SYNOPSIS:

This comment elaborates on how “REALITY” can be constructed differently depending on our intellectual habits.  I have referred to the major split as EAST versus WEST in this regard and would include in ‘EAST’, modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.  Included in ‘WEST’ are Newtonian physics and the WESTERN CULTURE ADHERING belief system.  These are general ‘groupings’ that can be more definitively described in terms of the relative priority (in ‘reality constructing’) given to TRANSFORMATION versus ‘PRODUCTION-and-CONSUMPTION’.  TRANSFORMATION is a NONLOCAL dynamic (i.e. it is a WAVE-FIELD dynamic) and since it is going on everywhere-at-the same time’, it is INEFFABLE.

Language and grammar equip us for intellectually splitting TRANSFORMATION (wherein FIGURE and GROUND are ONE which is why TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE) into TWO SEPARATE components; PRODUCING (creating/extruding) and CONSUMING (annihilating/subducting) wherein FIGURE and GROUND are TWO (i.e. where we imagine that there are TWO separate ontological entities).   The splitting of TRANSFORMATION into two separate parts succeeds in re-rendering (reducing) the ineffable-because-NONLOCAL, to effable-because-LOCAL   That is, we can ‘talk about’ FIGURE AND GROUND when we conceive of these as TWO as if, for example, the INHABITANT were INDEPENDENT of the HABITAT and was able to roam around on its own accord exploring and exploiting the PERCEIVED AS SEPARATE AND INDEPENDENT “HABITAT”.  This is part of the WESTERN CULTURE belief system that distinguishes the WEST from the EAST, since the EASTERN belief, which accords with modern physics, is that INHABITANT and HABITAT are ONE, … or in geometric terms, FIGURE and GROUND are ONE, this latter understanding is supported by the Wave-field conceptualizing of reality.

The point being made by Nietzsche and Nishitani is that the DOUBLE ERROR of “LIGHTNING FLASHES” (Nietzsche) and “FIRE BURNS” (Nishitani) is an expedient for reducing TRANSFORMATION which is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL (something we must remain silent about, as Wittgenstein puts it) to something EFFABLE-because-LOCAL such as CREATION and EXTINCTION as with FIRE BURNS and FIRE is EXTINGUISHED.  The reality of our sensory experience, meanwhile, is that we share inclusion in a seasonal world wherein what we are included in cycles through hot periods where everything gets dried out and becomes like gunpowder ready to burst into flames.  This is TRANSFORMATION but because TRANSFORMATION is NONLOCAL we can’t do our usual trick with language and grammar to render it in LOCAL terms until the opportunity for a LOCAL approach to reality capture opens up for us, as where we can say FIRE BURNS.   Likewise, when relations are such as to grow the relative difference between regions of surplus and regions of deficiency (rich and poor), we are still in the realm of relational TRANSFORMATION.

TRANSFORMATION continues as the operational dynamic even while, at some point, the ‘rebalancers’ like Robin Hood and Jean Valjean ‘come out of the woodwork’, a development which is met IN OUR WESTERN CULTURE by labelling the emergent agents of rebalancing PATHOGENS aka CRIMINALS aka THIEVES.  We do this LABELING by way of DOUBLE ERROR constructions akin to FIRE BURNS, such as THIEVES STEAL which ignores the RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION that is steadily developing (which is INEFFABLE but just because we can’t ‘lingualize’ and articulate it doesn’t mean we don’t experience it; i.e. WE DO EXPERIENCE the INEFFABLE relational TRANSFORMATION that we are all included in, and it is this experiencing of being included in rising relational imbalance that induces Robin Hood and Jean Valjean’s rebalancing actions).

The point is that our being included in TRANSFORMATION is an INEFFABLE EXPERIENCE and we sweat our way through the long hot summer as we walk through forests that are becoming more and more desiccated and turning into fire-bombs-in-waiting, and all through this we say nothing until, … LOOK!, THERE’S A FIRE BURNING OVER THERE!.

