On Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

I believe that it was Deleuze who pointed out the parallel - ingenious, really - betwixt Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I had myself intuited this condition (and immediately experienced it) from the moment that I committed myself to my first 'paying job'. Thankfully, I never went to the extreme of counting my own money and 'managing my finances'; I would have surely gone Crazy and never even known.
The human mind is not naturally equipped to perform mathematics. This is the theme of my first novel. Give me an imminent Bank Figure and I will take your word (or number) for it.
Ask me to check your math and I will, if I accept and fall into the Devil's hands, become lost in a forest that only the ignorant judge to be totally penetrable.
Deleuze speaks of schizophrenia as the state of agitation betwixt the Absolute and the Real. Numbers cannot exist outside us Absolutely; what is Real is our Conception of them, and 'our' is a tentative word. To say that they are Absolutely Real, one must say that one has Absolute Certainty of them. But Certainty in Mathematics is impossible because we cannot totally eliminate Error. Between any two steps in a calculation, Error might occcur, and we must be vigilant of the possibility of distortion. So, as Camus said, Lucid Reason notes its limits; between my desire for Certainty (or 'Money') and the Actuality of my Conscious ability, the gap will never be filled. At best I have a guess, which is therefore arbitrary. The corroboration of my fellows can at best lend only Assurance. The business-man plotting the 'future' in private is thus a victim of Caesarean Madness; if he believes his plans to be even Theoretically Certain, he has all ready deluded himself. I have seen victims of this. The Unconscious protests the inflation of the Ego. But how could something so simple as an extended math problem be a challenge to one's competence? Were one a person of Thought, one's mind might be put at rest and one's Soul at Peace. Yet for a Business-Man of Action to be a Person of Action, one must take Camus' leap (Ironically) and presume upon an Absolute as a Goal and therefore a Certainty by which not only to reach this (ultimately and originally Impossible) goal but to even justify (the presumption of) its Existence.

Planning for the future is bunk. I choose this truism: If one is truly going in a new direction, the Future is definitionally Uncertain (a more Shestovian idea), but it can be judged to be better simple because:

A. It is Novel,

and

B. The Mode of Travel is intrinsically rewarding.
'Goals' themselves begin to look, therefore, fundamentally flawed as abstract limits and not justifications for immediate, beloved Actions. Finally, Idealism -- not in opposition to Reality, but in Accord with and Because of it -- triumphs over Practicality, and the Life of Thought, rather than being a mere crutch to the Life of Action, triumphs over it and Becomes it, taking an entirely different course than reckless Action and enterprise that would have employed Thought as a crutch.

dm.A.A.

In Defense of the Truth:

If one Could describe every aspect of Experience, as Hegel posited, one would entirely change (and slaughter) Experience. For this reason, there must be a Reality distinct from description and a Truth beyond mere words.

Dmitry.

On the Fallacy of Perfectionism.

At any point in the process of any methodical Act, one is tempted away from an Idealised Goal to deviate. This can be observed in Inquiry; one is tempted to stop a given train of thought entirely in order to re-examine the matter. This comes at a risk; one may never capture again the original train of thought. Yet is the motive itself such a loss? No. To take the risk involves a courage that attempted self-destruction does not.
The temptation towards Deviation is the emergence of the New; one is flooded with new variables for Consideration. This cannot be stopped; one cannot step in the same river twice.
One needs always to withhold this in order to attain 'perfection'.
Yet perfection is always something one has all ready done before, and it is impossible to have a successful repetition.
The only motive for such a perfectionism would be this conviction: That the first time it was done this way it was done poorly. This was because the first time one 'deviates', such as in the case of a person who tries to renounce Thought part-way through an Inquiry. In short, it was Imperfect then, but it sets the standard for what is Perfect now. Yet it will never truly be Perfect because what one imagines to be Perfect has all ready happened and therefore cannot be repeated.

Failure and Success are in many ways Cognitively Arbitrary.
In the process of Inquiry, for instance, to forego one line of thought is simply to enable another. This may be inevitable. Everything is change, and when one Being Reveals itself to us it Conceals another. We think, to use now a Wattsian rather than a Heideggerean image, in waves. We cannot think in words without taking pauses to 'gather our thoughts'. During one of these pauses, one may arbitrarily vow to disavow oneself of all Intellect. Yet this decision is not binding. We are always Two people: The Present and the Future, and at any moment the Future may annihilate the Present.
Here is a potentially frustrating riddle: If I begin a train of Thought and partway through I am tempted to sabotage myself and to disavow all thought, but I conclude the thought in spite of this and forego my disavowal, was the Inquiry a failure? It seems not.

