Incompatible Ballerina and Other Essays - Softcover

Charles William Johns

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782798757 ISBN 13: 9781782798750

Publisher: Iff Books, 2015

Synopsis

An ontological and epistemological framework and foundation for the psychological symptom 'neurosis'.

About this title

About the Author

Charles William Johns is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Lincoln. He is interested in liberating the psychotic, neurotic and 'in-human' tendencies from within the ostensibly intellectual and moral desires found in philosophical disciplines. He is a founding member of the Lincoln Philosophy Forum UK.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Incompatible Ballerina and Other Essays

By Charles William Johns

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Charles William Johns
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-875-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Forewords:, 
Neurotic Ontology by Graham Freestone, 
Ballet as Sleeping Beauty by Kirsten Wilkinson, 
Preface: A Philosophy of Neurosis/Four Fireworks, 
Humiliation, Idealism or What Forces Us to Think From Consciousness?, 
Rebellion: or what Man can do with desire, 
Immanence, 
The consequence of creativity, 
Desire, 
Being, 
Vertigo: the lost and the lonely, 
I Obsession, 
II Words, 
III The 'Lost' and the 'Lonely', 
IV The Vertiginous Subject, 
Incompatible Ballerina: A Meditation on Desire, Meaning and Beauty, 
End Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Humiliation, Idealism, or what forces us to think from consciousness?

Humiliation is first philosophy in the sense that one must participate as learner or seeker in relation to the 'knowledge' that they so ignorantly desire. The vulnerable process of standing face-to-face and 'open' to 'knowledge' also has a brutish violence to it – "I purport to want to know, I purport to not yet know, but I also purport that I know that this process will lead me to knowledge and that the seduction of the goal of a particular knowledge connects to my equivocal desire, is legitimate, honest, transparent and true.

The construct of knowledge and its method (asceticism) automatically posits the subject as slave to knowledge, slave to the assimilation (order/law) of the particular discourse that this knowledge has found expression in. To read or listen is to have made time for it (labour), to abide by it (law), to accept and assert such as signifying/significant, and finally the construct of knowledge and its method makes us slave to the ideal of knowledge i.e. we not only sublimate ourselves in the process of trying to know, we also believe that there is saviour, truth or the real in the very acquisition and exposition of knowledge (there must be some kind of comeuppance for our little struggles). In fact we do not know this: we may have constructed institutions, caricatures, values and rewards for persons that we identify as knowers, their knowledge may have achieved a level of construction whereby we can utilize this construct in esoteric or exoteric situations, but we do not know – outside of utility and desire – where this ostensible knowledge really leads, whether it enters the real.

Hence we are humiliated by the vulnerable act of seeking knowledge (asking for help) as opposed to the sovereign impossibility of 'thinking for oneself', we are humiliated that we even believe that knowledge will help us, we are humiliated by the 'forced' labour that 'knowledge' seems to require – that forces us to become one of knowledge's workers (but doesn't knowledge also need its knowers)?

It may be helpful to describe the sources of this humiliation as in a sense antithetical. Part of the subject's humiliation could be described as stemming from religion and the other part as stemming from its counterpart, its enemy, the sovereign ego. What I have here termed 'religion' and the 'ego' have not always been seen as antithetical, in- fact why should they be? The ego finds power in the religious order of things, s/he just needs to find his place (or is given his place) within this order. The operation of religion, institutionally and within its texts is the naming and designating of the ego within its political and metaphysical power-relations (the bishops role and status in relation to the Church, Paul's role and status in relation to the operation of Christianity etc.). Isn't the ego a type of theologizing of itself, turning its status into something above and beyond the sum of its parts, its characteristics and its biological constraints? Is not the concept of religion also an extension of the ego, the desire to construct a world where subjects are both the centre of importance (care, love, pity, our saviour Jesus Christ, our God that loves and looks over us etc.) and are also given the possibility to transcend this original structure of signification by sinning, over-ruling Christianity. The Ego and Religions inextricability can cause somewhat contradictory results; the ego enjoys the security of being posited within a larger theological system; the Christian does not need to struggle to keep the authority of his ego in-tact because its reality lies in 'the starry heavens above and the moral law below'. However, the ego reminds us of Descartes 'doubt' (or the doubt of Thomas); s/he asks 'could there be more reality elsewhere?', 'could I accumulate more power somehow?' and 'is my father really alive ... is he mocking me?!'. In order for the ego to be truly sovereign it had to kill its maker, overcome him and take the entire universe for itself; we can see this notion already in the New Testament and also in its demise encapsulated by Nietzsche's proclamation 'God is Dead ... who killed him?!'. We could aptly describe this contradictory characteristic of the ego – via the terrains or religion – as dialectical ( ... as neurotically dialectical).

