Philosophical IN(TER)CEPT

INCEPTION to

SCHOPENHAUER: The World as Will and IDEA
Schadenfreude to Afghanistan.


PART THE FIRST - The Film

As it proceeds, we (speaking as delegate for the audiences) learn that the plot is this: a team of mind-behavior modification/control specialists has been recruited to reprogram the psyche of a powerful Tycoon's son in order to extract from him the combination of his father's safe. It contains his inheritance,"The Treasure", and high intrigue is involved in the enterprise of entering his mind, extracting the memory, leaving everything as it was, and stealing the secret.

"He has to feel like he is doing it himself."

His 'sub-conscious' (as their psychic architecture has it; more later on this) is cluttered by a traumatic event. The last word the son hears by his father's deathbed is "disappointed". This has buffered his psyche; they have to work around it. It is intimated at the end that this might not even have occurred. Maybe he just imagined, or thought it, and had lived
life ever since relating to reality under that particular delusion about himself. This is the "waking dream" 2nd objective conscious state. The action is too quick and blurry to be clear; by that time the audience has already been wrung out of anything except dream-reality to relate to, the question has become irrelevant. But one understands that "disappointed" has been installed in his psyche as Father's judgment, and that is a barrier in his Unconscious (Freud, this time) they have to break down, to get the secret. By the end, you are catching on the movie maker is maybe just fucking with your mind, anyway, but what did you expect?

That's only one thread, however, call it Reality 1 (you watching a movie with this plot).

The brilliance, and Beauty, according to (my version of Schopenhauer's Platonism -- what is Beautiful in beautiful things -- can be traced through this thread:

SYNCHRON ... The Word-sign

-> Text-Token Doubles: One context for text, another context for the token...in this case, tokens of synchronicity (which "SYNCHRON" adumbrates) in the movie to follow. The Word-sign functions textually to suggest what is completed 'below', by audience mix-matching tokens. Ex.: sequence of snippets of DeCaprio's character seeing his children's backs, in dream-state projection; then, at the end, "them seeing him back". These 'folded' doubles occur throughout. (The secret to what they are trying to 'save' is in the 'safe'.)



PART THE SECOND -- Application to America
and the concept of psychosemiotic nonsense

At one point, the girl who has joined the team as a 'pure imaginer', in order to create the 'architechture' of the altered dream-state reality all enter into, warns Tom that his buried personal memories are interfering. The rule is, these must be left out; otherwise, they will find themselves shooting at other's projections. This is a profound touch. All must focus on the 'reality' the target-consciousness relates to, or the mission can't be accomplished. An analogue, substituting 'America' for the Collective entity they are trying to 'save'; and making the mission decoding son-Bush's unconscious craving for Father Bush's approval; would be allowing Catholic and Jewish girls to be the one's creating the religious landscape. The personal memories of these groups, collectively merging through WWII trauma on either side of "the Holocaust", would/do/did block any attempt to cut that tie. In fact, GWBush affirmed in 2001, before 911, that these two groups were the swing votes to be wooed for 2004. This was from his deep personal memory. Thus, the ambient world in which young soul desire finds satisfaction is theirs, and it blocks getting at the psychological roots of Afghanistan, the on-going sacrifice of youth to Militarist Fathers, loved by (M)Others.

This would be profound SYNCHRONicity enough, in our reality analogized to what endangered the Inception mission. But the rudest twist is yet to come. Nobody expects any sort of rational consistency in a dream narrative. Least of all in Double (-ed Double (-ed Double)....) sequences crossing characters and action across category shifts. But there is one thing audiences have the right to expect from the film maker, and citizens trapped inside America's usurped Dream Theatre have a right to demand, I hold. That is this: no unresolved self-contradictions are to be used in predications intended for reality. Will to the opposite effect -- deliberate and intentional predication os self contradictions because they ARE that are excluded in principle from possible rational communication. Among simple examples, the sentence S*: "The Ace of Spades trumps the Double Six" is perfectly grammatical, but nonsense. "Trumps" has rules of use in card games and dominoes, taken separately, but none for both taken together> Though one could be concocted, e.g., "S* says poker is a better game than Dominoes." "Well, whose to say it doesn't?" The point is, there IS no "it", except by false relating, therefore no unanswered question of "what it says". To try to extract an answer is a form of psychosemiotic bullying, since it drives other, latent differences, into open opposition polarized around the misused terms (e.g., "what is trumping?").

This is the most critical point in transcendental psychosemiotics. The consistency in principle principle is the point of agreement between rationality in formal logic, and rationality in dream talk, if it's real. That is the point of each person's individual "Token": an object only you know, whose identity grounds reality through consciousness. A mere "Idea", no matter how grand, fruitful, and self-contained, as access to the 4th state, carries only the potential for grounding 'in the head'. His spinning top grounds him to the reality he has lived with his wife, the '3rd layer' of his subconscious, spiraling the 2nd level of reality-dream processing in the anatomical apparatus onto itself.

When people in their 2nd state dream world relate to each other through architecture from the personalized memory of a sub-class, they are, ipso facto, not living in their own, but in the other's world inner, or soul world.

It is shown elsewhere that "Jew", to which American citizens are required to relate in a hate-tinged way, with the swastika and anti-Semitic graffiti on the synagogue in Maryland, has become a self-contradictory token synchron.

