The Background to the Humilityless Twits Label Applied to top University Graduates Going into Management

This title attaches to a backwards reflection on my part to the surprising (to me) reference that some experience-seasoned (salty-dog) managers made to the best and brightest of the college graduates coming into the workforce.  I discovered that this was (and is) very much tied up in the difference between intellectual learning and experiential learning. This note is about how our understanding is becoming increasingly ‘CANTILEVERED’ by intellectual learning and correspondingly increasingly UNgrounded in sensory experience.  The confidence that modern internet-informed youth have in their intellectual understanding even though it is ungrounded in experience, is quite amazing (The inexperienced virgin youth  may know far more about sexual intercourse than her experienced parents),  And whereas youth was in prior eras more reticent than bullish in throwing their bodies behind intellectual-conceptual ‘truths’, modern youth are now, even when still on the slim end of the experience-based learning curve, … highly confident of the ‘truth’ of their intellectual convictions. This can be seen in the ‘climate change’ demonstrations by youth where their reasoned assumption is that ‘man’ is the ‘source’ of rising global temperatures.

To ‘cut to the quick’, my understanding, like Nietzsche’s, is that ‘reason’ is NOT a tool that can give us understanding of our experience of inclusion in the Tao.  However, modern Western youth tend to be confident that their ‘reason’ is delivering ‘the truth’ about ‘reality’.

“In Reason’ in language!  ……..(Note how Nietzsche points to ‘being’ as the underpinning of ‘reason‘; i.e.  … “Being is thought into and insinuated into everything as ‘cause’; from the concept ‘ego,’ alone, can the concept ‘Being’ proceed.”……….– oh what a deceptive old witch it (reason) has been!  I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

“Reason” comes under full frontal fire here.

‘Reason’ may be a handy tool for loosely INFERRING ‘what is going on in the world, but it is not a capable tool for dealing with inclusion in the transforming relational continuum of modern physics (aka the Tao’).  REASON  IS INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTION THAT HAS PULLED AWAY FROM ITS MOORINGS IN SENSORY EXPERIENCE.

That is; reason reduces the BOTH/AND  (modern physics) logic of the included medium to the EITHER/OR (classical physics) logic of the excluded medium; e.g. it reduces ‘duning’ as resonance-based  (wave-field-based) transformation to ‘dunes’-and-desert floor’, two ABSTRACT ontologically separate and distinct things-in-themselves that, with binary ambiguity, play off of one another, giving us the crazy-making …  EITHER figure OR ground … MENTAL impression wherein the ‘dunes’  ARE  “UNDERSTOOD” as THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES that can ‘shift across the desert floor’! (or is it the desert floor dynamic that pushes those dunes around?  How crazy-schizo is that!  How crazy -schizo does that make us as believers of either of these binaries?

As Bohm discovered, EAST IS EAST (embracing the BOTH/AND logic of the included medium aka quantum logic) AND WEST IS WEST (embracing the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium), … and Kipling was pretty much on target in suggesting that ‘never the twain shall meet’.  Because, as it turns out ‘reason’ is a psychological derivative of the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium, and as Nietzsche points out, reason is anchored in place by ‘ego-that-swells-the-head‘ while the Eastern ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (everything is related) associates with inspiration that fills the heart.

We Western culture adherents brag about how we have ‘improved’ the land by constructing roads and railways and skyscrapers and modern cities.  That slips off the tongue easily, but all the while, continents are ‘drifting’ and subsiding and being ‘recycled’ and seafloors are spreading and sea-mounts rising while humans are outwellin/emerging-and-inwelling/subducting (popping out and popping back in) and everything is in a continuing transformational flux, so how do we isolate within this, an inventory of local, human sourced producer-product developments?

ANSWER: we have the ‘double error’ of language and grammar that allows us to reduce all of this ineffable-nonlocal-relationally IMPLICIT FLUIDITY/TAO, by means of language and grammar stimulated intellection, to a local, explicit and thus effable ‘INVENTED REALITY’.  (One doesn’t REALLY produce a product’ or construct a vibrant and bustling city in the wilderness).  As with ‘duning’-and-‘the-dune’, it is not the dune that ‘grows larger and longer and shifts across the desert floor’, duning is relational resonance-based transformation, and likewise, it is not ‘reality’ we are talking about when we speak of ‘the city in the wilderness’ that grows larger and more dynamic’, we are instead looking at how relational resonance manifests (“Of that which we cannot speak (the ineffable) we must pass over in silence” –Wittgenstein) and using the double error of language and grammar to ‘reduce, idealize, localize and re-cast relational resonance’ in the producer-product (locally incipient sorcery) based terms of a name-instantiated thing-in-itself notionally with its own powers of sourcing actions and development.

The shortfall in the conceptual base of reason can be understood by exploring the relationship between ‘duning’ (resonance) which is nonlocal and implicit, …  and ‘dunes’, which are local and explicit (abstract things-in-themselves).  That is, we use language and grammar to reduce ‘duning-as-resonance’ (ineffable in the sense of nonlocal and non-explicit, to ‘dunes’ which are local and explicit, NOT PHENOMENALLY BUT INTELLECTUALLY thanks to the reductive powers of language and grammar).

