Simply put
Simple - Complex
Mono - Poly
One - Many
“Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”.
One third (33%) said the main reason was that leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.””
'How the United Kingdom voted on Thursday ... and why'
Following the referendum on the EU there are many who have found themselves asking why the vote went the way it did - why did so many people vote ‘Leave’? In the post-mortem that has played out in the media, some reasons have been more prominent than others, with ‘immigration’ being a particularly hot topic. But what are we really talking about when we talk about ‘immigration’? Is there more to it than there appears to be?
The subject of whether to stay in or leave the EU is extremely wide ranging. There are many different considerations, ranging from the pragmatic to the ideal; from concrete concerns about business, legislation or immigration, to more ephemeral notions like ‘togetherness’, or ‘independence’; from those considerations that occupy the mainstream, to those more esoteric viewpoints on the lunatic fringe.
Much of the commentary following the referendum has seemed to suggest that people voted for a few, or even one, core reason. For instance, one prominent exit poll gave a list of three pre-determined reasons for voting, and asked its subjects to rank them in light of how much they influenced their decision. In light of their responses it claimed to explain why people voted the way they did.
No doubt there are some who are only aware of, or interested, in a single issue, and have voted with only that in mind. However, it is equally true to say there will be others who feel pulled in many directions by many different, and even contrasting, considerations.
In asking someone to select a reason - or even a core group of reasons - we are demanding that a multiplicity be shrunk down to a unity; that something complex, expansive and nuanced be converted into something bite-sized and simple.
So for example, a person may, when asked, give their reason for voting ‘Leave’ as ‘immigration.’ Whilst it can refer to a specific issue, ‘immigration’ can also be a catch all term for a variety of other things. The person in question may be worried about the disintegration of their community; or about their lack of individual, local or national identity. Indeed, these notions can also be taken apart and seen to consist of many other, smaller, issues.
In this sense, ‘immigration’ is used as a shorthand; perhaps because it is the most relevant of the available options; or because the person can’t, for whatever reason, articulate a better, more accurate, reason.
When I’m asked to explain my reason for doing something I’m often unable to articulate my thoughts and feelings. It may be that at some point in the past I have come to a conclusion based on a rational thought process - a moment of clarity - but now, some time later, this thought process has become lost in all of the thoughts, feelings and experiences that I’ve had since.
Recalling my reasoning may be difficult, and could take a long time. It may be that I simply can’t recall it at all. All I may know is that I have a conviction about something, and, at best, I may have a memory that there was a thought process that led to that conviction. Remembering the ins and outs of the that process is another matter.
Or consider the person who is not used to rationalising their thought process, or articulating their motivations. When asked to articulate and to rationalise - to provide a reason - they may struggle, and reach for the nearest available option; an option that may not be entirely accurate.
A person may even tell themselves that immigration is the core issue for them, whilst remaining oblivious to their deeper motives; to the wounds and grievances that really move them. For instance, they may feel deep grief because the lack of community in their life, whilst being in denial about this grief, and in the dark as to its causes.
Its also worth considering how people are polled. Have they been given the time and space to articulate their own concerns, or have they been asked to choose from a limited range of options? Have they been given enough time to think their answer through?
When we are forced to choose from a selection of pre-determined answers our thought is shepherded in certain directions. Indeed, the very fact that we must limit our reasons (choose one, or a few) closes out nuance and complexity. If we must give our answer within a certain time limit - for instance, if we have a questioner in front of us who is waiting for an answer - then we may feel compelled to rush and could find ourselves groping for the nearest available option.
I suppose my point is that stats can be very misleading. Or to put it another way, my point is that I have many points.
Perhaps this impulse to conclude with a singular, simple ‘point’ is at the heart of the matter. Put simply, we have a need to simplify.
There are always a multitude of reasons, and we can, if we wish, simply things and whittle them down; place one above another and so on. And this process of simplification - or purification - can be very useful. But it seems to me that its always worth remembering the multiplicity that lies beneath every unit; the complexity that lies beneath every simple answer.
To say that a certain percentage of people voted ‘Leave’ because of ‘immigration’ is a simplification.
Whether it is too simple depends on your point of view.
Related posts:-
The Pyramid
Short Cuts
Digging Deeper
This, Not That
Exclusion
Life - Death
Together - Apart
Include - Exclude
If a thing is only a thing because of all of the things it is not, then identity is predicated on the idea of exclusion. As a person you have an identity because you say yes to some things, and no to others. You allow certain things within your borders, whilst keeping others at a distance.
Thus, inasmuch as a collective (a locality, a community, a society) has an identity, it must be exclusive.
From this it follows that when a collective attempts to include all - give everyone a place - within its boundaries, it also works to erase its sense of identity.
