Where does intelligence begin? Certainly it makes intuitive sense to say that animals have it, but what they don't have is language, and thought, which is how we tend to-- think of-- intelligence, what we perceive a complex use of, and say, that's intelligent. The issue is dawning on me, that I believe my intelligence has downgraded, short sold, the importance of intelligence. Here on Planet Human, we think of intelligence in terms of superior and inferior, and again we're back to the language thing which is always a matter of education. But we don't look at a fine painting designed after years of training and practice, and say, how intelligent, that's not the adjective we use. How skillful, how beautiful, how mature, how sophisticated-- usually a signal of something captured, of the artistic effort. Sometimes we remark on something being the product of a powerful intuition, or inspiration, sensing an element in the finished work that seems spontaneous, an energy captured, but perhaps in a flash of insight, not out of a grueling process of investigation. And yet, so it seems to me, our popular thoughts about the "unconscious," about the subliminal depths of human knowledge, are either Freud's or Jung's: we're all horny psychopaths beneath our friendly, rational demeanor, or we're mystics channelling the flood of symbolic history. Perhaps these analyses are but of "conscious" mental contents of certain people that are merely concealed behind social personas, and have little to do with the unconscious.
More than Jung's religiosity, far more mainstream is the Freudian conception, precisely because it fits more people in this way of social versus personal being, of superego vs ego, of persona versus self. Jung was probably far more interested in himself, and Freud far more critical and defensive of others, in designing these schemes, and psychological quackery is far less demanding intellectually than philosophy, so psychologists can design cosmologies of mind that say nothing but their own psychology, and then shrug their shoulders, and say, well that's the way it is, it's all projection. They both skim the works of earlier thinkers like Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or literary artists like Sophocles and Shakespeare, and show great erudition but are as intellectually rigorous as generalization-prone literary critics, and make excuses for how they do a shitty job responding to earlier philosophers because they've invented or are a part of a grand new doctrine that sets its own rules for self-validation. Psychoanalysis and its derivatives springs off the basis of anecdotal reportage, and having a bullshit credential, and a deprecating remark about the work of philosophers, all so they can say, it's not my job to think that hard. I'm just reporting on my horseshit findings that are extremely scientifically compromised. But that all said, all Freud and Jung are are philosophers, but in the rhetorical, I-say-it-so-its-true tradition of Nietzsche. All the egoism of Nietzsche carries on in a way that's diluted in them, or perhaps sublimated into their being doctors, men of authority. The earlier enlightenment ethos of good thinking being its own credential for a scientist gets rocketed into sentimental hatred in Nietzsche's romantic "epoch," perhaps the first postmodern philosopher, the Tarantino of the game, in that he really gets off on being one. Hook on a psychiatric degree to try to moderate that narcissism with authority and you've got Freud.
That's all a little to the side of what I'm trying to say, but it exploded out of me so there we are. My main point I've been playing with, is that we principally live out a psychology Freud "invented," which is so commonplace, and useful a thing to think, it's hard to really give him that much credit. I mean, he put this in a book, congratulations: social being conceals sexual being. But the nonsense about that being the unconscious psyche is really miserably stupid! So we think of ourselves as split between reality-principle and pleasure-principle, superego and id, and we see evidence of it everywhere, because of course, what we're really seeing is social and sexual being, not conscious and unconscious. Freud considers superego and ego as the ego and the id. This just seems like a hypnotic delusion that makes people think they're even more sexual than they already think they are, than they know they are, and makes us think to interpret our dreams as if we're dumber than animals, or even protozoa, no, we're all Viking-pirates underneath the thinking, perceptual mind. The greater horror is that everyone's a monster quite consciously, and that there's a doctor stupid enough to think that they're monsters despite themselves, in any-- however culturally "naive"-- age.
