Emordnilap

Zizek on Capital

Science Fiction becomes Science Reality

Logan's Run

Goethe vs. Hegel

...and the birth of the anti-philosopher, FN.

Scaling Intelligence - What's Your Temporal Light Cone?

Ross Pomeroy, "Are We Prepared for Revolutionary Biohybrid Robots?"

In 2014, researchers at the University of Illinois created a microscopic swimming robot. This accomplishment alone might not have attracted much attention. But what set it apart was how they constructed their creation: with cardiac muscle cells derived from rats. This was one of the very first “biohybrid robots.”

With perceptions shaped by decades of science fiction, the general public has long viewed robots as nonbiological entities. Their bones are metal, their hearts are batteries, and their muscles are motors, pistons, and gears. They might be enveloped in real-looking synthetic skin, but this is merely a cloak for their inorganic interiors.

Now, scientific advances have increasingly shown that biological beings aren’t just born; they can be built. Two years after the biohybrid swimmers, researchers at Harvard scaled up the idea to make the first biohybrid “animal” — a 16-millimeter-long ray. With a body of elastomer, a skeleton of gold, and muscles made of rat cells, the critter glided through the water at a meandering yet meaningful pace, steered and powered by light.

More recently, a team made a small biohybrid robot that walks with a human gait. Another constructed a robotic hand that can sense with built-in biological neural networks.

As creatures and machines meld together in increasingly advanced forms, ethicists are starting to take note. Dr. Rafael Mestre from the University of Southampton, who specializes in emergent technologies, recently teamed up with colleagues from around the world to ponder the ethical ramifications of biohybrid robots.

Biohybrid bots

Essentially, biohybrid robots combine living and synthetic materials. They might have muscle cells as actuators, neurons as motor controllers, and sensory cells as tactile sensors, for example. Some even build upon living organisms themselves. Biohybrid robots take advantage of living systems’ millions of years of evolution to grant robots benefits such as self-healing, greater adaptability, and superior sensor resolution.

But are we ready for a brave new world where blending the artificial and the biological blurs the line between life and non-life? That’s one ethical concern that Mestre and his co-authors probe with a hypothetical scenario. Imagine a future, they write, where “biohybrid systems have evolved to create full-sized robots that can interact with humans and perform complex actions in a very organic manner, assisted by muscular tissue and neuromuscular junctions. Every year, they become more complex, and different types of tissues are added into the mix… As their complexity increases, people wonder whether they feel pain and are sentient, and how they should interact with them.”

Among these hypothetical bio-bots, where is the point where they are more of a living being rather than a machine? Early versions might start with just a few biological parts but eventually get “upgraded” to contain more tissue than metal as non-living systems are swapped out for living ones. Will they require a living brain to merit our empathy?

Granted, this scenario is currently still within the realm of science fiction. But there’s another that’s getting closer to reality. The researchers foresee human-computer interfaces “enabling the control of artificial limbs using existing nervous tissue.”

Biohybrid robotic arms, employing “actual and adaptable muscles” extracted from living animals, could arrive in the near future. Biohybrid organs might also become available. Moreover, these limbs and organs could very well exceed the capabilities of our own. Patients in dire need of transplants and prosthetics would likely hail such advances, but the high costs of cutting-edge tech could limit its availability to the wealthy.

The biohybrid future

Dr. Arthur Caplan, the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health in New York City, agreed that cost and access could be a key ethical issue with futuristic biohybrid limbs and organs, as it is with any significant medical advance.

“I think that’s a core justice issue — better to address it now,” he told RealClearScience in an interview. “This is complicated technology; it’s certainly going to start out pricey. I doubt it will be available anywhere except rich countries. And within the rich countries, there’s a pretty good chance it will go first to the better off.”

Caplan suggests that researchers studying advanced biohybrid robotics could make provisions to ensure diverse access to the technology.

“For example, that may influence who you pick to study this,” he said. “You want to have a rich and varied subject pool, so if the technology works, you haven’t just tested it on 40-year-old wealthy white men,” he said.

Caplan identified other thorny ethical issues with researching biohybrid limbs and organs. For one, teams testing the technology on people should perform their interventions at top-of-the-line transplant centers and ensure subjects are properly informed of the risks, which might include death.

Second, those researchers need to have a plan for what happens if the biohybrid limb or organ fails. “If patients get one of these stuck inside them, then what? Is this what we call a ‘bridge to nowhere’?” Caplan said.

Third, Caplan noted that it’s a legitimate question whether the pursuit of biohybrid organs is a worthwhile use of limited research resources.

“There are obviously a lot of people who might benefit from a bioartificial organ, whether it’s a kidney replacement, muscle replacement, or connectivity replacement. But it’s going to take a while to get there and make sure that it functions with some sustainability and durability. That’s a pretty big research endeavor.”

So, the question becomes: Would those resources spent on biohybrid robotics be better off used to mitigate the problems that might cause people to need them, such as diabetes and obesity? Is it wiser to prevent the malady via tried and tested interventions rather than focus on a far-off, flashy cure?

Caplan stressed that research into biohybrid organs is still very much in the preliminary stages. In the past, there’s been lots of focus on creating synthetic kidneys. These take the form of kidney cells housed in implantable bioreactors.

Philosophically, biohybrid robots make plain something that many scientists and thinkers have suspected: Humans and other living creatures really are machines, in a relevant sense, albeit with organic rather than inorganic parts.

“Biohybrid robots serve as a platform for understanding life itself,” Mestre and his co-authors wrote. “Developing components for these robots, such as muscle actuators, neuronal circuits as sensors, or neuro-muscular junctions to form intelligent robots, requires a deeper exploration of cells and their behavior beyond traditional Petri dish platforms. Each biohybrid robot emerges into a ‘being’ mimicking ‘development in vitro.'”

With lessons from biohybrid robotics, scientists could one day even build a complex, living being from scratch. But to make breakthrough biohybrid robots a success story rather than a tragedy, the time to consider the ramifications is now. Mestre and his team recommended we get prepared.

The Globalist God Now Crushing America

"In 2019, Foreign Policy IS Domestic Policy in My View, and Domestic Policy is Foreign Policy.  They're Deeply Connected.  Deeply Connected so that Choices We Make about How to Advance the American Way of Life and Our Vision for the Future." 

- Joseph R. Biden

A competing and earlier origin story...

Jameson, "The End of Temporality"

The end of American history and the sovereign nation state became the birth of Global History through the UN and the legalisms of the New World Order.  Nationalism and nationalists, the new homo sacer, managed and controlled through the global Big Tech panopticon and reducing their new wage slaves to a bare life of individualized perpetual "achievement" with all future alternative possibilities for life, permanently foreclosed.  Chase the carrot, or face marginalization and cancellation, access to existing alternative pursuits choked off and smothered through digital gates and access control protocols.

I Would Prefer NOT to... Politics

Introducing a touch of Negativity into a politics of achievement and "Yes we Can!" Positivity.