Inasmuch as those within the collective define themselves in opposition to those on the outside, the more people there are on the outside, the more there is to oppose; and thus, the stronger the sense of identity within the collective. As the number of people on the outside decreases, the opposition becomes weaker. When there is no-one left on the outside then there is no longer anything to oppose; and all sense of collective identity disappears (indeed, the notion of the collective itself disappears).
The communities that have managed to retain a strong sense of identity in the contemporary world seem to be those that have very definite borders; in other words, those that are exclusive.
Two that come to mind are the traditional Amish and Jewish communities. Both set very firm guidelines on the kinds of person they will and won’t accept within their collective. I imagine that most people from modern western societies, myself included, would find these communities extremely restricting, and very hard to live within.
Thus the Amish primarily identify as 'Amish,' and secondarily as 'American.' And, inasmuch as 'Amish' and 'American' are mutually exclusive - as much as to be one means to not be the other - then one must suffer in deference to the other.
Multiculturalism faces its multiple cultures with a choice; to loosen their cultural boundaries and assimilate, to a degree, into the larger whole; or to maintain those boundaries and remain isolated.
Picture a colour wheel. The more the colours mix, the less distinct they become. When all colours are merged they become a dull brown or grey. To retain their vibrancy, they must remain separate: they must have boundaries; say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
I’ve heard it said that multiculturalism is good because it increases diversity within a society; it brings new things, different viewpoints, ideas, experiences, and so on: it brings new colours into the wheel. However, this diversity is only possible to the extent that the cultures - the colours - within the collective do not mix. We gain diversity, but at the expense of cohesion.
This presents a schizophrenic situation: on the one hand, I want to belong to something greater than myself, a collective; and for that collective to exist it must have an identity. In other words, it must distinguish itself from other collectives. But on the other hand, I’m urged to transcend boundaries and think of myself as part of something larger. My urge to be part of a collective conflicts with the imperative to transcend the boundaries of that collective.
What affect does this swelling of boundaries have upon us? If, for instance, I'm part of a community of 50 people, chances are that I will know most, if not all, of these people. It will be a close community, at a scale that makes sense to me (a 'human scale'). I understand this collective in a relatively concrete way, inasmuch as I know the people within it and understand our relation to one another.
However, the more my collective increases in size, the less likely I am to know everyone within it. Concrete relations are replaced with an abstract sense of relatedness. As the collective becomes more inclusive, the links between its constituent parts weaken. It may be that the kind of bonds that tie together small groups of people simply don't emerge when a group exceeds critical mass.
I raise this because the pendulum of contemporary culture seems to have swung fully in a particular direction, embracing concepts like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘inclusion’ whilst maligning concepts like ‘boundaries,’ ‘exclusion,’ and so on. In other words, we’ve swung, collectively, into an imbalance. Another way to put it is to say that we’ve had the thesis - exclusion (tribalism, etc) - and we’re now getting the anti-thesis - inclusion (mutilculturalism, etc).
Perhaps we’re just about ready for the synthesis…
It seems that I need vulgarity. I'm fascinated by it. The things I disapprove of define me as much as the things I approve of.
Sure, I could spend all my internet time reading my digital copy of The Wire, watching the films on ("all avant garde, all the time") ubu.com, or listening to Arte Radio. But, even given the opportunity to be my own curator, my own programmer, I throw in some stuff that's compellingly appalling, some stuff I love to hate.
Otherwise, what would there be to rebel against? How could I enjoy my trek to the cultural high ground?
[Momus]
'Portrait of the artist as a young snob'
A third theory attracting considerable attention recently is that mechanisms similar to those behind racism drive affective polarization.
Thus, party identification becomes a central component of people’s social identity, regardless of any meaningful differences in policy goals. The intense emotional conflict between partisans then is not a dispute about issue positions, but rather an “us versus them” dynamic familiar in social psychology
[Darren Schreiber, Greg Fronzo, Alan Simmons, Chris Dawes, Taru Flagan & Martin Paulus]
'Neural nonpartisans', p. 3
In social identity theory, the mere sorting of individuals into groups is sufficient to lead to a range of discriminatory beliefs, emotions, and behaviors.
Whereas previous generations of scholarship had attributed intergroup tensions to a range of sources including historical animosity or resource scarcity, subsequent research using a “minimal group paradigm” showed that bias in favor of members of the ingroup and negative affect towards the outgroup could be created by just arbitrarily divvying people into clusters, in the absence of any of the factors typically suggested as causes of ingroup bias.
[Darren Schreiber, Greg Fronzo, Alan Simmons, Chris Dawes, Taru Flagan & Martin Paulus]
'Neural nonpartisans', p.3
Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:
1. the differences between groups
2. the similarities of things in the same group.
This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.
