- Joined
- Sep 23, 2014
- Messages
- 189
Drck,
It means that human adaptation is not adaptation to a given ecology, but to a definite mode of production comprised of none other than men and women themselves.
The reason why evolutionary psychology becomes popular and prevalent, is because it assumes that its premise, is a given, is simply a logical conclusion of Darwinism, which is that the essential basis of human consciousness, what we call "human behavior" in modern society, must have been selected for as a series of evolutionary adaptations. It ignores the fact that behaviors that are selected for for animals, are purely physical reflexes in relation to a set ecology, animals have habitats which they are hard-wired to conform to - the only 'human habitat', conversely, is produced by humans themselves - because humans define the conditions of their own existence. When animals select for this or that behavior, it is no different from a robot - it is purely mechanical, it is a PHYSICAL REFLEX they do not consciously control, or even are consciously aware of, they are "with" their biological needs, that is what they are - they are no different from automata. The more social an animal becomes, the more varied its behavior is allowed to become - but still, only within the context of a pre-defined ecological habitat that which their physical reflexes are selected to adapt to. Humans represent a CUTTING POINT, where we do not have instincts, or physical reflexes that determine our behavior - we possess complete and total control of our bodily movements where those bodily movements for us constitute human behavior. The domain that which we are allowed to control for this behavior, was not 'selected' for, for this assumes that the complexities of human consciousness as it is historical and social, pre-exists in the brain, when in reality, the brain merely FACILITATES the social dimension. Humans are not like ants, who are 'hard-wired' to act in a social way, humans act in a social way, because this social dimension IS ITS OWN dimension, which subsumse all others. That is why humans have fields of knowledge they call "biology" in the first place - how can one even talk or think about biology, if the contours of the same consciousness is a biological entity? But I digress. The underlying point is: Evo psych is pseudoscientific because it does not properly prove the hypothesis that it starts out with, by correctly controlling for the necessary variables. It observes real empirical phenomena, but it does not prove scientifically how this phenomena was 'selected' for, they don't even prove how it is innate empirically by locating it physiologically, and subsequently proving that this physiological structure is, and always will be responsible for X behavior. It attempts to make, in other words, ossified physiological basis's for ABSTRACTIONS. There is no 'innate' predisposition, for example, for rape, if the ways in which men rape, historically, alter and change in relation to their social totality. If rape was some innate instinct, as they say, then the expression of rape would not be able to vary as it does - otherwise, how does one isolate the phenomena of "rape" that can be abstracted from its real context, even as it relates to man's consciousness? They do this, of course, by attributing to ABSTRACTIONS IN THOUGHT, essential qualities - i.e. ideas and concepts are given an ontologically definite basis. That is why it is superstitious and pseudoscientific. The reason as to why it gained predominance, again, is because of how it relates to anti-democratic discourse, the notion of qualifying the inner essence of man's consciousness/being in a way that is external from his consciousness and being, outside of his social being. Because none other than men are qualifying in the first place, this is perfectly synonymous with the anti-democratic pathology, that men and women, or even onself is controlled by some mysterious force that is external from the contours of their own consciousness. The paradox begins when we ask: What is the evolutionary purpose, specifically, that can explain why humans are engaging in evolutionary psychology as a pseudoscience? What evolutionary psychological structure, innate process, is responsible for humans thinking about evolutionary psychology in the first place? This is clearly a paradox.
I am not denying that genes do in fact mutate and change. No one, actually, is saying that here. The point of controversy is that you are arguing that things like intelligence, speech, etc., are caused by genetic mutations, which is just as stupid as saying that chemical reactions are caused by atomic ones. One order facilitates the next, but chemical reactions are not reducible to atomic ones. This is very basic, Science 101 type stuff here, btw, and is in no way controversial. If you’re studying chemical phenomena, you are studying a different order of being than if you’re studying the quantic level, and you don’t explain the chemical relationships in terms of nuclear ones. I’ve addressed this in greater detail in my post specifically devoted to EP.
