The latest big thought-process to come to me is on the subject of causality, my new understanding that this is where the problem of "becoming" resides, referenced way back in our beginning "Fuck our Ideas, and Long Live Our Memories." Our memories depict being, and our ideas depict becoming, which is coherent with "The Reality of Intelligence," what was divined from reading Schopenhauer, to the effect that our intelligence, or understanding, is that of causality, and so, will is causality, and the world is the representation of causality. I'm not sure Schopenhauer spells it out like that, but that's how I spell out what he's saying. He's correct to bring down the whole edifice of concepts with which Kant understands understanding, and to see causality as the only prerequisite of space-time perception is a brilliant way to do this, however this is where he makes a subtle mistake. On my previous post, and I believe I deleted this because I didn't have time to go into it fully, I considered that the thing-in-itself was as much a mystery as the relation-in-itself. But the thing-in-itself is itself a relation, which establishes its thingness, which is its self-causality. Schopenhauer glosses thingness with causality by saying that the object establishes itself in perception as the cause of its representation, but this conflates causality in time and self-causality in space. Also, the concept of causality itself, as cause-and-effect, as term for both effectuality and causality, is really self-causality. If we say that causality causes causality, even at the level of supposing it is because we have a causal understanding which makes objects seem self-causal, things-in-themselves, as well as linked on causal chains in time, then all causality is only existent with self-causality, which furthers Schopenhauer's animalistic comprehension of preverbal perception, for it seems a bit of a conceptual stretch to say that animals intuit causality, this, I believe, requires conceptualization, an interruption of the continuity of memory and sensation that creates time-perception, for an abstract linkage to be made between a discontinuous memory to the factor of sensation with which it concerns. It may not be a rational concept, but it is an imaginal concept which is used rationally.
This imaginal concept, it is true, could be autonomous, in the way animals, and humans, enact memorized actions, but this still does not establish a perception of causality, but a being-subject to something that could be interpreted in a causal schema. This only goes to show that in making recourse to the preverbal, Schopenhauer has not distinguished reflection from intuition, because he has not identified imaginal reflection as a preverbal form of conceptual rationality. Imaginal reflection is perhaps the origin of all concepts, as experienced within a rational process that understands causality. But we do not need to understand causality with an imaginal concept to experience space, time, and causality, to understand them as phenomena within perception, all we need is continuity. And continuity, which we thought much about in earlier posts, may very well be this self-causality, this reflective causality, that has things-in-themselves appear as autonomous. This entrains certain autonomies into ourselves, like memorized behaviors which are reactive to the nature of the reality we see. We become autonomous in response to autonomy in nature, or, perceive autonomy in nature on account of the autonomy with which we see objects having as the understanding-element of our perception, and, having no way to distinguish which is which, we can only say that the "in-itself" is the intelligence of forms.
To comprehend that both subject and object are representations before that perception which endows them both with the autonomy of perception, or that our perception is endowed by the things-in-themselves of subject and object with autonomy, we realize that the endless slippage of language here, the sense of an irresolvable antinomy, is caused by the insistence on causal dependence in our logical articulation. And here we can give Jung a big ol' slap on the back for palling around with the physicist what's-his-face, Wolfgang Pauli, and dreaming up "synchronicity," as Jung's only really useful idea. Everything else, his dialectical individuation and his system of archetypes, is just garbage that came from Plato and Hegel. Synchronicity is "indigenous" not by virtue of origins but by virtue of peak experiences, continuities, by the refusal to see that there is any causal nexus whatsoever. That what is, just is. As Hume put it, cause and effect always occur in a constant conjunction, so we only ever discern causality rationally. Hume had the right idea: its continuity that we see, not causality. And causality is the way our mind works, because continuity is self-causality, or acausality, the non-becoming that is being ... or self-becoming? No.
The only way that works is if the self-symbol and individuation are one. Sort of. The problem with individuation as a "continuity," is that it forever throws being into the future. Which is not totally a bad thing, but it removes being from the present moment, and continuity becomes becoming. When we say auto-causality is acausality, what we mean is that cause and effect are one, we don't involve the "self" in that in any way, except to say that any subject or object that can be experienced as existent is an expression of this circular cause. The "Self" as a concept, as derived from auto-causality, is the cause's identification with the effect, its reflexivity creates a self.
