earthmoss
evolving our futureChapter 3 : Pandora's box and the great war of electrified mice - being-for-others
Contents / click & jump to :
- 01: Lubbock’s walk through the alleys and courtyards of beidha provides him with other new experiences.
- 02: Lets get the band back together- a limited-capital idea!
- 03: The great war of the electrified mice
- 04: Being-for-others
- 05: Such is the origin of my concrete relations with the other
- 06: Desire is a conduct of enchantment
- 07: Pandora, prometheus and epimetheus
- 08: Hesiod – the homeric hymns and homerica
- 09: In order to understand this myth, we merely need to translate the names of these gods involved in the story
- 10: Hubris and nemesis and karma
- 11: The Hindu myth that will hopefully explain all of above much more clearly
- 12: The relationship between Shiva and Parvati is not based on power
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Introduction
One day a snake-charmer caught a snake and charmed it with his music, to make it dance. Taking it to the market to perform for others, he received gold from those in the market-place. But whilst the man thought he had charmed the snake, he did not realise that, upon receipt of gold, the snake had charmed him.
In the last two chapters we have discovered that for the majority of human existence, we have lived in peace together, in a land of plenty, with one religion, with one God; with freedom, fraternity, and equality.
We have also seen how the perspective of this historical cave-man, and his use of language ,especially regarding being-in-Being, and dwelling, and truth itself meant different things to a being-in-Being to a being-for-itself.
In this chapter we are going to look at the being-for-itself, when it meets another being-for-itself, not, as with individual totemism and the family as met them briefly in the last chapter, where they all have the same goal, but where two egoic goals meet each other. What happens when two ‘beings-for-itself’ meet? Does one of them say, “thy will, not my will be done?”, “No, no I insist, please pretend I am not in a circle where the centre is me and not you. Go right ahead and take that which I make believe to be mine”.
In other words, we have seen mankind suddenly state the term ‘mine’, this is ‘my space’ and this is ‘my time’, due to suddenly believing in the centre as self, over Being. What then are the conditions necessary for this way of life to come into existence? Who was the first person to say, ‘that is mine’, and get away with it? As we saw previously, a being-for-itself would be either laughed at or secretly put to death, for trying to live and inculcate other members of humanity in to such a perspective of existence. Something must have shifted in order for a being-for-itself to gain through such a perspective. To receive pleasure and not pain for behaving in such a manner.
The word belief, means to be-in-lief. Lief comes from the latin word ‘libet’, meaning ‘it pleases’ and ‘libet’ itself comes from the Sanskrit word ‘lubh’, meaning ‘to desire’.
We left our families of beings-for-itself in their little circles of beliefs and farmsteads of desire, with their new leaders who emerged our of this land of plenty. Let us see what has happened to them now, and see how things are going. Is it still a land of plenty, are the leaders working for alimental communion?
“The town of Beidha is a dramatic statement of human detachment from the natural world, epitomised by the sharp angles and ordered layout of buildings, the goats within their pens, the land cleared for farming.” (Mithen:2003:72)
“The transition from small circular dwellings typical of PPNA settlements such as Jericho, Netiv Hagdud and WF16 to the relatively large, rectangular and often two-storey buildings of Beidha and other PPNB settlements documents a major social transformation. Kent Flannery from the University of Michigan has argued that this reflects a shift from a group-oriented society- in which any food surpluses are pooled and available to all- to one in which families are the key social unit. Rather than being spread out between several small circular huts, such families consolidated their presence with multiple rooms within a single building….
01: Lubbock’s walk through the alleys and courtyards of Beidha provides him with other new experiences.
In the hunter-gatherer settlements he had visited there had been few surprises- he could almost always see from one side of the village to another, most of the work occurred in the open air, and everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business. Here, as in the other Neolithic towns, turning almost every corner can lead to a surprise- unexpected clusters of people, an outdoor hearth, a tethered goat. People simply cannot know what is happening elsewhere in the town- even just a few metres away- because so much occurs behind thick walls. The number of inhabitants has become too great for people to know one another’s business and relations. There is, Lubbock senses, an atmosphere of distrust and anxiety, one brought on by the impact of town life on a mentality that had evolved for living in smaller communities.
Along with sheep, goats were the first animals to be domesticated after the dog, and completed the shift from hunting and gathering to a farming lifestyle. Precisely where, when, and why such domestication occurred is still much debated by archaeologists.
The goat is very rare in the collections of bones from Natufian and Early Neolithic villages, these being dominated by gazelle- the preferred prey ever since the LGM. So the abundance of goats found at Beidha- 80 per cent of all animals bones- suggests herding rather than hunting.
The Beidha goats were also small in size compared to known wild goats. A reduction in body-size occurs with all animals once they become domesticated- pigs are smaller than wild boar, cows smaller than wild cattle.” (Mithen:2003:76-77)
“The town of ‘Ain Ghazal made remarkable growth, reaching thirty acres in extent, spilling over to the east side of Wadi Zarqa, housing 2,000 people and more. By 6300 BC, however, it is in an advanced state of terminal decline….
The river within Wadi Zarqa still flows but the valley sides are bare- not just around the village but as far as one can see. Soil exhaustion and erosion had devastated the farming economy of ‘Ain Ghazal. Not a single tree remains within walking distance of the town. Its people had travelled further and further every year to plant their crops and to find fodder for their goats. Yields declined, fuel became scarce and the river polluted with human waste. Infant mortality, always high, reached catastrophic proportions, so that population levels collapsed, compounded by the steady departure of people back to a life within scattered hamlets. Such is the story of all PPNB towns of the Jordan valley- complete economic collapse.” (Mithen:2003:87)
“The new architecture in western Asia had gone hand in hand with new rules and regulations for living together. These were imposed by the priests such as Lubbock had seen in ‘Ain Ghazal, or agreed upon in public meeting-houses such as that of Beidha. But no such authority or decision-making for the common good has arisen at Khirokitia. Each extended family effectively cared for itself alone- producing and storing its own food, burying its own dead, even having its own religious beliefs.
Lubbock had searched in vain for public buildings where communal planning, worship or ritual might have taken place. Neither could he find any sign of authority-figures that might have provided rules and resolved disputes. While such independent family groups had been viable when fresh water, land and firewood were in good supply, these were now seriously depleted. The result was unremitting tension and conflict in the over-populated town.” (Mithen:2003:105)
“Unlike cattle, the ultimate source of the sheep and goats, wheat and barley at Merimde, Fayum and Nabta was western Asia. There are no signs that these were independently domesticated in the Nile valley where they first appear long after farming had become established in the Jordan valley and beyond. Quite how the sheep, goats and cereals spread westwards into Africa remains unclear. Arid spells may have driven pastoralists out of the Negev and Sinai deserts towards the Nile valley. Excavations at Merimde and Fayum have recovered many types of tools that are found in western Asia, such as distinctively notched arrow points and pear-shaped mace heads. The arts of spinning and weaving also appear to have spread from the east.
Both the migration of people and of trade are likely to have played a role in the arrival of Asian-style Neolithic villages in the Nile valley, just as they did in the spread of farming into Europe. But why the goats, sheep and cereals took so long to arrive remains unclear. By 5000 BC substantial farming towns were already thriving in Europe and southern Asia, to where the sheep, goat and cereals of western Asia had spread at least two thousand years before. That had required migrants or traders to travel far greater distances than is needed to reach the Nile delta from the Jordan valley. The Sinai desert may have provided a barrier, but this could hardly have been more severe than the Iranian plateau which had to be crossed for farming to reach southern Asia.
Once present in North Africa, farming settlements similar to that of Merimde soon spread along the Nile valley.
They formed small dispersed communities with huts, storage pits and animal enclosures. It took another thousand years before more substantial settlements arose, with mud-brick houses. Soon after 3500 BC the first traces of canals are found- the beginning of an irrigation system that would be the key to crop cultivation, on which Egyptian civilisation would be based as it emerged during the next two thousand years.” (Mithen:2003:502)
“Lubbock leaves the village, returning to his lofty seat in the woods, choosing to watch village life from a distance. Within a few days he begins to understand how the village works. Each household is self-sufficient; families tend their own gardens, manage their own livestock, and make their own pottery and tools. At the same time, this household independence is balanced by a culture of hospitality, the outside fireplaces being used for communal meals.” (Mithen:2003:165)
“Acorns drop, seedlings sprout only to have their life snubbed out by the nibbling teeth of deer; any saplings that survive are soon cut and taken to the village. As time passes, Lubbock watches a complete harvest fail owing to a dry winter with late frosts, and the people reluctantly slaughter sheep and goats to survive. The friendships between households, maintained by the constant hospitality, help in times of need; when one household is short of food they can rely on gaining a share of another’s.
The overriding impression from his woodland seat is that life at Nea Nikomedeia is hard: tilling fields, weeding, watering, grinding seed, digging clay, clearing woodland. Labour appears to be in short supply as even young children are pressed into weeding and spreading muck. Lubbock recalls the hunter-gatherers of Lepenski Vir, those of La Riera, Gönnersdorf and Creswell Crags, none of whom seemed to work for more than a few hours on any one day. For them, the key to a full stomach had been knowledge, not labour: where the game would be, when the fruit would ripen, how to hunt wild boar and catch shoals of fish.
As the years pass by, Lubbock watches the construction of new houses and the number of gardens increase. Villages throughout the Macedonian plain are similarly increasing in size and soon population limits are reached. The available soils around Nea Nikomedeia cannot support more people and so a group of families leave to find new land. With a herd of goats and a straggle of piglets they head northwards, aiming to create a new settlement on the first suitable flood plain they locate.
The farmers ‘leap-frogged’ their way from one fertile plain to the next, through the Balkans and on to the Hungarian plain where new farming cultures would develop. Farming settlements were made no more than 50 kilometres from Lepenski Vir, their presence leading to an initial florescence and then to the collapse of its Mesolithic culture. Some of the Lepenski Vir people, most likely the old, elaborated their artistic traditions as a means to resist the new farmers and their way of life….
But for others, most likely the young, farming settlements provided new ideas and opportunities for trade. Lepenski Vir’s fate was inevitable: an increasing number of pottery vessels appeared amidst the hunting weapons and fishing nets; its people became seduced by the farming way of life. There were some good reasons for this: sheep, cattle, and wheat could fill the dietary gaps created by the periodic shortages of wild food that had left children undernourished. But very soon the culinary tables had turned- the wild foods became the supplements to a diet of cereals and peas.” (Mithen:2003:165-6)
“There were few clear patterns between the type of burial and type of person, in terms of age and sex. As at Oleneostrovski Mogilnik, the wealthiest individuals appeared to be those in the prime of life. So power and prestige were again largely a matter of personal achievement rather than inheritance. There were limited differences between men and women, the former more frequently buried with the flint blades and axes, while elk and auroch- (wild cattle) teeth pendants seem to have been for females alone. There are no examples of individuals with inordinate amounts of wealth or who may have been shamans or chiefs.” (Mithen:2003:174)
“Lars Larsson found disturbing evidence that the Skateholm people had fought aggressively either amongst themselves or with others. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence from cemeteries and isolated burials has shown that violence was endemic within the Mesolithic communities throughout northern Europe.
At Skateholm four individuals were found with depressed skull fractures- at some time they had been hit on the head with a blunt instrument that left a permanent dent. Such blows may have simply rendered the victims unconscious, but they could well have been fatal. Flint arrowheads had hit two others from Skateholm and still lay amid their bones when excavated by Larsson: one had been hit in the stomach, the other in the chest.
These might have been innocent hunting accidents- but that would hardly explain the fractured skulls. Some of the violence may have been ritualistic in nature. At Skateholm, a young adult female had been killed by a blow to the temple and then laid beside an older male within a single grave- perhaps a sacrifice to join her partner, perhaps the ultimate punishment for some unknown crime. But most likely explanation for the violence is that these Mesolithic communities were fighting to defend their land.
Skateholm must have been highly desirable for hunter-gatherers, with abundant supplies of food in the woodland, the marshes, the rivers, the lagoon, and the sea. When the people dispersed in the summer they would not have wished to relinquish the lagoon to unexpected strangers, or to those who lived in adjacent but less productive regions.
The majority of the head injuries had come from blows to the front and left side- the outcome of face-to-face combat with a right-handed opponent. Males were more involved in fighting than the females, having three times as many head-wounds and four times those from arrows. One can easily imagine groups returning to the lagoon as summer ended, finding uninvited occupants already present and fighting for their land.” (Mithen:2003:175)
“The common explanation among archaeologists for the growth of violence in the Mesolithic societies of northern Europe after 5500 BC concerns population pressure on diminishing resources. Ever since 9600 BC the woodlands, lagoons, rivers, estuaries, and seashores of northern Europe had provided abundant wild resources. The populations of the first settlers after the ice age and those of the Early Holocene would have expanded rapidly- they were in a Mesolithic Garden of Eden. But by 7000 BC those living in the lands of modern-day Sweden and Denmark were losing substantial areas of land to the rising sea. People were increasingly crammed into smaller and smaller territories, leading to intense competition for the best hunting, plant-gathering and- especially- fishing locations.
The economic and social problems caused by environmental change had been exacerbated, however, by a new force that had entered these people’s lives.
It was one that had already overwhelmed the occupants of Franchthi Cave and Lepenski Vir and which had originated far away in western Asia. By 5500 BC, farmers had arrived in central Europe and made contact with the indigenous people, either in person or via traded goods. The farmers’ desire for land, for women, for furs and wild game fitted neatly with the Mesolithic people’s need for new items of prestige such as polished axes in other to pursue their own internal social competition. They began to trade across a frontier- farmers to the south in what is now Poland and Germany, hunter-gatherers to the north in Denmark and Sweden. But whereas the farming settlements flourished by such contact, it caused further social disruption and economic stress for the Mesolithic people. And it would eventually lead to complete cultural collapse.” (Mithen:2003:177)
“By 6000 BC the Mesolithic people of northern Europe were listening to fire-side stories from visitors about a new people in the east, people who lived in great wooden houses and controlled the game. Soon they found their own Mesolithic neighbours using polished stone axes, moulding cooking vessels from clay and herding cattle for themselves. When farming villages arrived within their own hunting lands, Mesolithic eyes peered from behind trees at the timber long houses, the tethered cattle and the sprouting crops with mixed emotions- fear, awe, dismay, disgust.
The older generation must have struggled to understand what they saw. Although they had felled trees and built dwellings themselves, the new farmsteads were quite beyond their comprehensions. The farmers appeared intent on controlling, dominating and transforming nature….
Mesolithic dwelling required no more than promoting and combining the existing suppleness of hazel, the stringiness of willow and the sheets of birch bark that grew ready-made; a timber-framed long house, on the other hand, required nature to be torn apart and the world constructed anew.
The older men and women are likely to have retreated from the forests of central Europe, relinquishing their hunting grounds and insisting that ever more time be spent celebrating the natural world. But they sang and danced against the tide of history: the younger generation had quite different ideas….
Those who continued with their Mesolithic culture in the northern forests had to adjust their traditional hunting-and-gathering patterns. Furs, game, honey, and other forest products had to be procured for trade; the wild resources were fought over and further depleted. And as increasing numbers of women joined the farmers, perceiving agriculture as providing greater economic security for themselves and their children, there were fewer to maintain the Mesolithic populations. Both land and women became sources of tension that often boiled over into the violence so vividly documented within the Mesolithic graves.
By 5000 BC a new type of farming culture had emerged from the fringes of the Hungarian plain: the Linerbandkeramik, which archaeologists thankfully abbreviate to the LBK. It spread with astonishing speed both east and west, into the Ukraine and into central Europe. While Lubbock was canoeing towards Skateholm, the LBK farmers were crossing and clearing the deciduous woodlands of Poland, Germany, the Low Countries and eastern France.
This was a quite different type of Neolithic to that which had appeared in Greece and spread northwards through the Balkans to reach the Hungarian plain.
As their LBK name implies, these farmers decorated their pottery with bands of narrow lines; they constructed timber long houses and relied on cattle rather than sheep and goats. Nevertheless, archaeologists have traditionally assumed that the LBK farmers were direct descendants of the original immigrants from western Asia and represented a new phase of their migration across Europe.… the new farmers travelled westwards at a remarkable rate, covering 25 kilometres a generation. Just like the original immigrant farmers of Southeast Europe, they filled up each new region of fertile soils with farmsteads and villages and then leap-frogged across less favourable soils to establish a new frontier. Such speed reflects more than the success of their lifestyle- it implies an ideology of colonisation, an attraction to ‘frontier life’, similar, some have suggested, to that of the Trekboers of South Africa and the pioneers of the American West.” (Mithen:2003:178-80)
“Lubbock remains with the pine-marten furs as they are traded from group to group into northern Germany. As he travels south, the Mesolithic people seem increasingly concerned with identity and territorial boundary: each group can be identified by their distinctive clothes and hairstyles, and by the manner in which they make their tools. Some have made their harpoons straight and others curved; some have made their stone axes with parallel sides while others produce axes with a flared cutting edge. Lubbock recalls the time when the Mesolithic had begun, the time of Star Carr- when a virtual identity in human culture had existed across the whole of northern Europe. The old Mesolithic order had become fractured and would be soon be gone….
Lubbock is at the frontier- that between the LBK farmers and the remaining indigenous hunter-gatherers of the forests. The clearing is a known meeting-place, but as yet quite unmarked by human structures. Within a few generations, the farmers will build houses and surround them by a ditch. Archaeologists will eventually know their settlement as Esbeck. Some will argue that the ditch was made for defence against the remaining hunter-gatherers who had turned hostile after their Mesolithic culture had almost entirely disappeared.” (Mithen:2003:186)
“When full-scale rice farming arrived in Japan at around 500 BC, the hunting-gathering-cultivating Jomon lifestyle was replaced by a rural agricultural economy that made use of iron tools and continued into modern times. Incoming people originating in China and Korea brought this new economy to Japan. It is from these people that almost all modern-day Japanese people are descended. Because rice was unable to grow in the colder environments of northern Honshu and Hokkaido the Jomon culture survived a little longer in the north of Japan. Today, the Ainu people who maintain a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle inhabit these regions. Many believe that the Ainu are not only the cultural inheritors of the Jomon way of life, but the biological descendants of the Jomon people themselves.” (Mithen:2003:380)
“The Hassuna period, approximately 6800-5600 BC, marks the turning point of Mesopotamian prehistory. It leaves behind the world of hunter-gatherers and small farming villages and looks forward to the expansion of towns and trade. …
By 5000 BC substantial towns are found throughout the whole of the Fertile Crescent, except in the extreme southwest where those of the Jordan valley had long been abandoned. In the lands surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates a new cultural unity had emerged, combining the Hassuna and Samarra cultures. Known as the Halaf period, this lasts for a whole millennium, supported by the same crops that had sustained prehistoric farmers since the days of Jericho and Maghzaliyah: wheat and barley, peas and lentils. But a key development had occurred: the use of artificial irrigation. It had been this which enabled people to fully exploit the rich alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia.