The essential basis of what it means to be human, is death drive, what Freud called but misinterpreted (Here is Freud's basic stupidity - falling back from his real observations, i.e. nonsense like eros and thanatos). Death drive is not what you think it is - it is not simply the desire to irrationally kill or die. Instead, what Lacan calls death drive, refers to a space between 'nature' and 'culture' which defines the essential basis of what it means to be human. This drive, refers to a 'crazy' kind of insistence beyond both life and death, in insistence on repetition, irreducible to any kind of survival utility, a total catastrophe is responsible for human existence, probably. Death drive, the sphere that is neither nature nor culture, but something in between, is best encapsulated by the screaming cries of a baby at birth. No other ape, no other mammal, or even animal in general, cries so irrationally and helplessly at birth, and why? Because other animals, no matter how social (i.e. chimps), their basis of existence is hard-wired. This 'wailing' at birth, represents the utter naked helplessness of the child, subject to further qualification by latching onto some kind of social/symbolic order that would allow it to define its own basis of existence, its own meaning. One only becomes human, by mimicking other humans, there is no dimension to being 'human', that is outside of this mimicry, outside of one's total subjugation to what Lacan calls the symbolic order, the means by which biological processes are facilitated by the social. Other animals, no matter how social, have varying degrees of physical reflex that are responsible for some of their behaviors. THERE IS NOT ONE physical reflex that is responsible for the contours of human social behavior, because one cannot assume the role of a zoologist investigating 'human behavior' and 'human instincts', YOU ARE A PART of this, even as you are pretending to play the zoologist and taxomonize them, YOU ARE ENGAGING in 'human behavior', what we call human social life. Kant said something which encapsulated this: Humans are the animal, which needs a master. No other animal, not chimps with their alpha males either, need a master to constitute themselves. Here, "master" does not mean domineering power figure, but in Lacanian terms master-signifier, i.e. humans need to be 'controlled' by the social totality they constitute, by their inter-relations toward each other, i.e. language. Zizek summarizes this quite nicely:
A naked man is the same nonsense as a shaved ape: without language (and tools and...), man is a crippled animal - it is this lack which is supplemented by symbolic institutions and tools, so that the point made obvious today, in popular culture figures like Robocop (man is simultaneously super-animal and crippled), holds from the very beginning. How do we pass from "natural" to "symbolic" environs? This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of "vanishing mediator," which is neither Nature nor Culture - this In-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be "repressed" by logos - the Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive. It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the "birth of man" are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a "being of language," bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly "perverted," "denaturalized", "derailed" nature which is not yet culture. In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny "unruliness" which seems to be inherent to human nature - a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one's own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this "unruliness" that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this "unruliness," not the animal nature in man.
In Hegel's Lectures on Philosophy of History, a similar role is played by the reference to "negroes": significantly, Hegel deals with "negroes" before history proper (which starts with ancient China), in the section entitled "The Natural Context or the Geographical Basis of World History": "negroes" stand there for the human spirit in its "state of nature," they are described as a kind of perverted, monstrous child, simultaneously naive and extremely corrupted, i.e. living in the pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precisely as such, the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards... [3] This In-between is the "repressed" of the narrative form (in this case, of Hegel's "large narrative" of world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of narratives. According to Schelling, prior to its assertion as the medium of the rational Word, the subject is the "infinite lack of being /unendliche Mangel an Sein/," the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itself. This insight also forms the core of Hegel's notion of madness: when Hegel determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itself, its "contraction," the cutting-off of its links with external reality, he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a "regression" to the level of the "animal soul" still embedded in its natural environs and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.). Does this withdrawal, on the contrary, not designate the severing of the links with the Umwelt, the end of the subject's immersion into its immediate natural environs, and is it, as such, not the founding gesture of "humanization"? Was this withdrawal-into-self not accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction to Cogito, which, as Derrida pointed out in his "Cogito and the history of madness", [4] also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness?
