This thing we identify with . . .

Simone Weil once said “Appearance has the completeness of reality, but only as appearance.  As anything other than appearance it is error.”

The freedom of the self is simply an illusion of being the master of its own house. It is in the symbolic order where there is autonomy.  Although this concept of the ego seems so natural, it has only recently been constructed.  It is through a “dialectical process” that the illusion of immutability and the illusion of a self can be subverted.  It is an illusion to think of the self as being stable and enduring; these are the truths that I have come upon over years of wondering a searching.  I have also found Martin Heidegger’s notion of the origin of selfhood, as he says “it is through the anxiety which the true authentic self comes into existence.”

Lacan has a paradigm for the relation of subject to the other that suggests that one is supposed to know how to “be” for others—and we know how to exploit this situation in a way that benefits the desire which drives us.  I postulate that the sense of self is illusory in the face of what Weil calls necessity and gravity.  One may satisfy the formal conditions of knowing, so long as she speaks of knowing, or play the part of one who knows how to be a cognizant and competent person. We can create a self as the one who knows.  For Lacan, this kind of acting can put one in the position of presumed mastery. Meanwhile, it is not in the real that the subject which we create exists, but in the symbolic order.  The subject is a representation of some self-created inner state like this which exists for us as illusory.  It would be convenient, inner-psychically, to produce a personhood which is stable, but existentially this is impractical, because we are in so many ways expected to change and be flexible.         

Predatoriality is the mOther of Anxiety !!!

“Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein”   Martin Heidegger also once stated that it is through the anxiety which the authentic self comes into existence . . . .  In the line of psychotherapy in working with those in psychic pain this is a nugget of gold, a jewel, for them.  The Other is always lurking, predatoriality is the nature of existence as persons in a world with multiple layers of victimization.  There is something comfortable about foreclosing on the nom du père, giving back one's allegiance to the Other, or to some imagined symbiotic relationship with the mOther, is a kernel at the core of psychosis, according to Jacques Lacan.  Anxiety then is the admission that we are vulnerable? We are made vulnerable to the name of the father, within the Symbolic Order.  In the Real we are; in the Imaginary we can be thus. Anxiety prevents the person from being encompassed by mOther, to be issued a loss.  Friedrich Nietszche, who uttered that we grow strong through wounding, went mad; and Henri Nouwen implied something akin to this matter of being wounded, making a healer, though, in such weakness.        

Does the "I" have to imply Logos ?

The most momentous circumstances for which my subjective experience great potential is through the language of the socius, and the unconscious, as well through the symbolic order.  Though I look forward I must only look inward to see everyone, in that collective of symbols that pervades me to what feels like my core.  There seems to be something swirling like a galaxy within me, with a grammar, though seemingly without a center.  The closer I get to the experience of such a core more dense it becomes, the more murky, and it escapes every time it is approached.  This makes me wonder who the “I” (id or ego) is who is focusing on this linguistic quiz.  Is it the Greek idea or eidos, idol or ideology, something in oneself which one worships or an idea, or set of ideas, which one adheres to incessantly? How wonderful it would be to have the originary grammar from whence these notions come from, or the reasons why I think I have an “I.”  Is this “I” a pack of wolves, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would suggest, or is it the “I” a board member peaking out a narrowly opened door to pass the “I” message along to those awaiting an answer, as Daniel Dennett suggests? Thus the etiology of the “I” within us; could it be rooted in something universal or the universe itself?  Is there a transpersonal, yet does the universe itself have consciousness.  There is a grammar, math of complexity, for the universe; does this imply there is order, in seeming chaos? Social insects communicate; is this the nature of it all, of the Other as distinct from me, or including me?  Must I follow Simone Weil in understanding? “We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events—in short the ‘consolations’ which are ordinarily sought in religion.” I certainly am not looking for something mystical here, just an explanation for the etiology of the subjective experience which seems so illusory.    

Drive to the ideal-ego

Those things which seem to drive the conscious world, from the “imaginary,” that place or order (within what is known as Lacanian terms as registers), are there to motivate or even frighten one into a place of carrying on, or of traversing the lived-out space of one’s conscious reality  Whether or not one is frightened by a flash of fear or goes about life driven by other motivational forces or propensities, the imaginary is filled with thought to be expectations, experiences, or perspectives of the other or others.  It is too likely that one would experience affective worlds and emotional realms which are the internally perceived visions and thoughts of the other.  The perceptions about the other’s or others’ as not being real is a hoax, when it is the experience of many that they don’t know what drives them either in the world of dreams or the world of the felt, tactile, kinesthetic and actualized experience.  The imaginary order or register captures the forces that propel individuals into life and away from some unreal pattern of behaviors that are affected by a real world.  The imaginary is just as real yet not “unreal,” the effect that it has on the order or disorder of life.  The flash of light that can startle one into the motions of life seems at time either capricious or nondirective as it can be, yet pushes me to yearn for and expect to participate in the presumed fate it has nudged me toward.   So that is what I am left with, in essence a yearning, not for a specificity or known world of fact, but a world of imagined intents and expectations of the other(s).   Within me resides something from without which I cannot express in language, yet is very much linked to a law or grammar of its own.  The drive I have can at times feel lax or at times might be experienced as directive. But, as Heidegger would have it, this “anxiety” which drives people to the “authentic self” some transpersonal ideal self, the ideal ego, to use Lacanian terms, is imbibed in to order our life.