The one-ness of resonance is that of the coincidentia oppositorum or coniunctio oppositorum implicit in wave-field phenomena which we tend to reduce to the local and explicit through language and name-labels such as ‘peak’ and ‘trough’.  These are visual closed form geometries (abstractions) that we impose to ‘effable-ize’ the ineffable phenomenon of resonance; i.e. resonance doesn’t break itself down into voyeur visual picture terms of ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs’, the abstracting language and grammar equipped intellect does this reducing.

Since wave-field resonance is fundamental to the understanding of reality as in ‘the Tao’, it is important to bear in mind how language and grammar can REDUCE the resonance-based reality of our actual sensory experience (of inclusion in the Tao) to abstract things-in-themselves with purported powers of sourcing actions and developments (the ‘double error’ of language and grammar).

The ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ as in resonance is a nonlocal phenomenon that is ineffable; i.e. we can’t break it down into local, explicitly existing parts that we can point to and say; ‘see, this here is where resonance originates.  Nonlocal phenomena such as resonance are ineffable.  “Of that which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence” – Wittgenstein.  Our sensory experiencing of resonance is a case in point.

The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao – Lao Tzu. Likewise the wave-field resonance that can be told is not the true wave-field resonance since everything is in flux including the teller.  This is not the same problem as determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or how many atoms in the universe since there is no implication, in the Tao, of ‘things-in-themselves’, abstractions that come from language and grammar.

Our virgin daughter may thus know more about sexual intercourse than her experienced parents will ever know, but the shortfall in such language-based knowledge (versus experience-based understanding) is precisely why many directors of business operations bring their managers down to work the shop floor when operations are the most challenged and troubled since intellectual knowledge is innately limited.  As Heraclitus observed; “The knowledge of many things does not teach understanding” (sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum [the Tao] teaches understanding).

Given that we are included in a transforming relational continuum, aka ‘the wavefield’’, aka ‘the Tao’, … there are no ‘solid footings’ to base our understanding of ‘where we are at’ and ‘what is going on’.  Everything is in flux, as Heraclitus asserted and as modern physics affirms (along with indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoists/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta adherents).

The absolutes of ‘being’, and ‘local sourcing’ (the ‘double error’ constructs of Western culture language and grammar usage, are intellectual abstractions that are not supported by modern physics as belonging to the relational reality of our sensory experience.

The first error in our ‘double error’ is where we use ‘naming’ to impute ‘local thing-in-itself being’ to a relational form in the Tao.  The second error is grammar based and conflates the first error by imputing the power of sourcing actions and development to the name-instantiated ‘thing-in-itself’.  Instead of wave-field resonance as in ‘duning’, the double error reduction gives us ‘the dune that grows longer and higher and shifts across the desert floor’.   NO MORE WAVE-FIELD RESONANCE AKA ‘DUNING’, … INSTEAD, THE DOUBLE ERROR SUBSTITUTES ‘DUNES’, LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES WITH LOCALLY INCIPIENT POWERS OF SOURCING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.  In other words, ‘wavefield resonance is ‘out of work’, its job has been taken over by the double error of language and grammar which is the dominant and popular ‘reality builder’ of Western culture.

But, am I not the voice of reason and truth when I say that ‘the dune is growing larger and longer and is shifting to the East?  How about if 100 people affirm, with me, that this is the truth and no-one raises any reasonable challenge?  Can we say the truth is proven if everyone agrees that ‘IT IS TRUE THAT THE DUNE IS GROWING LARGER AND LONGER AND IS SHIFTING TO THE EAST’?  (Giordano Bruno did complain, shortly before being burned at the stake for witchcraft in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome in 1600, that ‘the majority has no monopoly on ‘the truth’).   How about the Taoist who understands duning as a purely relational (non-local) resonance within the ineffable transforming relational continuum?  He might say to those talking in terms of ‘dunes’ that ‘do stuff’; ‘I guess if you are going to reduce the ineffable Tao to such over-simplistic effable abstraction, there is no point in engaging with you’.  As Nietzsche puts it, ‘truth’ is one of those made-up intellectual absolutes that, however expedient for sharing abstract reductions of the ineffable, has no place in the transforming relational continuum otherwise known as the Tao.

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”  — Nietzsche, –Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, (On Truth and Lies in an extra-moral sense).