The problem with evolutionary psychologists, is that they assume man is in fact not a crippled animal, but that the essential basis of what it means to be what we call human, is something people "selected" for in an evolutionary way, i.e. something they already have outside the social/symbolic order. Human sexual practice, or human "behavior" (in disgusting ecological terms) in general, among other things, is now deemed to not only have an innate basis (which is baseless), but was apparently "selected". This is totally nonsensical, because the domain that is responsible for this "human behavior" is something that humans themselves are either consciously or subconsciously already immersed in, because OUTSIDE OF THE SOCIAL ORDER, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "HUMAN", but a very crippled person who would not even be able to walk on two feet. You are talking to me right now. We are talking about "humans". THIS VERY definition of the "human", what we conceive as human, is social. Otherwise, why are you talking to me about something you should not even be aware of, something that should simply, passively define the conditions of your existence? The point is quite simple: What is the PRACTICAL PURPOSE behind evolutioanry psychology? It is a scholasticism which attempts to explain phenomena in our society, in terms that give this phenomena an inevitable or primordial basis. It is almost a knee jerk reflex today - go on google, search "Why do we like scary movies" and I promise you, you will be given some pseudo-evolutionary explanation as to why scary movies are popular in our society. In doing this, they leap-frog over 200 years of Western philosophy, the highest spheres of intellectual achievement, and replace it with the most crass and juvenile narratives of human existence. So degenerate is our society, that over 200 years ago, in this very same domain of qualifying humans, thinkers were ahead of us. The assumption that we are living in the end of history, that present day capitalist relations constitute some inevitable human habitat or ecology, when these relations are not born out of some static balanced relationship with nature, but are constituted by none other than humans themselves. It is just like how Marx attacked the older political economists: THE MINUTE you introduce the historical dimension ,their scholasticism of capital falls apart. Neuroscientists accommodate for this by calling it the "Sapient Paradox", which is laughable considering only philistines think this is a paradox, i.e. who presuppose nonsensical notions of human essential existence that doesn't even fucking take into account historical change.
The main problem with this analogy is that you designate human IQ as the software, reducing consciousness to one’s intelligence variance, so you can tautologically persist in your pseudo-scientific reductionism. If you did any amount of research on what IQ tests actually measure, you would realize this.
E.g. from a random article from The Atlantic, on IQ:
Need we go on?
Masculinity is in your genes, eh? And women are genetically predisposed to submit to “stronger, powerful males”… This is ridiculous on so many levels… Can you even provide A SHRED evidence for a “masculinity” gene? A gene unique to women that causes them to be submissive to “Alpha Males”? Your apparent verification is that because many women are more attracted to men who display so-called dominant behaviors, this means it’s genetic. Do you see the problem? Besides being based on a tautology, the science also just isn’t there.
It means that human adaptation is not adaptation to a given ecology, but to a definite mode of production comprised of none other than men and women themselves.
The reason why evolutionary psychology becomes popular and prevalent, is because it assumes that its premise, is a given, is simply a logical conclusion of Darwinism, which is that the essential basis of human consciousness, what we call "human behavior" in modern society, must have been selected for as a series of evolutionary adaptations. It ignores the fact that behaviors that are selected for for animals, are purely physical reflexes in relation to a set ecology, animals have habitats which they are hard-wired to conform to - the only 'human habitat', conversely, is produced by humans themselves - because humans define the conditions of their own existence. When animals select for this or that behavior, it is no different from a robot - it is purely mechanical, it is a PHYSICAL REFLEX they do not consciously control, or even are consciously aware of, they are "with" their biological needs, that is what they are - they are no different from automata. The more social an animal becomes, the more varied its behavior is allowed to become - but still, only within the context of a pre-defined ecological habitat that which their physical reflexes are selected to adapt to. Humans represent a CUTTING POINT, where we do not have instincts, or physical reflexes that determine our behavior - we possess complete and total control of our bodily movements where those bodily movements for us constitute human behavior. The domain that which we are allowed to control for this behavior, was not 'selected' for, for this assumes that the complexities of human consciousness as it is historical and social, pre-exists in the brain, when in reality, the brain merely FACILITATES the social dimension. Humans are not like ants, who are 'hard-wired' to act in a social way, humans act in a social way, because this social dimension IS ITS OWN dimension, which subsumse all others. That is why humans have fields of knowledge they call "biology" in the first place - how can one even talk or think about biology, if the contours of the same consciousness is a biological entity? But I digress. The underlying point is: Evo psych is pseudoscientific because it does not properly prove the hypothesis that it starts out with, by correctly controlling for the necessary variables. It observes real empirical phenomena, but it does not prove scientifically how this phenomena was 'selected' for, they don't even prove how it is innate empirically by locating it physiologically, and subsequently proving that this physiological structure is, and always will be responsible for X behavior. It attempts to make, in other words, ossified physiological basis's for ABSTRACTIONS. There is no 'innate' predisposition, for example, for rape, if the ways in which men rape, historically, alter and change in relation to their social totality. If rape was some innate instinct, as they say, then the expression of rape would not be able to vary as it does - otherwise, how does one isolate the phenomena of "rape" that can be abstracted from its real context, even as it relates to man's consciousness? They do this, of course, by attributing to ABSTRACTIONS IN THOUGHT, essential qualities - i.e. ideas and concepts are given an ontologically definite basis. That is why it is superstitious and pseudoscientific. The reason as to why it gained predominance, again, is because of how it relates to anti-democratic discourse, the notion of qualifying the inner essence of man's consciousness/being in a way that is external from his consciousness and being, outside of his social being. Because none other than men are qualifying in the first place, this is perfectly synonymous with the anti-democratic pathology, that men and women, or even onself is controlled by some mysterious force that is external from the contours of their own consciousness. The paradox begins when we ask: What is the evolutionary purpose, specifically, that can explain why humans are engaging in evolutionary psychology as a pseudoscience? What evolutionary psychological structure, innate process, is responsible for humans thinking about evolutionary psychology in the first place? This is clearly a paradox.
