apperception, posts by tag: philosophy of nature - LiveJournal

A Seminal Connexion to the Collective Unconscious of Stupidity

I notice there's been a sharp increase in stupid posts and comments on both philosophy and real_philosophy. Here are just a few things that have popped up out of the woodwork in the last week:

• You have this arrogant Objectivist monkey who seemingly came out of nowhere.



• There's this guy who might not actually be that stupid, but his post definitely generated a lot of stupid comments and pointless back-and-forths.



• Then you have this moron who thinks he's clever because he's used propositional logic to refute Plato. (He's so smart that he doesn't realize you need predicate logic to properly represent the argument.)



• On top of that you have the usual stupid shit from 4inquiries aka mucilofamucil.



• The post was deleted (after it was up for three or four days), but some hippie shithead posted this garbage to real_philosophy last week. I thought the person couldn't possibly be for real, but it turns out he is.

What I'm wondering is, why do the communities remain quiet for so long, only to suddenly erupt with stupid posts? Why is this happening now as opposed to a few weeks ago?

I'd like to present to you a possible explanation for why this is taking place. For simplicity sake, we'll call this "The apperception and zentiger Hypothesis: A Seminal Connexion to the Collective Unconscious of Stupidity". Allow me to explain.

According to our hypothesis, once the fall semester starts in September, all the white, privileged philosophy boys start feeling smart and important, so now they have lots to contribute to the communities.

In the summer, they're too busy trying to get laid. Not only have they been too busy to think about philosophy, but this entire time, their inability to get laid has actually forced the semen to back up within their bodies. The semen gets into the brain itself, in between the neurons in the prefrontal cortex (the center of manners and higher thought processes), keeping them from firing. All rational, reflective thought processes -- assuming they were there to begin with -- cease. So by the time September comes around, only the reptilian portion of the brain is working.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Because the rational thought processes are shut down and only the reptilian portion of the brain is functioning, they're actually more passive, more in touch with nature and the collective unconscious. In particular, they're in touch with a special part of the collective unconscious, one that Jung himself didn't know about. It's the part of the collective unconscious devoted to being a cocky philosophy kid who acts like he knows a lot more than he actually does.

You see, Jung theorized that each of us has an unconscious but also that each of us is connected to something called the "collective unconscious" which is a kind of shared repository of memories, histories, and even discrete persona which he called "archetypes". According to this theory, you can imagine each of us, not as discrete individuals existing absolutely independently of one another, but rather as the tips of the spokes of a wheel, all connected at the center.

Now our hypothesis is that some of these spokes terminate in a special region of the collective unconscious, the archetype of the horny, poorly socialized philosophy undergrad who fails miserably in every other portion of his life and so feels compelled to be a cocky little shit on the internet.

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According to the apperception and zentiger Hypothesis, the connection to this archetype remains active to greater or lesser degrees throughout the year. The connection is most dormant at the beginning of the summer, after the student's sophistical abilities have been burnt out by finals. But over the course of the summer, the student, roused to more prurient interests by the oppressive July sun and the appearance of scantily clad women, suffers a build-up of semen. This semen works its way up through the student's body (since it has nowhere else to go) until it finally reaches the brain. Once the sperm has sufficiently worked its way into the prefrontal cortex and burnt out the higher functions of the brain, the reptilian brain can take over once again, thus reactivating the previously dormant connection with the rude, awful archetype.

Our hypothesis is that this happens universally amongst privileged, undergrad philosophy students, and this is why they all pop out of the woodwork at the same time, en masse.

ETA: It has recently come to our attention that kira_speaks is female, not male. Some may believe this disproves the hypothesis, but it does not. The hypothesis posits an explanation for the behavior of irritating male philosophy kids, but it does not purport to explain the behavior of irritating philosophy kids überhaupt. Nevertheless, this revelation has led zentiger to come up with the zentiger Corollary to the apperception and zentiger hypothesis:

Though, as all know, the most common cause of this unification with the Jungian archetype is biological, it is, in degenerate cases, possible to gain such a connection by creating a backup of similar material. The most obvious source of this material is, of course, Objectivism, which - again, as all know - is philosophically precisely equivalent to semen, and so can have the same effect on the rational processes of the brain.

That is, while kira_speaks does not have semen backing up into her brain, she does have Objectivism inside her brain, and this causes the same cessation of rational thought processes, thus igniting the connection the annoying archetype in the Jungian collective unconscious. Just think of Objectivism as if it were a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that doesn't kill the host but renders it more or less like a zombie in perpetuity.

