Forever Becoming: Cowen

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The Middle Path

Thesis             Synthesis                Antithesis
Birth             Life                       Death
Being             Becoming                Nothing
Apollo             Hermes                   Dionysus
Centripetal              Static                Centrifugal
Active                Neutral                   Passive
Positive                Ambivalent              Negative
Left                     Centre                  Right
Upper                   Middle               Lower
Manic                    Normal                   Depressive
Excessive               Balanced              Deficient
Hot                      Warm                    Cold
Acid                    Neutral                  Alkali
Red                   Purple                  Blue
White                     Gray                    Black

1 + 2 = 3

[...] every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the "third." In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored.

It presents itself in a form that is neither a straight “yes” nor a straight “no.”

[C. G. Jung]
'A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity' (CW 11)
and, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9), par. 285

In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to keep" and "to pick up").

The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

Sublation can be seen at work at the most basic level of Hegel's system of logic. The two concepts Being and Nothing are each both preserved and changed through sublation in the concept Becoming. Similarly, determinateness, or quality, and magnitude, or quantity, are each both preserved and sublated in the concept measure.

'Aufheben'

A thought is affirmed which on reflection proves itself unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradictory, which propels the affirmation of its negation, the antithesis, which also on reflection proves inadequate, and so is again negated.

In classical logic, this double negation ("A is not non-A") would simply reinstate the original thesis. The synthesis does not do this.

It has "overcome and preserved" (or sublated) the stages of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity.

[Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze]
Hegel for Beginners

Hegel's overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole.

In Hegel's view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. Each phase of being contains within itself a self-contradiction, and it is this that serves as the motor of its movement to a higher and more complete phase.

Through a continuing dialectical process of opposition and synthesis, the world is always in the process of completing itself. Whereas for most of the history of Western philosophy from Aristotle onward, the defining essence of opposites was that they were logically contradictory and mutually exclusive, for Hegel all opposites are logically necessary and mutually implicated elements in a larger truth.

Truth is thus radically paradoxical.

[Richard Tarnas]

The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 379

Since "one" and "two" were considered by ancient mathematical philosophers to be the parents of numbers, then their firstborn, "three," the Greek Triad, is the first and eldest number.

The birth of the number 3 and triangle enables opposites to balance and transcend to a new wholeness they couldn't achieve by themselves.

A third leg makes a tripod stable, and a third strand of hair allows a braid to knot as one whole, just as neutral judges balance opposing parties, neutrons balance atoms, and the Supreme Court plays the role of the balancing, transcendent third force between the Executive and Legislative branches. The triangle is the strongest and most stable of shapes and so appears in the constructions of humans and nature.

Speak aloud the word "three" in English [...] and you'll hear its relation to words like "through" and "threshold" and the prefix trans ("across," "penetrate"). The leap to "three," as its linguistic root tells us, takes us over a threshold and through past polarized limits of the Dyad.

[Michael S. Schneider]
A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, p. 39
and 'Number and Shapes: The Timeless Alphabet of Art and Life'

Homeostasis is the property of a system in which a variable (for example, the concentration of a substance in solution, or its temperature) is actively regulated to remain very nearly constant.

'Homeostasis'

Maimonides [taught] that an intelligent person should live a life based on reality, on what is true and false, while the average person who lacks the ability to do so should live according to “necessary truths,” morality.

Maimonides makes it clear in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:4 and 5, that the moral “middle path” is the “necessary truth,” the guidance given to the general public who are not capable of evaluating every occurrence in their lives and making decisions each time how they should act based on reason, on what is true and false.

[He] introduces the concept of the “golden mean” and advises people to live a life in which they behave according to a middle path between two extremes.

For example, people should not be overly stingy nor should they be spendthrifts; they should not laugh excessively nor be sad and dispirited. He calls this derekh hachakhamim, “the path of the wise.”

[On the other hand] the ideal path, the method for the intellectual, is “the virtuous way,” the carefully considered rational behavior beyond the middle path, when reason dictates the need for such behavior.

An individual who is very careful about himself deviates somewhat from the mean to either side, and is called 'virtuous'. For example, the individual who distances himself from pride and turns to the other extreme and becomes very humble – this is the virtuous quality. If he only moves toward the middle and is humble, [whilst this is] not the best behavior, it is still considered wise behavior, [thus the individual] is called 'wise.'

The virtuous people of old would arrange their behaviors away from the middle path toward the two extremes. There were times when the behavior would veer toward one extreme, while there were times when the behavior would veer toward the other. This is behavior that is beyond the legal requirement. We are required to take the middle paths.

Both the essential truth of morality and the real truth advocate proper conduct. However, the essential truth focuses only on what the average person is capable of doing, morality. The difference between the two can be seen in the example presented by Maimonides in his Hilkhot De’ot.

The average person following morality is advised to follow the middle path for it is easier than having to analyze every situation independently, while intellectuals, who are capable of using reason and considering the “true” results of their behavior, are told to deviate when advisable from the middle path.

[Israel Drazin]
'An Intelligent Person is not Moral' (minor adjustments have been made to the original text)

I feel I’ve been very fortunate in life and I think I have about the most even temperament of anyone I know.

I literally don’t have unhappy days. I’ve always felt pretty happy. I suspect my peak happiness is well below that of most people. When I see people very, very happy it’s quite strange to me - I feel I’ve never felt this. The same when people are depressed.

I think my range is compressed.

[Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins | The Tim Ferriss Show'

Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger, or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Strauss is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them.

But expressing is not any more admirable than repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them.

Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die.

[Robert Bly]
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, p. 56

[...] living beauty spreads her golden shimmer only when soaring above a reality full of misery, pain, and squalor [...] all experience goes to show that beauty needs her opposite as a condition of her existence.

"Whenever we turn our gaze in the the ancient world, we find taste and freedom mutually avoiding each other, and Beauty establishing her sway only on the ruins of heroic virtues.

If then we keep solely to what experience has taught us hitherto about the influence of Beauty, we cannot certainly be much encouraged in the development of feelings which are so dangerous to the true culture of mankind; and we should rather dispense with the melting power of Beauty, even at the risk of coarseness and austerity, than see ourselves, for all the advantages of refinement, consigned to her enervating influence."

[...] under no circumstances can the initial value of the higher form of energy be attained by the lower forms as well or be resumed by the superior function: an equilization at some intermediate level must inevitably result. For every individual who identifies with his one differentiated function, this entails a descent to a lower value as compared with the initial value.

This conclusion is unavoidable. All education that aspires to the unity and harmony of man's nature has to reckon with this fact.

[C. G. Jung, also Friedrich Schiller (in quotations)]
Psychological Types, p. 84-6

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to perfection that make existence intolerable.

Capacity for compromise is not a characteristic of the insane.

The mature human being is neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass is muddy, but is not mud.

[D.W. Winnicott]
Human Nature, p. 138

Iphigenia sees her role in life as that of “making men mild.”

She is always encouraging people to calm down and be merciful. She is committed to love, but a love marked not by wild passion, but by understanding, sympathy and a desire for harmony [...]

