The Science of Mirages

Lacan called psychoanalysis a science of mirages[i], but aren’t all truth-seeking disciplines concerned with the mirage? Mustn’t truth always be uncovered from a reality which is a constant process of covering up?

That the truth is ugly and ashamed of itself while at the same time being proud of its power and its ability to seduce via the masks it wears, makes it easy for us to exist with our backs turned. It is more comfortable for us to look away from the real and face a false projection of reality rather than tackling the ugly truth itself. This is the unauthentic nature of the civilised human’s perception of life. It is a virtual but interactive existence that sublimates the real slavery inherent in our sacrifices. By immersing ourselves in the false projection we give ourselves a space to play in with our own meanings, where we are able to create roles with our own reasons for playing the game. The unreality of our fantasies seeps into the real in a liquid way, mixing with it, tainting it and making it even uglier than it already is. There is a psychological distortion affecting both parts of human nature – the animal as well as the Sapien nature – and the socio-cultural life of civilisation must pay a psychological price for that distortion. We lean ever further in the direction of the fantasy, and that act has another price to pay.

But the real cost of the fantasy is our misunderstanding of the world we must live in, and the over-appreciation of the strength of the bubble we have created in order to isolate ourselves from the natural space we will always depend on. We think the bubble protects us, but really it endangers us. The truth is ugly because it lies to us, and it is intangible for that same reason. How can one grasp a truth that is really a lie? What is the truth in the lie of the truth?

Such questions swallow their own tails. The paradox nature of this truth is maddening. Nevertheless once this is accepted we can act with purpose. If the truth is a lie, it needs to be changed. A new reality needs to be made. We need to make truth honest again. But in order to do that we need to burst the bubble of fantasy and lies that we are floating in. We have to walk through the mirage, confront the desert, and cross over it.

[i] Jacques Lacan, Écrits (the first complete edition in English), W. W. Norton and co., New York, 1999, p. 339

NEUROSIS: OUR PARODIXICAL REALITY

The power and meaningfulness of paradox is embedded in the unity of its own greatest contradiction: Paradox is something that reveals and conceals at the same time. But this could also be a definition of reality itself. Reality is something that reveals and conceals and hence, reality has a paradoxical nature.

It is certainly true of the reality propagated by the System. The System reveals and conceals. Watch the nightly news and that which is unveiled is at the same time concealing just as much information, if not more. In the same way, at the same time that we discover things we also repress our awareness of other things. Concentration opens our eyes to minute details by blurring the forms around it. This is not a contradiction but rather a paradoxical reality.

To find another example let us examine the psychological or psycho-pathological state of our society and consider the existence of neurosis. At the subjective level, neurosis is a removal of the individual’s narrative from public communication. However, on the social or macro-psychological level, it is the public communication that has become senseless to the individual. Alienation is the cause of neurosis and an alienating society will breed neurotics. Nevertheless, in the case of neurotic illness quite the opposite takes place: society sees the neurotic as ill and the neurotics will see that “illness” in themselves because the  society reflects it at them. But whose fault is it when someone feels disconnected from society: the fault of the neurotic or of the system that creates neurosis? In our System, it is a neurotic splitting of discourse from meaning that alienates the individual, not a particular moral weakness or infirm nervous system in the neurotics themselves. Nevertheless, the fact that society creates neurotics is not considered an important criticism of the structure of society itself. There are no political party agendas dedicated to the eradication of neurosis, because, in order to do such a thing a complete rethinking and restructuring of the fabric of society would be required. The existence of neurotics condemns the failures of society and yet the condemnation is covered up and loaded upon the victim. The truth concerning neurosis is therefore embedded in the mystification of its paradoxical nature and only by looking for the paradox that encloses the problem are we really able to see it.

It is the discovery of the paradox that allows for the unveiling of the real. Always search for the paradoxical nature of things, even when, or especially when, things seem perfectly straight forward.

HOW TO FIND YOUR TRUE VOCATION IN LIFE?

Imagine a future civilisation in which our technologies are so advanced that money has been rendered obsolete. Work, as something that one needs to do to earn an income which will pay for your survival or improve your standard of living, no longer exists. Now think: in such a scenario what would I do with my time now that I have all day to do what I want? Try and imagine something that you could spend most of your time doing without really needing to do it. If something comes immediately to mind that is probably your vocation in life. If nothing does then you’ll have to look harder for it. Or perhaps you can think of many things, in which case you probably have a holistic vocation that does not limit itself to specific areas and you’ve got a Renaissance soul.

What this also gives us is a measure of progress. The standard of living in a society improves when we can all actually do what we really want to do. Only when we have liberated society from the money system will we be able to make it a vocation-driven one.

