Forever Becoming: Kawai

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Everything is Connected

In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism is the methodology that implies elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader, overarching system or structure.

It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".

'Structuralism'

Suppose there are the phenomena A, B, and C, and each of them is itself without any self-nature, yet they are all related. Consequently, the existence of A as "A" is determined by its relation to B and C and all other phenomena.

Everything is related to everything; nothing can be considered apart from its relatedness to the whole.

Although A is without self-nature, still it is A because of its relationship to everything else. In short, the inner structure of A includes everything else in hidden or "powerless" form. And by such relationship A is A, not B or C.

The entire universe supports the existence of any single thing, and absolutely nothing exists as an individual particular by itself alone. All things continually and simultaneously manifest themselves together as a whole. The philosophy of the Hua-yen calls this ontological reality "Interdependent Origination."

As no "individual" can exist in itself alone, it exists by the support of everything other than itself.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.101-2

In his book, Bostrom considers a distant future in which trillions of digital minds merge into an enormous cognitive cyber-soup.

“Whether the set of extremely positive posthuman modes of being would include some kind of dissolved bouillon, there is some uncertainty,” he said. “If you look at religious views, there are many where merging with something greater is a form of heaven, being in the presence of this enormous beauty and goodness. In many traditions, the best possible state does not involve being a little individual pursuing goals.

'The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?'

If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.

And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured [...] If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have [little time] before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us.

The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.468

The notion that all these fragments separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.

Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it.

Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.

[David Bohm]
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ... The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self ...

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

[Albert Einstein]

In the traditional society, the most respected person was the lama. In the modern sector, it is the engineer.

[..] The world views of the lama and the engineer are very different. The old beliefs were based on a description of reality that emphasized the unity or dependent origination of all life, whereas the new scientific perspective emphasizes its separateness.

It seems to say that we stand apart - outside the rest of creation. And to gain a greater understanding of the way nature works, we simply have to split matter into smaller and smaller fragments and examine the various pieces in isolation.

The shift from lama to engineer represents a shift from ethical values that encourage an empathetic and compassionate relationship with all that lives toward a value-free "objectivity" that has no ethical foundation.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.108-9

What links:

A. The decline in bee numbers

B. The decline in Fernando Torres' career?

When you look in the mirror you see yourself as an object. You see your eyes, you see your nose, you see your face, you see your body. And that’s pretty much what you see when you look at other people. But that isn’t all there is to you. In fact, that’s hardly any of what there is to you.

So you could say, for example, you exist at the level of the quantum particle [...] Above that level you exist at an atomic level, and then a molecular level, and then you exist at the level of complex organs and the interactions between those organs. And then you, and then your family, and then the groups that your family belongs to. And then the ecosystems that the groups belong to and so on and so forth until what it is that you are can expand to encompass virtually anything.

Now, when you look at yourself you don’t see that. You see yourself at a certain level of resolution [...] but all those other levels are equally real and equally relevant. And we in fact have very little idea how it is that you’re only able to see what you see. Almost nothing has obvious boundaries and this has real world consequences, it’s not something that’s merely abstract.

The technical term for this problem , the problem of how to bind your perceptions to limit them, is called the frame problem. The frame problem emerges to cause all sorts of trouble for people.

So, for example, when Henry Ford invented the automobile [he presumed he was] building an efficient means of transporting people from one place to the other. There were other unintended consequences of Ford’s discovery.

[...] Ford happened to be a great supporter of Fascism. And the reason that he was a supporter of Fascism was because he regarded the Fascist political structure as a logical extension of the efficient methods that he’d used to assemble vehicles. So his mode of production was instantly manifested in a political philosophy.

Furthermore now - 2009 - a hundred years after the invention of the automobile, we’ve discovered some other things that the car was, other than a place to move people from point A to point B.

So for example, it turns out that the automobile and the internal combustion engine are among the most effective technologies ever devised to transform the nature of the atmosphere to heat up the world. Not only that, the car has completely transformed the nature of cities.

And these were all unintended consequences of the fact that the car was far more than what people thought it was.

You can say that about any technological structure. No one knew what TV would do to the news, for example. No one knew what the internet would do to the music industry. Everything that you interact with is far more complicated than you see.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'

[...] in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as whole.

[A] computer is only an arc of a larger circuit which always includes a man and an environment from which information is received and upon which efferent messages from the computer have effect. This total system, or ensemble, may legitimately be said to show mental characteristics. It operates by trial and error and has creative character.

Similarly, we may say that "mind" is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system - man plus environment.

In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system - that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behaviour of a man or an other organism, this "system" will usually not have the same limits as the "self" - as this term is commonly (and variously) understood.

Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of an immanent mind.

But this is not how the average Occidental sees the event sequence of tree felling. He says, "I cut down the tree" and he even believes that there is a delimited agent, the "self" which performed a delimited "purposive" action upon a delimited object.

[...] popular parlance includes mind in its utterance by invoking the personal pronoun, and then achieves a mixture of mentalism and physicalism by restricting mind within the man and reifying the tree.

The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, "thinks" and "acts" and "decides," is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the "self" or "consciousness" [...]

[...] if we exclude the unconscious processes from the "self" and call them "ego alien," then these processes take on the subjective colouring of "urges" and "forces"; and this pseudodynamic quality is then extended to the conscious "self" which attempts to "resist" the "forces" of the unconscious. The "self" thereby becomes itself an organization of seeming 'forces."

The popular notion which would equate "self" with consciousness thus leads into the notion that ideas are "forces" [...]

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism'), p.316-20

That’s the key of the future of macro-economics - the alignment of agency and wellbeing, and that correlates with closing the loop.

We’re closing the loop between agency of individuals/well being of others - moving from an open loop system, where I could affect things but not internalise those effects in the cost equation, to [a system where] all [affects are] internalised in the cost equation.

That corresponds to a world view where my sense of self and my sense of the rest of the universe are not fundamentally separate concepts. I wouldn’t exist without oxygen, or the plants that make the oxygen, or the bugs and fungus that makes the plants work to make the oxygen.

I am not an individual. I have a self-organising membrane that has some individuality to it but I am an emergent property of everything else.

So when you close the loop between sense of self and sense of others, then what’s in my best interest [is] whats in the best interest of others. There is loop closure between ‘advantage self at the expense of others’ or ‘sacrifice self for the well being of others’, both of which are nonsense in a radically interconnected system.

What we’re looking at is closing all the causal loops so that everything that influences decision making is being informed by everything being influenced.

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'36: Daniel Schmachtenberger - Phase Shifting Humanity', The Future Thinkers Podcast (29:55)

The will to power […] depends on the fact that for Nietzsche all things in the world are interconnected and that their interconnections are crucial to their very character. But from these ideas a more radical conclusion seems to follow: “No things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their ‘effect’ upon the same.”