My radical entropy of popular intellectualization intervened here to suggest that the opposite is true: that pleasure is built on top of reality, and not the reverse. I just wanted to play with the reversal at first, and then thinking about it more I could see more and more reasons why that might be true. Egoism is so involved with sexuality its mystifying how sexuality could belong to an unconscious that transcends the very ego, as both Freud and Jung contend. Mainly it just gave me that epiphany about conscious life that seemed to be on my lips quietly when I first flipped open The Interpretation of Dreams, that people don't seem to be censoring very much about their sexuality, their desires, et cetera, and that a pleasure-principle seems absolutely paramount, overwhelming, relentless with respect to conscious life. The main threat to this point of view is Jung, and he just wants to shoot that down like a deluded Catholic priest who cuckolds all the men in town and doesn't want to think about his sexuality, and so sees the cosmic play of symbols at the end of his dick, in the forest of mystery. I mean maybe Jung's right to question that, but when you switch footing over to religion and mythology to do that, one sees you as very perennial "archetype" of spiritual self-conceit.
And so between them they both establish this crazy either-or which is all about culture and has nothing to do with nature, and it's why they write like literary critics, such fanboys for the spirit of eons and historical periods, and lovers of objectifying talented people for terribly undisciplined case studies. But what if we go back to Freud, and just switch the two around? Unconsciously, it's all about reality, and consciously, it's all about pleasure. Why wouldn't that be the case? Would the brain, freed from the task of waking life, not become reflective and analytical, returning to pure perception from perception enchained to agenda? Wouldn't "wish fulfillment" be more the modus operandi of every minute we're awake? Why is it when we take LSD, we experience the sense of "expanded consciousness" which doesn't just make us ravenous sexual predators, nor make us more beholden to social codes? There's a bit more evidence for Jung's theory of unconscious mysticism, surely, from the LSD trip, but that mysticism takes a very different form from that of alchemical drawings and religious symbols. Instead, nature and "chaos" attain luminosity, and all human constructions appear like candy wrappers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Jung's gothic, medieval spirituality, however interesting, doesn't show up, and something far more dynamic and spontaneous does, the radiance of the natural and the ordinary.
When I began to think about this, I thought, what if sexuality were sculpted by unconscious intelligence? Freud says that sadistic jokes betray a sadistic sexuality. Chicken or the egg? I mean to say, wouldn't it stand to reason that our sexual desires are themselves expressions of mental factors, that sexual energy is neither conscious or unconscious, but both, a constant part of life, yet it is the construction of "reality" that makes our sexuality what it is? Sexuality is not censored, it is not so self-evident and given a thing, it doesn't have a specific form, but an energy that can be molded in certain ways, and it is the mind which does these things but perhaps we should no longer say "the mind," since that tends to just express the purely intellectual conscious evaluation of things (which I yet say impinges on spontaneous expressions of sexuality). And this has brought me to the notion of intelligence, as something that is mental and visual and emotional, which measures the comprehension of these perceptions, the Kantian "understanding" of them.
Supposedly, in Freud's world, sex is primary, and then since it's mostly impossible we "sublimate" to intellectual, artistic, vocational activities. We create civilization out of the impossible violence life does against our libido. Here's a little radical view on sex, however-- isn't it possible that sexual activity itself can be a sublimation of other despairs and desires? We break through the ponderous theory here with a remark that I think most people could furnish examples from their own and others' lives. How much sexuality has been exercised in human history as an escape from pain of another sort, like grief, heartbreak, loneliness, existential despair? If Freud were right, the sexual bliss would be restoration of Edenic normalcy, and the other stuff wouldn't matter after the orgasm, that's all neurosis and sex is the truth and the light. It's tempting to think that when you're horny, and possibly coked-up as Freud was some of the time, and in the process reduce your nostalgias, sense of friendship, family, kindness, romanticism, all those things that get stabbed a million times by an ugly machine of a society to a desire to get laid. So yeah, go fuck some drunk dumbass, and see if all that existential despair disappears. It'll probably be with you the whole time you're humping away. Now, you might feel much better after orgasm, but it won't change the fact that nobody loves you, you're going to die, life has no apparent meaning, all that stuff you were sad about beforehand, and during, since "during" didn't contradict any of that.
