The apparent innateness, a
priori nature and holiness of consciousness is to be re-examined here, or
at least developed in a way to be able to pose an answer to the mysteriousness
ascribed to this entity in modern, scientific discourse. Let’s imagine some primordial
life conditions of thrown-in-the-world-ness where some molecules come together
and form a concentrated self or cell: an environment in its, of its
environment, which precisely is the same one it came from and is. These
chemical conditions that manifest act on the cell and the chemical conditions
in the cell respond and act on that environment, thus comes the world as such:
that thing as outside and that shapes its self. The essential
movement for the world to exist, in its bare, minimal state, is the cell to be
identified as in its-self. But these initial primitive cells find themselves in
a certain gap-to-be-filled, which I parallel with a very same gap where
creativity fills in the human condition: the condition, the one
universal law some call God, such as Spinoza. So then, the primordial cell came
to reproduce itself as between its world and the environment, in doing so it
practically creates its own world: its-self. This world is how it shapes its
own identity as through the molecules available to it from its environment,
which includes its-self as composed of the same chemical constituents. In the
same way, we identify in our bodies the same primitive being which all
objects possess insofar as they exist. For these same primordial conditions are
not primarily found millions of years ago, but are here and now where life is
continually being created in the same way, in this very moment as I put ink to
paper, when a note emits from a violin, when a baby cries; the formation of
life did not happen in a single cell long ago but necessarily
always-already-is. What we call the gap-to-be-filled is the answer to the
so-called origins of life where confronting this very gap contains its own
answer. The very same primordial conditions occur in which it is automatically
filled in by the unconscious, if not we consciously close it. When the
primordial cell forms it creates an artificiality of self-ness and the laws of
nature (its unconscious) filled in the gaps for the cell (the gap of seeing
itself in its world, it is the world it came from, like two mirrors facing each
other) by reproducing itself in copies and through storage in molecules in its
artificial, self environment. Currently the largest cell we know, and can know
is the universe, which came from the big bang: the ‘origin’ of its life. A
curious matter is in the scientists studying the smallest particles for such a
grand event but the point is at even the largest space-time scale (and thus
lowest) we can only conceive of our own spontaneous life event. On all these
scales life is only formed in (pre)conditions of death: the primary constituent
of the unconscious. The universe is set to reach its zero-level of entropy and
ordering knowledge in its only tool of matter (the world) is its recourse when
the laws of nature command death. DNA, planets, buildings, computers, 1’s and
0’s are all reproductions of their respective wholes. This necessary condition
for life is called freedom, that is, the realization and appropriation of death
that characterizes the creative act. The necessary conditions of Dasein are
being-in-the-world and freedom says Heidegger. The conscious-creative-act in
the human who recognizes death creates a symbol in his world to reappropriate
himself. In this act a doubling of sorts happens in the psyche, precisely only
in the conscious-creative-act, where life again is formed: the very same
primordial conditions that always-already-were. This is the transcendental
realm of Kant where space and time are of the pure intuition. Death is held up
in this realm and with every act appropriated as a last attempt to reproduce
its-self in its material world that it is before the horizon of the zero-level.
Descartes identified a new realm of life, a new primordial cell for analysis:
the cogito, with its environment the body. The gap between mind and body
was only a novel description for the very same void that characterizes the life
always-already-there. However, the laws of nature, the unconscious, God
commands a reproduction of self in face of the void: which, precisely is the
universal solution to freedom. For Deleuze, the solution is the repetition of
the same act as always a pure difference. For philosophy, the number one
problem is what to do with freedom engendered from self-conscious Dasein that
is being-in-the-world and free.
In modern society, working solely for the basic
sustenance of your physical body is the every-day comportment toward being.
