GNOSIS AND THE AGE OF (INTUITIVE) POST-SKEPTICISM.

GNOSIS AND THE AGE OF (INTUITIVE) POST-SKEPTICISM.

A Return to Eden.

There are principally two schools of thought in the world: That of Gnosis and that of Agnosis.

The agnostics believe that truth belongs to a selected few.

But the Gnostics believe it to be ubiquitous. The only issue is that there are so few of them with the tenacity to assert the truth that they too become elitists. And naive man confuses the one elitist with the other.

The agnostics are traditional Christians. They are all so Confucianists, Orthodox Jews, orthodox Muslims, Shintoists, and members of any religious group that lends authority to an organization with the HOPE that that authority will trickle down to their selves. They are all so thus the atheists, the dogmatic empiricists, the reductionists, the patriots, the consumers of trickle down economic theory, and the so-called scientists. What they all have in common is a preference for the security of collective opinion. There is a fetish for structure that is raised over their heads like a roof-beam to protect them from the forces of nature. Yet it is bound to be stultifying to those intellectual giants who like Ares scrape the ceiling when they try to enter into discussion in the cushioned and dismissive home of a dogmatic agnostic.

Among agnostics there is all ways an appeal to tradition, the mire of the past. And so it is that communal agreement is necessary to complete the cross. Communal agreement appeals horizontal, yet it is supported vertically by history. And it comes in the forms of both communion and peer review.

By contrast the Gnostics understand most of the epistemological pretensions of the agnostics to be not merely arbitrary but to be traps. No structuralist, for instance, can fully imagine the frustration that a post-structuralist feels in trying to decide whether or not to break up a paragraph HALF-WAY THROUGH the depiction of a given group. The distinction is made difficult because it is so arbitrary; why try to align the proverbial “reader’s” notion of what a “group” is with the breaking of a paragraph in two? must one invisible and imagined boundary line up with another imminent one? (imminent here is of course meant to refer to the opposite of invisible and imagined.) Even a parenthetical phrase is much too stifling, yet in its absence the arrogant structuralist DEMANDS clarity and presumes upon it even in its absence. The parallels to rape are not entirely exaggerated, just miss attributed.

And of course because to write means to choose some thing from innumerable possibilities, not innumerable so much because of quantity so much as there is no time in which to count them, for they are constantly moving, what is left out is just as important as what is included. At least at the moment that one chooses one remembers that one is not driven ENtiRELY by necessity; the nature of CHOICE at least lends one room to be SOME what arbitrary. But the structuralist agnostic sees only what is imminent and not what is transcendent. Again he DEMANDS clarity and INSISTS upon the authority of what ever text he likes, or other wise he insists on its total absence of authority because he has “gotten the gist of it”. And while certain things are stupid at first blush, without a doubt, it is funny to note that agnostic, authoritarian people, whilst demanding attention for their favourite works, still are prone to dismiss any threat to their dogmae with infantile aggression.

Dm.A.A.