KNOWING THE LIE – CONSCIOUSNESS (1)

One cannot be free unless one has the power to change one’s circumstances in a positive way. One cannot change one’s circumstances unless one can see what needs to be changed. Consciousness is therefore an a priori necessity for freedom. Dictatorship can be achieved by simply making the people it oppresses unconscious of the reality that really dominates them.

Consciousness has to be an alert force, if it is not alert it cannot be consciousness. Its power lies in its ability to see through the veil of systemic mystification. Consciousness allows us the right to be critical, sceptical, or even cynical.

Of course consciousness can also be false. False consciousness lacks clarity as it is muddied by its own ideologies: ideologies that stem from identities. For consciousness to be clear it needs to transcend all ideology-mask identities.

False consciousness could also be called misguided consciousness – a consciousness looking for a reality which is simply just not there, and probably never will be, is a misguided one. Consciousness needs to see through the masks, but that does not mean it must cut through all still surfaces. The cutting open can have negative results if the process itself does nothing but churn already clear waters and makes them no longer transparent.

Can we say that reality should be that which needs to be? What about want it to be? If we accept the validity of both possibilities, which is stronger: want or needs? Desires must be subject to needs. Desires can only be gained when needs are satisfied. Likewise, in order to uncover reality and therefore find truth, consciousness must be guided by needs at first and desires only when those needs are satisfied or safeguarded. The first thing consciousness must look for is necessity.

MAKING THE MASK – IDENTITY AS IDEOLOGY (2)

Ideologies are masks. And if we add to this Althusser’s idea that “Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respirations and life,”[i] then we start to get an image of the veiling process of human society in the falsifying process of mask-making. It is through the creation of masks that society paints (in a secreting way) its own suitable, fake reality around itself. Any reality that is secreted or painted on must be regarded as a false one.

Once we have recognised the existence of the ideological mask we must ask ourselves: what is the real condition under that mask? Is it so ugly or so drab that it needs a mask to make it interesting or presentable? Of course the mask bearer erroneously thinks he or she is looking at his or own reflection in the mirror – and in this way we must see ideology as a bewildering hoax or scam, and the society as a clever grafter who has its subjects in its pocket. But why is it that the subjects are so susceptible to this hoax?

The first mask is the name which itself comes out of a language that frames us within that name. And here we have the paradox of language: it frees us by allowing us to communicate but enslaves us by making us subject to the requirements of the other’s communication. Without language our society and culture, indeed humanity itself, would be inconceivable, but it is not until one can escape into another new language that one can ever be aware of the power contained in the mask that we were given in the first place. Language unites but also separates us. It makes us different to those who speak other languages and unites us with those we immediately understand. They who speak our language are our own, but this is another restriction. If language is our most human trait, it is also our most anti-human as being the prime cause of human division and our lack of species consciousness.

The masks of cultures make demands on us and ultimately strive to condition our existence, pushing our self-perception towards a sense of belonging to a part of humanity that is different to, separate from and better than the rest of humanity … and this is the fundamental error.

Emphasis on difference is always there whilst the dividing lines are clearly and deliberately drawn, and emphasis on differences engenders the competitive spirit – the struggle against the others; the creed of us and them; the multifarious masks of isolating identities.

Ideologies grow like mushrooms, sprouting out of the damp earth of separation and the fertile soil of competition. Ideologies look for their antithesis to give them purpose, furbishing them with the power of dialectic against the rivals and enemies. Ideology needs to coexist with its ideological antithesis in order to give itself meaning. “We only makes sense whilst we stand by Them,” is the unmasked motto of all ideologies. Ideologies coexist in order for them to compete and clash, and it is in this coexistence that these opposing forces seep into each other, muddying each other and forcing each other to evolve into hypocritical absurdities that eventually become unsustainable.

The falsity of the mask can only be maintained for so long. Eventually all lies must be seen for the fictions they are. Reality will always push its way through to the surface of the artificial cover that is hiding it. Our own Moloch system is a massive ideological mess of a mask which is rapidly starting to peel and crack.

[i] Louis Althusser, FOR MARX, London, 1969, p.232

THE CHEATING GAME

It is obvious that the triumph of Western liberal democracy[i] and its subsequent process of Globalisation has done very little toward bringing humanity more closely together. Quite the opposite is true: we all seem to be drifting further and further apart. But, if it has failed with humanity, what has two centuries of liberal democracy achieved with the individual? How successful has it been in its attempts to forge a society of strong-selves? If we have failed with the whole, then surely we must have succeeded with the individuals who are the antithesis of the whole?

