text:
Beyond Psychoanalysis
by Lyndon LaRouche
Rev A (removed nonbreaking spaces, which caused premature line breaks, and made minor format corrections)
from the Beyond Psychoanalysis reprint-issue of The Campaigner
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Over the period since September, 1972, organizations of the Labor Committees in North America and Western Europe have been given preliminary exposure to techniques more advanced in some aspects than have so far been known to professional psychology. These approaches are being developed as indispensable auxiliary means for directly overcoming the fatal internal flaw of all socialist organizations, Lenin's included, up to this time. The application of psychological knowledge in this process has been a means, not an independent end.
Although the general basis for this has been identified in published items earlier and the program broadly detailed in Spring, 1973 internal transactions of the Labor Committees, several ends are served by a public account of the matter at this juncture. It is of relatively trivial significance that our report will remove credible basis for continuation of the sort of reckless, scandal-mongering speculation which the project has recently stirred up among certain nominally socialist groupings. More relevant, we provide qualified professionals with an adequate guide to their own contributing studies and reflections along the lines we outline. More important, we shall illuminate one of the most important, and hitherto fatally neglected problems of socialist organizations.
1. Motives for the Project
Although the writer's collateral work in related fields includes scattered projects over a period of a quarter-century, the focussing of that background into the present project originated in the effort to solve certain critical problems of pedagogy in the teaching of dialectical method and Marxian economics. The elementary notion of a dialectical method itself and those
Marxian economic conceptions subsumed by the notion of "extended reproduction" are ostensibly so difficult of comprehension that there has been no competent secondary writing on the dialectical method until recent years. Of all well-known Marxian economists, only Rosa Luxemburg attained a credible comprehension of Marx's notion of extended reproduction. (11a) From studies of the outstanding secondary literature and experience with well over a thousand students in the writer's course in Marxian economics, it was possible to isolate the form of the mental blockage which usually prevents comprehension of notions of that order. It was clear that remedial methods lay beyond the scope of curriculum design per se.
A more immediate prompting for the current form of the project was developed out of work undertaken under such rubrics as "The German Ideology Today." Currently, in addition to the intensive continuing study since 1968 of the development of fascist movements out of "counter-culture" and anarcho-syndicalist ferment, for over a year Labor Committee task forces drawn from (presently) each of the major branches of Western national cultures have been critically examining the origins and dynamics of the special form of capitalist ideology more or less characteristic of the dominant working-class strata of each contemporary national-language sector. The cited, "The German Ideology Today," has already begun the process of publication with a series of preliminary papers. Projects in the French, Italian, English, Latin American, Greek, and Swedish ideologies today are in various stages of maturity. The dominant capitalist ideologies of workers in the U.S.A. are being analyzed by focussing on the distinctions among the U.S., (English-speaking) Canadian, and English forms of ideology.
The practical political feature of such investigations can be made obvious enough.
If each individual will look ahead, imagining himself permitted one last recurrence of consciousness at his own funeral, he must imagine himself thinking then, "I wonder what that was all about?" Notably in the present period, when the mythos of "Zero Population Growth" is rampant, the individual considering himself as an isolated individual must find it difficult to argue against the indictment that he has been using up scarce resources, space and "employment opportunities" otherwise available to other individuals. Objectively speaking, can he "competitively" justify his existence to society?
To the extent that the individual worker (among others) in capitalist society views himself as a mere self-evident individual, his "detached" assessment of the existential question must impel him toward the most profound despair, and even perhaps toward suicide. If he reviews each year of his adult life in detail, he has a picture of the following sort. He arises, weekdays, perhaps at about six in the morning, wretchedly bustling to get out and begin commuting to work. During the remainder of the day, his sixteen or less waking hours are apportioned somewhat as follows. Eight hours work, one to two and a half hours commuting, a half hour for lunch -- a total of about two hours a day for meals and cleaning up for meals. One to three hours for chores about the house or automobile, and an hour or so propped in front of the "boob tube" sucking at a couple cans of beer or highballs. Each year, one to three weeks for a vacation -- when the budget will tolerate that, and throughout it all, the years pass one by one in greying banality,
For example: in West Germany the typical young adult worker of today was "tracked" into a miserable Volkschule early in his education, from which he was "graduated" at the age of fifteen, when he became an apprentice, earning perhaps the magnificent monthly sum of about 300 D-marks. This is a miserable pittance on which he could not support himself, but which usually represented a much-needed supplementary income for his parents' household. After completing this apprenticeship, during which he has acquired a skill or semi-skill which in a majority of cases is already obsolete, he rose typically to the magnificent monthly income of about 1,000 D-marks. If he is fortunate, he, his wife, and two children spend about 300 D-marks monthly rent for a tiny three-plus-room apartment, and perhaps eventually buys a small automobile, which is used more as a curb-space display fetish for polishing than for driving (since his budget can ill-afford gasoline). Yet, this oppressed West German worker typically takes pride in the fact that he is an appendage of his firm and thus a minute cog in the so-called "economic miracle" of his country.
In each country, the worker is protected against the suicidal despair of an objective view of his individual qua individual life, by seizing tightly to a set of illusions. These illusions give his individual life a fictitious sort of importance and, not accidentally, locate that fictitious importance in accepting the prevailing capitalists' rules of life for a dutiful wage-slave. The general form of such capitalist ideologies is ultimately identical from country to country, but each national sector tends to be distinguished by a peculiar sub-species of that ideology, to the effect that the secondary problems of organizing workers differ correspondingly from one such sector to the next.
Consider a summary comparison of the English and U.S. workers' capitalist ideologies. Both of these English-language capitalist cultures are characterized by pragmatism, but there are important differentiations between English and U.S. pragmatism. The U.S.A., at least until the most recent period, was characterized by an outlook of the sort addressed by the 1960 John F. Kennedy presidential campaign's "New Frontier" appeal to U.S. ideology. Depreciating British capital, at least for the past sixty years, distinguishes England from the U.S.A. by that vicious stagnation and relatively stone-like social immobility otherwise expressed in the British monarchy's support from the Labour Party.
These broad distinctions underlie contradictory special distinctions between the U.S. and British labor movements. Because of greater social mobility and "frontier" outlooks in the U.S. working class, the U.S. worker has relatively greater individual combat potential. Connected to this greater relative combativity, since the U. S. is a society of change relative to the English situation, the U.S. worker is quicker to understand and accept the notion of changing things.
Yet, during the past thirty-odd years, the English worker has been in effect more combative in class struggles than the U.S. worker! The irony of this is that the U.S. worker, just because he is more inclined to foresee change, is more vulnerable to the recurring illusion that U.S. capitalism is about to change for the better, an inclination to foresee favorable change in his personal situation which ameliorates his feeling of desperation as an individual under oppressive circumstances. The British worker has less confidence in his ability to individually get ahead of his mates (to find alternatives much nearer than Australia), and regards existing oppressive circumstances as something which has to be faced up to along class lines.
In net, the combativity of the English militant worker, just because of the English ideology, tends to be conservative (defensive) militancy rather than the potentially revolutionary militancy of fighting for change. The British worker tends to fight along traditional-goals lines of resistance to employer and capitalist-state encroachments, by contrast with the U.S. worker who is more disposed, relatively, to fight for innovations.
In each national sector, the general task of the socialist working-class organizer remains fundamentally the same. His essential task is to strip away the bourgeois persona of the worker, making it possible for the worker to tolerate the awful objective truth thus confronted by offering the worker a new, positive basis for his personal identity in the political class-organizing process. Although the general form of capitalist ideology gives this problem the same basic form and programmatic remedy in all advanced capitalist sectors, the differentiations of specific sectoral ideologies require the psychotherapeutic aspects of the effort to subsume somewhat different concrete secondary forms in each such sector.
For example, the case of Italy today. The entire Italian Left demonstrates nothing so clearly as that it seems to have learned nothing, "organically" or otherwise, from the experience of 1919-1922. The best the Italian Left today could do would be to occupy the factories individually, as it did in the great upsurge of the post-World War I period, and then wait for the fascist squadristi to pick off these factories one by one. The reason for this hysterical blindness to the lessons of history is located more immediately in the predominance
of interconnected machismo and derived anarcho-syndicalist parochialist tendencies in the individual Italian worker. Like the French and Hispanic cultures, the Italian culture is closer to the peasant-like petit-bourgeois world-outlook examined by Karl Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire and Poverty of Philosophy. He has a peasant-like asociality - relative to the more socialized American or English worker - which demands of him a massive outer layer of persona, protecting a terrified secret "inner Self" underneath. Existentialism is not accidentally the suitable ideology of such Latin machismo cultures, and suicide not-accidentally the only complete existentialist act. Without ripping away the Italian ideology from the Italian worker - and similar psychological surgery on the French - to speak of actual revolutionary movements in those countries is purely idle chatter.
Exemplary of the anarcho-syndicalist variant is the proto-fascist D.H. Lawrence's self-revealing criticism of Walt Whitman. Lawrence charged that Whitman "leaks," referring to the American tendency to "spill the gut" even with mere acquaintances. D.H. Lawrence's reactionary social tendencies are underlined by the notorious theme of Lady Chatterly's lover (although the same bestial Weltanschaunng permeates all Lawrence's writings). Sexual relations for Lawrence are animal, not human relations; they are a realization of the bestial sensual element of the partners, in opposition to a sensuous celebration of a human love relationship. Lawrence' sexual partners are tightly self-encased "pure individuals," using one another as objects in turn. Lawrence cannot conceive of a mutual sensuous relationship between human lovers. The proto-fascist petit-bourgeois character-type is an isolated asocial (heteronomic) individual who finds nothing so abhorrent and frightening as the notion of sharing one's innermost thoughts with other human beings.*
Consider the implications of ideology for the cadres of a socialist organization. It should be obvious that all talk of socialist organizing is merely pathetic chattering unless the organization involved first settles account with the characteristic capitalist ideology chaining the minds of the workers of that sector. The cadres must first begin to settle accounts with that same ideology in themselves: the educator must himself be educated.
* Some Europeans and American cultural relativists will see in this a tendency toward American chauvinism. In certain respects, the U S industrial worker is more culturally advanced than his European brothers, sisters, and, literally, cousins! That is a simple fact, despite the notorious philistine anti-intellectualism of the U.S. society generally. The greater social mobility, the higher material standard of living, the higher standards of public education, the greater rate of technological development and change, the greater ratios of leisure time and activity in the U.S.A., especially respecting the past sixty years of mostly misery, war, and stagnation in Europe, have given the U.S worker certain actual and potential material and cultural advantages over his European brothers and sisters. However: send a U.S worker to a Volkschule, apprentice him at fifteen, and limit him to 1,000 D-marks monthly income (of which 300 D-marks goes for rent of tiny quarters), and perhaps he would not do so well in these conditions as his German brothers; material conditions of life do not count for nothing!
That is merely the negative aspect of the organizer's task. Strip away the worker's persona (his ideologized self-estimation) and, if one has done nothing more, one has merely confronted the worker (qua individual) with intolerable objective reality respecting his conditions. To organize the working class one must effectively answer our hypothetical question of the funeral: "What was that all about?" One must be able give the worker a self-conscious social identity as a person whose existence is necessary to the entire human race.
The immediate empirical location of that new self- estimation for the worker is generally in the worker's activity in organizing other workers. The worker must be able to see the importance of his "inner Self" as reflected in the positive changes in world-outlook he is effecting among other workers. To communicate this new sense of self to the worker, the cadre himself must have a clear self-consciousness of his own identity in the same general terms.
It will be clearer toward the later parts of this present report that the two problems, that of Marxian pedagogy and that of overcoming ideology, are ultimately the same matter. Retrospectively, this is now clear to the leading layers of the International Caucus of Labour Committees and the National Caucus of Labor Committees. It was not quite so clear in fact until the Fall-Winter, 1972-73 months, when the ICLC's growth confronted it with the urgency of conceptualizing a practice based on understanding of national ideologies. It was not quite so clear until the work of organizing employed and unemployed, Black, Hispanic, and "white" workers into a common NUWRO formation confronted the entire NCLC membership with certain ugly ideological difficulties to be overcome as a precondition for organizing the U.S. working-class forces en masse. As the result of a self-conscious reflection on such experience, the Labor Committee tendency was forced to begin pushing the bounds of applied psychology beyond the scope of existing conceptions of psychology on certain fronts." The tendency was compelled, like Marx, to locate the individual cadre's personal resources as a socialist organizer in creative qualities of mind which extant psychology generally did not imagine to exist in that form.
2. The General Thesis: Humanism
The greater part of the material we introduce to psychology is by no means new in itself, but has long existed as established knowledge outside institutionalized psychology per se. Because the fundamental conceptions were successively developed by Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, we may properly define the specific enlargement we now introduce as the contribution from "Marxian psychology."
Although we have not previously situated this body of established knowledge as the specific basis for psychology, apart from several internal Labor Committee transactions and Dialectical Economics (11a), we have frequently cited the general body of systematic evidence on which the basic principles are premised. That includes the 1970 convention resolution draft of "Founding Principles of the Labor Committees." It is sufficient to summarize that general thesis again here.
The eruption of scientific knowledge which occurred in Western Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century is characterized by the notion we properly term Humanism. This notion arose in circumstances in which a few centers of Europe were enjoying rapid advance in contrast to pervasive depopulation and decay around them. The progress of these exceptional centers, taken in contrast to the ruin, stimulated the conception known as the Necessity for Progress: (12f) that progress of the sort then typified by emergent capitalist development was necessary for the successful perpetuation of human existence generally. This progress, in turn, was associated with innovations in social, political, and technological forms, innovations which were substantially attributable to the creative initiatives of individual minds. Taken together, this portended the view that Freedom (creative initiatives by gifted individuals) was Necessity. To the extent that the capitalist notion of political freedom represents qualitative progress in the human condition over all pre-capitalist forms, the capitalist notion of political freedom is a banalized expression of the Freedom/Necessity concept just identified. The other term from this notion of Freedom/Necessity is Humanism. (11g)
Humanism, as a practical way of describing such notions of Freedom/Necessity, begins with attention to the creative individual, whose inventions make general progress possible. Freedom means initially the conditions favorable to the discovery and propagation of new fundamental laws, new ways of doing things, by individuals. Humanism is therefore also occupied with the conditions required to produce such gifted individuals, the material and political conditions necessary to produce the numbers and varieties of gifted individuals society requires for maintaining the necessary rate of general progress. As a corollary, humanism is also occupied with the material and political conditions of the population more generally, its mobility, cultural development, and material preconditions of cultural development: that new inventions might be realized for practice by a general society culturally qualified to assimilate the conceptions involved in such practice.
This capitalist discovery proves, on systematic examination of human history and pre-history, to reflect a general law of human existence.
The discovery of Humanism (Freedom-Necessity) as a concept belongs to capitalist development, since capitalism is the first form of society to make progress (change) the immediate, conscious feature of the process of expansion of the productive forces. So capitalism, by creating the practical conditions demanding discovery of this notion, made possible and necessary man's knowledge of his own history. The whole realm of human experience, to the extent that expanding collations of evidence and other artifacts could adduce it, has provided the empirical resource for testing the Humanist hypothesis against the totality of man's experience. Hence, to the extent that History first developed as a serious discipline under capitialism it abandoned the sterile (e.g., Hellenic, Roman, etc.) forms of mere narratives, genealogies, and homiletics, and became a new body of systematic inquiry, a testing of the hypothesis that the course of human existence was adumbrated by a principle of progress. (Serious historiography today thus has no internal systematic resemblance to Ancient or other pre-Renaissance predecessors.)
With the evidence so accumulated and analyzed to this time, the hypothesis has been conclusively proven.
Systematic study of human pre-history today begins with the biosphere. The following elliptical summary does not distort any of the essential points in its simplification of the account.
It is permissible to discount the sources of energy (geothermal, radioactivity) for life indigenous to earth (in earlier periods) and to interpret the processes as functions of the throughput and accumulation of solar radiation. (N.B. thermonuclear power development today is an apparent exception.) Three connected parameters then summarize analysis of the biosphere as a whole. First, we measure the total caloric content of the biosphere, next the rate of growth of this caloric content, and finally the acceleration of this rate of growth. The last parameter, exponential tendencies associated with the rate of growth of the caloric content of the biosphere, subsumes the other two. (11a)
We trace the evolution of the biosphere m the following general terms. If we assumed a fixed rate of growth for the caloric content of the biosphere, we would first encounter the hypothetical limit at which the mass of biosphere had reached the relatively-finite spatial and resource boundaries for the "inorganic" earth for that mode of expansion. However, a fixed mode of growth could not simply stagnate at that limit: it would have to regress as the boundary values were approached. Thus, the principle of exponential tendencies is proven by the continued existence of the biosphere -- as well as by its intriguing biochemical history.
Competent ecology rejects the Darwinian approach. The question of the viability of a new variety in a certain relative magnitude is a question of the effect of that variety's existence on, (1) the total caloric mass of the biosphere as a whole, (2) the rate of growth of the biomass, (3) the rate of increase of the biomass's growth-rate, with the third parameter again subsuming the other two. This relationship to the biomass is reflexive: the conditions for existence of a variety represent as aggregation of kinds of species and biological processes, which, in turn, are the preconditions for propagations of a variety in a certain magnitude. This larger aggregation, the conditions for reproductive existence of the specific type, corresponds to a parameter of the third type: that is, the existence of such an aggregation is determined (subsumed) by a specific value for the third parameter!
With the emergence of man, the form of evolution of the biosphere changes qualitatively. As man begins to use even deliberative cooperative forms of food-gathering, and then begins to employ the simplest tools, his rate of reproduction exceeds the prior rate of evolutionary adaptation of the biosphere generally. Consequently, each mode of social existence represents what we can retrospectively identify as a specific technology, a technology which, in turn, defines certain aspects of nature as implicit "resources," which are inevitably relatively-finite for that technology. Consequently, human existence is characterized by a continual overtaking of such boundary-conditions, such that the more successfully a society even simply perpetuates a constant population in a specific mode, the more it exhausts the material basis for continued human existence in that mode.
Hence, human development, or the Necessity of Freedom.
In general, the existence of man demands successive modes of "Technology" (and parallel, qualitative alterations in the organization of human activity). Al though these do not necessarily occur unilinearly, and although progress is not inevitable for each society, progress in some stems of the development of society does represent a successive ordering of human existence. The increase in population, since the Pleistocene, to approaching four billions persons today is a summation of that progressive development of "technology" and appropriate social forms.
This exceptional feature of human evolution noted, human development otherwise fits the general ecological model we summarized above. If we include the "caloric" throughput content of man and all his activities within the biomass, we have the approach (including man and his activities with the total biomass) through which human evolution can be fitted into a competent general "thermodynamical" ecology.
In this approach, we determine the ordering of human societies as follows. Our first parameter is the per capita caloric content of human consumption per se (including all objects of human consumption); this rises, and its rate of growth tends to accelerate. We must also consider the per capita caloric content of all human productive activities (over and above consumption per se). This defines, for capitalist or socialist economy, the real magnitudes of V (Variable Capital), C (Constant Capital), d (Capitalists' Consumption). The expansion of this mass defines a ratio, (S-d)/(C+V), which is, obviously enough, a "free energy" ratio. The exponential growth of this ratio, relative to the equivalent of current per-capita values for C, V, d, provided that the total biomass is also growing, satisfies the preconditions for evolution of society.
Such facts pose the question of whence the negative entropy of evolutionary development? Wolfgang Koehler's famous experiments with chimpanzees circumscribes the class of phenomena to be more directly investigated.(9) Given the task-oriented setting of necessity for rises in S'/(C+V), the objects presented (as objects of consumption and production) to man by his own productive output can be crudely regarded as similar in implication to the potential tools set in the cages of Koehler's chimpanzee subjects. The synthesis of a Gestalt by the chimpanzee, the rudimentary form of creative mentation, is an empirical proof of the existence of the kind of phenomena we must isolate for the investigation.
The evolution of man is absolutely contrasted to the existence and behavior of any of the lower beasts, chimpanzees included. In the lower beasts, including the higher apes, virtually no alteration in the range of behavior occurs progressively from generation to generation. The per capita calorie throughput and the rates of potential growth of that species of biomass material are essentially fixed -- at least in range. With man, the physiology of creative mentation, exhibited in a more rudimentary fashion by Koehler's chimpanzees, has led to deliberatively synthesized new technologies, equivalent in effect to a species' deliberatively turning itself (by will) into a higher species (higher negentropic values). It is, indeed, man's study of his own progress through such processes of deliberation which makes possible and is scientific knowledge.
Kant and Hegel properly emphasize this distinction between man and the lower beasts.(6a,8) In place of a learned response to fixed classes of phenomena, man's deliberative process of development of his mode of behavior addresses itself to principles underlying transformations in otherwise apparently fixed classes of phenomena. It is the adduction of such underlying principles, enabling man to implicitly (at least) predict that a new form of behavior will be superior to an old form, which yields those same principles which are the subject and substance of human knowledge in general.
It is our thesis, continuing the successive development of the same kind of thesis by Descartes,(2) Spinoza,(6c) Hegel,(6a) Feuerbach,(3a) and Marx,(12b) that the "primary substance" of human mental processes is creative mentation; this view is in direct and absolute opposition to the prevailing, reductionist conception of psychology.
Reductionist psychology locates the primary data of mind in mental events which exhibit the form of logic, in terms of discrete images or psychological material susceptible of being made conscious in the form of discrete images. Like logic, reductionist psychology accounts for the motivation of those images (elements) in terms of metaphysical notions of relations (e.g., "instincts," "drives," etc.). Even those forms of radical behaviorist psychology which pretend to deny the existence of "drives," "instincts," etc., do nothing more than rather hysterically ignore the necessary implicit assumption of such axiomatic "drives" in their schemas. We insist, on the basis of the kind of evidence cited, that the process associated with creative mentation is the "primary substance" of the human mind, and that all other mental phenomena are determined (subsumed) by those primary processes. (11a)
That, in brief, is the case for the general thesis within which the question of human psychology must be circumscribed. The analysis of the mind is necessarily limited in usefulness and even tinged with reckless incompetence until psychology accounts for that which is the deliberative processes underlying the whole sweep of human history and pre-history in the ecological terms we have prescribed for that history. Such a view of history, Marx's view of man as a world-historical being,(12b) is the constant criterion to which every conjecture must be submitted for criticism before one advances to hypothesis. Any facts respecting psychology are obviously either false or are obviously grossly misconstrued unless they represent knowledge bearing on such an historical view of the human deliberative processes. This is our general thesis.
3. The Cartesian Theorems
In the emergence of fundamental new scientific conceptions and entire new world-outlooks, one properly distinguishes among various proto-discoveries, which occur as improvisatory glimmerings or intuitions, and the initial systematic demonstration of some new, comprehensive principle. Throughout the Renaissance from approximately the latter part of the thirteenth century, Humanist ferment does not begin to appear as a systematic world view until Giordano Bruno (murdered by the Inquisition in 1600). Yet his writings do not stand on their own feet; it is only when we look backwards at Bruno's writings from the standpoint of Kepler (1571-1630) and Descartes (1596-1650)(2,6e) that we can isolate the germ of Kepler's and Descartes' systematical humanism in Bruno.
Unlike Descartes, who we shall examine here as the founder of scientific psychology, Kepler offers no direct attack on the problem of the form and content of human thought. Yet, once we look beyond plausible edification to concentrate on the fanatical determination behind Kepler's founding of modern physical science, we are compelled to adduce that philosophical outlook which impelled and regulated his discovery and proof of the existence of universal law.
A certain crude, empirical conception of physical science did of course exist prior to and following Kepler, but the advantage of Kepler over, for example, the outlook of Galileo is qualitative, not one of degree. Before Kepler, as with those who maintained or regressed to the pre-Keplerian thrust toward empiricism, the notion of the study of the regular order of nature was "pluralistic." Various categories of phenomena were treated as if separate categories of the Divine Will, within which narrow confines man could explore regularity through observation and experiment, hoping thereby to adduce the specific regularity of God's Will (Dispensation) for such classes of phenomena. Kepler cut through such pathetic forms of inquiry, specifying that the entire universe was subject to a single principle of lawfulness, which subsumed all other, more particular forms of law. Kepler expressed this view in the argument that God's infinite (i.e., unique, comprehensive, existent) Will was rational, i.e., susceptible of being mastered as human knowledge of even human individuals.
We have two, ultimately interconnected sorts of evidence of the determining importance of this philosophical premise in Kepler. Immediately, his papers suffice to demonstrate that he could not have sustained the effort to produce his great universal laws without the impetus and critical rigor supplied by this premise, More broadly, respecting the empiricists' objection that the general development of physical science is not shown (to them!) to depend upon such philosophical assumptions, the whole history of scientific development, from Kepler through Einstein, shows that the seminal conceptions governing the critical advances in science have been contributed chiefly by individuals in whom the kernel of Kepler's philosophical outlook operated as a largely self-conscious motivation and critical faculty for their creative work.
We shall shortly show exactly such concern in the case of Descartes. As for Newton, and other representatives of that branch of Descartes' "family," the conceptual basis for the practical advances of Newton, Euler, Lagrange, et al., is principally directly taken from Kepler and Descartes. Leibniz's perception of the problem of the epistemological fallacy of entropy ("God's clock") and his efforts to develop an analysis situs, are exemplary of a different branch of the same influences. Empiricist cynics may disparage the overview of eighteenth-century physics advances by Kant
and Hegel. Despite these cynics, all the great formal achievements of the latter half of the 19th century, exemplified by G. Riemann, G. Cantor,(1) F. Klein, depend upon individuals who were passionately self-conscious of the kind of contradictions in science cited by Hegel. Moreover, the principal actualized achievements of modern science (e.g., epitomized by Planck, Einstein, Schroedinger, et al.) could not have occurred except as a consequence of precisely such philosophical preoccupations of Riemann, Cantor, and Klein.
Kepler's thrust of self-development, resurrected in a more advanced form by Einstein's Riemannian approaches, distinguishes between two possible approaches to physical universalities, the continuous and the discrete, recognizing that the discrete is a lower, adumbrated form of the continuous.
In the simplest classroom sort of illustration of this point, one can emphasize the fact, formally proven by Cantor,(1) that even in an "infinite" period of time it would be impossible to identify all of the points which can be located within any line segment, or that the curve cannot be developed from the straight line. Consequently, the attempt to discover universal laws of the complete order of nature from an ordinary algebraic (formal-logical) standpoint must ultimately fail. Hence, any interpretation of the universe which assumes the
universe to be an aggregation of either elementary physical particles, or of elementary discrete sense-perceptions of the continuum, is necessarily false as a basis for representation of fundamental physical law. Consequently, Kepler's converging toward his partial demonstration that fundamental physical laws of discrete motion were properties of such continua, is an awesome achievement for his time from the retrospective view of modern knowledge. From the standpoint of Einstein and Planck (as partial realizations of Riemann and Cantor), we must regard Kepler as the virtual founder of all modern physical science.