Although sheep and goats were pre-eminent at Sawwan, cattle were important, their significance reflected in cow figurines and pottery painted with a bull’s-head motif. As the addition of rich milk fats to human diets can increase the birth rate, cattle herding may have been a factor behind what appears to have been a population explosion.” (Mithen:2003:438-9)
What we see from the above quotes is that settlers began to over-populate every land of plenty that they came across and so the effect of settling caused overpopulation and the effect of this was the necessity to require more and more land. In other words, the idea of necessity had been effected. More people and more land meant that people in different circles ‘families’ or people one is familiar with as this originally meant, began to fight to gain new lands and keep old ones.
What we must ask therefore is, what was the story that replaced the ancient story of wakan and the universal nature of all of Nature.
Did we want this new story, or was it thrust on us, as a necessity due to the new experiences of these hungry, over-populated man-made deserts of previous-abundance?
We have seen that this event was a global one, and so we must we able to find this perspective told in myth too. How did the story of the hunter-gatherer change in order to become the settler story, that got ‘us’ to fight against ‘them’, as a way of thinking in terms of good and evil, right and wrong? And when new lands are gained by a family, how does the story intimate that the booty should be shared? Universally, individually, hierarchically? The story must reflect these behaviours. And what of God now, a God now slightly more distant from this intimate story, how does he look down upon us, across this space and time, that we have created? Let us look further at the scientific story, or evidence, as they call it, keeping these questions in our minds, and then see these ancient stories, to reconcile the two as showing the same evident ‘truth’, whilst the latter still contains ‘aletheia’ before this same ‘truth’ is framed.
02: Lets get the band back together – a limited-capital idea!
When a group of villagers come across an invader then the ‘them’ is quite obvious, but when the ‘them’ is others in the village i.e. ‘not me’, then it is not so easy to justify your loss over their gain, or your right over their lack of rights. It is also hard to get some-one else to work your land for you when they have their own land, and when a few generations have gone by, to justify why your land is still your land, when there is no more arable land left to farm within that territory and therefore the next generations land is ‘somewhere else’ or non-existent if they wish to stay.
What is needed is a story that will cohere a group of people within the village against another group of people within the village. In other words a story that will ‘Divide and Conquer’ in a self-worlded World of ‘poverty and over-population’, a world of ‘supply and demand’ not of ‘abundance and no satiety’ in a being-worlded World.
“Most important of all for the long-term evolution of the world economy were the changes in social organization that resulted from the establishment of settled agriculture. The previous communal social order was steadily replaced by a kin-ordered system that laid the basis for a new, stratified social structure. Kin groups emerged as a ‘natural’ way of assigning rights over resources, and organizing the production and storage of food, but they also generated new social institutions to deal with the ownership of property and the formal exchange of goods.
The increased volume and reliability of food supplies allowed much higher population densities and encouraged the proliferation of settled agricultural villages. Together with the new social institutions of kin-ordered societies, this, in turn, facilitated the development of non-agricultural crafts, such as pottery, weaving, jewellery and weaponry. Such specializations in their turn encouraged the beginnings of barter and trade between communities, sometimes over substantial distances.” (Knox et al:2003:121)
“Between these two types of unit, the one based on kinship and the other on common interest, there was a complex relationship. In illiterate societies few remember their ancestors five generations back, and to claim a common descent was a symbolic way of expressing a common interest, of giving it a strength it would not otherwise have. In some circumstances, however, there could be a conflict. A member of a kinship group called upon for help might not give it fully because it went against some other interest of personal relationship.
Beyond these more or less permanent minimal units there might be larger ones. All the villages of a district, or all the herding units of a grazing area, or even groups widely separated from each other, might think of themselves as belonging to a larger whole, a ‘fraction’ or ‘tribe’, which they would regard as differing from and standing in opposition to other similar groups. The existence and unity of the tribe were usually expressed in terms of descent from a common ancestor, but the precise way in which any fraction or family might be descended from the eponymous ancestor was not usually known, and the genealogies which were transmitted tended to be fictitious, and to be altered and manipulated from time to time in order to express changing relationships between the different units. Even if they were fictitious, however, they could acquire a force and strength by intermarriage within the group.
The tribe was first of all a name which existed in the minds of those who claimed to be linked with each other. It had a potential influence over their actions; for example, where there was a common danger from outside, or in times of large-scale migration. It could have a corporate spirit (‘asabiyya) which would lead its members to help each other in time of need. Those who shared a name shared also a belief in a hierarchy of honour. In the desert, the camel-breeding nomads regarded themselves as the most honourable, because their life was the freest and the least restrained by external authority.”(Hourani:1991:106-7)
“The power of such leaders and families varied across a wide spectrum. At one extreme stood leaders (shaykhs) of nomadic pastoral tribes, who had little effective power except that which was given them by their reputation in the public opinion of the group. Unless they could establish themselves in a town and become rulers of another kind they had no power of enforcement, only that of attraction, so that nomadic tribes could grow or diminish, depending on the success or failure of the leading family; followers might join or leave them, although this process might be concealed by the fabrication of genealogies, so that those who joined the group would appear as if they had always belonged to it.” (Hourani:1991:108)
“The family extended kinship groups often operate economic functions for their own benefit and such ties are a major basis for labour recruitment. Ascribed systems of social stratification focus primarily on those aspects of human experience which centre on kinship, gender, ethnicity and territorial locality. Life chances depend upon the status accorded by birth into a particular family or tribe. Under a simple form of economic organization, for example subsistence agriculture of household industry, there is little differentiation between economic roles and family roles. Pre-modern societies fuse social and political integration with kinship position, control of land, chieftainship or powerful culturally significant groups. Often peoples’ sense of self is bound up in the actualities of blood, race, language, locality, religion and tradition (Geertz 1967:168). According to one theorist, these deep-rooted sentiments stem from the feeling that, whatever may be the monetary economic advantages of the larger sphere, ultimate security, not necessarily dominated by economic forces, exists and persists within the village orbit:
‘Here there are always kinsmen and people’s of one’s own blood to whom the peasant may turn. Here is the plot of land enduring through generations. Here is the familiar world which, through lore and tradition, has nourished the peasant since childhood. Here within the village is an emotional form of security found elsewhere.’ (Fuller 1969: 116)
These primordial instincts can be powerful and resistant to change.
As Max Weber claimed, social action includes both ‘failure to act and passive acquiescence’ (Roth and Wittich 1968:22).
When industrialization occurs only in villages or when villages are built around paternalistic industrial enterprises ‘many ties of community and kinship can be maintained under industrial conditions’ (Smelser 1966:35). The difficulty with such communities is that political authority is coterminous with kinship relations and, therefore, can inhibit reform and development.” (Deegan:2009:10-11)
“There is a strong relationship between families and social capital. Families in the first instance constitute the most basic cooperative social unit, one in which mothers and fathers need to work together to create, socialize, and educate children. James Coleman, the sociologist who was most responsible for bringing the term social capital into broader use, defined it as “the set of resources that inhere in family relations and in community social organizations and that are useful for the cognitive or social development of a child.” Cooperation within families is facilitated by the fact that it is underpinned by biology: all animals favour kin and are willing to undertake large one-way transfers of resources to genetic relatives, in ways that vastly increase the chances of reciprocity and long-term cooperation within kin groups.
The propensity of family members to cooperate facilitates not just raising of children, but other sorts of social activities like running businesses. Even in today’s world of large, impersonal, bureaucratic corporations, small businesses, most of them run by families, account for as much as 20 percent of private sector employment in the American economy and are critical as incubators of new technologies and business practices.
On the other hand, excessive dependence on kinship ties can produce negative consequences for the broader society outside the family. Many cultures, from China to Southern Europe to Latin America, promote what is called “familism”, that is, the elevation of family and kinship ties above other sorts of social obligations. This produces a two-level morality, wherein the level of moral obligation to public authority of all sorts is weaker than that reserved for kin. In the case of a culture like that of China, familism is promoted by the prevailing ethical system, Confucianism. In this type of culture, there is a high degree of social capital inside families but a relative paucity of social capital outside kinship.” (Fukayama:1999:36-7)
“A popular saying in Brazil is that there is one morality for the family and another for the street.” (Fukayama:1999:241)
So, as communities started to gain, so people wanted to place themselves above, others. This initial mode of divide and conquer, and as we saw still continues to this day, is called ‘familism’ or ‘kin-groups’.
As no longer was the sacred blood of the spirit of God flowing through us all, through the trees and animals, clouds and stars in the ‘Great Brown River’ in the experience of these new beings-for-itself, so ‘their’ blood was renamed in its lingual meaning to that we know today in the term, ‘blood is thicker than water’. That is the water of the ‘Great Brown River’ that brings us life.
Family, then, is the first system that divides the whole peoples into those who have and those who do not, as soon as there is something to have due to the nature of a settlement, that is settling (therefore the requirement of the legal interpretation of this same word). And that this system, still holds sway over much of the organisation of peoples in the world today. Today, in the west we more often call familism- ‘nepotism’. It is also still strongly in our language, with most peoples surnames denoting the family trade or work that they as a kinship group undertook within the village.
As we shall see below, familism, whilst being a very strong form of social organisation up to a certain amount of peoples, becomes weakened by other greater stories, whereupon it begins to divide against itself. But before we look at these let us look more closely at just what the story of family provides the story-teller and its adherence.
If we remember the sacred and empowering feelings that invisibly cohered the Aborigines of Australia and the North-American Indians together, and Durkheims observation that it is society itself that creates this experience into the story of a ‘Greater Being’ or power as ‘wakan’. Then what shall we call the ‘force’ of this ‘greater being’ namely family? As we have seen the language of the word blood changes its meaning to actual blood that is now physically, not psychically, the ‘invisible force’ that runs through a select group of people. But for our purposes I would like to call it something else, a term that will enable us to see this invisible blood alongside another invisible blood that we will meet soon, due to its creation from this familial spirit and its settling way of life (Ham).
The term I would like to give this blood is that of ‘Social Capital’, as used by Fukayama above.
Capital comes from the Latin caput, meaning, ‘a head’ and in regards to the present context it therefore refers to the ‘head’ of the family, who by use of the story of familism uses these invisible bonds to get his ‘blood’ to work in his fields for him, or make pots for trade for him, etc, in order to create wealth, that is to say ‘financial’ Capital. Capital in this context, as money, comes from the Latin capitalis meaning ‘chief’, revealing the intimate connection. In other words, to witness the lingual change from social family capital to that which produced financial capital, we may see that the ‘head’ of the family in the village that amassed the most capital over all of the other families, became ‘capital’, ‘head’ of the village. Not due to his social capital but due to his capital.
But here-in lies a pertinent point. Capital is a thing, that is a piece of matter. Yes you can use your capital in order to borrow more capital, but you must have capital in order to do this. You must have some-thing that is of value. The repercussion of this is quite simply one of finity. That is to say the physical World is finite. There is only so much capital to be had, and therefore so much social capital, if this is the basis of your being The Capital, leader, of your family.
On the other hand, social capital is not a thing, it is an invisible experience that comes from the magical inner world. Yes, we are back to the magic horse (social capital) and the iron fish (capital). In other words I can love each of my family members as much as I want, no matter how many of them there are (infinitely), I can hate each of my enemies as much as I want, no matter how many of them there are (infinitely), I can be infinitely, envious, grateful, awe-full, powerful, happy, sad, ambivalent, etc, etcetera, with my social capital infinitely, but I cannot be so with my capital- my things, as they are finite.
As we have seen, the social capital of the hunter-gatherer, of the cave-man that we are following through the last 20,000 years up to the present and into the future, was one of social capital for all, and capital was to be laughed at, and its ‘possessor’ or ‘story-teller’ was to be killed. For the familist who relies on the self-interest of the individual in following the common interest of gain, capital is infinite whilst hunger for capital is infinite, and he must struggle to maintain the subjective infinite desires of his subjects, with the finite realities of objective Nature, which he turns to his will. For our cave-man social capital has infinity in its Nature, it is an infinite circle,- an openness- a being-in-Being. For the leader of these beings-for-itself, social capital therefore must either become the infinite resource that he can always call upon in a finite circle of resources, or the finite circle or resources, must become what he can always call upon in an infinite circle of social desires. From one perspective he can have infinite capital, from the other he can be only become poorer and poorer until he is usurped. a closedness that requires protection, i.e. a garment, to defend itself from those other people in their finite circles.
It is then resultant from standing in these finite circles, that the conditions of loss and gain, of us and them, of mine and an-others come into existence. Within the village, as we have seen, this was narrated by the story of family. Outside of the circle of the village, as we shall see throughout this book, it was called species identity, that is race, colour, creed, and later on nationality. For now I wish to bring your attention to exactly how the mindset of these people in circles, these pilgrims to the self, change as a consequent to their new ontological perspective, now that they are within a circle greater than themselves alone, that is greater than a single individual but lesser than the individual race of Adam, the great single individual- ‘humankind.
“All people in all continents at 20,000 BC were members of Homo sapiens, a single and recently evolved species of humankind. As such, they shared the same biological drives and the means to achieve them- a mix of co-operation and competition, sharing and selfishness, virtue and violence. All possessed a peculiar type of mind, one with an insatiable curiosity and new-found creativity. This mind- one quite different to that of any human ancestor- enabled people to colonise, to invent, to solve problems, and to create new religious beliefs and styles of art. Without it, there would have been no human history but merely a continuous cycle of the adaptation and readaptation to environmental change that had begun several million years ago when our genus first evolved. Instead, all of these common factors combined, engaging with each continent’s unique conditions and a succession of historical contingencies and events, to create a world that included farmers, towns, craftsmen and traders. Indeed, by 5000 BC there was very little left for later history to do; all the groundwork for the modern world had been completed. History had simply to unfold until it reached the present day.” (Mithen:2003:505-6)
What we must look at then in order to discover why settled man became so curious and creative is the situation and the subsequent perspective of a peoples who are now in a land of supply and demand, due to the lack of resources that the life style of settling produces by over-population and environmental degradation.
03: The great war of the electrified mice
This is a true story about a real scientist and some real mice.
Once upon a time a mouse was sitting in a cage. A scientist came along and decided to experiment on it in order to understand its reaction to stress.
What she did first of all was to electrify one half of the cage. To this experience of pain coming from its urgrund, the mouse got off its lazy arse, at great speed I might add, and, inspired by the pain, created the curiosity of seeing if all the cage was this painful to try and sit peacefully in, he strategically moved to the other side, using the technique of jumping. This being the most efficient method. Anyway, once the mouse had learnt this technique to alleviate its stress the scientist decided to electrify both sides of the cage to see what it would now do.
The mouse tried jumping from one side to the other until it realised that it had no strategy to escape the stress of the situation and so instead it went into a corner, curled up into a ball, and began to lose its fur. Ah, poor little mouse.
The scientist then put another mouse into the mix. Once again, she electrified half of the cage and the mice learnt to jump to the other half. Once again, she then electrified both sides. But, instead of finding that each mouse chose a corner each, huddled up in it and started losing its fur, they started to attack each other!
In other words, when an animal is stressed it does what it can to relieve the situation. Unfortunately, due to the lack of intelligence of the animal, the cause and effect, side of things, i.e. for the mouse; “Is it actually this other mouse causing the effect of electrifying the cage?”, wasn’t really thought out before it came to blows. Blows one might add, that would be totally fruitless in regard to solving the situation that the mice found themselves in, but were rational based upon the physical evidence. Based upon this reasoning however, and the constant pain accompanying it, the mouse saw a cause and effected a solution consequent to it. If it had said that it was God punishing him, then he would have been closer to the truth (the unconcealedness of the human-Being in the white coat) and if he had said that it was a force- wakan- running through the cage he would have been closer to the truth also, but that would have been unreasonable to the other mouse who believed only in experience and il poche’d their experience when it came to looking out of the cage and seeing a Being in a white coat. Food for thought perhaps.
Anyway these two mice now define an invisible circle ontologically called enemy, called other, and attacks it to end its suffering. The victorious mouse found that killing the other mouse could indeed end his suffering. How? By standing on top of the dead mouse corpse it reduced the amount of electricity going through its own body, it became insulated- that is to say closed off- from the pain, by the suffering of another of its own species. It is rumoured that the victorious mouse was an American mouse and the loser was a European mouse but that is another story.
In the same manner then, at the dawn of civilization, mankind finds that, not nature, but he himself, has created a cage, out of an insurance policy based on wild grains, that by becoming non-brittle, domesticate us. That is to say, we call non-brittle grains ‘domesticated’ over ‘wild’, yet in truth it is the grain that is now roaming the Earth freely, and we ‘ourselves’ that have become domesticated by it. As humans now tell an unquestioned story that we are above nature, and have our own separate nature consequently, we have told the story of the grain as domesticated by us, because it makes us feel more powerful in some invisible inner world way. So too do we now tell stories of the superiority of one’s own human-nature over another’s human-nature because it simply allows us to feel more powerful in some invisible inner world way, and this story allows us to experience others as inferior, and hence less valuable, and so our behaviour begins to reflect this belief. The word for this is belief system is ‘Justified’.
The Mouse then, has been electrified into seeing the world in terms of space and time in accordance with the scientists view of the world. No longer is the world a safe place, it is now only safe at a certain time in a certain place, and therefore, by necessity the mouse must not only perceive the outer world that way but also his inner world and this will change his behaviour. The inner world experience is now one of pleasure and pain, not abundance without any opposite.
