Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 05:11:29 -0800 (PST)
From: "Gary C. Moore" <gospode-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Fwd: ON MY RECENT THINKING OR NONTHINKING


--0-71134148-1044969089=:72620


 
 "Gary C. Moore" <gottlos75-AT-mindspring.com> wrote:From: "Gary C. Moore" 
To: 
CC: 
Subject: ON MY RECENT THINKING OR NONTHINKING
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 07:08:07 -0600

Dear Jud,This is to let you know I have not completely vegetated. This morning I was reading selected passages in a biography of Melanie Kline on Freud's and Kline's thoughts about Freud's so-called 'death instinct.' Now, be aware I think Freud as a person is as dispicable as Heidegger and has actually ruined more lives than Heidegger did. However, totally disengaging from his personality, and psychoanalysis as a system, and trying to go back to the basic 'thoughts' that made such a thing as psychoanalysis arise, we arrive at a basic of historical human being: how can we describe how an infant relates to the world? This is far from an obvious question. The fundamental mistake we make is observing infants, the mistake actually being we are not at all observing how the infant itself relates to the world but, instead, are immediately bogged down in inherited interpretations of external infant INTER-RELATIONS with others. We do not have any rational viewpoint of how the infant relates to the 'world'. First I think we have to discard words like "reality" and "world". They are abstractions that actually grew up in contradictions to irrational behaviour that presuppose the "unreal" or "another reality" whether Cartesian "inner" and "outer" or Christian "this life" and "the afterlife" (now that I write it, the word "afterlife" seems so obviously absurd because if it is "after life" then it is no longer "alive" at all) and "another world". We immagine an abstract 'rational' unity "reality" as a counter to irrational "unreality." So it is the idea we reject that actuality forms the idea we create and accept. And then we presuppose it as basic to all of our thinking while totally ignoring the experiencial and historical process by which we arrived at it in the first place. Therefore, by logical necessity and temporal succession, there is something more basic and primal than "reality" or "the world." But can it even be called a "something"?That there is difficulty speaking about it is the same problem as dealing with the infant's relation to all that is around it. The phrasing is precise because if we are going to discard Descartes' "inner" and "outer" then then the infant's desires, sensations, and cravings are going to be as much "around" it as so-called "objective" objects as the mother's or the bottle's nipple. The pain from touching the burning match is going to be as much "inner" as outer" so as to have no distinction to the infant. That pain also is going to be in the "all that is around it." Kline states the mother's negative behaviour toward the infant can displace the infant's reassuring sucking action from the mother's breast to the father's penis. I will not comment on that. The point I want to emphasize is that she says this displacement is the beginning of a mental illness, a "disease". Now, if you have a cancerous tumor growing on your left cheek, you do have a relation to "something." You want to call it "real" because A) its creation had nothing to do with your desire, and B) if you JUDGE it is a bad thing, after identifying it as a "thing", as something you do not want (but WHY? exactly do you not want it?), you cannot get away from it any possible way except by excizing it. Now, I am going to try to keep away from all the problems of when your body is no longer regarded as your body. However, the aspect that your body has turned against "you" does, in a sense, place one back in the infant's situation of "relation to all that is around it" where the body has become "objective" as a matter of concern or threat (but WHOSE concern EXACTLY?).Dealing with this supposedly "objective" and 'logically ascertainable' situation makes Kline's statement (actually, someone else is saying Kline said it and meant it that way, and I have a slight reason to think Kline may have been massively misinterpreted to accord with accepted psychoanalytic thought) seem thoroughly ludicrous on the surface. Here we supposedly have a "real" object that is a disease. It is stated so in all the textbooks and ascertained by every doctor who wants to stay in business. And we have Kline's statement which refers to absolutely nothing whatsoever that anyone normally calls objective. However, the interpretation of Kline's statement in order to discover a "disease process" to be cured has exactly the same basic motivation as the medical diagnosis as cancer of the cheek ( it would almost certainly be metastatic or causing metastasis which not only brings in the problem of which came first but how one is going to treat the patient or even whether one should treat the patient at all -- and in that last statement, the possible impotence of medical practice, gives a tiny glimpse of that un alterable "something" we so want to call "reality" that we cannot possibly sidetrack, get around, censor, ignore, or -- 're-interpret.' ), that is, to correct a situation JUDGED inappropriate. But the "judgement" only exists in the mind of the "reinterpreted" 'Melanie Kline.' It does not exist in any way in the mind of the infant -- as far as I know. And that "as far as I know" in its unalterability extends to every animal mind upon this planet. If I cannot know your innermost . . . what exactly? . . . how can there be thoughts if abstractions do not exist? . . . so "thought" goes the way of "reality" and "the world." And if I have this relationship to you to whom I write, how can I possibly make any judgement of an infant's mind who is supposedly wordless? How do we 'know' an infant is wordless? Because it does not speak in recognizable language to others. Which is actually problematic because A) it is accepted by the majority of the scientific community that the structure of language is "always already" wired into the human brain from the moment of genetic conception (Noam Chomsky, Willhelm von Humbolt), yet B) it is also accepted by the majority of the scientific community that, to speak, each and every human being must be laboriously taught a specific language. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some scientists and philosophers tried to discover the "original" language spoke between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But surprize surprize all they got was babble. What else could you have expected? Therefore . . . But wait! Why did the Greek call the barbarians "barbarians"? Because all they could say was ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba . . . They babled. They had no rational way of speaking. Now, of course, being reasonable and scientific people, we say that is wrong because we are told it is wrong. They were actually speaking Lydian, Thracian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Egyptian, Aramaic . . . . or so 'they' say. And 'They' say they have plenty of overwhelming evidence to back them up. I won't disagree with that. But it does show that otherwise extremely intelligent people can be extremely stupid.An infant is not thinking about "sex", although what it relates as infant may stay related when one is a so-called adult. The woman sitting on the edge of her bed looking at the beautiful cancerous rose growing on her cheek in her mirror is not necessarily "obstinant" and "stupid" because she refuses to have it cut off. The judgements made of these situations are built on abstractions we have deliberately and persistently made fundamental to all of our thinking ----- when in fact we know better. They are not the most primal. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs the whole structure of human accomplishment, of all science and culture, are fundamentally and unalterably and eternally (that means constantly, every single damn moment) are based on a few simple-minded, supposedly uncomplicated things, food being the most basic. (It has been a while since I have seen Maslow's diagram and I need to read Maslow's whole account of the mater but I think this is truly his drift) If you take away any of the foundational 'bricks', the structure above collapses. But do you constantly have food in your 'thoughts'? Is food always the most important value in your life? You have higher values don't you? VALUES that disappear when food becomes completely absent. All value and all thought is based on food. Yet we refuse to hold it in any high minded regard unless it is all gone. Then you would eat your books after you ate your mother or your lover. Now Sartre in THE CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON is the only philosopher I know off that has founded his whole thinking upon solving the problem of the availability of food. That's all for now . . . . 
--0-71134148-1044969089=:72620

