Psychology and Observations

[-]

Specimens. Deviant Behaviours. Aberrant Logic.

[-]

"You know, as I get older and my sex drive becomes less strong, I feel a kind of relief. From the age of 14 to the age of 35, every moment of my life was occupied with excessive libidinal force, and being unable to satisfy it, I experienced all kinds of anxieties. Masturbating frequently and developing the paraphilia of exhibitionism as an outlet to experience sexual release and satisfaction. It became a surrogate activity in a way. All the elements involved in the act of exhibitionism- breaking the law, the elevated heart rate and rush from the risk of getting caught, the surprise of the gorgeous woman who sees me (I don't do the ugly ones), the sexual arousal I feel at the thought of fucking her- all these things combine to form a kind of cocktail of neurotransmitters which flooded over me and put me into a physical state of intoxication.

Now I find it wonderfully ironic that I am punished for this. Little do these idiots know, I've done everything within my power to not rape women, and without this outlet, I'm not sure if I would have forever prevented myself from doing so. Instead of being incarcerated for four years, I should have been given a fucking medal. Though I understand it's against the law, etc., etc., it is still comically ironic that I am incarcerated because another human being SAW a part of my body, and that all the while nobody has any idea how much my exhibitionism has prevented me from doing."

[-]

"The anthropomorphic personification of such a concept is inescapable. We cannot conceive of the universe as a thing which would accidentally produce intelligence. The deterministic processes which have produced intelligence are the work of the laws of nature, so it is inconsequential whether or not the universe has a purpose for this development. The fact that intelligence has evolved in the universe proves that the universe must be a thing which, at some point, becomes a rational process. Since intelligent creatures are the product of the laws of nature, the laws of nature must be intelligible- the universe now not only exists, but knows it exists. If no intelligence developed in the universe, the universe would remain an undifferentiated being, a gratuitous space of matter without direction and creative potential. It would simply be, and the only becoming it would be capable of would be quantitative reformation. Things would just move around and would assemble in no way that resulted in intelligence. If, on the other hand, nothing material developed in the universe, and existence was only a 'thought' of God (think Berkeley's radical empiricism), sensory experience would not be possible and nothing would become or have being. Remember the whole reason for the existence of the universe is the over-fullness of the Primordial One which, in the form of mind is awareness of this condition, and in the form of body is a disintegration and reintegration of individual parts.

The anthropomorphic interpretation of this process must give to the universe the qualities and characteristics of the intelligent life it has produced. The universe is not just a meaningless existence of things, but a system that changes according to a scheme, according to the teleological intentions of intelligent life, which are expressions of a vitality- the will to power. The universe has a form and content that directly reflects the modes (mind and body) of that intelligent life. And, just like that intelligent life, God experiences the full range of emotion, passion and intellect (symbolic of the Apollonian and/or Dionysian) that this form of life experiences simply because God is the incarnation of this form of life. God knows itself as the thesis/antithesis of Apollo and Dionysus, which takes the human form to first suffer, then resolve itself through the contemplation of its eternal oneness."

[Dæmon]

Who is this brilliant mind "Ignorance"?

[-]

Same bs.

[-]

I have bad genes. And I have passed on my weakness.

"The richest and most complex forms - for the expression "higher type" means no more than this-perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility.
The former are achieved only rarely and maintain their superiority with difficulty; the latter are favored by a compromising fruitfulness.

Among men, too, the higher types, the lucky strokes of evolution, perish most easily as fortunes change. They are exposed to every kind of decadence: they are extreme, and that almost means decadents.
The brief spell of beauty, of genius, of Caesar, is sui generis: such things are not inherited. The type is hereditary; a type is nothing extreme, no "lucky stroke"-

This is not due to any special fatality or malevolence of nature, but simply to the concept "higher type": the higher type represents an incomparably greater com plexity-a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: so its disintegration is also incomparably more likely.

The "genius" is the sublimest machine there is--consequently the most fragile." [WTP, 684]

[-]

This excellent article works to better illustrate what I mean when I say that 'nothing' is not a positive thing, not a capacity of being or a state of affairs.

