Showing posts with label Greer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greer. Show all posts
Growth
Malthus suggested that while technological advances could increase a society's supply of resources, such as food, and thereby improve the standard of living, the abundance of resources would enable population growth, which would eventually bring the supply of resources for each person back to its level prior to its original level.
Some economists contend that since the industrial revolution in the early 19th century, mankind has broken out of the trap.
Others argue that the continuation of extreme poverty indicates that the Malthusian trap continues to operate. Others further argue that due to lack of food availability coupled with excessive pollution, developing countries show more evidence of the trap as compared to developed countries.
‘Malthusianism’, Wikipedia
[...] creatures and plants live together in a combination of competition and mutual dependency, and it is that combination that is the important thing to consider.
Every species has a primary Malthusian capacity. Any species that does not, potentially, produce more young than the number of the population of the parental generation is out. They’re doomed. It is absolutely necessary for every species and for every such system that its components have a potential positive gain in the population curve.
But, if every species has potential gain, it is then quite a trick to achieve equilibrium. All sorts of interactive balances and dependencies come into play, and it is these processes that have the sort of circuit structure that I have mentioned.
The Malthusian curve is exponential. It is the curve of population growth and it is not inappropriate to call this the population explosion.
You may regret that organisms have this explosive characteristic, but you may as well settle for it. The creatures that don’t are out.
[Gregory Bateson]
'Conscious Purpose versus Nature', Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.436
Given a source of variation and a selection procedure, systems always evolve in a manner that is easy to describe in general and impossible to predict in detail. The overview is that they take up every opportunity available to them: that’s the part that’s easy to describe.
What’s impossible to predict is how and in what order they’ll do it. That’s true of cellular automata, and it’s also true of living things over time. Follow the evolutionary trajectory of any group of living things, from club moss to crocodiles to Galapagos finches to human beings, and you’ll see that same process at work.
Metaphorically, it’s as though you were inflating a big balloon inside a space too small to contain it: the balloon pushes outwards in all directions, now here, now there, until it runs up against the hard limits of walls and floor and ceiling.
Do evolutionary breakthroughs take place? Of course, and the process just outlined explains how and why those happen. Imagine for a moment that you’ve got a balloon made of some absurdly flexible substance, so that it can just keep stretching no matter how big it gets. You start inflating it inside your bedroom. The door’s closed, the windows are closed, pretty soon the balloon’s outer surface is pushing hard against the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the furniture—but there’s an inch-wide gap under the door you forgot about. Once the pressure gets high enough, the balloon pushes out through that gap, and all of a sudden it’s in the hallway and there’s a vast amount of previously inaccessible space for it to expand into.
Whoosh! Before long it’s filling up the living room and pushing against half a dozen other doors and windows. If one of those happens to be open a little, another evolutionary breakthrough follows. It’s not a linear process, and many different lines of evolutionary development can—and did—unfold at the same time.
That’s the story of life on Earth. The walls, floor, and ceiling are the laws of nature and the limits of environment, and the balloon represents the range of niches occupied by living things.
[John Michael Greer]
‘Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber’, Ecosophia
For the first long, long period, human population growth was held in check by negative feedback because we were part of ecosystems. And disease, famines, resource shortages, those sorts of things kept human populations in check, just like every other species.
Humans are no different from other species in our population dynamics. We have a natural propensity to expand exponentially, but we're held in check by the natural negative feedbacks of the human ecosystem.
Along comes fossil fuel, particularly in the early part of the 19th century when we began to use it in great quantity, as well as an advance of public health measures. Fossil fuel provided the means by which humans could acquire all the food and other resources needed to grow the human enterprise, and public health improvements increased the longevity and health of the population.
So for the first time in human history in the last, about one tenth of 1% of human history, humans were able to realize our full potential for exponential population growth. Until then, it had been suppressed […] We have found ways to relieve the negative feedback, allowing the positive feedback to take off.
We took the cork off the bottle and we've had this enormous population and boom of the whole human enterprise in just the past 200 years. So what we take to be the norm […] is the single most abnormal period in human history. We are like any other species exposed to an abundance of resources that goes through a population boom - there will be a bust, there has to be a bust because the boom can't continue.
Any system that is primarily driven by positive feedback is self-destructive because it means that it will grow forever in a situation, in a context which is clearly not going to grow forever. And we're no different […] I'll put it bluntly, we are in the plague phase of a one-off human population boom bust cycle. We're nearing the top and we will come down because of the onset of negative feedback. Nature will restore balance between that positive and negative feedback and who knows what will come of that.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
[…] K-selected species tend to always to press up against the available carrying capacity of their environments […] using whatever resources are available […] Our evolutionary success depends on high survival rates of infants and this constant pushing up against that carrying capacity.
By the way, that was Malthus's great insight. He realized that if more food was made available, human beings being K strategists would in effect always rise to the level of food availability.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
[…] there's no inherent conflict between technology and ecological thinking. The conflict comes from assuming you can use the technology to overcome the biophysical reality within which we are embedded.
So if we decided as a species 200 years ago, that the carrying capacity of planet Earth indefinitely was say 2 billion people, we could have used technology at an appropriate scale to ensure the continued wellbeing of some 2 billion people ad infinitum.
But we didn't do that. The assumption was that technology can increase carrying capacity indefinitely […]
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
In many cases the relationships, the stable relationships that indigenous peoples have developed with their natural environments occur after they've obliterated the natural environment. They occur after they've hunted out all of the megafauna, the large easily caught species.
If you just think of New Zealand, which has been settled since 800 years ago or so, 12 species of gigantic birds went extinct as a result of the deprivations of the indigenous people that now occupy New Zealand. The decimation of populations of large mammals […] in Australia just follows the progression of the occupation of that subcontinent by aboriginals in the last 50,000 years.
So yes, we can develop a harmonious relationship with our ecosystems, but often only after we've inserted ourselves into those ecosystems and appropriated the habitats and food chains of many of the mammals […]
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Any species capable of exponential growth will respond to a period of resource abundance. And many species in nature go through cycles. It's a boom bust cycle: things get good, we expand, then negative feedback kicks in, we crash, then we get good and expand.
Humans have never done that, not globally. We've done it locally.
But now for the first time we've managed to, in effect, colonize the entire planet. We've grown by liquidating our capital [but] you cannot continue to grow by liquidating the natural capital basis of your own existence. And so we get to the point where we become so large, there's simply insufficiency there to maintain even the maintenance activities, let alone further growth.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
We can't avoid the reality that humans are biophysical entities, that we are ecological species that have evolved as components of nature and that we require a certain energy flow just to breathe.
Historically, that energy flow has always been solar energy through our food supply. We broke from that, oh, just about 200 years ago. And with this exosomatic or outside the body source of energy called fossil fuel, we vastly increased our capacity to exploit and destroy the planet.
And so we see everywhere measurements of the decline in forest fertility. North America has lost 50% to 70% of the organic nutrients that took 11,000 or 12,000 years in the Postglacial period to accumulate. So in less than 200 years of deep tillage agriculture, half of that's gone or 70% is gone. And the only way we maintain the productivity of the Great Plains is through the massive applications of fertilizers and pesticides and increasing irrigation.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
William Rees: The biophysical reality is that human beings in the growth of the human system have displaced other species from their eco-niches. It's a concept I call competitive displacement.
Human unsustainability is a natural phenomenon. We are unsustainable by nature because all we're doing is following our natural propensity to expand and to fill all available habitat, but we do it better than any other species.
So if you go back 10,000 years, humans were fewer than, or less than 1% of the biomass of mammals on planet Earth. Then with agriculture and just more recently in the last couple of 100 years with fossil energy and the massive expansion of the human enterprise, humans have become 36% or 34% of the biomass of mammals.
And by the way, the biomass itself has gone up. But our domestic animals are another 62-63%. So that when you add all of that together, it means that wild mammals on planet Earth today are about 3%-4% of the total biomass of mammals. So all those great herds you see in Africa are a trivial appendage on the biomass of mammals, which has absolutely been commandeered by both humans and our domestic animals.
So there's been an enormous displacement of non-human species, and the remaining populations in the last 50 years have been reduced by 65-70%.
Nate Hagens: It's actually worse than that because it’s all mammals, including ocean mammals. So if it's only land mammals, it's 98%.
[William Rees & Nate Hagens]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Archaic societies do not make a sharp distinction between life and death. Death is an aspect of life, and life is only possible in symbolic exchange with death.
Rituals of initiation and sacrifice are symbolic acts which regulate numerous transitions from life to death. Initiation is a second birth, following upon death, that is, the end of a phase of life.
The relationship between life and death is characterized by reciprocity. Festivals as expenditure imply a symbolic exchange with death: 'Symbolic death, which has not undergone the imaginary disjunction of life and death which is at the origin of the reality of death, is exchanged in a social ritual of feasting."
The age of production is accordingly a time without festival. It is dominated by an irreversibility, that of endless growth.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.51
The price we pay for our enslavement to matter, to the negative devouring Becky, is great.
Gathering food for a devouring mother who cannot get enough becomes a metaphor for a fully automated society in which human efficiency must aspire to the performance of an automaton.
Psychic automatons are addicted personalities, governed by mysterious, irrational fetishes. To wean them from their addictions - to food, to alcohol, to sex, to drugs, to work - is to wean Becko from Becky. It is not easy. To wean Becko from Becky it is also necessary to wean Becky from herself. She is literally eating herself to death. Like her, our society grows on what it devours. It is destroying itself on what it manufactures. Economists call that self-destructive phenomenon "economic growth," and economic growth has become the chief measure of society's health.
Anyone who weighs 300 pounds and is gaining 10 "pounds" a month on the stock market must sense that society's way of measuring its health is both perverse and crazy.
A society that is devouring its natural resources is not becoming more healthy and more realistic. It is dying as surely as a patient who has gone from 300 to 400 pounds is dying. America at the moment is 200 billion dollars overweight. Many economists predict it will be 300 billion by the end of the century.
The Becky I have in mind, i.e. our global negative mother, weighs in the neighbourhood of £300 trillion - roughly the price we are now budgeting worldwide for armaments. The Beckos of the world are feeding a ravenously destructive appetite and it is bound to explode unless Becko can be stopped, which is to say, unless Becky can be stopped.
Becky's compulsive behavior must be redeemed if we are to survive. She not only controls with machine-like efficiency our waking "conscious" hours, but our sleeping, unconscious hours as well. She works both above ground and underground. Underground, she is worshipped, served, propitiated in fetishes, addictions, ravaging diseases, marital break- downs, premature deaths.
Nothing can satisfy her hunger, which is unconscious, insatiable and autonomous. Her appetite feeds on its own power, endlessly giving birth to more and more and more, endlessly feeding on what is feeding on her.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.204-5
The modern industrial system has a built-in tendency to grow; it cannot really work unless it is growing. The word ‘stability’ has been struck from its dictionary and replaced by ‘stagnation’.
Its continuous growth pursues no particular aims or objectives, it is growth for the sake of growing. No one, even inquires after its final shape. There is none, there is no ‘saturation point’.
Who, it may be asked, calls the tune? Fundamentally, the technologist. Whatever becomes technologically possible - within certain economic limits - must be done. Society must adapt itself to it. The question whether or not it does any good is ruled out on the specious argument that no one knows anyhow what is good or evil, wholesome or unwholesome, worthy of man or unworthy.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 30
Once agriculture-generated surplus created private ownership and a system of differential and competitive advantage, the game theory shoot was greased and the continual evolution of power dynamics was set.
No, we could not go back to a previous stage in the system. No, it couldn’t have stayed at a previous phase. No, we can’t prevent continued exponential growth within this framework. No, we can’t bind the dynamics with law, given that economics is more fundamental to the power stack than law is.
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'New Economics Series: Part 4', Explorations on the Future of Civilisation
An economic system does not have to be expansive—that is, constantly increasing its production of wealth—and it might well be possible for people to be completely happy in a non-expansive economic system if they were accustomed to it.
In the twentieth century, however, the people of our culture have been living under expansive conditions for generations. Their minds are psychologically adjusted to expansion, and they feel deeply frustrated unless they are better off each year than they were the preceding year.
The economic system itself has become organized for expansion, and if it does not expand it tends to collapse.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.313
The past history of weapons over thousands of years shows that the reason political units have grown larger in certain periods has been because of the increased power of the offensive in the dominant weapons systems, and that periods in which defensive weapons became dominant have been those in which political units remained small in area or even became smaller.
