Category Archives: Religion

Thoughts on ethics

Ethics, Metaphysics

An ethic supports a particular ethos. Behavior is judged ethically according to the ethos promoted or undermined. Ethics is relative.

Morality transcends ethics, and judges ethos and ethics.

According to this view, it is possible in principle to be ethically immoral by participating in bad ethos.

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Relativists believe morality is an illusion produced by ethical provincialism.

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Some kind of analogue exists here:

ethics : morals = phenomenon : noumenon

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My three most fundamental ethical principles:

  1. Listen to appeals.
  2. Keep your promises.
  3. Repent when you err.

Vision and voice

Hermeneutics, History, Judaism

People love to watch an artist draw. He draws a line and slowly it becomes a shape. He adds more lines, and introduces shading. So far, the relationships are all within the page; a composition takes form. But the drawing suggests that it is a drawing of something — but of what? Here is where the suspense is concentrated. The interrelated elements on the page taken as a whole point beyond themselves, to realities beyond the page. In figurative art, the reference is to physical objects. But this is only the basest reality. Beyond it is mood, and the mood is connected to the figures. And beyond that, there are layers of symbol, starting with shared cultural meanings, proceeding onward to more obscure and personal intimations.

I think storytelling is a mode of speech that imitates drawing. Human beings are predominantly visual, and whatever modes of thought make use of the visual modes of thought gain an advantage.

Maybe objectivity is preferred over subjectivity because objectivity is more optical. When we don’t want to follow some involved line of thought, when we don’t want to reach the conclusion by the path of personal realization, but just want the bottom-line result, what do we ask for? A synopsis.

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Martin Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

More and more, I am understanding Judaism to be a perpetually developing religion of time and speech subsuming space and sight, eternally at odds with the eternalizing religions of space and sight which look forward to the end of time (which entails an end to speech). Jews hear truth and say truth. In the process truth is revealed. Truth is a relationship. “Gentiles” see the truth and assert the truth. Truth is a thing.

To flatten the history of the Jews into a series of factual ethical assertions strung together on a thread of narrative is to misunderstand it (almost) completely.

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Here’s the Ricoeur passage that set me off on this line of thought:

…polysemy is the pivot of semantics. …we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this process presents itself as a convergence of two factors, a factor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the cumulative process… the word tends to be charged with use-values, but the projection of this cumulative process into the system of signs implies that the new meaning finds its place within the system. The expansion, and, if the case obtains, the surcharge is arrested by the mutual limitation of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limiting action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion, which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the law of our language. Words have more than one sense, but they do not have an infinity of meanings.

This example shows how semantic systems differ from semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any reference to history; they are intemporal systems because they are potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the binary oppositions between distinctive units play a role. In semantics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-sections in the process of sense, in the process of nomination.

We then understand what happens when the word returns to the discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greiman calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word volume will be interpreted as a body in space; if the theme concerns the library, the word volume will be interpreted as designating a book). If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run together in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More than one interpretation is then justified by the structure of a discourse which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be realized at the same time.

In short, language is in celebration. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered and deployed; but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic discourse, and the polysemy itself of our words results from the concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action of the semantic field.

 

Having a place

Ethics, Judaism

Reading Gilbert Ryle’s explanation of the expression “in my head”, I reflexively asked a Nietzschean question: Why would we be satisfied with understanding thoughts to be located in our heads, as if they occupied a space? Certainly, a thought process could lead us to that idea, and (collective) intellectual habit could preserve it, but could there be something satisfying or comforting about the idea that has made us more hospitable toward it? I recalled a passage from Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition:

The profound connection between private and public, manifest on its most elementary level in the question of private property, is likely to be misunderstood today because of the modern equation of property and wealth on one side and propertylessness and poverty on the other. This misunderstanding is all the more annoying as both, property as well as wealth, are historically of greater relevance to the public realm than any other private matter or concern and have played, at least formally, more or less the same role as the chief condition for admission to the public realm and full-fledged citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two things are connected.