Goethe's first audiences, brought up on Romanticism, were slow to get the message. Was Goethe turning his back on Romantic love? Where was all the passion? They described the story of Iphigenia as like “watching grey mist.”

Goethe, now in middle-age, was undaunted. He’d had enough of Werther and expressed his own view emphatically – “Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.”

But he encountered an elemental cultural problem: Romanticism feels more exciting. Goethe pinpointed one of the central problems of culture: how to make things that are good for us compete successfully for attention with the thrilling passionate stuff?

'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe'

Taoists believe that a meaningful life, the optimally meaningful life, is to be found on the border between chaos and order.

And I would say that your nervous system tells you exactly when you are there and it’s a kind of place and you can tell when you’re there because you’re secure enough to be confident, but not so secure that you’re bored and you’re interested enough to be awake but not so interested that you’re terrified.

And when you’re in a state like that, you find things interesting and meaningful, time slips by you and you’re no longer self-conscious.

[Jordan Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'

The thing is, when I'm balanced I'm not here, and I don't like not being here. I like to feel myself rubbing against things.

In the revisional concept of psychoanalysis in his first book, Perls called Friedlaender's polar philosophy "differential thinking" and considered it to be a "mental precision tool", since it can find the point of "predifference", as he also refers to creative indifference, as well as the zero-point, the center from which balancing equilibrium is possible and

"we could find a point from which the observer could gain the most comprehensive and undistorted view [...]

By remaining alert in the centre, we can acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence and completing an incomplete half. By avoiding a one-sided outlook we gain a much deeper insight into the structure and function of the organism"

The center is a "magical" word for Friedlaender; likewise, for Perls, "to center one's existence", or centering, is the most basic goal of therapy, because we "acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence" [...]

[Ludwig Frambach, quoting Fritz Perls]
Creative License: The Art of Gestalt Therapy, p. 121

Friedlaender's “creative indifference" [...] became for Fritz Perls the “fertile void” [...] the usual meaning-making process of polar differentiation is set aside in a state of pure being, through a deliberate act of polar indifferentiation. The closer we come to simply being, the more we open a space in which fresh possibilities can arise.

The fertile void or place of creative indifference is the ground. The goal of Gestalt process is to “lead increasingly from the one-sided fixation [on] that which is in the foreground to the ground, from the periphery to the middle and center, by way of integrating rigid dualities into flexible polarities”

Poles such as rage and gentleness "should not be isolated from each other as mutually exclusive contradictions, but should be experienced as a unit of opposites" [...]

It is possible to achieve this perspective by being "flexibly centered in [one's own] indifferent center." In this way, one can react freely and appropriately, either angrily or with gentleness, to the demands of the situation from a totality of experience.

Friedlaender’s goal, as Perls saw it, was the achievement of this lovely neutrality in which one no longer feels pulled toward one extreme or the other and is no longer the prisoner of one way of seeing the world, which inevitably blinds one to other possibilities.

[Herb Stevenson, quoting Ludwig Frambach]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'

Self

As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man.

Just as conscious as well as unconscious phenomena are to be met with in practice, the self as psychic totality also has a conscious as well as an unconscious aspect.

Empirically, the self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the "supraordinate personality", such as king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc.

When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary [...]

Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united. Since such a concept is irrepresentable - tertium non datur - it is transcendental on this account also.

[C.G. Jung]
Psychological Types (CW 6, 1991), p. 460

Equilibration

This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.

When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e. a state of cognitive (i.e. mental) balance.

However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

[Saul McLeod]
'Jean Piaget'

Assimilate - will fit into existing order - no change - dominate (change other)
Accommodate - will not fit into existing order - change - capitulate (change self)

Popper envisioned science as progressing by the successive rejection of falsified theories, rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are to be replaced by theories that can account for the phenomena that falsified the prior theory, that is, with greater explanatory power.

For example, Aristotelian mechanics explained observations of everyday situations, but were falsified by Galileo's experiments, and were replaced by Newtonian mechanics, which accounted for the phenomena noted by Galileo (and others). Newtonian mechanics' reach included the observed motion of the planets and the mechanics of gases. The Youngian wave theory of light (i.e., waves carried by the luminiferous aether) replaced Newton's (and many of the Classical Greeks') particles of light but in turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment and was superseded by Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's special relativity, which did account for the newly observed phenomena.

At each stage, experimental observation made a theory untenable (i.e., falsified it) and a new theory was found that had greater explanatory power (i.e., could account for the previously unexplained phenomena), and as a result, provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.

'Falsifiability'

Unqualified freedom, like unqualified tolerance, is not only self-destructive but bound to produce its opposite - for if all restraints were removed there would be nothing whatever to stop the strong enslaving the weak (or meek).

So complete freedom would bring about the end of freedom, and therefore proponents of complete freedom are in actuality, whatever their intentions, enemies of freedom.

[...] the maximum possible tolerance or freedom is an optimum, not an absolute, for it has to be restricted if it is to exist at all.

The government intervention which alone can guarantee it is a dangerous weapon: without it, or with too little, freedom dies; but with too much of it freedom dies also. We are brought back to the inescapability of control [...] the maximum freedom is a qualified one [...]

[...] the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

[Brian Magee]
Popper, p. 80-2

[Derrida's] essay on Levinas [...] takes an epigraph from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.

'Hebraism and Hellenism - between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, although it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them' [...]

It is the desire to reconcile oppositions and differences through a movement of thought that would finally reduce them to aspects of a single, comprehensive vision.

[...] Derrida's epigraph from Arnold carries a considerable weight of implied ideology.

It stands for that power of logocentric thinking to absorb all differences into itself by viewing them as mere stages or signposts on the way to some grand conceptual synthesis.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 230-1

There is no 2D slice of a 3D object that gives a real sense of what it is. Neither is any 2D negotiation of slices going to yield something in 3D.

[A] cylinder is not somewhere between the two reductionistic views: 50% circle, 50% rectangle… It is 100% of both descriptions…which are only mutually exclusive and paradoxical if they are trying to be reconciled in the same plane, which is the essential mistake.

In the higher dimensional reality the object actually lives in, the simultaneous full truth of both partial descriptions is obvious and non-paradoxical…as is the seamless way they fit together as parts of a congruent whole.

The key insight is recognizing these differing perspectives as orthogonal to each other rather than opposite ends of a gradient spectrum. The gradient view leads to a middle path that in this case is the rounded rectangle (or a continual maddening flip flop between circle and rectangle) … completely failing to recognize the simultaneous fullness of each truth and the irreconcilability of them within the same level of dimensionality/ complexity.

The recognition of orthogonality…gives us the cylinder, recognizes both lower dimensional perspectives as 100% true from their limited vantage point, and forces the recognition that a congruent picture is possible but requires a fundamentally more complex kind of perspective.