We shall see that the necessary preference of the true continuum, over the universal aggregation of discrete elementarities, is of absolutely decisive importance respecting the nature of the human mind. In citing Kepler's case in the terms employed above, we have moved toward that result for psychology, to the extent we have indicated that the deliberative processes of creative mentation, by which man makes fundamental advances in the material precondition for his continued existence, are processes coherent with the notion of universal continuities as the unique elementary (primitive) substance.
The essence of Humanism (and modern fundamental scientific achievements) is summed up in the Spinozan view of two theorems from Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum" (properly translated: " 'I think,' therefore I am being.") and "the existence of perfection." We shall restate these in symbolic form.
Cogito ergo sum: Every particular of human know- ledge exists uniquely in the form: "I think that Xi" (i = 1,2,3,...). No Xi exists as a predicate except as a predicate of an existing subject, "I think." Therefore, if some Xi actually exists, the universal subject, "I think," not only is existent but has a superior certainty of existence with respect to that of any predicates.
Even in this form, "Cogito ergo sum" states the first approximation of the modern dialectical method. In contemporary academic jargon, "I think" is a metalogical existence relative to the aggregation of particular predicates. "I think" is the existence of the class for which all Xi are merely members. The "independence" of the existence of "I think," as the existence of the class as such, is demonstrated by the impossibility of including "I think" as one of the members of the class, as a member of the class which can be prescribed to exist by logical induction from even any large number of other members. The aggregation of members of the class does not logically subsume the existence of the class itself.
Although formal discussion of this problem is more or less restricted in modern times to mootings within pure mathematics and formal logic, the essential paradox (antinomy) encountered in some formal investigations
is a sub-species of the same essential predicament confronted constantly in everyday psychological life. We shall demonstrate that connection, with increasing force, as we proceed. Immediately, the reader should bear this point in mind respecting the relevance of the material we are treating at this phase of the present article.
To situate Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" in the terms of reference respectively employed later by such figures as Hegel and Cantor, we argue that Descartes is wilfully avoiding the induction fallacies of "bad infinity." We offer a limited view of that problem as follows. As Cantor proves formally (respecting the "power set of all sets"), even an "infinite" enumeration of the terms of a class could not completely identify the totality (Gestalt) of the class. No amount (Descartes insists) of experience of the sort by which we "know" any Xi could possibly reach knowledge of the human in terms of Xi. The class as a whole ("I think" as an existent subject, the existence of the class as a whole) determines the existence of the particular members of the class, but is neither determined by them nor as one of them.
Yet, foreshadowing the kernel of Cantor's notion of transfinite numbers, from the existence of the predicates we do know the actual existence of the class as a whole dialectically. The difficulty immediately confronting one at such a point of the investigation is that the argument of "Cogito ergo sum" conditionally proves a proposition which has to be explored further before we can account fully for what the first theorem has proven. To restate the point: the argument of "Cogito ergo sum" proves the existence of the subject (the human self = "I think") by demonstrating the absurdity of a contrary judgement. It is a "negative" proof, not yet positive knowledge of the human self (i.e., Mind). The first theorem thus begs the second, "perfection," such that the two must be regarded as interconnected, interdependent.
"Perfection": Modify the symbolic statement to read: "I think that Xij," in which, for any value of i, j = 1,2,3...., are successive orderings of advancement in knowledge respecting any species of experience. Employing the same dialectic used to determine the existence of the subject, "I think," for "Cogito ergo sum," what is the quality of the same subject for the expression "I think that Xij"? Relative to any fixed ordering of knowledge (e.g., for j =1 throughout any "complete" class of enumerations, " I think that Xij," ) "I think" has the self-evident quality of self-developing progressive change.
The attempt to interpret this from the standpoint of elementary discrete sense-impressions (e.g., empiricism, logical positivism) must be rejected as a reading of Descartes' argument. i.e., Xij cannot be treated as an elementary or self-evident sense-impression, since it is not only changing, but its "motion" of change is the
primary datum (predicate) of the "set." E.g., instead of treating each Xij as a self-evident factual datum, the ceil-form of human knowledge becomes, as first approximation for hypothesis, the process of change linking any Xij to its successor Xi(j+1).
However, the subject can no longer be treated as empirically equivalent to the particular individual self. Since the advancement of knowledge in individuals is dependent upon developments occurring throughout contemporary society, and since the "set" of predicates for the subject of this theorem is not completed except in the future and past, the advancement of knowledge in the individual is itself merely a predicate of something infinite: universal, unique, and comprehensive. The existent subject defined by "I think that Xij is an infinite existence of the motion of self-perfection of human knowledge, which is actualized through the creative contributions of particular individuals as immediate predicates of that infinite being.
If Spinoza's interpretation of Descartes is correct in this argument, and it is absolutely correct as far as he proceeds, then, setting the evidence for the general thesis in conjunction with Descartes' two great dialectical theorems, the motion of the human mind (its primary substance, being = self-perfection), must be coherent in form and nature with the primary substance of the infinity which is the physical universe. The form of "matter" itself must be that of a self-perfecting continuum, and neither an aggregation of discrete elementary particles nor a simple, linear continuum.
This reading of Descartes was first developed by B. Spinoza (notably, his Ethics) who adduced from such dialectical insights the notion that the creative principle of universal mind and universal matter-motion were coextensive infinite "substances," infinitely extended being. Spinoza was also the first to articulate the notion of an actual infinite in opposition to "bad infinity," situating this distinction in respect to the ethical predicament confronting each individual in society.(3b)
From a modern standpoint, even the application of crude engineering-school thermodynamics to industrial engineering knowledge of production and distribution proves Spinoza's specific notion on this point.(11a) The material preconditions for the existence of any individual in capitalist society (or, the U.S.S.R., China, etc., as well) depends upon a worldwide network of interconnected production of both material conditions of life and of the households in which workers are accultured to be productive in terms of modern technologies. This network could not be broken up into smaller units without reversing technological development and general social productivity. The existing human population would then be largely wiped out and the residue degraded to a medieval material and cultural condition, by such autarchical "reforms." In such a world-historical
organization of production every creative contribution to the advancement of, or realization of innovations increasing the negentropy of the network is of universal benefit to the human race present, future - and, implicitly, past! Such acts of creative mentation (e.g., either in creating new knowledge or realizing its application) make each human individual responsible for these an actually infinite being, a concrete form of infinite being, a concrete universal.
Spinoza's argument becomes lucid when he is read in terms of our illustration of the point. The task of the individual, he prescribed, is to locate the necessary form of progress for one's society, to also locate the "handles" of social development accessible to one's practice, and in that setting make one's active existence (creative acts) a positive and permanent (i.e., "infinite") contribution to the existence of humanity.
The individual who has competently adduced his Spinozan ethical task for his time and place, and who also self-consciously governs his actions with scientific competence to such ends, is by definition an un-alienated man, a true human being. His value to society is located not in the mere specific acts ("predicates") which are useful, since the completion of the act would annul his further importance to society. His value to society is located in his self-conscious activity; he is valuable to society not merely for what specific contributions he has made, but as he represents continuing resource, a self-conscious activity engaged in
continuously struggling to make such contributions. That is the kernel of the Spinozan dialectic and Spinozan Humanism.
There is another major conceptual difficulty to be overcome in connection with the Descartes-Spinoza dialectic. Hegel's devastating quip on Joseph Schelling suffices to illustrate the problem involved.(6a,8)
Schelling earned personal honor in philosophy by rejecting the dominant, fatuous proclivity of the eighteenth century to disregard Spinoza as a "dead dog." Yet, Schelling himself proved incapable of understanding the actual content of either Descartes or Spinoza. He accepted the idea of as "infinitely extended being," simultaneously mind and substance, but he had no notion of this substance as being actual self-movement, actual self-perfection.
The attempt to establish a "unified field theory" illustrates the point to be made. If one interprets the implications of Riemann's discoveries only in a certain limited way, pathetic fallacies are introduced which prohibit the advancement of useful experimental hypotheses respecting a comprehensive notion of universal physical law. If one interprets "continuum" as signifying a simple energy continuum, the cognition of the universe as a totality leads only to a notion of an infinity of Unending "Blah." Or, as Hegel demolished Schelling on precisely this account in his Phenomenology, one's efforts to conceptualize an infinite continuum in this way leads only to "a night in which all cows are black."(6a)
To conceptualize the physical universe as a true continuum, it would be necessary to supercede the notion of simple energy by a notion of a universal continuum of negative entropy, just as exponential values for the expression S'/(C+V) define a self-developing continuum for socialist society (when the elements of the ratio are proportions of total productive labor and changes in values are compared with existing per capita rates of throughput of C and V).(11a) It would be necessary, in the case of universal physics, to approach the formulation of observational and experimental hypotheses from the standpoint of recognizing that the "fundamental laws of the universe" (as we now understand the notion of the application of those laws to nearby "macro" space) must be defined as changing in some ordered fashion. As a result, the fundamental metric of the universe must probably evolve in some fashion appropriate to the general, progressive evolution of the universe in general.*
For the reason indicated respecting Schelling's case, the elaborated comprehension of the accomplishments of Descartes and Spinoza begins with Hegel, and is essentially completed by Karl Marx's resolution of the uncompleted contributions to Spinoza and Hegel of Feuerbach.(12b) With Hegel the notion of a universal (actually infinite) self-developing creative process as primary substance becomes the center of scientific inquiry. Indeed, all the preconditions for psychological science are completed with the successive work of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx: as we shall show in a general way in due course.
4. The Case of Beethoven
The major practical problem confronted in the Labor Committee project of this past winter and spring was that of providing the members with some accessible empirical demonstration of the actual existence within themselves of powers of the form of Cartesian perfection. Although the essential and ultimate proof to be desired is found best in the political organizing process, we had the problem of communicating the necessary notion at a time when the few hundreds workers directly affected by our organization do not yet represent the advanced quality of mass-strike ferment in which these human qualities become overwhelmingly evident. For reasons to be indicated immediately below, an approximation, temporary substitute, and preparation for the mass-organizing experience is available in an individual's self-conscious experience of the creative qualities in a great work of art. Notably: the instance of the great compositions included among Beethoven's last forty opus numbers (from approximately Opus 95 onward).
The writer had developed a preliminary thesis on art to this point during the 1948-53 period, and had extended the inquiry in several bursts from about 1960 onwards. The thesis had been in circulation in the organization since late 1969; it had been furthered in some respects by considerable, growing research efforts within the organization respecting the direct correlation between a "counter-culture" and the spread of proto-fascist and actually-fascist movements among youth in Weimar Germany and in the U.S.A. and Western Europe today. Significant work had been done on applying and advancing this thesis by a gifted young composer, whose creative powers had also been the basis for her rise into a leading position in the organization. All that taken into account, the thesis we outline below was summarized to this member this past winter, with the urgent request that she develop a seminar focussed upon the slow movement of the Beethoven Opus 106, as a means for communicating a
* In stating this, it must be understood -- as the case of Kepler and Riemann suggest from different aspects or the problem -- that merely opening one's mind to the search for hypothesis of that sort does not in itself make one iota of progress in theoretical experimental physics. It is essential to create the systematic basis for observational and experimental hypothesis, as Riemann, Cantor, Klein, et al. did for the revolution in physics which exploded at the turn of the century. It is also necessary to have Keplers, Plancks and Einsteins working from an overview of the detailed observational and experimental work of lesser figures in the field, Keplers who fanatically fight through at all costs to bring actual material into the form they know it must latently represent.
sensuous comprehension of the dialectical notion of "inner self" required for mass-organizing work. That work has been the basis for a series of seminars and subsequent public classes, and will undoubtedly be written out and published at some time in the early future. We identify here those broader aspects of the matter which have direct bearing on the subject of this present paper.
Any intensive effort to learn to compose like Beethoven confronts the musician with a fundamental antinomy apparently identical with that adduced by Immanuel Kant. It is possible, to a certain extent, to develop from Beethoven's compositions various phase's of evolution of what seem to be definite rules of composition. Yet, no matter how gifted the musician so equipped, he could not realize a single composition in this way that would not be immediately distinguishable as a mere parody. This demonstrates that the peculiar power and identity of any important Beethoven composition is located in qualities which are beyond comprehension in terms of any possible fixed set of formal rules. This demonstrates that the essential feature of such compositions is something which lies outside the domain of any understanding in terms of formal logic, etc. Yet, like Descartes' "I think," it exists,
Proceeding from that initial predicament, the next phase of the formal investigation is properly implied by the nature of the problem. To understand Beethoven systematically, that is self-consciously, it is indispensable to master the rules, the canons, to adduce certain evolving such canons for Beethoven's work as a whole, and to also adduce the new canons developed in that way. This professional competence is indispensable precisely to be able to isolate those features of the composition in which the prior rules are diabolically violated. Concentrating for the moment on the major compositions from approximately Opus 95 onwards, it is sufficient for present illustration to identify two general kinds of "tricks" he introduces to give these works their living substance, their existence, the ruses of an hubristic/genie engaged in using and even creating the rules apparently precisely to violate them. We emphasize the special use of counterpoint and "arbitrary" surprise to achieve such ironies,
The case of counterpoint- especially as Beethoven develops this essence of Western music- emphasizes the meaning of irony in this setting. Counterpoint, properly realized for its creative potentialities, is a means for exploiting a set of canons to canonically reach "structural relations" within the composition which are potentially in more or less rude violation of those same canons. Surprise is a basic approach to realizing the same effect in the opposite fashion. One introduces an ostensibly alien feature, and then guilefully makes its existence appear to be canonical through development which resolves the contradiction in an
apparently lawful way -- through the creation of new formalities.
Beethoven's "late" discovery of the fuller potentialities and significance of the fugue is the most powerful demonstration of the creative principle within music. The introduction of ironical improvisations into musical composition by itself would be merely a petit-bourgeois anarchist irrationalist's act. Truth, especially in the sense that Beethoven is a fanatic for truth in music, lies outside both the Apollonian bathos of pure formalism and the Dionysian anti-intellectualism (i.e., anti-humanism, bestialism) of the capricious violation of "law" for the sake of asserting an animal sort of "freedom" from law. Freedom in Beethoven is as totally bounded by Necessity as it is in the same principled way for Karl Marx!(12f) His great late fugues most exactly express that principle of Truth.
To understand the reasons why the fugue, in its various developments (e.g., fantasy-fugue, variations and fugue, etc., in Bach, Beethoven) is the highest achievement of musical composition to date, it is necessary to see music as created to celebrate that quality in the composer, performer, and audience which otherwise expresses the noblest human qualities of daily life.
Turning our view of daily life to that subsumed by our general thesis, on the most primitive level of overview of the human condition, Necessity is represented in terms of fixed natural and man-made laws. Reality, presented to society and the individual in terms determined apparently by such laws, is constantly a struggle for existence. In this view, Freedom appears as the problem-solving mental activity, and realized practice, by which such Necessity-bounded problems of existence are resolved. On a higher level, man-made law and technology are seen as evolving, with the result that the notion of Freedom is also enlarged in a similar way. Man, in this second view, is free to synthesize changes in fixed man-made and technology laws, but not in a totally arbitrary (i.e., not in an anarchistic) way. The Freedom through which man-made and technological laws can be changed for the benefit of the individual and society's existence is itself restricted by a Necessity governing this.
Arbitrary or anarchistic "freedom" in art evokes properly the same degree of intellectual interest as crude cheating at solitaire. Freedom in musical composition becomes moving, exciting when it expresses a solution to the problem of lawfully altering fixed Necessity. The late Beethoven fugues express this principle in the highest form found in art, since the peculiarity of the form is that it is so emphatically the creation of a new order of Necessity, through the introduction and development of those selected expressions of Freedom which accomplish the transition from one set of old canons to a new set.
The same principle is encountered in the admittedly rare great work of poetry. To the extent that a poem locates its subject-matter in literal or symbolic features of the composition, the poet has accomplished little better than to represent prosaic ideas in a precious fashion. Bad poetry, in this respect, is associated with an emphasis on forms as such. By this standard, for example, T.S. Eliot is not a poet, and the fascist poet, Ezra Pound, is actually only a semi-poet (by contrast with the banality of Eliot). The subject of a great poem is never identified within the body of the poem, neither literally nor symbolically. Rather, the predicates of the composition uniquely demand the reader's conceptualization of a subject-matter which thus seems to lie outside the poem as such; the identity of that subject matter, exactly like Descartes' "I think" in this respect, is none the less precise. This does not mean that poetry is properly a clever method of circumlocution; the subject-matter of poetry is properly the sort of definite notion which does not admit of communication in extant prose forms.
By this standard Shelley is inferior to Heine as a poet. For example: Heine's ironical juxtaposition of loved persons and places in such a fashion that neither can be competently adduced as the subject, but the subject is nonetheless powerfully definite as the dialectical content. Such unearthed, unartificial compactness Shelley rarely masters. Yet, his "Ode to the West Wind" is a suitable clinical case for illustrating the principle we have cited.
It is, admittedly possible to offer a banalized reading of the "Ode...", provided one degrades the change of seasons into a matter of symbolism. This bowlderized reading of the poet's intention evaporates for us the instant we take into account the fact that the true poetic faculty is associated with the most powerful kinds of agonized feeling-states. No great poem could be written with the kind of personal detachment which the symbolic interpretation of the "Ode..." imputes to Shelley at the time of composing.
Any person who has tasted the capacities for creative poetry within himself has probably frequently experienced the following sort of circumstances as those in which the impulse to write poetry overcame him. The poet experiences moments in which there is a conjunction between profound concern for others and a simultaneous agony respecting his incapacity or limited powers to aid those others. This conjunction challenges his identity in the most profound way, challenging him to create within himself, to force from his unconscious processes some new power for consciousness, without such a new power, he must fail at that particular conjunction, threatening his deepest sense of inner self-identity (the real inner self. as distinct from the persona).
Ignorant outsiders, including numerous literati, conclude from the discernment of agony in great poetic works that some ordinary sort of personal disappointment, bereavement, etc., must therefore be the prompting of the poem. In certain examples, undoubtedly, there is a specious germ of truth in such edifications. What mere educated men -- that is, men lacking a sense of creative powers in themselves fail to recognize, is that the creative personality has a different sense of inner identity than exists for the proverbial "ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths per cent" of the population of capitalist society (in particular). Where the ordinary alienated individual vaguely senses the existence of some inner "little me", as a kind of banalized monad, the creative individual, especially the great poets and composers, locates as his inner self precisely his power for creativity. While such a poet may also experience the ordinary sort of agonies, his development of self-conscious creative powers has endowed him with a capacity for a kind of agony which is generally unknown in this way to alienated persons. The alien pressure to be an "ordinary" person, the
difficulty in communicating certain kinds of conceptions to a banalized audience uniquely, problems characteristic of self-conscious creativity, confronts the creative person with a recurring fear of a special kind of "death:" fear of the day on which these egregious, fragile creative powers will cease to exist for him. It is that agony which he invariably experiences whenever he is in the throes of creative effort, and that agony which is at the same time his most powerful motivation for creative output. Hence, to be confronted in any way with the image of a human problem he cannot solve with his existing knowledge confronts the creative artist with the most powerful motive for drawing new qualities of knowledge from his creative powers, and at the same time threatens him with a kind of agony which few persons experience, the dreadful thought that perhaps his creative powers have mysteriously vanished ("died") since his last creative output. It is in that way that the fear of "death" of the creative inner self produces great agonies as the circumstances, theme, and motive of most of the great creative artistic productions of our culture.
The "Ode to the West Wind" can be understood as we locate the dialectical subject-matter uniting Shelley's (evolutionary outlook with his deep-felt personal agony respecting the fear of "death" of his inner, creative self: the fear of living biologically as the husk, the conscious coffin of a dead "spiritual" self. His "A Defence of Poetry"' permits one no doubt on this. In periods of great social upsurge, he argues correctly, there is a qualitative transformation of broader populations, to the effect that they suddenly acquire power to impart and receive the most profound communications respecting man and nature. Suddenly. then, the creative artist finds an audience capable and zealous in receiving and comprehending the kinds of conceptions which more directly reflect the creative processes within him. The enlivening of the minds of his audience in this way gives the inner self of the artist a social reality, As the kinds of conceptions expressing his creative processes are suddenly susceptible of life within an ennobled audience, this audience, as the expression of society, gives reflected social existence to the inner self of the creative artist. In such periods, these inner creative powers, so given social identity, are awakened to the boldest exercise of their potentialities. The artist is astonished to find in himself the nearly-constant outflow of such profound understanding as he had not imagined possible during earlier periods.(13b) He, his inner, creative self. has become alive, has an active social existence. Then, with the ebb of social ferment, his audience lose their powers of comprehension -- lose their souls -- and become again the old, familiar schlimihls, capable or receiving and enjoying only philistine banalities. These audiences are mystified as to what even they themselves had admired and understood in the creative works they embraced so enthusiastically during the preceding period of conferment.
That sort of relationship between the creative artist, and society (through the mediation of his audience) is the constant ironic theme of all great works of art; the life-death struggle of the artist's inner self, his creative faculties. It is the content, the deeply personal, sensuous content, he locates in every other subject and sensuous experience upon which he draws. The greatness of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is that it expresses in a more concentrated and exact way that same topic which is merely circumscribed through prose in his essays, "On Love" and "'A Defence of Poetry."
Anyone who has written poetry expressing sensibility of the creative process as his own identity, must sadly concede the obvious superiority of music over poetry as a creative artistic medium. The fact that poetry is so closely linked m prose in its predicates causes extra ordinary difficulty in the effort to uniquely force the dialectical subject-matter into the perception of the reader. The longer a poem becomes, the more monstrous this problem becomes: literal aspects, symbolic aspects constantly threaten to give credence to un- wanted banal interpretations of the subject-matter. A great poem must perforce be a short poem, which through its economy and concentration, permits no reasonable communication but that intended. The fact that Western musical development has created a medium which is a sensuous medium and yet distanced from commonly literal employment of its predicates establishes music as a medium in which the impossible desire of every great poet can be attained: the development of a single conception over the duration of an audience's prolonged attention-span. Yet, music is not "abstract" in the bathetic sense of "abstractness" sought by such zombies as the serialists or by the non-objective schools of the plastic forms. Its essential predicate, musical sound, has developed from the root of prosody in language, and thus expresses the most immediate sensuous aspect of social relations in intensely abstracted fashion. It is the most advanced art form for this reason: it is the medium in which we can most freely and intensely exercise the creative process in a medium of concentrated socialized sensuousness.
In this section so far, we have confined our attention to the most general and essential aspect of the content of great art: art as a medium for communicating, celebrating and strengthening the creative processes in artist and audience. We have not yet attempted to get inside the process itself, to discriminate among the differing qualities of affective states ("moods") which the creative process -- and its productions -- may represent as differentiations of itself. Mentioning our awareness of that omission should suffice to dispel any fears we have ignorantly overlooked such further considerations.
Social Roots of Creative Art
Situating a great Beethoven composition within our general thesis, we note that the quality which he expresses, and so evokes from his audience, in the creative identity of the whole development of the composition, is nothing but that quality which distinguishes man from the lower beasts. What distinguishes man from the lower beasts, the quality within him which enables him to live and develop as man, is the creative power for deliberatively developing new technologies, etc., through which man overcomes the entropy of outlived forms and supercedes these out-lived forms by rising to higher states of negentropy. To the extent that an art form is an elaboration of the connection of Freedom and Necessity, as the definition of that is developed by Marx, it is essentially a celebration of that in man which is distinctly human.
This has the most profound implications. From this standpoint, we cannot regard great art of any medium as either mere entertainment or indifferent to scientific criteria. Art, as a medium for the concentrated expression of the creative faculty by artist and audience, addresses itself to that in the individual which is human, those qualities of mentation upon which the advancement of society, even the mere perpetuation of society, depends absolutely. To the extent that any form of art contains and expresses creative activity of the form of Freedom/Necessity, it is a special and indispensable form of universal labor;(11b,12e) the artist, as the great abstract mathematician does in a different way, arouses and shapes new creative powers in the audience at the same time his work celebrates and strengthens those powers which are already matured.
By contrast, any art which is merely an application of established artistic canons, mere repetition of sensuous gimmickry without creative development (bestialized art: e.g., Rock, "socialist realism," etc.), is anti-human, reactionary. Art could not be a matter of personal taste-preferences; it is not personal tastes which properly judge art, but art which judges the mental condition reflected by the symptomology of taste. To the extent that any individual prefers Rock or serial-composed music to Beethoven, that evidence alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the individual has been bestialized in his self-estimation; no person could "enjoy" Rock or regard serial-composition as honest music unless his alienation had become sufficiently pathetic that he no longer even desired to recover those human qualities he has been denied. As for the person who "likes both Beethoven and Rock," that is sufficient, too, to prove that he has lost the power to listen to the content of Beethoven's music,
The object of Beethoven seminars in the Labor Committees, like the object of this outline of the case here, is to provide the means by which the individual
can become self-conscious of his "power to be powerfully moved" by that quality of great art which defies elucidation by ordinary formal criticism. Since one is able to demonstrate, along the lines of the Cartesian "perfection" theorem, that the essential content, the identity of great art, is located in the expression of the creative process, the individual is so enabled to identify that within himself which responds to this as his own creative processes. By making himself self-conscious of the way in which Beethoven, for example, attains such effects, the individual is then equipped to locate those feeling-states in himself, as empirical knowledge of those states, which correspond to the experiencing of the creative moment of the work of art. In general, the positive function of artistic criticism is to assist audiences in so "isolating" and self-consciously conceptualizing such a relationship between the creative content of art and the responsive movements of the creative potential in themselves.
The objective and potentiality of self-consciously studying Beethoven in that fashion is to locate in oneself that quality which must become one's sense of "inner Self" identity, as a precondition for becoming either, specifically, an effective political working-class organizer or, in the future, a true human being.
There is nothing mysterious, generally speaking, in Beethoven's continued preeminence as the most advanced musician down to the present day. Although certain kinds of progress have occurred in music since Beethoven, up to approximately the end of the last century (e.g., Mahler, Wolf), the dynamic of creative development in music shifted after Beethoven, from its former general upward sweep into him, down hill. No musician after Beethoven has actually comprehended, and thus built upon, the full implications of his last period of work. For music to advance today, it would have to begin its advance by going back to Beethoven and adducing from his last period the proper point of departure for actual, comprehensive progress. Respecting what was accomplished after him, these are secondary advances whose positive features could be duly assimilated into the general progress.
