Thursday, December 23, 2010
Hiatus
I'm taking a break from academically inclined masochism until after the holiday festivities. Thanks for your interest.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Schizophrenics: Part 2
I speak now of a typical malady of pedophiles, rapists, and those who murder for sport, and liken it to the ethics of a profession based on the Hyppocratic oath. What do they all have in common? Firstly, when they look at the person, they do not empathize with them as someone vaguely similar to themselves, but rather see an instrument, a thing, in the case of research psychiatrists, a bioda of research importance. The argument of course is that without such people there would be no way to gather such important information that allows for the helping of countless others. Such a defense is tantamount to the exoneration of Dr. Mengele and no less psychotic.
Like most ethical systems, the quality of its effectiveness is based upon the willingness of the practitioner to abide by its precepts. However, the psychiatric industry has manufactured such cures as the icepick lobotomy, and electro convulsive shock therapy. You have to ask yourself, how did the association between electrically shocking someone, and alleviating their depression ever come to be?
I will postulate a plausible circumstance. When dealing with the mentally insane, it easy to hide behind any defense because these poor souls can literally say nothing to defend themselves. Psychiatrists murder, maim, torture, and to this very day it is only with considerable oversight by powerful ex-patients within the industry that their research aims are to some degree stifled. The ethics that was instantiated by Hippocrates millennia ago failed, as all ethics must eventually fail.
We must consider the industry itself. The serial killer who murders for sport, secretly years to get caught so that their handiwork will be written about and their celebrity secured. So too with research psychiatrists whose publications ensure that their renown will be cited and recited, and that their celebrity is ensured. The basic Jesus-maxim is irrelevant. The psychotic who cannot speak for himself is less than a person and offers no possible threat to the psychiatrist who is an adept communicator.
The issue that concerns us here is that there is a disjunction in the person to person relationship which has been transmuted by the mental health professional into a subject to object relationship. This is further complicated by the society which uses the mental health industry to manufacture well adjusted workers for a dying economic system which itself produces nothing, preferring to send actual manufacturing jobs oversees to Thailand and China, where they don't have to pay the workers a living wage.
What it is tantamount to is instantiating a cultural schizoid personality which is itself alienated from the means of its own stability. The world is a resource, people are a resource, nature is a resource, our children are a resource. It is the common state of man then to think in alignment with the psychopath who uses people as instruments, and the psychiatric industry sees no reason to stand up for the person, who is a liability, and whose critical intellect and ability to see this system as evil and flawed, (and unviable) would be anathema to sustaining the consensus delusion that allows it to trundle toward its inevitable death.
No, the person in this system is a machine and its value to society is that of a production. The economy is thus a great machine built upon smaller machines whose soul value to the system is their ability to produce within the system. Being a machine in this system is tantamount to a productive member of society and is of course that very terminology we use when validating our role within that society. Nevermind the fact that we are trying to kill off the competing machines, and that the means of production is outsourced to foreign machines, if the mathematics of the bottom line is met to our liking, the machine in charge is pleased and can go about producing its own machines.
It is the phenomenological-existential debasement that American society, with all of its potential, has fallen into. True freedom is no longer civil liberties, it is the right of the economic establishment to imbalance the system toward a new depression. By funneling more fake money into the machine, and thus reducing the overall value of the money in question, we can give the appearance that the bottom is not falling out of the system. Meanwhile, the same banking schemes that generate money from money, and produce nothing but debt, are allowed to produce more debt. Our children, who are going to college on student loans automatically enter the work force in debt, and this is what our economy is capable of producing: debt. If you do not have the money, no bother, credit card companies are willing to give you the illusion that you can afford that new coat. Never mind the fact that you can by a similar coat for half the price, you want the name brand. This is what we manufacture, names and debt. It is a fake economy based on the illusion of credit, meant to enslave a society hypnotized by their own desire, pulled on invisible strings to sell their own interests to a name.
The pathology that we willfully instantiate is that of our own separation from the rest of the world, that our system is the free-est and people with socialized medicine are Nazi's. This is largely because the rest of the world is a resource to us, and we are not free even in spite of this. Again, the psychology of names is politicized in the act of name calling. If I can frame socialized medicine in the form of Nazism, millions of ignorant rednecks will immediately think our President is bin Laden. The problem is that it works. People really do sit in from of the TV and passively receive ignorance and pass it off as knowledge. These are articles of faith among them, but there is no distinction between faith and fact. Thus the manufacture of facts is hypodermically received by a passive viewership which does not understand the precept of its foundation.
Like most ethical systems, the quality of its effectiveness is based upon the willingness of the practitioner to abide by its precepts. However, the psychiatric industry has manufactured such cures as the icepick lobotomy, and electro convulsive shock therapy. You have to ask yourself, how did the association between electrically shocking someone, and alleviating their depression ever come to be?
I will postulate a plausible circumstance. When dealing with the mentally insane, it easy to hide behind any defense because these poor souls can literally say nothing to defend themselves. Psychiatrists murder, maim, torture, and to this very day it is only with considerable oversight by powerful ex-patients within the industry that their research aims are to some degree stifled. The ethics that was instantiated by Hippocrates millennia ago failed, as all ethics must eventually fail.
We must consider the industry itself. The serial killer who murders for sport, secretly years to get caught so that their handiwork will be written about and their celebrity secured. So too with research psychiatrists whose publications ensure that their renown will be cited and recited, and that their celebrity is ensured. The basic Jesus-maxim is irrelevant. The psychotic who cannot speak for himself is less than a person and offers no possible threat to the psychiatrist who is an adept communicator.
The issue that concerns us here is that there is a disjunction in the person to person relationship which has been transmuted by the mental health professional into a subject to object relationship. This is further complicated by the society which uses the mental health industry to manufacture well adjusted workers for a dying economic system which itself produces nothing, preferring to send actual manufacturing jobs oversees to Thailand and China, where they don't have to pay the workers a living wage.
What it is tantamount to is instantiating a cultural schizoid personality which is itself alienated from the means of its own stability. The world is a resource, people are a resource, nature is a resource, our children are a resource. It is the common state of man then to think in alignment with the psychopath who uses people as instruments, and the psychiatric industry sees no reason to stand up for the person, who is a liability, and whose critical intellect and ability to see this system as evil and flawed, (and unviable) would be anathema to sustaining the consensus delusion that allows it to trundle toward its inevitable death.
No, the person in this system is a machine and its value to society is that of a production. The economy is thus a great machine built upon smaller machines whose soul value to the system is their ability to produce within the system. Being a machine in this system is tantamount to a productive member of society and is of course that very terminology we use when validating our role within that society. Nevermind the fact that we are trying to kill off the competing machines, and that the means of production is outsourced to foreign machines, if the mathematics of the bottom line is met to our liking, the machine in charge is pleased and can go about producing its own machines.
It is the phenomenological-existential debasement that American society, with all of its potential, has fallen into. True freedom is no longer civil liberties, it is the right of the economic establishment to imbalance the system toward a new depression. By funneling more fake money into the machine, and thus reducing the overall value of the money in question, we can give the appearance that the bottom is not falling out of the system. Meanwhile, the same banking schemes that generate money from money, and produce nothing but debt, are allowed to produce more debt. Our children, who are going to college on student loans automatically enter the work force in debt, and this is what our economy is capable of producing: debt. If you do not have the money, no bother, credit card companies are willing to give you the illusion that you can afford that new coat. Never mind the fact that you can by a similar coat for half the price, you want the name brand. This is what we manufacture, names and debt. It is a fake economy based on the illusion of credit, meant to enslave a society hypnotized by their own desire, pulled on invisible strings to sell their own interests to a name.
The pathology that we willfully instantiate is that of our own separation from the rest of the world, that our system is the free-est and people with socialized medicine are Nazi's. This is largely because the rest of the world is a resource to us, and we are not free even in spite of this. Again, the psychology of names is politicized in the act of name calling. If I can frame socialized medicine in the form of Nazism, millions of ignorant rednecks will immediately think our President is bin Laden. The problem is that it works. People really do sit in from of the TV and passively receive ignorance and pass it off as knowledge. These are articles of faith among them, but there is no distinction between faith and fact. Thus the manufacture of facts is hypodermically received by a passive viewership which does not understand the precept of its foundation.
Dawn Will Eat History
dusk cannot eat history and hammer in a shell. the seat of a butterfly or a masochist's hell. the sulking shriek of a stroke of luck. from the homeless dreams of a calculator's fuck.
definition cannot move gravity or explain the portraits of a schizophrenic. heaven in a new dream. strangled in an animal's scream. the sandman better cry from the outside and empty into a field of bees. the emptiness. thrust crosswise. my desire around your day cell like a pimp in business season, moons through critical fornications and i heard her call my name.
rock and roll, baby. fear cannot bubble into a bankster's martyr. nor creep into the feeling that we're all linguistic knots. the hunter's kiss is a potential gift from a material god who collapsed into your field. and multiplied into names. i intercept the center. you avoid my secret demarcation, creating with a separation. like an angel being analyzed by a rat. dusk can eat history. lamenting the mystery of a phenomenal supercomputer.
i degrade again. you point me to the door. the vine of heaven is around my neck. a disposable sanity. a conjecture of the speculum. suckled around your clarity. dawn will eat history with a normative sun and a universal tooth.
another day then. one hundred years then. a grinding halt, then, the chaoticist becomes a god-knot. better assimilate into a punisher or the birds will sing an apocalypse of apples and our knees will become bloodflowers mirrored with peoples.
dawn will eat history, and rewrite our names in a homesick heaven. to be mused by sentient reptiles, who repopulate the stratasphere and dance on our bones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q5WjYjzrEQ
definition cannot move gravity or explain the portraits of a schizophrenic. heaven in a new dream. strangled in an animal's scream. the sandman better cry from the outside and empty into a field of bees. the emptiness. thrust crosswise. my desire around your day cell like a pimp in business season, moons through critical fornications and i heard her call my name.
rock and roll, baby. fear cannot bubble into a bankster's martyr. nor creep into the feeling that we're all linguistic knots. the hunter's kiss is a potential gift from a material god who collapsed into your field. and multiplied into names. i intercept the center. you avoid my secret demarcation, creating with a separation. like an angel being analyzed by a rat. dusk can eat history. lamenting the mystery of a phenomenal supercomputer.
i degrade again. you point me to the door. the vine of heaven is around my neck. a disposable sanity. a conjecture of the speculum. suckled around your clarity. dawn will eat history with a normative sun and a universal tooth.
another day then. one hundred years then. a grinding halt, then, the chaoticist becomes a god-knot. better assimilate into a punisher or the birds will sing an apocalypse of apples and our knees will become bloodflowers mirrored with peoples.
dawn will eat history, and rewrite our names in a homesick heaven. to be mused by sentient reptiles, who repopulate the stratasphere and dance on our bones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q5WjYjzrEQ
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Schizophrenics: Introduction
We introduce here not the typical schizophrenic known to the psychiatric community, but rather the everyday schizophrenic who by force of culture has severed their link to the external world by understanding, incorrectly, that their subjective experience of reality is somehow distinct from reality itself. Schizophrenics like Lyn Hejeinian, who in rejecting closure, create a new closure, closing her interior off from the exterior world. In dissecting the nature of this fallacy, the fallacious deductions that result from it as a lens, and the impoverished world it helps engender, we will be taking a look at Deleuze and Guatarri's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, RD Laing's The Divided Self, William Blake's prophetic texts, as well as contested authors such as Lyn Hejeinian who like all fabulous liars, opposes what she sustains. It will be here that we redefine the normal state of mankind as schizophrenic, careful not to include those who suffer from psychotic pathology. No, this schizophrenia is of an altogether more banal nature and is tantamount to dividing oneself from one's own perspective, for the world as we perceive it but a crystallization of our perceptions, and for most of us, is reduced to the mean.
It is therefore the aim of this text to point out first of all that the consensus delusion of what constitutes reality is forged in a scientific looking glass of psychiatric reductionism. More often than not, the theoretical underpinnings of psychiatry are based on studies of the brain, and this too is a reductive dismissal that the entire body is responsible for the internal states of the individual, and while inquiries into the brain may often lead to useful discoveries, patients are not walking brains, anymore than they are chemical imbalances. In treating their chemicals the underlying causes that resulted in their pathology are not considered or considered the realm of the therapist, who is more often than not a social worker who has taken a couple classes on abnormal psychology and is about qualified to cure the patient as I am to perform neuro-surgery. But the appearance that something is being done is often more important than the actuality of doing something, so patients are often left feeling hopeless that their malady has no cure.
In fact, it is this nihilism, this hopelessness, that is at the root of some depression, and that depression is treatable with pills, but the underlying hopelessness remains, for if I am my chemicals, then I am no one after all, a biological effect of a careless god.
The speculum is thus the issue. What you see is truly what you get, and the schizoid model of the self, which deems that we are separate from our environment, both hurts and helps us, depending upon the quality of that environment. The standardization of perspective however, has caused us to privilege one while making a disease of the other, and this why we've taken up this inquiry, for it is a delusion that we are separate things perceiving an objective reality, and in truth when we make this distinction, we are dividing ourselves from our own perspective, and thus projecting the psychic contents of our own experiences onto an illusion of objectivity.
I am not a body encapsulated at the fringes of my skin, rather, I am all that which is in range of my eyes, the clicking of the keyboard as I hear. I do not think from a hemisphere behind my eyes, I perceive with the entirety of my body, that is as a gestalt.
In order to overcome our denatured reality, we must relearn our mind's relationship to the body, which is to say, unlearn that there is a distinction between mind and body, for this is truly and illusion conjured perhaps by an evil magician ages ago to imprison men and women in a casing of flesh.
It is therefore the aim of this text to point out first of all that the consensus delusion of what constitutes reality is forged in a scientific looking glass of psychiatric reductionism. More often than not, the theoretical underpinnings of psychiatry are based on studies of the brain, and this too is a reductive dismissal that the entire body is responsible for the internal states of the individual, and while inquiries into the brain may often lead to useful discoveries, patients are not walking brains, anymore than they are chemical imbalances. In treating their chemicals the underlying causes that resulted in their pathology are not considered or considered the realm of the therapist, who is more often than not a social worker who has taken a couple classes on abnormal psychology and is about qualified to cure the patient as I am to perform neuro-surgery. But the appearance that something is being done is often more important than the actuality of doing something, so patients are often left feeling hopeless that their malady has no cure.
In fact, it is this nihilism, this hopelessness, that is at the root of some depression, and that depression is treatable with pills, but the underlying hopelessness remains, for if I am my chemicals, then I am no one after all, a biological effect of a careless god.
The speculum is thus the issue. What you see is truly what you get, and the schizoid model of the self, which deems that we are separate from our environment, both hurts and helps us, depending upon the quality of that environment. The standardization of perspective however, has caused us to privilege one while making a disease of the other, and this why we've taken up this inquiry, for it is a delusion that we are separate things perceiving an objective reality, and in truth when we make this distinction, we are dividing ourselves from our own perspective, and thus projecting the psychic contents of our own experiences onto an illusion of objectivity.
I am not a body encapsulated at the fringes of my skin, rather, I am all that which is in range of my eyes, the clicking of the keyboard as I hear. I do not think from a hemisphere behind my eyes, I perceive with the entirety of my body, that is as a gestalt.
In order to overcome our denatured reality, we must relearn our mind's relationship to the body, which is to say, unlearn that there is a distinction between mind and body, for this is truly and illusion conjured perhaps by an evil magician ages ago to imprison men and women in a casing of flesh.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Fiction
There was once an Assyrian, maddened by rage, as all men of his tribe were maddened by moral terror, to conquer men by their own fear; to impale them through their assholes and set their warriors as symbols. His brother, a twin, was lost in a battle to Canaanite warrior, and he knelt over the lost body, confused by its familiarity; knowing only that something that had inhabited him before was now lost. He shrieked at the moon. The sound sent shivers through the spines of his comrades. The held their heads and bowed; figuring incorrectly that it was his own death he was beholding.
