too much or too enough

More so in more interesting and human terms, need is greater and more significant than lack, because need is motivating to produce meaning (existentia): let's say I want to draw a picture because I have some sketching supplies here, and I can't think of anything else to do. So my level of motivation and interest is small and I'm sort of bored just sketching things for fun, but suddenly now someone else actually wants my sketches for some reason, say they are interested in my talent or they simply like me and are interested, or they have their own need for them for some reason... now my motivation and interest level is much greater and I will obtain far more meaning out of the activity of sketching. The other person's need or desire relative to my task is going to infuse that task with greater significance for me, at least in a general sense.

We need each other's interest and desires/needs in order for ourselves to have meaningful experiences, at least again speaking generally, and the other side of that is how we produce desires and needs on our own such as with our personal interest in philosophy. The existing need gives rise to an existential substance in man. The notion of lack by itself cannot account for that.


And furthermore, it is only because of man's ability to live partially in that "alternate reality" of facts, conceptual abstraction, emotions and "third universe" that any of this is even possible. My dog has basic feelings and simple anticipations, thus it is also able to draw some extra meaning-motivation from certain experiences more than others (I.e. it is capable of becoming bored or excited psychologically-speaking), but a dog's level of this will never come close to a human's level of it.

That's right, need hijacks the process and gives it unity separate from its origin within a larger scheme of necessities and processes. This is all I'm saying: lack doesn't exist without need, otherwise why is anything lacking? Lacking what? For what? There is an eternal regression problem, eventually something was needed. Why does your aggregate self refuse to stop the functioning of your lungs? Why does lack care?

An animal may not have the same abstraction processes as a human, but isn't there a difference, too, between a monkey and a crocodile? The problem of value is: what regards value? Only symbols? Or does the whale will itself to be whale-like?

I have things in common with a rock. If either of us is dropped, we fall onto the next closest solid thing between us and the Earth, and our molecules are racked.

The rock shares a value with me. Not to go all dialectical on your asses, but I feel a little weak. What is able to value falling? Is there only one way to do so?

A non dialectic theory then: the philosophical emotion is embedded in value chains that precede it and make part of it, and to struggle with these values already presupposes a valuing of styruggle, a need. Struggle doesn't just "happen." I don't question the daemonic theories, only their genealogy. Lack being reflected onto itself... Somebody needs to do the reflecting. Also, conflicting needs, as evolution is anything but single-minded.

I will post a few other things I have on my mind about this, but really quickly I want to address Capable's inquiry as to the kind of animal state of the pure affective surplus I claim appears after fully orienting with the ideal ego.


The animals do experience the entirety of their organo-affective unity, their entire body and nervous system fires in unison as a single affective flow, while in man the real ego formed to compensate for the disintegrating intrusion of a higher cognition as was afforded by an expanded neocortex and brought with it our emotions as the continuous-intensifications of an immediate, temporally constructed sense of self which serves as a potential excited state and liminal threshold to the truncated and partitioned affect-surplus itself. When man fully reorients the real ego with the ideal, he too will experience the organo-affective unity of his entire organism again- but here is the central difference... man's organism is far more complicated than any animal's, to the point of constituting a phase transition and qualitative rather than merely quantitative advancement beyond their capacity. So if a human were to experience his organo-affective unity it would be very much different than when the animals experience their own: symbols, words, differentiated emotions etc. are all parts of his organic capacity and are datums in that potential unity. This is why the organo-affective unity and surplus of a human would be very different than that which the animals do indeed experience- there is no human being that has ever lived who has experienced it, and I have not either, at least not yet, so I cannot say much more about what it would actually be like, I can just say that, for this important reason, it would certainly be very different than what animals experience.

Though there is definitively a qualitative difference between 'consciousness' of animal and 'consciousness' of man, in the sense that you have described, thee is also a tentatively comparable threshold between reptiles and mammals, cold and warm blooded animals. The difference is this; when a reptile is idle, he lurks, waits for something to respond to, but when a mammal is idle, he plays, has to keep himself occupied. He is too 'spirited' with his hot blood to remain passive. Here, the instincts begin to transform into 'meaning-giving', an it is only in recording meaning and representing it abstractly that humans are almost fundamentally 'estranged' so to speak, in need of a metaphysical coherence, a ring of time or an eternally combusting explosion, or an absolute in any sense - this dis-coherence is indeed absent in animals. And yet - is there not something in the ape that is already man? But this is it; in ape, nature had become so playful as to become serious about its 'self'. It had invented the ultimate plaything. And he was never ever going to share it.

Incipit 'sapientia'.