sickness - sequel

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH


Kierkegaard may have said it all already without knowing exactly to whom he was saying it. .

“Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto death,” he says. (Introduction)

Is this not a most startling claim? -- that there is a human condition or state, deserving such a doleful title, the meaning of which can only be understood by a certain group: Christians. And if that were so, what difference should that make to others?

Kierkegaard is 19th century Christian Danish, usually classified as an existentialist philosopher. I see his work in this respect as post-Kantian. (Though more often regarded as anti-dialectical in contrast with Hegel.) The disjunction between the phenomenal and noumenal (dinge an such) orders of being which Kant bequeathed is overcome, for Kierkegaard, in the process of living out the Christian concern. But it is also pre-Freudian. It does not relate Spirit, as a ‘given’ metaphysical concept used to define man (“Man is spirit.”) to libido; therefore, under the assumption that Spirit, in the phenomenal sense, is the derivative of sublimation, in the noumenal (psycho-physiological) sense, a dualism like that of Kant’s is perpetuated at a higher level, under disguise. (I say “like that of Kant” ion order to avoid arguments about what the great German philosopher ‘really meant’ by it.) The question is: do sublime and sensuous love proceed from the same source?

As Almighty and all-convulsively consuming sexual ejaculation is, it remains qualitatively different from spiritual apotheosis – if Biblical and other sources (e.g., the psychologist Maslow) are considered, apart from personal experience. One is Exhalted; the other, ecstatic. Both belong to the boundary of consciousness, but at opposite poles.

Living out and working through the differences between phenomenal and noumenal reality amounts (in psychosemiotic terms) to learning how to relate to what exists by using signs to communicate according to two different ‘logics’, or grammars.

PHENOMENAL CONTENT is given under the grammar of appearance: “how it appears to me”, specifically distinguishing ‘it’ from anything not included in the awareness of the moment. This ‘inverted’ grammar assigns content to ‘inner’ relations between whatever is wholly contained in consciousness under sign-use*. These include: What I directly perceive, as distinct from what is objectively the case. What I intend or think, however understood by anyone else or whether true or false; What I commit to as a totality inrelating to the universe, as opposed to whatever actually exists; What I will to do, however the act attempted turns out; What I dream (dreamed), whatever the explanation of dreaming; -- all these “settings” unfold as X’s within the generic/phenomenal grammar of appearance: “I am appeared to by ….( content x)”. They are hierarchically ordered as predicates of predicates of predicates…, illustrated by..

conscious will predicating the end of an act over a physical domain if completed. (“to carry out the groceries, I ought, etc.), and are required to remain strictly in their domain of stratified communications to avoid antinomy and self-contradictions. This is laid out elsewhere.

As has been learned, and post-Kantians were adjusting to, perception is caused by stimuli from the external world striking the body’s peripheral organs, which translate their information into streams of tiny electro-neural discharges, sequences of which evanesce in conscious brain events. This locates all content of consciousness, metaphysically, in the single person’s private individual *tokenspace.

PHYSICAL CONENT is given under the grammar of space-time location: whatever is predicated on as existing is essentially defined under predicates for “Where and When”. “Nowhere at no time” defines the externally non-existent. This grammar tacitly assigns its content to a container ‘outside me’; in contrast to phenomenal content explicitly signed as ‘inner’ (by use of ‘appearance’; a ‘for-me’ token).


…now back to K.

My proposal is to translate Kierkegaard’s formula as follows.

“Spirit” is libidinized consciousness: self-awareness as desiring, striving, willing being. It would be the background potentiating the transcendental form of change in the conscious moment. Consciousness itself would be the unity of what is experienced in tokenspace under sign-use (S*).

“The relation that relates itself to its own self” points toward F. H. Bradley’s Absolute, which absorbs all relations into itself, without self-contradiction, because all are its manifestations. In both cases, the question of reality of relations as a metaphysical category has emerged as a fundamental philosophical problem. Thus Kierkegaard writes: “In the relation between the two, the relation is the third term as a negative unity;

Proposed transcript: this passage counts the relation as one thing, and the related ‘two’ as distinct other things. The two are united into a relational whole through what they are not, a “negative unity”. This would hold for the concept of a “day”, as a unity divided between daylight and night time periods, marked as a whole by the sun’s orbital transit. Each of the two is not the other, with respect to light, yet they are united by this which neither is, a “negative unity” in common.