• Registered: 2009-03-17
  • Posts: 349

Topic: 52. VARIOUS TOPICS (MOVED FROM OTHER SECTIONS0

A lengthly segment was included early in this blog on the idea that human culture is "alien" to the human being himself.  This notion does not originate with this blog, but has long been a leading idea of Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy.  Such names as Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner and Engels all come to mind.  My perspective here has been that of Philosophical Anthropology.  I have attempted ot find the beginnings of "alienation" in the earliest human culture, in the era before language but at the precise onset of tool-use.  The stick used as a tool--which even chimpanzees are capable of but do not incorporate into their ordinary life--was also the moment of origin of "alienated culture."  Hopefully some new insights were provided then, in this blog, as to the nature and fate of human culture. We have seen how human culture is "other than" the human being himself.  That is, in simplest terms (and the ones we always come back to), the stick that "completes" the arm is also "other" than the arm.  What is true of the arm-stick relation persists throughout the entire history of the relationship of the human being to his culture.   In this last segment I have introduced something new.  That is, the "practical alienation" inhering in culture is paralleled, in addition, by a certain "moral" alienation.   That is, the human inherits from his animal past some sense or instinct as to certain "rules of the game" laid down by nature.  There is a certain sense, that if the fruit is high in the tree, the human being, weaker and less agile than the ape, "should" not climb the tree; furthermore he should not hit the fruit with a stick.  In his mind the person thinks that, simply, he should not have that fruit.  In the Garden of Eden story, God denied Adam and Eve the fruit but they took it anyway.  The force proscribing the fruit would in reality have been nature itself; and the enabler would have been human culture.  There is a sense that humans inherit from their animal beginnings that, again, the fruit is just not the right of human beings.  They take it anyway.  There is the story of Prometheus; again, he was not given a "right" to fire--he took it anyway.  I would say this--the prohibition of the human, by virute of "natural immorality" (essentially, weakness)--is what denies humans access to the fruits of nature.  We run the risk here of lapsing into a sort of poetic or Rousseauian maudlin sentimentality about a "state of nature."  There are, however, certain other facts that can be introduced here.  These come mainly from newspapers and television about everyday American life.  These reports have to do with happenings in our civilization that contradict all common sense.  What I mean is this:  things are allowed to happen which should not happen.  There are events of violence in the face, merely, of some verkehrt morality of Christian or democratic forgiveness and tolerance, which, in a true State of Nature--we are thinking more of Hobbes than of Rousseau--which "naturally" demand retribution.  A sort of nature-in-the-raw has overwhelmed our cities and our whole civilization.  I cannot speak of this state of events without lapsing into a certain Conservative whineyness.  Objectively, however, such events raise a legitimate philosophical issue.  How, in departing our proverbial state of nature, in which life was "nasty, brutal and short" (Hobbes), have we come to reinstitute this state, precisely, in the middle of our cities.  This is a paradox that attracts our most serious attention.  This blog simply loves paradoxes; that is our stock in trade.  In the context of what was said above in this segment, there is a clear answer:  humans allow a certain State of Nature to reappear in their midst, a certain "struggle for existence," we may say, simply to expatiate the "sin" of our human departure from nature three million years ago.  Thus if we think of society at all, we must say that it is both not nature and of nature.  Humans have created a RITUAL wherein they act out the parts of our animal ancestors, for which or whom "nothing is or was ever free."  Bruno Bauer said:  "The history of religion is the critque of religion."  Here we are offering a concept of society as an historical outcome; and we are suggesting, thereby, a critique of society, not as an entity that profits humans, solely, so much as one that expatiates the guilt of humans first entering culture.  This makes society dangerous--not so much to humanity as a whole, because in fact human beings are secure collectively in their culture--but to individuals.  Society is a menace, we are saying, to you and me personally.  Society removes humans in general from a "struggle for existence," but it places you and me, individually, right back in that struggle.  This is the paradox of culture and society.

