coincidentia oppositorum

 

The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one. -Heraclitus

καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα

 

The problem of the ‘one and the many’ has been around since the earliest records of humans reflecting on their ‘human condition’.   The strife that goes on within us fuels our quest to reconcile the strife within us.  Every ‘coincidentia oppositorum’; one and many, love and hate, evil and goodness, creative-urge and destructive-urge, the outer and the inner, objectivity and subjectivity, … cry out for some, … ‘mediation?’

 

‘Psychotherapy’ has become a popular approach to addressing inner-outer strife and much has been written about the ‘search for wholeness’, by, for example, the Jungian concept of the sacred union of anima with animus aka ‘individuation’.  Individuation is the process by which our outer reality and our inner reality are brought into balance.

 

This approach presumes … “the reality of the psyche whereby all things are perceived through the psyche and that this is the only reality we know of.  As Suzanne Gieser observes in ‘The Innermost Kernel’, Jung did not take this to mean that reality is in itself psychic or intra-mental, but “was convinced that there is an objective reality that causes the sensory impression and the dream, but how this reality is constituted is something on which we can only speculate.”

 

The psychotherapeutic process is operationalized by ‘talk’ (language and thought) yet we know that language and thought are already ‘contaminated’ with culture-specific concepts woven into the very architecture (grammar) of language groups such as the ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) languages, which, like a Trojan horse, carry in very different fundamental assumptions about ‘reality’ than do Native American aboriginal languages.

 

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

 

The question arises, then, since language comes into subjective dreams and imaginings (the inner world dynamic) as well as into objective, reasoned discourse about ‘what is going on out there’ (the outer world dynamic), whether the psychotherapeutic process has ‘all of the fish that it needs in its net’? [or are the hidden influences of different language group architectures slipping out of the investigative net?]

 

This essay explores the embedded ‘spin’ that language itself brings in to the ‘search for wholeness’ (into the process of ‘mediation’? or ‘bringing into balance’? of inner and outer worlds) and whether the language-born ‘Trojan horse input’ gets to be dealt with or not in the psychotherapeutic process.

 

* * *

 

Science [mainstream/newtonian] and the SAE languages group are co-conspirators in forcing our mental models of ‘dynamics’ into terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, as if this action ‘takes place’ within some inconsequential space; i.e. a space that is itself passive and non-participating, leaving the animative sourcing of ‘dynamics’ fully and solely up to the material inhabitants of the space.  This is the familiar Western cultural choice of space as ‘absolute’, ‘fixed’, ‘empty’ [where not occupied by a material inhabitant] and infinite; i.e. ‘Euclidian’.  The notional ‘local, independently-existing material objects/organisms/systems’ that we see as being the basis for ‘dynamics’ in this ‘outer reality’, are imputed by us to have ‘identity’, a property of ‘selfhood’ that persists; i.e. is not merely a relational nexus of influences as is the continually transforming form in a fluid-dynamical world (a world of interdependent connectedness where form-sourcing influence is ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time’, as is the nature of ‘fields’; e.g. the gravity field, the electromagnetic field (thermal energy fields) etc.).

 

‘Aboriginal science’, as F. David Peat (‘Blackfoot Physics’) refers to this alternative view of ‘dynamics’ in terms of forms understood as relational nexa in a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum (space is here seen as a Unum of fullness, … the fullness of interdependent connectedness as in ‘field’).  ‘Change’ in this ‘version of outer reality’ is in terms of transforming spatial-relations.  There is no such thing as ‘identity’ in a relational space (e.g. non-euclidian space) and there is no such thing as ‘linear time’.  ‘Change’ is NOT understood as something that acts on a ‘form’ with ‘persisting identity’ over the course of ‘time’ (from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’).  ‘Change’ is instead understood as deriving from the continually shifting, purely relational ‘nexus’ of influences as in a ‘convection cell’.

 

For example, a ‘hurricane’ has the visual appearance of a ‘thing-in-itself’ [an ‘identity’-possessing material system], however, it is a purely relational flow-feature in the flow of the atmosphere where air flow topology is circular or ‘toroidal’ (doughnut-shaped) falling into a ‘sink-hole’ at the top and fountaining forth from a ‘source-hole’ at the bottom.  The sink and the source are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum that are, in this case, NOT ‘linearly opposed’, but ‘resolving their opposition’ by ambiguating the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’.  That is, that which is ‘outside’ is, at the same time, ‘inside’.   Another way of saying this is that the observer would first have to notional endow the hurricane with ‘selfhood’ or ‘identity’ as a basis for talking about ‘the inside’ and ‘outside’ [of ‘the’ hurricane].  As the relational nexus of fluid influences, such convecting cells have no intrinsic outer-world ‘selfhood’ other than in the mental construct of the observer and his language since the convecting cells is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ but a pattern of resonance in the purely relational flow-space plenum.  The observer is free to ‘hang a word-label on it’; i.e. to give it ‘identity’ — ‘Katrina’, for example — but as John Stuart Mill observes, this is not the case where we are deducing ‘being’ from the physical phenomena, but rather the case of imposing ‘being’; i.e. “every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined”.