Nietzsche’s continual stress on the interconnectedness of everything in the world constitutes his attack on the “thing-in-itself,” by which he understands the concept of an object that is distinct from, more than, beyond, or behind the totality of its effects on every other thing.

A thing, he insists, cannot be distinguished (except provisionally) from its various interrelations. Objects are conditioned by other objects through and through: “‘Things that have a constitution in themselves’ - a dogmatic idea with which one must break absolutely.”

To speak of a thing-in-itself is to speak of a thing that can be conceived to exist independently of all other things and that is to that extent unconditioned. But this implies that at least some of its features, through which it is to be conceived, apply to it quite independently of the existence of any other thing or that it can be conceived to exist without any features at all.

Nietzsche does not believe that things can have properties on their own, properties that attach to them independently of the existence of other things, because he believes that properties are nothing but a thing’s effects on other things, including ourselves as perceivers:

“That things possess a constitution on themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is quite ideal hypothesis; it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing […] The properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things’: if one removes other ‘things,’ then a thing has no properties, i.e. there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no ‘thing-in-itself’.”

[…] what there is is always determined from a specific point of view that embodies its particular interests, needs, and values, its own will to power. “‘Essence’, ‘the essential nature,’ is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies ‘what is it for me?’ (for us, for all that lives, etc.)”

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 79-81

[…] in Structuralism, all signifiers are directly connected to an extra-linguistic signified, the invariable ones.

To 'mean' anything, a signifier must presuppose a signified already-always outside it. This is what Derrida terms as the "transcendental signified": as a signified, it belongs to the realm of language, but by being invariable, and by refusing any movement, it remains outside it

A word, if immovable, can mean nothing, or even exist. Only when an endless chain of other signifiers, other words, hints, get associated with it, it finally acquires meaning ('Camel' is understandable only when it is thinly associated with many related words, such as 'animal', 'desert', 'cigarette', 'long neck', etc.).

In other words, language is this movement.

‘Trace (deconstruction)’, Wikipedia

If both positive and negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast.

But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with net cost to society.

Consider job-protection measures: you notice those whose jobs are made safe and ascribe social benefits to such protections. You do not notice the effect on those who cannot find a job as a result, since the measure will reduce job openings. In some cases […] the positive consequences of an action will immediately benefit the politicians and phony humanitarians, while the negative ones take a long time to appear - they may never become noticeable.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 111

An organism’s primary properties are, according to evolutionary theory, both a record of past environments and a conjecture about the current one.

The overall species-niche super system determines the traits that individual organisms will exhibit. It is known that two animals with the same genotype can be phenotypically different depending on the environment in which they develop. Is this not a form of self-cause whereby the distributed whole influences its components?

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.107

Dynamical systems theory tells us that because they are embedded in history as well as in a structured environment, people are not independent, isolated atoms just plunked into a completely alien environment that affects them through mechanical forces.

As we saw earlier, by means of second-order context-dependencies established by persistent interaction with the environment, agents effectively import the environment into their internal dynamics by recalibrating these to incoming signals.

Over time, that is, both phylogenetically and developmentally, people establish interdependencies between the environment and their internal dynamics such that the former becomes part of their external structure: their boundary conditions.

Context-sensitive constraints established by positive feedback weave both the environment and history into the agent's cognitive and conative states, thereby achieving the embeddedness in space and time that characterizes those complex systems. The way adaptive systems function therefore strongly suggests that, as dynamical structures, intentions "ain't just in the head" either.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, 197

Feedback processes […] embody the context-sensitive constraints of history.

By embodying context-sensitive constraints, mutualist feedback renders a system sensitive to (constrained by) its own past experiences. This makes nonlinear dynamical systems historical, not just temporal the way near-equilibrium thermodynamical systems are.

Once the system's subsequent behavior depends on both the spatial and temporal conditions under which it was created and the contingent experiences it has undergone, the system is historically and contextually embedded in a way that near-equilibrium systems of traditional thermodynamics are not.

The very structure of a snowflake, for example, embodies the conditions under which it was created. Because dissipative structures are not just dropped into either time or space the way Newtonian atoms with only primary qualities are, their evolutionary trajectory is therefore not predictable in detail.

Mutualism thus makes a dynamical system's current and future properties, states, and behaviors dependent on the context in which the system is currently embedded as well as on its prior experiences. As a result, unlike the near-equilibrium processes of traditional thermodynamics, complex systems do not forget their initial conditions: they "carry their history on their backs"

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.140

This 'whole person' of whom we have been talking is not, then, a solitary, self-sufficient unit. It belongs essentially within a larger whole, indeed within an interlocking pattern formed by a great range of such wholes.

These wider systems are not an alien interference with its identity. They are its home, its native climate, the soil from which it grows, the atmosphere which it needs in order to breathe. Their unimaginable richness is what makes up the meaning of our lives.

The self's wholeness is not, then, the wholeness of a billiard-ball but that of an organism, a transient, struggling creature which has, of course, its own distinct shape but which still belongs in its own context and background.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.20

Saussure's 'structural' model of language remains a landmark in the study of complex systems. His primary insight - that meaning is generated through a system of differences - remains an excellent way of conceptualising the relationships in a complex system.

To think in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of deterministic rules, is not a novelty for science, but it has always been seen as part of qualitative descriptions and not as part of the quantitative descriptions and calculations deemed necessary ever since Kepler's insistence that 'to measure is to know'.

Many phenomena, especially in the life-sciences, but also in physics and mathematics, simply cannot be understood properly in terms of deterministic, rule-based or statistical processes. Quantum-mechanical descriptions of sub-atomic processes are essentially relational, and even on a more macroscopic level, relations determine the nature of matter.

The carbon atoms in my body can all be interchanged with carbon atoms from the wood of my desktop, and there will be no noticeable difference (Penrose 1989: 32).

The significance of each atom is therefore not determined by its basic nature, but is a result of a large number of relationships between itself and other atoms.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.35, 37

[…] the relationality of the world is operationalised via an understanding of agency that no longer privileges human action.

Rather, all matter is ‘affective’ – it possesses a ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 127–8), whether it is human or non-human, animate or inanimate (DeLanda, 2006: 4; Mulcahy, 2012: 10; Youdell and Armstrong, 2011: 145).

Replacing (human) agency with ‘affect’ serves as an ethical and political counter to the humanism of the social sciences, supplying the basis both for an anti-humanist critique of the destructive capacities of humans in the Anthropocene (Lovelock, 2007: 141) and to reintegrate humans within ‘the environment’ (Fox and Alldred, 2016), thus underpinning a more positive posthumanism (Braidotti, 2006: 37).

