An inclusional worldview
PSI-6 Post-Stroke Impressions No. 6
Why East Doesn’t Meet West
The following is a ‘condensed’ account of how indigenous aboriginal ‘relational reality’ is faithful to our experience while Western ‘being-based’ (abstract) reality is the source of endemic social dysfunction. …
— reality is fluid (field)
— ‘being’ is suggested by way of ‘names’ (names give the cognitive impression of persisting ‘being’)
— ‘bootstrapping’ is ‘cognitive trickery’ whereby ‘being’ is used to trigger ‘cognition’ of ‘becoming’
— aboriginal culture uses ‘names’ NOT to designate ‘beings’ but to bootstrap ‘becoming’ (relational transformation as in ‘flow’).
— ‘dances with wolves’ exemplifies how names can be used to ‘bootstrap’ ‘flow-forms’ that are ‘all relations, no ‘being’’.
— western reality as in classical ‘science’ employs ‘being’ literally (i.e. ‘science’ fails to bootstrap beyond its own abstractions).
— poetry (western and eastern) employs words in a bootstrapping fashion so that relations prevail over ‘being’ not vice versa.
e.g. As Wittgenstein put it;
”Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. “ … “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.”
– Wittgenstein
— ‘Bootstrapping’ is a means of using being-based language to convey understanding of the relational reality of our actual experience. ‘Bootstrapping makes use of ‘being’; i.e. of notional ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things-in-themselves do’ to establish a relational matrix wherein the relations are ‘the cognitive take-away’ [the ‘things’ used to bootstrap the relations are like booster rockets that fall away after the main (relational) cognitive impression is launched into orbit because they are no longer needed]. ‘Thing-based dynamics’ [ i.e. ‘being-based dynamics] are cognitive abstractions that meanwhile play a foundational role in ‘Western classical science’. In ‘aboriginal physics’ [a term coined by David Bohm and F. David Peat], ‘being-based dynamics merely play a ‘springboard’ role in ‘bootstrapping cognition’. The relational reality of our actual experience lies beyond such ‘being-based Western science’; i.e. ‘being-based science’ or ‘rational intellection’ can only serve as a ‘launching pad’ from which we can make an intuitive ‘leap’ to a more realistic relational understanding.
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’s final two propositions in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus)
Once again, the point is that ‘being-based dynamics’ (material things-in-themselves based dynamics) are merely a convenient ‘cognitive device’ for inducing cognition of the purely relational physical reality of our experience.
— Indigenous versus Western culture based ‘reality-clash’ can be understood as follows; The indigenous aboriginal (traditional) culture understands language constructs that employ ‘names’ in relational context (e.g. ‘dances with wolves’) as a ‘bootstrapping’ device to induce cognition in purely relational terms [the abstraction of things-in-themselves triggered by ‘names’ (‘being’) ‘drops out’ after serving to stimulate/induce ‘relational cognition’]. That is, in poetic usage, ‘names’ are expedients to ‘bootstrap’ purely relational understanding so that to interpret them ‘literally’ in the sense of ‘being’ is an ‘error’;
“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 witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
The reference to ‘not being rid of God’ is a critique of the use of the abstract concept of ‘being’ (cognitively anchored by way of the notion of a ‘Supreme Being’ that sits atop a being-based hierarchy). This abstract ‘being’ concept is built into ‘noun-and-verb’ grammar so as to impute the power of ‘jumpstart authorship of actions and consequences to name-tagged ‘beings’ understood as ‘things-in-themselves’, notionally with ‘their own’ powers of jumpstart sourcing of actions and consequences.
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ANALYSIS:
… “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.”
– Wittgenstein
Poets do not make it into ‘the leadership’ in Western society but they clearly do in indigenous aboriginal society where language is not based on the abstraction of ‘being’ but on ‘relations’ as is demanded by an understanding of the world as ‘flow’. David Bohm’s flow-based understanding of modern physics demanded the development of a new form of language which shed its dependency on ‘being’ as with ‘things-in-themselves’. He called the needed new form of language ‘rheomode’ (flow-mode).
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’
In short, names and language were construed in the indigenous aboriginal culture, not as literal informers on reality, but as ‘bootstrapping’ tools employed relational inference (e.g. ‘dances with wolves’). The relational matrices developed with names furnished a cognitive jumping-off platform to get to purely relational (thingless/beingless) cognition. The Western European cognitive tradition, influenced by philosophers such as Parmenides, meanwhile imputed ‘primary reality’ to the ‘being-based’ ‘jumping off platform’ itself;
“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’, — ‘Frankfort et al’
Western culture includes ‘poets’ who may well live their lives ‘off the grid’ of the dominant ‘rational’ (thing-based) belief system of Western culture but perhaps as Mahavit rather than as Atmavit (i.e. as one who understands but not as one who openly ‘walks-the-talk’). Eg;
“T.S. Eliot studied Eastern religions in detail at Harvard, learning some Sanskrit and some Pali, and soon concluded that “their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.” For a young man disillusioned with his banal surroundings and desperate to break away from his family, there was something wonderfully aloof, impersonal and invulnerable about the Buddhist notion of the spirit, free of all attachments and desires. And by the time he was composing The Wasteland, which ends, of course, with the chant “Shantih shantih shantih,” he was genuinely considering a conversion to Buddhism. But the truth was, he wrote, “my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or European: which for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.”
