probabilityfields

Who’da thought they’d lead ya, back here where we need ya! You can now (once again) access this site at probabilityfields.com. If this surprises and confuses you then you must not have paid attention to my last post and I’ve got no time here to explain. But just in case I’ll have tautologist.com redirect back here so either way you won’t be able to escape my site.

And now, Deep Thoughts…
So I’ve been reading tons of Freud lately for my Psychoanalysis: Desire and Domination course. Our culture is submersed in Freud, we quote him, call out people for their “Freudian slips”, and even analyze each other and ourselves using ersatz psychoanalysis. In psychology and psychiatry though, he’s more known for how wrong he was about so many things. Still, Freud’s notion of the unconscious may be the most important discovery of the 20th Century, and I think it has a lot to say to us now.

In this “third blow” to “human megalomania” he puts all our desires in the unconscious, from the lowest parts of the ego to the highest. Even morality and the search for truth all find their roots in the unconscious. Ever since Descartes we’ve thought of ourselves as ego cogitos for whom free will and access to truth through reason are vouchsafed. But Freud disabuses us of all that.

Before Freud, Nietzsche denied the existence of capital-T-Truth. For him, it was all interpretation. Nietzsche’s future artist-philosophers would one day create truth, knowing that it was not necessarily true for anyone else. Freud forces us to acknowledge that we only find something true because we have an unconscious cathexis, or focus of psychic energy, to it that rewards us with pleasure when we think it, see it, or act on it. Meanwhile, the conscious ego insists that it is in control.

Morality too comes into question. What is moral for me may not be moral for you and there is no chance for appeal to God or transcendental moral laws. This is the way Nietzsche wanted it. For him, it was the slave morality that had named everything that was not a slave “evil”, making morality artificially universal, i.e. everyone is subject to the same rules that define good as weak, suffering, slave-like.

In The Sense of Beauty George Santayana attempts to correct the universalization of beauty. For Santayana, beauty is a feeling of pleasure within a subject, that occurs in the presence of an object. The subject objectifies its pleasure and projects it onto the object. This objectification of beauty has led to the idea that beauty exists as an entity within objects. It follows that beauty is mistaken as universal. But beauty does not arise out of the object, it occurs within the subject as an experience of pleasure. Universal concepts of beauty work only as normative concepts that constrain beauty and delegitimize a plurality of accounts of what is actually a deeply personal experience. Beauty is not capital-T-Truth, but my beauty is my lower-case-t-truth.

With Freud and Nietzsche, morality and truth can be plugged into Santayana’s beauty. A deeply personal experience that should not be constrained by universal, rational, and normative claims. But how much agency can we hope to have in creating truth, as Nietzsche wants, if the psychic structure of truth is unconscious, as Freud insists? The job of psychoanalysis is to enable the conscious ego to gain more control over the unconscious, and perhaps it will be the only tool that can achieve Nietzsche’s dream.

This also gives us new ways of thinking about something like racism. It’s hard to think about it consciously and pin-point exactly how it works. Thus people deny that they are racist or even that racism exists in places where it obviously does. Recognizing that racism is ultimately unconscious can lead to a new method of analyzing and “treating” society.

Psychoanalysis could thusly be applied in numerous ways, but the most immanently pragmatic action would be to come to terms with the fact that your conscious ego is not “master of its own house”. By admitting this first fact already the veil of repression is ruffled. Freud may have shown us how little control we have, but his project was always the ego’s freedom within a healthy society. Perhaps a new reading of psychoanalysis can finally provide us with an invaluable tool for reconciling society with the individual.