Prior to the modern age, which began with the expropriation of the poor and then proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes, all civilizations have rested upon the sacredness of private property. Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that he expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it. In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well. The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of an underworld. The nonprivative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies.

Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, and it appears in the realm of the city through the boundaries between one household and the other. The law originally was identified with this boundary line, which in ancient times was still actually a space, a kind of no man’s land between the private and the public, sheltering and protecting both realms while, at the same time, separating them from each other. The law of the polls, to be sure, transcended this ancient understanding from which, however, it retained its original spatial significance. The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action (the idea that political activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern and found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy) nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town, but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.

It is therefore not really accurate to say that private property, prior to the modern age, was thought to be a self-evident condition for admission to the public realm; it is much more than that. Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.

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We will have a place of our own, one way or another. If we cannot have it in physical space, we will create that place socially. And failing that, we will establish it in our own mind and live inside our own private place.

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Giving a person a place in your own life is an act of humanity.

Solitude

Metaphysics

Solitary confinement deprives a human being of all intentional objects. The continua of mind, of time, of cosmos are truncated to I, now and here, which, despite all narcissistic new age notions are perfectly meaningless apart from the being beyond them. Life is lived in reference to the metaphysical, through the medium of world.

Chord: mind over matter

Chord, Metaphysics

Some quotes on the theme of divorce of mind and matter:

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Arthur Eddington:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

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Hannah Arendt:

…While world alienation determined the course and the development of modern society, earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science. Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all. This is perhaps clearest in the development of the new science’s most important mental instrument, the devices of modern algebra, by which mathematics “succeeded in freeing itself from the shackles of spatiality,” that is, from geometry, which, as the name indicates, depends on terrestrial measures and measurements. Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of earth-bound experience and his power of cognition from the shackles of finitude.

The decisive point here is not that men at the beginning of the modern age still believed with Plato in the mathematical structure of the universe nor that, one generation later, they believed with Descartes that certain knowledge is possible only where the mind plays with its own forms and formulas. What is decisive is the entirely un-Platonic subjection of geometry to algebraic treatment, which discloses the modern ideal of reducing terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols. … Yet even more significant than this possibility — to reckon with entities which could not be “seen” by the eye of the mind — was the fact that the new mental instrument, in this respect even newer and more significant than all the scientific tools it helped to devise, opened the way for an altogether novel mode of meeting and approaching nature in the experiment. In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.

…With the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all. It is no longer the beginning of philosophy, of the “science” of Being in its true appearance, but becomes instead the science of the structure of the human mind.

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Jorge Luis Borges:

Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth: I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

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If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

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A face is a gate.

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It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Analytic dialectic and synthetic dialectic

Ideas, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

Two forms of dialectic can be distinguished. They have different characters and different trajectories.

Synthetic dialectic moves toward monism.

  • Synthetic dialectic is reductionistic.
  • Its method  is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which preserve irrelevant, complicating and inhibiting distinctions.
  • Synthetic dialectic has a passionate and destructive character. It tends to destroy complex structure and release energy.
  • Synthetic dialectic tends to decrease the total number of categories as well as the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting these categories, while increasing the scope of the remaining categories.
  • Synthetic dialectic is experienced as liberation from de-centering illusions — oppressive notions that alienate a person from himself, prevent him from living according to his own experience and judgment, and which oblige him to live according to the experiences and judgments of others.
  • The thrust of synthetic dialectic is to detect the irrelevance and invalidity of alien claims and to reject them on that basis.
  • Whether idealistic or materialistic, synthetic dialectic attempts to finally subsume all being under a single, universal ontological category, or a monad. This category is understood to be basis of truth. Thinking from other bases is at best provisional and at worst, false.
  • Synthetic dialectic can appear absolutist, and often succumbs to absolutism.
  • Synthetic dialectic strengthens the will, but weakens the intellect.
  • Synthetic dialectic synthesizes — “puts together” — broader, more universal categories. Fewer and fewer particularities are perceived in their particularity, but are taken as generalities, types or manifested principles and are treated according to their abstract intelligible character. Anomalous particularities are disregarded as irrelevant.

