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[This essay is directed to the identification of the 'phenomenological kernels' that account for the mental and physical constitution of 'the human phenomenon and things human' -the etiology of 'the human condition' therein. Necessarily then, they consolidate various characterizations of 'human properties' and bridge some of that soft-science theorization into the 'phenomenology of human-being' as -critically, yet to be commonly and properly understood and accommodated into 'meliorating' that condition.] |
CONGREGATIONAL SEXUALITY is a primary property of human evolution, two people 'communing', even homosexual and allowing for no reproduction otherwise, generally 'superceding' two non-communing in one way or another. A genetic property we identify
with anthropoids in general, congregational sexuality(*1) is critically underrated as the basis of and permeating everything we identify with humanity: directly or indirectly, 'the human phenomenon and all things human' are
consequent, sustaining or promotional of some aspect of sexual expression.
Thruout the world however, sexual expression today is 'little better than of primitive communion': despite civilizational advances -science and technology greatly transforming and influencing that expression, the operations of neither gender reflect a
relatively coherent understanding and assimilation of the physiology of either sex and its roles in what is essentially hominid-being sexual expression (Feminism, Male Sex, Evolution and Jail). The thesis here
is that insofar as that expression continues to manifest the more or less mechanical mental and physical cast of 'primitive-vertebrate-pecking-order', it will continue to be a major source of 'noise as human condition': however seemingly
removed from sex or 'intellectually esoteric', there is no aspect of 'the human phenomenon and things human' that does not reflect evolutional progression in 'sex, cerebration, warm-blooded pecking-order and (the) deliberative capability
(next) that makes this statement possible.
(*d) DELIBERATIVE CAPABILITY -'registering and assimilating various stimuli into increasingly complex, hierarchic cogitation', is a property we typically associate with humans and certain primates. Perhaps best identified with
our relatively open-ended capacity for mentation and, eventually, reification -'making the abstract concrete', it is this property that distinguishes us by our 'humanity and generation of things human' thru which we are able, in effect, to
'consider these such items and their consequences and implications'(*3). It is in this respect -humans having this capability, that we 'might do better' to advantage ourselves of information we have regarding the physicality of
'how we are constituted' and 'how we have come to be this way': that the existence of any and every organism has come about solely thru the evolution of 'a form more primitive than itself', a consequence of the solely physical properties,
circumstances and juxtapositions of matter:
1 - Deliberative capability is the purely physical and only mechanism thru which 'the human phenomenon and things human' come to exist -not 'special insight', nor 'soul', nor 'creative spirit' nor something 'extra-hominid'. Solely 'the
nature of matter', we are literally (and physically) 'evolved out of and born into ignorance' -everything evolving out of ignorance alone except (obviously) as influenced by and influencing other -but still purely physical, phenomena and
factors likewise assimilated and deliberated out of ignorance.
2 - There is no way for an organism to exist other than experientially, physically registering 'statistically qualifiable, evolutionally significant operation of, by and upon physical-sensation-and-phenomenon'. It is the nature of
this still-evolving property consequently, that-
(*b)
'IDLE-MINDNESS' - There is nothing 'naturally ready-and-present' to occupy 'the unoccupied mind' other than what experience has caused, precipitated or -critically, what someone-or-society may have 'deliberated' to be registrable and registered
there. As essential antithesis of 'deliberate' (or even inadvertently 'captive') mental occupation, the 'idle-mind state' is the state of potential occupation 'out' of which deliberative capability operates in the generation of 'knowledge'. It is
thus, the physicality of circumstance, situation and the 'idle-mind-state' in particular and alone that underlie the 'freedom of choice' of one's persona and out of which, consequently, 'life-style-and-quality' and the culture of a people evolve.
The 'idle-mind state' in this respect, goes unappreciated for the fact of its transiency -that it is occupied immediately by anything from 'physiologically internal' to whatever situation circumstance happens to present -'naturally,
deliberately and/or serendipitously'
-even to graffiti and 'mindless vandalism'.
[Anyone doubting the existence of 'idle-mind time' and 'idle-mind occupation' need look no further than Dear Abby or Ann Landers for example -for the complaints of wives about retired husbands who, 'having nothing better to do', follow them around the
kitchen, the laundry and anywhere else either babbling or telling them how to do their work. Be that what it be, one might also consider the role this property plays in economics today and our use of the resource/environment -GameBoy playing, cell-phone
chatting, flicking-on the TV ('nothing better to do'), The Scorpion King? -see 'Business' and 'Making money'.]