Since the realization of truth for Dasein is only found in its relation to its
objects and founding its own Being in said objects, the realization of its
Being is that of its physical body as object, that is, being no different than
a chair. A chair is undead because it does not realize its own finitude. Since
Dasein cannot ever know death through its physical-object-body, in its
comportment toward being (being of objects as for its material continuity) it
acts as though it will never die. Dasein’s primary mode in this capitalist
society is that of being-present-at-hand, where in the mere appearance of
objects as just being present comes the primitive, eternal nature of cold,
sterile being as mere existence: Dasein as un-dead. Only in Dasein’s freely
accepting its own finitude can its comportment toward reality be that of
being-toward-death. In this mode Dasein’s relation to objects is constituted in
its finitude and the realization of Being is that of death:
freedom-toward-death. In this mode Dasein is fundamentally opposed to the
primitive being in objects such as chairs, it negates things and becomes no thing,
no-thing, nothing. This is opposed to the un-dead nature of the subject of
Dasein today.
What we are in now, the predominate logic of every-day life that
is, Fredric Jameson names the postmodern: the logic of capitalism that pervades
the discourses of politics, school, the workplace, film narratives, etc. Or, we
can name this the logic of the Lacanian big Other, the entity which guarantees
proper communication and understanding between two modern individuals partaking
in dialogue. The minimal requirement of dialogue is this deferral of meaning to
a symbolic third party and is what Lacan calls castration. This
undifferentiated location in the field of symbols that we call language is the
subject, with our varying location always already determined. The defining
characteristic of the subject is a lack, always already there and never to be
filled in. These are the two requirements for the movement of desire (freedom
for Lacan). This characterizes the structure of freedom as we carry it out
today. How did the modern psyche develop into this machine of desire, all too
willing to accept the given norms of society? what Deleuze names the ‘society
of control’? In his Philosophy of History,
G. W. F. Hegel defines the course of human history as toward a realization of
freedom. The whole history of wars, technology, discourse, language, writing,
politics has been toward a structure, in material reality, of the gap of the
subject: his freedom. Freedom is realized in the very gap constitutive of the
human constructs of society as carried out by nations and their peoples.
Paradoxically, the opening of these vary structures opens a chaos of unmediated
freedom, these are the paradigmatic historical points in history defined by
revolutions, riots and general chaos. The general coordinates of this program
is the world, defined by Heidegger, as the very one we are ‘thrown’ into the
day we are born. The subsequent castration through language is the essential
component to establishing the free subject and negating the primordial,
pre-ontological abyss of the primitive mind, that of the primordial, un-dead
cell of sterile repetition. This lack through castration is the defining
characteristic of modern man. What we call human life needs to step first
through the death of the primordial nature into which we are born, thus
negating the un-dead (negation of negation) nature of the sterile material
world and becoming self-conscious. This self-consciousness is found only in the
face of the lack of its subject, or in death. Which is why in the structure of
science that has as its pre-ontological limit a ‘meaning to life’ we always see
the new atheists such as Dawkins proscribing science as a replacement for
religion on this very thesis. The very limit of religion and the limit of science
are two ‘regional ontologies’ of the same essential features of human Dasein:
that being which is in the world and free. The founding of the cogito of Descartes is the founding of
the general reference to the world of the subject. The thinking being, through
its language is the constant grounding of cognition in the modern society.