This matter of contrary long upward and subsequent declining sweeps is not principally a result of anything which can be comprehended within the bounds of music or musicians per se. Beethoven, like Goethe, Shelley, Heine, reflected and embodied the culmination of the greatest mass-wave of intellectual ferment in human history, the great upsurge of Humanism from the Renaissance through the culmination of the French Enlightenment in German culture. In this respect, Beethoven is to be compared to Kant and Hegel. Kant and Hegel epitomize the flowering and further advance of Humanism in backward Germany at the very point that upward development in philosophy had come to a halt in the countries of its origin, notably England and France. Although the effort to locate the motivation of Beethoven's compositions in specific aspects of the
social and political revolution of his time is "program-musical" edification, Beethoven expresses the Enlightenment in Germany in precisely the fashion implied by Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry." If there might have been some specific influences of political events on Beethoven, such demonstrations would have very little bearing on anything of importance here. The relationship to the creative artist to periods of revolutionary ferment is not so much to the political and social movements as such as to the effect of these developments upon the mental powers of his audiences.*
If we consider Beethoven's development as a musician, his youthful training in Bach, his saturation in Mozart, etc., and also examine the milieu in which he developed later, he was a product of a closely-interwoven fabric of Humanist musical development throughout Western Europe which had persisted with increasingly bold advances since the Renaissance. He enjoyed a developed audience as well as a setting amid such a great proliferation of the most gifted composers as the experience of no living person could approximate. This musical world, despite its considerable antipathy to the French Revolution and the merest hint of sans-culottism, inevitably reflected, like the French Enlightenment of Frederick the Great, the intellectual upsurge of the Enlightenment, despite its own immediate political intent.
As to what the impact of these forces was upon Beethoven, his music from the Bonn period onward leaves us with no basis for doubt. Beethoven's music, early steeped in the most hubristic sweep of bold improvisations, represents the successive phases of self-development of what might at first seem to be sheer musical creativity (Freedom) for its own sake. Yet, throughout, the dominant feature of his hubristic impulses is a powerful moral force, amounting to the most concentrated expression of the principles of Freedom-Necessity. It is proper to regard him therefore as the consummate revolutionary of his time, provided we do not banalize the notion of "revolutionary" as the early nineteenth-century equivalent of "Socialist Realism." Beethoven's revolutionary impulse is essentially focussed in the conception of himself as a man; his conception of what his activity must be as a musician-man is the most concentrated elaboration art has produced of the notion of Freedom-Necessity. *2
5. The State of Modem Psychology
None of this historical, evidence respecting the nature of the human mind enjoys better than a peripheral and
indirect reflection in professional psychology. For this we properly restrict our attention to two branches of inquiry, psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology, making no more than the unavoidable references to such pathetic factions as "classical psychiatry" or behaviorism.
Both psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology are developments emerging at the turn of the century. Consequently, the occasion for their belated appearance predetermined that psychology would evolve in pathetic ignorance of its extant prerequisites. The characteristic flaws of and respective distinctions between these two branches of psychological inquiry are typical of a period of general intellectual decay in every field of fundamental inquiry but the physical sciences.
Sigmund Freud took perverse pride in his pathetic illiteracy in philosophy, a streak of naked philistinism in him perhaps sufficiently understood by examining the post-1848 thrust of Viennese painters as well as the bankrupt political and moral condition of the Austrian monarchy. Christian Ehrenfels and his principal epigonoi, Wolfgang Koehler and Max Wertheimer, recognized the existence of the creative process in systematical terms, exactly where Freud and his principal disciples commit a fundamental flaw of omission in psychoanalytical "metapsychology." Yet, Ehrenfels, who looks for the creative process in Mind precisely because he reflects the dialectical influence of Riemann, Cantor, Klein, et al., implicitly denies the social determination of conscious (and unconscious) processes, and thus founds a valuable branch of no direct clinical therapeutic applicability.
We should first summarize the implications of Ehrenfels' approach as they are best known through Koehler's chimpanzee experiments.(9) It is most relevant to consider the epistemological reasons why Ehrenfels could discover the existence of the creative process where Freud, a thorough clinical investigator, with extraordinary creative powers of his own, shows not the slightest sensibility of the problem involved.
The notion of a Gestalt corresponds epistemologically to the dialectical subject, "I think," in Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum." To Ehrenfels, et al., as for Descartes: For a plenum of particular predicates of experience, there exists a subject, the concept of the class of experiences as a totality, which is not a simple member of the aggregation of predicates, which cannot logically
* In any case, Beethoven, if the authoritative Thayer is correct, was notoriously ingenuous respecting any form of politics. He apparently adduced from the freedom he was permitted to insult political celebrities and to make even publicly the most frank political criticisms, that Austrian society shared the same freedom. Beethoven, who was self-conscious of his greatness as a musician, was apparently consolingly indifferent to the reasons his eccentricities were so casually tolerated by the Austrian regime
*2 Indeed, the only indisputable specifically "political" element in Beethoven's work is his treatment of the subject of the "ideal woman." In those few locations, typified by "Fidelio," the music, more sturdy evidence than a libretto, attests to Beethoven's notion of what kind of a woman would match his thus most intimate notion of the personal quality and most intimate personal relationships of the kind of humanity he sought in himself.
be induced from even the most intensive and prolonged analysis of its predicates,
Ehrenfels located a paradigm for solving such a problem experimentally in the notion of invariant. The significance of this is implicit in analysis of the fundamental antinomy of line-points relationship. In one important sense, limiting our view of Riemann's work to this subsumed feature, the notion of invariant resolves the problem of experimentally identifying the relationship of whole to its subsumed particularities for all kinds of simple configurations and alterations of configurations of predicated particular features. Implicitly, and this bears upon the more important frontier-like aspect of Riemann's work even to the present day, we must consider the impossibility of conceptualizing a whole as primary (elementary) with respect to its predicates (as, relatively, constructs) unless the invariant feature of the whole is self-development,
Given the general thesis, it should be evident that an effective experimental approach to psychological behavior which aimed at isolating the phenomenon of invariant for the historic relationship between concept and particularities, would represent the efficient approach for experimentally demonstrating the existence of the creative process! Indeed, what Ehrenfels and his
leading epigonoi demonstrated in fact is Hegel's point that even simple perception is a reflection of a creative process. (6a) The simplest sort of discrete mental image, including those of abstract logic, is not primary (self-evident sense-phenomenon), but a "mere construct" of a physiology premising the human creative process of mentation!
Provided one extends such experimental and observational investigations in the obvious way, we encounter the fundamental antinomy in the most dreadful form. On the one hand, we naively regard the particular form of sense-phenomena and conscious mental images as self-evident, and consider it unthinkable to begin interpreting any aspect of reality as primitive except as one begins with "discrete images," "isolated simple facts." Yet, experimental investigation of the content of perception suffices to demonstrate that the axioms of discreteness are self-contradictory, even absurd!
This should signify to psychology that it must locate the fundamental substance (the elementary facts) of human mental processes beyond what are taken to be the conscious forms of conscious and unconscious activity. In the ordinary form of the conscious processes, thought is immediately in approximately the form it is abstractly represented by formal logic, a plenum of discrete object-like images being moved about by relations in the form of "feelings." (Cathexis in psychoanalysis.)
As we indicated, Freud is clinically powerful exactly where Gestalt psychology fails. His founding of psychoanalysis is the discovery that the clinical feature of human psychology is socially determined, rather than a biologically-determined function of individual experience: that the form of consciousness itself, as well as the regulating principle of judgment (ego-ideals) is created within the individual by society, principally, in the initial period of extra-uterine gestation, through the mediation of his parents and siblings. To that extent, Freud unwittingly replicated a crude approximation of the accomplishments of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach.
The greatness of Freud is centrally situated in his application of his considerable powers of insight (creative powers) to examine the dynamics of individual psychology, always guided by a special passion for truth. In this side of this work, Freud rejected the organized lying which is empiricism, and so never created a category of clinical psychodynamics except as the kind of phenomena defined actually existed as distinct Gestalts for clinical work. In empiricism, by contrast, categories are treated with epistemological indifferentism as mere inductive constructs; if induction from an aggregation of arbitrarily or otherwise assembled predicates repeatedly demonstrates a similar pattern of correlation within certain tolerances for "significance," the empiricist blithely presumes that he is free to assert his inductive interpretation of the data as if
such an edification were itself an existent reality, Hence, the complementary feature of empiricist intellectual immorality is the contempt for "theoretical work" among laymen and even the "theoreticians" themselves. Empiricism, the dominant intellectual immorality of contemporary capitalist culture, permits one to impute existence to all sorts of fictional rubbish; so, the reaction to this pathetic behavior is that all scientific judgment is regarded as "mere theory," as distinct from any ignorant man's "superior" (impressionistic) interpretation of an isolated "hard fact." Freud's clinical categories (unlike his metapsychology) are all experimentally demonstrated to be empirically-isolatable causes, or empirically known states. One sympathizes with and admires Freud's moral abhorrence for what he regarded rightly as irresponsible speculations in such students as the wild Wilhelms, Stekel and Reich.
The shortfall of Freud's method becomes epistemologically clear when we consider his treatment of a certain aspect of the unconscious processes as categorically unconscious;(4b,c) he regarded certain aspects of unconscious processes as intrinsically not susceptible of being made conscious. His various efforts to develop a "metapsychology," are inevitably permeated with reductionist metaphysics, a metaphysical fantasy-world of "instincts" and other crudely mechanistic epiphenomenal categories of mentation.
The powerful contrast in implicit epistemological outlook of two of his more widely-read writings gives an indication of the difficulty for him. In The Future of An Illusion (1927), his outlook is essentially that of Feuerbach, and not distant from the world-outlook of Marx. Two years later, we have Civilization and its Discontents, an almost Dionysian revel in pessimistic reductionist metaphysics. The profitable approach to comparison of these two works is to recognize that their differences in outlook can not be sufficiently explained from Freud's work and experiences during the intervening period. The mechanistic tendency is strong in the "metapsychology" studies of the earlier war period, and elsewhere in the general development of the notion of the "Id."(4b,c) Freud vacillated between the two tendencies, the semi-dialectical and the reductionist, throughout his work.
One effective approach to the distinctions between the works is to recognize that in The Future of An Illusion, Freud is relying upon the aspect of his practice which bears more directly on his clinical work, upon his fundamental achievements. In the works dominated by the opposing tendency, he is veering into regions where he is epistemologically incompetent to judge the significance of his own clinical findings.
This leaves us with two immediate lines of discussion to be considered, to get at what psychoanalysis does accomplish and to get underneath its clinical superstructure to locate the wretched epistemological foundations
which prevent it from developing psychology more profoundly. We treat the first here, and the other in the following section on Marxian Psychology.
Basis for Clinical Work
In the phylogenesis of the typical adult petit-bourgeois personality ("character-structure") of U.S. urban regions comparable in this respect to Metropolitan New York City, we can readily distinguish the following distinct phases, each with its actual and otherwise potential contribution to the successive phases. Usually, the happiest phase is that of infancy, during which reasonably sane parents generally extend undifferentiated love toward the infant, so nourishing every variety of increase in the infant's powers. The misery begins with the second phase, usually highlighted by efforts to induce "bowel training." Undifferentiated love ceases, love is increasingly withdrawn for certain kinds of the child's development of his powers and continued only for others. The child is subjected to distinctions of "good" and "bad," in terms of the continuation and withholding of parental love respecting the development of his powers. One has the image of the more revealing child of this phase, who strikes out at his mother saying, in one fashion or another, "Why don't you love me when I'm bad, too?" The third phase is still more cruel. "Good" and "bad" become more complex, as the awarding and withholding of love from the parents and siblings tends to be mediated through the opinions of "others" outside the household; teachers, playmates, and other such "outsiders." As puberty approaches, an aggravation of this estrangement occurs. At the same time the child now experiences a qualitative increase in lessening of parental love (both by his parents and by virtue of his own internalized ideals), he begins to be made aware that he can look forward to a surrogate for lost parental love in the form of a relationship like that between his mother and father. He adduces from hints, gossip, and what-have-you the report that the lost feeling of "being loved," that which he has lost since infancy, can be regained by the performance of come mysterious act with a peer of the opposite sex. He also learns that it is "too soon" for him to reach such a paradisiacal state. For most such persons this is the "awkward age" between the accelerating loss of active parental love and the distant future gaining of a replacement. The fifth phase begins as he comes to regard himself as "sexually mature," in a social as well as a biological sense; the assuming or self-denial of a paired mating relationship (or, being externally denied this), becomes a central preoccupation. Then, usually at a time approaching the end of baccalaureate matriculation for the exemplary strata under consideration, we enter the sixth phase. He is being "economically" semi-weaned in the social identity he outwardly, and privately, affords to himself. Somewhere between twenty-four and thirty, for typical cases, the individual enters "middle age," sensing his life now almost finished.
There are two immediately discernible approaches to the interpretation of this phylogenetical process. The banal, reductionist approach treats the regulating principle of "love" in this development as an epiphenomenon of the genetical, as a more or less reified "biological sex drive." The extreme pathological version of such views in psychoanalysis is exemplified by the case of Wilhelm Reich, who brought hysterically reductionist prejudices into his psychoanalytical training, and whose later charlatanry of "orgone energy" is essentially nothing but a consistent if pathetic extension of the mechanistic conceptions of sexuality which govern his writings of the pre-Hitler period. We have a hint of the hysterical element in the notion of the "biological sex drive" even in the mild and ambivalent form it recurs in Freud's own work. The attempt to make pubertal and post-pubertal "love" a reified epiphenomenon of a "biological sex drive" compels the reductionist in Freud to contort the sensuous aspect of sociality, to impose the fiction of the "sex drive" upon even the defenseless infant.
The opposite approach, which is not without merely apparent but apparently monstrous epistemological difficulties, is to regard the post-pubertal "sex" drive as a predicate of the need for love. Love itself is the primary phenomenon. The basis for this approach was developed by the successive contributions of Spinoza, Hegel, and Feuerbach. To settle the problems incurred by this approach, we must refer the matter to the next section, where we examine the problem of the distinction between human and animal psychology.
Immediately, we must finish our summary respecting the unique positive, clinical basis for psychoanalytical work.
Effective clinical work must approach the genesis of neurotic disturbances from the at least implicit correct assumption that consciousness and the principal features of unconscious processes involved are socially determined, through some sort of successive phases of individual development corresponding to the mode of maturation of the population from which the clinical subject is drawn. As The Future of An Illusion would imply to the perceptive reader, neurosis and its appendages are to be treated as a special case of ideology, in the sense we earlier attributed ideology to the prevailing self-images among workers of various capitalist sectors.(5a,5d)
Obviously, psychoanalysis is not (at least generally) a program intended to turn subjects of capitalist society into true human beings (i.e., socialists), so the analyst is inhibited by conscience as well as by his own ideological prejudices from engaging in the more fundamental effort of stripping away entirely the ideological muck which constitutes the individual persona. Since the analyst is unable to offer his subject a mass-movement orientation in which to locate a new, positive
social identity, if the analyst were concerned to strip away the persona, the result would be frequent psychoses and suicides among the individuals so stripped of those protective illusions which hide from them the emptiness of their individual qua individual lives. The analyst has more limited objectives, approximating the form and technique which would be employed properly in totally stripping away the bourgeois persona.
If one accepts such a limitation, as Freud and most other analysts have, the competence of clinical work is restricted to two somewhat interconnected results. Firstly, to the extent that the individual's neurotic dysfunctioning represents behavior which does not correspond to the reality of his individual life-situation, his problem tends to be of the form of reflected pressures acting upon him as internalized images of actual or synthesized individuals and groups from his past. To the extent that such problems can be brought to consciousness, the subject freed of his internalized oppressors with the aid of the analyst's role as a surrogate father, the individual can be "cured" of much of that behavior and internal suffering which is out of correspondence with the reality of his bourgeois individual existence. Secondly, the individual's dysfunctioning is frequently enough linked to circumstances which are themselves destructive of his functioning as a bourgeois individual; also the individual may have brought additional such poisonous circumstances upon himself as a result of his neurosis. In such connections, the subject may be induced to willfully alter his circumstances -- job, personal relationships, and so forth as an essential practical concomitant of his attack on the historical roots of the problem.
The essential feature of this process is love. The point is perhaps best illustrated by referring to a development which either predetermines potential revolutionaries by the age of about five or six, or otherwise, contrary character-development, the "schlimihl syndrome."
Every individual who has manifest significant creative output in later life can undoubtedly recall incidents from approximately that age which parallel the following example. He experiences a relationship which was later soiled by the self-degrading response of that playmate to social pressures. The playmate, under social pressure, would "hear the cock crow thrice" and thereupon repudiate or otherwise reject an interest or opinion which he had earlier professed in the course of the exchanges between the two playmates. In the years that followed, the future creative adult was increasingly pained to observe members of his peer groups undergoing changes in passionately-held opinions and tastes in more or less perfect synchronization with prevailing fads. "Why do you do that?" he perhaps had asked such labile playmates and peers. The probable response, "Because it's good," or "Because I just like
it," was, of course, singularly unconvincing. He began to regard such persons -- the majority of his age-group -- as persons without "souls of their own," persons whose convictions were proverbially "mortgaged" to varying extents to whatever peer-group they wished to propitiate at that moment.
What, one should reflect most intensely, is the basis for the determining difference in personal character, even at age five or six, between the rare creative individual and the overwhelming majority, victims of the schlimihl syndrome? To make short of the point, the creative individual develops from the child who was better loved in infancy and whose first phase of childhood, uncharacteristically for our culture, did not so undermine his sense of positive identity (the quality of meriting love) that his self- estimation depended largely on short-term favorable peer-group opinion. The creative individual develops out of the child who has been loved for his development of his powers such that he has internalized a powerful self-confidence in progressive development of his powers of judgment.
The dynamics of this should be obvious from the standpoint of what we identified as the second and third phases of the child's development. (In the succeeding sections, we shall be considering the underlying epistemological basis for this approach.) The withdrawal of love is, in form and implicit content, a withdrawal of the social basis for the child's sense of identity, his sense of having the rights and privileges on which his existence depends -- as those rights and privileges exist for him in his power to command the behavior of others in the interest of his existence. If we examine the problems of the second phase of development of the individual, we see the source of major disturbances in personality development here, even if we assumed that the prior period of infancy was "virtually perfect." Perhaps for an instant one is angrily impelled to consider eliminating this second phase entirely. Yet, that "solution" neither exists in practice, nor is it to be desired "even in a socialist society." The child's increase in powers beyond a certain age become the capacity for ignorantly destructive and self-destructive acts. The child must develop a sense which acts, under what circumstances, are positive, and which to be abjured correspondingly. The question of the second phase is therefore not of how to eliminate it, but of what constitutes the desirable approach to the necessary socialization of the post- infant.
There are two general alternatives. The one most in use is "negation of the negation," more or less as Kant described this in his Critique of Practical Reason. The individual of post-infancy "knows" that his existence (his power to mediate his existence through rights and privileges) depends chiefly on the love (implicit commitment to his desired rights and privileges) of his parents. He must "please them," thus perpetuating and increasing their love for him. Consequently, in
such a "negation of the negation" determination of the socialized personality, the child seeks to maintain the love on which his power to exist depends, by negating those "impulses within himself" which his society (his parents) negates: the "schlimihl syndrome."
Rarely, in contrast, he may be socialized by an alternative approach, that corresponding to a self-subsisting positive. He accepts responsibility for mastering the knowledge by which he can determine "rationally" those forms of his behavior which make his existence valuable to his society (e.g., immediately, his parents and siblings). This approach cannot be merely limiting his acts to those which are immediately beneficial to others. His value to others, especially at that age, chiefly demands his developing his power of discovery, of those forms of activity which are socially positive under varying circumstances: notably, his creative powers. Although this is the program to be desired for child-rearing between the ages of approximately eighteen months and five years, the post-infantile individual can assimilate such opportunity only to the extent that his infancy has prepared him for such freedom -- and responsibility! The extensive mooting of the proper approach to the "problem of bowel training" exemplifies the extant, crude, almost trivial insight into these alternatives.
In principle, the development of the self-subsisting positive form of childhood socialization is constantly premised on the focussing of parental love for the child upon the development of his powers to make independent discriminations of what is positive social behavior. Since the "schlimihl syndrome" is not only the characteristic molecular expression of bourgeois ideology, but also the mediation principle of neurosis, the analyst properly extends but also limits love to the subject for the subject's development of the powers to judge what are positive acts. At the same time, on the basis of this "support," the analyst impels the subject to discriminate sanity, stupidity, and so forth among the various internalized voices stored up within the neurotic, creating an approximation of a healthy reconstruction of the post-infantile socialization phase.
We need merely acknowledge that the analyst must have competent knowledge of clinical psychodynamics, and to thus be able to steer the subject's self-critical processes in productive directions. More important is the analyst's ability to match an appropriate (corresponding) kaleidoscopic array of "feeling states" within himself to the succession of such states which the subject is experiencing.
The analysts' most urgent duty is to direct the explorations in such a way that he can piece together precisely such a replication of the patient's feeling-state dynamics within himself. It is not only the succession of feeling-states as such which is involved here. The feelings
exist for the subject only as attached companions of object-images (cathexis), internalized images which are variously persons, specific experiences, and so forth. By establishing the pattern of feeling-states and discerning the cathetical connections, the analyst is enabled to take the subject's mind inside his own. There he can now examine this replication, the operation of insight. The powers to accomplish this are not acquired by whim, although there are laymen throughout society who have more or less unconsciously developed approximations of the same capacity. Almost equally significant in the process is the fact that the "taking in" of a replication of a neurotic pattern into one's own mind is a dreadful experience. Only an ingenue of a pathetic individual would profess a desire to take another person's mind inside his own for entertainment: more often, the experience is so sickening and debilitating that the analyst himself must develop the capacity to experience the replication without becoming the victim of his subject's pathology.
Experiences approximating this analyst-subject relationship occur in daily life among ordinary people. Most instructive in that connection is the corollary of this, the nature and widespread use of devices by which individuals ordinarily block out deeper insights into the mental processes of others. Reflect! How often have you "felt" yourself beginning to assimilate a replication of another person's troubled mental state into your own mental processes, and have quickly stopped the process by a commonplace ruse. You probably blocked the process of assimilation by quickly and insistently giving a name to the phenomenon confronting you. "In other words," you say, "the problem is...," adding the name. Immediately, you follow that glib naming of the phenomenon by suggesting a "canonical" remedial action "for such problems," proceeding as if to suggest you had suddenly looked the name of the phenomenon up in some medical textbook and have begun reciting the glosses on etiology, prognosis and treatment, thus, by chatting away in that fashion, happily closing your mind against further insight into the actual phenomenon.
Analogous behavior is commonplace among members of socialist groups. The member, confronted with the problem of introducing a preliminary working notion of socialist politics into the mind of an interested contact, escapes the difficulties of the situation by reciting some cant, such as "dictatorship of the proletariat," all the while with a glint of hysteria in his own eyes as he recites such anaesthetic banalities. Exemplary of the point: "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a term developed by Karl Marx to identify an actualized intermediate form of the political class for itself. The term was developed by Marx to situate the empirical actuality of certain tendencies in the Paris Commune within a broader and more fundamental conception, the class-for-itself process, earlier explicated in such locations
as the Communist Manifesto and The Poverty of Philosophy. Interestingly enough, one frequently meets Leftists who deride the class-for-itself conception by insisting that that notion is an idealist's rejection of the revolutionary-practical "dictatorship of the proletariat. They so employ the recital of what is for them a cant phrase to protect their minds against (actually) the threat to their bourgeois ego-ideals implicit in even a formal assimilation of Marx's outline of the class-for itself concept.
In a similar way, most of the significant internal features of clinical psychoanalytical work occur, perhaps unwittingly, as commonplace transactions within the socialist movement. This is not to merely emphasize that the socialist movement shares such tendencies with society more generally; there is a qualitative distinction between the Left and society generally on exactly that point. Because the activity of socialist groups is task-oriented toward attempting to explore and remove bourgeois ideology, and since the psychodynamics of ideology are only the more general form for the psychodynamics of neurosis, the intellectual preoccupations of the socialist profession properly impel the movement, however reluctantly, to converge upon much of the work of psychoanalysis in that respect. This aspect of the matter is complemented by the "official pariah" status of being a member of such an organization, a circumstance of social stress which brings certain crises of the carried-forward bourgeois character-formation to the fore in a way approximating that appropriate to the psychoanalytical session.
The Fraud of "Spontaneous Remission"
By contrast with psychoanalysis, "classical psychiatry" and various forms of "behaviorist" therapy are charlatanry. This is not to deny that both varieties sometimes produce apparent "cures" in a certain fashion. The point to be made is forced into focus by a quick overview of the myth of "spontaneous remission."
The so-called "objective studies" of "spontaneous remission have been employed as libels variously against both the psychoanalysts and the anti-analysts. In all cases, the point is to argue that the ratio of neurotics recovering without treatment is not significantly less than among those receiving it. The same method may be used to pretend that classical psychiatry secures as high a ratio of remission as psychoanalysis. Either way, the statistics are worthless: the conception of "spontaneous remission" used for such actual and fictitious studies is buncombe.
The dominant conception of "mental illness" has only an accidental correspondence to any scientific notion of mental health. It may be a cause for public shock to hear muckraking reports that the majority of the
aged committed to public snakepits are incarcerated chiefly because it was convenient to their grandchildren or others to get rid of them in this fashion. There is nothing in this atrocity inconsistent with the corpus of prevailing psychiatric practice! The definition of "mental illness" used generally is that some person's behavior, condition, or even mere existence is regarded as a nuisance by other persons. When their existence and conduct is no longer considered a serious nuisance, or when shrinking state budgets demand reducing mental health care services, "suddenly" and "mysteriously" the "'mental illness" enjoys "remission."
Some of the more popular methods of treatment are especially instructive to the same effect. At the head of the list, one might place electric shock "therapy," which Freud exposed as charlatanry at the time of the inception of this barbarous practice. Significantly, electric-shock "therapy" was developed by the Kaiser's Army during World War I, as a disciplinary procedure for terrifying and torturing combat fatigue cases back into the trenches. It works, in a certain manner of speaking; given a patient "guilty" of untoward behavioral episodes, a certain degree of "improvement" in their conduct could be effected, even for profound mental problems, by the following procedure. It is irrelevant whether the shocks are applied to the head, nor are any expensive hospital facilities required. Indeed, the stronger the resemblance of the treatment room to a medieval torture-chamber the more certain the ensuing "remission." Strap the subject securely to a stout plank and, optionally, sloshing the nude body liberally with salt water, apply the contacts from a high-voltage coil to the genitalia. If the first "treatment" does not induce "remission," repeat the "medication" in increased doses until the desired remission or death occurs. One can guarantee an impressive ratio of short-lived apparent "remissions."