The growing power of castles in the period about 1100 B.C. or about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made power units so small that all power became private power, and the state disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose the so-called “Dark Ages” about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000.
We do not expect any such extreme growth of defensive power in the future, but any increase in defensive weapon power would stop the growth in size of power areas and would, in time, reverse this tendency.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.765-6
Related posts:
One True Path
Reason - Nature
One - Many
Global - Local
Context independent - Context dependent
Christians opened to door to infinity; rationalists walked through it.
Pre-modern rationalism was contained within a (religious) tradition. Modern rationalism is uncontained. The problem is not rationality per se, but 'rationality without a cause'.
Clear - Complex
Closed - Open
Predetermined - Free
Transcendent - Immanent
Christians opened to door to infinity; rationalists walked through it.
Pre-modern rationalism was contained within a (religious) tradition. Modern rationalism is uncontained. The problem is not rationality per se, but 'rationality without a cause'.
The progressive, focused on a dream of universal consensus, attempts "to escape the agonistics of the network." Argumentation, confusion, conflict, and error disappear in a higher synthesis.
The global vision can be reductionist or pluralist. The former attempts to unify under a "single privileged vocabulary" (e.g. physics or maths) whereas the latter attempts to synthesise all vocabularies and levels of description into an "integral" vision.
The Kantian transcendental project, like all transcendental theologies, aims to give grounds for settling all moral disputes.
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]
'Locksley Hall'
Niebuhr found another example of this misguided search for unity - for an "absolute perspective which transcends the conflict” between competing loyalties - in Dewey's little book on religion, A Common Faith (1934).
Niebuhr considered Dewey's plea for a "religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race" as an attempt to “eliminate conflict and unite men of good will everywhere by stripping their spiritual life of historic, traditional, and supposedly anachronistic accretions." Dewey's position exemplified the "faith of modern rationalism in the ability of reason to transcend the partial perspectives of the natural world in which reason is rooted."
Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that “with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution."
Dewey did not understand that competing loyalties were rooted in "something more vital and immediate than anachronistic religious traditions.” The fervor they evoked could not be modified or resolved, as Dewey seemed to think, by a "small group of intellectuals" who enjoyed the "comparative neutrality and security of the intellectual life."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.370, 375
Niebuhr distinguished prophetic religion not only from scientific rationality, which cannot justify hope, but from mystical religion, which cannot justify it either, except by turning its back on the "facts of incoherence.”
If science dismissed the existence of moral order and coherence in history as an illusion, mysticism dismissed the natural world itself as an illusion, together with the whole course of human history. For the mystic, reality dwelled in the timeless realm of pure essence, the contemplation of which, undistracted by unruly historical facts, became the goal of religious aspiration.
Mysticism, according to Niebuhr, was rationalism's mirror image. It carried the “rational passion for unity and coherence to the point where the eye turns from the outward scene, with its recalcitrant facts and stubborn variety, to the inner world of spirit."
The prophetic tradition found moral significance in history (since history is under God's judgment) without denying the reality of incoherence and evil. The achievement of the “prophetic movement in Hebraic religion," Niebuhr wrote, lay in its ability “to purge its religion of the parochial and puerile weaknesses of its childhood without rationalizing it and thus destroying the virtue of its myth."
His reference to the “virtue” of the prophetic myth, when we recall the rich associations and multiple meanings of the term, provides the clearest indication of the meaning of mythology, as Niebuhr understood it.
In the prophetic tradition, virtue is the truth that breaks the cycle of excessive optimism and disillusionment. It asserts the goodness of life without denying the evidence that would justify despair. Thus "Hebrew spirituality," Niebuhr argued, "was never corrupted by either the optimism which conceived the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness or the pessimism which relegated historic existence to a realm of meaningless cycles.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.372
In policy evaluation, “there is never a point at which the thinking, research, and action is 'objective' or 'unbiased’. It is partisan through and through, as are all human activities, in the sense that the expectations and priorities of those commissioning and doing the analysis shape it, and in the sense that those using the information shape its interpretation and application.”
The top-down models of policy evaluation and formulation do not suggest that elites never disagree about public policy. Elites may share a consensus about goals and values yet disagree on how to achieve them [...] Foundations sometimes fund studies that make conflicting policy recommendations, and think tanks compete with one another for preeminence in policymaking [...] And it is unlikely that there ever was a society in which elites did not compete among themselves for power and preeminence.
But interelite conflict and competition takes place within a broader consensus on the goals of public policy, especially economic growth, global expansion, and the protection of corporate enterprise [...] Disagreement occurs over the means rather than the ends of public policy.
It is the shared consensus among elites over the fundamental values of American society that allows public policy to be guided by “the intelligence of democracy." Political scientist Charles E. Lindblom explains the intelligence of democracy: “Strategic analysis and mutual adjustment among political participants, then, are the underlying processes by which democratic systems achieve the level of intelligent action that they do."
"The staid and dignified policy-formation process is very different from the helter-skelter special-interest process. ... It appears as disinterested and fairminded as the special-interest process seems self-seeking and biased."
The foundations, think tanks, and policy planning organizations generally try to remain above partisan politics. Their tax-exempt status under Section 501C3 of the Internal Revenue Code requires that they remain nonpartisan, that they do not endorse political candidates, and that their policy recommendations be presented as “civic and educational” activities.
They describe themselves as “independent,” “nonpartisan,” “objective,” “problem-solving,” and “public-spirited.”
But strategic analysis and mutual adjustment - the keys to intelligent policymaking - cannot develop in the absence of agreement on fundamental values.
[Thomas R. Dye]
Top Down Policymaking, p.63-4, 174
Science's goal of ultimate law and ultimate level also reflects the prevailing notion in the West of a single, unified deity.
Rather than seeking a single, most fundamental ground, the Native mind prefers to dance among the ever-changing movements of a living, subtle nature. Harmony and balance must accommodate change and the activities of the trickster.
[…] Native science works with a multiplicity of symbols, images, and stories. There is no single, unique reading to a story, but rather many enfolded and interpenetrating levels, none of which needs be thought of as being more fundamental than any other. Understanding comes from a direct experience of the dance between these levels of meaning.
In this sense, understanding within Indigenous science has something in common with Niels Bohr's notion of complementarity. Bohr's complementarity states that a single consistent description will never exhaust the meaning of what is happening at the quantum level. Rather, what is required are a number of complementary, mutually contradictory descriptions.
An electron is described as being both delocalized and wavelike, but also localized and particlelike. Likewise, the meaning of a traditional story depends upon a variety of contexts and can be unfolded in a variety of ways.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.262, 264
[...] what Wilber is presenting in his theory of evolutionary stages is perhaps the most detailed and consistent attempt yet to shoehorn mystical spirituality into the modern belief in progress.
[John Michael Greer]
'Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber', Ecosophia
The traditional (or modern) way of confronting complexity was to find a secure point of reference that could serve as foundation, a passe-partout, a master key from which everything else could be derived.
Whatever that point of reference might be - a transcendental world of perfect ideas, the radically sceptic mind, the phenomenological subject - my claim is that following such a strategy constitutes an avoidance of complexity.
The obsession to find one essential truth blinds us to the relationary nature of complexity, and especially to the continuous shifting of those relationships. Any acknowledgement of complexity will have to incorporate these shifts and changes, not as epiphenomena, but as constitutive of complex systems.
[…] the suggestion will be that the postmodern approach is inherently sensitive to complexity, that it acknowledges the importance of self-organisation whilst denying a conventional theory of representation.
Scientific knowledge […] habitually legitimates itself by appealing to a coherent metadiscourse that performs a general unifying function. Should such a metadiscourse be found, it will be possible to incorporate all forms of knowledge into one grand narrative. This is the dream of modernism. Postmodernism is consequently defined as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' […]
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.112-4
The postmodern denial of single meta-narratives, and its emphasis on the importance of difference and opposition, is not normally formulated in terms of 'population thinking' (to use the biological expression for the kind of systems thinking referred to here), but the similarities are undeniable.
Although strains of thought that value the importance of relationships - and look for patterns rather than essences - can be found throughout the intellectual history of the West, they have usually been trampled over by more macho theories claiming to have found the Truth: Platonic idealism, rationalism, Marxism, positivism.
In our analysis of complex systems (like the brain and language) we must avoid the trap of trying to find master keys. Because of the mechanisms by which complex systems structure themselves, single principles provide inadequate descriptions.
We should rather be sensitive to complex and self-organising interactions and appreciate the play of patterns that perpetually transforms the system itself as well as the environment in which it operates.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.107
Lyotard's insistence on dissension and destabilising forces, as opposed to consensus - notions which also form the core of Lyotard's critique of Habermas - has serious implications for philosophy in general, and specifically for the philosophy of science.
The role of science has traditionally been understood as one that has to fix knowledge in a permanent grid. Experimental evidence was used to verify theories. Sufficient verification would ensure a permanent place in the grid. It soon became clear, however, that the conditions for objective verification were problematic, that experimental evidence could support a theory, but not prove it.
The experimental process cannot include all the factors that could possibly be involved, nor can it predict how new knowledge would change the interpretation of experimental results. Since one could still disprove theories, the process of verification was replaced by one of falsification. If one could not add to the grid, one could at least disqualify unwanted members.
This strategy of 'throwing away' has the result of making the body of knowledge qualifying as 'scientific' leaner and leaner. Everything too complex or containing uncertainties or unpredictability is, for the time being at least, left aside.
Consequently, large parts of the totality of human knowledge are disregarded as unscientific - most of the arts, most of psychology (for many scientists Freud remains the paradigm of a scientific charlatan), and often, human sciences in general. Working with a narrow understanding of what science should be, even the life sciences (biology) and the empirical sciences (engineering) become suspect.
Pushed to its limits, the theory of falsification implies that only abstract, a priori truths are really scientific.
Lyotard's suggestion is that we discard the idea of consensus since it is impoverishing. To proliferate knowledge, we have to proliferate discourses without trying to fix them into a permanent grid.
This position has some affinity with the position of Paul Feyerabend (1975). Feyerabend insists on a scientific anarchy' in which all the marginalised voices should participate. There should be no immutable 'method' that determines what forms part of the canon and what does not. Instead of throwing away everything that does not fit into the scheme, one should try to find meaningful relationships among the different discourses.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.118
The question that should be posed at this point is the following: can behaviour in accordance with an abstract, universal set of rules be called ‘ethical’ at all? What is at stake here is the very meaning of the word ‘ethics’.
It was part of the dream of modernism to establish a universal set of rules that would be able to regulate our behaviour in every circumstance. Taken by itself, this is a noble ideal, but if we wish to argue that human beings are constituted by their ethical behaviour, we run into problems. Following a universal set of rules (assuming such rules exist) does not involve decision or dilemma, it merely asks for calculation. Given the circumstances, what do the rules decree my behaviour should be? Can this be called ‘ethical’? What kind of human being would act like this? Clearly some kind of automaton, itself constituted by rational, rule-based principles. Modernist ethics, and an understanding of language and the mind in terms of rule-based systems, fit together perfectly.
This concurs with Zygmunt Bauman’s (1992, 1993) analysis of modern and postmodern ethics. For him, modernism’s attempt to structure our existence leads to nothing less than our imprisonment.
A postmodern attitude sets us free, not to do as we like, but to behave ethically. He acknowledges that this involves a paradox: ‘it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility while simultaneously depriving them of the comfort of the universal guidance that that modern self-confidence once promised…. Moral responsibility comes with the loneliness of moral choice’ (Bauman 1992: xxii).
Actually this is just another formulation of the principle that has become a leitmotiv of this chapter: you cannot escape the agonistics of the network.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.137-8
In his criticism of Kant’s abstract idealism, Hegel realises that we are constituted within the social system, but for him it is a system that will ultimately be perfectly organised. Everybody will have their specified place.
Although Hegel realised that the (dialectical) process of organisation is still in progress, his view is, in the end, still a conservative one. At some stage there will be no further need for transformation.
Adorno argues that there are differences among human beings that remain irreducible to a totalising system. He thus reminds us of the importance of differences, not as something that prevents us from finding a comfortable place in the system, but as that which constitutes our humanity.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.138
[…] Rouse rejects the idea of the unity of science ‘which postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.’
