From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 16:23:27 EST Subject: JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON --part1_145.bd9adbc.2b912d4f_boundary Content-Language: en ON JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON Dear Jud and Sunthar, This is just the try to nail down a number of lose threads of thought in a moment of clarity that have always in my mind mutually desired amongst themselves an interconnection. The elimination of my own desire and intent is deliberate, growing out of an increasing realization that =E2=80=9Cmy,=E2=80=9D =E2=80=9Cmine,=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cself=E2=80=9D are 'spiritualizating' abstractions committing and condemning me to motivations and goals I have inherited from my culture, are truly culture specific, Jud: Dear Gary: I enjoy your pieces more than any other. I too I have never understood the reason why one would wish to completely escape from desire. I can fully appreciate the desire to escape from something that is considered by the desiree to be undesirable, in exchange for a behaviour or experience which is considered to be desirable. I would not consider a desire to escape from some form of lifestyle that I consider to be undesirable to be an escape from desire per se, but simply to be the act of exchanging one life-style or longing for another more desirable. Those that sit naked on a bed of nails under a baobab tree obviously do so because they find it more desirable than working in a busy office in Mumbai, or labouring in some field or on some supermarket check-out desk, or (in the case of Lord Buddha) repeating the boring rituals of a life at court - all that they are doing is substituting one object or form of desire for another and capitulating to the desire to escape from the undesirable. The very fact of choosing to sit in the shade of the baobab tree rather than out in the hot sun, is a capitulation to a desire, and any attempt to deliberately sit in the sun rather than the shade is also a capitulation to the desire of not surrendering to the desire to sit in the shade. Those that attempt to rid or cleanse their minds of selfhood and suppress their bodily urges of all forms of yearning are doing what they desire by rejecting the desire for other activities. There is no escape from desire, for the desire to escape from desire is also desire. I personally do not agree that any concepts of =E2=80=9Cmy,=E2=80=9D =E2=80=9Cmine,=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cself=E2=80=9D are culturally transmitted concepts, although society and language certainly reinforce theses ideas, but rather that the concept of selfhood and me-ness=E2=80=9D is innate and universal and can be observed in the behaviour of babies and infants. On the contrary it is religion and dictatorial style politics, which introduce and reinforce ideas of personal sacrifice for God or Der Fuhrer or Stalin or one's fellow believers, patriotism unto death in the trenches, and brotherly universality for the greater good. In the past religion may have been useful to the state in certain societies for reasons of manipulation and control, but in the modern world it is more than a hinderance than a help. Gary: =E2=80=A6and are granted their so-called 'validation', 'logical' and moral and most ludicrously 'spiritual,' from =E2=80=9Csuccess,=E2=80=9D interpreted by whatever soothing, self-justifying, and consolating and deliberately obscuring fuzzy mystical words that one never examines in depth for, actually, a very good and solid pragmatic reason: That such an examination puts into question absolutely all praxis itself. Jud: The choice as I see it is by an examination of words, gerunds, gerundials and abstractions of all types (which means an examination of ideas,) to live in the fresh bracing intellectually dignified world of reason unencumbered by the degrading dross of spirituality, or by a blithe non-examination of words and ideas, to live out one's drab life in [what to me is] the equivalent of noetic squalor and hopelessness, by twisting meanings into fatuous nonsensicalities and turning intelligent men into comic buffoons and laughing stocks. For me the scrutiny of abstractions does not lead to a forsaking of praxis, but on the contrary actuates me more to attack the wickedness of religion and all forms of transcendentalism as the embodiment of depravity, and the greatest threat to world peace, and the very continuance of humankind as a viable species on this planet. Even the present crisis regarding Iraq represents a clash of religions - that of the aggressive morbid Christianity of the USA on which Bush (who is said to pray before every meeting) depends for his constituency, and his pathetic untrustworthy stooge Blair, known in the British press as: =E2=80=9CThe Reverend Blair,=E2=80=9D with the aggressive Islam of Iraq and Palestine juxtapositioned with the pushy Judaism of Israel. To supply a roll-call of the warring religious cults with its continuously burgeoning eruptions of concomitant death, bloodshed and despair throughout the world from the Twin Towers to Northern Ireland, from Indonesia to the India - Pakistani border is not necessary, for our TV screens are full of such horrors every time we switch on our sets there is some transcendentalist outrage. Mosques are being attacked and bombs cast into churches and Hindu temples. Nor is it necessary to review the millions that have died in the name of religion or political transcendentalism throughout history, from individual human sacrifice to mass human ritual killings and the religious wars and massacres that have plagued mankind. Practically every time one opens a newspaper one reads about perverted priests or Lesbian nuns attacking our innocent children, and the British people were recently warned that one of the most dangerous places for a young child to venture alone is - into a church. Today's radio is full of the scandal of the Church Laundries in Ireland, where thousands of young females were made to slave 7 days per week in the steam-filled laundries, hair shorn short shouted at and and abused by nuns, and paid a few coins per week for their incessant labour. One