Justified

So here's part 3 in my little philosophical anthropology.

So: fundamentally, our efforts are devoted to justifying and pursuing our imago. If there is a difference between justification and pursuit, it is thus: our pursuit of our imago lies in the activities that we perform to take up certain roles in life. Our justification of our imago lies in the ways we attempt to add value to our imago itself.

Now, how do we increase/justify the value of our imago? Social recognition.

Consider gold. The value of gold lies entirely outside of practical concerns; gold's value is a purely social construct. If no humans recognized the value of gold, it would just be lumps of rock. It is the recognition of gold in the eyes of people that gold gains its value.

Our imagos are largely the same. Basically, we all want social value. We want others to Desire us. I wrote a bit about capital-D Desire near the bottom of this post. We need others to look at us and find us valuable.

Now, this is slightly different from one's value hierarchy. Saying that your "self" ranks high in your value hierarchy is not the same as social recognition. Your value hierarchy is basically a cognitive tool for judging the world; social recognition is part of our attempt to engineer the world into our own image. When we know others value us, it provides confirmation of the value of our personal centre (where our imago and highest values intersect). It is one of the two ways we can confirm the value of our personal centre; the other way is through actions, such as exercising our talents.

Social recognition also plays another role: it exercises and increase our power. When others value you, you increase your power; aka you increase your ability to engineer the world in your own image. Just like physical muscles. Working towards social recognition exercises our muscles, and gaining recognition acts like nutrients.

Social recognition is one of the most important aspects in our fight against nihilistic suicide. Being valued by others, and having a high social position, confirms and inceases the value of our centre and whole meaning structure.

So how to gain recognition? There are two ways: empathy and dominance. Empathy is a matter of two people seeing themselves in each other. You look at another personal, you are able to identify with them on some level. This provides them with recognition, and when they emphathize with you, you gain recognition from them.

Dominance is different. There is only one context that "equality" can possibly exist in human life, and that is within a complex legal system. Equal before the law and whatnot. Other than this, however, our lives are constant struggles over dominance and submission. You'll never find a social situation in which someone is not dominant. One person's meaning structure and power will always - even if subtly - shape the nature of any social situation. If you play the dominant role, than you gain more recognition from the submissive than the submissive gains from you. Um... I don't mean to sound so S&My. Really.

Empathy isn't better than dominance and vice versa. They have a strange relationship, and there are counterfeits of both. All for later dates, though. This is long enough already.

So: the justification of our imago takes place largely in the social world. Recognition tells us we are valuable and increases our ability to affect the world We gain recogition through mutual empathy and a master/slave relationship.

Questions? Yawns? Baffled looks?

(Post script: in later posts, probably about religion, I'll say that what we want is the recognition of "active subjects," or "knowing Is." Spirits such as God would then be included. But it's not important for now.)

Laboring In The World

Or Loose Ends part 2.

So, to recap the previous post. I talked about how our imago is the foundation of our motivations in life, and how the knowledge that we build up over our lives is used by our imago, and how that imago regulates the significance of particular statements. Our primary use of information - be it education in carpentry, math or theology - is giving aid to justifying and pursuing our imago, the horizon of our efforts.

So, what do I mean by justifying and pursuing? Attempting to justify our imago is about asserting the significance or value of that image. It shares a lot in common with what we normally mean by "building confidence." That's the personal aspect of it; however there is more to it. We attempt to justify our imago in order to gain recognition from other humans. That is the common denominator of all social relations - the quest for recognition. More on this later.

Pursuing our imago centres around actions. Now, I'm going to be a bit cheap and lazy here: I'm going to set forth a rather strange and counter intuitive thesis, and then not defend it fully. We primarily perform actions not for the productive or practical benefits they offer, but rather because of how particular actions allow us to "look like" our imago.

Why do people become doctors? For sake of being doctors. Not to help others; the concern for the welfare of others (which is a real concern!) is secondary to the importance of the doctor pursuing their imago.