In other words, THERE IS NO BASIS IN THE REALITY OF OUR SENSUAL EXPERIENCE OF INCLUSION IN THE TAO FOR POSTULATING ABSOLUTE LOCAL REALITIES TERMED ‘THE TRUTH’, AS IN TRUTH-BASED ‘REASON’

Recall ‘Les Miserables’ and the story of Jean Valjean who went to jail for many years for ‘stealing a loaf of bread’.  As David Bohm infers, such actions as Jean Valjean’s derive from our natural desire to cultivate balance and harmony in the relational continuum in which we are included (as with Robin Hood, our actions and developments are pulled forth in the service of cultivating balance and harmony (subsuming imbalance and dissonance) as in shifting excess from regions of surplus to regions of deficiency.  The participants in Nature aka the Tao, are balancing acts.  It is not that ‘they are ‘things-in-themselves’ that DO balancing acts’, it is that ‘they ARE balancing acts’.  Duning is a balancing act, it is resonance, … it is the ‘wave field’, … it is not ‘a dune that does stuff’, as in the Western culture ‘double error’ reduction where, as mentioned, the ‘first error’ is ‘naming’ that imputes ‘independent thing-in-itself existence’ to the named flow-form while the ‘second error’ is an error of grammar that conflates the first by notionally endowing the name-instantiated thing-in-itself (first error) with the powers of sourcing actions and development.

In using language and grammar in the usual Western culture adherent REDUCTIONIST manner, instead of ‘duning’ as resonance in the Tao, we get… ‘the dune’ that ‘grows longer and higher and shifts to the East’.

Note that ‘duning’ (resonance aka ‘wave-dynamic’) is a nonlocal, non-being, non-material based phenomenon that is ‘ineffable’.  That is, we can say the name ‘the Tao’ or the name ‘resonance’, but it remains an implicit nonlocal phenomenon because it has no explicit local beginning or ending, and no explicit local material being.

The fact is, in the Tao, THERE IS NO ‘EFFING’ DUNE, THERE IS ONLY ‘DUNING’.

And, there is no ‘effing’ human, there is only ‘humaning’ as is natural in a wave-field dynamic such as the Tao.  2500 years of Western culture adherent screwing up with the double error base of ‘things-with-sourcing powers’ does not ‘make it right’, … it merely makes it a deeply psychologically-ingrained way of Western culture adherent thinking which is leading to very screwed up social dynamics (the operative social dynamics being based on the reduction of the ineffable Tao by double-error reduction to an ersatz ‘effable’ pseudo-reality).

In nonlinear theory, the persistence of this situation is called ‘lock-by high switching costs’.  The Western culture belief in double-error based ‘sorcery’ has given rise to a whole class structure based on ‘sorcery’ where the bigtime ‘sorcerers of good’ are given superior powers of influence over the beliefs and practices of the social collective, and where bigtime ‘sorcerers of bad’ are hunted down, corralled, stripped of their influence and punished and/or eliminated.   This Western culture sorcery-based ‘crime-and-punishment’ dynamic comes directly from belief in the ‘double error’ of ‘sorcery’.

In modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, the basic dynamic is not absolute being-based but relational as in ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related) which, like modern physics, acknowledges relational harmony and relational dissonance but NOT the double error absolutes of the sourcing of good or bad actions and developments as in Western culture adherent conceptualizing of ‘reality’…

What’s this got to do with experience-rich ‘old-timers’ calling today’s top university graduates ‘humilityless twits’?

There is a shift going on in the world thanks to language and communications.  We might call it the CANTILEVERING OF KNOWLEDGE.  Consider what the inventing of language has done for us in regard to sharing experience-derived learning; i.e. we are no longer so dependent on our own personal sensory experience for the growth of knowledge and understanding; i.e. imagine that we have two buckets for gathering knowledge and one bucket is filled from direct sensory experience and the other bucket is filled from language based accounts of the experiences of others.  Thanks to evolving communications systems such as the internet, we have truly amazing access to the experiences of diverse varieties of others, told by themselves or by those observing them, whether they are living today or having lived 2500 years ago.

We are not nearly so dependent as we formerly were on knowledge gleaned from our own personal sensory experiences. (imagine how this has changed from cave-man times to modern electronic global village communications).  That’s where the ‘humilityless twits’ comment was coming from; i.e. it was the reaction of those with actual sensory experience of inclusion in WWII turbulence, who were acutely aware of the gap between intellectual knowledge-as-understanding and sensory experience-based understanding, as applies generally in life.  That is, regardless of whether the virgin daughter knows more about sexual intercourse than her experienced parents will ever know, the reality is that “the knowledge of many things does not teach understanding (in the manner that sensory experience does)” (Heraclitus).

MEANWHILE, there is a growing ‘CANTILEVERING’ of our knowledge sourcing that is filling up the bucket of knowledge from non-personally experienced, intellectually informed language capture far faster than the bucket of knowledge from our personal sensory experience is filling.

The young student of history of armed conflicts may know far more about armed conflict than the crusty old one-eyed, amputee soldier, and the ‘young ‘un’ may even have a naïve ‘romantic’ conception of war as an opportunity to demonstrate courage and bravado and rise up in the glory light that gives fame and fortune.   Some ‘salty-dog’ directors of organizations insist on making their managers/supervisors work on the shop floor when conditions are the most extreme (when shop floor workers are caught in the squeeze between an aggressive top-down command and control function and an incalcitrant or even contrary market dynamic).  The point is that knowledge is no substitute for sensory experience, however, THE CANTILEVERING CONTINUES TO GROW, so that most of us have an expanding INTELLECTUAL knowledge of the world obtained through media and internet knowledge-transfer, while very little (less and less) a percentage of our understanding is grounded in SENSORY EXPERIENCE.  The ‘cantilevering’ ratio is growing larger and larger in favour of non-experience-based intellectual knowledge of ‘reality’.