Looking at some of what have often been thought of as existential dualities:

- Loving what is or working to make things better…
- Accepting ourselves as we are unconditionally or aspiring to grow and express more of our full potential…
- Maximizing intentionality or following the flow of life…
- Bettering our individual ego or transcending it…
- Free will or determinism…
- Being in the now or planning for the future…
- Increasing witness consciousness or losing oneself in experience…
- Open mindedness or critical thinking…
- Persistence or surrender…
- Boundaries or allowing…
- Being or becoming…
- Freedom or structure…
- Gratitude or desire…
- Rights or responsibilities…
- Agency or communion…
- Particle or wave descriptions of the quantum…
- The fundamentality of subject or object…

All of these, commonly seen as paradoxes to be embraced or extremes to find a middle path between…are indeed orthogonal and equally fundamental partial truths…to be simultaneously optimized…fully reconciled in a congruent understanding of the higher dimensional (eg, more complex) nature of reality.

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality'

[…] in the total accounting the hitherto sovereign religions are among the main reasons the type 'man' has been kept on a lower level - they have preserved too much of that which ought to perish.

And yet, when they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those who were inwardly shattered and had become savage away from society into monasteries and houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in addition so as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work at the preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and truth at the corruption of the European race?

Stand all evaluations on their head - that is what they had to do! And smash the strong, contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the highest and most successful of the type man', into uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly - that is the fact the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its evaluation ‘unworldliness', 'unsensuality', and 'higher man' were finally fused together into one feeling.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 62

In the romantic, the "organic” conception of the state rests on [an] inability to make a normative evaluation.

This conception repudiates the “juridical” as narrow and mechanical, and it searches for the state that is above right and wrong: that is, a point of reference for feelings, which at the same time is a projection of the romantic subject into the domain of the political.

The root of romantic sublimity is the inability to decide, the "higher third” factor they are always talking about, which is not a higher factor but a different third factor: in other words, it is always a way out of the either-or.

[…] the antitheses themselves are not antitheses, but merely occasions […] The antitheses are immediately mediated and reconciled, and an agreement invariably follows.

In the absence of the occasionalistic displacement into the higher, subjective creativity that resolves all antitheses in a harmonious unity, there is no romanticism.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 117, 140, 148

From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts:

1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)

2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority)

3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute)

4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.

5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.

6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations.

[…] Throughout Western religious history, in spite of the frequent outbursts by dissident groups insisting that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God’s revelation, Western religious thought has continued to believe that revelation itself is never final, total, complete, or literal, but is a continuous symbolic process that must be interpreted and reinterpreted by discussion.

The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final stage of eternity.

Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.

That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.

But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves.

Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.

In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.

When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate.

Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.779-81

[...] we must ask what does the dialectician himself want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want?

It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it - only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.

"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different' what is 'not itself and this No is its creative deed".

This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference, reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.

And, conversely, Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence. Moreover the relation of master and slave is not, in itself, dialectical. Who is the dialectician, who dialectises the relationship? It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.9-10

Criticality

Opposition

Free Space

Masculine / Feminine

Masculine         - Feminine
Order                 - Chaos
Active               - Passive
Give              - Receive
Assertive           - Receptive
Creator              - Consumer
Red                - Blue
Death                 - Birth
Known               - Unknown
Authoritarian      - Decadent
Fascism              - Nihilism
Day                   - Night
Stability              - Plasticity
Negative - Positive

Differentiation - Equalisation

Within every living thing there is a tug of war, consisting of the the pull towards life, and the pull towards death. The life urge is conservative, the death urge expansive.

Life is defined by the process of limitation; a thing is only a thing because of all the things it is not; from a sea of infinite possibility certain characteristics are chosen, at the expense of others. Infinity is bounded.

Death is the return to infinity; the unbounding of what has been bound. If life is synonymous with 'limited', then death is synonymous with 'unlimited.'

As humans we have an urge towards expansiveness - the need to constantly explore new territory - that must be balanced by the imposition of limits. A lack of boundaries allows us to adventure to far flung places, full of mystery and novelty - but whenever we travel to extremes we also dance with death.

We mothers do what we can to keep our sons from the grave. But they do seem to yearn for it.

['Oleanna Tyrell']
Dialogue from 'Game of Thrones'

Dumont: No. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched.

It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

In Twentynine Palms because supposedly nothing is happening, it's impossible, something has to happen. What I discovered during the editing was that a dramatic tension emerged [between the scenes] that hadn't been there during the shooting.

indieWIRE: Yes, but that's partly the result of your very precise mise-en-scene.

Dumont: Maybe, but the more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

[Bruno Dumont]
Interview with indieWIRE, full text here.

In the Jungian way, Neumann sees the creative man as "bisexual," even "feminine," because of his high "receptivity."

[Camille Paglia]
'Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother', p. 13

At the broadest level of description, variation in human personality appears to reflect engagement and restraint of behavior.

The first metatrait ['Stability'] is thought to relate to the need to maintain a stable organization of behavioral and psychological function.

The second metatrait ['Plasticity'] has been hypothesized to relate to an individual’s basic need to incorporate novel information from the environment.

These two metatraits have been theoretically linked to the functioning of the serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems, respectively.

Serotonin is a broadly functioning neuromodulator with regulatory or inhibiting effects on mood, behavior, and cognition [...] its widespread projections act to limit negative affect and aggression while maintaining behavioral and motivational stability [...] a review of research on serotonin and personality found the most consistent association to be between greater serotonin function and greater impulse control.

Dopamine is also a broadly functioning neuromodulator, but with primarily activating effects on behavior and cognition.

[Jacob B. Hirsh, Colin G. DeYoung, and Jordan B. Peterson]
'Metatraits of the Big Five Differentially Predict Engagement and Restraint of Behavior,' p. 1-2

Here's why the sexes differ.

A sexual organism must divide its total reproductive investment into two—competing for mates and caring for offspring. Almost from the dawn of sexual reproduction, one sex specialized slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly more in caring for offspring. This was because only one sex was able to inherit the mitochondria (the powerhouse of cells); so that sex started out with sex cells larger and more resource-rich than the other sex.

And thus began the great divide into fat, resource-laden eggs, already investing in "caring"—providing for offspring—and slim, streamlined sperm, already competing for that vital investment. Over evolutionary time, this divergence widened, proliferating and amplifying, in every sexually reproducing species that has ever existed.

So the differences go far beyond reproductive plumbing. They are distinctive adaptations for the different life-strategies of competers and carers. Wherever ancestral males and females faced different adaptive problems, we should expect sex differences—encompassing bodies, brains and behaviour. And we should expect that, reflecting those differences, competers and carers will have correspondingly different life-priorities.

And that's why, from that initial asymmetry, the same characteristic differences between males and females have evolved across all sexually-reproducing animals, differences that pervade what constitutes being male or female.

[Helena Cronin]
'2017 : What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?'

Cowen: Marriage is good for men, on net - it feminises them, for one thing.

Weinstein: So, greater health, lower depression...

Cowen: ... less drug abuse, suicide rates lower, and so on.