Society may be defined as one's living together with people one simply does not like.  This--a negation--is what society actually is.    I say this at the risk of reducing what is a serious philosophical issue to a mere quip.  Soceity as a concept is contrary to the old adage that if one does not like a person, one should simply avoid him.  Under this assumption--that society is a negation--it could be suggested that one could rid oneself of enemies simply by abolishing society.  That might be a more humane course of action than attacking these same enemies within society.  We are not saying this, precisely, but perhaps something close to it.  Force Theory has attracted adversaries just on account of this negatism.  But there is more.  Not only does one live with people he doesn't like, he may gain nothing from them materially or mentally.  He is, in effect, carrying baggage that he does not need.  This is a cynical definition of society but consistent with Force Theory.  The corollary of this idea is that, if one accepts the idea of society, and can live with and in it, he accepts also close contact with people whom he does not like.  The next--and obvious--question is:  how did such an arrangement come about.  And what, in the absence of practical material ties of trade and reciprocity, holds society together?  Force Theory as stated above has some kind of answer; but not the answer we started with two years ago.  What I am saying now is that the connections that human beings have with one another are not so much practical and material ones as moral ties.  We are inching our way into the domain of religion, of moral principles and the idea of The Good.  This notion is a turnaround for our blog.    Following the line of thinking stated above--that culture is a "violation" of nature--we may say, consistent with what we said before, that what has appeared as "society" is a ritual grouping of human beings held together by respect for The Good.  And The Good is a purely abstract conception that has come into being where culture and nature separate.  The Good in its majesty--in its absolute position in the world--rivets the human's attention to what holds the world together, rather than dispairing regarding whatever it is that separates humans from nature and from one another.  Society is now the issue before us.  We have said that humans by virtue of their culture have separated themselves from nature.  This could be physical nature, of course, of trees and rivers and such; but it is also the nature that binds humans to one another.  Culture intrudes in the human relationship.  It translates the biological family, for example, into a work group; and culture also translates that work group into a full industrial system.  Humans in industrialism are "alienated," to use Hegel's word, from nature; but they are also alienated from one another.  Alienation means here something other than what Engels meant.  In fact Engels actually applauded industrialism for disrupting the natural relations of parent to child, and among close familials.  The Good appears in the midst of such alienation.  In other words, now--in the age of technology what will hold human beings together as some kind of community is no longer instinct and "nature," rather this tie will be through the shared idea of The Good.  In other words, the relations within a group of people become so artificial and "material" that no concept of practical need for one another suggests itself.  The people really no longer believe that they actually "need" one another in any actual or useful way.  At this point--when all thought of a general usefulness or utility of relations has passed--there enters the very general thought that humans need one another "morally."  That is, they need one another for no reason at all.    The reason that is not a practical reason is the moral reason.  Humans need one another, in this viewpoint, bcause to live together is "morally" right.  I have hitherto neglected the issue of morality and ethical values in this blog; I have neglected the issue, but I have never denied the importance of The Good or of moral rightness that is derived from The Good.  We are interested in knowing its history so that we can understand The Good.

Is culture in some sense "cheating"?   Through culture the human can do what he is unable to do "naturally."    What the human being does, in using a stick to reach an object, is in effect to INVENT A PROBLEM that was not there before.  That is, the primal man aspired to reach a fruit hanging high in a tree; this fruit was previously "unreachable."    Not only was the fruit outside the man's immediate reach, it was in a tree that the human--who is not an ape--simply did not want to climb.  The man was weak, clumbsy and lazy.  The human's present accomplishments are intellectual; early man had no comparison of himself to other animals except through physical prowess.  In proposing that culture might be "cheating" we are undertaking an altogether strange and perhaps, in polite company, in appropriate train of thinking.   This in normal conversation would be an odd question; but it is one we can ask here.  The question is unusual and relegates Philosophical Anthropology to a remote corner of the human consciousness.   If we assume "nature" is some sort of game or sport played by rules, culture would be cheating.  Of course, nature in the raw is not a sport and there are no rules.  So, in this sense, culture does not mean breaking rules.  Culture would mean, rather, understanding nature from an oblique--Plessner would say, ex-centric--point of view.  The human being understands, first, the inadequacy of his own hands and physical strength to do a job.  He understands, too, that a mere stick or stone could solve his problem.  So, the human interposes the stick or stone into the problem he has; he interposes the stick between himself and this objective.  This seems to us now like a "natural" thing to do; by no means does this act, we think, "separate" this human being from so-called nature.  We are wrong in our assumption.  Culture in a sense is cheating.  That is, we were given arms and hands to solve a given problem that was at hand at the time of the evolution of these appendages.  Such a problem would be picking a fruit from a tree:  hands are adaptive for that puroose.  What the human being did, in using a stick, was to INVENT A PROBLEM.  That is, he aspired to reach a fruit hanging high in a tree; this fruit was previously "unreachable."    Not only was the fruit outside the man's immediate reach, it was in a tree that the human--who is not an ape--simply did not want to climb.   It was simply outside the reach of the forager.  In using the stick, the human had to "admit" that he is not as good a climber as an ape; nor is his neck as long as a giraffe's.    The problem that the human had was to reach the unreachable.  And to do so he "cheated" insofar as he "played the game" in a way that nature, so-called, never intended.  Of course, nature is not a sport or game with set rules.  We have already said that.  In speculating whether culture is cheating, we are engaging in a purely other-worldly kind of intellectual play.   From the vantage point of Philosophical Anthropology, however, where we stand for a moment outside ourselves, we can see a general sort of human error wherein short term benefits obscure long range consequences.  The human being has, as the post-Hegelians have observed, is an "alien" being of the humans own creation.  We may speak of culture as a kind of "rebuke" to human beings.  What we are saying is that, in using a stick, the human has admitted, sadly, that he is incapable of climbing that tree and reaching the fruit.   The human being made his appearance in the world, living as he does with technology that was simple but was the same in general concept as the technics of today, as one who understood himself to be a "cheater" and one deserving of criticism.  For thousands of years he looked to animals for inspiration; his religion--totemism--had the premise of the natural superiority of animals.  Modern man has not lost this admiration of the animal world.  Nor has he ceased to rebuke himself for his "cheating" of what was assumed to be a sort of game plan of nature.

