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 A new ethics.

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PostSubject: A new ethics.   A new ethics. Icon_minitimeThu Feb 23, 2012 7:55 pm

In contrast to the theory of repression and sublimation which Freud elaborated from Nietzsche, I have my own picture.


I have gone on about my theory of consciousness, the reflexive nature of it, and the disintegration of the drives... Instead of the repression of one drive by another drive or drives, you get simply one drive acting separately from the others. Instead of sublimation, you get multiple drives operating in unison. This unison I called active consciousness, because it is involved in the higher ventures, like art, the production of genius, the creation of values. You could picture the consciousness of man as a number of pendulums swinging... In most men the pendulums are separated by a great distance, they swing not together but at different speeds, by different paces, etc. A lot of them do not swing at all, they have run down over time, a particular drive has atrophied, ie. human domestication prevails. But in the man of genius all the pendulums- the drives, instincts, thoughts, and emotions which constitute consciousness.... are close to one another. If one pendulum swings, it hits up against the one next to it, and it to the one that follows, and so on, until all the pendulums are operating equally. Genius is measured by how little stimuli is needed to induce the entire consciousness to activity, the greatest geniuses need only a little stimulation to become very, very conscious. The fact that the drives operate as one leads to the strange behavior that allows the association between genius and insanity to be possible. Sexuality, intellect, all the emotions, etc.. all operate as one. Of course this is all archetypal, no genius, no man, has every united in his consciousness absolutely all the constituent drives available to human nature. They have achieved greater and lesser degrees of such a union, which always operates against a much stronger, much larger background of the unconscious which, again, is not repressed memories and drives, but those drives, thoughts, etc. which resist integration and still operate as separate forces.







------

"In nature, the animal man’s instincts were coordinated in such a way that the expression of one instinct was not merely the expression of its own force, but that of the entire organism, that of the consciousness. Consciousness is only this unified force, this reflexivity. To call forth the greatest store of consciousness with the slightest amount of sensory excitation, that was the “goal” of nature. Man’s reason eventually separated the instincts from one another, it introduced discontiguous states of mental affect into a consciousness born out of the need to grasp through continguous impressions relations of temporal and spatial nature. Such discontiguous states of affect we now recognize as “ideas,” words, abstractions. To reason, to arrange aesthetically the same kinds of relationships arranged metonymically by the early consciousness, relationships between events, things, and feelings, that is to say, to arrange them in accordance with these abstractions and the relationships suggested by an appeal to their standard (such as causality) man would have been provided with an advantage over the other beasts, the advantage of anticipation, imagination, and strategy.


His reason, in short, had the psychological consequence of a disruption in the metonymic structure of consciousness so that man began to experience the force of the instincts individually. The sensation of distance and gulf within himself inspired him with the thought of the soul, the thought of a self. The self represents a kind of abeyance of consciousness, the repose of a continuously discharging instinctual organism, a fragmentation of this activity in accordance with which the instincts could be re-coordinated, through “thought.” But this “thinking” could not realize a harmonious order of the instincts like that which nature took thousands of years to produce. The first thoughts to lend their coloring to the humans soul were accordingly very painful, and constituted a kind of negative expression of the organism, the force not of an organization but of a disorganization, from which man still suffers, for this disorganizing power of thought was doubtlessly very seductive, the force it was capable of generating far surpassed that of the organized instincts and the individuated instincts, and was in its power very compelling to early man, offering to him an impetus toward action and life that could not be denied, even if the life and the acts it led him to were dangerous, painful, tragic. It took root in the deepest parts of his consciousness. It is his "conscience." "

From Hamartia.


----

One only needs to think of human sacrifice, self-torture, cannibalism, death worship, all common in the earliest human societies. Why is this destructive "disorganizing force" preservative of the human species? It is a greater impetus to life, it is "stronger" than the half-slumbering active consciousness achieved by re-harmonizing the drives through "thinking." It provides a greater way of cohering a social order. When man made the switch from small hunter-gatherer tribes to larger communities, it found its best soil.



" The conscience juxtaposes instincts and passions of contrary dispositions, as the sexual drive and the metaphysical need are counter-poised to produce the inspiration of the Christian saint, and grasps this disorganizing power, this inspiration, in an abstraction, in a discontiguous state of consciousness. "


It allows contrary mental states/affects to be grasped simultaneously. That is much easier, comparatively, then achieving genuine mental integration.