[Eric Weinstein & Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on "The Portal", Ep. #016 (w/ Eric Weinstein) - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized', The Portal, YouTube

Marriage is the social regulation and placement of sexual energies, which for Spenser otherwise fall back into the anarchy of nature, ruled by the will-to-power and survival of the fittest.

Marriage is the sanctified link between nature and society. Sex in Spenser must always have a social goal.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.189

Marriage, in other words, is a way of channeling female hypergamy in a socially useful way. (We frequently hear of the need to channel the male sexual instinct into marriage and family, but not the female; this is a mistake.)

Abolishing marriage only strengthens the naturally stronger: it strengthens the female at the expense of the male and the attractive at the expense of the unattractive.

[F. Roger Devlin]
'Sexual Utopia in Power', Sexual Utopia in Power, p. 40

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.

A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there's no other way. There's no room for her if she's not a he. If she's a her-she, it's in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow the law, everything, to break up the "truth" with laughter.

[...] you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes - any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.

The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. It is still unexplored only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack.

We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking.

At times it is in the fissure caused by an earthquake, through that radical mutation of things brought on by a material upheaval when every structure is for a moment thrown off balance and an ephemeral wildness sweeps order away, that the poet slips something by, for a brief span, of woman.

But only the poets - not the novelists, allies of representationalism. Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann would say, fairies.

[Hélène Cixous]

‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1976, vol. 1, no. 4, p. 876, 878, 879-80, 883, 885, 888.

‘A hard heart has Wotan set in my breast', it says in an old Scandinavian saga: a just expression coming from the soul of a proud Viking. A man of this type is actually proud that he is not made for pity: which is why the hero of the saga adds as a warning: 'he whose heart is not hard in youth will never have a hard heart'.

Brave and noble men who think that are at the farthest remove from that morality which sees the mark of the moral precisely in pity or in acting for others or in désintéressement; belief in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony for ‘selflessness' belong just as definitely to noble morality as does a mild contempt for and caution against sympathy and the ‘warm heart'.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 260

To blunder over the fundamental problem of 'man and woman', to deny here the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream here of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and duties: this is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved himself to be shallow on this dangerous point - shallow of instinct! - may be regarded as suspect in general, more, as betrayed, as found out: he will probably be too 'short' for all the fundamental questions of life, those of life in the future too, incapable of any depth.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 238

Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown less in the same proportion as her rights and claims have grown greater; and the ‘emancipation of woman', in so far as it has been demanded and advanced by women themselves (and not only by male shallow-pates), is thus revealed as a noteworthy symptom of the growing enfeeblement and blunting of the most feminine instincts.

There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart.

To lose her sense for the ground on which she is most sure of victory; to neglect to practise the use of her own proper weapons; to let herself go before the man, perhaps even ‘to the extent of producing a book', where formerly she kept herself in check and in subtle cunning humility; to seek with virtuous assurance to destroy man's belief that a fundamentally different ideal is wrapped up in woman, that there is something eternally, necessarily feminine; emphatically and loquaciously to talk man out of the idea that woman has to be maintained, cared for, protected, indulged like a delicate, strangely wild and often agreeable domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant parade of all of slavery and bondage that woman's position in the order of society has hitherto entailed and still entails (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of every enhancement of culture) - what does all this mean if not a crumbling of the feminine instinct, a defeminizing?

There is a desire to make her in general more ‘cultivated’ and, as they say, to make the ‘weak sex' strong through culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner possible that making human beings ‘cultivated' and making them weaker - that is to say, enfeebling, fragmenting, contaminating, the force of the will, have always gone hand in hand, and that the world's most powerful and influential women (most recently the mother of Napoleon) owed their power and ascendancy over men precisely to the force of their will – and not to schoolmasters!

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural' than that of the man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove, the naïvety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are....

And is woman now being deprived of her enchantment? Is woman slowly being made boring? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned beast which always attracted you most, which again and again threatens you with danger! Your ancient fable could once again become ‘history' - once again a monstrous stupidity could master you and carry you off! And no god concealed within it, no! merely an idea', a 'modern idea’! ...

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 239

Women, too, recognize the social value of male initiation and accede to its necessities. The power and authority of older men in this context are considered necessary to make everyone conform to the cosmic plan.

What men display is the ability to “look after” people. Of course, at the same time, they define what it means to “look after” others: One does so by carrying and passing on the Law.

[Fred R. Myers]

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p. 240

That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing anything but what is quite close to them, cleaving to the present moment, taking appearance for reality, and preferring trifles to matters of the first importance.

For it is by virtue of his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, like the brute, but looks about him and considers the past and the future; and this is the origin of prudence, as well as of that care and anxiety which so many people exhibit.

Both the advantages and the disadvantages which this involves, are shared in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted, because, while she has an intuitive understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of vision is narrow and does not reach to what is remote: so that things which are absent or past or to come have much less effect upon women than upon men.

However many disadvantages all this may involve, there is at least this to be said in its favour: that the woman lives more in the present than the man, and that, if the present is at all tolerable, she enjoys it more eagerly.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
‘On Women’, Parerga and Paralipomena

Projection is a male curse: forever to need something or someone to make oneself complete. This is one of the sources of art and the secret of its historical domination by males.

The artist is the closest man has come to imitating woman’s superb self-containment. But the artist needs his art, his projection. The blocked artist, like Leonardo, suffers tortures of the damned. The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, records woman’s selfsatisfied apartness, her ambiguous mocking smile at the vanity and despair of her many sons.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.28

Male homosexuality may be the most valorous of attempts to evade the femme fatale and to defeat nature. By turning away from the Medusan mother, whether in honor or detestation of her, the male homosexual is one of the great forgers of absolutist western identity.

Male concentration and projection are visible everywhere in the aggressive energy of the streets. Fortunately, male homosexuals of every social class have preserved the cult of the masculine, which will therefore never lose its aesthetic legitimacy.

Major peaks of western culture have been accompanied by a high incidence of male homosexuality—in classical Athens and Renaissance Florence and London. Male concentration and projection are self-enhancing, leading to supreme achievements of Apollonian conceptualization.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.14-15, 22

The fire-pit ... signifies the woman and the poles represent the man. Men are the shield; they protect. The woman is the center, being protected …

Everything revolves around the tipi … it's a people. The cover is men. The fire is woman, warmth, love, and perpetual labor for a family to live. If there's no woman in here, there's no rhyme or reason to it … Everything is male in that lodge except the women and the fire.

The four Grandfathers are the home: in the center is the hearth, the woman: this is completion. Neither is anything without the other. That is what our life is about.

Creation is recapitulated in the holy lodge as the Singers sing the first night to the first Grandfather and what he represents, the second night to the second Grandfather; and so on.

The singing is structured to bring together male principles (the structure itself, the dancing hides, the Singers) with female principles (the fire-pit, Godmothers, those impersonating White Painted Woman) - balance again.

[Bernard Second]
‘Singing for Life: The Mescalero Apache Girls’ Puberty Ceremony’, Betwixt and Between, p.244, 255, 257

Primitive life, far from peaceable, was submerged in the turbulence of nature. Man’s superior strength provided protection to women, particularly in the incapacitating final stages of pregnancy.