Does "nature" have a "game plan" or "rules"?   We are inclined to assume that living nature, where "all is fair in love and war,"  has no rules or plan. But speculating idly, as we do here, and assuming that there is a broader plan to nature, one corresponding to the rules of football or basketball, is that plan "made known" to, and enforced within, the human psyhe?  These are questions we can ask--but are not normally asked by outsiders to Philosophical Anthropology.   Here we will ask them.   In raising the possibility of a broader organization of nature, which also assigns the individual human being a definite role--and enforces that role--we seem to enter the domain of religion.  We are at risk of seeming to propose that there is a plan laid down by a grand creator.  I am talking purely hypothetically, without any direct knowledge of any grand plan of nature.  I am proposing the mere possibility of such a thing, in which the human being is given--and here we say given at an "animal" stage of existence and before the advent of culture--a sort of book of rules.   This book contains the plan--essentially, the morality--of nature.   Assuming that nature has a plan, and one encoded or programmed into the human, then it follows that culture--which breaks with this plan and unilaterally announces its own rules--would be a sort of cheating.  That is, the human being "knows" or has some instinctive respect for the rules of nature, yet--like Prometheus--goes away-without-leave from nature.  In using technics rather than his own hands and physical strength, he refuses to play by the rules of the so-called game.  These are questions raised in Philosophical Anthropology which human beings do not normally ask.  Rather, the human being in his proverbial daily life is following--because he finally has no choice--the rules of culture.  The rules of culture are not those of nature.  We can put this conclusion differently, and qualify it--because in culture finally humans are indeed following very general rules of nature--with a difference.  What humans do is not so much violate nature, as re-arrange it in a way that broader forces never "intended."  But humans may still suffer from thoughts of guilt, unconsciously and instinctively, that they "violate" nature or the "rules of the game."  The physical facts of a man lifting a stone are set "by nature."  Using leverage is a circumvention of the stress "imposed" by the physical attributes of the man and the stone.  But there is more.  We may go on to suggest that in breaking the rules of nature, the human being brings to himself a certain guilt--and a guilt, moreover, that must be expatiated.  There is the possibility in culture that humans are separated from nature; a separation, that is, which is not only physical (the physical break is only too obvious), but is mosral and guilt-inducing as well.   We can easily point to the physical difference between the force of the human body, and on the other hand, the leverage of a stick or other tool.  These are all physical facts.  The human being as engineer and technician simply re-arranges nature to suit himself.  But I have raised the possibility that, assuming there are "rules to the game" of nature, and that the human being is aware of himself, if only by instinct, as breaking these rules.   Physically the human has separated himself from nature; but there is the further suggestion, raised here, that he is breaking some inbred "moral rule" as well.  This moral rule is established by nature, and is one in which the human being instinctively participates; so that to break it is a"violation" of some code.  This is not a code of God, really, but neither is the code of human making.  Again, I emphasize that these speculations are not the ordinary fare of philosophy let alone of everyday existence.  They are archane broodings of introverted minds, which is also the lot of the present writer.  Our purpose here is to set down a premise--here of the "rules of nature"--and to draw out the logical conclusions of that premise.  We may wait until a later time to ask further about this premise.  All along in this blog, stress has been laid on the oppositions of human existence.  We are simply strengthing or emphasizing the separation of man and nature by suggesting that this separation is not merely physical, but is in some sense "moral" as well.  Simple separation thereby turns, through this consideration, into outright categorical or logical opposition.  The human being feels he has morally challenged nature.  And he sets out, by certain intellectual and ritual acts, to expatiate this guilt.  We turn finally to questions of "moral reconciliation" that the human has.  We will propose that this moral reconciliation is between humans, rather than between the human and physical nature.  I want to be clear on this point.  The human being has over time come to understand his separation from nature as a separation of man from man.  Society, we are saying, is essentially religious and ritual rather than practical

