Monthly Archives: September 2011

Nietzsche, morality, shamanism

Posted on by Standard 12

Too many people die with their souls yet unborn.

What shamanistic systems do (that moralistic systems do not) is to put you in a relationship with yourself. 

Moralistic systems are actually designed to avoid this, since they are constructed in order to prevent you from succumbing to harm/danger. However, one cannot deeply know anything without free experimentation. In particular one cannot know the limits of anything, without experiencing some degree of harm. So, morality, which seeks to save us from harm, is always in danger of doing us ongoing harm by denying us self-knowledge.

Moralistic systems covert intention is to deliver an unborn soul into the hands of a deity.  Shamanistic practices crack the shell of the self to reveal one’s true nature.

Nietzsche, Bataille and the philosophy of self-destruction

Posted on by Standard 1
What shamanistic systems do that moralistic systems do not is to put you into a relationship with yourself. Moralistic systems are actually designed to avoid this, since they are constructed in order to prevent you from succumbing to harm/danger, but one cannot learn anything in relation to oneself without risking oneself.

You solitary one, you go the way of the creator: you will create a god for yourself out of your seven devils! You solitary one, you go the way of the lover: you love yourself, and on that account you despise yourself, as only the lover can despise. The lover wants to create because he despises! What does he know of love who has not despised that which he loved! With your love and with your creating go into your solitude, my brother; only much later will justice limp after you. With my tears, go into your solitude, my brother. I love him who seeks to create beyond himself, and thus perishes. [Nietzsche/Zarathustra (emphasis mine).]

In HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN, Nietzsche also says that intellectual truth has nothing in common with morality.  Group based morality preserves human nature, but it is intellectually in error.  

 Is there a desire to transcend the human, here, and is it part of Nietzsche’s Icarian complex? To transcend one’s humanity is to destroy oneself.
Bataille was at least more explicit as to what his Nietzschean proclivities involved. To go against morality — to transgress — was explicitly to self-destruct. The fall from grace is forever. Bataille held that Nietzsche’s quest for self-destruction was indirect and thus unconscious  – an “Icarian complex”. Bataille’s philosophical paradigm makes out that self-destruction ought be undertaken in a way that is conscious and understands that human destruction is inevitable. Not only is it inevitable to the degree that we must necessarily transgress against morality in order to “find ourselves”, but it is also so in that we are mortal creatures, doomed to die. So, by embracing this reality directly (rather than indirectly, as Nietzsche does) we can — paradoxically as it happens, for human nature is contradictory and paradoxical — actualise our own natures more fully.

Common to both Nietzsche and Bataille is the following paradoxical understanding of human nature and philosophical dialectic:  moral systems have a  preservative effect on humanity, but at the cost of truth as well as at the cost of creative self actualisation.  Not to seek to preserve oneself is, by contrast, the way to individual self-actualisation, but at the cost of self-destruction.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Being and Becoming: ideals of mental health?

Posted on by Standard Respond

My observations are that conventional psychology/psychiatry has a prejudice against “becoming”. To be one particular thing or another is considered respectable, but for somebody to be in a process of movement, from being one thing to becoming another incites all sorts of nervous reactions.

I draw much of my theory from Nietzsche, Bataille and practitioners of shamanism

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Feminist identity, anyone?

Posted on by Standard Respond

Bourgeois mores are a mystery to me as I can only ever view them from the outside, rather than partaking of them on an experiential level. Compliance with bourgeois mores seems to involve operating within a category of identity and fulfilling the requirements of that particular categorical definition, without doing things that either contradict it or suggest that one does not have the skill set to perform it effectively.

I suspect this need to produce public compliance leads to the view that feminism needs a public and clear definition, similar to the definition of “man” or “woman” according to traditional conservative culture.


I find it much more useful and effective to do without a categorical identity.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Why talk to therapists?

Posted on by Standard Respond

1. When you look deeply into it what are therapists actually trying to do?

They are representing themselves as experts in “human psychology”. This is a field that relies upon an abstraction and generalisation from certain kinds of human behaviour in the possibly relatively near past. But people’s lives are generally more complicated and specific than these generalizations can express.

What does one gain from therapy? One’s life must be simplified to fit the generalizations based on common experiences, or else, perhaps one could try to make use of the generalizations about other people’s problems to see how they might apply to your specific instance.

No matter which way one chooses to respond, it seems to me that there remains a significant risk in terms of losing a great deal of one’s life’s previous intelligibility in talking to a therapist. What may have been important but specific to one’s own experiences can be all too easily lost to the power of generalizations.

By contrast, certain types of shamanism offer a more holistic approach than conventional psychology, by embracing individually lived realities and experiences.

2. I for the pursuit of psychological knowledge– however, in contemporary industry, I have rarely seen it put to good use. The knowledge becomes an instrument of torture rather than a method of release.

The problem of knowledge in terms of the way it is applied in Western culture gave the writer, Georges Bataille, reason to coin the term, “non-knowledge” as indicative of deep inner experience, because contemporary knowledge tends to overlook the meaning of being an experiential subject and tends to produce, instead, objectification.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

The compelling force of tradition as anti-feminist rhetoric

Posted on by Standard Respond

The fogging of feminist critiques by patriarchy is all too common, not least because it is taught by patriarchal systems that “women” per se are only able to communicate about personal issues not real ones. So, what we are encountering here is, in a very material sense, patriarchy’s immune defence against a hostile critique. Feminism is not a hostile critique of men, but of a system that keeps men and women at each other’s throats.

The fearful and/or angry reaction has its roots in feelings, spouting forth in many men, that in and of themselves they are not attractive to women.

Men often underestimate their capacity to be appealing, just for being men, that is for their intrinsic qualities like personality and intelligence and so on. Patriarchy is therefore a compensatory system for this (often delusional) sense of something lacking in the nature of one’s unfurnished being. The emotional certainty that many men express is the ideological certainty that no woman would like them as they are, in their truly spiritually/psychological naked state. Without puffing themselves up with titles or money or pretending to be more intelligent than they are, they assume women would reject them.

Feminism represents a challenge to men to simply be who they are, on an equal level with women, without trying to be something else — above all, without trying to be something more than women are capable of being (appealing, perhaps to factors biological) to shackle women into a relationship based on power.

The feminist challenge to be what they actually are frightens many men because they don’t think it is based on reality.

Many males feel certain that women do not actually want anything as straight-forward as feminists imply, but that women are expecting more than that.  Such men’s fear that men cannot live up to women’s expectations becomes translated as “women are fickle”. Many men may also suffer from fear that they would be abandoned by their women, unless there is something compulsive at work like the ideology of patriarchy which preaches female inferiority and therefore keeps women partly shattered, or some act of law that will prevent women from leaving men.

It’s not the case that men recoil from women acting outside of their traditional roles. It’s more that many men,but not all, cannot imagine maintaining a relationship that isn’t based on force.