Intuitionism.

To surrender to one’s Intuition is to surrender the clamp of conscious control to the Other. How long can one live without permitting this to happen? Why does my professor insist that Intuitionism is a false criterion for ethics? In truth, it may be the only sensible one! Life abo0unds in such possibilities that only a totally sedentary person could deny that one’s Unconscious Mind knows infinitely more than does one’s consciousness. One feels a connectedness with it intuitively, and therein is paradise, and therein is Sanity: The recognition that Life is paradise. What could be more native to the Soul than the immediate, felt, uncontroverted and all most unrecognized recognition that everything is divine manifestation, peculiar and more Alive than one’s own self, boundless and totally interconnected with it? Like the caterpillar that curses the frog for asking too many questions, this is our native state. Only excessive intellectual bullying and teasing creates that schizophrenic split that primitives call the Death of the Soul. When one first makes the Visionary State an object of knowledge by remembering it in its absence, how could one call this loss anything but a vile death??

All ethical thought must at first be felt. We do not act ethically out of an infantile fear of reproof; that could not be ethical. Some passion moves us, charging us with direction. This wells up from the body and fills the heart long before it settles in the mind. This is the impulse to transcend boundaries, no different from the love that one feels for all things, but that it moves towards people.

Surely paltry reason could not occupy this role. Reason is an aesthetic trend, as is causality. Logic only appears amidst symbols. Only once experience has been reduced to abstractions – and this is all ways done with the intent to Control – can it be made “sense” of. But who would trade unadulterated Splendor and spontaneity for the feebleness of estrangement betwixt subject and object? What Integration could one descend into if one began with a schizophrenic split, no different from the Christian [and Platonic] tradition of severing one part of the Soul from the other? Why pretend towards a knowledge if that means to pretend that the World is known but hidden, as though our relationship to reality were always a debilitated one, a disempowered and passionless subservience to the Socratic ideal? And what could be more pompous than to presume upon one’s own knowledge, reducing all to the Self as though no Other wove in and out of every action and decision, haunting the medium before us with potentialities that the Self does not yet comprehend except by feeble wisps of intuition? Is all systematic thinking not just interference aimed to impress?

My professor insisted that the “competent ethical reasoner” – the one that has learned how to reason – would not be a Schindler. What this means is that his ethic justifies with pitiful subtlety the deaths of thousands of Jews. For what end? Comfort? Survival, for the love of God? The fuck. It is nothing short of neurotic. Then he has the nerve to generalize and to say that all boys of fifteen think highly of their own sexuality. What sort of unanimal beast romps into the hidden life of a young adolescent boorishly and, in the words of the Bard, tries to sound him from his lowest note? Besides: Any one could meet so arbitrary a description, because the Signifier never adequately signifies the signified. What perversion then to reduce a child to an object.

Dm.A.A.

Aphorisms.

Aphorisms.

11.       There is no argument in the plaint that God created a harsh world. God gave us everything, including Free Will, Responsibility, and the capacity to weather any Natural Disaster with the poise of a Buddhist monk who lights his self on fire. God is not to be blamed for Human Stupidity, for stupidity is a choice.

22.       Common Sense is what minds flee to when they have not thought something through.

33.       We are not responsible for our past. We are responsible for our Future.

44.       People who ask: What the hell are you talking about? Are trying to make you look stupid in their own befuddlement.

55.       We can draw on the Power of the Past, but not on the ‘Authority’ of it.

66.       God does have a plan, but it takes too long to fathom and perchance longer to explain.

77.       A poet’s intent is not the effect of a cause. It is rather what occurs in the space betwixt what Is and what Could Be when one says: This is good enough.

Dm.A.A.

Time and Poetry. [How Art disproves Causality.]

Time and Poetry. [How Art disproves Causality.]

Sheldrake was right, yet again. The present does not come out of the past into the future; it comes From the Future as one of a series of Possibilities.

There is no Causality in Art. When I move one word from one stanza to another, I wonder (causally): What WOULD that first stanza looked like HAD I put the word in the earlier stanza earlier?

I begin to imagine: The stanza would have had a greater Order. BECAUSE the word would have been in a different place, its presence would have displaced the entire following stanza. This is Causal Reasoning. It is all so a fallacy because I do not know for certain that I would not have written the stanza in the same irregular pattern.

From a Nietzschean perspective, the stanza originally came into being as a synthesis of that irregular pattern and, in its midst, the incidental presence of the Word. By [re]moving the Word, one does not disturb the pattern; the water remains the same even in the absence of a prior stone.

The poet attests: I wrote this to be intentionally irregular! The causal theorist, thinking to one-up affect with logic, insists: But in fact that was only your out-come, not your intent. Had it been your intent, you would have written it that way from the beginning. It was only by chance that you made an error, only corrected it partly, and called the settled-for mess of an outcome ‘your intent’.

Clever but false. For in fact the poem was All Ready Complete in the Future, and one had to make attempts, experiments, and revisions to find it. Had one failed, probably by sloth, the Future would have not become a Present.

Most artists will attest to this.

Dm.A.A.

On Science, God, and their Illusory Distinction.

On Science, God, and their Illusory Distinction.