We categorize objects in order to understand them and identify them. In a very similar way we categorize people (including ourselves) in order to understand the social environment.
Similarly, we find out things about ourselves by knowing what categories we belong to. We define appropriate behavior by reference to the norms of groups we belong to, but you can only do this if you can tell who belongs to your group.
Once we have categorized ourselves as part of a group and have identified with that group we then tend to compare that group with other groups. If our self-esteem is to be maintained our group needs to compare favorably with other groups.
[Saul McLeod]
'Social Identity Theory'
Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel
The Principle of Polarity
This, Not That
Borders
Bondage
Entropy
Here Be Dragons
Seeing Through
Attached - Detached
Connected - Disconnected
Engaged - Disengaged
Absolute - Relative
Immanent - Transcendent
Literal - Figurative
'Is' - 'May be'
"If atoms are mostly empty space then how come we don't see through things?"
To the Jews God said, 'you must play the game.' It was inferred that the meaning of life was in this activity: the game is life, and to avoid playing it - to say, 'its only a game' - is to avoid living life. This is perhaps why the Jews do not revere the ascetic life.
To others, it was said 'you must see through the game.' It was inferred that the meaning of life was to see beyond the falsehoods of Māyā and to penetrate to the spiritual truth of existence.
Crucially the Judaic philosophy has at its core a mystery or a secret; a curtain that must not be looked behind. The Jew can know too much, and so must refrain from flying too close to the sun. In this sense the Jew is forever destined to play the game and to find all of life's meaning within it. To see through everything is to see with the eyes of God; and so the Jew must accept that there are certain things that must remain opaque; that there are limits to his vision.
The ascetic sees through the veil of Māyā and so refuses to play the game. In attempting to avoid the endless cycle of desire and satisfaction, they have perhaps, from the Jewish perspective, gone too far; they try to see too much.
When you can see everything then choosing between things becomes arbitrary. Why choose one thing over another? This is God's view, and explains, perhaps, why God cannot intervene. If you can see far enough then you can see that every outcome is good, and also bad. When all outcomes are good, and all are bad, then there is nothing to recommend any option over any other. Thus God simply observes, and leaves the choosing to those who cannot see far enough.
Moses must learn to live in ignorance because seeing too far may lead to 'not feeling so bad about things,' and ultimately to complaceny. He may begin to tolerate darkness. Yet his role is to fight darkness, and to play his role well he must believe in the game.
This is perhaps part of Dr. Strange's dilemma in 'Civil War.' He refrains from playing the game - from choosing sides - and it is significant that he is joined at this time by another who is gifted with far-sightedness and who also chooses to remain non-partisan, Uata The Watcher. Both see too much to be able to involve themselves in the fray; as Strange says, there is no right or wrong, only differing perspectives. I'm putting a spin on this, because both also have other important reasons for not interfering; but I can't help think that in spite of these other considerations, their long-sightedness is a primary factor.
It can be hard to engage with things when you see through them. There are those who give their lives to a game, in spite of the knowledge that it is, in the end, 'only a game'. And there are those who would mock them for such short-sightedness.
I believe that all of us are born somewhere between the binary at the top of this page; that there are those of us whose tendency is to attach to things, and who struggle to disengage or to hold a detached viewpoint. And on the other hand there are those of us who tend to detach, and who struggle to engage and to take things seriously.
We can put a negative slant on Dr Strange's action (or inaction), characterising it as 'cowardice', or 'indecision'; and at the same time we can see it in a positive light, as coming from 'wisdom,' the same wisdom that leads certain spiritual types to embrace the ascetic life of withdrawal. The view we take, as Strange says, is a matter of perspective.
I believe that as individuals, and as a collective, we need both attachment and detachment. There are times when we must get close and commit ourselves, and there are times when we must stand back and see through. As with any binary, it is the job of one side to remind the other of what it is lacking. The balance, the health, of the individual or collective rests on this dialogue.
Māyā connotes a "magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem".
Māyā is also a spiritual concept connoting "that which exists, but is constantly changing and thus is spiritually unreal", and the "power or the principle that conceals the true character of spiritual reality"
Jews are familiar with the ascetic ideal inherent in the Christian tradition [...]
[and] they have come to know the hedonistic ideal inherent in the secularism of our day [...]
The Jewish attitude has in fact stood in sharp contrast to both extremes and the Jew has maintained an age-old resistance to both views and the practices they generate.
[The] image of the ascetic is not the Jewish idea of a holy person. On the contrary, there is reason to argue that although such asceticism is not forbidden, such a disassociation from life and the assumption of additional prohibitions is actually frowned upon in Judaism.
A Jewish definition of holiness may be put in these terms: Holiness does not lie in the ascetic, saintly withdrawal from life, or in excessive denial to oneself of all human pleasures, or in the repression of all human drives.