He motivates this rejection by denying that the goal of science is the ‘accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research.’ The advance of science is centrifugal rather than centripetal, and in this process established results are often left by the wayside.
The concerns of science are practical rather than representational, and insofar as there is a concern for coherence, it is only local, more local even than the level of the applicable discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.132
This projected goal of a coherent world-picture has its reductionist versions, in which the coherence comes from explaining everything in a single privileged theoretical vocabulary (typically that of physics).
It also has pluralist versions, in which the results of different fields fit together as different levels of description appropriate for different levels of organization or complexity in the world.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Construed in its traditional way, the unity of science is predicated upon a representationalist view of scientific knowledge, and postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.
There are three respects in which I reject this construal of the unification of scientific knowledge. Most fundamentally, I do not believe that the accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research is a goal of science at all.
Second, I am arguing that, far from inclusively bringing together all or most established scientific results into a single picture, the ongoing narrative reconstruction of scientific practices regularly excises established results from the background knowledge of a field, in order to focus its subsequent development. The coherence achieved through scientific research is thus practical rather than representational.
Third, the advance of scientific research seems centrifugal rather than centripetal.
New fields continually spin off with their own interests, methods, and interpretations. Their practitioners show little concern for how retrospectively to reconcile their interests and results with those of their progenitor disciplines. They will more typically consolidate their own results toward a new advance, perhaps in a still more divergent direction, than look back and try to see how it fits together with its origins.
Scientists' concern for coherence, at least in what they choose to investigate, is usually situated more locally than even the level of the discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
What we get is not a single coherent picture of the world, but an ever more complex network of interconnections binding together various scientific endeavors. Achievements from one field get reworked and reinterpreted in order to serve the interests of another which may be at cross-purposes.
The loss in coherence is often happily compensated by the creation of new possibilities to explore, and new capabilities for doing that.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Vervaeke: […] what myth is always doing - and Levi Strauss had sort of a sense of this with structuralism - is pointing you to opponent processing.
Here's this myth, with this opponent processing; and here’s this myth with this opponent processing - but what's the through line? […] you're trying to find the multi-dimensional nexus …
Peterson: - the meta-through-line -
Vervaeke: … of all the opponent processing.
This is Nicholas Of Cusa with his open sense of infinity. In the ancient Greek world infinity is a bad thing, it's chaos. But with Cusa, and then the whole neoplatonic tradition, it opens up into a positive thing. If I could get all of the opposites, I would see that in infinity they all coincide, and that would be the culmination or summation - not in any entity - of what our cognition is about.
I would have found the source of intelligibility, because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition […]
Peterson: […] and that's the resolution of all opposing conflicts in some sense.
[Jordan B. Peterson & John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, YouTube
And that's the third and I think, therefore, best vision of Cognitive Science. That's the vision of Cognitive Science as Synoptic Integration.
Synoptic Integration is not saying that all the disciplines are saying the same thing. But it's not simple eclecticism of “well, they're all saying different things, but let's get them all to be friendly and like each other, and they can have some sort of peripheral influence on each other”.
Synoptic integration is saying, “no, we need to build something right between the disciplines that addresses the equivocation, deals with the fragmentation and fills in the ignorance - tells us about how the levels are actually causally interacting and constraining each other. That's Synoptic Integration.
So what you want to do is you need to say, “They're not saying the same thing, but they're not just saying different things either!”. You have to create this bridging vocabulary that integrates across the disciplines.
So I'm trying to create constructs with multi-aptness. They get this balance between identity and difference that affords and provokes insightful transformation of the theorising from one discipline to another. And I start to create an overarching integration.
[John Vervaeke]
‘Ep. 26 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Cognitive Science’, John Vervaeke, YouTube
The structure of Plato’s philosophy meets all the requirements of the Apollonian Logos. At the top of his theory is the One, surrounded by eternal ideas. This is the peak of the divine, celestial world, illuminated by timeless light. The highest principle is the Good, which exudes its abundance firstly upon the world of ideas (paradigms) and then, through the good Creator-Demiurge, on the created cosmos.
Plato described all three of these world zones in his Timaeus, in particular distinguishing the realm of paradigms (the observatory point of the gods, the Father), the realm of models, or “copies” and “icons” (the Son), and the mysterious khora (χώρα), the space or country which Plato likened to the Nurse or Mother.
In describing the khora (which was later identified by the Neoplatonists with the mother), Plato’s dialogue loses its crystal clarity, thus lending towards the strange assumption that this element can be comprehended only by means of a “special Logos”, which Plato called “bastard” or “illegitimate” (νόθος λόγος).
The vision of the celestial god thus reaches the surface of the earth, the lower limits of the world of copies, but here is confronted with its limits, as it can no longer see anything amenable to clear Apollonian discernment. At the border of the day, the realm of night-dreaming flickers. Timaeus (Plato) restricts himself to only a few suggestions and postulates the khora (space) to be a flat intermediary, beyond which there is nothing, and which is impossible to understand, insofar as there is nothing to properly understand in it.
In the solar Platonic vision, we can obtain only an external, “celestial” view, which sees as its bottom the khora (Χώρα), the space of the subtle film of the chaotic movement of scattered particles not yet formed by the ordering demiurge. Χώρα comes from the same root as mythological “chaos”, χάος, meaning “yawning”, or literally “opening the jaws”, “freeing the empty space.”
Instead of the voluminous “chaos” that creates the three-dimensionality of unordered void, Timaeus sees a film that resists comprehension by the classical Apollonian logos and whose comprehension demands falling into slumber, losing clarity and rigor, and degeneration […] This khora is the view of the back of the Great Mother, a limit unreachable by the Apollonian, where hell begins.
In a certain sense, Platonism is eternal, and has continued in both Christian theology by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Michael Psellos, John Italus, and Gemistus Plethon in the East, and by Boethius and John Scotus Eriugena in the West), as well as in the Renaissance and even amidst modern philosophy.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[...] what Kant presented as the universal and necessary principles of the human mind turned out in fact to be principles specific to particular times, places and stages of human activity and enquiry.
Just as what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of natural science as such turned out after all to be the principles and presuppositions specific to Newtonian physics, so what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of morality as such turned out to be the principles and presuppositions of one highly specific morality, a secularized version of Protestantism which furnished modern liberal individualism with one of its founding charters. Thus the claim to universality foundered.
For what the progress of analytic philosophy has succeeded in establishing is that there are no grounds for belief in universal necessary principles outside purely formal enquiries - except relative to some set of assumptions.
[...] analytic philosophers [...] seem to be determined to go on considering arguments as objects of investigation in abstraction from the social and historical contexts of activity and enquiry in which they are or were at home and from which they characteristically derive their particular import.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.309-11
[...] there are no general timeless standards.
It is in the ability of one particular moral-philosophy-articulating-the-claims-of-a-particular-morality to identify and to transcend the limitations of its rival or rivals, limitations which can be - although they may not in fact have been - identified by the rational standards to which the protagonists of the rival morality are committed by their allegiance to it, that the rational superiority of that particular moral philosophy and that particular morality emerges.
The history of morality-and-moral-philosophy is the history of successive challenges to some preexisting moral order, a history in which the question of which party defeated the other in rational argument is always to be distinguished from the question of which party retained or gained social and political hegemony.
I hold not only that historical enquiry is required in order to establish what a particular point of view is, but also that it is in its historical encounter that any given point of view establishes or fails to establish its rational superiority relative to its particular rivals in some specific contexts.
[...] our situation in respect of theories about what makes one theory rationally superior to another is no different from our situation in regard to scientific theories or to moralities-and-moral-philosophies. In the former as in the latter case what we have to aspire to is not a perfect theory, one necessarily to be assented to by any rational being, because invulnerable or almost invulnerable to objections, but rather the best theory to emerge so far in the history of this class of theories.
It follows that the writing of this kind of philosophical history can never be brought to completion. The possibility has always to be left open that in any particular field, whether the natural sciences or morality-and-moral-philosophy, or the theory of theory, some new challenge to the established best theory so far will appear and will displace it.
Hence this kind of historicism, unlike Hegel's, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of historicism which excludes all claims to absolute knowledge.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.305
[...] in much of the ancient and medieval worlds, as in many other premodern societies, the individual is identified and constituted in and through certain of his or her roles, those roles which bind the individual to the communities in and through which alone specifically human goods are to be attained; I confront the world as a member of this family, this household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no 'I' apart from these.
For the Platonist, as later for the Cartesian, the soul, preceding all bodily and social existence, must [...] possess an identity prior to all social roles; but for the Catholic Christian, as earlier for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity.
What does make a difference for the Catholic Christian is that I, whatever earthly community I may belong to, am also held to be a member of a heavenly, eternal community in which I also have a role, a community represented on earth by the church.
Of course I can be expelled from, defect from or otherwise lose my place in any of these forms of community. I can become an exile, a stranger, a wanderer. These too are assigned social roles, recognized within ancient and medieval communities. But it is always as part of an ordered community that I have to seek the human good, and in this sense of community the solitary anchorite or the shepherd on the remote mountainside is as much a member of a community as is a dweller in cities.
Hence solitariness is no longer what it was for Philoctetes. The individual carries his communal roles with him as part of the definition of his self, even into his isolation.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.201-2
[...] nothing that I have said goes any way to show that a situation could not arise in which it proved possible to discover no rational way to settle the disagreements between two rival moral and epistemological traditions, so that positive grounds for a relativistic thesis would emerge.
[...] there are no successful a priori arguments which will guarantee in advance that such a situation could not occur. Indeed nothing could provide us with such a guarantee which did not involve the successful resuscitation of the Kantian transcendental project.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.322
Recognition of the complex multicultural structure of human societies leads to differentialism and the complete rejection of hierarchy. Moreover, the reduction to the individual, which is the basis of the egalitarian morality of postmodernism, destroys cultural ensembles instead of protecting and strengthening them.
Differentialist anti-racism, on the contrary, merely postulates differences between societies, without attempting to evaluate them with the help of a general 'transcendental' criterion (which in principle cannot exist and any candidate for such status would only be a projection of one of the societies), nor to destroy them.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
'ALTERNATIVE POSTMODERNISM: AN UNNAMED PHENOMENON'
The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity.
This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the “key” to life and to truth. Once this “key” has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Russian Empire to 1917,’ p.65
The inexorable growth of a world market does not advance a universal civilisation. It makes the interpenetration of cultures an irreversible global condition.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.193
Liberalism—and proto-liberalisms such as Christianity, Platonism, Vedanta, and so forth—do not see will at the bottom of the ethical proposition. They see only true.
For them, good is a species of true. For the folkish thinker, true is a species of good, and good is a matter of will. And so, under these proto-liberalisms, the will—whether it be your own will, or that of the king—is always and everywhere governed by propositions. This is the ultimate source of Schmitt’s “forever-deferred decision” of the sovereign.
When will is subordinated to proposition, willing is impossible. Where will is impossible, ethics is impossible, hence the devolution into individualism.
Folkishness, by seeing ethics as second-order commands, reintroduces will into the world. Specifically, this takes the form of the will of the founder. In our terms, this is the Odinic—the great man.
[Imperium Press]
‘Who’s the Boss — Folk or Elite?’, Imperium Press, Substack
[…] we have to have some idea about how we come towards ideas that are truer than others. And I’m not suggesting that there is one simple truth, but we wouldn’t be able to do anything or say anything unless we believe that certain things were truer than others. So how do we get that?
[…] there’s a difference between the left hemisphere’s idea of truth and the right hemisphere idea of truth.
[…] correspondence truth is the idea that the propositions that we make or have the thoughts, beliefs that we have a kind of version of the world, they reflect the world so that we’ve got a model to be able to work on. Whereas, coherence theory says it’s not about correspondence in a one-to-one way, it’s more about do these various aspects of what we believe to be true make a coherent whole?
I don’t think that either of these is right and I quote Anthony Quinton saying that probably truth will turn out to be an amalgam of these points of view.
But I think we can also, using the hemisphere approach, see a certain difference, which is that the left hemisphere is again viewing the world, the cosmos, as made of things, of stuff, bits here and there, whereas the right hemisphere is likely to prioritize relationships. This is what it is always seeing in both the human and the non-human world. And so it’s interested in the relationships that come and go between the observer and the thing that’s observed.
And the idea of this is not truth as a thing or correctness - which lies in a way behind all the left hemisphere versions of how we get at truth, including the coherence theory and the correspondence theory - it’s not so much like that, as a clearing a way of error.