The latter, according to Braidotti, can be a basis for an eco-philosophy that establishes a continuum between human and non-human matter (Braidotti, 2006: 41, 2013: 104).

When applied to sociology, these aspects of contemporary materialism’s monism (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 155) or ‘flat ontology’ (DeLanda, 2005: 51) collapse or cut across a range of conventional social theory dualisms – including agency/structure, nature/culture, animate/inanimate, micro/macro, reason/emotion, surface/depth, word/ world and mind/matter (Braidotti, 2013: 4–5; Coole and Frost, 2010: 26–7; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 23; van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 157).

[Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred]
‘Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights’

Urbanization has done many things, but the important things that it has done from an ecological point of view is to separate people psychologically from the ecosphere and separate them physically from the ecosystems that actually sustain them.

Many people can live all their lives, and most of our young people in school, in cities with no psychological or physical sense of connectivity to anything outside of themselves.

In some sense, it replicates the economist notion that we're disconnected from all things, when the reality is that every city on the planet would curl up and die, were we cut off from […] the huge arterial network needed to supply cities. But in the process [of supplying cities] we're depleting the resources of the land base all over the planet.

[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube

Unintended consequences

Nested in Tradition

Narrow Contexts

Border and Flow

Mono / Poly

Mono - Poly
One - Many

Masculine - Feminine
Efficiency - Redundancy
Narrow - Wide
Specialist - Generalist

Vertical - Horizontal

Inner - Outer
Objects - Relations

Communal - Individual

Self-identity - Self-division

Universal - Particular

Spirit - Soul

Transcendent - Immanent

Rationalism - Empiricism

Mono - one way for everyone - promotes the collective by making all conform to a single norm. Differences are discouraged.

Poly, on the other hand, allows divergence, and thus promotes the freedom of the individual; to roam and become distinct.

We like it when a thing is only one thing. But society is always two things: it’s the thing that alienates you, and it's the benevolent father; always.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'Joe Rogan Experience #958 - Jordan Peterson'

It's not Christian love that's conquered the world; it's not its sophisticated interpretations, sophisticated theology.

It's successful because it mobilizes the will, and the will needs fundamentalism or it doesn't know what to do.

Fundamentalism serves the hero myth. It gives you fundamental principles - words, truths, directions. It builds a strong ego. It is American psychology. No Hermes, no Dionysus, no Aphrodite in it at all.

Utterly monotheistic because there is only one meaning, one reading of the text - like, for instance, the one meaning of Christ's suffering.

[...] anything that doesn't fit within that unity is split, or schizoid, a hysterical complex or autonomous or whatever else, and you have lost the fact that you are a bundle of many levels, people, noises, impulses, trends, personalities, possibilities and no two days are the same and no two voices are the same and one is a loose structure of many beings - Jung called them complexes.

But as long as one lives in the myth of unity one is forced into commanding the psyche to obey the principle of unity and the unifier, the ego, creating this monstrous Western ego, which then has to be subdued by all kinds of Christian virtues: tolerance, self-control, patience, humility, charity, obedience, poverty ... all this huge ascetic structure to deal with the Monster which is created by its own dogma!

So that the repression which Freud placed at the basis of our relation with the unconscious is nothing more than the Christian myth at work in us each, cutting us off from our innate polytheistic imagination and renaming it, the unconscious.

[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.81-2

It is conventionally held that ancient polytheistic humanism collapsed because it was unrealistic, a highly artificial system.

But there is a sense in which it was realistic, as we should expect in any religion springing from Greek origins.

The gods on Olympus at least represented actual human attributes, or varying and often conflicting archetypal human tendencies; while the Hebraic system - the uniting of desirable (moralistic) human attributes into one god - was a highly artificial procedure.

In many ways the Greek system is the more rational and intelligent; which perhaps explains why it has been the less appealing.

The Hebrew god is a creation of man; and the Greek gods are a reflection of him.

Nonetheless, periods of history come when it seems clear which serves the general need best. Monotheism saw man through the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman empire; but today the benevolent scepticism of humanism seems better suited to our situation.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.114-15

Whether something is monolithic, binary, dialectical, or meaninglessly plural is a function of your distance from it.

When you're very close to something, all you can see is oneness, pure dominance by the thing of all others. For a baby, Mother's breast is the entire universe. For a fundamentalist, it's God.

When you're a bit further away, a tidy binary replaces oneness. There are men and there are women. There's East and there's West. This is the distance journalists live at. The world of journalism is always seeing small fluctuations in the relative positions of big, established binaries like these.

[Momus]
'Binary hopping'

In psychological inflation, as Jung developed the idea, the personality is ‘taken over’ by a single archetypal pattern.

A person’s perceptions, values, and behaviour are driven by an image which has its source outside the individual, in the collective or objective psyche. Personal identity is engulfed by the archetype. One’s perceptions of the world, one’s thoughts about it, one’s values, are shaped by a single image.

Ancient cultures explained it as coming under the power of a god. Where we see someone as having a “power complex” or a “mother complex” or just as “falling in love”, the classical Greeks would have seen an individual driven by Zeus, Demeter or Eros.

Analogously we can talk about cultural inflation, in which a nation or society, or at least a substantial part of the population, is taken over by an archetype, so that the group’s perceptions, self-image and behaviour are formed by a single archetypal pattern and driven by a single archetypal energy.

Domination by a single pattern to the detail of everything else can be considered a form of pathology (personal or societal), though some pathologies (e.g. falling in love) are obviously more benign than others.

[Bernie Neville]
‘The Charm of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard, and the Postmodern Condition’, Journal of Analytical Psychology (1992), p. 347

According to the research, three key bodily systems - the neurological system, the endocrine system, and the immune system - function independently yet work harmoniously together.

There is no central system which integrates these three systems. Each of these functions within its own integration, and, in addition, they function well as a whole though not integrated by a central control.

Taking a hint from the above, I think that the human psyche also should be seen as a "supersystem."

I have repeatedly discussed different levels of consciousness while also indicating that even logically conflicting things will coexist in the mind of a human being. Indeed, that coexistence has value.

I am inclined to think that our human mind maintains integration in each of the different levels of consciousness. In addition, as a whole it functions as a supersystem without a center. In short, I think that the psyche as a whole, when it is healthy and functioning well, does not need to have an integrative center.

Some might say that, if a system as a whole is functioning well, you call it "integration." For integration, we tend to think that a principle or rule exists which should be central and controlling. I think that things - including human beings - work well beyond the center or principle which man creates.

I described my great trouble being caught between Eastern and Western cultures. While in such suffering, I believed in the integration of the two and talked about it easily. But, after trying hard many times, I gradually came to know that it is, in fact, impossible to "integrate" them.