The disavowal itself was futile, if a disavowal of this kind aims at an Absolute; To disavow Thought one must make impossible any success for Thought in the Future. Yet my status in the Future as a free agent ungoverned by the Past renders this futile. The disavowal was therefore Arbitrary entirely. Not only could nothing be gained by it but nothing could be lost by it; the time spent not thinking might have been no longer and no practically different than the Necessary Pause which serves Thought.

What motive might there be to renounce Thought? Forgetfulness.
Truth is the imaginary Limit that Inquiry never reaches. We approach it like a horizon; it is as illusory as Perfection. We try to Leap into it when we get close, at the peak of Reasoning and Thought.
But at the moment we stop Thinking we find nothing so to Leap into so Reassuring as what was there while we were thinking, for Thought created it.

In light of all of this, the Perfectionism and anti-intellectualism of Fundamentalism is understood (to be Absurd).

dm.A.A.

On the Relationship betwixt Conviction and Consideration.

It may be that Consideration is the Objective of the two functions whilst Conviction is emotive. Yet it is also conceivable that they rest on a Continuum.

The facts of the matter would usually be Unconscious, and Inquiry offers us the only measuring rope by which to fathom them.*

The Fanatical rejection of Inquiry as the 'work of Satan' thus presdisposes us to absurdly neurotic Conscious Cramp.

dm.A.A.

*The measurement itself, in its distinction betwixt a continuum and a confluence of Opposing and Cooperating Forces, may be arbitrary.

On the Fallacy of the Open Mind.

Whilst it is indispensable that one should entertain many possibilities and walk down many avenues of thought, one should be guarded against redundancy, and most of these explorations should be done in Solitude. To entertain 'another's point of view' is dangerous where it involves this a priori concession: That there 'may be a possible Truth' to what the Other is saying. The affirmation of this 'Truth' is in fact indispensable to the Inquiry. A Truth of this nature may amount to little more than a construct. By 'considering' it, one affirms this Construct. This predisposes one to plant evidence for one's self; one paints the tree red to prove that it is red. If the Truth being sold is nothing more than a figment of the Imagination. Imagining it becomes indistinct from Believing it. An Open Mind is indistinct here from a gullible one; Consideration is indistinct from Belief.

dm.A.A.

On the Fanatical Mindset.

1. One presumes, at the Outset, that one has 'The Truth'.
2. All of one's beliefs are adopted in a Spirit of Compulsion.
3. They are valued above Reason. They are believed because of Conviction.
4. One's beliefs are challenged by Dissent.
5. One fails to maintain muscular tension of making a futile effort to Believe ensues.
6. This tension is familiar because it is learned in the self-defense of stage 4. One identifies the tension with the sense of self-righteousness (and Rightness) that occurs simultaneously during Stage 7. It is a token of the Self-convinced Ego that only shines in preaching.
8. From the confusion at Stage 7, one re-gains Conviction. One is self-assured again because the tension is (falsely) justified and the Other 'defeated'. The Cycle repeats.

dm.A.

On Science and the Unconscious.

 

Empiricism cannot account for nearly all phenomena. I may begin to imagine: What is it like to be possessed if a Conviction? Could it be possible that one might confuse the sense of tension that comes about from the futility of trying to prove one’s own self right with the frustration of failing to prove another wrong? If the tension is experienced simultaneously with the argument, one may easily make that error.

Yet how am I to test such a hypothesis? I should have to be possessed of such a Fanaticism, in which case I would lack the Reasoning faculties necessary to observe myself objectively in the process of delusion. I cannot stage an experiment because I have no more control of the Unconscious Complexes that would produce such a neurosis than I do over my own hart or liver; each functions Involuntarily; my only hope at changing their behavior would be by a series of fruitless decisions that would ultimately so impair my judgement that I would be unsuccessful, again, in making an objective observation.

Thankfully, I am NOT a fanatic, so I cannot know what the mind of one is except secondarily. Alan Watts was right: The Ego cannot be held onto. It dies when the Unconscious necessitates it, though perhaps not by the ‘command’of the Unconscious so much as its withdrawal of support for the Ego. The sense of tension identified with clinging to an obsolete self-conception is futile and unnecessary; it has nothing to do with the magical and mysterious interplay of psychic forces. Yet one attempts to salvage this naïve self-conception when one feels it slipping away.

At times, such an enterprise is necessary to prevent psychosis. Yet in the functioning of a healthy mind during a Transitional Period, such clinging is ridiculous.

Is it not possible that my recent interest in it stems from a self-defensiveness? What if all egoic tension is in self-defense, with the intent to prove oneself ‘Right’ and another ‘Wrong’?

It is conceivable, however Universalised.

This all seems to serve as a reminder that the mind, like the body, is largely outside of our control. What would we be otherwise? Power Gods.

Dm.A.A.