There's some ambiguity, of course. We all have careers for social purposes - people without jobs are bums. But this is simply another aspect of our imago at work. Even the seemingly mercinary goal of earning gobs of money has this truly unproductive and impractical fundamental purpose of pursuing the imago. I'm not saying practicality and productivity are not a part of our decision making processes. I'm saying the primary, fundamental drive is the attempt to assume our imago and to be just like that image we see in the mirror.

Now, justifying our imago works in two ways. One, the knowledge we have allows us to pursue our imago in fuller and more complete ways. I don't really mean to sound Platonic here... or maybe I do. I'm not sure. Anyways. If you know you're a kick ass carpenter, then you can more completely justify your own value relative to your imago's ideal. But even here, practicality and productivity take a back seat; the main concern is one's perception of their abilities and the resultant practical benefits. Hair splitting is fun for the whole family!

So the carpenter works for the usual reasons. He doesn't want to be a welfare bum. However, if he is a lucky man, than he also wants to be a carpenter. Being a carpenter helps him pursue his imago. So he builds a cabinet. Productivity is a seconary matter; so why does a carpenter take such pleasure in a well built cabinet?

A parallel motivation to wanting to be something: we also want the world to reflect our efforts and desires. When the carpenter builds a cabinet, he has taken some raw wood, and with his own labour, he has changed a part of the world to reflect his desires for the world. He has recreated at least a part of the world in his own image. This is the pleasure we take in our work. An addition source of pleasure is the exercise of power; both the labour and the skill required to build a cabinet are expresses of power.

Think about it. What is one of the surest ways to claw at someone? Call their work or art shit. And some of the highest praise you'll ever receive is towards work that is close to your heart. That's because it really is a piece of you.

Once the cabinet is complete, it becomes a tool for him to pursue some other goal. It can allow him to participate in the economy by selling it, or it will allow him to store his equipment in style, or it will gain him social recognition when others acknowledge his skill.

Ideas work the same way. Building what a presupper would call a worldview has many common denominators with building a cabinet. You select the body of knowledge your imago needs, and carefully build it with propositions and conclusions and concepts and whatnot. If you are really good, then you come out with a system you find coherant and useful. If you're kinda lousy at it, you end up an Evangelical. I JEST! ha, ha.

We're all engineers of our own worlds; some of us do it better than others. Some of us are so terrible at it that we lay on the couch all day sinking into depression, and some of us are are so God awful at it that we swallow a bottle of pills.

So, that's pursuing. Justifying next time.

Loose Ends

Now is the time on Sprockets in which we attempt to clarify and expand some past statements. Huzzah for quantity over quality!

Here's the last several posts in a nutshell:

As infants, we basically exist as radical empiricists. We know only what is right in front of us and what is inside us - ie, our hunger. A baby is a more consistant and thorough empiricist than David Hume ever was.

As we begin to conceive of the world as a discontinuous place (the mirror stage) and acquire language, our thought necassarily becomes more abstract. More symbolic, more concept based.

With the aid of our primary care givers (and possibly even a physical mirror) we begin to develop an idea of what we are, or what we should be. As the mirror stage metaphor goes, we see ourselves in a mirror, and our mothers say "Yes! That's you! Aren't you just so cute!" We see that image, we take it up, and it becomes our imago. Of course, it isn't us; it's a mirror image and we can't ever actually be that image. Our imago forms the horizon of our personal efforts - and like every other horizon, you can't actually reach it. It just moves further and further away.

Now, we live in a real world and there are facts about this world. Without getting into a discussion about theories of knowledge or tests for truth (they can come later), there is such a thing as a true statement. The thing is, our world contains such a vast number of possible true statements - or at least approximations of true statements - that no one human being can gather them all.

So which (potentially true or false) statements do we show interest in? The ones that serve our pursuit of our imago. I think the imago is basically a psychological concept, and as such I can only skirt around the edges of it. That being said, we find statements that we believe justify and aid the pursuit of our imago.