 

The resonantly repeating, purely relational flow-lines burn a picture of a persisting form in our psyche and on this basis we impose ‘selfhood’ or ‘identity’ on it, at which point our SAE language facilitates our treating is as a ‘subject’ that is capable of its own development and behaviour.  ‘Hurricanes’, resonance features in a flow that derive from the nexus of non-local, non-visible, non-material relation (fluid-dynamical) influences, once the OBSERVER cloaks in language-based ‘identity’, can be treated as a ‘subject’ that now notional jumpstarts ‘its own’ development and behaviour.  In this ‘language game’ we ‘personify’ ‘Katrina’ and say that ‘she’; … grows in size’, ‘strengthens’, ‘feeds on thermal energy from warm waters’, ‘heads north’, ‘ravages New Orleans’, ‘dissipates’.   As Nietzsche observes, we impose our own ego-based sense of self to synthetically deconstruct fluid phenomena, reducing them to doer-deed constructs; e.g. ‘lightning flashes’.  Poincaré makes the same point using the example ‘the earth rotates’ [the earth is not the ‘doer of the deed’, the dynamics of the relational space the earth is included in, is the animative source of the rotational dynamic].

 

The point is that the language we use assumes ‘identity’ where ‘identity’ is not a supportable assumption.  It is an ‘imposition’ that comes from the game of capturing our sensory experiencing with the tool of language.  The SAE language group likes to capture our sensory experiencing of dynamics in ‘subject-attribute’ or ‘doer-deed’ form viz. ‘the sun rises’.  Our sensory experience is that we are included within a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, but our SAE language gives us the capability of capturing such experience in observer-dis-including constructs; i.e. in terms of ‘what notional things-in-themselves are doing’.  Of this deceptive, language based game of reducing relational dynamics to subject-driven dynamics, Nietzsche has this to say;

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

In the modern physics [Machean] world view that is the ‘outer reality’ component of the Jungian model of the psyche, there is no such thing as ‘identity’ or ‘persisting selfhood’ that belongs to a form, since all forms are the nexa of relational influences in an inherently interdependent connectedness.  This is the ecosystemic view or ‘web-of-life’ view of the aboriginal culture which their ‘thing-in-itself eschewing’ oral language tradition allows them to capture, without having to make the reduction of dynamics, as in the SAE language group, to the reduced doer-deed, subject-attribute terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.

 

In a transforming relational spatial-plenum; … the dynamic world as understood in modern physics wherein “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of inhabitants”, ‘identity’ does not come into it.  As in the example of Katrina, ‘identity’ is something we use language to impose ‘over top of’ resonance features in the relational flow, WHICH SHIFTS OUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE ‘DYNAMIC’ UNDERSTOOD AS AN OVERALL, flow-form-filled TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL SPATIAL-PLENUM; i.e. where the forms are artefacts of the ‘universe/plenum expressing itself’.  That is, we use ‘identity’-imposing language to notionally ‘short-circuit’ the ‘physically actual’ animative sourcing of the dynamics [which is coming from the transforming relational spatial-plenum], and to impute the animative sourcing as instead, jumpstarting from the interior of these notional ‘identities’ or ‘selfhoods’, language-based space-uncluttering, local, independently-existing things-in-themselves.

 

‘Identity’ has no place in a transforming relational spatial-plenum, and without ‘identity’ we can no longer speak of ‘development’ and ‘behaviour’ in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, but are obliged to stick with the pre-lingual understanding of our sensory experience; i.e. of inclusion in a transforming relational space.  There is no basis for hypothesizing the existence of ‘things-in-themselves’ in such a space;

 

“So [since the problem of certainty in identity such as A=A is handled, in Euclidian geometry, by invoking the notion of invariable solids] “objects” are implicitly assumed to be invariable bodies. Therefore the axioms of geometry already contain an irreducible assumption which does not follow from the axioms themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us with “faulty definitions” of objects, definitions that are grounded not in formal logic but in a hypothesis — a “prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer might say — that is prior to logic. As a corollary, our logic of identity cannot be said to be necessary and universally valid. “Such axioms,” says Poincaré, “would be utterly meaningless to a being living in a world in which there are only fluids.” — Vladimir Tasic

 

As Mach and Poincaré suggest, the basis for imposing ‘identity’ in the form of ‘things-in-themselves’ that in turn leads to dynamics understood as ‘what things-in-themselves do’, is ‘convenience’ as in ‘economy of thought’ and ‘ease of discourse’.

 

With this in mind, is ‘individuation’ still definable in terms of bringing the inner world of the psyche into balance with the outer world of the psyche?   That is, is there not a question as to what constitutes the ‘outer world of the psyche’ since it appears that different language architectures yield different ‘renderings’ or ‘RE-presentations’ of the ‘outer world’.

 

Example: The colonizer culture’s dispute with the indigenous aboriginal culture over ‘colonization’.

