On Dogma and Intersubjectivity.

An Appeal to Mass Opinion does not render the subjectivity of individual opinion any more objective. All that it serves to indicate is the capacity for people in general to delude themselves (and each other) in pursuit of that Objectivity (or perhaps simple participation in a group). Thus, the reasoning is seen to be circular. To insist otherwise is a suicidal argument because if everyone were to make the same insistence then such a mass delusion would be more likely. Again, a circular argument. However moving the passions towards “Objectivity” and “shared experience” may be, that does not render them any more logical as impulses. If it is possible to conceive of only two members of a given social group to delude themselves and each other into a feeling of Agreement, then this can be extrapolated upon the entire community. “Overwhelming evidence” thus becomes synonymous with “overwhelming opinion” or even “overwhelming mis-information”.

God is a Fact.

The Atheists are going to love this. First I begin by saying
that Science is Dead and now I proclaim that God is a Fact.

By “atheists”, of course, I mean a specific, stereotyped,
self-caricaturing group of dogmatists that I envision in my mind, based on
extrapolations from experience.

They may very well say: “Have you been living under the
rock?”

Let me make my point clearer, then:

What is a Fact? A fact, by my definition, (drawn from
personal reading rather than some readily-accessible definition on the internet*)
is something that is irrefutable. One cannot FAIRLY negate its existence.



Hitherto, I had claimed that, usually, a “fact” is the
result of not having thought things through carefully. But that is in fact not
a fact but an opinion taken to be a fact.

Why is God a fact then?

That I cannot explain and need not to. Suffice to ask is:
Why ought I not to proclaim it, nonchalantly? Is it perhaps because I proclaim
it with such confidence that one should think it was as though the Fact had to
be accepted by every one?



And therein lies the fallacy – there’s the rub. “As Though”.
I do not expect at all for others to accept this Fact on my say-so. That would
be a matter of opinion. Further more, I do not even begin to claim that anyone
could avail himself of this fact. But most importantly perhaps (for you the
skeptics to hear): I do not claim that the Absence of God is not a fact. But
then I cannot claim that its absence Is a fact, for I do not know such a fact.
But others might.

Obviously, dealing with a Paradox that is the ground of this
incomprehensible Universe, it is not too absurd to sensibly say: Those two
facts – the Existence of God for one person and its Non-existence for another –
are not mutually exclusive. I see a total vacancy of reason for why this most basic
of paradoxes should be condemned as meaningless. In fact, the verity of such a
paradox invokes the entire essence of Humility and Doubt.

There can BE no facts in science, because science as a mode
of inquiry deals with theory. To confuse an opinion in science with fact is to
exit science, for science must all ways be open to being falsified lest it
fester. Nothing is settled in science, except, as I have said, by overlooking
things, Too great is the tendency, I might say, for people operating in what
must surely be a very linear mode of thinking to settle upon a hypothesis as “fact”
because they do not avail themselves of the imagination to think outside of the
philosophical confines that render another variant impossible to conceive. This
is perhaps why science condemns philosophy, so that as a world-view it may
adhere to its existing philosophical prejudices and refuse to admit that they
are entirely prejudices by any definition.

So the atheist says: Science rescued us from Religion. It
did nothing of the kind. To deny my freedom to claim “Science is Dead” and “God
is a Fact” is to enact a dogma, the very thing that the (again, stereotypically)
atheist person hypocritically crusades against. There must be at least three
categories: science, religion, and creed. Throughout the known history of the
humanity, man has condemned human consciousness and even the human body to
slavery through Creed. This was done in by the Church, and now it is done by
the Scientific Community. But there have all ways been outliers in defiance of
it. In ancient Chinese society, they were the Taoists. In Indian society, they
were the Hindu yogis. In Christian society, the mystics and several theologians
were such a heretical group. And now a new form of Shamanism is emerging out of
old traditions, seemingly combining the old forms. Meanwhile, there are
researchers in the Community of scientists that are vilified as heretics for
challenging essentially philosophical presuppositions. Maybe what Philosophy has
to offer us is another form of shamanism and freedom from dogma.

Science itself here may be divided in two: World-view and
Inquiry. The Inquiry is based in Doubt. Yet Doubt is all ways a matter of
opinion, so even there Science has nothing to do with Fact. One can only Doubt
an Opinion. One does not Doubt what one Knows.

