Pamphleteering: - Islands Independent photo

My inquiry into ‘what is not going right’ in our mainstream society has now piled up more than 30,000 hours, which, at minimum wage, would have a value of over $250,000.  Here is my latest ‘free’ report.

I am not the only one to home in on this same view.  There are many, many others searching for answers, though not many are free to commit their full working week to it, as I have been doing for over 15 years now.  I have met very few that have also homed in on the same ‘understanding’ as I, but that is misleading since the problem continues to be in formulating a shareable articulation of the ‘understanding’.

One of the better articulations appears in a book called ‘Soil and Civilization’ by Edward Hyams (1952), shared with me by Howard, who has also, by his own route, converged to this same ‘understanding’.  A portion of Hyam’s summary follows;

“Man in nature prospers when he is working in such a way as to move with life’s pattern, collaborating with the other members of the Soil Community to which he belongs. That kind of knowledge which, at some risk of being dismissed as fanciful, I can only call intuitive, and of which I have been writing above, is not the kind to which much importance is now given. The antithetical kind is Intellectual knowledge. Intellectual knowledge of man’s material environment rarely originates, like intuitive knowledge, in the practice of living in harmony with non-human life; nor indeed, until the seventeenth century of our era, did it even pretend to do so. Ordered and deliberate thinking began in the Western Hemisphere with, apparently, the Greek philosophers, and extraordinarily little of significance seems thereafter to have been added to their results, although the practical application of methods devised by them was to have remarkable consequences.”

I would put it like this;  We used to [and in informal situations often still do] let our behaviours be orchestrated from the outside inward, by the dynamics of the habitat that we were included in.   It is not that this has ceased, but our modern institutionalized dynamics are increasingly intellectually driven which means that they are inside-outward driven [in an acorn-to-oak-tree sense].  That is, instead of people being drawn to appealing Oases or Islands and letting the outside-inward influence of these habitats shape their behaviour and organization [their individual and collective ‘becoming’] in establishing community, people are increasingly in ‘inside-outward driving mode’, pushing forth from out of the centre of their intentions to achieve their individual and/or collective objectives.  Instead of the magic of the landscape transforming them, they set out to transform the landscape.

Now, here’s the shocker, and I wouldn’t say this unless I was convinced of it myself; this flip in our social organization from where outside-inward influence [habitat-orchestrated] predominated over inside-outward influence [intellectually driven] to pure and direct inside-outward intellectual drive has been ‘taking the soul or spirit out of community’.

This is also Nietzsche’s assertion and I believe he is right on target.  He speaks of ‘will-to-power’ and what he intends is ‘self-transcendence’.  For example, if the habitat ‘beckons’ to you, and you answer its call, it will orchestrate your behaviour and its needs will reach down inside you from outside-inwards to grab your vitals and pull you into a self-transcending blossoming.  You can think of ‘will to power’ and self-transcendence this way; you are in some situation and a need develops; it could be that someone needs to be rescued from abuse/beating or that some field needs to be ploughed and planted or a date palm needs to be climbed.  The will to power is what you feel that is pulling on you to rise to the occasion, to transcend who you are.

Compare this to when one starts right off in inside-outward intellectual driving mode to achieve some objective.   This is the degenerate form of the will to power.  It is the form wherein you will exercise your authority to ‘make things happen’ to control the doer-deed actions and to change the landscape.  This degenerate ‘flipped’ form of ‘will-to-power’ is not what Nietzsche intended but is the ‘twist’ that the Nazi’s gave to it.

Can you ‘feel’ the difference between ‘being pulled to rise to the occasion’ when the outside-inward, habitat-to-inhabitant influence predominates over the inside-outward influence, … relative to, … going directly with inside-outward intellect and purpose driven inhabitant-to-habitat shaping of the landscape?  The self-transcendence that orchestrates collection action in the former mode is the ‘spirit of community’ and it is nowhere to be seen in the latter mode.