 

According to the colonizer’s language based rendering of ‘colonization’, the colonizers ‘discovered’ America, moved from Europe to America, brought ‘civilization’ [including science and technology] to America and in short, constructed a wonderful new world in America.’.

 

According to the indigenous aboriginal language based rendering of ‘colonization’, Turtle Island was always there and the colonizer’s ‘discovery’ was a revision to their own condition of relative ignorance.  Furthermore, there is no such thing as ‘construction’ without ‘destruction’ since these two are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ in that one cannot construct a city without, at the same time, destroying a forest.  In the transforming relational spatial-plenum understanding of dynamics, construction [creation] and destruction are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.  In the aboriginal tradition of understanding ‘outer reality’, all inhabitants of the transforming relational world-space are strands in a common web-of-life; i.e. everyone is included in an interdependent relational-spatial connectedness.  There is no place in this version of ‘outer reality’ for dynamics in the over-simplified ‘identity’-based terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’.  The colonizers are hallucinating if they ‘really believe’ that they can split apart the ‘constructive things they do’ from the ‘destructive things they do’.

 

McLuhan makes the same point with his example of how the Western colonizer culture understands the dynamics of machines; i.e. ‘relational transformation’ is the ‘physical reality’ while ‘doer-deed achievement’ is a psychological reduction to the ‘creative’ pole of the ‘creating-destroying’ coincidentia oppositorum.

 

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’

 

Our experience informs us that the world we live in is a ‘different place’ when we introduce machines/technologies into it.  As Mach’s principle captures this; “The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants’.”  In beginning work on the Cadillac factory, farm workers are being pulled off the farm, leaving farmers in the lurch, the new supply roads to serve the factory are leaving old highways abandoned and the mom-and-pop business on them in bankruptcy, the influx of sophisticated engineers, experts and managers are stealing the sweethearts of the farmboys and small town icons who were ‘ruling the roost’.  In other words, there was already a transforming relational space/medium ‘in place’ and the ‘change’ associated with the notion of ‘moving a new mechanical doer of deeds capability’ into place, is, in physical reality accomplished by transforming the relational space that is already ‘in place’.  The ‘transforming medium is the message’.  Dynamics seen in term of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is a language-based abstraction.  The same applies to the notion of ‘moving a new mechanical doer of deed capability’ into place as constituted by the flow European colonizers form Europe to Turtle Island; i.e. this amounts to, in physical reality, transformation of the relational space of the earth’s ecosphere.

 

Nietzsche echoes McLuhan’s point; i.e. that the dynamics of our physical experience are not in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ but are in terms of relational transformation of the spatial medium.  That is, the ecosphere, which included the atmosphere, is dynamical in the same ‘relational’ sense as the atmosphere.  It stays the same size while new forms gather and old forms are regathered within it; ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’; i.e. they are conjugate phases of the one relational dynamic of ‘transformation’.  Storm-cells [resonance-based relational features] are continually gathered and being re-gathered, nothing is lost, it is instead ‘relationally re-arranged’.  What is ‘lost’ are the observer-created ‘identities’ we impose on the relational nexa or flow-forms.  As Nietzsche says;

 

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

 

Where did we get the ‘identity-based’ or ‘being-based’ ‘doer-deed’ version of dynamics.  What is the ‘Trojan horse’ in our SAE language architecture that invokes it in our Western culture renderings of ‘outer reality’?  Evidently, according to Nietzsche, the Trojan horse is nothing other than our own ‘ego’;

 

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

 

To tie this ‘point’ back to how it might impact our quest for bringing our outer and inner realities into attunement;

 

Both our inner reality [dreams etc.] and our outer reality [our rendering of the world dynamic] are evidently shaped in different ways by different language architectures.  The dreams of a colonizer of constructing a new city won’t be seen in a ‘one-sided’ manner where ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are split into two different processes by language, … not in the dreams of the aboriginal whose language comprehends creation and destruction as conjugate aspects of relational-spatial transformation.  The Navajo will dream of gathering mud into adobe mounds, transforming the web of spatial relations he sees himself as being woven into.  The Hopi Kiva and the Haida longhouse are understood as manifestations of the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.  One speaks the words ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related) as one enters or leaves the sweat-lodge, to affirm the conjugate relation [coincidentia oppositorum] of outer and inner.

“The emergence of humanity is the stating point of Hopi mythology and the Kiva is the point where people first emerge from darkness to light. The circle motif represents what the Hopi call the sipapu; the womb or the place of emergence. When we emerged from underworld, the shadow side emerged with us. The figures in gray represent the unhealed side of humanity, which must be purified in order to find the middle place.” – Museum of Northern Arizona

 

It is common for people of the SAE language group to divide on a ‘pro-development’ [‘We want to ‘improve the land’ to create a wonderful new city in this savage wilderness’], – ‘anti-development’ [‘We want to preserve this wonderful natural environment and protect it from destruction by commerical development] basis.  This associates directly with the architecture of SAE languages which split apart ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ by implying that dynamics are ‘foreground’ and transpire by way of ‘what things-in-themselves do, which can be EITHER ‘creative’ OR ‘destructive’.  This leads to a ‘false dichotomy’ in which, blinding ourselves to the actual physical dynamic of relational transformation, we compel ourselves to factor how much of our dynamic is ‘constructive’ and how much is ‘destructive’.  Aboriginals, meanwhile, as in the Kiva/Longhouse example, do not jumpstart their activities from a quest of either ‘pure construction’ or ‘pure destruction’, but rather to act upon relational balances and harmonies; i.e. to see themselves as ‘agents of transformation’ rather than as ‘authors of creative achievement’ or ‘authors of destruction’.