It consists, rather, of full participation in the stream of human community life, sharing the joyous as well as the sorrowful experiences which life has to offer, denying to oneself no legitimate pleasures; but at the same time so developing one's sense of discernment as to be able to distinguish and choose the right from the wrong, the true from the false, the good from the bad, the sacred from the profane, the pure from the impure, and the clean from the unclean.
The common denominator between the Jewish concept of hoiness and that of other faiths is indeed expressed in the crucial concept of being removed.
[...] Views differ, however, when one proceeds to consider the question - [...] removed from what? To others it has meant being removed from life. To the Jew, it has meant being removed from idolatry; being removed from secularism; being removed from the vulgar and the profane.
[Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin]
To Be A Jew, p. 36-7, 122
"But there is one thing that, as long as you live in this world, I cannot reveal to you, one thing for which I must only say, 'Silence! So I have decided that it should be!'"
"But tell me why, Eternal G‑d!" Moses pleaded.
"Moses," G‑d asked, "if you knew the answer, if you understood why there had to be suffering from an all-powerful, beneficent G‑d. What would you do then?"
"I suppose I wouldn't feel so bad about it then."
"Precisely. And that is just what I don't want. I don't want you to be complacent. I don't want you to tolerate darkness.
You must fight it with every sinew of your flesh, with all the capacity of your soul. Until you redeem every spark of light from its captivity, until you can bring sweetness to the most bitter places, until you have not left a corner of my world untouched with acts of kindness and compassion... until then you must hate the darkness as a blood-sworn enemy."
[Tzvi Freeman]
'The Lunar Files'
The Sorcerer Supreme replies that he has had just a little water since the Civil War began. Uatu asks Strange if he isn’t tempted to simply end this - with his great power he could stop this quarrel with a gesture or whisper.
Dr. Strange replies that is exactly why he must remain above the fray, for there is no right or wrong in this debate, but it is simply a matter of perspective [...]
Uatu replies that, as a Watcher, he is more than familiar with such dilemmas. Uatu asks Strange to tell him why he is fasting if he favors no side - ‘What outcome are you meditating for?’ Strange replies ‘Whichever victory is best for all mankind, my friend…and spills the least amount of blood tonight!’
'Civil War #6'
When there is full parity of the opposites, attested by the ego’s absolute participation in both, this necessarily leads to a suspension of the will, for the will can no longer operate when every motive has an equally strong countermotive.
Since life cannot tolerate a standstill, a damming up of vital energy results, and this would lead to an insupportable condition did not the tension of opposites produce a new, uniting function that transcends them. This function arises quite naturally from the regression of libido caused by the blockage.
[C.G. Jung]
Psychological Types (CW 6, 1991), p. 479
To understand everything makes one tolerant, and to feel deeply inspires great kindness.
[Madame de Stael]
Corinne
Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing.
[Duc de Broglie]
[...] Nietzsche diagnoses the Socratic Dialectic as being diseased in the manner that it deals with looking at life.
The scholarly dialectic is directly opposed to the concept of the Dionysian because it only seeks to negate life; it uses reason to always deflect, but never to create. Socrates rejects the intrinsic value of the senses and life for "higher" ideals.
Nietzsche claims in The Gay Science that when Socrates drinks the hemlock, he sees the hemlock as the cure for life, proclaiming that he has been sick a long time. Nietzsche interprets Socrates' ultimate utterance as a thankful reference to the Greek god of healing.
In contrast, the Dionysian existence constantly seeks to affirm life. Whether in pain or pleasure, suffering or joy, the intoxicating revelry that Dionysus has for life itself overcomes the Socratic sickness and perpetuates the growth and flourishing of visceral life force—a great Dionysian 'Yes', to a Socratic 'No'.
'Apollonian and Dionysian'
Wikipedia
For the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of experience, contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality reenters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.
In this sense, the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint.
Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get round to action.
Not reflection, no - true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Birth of Tragedy, 7
[…] one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and out into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons.
No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too deep. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn - we have lived enough not to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything.
“Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that’s indecent” - a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is - to speak Greek - Baubo?
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for this is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, word, in the whole Olympus of appearance.
Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity. And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there - we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore - artists?
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, Pref., 4
Ever since he has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with “positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively.
What, for example, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese, mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star, at which one can even fire missiles. And what is left of Kant's pathetic appeal to “the starry sky above me," when one is educated by the latest astrophysics and its equations about the constitution of space?
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 138
The hermeneutics of suspicion is a style of literary interpretation in which texts are read with skepticism in order to expose their purported repressed or hidden meanings.
This mode of interpretation was conceptualized by Paul Ricœur, inspired by the works of what he called the three "masters of suspicion": Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he believed shared a similar view of consciousness as false.