Consider this, in the place of this spirit of community where we formerly let outside-inward habitat-influence pull us into collective self-transcendence, we are now electing/authorizing politicians, corporate CEOs, bankers and economists to sit at the top, and from a notional ‘centre-of-intention’ jumpstarting point that has taken over from the outside-inward seduction of habitat, drive community top-down and inside-outwards from local internal intellect and purpose.  In other words, politicians, corporate CEOs, bankers and economists are now plugging off the hole in the sky that is needed for [individual and collective] self-transcendence to occur and thus for spirit of community to be engendered.

Lamarckism [outside-inward predominates over inside-outward] and Darwinism [inside-outward predominates over outside-inward] also points to the latter stripping out the spirit of community;

“In The Gay Science , Nietzsche explicitly names Lamarck to defend him against Schopenhauer, while in a later note (xvi, 9) he describes Hegel and Lamarck as the proponents of a truer doctrine of evolution than Darwin’s “Darwin has forgotten the spirit,” Nietzsche explains later. [by ‘spirit’, Nietzsche is referring to the ‘will-to-power’ that we feel in a demanding situation that pulls us into a blossoming-forth to transcend who we just were]. Kaufmann also contends that: “the decisive point is that Nietzsche was faithful to his own repudiation of any strict division of flesh and spirit and that he insisted that the two could be understood only in their inextricable togetherness.”

So, according to Nietzsche and Hyam, the shift from the natural predominance of our ‘sailboater understanding of self’ [where outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence so that the inhabitant derives his power and steerage from the habitat] to our popular ‘powerboater understanding of self’ [where inside-outward influence predominates over our outside-inward influence so that the inhabitant assumes he is applying his own inboard power and steerage] is what has ‘gone wrong with our society.  This shift has stripped the soul right out of ‘community’ and we call the result ‘Western Civilization’.

That is essentially the introduction that prepares the reader for what he/she can look for in the following historical exploration into how and why this unnatural flip of the ‘anima motrix’ from predominantly outside-inward, to predominantly inside-outward, transpired.

One last word of introduction.  The term ‘anima motrix’ (‘motive soul’) and ‘vis motrix’ (‘life force’) were originally used by Johannes Kepler in his efforts to explain the movement of sun and planets, the former source originating within a material body and the latter inhabiting the aether.   Just as physics has oscillated between explaining dynamic physical phenomena in terms of EITHER matter OR field [aether] which raises the question as to which takes precedence over which, so did Kepler, however, he avoided the EITHER/OR nature of the question by using the example of the ferryboat, which, like a sailboat, derives its power and steerage from the flow [“aetherial winds”] that it is included in.  That is, the ‘anima motrix could appear to be originating within the material body but, as with a sailboat/ferryboat, could actually be originating in the flow;

“On broader rivers they [Ferrymen] make the skiffs go in circles, send them hither and thither, and play a thousand tricks, without touching the bottom or the banks, but by the use of the oar alone, directing the unified and most simple flow of the river to their own ends. In very much the same manner, the power moving out into the world through the species is a kind of rapid torrent, which sweeps along all the planets, as well as, perhaps, the entire aethereal air, from west to east.” – Kepler, Astronomia Nova, 1609

This same question of precedence of sourcing of animation in physical dynamics arises between the philosophies of Nietzsche, Lamarck, and Schroedinger, on the one hand, who maintain, consistent with relativity and quantum physics, that local material objects and organisms derive their power and steerage from the energy charged spatial plenum [the organism is seen as a sailboater] and Darwin and mainstream science, on the other hand, who split nature into ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ realms on the grounds that the ‘organism’ is equipped with ITS OWN internal ‘anima motrix’ [the organism is seen as a powerboater].

A Brief History of the ‘Anima Motrix’ [the source of dynamic behaviour that manifests through, but is not limited to, visible material forms]

The short story is this.  Philosophers had to decide whether the animating force in nature derived from matter or from the aether.  If it was ‘in matter’ and the intervening space was passive, then there was the problem of ‘action at a distance’. If it was ‘in the aether’, then there was the problem of the apparent ‘locally originating behaviour’ of material forms.