PART THE THIRD - Philosophical Interlude

Following Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena -- the world as appearance, vrs. the world as it is in itself -- philosophers were stuck with the problem of where to assign various ideal categories, among them Beauty. Experience of Arete (virtue, excellence); Morality; even Religion "within the limits of pure reason" could be constructed on a phenomenal basis through his hypothesis of transcendental unity of apperception, given the structure of empirical consciousness under the intuitions of space and time. Kant restored the unity of the psyche through that which is 'bright to' perception, whereas the British had allowed the flux of discrete content dissolve form, following John Locke's notion of sense qualities as inscriptions*, like on a "tabula rosa", followed up by language, then ideas. But his confusion of qualities and 'ideas', clearly distinct things as phenomenal content, allowed his successor, George Berkeley, to assimilate both to the category of 'deas', preserving the grammar of 'soul' and 'God" as directly applicable. Then David Hume, succeeding both, dispensed with ALL meanings of words not tied to sense-qualities, even "soul", "I", "cause", and "God", reducing the content of human knowledge through experience to pure flux, nothing else; self-organized by the 'gentle attraction' of association, when words for cause and effect, matching 'impressions' whose c->e content are repeated in space-time contiguities, relate to (what is called) 'reality'. This is the broad movement of critical metaphysical thought after Locke began assimilating the language of the causal theory of perception, following the atomic-molecular theory of matter, ...to the language of psychic totality inherited from classical Greece. This was the deep psychosemiotic clash Kant inherited, and which INCEPTION is still reconcilling, in its way..



FOOTNOTES FROM 1st draft

*Two psychodynamic foci of personal psychology of the movie: I. Father-son-relations -- The overall plot pivots on the attempt of The Crew to reprogram his very psyche, in 10 hours, without him knowing it. It is determined that the key to his personality is his feeling of being a disappointment to his fabulous tycoon Father. This is brought about by sedating him on an extended airplane flight, entering his dream-world and re-creating a particular experience buried in his mind from his father's deathbed. "Disappointed' was the last word he remembered the old man said.. This is changed to words that open a metal safe that has appeared, in which he finds a whirly-toy token of early childhood. In effect, the brings back early, pre-Oedipal psychosexual development, where ego-attitudes toward the Father first constellate. On the surface this is a minute, untraceble intervention. In the total scheme of things, it takes a gargantuan effort to change, but focused at the point in one individual's consciousness sufficient to profoundly affect the course of events. Chaos theory could provide the explanatory mathematics thenceforth. (in the presence of a 'strange attractor', a butterfly in China could set off an avalanch in Iceland.)


The second point of psychodynamic focus is Husband-wife relations --

: He can't get back home because he was wanted for murdering his wife.

The story: she committed suicide jumping off a skyscraper ledge, while he watched helplessly and tried to talk her down.

The story behind this story was that she was carrying through with the IDEA he and she had explored -- that what was called reality was a dream and they had to die, together, to escape it. He carried deep guilt, as she carried through what he had suggested -- sown like a seed, grown by his participation until she manipulated lawyers and children to get to die with her. The guilt from this complex relationship follows him through the movie, and at the 3rd and deepest level of (what they call) the sub-conscious. Each level splits off and follows its own narrative thread like parallel octaves on the Ray of Creation. (Ouspensky). On the levels closer to consciousness (this language is Freud's; what it meant was problematic), this part of "Tom"'s psychic apparatus does not come into play. Only when he arrives at the stark contradiction between waking-dreaming///reality-fantasy at the 3rd level does his wife's presence in his unconscious projectively emerge. This is when he must complete the job of altering 'Anderson''s psyche at that level; he loses control of his projections, endangering the mission as the young girl architect had warned.

The stories intertwine in the narrative through the oriental figure of Fisher. In the first flashback, he wants to hire Tom's super sophisticated metaphysical mind-alterers to do the job on 'Son'. He has the power to get Tom HOME, if he can do it. It's hard, entering and returning from limbo, requiring total allowance into Fisher's secrets, but Tom declares it can be done because he's done it.
Fisher participates in the dream-level action, even getting killed off in artic ice layer. But he is present at beginning and end with motives and agenda largely undisclosed in the movie leaving it to that extent unbounded (irrational; non-sense). His continuous existence in limbo for 50 years during the few seconds it takes the bus to plunge through the bridge railing into to the sea water below; and the 10 hour airplane flight. The intellectual meme inviked here is "HIGH TIME". Everyone who has tripped on LSD, or got really high on hashish or marijuana, may be presumed to have experienced the subjective state in which time as-if slows to a crawl, and it 'takes forever' to drive at 30 MPH across a bridge. In actuality, the illusion of 'time slowing down' results from brain-processes speeding up, overtaking the tempo of the steady perceptual process. Carried to its logical extreme, this experience of a gradient in the felt length of a given objective duration extrapolates to the conception of a completed totality of spatial experience, itself, under time. As if there were a conscious content consisting of all and everything present at once, existing in a simultaneous present. Some esoteric schools teach this conception. . It could be said that Inception, the movie, instantiates an inception, as process-controlling idea; and carries it forward through SYNCHRON(-icity). This link of simultaneity of all that is experienced in the two hour frame, plus its outside world context, when you walk out into the real world outside, is, literally, its opening Text-token*. It 'spreads' the Unconscious of the audience over that fantasy-reality frame, and there is strange, isolated-yet-bonded feel in relating to others.
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The 4th e-State (1-> the media, journalistic class; 2.> esoteric state of objective consciousness): presence to all that exists, including all motion and change as geometrical shapes, given at one time.

The conception of Inception is the thing of beauty. 'Beauty Itself', taken as higher level energy shining through through the phenomenon of their creation. This is where Platonic metaphysics needs elaboration. Another time

-Denizen of limbo tie the ends of the movie's reality cycle.