Is personality the same as ego? How do we distinguish confidence and self-knowledge from arrogance and the ego? It has been said that arrogance is a thought while confidence is a feeling, and in this dictum (and the distinction between thought and feeling) we find light. To understand this dictum, we must associate the term ‘thought’ with the peripatetic mode of thought (the linear accumulation of sensory evidence, thought as manifest in words, etc.) and ‘feeling’ with the intuitive mode of knowing (where what is known by reason is brought to bear in a single, silent movement of the mind).
The Ego is predicated on our experience and conception of self as discrete, biologically determined entities that are manifest in passing time and physical space—in the potential for competition produced by the atomization of consciousness into seemingly discrete (from the perspective of our existence in passing time and physical space) systems of organization. It is produced by the application of materially-reductive, linear logic to our experience in passing time and physical space (for example, in producing the illusion of death). Ego, then, can be understood as a lack of self-knowledge produced by the illusion of self-knowledge from the peripatetic perspective.
Nomad Exploration of Ego
by Luke Barnesmoore
Academia.edu
https://www.academia.edu/21666509/Nomad_Exploration_of_Ego
The term Ego is oft levied in the contemporary era, and rightly so given the Newtonian Dogma that pervades the public mind (including notions of self as discrete from ‘the world’ and the beings who inhabit it as well as reduction of reality to passing time and physical space—the illusion of the senses and temporal existence that itself gives rise to ego), notions of human nature as evil and self serving that span much of the illusory dichotomy between right and left, the cult of personality that dominates contemporary political discourse (i.e. narration of systemic problems as being produced by individuals rather than the nature of the system itself), etc. While this focus on the role of Ego in producing the woes of the contemporary world is to be commended, it should be noted that many actors seem to use this term without a very nuanced understanding of its meaning. As such, we hope to explore the nature of Ego in the hope that such an exploration might vivify discourses concerning the role of Ego in our Noosphere.
Is personality the same as ego? How do we distinguish confidence and self-knowledge from arrogance and the ego? It has been said that arrogance is a thought while confidence is a feeling, and in this dictum (and the distinction between thought and feeling) we find light. To understand this dictum, we must associate the term ‘thought’ with the peripatetic mode of thought (the linear accumulation of sensory evidence, thought as manifest in words, etc.) and ‘feeling’ with the intuitive mode of knowing (where what is known by reason is brought to bear in a single, silent movement of the mind).
The Ego is predicated on our experience and conception of self as discrete, biologically determined entities that are manifest in passing time and physical space—in the potential for competition produced by the atomization of consciousness into seemingly discrete (from the perspective of our existence in passing time and physical space) systems of organization. It is produced by the application of materially-reductive, linear logic to our experience in passing time and physical space (for example, in producing the illusion of death). Ego, then, can be understood as a lack of self-knowledge produced by the illusion of self-knowledge from the peripatetic perspective.
“Know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God.”[Pythagoris as quoted in Cajander, P. (2006) Fragments of Reality: Daily Entries of Lived Life p. 109] The great sages have no illusions about this distinction between self-knowledge and ego. Self-knowledge is holistic, derived from the silence of our being and the many vistas attained in the climax of this silence (which is to say motion…). Ego is self-knowledge derived purely from the peripatetic mind, from knowledge of self as a discrete biological being doomed to die and the many potentials created and extinguished therein…
Thus it was that the great sages of old would stand upon the mountaintop and proclaim themselves as God. Ego is a godlike conception of the bio-temporal self. Selfknowledge is recognition that I am that I am (that God is all things). It is dissolution of Maya, of Newtonian Dogma. It is escape from the cave into the light of day. Self-knowledge is ‘Wu Wei’ (Effortless Action, Striving without Striving).
In this definition of self-knowledge as ‘Wu Wei’ we are drawn back to contemporary use of the term Ego. In many spheres of our noosphere utopian thought that looks to a utopia outside the dogmatic cosmological, ontological and teleological conceptions that underlie Modernism and its Economic Theology has been relegated to the sphere of Ego (and often elitist privilege). When an individual posits that progress towards a utopian ‘world view’ must necessarily occur outside the dogma of Modernism and Economic Theology, the individual is thought to be egotistical in ‘presuming’ (again the distinction between Egotistical thought and Self-Knowledge in the intuitive, dimensionally-holistic mode outlined above is lost in such situations…) to have more insight that the general public (most of whom have been so completely socialized within the oppression of Modernism and Economic Theology that they lack the capacity to consider potential modes of social organization beyond police rule, economics, written law, the state and the many other Paternalist systems of social organization which presume that order is produced through domination and fear—thus we need a police force to dominate the public, a legal system to impel egotistical fear of punishment, an economic system to dominate our selfishness, etc.). While such a supposition may be true for the many people whose ‘truths’ and ‘realities’ (note that truth and reality must be plural when defined as rooted in passing time and physical space, which is defined by change, motion, etc. and thus precludes the potential for an objective (eternal) form of truth-reality) are derived through purely peripatetic means, this does not preclude the potential of human beings transcending the limited ideas and modes of logic associated with passing time, physical space, the peripatetic mind and the ego and thus observing that Paternalist systems of social organization through domination work to sustain the ego and its peripatetic reductionism thus precluding the potential for meaningful systemic change.
Often such calls for meaningful systemic change rooted in cosmological,
ontological, teleological, epistemological, ethical-moral and aesthetic reform are derisively labeled as idealistic and out of touch with reality. However, “idealism and matter of fact are… not sundered, but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by ideals of direction.”[Geddes, Sir P. (1915) Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics. London: Williams & Norgate. p. vii] Indeed, consciousness produces matter (both in the macro cosmological terms of the first cause and in physical terms from the perspective of quantum physics (which of course means that the capacity for observation necessarily existed prior to the manifestation of biological beings…)). So, while many ‘realists’ may deride ‘idealism’, such derision comes from the egotistical perspective (the perspective of the peripatetic mind) and is itself exceedingly destructive for the ‘reality’ the peripatetic preachers hold so dear as it produces a form of ideational-intellectual nihilism (it is impractical to try and change the ideas that guide the daily steps of our noospheric body and so we need not concern ourselves with ideational-intellectual cultivation or reform—instead, we can pick the ‘best’ option within the existing ideational-intellectual boundaries of the noospheric body and feel like we are ‘doing our part’ so that we might sleep at night after working all day to service the infrastructure of the system of oppression we currently inhabit)…
http://www.c-c-i-s.org/people/
Luke Barnesmoore is Founder, President of the Board of Directors and Executive Director of the Center for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS), the Chief Editor of Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CiS), Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UBC Urban Studies Lab and a graduate student in the University of British Columbia Department of Geography. His research centers on development of analytic, theoretical and methodological models for Social Science and Humanities research. His forthcoming book, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity (Common Grounds Publishing), is the first in a series interrogating Modernism and its relationship with the history of global philosophy and religion. Luke completed his Bachelor of Arts in International Relations at San Francisco State University and has held academic posts including Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley Statnews.org Lab. In his free time, Luke enjoys reading fantasy fiction and the study-practice of contemplative philosophy and religion.
**
Luke Barnesmoore
Academia
https://ubc.academia.edu/LukeBarnesmoore