Newtonian physics opted for the materialist model wherein material bodies were considered to ‘exist locally’ [absolute being] and to have ‘their own motive behaviours’ [absolute motion] while space was conceived of as absolutely fixed and ’empty’ wherever it was not ‘occupied’ by material presence.  Newton pointed out that the universe was evidently more ‘fluid’ and interconnected than his simple material mode allowed, and he particularly did not want to be associated with the notion that the anima motrix derived from matter as his comments in a letter to his friend Bentley make clear;

“It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must do, if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it.  And this is one reason, why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me.  That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another, at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.”

Mathematical models are not to be confused with the physical reality of our experience.  In fact the point has been made by Poincaré that by making the anima motrix simple (i.e. by imputing it to inhabit matter or local material structures such as the organism, we can greatly simplify our models of how things behave.   It is far easier to describe the behaviour of things in ‘inside-outward terms’ by imputing to them their own local ‘anima motrix’, than it is to explain their individual and collective behaviour where it is shaped by an outside-inward aetherial anima motrix.  Meanwhile, the latter model provides a means of explaining simultaneous mutual influence of multiple bodies separated by large distances, such as the harmonies between the motion of the planet earth and Jupiter’s moon and in the spiral-coherence of planets in the Milky Way etc., while the former does not.

Kepler explained that regardless of the fact that we describe the movement of things as if in empty space, the natural physics of the situation was suggestive of the material bodies being included within a fluid-anima-motrix;

“Ye physicists, prick your ears, for now we are going to invade your territory.” (Kepler, cited in Koestler, The Act of Creation).

Kepler (who oscillated between infusing the anima motrix in the material bodies, or into the ‘aetherial air’), developed the analogy of a ferryman whose power and steering derives from the flow;

“On broader rivers they [Ferrymen] make the skiffs go in circles, send them hither and thither, and play a thousand tricks, without touching the bottom or the banks, but by the use of the oar alone, directing the unified and most simple flow of the river to their own ends. In very much the same manner, the power moving out into the world through the species is a kind of rapid torrent, which sweeps along all the planets, as well as, perhaps, the entire aethereal air, from west to east.” – Kepler, Astronomia Nova

To cut to the quick here, this problem of where to put anima motrix had been mostly seen as an ‘is’/‘is not’, either/or choice, but Michael Faraday came up with a ‘both/and’ solution by putting the primary anima motrix into space/field but allowing that matter could nevertheless be ‘electrically charged’ or ‘magnetically charged’ to give some truth to the notion that the anima motrix resided in the material structures and explained their apparently locally originating behaviours, but at the same time explaining the outside-inward shaping of form, behaviour and organization since the aether [energy-charged spatial plenum] was the primary or ultimate home of the anima motrix while the local material bodies were like spring-loaded toys that borrowed power and steerage from the ‘bank of aetherial flow’, and in the act of spending it, were at the same time depositing it back into the ‘bank of aetherial flow’.  [Mach’s principle is in evidence here; “the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat”, a principle that captures matter-energy equivalence in the sense that material forms are relative concentrations of energy in the spatial-plenum.]

Now, the stage was set for doing exactly the same with gravity as Faraday did with electricity and magnetism.  General relativity has essentially blurred space and matter; i.e. matter is now understood as concentrations of energy in the field which renders them (the concentrations) visible.  Quantum physics further describes matter as ‘ripples in the energy-charged spatial plenum’ [Bohm, Schroedinger].

So, Parmenides, who said that the gods that ruled the universe would never accept such blurriness and would go only with the perfection of ‘is’ or ‘is not’ is probably rolling over in his grave, since ‘is’ and ‘is not’ [phraseology used by his flow-promoting contemporary Heraclitus] evidently prevails in nature.