The polarization of sex roles probably occurred rather early. Men roamed and hunted, while women in their gathering forays ventured no farther from the campsite than they could carry their nursing infants. There was simple logic in this, not injustice.

The link between father and child was a late development. Margaret Mead remarks, “Human fatherhood is a social invention.” James Joyce says, “Paternity may be a legal fiction.” Society had advanced when the male contribution to conception was acknowledged. Both sexes have profited from the consolidation and stability of the family.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.42

“Women want men to read their minds—or, more accurately, their emotions—because it’s what they do, easily…. Females want males to anticipate their needs and desires.”

Women do in fact have a greater ability to perceive the needs and feelings of others without verbal communication, an evolved adaptation to the requirements of successfully nurturing infants. When they expect their husbands to have this same ability, they are in effect upset that their husbands are not women.

[F. Roger Devlin]
'Rotating Polyandry - & it's Enforcers', Sexual Utopia in Power, p. 40

Top-down / Bottom-up

Top down - Bottom up
Order - Chaos
Conscious - Unconscious
Solid - Liquid
Determined - Undetermined

Planned - Emergent
Known - Unknown
Certain - Uncertain
Closed - Open

Theory - Story
Intentional - Accidental
Centralised - Distributed
Authoritarian - Anarchic
Spiritualism - Materialism
Limited - Unlimited
Mono - Poly
Familiar - Novel
Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere

The more intentional something becomes, the more idiosyncratic and limited it also becomes.

Cilliers - "instead of a program you have memory." Memory over a program; past over future. Memory implies learning from mistakes (traditional approach), whereas a program implies setting an ideal future goal (modern approach). The traditional approach is "unconscious", because it has no sense of an overall scheme - it 'tinkers' when necessary. The modern approach is "conscious" because it purposely plans to make the future different from the present/past.

Classical music, like classical architecture, like many other classical forms, specifies an entity in advance and then builds it. Generative music doesn't do that, it specifies a set of rules and then lets them make the thing.

In the words of Kevin Kelly's great book, generative music is out of control, classical music is under control.

Now, out of control means you don't know quite what it's apt to do. It has it's own life. Generative music is unpredictable, classical music is predicted. Generative unrepeatable, classical repeatable. Generative music is unfinished, that's to say, when you use generative you implicitly don't know what the end of this is.

Generative music is sensitive to circumstances, that is to say it will react differently depending on its initial condition, on where it's happening and so on. Where classical music seeks to subdue them. By that I mean classical music seeks a neutral battleground, the flat field. It won't be comfortable -- with a fixed reverberation, -- not too many emergencies, and people who don't cough during the music basically.

Generative forms in general are multi-centered. There's not a single chain of command which runs from the top of the pyramid to the rank and file below.

There are many, many, many web-like modes which become more or less active. You might notice the resemblance here to the difference between broadcasting and the Internet, for example.

[Brian Eno]
'Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do'

Our complexity-inspired workshop techniques make intensive use of the boundary between the complex and the chaotic, in effect cycling between the dynamics of the two states as a sort of pattern generator to create a rich variety of patterns among which to choose—to stabilize and to disrupt—in order to facilitate sense-making.

[Cynthia Kurtz & Dave Snowden]
'The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world'

Introspection's course and limits were set by a consciousness that insisted on unity. To hear the deeps not only affronted Christian tradition; it invited what had been declared the Devil, Hell, and madness.

Here we begin to see the staggering consequences of denial of the daimons: it leaves the psyche bereft of all persons but the ego, the controller who becomes super-ego.

No spontaneous fantasy, image, or feeling may be independent of this unified ego. Every psychic happening becomes 'mine.' Know Thyself shifts to Know Myself.

What Philemon taught Jung, however, was that there are things in the psyche that are no more "mine" than animals in the forest ... or birds in the air." Moreover, without images, the imaginative perspective itself withers, only reinforcing the ego's literalism.

The images which could teach the ego its limits, as Philemon taught Jung, having been repressed, only return unimaged as archetypal delusions in the midst of subjective consciousness itself.

The ego becomes demonic. It fully believes in its own power.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.65

There's a necessary inferiority when you're in psychic reality.

[...] soul means inferiority - something sensitive, something ... well ... pathologized. Soul makes the ego feel uncomfortable, uncertain, lost. And that lostness is a sign of soul.

You couldn't have soul or be a soul if you couldn't feel that you have lost it. The person as the strong ego [...] doesn't feel that he's lost anything.

That's one reason I question the psychiatric process of developing a strong ego. That seems to me a monstrous goal for psychotherapy because it attempts to overcome the sense of soul which appears as weakness, a weakness that seems almost to require symptoms.

Violence or power or sadism or domination keep us from sensing soul, and until they crack from inside, don't work anymore, fall apart, as I have called it, we can't work with them.

[...] when you are suffering, when there's failure, dejection, and you are cast down, thrown back on yourself, left alone, wet, in one way or another - then you begin to feel, Who am I? What is going on? Why can't I? Why doesn't my will work?

The Great Western Will - that I have been trained ever since I was a child to know what I want, to get it, and do it. To be independent!

It doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman here. You're taught to be independent, to stand on your own two feet, to take what you need, to know what you want, and to know where you're going.

Now all of that gets defeated by the syndromes or the symptoms I'm talking about, the pathologizing. Suicide is one. Betrayal is one. Masturbation is another one [...]

[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.12, 17

Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D.

They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own systemic nature and of its total systemic nature.

[...] Eve began to resent the business of sex and reproduction. Whenever these rather basic phenomena intruded upon her now purposive way of living, she was reminded of the larger life which had been kicked out of the Garden.

[...] there is humility, and I propose this not as a moral principle, distasteful to a large number of people, but simply as an item of a scientific philosophy.

In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance. We had discovered how to make trains and other machines. We knew how to put one box on top of the other to get that apple, and Occidental man saw himself as an autocrat with complete power over a universe which was made of physics and chemistry.

But that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete, and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Conscious Purpose versus Nature'), p. 441, 443

Mechanisation, bureaucracy, the increasing complexity of technology and scientific specialisation are […] typical phenomena of mass society today, ‘yet they seem to vitiate the authority of the individual, as well as the democratic power of the majority, in favour of an anonymous principle of organisation and discipline.’

If this is the case, the artist can’t hope for any privileges from mass society, or even from the concession of a marginal status […] Such a society won’t recognise the need of a safety valve.

[…] a mass society won’t have any need of the artist, and presumably won’t even bother to domesticate his mystery.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 91-2

Mill’s model of society follows his view of science as bottom-up: people express their sentiments, debate them, and negotiate compromises. There’s no predefined model of society, it emerges out of the discourse.

You can’t ban certain people from speaking, because you can’t know beforehand whether or not they have something of value to say. At the very least, people must be allowed to express their sentiments, which is information in itself.

Marcuse’s model of society, of course, follows his view of science, and his view is top-down.