ARE THE RUSSIANS PLAYING WITH OUR MINDS? … HAVE THEY INFLUENCED U.S. ELECTIONS? (a current Western culture paranoia)  is just one of the questions arising from this continually growing cantilevering of non-experience-grounded knowledge over experience-grounded knowledge.

IN OTHER WORDS, WE ARE BECOMING MORE AWARE OF ‘AN EXPOSURE’ DUE TO THE INCREASING CANTILEVERING OF OUR KNOWLEDGE WITH RESPECT TO ITS INCREASINGLY BEING INFLUENCED BY LINGUISTIC HEARSAY AND ITS DECREASING INFLUENCE FROM SENSORY EXPERIENCE.  Of course I am speaking of our intellectual constructions of reality here, and not of our sensory motor responses.

SO YES, OF COURSE, this is the reaping of the promised rewards of language that opens the floodgates to the vicarious sharing of non-sensory, reduced-to-intellectual abstraction (language-and grammar based) accounts of sensory experience.  The ‘sharing’ benefits are being reaped in massive proportions by the intellect, … too bad that language has to strip out the sensory experience part and transfer only the reduced to intellectual ‘double error’ based abstraction.

Nevertheless, the fact that language and grammar allow us to reduce our ineffable experience of inclusion in the Tao (wave-field) to something effable that alludes to the ineffable opens up the huge POTENTIAL BENEFIT of sharing some reduced allusion to our ineffable experience, a benefit that can easily become a liability if the reduction to effable is ‘taken literally’ rather than accepted as an effable allusion to something ineffable.

In the infeffable Tao, there is no absolute basement of truth that supports the whole system of understanding of reality, because, as Heraclitus declared and modern physics has affirmed; ‘everything is in flux’.

There is no concrete foundation to reality.  The Tao is the reality.

The Russians as alleged agents of messing with public communications to distort (to further some clandestine purpose?) what we understand to be ‘reality’, opens the door to the larger question; ‘what is reality’ and how do we check it out and make sure the reality that we are assuming is ‘the correct reality’?

The reason why indigenous aboriginals and Taoists/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta, who believe in reality as our inclusion in the Tao (the wave-field), employ relational means of understanding reality as in ‘mitakuye oyasin’ and the ‘learning circle’ as also in the modern physics ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ is because of the understanding of reality as ‘flow’, the Tao, where ‘everything is in flux’ and thus an ‘ineffable’ reality.

WHAT ABOUT THE DOUBLE ERROR BASED REALITY OF WESTERN CULTURE?  DOES IT NOT FURNISH AN APPROPRIATE BASED FOR DELIVERING A RELIABLE ‘REALITY’?

The Western culture double error-based reality was developed with one thing in mind; i.e. to render an effable version of the ineffable Tao (reality as flow or a wave-field/resonance-field).  While this rendering of the ineffable in effable terms was the same goal as the Eastern culture, the EAST/WEST split in approach came to pass in 500 B.C.E. where  (EAST) the relational (BOTH/AND logic of the included medium) understanding of Heraclitus was ‘eclipsed and supplanted’ (but only in the WEST) by a binary EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium.

“In the writing of Heraclitus, to a larger degree than ever before, the images do not impose their burden of concreteness but are entirely subservient to the achievement of clarity and precision

“Heraclitus had declared ‘being’ a perpetual ‘becoming’ and had correlated the two concepts with his ‘hidden attunement.’ Now Parmenides declared the two to be mutually exclusive, and only ‘being’ to be real.” — ‘The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man’, — ‘Henri Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin.

The ‘hidden attunement’ is ‘resonance’ aka ‘the wave dynamic’.

So, IN A NUTSHELL, while the East opted for BOTH/AND logic of the included medium so that the boil and flow ARE DISTINGUISHED ONLY BY APPEARANCE, the West opted for EITHER/OR logic of the excluded medium so that the boil and the flow ARE DISTINGUISHED AS SEPARATE ONTOLOGIES.

As we know, this ‘two-ontology’ interpretation of boil and flow based change introduces an innate ambiguity because of the intellect demanding that EITHER the boil sources the flow OR the flow sources the boil.  This is what splits the psyche and sources ‘schizophrenia’ aka ‘bipolar disorder’.   When groups of people bond together and take sides as to which way the split goes, we get ‘conservatives’ (the boil sources the flow or ‘one bad apple spoils the barrel’) and ‘liberals’ (the flow sources the boil or ‘it takes a whole community to raise a [good/bad] child).

There is no schizophrenia in the indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta cultures (provided they are not contaminated by Western binary thinking) BECAUSE THERE IS NO ONTIC SPLITTING OF INHABITANT AND HABITAT, FIGURE AND GROUND, THERE IS ONLY APPEARANCE BASED DISTINGUISHING..