The prophesies of the astrologers were not aimed at the warrior class; not at least at the individual warrior, and Sarkon, a man of reason, mistrusted the priests. In that moment, with the king's head beneath his knees, his fist clenched so tightly that it went white, he closed his eyes, knowing, but not wanting to know, that his brother was lost to him forever, and that a piece of him would be forever gone.
He stood without a word, the other warriors moving out of his way, and decided he would walk toward the moon until he stood directly underneath it.
For twenty days we walked without food, stopping only for water in the Arabian desert. He walked in a dream, with glazed eyes, staring at the waxing moon. When it had grown full, he knew that he would have to stop, and to his great joy, the gods had given him a sign. There, on the horizon, in the blank sands of the Arabian desert, was a perfectly cylindrical shrine, crafted in a black stone that he had never before seen.
When he entered it, he realized that it was several times larger on the inside, than it appeared to be on the outside. It is the work of the gods, he thought to himself. When he entered, he saw the moon itself, a little ball in a glass globe; then the sun, shining like template. When he looked up, the firmament hung atop him, moving several times more quickly than the sky of the mathematicians and astrologers. Surely this was the work of some god.
His faith would not hang in indeterminacy for long. A light broke from the miniature firmament and if by reflex, he dropped to his knees and averted his eyes. He could he it on his back, the smell of his flesh burning, but no pain, not yet.
An image of a man, bearing a great cross on his back and being led through the deserts of some foreign territory. Metal machines racing through stone streets; great buildings as tall as the sky; a small women bent over a glass ball, peering into it, she could see him, and he could feel her gaze looking down on him.
Her eyes, fogged over. Ogden saw this with some dismay. Blue became gray became black. Then suddenly she was back.
"Your brother is dead," she said. The man looked away to his wife. "Killed in Arabia, he was on an expedition there? For the Royal Navy?"
"Yes," he sighed.
The prophesies of the astrologers were not aimed at the warrior class; not at least at the individual warrior, and Sarkon, a man of reason, mistrusted the priests. In that moment, with the king's head beneath his knees, his fist clenched so tightly that it went white, he closed his eyes, knowing, but not wanting to know, that his brother was lost to him forever, and that a piece of him would be forever gone.
He stood without a word, the other warriors moving out of his way, and decided he would walk toward the moon until he stood directly underneath it.
For twenty days we walked without food, stopping only for water in the Arabian desert. He walked in a dream, with glazed eyes, staring at the waxing moon. When it had grown full, he knew that he would have to stop, and to his great joy, the gods had given him a sign. There, on the horizon, in the blank sands of the Arabian desert, was a perfectly cylindrical shrine, crafted in a black stone that he had never before seen.
When he entered it, he realized that it was several times larger on the inside, than it appeared to be on the outside. It is the work of the gods, he thought to himself. When he entered, he saw the moon itself, a little ball in a glass globe; then the sun, shining like template. When he looked up, the firmament hung atop him, moving several times more quickly than the sky of the mathematicians and astrologers. Surely this was the work of some god.
His faith would not hang in indeterminacy for long. A light broke from the miniature firmament and if by reflex, he dropped to his knees and averted his eyes. He could he it on his back, the smell of his flesh burning, but no pain, not yet.
An image of a man, bearing a great cross on his back and being led through the deserts of some foreign territory. Metal machines racing through stone streets; great buildings as tall as the sky; a small women bent over a glass ball, peering into it, she could see him, and he could feel her gaze looking down on him.
Her eyes, fogged over. Ogden saw this with some dismay. Blue became gray became black. Then suddenly she was back.
"Your brother is dead," she said. The man looked away to his wife. "Killed in Arabia, he was on an expedition there? For the Royal Navy?"
"Yes," he sighed.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
RIP, Sam Paley
Uhm. I wanted to e-mail Dr. Paley, tell him that I was doing well. He treated me like a son; I saw in him a father. He wanted me to stick through the Akkadian, but I had other plans post-September 11th. He knew that I needed the discipline, but I would in time, gain that on my own. He would always look at my papers bemusedly, I was a born interpreter, and he was a master scientist. We exchanged gifts, I suppose, I don't know what I could give a man of his renown, but he kept me around for whatever reason, giving me opportunities that he denied others.
I wish I had an opportunity to tell him how I unleashed his tricks of rhetoric on unsuspecting humanities professors, and that I indeed had lived up to the gifts that I had been given. It's a shame that I left him without knowing these things. He would have proud of me. And I was proud to have invested with his time. I offer his family my condolences, his wife and brothers. He shared his culture and his knowledge with a student who was convinced that the X-Files was a literal truth, and understood, I think that we are all groping at shadows in a vast sea of confusion. We come to these arenas with the baggage of a lifetime, and end up trying to unscript our deficiencies with the desire to be renowned.
I consider him a guru, and I believe that his time was not wasted on me, that I indeed shared what I know about Akkadian and Hebrew, and I have applied what I learned there to the theory that I have developed.
I wish his family the best, and assume that he will be transmigrated into a good life, without too many stains on his soul. He was a good man. Goodbye, Sam.
Your faithful student,
Dave
I wish I had an opportunity to tell him how I unleashed his tricks of rhetoric on unsuspecting humanities professors, and that I indeed had lived up to the gifts that I had been given. It's a shame that I left him without knowing these things. He would have proud of me. And I was proud to have invested with his time. I offer his family my condolences, his wife and brothers. He shared his culture and his knowledge with a student who was convinced that the X-Files was a literal truth, and understood, I think that we are all groping at shadows in a vast sea of confusion. We come to these arenas with the baggage of a lifetime, and end up trying to unscript our deficiencies with the desire to be renowned.
I consider him a guru, and I believe that his time was not wasted on me, that I indeed shared what I know about Akkadian and Hebrew, and I have applied what I learned there to the theory that I have developed.
I wish his family the best, and assume that he will be transmigrated into a good life, without too many stains on his soul. He was a good man. Goodbye, Sam.
Your faithful student,
Dave
Hello All
I'm taking a break from Much Ado. Most if not everything that I could say has already been said, and now it's a matter of repeating myself ad-nauseum, which is fine, but I need a break.
I am thoroughly proud of the scope and the product, and will be proof-reading and correcting the grammar before I get into Borges and maybe some more Blake. We have noticed that the trend in critical theory is moving toward science. This is great. Science has much to offer literary criticism and archaic psychoanalysis is not the end all and be all of interpretive understanding. It is great that Lacan has found an arena where his insights are not suspect, but Relativity also has much to tell us, especially when we get into collapsed temporal frameworks, and writers who think they're enlightened.
This really began as a joke. I was like, well, if you think you're so enlightened Mr. Blake, so illuminated, let's test out just how illuminated you really are. He's illuminated. The insights of Einstein do well to understand certain qualities of texts where opposition has been rendered simultaneously true. The principle transcendence afforded to us is our ability to make insights across time. If we are doing it in succession, we are talking about evolution, and this schema I used because I was, and still am, a student of Archaeology. My Guru, Samuel Paley. He taught me Akkadian, and Hebrew, and I studied Greek and Latin under UB's phenomenal Classics department.
If we want to study principles which transcend time, we can talk about them in terms of Relativity and theoretical physics which afford a schema and an impulse to do just that.
Psychoanalysis is still a great tool, and I am a big fan of Lecercle, whose name I pun on, yet still admire. The older I get, the less admiration I have for Jung's archetypes, but I still admire his insights, and Campbell did much to advance Jung's theory.
From a personal standpoint, I admired the mysticism of Judaic tradition, as a student of Rabbi Noson Gurary's Jewish mysticism class. He said that King David's great gift was to take the highest spiritual knowledge and relate it to everyone; I believe that I have lived up to his criticism, merely by living up to my own name.
Anyway, thank you for your interest, more will be added when I've thoroughly proofed the twelve chapters currently here.
I am thoroughly proud of the scope and the product, and will be proof-reading and correcting the grammar before I get into Borges and maybe some more Blake. We have noticed that the trend in critical theory is moving toward science. This is great. Science has much to offer literary criticism and archaic psychoanalysis is not the end all and be all of interpretive understanding. It is great that Lacan has found an arena where his insights are not suspect, but Relativity also has much to tell us, especially when we get into collapsed temporal frameworks, and writers who think they're enlightened.
This really began as a joke. I was like, well, if you think you're so enlightened Mr. Blake, so illuminated, let's test out just how illuminated you really are. He's illuminated. The insights of Einstein do well to understand certain qualities of texts where opposition has been rendered simultaneously true. The principle transcendence afforded to us is our ability to make insights across time. If we are doing it in succession, we are talking about evolution, and this schema I used because I was, and still am, a student of Archaeology. My Guru, Samuel Paley. He taught me Akkadian, and Hebrew, and I studied Greek and Latin under UB's phenomenal Classics department.
If we want to study principles which transcend time, we can talk about them in terms of Relativity and theoretical physics which afford a schema and an impulse to do just that.
Psychoanalysis is still a great tool, and I am a big fan of Lecercle, whose name I pun on, yet still admire. The older I get, the less admiration I have for Jung's archetypes, but I still admire his insights, and Campbell did much to advance Jung's theory.
From a personal standpoint, I admired the mysticism of Judaic tradition, as a student of Rabbi Noson Gurary's Jewish mysticism class. He said that King David's great gift was to take the highest spiritual knowledge and relate it to everyone; I believe that I have lived up to his criticism, merely by living up to my own name.
Anyway, thank you for your interest, more will be added when I've thoroughly proofed the twelve chapters currently here.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Art of Perspective: DaVinci
All the problems of perspective are made clear by the five terms of mathematicians, which are:--the point, the line, the angle, the superficies and the solid. The point is unique of its kind. And the point has neither height, breadth, length, nor depth, whence it is to be regarded as indivisible and as having no dimensions in space. The line is of three kinds, straight, curved and sinuous and it has neither breadth, height, nor depth. Hence it is indivisible, excepting in its length, and its ends are two points. The angle is the junction of two lines in a point.
Every number, expressible and inexpressible sits upon a template for organizing the numberness of the number. We call this template a base. The base of a number is a power series which escalates to infinity in one dimension, (it's post decimal dimension), and toward zero in the other pre-decimal dimension.
Here we have a vector going in either direction, toward infinity, and toward zero. For instance, base 10 mathematics uses 10 as its base and thus everything is power of 10. Behold:
116,651 = 1*10^5 + 1*10^4 + 6*10^3 + 6*10^2 + 5*10^1 + 1*10^0
Now if we wanted to add .1234 to this number our power series would extend like so:
1*10^-1 + 2*10^-2 + 3*10^-3 + 4*10^-4.
Now, when we represent the number, we only consider the segment between the highest and the lowest place value, where 1^10^0 would always be considered the origin of both vectors. So, when you are seeing a number, you are always only seeing part of an infinite series which is lit up between extremes.
~~~
Now in Base-2, or Binary, the same rules hold true as in base 10, except that everything is a power of 2.
So instead of the chain extending like this:
1,10,100,1000,10000 ...
It extends like this:
1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 ...
&
.5, .25, .125., .0625, ...
~~~
Our Base 10 system of representations is not without its paradoxes. Behold:
1/3 = .333333...
1/3 = .333333...
1/3 = .333333...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3/3 = .999999... = 1
In such an instance the bare bones of our structure to contain the Number is laid bare, extending infinitely toward 9*10^-INF which is also Zero. So, even with an eternity to work with, we can never finish the task of writing this number.
~~~
What is the Point?
Well, just that the number seems to be describing the relationship of one thing to another in a very specific sequence, where the sequence conveys a large part of what the representation refers to.
Suffice it to say, when we introduce the concept of number it's a how much/how many indication. Each number occupies one infinitessimal point on a line known as the "real number line". The end points (which do not fall on the line) are INFINITY and -INFINITY.
The number is a point. A geometric object which describes itself only in relation to other objects and as part of some system.
Much Ado: Core Concept Inventory
As we have discussed earlier, the primary fundamental binary that we have proposed in our discourse is one between mutability and symmetry which is personified in the Blakean concepts of Los and Urizen.
Urizen represents the mutable motif of variability. He is in Blake a demon, but needn't be. When the mutable aspect becomes frozen to a specific image, he loses his potency, and this act is considered "demonic" in Blake, not the principality of reason itself, of which Blake has plenty of.
In number theory, this amounts to being able to abstract the concept of the number to a numberness, and this allows us to create systematic theorems that describe the relationship of numbers to numbers, that work regardless of the specific numbers in question.
The Losian principle becomes a reflective principle which you find in Derrida's work that amounts to a structural re-entry and motif revolution. We find in the Bible, in Blake, in Derrida, in Heidegger, and Gertrude Stein, and here is where it is most evident.
The movement then becomes a thematic element of the text, and this recursive re-entry, afford a higher geometry than what was available to the Pythagoreans and others Classical thinkers that we discussed. The re-entry however is still evident in the handing down of ideas, sometimes it whittles its way downward and reduces complexity, or to put it otherwords, the snake swallows its tail, other times it increases complexity, or the snake generates its tail.
Other core concepts to Chaos theory as we are explicating it, are confusion, self-reference, self-negation, self-generation, a dialectic of dominance and submission, and vicious circularity, which has been articulated in Lecercle's concept of Derlire as a master-slave dialectic. We have engaged in other discourses as well, but these concepts are themselves, by nature, chaotic.
Urizen represents the mutable motif of variability. He is in Blake a demon, but needn't be. When the mutable aspect becomes frozen to a specific image, he loses his potency, and this act is considered "demonic" in Blake, not the principality of reason itself, of which Blake has plenty of.
In number theory, this amounts to being able to abstract the concept of the number to a numberness, and this allows us to create systematic theorems that describe the relationship of numbers to numbers, that work regardless of the specific numbers in question.
The Losian principle becomes a reflective principle which you find in Derrida's work that amounts to a structural re-entry and motif revolution. We find in the Bible, in Blake, in Derrida, in Heidegger, and Gertrude Stein, and here is where it is most evident.
The movement then becomes a thematic element of the text, and this recursive re-entry, afford a higher geometry than what was available to the Pythagoreans and others Classical thinkers that we discussed. The re-entry however is still evident in the handing down of ideas, sometimes it whittles its way downward and reduces complexity, or to put it otherwords, the snake swallows its tail, other times it increases complexity, or the snake generates its tail.
Other core concepts to Chaos theory as we are explicating it, are confusion, self-reference, self-negation, self-generation, a dialectic of dominance and submission, and vicious circularity, which has been articulated in Lecercle's concept of Derlire as a master-slave dialectic. We have engaged in other discourses as well, but these concepts are themselves, by nature, chaotic.
Hi All
I haven't "finished" my book, I have merely found a definitive ending toward which to work. There are still a couple poets I definitely would like to add.
On that list: Borges' Aleph, Stein's recursive poetry, and RD Laing's Knots.
Again, thank you for you interest.
Dave
On that list: Borges' Aleph, Stein's recursive poetry, and RD Laing's Knots.
Again, thank you for you interest.
Dave
Much Ado, Chapter N
The structural repetition that has dominated the course of twelve chapters is the Losian notion of symmetry. The symmetry we speak of needn't be a perfect mirror, but the image of the pattern can be exemplified in a repetition similar to the modality of writing found in the poetical sketches of Gertrude Stein. Another luminary of thought who utilizes this motif is the great psychiatrist, poet, theorist RD Laing.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Judged and the Judger [The End]
Once upon a time, lived a rich and humble servant of God. He was richer than any man in the land, and God delighted in his child, telling the Accuser: "Look upon my servant Job. He is a good and righteous man; he would never hurt a soul." "Of course, Satan replied, he is rich, and the rich act well to ensure that they remain so. This is the world that you have made them."
