“As soon as human beings attempt to
attain certainty about the totality of the world and life, they find
themselves faced with ultimate forms of incompatibility.”
“ It is from our experience of such
antinomy that there arises within us a vital will to unity.”
“Antinomies destroy and bifurcate,
and our experience of them amounts to standing within limit
situations.”
Incompatibilities, or contradictions,
permeate reality. In TPE we absolutize the master / slave
relationship, which keeps the dialectic and both antinomies alive in
a unique manner, affecting our experience of reality in a number of
fundamental ways. I will attempt to point towards them in the next
little section of blogworld. In this particular post in the series I
have a subintention as well, which is to provide an answer to the
objection raised in an earlier post towards use of the term "Total Power Exchange" or alternatively "Absolute Power Exchange".
Self certainty, from the perspective of
philosophical history and epistemology in particular, has a very
privileged place. It is from self certainty that Descartes arrives
at the absolute positing of the subject of the assertion, and the
subsequent subject object split has haunted epistemology since. If
the subject experiences only a representation of the posited
thing-in-itself, the thing-in-itself is never actually known. This
relativizing conception, generally known as subjectivism, has been
fought more or less successfully since in a number of philosophical
ideas. One of these is Hegel's conception of absolute knowledge, or
Spirit. For Hegel we are able to arrive, here at the end of History,
at absolute knowledge, because knowledge is able to know its own
knowing, and this double relation totalizes it, not quantitively, but
qualitatively. The sublation from self certain self consciousness
to absolute knowledge accomplished in the Phenomenology of Spirit
requires that Hegel explicate, and we experience, the unfolding of
the Master/slave dialectic. Hegel has been turned on his head a few
times since the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and for
good reason. But there remains something crucial in its exposition
that returns again in existential analysis.
In an earlier post I talked about the
limit situation and TPE as an example of such a situation. It was
posited there that in a limit situation such as TPE “ ... human
life knows itself drawn by a motive (idea), which extends it beyond
the forms, both subjective and objective, in which it customarily
exists." This is a bold statement. Within a recognized limit
situation such as TPE the human being is drawn beyond the forms of
subjective and objective reality. This totalizing move (totalizing
because it allows us to go beyond the relativizing subjectivism of
Descartes to a reconstitution of the world as a whole), obviates the
subject-object split, not merely within a theory, but practically as
well. Which brings us to another aspect of the limit situation.
Within it, the distinction between theory and practice, thought and
action, disappears as well. This is the second totalizing, or
absolutizing, move of the limit situation.
These things together produce the
situation where the human being can be aware of the totality of
world. World sounds a bit mysterious here, but a simple explanation
would be that World represents the sum total of meanings at our
disposal. We talk of worlds in this sense all the time, in fact,
when we use terms like “sports world” or “fashion world” - by
this denotation it describes a total of meanings that in turn
determine specific meanings, such that something like “walk”
means a positive thing in the “ baseball” world and a rather
negative one in the “business” world. We also call this context.
And the “text” in context is always intimately associated with
language as meaning. Jaspers notes a “splitting asunder” in the
limit situation as “the primary phenomenon of psychical life”.
But that splitting asunder also brings to light an unnoticed, a
priori unity, that must have always already existed before the limit
situation caused the splitting apart. Specifically with regard to
TPE this splitting asunder, that creates the Master/slave dichotomy,
points to the unity in which they exist a priori. And this pointing
at a unity, a totality, an absolute, which cannot be directly
experienced by finite, mortal man, is held fast in the TPE limit
situation, because it does not admit of a resolution.
For these reasons I believe we are
justified in the use of the term “Total Power Exchange” (or
“Absolute Power Exchange” when we are asked to describe what it
is that we do. We do not need to replace this term with the new
“Internal Enslavement”, because while IE is in itself a useful
term, and implies things of matter to the practice of TPE, by itself
IE implies that subjectivism and relativism that we seek to overcome;
implies that the slave enslaves himself, internally, in a
representing activity, rather than being enslaved in a dialectical
process whereby he first and finally becomes himself, as slave, and
the Master first becomes Master.
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