So we have one group that grasps contrary emotional states in an abstraction, through discontinguous states of consciousness, so that the intellect operates separately from the emotional organism, the egoic consciousness wholly circumscribed by the intellectualiation and narcotisized as it were. Everything is morally good which provides this respite, anything that reawakens emotional and sensual life (which must be highly painful, granted the contrary passions) is bad, like sexual desire, etc. Another group, who achieve mental integration, are not hurt by the same things that awaken for the former the drives, because their drives do not exist in such destructive configurations. But these two classes of people do not war, they integrate, socially, over time. Those who are not harmed by the drives, as the drive for sex, become early priests, the administrators of the Gods, and teach others how to tolerate these drives through things like sex rituals, as was practiced at the temples of Athena. The grasping through abstraction of contrary drives and the active integration of compatible drives, as two tendencies or psychological strategies, operate together, producing the model of the modern human being, a highly compartmentalized, coping-efficient, somewhat "less insane" psychology.



But the truth is often spurred along under the wing of madness.



But for us philosophers of the future, what do we need to do to intentionally produce what all genius has heretofore only for-shadowed? A truly active consciousness? It involves a new way of valuing, of creating morality.



"......... doubt and suffering can only serve as the presentiment of a replete and living self, of some vital power within us that longs to be exhausted, and certainly can never extinguish such a vitality; for who and what a person is depends in the final case, not on the truth he has acquired or the morality for which he lives, but rather on the number of passions, joys, sufferings, and thoughts that he can unite within the circle of his comprehension, it depends upon the breadth of that image, of that idea, which he is capable of drawing from out of their opposition and turmoil, for anything not held within the confines of this image will certainly be lost amidst the passage of years, and everything not informed by its singularity destroyed. It is what Shelley called the hope which has created from its own wreck the thing it contemplates; it is Eros, that love which ennobles philosophy, which searches into the depths of mortal passion, which chastens the springs of joy and suffering, which raises our passions and experiences into the higher language of ideas; it is love, which engenders within that suffering which is the bitter fruit of all practical morality the seed of heroicism, that unites the disparate elements through which our individuality comes into being. When the sky darkens and the storm sets in, the bird does not cease flying because it is afraid, but because it can no longer see the horizon in its infinite distance, and it longs to brave immensity and impossibility, and cannot live under anything but that boundless horizon; so too does a man live and take shape only in the horizon of his love, his hope, and his ideas." -- Hamartia






The logic of the daemonic and the idea of reflexive consciousness I developed before I ever caught word of what you were doing here. Once I familiarized myself with value ontology I realized my concepts of the daemonic and my theory of consciousness could be used as the psychological basis of it, of value ontology. The psychology of the daemonic also articulates a new conception of morality, the idea of transcendental goods. Value ontology, when it has been fully formed, might be understood as the science of articulating and creating such transcendental goods, transcendental values, values which intentionally provoke the daemonic side of man. All of these separate ventures are different components of a new philosophical movement I don't have a name for.








"All youths are prophets. Is not all of our wisdom only a long interpretation of the poem and dream of youth?"
- Hamartia
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PostSubject: Re: A new ethics.   A new ethics. Icon_minitimeThu Feb 23, 2012 8:01 pm

This was supposed to be a reply to a PM by Capable, and I accidentally posted it in ethics. I suppose I might as well leave it here.
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PostSubject: Re: A new ethics.   A new ethics. Icon_minitimeThu Feb 23, 2012 8:49 pm

It is good that you did post this here. This is quite substantial. I would first like to focus on one small part here (essentially I feel like I understand most of what you write here - although it has taken me a while to habituate to your language and terms - so I want to focus more on where I so far have less grasp on your meaning),

Quote :
The first thoughts to lend their coloring to the humans soul were accordingly very painful, and constituted a kind of negative expression of the organism, the force not of an organization but of a disorganization, from which man still suffers, for this disorganizing power of thought was doubtlessly very seductive, the force it was capable of generating far surpassed that of the organized instincts and the individuated instincts, and was in its power very compelling to early man, offering to him an impetus toward action and life that could not be denied, even if the life and the acts it led him to were dangerous, painful, tragic. It took root in the deepest parts of his consciousness. It is his "conscience." "