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
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Re: 52. VARIOUS TOPICS (MOVED FROM OTHER SECTIONS0

FROM 51:

We ask what is the relation of a white person to a black person?  Or a gentile to a Jew?   I want to keep the cast of characters small for purposes of coherency and simplicity.   We are not talking about the Old South, where a slave was in effect a personal artifact or tool.    The point to be made is that the interracial relationship, in either case, is, in our own time, religious and through agency of morality and The Good.   It has to be thus because mutual usefulness and use no longer exists.   Today and in the civilization of high technology--where humans factor less than machines--the white man accepts the people around him because he thinks that that is the right and moral thing to do.  He is in a relationship with either of these groups because in his own mind he "should" be in this relation.  This is the essence of his religion.  There is no practical reason for the connection.  This is true in today's economy.  Once upon a time in the past the white man enslaved the black for financial gain and to support an industry.  This was his reason for being with him; now that reason no longer exists.  There must be some other reason the two are together.  I can think of no reason other than religion, morality and the idea of The Good.  Now, in the absence of any practical reason to be in the company of black people, the only answr we are left with is religion.  Our relation is religious.  I cannot stress this fact enough.  But there is more. This is not to say, however, that religion in itself is "practical" because obviously it is not.   Religion rather compensates for the lack of mutual usefulness.  First there is mutual use which bridges or covers over otherness; then, that use disappearing, a gap between humans opens which is radical otherness.  That gap can ber closed, at least temporarily, by religion.  Religion  fills in the breaches in practical life where because of conflicts and contradictions of the elements of an economy.  Religion re-connects (in the Latin sense of religare) disperate practical acts which fail to intersect or cohere.  Religion is essentially an attempt to make up for, symbolically, the failings of the economy and of human technological cooperation.   We are presently close to Engels and Marx in the point that morality and The Good is itself a "reflex," in their terms, of the economic conditions of the time. Yet religion is not per se economic.   We do not reject Marxism but above all the insights of Engels and his anthropological mentor LH Morgan on this point; our only purpose is to enquire as to the ancient beginnings of the entire notion of morality and The Good, which is in the uniquely human practical relation with nature.  The practicality that inhered in the human's first knowledge of a stick or stone, in which he found this object to be useful, began a long course of events which resulted (we are stretching to say) in the present relation between (as we have said) the white man and the black man or Jew.  The human being came into intimate association with an object that was previously simply "other."  Instead of being other than this other, simply, the human being became part of it or it became a part of him.  So the object and the person were not now other, precisely; yet neither were they one together.  The contradiction inherent in this first relation between the man and the tools of his life carries over, finally, into his relations with other human beings.  The other humans are, as in culture in general, not now other, nor are they one and the same.   But this "sameness which is still otherness" is a paradox; and there opens the fact we now call "alienation."  Religion and its idea of The Good serves the purpose that it "resolves" contradictions within human practical existence.  At first, in the primal human's relation with his meagre stick or stone tool, there was no alienation.  There was simply the comfortable relation of some object, like a stick or stone, used as a tool, to the tool's user.  But humans soon began using one another as tools.  We are at this stage in our argument at the level of a simple cliche of sociology:  that humans often use one another in an impersonal way.  Force Theory accepts this cliche as true but wants merely to get behind it to a deeper principle.  Assuming that is true--that humans "use" one another--what happens when, having used one another as tools, they stop using one another in this way?  Having been brought together by culture, they are now separated by their respective cultures.   Such peoples exist in the same space, having been brought together by culture, but live in that space in an entirely new and different way.  They are together still, in this space; had they not been brought together originally by culture, their presence in the same space would be considered mutually invasive and hostile.  It would be as though one group had invaded the territory of the other group.  Here they are now, living in the same houses and carrying on the same lives, yet without the original infrastructure and purpose that first brought them together.  They are "other" now than one another.  But this otherness is also exaggerated and exacerbated by the fact that there is no natural principle--more specifically, a natural spacing--wherein they would accept one another as "part of nature."  Not now in a State of Nature, or what is the same "part of nature," they are even more strange to one another than they were when in a "State of Nature" in relation to one another..  This--when strangers meet who are more than strangers, they are aliens--is where religion enters.  There is a short term purpose for religion.  A set of symbols and rituals are implemented in place of the older ties of use and mutual usefulness.

