Ridere, lugere, detestari

[sparkinthedark]

Beautiful passage, number 333 from The Gay Science.

[Carl G.]

Could a philosophy of the unconscious be possible?

[sparkinthedark]

I think I know what you mean, but it wouldn't really be a philosophy, although there is a book with precisely this title.

In their search for the active forces behind thinking, Nietzsche, Deleuze and a few others got into psychology and developed a few great theories, while Lacan did it the other way around. These could be the theories you're looking for.

[Onasander]

I just had a conversation about unconscious philosophy sunday night on SL about how the Conscious and Unconscious communicates (it was headed by a clinical psychologist who was clearly bored out of his mind). It took me a while to get what he was getting at, I brought up the idea of one of us being a really overweight guy who wanted to lose weight, and decided upon eating tuna sandwiches as his weight loss diet- but unbeknown to him, it turns out he is mildly allergic to tuna, and is spending long stretches of his nights on a toilet as a result- but never correlates this initially cause he's to dazzled by the image of health and finesse to pick up that it's unhealthy.

Tuna guy presents a situation where I flat out stated- since we were not allowed to touch upon the subconscious for whatever reason- what the heck are we suppose to do with this idea? Are we to become like Yoda and feel the force of the universe and be guided by it to proper mental balance and perceptions, or like Sherlock homes and recognize clues and solve the unconscious mystery. They psychologist choose Sherlock, and I was bummed cause I was so hoping for it to go in the direction of Yoda. Would of been cool had he wiped out some kind of esoteric knowledge of conscious-unconscious interactions at that moment, but we instead was left with what we already knew since childhood, and the rest of the debate fell apart resultingly as no one could care about it anymore. Situational awareness and non-awareness giving cues, self preservation and personal exploration meeting mid way.

If anyone here knows my views on philosophy, you'll know how I view it as something that radically predates consciousness or even brains- it's a force of evolution, and evolves with each species and in every action, it didn't just poof out of the air. Fear for example is a response that can exist re actively without a central nervous system or brains, many 'primitive' creature exhibit behaviors closely paralleling the expected behavior a flight, avoidance, or aggression response we expect in more complex animal predators- say the jellyfish for example. You might scoff at this, but if we do even encounter intelligent life out there in the universe, don't be surprised if their biology and evolution took a dramatically different course and yet still share certain behavioral traits similar to ours in some ways.... evolution, like the wind- happens as a reaction. Life on earth have treaded a philosophical line between fear and lust for at least 4.87 billion years and will continue to do so for some time, and many branches of the tree of life have expressed this in various ways: protien codings like DNA, multi-celled structures, Sexual Reproduction, dynamic economies, perceptive intelligence, and emotive bondings via hominid is how our particular branch has expressed it as far as we know. You don't need a believe in the super natural to see philosophy as something predating intelligence- it's a force of nature.

(p.s. what does detestari mean- I can't figure out the stem- got the rest of it- my attempts to learn latin in the past is not paying off enough dividends to navigate even a dictionary at this time to finish this translation- wheelock not helping much either)

[sparkinthedark]

what does detestari mean

It says: "deride, lament and execrate" in the fragment above

Nietzsche thought that thinking is nothing but the communication of the instincts and the other pre-individual forces. So, in this fragment he says that knowing is just a peace treaty between these three impulses, as opposed to Spinoza.

By the way, they've made The Gay Science an audiobook at librivox.

http://librivox.org/the-joyful-wisdom-b ... nietzsche/

[Onasander]

will be listening to that soon, reading a book by Emily Durkheim at the moment.