Why/how was this first experienced as a suffering, as a negative expression? Delimitation of what I will call the human-subjective drives from a functional unity-whole into discrete units ("thoughts" or ideas/conceptual-perceptive imaginings, and distinct "feelings") would seemingly have schizophrenized the human mind, introducing total confusion and chaos into the human. Suddenly man is experiencing powerful "thoughts", internal images that are not memories but vivid imaginings of presently unreal conditions that yet seem entirely real, and intense passional-emotional states that linger and seem to arise "out of nowhere" rather than as a result of immediate environmental stimulus. It seems like "chaotic" and confusing would be a good way to describe all this. What I want to get at is more exactly what you mean by, "very painful, and constituted a kind of negative expression of the organism". This negative expression resulting from how a single moment of consciousness is now being defined-constituted by a more limited-narrow experiential stimulus rather than the result of a unified functional whole of all relevant internal states, drives and affects ("instincts") given the stipulations of the environment of the immediate moment? That each moment of such a now highly compartmentalized consciousness is an expression of more "lack" of "what is not there, what is not saliently functional" than what is?

I am also curious in what manners this would have been so seductive and socially useful to man. Probably the emergence of shaman and language (or further development of language) was spurred by the necessity of coping with this now-schizophrenized consciousness, which had previously known only "animal unity" of a more or less functional whole "image" of consciousness where no single drive or impulse would have unduly impeeded upon the rest (out of sync with environmental necessity, of course). Now picture this new man, this ape, standing around experiencing these inner turmoils that have no immediate environmental stimulus. Certainly language and social force, in other words the imposition of powerful regulatings and limiting mechanisms that would have been recognized by this ape (e.g. elements of the social sphere, power hierarchies, words/sounds designating known threats or desired objects, etc.), would have been needed. Those early societies which survived were the ones that developed more useful mechanisms of limitation and constraint with respect to this newly compartmentalized-freed system of drives and affects? In otherwords, without an "animal" functional unity the consciousness needed to supplement itself in part with a new sort of compensational unity, one borrowed from the social sphere.

Assuming this is hitting on where you are going with this, I would like to further explore how this situation led to the emergence of conscience, specifically what this conscience was, consisted of, at first, and how our modern experiences with it can be seen as derivative of these earlier states. I suppose I have a preconceived connotation of what "conscience" means and is, and there is some lack of overlap here with regard to how this may be seen to have derived from the early condition of man just having developed rudimentary self-consciousness and "reason", and a basic symbolic-representational language in such a way so as to experience the delimitation and compartmentalization of the various inner sensations from each other, and what this situation would have been like and what it would have necessitated on a social-collective scale.
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PostSubject: Re: A new ethics.   A new ethics. Icon_minitimeFri Feb 24, 2012 12:19 am

To answer Capable's questions... Nietzsche often makes the point that we cannot understand the origin of a thing based on what it does or what it is used for now. In the present time we understand the conscience to be the internal voice of a moral system. It has, or produces, this inner sense of right and wrong because the moral system has been so thoroughly ingrained in a person that he no longer has to think about it, it is intuited.


When man first learned to look beyond the veil of time, when he began to think... He very quickly learned how to differentiate internal states of emotion and drive in accordance to the now easily divisible world outside of him. Man could now only act in accord with a particular emotional state that was paired with a change he wanted to see in the world outside of him. He could no longer behave as animals do, he had to think, he now possessed a will. The problem is that individual drives do not possess enough power to compel man to act, save for those drives directly involved in his survival, and that is only because they overcome his reason. Starvation would compel him to eat. But there was no way to evolve social bonds, a culture, anything beyond hunter-gather societies. There was no way to value. The fact that the individual drives were not powerful enough to seduce man to action is exampled by the fact that they do not grant him the capacity to value, and it is only value that will satisfy that hunger which no other animal possesses, the hunger of his newly developed intellect.

He could only pair one drive with an intended result, he could not appraise many results and value them against each other. He was just a clever animal at that point. He needed a lot of stimuli and got only a little consciousness out of it... He needed a way to weigh many different decisions and drives against each other, but for that he needed a developed sense of self-hood.