For him, the desired end-state of society is defined in advance, so there is little need to listen to what people have to say; he can evaluate every person or movement on whether or not they are perceived to be working towards or away from his end-goal (which correlates strongly with Left and Right, respectively), and promote or censor them accordingly.

[Uri Harris]
'Wilfrid Laurier and the Creep of Critical Theory'

One theory from Thomas Sowell is that intellectuals tend to like systems where you can articulate a theory in a bunch of verbal propositions, and the government implements them.

Whereas there are certain phenomena in social life, like market economies, where the intelligence is distributed across millions of people. No-one actually knows how to make the system work, but people make things, look for buyers, set the price, and then over the entire society things kind of work out - but no single individual has the theory as to how that ought to work.

A language is another example - there’s no committee that designed the English language, there’s no theory of how the English language ought to work. It’s hundreds of millions of people just talking - and they invent new slang, and they slur, and they emphasise, and they borrow from other languages - and the language changes. And it works pretty well - here we are speaking in English, and no committee ever designed it.

So according to Sowell’s theory - I think he was influenced by Hayek - systems of distributed intelligence - where no one genius designed it, but millions of people cooperating give rise to a collective intelligence - run against the grain of the way intellectuals often think.

If your first impulse is “What’s the theory? What are the set of principles?”, then you’re going to gravitate to planned systems and be a bit oblivious to distributed systems.

[Steven Pinker]
Joe Rogan Experience #1073

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.

We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders.

We must solve it by some form of decentralization.

[Friedrich Hayek]
'The Use of Knowledge in Society'

Hillman: ... "You are out of control," "I am out of control," are big sentences now in this culture.

And the important thing is to be able to control your behaviour, get your shit together. I think control is one of the most dangerous words we've got right now in our vocabulary.

First of all, it's a word that belongs with Honeywell, it's a "control systems" idea - that the controls (not the psyche or the Gods) are what run everything, run the ship, run the air conditioner, run the factory.

Second of all, it's a word that belongs in the police world. So it's a combination of technological and bureaucratic or oligarchic or fascist. And it's become an ideal of therapy!

Ventura: When you're falling in love your life's out of control. And when you're falling out of love [...] You get fired or let go or have an accident, your life's out of control.

Hillman: When you have a breakdown of any kind - bankruptcy, a death, a big illness - your life's out of control. Do you realize the conditions we've just described are the great dramatic moments of life?

Ventura: Which we're supposedly living for!

Hillman: That's what we're living for. Falling in love, being heartbroken by love -

Ventura: - revelations that turn you inside out -

Hillman: - mourning and grief -

Ventura: - victory, defeat - because when you get a big victory you're often as out of control as when you're badly defeated -

Hillman: - losing it, finding it -

What is all this emphasis on control? Isn't that what they call secular humanism, to ban the Gods?

Ventura: We're banning the Gods -

Hillman: - with that control system.

Ventura: We want to control all the things you supposedly live for - all those things that, if you get to be an old person, and have not had them, you go, "What was my life about?"

So on one level what you want is to be out of control, and on another level you're fighting that. That's your dialectic.

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.203, 204

[...] it has been widely believed, and in our century more than any other, that rationality, logic, the scientific approach, call for a society which is centrally organized, and planned and ordered as a whole. Popper has shown that this, besides being authoritarian, rests on a mistaken and superseded conception of science.

Rationality, logic and a scientific approach all point to a society which is 'open' and pluralistic, within which incompatible views are expressed and conflicting aims pursued; a society in which everyone is free to investigate problem-situations and to propose solutions; a society in which everyone is free to criticize the proposed solutions of others, most importantly those of the government [...]

[...] the perpetual search for, and admission of, error at even the organizational level is hardest of all for authoritarian structures.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 77-8

Intentional fallacy, term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it.

'Intentional Fallacy'

The conceptual operation that extracts 'themes' from writing has its counterpart in the notion that books exist as self-enclosed systems of meaning and reference, their signifiers all pointing back toward some 'transcendental signified' or source of authentic and unitary truth.

The traditional idea of the book is of a writing held within bounds by the author's sovereign presence; a writing whose integrity of purpose and theme comes from its acceptance of these proper, self-regulating limits.

What is at issue is not the intentionality of language - the precondition of all understanding - but the belief that texts must always point back to their source in a moment of pure, self-authorized meaning.

Language is intentional through and through, but not in the sense that its meanings either could or should be confined to what the author (supposedly) intended.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 63, 113

[...] our acceptance of a degree of uncertainty is the very essence of being alive in the universe.

Many system have evolved through processes of self-organization. They were not put together in a mechanical way, by bringing various parts together and arranging them according to some hierarchical scheme and overarching law.

Rather they emerged through the interlocking of feedback loops and out of flows to and from the external environment. In this sense, the stabilities of our lives, of our organizations and our social structures, do not arise out of fundamental certainties but from out of the womb of chance, chaos, and openness.

Patterns in a pan of heated water and the vortex in a river are particularly simple examples of order emerging out of chaos. Likewise human society itself, with its cities, international governments, and global economics can only exist through this dynamical dance between chaos and order.

The contrast between versatility and flexibility of self-organization and the behaviour of mechanical systems can be illustrated by comparing life in a village to that within a traditional army.

To function effectively during war, an army must have a predetermined and well-understood hierarchy [...] Each person entering the army fits neatly into a particular slot, so that during battles and campaigns the army machine continues to function despite a turnover in personnel. This also means that, with the exception of the highest ranks or individual acts of heroism, the skills and personalities of any particular individual have little significance.

Soldiers fit into the army, rather than the army accommodating them.

Whereas, in the army, soldiers are forced to sacrifice a measure of their personal freedom so as to fit in and obey, within the village a wide range of behaviour, even verging on the eccentric, can be tolerated. The former type of structure is a metaphor for mechanical, hierarchical organization; the latter stands for the self-organization seen in many natural and social systems.

[F. David Peat]
From Certainty to Uncertainty, p. 138-9

[...] in the first months following surgery, split-brain patients reported some rather disconcerting experiences. These took the form of an apparent conflict of will, displayed in so-called intermanual conflict.

Such was the case of a man who found himself in the unfortunate position of going to embrace his wife with one arm and pushing her away with the other. Other patients [...] reported instances in which the left hand closed doors the right hand had opened, unfolded sheets the right had folded, snatched money the right had offered to a store cashier, and disrupted [...] reading by turning pages and closing books.

What the stories of the split-brain patients in their first few months after operation also reveal is that it is the left hemisphere, Gazzaniga's interpreter, that is in control, at the conscious level, of the consistent nature of ‘our’ experience, even though we may have differing views, desires, and values in either hemisphere.

In inter-manual conflict, it is never the right hand that is experienced as the rebel, the ‘naughty’ hand, the one that is ‘out of control’: it is always the left, that pushes the other way, grabs the wheel, chooses the ‘wrong’ clothes.

[...] Once the script has been written and the play half performed by the left hemisphere, an incursion from the right hemisphere is bound to be disruptive and unwelcome from its point of view.