So it’s working apophatically, in the way that science actually works, which is to clear away mistakes. Science never says this is true, it just says, this doesn’t look true on the basis of what we know now. And that leaves you with something else that you can work with.
[…] truth [is] as a process […] a never ending journey of a reverberative kind in which our consciousness and the consciousness of what is around us come into alignment. And this doesn’t really have the same features as a world of things that are in principle knowable, even if we can’t actually know them too well.
I oppose to that, the idea of truth as unconcealing, in other words, clearing away so that we see the picture ever more clearly, rather as a sculptor makes a statue, not by putting together an arm, a leg ahead, and a torso, but by actually clearing away the stone, that makes the thing stand out.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Jim Rutt Show - ‘EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things’, ‘EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things’
[...] if Schopenhauer is led to deny the will it is primarily because he believes in the unity of willing.
Because the will, according to Schopenhauer, is essentially unitary, the executioner comes to understand that he is one with his own victim. The consciousness of the identity of the will in all its manifestations leads the will to deny itself, to suppress itself in pity, morality and ascetism.
Nietzsche discovers what seems to him the authentically Schopenhauerian mystification; when we posit the unity, the identity, of the will we must necessarily repudiate the will itself.
When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.7
It is well known that in fact man rarely seeks after truth: our interests and also our stupidity separate us from truth even more than our errors do.
The concept of truth describes a "truthful" world. Even in science the truth of phenomena forms a "world" distinct from that of phenomena themselves. But a truthful world presupposes a truthful man as its centre. – Who is this truthful man, what does he want?
First hypothesis: He wants not to be deceived, not to let himself be deceived, because it is "harmful, dangerous and inauspicious to be deceived". But this hypothesis presupposes the truthfulness of the world itself. For, in a radically false world it is the will to not let oneself be deceived that becomes inauspicious, dangerous and harmful.
In fact, the will to truth had to be formed "in spite of the danger and the uselessness of the truth at any price".
There remains another hypothesis: I want the truth means I do not want to deceive, and "I do not want to be deceived comprises, as a special case, I do not want to deceive myself. - If someone wills the truth it is not in the name of what the world is but in the name of what the world is not.
It is understood that "life aims to mislead, to dupe, to dissimilate, to dazzle, to blind". But he who wills the truth always wants to depreciate this high power of the false: he makes life an "error" and this world an "appearance". He therefore opposes knowledge to life and to the world he opposes another world, a world-beyond, the truthful world.
"Life against life". He wants life to become virtuous, to correct itself and to correct appearance, for it to serve as the way to the other world. He wants life to repudiate itself and to turn against itself [...]
The one who repudiates life is also the one who wants a diminished life, the conservation of his type and moreover its power and triumph, the triumph and contagion of reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.95-6
Related posts:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]
'Locksley Hall'
Niebuhr found another example of this misguided search for unity - for an "absolute perspective which transcends the conflict” between competing loyalties - in Dewey's little book on religion, A Common Faith (1934).
Niebuhr considered Dewey's plea for a "religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race" as an attempt to “eliminate conflict and unite men of good will everywhere by stripping their spiritual life of historic, traditional, and supposedly anachronistic accretions." Dewey's position exemplified the "faith of modern rationalism in the ability of reason to transcend the partial perspectives of the natural world in which reason is rooted."
Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that “with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution."
Dewey did not understand that competing loyalties were rooted in "something more vital and immediate than anachronistic religious traditions.” The fervor they evoked could not be modified or resolved, as Dewey seemed to think, by a "small group of intellectuals" who enjoyed the "comparative neutrality and security of the intellectual life."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.370, 375
Niebuhr distinguished prophetic religion not only from scientific rationality, which cannot justify hope, but from mystical religion, which cannot justify it either, except by turning its back on the "facts of incoherence.”
If science dismissed the existence of moral order and coherence in history as an illusion, mysticism dismissed the natural world itself as an illusion, together with the whole course of human history. For the mystic, reality dwelled in the timeless realm of pure essence, the contemplation of which, undistracted by unruly historical facts, became the goal of religious aspiration.
Mysticism, according to Niebuhr, was rationalism's mirror image. It carried the “rational passion for unity and coherence to the point where the eye turns from the outward scene, with its recalcitrant facts and stubborn variety, to the inner world of spirit."
The prophetic tradition found moral significance in history (since history is under God's judgment) without denying the reality of incoherence and evil. The achievement of the “prophetic movement in Hebraic religion," Niebuhr wrote, lay in its ability “to purge its religion of the parochial and puerile weaknesses of its childhood without rationalizing it and thus destroying the virtue of its myth."
His reference to the “virtue” of the prophetic myth, when we recall the rich associations and multiple meanings of the term, provides the clearest indication of the meaning of mythology, as Niebuhr understood it.
In the prophetic tradition, virtue is the truth that breaks the cycle of excessive optimism and disillusionment. It asserts the goodness of life without denying the evidence that would justify despair. Thus "Hebrew spirituality," Niebuhr argued, "was never corrupted by either the optimism which conceived the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness or the pessimism which relegated historic existence to a realm of meaningless cycles.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.372
In policy evaluation, “there is never a point at which the thinking, research, and action is 'objective' or 'unbiased’. It is partisan through and through, as are all human activities, in the sense that the expectations and priorities of those commissioning and doing the analysis shape it, and in the sense that those using the information shape its interpretation and application.”
The top-down models of policy evaluation and formulation do not suggest that elites never disagree about public policy. Elites may share a consensus about goals and values yet disagree on how to achieve them [...] Foundations sometimes fund studies that make conflicting policy recommendations, and think tanks compete with one another for preeminence in policymaking [...] And it is unlikely that there ever was a society in which elites did not compete among themselves for power and preeminence.
But interelite conflict and competition takes place within a broader consensus on the goals of public policy, especially economic growth, global expansion, and the protection of corporate enterprise [...] Disagreement occurs over the means rather than the ends of public policy.
It is the shared consensus among elites over the fundamental values of American society that allows public policy to be guided by “the intelligence of democracy." Political scientist Charles E. Lindblom explains the intelligence of democracy: “Strategic analysis and mutual adjustment among political participants, then, are the underlying processes by which democratic systems achieve the level of intelligent action that they do."
"The staid and dignified policy-formation process is very different from the helter-skelter special-interest process. ... It appears as disinterested and fairminded as the special-interest process seems self-seeking and biased."
The foundations, think tanks, and policy planning organizations generally try to remain above partisan politics. Their tax-exempt status under Section 501C3 of the Internal Revenue Code requires that they remain nonpartisan, that they do not endorse political candidates, and that their policy recommendations be presented as “civic and educational” activities.
They describe themselves as “independent,” “nonpartisan,” “objective,” “problem-solving,” and “public-spirited.”
But strategic analysis and mutual adjustment - the keys to intelligent policymaking - cannot develop in the absence of agreement on fundamental values.
[Thomas R. Dye]
Top Down Policymaking, p.63-4, 174
Science's goal of ultimate law and ultimate level also reflects the prevailing notion in the West of a single, unified deity.
Rather than seeking a single, most fundamental ground, the Native mind prefers to dance among the ever-changing movements of a living, subtle nature. Harmony and balance must accommodate change and the activities of the trickster.
[…] Native science works with a multiplicity of symbols, images, and stories. There is no single, unique reading to a story, but rather many enfolded and interpenetrating levels, none of which needs be thought of as being more fundamental than any other. Understanding comes from a direct experience of the dance between these levels of meaning.
In this sense, understanding within Indigenous science has something in common with Niels Bohr's notion of complementarity. Bohr's complementarity states that a single consistent description will never exhaust the meaning of what is happening at the quantum level. Rather, what is required are a number of complementary, mutually contradictory descriptions.
An electron is described as being both delocalized and wavelike, but also localized and particlelike. Likewise, the meaning of a traditional story depends upon a variety of contexts and can be unfolded in a variety of ways.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.262, 264
[...] what Wilber is presenting in his theory of evolutionary stages is perhaps the most detailed and consistent attempt yet to shoehorn mystical spirituality into the modern belief in progress.
[John Michael Greer]
'Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber', Ecosophia
The traditional (or modern) way of confronting complexity was to find a secure point of reference that could serve as foundation, a passe-partout, a master key from which everything else could be derived.
Whatever that point of reference might be - a transcendental world of perfect ideas, the radically sceptic mind, the phenomenological subject - my claim is that following such a strategy constitutes an avoidance of complexity.
The obsession to find one essential truth blinds us to the relationary nature of complexity, and especially to the continuous shifting of those relationships. Any acknowledgement of complexity will have to incorporate these shifts and changes, not as epiphenomena, but as constitutive of complex systems.
[…] the suggestion will be that the postmodern approach is inherently sensitive to complexity, that it acknowledges the importance of self-organisation whilst denying a conventional theory of representation.
Scientific knowledge […] habitually legitimates itself by appealing to a coherent metadiscourse that performs a general unifying function. Should such a metadiscourse be found, it will be possible to incorporate all forms of knowledge into one grand narrative. This is the dream of modernism. Postmodernism is consequently defined as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' […]
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.112-4
The postmodern denial of single meta-narratives, and its emphasis on the importance of difference and opposition, is not normally formulated in terms of 'population thinking' (to use the biological expression for the kind of systems thinking referred to here), but the similarities are undeniable.
Although strains of thought that value the importance of relationships - and look for patterns rather than essences - can be found throughout the intellectual history of the West, they have usually been trampled over by more macho theories claiming to have found the Truth: Platonic idealism, rationalism, Marxism, positivism.
In our analysis of complex systems (like the brain and language) we must avoid the trap of trying to find master keys. Because of the mechanisms by which complex systems structure themselves, single principles provide inadequate descriptions.
We should rather be sensitive to complex and self-organising interactions and appreciate the play of patterns that perpetually transforms the system itself as well as the environment in which it operates.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.107
Lyotard's insistence on dissension and destabilising forces, as opposed to consensus - notions which also form the core of Lyotard's critique of Habermas - has serious implications for philosophy in general, and specifically for the philosophy of science.
The role of science has traditionally been understood as one that has to fix knowledge in a permanent grid. Experimental evidence was used to verify theories. Sufficient verification would ensure a permanent place in the grid. It soon became clear, however, that the conditions for objective verification were problematic, that experimental evidence could support a theory, but not prove it.
The experimental process cannot include all the factors that could possibly be involved, nor can it predict how new knowledge would change the interpretation of experimental results. Since one could still disprove theories, the process of verification was replaced by one of falsification. If one could not add to the grid, one could at least disqualify unwanted members.
This strategy of 'throwing away' has the result of making the body of knowledge qualifying as 'scientific' leaner and leaner. Everything too complex or containing uncertainties or unpredictability is, for the time being at least, left aside.
Consequently, large parts of the totality of human knowledge are disregarded as unscientific - most of the arts, most of psychology (for many scientists Freud remains the paradigm of a scientific charlatan), and often, human sciences in general. Working with a narrow understanding of what science should be, even the life sciences (biology) and the empirical sciences (engineering) become suspect.
Pushed to its limits, the theory of falsification implies that only abstract, a priori truths are really scientific.
Lyotard's suggestion is that we discard the idea of consensus since it is impoverishing. To proliferate knowledge, we have to proliferate discourses without trying to fix them into a permanent grid.
This position has some affinity with the position of Paul Feyerabend (1975). Feyerabend insists on a scientific anarchy' in which all the marginalised voices should participate. There should be no immutable 'method' that determines what forms part of the canon and what does not. Instead of throwing away everything that does not fit into the scheme, one should try to find meaningful relationships among the different discourses.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.118
The question that should be posed at this point is the following: can behaviour in accordance with an abstract, universal set of rules be called ‘ethical’ at all? What is at stake here is the very meaning of the word ‘ethics’.
It was part of the dream of modernism to establish a universal set of rules that would be able to regulate our behaviour in every circumstance. Taken by itself, this is a noble ideal, but if we wish to argue that human beings are constituted by their ethical behaviour, we run into problems. Following a universal set of rules (assuming such rules exist) does not involve decision or dilemma, it merely asks for calculation. Given the circumstances, what do the rules decree my behaviour should be? Can this be called ‘ethical’? What kind of human being would act like this? Clearly some kind of automaton, itself constituted by rational, rule-based principles. Modernist ethics, and an understanding of language and the mind in terms of rule-based systems, fit together perfectly.