HTML VERSION:

 "Gary C. Moore" <gottlos75-AT-mindspring.com> wrote:

From: "Gary C. Moore"
To:
CC:
Subject: ON MY RECENT THINKING OR NONTHINKING
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 07:08:07 -0600

Dear Jud,

This is to let you know I have not completely vegetated.

This morning I was reading selected passages in a biography of Melanie Kline on Freud's and Kline's thoughts about Freud's so-called 'death instinct.' Now, be aware I think Freud as a person is as dispicable as Heidegger and has actually ruined more lives than Heidegger did. However, totally disengaging from his personality, and psychoanalysis as a system, and trying to go back to the basic 'thoughts' that made such a thing as psychoanalysis arise, we arrive at a basic of historical human being: how can we describe how an infant relates to the world? This is far from an obvious question. The fundamental mistake we make is observing infants, the mistake actually being we are not at all observing how the infant itself relates to the world but, instead, are immediately bogged down in inherited interpretations of external infant INTER-RELATIONS with others. We do not have any rational viewpoint of how the infant relates to the 'world'.

First I think we have to discard words like "reality" and "world". They are abstractions that actually grew up in contradictions to irrational behaviour that presuppose the "unreal" or "another reality" whether Cartesian "inner" and "outer" or Christian "this life" and "the afterlife" (now that I write it, the word "afterlife" seems so obviously absurd because if it is "after life" then it is no longer "alive" at all) and "another world". We immagine an abstract 'rational' unity "reality" as a counter to irrational "unreality." So it is the idea we reject that actuality forms the idea we create and accept. And then we presuppose it as basic to all of our thinking while totally ignoring the experiencial and historical process by which we arrived at it in the first place. Therefore, by logical necessity and temporal succession, there is something more basic and primal than "reality" or "the world." But can it even be called a "something"?

That there is difficulty speaking about it is the same problem as dealing with the infant's relation to all that is around it. The phrasing is precise because if we are going to discard Descartes' "inner" and "outer" then then the infant's desires, sensations, and cravings are going to be as much "around" it as so-called "objective" objects as the mother's or the bottle's nipple. The pain from touching the burning match is going to be as much "inner" as outer" so as to have no distinction to the infant. That pain also is going to be in the "all that is around it." Kline states the mother's negative behaviour toward the infant can displace the infant's reassuring sucking action from the mother's breast to the father's penis. I will not comment on that. The point I want to emphasize is that she says this displacement is the beginning of a mental illness, a "disease".