Ricœur's term "school of suspicion" (French: école du soupçon) refers to his association of his theory with the writings of the three, who themselves never used this term, and was coined in Freud and Philosophy (1965). This school is defined by a belief that the straightforward appearances of texts are deceptive or self-deceptive and that explicit content hide deeper meanings or implications.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method, offers perhaps the most systematic survey of hermeneutics in the 20th century. The title of the work indicates his dialogue between claims of "truth" on the one hand and the processes of "method" on the other—in brief, the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Gadamer suggests that, ultimately, one must decide between one and the other when reading.
Ruthellen Josselson similarly writes, "Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised."
According to literary theorist Rita Felski, hermeneutics of suspicion is "a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths." Felski further writes:
[Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche] share a commitment to unmasking 'the lies and illusions of consciousness'; they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths…
Felski also notes that the "'hermeneutics of suspicion' is the name usually bestowed on [a] technique of reading texts against the grain and between the lines, of cataloging their omissions and laying bare their contradictions, of rubbing in what they fail to know and cannot represent."
'Hermeneutics of suspicion', Wikipedia
Unmasking the unacknowledged motives of arbitrary will and desire which sustain the moral masks of modernity is itself one of the most characteristically modern of activities.
It was Freud's achievement to discover that unmasking arbitrariness in others may always be a defence against uncovering it in ourselves.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.86
Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel
All is Change
Solid Ground
Only playing
Boxed off
The Perils of Radical Subjectivity
Nobody knows, and nobody can ever know
Radical Doubt
Infinite Doorways
Open Wound
The Healing Process
Guiding Fiction
Reinterpretation
A necessary lie
Short Cuts
Middle World
The Middle Path
Thesis Synthesis Antithesis
Birth Life Death
Being Becoming Nothing
Apollo Hermes Dionysus
Centripetal Static Centrifugal
Active Neutral Passive
Positive Ambivalent Negative
Left Centre Right
Upper Middle Lower
Manic Normal Depressive
Excessive Balanced Deficient
Hot Warm Cold
Acid Neutral Alkali
Red Purple Blue
White Gray Black
1 + 2 = 3
[...] every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the "third." In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored.
It presents itself in a form that is neither a straight “yes” nor a straight “no.”
[C. G. Jung]
'A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity' (CW 11)
and, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9), par. 285
In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to keep" and "to pick up").
The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.
Sublation can be seen at work at the most basic level of Hegel's system of logic. The two concepts Being and Nothing are each both preserved and changed through sublation in the concept Becoming. Similarly, determinateness, or quality, and magnitude, or quantity, are each both preserved and sublated in the concept measure.
'Aufheben'
A thought is affirmed which on reflection proves itself unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradictory, which propels the affirmation of its negation, the antithesis, which also on reflection proves inadequate, and so is again negated.
In classical logic, this double negation ("A is not non-A") would simply reinstate the original thesis. The synthesis does not do this.
It has "overcome and preserved" (or sublated) the stages of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity.
[Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze]
Hegel for Beginners
Hegel's overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole.
In Hegel's view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. Each phase of being contains within itself a self-contradiction, and it is this that serves as the motor of its movement to a higher and more complete phase.
Through a continuing dialectical process of opposition and synthesis, the world is always in the process of completing itself. Whereas for most of the history of Western philosophy from Aristotle onward, the defining essence of opposites was that they were logically contradictory and mutually exclusive, for Hegel all opposites are logically necessary and mutually implicated elements in a larger truth.
Truth is thus radically paradoxical.
[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 379
The birth of the number 3 and triangle enables opposites to balance and transcend to a new wholeness they couldn't achieve by themselves.
A third leg makes a tripod stable, and a third strand of hair allows a braid to knot as one whole, just as neutral judges balance opposing parties, neutrons balance atoms, and the Supreme Court plays the role of the balancing, transcendent third force between the Executive and Legislative branches. The triangle is the strongest and most stable of shapes and so appears in the constructions of humans and nature.
Speak aloud the word "three" in English [...] and you'll hear its relation to words like "through" and "threshold" and the prefix trans ("across," "penetrate"). The leap to "three," as its linguistic root tells us, takes us over a threshold and through past polarized limits of the Dyad.
[Michael S. Schneider]
A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, p. 39
and 'Number and Shapes: The Timeless Alphabet of Art and Life'
Homeostasis is the property of a system in which a variable (for example, the concentration of a substance in solution, or its temperature) is actively regulated to remain very nearly constant.
'Homeostasis'
Maimonides makes it clear in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:4 and 5, that the moral “middle path” is the “necessary truth,” the guidance given to the general public who are not capable of evaluating every occurrence in their lives and making decisions each time how they should act based on reason, on what is true and false.