Schrodinger seems to have had the same problem. …” — Ned Beauman, ‘Great Mahavits’ January 4, 2010,
A society led by (inspired by) poets is essentially what the society of indigenous aboriginals is. It is a society that collectively comprehends the essentially relational essence of our experiential reality.
Meanwhile, David Bohm suggested that a pervasive incoherence in the process of Western human thought is the essential source of the endless crises affecting Western society. This incoherence derives from the fact that relational reality is beyond capture in ‘being-based terms’ connoted by noun-and-verb language-and-grammar. The ‘being-based’ rational, materialist (‘scientific’) pseudo-reality that Western society employs as the ‘operative reality’ is the source of endemic social-relational dysfunction aka ‘incoherence’.
What a [left-brain] stroke does is to pull the rug out from under the feet of being-based cognition. The ‘names’ that are key to being-based cognition go AWOL from the mind of someone who has experienced [left-brain] stroke. The ‘stroke-experient’, faced with trying to linguistically share an experience or observation with another, is unable to express what is going on in the ‘being-based terms’ of ‘named things’ and ‘what named things are doing or have done’. For example, the ‘stroke-experient’ is unable to dig out the name ‘John Dunbar’ to cognitively convey the notion that ‘John Dunbar did such-and-such’ as in ‘being-based language and grammar’ [this conflicts with the understanding of human forms as relational features in a transforming relational continuum]
The concept of ‘being’ and the associated notion of ‘beings’ as jumpstart authors of actions and their products is triggered by a ‘name’ and if one does not recall the name, one must revert to relational cognition. There is a kind of (black) magic in a name. Just as one either knows the name of Rumpelstiltskin or not, so it is with the name John Dunbar (otherwise known ‘relationally’ as ‘Dances with Wolves’); i.e. there is a fundamental difference between cognition of ‘being’ and ‘relational knowing’. The abstract concept of ‘thing-in-itself being’ does not exist in the flow-based universe of our natural experience, as pointed out by Heraclitus, Lao Tzu and/or the practitioners of indigenous aboriginal culture. Therefore, all ‘names’, insofar as they signify ‘being’ (persisting thing-in-itself existence) are rational abstractions that have no place in the relational world of our actual experience. Yet it is always possible to use names to create a web of relations rather than to identify ‘thing-in-itself being’. The ‘being’ in this case is a temporary expedient ‘being’ that serves within a matrix of temporary expedient ‘beings’ to ‘bootstrap’ cognition of purely relational form; e.g. as in the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ in which case a relational understanding of a form (a flow-feature) is developed so that the notional abstract ‘existence’ of ‘a things-in-itself’ (‘being’) need not persist in any ‘foundational’ way.
For example, relational flow in a fluid as in oceanic or atmospheric flow (e.g. as induced by solar irradiation) includes ‘whorls’ which are ‘cognitively separable from’ but not physically separable from the flow. Nevertheless, we use language and grammar to impute ‘being’ (thing-in-itselfness) to these purely relational flow-features by ‘naming’ them as ‘storm-cells’ (e.g. ‘Katrina’) and then adapting our language and grammar treatment of them to make it seem as if ‘these so-defined things-that-be’ are the source of flow rather than the ‘optical’ result of flow. This inverted view, as Nietzsche points out, stems from ‘ego’ and the ego-view of ‘self’ in the ‘being’-based terms of a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own intrinsic jumpstart powers of assertive agency. The man who looks in a mirror and perceives ‘himself’ out of the full relational context of the flow in which he is an included flow-form, may fixate on the abstract concept of ‘his own being’ while losing touch with his inclusion, as a relational feature, within a transforming relational continuum. In the case where such a person has cognitively equipped himself with a noun-and-verb language (unlike the flow based language of indigenous aboriginals), he is ripe for the self-deception of believing in the ‘reality’ of ‘being’; i.e. to repeat for emphasis Nietzsche’s point on the cognitive deceptiveness of ‘being’ within a Western language-and-grammar framework, as discussed earlier;
“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 witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
Meanwhile, it is possible for an indigenous aboriginal, who was never raised with the intellectual custom of imputing the abstraction of ‘being’ to the relational forms in nature, to learn the name-tag ‘John Dunbar’ and to refer to that relational form using that name-tag, while at the same time understanding him first-and-foremost in relational terms such as ‘dances with wolves’ or in some other relational context. In this manner, different people [aboriginals and/or non-aboriginals, poets and/or rationalists] can be talking about the same person, animal etc. but understanding him/it either as a relational form in the flow or as a thing-in-itself being. The difference will show up in the ‘social dynamic’; e.g. in the person’s sense of social justice.