Psychosurgery and the less drastic approximation of the same result, saturating the victim with drugs, are of the same general quality as psychological medicine. Psychosurgery or saturating the case with pills "works" by means of aborting or reducing the level of mental functioning. One way to suppress symptoms of mental dysfunctioning is to lower the level of possible activity of the nervous and endocrine systems below the "threshold level" at which episodes will appear. The mindless do not exhibit active mental disturbances.
Only one concession could be offered for "chemotherapy" from the standpoint of psychology. There are certain forms of neurotic patterns, as some manic-depressives, in which the episodes themselves are self-aggravating or may involve destructive behavior by the subject. Since the object of treatment is to ensure that the patient survives to the day when treatment can produce results, a restrained employment of the minimal required level of chemical "inhibitions" may be permissible or necessary. However, in no case could chemotherapy cure the dysfunction itself.
"Conditioned reflex" and other behaviorist clinical methods are all of a homogeneous kind of charlatanry. At best, they are subtler versions of the crude electric shock "therapy" ruse, applying techniques perfected in the training of pathetic performing animals and fleas to the analogous training of people. The worst feature of behaviorist therapy is not the speciousness of the claims which represent animal training as human cures, but the fact that behaviorist methods necessarily, in all cases must produce a significant reduction in the subject's intelligence and at the same time make the individual more vulnerable to "nervous breakdowns" and actual psychoses.
More broadly on "spontaneous remission," the following points are sufficient. In most people who experience significant neurotic episodes at some time in their lives, these episodes have been latently there all along, merely awaiting the suitable circumstances in which they would manifest themselves. After either that specific stress has been removed, or the episodes have otherwise served their purpose for the subject, the subject will frequently revert to the more "normal" form of his neurosis he exhibited before the incidents. Does this sort of remission represent a return to mental health? There are admittedly the instances in which a person experiencing an episodic crisis will be driven to some positive improvement in his underlying mental functioning. Confronted with the threats to his identity itself, expressed in threatened job, marriage, etc., the individual may be driven to face certain problems and accomplish an approximation of what he might better have done with psychoanalytical help. In this sense, there is unquestionably what one intends by "spontaneous remission." Such instances are not at issue. What is at issue is that the criteria of studies of "spontaneous remission" do not discriminate between these instances and mere temporary remission of the episodic manifestation.
The definition of mental health generally employed in this society goes no deeper than classifying the symptoms of personal behavior as either approximately "'normal" or egregious. As the use of electric-shock, psycho-surgery, pill-pushing, and toleration of behaviorist charlatanry attest, capitalist society has very little concern with anything more than the desirability of outward behavior. Such a crude fallacy of composition says very little about the systematic features of mentation.
This is not to exaggerate, to insist that all non-psychoanalytical psychiatrists are totally incompetent respecting mental disorders. The fact that a culture, by its specific nature, must produce a limited number of types of characteristic mental disturbances, and that each such type will frequently conform to a prima facie etiology, symptoms, and prognosis, permits tolerable performance, by capitalist standards, for the practice of
"classical psychiatry" as a purely administrative procedure, a crude screening procedure by which this case is given a standard label and sorted out for this treatment accordingly, or discharged with a certain probable prognosis of remission. One must also add that over and above the intrinsic incompetence of psychiatry's claim to science, the individual classical psychiatrist may, by personal commitment and insight, rise above the banality of his learning and thus develop positive skills despite his formal learning.
In the context of capitalist culture, the psychoanalyst is constrained to aim at behavioral results which conform to those demanded for clinical psychology of all forms. Behind such surface considerations, the actual improvement in mental health which may occur would be considered an "intangible" by the prevailing conventions. The proper objective of psychoanalysis, which it has been frequently clearly demonstrated to achieve, is a positive increase in the subject's capacities and social value as a human being. What might ordinarily be regarded as the cure effected would therefore occur as a mere byproduct of the essential result. We have already identified the reason for this. The focal feature of effective therapy by these methods is the use of the love of the surrogate parent, the analyst, to assist the subject in developing a stronger sense of inner personal worth, a result which tends to develop as the analyst focusses parental-like compassion to the effect of "rewarding" the subject for progress in developing autonomous powers of creative insight into the wilful determination of useful social behavior. To the extent that the subject develops a stronger sense of "inner self" in this way, he has in that a greater ego-strength to free himself of the "schlimihl syndrome," both with respect to persons outside his skin, and with respect to the internalized persons who harass him within his mind. Since the neurotic disturbance is invariably focussed on the "inner self's" imagined relationship to some or all of that internalized gallery of personalities, to the degree the subject is able to become less a schlimihl he is able to free himself of the compulsion to propitiate or anti-propitiate (e.g., "kill") fetishistically the internalized persons who oppress him.
6. Freud Versus Feuerbach
The obvious shortcoming of Koehler's work for theoretical psychology in general, in its own terms, is that the emphatically useful demonstration of creative mentation in higher apes and other species fails to distinguish between those qualities of mentation which in turn distinguish the mind of the ape absolutely from the human mind.
The distinction to be made overlaps the urgent inquiry into connected issue of human psychology itself, In this latter connection, the demonstration that even perception itself requires precursors of creative mentation
confronts us with the need to test the hypothesis that there is a qualitative distinction between creative mentation respecting perception itself and some other order of creative mentation associated with the discrimination among ordinary and creative minds. The two issues are interrelated in the respect that Koehler's apes -- and even animals much lower in intelligence than the apes obviously embody something akin in some way to the creative processes associated with human perception.
The fact that there is a qualitative distinction of the human mind from that of the higher apes is already established in several major aspects of the matter by our general thesis. To treat this inquiry definitively, we begin here with the writer's much-used pedagogy for presenting Feuerbach's notion of the determination of self-consciousness. (See Figures 1,2,3)
Figure 1 depicts the most naive of the reductionist interpretations of mental processes. (Cf., Locke, et el.) Both the individual person and the object (Xi) of his knowledge are axiomatically (explicitly or at least implicitly) taken as self-evidently elementary. The object's existence impinges upon the sensory apparatus of the individual, through which connection he is presumed to "know" the object. The obviously pathetic fallacy in this schema is this. The assumption is demanded that the universe has been so prearranged that, on the one hand, the sensation ostensibly emanated by the object to the sensory apparatus is an appropriate code for the intrinsic nature of that object, and that, on the second hand, the mind of the individual has been predisposed to call forth an appropriate image
of the external object through mere interpretation of the sensation as a code for that object-image. In addition to the implicit requirement of such wild metaphysics, the schema eliminates the possibility that the human mind can acquire the power to identify objects from experience of the outer world, and in that way the notion of what human knowledge can become is limited to the exploration of the sequence of events as a sequential array of sensations of objects.
Figure 2 represents a variety of proposed remedies for the monstrous assumptions of the first schema.
Both the Kantian view (8) and the view sometimes originating from modern "information theory" are examples of this second outlook.
This schema has the advantage, relative to the first, that it eliminates the complete precoding of the sensations ostensibly emanating from the object. Knowledge of the quality of the object is not viewed as secured through isolated acts of sense-experience, Individual sense-experiences are assumed to provide the individual with little more than knowledge of the location of the object in both his subjective space and time orientations. Knowledge of the object in particular is then explained in terms related to those employed by John Dewey for reflection. The cognition of the quality subjectively attributed to the object not by isolated sense-experiences per se, but through a packet of combined sensations and actions. The obvious fallacy of the first schema, in which sensory knowledge is the outcome of a passive individual relationship to the act of sensation, is superceded by the notion that the individual's knowledge is both passive and active. It is regarded
as the outcome of a succession of interwoven sensations of the object and actions upon the some objective point of reference. In this second schema, the first schema's passive experience of the object is superceded by the notion of a practical experience of the objective point of reference. The paradigm for developing knowledge of an imputed quality of the object is the notion of a statistical correlation of some kind within the patterns of changing actions and sensations aggregating to make up the packet of practical experience. Hence, it is not assumed that the individual actually knows the object in itself, as such; this schema limits the question of competent knowledge of the quality of experience-packets to the packet itself. It relinquishes further concern for the quality of the object per se with the presumption that the adduced subjective quality attributed to the packet corresponds with increasing appropriateness to as much knowledge as is necessary to man for his existence in whatever unknown physical universe per se may exist beyond his direct cognition of it. Gestalt psychology is the only useful consequence of this approach, since it supercedes inductive fictions with actual Gestalts.
This second schema pares down the proliferation of metaphysical aprioristic assumptions significantly, relative to more naive views, but it itself depends on a few arbitrary assumptions which are beyond the power of the pragmatist to more than assert hysterically as necessary to the perpetuation of his schema.
Taking such aprioristic assumptions in the order of their obviousness, we have the following principal features to consider. Firstly, the location of the sensation respecting subjective space and time demands a priori aesthetic qualities, such that the second schema merely simplifies the aesthetical apriorism of the first while preserving the actual essence of the fallacy. Secondly, the act of judgment through which the packet of practical experience is determined as a discrete quality of experience is arbitrarily invoked from outside the realm of experience itself, replacing the "look-up table" metaphysics of the first schema with the built-in "logical self-programming" metaphysics of the second. Thirdly, the whole schema is arbitrarily situated within the sweeping assertion that the fundamental order of the universe is that of an aggregation of self-evident discrete existences.
From those aprioristic axiomatic fallacies a whole array of fallacious theorems are inevitably adduced. In the case of Kant, such predicaments are variously explicitly and implicitly acknowledged. His recognition arises principally from sensibility of the necessary existence of universals and of the consequent fundamental antinomy in his world-view.(8) In those who have narrowly parodied the secondary features of Kant, as with John Dewey, or with the empiricists and logical positivists generally, the development of the schema is pervasively trivial. The exponents of these modern
views, are pathetic and intellectually dishonest even relative to Kant, notably in their effort to hysterically deny the existence of devastating metaphysical paradoxes, by the shyster's ruse of arbitrarily refusing to permit discussion of the problem of universals.
Figure 3 represents the interpretation of the problem introduced by Ludwig Feuerbach.(3b) This model, with certain essential alterations by Marx, is the immediate basis for Marxian psychology.(12b,f) An approximation of the same model is employed by Freud to establish the entire principled basis for psychoanalysis.
Feuerbach's solution was not wholly original with him. He, like Hegel, proceeded explicitly from the preceding advancement of the general thesis in its Cartesian-Spinozan form.(3b) Like Hegel, his approach to Spinoza's conception was substantially informed by Kant's Critiques, especially the Critique of Practical Reason. Finally, in all but one critical feature, the entirety of Feuerbach's schema had been elaborated by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Mind. As to Marx's alterations of Feuerbach's achievements, we shall reach the place for treating that shortly.
In our initial exploration of Figure 3, we take the individual under consideration as a sensuously purblind infant. In his existent state as an individual infant, there is no a priori quality within him by which he could acquire practical knowledge of nature. His existence is not functionally situated within his individual relationship to the world of objects around him; his existence
depends wholly upon the intervention of certain adults who care for him into that world of objects.
In that primitive condition, the active principle for his continued existence is what we may identify as the notion of the individual infant's rights and privileges in the minds of the adults around him. They act on the world for him both without regard to the infant's manifest states, and also according to the way they are prepared to respond to certain of his manifest states as his commands for exercise of those rights and privileges which he possesses within those adults. As he develops through early infancy, knowledge occurs for the individual in a fashion we may approximate by initially considering certain similarities between Figures 2 and 3.
Treating all of the solid directed lines among the individual, the adults, and the Xij of Figure 3 as forming a packet of practical experience, we have the following. The adult society maintains a packet (implicit Gestalt) of practical experience with the totality of Xij. This adult society's immediate knowledge of the universe of predicates, Xij, requires no aprioristic assumptions; the adult society acts on the universe of experience in terms of historically developed and acquired knowledge. No abstract, wild "Robinson Crusoe"-model assumptions are introduced respecting the origins of adult society's knowledge. The universe of predicates, xij, acts both on the infant's purblind sensorium and on the adult society. The adult society acts upon the predicates. The infant's states, as objective states, act upon the adult
society, by which they are interpreted according to the criteria of the infant individual's explicit and implicit rights and privileges.
In addition, we have the dotted directed line from the adult society to the infant, representing actions on the infant by the adult society.
So, the external world for this infant is not the objective location of reference of Figure 2, but the packet of experience represented by his relationship to the combined adult society and the object-world on which that adult society acts. Hence, the problem of knowing the subjective world per se does not exist for the infant of Figure 3. From such a packet of practical experience the individual could obtain, obviously, neither subjective knowledge respecting the objective world by itself or adult society by itself. Only a kind of combination of the two could ever be adduced as knowledge, even assuming, for this approximation, the individual of Figure 2 to be situated in the location of the infant in Figure 3.
The possibility of practical action by the infant is therefore limited as follows. Taking firstly, only the solid directed connecting lines of the figure, his packet of experience would be limited in type to his actions on the adult society and the actions of the universe of xij upon him. From the standpoint of the assumptions employed in respect to a Gestalt approach to Figure 2, the notions of causality he would attain from his packets of
practical experience would be notions of socialized causality, a universe of Xij in which the acting will of the adult society was the universal lawful quality of causation with that universe!
Adding to this representation the further link represented by the dotted directed line from the adult society to the infant, he must "see" himself as a special object within the packet of practical experience.(3b) He must begin to abstract the "immediate" coupling of the sub-packet of his relationship to adult society as modifying the causality of the socialized universe of Xij for him. It is not simply his action upon the adult world which determines the lawful sequence of events for him, but the ultimate significance of his action varies within the social sub-packet of practical experience. The adult society is for him both his master and his slave, and through this relationship, the whole universe is similarly made to seem alternately his master and slave. (Freedom and Necessity!)
His practical existence, as he is able to adduce a notion of his existence from such a packet of practical experience, does not exist within himself, but is the Gestalt of those combined explicit and implicit rights and privileges which exist for him outside himself, which exist within adult society. To locate his practical existence in the entire world, to discriminate himself as somehow distinct from the universe in general, he must locate the existence of himself as an actual, practical existence in the practical idea of his existence uniquely located in others. His feasible perception of himself exists only as a reflection upon him of that right for existence which is located within others.(3,3b)
This schema, at least as so far developed, does not eliminate all hypothetical assumptions.(12b) The power of discrimination must exist within him, otherwise no quality could be imputed to the packets of practical socialized experience. Without elaborating here the systematical study assigned to other locations, it suffices to abstract from this report of those conclusions that the only qualities required of the infant is the appropriateness of his physiological processes to discriminate for two interconnected criteria. In first approximation, we have the need to determine judgment according to what enhances his biological existence as such. Yet, that which accomplishes this end is the development of his biological human powers. Futhermore, his existence demands development of his powers of judgment, to determine that which is necessary for enhancement of his biological existence and powers. The only necessary assumption respecting the infant is the appropriateness of the physiological processes of purblind pre-mentation to judge practical socialized experience in terms of the enhancement or impairment of his existence. Not his biological existence as a monad, but his biological existence as the development of his powers to exist.
In short, the only necessary assumption for criteria of judgment in the purblind mentation of the infant is of the form and order of the kind of universal, the kind of invariant adduced in the statement of our general thesis.
The form of development of these powers is not his individualized relationship to objects per se. He is not discovering the "natural laws" of nature in an individual way. He is acting upon and being acted upon by socialized nature, whose laws (whose order of causality) are of the socialized form nature assumes in the practice of that specific society.(12b) Every object of his acquired knowledge is imbued with the qualities of social causation, a notion of the (causal) qualities imputable to objects which is inseparable from his notion of the Gestalt of his rights and privileges existing in others.
We have thus located the determination of the specific qualities of his developing knowledge within the qualities attributable to the world of experience, by the intelligent form of causation given to the world for the individual in society by that society's wilful practice. Consequently, any effort to account for the existent, empirical forms of human behavior in terms of the experience of the isolated biological individual must be bankrupt fallacy of composition, and steeped in the wildest and most ingenuous sort of metaphysical rubbish. The mind of the individual man is formed by his society, not by his biological inheritance as such, and the source of the specific intelligence which the individual exhibits in the development of knowledge is the ready-made intelligence of socialized causation.
The relationship of the individual's existence to society's implicit if evolving notion of his rights and privileges "reduces" to an abstractable quality we know as "love." This emotion is synthesized in the infant in the same processes through which his sense of self is formed for him. This quality, the feeling of love, thus becomes the active (feeling-state) expression for what we otherwise distinguish as the invariant principle of judgment.(3b)
"Scientific Knowledge"
We are at the kernel of scientific knowledge when we insist perversely that for human knowledge there are no "abstractly correct" answers, but only lovable answers. Indeed, the terms, good, right, lovable are interchangeable terms in this respect. To be a loved person is the same thing as saying "I have the right to exist" because I enjoy those essential rights and privileges on which that existence depends. The terms, correct, right, logical, scientific, and so forth, as terms of approbation for the quality of judgment manifest by the individual toward society, do not identify qualities of judgment independent of society, but exactly the opposite; the use of the terms, correct, right, scientific,
and so forth to attribute abstract objective qualities to judgment perversely reveals the pathetic subjectivity of the processes of so-called scientific or logical reason in capitalist society (in particular). Such terms are a pitiable effort to disguise and hysterically deny the essentially propitiatory content and quality of the processes governing the selection of those judgments which the individual manifests for the propitiatory edification of his society (or particular surrogate for society as a whole).
Such evidence of the "merely subjective" quality of individual rational knowledge in capitalist culture (in particular) does not eliminate but only resituates the question of the ultimate objective truth of so-called scientific knowledge. Immediately, as Durkheim emphasizes correctly, the notion of scientific law is a subjective, ideological notion: at least, as we presently know scientific work. That implies that extant knowledge is permeated with a certain falseness on account of this subjectivity. Such is indeed the case, as the intrinsic antinomies of formal mathematical knowledge reflect this fact. Nor is our knowledge of the error limited to the repeatedly demonstrated fact of such antinomies. The fundamental antinomies of formal science have been exposed not only as vicious errors within that knowledge, but are able to diagnose those errors as reflecting a very specific form of pathology. The adduced pathetic feature is not surprisingly the characteristic ideology of capitalist culture (in particular). Yet, this same ideology-riddled knowledge is at the same time muddled self-consciousness of the most effective body of human practice yet known.
Hence, in Freud's terms, science must be regarded as having developed a certain degree of appropriateness to the specific (capitalist form of) tasks of human existence it has been developed to assist. The solution to this contradictory picture of general scientific ideology today is that the question of the objective correctness of the individual's "right answers" according to the terms of prevailing scientific canons is a misplaced question. Whether his "right answers" are indicative or not of what should be done in practice is properly settled by considering first the approximate degree of appropriateness of the existing mere ideology to the form of tasks of human existence confronting man in capitalist culture. The pathetic feature of the naive notions of rightness, correctness, and so forth, in human scientific judgment is the slave mentality embodied in the conceit that the canons of prevailing scientific practice are an approximation of absolute science, the pathetic slave mentality which credulously grovels before the mythos of a mere capitalist science apotheosized as "pure science."
The contrasting fallacy of Freud's metaphysical epiphenomenalist notion of "love" drives our attention
to the same issue otherwise posed by the question of distinguishing between the creative mentations of higher apes and man. Freud himself repeatedly demonstrates that he suffers ultimately from the same essential ideological difficulty as the Gestalt psychologists on this point. Insofar as Freud limits Individual Psychology to the more immediate clinical problems-forms of cathexis, he is able to approximate Feuerbach's psychophysical parallelist discoveries of the social determination of the contents and categorical features of the conscious and unconscious processes with which he deals. He fails to advance beyond a worse-than-Kantian "negation of the negation" notion of the positive social determination of consciousness, repressed unconsciousness, ego, and so forth. Yet, within the consequences of such a fallacy of composition, he fulfills his ego-ideal of the brilliant scientific investigator. The root and hereditary difficulties arising from the fallacy of composition become conspicuous as he attempts to locate the basis for the "self-moving feeling states" which are the abstracted active constituent of cathexis and psychodynamics generally. For him, these "instincts," etc., are to be taken as more or less axiomatic by psychology. His treatment of love, on which this writer finds Freud's metapsychology wretchedly explicit (despite the apologetic temporizing on this issue of interpretation by Reik and other well-intentioned epigonoi),(5b) is the model for Freud's mechanistic tendencies in this and other respects.
Freud attempts to rationalize his notion of love (as a variously reified "sexual drive" as such) by two interconnected ruses. Both of these share the common feature of avoiding the qualitative distinction between human and lower-beast mentation. In the first of these, the approach he initiated earlier, he attempted to account for the development of the potentialities of mentation in a certain interpretation of the history of evolution of the nervous system: metapsychology.(4b,e) Later, he supplements his earlier rationalizations with efforts to trace the evolution of modern human qualities according to stages of historical development, beginning from an hypothetical "Primeval Horde."(4a,e) He brings the two approaches into conjunction by correlating certain later aspects of the process of physiological development with the stages of progress of man himself from the origin in a Primeval Horde.
From the standpoint of our general thesis, the conclusive manifestation of a qualitative distinction between human and lower-beast mentation is the evidence of the general tendency for a negentropic advancement through a multilinear evolution of society. Even limiting oneself to the Cartesian form of the dialectical method, this suffices to demonstrate that human mentation is qualitatively distinguished from that of even the higher apes by an invariant: the negentropic practical aspect of human creative mentation.
This interpretation of the invariant has the same form we adduced from the developmental model of the biosphere as a whole. That similarity might mislead some to put off further efforts to define a qualitative distinction of that sort in human existence. One might, on such grounds, limit oneself to the ecologist's casual truism, that the negentropic rates of human development are of a significantly higher order than for the rest of the biosphere, mammals generally included. The difference may so appear to be merely one of degree, but there is nonetheless a fundamental, qualitative distinction to be isolated. In the rest of the biosphere, the expression of this invariant respecting particular species within sub-ecologies is located in the evolution of new arrays of varieties and species. For man, this evolutionary principle undoubtedly still acts upon his biological development as it does for other species; however, that aspect of the matter absolutely fails to account for the qualitative difference in rates of negentropy characteristic of society. With man, the evolutionary principle has been situated within his processes of collective deliberation.(11a)
At this point that very aspect of Gestalt psychological investigations which seem, initially, to represent a barrier to the wanted distinctions becomes the means for uncovering the exact nature and location of the qualitative difference between man and the higher apes. We find that Marx has already definitely resolved the problem. (12b,f)
What fundamentally distinguishes man from the lower beasts, according to Marx's "Feuerbach," is man's evolving (i.e., negentropic) production of the material preconditions for his species-existence. (12b) Hypothetically, situate the selective actions of biological variation on some advanced hominids existing in a Pleistocene model of a baboon-like hominid "culture." Consider the conditions in which some hominids achieve higher relative rates of negentropy for their variation, on the basis of a deliberative alteration in the form of cooperative relations within the "troop." At that "first instant" of breaking the chains of ostensibly genetical determination of the mode of extra-uterine hominid gestation, the hominid species has become a domain of the most remarkable transformation. The hominid has become proto-man, and the mere hominid troop has suddenly become a proto-human "tribe." This deliberative element, to the extent that it provides higher rates of negentropy for proto-man, advantages his social-reproductive rates over those of the various stocks of hominids from which he has thus begun to differentiate himself. Those Pleistocene variations in the physiology of mentation which enhance this feature of proto-human existence consequently tend to establish themselves as the biological distinction of a new
species, directly at the expense of other hominid and proto-human stocks which contiguously suffer the productive depletion of their outlived mode of existence, To restate: a small advance in differentiations of the physiology of mentation to this effect would rapidly determine a dominant hominid biological stock. We have only to emphasize in this connection the relatively devastating effects of the smallest shift into this qualitative domain of proto-human development. As to whether this particular hypothesis conforms to the exact pre-history of proto-human hominid differentiation, we insist upon nothing but this: we have created this hypothetical account as a pedagogical device for imparting a representation of the necessary conditions for human development.
It now becomes most useful as well as collaterally necessary to debunk a prominent methodological fallacy in Freud's metapsychology. Freud locates the "seat" of specific functions of mentation in the various "historically emergent" organs of the brain (principally), falling into the wildly ingenuous assumption that the evolution of higher organs of the brain, etc., permits the subordinated "older" tissues to continue their former specific function with a large degree of organ-autonomy. Freud's presumption on this point may enjoy specious experimental support from the efforts to isolate the specific functions of various regions of the brain by traumatic (surgical or other) impairment of such tissue. If it is acknowledged that the emergence of
a new dominant function not merely subordinates but reifies the dominated function as its predicate and that the physiology of mentation interacts as a whole to effect perception or higher forms of cognition, the traumatic demonstrations of specific impairment prove absolutely nothing respecting the point at issue. Freud's blunders respecting metapsychology cohere with and are indeed subsumed by the most conspicuous factual blunder in the entirety of his psychoanalytical writings. Nowhere does Freud take the holistic quality of creative mentation into account. In his effort to speculatively adduce the physiological basis of the "instinctual" features of mentation he disregards the most essential empirical fact respecting the holistic nature of development, sizing mentation itself.
Return for a moment to Freud's discoveries, respecting cathexis. The contents of consciousness and repressed-unconscious material for Freud is limited to a kaleidoscopic interplay of "feeling-states," with each such feeling-state momentarily identified (association) with one or more particular object-images. Concerning ordinary consciousness and even those aspects of the conscious processes which are ordinarily susceptible of being brought forward for consciousness, this portrait of cathexis is an accurate model of the phenomena...up to a point! Nowhere in Freud's dynamical overview of cathexis do we find acknowledgement of the processes which synthesize new objects, Gestalts??!!!!
