Part one discussed Descartes, and Mind-Body Dualism. This part covers Lacan, the shrink from Hell... but first a quick look at the concept of Alienation.
[... and yes, I am going somewhere with all of this ;-) ...]
Alienation was originally a concept from the fields of jurisprudence and political economy. The world could be neatly divided between what was a person's own (proper to him - his property) and everything else (what was alien to him). Notably, [and as far as I know, I'm the first to note this notable] these 'classical' theories of property presume cartesian dualism: my mind and my free will are unalienably mine - everything else I may have, that is made of physical matter, is alienable property... not my essential self, and capable of being sold, lost, stolen, or floated on the stock market. My lands, my livestock, my labour and my right arm all fall into this category. In this theory, the ghost can sell his machine.
So alienation at this point just meant selling.
A more philosophical sense of the term was promoted by Hegel and Feuerbach, and brought to bloom in the writings of Karl Marx. For Marx, alienation was intrinsic to industrial capitalism. A worker sold his work and his time to a capitalist...who took posession of the product of the work. The worker had no control over what he produced or how: his work had no meaning. Marx saw this as robbing a person of his most basic human trait - to improve and adapt the world by co-operatively planning and executing work for the benefit of all concerned. Man was being turned into a mere machine: and was thereby being made miserable.
But wasn't this inherent in the empirical sciences on which industrial technology was based, which were cartesian to the marrow? Is capitalism underpinned by a mistaken, de-humanising mind/body dualism? I believe so, and I'll argue for that point in detail in an upcoming post. To be already a ghost in a machine, an atom of immaterial mind, is the root of all cruelty. Such an existential position is definitional of disocciation and psychosis: if I have no fundamental connection with the world, it matters little how I treat the world, or the people in it. If I'm Rene Descartes, and I believe in a Big Other - a God, who will zap my soul to perdition if I misbehave, I may act with balance: if I'm Andrew Carnegie, or Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or anyone who holds to the ghost in the machine theory - but doesn't dig the Holy Sky Ghost - it's harder to feel a good reason to be invariably ethical.
In any case, Marx's analysis of capitalism became well known, and stayed popular through a hundred years of social struggles, revolutions, and a brace of global wars.
After the second of these wars - Jacque Lacan tottered into the limelight.
To be continued...
[... and yes, I am going somewhere with all of this ;-) ...]
Alienation was originally a concept from the fields of jurisprudence and political economy. The world could be neatly divided between what was a person's own (proper to him - his property) and everything else (what was alien to him). Notably, [and as far as I know, I'm the first to note this notable] these 'classical' theories of property presume cartesian dualism: my mind and my free will are unalienably mine - everything else I may have, that is made of physical matter, is alienable property... not my essential self, and capable of being sold, lost, stolen, or floated on the stock market. My lands, my livestock, my labour and my right arm all fall into this category. In this theory, the ghost can sell his machine.
So alienation at this point just meant selling.
A more philosophical sense of the term was promoted by Hegel and Feuerbach, and brought to bloom in the writings of Karl Marx. For Marx, alienation was intrinsic to industrial capitalism. A worker sold his work and his time to a capitalist...who took posession of the product of the work. The worker had no control over what he produced or how: his work had no meaning. Marx saw this as robbing a person of his most basic human trait - to improve and adapt the world by co-operatively planning and executing work for the benefit of all concerned. Man was being turned into a mere machine: and was thereby being made miserable.
But wasn't this inherent in the empirical sciences on which industrial technology was based, which were cartesian to the marrow? Is capitalism underpinned by a mistaken, de-humanising mind/body dualism? I believe so, and I'll argue for that point in detail in an upcoming post. To be already a ghost in a machine, an atom of immaterial mind, is the root of all cruelty. Such an existential position is definitional of disocciation and psychosis: if I have no fundamental connection with the world, it matters little how I treat the world, or the people in it. If I'm Rene Descartes, and I believe in a Big Other - a God, who will zap my soul to perdition if I misbehave, I may act with balance: if I'm Andrew Carnegie, or Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or anyone who holds to the ghost in the machine theory - but doesn't dig the Holy Sky Ghost - it's harder to feel a good reason to be invariably ethical.
In any case, Marx's analysis of capitalism became well known, and stayed popular through a hundred years of social struggles, revolutions, and a brace of global wars.
After the second of these wars - Jacque Lacan tottered into the limelight.
To be continued...
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