 

‘Agents of transformation’ do not put primary focus on ‘the results of causal actions’, they orient to how the continuing transformation of the relational space they share inclusion in, will be influenced by their actions,… looking five generations out.   They are not like owner of the Cadillac factory, in the earlier example, who is focussed intently on constructing and operationalizing the factor, out of the context of the transforming of relations in the hostspace [letting it ‘flap like a loose sheet in the breeze’].  As many different entrepreneurs move into the same space intent on each ‘doing their stuff’, the ‘warp’ that results in the continuing transformation of the relational space, such as it unfolds, is referred to as ‘progress’ and the Western capitalist culture says courageously or foolishly, ‘bring it on’.

 

John Locke’s concern, back in the late 17th century, about the ‘unravelling of community’ due to the invention of money and thus ‘paid wages’ that split ‘workers’ out of aware participation in relational transformation, and made them over into non-transformation-aware agents of one-sided mechanical constructions [which manifests in this sum of odds and bods of unintended transformative effects called ‘progress’], would appear to have even more deeply at the bottom of it, the language based splitting apart of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’.

 

That is to say, it is one thing to set up a plain and simple incentive of profit in the notional one-sided dynamics of  ‘moving a new mechanical doer of deeds capability’ into place, but quite another to actually accept in one’s mental rendering of ‘outer world reality’ that the coincidentia oppositorum of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ can be dealt with using Aristotelian EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third, when in the ‘reality of our physical experience’ they need to be understood using BOTH/AND logic of the included third.  The latter BOTH/AND logic acknowledges Mach’s principle; the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation, in the relational topology exemplified by the relational flow-form in the relational flow [e.g. the hurricane in the atmosphere].

 

As it is, the aboriginal needs psychotherapy due to his having to live in a nutty society dominated by SAE language group types who believe in an ‘outer reality’ wherein ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are two separate processes which can be undertaken ‘one at a time’.  Simultaneous, psychotherapy is needed by member of the SAE language group who are troubled by conflict between their actions that assume that ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ can be achieved separately, and the increasingly troublesome involuntary residue called ‘progress’, the most prominent agents of which are being targeted for bombs [unabomber] and ‘kneecapping’ [by anarcho-primitives].

 

Does this situation not suggest that ‘language based influences’ that are ‘upstream’ from the models of the psyche and which are impacting the ‘renderings’ of ‘outer reality’ [worldview] and ‘inner reality’ [dreams etc.], and that since language is used ‘innocently’ in psychotherapeutic inquiry [without attending to Trojan horse infection exposure coming from not including this ‘tool of inquiry’ in the ‘inquiry’], there may be a continual re-infection of conflict into the ‘psyche’ by way of the conversations with oneself, mirrored back by the psychotherapist, that are healing motivated?

 

* * *

 

Moving on from this brief ‘sketch’ of the potential issue wherein ‘language’ can be a source of psychical conflict that does not show up as a fish in the net of psychotherapeutic healing attempts, but instead participates in the manner of pathogens on the unwashed hands of both psychotherapist-intervener and patient that they are both unaware of.

 

 

 

Part II.

 

An alternative view of ‘individuation’ as arises directly from the language and [BOTH/AND] logic [of the included third] of Machean physics.

 

We want to somehow solve or ‘overcome/transcend’ the strife of the opposites.  The topologies of modern physics give us a clue how this might be done.  Understanding ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ as conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’ enables us, when we become stuck down at the level of the conflict, to rise above it.    The physics of Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, David Bohm, Erwin Schrödinger and the ‘relational theorists’ suggest that the world is a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.  In such a worldview, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ do not exist as separate processes; instead, they are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.