The Case of L.S. Kubie
Psychoanalysis as an ongoing practice has not wholly overlooked this problem. The case of L. S. Kubie is notable.(10a) However, Kubie makes several errors in the course of otherwise assembling and synthesizing important insights into the matter. Generally, Kubie ignores the dynamics of "task-orientation" in the determination of creative mentation in his writings; in fact, when recently queried on this specific point at a lecture, he acknowledged that he had not taken such problems into consideration and was otherwise content to rest his case with the view that mentation as such was a self-evident good without respect to task-oriented determinations. Broadly, otherwise, he aborts the rich further development his work immediately implies by adhering too closely to the canons of Freudian metapsychology.(10a,b) In this respect he declines to risk upsetting the Freudian tradition so profoundly by the obvious course of exploring roots of creative mentation in the "deeper" (categorically) unconscious processes. To this effect he situates creative mentation in the "preconscious processes," overlooking the Gestalt argument which properly applies to his own conception of the role of the "shaking" process in creative mentation. (10b) Finally, directly bearing on the point under consideration, he recognizes the phenomenon of creative mentation but adheres to those precise metaphysical notions of mentation which coincide with Freud's ignoring noetic phenomena entirely. He attempts to limit creative processes to a kind of "shaking" upheaval in
the cathetical realm of events, resulting in original arrangements not predetermined by psychological experience; this model obviously is not the content of the creative processes of mentation.
To identify the essential point to be argued here, we are permitted to grossly oversimplify the form of dynamics in the following way. For this illustration, assume that cathexis involves a single object-image attached at any one time to each specific (determinate) feeling-state in motion in the mind. In Kubie's approach to representation, the outcome of a massive upheaval in the mental state would be an original reallocation of object-images among feeling-states, or some more complex transformation of the same primitive type. Transformations of the sort Kubie describes do occur as an important part of mental life, and are phenomena whose exploitation is indispensable to the most ordinary progress in clinical work. Unfortunately for Kubie's thesis, these are not the processes of creative mentation.
The Gestalt evidence underlines the fallacy of composition in Kubie. In actual creative mentation an object-image is synthesized. This occurs in such a fashion that two principal changes in mental states ensue from this. Firstly, a significant number of previously-existing object-images either vanish or are totally reifled as mere predicates of the new Gestalt. Secondly, integration of a new Gestalt effects the ensuing unfolding of a sweeping reordering of the world-outlook characteristic of the individual's mental processes. Contrary to Kubie's plausible misplacement of the phenomenon, the act of creative mentation is not characterized merely by upheavals in the cathexical states, but by a synthesis of a new object-image by a process qualitatively distinguished from perceptual synthesis and is accompanied and succeeded by a number of sweeping alterations in world-outlook "around it."
In both instances, Freud's and Kubie's, the obvious common fallacy is the attempt to explicate the psycho-dynamical processes in terms agreeable to a reductionist interpretation of the contents of conscious states. They are victimized in that sense by the fallacy of logical induction. This is the same essential fallacy as that of the modern angle-trisecter or the ingenue ignorant of modern mathematics who pathetically presumes that in an "infinite" period of time all the possible particular points locatable on a line-segment could be enumerated. From this standpoint the obvious common formal error of Freud and Kubie is their implicit denial of the existence of actual cognitive processes, their ignoring evidence of cognitive processes by which the mind directly synthesizes "true infinities" from partial arrays of predicates. Despite our harsh criticisms of Kubie in those respects, the practical object of his work on the creative process is not only commendable respecting preliminary
matters, but goes directly to that extent to the kernel of the problem which occupies the leadership of the Labor Committee tendency: that the absence of manifest powers of creative mentation in any individual in capitalist society (in particular) is not a result of his lack of adequate genetical endowment, etc., but is a consequence of a neurotic impairment of his mental powers. (10b,c)
Mechanistic Physiology
The reductionist prejudice expressed as the epiphenomenal nomenalist features of Freudian metapsychology is that since knowledge (and other mental behavior) is particular in form, brain physiology must be correspondingly adapted to both the "pluralistic" generation of instinctual motivations and the warehousing of a growing aggregation of specific discrete packets of experience. Once we have demonstrated the case against a universe as an aggregation of discrete elementarities, we have thus demolished the conventional, reductionist or formal-logical notion of the ordering of real knowledge of the Lagrangian universe. When that fact is compared with the experimental (Gestalt) evidence of the non-algebraic form of fundamental mental processes, and when the outcome of these deliberative processes is judged in terms of the whole of human history and pre-history, it is clear that Freud's and Kubie's epistemological approach to defining the essential content of mentation is false to the primitive reality of mentation. We are then left with no alternative but to approach the analysis of mental processes with the same notion of the form and significance of an invariant as we have adduced for our general thesis.
That established, the existence of such mentation prescribes that the physiology of mentation must be in appropriate correspondence to this form of mentation. Otherwise, the existence of distinctly human mental phenomena must be entirely attributed by honest investigators to the deus ex machina of a metaphysical "soul."
At this point we again resort to a pedagogical hypothesis as an efficient way of communicating necessary preconditions. (We do not prescribe that this hypothesis actually represents the physiology of mentation, but merely that it is one of several alternative hypotheses which satisfy the preconditions we know to prevail.) It would be plausible to suggest the possibility, since mentation is characterized by the negentropic tendency we otherwise locate in progressive evolution of varieties and species, that the emergence of human mentation (in particular) involves the reification of the function of "genetical processes" within certain tissues, such that each experience induces a pervasive alteration of the state of that tissue taken as a whole. It would be consistent with this possibility to suggest that thought-images are not specifically stored as discrete images, but that the totality of "reified genetical material"
acquires the assignment to reproduce such an image de novo as ordinary genetical determination differentiates organs, etc. The obvious immediate difficulty presented by such an hypothesis from the standpoint of biology would be that since the determinations of creative mentation are negentropic, the evolutionary ("genetical") processes reified to perform this function are themselves positively negentropically, oriented, rather than "random." To argue otherwise would, again, require the assumption of the existence of a "soul" as the source of creative mentation, and an elan vital to explain the existence of life itself.
This hypothesis, or any other satisfying the same demonstrated preconditions, would signify that the uniqueness of the form of extra-uterine human gestation creates fundamental determinate categories of mind, relation which do not exist in any preceding species. This would be necessary since the noetic element in socialized causation locates the essential quality of individual (creative) mentation in its development, as the origin of mediation of innovations in the mode of general reproduction. This would, in turn, demand that the fundamental "emotive" feature of human mentation would be of the form we attributed to love. It would, in turn, determine a complementary "emotion" (anti-love) corresponding to entropy respecting the individual's sense of socialized identity.
This would indicate that Freud's notion of love is inside out. Rather than love as a reification of a "sexual instinct," sexual union would become a necessary central feature of adult human behavior as a determined realization of love.
Two primary considerations are involved.
Firstly, the production of viable new individuals for society depends, most emphatically, on the role of parental love toward the infant, the key feature in the effective extra-uterine gestation of a new human personality. In this relationship, both the parents and the infant are what we term concrete universals (actual infinities). Each is a particular human being through which the other mediates his or her relationship to society as a whole. To the infant, the otherwise vague sense of his social rights and privileges -- as they are scattered throughout society in various persons, each in part -- is superceded by the more precise determination of an exact Gestalt of rights and privileges concentrated within and mediated through a single concrete adult individual, e.g., his mother. It is a corollary of this point that one could not imagine any more effective way of maximizing the incidence of psychotic and otherwise crippled personalities in capitalist cultures in particular) than by replacing the paired-mating relationship household with creches staffed by a plurality of (inconsistent) mother-father surrogates. The infant's opportunities for developing a stable exact sense of reflected social identity would be minimal. Respecting
the role of the infant for the parent, for the mother (especially) capitalist and earlier cultures had assiduously conditioned the young girl such that in womanhood she frequently experiences the most profound crises at the thought she might "fail" to become a mother; not to become pregnant, or not to be a mother of a child, is to fail to be a "real woman." The specifics of capitalist cultures aside, societies arrange that the mother (and other responsible adults) should obtain from "command" and "responsibility" for the infant and child a mediation of her social identity, such that the child becomes to that extent a concrete universal for her. The "roles" of uncles, fathers, aunts, and so forth in various societies for various phases of the child's development are similarly controlled.
This has two bearings on paired mating relationships. For the product of such a household, the paired mating relationship in adulthood becomes the only way of replacing the kind of identity-establishing love he or she enjoyed in infancy. Apart from that specific, the "permanent form" (i.e., "infinite" form) of attachment to a particular individual of the opposite sex is a uniquely effective instrumentality for sustaining the individual's sense of identity. The rights and privileges which exist for him (or her) in the love of another concrete individual becomes a basis for reflecting one's identity as a loved person into oneself as one's reflected self-consciousness of one's identity.
The problem in attempting to adduce the principles involved from empirical sources is that virtually all paired love relationships in capitalist culture are necessarily pathological to a significant extent. The absolutely necessary degree of identification of this point is accomplished by citing the classical paradigm. The male selects a woman for a mate by "settling for the best bargain" he imagines within his means. The quality by which he, broadly speaking, determines the "price-scales" for comparing his and the woman's respective eligibilities, is the desirability of himself in the eyes of a certain strata of women and to corresponding desirability of himself in the eyes of a certain strata of women and the corresponding desirability of the women among a certain strata of men he wishes to "impress." By possessing the object which other men desire, he commands their favorable opinion of himself. This concentrated model, with all its involuted derivatives (such as "reaction formations") implicitly considered, exemplifies the "negation of the negation" form of all capitalist social relationships.
Thus, to state the basis for adducing the essential content of the "infinite" form of the concrete-universal relationship in capitalist society, we must situate the statement of the case in terms of the kind of healthy society which could be established for the present technological development of the productive forces. It is within that context that we can identify the reasons why the relationship between love and sex is exactly opposite to that argued by Freud.
7. Freud's Error on Society
In the "Introduction" to his 1921 "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," Freud goes as far as he is able to go there or elsewhere in conceding the social determination of the human mind:
...In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well -- in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words.
The relations of an individual to his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the object of his love, and to his physician -- in fact all the relations which have hitherto been the chief subject of psychoanalytical research -- may claim to be considered as social phenomena, and in this respect they may be contrasted with certain other processes, described by us as "narcissistic," in which the satisfaction of the instincts is partially or totally withdrawn from the influence of other people. The contrast between social and narcissistic -- Bleuler would perhaps call them "autistic" -- mental acts therefore falls wholly within the domain of Individual Psychology, and is not well calculated to differentiate it from a Social or Group Psychology.
It is the contrasting residue of that short book of Freud's which chiefly occupies our attention. In this we emphasize exactly those evidences, respecting the connection of the individual's mentation to social processes, by which Freud exhibits in the most telling way his pathetic assumption respecting social processes, the assumptions on which his reductionist tendencies in individual psychology depend.
The book as a whole is ostensibly an extended critical review of a then recently published book on the Psychology of Crowds by the French reactionary psychologist, Le Bon. This aspect of Le Bon, Freud locates and underlines plainly enough; following what proves to have been forced deference to Le Bon in the second chapter, Freud arouses his critical faculties from their preceding chapter of semi-slumber:
Everything that he says to the detriment and depreciation of the manifestations of the group mind had already been said by others before him with equal distinctness and equal hostility, and has been repeated in unison by thinkers, statements, and writers since the earliest per- iods of literature,
and, shortly thereafter, he qualifies this:
The assertions of Sighele, Le Bon, and the rest relate to groups of a short-lived character, which some passing interest has hastily agglomerated out of various sorts of individuals. The characteristics of revolutionary groups, and especially those of the Great French Revolution, have unmistakeably influenced their descriptions....
Freud's efforts to establish a corrective to such a one-sided diatribe against crowds are initially almost promising.
Le Bon himself was prepared to admit that in certain circumstances the morals of a group can be higher than those of the individuals that compose it, and that only collectives are capable of a high degree of unselfishness and devotion.
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude. But...It remains an open question, moreover, how much the individual thinker or writer owes to the stimulation of the group in which he lives, or whether he does more than perfect a mental work in which the others have had a simultaneous share.
and, emphasizing the point that a group is by no means simple massing of individuals:
...a condition has to be fulfilled: these individuals must have something in common with one another, a common interest in an object, a similar emotional bias in some situation or other....
Thereafter, Freud's efforts fail entirely, except in two interrelated respects. He fails precisely in the ironical respect that he actually accomplishes a secondary task, rather than his stated purpose. He fails in the respect that he sets out to examine group psychology as a lawful phenomenon, but represents as the empirical basis for adducing such laws what is merely a pathological aspect of social relations in capitalist society. Consequently, insofar as he touches on the sort of "short-lived group" which represents the contrast of a "choppy sea" to the "ground-swell" of stable institutions, what he depicts with a certain accuracy is the dynamic a fascist mob! -- the group psychology, in fact, of Hitler's prophet, Stefan George!
Perhaps the most efficient approach to this little book to compare Freud's conception of the dynamic relationship of the individual to society with Kant's treatment of the problems of heteronomy in the Critique of Practical Reason. The usefulness of such an approach is no respect accidental. A full century before Freud's establishment of psychoanalysis, Kant had examined the abstractable form of psychological repression and of bourgeois individual/societal relations with far greater competence than Freud. "Negation of the negation" is a concept developed by Kant in this connection,(8) both to deal with repression of censorable individual impulses, the problem of the determination of the ego, and the determination of ego-ideals. Cohering with the superiority of Kant's such systematic features over Freud's, Freud remains ignorant of the systematic (dialectical) implications of the problem of heteronomy, and consequently Freud premises his criticism of societal/individual relationships largely on an element which Kant rightly recognizes to be pathological.
In general, the kind of society which Kant dissects with such consummate powers of insight is nothing but
capitalist society. Hence, since Kant's Critique of Practical Reason subsumes entirely the special case of societal/individual dynamics which Freud ingeniously assumes to be manifestations of more general psychological laws, we can directly apply the corpus of our established criticism of Kant directly to Freud. In short, Freud's individual is the pathologically-determined, i.e., heteronomic, individual of capitalist society, and his notion of lawful social relationships is nothing but the attempt to bring society into conformity with the perpetuation of heteronomic individual psychopathology!
It might appear, at first reading of this little book, that the regrettable shortcomings of the later chapters reflect his failure to maintain the high level of approximate insight manifest in the opening pages. Yet, after considering the invariant qualities of the whole text in respect to the Kantian Critique, we see that Freud's systematical notions of social determination of individual psychology is entirely within the bounds of a society based on heteronomic individuals. Consequently, the principal ironies of Freudian psychology are placed in better focus by study of this text. Freud, as a gifted empirical investigator and clinician, is impelled to reflect the evidence much as it leads him in the course of actually solving problems of ameliorating neurotic disturbances. Yet, despite those commendable features and outstanding achievements as a clinician and clinical theorist, Freud balked at that evidence which would have compelled him to break free of the ideological bounds of capitalist culture. His heteronomic conception of the individual's lawful psychodynamics and his cohering acceptance of the extension of social heteronomy into abstract thought, e.g., reductionist epiphenomenalism respecting the so-called "instinctual" aspects of mentation, are the most immediately apparent expressions of his bourgeois ideological premises.
The Marxian criticism of Kant, coinciding with our earlier emphasis on Freud's ignorance of creative mentation, points up a vicious error which is a more fundamental expression of capitalist ideology. Or, to restate the case on this point: the commitment to heteronomic "norms" is to be regarded as a derivative flaw relative to this more fundamental error.
Kant's fundamental antinomy divides the evidence of human knowledge into two antagonistic but nonetheless interpenetrating classes.(8) On the one side, there is the evidence for the form of logical thought embodied in Lagrange's physics: the universe as entirely ordered by physical laws susceptible of algebraic representation. Yet the "free will" of man, to the extent this will is realized as human practice, thus becomes a determining cause for the ordering of the universe, and creates incontestable proof in defiance of the universality of ordinary kinds of physical laws. The systematic, devastating correction of Kant on this point by Hegel (6f) and Marx(12b,f) shows that Kant's fundamental
antinomy is only an abstract disguise for everyday capitalist alienation.
Beyond Alienation
The negentropic feature of social progress, those creative conceptual advances involved in the synthesis and realization of both new technologies and new forms of socialized practice, is as we have noted categorically identified by Marx as universal labor. (12e) It is this aspect of human thought and practice which expresses the active principle absolutely distinguishing man from the lower beasts.(12b) Yet, in capitalist society, this aspect of the totality of human thought and activity is suppressed and otherwise estranged from what is regarded as ordinary mental and practical life.
The model for this is wage-labor. The wage-laborer sells a segment of his life to the employer, to the end that labor subordinates itself to the will of the employer and exerts itself in a fixed way. For the period the wage-laborer works in this way, he is dehumanized, degraded to a beast-like status. Like a mere beast, he is treated as if his specific (fixed) skill were the genetically determined mode of behavior of a mere animal; or, to be more exact, by fixing his behavior in this way, his human behavior is bestialized in form. He is denied the prompting or exercise of his creative (human) potentialities. He is not, however, denied some bumptious creative powers he brings to his employment; long before he began his first employment, virtually all his human creative potentialities were virtually destroyed.
"Destroyed" in this instance does not signify that the workers under capitalism are denied some qualities which adults enjoyed in some preceding society. In no society up through capitalism have adult social relations been premised on an actually human form of the individual identity. For, to be human in that sense, individual man would not only have to consciously participate in formulating the developmental and related policies for his entire society, but he would also have to locate his sense of importance to his society in the exercise and development of his creative mental powers. Capitalist society, as we have emphasized, gives man the potentiality to discover what it might be like to become human, precisely because the capitalist world-historical form of development of interrelated productive forces is dependent upon a more or less continual explicit advancement in technology and social organization of the mode of social reproduction. Capitalist society is therefore the first society in which the decisions made by anyone respecting social-reproductive development are addressed to negentropy in the productive forces! What capitalist society suppresses and denies is only what capitalist development situates man within reach of becoming. Although individual human potential appears to a certain extent in every society, and is brutally suppressed in every society so far, it is
only at the appearance of capitalist society that the suppression denies man human qualities within his reach.
This involves a further dimension of irony. The common feature of every form of society presently known, and the necessary feature of even those forms yet to be detected and examined, is that society must begin the process of extra-uterine gestation in a form somehow appropriate to the limited development of creative mentation in the new individual. At a certain point in childhood, the same society must then subject the same new individual to brutal processes of destruction of the same creative qualities. The comparison of the first and second phases of maturation in a model modern petit-bourgeois development only exemplifies this. In some fashion and period, after an initial period of infancy, in which the building of the child's sense of identity occurs, the processes of negative socialization are introduced, always of the form best generally described as a "negation of the negation" battering of the child into the mold adult society will require him to fit. He is induced to regard his positive identity as that pathetic residue of his creative impulses, a residue which is principally occupied in self-repressing that aspect of himself which society instructs him to endungeon.
The summary description of the role of the individual worker in formulating programmatic policies of extended socialist reproduction locates an alternative "normal" form of adult identity and functioning from which we can adduce a form of post-infantile socialization which does not replicate the brutal traditions passed down from one specific preceding social form to its successor. It is the process of socialization wanted to transform children into adult universal labor which affords us a basis for counterposing to Freud such knowledge of the actually normal, healthy psychodynamics of the individual.
In general, to establish the general setting for our summary examination of socialist planning, the role of the individual worker in the formulation of programmatic policies of development is an individual who must responsibly formulate the optimal developmental policies for his entire society.(11b) Since he typifies the self-interest of the working class, his initial impulse must seem to be that of maximizing material consumption and leisure, at the expense of "saving" for development of the productive forces. For the pseudo-socialist, the notion of planning in an "ideal socialist state" ends with that single impulse. The pseudo-socialist must necessarily presume that in this ideal state there is so much super-abundance that capacity and productivity have thus outrun any imaginable greed by the working class. In reality, the rate of development of the productive forces seems to depend upon maximizing the rate of accumulation at the expense of consumption and of leisure. Yet, the possible rate of consumption, and of leisure, entirely depends upon the rate of development.
To the extent that the worker-planner opts for maximum consumption, he lowers his rate of consumption and leisure. Yet, if he were to opt for the other extreme, reduction in present levels of consumption and leisure, this would result in a strong tendency for a decline in the rate of development of the productive forces, since the productive potentialities of the working class are a function of its increased rates of consumption and leisure! So, it must appear that the worker's problem in formulating policy is to hit upon the optimal proportions; it must seem, at first, that this optimal program is the one which yields the highest aggregate combined consumption and leisure for some period up to a "horizon" point. In a sense, that is the required solution, but...
The task of hitting upon the optimal rate of accumulation has a bad taste, and rightly so. What is the useful purpose realized by drawing the entirety of the working class into the executive function of calculating this optimum? If it is merely a matter of calculations, were it not more efficiently and speedily accomplished by an elite? Is "democratic socialist planning" then merely a sop? Is the point of setting up this grand participation scheme to induce in the worker an illusion of self-importance? Is it all such a maudlin charade? If so, then it could not be argued that the worker achieves any realization of the necessity of his existence through such a mere charade! If so, then all this talk of socialism is a mere chimera; if so, then what is wanted is a non-capitalist, centralized economic dictatorship ruled by a beneficent elite, which thus ensures that each receives that which is best for him within the terms permitted by the prevailing negentropy value for productive development.
Is there something critical to successful socialist planning which demands the self-conscious participation of every worker in the formulation of programmatic policies? Just so -- once we lift the statistician's ideological fog from our view of the planning task. The means for hitting the right numbers in determining the accumulation rate for planning is not locatable within the realm of statistics. The numbers are important but they are the mere spoor, not the substance, of the problem to be overcome. What statistics merely reflect is a reality composed of specific technologies, susceptible of being employed in alternative ways. The individual worker's role in formulating policy thus absolutely does not represent billions of individuals on earth each individually calculating and then debating and then recalculating the optimal accumulation rate.
In a simplified (and thus distorted) illustration of the actual planning process involved, there is a centralized agency (typified by a "vanguard cadre party") which issues a set of alternative draft programmatic proposals. These proposals initiate the process of formulation of policy within the class as a whole. Going over this budgetary study, each worker locates means by which
the bill of consumption, process sheets, and so forth can be improved. He may, in one instance, recognize that the drafts overlook a potential alternative product from the particular industry in which he is immediately employed. This alternative would correspondingly shift the possible rate of general accumulation upwards. In another instance, the program may misconceive the specific form of bill of consumption need most appropriate to that worker and numbers of workers like him. In general, a centralized agency, initiating the process task of formulation, begins with proposals which reflect the optimal rate of accumulation for known technologies of production and consumption. If the budgetary drafts merely specified figures, this would give the workers receiving the drafts little enough to contribute. However, if the drafts also identify the bottlenecks of technology, the variable, problem-areas of determining consumption-needs or the available modes for satisfying those needs, the specialized experience and knowledge of every worker can thus focus on the significant qualitative aspects of the program, to the thus-mediated end of improving the realizable reproductive rate.
However, even that explanation presents the role of the individual worker as more passive than it must be in fact. The planning process is not an annual or semi-annual festivity, but in constant operation. The individual worker participates not merely by passing judgment on draft proposals issued to his scrutiny for this purpose, The existing technology of production and consumption, existing practices generally, are already an implicit program. The worker's identity in this process is located in his increasing leisure activity as a consultant and executive for the entire society of which he is a part. In this fashion, as he manifests himself as a continuous process of proposals which improve social productivity for the entire society, his continuous existence represents a positive necessity for every other person in that society.
The objective of democratic planning is not to provide the individual worker with consoling "participation" in deciding on a statistical formulation. The objective of socialist planning is to provide a (Spinozan) form through which the creative potential of every member of the society can be efficiently realized to the benefit of the entire society. In this process, reciprocally, as the society thus enables itself to benefit from the workers' unique creative contributions, the worker is obtaining the identity of a human being whose existence is universally acknowledged as necessary by the entirety of his society. He is recognized as necessary, as an important individual, not because of his personality, his past accomplishments, etc., but precisely because of the importance of developing further his human qualities, his powers of creative mentation.
Hence, in the process of childhood socialization of the new individual for such a society, the discrimination between "good" and "evil" acts by the isolated heteronomic
individual ceases. The basis for socialization of the individual is his dread of failing to exercise his ability to develop, to the effect that development enables him to satisfy the ego-ideal provided him by his parents, parents who are identified for society by their participation in the planning process. The heteronomic or "competitive" approach to individual development is junked.
To any parent, the feasibility of such extended task-oriented permissiveness is not so obvious. In today's actuality, up to a certain point every increase in the infant's powers is a source of unqualified pleasure. Then, one day, the further increase in these powers means that the child has begun to develop destructive powers. The point at which this change in valuation appears is no sense peculiar to the biology of human infants. The degree to which parents must regard the child's freedom as potentially destructive is a variable, determined in the more general fashion symptomized by the notion of "baby-proofing" a house or apartment, or by the cretinism of the social worker who recommends "permissive child rearing" to a ghetto welfare-recipient mother of several children. The possibility of providing a child with the physical setting in which he can freely exercise a developing attention-span, respecting emerging physical and mental powers and impulses, determines the possibility of minimizing the amount of stultifying forms of socialization of child behavior. Generally, without the corresponding material prerequisites for a more permissive task-oriented childhood development, no significant change can appear. Without the material prerequisites one can only exercise self-consciousness of one's unavoidable crimes against the mind of the child, and thus ameliorate the effects of those crimes against the child, abuses which one's material circumstances and prevailing bourgeois regimentation of life compel one to impose. (There is undeniably a stink from Marie Antoinette's grave, "Then, let them eat cake," in the petit-bourgeois liberal's efforts to "uplift" the "blue-collar" worker and unemployed from vulgar "material demands" to "spiritual reforms.") Any thoughtful parent who is self-conscious of his or her cruel obligations to brutalize a child of eighteen months or more in such unavoidable respects, already has negative insight into the fact that the increase in per capita material consumption and a simultaneous increase in leisure is the material precondition for advancing the human qualities, the intelligence, of a new generation. This painful truth is only the more obvious and concentrated complement for the knowledge that it is a lack of material consumption and lack of leisure which compels the adult also to brutalize (banalize) his own mental life.
The object of child-rearing is to realize the Spinozan ethic as the replacement of the present (capitalist) "negation of the negation" form of determination of the new individual's motivation, self-consciousness, ego-ideals, etc.
The implicit potentiality and need for democratic socialist formulation of programmatic developmental policies shows up more clearly what the worker is denied in capitalist society (and, also, in the alienated culture of the Soviet Union). The location of his importance as an individual to society in his performance of a fixed, learned mode of behavior mislocates the basis for his sense of social identity in a bestialized, alienated form of his human activities. By denying almost the existence of his creative mental powers, and pervasively denying him the right to make such creative powers the basis for his social identity, the society degrades man to a beast-like status. Society thus alienates the individual from his human qualities, his power to develop and realize his power for universal labor.