So the subject is not bottomless because its bottomless but because causality is reflexive, and that reflexivity lends the concept of a self. It is because causality causes it-self that there is a self. What causes causality? Causality. Because this "will" or "force" authors itself autopoetically, it is no longer will or force. This does not come about due to individuation but due to reflexivity, because of the persistence of reflexivity in all causal relations. And likewise, this answers Jung's slurring of individuation with collectivization, because he tries to make them mean the same thing, and they only mean the same thing by making recourse to this different concept, which also relates to compensation, which is reflexivity. It is for the sake of the reflexive function of acausality that there is a self. It is for the sake of an expressive function of acausality that there is a world, for acausality cannot materialize itself without the individuation into causality and effectuality: into a world of apparent dependence occupied by an independent subject.
So it is because the effect is the cause of that effect that there is self, because of its reflexivity; but it is because this reflexivity occurs through effectuality, that there is a materialization. I.E. self is cause/effect moving backwards, and world is cause/effect moving forwards. But this does mean that self/world are connected along the lines of causality, for they are both acausal, synchronous representations perceived within the relation of continuity. In other words, we have a quaternity
Cause
Reflexivity Continuity Expression
Effect
Because, going clockwise, cause-to-effect is expression, and effect-to-cause is reflexivity. So! So! So! Even better articulation of this is that in the material world we only see cause-to-effect, we do not see outwardly the effect-to-cause side of circle, because we see that in ourselves, in our being a self. We see in the material world the expression of acausality which is causality, whereas in the psychical world we see the expression of acausality which is self-causality.
Noumena
Self Continuity World
Phenomena
So that's the secret of Castle Rackrent, and our means of decentralizing the Self, without succumbing to the pressure of the World, which depicts the phenomena of effectuality, of a cause related to an effect that is somehow both admitted to be infinite and indiscernible. This is why the World is trouble: because it shows us cause-to-effect, because it locks us in a causal paradigm of dependence. Why the Self is trouble, is explained for the very same reason Jung loves his fucking self-symbols of Christ and Buddha, and puts the Self at the center of this quaternity: its effect-to-cause, because it makes autonomy the exclusive possession of the self. The solution, contrary to my ridiculous program, is not to make the self dependent.
The self reveals autonomy as the essential condition of anything. The world reveals reality as the essential condition of anything. Thus, both self and world are continuous with each other and within themselves, as autonomous, and reflexive, and as real, and expressive.
Seeing acausality as cause-and-effect is deceptive, because it demonstrates a world which is not acausal, which is not continuously reflexive, which is not immanently cause for itself, but which has a transcendent cause, which stretches beyond the world. Seeing acausality as effect-and-cause is deceptive, because a demonstrates a self which is not continuously expressive, which does not have that power of effectuality that belongs to the world, but a kind of phenomenal reality. So in the world and in the self we see two half-circles of the full-circle that is acausality/autocausality and continuity.
Or, just as a psychological commonplace-- because if we really think about how we know the world, we realize we know it as a world-in-itself, its own effectuality of expression reflexive to its own causality, and we think about how we observe ourselves, we realize we know our self as a representation before a perception which is only organized as a self by way of perspective, which is itself the intercession of a representational dimension "on top of" perception. We know the self as an effectuality of our perception which causes it. So with a little elbow grease we can see the full-circle in the half-circles.
Nevertheless, we don't get away from "perception" so easily in doing this, yet by the same token nor we can we get away from "reality" so easily in doing so. For perception is reality, and reality perception; they are continuous and non-causal. Anyway we think about it -- causality is an illusion, and it is the illusion of the world, which is its Maya. The world however is reality; it is that it is causally dependent or provides an image of causal dependence that is Maya. It is also an illusion of the Self, that is self is an effect or a cause, when it is both. The meaning and the value of life is life, is being. Nothing happens, nothing changes, everything is. I am, you are, the world is, and was and will be.
What happens in this illusion of causality we live in is that we awaken from the illusion. Being manifests within the appearance of becoming, which is a self-degenerative process. Becoming un-becomes; expression is reflexive; the peak experience acts as an entropic corrosive on its alternatives, which are non-alternatives. Energy is housed in the form of being-- that is both statement of becoming and being, verb and noun. What is unreal is not what happens, but the process of a happening of what is real. This is not really happening, it is what always happens, appearing within the illusion of change.
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