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
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Re: 52. VARIOUS TOPICS (MOVED FROM OTHER SECTIONS0

Humans come together in an entity or institution called society.  We enquire, naturally, what that entity is.  We have so far given a "negative" account of society, proposing that this entity is an arrangement whereby humans come together, true, but without liking or caring for one another.  There are many anecdotal accounts from daily newspapers and television that support this idea.  We are a community of laws; and any hostility towards another person must be directed through authorities.  Direct action is out of the question.  For our part, we do not ordinarily think of harm we may do without considering the element of society.  I would gladly kill, not my neighbor, but my neighbor's dog; indeed I have personally spent hours fantasizing about this.  But killing a mere dog in our Country brings a prison sentence.   What the court decides about your relation with your "enemy" is not always to your liking.   I hesitate to use the word "enemy."   Here we are speaking purely hypothetically and theoretically, so we can allow ourselves, at the risk of violating some proprieties of white conversation, to use this word.  Arabs speak straightforwardly and unabashedly of their "enemy," white people do not.    For the moment we are gong to think, hypothetically, like Arabs.  We live with our enemies, not in a state of peace, precisely, but in a condition of mediated and authorized strife.  We live in faux peace with our enemy, but only because we are not permitted a direct relation with him.  To speak of this social relation as one of peace and understanding would be a mistake.   Society does not change one's essentially hostile point of view, it simply builds relationships around this relation in the full expectation that the relation is hostile.  In thinking about human relationships we are here forced into a difficult and troubling situation.  Arabs may spend in hours in their desert tents, surrounded by the concubines and weapons, conspiring to hurt their enemies; perhaps planning an ambush behind some sand dune.  We can image them there; that is what Arab nomads do. That is, if I want to damage my enemy, I cannot do so, directly, without also damaging society.  We can speak of racism in this context.  Our relationship as white people with other races is mediated by society; and the society itself stands or falls on account of how this relationship evolves or deteriorates.  Society IS the relation between, say, black and white people.  The corollary of this proposition is that, obviously, if we attack society, then we effectively part ways with our enemies; we no longer are living with them.  They are neutralized as enemies.  The Arabs say: the enemy of my enemy is my friend; and the friend of my enemy is my enemy.  We are asking precisely if, in this context, society might actually be our enemy.  A reasonable position might be racialism, in which case we would finally destroy society.  Or it might be anarchism, in which we would destroy society but we would also neutralize a real or imagined enemy.  Either case is drastic.  These issues however are not to be finally settled here; they are settled in the minds and hearts of individuals.  Likely they have been settled along time ago.  Society, like Force Theory or any other ideology, is itself an ephemeral being.