The "Rule of Law"
Hegel's devastating criticism of Kant's "negation of the negation" goes to the kernel of the ideological problem:
...by the conversion of opinion held on authority into opinion held out of personal conviction, the content of what is held is not necessarily altered, and truth has not thereby taken the place of error.[6a]
Kant's "respect for law," which is only a circumlocution for "respect for bourgeois law," is not merely a matter of subjecting one's individual will to dread of the force of courts and police agencies. Although, indeed, the hallowed lie that bourgeois parliamentary constitutional system establishes a "rule by law, not by men," is of no small significance as ideology.
This ideology is exposed as an hallowed lie, indeed, when we consider that the entire corpus of bourgeois constitutional law is premised on the enforcement of debt-obligations, such that the person's rights themselves, under bourgeois constitutional law, are merely those grudgingly acceded to a "corporation sole." The entire body of bourgeois constitutional law, its invariant feature, is that it is a rationalization for the policeman's pistol in the enforcement of debt-obligations to the capitalist system. If the constitutional system is to a certain extent a "rule by law," that law itself is ruled by the interest of a definite body of men, the capitalist class. The significance of the systematic law is that parliamentary and judicial proceedings are occupied in maintaining a certain degree of consistency in the corpus of law as a rationalization, to the end of preventing the law from becoming the means for setting its own authority against itself in such a way as to overthrow itself. "Respect for law," in the sense of the "rule of law," is one of the thinnest of ideological devices employed to console the individual that such "respect for law" is principally the act of credulously grovelling before a ruling class of men. Not even the most ingenious forms of rationalization of capitalist constitutional law have been notably successful in concealing the truth from a sufficiently skeptical critic: "social contracts,"
"compacts," and such ideological refuse-fictions invariably emphasize the form of the contract (e.g., the bill of exchange, the debt), and otherwise identify the notions of individual right in nothing but heteronomic terms of reference.
It is not therefore inconsistent that socialists should zealously defend every bourgeois constitutional guarantee of civil liberties and rights to the maximum. Ironically, just to the extent that capitalist reproduction depends upon the development of productive individuals according to advancing forms of technology and advancing social-political forms as demanded by technological change, capitalist law is compelled, however grudgingly, to make certain humanist concessions. In the fashion of a society which must create human qualities in the infant and then begin to destroy those same qualities in the child, capitalist accumulation grudgingly depends upon the development of labor-power, which cannot flourish without both degrees of individual political freedoms and also giving limited protection to the individual's efforts to further his development as labor-power through struggles for material consumption and leisure forms. These limited humanistic contingencies of capitalist law are always to be exploited to the maximum possible. The socialist finds himself often in limited common cause with liberals on this, insofar as the maintenance and augmentation of existing individual freedom tend to force the capitalist system to modify its practices in directions appropriate to capitalist accumulation itself. Notable is the 1954 Supreme
Court "Civil Rights" decision, which augmented the freedom of black workers in more or less exactly the directions then-coincident in the dominant U.S. financial and corporate interests in "runaway shop" exploitation of the cheap-labor southern states. The socialist exploits these contradictions of capitalist law not only because he is a Humanist per se, but, more positively, because the material preconditions for advancement for the cognitive powers of the working class are a precondition for increasing the revolutionary potential of that class.
This struggle for individual right indeed becomes implicitly revolutionary at the point that the liberals show a decided tendency to break away from the civil liberties struggle.
This latter is exemplified by several notable trends toward reactionary policies on civil liberties by U.S. liberals since approximately 1969. The outright bonanza granted to New York real estate interests, with the support of the city's liberal machines, meant a rise in welfare payments to slumlords at precisely the point the current dollar (to say nothing of the constant dollar) subsidies to recipients were being drastically cut. The nationwide reversal of the liberal policy for improving the quality of education has recently been superseded by a virtual mania, with widespread liberal support, for deschooling. The widespread liberal support for bestial educational forms of repression, approaching or even exceeding the "fascist" regimentation of the "Cureton methods," is an absolute turnabout from pre-1969 emphasis on enrichment of cognitive development. This epitomizes a pervasive drive, with liberal support, toward increasing repressiveness, a reaction against individual liberties correlating with the anti-libertarian bias of Supreme Court majority decisions. In all these and other instances, the reason for the abandonment of civil liberties by the overwhelming majority of former liberal strata reflects a capitalist "economic motive." The capitalist system, veering ever-more deeply into a depression, is therefore engaged in reducing individual freedom as its immediate "historic" thrust, and cannot tolerate anything but a reduction in those individual rights and liberties which represent real-wage costs or costs of public services. Nor can it permit anything but a reduction in the freedom of individuals to assemble and organize against such repressions. It is at such points as this that the essential feature of "respect for bourgeois law" reveals itself: behind the law there is policeman's pistol, and behind the police, the ruling class of capitalist men. The reactionary trends currently dominant among former liberal strata reflect that the rights and liberties of the individual are granted by law only to the extent that the exercise of those rights and liberties is within the bounds of self-interest of a ruling class of man.
Behind this relatively formal aspect of the "respect
for law" there is the more fundamental implicit law expressed sometimes by the philistine's apotheosis of "horse sense," "common sense," "the way to get things done," "the way things work," "let's be practical." This entire array of bourgeois-ideological cant essentially expresses a belief that the order of behavior and relations in society is essentially fixed. "l have a fixed skill" is the epitome of this bourgeois-ideological notion. "My social identity depends upon society's continued positive valuation of the sort of fixed qualities of productive behavior represented by my skill," profession, and so forth. In general, although capitalist development (and, thus, the historic basis for capitalist accumulation) depends upon the exploitation of the human (creative) qualities of the individual, the value, the identity afforded to the individual essentially denies any importance to those human qualities, and locates the value of the individual in the bestialization of an ostensibly fixed form of the individual's behavioral development, and, like Freud, a preference for "fixed institutions" over the "choppy seas" of changing institutions.
As we noted earlier respecting the pathetic aspect of Schelling, it is impossible to conceptualize a universality as long as that universality is conceived in terms of simple extension, fixed laws. Conceptualization of universals can occur only when the extension characteristic of the whole is a principle of self-development (invariant). Every effort to conceptualize a whole in terms of simple extension (fixed laws, "strict constitutionalism") reduces the notion of the whole to that of an "algebraic" aggregation of self-evidently discrete primitives (elementarities). This is precisely the correlative of "respect for law" in capitalist culture. The individual is degraded into a primitive being, a bestialized heteronomic individual. This heteronomic individual is in "competitive" relations with all other individuals, each aspect of the interconnected productive forces is reified as in "competition" with others, and man himself is pathetically viewed as "in competition" with the biosphere of which he is the leading and most essential feature!
Consequently, Hegel, recognizing that creative mentation was the essential human quality of man, and recognizing the evolutionary principle of social existence, was able to proceed from his demonstrations to discredit the entire pathetic aspect of Kant in almost a single sentence. A few further passages from the Phenomenology illustrate the point:
Since I have taken the self-development of the notion to be the medium wherein science really exists .... [emphasis added]
The series of shapes, which consciousness traverses on this road, is rather the detailed history of the process of training and educating consciousness itself up to the level of science. The resolve presents this mental development...in the simple form of an intended purpose, as
immediately finished and complete, as having taken place; this pathway, on the other hand, is, as opposed to this abstract intention, or untruth, the actual carrying out of that process of development. [emphasis added]
...what is actual and concrete is the same as its inner principle or notion simply because the immediate qua purpose contains within it the self or pure actuality. The realized purpose, or concrete actuality, is movement and development unfolded. But this very unrest is the self;... [emphasis added]
8. A Social Approach to Individual Psychology
The contradiction of individual development in capitalist culture (to which we have several times referred), obviously determines the specific forms of psychodynamics apparent in study of the mind of the adult in this way. The main features of the mind as described by Freud are more or less exactly an accurate description of this phenomenon, within the limits of Freud's flawed method of judging that evidence. Apart from the consideration that Freud was obviously prevented from competently judging the deeper implications of his essentially accurate descriptions by his enslavement to bourgeois ideology, a certain perverse kind of apology can be made for him. Had Freud broken beyond the bounds of capitalist epistemological prejudices to pose the experimental and observational hypothesis wanted for a competent deeper exploration of the evidence, the type of clinical cases required by such hypotheses would be needed as well. These cases would be from the ranks of those extremely rare individuals in which creative processes have become a self-conscious aspect of mental life.
This need would not efficiently be satisfied by the individual who is merely creative. A still rarer individual is wanted. Experimental work demands the individual who has become self-conscious of creative mentation as a distinct phenomenon, and who has in that process relocated his sense of social identity in that sort of activity.
Our Experimental Authority
At this point, the writer's authority to develop his case depends critically upon the particular empirical investigations he conducted, especially over the past decade and a half.
Through an examination of himself included in this, the discriminated distinct phenomena which could thus be sought out as reflected in the persons and work of other contemporary and historic individuals distinguished for their creative activities. The first kind of phenomenon sought in these individuals was the effort to communicate certain kinds of conceptions which necessarily appear as working ideas only in those who are self-conscious of the distinct forms of creative mentation
in themselves. Kepler, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Shelley, Goethe, Heine, Beethoven, Cantor, Felix Klein, Emile Durkheim, Albert Einstein, were the principal cases explored.
The most important of such phenomena is the notion of a dialectic itself, which is usually situated (by the "systematic" creative thinkers: philosophers, scientists, etc.) in a specific kind of conceptual approach to solving the class of antinomies portended by the point-line paradox. What distinguishes the self-consciously creative personality in this respect is not necessarily a satisfactory solution to the problem -- the case of Kant is exemplary here -- but rather an awareness of the concept of the problem, and of certain specifications of the conception sought as a solution to that problem. In creative artists, the emphasis tends to be immediately on the notion of self-movement as the content of the artistic conception, and the accompanying recognition that the content of the work of art in that respect is nothing but a reflection of a similar empirical existence in the kind of mental activity by which the artist conceived that work.
The criteria used for judging progress in the self-analytical aspect of this inquiry have been those which any even merely creative individual would commend. The person who has been prompted to locate his sense of social identity in output of creative work is plagued (as we noted in discussing Shelley's "Ode...") by the fear of loss of the specific kind of mental powers on which that production depends. This problem is the commendable focus of Kubie's inquiry, in which he attempts and rightly so -- to locate the cause for loss or attenuation of creative powers in neurotic disorders. The nature of the work coincides in this respect with the general approach of competent psychoanalysis, in which the proper goal is to identify, and hence to either remove or check, those internalized "noises" which abort the individual's wilful command over his powers of reason and acting on reason. The measure of effectiveness of self-analysis of creative processes is similarly to discriminate between the desired and dysfunctional elements of mental life, and to gauge progress as increasing wilful control of creative activity through removing the dysfunctional and enhancing the self-consciousness of the desired aspects.
The two interconnected theorems of Descartes are a paradigm for creative thought in general. The unique feature of self-consciously creative work, thus distinguishing it from logical problem-solving merely assisted by the intervening impulse of creative processes, is the wilful synthesis of an empirically demonstrable universal from an array of predicates. The duration of attention-span over which one is able to sustain consistent advances toward such objectives, the ability to marshal one's appropriate mental processes for such work at will, and subsumed considerations, are the tests employed.
The writer was also most advantageously situated for this investigation, especially in recent years.
The unique feature of the now-international Labor Committee tendency, distinguishing it qualitatively from all socialist organizations heretofore established, is that expressed by its adopted "Founding Principles" among other locations. The central conception regulating the political judgments of the organization is the interconnected notion of the class-for-itself and of a fundamental law of evolutionary social reproduction. Consequently, the recruitment of members and the principal collective activities have been regulated by the propagation and realization of conceptions whose origination is uniquely representative of self-conscious creative mentation.
The location of the writer's personal identity in the process of communicating an increasingly appropriate approximation of these conceptions, and conceiving and motivating the realization of them, represents a situation exactly analogous to that we attributed to the creative artist in our discussion of Shelley and Beethoven. The motion reflected in the enhanced consciousness of the organization's members, in the workers and others directly affected by this organization, is in part a social reflection of the writer's own "internal" universal labor. This advantages him by affording him an extraordinary degree of actually human identity even within capitalist society. The access to the realization of universal labor in this way provides him with an objective measure of the relative "productivity" of his output in those same terms.
These positive features of his self-analytical situation are complemented by the resulting means to isolate, in himself and others, those psychological phenomena (and associated social behaviors) which correlate variously with the ebbs and flows of concept-assimilating capacities within the organization and its peripheral social strata. Furthermore, the advancement of a significant number of individuals' mental powers in the organization as a general Promethean process has produced a considerable extension of the investigation of the problems of ideology and mass-neurosis by a rapidly-growing number of special task forces established within the various sectoral groupings of this international tendency.
To emphasize the focus this investigation enjoys, we report that the degree to which significant numbers of working people (and others) are drawn toward or briefly ebb away from collaboration with the Labor Committees is governed principally by tendencies or counter-tendencies toward agreement with the class-for-itself conception on which all the principal organizing campaigns and tactical undertakings of the groupings are premised. Hence, the more progress Labor Committee members effect in themselves as political organizers, the more exactly and profoundly their "molecular"
exchanges with individual working people adduce manifestations of deeper motivations operating within those peripheral strata. This molecular intelligence-gathering, linked to the "ideology" projects, represents the first actually scientific empirical study of mass psychological phenomena to be undertaken.
At the same time, study of the correlations between ebbs, flows in concept-comprehension and personal behaviors, etc., has provided experimental hypotheses through which to test the adduced psychodynamics respecting creative processes within the organization itself. Notable in this connection are studies of the consistent tendency of academic identity-roles to abort the individual's powers of concept-formation (coinciding with Kubie's observations partially to the same effect), and the immediate correlation between banalized sexual relations and an almost total temporary loss of conceptual powers.
To those with an ego-investment in their knowledge of psychoanalytical nomenclature and glosses, the most shocking aspect of the criticism we have to offer Freudian psychodynamics is undoubtedly our denial of the existence of the "Id." This is complemented by the related finding that there exists no categorical unconscious in the sense of processes of mentation not susceptible of being made conscious (at least, in a certain modified sense of consciousness).
Ordinarily, until we introduce the phenomena of creative mentation as empirically deliberative processes, the definition of consciousness is restricted to the cathexized form, logical thought. We use "logical" in the broad sense of arrays of object-like images "connected" by feeling-states. This broader usage of "logical" is entirely justified, and indeed mandatory in this instance; if we recognize that the feeling-state aspect, the "color" of so-called conscious thought, corresponds to the notion of "relationship" in a logical system of object-images, no other term but "logical" will do. From the standpoint of ordinary consciousness, the existence of such consciousness is associated with both the point of reference of consciousness (ego) and an associated, shadowy but existent, persona-maker, the ego-ideal, (Actually, there may be several distinct sets of ego-ideals in effect, a prominent feature in certain types of disturbed personalities.)
In this view of consciousness in terms of "respect for law," the consciousness of alienated man, the executive agency (ego and ego-ideal) is vaguely present as the producer and traffic-manager of consciousness, the so-called "pre-conscious." This "pre-conscious," insofar as we can determine, must be regarded as essentially identical with the so-called Freudian "super-ego," and the terms, super-ego, ego and pre-conscious, must be regarded as signifying only distinctions of dynamic and descriptive aspects of the same actualities. In addition, there is unconscious thought-activity constantly in motion, thought-activity of the sort which tends to be reflected as conscious thought, but which, for reason of the pre-conscious "traffic management," is generally kept from appearing to consciousness at that particular moment. Using the term, "repression," in its broadest functional terms, this aspect of mentation represents the apparently repressed unconscious processes. In addition, so long as we continue to adhere to the naive notion of ordinary consciousness itself, there is a "deeper" aspect of mentation which is not susceptible of "being made conscious," in the sense that repressed unconscious processes are so susceptible.
Once we approach the mind from the standpoint of the fact of self-conscious creative mentation, the description changes. In creative mentation, the productive activity of the mind is under deliberative control of a different form (and content) of the Ego, and therefore the term, consciousness, must be employed in the sense of deliberative, but the dominant mental activity under such deliberation (executive control) is not object-like images. Yet, at the same time, an object-like stratum of awareness exists. (The feeling one has in experiencing shifts back and forth between a self-consciously creative and ordinary state, is that this stratum becomes relatively "thin," reduced to a minimal "buffering" region between deliberation and communication, when creative production is occurring.)
The most efficient way in which to identify the distinctions to be made is this. In abstraction of ordinary consciousness, the control of mental productions and communications is associated constantly with notions of one's self. Perhaps the individual ordinarily does not reflect on this, and ordinarily is therefore usually unaware of the existence of these executive controls; it is not difficult to provoke such awareness (indeed, a skillful operator in a "therapy group," or in any group which can be directed to act as a "therapy group," can readily force the attention of virtually all participants to such "feelings" very quickly. Once one has done this several times, the ability to replicate the effect becomes almost automatic.) In ordinary states, the form of these notions of ego-ideals is what one would best describe as feelings about attributes of a monad-like "little me." In general, the instant one succeeds in "cutting through the persona" of an individual to force his reflection on these "feelings," the usual sensation experienced by the "opened-up" individuals is "I am a fraud." ("Original Sin"?) There is a more or less immediate recognition that the self one presents to the outer world is a synthetic character, a mere persona, a manufactured (e.g., artificial) product created for the propitiatory edification of the credulous. Thus, one's self as presented to the world is not "the real me," not the "soul." Very quickly the affected individual can begin to discover and detail "how I operate." Accompanying this enlarged awareness there is usually a growing depression, associated with the sense that the "real self" is a kind of monad, a "little me." The fact that such a monad could only be an empty construct forces the individual to regard the criteria "by which I operate" as necessarily the only existent qualities attributable to the "little me." Consequently, these being the same qualities associated with the production of the "fraudulent outer self," the persona, the "little me" is a degraded thing, intrinsically "unloveable." ("How could God love my miserable little soul?")
At bottom, in this respect, the effort to get at the "inner self" brings us, in the ordinary case, to a little hard ball, a monad of sorts, from which apparently emanate the qualities, the "feeling-states," "instincts," etc., which one otherwise encounters in cathexis in consciousness and semi-consciousness. Ostensibly, any effort to probe the self more deeply, to "get within" the monad, results in locating only an "it," an Id. In fact, precisely such results can actually be obtained.
When the same self-analysis is effected in the case of individuals in a state of self-conscious creative production, the phenomena of the monad are not obtained. The ego-ideal and the notion of "inner self" are instead united in a single quality. Examined more superficially, one could obtain the apparent result emphasized by Kubie. At first inspection, the idea of creative activity for its own sake is the ego-ideal, a form whose content is the activity of "negentropic synthesis" itself. Accordingly,
if one studied artistic and other personalities who are merely creative, or only yet potentially self-conscious, one would tend to concur with Kubie's argument that the creative process must be regarded as a virtue in itself.
Such a superficial, one-sided view of the "inner self" overlooks the paramount fact of mental life. The feeling aspect of thought is a movement, a disposition to act, a kind of kinaesthesis in abstract, which connected to a definite object-image is nothing but the impulse for a definite action ("sensuous" thought in Feuerbach and Marx). All acts are related to the "'ego," not only by the executive control of conscious and semi-conscious thought, but by the actual or imputed consequences of the specific act for the identity of the self. The idea of the freedom to express itself as an act without socially-reflected consequences for the identity is an understandable pathological misconception, from the standpoint of the heteronomic individual. (8) The actual significance of every act or imagined act for the ego is some change in the external world which, in turn, increases or diminishes rights and privileges, and which increase or diminution is reflected back as an enhancement or weakening of the social identity.(8,6c) Consequently, "pure creativity" (for its own sake) could not be a self-evident attribute of identity of an inner self. To that extent it might appear to be self-evident, there is inevitably some pathology afoot attempting to thereby conceal the reflex aspect of the creative impulse.(6a)
In every important case of self-conscious creative personalities, as with Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, the efficient sense of inner identity is demonstrably the consequence of creative inner activity as a realized improvement (perfection) of the universal. The first approximation of this result for each of them is an increase in the self-consciousness of persons directly influenced by them, which immediate effect is imputed to be the mediation of a positive development of the universal. The sense of self in these cases demonstrably coincides with the ego-ideal of the creative artist, as the enhancement of inner creative powers through the reflected increase in creative powers among the individuals contiguous to one's existence, In this sense, the form and content of the sense of identity in the creative individual are not freedom per se, but Freedom-Necessity.
This point can be strengthened by returning attention to our earlier discussion of the "schlimihl syndrome." This notion was initially conjectured from the writer's own experience and shaped and established as a notion through broader investigations. The interesting question posed in this example is whence comes the source of that sense of identity which enables the rarer individual to be relatively freer of the pandemic pathetic gregariousness? At first glance, some would argue the "independent individual" is more or less of
the Nietzschean type, an asocial specimen narcissistically distinguishing himself from "the herd." Yet, in fact, neither this specimen nor the strict Nietzschean fits the "autistic" etiology; exactly the opposite!
The independent individual locates his independence in his confidence in his powers of judgment. Not as fixed, already "perfected" powers, but in respect to his confidence in his ability to develop those powers (creativity) to the point of arriving at responsible judgment. He is not asocial; he justifies his social practice by argument with others, and is qualitatively affected by the systematic content in arguments of others much more than the gregarious type. What he rejects is the authority of external opinion for its own sake: he demands that he be convinced - not as a professional "pluralist" skeptic - and is readily susceptible of being convinced by any argument or other demonstration which can upset the assumptions on which his preceding opinions were premised. He proceeds always from the at least implicit standpoint of a lawfully holistic universe in which action is properly determined by lawful reflection accessible to his individual creative powers.
In personal history he is usually intellectually gifted, but at the same time usually a poor schoolroom student. Since he demands that he be convinced of each conception before assimilating it to belief, a sanitary mental self-discipline causes him to resist any pedagogy premised on the assertions of arbitrary authority. He is not therefore unwilling to act (at least not by nature) until he has "independently" settled everything relevant to the action in his own mind. He is willing to act on the basis of external authority, provided that the competence of following that external authority relative to concepts has itself been rationally established.
Whence this independence? It should be obvious, at least as an hypothesis for observation and experiment, that such a confidence in the perfectability of mental powers corresponds in form to the case of the child who has to a certain extent escaped the strict negation-of-the-negation form of socialization. Instead of an arbitrary abortion of the use of powers under repression by external authority, the child has in some way concentrated on channelling his powers into positive social acts (e.g., the Spinozan ethic). How this occurs is reflected in the familiar "Why?" of children during the period in question. Instead of the abrupt and arbitrary "Because I say so" form of reply to his "Why?," the child has frequently enjoyed an explication which situated the motivation for a certain course of action in love for his immediate society (e.g., parents, siblings). This illustration is only a feature of something more general: the experience of parental, etc., love respecting the extension of his infantile and childhood powers, an experience extended to the development of his powers of reason. His ego-ideal is made to be, through
some combination of circumstances, to "think it out for yourself" to the end that he can by such resources arrive at a positive social act.(3b,6a)
Examining the subsequent history of the five-to-six-year-old "independent" child, in cases considered we see him developing in one of two principal alternative ways. The determining feature of this development is reflected in his attitude toward the pathetic gregariousness of his peers. Either he combines enmity for their pathetic behavior with love for them as sickened persons, or he permits hostility to their gregariousness to alienate him, to determine his reductionist equation of the victim to the victim's pathology. Undoubtedly, a principal source of our most gifted physicists, mathematicians, chessmasters, and so forth is the "independent child" of the pathetic second evolution. The extreme might be the creative "pure mathematician" or astronomer, who thus exercises his independent powers for society while also getting as far removed from "the herd" as possible. In the first instance, we have the potential revolutionary intelligentsia, who must realize love for humanity by eliminating the disease of schlimihlism.
The case of Nietzsche is actually relevant here. The positive features of his work his keen historical insight in philology, his perceptive hostility to the renegacy of Richard Wagner -- attest to the unusual potential of the five-to-six year old Nietzsche. Yet, he has gone the way of the brilliant astronomer; the world of real people around him has died, and he is left alone to await the coming of a new human race which "speaks his language" (creativity). He has acquired the hostile impulse to reject attempting to change his fellow-man - although not with total success. Since he is creative, he knows he must have been produced by a species that was actually human, but since the people around him are ostensibly merely schlimihls, that human race must have died. He sprawls on his Italian exile-bed, periodically roused, no doubt by his sister's arranging his pillows and coverings, craggily muttering his role as the prophet foretelling the doom which has already occurred. His assumed identity is the last dying Dodo of an extinct race.
Nietzsche is in no sense a true existentialist. The true existentialist is typified by a Latin peasant or petit-bourgeois French, Italian, or Spanish. Nietzsche has merely degenerated to mimic the existentialist pathology. The true existentialist, like the farmer, or the Latin petit-bourgeois, knows no real human relationships, even in the ordinary sense. The Latin existentialist has the thickest of personas -- his Machismo -- within which a totally isolated "little me" shrieks and moans as it rolls in its own perfect alienation like a pig in mud. His inner self desires nothing but the individual (totally asocial) act, which because it is a totally asocial act is the actualization of a null-identity-suicide, and thus the realization of the psychological death of a monad. The true existentialist could not be a Nietzsche, whose pathology is his hostility toward his lost capacity for human relationships, of which he is so morbidly sensible. The true existentialist is one never capable of knowing human relationships. The true existentialist is a French petit-bourgeois anarcho-syndicalist or aggrege, an honor-stricken Sicilian, or, in the worst extreme, the proto-fascist animal, D.H. Lawrence.*
The form of "modified consciousness" experienced in the creative process is that of the motion connecting Xij to Xi(j + 1).(6a) It would seem, from the standards of ordinary, alienated consciousness, that the definiteness of the object-images has been replaced by blurs. Indeed, creative processes, at least for persons developed in an alienated culture, are preceded by an accumulation of definite facts, after which the mind wilfully runs these object-images into one another, so to speak. The form in which this occurs has a certain resemblance to ordinary conscious deliberations in another respect, and necessarily so. The ego functions as the executive agency of thought, but it is the changed, creative form and content of the ego. The quality of this executive agency is the self-motion of the creative impulse. It is this self-motion, thus supplying the necessary principle for the conceptualization of a universal, which makes the "blurring" process a phase of synthesizing universals for an array of predicates as definite Gestalts. ("Impressionism" reflects, hence, the neurotic abortion of the creative process at its onset phase.)
* There is a form of the "schlimihl syndrome" whose victim often disguises his pathetic gregariousness as "healthy skepticism." This specimen affords us the proverbial exception which tends to prove the role. Two connected examples of the disorder, the "hard Bolshevik" and "independent radical," exemplify the etiology of the general sort of rationalized behavior encountered.