It even seems dangerous to attempt quick integration, as I have realized that people who attempt it tend to ignore things which are "inconvenient."

So it seems likely that a new science would not try to develop a system of knowledge featuring simple, logical integration [...]

If we are to develop this new science of the whole, we must open ourselves to imaginative ways of thinking and perceiving and summon up our most determined efforts.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.140-1

With all such control phenomena, a critical issue is robustness: how well can a system withstand small jolts. Equally critical in biological systems is flexibility: how well can a system function over a range of frequencies.

A locking-in to a single mode can be enslavement, preventing a system from adapting to change.

Organisms must respond to circumstances that vary rapidly and unpredictably; no heartbeat or respiratory rhythm can be locked into the strict periodicities of the simplest physical models, and the same is true of the subtler rhythms of the rest of the body.

Some researchers [...] proposed that healthy dynamics were marked by fractal physical structures, like the branching networks of bronchial tubes in the lung and conducting fibers in the heart, that allow a wide range of rhythms.

Fractal processes associated with scaled, broad-band spectra are 'information rich.' Periodic states, in contrast, reflect narrow-band spectra and are defined by monotonous, repetitive sequences, depleted of information content.

Treating such disorders [...] may depend on broadening a system's spectral reserve, its ability to range over many different frequencies without falling back into a locked periodic channel.

[James Gleick]
Chaos, p. 293

'Wittgenstein develops a style of writing which is radically errant, which unlids all the accidence concealed by "normal" uses of words in order to show how many different routes it would be possible to take from any given point in their discourse - routes which we had simply not thought of because we were bemused by normality.'

Once 'ordinary language' is shorn of its residual metaphysics - the idea that ultimate truths are somehow vested in our normal, everyday habits of usage - linguistic philosophy takes on a very different aspect.

Rather than reinforce existing conventions or naturalized 'forms of life', it works to reveal the unlooked-for possibilities latent in all communication.

Plato is the prototype of all those unfortunate philosophers who must resort to writing in order to communicate their thoughts, but who lay themselves open, in the process, to all manner of unauthorized reading and interpretation.

[...] language is subject to a generalized 'iterability' - or readiness to be grafted into new and unforeseeable contexts - such that no appeal to performative intent can serve to delimit the range of possible meaning.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 178, 187, 191

Jim Rutt: Another theme that I […] took out of what I read of your work is that you certainly encourage dissent and diversity […] but at the same time, if one’s trying to make an organization work you have to manage the signal to the noise. Not all opinions are equal. How do you encourage dissent and diversity without being overwhelmed by crankery?

Dave Snowden: […] First of all, I say we need to shift from homogeneity […] I disbelieve everybody should have the same values, the same goals, and the same objectives, because that destroys. That makes systems non-resilient.

[We need to shift] into what I call coherent heterogeneity.

You have to have differences which can come together in different ways. For example, I’m Welsh. If you meet anybody from Wales, the first thing they’ll ask you is where’d you come from, because we have to establish some way in which we can have a fight with you […] but when the English come we’re Welsh.

That’s an example of coherent heterogeneity. Now what we can do with the attitude map that I mentioned earlier is we can measure the level of cognitive and behavioral diversity in your organization, and we can identify outlier groups that you should pay attention to, rather than them getting drowned out by middle management.

That’s the key thing that comes out of the attitudinal mapping. You have to maintain diversity in the system, but you have to maintain diversity which isn’t freakish […] You actually need to get around those sort of problems by providing interactions between dissonant groups.

I present a situation, I’ll get everybody in the workforce to interpret it. I’ll then get dominant views, but I’ll get 15 or 16 clusters of outlier views. I let the clusters run a small safe-to-fail experiment and we see what works. That’s a key conflict resolution device. Effectively I do what’s called a shallow dive into chaos. I move into an unconstrained system to actually statistically map onto a landscape, and I know which ideas are coherent enough to explore even though they’re different, and which are actually nonsense.

A lot of our work has been to produce objective quantifiable measures of coherence within an organization, so you know which dissonants are worth talking to and which aren’t. That’s actually a relatively simple process.

[Jim Rutt & Dave Snowden]
'EP11 Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking'

Freedom of the will so construed is not the absence of causal determination but a harmony among all of a person’s preference schemes. It is a state in which desire follows thought, and action follows desire, without tension or struggle, and in which the distinction between choice and constraint may well be thought to disappear.

Nietzsche is very clear about the extraordinary difficulty with which this state of harmony of thought and action can be reached […] success consists in having the minimum level of discord among the maximum possible number of diverse tendencies.

“The highest human being would have the highest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘human being’ shows itself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g. in Shakespeare) but are controlled.”

The creation of the self therefore appears to be the creation, or imposition, of a higher-order accord among our lower-level thoughts, desires, and actions.

It is the development of the ability, or the willingness, to accept responsibility for everything that we have done and to admit what is in any case true: that everything we have done actually constitutes which each one of us is.

[…] we are always finding ourselves in new and unforeseen situations; we constantly have new thoughts and desires, we continue to perform new actions. In their light we may at any point come to face the need to reinterpret, to reorganise, or even to abandon earlier ones.

To desire to remain who I am in this context is not so much to want any specific character traits to remain constant: the very same passage speaks of “multiplicity of character considered and exploited as an advantage.” Rather, it is to desire to appropriate and to organise as my own all that I have done, or at least that I know I have done, into a coherent whole.

It is simply to become able to accept all such things, good and evil, as things I have done. It is not to cultivate stable character traits that make my reactions predictable and unsurprising.

[…] it is to become flexible enough to use whatever I have done, do, or will do as elements within a constantly changing, never finally completed whole.

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 187-190

For Aristotle, an object had a clear purpose set by its designer. An eye was there to see, a nose to smell. This is a rationalistic argument, another manifestation of what I call Platonicity.

Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive - and on occasion [...] the auxiliary function becomes the principal one.

[...] anything that has a secondary use, and one you did not pay for, will present an extra opportunity should a heretofore unknown application emerge or a new environment appear.

The organism with the largest number of secondary uses is the one that will gain the most from environmental randomness and epistemic opacity!

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 318-9

Brian Arthur in a brilliant book, shows the degree to which technology innovation depends on exaption rather than adaption.

Exaption is more important than adaption; traits that evolve for one context accidentally get used in a different one and we get true innovation. Most of human development including language is the result of exaptive processes. There are some related techniques here, the use of metaphor for example can allow association or linkage of ideas in new ways.

[...] we need to create the conditions for innovation. Now critically that means that we need to focus on a degree of inefficiency [...] Managing for exaption requires a degree of mess [...] You can’t determine in advance what innovation is needed, you have to create an ecology in which novel solutions can emerge.