This concurs with Zygmunt Bauman’s (1992, 1993) analysis of modern and postmodern ethics. For him, modernism’s attempt to structure our existence leads to nothing less than our imprisonment.
A postmodern attitude sets us free, not to do as we like, but to behave ethically. He acknowledges that this involves a paradox: ‘it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility while simultaneously depriving them of the comfort of the universal guidance that that modern self-confidence once promised…. Moral responsibility comes with the loneliness of moral choice’ (Bauman 1992: xxii).
Actually this is just another formulation of the principle that has become a leitmotiv of this chapter: you cannot escape the agonistics of the network.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.137-8
In his criticism of Kant’s abstract idealism, Hegel realises that we are constituted within the social system, but for him it is a system that will ultimately be perfectly organised. Everybody will have their specified place.
Although Hegel realised that the (dialectical) process of organisation is still in progress, his view is, in the end, still a conservative one. At some stage there will be no further need for transformation.
Adorno argues that there are differences among human beings that remain irreducible to a totalising system. He thus reminds us of the importance of differences, not as something that prevents us from finding a comfortable place in the system, but as that which constitutes our humanity.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.138
[…] Rouse rejects the idea of the unity of science ‘which postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.’
He motivates this rejection by denying that the goal of science is the ‘accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research.’ The advance of science is centrifugal rather than centripetal, and in this process established results are often left by the wayside.
The concerns of science are practical rather than representational, and insofar as there is a concern for coherence, it is only local, more local even than the level of the applicable discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.132
This projected goal of a coherent world-picture has its reductionist versions, in which the coherence comes from explaining everything in a single privileged theoretical vocabulary (typically that of physics).
It also has pluralist versions, in which the results of different fields fit together as different levels of description appropriate for different levels of organization or complexity in the world.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Construed in its traditional way, the unity of science is predicated upon a representationalist view of scientific knowledge, and postulates as an epistemic ideal the unification of scientific representations of the world into a single all-inclusive and coherent picture.
There are three respects in which I reject this construal of the unification of scientific knowledge. Most fundamentally, I do not believe that the accumulation of a body of representations abstracted from the activity of research is a goal of science at all.
Second, I am arguing that, far from inclusively bringing together all or most established scientific results into a single picture, the ongoing narrative reconstruction of scientific practices regularly excises established results from the background knowledge of a field, in order to focus its subsequent development. The coherence achieved through scientific research is thus practical rather than representational.
Third, the advance of scientific research seems centrifugal rather than centripetal.
New fields continually spin off with their own interests, methods, and interpretations. Their practitioners show little concern for how retrospectively to reconcile their interests and results with those of their progenitor disciplines. They will more typically consolidate their own results toward a new advance, perhaps in a still more divergent direction, than look back and try to see how it fits together with its origins.
Scientists' concern for coherence, at least in what they choose to investigate, is usually situated more locally than even the level of the discipline, let alone that of the whole of science.
What we get is not a single coherent picture of the world, but an ever more complex network of interconnections binding together various scientific endeavors. Achievements from one field get reworked and reinterpreted in order to serve the interests of another which may be at cross-purposes.
The loss in coherence is often happily compensated by the creation of new possibilities to explore, and new capabilities for doing that.
[Joseph Rouse]
‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’
Vervaeke: […] what myth is always doing - and Levi Strauss had sort of a sense of this with structuralism - is pointing you to opponent processing.
Here's this myth, with this opponent processing; and here’s this myth with this opponent processing - but what's the through line? […] you're trying to find the multi-dimensional nexus …
Peterson: - the meta-through-line -
Vervaeke: … of all the opponent processing.
This is Nicholas Of Cusa with his open sense of infinity. In the ancient Greek world infinity is a bad thing, it's chaos. But with Cusa, and then the whole neoplatonic tradition, it opens up into a positive thing. If I could get all of the opposites, I would see that in infinity they all coincide, and that would be the culmination or summation - not in any entity - of what our cognition is about.
I would have found the source of intelligibility, because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition […]
Peterson: […] and that's the resolution of all opposing conflicts in some sense.
[Jordan B. Peterson & John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, YouTube
And that's the third and I think, therefore, best vision of Cognitive Science. That's the vision of Cognitive Science as Synoptic Integration.
Synoptic Integration is not saying that all the disciplines are saying the same thing. But it's not simple eclecticism of “well, they're all saying different things, but let's get them all to be friendly and like each other, and they can have some sort of peripheral influence on each other”.
Synoptic integration is saying, “no, we need to build something right between the disciplines that addresses the equivocation, deals with the fragmentation and fills in the ignorance - tells us about how the levels are actually causally interacting and constraining each other. That's Synoptic Integration.
So what you want to do is you need to say, “They're not saying the same thing, but they're not just saying different things either!”. You have to create this bridging vocabulary that integrates across the disciplines.
So I'm trying to create constructs with multi-aptness. They get this balance between identity and difference that affords and provokes insightful transformation of the theorising from one discipline to another. And I start to create an overarching integration.
[John Vervaeke]
‘Ep. 26 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Cognitive Science’, John Vervaeke, YouTube
The structure of Plato’s philosophy meets all the requirements of the Apollonian Logos. At the top of his theory is the One, surrounded by eternal ideas. This is the peak of the divine, celestial world, illuminated by timeless light. The highest principle is the Good, which exudes its abundance firstly upon the world of ideas (paradigms) and then, through the good Creator-Demiurge, on the created cosmos.
Plato described all three of these world zones in his Timaeus, in particular distinguishing the realm of paradigms (the observatory point of the gods, the Father), the realm of models, or “copies” and “icons” (the Son), and the mysterious khora (χώρα), the space or country which Plato likened to the Nurse or Mother.
In describing the khora (which was later identified by the Neoplatonists with the mother), Plato’s dialogue loses its crystal clarity, thus lending towards the strange assumption that this element can be comprehended only by means of a “special Logos”, which Plato called “bastard” or “illegitimate” (νόθος λόγος).
The vision of the celestial god thus reaches the surface of the earth, the lower limits of the world of copies, but here is confronted with its limits, as it can no longer see anything amenable to clear Apollonian discernment. At the border of the day, the realm of night-dreaming flickers. Timaeus (Plato) restricts himself to only a few suggestions and postulates the khora (space) to be a flat intermediary, beyond which there is nothing, and which is impossible to understand, insofar as there is nothing to properly understand in it.
In the solar Platonic vision, we can obtain only an external, “celestial” view, which sees as its bottom the khora (Χώρα), the space of the subtle film of the chaotic movement of scattered particles not yet formed by the ordering demiurge. Χώρα comes from the same root as mythological “chaos”, χάος, meaning “yawning”, or literally “opening the jaws”, “freeing the empty space.”
Instead of the voluminous “chaos” that creates the three-dimensionality of unordered void, Timaeus sees a film that resists comprehension by the classical Apollonian logos and whose comprehension demands falling into slumber, losing clarity and rigor, and degeneration […] This khora is the view of the back of the Great Mother, a limit unreachable by the Apollonian, where hell begins.
In a certain sense, Platonism is eternal, and has continued in both Christian theology by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Michael Psellos, John Italus, and Gemistus Plethon in the East, and by Boethius and John Scotus Eriugena in the West), as well as in the Renaissance and even amidst modern philosophy.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[...] what Kant presented as the universal and necessary principles of the human mind turned out in fact to be principles specific to particular times, places and stages of human activity and enquiry.
Just as what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of natural science as such turned out after all to be the principles and presuppositions specific to Newtonian physics, so what Kant took to be the principles and presuppositions of morality as such turned out to be the principles and presuppositions of one highly specific morality, a secularized version of Protestantism which furnished modern liberal individualism with one of its founding charters. Thus the claim to universality foundered.
For what the progress of analytic philosophy has succeeded in establishing is that there are no grounds for belief in universal necessary principles outside purely formal enquiries - except relative to some set of assumptions.
[...] analytic philosophers [...] seem to be determined to go on considering arguments as objects of investigation in abstraction from the social and historical contexts of activity and enquiry in which they are or were at home and from which they characteristically derive their particular import.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.309-11
[...] there are no general timeless standards.
It is in the ability of one particular moral-philosophy-articulating-the-claims-of-a-particular-morality to identify and to transcend the limitations of its rival or rivals, limitations which can be - although they may not in fact have been - identified by the rational standards to which the protagonists of the rival morality are committed by their allegiance to it, that the rational superiority of that particular moral philosophy and that particular morality emerges.
The history of morality-and-moral-philosophy is the history of successive challenges to some preexisting moral order, a history in which the question of which party defeated the other in rational argument is always to be distinguished from the question of which party retained or gained social and political hegemony.
I hold not only that historical enquiry is required in order to establish what a particular point of view is, but also that it is in its historical encounter that any given point of view establishes or fails to establish its rational superiority relative to its particular rivals in some specific contexts.
[...] our situation in respect of theories about what makes one theory rationally superior to another is no different from our situation in regard to scientific theories or to moralities-and-moral-philosophies. In the former as in the latter case what we have to aspire to is not a perfect theory, one necessarily to be assented to by any rational being, because invulnerable or almost invulnerable to objections, but rather the best theory to emerge so far in the history of this class of theories.
It follows that the writing of this kind of philosophical history can never be brought to completion. The possibility has always to be left open that in any particular field, whether the natural sciences or morality-and-moral-philosophy, or the theory of theory, some new challenge to the established best theory so far will appear and will displace it.
Hence this kind of historicism, unlike Hegel's, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of historicism which excludes all claims to absolute knowledge.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.305
[...] in much of the ancient and medieval worlds, as in many other premodern societies, the individual is identified and constituted in and through certain of his or her roles, those roles which bind the individual to the communities in and through which alone specifically human goods are to be attained; I confront the world as a member of this family, this household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no 'I' apart from these.
For the Platonist, as later for the Cartesian, the soul, preceding all bodily and social existence, must [...] possess an identity prior to all social roles; but for the Catholic Christian, as earlier for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity.
What does make a difference for the Catholic Christian is that I, whatever earthly community I may belong to, am also held to be a member of a heavenly, eternal community in which I also have a role, a community represented on earth by the church.
Of course I can be expelled from, defect from or otherwise lose my place in any of these forms of community. I can become an exile, a stranger, a wanderer. These too are assigned social roles, recognized within ancient and medieval communities. But it is always as part of an ordered community that I have to seek the human good, and in this sense of community the solitary anchorite or the shepherd on the remote mountainside is as much a member of a community as is a dweller in cities.
Hence solitariness is no longer what it was for Philoctetes. The individual carries his communal roles with him as part of the definition of his self, even into his isolation.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.201-2
[...] nothing that I have said goes any way to show that a situation could not arise in which it proved possible to discover no rational way to settle the disagreements between two rival moral and epistemological traditions, so that positive grounds for a relativistic thesis would emerge.
[...] there are no successful a priori arguments which will guarantee in advance that such a situation could not occur. Indeed nothing could provide us with such a guarantee which did not involve the successful resuscitation of the Kantian transcendental project.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.322
Recognition of the complex multicultural structure of human societies leads to differentialism and the complete rejection of hierarchy. Moreover, the reduction to the individual, which is the basis of the egalitarian morality of postmodernism, destroys cultural ensembles instead of protecting and strengthening them.
Differentialist anti-racism, on the contrary, merely postulates differences between societies, without attempting to evaluate them with the help of a general 'transcendental' criterion (which in principle cannot exist and any candidate for such status would only be a projection of one of the societies), nor to destroy them.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
'ALTERNATIVE POSTMODERNISM: AN UNNAMED PHENOMENON'
The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity.
This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the “key” to life and to truth. Once this “key” has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Russian Empire to 1917,’ p.65
The inexorable growth of a world market does not advance a universal civilisation. It makes the interpenetration of cultures an irreversible global condition.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.193
Liberalism—and proto-liberalisms such as Christianity, Platonism, Vedanta, and so forth—do not see will at the bottom of the ethical proposition. They see only true.
For them, good is a species of true. For the folkish thinker, true is a species of good, and good is a matter of will. And so, under these proto-liberalisms, the will—whether it be your own will, or that of the king—is always and everywhere governed by propositions. This is the ultimate source of Schmitt’s “forever-deferred decision” of the sovereign.