In our pedagogically simplified representation of the successive infantile and two earliest childhood phases of development of the petit-bourgeois individual, the rudimentary notion was more easily conveyed by assuming the purely hypothetical case in which the parents are jointly and separately an integrated packet of rights and privileges for the child. In actuality, the parents are much more complex problems for the infant and young child. Out of the antagonisms between and within the parents necessarily emerge contradictory notions of identity for the child. These contradictions of the personality developed within the household become a susceptibility for the further contradictions experienced respecting the respective authority of the household and the outside world.
The most vicious aspect of the parental relationship to the child is associated with the fact that the child represents a concrete universal for the parent. The child becomes the hapless victim of pathological behavior which may be more obvious in the pathetic form. The same syndrome occurs between the parents themselves. The fact that the individual is a concrete universal is translated into the psychology of the heteronomic (alienated) personality as the quality of fetish. For example, the fact that the wife is a propitiatory device for the husband's sense of social identity makes her the object (hostage) to be punished for society's failures toward the husband, and vice versa. We commonly see that paired mating relationships are governed by a "struggle for goods and services"; in response to the failures of society
The prerequisite phase of accumulating ordinary forms of knowledge as predicates should not be interpreted as necessarily requiring a suppression of the creative processes during that phase. Rather, each fact assimilated in this phase is assimilated for a creative process by being assimilated with a certain "fuzziness" of the sort which Hegel identifies as skepticism of a positive sort. The fact is not assimilated as a self-evident fact, but as a challenged appearance of factualness. The root of skepticism of this sort is the role of the creative ego in regulating this process. The ego "recognizes" that each of the facts is of an unsatisfactory form and applies the appropriate question-mark to it at that time. The ego is at the same time constantly testing the process of accumulation for the possibility of creative hypotheses leading toward a new Gestalt.(6a)
The "blurred" form of the predicates suggests that the form of cathexis in creative states is such that the awareness of the feeling-state is much stronger in this
form of deliberation than in ordinary consciousness. This is precisely the case.
Another way of interpreting these phenomena is to compare the mental processes in deliberative creative activity with certain heightened states of empathy. In such forms of empathy, which are incidentally a prominent feature of the mental activity appropriate to mass organizing work, the blurring effect arises from the "taking in" of the replicated cathexized states of the masses in respect to comparable patterns from one's own mental experience. The art of the mass organizer depends on knowing in that way what the masses "are thinking." This knowledge focuses not merely on what those masses have been consciously thinking; the art of the mass organizer depends upon anticipating what they can be induced to call forth by suggestion. He accomplishes this result by replicating their mental states within himself and critically examining the processes so replicated, so effecting experimental foreknowledge of what further states are susceptible of production by various means of suggestion.
[footnote continued from previous page] to adequately gratify the sense of identity, the mate is blamed for this failure, as a fetish. At the same time that the need to hold onto the mate is giving an hostage to society, the mate is treated as the hostage taken from society. If the individual mate's sense of identity (rights and privileges in society generally) is threatened, it is the partner who must be punished as a surrogate for society. The child is similarly a fetish, directly so for the mother and in a more complex fashion for the father.
In one commonplace form of this, the child is the mother's fetish, becoming thus a basis for the mother's asserting a social identity in opposition to the father. To the father, the possession of the child becomes an escape for the mother threatening the father's control of rights and privileges (identity) from the mother, at the same time that the father's obligations to the child are his hostage to circumstances. The mother uses the child against the social authority represented by the father, and father struggles to assert compensatory rights in the child's sense of identity. The father struggles in this way both to contain the mother and to find in the child a substitute concrete universal for the mother.
At bottom, the dynamics of two-parent experience for the child should be a "healthy" influence, a means by which the child would be able to situate his or her identity within the microcosm of social relationships. The location of the child's rights and privileges in both parents simultaneously is what ought to be obviously the basis for healthy socialization of the child's social identity and associated judgmental processes. The pathetic character of the relationship between the bourgeois parents, subsumed by the alienated form of each parent's identity, makes what should be an essential, positive feature of having two parents into a source of vicious pathologies in the child's development.
Through the heteronomic, pathological form of the relationship among parents and child (and other siblings), the child immediately "internalizes" the fetishistic "goods and services" relationship as the proper content of interpersonal relationships generally. The heteronomic dualism of the child's rights and privileges in the parents means a corresponding pathetic feature in the child's own ego-ideals. This dualism is manifest as a pathological quality of skepticism. "But mommy says..." and "But daddy says..." become pathetic devices by which the child seems to adopt, alternatively, the practice of surrogate for the conflict role of one parent against the other.
We emphasize that the differences between the specific approaches of two parents to life is not necessarily a pathological element in the child's situation. Provided that both parents reflect, at bottom, the same positive (Spinozan) world-outlook, the particular differences in individual approach to immediate problems are predicates of a common world-outlook. If the outlook of the parents were sane, then the child would be continually forced to acquire an independent knowledge of the underlying world-outlook from the predicated differences between the parents in each particular situation. If the implicit outlook (Gestalt) expressed by the conflict between the parents is a pathological one, the child will acquire that one instead.
Since the pathological outlook of the typical intrahousehold conflicts are those of heteronomic relationships, the child acquires an heteronomic world-outlook, and the kind of pathological skepticism in individual social practice which is formally represented by empiricism or existentialism.
Skepticism, exemplified as alternation between the contrasting heteronomic rationalization of two parents, becomes a kind of moral indifferentism otherwise expressed by pluralism or "cultural relativism." The object of skepticism in the child's behavior is not to determine the discrepancy between a particular theorem and a coherent world-view; the object of pathetic skepticism is to assert that no coherent world-view exists, or that there are as many world-views as there are conflicting individuals. Otherwise expressed, the child develops the sort of skepticism which is properly identified as an anti-theoretical outlook. The typical petit-bourgeois child rejects the notion that there exists any overriding, universal law which ought to govern individual human behavior, and tends to the "bourgeois-feminine outlook," which regards the heteronomic feeling-impulses of the individual as primary. Law becomes for the child merely a set of procedures by which an aggregation of heteronomically autonomous individual "innate" impulses can be satisfactorily accommodated to one another.
During the succeeding phase of socialization (in which the mediation of authority outside the family acts selectively on the love received within the family), the pluralism of the household itself is amplified to the effect of increasingly setting the authority of the external peer-group (for example) against the household. The child "reasons": "If you yourselves have made the approval I gain from outside authorities [teachers, peer-groups, etc.] the basis for determining the love I secure from within the household, then that external authority must have a corresponding higher authority than my direct relationship to you."
Consequently, the contradictory forms of "rights and privileges" the child obtains from various adult authorities and peer-groups
The process required represents a rapid shifting among various alternative "cathexes" for the same patterns of feeling states, and also location of new feeling states, which can be brought forward in the course of such shifts. To a considerable extent, the mass organizer thus strips away the persona of the mass, creating a new persona for it at the same time. Wittingly, or perhaps unwittingly, his employment of empathy in this way can be, properly directed, a means for reaching self-conscious control of creative processes in himself.
Empathy demonstrates the means by which the notion of feeling-states can be conceptualized or abstracted from ordinary mental processes. The notion of the
feeling-state is abstracted as the relative subject for the array of predicated specific object-images with which it is associated. If the process of abstraction from association is pursued to a sufficient extent, with concentrated and prolonged attention, the result is a kind of deliberate (if reflected, negative) awareness of the "contents" of the deeper unconscious processes. When such phenomena are examined in respect to deliberate creative mentation, it is evident that these abstracted "pure feeling states" have the most direct relationship to creative processes.
At that point, the last vestige of a topographical interpretation of conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious evaporates. The distinctions among these categories
[world's longest footnote continued from a previous page] outside the household lead ultimately to those pathological forms of skepticism we meet in "I'm from Missouri," or in academic empiricist skepticism. Truth, as a body of underlying law (Freedom/Necessity) properly governing individual behavior despite momentary prevailing opinion, virtually ceases to exist for the developing new individual. "Truth" is reduced to moral relativism, to a policy of effective propitiation of whatever authority or peer-group from which the individual is concerned to secure love. Consequently, the form of cynicism which is mistaken for "healthy skepticism" among, for example, the academic petit-bourgeoisie. "Truth is reduced, in such pathetic cases, to earning a "passing grade in recitations" from whatever peer-group or other authority the "independent" individual is preoccupied to propitiate. The psuedo-independence which apparently preoccupies this pathological type of "healthy skeptic" is nothing but independence from any obligation to reason and act according to some law independent of such authorities. Skepticism is a form of hysterical blindness to the fact of one's own credulous grovelling.
One cannot systematically know the pathology of most Left groups and "independent radicals" except from this analytical standpoint. In the "workerist" versions of this, the group focuses on propitiating the prevailing prejudices of militant workers. Such groups villify, as either "idealism" or "elitism," the notion that there exists some immediate self-interest for workers which is either independent of or opposite to (not merely an extrapolation of) the prevailing prejudices of militant trade-union "rank-and-fliers." Hence, they reject Kepler's outlook, that the interests of (workers as) the whole, and therefore the actual interests of the individual (worker), are governed by some underlying rational principle which can be known only by rising above the heteronomic conceits of self-interest of (worker) monads. This is reflected in the fact that most of such Left groups can be, in one instance trade-union chauvinists (when they are attempting to propitiate trade-union "militant rank-and-fliers"), and in another instance union-busters and job-busters (when they are propitiating the adduced narrow prejudices of unorganized oppressed and unemployed workers). They are incapable of discerning the common class-interest which is lawfully common to both groupings and which is thus in opposition to the pathetic heteronomic immediate impulses of each. The anti-theoretical attitudes, or "healthy skepticism" toward theoretical determination of necessary policies, must be understood not as a point of view, but as a lawful reflection of bourgeois ideology.
The form of "academic" debates within the Left reveals the same "schlimihl syndrome." Choosing idealized authority (Lenin, or Mao Tse Tung, et al.), the Left group argues its point of view in terms of canonical glosses on canonical literary extractions or canonical interpretations of practice of these "authorities." Obviously, here the question of lawfully demonstrating a principle is brushed aside in favor of the academic norm of seeking "a passing grade for recitations." Or, among "independent Leftists," we see the refusal to commit themselves firmly to any policy but that of the "need to have rational discussion among the various points of view." As soon as any one discussion is apparently "settled even in this miserable fashion, the "independent Leftist" dredges up notice of some other alternative, which has to be discussed in its own terms, before commitment can be entertained.
The differentiation between the two such tendencies (so-called "Marxist-Leninist .... hards," and "independents ") is real, but still demonstrates the common quality within which those differentiations are subsumed. The "hard" has chosen to act in a certain way, and resorts to the same sort of skeptics' rationalization of strong personal impulses ("constituency" rights of heteronomic impulses) as the "independent," who uses the same skepticism as the inexhaustible basis for rationalizing moral indifferentism toward any definite Left commitment. The "independent" is only the more immediately obvious symptom of the quality shared by both. The "independent," by rejecting any identity-commitment, poses the question of whether he is able to act on anything at all in life. Almost invariably, we do find him committed to something: the pursuit of individual, personal gratification of himself as a "little me," according to the dictates of his persona. This shows more obviously what is nonetheless obviously the case for deeper inquiry into the "hard." Neither accepts the existence of any deeper, fundamental body of lawful determination. Both are schlimihls, exploiting pathetic skepticism to distance themselves from obligations to any law but that of the universe of heteronomic little egos. Both reject the Spinozan notion of the individual's obligation to Freedom/Necessity, in favor of a moral rule agreeable to a world of monad-selves each fundamentally regulated by pursuit of autonomous impulses. Both the "hard" and the "independent" reflect this in the opposite ways they interpret the conflict between world-historical undertakings and the contrary right of the individual for a "meaningful personal life" qua heteronomic individual life.
The "Why?" of actually healthy childhood skepticism to which we refer in the text is not the sort of pathetic skepticism we have described in this extended footnote so far. The "Why?'' of actually healthy childhood skepticism is a Keplerian "Why?", preoccupied with the search for fundamental laws, independent of the opinion of any particular other authorities per se. It seeks the universal which properly regulates the judgment and practice of both himself and those others.
This actually healthy skepticism does not specify rejection of all external institutional authority. Rather, it limits its submission to external authority to that authority which has demonstrably shown itself to reflect systematic deliberations respecting fundamental law. It submits conditionally only to what it properly judges to be external scientific authority of that sort. Ironically, it is just that sort of external scientific authority which pathetic skepticism rejects. Pathetic skepticism counterposes the universal external law of heteronomy {empiricism, pragmatism, existential views) to the authority of systematic comprehension of universality. It rejects the approach from the standpoint of fundamentals (universal principles) in favor of the authority of aggregations of particular heteronomic opinion and isolated experiences.
is in no way analogous to distinct functions as if of distinct organs, but rather these categories represent different phases (determinations) of an indivisible process.
The explication of this flows readily from two considerations we have already developed. Firstly, the Feuerbachian schema, as modified to agree with Marx's notion of actualized creative processes (Freedom/Necessity). Secondly, the contradictions arising between infantile and socialization phases of development of the new individual in capitalist culture,
The Feuerbach schema defines consciousness as the act of mediation of the social relations of the individual, a form typified by language. It also determines a distinction between the subject (universal = ego) and its predicate (the particular act).(3b) Both the ego and the predicated act are specifically determined. The ego and act are thus abstractable forms, reflecting a reality which is otherwise the continuous process of mentation, a process which has the quality of its development, its invariant and predicated specific powers.
The contradictory development of the alienated individual limits the incompletely positive (infantile) form of the ordinary ego and predicated acts to the alienated form imposed by capitalist culture (in particular). Thus, for capitalist norms, that which is reflected as self-consciousness is that which is functionally acknowledged as the basis for the development of the inner infantile ego's rights and privileges by capitalist society. Thus, the ordinary (infantile) form of the ego and ordinary unconsciousness must be regarded, for practical put- poses, as specifically bourgeois.
From this standpoint, the Freudian "Id" does exist in a certain historically-specific sense. Where the society does not recognize the creative processes of the human mind as the primitive basis for individual social identity, the form of the ego must be that of the monad which, stripped of its persona qualities, becomes a mere object lacking in any social identity, an "It." This alienating judgment of the society must be, and is, a determined internalized (reflected) quality of the individual's mentation! In that sense it exists. (The fallacy of the Freudian "Id" is suggested by Jung's happier term "social unconscious.") The qualities located within it are just those human powers developed by society in the new individual infant, powers suppressed by the negative socialization of the immature ego. Since their exercise is controlled by negation of the negation, these powers have been stupefied (made imbecilically destructive) in most individuals,
A crude example suggests the kind of problem involved. One has undoubtedly watched an infant in the process of learning to reach directly to an object, undershooting, overshooting, missing, proceeding in his
development from lunges and over-inhibited muscular thrusts, toward the Gestalt of an effectively directed coordination of muscular movements. (We emphasize Gestalt, in rejection of the specious, pathetic "feedback" learning" edification.) Apply the same principle of necessary development to certain mental powers. Abort their development before it could be completed. Imagine, then the consequence if those aborted infantile powers are summoned forth in a fully-developed adult; compare the case of the muscular, 250-pound young adult who never learned to reach directly, but suddenly attempted to reach out to a friend to steady him: he might kill him! The point to be conveyed by such admittedly glib arguments is that the negation-of-the-negation socialization process results in the degradation of potentially essential human capacities into the restive impulses of an imbecile.
That glib illustration is premised on actual knowledge of various persons who have astonished and terrified themselves for a period at discovering what unwanted results can occur in the course of poorly informed efforts to gain direct control of the feeling-states in their creative processes. The result could too easily be psychosis or suicide. This occurs occasionally and inevitably in such undertakings at self-development because of the creative individual's early recognition of the prominence and identity of "feeling-states" in noetic processes. He rather understandably concentrates on the effort to directly recall such feeling-states at will, and then sometimes finds himself evoking a maddened imbecilic genie whose rampages he is unable to control.
Any musician or committed music-lover should be able to locate the means for understanding the point. In the work of arriving at a proper interpretation of a composition, the direct ("rational") approach to the objective aspects of the formal composition is superseded by "phrasing" the articulation of clusters of notes under the control of a selected combination of "feelings." The public performance or private hearing-interpretation of the thus-familiar composition is then conceptually controlled by that Gestalt, with the feeling-state recall tending to dominate. Related problems are reviewed by Hegel throughout the Phenomenology, notably in the chapters on the "Understanding," "The Unhappy Consciousness," "Absolute Freedom and Terror."
The creative person attempting that approach to direct control of his noetic potentialities is not fundamentally in error in presuming that these "forces" potentially represent a powerful "good." The source of his difficulty is that he is calling upon powerful imbeciles (as is done in the "get-ugly" "spiritual" aspects of "martial arts" or training in bayonet-drill or bodily-contact "sports.")
The example of music serves us further on this point, In Western music generally, it is not difficult to distinguish three distinct qualities of music from a "feeling" standpoint, the Apollonian (e.g., most of Brahms), the Dionysian (e.g., in the extreme case, the actually proto-fascist forms of "Rock"), and the Promethean (Beethoven).* Along the lines we indicated earlier, it is feasible to justify the objectivity of such "emotional judgments" from analysis of the formal and anti-formal features of composition, but we must also emphasize that affective judgment respecting the music is first reached without any such calculated objectivity. The same principle of "emotional intelligence" is demonstrated throughout life, representing aspects of mental life as essentially susceptible of deliberative control for positive results as the weaker reflection of these "feeling-states" when such emotions are brought forward by the calling-forward of cathexized object-images in "rational" thinking. Indeed, the deliberative control of such feeling-states as such is a major aspect of creative mental life, and is only most evident in the greatest expressions of artistic production.
This is necessarily the case. The abstracted feeling-state is thus an apparently "pure" feeling-state, cognized as such, is a potential universal relative to the plenum of predicates with which it is associated. All creative work is, by definition, focussed upon nothing but the synthesis of universals (Gestalts) relative to an array of predicates. In great art, such as that of Beethoven's Promethean productions, the object is to celebrate a mood of the Freedom/Necessity quality of creativity as such independent of any predicates but the sensuous medium in which the representation (communication) occurs. The different qualities of various compositions all converging commonly on the same objective are the result of the varying kaleidoscopic arrays of feeling-states (motion) which are arranged to provoke a Gestalt of that aggregation.
In the composition of poetry, a similar process applies. The initial conception of a great poem exists for development as a mood and a snatch of some line, usually the opening line. The conception of the whole poem exists at the initial point of elaboration as a kaleidoscopic fabric of feeling-states, a would be Gestalt of such feeling-state patterns identified by that bit of thematic line. This is the subject of the poem. The poet unfolds the poem from this, words marching in phrase-groups, feeling-states and feeling-state clusters seizing upon the appropriate cathexis which comes to the fore from unfolding association with the thematic snatch of line. The end-result has ostensible symbology, metrical and other prosodic subtleties, such that from those isolable features foolish, banal critics may indeed attempt to fashion a logical interpretation, but their effort is pathetic. The intent of the poem's elaboration was to communicate to the reader the Gestalt from desire for
which the elaboration began for the poet. This is more emphatically the case for great music -- as we have already emphasized.
The primary feeling-state is love, the affective content and form of recall of the creative process itself, the invariant human quality of the mind. To understand the dynamics of love, one begins by inquiring as to what practical expression can be given to the direct calling forth of the universal for all particular expressions of social creative activity. Every detail dissolves; the mind is dissolved into pure creative ferment, the universality of the creative act. What, then?
We have emphasized that thought is the demand for an act. The omission of the act for the thought is a denial of the reflected benefit of the act for the identity, and correspondingly a dimunition of the identity. The force (emotion) of the thought would therefore seem to be in direct proportion to the force of reaction against the sense of identity (anxiety) experienced by frustration of the act. Experience substantiates such an hypothesis. Furthermore, it is demanded that the act must be in proportion to the force of the thought.
Then, what is the act corresponding to the "pure emotion" of love? What, but the intensely sensuous concretized celebration of creative sociality in general? The mood must seize upon a concrete individual as its object. Either a concrete universalizing (social) creative act -- as a great work of art, or sensuous loving of a concrete (universal) person.
The poet Heine has the greatest clinical interest as a creative artist for this facet of the inquiry. A few preliminary contextual qualifications:
If we use the term, "Romantic," to identify the tragic outcome of the great creative potential in a Robert Schumann, or the tragic limitations of the magnificently gifted Hugo Wolf, then Heine does not become a Romantic until his last wretched years of despondency. In form, Romantic art expresses the tragic interplay of Apollonian and Dionysian moods in the poets and musicians, especially, who are best identified with that movement.
Wolf efficiently expresses the kernel of the tragedy at (this would please Hegel[) the point the Romantic period in art had been essentially completed. Wolf's pathology is efficiently isolated for clinical study by his setting of three Goethe poems, "Ganymed," "Grenzen der Menschheit," and "Prometheus." In the first two, Wolf's setting is definitive representation of the poem.
* Although as able a musician as the late Bruno Walter, among others, misplaced the feeling in identifying Beethoven with the Dionysian camp.
In the third, excepting some brilliant passages (second, third, last segment of fourth, and fifth stanzas), Wolf fails to comprehend the essential conception brilliantly situated as the subject of the Goethe poem itself; as a setting of that poem, the ironic theme of Wolf's composition leads to a brilliantly executed artistic failure. This failure is not an incidental lapse, but the outcome of a systematic flaw which Wolf shares with the world-spirit of the Romantic period. The subject-matter (world-outlook) of the three Goethe poems gives the evidence required. "Ganymed" is the almost pure Apollonian mood, "Grenzen der Menschheit" a conflict between the Apollonian (fixed laws beyond alteration by man) and restive Dionysian (heteronomic) submission to that condition. Both moods Wolf captures perfectly, expressing thus the best powers encountered in the Romantics generally. The "Prometheus" reflects Goethe's genius in adducing the world-outlook of his own most revolutionary period of life, with a marked resemblance to Marx's "Theses On Feuerbach" -- in contrast to Goethe's preoccupation of his philistine moods, fixed "Iron Laws." Wolf, perhaps the most fertile creative talent of the late Romantic ferment, shares the tragic flaw of that current, that he can comprehend only the Apollonian and Dionysian moods, and reflect the struggle between the two within himself. His creative potential is aborted at the point of solving that antinomy; he can not resolve the Dionysian-Apollonian contradiction in a Promethean Gestalt. Prometheus, for him, can attain only to anarchist's insolence, not all-conquering hubris.
These three moods are affective (active) forms of what are otherwise three distinct epistemological world-outlooks. The Apollonian mood corresponds to naive "respect for law," the hysterical state of false-positiveness within general negation-of-the-negation determinations. The Dionysian mood is heteronomy unhinged. As its extreme expression, fascist movements, exhibits the point, the Dionysian tends toward the blind assertion of individual pathological freedom (i.e., hysterical existentialist "Libertarianism"), in insolent defiance of what anarchism otherwise slyly acknowledges to be the unchangeable "Iron Laws" of fixed Necessity. The Dionysian can not conceive of creating a positive new Necessity to conquer the old; he can conceive only of sly or exhibitionist smashing of a few artifacts of what remain for him unchangeable laws. The Dionysian (variously, fascist, anarchist, or "Third Camper") is entirely the subject of bourgeois ideology in every turn of his logic, his epistemology; his rebellion is limited to exhibitionist acts of pathetic insolence against the mere tokens, predicates of what he
otherwise accepts as an unchangeable order of things. The Promethean mood, best epitomized by Beethoven in art, is that of our general thesis.
Heine is located affectively and epistemologically on the last upsurge of the French Enlightenment, standing in outlook and reflective consciousness alike between Kant and Hegel.(7) Artistically, he belongs to the same species of German culture's advancement of the French Enlightenment as Goethe, Beethoven and Hegel, adding to this the critical element of relative genius which is relatively the persisting phenomenon of the creative intellect among assimilated Jews.* Beethoven is the peak dividing the ascent from decline in art throughout the history of capitalist development. Heine belongs to what is still the ascent phase; after Beethoven, there is generally decline, for which the Romantic artistic movement is the opening and less degenerate form.
The Romantic artist's notion of love converges upon the love of the love-object as an object of heteronomical social relationships. His fixation converges increasingly upon the banal. Romantic art's conception of love tends to become degraded to the apotheosis of banalized bourgeois love.
In Heine, love is a world-historical act. This notion is underlined by such ironical devices as the interdependency of the poet's love for the beloved person, the beloved place, and the beloved upsurge in human potential through which emergent development the poet, the beloved person, the beloved place, and the beloved human potential of peoples are unified. For Heine, the tragic element of the act of loving the person, the place, the peoples, is that each in its immediate "here" and "now" are mere alienated predicates of the process of self-perfection, which can not be gigantic enough as such predicates to contain the infinite scope of his love (creativity, self-perfecting self-movement).
Reflect for a moment on the tragedy of the creative poet's search for a beloved person (his concrete universal). He encounters in capitalist culture a banalized woman who portends momentarily all those qualities of humanity which might reflect (potentially) his own creative self-activity (as the rights and privileges of his thus beloved identity), a woman whose creative activity he could not only arouse but reflect. He is overwhelmed, thus, by the potential act of love, the sensuous thought of creating loving. The act of loving touches the woman, who reflects nothing of the poet's inner identity. She is a banalized, bourgeois woman, in whom creative processes lie inert, unwakeable. The poet desperately
* If we understand Marx on "The Jewish Question," we understand Spinoza, Marx, Heine, and other lesser figures the Enlightenment influence produced among such a disproportionate incidence of creative Jewish intellects. The Jew, whose medieval cultural identity adaptively reifies itself to the universalizing tendency in capitalist development, can cease to be a pariah (a Jew) either by becoming an ultra-nationalist chauvinist {e.g., the pathetic, hysterical French chauvinism of Emile Durkheim, or of Zionism) or becoming a revolutionary, an expression of world-historical man (e.g, Spinoza, Heine, Marx).(12a)
wills to arouse her creative inner self with the sheer force of his creative outpourings, but she remains dead, inert. The idea of a concrete-universal love- relationship for him so becomes a facet of his eternal migration in search of the "land that speaks my own language." It is a land of Life, of Springtime (Life born), and the awakening of great peoples. Yet, eternally, that desired place remains perpetually what the haunting voice within says to be always where he cannot be. Florestan's mate, Fidelio, the Claerchen of "Egmont," revolutionary (creative) woman, does not yet exist for him. This notion of tragic artist's love is absolutely in opposition to the maudlin banalities of the Romantic period. The creative poet does not will to die for lack of such a love; he is perversely strengthened by the fact that the land of the philistines has no Delilah who can seduce him, banalize him. His tragedy is turned into a positive force; he becomes a revolutionary against all extant "Iron Laws," either a revolutionary relapse or a revolutionary as all creative artists are revolutionaries.
