-in-the-world and which we call Existence, i.e. as being a unity to all intents and purposes as far as the conscious subject is concerned. If we knew the not-unity of the unity of Existence, then it would cease to be raw Existence and become some-thing instead of no-thing-in-particular that may or may not be No-Thing-At-All. That, I think, is unanswerable.

Physics shows us merely what is utile to us. It is 'true' but its truth is tautological - that is, we call it true because it works for us and can be perceived by us out of the raw material of Existence.

It is just the 'is-ness' of things to the degree that we can understand and make use of it but it is not all the 'is-ness' of Existence, much of which we clearly cannot know and may be beyond physics or may not. We do not know. The quantum stuff is covered by this as is any future model of the world that the human mind can cope with.

If Heidegger was insane, then I am insane - don't answer that!

First Critic

'is-ness' makes more sense than 'existence' But I'm not sure about this unity of unknowability, its an odd definition of unity.

I think Physics is a fairly accurate approximation of the 'is-ness' of existance, obviously not a complete description but a very close one.

To Which I Replied

It is the unity of all that cannot be knowingly divided ... you may not assume its division: that is an act of 'faith' and you may as well believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which perhaps you do) in which case there is no arguing with you ... as for the last point, isness is isness, it cannot be approximated - to be close is not to be near at all. You can be as close as you like in your mind's eye but you are never 'there'in fact ... and cannot know where 'there' is in order to be adequately near enough to say that you are close with any meaning.

G:

Second Critic:  As regards your Existential fundamentalism... maybe we will get ya next time 'round.

Me: I'm as slippery an eel: I'd like to see you try ... Ha! I am a fundamentalist ... the FBI will now be on to me ...

Second Critic: Indeed, Tim, you ARE an existential fundamentalist... own it... and beg forgiveness..

Me: I never beg ... better to die on your feet than live on your knees ...

Second Critic: That's the spirit...

ENDS