The problem with worshippers of Lacan and “irrational psyches” is that everything looks like a nail. (True of most groups, but anyways…) Some parts of the psyche are pretty straightforward. Other parts are riddled with one or more PARADOXes. If you look for PARADOX everywhere, you can hardly proceed. It is one place where you cannot let the obstacle become the way.
I loved Scott’s post on Lacan yesterday for a few reasons, but something felt a bit wrong with its frame on applicability. Seemed like it erred toward a standard rationalist mistake of “is this everywhere, or a bad model?” The gradations of hypothesis seemed more like they were over intensities or amounts, rather than situations. Instead, what seems clear to me is that it’s a great model for many [deep, fundamental] twists of the psyche, but a flatly wrong and very destructive model in many other cases. I think rationalists fear Lacanian things partlyyyy because everyone who gets into them goes insane (fair) but partly because rationalists, like much of Western culture, implicitly assume universal applicability of knowledge. Universalize the Lacanian paradigm and that way lies madness; understand the Lacanian underpinnings of some key patterns (hatred of billionaires) and the world will just be more hospitable. Very general and important principle: If you know the bounds of applicability, you’re at much less danger from an ideology.
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One theme I like around all the ideologies grappling with PARADOX is that they help with some deep version of the virtue of lightness. At least for someone bound up in rationalism habits of thought like myself, there is a deep relief I get when briefly immersing myself in places with acknowledged PARADOX, like Zizek or the TV show Legion. You can’t just keep clenching forward or you’ll get burned by your own pigheadedness, so you have to do an extremely central version of “going with the flow”.
(Lacan: “ah, so you’d like to do this more often but are unwilling to go out on a limb because you’d lose status in the eyes of your culture, so instead you like to use the cover of ‘truth-seeking’ to put yourself in situations that will demand deep unclenching from you?” “yes Lacan, but it’s a fine patch :face_with_rolling_eyes:”.)
(x-posted from rationalist house slack)
The problem with worshippers of Lacan and “irrational psyches” is that everything looks like a nail. (True of most groups, but anyways…) Some parts of the psyche are pretty straightforward. Other parts are riddled with one or more PARADOXes. If you look for PARADOX everywhere, you can hardly proceed. It is one place where you cannot let the obstacle become the way.
I loved Scott’s post on Lacan yesterday for a few reasons, but something felt a bit wrong with its frame on applicability. Seemed like it erred toward a standard rationalist mistake of “is this everywhere, or a bad model?” The gradations of hypothesis seemed more like they were over intensities or amounts, rather than situations. Instead, what seems clear to me is that it’s a great model for many [deep, fundamental] twists of the psyche, but a flatly wrong and very destructive model in many other cases. I think rationalists fear Lacanian things partlyyyy because everyone who gets into them goes insane (fair) but partly because rationalists, like much of Western culture, implicitly assume universal applicability of knowledge. Universalize the Lacanian paradigm and that way lies madness; understand the Lacanian underpinnings of some key patterns (hatred of billionaires) and the world will just be more hospitable. Very general and important principle: If you know the bounds of applicability, you’re at much less danger from an ideology.
---
One theme I like around all the ideologies grappling with PARADOX is that they help with some deep version of the virtue of lightness. At least for someone bound up in rationalism habits of thought like myself, there is a deep relief I get when briefly immersing myself in places with acknowledged PARADOX, like Zizek or the TV show Legion. You can’t just keep clenching forward or you’ll get burned by your own pigheadedness, so you have to do an extremely central version of “going with the flow”.
(Lacan: “ah, so you’d like to do this more often but are unwilling to go out on a limb because you’d lose status in the eyes of your culture, so instead you like to use the cover of ‘truth-seeking’ to put yourself in situations that will demand deep unclenching from you?” “yes Lacan, but it’s a fine patch :face_with_rolling_eyes:”.)