"Otherness" is a natural event in human thinking which humans inherit from their animal past.  Even though it is a human being thinking that this or that thing is "other" than he is, his mentality is then in accord with the way animals in general think.  This is a "natural" or "animal" way that humans think.  But there is more.  If an animal sees a stick or stone, the animal knows that this thing is other that it, the animal itself, is.  And for the human, too, the stick or other object is not the human himself.  To the man the world itself is "other."  The being of the man as that of an animal, in an animal mode of thought, separated mentally from the being of the stone.  And in the otherness of the world the human being can define himself, conversley, over against that world, as not the world.  This is the beginning of human categorical thinking.   But we have to move to a somewhat different idea.   At a certain point in evolution, the human being began a more complex relationship with the world around him, in which  he, the human, took ahold of nature in a way that involved him and connected him to nature as never before.  We are tempted to say, along with Klages and other German romantics, that the man has always been separated from nature; as a human being he despises, says Klages, this tree or living thing.  But the romantic philosophy is mistaken; the reverse is true.  What was a separation now becomes, through culture--even at culture's earliest stages--a connection.  In taking hold of a stick, the human takes hold--in a certain intimate way that we must call practical--of nature; he comes together with nature.  What we are saying is quite simple.  We can leave the SCHWAERMEREI of German romantic philosophy to the aesthetes.   Culture is a special involvement with nature. This is the natural order of things in our proverbial State of Nature.   It was the primal or unculture apeman who was separated from nature; he could admire this tree or stone, but it would be an entirely aesthetic admiration.  There was no intimate involvement of the primal uncultured man with the world around him.  That stone over there is other than I am, certainly, unless I pick up and use it as a tool.  Then, at that time, the stick becomes at least "connected" to my arm; but over time this connection becomes more or less "intimate" and is even encoded, finally, in the instincts and minds of human beings.   Hegel talked about otherness.  This blog is not a work in Hegelian scholarship; so I will assume, based on what I know or have read, that Hegel brought together the ideas of andersyen (otherness) and entfremdung (alienation).  Hegel assumed that one was necessarily alienated from that of which he is other.  Here we strongly separate these two concepts.  For alienation to occur, we are saying, there has to be an original conjoining.  This happens when the human being takes hold of and begins to "use" this or that stone or stick.  We call this connection culture.  Once the human being picks up the stone he "joins" nature, as a stick is joined as tool to the arm and hand.  From this point in our discussion we can reach a more remote, but more immediately relevant, conclusion.  That is, that the FACT OF ALIENATION SETS IN WITHIN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HUMAN BEING AND HIS CULTURE.  That is, what had been conjoined now becomes separated.  This is not "otherness" itself, which is an entirely natural and expected phenomenon, and one that dominates much in human life as all of animal life.  Alienation follows the otherness that is AUFGEHOBEN or overcome by a cultural synthesis.  First, through culture, things or beings that are other are conjoined through culture.  Then what was connected is separated.  This is a rhythm or dialectical cadence of the man-culture relationship.  Indeed, the human being--as Heidegger and extistenialists hold--can live in a world that has become, in effect, the same world of categorical "otherness" that characterized the first world, that of nature.  What once was culture--a connection between man and nature--is now simply a world, not the original world of nature that once was, but a world entirely of human making.  But this world is now "other."  We call this new world the "alienated" world of the human being--alienated because it once was connected to humans even as it constituted, by itself, a connection with nature.  Culture, as we said, is a connection with nature, not a distancing from it.  Therefore Klages is wrong.  But where new ground for critical philosophy opens is precisely in the fact that, THE ESTRANGEMENT OF THE HUMAN BEING FROM NATURE IS ALL THE MORE RADICAL ON ACCOUNT OF THE FACT OF CULTURE--THE IDEA THAT THE HUMAN BEING HAD BEEN ONCE CONNECTED TO NATURE THROUGH CULTURE.  Alienation is the final act of culture, wherein the human being, once a part of nature through the tools and technics of his life, now finds himself in an entirely new world.  This world is of his own making, as a way of connecting to nature, while at the same time "other" than not only nature, but than the human being himself.  This is a condition of total alienation.  And it is a phase of human life, moreover, that demands resolution.  The contradiction would be fatal.  I propose "race," that is, unfolding Being, as the negation of the negation, the Aufhebung or resolution of the contradiction of a culture that is now "other" than its human creator.