In a world of pleasure and pain, (an animal world), the accompanying intimate feelings are those of hope and fear and when another animal enters that world it also enters that same space and time. When the second mouse arrives and the pain increases in space and time, then both mice attack any cause that they can see might effect an end to that pain. There solution is unreasonable and will not result in the required goal, but they continue to behave in such a manner. When a group of people cause their own pleasure and it results in pain over space and time and then another group of people is seen in this same world, then they both attack any cause that they can see might effect an end to that pain. There solution is unreasonable and will not result in the required goal, but they continue to behave in such a manner, unable to see that the ‘person in white coat pressing the button’ is their own way of perception, desires as justified beliefs.
Unable to comprehend this greater truth- the unconcealed nature of the being-for-itself, dons a new veiled garment imperceptibly over the two thousand years that it took to weave it between 5500 B.C. and 3500 B.C, he used his power, to escape the pain it was causing each individual in the only way he knows how. Divide and conquer, fight the other mice and stand upon their finite corpses as capital.
This new dance of ‘us’ and ‘them’, therefore becomes a ritual that solves the problem of desertification of the landscape and over population too, much as the magical words of the weather-man resulted in less weekend rain as well as the social capital of rush hour being turned into alimental communal travel
The by-product of this dance, or reason, is that the supply of capital goes up as demand for capital goes down, due to loads of people being killed, that were once alive. The dead cannot eat, they cannot fight, they cannot claim property rights over land they cannot work, but we can take the efforts of their work and reduce our pain by standing on their corpses- pleasure. Therefore the story of the victors must be true because they live to right it.
Meanwhile ‘concealed’ underneath this ‘truth’ and its subsequent justified behaviour lies the ontological electrified cage, the mechanism of the insurance policy, settling, which is still in place, still exists and hence, given time will result in over population of the cage, causing supply problems once again due to increased demand in the form of over-population, as natural population control is no longer enforced by the necessity of carrying only one baby at a time when living as a hunter-gatherer, not a settler, and so the Great War of the Electrified Mice will forever continue under the unreasonable reasons for ‘Divide and Conquer’.
As we saw above, for the first civilizations, this electrified cage became the root of their demise.
As we will see, for every civilization that came after it, it was the root of its demise. As we will see, for every civilization today, it is the root of its existence and its coming demise, unless it changes its story.
It may seem that linking an experiment with mice to human civilization is a bit of a weak one, and so I would like to add two addendums to strengthen my case.
The first is that every 5 seconds a mouse dies. Why? Because mice are so similar in their genetic make-up to man- 97% similar, that they are used by modern science in countless biological and psychological experiments, from new skin products to curing cancer, from maze solving to office efficiency. So the connection I am making with the above story is resultant from actual experiments of behavioural psychology itself, and a mouse was chosen because, primarily, of its similarity to ourselves genetically.
The second illustrative point, is, I am afraid, both true and horrendous. Imagine the Great War of the Electrified Mice, actually taking place with human-beings. Would you, if you put a load of humans in a cage and caused that cage to be pain causing, see the response of the mice where the people piled themselves ever higher upon the corpses of the others in order to escape the pain. Well in World War II this experiment was actually practiced for sociological reasons other than those we now speak of, at least in the minds of those conducting the experiment, but ontologically for the same reason as we now speak of.
It did so in the form of the concentration camps such as Auschwitz. In these camps soldiers who were being electrified by the lack of supply to their demand were convinced that the mice responsible were called Jews, and could be recognised by certain physical signs to denote their difference. They could also been seen to be holding a lot of the money that rationally caused the lack of supply to their demands of hunger (pain). These Jewish mice were then divided from the human species as a whole and conquered by being put to death.
Once all the German-Jewish mice, who were also families as well as Jews, were collected together, they were taken to concentration camps, where they were sub-divided once again, From German into German-Jews, into German-Jews who would be useful to the German (non-Jewish) state, i.e. the educated- group, and the strong- group, over the kinship-group. The German-Jews who were not useful to the German (non-Jews), because they were the weak or useless, i.e. the old, the women, the children, i.e. those not in demand, because they could not supply, were put into the ‘to-being-killed’- group
These weak and ‘unnecessary’ for my purpose were then taken to a shower room, an electrified cage, where Xyclon B, a poisonous and invisible gas (force), was pumped in and they were all killed.
What the German (but not Jewish) soldiers discovered when they opened the doors was not a collection of bodies all in the corners of the room, who had given up and let it happen. Instead they found a pyramid of bodies, where children had climbed over women, where the old had climbed over children, where all had fought each other to get to the top where the gas was less, so that they may live longer, despite rationally knowing that it would not, in the long term, help anyone including themselves.
In other words, it is necessity that is the mother of invention. It is pain that calls the human to invent, to be curious about those ‘things’ around him and how they can be inventively used towards his own ends. It was settling, over-population and desertification of the environment that created the pain, the cause of the effect. It was the greed of some Jews throughout history that caused the pogroms of all Jews throughout history. It was the gain of capital by the few by using the social capital of the many, that the social capital of the many became depleted (pogroms) by another group of capitalists ‘chiefs’, using the power of another group of social capital (Germans in this case, but throughout history pretty much every other circle). It was the closing of the circle that created the electrification, and it was the being-for-itself that created the circle, therefore the climbing on top of each other, ‘inventiveness’ of a story called ‘family’, and subsequently, as we shall see, of the invention of civilization that created a new language for its own new story. What the story and perspective of the German peoples was at this time will be shown later to be the root cause of The Holocaust, and it will also be shown to be our own perspective!
This new ontological outlook then we will call political philosophy, that is to say, once a human-being becomes a type of person different from another he becomes a part of a group of people who think the same way, and apart of a group of people who do not. When underpinned by necessity, i.e. when the urgrund of settling, being-for-itself, has created necessity in order to survive by desertification, the philosophy of each peoples (in Greek polis, from where we derive the word politics) becomes, ‘the philosophy you can afford’, in order to live (a necessity). We will see great atrocities done in the name of acquiring the power to have the ‘right’ to a political philosophy that can be afforded in a world now based upon survival. A world we have forced ourselves to live in for only the last 5,000 years. It is called the history of civilization.
04: Being-for-others
“As a temporal-spatial object in the world, as an essential structure of a temporal-spatial situation in the world, I offer myself to the Other’s appraisal. This also I apprehend by the pure exercise of the cogito. To be looked at is to apprehend oneself as the unknown object of unknowable appraisals- in particular, of value judgement. But at the same time that in shame or pride I recognize the justice of these appraisals, I do not cease to take them for what they are- a free surpassing of the given toward possibilities. A judgement is the transcendental act of a free being. Thus being-seen constitutes me as a defenceless being for a freedom which is not my freedom. It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as “slaves” in so far as we appear to the Other. But this slavery is not a historical result- capable of being surmounted- of a life in the abstract form of consciousness. I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the centre of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being. In so far as I am the object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification or even to know it, I am enslaved. By the same token in so far as I am the instrument of possibilities which are not my possibilities, whose pure presence beyond my being I can not even glimpse, and which deny my transcendence in order to constitute me as a means to ends of which I am ignorant- I am in danger. This danger is not an accident but the permanent structure of my being-for-others.” (Sartre:2003:291)
“In the first place, he is the being toward whom I do not turn my attention. He is the one who looks at me and at whom I am not yet looking, the one who delivers me to myself as unrevealed but without revealing himself, the one who is present to me as directing at me but never as the object of my direction; he is the concrete pole (though out of reach) of my flight, of the alienation of my possibles, and of the flow of the world toward another world which is the same world and yet lacks all communication with it. But he can not be distinct of them; he haunts this flow not as a real or categorical element but as a presence which is fixed and made part of the world if I attempt to “make-it-present” and which is never more present, more urgent than when I am not aware of it. For example if I am wholly engulfed in my shame, the Other is the immense, invisible presence which supports this shame and embraces it on every side; he is the supporting environment of my being-unrevealed. Let us see what it is which the Other manifests as unrevealable across my lived experience of the unrevealed.
First the Other’s look as the necessary condition of my objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity for me. The Other’s look touches me across the world and is not only a transformation of myself but a total metamorphosis of the world. I am looked-at in the world which is look-at. In particular the Other’s look, which is a look-looking and not a look-looked at, denies my distances from objects and unfolds its own distances. This look of the Other is given immediately as that by which distance comes to the world at the heart of a presence without distance. I withdraw; I am stripped of my distanceless presence to my world, and I am provided with a distance from the Other. There I am fifteen paces from the door, six yards from the window. But the Other comes searching for me so as to constitute me at a certain distance from him. As the Other constitutes me as at six yards from him, it is necessary that he be present to me without distance. Thus within the very experience of my distance from things and from the Other, I experience the distanceless presence of the Other to me.
Anyone may recognize in this abstract description that immediate and burning presence of the Other’s look which has so often filled him with shame. In other words, in so far as I experience myself as looked-at, there is realized for me a trans-mundane presence of the Other. The Other looks at me not as he is “in the midst of” my world but as he comes toward the world and toward me from all his transcendence; when he looks at me, he is separated from me by no distance, by no object of the world- whether real or ideal- by no body in the world, but the sole fact of his nature as Other. Thus the appearance of the Other’s look is not an appearance in the world– neither in “mine” nor in the “Other’s”- and the relation which unites me to the Other can not be a relation of exteriority inside the world. By the Other’s look I effect the concrete proof that there is a “beyond the world”. The Other is present to me without any intermediary as a transcendence which is not mine. But this presence is not reciprocal. All of the world’s density is necessary in order that I may myself be present to the Other. An omnipresent and inapprehensible transcendence, posited upon me without intermediary as I am my being-unrevealed, a transcendence separated from me by the infinity of being, as I am plunged by this look into the heart of a world complete with its distances and its instruments- such is the Other’s look when first I experience it as a look.
Furthermore by fixing my possibilities the Other reveals to me the impossibility of my being an object except for another freedom. I can not be an object for myself, for I am what I am; thrown back on its own resources, the reflective effort toward a dissociation results in failure; I am always reapprehended by myself. And when I naively assume that it is possible for me to be an objective being without being responsible for it, I thereby implicitly suppose the Other’s existence; for how could I be an object if not for a subject. Thus for me the Other is first the being for whom I am an object; that is, the being through whom I gain my objectness. …
At the same time I experience the Other’s infinite freedom.
It is for and by means of a freedom and only for and by means of it that my possibilities can be limited and fixed. A material obstacle can not fix my possibilities; it is only the occasion for my projecting myself toward other possibles and can not confer upon them an outside. To remain at home because it is raining and to remain at home because one has been forbidden to go out are by no means the same thing. In the first case I myself determine to stay inside in consideration of the consequences of my acts; I surpass the obstacle “rain” toward myself and I make an instrument of it. In the second case it is my very possibilities of going out of or staying inside which are presented to me as surpassed and fixed and which a freedom simultaneously foresees and prevents. It is not mere caprice which causes us often to do very naturally and without annoyance what would irritate us if another commanded it. This is because the order and the prohibition cause us to experience the Other’s freedom across our own slavery. Thus in the look the death of my possibilities causes me to experience the Other’s freedom. This death is realized only at the heart of that freedom; I am inaccessible to myself and yet myself, thrown, abandoned at the heart of the Other’s freedom….
Thus through the look I experience the Other concretely as a free, conscious subject who causes there to be a world by temporalizing himself toward his own possibilities. That subject’s presence without intermediary is the necessary condition of all thought which I would attempt to form concerning myself. The Other is that “myself” from which nothing separates me, absolutely nothing except his pure and total freedom; that is, that indetermination of himself which he has to be for and through himself.” (Sartre:2003:293-5)
“… the Other’s presence in his look-looking can not contribute to reinforce the world, for on the contrary it undoes the world from me when it is relative and when it is an escape toward the Other-as-object, reinforces objectivity. The escape of the world and of my self from me when it is absolute and when it is effected toward a freedom which is not mine, is a dissolution of my knowledge. The world disintegrates in order to be reintegrated over there as a world; but this disintegration is not given to me; I can not know it nor even think it. The presence to me of the Other-as-a-look is therefore neither a knowledge nor a projection of my being nor a form of unification nor a category. It is and I can not derive it from me.” (Sartre:2003:296)
“But these remarks can be generalized; it is not only Pierre, Rene, Lucien, who are absent or present in relation to me on the ground of original presence, for they are not alone in contributing to situate me; I am situated also as a European in relation to Asiatics, or to Negroes, as an old man in relation to the young, as a judge in relation to delinquents, as a bourgeois in relation to workers, etc. In short it is in relation to every living man that every human reality is present or absent on the ground of an original presence. This original presence can have meaning only as a being-looked-at or as a being-looking-at; that is, according to whether the Other is an object for me or whether I myself am an object-for-the-Other. Being-for-others is a constant fact of my human reality, and I grasp it with its factual necessity in every thought, however slight, which I form concerning myself. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I only succeed in changing the distances between me and the Other-as-object, only avail myself of paths toward the Other. To withdraw, to approach, to discover this particular Other-as-object is only to effect empirical variations on the fundamental theme of my being-for-others. The Other is present to me everywhere as the one through whom I become an object. Hence I can indeed be mistaken concerning the empirical presence of an Other-as-object whom I happen to encounter on my path.” (Sartre:2003:303)
“It is indubitable that at present I exist as an object for some German or other. But do I exist as a Frenchman, as a Parisian in the indifferentiation of these collectivities or in my capacity as this Parisian around whom the Parisian population and the French collectivity are suddenly organized to serve for him as ground? On this point I shall never obtain anything but bits of probable knowledge although they can be infinitely probable.
We are able to now to apprehend the nature of the look.
In every look there is the appearance of an Other-as-object as a concrete and probable presence in my perceptive field; on the occasion of certain attitudes of that Other I determine myself to apprehend—through the shame, anguish, etc.- my being-looked-at. This “being-looked-at” is presented as the pure probability that I am at present this concrete this– a probability which can derive its meaning and its very nature as probable, only from a fundamental certainty that the Other is always present to me inasmuch as I am always for-others. The experience of my condition as man, as an object for all other living men, as thrown in the arena beneath millions of looks and escaping myself millions of times- this experience I realize concretely on the occasion of the upsurge of an object into my universe if this object indicates to me that I am probably an object at present functioning as a differentiated this for a consciousness. The whole phenomenon, we call it the look. Each look makes us feel concretely-and in the indubitable certainty of the cogito– that we exist for all living men; that is, that there are (some) consciousness for whom I exist. We put “some” between parentheses to indicate that the Other-as-subject present to me in this look is not given in the form of plurality any more than as unity (save in its concrete relation to one particular Other-as-object). Plurality, in fact, belongs only to objects; it comes into being through the appearance of a world-making For-itself. The being-looked-at, by causing (some) subjects to arise for us, puts us in the presence of an unnumbered reality.
By contrast, as soon as I look at those who are looking at me, the other consciousnesses are isolated in multiplicity. On the other hand if I turn away from the look as the occasion of concrete proof and seek to think emptily of the infinite subject which is never an object, then I obtain a purely formal notion which refers to an infinite series of mystic experiences of the presence of the Other, the notion of God as the omnipresent, infinite subject for whom I exist. But these two objectivations, the concrete, enumerating objectivation and the unifying, abstract objectivation, both lacked proved reality- that is, the prenumerical presence of the Other.” (Sartre:2003:304-5)
“Therefore what I apprehend as real characteristics of the Other is a being-in-situation. In fact I organize him in the midst of the world in so far as he organizes the world toward himself; I apprehend him as the objective unity of instruments and of obstacles…
Thus the world announces the Other to me in his totality and as a totality. To be sure, the announcement remains ambiguous. But this is because I grasp the order of the world toward the Other as an undifferentiated totality on the ground of which certain explicit structures appear. If I could make explicit all the instrumental complexes as they are turned toward the Other (that is, if I could grasp not only the place which the hammer and the nails occupy in this complex of instrumentality but also the street, the city, the nation, etc.), I should have defined explicitly and totally the being of the Other as object.” (Sartre:2003:316)
“Does this mean that we must grant that the Behaviorists are right? Certainly not. For although the Behaviorists interpret man in terms of his situation, they have lost sight of his characteristic principle, which is transcendence-transcended. In fact if the Other is the object which can not be limited to himself, he is also the object which is understood only in terms of his end. Of course the hammer and the saw are not understood any differently. Both are apprehended through their function; that is, through their end. But this is exactly because they are already human. I can understand them only in so far as they refer me to an instrumental-organization in which the Other is the centre, only in so far as they form a part of a complex wholly transcended toward an end which I in turn transcend. If then we can compare the Other to a machine, this is because the machine as a human fact presents already the trace of a transcendence-transcended, just as the looms in a mill are explained only by the fabrics which they produce. The Behaviorist point of view must be reversed, and this reversal, moreover will leave the Other’s objectivity intact. For that which first of all is objective- what we shall call signification after the fashion of French and English psychologists, intention according to the Phenomenologists, transcendence with Heidegger, or form with the Gestalt School—this is the fact that the Other can be defined only by a total organization of the world and that he is the key to this organization. If therefore I return from the world to the Other in order to define him, this is not because the world would make me understand the Other but because the Other-as-object is nothing but a centre of autonomous and intra-mundane reference in my world.
