Curse of the heir

[entertainment]

Modernists who saw the birth of the city experienced in it a new sense of time that was distinct from what was before. They were able to circumscribe this sense of time as their subject because they had a vantage point outside of it, belonging to some earlier but still real state of things. We who come after are cursed with living in it without fully understanding it.

Different example. A world without, let's say, psychoanalysis, is inconceivable to me because the only culture I've known is one that has been shaped by it. For me psychoanalysis acquires an innate legitimacy, a sort of ontological necessity. It is a slightly strange experience reading early critics of psychoanalysis because to them, it is something completely different. It is a contingency, something simply thought up by a person who is possibly completely off the mark.

Of course it is possible for me to see it this way as well. But it requires some cognitive restructuring. And I am not certain I can ever lift myself completely out of it.

There is a principle here I'm interested it. How ideas go through a process of naturalization as they are passed on to the next generation. How they seep into the fabric of the world. I'm sure you can come up with better examples than me, or help expand it, or just tell me that what I'm describing is nothing but a simplified version of X's concept of Y.

 

[Clinamenic]

Modernists who saw the birth of the city experienced in it a new sense of time that was distinct from what was before. They were able to circumscribe this sense of time as their subject because they had a vantage point outside of it, belonging to some earlier but still real state of things. We who come after are cursed with living in it without fully understanding it.

Different example. A world without, let's say, psychoanalysis, is inconceivable to me because the only culture I've known is one that has been shaped by it. For me psychoanalysis acquires an innate legitimacy, a sort of ontological necessity. It is a slightly strange experience reading early critics of psychoanalysis because to them, it is something completely different. It is a contingency, something simply thought up by a person who is possibly completely off the mark.

Of course it is possible for me to see it this way as well. But it requires some cognitive restructuring. And I am not certain I can ever lift myself completely out of it.

There is a principle here I'm interested it. How ideas go through a process of naturalization as they are passed on to the next generation. How they seep into the fabric of the world. I'm sure you can come up with better examples than me, or help expand it, or just tell me that what I'm describing is nothing but a simplified version of X's concept of Y.

I'd imagine a pre-psychoanalytic status quo would consist of attributing behavior (which we would now consider in terms of complexes or trauma) to vaguely physiological determinants, EG hysteria.

So without the advent of psychoanalysis and any related psychotherapeutical discourse, we'd likely be left with a culture in which a slightly greater degree of our own psychological affairs would remain in the dark, and in which our mode of parsing out certain behaviors would likely be more superstitious and blunt in certain ways.

 

[Clinamenic]

In general I agree that this epistemic churn makes it more difficult to really analyze how our world develops.

 

[Clinamenic]

Another big one is teleology, I suspect. All the modern civilizational ideologies (capitalism, communism, fascism - at least, as they were embodied by the leading geopolitical players) involve a teleological perspective of our world, which may perhaps be attributed to certain conceptual strains in certain religions, IE that our world is advancing toward some revelatory/divine destiny, rather than just drifting without telos. Capitalism has this mythical notion of technological revolutions indefinitely driving material progress, communism has a mythical notion of self-abolition of the proletarian dictatorship unto a completely horizontal utopia where everyone is in control of how they contribute to society, and fascism has a mythical notion of marching toward ethno-national supremacy.

 

[Clinamenic]

Imagining a culture without teleological underpinnings is a challenge, but I suspect certain eastern religions may hold some worldviews more conducive to such an undertaking, EG samsara.

 

[Clinamenic]

That reactionary Russian ideologue - blanking on his name, I think his daughter died in a suspicious car accident - has talked about this. I believe his spiel was that Russia should adopt some traditionalist non-teleological culture which would effectively place it outside of the world-historical narrative, in a sort of timeless fashion. I could just be extrapolating here though.

 

[entertainment]

Borges' Tlon is an example of this imagination of course. To be fair I always found it to be pushing it a bit.

 

[entertainment]

Imagining a culture without teleological underpinnings is a challenge, but I suspect certain eastern religions may hold some worldviews more conducive to such an undertaking, EG samsara.

How far do you reckon you'd have to go to make the cut? Before democracy certainly. Before Abrahamic religion?

 

[Clinamenic]

How far do you reckon you'd have to go to make the cut? Before democracy certainly. Before Abrahamic religion?