As Henri Poincaré observes, formulating scientific rules of behaviour is greatly simplified if we simplify the ‘sourcing of behaviour’ by defining the agents of behaviour as ‘powerboaters’ rather than ferryman or ‘sailboaters’ by [we who simplify our models for our own convenience] infusing a notional anima motrix into their interiors.  In the case of biological organisms, by defining them as ‘local systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven behaviours’, we set the ‘organism’ up as a ‘powerboater’ and simplify the rules of behaviour to that of ‘doers-of-deeds’ and ‘cause and effect’.   It would be far more difficult, for example, to try to understand the behaviour of a man in terms of the tides and currents in which he had been situationally included.   Instead of the judge and prosecutor being able to simply assume that Jean Valjean’s actions derived from an internal anima motrix, they would have to take into account what fair or foul winds and currents brought him there, to stealing a loaf of bread, and whether their own overbearing actions were contributing factors.  [‘overbearing’: nautical term for ‘stealing the wind from another’s sails]

The convenience of notionally infusing the anima motrix into the interior of the causal agent, as we do in the case of biological organisms such as man, is that we do not have to consider, in our judgement of ‘causal responsibility’, the outside-inward influence of the socialized or unsocialized habitat.  We can instead assume, like the prosecutor and judge in Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’, that thanks to the positioning of the anima motrix INSIDE the local material dynamic form aka ‘organism’ thus portraying it as a ‘powerboater’ rather than positioning the anima motrix within the spatial-plenum and  thus portraying the organism as a sailboater, inquiry into the ’cause’ of the theft of bread stops ‘absolutely’ in the interior of Jean Valjean where its full and sole author, the local, personal, internal anima motrix is seen to reside.

Aristotle, following in Parmenides footsteps, came up with the notion of a local animating soul that he called τέλος [telos] from τέλλω, “I accomplish”  which we also know by the name ‘purpose’ or ‘intention’.  This ‘does a job’ very much like the ‘charge’ that is said to be a ‘property of matter’ (i.e. Aristotle implies that ‘purpose’ or τέλος is a property of living matter); i.e. it explains things in a ‘backwards direction’.  It is the anima motrix that reaches back from the future and constitutes the notional internal driver that brings about a ‘desired end result’.   This invented concept of ‘internal purpose’ works together with the concept of ‘cause-and-effect’ or ‘doer-and-deed’, to suggest that the behaviour of organisms and organism collectives are organized ‘backwards from the future’, as if their destination is orchestrating their actions by way of the anima motrix called τέλος that resides in their interior.  Thus, if an oasis pops up in the desert, habitat feature that attracts people from the outside-inward like a honey pot attracts ants, when the houses are built and the construction of the village is sufficiently substantial to name it Bir Lehlu (beautiful springs), the residents may well say; ‘yes, together we have accomplished this.’ … true to the model of the human organism as a ‘local system with its own locally originating, intellect and purpose directed behaviour’.   The fact that the primary anima motrix resided in the land is missing from such a model and statement.  Without the outside-inward nurturance of the spring [which sustaining the camels, goats and sheep as well as humans], the date palms and other fruit-bearing plants, the wild barbary sheep (uaddan), the evolution of the village would never have even occurred [as Nietzsche and Lamarck point out “evolution is a process of diffusion in which the outside-inward flow predominates over the inside-outward flow.”]

For example, if an active fault in the desert were to open conduits from a subsurface aquifer to the surface, spawning a half dozen new oases which were then sown with seeds by birds and animals that came to water there, and these oases became the destinations of desert nomads who were attracted to them like ants to a honey-pot, where would we situate the ‘anima motrix’ that sourced this evolutionary development?  Surely not ‘solely’ within the ‘ants’ in the ant-like stream of people suggesting that evolution of the oases communities was fully and solely driven by the intellect and purpose of the human organisms.    While the dynamics of the habitat/land clearly orchestrated their individual and collective behaviour, man’s ego stubbornly persists in positioning the ‘anima motrix’ in his own interior and credits his ‘intellection’ and ‘purpose’; i.e. he insists, after the fact, that his behaviour was inside-outward driven by his ‘knowledge-and-purpose’.