God considers this and says, "Ok, Accuser, you may blight my righteous servant, only do not touch his body." So Satan makes sure that all his property is stolen, and his servants killed. Then he kills his sons and daughters and whatever else bore life about him. Job cries but does not curse God.
God says "Look at that, you did your worst and Job has remained faithful. Ha!"
Satan says: "Of course he's faithful, he hopes in the future you will grant him more wealth. Let's see what he does when I curse him with boils."
So God says "Ok. Just don't kill him." So Satan blights him with the boils, and Job curses the day he was born, in a poetical sort of way. This amounts to a rejection of God's gift, and in fact, a curse on the act of creation, a curse on God himself, so Satan wins.
Job is caught up in a world in which, like the Protestant Work Ethic, material gain is a sign of God's favor, while scant wealth is a sign of malicious intentions. Job knows that he has done nothing wrong, but his friends, invested in this notion, insist he must have done something to earn God's ire. Why, he's covered in boils and all his stuff is gone. And his children are dead.
Job faces down judge after judge who insists on this system where ethical purity is manifest in material wealth, but Job sticks to his guns himself insisting that he has done nothing to deserve the sort of punishment that God has heaped upon him.
We know as readers that Job is correct. Now the cyclic nature of the structure which is beyond our capacity to reproduce, but is evident in the repetitive discourse of judging and defending, is a very simple expression, of the cyclical-linear form that we have called spiral. It is an example of a recursive text.
The reason it is structured in this cyclic pattern is because it was originally a song, that was meant to be performed in from of an audience, and songs tend to repeat for the sake of a listener. The basic pattern vascillates between judgement and defense, two principle parts, and ends with God agreeing with Job, he is indeed a good man, and blameless, and in the end he gets everything back, regardless of the fact that he cursed God.
Structurally, Job is paradigmatic of the sort of recursive geometry we are advancing in this book. The actual content of the story however is also relevant. We have a story about a man who is living in harmony with his world and his God, and even when he is robbed of everything that makes his life good, he is still faithful to the God who gave him life. Eventually he breaks down, but who can blame him?
This accounts for about one fifteenth of the entire story. The rest is back and forth between him and the community who is judging him on God's behalf.
So we have the first principle of vascillation between judgement and defense. And a cyclic turning with is also linear, as we mentioned in our paradigm archetype $This Sentence is False$.
In Revelation, the recursive geometry is still there, but now instead of identifying with the judged, we are to identify ourselves with the judging. The entire psychology of the story is different here, it is a ballistic finger pointing and a mass negation. The spirituality is itself of abnegation. It moves in turns, first a repudiation of the churches, then a holy vision of heaven, then the opening of the seals, then the seven trumpets and etc...
The issue that we're drawing to the four, rather than decode the numerological code of Revelation, is that the repetition is itself, much like Heidegger's work, written on the name of God.
It is this emanation from a center that defines recursive turning and the repetition is not a defect of the articulation, but a conscious choice to move in accord with the temporality that is evident to a human living in this realm.
YHWH, remember, is the a participle for the word Being, and that being moves through time in a fashion which is both circular and linear. The week is seven days long, and in fact, was also when Revelation was written. The days move forward, but also loop. So when we move in turns like this, as we are writing on the name of God.
The principle of $This Sentence is False$ is partially generative, itself infinite, mechanical, temporal, spatial. It transcends and sustains the dualities. It is unwritable, but can still be referred to.
It suggests a complex geometry, and a rule set which is scale invariant. If it is not God Himself, then it is God's patterning on to human language, the generative mechanism as it is patterned on language.
Jerusalem and Milton both by Blake move in accord with this cyclic linearity. It is (if not god) the pattern of being, and it is here that we will end. In the abnegating space of Revelation, having scribbled our histories on the creative principle itself, returning to that very place we began, in the wide gulf beyond even yawning distance, namely Chaos.
God considers this and says, "Ok, Accuser, you may blight my righteous servant, only do not touch his body." So Satan makes sure that all his property is stolen, and his servants killed. Then he kills his sons and daughters and whatever else bore life about him. Job cries but does not curse God.
God says "Look at that, you did your worst and Job has remained faithful. Ha!"
Satan says: "Of course he's faithful, he hopes in the future you will grant him more wealth. Let's see what he does when I curse him with boils."
So God says "Ok. Just don't kill him." So Satan blights him with the boils, and Job curses the day he was born, in a poetical sort of way. This amounts to a rejection of God's gift, and in fact, a curse on the act of creation, a curse on God himself, so Satan wins.
Job is caught up in a world in which, like the Protestant Work Ethic, material gain is a sign of God's favor, while scant wealth is a sign of malicious intentions. Job knows that he has done nothing wrong, but his friends, invested in this notion, insist he must have done something to earn God's ire. Why, he's covered in boils and all his stuff is gone. And his children are dead.
Job faces down judge after judge who insists on this system where ethical purity is manifest in material wealth, but Job sticks to his guns himself insisting that he has done nothing to deserve the sort of punishment that God has heaped upon him.
We know as readers that Job is correct. Now the cyclic nature of the structure which is beyond our capacity to reproduce, but is evident in the repetitive discourse of judging and defending, is a very simple expression, of the cyclical-linear form that we have called spiral. It is an example of a recursive text.
The reason it is structured in this cyclic pattern is because it was originally a song, that was meant to be performed in from of an audience, and songs tend to repeat for the sake of a listener. The basic pattern vascillates between judgement and defense, two principle parts, and ends with God agreeing with Job, he is indeed a good man, and blameless, and in the end he gets everything back, regardless of the fact that he cursed God.
Structurally, Job is paradigmatic of the sort of recursive geometry we are advancing in this book. The actual content of the story however is also relevant. We have a story about a man who is living in harmony with his world and his God, and even when he is robbed of everything that makes his life good, he is still faithful to the God who gave him life. Eventually he breaks down, but who can blame him?
This accounts for about one fifteenth of the entire story. The rest is back and forth between him and the community who is judging him on God's behalf.
So we have the first principle of vascillation between judgement and defense. And a cyclic turning with is also linear, as we mentioned in our paradigm archetype $This Sentence is False$.
In Revelation, the recursive geometry is still there, but now instead of identifying with the judged, we are to identify ourselves with the judging. The entire psychology of the story is different here, it is a ballistic finger pointing and a mass negation. The spirituality is itself of abnegation. It moves in turns, first a repudiation of the churches, then a holy vision of heaven, then the opening of the seals, then the seven trumpets and etc...
The issue that we're drawing to the four, rather than decode the numerological code of Revelation, is that the repetition is itself, much like Heidegger's work, written on the name of God.
It is this emanation from a center that defines recursive turning and the repetition is not a defect of the articulation, but a conscious choice to move in accord with the temporality that is evident to a human living in this realm.
YHWH, remember, is the a participle for the word Being, and that being moves through time in a fashion which is both circular and linear. The week is seven days long, and in fact, was also when Revelation was written. The days move forward, but also loop. So when we move in turns like this, as we are writing on the name of God.
The principle of $This Sentence is False$ is partially generative, itself infinite, mechanical, temporal, spatial. It transcends and sustains the dualities. It is unwritable, but can still be referred to.
It suggests a complex geometry, and a rule set which is scale invariant. If it is not God Himself, then it is God's patterning on to human language, the generative mechanism as it is patterned on language.
Jerusalem and Milton both by Blake move in accord with this cyclic linearity. It is (if not god) the pattern of being, and it is here that we will end. In the abnegating space of Revelation, having scribbled our histories on the creative principle itself, returning to that very place we began, in the wide gulf beyond even yawning distance, namely Chaos.
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 6
One attempt to reconcile the monists with the pluralists was the atomists championed by Lucippus and Democritus who both postulated that there were only two principles: the void, and the atoms of plenitude. Non-being is a great vacuum and this accounts for movement. He believed that nothing happened at random, and that is about all we know.
Democritus left his stain on history in a more evident manner. He believed that perception is unreliable, and learning must divorce itself from reality. Opinion flows into us from the vast external gulf and truth lies somewhere off in the abyss. Atoms exist, the void exists, and only by convention are things hot or cold, soft and hard, dark and light. Knowing makes us ignorant, and the best we can hope for is the luck of this or that opinion being at any given time true.
In other words, it's all downhill from Heraclitus. Now let's consider this for a second. Heraclitus takes us to the edge of reason, the great triumph of which is to cast doubt upon its own validity. But if this is all we can know, that no knowing is adequate then where do we go as thinkers?
This is the major glitch in Heraclitus' system, being like Taoism in the sense that it if we take it literally, it is an attempt to shut down reason, to stop thinking. But the Taoists don't transmigrate into ethereal beings once they have this revelation, they spend all day training their bodies and disciplining their minds. And this is where Heraclitus' theory of knowledge must go, into a theory disciplining, a theory of dissatisfaction which seeks to better itself in every way, and this is where we are left.
Pythagoras will be the great master who advances the Heraclitusian glitch that the end of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom which does not seek for an explanation, but rather becomes an experimental dialog with the real world.
Pythagoras was part scientist, part philosopher, part mathematician, part mystic. He is reputed to have trained under the Egyptian priests who had some twine in which the ratio of the lengths was 3:4:5. Pythagoras saw this and realized that this principle did not just apply to congruent triangles, but any right triangle could be described by this process. Pythagoras was a careful student of reality. He recognized that general principles could be extracted from anything.
Pythagoras, the story goes, chanced upon the sound of hammers clanking anvils and realized that the larger the hammer, the deeper the sound. It was from this that he acquired his doctrine of the Music of the Spheres. It was his mathematical training that allowed him to translate this idea into numbers. So among other things, Pythagoras was a musical theorist.
From this notion the doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration, or reincarnation came. He believed that our souls had been born and reborn many times and that they were being purified for a higher form of life, a poetical notion indeed, and an article of faith among the brotherhood.
It is precisely his insight into the real that mankind lost when the disciplines that he was engaged with specialized into their separate sectors.
It is precisely this discipline that I am attempting to resurrect; for I am after all a student of the humanities, and music is not divorced from modern theories of physics; for the the string theorists postulate that the rate of vibration of a string determines the qualities of the particle that it will become, so now is the perfect time to resurrect such Pythagorean insight into the real.
Pythagoras' insight was that we could align information, mythological, spiritual, mathematical, musical, and that the same ratios or harmonies would yield a consistent pattern. Discovery was a matter of recollecting a higher form of knowing that had been lost upon being reincarnated into this realm. He believed the spirituality of the mysteries. His dialog with nature has proven invaluable, and every student of mathematics knows his name by heart.
His insight opens up the expanding dimensionality of the Taoists, and reveals it to be a triangular revelation, the one becomes the two becomes the three, and so on toward the myriad things:
o
o o
o o o
He added a fourth layer to this, knowing that dimensionwise, it requires four points to define a three dimensional plane. This Pythagorean insight makes us believe that we have nothing to fear, that there is no death, that in fact this world is as far away from the source as is humanly possible. There is an underlying unity, but this unity seeks to express itself in plenitude, and that we should be grateful for the opportunity that we are given.
The fundamental nature of this reality is chaotic. The principles that are expressed in the very large are the same as the principles expressed in the very small. With discipline and experimentation our knowing can expand. It is not ourselves that we should search, but our world. This was the end of the Heraclitusian method. It works when you stop needing it. It expresses reality to an end, and this ending of searching is anathema to our method. We seek because we don't know. If we knew, we would not seek. We know better than to know. This is the end of knowing to not stop seeking for more knowledge. Knowing is a limit. We limit ourselves by knowing, and this is the basic insight that Socrates dies for. That we know that we do not know, and that this is true wisdom.
Praise be unto philosophy. I have searched myself, and now I search the world.
Democritus left his stain on history in a more evident manner. He believed that perception is unreliable, and learning must divorce itself from reality. Opinion flows into us from the vast external gulf and truth lies somewhere off in the abyss. Atoms exist, the void exists, and only by convention are things hot or cold, soft and hard, dark and light. Knowing makes us ignorant, and the best we can hope for is the luck of this or that opinion being at any given time true.
In other words, it's all downhill from Heraclitus. Now let's consider this for a second. Heraclitus takes us to the edge of reason, the great triumph of which is to cast doubt upon its own validity. But if this is all we can know, that no knowing is adequate then where do we go as thinkers?
This is the major glitch in Heraclitus' system, being like Taoism in the sense that it if we take it literally, it is an attempt to shut down reason, to stop thinking. But the Taoists don't transmigrate into ethereal beings once they have this revelation, they spend all day training their bodies and disciplining their minds. And this is where Heraclitus' theory of knowledge must go, into a theory disciplining, a theory of dissatisfaction which seeks to better itself in every way, and this is where we are left.
Pythagoras will be the great master who advances the Heraclitusian glitch that the end of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom which does not seek for an explanation, but rather becomes an experimental dialog with the real world.
Pythagoras was part scientist, part philosopher, part mathematician, part mystic. He is reputed to have trained under the Egyptian priests who had some twine in which the ratio of the lengths was 3:4:5. Pythagoras saw this and realized that this principle did not just apply to congruent triangles, but any right triangle could be described by this process. Pythagoras was a careful student of reality. He recognized that general principles could be extracted from anything.
Pythagoras, the story goes, chanced upon the sound of hammers clanking anvils and realized that the larger the hammer, the deeper the sound. It was from this that he acquired his doctrine of the Music of the Spheres. It was his mathematical training that allowed him to translate this idea into numbers. So among other things, Pythagoras was a musical theorist.
From this notion the doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration, or reincarnation came. He believed that our souls had been born and reborn many times and that they were being purified for a higher form of life, a poetical notion indeed, and an article of faith among the brotherhood.
It is precisely his insight into the real that mankind lost when the disciplines that he was engaged with specialized into their separate sectors.
It is precisely this discipline that I am attempting to resurrect; for I am after all a student of the humanities, and music is not divorced from modern theories of physics; for the the string theorists postulate that the rate of vibration of a string determines the qualities of the particle that it will become, so now is the perfect time to resurrect such Pythagorean insight into the real.
Pythagoras' insight was that we could align information, mythological, spiritual, mathematical, musical, and that the same ratios or harmonies would yield a consistent pattern. Discovery was a matter of recollecting a higher form of knowing that had been lost upon being reincarnated into this realm. He believed the spirituality of the mysteries. His dialog with nature has proven invaluable, and every student of mathematics knows his name by heart.
His insight opens up the expanding dimensionality of the Taoists, and reveals it to be a triangular revelation, the one becomes the two becomes the three, and so on toward the myriad things:
o
o o
o o o
He added a fourth layer to this, knowing that dimensionwise, it requires four points to define a three dimensional plane. This Pythagorean insight makes us believe that we have nothing to fear, that there is no death, that in fact this world is as far away from the source as is humanly possible. There is an underlying unity, but this unity seeks to express itself in plenitude, and that we should be grateful for the opportunity that we are given.
The fundamental nature of this reality is chaotic. The principles that are expressed in the very large are the same as the principles expressed in the very small. With discipline and experimentation our knowing can expand. It is not ourselves that we should search, but our world. This was the end of the Heraclitusian method. It works when you stop needing it. It expresses reality to an end, and this ending of searching is anathema to our method. We seek because we don't know. If we knew, we would not seek. We know better than to know. This is the end of knowing to not stop seeking for more knowledge. Knowing is a limit. We limit ourselves by knowing, and this is the basic insight that Socrates dies for. That we know that we do not know, and that this is true wisdom.