Analytic dialectic moves toward pluralism.

  • Analytic dialectic is antireductionistic.
  • Its method is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which project unnecessary, simplistic and unproductive equivalencies.
  • Analytic dialectic has a moderating and constructive character. It tends to consume energy generating structures of increasing complexity.
  • Analytic dialectic tends to increase the total number of categories and the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting them, while decreasing the scope of each categories.
  • Analytic dialectic discovers diversity within apparent equivalency. It looks for failures to detect relevant distinctions made by other people, due to the crudeness of one’s own schema. It discovers both new distinctions and new, valid, obligating claims from others.
  • The thrust of analytic dialectic is to detect the relevance and validity of alien claims and to affirm them.
  • Analytic dialectic attempts to understand multiple, overlapping ontological existences in all being, which permits the understanding of diverse, valid and finite perspectives. The ground of being is understood as an engulfing infinity, to which human beings relate in finite terms.
  • Analytic dialectic can appear relativist, and often succumbs to relativism.
  • Analytic dialectic strengthens the intellect, but weakens the will.
  • Analytic dialectic scrutinizes broad, universal categories and analyzes — “loosens them up” — into finer categorizations more capable of doing justice to “particularities in their particularity”. Particularities are still treated according to their intelligible character, but intelligibility is obligated to answer to the truth of particulars and to accommodate them.

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Both forms of dialectic are necessary to human life. Neither is intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. The question is one of context and dynamic balance.

Somethingness

Ideas, Metaphysics

Blindness conceals itself behind nothing.

Nothing is there, but nothing is missing. Nothing is seen, but more importantly, nothing is not seen.

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Contrast disrupts nothingness and brings somethingness into existence to us.

Presence in the midst of absence and absence in the midst of presence are equally capable of disrupting nothingness.

But presence in the midst of presence and absence in the midst of absence are nothing.

Same against same means nothing. White against white and black against black have the same effect.

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We are blind to time because we are always inside time and never not inside it.

We are blind to space because we are always inside space and never not inside it.

We are blind to spirit because we are always inside spirit and never not inside it.

Yet we sense that there is an outside. Who knows how we sense it, or what such an outside could be?

And who knows what else we are inside and cannot conceive of not being inside?

Edenic seeds

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas, Judaism

A biologist held out two seeds, one in each hand.

“This seed in my left hand is a future tree. If you plant this seed in a sunny spot on fertile soil and keep it watered it will consume nutrients, water and sunlight and grow into a tree.

“This seed in my right hand is a generative principle. If you place this seed in a sunny spot, on fertile soil and keep the soil watered, through the seed nutrients, water and sunlight will congregate and organize themselves into a huge tree.”

“That I can accept,” said the biologist’s colleague; “but your claim that these seeds come from the two trees of Eden strikes me as unprovable, and, frankly, unscientific.”

Chuang Tzu on music, fear, weariness and stupidity

Taoism

Ch’eng of North Gate said to the Yellow Emperor, “When Your Majesty performed the Hsien-ch’ih music in the wilds around Lake Tung-t’ing, I listened, and at first I was afraid. I listened some more and felt weary, and then I listened to the end and felt confused. Overwhelmed, speechless, I couldn’t get hold of myself.”

“It’s not surprising you felt that way,” said the emperor. “I performed it through man, tuned it to Heaven, went forward with ritual principle, and established it in Great Purity. Perfect music must first respond to the needs of man, accord with the reason of Heaven, proceed by the Five Virtues, and blend with spontaneity; only then can it bring order to the four seasons and bestow a final harmony upon the ten thousand things. Then the four seasons will rise one after the other, the ten thousand things will take their turn at living. Now flourishing, now decaying, the civil and military strains will keep them in step; now with clear notes, now with dull ones, the yin and the yang will blend all in harmony, the sounds flowing forth like light, like hibernating insects that start to wriggle again, like the crash of thunder with which I awe the world. At the end, no tail; at the beginning, no head; now dead, now alive, now flat on the ground, now up on its feet, its constancy is unending, yet there is nothing that can be counted on. That’s why you felt afraid.

