All posts by anomalogue

Conceptions of power

Ideas

When people feel “powerful” they can mean quite a few things. Some of them are not even actual powers with practical potential, but ephemeral sensations of powerfulness. Genuine power is demonstrated in application: what can it do? Here is a partial typology of powers, both imagined and real:

1) Power to inflict pain – sadistic power – the capacity to steal energy directly from another.

2) Power to coerce – tyrannical power – the capacity to render another will strictly instrumental to one’s own.

3) Power to evade other powers – freedom – the capacity to at least feel that one’s own will is independent and unrestricted by other wills in all relevant categories of action.

4) Power to understand – philosophy – the capacity to at least feel that through one’s intellectual efforts one is brought to an experiences of self-sovereignty.

5) Power to persuade – charisma – the capacity to harmonize other wills with one’s own will (to form consensus).

6) Power to organize desires into unities – leadership – the capacity to synthesize individual wills within one’s own overarching will (to align disparate interests).

7) Power to transcend – The capacity to identify one’s will with a will that includes and exceeds it, and to participate knowingly as a participant in what defies objective knowledge.

Some ethical fragments

Judaism

Gratitude: Gratitude is acknowledging that your own apparently individual successes and good fortune are actually collective, and only illusorily individual. Gratitude is giving others their fair share in your self: shared oneness. Ingratitude is spiritual theft.

Apology:  Apology is the repairing of damage done to the oneness of a collective self by one or both of its participants. Apology is essentially atonement: the participant reaffirming oneness with a partner after denial (in word, action, or even thought) of a shared oneness.

Offense: Offense is the palpable feeling of destruction of actual or possible oneness. We are offended by ethical breaches because oneness is accomplished within an ethos – an ethos being a way of seeing and living, and an ethic being the sustaining praxis of its ethos.

Metanoia: A Greek word which means radically changing one’s mind, seeing differently. This is generally translated as “repentance”. When a person violates an ethic severely enough, the person is no longer able to exist within the violated ethos, and in fact changes modes of existence and becomes a stranger.

Unrepentant regret: The expression of regret for destroying oneness with another without the intention of atonement – that is, unrepentant regret – is the opposite of apology: it consummates an estrangement.  These  has the form: “I’m sorry, but…” It also frequently has the form: “Forgive me, God…”

The retraction of gratitude, which is the same as denial of oneness, is one of the deepest offenses one can commit.

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The Jews are humanity’s geniuses of oneness. Antisemitism is a poetic expression of radical individualism.

Good quote

Ideas

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” – Aldous Huxley

True; but I’d still say an intellectual is interesting to the degree that he finds sex interesting.

To constellate

Brand, Fables, myths & parables

Facts, or personal attributes, or elements – think of them as stars. Throw them into the sky and let each find its logical place in the heavens. Walk around and look out into them from different perspectives. See with unsquinting eyes what is there, adding nothing and subtracting nothing. When you find the place where they are most beautiful sit down and and trace out the constellations.

A way of understanding a situation; the spontaneous experience of a person; a brand; a design – what matters is constellations.

“Constellate”: ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin constellatus, from con- ‘together’ + stellatus ‘arranged like a star.’

Myth

Ideas

It may be stupid, but at least it is decently stupid to misunderstand and reject myth. What is indecently stupid is to misunderstand and accept myth.

This indecent stupidity comes in two strains, one phobic and the other counter-phobic: 1) fundamentalism, and 2) psychologization of myth, a la Joseph Campbell.

The commonality of the two strains is also two-fold. They share: 1) a stunted intellectuality dominated by a narrow conception of knowledge as explanation; and 2) a preoccupation with religion experienced primarily as a form of libidinous power, fascinating because it defies explanation. The fundamentalist wants to harness that power (which is alarming) and the psychological mythicist wants to disarm and diffuse it (which is boring). And of course, there are also those disordered souls who have both attitudes toward myth simultaneously, and spasmodically push and pull against it according to their current orientation (which is embarrassing). This type is common in the New Age community.

These three types all have “spiritual” self-identities, but are the furthest thing from spiritual. They lack depth, and they lack the will to know what depth is.

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People who want life explained to them should study science. People who find God incomprehensible ought to be (cautious) atheists.

The Star Grid

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

When I was ten years old I read an astronomy book which claimed that from a particular point in our galaxy one could look out into the night sky and see all the stars arranged in a perfect grid.

The idea of the Star Grid impressed me so deeply it became one of my dominant guiding idea-images.