Praise be unto philosophy. I have searched myself, and now I search the world.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Much Ado About Nothing
Chapter 1: This Sentence is False
Chapter 2: Part 1
Chapter 2: Part 2
Chapter 2: Part 3
Chapter 3: The Hyper 4
Chapter 4: Part 1: From the Perspective of Light / Hegelian Dialectic
Chapter 4: Part 2
Chapter 4: Part 3
Chapter 4: Part 4
Chapter 5: Stanley Fish & Self-Consuming Artifacts: Part 1
Chapter 5: The Trace: Part 2
Chapter 6: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Chapter 7: The First Book of Urizen
Chapter 8: The Blackness of Blackness
Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports
Chapter 9: Part 2: The Rise and Fall of Satan
Chapter 9: Part 3: Milton's Messiah
Chapter 9: Part 4: Where the Contraries are Equally True
Chapter 9: Part 5: An Inquiry into the Good
Chapter 10: Interlude
Chapter 11: Part 1
Chapter 11: Part 2
Chapter 11: Part 3
Chapter 11: Part 4
Chapter 11: Part 5
Chapter 11: Part 6
http://basenothing.blogspot.com/2010/12/chapter-12-judged-and-judger-end.html
Chapter 2: Part 1
Chapter 2: Part 2
Chapter 2: Part 3
Chapter 3: The Hyper 4
Chapter 4: Part 1: From the Perspective of Light / Hegelian Dialectic
Chapter 4: Part 2
Chapter 4: Part 3
Chapter 4: Part 4
Chapter 5: Stanley Fish & Self-Consuming Artifacts: Part 1
Chapter 5: The Trace: Part 2
Chapter 6: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Chapter 7: The First Book of Urizen
Chapter 8: The Blackness of Blackness
Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports
Chapter 9: Part 2: The Rise and Fall of Satan
Chapter 9: Part 3: Milton's Messiah
Chapter 9: Part 4: Where the Contraries are Equally True
Chapter 9: Part 5: An Inquiry into the Good
Chapter 10: Interlude
Chapter 11: Part 1
Chapter 11: Part 2
Chapter 11: Part 3
Chapter 11: Part 4
Chapter 11: Part 5
Chapter 11: Part 6
http://basenothing.blogspot.com/2010/12/chapter-12-judged-and-judger-end.html
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 5: The Fall of Heraclitus
The philosophy of Heraclitus was neither monist nor monadic, but rather both; what happens is it splits in half. The monists become monists, the monadists become pluralists, the first of which Empedocles, was part scientist, part prophet. Empedocles believed that the four elements, earth, air, water, and fire pervaded all things in different proportions, and their nature could be discerned by determining the proportion. For instance, fire was 100% fire, and 0% everything else. The particular forms were all derived from the elements, and the principle verbal ontological commitment was to growth and mixture. This will form the foundation for Aristotle's philosophy which is itself based upon empiricism and observation. But the quality of the observation is dependent on the insights of the observer.
Empedocles postulated a crude form of Darwinistic evolution that speculated at an also crude form of natural selection. He was working from Anaximander's writing as well as the prevalence of fish fossils available in creeks and rivers.
Part of the lure of monist theory was that it stipulated that being could not arise from non-being, and this makes a certain sort of sense, appealing to an intuition that is at once sensible and rational. The correllary to this was that like beget like. But now you have a problem that mandates a pluralism. Namely, that we eat an olive it turns into bone and blood and muscle.
Anaxagoras' solution to this issue was a notion that dominated the qualitative pluralists: that the olive has bits of bone and blood and muscle.
The issue that concerns us here is the "fall" from Heraclitus into what we are arguing are two half-theories at war with each other. The monist paradigm does not explain, or deems as trivial all the stuff that we can see that is prone to changing. The pluralist paradigm fails to accurately describe the system of transmutation that pervades the natural world. The rise of monism thus predicts its own supplementation by pluralism; and honestly all this had been previously solved and now is resolved inadequately. So what happened?
This is where we theorize a little about the environment that constitutes most academic circles. You get one guy who is truly a genius, and he comes up with a theory that should settle most arguments. But then you get more guys who are less smart who want to feel like genius who mimic the genius in their own reductive way and they take control of the argument. Since they are not as smart as the genius (Heraclitus) their theory is of course his theory except that its only half understood. Suddenly there are more pseudo-geniuses and they come along and realize the inadequacy of the other pseudo-geniuses theory, argue with it, and you end up with two half theories which explain only the inadequacy of the other.
Such is the nature of theory. Not quite an evolution, is it?
Empedocles postulated a crude form of Darwinistic evolution that speculated at an also crude form of natural selection. He was working from Anaximander's writing as well as the prevalence of fish fossils available in creeks and rivers.
Part of the lure of monist theory was that it stipulated that being could not arise from non-being, and this makes a certain sort of sense, appealing to an intuition that is at once sensible and rational. The correllary to this was that like beget like. But now you have a problem that mandates a pluralism. Namely, that we eat an olive it turns into bone and blood and muscle.
Anaxagoras' solution to this issue was a notion that dominated the qualitative pluralists: that the olive has bits of bone and blood and muscle.
The issue that concerns us here is the "fall" from Heraclitus into what we are arguing are two half-theories at war with each other. The monist paradigm does not explain, or deems as trivial all the stuff that we can see that is prone to changing. The pluralist paradigm fails to accurately describe the system of transmutation that pervades the natural world. The rise of monism thus predicts its own supplementation by pluralism; and honestly all this had been previously solved and now is resolved inadequately. So what happened?
This is where we theorize a little about the environment that constitutes most academic circles. You get one guy who is truly a genius, and he comes up with a theory that should settle most arguments. But then you get more guys who are less smart who want to feel like genius who mimic the genius in their own reductive way and they take control of the argument. Since they are not as smart as the genius (Heraclitus) their theory is of course his theory except that its only half understood. Suddenly there are more pseudo-geniuses and they come along and realize the inadequacy of the other pseudo-geniuses theory, argue with it, and you end up with two half theories which explain only the inadequacy of the other.
Such is the nature of theory. Not quite an evolution, is it?
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 4: Eleatic School
Eleatic School
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Eleatics were monists, and their most famous pupil was the great paradoxist Zeno whose is most well known for the famous race between Achilles and the tortoise. The result of the race is less important than Zeno's technique which Aristotle called "dialectic syllogism" but in modern terms is known as reductio ad absurdem. He also uses the rather modern method of systematic assumption, which pervades Wittgenstein as well as Hofstadter, and Russell.
Parmenides and Melissus were both of the Eleatic school of monism which stipulated that all things are one, but it lacks the intellectual fortitude of Heraclitus and the Taoist tradition, neglecting the plenitude of particulars that define our experience of this world. It was our experience, our seeming, they argue that was the illusion, and the logical consequences of such a system are refuted by modern physics and are thus of little consequence.
Suffice it to say, they believe that the Great One was unchanging and uncreated, and thus everlasting. Space was boundless, and filled. Reality was eternal, unlimited, everywhere alike, unchanging, unchangeable, and pervasively filled.
This incomplete doctrine of the Monists would lead to another which fulfilled it. Namely the doctrine of Qualitative Pluralism.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Eleatics were monists, and their most famous pupil was the great paradoxist Zeno whose is most well known for the famous race between Achilles and the tortoise. The result of the race is less important than Zeno's technique which Aristotle called "dialectic syllogism" but in modern terms is known as reductio ad absurdem. He also uses the rather modern method of systematic assumption, which pervades Wittgenstein as well as Hofstadter, and Russell.
Parmenides and Melissus were both of the Eleatic school of monism which stipulated that all things are one, but it lacks the intellectual fortitude of Heraclitus and the Taoist tradition, neglecting the plenitude of particulars that define our experience of this world. It was our experience, our seeming, they argue that was the illusion, and the logical consequences of such a system are refuted by modern physics and are thus of little consequence.
Suffice it to say, they believe that the Great One was unchanging and uncreated, and thus everlasting. Space was boundless, and filled. Reality was eternal, unlimited, everywhere alike, unchanging, unchangeable, and pervasively filled.
This incomplete doctrine of the Monists would lead to another which fulfilled it. Namely the doctrine of Qualitative Pluralism.
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 11: Part 3
Heraclitus
~~~~~~~~~~
The Taoist spirituality of Heraclitus is not based, like Taoism, on water, but rather takes as its base principle fire. Heraclitus' spirituality is of a psychologically mature order which seeks to unite the opposites, and understands that things are in flux.
Paradox becomes the modality of this expression, and bespeaks an understanding that sees any genuine discourse with the real as having a peculiar epistemology. Heraclitus believed in an upward mobility that sought to transcendence itself, which was a transcendence of the desires and the customs of the common man. The Logos (as opposed to Tao) was the all-pervasive principle which was present in all things. The Logos comes into being by differentiating into the myriad things of nature. It is itself nature and to put yourself in accord with it is to be in accord with the highest possible principle.
Heraclitus believed that we should put ourselves in accord to that which is common to all, which bespeaks the syncretistic reduction of his forebearer, Thales. He also believed (paradoxically) that lovers of wisdom should put themselves in accord with the particulars. He believed in searching the self for understanding, and that the eyes and ears of men were naturally prone to error.
Most people then lived in a state of sleeping, pulled this or that way by desires they did not themselves control. Most men were asleep in a private dream, hypnotized by the rhythms of greed and fame.
He had a Blakean sense that everything flowed, but nothing abides, as in no single law could explain the myriad forces moving through the myriad things.
Such a statement undermines our notion that a river is an irreducible thing; rather it is the flow of waters that is ever changing, ever in motion, and it is as it must be and we should take it as a metaphor, a lesson, which teaches us the wisdom of being:
~~~~~~~~~~
The Taoist spirituality of Heraclitus is not based, like Taoism, on water, but rather takes as its base principle fire. Heraclitus' spirituality is of a psychologically mature order which seeks to unite the opposites, and understands that things are in flux.
"Good and evil are two sides of the same coin."
Paradox becomes the modality of this expression, and bespeaks an understanding that sees any genuine discourse with the real as having a peculiar epistemology. Heraclitus believed in an upward mobility that sought to transcendence itself, which was a transcendence of the desires and the customs of the common man. The Logos (as opposed to Tao) was the all-pervasive principle which was present in all things. The Logos comes into being by differentiating into the myriad things of nature. It is itself nature and to put yourself in accord with it is to be in accord with the highest possible principle.
Heraclitus believed that we should put ourselves in accord to that which is common to all, which bespeaks the syncretistic reduction of his forebearer, Thales. He also believed (paradoxically) that lovers of wisdom should put themselves in accord with the particulars. He believed in searching the self for understanding, and that the eyes and ears of men were naturally prone to error.
Most people then lived in a state of sleeping, pulled this or that way by desires they did not themselves control. Most men were asleep in a private dream, hypnotized by the rhythms of greed and fame.
He had a Blakean sense that everything flowed, but nothing abides, as in no single law could explain the myriad forces moving through the myriad things.
"You can never step in the same river twice."
Such a statement undermines our notion that a river is an irreducible thing; rather it is the flow of waters that is ever changing, ever in motion, and it is as it must be and we should take it as a metaphor, a lesson, which teaches us the wisdom of being:
"It is in changing that things find repose."
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 11: Part 2
No single interpretive schema will do anything but reduce our various examples to a categorical imposition which is anathema to our discourse. We offer essential repeating patterns which are born from the texts themselves. We treat criticism as religion, and science as criticism; we criticize science and religion with the same arguments, we refuse to compartmentalize, and refuse to boil things down to their essences, doing sometimes both, and often neither.
It will be here then that we re-enter the philosophical debates of the pre-Socratics who, having inspired the dialectic born out of Plato and Aristotle, have done much to color our perspective on the nature of reason.
It is part of the nature of the western mind, that those luminaries of thought initially existed in a state of confusion. They were scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, and mathematicians who wanted nothing more than to understand the mind of gods. It would be later that religion became religion, math became math, science became science. Only philosophy retains this primordial confusion, and thus it is of particular interest to our discourse.
Let us begin (again) then in Miletus.
Miletus was an ancient Turkish city which acted as a center of trade, and as such, became the breeding ground for the exchange of ideas. Stories were traded as well as material culture, and the diffusion of notions resulted. Thales, who became the first in the line of Miletusian thinkers, collected these stories and attempted to bring them into a unity, to find some principle that described or accounted for the various accounts of gods and godesses and the trials and tribulations that resulted therein. According to Thales all things are filled with gods and water, the gods pervade nature; they are themselves forces of nature. Lacking formal training in mathematics, Thales' was a qualitative approach, ontologically committed to qualities, which were themselves the basis for categorization. Bertrand Russell's Set Theory is contained in the embryo of Thales' insight. So from Thales we get attributes which are sets, and also actions, or dynamis, motion, for "to ask what a thing is involves asking what it does." So at the advent of proto-philosophy, you get water, gods, fullness, and soul (which amounts to motion).
Then comes Anaximander, who is reputed to have invented the first sundial. He correctly guessed that earth was a sphere that "hung" in the sky. His insight was that all things seem to change from one state into their opposite. Night turns into day. Darkness turns into light. Life turns into death. Thus the transformative nature of reality, it is constantly in flux. Anaximander believed that when the day passed out of being, it was stored in a great warehouse of potencies he called the apeiron, (Greek for boundless); that in fact all things were stored in this warehouse, this storehouse of potencies or potentialities and that the day willingly sacrificed itself so that the night could come into being; that in fact, all life partook in this sacrifice so that things could pass in and out of being, and that without this opposition there could be no dynamis, or change.
Anaximenes abstracted the serial order of the elements, (Earth/Water/Wind/Fire) to a fourfold series of relations, thereby making a principle of the sequence itself. The guiding principle of the order was defined by weight. The heaviest things settled lowest. Therefore Earth was at the base, water next, wind and then fire. He postulated that Wind was the pervasive principle because breath is associated with life.
This partitioning of things in a few basic principles is by necessity the impulse of metaphysics. The abstraction of the principle will guide Greek reason and it still facilitates the potency of Western metaphysics. It is from these insights, that the alignment of nature with man, and man with ethics is guided. For the rules that applied to the external world, were seen as indicative of the right way to govern our own actions, and this tradition endures all the way to Hume's skepticism, which argues that we can never know what should be from what is.
The key ontological issues are physis (nature), and pervasiveness. These will guide the pre-Socratics and the post-Socratics, in their attempt to come to terms with life and nature. They also will form the foundation of the metaphysical knot that humankind will spend perhaps its entire existence trying to unwind.
One key point to be made here, is that the philosophical tradition is necessarily antagonistic to the secular mythic tradition of "the people". The two are not necessarily antagonistic, that is to say, they could be aligned with each other, but the philosopher here is seeking to define his own strategies of truth in contradistinction to what is held to be true by custom.
~~~
All info on pre-Socratics is taken from Phillip Wheelwright's "The Presocratics"
It will be here then that we re-enter the philosophical debates of the pre-Socratics who, having inspired the dialectic born out of Plato and Aristotle, have done much to color our perspective on the nature of reason.
It is part of the nature of the western mind, that those luminaries of thought initially existed in a state of confusion. They were scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, and mathematicians who wanted nothing more than to understand the mind of gods. It would be later that religion became religion, math became math, science became science. Only philosophy retains this primordial confusion, and thus it is of particular interest to our discourse.
Let us begin (again) then in Miletus.
Miletus was an ancient Turkish city which acted as a center of trade, and as such, became the breeding ground for the exchange of ideas. Stories were traded as well as material culture, and the diffusion of notions resulted. Thales, who became the first in the line of Miletusian thinkers, collected these stories and attempted to bring them into a unity, to find some principle that described or accounted for the various accounts of gods and godesses and the trials and tribulations that resulted therein. According to Thales all things are filled with gods and water, the gods pervade nature; they are themselves forces of nature. Lacking formal training in mathematics, Thales' was a qualitative approach, ontologically committed to qualities, which were themselves the basis for categorization. Bertrand Russell's Set Theory is contained in the embryo of Thales' insight. So from Thales we get attributes which are sets, and also actions, or dynamis, motion, for "to ask what a thing is involves asking what it does." So at the advent of proto-philosophy, you get water, gods, fullness, and soul (which amounts to motion).