One can use both false and true statements to pursue their imago. This, I think, is what trips up pure subjectivists. You know, the people who think every truth statement is purely subjective. Statements that are false are almost or just as effective as statements that are true. Anyone who says their highest goal is the pursuit of truth is off the mark; their true highest goal is to believe and act as if their highest goal is the pursuit of truth.

An important point: while the actual truth of a statement is not vitally important, our belief about the truth of that statement is. Doubting a statement reduces its value in justifying and pursuing. And doubts about the justifications of our imago result in doubts about the value of our lives.

The statements that most readily aid and justify become the most important to us. Hence, our hierarchy of value. We also consider these statements to be the most true. It's the stuff we just won't question. This is also the stuff that the martyr and the seppuku-er die for. I like to steal Paul Tillich's term "the personal centre" and use it to describe how our imago and our most important statements interact; it's our personal identity.

The body of statements that aid our pursuit, as well as the (relatively) less interesting body of statements that we give intellectual ascent to but do not really care about, form our body of knowledge.

That's enough for one post. More later.

Suicide Is Painless

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."

- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

It's not quite the first line, but for sake of drama it probably should have been. Camus was a French writer that died in 1960; he is one of the unfortunates that history remembers as an "existentialist."

I just finished reading Sisyphus, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I like the way he thought, and I admire his political actions. However, despite my deep-seated respect, my philosophical agreements with him go little beyond the above quote.

I've had a few starts and stops while trying to explain myself on this blog. It's hard knowing where to begin. So, like Camus, I'll start at the literal end: death.

A lot of human thought goes into trying to figure out what the good life is. Aristotle had his ideas, Confucius had ideas, and Nietzsche had his ideas. There are a lot of people out there willing to tell you how to live a good life.

So how can we decide which of these ideas are right? I think the first step in deciding is to realize that the question of who is right is not of fundamental importance.

Maybe there are no good, comprehensive answers as to what the "good life" is. On the other hand, there is an easy way to see what a life poorly lived looks like. They end in suicide.

The answers to the question of the good life are incredibly diverse, and humans have been producing them for as long as speaking and writing have existed. Because of the complexity and openness of the question, it is nearly impossible to decide upon a correct path. Discussing suicide provides a solid and unquestionable boundary. Whatever else may be said of a suicide's life, that individual believed firmly that their life was not worth living. Knowing what factors drives people to suicide will help us avoid those factors in our own lives.

So why do people commit suicide?

That sounds like a question that needs to be answered in the vocabulary of psychology or psychiatry. I'm not a psychologist, though, and I don't play one on TV. So I'll write in the much more open (less rigorous?) vocabulary I am familiar with.

That vocabulary will require me to do some pre-supposing. I'm going to use terms that I haven't properly explained yet. The only real background reading for this I can give you is this post.

To supplement that post, we all seek to interpret ourselves into the world based upon an image that has been developing since infancy. We engage in certain activities to take on the corresponding identity; one man works with wood so he can be a carpenter, another writes a book so he can be a novelist. When we exercise our talents, we are donning a particular identity; we solidify our understanding of ourselves and further develop our imago.

To engage with the world and develop our imago, we all have to apply power. I mean power in the broadest and most inclusive sense possible. The carpenter and the athlete use physical power. The scientist uses intellectual power. The lawyer wields social power. Interpersonal relations are primarily influenced. though not necessarily dictated by, power. There are many expressions of power, but it is all the same principle (or perhaps one of two).

We also develop value hierarchies, and these hierarchies are based on the law of our imago (this is a term I don't think I need to explain right now). Different behavior patterns or events are more or less important to us, and more or less desirable, based upon this law. The world becomes understandable; we have answers for why things are the way they are, and we have a guide to action. The intersection of knowledge and ethics form the meaning structure through which the world becomes understandable and relatable.

Now, back to suicide.

I believe there are two basic reasons why people commit suicide.