Earth's Ambipolar Electrical Field Measured for 1st Time

The Ambipolar Electrical Field as described by Glyn Collinson

High above the Earth’s North and South Poles, a steady stream of particles escapes from our atmosphere into space. Scientists call this mysterious outflow the “polar wind,” and for almost 60 years, spacecraft have been flying through it as scientists have theorized about its cause. The leading theory was that a planet-wide electric field was drawing those particles up into space. But this so-called ambipolar electric field, if it exists, is so weak that all attempts to measure it have failed – until now. 

In 2022, scientists traveled to Svalbard, a small archipelago in Norway, to launch a rocket in an attempt to measure Earth’s ambipolar electric field for the first time. This was NASA’s Endurance rocketship mission, and this is its story

Hopeful?

Francesc Miralles, "Hope, the secret weapon of philosopher Byung-Chul Han"

Here are three lessons from the latest book by the famous South Korean thinker, which describes how this feeling can create new paths and help us escape paralyzing fear

It has been somewhat of a surprise that the famous South Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han chose hope as the theme of his latest book, set to be published on September 26. Based in Berlin, this philosopher — who writes his short works in German — is known for his criticism of capitalism and neoliberalism thanks to books such as The Burnout Society and Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Choosing hope is a way of finding the light at the end of the tunnel, it is a feeling or vision that seems to go against the current, but one we need in order to feel alive.

But The Spirit of Hope — a book of less than 150 pages — is not the vision of a naive person who believes that, in the end, everything will just work out. It refers to a hope that is born from being proactive, since it illuminates new paths that no one is going to take for us. As the thinker suggests, hope is born precisely from despair, from negativity, but it is a compass that leads us to new situations and territories, to that which does not yet exist.

Winston Churchill, a man who was very prone to depression, said: “If you are going through hell, keep going.” This advice implies that everything, the good and the bad, is temporary, like life itself.

What kills hope, according to Byung-Chul Han, is not despair; on the contrary, despair is its starting point, the beginning of the journey. As he explains in the prelude to the book, the opposite of hope is fear. In his own words: “We go from one crisis to the next, from one catastrophe to the next, from one problem to the next. With so many problems to solve and so many crises to manage, life has been reduced to survival.” For the South Korean philosopher, living in survival mode anchors us to depression and fear, which closes doors and robs us of freedom, as it makes it impossible for us to get moving. Someone who is afraid of the future will be unable to organize and create their own future. They enter into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

As Byung-Chul Han points out, the German word for fear — Angst — comes from the Latina word angustia, meaning tensity and tightness. In other words, the greater our fear, the tighter our room of action. That is why someone who is anxious feels, in one way or another, cornered.

The antidote is hope, since, in the philosopher’s own words, “it leaves us with signs and markers along the way. Hope is the only thing that makes us move forward. It gives us meaning and direction […] And actions need a horizon of meaning.” Just as fear makes things impossible, hope, as defined by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, is a passion for the possible.

Summarizing these reflections in a practical sense, we can conclude three things:

1. To have hope is to see new possibilities. In other words, to anticipate other scenarios, even if they are far from our current situation. Byung-Chul Han quotes an Epistle to the Romans from the New Testament: “Hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” So there is something visionary about hope.

2. There is passive hope and proactive hope. The former puts us at the mercy of events. The latter involves working to make the new possibility materialize. In fact, the French playwright Gabriel Marcel said that hope is woven: “In the fabric of an ongoing experience […] it is embedded in an adventure that has not yet ended.” That is, it involves the process of moving toward something better.

3. Hope means assuming that everything is passing. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before we get out of a tough spot. The hopeless often believe that their situation is permanent. A depressed person convinces themselves that they will never feel better, while the person who feels that the world has turned against them believes that they are condemned for life. To escape this anguish, one must avoid taking the part for the whole. Every bad moment is just a chapter in the story. The next one can be different. With the right actions, events and circumstances will change.

The poet Emily Dickinson defined hope with this beautiful image: “Hope is the thing with feathers. That perches in the soul. And sings the tune without words. And never stops at all.”

Hope versus optimism

In his latest essay, Byung-Chul Han makes a clear distinction between hope and optimism, which the philosopher sees as passive and limited. As he explains in The Spirit of Hope: "Optimism is devoid of all negativity. It knows no doubt and no despair […] The optimist is convinced that things will end up working out well," even though they don't view the future as an open field of possibilities.

His criticism of extreme optimism includes the misunderstood law of attraction: the idea that thinking of a positive result is enough to make it happen. This effort begins by nurturing hope itself, which, according to Byung-Chul Han, "often has to be specifically aroused and encouraged."

Agamben on "State of Exception" & Therefore the Importance of Isaiah Berlin's Concept of "Negative Liberty"

Excerpts from video above:

"If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called a dictatorship."

- Carl Schmitt

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"In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system... The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, it is a suspension of the judicial order itself and opens up a space in which application and normativity become indistinguishable."

-Giorgio Agamben

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"The camp is the paradigm itself of a political space at the point of which, politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen."

-Giorgi Agamben

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"The situation created in the exception has the particular characteristic that it cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or a situation of right, but instead a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two. It is not a fact, since it is only created through the suspension of the rule."

-Giorgio Agamben

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"Laws develop through their enforcement."

Agamben argues application is the key. Laws develop through their application and enforcement. They aren't merely categories separate from how they are applied. This is exactly why, in "State of Exception" within the chapter "Force of Law" Agamben marks out law, force of law: "It's not about the rule, it's not about the law itself, it's about a sovereign interpretation and execution the overarching force.

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“There is little need to stress the fact that monism, and faith in a single criterion, has always proved a deep source of satisfaction both to the intellect and to the emotions. [...] Pluralism, with the measure of 'negative' liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal [...]. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them conmensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform. [...] 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.' To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.”

- Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958

Monotheism is a theological ideal.  But Sparta had two kings, and the Roman Republic, two consuls.  Pluralism.  And the tendency of every Republic is to eventually devolve into an Empire, and for its' former pluralism to become a monism

Polyphemus* Guarding the Gate

*His name comes from the Greek word Polyphēmos and translates to "many voices and songs," "abounding in songs and legends," or "very famous". In the Odyssey, Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea, and the nymph Thoosa (meaning swift currents).

The Mirror Stage  is the experiential human (tree of life/ego from pleasure principle) process that frames and amalgamates the psyche and the demands of the various bodily organs into a single subjective consciousness.  As for human individuals, the same holds true for their human collectivities (ie- family) where the Oedipus Complex establishes the hierarchical order (tree of knowledge of good & evil/superego/ Thanatos-death drive) for framing the psyche's outward-facing/exteriorized amalgamate thereby entrapping the individual into his subsequent socialized fate through acceptance of  limits, and thereby forming his character.

Angola State Penitentiary

Sovereign = one with the ability to grant or make an exception to the rule

Zizek: We Rant About Fascists and Communists of the Past...

...to divert our attention away from atrocities being committed in the present that we should be doing something today about.

