An inclusional worldview
Why Poetry is Necessary for Portraying Reality
Preface: In a world that is fluid where ‘relations are all there is’ (a unum wherein plurality, as in a plurality of whorls-in-the-flow or ‘relational forms’ is only a plurality by ‘appearances’), “life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans”. The fluid world of our natural experience is a world where there are no things with fixed ‘identities’ that we can anchor the authorship of cause-and-effect actions to. In nature, the individual forms reciprocally determine one another; i.e. an ecosystem is where relations determine forms rather than vice versa. Developing an understanding of the world/self by way of intellectual RE-PRESENTATION of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar anchored to forms that such language imputes fixed identity (subjecthood) to, puts us at odds with the fluid physical reality of our natural experience. Poetic use of language (e.g. intentional ambiguity combined with linguistic resonance) melts the fixing of identities of the forms and, in allowing them to ‘float’ and take on meaning as relational nexa, affirms that ‘relations are all there is’ in the world of our natural experience. Poetic representation avoids the conflict that arises between the physical reality of our actual relational experience and an intellectually idealized ‘operative reality’ constructed from a linguistic plurality of ‘existing things’ depicted as local jumpstart ‘authors’ of actions and results.
Representation of the world of our experience can come through works of art and also through linguistic renditions, both literal and information-giving, and poetic as by relational allusion (“shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”)
We are really talking about two different types of ‘representation’ and this is handled differently in different languages;
(1) Capturing and RE-PRESENTING physical properties and appearance
represent as in duplicate – vertreten (stand-in-for)
capture – gefangnahme (take prisoner)
(2) Capturing the meaning of experiencing some thing
represent as in betoken (tacn = sign) – versinnbildlichen (bedeuten)
symbolize – symbolisieren
There is a uniqueness to an individual human that goes well beyond its ‘local material aspect’, so that ‘representing’ the individual by capturing and RE-PRESENTING his local physical properties and appearances will fall radically short of capturing what it is like to experience engaging with him.
In ‘What is Life?’, Erwin Shroedinger makes the following comment;
“ … Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as ‘I’ and What is this ‘I’? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just the facts little more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. “The youth that was I’, you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.” – Erwin Schroedinger, ‘What is Life?’
Our experience is that each human is a unique individual but that sense of their individuality is better described in Schroedinger’s above comment than by anything we could come up with in deconstructing their local body parts and studying their physical properties. In fact, from youth to age, the physical properties and appearances can alter dramatically, however, when we experientially engage with the individual, we find that this individual uniqueness has persisted and we intuitively know that it derives from their experiential becoming which picks up paint and scratches from whatever it bumps into. When we look at a gnarly cypress on a windswept coastline, we know that if it could talk, it could tell us of stormy nights in which whales were breaching and eagles were screaming while its own limbs broke and then mended crookedly.
None of this experience that builds the ‘I’ can be found by investigating the local material structure in even the most precise and microscopic detail, yet essences of those vaporized experiences are gathered into this persona and are this persona.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” is an allusion to the nexus of experiential influences that are gathered and form the unique persona of the individual. No amount of searching within the ‘local manifestation’ (physical properties and appearances) aka ‘the thing-in-itself’ will reveal the source of that uniqueness.
What comes to mind is Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ and ‘différance’ where the meaning of the persona as associates with its uniqueness is smeared out over spacetime, over its continuing becoming, indefinitely deferred and never establishing a complete presence that can be captured in the here-and-now. Yet this smeared out in spacetime experiential becoming (which extends into nonlocality well beyond the life and times of the individual ‘wearing it’), is the heart of the uniqueness of the individual. the expression ‘old soul’ takes on some meaning here.
In any case, the important form of ‘representation’ would appear to be (2), the ‘betokening’ or ‘symbolizing’ or ‘signifying’ the ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ of the thing as in versinnbildlichen, which is not restricted to referencing to a local physical presence, but opens the door to that which has rubbed off on the canvas of the ‘self’, … the, as Emerson calls it, … influences from the vast and universal which gather and make themselves available, at the point on which one’s genius [a unique nexus of influences from the transforming relational activity continuum] can act.
While our default habit is to use type (1) representation, this leads to the construction of logical propositions that use notional ‘independent entities’ to generate ‘operative realities’. “When we dream together, it is reality” (John and Yoko, Miguel Cervantes).
