So in West we have got ourselves in a bit of a mix up.
We have Science which seeks to find the "universal truth" this is true for everyone. This links to ideas of Democracy, Law, Rights and Freedom. There is a universal Law that applies to everyone. This is also the Public realm. This is the realm favoured by Socialists.
Then we have Individualism, Private, Relativity and Subjectivity which bestows ultimate weight to private, personal and individual experiences. This is the realm favoured by Capitalists and Romantics who place their own wealth, feelings, experiences above the Universal. Libertarians and Libertines favour this side too. Anarchists too.
Art falls into a complex relationship. Some say the artists is trying to express their private feelings and thoughts, but if they are that private then what use are they to other people? The artist must be expressing something universal to make it of anything other than private temporary value.
There is an unhappy marriage where Private world reigns until the individual encroaches upon the "rights of another individual" where upon the Universal must be invoked.
There is a 3rd option between Universal and Solipsistic and that is Interpersonal. The interpersonal is a Universal that exists between individuals. It does not then exclude the possibility of other groups having their own Universal, but it does exclude the possibility of private individuals hijacking the Universal and claiming it for themselves. This embodies the true dialectical complexity of Individual and Group, that neither exists without the other and that both are interdependent. Groups are made of individuals who then recognised the individuals within the Groups. And likewise Universal is recognised by the individuals within the group...
What has been raised in this blog this year is something very obvious but not widely recognised. The self we are talking is not a thing along side other things, it is the special relationship a self has with itself. It is this bizarre thing which makes an individual see themselves as more special than another individual.
It is none other than narcissism. When we consider ourselves we are caught like Narcissus by our reflection. Unlike other people's reflection, the reflection of our self raises this interesting thought called "self". But the "self" thought is really triggered not by a thing called self, but by the relationship between our self and our self. Its not the reflection that matters to Narcissus, everything has a reflection, but that this reflection if of the person who is seeing. It is this self-relationship that is the basis of ALL Western ideas. And what we will show eventually is that this self-relationship is nothing. Just like the reflection itself which is just a mirage on water, the relationship of that to itself is even more phantasmagorical.
But just for now its worth just identifying this self-relationship being the object of fascination in the West and not our actual self.
To make that a bit clearer. Lots of people know me. But only one of them IS me. So me is not the point, its the relationship between me and myself that is the basis of EVERYTHING in the West. Its the root of the Religion here. Where G-d once stood now stands and equally improbable and imaginary self.
Just as Nietzsche said "God is Dead" I now proclaim that "I am Dead."
And in that seeming (but not) contradiction I'll leave this.
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Having added the section on Interpersonal the reflections of Narcissus become all the more complex. And this related to SRH. Quick recap: SRH was just the name given to a number of problems I noticed with self reference, that there seemed to be a Law of dependency that limited the "freedom" of a system that was self referential. For instance like M.C.Escher type drawings, the foundations of a castle cannot be upon that castle. Things MUST be founded upon things that are not themselves. SRH and the impossibility of self-foundation should be a warning to Narcissus. When he sees his reflection he gets that sudden "wow" moment as he realises that the reflection of not of a stranger but of the person who is seeing it. Most animals fail this test and always think their reflection is a stranger. But for some animals and humans they can get the "wow" and combine the object that they see (the objective) and the person doing the seeing (the subjective) in a new thought The SelfConscious Self. In Hegelian Dialectics this is a moment of Aufhebung where a new synthesis unifies the seeming contradictions of Object and Subject. Its a tremendous moment for the mind. But it comes with risks.
Looking into the eyes of the "seer" as we gaze into a mirror we enter a loop. I am seeing, and what I am seeing is I. The object of seeing is the seer. It appears self sufficient. As lomng as I gaze upon myself I have no need for the rest of the universe. The object is proof that I exist, and that I am seeing it is proof that I exist. As object of my own gaze I am solid and existing. I can reflect upon that being and see it as myself, and that being embodies the consciousness and awareness that is reflecting. Its a perfect thing to take home and cherish. The Self.
But Narcissus should consider Descartes. What if Descartes Demon was making up the reflection. We can do that these days. Consider being in 3D virtual reality with your avatar. When you get to a "mirror" and look you see a "reflection" of your avatar, perfectly rendered to look like you. You stare into the eyes and your avatar looks at you. You look away and your avatar looks away. You stare back into the reflected eyes of your avatar and start to pursue the realisation that the avatar really is you, what you are looking at is the thing that is doing the looking. Yet its not even a thing, it's just pixels on a screen constructed from data in a GPU and using input data from eye trackers in a headset. Yet its enough to trigger the self-reflexive thoughts about "me" having the ability to see, and so I start to think about myself as a real entity. Then it becomes Descartes, but instead of a mirror, we are using the existence of thoughts (rather than reflections) to deduce the presence of a thinker (or seer).
I guess what is central to this mirror illusion is the coincidence between what I see and what I do. When I move my eyes left, the reflection goes left, and when I look into my eyes the eyes of the reflection look directly at me. Its this way in which the reflection copies me which leads me to think it "IS" me. Its obviously just a flat reflection. I add the fact it is "me" with some creative imagination. Just as Descartes added the fact those thoughts belong to some "I" with some creative imagination. But it does trigger this idea of "self" and, as analysed already, what is critical about self is not the self itself-- everyone has one of those--its the relationship of the this self to itself. The picking myself out of a photo moment. Its an interesting moment to pick our self out of a photo, or have someone call our name, or have someone love us and no one else, but it has no ontological value. That is to say we are not finding anything new in this moment. We already know there are people on this planet, and we know we are a person so one of them is us. No big deal. When we get to know our self it is the same as getting to know anyone. The feeling that there is some deep thing to discover within our self, or that our self is special, or that this relationship we have with our self will ever grow fruit: all these beliefs are what keep Narcissus staring at his flat empty reflection in the pool. We can see he is wasting his time staring at the water, but in his mind a kaleidoscope of self-reflections open up a well of possibility that he will eventually realise once he falls in is bottomless, dark and empty. Like so many illusions it is fascinating, but its fake.
And this is the essence of what has ended up being called "Good." There is no such thing as good, all there is, is the empty, pointless pursuit of self. People like Narcissus who waste their time on their reflections become a bore to other people and become dysfunctional because their world revolves around this fake bottomless dark well. Perhaps such people can share time because at least they understand the fascination of each others dark wells, but ultimately they are just sharing wasted empty time revolving around a mirage. When you see what is called "evil" there are always 2 sides. There is the negative impulse--perhaps anger and hatred, or greed, or lust-- but then it is always married to self-interest to become evil. Many people get angry and what to hurt someone else, but they are not so obsessed with themselves and so they simply ignore themselves for not being helpful and let the anger go. But for Narcissus there is only the self, so when it gets angry it appears to consume the whole world. Given that you can see why when things are going well Narcissus is happy because his success and joy fills the whole world. The reflection is young, heathy, beautiful, happy, successful the world is a good place. But if anything happens to that reflection the whole world changes. Obvious nonsense, it doesn't even matter if we die in reality: every day 70,000,000 people die, but in Narcissus' world of 1 that death becomes everything. And this is the whole danger of this self illusion, and the way it so easily gets trapped in a relationship of just one between itself and itself.
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