Skip to main content

"What if"" will, symbolism, Freud, universal good

What if the proper object of the human will is not this or that good, but a kind of good, a good under a universal formality (for example, we seek not just to know this or that truth but truth as such, etc.)? One consequence would be that we often cannot really see or imagine precisely what it is that we (at a deeper level) desire, and the things that we imagine to be the objects of our desire are at in some ways merely symbolic of the kind of thing we more truly long for, and this kind of thing is more desirable than this thing (it might be more helpful to say that we desire a way of being rather than this or that being).  For example, what seems at first glance to be mere lust for concrete pleasure here and now might really be an example of a venereal craving that has become super-animated with the desire for power as such.  In other words, sometimes when humans crave sex, they crave it inordinately not simply because of a biochemically caused fixation, but because that animal desire is overlaid (oops--pun permitted) with a deeper desire for power as such.  Animal desires in humans can have an extra layer of desire or can become super animated with desires proper to rational beings.  One who accepts all this would expect the psychologist's query into this or that human's motivations to uncover desires that could be described in somewhat Platonic-sounding terms (for example, justice-itself, power-itself, etc.).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more

continuing the discussion with Tim in a new post

Hi Tim, I am posting my reply here, because the great blogmeister won't let me put it all in a comment. Me thinks I get your point: is it that we can name and chimps can't, so therefore we are of greater value than chimps? Naming is something above and beyond what a chimp can do, right? In other words, you are illustrating the point I am making (if I catch your drift). My argument is only a sketch, but I think adding the ability to name names, as it were, is still not enough to make the argument seem cogent. For one can still ask why we prefer being able to name over other skills had by animals but not by humans. The objector would demand a more convincing reason. The answer I have in mind is, to put it briefly, that there is something infinite about human beings in comparison with the subhuman. That "something" has to do with our ability to think of the meaning of the cosmos. Whereas one might say"He's got the whole world in His han...
2 comments
Read more