THE POINT IS MADE THAT THE ‘EAST’ IS ON THE SAME TRACK AS MODERN PHYSICS ON THIS ISSUE; I.E. THE INHABITANT-HABITAT OR FIGURE/GROUND SPLIT IS ONLY ‘APPEARANCE’ (i.e. there is no ‘ontological binary split’ in the ‘foundations of reality’ as in THE ‘WEST’; e.g;

A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

SO NOW WE CAN FOCUS ON HOW THE PATH THE WEST CHOSE TO FOLLOW; I.E. OPTING FOR A BINARY REALITY RATHER THAN THE TAO, IS A ‘CRAZY-MAKER’.   IN PARTICULAR I WOULD LIKE TO REVIEW;

THE CANTILEVERING OF KNOWLEDGE BEYOND DIRECT SENSORY EXPERIENCE HAS BECOME HUGE AND THE PROBLEMS THEREIN ARE BECOMING MUCH MORE EVIDENT.

Recall, first of all, the inversion of thinking that comes with the Western choice of splitting apart ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ into separate ontologies. While the East does not have to invoke the notion of ‘sorcery’ because the Tao incorporates relational transformation wherein ‘biol’ and ‘flow’ are appearances, … the West, having invoked the ‘double error’ and split reality apart into a ‘thing-in-itself’ with ‘the powers of sourcing actions and developments, has created a ‘figure’ that implies a separate and reciprocal ‘ground’.  Since we use naming to impute ‘being’ to the boil (the figure), this imputes, by symmetry, ‘being’ to the flow, as well.  This figure and ground split is only an ‘ontic’ split in the West, while it is simply ‘appearance’ based in the East (as in the yin/yang (tai-chi) symbol).

THIS WESTERN ONTOLOGICAL SPLIT BETWEEN FIGURE AND GROUND IS ‘BIG TROUBLE’ IN THE PSYCHE!

It is BIG TROUBLE because of the ‘double error’ split which LOCALIZES SOURCING OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT.  In the example of the ‘boil’ and the ‘flow’, if we attribute the power of sourcing actions and development to the ‘boil’ while claiming that the ‘boil’ is a ‘thing-in-itself’, … then how about the associated thought (which became Newton’s 3rd law) that says that ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’?

This is not just an obscure philosophical point, this crops up in the social mainstream as the conservative liberal split in understanding reality, as discussed re the ‘two-ontology’ interpretation.

DOES THE DYNAMIC OF THE FIGURE/INHABITANT SOURCE THE DYNAMIC OF THE GROUND/HABITAT OR DOES THE DYNAMIC OF THE GROUND/HABITAT SOURCE THE DYNAMIC OF THE FIGURE/INHABITANT?

As the Zen parable of wind and flag (which sources the moving of which) observes, the answer is ‘neither’, the mind moves.

In other words, there is no such thing as ‘sorcery’, it is an intellectual (mind-based) abstraction that derives from our abstract architecting of language and grammar.

The above covers the ‘main points’ while the following is a bit of a review bringing to bear some additional angles on the same topic.

The main take-away is alluded to by the opening allusion to the ‘humilityless twits’  In the terms of ‘cantilevering’, this would refer to those people who support their understandings of reality with abstract intellectual knowledge that is built out far beyond any foundational stub of sensory experience based grounding; i.e. understanding that is highly CANTILEVERED with intellectual abstraction pivoting from a long forgotten base of sensory experience (or maybe from a story that never was grounded in sensory experience, as in the story of the chimpanzees as cited in the continuing text).

The term ‘CANTILEVER’ is a Wittgenstein ladder type term in that it suggests a ‘small base’ supporting a larger superstructure, as with ‘subsystem’ and ‘suprasystem’, however, the relationship between a system and suprasystem can be according to the BOTH/AND logic of the included medium wherein there is no ‘small but solid base’ that is supporting the much larger superstructure, there is only a holographic relation wherein a confluence of relations points to a notional ‘something’ (as in the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions) and this web of relations can open up a funneling into more webs of relations in the manner of an ever-opening fractal tunnel or ‘wormhole’ in a Dr. Who movie.

In narratives like ‘The Collapse of Chaos’ by Stewart and Cohen, we are reminded of this basic ambiguity between reductionism and holism where the former delivers understanding is in terms of explicit micro-to-macro structures and the latter is in terms of purely relational complexes.  The ineffable nature of inclusion in the Tao corresponds with the latter falling through a wormhole allusion, while the reduction to explicit structure renders the ineffable effable, albeit with some basic loss of meanin, the price that must be paid for reducing the ineffable to effable terms..

WHY DID I INTRODUCE THE CONCEPT OF CANTILEVERING IF IT IS NOT ‘BASIC ENOUGH’?