Clearly there is ‘SOME truth’ to this just as there was ‘some truth’ to the notion that charge resides within the material particle.  But the larger truth is that the primary ‘motherlode’ of ‘anima motrix’ resides in the energy-charged spatial plenum and that the organism is more like the sailboater or ferryman that derives power and steerage from the ‘anima matrix motherground‘ in which the inhabitant is included.

It is evident that the concept of ‘telos’ or ‘purpose’ is the magic ‘inverter’ of our conceptual understanding, which flips the predominating of ‘outside-inward habitat-inhabitant orchestrating of behaviour’ to the predominating of ‘inside-outward inhabitant-into-habitat destination-driving behaviour’, the internal ‘anima motrix’ in the latter case being understood to be ‘purpose’ (supported by knowledge/intellection).  Thus ‘purpose’ or τέλος  is playing the same sort of role as ‘charge’ prior to Faraday; i.e. it is seen as a basic anima motrix property of the material form, rather than as a sort of ‘spring-loading’ deriving from the mother-source, the energy-charged spatial-plenum aka ‘habitat’, rendering the material form as a ‘powerboater’ rather than in a more realistic ‘sailboater’ rendering.

This ‘internal purpose’ or τέλος concept is one of those assumptions of convenience which helps us develop a simpler and more convenient model for the behaviour of things in terms of those ‘things’ being absolute local self-animating material presences or ‘beings’.  It is easier to talk about the oasis community in terms of our having ‘purposefully developed it’, and indeed we would develop some sort of community if we left Northern Europe by ship and wound up shipwrecked in a South Pacific Island Paradise, in which case the community, as Heraclitus would say; ‘is’ and ‘is not’ the product of our purpose.  That is, the outside-inward orchestrating of form, behaviour and organization predominates over the inside-outward purpose-driven ‘I accomplish’ construction.  We are in this gestalt-like situation, like the sailboater rather than the powerboater, the land that we are situationally included in is the ‘ground-of-community’ for our ant-like constructed figure-of-community, the two things, the outside-inward influencing dynamic and the inside-outward influencing dynamic being OUR two ways of understanding a single persisting-in-the-continuing present ‘dynamic-gestalt’ wherein spatial relationships persist while local material beings come and go (gather anew and are newly regathered).  The anima motrix of the energy-charged transforming space/habitat is thus primary while the anima motrix of the transient ‘local material beings’ is ‘borrowed’ in the manner that the sailboater or ferryman borrows his power and steerage from the spatial-flow he is included in.

‘Internal purpose’ is a concept that ‘stands-for’ (signs or signifies) this borrowed ‘anima motrix’.  It is not ‘absolute’ or ‘locally existing, jumpstarting power’ as we imply that it is within our simplified model in terms of the organism as a ‘local material system with its own locally originating, internal process-driven behaviour’.

What would ‘purpose’ mean without outside-inward attraction?  As an infant, shiny objects around us orchestrate our movements and we move to put them in our mouth.  This basic ‘outside-inward flow’ is naturally predominating.  Shiny objects and things good to eat continue to orchestrate our movements when we are adults, but as adults-with-ego, we tend to insist that our movements are intellect-and-purpose driven; i.e. that inside-outward influence predominates over outside-inward influence.

This ‘mental flip’ in the natural predominance of ‘outside-inward influence over inside-outward influence’ is due to the development of the ‘ego’ which is pure, personal epitome of ‘anima motrix’ and sets in motion the notional ‘intellect-and-purpose driven pursuit of self-interest’ which is foundational to Darwinism and Ayn Randian philosophy.  Starting from this point, the outside-inward self-transcendence [will-to-power] wherein the opening of pregnant spatial-possibility-to-do that grabs at our vitals and pulls us inside-out to become more than we just were, that has us rise to the occasion, is no longer possible.  As Nietzsche says, the ‘spiritual experience’ of outside-inward induced transformation that makes ‘community’ what it really is when it is at its best is stripped out, cast aside and abandoned when the starting point for collective action shifts to intellect and purpose-driven self-interest, as in Darwinism and Ayn Randism.  Western civilization which has been moving steadily towards this exalted goal of fully intellectually and purposefully controlled individual and collective behaviour is moving towards community purged of ‘spirit’.