visit per year was allowed to parents - and that only lasting for two hours. Hundreds, perhaps thousands are now preparing to sue the Catholic Church and the Irish State for allowing it to happen. Their crime? Being raped as children. An awareness of this =E2=80=9Cspiritual=E2=80=9D beastliness and the dangers it represents for humanity usually encourages praxis rather than stifles it or renders a person oblivious to its perfidy. Gary: Praxis always assumes, as an absolute fundamental and necessity, the universal desirability of =E2=80=9Csuccess=E2=80=9D whether it is killing one's neighbor to take his food, rape his wife, and seize his property, or like Dr. Jonas Salk inventing the cure for polio or Dr. Christian Bernard discovering the technique of translating a heart or, or (very supposedly and deeply questionable) Shankara's and Abhinavagupta's paths for finding but most significantly experiencing 'God'. There has always been in the Roman Catholic Church (as distinctly opposed to the Eastern Orthodox Church) a deep and explicit hatred of real mystics who claim to experience - and if one 'experiences,' one must 'be' - 'God' because, quite sensibly, one cannot have human beings running around claiming to be God for a number of moral, rational, and quite practical reasons. Jud: The number of tiresome Messianic transcendentalist screwballs who kept popping up in ancient Israel before and contemporaneously with Jesus Christ were aparently legion, and some ragged-arsed babbler tugging at one's sleeve claiming to be the Son of God could be found on most street-corners in downtown Jerusalem. The only reason that Jesus was =E2=80=9Csuccessful=E2=80=9D was because the theological and political situation in occupied Judea at the time was ready for such a =E2=80=9Cprophet.=E2=80=9D He was the right man in the right place at the right time to satisfy the spiritual appetites of a certain section of the Jewish intelligentsia, and at the same time to provide hope for a section of the populace for whom the current form of Judaism, {headed by a cynical Sanhedrim of quisling and collaborationalist priests) was a disenchantment. Gary: As both Shankara and Abhinavagupta made extremely clear in a negatively rational manner, since they could obviously not say even in Indian culture, 'experiencing' and 'being' God, in a literal and effective fashion, put one beyond moral or any other kind of rules. They were governed, like you and I are, by an inherent and inherited code of desire and its absolutely necessary correlative success. Jud: The aspiration to be a desire-less =E2=80=9Cwise man=E2=80=9D is a desire to be successful as desire-less sage, and no wise man counts himself successful as a sage if he is thought of as a fool. Even the hermit in his cave who desires to separate himself from the company of humans is a schlemiel of desire, and an aspirant to be successful in displacing himself from the company of humans. The suicide who wishes to extinguish sensualism by obliterating himself can never achieve it, for the desire for oblivion cannot be realised, for upon death the lack of desire is not registered by the mind, and limbo is not comprehended, nor the lack of desire detected or perceived. There is no such thing as "not to be." Gary: Their methodology, in a grand sense, is no different from mine and yours the murderers, Drs, Salk and Bernard, and the vast majority the members of Indian and Anglo-American culture. Success is the primary arbiter however it may be described, visible or invisible, material or spiritual. I have it, you have it, Shiva has it, Brahma has it --- or all of our mutual, so-called =E2=80=9Cidentities,=E2=80=9D even if one calls it =E2=80=9CAtman=E2=80=9D or even =E2=80=9Cnon-self=E2=80=9D or =E2=80=9CBuddha,=E2=80=9D is not only put into question but deeply undermined - and simply because it can be questioned. The last phrase is very important. It does not have to come up with facts, and therefore the =E2=80=9Csuccess=E2=80=9D of =20'conclusions' that, by the very nature of time as experienced --- not as abstractly understood --- cannot ever be truly conclusive but merely moments that are the start or other equally valid (i.e., meaningless) moments that are in turn the start of . . . . etc., etc., etc. In essence, whatever divinity one can possibly imagine works under exactly the same limitations in the long run as a stupid, weak, ludicrous, mortal, utterly impotent success-wise human being. Success is not success. It is merely a moment, without meaningful distinction, from every other moment in continual succession that, however, does intrigue me at times that it always and only without exception, for man and God, goes most singularly in one direction. This is time purely as experienced. You can pretend to escape this by abstracting it, studying it, putting it into a story with an imagined larger context. But that =E2=80=9Clarger context=E2=80=9D one knows directly and immediately and inescapably from daily life, does not exist. It never intrudes except as extraneously imposed as a moral law, a rule, as a motive for =E2=80=9Csuccess=E2=80=9D which then properly makes =E2=80=9Csuccess=E2=80=9D show itself as created from its imaginary progenitor. Even Shankara and Heidegger and Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Avila and Paul could only conceive the experience of 'timelessness' only upon the inescapable, existentially maintaining vehicle of mean, nasty, sequential time, either directly with it, simultaneously one in the other as in Heidegger's BEING AND TIME and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude, through it, or supposedly standing outside but always beside and right along with it, always, in their strangely accurate realistic assessment, at the same time: One is experiencing God and timelessness at exactly the same 'time' as one is engaged in daily life that all of these - 'mystics' - regard as a necessity=20- =E2=80=9Cjivanmukta=E2=80=9D while still alive. And it is only after death,=20=E2=80=9Cthe land from which no one returns=E2=80=9D always and forever, that one can truly experience 'timelessness' in its full purity. That something corresponds to this experience is undeniable. But the experience, as real, must stand by itself=20- as everything else in existence has, is, and will stand by itself - in the real context of daily life. Even death here is a mystical abstraction. What you actually have, forever on and at hand, is . . . this moment . . . and .