I am reminded of the joke – I think it is a Mexican joke – about the Mosquito and the Elephant. This mosquito lands on an elephant’s raw hide and thinks: I’m going to give this elephant a good time.

The elephant feels the mosquito on its back, stands up, and begins to rub its back against a tree, emitting moans and groans. The mosquito, hearing these sounds and feeling the vibration beneath its legs, considers himself successful.

What I find to be the significance of the story is that the male mosquito implements a method, gets the results that he was looking for, but was fundamentally confused about the nature of what was going on. His method ‘worked’, but it said nothing of the Truth; he was none the wiser.

Our Western conception of God is that He is traditionally omni-potent and omni-scient. In fact, it would come as no surprise if the word ‘Science’ emerged from the word ‘Omniscience’. In the absence of a firm belief in such a God in the nineteenth century, people turned to Science to fill His place. In the words of Nietzsche: We did not tear down the old idols just so that we may erect new ones.

Yet despite his plaints, the Dead God to this day haunts the Western Psyche in the guise of Science with a capital ‘S’.

At the root of this fallacy that has slept through more than a hundred years of development in Every Other Field of Study lie several presumptions. The first is that Power is Good.

An omni-potent God was a Just and a Good God, so any method that brings us closer to this ideal is all so Good. The reason that this is easy to deny is that it goes without saying; the a priori value of Power appears incontrovertible to some members of our culture. So Technology becomes an end and an ethic in and of its self. Yet technology by its self, like Art, is not a menace. All so, like Art, its roots are in the primordial Dawn of Man, long before the twi-light of Modern Science. Is it not possible that, like Art, its origin is ultimately unknown and unknowable to us? In one’s Dreams, one can see many inventions and many works of Art one had never seen in the Waking World. So what does one require to make these Platonic forms manifest in Reality? They have to work first in theory, because otherwise not only would we not take risks with them; we would not even find the Funds to facilitate their production!

Yet theoretically we Knew the secret ingredients all along, just like we knew the Possibility of this creation, for in the absence of the ingredients there would have been an absent Possibility.

The reasoning seems less alien once one considers Heidegger’s reversals of Common Sense in both Technology and Art. Art does not come from the Artist. Rather, an artwork creates the Artist whilst the Artist creates the artwork, and Art creates them both.

This is of course of indispensable value to many Artists who would otherwise suffer the burdens of being a Creator, subjecting the Work to too much criticism on the part of the Artist (which they would mistake for self-criticism), rather than respecting it as something that belongs ultimately to Art.

Technology in Heidegger’s view follows a similar pattern. It uses us as much as we use it, a;; most as though it had been there all along long before we encountered it. (which is at least incontrovertibly the case in any Individual Life, so it is primordially easy to imagine.)

The United States’ military strategy for Nuclear War corroborates Heidegger’s point. A man I knew in high repute visited a facility housing missiles. The facility operator explained that, in the event of a foreign attack, the policy was to fire back.

The out-come would be mutually assured destruction, with the exception of the facility, which would be protected by virtue of the retaliation. The aim was not to preserve people, but to preserve Technology.

So the second fallacy is that Science and technology are interchangeable. Yet as I have pointed out they are entirely different entities. Science could be described as a conscious process whereas Technology can be seen to be largely unconscious. This was why Jung attributed the former to his egoic personality. The fallacy is that simply because we are able to produce results that we understand how we do so.

Watts pointed out that the Eastern God performed the entire Universe without knowing How It was Done. The motive was self-evident: To surprise and baffle one’s self by separating off into isolated and imperfect parts.

I have pointed out that to step from Personal Subjectivity to a Universal, one must meet one central requirement.

It is not sufficient to say: You can see a trend, because only by force could you compel others to make a similar observation, only by insult could you elevate your self above those who do not see it, and only by a leap of faith into absurdity could you pretend that others who use the same words to describe the experience are in fact having the same experience. Yet a Universal claim could be possibly sound if one provides an explanation for Why it would be so for multiple and maybe all people.

Due to the relative novelty of the proposition (relative because I do not immediately recall having heard it before), I can understand that considering the idea may feel at first akin to walking off into thin air, as in a cartoon, and looking down to find one has no prior ground to stand on. Yet in philosophy the ground materializes under one’s feet for those who can create new ideas and handle the Vertigo.

Watts meets my criterion by explaining Shiva’s motives – The Why – for being at once omni-present and imperfect and ignorant by the same token. Why a God – or a man in His image (or in man’s self-image, which is nonetheless inferred from conception of God) would desire total Control and Knowledge, pathologically, when the possibilities of eternity and infinity lie available to Him, remains unanswered.

Dm.A.A.

On Reporting.

On Reporting.

It is hard for me to read anything that passes its self off as fact and is only loosely based on immediate experience. If you don’t even have the nerve to insert yourself into the description, showing how you reacted and why these things would have appeared this way to you, then I cannot trust you as a writer.

My plaint is not a sentimental one. “And here I might have distorted this” encourages the writer to elaborate, and that gives more information. Rather than a direct statement, cumbersome to work with because it is definitionally dubious, the reader is given now a series of either very concrete details or potential impressions, as a kind of colloid, left to decide what might have happened without being expected to believe it. This is not an insult to a reader’s intelligence, whereas an account that makes pretenses towards objectivity is.

Dm.A.A.