But again it is obvious that we haven’t? In Nietzsche’s terms, we have achieved neither the Human nor the Superman, just the Last Man. The pathetic Last Man, bumbling through a cheating-game world of relativity and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories because, whether we accept them or not, they point an accusing finger at the basic fabric of the system, undermining all responsibilities and moralities with scepticism. How can one be morally responsible in a system which is inherently corrupt? The individual, rather than standing strong and finding a good position in the competitive world, finds him or herself immersed in a society of cheats. The system has now become a cheating-game and the strong-self has to be identified in such an environment as a morally irresponsible subject.

One can only be a strong, successful player in the cheating-game by being a good cheat. This of course makes all success seem suspicious. Eventually decisions need to be made in which “honesty” is needed, but… who can we trust anymore? A strong leader is obviously a good liar and a very good cheat. This kind of leader is useful at convincing us that we are happy in a world that in reality offers us very little… Useful that is until we start to understand the truth. And the simple truth is that we are being cheated.

The first great lie is freedom as individuality and its idea of the unfettered individual along with the creation of a passion for strong individuals. Freedom is now a term used to propagate the unfettering of power: freedom to dominate; freedom to manipulate. The second great lie is democracy itself. The lie of free choice. The lie of majority rule. The lie of the individual’s capacity for achievement in the system.

The only way to combat the lie is by establishing positive, human objectives. We must look beyond the individual and the tyranny of egos in order to establish goals that are out of the cheating game. Goals without any other reward except progress towards human fulfilment. Goals that would pull us out of the cheating-game into another game with real rules that we know will really protect us and protect the world we depend on for our survival. All the rest is petty bickering, which is inevitable when you’re playing the cheating-game.

[i] See Francis Fukuyama’s thesis THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

WHAT ARE WE ACCOMPLISHING?

According to Heidegger, the essence of all action is accomplishment, and this is defined as an unfolding of something into the fullness of its essence.[1]

If we can agree with this then shouldn’t we asks ourselves what steps we have made, as Homo sapiens sapiens, towards achieving the fullness of our essence? Of course this can only be contemplated once we have agreed on what the fullness of our essence might be. And the problem now is: can it be possible in a world of individualistic minds to ever answer this? Or, in other words, is the idea of real human accomplishment impossible?

And yet, perhaps the answer is staring us right in the face, for who are we when we ask this question?

We are the Homo sapiens sapiens: the double sapiens, the double knowing; knowing that we can know; that we can know where we are (in the world) and knowing that the world is in our knowledge of it; that the world is known in us. Our essence and definition has to be that of knowing. Our essence lies in our knowing, but also in our being known, for all knowing implies a being known. Being is being known: the fulfilment of existence has to pass through intelligence, for only an intelligence can know.

From this we can see that human accomplishment has to come from the labour to create the fullness of knowing. A tremendous but impossible task, like Borges’ Biblioteca de Babel, forever unfolding and opening new doors and new possibilities for newer discoveries and the renewed uncoverings of the deepest wells of our past and that which is long forgotten. But in the futility of such an enterprise lies its strongest positivism: it is an eternal task, a destiny of ever-becoming.

Perhaps we can say that this idea is nothing new, after all how very much have we accomplished so far. And yet, how little we try. How much accomplishment has been frustrated by the unfocused structures of societies that measure themselves not by their wisdom and acquisition of knowledge but through their power to accumulate and separate by wealth comparison? How much anti-sapience is embedded in our market-orientated society of consumerism?

The essence of all action may be accomplishment and the unfolding into a fullness, but we have forgotten about the necessity of funnelling all action into the unfolding of that which is the most essential – the fulfilment of our knowing.

With humanity itself diverted away from its essence, the feeling of alienation will increase, as will the need for substitute essences, gods and idols, clubs, hobbies, sports – but these are mere distractions designed to fill the void of not-knowing. A not-knowing fuelled by distraction and maintained by nurtured forgetting. A process that teaches us to forget that we need to know, and once that is forgotten then likewise we become ignorant of any need to ask again what it is that we need to know.

Humanity’s greatest mistake was to unconditionally trust in its own techni,[2] its own amazing giftedness at inventing things – especially reasons and ideas. But without the consciousness that the ecstasy derived from this gift was tugging them away from the real essence of humanity, its ability to know.

This tugging away has been our most anti-human experience – the division of castes and hierarchies, the separation and privatisation of knowledge: the idea of the patent; of the profit to be made by sharing the result but not the means of reproducing it ourselves. The discovery of the power that knowledge provides – and knowledge is the key to all power.