What occupation there is, 'genetically speaking', is only whatever 'indefinable primitive idiomatics' there are that attach basic evolution of 'a sexually congregational organism of deliberative capability' -neonate sucking, hand-to-mouth motions,
certain imprintings and, growingly, physiological sensitivities and capabilities registering experience thru genetic disposition -learning mechanisms and eventually evolving companionship and sex. What occupation ultimately depends upon then (learning,
knowledge), is its physiologically material constitution and the 'dimensions, mass and quality of experience entered and entering that constitution', the antithesis of which is sensory deprivation. -It is the 'how' and 'by what' of that
occupation that is a major factor in the human condition. Idle-mind-occupation, consequently, goes unappreciated for how it plays into 'the nature and constitution of human-being'; present-day life-style-and-quality, persona and culture, consequently,
continue to be based largely upon 'hominid-being survival-of-the-fittest' pecking-order(*5).
[Primitive and early man had little 'idle-mind time', taken-up as all time was either by just trying to stay alive or recovering from that -largely a matter of where one stood in 'the pecking-order of things'. But one has only to observe someone with
'nothing to do' -clinically, to understand the importance of 'meritable experience' in life-style-and-quality. In the absence of viability-related or motivating circumstances, the idle mind is occupied either 'best as can out of experience' or it
defaults: the 'financially able to indulge themselves' do so, for example, and the destitute or unemployable beg, steal, vandalize, drink or drug-out. It remains the 'how' and 'by what' of that occupation that is a major factor in the human
condition.]
The thesis here is that it is not true that we 'know' 'how' 'what kind' of 'idle-mind occupation' should or can play into 'life-style-and-quality and what the system can bear' -except deliberatively and heuristically. In terms of such an
organism and its increasingly complex society, it is rather 'a poverty of progressive, communal experience' that leads to 'an impoverished communal presence and response', and it is the 'human-organism-advancing occupation' of this idle-mind state by
physically experiential knowledge (-there is no other) that determines the meaning and content of 'hominid-being', 'the human condition' and 'the nature and constitution of human-being'.
(*2)
THE IDIOMATICS is 'the body of generalized beliefs, thought processes and modes of confrontation and expression variously common to most peoples of the world'; essentially 'what it is the nature of things to be' (especially men and women: 'You
can't change human nature') or 'what they ought to be' -a kind of hominid-being ethos. It includes for example, both the 'inner rights' of 'looking good' and 'having fun' and the outer but universal interrelationships and expressions of 'nurturing (soft)
womanhood', 'provident (strong) manhood' and the 'propriety of having children', of 'belonging' and the 'primacy of one's kind and ways' (-expressions of shame and insult -'saving face', machismo, 'gay pride', 'self esteem' etc), of practices in 'powers
unknowable to us' (religion of any form) and of various work and play criteria and ethics -'merit', 'worth', 'ownership' et cetera. (See Organizational Aspects of 'The Human Phenomenon and Things Human' and Roget's Thesaurus and 'The System of Human Experience').
What the idiomatics 'do', in effect, is constitute a vocabulary and structure -society and government, for manipulating 'daily-essential situation and circumstance'. Little more than 'communicational glue', they inherently lag 'timely assimilation of the
phenomenology'. It is this logical softness, consequently, which accounts for the relative ease with which people factionalize religious, political and other 'truths' -'the human condition'. -There is no mystery in the observation that discussion,
territoriality, disagreement, manifest pecking-order and even violence, for example, and the various governmental and other organizational structures under which they exist, all have certain universally common developmental, procedural, 'textural'
and inherently non-resolutional elements about them.
'The idiomatics' then, invest the persona and 'momentum' of the human condition in such a way that internal differences and even small factionalisms that may be relatively unobtrusive in the general sustenance of isolated peoples invariably become
the first and major source of 'disharmony' as those peoples 'overpopulate' against each other -incompatibly, under 'what the system can bear', and they are important -in a 'pejorative' sense, because they predispose communication to failure by belief in
'phenomenology that isn't'. -'Melioration of the human condition can be expedited', consequently, only to the extent that that 'phenomenology' is corrected.