Thus the objective fear which we can apprehend when we perceive the Other-as-object is not the ensemble of the physiological manifestations of disorder which we see or which we measure with sphygmograph or a stethoscope. Fear is a flight; it is a fainting. These phenomena themselves are not released to us as a pure series of movements but as transcendence-transcended: the flight or the fainting is not only the desperate running through the brush, nor that heavy fall on the stones of the road; it is the total upheaval of the instrumental-organization which had the other for its centre. This soldier who is fleeing formerly had the Other-as-enemy at the point of his gun, The distance from him to the enemy was measured by the trajectory of his bullet, and I too could apprehend and transcend that distance as a distance organized round the “soldier” as centre. But behold now he throws his gun in the ditch and is trying to save himself. Immediately the presence of the enemy surrounds him and presses in upon him; the enemy, who had been held at a distance by the trajectory of the bullets, leaps upon him at the very instant when the trajectory collapses; at the same time that land in the background, which he was defending and against which he was leaning as against a wall, suddenly opens fan-wise and becomes the foreground, the welcoming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge. All this I establish objectively, and it is precisely this which I apprehend as fear. Fear is nothing but a magical conduct tending by incantation to suppress the frightening objects which we are unable to keep at a distance. It is precisely through its results that we apprehend fear, for it is given to us a new type of internal haemorrhage in the world—the passage from the world to a type of magical existence.” (Sartre:2003:318-9)
“Nevertheless as the Other is thus given, he is given in what he is. Character is not different from facticity—that is, from original contingency. We apprehend the Other as free, and we have demonstrated above that freedom is an objective quality of the Other as the unconditioned power of modifying situations. This power is not to be distinguished from that which originally constitutes the Other and which is the power to make a situation exist in general. In fact, to be able to modify a situation is precisely to make a situation exist. The Other’s objective freedom is only transcendence-transcended; it is, as we have established, freedom-as-object…Although the Other’s anger appears to me always as a free-anger (which is evident by the very fact that I pass judgement on it) I can always transcend it—i.e., stir it up or calm it down; better yet it is by transcending it and only by transcending it that I apprehend it. Thus since the body is the facticity of the transcendence-transcended, it is always the body-which-points-beyond-itself; it is at once in space (it is the situation) and in time (it is freedom-as-object). The body-for-others is the magic object par excellence. Thus the Other’s body is always “a body-more-than-body” because the Other is given to me totally and without intermediary in the perpetual surpassing of its facticity. But this surpassing does not refer to me a subjectivity; it is the objective fact that the body—whether it be as organism, as character, or as tool—never appears to me without surroundings, and that the body must be determined in terms of these surroundings. The Other’s body must not be confused with his objectivity. The Other’s objectivity is his transcendence as transcended. The body is the facticity of this transcendence. But the Other’s corporeality and objectivity are strictly inseparable.” (Sartre:2003:374)
“I exist my body: this is its first dimension of being. My body is utilized and known by the Other: this is its second dimension. But in so far as I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object. Even there the question, as we have seen, is of my fundamental relation with the Other. I exist therefore for myself as known by the Other—in particular in my very facticity. I exist for myself as a body known by the Other. This is the third ontological dimension of my body….
With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object; that is, of my transcendence as transcended. A me-as-object is revealed to me as an unknowable being, as the flight into an Other which I am with full responsibility. But while I can not know nor even conceive of this “Me” in its reality, at least I am not without apprehending certain of its formal structures. In particular I feel myself touched by the Other in my factual existence; it is my being-there-for-others for which I am responsible.” (Sartre:2003:375)
“The experience of my alienation is made in and through affective structures such as, for example, shyness. To “feel oneself blushing”, to “feel oneself sweating,” etc., are inaccurate expressions which the shy person uses to describe his state; what he really means is that he is vividly and constantly conscious of his body not as it is for him but as it is for the Other. This constant uneasiness, which is the apprehension of my body’s alienation as irremediable, can determine psychoses such as ereutophobia (a pathological fear of blushing); these are nothing but the horrified metaphysical apprehension of the existence of my body for the Others. We often say that the shy man is “embarrassed by his own body.” Actually this expression is incorrect; I can not be embarrassed by my own body as I exist it. It is my body as it is for the Other which may embarrass me. Yet there too the expression is not a happy one, for I can be embarrassed only by a concrete thing which is present inside my universe and which hinders me as I try to use other tools. Here the embarrassment is more subtle, for what constrains me is absent. I never encounter my body-for-the-Other as an obstacle; on the contrary, it is because the body is never there, because it remains inapprehensible that it can be constraining. I seek to reach it, to master it, by making use of it as an instrument- since it is also given as an instrument in a world– in order to give it the form and the attitude which are appropriate. But it is on principle out of reach, and all the acts which I perform in order to appropriate it to myself escape me in turn and are fixed at a distance from me as my body-for-the-Other. Thus I forever act “blindly”, shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of my shooting. This is why the effort of the shy man after he has recognized the uselessness of these attempts will be to suppress his body-for-the-Other. When he longs “not to have a body anymore”, to be “invisible”, etc., it is not his body-for-himself which he wants to annihilate, but this apprehensible dimension of the body-alienated.
The explanation here is that we in fact attribute to the body-for-the-Other as much reality as to the body-for-us.
Better yet, the body-for-the-Other is the body-for-us, but inapprehensible and alienated. It appears to us then that the Other accomplishes for us a function of which we are incapable and which nevertheless in incumbent on us: to see ourselves as we are. Language by revealing to us abstractly the principle structures of our body-for-others (even though the existed body is ineffable) impels us to place our alleged mission wholly in the hands of the Other. We resign ourselves to seeing ourselves through the Other’s eyes; this means that we attempt to learn our being through the revelations of language. Thus there appears a whole system of verbal correspondence by which we cause our body to be designated for us as it is for the Other by utilizing these designations to denote our body as it is for us.” (Sartre:2003:376-7)
“Reflection, as we have seen, apprehends facticity and surpasses it toward an unreal whose esse is a pure percipi and which we have named psychic. This psychic is constituted. The conceptual pieces of knowledge which we acquire in our history and which all come from our commerce with the Other are going to produce a stratum constitutive of the psychic body. In short, so far as we suffer our body reflectively we constitute it as a quasi-object by means of an accessory reflection—thus observation comes from ourselves. But as soon as we know the body—i.e., as soon as we apprehend it in a purely cognitive intuition—we constitute it by that very intuition with the Other’s knowledge (i.e. as it would never be for us by itself). The knowable structures of our psychic body therefore simply indicate emptily its perpetual alienation. Instead of living this alienation we constitute it emptily by surpassing the lived facticity toward this quasi-object which is the psychic-body and by once again surpassing this quasi-object which is suffered toward characters of being which on principle can not be given to me and which are simply signified.” (Sartre:2003:378)
“…it would be possible to conceive of a system of visual organs such that it would allow one eye to see the other. But the seen eye would be seen as a thing, not as a being, of reference. Similarly the hand which I am grasping but as an apprehensible object. Thus the nature of our body for us entirely escapes us to the extent that we can take upon it the Other’s point of view. Moreover it must be noted that even if the arrangement of sense organs allows us to see the body as it appears to the Other, this appearance of the body as an instrumental-thing is very late in the child; it is in any case later than the consciousness (of) the body proper and of the world as a complex of instrumentality; it is later than the perception of the body of the Other. The child has known for a long time how to grasp, to draw toward himself, to push away, and to hold on to something before he first learns to pick up his hand and to look at it. Frequent observation has shown that the child of two months does not see his hand as his hand. He considers it, and if it is outside his visual field, he turns his head and looks around for his hand as if it did not depend on him to bring it back within his sight. It is by a series of psychological operations and of syntheses of identification and recognition that the child will succeed in establishing tables of reference between the body-existed and the body-seen. Moreover, it is necessary that the child begin the learning process with the Other’s body. Thus the perception of my body is placed chronologically after the perception of the body of the Other.” (Sartre:2003:382)
“Up to this point we have described only our fundamental relation with the Other. This relation has enabled us to make explicit our body’s three dimensions of being. And although the original bond with the Other arises before the relation between the body and the Other’s body, it seemed clear to us that the knowledge of the nature of the body was indispensable to any study of the particular relations of my being with that of the Other. These particular relations, in fact, on both sides presuppose facticity; that is, our existence as body in the midst of the world. Not that the body is the instrument and the cause of my relations with others. But the body constitutes their meaning and marks their limits. It is a body-in-situation that I apprehend the Other’s transcendence-transcended, and it is a body-in-situation that I experience myself in my alienation for the Other’s benefit.” (Sartre:2003:383)
“Such being the case, the upsurge of the Other touches the for-itself in its very heart. By the Other and for the Other the pursuing flight is fixed in in-itself. Already the in-itself was progressively recapturing it; already it was at once a radical negation of fact, an absolute positing of value and yet wholly paralyzed with facticity. But at least it was escaping by temporalization; at least it character as a totality detotalized conferred on it a perpetual “elsewhere”. Now it is this very totality which the Other makes appear before him and which he transcends toward his own “elsewhere”. It is this totality which is totalized. For the Other I am irremediably what I am, and my very freedom is a given characteristic of my being. Thus the in-self recaptures me at the threshold of the future and fixes me wholly in my very flight, which becomes a flight foreseen and contemplated, a given flight. But this fixed flight is never the flight which I am for myself; it is fixed outside. The objectivity of my flight I experience as an alienation which I can neither transcend nor know. Yet by the sole fact that I experience it and that it confers on my flight that in-itself which it flees, I must turn back toward it and assume attitudes with respect to it.
05: Such is the origin of my concrete relations with the Other
They are wholly governed by my attitudes with respect to the object which I am for the Other. And as the Other’s existence reveals to me the being which I am without my being able either to appropriate that being or even to conceive it, this existence will motivate two opposed attitudes: First—The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am….That is the original fact. But this proof of the Other is in itself an attitude toward the Other; that is, I can not be in the presence of the Other without being that “in-the-presence” in the form of having to be it. Thus again we are describing the for-itself’s structure of being although the Other’s presence in the world is an absolute and self-evident fact, but a contingent fact—that is, a fact impossible to deduce from the ontological structures of the for-itself.
These two attempts which I am are opposed to one another. Each attempt is the death of the other; that is, the failure of the one motivates the adoption of the other. Thus there is no dialectic for my relations toward the Other but rather a circle—although each attempt is enriched by the failure of the other… Thus we can never get outside the circle.” (Sartre:2003:384-6)
“Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations. The following descriptions of concrete behaviour must therefore be envisaged within the perspective of conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.
If we start with the first revelation of the Other as a look, we must recognize that we experience our inapprehensible being-for-others in the form of a possession. I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am. He makes me be and thereby he possesses me, and this possession is nothing other than the consciousness of possessing me. I in the recognition of my object-state have proof that he has this consciousness. By virtue of consciousness the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes “there to be” a being which is my being. Thus I have a comprehension of this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being-for-others, but I am not the foundation of it. It appears to me therefore in the form of a contingent given for which I am nevertheless responsible; the Other founds my being in so far as this being is in the form of the “there is.” But he is not responsible for my being although he founds it in complete freedom—in and by means of his free transcendence. Thus to the extent that I am revealed to myself as responsible for my being, I lay claim to this being which I am; that is, I wish to recover it, or, more exactly, I am the project of the recovery of my being…But this conceivable only if I assimilate the Other’s freedom. Thus my project of recovering myself is fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other.
Nevertheless this project must leave the Other’s nature intact. Two consequences result: (1) I do not thereby cease to assert the Other—that is, to deny concerning myself that I am the Other….(2) The Other whom I wish to assimilate is by no means the Other-as-object. Or, if you prefer, my project of incorporating the Other in no way corresponds to a recapturing of my for-itself as myself and to a surpassing of the Other’s transcendence toward my own possibilities. For me it is not a question of obliterating my object-state by making an object of the Other, which would amount to releasing myself from my being-for-others. Quite the contrary, I want to assimilate the Other as the Other-looking-at-me, and this project of assimilation includes an augmented recognition of my being-looked-at. In short, in order to maintain before me the Other’s freedom which is looking at me, I identify myself totally with my-being-looked-at. And since my being-as-object is the only possible relation between me and the Other, it is this being-as-object which alone can serve me as an instrument to effect my assimilation of the other freedom.
Thus as a reaction to the failure of the third ekstasis, the for-itself wishes to be identified with the Other’s freedom as founding its own being-in-itself. To be other to oneself—the ideal always aimed at concretely in the form of being this Other to oneself—is the primary value of my relations with the Other. This means that my being-for-others is haunted by the indication of an absolute-being which would be itself as other and other as itself and which by freely giving to itself its being-itself as other and its being-other as itself, would be the very being on the ontological proof—that is, God. This ideal can not be realized without my surmounting the original contingency of my relations to the Other; that is, by overcoming the fact that there is no relation of internal negativity between the negation by which the Other is made other than I and the negation by which I am made other than the Other. We have seen that this contingency is insurmountable; it is the fact of my relations with the Other, just as my body is the fact of my being-in-the-world. …
This unrealizable ideal which haunts my project of myself in the presence of the Other is not to be identified with love in so far as love is an enterprise; i.e., an organic ensemble of projects toward my own possibilities. But it is the ideal of love, its motivation and its end, its unique value. Love as the primitive relation to the Other is the ensemble of the projects by which I aim at realizing this value.” (Sartre:2003:386-88)
“The notion of “ownership”, by which love is so often explained, is not actually primary. Why should I want to appropriate the Other if it were not precisely that the Other makes me be? But this implies precisely a certain mode of appropriation; it is the Other’s freedom as such that we want to get hold of. Not because of a desire for power. The tyrant scorns love, he is content with fear. If he seeks to win the love of his subjects, it is for political reasons; and if he finds a more economical way to enslave them, he adopts it immediately. On the other hand, the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved…The total enslavement of the beloved kills the love of the lover. The end is surpassed; if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.
On the other hand, the lover can not be satisfied with that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement. Who would be content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath? Who would be satisfied with the words, “I love you because I have freely engaged myself to love you and because I do not wish to go back on my word.” Thus the lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by a pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He wishes that the Other’s freedom should determine itself to become love—and this not only at the beginning of the affair but at each instant—and at the same time he wants his freedom to be captured by itself, to turn back upon itself, as in madness, as in a dream, so as to will its own capacity.
This captivity must be a resignation that is both free and yet chained in our hands. In love it is not a determinism of the passions which we desire in the Other nor a freedom beyond reach; it is a freedom which plays the role of a determinism of the passions and which is caught in its own role. For himself the lover does not demand that he be the cause of this radical modification of freedom but that he be the unique and privileged occasion of it. In fact he could not want to be the cause of it without immediately submerging the beloved in the midst of the world as a tool which can be transcended. That is not the essence of love. On the contrary, in Love the Lover wants to be “ the whole World” for the beloved.
This means that he puts himself on the side of the world; he is the one who assumes and symbolizes the world; he is a this which includes all other thises. He is and consents to be an object. But on the other hand, he wants to be the object in which the Other’s freedom consents to lose itself, the object in which the Other consents to find his being and his raison d’être as his second facticity—the object-limit of transcendence, that toward which the Other’s transcendence transcends all other objects but which it can in no way transcend. And everywhere he desires the circle of the Other’s freedom; that is, at each instant as the Other’s freedom accepts this limit to his transcendence, this acceptance is already present as the motivation of the acceptance considered. It is in the capacity of an end already chosen that the lover wishes to be chosen as an end. This allows us to grasp what basically the lover demands of the beloved; he does not want to act on the Other’s freedom but to exist a priori as the objective limit of this freedom; that is, to be given at one stroke along with it and its very upsurge as the limit which the freedom must accept in order to be free.
By this very fact, what he demands is a liming, a gluing down of the Other’s freedom by itself; this limit of structure is in fact a given, and the very appearance of the given as the limit of freedom means that the freedom makes itself exist within the given by being its own prohibition against surpassing it. This prohibition is envisaged by the lover simultaneously as something lived—that is, something suffered (in a word, as a facticity) and as something freely consented to. It must be freely consented to since it must be effected only with the upsurge of a freedom which chooses itself as freedom. But it must be only what is lived since it must be an impossibility always present, a facticity which surges back to the heart of the Other’s freedom. This is expressed psychologically by the demand that the free decision to love me, which the beloved formerly has taken, must slip in as a magically determining motivation within his present free engagement.
Now we can grasp the meaning of this demand: the facticity which is to be a factual limit for the Other in my demand to be loved and which is to result in being his own facticity—this is my facticity. It is in so far as I am the object which the Other makes come into being that I must be the inherent limit to his very transcendence. Thus the Other by his upsurge into being makes me be as unsurpassable and absolute, not as a nihilating For-itself but as a being-for-others-in-the-midst-of-the-world. Thus to want to be loved is to infect the Other with one’s own facticity; it is to wish to compel him to recreate you perpetually as the condition of a freedom which submits itself and which is engaged; it is to wish both that freedom found fact and that fact have pre-eminence over freedom. If this end could be attained, it would result in the first place in my being secure within the Other’s consciousness. First because the motive of my uneasiness and my shame is the fact that I apprehend and experience myself in my being-for-others as that which can always be surpassed towards something else, that which is the pure object of a value judgement, a pure means, a pure tool. My uneasiness stems from the fact that I assume necessarily and freely that being which another makes me be in an absolute freedom. “God knows what I am for him! God knows what he thinks of me!” This means “God knows what he makes me be.” I am haunted by this being which I fear to encounter someday at the turn of a path, this being which is to strange to me and which is yet my being and which I know that I shall never encounter in spite of all my efforts to do so. But if the Other loves me than I become unsurpassable, which means that I must be the absolute end. In this sense I am saved from instrumentality.
My existence in the midst of the world becomes the exact correlate of my transcendence-for-myself since the independence is absolutely safeguarded. The object which the Other must make me be is an object-transcendence, an absolute centre of as pure means. At the same time, as the absolute limit of freedom—i.e., of the absolute source of all values—I am protected against any eventual devalorization. I am the absolute value. To the extent that I assume my being-for-others, I assume myself as value. Thus to want to be loved is to want to be placed beyond the whole system of values posited by the Other and to be the condition of all valorization and the objective foundation of all values. This demand is the usual theme of lovers’ conversations, whether as in La Porte Etriote, the woman who wants to be loved identifies herself with an ascetic morality of self-surpassing and wishes to embody the ideal limit of this surpassing—or as more usually happens, the lover demands that the beloved in his acts should sacrifice traditional morality for him and is anxious to know whether the beloved would betray his friends for him, “would steal for him”, “would kill for him”, etc.
From this point of view, my being must escape the look of the beloved, or rather that it must be the object of a look with another structure. I must no longer be seen on the ground of the world as a “this” among other “thises”, but the world must be revealed in terms of me. In fact to the extent that the upsurge of freedom makes a world exist, I must be, as the limiting-condition of this upsurge, the very condition of the upsurge of a world. I must be the one whose function is to make trees and water exist, to make cities and fields and other men exist, in order to give them later to the Other who arranges them into a world, just as the mother in matrilineal communities receives titles and the family name not to keep them herself but to transfer them immediately to her children.