Whoever proclaims that I ought NOT to proclaim the
Factuality of God, I ask: Why? One might say: “That’s just your opinion.”
Wrong. It may be YOUR opinion that it is a matter of opinion. But you are
mistaken. To the best of my memory, this Fact had all ways BEEN a fact even
when I leant it not the name God. It was a Fact to me even when I held the
opinion that there was no God or that I did not know him. But it was not until
I lost God that I found him again and found him to be God; hitherto I simply
had not used that word.

But here I must make it clear: I do not subscribe to the
Bible. The Bible is not a fact, for every reading of it is done by a human
being. It must surely be a matter of opinion. Even if one finds a Fact within
it, that Fact cannot be binding upon anyone. No Facts can. Only opinions can,
and most or all of such things are done poorly. Why should you condemn me for
speaking of God? You cannot condemn me for a fact because I cannot change a
Fact, and therefore I cannot be held responsible. I can only be held
responsible for my opinions, which I can change; they are malleable. For you to
claim that this Fact originated out of Opinion is misinformed, presumptuous,
and wrong; I may have never HAD an opinion of God; I only came to discover it.
I was raised more or less secularly and identified myself that way, to the best
of my knowledge, until I realized that what I craved, lost and found again was
God. But that narrative is all ready an opinion; it is merely how I make sense
of my past to lend myself an Ethos. This last concern is on my mind: Atheists
who do NOT possess the Fact of God’s absence but merely possess an opinion of
it would surely rage against me in order to defend their opinions. This
insecurity is understandable. As I have said: It is totally possible for one to
possess the Fact of God’s Absence. Yet those who do not will be insecure in
their Opinions.



*People who look up definitions on their phones crack me up,
though in a bad way.



Dm.A.A.

In Defense of Faulkner.

Ali insisted that Faulkner was a part of the Illumination movement. This un-nerves me. There is an immediacy and Honesty with which Faulkner writes that is incontrovertibly True. Yet this does not seem to occur to Ali, or if it does he muddies it with knowledge. To speak of Faulkner’s Truth as though it were the kind of ‘truth’ that Derrida could deconstruct is entirely arbitrary. I refuse to be seduced. How could one even relate the two and do justice to their sovereignty? One must draw a distinction betwixt them! This truth can be deconstructed; that one can not.

To confuse the two as one is ironically Fascistic; it is to deny the Individual. My entire life has been a negative enterprise. The individual says No time and time again. No, I do not want to partake. No, don’t identify me with that. No, I am not a part of culture. Faulkner was not a product of a movement! One must judge the merit of the movement, if indeed he was influenced by it, by his sovereign integrity – Not vice-versa! But for an Extravert to draw such a line of Distinction – to depend upon such a line of distinction: Individuation! – is too much to ask.

Simply because we employ one word – Truth – for both means Nothing. One should know better than to worry if one is mis-understood; to know a Truth suffices. The artifice of truth – Culture – deserves and needs to be taken apart. It is malleable, and Directed Thought must serve Non-directed Thought. But Individual Truth, manifest in the non-social and the Non-directed, stands apart, in the healthy individual, as a monolithic source of authority by which Culture is modeled after private needs in the individual psyche.

 

Dm.A.A.

Science is Dead.

I wonder why I feel trepidation writing this note. I suppose that it is because I have become so sick of attacks from people who are like-minded that I NEED this note to qualify the statement which is the Note's title. Had this been a different forum and medium, the three words themselves would suffice. But now I have something to write about!

At one point, I encountered a quote by Stephen Hawking, an old hero of mine, in the internet. I wondered if it was a joke. He said that philosophy was dead and that science would come to take its place. That it all ready had taken its place.

The sentiment seems to be about a hundred years old. For a man who tried to keep up with the times, this seemed like a joke.

When I was volunteering at my old High School with the Speech and Debate team, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Library. This was a privilege of such magnitude it should have been a right. You could not fathom my joy. The book that I picked out from the shelves that day was a rather thick but very clearly and sonorously written text called "The Passion of the Western Mind". It was recommended by Joseph Campbell, as I would find.

There was an entire chapter, I think following (but maybe preceding a chapter on the collapse of Romanticism) entitled "The Crisis in Modern Science". I read it and looked up from it and around at all of my fellow patrons at the library. I wondered how in the years I had slipped; the post-modern sentiments therein had been entirely the point where I had last saved my game; beyond this point the past several years have felt like intellectual regression (although emotional growth, one might say.). And as I beheld the students, I thought: Most probably every one of them KNOWS what this book had said, intuitively. It seems unlikely that I had drawn my conclusions from this very text and passage and simply forgotten (although the possibility looms, perchance never to be resolved). The conclusion seems INTUITIVE. I had READ Hawking, and Heinlein, and Asimov, et cetera, long before High School. The progress of the mind led me to abandon them. This author had simply leant a mature voice to all ready brilliant sentiments; as Andrew had pointed out to me, Brilliance and Maturity were two different things. Salinger's books evidence that.