 

As mentioned and repeated to ‘refresh’ this discussion thread, Nietzsche captures this understanding as follows;

 

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

 

This ‘Heraclitean [everything is in a relational-spatial flux] foundation’ is important in that it does away with the notions of ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ as ‘separate processes’.  In the transforming of the relational spatial-plenum, ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of ‘transformation’.   This matches our physical experience; e.g. if we want to ‘construct a house’, we have to, at the same time, ‘destroy some forest’.  We commonly, ‘mentally’, get around this by thinking in terms that we shall build our house ‘outside the forest’ as if space was an unbounded emptiness, and we could ‘PUT OUR CREATION’ in an ‘unoccupied space’.  But, the physical reality is that ‘forest’ is just a language based idealization we use that implies an ‘EITHER/OR’ distinction between ‘forest’ and ‘non-forest’ when it is, in physical reality, ‘all the same space’ that is variegated, relational form wise, as in a fluid dynamic [a transforming relational spatial-plenum] in our visual sensing of it.   In this latter understanding, a BOTH/AND distinction applies between the ‘forest’ and ‘non-forest’.  In fuzzy logic, this is termed [Bart Kosko], the ‘yin-yang equation’, A = Not.A.  That is, the convection cell, A is included in F, the flow-space and in fact A is an ‘appearance’ or ‘relational pattern’ [resonance feature] within F.  That which is Not.A is also in F since F is the entire space or ‘spatial-plenum’, therefore, since A = F and Not.A = F, A = Not.A, … or A is BOTH A AND Not.A.   The old ‘nature-nurture’ dichotomy is thus a ‘false dichotomy’ since ‘nature [genesis] = nurture [epigenesis or ‘environmental shaping influence].

 

We come around again to two ways of handling ‘coincidentia oppositori’; the familiar way as in our SAE language group where we use EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third, or the less familiar way as in the indigenous Turtle Island aboriginal language group where we use BOTH/AND logic of the included third.  Using the former logic, our rendering of ‘outer reality’ would break apart ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ into two separate processes, as it would with ‘growth’ and ‘decline’, ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ etc.  Using the latter logic is required if the space is a relational space such as the space on the surface of a sphere.  That is, if one draws a circle on a sphere, that circle defines two conjugate areas at the same time, so in terms of ‘circle dynamics’ (e.g. growth or shrinkage), it is impossible to split apart the growth of the circle from shrinkage of the conjugate circle.   Only by the observer ignoring the conjugate relation could one isolate ‘growth’ from ‘shrinkage’.  Of course, if the circle was in a flat plane, which implies infinite space, the growth in the circle could be understood as a separate process.  That’s why the common ‘newtonian’ or ‘cartesian’ view is sometimes described as the flatspace view.  In the flatspace, view, coincidentia oppositori are handled with EITHER/OR logic.  This sort of influence on ‘inner and outer reality’ was alluded to in the 1884 classic, ‘Flatland’ by E. A. Abbott.

 

Moving on to our sense of our ‘inhabitant’ – ‘habitat’ relation, we once again have this same choice, which divides the aboriginal culture and language group from the SAE culture and language group; i.e. the former treat this coincidentia oppositorum using BOTH/AND logic while the latter treat of it using EITHER/OR logic.

 

The ‘split-apartness’ of ‘self’ and ‘other’, is reinforced by the different impressions coming to us from visual sensing [visual sensing gives us an individual-person-al perspective because of our unique, situational inclusion within the space].  For example, if we ‘were a hurricane’ or ‘storm cell’, when we look out, we cannot see ‘around the world’ so our view is the ‘flatspace view’ which seems to extend out to ‘infinity’ since the ‘finiteness’ of spherical space derives from the fact that it wraps over and around the sphere, and ‘back into itself’.  The storm-cells in this space are like a matrix of springs that never ‘end’ because they wrap over and back around into themselves.  If we put some stress into one, the entire web experiences the stress or stress pulse (sproing!).

 

So, if we ‘were one of these springs’ our visual sensing of ‘outer reality’ would be of ‘flatspace’ where if we rolled a ball away from ourselves, it would go outwards forever.  But our sensing of inertia/accelerations (sproings) would be attuning to ‘everywhere at the same time’ as is the case in the ‘gravity field’; i.e. it is everywhere at the same time.  Our intuition would be that if we rolled a ball directly outward, it would roll over the horizon, disappear, and eventually come up and hit us from behind.

 

Historically, this split between visual sensing of ‘what’s going on out there’ and inertial sensing of outside-inward — inside-outward dynamics [compression – divergence] did indeed confuse and trouble the rendering of ‘outer reality’ [habitat] and the individual’s [inhabitant’s] ‘inner-reality’ relationship with it.  While we now understand that if we dump garbage off the stern of our boat and sail off in a straight line distancing ourselves from it, it will re-emerge coming over the horizon towards us, approaching our bow, we haven’t made any changes to our SAE language group.  The fact is, that our language, and the language of mainstream science, is architected more for a fit with our visual sensing than with our inertial outside-inward — inside-outward conjugate relational sensing.  This leads to ambiguity in what we mean by ‘perception’.  Do we mean ‘visual sensing’ of what is going on ‘out there’ or ‘feeling sensing’ of how what is going on out there is engaging with what is going on in here’.   This ambiguity in ‘what perception is’ led to a public debate between Henri Poincaré and Bertrand Russell which was never resolved [they ‘agreed to disagree].