Innovation never happens within a formal highly efficient system. Yes, when the informal system makes the bureaucracy work despite itself you get considerable innovation. However this is generally invisible to the formal system.

[Dave Snowden]
'A grain of sand: Innovation diffusion', '… forever blunt and merciless'

In an accurate language, meaning would be a one-one relation; no word would have two meanings, and no two words would have the same meaning.

In actual languages, as we have seen, meaning is one-many. (It happens often that two words have the same meaning, but this is easily avoided, and can be assumed not to happen without injuring the argument.) That is to say, there is not only one object that a word means, and not only one possible fact that will verify a proposition.

The fact that meaning is a one-many relation is the precise statement of the fact that all language is more or less vague.

[Bertrand Russell]
'Vagueness', The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1:2, p. 90

We may be seeing the beginnings of the reintegration of our culture, a new possibility of the unity of consciousness. If so, it will not be on the basis of any new orthodoxy, either religious or scientific.

Such a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal understandings of reality, of all identifications of one conception of reality with reality itself.

It will recognize the multiplicity of the human spirit, and the necessity to translate constantly between different scientific and imaginative vocabularies. It will recognize the human proclivity to fall comfortably into some single literal interpretation of the world and therefore the necessity to be continuously open to rebirth in a new heaven and a new earth.

[Robert Bellah]

Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World, p. 246

A certain distance too from oneself is necessary. A “clinical” eye in regards to oneself, one’s faults, is required for this mindset.

In our time this can be achieved in part by embracing spirit of true science, whereas for man of Bronze Age it was easy to embrace because he saw things that happened to him, including the great motions of the spirit, the feelings that troubled him, as instantiations of various gods, for which he was not responsible, and which he could therefore judge and evaluate externally.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Bronze Age Mindset, p. 139

Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease; namely, a constant irritability in the face of all natural stirrings and inclinations—as it were, a kind of itching.

Whatever may henceforth push, pull, attract, or impel such an irritable person from inside or outside, it will always seem to him as if his self-control were endangered. No longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wingbeat; he stands in a fixed position with a gesture that wards off, armed against himself, with sharp and mistrustful eyes—the eternal guardian of his castle, since he has turned himself into a castle.

Of course, he can achieve greatness this way. But he has certainly become insufferable for others, difficult for himself, and impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of his soul. Also from all further instruction. For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 305

It is interesting that, being so radically different from Christian symbolism, modern symbolism obeys the same semiotic laws. In one case, one assumes that symbols do have a final meaning, but since it is the same everlasting message, there is an inexhaustible variety of signifiers for a unique signified.

In the other case, symbols have any possible meaning because of the inner contradictoriness of reality, but since every symbol speaks about this fundamental contradictoriness, an inexhaustible quantity of signifiers always stand for their unique signified, the inexhaustibility of the senses of any text.

One witnesses in both cases a form of “fundamentalism.” In the former case, every text speaks of the rational and univocal discourse of God; in the latter every text speaks of the irrational and ambiguous discourse of Hermes.

[Umberto Eco]

The Limits of Interpretation, p. 20

The Classical soul [...] with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of Temperance and Ataraxia.

[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 313

The ego, with its illusion of self-mastery and containment, is formed through misrecognition, an anticipatory identification with an idealized, stable, self-enclosed, citadel of self.

This identification with an image of oneself sets up the ego as rivalrous, narcissistic, and aggressive. While the act of misrecognition becomes the basis for a sense of self or for self-consciousness, it is also an act of alienation, exclusion, or self-division; by erecting an imaginary ideal, representing oneself in a perfected image, the self is also split and rendered unconscious to itself, cut off from the multiplicity of dispersed drives.

For Lacan, the ego is a “knot of imaginary servitude” and thus the site of the subject's stagnancy and inertia. The mirror stage also forms the basis of Lacan's critique of ego psychology; whereas the latter takes strengthening the ego to be the aim of analytic practice, Lacan takes the aspirations of the ego to be a “lure” of self-possession, an armor that rigidifies the subject and resists freedom and movement, a defensive structure that provides an alienating identity.

With this theory of the ego, Lacan presents a subject at odds with itself, non-self-identical, in “primordial Discord”, torn between unity and anarchy, organization and chaos, integration and fragmentation.

The writers affiliated with French Feminism […] are philosophically and temperamentally more sympathetic to the split of subjectivity detailed by psychoanalysis, the idea that I am not I, that self-division rather than self-identity is the fundamental feature of human existence, and therefore that the subject is not a unitary point of origin for choice.

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Irigaray's genealogical account of sexual difference resists both the idea of an invariant universal (and hence sexually neutral) human essence that subtends (and thereby expels) human multiplicity and the idea of sexual essences that consist in self-enclosed identities between which there is an uncrossable divide.

That is, she rejects the ontological assumptions of both universal equality and separatism, taking both to be implicitly masculine and patriarchal, bound to a metaphysical essentialism that aims to capture diversity in first or final principles, or to subsume particulars under general concepts.

Challenging the logic of the one and the many, Irigaray takes the self-division of nature, its being-two, as a model of autonomous self-development. When Irigaray says that human nature is two, she does not mean that there are two fixed sexual substances, but that to be natural is to be embodied, finite, divided, that the fundamental character of nature is growth through differentiation. Human nature, in her view, is not disembodied or neutral; it is always distinctively sexed or sexuate, a neologism for sexed, but not necessarily erotic, bodily difference.

Viewing the natural body as self-differentiating rather than self-identical, Irigaray also articulates distinctive capacities for generation corresponding to differing morphological possibilities (the possibilities of bodily form) that entail “different subjective configurations.”

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The vision of Western science rests on the notion of the uniformity of nature and its law.

The current perception of the universe occurs in terms of a hierarchy of laws built on the foundation at the most fundamental level. Mathematical elegance, simplicity, and beauty are considered to be a feature of the universe and its laws. Complexity is a secondary effect that emerged out of the primordial simplicity of the big bang through a series of chance processes called "symmetry breaking."

What is considered to be preeminent about the universe could perhaps be classified as the general, the abstract, the repeatable, the context-independent, and the all-embracing. By contrast the individual, the idiosyncratic, and the singular event are considered to be of less importance, or as being particular and superficial cases of something deeper and more embracing.

While native science also stresses harmony and balance, it nevertheless gives importance to diversity, as well as to the particular event - to the dream and vision, to a unique phenomenon, and to the experience of each individual.

Indigenous science accepts the rich complexity of life and the natural world as being the essence of the cosmos. Relationships and renewable alliances take the place of fixed laws, and Indigenous science accepts the possibility that chance and the unexpected can enter and disturb any scheme. Thus, the circle is left open and chance, as represented by the clown, the trickster, and gambling games, occupies an important role.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.255-6

If one accepts that information is proliferated throughout the system and that it is continually transformed - by other bits of information and by itself - then it becomes impossible to stipulate a 'true' interpretation for any piece of information.