I am not denying that genes do in fact mutate and change. No one, actually, is saying that here. The point of controversy is that you are arguing that things like intelligence, speech, etc., are caused by genetic mutations, which is just as stupid as saying that chemical reactions are caused by atomic ones. One order facilitates the next, but chemical reactions are not reducible to atomic ones. This is very basic, Science 101 type stuff here, btw, and is in no way controversial. If you’re studying chemical phenomena, you are studying a different order of being than if you’re studying the quantic level, and you don’t explain the chemical relationships in terms of nuclear ones. I’ve addressed this in greater detail in my post specifically devoted to EP.
The essential basis of what it means to be human, is death drive, what Freud called but misinterpreted (Here is Freud's basic stupidity - falling back from his real observations, i.e. nonsense like eros and thanatos). Death drive is not what you think it is - it is not simply the desire to irrationally kill or die. Instead, what Lacan calls death drive, refers to a space between 'nature' and 'culture' which defines the essential basis of what it means to be human. This drive, refers to a 'crazy' kind of insistence beyond both life and death, in insistence on repetition, irreducible to any kind of survival utility, a total catastrophe is responsible for human existence, probably. Death drive, the sphere that is neither nature nor culture, but something in between, is best encapsulated by the screaming cries of a baby at birth. No other ape, no other mammal, or even animal in general, cries so irrationally and helplessly at birth, and why? Because other animals, no matter how social (i.e. chimps), their basis of existence is hard-wired. This 'wailing' at birth, represents the utter naked helplessness of the child, subject to further qualification by latching onto some kind of social/symbolic order that would allow it to define its own basis of existence, its own meaning. One only becomes human, by mimicking other humans, there is no dimension to being 'human', that is outside of this mimicry, outside of one's total subjugation to what Lacan calls the symbolic order, the means by which biological processes are facilitated by the social. Other animals, no matter how social, have varying degrees of physical reflex that are responsible for some of their behaviors. THERE IS NOT ONE physical reflex that is responsible for the contours of human social behavior, because one cannot assume the role of a zoologist investigating 'human behavior' and 'human instincts', YOU ARE A PART of this, even as you are pretending to play the zoologist and taxomonize them, YOU ARE ENGAGING in 'human behavior', what we call human social life. Kant said something which encapsulated this: Humans are the animal, which needs a master. No other animal, not chimps with their alpha males either, need a master to constitute themselves. Here, "master" does not mean domineering power figure, but in Lacanian terms master-signifier, i.e. humans need to be 'controlled' by the social totality they constitute, by their inter-relations toward each other, i.e. language. Zizek summarizes this quite nicely:
A naked man is the same nonsense as a shaved ape: without language (and tools and...), man is a crippled animal - it is this lack which is supplemented by symbolic institutions and tools, so that the point made obvious today, in popular culture figures like Robocop (man is simultaneously super-animal and crippled), holds from the very beginning. How do we pass from "natural" to "symbolic" environs? This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of "vanishing mediator," which is neither Nature nor Culture - this In-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be "repressed" by logos - the Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive. It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the "birth of man" are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a "being of language," bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly "perverted," "denaturalized", "derailed" nature which is not yet culture. In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny "unruliness" which seems to be inherent to human nature - a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one's own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this "unruliness" that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this "unruliness," not the animal nature in man.