[He] introduces the concept of the “golden mean” and advises people to live a life in which they behave according to a middle path between two extremes.
For example, people should not be overly stingy nor should they be spendthrifts; they should not laugh excessively nor be sad and dispirited. He calls this derekh hachakhamim, “the path of the wise.”
[On the other hand] the ideal path, the method for the intellectual, is “the virtuous way,” the carefully considered rational behavior beyond the middle path, when reason dictates the need for such behavior.
An individual who is very careful about himself deviates somewhat from the mean to either side, and is called 'virtuous'. For example, the individual who distances himself from pride and turns
to the other extreme and becomes very humble – this is the virtuous
quality. If he only moves toward the middle and is humble, [whilst this is] not the best behavior, it is still considered wise behavior, [thus the individual] is called 'wise.'
The average person following morality is advised to follow the middle path for it is easier than having to analyze every situation independently, while intellectuals, who are capable of using reason and considering the “true” results of their behavior, are told to deviate when advisable from the middle path.
[Israel Drazin]
'An Intelligent Person is not Moral' (minor adjustments have been made to the original text)
I feel I’ve been very fortunate in life and I think I have about the most even temperament of anyone I know.
I literally don’t have unhappy days. I’ve always felt pretty happy. I suspect my peak happiness is well below that of most people. When I see people very, very happy it’s quite strange to me - I feel I’ve never felt this. The same when people are depressed.
I think my range is compressed.
[Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins | The Tim Ferriss Show'
Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger, or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Strauss is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them.
But expressing is not any more admirable than repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them.
Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die.
[Robert Bly]
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, p. 56
[...] living beauty spreads her golden shimmer only when soaring above a reality full of misery, pain, and squalor [...] all experience goes to show that beauty needs her opposite as a condition of her existence.
"Whenever we turn our gaze in the the ancient world, we find taste and freedom mutually avoiding each other, and Beauty establishing her sway only on the ruins of heroic virtues.
If then we keep solely to what experience has taught us hitherto about the influence of Beauty, we cannot certainly be much encouraged in the development of feelings which are so dangerous to the true culture of mankind; and we should rather dispense with the melting power of Beauty, even at the risk of coarseness and austerity, than see ourselves, for all the advantages of refinement, consigned to her enervating influence."
[...] under no circumstances can the initial value of the higher form of energy be attained by the lower forms as well or be resumed by the superior function: an equilization at some intermediate level must inevitably result. For every individual who identifies with his one differentiated function, this entails a descent to a lower value as compared with the initial value.
This conclusion is unavoidable. All education that aspires to the unity and harmony of man's nature has to reckon with this fact.
[C. G. Jung, also Friedrich Schiller (in quotations)]
Psychological Types, p. 84-6
If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to perfection that make existence intolerable.
Capacity for compromise is not a characteristic of the insane.
The mature human being is neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass is muddy, but is not mud.
[D.W. Winnicott]
Human Nature, p. 138
Iphigenia sees her role in life as that of “making men mild.”
She is always encouraging people to calm down and be merciful. She is committed to love, but a love marked not by wild passion, but by understanding, sympathy and a desire for harmony [...]
Goethe's first audiences, brought up on
Romanticism, were slow to get the message. Was Goethe turning his back
on Romantic love? Where was all the passion? They described the story of
Iphigenia as like “watching grey mist.”
Goethe, now in middle-age, was undaunted.
He’d had enough of Werther and expressed his own view emphatically –
“Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.”
But he encountered an elemental cultural problem: Romanticism feels more exciting. Goethe pinpointed one of the central problems of culture: how to make things that are good for us compete successfully for attention with the thrilling passionate stuff?
But he encountered an elemental cultural problem: Romanticism feels more exciting. Goethe pinpointed one of the central problems of culture: how to make things that are good for us compete successfully for attention with the thrilling passionate stuff?
And I would say that your nervous system tells you exactly when you are there and it’s a kind of place and you can tell when you’re there because you’re secure enough to be confident, but not so secure that you’re bored and you’re interested enough to be awake but not so interested that you’re terrified.
And when you’re in a state like that, you find things interesting and meaningful, time slips by you and you’re no longer self-conscious.
[Jordan Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'
The thing is, when I'm balanced I'm not here, and I don't like not being here. I like to feel myself rubbing against things.
"we could find a point from which the observer could gain the most comprehensive and undistorted view [...]
By remaining alert in the centre, we can acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence and completing an incomplete half. By avoiding a one-sided outlook we gain a much deeper insight into the structure and function of the organism"
The center is a "magical" word for Friedlaender; likewise, for Perls, "to center one's existence", or centering, is the most basic goal of therapy, because we "acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence" [...]