I mean, the way that Abrahamic (at least most of it, from what I'm aware of) traditions arrange significant events in history, so as to construct a lineage of prophets and messianic figures which point toward some sort of salvation and/or apocalypse, is arguably inherently teleological. Unless, perhaps, if you argue that such a lineage is always already pointing to some horizon of salvation, which never ends up arriving. But even in that case, there is still a notion of time unfolding in such a way that involves events culminating toward some ultimate destiny.

Whereas I suspect that certain eastern religions (still unsure what blanket term to use, along the lines of Abrahamic. Vedic?) may view the world as a infinite unfolding of phenomena, cyclical or not, wherein no such ultimate reckoning takes place. Salvation, here, may take some orthogonal form of transcending this non-teleological time, if even for a while before returning to it.

 

[Clinamenic]

A key practice, I think, in taking up a non-teleological worldview, is detachment - detachment not from material and sensory gratification per se, but detachment from any expectations of one's world or oneself evolving unto a greater degree of perfection. This kind of detachment is pretty antithetical to how most of global society seems to operate now - perhaps especially capitalism.

 

[Clinamenic]

From the perspective of our teleological episteme, this kind of detachment can negatively be considered nihilism.

 

[entertainment]

A key practice, I think, in taking up a non-teleological worldview, is detachment - detachment not from material and sensory gratification per se, but detachment from any expectations of one's world or oneself evolving unto a greater degree of perfection. This kind of detachment is pretty antithetical to how most of global society seems to operate now - perhaps especially capitalism.

my instinct tells me this stuff is possible but rarely truly achieved because you have to practically kill yourself (not your body, your brain) to get to the other side

 

[entertainment]

I'm also not convinced we don't momentarily pass through these states of detachment all the time -- in the moments we might call beautiful -- but that they are fickle states easily contaminated by a whiff of ideology (capitalism, whatever)

 

[Clinamenic]

my instinct tells me this stuff is possible but rarely truly achieved because you have to practically kill yourself (not your body, your brain) to get to the other side

I tend to agree - that what is needed is a sort pathologically intense Nietzschen passing through some abyss to really let the teleological worldview die (not "die" as in disappear completely, but "die" in that it loses its position as the ultimate determinant of your worldview). This is how I understand the death of God, on the individual level.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm also not convinced we don't momentarily pass through these states of detachment all the time -- in the moments we might call beautiful -- but that they are fickle states easily contaminated by a whiff of ideology (capitalism, whatever)

I agree here too, that these two "states" can be seen not in black/white, either/or terms - but in both/and terms, probabilistic terms, IE the "weight" of teleology's influence on your worldview can fluctuate over time.

 

[Clinamenic]

So surviving the death of God wouldn't mean you never have any hue of teleology left in your worldview, but rather that you've progressed past some critical turning point where such teleology no longer dictates your worldview. (edit: objective teleology, that is).

 

[Clinamenic]

I also think this is the essential characteristic of what Nietzsche meant by overman, IE the phase of the individual (or the phase of society such such individuals exert a greater influence on culture than do those of religious mind) where they can subsist without some overarching cosmological teleology (qua objective meaning), and can instead rely on the subjective meaning which they recognize as stemming from their own consciousness.

 

[Clinamenic]

Only he painted this concept with proto-fascist language and he seemed to despise compassion as a form of self-injurious pity, at the expense of one's own vitality. He also placed a high premium on the "pathos of distance" or the function (edit: psychological function, that is) of clearly-defined and well-enforced social hierarchy.

 

[Clinamenic]

But I think the concept of progressing past teleology (which is paradoxical because progress is inherently teleological - so a form of self-abolition of teleology perhaps, or perhaps just the supplanting of objective teleology with subjective teleology) is a notion which is anterior to any fascist appropriation, and is indeed that which (I think) ought to be dialectically salvaged from the intellectual tradition of fascism. In fact, I'm fairly confident in saying I've already done this.

 

[Clinamenic]

The main residuum of teleology which remains, in my case, is the belief that I have "advanced" from the tacit assumption of there being some objective cosmological meaning, to a stage whereby I recognize the ground on which I stand as being of my own subjective conjuring. This belief is teleological, but the distinction remains between the transition from objective to subjective teleology (which I'm arguing is the main idea behind the overman) and the transition from teleological to non-teleological thinking.