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It is fair to ask: What if this idea is factually false? My guess is that it is factually false. However, this idea is not essentially factual but mythical, and this means fact is secondary to… something else… in the truth of the idea. The stars are the anchor point of an analogy, but the analogy was only the scaffolding of a way of seeing. Once that way of seeing was established the scaffold could be disassembled. Frankly, I care as little about the factuality of the Star Grid as I do about the metaphysical reality of the world of physics or of the existence of the so-called “historical Jesus”. As Black Elk said, after relating his tribe’s myth of its origin: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. ”

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Does any of this mean I disregard facts? No. I respect – I obey – facts within their domain. But the domain of facts is limited. I observe the limits of factuality’s sovereignty as scrupulously as I observe factuality’s laws within its limits (in the objective world, which is “Caesar’s”). Beyond those limits I observe the laws of meaning which belong to the subjective world. (Properly understood, the subjective world is essentially “inter-subjective”. A “subject” is best understood as a point of participation within a collective spiritual existence that sustains and exceeds any particular soul. Subjectivity is rarely understood, despite the fact that everyone knows their subjectivity best of all. Did I say “despite”? I’m sorry: because. There’s known unknowns, there’s unknown unknowns, but the biggest bitch of all – the one who took Rumsfeld down – is the too-emphatically-known known.)

Know what I mean?

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All this abstract crap is utterly practical and applicable to concrete life.

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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The noble lie

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

The idea of the “noble lie” is dangerous and unnecessary. It is a distorted conception of the kind of truth spoken in symbolic language, capable of graceful degradation of meaning in more limited ears – including the speaker’s own. I am talking about the revelatory language of religion and poetry.

Joints

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

Truth does not accrete in a vacuum of ignorance; truth articulates from pre-existent, pre-articulate wholes. Truth does not extend outwardly; it intends inwardly. Truth resolves; truth cannot be constructed. Truth is not a machine or a story or a system. It is not invented; it is discovered and rediscovered.

The primordial truth is a crude, chaotic undifferentiated whole. Language divides the whole into finer and finer distinctions. Only in hindsight are we born on some particular day, on a bed, in a room, in a building, in a city. In actual fact, we are all born exactly at the same time, in exactly the same place, and we all say exactly the same thing about it: “waaaaaaah.”

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They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day we came.

– Edwin Muir

Metaphysics and epoche

Philosophy

The phenomenal can be interpreted variously, but it must be incorporated in any interpretation. In other words, in a legitimate interpretation no phenomenon can be omitted

A dimension or pole of the metaphysical manifold can be omitted from a legitimate interpretation, but this omission is not a matter of will (a.k.a. “faith”). It is a matter of experiencing the metaphysical extensivity in the phenomenon or not experiencing it. To superimpose an interpretation onto an experience, either before or after, is bad faith. If the interpretive superimposition leaves the phenomenal element intact, somehow that is even worse.

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Proper faith tries on possibilities and makes a genuine effort to see differently. If it succeeds, it succeeds; if it fails, it fails – but faith is necessarily intellectually honest.

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Subjective intellectual honesty is the ground of friendship. Active, receptive intellectual honesty is the ground of philosophical friendship. It has been said that true friendship only exists among philosophers.

Interest

Etymology

Consider the etymology of “interest”, and ask yourself: Isn’t it a case study of how meaning drains from words over time? Inter + est. Nowadays the word “interest” implies that we stand apart from a thing and regard it objectively. That is we stay apart from it and keep it “whole against the sky”, as opposed to entering into its being – really being with it. At least we’ve preserved some formal grammatical clues: we remain interested in something, not interested about it, or on it, or toward it.

Reflection on the Moon

Fables, myths & parables

The Moon, the pseudo-Sun of the night sky, which derives its illumination entirely from the Sun it imitates, always shows us one face. The other side, the “dark” side, always faces away: like the back of one’s head when one looks in the mirror, or like the self when one reflects on who one really is, or like the status of a relationship or a situation when one regards it objectively.

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I wrote this in order to participate in the mythical existence for a moment. What was it like? I’ve trained my reflective mind to admit: I don’t know.

Subjectivity

Philosophy

Until a person discovers the existence of the existential I (Dasein), subjectivity exists as the objective psychic content of an objective self.

Until a person discovers the existence of the existential We and connects it back to existential I, subjectivity exists as the container of objectivity. What stands beyond the existential I literally is  unthinkable, because one does not know what to look for or how to think with the appropriate structures. Such a thinker can find only Himself at the ultimate bounds of knowledge. This ignorance is spiritual bliss.

A vision

Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy

Having vision is a matter of seeing from a distinctive point of view. What is seen from that perspective is not itself the vision but the result of the vision.

Objectivist thinking misses what is essential to vision and leaps over the perspective directly to the objects of sight. Any vividly imagined aggregate of ideas is “a vision”, whether it is seen coherently or not.

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A vision, being perspectival, is holistic. If, in the course of resolving a problem, you have a vision of its solution, if you are open and alert, you will notice that much more than the object of the vision is affected. With genuine philosophical problems everything is affected simultaneously.

Objectivist thinking misses what is essential to holism and leaps over the quality of wholeness directly to the object-parts that “constitute” a whole. Any aggregate, whether it is seen coherently or not, is called holistic if it satisfies all criteria of “completeness” – that is, no omission is identified. The being of the wholes is reduced to sum of parts.