[Ludwig Frambach, quoting Fritz Perls]
Creative License: The Art of Gestalt Therapy, p. 121
The fertile void or place of creative indifference is the ground. The goal of Gestalt process is to “lead increasingly from the one-sided fixation [on] that which is in the foreground to the ground, from the periphery to the middle and center, by way of integrating rigid dualities into flexible polarities”
Poles such as rage and gentleness "should not be isolated from each other as mutually exclusive contradictions, but should be experienced as a unit of opposites" [...]
It is possible to achieve this perspective by being "flexibly centered in [one's own] indifferent center." In this way, one can react freely and appropriately, either angrily or with gentleness, to the demands of the situation from a totality of experience.
Friedlaender’s goal, as Perls saw it, was the achievement of this lovely neutrality in which one no longer feels pulled toward one extreme or the other and is no longer the prisoner of one way of seeing the world, which inevitably blinds one to other possibilities.
[Herb Stevenson, quoting Ludwig Frambach]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'
Self
As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man.
Just as conscious as well as unconscious phenomena are to be met with in practice, the self as psychic totality also has a conscious as well as an unconscious aspect.
Empirically, the self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the "supraordinate personality", such as king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc.
When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary [...]
Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united. Since such a concept is irrepresentable - tertium non datur - it is transcendental on this account also.
[C.G. Jung]
Psychological Types (CW 6, 1991), p. 460
Equilibration
This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.
When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e. a state of cognitive (i.e. mental) balance.
However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).
Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.
[Saul McLeod]
'Jean Piaget'
Assimilate - will fit into existing order - no change - dominate (change other)
Accommodate - will not fit into existing order - change - capitulate (change self)
For example, Aristotelian mechanics explained observations of everyday situations, but were falsified by Galileo's experiments, and were replaced by Newtonian mechanics, which accounted for the phenomena noted by Galileo (and others). Newtonian mechanics' reach included the observed motion of the planets and the mechanics of gases. The Youngian wave theory of light (i.e., waves carried by the luminiferous aether) replaced Newton's (and many of the Classical Greeks') particles of light but in turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment and was superseded by Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's special relativity, which did account for the newly observed phenomena.
At each stage, experimental observation made a theory untenable (i.e., falsified it) and a new theory was found that had greater explanatory power (i.e., could account for the previously unexplained phenomena), and as a result, provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.
'Falsifiability'
Unqualified freedom, like unqualified tolerance, is not only self-destructive but bound to produce its opposite - for if all restraints were removed there would be nothing whatever to stop the strong enslaving the weak (or meek).
So complete freedom would bring about the end of freedom, and therefore proponents of complete freedom are in actuality, whatever their intentions, enemies of freedom.
[...] the maximum possible tolerance or freedom is an optimum, not an absolute, for it has to be restricted if it is to exist at all.
The government intervention which alone can guarantee it is a dangerous weapon: without it, or with too little, freedom dies; but with too much of it freedom dies also. We are brought back to the inescapability of control [...] the maximum freedom is a qualified one [...]
[...] the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
[Brian Magee]
Popper, p. 80-2
[Derrida's] essay on Levinas [...] takes an epigraph from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.
'Hebraism and Hellenism - between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, although it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them' [...]
It is the desire to reconcile oppositions and differences through a movement of thought that would finally reduce them to aspects of a single, comprehensive vision.
[...] Derrida's epigraph from Arnold carries a considerable weight of implied ideology.
It stands for that power of logocentric thinking to absorb all differences into itself by viewing them as mere stages or signposts on the way to some grand conceptual synthesis.
[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 230-1
[A] cylinder is not somewhere between the two reductionistic views: 50% circle, 50% rectangle… It is 100% of both descriptions…which are only mutually exclusive and paradoxical if they are trying to be reconciled in the same plane, which is the essential mistake.
In the higher dimensional reality the object actually lives in, the simultaneous full truth of both partial descriptions is obvious and non-paradoxical…as is the seamless way they fit together as parts of a congruent whole.
The key insight is recognizing these differing perspectives as orthogonal to each other rather than opposite ends of a gradient spectrum. The gradient view leads to a middle path that in this case is the rounded rectangle (or a continual maddening flip flop between circle and rectangle) … completely failing to recognize the simultaneous fullness of each truth and the irreconcilability of them within the same level of dimensionality/ complexity.
The recognition of orthogonality…gives us the cylinder, recognizes both lower dimensional perspectives as 100% true from their limited vantage point, and forces the recognition that a congruent picture is possible but requires a fundamentally more complex kind of perspective.
