Why is the Understanding "astonishing"? §32 Phenomenology

(?)The understanding is astonishing because a bland undifferentiated abstraction about 'the whole' is on the tip of the Spirit's tongue---Wouldn't an undifferentiated whole be economical, at least? Why difference? Maybe Parmenidies should be right? Then the understanding, fueled by "magic" and death, somehow "astonishingly" reveals (reveals?) difference and determinateness. Is THAT why the understanding is "astonishing"??---WHY is it astonishing? 

What would the 'Idea' be if understanding didn't 'tarry with the negative' and provide Geist with things like difference and determinateness? I want to say: it's "the circle that remains self-enclosed", and that would be my whole world. Can you even think "a world in which there is no Understanding"? 

If the understanding is astonishing it's because somehow the world might easily have been an undifferentiated whole. The Understanding is the power of death, maintaining itself in "devastation", that astonishingly brings us difference and freedom. Doesn't §32 make it sound that way? 

only women can fix the universe

Sure, you might say good things about men. But the experience of male anger, violence, and ugliness is so big it eclipses everything else about men---so big you can live in it; indeed the world does live in it, and male violence runs the world. 

Unfortunately, in the final analysis, the entire universe is somehow at fault for the male stain. Being itself is marked, it goes 'all the way down'---it's everywhere. 

Only women can fix this. 

radical feminism & the uber-frau

Nature leans on women more heavily than on men. Whether in a "state of nature" or in a competitive capitalist society, a solitary pregnant woman has a harder time racing for resources. Pregnancy and child birth also threaten women's lives, they're very dangerous. Mother Nature does not cut womankind a bonus check for being tasked with doing the physical work of reproducing humanity. At its core, feminism must at some point be the tragic adventure of seeking---per impossible---reparations from the universe itself. We might call it 'the tragic pursuit of ontological reparations'. Radical feminism must be informed by this "wrestling with an angel". Anything less is just an incrementalist Political Action Group.

Put another way: testosterone is stupid---an intelligently designed universe would not be motivated by this muti-tasking chemical with so many undesirable side-effects. Testosterone is stupid, therefore sexual reproduction is stupid . . . therefore the dialectic itself is stupid! Feminism must rescue the dialectic from this farce. Feminism's job is nothing less than to somehow save Being itself. 

It takes an Uber-Frau, or no? 

get the "air mattress"

heard a story today about very old woman who died bc her guts basically ruptured everywhere inside. she might have lived but she didn't want to live with a colostomy bag. she was at least 85. she fell bad. bones were fine but her insides were mush. she was in the hospital for months but then finally the hospice. she was very uncomfortable at the hospital. she was in a lot of pain, even though she took a lot of narcotics. still a lot of pain at the hospice, but felt much improved bc she used an "air mattress". it's a thing. get the air mattress. I can't believe there isn't a run on them. 

http://www.medicalairmattress.com/mdt24supradps.htm

quick thought on Hegel's dialectic as ontological machinery, the lastman & Nietzsche

Hegel's dialectics are written into the heart of being itself and matter/"substance", the result is a universe that thrums---the ubiquitous, eternal back and forth of the dialectic in theory and in practice. Dialectics is ontological machinery. Hegel's ontology is just as 'mechanical' as Newton's physics. It is love of technology that leads Hegel here. Hegel is a Last Man.

So, maybe Nietzsche ought to have the last word here, as an advocate for chaos?---If you don't admit chaos into the mix, then you're left with a dull, dialectically/mechanically churning universe.  

As an admirer of Hegel's Logic & Phenom. this is a tough choice. But then again, how can Hegel guarantee that the negative proceeds so smoothly? Why isn't the negative wild?---How do we know it isn't? 

notes on the left's traumatic origin of the self; thrown vs. smeared; & glimpse of a creator that isn't a hater

I'm not sure what I mean by "the left". What I intend to point to is not a homogenous theory, but rather all that thinking that involves bringing together Marx, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, et al. I might point to Sartre or Zizek as famous examples----but then I'm not trying to describe only Zizek's theory of the self, object...etc. 

I'm an atheist, but what I'll get to is the best possible (to my mind) argument in favor of a not so horrible god or gods, or whatever---just there is a creator and it doesn't completely hate us.

The left often teaches that self-awareness is originated in a kind of ontological/psychological/developmental trauma at some point in infancy. At birth we are not aware of ourselves, but later we are aware of ourselves. That change is traumatic. In the transition we find ourselves but we also find the other, "the other" being the correlative of the self. The object is also originated here, the object as such being just anything that is not-me.

Before I come to self-awareness my desires and their fulfillment are one and the same. My non-self, my self before it is aware of itself, does not, cannot, distinguish between a desire and its fulfillment. It is hard to flesh-out the experience of a non-self-aware human, but that is what is required. Julia Kristeva calls it the "chora" (eg http://goo.gl/ygTjZb , 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810844). Within the chora desires and their fulfillment are seamless, which is very very nice for me. A warm OM. No 'me', no other, no questions, no answers, no work, no drama. 

However, eventually I arrive at myself. There is an experience of difference, a gulf between my self and all things (that gulf is grounded in the fact that there is now a gulf between myself and myself---see Hegel's notion of "self-othering" in the Phenom., et al). Suddenly there is an other out there who delivers the fulfillment of my desires (think mouth to breast), I am dependent on them. Desire and its fulfillment are divorced when I become aware of my self. They might be cobbled together again . . . but it all depends. This new element of dependency and difference, a space, a void, a presence of an absence, between my self and the fulfillment of my desires is a shock---an ontological/psychological shock. It's a shock, some might say, we are never done working through. Even if one is of 'perfect' health psychologically, there is still the problem of selfhood to work through. The origin of the self then is necessarily at the very same time the self's introduction to the negative, to nothingness. Me, the negative, the other, the object---they are conjoined twins born at the same time.

Our "tarrying with the negative" does not begin within some exquisite existential event, it begins with you at the very moment you become self-aware. My very own self is the embodiment of the shock of the negative. There is no happy place at the core of my being. 

Now the problem with the left's shock theory described above is this: we are not *thrown* into the world; or rather, I'm not thrown into my self-awareness. Empirically speaking, the development of my self-awareness is so very extremely, ridiculously slow it makes the precise location of the origin of self-awareness impossible. And that's it! The benevolence, the god part. We aren't thrown, we're smeared---verrrrry sloooowly smeared. Smeared with love. Smeared into the world so slowly that the trauma that ordinarily attends the introduction of difference is avoided.

I'm still an atheist, and in the end I actually think we're thrown. Thrown because one can actually recover the shock of the introduction of difference (see Sartre's Nausea, for instance). Though, it sure looks like we're smeared. Like I said at the beginning, I don't find the smear theory persuasive, it's just the "best possible" argument 

the Last Man needs an apologist

contemporary humanity is invested in the belief that the world necessarily progresses over time. looking for progress, technological progress stands out because that kind of progress is so easy for us to discern---it's easy to measure the ever increasing speed of CPUs over time, less so something like the amount of justice in the world. So, the contemporary pursuit of progress leads to the pursuit of technological progress. Perceived progress turns our worldview into a virtue and renders it legitimate and realized. Being wed to technological progress in this way is to be a Last Man. Our condition is inescapable. The point then is not (per impossible) to resist; rather, the Last Man needs an apologist.