Slavoj Žižek, "The Lesson of Superimpositions in Art"

Not only is appearance inherent to reality – what we get beyond reality is a weird split in appearance itself, an unheard-of mode designating “the way things really appear to us” as opposed to both their reality and their (direct) appearance to us. This shift from the split between appearance and reality to the split inherent to appearance itself, between “true” and “false” appearance, is to be linked to its obverse, to a split inherent to reality itself. If, then, there is appearance (as distinct from reality) because there is a (logically) prior split inherent to reality itself, is it also that “reality” itself is ultimately nothing but a (self-)split of the appearance? However, how does this topos differ from the old boring Rashomon-motif of an irreducible multiplicity of subjective perspectives on reality, with no way – with no exempted position from which – to establish the one truth represented distortedly by these multiple perspectives?

What best way to clarify this point than to refer to the very film (and the short story on which the film is based) whose title was elevated into a notion, Akira Kurosava’s Rashomon? As the legend goes, it was through Rashomon, its European triumph in the early 1950s, that the Western public discovered the “Oriental spirit” in cinema. The less-known obverse of this legend is that Rashomon was a failure in Japan itself where it was perceived as all too “Western” – and one can well see why.

When the same tragic event (in a forest, a bandit rapes the samurai’s beautiful wife and kills the samurai) is retold by four witnesses-participants, the effect, pertaining to the very Western realism of the cinematic image, is simply that we are told four different subjective perspectives. However, what effectively distinguishes the so-called “Oriental spirit” from the Western attitude is that ambiguity and undecidability are not “subjectivized”: they should not be reduced to different “subjective perspectives” on some reality beyond reach. They rather pertain to this “reality” itself, and it is this ontological ambiguity-fragility of the “thing itself” that is difficult to render through the realism of the cinematic medium. What this means is that the authentic “Rashomon” has nothing to do with the pseudo-Nietzschean perspectivism, with the notion that there is no objective truth, just an irreducible multitude of subjectively distorted-biased narratives.

The first thing to do apropos Rashomon is to avoid the formalist trap: what one is tempted to call the film’s formal-ontological thesis (the impossibility to arrive at truth from multiple narratives of the same event) should NOT be abstracted from the particular nature of this event – the feminine challenge to the male authority, the explosion of feminine desire. The four witness reports are to be conceived as four versions of the same myth in the Levi-Straussian sense of the term, as a complete matrix of variations. In the first (the bandit’s) version, he raped the wife and then, in an honest duel, killed her husband. In the second (the survivor-wife’s) version, in the course of the rape, she got caught in the passion of the bandit’s forceful love-making and, at the end, told him that she could not live in shame with both of men knowing about her disgrace – one of them had to die, and it was then that the duel ensued. In the third version (told by the ghost of the dead husband himself), after the husband is set free by the bandit, he stabs and kills himself out of shame. In the last version, told by the woodcutter who observed the events hidden in a nearby bush, when, after the rape, the bandit cuts the rope tying the husband, and the husband furiously rejects his wife as a dishonored whore, the ecstatically furious wife explodes against both men, reproaching them with weakness and challenging them to fight for her.

The succession of the four versions is thus not neutral; they do not all move at the same level. In the course of their progression, the male authority is step by step weakened and feminine desire asserted. So, when we privilege the last (woodcutter’s) report, the point is not that it tells what “truly happened,” but that, within the immanent structure that links the four version, it functions as the traumatic point with regard to which the other three versions are to be conceived as defenses, or defense formations.

The “official” message of the film is clear enough. At the very beginning, in the conversation that provides the frame for the flashbacks, a monk points out that the lesson of the events recounted is more terrifying than the hunger, war, and chaos that pervaded society at that time. In what does this horror reside? In the disintegration of the social link: there was no “big Other,” on which people could rely, no basic symbolic pact guaranteeing trust and sustaining obligations. The film is not engaged in ontological games about how there is no ultimate unambiguous reality behind a multitude of narratives; it is, rather, concerned with the socio-ethical consequences of the disintegration of the basic symbolic pact that holds the social fabric together. Nevertheless, the story – the incident retold from different perspectives – tells more than that: it locates the threat to the big Other, the ultimate cause that destabilizes the male pact and blurs the clarity of the male vision of a woman, of feminine desire. As already Nietzsche put it: in its very inconsistency and lack of any ultimate point of reference beneath multiple veils, truth is feminine.

It seems that Oriental spirituality, especially that of Japan and South Korea, provides a privileged site of superpositions. The definitive movie about superpositions is, without doubt, Monsters (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Japan 2023). Here is the outline of the story.

Saori Mugino, a single mother, is raising her fifth-grade son Minato who begins exhibiting strange behavior (cutting his own hair, coming home with only one shoe). One night, Minato does not come home at all, and, after calling around, Saori finds him in an abandoned train tunnel. Saori begins to suspect her son’s teacher, Hori, is abusing him and confronts the school about it. She is treated coldly by the faculty, culminating in Hori making a disingenuous apology. When she confronts Hori directly, he asserts that Minato is actually bullying another student named Yori. Saori visits Yori’s house and discovers that Yori, despite his strange behavior, is fond of and concerned for Minato. Hori is eventually fired from the school, but returns there days later. Minato falls down a flight of stairs trying to escape from him. Hori later comes to Saori and Minato’s house during a rain storm, but Minato has gone missing.

At this point, a flashback brings us back to the beginning of the film from Hori’s point of view. He notices Minato exhibiting disruptive behavior, such as throwing other students’ belongings around the classroom and seemingly locking Yori in a bathroom stall. Hori too visits Yori’s house, where he discovers that his father, Kiyotaka, is an abusive alcoholic. When Saori begins inquiring about her son, the faculty requires Hori to resign. Hori returns to the school to confront Minato, and contemplates jumping from the roof. Back at home, Hori notices a pattern in Yori’s old homework that seems to spell out Minato’s name. Realizing the two boys were actually in love, Hori rushes to the Mugino household to apologize. When Saori tells him Minato is missing, they go to the train tunnel to find him. They find an abandoned railcar nearly buried in mud, but only see Minato’s poncho inside.

The final flashback begins from Minato’s point of view. Yori plays with Minato’s hair, which the latter then impulsively cuts off. The two boys grow close and Minato begins defending him from other bullies, which Hori confuses for bullying. As the two become closer, Minato is distressed that his feelings are becoming romantic and that he is not a worthy son to his father. One night when he goes to Yori’s house, Yori and Kiyotaka declare that Yori has been “cured,” though Yori quickly recants, which incites his father’s wrath. During a rainstorm, Minato finds Yori fully clothed in his bathtub, covered in bruises, and the two escape to the abandoned railcar, which has become their hideout. After the rain subsides, they emerge from the bottom of the railcar and question whether they have been reborn, and run through a field together.