The challenge of rendering the ineffable effable while keeping the listener on a safety line so that the listener won’t take the bait ‘literally’ and mistake the allusion for the reality’ is a design challenge; i.e. the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ is fine if one has time for it, but in rapid discourse, the listener may be tempted to digest the input bit by incoming bit, in which case the allusion to the ineffable understanding will be lost.  I can say, as Heraclitus did; “Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that one is all /all is one.”in which case, the listener can’t expect to get meaning delivered in word-bites, but must relax and open up to the streaming in of words with the patience of waiting for understanding to form ‘relationally’, as will never be seen by stopping to examine and make sense of each incoming explicit bit.

If the listener demands that the speaker ‘slow down’ and deliver his message in explicit, crisp bits, then all possibility of sharing ineffable experience is removed.

We are constantly the recipients of others’ language and grammar based accounts of complex sensory experience that they have reduced to language and grammar based renderings for the purpose of making the ineffable effable and thus shareable.  The more we accumulate ‘de-ineffable-ized’ understandings of reality, the more such understanding of reality will be ‘CANTILEVERED’ into emphasizing blandified reductionist versions of experience, so that these blandified but effable understandings will tend towards monopolizing our conceptualizing of reality.  While our personal lives may have exciting experiential moments, our impression of the overall global reality is becoming progressively blandified and depressing through the rapidly rising CANTILEVERING of language and grammar effable-izations of reality, within which our ineffable sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao is shrinking in its relative proportion of what, for us, constitutes ‘reality’.

“Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to remember that all things are One’ –Heraclitus

 

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN CANTILEVERING KNOWLEDGE-BASED UNDERSTANDING WELL BEYOND EXPERIENCE.

Overcoming (sort of) the restriction of the ‘ineffable’ nature of the Tao, which prevents us from sharing our REAL experience; i.e. we cannot articulate our experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum however, the value of being able to share our experience, even some crude, reduced ‘effable’ allusion of our ineffable experience is so great that there is no problem with trading some sort of reduced versions of our ineffable experience, as may be achieved through our reducing of experience to language and grammar articulable (effable) terms.

What are the ‘downside’ consequences of this trade in reduced-to-language, ‘shareable’ versions of our ineffable experience of inclusion in the Tao?  The upsides may be significant as when the virgin who is an expert on sexual relations gets to experience sexual relations.  The downsides may be significant when the virgin who is an expert in military strategies and programs get to experience what it’s like in an actual war.

Meanwhile, we live in a world of people whose understanding is increasingly ‘cantilevered’ well beyond grounding in actual sensory experience, thanks NOT ONLY to language per se, but to the systems or ‘media’ of communication (books, radio, movies, television, internet etc.).

THE CANTILEVERING OF KNOWLEDGE BEYOND DIRECT SENSORY EXPERIENCE HAS BECOME HUGE AND THE PROBLEMS THEREIN ARE BECOMING MUCH MORE EVIDENT.

Ivan Illich’s ringing of the alarm bell in ‘Silence is a Commons’ was for a good reason; i.e. his point is that while language enabled our direct interpersonal SHARING of knowledge and/or some sort of inferred version of our sensory experience of inclusion in the Tao, …, it was one thing for this sharing to propagate on an interpersonal basis, and quite another for it to propagate on a massive one-to-many basis through ‘the invention of the loudspeaker’ (electronic communictions).

Today, ‘as we speak’, there is concern about our view-sharing apparatus (wherein the views shared are not only of individuals honestly sharing their experiences, but also of advertisers and adversaries whose view-sharing has the purpose of influencing the ‘understanding’ of the social collective in a manner ‘convenient-to-themselves and their purposes’).  Are the Russians influencing our (Western bloc) understanding, clandestinely, by salting the general media discourse with made-up stories and facts that can spread and infect the public understanding?

IS THIS NOT THE GENERAL CASE, AS IVAN ILLICH IS CONTENDING, THAT CAME WITH THE INVENTION OF THE LOUDSPEAKER?

We know that the knowledge that is transmitted by language is already highly cantilevered beyond the sparse grounding of our actual, limited direct sensory experience.  So what do we mean by ‘truth’?  Is it something that language is capable of transmitting?  How could it be if the Tao is ineffable?

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”  — Nietzsche, –Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, (On Truth and Lies in an extra-moral sense).

“The reality is that the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao” – Lao Tzu.

Yet our reduction of the Tao to something shareable is of huge value, … SO LONG AS WE DON’T FORGET THAT WE HAVE TO MAKE A FUNDAMENTAL REDUCTION OF ‘DIMENSIONALITY’ IN ORDER TO PUT THE INEFFABLE TAO INTO AN EFFABLE AND THUS SHAREABLE FORM.

As Lao Tzu was saying; “If we are sharing an account of reality, it is not reality’.  In modern physics, what we are sharing is ‘inference’ of the wave-field dynamic (the Tao) that cannot be directly told.  We (not you and as Western culture adherents who are communicating in the same way as in medieval times; i.e. using the allusion to ‘sorcery’, but modern physics aficionados like Bohm and like indigenous aboriginal, Taoist/Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta cultural adherents.  In these cases language is only used as ‘inference’ as in poetic usage and as ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.  The Tao is not an ‘explicit reality’ that can be captured by explicit language constructs.