For any democracy to be able to be truly considered real, it must bring knowledge back to the people in an authentic way. Knowledge must become a holistic concept, the common property of all of humanity. Intellectual property is the first abuse of knowledge, the intellectual patent – the most brutal crime against human nature.

In the democracy of knowledge as the most integral human right lies an unbounded freedom, but also a communism, an ideology of the common, human property of all knowledge. Knowledge as something sacred, for the sacred can never be the economic privilege of a minority. As sacred its purity must be preserved and the transformation of knowledge into a commodity that can be owned and sold is a perversion of that sanctity.

In order for Sapiens’ accomplishment to take place the battle for the demonetarising of knowledge and techni has to be the first to be won. The labour of unfolding knowledge and creating new techni from that unfolding has to be disassociated from the economic system of production of commodities for consumption and elevated into the field of production for accomplishment. Accomplishment therefore becomes an alternative force to consumption. Instead of working in order to make money so that we can buy consumer goods, we can labour in order to accomplish important things, work in order to unfold knowledge. Only in this way will the essence of the Sapiens’ nature be able to be fulfilled. Of course we are talking about a re-structuring of the capitalist system, which, despite all its claims to progress, is anti-accomplishment.

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[1] Heidegger, LETTERS ON HUMANISM, PATHMARKS, CUP, 1998, p. 239

[2] We are using the Greek term techni to combine the concepts of both art and technology

Uroboros vs. Ego : World vs. Humanity

“The nascent ego becomes aware of pleasure-pain qualities, and from them it experiences its own pleasure and pain… The unconscious life of nature, which is also the life of the Uroboros, combines the most meaningless destruction with the supreme meaningfulness of instinctive creation…” (Neumann, 1949, p. 39)

Human reality is a dual expression between pleasure and pain in a world of meaningless destructions and meaningful creations. A dual experience between the reality of the world’s nature and the fantasies and creations of our imaginations. The real is the great duality of Being: that we are in the world and the world is in us. A dual reality that breeds its own dualities: the agony of the ecstasy of creation, the senselessness and inherent natural necessity of destruction.

The Uroboric reality is an unconscious one, egoless. We preserve a sense of it in our subconscious for it was our prenatal reality. The unconscious being of being in the womb. With birth so to is born the ego: the self-consciousness that separates us from the Uroboric world and empowers us with contemplation of it and of ourselves. From sensory consciousness to cerebral understanding, to reason.

With its ego activated, life for the human becomes a tremendous, often overwhelming experience. At times there seems to be too much life; at others everything seems to be lacking. Yet the unconscious connection with the Uroboric is never completely lost, in fact it seems to manifest itself in the fabric of all our ideologies as a yearning for autarchy.

 

The yearning for the Paradise, for a return to the Garden of Eden, is a yearning for a return to the autarchy of the Uroboros. The simple autarchy of being-in-the-world without any other responsibility or necessity other than that of being-in-the-world.

The yearning persists, but the ego has turned against it, transforming the yearning into a melancholy that we dare indulge in only spasmodically – lest it annihilate us. The infant ego contemplates the overwhelming with more fear than wonder. Reality for the child is a constant struggle to face fear and overcome it. It is from this struggle that the idea of the hero is born, and the protector, which is another form of heroism.

Inherent in both heroism and protection there is the concept of power. Power is a struggle which has to be either provided, as a gift from the powerful hero or a god, or acquired, usually by passing a test, a quest, a coming-of-age ceremony, an initiation.

According to depth psychology, ruling over the psychic stage of the adolescent ego is the Uroboric figure of the Great Mother of Mother Nature: the Earth Mother; the world in which we must be; the great womb enclosing our after-birth existence.

It is the Earth Mother who brings death and sickness: plagues, famine, floods, forest fires, droughts and earthquakes. She terrifies us with her thunder and will strike us down with lightning.

In the beginning we did not love the world, we could not love it, we were terrified of it. Our fantasies, instead of liberating us from our fears only worsened them – for human reality is not just being-in-the-world but being there accompanied by all the phantoms, beasts and monsters of our fecund imagination. It is not enough that there is a famine this year, there is also a terrible demon and dragon that is causing the famine.

Yet it is this fear which also fed the human ingenuity that created a human need for technology, art, science and culture. Every inventor is a potential hero. Every architect, every doctor, every sculptor… Every culture until now has been the result of our heroic need to overcome our inherent fear of the world, and in this detail we see our inherent problem with the world.

We have to stop fearing and learn to love it; learn to unselfishly live with it; to treat it with the respect that it deserves.

We are in this world and we would like to think that we control it, but that is a lie. We are never really in control. The force and power of nature is tremendous. We can but react to what nature throws at us when it throws itself at us. We do our best to protect ourselves, but ultimately we are dependent on the benevolence of the powers that be.