This poet's tragedy is elaborated constantly in the life of every adolescent and adult. The positive (creative) impulse in each individual, as this is more or less more conspicuous in virtually all children, seeks a social identity for itself as the inner self through love-relationships in which other persons become the concrete universal -- the person who echoes the creative impulses of the loving one, the person whose creative impulses are reflected in oneself. Yet, in capitalist culture (in particular), the social identity, including that employed in mate-selection, is that of the persona. This persona is developed to establish the individual's value as an object in a world of fixed relationships, and thus locates the identity (persona-identity) in that which denies the existence of the creative impulses. The suppressed and repression-deformed creative impulse, a poor Caliban of a secret self, seeks realization of its deformed self, which is secured in a pathetic fashion by a surrogate for a concrete universal, a mating relationship premised on the bargaining of persona-qualities. Certain persona qualities in the opposite sex are made ideals for the alienated individual, the apparent qualities of physical appearance and "personality" (persona) which it is desirable to possess in another. Instead of actual love of the sort sung by Heine, selecting a concrete universal, the object-images of these "secondary characteristics" become "triggers" of a weak feeling of a stultified love "feeling-state" through cathexis relationships. (One's "it," the monad, is only implicitly loved "for itself.")
Nonetheless, despite the fraudulent form and content of the prevailing paired relationships of this culture (in particular), this pairing, especially pre-climactic phases of the sexual act, becomes the closest approximation of a human relationship (love of the "inner self") which occurs generally in capitalist social relations, just because this pathetic mechanism does evoke a weak and
pathological form of the generally suppressed human qualities of the individual. At the same time, for both better and worse, the mate does function as a surrogate for an actual concrete universal. A concretized sense of personal identity is supplied through the Gestalt of rights and privileges represented by the mate's love, and by making the sense of identity dependent upon the terms of perpetuation of that love. Love, the instrument for fostering creativity is deformed into an instrument for suppressing and even destroying creative impulses!
This is most viciously developed in this culture respecting women. The woman is accultured to be a repository of banality (anti-intellectual, at least antagonistic toward the creative aspect of creative life). Even women of marked creative potentialities exhibit this in the anti-intellectual form of "feeling insights," "intuition." The woman is banalized by her principal oppressor, her mother, and becomes in the paired relationship as well as in the adolescent and adult mating process a catalyst and policeman of the bourgeois cult of banality.
These connections of love and paired relationships to the creative processes in general are of the utmost importance for socialist groupings. Any toleration of the mythos of the woman as a creature of "feeling," in its "cultural relativist" forms of advocacy of "women's liberation" as well as the "chauvinist" practices, not only destroys the human potential of women in the movement, but has almost equally destructive reflected consequences for the men. Similarly, the cult of "sexual liberation," which imagined itself to be a revolt against the "bourgeois hang-up" of paired relationships, is absolutely guaranteed to destroy the intellectual powers of both-the men and women who submit to such pathological "freedom." Love, as the expression and complement of creative mentation, is not an isolated act, but a process of development; for the period of its duration, the love-relationship must be a "permanent (infinite) form" of paired mating -- otherwise the mental powers of both participants will be qualitatively impaired by the relationship.
The specious argument against this is that sexual union with a number of people, as replacement for the paired relationship, does nothing but overcome the "hang-up" against following-through on one's love for "one's comrade," etc. The fallacy in this is that the love one extends to most people has the form of a predicate of a universal love for a class, etc. The quality of love appropriate to a paired love relationship among creative (e.g., revolutionary) individuals, is the universal act, in which all the predicates "dissolve" into their corresponding universality. The sexual act (or. a developing process of sexual acts as the sensuous distinction of a love-relationship) is uniquely the act which corresponds to that universal feeling of creativity. The loving in the particular relationship to others already has its appropriate, necessary sensuous realization in
the predicated particular act; to introduce sexual acts into this sort of predicated particular relationship is to introduce an act which nothing in healthy mental life demands, and which could therefore contribute nothing to a healthy mental life. However, it is obvious whence arises this argument in defense of casually loving "one's comrade" sexually. This is nothing but the pornographic "sexual liberation" otherwise seen in the "sexual delicatessen" practices of the happily-defunct Weatherman SDS cult. This is nothing but a rationalization for the "community of women," the pathological bourgeois impulse so aptly discredited by Marx in his 1844 Manuscripts. Indeed, it cannot be considered accidental that the socialists of otherwise demonstrable creative potentials lose those creative capacities during the period they are committed to "liberated" sexual behavioral outlooks, and that these powers can be rather readily reestablished once the individual liberates himself, through appropriate self-examination, from the bourgeois ideological fetish of "sexual freedom."
Because of the importance of the sense of identity in the dynamics of creative mentation, it is urgent that the socialist (individuals and group) insist on the best standard of paired mating-relationships. Specifically, there must be a sharing of mutual struggle to realize identity for one's creative powers, which as an array of predicates of particular creative activity, demand the corresponding Gestalt of universal creativity. The healthy internal life and outward functioning of a socialist group demands a socialist standard of paired relationships, in which the sense of identities involved is premised on the mutual struggle to realize the creative potentialities in oneself and the other, not as a pedagogical relationship of teacher to pupil, but as a relationship in which each is drawing upon the creative ferment in the other and realizing himself or herself in stimulating and receiving that ferment in the other.
9. The Psychology of Mass Organizing
In political mass organizing, the socialist propagandist and individual organizer in effect strips away a critical aspect of the persona of the worker, and so momentarily implicitly reduces that worker to the wretched state of a "little me." The general possibility of that negative aspect of mass-organizing work varies in effect to the extent that the practical habits of the workers' bourgeois ideology have ceased to work. Trade-union forms, for example, have ceased to provide efficient means within themselves for securing the worker the circumstances which coincide with his bourgeoisified illusions. More generally, depression conditions, unpopular wars. etc.. have undermined the authority of those apparent "fixed laws" which correspond to the workers' bourgeois-ideological "respect for law." The anxiety which the workers have experienced through the failure of acts corresponding to their bourgeoisified ego-ideal has weakened their sense of
identity (passivity) and has undermined the authority of the bourgeois-ideological ego-ideals. These are circumstances in which aspects of the persona may be more readily stripped away.
Stripping away such elements of the persona, by itself, obviously does not produce socialist impulses in workers. Quite the opposite; it produces an alternation between pathetic passivity and wild, imbecilic heteronomic rage. Oppressive conditions, etc., absolutely do not make workers class-conscious, revolutionary, etc. Nor could stripping away the persona in itself accomplish this.
Socialist organizing is directed to the mobilization of workers around a new sense of social identity replacing the "little me," a new sense of identity which the propagandist and organizer must synthesize. What is to be done is, in effect, to realize to the extent possible the possibility for reconstructing an actually human individual from an adult accultured by capitalist society. The partial stripping away of the persona is at best merely a precondition for the positive work; moreover, this stripping-away should be carried out only to the extent that the debridement is accompanied by the beginnings of a new sense of social identity in the worker. This new sense of social identity is an approximation of the creative identity.
The object of organizing is to replace the old persona-determining ego-ideals with new criteria, formally identifiable by the concepts of class-for-itself and of socialist expanded reproduction. This transformation cannot be accomplished by a mere pedagogical relationship to the workers involved in this program of personal reconstruction. The advancement of the process depends upon the individual's acting in such a way as to establish such criteria through acts which approximate the realization of class-for-itself and expanded reproduction. The new qualities of the worker's identity can be developed only as his developing human powers for actualizing those qualities in the outer world.
The solution to this apparent difficulty appears in the understanding of the point that all abstract (formal) ideas, to the extent they reflect or are susceptible of actuality, are nothing but concentrated social relations. In this view of the tasks of mass organizing, the two conceptions, class-for-itself and socialist expanded workers' production, reduce to a single process-conception as follows.
The immediate practical basis for developing rudiments of the class-for-itself conception in the worker is that otherwise identified by the term motion. The socialist cadre induces the scintilla of a change in the individual worker, who replicates that by inducing a scintilla of change in other workers. The spread of this process, under the conditions that the affected individual workers are being brought together to "reenforce"
the tendency by unifying their forces on this basis, is the deliberate determination of a movement of social forces corresponding in principle to a mass-strike process. The psychodynamics of the relationships among workers in this process are those of love (e.g., "comradeship"); the individual realizes his inner identity by positive developments in the conceptual powers of other workers, and depends upon them in turn, for development of his conceptual powers. These are not abstract conceptions as such, but sensuous conceptions, in the sense that the conceptions in themselves imply and demand appropriate collective action and represent the potential basis for common such actions otherwise impossible.
In this process, up to a certain point, the process of organizing a broader force is itself the sensuous activity which feeds the development as a whole. The elementary laws of mental life demand superseding that condition. Since the failure to execute an appropriate collective act destroys the will and weakens the conceptions associated with new social identity, the organizing process under capitalism must become the basis for a strike process. The conception must be sensuously actualized.
Once we consider the sensuous acts corresponding to this mass-strike organizing process, the importance of the notion of Freedom/Necessity in this process becomes obvious. What is the conception that properly demands actuality? Essentially, the mass must act to realize the necessary acts corresponding to the potentiality of its actual powers. The mere impulse to "free" itself from the objective chains of capitalist oppression, which would ordinarily be an irresponsible, suicidal act, represents only the pathetic notion of the new creativity proof the worker's identity. Freedom must be realized as a scientifically known means for developing the powers to overthrow existing, oppressive laws.
The practical point for the socialist cadres is identified by noting the bourgeois-ideological idiocy of the typical members of Progressive Labor, International Socialists, etc., which prompts them to limit their efforts to exciting the workers to greater militancy around linear slogan-impulses. If one instructs the workers that militancy is what is wanted, then how can one restrain the militant group of isolated workers from undertaking almost any sort of premature, futile heteronomic act of suicidal desperation? The idea of mass-organizing cannot be a simple linear notion of freedom; it must be introduced and constantly reestablished as a concept embracing Freedom/Necessity, such that the criteria of the mass-act are presented as subsumed by the notion of Freedom and vice versa.
Already, we have identified a rudimentary approximation of the tasks of organizing. We have eliminated
the problem of the pathetic monad-self by giving the worker the sensuous realization of the real inner self of his creative life. This is socially located (and thus reflected) for him, to become an actuality, through his activity of reciprocally advancing the conceptual grasp of the situation with a growing number of workers. Instead of "little me," as a fixed monad, the worker begins to locate his inner self as the socially-reflected self-perfecting activity of increasing his mental-sensuous powers. In practice, he begins to realize this advancement in his mental and social life by working in concert with socialist cadres to effect the rudiments of similar changes in other workers.
The instant this begins to occur, the worker becomes virtually class-conscious and revolutionary. The instant he breaks with the notion of his inner self as a monad-like thing, he has also broken with the "organic" epistemological outlook on the world around him as a world of fixed laws. He is open to judging possible ways of effecting even sweeping changes in the way society is organized, the way "things are done."
The change which occurs in this way is efficiently illustrated by reviewing the bourgeois myth that the axiomatic principle of individual human behavior is "individual material greed." It should be obvious that the person who accepts such a false axiom is giving prima facie evidence of his own state of internal mental life; he obviously has a bourgeois character-structure, with its reductionist monad-persona dynamics and its cohering reductionist outlook on the universe of the monad's experience. This pathetic element of the worker's usual bourgeois character-structure is at the same time an axiomatic basis for rationalization of the inevitability and permanence of capitalist control of the productive forces. A society of individual-greed optimizing monads could only be a pluralistic parody of a capitalist form!* "Human nature will never change." "I'm minding my own business." "We can take care of our own interests by ourselves without outside interference." "That's his problem; I've got to get mine where I can." "You couldn't understand, since you're not black and not a woman." "Local control." These and similar prima facie evidence of a bourgeois character structure more or less directly indicate the reasons why no socialist transformation could occur without an accompanying and preceding destruction of the personality characteristics reflected by such alienated, suicidal human rubbish as these commonplace slogans. Indeed, precisely as the cynical critics of socialism charge, to have socialism it is first necessary to "change human nature," or, more exactly, to conquer the bestiality of the bourgeois character-structure.
The previous review of socialist planning focusses on the complementary features wanted to locate the social basis for actualizing the notion of Necessity which accompanies the sense of the Free (creative) inner self.
* Marx and Engels in 1875 describe the pathetic view of the social-democracy, the present-day society without certain of its defects.
The very existence of the human species in the quality of life (material conditions and leisure) presently existing at any time already demands development of the productive forces as a whole. Without modified technology, measured by greater negentropy of the productive forces as a whole, it would be impossible to maintain the prevailing quality of life within relatively finite resources of a fixed technology. This development, which is thus the unique self-interest of even each individual qua individual, depends upon the process of expanded reproduction involving the entire world's working-class population. Within this, expanded reproduction occurs as the extension of the existing productive forces through productive employment of the unemployed. This productive employment occurs through the realization of the surplus product produced through the employment of employed productive labor. Hence, if employed labor attempted to maximize its immediate consumption at the expense of expanded employment, the consequence must be a reduction in the material consumption and leisure of employed labor. If unemployed labor attempts to maximize its consumption by undermining the employment conditions of employed labor or at the expense of productive development, the material interests of unemployed labor are thereby undermined.
That is only the crudest aspect of the problem,
The more profound truth is located in the lawful means and consequences of the development of the increased productive powers of any individual worker in the world. The development of productive powers is the development of the individual's creative (cognitive) powers. This obviously suggests the increase in the individual's powers to invent technological advances of universal benefit. Less obviously, but of equal significance, this development, epitomized by education, is essential to enable employed labor to realize the productive benefits of new technological developments embodied in the productive process. This advance in cognitive potentialities of individuals is limited by the rates of advance in both the material quality of consumption and the ratio of leisure.
We emphasize this point by means of an illustration we have frequently employed before this. It is obvious enough that the cheaper the cost of copper (among other essentials) to the U.S. sector, the higher the rate of social productivity in the U.S., and the higher the standard of consumption and leisure possible in the U.S. To obtain cheaper copper from the underdeveloped copper-exporting sector, it is essential to generally advance the material conditions of productive technology, and of material consumption and leisure throughout that sector. To fail to do so lowers thus the possible quality of existence in the U.S. sector.
This is the kernel of socialist humanism. The creative powers and the development of the creative powers of
every other potentially-productive individual in the world (as either or both universal and cooperative labor) is in the concrete interest of every other such person in the world.
In the organizing process, this principle has several interconnected immediate applications. Broadly speaking, as education, discussion of such scientific evidence is the pedagogical device for communicating the rudiments of potential socialist program and human conceptions to workers. In the negative aspect of socialist propaganda, this same evidence provides the clearest contrast between what the working class can accomplish for itself after taking over existing productive forces and capitalist decay, underproduction. It gives thus the negative motivation for socialist struggle. In the positive aspect of propaganda work, it provides the worker with a meaningful notion of socialist expanded reproduction, and arouses his mental powers for contributing to the specifications of socialist program: he begins to act in the mode of the socialist individual worker engaged in formulating socialist programmatic developmental policies, he begins to think and act as socialist man. In the organizing process, these notions provide him with class-consciousness respecting the workers whose bourgeois traditions set into "competition" with him. He can now see directly the importance of the unorganized or unemployed worker to himself, and his importance to that worker. He overcomes chauvinism toward workers of other races and nationalities, and recognizes his importance to them.
This organizing work depends upon the socialist cadres who are the unifying and leading organ of the organizing process as a whole. The organizing of the class cannot be effected unless a significant number of such cadres can become the kind of mass organizers our outlined approach demands of them.
This is no mere sweeping generalization, no mere truism. The instant one deploys large proportions of a socialist group's membership into direct organizing of sections of the working class, all sorts of dismal and even sometimes hideous difficulties appear. The persisting, actually neurotic bourgeois deformations of the personality of the individual cadres result in behavior which proves to be nothing but an unconscious intent to sabotage the organizing work in which they are purportedly engaged! Since the majority of cadres of an initiating group for any socialist party are drawn from an exceptional stratum of petit-bourgeois youth, it might appear that the unique source of the difficulties is the characteristics of the stratum in which these cadres have been accultured. The instant one notices the not-unrelated form of unconscious sabotaging by cadres directly drawn from the working class itself, the truth confronts us.
The petit-bourgeois background of many cadres does indeed involve a special, vicious form of problems. In
academic life, truth is of the propitiatory neurotic form we identified earlier. To express the problem most concisely, the characteristic neurotic behavior of the petit-bourgeois socialist cadre is summed up by the notion of "passing one's classroom recitations and quizzes." Success in life, to the petit-bourgeois, is largely restricted to the task of being heard by the right people reciting the proper phrases. This more fundamental form of characteristic petit-bourgeois disorder is often maintained by internalized images of actual or synthetic academic authorities or peer-groups; the victim of this pathology is constantly looking over his shoulder, even when he is apparently addressing a worker, to reflect on the increase or diminution of status in the eyes of those academic authorities and peer-groups, should these authorities and peer-groups witness his performance in front of the worker. In addition to academic authorities and peer-groups as such, the typical such petit-bourgeois cadre is also "conscience-stricken" respecting the relationship between his academic status and the ego-ideals developed in the family. The neurotic behavior immediately controlled by reference to these internalized authorities may be either direct adaptation or counter-adaptation. Many members of socialist groups (such as the case of the typically anti-intellectual academic instructor who has joined PLP, etc.) restrict their socialist "politics" to merely acting out rebellions against internalized authorities, an actually harmless sort of delayed-adolescence prankishness which, even in its inversions, faithfully follows the guidelines of the academic neurosis. On this account, it is absolutely indispensable that the socialist group rip apart publicly the easily-demonstrated ideological con tent and (in many instances) outright objective incompetence of authoritative academic views, showing that the pathetic features of credulously respected academic authority are removed once the field in question is critically examined from the standpoint of the Marxian method. The socialist organization must create psychological distance between the mind of its members and academic authorities and peer-group opinion. This is not effected by simple negation, but by demonstrating the superior authority of the Marxian method in selected fields of such academic authority. If this drives certain potential recruits from the socialist group, such a selective process is to be desired. A few painful examples of the behavior of the petit-bourgeois academic outlook in mass organizing suffices to convince one of the need to select.
The issue here the real issue -- is ultimately identical with that confronting the socialist organization from its working-class social strata. The pathetic feature of academic ideology and influences for mass-organizing work is precisely the fact, as study of individual Ph.D.'s shows, that the academic ideology systematically destroys the creative potentialities of the student. The root of the nonsensical antics among petit-bourgeois cadres sent into mass organizing is their lack of creative activity; if this assumes the form of overt
anti-intellectuality among worker cadres with the same neurotic disability, the two cases are no less the same in the final analysis. It is the forms through which the neurosis is mediated which differ significantly.
It should be obvious, from our emphasizing on the stripping and rebuilding processes, that the tasks of the cadres are distantly related to those of the psychoanalyst. The kernel of the consequent practical problem involved: unless the cadres themselves have developed their creative powers and identities in terms of class-for-itself and socialist-expanded-reproduction criteria, they are unable to direct their efforts toward the positive reconstruction of the worker's sense of inner identity.
Where those qualities are lacking, the resulting foolishness of cadres invariably assumes one of three general forms. The most common form of neurotic behavior by organizers is that of adaptation to the backwardness of the workers they are assigned to organize: so-called "workerism." The backwardness of the workers in effect organizes the cadres. The second form is one which perhaps has a higher incidence among Labor Committee novice-organizers than those of other groups. Because the members have some formal knowledge and experience of the significance and of some techniques for stripping away aspects of the persona, the member who applies such techniques without having yet developed a working grasp of the dialectical method rather inevitably accomplishes only the negative aspect of the "molecular" organizing task. He succeeds in either organizing or estranging worker-contacts on the basis of induced heteronomic rage. (Either way, the organization is thus confronted with a bit of a mess to be cleaned up.) The third neurotic form is commonplace among those most closely bound to the academic ego ideal (or, to its simple inversion). The socialist, in this sickening sort of incident, hides himself from any real contact with the workers by throwing up a pathetic persona-mask of chanted or shouted ritual slogans or other cant. He is not organizing anyone: he is acting out a pitiable neurotic episode. He is attempting to artifice an appearance of belief in his own role against the reflected skepticism he actually meets or projects on the workers.
Consequently, every engagement in mass-organizing deployments properly forces the socialist organization to concentrate on the conceptual problems of the dialectical method and Marxian economics. The inability of socialist members to master the dialectical method for themselves is the inevitable root of their probable failure as mass-organizers.
From our discussion of related matters, it should be evident that the difficulties of comprehending certain conceptions in dialectical method and Marxian economics are not pedagogical problems in the ordinary sense. The cause of these difficulties is nothing but a form of
hysteria in the proper clinical sense of that term. The difficulty in comprehending the notions of class-for-itself and expanded reproduction in more than a merely descriptive fashion is singularly located in the fact that these notions are insusceptible of comprehension to ordinary (bourgeois-ideological) forms of consciousness. No person who experiences (or would experience) a sense of a monad-like "little me" inner self through the stripping-away of his persona could possibly conceptualize the notions of class-for-itself or expanded reproduction,
Hence, the persisting difficulty of comprehending these notions must be regarded as prima facie evidence of a severe neurotic disturbance, which must be examined and treated as such a pathology. Undoubtedly, ordinary psychoanalytical work can contribute significantly toward the ultimate remedy. Competent psychoanalytic work would reduce the force of crippling secondary neurotic disorders, and increase the individual's "ego-strength" to the point of making more feasible a direct attack on the more fundamental pathology. However, so far, psychoanalytical methods and conceptions necessarily have failed to develop the competence to directly attack this grandfather of all neurosis, bourgeois ideology itself.
The hazard in utilizing the powerful concentrated social forces of an entire organization to effect forced therapy ought to be more or less obvious. As the representation of the problems and goals indicates, the approximation of clinical group confrontations within the limits of clear and restricted task-orientations is absolutely mandatory. However, this would fail if these practices degenerated into mere "therapy-group" sessions, which must occur unless the process is under rigorous control of qualified leading individuals and unless the notion of task-orientation criteria is positively focussed in such a way that the participants can locate thus an approximation of positive identity.
A preliminary period of several weeks of intensive sessions by member groups in the U.S.A. and Western Europe has made the requirements clearer, but, has also shown results in the form of discernible qualitative improvements -- with an absolute minimum of instances
of neurotic episodes in individual participants. Despite the disturbing, although much-reduced incidence of neurotic behaviors of the sort which would have occurred in any case, the result of months of successive phases of work on this problem has been a grudging but marked improvement in performance, both in the quality of intellectual productions and in organizing work.
A remark on the history of the socialist movement gives the necessary focus. The socialist organizations have been characterized by handfuls of actual mass organizers, around which the general membership otherwise operated as apparatus functionaries or as unskilled auxiliary aides to the actual mass organizers "in the field." These handfuls of qualified organizers developed as such more or less "spontaneously," and the socialist movement, up to this time, had developed no systematic notion of practice by which it could wilfully (self-consciously) increase the incidence of such persons within its membership. At the same time, every socialist organization has depended for its effective political leadership on the "spontaneous" incidence of a handful of such rare persons, to the effect that the "decapitation" of that group in terms of the loss of one or at most several such figures meant the effective destruction of the continued effective development and tactical direction of the organization. In both instances, the basis for these critical limitations on such forms of creative development has obviously been the same neurotic problem examined in this paper. Viewing such problems in the context of the brief period available to establish socialism (before an otherwise inevitable fascist holocaust), and considering the tiny nucleus of viable organized socialist forces available at this very late phase of the process, without the wilful production of an increased ratio of qualified mass organizers and political leaders from "mere ordinary" socialist cadres, there would not appear to be much hope for the continued existence of the human race during the remainder of this century.
The limited but nonetheless unequivocal advances we have effected during the past months substantiate the conviction that our plunge a few steps beyond psychoanalysis in this respect contributes to saving the human race from the threatened new fascist holocaust.
Numbers and letter-suffixes indicated below identify the items referred to by these same symbols placed in the body of the text.
1. Georg Cantor:
a. Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Hildesheim, 1962 (Collected Works in German); N.B. "Grundlagen.... " 1883.
b. A Contribution to...Transfinlte Numbers, P. Jourdain, ed., New York, 1951 (In English; "Introduction by Jourdain, a collaborator of Cantor, does not misrepresent the immediate point of the collected works.).
2. Rene Descartes: Meditations (and other philosophical writings).
3. Ludwig Feuerbach:
a. The Essence of Christianity, "Introduction."
b. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future.
4. Sigmund Freud:
a. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
b. The Ego and the ld.
c. Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
d. The Future of an Illusion.
e. Civilization and its Discontents.
5. Erich Fromm:
a. The Art of Loving.
b. Beyond the Chains of Illusion.
6. G.W.F. Hegel:
a. The Phenomenology of Mind.
b. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III, pp. 158-159 (paragraph).
c. Ibid., pp. 162 (Kepler).
d. lbld., pp. 164-165 (3c).
e. Ibid., pp. 220-290 (Descartes, Spinoza).
f. Ibid., pp. 423-478 (Kant).,
g. Ibid., pp. 512-554 (Schelling, etc.).
7. Heinrich Heine: Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Part IIl.
8. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason.
9. Wolfgang Koehler:
a. The Mentality of Apes.
b. Gestalt Psychology.
10. L.S. Kubie:
a. Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process, Lawrence (Kansas), 1958.
b. Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psychoanalysis, 2nd ed., New York, 1960.
c. "On Fostering of Scientific Creative Productivity," Daedalus, Spring, 1962.
11. L. Marcus:
a. Dialectical Economics, Lexington, 1973 (in publication), Chaps. 1-6.
b. "The United States of Europe: Their Program and Ours," Campaigner, Fall, 1972.
c. "In Defense of Rosa Luxemburg," Campaigner, Spring, 1973.
12. Karl Marx:
a. "The Jewish Question."
b. "Feuerbach," The German Ideology.
c. (with F. Engels) The Communist Manifesto.
d. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
e. Capital, Vol. III, Chap. V.
f. Loc. cit., Sec. VII.
13. P.B. Shelley:
a. "On Life."'
b. "A Defence of Poetry."
c. "Ode to the West Wind."
14. Hugo Wolf: Goethe Lieder.