THE REDUCTION OF THE TAO TO LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR THAT ALLOWS EXPLICIT EXPRESSION, AS IN THE DOUBLE ERROR APPROACH, DOES SUCCEED IN RE-RENDERING THE INEFFABLE IN (REDUCED) EFFABLE TERMS THAT ENABLE LANGUAGE-BASED SHARING.   However, this ineffable-reduced-to-articulable-effable is not the ‘true Tao’.  The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao’.

However, reducing the ineffable to something (although no longer the ineffable but merely an effable-based inference that alludes to the ineffable) effable, DOES open the way to ‘SHARING’ (sharing an inference of an ineffable reality that lies innately beyond the effable reduction we are using to allude to it).

I HAVE DESCRIBED TWO APPROACHES TO ‘SHARING’ some REDUCED-TO-EFFABLE INFERENCES OF THE INEFFABLE.

-.- THE RELATIONAL INFERENCE VIA THE SURPRISE VERSION OF THE GAME OF TWENTY QUESTIONS. This one uses a matrix of relational inferences to give us the thingless impression of motion (transformation).

-.- THE DOUBLE ERROR BASED APPROACH WHICH IS MAINSTREAM IN WESTERN CULTURE. The first error of ‘naming’ to impute ‘independent thing-in-itself existence to a relational flow-form in the Tao, … conflated by a second error of grammar that imputes the power of sourcing actions and developments to the name-instantiated thing-in-itself. Thus, instead of the purely relational, nonlocal, non-material wave dynamic of ‘duning’, the double error reduces this to ‘the dune’, a notional local, material thing-in-itself that grammar equips with the notional power of sourcing actions and development; “the dune is growing taller and longer and shifting to the East”.

We thus have at our disposal two very different tools for the construction of a pseudo-reality that can facilitate our side-stepping of the ineffable nature of the Tao of our actual experience, so that we can share an allusion to it, the allusion described in -1- above which is purely implicit and relational and the illusion described in -2- which is explicit and material, but nevertheless, nothing other than ‘allusion’; i.e. there is ‘duning’ but there are no ‘dunes that ‘grow larger’ and ‘shift across the desert floor’.   NOTE that ‘the desert floor is an invention that comes with the imaginary ontological splitting into ‘figure and ground’ that comes the ‘the double error’.

As you can see, the ‘double error’ renders the ineffable effable, but in a very different manner than ‘the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ or as also in the ‘sharing circle’ of indigenous aboriginal cultural practice.

Emerson’s cautionary re the ‘tool running away with the workman’ is in regard to using the ‘double error’ approach which imputes the power of sorcery to a relational form reduced to a ‘thing-in-itself’ such as the ‘dune’.  That is, the power of sorcery is NOT REAL, it is part of the game of using language and grammar to infer the ineffable Tao.  Again, the benefits of being able to share, … EVEN A CRUDE REPLICA OF OUR INEFFABLE EXPERIENCE OF INCLUSION IN THE TAO, … is extremely valuable in that it allows us to share knowledge (crude, reduced replication) of ineffable experience with one another.   As communications have developed, the sharing has become huge and so has the degree of ‘cantilevering’ of our knowledge beyond our experience-grounded understanding (‘The knowledge of many things does not teach understanding’ – Heraclitus [repeated for convenience of easy recall].

THE CANTILEVERING OF KNOWLEDGE BEYOND OUR DIRECT SENSORY EXPERIENCE, THANKS TO TECHNOLOGY LEVERAGING, HAS BECOME HUGE.

TAKE-AWAY POINTS ON THE ‘EXPOSURES’ TO CONFUSION AS A RESULT OF THE ABOVE-DESCRIBED HABITS.

-1- The humilityless twits label that older war-experienced business managers pinned on the best and brightest university (Ph.D. and M.Sc.) graduates is a direct result of the increasing ‘cantilevering’ of knowledge beyond our actual sensual experience based understanding.

This development of language based cantilevering of knowledge beyond sensory experience has been greatly amplified by the evolving sophistication and electronic communications.  A modern youth may spend most of his young life ‘on his computer’, using it as his ‘ears and eyes on the world’ without having to leave his classroom or bedroom.   While his intellectual tapping into ‘reality’??? via electronic communications has soared, his sensory experience engaging in the world has, over the past decades, substantially declined.   In other words THE CANTILEVERING OF KNOWLEDGE BEYOND SENSORY EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN GREATLY AMPLIFIED.

IVAN ILLICH’S ‘WARNING’ THUS DESERVES OUR ATTENTION.  THIS IS UNDERSCORED BY NIETZSCHE’S OBSERVATIONS ON THE ARBITRARINESS OF ‘TRUTH’ ONCE IT IS INTELLECTUALLY EXTRACTED FROM, AND SEPARATED FROM SENSORY EXPERIENCE.