In one sense if I am to be loved, I am the object through whose procuration the world will exist for the Other; in another sense I am the world. Instead of being a “this” detaching itself on the background-world. I am the object-as-ground on which the world detaches itself. Thus I am reassured; the Other’s look no longer paralyzes me with finitude. It no longer fixes my being in what I am. I can no longer be looked at as ugly, as small, as cowardly, since these characteristics necessarily represent a factual limitation of my being and an apprehension of my finitude as finitude.
To be sure, my possibles remained transcended possibilities, dead-possibilities; but I possess all possibles. I am all the dead-possibilites in the world; hence I cease to be the being who is understood from the standpoint of other beings or of its acts. In the loving intuition which I demand, I am to be given as an absolute totality in terms of which all its peculiar acts and all beings are to be understood. One could say, slightly modifying a famous pronouncement of the Stoics, that “the beloved can fail in three ways.” The ideal of the sage and the ideal of the man who wants to be loved actually coincide in this that both want to be an object-as-totality accessible to a global intuition which will apprehend the beloved’s or the sage’s actions in the world as partial structures which are interpreted in terms of the totality. Just as wisdom is proposed as a state to be attained by an absolute metamorphosis, so the Other’s freedom must be absolutely metamorphosed in order to allow me to attain the state of being loved.
Up to this point our description would fall into line with Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave relation. What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover wants to be for the beloved. But the analogy stops here, for with Hegel the master demands the Slave’s freedom only laterally and, so to speak, implicitly, while the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost. In this sense if I am to be loved by the Other, this means that I am to be freely chosen as beloved. As we know, in the current terminology of love, the beloved is often called the chosen one. But this choice must not be relative and contingent. The lover is irritated and feels himself cheapened when he thinks that the beloved has chosen from among others. “Then if I had not come into a certain city, if I had not visited the home of so and so, you would never have known me, you wouldn’t have loved me?” This thought grieves the lover; his love becomes one love among others and is limited by the beloved’s facticity and by his own facticity as well as by the contingency of encounters. It becomes love in the world, an object which presupposes the world and which in turn can exist for others.
What he is demanding he expresses by the awkward and vitiated phrases of “fatalism”. He says, “We were made for each other,” or again he uses the expression “soul mate”. But we must translate all this. The lover knows very well that “being made for each other” refers to an original choice. This choice can be God’s since he is the being who is absolute choice, but God here represents only the farthest possible limit of the demand for an absolute. Actually what the lover demands is that the beloved should make of him an absolute choice. This means that the beloved’s being-in-the-world must be a being-as-loving. The upsurge of the beloved must be the beloved’s free choice of the lover. And since the Other is the foundation of my being-as-object, I demand of him that the free upsurge of his being should have his choice of me as his unique and absolute end; that is, that he should choose to be for the sake of founding my object-state and my facticity.
Thus my facticity is saved.
It is no longer this unthinkable and insurmountable given which I am fleeing; it is that for which the Other freely makes himself exist; it is an end which he has given to himself. I have infected him with my facticity, but as it is in the form of freedom that he has been infected with it, he refers it back to me as a facticity taken up and consented to. He is the foundation of it in order that it may be his end. By means of this love I then have a different apprehension of my alienation and of my own facticity. My facticity—as for others—is no longer a fact but a right. My existence is because it is required. That existence, in so far as I assume it, becomes pure generosity. I am because I give myself away…. Whereas before being loved we were uneasy about that unjustified, unjustifiable protuberance which was our existence, whereas we felt ourselves “de trop”, we now feel that our existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom which at the same time our existence conditions and which we ourselves will with out freedom. This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy: we feel that our existence is justified.
By the same token if the beloved can love us, he is wholly ready to be assimilated by our freedom; for this being-loved which we desire is already the ontological proof applied to our being-for-others. Our objective essence implies the existence of the Other, and conversely it is the Other’s freedom which founds our essence. If we could manage to interiorize the whole system, we should be our own foundation.” (Sartre:2003:389-93)
“Love thus exacted from the other could not ask for anything; it is a pure engagement without reciprocity. Yet this love can not exist except in the form of a demand on the part of the lover.
The lover is held captive in a wholly different way. He is the captive of his very demand since love is the demand to be loved; he is a freedom which wills itself a body and which demands an outside, hence a freedom which imitates the flight toward the Other, a freedom which qua freedom lays claim to its alienation. The lover’s freedom, in his very effort to make himself be loved as an object by the Other, is alienated by slipping into the body-for-others; that is, it is brought into existence with a dimension of flight toward the Other. It is the perpetual refusal to posit itself as pure selfness, for this affirmation of self as itself would involve the collapse of the Other as a look and the upsurge of the Other-as-object—hence a state of affairs in which the very possibility of being loved disappears since the Other is reduced to the dimension of objectivity. This refusal therefore constitutes freedom as dependent on the Other; and the Other as subjectivity becomes indeed an unsurpassable limit of the freedom of the for-itself, the goal and supreme end of the for-itself since the Other holds the key to its being. Here in fact we encounter the true ideal of love’s enterprise: alienated freedom. But it is the one who wants to be loved who by the mere fact of wanting someone to love him alienates his freedom.” (Sartre:2003:397)
What we learn above is that being-for-Others is a fact of existence, by the very existence of our bodies, and the perspective of being-for-itself. The lover just as much as the slave-owner experiences your body as an object separate from his own. It is your urgrund and not his, because two beings-for-itself have both chosen themselves firstly. Through this perspective we see ourselves, also. I am loved by him- therefore I am. But also I am loved by him and therefore he is my lover as object. He is not, to me, my accountant, as he is to an-other as object in the world. When we see couples that wilfully wear matching clothes we are seeing a couple who are trying to become one ontological being in two-bodies-as-Others, to remove the empirical distance and difference that they really are. They wish to create one-being by destroying two-beings in order to possess each-other equally and become their own singular urgrund- Aah! Or Aargh!, depending on how you ‘look’ at these two objects who are trying to become in-itself-for-itself. That is to say their own garment.
In this regard then, being-for-Others means to be given a value (an amount of valour), to be judged in regards to your use as an instrument, as an object, in the Others world. It is in this judgemental looking up and down in order to value ones-self to an-others, that we identify the freedom of the Other. For as he looks at me he is free to value me and hence to value the world accordingly. For example, if I am ugly, that is only in comparison to the Others experienced World, i.e. how many hotties he’s seen and how many uglies he’s seen, and where my appearance exists, within that experience. It is not the truth but his truth that he weighs, and in this regard he is free, I am not. In like manner I am free to judge him as ugly or not, and he is not.
It is by this judgement also that we in fact gain a third way of knowing ourselves, by knowing our value. Indeed today many people go to the gym and diet in order to ‘fit in’ to the global worlding image that the media as the Other represents. When the required image is possessed, then the owner of that body states, not ‘I fit in’, but ‘I am fit’, ‘I am fit therefore I am’, this is the ‘value’ of my existence as appropriated by the Other (the media in this case), denoting their ontological perspective.
It is when someone judges us as something that we are not that we become most upset (an insult) or most illusioned (praise), and when someone judges us as something not worth noticing (ignored) that we become most lost, isolated, unfounded, as we can not anchor ourselves to their being and possess them by our existence, as they possess us in their existence but non-look. In other words we are not valued in the world of the Other, and hence we are valueless, worthless.
In relation to the family therefore we see each individual become a being-for-Others by the fact of their existence within the story (the circle) of family. A man may become as Object, a dad, brother, son, uncle, a black sheep, etc, etcetera. This story therefore represents the ontological relationships and ties that each person within that circle will know themselves by, and be shaped by, and vice versa.
This valuation, as we shall see, is so valuable to the being-for-itself that for many it becomes their raison d’être, their reason to live, their purpose. To be valued within their circle, with themselves as the centre. It becomes, by embracing the Other as a value basis of judgement, their new way of enacting the desire that replaces the lack, that causes the trouble of spirit, within the Great Spirit, to trouble the waters of the Great Brown River. Others on the other hand pretend that they don’t care about the Look of others and hence see themselves as free, “Tune in and drop out, man, freedom and flower power and love’, (an unassailable and invisible power for The Other to compete with) or more aggressively, “Hey Jonny, what you rebelling against?”, “What ya’ got?”. In this reality, the World has become their worlding and the Others are those that do not accept their world. As long as their not drafted to Vietnam by these Others, and are provided with capital in order to afford this philosophy by these same Others (‘The Man’ separated from the Great River of Love that they are pretending to be-in, to dwell in) then these beings-for-itself take the money and run towards the flight of being-in-itself-for-itself, and not being-in-Being, because they are living within a lesser circle (America and global economics) in reality, whilst Others are suffering.
“But granted that desire is a consciousness which makes itself body in order to appropriate the Other’s body apprehended as an organic totality in situation with consciousness on the horizon—what then is the meaning of to do so—and what does it expect from the object of its desire? The answer is easy if we realize that in desire I make myself flesh in the presence of the Other in order to appropriate the Other’s flesh. This means that it is not merely a question of my grasping the Other’s shoulders or thighs or of my drawing a body over against me; it is necessary as well for me to apprehend them with this particular instrument which is the body as it produces a clogging of consciousness. In this sense when I grasp these shoulders, it can be said not only that my body is a means for touching the shoulders but that the Other’s shoulders are a means for my discovering my body as the fascinating revelation of facticity—that is, as flesh. Thus desire is the desire to appropriate a body as this appropriation reveals to me my body as flesh. But this body which I wish to appropriate, I wish to appropriate as flesh. Now at first the Other’s body is not flesh for me; it appears as a synthetic form in action. As we have seen, we can not perceive the Other’s body as pure flesh; that is, in the form of an isolated object maintaining external relations with other thises. The Other’s body is originally a body in situation; flesh on the contrary, appears as the pure contingency of presence. Ordinarily it is hidden by cosmetics, clothing, etc.; in particular it is hidden by movements. Nothing is less “in the flesh” than a dancer even though she is nude. Desire is an attempt to strip the body of its movements as of its clothing and to make it exist as pure flesh; it is an attempt to incarnate the Other’s body.
It is in this sense that the caress is an appropriation of the Other’s body.
It is evident that if caresses were only a stroking or brushing of the surface, there could be no relation between them and the powerful desire which they claim to fulfil; they would remain on the surface like looks and could not appropriate the Other for me.”…The caress causes the Other to be born as flesh for me and for herself… the caress reveals the flesh by stripping the body of its action, by cutting it off from the possibilities which surround it; the caress is designed to uncover the web of inertia beneath the action—i.e., the pure “being-there”—which sustains it…The caresss is designed to cause the Other’s body to be born, through pleasure, for the Other—and for myself…Thus in desire there is an attempt at the incarnation of consciousness (this is what we called earlier the clogging of consciousness, a troubled consciousness, etc.” (Sartre:2003:410-13)
“The same is true of desire as of emotion. We have pointed elsewhere that emotion is not the apprehension of an exciting object in an unchanged world; rather since it corresponds to a global modification of consciousness and of its relations to the world, emotion expresses itself by means of a radical alteration of the world… Correlatively the world must come into being for the For-itself in a new way. There is a world of desire. If my body is no longer felt as the instrument which can not be utilized by any instrument—i.e. as the synthetic organization of my acts in the world—if it is lived as flesh, then it is as a reference to my flesh that I apprehend the objects in the world. This means that I make myself passive in relation to them and that they are revealed to me from the point of view of this passivity, in it and through it (for passivity is the body, and the body does not cease to be a point of view). Objects then become the transcendent ensemble which reveals my incarnation to me. A contact with them is a caress; that is, my perception is not the utilization of the object and the surpassing of the present in view of an end, but to perceive an object when I am in the desiring attitude is to caress myself with it. Thus I am sensitive not so much to the form of the object and to its instrumentality, as to its matter (gritty, smooth, tepid, greasy, rough, etc). In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects….From this point of view desire is not only the clogging of a consciousness by its facticity; it is correlatively the ensnarement of a body by the world. The world is made ensnaring; consciousness is engulfed in a body which is engulfed in the world. Thus the ideal which is proposed here is being-in-the-midst-of-the-world; the For-itself attempts to realize a being-in-the-midst-of-the-world as the ultimate project of its being-in-the-world; that is why sensual pleasure is so often linked with death—which is also a metamorphosis or “being-in-the-midst-of-the-world.”…
I desire to be revealed as flesh by means of and for another flesh. I try to cast a spell over the Other and make him appear; and the world of desire indicates by a sort of prepared space the Other whom I am calling. Thus desire is by no means a physiological accident, an itching of our flesh which may fortuitously direct us on the Other’s flesh. Quite the contrary, in order for my flesh to exist and for the Other’s flesh to exist, consciousness must necessarily be preliminarily shaped in the mould of desire. This desire is a primitive mode of our relations with the Other which constitutes the Other as desirable flesh on the ground of a world of desire….
06: Desire is a conduct of enchantment
Since I can grasp the Other only in his objective facticity, the problem is to ensure his freedom within his facticity. It is necessary that his freedom be “caught” in it as the cream is caught up by a person skimming milk. So the Other’s For-itself must come to play on the surface of his body, and be extended all through his body; and by touching this body I should finally touch the Other’s free subjectivity. This is the true meaning of the word possession. It is certain that I want to possess the Other’s body, but I want to possess it in so far as it is itself a “possessed”; that is, in so far as the Other’s consciousness is identified with his body. Such is the impossible ideal of desire: to possess the Other’s transcendence as pure transcendence and at the same time as body, to reduce the Other to his simple facticity because he is then in the midst of my world but to bring it about that this facticity is a perpetual appresentation of his nihilating transcendence.” (Sartre:2003:413-6)
“Desire is a lived project which does not suppose any preliminary deliberation but which includes within itself its meaning and its interpretation. As soon as I throw myself toward the Other’s facticity, as soon as I wish to push aside his acts and his functions so as to touch him in his flesh, I incarnate myself, for I can neither wish nor even conceive of the incarnation of the Other except in and by means of my own incarnation….
But my incarnation is not only the preliminary condition of the appearance of the Other as flesh to my eyes. My goal is to cause him to be incarnated as flesh in his own eyes. It is necessary that I drag him onto the level of pure facticity; he must be reduced for himself to being only flesh. Thus I shall be reassured as to the permanent possibilities of a transcendence which can at any instant transcend me on all sides. This transcendence will be no more than this; it will remain inclosed within the limits of an object; in addition and because of this very fact, I shall be able to touch it, feel it, possess it. Thus the other meaning of my incarnation—that is, of my troubled disturbance—is that it is a magical language. I make myself flesh so as to fascinate the Other by my nakedness and to provoke in her the desire for my flesh—exactly because this desire will be nothing else in the Other but an incarnation similar to mine.
Thus desire is an invitation to desire. It is my flesh alone which knows how to find the road to the Other’s flesh, and I lay my flesh next to her flesh so as to awaken her to the meaning of flesh. In the caress when I slowly lay my inert hand against the Other’s flank, I am making that flank feel my flesh, and this can be achieved only if it renders itself inert. The shiver of pleasure which it feels is precisely the awakening of its consciousness as flesh. If I extend my hand, remove it, or clasp it, then it becomes again body in action; but by the same stroke I make my hand disappear as flesh….this is to give up for oneself being the one who establishes references and unfolds distances; it is to be made pure mucous membrane. At this moment the communion of desire is realized; each consciousness by incarnating itself has realized the incarnation of the other; each one’s disturbance has caused disturbance to be born in the Other and is thereby so much enriched. By each caress I experience my own flesh and the Other’s flesh through my flesh, and I am conscious that this flesh which I feel and appropriate through my flesh is flesh-realized-by-the-Other…This is why also the true caress is the contact of two bodies in their mostly fleshy parts, the contact of stomachs and breasts; the caressing hand is too clever, too much like a perfected instrument. But the full pressing together of the flesh of two people against one another is the true goal of desire.” (Sartre:2003:417-8)
“Pleasure in fact—like too keen a pain—motivates the appearance of reflective consciousness which is “attention to pleasure.”
But pleasure is the death and the failure of desire.
It is the death of desire because it is not only its fulfilment but its limit and its end. This, moreover is only an organic contingency; it happens that the incarnation is manifested by erection and that the erection ceases with ejaculation. But in addition pleasure closes the sluice to desire because it motivates the appearance of a reflective consciousness of pleasure, whose object becomes a reflective enjoyment; that is, it is attention to the incarnation of the For-itself which is reflected-on and by the same token it is forgetful of the Other’s incarnation….This is because consciousness by incarnating itself loses sight of the Other’s incarnation, and its own incarnation absorbs it to the point of becoming the ultimate goal. In this case the pleasure of caressing is transformed into the pleasure of being caressed; what the For-itself demands is to feel within it its own body expanding to the point of nausea. Immediately there is a rupture of contact and desire misses its goal. It happens very often that this failure of desire motivates a passage to masochism; that is, consciousness apprehending itself in its facticity demands to be apprehended and transcended as body-for-the-Other by means of the Other’s consciousness. In this case the Other-as-object collapses, the Other-as-look appears, and my consciousness is a consciousness swooning in its flesh beneath the Other’s look.
Yet conversely desire stands at the origin of its own failure inasmuch as it is a desire of taking and of appropriating. It is not enough merely that troubled disturbance should effect the Other’s incarnation; desire is the desire to appropriate this incarnated consciousness. Therefore desire is naturally continued not by caresses but by acts of taking and of penetration. The caress has for its goal only to impregnate the Other’s body with consciousness and freedom. Now it is necessary to take this saturated body, to seize it, to enter into it. But by the very fact that I now attempt to seize the Other’s body, to pull it toward me, to grab hold of it, to bite it, my own body ceases to be flesh and becomes again the synthetic instrument which I am. And by the same token the Other ceases to be an incarnation; she becomes once more an instrument in the midst of the world which I apprehend in terms of its situation.” (Sartre:2003:419-20)
This is why some say, call out my name, during sex, and some say, call me dirty names. Nominating their own role in this being-for-the-other, as an instrument, and as a being that you should reflect back to them in order to be free (or unfree) within the Other’s perspective.