In Hegel's Lectures on Philosophy of History, a similar role is played by the reference to "negroes": significantly, Hegel deals with "negroes" before history proper (which starts with ancient China), in the section entitled "The Natural Context or the Geographical Basis of World History": "negroes" stand there for the human spirit in its "state of nature," they are described as a kind of perverted, monstrous child, simultaneously naive and extremely corrupted, i.e. living in the pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precisely as such, the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards... [3] This In-between is the "repressed" of the narrative form (in this case, of Hegel's "large narrative" of world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of narratives. According to Schelling, prior to its assertion as the medium of the rational Word, the subject is the "infinite lack of being /unendliche Mangel an Sein/," the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itself. This insight also forms the core of Hegel's notion of madness: when Hegel determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itself, its "contraction," the cutting-off of its links with external reality, he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a "regression" to the level of the "animal soul" still embedded in its natural environs and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.). Does this withdrawal, on the contrary, not designate the severing of the links with the Umwelt, the end of the subject's immersion into its immediate natural environs, and is it, as such, not the founding gesture of "humanization"? Was this withdrawal-into-self not accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction to Cogito, which, as Derrida pointed out in his "Cogito and the history of madness", [4] also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness?
The problem with evolutionary psychologists, is that they assume man is in fact not a crippled animal, but that the essential basis of what it means to be what we call human, is something people "selected" for in an evolutionary way, i.e. something they already have outside the social/symbolic order. Human sexual practice, or human "behavior" (in disgusting ecological terms) in general, among other things, is now deemed to not only have an innate basis (which is baseless), but was apparently "selected". This is totally nonsensical, because the domain that is responsible for this "human behavior" is something that humans themselves are either consciously or subconsciously already immersed in, because OUTSIDE OF THE SOCIAL ORDER, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "HUMAN", but a very crippled person who would not even be able to walk on two feet. You are talking to me right now. We are talking about "humans". THIS VERY definition of the "human", what we conceive as human, is social. Otherwise, why are you talking to me about something you should not even be aware of, something that should simply, passively define the conditions of your existence? The point is quite simple: What is the PRACTICAL PURPOSE behind evolutioanry psychology? It is a scholasticism which attempts to explain phenomena in our society, in terms that give this phenomena an inevitable or primordial basis. It is almost a knee jerk reflex today - go on google, search "Why do we like scary movies" and I promise you, you will be given some pseudo-evolutionary explanation as to why scary movies are popular in our society. In doing this, they leap-frog over 200 years of Western philosophy, the highest spheres of intellectual achievement, and replace it with the most crass and juvenile narratives of human existence. So degenerate is our society, that over 200 years ago, in this very same domain of qualifying humans, thinkers were ahead of us. The assumption that we are living in the end of history, that present day capitalist relations constitute some inevitable human habitat or ecology, when these relations are not born out of some static balanced relationship with nature, but are constituted by none other than humans themselves. It is just like how Marx attacked the older political economists: THE MINUTE you introduce the historical dimension ,their scholasticism of capital falls apart. Neuroscientists accommodate for this by calling it the "Sapient Paradox", which is laughable considering only philistines think this is a paradox, i.e. who presuppose nonsensical notions of human essential existence that doesn't even fucking take into account historical change.
The main problem with this analogy is that you designate human IQ as the software, reducing consciousness to one’s intelligence variance, so you can tautologically persist in your pseudo-scientific reductionism. If you did any amount of research on what IQ tests actually measure, you would realize this.
E.g. from a random article from The Atlantic, on IQ:
Need we go on?
Masculinity is in your genes, eh? And women are genetically predisposed to submit to “stronger, powerful males”… This is ridiculous on so many levels… Can you even provide A SHRED evidence for a “masculinity” gene? A gene unique to women that causes them to be submissive to “Alpha Males”? Your apparent verification is that because many women are more attracted to men who display so-called dominant behaviors, this means it’s genetic. Do you see the problem? Besides being based on a tautology, the science also just isn’t there.
I've always excelled at a more elegant, aloof style than an aggressive one. That was partly due to anxiety too. Nonetheless I've always been a bit of an asshole, albeit a quiet one. Now that I'm working on it, maybe I could incorporate some 'asshole game' like yours, into my style, although I can't for the life of me be that completely. Thanks