Information can only be interpreted locally and then only through the dynamics of différance - as reflecting upon and transforming itself. These dynamics precludes the definition of truth or origin at a meta-level and is therefore referred to as the postmodern predicament - ‘a crisis of our truths, our values, our most cherished beliefs' (Lawson 1985:9).

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.121

Lyotard is quite clear on the point that the complexity of the social system does not automatically lead to randomness or noise.

From the passage above it is clear that the system 'combats entropy', that it generates meaning, not noise or chaos. To optimise this process, the system has to be as diverse as possible, not as structured as possible. This, for Lyotard, is the function of paralogy. Paralogy thus performs a similar function to that of self-organised criticality.

Self-organised criticality is the mechanism by which networks diversify their internal structure maximally. The more diverse the structure, the richer is the information that can be stored and manipulated. The network has to walk the tightrope between solid structure, on the one hand, and disorder, on the other.

In our network model, this process is the consequence of fierce competition among units or groups of units. For Lyotard, the driving force in a social system is that of paralogy and dissension […]

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.117

Language and personae mirror each other in both Spenser and Shakespeare.

The archaizing language of The Faerie Queene is analogous to the Apollonian unity of its armoured personalities. Belphoebe and Britomart have one line of thought, as they have one line of action. They are not besieged by fantasy or mood, by the rising torrent of imagination surging through Shakespeare’s major characters.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.196

Cleopatra has a Dionysian all-inclusiveness. She breaks through social restraints to plunge into the sensual, orgiastic pleasure of pure feeling [...] For Cleopatra, life is theater. She is a master propagandist. Truth is inconsequential; dramatic values are supreme.

Metamorphoses are horrific for both Spenser and Dante, who consigns impersonation to one of the lowest circles of the Inferno: incestuous Myrrha, “falsifying herself in another’s form,” is classed with liars and counterfeiters (XXX.41). Puritan hostility to theater was justified.

Like Auntie Mame, Cleopatra, a creature of theater, sees persona as a mirror of soul. The pagan folk sciences, astrology, palmistry, and phrenology, have never forgotten that externals are truth. Beauty is only skin-deep; you can’t tell a book by its cover: these pious axioms come from a contrary moral tradition.

The aesthete, who lives in a world of surfaces, and the male homosexual, who lives in a world of masks, believe in the absoluteness of externals. That is why Auntie Mame was a diva of homosexuals. Cleopatra’s multiple personae are far from feminine fickleness. She represents a radical theatricality in which the inner world is completely transformed into the outer.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.219, 221

I have already emphasized that medieval societies are in general societies of conflict, lawlessness and multiplicity.

John Gardner has written of the fifteenth-century circle around John of Gaunt, Edward III of England's fourth son, 'What they desired of their world was law and order, firm and unchallenged monarchy, or, in Dante's phrase, "The one will that resolves the many"; what they saw all around them, and ardently hated, was instability, debased values, endless struggle, a mad commingling of high and low, not Oneness but Manyness - what Chaucer would describe, in his magnificent elaboration of a poem by Boethius, as a cosmic fornication' [...] This passage suggests a common ambiguity in the medieval vision of the moral life.

On the one hand that life is informed by an idealized view of the world as an integrated order, in which the temporal mirrors the eternal. Every particular item has its due place in the order of things. This is that intellectual vision of total system which finds its supreme expression in Dante and in Aquinas, but to which a great deal of ordinary medieval thought continuously aspires.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.206

Dionysus affirms all that appears, "even the most bitter suffering", and appears in all that is affirmed. Multiple and pluralist affirmation - this is the essence of the tragic.

We must find, for each thing in turn, the special means by which it is affirmed, by which it ceases to be negative. The tragic is not to be found in this anguish or disgust, nor in a nostalgia for lost unity. The tragic is only to be found in multiplicity, in the diversity of affirmation as such. What defines the tragic is the joy of multiplicity, plural joy. This joy is not the result of a sublimation, a purging, a compensation, a resignation or a reconciliation.

The anti-dialectical and anti-religious dream which runs through the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy is a logic of multiple affirmation and therefore a logic of pure affirmation and a corresponding ethic of joy.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.17

[...] pluralism (otherwise known as empiricism) is almost indistinguishable from philosophy itself.

Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy; the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violent atheism.

The Gods are dead but they have died from laughing, on hearing one God claim to be the only one, "Is not precisely this godliness, that there are gods but no God?"

There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated - depending on the forces (the gods) which take possession of it.

Hegel wanted to ridicule pluralism, identifying it with a naive consciousness which would be happy to say "this, that, here, now" - like a child stuttering out its most humble needs. The pluralist idea that a thing has many senses, the idea that there are many things and one thing can be seen as "this and then that" is philosophy's greatest achievement, the conquest of the true concept, its maturity and not its renunciation or infancy.

For the evaluation of this and that, the delicate weighing of each thing and its sense, the estimation of the forces which define the aspects of a thing and its relations with others at every instant - all this (or all that) depends on philosophy's highest art - that of interpretation.

To interpret and even to evaluate is always to weigh. The notion of essence does not disappear here but takes on a new significance, for not every sense has the same value. A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it. But the thing itself is not neutral and will have more or less affinity with the force in current possession.

There are forces which can only get a grip on something by giving it a restrictive sense and a negative value. Essence, on the other hand, will be defined as that one, among all the senses of a thing, which gives it the force with which it has the most affinity.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.4

Stay with the Image

Known - Unknown
Conscious - Unconscious
Manifest - Latent

Convergent - Divergent

Snowden - 'premature convergence'

‘Following’ as an approach to complexity. Staying with the Image is also about complexity - you are in complex space, and so you keep things open, make tentative forays, and don’t close down too soon, nor on a single solution. Also links to process language, and conditional terms. Leaving things open, probability over certainty.

[...] the point is that consciousness floats; a psychic fluidum, as Mesmer might have called it, wrapping around and all through the analytical session.

It doesn't belong to either party.

Sometimes the patient has an insight, and another moment the analyst is conscious by simply being reticent, and another moment the consciousness is really in the image.

For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about the anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what that snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake walking into your life [...]

[...] and the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it, and then the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions or my mother or whatever it is, and you've lost the snake.

The task of analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake, and there are various ways for keeping the black snake [...] see, the black snake's no longer necessary the moment it's been interpreted, and you don't need your dreams any more because they've been interpreted.

But I think you need them all the time, you need that very image you had during the night.