That’s how PATHOGENS like COVID 19 get INVENTED, as an EFFABLE COVER for INEFFABLE TRANSFORMATION.  Such DOUBLE ERROR EFFABLE-IZING TOOL can be highly useful since it allows us to share our experiences and observations and coordinate our actions, but it can be a CRAZY-MAKER when we, as we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS are prone to doing, ‘let the tool run away with the workman, the human (LOCAL) with the divine (NONLOCAL).

The LOCALIZING abstractions of ‘FIRE BURNS’ and ‘PATHOGENS ATTACK and KILL’ (e.g. COVID 19, clostridium difficile etc.) are great communication aids but, like FIRE BURNS, they are only up to the job of INFERENCE of something innately more profound that is going on, which is TRANSFORMATION, … something that is INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL.  So, thanks to the DOUBLE ERROR of language and grammar, we are able to reduce the NONLOCAL to the LOCAL as we are doing when we speak in terms of “FIRE BURNS” and “COVID 19 KILLS”, as if the relational world of NONLOCAL TRANSFORMATION of our sensory experience could be reduced by our language based intellectual constructions, to a world of LOCALLY SOURCED ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENTS, which is what the DOUBLE ERROR does; …. thank you very much ‘FIRE BURNS’ and ‘COVID 19 KILLS’, because you (the reductive DOUBLE ERROR) are a VALUABLE TOOL for enabling at least a REDUCED version of the INEFFABLE-because-NONLOCAL “TRANSFORMATION” to be put in a form that is EFFABLE-BECAUSE-LOCAL [*The ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ identified by Nietzsche is (first error) ‘NAMING’ to impute LOCAL thing-in-itself being, conflated with (second error) GRAMMAR to impute to the NAMING-instantiated thing-in-itself the power of SOURCING actions and developments)*].

IF ONLY WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS DIDN’T let the tool run away with the workman, the human (LOCAL) with the divine (NONLOCAL) , and instead, like our EASTERN CULTURE and MODERN PHYSICS cultures, hold in perspective, the reality that such reductions to the LOCAL are only good for INFERENCE of the ineffable and are not good for direct employment as a notional EXPLICIT (pseudo-) REALITY feature.  For example “FIRE BURNS” cannot be construed as a REAL LOCAL phenomenon because the real phenomenon is NONLOCAL relational TRANSFORMATION that, because it is INEFFABLE, we do not talk about.  Though we can’t break TRANSFORMATION down into LOCAL agency, we know that we are included in some overall process that is sucking the moisture out of the once-green moist grass and shrubbery and transforming this vegetation into an easily triggered explosive while we ourselves are funnels for water coming in and evaporating out of our pores even as we turn brown and sunburned, much like the grass without the extreme desiccating that can convert shrubbery into easily detonated explosives.  WE ARE FIGURES INCLUDED IN A GROUND that is NOT INDEPENDENT OF OURSELVES, and we can’t escape from the TRANSFORMATION that characterizes the transforming relational continuum aka the ‘Wave-field’ aka ‘the Tao’ that is all inclusive and that includes us (i.e. FIGURE and GROUND are ONE).

So, the expressions ‘FIRE BURNS” and “COVID 19 KILLS” are convenient DOUBLE ERROR abstractions that we can use for purposes of reductive EFFABLE INFERENCE of the INEFFABLE TRANSFORMATION that we share inclusion in.  Such REDUCTIONS are good only for INFERENCE and not competent for use as EXPLICIT REPRESENTATIONS of REALITY, however, that is what is currently going on in our popular WESTERN CULTURE psychological reality constructing practice.   ‘FIRE BURNS’ and ‘COVID 19 KILLS’ come with the archetypal sense of LOCAL SOURCING OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS that, in the psyche of us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, USURPS the reality-furnishing role of our INTUITION of NONLOCALITY that is innate in TRANSFORMATION.

Where this gets confusing is that we don’t know from a person’s language, if they are ‘coming from the EASTERN understanding or ‘coming from the WESTERN understanding’ because WESTERN language and grammar is ambiguous in this respect. If a person uses the DOUBLE ERROR and says ‘my farm is growing larger and increasing its production’, such language usage does not mention that ‘the Wilderness lands’ are growing reciprocally smaller.  This ‘incompleteness’ is the same incompleteness of all finite logical constructs as pointed out by Goedel’s theorem.  In other words, our normal WESTERN logic is the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED MEDIUM wherein FIGURE and GROUND are TWO (note that the medium is excluded when we talk in terms of the GROWTH of a LOCAL ‘NAMING-instantiated-thing-in-itself such as ‘a farm’).