 

“Regarding geometry, I have had a long discussion with M. Russell, and I see that he persists in his opinion as I persist in mine; but there is one phrase that allows one to better understand the origin of our disagreement, ‘so that objects’, says M. Russell, ‘which we *perceive* as near together ..’ and he comes back to the word perceive several times in his writing. as for me, I never use the verb ‘to perceive’, nor the noun ‘perception’ because I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know if the perception is a feeling or a judgment, and I truly believe that amongst philosophers that use this word, some understand it in the first way [feeling] and others in the second [judging]. that’s why I avoid using it.” — Henri Poincaré, in a letter to the journal ‘Mind’ in 1906 in response to Bertrand Russell’s critiques of Poincare’s ‘Science and Hypotheses’

 

These issues of ‘perception’ impinge, by way of language, on our inner reality and our outer reality.  That is, our ‘visual perception’ is constrained by ‘line of sight’ with emphasis on ‘LINE’ while our ‘feeling perception’ allows us to engage with ‘everywhere at the same time’ [our capacity for ‘inertial guidance’ allows us to engage with the universe-plenum or the gravity field which is ‘everywhere at the same time’.].

 

This becomes particularly important in regard to our ‘sense of self and other’ and how we ‘render them’ in our ‘inner reality’ and ‘outer reality’; i.e. in our experiencing of physical reality, our sensing of gravity is given to all in common, while our visual sensing is given to each individual in particular due to his unique situational inclusion in the spatial-plenum.  In the view where we feel inclusion in a field that is ‘everywhere at the same time’, we have the sense we are … ‘the universe expressing itself’.  The influence/s that ‘source our development and behaviour’, in this view, are non-local, non-visible and non-material, as is the nature of influence in a transforming relational space as modern physics has determined, is the best way to describe the world we live in.  In this view, we are in common with everything; i.e. ‘we are ONE with everything’;

 

The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one. -Heraclitus

 

As Mach says, and he seems to imply a model of psyche that differs from that of Jung, although I do not wish to get into that at this point as it will detract from this thread, which is to investigate how language impinges on our sense of self-other relationship;

 

“That which is given to all in common we call the ‘physical’; that which is directly given only to one we call the ‘psychical’. That which is given only to one can also be called the ‘ego’ [ich].” – Ernst Mach, ‘The Guiding Principles of My Scientific Theory of Knowledge’

 

In this view, our visualizing powers are ‘psychical’ while our inclusional/inertial feeling powers are ‘physical’.  This point is also articulated by Nietzsche who calls visual subjects ‘total Fiktion’ and ‘stupidity’ [since they synthetically break dynamical phenomena up into doer-deed events], Poincaré who calls visual identities ‘nonsense’ [since they imply that space is absolute], and Schrödinger, who calls visual objects ‘schaumkommen’ or ‘appearances’ [since they are resonance features within the energy-charged relational spatial-plenum].  The Vedantic belief, cited by Schrödinger, is that the visual object based world is Maya, ‘illusion’.

 

To bring out more clearly why these philosophers are ‘calling the bluff’ of what our visual sensing tends to contribute to our ‘outer reality’, recall your own experience in being ‘in stormy conditions’ [here the sense of inclusion is strong, from the inertial/accelerational feeling] and then you see ‘it’, … a wall cloud with a descending ‘funnel’.  The more the funnel descends and ‘takes shape’, the more you have the sense that ‘something else is out there with me in this common space’.  Pretty soon, the moving tubular body breaks out of the transforming relational spatial-plenum and dominates the visual field of observation.  The ‘dynamic figure’ break out of its imprisonment in the ‘dynamic ground’ and, now liberated, becomes a very threatening ‘subject’ or ‘doer-of-deeds’.  The ‘dynamic ground’ has now receded into the background of our awareness and is now, essentially ‘gone’.  It is not ‘gone’ in a physical reality sense, it is merely ‘gone’ from our psychical focus, from the renderings in our ‘outer reality’.   That is, as we watch ‘IT’ move, the transforming relational space our outside-inward — inside-outward inertial feeling informs us we are included in is now a forgotten concept.  ‘IT’ is captured in an ominous word, ‘tornado’!!!   We ‘know it’ by its reputation [i.e. through linguistic discourse], even though this may be the first time we have ever personally ‘seen one’.  Tornadoes are ‘doers of deeds’, they are ‘killers’, … we have all ‘heard the stories’ of the ‘deeds they have done’.  Lightning strikes, … tornadoes strike.

 

So why are we so convinced there is something ‘there’?  If we are watching a convection cell take on form, we can see that ‘it’ derives from non-local, non-visible, non-material influence, as all flow-features do.  How come we started off experiencing a kind of ‘sailboater experience of inclusion in a turbulent flow’, … and soon became so riveted to a visual image that only two objects remained in an otherwise, ‘of-no-particular consequence space’, ‘it’ and ‘me’, ‘my self’ and ‘the other’.   ‘It’ is now ‘local, visible, material’ whereas my understanding of fluid dynamics is that ‘it’ is, in physical reality, an ‘appearance’ or resonance feature that derives from a nexus of ‘non-local, non-visible, non-material’ influence [purely relational influence], a ‘spirit’ [the universe expressing itself] that has now taken on ‘a body of its own’.