“Then I played it with the harmony of yin and yang, lit it with the shining of sun and moon; its notes I was able to make long or short, yielding or strong, modulating about a single unity, but bowing before no rule or constancy. In the valley they filled the valley; in the void they filled the void; plugging up the crevices, holding back the spirit, accepting things on their own terms. Its notes were clear and radiant, its fame high and bright. Therefore the ghosts and spirits kept to their darkness and the sun, moon, stars, and constellations marched in their orbits. I made it stop where there is an end to things, made it flow where there is no stopping. You try to fathom it but can’t understand, try to gaze at it but can’t see, try to overtake it but can’t catch up. You stand dazed before the four-directioned emptiness of the Way, or lean on your desk and moan. Your eyes fail before you can see, your strength knuckles under before you can catch up. It was nothing I could do anything about. Your body melted into the empty void, and this brought you to an idle freedom. It was this idle freedom that made you feel weary.

“Then I played it with unwearying notes and tuned it to the command of spontaneity. Therefore there seemed to be a chaos where things grow in thickets together, a maturity where nothing takes form, a universal plucking where nothing gets pulled, a clouded obscurity where there is no sound. It moved in no direction at all, rested in mysterious shadow. Some called it death, some called it life, some called it fruit, some called it flower. It flowed and scattered, and bowed before no constant tone. The world, perplexed by it, went to the sage for instruction, for the sage is the comprehender of true form and the completer of fate. When the Heavenly mechanism is not put into action and yet the five vital organs are all complete this may be called the music of Heaven. Wordless, it delights the mind. Therefore the lord of Yen sang its praises thus: ‘Listen — you do not hear its sound; look — you do not see its form. It fills all Heaven and earth, enwraps all the six directions.’ You wanted to hear it but had no way to go about it. That was why you felt confused.

“Music begins with fear, and because of this fear there is dread, as of a curse. Then I add the weariness, and because of the weariness there is compliance. I end it all with confusion, and because of the confusion there is stupidity. And because of the stupidity there is the Way, the Way that can be lifted up and carried around wherever you go.”

Metaphysical pluralism

Ideas, Metaphysics

For whatever reason, I’ve found myself reading books by professed materialists (Santayana, Geertz, Langer). A couple of years ago that would have been grounds for dropping the book immediately, but now I’m approaching it phenomenologically: Anchor your work in whatever metaphysic you like if you need to — as long as I am able to bracket that metaphysic and still find validity in what you’ve built upon it.

If I am going to take a philosophy seriously that philosophy must be capable of standing on any base, and of standing on no base, and of standing on all conceivable bases simultaneously. Taking a philosophy seriously means its ideas eventually might be accepted and integrated into my own body of understanding, as opposed to being  regarded as an intellectual sickness to diagnose or an alien artifact to observe externally as “someone else’s”. Taking a philosophy seriously means it might deeply influence my own way of seeing the world.

When a person confesses faith in a particular metaphysic or seems intent on eliminating metaphysics altogether it makes me suspicious, but that suspicion is only grounds for caution, not rejection.

Iridescent irritants

Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics, Phenomenology

Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…

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A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.

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An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.

Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.

Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.

It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.

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Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.

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We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.

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We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.

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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.

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Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.

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Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.

Diagram du jour

Ideas, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Taoism

This is pretty much a paraphrasing of what I’m always saying, one way or another, but I think it’s a relatively clear one. What I’m trying to do is to classify the different modes of understanding available to us to help us relate and unify our experience. In this diagram the darker, outer circles of why, how and what are the space in which we can feel the relevance of a problem and pursue understanding; the brighter inner circles of the venn diagram are the successful resolution of a problem through the exercise of various modes of understanding. At the center is totality as (as I believe) Levinas uses it, though without the moral overtones.