=20. . this moment . . . and . . . ad nauseum . . . The =E2=80=9Ceternal recurrence=E2=80=9D of Nietzsche as he actually described it . . . =E2=80=9CCould you accept living your life again, exactly as it was, in every single detail, and all of existence=20. . . again . . . and again . . . again and . . .=E2=80=9D Of course, logically, this though cancels itself out. If you do live your life again as exactly the same, then you will not know you are living your life again . . . or another life . . . or another's life . . . etcetera ad infinitum ad nauseum - but only to us impossibly standing outside the imaginary circle, impossibly observing the process. Success then cannot be a success, then, but only succession and succession and succession and . . . There is no completion. Completion is an abstraction and it does not exist along with all the derivative concepts from =E2=80=9Csuccess=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Ccompletion=E2=80=9D like =E2=80=9Cself=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9CGod=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cmotive=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cdesire=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Chistory=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cphilosophy.=E2=80=9D There is pain for certain. That, like that singular direction of time, is an interesting mystery. But 'pleasure' like Schopenhauer and Epicurus and numerous others have said is an illusion, and at best merely an escape from pain. But it is=20a substantial clue as to where the idea of =E2=80=9Csuccess=E2=80=9D came from Jud: As the incomparable son of the tentmaker said: =E2=80=9CMyself, when young, Did eagerly frequent Doctor and Sage, And heard great argument About this=E2=80=A6and about that, But always did I leave by the same door As wherein I went.=E2=80=9D And as for life's ephemeral =E2=80=9Csuccesses?=E2=80=9D =E2=80=9CThe Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep, And Bahram, that great Hunter--the Wild Ass Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep." We don't need a shabby Heidegger to tell us that soon we will all be joining Jamshyd and Bahram, in their =E2=80=9Clong sleep=E2=80=9D and particularly=20a Heidegger who couldn't recognise the futility of =E2=80=9Csuccess,=E2=80=9D but rather strove for the ultimate attainment (in his terms) of being appointed Hitler's personal philosopher. Do we really need such tawdry =E2=80=9Cphilosophers?=E2=80=9D Gary: This is part of what I am finding in Sartre's CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON. If thought were to understand itself as a dialectical process, it could not formulate its discovery except as a simple fact. Still less could thought pretend to settle this question whether the movement of its object is modeled on the movement of thought, or whether the movement of thought is modeled on that of its object . . . If the search for truth is to be dialectical in its methods, how can it be shown without idealism that it corresponds to the movement of Being? And on the other hand, if Knowledge is to allow Being to develop itself according to its own laws, how can we prevent whatever processes are involved from appearing as empirical? Moreover, in the later case, the question arises how passive, and therefore non-dialectical, thought can evaluate the dialectic; or in ontological terms, how it can be that the only reality which lies beyond the laws of synthetic Reason is that which decrees them. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, NLB, 1976, pp. 24-5 Jud: Of course I cannot agree with the quasi-materialist Sartre because of his acceptance of the concept of =E2=80=9CBeing,=E2=80=9D which for me is something of an abstraction, which is particularly ridiculous and childish - a mere grammatical mechanism. For me as is well known =E2=80=9Cbeing=E2=80=9D does=20not exist, for grammatical concepts like all ideas of the mind do not exist - only the entities that exist exist to think the ideas of their minds. Gary: This is just a blurb. Sartre is well aware of the difficulties of talking about =E2=80=9Creal life=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cdialectics=E2=80=9D =E2=80=9Cphilosophically=E2=80=9D when =E2=80=9Cphilosophy=E2=80=9D itself is totally absorbed into and is merely an abstraction of =E2=80=9Cmaterial existence . . . irreducible to knowledge=E2=80=9D as Sartre says of Marx. It has always been the great virtue of Jud Evans to always drag me back again and again kicking and screaming into =E2=80=9Cmaterial existence . . . irreducible to knowledge=E2=80=9D because, no matter what whatsoever, the real is the only=20thing worth talking about Now --- WHY is the =E2=80=9Creal=E2=80=9D worth talking=20about? MARK ANTHONY: O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure? . . . . The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones. =E2=80=9CSuccess=E2=80=9D is not successful. But, if one reads closely, one=20can still see how the Sartre of the CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON is still essentially the same Sartre of BEING AND NOTHINGNESS. Jud: The real is worth talking about because a belief in the unreal is suicidal for mankind, which means that those who believe in the unreal are a peril to themselves, their society and to mankind. Why bother combating them? Why want to be =E2=80=9Csuccessful=E2=80=9D in engaging evil? For the sake of my children and grandchildren and the children and grandchildren of others - that they may be free from the nemesis of mankind - religion - philosophical cultism - transcendentalism and superstition of all kinds. regards, Jud Evans. <A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY. <A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A> --part1_145.bd9adbc.2b912d4f_boundary
HTML VERSION:
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005