Nominalization

Gregory Bateson asked Richard Bandler once whether the “I” was a nominalization and Richard answered Gregory: “No, only nouns that stand for a abstract concept are nominalizations. If you put a nominalization into a wheelbarrow there is nothing there.” Gregory answered: “Ah, that is too bad.”

A nominalization is a distortion of reality because it treats abstract concepts as real existing things. A nominalisation is taking a process and making it into a thing. As part of the metamodel a nominalisation is a distortion of reality because it takes something dynamic (a process) and presents it as something static (a thing). The issue here is that in their nominalized form these processes are less changeable and fluid then they would have been if they were stated in their active form. Denominalizing is the process of breaking down the thing the underlying process. This is mostly done with nominalisation that someone uses and where negative stuff follows on its use. In the case of positive processes it is often a good idea to nominalize them so they become less changeable and more lasting.

What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the’I’ is what thinks. Instead, I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘purpose’, ‘number’; in other words to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming. Up to now belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has subjugated the metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. It is only thinking that posits the I: but up to now philosophers have believed, like the ‘common people’, that in ‘I think’ there lay something or other of unmediated certainty and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, in analogy with which we ‘understood’ all other causal relations. However habituated and indispensable this fiction may now be, that in no way disproves its having been invented: something can be a condition of life and nevertheless be false.

Notebook 35, May – July 1885 paragraph 35

In a world of becoming in which everything is conditional, the assumption of the unconditional, of substance, of being, of a thing, etc., can only be error. But how is error possible?

Notebook 35, May – July 1885 paragraph 51

The genesis of ‘things’ is wholly the work of the imaginers, thinkers, willers, inventors – the very concept of ‘thing’ as well as all qualities. – Even ‘the subject’ is something created in this way, is a ‘thing’ like all the others: a simplification to designate as such the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from all individual positing, inventing, thinking. Thus, the capacity is designated, as distinct from all individual cases: at bottom, it is action summarized with regard to all the action anticipated for the future (action and the likelihood of similar action).

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 152

Number

A number is a nominalization and as such a distortion of reality.

Number. – The invention of the laws of numbers was made on the basis of the error, dominant even from the earliest times, that there are identical things (but in fact nothing is identical with anything else); at least that there are things (but there is no ‘thing’). The assumption of plurality always presupposes the existence of something that occurs more than once: but precisely here error already holds sway, here already we are fabricating beings, unities which do not exist. – Our sensations of space and time are false, for tested consistently they lead to logical contradictions. The establishment of conclusions in science always unavoidably involves us in calculating with certain false magnitudes: but because these magnitudes are at least constant, as for example are our sensations of time and space, the conclusions of science acquire a complete rigorousness and certainty in their coherence with one another; one can build on them – up to that final stage at which our erroneous basic assumptions, those constant errors, come to be incompatible with our conclusions, for example in the theory of atoms. Here we continue to feel ourselves compelled to assume the existence of a ‘thing’ or material ‘substratum’ which is moved, while the whole procedure of science has pursued the task of resolving everything thing-like (material) in motions: here too our sensations divide that which moves from that which is moved, and we cannot get out of this circle because our belief in the existence of things has been tied up with our being from time immemorial. – When Kant says ‘the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature’, this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature which we are obliged to attach to nature (nature = world as idea, that is as error), but which is the summation of a host of errors of the understanding. – To a world which is not our idea the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 19

Ridiculousness

Many processes within NLP are ridiculous. This is done on purpose. For the more laughter there is in the world, the better it is.

Pleasure in nonsense. – How can man take pleasure in nonsense? For wherever in the world there is laughter this is the case; one can say, indeed, that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this event causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits, delights us, for it momentarily liberates us from the constraint of the necessary, the purposive and that which corresponds to our experience, which we usually see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly. It is the pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 213

Seriousness

The idea within NLP is that if you can laugh at your problem your problems disappear. Only when people take their problem seriously problems remain. So many NLP techniques have an inherent ridiculousness on purpose. As soon as there is laughter in the room, things start to get better.