Monsters is a movie about neighbors in the strict Judeo-Christian sense of the term. One should oppose here neighbor to a fellow man: fellow men are those who are like us; we immediately recognize in them the common ground that we share. Fellowmen are friends, members of my family, co-workers, those whom I think I know intimately. A fellow man transforms itself into a neighbour when I detect in him a feature or a gesture which makes him a total stranger to me: “How could he do THAT? I never expected this from him. Is he one of us at all or an alien monster?” It is on account of this monstrosity of the neighbour that Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King’s Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. But a neighbour can also imply an unexpected positive surprise: a fellow man whom we considered just an ordinary person with all his weaknesses becomes a neighbour when he displays unexpected courage or honesty.

In Monsters, we see how, first, Minato becomes a monster for his mother due to his weird acts, and, to account for his weird acts and simultaneously de-monstrify Minato, she projects monstrosity onto his teacher Hori. In the first flashback, Hori is de-monstrified: we see him from his own standpoint as a modest and compassionate teacher who perceives a monstrosity in Minato but is then compelled to see the inner tension of Minato who is not able to come to terms with his affection towards Yori. The interest of the film resides in the fact that it repeatedly performs the operation that is the exact opposite of a fellow man becoming a monstrous neighbour: when we shift the perspective to the inner experience of the monster him/herself, we see s/he is really a fellow human being like us…

The obvious lesson of the film is that the ultimate monster is patriarchal order itself, and for that reason, the only person who remains a monster is Kiyotaka, Yori’s abusive and alcoholic father who wants to brutally “renormalize” his son and make him act as it befits a boy. We never see the other side of his character that would have made him more sympathetic since he is reduced to a ridiculous embodiment of the patriarchal stance. This fact indicates the limit of the film’s ideological coordinates: the opposition of patriarchal culture and gay love is unconditional; there is no process of de-monstrification of patriarchy and of monstrification of gay love in this universe. (One should add here that the couple Is not yet sexualized, so that the love of the two boys is asexual – a further compromise, because the asexual character of their love makes this love pure and innocent. Sexualization always implies duplicity, deceit and a kind of monstrosity.)

The multiple standpoints of the film’s narrative, whereby flashbacks make us see the same events in a different light, are a strategy to de-monstrify someone who is perceived/constructed in the eyes of the others as a monster. What I find problematic here is the underlying premise that comes close to the utter fatuity masquerading as a deep wisdom: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”[1] Are we also ready to affirm that Hitler was our enemy only because his story was not heard? Is it not that the more I know about and “understand” Hitler, the more Hitler is my enemy? Not to mention the fact that the stories we ourselves are telling to ourselves are as a rule a lie manufactured to justify the horrors we are doing to others – the truth is out there, in what we are doing in reality. All aggressors present themselves as victims reacting to an aggression. That’s why my motto is “no ethnic cleansing without poetry”; that’s why wars are sustained not only by industrial-military complex but also by what one should call the poetic-military complex. We saw this complex at work in the post-Yugoslav war in the early 1990s, but to avoid the illusion that the poetic-military complex is a Balkan specialty, one should mention at least Hassan Ngeze who, in his journal Kangura, was systematically spreading anti-Tutsi hatred and calling for their genocide. Foundations for the genocidal war are there.

The predominance of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence can be accounted for by the very fact that we live in an era that perceives itself as post-ideological. The large majority of people are spontaneously ‘moral’: killing another human being is deeply traumatic for them. So, in order to make them do it, a larger ‘sacred’ Cause is needed, which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. Of course, there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be ‘anaesthetized’ against their elementary sensitivity to the other’s suffering. For this, a sacred Cause is needed.

More than a century ago, in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism: “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.” The lesson of today’s terrorism is, on the contrary, that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations. “Godless” Stalinist Communists are the ultimate proof of it: everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress towards Communism. Religious ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things; from today’s experience, one should rather stick to Steven Weinreich’s claim that, while, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.

This is why the shifting perspectives in Monsters tell only half of the story. In the film, all characters (except Kiyotaka) are ethically rehabilitated when we hear their side of the story. Even the headmistress of the school who treats Saori in a polite but brutally dismissive way, ignoring her pain, is rehabilitated when we learn about the tragic accident that ruined her life. But one should still insist that this inner experience of trauma in no way justifies her brutal treatment of Saori: whatever her inner experience, the truth is that she acted in an ethically unacceptable way – or, in quantum mechanics terms, a superposition of two stances irreducibly marks her life.

There are some unexpected parallels between Monsters and Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s 2016 South Korean movie based on Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a 2002 novel with a similar plot set in Victorian time which, prior to Chan-wook’s movie, was already twice adapted: a BBC TV adaptation in 2005 and a stage adaptation in 2015. Handmaiden also uses shifting perspectives (the same event, depicted from a different perspective, appears in a wholly new light), plus it praises homosexual (here lesbian) sexuality as a resource against violent patriarchy. The difference is that same-sex love is here fully sexualized (some critics accused the film of getting too close to pornography), going beyond a pre-sexual gentle feeling of affection (as is the case in Monsters). What makes the movie interesting is that its shifts of perspective work in the opposite direction with regard to Monsters: the two women who first appear as naively innocent are revealed to be involved in almost diabolically evil plots (their naivety was a fake), while the two main masculine persons are from the beginning presented as almost ridiculously evil, and in the course of the film their evil gradually gets even more diabolical. (There is no radical shift of perspective here, no other view that would at least partially justify their acts – to make a more general point, it is as if there are not enough flashbacks here, not enough shifts of standpoint.)

What redeems the two women is that, although each of the two is involved in a deadly plot against the other, they fall passionately in love with each other, and this love allows them to exit the vicious cycle of evil, while the two men both end up dead. One has to add here that the way the two women exit the circle of male domination is no less criminal – they both act in a brutal manipulative way against others. The world we end up in Handmaiden is thus a world of global violence, manipulation and exploitation: there is no way out of it. The escape of the two women is limited to their sexual intimacy, while in their relations to others they remain fully within the world of corrupted manipulation. What if they – the two woman – are the paradigmatic subjects of our time (with “authentic” intimate experience somehow justifying their social behaviour), is one of the men at least (the fake “Count”) not much more honest in his open admission of total corruption not justified by any inner authenticity?

Surprisingly (or not so), this brings us back to our first case, Rashomon. As we have already seen, the succession of the four versions is not neutral: in the course of their progression, male authority is step by step weakened and feminine desire asserted. This brings us to Lacan and his theory of feminine sexuality (and subjectivity): the multiplicity of superpositions is not a formal scheme indifferent with regard to sexual difference. The (irreducible) multiplicity of superpositions is as such, in itself, feminine, and its collapse into a single point is masculine. This in no way implies that femininity is reduced to a confusing ground, which is magically turned into a single consistent order through the intervention of a masculine Master-Signifier (S1). Quite on the contrary, the imposition of a single Master-Signifier obfuscates the multiplicity of Master-Signifiers themselves… But this is another story.

Notes:

[1] Epigraph of “Living Room Dialogues on the Middle East,” quoted from Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Nassim Taleb's Secret Rule that Runs the World

Squeeky Wheels Get Greased!