My view is that most us overemphasize episteme (the type of knowledge by which we comprehend objects), if we recognize the other forms of understanding at all. Even when we do, we tend to reduce them to the terms of episteme. In my view, sophia and phronesis are felt and responded, to aptly or not, according to the degree of one’s understanding. One’s ability to articulate the understanding has much less to do than with one’s ability to relate and respond (verbally or not) by the terms of and to the ends set by the understanding. Sophia and phronesis are essentially tacit forms of knowledge, which can find articulations, but precedes and exceeds the articulation of language.

These diagrams are the attempts of my own episteme to relate to the other faculties within my soul. And when I find myself caring about the form and content of these diagrams and then later catch myself working naturally according to the principles I’m attempting to show, I experience wholeness of purpose and coherence in the world. And if others experience my diagrams this way — or show me how I can improve them, or convince me that I ought to destroy them — I feel the potential of the world to be a home.

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I’m always looking for structures, but not because I think the structure is already there to be discovered. It’s because I think sanity requires these kinds of structures. I am perfectly willing to project a structure onto reality as if it is already in it, and see it there afterward. These structures are not tools I employ to help me see; they’re understanding itself, by which I see.

I’m enough of a skeptic that I do not care if a model is a discovery or an invention. What matters is that it is experienced as a discovery, and that the structure clings to my vision as if it is part of what I see, not a feature of my sight.

Subject-object

Metaphysics, Phenomenology

Our minds grasp only that which is objective in form. What concerns us most, though, is subjective in form. This fundamental agony of being is the root of the best and worst religion.

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An object is that which exists side-by-side among other entities.

A subject is one who participates in a whole that wholly includes and exceeds himself.

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A person: a subject and object, who relates as an object or subject to objects and subjects.

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Both the objective and the subjective are violently reducible to the the terms of the other. One can inhabit a radically subjective world of extensionless phenomena. One can also inhabit a radically objective world as a being with emergent consciousness. Why, though?

To forget a dream

Ideas, Judaism

Two ways to forget a dream: 1) leave it alone and let it evaporate naturally; 2) misremember it with narrative coherence.

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Equally inhuman: total artificiality and pure naturalness.

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At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

– Bob Dylan

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snakeorders

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Dreams, children’s stories, Greek myths (pre-Bullfinch, pre-Hamilton, pre-Disney), raw observations of well-executed research — this is empirical truth. The minute understanding enters the picture — any concept, theory, narrative, even relevance or quantification — (any kind of coherence apart from the fact that these were all experienced by a single consciousness) — the empirical truth is diluted with interpretation.

Empirical purity is lost. Good riddance, too.

Understanding digests raw empirical fact and absorbs it into the body of meaning.

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You want pure empirical truth? Why? Search your biography for reasons. What for you makes the empirical chaos superior to that which hovers over that-which-is, which articulates distinctions and narrates a continuous story? Are you sure you are as empirical as you think?

Here’s my opinion: most of us reject grand narratives (or concepts), not because we are against narratives (or concepts) per se, but because the narrative (which is an expression of our conceptual system) in which we are enmeshed requires us to repel truths which feel suspiciously relevant and meaningful, and systematically excludes them from the general body of meaning, our culture. It is a principled self-denial, a postmodern geek’s asceticism.

Freedom from the dominant narrative and conceptual framework is the means to a better narrative and conceptual framework, one where we have a place. We need a place where we have the words we need say and hear, a place where we can do our work and where we can rest.

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Imprisonment, liberation, building, dwelling… then realizing our dwelling has degraded to imprisonment… that’s the cycle of culture.

We humans keep reinventing what a human is. We’re at least as cultural as we are biological. The line between the cultural and the biological is a fine one. The line is a narrated one.

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In addition to our physical “homeless problem” I believe we have a spiritual homeless problem. How many of us have found situations where we are permitted to do our own kind of service for others, and are valued for it?