Does the concept of the ego not depend on the very presupposition that it requires something outside of it to give it admission into signification i.e. Jacques Lacan's notion of the subject emerging from out of a symbolically coded society/ reality and the need for the subject to identify with this society/ reality in order for it to gain selfhood?

Through this trajectory of thought we could say that all designations of any kind depend on both a context and on the Other that co-creates and sanctifies the identification/bond of the designation. A far too crude example would be the designation of an 'I' that is also partially constructed and embedded within a larger social convention of language and a 'logic' of taxonomy/ classification of 'things' and their distinctions.

Now, my polemic here, apart from instantiating humiliation as a certain paradigm in which forms of knowledge take shape and are desired, is to explore the double-bind/contradiction of humiliation, to show that humiliation moves both in the direction of the self (ego) and in the direction of the Other (religion). This is not just true of humiliation but of knowledge itself. On the one hand there is a characterisation of knowledge that desires to be truly sceptical of all constructs of pre-existing knowledge i.e. criticality/scepticism. It is sceptical of knowledge's 'foundations', but also (in an extremely philosophical manner) it is sceptical of the knowledge that guarantees perceptions' 'reality'; the ostensible 'gift' or 'myth of the given'. On the other hand, however subconsciously or naturally, there is a humiliation/knowledge that accepts (and perhaps affirms) the relation between a faith in experience and a 'truth-of-the-matter' that causes and reflects such faith/experience, even in such practices of scepticism (Hume accepted this belief as a sceptic). After all, the gift of the 'I' that thinks, which apparently cannot be refuted, must be seen as a gift that the sceptic must affirm before mobilizing his many complaints as to the apparent reality of the external world and the constructs of knowledge and certainty. There is also a sovereign humility within the sceptic when s/he asks "what can I do?", and then there is the humility that touches the Other when s/he asks "what can I do in the presence of life/knowledge"? The first subordinates his faith in a larger all-powerful/teleological life system and prioritizes the scepticism of what s/he thinks is his/her sovereign ego. The latter first asks Life to respond to him, asks Life for a criteria of/for questioning. Regardless of these antithetical modes of thinking, both have a joint sense of futility attached to them.

Already to challenge is to accept so many things, to be critical is to accept the language and vector of criticality. This may not boil down to a question of religious humility or non-religious humility. One could be a sceptic of all philosophical theories of perception, knowledge and truth yet still believe in a God, and vice versa, one can accept a common-sense realist view of the world or accept that perception intrinsically involves belief in both appearances and an apparent teleological structure in the world without being a theist.

There appear two questions that naturally lead from the above insights; firstly – should we construct a distinction between an operation of sense-making which may have built within it a theological necessity i.e. to believe in the world, a reality, the self, to believe in operation, to have within local experience a larger intuition of its workings, and then a further operation which creates the same results but through non-theological concepts such as neurological visual mapping/receptivity etc, whereby such non-theological operations are a contingent and determinate function and not an unconditional gift? Secondly – would these paradigms of sense-making be different and would they lead to different aesthetic/moral/philosophical outlooks on thinking and life?

With humiliation the 'unconditional' gift is neither the participatory-belief in life/reality nor the gift to intellectually doubt life/reality (scepticism) but is rather the humiliation itself. For example I accept a level of humility when I undergo the process of thinking philosophically; I ask the very same above questions – "am I thinking for myself", "what is the criteria and objective for thought and do I trust it?'. These questions – and in-fact my thinking process – is determined by the neurosis of this humility itself and not some external guarantee (i.e there is no proof of a God granting me this thinking, or the utter disproof of the necessity of thinking). The beauty of this mode of humiliating- thinking is that it is both sceptical and aware of external/theological systems of thought. Humiliation is an awareness of something that is playing with your thought whilst you remain unsure whether its content could be said to be real or valuable. The dialectics of this unfolding process of awareness returns us back to our original symbolic construction of the relation between the ego and religion; the ego driven by the humiliation that it has not been endowed with a transparent 'cogito' identity (and is hence highly sceptical of exteriority, external power and is humiliated by its general vulnerability) and then the thinking that embraces the identity of religion – allowing thought to take flight on the breeze of necessary, intentional and teleological thinking that it believes in. It is interesting that such a huge shift in thinking does not come from any external material or historical event but rather comes from the choice of thought itself to decide (I think Descartes was suggesting this 500 years ago).

It is in the fundamental solipsism, scepticism or non-belief in the external world (let us refer to David Hume) that designates the external world as a matter of belief; 'I am led to regard the world as something real and durable and as preserving its existence, even when it is no longer present to my perception' (my italics). It seems here that the more philosophical, atheist and non-common sense realist the philosopher becomes, the more s/he seems to supplement areas outside of his philosophy as pure belief. We see this double-edged humiliation of the ego and religion again here i.e. the humiliation of deprived certainty driving proper scepticism, the humiliation that one believes in the project of certainty in the first place, and finally the humiliation of all 'real' factors that resist or appear external to rationalisation, which leads Hume to regard the world as real.