Science could not ever, in its definitionally orthodox and methodical nature, meet the standard, if one could be set, of an Absolute Truth. Any kind of Truth that Science produced was as much constructed as perceived. Psychology made readily apparent the phenomenon that one subjectivises the world; Heisenberg did the same thing. Science could only be valued for its practical applications, and those had been ethically suspect for ages. To speak with such grimness has become so debased a sentiment in our happy-go-lucky Positivist society that it's no wonder that suicide is such a problem; as a friend of mine who I suspect to have been a suicide victim said: When she attempted suicide, it seemed entirely LOGICAL. Of course, if one villifies the darker of the human being's emotions, it had all ways been my suspicion, this is a natural conclusion: Man is a useless passion.

All of these sentiments had been readily apparent and troubling to me in High School, yet somehow it felt as though I were alone in them. Only age could inform me that Camus and others had all ready struggled with purportedly the same difficulties. With the loss of innocence in High School came a loss of faith in the Positivistic pretensions of the Scientific Community. This was no mere rebellion against my parents, who had all ways been researchers. It was a rejection of my own faith in what I read, which of course had never or seldom been more enthusiastic in favour of Hawking or Asimov than it was in favour of Steinbeck and Rowling. By the time that I had matured to the point that I could comprehend Shakespeare, which seemed much more complex than Hawking, it seemed definite that I could lend no more authority to science than to literature. Besides, people like Thoreau, Poe, and Hugo tended to describe experiences with such detail and brilliance as I had never observed in science, which however seemed to pride itself in not only "theory" but "observation". Scholarly speaking, I did not see what the big deal was. This group of people here took a set of philosophical postulates and presuppositions -- the Scientific Method -- and had run with it for several centuries. These others more or less developed their own modes of inquiry, and they were preferable to read and offered a bit more hope in the midst of my deep depression. Camus explains this depression as the Absurd: In having the structure of an atom described to him, his appetite for Clarity and Unity, a so moving passion in the human heart, is whetted. But by the time that the scientist gets down to the sub-atomic particles, Camus is all ready disappointed; the scientist has been "reduced to poetry". Remembering the Illustrated Brief History of Time, with its models of the atom over the course of human intellectual history, I am reminded of an assignment I had in the sixth grade. We were given a chart with seven boxes. There were two rows and four columns, but the boxes were separated by long, thin, intersecting spaces. There were four boxes therefore in the top row and three in the bottom row. Each of the columns was labeled with a style of government from the history of Hellenistic Greece: "Monarchy", "Oligarchy", "Tyranny", and "Democracy". The two rows were as follows: "Pros" and "Cons". We were expected to list the benefits and detriments of Monarchy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny. There was no second box for Democracy; we were only expected to list its Pros. I might have written some Cons in the space underneath though. Had I read Nietzsche and Marx by that time, as well as known more about Benjamin Franklin, I would have had something qualified to name-drop.

To have lost my faith in Science, Intuitively, was not an ideological transformation limited to Science; it was an entire parting with Certainty and a coming to maturation in a post-modern world. It was as though the ground had dissolved beneath my feet, as I like to say. Yet I wonder if this is really as Universal an experience as people make it out to be. Is anything? In this modern life with its growing Mass, people are too keen to level and to generalise in order to keep moving. They have to keep moving, as though to escape something. Are they trying to escape that which had caught up with me? With Camus? With Salinger? With everyone I could think of who still impressed me after that age?

With the aforementioned recent finding of this book -- "The Passion of the Western Mind" -- it certainly seemed as though Camus had at least been wrong about one thing: There IS hope, in that we are all in this together. Surely MOST of the world -- the civilised world -- has recognised this by now. The evidence seemed overwhelming. As early as Nietzsche and Lev Shestov the Absolutist pretensions of Science were suspect as merely new idols used to replace the creed of the Christian Church. The parallels between Scientific dogmatism, Religious dogmatism, and any other kind of dogmatism are so readily emotionally apparent upon first meeting that the three kinds (and all others and sub-divisions) seem inscrutable from one another. After all: One had been raised to believe that somewhere, SOMEONE knew everything you were going through. So surely, even if this was not a God, it was the solidarity of man and the Universality of human experience? If Common Sense has any authority, it must be that the same basically negative conclusion I had come to about Science, amongst many others, was shared by most?