For example, the being-based view gives rise to the notion that the individual ‘exists independently’ and is thus fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour, while the aboriginal relational form based view is that ‘it takes a whole community to raise a child’ and ‘we are all related’ (mitakuye oyasin). This basic difference in understanding (as to whether ‘John Dunbar’ is a ‘relational form in the flow’ or an ‘independently-existing material being that is fully and solely responsible for ‘his own actions and their results’ will lead to ‘retributive justice’ in the ‘being’ based understanding and to ‘restorative justice’ in the relational form-in-the-flow based understanding wherein, ‘it takes a whole community to raise a child’.
The stroke induced revision of one’s cognitive mode, which restores level 1 relational cognition to its natural primacy (see discussion on Erich Jantsch’s three-level model of cognition) does not mean that the person experiencing this ‘stroke of insight’ will allow that to modify his/her mode of behaviour, for the same reason as cited by T.S. Eliot; i.e. our attachments to others embracing ‘the culture as it is’ may be more important to us than being faithful to a mode of cognition which, if acted on, would be more appropriate for life in an indigenous aboriginal community than in the typical Western European social dynamic that we have become comfortable in.
And by the time he (T.S. Eliot) was composing The Wasteland, which ends, of course, with the chant “Shantih shantih shantih,” he was genuinely considering a conversion to Buddhism. But the truth was, he wrote, “my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or European: which for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.”
David Bohm, who similarly came to conclude that the indigenous aboriginal mode of cognition was consistent with a modern physics, relational understanding of the world of our experience, seemed more prepared to live on as a ‘Mahavit teacher’ than to ‘walk-the-talk’ and undergo a transformation to Atmavit. The Mahavit’s level of commitment is like that described in the adage; ‘the chicken who lays an egg does not make the same level of commitment as the pig does, to a bacon and egg breakfast; i.e. he does not ‘put his skin in the game’.
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The toughest part in verbally communicating one’s stroke experience, it seems to me, is in trying to invoke ‘awareness’ of how we use ‘being’ in language. We are so accustomed to it, that we ‘can’t see it’. This is important because the abstract concept of ‘being’ drops out in the wake of a (left-brain) stroke. This is the ‘key impact’ of a stroke but it is not acknowledged in Western medicine because ‘being’ is ‘taken for granted’ as if it were ‘part of reality’ rather than ‘abstraction’ as modern physics would see it.
Only when we use a ‘name’ as a unique identifier of someone or something do we impute ‘being’ by its use (e.g. ‘Rumpelstiltskin’). This name cannot be ‘guessed’ through knowledge of ‘what the person does [e.g. ‘dances with wolves’ which informs us ‘relationally’ of ‘who a person is’ does not reveal his (Western cognition purported) ‘thing-in-itself being’]. The funny little man’s actions (rumpelstiltskin’s) of hopping up and down when he gets excited may allow us to ‘identify him’ in a relational sense but it does not tell us his ‘name’ which designates his ‘thing-in-itself’ ‘being’ and it is ‘being’ than informs us whether he ‘really is’ a ‘prince’ and ‘really is not’ a ‘pauper’.
That is, a ‘name’ which signifies ‘being’ ‘over-rides’, in the habitual cognitive habit of Western culture, our actual relational experience, as in stories such as ‘the Prince and the Pauper’. In the ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ fable, there is ‘magic’ in a name that allows us to ‘turn straw into gold’ [turn a pauper into a prince]. One may ‘know Rumpelstiltskin through one’s relational interactions with him, but to understand ‘how to turn straw into gold’, we must discover his ‘name’ because it is the ‘name’ that has the power to turn straw into gold, … that is, … to turn a pauper into a prince [value is not naturally intrinsic in a named thing since ‘being’ is an abstraction. Belief in ‘being’ is a prerequisite for ascribing value to a named thing. Using a name to turn a pauper into a prince is ‘magic’ akin to spinning straw into gold.].
The magical power in a name is part of the Western culture ‘belief system’; e.g. if one discovers that one’s childhood playmate is ‘the King od England’, the Western culture demands that we fall on our knees, saying something like’ ‘my liege, my lord and master, your wish is my command for I am your faithful servant’. That is, Western culture, since 500 BCE when the abstract ideas of Parmenides eclipsed the nature-based understanding of Heraclitus, has put ‘being’ into an unnatural primacy over relational-experience based ‘becoming’.