You look at sexual acts visually, and from a certain unaroused perception, you see people getting off on something very simple, repetitive, and not that visually interesting. It's like looking at people eat food when you're not hungry. But then we say shit like "ah, the sexuality of food," so it's all forms of the same thing our egos are terrified by not being identified with and having easy access to. My argument is that we all suffer from existential despair, from loneliness and fear, because of the difficulties of existence, including its mortality and its dependence on desires for things we have to work to attain such as food and sex, and the social conflicts that emerge out of that. We have traumatic memories, all of us, some more than others, which increases that despair in proportion to the frequency of unpleasant memories. And thereby intellectuals and idiots alike may turn to sex as the panacea, as the sublimation of what is an existential discomfort, as the desire for a secure existence and a sublime destiny when we have neither. And this makes the root of Jung's dispute with Freud sympathetic even though the extent he ran with that gets a little much for me right now.
Jung would have us turn to highbrow mysticism as the religion of the literati to attenuate that existential discomfort, to see in sex a sublimation of our distance from the divine. Maybe so, but in truth I see religiosity of any stripe as just another narcotic, which attempts to address that basic existential problem in a sublimed way. You see people practicing an alien religion and it's like food when you're full or sex when you're not interested. It's not the de facto face of what we want that we'd recognize anywhere and at any time, and what we most deeply want is the relief from a distressing appraisal of existential conditions, a fresh perspective that I believe we hunt for all the time, in every moment. What is our relationship to reality? We perceive it. And the quality of how this perception of reality is interpreted and understood, beyond thought, is what I am going to call "intelligence." In visual terms, the only creation that perception is capable of is through the choosing of what and how it perceives, the perspective. Now, two different perspectives may give the same "perception" or "consciousness" of a certain thing perceived. The thing perceived in there, so it's conscious and within perception. So if one perspective is superior to the other, in terms of the interpretation and understanding of the thing-perceived, that is "intelligence."
And so we look for intelligence all the time because we're raised on a mental diet of a lot of fearsome and stupid things coming from religion, politics, culture, family, school and on and on. We don't really, deep down, want to be "cynics" or "pessimists," and we want to love the truth of our existence, but the truth as we're given it out of the gate is very difficult to swallow. So we look at interpretations, and we experiment with our own interpretations by trying new things, all the while we're hunting for pleasure and security in a more everyday sense. Underneath the eyelids of our hunger, we conceive reality, and what reality we know, the quality of our perspective, designs that hunger.
It used to be I thought of memory as being the function of imagination, tasked with narrating our lives. But this is like the mentality of -- everything done well comes from skill, and learning. Maybe one of the most powerful things we learn is not the memorization of techniques, but learning to access an unconscious intelligence. Memory is imagination, it's true, but how could you call it a "perception," or a "consciousness," since it's not organized spatially or temporally, but cognitively? Memory is used by intelligence, in the same way desire is used by intelligence, and in a manner that transcends the self and its agendas, needs, desires, goal-oriented psychology. Intelligence is pure reality-orientation, and does, to throw Jung a bone, reflect an intrinsic spiritual search, which it pursues, might I add, in independence from an extrinsic spiritual search we might take. No symbols--just what is this, where am I, what's happening, is this good? And that last question, surprisingly, is what has to be at the heart of this unconscious reality-principle, valuation, since valuation is all that can endure parallel realms of fantasy and reality, illusion and truth, dream and waking life, is all that we can take away from something that may not endure, the only positive to be taken from the false positive, the only reality that is beyond reality and fiction, how we value an ephemeral and/or unreal experience. And intelligence is a valuation-- and valuation is not necessarily desire but what could design desire. If there's an unconscious psyche it must be characterized in terms that make it causally responsible for the tip of the iceberg we surf on, and desire doesn't do that, and nor do symbols. Valuation and intelligence are my attempt to correct what I see as an error, and I believe it's more humanist than elitist to emphasize "intelligence" this way: as an expression of something we all have, even animals have, and which reflects our insecurity about the world we're in, not about ourselves. That's our conscious problem, LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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