OUR REALITY AND HEGEL’S FRUIT

It is the very fluid nature of human existence in the world that creates our uniquely human problem with “reality”. The human experience is enclosed within our  passage through time, our present is embedded in the historical movement through the ages of our technological development both in the past and the future. Of course this must be considered enriching, but we become so enamored by the motion of the historical phases that we lose sight of the constant and this creates a very dangerous condition: for it is when the continual is no longer consciously conceived amidst change that reality becomes a lie.

Hegel’s metaphor of the flower works here[1]. Imagine that reality is a tree. On the branch of this tree there appears a new, green bud which draws our attention to it. The tree had always seemed so dull and tedious before. Now it seems that there might be some other, more interesting, reason for its existence. This seems to be affirmed when the bud suddenly explodes into a colourful blossom, so beautiful that the flower itself refutes the significance of the bud and claims all attention for itself. The purpose of the tree is now so obviously to make this flower, we think. And in making this logical deduction we imbue the flower itself with the idea of Reality. But this is a mistake. The flower itself is merely an ephemeral phenomena and it will soon be replaced by a new truth, the manifestation of fruit.

Hegel uses the fruit metaphor to represent truth rather than reality, but if we were to implement our geometry of erroneous judgements on this (see our essay REAL DEMOCRACY AND THE LINE OF ERRONEOUS JUDGEMENT) we would be able to draw a triangle with a vertical axis of “truth” sprouting from a horizontal line of “reality” and linked by a hypotenuse of “ideology”.  Through understanding this relationship between ideology, truth and reality we can also see how Hegel’s metaphor works to describe the blossoming and fruition of ideologies that dazzle us, convincing us of themselves as the purposeful aims of humanity, until they themselves, explode, wither or just drop off. Of course it is the tree itself which is the constant source and power of all ideologies: but who can say they know now, with all the stentor, commotion and partitioning violence that the ideologies have thrown at us, what singular truth could possibly be the source of so much division? Where is the constant trunk from which all this diversity has grown?

As for our current, Western-world system it is very much a “fruit ideology”. We find it most often at the market-place and hardly ever on a tree. We may walk through a greengrocer, peruse the fruit and have no idea at all what the trees that they were plucked from may look like. We hardly even consider that the most essential component in the market is actually the trees from which the fruits were picked: we cannot see where the fruit of our reality came from any more. Reality has become too alienated from the real source.

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[1] G.W. Hegel PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT, Forward.

 

THE ARTIST AND HUMANITY

The artist is often advised to ask him or herself who is his or her art aimed at? Likewise the writer is asked: “who are you writing for?” But in doing so the more important question of what (what is being addressed through the artistic creation?; what are we trying to bestow?; what are we trying to communicate?) is pushed into second place or worse. The who question, which seems so important for publishers and their publicists or for arts council grants, should always be an irrelevant interrogative because in its essence it is a tautological one: the subject addressed by the artist must in its essence be a human one, transmitted for humanity. The human is rooted in the essence of the term art and any exclusion (this work is not for them) is, by that exclusion, anti-human and anti-art. Not that art has to speak lowly so that all can understand it through its simplicity; in fact it should be allowed to speak from any register, but that choice of register has to come from asking oneself what is being addressed in the work rather than who is it being addressed to.

In order to see the true potential of what the artist is addressing it is necessary to not extricate the so-called fine arts and music and literature from their cousins in the Arts or Humanities, or human sciences such as psychology, philosophy, history, sociology, architecture, etc., nor from the pure sciences. All of these activities have a common-function which is expressed in the uncovering or peeling open of reality in order to find the essence and by so doing come to an understanding of what our place, as humans, is in this reality.

The role of both art and science, therefore, is to know, and through knowing to understand. But just as art is about knowing and understanding reality, an area usually associated with the sciences, so is science about representing, which is a function traditionally attributed to the arts. Therefore we can say that all the arts and sciences have their essence in knowing, understanding, and representing reality.

Whether through fiction or non-fiction the human perception of reality is formed through our arts and sciences: reality is both truth and imagination. And if reality is truth and imagination what is non-reality other than lies. Lies are an aberration or a perversion between truth and imagination. Lies are fictions created to be passed off as truths in order to benefit the liar in some way.

Another role of art and science is to unmask these lies and for this reason skepticism and cynicism are useful, if not difficult and dangerous tools, for artists and scientists alike. Part of the role of art and science becomes the act of revealing the lies for what they are, such as when they infiltrate our imaginations through seduction or by imposition through habits or norms.