Understanding ‘purpose’ in the absolutist terms of a local internal ‘anima motrix’  puts us into a notional world where organisms move about and interact ‘causally’ within a passive space, a notional world that renders ‘habitat’ as if it were devoid of  ‘anima motrix’.  This Fiktional world of internal purpose-driven organisms that move about and interact in a neutered habitat is otherwise known as ‘Western Civilization’ [whatever we call it, we need to differentiate it from Amerindian and other systems of understanding that continue to understand that outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence.]    Our sovereign state, corporate and institutional structures are all based on this notion of a world dynamic in which the inside-outward influence predominates over the outside-inward influence, in contradiction to our real-world experience.  This is a Fiktional doer-deed world wherein ‘self-interest generated might makes right’ and where the absolutist breakdown into ‘is’ OR ‘is not’ continues to follow the Parmenidian tradition and leave the Heraclitean ‘is’ AND ‘is not’ tradition in the lurch, even though the latter’s being the ‘natural case’ in regard to the residency of anima motrix is supported by the physics of Faraday and the ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum’ physics of Mach, Nietzsche, Poincaré, Einstein, Schroedinger et al.

The ‘is’ AND ‘is not’ view of the outside-inward influencing AND inside-outward influencing ‘anima motrix’ of the charged particle (e.g. magnetized iron filings) is one of those curious dichotomies that we tend to see as being without relevance to ourselves [e.g. when the collective of filings ‘move into the form of a circle [due to an out-of-the-plane magnetic field], is it due to an ‘outside-inward anima motrix’ or to an ‘inside-outward anima motrix‘?  The answer is, it is both, and it is Kepler’s ‘Ferryboat’ understanding analogy that subsumes the ‘either/or’ dichotomy.

Meanwhile, Emerson observes in ‘The Method of Nature’ that all of this is relevant to our ‘self’, the human organism, and we can see this if we acknowledge that the ‘anima motrix’ of nature not only ‘inhabits the organism’ but ‘creates it’, all of which is in agreement with the new physics.  While the new physics arrived ‘after Emerson (1803 – 1882), he was a contemporary of Lamarck (1744 – 1829), Mach (1838 – 1916), Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) and his ideas on evolution were ‘transcendentalist’ in the same sense as Lamarck’s and Nietzsche’s; i.e. ‘evolution is a process wherein outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence’ and thus contradictory to Darwin’s inside-outward influence predominating; “theory of descent [evolving lineages] by way of modification through [inside-outward-driven] variation and natural selection’.

All of the ideas of ‘the new physics’ were brewing in the nineteenth century philosphical dialogues and Ernst Mach is the intuitive mentor of Poincaré, Einstein and Lorenz who have jointly precipitated the intuition of ‘relativity’ into mathematical formulation.

While Kepler had used the analogy of the ferryman [the ‘sailboater’ that derives power and steerage or ‘borrowed anima motrix’ from the flow he is included in] to infuse his geometric-celestial-dynamical model with physical reality, Aristotle had ‘worked the problem backwards’ from his stake-in-the-ground starting assumptions in terms of ‘local material being’.  If an acorn is a local material being’ in a world seen as a vast expanse of empty space populated by local material presences such as ‘an acorn’, then since we observe that an acorn develops into an oak tree, it must therefore have within it, the knowledge, know-how and ‘purpose’ to take it all the way to accomplishing its final end [ τέλος from τέλλω, “I accomplish”].

That is, Aristotle’s observation of acorn-development is ‘theory-laden’ [a ‘petitio principii’] since, to avoid having to put the ‘anima motrix’ into the aether or pervasive spatial medium and to understand it as ‘empty space’ wherever it is ‘not occupied’ by ‘local material being’, he was forced to notionally infuse the ‘local material being’ with τέλος or ‘result-oriented purpose’.