(*c) MOMENTUM - We are 'physiologically disposed' to the daily routines that characterize us, and there is therefore, very much an equally physical momentum in 'the human phenomenon and generation of things human': it is
only under some system of atoms disposed to the survival and propagation of the human organism that an automobile exists and is driveable and driven. What is important here is the understatement of momentum in 'the mass of humanity and its
million-and-a-half-years nature-of-evolution-driven idiomatics' -day-to-day, generation-to-generation propulsion of the human condition. 'You can't change people' and 'That's the way people are', but 'the nature and constitution of human-being' is
increasingly and ultimately a matter of 'the heuristic determination of life-style-and-quality under what the system can bear'. The only question then, is to what urgency this momentum may be understood and reconstituted so as to 'meliorate
various otherwise inherent disasters'.
(*f)
[PAIN AND LIFE-STYLE-AND-QUALITY - It is intrinsic of warm-blooded vertebrate evolution that pecking-order is based on pain and that 'successful peckers' consequently enjoy something of 'an accordingly convenienced viability'. Given that,
'deliberative capability' and certain other mutations, hominid evolution is generally marked by 'peckers one-upping and superceding each other by successive assimilation of ecosystem constitution' -idle-mind-time eventually, and 'life-style-and-quality'
-the whole of such evolution, 'a machine that goes by itself'.]
PAIN constitutes a major 'tool and criterion' underlying the hierarchization and generally upward complexity of vertebrate evolution -what one animal learns to avoid in the course of its basic survival -and what 'one hominid applies another in the
deferral of pain to himself and his own'. Whatever our interactions, their evolution reflects this 'survival-based, downwardly-exacted facilitation of viability. (-Nor should the 'physical discomfiture or depression of absent sex-and-companionship' be
considered less than painful.)
But because pain is not 'usually encountered or acceptably used' in general daily life, it is not appreciated how critically integral that 'primitive application of pain and avoidance of possible pain' were to our evolution, and how, consequently, pain
continues to underlie 'the human phenomenon and all things human' -that it is only thru 'further deliberative capability' in addition (that) we have constructed upon 'relatively mechanistic pecking-order and survival-of-the-fittest', the personas,
culture and life-style-and-quality, the family, government and all other structures we presently associate with 'human-being'. (See Pecking Order, Competition, Institution, Government and Economic Policy.)
It is increasingly 'the nature of man' however, to find his pain-and-pecking-order-based institutionalizations constraining his life-style-and-quality and to find it 'increasingly practical', consequently, to degrade them in that progression. What
this means is that despite 'a certain usefulness of societal and civilizational structures primitively based in pain, those structures will continue to be superceded under increasingly phenomenological, inherently broader-based and 'better
intellectualized' criteria(*6).
LIFE-STYLE-AND-QUALITY is a personal holding more or less defined by the whole of 'idle-mind-time, the substance of that occupation and the potentials for both', and it exists, essentially, as 'the substance-and-measure of
idle-mind-occupation in excess (or deficit) of occupation towards some basic viability'(*7).
Humans generally supercede each other not by 'reinventing the wheel' or by arbitrarily adopting the idle-mind-occupation of others, but by assimilating routine mechanisms of viability and, more generally, by learning, optimizing and exploring-for
(oftentimes unknowingly) other 'viability-advancing properties of econiche constituency' -essentially increasing knowledge: the greater the assimilation of the phenomenology, the greater the configuration space entering both viability and
life-style-and-quality(*8). -Whatever the course of human evolution 'appears' to be or have been in the past then, it is the nature of life-style-and-quality -superceding existing 'propriety', 'value' and other idiomatic
expressions of 'human nature' basis and development, to be increasingly determined by 'phenomeknowledgy'.
(*e)
ARISTOCRATIZATION AND VIABILITY - The supercessions of mankind -one genus or strain of hominids by another, false starts and dead branches included, is characterizable as an 'aristocratization' in that each such hominid is 'increasing-potentially
capable of manifesting a more phenomenologically knowledgeable viability and idle-mind-occupation' -a more sophisticated life-style-and-quality. In this respect, 'aristocratization' naturally entails 'an optimization of its physiological
constitution and viability under what the system can bear' as, ultimately, an only way of 'optimizing life-style-and-quality'. -Thus despite having no way of knowing how life-style-and-quality might be 'better constituted' than thru (present
example) 'materiality', to some aristocratization it will forever be 'increasingly and heuristically determined by knowledge -and what materiality develops from that'.
feedback? -perryb@condition.org
First posted: November 7, 1995; Last modified May 27, 2010