 

This ‘subjectizing’ of forms that are understood in modern Machean physics and in the Turtle Island Aboriginal language group [TIA language group], as ‘relational nexa’ in the flow-plenum, and in mainstream western science and the SAE language group as ‘identities’ or ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour, ‘shows up as’ different senses of ‘justice’ in these respective language groups.

 

Example: A ‘protestor’ that blocks a railway line

SAE language group Justice: The SAE judge sees railway-blockers, consistent with biological sciences, as ‘local, independently-existing material systems whose behaviours jumpstart from their internal processes, the power-drive coming from biochemical and biophysical processes, and the steerage/direction coming from the knowledge and purpose-directed intellection in a ‘central processing unit’ aka ‘brain’. Since this behaviour originates fully and solely within the notional ‘independently-existing individual’, the court need look no further than the interior of the individual to explain the ‘animative sourcing’ of the railway-blocking behaviour. The court need therefore only establish that the individual accused of this railway blocking is indeed the doer of the deed, and from that point refer to the law, formulated in terms of allowable and prohibited, locally jumpstarting actions of independent individuals, for the particular violations of the law associated with the railblocking actions and the prescribed punishments.

TIA language group Justice: The ‘restorative justice’ judge sees all people and their behaviours as ‘the relational dynamics of the universe/community expressing itself’, in much the same [relational] manner as in the relational dynamics of the atmosphere and the storm-cells that develop therein. The [relational dynamic of the] community is therefore ultimately responsible for the dissonant acts that emerge within the community, such as railway-blocking. The notion of the individual as a ‘local independently-existing material system with its own locally originating behaviour’ is nonsense, in this restorative justice view. Instead, the dynamics of the inhabitants are understood as being conditioned by the dynamics of the habitat [‘community dynamics’] at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are being conditioned by the dynamics of the inhabitants [Mach’s principle describing the physically real dynamics of our sensory experience, in modern physics terms].

The animative sourcing of the railway-blocking behaviour is understood as deriving from the relational dynamics of community in the same sense that the animative sourcing of an earthquake is understood as deriving from tensions within the relational dynamics of the spherical geospace/habitat. While an ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ are identified that correspond, topologically, to the two rock bodies that engage in the earthquake ‘rumble’, the animative sourcing is understood to derive from the relational dynamics they are included in and NOT as jumpstarting from ‘local causal agencies’ or notional ‘independently-existing material systems’. A ‘peace-making circle’ process is initiated that represents the relational community, including the ‘offender’ and ‘victim’, with the goal of restoring balance and harmony in the relational dynamics of the community, the mother-source of the dissonance. Conflict that appears from superficial inquiry to arise from linear, polar opposition between ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ is thus understood more comprehensively/realistically as a circular process that transpires within the relational body of the community/habitat, as with all processes in nature. In the restorative justice view, conflict is understood as NATURAL fuelling for the continuing transformation of the relational dynamics of community/habitat, and not as a ‘disturbance’ that disrupts the operations of a fixed, non-transforming, ‘mechanistic’, ‘what things-in-themselves-do-over-time’ based community dynamic. To allow a mechanical justice process based on fixed laws to deal directly with ‘offenders’ seen as independent causal agents with self-jumpstarting behaviours, without letting community engage with its own, natural transformation-fuelling dissonance, is dysfunctional, in the view of restorative justice.

“Circle sentencing [restorative justice] fundamentally shifts the focus in searching for solutions from symptoms to causes. The discussion in circles, unlike courts, does not isolate the criminal act from the social, economic and family environment fostering crime. Further, unlike courts, the circle focus extends beyond the offender to include the interests and concerns and circumstances of offenders, their families, the victim and the community.”
— Justice Barry Stuart of the Yukon Territorial Court

Currently, TIA language group ‘restorative justice’ is seen as a viable candidate for replacing ‘Western SAE language group justice’ on a global basis. This returns the sourcing of community transformation to the community, taking it out of the hands of a supreme central authority with adjunct law-making and enforcing machinery.

These two views of ‘justice’ imply two very different understandings of the ‘self-other’ coincidentia oppositorum; i.e. in the TIA language group, it is handled with BOTH/AND logic of the included third, while in the SAE language group, it is handled with EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third.

 

Schrödinger makes an analogy with Vedantic belief, equating the EITHER/OR logical view of self with ‘Atman and the BOTH/AND logical view of self with ‘Brahman’ [the individual is understood as ‘the universe expressing itself’].

 

“In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference [see extended quote below at {2}] is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).” – Erwin Schrödinger, ‘What is Life’

 

What then, is always putting me back into my small Atman shell?  Could it be ‘vision’?  Could it be ‘visual perspective’?   Could it be my loss of touch with inertial/accelerational inclusion in the fields that are ‘everywhere at the same time’?  Could it be the SAE language architecture whose flatspace visual constructs are concretizings of my own ‘ego’?