Then comes Anaximander, who is reputed to have invented the first sundial. He correctly guessed that earth was a sphere that "hung" in the sky. His insight was that all things seem to change from one state into their opposite. Night turns into day. Darkness turns into light. Life turns into death. Thus the transformative nature of reality, it is constantly in flux. Anaximander believed that when the day passed out of being, it was stored in a great warehouse of potencies he called the apeiron, (Greek for boundless); that in fact all things were stored in this warehouse, this storehouse of potencies or potentialities and that the day willingly sacrificed itself so that the night could come into being; that in fact, all life partook in this sacrifice so that things could pass in and out of being, and that without this opposition there could be no dynamis, or change.
Anaximenes abstracted the serial order of the elements, (Earth/Water/Wind/Fire) to a fourfold series of relations, thereby making a principle of the sequence itself. The guiding principle of the order was defined by weight. The heaviest things settled lowest. Therefore Earth was at the base, water next, wind and then fire. He postulated that Wind was the pervasive principle because breath is associated with life.
This partitioning of things in a few basic principles is by necessity the impulse of metaphysics. The abstraction of the principle will guide Greek reason and it still facilitates the potency of Western metaphysics. It is from these insights, that the alignment of nature with man, and man with ethics is guided. For the rules that applied to the external world, were seen as indicative of the right way to govern our own actions, and this tradition endures all the way to Hume's skepticism, which argues that we can never know what should be from what is.
The key ontological issues are physis (nature), and pervasiveness. These will guide the pre-Socratics and the post-Socratics, in their attempt to come to terms with life and nature. They also will form the foundation of the metaphysical knot that humankind will spend perhaps its entire existence trying to unwind.
One key point to be made here, is that the philosophical tradition is necessarily antagonistic to the secular mythic tradition of "the people". The two are not necessarily antagonistic, that is to say, they could be aligned with each other, but the philosopher here is seeking to define his own strategies of truth in contradistinction to what is held to be true by custom.
~~~
All info on pre-Socratics is taken from Phillip Wheelwright's "The Presocratics"
Friday, December 10, 2010
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 1
"Nocturnal the river of hours flows/from its source, the eternal tomorrow."
The concept of spacing in Derrida's Differance is related to this quotation which is taken from Miguel de Unamuno's poem. There is something which hovers just beyond the last, the space in which the next will reside; yet as soon as it is occupied by the next, a new space is created to hold the next next. We call this space, tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes. It shadows, in fact, what was and the moment it opens up, it is closed off. What we are describing then is a relation to this space, the last's relationship to the next. The eternal tomorrow, the one that never comes.
Tomorrow is adequate to describe the spacing and temporalizing aspect of Differance, in fact, it is so readily apparent that it ruin's Derrida's game, which is what I'm all about, beating Derrida at his own game.
For this I go to Borges, whose History of Eternity proffers the Blakean notion that in eternity, the past, present and future happen simultaneously, and as we know from Einstein's Relativity, this is literally the case for light. As an object approaches the speed of light, the past and the future collapse into an expanding present.
For Derrida, there is no outside of time, Eternity is a collapsed word set, redoubled in several turns. The words stay the same, the meanings in context change, but the movement is always there, even if it comes back as Nietzsche's ghost in an eternal return.
This is not the eternity we wish to endure, rather, we postulate a framework which hovers just beyond the real, where the future is present, and the past is also present, and we can see the unfolding of the present into the future as man on a mountain overlooking the city-scape.
Now this man is not outside of space just because he can see the entire city at once, in this "outside of time" there is still sequence. There is an order to events, but that is all. Time is a discontinuity of happenstances, not the continuous ebb and flow we have in the earth realm. Perhaps there is a realm even higher than the sequential space of no-time, I do not know.
In Blake eternity is the manner in which a child perceives time, as a succession of events, and then he is indoctrinated by Urizenic adults. We fall into the cinematic time of the sun dial, quite possibly the origin of the spiral construction of time.
The difference between this construction and the sequential construction, is that we can roll the sequence forward and backward, or see the entire sequence as a whole. This in ticker time is accomplished by force of will, by measurement. In Blakean sequence, there is no measure, no notion of time at all. We simply disregard it.
According to Plotinus:
"For all the Intelligible Heaven is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea is heaven; and animal, plant, and man. For spectacle they have a world that has no been engendered. In beholding others they behold themselves. For all things are translucent: nothing is dark, nothing impenetrable, for light is manifest in light. All are everywhere, and all is all, and the whole is in each as in the sum. The sun is one with all the stars and every star with the sun and all its fellows."
This is a "unanimous" universe, as Borges so wonderfully puts it. Unanimous, insofar as it is of a united spirit. This is only partially a univocal tradition. It is partially monist. It is both univox and polyvox at once, these two notions not being mutually exclusive. Monadism, is reconcilable with monism, we are one and we are many, e pluribus unum. The One, the All-Father, the Pleroma as he is referred to by the Gnostics, disarticulates himself, and solidifies, and we are his articulations. This is the nature of Blake's universe, and Blake's schema, of which our mythographical framework has been partially derived (as is Northrop Frye's). And Blake's is derived from Plotinus, and Jacob Boehme.
The concept of spacing in Derrida's Differance is related to this quotation which is taken from Miguel de Unamuno's poem. There is something which hovers just beyond the last, the space in which the next will reside; yet as soon as it is occupied by the next, a new space is created to hold the next next. We call this space, tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes. It shadows, in fact, what was and the moment it opens up, it is closed off. What we are describing then is a relation to this space, the last's relationship to the next. The eternal tomorrow, the one that never comes.
Tomorrow is adequate to describe the spacing and temporalizing aspect of Differance, in fact, it is so readily apparent that it ruin's Derrida's game, which is what I'm all about, beating Derrida at his own game.
For this I go to Borges, whose History of Eternity proffers the Blakean notion that in eternity, the past, present and future happen simultaneously, and as we know from Einstein's Relativity, this is literally the case for light. As an object approaches the speed of light, the past and the future collapse into an expanding present.
For Derrida, there is no outside of time, Eternity is a collapsed word set, redoubled in several turns. The words stay the same, the meanings in context change, but the movement is always there, even if it comes back as Nietzsche's ghost in an eternal return.
This is not the eternity we wish to endure, rather, we postulate a framework which hovers just beyond the real, where the future is present, and the past is also present, and we can see the unfolding of the present into the future as man on a mountain overlooking the city-scape.
Now this man is not outside of space just because he can see the entire city at once, in this "outside of time" there is still sequence. There is an order to events, but that is all. Time is a discontinuity of happenstances, not the continuous ebb and flow we have in the earth realm. Perhaps there is a realm even higher than the sequential space of no-time, I do not know.
In Blake eternity is the manner in which a child perceives time, as a succession of events, and then he is indoctrinated by Urizenic adults. We fall into the cinematic time of the sun dial, quite possibly the origin of the spiral construction of time.
The difference between this construction and the sequential construction, is that we can roll the sequence forward and backward, or see the entire sequence as a whole. This in ticker time is accomplished by force of will, by measurement. In Blakean sequence, there is no measure, no notion of time at all. We simply disregard it.
According to Plotinus:
"For all the Intelligible Heaven is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea is heaven; and animal, plant, and man. For spectacle they have a world that has no been engendered. In beholding others they behold themselves. For all things are translucent: nothing is dark, nothing impenetrable, for light is manifest in light. All are everywhere, and all is all, and the whole is in each as in the sum. The sun is one with all the stars and every star with the sun and all its fellows."
This is a "unanimous" universe, as Borges so wonderfully puts it. Unanimous, insofar as it is of a united spirit. This is only partially a univocal tradition. It is partially monist. It is both univox and polyvox at once, these two notions not being mutually exclusive. Monadism, is reconcilable with monism, we are one and we are many, e pluribus unum. The One, the All-Father, the Pleroma as he is referred to by the Gnostics, disarticulates himself, and solidifies, and we are his articulations. This is the nature of Blake's universe, and Blake's schema, of which our mythographical framework has been partially derived (as is Northrop Frye's). And Blake's is derived from Plotinus, and Jacob Boehme.
Chapter 10: Interlude
I find it behooves me the writer to take an inventory of my theses, as many have been brought to bear in the short space of nine chapters. In dealing with paradoxes of self-reference, we have argued for a theory of reading which is cyclical, being at once linear and circular, and we have called this concept "recursion" and linked it with the concept of the spiral. As we will see as we continue, this will be the pardigmatic motif which binds our texts to a unity.
We have discussed number theory, and talked about two "nothings" which are not nothing, but amount to a zero sum. One is symmetry, the other variability. We have discussed the role of paradox, the role of myth, the strategies of description which unsettle their own meaning. We have mentioned regresses in terms of Aristotle's First Mover. We have transcended time in the personage of Sophia, and space in William Blake. We have fallen into time, and then out of time, and then back into time.
We have traced a magic circle, and performed a magic trick. We have seen the prevalence of fours and threes and twos and ones. We've seen contradictions become truth, and rode a beam of light into the sun. We've watched difference engines in turn, differentiate into similitudes, and we've watched luminaries of science fall into mere reactionaries. A line is a circle? A point can be a line? Artifacts which self-consume, and snakes with their tail in their mouths. Heaven and Hell are married and contraries are equally true.
This is the gift of an analysis which resists the urge to define itself. We are arguing then for a Chaotic interpretive schema which seeks out the fringes of reason, and then rationalizes itself, all the while arguing with itself, arguing for itself, as it argues against itself.
There is no transcendence here for us to find. If I want to leave this world, I'll build a spacecraft. This is an engagement with texts that understands that the fractal geometry that makes up my brain, makes up the produce of the brain. We project as we create. Creation is an act of projection, and while it's easy to see the phallic nature of $This Sentence is False$ it functions also like a projector, shooting forth light through a lens.
And yes, we have obliterated the name of God, for the name of God, the image of God, becomes the final barrier to "oneing" your soul to God, or in less secular terms, we have merged with our creative faculty without suppressing the analytical faculty.
We have resurrected the other way, the kataphatic tradition, neglected in Derrida's work. And this is where we stand, as resurrectors of ancient wars, playing out their battle in this space, attempting to explain the unexplainable.
It is now that we can move into the dialectic we have suggested. The war between sworn enemies, spiritual enemies, corporeal friends.
We have discussed number theory, and talked about two "nothings" which are not nothing, but amount to a zero sum. One is symmetry, the other variability. We have discussed the role of paradox, the role of myth, the strategies of description which unsettle their own meaning. We have mentioned regresses in terms of Aristotle's First Mover. We have transcended time in the personage of Sophia, and space in William Blake. We have fallen into time, and then out of time, and then back into time.
We have traced a magic circle, and performed a magic trick. We have seen the prevalence of fours and threes and twos and ones. We've seen contradictions become truth, and rode a beam of light into the sun. We've watched difference engines in turn, differentiate into similitudes, and we've watched luminaries of science fall into mere reactionaries. A line is a circle? A point can be a line? Artifacts which self-consume, and snakes with their tail in their mouths. Heaven and Hell are married and contraries are equally true.
This is the gift of an analysis which resists the urge to define itself. We are arguing then for a Chaotic interpretive schema which seeks out the fringes of reason, and then rationalizes itself, all the while arguing with itself, arguing for itself, as it argues against itself.
There is no transcendence here for us to find. If I want to leave this world, I'll build a spacecraft. This is an engagement with texts that understands that the fractal geometry that makes up my brain, makes up the produce of the brain. We project as we create. Creation is an act of projection, and while it's easy to see the phallic nature of $This Sentence is False$ it functions also like a projector, shooting forth light through a lens.
And yes, we have obliterated the name of God, for the name of God, the image of God, becomes the final barrier to "oneing" your soul to God, or in less secular terms, we have merged with our creative faculty without suppressing the analytical faculty.
We have resurrected the other way, the kataphatic tradition, neglected in Derrida's work. And this is where we stand, as resurrectors of ancient wars, playing out their battle in this space, attempting to explain the unexplainable.
It is now that we can move into the dialectic we have suggested. The war between sworn enemies, spiritual enemies, corporeal friends.
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 5: End Chapter
For Blake, the rebel character is a redeemer in disguise. The force of the oppresser, boomerangs back into his face via the agency of the character Orc, who is the archetype of compressed energy exploding. This is echoed in the prophesies of the American and French revolution, where Orc is depicted as serpentine. He is the child of Enitharmon and Los, the sacrifice they leave on the mountain; a Promethean figure.
In Milton, the rebel is Satan who organizes the angels in a rebellion against God. When his war is shown to be mere hubris, he causes the fall of man or rather the loss of Eden.
For Freud, the loss of Eden is the loss of the womb, that state where we want nothing and live in perfect unity with the environment. For Blake, the loss of Eden is the rise of Urizen over the other eternals. Eden then is a balancing of the four principalities of intelligence so that one doesn't take control of the entire personality. In Jung, this is known as "centering" which isn't really a centroidal method, it is more like during certain points we can only see from one principality at a time, until we are centered at which point we take a step back, so that we can utilize our entire personality at every given moment, instead of a part at a time.
This Unity of Personality is a paradigm motif in Kitaro Nishida's inquiry into the good and echoes a Buddhist belief that one can unite the conscious with the unconscious to achieve a higher form of consciousness.
And this is the fundamental principle which pervades the text, a sort of Gestalt synthesis of varying psychic energies which operate best when operating together.
Milton isn't just a poem, it is a reading of a poem, and itself a method for analyzing poetry, prone as it is, to hyperbolic ballistics and forcing the reader at every point to interpret, to re-interpret, to analyze the quality of the interpretation, to test the interpretation, and to see eventually that interpretation itself is indebted to some context.
Blake's is a theory of states, which is about you, the reader, and Milton, the subject. It is more about how it signifies than what it signifies. It tropes on motifs the same way Gates suggests Ellison tropes on Richard Wright. Blake's insult of Milton is an homage to Milton. Blake's read of Milton is a work of art in and of itself, it is poetry. Poetry is not pile of words but a mental act that brings disparate things together, mimicking a structure, troping a motif there. With rhetorical turns, and catechresis (the intentional misuse of symbols).
The role metanymy plays is of the utmost significance but outside the thesis of this text. Suffice it to say, many parts are all fighting with each other to take control of the whole and while Albion sleeps, no resolution is possible.
It is not until God forgives Satan that great Albion awakens.
In Milton, the rebel is Satan who organizes the angels in a rebellion against God. When his war is shown to be mere hubris, he causes the fall of man or rather the loss of Eden.
For Freud, the loss of Eden is the loss of the womb, that state where we want nothing and live in perfect unity with the environment. For Blake, the loss of Eden is the rise of Urizen over the other eternals. Eden then is a balancing of the four principalities of intelligence so that one doesn't take control of the entire personality. In Jung, this is known as "centering" which isn't really a centroidal method, it is more like during certain points we can only see from one principality at a time, until we are centered at which point we take a step back, so that we can utilize our entire personality at every given moment, instead of a part at a time.
This Unity of Personality is a paradigm motif in Kitaro Nishida's inquiry into the good and echoes a Buddhist belief that one can unite the conscious with the unconscious to achieve a higher form of consciousness.
And this is the fundamental principle which pervades the text, a sort of Gestalt synthesis of varying psychic energies which operate best when operating together.
Milton isn't just a poem, it is a reading of a poem, and itself a method for analyzing poetry, prone as it is, to hyperbolic ballistics and forcing the reader at every point to interpret, to re-interpret, to analyze the quality of the interpretation, to test the interpretation, and to see eventually that interpretation itself is indebted to some context.