Kepler’s use of experience-based analogy [the ferryman] opens the door to the ‘sailboater’ view of material forms wherein the primary residence of the ‘anima motrix’ is in the spatial plenum/habitat which can be ‘tapped’ by the material inhabitant so that that the ‘anima motrix’ ‘inhabits’ the material form/structure even though it does not ‘originate within it’; i.e. even though the ‘anima motrix’ is not a ‘property of the material form/structure’ just as ‘electric attraction’, ‘magnetic attraction’, and ‘gravitational attraction’ are not ‘properties of the local material forms/structures’ that they appear to be ‘originating from’.

Note that Kepler, like Newton, does not equivalence his mathematical laws to his philosophical views on the nature of the dynamic spatial plenum we call ‘nature’.   His view of the overall harmonies of the planets means that the ‘real’ situation involves multiple bodies moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, a situation that is mathematically impossible to resolve for three or more bodies [the famous ‘three-body problem’] while still preserving the notion that each of the bodies possesses its own ‘anima motrix’.  That is, this multi-body harmony is easily resolved if one considers the ‘material bodies’ to be ripples in the spatial flow-plenum; i.e. to be ‘borrowing’ anima motrix from the spatial plenum [Kepler’s “the entire aethereal air” from which the planet-ferryman derives his power and steerage] as can be observed in the dynamics of simultaneously mutually-influencing storm-cells in the atmospheric spatial-plenum.  Our habit is meanwhile to synthetically ‘break these storm cells of their simultaneous mutual influencing (3+ body) dynamic’ by notionally imposing an absolute reference space/frame which then serves as the ‘ground’ relative to which the motion of the storm-cell’s development of shape and motion can be referenced, rather than the dynamic spatial plenum which it is, in actual physical fact, included in.

As Poincaré observes, there is a trade off between the ‘rules of behaviour’ and the ‘defining of the things whose behaviours we seek to model’.  Kepler and Newton both acknowledged this, noting that the ‘gravitational anima motrix’ was not a property of the material body itself; i.e. the material body, rather than being a powerboater, was more akin to a sailboater that derives his power and steerage from the energy-charged spatial-plenum in which he is included.   Thus they pointed out that their scientific laws of motion were not ‘nature’s laws’ but convenient descriptors of the behaviour of material forms, reduced by simplifying definitions, to ‘local material presences’ notionally equipped with their own ‘anima motrix’ .

What is currently ‘blocking’ our acknowledgement of a field-flow based sourcing of  the form, development and organization of the  human/organism, is ‘ego’ since the ‘ego’ is the very definition of a local inbuilt ‘anima motrix’ or ‘end-accomplishment-oriented purposeful drive’ [τέλλω or “I accomplish”] which notionally has ZERO DEPENDENCY for its self-jumpstarting drive, on the dynamic habitat in which it is included [and which engenders it].  We have built ‘ego’ according to this definition, into our institutions such as the sovereign state and the corporation, and this is having us see these ‘local material agencies’ as ‘powerboaters’ that achieve results by pure intellect and purpose-driven effort.  This is, of course, a ‘total Fiktion’.  These agencies are, like all material structures in nature, ‘sailboaters’ that derive their power and steerage from the energy-charged spatial plenum that, as Emerson says, not only inhabits them but creates them.

So, as long as ego prevails as the building brick of our society,we shall have to continue to;

“Consider this, in the place of this spirit of community where we formerly let outside-inward habitat-influence pull us into collective self-transcendence, we are now electing/authorizing politicians, corporate CEOs, bankers and economists to sit at the top, and from a notional ‘centre-of-intention’ jumpstarting point that has taken over from the outside-inward seduction of habitat, drive community top-down and inside-outwards from local internal intellect and purpose.  In other words, politicians, corporate CEOs, bankers and economists are now plugging off the hole in the sky that is needed for [individual and collective] self-transcendence to occur and thus for spirit of community to be engendered.”


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