“The true limit of my freedom lies purely and simply in the very fact that an Other apprehends me as the Other-as-object and in that second corollary fact that my situation ceases for the Other to be a situation and becomes an objective form in which I exist as an objective structure. It is this alienating process of making an object of my situation which is the constant and specific limit of my situation, just as the making an object of my being-for-itself in being-for-others is the limit of my being. And it is precisely these two characteristic limits which represent the boundaries of my freedom. …
Thus we grasp a truth of great importance: we saw earlier, keeping ourselves within the compass of existence-for-itself, that only my freedom can limit my freedom; w see now, when we include the Other’s existence in our considerations, that my freedom on this new level finds its limits also in the existence of the Other’s freedom….Its limitation as internal finitude stems from the fact that it can not not-be freedom—that is, it is condemned to be free; its limitation as external finitude stems from the fact that being freedom, it is for other freedoms, freedoms which freely apprehend it in the light of their own ends….
Thus the very meaning of our free choice is to cause a situation to arise which expresses this choice, a situation the essential characteristic of which is to be alienated; that is, to exist as a form in itself for the Other. We can not escape this alienation since it would be absurd even to think of existing otherwise than in situation. This characteristic is not manifested by an internal resistance; on the contrary, one makes proof of it in and through its very inapprehensibility. It is therefore ultimately not an head-on obstacle which freedom encounters but a sort of centrifugal force in the very nature of freedom, a weakness in the basic “stuff” of freedom which causes everything which it undertakes to have always one face which freedom will not have chosen, which escapes it and which for the Other will be pure existence.” (Sartre:2003:546-7)
“Thus the Other’s freedom confers limits on my situation, but I can experience these limits only if I recover this being-for-others which I am and if I give to it a meaning in the light of the ends which I have chosen. Of course, this very assumption is alienated; it has its outside, but it is through this assumption that I can experience my being-outside as outside.
How then shall I experience the objective limits of my being: Jew, Aryan, ugly, handsome, king, a civil servant, an untouchable, etc.—when will language have informed me as to which of these are my limits? It can not be in the way in which I intuitively apprehend the Other’s beauty, ugliness, race, nor in the way if which I have a non-thetic consciousness (of) projecting myself toward this or that possibility. It is not these objective characteristics must necessarily be abstract; some are abstract, others not. My beauty or my ugliness or the insignificance of my features are apprehended by the Other in their full concreteness, and it is this concreteness which the Other’s speech will indicate to me; it is toward this that I shall emptily direct myself. Therefore we are not dealing with an abstraction but with an ensemble of structures, of which certain are abstract but whose totality is an absolute concrete, an ensemble which simply is indicated to me as on principle escaping me. This ensemble is in fact what I am. Now we observed at the beginning of Part Two that the for-itself can not be anything. For-myself I am not a professor or a waiter in a café, nor am I handsome or ugly, Jew or Aryan, witty, vulgar, or distinguished.
We shall call these characteristics unrealizables. We must be careful not to confuse them with the imaginaries. We have to do with perfectly real existences; but those for which these characteristics are really given are not these characteristics, and I who am them can not realize them. If I am told that I am vulgar, for example, I have often grasped by intuition as regards others the nature of vulgarity; thus I can apply the word “vulgar” to my person. But I can not join the meaning of this word to my person. There is here exactly the indication of a connection to be effected but one which could be made only by an ineriorization and a subjectivizing of the vulgarity or by the objectivising of the person—two operations which involve the immediate collapse of the reality in question.
Thus we are surrounded by an infinity of unrealizables.
Certain among these unrealizables we feel vividly as irritating absences. Who has not felt a profound disappointment at not being able after his return from a long exile to realize that he “is in Paris”. The objects are there and offer themselves familiarly, but I am only an absence, only the pure nothingness which is necessary in order that there may be a Paris. My friends, my relatives offer the image of a promised land when they say to me: “At last you are here! You have returned! You are in Paris!” But access to this promised land is wholly denied me. And if the majority of people deserve the reproach of “applying a double standard” according to whether they are considering others or themselves, if when they perceive that they are guilty of a fault which they had blamed in someone else the day before, they have a tendency to say, “That’s not the same thing,” this is because in fact “it is not the same thing.” The one action is a given object of moral evaluation; the other is a pure transcendence which carries its justification in its very existence since its being is a choice.
We shall be able to convince its agent by a comparison of the results that the two acts be able to convince its agent by a comparison of the results that the two acts have a strictly identical “outside”, but the best will in the world will not allow him to realize this identity. Here is the source of a good part of the troubles of the moral consciousness, in particular despair at not being able truly to contemn oneself, at not being able to realize oneself as guilty, at feeling perpetually a gap between the expressed meaning of the words: “I am guilty, I have sinned,” etc, and the real apprehension of the situation. In short this is the origin of all the anguish of a “bad conscience”, that is, the consciousness of bad faith which has for its ideal a self-judgement—i.e., taking toward oneself the point of view of the Other.
But if some particular kinds of unrealizables have impressed us more than others, if they have become the object of psychological descriptions, they must not blind us to the fact that unrealizables are infinite in number since they represent the reverse side of the situation.
These unrealizables, however, are not only appresented to us as unrealizables; in fact in order that they may have the character of unrealizables, they must be revealed in the light of some project aiming at realizing them. This is indeed what we noted earlier when we were showing how the for-itself assumes its being-for-others in and by the very act which recognizes the existence of others. Correlatively therefore with this assuming project, the unrealizables are revealed as to be realized. At first, indeed, the assumption is made in the perspective of my fundamental project. I do not limit myself to receiving passively the meaning “ugliness”, “infirmity”, “race”, etc., but, on the contrary, I can grasp these characteristics—in the simple capacity of a meaning—only in the light of my own ends. This is what is expressed—but by completely reversing the terms—when it is said that the fact of being of a certain race can determine a reaction of pride or an inferiority complex. In actual fact the race, the infirmity, the ugliness can appear only within the limits of my own choice of inferiority or of pride; in other words, they can appear only with a meaning which my freedom confers on them. This means once again that they are for the Other but that they can be for me only if I choose them.
The law of my freedom which makes me unable to be without choosing myself applies here too: I do not choose to be for the Other what I am, but I can try to be for myself what I am for the Other, by choosing myself such as I appear to the Other—i.e., by an elective assumption. A Jew is not a Jew first in order to be subsequently ashamed or proud; it is his pride of being a Jew, his shame, or his indifference which will reveal to him his being-a-Jew; and this being-a-Jew is nothing outside the free manner of adopting it. Although I have at my disposal an infinity of ways of assuming my being-for-others, I am not able not to assume it. We find here again that condemnation to freedom which we defined above as facticity. I can neither abstain totally in relation to what I am (for the Other)—for to refuse is not to abstain but still to assume—nor can I submit to it passively (which in a sense amounts to the same thing). Whether in fury, hate, pride, shame, disheartened refusal or joyous demand, it is necessary for me to choose to be what I am.
Thus the unrealizables are revealed to the for-itself as “unrealizables-to-be-realized.” They do not thereby lose their character as limits; quite the contrary, it is as objective and external limits that they are presented to the for-itself as to be interiorized. They have therefore a character which is distinctly obligatory. In fact we are not dealing with an instrument revealing itself as “to be employed” in the movement of the free project which I am. Here the unrealizable appears as an a priori limit given to my situation (since I am such for the Other) and hence as an existent which does not wait for me to give it existence; but also it appears as able to exist only in and through the free project by which I shall assume it—the assumption evidently being identical with the synthetic organization of all the conduct aimed at realizing the unrealizable for me. At the same time since it is given in the capacity of an unrealizable, it is manifested as beyond all the attempts which I can make to realize it….
Thus freedom is fully responsible and makes the unrealizable limits enter into the situation by choosing to be a freedom limited by the Other’s freedom.” (Sartre:2003:548-51)
What we learn from all of the above is that the being-for-itself by being in the company of other such beings, becomes by default an object in the eyes of others. That is to say, not an individual person-being, but an individual nominated role within their worlding of the World, within their project towards happiness, whatever that may be. Whatever that may be does not mean in their mind that it is evil to see you like this, but always good, because their desired project is of course good. Just as the mouse killed and stood on the other, for-itself. The role therefore of being a sister, mother, wife, daughter, grandmother for the Other in regards to family roles, its consequent social capital and ‘necessary’ capital to live (land), meant that you as a being-for-itself were able to speak to the peoples of the village as different objects of the village, they were now aunts and cousins and not aunts and enemies- objects, all of which either empowered or disempowered your project by accepting your role. In other words, in the world of politics, which has now been created by this perspective, one could say, “I Object”.
The word object comes from the word jet, meaning to throw out, to fling about, to spout, to push, in the sense of guise or fashion. Guise comes from the word wise, meaning to know, and fashion comes from the word fact, meaning a deed, or a reality. What we see here then is what Heidegger calls our thrownness, and what we call history. That is to say, that as settler man begins to accept the role of being an object, then he is thrown into a world fashioned by the deeds of his ancestors into the very reality of the land, in its guise, as ‘ours’. The wise one who knows the facticity of this reality and teaches the children in the circle this reality, then throws us into this worlding of the World. For example, inheritance is a concept of ownership, and each kin member awaits the death of the wise one, the elder, in order to appropriate his capital power through the guise, the reality of the story of family that is to this inheriting kin member a chosen reality, as it empowers their being-for-itself, just as being in the family has also empowered their being-for-itself.
However, the constraint of freedom that comes from taking on this role as object depends on the status of your role in the family, and the strength of that family in the thrownness of the World, over your own personal strength as a being-for-itself. So your existence as a being-for-itself becomes entwined with existing as being-for-others, because you all need the social capital of family in order to work and protect the land and create enough food and safety to eat, etc, etcetera.
This type of existence, under The Look, creates in some the desire to become that look, in order to feel free, i.e. ‘I am a CEO of a big firm and am very rich and powerful, and hence I am free and happy’. ‘I am a doctor’, ‘I am a knight of the realm’, etc, etcetera. What they are really saying is I am a powerful object who can push my reality, my worlding into your worlding, more than you can into mine, because of my status as object. It is therefore my reality, which by deed, by this fashioning of my world, becomes the World in which you must live as object, that is your thrownness and will determine your project, your purpose, and ultimately your history and our history.
Any of these strategies are rooted in the initial ontological choice of the being-for-itself. As they chose this perspective, then the world became, suddenly, a world of objects and distances, a world of desires, and projects, of lack and value, of trouble and strife, that could fill the fundamental lack of urgrund that the being-for-itself feels. On top of this, of course, lest we forget, lay the reality of having to work far harder and for far longer than hunter-gatherer man ever had to (three hours only of picking fruits, berries, grains, walking, and setting up camp).
On top of this also, came the diseases, the famines, the wars, the stress, and the politics of living in a polis, as a group of settled peoples.
07: Pandora, Prometheus and Epimetheus
Fire – The Burning Bush
Hominins harnessed fire long before Neandertals appeared on the evolutionary stage. Exactly who were the first pyrotechnicians remains controversial, largely because the most direct evidence of fire use, charred wood or charcoal, rarely preserves longer than a few hundred thousand years. The oldest, widely accepted direct evidence for use of fire comes from the Israeli site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, where sediment preserved the remains of burnt seeds and wood, all associated with stone tools. The site is about 790,000 years old, early enough that the pyrotechnicians must have been Homo erectus. More controversial evidence pushes back use of fire to perhaps 1.2 million years ago. The South African cave site of Swartkrans yielded the remains of burnt, butchered bones. There is no charcoal and no possible hearth features or heat-altered sediment, and some paleoanthropolgists have suggested that the discoloration of the bones either had a chemical source or was somehow the result of natural burning.
Indirect evidence supports the use of fire at this earlier date….By the time of Neandertals, fire use and cooking had long been established components of hominin life. Neandertals could not have survived in the cold of glacial Europe, nor consumed the massive quantity of meat that was their primary diet, without fire. They clearly knew how to keep and maintain it. We suspect that they also knew how to make it through friction, or perhaps even by creating sparks using meteoric iron to strike flint. No one, to our knowledge, has explored the cognitive implications of fire making and use, but it would appear to be well within the range of the expert procedures well documented for Neandertals.” (Wynn&Coolidge:2012:113-14)
The pramanatha or ursa major and the great pyramid of Giza are the humanbeing repercussions, i.e. civilizations and its major religions from zarathustra. It is the bija the phoenix of prometheus’ liver, the aeteonoetic consciousness possessed by the perspective of the settler.
“Neandertal Hearth- [where they dwell- authors note]
Hearth’s similar to the Neandertal hearths just described are typical of prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups all over the world- individuals building fires for cooking and warmth in an ad hoc manner. This pragmatic at least several hundred thousand years, perhaps longer….
Most of the hearths archaeologists can attribute to prehistoric modern humans resemble those of Neandertals, but not all. About 23,000 years ago at the rockshelter of Abri Pataud in southwestern France, modern people scooped out shallow pits and lined them with river cobbles. There were also larger hearths, over a metre in diameter. At the slightly earlier with Czech site of Dolni Vestonice are the remains of large hearths over 2 metres in diameter with deposits over 40 centimetres (over a foot) thick, attesting to continued, intensive use. Moreover some of the Dolni Vestonice fires were associated with shattered clay figurines, and clay pellets apparently made to expand rapidly and explode in the fire. Dolni Vestonice even boasts two kilns, clay structures built to produce very high temperature burning for firing the clay figurines. Fire had become much more than a practical tool for warmth and cooking. It had become a focus of social activity.
Imagine for a moment the activities surrounding a hearth at Dolni Vestonice. The shattered figurines and clay pellets points to social interaction, not just shared warmth and cooking. Someone placed these things in the fire and watched them shatter and explode. We suppose it might just have been preadolescent boys on a lark with Stone Age fire crackers, but there are really too many shattered pieces for this to be the most likely explanation. Following Clive Gamble, we think someone was telling stories, using figurines and clay pellets as props in the performance. Hearths had become a focus of social life. Long after the cooking was done, people sat around the fires and talked, recited myths, and performed rituals. This is a familiar use of fire in the twenty-first century, and has been for at least 25,000 years. It is this kind of fire use that has never been found with Neandertals. It marks an important social difference between Neandertals and us, and also a possible difference in the nature of mind and language.
The psychologist Matt Rossano thinks he knows why modern humans built larger, longer burning, and more intense fires: they used them in their rituals. By ritual Rossano is referring to something both more inclusive than the common notion of religious ritual, and also something more narrowly defined. Rituals are simply activities performed according to sets of procedures that are rule-governed and formalized. From this point of view any repetitive sequence of action that one performs in an invariant way would qualify, so a major league batter tapping the plate with his bat three times, taking two slow swings, and then setting his stance is following a ritual. Why does he do it? To “get in the zone” and to “focus” are common explanations. Cognitively both imply focusing attention, which is an aid to performance. …
Modern human intensified ritual performance in at least two ways. First, they enhanced the quality of focused attention through consciousness-altering meditation (sometimes aided by mind-altering chemicals). Second, they invented group rituals in which many individuals together coordinated attention. Both had short-term and long-term effects on the brain itself.
Research using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging has clearly documented that meditation changes brain activity. In one EEG study experienced meditators were able to coordinate neural activity across the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain to a degree that was far beyond the abilities of normal individuals. There is even some evidence for permanent changes induced by long experience with meditation. Some meditators have significantly thicker regions of the prefrontal cortex than is typical. This is perhaps not surprising; neuroscientists have long known that the brain has some plasticity, with heavily used areas expanding slightly (e.g., in string musicians the area of the motor cortex devoted to fingertips is larger than that of nonmusicians). So what areas of the brain enlarged in meditators? Primarily areas of the prefrontal cortex devoted to working memory and focused attention. Meditation is a kind of ritualized thinking: by following a series of action and thought patterns the meditator marshals his or her neural resources to focus on a narrow range of stimuli, either external or internal. The goal is an altered state of consciousness. It takes practice because it is not easy.
Shares rituals are a bit different.
The goal here is for a group to achieve some level of altered awareness. Most modern religions have group performances in which some or all participants strive for ecstasy, a feeling of disembodied joy, or terror. Speaking in tongues, being “saved”, and experiencing miraculous healing are just a few examples. Psychologists and physicians have long known that healing rituals can have very real psychological and physical effects. Much of the efficacy of such ritual depends on a participant’s hypnotisability, the ability to respond to suggestion induced by ritual performance, and more often than not such suggestibility induced by ritual performance, and more often than not such suggestibility is actively manipulated by a religious practitioner- a shaman, priest, or even a charismatic preacher. The cognitive and neurological effects are similar to those of meditation, and like meditation, practice improves performance. The states of altered consciousness are highly valued by most participants. Their evolutionary significance is not as obvious…. What role, if any, did fire play in the emergence of these consciousness-altering activities?
The answer to this question could be quite mundane: group rituals often occurred after dark, and the only light available came from fires or, in cold places, the only communal warmth came from fire. But somehow this mundane explanation doesn’t seem quite adequate. Why is fire common in rituals performed in daylight, or on warm days, or in the tropics? Fire is strangely alive. It flickers and dances, and the coals seem to throb with vitality. We suspect that fire helps individuals and groups focus attention. It is visually dynamic. It constantly changes, but it does not move, and the more suggestible someone is, the more effective it is. This is why people invested effort to build fireplaces that would allow long-burning fires. Homo sapiens sapiens used them for more than cooking: they used them to help create a spiritual life. Neandertals never appear to have done this. It is one of the most profound differences between them and us.” (Wynn&Coolidge:2012:114-18)
Fire is the same as the rainbow as energy in regards to the true nature of the universe as energy that we can see under certain conditions. See Buddha text re temperature as radiation and ealiest Greek philosopher re fire is everything. Also see Buddhism and Taoism and Allah going to the mountain regarding the unmoving mover that fire symbolises. In other words the fire is the hearth the dwelling place that gives rise to the phratrie system of a universal clan by experience and ritual and hence phylogeny and hence experience known as the Garden of Eden.
