I was considering continuing work on chapter 8 of Dead End :
A Strong Dose of Madness, focusing on the theme of
How to Get Through a Life Not Worth Living. I'm not quite sure how I would go about this. Most likely, I would start from scratch and write from the perspective of this 50 year old hunk of flesh on disintegrating bones. It's just a thought. If I am going to write anything, it will be a philosophical satire focused on how to get through a life not worth living. It's audience will be those who have evolved to the point where they are able to acknowledge the pointless absurdity of existence. The mood I aim at evoking will be one between deep depression and cosmic satire, where we might even be able to emit a chuckle from beholding our true nature, the inner being of Nature itself, as the absolute ludicrous in the flesh.
This writing project I have in mind would be slow going. It would not include any notes from A Strong Dose of Madness, as that was written from a different perspective, when I thought, for sure, I would always have recourse to drinking whisky and chasing it down with beer while sitting in a hot tub of water.
While going through that relatively long chapter I came across some notes that may offer us some food for thought about the world as a mental construct, specifically where Schopenhauer suggests that Intellect and Matter are one in the same.
I will leave bits and pieces of those notes here.
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Once I choose to continue living, how am I to exist?
Phenomenology confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that there is no truth, but merely truths. Is the phenomenological reduction an absurd procedure? “Intention” characterizes consciousness. Returning to consciousness, as we “awaken,” we escape from everyday sleepwalking and move toward absurd freedom. It’s not so much about explaining and solving as it is about experiencing and describing.
I have become alienated, marginalized, and superfluous. I can’t explain how I’ve come to be this way. I merely experience and attempt to describe experience. Radical intellectual honesty seems to be a necessary component in this process. I want to push through the barriers that prevent us from deep experience – self-deception, delusion, and downright blindness as to the motivations underlying behaviors which baffle us.
Scientific training/education imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, where the individual body-subject plays a minor role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality (Jung). Rationalists are incapable of psychological insight. Feeling like an insignificant statistic or “vote,” and that life has lost its meaning, the poor gort is already on its way to State slavery. The individual personality is the real life-carrier.
Science and technology made reason ascendant over our emotional system (instinct, intuition, unconscious animal responses), and from this comes the prime assumption of modern humanism: “All problems are soluable.” Emotion is held up to contempt and ridicule. Industrial society believes reason to be superior to emotion, and yet, as complex neurobiological organisms, we can’t reason without our complex emotional systems. Emotions are the mechanism that Nature has given us for fitting ourselves into our world (Ehernfeld).
A body (corps) is not reducible to an organism, any more than espirit de corps is reducible to the soul of an organism.
The essence of animism is a radical rejection of Cartesian dualism. Animism is the recognition that we are our bodies and not ephemeral spirit wrapped in an arbitrary fleshy shell; animism is the simple belief in our own experience. This is where phenomenology and animism merge. The body becomes the symbol for the I.
Alone, without the body, the I is an empty concept.
Reason seems impotent when confronted with the depths of existence. The ultimate truth of our condition cannot be known rationally, because this truth is elusive, and any attempt to objectify it can delude us. The Hegelian philosophy of history is meaningless. Worse yet, it is cruel and coercive.
Heidegger viewed reason as an obstacle to thinking.
If there is no consciousness outside of the neural nerve net (the brain), if there is no soul outside the brain, where does consciousness come from? What causes consciousness?
What does the great Oracle, Arthur Schopenhauer, have to tell me about soul or consciousness?
“The maintenance of an empirical freedom of the will, a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, is very closely connected with the assertion that places man’s inner nature in a soul that is originally a knowing, indeed, really an abstract thinking entity, and only in consequence thereof a willing entity. Such a view, therefore, regarded the will as a secondary nature, instead of knowledge, which is really secondary.”
Of course, according to Schopenhauer, the will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will.
Do mental states have non-physical features? Schopenhauer says that everything is most certainly physical, yet not explainable. Paul M. Churchland offers an explanation with neurocomputational terminology. The existence of one’s auto-connected epistemic pathways, their origins, and their current cognitive functions are all intelligible on purely physicalist assumptions. Isn’t this going about things counter to implementing Husserl’s “pre-scientific awareness”? I don’t think so.