It's the left hemisphere, ignorant of what is going on in the right hemisphere, that both decides what it is that ‘I’ want, and then judges any interruption from the right hemisphere as contrary to ‘my’ best interests.

But set it in another context, and who knows what might have happened had he actually listened a long while back to his right hemisphere and left his wife rather than embrace her; or – in another patient's story – had she closed the door, driven the other way, worn the flame-coloured dress?

At any rate, at least we can deduce that when she says ‘I know what I want to wear’, she means ‘My left hemisphere knows what it wants me to wear, and I am identified with my left hemisphere.’

Despite the asymmetry in their roles, in favour of the right hemisphere, there is an important opposing asymmetry of power, in favour of the left hemisphere [...] and it may even, mistakenly, see the right hemisphere's world as undoing its work, challenging its ‘supremacy’.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 211, 218-19

The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of 'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle.

One may deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces.

It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says. The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may better be called naturalism.

Over against it stands 'theism,' or what in a wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.' Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher element.

[William James]
'Some Metaphysical Problems', Pragmatism and Other Writings, p. 44

Historically we find the terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of, 'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous.

Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection - is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.

Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist - I use the terms most popularly current.

The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.

[William James]
'The Present Dilemma in Philosophy', Pragmatism and Other Writings, p. 10

The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert.

This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Quora, Stack Exchange and other web resources that rely on collective human knowledge.

An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.

Wisdom-of-the-crowds research routinely attributes the superiority of crowd averages over individual judgments to the elimination of individual noise, an explanation that assumes independence of the individual judgments from each other. Thus the crowd tends to make its best decisions if it is made up of diverse opinions and ideologies.

[...] when the diversity in a group is large, the error of the crowd is small.

Experiments run by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology found that when a group of people were asked to answer a question together they would attempt to come to a consensus which would frequently cause the accuracy of the answer to decrease. i.e. what is the length of a border between two countries? One suggestion to counter this effect is to ensure that the group contains a population with diverse backgrounds.

Crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics.When there is not a precise answer crowds can come to arbitrary conclusions.

'Wisdom of the crowd'
Wikipedia

In his book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier argues that crowd wisdom is best suited for problems that involve optimization, but ill-suited for problems that require creativity or innovation.

In the online article Digital Maoism, Lanier argues that the collective is more likely to be smart only when

1. it isn't defining its own questions,

2. the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value), and

3. the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree.

Lanier argues that only under those circumstances can a collective be smarter than a person. If any of these conditions are broken, the collective becomes unreliable or worse.

'The Wisdom of Crowds'
Wikipedia

Lanier accuses Web 2.0 developments of devaluing progress and innovation, as well as glorifying the collective at the expense of the individual.

Lanier also argues that there are limitations to certain aspects of the open source and content movement in that they lack the ability to create anything truly new and innovative.

For example, Lanier argues that the open source movement didn't create the iPhone. In another example, Lanier further accuses Web 2.0 of making search engines lazy, destroying the potential of innovative websites like Thinkquest, and hampering the communication of ideas like mathematics to a wider audience.

'Jaron Lanier'
Wikipedia

Swarm Intelligence

Swarm intelligence systems consist typically of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment.

The inspiration often comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents.

Examples of swarm intelligence in natural systems include ant colonies, bird flocking, hawks hunting, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and microbial intelligence.

Enabled by mediating software such as the SWARM platform [...] networks of distributed users can be organized into "human swarms" through the implementation of real-time closed-loop control systems.

[...] such real-time systems enable groups of human participants to behave as a unified collective intelligence that works as a single entity to make predictions, answer questions, and evoke opinions. Such systems [...] have been shown to significantly amplify human intelligence, resulting in a string of high-profile predictions of extreme accuracy.

Academic testing shows that human swarms can out-predict individuals across a variety of real-world projections. Famously, human swarming was used to correctly predict the Kentucky Derby Superfecta, against 541 to 1 odds, in response to a challenge from reporters.

'Swarm Intelligence'
Wikipedia

“Sometimes it seems like everyone’s a manager,” says Karl Marginson, who has been FC’s team manager since the club was established, as he sits on the team bus on the way to a fixture at Whitby.

“Everybody who comes along to football has an opinion. They’re very quick to tell me how I should be doing things. I’m sure it’s the same for Louis Van Gaal.”

Marginson says he will listen to anyone’s opinion. Though rather like Brian Clough, once he has listened, he then does what he believes is right. A couple of years ago, the then Conference club Ebbsfleet did an experiment whereby they invited supporters to vote weekly on who should be in the first team. Had FC’s members not been tempted to try the same thing?

“There’s a difference,” Walsh says of the Ebbsfleet idea. “We’re serious.”

“Listen, that could never work,” adds Marginson. “If you give out 200 pieces of paper to 200 people and asked them to work out a team, you’d get 200 different combinations. At some point there’s got to be one person making those decisions.”

[Jim White]
'How FC United rose to the brink of the big time'

There’s a whole world of philanthropy out there and I think its one of the least well functioning sectors of the American economy.

So much of it is bureaucratic and risk averse, and people doing the same things. I thought, let’s go back to earlier models of giving, from the Renaissance or the eighteenth century, where in essence there was no bureaucracy.

One person says yes or no […] the evaluator is me, there’s no panel, no bureaucracy, it’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I think far more philanthropy should work this way.

[Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins | The Tim Ferriss Show'

The libertarian-authoritarian axis on the Political Compass is a tradeoff between discoordination and tyranny.

You can have everything perfectly coordinated by someone with a god’s-eye-view – but then you risk Stalin. And you can be totally free of all central authority – but then you’re stuck in every stupid multipolar trap Moloch can devise.

The libertarians make a convincing argument for the one side, and the monarchists for the other, but I expect that like most tradeoffs we just have to hold our noses and admit it’s a really hard problem.

[Scott Alexander]
'Meditations on Moloch'

FAT TONY: “Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meanings of things?”

SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”

FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”

“My dear Socrates… you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them”

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 253

[…] things that grow in a natural way, whether cities or individual houses, have a fractal quality to them. Like everything alive, all organisms, like lungs, or trees, grow in some form of self-guided but tame randomness.

[…] fractals induce a certain wealth of detail based on a small number of rules of repetition of nested patterns. The fractal require some jaggedness, but one that has some method to its madness. Everything in nature is fractal, jagged, and rich in detail, though with a certain pattern.

The smooth, by comparison, belongs to the class of Euclidean geometry we study in school, simplified shapes that lose this layer of wealth.

Alas, contemporary architecture is smooth, even when it tries to look whimsical. What is top-down is generally unwrinkled (that is, unfractal) and feels dead.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 324-5

Evolution proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or tinkering, inherently robust, i.e., with the achievement of potential stochastic gains thanks to continuous, repetitive, small, localised mistakes.

What men have done with top-down, command-and-control science has been exactly the reverse: interventions with negative convexity effects, i.e., the achievement of small certain gains through exposure to massive potential mistakes.

