What am I? I am maybe a small part of what constitutes my nervous system, I am partially my senses. Partially my senses because there are other senses which I am not conscious of, these are called unconscious senses (collectively the unconscious). I exert will on my conscious senses, but is this will exerted by the unconscious and not what I call me? What is this unconscious? It is certainly not a thing or an object, I assume it is what we don’t know, a concept, it cannot be proved empirically, only by rational necessity.
"Likewise our love of the beautiful: it also is our shaping will. The two senses stand side-by-side; the sense for the real is the means of acquiring the power to shape things according to our wish. The joy in shaping and reshaping—a primeval joy! We can comprehend only a world that we ourselves have made."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power
Answering questions from a follower
My question concerning life is one: what is the point? There is no point to existence, there never existed a “void” a “nothingness” in which this existence spontaneously happened. It just is, and this makes my mind go insane, because normally everything has a cause and comes from something previous to it. But existence is just eternal effect, and nothing caused it.
My deepest fear is the fear of having fear; fear is horrible. Throughout my life I’ve had some panic attacks (but not many) concerning the fear of death and eternal “nothingness”. But I’ve rationalized death, so I don’t have this fear anymore, but I still do have a fear of that death fear.
Five things I’ve learned about life is that 1) everything depends on perspective 2) life is like a flowing river of moods, slowly changing through time 3) you are always on your way, always becoming, wanting what is lacking, missing, filling the same emptiness inside that has always existed 4) everything sort of comes and goes, especially people, so we must celebrate the arrivals as well as the partings 5) everyone is sort of like you, but not like you at the same time. Its confusing heh.
"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."
Michel Montaigne
"There exists neither “spirit,” nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of “subject and object,” but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience). Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power. The meaning of “knowledge”: here, as in the case of “good” or “beautiful”, the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation —not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived—stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service."
Nietzsche, The Will To Power
"I do not believe that an occurrence in which my mental life takes no part can teach me anything hidden concerning the future shaping of reality; but I do believe that an unintentional manifestation of my own mental activity surely contains something concealed which belongs only to my mental life—that is, I believe in outer (real) chance, but not in inner (psychic) accidents. With the superstitious person the case is reversed: he knows nothing of the motive of his chance and faulty actions, he believes in the existence of psychic contingencies; he is therefore inclined to attribute meaning to external chance, which manifests itself in actual occurrence, and to see in the accident a means of expression for something hidden outside of him."
Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
When I meditate on awareness, I can see the world and things as awareness, they just exist because I’m aware of them and retain them in memory. So for something to exist, you must be there to witness it. Therefore, things only exist in awareness of them.
The same thing happens when you compare awareness with experience. If there was no experience, then there would be no self or world, because you are the experience of your self and you are always experiencing your self interacting with the world (which is one with the self).
"Now, this unconscious which was a philosophical object since Shopenhauer and was as such until Nietzsche, was for philosophy at the same time, what allowed the anthropological question to take form, the question that Kant had assigned to philosophy (What is Man?) as its most general domain. Thanks to the reflections on the unconscious, we finally realized, to talk vulgarly, that man dosen’t exist."
Michel Foucault, Interview about the birth of psychology and its relation to philosophy (1965)
"Science has probably never demanded a more sweeping change in a traditional way of thinking about a subject; nor has there ever been a more important subject. In the traditional picture a person perceives the world around him, selects features to be perceived, discriminates among them, judges them good or bad, changes them to make them better (or, if he is careless, worse), and may be held responsible for his action and justly rewarded or punished for its consequences. In the scientific picture a person is a member of a species shaped by evolutionary contingencies of survival, displaying behavioral processes which bring him under the control of the environment in which he lives, and largely under the control of a social environment which he and millions of others like him have constructed and maintained during the evolution of a culture. The direction of the controlling relation is reversed: a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him."
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
"Language is a guide to ‘social reality’. Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
Edward Sapir
Cognitive Relativism
Richard Rorty’s relativism:
The traditional view–call it Platonist, absolutist, objectivist or realist–is that when we do something like abolish slavery we move closer to an independent ideal and we bring our way of thinking closer to the One Right Way, the way dictated by reason or by our essential human nature. Rorty thinks this sort of thinking has been valuable in the past; but in more recent times it has become constraining rather than liberating. He therefore urges us to see intellectual and cultural progress as simply consisting in our exchanging one vocabulary for another. Descriptions of human beings that view themselves as entitled to equal rights before the law, and descriptions of the solar system that views it as heliocentric are both preferable to the descriptions they replaced; but not because they are closer to the truth. In both cases, we should prefer the newer descriptions on pragmatic grounds; they better enable us to achieve our purposes.
Michel Foucault’s relativism:
In works like Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish, Foucault tries to show how what we call “reason”, “science”, “knowledge” and “truth” are socially constituted and shaped by political forces. He argues that in order to pass muster as “scientific” or as “rational”, a discourse must satisfy certain conditions, and these conditions are socially and historically relative, reflecting the needs and interests of existing power structures. This relativity is more obvious in the case of classifications based on distinctions such as normal-perverted, natural-unnatural, rational-insane, or healthy-sick. But Foucault suggests that it applies also to other, more epistemologically central distinctions such as scientific-unscientific, knowledge-error, and true-false. The ideal of a neutral standpoint transcending epochs and interests is thus a chimera.