Looking at some of what have often been thought of as existential dualities:
- Loving what is or working to make things better…
- Accepting ourselves as we are unconditionally or aspiring to grow and express more of our full potential…
- Maximizing intentionality or following the flow of life…
- Bettering our individual ego or transcending it…
- Free will or determinism…
- Being in the now or planning for the future…
- Increasing witness consciousness or losing oneself in experience…
- Open mindedness or critical thinking…
- Persistence or surrender…
- Boundaries or allowing…
- Being or becoming…
- Freedom or structure…
- Gratitude or desire…
- Rights or responsibilities…
- Agency or communion…
- Particle or wave descriptions of the quantum…
- The fundamentality of subject or object…
All of these, commonly seen as paradoxes to be embraced or extremes to find a middle path between…are indeed orthogonal and equally fundamental partial truths…to be simultaneously optimized…fully reconciled in a congruent understanding of the higher dimensional (eg, more complex) nature of reality.
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality'
[…] in the total accounting the hitherto sovereign religions are among the main reasons the type 'man' has been kept on a lower level - they have preserved too much of that which ought to perish.
And yet, when they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those who were inwardly shattered and had become savage away from society into monasteries and houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in addition so as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work at the preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and truth at the corruption of the European race?
Stand all evaluations on their head - that is what they had to do! And smash the strong, contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the highest and most successful of the type man', into uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly - that is the fact the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its evaluation ‘unworldliness', 'unsensuality', and 'higher man' were finally fused together into one feeling.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 62
In the romantic, the "organic” conception of the state rests on [an] inability to make a normative evaluation.
This conception repudiates the “juridical” as narrow and mechanical, and it searches for the state that is above right and wrong: that is, a point of reference for feelings, which at the same time is a projection of the romantic subject into the domain of the political.
The root of romantic sublimity is the inability to decide, the "higher third” factor they are always talking about, which is not a higher factor but a different third factor: in other words, it is always a way out of the either-or.
[…] the antitheses themselves are not antitheses, but merely occasions […] The antitheses are immediately mediated and reconciled, and an agreement invariably follows.
In the absence of the occasionalistic displacement into the higher, subjective creativity that resolves all antitheses in a harmonious unity, there is no romanticism.
[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 117, 140, 148
From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts:
1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)
2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority)
3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute)
4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.
5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.
6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.
This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations.
[…] Throughout Western religious history, in spite of the frequent outbursts by dissident groups insisting that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God’s revelation, Western religious thought has continued to believe that revelation itself is never final, total, complete, or literal, but is a continuous symbolic process that must be interpreted and reinterpreted by discussion.
The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final stage of eternity.
Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.
That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.
But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves.
Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.
In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.
When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate.
Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.779-81
[...] we must ask what does the dialectician himself want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want?
It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it - only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.
"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different' what is 'not itself and this No is its creative deed".
This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference, reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.
And, conversely, Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence. Moreover the relation of master and slave is not, in itself, dialectical. Who is the dialectician, who dialectises the relationship? It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.9-10
Related posts:-
Centre / Periphery
Lines, Circles and Spirals
Land and Sea
Balance
Shades of Gray
In-between
Open Wound
Everything and Nothing
Searching Without/Searching Within
Frozen in time
Forget Your Self
Mono / Poly
Accept / Aspire
This conception repudiates the “juridical” as narrow and mechanical, and it searches for the state that is above right and wrong: that is, a point of reference for feelings, which at the same time is a projection of the romantic subject into the domain of the political.
The root of romantic sublimity is the inability to decide, the "higher third” factor they are always talking about, which is not a higher factor but a different third factor: in other words, it is always a way out of the either-or.
[…] the antitheses themselves are not antitheses, but merely occasions […] The antitheses are immediately mediated and reconciled, and an agreement invariably follows.
In the absence of the occasionalistic displacement into the higher, subjective creativity that resolves all antitheses in a harmonious unity, there is no romanticism.
[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 117, 140, 148
From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts:
1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)
2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority)
3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute)
4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.
5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.
6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.
This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations.
[…] Throughout Western religious history, in spite of the frequent outbursts by dissident groups insisting that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God’s revelation, Western religious thought has continued to believe that revelation itself is never final, total, complete, or literal, but is a continuous symbolic process that must be interpreted and reinterpreted by discussion.
The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final stage of eternity.
Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.
That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.
But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves.
Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.
In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.
When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate.
Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.779-81
[...] we must ask what does the dialectician himself want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want?
It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it - only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.
"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different' what is 'not itself and this No is its creative deed".
This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference, reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.
And, conversely, Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence. Moreover the relation of master and slave is not, in itself, dialectical. Who is the dialectician, who dialectises the relationship? It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.9-10
Related posts:-
Centre / Periphery
Lines, Circles and Spirals
Land and Sea
Balance
Shades of Gray
In-between
Open Wound
Everything and Nothing
Searching Without/Searching Within
Frozen in time
Forget Your Self
Mono / Poly
Accept / Aspire
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