The modus operandi of this blog is apriori reasoning.  To some this appears old-fashioned and futile.  First I lay down one or several premises, and then draw logical conclusions--as logical as possible--from these premises.  As for the premises, they are not necessarily afforded any  empirical and support.  I might  return later to contribute some fact or other in support the premises. This is in accordance with my very general agenda, which is not to prove anything but suggest relations between ideas.  Logic, not fact, is the objective here.   The mode of reasoning is out of fashion with anyone claiming to be scientific.  It resembles rather the kind of argumentation of the old Church fathers.  Schopenhauer might approve (cf. his essay "How to Win an Argument.").   But there is more.  We do not contradict science, ever, or get too far from a real world of facts.  Nothing said here is contrary to science; everything here is, if not proven, then at least is naturalistic as opposed to religious.  In accepting the general views of scientists on such subjects as genetics and evolution, and in confining ourselves to logical propositions rather than empirically derived ideas, we greatly reduce our own burden of proof.  We speak only of nature, in other words, if perhaps in some antiquated terms such as did the Natural Law philosophers in their time.  The worst we can say is that our science, which does not interest me so much, is somewhat outdated.  There is no need to go head to head with anthropologists, for instance, over the subject of race or human nature, when the anthropologist is going to be superior in the area of fact even while, on the other hand, he is weak in logic.  Our grounds for argument will be in the area of the logical or apriori connections of ideas. We are scientific here and empirical to the extent that we are never religious or mystical.  We avoid pseudo science such as science-fiction sorts of things; never do we lower ourselves to psychic phenomena and so forth.  We have no dispute with science--we respect it--and we try not to contradict it, unless accidentally and through outright ignorance.  There is more to say on the topic of the relation of Force Theory to science.  I believe we are within the bounds of Philosophical Anthropology, whose relation to science has never been properly clarified by the early Philosophical Anthropologists such as Plessner and Gehlen.  Nor, other than some lapses by Christian Philosophical Anthropologists, has there been a lapes into anything categorically unscientific.  This has been the case while PA was still a budding field  Never do we invoke God or space aliens or anything of that sort.  As for our premises regarding "nature's plan," I do not feel that that is a problem so far as we are concerned.  I "entertain" here the idea of "natures plan" just so we can move on, expeditiously, to a conclusion.  I have even decided in advance what that conclusion is going to be (see below).    So far two premises have been set down:  (1) So-called "nature" has certain "rules" or "expectations"  (2) The human being "knows" these expectations by virtue of some "instinct" or code that is implanted in him in his genetics.  For instance, the human being does not "expect" to fly like a bird, therefore he does not normally "try" to fly.  With the realization, however, that he could theoretically fly, the human being tried and finally succeeded in doing so.  In effect, the human "violated the rules of the game."  These are all assmptions I have laid down as premises.  There has been no attempt to prove any of these assumptions.  Rather I have moved on to draw the conclusions that would follow logically:  That is, that there is "guilt" inherent in the very fact of culture.  This guilt--not practical necessity--is a major mover of culture in its evolutionary development.   Thus each practical act of culture is followed by an ritual act of expatiating guilt.  Evert act if culture separates the human being from nature, not only the nature of land and physical things, but the nature within human beings that brings them together as family.  Society we are saying is a creation of guilt.  Finally, the bonds of family that once existed within primal human groupings have been dissolved, or are under severe attack, by the new relationships around technics and through culture in general.  Following from the premises we have stated (but have not proven), the relationship we have today in what is called society are essentially religious bonds or ones that expatiate old guilt.  Thus, for instance, how we treat criminals and humans who are other than we are is essentially a ritual.  This ritual derives from some idea of the Good, in a non-practical and repetitive action that not only gives character to society but establishes what society finally is.  The Good is an idea that has resulted to bridge the gap between humans and nature that opened with the first culture.  The Good expatiates the bad that comes of violating nature's ingrained rules.

  • Registered: 2009-03-17
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Re: 52. VARIOUS TOPICS (MOVED FROM OTHER SECTIONS0

The Good is generated out of the contradidictions among elements and entities and principles that are useful.  It is from the self-contradictions within the useful that The Good appears.  But the reverse is not true.  The useful does not appear by the "doing" of The Good.  Rather what appears out of doing The Good is ritual, or empty, repetitive action.  Yet society--which is not primarily useful--consists precisely in such useless ritual acts.  At the same time, however, doing The Good compromises the majesty--the unifying power--of The Good.  That is why societies die:  the kill, precisely by doing The Good, their own unifying principle.

Earlier in this blog we made the distinction, following Hume and Carnap, between fact and value.  I want to know, throughout this writing, whether when we say the word "man" we are talking about a fact or a value.  Can we talk of a value as "something"?  If so, could the something we talk about be a man, not as a fact, in other words, but as a value?