IMAGINE MY DISAPPOINTMENT. Upon return to the Speech and Debate class-room, I was met with a gang of these young, "bright", promising pupils in unaninimity that one cannot "challenge Science" in a round and expect to win. Even the president of the group had to waver momentarily in his confidence, with a slight stutter of nervousness, when suggesting that Science "was wrong in the past". And I had to remind his opponents, as a judge, that all though the opponent made the claim that "Science may have been wrong in the past, but it's not wrong now," that same sentiment might easily have been held in the past. The class laughed, more or less. Hubris. The last atom to be published in A Brief HIstory of TIme was Democracy. There are all ways those who forget that even the present has its Cons.

Of course, true people of Science do not hold this view. Popper pointed out that all theory is falsifiable. I don't mean to put my parents out of the job, only to adhere to my own quest. Science is beautiful. Like theatre. Like Painting. Like architecture. But when I hear someone say "Science does not give a [you can imagine]" in assertion that, say:

1. Women are worse drivers than men.
2. Human beings are intrinsically greedy.
3. Any other prejudice you can think of that someone could easily construct an experiment for, "test", and decide what to determine as conclusive and inconclusive,

I think that we could do well exercise the same kind of politeness (I avoid saying "Political Correctedness") in Science as in the Arts. Why exempt any process of human subjectivity? After all: It's obvious that there was no such thing as Gravity before Newton observed it. As Heidegger pointed out, to his credit, any Truth (of which I would exempt deeply personal, usually ineffable experiences) was the comportment of an actual Thing or Being, a Mental Conception, and the Language necessary to refer to the mental conception and the indicate the Thing. So you might have all ways fallen down the stairs before Newton came along, but there was no "law of Gravity" before we constructed it, just like there is no current "law of reverse Gravity" that explains why we grow upwards and seldom downwards. One can watch, say, a bit of mucus following one's finger in the bath, but when one begins to imagine: Tiny vacuums are forming about my finger-tip, concentrating in my pores and grooves, and attracting this little particle... Well, one has been reduced to poetry. The immediacy of the non-verbal is gone; we are now in the realm of Words, of Concepts, and of Intersubjectivity. The naked experience has been clothed in abstraction.

Plato suggested a dichotomy of the Noumenal World and the Phenomenal World. There is what we Know and what we Think. He justified this by Inspiration. Kant rejected this and yet accepted it; he said that if there WERE a Noumenal World, we would be unable to contact it. Typical Kant. HOW would one be able to SPEAK of a world that we "Know" if one had never "Known" it? Well, I subscribe to the tentative theory that the Noumenal World, and even Certainty, are possibilities. This is my hypothesis: All abstract, intersubjective, readily available knowledge -- the entire scholastic, historical, scientific, frame of reference, et al -- belongs to the Phenomenal. We THINK these things, but they do not have the luster of Knowledge. This seems to hold with Eastern thought as well as with Western thought. If any Certainty of Truth is possible, it is personal and individual. True intersubjectivity is incredibly rare; one is lucky to experience it once a year. We can all agree, for instance, that the "sky is blue" because we would be damned to call it something else on a bright, cloudless day. But for me it seems not mere sophistry but the very essence of truth to make this observation: The fact that every painting you have ever seen of the sky looks distinct proves that every painter saw a different sky. Few of us just have the nerve and patience to render it. Furthermore, the "sky" that I see when I tell you about it -- the sky "out there" -- is NOT the sky that I saw when I was five years old, whic only in passing and at those rare moments of solidarity can I avail myself of again. The forer has the colour of blue construction paper and is projected outwards upon the "out there". The True Sky is everywhere around me, nebulously sapphire blue and maddeningly beautiful.

Our Mass-mindedness obscures that sky in all the ways that Huxley predicted in Brave New World. Let me make my point clear: Each of us belongs to a tower at the top of which one can see the Sun over the hills. Yet that solitary window does not face any other windows in the castle. We can descend onto the parapet and mingle, but then we will not see the Sun. Very rarely do we see each other and the Sun at the same time.