1. The person's meaning structure is at stake, and only their death can preserve it. This is martyrdom or ritual suicide. History is full of accounts of people willingly choosing death - by their own hand or another's. A Japanese samurai could be placed into a situation in which their meaning structure - their knowledge, ethics, and very imago - were threatened. If the samurai refuses to commit seppuku in this context, then their image of themselves dissolves as surely as if they had died. They enter into a state of shame, and slide towards the second kind of suicide, even if they never arrive there. A martyr faces the same problem; if a Christian bows the knee to another God, then their imago is shattered and the intelligibility of their world is correspondingly damaged (grace and forgiveness shall be considered in another post). The Christian must accept death in order to preserve the coherence of their meaning structure. Both the ritual suicide and the martyr exert a great deal of power in giving themselves over as sacrifices, and thus both strengthen the meaning structures of those around them. But this meaning structure must already be existing - if Jesus died right after he met Peter, Christianity would never have been born. So - ritual/martyr suicide has a particular effect on a community: it strengthens an existing meaning structure.

2. A person commits the second kind of suicide when they are, for whatever reason, unable to develop their imago or assert their meaning structure. I'll call this nihilistic suicide. There are two ways this can happen. One is your standard clinical depression. Nothing has any meaning or significance, including one's self. Now, remember how the ritual/martyr suicide strengthens the meaning structure of the existing community? Nihilistic suicide is a pale reflection of this. The thoughts of "they'll miss me when I'm gone" is an attempt to pretend that suicide will bring meaning to their lives - but of course it doesn't, it brings only misery. Nihilistic suicide is also an attempt to exert a great deal of power in a short time; hence the fact that thoughts of suicide are in fact a great comfort to many people living through dark nights. No matter how bad things get, they always have the ultimate act of finality within their grasp.

The second expression of nihilistic suicide takes place when someone's meaning structure or imago is radically and totally destroyed in an extremely brief period of time. For example, in the great stock market crash of the late 1920s, many of the wealthy men that were ruined took their own lives. Their identity and worth was in their role as a wealthy man; when that was taken, they needed to commit a pale reflection of ritual suicide to regain that worth. However, their worth and identity was found in wealth, not in a community - their suicide does not achieve their goal.

It is nihilistic suicide that haunts the human race. Say what you will about philosophy, religion, science or anything else, suicide ends all the debates. Ritual/martyr suicides are necessary in specific contexts, and they are not evidence of the failure of a particular meaning structure - they are evidence of that structure's strength.

So what is the good life? The only specifics I'll ever be able to offer are tailored to my own life. I can offer a general answer, however: whatever moves you away from nihilistic suicide. Sound out your imago; seek to understand your world and to engage with it actively.

Bloggin'

Look! An update!

I decided I'd list a few of the blogs that I've recently begun to read.

Sacra Doctrina - The newest addition to my blog role. SD boasts probably the best blog writing I've ever come across. Written by some professor at some university, it's a fine showcase of conservative Christian thought and philosophy. Visit for the scholarship and writing, stay for the warm yet uncheesy stories about his family.

Mormon Philosophy and Theology - Another addition to my blog role. MPT is an interesting counterpoint to SD, because they sometimes cross philosophical paths. The best thing about MPT: it is a front row seat to the development of Mormon metaphysics. Endlessly fascinating. The second best thing about MPT: I was able to download almost an entire courses' worth of Hubert Dreyfus lecturing about Martin Heidegger from it. Champagne all around!

Vox Popli - One of the denizens of World Net Daily. The writer, Vox Day, is a libertarian who thinks voting rights should be greatly restricted and that women are prone to fascism. It makes for interesting reading and interesting discussions. Discussions that mysteriously end once certain people run out of quips and generalizations, though.

Right Reason - This blog has a stable of Conservative writers. It's interesting reading, a bit less polemic than Vox Popli. I rarely agree with anything I read here.

Radical Goddess Thealogy - That's thealogy, not theology. All about how male centred religions have destroyed the world and that mother religions would make it all better. Aaaactually, I shouldn't be so dismissive. I've pressed Athana on several issues, and have come to accept that we don't need to quarrel with each other. Or rather, I don't need to quarrel with her, since her answers were never anything but polite.