There is no such thing, in any practical sense, as absolute certainty.  This may now become an axiom of Force Theory whose implications are great.  There is only relative certainty.  Likewise there is only relative uncertainty.  In a given situation the man can always entertain a guess as to what the right action might be.  We now go on to a distinction--vis-a-vis certainty and uncertainty--between the human being and an animal.   For the animal the world around it is relatively certain or uncertain.  Recently we have talked about self-evidency (selbstverstaendlichkeit); we are in the general area of this consideration.  The world for the animal is relatively certain (self-evident) or uncertain.  Certainty will encourage the animal or human, either one, to act.  Uncertainty will inhibit its or his action.  We see certain examples of this, as when an animal reacts to the mere rustle of branches; the animal thinks it is being stalked.  The animal exerts itself very quickly but perhaps also wastefully.   A human being might pause to consider other possibilties, such as that it is merely the wind rustling the branches. The human listens carefully before expending valuable energy running or acting to defend himself.  For the human being, we are saying, there is an area--a rather wide space--between on the one hand certainty and on the other uncertainty.  This is the area for consideration and thought and planning.  For the human there are finer shades of certainty and uncertainty.  These nuances are material for thinking.  The human is slow to react because he "cerebralizes" his responses in accordance with the finer distinctions between what is know and what is not known.  The known and unknow are a vast dark area full of ominous portent but also presentl new possibilities that are not there for animals.  It is precisely in this area, now grown larger, that the phenomon arises that we call trust.  The human being trusts, the animal does not trust.  Trust means to submit to a reality that is still largely unknown, or certain only to a relatively small degree. I have said that the human trusts, but the animal doesn't.  That is true.  It is precisely, we are saying, in this area defined by trust--where the human will commit himself to an action or thing that is not entirely certain--that there arises what we call human culture in the most general sense of the word culture.  Culture--and society and all institutions--are based on trust.  But that is only to say that humans commit themselves to a reality--that only humans, but not animals, can know--that is uncertain.  Culture arises out of an in response to an uncertain world.  A course of action, we are saying, that seems certain turns out to be, finally, a wrong course.  In this case the situation was simply more uncertain than first thought to be.  The core of culture is not, that is, in the accomplishment of some goal but in the mitigation of error caused by erroneous estimation of chances.  This is our general position.  Of course, there is the human's relation to so-called nature (the terms we use are simplistic and hypothetical); there is also a man's relation to other men.  Force Theory proposes that the essence of culture is in its capacity to mitigate the mistakes that humans are bound to make.  Humans do not take the view that discretion is the better part of value; or that it is better to err on the side of saftey.  Humans are risk takers.  Culture steps in where human beings have failed.  The example which will appear throughout this blog is in the case of justice.  We will talk frequently about agreements and contracts; we will talk about how agreements differ from contracts.  In these cases it is always assumed by the men entering these institutionalized relationships that the relationships will possibly fail; they will then resort to justice.  The agreements (and so forth) evoke culture; they are the essence of human institutions.  So here again culture is compensatory rather than primary.  In talking about technology we could develop the same theme, to the effect that the first use of culture was tentative, exploring with a stick, say, where the hand refused to go.  The hand was a vital organ and hurt when bitten or stuck.  The hand was always cautious and moved slowly and tentatively where there was danger; technics essentially took the place of the hand in this work.  Were a task certain, the hand would engage.  But many tasks had only the vaguest prospects of success; here technics were used.    Culture as technology "reached" in an exploratory way into the vague area of uncertainty.  A great deal has been left out of our philosophy of technology to date--and this includes the profound and insightful Arnold Gehlen--about the function of technology not merely to act and create, but to explore.  Technology was originally a product of human intelligence, but an intelligence whose domain was not the certain reality that got the attention of animals, but the uncertain reality that lay outside of primal animal interest.  These things--trust where the animal would not want to trust, exploration and engagement in a risky course of action--are motivation for culture; and they determine the nature and outcome of culture.  Justice is an example.  There is, or would be, no reason for justice were human agreements and understandings certain.  Justice is a "higher" form of culture than a mere agreement; the contract evokes justice.  In this way, to overcome the primal fact of uncertainty, other institutions whether legal or technological are evoked to fill the void between certainty and uncertainty, a void that was always there for animals and humans alike, but one that only humans came to understand for what it was.  Human culture exists in the face of uncertainty. 


The Three Pillars of Force Theory are these:

1. Liberalism has prevailed because it has been consistently anti-racist.   Conservatism, on the other hand, as Liberalism's adversary, has been ambiguously--inconsistently--racist.  Force Theory decries this weakness in Conservatism and attempts to correct it.  The problem, we are saying, is Conservatism's obession with nation and itsattempt to reconcile American Jingoism with racialism.  This is a futile task.  Nation and race as concepts are entirely different and incompatible.  This lack of understanding of the two concepts has mired Conservatism in a fatal self-contradiction.  Our prescription is to eject Nationalism from the Conservative agenda, leaving only racialism.  And to build a social theory around the idea of race.
 
2.  Much of writing in the area of Force Theory is a tortuous and confused depiction of the evolution of human culture.  Force Theory has taken on the task to understand how, in his long evolution, the human being has come to become possessed by ideas that are contradictory. To depict such a history is a laborious task.   Human culture in general is a entity disturbed by constant and confusisng internal contradictions.   Force Theory presents a long and rambling--often inconsistent--idea about how, from earliest beginnings as a tool-using animal, human beings have engaged themselves in a way of life that itself is confusing and contradictory. Since this part of Force Theory is still work in progress, some order and coherence may presently be brought to the subject matter.

3. Finally, as confused and contradictory as human culture and history have been, one reality emerges as something permanent.  Upon this reality we may build a complete (gesamt) conception of the society of the future.  This idea is race.  Race--an entire process wherein the human being transcends himself as a new and higher biological species--is the constant in human effort; and is the reality which will replace the confusion of culture.  In race--which Heidegger calls "heavy with Being-- there is certainty.