The people who are trying to make it "big" in the intellectual world would not begin to question that presuppositions of Science. Money talks, B.S. walks. The government funds Science and Science we get. But the brilliant minds of our time that pick up where Einstein left off are not a part of this oppressive majority. Rupert Sheldrake said that he had been an Anglican for I think twenty-three years and had never heard the word "heretic" used once in the Church. Yet he has heard it used innumerable times in the Scientific Community, perhaps chiefly targeted at him for his refusal to accept the philosophical, unverified prejudices of Materialism and other dogmas.

For a very long time, Philosophers have known that Science was dying. Yet if one de-funds History and Philosophy, what do you expect to happen? Oh Brave New World that has such people in it. People with no qualms with repeating themselves or saying that they "Agree" will line up and crusade against you for any "unverified" (read: Original) thought. Who am I to drop a bomb like "Science is Dead"? If I cannot with-stand the shelling of Common Sense, maybe I will start believing it. Yet I know enough about the history of religious creed and the evolution of common sense not to be worried: Only depressingly annoyed. Shestov pointed out very clearly how Common Sense and Logic work within a tightly knit community, and with the Internet now, it jeels impossible to escape the entangling Net of like-mindedness. Add that introversion has all ways been a minority and that does not help at all. I need only to remind myself of these things, though, and I won't be impressed by hearing appeals to the virtues of the Scientific Method. The Method is a Method, not an idol. To commit to it entirely in one's life is to commit philosophical suicide and to join the Church during the Inquisition. And that is alone enough for one solitary to say "Science is Dead", as Nietzsche would have said of God (and science as well) decades ago.

To defend science according to science is stupid. What psychology has shown us, as well as physics, is that, just as philosophy can be used to get out of philosophy, science can be used to invalidate science. It's a world within a world, but only a dolt would say: "This state of consciousness that I am in now, which is entirely logically understood and agreed-upon by my friends and perhaps by the majority, is certainly the entirety of experience. There has been nothing I have forgotten or over-looked." My whole struggle has been to maintain contact with something more vulnerable and true. In that very process what had appeared totally clear was lost. The quest of the philosopher is a nebulous and paradoxal one. Enough people remember my depression from high school to note my seriousness, though, and that consistency should lend me merit.

I could not bring myself to believe in a "society" outside of my mind that has more authority than my own "anecdotal" experience. What is it? Everyone on facebook has a different set of friends. If my "society" is the sum of my relationships with people, how is it that I occupy the same society as anyone else? To appeal to its authority would be to appeal to a narcissistic projection. But I am consciously and unconsciously subtle enough to know how to please and flatter people. If you must hear me say that the sky is blue, I just might do it if there's something in it for me. If I refuse to, soon the "Objective" world dissolves. I am left only with the subjective. How do *I* know what the totality of all Societies is like? I am not God, to the best of my knowledge, and that is a Noumenal world which, if I cannot contact it, can be said not to exist.

I would be foolish to project the logic of my own mind onto the World and to say that the World follows the same laws. This was the Leap that Camus was talking about. It is entirely emotional, not logical. True, pure logic all ways transcends itself. I don't care much for the dogma of people living in a snow-globe; I only fear them when they attack or when they retaliate. All conceptual knowledge is a world within a world. We need it. We eed to get out of it. We may need it to get out of it. I would like to live in the society that I envisioned the adult world to be: One of radically Individual people who re-invent themselves with every hour to suit a changing Universe. But perhaps to project THAT hope upon the world is equally naiive.

Dmitry.

On Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

I believe that it was Deleuze who pointed out the parallel - ingenious, really - betwixt Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I had myself intuited this condition (and immediately experienced it) from the moment that I committed myself to my first 'paying job'. Thankfully, I never went to the extreme of counting my own money and 'managing my finances'; I would have surely gone Crazy and never even known.
The human mind is not naturally equipped to perform mathematics. This is the theme of my first novel. Give me an imminent Bank Figure and I will take your word (or number) for it.
Ask me to check your math and I will, if I accept and fall into the Devil's hands, become lost in a forest that only the ignorant judge to be totally penetrable.
Deleuze speaks of schizophrenia as the state of agitation betwixt the Absolute and the Real. Numbers cannot exist outside us Absolutely; what is Real is our Conception of them, and 'our' is a tentative word. To say that they are Absolutely Real, one must say that one has Absolute Certainty of them. But Certainty in Mathematics is impossible because we cannot totally eliminate Error. Between any two steps in a calculation, Error might occcur, and we must be vigilant of the possibility of distortion. So, as Camus said, Lucid Reason notes its limits; between my desire for Certainty (or 'Money') and the Actuality of my Conscious ability, the gap will never be filled. At best I have a guess, which is therefore arbitrary. The corroboration of my fellows can at best lend only Assurance. The business-man plotting the 'future' in private is thus a victim of Caesarean Madness; if he believes his plans to be even Theoretically Certain, he has all ready deluded himself. I have seen victims of this. The Unconscious protests the inflation of the Ego. But how could something so simple as an extended math problem be a challenge to one's competence? Were one a person of Thought, one's mind might be put at rest and one's Soul at Peace. Yet for a Business-Man of Action to be a Person of Action, one must take Camus' leap (Ironically) and presume upon an Absolute as a Goal and therefore a Certainty by which not only to reach this (ultimately and originally Impossible) goal but to even justify (the presumption of) its Existence.