Husserl’s phenomenology is a bringing us into contact with things through their being perceived in their fleshly presence. Each of us, including non-human creatures, has a proprietary way of knowing about the occurrence and character of one’s own internal states. Truth cannot be limited to what can be gained through the application of the scientific method. Merleau-Ponty went as far as describing scientific points of view as “always naïve and at the same time dishonest.” Many truths we arrive at intuitively through our living bodies.
I have a strong ambivalence towards professional, academic philosophy. What about the old issue about the essentially objective nature of physical phenomena and the essentially subjective nature of mental phenomena? We can now see that there is nothing exclusively objective about physical phenomena, since they can occasionally be known by subjective means as well, specifically, by the activity of one’s auto-connected epistemic pathways. Neither is there anything exclusively subjective about one’s mental states. While our mental states are known by way of one’s auto-connected pathways, our states can also be observed by Others. The very faculties of understanding are themselves physical in nature.
Consciousness flows. Consciousness is not me, but I am of consciousness. I am a species of consciousness. Husserl can’t transcend the ‘unknown forces of Nature” without invoking specific “magical” terminology such as the phenomenological act of reduction (epoche, bracketing off, suspending judgment). “Magic” is a simple direct way of escaping the narrowness of everydayness. Instead of turning to the great thinkers, the student of the occult turns immediately inward and tries to reach down to his subliminal depths, into the cognitive unconscious itself, what Husserl imagined to be a “pure consciousness,” a primordial pre-scientific awareness, the ground of non-conceptual, “spiritual” knowledge. I think the chief thing is to establish a link between the conscious and subconscious mind.
“There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” (Wittgenstein)
According to Western neuroscience, consciousness is a product of the physiological processes in the brain, and thus critically dependent on the body. We have absolutely no proof that consciousness is actually produced by the brain. We do not have even a remote notion how something like consciousness could possibly happen. That consciousness is a brain process remains one of the leading myths of Western materialistic science and has profound influence on our entire society (Grof).
Experiences originating on deeper levels have a certain quality Jung called numinosity. The term numinous is neutral and preferable to similar names, such as religious, mystical, magical, holy, or sacred. The mystics do not need churches or temples or universities.
Alcoholism and dependence on street drugs may represent a misguided search for transcendence. “Mystical states” offer richness of philosophical insights, but drunkenness does not offer such insights. People go into therapy trying to make the unconscious conscious. And yet, our spiritual ancestors close to the origins of our species realized the conscious and subconscious are linked together through the process of breathing.
Husserl had a deep conviction that Western culture had lost its direction and purpose. The individual is threatened from both sides: by the State and by God. It seems there is a psychological opposition between the phenomenal Natural World and the monotheistic God. The peasants starve and the police are kept well-disciplined and well-fed. Who is this goon lumbering around as my government?
To me, radicalizing phenomenology is simply acknowledging that when Husserl attempted to use rational means for attaining a transcendental state, he unleashed into the world a confusion. When I refer to myself as a “radical phenomenologist,” I mean that I fully embrace the confusion Husserl has exposed; in fact, I rest in this confusion. Edmund Husserl, without trying to do so, has undermined Reason, the god of the Industrial World. As a radical phenomenologist, I call into question the conventional scientific worldview. In so doing, I set about to further undermine mass industrial society. The connection between science and totalitarian control has become apparent. The general population finds itself existing within a gargantuan industrial apparatus which it admires, worships, and idolizes, and yet cannot comprehend. Hence, the general population defers to the authority of the experts and specialists.
Albert Camus writes, “Husserl’s manner of proceeding negates the classical method of reason, disappoints hope, opens to intuition and to the heart of the whole proliferation of phenomena, the wealth of which has something about it inhuman. These paths lead to all sciences or to none.”
I am moving towards an embodied realism, and yet I trust Schopenhauer when he writes, “True philosophy must at all costs be idealistic; indeed, it must be so merely to be honest. For nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty; but the first principle of a science must have such a certainty. It is quite appropriate to the empirical standpoint of all the other sciences to assume the objective world as positively and actually existing; it is not appropriate to the standpoint of philosophy, which has to go back to what is primary and original. Consciousness alone is immediately given, hence the basis of philosophy is limited to the facts of consciousness; in other words, philosophy is essentially idealistic.”
