Thursday 7 May 2009
The Intellect and Slavery
Insofar as man exists as a slave, which if outside of truth must be his condition, the intellect serves its function in creating the edifices beneath which the self or slave bows down, and also furnishing, if and when the need arises, the justifications for the bowing down. Given the slave structure itself, such mental edifices and their justifications don't need to be of a high quality, and indeed it would be worse if they were, for then the slave would be in danger of moving beyond his condition.
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i think what you call a 'slave structure' that has no admixture of the world beyond the prison won't tend to last long. Such structures come to seem insane or farcical to the slave's children or grandchildren. The evils that last tend to parasitically deploy what has substance & merit, pervert it. i always felt Literary Theory wouldn't last longer than a generation (and it hasn't - it started in the 80s and is crumbling now) because it wasn't 'of a high quality', as you say; though cheap chains are often fashionable, for a generation.
No, I'm talking not about something that exists in terms of obvious social conditions, something utterly artificial, the result of exceptional circumstances, but something much more fundamental to even biological existence. The human as a species is obviously very young & what makes him human, the obvious single feature that distinguishes him & makes everything else possible is his faculty of language. This could, or will be here, be described as a kind of sense organ, it creates teh world the user of the language imagines he dwells in, & so effectively does dwell in, but sense organ of reason could not be said to be in anyway comparable to something like sight where normal and fully afdvanced functioning is teh normal condition. Just consider the handful of highest geniuses like Jesus, Buddha, Mozart, Shakespeare- they're still only human, so what is it that separates them? They are far more alive, their intellectual senses are 'enlightened' & this resulting in teh enormous floods of creative genius. Jesus says something like that if you sin, then you are a slave to sin; that this in a broader sense being the inevitable state of being in spiritual ignorance about oneself, though it's not an ignorance 'about' oneself- that it is the very 'structure' that is intrinsically flawed. Thus Beckett's sense of self being "an inorganic singleness": blatant nonsense in terms of the reality of a living being but it is his sense of himself as it appears to himself, and that self is to be a slave; this the inevitable consequences of being in a state of ignorance, but because the state is the actual structure, then it has nothing contrary to itself to compare itself. This ignorance appears to be life itself.
I'm spending alot more on this than the post itself, which I suppose is very raw. But this reasoning power is evolutionarily an extremely young faculty, not like the other sense organs which are purely biological, not dependent on the person's own individual intelligence for optimum functioning, & actually it is only his flawed individual self that can impair their functioning, leading to bad sight, for example.
And then beyond this biological development of the human, his cultural-historical development has been almost wholly within hierarchical structures that have gradations of being, & which subconsciously work away on his notions of his reality. I wrote a piece a while back on the logic of monarchy about this.
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