We can embody knowledge that we gain from intellectual sourcing that is ungrounded in our own sensory experience.  The story of the chimps sprayed with ice-water every time they turned a distinctive red tap, led to the group policing themselves to as to cease touching the red tap, and this continued long after the spraying apparatus was dismantled; i.e. it had become a standard policing action adopted by all, even those who had never seen or experienced the cold-water spraying that had once been associated with turning the red tap.

Today, increasingly, we are becoming concerned with what is being circulated as ‘truth’.  Who is putting it out there?  Is it the Russians?  Are the Russians influencing U.S. elections?  How about political candidates in elections, are they speaking the truth?

WHAT IS TRUTH?  As Nietzsche says (cited above), truth is just popular INTELLECTUAL ‘coinage’ as with the chimp example (“IT IS BAD FOR ANY OF US TO TURN THE RED TAP AS TERRIBLE THINGS MAY HAPPEN TO US” that is no longer grounded in sensory experience.

Directors of successful enterprises have found it important to put their managers out ‘on shop floor front lines’ when operations are stressed so they can understand the plight of shop-floor workers who are caught between the top-down instructions from managers and the bottom-up pressures of ground level engagement with volatile world they are operating in.  The intellection formulating of instructions from the top that can become overly cantilevered relative to the relational experience grounded ‘shop floor’ reality.  This ‘cantilevering’ of intellection over sensory experience, is at the heart of ‘sharing’ without ‘having to experience’ which has made Western culture stand out by way of the amazing knowledge transfer capabilities of ‘experience that is canned’ and shared as knowledge of ‘how things work’ and ‘what to do’, as with the virgin teenager that has more complete knowledge of sexual relations that her well experienced parents.  Evidently, ‘the knowledge of many things does not teach understanding’, — Heraclitus (repeated for convenience)

When we listen to the news, we form a knowledge-based impression of what is going on around the world which is highly cantilevered beyond our sensory experience.  We nevertheless feel qualified to express our views so as to influence our government and others to act in a manner that we feel may attenuate dissonance and imbalance and cultivate or amplify harmony and balance.

WE WOULD LIKE TO BASE OUR ARGUMENTS AND OUR ACTIVE INFLUENCING THROUGH OTHERS OF INFLUENCE INCLUDING OUR GOVERNMENT AND ITS INFLUENCING POWERS, (i.e. influencing  through intellectual messaging that carries beyond the interactions of our immediate sensory experience) ON OUR INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS OF THE TRUTH AS TO WHAT IS GOING ON OUT THERE IN THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.

The problem is, there is no such thing as ‘the truth’ beyond the truth of our experience of inclusion in the Tao which is ineffable.  What our language allows us to share as if it were the truth is;  (repeating this for reading convenience)

 “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”  — Nietzsche, –Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, (On Truth and Lies in an extra-moral sense).

The ‘bottom line’ is that we have developed language and grammar as a crude means of reducing the reality of the ineffable Tao to something ‘effable’ so that we could ‘share’ something that at least infers the ineffable reality of our inclusion in the Tao.  To speak in terms of a rock-solid, explicit, local ‘truth’ while swimming in a purely relational implicit nonlocal transforming relational continuum is ‘a bit much’.  In fact, the only means of rendering an innately fuzzy implicit, relational reality so as to present it in terms of explicit truths is by the method of Lafontaine; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’.  (The reasoning/truth of the most powerful is always the best).

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, for we have REASON!” Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “REASON” in language–oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Nietzsche quote  “on the deceptiveness of ‘reason’ in philosophy” — (Proposition 5 in Chapter 5 (Reason in Philosophy) of Twilight of the Idols.

 

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NOTES:

Anthropogenic sourcing of global warming is psychological delusion stemming from the double error of language and grammar that substitutes (in the intellectual visualizing of the mind), local, material sources of action and development. While this double error renders the ineffable Tao effable by allowing the Tao to be spoken of in the abstract reduced terms of local parts (things-in-themselves’, notionally with ‘their own’ powers of sourcing actions and developments, this reduced-to-effable pseudo reality is no longer the natural/authentic reality of our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

The imputing of local sourcing sets up an ambiguous ‘figure-ground’ relational as in the Zen ‘wind’ and ‘flag’ koan; i.e. ‘which is  sourcing the actions and development of ‘which’?  This ambiguity divides Western culture adherents into ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’; the former believing that the figure (individual) is the source of its own action and the latter believing that the ground (social collective) is the source of the individual’s actions and developments.  IN REALITY, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘SOURCING’, THERE IS ONLY THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM AKA THE TAO.

We forget that introduction of the ‘double error’ of language and grammar was an expedient reduction to render the ineffable Tao in an effable intellectual form.  The double error is ladder that we can climb to stimulate an intuition of the ineffable that lies innately beyond explicit capture.

  6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

“7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

  — Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

IN REALITY, THERE IS NO FIGURE-GROUND (INHABITANT-HABITAT) ONTOLOGICAL SPLIT, THERE IS ONLY AN APPEARANCE-BASED SPLIT.   IN OTHER WORDS, THE TAO THAT CAN BE TOLD IS NOT THE TRUE TAO.

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