Perhaps in some way there is that other more 'compromising' line of thought in the works of the German idealists such as Kant and Hegel. Kant secures the ego by maintaining that it is we ourselves who determine the structure of our experience, giving the concept of 'reality' a new purchase in that it exists as a criteria separate (although necessarily connected) from simply what is evaluated in the natural sciences or scientific realism/instrumentalism. One could say that Kant defends the criterion of 'reality' by saying that it is real 'for us' and then re-locating the 'us' as a logical principle that governs space, time, rationality and geometry a priori. But the ego is here still not given complete sovereignty because 'it' did not ask for the a priori judgments that are apparently central to the cognitive faculty of the mind. Again there is a type of comfort or faith in Kant's philosophy whereby we freely accept/affirm both his categorical imperative (which assumes universality) and the a priori structure of mind which gives rise to 'determinate judgments' in which 'the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given' and the judgment subsumes the particular under it'.

I am humiliated that there is a 'real' that 'grounds' me and my existence (what I would call a religiosity). Most philosophers, conversely, find their own personal location of the real as comforting (Descartes' certainty, his geometrical proofs, Schopenhauer's Will etc.). I am also humiliated that the ego has not conquered knowledge for itself yet (Descartes' doubt and his attempt to re-think/build the foundations of philosophy). I feel as if there is an attempt to both uphold the ego and affirm the theological 'Oneness' or bedrock of the world-as-it-is at one and the same time in Modern Philosophy.

There is an interesting distinction in the notion that the practice of knowledge/asceticism is physiologically antithetical to the experience of religion i.e. awe, comfort etc. (I have tried to disprove this in the examples above, however I find the dichotomy useful). Its dictum is that in religion, God will think for you so you don't have to. This obscure and scientifically unfulfilling theory finds expression in a certain stereotype of the genius, one that brings my two definitions of humility back into consideration. In ancient Rome genius was etymologically linked to genii – the guiding spirit or deity. Here one does not need to be 'clever' to be a genius i.e. one could be a humiliated genius (humiliated by God?). Jesus Christ was a unique conduit for humiliation. We find especially in The Passion so many of those transgressive ideas: that to suffer is to be strong; we find the construct of the 'martyr' etc., all reversals of the usual dialectic between master and slave, weak and strong, guilty and innocent. Jesus Christ is a type of genius who perhaps sets the trajectory for our descriptions of humiliation: he is perpetually humiliated by 'non-believers' that encounter him, he is tortured and ridiculed, he believes in the one God our saviour. The humiliation that retroactively creates genius is in this theological belief that we have discussed, however, the ego finds its seat right at the end of The Passion. Apart from the incarnation of the son of God being an individual 'normal' man (giving the ego some promise here) it is finally in the words "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" which affirms a very real humiliation (to be deceived/neglected), but again it is the aura of the sceptical sovereign ego we have talked about. Deep within Christ's soul (his ego perhaps) is a retaliation, it is the beginnings of a real philosophy i.e. "I have been neglected and therefore I MUST think for myself, I MUST think-out of this mess". It is possible to accept that there was no neglect or Other that neglected you in the first place. What forces thought to think within this context? Is it still the vector of humiliation? To be humiliated by that which one does not know and so to attempt to know, to be humiliated by the status of knowledge in society (that people are 'cleverer' than you and so achieve a level of power or grace in which you desire for yourself)? Is there not a strange self-assimilating quality in the discourses of knowledge itself, removed from the interlocutors, that seduces one into illusions of certainty and mastery (simply in the mere following or application of a method)?

What became humiliating for Christ was belief. He believed and he believed. Of course there is that slight humiliation within every thought whereby we understand that the thought is not solely ours, we understand that the impetus to think it is in some ways irreducible to the cogito or willing subject that apparently causes this thought in the first place. Especially for Christ we understand that every thought and action was in some ways a homage or acting-out of God's will. However at the end his belief did not come through for him, his belief did not create a reality that was identical to his desires ("My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me") and so he died hating belief and hating the knowledge that he continually swept aside in order to give room for his belief (the sacred ties of custom and education, the alternative, orthodox religious institutions of the time etc.). There is no way to live after hating these two things. An impossible task of philosophy would be to think within this bereft mode of thought.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Incompatible Ballerina and Other Essays by Charles William Johns. Copyright © 2015 Charles William Johns. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Iff Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782798757
• ISBN 13: 9781782798750
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248