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Thinking literally: If you stand in place and have someone else shift the furniture around for you have you changed your perspective?

If you change your opinion on this or that isolated fact have you changed your perspective on it?

Existential entities

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

The existential I – Heidegger’s Dasein – is the cheapest and most exciting philosophical discovery.

The existential You – Buber’s Thou – is more elusive. Catching sight of the concept of the existential You points the way to the development of the intellectual and ethical practice of existing in the I-Thou relationship. The rules in this strata of being are different from those of ordinary objective thought.

Developing the practice of the I-Thou relationship, one necessarily discovers the existential We, the ground of I-Thou. With that discovery one begins to move into the profound and boring world of Pragmatism.

(At this point, I’d call myself a Hermeneutical Pragmatist. When I’m done reading Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology I am looking forward to reading Richard Rorty.)

Two kinds of wholes

Holarchy

1) The indivisible objects — indivisible, not because they cannot be divided into parts, but because they cannot be divided into parts and remain what they are.

2) The indivisible environments, to which we belong and from which we cannot be removed and remain ourselves.

Time softener

Ideas

When I am in charge, the accuracy of watches will be limited to +/- 15 minutes. They will be designed to speed up, slow down, jump forward, stop and start randomly throughout the day.

Punctuality will go the way of small pox.

Atomized

Ideas

Business habitually adopts philosophical language with very specific, subtle and valuable meanings, softens the meaning, and reduces the words to banal synonymity. Precisely what most needs saying cannot be said.

1) Each; 2) Sentence; 3) Is; 4) Reduced; 4.a) To; 4.a.i.) A; 4.b) Series; 4.b.i) Of; 4.c.) Discrete; 4.d.) Words.

  • The
  • Format
    • Is
    • As
  • Inhospitable
  • To
    • Meaning
  • As
  • The
    • News.
      • Separated
      • and
      • decontextualized

    everything

    1. is
    2. synonymous.

The flower arranger

Fables, myths & parables

The man and the woman met when they were students. Once or twice a month he would bring her a perfect rose. He would go from shop to shop, looking for one with a perfect color and shape with no blemishes on the petals or stem.

After they graduated and got married, he began giving her bouquets. At first they were conventionally perfect, but gradually they became increasingly eccentric. He began combining selections of flowers in unusual ways, in symmetries she had never seen, but which felt familiar to her.

After the birth of their child, he began arranging the flowers in front of her. He would dump a pile of flowers on the table and, without taking his eyes off her, he would arrange the flowers into a perfect unity, incorporating every one. She sometimes saw him steal flowers from the neighbors’ front lawns as he walked home.

At some point she realized that his flower selections, which had been growing more haphazard by the year, were now random. Some of the flowers were severely damaged and some were rotten–but he used them all, and his compositions gained depth and power. He would finish, and, seeing what he had made, she would cry without knowing why.

Toward the end of their life he would run his lawn mower over a corner of their wildflower bed, and create a bouquet from the clippings.

Being concept-bound

Philosophy

To think conceptually is not the same as to be concept-bound.

One decisive difference is in one’s interpretation of sequence: are the conceptualized elements that constitute the concept understood to precede and produce the meaning of the concept; or do the conceptualized elements follow and attempt to account for the spontaneous meaning of the concept?

To make this concrete: Let’s say that a wife is angry with her husband. He asks her why. She begins to explain, listing reasons. However, each time she lists a reasons her husband calls it into doubt, pointing to an assumption she’s made about his motives. According to him it is these unsubstantiated assumptions that have caused her offense – not his actions as he meant them. He points out to her that since the reasons are faulty, her anger is unfounded. Here’s the crux: the assumption is that her anger is founded on the assumptions.

In this example if the husband actually believes his own argument, he is concept-bound – and this is true even if the wife has in fact misinterpreted the meaning of his actions. And if the wife is not genuinely emotionally persuaded but is no longer confident in her assessment of her husband’s behavior she is also concept-bound. She has been bound-up by her husband’s argument, and made unable to act on her interpretation, not relieved of a painful conception and enabled to act according to a less painful and more persuasive truth. If the wife were brought to see what happened from a shifted perspective and found that her offense has simply vanished this would have been thinking conceptually without succumbing to conceptualization.

The conceptualization of facts preceding meaning is itself one of our deepest concept-binding conceptualizations.

Derivative conceptualizations are sometimes conceived to to relieve a thinker of unwanted conceptualizations. Examples are: 1) Skepticism, the belief that calling all individual elements of a way of seeing into doubt will weaken the sense of an unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive meaningful whole; 2) the notion that conceptual thought is the root of unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive wholes, so avoidance of clear thought is avoidance of concept-boundness; and 3) a favorite of moms everywhere, that we can decide to conceptualize individual elements and the whole in a way that suits us in order to feel how we wish to about life.

The way out of concept-boundedness is to be faithful to one’s full experience and to reflect on this experience conceptually.