Taking Things Seriously. — The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it “taking a thing seriously” when they work with this machine and want to think well — oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good humor whenever he thinks well; he becomes serious! And “where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything” — so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all “Gay Science” — Well, then ! Let us show that it is prejudice!

Gay Science paragraph 327

In the field. – ‘We must take things more cheerfully than they deserve; especially since we have for a long time taken them more seriously than they deserve.’ – So speak brave soldiers of knowledge.

Daybreak paragraph 567

Will

Richard Bandler expressed a strong preference during his Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR) seminar in 2015 in Brighton, U.K. for a stronger will. He showed the difference between “wanting something” and “willing something”.

The will – Every willing unites a multiplicity of feelings: the feeling of the state to be left, the feeling of the state to be reached, the feeling of this ‘leaving and reaching’ itself, the feeling of the duration of the process, then lastly an accompanying feeling of the muscles which begins its play through a kind of habit, even without our moving arms or legs, as soon as we ‘will’. Feeling, then, in fact many ways of feeling, must be recognized as an ingredient of the will, and so, secondly, must thinking. In every act of will, a thought commands – and it would be a great mistake to believe we could separate this thought off from the willing itself, as if willing would then remain behind. Thirdly, the will is not only a complex of feeling and thinking, but above all also an affect: that affect of command. What is called freedom of the will is essentially a feeling of superiority over the one who must obey: ‘I am free, he must obey’ – this consciousness is present in every will, and it’s that tense alertness, that clear gaze focused on one thing only, that exclusive valuation: ‘this and nothing else is now necessary’, that inner certainty of being obeyed, how all this belongs to the state of the one commanding. A man who wills- commands a something in himself which obeys, or which he believes will obey. Now, however, notice what is the most essential aspect of ‘will’, of this so complicated thing for which the common people have a single word. Because in a given case we are simultaneously the commanders and the obeyers, and as obeyers know the feelings of resisting, harassing, pushing, which usually begin immediately after the act of will; because, however, in using the synthetic concept ‘I’ we habitually disregard, disguise from ourselves this duality, willing has become encumbered with a whole chain of erroneous conclusions and consequently false valuations of will itself- so that the willer believes in all good faith that his will itself is the actual and sufficient motor for the whole action. And because, in almost every case, willing only happened where some effect of the command – obedience, thus some action – was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the feeling that there is a necessity of effect. Enough: the willer believes with a fair degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one – he ascribes the success of execution to the will itself, enjoying a growth in that feeling of power which all commanding brings with it. ‘Freedom of will’: this is the word for that very mixed state of the willer, who commands and at the same time, as the executor of the command, enjoys the triumph of superiority over resistance; who, however, judges that the will itself is what overcomes the resistance. He takes the pleasurable feelings of the successfully executing tool – the ministering will and sub-will- and adds them to his pleasurable feelings as the giver of the command. – This tangled nest of feelings, states and false assumptions, which the common people designate with one word and as one thing, because it is there suddenly and ‘at once’ and is among the very most frequent, consequently most ‘well-known’ experiences: the will, as I have described it here – who can credit that it has never been described before? That the common people’s clumsy prejudice has kept its validity and remained unexamined in every philosophy? That philosophers’ opinions have never differed on what ‘willing’ is, because they all believed that precisely here one had an immediate certainty, a fundamental fact, that precisely here there was no room for opinion? And that all logicians still teach the holy trinity of ‘thinking, feeling, willing’ as if ‘willing’ did not include feeling and thinking? – After all this, Schopenhauer’s great mistake of taking the will to be the best-known thing in the world, indeed as the genuinely and solely known thing, seems less crazed and arbitrary: he only adopted a tremendous prejudice of all previous philosophers, a prejudice of the common people- adopted it and, as philosophers generally do, exaggerated it.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 8

‘willing’ is not ‘desiring’, striving, wanting: it distinguishes itself from these by the affect of the command there is no ‘willing’, but only a willing-something: one must not uncouple the goal from the state, as the theorists of knowledge do. ‘Willing’ in the way they understand it occurs just as little as ‘thinking’; is pure fiction. that something is commanded is part of willing (this does not, of course, mean that the will is ‘executed’ …) That general state of tension by means of which a force strives to discharge itself- is not ‘willing’

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 114