Now, if you have a cancerous tumor growing on your left cheek, you do have a relation to "something." You want to call it "real" because A) its creation had nothing to do with your desire, and B) if you JUDGE it is a bad thing, after identifying it as a "thing", as something you do not want (but WHY? exactly do you not want it?), you cannot get away from it any possible way except by excizing it. Now, I am going to try to keep away from all the problems of when your body is no longer regarded as your body. However, the aspect that your body has turned against "you" does, in a sense, place one back in the infant's situation of "relation to all that is around it" where the body has become "objective" as a matter of concern or threat (but WHOSE concern EXACTLY?).

Dealing with this supposedly "objective" and 'logically ascertainable' situation makes Kline's statement (actually, someone else is saying Kline said it and meant it that way, and I have a slight reason to think Kline may have been massively misinterpreted to accord with accepted psychoanalytic thought) seem thoroughly ludicrous on the surface. Here we supposedly have a "real" object that is a disease. It is stated so in all the textbooks and ascertained by every doctor who wants to stay in business. And we have Kline's statement which refers to absolutely nothing whatsoever that anyone normally calls objective. However, the interpretation of Kline's statement in order to discover a "disease process" to be cured has exactly the same basic motivation as the medical diagnosis as cancer of the cheek ( it would almost certainly be metastatic or causing metastasis which not only brings in the problem of which came first but how one is going to treat the patient or even whether one should treat the patient at all -- and in that last statement, the possible impotence of medical practice, gives a tiny glimpse of that un alterable "something" we so want to call "reality" that we cannot possibly sidetrack, get around, censor, ignore, or -- 're-interpret.' ), that is, to correct a situation JUDGED inappropriate. But the "judgement" only exists in the mind of the "reinterpreted" 'Melanie Kline.' It does not exist in any way in the mind of the infant -- as far as I know. And that "as far as I know" in its unalterability extends to every animal mind upon this planet. If I cannot know your innermost . . . what exactly? . . . how can there be thoughts if abstractions do not exist? . . . so "thought" goes the way of "reality" and "the world." And if I have this relationship to you to whom I write, how can I possibly make any judgement of an infant's mind who is supposedly wordless? How do we 'know' an infant is wordless? Because it does not speak in recognizable language to others. Which is actually problematic because A) it is accepted by the majority of the scientific community that the structure of language is "always already" wired into the human brain from the moment of genetic conception (Noam Chomsky, Willhelm von Humbolt), yet B) it is also accepted by the majority of the scientific community that, to speak, each and every human being must be laboriously taught a specific language. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some scientists and philosophers tried to discover the "original" language spoke between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But surprize surprize all they got was babble. What else could you have expected? Therefore . . . But wait! Why did the Greek call the barbarians "barbarians"? Because all they could say was ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba . . . They babled. They had no rational way of speaking. Now, of course, being reasonable and scientific people, we say that is wrong because we are told it is wrong. They were actually speaking Lydian, Thracian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Egyptian, Aramaic . . . . or so 'they' say. And 'They' say they have plenty of overwhelming evidence to back them up. I won't disagree with that. But it does show that otherwise extremely intelligent people can be extremely stupid.

An infant is not thinking about "sex", although what it relates as infant may stay related when one is a so-called adult. The woman sitting on the edge of her bed looking at the beautiful cancerous rose growing on her cheek in her mirror is not necessarily "obstinant" and "stupid" because she refuses to have it cut off. The judgements made of these situations are built on abstractions we have deliberately and persistently made fundamental to all of our thinking ----- when in fact we know better. They are not the most primal. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs the whole structure of human accomplishment, of all science and culture, are fundamentally and unalterably and eternally (that means constantly, every single damn moment) are based on a few simple-minded, supposedly uncomplicated things, food being the most basic. (It has been a while since I have seen Maslow's diagram and I need to read Maslow's whole account of the mater but I think this is truly his drift) If you take away any of the foundational 'bricks', the structure above collapses. But do you constantly have food in your 'thoughts'? Is food always the most important value in your life? You have higher values don't you? VALUES that disappear when food becomes completely absent. All value and all thought is based on food. Yet we refuse to hold it in any high minded regard unless it is all gone. Then you would eat your books after you ate your mother or your lover. Now Sartre in THE CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON is the only philosopher I know off that has founded his whole thinking upon solving the problem of the availability of food. That's all for now . . . .