REGAIN SANITY by Sean Pape
abstract/teaser: this is more important than just Gaza: it is a quandary of Multicultural society all over the first world as it integrates more muslims into its christian or secular burrows. Three groups need to harmonize their articulation of the path to good society, for the purposes of sanity, meaningful transparency (that when we read and hear others, we actually see INTO their mind not just hear and interpret along our own prejudices of what they mean), and to regain the ability to trust, to disnegage the paranoid and violent parts of the agricultural subject's brain.
all quotations from Philosophy of Right 1821 (translation to English 1897)
So as not to jump into deep Hegelese right from the beginning, I want to introduce the way I view the theory of State and Mind presented by Hegel in this work. He continually refers to State and Mind as conflicted realities that correspond to idealistic notions. A government is nothing but an organization of people using words and power to organize their own personal lives. In a characteristically 19th century vision of ethics through semi-literal self-sacrifice, the individuals making up each government have to defeat the personal limitations and spurs to vice and greed that continually stop their collective actions from resembling the ideal 'State', acting as one as an ideal 'National Mind'. The ability for a nation (nonetheless any individual, or any group of people no matter the size, from a group of hooligans to a couple to a commune to an entire planet) to understand itself and correctly recall and consider the multitude of views and thoughts and feelings and possible actions within it is vigorously doubted by Hegel. Nevertheless, he goes on describing the perfect actions these ideal characters would (or will we hope) carry out if they were better coordinated, better informed of each others' conditions. By narrating this idealistic view right from the beginning of the section 'The State' (within 'Ethics'), he sets out the perfect completion of the story of politics, individuality, and universality as he sees it, jumping in continually to remind us of the realistic fetters to this story that still bar our completion, and will until the conditions of individuality and time are changed or radically re-arranged by technology or other means.
The situation of what should be done with Palestine, in its full modern context including self-serving close-minded circulation of one-sided pamphlets and news by both right and left, is a perfect quandary to tackle with Hegel's theory. If it holds true, than increasing our ability to discuss it as a GROUP will increase our ability to resolve it. We must be ciritcal and focus on the ability of each conversation we have or we witness to conjure and deal with all the relevant facts and fears of law, history, sentiment, religion, crime, weapons, and the stages each of those areas has evolved through that result in the current situation. Each of those topics has evolved in the minds of different nations or different types of people, in collaborative efforts to build or sustain society. Each has a conflicted history, with stage A being contradicted by stage B, and both being semi-synthesized in later stages and so on (dialectics). It's important to remember that it's likely that no stage is fully negated by any modern rhetoric (in the sorry state they operate in at least), in that each springs from a state of nature (or Urban Nature if you like) or naturalistic/spontaneous response to a given scenario, like the scenario of fearing one's neighbor and knowing they avoid the law. Some 'skip' these stages and simply learn other 'more up-to-date' responses to the situation, forgetting the basic facts of life in a threatening area, and the basic responses the brain has to this situation, and how those responses (whether direct responses or abstract plans) are circulated and glorified by conservatism or liberalism. To understand the full scheme of dialectics is important in being able to untie the 'certainty' of a person residing at only ONE point of it claiming they have the solution, whether anachronistic or 'up-to-date'. Residing at only one point and claiming to have a solution is an illusion, for the real problem to be solved is how to synthesize all points within the conversation, not simply what to 'do'.
I have more to say in this intro but i will add it later- - - the rest of this post is the article in Hegelese as I composed it initially for my own reference. I will edit and expand it and re-post so it can be more understood. For now I am still proud of it, though I acknowledge it's in slang that needs expanding to say just what I mean in each point.
Besides Hegel, other important references for the formulation of this theory are psychoanalysis, Max Weber's sociology (which is, as I see it, about the growth of separate societies' stories, rationalizations, truths, etc as forms of Mind and collective unconscious), classical studies and pre-agricultural anthropology (for the real beginning of the dialectic of civilization, state, police, etc), and a bit of neuroscience. yeah i will expand it. it's a book. you'll get it I promise.
1:ii:B: 'Fraud' in Wrong
"The principle of rightness, when distinguished from the right as particular and as determinately existent, is characterised as something [b][i]demanded[/], as the essential thing; yet in this situation it is still only something demanded and from that point of view something purely subjective, and so inessential — something merely showing there. Thus we have [b][i]fraud[/] when the universal is set aside by the particular will and reduced to something only showing in the situation, primarily in contract, when the universal will is reduced to a will which is common only from the outsider’s point of view."