One would expect, such a monumental change of life-style to have been witnessed by the hunter-gatherer, myth makers, and then relayed in story. Just as we saw in regards to the flood of the bible, there was a similar myth told throughout the World, in Sumeria, Greece, and Australia, etc to record this global happening, so this same phase of humanity, told ontologically i.e. in myth, and not historically, i.e. in legend, was recorded by the authors of myth in different cultures throughout the world. In biblical terms we have already met Cain and Abel as the settler and the hunter-gatherer, but it is to the Greek myth of Pandora that we must look in order to discover what myself-as-Object really entails for mankind.
In this myth the two gods Epimetheus and Prometheus are given the task of giving gifts to the animals, in the same manner as Adam is given in the bible, the task of giving out names to the animals, for Prometheus and Epimetheus, together represent Adam, that is the Adam before the fall, and the Adam after the Fall of planting wheat, i.e., ‘eating the fruit of knowledge’, that subsequently gets Adam to wear a fig leaf to dis-‘guise’ his nakedness, to wear a garment of his own fashioning, upon becoming conscious of his distance from God. In the like manner, in the Greek myth Eve is represented as Pandora:
“Athene, at whose birth from Zeus’s head he had assisted, taught him [Prometheus] architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind. But Zeus, who had decided to extripate the whole race of man, and spared them only at Prometheus’s urgent plea, grew angry at their increasing powers and talents….
Prometheus… went to Athene with a plea for a backstairs admittance to Olympus, and this she granted. On his arrival, he lighted a torch at the fiery chariot of the Sun and presently broke from it a fragment of glowing charcoal, which he thrust into the pithy hollow of a giant fennel-stalk. Then, extinguishing his torch, he stole away undiscovered, and gave fire to mankind.
Zeus swore revenge. He ordered Hephaestus to make a clay woman, and the four Winds to breathe life into her, and all the goddesses of Olypmus to adorn her. This woman, Pandora, the most beautiful ever-created, Zeus sent as a gift to Epimetheus, under Hermes’s escort. But Epimetheus, having been warned by his brother to accept no gift from Zeus, respectfully excused himself. Now even angrier than before, Zeus had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains, where a greedy vulture tore at his liver all day, year in, year out; and there was no end to the pain, because every night (during which Prometheus was exposed to cruel frost and cold) his liver grew whole again.
But Zeus, loth to confess that he had been vindictive, excused his savagery by circulating falsehood: Athene, he said, had invited Prometheus to Olympus for a secret love affair.
Epimetheus, alarmed by his brother’s fate, hastened to marry Pandora, whom Zeus had made as foolish, mischievous, and idle as she was beautiful…. Presently she opened a jar, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion. Out of these flew in a cloud, stung Epimetheus and Pandora in every part of their bodies, and then attacked the race of mortals. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut in the jar, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide.” (Graves:1992:144-45)
08: Hesiod- The Homeric Hymns and Homerica
Works and Days
“Muses of Pieria who give glory through song, come hither, tell of Zeus your father and chant his praise. Through him mortal men are famed or unfamed, sung or unsung alike, as great Zeus wills. For easily he makes strong, and easily he brings the strong man low; easily he humbles the proud and raises the obscure, and easily he straightens the crooked and blasts the proud, – Zeus who thunders aloft and has his dwelling most high. Attend thou with eye and ear, and make judgements straight with righteousness. And I, Perses, would tell of true things.
So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due. But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and the son of Cronos who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter in angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.
Perses, lay up these things in your heart, and do not let that Strife who delights in mischief hold your heart back from work, while you peep and peer and listen to the wrangles of the court-house. Little concern has he with quarrels and courts who has not a year’s victuals laid up betimes, even that which the earth bears, Demeter’s grain. When you have got plenty of that, you can raise disputes and strive to get another’s goods. But you shall have no second chance to deal so again: nay, let us settle our dispute here with true judgement which is of Zeus and is perfect. For we had already divided our inheritance, but you seized the greater share and carried it off, greatly swelling the glory of our bribe-swallowing lords who love to judge such a cause as this. Fools! They know not how much more the half is than the whole, nor what great advantage there is in mallow and asphodel [That is, the poor man’s fare, like “bread and cheese”/Bread alone].
For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetus [Prometheus] stole again for men from Zeus the Counsellor in a hollow fennel-stalk, so that Zeus who delights in thunder did not see it. But afterwards Zeus who gathers the clouds said to him in anger:
“Son of Iapetus [Hurrier], surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire- a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.”
So said the father of men and gods, and laughed aloud. And he bade famous Hephaestus make haste and mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face; and Athene to teach her needlework and the weaving of the varied web; and golden Aphrodite to shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares [desire] that weary the limbs. And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature.
So he ordered. And they obeyed the lord Zeus the son of Cronos.
Forthwith the famous Lame God [Hephaestus] moulded clay in the likeness of a modest maid, as the son of Cronos purposed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athene girded and clothed her, and the divine Graces and queenly Persuasion put necklaces of gold upon her, and the rich-haired Hours crowned her head with spring flowers. And Pallas Athene bedecked her form with all manner of finery. Also the Guide, the Slayer of Argus [Hermes/Mercury], contrived within her lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature at the will of loud thundering Zeus, and the Herald of the gods put speech in her. And he called this woman Pandora [the All-Endowed/Gift-bearer], because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread.
But when he had finished the sheer, hopeless snare, the Father send glorious Argus-Slayer, the swift messenger of the gods, to take it to Epimetheus as a gift. And Epimetheus did not think on what Prometheus had said to him, bidding him never take a gift of Olympian Zeus, but to send it back for fear it might prove to be something harmful to men. But he took the gift, and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood.
For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sicknesses which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But for earth is full of evils and the sea is full. Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there n way to escape the will of Zeus.
Or, if you will, I will sum you up another tale well and skilfully- and do you lay it up in your heart, how the gods and mortal men sprang from one source.
First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gds.
But after the earth had covered this generation- they are called pure spirits dwelling on the earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere on the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth; for this royal right also they received;- then thy who dwell on Olympus made a second generation which was of silver and less noble by far. It was like the golden race neither in body nor in spirit. A child was brought up at his good mother’s side an hundred years, an utter simpleton, playing childishly in his own home. But when they were full grown and were come to the full measure of their prime, they lived only a little time and that in sorrow because of their foolishness, for they could not keep from sinning and from wronging one another, nor would they serve the immortals, nor sacrifice on the holy altars of the blessed ones as it is right for men to do wherever they dwell. Then Zeus the son of Cronos was angry and put them away, because they would not give honour to the blessed gods who live on Olympus.
But when earth had covered this generation also- they are called blessed spirits of the underworld by men, and, though they are of second order, yet honour attends them also- Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash-trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence; they ate no bread, but were hard of heart like adamant, fearful men. Great was their strength and unconquerable the arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs. Their armour was of bronze [Icarus], and their houses of bronze, and of bronze were their implements: there was no black iron. These were destroyed by their own hands and passed to the dank house of chill Hades, and left no name: terrible though they were, black Death seized them, and they left the bright light of the sun.
But when the earth had covered this generation also, Zeus the son of Cronos made yet another, the fourth, upon the fruitful earth, which was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth. Grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them, some in the land of Cadmus at seven-gated Thebe when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and some, when it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helen’s sake: there death’s end enshrouded a part of them. But to the others father Zeus the son of Cronos gave a living and an abode apart from men, and made them dwell at the ends of earth. And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods, and Cronos rules over them; for the father of men and gods released him from his bonds. And these last equally have honour and glory.
Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth. The father will not agree with his children, nor the children with their father, nor guest with his host, nor comrade with comrade; nor will brother be dear to brother as aforetime. Men will dishonour their parents as they grow quickly old, and will carp at them, chiding them with bitter words, hard-hearted they, not knowing the fear of the gods. They will not repay their aged parents the cost of their nurture, for might shall be their right: and one man will sack another’s city.
There will be no favour for the man who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil-doer and his violent dealing. Strength will be right and reverence will cease to be; and the wicked will hurt the worthy man, speaking false words against him, and will swear an oath upon them. Envy, foul-mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all. And then Aidos and Nemesis [Aidos, as a quality, is that feeling of reverence or shame [awe-ful] which restrains men from wrong: Nemesis is the feeling of righteous indignation aroused especially by the sight of the wicked in undeserted prosperity [invidious] (cf.Psalms, lxxii. 1-19).) with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods: and bitter sorrows will be left for mortal man, and there will be no help against evil.
And now I will tell a fable for the princes who themselves understand. Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck, while he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his talons, and she, pierced by his crooked talons, cried pitifully. To her he spoke disdainfully: “Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.” So said the swiftly flying hawk, the long-winged bird.” (Hesiod:1974:3-19)
09: In order to understand this myth, we merely need to translate the names of these gods involved in the story.
As I stated earlier the gods are merely natures of existence, that come into existence and create each other as they are played out in the experience of the mythographer. Prometheus means forethought, Epimetheus means afterthought, i.e. the nature of Prometheus is to look forward, to project his thought into the future, whilst Epimetheus’s nature is to look backwards and see the world through the eyes of the past. Pandora means the ‘all-giver’ and was Earth-goddess Rhea: “Rhea’s name is probably a variant of Era, ‘earth’; her chief bird was the dove, her chief beast the mountain-lion. Demeter’s name means ‘Barley-mother; Hestia… is the goddess of the domestic hearth.” (Graves:1992:43) (Rhea, who sanctified the mysterious object in Demophon’s casket, was also called Pandora, and this myth may therefore be an earlier version of how Epimetheus’s wife Pandora opened the box of spites” (Graves:1992:714) Athene means ‘queen of heaven’ and was known for her ‘wisdom’.
What are we being told in this myth? Prometheus represents as forethought, in our modern parlance, the evolution of our human nature. Fire is a symbol of the transmutation of nature, useless rocks become transmuted into ‘valued’ metals, inedible aspects of nature, become edible, the unpossessable, becomes possessable. Nature becomes transmutable into the form of human-nature.
As we have seen, Prometheus had been taught the arts of architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind by the assistance of wisdom ‘Athene’. That is to say, the settler man had learnt how to construct a village, how to construct tools and weapons in order to defend it, and to read the moon in relation to timing his harvest and sowing, and how to use plants and practices in order to attain some level of medicine. He had done this so successfully that Zeus decided to punish them, for they had become too powerful in using their knowledge for their own purposes, for being-for-itself. The fire, the ability to transmute nature to our own purposes, introduced into our nature as beings-in-Being, had shifted our perspective from the urgrund of Mount Olympus of the Gods who had the power to change us (the fire of the gods- Nature) to the Mountain of Self, where the spirit of forethought, thinking for ourselves, ‘I think, therefore I am’, became our centre. The liver in ancient times was the centre of man, not the heart as it is today, and was used in order to prophecy, that is to say to look forward into the future. I won’t go into the meaning of the vulture here.
Upon this shift of centre, upon Prometheus’ urgrund change, Epimetheus ‘afterthought’ marries with Pandora, the all-giver, who is beautiful but idle and useless to his true purpose. In other words, upon this change of perspective, the settler looks at his now powerful situation as a being-for-itself, and sees the trap that he has made for himself. The box that has been opened, the can of worms that this transmutation of his spirit has caused to the World. The fruits of the knowledge of being-for-itself were those of agriculture as the name Pandora, as Rhea- Earth goddess, and Demeter, Barley-mother, convey. In other words, it was the Earth itself that became our ‘God’, as the provider of our existence, through the bounty of grains, agriculture. In other words, our perspective turned from the heights of the mountain and became downcast to the Earth itself as our mother, not God.
This trap of settling, that hunter-gatherer man fell into to become Cain, brought with it its own nature of existence. As we have seen they are, on the plus side, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, that is to say, they are useful to the being-for-itself in his project, his Promethean project of having eaten of the fruit of knowledge. On the negative side these new natures are those resultant from being treated as an object, in this case symbolised by the box of Pandora. The box is actually ourselves, represented literally as Object, and the curses of Zeus represent the experiences we undergo consequently. These are things such as, ‘Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion.’ Out of these flew in a cloud, stung Epimetheus and Pandora in every part of their bodies, and then attacked the race of mortals.’ (ibid).
“This remarkable work by Moore, Rowley-Conwy, Legge and many other archaeologists shows that the hunter-gatherers of Abu Hureyra enjoyed the most attractive environmental conditions that had existed for many thousands of years, since long before the LGM. At no other times had animals and plants been so abundant, so diverse and so predictable in their availability- just as they were for the Natufian inhabitants of the Mediterranean woodlands. This provided them with the opportunity to give up the mobile lifestyle that had served human society since its first appearance 3.5 million years ago on the African savannah. But why do it?
Why create the social tensions that inevitably arise when one has permanent next-door neighbours within a village? Why expose oneself to human waste and garbage and the health risks that accompany a more sedentary lifestyle? Why risk the depletion of the animals and plants near one’s own village?…
The Natufian people appear to have quite peaceable as well as healthy. There are no signs of conflict between groups, such as embedded arrow points in human bones- unlike the situation that Lubbock will find on his European, Australian and African travels. The Natufian hunter-gatherer groups were good neighbours; there was plenty of land, gardens and animals for all.
It is possible that the Natufian and Abu Hureyran people were prepared to suffer the downside of village life- the social tensions, the human waste, depletion of resources- to enjoy the benefits. Franҫois Valla, the excavator of ‘Ain Mallaha, believes that the Natufian villages simply emerged from the seasonal gatherings of the Kebaran people. He recalls the work of the social anthropologist Marcel Mauss who lived with hunter-gatherers in the Arctic at the turn of the century. Mauss recognised that periodic gatherings were characterised by intense communal life, by feasts and religious ceremonies, by intellectual discussion, and by lots of sex. In comparison, the rest of the year, when people lived in small far-flung groups, was rather dull. … the opportunity to stretch out those periods of aggregation, until they effectively continued for the whole year.” (Mithen:2003:42-44)
A further consequence of being-for-itself, resulting in being-for-others as object is that of a lack of freedom, and war.
“The existence of others of his kind, and the impossibility of escaping their company, is the first real impediment in the pursuit of felicity; for another man is necessarily a competitor… To have built a house and cultivated a garden is to have issued an invitation to all others to take it by force, for it is against the common view of felicity to weary oneself with making what can be acquired by less arduous means. And further, competition does not arise merely when two or more happen to want the same thing, for when a man is among others of his kind his felicity is not absolute but comparative; and since a large part of it comes from a feeling of superiority, of having more than his fellow, the competition is essential, not accidental. There is, at best, a permanent potential enmity between men, ‘a perpetual contention for Honour, Riches and Authority.’ And to make matters worse, each man is so nearly the equal to each other man in power, that superiority of strength (which might set some men above the disadvantages of competition: the possibility of losing) is nothing better than an illusion…And the end is open conflict, a war of all against all, in which the defects of man’s character and circumstances make him additionally vulnerable…When a man is among men, pride is more dangerous and death more likely.” (Hobbes:1651:xxxiv-xxxv)
“Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.
And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general, and infallible rules, called science; which very few have, and but in few things; a being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For prudence, is but experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one’s own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men’s at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.
From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope [authors italics] in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and then in way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another….
And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the person of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: and this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist….
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third for reputation.” (Hobbes:1651:80-81)
In the myth of Pandora then we see the consequences of living a settled life-style and the perspective of looking back, Epimetheus, from where we see that we are forever cursed by these consequences.
Hope, hope of liberty, equality, and fraternity, etc, etcetera, accompanied by hopes of gain, safety, and reputation are incompatible realities, but lived hopes. In fact in the language framework of Sartre hope is another word for the feeling of lack felt by the being-for-itself. It is a description of the distance, travelled away from God (Epimetheus), and the distance to be travelled towards his project for pleasure, happiness as God (Prometheus). As Hobbes describes it, felicity, meaning happy or fruitful, i.e. the fruit of knowledge.
One last quick proof is required before we go on to Babylon, in regards to the above, and that is to establish that this Greek myth was originally a global story, just as we did with the biblical flood before, and to establish that it was known in Babylon, and by its people the Sumerians, or the family of Ham. Firstly the myth:
“Prometheus’s name, ‘forethought’, may originate in a Greek misunderstanding of the Sanskrit word pramantha, the swastika, or fire-drill, which he had supposedly invented, since Zeus Prometheus at Thurii was shown holding a fire-drill. Prometheus, the Indo-European folk-hero, became confused with the Carian hero Palamedes, the inventor or distributor of all civilized arts (under the goddess’s inspiration); and with the Babylonian god Ea, who claimed to have created a splendid man from the blood of Kingu (a sort of Cronus), while the Mother-goddess Aruru created an inferior man from clay. The brothers Pramanthu and Manthu, who occur in the Bhagavata Purāna, A Sanskrit epic, may be prototypes of Prometheus and Epimetheus (‘afterthought’);” (Graves:1992:148)
10: Hubris and Nemesis and Karma
We have seen the global nature of this change of perspective through the medium of myth but we must also expect it to arise in the experience of these settled peoples, and so we must look for it in language. Obviously the great three monotheistic religions term this feeling of lack as original sin, that is the original turning away from God’s will, and becoming beings-for-itself, but as we have seen the Greeks called this not sin but the curse of hope. To hope something, means to desire something, and therefore implies, a distance from it, as does sin. A hope is a project without the power to achieve it. Faith in like manner describes this same distance from God, in regards to lack of experiential knowledge. Faith is the distance of Epimetheus, ‘it is a leap’, and hope, the attaining of the experience of walking with God again in heaven, in paradise, is the distance of Prometheus from the perspective of a religious individual.
The Greeks however also had specific words for these two experiences in lived reality, in order to separate the describe this idea of sin from the eyes of the gods as well as of themselves. That is to say through the eyes of Nature as well as the eyes of man. In other words in order to describe these two new natures, they created two new gods, these were called Tyche (Fortune) and Nemesis (Divine vengeance). For the Greeks, the project of gain for oneself, the seeking of ones fortune, was called Hubris, and its result was to bring upon oneself the nature of Nemesis. It was not seen as a sin that required a punishment but instead as an act of free-will in the Great Will of Nature, that created its own re-action of Natural will- Nemesis in order to restore harmony, in order to restrain the self and create a balance or harmony once again. For the Greeks then this idea of fortune, of personal gain, becomes the basis of the idea of tragedy, the troubled waters charted in their great plays to elucidate the folly of man being-for-itself, and ignoring the gods.