The Guilt-Pride (Oedipal) Radiant - Blind Adherence

Welcome to the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end.

Hemispheric Brain Differences in Dominant Ideologies

Attention - A Confluence of Neurological Symmetries

Dominant hemispheres - A confluence of neurochemical controls.

Reciprocally exchanged (awake/asleep)

La Clemenza di Kamala

Mozart - adapted

loyalty born of fear?

fear at the heart of love?

better to be feared than loved?

is love a force to be feared?

love is stronger than fear?

You can't make someone love you

You can make someone fear you.

Love of Power

Merciful power/Fearful power

terror of merciless power

desire for immortal possession of the beautiful and good

desire for eternal birth and rebirth in beauty

---

On the arrival of the Fake Master 

The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God is the obverse of the statement that relating to one’s neighbor is the ONLY terrain of religious practice, where the divine dimension is present in our lives – ‘‘no images of God’’ does not point towards a gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta: you want to be religious? OK, prove it HERE, in the ‘‘works of love,’’ in the way you relate to your neighbors… We have here a nice case of the Hegelian reversal of reflexive determination into determi­nate reflection: instead of saying ‘‘God is love,’’ we should say ‘‘love is divine’’ (and, of course, the point is not to conceive of this reversal as the standard humanist platitude). It is for this precise reason that Christianity, far from standing for a regression towards an image of God, only draws the conse­quence from Jewish iconoclasm by asserting the identity of God and man. 

If, then, the modern topic of human rights is ultimately grounded in this Jewish notion of the Neighbor as the abyss of Otherness, how did we reach the weird contemporary negative link between the Decalogue (the traumatically imposed divine Commandments) and human rights? That is to say, within our post-political liberal-permissive society, human rights are ulti­mately, in their innermost, simply rights to violate the ten Commandments. ‘‘The right to privacy’’ – the right to adultery, done in secret, when no one sees me or has the right to probe into my life. ‘‘The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property’’ – the right to steal (to exploit others). ‘‘Freedom of the press and the expression of opinion’’ – the right to lie. ‘‘The right of free citizens to possess weapons’’ – the right to kill. And, ultimately, ‘‘freedom of religious belief” – the right to celebrate false gods.1 Of course, human rights do not directly condone the violation of the Commandments – the point is just that they keep open a marginal ‘grey zone’ which should remain out of reach of (religious or secular) power: in this shady zone, I can violate the commandments, and if power probes into it, catching me with my pants down and trying to prevent my violations, I can cry ‘‘Assault on my basic human rights!’’ The point is thus that it is structurally impossible, for Power, to draw a clear line of separation and prevent only the ‘misuse’, while not infringing upon the proper use of Rights, i.e., the use that does NOT violate the Commandments… The first step in this direction was accomplished by the Christian notion of grace. In Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, just before the final pardon, Tito himself exasperates at the proliferation of treasons which oblige him to proliferate acts of clemency:

The very moment that I absolve one criminal, I discover another. /…/ I believe the stars conspire to oblige me, in spite of myself, to become cruel. No: they shall not have this satisfaction. My virtue has already pledged itself to continue the contest. Let us see, which is more constant, the treachery of others or my mercy. /…/ Let it be known to Rome that I am the same and that I know all, absolve everyone, and forget everything.

One can almost hear Tito complaining: ‘‘Uno per volta, per carita!’’ – ‘‘Please, not so fast, one after the other, in the line for mercy!’’ Living up to his task Tito forgets everyone, but those whom he pardons are condemned to remember forever:

SEXTUS: It is true, you pardon me, Emperor; but my heart will not absolve me; it will lament the error until it no longer has memory.

TITUS: The true repentance of which you are capable is worth more than constant fidelity.

This couplet from the finale blurts out the obscene secret of clemenza: the pardon does not really abolish the debt, it rather makes it infinite – we are FOREVER indebted to the person who pardoned us. No wonder Tito prefers repentance to fidelity: in fidelity to the Master, I follow him out of respect, while in repentance, what attached me to the Master is the infinite indelible guilt. In this, Tito is a thoroughly Christian master, the practician of a logic which culminates today in the new capitalist ethics, where the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is, today, part of the game as a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploita­tion. In a superego-blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ the undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.), thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their COMPLICITY in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped. Which discursive shift underlies this new form of domination?

Lacan provides the answer in L’envers de la psychanalyse, Seminar XVII (1969-1970) on the four discourses, his response to the events of 1968. The guiding premise is best captured as Lacan’s reversal of the well-known anti-structuralist graffiti from the Paris walls of 1968 ‘‘Structures do not walk on the streets!’’ – if anything, this Seminar endeavors to demonstrate how structures DO walk on the streets, i.e., how structural shifts CAN account for the social outbursts like that of 1968. Instead of the one symbolic Order with its set of a priori rules which guarantee social cohesion, we get the matrix of passages from one discourse to another: Lacan’s interest is focused on the passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of university as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. No wonder that the revolt was located in the universities: as such, it merely signaled the shift to the new forms of domination in which scientific discourse legitimizes relations of domination. Lacan’s underlying premise is skeptical-conserva­tive – Lacan’s diagnosis is best captured by his famous retort to the student revolutionaries: ‘‘As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!’’ This passage can also be conceived in more general terms, as the passage from the pre-revolutionary ancien regime to the post-revolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere ‘servant’ of the People – in Nietzsche’s terms, it is simply the passage from the Master’s ethics to slave morality, and this fact, perhaps, provides a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche scornfully dismisses ‘slave morality’ he is not attacking lower classes as such but rather the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the title of the Master – ‘slave’ is Nietzsche’s term for a fake master.

-Slavoj Zizek, "The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View"

A Video and an Interview with Hans-Georg Moeller

An excerpt from the above video:

Wokeism is the only of these terms, unlike "identity politics" or unlike "political correctness" or unlike "virtue signaling", it has very strong religious connotations, right? It connotes "awakening" and this shows what I think is really at the heart of wokeism. That it's basically a sort of civil religious movement. It's a kind of a secular awakening, somehow in the tradition of earlier great awakenings in American culture. And thereby actually the term wokeism, against the intentions of the people on the right you use it, implies a critique of religion, and again, that's why I do like the term.

Now my central argument is that today's wokeism is the civil religion of the West, and it combines two elements. Traditional US American civil religion and German guilt pride. I'm gonna discuss American civil religion first and then German guilt pride second.

There's an excellent essay on what American civil religion is. It's written by Robert Bellah in 1967 and is called "Civil Religion in America". Bellah takes the term civil religion from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and like Rousseau, conceives of it as a shared spiritual, political, moral vision, and ideology that has kind of a national foundational impact. He rightly says that American civil religion is grounded in Christianity, but then also in the largely secular ideas that we find in such crucial foundational texts as the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Bella, at the beginning of the article, quotes someone else, SM Lipset to make an important point so I quote this quote, here it says, "at least since the early 19th century, a civil religion has been predominantly activist, moralistic, and social rather than contemplative, theological, or innerly spiritual."