For example, a policeman, chasing you down the street [...] you need that image, because that image keeps you in imaginative possibility [...] if you say, "Oh, my guilt complex is loose again and is chasing me down the street," it's a different feeling, because you've taken up the unknown policeman into your ego system of what you know, your guilt.

You've absorbed the unknown into the known (made the unconscious conscious) and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened, nothing.

You're really safe from that policeman, and you can go to sleep again.

[James Hillman]
A Blue Fire, p.74

The content of the symbol is not easily replaceable by content one already knows. Its manifestation is its most appropriate expression. There is no way to replace it.

[Jung] disliked for anyone to forget this point and just interpret dreams according to ready-made theories or known ideas. His warning, "Do anything you like, only don't try to understand [dreams]," reflects his attitude well.

[...] we would appreciate the importance of both understanding a dream and nonunderstanding a dream.

Or we might spend our entire effort on interpretation, while also remembering nevertheless that that is not the primary importance of the dream.

Amplification [...] is an effective method. Similarly, using the contents of amplification also has two directions, understanding and nonunderstanding. We cannot forget that both are important.

[...[ by the amplification of nonunderstanding, we open ourselves to discovery.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.134-5

Amplification.

Elaboration and clarification of a dream-image by means of directed association and of parallels from the humane sciences (symbology, mythology, mysticism, folklore, history of religion, ethnology, etc.)

Since the unconscious, as the result of its spatio-temporal relativity, possesses better sources of information than the conscious mind - which has only sense perceptions available to it - we are dependent for our myth of life after death upon the meagre hints of dreams and similar spontaneous revelations from the unconscious.

As I have already said, we cannot attribute to these allusions the value of knowledge, let alone proof. They can, however, serve as suitable bases for mythic amplifications; they give the probing intellect the raw material which is indispensable for its vitality.

Cut off the intermediary world of mythic imagination, and the mind falls prey to doctrinaire rigidities. On the other hand, too much traffic with these germs of myth is dangerous for weak and suggestible minds, for they are led to mistake vague intimations for substantial knowledge, and to hypostatise mere phantasms.

[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.348, 411

He had told Richard that his Hopi friend was involved in a very vast and complicated struggle that was taking place on many levels. The old man's cancer was only a small part of this whole struggle, and he explained that things like this needed to be seen in a wider context.

It is always necessary to be aware of and consider the entire situation.

It is always necessary to be cognizant of what the spirit wants.

It is a mistake to think that the only way to help a sick man is to take away the illness.

[Doug Boyd]
Rolling Thunder, p.202

[...] the label gives the viewer [...] too much, it pacifies him too soon.

To see a poem or a picture as fulfilling a category is to reach a premature sense of it. Naming or labelling is important because it is the most effective means of making something familiar, and familiarity is necessary if the arts are to be managed.

The snag is that the familiarity comes too soon, the label imposes local clarity by ridding the work of its mystery and releasing the viwer from his hesitation. But it's hard to make this point without giving the impression that I want people to remain hesitant or insecure forever.

I want them to postpone their security.

Most cultural forces are working towards making the arts comfortably familiar. The problem is how to break off the impression of familiarity in time to let the force of the artistic vision come through.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 77

A lot of hostility against art is based on people's misapprehension that they're supposed to be understanding it, and failing to.

Actually, this failure is a sort of success, because it leads us away from habit, from repetition, from recognition.

[Momus]
'Derstand, understand, un-understand'

My idea about ideas [...] is that we burn them up too quickly. We get rid of them by immediately putting them into practice. We only know one thing to do with an idea: apply it; convert it into something usable. And it dies right there in the conversion. It loses its generative power.

This sterilizing of ideas happens often when I give a talk. Someone in the audience asks, "How does that work?" "Can you give an example?" These are questions from what's classically called the Practical Intellect, whereas my talk was ideational, another aspect of reason altogether.

Explain means to lay out flat [...] when a speaker puts out an idea and then answers a question about how it works, he or she is depriving the listener of the full impact of the idea and where it might carry the listener if pondered. My answer tends to channel the thought only in one direction, generally my direction.

Again, it's that latent child in the head who believes himself, herself, unknowing (innocent), who asks questions and expects someone else to carry the work of thinking.

[...] we don't have places for entertaining ideas. And that is precisely what we're supposed to do with an idea: entertain it. This means having respect for ideas in themselves: letting them come and go without demanding too much from them at first [...]

That word "entertain" means to hold in between. What you do with an idea is hold it between - between your two hands. On the one hand, acting or applying it in the world and on the other hand, forgetting it, judging it, ignoring it, etc. So when these crazy things come in come in on you unannounced the best you can do for them is to think them, holding them, turning them over, wondering awhile.

Not rushing into practice. Not rushing into associations. This reminds of that: this is just like that. Off we go, away from the strange idea to things we already know.

Not judging. Rather than judging them as good and bad, true or false, we might first spend a little time with them [...] Putting the idea in practice stops the play of ideas, the entertainment from going on.

[Ideas] give you eyes, new ways of seeing things. Ideas are already operating in our perspectives, the way we look at things. We take our usual ideas for granted, and so, ideas have us rather then we have them.

For ideas to be therapeutic, that is, beneficial to the soul and body politic, they must gather into themselves, garnering force, building strength, like great movers of the mind's furniture, so that the space we inhabit is rearranged. Your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories have to move around in new ways, because the furniture has been moved.

Viable ideas have their own innate heat, their own vitality. They are living things too. But first they have to move your furniture, else it is the same old you, with your same old habits trying to apply a new idea in the same old way. Then nothing happens except the loss of the idea as "impractical" because of your haste to make it "practical"

A long-lasting idea, like a good poem or a strong character in a movie or a novel, continues to affect your practical life without ever having been put there. Ideas that live, live in us and through us into the world.

[James Hillman]
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.142, 143, 144, 145, 146

[My artworks are] numbered for a reason. They’re numbered because you should have your experience.

Why should you be bogged down with my titles and how I thought about it and my poetic reasoning? No, that’s not necessary. Either you’re going to be drawn into it [or not]. It’s a black hole; gravity should pull you in and you should have that experience. Why should I actually infringe and dictate? It’s ridiculous.

I learn more from people who have lived with the works. … They go out, people get to live with them, security guards get to stand around them in museums, and they know more in the end about that whole experience, and they tell me things. I listen and I hear and it’s like, “Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.” It’s beautiful.

But if I were shut off, and said, “This is what it’s supposed to be about, this is how are you supposed to think about it,” that’s stupid as hell. Why would I want to get in the way of that?

In a way, I’m also being educated. It should be not only a synergy, but a complicity between the viewer and the artist, and so I’m wide open to that.