- it is fraud to present the universal will's Demand for a particular outsider's demand.
3:C: World History
"Justice and virtue, wrongdoing, power and vice, talents and their achievements, passions strong and weak, guilt and innocence, grandeur in individual and national life, autonomy, fortune and misfortune of states and individuals, all these have their specific significance and worth in the field of known actuality; therein they are judged and therein they have their partial, though only partial justification. World-history, however, is above the point of view from which these things matter. Each of its stages is the presence of a necessary moment in the Idea of the world mind, and that moment attains its absolute right in that stage. The nation whose life embodies this moment secures its good fortune and fame, and its deeds are brought to fruition."
- the current idea to be achieved in Gaza is the overcoming of partial justifications that point to suppression as a logical choice, in favor of the universal's choice of freedom and support. It is the culmination, so far, (or simply a new area in need of synthesis with theory to be explained and solved) of the warnings set out for The State as a combination of limited Minds, limited methods of access to information and access to the faculties of hypothesis/imagination. The vice and strife of the situation is too distracting for the state of the area in question, and a higher Mind must make itself clear to gather the distracted ones into it, so they will all gain the fruit of higher deeds.
"History is mind clothing itself with the form of events or the immediate actuality of nature. The stages of its development are therefore presented as immediate natural principles. These, because they are natural, are a plurality external to one another, and they are present therefore in such a way that each of them is assigned to one nation in the external form of its geographical and anthropological conditions."
"A nation does not begin by being a state. The transition from a family, a horde, a clan, a multitude, &c., to political conditions is the realisation of the Idea in the form of that nation. Without this form, a nation, as — an ethical substance — which is what it is implicitly, lacks the objectivity of possessing in its own eyes and in the eyes of others, a universal and universally valid embodiment in laws, i.e. in determinate thoughts, and as a result it fails to secure recognition from others. So long as it lacks objective law and an explicitly established rational constitution, its autonomy is formal only and is not sovereignty."
(emphasizing the geneological process of the growth of Mind)
3:B: International Law
"The fact that states reciprocally recognise each other as states remains, even in war — the state of affairs when rights disappear and force and chance hold sway — a bond wherein each counts to the rest as something absolute. Hence in war, war itself is characterised as something which ought to pass away. It implies therefore the proviso of, the jus gentium — that the possibility of peace be retained (and so, for example, that envoys must be respected), and, in general, that war be not waged against domestic institutions, against the peace of family and private life, or against persons in their private capacity."
- The carrying out of war should intend to be discrete, but often (usually) fails to do so. Free association of justification and a spirit of vice leads to the desire to punish the enemy's population itself, to act outside of the rules of war. This stands in for the comparison of virtues made by citizens that goes into the justification of any scale of war: gang war, war on this or that drug or type of crime, war on abortion, etc. Hegel correctly predicts/observes the messy nature of conflict, and the need to theorize a transcendence of this to re-order the geist/mind/spirit of our nations. That is the grace of the theory.
(directly following)
"Apart from this, relations between states (e.g. in war-time, reciprocal agreements about taking prisoners; in peace-time, concessions of rights to subjects of other states for the purpose of private trade and intercourse, &c.) depend principally upon the customs of nations, custom being the inner universality of behaviour maintained in all circumstances."
- the limitation is acknowledged again in more mystical terms recognizable by today's observers of the evolution of multiculturalism: custom as "inner universality". This is the point of spilling-over that we see pulled to its highest melodramatic principle in Gaza: the inability of both sides to understand and recognize the terminology their neighbor internally uses to articulate their approach to a good society. Both sides misrecognize the voices fo the other as veiled or direct calls to violence, not attempts to regain sanity.
- this is more important than just Gaza: it is a quandary of Multicultural society all over the first world as it integrates more muslims into its christian or secular burrows. Three groups need to harmonize their articulation of the path to good society, for the purposes of sanity, meaningful transparency, and to regain the ability to trust, to disnegage the paranoid and violent parts of the agricultural subject's brain.
(quotes from http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/ -scroll to the work Philosophy of Right)
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