So, a civil religion basically represents a shift from strictly theological, let's say transcendent values, to activist moralistic and social movement. Now, what does American civil religion consist in? Well, it has strong elements of individualism, a focus on liberty and private property as well. A sense of equality, pursuit of happiness, individual happiness, and also collective happiness progress, prosperity, a sort of pragmatic optimism. Obama's famous slogan, "Yes we can!" also embodies it. And it combines it with a sense of national destiny, some sort of missionary zeal that is supposed to guide the whole world, or the idea of the United States is some form of beacon of liberty, whose role it is to liberate everyone basically.

Bellah pointed out that this American civil religion comes in different forms, and he saw one as positive and one as a negative. So it can, and it did, equally inform something like the US civil rights movements of the 1960s and seventies, as well as it did inform the Vietnam war, which also supposed, you know, to liberate the Vietnamese people. So, there are clearly different denominations of American civil religion, one that is more Republic, one that is more Democratic, one that's more progressive, one that's more conservative, one that's more left, one that's more right, and Bellah was strongly sympathizing with the more progressive, more leftist denomination, and was actually strongly arguing against the Vietnam war. And he tried to use civil religion to argue against the Vietnam war.

And equally today we can say generally, that the American civil religion as a whole equally informs the Black Lives Matter movement and the War on Terror. However, there are two different denominations within this civil religion, and the one is more strongly behind Black Lives Matter, and the other one, the more conservative one, is more behind the War on Terror. I think it's pretty obvious that this activist, individualistic, post-leftist American civil religion, as represented by the civil rights movement and by feminism, is what gave rise to identity politics in the usa in the 1970s, which in turn then later on gave rise to Wokeism. So, American civil religion, and particularly its' progressive post-leftist denomination, are one decisive element that later on constituted Wokeism.

U.S. American Civil Religion + German Guilt-Pride = Wokeism

Now, let's move to the second element, a German guilt-pride. Of course the situation in Germany was very different from the situation in the United States after the Second World War, right? Germany lost the war, it was exposed for having committed genocide, and the country ended up divided. And the two different Germanies after the war reacted very differently to their fascist past. Communist Germany defined itself as anti-fascist, the government said, "we had nothing to do with the fascists, we were victims, our leaders were themselves persecuted by the Nazis, and we actually liberated Germany from fascism. So we are by no means continuing the fascist regime, we are anti-fascists."

Now in West Germany, this was different. Western Germany somehow acknowledged that it was a successor state of Nazi Germany, but it also, of course, acknowledged that Nazi Germany was basically just an enormous crime. And so Western Germany adopted the following strategy. The aim was to basically admit a guilt, but, at the same time, trying to pay off the debt. And so there was the idea that Germany can somehow work towards "sluschtis", a final line when all the debt has been paid off.

Now, after 1989 after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, after German reunification and the end of the cold war, Germany got reunited, and then, obviously, those two strategies didn't really work anymore. And then a new strategy was developed. And this strategy, I think, is perfectly represented by what now became basically the symbol of the New Germany in the center of Berlin, the new capital of the reunified Germany, namely, the Holocaust Memorial. And the Holocaust Memorial represents this new idea, that "Yes we accept our guilt, but it is a guilt that can never be paid off, it will never go away. It's a guilt that we inherited from the previous generation, and that we also internalize. So we define ourselves by admitting this immense guilt and we take on basically everlasting responsibility for it."

And this is what the Holocaust Memorial at the center of Berlin symbolizes. Yet at the same time, comes a miraculous transformation, namely, by admitting the most serious guilt that, to such an extent no one has ever yet admitted, by accepting that one is guilty of such an enormous crime that no one ever accepted guilt for, Germany somehow becomes, in a paradoxical way, morally superior. Again, because our guilt is greater than everyone else, and our admission of guilt is greater than everyone else's, we become also somehow, more morally elevated than anyone else, and we can be proud of being capable of accepting such an enormous guilt. So a guilt-pride is this paradoxical redemption, and moral self-elevation through guilt admission.

Now, let's address the question what wokeism really is. It is neither cultural Marxism, nor is it a Post-modernist Leftism. At heart, it represents the incorporation of a German-style guilt-pride into the identity politics that took place after 1989, after the breakdown of communism, after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the end of the cold war. And thereby, by the way ironically,despite being against such things as white supremacy, it is actually deeply white, right? It's rooted in Christianity, it's rooted in Western individualism, it's rooted very much in the western historical experience regarding slavery, colonialism, the holocaust, and so forth. And that's why, by the way, the Chinese call it Baizuo, white-left. So from the Chinese perspective, it is clearly seen and identified as a Western, and thereby white phenomenon. And it consists, basically, in some form of taking the moral high ground through intense guilt admission with respect to such things as the holocaust, or in the American case, slavery.

There is, at the same time, a very strong focus on identity, right? Today, identity is very much curated through the creation of profiles, and I talk about length at this in the "You and your profile" book, which just recently came out. So it serves the function of creating an identity, both for individuals as well as for organizations, CIA for instance, an organization. So it is an identity politics that creates identity in the form of profiles. Now, what are profiles? Profiles are publicly projected images that once you get positive feedback on them, you can identify with and you can internalize. And we did some other videos on this as well, with regard to the philosophy channel, "Philosophy Tube."

So, this brings us now to an updated and more complex definition of what wokeism is. Wokism is a civil religion combining American individualistic liberalism with guilt-pride. It is based on, and comes from identity politics, and focuses on the creation of identity profiles. It is now penetrating all sectors of society in the West, politics, media, advertising, sports, arts, education, military, and so forth.

Now, what is religious about wokeism? First, a strong emphasis on guilt and redemption. Similar to Christianity, there's an emphasis on on confessing guilt and the hope of redemption through this confession. Secondly, very strong dogmatism. Of certain taboos of public speech and thought. Humor, for instance, becomes more and more suspicious. And there are punitive tendencies, as I pointed out with respect to the Derek Chauvin trial. So basically, all these phenomena that we can nowadays call, or associate with, so-called "cancel culture". Thirdly there is a divisive moralism to it, right? Jesus Christ famously says in the bible, "Who's not for me is against me". They're somewhat similar to wokeism, right? There is not much room for neutral ground, there is no fence sitting, right? You're either for it or against it. And that creates a very binary good-bad distinction with not much middle ground between us and them.

So it's basically manifesting itself, in this increasingly hostile schism between traditional American civil religion (Trumpism) without guilt-pride and wokism with guilt-pride. We see a very strong symbolic struggle about this as well, like there was this conflict about statues and monuments in the U.S where the woke people wanted to take down the monuments, and Trump was saying this cannot be done. So the wokists wanted to admit and ascribe guilt, whereas Trumpism wanted to basically not allow any form of guilt into american civil religion

Then, fourthly, there is a strong ritualistic conformity pressure, and that's what the notion of virtue signaling points to. But that's also what we see when I gave this example at the beginning of the video when it comes to diversity statements. When you apply for a job in academia, right? You have to demonstrate that you are willing to conform. So there is some form of systemic hypocrisy here, right? We have all the woke celebrities famously, and also the CIA video, which are basically regarded, easily regarded as forced statements. And therefore, their credibility is questioned because they seem just to be a sort of, as I said, ritualistic conformity.