“…the Histories give us a wonderful picture of what we might call the Greek tragic world-view. All tragedy consists, according to Aristotle, in a reversal of fortune. Such reversals, according to Herodotus and most Greeks, are likely to occur when the natural order of things is disturbed by excess of some kind. This is the idea of hubris and its counterpart nemesis. Hubris is the disturbance of the natural order. The reversal of fortune which restored the natural order is nemesis. In modern usage we tend to treat hubris as human arrogance, and certainly it can take this form….
There are other manifestations of hubris, however, which do not involve the arrogance of humans. Polycrates the tyrant of Samos is warned by his friend Amasis to throw away his most treasured possession (Book iii, 40). Polycrates recognises the danger of being too successful, and throws his favourite ring into the sea. There it is swallowed by an enormous fish- a fish so enormous that the fisherman who catches it offers it up to the tyrant’s household in the hope of a reward. So Polycrates gets his ring back, and Amasis breaks off his friendship with him. Not because Polycrates is arrogant- he is not- but because any human being who has that kind of luck is bound to come to a disastrous end. And sure enough, Polycrates grows careless, and does come to a disastrous end….
Solon’s remarks to Croesus are another. ‘Until he is dead, no man can be called happy- only lucky’” (Herodotus:1996:x)
We will meet Croesus, the King at the beginning of Greek history itself, later on in regards to his hubris through the ‘ring of Gyges’ and the birth of the military mind-set of civilization itself, where we will meet another great beauty who is idle and useless and calls another curse upon mankind- Helen of Troy.
In Eastern Philosophy, this same enigma (invisible force, sub-nature of wakan) is called ‘Karma’.
A term much misunderstood in the West. It does not merely mean the unforeseeable consequence of your actions in this life, as many people think. It means, ‘habit and its consequence’, and is to be understood universally. In other words if one’s habit is to hunt and gather then you will create no nemesis as you are living in harmony with nature. But if one’s habit becomes to take out a small insurance policy, then the subsequent nemesis will arise consequent to this new habit. It is unforeseeable to Prometheus but not to Epimetheus’ using reason ‘afterthought’, that is to say, ‘experience’ or perhaps even, ‘scientific method’, as we have used archaeology and sociology, etc.
It is not a sin or punishment by a Being, but a repercussion of a way of being within the Being of the Nature of the Universe. Karma is a further description of the blind scales of justice, that God enacts wilfully if you believe in an actual physical God separate from the Nature of the physical universe, or that Nature brings about by reacting to ones actions, whether they be for-itself or in-Being. My will or thy will be done can only be said (thought) by a being-for-itself.
If one extends this perspective of Karma or ‘Hubris and Nemesis’ to its fullest extent, that is to say, out of the circle of self-centredness and back to the infinite circle of Nature or God then find that expand these concepts to touch upon the urgrund of aletheia:
“If we perceive and co-ordinate organically the inner movement (growth, development; emotional, mental, and spiritual movement, etc.) of a conscious being, we become aware of its individuality, its psychic character.
If we perceive the manifold forms of existence, through which an individual has to pass, and observe how these forms arise, according to various conditions, and depending on a multitude of inherent factors, we arrive at the perception and understanding of the law of action and re-action, the law of karma.
If we observe the various phases of a karmic chain-reaction in their relationship to other sequences of karmic action and reaction as this is said to have been observed by the Buddha, we become conscious of a supra-individual karmic interrelatedness, comprising nations, races, civilizations, humanity, planets, solar systems and finally the whole universe. In short, we arrive, at the perception of a cosmic world-order, an infinite mutual relationship of all things, beings and events, until we finally realize the universality of consciousness in the Dharmakaya*” (Govinda:1977:218-9)
*Dharmakaya means ‘truth body’, that is to say ‘aletheia’, the ‘unconcealedness of Being’ or God. It is a body of truth, a perspective of experience that encompasses all truths, such as the movement of all forces, or lesser gods. These truth bodies are represented in physical form as rainbow coloured statues of people who have attained to this state of perception through meditation, just as God was seen by Noah and the reflective surface of the clear quartz of the Aborigines represented the essence of all life. “The seed-grain is likely to have featured in the Neolithic trade network that had extended from Turkey to the southern reaches of the Jordan valley. We know such trade occurred because obsidian, a very fine jet-black and shiny volcanic glass originating from a single source in the hills of southern Turkey, is found on all the Early Neolithic sites. For those who relied upon relatively dull flint in the Jordan valley, obsidian must have been a highly valued material. Many modern hunter-gatherers, such as the Australian Aborigines, have invested shiny stones with supernatural powers and the same must surely have been true of obsidian in the Neolithic period: its thin flakes are effectively transparent; thick flakes can be used as mirrors; it has the sharpest edge of any stone, and can be knapped into intricate forms. It is a truly magical material.” (Mithen:2003:67)
For further details on this in regards to Buddhism see page 216 of Lama Anagarika Govinda’s book ‘Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism’.
This studying of the karmic chain-reaction is precisely what we have done in order to arrive at the dawn of civilization seen through the perspective of our cave-man, and not through the perspective of civilized man, who, as I believe I have proved, cannot understand these ancient tales from the perspective of a being-for-itself, without making this same change of state into a super-state that transcends his own self-centred state into that of a larger organism, i.e. one that has not been divided due to the desire of it being conquered, human-nature over Nature. A case we literally saw with the race of Adam, becoming divided into Cain and Abel, and then into the sons of Noah.
11: The Hindu Myth that will hopefully explain all of above much more clearly
“Siva is Rudra, the angry god. He is angry with Brahma because Brahma sees freedom from fear by trying to control Prakriti rather than by seeking Purusha. In anger he beheads Brahma, then shuts his eyes and immerses himself in the infinite bliss of an unfettered consciousness, sat-chitta-ananda. Liberated from all things sensory, nature has no effect on him…
Brahma’s eyes are open, but he sees only his own fears, not those of others around him. Consumed by his own Brahmanda, he does not realise each one of those around him has a Brahmanda of his or her own. He needs to look at others, recognise that every man and every woman has his or her own subjective reality, his or her own unique way of looking at the world. He needs to have empathy.
Looking at others is called darshan. Brahma looks at others in fear: he pursues them…He seeks them when they comfort him [rescuer]; he shuns them if they frighten him [victim]. When he looks at them, he wonders if they are ‘mine’ or ‘not mine’ [the third]. A gaze that is born of fear, a gaze that excludes and exploits is not darshan. Darshan is gaze that is free of fear. Darshan is gaze that looks at the other for its own sake not because it is ‘mine’ or ‘not mine’. Darshan is an empathy-filled gaze…
When we genuinely do darshan, we discover how the other reacts to us. That is, the other ends up as a mirror or darpan, reflecting who we are. If people around us behave like deer, it means we are behaving like lions. If people around us behave like lions, it means they see us as deer. If people around us behave like dogs, friendly or hostile, it means that we matter to them.” (Pattanaik:2011:63-7)
“The Puranas inform us that Brahma gives birth to ‘mind-born’ sons, which means sons created without copulating with a woman
Writer’s Voice: God created man in his own image…ination
This is a metaphor for mental modification, a twisting and folding of the pristine imagination as it experiences more and more fear. One of these sons is called Daksha, the skilled one…. The birth of Daksha is Brahma’s response to nature.
Dakha…is skilled at coping with nature’s transformation. He does so by establishing culture through the ritual of yagna.
Yagna is all about controlling wild nature and domesticating it so that it comes under human control, becomes manageable, predictable, hence less frightening. Yagna is a metaphor for domestication. Yagna involves domestication of water, limiting it to a pot. Yagna involves domestication of plants and animals; some become auspicious offerings while others remain inauspicious outsiders. Yagna involves domestication of humans through rules, regulations, and rituals; every one has a different role and responsibility with respect to the ritual, hence to society.
Writer’s Voice: Dancing pigeons.
. Yagna thus transforms forest into field, wild animals into pets and beasts of burden, man into husband, woman into wife, and humans to members of castes, clans and communities. Yagna thus creates hierarchy….
Through Daksha, Brahma becomes domesticator of nature and creator of culture. In exchange for domestication, yagna grants abundance and security and so promises the end of fear.
But the end of fear for whom?
Daksha is Praja-pati, master of the people. He is not Pashu-pati, master of animal instincts. Daksha seeks to dominate people around him rather than outgrow his own fears. His gaze is outward not inward. He seeks to domesticate everyone around him. He is not willing to question his own delusions which cause the amplification of his own fears. He is the alpha male, no different from the lion in the jungle that uses force to dominate and control his pride of lionesses. He remains pashu (animal).
Daksha finds nature inhabited by two sets of divine beings: the Devas who live in the sky and the Asuras who live under the earth. Under the earth, withheld by Asuras, is all the wealth that society needs- plants and metals. The Devas provide the wherewithal- heat, light, wind, fire, rain- to draw this subterranean wealth hoarded by the Asuras. For Daksha, Devas are therefore ‘gods’ while Asuras are ‘demons’.
Yagna (domestication) is the ritual performed to make the Devas stronger so as to defeat and kill Asuras….
Daksha takes the life of one who does not align to his rules; Shiva gives life instead and expects nothing in return, least of all obedience. The Devas therefore call Shiva Maha-deva, the greatest of gods, he who is Go, hence independent of nature’s laws.
Daksha does not consider Shiva to be Maha-deva. He views Shiva as the enemy who opposes him. Shiva seems to side with the Asuras by giving their guru, Shukra, the secret knowledge of resurrection known as Sanjivani Vidya. Using Sanjivani Vidya, Shukra is able to bring back to life all the Asuras killed by the Devas. That is why, much to Daksha’s exasperation, wild nature cannot be permanently domesticated. Eventually fields and orchards are overrun by weeds and forests season after season, children of domesticated animals remain wild and have to be broken generation after generation, rules once instituted have to be reinforced year after year. Yagnas have to be performed again and again to keep intact the crucible of culture….
For Daksha, obedience is virtue. He excludes those who do not obey him. Asuras do not obey him…Asuras are therefore sacrificed during the yagna;… but Shiva is always excluded, as Shiva remains indifferent to him.” (Pattanaik:2011:71-3)
This splitting of the world into three aspects is also achieved in Babylonian culture as we see below:
In figure 37 you will see what the Sumerians meant when referring to the gods, Anu, Enlil and Ea.

Figure 37. The Sumerian Gods who control the three portions of space as seen from Earth
“To Daksha’s vexation, his youngest daughter, Sati, disobeys him. One day she sees Siva wandering in the mountains. She re-cognises him for who he is and falls in love with him. She expresses her desire to be his wife. Her father refuses to grant permission…Rather than understanding, Daksha is angry. Sati’s defiance makes him feel insignificant….He blames Shiva for Sati’s behaviour. To teach both Shiva and Sati a lesson, he conducts a grand yagna. All Devas are invited to Daksha’s sacrificial hall to partake the sacrificial offerings. Everyone except Shiva and Sati are called. Through exclusion, Daksha seeks to teach both of them a lesson. He hopes to eventually domesticate them.
Writer’s Voice: Organised religion ontologically created by hierarchy.
Shiva does not care. But Sati is upset….Sati knows that her father’s insults do not matter to her husband. Daksha seeks control; Shiva lives in freedom. But she wants her father to see sense, recognise the Maha-deva, the god who gives life. She also wants her husband to see sense, realise that engaging with Daksha is critical. How else will Daksha outgrow his desire for control? How else will Daksha outgrow his fears? How else will Praja-pati (master of the people) understand Pashu-pati (master of animal instincts)?
So Sati leaps into the sacrificial fire and sets herself ablaze. She makes herself the offering to the one who is denied offering by Daksha. She burns for Shiva.
Writer’s Voice: Just as Christ does on the cross.
When Sati follows Shiva, she does it out of unconditional love. She does not expect him to change. She serves him without asking anything in return…This is why the word ‘Sati’ means a devoted wife….
But Sati’s unquestioning undemanding company dents Shiva’s indifference. Following her self-immolation, he is forced to look at her. He does Sati’s darshan- finds a charred corpse in the sacrificial altar. Sati becomes his mirror, his darpan….When he learns that no one came to her rescue, he realises how much fear governs the world of Praja-pati, making people submit to the most unreasonable demands. He decides to show Praja-pati a fear greater than all others fears. His righteous outrage takes the form of Virabhadra, a terrifying warrior.” (Pattanaik:2011:73-77)
“Virabhadra leads an army of ghosts and goblins, of Ganas and Pramathas, all inauspicious and wild creatures, into Daksha’s sacrificial hall and goes about destroying the precinct. Everything that is holy is rendered unholy. Urine, sputum, blood and vomit are poured into the pots and pans….Order is disrupted. The guests run and scream in fear…Virabhadra finally finds Daksha and beheads him….By beheading, Shiva condemns the misuse of the human mind to control and domesticate nature and to create a self-image that deludes one to justify such action. Rather than exploring the possibility of outgrowing fear, humans are indulging animal instincts. Rather than discovering the infinite, humans are choosing to entrap themselves in the finite….
With the body gone, Shiva regains his composure. The Devas beg him to forgive Daksha. They beg him to resurrect Daksha so that the yagna is not left unfinished. Shiva replaces Daksha’s head with that of a male goat, which was supposed to be the sacrificial offering. Symbolically, he reminds Daksha what true sacrifice is- that sacrifice of one’s animal nature and the realisation of one’s human nature. Only then will Praja-pati become Pashu-pati. Only then will fear give way to tranquillity.” (Pattanaik:2011:77-81)
“To help Parvati awaken Shiva, the Devas enlist the help of Kama, the god of desire. They tell him to shoot his arrows at Shiva …His entourage is made up of Apsaras, dancing damsels, and Gandharvas, celestial musicians. They hold aloft his banner which displays his symbol, the Makara, the constellation Capricorn. When the sun enters this constellation, winter gives way to spring, the cold earth is warmed with desire and like a flower opens itself to the sky…
When Kama shoots his arrows, Shiva remains unaffected. He simply opens his third eye. Out comes a missile of flames and sets Kama ablaze….reduced to ashes….The third eye of Shiva indicates transcendental wisdom. Implicit in the idea of desire, is the idea of choice…..The third eye therefore embodies absence of discrimination and choice, hence the absence of desire.” (Pattanaik:2011:83)
“Shiva refuses to respond to lust. That is why Kama fails. Shiva responds to prayer. That is why Kamakshi succeeds. She does not force Shiva to engage with the world; she beseeches him to do so….
12: The relationship between Shiva and Parvati is not based on power.
There is no conqueror and there is no conquest. Each one allows the other to dominate. Neither seeks to dominate the other. This is love.
In south India, the marriage of Shiva and Shakti turns the Goddess from a wild warrior into a demure consort. The domestication is mutual. While he stops being a hermit, she stops being wild. He surrenders to become the householder, and she surrenders to be his wife. From the fearsome Bhairavi, she becomes the pretty Lalita, as Shiva transforms into Shankara. …
By making Shakti half his body, Shiva declares to the world he is indeed Shankara, who empathises with the imperfections of worldly life….
Neither imagination, nor the wisdom that bursts out of it, has any meaning without nature. Wisdom exists for the world. Shiva and Shakti thus form one single unit.” (Pattanaik:2011:89-93)
The reason that I have introduced the concepts of karma and of Hubris and Nemesis into this language usage alongside that of sin, is to show the global experience of this change of ourselves and therefore the necessity of creating a language to describe it.
If we now witness mankind as a single larger organism within Nature, then may see that we did not individually choose to become settlers by some great act of evil from within us, but that we as a collective were trapped into it over a period of two thousand years, through a small habit of taking out an insurance policy of sowing grain, the repercussion of which was that all of the future generations found themselves in a land of increasing scarcity of resources due to the repercussion of desertification through the habit of settling.
The knowledge that we gained from the experience of settling by experiencing the nature of a social being in a larger community, that the grain goddess, Demeter, allowed us to know a new inner world of desire.
Each incremental shift towards extending this social aspect were sins from this original sin, forced upon future generations by their forebears in the very environment and cultural story that they were thrown into as the garment they wore, as the worlding they weaved (unlike Joseph and his coat of many ‘rainbow’ colours) simply because they were focused upon the ontological perspective of being-for-itself immediately by their experiences of the World as worlded by these people who were their world.
Original sin then is an a contagion within settled man. Contagion comes from the word tangent, meaning a change in direction, and as we have seen, this means a change in focus upon the centre, i.e. that upon which one is going towards, the goal, is directed by your will. This idea of an individual self, of another tangent, another path of experience to walk and know (pathein) took thousands of years to be trod before it became a clear path-way in the wilderness of the hunter-gatherers mind, as we saw from individual totemism, and then karmically to family, from being-for-itself, to being-for-others, as Hubris to Nemesis. God as an actual physical Being was not present, it was just that we were present within Natures presence. Does your love for your family feel like a sin, for me the answer is no, but I can see using the perspective of Epimetheus, that it has consequences, unforeseen, to our cave-man way of existence of the greater family of Nature.
It is this consequent perspective that creates the distance, that transmutes the spirit of the language of the words ‘family’ and ‘blood’ to be perceived differently and therefore experienced differently, and therefore acted upon differently- karmically- in a habit of thought that causes a lack- pain and desire- Nemesis, and we can see that it is a universal experience that came to bear upon humanity by 5,000 B.C.
Now that we have met the being-for-itself and seen his self-fashioned electrified cage, to be the accompanying, accursed natures released by Pandora, and the infinite punishment of ‘hopes’ or ‘Object-ives’, that can never be achieved due to their ontological lack of a true urgrund of possession. Now that we have tied all of this to the beginning of the settled life throughout the world and agriculture and the trap that it was to mankind. Now that we have ascertained what the fruit of knowledge really was and what sin really means. Now that we have understood that God’s punishments are merely a way of describing the repercussions of living out of harmony with Nature and our experience of these inner experiences as a part of that Nature, we may proceed to Babylon to discover how these beings-for-itself, stung by Zeus’s curse (as being-for-Others and myself-as-Object), proceed and project themselves onto the World.
How does the power of Object itself, trump the objectives of the family as objects, and expand its self to become a civilization? What is the experience that creates the words that transmutes the thoughts of civilized man from the family man?