When we understand the concept of nothingness to be the absence of being, we draw a kind of hole in the plane of being, deprive it of its fullness and capacity to act. Really, 'nothing' is only a designation of changing place, not negation.

The article works off of a letter written by Spinoza to a colleague. In it, Spinoza explains that we shouldn't think of a man who cannot see as missing a capacity, since man, as a particular mode of being of God, is pure positivity of power and being. That is to say that since God cannot lack a capacity to act, none of its actions are 'incomplete'; we can only say that this particular man who is blind does not possess a particular capacity, but we do not say that he is lacking or missing a positive aspect of the capacity to act. The capacity to act is not a relative gradient of power which is different for different people with different capacities, see. One is not 'less powerful' when they are incapable of emanating a particular, physical capacity to act. This blind man is as complete as the man who can see, and his completeness is expressed in his particular power to act in the ways that he can.

In other words, there is no 'empty space', no weakness, in the body in God- there is no state in which there is incapability once we see that each individual aspect of God's being is as complete and positive as any other aspect in its total activity. Stronger and weaker parts of the body of God are only confused notions we have when we compare capacities of individuals. Again, there is no 'failure', no 'faultiness', no negativity in God. God is pure conatus, the pure capacity to act in its infinite modes of being.

Modes do not lack anything, they are complete in their being, and form a perfect union with all other modes. We no longer should think of individuals as separate modes of being, and contrast capacities, describing some as lacking or missing power.

If you imagine all that exists as working in the form of a machine, each part has its function and should not be compared with other parts of the machine. To use the analogy of a car, we couldn't say that a spark-plug lacks a capacity when it doesn't sense oxygen in the exhaust. The spark-plug's function does not include sensing oxygen, so not doing so is not a lack of capacity. The blind man's function is not to see, so it does not lack a capacity, is not deprived of a capacity, is not missing a capacity to act.

[-]

in fact the common and scientific belief in the great isolation, disconnection and meaningless coincidental nature of our experiences and world is a very "insane" and unreal kind of perspective-- but one that can potentiate certain kinds of limited growth. If an organism limits itself to only one direction of sensation and movement it becomes far easier to 'master' that limited perspective, however such mastery comes at the cost of truly seeing reality and oneself, thus the kind of "new age openness" appears as a competing impulse and idea to "scientific skepticism", with post-modernity a kind of synthesis of these two radically differet pathos.

[-]

"And neither is Becomming a termination or anihilation of Being, but only a modification of it (erase the word 'nothingness' from your vocabulary). This is why I don't juggle existential ontology. It's impossible to do."

[-]

"The antagonistic activity of the Apollonian and Dionysian, then, reduces itself to a basic, singular form seen from the aspect of eternity. The Primordial One watches the two brothers Apollo and Dionysus quarreling, as if looking at itself in a mirror. The cyclic process of fragmentation and resolution (the fight) is eternal and repetitious, and takes the form of a single, dynamic will to power(the only teleological form nature can have- it cannot be moving toward a final state or end, but it can be functioning in a closed, systemic way). The 'Will to Power' can be understood as being similar to Bergson's concept of 'elan vital', a creative and organizing force intrinsic to the physical and biological world.

So to summarize what has been suggested so far: a God/Primordial One exists. Through and by the extraordinary states achieved by intelligent human beings while they are subjected to the agonies and ecstasies of the Apollonian and Dionysian experiences, this God/Primordial One becomes aware of itself as a Being which has been torn apart and fragmented in space/time, and yet conceives of itself as Becoming unified once again after the pure contemplation of the illusion of individuality which it suffers.

Now the proof of such a being is simple. Because there cannot be 'nothing', God and the Primordial One are in the same way a substance which cannot be contingent, cannot depend upon anything else to define its being, cannot be the 'effect' of another cause, something wholly existent and self-determined, something that cannot not exist, something that has nothing outside of it. In Spinoza's Ethics this ontological proof is defined clearly.


Proposition 1: A substance is prior in nature to its affections.

Proposition 7: It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.

There must be a 'substantial' prima causa, and it cannot be a prima causa which is separate from the universe but can cause effects in the universe while at the same time being transcendent from it, as a different substance...