Fifth, there is woke-washing of Capitalism and Imperialism. Again, very much represented through the CIA ad. And that's the very same function that Christianity had in the 19th century, for instance, and earlier during imperialism, right? The ships that brought soldiers and took the wealth of the colonies, also brought bibles with them, right? And similarly today, CIA doesn't embrace Christianity anymore, but it embraces wokeism. So it serves a moralistic profile creation of Capitalist and still imperialist institutions.

And number five, there's a strong personal internalization that becomes possible through wokeism, just like in religions. It enables a certain fundamentalism, it enables zealotry. So for instance, one friend once told me, and this was a remarkable statement, he said that one of his family members had become a reborn Christian, and this somehow destroyed the family, because the person developed such a strong zealotry. And, in a similar way, I think, we see this phenomenon, that wokeism also, of course not in everyone but in some, breeds fundamentalism, breeds zealotry, and leads to what we could probably call a personal over-internalization.

And then, sixth, of course it helps the creation of a public identity, some form of civil religious affiliation becomes possible. And that's, on the one hand, similar to traditional religions, where you could also define your identity through publicly adopting a faith, or publicly professing a faith. However, this now happens of course, in a very different environment. And as I like to say, it happens on the basis of profilicity, profile based identity. So instead of, whatever, having monks and nuns who, you know, create an identity by going to a monastery and reading text from the bible, now you demonstrate your affiliation with wokeness, for instance, by being a youtuber and by producing social media communication.

 
Now, still we may ask, isn't wokism about all the right things? Isn't it all great? I mean, people like Bellah and Rousseau also thought that civil religion is basically a very good thing if it's done right. So we could say, "Yeah wokeism is perfect, it creates public enthusiasm for justice, equality, human rights." But well I mean Christianity also could be considered as having been all great, after all you know, it created enthusiasm for love and peace. However with Christianity in hindsight, we also know that it created a lot of problems. Wars, even genocide, fundamentalism, and so forth. I think it's important to see that, just as Christianity did not invent love and peace, wokeism also did not invent justice and equality. I think it can be said that Christianity somehow appropriated, and to a certain extent even monopolized, love and peace, and thereby imposed a sort of dogmatic belief system onto it which led not only, but also, to war and fanaticism. And these problems with Christianity have been pointed out by many people, just to mention few, Nietzsche, in the 19th century, and very recently Sam Harris. And to point out these problems, of course, of Christianity, for instance, is not to argue against love and peace, but against what could be called the corruption of love and peace through some form of religious appropriation. And similarly, I guess, to point out problems with wokeism as a civil religion, is of course not to argue against justice and equality, but against their civil religious appropriation and even monopolization.

So to conclude, I think maybe in these times of a new awakening in form of wokeism, we might again be in need of a second Enlightenment, as I pointed out in an earlier video, right? And we might remember Kant's Critique of Philosophy as the "maidservant of theology" and ask of philosophy that it doesn't become the maidservant of wokeism. Its' job is not to abolish wokeism, but to critically shed light on it. To question it, so that it does not turn into a fundamentalist frenzy

---

The following is an interview with Hans-Georg Moeller, author of The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality.

Q: What’s wrong with morality?

Hans-Georg Moeller: People usually assume that morality is a good thing. It is generally believed that a moral person is somehow better than a person who is not moral and that a society which holds moral values in high esteem is better of than one which does not. I do not think that this is the case—and this is what the whole book is about. It is about pointing out the “sick” aspects of morality, about the “pathology of morality,” so to speak. I think that morality does not deserve to be valued as much as it is today.

Q: What is morality?

HGM: I think it is a way of thinking and talking about people, groups of people, actions, and events in terms of good or bad. Once we talk or think morally, we create a distinction between “us” and “them,” our values will seem good to us and others who do not share them will seem “bad” or even “evil.” This can create a lot of problems, both socially and individually. In wartime, for instance, moral talk and moral thought flourish. Likewise, thinking of the people around us in a very moral way is rather stressful and will create a lot of tensions. Imagine a family in which moral values dominate everything else, including the affection the family members feel for each other: life in such a family will probably be quite miserable and thus somewhat “sick.” In short, I argue that a high degree of moral language and a highly moral mindset is not an indicator of the “health” of a person or a society, but, to the contrary, a worrisome symptom of tension and uneasiness.

Q: What is a “Moral Fool”?

HGM: The “Moral Fool” is a figure that I take from Asian philosophy, from Daoism and Zen Buddhism in particular. As opposed to the moral heroes from Greek antiquity up to today’s Hollywood films, the Moral Fool is an entirely average person. He or she, like most of us most of the time, simply does not immediately conceive of the people he or she meets or the situation he or she encounters in moral terms. Even though morality has such prestige in our society today, in most of our dealings we function quite well and are able to more or less enjoy our lives without the necessity to make moral judgments. Rather than seeing anything wrong with this, I think it is a paradoxical amoral virtue. I do not argue for immorality, but, as much as possible, for moral abstinence, I argue for amorality, not for immorality. In many situations, amoral approaches may work more effectively and less pathologically than morality, for example, law in a courtroom and the aforementioned affection in a family. These are two important antidotes against morality that we already make frequent use of. In fact, I think, people do already act as moral fools most of the time. And I think there’s nothing wrong with this and that society—and philosophy—should embrace it.

Q: Can you give some concrete examples for how morality can be “sick”?

HGM: Yes. I think that moral “sickness” is different in different societies. In my book I focus on moral pathologies in today’s “Western” countries like the USA, Canada, or Europe. The most obvious example, which I alluded to already, is war rhetoric. How could mass support for the “war on terror” and obedience to the government—against actual facts and reason—be produced? Mainly through an intense use of moral language and the creation of moral outrage against an “evil” foe. It is a very common strategy to stir up moral mass hysteria in war times. Another example is how death penalty trials are performed in the U.S.. Why have there been so many wrongful convictions? I argue that this is mainly due to the intensity of moral argumentation in these cases. The jurors are overpowered by moral language so that they themselves will feel morally guilty if they do not vote for the extinction of a supposedly evil person. When it comes to deciding about the death penalty in an American court, the scene changes from an attempt to establish the facts of a case to a moral drama pitching the “innocent” against the “perpetrator”—and who would then dare to vote against the innocent?

Q: Didn’t a lot of things in society get better because of moral engagement, the civil rights movements for instance?

HGM: I discuss this issue in detail in my book, and my view is this: Yes, moral awareness and moral activism has played a historical role in improving the situation of oppressed groups such as African Americans or women. However, civil rights movements are called civil rights movements for a reason. What is much more important for these groups than being morally emancipated is to get certain rights that they lack. Just look at the current debate about gay rights in the USA. In every single state where there was a popular referendum on gay marriage it was defeated by the “moral majority.” But most of the American courts faced with this issue decided on a legal basis in favor of gay rights. Minorities will always have a hard time achieving moral esteem, but in a society where there is not only a separation between religion and the state but also a separation between morality and the law minorities might win some important legal victories.