The origin of the western civilization that dominates world
culture today is the Greek state of Athens, the birthplace of the Philosopher-King
Plato. The goal of his Socratic dialogues is a reframing of the Athenian subject
to fit into the Republic through remapping the thinking substrate of the cogito. The goal is an aporia, a simulated opening of the
coordinates of the mind to a primordial abyss of radical, paralyzing freedom
where the subjects only recourse is the subsequent positive closing of reading
into the dialogue and seeking a limit to reinstantiate a freedom that the
subject is comfortable with: a material instantiation of culture that guides a
free process of every-day life as pure difference and repetition. The same
process is what guides the desires of the un-dead, postmodern man where he
seeks external guidance in the big Other and freely chooses his commodities,
sexuality, place of employment or where he lives. However, the free process of
instantiating the very limits of his freedom is the true form of radical
freedom, or the notion of Freedom in Hegel. In Hegel, the gap from one limit to
the next is the end of history, for afterward the reading of history hitherto
is a retroactive re-reading of all past events into a necessary culmination
into the current mode of freedom. This radical freedom is precisely the
difference between the cold, sterile, un-dead nature of being today and the
potential of being-toward-death. Radical freedom today would look something
like a democratic process of opening up and changing the pre-ontological
horizon of our limits and subsequent freedom of the every-day repetitive
routine of being in society. The difference is between a life as mere material
existence found in our comportment as rational scientific beings who see the
world as a being to be exploited for human progress, and a life characterized,
through death, as constant admiration, adoration of the miracle of existence of
pure presence or the aesthetic of the Being of beings. The value of art in
unveiling truth for the later Heidegger is essential, for the founding of truth
through art, not science, is in letting nature be in its aletheia, and stopping the path of exploitation that threatens the
world of capitalistic rationality seen in the scientific discourse.
From here on, Dasein’s comportment toward beings
presupposes its own finitude, and further engagement in objects in the world
attempts to appropriate a no-thing characteristic of its freedom-toward-death:
it cannot appropriate its Being. Here resides the fundamental lesson in Hegel
where in attempting to instantiate the ideal onto the world necessarily ends in
failure to realize the intended outcome; you can only come to recognize the
correct act through reconciliation of the wrong act first: this is Hegelian
infinite negativity, or negation of the negation, or absolute knowledge. This
Hegelian system in terms of Heidegger, where the problems (contradictions)
within the context of said system, with all of its presupposed axioms,
always-already hold its own solution: Identification [Freud] of the problem
holds its own solution. Which is precisely why capitalism engenders its
contradictions in the context of its own solutions to the problem: all the
political charades are merely appearances for the big Other, when in reality
the problem already was always resolved before its material manifestation and
the fundamental ideals of capitalism remain unchanged.
The castration of the subject required to enter into the
discourse of the Other, Lacan recognizes as the death conceptualized in
Heidegger. This symbolic castration represents the no-thing of Dasein and takes
away the freedom-toward-death needed in its Identification. This is why true
atheism requires the death of the big Other and the discourse of science cannot
answer the question of life, being, consciousness. To engage in the discourse
necessarily requires you to give up your death, castrate yourself and recognize
it in the Other. Authentic Being is in direct identification with your self as
the master, following the logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. This
characterizes Heidegger’s classification between science and philosophy: only
philosophy can probe the pre-ontological abyss characterizing the mystery of
Being. This authentic part of ourselves, this desire is castrated when engaging
in the postmodern logic of capital, culture and every-day life itself. This is
why Heidegger recommends we spend more time in graveyards: only in direct,
immediate identification with our own death can we come to know true Freedom.
The closest we can get to the realization of truth is in the unveiling of being
(aletheia for Heidegger) with the deployment of the essence of mind: the faculty
of Understanding for Hegel. This is the absolute power of consciousness carried
out by Understanding that reveals the pre-ontological abyss and sets the limits
of freedom for self:
The analysis of an
idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it
of the form in which it had become familiar. To break an idea up into its
original elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the
form of the given idea, but rather constitute the immediate property of the
self. This analysis, to be sure, only arrives at thoughts which are themselves familiar, fixed, and inert
determinations. But what is thus
separated and non-actual is an essential moment; for it is only because the
concrete does divide itself, and make itself into something non-actual, that it
is self-moving. The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and
mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that remains
self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate
relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an
accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is
actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own
and a separate freedom -- this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is
the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’. Death, if that is what we want to call
this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what
is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the
Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is
not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation,
but rather the life that maintains it and endures itself in it. It wins its
truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not
as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of
something that it is nothing or it is false, and then, having done with it,
turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power
only by looking at the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This
tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.
This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by
giving determinations an existence in its own element supersedes abstract
immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance:
that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this
mediation itself.1
- Nothing in Color
____________________________________
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.
Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977 pps. 18-19.
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