So this Primordial One is immanent, but appears in the form of transcendent phenomena, as different attributes, and is the essence of all individual, existing things- it begins to move and changes itself because it is over-full (Zizek once called the universe a cosmic catastrophe in which things exists by mistake).

The Prime Mover does not set a universe in motion; a Prime Mover sets itself in motion. It shatters, creating and entering space/time. As a transcendent thing, this Primordial One, aware and unsatisfied with itself, modifies itself, works upon itself as a god works upon a creation, and yet is not separate from the material which is worked. Now the universe becomes intelligent. The Primordial One is aware of itself, but also aware of that awareness, and it is this that constitutes intelligence.

The Primordial One achieves self-awareness though human 'intentionality' because human beings are one kind of particular mode of the Primordial One's being. By this I don't just mean the human being's capacity to have knowledge, or the human being's capacity to act-toward-ends, but the unification of both things in the form of intention. Mind and matter struggle against each other and the conflict of this interaction produces the activity of 'becoming'- a vitalistic aspect (the animating force) of intelligent beings which is both determined but self-motivating as if by a deterministic 'loop' is a universe being and becoming and changing itself, knowing itself anthropocentrically. God is, knows itself, but actively defines itself through time and space by intentional action.

We are not saying that a particular human mind gives direction and structure to this becoming, but that the Primordial One does so as and in the form of the human body. So the human mind is a reflection of the Primordial mind, is intentional, and as such it gives form and structure to natural law .

Intentional act, an act which is taken as a means toward an end, is a 'choice', and cannot be understood in purely deterministic or compatibilist terms. To explain how this functions a division must first be made between mind and body, but not in a Cartesian sense; not as two substances in a causal relationship to each other. Rather the mind, being determined to will this or that, does not function in this compulsion to will as a body functions in its compulsion to exist. The mind, in its willing, is in a Heraclitean state of flux, not an inert Parmenidean state of being. The Primodial mind which is aware of its body and acts to change the body's state, through operating natural law, is in the same instance the particular mind of the body of man deciding to act intentionally. Because nothing compels the Primodial One to act (since nothing is outside it), nothing compels the human body to act either. This makes sense when we understand that there is no division between the external and internal regarding the natural world; there is no a separate, external environment that influences and determines the internal parts of the body to function and act. The body, seen from the perspective of the Primordial One, is the entirety of all things that exist, and this entirety is fundamentally one closed, correlative system of being. There are not different compulsions-to-act operating throughout nature, but one compulsion to act, however this remains under the guise of the illusion of principium individuationis.

[-]

'God' will be called the 'Primordial One'. I want to interpret this Primordial One as both Nietzsche and xyz do- an eternal and infinite form or 'being' which has expressed itself through the interactions and activities (or modes) of time, space and energy.

"THERE IS NO WILL, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a "weak will"; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a "strong will": in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the precision and clarity of the direction." [WTP, 46]

I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing).

"Necessity" not in the shape of an overreaching, dominating total force, or that of a prime mover; even less as a necessary condition for something valuable. To this end, it is necessary to deny a total consciousness of becoming, a "God."

Fortunately such a summarizing power is missing (—a suffering and all-seeing God, a "total sensorium" and "cosmic spirit" would be the greatest objection to being). More strictly one must admit nothing that has being—because then becoming would lose its value and actually appear meaningless and superfluous.

Becoming is of equivalent value every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it and in relation to which the word "value" could have any meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated." [WTP, 708]

[-]

Need does not determine what is to be considered tasteful, beautiful, captivating. That which is considered tasteful, beautiful and captivating determines how one decides to soothe one's need.

[-]

The laws of physics dictate that in isolated systems, entropy will always grow or remain constant. Simplified: everything that exists in isolation falls apart. I often hear it even further simplified: everything eventually disintegrates, entropy has the final word.

In reality however quite the opposite seems to be happening. When we reason from the Big Bang, then from this beginning matter has evidently structured itself more to constantly increasing degrees – first into atoms, then into molecules, later into living cells, and eventually into this miracle of complexity, the human. And humans keep organizing further into even greater structures: tribes, groups, nations, united continents. This is happening directly against the tide of entropy. The concepts “reality” and “isolated system” do not appear to be compatible.