Blake's is a theory of states, which is about you, the reader, and Milton, the subject. It is more about how it signifies than what it signifies. It tropes on motifs the same way Gates suggests Ellison tropes on Richard Wright. Blake's insult of Milton is an homage to Milton. Blake's read of Milton is a work of art in and of itself, it is poetry. Poetry is not pile of words but a mental act that brings disparate things together, mimicking a structure, troping a motif there. With rhetorical turns, and catechresis (the intentional misuse of symbols).
The role metanymy plays is of the utmost significance but outside the thesis of this text. Suffice it to say, many parts are all fighting with each other to take control of the whole and while Albion sleeps, no resolution is possible.
It is not until God forgives Satan that great Albion awakens.
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 4
Next we are introduced to Blake's concept of the spectre. The spectre is the divided aspect of a soul which becomes its other.
Much like Jung's concept of the shadow, the spectre casts its own negative across the external world, seeking to destroy its opposite. What Blake is saying here, from the voice of Milton, is that Milton at some point recognizes that the satan-principle is a portion of his own soul, that portion he has sacrificed to God, and by so sacrificing he has betrayed his own nature, his is as a poet of "the devil's party" without realizing it. That is to say, he was full of energy. Afterward, Milton beholds his shadow:
According to Northrop Frye, Beulah is a place where lovers perceive their beloveds, Ulro is a mechanistic void where subjects perceive objects; and Eden is the dichotomy of creatures and creators.
The shadow is 27 fold, or 3^3; again a Hyper-Four. And Blake waxes mathematical in his very modern construction of the nature of infinity.
We know that in an infinite line, any single point can be taken as the center. So too each being upon the earth is an infinite vortex, and not the "three layer cake" of the of sky, earth, and hell. This is a construction of reality, which limits reality. Each globe in the sky is its own center; and each man and woman is their own center; and we too are the center of all being, so long as we respect that each person is a center and do not think ourselves the sole center of everything.
Also, heaven is not a place you go when you die, rather it is a passed eternity, a script which has already run its course. Earth is still in motion, still evolving into a new heaven which is collected in the mind of God, when its script has fully run its course. Thus to resolve the contraries is to destroy creation, to create a heaven which will then be taken into God so that a new script can run its course.
To be in Heaven is to be in Eternity, which means outside of time.
The four principalities of man, Urthona, which only mitigates itself via Los, Urizen, Tharmas and Luvah, who represent the four forms of intelligences. The four zoas, or energies of life, collapse into the void. Milton attempts to go toward the universe of Enitharmon and Los, but is headed off by Urizen. It is toward Beulah where Milton is headed, that place where the contraries are equally true, echoing Fish's aesthetic of the good physician.
For Blake, natural causes are an idiotic conscription of the soulless attributions of science. Spiritual is indistinct from mental. Bodies have no cause, minds cause. The ratio is by analog. Anything reducible to an analogy is reduced to the ratio.
Book One of Milton ends with the labors of Los against the facts of Urizen. Again, for Blake meaning, and understanding are a matter of attribution. We give meaning to the world around, we propose possibilities, we live in our imaginations. This is the language of Eden, the logic of the imagination, that we create the world around us, we perceive with our imagination; if the doors of perception were properly cleansed we would see the world around us, as if for the first time, in its infinite complexity, an unspeakable beauty that all life on earth rejoices in.
"I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One! He is my Spectre"
Much like Jung's concept of the shadow, the spectre casts its own negative across the external world, seeking to destroy its opposite. What Blake is saying here, from the voice of Milton, is that Milton at some point recognizes that the satan-principle is a portion of his own soul, that portion he has sacrificed to God, and by so sacrificing he has betrayed his own nature, his is as a poet of "the devil's party" without realizing it. That is to say, he was full of energy. Afterward, Milton beholds his shadow:
M14.36; E108| Then on the verge of Beulah he beheld his own Shadow;
M14.37; E108| A mournful form double; hermaphroditic: male & female
M14.38; E108| In one wonderful body. and he enterd into it
M14.39; E108| In direful pain for the dread shadow, twenty-seven-fold
According to Northrop Frye, Beulah is a place where lovers perceive their beloveds, Ulro is a mechanistic void where subjects perceive objects; and Eden is the dichotomy of creatures and creators.
The shadow is 27 fold, or 3^3; again a Hyper-Four. And Blake waxes mathematical in his very modern construction of the nature of infinity.
M15.21; E109| The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its
M15.22; E109| Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity.
M15.23; E109| Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind
M15.24; E109| His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun:
M15.25; E109| Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
M15.26; E109| While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth
M15.27; E109| Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent.
M15.28; E109| As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing
M15.29; E109| Its vortex; and the north & south, with all their starry host;
M15.30; E109| Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding
M15.31; E109| His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square.
M15.32; E109| Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
M15.33; E109| To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the moony shade.
M15.34; E109| Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth
M15.35; E109| A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity.
We know that in an infinite line, any single point can be taken as the center. So too each being upon the earth is an infinite vortex, and not the "three layer cake" of the of sky, earth, and hell. This is a construction of reality, which limits reality. Each globe in the sky is its own center; and each man and woman is their own center; and we too are the center of all being, so long as we respect that each person is a center and do not think ourselves the sole center of everything.
Also, heaven is not a place you go when you die, rather it is a passed eternity, a script which has already run its course. Earth is still in motion, still evolving into a new heaven which is collected in the mind of God, when its script has fully run its course. Thus to resolve the contraries is to destroy creation, to create a heaven which will then be taken into God so that a new script can run its course.
To be in Heaven is to be in Eternity, which means outside of time.
Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic
M19.16; E112| One to the North, named Urthona: One to the South, named Urizen:
M19.17; E112| One to the East, named Luvah: One to the West, named Tharmas
M19.18; E112| They are the Four Zoa's that stood around the Throne Divine!
M19.19; E112| But when Luvah assum'd the World of Urizen to the South:
M19.20; E112| And Albion was slain upon his mountains, & in his tent;
M19.21; E112| All fell towards the Center in dire ruin, sinking down.
M19.22; E112| And in the South remains a burning fire; in the East a void.
The four principalities of man, Urthona, which only mitigates itself via Los, Urizen, Tharmas and Luvah, who represent the four forms of intelligences. The four zoas, or energies of life, collapse into the void. Milton attempts to go toward the universe of Enitharmon and Los, but is headed off by Urizen. It is toward Beulah where Milton is headed, that place where the contraries are equally true, echoing Fish's aesthetic of the good physician.
M26.45; E124| And every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not
M26.45; E124| A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems, it is Delusion
M26.46; E124| Of Ulro: & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory.
For Blake, natural causes are an idiotic conscription of the soulless attributions of science. Spiritual is indistinct from mental. Bodies have no cause, minds cause. The ratio is by analog. Anything reducible to an analogy is reduced to the ratio.
Book One of Milton ends with the labors of Los against the facts of Urizen. Again, for Blake meaning, and understanding are a matter of attribution. We give meaning to the world around, we propose possibilities, we live in our imaginations. This is the language of Eden, the logic of the imagination, that we create the world around us, we perceive with our imagination; if the doors of perception were properly cleansed we would see the world around us, as if for the first time, in its infinite complexity, an unspeakable beauty that all life on earth rejoices in.
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 3
Milton's Satan is Blake's Orc. Blake's Satan is Milton's Messiah, and Job's Satan, the accuser, the deceiver; he is weak in courage; he is strong in cunning. He tricks Los accusing those around him of the turpitude he himself is guilty of. He plays on their desires, their emotions. He plays them against one another. He is associated with a class of men Blake refers to as "the elect" who were created before time and space, and who are perpetually recycled into the world system, whereas the Reprobate and the Redeemed can go to some manner of Heaven. For Blake there is more than one Heaven.
Milton's Satan, like Blake's is the only full fledged personality in Hell. The other demons are more like aspects of his potency than fully realized characters in and of themselves. When Satan finds his mill workers celebrating with drunken revelries, he cries and comes back to Los, convinced that Palamabron is behaving badly.
Satan is not the god of desire, he is the god of moral imposition and austere self-hood. He wants everything to run according to a specific order. He is a tyrant, a megalomaniac. But as Blake reminds us, one man's Satan is another man's God.
Satan here tries to supplement the creator, he is a false God, mimicking the God of the Old Testament; he passes these laws down out of jealousy for Palamabron's "ingratitude." Satan alone is God, and this individuation which exists at the expense of all others, will prefigure the wars that are fought. It is this desire to put all people under one name, the insanity of unity, the insanity of unifying all human consciousness, which Paul himself is guilty of, that drives men to destroy men.
Satan's bosom grows opaque so that his heart, and motivations may not be questioned. He offers everlasting death to those who disobey him and thus the world of Ulro is born, out of moral slavery, and Satan's jealousy.
Satan's role now is to obscure vision, his motivations are megalomania and enslavement. What is lost is the ability to see through language. Instead language acts as a barrier to the external world, a barrier which must be broken in order to reclaim the divine vision, which is the sole providence of no single religion, but rather all religious systems.
It is then that Blake mentions the Covering Cherub which the God of the Old Testament placed before the Tree of Life after the fall. This re-echoes the fall from Eden, and Urizen's fall from Eternity, which is explicitly spelled out by Blake: Satan is Urizen.
So Satan's role is to divide the whole of humanity into pieces, and then set the principle parts at war with each other.
Milton's Satan, like Blake's is the only full fledged personality in Hell. The other demons are more like aspects of his potency than fully realized characters in and of themselves. When Satan finds his mill workers celebrating with drunken revelries, he cries and comes back to Los, convinced that Palamabron is behaving badly.
Satan is not the god of desire, he is the god of moral imposition and austere self-hood. He wants everything to run according to a specific order. He is a tyrant, a megalomaniac. But as Blake reminds us, one man's Satan is another man's God.
M9.19; E103| For Satan flaming with Rintrahs fury hidden beneath his own mildness
M9.20; E103| Accus'd Palamabron before the Assembly of ingratitude! of malice:
M9.21; E103| He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll,
M9.22; E103| Of Moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah
M9.23; E103| To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth
M9.24; E103| With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease
M9.25; E103| Punishments & deaths musterd & number'd; Saying I am God alone
M9.26; E103| There is no other! let all obey my principles of moral individuality
M9.27; E103| I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses
M9.28; E103| Of my Eternal Mind, transgressors I will rend off for ever,
M9.29; E103| As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering.
Satan here tries to supplement the creator, he is a false God, mimicking the God of the Old Testament; he passes these laws down out of jealousy for Palamabron's "ingratitude." Satan alone is God, and this individuation which exists at the expense of all others, will prefigure the wars that are fought. It is this desire to put all people under one name, the insanity of unity, the insanity of unifying all human consciousness, which Paul himself is guilty of, that drives men to destroy men.
Satan's bosom grows opaque so that his heart, and motivations may not be questioned. He offers everlasting death to those who disobey him and thus the world of Ulro is born, out of moral slavery, and Satan's jealousy.
Satan's role now is to obscure vision, his motivations are megalomania and enslavement. What is lost is the ability to see through language. Instead language acts as a barrier to the external world, a barrier which must be broken in order to reclaim the divine vision, which is the sole providence of no single religion, but rather all religious systems.
It is then that Blake mentions the Covering Cherub which the God of the Old Testament placed before the Tree of Life after the fall. This re-echoes the fall from Eden, and Urizen's fall from Eternity, which is explicitly spelled out by Blake: Satan is Urizen.
So Satan's role is to divide the whole of humanity into pieces, and then set the principle parts at war with each other.
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 2
So we fall into essences, call generalities, and together, Los and Enitharmon, bring forth their family. Orc, the "shadowy female" and Satan himself who like Urizen "refuses form". He is called the Miller of Eternity, and is assigned the qualities of mechanism, and grinding, and the "prince of the Starry Wheels." Again, the notion of machine logic is called Satan by Blake.
This mirrors the Dogon division of the male aspect being threefold, while the female is fourfold. Here, the sexual, or generative process is threefold, and the human is fourfold. The threefold is aspected as head, heart, and loins. While the fourfold is, Tharmas, Los, Urizen, and Luvah.
For Blake, this process links back to the notion of opposition. We have thesis, anti-thesis, and negation, where the thesis is considered a contrary, like love and hate, and the negation is all that which is not love, a delimiting of the infinite toward the finite. Blake's association of the starry wheels with Satan comes via his disposition toward Newton. The notion that reality could be set under discernible laws was anathema to Blakes antinomian tradition. He imagines it much like a clock, with gears, and cogs, void of humanity, void of soul, void of spirit.
Blake goes on to stipulate that every man's wisdom, being born out of his experience is peculiar to his own shortcomings. Wisdom is thus a strategy, what in Freud is called a negation. It seeks to un-script the experience in order to leave the speaker in a new place which is free of the psychic baggage caused by the experience.
Blake's Satan, is Milton's Messiah, and Newton's Pantocrator (or all-power), the Woof of Locke. Again, Blake's argument is not against the machine, it is against the principality of reason taking over the entire show. We are selling our souls to this amorphous essentialist principality. Logic is a tool, not an end in itself.
Blake goes on to blast the "druidicle proportion" of "length, bredth, and height", contrasting it with "naked beauty" and "flutes, harps, and songs".
The important thing through all this is the association of machine logic with Satan, and the fact that if we reduce ourselves to mere logic, then I will be able to write a piece of code that simulates your machinations.
The reasoning negative is associated with the "elect". Note that the structure of the heavens is a Hyper-Four (also called a tetration) but its 3^3, so our sense of dimensionality is fourfold but aspected in terms of three.
M4.1; E97| Beneath the Plow of Rintrah & the harrow of the Almighty
M4.2; E97| In the hands of Palamabron. Where the Starry Mills of Satan
M4.3; E97| Are built beneath the Earth & Waters of the Mundane Shell
M4.4; E97| Here the Three Classes of Men take their Sexual texture Woven
M4.5; E97| The Sexual is Threefold: the Human is Fourfold.
This mirrors the Dogon division of the male aspect being threefold, while the female is fourfold. Here, the sexual, or generative process is threefold, and the human is fourfold. The threefold is aspected as head, heart, and loins. While the fourfold is, Tharmas, Los, Urizen, and Luvah.
For Blake, this process links back to the notion of opposition. We have thesis, anti-thesis, and negation, where the thesis is considered a contrary, like love and hate, and the negation is all that which is not love, a delimiting of the infinite toward the finite. Blake's association of the starry wheels with Satan comes via his disposition toward Newton. The notion that reality could be set under discernible laws was anathema to Blakes antinomian tradition. He imagines it much like a clock, with gears, and cogs, void of humanity, void of soul, void of spirit.
Blake goes on to stipulate that every man's wisdom, being born out of his experience is peculiar to his own shortcomings. Wisdom is thus a strategy, what in Freud is called a negation. It seeks to un-script the experience in order to leave the speaker in a new place which is free of the psychic baggage caused by the experience.
Blake's Satan, is Milton's Messiah, and Newton's Pantocrator (or all-power), the Woof of Locke. Again, Blake's argument is not against the machine, it is against the principality of reason taking over the entire show. We are selling our souls to this amorphous essentialist principality. Logic is a tool, not an end in itself.
Blake goes on to blast the "druidicle proportion" of "length, bredth, and height", contrasting it with "naked beauty" and "flutes, harps, and songs".
The important thing through all this is the association of machine logic with Satan, and the fact that if we reduce ourselves to mere logic, then I will be able to write a piece of code that simulates your machinations.