When will is subordinated to proposition, willing is impossible. Where will is impossible, ethics is impossible, hence the devolution into individualism.
Folkishness, by seeing ethics as second-order commands, reintroduces will into the world. Specifically, this takes the form of the will of the founder. In our terms, this is the Odinic—the great man.
[Imperium Press]
‘Who’s the Boss — Folk or Elite?’, Imperium Press, Substack
[…] we have to have some idea about how we come towards ideas that are truer than others. And I’m not suggesting that there is one simple truth, but we wouldn’t be able to do anything or say anything unless we believe that certain things were truer than others. So how do we get that?
[…] there’s a difference between the left hemisphere’s idea of truth and the right hemisphere idea of truth.
[…] correspondence truth is the idea that the propositions that we make or have the thoughts, beliefs that we have a kind of version of the world, they reflect the world so that we’ve got a model to be able to work on. Whereas, coherence theory says it’s not about correspondence in a one-to-one way, it’s more about do these various aspects of what we believe to be true make a coherent whole?
I don’t think that either of these is right and I quote Anthony Quinton saying that probably truth will turn out to be an amalgam of these points of view.
But I think we can also, using the hemisphere approach, see a certain difference, which is that the left hemisphere is again viewing the world, the cosmos, as made of things, of stuff, bits here and there, whereas the right hemisphere is likely to prioritize relationships. This is what it is always seeing in both the human and the non-human world. And so it’s interested in the relationships that come and go between the observer and the thing that’s observed.
And the idea of this is not truth as a thing or correctness - which lies in a way behind all the left hemisphere versions of how we get at truth, including the coherence theory and the correspondence theory - it’s not so much like that, as a clearing a way of error.
So it’s working apophatically, in the way that science actually works, which is to clear away mistakes. Science never says this is true, it just says, this doesn’t look true on the basis of what we know now. And that leaves you with something else that you can work with.
[…] truth [is] as a process […] a never ending journey of a reverberative kind in which our consciousness and the consciousness of what is around us come into alignment. And this doesn’t really have the same features as a world of things that are in principle knowable, even if we can’t actually know them too well.
I oppose to that, the idea of truth as unconcealing, in other words, clearing away so that we see the picture ever more clearly, rather as a sculptor makes a statue, not by putting together an arm, a leg ahead, and a torso, but by actually clearing away the stone, that makes the thing stand out.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Jim Rutt Show - ‘EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things’, ‘EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things’
[...] if Schopenhauer is led to deny the will it is primarily because he believes in the unity of willing.
Because the will, according to Schopenhauer, is essentially unitary, the executioner comes to understand that he is one with his own victim. The consciousness of the identity of the will in all its manifestations leads the will to deny itself, to suppress itself in pity, morality and ascetism.
Nietzsche discovers what seems to him the authentically Schopenhauerian mystification; when we posit the unity, the identity, of the will we must necessarily repudiate the will itself.
When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.7
It is well known that in fact man rarely seeks after truth: our interests and also our stupidity separate us from truth even more than our errors do.
The concept of truth describes a "truthful" world. Even in science the truth of phenomena forms a "world" distinct from that of phenomena themselves. But a truthful world presupposes a truthful man as its centre. – Who is this truthful man, what does he want?
First hypothesis: He wants not to be deceived, not to let himself be deceived, because it is "harmful, dangerous and inauspicious to be deceived". But this hypothesis presupposes the truthfulness of the world itself. For, in a radically false world it is the will to not let oneself be deceived that becomes inauspicious, dangerous and harmful.
In fact, the will to truth had to be formed "in spite of the danger and the uselessness of the truth at any price".
There remains another hypothesis: I want the truth means I do not want to deceive, and "I do not want to be deceived comprises, as a special case, I do not want to deceive myself. - If someone wills the truth it is not in the name of what the world is but in the name of what the world is not.
It is understood that "life aims to mislead, to dupe, to dissimilate, to dazzle, to blind". But he who wills the truth always wants to depreciate this high power of the false: he makes life an "error" and this world an "appearance". He therefore opposes knowledge to life and to the world he opposes another world, a world-beyond, the truthful world.
"Life against life". He wants life to become virtuous, to correct itself and to correct appearance, for it to serve as the way to the other world. He wants life to repudiate itself and to turn against itself [...]
The one who repudiates life is also the one who wants a diminished life, the conservation of his type and moreover its power and triumph, the triumph and contagion of reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.95-6
Related posts:
The De-Souling of Culture
Civilisation - Culture
Atheistic - Theistic
Intelligence - Wisdom
Profane - Sacred
Machine - Organism
Quantity - Quality
Static - Dynamic
Objective - Subjective
Global - Local
Material - Spiritual
Reactive - Active
Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic.
Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the "educated man" of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his fore fathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically.
Men continue to experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be, but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to be, inclusively mechanical.
There are atheisms of Classical, Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis that "God is dead," and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the static and Euclidean by saying that the "gods who dwell in the holy places are "dead," the one indicating that boundless space has, the other that countless bodies have, become godless.
But dead space and dead things are the "facts" of physics. The atheist is unable to experience any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of religion.
Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence - the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates and Rousseau were intelligent and not “wise" men. There is something root-less in the word.
Humanity's existential lesion is generally explained as an effect of material, economic organization in a society such as the capitalist one.
The true remedy, the start of a “new and authentic humanism,” a human integrity and a “happiness never known before,” would then be furnished by the setting up of a different socioeconomic system, by the abolition of capitalism, and by the institution of a communist society of workers, such as is taking place in the Soviet area.
Karl Marx had already praised in communism “the real appropriation of the human essence on the part of man and for the sake of man, the return of man to himself as a social being, thus as a human man," seeing in it the equivalent of a perfect naturalism and even a true humanism.
In its radical forms, wherever this myth is affirmed through the control of movements, organizations, and people, it is linked to a corresponding education, a sort of psychic lobotomy intended methodically to neutralize and infantilize any form of higher sensibility and interest, every way of thought that is not in terms of the economy and socioeconomic processes.
Behind the myth is the most terrible void, which acts as the worst opiate yet administered to a rootless humanity. Yet this deception is no different from the myth of prosperity, especially in the form it has taken in the West. Oblivious of the fact that they are living on a volcano, materially, politically, and in relation to the struggle for world domination, Westerners enjoy a technological euphoria, encouraged by the prospects of the "second industrial revolution" of the atomic age.
At all events, the error and the illusion are the same in both socioeconomic ideologies, namely the serious assumption that existential misery can be reduced to suffering in one way or another from material want, and to impoverishment due to a given socioeconomic system.
They assume that misery is greater among the disinherited or the proletariat than among those living in prosperous or privileged economic conditions, and that it will consequently diminish with the "freedom from want" and the general advance of the material conditions of existence.
The truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be lacking as much in one group as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 28-9
Our commitment to a radical reconstruction is directly relevant here because it insists there can be no dealings not only with every variety of Marxist and socialist ideology, but likewise with what in general can be called the hallucination, or the demonic possession by the economy.
We are dealing here with the idea that in both the individual and collective life, the economic factor is the important, real, and decisive one; that the concentration of every value and interest upon the field of economics and production is not the unprecedented aberration of modern Western man, but on the contrary something normal; not something that is, possibly, an ugly necessity, but rather something that should be desired and exalted.
Both capitalism and Marxism are trapped in this closed and dark circle. We need to break this circle wide open.
As long as we talk about nothing else but economic classes, work, wages, and production; and as long as we delude ourselves that real human progress and the genuine elevation of the individual is conditioned by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and therefore has to do with poverty and ease, with the state of prosperity à la the United States or with that of utopian socialism, we yet remain on the same level as that which we need to combat.
We need to assert the following: that everything that relates to economy and the view of economic interest as a mere satisfaction of physical needs has had, has now, and always will have a subordinate role in a normal humanity.
Beyond this sphere we need to separate an order of superior values which are political, spiritual, and heroic; an order that — as we already said — does not recognise, or even admit, ‘proletarians’ or ‘capitalists’. It is only in terms of this order that it is proper to define the things for which it is worth living and dying, which establish a true hierarchy, which differentiate new ranks of dignity, and, at the top, place on the throne a superior function of command, an Imperium.
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, VI
It would be good to look further into the kind and presuppositions of [scientific] “knowing.”
The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imagines speed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers and symbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, without accepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request.
Ever since [modern man] has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with “positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 133, 138
This is why atomistic thinking led people to metaphysical materialism, to the rather mysterious idea that only matter is real. The Greek atomists were the first people who seriously made this striking claim, the first real materialists.
Their Ionian predecessors such as Thales had taken for granted that life and spirit were included as properties of their primal substance - water, air or fire. Instead, the atomists seriously tried to show how life and consciousness could emerge from a world consisting only of static, inert atoms and the void.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.89
The “natural conscience” of mankind, Edwards says, "should approve and condemn the same things that are approved and condemned by a spiritual sense or virtuous taste.”
Those who take a purely behavioral view of morality will see this as an admission that the distinctions Edwards is so eager to establish—the distinction between “true virtue" and "secondary virtue," between the "gratitude that is truly virtuous” and the gratitude that comes from “loving those which love us," or again between "remorse of conscience" and genuine repentance - have no practical consequences and are therefore completely irrelevant to moral philosophy.
If “natural conscience ... concurs with the law of God," why do we need the law of God at all? Man-made morality appears to be enough for practical purposes.
Indeed the man-made morality outlined by Edwards, apparently indistinguishable in its content from the morality that issues from a love of God, itself appears to hold up an impossibly exalted standard of conduct, one that most people will inevitably fall short of. What good does it do to hold up a standard higher still, especially when we cannot show that it will improve the way anyone actually behaves? Edwards seems to prescribe a morality more suited to angels than to human beings, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed.
Perry Miller points out in his biography of Edwards that Edwards would have agreed with this description of his morality, though not with the corollary that his morality was therefore irrelevant to human purposes. Civic order and social peace, we might add, are simply not the human purposes Edwards chiefly has in mind.
Important as these are, they do not exhaust the concerns that ought to be addressed by a well-conceived ethical theory.
In Edwards's view, the regulation of collective behavior remains a secondary concern. A more important concern is what men have to do in order to achieve a state of grace—the condition described only imperfectly as peace of mind, inner assurance, trust, overflowing vitality, and spiritual health.
Curiously enough, the concept of happiness, that eighteenth-century obsession, may explain as well as any other why the virtue that enables us to live in peace with our neighbors matters so much less, in Edwards's scheme of things, than the virtue that "softens and sweetens the mind” and thus enables us to live in peace with God—who “himself,” Edwards reminds us, "is in effect being in general.”
Secondary virtue cannot make us happy (to put the point in terms intelligible to the modern mind). It cannot overcome our resentment of the world's imperfections. It cannot solve the “problem of evil.” It cannot explain why we should be expected to love life when it is full of pain and suffering, heartbreakingly short, and bounded on either side by darkness.
Only "repentance” and “consent" can do that: such is Edwards's answer to the eighteenth-century "pursuit of happiness."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.255-6
[…] I propose a different definition of capitalism, and implicit in this definition is a foundational critique. The definition is simple: capitalism is the total desacralization of property.
Feudalism arose from the combination of vassalage with fief-holding—that is, it arose from the inherently personal obligation to a man, in conjunction with the granting of immovable property by that man. Property under feudalism is bound up with social obligation—all property is held subject to the performance of duties.
One mark of sacral property is inalienability; feudal property was not exactly inalienable, but in some degree indivisible. The serf can’t be alienated from his land and can’t be parted from his family—this is one of his rights, which is God-given and sacred.
All feudal property stood upon this sacral basis, however indirectly. Later, the glue that held the system of property relations together came to be the great chain of being, where each man in the divine hierarchy, from bonded serf all the way up to the Holy Roman Emperor, could trace his part in the social order unto the throne of God himself. And property itself was in some sense consecrated. It was restricted in its usages; it was possible to abuse it; above all, property conferred not only rights, but duties. Property was not exactly a sacred relation, but nor was it purely economic—it was a mixture of the two.
The break between feudalism and capitalist was not so much the break between corporate and individual ownership; more fundamentally the break involved the loss of this mixed sacrality.