Think about the people you love. How often  is there agreement between one’s own sense of value and the collective’s sense of one’s value? Isn’t it more common that the collective has no use for what one wants to give, or is even hostile to accepting it?

One is enslaved or marginalized.

Imagine a world where people actively value what you need to offer, what you feel born to offer.

*

Has it ever occurred to you that culture changes because it produces new kinds of people, the people it needs next, and it is up to those new people to effect change, to make a place in the world for themselves?

*

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” *

* Note added Easter Sunday April 16, 2017 / Pesach VI, 20th of Nisan, 5777:

On “Son of Man”: A child of humanity never has a place to lay her head because she is born to make a new place for new heads to lie! Sacred galut. A child of humanity — a new humanity produced by humanity, by culture — by a particular culture, that essentially progressive and eternally productive Jewish culture — is born and reborn. Judaism produces yet one more new kind of Jew, one particularly beautiful link in a long chain of generating generations. How can anyone not want to become part of such a tradition — a project of  human self-reinvention?

 

Chord: Nietzsche’s practical metaphysics

Chord, Ideas, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Pragmatism

The circle must be closed. — He who has followed a philosophy or a species of thought to the end of its course and then around the end will grasp from his inner experience why the masters and teachers who came afterwards turned away from it, often with an expression of deprecation. For, though the circle has to be circumscribed, the individual, even the greatest, sits firmly on his point of the periphery with an inexorable expression of obstinacy, as though the circle ought never to be closed.

*

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned!

*

A few rungs down. — One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the soul’s salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind’s greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind’s finest accomplishments to date.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I now see a number of people who have arrived at the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but only a few who climb back down a few rungs. For one should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it. Those who are most enlightened can go only as far as to free themselves of metaphysics and look back on it with superiority, while here, as in the hippodrome, it is necessary to take a turn at the end of the track.

*

One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics… Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself — behind oneself … A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength … Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them — it knows itself sovereign…

Sanity and vision

Ethics, Etymology, Politics, Synesis, Taoism

The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.

What is lacking is:

  1. vision which respects sanity, and
  2. sanity which recognizes vision.

*

Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.

Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.

But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.

*

We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.

We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.

*

Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.

We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.

*

Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”

Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”

Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”

Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”

Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”

Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”

Is experience essentially individual?

*

Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive.  The world is seen as together.

Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.

Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.

Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.

Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of  synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.

*

On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.

*

Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.

openstablespiral

Earth and heaven

Ideas, Philosophy, Taoism

This is yet another attempt at a comprehensible, practical and understandable account of the trigram (of the I Ching).

*

Earth

Observations are unified in comprehension (com- “together” -prehendere “grasp”). Comprehension is objective.

Yin earth is that which is observed without comprehension. (Chaos.)

Changing yin earth is the first glimmer of comprehension of that which is observed. (Birth of a paradigm.)

Yang earth is the comprehension of that which is observed. (Normal science.)

Changing yang earth is skepticism toward comprehension of that which is observed. (Scientific crisis.)

*

Heaven

Understanding unifies experience. Understanding is subjective. (Under all “objects” stands that by which the objects exist to us. See the first line of the Dhammapada, or verse 29 of the Gospel of Thomas or anything by any famous philosopher whose name begins with the letter H.)

Yang heaven experiences the world in a unified and sustained understanding. (Nobility.)

Changing yang heaven begins to doubt, and experiences the world in increasingly incoherent and wavering understanding. (Loss of faith. Danger of reactionary hubris.)

Yin heaven doubts, and experiences the world in fragmentary and fleeting understandings. (Akrasia.)

Changing yin heaven begins to understand, experiences the world in increasingly unified and sustained understandings. (Insight.)

*

Man

Action is animated by understanding and directed by comprehension:

Yang man acts upon the world instinctive sureness.

Changing yang man acts upon the world with wavering instincts and diminishing confidence.

Yin man withdraws from the world and abstains from action.

Changing yin man learns how to act upon the world.