M5.5; E98| And this is the manner of the Daughters of Albion in their beauty
M5.6; E98| Every one is threefold in Head & Heart & Reins, & every one
M5.7; E98| Has three Gates into the Three Heavens of Beulah which shine
M5.8; E98| Translucent in their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins
M5.9; E98| Surrounded with fires unapproachable: but whom they please
M5.10; E98| They take up into their Heavens in intoxicating delight
M5.11; E98| For the Elect cannot be Redeemd, but Created continually
M5.12; E98| By Offering & Atonement in the crue[l]ties of Moral Law
M5.13; E98| Hence the three Classes of Men take their fix'd destinations
M5.14; E98| They are the Two Contraries & the Reasoning Negative.
The reasoning negative is associated with the "elect". Note that the structure of the heavens is a Hyper-Four (also called a tetration) but its 3^3, so our sense of dimensionality is fourfold but aspected in terms of three.
New Blog
To reduce clutter here, and on Base Infinity I have created a new blog for philosophical and political writings called Base Meridian
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports
Mental Sports
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Before we begin the passage of "Milton" through the polluted climes of Urizen's void, Blake is going to give him a little kick in jewels by calling his work the perverted and stolen writings of the Classical Poets, set up "by artifice against the sublime of the Bible". Milton is really a poetical critique of Paradise Lost, a Paradise in fact that we lose everyday by seeing it as lost. Blake promises us a second innocence, an innocence born out of the desire to return to the place we as children habitated, a way of relating to the world which is partially imaginative, in fact, consciously imaginative.
Now, in Milton there is a conflation of reflections, images, and creations that is apparent during the Narcissus scene in Paradise Lost, as Eve stares at her reflection in the water. Eden is solipsistic sort of place where an act of perception, is also an act of creation. It is the poet's paradise, a Second Eden.
Now, what Blake is arguing for is a sort of pacificism which is not passive. Spiritual war, a war of words, rather than murder and swords and guns. We are supposed to fight each other, without contraries is no progression. But we're not supposed to literally kill each other. We should attempt instead to debate. This is Blakean war. It is the reason I have taken up his case. Blake won, but no one realized it. We are in a looking glass universe, as modern physicists are sure to tell you. The observer is not distinct from the observation, so Blake defeats Locke, but Locke, trapped in the hubris of his own reductivity, could never tell.
The role that Christ plays in Blake is similar to the role that Los plays, but also different. I don't want to jump the gun on a conclusion, here. Suffice it to say they are both redeemers, and Christ came here to redeem the outward creation, so that Heaven could be opened up for the souls of the dead. Blake doesn't care about the next world too much, he is more concerned with this world, and even if there are heavens and angels, Blake will argue that each of these concepts have psychic analogs which pattern themselves onto the consciousness of everyday men. He is extremely pragmatic. His is a religion of strategies. The goal of this text then, is to One (or unite) the soul with its God, the creative source of all gods, the imagination.
What we get next is a sleeping Urizen, who refuses "definite form", and he is called an "abstract horror". Urizen is an essence, in the philosophical notion of the term. A reductive abstraction that refuses to articulate. In Blake things move from the indefinite, or a reductive essence, toward articulation, and articulation is considered the highest as opposed to the lowest form of a thing. This is a reversal of the Platonic notion of essences and ideals, which are disarticulated proto-forms which are considered more real than the world around us. Blake wants to get out of our own heads, and return us to the now, the present, the stuff before your eyes. He echoes the language in Urizen, "another age pass'd over, and a state of dismal woe."
Then we find Urizen's body articulating into corporeal form, with the inlets of soul, the five senses petrifying or solidifying. The tongue hungers and thirsts, the nostrils hang upon the wind. He throws his right arm north, his left arm south, like Christ giving us the choice between heaven and hell. The right hand path of restraint and bodily deprivation leads to heaven, the left hand path of indulgence and sensual bounty leading to hell.
The curse of Los, you become what you behold, is a recurring motif in Blake and speaks to a certain relationship of the judge to the judged. It is a wise insight that we judge people out of our own fears and desires, in fact, out of our self-hate, for the truly contented see no need to judge others.
So Los is going to split in half the moment he sees this red round globe and in fact is already divided from Urizen who lay sleeping in his mental cave. Enitharmon is depicted as the fates are depicted, tending a loom. And these are the three geniuses that we have access to thus far. They are all mere functionaries of the sleeping God Albion who is Urizenic in character. The end game is to wake him up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Before we begin the passage of "Milton" through the polluted climes of Urizen's void, Blake is going to give him a little kick in jewels by calling his work the perverted and stolen writings of the Classical Poets, set up "by artifice against the sublime of the Bible". Milton is really a poetical critique of Paradise Lost, a Paradise in fact that we lose everyday by seeing it as lost. Blake promises us a second innocence, an innocence born out of the desire to return to the place we as children habitated, a way of relating to the world which is partially imaginative, in fact, consciously imaginative.
Now, in Milton there is a conflation of reflections, images, and creations that is apparent during the Narcissus scene in Paradise Lost, as Eve stares at her reflection in the water. Eden is solipsistic sort of place where an act of perception, is also an act of creation. It is the poet's paradise, a Second Eden.
Now, what Blake is arguing for is a sort of pacificism which is not passive. Spiritual war, a war of words, rather than murder and swords and guns. We are supposed to fight each other, without contraries is no progression. But we're not supposed to literally kill each other. We should attempt instead to debate. This is Blakean war. It is the reason I have taken up his case. Blake won, but no one realized it. We are in a looking glass universe, as modern physicists are sure to tell you. The observer is not distinct from the observation, so Blake defeats Locke, but Locke, trapped in the hubris of his own reductivity, could never tell.
Three Classes are Created by the Hammer of Los, & Woven t214
M3.1; E96| By Enitharmons Looms when Albion was slain upon his Mountains
M3.2; E96| And in his Tent, thro envy of Living Form, even of the Divine Vision
M3.3; E96| And of the sports of Wisdom in the Human Imagination
M3.4; E96| Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever.
The role that Christ plays in Blake is similar to the role that Los plays, but also different. I don't want to jump the gun on a conclusion, here. Suffice it to say they are both redeemers, and Christ came here to redeem the outward creation, so that Heaven could be opened up for the souls of the dead. Blake doesn't care about the next world too much, he is more concerned with this world, and even if there are heavens and angels, Blake will argue that each of these concepts have psychic analogs which pattern themselves onto the consciousness of everyday men. He is extremely pragmatic. His is a religion of strategies. The goal of this text then, is to One (or unite) the soul with its God, the creative source of all gods, the imagination.
What we get next is a sleeping Urizen, who refuses "definite form", and he is called an "abstract horror". Urizen is an essence, in the philosophical notion of the term. A reductive abstraction that refuses to articulate. In Blake things move from the indefinite, or a reductive essence, toward articulation, and articulation is considered the highest as opposed to the lowest form of a thing. This is a reversal of the Platonic notion of essences and ideals, which are disarticulated proto-forms which are considered more real than the world around us. Blake wants to get out of our own heads, and return us to the now, the present, the stuff before your eyes. He echoes the language in Urizen, "another age pass'd over, and a state of dismal woe."
Then we find Urizen's body articulating into corporeal form, with the inlets of soul, the five senses petrifying or solidifying. The tongue hungers and thirsts, the nostrils hang upon the wind. He throws his right arm north, his left arm south, like Christ giving us the choice between heaven and hell. The right hand path of restraint and bodily deprivation leads to heaven, the left hand path of indulgence and sensual bounty leading to hell.
Terrified Los stood in the Abyss & his immortal limbs
M3.29; E97| Grew deadly pale; he became what he beheld: for a red
M3.30; E97| Round Globe sunk down from his Bosom into the Deep in pangs
M3.31; E97| He hoverd over it trembling & weeping. suspended it shook
M3.32; E97| The nether Abyss in tremblings. he wept over it, he cherish'd it
M3.33; E97| In deadly sickening pain: till separated into a Female pale
M3.34; E97| As the cloud that brings the snow: all the while from his Back
M3.35; E97| A blue fluid exuded in Sinews hardening in the Abyss
M3.36; E97| Till it separated into a Male Form howling in Jealousy
The curse of Los, you become what you behold, is a recurring motif in Blake and speaks to a certain relationship of the judge to the judged. It is a wise insight that we judge people out of our own fears and desires, in fact, out of our self-hate, for the truly contented see no need to judge others.
So Los is going to split in half the moment he sees this red round globe and in fact is already divided from Urizen who lay sleeping in his mental cave. Enitharmon is depicted as the fates are depicted, tending a loom. And these are the three geniuses that we have access to thus far. They are all mere functionaries of the sleeping God Albion who is Urizenic in character. The end game is to wake him up.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 8: Sig Monk
The Signifying Monkey
God help me for going here, but I do it knowing full well the dangers I face. It is my relationship to the monkey that differs. I do not see the animal as a non-person. It is here that I enter the slave's discourse against the master. The slave who must appear small, and feeble minded tricking the master by self-mockery, and tricking none the less. Our job as madmen is to create instability in the sane man's discourse with the real, an intercourse really, a fucking of reality with a meta-linguistic dick. Finding holes in theories, and plugging them up. It is a sexual discourse, it is bereft of telos; we are the Signifying Monkey. But like the feminist who despises the association of females with the land, we are born into a system which preloads that association with ownership. If we were Native Americans this would not be an issue, for the land sustains, nurtures us, gives us life. And the monkey in pre-WWII anthropology is one step behind the Australian Aborigine, and it is this discourse, this evolutionary notion that there is hierarchy to culture that puts the white man at the top, and everyone else beneath.
It is precisely this desire to fuck you, Mr. Gates, to put you underneath them that we have rebelled against in our doctrine. The same basic hardware that was gifted to you, has been gifted to me, by fate, or chance, or God himself. It is precisely the right to feel good about our own brilliance that white men lost in the wake of Nazi Germany. For if we are great and white, are we not white supremacists (in a literal sense)?
It makes me sick to my fucking stomach this is the tradition I am born into, for it killed evolution, with so many Jews. We can't talk about our similarities, we cannot talk about our differences, we cannot talk at all, like Chaucer's Manciple, we are terrified of our own ideas, and how they may be received.
Natural Selection only Applies To Lizards and Fish
At higher levels of mammalian life you get some natural selection, but otherwise you get aesthetic selection. The survival of the prettiest. It is here that American culture has advanced evolution itself, for all people of all colors are now seen as beautiful. And this is as it should be, and it only could have happened here. For a brief history of Aesthetic Selection, please have a look at the Irish Elk.
One possible interpretation of the fossil record, an interpretation which suits human cultural factually, is that the female elk thought the men with the biggest horns were indeed the most desirable, so generation after generation, the horns of the elk became larger and larger, and thus did the Irish Elk die out, because they could no longer take in enough energy to support their own heads.
Simple enough, and you can see how aesthetics take over natural selection at the higher forms of life. Birds too share this tradition. They sing, the floof their plumes, they manipulate, they seduce.
So it is here that we enter, the Blackness of Blackness, still in the wake of Nazism, still recovering from genocide, all of us, together, in Hitler's hell.
"The Signifying Monkey is a trickster figure...(Esu Elegbara)...they are mediators, there mediations are tricks."
Esu is an interpreter of the will of God, he carries the people's wishes to the God, he mediates, he is a messenger, an angel; he is a master of style a phallic emblem, a divine linguist (Gates, Blackness of Blackness), but himself a slave, having no motive of his own, no telos to advance, no bone to pick, just games to play, and systems (and players) to break.
Esu's job is to wreak havoc on the signified, he signifies signifying, like our ejaculating Sentence, he represents the signifier in a constant state of signification, signifying the act itself, he is a process, like all gods, he is a force of nature. He does not signify something, rather, he signifies in some way. And the way is more important than the meaning, (or signfied) in fact, the manner of signification carries more meaning that the object referred to. It is a stylistic imperative that demands we sound cool.
And this style imperative is tropological and ballistic in nature, it annihilates that which it refers to, vividly; like the Hegelian dialect, it abolishes, but not in order to get to a higher level, which is largely to sink into the basement, so that you can feel what its like to ascend, there is no other level, its a play, a game, a pastiche.
This type of signification is known also to punk subculture where the insult is really seen as a complement in disguise. It means I'm cool with you, cool enough to get away with insulting you, and your response is a shot back. White culture really doesn't understand this unless they told so by punks or blacks, the value of a thing is pre-assigned, always prejudicial, we always pussyfoot around the issue, you're black, I'm a punk, you're a white bred cracker asshole who really wants to freeze me into this post-WWII place so that you can tell me how to signify.
Not a chance.
So the slave always wins by losing, by pretending to be an idiot, they never see him coming, and when his tricks get found out, they go mad and cry foul, but the Signifying Monkey has disappeared into landscape, and they have nothing left but their own unsettled rage to vanquish. No one but themselves left to fight.
The master's pride is our greatest weapon. Praise be unto Esu, I too have worshipped here.
God help me for going here, but I do it knowing full well the dangers I face. It is my relationship to the monkey that differs. I do not see the animal as a non-person. It is here that I enter the slave's discourse against the master. The slave who must appear small, and feeble minded tricking the master by self-mockery, and tricking none the less. Our job as madmen is to create instability in the sane man's discourse with the real, an intercourse really, a fucking of reality with a meta-linguistic dick. Finding holes in theories, and plugging them up. It is a sexual discourse, it is bereft of telos; we are the Signifying Monkey. But like the feminist who despises the association of females with the land, we are born into a system which preloads that association with ownership. If we were Native Americans this would not be an issue, for the land sustains, nurtures us, gives us life. And the monkey in pre-WWII anthropology is one step behind the Australian Aborigine, and it is this discourse, this evolutionary notion that there is hierarchy to culture that puts the white man at the top, and everyone else beneath.
It is precisely this desire to fuck you, Mr. Gates, to put you underneath them that we have rebelled against in our doctrine. The same basic hardware that was gifted to you, has been gifted to me, by fate, or chance, or God himself. It is precisely the right to feel good about our own brilliance that white men lost in the wake of Nazi Germany. For if we are great and white, are we not white supremacists (in a literal sense)?
It makes me sick to my fucking stomach this is the tradition I am born into, for it killed evolution, with so many Jews. We can't talk about our similarities, we cannot talk about our differences, we cannot talk at all, like Chaucer's Manciple, we are terrified of our own ideas, and how they may be received.
Natural Selection only Applies To Lizards and Fish
At higher levels of mammalian life you get some natural selection, but otherwise you get aesthetic selection. The survival of the prettiest. It is here that American culture has advanced evolution itself, for all people of all colors are now seen as beautiful. And this is as it should be, and it only could have happened here. For a brief history of Aesthetic Selection, please have a look at the Irish Elk.
One possible interpretation of the fossil record, an interpretation which suits human cultural factually, is that the female elk thought the men with the biggest horns were indeed the most desirable, so generation after generation, the horns of the elk became larger and larger, and thus did the Irish Elk die out, because they could no longer take in enough energy to support their own heads.
Simple enough, and you can see how aesthetics take over natural selection at the higher forms of life. Birds too share this tradition. They sing, the floof their plumes, they manipulate, they seduce.
So it is here that we enter, the Blackness of Blackness, still in the wake of Nazism, still recovering from genocide, all of us, together, in Hitler's hell.
"The Signifying Monkey is a trickster figure...(Esu Elegbara)...they are mediators, there mediations are tricks."
Esu is an interpreter of the will of God, he carries the people's wishes to the God, he mediates, he is a messenger, an angel; he is a master of style a phallic emblem, a divine linguist (Gates, Blackness of Blackness), but himself a slave, having no motive of his own, no telos to advance, no bone to pick, just games to play, and systems (and players) to break.
Esu's job is to wreak havoc on the signified, he signifies signifying, like our ejaculating Sentence, he represents the signifier in a constant state of signification, signifying the act itself, he is a process, like all gods, he is a force of nature. He does not signify something, rather, he signifies in some way. And the way is more important than the meaning, (or signfied) in fact, the manner of signification carries more meaning that the object referred to. It is a stylistic imperative that demands we sound cool.