[…] For the archaic Roman, all economic transactions were essentially sacred matters, requiring an elaborate ceremony known as the mancipatio (lit. “taking hold of the hand”). A sale was not a mere handshake, but an elaborate ceremony presided over by a god, with prescribed ritual actions and verbal formulae that must be performed exactly for a valid transaction to take place. The reason for this was that for our Roman, ownership was not an agreement between men as to the status of a thing, but the status of a thing in the eyes of the god.
This point-of-sale system was necessarily somewhat limited and localized. Over time, as the needs of Roman society changed, a second category came into existence: the res “nec mancipi”—goods not requiring the mancipatio.
[…] The Marxist attempt to draw a line between capitalism and itself is utterly naïve, because properly understood, it is desacralization of property which gives birth to both communism and capitalism—not opposites, but cousins.
First, the move from res mancipi to res nec mancipi desacralizes property. Later, usufruct enables the use-based proprietorship of the emphyteusis—a further desacralization. Still later, the secularization of the homage and the discharge of obligation in impersonal terms moves us still closer to capitalism. At every stage the relation between owner and owned devolves into mere use—we call this “commodification”. This is the fountainhead of our “rights based” moral paradigm—today only rights attach to property; duties attaching to property is unintelligible.
What began as particularized, inherited, rooted in the soil, inalienable, and corporative, through the slow march of time devolved—though by no means necessarily—into something universal, deterritorialized, free, and individual. Over thousands of years, in the move from the archaic to the classical, through feudalism and ultimately to capitalism, the history of property relations is a history of desacralization.
These are all special cases of our view, which sees in the originary and undistorted essence of capitalism a loss of property’s ultimate significance. When we say that capitalism is materialistic, commodified, exploitative, usurious, utilitarian, and mercantile, these are all distorted and indirect ways of saying that capitalism is irreligious.
Capitalism is not something new, but is simply the logical conclusion of something old—capitalism is the total desacralization of property. Feudal property still retained something of the sacred character handed down from the earliest times, and where capitalism makes a qualitative break from it is in its total, or at least near-total abdication of this sacrality.
Above all, the archaic critique of capitalism lays bare the essential solution: resacralization. The burden here is that the problem of capitalism is not separate from the other problems of modernity that demand resacralization, such as the problem of meaning, of the state, and of the family—not for no reason is oiko-nomos the “law of the household”. The issue is resacralizing property, which is not separable from resacralizing our world—this is “one struggle” against one problem.
[Imperium Press]
‘Capitalism: An Archaic Critique’, Imperium Press, Substack
Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred. Work, by contrast, is a profane activity that must be wholly absent from the religious act. Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms. They are divided by an ontological, even a theological, difference.
If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today, it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.
Today's compulsion of production perpetuates work and thus eliminates that sacred silence. Life becomes entirely profane, desecrated.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.38-9
[...] it may be a debatable issue whether these evils are the result of industrialism as such or of the particular capitalist form in which it made its appearance in the West.
I myself fear it is industrialism as such, irrespective of the social form. In what way does it stunt personality? [...] mainly by making most forms of work - manual and white-collared - utterly uninteresting and meaningless.
Mechanical, artificial, divorced from nature, utilizing only the smallest part of man's potential capabilities, it sentences the great majority of workers to spending their working lives in a way which contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self-perfection, no chance of development, no element of Beauty, truth, or Goodness.
The basic aim of modern industrialism is not to make work satisfying but to raise productivity; its proudest achievement is labor saving, whereby labor is stamped with the mark, of undesirability. But what is undesirable cannot offer dignity so the working life of a laborer is a life without dignity.
The result, not surprisingly, is a spirit of sullen irresponsibility which refuses to be mollified by higher wage awards but is often only stimulated by them.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 27-8
It is interesting to note that the modern world takes a lot of care that the worker's body should not accidentally or otherwise be damaged. If it is damaged, the worker may claim compensation. But his soul and his spirit? If his work damages him, by reducing him to a robot - that is just too bad.
Here we can see very clearly the crucial importance of metaphysics. Materialistic metaphysics, or the metaphysics of the doctrine of mindless evolution, does not attribute reality to anything but the physical body: why then bother about safety or health when it comes to such nebulous, unreal things as soul or spirit?
We acknowledge, and understand the need for, the development of a person's body; but the development of his soul or spirit? Yes, education for the sake of enabling a man or woman to make a living; but education for the sake of leading them out of the dark wood of egocentricity, pettiness, and worldly ignorance - at the most, this would be a purely private affair: does it not smack of "copping out" and "turning one's back on reality"?
Materialistic metaphysics, therefore, leaves no room for the idea of good work, that work is good for the worker.
Anyone who says, "The worker needs work for the development and perfection of his soul," sounds like a fanciful dreamer, because materialistic metaphysics does not recognize any such need. It recognizes the needs of the body; that they can be met only by somebody's work is an unpleasant fact and perhaps automation will soon abolish it. Meanwhile, the work needs to be done. Let's get on with it, but make sure the body doesn't get hurt.
If we see work as nothing but an unpleasant necessity, it is no use talking about good work, unless we mean less work.
If we continue to teach that the human being is nothing but the outcome of a mindless, meaningless, and purposeless process of evolution, a process of "selection" for survival, that is to say, the outcome of nothing but utilitarianism - we only come to a utilitarian idea of work: that work is nothing but a more or less unpleasant necessity, and the less there is of it the better.
Our ancestors knew about good work, but we cannot learn from them if we continue to treat them with friendly contempt - as pathetic illusionists who wasted their time worshiping non existing deities; and if we continue to treat traditional wisdom as a tissue of superstitious poetry, not to be taken seriously; and if we continue to take materialistic scientism as the one and only measure of progress.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 119-21
We take this tree, with this radical, contextualised, complex value, and take it out of its context and give it this reduced, abstracted, simplified value metric.
We’ve done that to eighty percent of the old growth forests that the earth has spent billions of years developing, [and] 90% of the large fish species in the ocean. What does that capital then really do, other than continue to [reproduce and maintain itself].
It’s a process of abstracting value - from complex value to abstract value - and then extracting and accumulating it. Capitalism does that, but socialism and communism have other versions of doing [- they] were really only subsets of this kind of resource concentration system
That’s the core, that’s the ring of power that has to be broken: abstraction of value, and specifically a reductive abstraction; extraction, so you remove the content form its context; and accumulation.
And that’s how you take a complex system - that is resilient -and turn it into a complicated system - that is not resilient, that is becoming progressively simpler - and kill it.
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'46: Daniel Schmachtenberger - Phase Shifting Humanity', The Future Thinkers Podcast
The conflict between Soviet communism and liberal democracy was not a clash between the West and the rest. It was a family quarrel among western ideologies [...] The Cold War was a conflict between opposed variants of the same Enlightenment project.
The Soviet collapse was not a victory by ‘the West’ over one of its enemies. It was the ruin of this century’s most ambitious westernising regime.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.102-3
The oldest surviving strata of Greek literature display the same immersion in a world of enchantments that can be found in the oldest surviving strata of post-Roman European literature.
Then, like clockwork, poetry gives way to prose, and the first stirrings of philosophy and natural science give rise to rationalist currents. Thoughtful intellectuals turn their attention to traditional religion in an attempt to make sense of it, never realizing until too late that they are undermining the faith they themselves hold dear.
[John Michael Greer]
'The Destiny of Disenchantment', Ecosophia
[Spengler] showed, among other things, that every major civilization has had its own age of reason, the rationalist philosophies deployed by each age of reason are simply that culture’s religious beliefs with the serial numbers filed off and some abstraction put in place of the former god or gods, and ages of reason differ because civilizations differ—the seeming superiority of our age of reason is simply a reflection of the fact that it’s better at fulfilling our civilization’s idiosyncratic fantasies, while the ages of reason of other cultures fulfilled those cultures’ fantasies instead.
[John Michael Greer]
'The Return of Religion', Ecosophia
It could be said that the scientist sets up the triumph of reactive forces as his model and wants to chain thought to it.
"Observe the ages in the history of peoples when the scholar steps into the foreground: they are ages of exhaustion, often of evening and decline"
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.73
Related posts:
Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic.
Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the "educated man" of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his fore fathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically.
Men continue to experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be, but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to be, inclusively mechanical.
There are atheisms of Classical, Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis that "God is dead," and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the static and Euclidean by saying that the "gods who dwell in the holy places are "dead," the one indicating that boundless space has, the other that countless bodies have, become godless.
But dead space and dead things are the "facts" of physics. The atheist is unable to experience any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of religion.
Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence - the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates and Rousseau were intelligent and not “wise" men. There is something root-less in the word.
It is only from the standpoint of the Stoic and of the Socialist, of the typical irreligious man, that want of intelligence is a matter for contempt.
The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, has religion, whether it be conscious of it or not. That it exists, becomes, develops, fulfils itself, is its religion. It is not open to a spirituality to be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as Medicean Florentines did.
But the megalopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be religious, it is out of his power to be so.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 408-9
The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, has religion, whether it be conscious of it or not. That it exists, becomes, develops, fulfils itself, is its religion. It is not open to a spirituality to be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as Medicean Florentines did.
But the megalopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be religious, it is out of his power to be so.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 408-9
Humanity's existential lesion is generally explained as an effect of material, economic organization in a society such as the capitalist one.
The true remedy, the start of a “new and authentic humanism,” a human integrity and a “happiness never known before,” would then be furnished by the setting up of a different socioeconomic system, by the abolition of capitalism, and by the institution of a communist society of workers, such as is taking place in the Soviet area.
Karl Marx had already praised in communism “the real appropriation of the human essence on the part of man and for the sake of man, the return of man to himself as a social being, thus as a human man," seeing in it the equivalent of a perfect naturalism and even a true humanism.
In its radical forms, wherever this myth is affirmed through the control of movements, organizations, and people, it is linked to a corresponding education, a sort of psychic lobotomy intended methodically to neutralize and infantilize any form of higher sensibility and interest, every way of thought that is not in terms of the economy and socioeconomic processes.
Behind the myth is the most terrible void, which acts as the worst opiate yet administered to a rootless humanity. Yet this deception is no different from the myth of prosperity, especially in the form it has taken in the West. Oblivious of the fact that they are living on a volcano, materially, politically, and in relation to the struggle for world domination, Westerners enjoy a technological euphoria, encouraged by the prospects of the "second industrial revolution" of the atomic age.
At all events, the error and the illusion are the same in both socioeconomic ideologies, namely the serious assumption that existential misery can be reduced to suffering in one way or another from material want, and to impoverishment due to a given socioeconomic system.
They assume that misery is greater among the disinherited or the proletariat than among those living in prosperous or privileged economic conditions, and that it will consequently diminish with the "freedom from want" and the general advance of the material conditions of existence.
The truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be lacking as much in one group as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 28-9
Our commitment to a radical reconstruction is directly relevant here because it insists there can be no dealings not only with every variety of Marxist and socialist ideology, but likewise with what in general can be called the hallucination, or the demonic possession by the economy.
We are dealing here with the idea that in both the individual and collective life, the economic factor is the important, real, and decisive one; that the concentration of every value and interest upon the field of economics and production is not the unprecedented aberration of modern Western man, but on the contrary something normal; not something that is, possibly, an ugly necessity, but rather something that should be desired and exalted.
Both capitalism and Marxism are trapped in this closed and dark circle. We need to break this circle wide open.
As long as we talk about nothing else but economic classes, work, wages, and production; and as long as we delude ourselves that real human progress and the genuine elevation of the individual is conditioned by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and therefore has to do with poverty and ease, with the state of prosperity à la the United States or with that of utopian socialism, we yet remain on the same level as that which we need to combat.
We need to assert the following: that everything that relates to economy and the view of economic interest as a mere satisfaction of physical needs has had, has now, and always will have a subordinate role in a normal humanity.
Beyond this sphere we need to separate an order of superior values which are political, spiritual, and heroic; an order that — as we already said — does not recognise, or even admit, ‘proletarians’ or ‘capitalists’. It is only in terms of this order that it is proper to define the things for which it is worth living and dying, which establish a true hierarchy, which differentiate new ranks of dignity, and, at the top, place on the throne a superior function of command, an Imperium.
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, VI
It would be good to look further into the kind and presuppositions of [scientific] “knowing.”
The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imagines speed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers and symbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, without accepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request.
Ever since [modern man] has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with “positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 133, 138
This is why atomistic thinking led people to metaphysical materialism, to the rather mysterious idea that only matter is real. The Greek atomists were the first people who seriously made this striking claim, the first real materialists.