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

In my view, it makes sense that visual sensing [which inherently delivers ‘flatspace’ renderings of ‘outer reality’] combined with our SAE language group architecture psychologically ‘splits us out of the common transforming relational spatial-plenum’ and notionally ‘subjectizes us’, reduces and traps us in a localized, independently-existing ‘ego’; i.e. constrains us to our Atman, our personal self, our separate body-self that we psychologically ‘take out of touch’ with our Brahman-self, our physical, phenomenologically real, self-originating, non-local, non-visible, non-material ‘spirit’.

 

The aboriginal psyche, as mentioned, is very conflicted in the modern era by the experience of forced living within a culture whose institutions, including Justice, acknowledge only the local, personal self [the ‘apparition’], and denies the natural primacy of the Brahman-self, our physical, phenomenologically real, relational, non-local, non-visible, non-material ‘spirit’ self.

 

This ‘denial’ of our ‘spirit-self’ that modern physics insists is the primary reality concerning the nature of the self, is showing up by way of ‘progress’.  ‘Progress’ arises from our psychological disconnecting of ‘construction’ and ‘deconstruction’ and our corresponding one-sided emphasis on ‘construction’, ignoring that the physical reality is ‘transformation’, the conjugate relation of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’.  ‘Progress’ is thus a measure of the effect of operating in a ‘de-spiritualized’, ego-directed manner.

 

Evidently, there is an ‘aboriginal psyche’ in each of us, and we are increasingly intuiting that we are the bus that we are passengers on, and that ‘Progress’, ultimate Progress, is our destination.  This would come when ‘the one-and-many’ come fully together according to the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third; i.e. as the perfect machine.

 

Unlike the ‘one-and-many’ according to the BOTH/AND logic of the included third, where the energy-charged relational spatial-plenum is the mother habitat of all inhabitants, and where organization is by way of outside-inward — inside-outward feeling experience, the ‘one-and-many’ according to the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third can only gather together on the basis of human reason based on visual perception; i.e. on the basis of reason and judgement in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves are doing’.

 

In other words, ‘Progress’ is where we humans continue to perfect our own organizing out of the context of the full eco-diversity of the relational space we share inclusion in, and ‘ultimate Progress’ is where we do this to the max.

 

Of course, if the coincidentia oppositorum of self-other is as Machean physics says it is, and thus it must be treated of in the BOTH/AND logic of the included third, then Frédéric Neyrat’s observation is on target;

 

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.” — Frédéric Neyrat,  ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’

 

* * *

 

NOTES:

 

 

{1}   “In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

“Continual transition does not allow us to speak of “individuals,” etc; the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would say nothing of time and know nothing of motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see stationary forms beside transitory flow. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of “empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has behind it the “appearance” that it refers to the same things. A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or “known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life–only to this extent is there anything like “knowledge”; i. e., a matching of earlier and more recent errors with one another.” – Nietzsche, Will to Power, 520 (1885)

 

“Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

 

“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

 

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

 

 

{2}  Excerpt from ‘What is Life’ by Erwin Schrödinger;

 

Epilogue

 

On Determinism and Free Will

 

As a reward for the serious trouble I have taken to expound the purely scientific aspects of our problem sine ira et studio, I beg leave to add my own, necessarily subjective, view of the philosophical implications. According to the evidence put forward in the preceding pages the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self conscious or any other actions, are (considering also their complex structure and the accepted statistical explanation of physico-chemistry) if not strictly deterministic at any rate statistico-deterministic. To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters, quantum indeterminacy plays no biologically relevant role in them, except perhaps by enhancing their purely accidental character in such events as meiosis, natural and X-rayinduced mutation and so on -and this is in any case obvious and well  recognized.

 

For the sake of argument, let me regard this as a fact, as I believe every unbiased biologist would, if there were not the well-known, unpleasant feeling about ‘declaring oneself to be a pure mechanism’. For it is deemed to contradict Free Will as in warranted by direct introspection. But immediate experiences in themselves, however various and disparate they be, are logically incapable of contradicting each other. So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:

 

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

 

(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

 

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I –I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ –am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become  aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one – not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, which respect they very  much resemble the mystic. Allow me a few further comments. Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Even in the pathological cases of split  consciousness or double personality the two persons alternate, they are never manifest simultaneously. In a dream we do perform several characters at the same time, but not indiscriminately: we are one of them; in him we act and speak directly, while we often eagerly await answer or response of another person, unaware of the fact that it is we who control his movements and his speech just as much as our own. How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, at puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple, ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of Western philosophers, have accepted it. It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the fact upon which the plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls. Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official Western creeds. Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naive idea of plurality of souls, but ‘remedy’ it by declaring the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies? The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of less is never which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and Even in the that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.

 

{3} Sapir, Whorf and Poincare [on language]

 

 

 

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously  built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”  – Edward Sapir

 

Benjamin Whorf published three articles in the MIT Technology Review titled “Science and Linguistics”, “Linguistics as an Exact Science” and “Language and Logic”. He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal, Theosophist, published in Madras, India, for which he wrote “Language, Mind and Reality”. In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences. Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.”

 

 

“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible. Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis