Forever Becoming: Schopenhauer

Showing posts with label Schopenhauer. Show all posts

The Colour Wheel

Analogous colors are any three colors which are side by side on a 12 part color wheel, such as yellow-green, yellow, and yellow-orange. Usually one of the three colors predominates.

Complementary colors are pairs of colors which, when combined, cancel each other out. This means that when combined, they produce black, or if colored light (rather than pigment) is used, they produce white. When placed next to each other, they create the strongest contrast for those particular two colors.

Due to this striking color clash, the term opposite colors is often considered more appropriate than "complementary colors".

The colour wheel reminds us that opposing viewpoints can be held within the same structure.

We can apply this analogy to ourselves as individuals, or to the larger collection of individuals that we call a society. Indeed, the wheel even suggests that not only can these pairs be seen as opposites but they can also be seen as complementary. Both descriptions offer us something useful.

How can two opposing views of something both be true?

Imagine you have two pairs of sunglasses, one with red lenses, the other with green lenses. You give these sunglasses to two people; one wears the red, the other wears the green. Both stand in the same room. You ask each to describe the colour of the room. One says 'red.' The other says 'green.'

If the room is red, then it cannot be green. If it is green, then it cannot be red. One truth appears to negate the other. Which colour is it then - red or green?

This is a trap we often find ourselves walking into on a daily basis. The Truth of the situation is that both views are 'correct.' But correct is a misleading word. It may be better to say that both offer us a truthful view. It is through the combination of these views that we get nearer to Truth with a capital 'T.'

The Truth of the colour spectrum is in the combination of all colours: white light. The same can be said about the spectrum of people. We each offer a view, one that is characterised by the various lenses that we wear. Our lenses arise from our individual biases; which, depending on what you believe, arise from our various experiences and/or our basic personality type. Whatever you attribute the cause of our lenses to be, it is undeniable that we all wear them: that each of us offers a unique view of things.

In the same way that the colour wheel contains an infinite variety of colours, each one merging into the next, the people-wheel comprises an infinite variety of views. Whilst one colour may be indistinguishable from its neighbour, each is also unique.

And whilst a certain situation may call for red rather than green, this does not mean that red is any more truthful than green. It simply shows us that each colour has its strengths and weaknesses, and that in one context a certain colour may be more appropriate, and in another it may not.

So whilst each colour holds an equal - and often opposing - truth, it is context that defines a colour's value in any given moment.

In referring to our opposite as complementary we acknowledge that together - as a pair of opposites - we form a balance. In a larger sense, we need them, and they need us. Remove any of the colours from the spectrum and we lose the ability to create white light - in other words, we lose our path towards Truth.

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing our own view - our own colour - to be 'the right one.' In times like these we would do well to remember the wheel. In remembering that all colours are needed to form the balanced spectrum, we are able to put our own little contribution into perspective.

That little feeling we often get, that we alone hold the Truth, is a trustworthy one. What we are sensing is the white light from which our individual colour was refracted. Our only mistake is to confuse our surface truth - our small piece of the spectrum - with the universal Truth of white light. It is when we are able to see beyond our individual viewpoint to the larger balance - the full spectrum - that we are able to to see things in a more balanced and Truthful light.

An Indian from Arizona states, "Among my people, gay is a special status ... The more unique someone is, the more valuable they are, the more unique their vision, the more unique their gift, their perspective, everything they can offer us something other people can't offer ...

The thing that's different about where I come from, is that all human beings are respected because all human beings have potential, all human beings have value."

[Walter L. Williams]
The Spirit and the Flesh, p. 229

At the least, our awareness of alternative attitudes and roles can allow us to appreciate the diversity of the human population, and the similarities that we share across the boundaries of culture.

[Walter L. Williams]
The Spirit and the Flesh, p. 275

Since it is the one indivisible will, which for this reason is wholly in agreement with itself, and reveals itself in the whole Idea as in an act, its phenomenon, though broken up into a variety of different parts and conditions, must yet again show that unity in a thorough harmony of these.

This takes place through a necessary relation and dependence of all the parts on one another, whereby the unity of the Idea is also re-established in the phenomenon.

Accordingly, we now recognize those different parts and functions of the organism reciprocally as means and end of one another, and the organism itself as the ultimate end of all.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.157

The manner in which Arcesilaus taught would have had much to commend it, if the young men who learnt from him had been able to avoid being paralysed by it. He maintained no thesis, but would refute any thesis set up by a pupil.

Sometimes he would himself advance two contradictory propositions on successive occasions, showing how to argue convincingly in favour of either.

[Bertrand Russell]
History of Western Philosophy ('Cynics and Sceptics')

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

[Henry David Thoreau]
Walden, p.19

You can’t collapse your political landscape into a single set of values […]

there are different values; one value might be accomplishment; another value might be achievement; another value might be hard work; another value might be equality. And fine, those are all useful values; but there has to be a continual dialogue between all of those values so that the whole value structure - which has to be diverse - doesn’t collapse into a single dimension.

Because then what you have is one tool for every problem, and that’s not good because the same tool can’t solve every problem […]

this is partly why I’m no fan of ideologues […] an ideological stance gives you a solution to every problem without ever being able to solve the problem; or maybe not even to articulate it properly.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
Where do SJWs come from?

The sensualist brags about the undeniable certainty of his reality, and the idealist insists on his.

Psychology has to resign itself to the existence of these two (or more) types, and must at all costs avoid thinking of one as a misconception of the other; and it should never seriously try to reduce one type to the other, as though everything "other" were merely a function of the one.

This does not mean that the scientific axiom known as Occam's razor - "explanatory principles should not be multiplied beyond the necessary" - should be abrogated. But the need for a plurality of psychological explanatory principles still remains.

[C. G. Jung]
Psychological Types, p. 41

Psychotherapy and analysis are as varied as are human individuals. I treat every patient as individually as possible, because the solution of the problem is always an individual one. Universal rules can be postulated only with a grain of salt.

[...] Naturally, a doctor must be familiar with the so-called "methods." But he must guard against falling into any specific, routine approach. In general one must guard against theoretical assumptions. To-day they may be valid, to-morrow it may be the turn of other assumptions. In my analyses they play no part.

I am unsystematic very much by intention [...] We need a different language for every patient. In one analysis I can be heard talking the Adlerian dialect, in another the Freudian.

[C. G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1995), p. 153

It seems to me that the majority of people are unable or unwilling to 'think for themselves' and so need systems, or methods, in order to orient themselves to certain situations. Indeed, it seems rare to find a person who is willing or able to be as liquid; to remould themselves in light of what the situation demands. The majority of people, in most areas of their lives, need guidance.

If we define an adult as someone who is able to think for themselves; as someone who has the confidence, versatility - the maturity - to shape-shift when required (abandoning the comfort of familiar territory for the uncertainty of the unknown); and if we define a child as someone who lacks these attributes; then surely the great majority of people, in most areas of their lives, remain as children?

To respond effectively and appropriately to environmental demands.

At birth, each of us is given a particular Beginning Place within these Four Great Directions on the Medicine Wheel. This starting Place gives us our first way of perceiving things, which will then be our easiest and most natural way throughout our lives.

But any person who perceives from only one of these Four Great Directions will remain just a partial man.

For example, a man who possesses only the Gift of the North will be wise. But he will be a cold man, a man without feeling. And the man who lives only in the East will have the clear, far sighted vision of the Eagle, but he will never be close to things. This man will feel separated, high above life, and will never understand or believe that he can be touched by anything.

A man or woman who perceives only from the West will go over the same thought again and again in their mind, and will always be undecided. And if a person has only the Gift of the South , he will see everything with the eyes of a Mouse. He will be too close to the ground and too near sighted to see anything except whatever is right in front of him, touching his whiskers.

Each of us has as his personal Medicine a particular animal reflection. The characteristics of this reflection are determined by the nature of the animal itself, and also by the location of our individual Beginning Place on the Medicine Wheel. These two things, our Medicine Animal and our Beginning Place on the Medicine Wheel, together are the Beginning Gift to each of us from Miaheyyum.

For example, there are Eagle People, elk People, Bear People, Wolf People, Pheasant People, Otter People, Buffalo People, Mice People, Rock People, Cloud People, and as many other kinds of People as there are kinds of living beings on this earth. And within each of these different kinds of People, there are other differences of the Four Great Directions. Thus an Elk Person might be born a White Elk of the North, a Green Elk of the South, a Black Elk of the West, or a Yellow Elk of the East, depending upon the Direction of their Beginning Gift.

After each of us has learned of our Beginning Gift, our First place on the Medicine Wheel, we then must Grow by Seeking Understanding in each of the four Great Ways. Only in this way can we become Full, capable of Balance and decision in what we do.

A person with the Beginning Gift of the Mind must always try to include his Heart in his decisions. When he does this, he begins to turn upon the Medicine Wheel. A man can live out his entire life without ever finding more than what was already within him as his Beginning Gift, but if he wishes to Grow he must become a Seeker and Seek for himself the other Ways.

When you have done this yourself, and when you have reached a full Understanding of the different Medicines of men, you will never feel surprised or threatened by the actions or decisions of your Brothers and Sisters.

[Hyemeyohsts Storm]
Seven Arrows, p. 6-8

All students of man and society who have the first thing they need for such a difficult study, namely a proper sense of its difficulties, are aware that the constant danger is not so much of accepting falsehood for truth as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole of it.

It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed and wrong in what they denied; and that if either side had been made to accept the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.

That’s how it is with every important partial truth; there are always two conflicting modes of thought, one tending to give to that truth too large, the other to give it too small, a place: and the history of opinion is generally an oscillation between the extremes.

Because of the imperfection of the human faculties, it seldom happens, even in the minds of eminent thinkers, that each partial view of their subject is credited with its worth and no more than its worth. But even if this just balance does exist in the mind of the wiser teacher, it will not exist in his disciples, let alone in the general mind.

Thus every excess in either direction produces a corresponding reaction; and the only improvement comes from the fact that each time the oscillation is a little less wide than before, so that there is an ever-increasing tendency to settle finally in the centre

[John Stuart Mill]
'Essays on Bentham and Coleridge'

And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another.

It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us.

Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations.

It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.

[William James]
'On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings', Pragmatism and Other Writings, p. 285

Morality aims at a code of conduct to which everyone must conform. This must therefore also be a code that everyone can follow, and morality this necessarily addresses itself to the lowest common denominator among the people whose conduct it guides.

This is the “levelling” effect, which Nietzsche so despises. The only actions it allows aim at the interest of each group as a whole and therefore at the interest of its weakest members.

But the rules that prescribe such actions may not at all be in the interest of the (not very helpfully described) strong members of that group. They actually prevent them from exploiting qualities that may be dangerous to the group as a whole and by means of which they can distinguish themselves from their community and accomplish the deeds Nietzsche sometimes equally unhelpfully , describes as unique, high, or great.

The deeds need not themselves be dangerous to a society as a whole, not need the qualities and abilities that bring them about when exercised by the proper individuals create such dangers. The problems, he thinks, are generated when these qualities are encouraged in general within a society.

But morality, according to Nietzsche, recognises only two alternatives: a feature is acceptable either in every case or in none. Morality, he repeatedly insists, refuses to recognise an “order of rank” and does not want to run the risk of encouraging some qualities in some people while denying them to others.

[Alexander Nehamas]

Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 214-5

Prototypes act like creosote bush in the Mojave Desert - they space themselves away from each other. They not only exemplify the class, but distinguish it.

[…] the better the prototype, the less it had in common with contrasting classes.

[Daniel McNeill & Paul Freiberger]
Fuzzy Logic, p. 87

Truth has many aspects; and the limitations imposed by inheritance preclude each one of us from seeing more than a small part of it.

The most that anyone can do is to be faithful to that aspect which he himself is able to see. Each of us has his own interpretation of the truth; but our very differences may link us more closely when we recognize that the man who is capable of the deepest human relationship is the man who is most surely himself.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.177

Closing The Book

The innermost kernel of every genuine and actual piece of knowledge is a perception; every new truth is also the fruit of such a perception.

Even writing and speaking, whether didactic or poetical, have as their ultimate aim the guidance of the reader to that knowledge of perception from which the author started; if they do not have this aim, they are bad.

For this reason, the contemplation and observation of everything actual, as soon as it presents something new to the observer, is more instructive than all reading and hearing about it.

For indeed, if we go to the bottom of the matter, all truth and wisdom, in fact the ultimate secret of things, is contained in everything actual, yet certainly only in concreto and like gold hidden in ore. The question is how to extract it. From a book, on the other hand, we obtain the truth only second-hand at best, and often not at all.

[...] Therefore, as a rule, the man of the world cannot impart his accumulated truth and wisdom, but only practice it. He rightly comprehends everything that occurs, and decides what is conformable thereto. That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.

Therefore books do not take the place of experience, because concepts always remain universal, and so do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that has to be dealt with in life.

Only the person who intuitively knows the true nature of men as they generally are, and comprehends the individuality of the particular person before him, will understand how to deal with him correctly and with certainty. Another person may know by heart all the three hundred maxims of wisdom by Gracián, but this will not protect him from stupid blunders and mistakes, if he lacks that intuitive knowledge.

[...] This explains why the scholar, whose merit lies in abundance of abstract knowledge, is so inferior to the man of the world, whose merit consists in perfect intuitive knowledge, which an original disposition has conceded to him, and a rich experience has developed.

According to what has been said, we find among all classes of persons of intellectual superiority, often without any learning at all. For natural understanding can take the place of almost every degree of intellectual culture, but no culture can take the place of natural understanding.

The scholar certainly has the advantage of such people in an abundance of cases and facts (historical knowledge), and of causal determinations (natural science), everything in well arranged, easily surveyed sequence; but yet, with all this, he does not have a more accurate and profound insight into what is really essential in all those cases, facts, and causalities.

The unlearned man of acuteness and penetration knows how to dispense with that abundance; we are sparing of much, we make do with little. One case from his own experience teaches him more than many a scholar is taught by a thousand cases which he knows, but does not really understand.

For the little knowledge of that unlearned man is alive, since every fact known to him is verified by accurate and well-apprehended perception. Thus this fact is for him the representative of a thousand similar facts. On the other hand, much of the ordinary scholar's knowledge is dead, since, even if it does not consist of mere words, as often is the case, it nevertheless consists of nothing but abstract knowledge.

--

The constant influx of other people's ideas must certainly stop and stifle our own, and indeed, in the long run, paralyse the power of thought, unless it has a high degree of elasticity able to withstand that unnatural flow.

Therefore incessant reading and study positively ruin the mind; this, moreover, is caused by the fact that the system of our own ideas and knowledge loses its completeness and uninterrupted continuity, when we arbitrarily upset this so often in order to gain room for an entirely foreign range of ideas.

To banish my thoughts in order to make room for those of a book would seem to me to be just what Shakespeare censures in the travellers of his time, that they sell their own land in order to see those of others.

It is even risky to read about a subject before we ourselves have reflected on it. For with the new material, another person's view and treatment of it creep into the mind, all the more since laziness and apathy urge us to save ourselves the trouble of thinking, to accept what has already been thought, and to allow this to become current.

The mind certainly requires nourishment, namely material from outside. All that we eat, however, is not incorporated into the organism at once, but only in so far as it has been digested, whereby only a small part of it is actually assimilated, the remainder passing from the system, so that to eat more than we can assimilate is useless, and even injurious.

It is precisely the same as regards what we read; only in so far as it gives material for thinking does it increase our insight and our knowledge proper.

--

[...] the more they neglected practice, the more sharply did they bring theory to a fine point.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.72, 156

Related posts:-
Searching for Truth
Searching Without/ Searching Within

Maturity

Immature - Mature
Irresponsible - Responsible

Development [...] can be defined as a successive decrease in egocentrism.

Carol Gilligan found, for example, that female moral development tends to go through three general stages, which she calls selfish, care, and universal care. In each of these stages, the circle of care and compassion expands and egocentrism declines.

[Ken Wilber]
A Theory of Everything, p. 17-18

Elders speak about everyone, but they do not ask to spoken about. They see everyone, but do not ask to be seen. The self is sacrificed, put to one side.

As we mature our gaze gradually turns away from the self and out towards others. We see more and become responsible for more. The less we look at the self, the more we see of our surroundings.

We begin to speak less in terms of "I" and "me" and more in terms of "we" and "us." We recognize our connectedness and become communalized.

For an elder to ask to be seen or spoken about is a perversity, and goes against the natural order. Just as water flows downhill, our gaze should also flow downwards, so that we see and speak about all those beneath us - less mature than us - and are in turn seen and spoken about by those above us. And as we wouldn't expect water to flow uphill - and would be engaging in a fruitless activity if we were attempt to make it - we shouldn't expect to be seen or spoken about by those beneath us. As we become older the self should become less important, and should not need to be stroked as much as when we were younger.

o < ------- o < ------- o < ------- o < ------- o < ------- o

This is one of the reasons why it is so disturbing when we meet an older person who is still consumed by selfishness and vanity, and who demands that we see and hear them, rather than the other way around. They may be older than us, but through such behaviour we see that they are no more mature. Often in cases like this, we must become the adult, sacrificing our self so that theirs is satisfied. An old person like this has ducked their duties and cannot rightly be seen as an elder. They are frozen in time, perpetually immature.

How can we hope for a mature and wise society if our grown-ups refuse to grow up?

"I will speak about others, but I will not expect or demand to be spoken about."

In many indigenous cultures, elders are accorded great respect.

To be an elder is more than being old; it means being a person who has learned some wisdom from their life experiences, including their mistakes. An elder may be someone who has lived a blameless life of complete integrity, or a recovering alcoholic who knows from personal experience how hard it is to struggle with an addiction, and so can guide others.

Not everyone old is wise. For some people, aging can simply rigidify longstanding patterns of dysfunction.

And some "elders" may be young, blessed with good judgment, compassion and sound sense from an early age.

Groups need elders: people who put the needs of the group first and help keep its balance.

We may become elders and gain social power in many constructive ways:

- By Taking on Responsibility and Fulfilling It

- By Helping the Group Function Smoothly

- By Good Judgment

- By Making Mistakes and Acknowledging Them so They Become Part of Group Learning

- By Showing Compassion and Forgiveness

- By Integrity and Upholding Values

- By Bringing Experience, Skills and Training to the Service of the Group

- By Mentoring and Being Mentored

- By Commitment and Time

- By Modeling Good Self-Care

[Starhawk]
http://www.realitysandwich.com/developing_elders

In maturity environment is something to which the individual contributes and for which the individual man or woman takes responsibility.

In a community in which there is a sufficiently high proportion of mature individuals there is a state of affairs which provides the basis for what is called democracy.

Of a true democracy (as the term is used today) one can say: In this society at this time there is sufficient maturity in the emotional development of a sufficient proportion of the individuals that comprise it for there to exist an innate tendency towards the creation and re-creation and maintenance of the democratic machinery.

By 'innate' I intend to convey the following: the natural tendencies in human nature (hereditary) bud and flower into the democratic way of life (social maturity), but this only happens through the healthy emotional development of individuals.

In bodily development the growth factor is more clear; in the development of the psyche, by contrast, there is a possibility of failure at every point, and indeed there can be no such thing as growth without distortion due to some degree of failure of environmental adaptation

[...] only a proportion of individuals in a social group will have had the luck to develop to maturity, and therefore it is only through them that the innate (inherited) tendency of the group towards social maturity can be implemented.

If the proportion of mature individuals is below a certain number, democracy is not something which can become a political fact since affairs will be swayed by the immature, that is to say, by those who by identification with the community lose their own individuality or by those who never achieve more than the attitude of the individual dependent upon society.

Maturity means, among other things, a capacity for tolerating ideas, [a capacity] which at its best is part of social maturity. A mature social system (while making certain demands in regard to action) allows freedom of ideas and the free expression of them.

[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From ('The Meaning of the Word 'Democracy''), p.242-3
Human Nature, p.29, 59-60, 152

The psychologically mature person as I have described him has, I believe, the qualities which would cause him to value those experiences which would make for the enhancement and survival of the human race.

He would be a worthy participant and guide in the process of human evolution.

[Carl Rogers]
Person to person, the problem of being human, p. 27

Our explanation of the sublime can indeed be extended to cover the ethical, namely what is described as the sublime character.

Such a character springs from the fact that the will is not excited here by objects certainly well calculated to excite it, but that knowledge retains the upper hand.

Such a character will accordingly consider men in a purely objective way, and not according to the relations they might have to his will.

For example, he will observe their faults, and even their hatred and injustice to himself, without being thereby stirred to hatred on his own part. He will contemplate their happiness without feeling envy, recognize their good qualities without desiring closer association with them, perceive the beauty of women without hankering after them. His personal happiness or unhappiness will not violently affect him [...]

For, in the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself in this respect rather as a knower than as a sufferer.

This contemplation is only maintained by a constant turning away from the will and exaltation above its interests; and this constitutes the sublimity of the disposition.

On the other hand, the charming or attractive draws the beholder down from pure contemplation, demanded by every apprehension of the beautiful, since it necessarily stirs his will by objects that directly appeal to it.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.206-7

The Master of Hermetics polarizes himself at the point at which he desires to rest, and then neutralizes the Rhythmic swing of the pendulum which would tend to carry him to the other pole.

All individuals who have attained any degree of Self-Mastery do this to a certain degree, more or less unconsciously, but the Master does this consciously, and by the use of his Will and attains a degree of Poise and Mental Firmness almost impossible of belief on the part of the masses who are swung backward and forward like a pendulum.

The Kybalion, Chapter II: "The Seven Hermetic Principles"

In Pintupi life, autonomy is inseparable from relatedness. The two are coordinated through initiation.

The production of the social person involves an elaboration of the ties of relatedness to others, the creation of a public self that takes priority over its private qualities, and the development of the ability to "look after" others.

Thus, initiation is a dramatization of a man's becoming responsible for himself, developing autonomy and capacity to look after others through relations, and a negation of being "looked after” by elders. The initiate becomes one among equal men, capable of entering into reciprocal exchange with others […]

In initiation, the strands of Pintupi social life are brought together at the fulcrum of the system: the construction of related individuals.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.228, 236, 239

A tolerant scepticism, an ability to doubt one's own ideas as well as those of other people, is a good test of maturity: fanaticism, insanity, and an infantile attitude to others are closely related.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.174

Touching Base

Artificial - Real
Simulacrum - Original
Concept - Percept
Abstract - Concrete
Observe - Participate
Distanced - Close
Detached - Attached
Horizontal - Vertical
Playful - Serious
Ironic - Earnest
Empty - Full

Partial - Whole
Light - Heavy
Conscious - Unconscious
Unlimited - Limited
Infinite - Finite

[...] the celebrant's or devotee's intention is not that of understanding, and, in the ordinary routine of the cult of the work of art, the play of the academic or urbane references has no other function than to bring the work into an interminable circuit of inter-legitimation,

so that a reference to Jan Breughel's Bouquet of Flowers lends dignity to Jean-Michel Picart's Bouquet of Flowers with Parrot, just as, in another context, reference to the latter can, being less common, serve to enhance the former.

This play of cultured allusions and analogies endlessly pointing to other analogies, which, like the cardinal oppositions in mythical or ritual systems, never have to justify themselves by stating the basis of the relating which they perform, weaves around the works a complex web of factitious experiences, each answering and reinforcing all the others, which creates the enchantment of artistic contemplation.

It is the source of the 'idolatry' to which Proust refers, which leads one to find 'an actress's robe or a society woman's dress beautiful ... not because the cloth is beautiful but because it is the cloth painted by Moreau or described by Balzac.

Analogy, functioning as a circular mode of thought, makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it.

Thus Chateau Margaux wine can be described with the same words as are used to describe the chateau, just as others will evoke Proust apropos of Monet or César Franck, which is a good way of talking about neither [...]

[Pierre Bourdieu]
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.53

Since the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases).

Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.

[Momus]
'Proposal for a Wikipedia page about Humperson, father of the "laws of meta"'

Philosopher Jacques Derrida played on Saussure’s idea that meaning lies in difference, by adding the idea that meaning is also defered endlessly down [a] chain.

Language never points to a concrete signified outside the chain, that would anchor it in an external reality. Instead, language only ever points at additional layers of language further down the chain.

Derrida famously declared that, “There is nothing outside of the text.” […] Realising that there is nothing outside of the text means recognising that […] we can never get to the end of [the] chain - because there is no meaning or referent that cannot, in turn, be reinterpreted to mean something else.

'Animating Poststructuralism'

It is necessary, [Derrida] says, to interrogate those various naive or pre-critical ideas of reference that envisage a straightforward matching-up between language and the world 'outside'.

Deconstruction must work to problematize such habits of thought by showing how strictly impossible it is to draw a firm line between reality and representation.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 142

In the West, we tend to live our lives at one remove from reality, relying on images and concepts.

As Tashi Rabgyas said after spending a few months in England,

"It's amazing how indirect everything is here. They write about the beauty of nature, they talk about it, and everywhere there are potted plants and plastic plants, and pictures of trees on the wall.

And all the time television programs about nature. But they don't ever seem to have contact with the real thing."

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.190

In the eyes of Indians, white Americans became interested only in the shadows of things and strove to ignore and even deny the realities behind them.

[Doug Boyd]
Rolling Thunder, p.59

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation

"All that was once directly lived has become mere representation."

Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."

This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."

With the term spectacle, Debord defines the system that is a confluence of advanced capitalism, the mass media, and the types of governments who favor those phenomena.

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "

The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes. "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

'Society of the Spectacle', Wikipedia

It has been shown that concepts borrow their material from knowledge of perception, and that therefore the whole structure of our world of thought rests on the world of perceptions.

It must therefore be possible for us to go back from every concept, even if through intermediate stages, to the perceptions from which it has itself been directly drawn, or from which have been drawn the concepts of which it is in turn an abstraction.

In other words, it must be possible for us to verify the concept with perceptions that stand to abstractions in the relation of examples.

Therefore these perceptions furnish us with the real content of all our thinking, and wherever they are missing we have had in our heads not concepts but mere words.

[...] Actually all truth and all wisdom ultimately lie in perception; but unfortunately perception cannot be either retained or communicated.

[...] Therefore, as a rule, the man of the world cannot impart his accumulated truth and wisdom, but only practice it.

That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive. Therefore books do not take the place of experience, because concepts always remain universal, and so do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that has to be dealt with in life.

In addition to this is the fact that all concepts are abstracted from the particular and perceptive of experience [...]

Wisdom proper is something intuitive, not something abstract. It does not consist in principles and ideas which a person carries round ready in his head, as results of his own or others' investigation; it is the whole way in which the world presents itself in his head.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.71, 74-5

Rolling Thunder had explained at Council Grove that his training was experiential.

In his first conversation with me he said that truth cannot be expressed verbally, that it can only be experienced [...]

"[...] You can't just sit down and talk about the truth. It doesn't work that way. You have to live it and be part of it and you might get to know it. I say you might. And it's slow and gradual and it don't come easy [...]"

[Doug Boyd]
Rolling Thunder, p.37, 71

Wow, so interesting to read this about Lady Gaga.

I see her as the exact opposite of Ammachi, as the epitome of Kali Yuga, the dark mother, a post-modern Madonna accelerating Time Wave Zero with her cut up pastiche videos that flash image, image, image towards the breaking point of narrative and meaning.

I see her as the goddess of Hubbert’s Peak, epitomizing pop culture morphed into its final-last-gasp-stage attempt at meaning making before the entire material culture we live in collapses. I see an emaciated woman that mistakes fashion for femininity as she dwindles away.

I see spectacle without substance, a consumable product of the Kali Yuga age.

[Poeting]
Comment on article 'Lada Gaga: The Visionary Rebirth of the Divine Mother Monster'

Perhaps we don't know what's real any more.

Consumerism, after all, specialises in creating a fake world, in which new 'needs' are created every day by fashionistas and marketing gurus, who will then meet them - at a price.

In this fake world, age, pain, misery, insecurity, loneliness - all can be fended off or overcome with purchases. Animals die out of sight, and their meat comes to us shrink-wrapped and washed clean of blood. Apples fall from the trees twelve months of the year. Plastic landscapes, designed in distant office suites, come between us and the reality of place.

We are cut off from the land, from seasons, from geography, from the dirt and hard work and complications of the world outside the bubble. Enough of this, and the bubble itself becomes the reality.

[Paul Kingsnorth]
Real England, p.272

For the primitive, thought is visionary and auditory, hence it also has the character of revelation. Thus the sorcerer, the visionary, is always the thinker of the tribe, who brings about the manifestation of the spirits or gods.

This also explains the magical effect of thought; it is as good as the deed, just because it is real. In the same way the word, the outer covering of thought, has a "real" effect because it calls up "real" memory-images.

Primitive superstition surprises us only because we have largely succeeded in de-sensualizing the psychic image; we have learnt to think abstractly [...]

[C. G. Jung]
Psychological Types, p. 30

Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself.

It is what links language to life.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 115

In the opening of Book VIII of his long autobiographical poem The Prelude, Wordsworth depicts a country fair taking place in the valley below him as he sits on the side of Helvellyn, the voices of the country folk, laughing and talking, coming up to him in snatches.

Again his elevated view is an image of self-consciousness, a level of self-awareness that he cannot now lose, forever separated from the simple pleasures of rusticity by his awareness that true pleasure belongs only to those who are not self-aware.

The evocation of their voices carrying echoingly up to his seat above conveys perfectly the combination of closeness and distance, of something recaptured, but also forever lost.

How to be unself-reflectingly simple down there, and yet in a position to appreciate the simplicity at the same time?

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 362

The mind does not derive cause and effect from observations, but already experiences its observations in a context in which cause and effect are presupposed realities: causality in human cognition is not derived from experience but is brought to experience.

As with cause and effect, so too with other categories of the understanding such as substance, quantity, and relation. Without such fundamental frames of reference, such a priori interpretive principles, the human mind would be incapable of comprehending its world.

Human experience would be an impossible chaos, an utterly formless and miscellaneous manifold, except that the human sensibility and understanding by their very nature transfigure that manifold into a unified perception, place it in a framework of time and space, and subject it to the ordering principles of causality, substance, and the other categories.

Experience is a construction of the mind imposed on sensation.

[Richard Tarnas]

The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 344

[Don Quixote] often approximates a subjectivistic occasionalism.

He declares his idea of Dulcinea to be more important than her real aspect. This is because who Dulcinea is does not matter. What matters is only that, for him, she remains the object of the ideal devotion that inspires him to great deeds.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 148

Subjective occasionalism - the object is important only as an occasion, a conduit, for subjectivity, rather than for what it is in itself; its essence. The thing-in-itself is unimportant, and remains untouched. Objective reality is irrelevant, it matters only as a launching pad for subjective flights of fancy.

Not only literature but every form of expression, knowledge, and work has surrounded itself with commentary and criticism; the creative impulse, smothered by "metaphysical" speculation, runs out of breath. "Never since the beginning of Time was there... so intensely self-conscious a society." Everything is "probed into" - "anatomically studied, that it may be medically aided."

When thought becomes too conscious of itself, it loses contact with "vital action" and drifts off into airy, increasingly self-referential abstractions.

German idealism and British utilitarianism, the latter with its "cunning mechanising of self-interests, and all conceivable adjustments of checking and balancing," exemplify the split between action and inquiry. The "whole man, heaven-inspired," recedes from view, and partial men stand in his place, incapacitated alike for intelligent action and for original thought.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.237

Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist, has proposed that there are deep linguistic structures within the brain that are common to human beings irrespective of the language they happen to speak […] Within Chomsky's picture, the world's languages are surface structures, vehicles for expressing what is being generated at a much deeper level within the brain.

Indigenous people do not, I think, see things in the same way as Noam Chomsky.

Within Indigenous science, thoughts are inseparable from language. The language that is spoken is not simply a medium, or a vehicle for communication, rather it is a living thing, an actual physical power within the universe. The vibrations of its words are energies that act within the transforming processes we call reality.

Moreover, each language is a link with the particular landscape in which a people live.

Within Indigenous science the word itself has power. Conventional linguistics holds that the connection between a word and its referent is purely arbitrary. Thus, one of the fathers of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, distinguished between what he called signifiant ("the thing that signifies," or "the sound image") and signifié (the concept or thing that is being signified).

This question of the arbitrary nature of words goes back to the disputes of the Greek philosophers. Aristotle, for example, felt that names had no intrinsic existence and were no more than symbols for objects and concepts. On the other hand, Plato suggested that a certain intrinsic relationship existed between the name and the thing signified. This echoes the tradition that comes from several of the world's esoteric and mystical practices that certain names in themselves have power and significance.

There are also traditions of sacred languages - the languages in which the gods spoke to humans - in which each word has a perfect correspondence to the inner nature of the universe.

Within Indigenous science, to say something is to create an objective event and release a process of energetic vibrations that enter into relationships with the other powers and energies of nature. Thus, since every sound is an event of significance, a person must take responsibility for whatever he or she says.

Language was created by the Ancestors as a direct connection to nature. Words link man to the inner meaning of things.

Sa'ke'j Henderson has explained how in Mic Mag the names of trees are the sound that the wind makes as it moves through their leaves in the fall. The name of a tree is therefore far from arbitrary. It is based upon the direct experience of listening to a specific sound that refers to a particular tree for each of the different species of trees makes a different sound. It is, moreover, a sound made at that time of the year when the leaves begin to dry, a sound specific to a particular area of Turtle Island as the salt-laden wind blows in from the Atlantic Ocean.

Trees process, the manifestations of animating energies in a particular environment. Move to a different part of the world and the tree, in its deeper sense, is no longer the same. While the word dog changes in a purely arbitrary fashion as we drive across the frontier between the United States and Mexico, the sound vibration of the word for tree and the material manifestation of the process are all tied to the changing context of an actual landscape.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.223-4, 226-7

Those who support a post-structural understanding of language are often confronted with the following question: if language is constituted by a set of relationships among signifiers, how do you account for the relationship between language and the world?

The concern here is that if meaning is ascribed to the play of signs only, language will become free-floating to the extent that no empirical truth claims can be made anymore. Although this objection is usually motivated by a nostalgia for a coherent metanarrative capable of regulating the production of meaning, it does pose a question that deserves a careful answer.

[…] information from the environment has a direct, though non-determinate, influence on the system: it causes certain changes in the system, but it does not fully determine the nature of these changes.

Information from the environment interacts in a nonlinear way with information already stored in the system. (Bear in mind that the memory of the system is distributed, not iconic.) Incoming signals are mediated by the history of the system in such a way that it incorporates important new aspects, but resists unnecessary fluctuations.

The state of the system at any given time is thus the result of conditions in the environment, the history of the system and the effects that the system must have on its environment in order to perform its functions.

How does language in fact interact with the environment (the ‘world out there’)? Primarily through the users of language who have to interact with the environment in order to survive and operate in it. As a matter of fact, language is one of the most important tools we use to cope with the task. We try to make sense of our experiences, and in the process create and expand our language. This is not the result of an act by an abstract mind, nor a mere reflection of circumstances.

Meaningful language evolves in time through a self-organising process, suspended between active and passive, in which useful or effective forms of language survive, and obsolete forms decay.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.125-6

If language can be described as a self-organising system, the problem of the relationship between language and the world is solved in a fairly sophisticated way.

The world has a direct causal influence on the meaning of words, but it does not determine the exact meaning of words. Meaning flows from a complex process of interaction between information from the world, on the one hand, and a web of already existing relationships, built up through previous interactions, on the other hand. This makes language a vital, evolving system, capable of coping with great complexity.

If certain aspects of the environment are of great importance, the system will organise itself towards a robust, accurate interpretation of these aspects. It will not waste its resources by allocating too much of it to terms that are used infrequently or are of little interest.

This kind of interpretation of language allows us to find an important place for the dynamics of trace and différance; it also leads us to acknowledge that the linguistic system will organise itself to a point of criticality where the maximum amount of meaning can be generated without becoming unanchored from the world.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.126

Living Things and Dead Things

Mind Your Language

State / Process

Where physics ends (and metaphysics begins)

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

[...] Certainly the whole present condition of all things in the world or in nature must necessarily be capable of explanation from purely physical causes.

But such an explanation - supposing one actually succeeded so far as to be able to give it - must always just as necessarily be burdened with two essential imperfections [...]

