Template Thinking: The ever narrowing border of human reason

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'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'  Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought.  But we have forgotten Ka...
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The Anti-'Witnessing Consciousness'

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'Is it only you alone who fails to find the self or everyone? You could never be sure about what all others do or do not perceive. As to your own non-perception that is no invariable sign of the self's nonbeing'. Udayana agsint Buddhist arguments for non-perception and non-existence (in Arindam Chakrabarti's 'Realisms Interlinked' pg 17

 'Consciousness, in its observing, learns that what things are in themselves, it itself is.' - Hegel, THe Phenomenology of Consciousness



At the start I want to say straight up that Hegelian theme of 'observing reason' which has eastern correlates in the idea of a 'witness' to consciousness is in fact one of the few genuinely productive startegies produced by ancient and medieval philosophy. By anti I don't (obviously) mean a simple negative but rather what my friend D calls a 'retentive negation' : a negation that preserves what it negates. 

In fact the theme of 'the witness' in philosophy has interesting correlates in social philosophy and even in anthropology. As practicing ethnographers we are to rise to moments of witnessing trauma. By witnessing of course is meant bearing testament to the unasayable, the the limits of what can be said. 

As such 'witnessing' connotes basically some kind of meta-cognition, that to see the fact that the Amaltas flower twirls in spirals as it falls 'I' must see myself seeing the Amaltas flower twirl. I must be conscious of my consciousness of this twirling. 






This strategy is immensely useful as it simultaneously negates two possible outcomes: first the phenomenological (Husserl's return to the things in themselves) which argues for a non-conceptual perception, and on the other hand the Kantian which see only the 'I' itself as being unknowable and thus in a sense the very bastion of cognitive causality. 

Here instead we get the idea of a second order consciousness observing the immediate perceptual order. Moreover in Hegel the witness, called 'observing consciousness' is liable to change itself with each successive stage of consciouensss. It is the transformation in form which itself is determined causally by a particular content: like a twirling Amaltas Flower. It like my perception itself becomes all 'amaltas-twirly' the moment it is struck by it. (This kind of move perhaps is seen even in later Kant as I attempt to show in my posts of LLMs).

                                                                            -x-

However these set of philosophical strategies meet their maker, quite literally, in the thought of Jaqcues Lacan. It has always surprised me that many persons who take philosophy seriously have no place in it for the devastation wrecked on philosophy by Freud and Lacan.

In fact I always imagine them (definitely in a cartoonish way) as bringing chills and shivers to old philosophical and theological relics. This is precisely because Freud exceeds in everyway the possiblities of considering the self and the other. There is no return after Freud to the old dialectics of Self and self and Other and other. 

Following Freud, Lacan takes up his fundamental premises and launches a series of 'projective concepts' which are veritable existent entities in their own right. Perhaps the most striking of them is that of the destruction of the mirror stage through dis-identification of anamorphosis.

Have you ever cauffered yourself in front of the mirror and felt that sudden terror at being confronted with the fact that you are a self?

Well, says Lacan, this proves you're unfortunately human. 

While the mirror stage implies that the infant gains a kind of social body by imitating bodies around it (think of the endless becoming animals wasted here in mere human imitation, ah what of all our aspirations to become trees and clouds and elephants!). And then we are faced with breaks in our self-identification, some breaks more devastating than others. Here, the paradigmatic example of anamorphosis is of course the gaze: when we are struck, for example, in a sudden moment, watching a crime-thriller that we are empathizing with the villain. 

But in a more serious vein, how many of us are struck everyday by the unlivability of the projections of ourselves we send out into the ether, the lack of robustness of our storytelling of our own selves. For how many is it too much to stare in the mirror, beyond the absolute immediate trimming of the face. And for how many is even that much too much?

I feel as fieldworkers it is time for us to give up on the witness, on the observer. It is time for the observing consciousness to reverse its gaze altogether, to turn from the other side to watch the witness witnessing the ritual, where the witness is the community itself. 



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