Q: What about the efforts of so many philosophical and religious thinkers to find out what is good and to distinguish it from what is evil?

HGM: Interestingly enough, there have always been a number of philosophers who were highly suspicious of ethics; Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, for example. I follow these thinkers rather than the likes of Kant or contemporary ethical theorists who believe that they are able to identify what is “really” good. The attempt to define criteria for moral goodness has often ended in grotesque failures. I cite a number of examples of “shocking” or ridiculous ethical demands by some of the great heroes of today’s academic ethics, such as Kant’s moral defense of murdering “illegitimate” children or Bentham’s “scientific” suggestion of measuring weightlifting abilities in order to establish people’s strength for tolerating pain so that the moral quality of certain policies that might inflict pain on them could be objectively assessed. I argue that the history of “philosophical” ethics accounts for not much more than a series of unwarranted academic presumptions.

Bound to the Apollonian Sphere...

Nietzsche on Sophocles' "Oedipus"

Excerpts from the video:

Every successful attempt at moving from ignorance to knowledge produces the opposite effect as intended. The pursuit of the knowledge of who killed the previous King is an attempt to deliver the land of Thebes from sorrow and despair, and yet this brings about further sorrow and despair. That element of the play structure is recognized by the likes of Nietzsche as a subtle Sophoclean critique against excessive knowledge, excessive wisdom, which is quite in keeping with Nietzsche's philosophical outlook.

But that might leave us to wonder what somebody like Aristotle would have thought of this, why he would have such a high praise for Oedipus, being that Aristotle is a philosopher who sees the truth as a good? Well, for Aristotle, the Oedipus play is superb because it fulfills the function of tragedy, which is to allow us a catharsis, a release of negative emotion, the fear for Oedipus that we experience, and the pity that we experience for his plight. These are for Aristotle, negative emotions. And the tradition of Platonic thought, these are vicious emotional states because they're harmful to our character. So Plato thought that we should therefore avoid tragedy, because it makes us experience those feelings under the theory that experiencing the feeling, reinforces it. Aristotle's opposing perspective to that, is that by indulging in dramatic tragedy, we purge those feelings, so that by experiencing the negative emotion we discharge it. And whichever of these perspectives we may happen to find convincing, the point here is that Aristotle sees in Oedipus the maximal possibility for heightened fear and pity, the maximal possibility for therefore the catharsis the purging of those feelings, and the reason why it achieves this maximal height of those feelings is because every attempt at avoiding the tragedy, or of righting the past wrongs produces, instead, this recognition that the opposite has happened. And so through no fault of his own, through no moral culpability, Oedipus finds himself guilty of the worst crimes.

Time: Randomizing Determinism...

...Quantum by Quantum

Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass: Half Empty, Half Full, or Shattered?

A static representation of perpetual motion?

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into and energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machines that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it… we are all handymen: each with his little machines… 

- Deleuze & Guattari

...such an assemblage!

Do You Have Haptic Intelligence? Olfactic Intelligence? Gustatory Intelligence?

from Wikipedia:

Haptic communication is nonverbal communication and interaction via the sense of touch. Touch can come in many different forms, some can promote physical and psychological well-being. A warm, loving touch can lead to positive outcomes while a violent touch can ultimately lead to a negative outcome. The sense of touch allows one to experience different sensations such as pleasure, pain, heat, or cold. One of the most significant aspects of touch is the ability to convey and enhance physical intimacy.[1] The sense of touch is the fundamental component of haptic communication for interpersonal relationships. Touch can be categorized in many terms such as positive, playful, control, ritualistic, task-related or unintentional. It can be both sexual (kissing is one example that some perceived as sexual), and platonic (such as hugging or a handshake). Striking, pushing, pulling, pinching, kicking, strangling and hand-to-hand fighting are forms of touch in the context of physical abuse.

Touch is the most sophisticated and intimate of the five senses.[2] Touch or haptics, from the ancient Greek word haptikos, is vital for survival.[3] Touch is the first sense to develop in the fetus.[4] The development of an infant's haptic senses and how it relates to the development of the other senses, such as vision, has been the target of much research. Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing.[5] Infants who can perceive through touch, even without sight and hearing, tend to fare much better.[6]

Similarly to infants, in chimpanzees the sense of touch is highly developed. As newborns they see and hear poorly but cling strongly to their mothers. Harry Harlow conducted a controversial study involving rhesus monkeys and observed that monkeys reared with a "terry cloth mother", a wire feeding apparatus wrapped in softer terry cloth which provided a level of tactile stimulation and comfort, were considerably more emotionally stable as adults than those with a mere "wire mother". For his experiment, he presented the infants with a clothed surrogate mother and a wire surrogate mother which held a bottle with food. It turns out that the rhesus monkeys spent most of their time with the terry cloth mother, over the wire surrogate with a bottle of food, which indicates that they preferred touch, warmth, and comfort over sustenance.[7]

Categories

Heslin outlines five haptic categories: 

Functional/professional: expresses task-orientation 

Social/polite: expresses ritual interaction 

Friendship/warmth: expresses idiosyncratic relationship 

Love/intimacy: expresses emotional attachment 

Sexual/arousal: expresses sexual intent

The intent of a touch is not always exclusive and touching can evolve to each one of Heslin's categories.

From Wikipedia:

Olfactic communication is a channel of nonverbal communication referring to the various ways people and animals communicate and engage in social interaction through their sense of smell. Our human olfactory sense is one of the most phylogenetically primitive[1] and emotionally intimate[2] of the five senses; the sensation of smell is thought to be the most matured and developed human sense.

Human ancestors essentially depended on their sense of smell to alert themselves of danger such as poisonous food and to locate potent mating partners. Using the sense of smell as an instrument paved a way for smell to become a platform of nonverbal communication. Smell also has a significant influence on social interactions. Through their branch of olfaction research, the National Science Foundation recorded that over 70 percent of American adults believe a person's body odor has a significant effect on how interested they will be when conversing with people of a different sex.[3] This process is possible with olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain that discriminates and enhances certain odors. Typically, women will prefer men whose natural odor is similar to their own, while heterosexual men are attracted to females with high estrogen levels and strong menstrual secretions.[4] An entire industry has been developed to provide people with personal smell-masking products, such as perfume, cologne, deodorant, and scented lotions. When a person covers their natural body odor with a pleasant smell, they are communicating their desire to be attractive either emotionally, sexually, or romantically.[3]

Can you speak it?  Or merely listen to others narrate? How "sensitive" is your pallate? And how well do they all sensually combine? What "language" do they all harmonically share?

I think I need to find me some Autotune!  ;)

.... or to take an AQ test!

...and then decide whether or not to buy me some AGI