But I digress. Spiritualism is the false safeguard against materialism; but the real and true safeguard against materialism is idealism. In spiritualism, what is proved is the knower’s independence of matter, but in idealism, what is proved is the dependence of all matter on the knower. Husserl always reminds us that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Schopenhauer says that consciousness without object is no consciousness at all. Both appear to be transcendental idealists.
Intellect and matter are correlatives. They are one and the same thing – not opposites. From one point of view, we have intellect, from the other point of view we have matter; and both are this one thing, the phenomenon of this will-to-live, the primordial one, Ur-Einen.
Immanuel Kant’s proposition, that the “I think” must accompany all our representations, is insufficient, for “the I” is an unknown quantity. The I itself is a mystery and a secret. Isn’t the I Ur-Einen? Isn’t the I the thing-in-itself?
We partake in the unconscious omniscience of the inner being of Nature.
In the emerging post-modern world, the drive for authenticity is thwarted by the entire social system in which our lives are embedded.
Why am I so intensely concerned with philosophical questions? Isn’t the real world directly accessible to us through intuition? Intuitions are the hard-won insights akin to mathematical discoveries. My insights become part and parcel of my mental equipment.
Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” is a reflection of the chaos left in the wake of Kant.
My motive is not to drive myself insane, but to overcome the fear of insanity. Losing objective consciousness might be mistaken for insanity by the “sane” who are stuck in objective consciousness. I’m too engrossed in my own transformations to be disturbed by the images my presence of mind produces in the heads of others. Most likely, I will be forgotten in the silence of history, and so, while walking upon the earth, I’ll not live for an image, for those impressions are in others’ minds, and hence are but mere phantoms, constructions intended to give them an impression of me.
Phenomenology is a kind of trained introspection and self-observation. Our so-called “outer-perception” presents us with nothing that appears the way it really is. We are subject to some serious illusions with respect to rest, motion, figure, and size. All we know are the effects of these physical things on our sense organs.
Enter philosophical movements disguised as jokes or jokes disguised as philosophical movements. These are grim days indeed. Jokes are in high demand, but a few hearty laughs may shake us from our angst so that we might become more focused on the task at hand, whether it is sleeping, feeding, warming, or even contemplating our own death. I wish we could organize a movement to keep writers, scholars, and artists physically alive – to permit them to continue their work in this most difficult century. Studios could be organized where we form our own schools.
Dressed in old coats, chilled and hungry, we could become totally absorbed in discussions of literature, philosophy, comedy, wilderness survival, and “the end of history.” My “true” inner self is different from the self that appears in conversations with others. I need writing to supplement the misleading signs of my speech. In other words, in my speech and action I may seem to be going along with the status-quo, so I need my writing to pick up on the elements within me resisting. I need writing because my speech gets misinterpreted.
The most important lesson the [phenomenological] reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.
The philosopher is the perpetual beginner. The unfinished nature of phenomenology is not a sign of failure. It is inevitable because phenomenology’s task is to reveal the mystery of the world and the impotency of reason when confronted with the depth of our lived experiences (existence itself).
Husserl believed we should not assume any philosophic or scientific theory, and furthermore, must avoid deductive reasoning (which presupposed logic) and mathematics as well as any other speculative theory of psychology and philosophy, in order to concentrate on describing what is given directly in intuition (Anschauung). This involves the most radical form of self-questioning, involving a kind of overthrow of all previous assumptions to knowledge, and a questioning of many of our ‘natural’ (common sense, scientific) intuitions about the nature of our mental processes or the make-up of the so-called objective world.
Husserlian phenomenology focuses totally on what is given in intuition and is not meant to rely on logical inferences, or mediate knowledge of any kind.
Phenomenology must be able to cope with the most radical denial of the world, with the challenge of the most hyperbolic doubt which sees the whole world as a dream or even as non-existent. As Dermot Moran says, “The objects focused on in phenomenological viewing must be neutralized with respect to the question of actuality.”
Phenomenology is riddled with as much paradox and mystery as life itself: How can a science which claims to remain true to experience seek to be a pure science stripped of all experiential elements? Phenomenology is remote from common sense. In the phenomenological reduction, there is a radical upheaval and consciousness even ceases to be human, loses all connection to the empirical, natural, human ego and its psychological states.