Now, as it turns out, kira_speaks is home-schooled. (Heroes don't go to university.) This means that her popping out of the woodwork at this precise moment can't be explained by the commencement of the fall semester. But her action is intelligible if one keeps in mind that she is connected to the same portion of the collective unconscious as her fellow annoying philosophy asshats. kira_speaks, therefore, is responding neither to an excess of semen in the brain nor the particular time of the year but rather is responding to psychic signals transmitted to her by means of the spokes of the collective unconscious. This acausal connection is what Jung referred to as synchronicity. (It's sort of like when you're thinking about someone you haven't spoken to in ages, and all of the sudden the phone rings and it's that person.) What happens is, if you're really strongly connected to that archetype of the collective unconscious (as Objectivists always are, due to the brain damage and interest in abstract nonsense), then you will feel the pull, quite strongly in fact, to join in with your fellow morons in realizing pure philosophy doucheness.

So as it turns out, the fact that this individual is female actually supports The apperception & zentiger Hypothesis.

Caroline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel, wife of the Romantic poet/theorist August Schlegel, led an unusually emancipated life for a woman in the 18th century. She was a German Jacobin in Mainz (a city in the west part of Germany that attempted its own version of the French Revolution), and when that city was recaptured by German authorities, she was imprisoned. She was banished from her hometown when it was discovered she had become pregnant by a French officer.

Initially she didn't want to marry August Schlegel and actually found the proposition "laughable", but then after her release from prison she decided it would be a more prudent life direction than the one she had hitherto followed. Together they moved to Jena in the late-1790's.

Now, Jena at that point was the hippest place in all of Germany to be. It was a center of Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Fichte and Schelling both lectured there. The university was overseen and organized by none other than Goethe himself, then the Minister of Culture in Weimar. It was the birthplace of post-Kantian philosophy and German Romanticism, and in the first years of the 19th century, it was home to Hegel and the Critical Journal of Philosophy, the principle organ of Schellingian thought.

When August Schlegel moved there, Schelling quickly made the acquaintance of Caroline Schlegel. He was 23, she was 35 with a history of falling for younger men. She possessed a certain independence of mind that attracted some of the men around her and frightened a great many more. For example, Goethe liked her, but Schiller referred to her as "Dame Lucifer". But Schelling being as he was, and Caroline being as she was, a torrid love affair quickly sparked up between the two of them. This state of affairs was so obvious to everyone that, in 1802, Caroline, August Schlegel, and Schelling met together in Berlin to work out the details of the problem. With Goethe intervening, Caroline got a divorce, and she and Schelling were married in 1803.

Now here's where it gets funny. Before the affair had even begun, Caroline Schlegel's daughter from her first marriage was engaged to Schelling. In 1800 the daughter became ill, and according to a rumor that was floating around Jena, Caroline and Schelling attempted to cure the daughter of her illness using principles found in Schelling's "philosophy of nature".¹ This, of course, led to the daughter's death. Another rumor got started that Caroline Schlegel had had her own daughter killed in order that she might have Schelling all to herself. Both of these insinuations actually made the front page of the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung, the main organ in all of Germany for Kantian philosophy! (If philosophical journals nowadays contained this sort of trash, I'd probably read more of them!)

Hegel himself never liked Caroline Schlegel. He never had an easy time with independent women anyway, but Caroline was a bit much to take, and the fact that his friend Schelling married her in the midst of all this scandal didn't make matters any better. After her death he remarked to Immanuel Niethammer that many "have enunciated the hypothesis that the Devil had fetched her". He also said of Niethammer's own wife that God should "preserve her as befits her merit ten times longer than" Caroline Schlegel.

(One can read more about Hegel and the Jena Romantics in Terry Pinkard's Hegel biography, which is what I'm reading now.)

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¹ "Philosophy of nature" is the often hilarious attempt of people to use reason alone to compete with natural science in the attempt to discover truths about the world. For example, Leibniz attempted to demonstrate that reason alone tells us there is more than a vis mortua (mechanical force) in the universe; there is also vis viva, a kind of living principle of matter itself upon which physics must rely. Newton hypothesized that the laws of nature themselves (as he had presented them) could not account for everything in the universe, and so we must rely upon divine explanation. Kant attempted to argue from reason alone that every event has a cause. There was a big debate at the end of the 18th century, after the publication of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, as to whether or not there was one force in the universe or whether there had to be at least two, again, all attempted on the basis of a priori reasoning alone. This led to much postulating about the "attractive" and "repulsive" forces in matter. Schelling devotes a portion of his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism to a discussion of electromagnetism. I take it the reference to Schelling's "philosophy of nature" here probably has something to do with that. Since this was before the age where you could toss a hair dryer or toaster into a bath tub with someone, we can only guess what his slanderers had in mind!

NB: It should also be noted that there are contemporary "philosophies of nature" that do not present themselves as such but which for all practical purposes rival their ancestors in terms of dogmatism. I of course have in mind here thoughts along the lines of "Everything that exists is physical", "The universe is causally closed", and any other methodological assumption of the sciences that bad scientists and bad students of philosophy raise to the majesty of a divine creed.