Our record of understanding risks in complex systems (biology, economics, climate) has been pitiful, marred with retrospective distortions (we only understand the risks after the damage takes place, yet we keep making the mistake), and there is nothing to convince me that we have gotten better at risk management.

Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life).

If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 348-9

Although Kant criticized Leibniz and the rationalists for believing that reason alone without sense experience can calculate the universe (for, Kant argued, knowledge requires acquaintance with particulars), he also criticized Locke and the empiricists for believing that sense impressions alone, without a priori concepts of the understanding, could ever lead to knowledge (for particulars are meaningless without general concepts by which they are interpreted).

Locke was correct to deny innate ideas in the sense of mental representations of physical reality, but wrong to deny innate formal knowledge. As thought without sensation is empty, so is sensation without thought blind.

Only in conjunction can understanding and sensibility supply objectively valid knowledge of things.

[Richard Tarnas]

The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 345

Samuel Johnson famously said that "the first Whig was the Devil." If the left is chaos and the right is order then naturally things tend toward entropy over time, right? But human institutions aren't closed thermodynamic systems - there must be a mechanism causing chaos to emerge

To understand the mechanism, you must first understand what "left" and "right" mean. Some people say that this is a vestigial artifact of the French Revolution. In specific details, that's correct. But it doesn't explain why you can look at the Roman Republic and tell who's who

I submit to you that there is substance to the concept of "right" and "left." I say that being "right" means believing in the superiority of *evolved* systems and being "left" means believing in the superiority of *planned* systems.

The right is the philosophy of tradition, of religion, of hierarchy, of burkean incrementalism, of survival of the fittest, of primitivism. Each of these are in tension with each other on specific points, but they are all about the maintenance of evolved value systems.

The most fundamentally right-wing thinker is Nassim Taleb. #Lindy is a right-wing ideology. The rightist understands that the world is a strange and horrifying place and that the tools we use to navigate it were bought with generations of human suffering

We do not have complete theories of anything. All we have are heuristics. Man cannot produce absolute truth, it is the domain of God alone. The best that man can do in this world is "true enough." True enough to survive. True enough to be filtered until it becomes tradition.

The left is the philosophy of expertise, of science, of "progressing" past the beliefs of our hidebound ancestors, of individual freedom and self-expression outside inherited rules, of caring for those who cannot survive, of man as the beginning and the end of all things

The left believes that man is perfectible in principle. That man's ability to reason can produce better and more effective morality than what has been selected for over the generations. That the "rational" maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain is the whole of morality

If this were so wrong that anyone who embraced it died quickly and painfully, we wouldn't have a problem. But human societies are like commercial jets - they can glide for a long time before they crash. And in the meantime, you don't have to listen to those dreadful engines

So, back to our original question. Why does Cthulhu

always swim left? Because to *do* politics is an essentially left-wing act. To make changes to what has been selected for in favor of particular human interests is to trade the robust for the ephemeral.

Sometimes it's not a big deal. Plenty of beliefs are probably pretty arbitrary, and taken individually rather than as part of an interconnected system they may seem especially meaningless. But over time - and that is all that matters - the tendency is toward chaos and fragility.

Democracy accelerates this process because it makes power (always desirable) contingent regular concessions to particular ephemeral human desires. But monarchies face this pressure as well. The gap between the interest of a person and the interest of a people - that is politics.

And that is why you live in a time that offers you great somatic pleasures, but faces collapse on all fronts. Collapse of families, collapse of institutional trust, collapse of supply chains in the face of even predictable complications. All the result of Cthulhu's endless drift.

[@kwamurai]

Twitter

To "give style" to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.

[…] In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!

It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.

Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve.

Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising.

And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 290

Our scientists incessantly tell us with the utmost assurance that everything around us has evolved by small mutations sieved out through natural selection. Even the Almighty is not credited with having been able to create anything complex. Every complexity, we are told, is the result of evolution.

Yet our development planners seem to think that they can do better than the Almighty, that they can create the most complex things at one throw by a process called planning, letting Athene spring, not out of the head of Zeus, but out of nothingness, fully armed, resplendent, and viable.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Small is Beautiful, p.138

Unlike covering-law explanations of behaviour, which abstract away time and space in favour of universalities, hermeneutics explains by highlighting and showing the concrete and temporal, context-dependent dynamical interrelationships that give the action its unique character.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 231

Theory - explains through generalities, top down, compressed (cooked)

Story - explains through specifics, bottom up, uncompressed (raw)

Dupré (1993) is […] correct in proposing that we think of free will as human ability to project meaningful distinctions into behavior. To act top-down from the intentional level in which meaning is embodied is thus to exercise free will […]

Because all self-organizing systems select the stimuli to which they respond, behavior constrained top-down is to that extent increasingly autonomous of forceful impacts from the environment. Self-organized systems act from their own point of view.

The more structured the entity, the more complex its organization and its behavior, and the more decoupled from and independent of its environment: the more autonomous and authentic, in short.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 249

As a distributed whole, a self-organized structure imposes second-order contextual constraints on its components, thereby restricting their degrees of freedom.

As we saw, once top-down, second-order contextual constraints are in place, energy and matter exchanged across an autocatalytic structure's boundaries cannot flow any which way. The autocatalytic web's dynamical organization does not allow any molecule to be imported into the system: in a very important feature of self-organizing dynamical systems, their organization itself determines the stimuli to which they will respond.

By making its components interdependent, thereby constraining their behavioral variability, the system preserves and enhances its cohesion and integrity, its organization and identity. As a whole it also prunes inefficient components.

[...] By correlating and coordinating previously aggregated parts into a more complex, differentiated, systematic whole, contextual constraints enlarge the variety of states the system as a whole can access [...] Second-order contextual constraints are thus in the service of the whole.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.138, 143

Whereas formal systems apply inference rules to logical variables, neural networks apply evolutive principles to numerical variables. Instead of calculating a solution, the network settles into a condition that satisfies the constraints imposed on it.

Neural nets have no central control in the classical sense. Processing is distributed over the network and the roles of the various components (or groups of components) change dynamically.

Every symbol in a rule-based system has a precise, predefined meaning - this constitutes a local representation. In a connectionist network individual neurons have no pre-defined meaning. Changing patterns of activity over several nodes perform meaningful functions. This is often referred to as distributed representation.

Formal systems have well-defined terminating conditions and results are only produced when these conditions are reached. Connectionist systems tend to dynamically converge on a solution, usually in an asymptotic fashion. The process does not have to terminate; as a matter of fact, usually it will not arrive at a single, final conclusion.

Apart from the fact that formal rule-based models have to be interpreted on a semantic level, the model itself is divided into two levels: that of the symbols and that of the rules; or the data and the program. In connectionist models there is only one level, that of the neurons and their weights. Instead of an 'active' program and 'passive' data, you have numerical weights that are dynamically adjusted through interaction. Instead of a program you have memory.

For those accustomed to the high level of abstraction and the crispness of logical inference, the connectionist approach often appears vague, shallow and too sparse.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.19

The Middle Path

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