What we need, as Bohm and Nietzsche and others have pointed out, is a more comprehensive language which employs what has been called ‘quantum logic’; i.e. the BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED medium where FIGURE and GROUND are ONE.  In this case, there is no such thing as the GROWTH of ‘the FARM’, there is only relational TRANSFORMATION which comprehends as ONE, BOTH the “GROWTH” of the farm AND the SHRINKAGE of ‘the Wilderness’.  Not only does TRANSFORMATION do away with the abstract concept of GROWTH (which comes from the DOUBLE ERROR), it does away with the abstract concept of ‘LOCAL’ which, together with the abstract concept of ‘GROWTH’, usurps understanding in terms of TRANSFORMATION.  The only place that the GROWTH of things (such as FIRES that BURN) could be possible ‘on its own’ is within an absolute space of infinite extent, something that is not available to our real-life sensual experience.

Just because TRANSFORMATION is INEFFABLE doesn’t mean that it is NOT REAL.  It is the DOUBLE ERROR constructions such as “FIRE BURNS” and “COVID 19 KILLS” that are NOT REAL, and take us inside an abstract absolute space based pseudo-reality notionally populated with NAMING instantiated LOCAL things-in-themselves with GRAMMAR-given (notional) powers of SOURCING actions and developments.  This DOUBLE ERROR bullshit is fine as a tool of INFERENCE of an ineffable reality but used as an EXPLICIT reality-substitute rather than IMPLICITLY, it is a CRAZY-MAKER and that is the current plight of those of us who are WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS or ‘WESTERN CULTURE FELLOW TRAVELLERS’.

 

**** **** ****

 

What we have in the world today are TWO different strains of language architecture.  As David Bohm pointed out, modern physics needed a new and more comprehensive language to capture ‘reality’ that would overcome the limitations of our European languages.  The needed language architecture was one wherein there was no hard dependency on the abstract concept of LOCAL things-in-themselves, as in the European languages which are based on the NAMING and GRAMMAR which creates LOCAL things-in-themselves that facilitate a LOCAL, bottom-up construction of representations of reality.

Isaac Newton (somewhat cautiously) affirmed the correctness of this approach to linguistic-conceptual representations of the reality of our experience (as separate things-in-ourselves) in Nature, justifying it on the basis that it fit the way God would have done it in the CREATION;

The fertile mind of Isaac Newton turned to this concept, in his 31st Query, one of a number appended to his work on Optics. Newton published certain of his thoughts, each in the form of a Question, “because I am not yet satisfied about it for want of Experiments.” He launched into considering this Query by writing:

“Qu. 31. Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting and inflecting them, but also upon one another producing a great part of the Phænomena of Nature?”

After speaking of chemical reactions, and various musings on attraction in different circumstances, several pages later he proceeds as follows:

“All these things being considered, it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form’d matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the end for which he form’d them; and these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces: no ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation.”

Newton quotes from Opticks (1704, 2nd ed., 1718), 350 & 375-376

 

For a very different perspective on where Newton got the foundataional basics for his Natural Philosophy, see Benjamin Whorf’s investigations that show that Newton’s extracted his laws of physics from the already existing European language and grammar, the basic building block in which is the DOUBLE ERROR (Nietzsche) of NAMING (to conceptually establish in the intellect a LOCAL thing-in-itself), conflating this with GRAMMAR ( to impute the power of LOCAL SOURCING of actions and developments to the NAMING instantiated thing-in-itself.   

By contrast, indigenous aboriginal cultures along with Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta grounded their language in the understanding that ‘everything is in flux’ (Heraclitus) wherein reality is inherently NONLOCAL in the manner of a fluid flow or Wave-field dynamic and THAT WHICH APPEARS TO BE A LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF is instead a persisting RELATIONAL GATHERING AND SCATTERING like the ‘BOIL’ in the river FLOW and the DUNING in the DESERTING.

(more…)