On account of these imperfections, everything so explained would still really remain unexplained.

1. The beginning of the chain of causes and effects that explains everything, in other words, of the connected and continuous changes, can positively never be reached, but, just like the limits of the world in space and time, recedes incessantly and in infinitum.
2. [...] all the efficient causes from which everything is explained always rest on something wholly inexplicable, that is, on the original qualities of things and the natural forces that make their appearance in them.

[...] Accordingly there is not a fragment of clay, however little its value, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities.

Therefore these two inevitable defects in every purely physical, i.e., causal, explanation indicate that such an explanation can be only relatively true, and that its whole method and nature cannot be the only, the ultimate and hence sufficient one,

in other words, cannot be the method that will ever be able to lead to the satisfactory solution of the difficult riddle of things, and to the true understanding of the world and of existence;

but that the physical explanation, in general and as such, still requires one that is metaphysical, which would furnish the key to all its assumptions, but for that very reason would have to follow quite a different path.

[the difference between them] rests on the Kantian distinction between phenomena and thing-in-itself.

[...] As for the motion of the projected bullet, so also for the thinking of the brain, a physical explanation in itself must ultimately be possible which would make the latter just as comprehensible as the former.

But the former, which we imagine we understand so perfectly, is at bottom just as obscure to us as the latter; for whatever the inner nature of expansion in space, of impenetrability, mobility, hardness, elasticity, and gravity may be - it remains, after all physical explanations, just as much a mystery as thinking does.

[...] physical explanation everywhere comes across what is metaphysical, and by this is reduced to nought, in other words, ceases to be explanation.

[In materialism we see] the unceasing attempt to set up a system of physics without metaphysics, in other words, a doctrine that would make the phenomenon into the thing-in-itself [...]

They endeavour to show that all phenomena are physical, even those of the mind; and rightly so, only they do not see that everything physical is, on the other hand, metaphysical also.

[...] Beginningless and endless causal series, inscrutable fundamental forces, endless space, beginningless time, infinite divisibility of matter, and all this further conditioned by a knowing brain, in which alone it exists just like a dream and without which it vanishes - all these things constitute the labyrinth in which naturalism leads us incessantly round and round.

[...] however great the advances which physics (understood in the wide sense of the ancients) may make, not the smallest step towards metaphysics will be made in this way

[...] For such advances will always supplement only knowledge of the phenomenon, whereas metaphysics strives to pass beyond the phenomenal appearance to that which appears [...]

Metaphysics [...] remains immanent, and does not become transcendent; for it never tears itself entirely from experience, but remains the mere interpretation and explanation thereof, as it never speaks of the thing-in-itself otherwise than in its relation to the phenomenon.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.172-7, 183

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How do you take your metaphysics?

How do you take your metaphysics?

Metaphysics: all so-called knowledge that goes beyond the possibility of experience, and so beyond nature or the given phenomenal appearance of things,

in order to give information about that which, in some sense or other, this experience or nature is conditioned [...]

[... ] that which is hidden behind nature, and renders nature possible.
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But the great original difference in the powers of understanding, and also their cultivation [...] cause so great a variety among men that [...]

no one metaphysical system can suffice for all.

Therefore in the case of civilized nations we generally come across two different kinds of metaphysics, distinguished by the fact that the one has its verification and credentials in itself, the other outside itself.

1. Philosophy

[...] A system of the first kind, that is, a philosophy, makes the claim, and therefore has the obligation, to be true sensu stricto et proprio in all that it says, for it appeals to thought and conviction

[Because it requires] reflection, culture, leisure, and judgement for the recognition of their credentials, [it] can be accessible only to an extremely small number of persons [...]

2. Religion

A religion, on the other hand, has only the obligation to be true sensu allegorico, since it is destined for the innumerable multitude who, being incapable of investigating and thinking, would never grasp the profoundest and most difficult truths sensu proprio.

[Religions] are exclusively for the great majority of people who are not capable of thinking but only of believing, and are susceptible not to arguments, but only to authority.

Before the people truth cannot appear naked.

[...] Therefore, not only the contradictory but also the intelligible dogmas are really only allegories and accommodations to the human power of comprehension

[...] This allegorical nature of religions also exempts them from the proofs incumbent on philosophy, and in general from scrutiny and investigation.

[...] We therefore see that in the main, and for the great majority unable to devote themselves to thinking, religions fill very well the place of metaphysics in general, the need of which man feels to be imperative.

They do this partly for a practical purpose as the guiding star of their action, as the public standard of integrity and virtue, as Kant admirably expresses it; partly as the indispensable consolation in the deep sorrows of life.

In this they completely take the place of of an objectively true system of metaphysics, since they lift man above himself and above existence in time, as well, perhaps, as such a system ever could.

In this their great value, indeed their indispensability is quite clearly to be seen. For Plato rightly says:

"It is impossible for the crowd to be philosophically enlightened."

The controversy between supernaturalists and rationalists, carried on so incessantly in our own day, is due to the failure of both to recognize the allegorical nature of all religion.

[...] Religions are necessary for the people, and are an inestimable benefit to them.

[...] to require that even a great mind - a Shakespeare or a Goethe - should make the dogmas of any religion his implicit conviction, bona fide et sensu proprio, is like requiring a giant to put on the shoes of a dwarf.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.164, 166-8

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