So now a "self" had to be developed, the thing that values... Something that can apprehend the variances in drive and emotion, between internal states, that can comprehend them and itself as something enduring throughout them. The disorganization of his integrated sensuality, the separation of his animal nature into constituent drives through his reason, took on a life of its own. Two inner states were reified in an abstraction in which their discontiguity, their variance, their difference, could be comprehended. This is the beginning of the spiritualization of man and world, and the development of the "self," of the psychological sense of selfhood, in such abstractions. Those abstractions in which man grasped the changes, the transformations and difference between his emotional states, granted him more and more consciousness of his selfhood. So the first stage of the development of the conscience, the capacity to value, was the intuited sense of self-permanence, self-hood.

Contrast is then the basis of our consciousness. There is no consciousness without the separation of inner and outer phenomenon into opposition, oppositions which must be reified in some abstraction that makes us conscious of the variance between two things or inner states. It would have been psychologically painful at first because all the drives responsible for the survival of man had to be placed in opposition to one another. Death rituals that celebrated life, things of this sort, took place. Mass suicides, cannibalism, death orgies, pain festivals. All of this was necessary. It formed the first social connections beyond hunter-gather, ie. religious connections, as well as helped develop self-consciousness. The failed abstractions, the values that proved suicidal or ended up leading toward death, obviously we don't know of. The failed cultures to which they belonged never lived long enough to write their own history books. But there is an extensive history which we have no knowledge of which details such failed cultures, the forgotten madness of our species, and much self-imposed torture. Only the "sanest" values and value-creators survived, all the history and culture we know is of them. The values and moral philosophies of this survivor culture are no more credible though, they just didn't end up killing us. Well, they didn't end up killing all of us.


In our time, in recent history.... this process of reifying the variance of the inner life, of extending the sphere of consciousness over the collapsed foundation of animal instincts, is only carried out by "geniuses," through moral philosophy, art, etc. But in our early history all men were doing this, in order to deal with their destroyed psyches and broken drives. Values are created only in response to the fact that there is no impetus to live. All men once needed that impetus, few men do now.








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PostSubject: Re: A new ethics.   A new ethics. Icon_minitimeFri Feb 24, 2012 12:30 am

However that impetus to life has dimmed and is dying, Nietzsche called it nihilism. The brutal process I just described and all the madness that comes with it- much greater madness now though, since so many centuries of philosophers and knowledge-workers have differentiated the drives, the animal pathos... All of that must be done again and endured again. You see, we have already seen a few failed cultures and noted their dying rituals. The madness of the Nazis, for example. More of that will come. Nietzsche himself is an example of a failed culture, perhaps. Maybe we all are too. Hard to say.
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PostSubject: Re: A new ethics.   A new ethics. Icon_minitimeFri Mar 09, 2012 4:12 pm

I just made a connection between something I wrote in the topic 'What is religion?' and your new theory of ethics.

I wrote,

    But whereas actual children grow whether they want to or not, are forced to grow and overcome themselves again and again even if they do not wish to, the adult "child" of the religious type has no such organic-physiological necessity. Man can remain child-like throughout his entire life, child-like when it comes to the character and quality of his consciousness. This lack of an impelling necessity for growth to continue outside of actual child-hood might be one of the severest problems we face as a species.


And your ethics now stands as a solution for this lack: what man lacks, presently, is a psychological necessity which would impel him to continue "growing up" once he has abandoned childhood and become an "adult". But this necessity would need to be of a psychological, conceptual, ideational form, and would need to draw heavily from affectation as well. Religion merely appropriates this lack, utilizing it rather than filling it in or answering it. What your new ethics here speaks of is a totally new way to fill in this lack, to give man a powerful and vital psychological necessity that would impel him toward higher degrees of self-actualizational development, growth. It is easy for us to see how religious methodology does not produce psychological necessity but rather represses this possibility, disguises and degenerates the feeling/sense of this otherwise lacking need. Philosophy can create some necessity here, but it is haphazard, insufficient, not yet fully formed. I think you have gathered these fragments and fused them together into a new ethical order and potentiality, one which now would generate in man a significant psychological necessity were it to take hold in him.




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