[Leonardo Drew]
'Leonardo Drew and The Mother'

[...] what deconstruction finds at work in Mallarmé's text is the very reverse of a rich multiplicity of sense attaching to certain privileged 'themes'.

It is the effect of an endless displacement of meaning, one that constantly baffles and frustrates the desire for some assurance of thematic unity or grasp.

A phenomenological reading would assimilate these words to a complex of themes which could then be traced back - at the end of many fascinating detours and delays - to some ultimate source of interpretative unity and truth.

But this is to ignore the problems that arise as soon as one follows out the intricate logic that relates each of these terms in a series of endlessly self-effacing gestures.

[...] It is only by a certain conceptual strategy - a move to repress or contain these effects - that writing can be held within the limits laid down by any kind of thematic or phenomenological approach.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 59, 60

Goethe, whose scientific writings are fascinating and too little known today, warned against the tendency immediately to reduce observation to conception, thus losing the power of the object in all its newness to help us break out of the otherwise unbreachable defences of our conceptual systems.

He wrote that the student of nature ‘should form to himself a method in accordance with observation, but he should be careful not to reduce observation to a mere concept, to substitute words for this concept, and to proceed to treat these words as if they were objects’.

In general language is the route by which this conceptualisation occurs: ‘how difficult it is to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign; to keep the object (Wesen) alive before us instead of killing it with the word.’

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 373

"In astonishment we restrain ourselves"

We step back, as it were, from being, from the fact that it is as it is and not otherwise. And astonishment is not used up in this retreat from the Being of being but it is simultaneously drawn to and, as it were, held fast by that from which it retreats. Thus, astonishment is a disposition [...] in which and for which the Being of being unfolds.

For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego. The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative, way. As knower and user, the ego is predator.

For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the center, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of "grasping" and pragmatic use, it is a relation of audition. We are trying "to listen to the voice of Being." It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for.

Of this answerability, the thinker and the poet, der Denker und der Dichter, are at once the carriers and trustees. This is because it is in their oneness to language (to the logos), in their capacity to be spoken rather than to speak that the truth, or can we say with Wordsworth and Hölderlin "the music of being," most urgently class for and summons up response.

[George Steiner]
Heidegger, p. 31-2

Definition states what something is and where it is separated from what it is not. Definition excludes by cutting out what does not belong.

As much of the soul is ambiguous and as knowledge about it is still incomplete, and may always be, sharp definitions are premature.

The major problems which one brings to an analysis are the major problems of every soul: love, family, work, money, emotion, death; and the defining knife may rather maim these issues than free them from their surrounds.

Definitions are anyway more appropriate to logic and natural science, where strict conventions about words must be followed and where definitions serve closed systems of operations. The psyche is not a closed system in the same way.

Definition settles unease by nailing things down. But the psyche may be better served by amplification, because it pries things loose from their habitual rigid frames in knowledge. Amplification confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical aspect called the unconscious.

The method of amplification is rather like the methods of the humanities and the arts. By revolving around the matter under surveillance, one amplifies a problem exhaustively. This activity is like a prolonged meditation, or variations on a theme of music, or the patterns of dance or brush-strokes […] This permits levels of meaning in any problem to reveal themselves, and it corresponds to the way the soul itself presents its demands by its iterative returning to basic complexes to elaborate a new variation and urge consciousness on.

[James Hillman]

Suicide and the Soul, p. 147-8

Instead of focusing on an object that can be understood and categorised through its historical, material or cultural pre-texts, new materialist explorations of emergent, unpredictable matter encourage researchers to follow the research object's undetermined material-relational becoming. As such, Following indicates an observational and analytic modality that appreciates the intensive, moving qualities of matter, and prefers to work on the level of their action without determining what they represent.

[…] following does not offer a stable, fixed position for making interpretations or readings. The researcher as follower cannot stay still perceptually or epistemologically; following entails adjustment to the movements of the followee […] Following aims to let flows stay flows without straightening them into lines. Methodologically, following takes movement and change as its starting point.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 372) underline that following is not about the reproduction of what already is, from a fixed point of view, but about opening to what is in itself still in the making.

It is a way of opening to uncertainties of process and also towards the future. While watching the flow from the bank prevents one from moving with the flow, following offers a different (non-)position, one that instead of confirming the already known, affirms what is still unfolding, and as such always takes the follower somewhere else.

For Deleuze and Guattari following, compared to other practices of relation, "is not better, just different" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 372). This difference is crucial if we are to explore the subtle and surprising flows of matter in movement, instead of simply analyzing already stratified entities. If we wish to engage "with a continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting constants of them" (ibid.) then following is our answer.

'Following'
[Katve-Kaisa Kontturi]

The romantic theoretician – it is, of course, imprecise to speak of theory or thought in this context — lets the image do its own thinking.

Abandoning himself to permutational or antithetical play with the ideas of others, he inflates linguistic designations of these ideas to an ambiguity rich in allusions.

Thus there are no romantic ideas, but only romanticized ideas.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 144

That they lie outside of human control - unwitnessable - gives dreams much potency: They remain open to enormous interpretive possibilities, while individuals need not commit themselves to a particular meaning. Social construction can take place around them without attributing creativity to individuals.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.52

Magic gives way to transparency. The imperative of transparency fosters an animosity to form. Art becomes transparent with regard to its meaning. It no longer seduces. The magic veil is cast off. The forms do not themselves talk.

The language of forms, of signifiers, is characterized by compression, complexity, equivocation, exaggeration, a high degree of ambiguity that even reaches the level of contradiction. These suggest meaningfulness without immediately being reducible to meaning.

All these now disappear, and instead we are confronted with simplified claims and messages that are artificially imposed on the work of art.

The disenchantment of art makes it Protestant in nature. It is de-ritualized, as it were, and stripped of its splendid forms […]

Art is not a discourse. It produces its effects through forms and signifiers, and not through the signified. The process of internalization destroys the arts, bringing them closer to discourse and forsaking the mysterious outside for the profane inside. The disenchantment of art is a symptom of narcissism, of narcissistic internalization.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.25

Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion. Every word is a palpation of the body.

The multiplicity of interpretation surrounding a poem mirrors the stormy uncontrollability of emotion, where nature works her will.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.18

Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness.

No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretative cloud.

Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He mesmerizes by disorienting us. He suspends the traditional compass-points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare’s main influence. Shakespeare’s words have “aura.” This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe. Spenser’s daemonic imagery turns into turmoil and hallucination in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s language hovers at the very threshold of dreaming. It is shaped by the irrational. Shakespearean characters are controlled by rather than controlling their speech. They are like Michelangelo’s Mannerist sculptures, restive under night visitations. Consciousness in Shakespeare is soaked in primal compulsion.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.196

Living Things and Dead Things

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