Their Ionian predecessors such as Thales had taken for granted that life and spirit were included as properties of their primal substance - water, air or fire. Instead, the atomists seriously tried to show how life and consciousness could emerge from a world consisting only of static, inert atoms and the void.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.89
The “natural conscience” of mankind, Edwards says, "should approve and condemn the same things that are approved and condemned by a spiritual sense or virtuous taste.”
Those who take a purely behavioral view of morality will see this as an admission that the distinctions Edwards is so eager to establish—the distinction between “true virtue" and "secondary virtue," between the "gratitude that is truly virtuous” and the gratitude that comes from “loving those which love us," or again between "remorse of conscience" and genuine repentance - have no practical consequences and are therefore completely irrelevant to moral philosophy.
If “natural conscience ... concurs with the law of God," why do we need the law of God at all? Man-made morality appears to be enough for practical purposes.
Indeed the man-made morality outlined by Edwards, apparently indistinguishable in its content from the morality that issues from a love of God, itself appears to hold up an impossibly exalted standard of conduct, one that most people will inevitably fall short of. What good does it do to hold up a standard higher still, especially when we cannot show that it will improve the way anyone actually behaves? Edwards seems to prescribe a morality more suited to angels than to human beings, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed.
Perry Miller points out in his biography of Edwards that Edwards would have agreed with this description of his morality, though not with the corollary that his morality was therefore irrelevant to human purposes. Civic order and social peace, we might add, are simply not the human purposes Edwards chiefly has in mind.
Important as these are, they do not exhaust the concerns that ought to be addressed by a well-conceived ethical theory.
In Edwards's view, the regulation of collective behavior remains a secondary concern. A more important concern is what men have to do in order to achieve a state of grace—the condition described only imperfectly as peace of mind, inner assurance, trust, overflowing vitality, and spiritual health.
Curiously enough, the concept of happiness, that eighteenth-century obsession, may explain as well as any other why the virtue that enables us to live in peace with our neighbors matters so much less, in Edwards's scheme of things, than the virtue that "softens and sweetens the mind” and thus enables us to live in peace with God—who “himself,” Edwards reminds us, "is in effect being in general.”
Secondary virtue cannot make us happy (to put the point in terms intelligible to the modern mind). It cannot overcome our resentment of the world's imperfections. It cannot solve the “problem of evil.” It cannot explain why we should be expected to love life when it is full of pain and suffering, heartbreakingly short, and bounded on either side by darkness.
Only "repentance” and “consent" can do that: such is Edwards's answer to the eighteenth-century "pursuit of happiness."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.255-6
[…] I propose a different definition of capitalism, and implicit in this definition is a foundational critique. The definition is simple: capitalism is the total desacralization of property.
Feudalism arose from the combination of vassalage with fief-holding—that is, it arose from the inherently personal obligation to a man, in conjunction with the granting of immovable property by that man. Property under feudalism is bound up with social obligation—all property is held subject to the performance of duties.
One mark of sacral property is inalienability; feudal property was not exactly inalienable, but in some degree indivisible. The serf can’t be alienated from his land and can’t be parted from his family—this is one of his rights, which is God-given and sacred.
All feudal property stood upon this sacral basis, however indirectly. Later, the glue that held the system of property relations together came to be the great chain of being, where each man in the divine hierarchy, from bonded serf all the way up to the Holy Roman Emperor, could trace his part in the social order unto the throne of God himself. And property itself was in some sense consecrated. It was restricted in its usages; it was possible to abuse it; above all, property conferred not only rights, but duties. Property was not exactly a sacred relation, but nor was it purely economic—it was a mixture of the two.
The break between feudalism and capitalist was not so much the break between corporate and individual ownership; more fundamentally the break involved the loss of this mixed sacrality.
[…] For the archaic Roman, all economic transactions were essentially sacred matters, requiring an elaborate ceremony known as the mancipatio (lit. “taking hold of the hand”). A sale was not a mere handshake, but an elaborate ceremony presided over by a god, with prescribed ritual actions and verbal formulae that must be performed exactly for a valid transaction to take place. The reason for this was that for our Roman, ownership was not an agreement between men as to the status of a thing, but the status of a thing in the eyes of the god.
This point-of-sale system was necessarily somewhat limited and localized. Over time, as the needs of Roman society changed, a second category came into existence: the res “nec mancipi”—goods not requiring the mancipatio.
[…] The Marxist attempt to draw a line between capitalism and itself is utterly naïve, because properly understood, it is desacralization of property which gives birth to both communism and capitalism—not opposites, but cousins.
First, the move from res mancipi to res nec mancipi desacralizes property. Later, usufruct enables the use-based proprietorship of the emphyteusis—a further desacralization. Still later, the secularization of the homage and the discharge of obligation in impersonal terms moves us still closer to capitalism. At every stage the relation between owner and owned devolves into mere use—we call this “commodification”. This is the fountainhead of our “rights based” moral paradigm—today only rights attach to property; duties attaching to property is unintelligible.
What began as particularized, inherited, rooted in the soil, inalienable, and corporative, through the slow march of time devolved—though by no means necessarily—into something universal, deterritorialized, free, and individual. Over thousands of years, in the move from the archaic to the classical, through feudalism and ultimately to capitalism, the history of property relations is a history of desacralization.
These are all special cases of our view, which sees in the originary and undistorted essence of capitalism a loss of property’s ultimate significance. When we say that capitalism is materialistic, commodified, exploitative, usurious, utilitarian, and mercantile, these are all distorted and indirect ways of saying that capitalism is irreligious.
Capitalism is not something new, but is simply the logical conclusion of something old—capitalism is the total desacralization of property. Feudal property still retained something of the sacred character handed down from the earliest times, and where capitalism makes a qualitative break from it is in its total, or at least near-total abdication of this sacrality.
Above all, the archaic critique of capitalism lays bare the essential solution: resacralization. The burden here is that the problem of capitalism is not separate from the other problems of modernity that demand resacralization, such as the problem of meaning, of the state, and of the family—not for no reason is oiko-nomos the “law of the household”. The issue is resacralizing property, which is not separable from resacralizing our world—this is “one struggle” against one problem.
[Imperium Press]
‘Capitalism: An Archaic Critique’, Imperium Press, Substack
Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred. Work, by contrast, is a profane activity that must be wholly absent from the religious act. Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms. They are divided by an ontological, even a theological, difference.
“This is because work is an eminent form of profane activity: it has no other apparent end than to provide for the temporal necessities of life; it puts us in relations with ordinary things only.
On feast days, on the contrary, the religious life attains an exceptional degree of intensity. So the contrast between the two forms of existence is especially marked at this moment; consequently, they cannot remain near to each other. A man cannot approach his god intimately while he still bears on him marks of his profane life; inversely, he cannot return to his usual occupations when a rite has just sanctified him. So the ritual day of rest is only one particular case of the general incompatibility separating the sacred from the profane.”
If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today, it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.
Today's compulsion of production perpetuates work and thus eliminates that sacred silence. Life becomes entirely profane, desecrated.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.38-9
[...] it may be a debatable issue whether these evils are the result of industrialism as such or of the particular capitalist form in which it made its appearance in the West.
I myself fear it is industrialism as such, irrespective of the social form. In what way does it stunt personality? [...] mainly by making most forms of work - manual and white-collared - utterly uninteresting and meaningless.
Mechanical, artificial, divorced from nature, utilizing only the smallest part of man's potential capabilities, it sentences the great majority of workers to spending their working lives in a way which contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self-perfection, no chance of development, no element of Beauty, truth, or Goodness.
The basic aim of modern industrialism is not to make work satisfying but to raise productivity; its proudest achievement is labor saving, whereby labor is stamped with the mark, of undesirability. But what is undesirable cannot offer dignity so the working life of a laborer is a life without dignity.
The result, not surprisingly, is a spirit of sullen irresponsibility which refuses to be mollified by higher wage awards but is often only stimulated by them.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 27-8
It is interesting to note that the modern world takes a lot of care that the worker's body should not accidentally or otherwise be damaged. If it is damaged, the worker may claim compensation. But his soul and his spirit? If his work damages him, by reducing him to a robot - that is just too bad.
Here we can see very clearly the crucial importance of metaphysics. Materialistic metaphysics, or the metaphysics of the doctrine of mindless evolution, does not attribute reality to anything but the physical body: why then bother about safety or health when it comes to such nebulous, unreal things as soul or spirit?
We acknowledge, and understand the need for, the development of a person's body; but the development of his soul or spirit? Yes, education for the sake of enabling a man or woman to make a living; but education for the sake of leading them out of the dark wood of egocentricity, pettiness, and worldly ignorance - at the most, this would be a purely private affair: does it not smack of "copping out" and "turning one's back on reality"?
Materialistic metaphysics, therefore, leaves no room for the idea of good work, that work is good for the worker.
Anyone who says, "The worker needs work for the development and perfection of his soul," sounds like a fanciful dreamer, because materialistic metaphysics does not recognize any such need. It recognizes the needs of the body; that they can be met only by somebody's work is an unpleasant fact and perhaps automation will soon abolish it. Meanwhile, the work needs to be done. Let's get on with it, but make sure the body doesn't get hurt.
If we see work as nothing but an unpleasant necessity, it is no use talking about good work, unless we mean less work.
If we continue to teach that the human being is nothing but the outcome of a mindless, meaningless, and purposeless process of evolution, a process of "selection" for survival, that is to say, the outcome of nothing but utilitarianism - we only come to a utilitarian idea of work: that work is nothing but a more or less unpleasant necessity, and the less there is of it the better.
Our ancestors knew about good work, but we cannot learn from them if we continue to treat them with friendly contempt - as pathetic illusionists who wasted their time worshiping non existing deities; and if we continue to treat traditional wisdom as a tissue of superstitious poetry, not to be taken seriously; and if we continue to take materialistic scientism as the one and only measure of progress.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 119-21
We take this tree, with this radical, contextualised, complex value, and take it out of its context and give it this reduced, abstracted, simplified value metric.
We’ve done that to eighty percent of the old growth forests that the earth has spent billions of years developing, [and] 90% of the large fish species in the ocean. What does that capital then really do, other than continue to [reproduce and maintain itself].
It’s a process of abstracting value - from complex value to abstract value - and then extracting and accumulating it. Capitalism does that, but socialism and communism have other versions of doing [- they] were really only subsets of this kind of resource concentration system
That’s the core, that’s the ring of power that has to be broken: abstraction of value, and specifically a reductive abstraction; extraction, so you remove the content form its context; and accumulation.
And that’s how you take a complex system - that is resilient -and turn it into a complicated system - that is not resilient, that is becoming progressively simpler - and kill it.
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'46: Daniel Schmachtenberger - Phase Shifting Humanity', The Future Thinkers Podcast
The conflict between Soviet communism and liberal democracy was not a clash between the West and the rest. It was a family quarrel among western ideologies [...] The Cold War was a conflict between opposed variants of the same Enlightenment project.
The Soviet collapse was not a victory by ‘the West’ over one of its enemies. It was the ruin of this century’s most ambitious westernising regime.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.102-3
The oldest surviving strata of Greek literature display the same immersion in a world of enchantments that can be found in the oldest surviving strata of post-Roman European literature.
Then, like clockwork, poetry gives way to prose, and the first stirrings of philosophy and natural science give rise to rationalist currents. Thoughtful intellectuals turn their attention to traditional religion in an attempt to make sense of it, never realizing until too late that they are undermining the faith they themselves hold dear.
[John Michael Greer]
'The Destiny of Disenchantment', Ecosophia
[Spengler] showed, among other things, that every major civilization has had its own age of reason, the rationalist philosophies deployed by each age of reason are simply that culture’s religious beliefs with the serial numbers filed off and some abstraction put in place of the former god or gods, and ages of reason differ because civilizations differ—the seeming superiority of our age of reason is simply a reflection of the fact that it’s better at fulfilling our civilization’s idiosyncratic fantasies, while the ages of reason of other cultures fulfilled those cultures’ fantasies instead.
[John Michael Greer]
'The Return of Religion', Ecosophia
It could be said that the scientist sets up the triumph of reactive forces as his model and wants to chain thought to it.
"Observe the ages in the history of peoples when the scholar steps into the foreground: they are ages of exhaustion, often of evening and decline"
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.73
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