In terms of Erich Jantsch’s three levels of comprehending ‘reality’ [i.e. … 3: ‘being’ as when a seed assertively develops into a ‘thing-in-itself’ (also referred to as ‘nature’), … 2: environment-induced becoming (also referred to as ‘nurture’) and, … 1: thingless relational becoming (also referred to as ‘flow’ or ‘field’ or ‘the Tao’). In Western culture, there is tacit agreement on ‘what is reality’ which positions level 3, the lowest level in the Heraclitean, Modern physics (Bohmian) and Taoist understanding, as the highest level. This is why the abstract concept of a powerful being (a King and/or a God) designated by a ‘name’ is given greater credence than our actual, living, relational experience.
This ‘error of grammar’, which puts ‘being’ into an unnatural precedence over ‘becoming’, while it has been directly critiqued by Nietzsche, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, modern physicists (e.g. Bohm, Schroedinger) has failed to make a significant dent in the body of the Western cognitive dynamic because, as Nietzsche has pointed out, our Western mode of cognition is anchored in place by ‘ego’ which is in turn anchored by ‘names’ that cognitively impart ‘thing-in-itself being’ as the authoring source of dynamics (rather than ‘relations’ as in ‘flow’).
There is ‘a lot’ of philosophical insight in the Rumpelstiltskin fairy-tale. It suggests that ‘being’ as designated by a ‘name’ is something magical, like having the power to turn straw into gold. Can the natural person we know through a matrix of relational associations have another, ‘beyond-relational’ sort of identity; a ‘being’-based identity signalled by a ‘name’ that ‘trumps’ the relational identity?
Could the familiar person or thing that we know through physical relations be something other, something that ‘over-rides’ relational knowing based identity? That is, could something that is purely relational be reduced to a ‘thing-in-itself’ by language and grammar? Evidently.
“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 fact that the error of grammar that imputes ‘being’ where there is only relational flow has been frontally exposed by Nietzsche, Bohm, Lao Tzu has not been sufficient to overcome the stranglehold grip of ego on Western society with its unnatural hierarchical social structures topped by leaders who are deaf to parables such ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ [the conceal the paisano in Prince’s clothes].
Of course, there is the problem that whistle-blowers like Nietzsche and Bohm tend to serve as ‘Mahavits’ rather than Atmavits, meaning that they intellectually point out that Western culture is inverting the natural primacies [letting level 3 being-based cognition take unnatural priority over level 1 flow-based cognition] yet do not themselves ‘walk the talk’. Mahavit like behaviour is alluded to in the joke as to the different roles of the chicken and the pig in provisioning a bacon-and-egg breakfast; i.e. both are important contributors, but the chicken has no ‘skin-in-the-game’.
T.S. Eliot ‘owns up’ to not moving beyond the Mahavit role for ‘practical and sentimental reasons’;
And by the time he (T.S. Eliot) was composing The Wasteland, which ends, of course, with the chant “Shantih shantih shantih,” he was genuinely considering a conversion to Buddhism. But the truth was, he wrote, “my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or European: which for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.”
My ‘personal post-stroke position’ in all of this puts me somewhere between a Mahavit and an Atmavit (between the chicken and the pig in the above-cited parable). The name-based ‘level 3 cognition’ has, in my post-stroke cognitive processing, dropped out, which means that ‘names’ that formerly induced direct cognition of ‘thing-in-itself’ being, no longer play a prominent role in my cognitive processing, as they do in Western culture and dialogue in general. I am not saying that I no longer recognize names, only that ‘names’ are no longer the pathway FOR ME to express cognitive understanding. That is, my post-stroke cognitive understanding is no longer ‘being-based’ [level 3 based]. A ‘stroke of insight’ restores level 1 relational cognition to its ‘natural primacy’.
Wherever dialogue is rich in relational clues, I (in my thingless/beingless relational post-stroke cognitive mode) do fine. However, wherever the structure of the ‘language game’ gives me no choice but to come up with a unique thing-in-itself name [like ‘Rumpelstiltskin’] that conveys an abstract ‘identity’ of ‘the thing/form’ that lies intrinsically beyond a relational understanding (e.g. a being-based ‘prince’ rather than what is, by all experience-informing inputs, a ‘pauper’), I draw a blank. My nature-grounded relational association with a King, if I had such a relational association, would over-ride any abstract being-based cognition that would compel me, by cultural tradition, to put ‘the abstraction of ‘being’ into an unnatural precedence over relation-based cognition’.
I have been active in cultivating, within relational dynamics, ‘restorative justice’ (aboriginal style rather than Western style in that there is no implied assumption of ‘being-sourced’ guilt/responsibility; i.e. all dynamics are assumed to be of relational origin. Meanwhile, I am finding the gap between Mahavit and Atmavit to present interesting challenges as my post-stroke experience continues to unfold.