It is clear that entropy is constantly present – it erodes that which organizes, it causes creatures to die and countries to fall apart.

But rather than that entropy is to be taken as a basic principle, it appears to be a secondary phenomenon, dependent on the existence of structures. After all, in a state of complete chaos there would be nothing to disintegrate, and since disintegration is the only meaning of entropy, entropy quite simply exists by virtue of structure. We can thus conclude that the law of entropy is preceded, sustained even, by another law – the tendency of things to exist.

This may seem like a simplistic formulation, but it is the disciplined elimination of unnecessary assumptions that enables us such a basic observation.

[-]

"Is E = Mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest."

[-]

"Although Sloterdijk insists on the 20th-century mutation of warfare from a symmetrical scheme to an asymmetrical one, which therefore develop terrorist activity, he however attributes the birth of “atmoterror” to the gas attacks created by the German army during the First World War, i.e. a war between two symmetrical armies. “Terror operates on a level beyond the naïve exchange of armed blows between regular troops; it involves replacing these classical forms of battle with assaults on the environmental conditions of the enemy’s life”.

The lightning-fast development of military breathing apparatuses (in the vernacular: linen gas masks) shows that troops were having to adapt to a situation in which human respiration was assuming a direct role in the events of war.

Breathing constitutes in fact one of the conditions for life to perpetuate and, depending on the species, there are specific atmospheric conditions in which breathing is possible. What the atmoterror invents is a shift of paradigm in warfare, from the “traditional” attempt to affect violently the living organs of bodies — whether with a spire, a sword or a bomb — to the manufacturing of the atmospheric conditions in which the “enemy” perpetuate their life. In this matter, the attacks of September 11, 2001 acted in these two paradigms as the explosion and collapse of the World Trade Center towers was followed by a cloud of toxic dust that has extended the amount of victims through time.

As Sloterdijk argues, this does not simply change the way wars are being fought, but more globally, it affects the very way we situates ourselves as bodies in the world: “The average human being-in-the-world […] was previous a Being-in-the-air; or more exactly a Being-in-the-breathable.” Just like the atmosphere of a gas attack, the atmosphere that constitutes the conditions in which (urban) bodies breath is also manufactured. Part of this manufacturing process involves in fact a toxic dimension that is often regulated to be maintained at a degree maintaining “livable conditions” of breathing. Life is however not an essence or a state, but a process and what is defined as “livable condition” often ignores the degree of toxicity of this condition when it does not immediately shows sign of affectation of the body. What we call pollution is a component of this toxicity and the effects are both individual and planetary.

As Sloterdijk writes, “the air lost its innocence.” This is something that Frantz Fanon (quoted by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos) had argued before him (1959) through the phrase “combat breathing” that insisted that what was colonized by a nation like France in Algeria was not merely a territory and its resources, but rather the totality of the atmospheric conditions of a country. The resistance to such monopolizing control had therefore to be acting within the same domain:

There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing. From this point on, the real values of the occupied quickly tend to acquire a clandestine form of existence. In the presence of the occupier, the occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery. (Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, Grove Press, 1994.)

http://thefunambulist.net/2014/06/13/history-atmopolitics-sloterdijk-and-the-being-in-the-breathable/

-

"To be plausible at all, Sloterdijk points out, such atmoterroristic strategies must claim "a moral asymmetry" vis-a-vis a putative enemy, and they must do so in a way that goes beyond the assertion of ethical superiority so common in war. It is this claim that allows military aggression to be legitimated as an "extrajudicial trial"; thus, for instance, the prosecution of the Iraq War--which began with the atmoterroristic campaign of "Shock and Awe"--was presented as the prosecution of Saddam Hussein by other means.

Revising the Freud dictum "Where there was Id, there must now be Ego," Sloterdijk quips in Spheres III, "Where there was 'life world,' there must now be air-conditioning."

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Hostile+Atmosphere%3a+HAL+FOSTER+ON+PETER+SLOTERDIJKJ%27S+TERROR+FROM+THE...-a0203139476

-

Air Quakes

[Sponsored content]