And this style imperative is tropological and ballistic in nature, it annihilates that which it refers to, vividly; like the Hegelian dialect, it abolishes, but not in order to get to a higher level, which is largely to sink into the basement, so that you can feel what its like to ascend, there is no other level, its a play, a game, a pastiche.
This type of signification is known also to punk subculture where the insult is really seen as a complement in disguise. It means I'm cool with you, cool enough to get away with insulting you, and your response is a shot back. White culture really doesn't understand this unless they told so by punks or blacks, the value of a thing is pre-assigned, always prejudicial, we always pussyfoot around the issue, you're black, I'm a punk, you're a white bred cracker asshole who really wants to freeze me into this post-WWII place so that you can tell me how to signify.
Not a chance.
So the slave always wins by losing, by pretending to be an idiot, they never see him coming, and when his tricks get found out, they go mad and cry foul, but the Signifying Monkey has disappeared into landscape, and they have nothing left but their own unsettled rage to vanquish. No one but themselves left to fight.
The master's pride is our greatest weapon. Praise be unto Esu, I too have worshipped here.
Much Ado About Nothing
Chapter 1: This Sentence is False
Chapter 2: Part 1
Chapter 2: Part 2
Chapter 2: Part 3
Chapter 3: The Hyper 4
Chapter 4: Part 1: From the Perspective of Light / Hegelian Dialectic
Chapter 4: Part 2
Chapter 4: Part 3
Chapter 4: Part 4
Chapter 5: Stanley Fish & Self-Consuming Artifacts: Part 1
Chapter 5: The Trace: Part 2
Chapter 6: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Chapter 7: The First Book of Urizen
Chapter 8: The Blackness of Blackness
Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports
Chapter 9: Part 2: The Rise and Fall of Satan
Chapter 9: Part 3: Milton's Messiah
Chapter 9: Part 4: Where the Contraries are Equally True
Chapter 9: Part 5: An Inquiry into the Good
Chapter 2: Part 1
Chapter 2: Part 2
Chapter 2: Part 3
Chapter 3: The Hyper 4
Chapter 4: Part 1: From the Perspective of Light / Hegelian Dialectic
Chapter 4: Part 2
Chapter 4: Part 3
Chapter 4: Part 4
Chapter 5: Stanley Fish & Self-Consuming Artifacts: Part 1
Chapter 5: The Trace: Part 2
Chapter 6: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Chapter 7: The First Book of Urizen
Chapter 8: The Blackness of Blackness
Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports
Chapter 9: Part 2: The Rise and Fall of Satan
Chapter 9: Part 3: Milton's Messiah
Chapter 9: Part 4: Where the Contraries are Equally True
Chapter 9: Part 5: An Inquiry into the Good
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 5: Part 2
The Trace
When a new word is formed, it is given a value, and immediately it instantiates in a holistic sense the division between itself and all other things. A word like "foltung" which means only itself, or perhaps jabberwocky which refers to itself, ends up meaning the value of its relation to the other words in a sentence.
"Oh man, I've got the worst case of foltung."
"You foltung peasant, give me back my cheese!"
"I'm going foltung with the wife and kids."
When the word is meaningless, as we discussed in chapter one, it refers to its signifying act, and this is where we differ from Derrida, we can still get away with assigning values, we don't need to Deconstruct everything all the time. We deconstruct, we reconstruct, we construct, we un-construct. We do what we please, because this is a game, and its fun to assign values to meaning, otherwise I'd be doing something else.
Next he goes on to say "an interval must separate it from something else". The interval in calculus is the shadow cast on each axis or the range value of all x and all y. By this "token" we are given a notion that time can become spatialized, and space can become temporalized which relates to our thesis on dimensions which stipulates that you can rob an object of its extension in space, so long as you give it another extension in time. Otherwise you are transmuting the object, you are burning it, and the extra information is given off in the form of nothing.
"Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be "present" appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element."
When a new word is formed, it is given a value, and immediately it instantiates in a holistic sense the division between itself and all other things. A word like "foltung" which means only itself, or perhaps jabberwocky which refers to itself, ends up meaning the value of its relation to the other words in a sentence.
"Oh man, I've got the worst case of foltung."
"You foltung peasant, give me back my cheese!"
"I'm going foltung with the wife and kids."
When the word is meaningless, as we discussed in chapter one, it refers to its signifying act, and this is where we differ from Derrida, we can still get away with assigning values, we don't need to Deconstruct everything all the time. We deconstruct, we reconstruct, we construct, we un-construct. We do what we please, because this is a game, and its fun to assign values to meaning, otherwise I'd be doing something else.
Next he goes on to say "an interval must separate it from something else". The interval in calculus is the shadow cast on each axis or the range value of all x and all y. By this "token" we are given a notion that time can become spatialized, and space can become temporalized which relates to our thesis on dimensions which stipulates that you can rob an object of its extension in space, so long as you give it another extension in time. Otherwise you are transmuting the object, you are burning it, and the extra information is given off in the form of nothing.
Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 5: Self Consuming Artifacts
A dialectical presentation, on the other hand, is disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe and live by...if the experience of a rhetorical form is flattering, the experience of a Dialectical form is humiliating." [2]
"...rather than distinguishing, it resolves, and in the world [...] the lines of demarcation between places and things, fade in an all-embracing unity..." [3]
"...the dialectical presentation succeeds at its own expense...it becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment."
The dialectical relationship then is a left brained vehicle which ends in the shutting up of the left brain, so that a right brained understanding, a cloud of unknowing, may persist. Untruths which lead to truths, ladders that crumble under the weight of the climber, as Wittgenstein would have put it. The lines of demarcation fade, the opposites collapse into the reference, the past and future fuse in an expanding present.
Stanley Fish is writing here about the aesthetic of the good physician which is itself an anti-aesthetic which judges not, but merely repairs. It is in truth a necessary negation of being so that being may be revealed. In Christian terms this allows a soul to be "oned" or united with the creator, or in Blakean terms, the imagination, the creative principle as it maps onto human consciousness.
The anti-aesthetic is not against beauty, but rather against the privileging of one opposition over another, which is similar to what Derrida is accomplishing, but here there is a sense of meaning, where Derrida claims to a truth beyond meaning, Fish claims to meaning beyond Truth (with a big t). This is the lie that unveils the truth. The system of values that prevents us from being united with our creative principle is blank slated so that a new form of knowing can be understood, a knowing which sees all principles in a unified field.
The problem here is that once this dialectic has run its course, there's nowhere left to go. The creative principle seeks to resolve, unite, the analytical principle to distinguish and categorize.
If we must turn one off in order to access the other then the two are constantly engaged in a Zero Sum Game, sort of warring, and this amounts to a civil war of the soul, which is the nature of western religion.
Fear against desire, man against nature, man against man, reason against imagination, God against man, God against nature, God against reason, God against imagination.
The primordial apparatus of this dialectic then is negation; the property of negating negates all things until its only left with itself, and yes, it negates even that, and there we are, in a cloud of un-knowing, or knowing which is purely unconscious; floating as it is, in a stream of unconsciousness.
In Lacan, the symbolic order is patterned atop the unconscious, which is itself a roiling void of potentiality, the Zero principle in its Urizenic articulation, the wildcard, the variable, the infinite potential, the numberness of the the number.
The self-consuming artifact succedes because it fails, because it signifies not itself, but something beyond, meta, trans. It is a metaphysic of the fractured, a transpersonal identity that can be looked from, but not at. It is Tao for the Taoist, the Holy Spirit for the Christian.
It is then that Fish digresses into a Plato's Gorgias where he elucidates the human condition of the soul, which is to be constantly at war with itself. It is perhaps Plato's fault, for he is the one who made the primordial distinction between soul and body which forged the necessity of warring in the first place. The fallen live to delight in their own body, the philosopher mistrusts such indulgent behavior being at once the master of his own domain, and the slave of his own mastery.
There is a sense that we are born into this world with desires and expectations that are utterly foreign to beings which have evolved here. We spend our lives trying to recover a vision that was lost to us in the fall and this is literally true, (according to Plato) we are literally fallen.
If we are fallen in the Blakean way, then we tripped ourselves up, for Blake's is a vision that recovers the lost vision which allows us to see the infinite in all things.
Urizen himself is the left brained analytical impulse which has taken control of the entire game, ie: taken control over the other faculties of experiencing so as to prevent change.
On some basic level, many of us are comfortable with sameness and predictability. We don't necessarily want change to enter into our systems. We want them to work the same way they worked before. For this we sacrifice the Divine Vision which raises men's perception to the infinite.
In order to do this, we must sacrifice our false selves, the phony egoic image of who we are, as well as its self-bound desires. And it is Blake's argument that this sentence is again false. We don't have to sacrifice our natural desires, we have to sacrifice our self-conception, what in Lacan is referred to a imago and elsewhere in Freud and Jung persona.
We give unnatural precedence to the reputation, thereby conceiving ourselves in the sulfur of another's values, sacrificing ourselves without necessarily seeing it. We must as dialecticians sacrifice the desire to be seen as wise for the wisdom of dialectics is that a thousand falsehoods lead inevitably to the truth.
So then what can we rely on? Our senses? No. Our passions? No. Our reason? Nope.
The trick would be to bring the four intelligences into an order that allows us to integrate them all at once.
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 4
So then, in the Derridean dialectic, we can say that if the sign is arbitrary and differential, as Saussure would have us believe, then it is also caught up in an integral, ad-hockiness, which persists throughout time. Signs are created by chance, they are caught up in a history of conquests, and class wars. I'm not supposed to eat with my elbows on the table, because that's how sailors eat to keep their trays from sliding about, and I don't want to be associated with them. See how this works? It's hardly the Difference Engine of analytic distinctions that Saussure is making it out to be, and in fact, I believe he thinks he can reduce the entire system to some sort of mathematics that he himself is unqualified to produce. Anyone who operates on this principle should see Charles Babbage's difference engine. This is the limit of your reason, it will end where Babbage ends, and then to Turing.
The line of signification, can then be transformed into a circle. If there is continuity at the extremes, that is to say, something defined in contradiction, like a word made out of flesh, an alpha and omega, we have a continuum bounded at the extremes, the extremes meeting, and the first and the last are situated next to each other in a one dimensional circle (See Urizen).
This knowledge is not new, it has always existed so long as men have had systems they've had rules and orders that transcend the linear temporal unity of signifier, signified, and symbol, which itself is defined as the fusion of opposites.
This system of circularity is not the end all and be all of the story, it is still merely two dimensional, and as we'll see, the Book of Revelation and the Book of Job boast an even more advanced spiral geometry.
The line of signification, can then be transformed into a circle. If there is continuity at the extremes, that is to say, something defined in contradiction, like a word made out of flesh, an alpha and omega, we have a continuum bounded at the extremes, the extremes meeting, and the first and the last are situated next to each other in a one dimensional circle (See Urizen).
This knowledge is not new, it has always existed so long as men have had systems they've had rules and orders that transcend the linear temporal unity of signifier, signified, and symbol, which itself is defined as the fusion of opposites.
This system of circularity is not the end all and be all of the story, it is still merely two dimensional, and as we'll see, the Book of Revelation and the Book of Job boast an even more advanced spiral geometry.
Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 3
1.) The Sign is Not Arbitrary
Regardless of what you've been taught, the sign in Western tradition traces its lineage to specific concepts. For instance, the aleph is based on the root word Ox, and is traditionally depicted as a upside down triangle with lines extending from the base vertices, or in other words, an upside down A. Likewise, every other letter refers to some readily present concept in the ancient world; Gamma, traces to camel, Delta, traces to door; Mem traces to water etc. It is largely because Saussure is so wrong that I initially took great issue with his work. The problem here is that the historical argument is being left out when such an utterance is emitted. So it is not the sign itself that is arbitrary, it's the system of values that is largely arbitrary. And more to the point, this notion that the sign is arbitrary, itself is arbitrary.
Now, I understand the rationale behind such an opinion, it is a reaction to religious dictates; but if we get caught up in reactionary politics, can we really claim any pretense to science?
Sure why not. Take a look at evolution for instance. The Platonic and religious argument is that man fell from a higher state into this lowly state we find ourselves in now. Evolution inverts this saying we are growing toward higher levels of consciousness. Again the Big Bang states that creation was an act of fusion between matter and anti-matter, while in Genesis, God separates the heavens from the earth. So in the wake of this revelation, is there any science, or is science merely the inversion of religion?
Now, the insight of Saussure is that any sign could have any meaning, and this is true, so long as you understand the historical argument, and that words have a specific trajectory, and certain layers can be peeled back and understood in terms of one another.
Take the numerological value of Mem, which is 40. Mem is the Hebrew word for water, and God poured rain upon the world during the great flood for forty days and forty nights. Then there is Enki, the Sumerian god of the waters, whose number is forty. There is a definite patterning of information, a trajectory, that we are in danger of losing when we consider such signs to be arbitrary.
The same also is true for utterances such as "our system of values is arbitrary." They are passed down generation to generation, and so arbitrary really is not the term to describe this. Chaotics predicts that nothing is arbitrary, everything comes from some source, but it also predicts a non-linear recursive aspect to the linearity of passage from one generation to the next.
So, is the sign arbitrary?
Yes and no. If we are caught in a web where we think that the sign is handed down to us by God, then yes, we should change our minds. If we are not, then look to the historical argument, because it reveals what Saussure's argument conceals: that the sign is literally both arbitrary, and not-arbitrary, and in fact, arbitrariness is a useless and impossible distinction to critique language from.
Regardless of what you've been taught, the sign in Western tradition traces its lineage to specific concepts. For instance, the aleph is based on the root word Ox, and is traditionally depicted as a upside down triangle with lines extending from the base vertices, or in other words, an upside down A. Likewise, every other letter refers to some readily present concept in the ancient world; Gamma, traces to camel, Delta, traces to door; Mem traces to water etc. It is largely because Saussure is so wrong that I initially took great issue with his work. The problem here is that the historical argument is being left out when such an utterance is emitted. So it is not the sign itself that is arbitrary, it's the system of values that is largely arbitrary. And more to the point, this notion that the sign is arbitrary, itself is arbitrary.
Now, I understand the rationale behind such an opinion, it is a reaction to religious dictates; but if we get caught up in reactionary politics, can we really claim any pretense to science?
Sure why not. Take a look at evolution for instance. The Platonic and religious argument is that man fell from a higher state into this lowly state we find ourselves in now. Evolution inverts this saying we are growing toward higher levels of consciousness. Again the Big Bang states that creation was an act of fusion between matter and anti-matter, while in Genesis, God separates the heavens from the earth. So in the wake of this revelation, is there any science, or is science merely the inversion of religion?
Now, the insight of Saussure is that any sign could have any meaning, and this is true, so long as you understand the historical argument, and that words have a specific trajectory, and certain layers can be peeled back and understood in terms of one another.
Take the numerological value of Mem, which is 40. Mem is the Hebrew word for water, and God poured rain upon the world during the great flood for forty days and forty nights. Then there is Enki, the Sumerian god of the waters, whose number is forty. There is a definite patterning of information, a trajectory, that we are in danger of losing when we consider such signs to be arbitrary.
The same also is true for utterances such as "our system of values is arbitrary." They are passed down generation to generation, and so arbitrary really is not the term to describe this. Chaotics predicts that nothing is arbitrary, everything comes from some source, but it also predicts a non-linear recursive aspect to the linearity of passage from one generation to the next.
So, is the sign arbitrary?
Yes and no. If we are caught in a web where we think that the sign is handed down to us by God, then yes, we should change our minds. If we are not, then look to the historical argument, because it reveals what Saussure's argument conceals: that the sign is literally both arbitrary, and not-arbitrary, and in fact, arbitrariness is a useless and impossible distinction to critique language from.
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