Planning for the future is bunk. I choose this truism: If one is truly going in a new direction, the Future is definitionally Uncertain (a more Shestovian idea), but it can be judged to be better simple because:

A. It is Novel,

and

B. The Mode of Travel is intrinsically rewarding.
'Goals' themselves begin to look, therefore, fundamentally flawed as abstract limits and not justifications for immediate, beloved Actions. Finally, Idealism -- not in opposition to Reality, but in Accord with and Because of it -- triumphs over Practicality, and the Life of Thought, rather than being a mere crutch to the Life of Action, triumphs over it and Becomes it, taking an entirely different course than reckless Action and enterprise that would have employed Thought as a crutch.

dm.A.A.

In Defense of the Truth:

If one Could describe every aspect of Experience, as Hegel posited, one would entirely change (and slaughter) Experience. For this reason, there must be a Reality distinct from description and a Truth beyond mere words.

Dmitry.

On the Fallacy of Perfectionism.

At any point in the process of any methodical Act, one is tempted away from an Idealised Goal to deviate. This can be observed in Inquiry; one is tempted to stop a given train of thought entirely in order to re-examine the matter. This comes at a risk; one may never capture again the original train of thought. Yet is the motive itself such a loss? No. To take the risk involves a courage that attempted self-destruction does not.
The temptation towards Deviation is the emergence of the New; one is flooded with new variables for Consideration. This cannot be stopped; one cannot step in the same river twice.
One needs always to withhold this in order to attain 'perfection'.
Yet perfection is always something one has all ready done before, and it is impossible to have a successful repetition.
The only motive for such a perfectionism would be this conviction: That the first time it was done this way it was done poorly. This was because the first time one 'deviates', such as in the case of a person who tries to renounce Thought part-way through an Inquiry. In short, it was Imperfect then, but it sets the standard for what is Perfect now. Yet it will never truly be Perfect because what one imagines to be Perfect has all ready happened and therefore cannot be repeated.

Failure and Success are in many ways Cognitively Arbitrary.
In the process of Inquiry, for instance, to forego one line of thought is simply to enable another. This may be inevitable. Everything is change, and when one Being Reveals itself to us it Conceals another. We think, to use now a Wattsian rather than a Heideggerean image, in waves. We cannot think in words without taking pauses to 'gather our thoughts'. During one of these pauses, one may arbitrarily vow to disavow oneself of all Intellect. Yet this decision is not binding. We are always Two people: The Present and the Future, and at any moment the Future may annihilate the Present.
Here is a potentially frustrating riddle: If I begin a train of Thought and partway through I am tempted to sabotage myself and to disavow all thought, but I conclude the thought in spite of this and forego my disavowal, was the Inquiry a failure? It seems not.

The disavowal itself was futile, if a disavowal of this kind aims at an Absolute; To disavow Thought one must make impossible any success for Thought in the Future. Yet my status in the Future as a free agent ungoverned by the Past renders this futile. The disavowal was therefore Arbitrary entirely. Not only could nothing be gained by it but nothing could be lost by it; the time spent not thinking might have been no longer and no practically different than the Necessary Pause which serves Thought.

What motive might there be to renounce Thought? Forgetfulness.
Truth is the imaginary Limit that Inquiry never reaches. We approach it like a horizon; it is as illusory as Perfection. We try to Leap into it when we get close, at the peak of Reasoning and Thought.
But at the moment we stop Thinking we find nothing so to Leap into so Reassuring as what was there while we were thinking, for Thought created it.

In light of all of this, the Perfectionism and anti-intellectualism of Fundamentalism is understood (to be Absurd).

dm.A.A.