As Wittgenstein notes, logical propositions are useful tools, but we can let such tools run away with the workman, … the workman needs to keep hold on his intuitive understanding which can go beyond logic to poetic allusion;
“He who understands me, finally recognizes [my logical propositions] 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) . . . . then he sees the world rightly”
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”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. “
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“Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.” – Wittgenstein
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What are Nietzsche, Stirner and Derrida complaining about?
What they are all saying is that Western culture has tended to attempt to ‘represent’ things starting from their notional local physical being, whether a person, a nation, or whatever. When one starts off the constructing of the representation from local being, the animating source is also constrained to residing within the local being, which is very limiting; e.g. we drop out the breaching whales or whatever made an impression on the canvas of continual becoming, in our trivial-because-local-being-based representation of the gnarly cypress, … now looking like a local, independently-existing material structure in our type (1) representation.
How we build type (1) representations, or rather, ‘misrepresentations’.
The first mistake we make is to use three-dimensional space as a reference frame. There is no such thing in the physical reality of our natural experience as ‘three-dimensional space’. It is an intellectual abstraction that we contrive by putting three straight edges together, orthogonal to one another and imagining that straight lines could pass through them and extend out to positive and negative infinity, in all three cases, and this could provide a notional ‘container’ for all of the forms we see; i.e. we define ‘space’ as a containing volume of emptiness to provide an arena for the residence, operations and interactions of local things. This is a convenient modeling construction in that it allows us to represent forms as if they were local objects or organisms with their own internally driven and directed development and behaviour.
There is no such thing as ‘local things’ nor ‘a containing space’. These are mathematical tools, intellectual abstractions/idealizations. These abstract tools of space and local thingness give us jargon for language-games that provide the means for the type (1) representation;
“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . “Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a [relational] 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 Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis
Three dimensional space is a kind of ‘egotistical intellectual invention’ since we can anchor it to our own body [see Poincaré, ‘The Relativity of Space’]: i.e. if we sit down and put our legs at right angles, they form the x and y axes and our torso the z axis of rectangular space, so we have a small representative cube of spatial volume to frame our actions or the action of a fly moving within it, and we can mentally replicate this rectangular volume as many times as we want, creating a rectangular space of infinite extent (Euclidian space) to frame ‘what goes on in the world’. Physics assumes that we can understand what goes on in the world by understanding what goes on in local dx-dy-dz volumes in small intervals of time, dt. This implies that physical phenomena are locally sourced and that the present depends only on the immediate past (dt = t(later) – t(earlier)). This three-dimensional space framing concept has a lot of holes in it; e.g. what the farmer does to the land he works in the small space in front of him conditions the larger space he is included in and depends on for life sustaining nutrients [space is a participant in physical phenomena]. Also, this egotistical three-dimensional space, while delivering much ‘economy of thought’ [avoiding real life complexity] reduces our understanding of continuing phenomena to an understanding of local-in-space-and-time events. In other words, it lets us deal with substitute phenomena that are simpler than the relational phenomena in the physical reality of our natural, actual experience.
“Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past.” — Poincare, ‘Origin of Mathematical Physics’
Western justice uses this simplifying assumption that the animating source of physical phenomena is local-in-space-and-time so that, for example, in the ongoing phenomenon of colonization, when colonized peoples reach their tolerance thresholds for being continually humiliated by the colonizing powers and lash out in ‘terrorist’ actions, the terrorist event that is local in dx-dy-dz-dt space is all that comes up for moral judging [humiliation is most often by induction, where the powerful dominate the activities in a common space, making that common space disaccommodating to the colonized (e.g. closure of access to traditional hunting and fishing grounds)]. Mathematically, this is described as the loss of ‘the constant of integration’ when, after analytically breaking the ongoing activity down into local-in-space-and-time events, we try to put it back together again, we are missing important information (e.g. the slowly building relational tensions that lead to sporadic eruptions of violent energy release which occur in local-in-space-and-time events). All we can do in this case is isolate the likely ‘causal agent’ responsible for the violent event, even though the physical sourcing of the eruption developed in the broad matrix of relations and simply manifested through local-space-and-time regions. The whole world dynamic in ‘plate tectonics’ is responsible for violent eruptions at points along the San Andreas fault, so while the local dx-dy-dz-dt view is in terms of the interaction of the hanging wall side of the fault with the opposing foot wall side, the real source of the violence is of nonlocal relational origin; i.e. “the progressive development of the phenomenon”. The same is true of the child soldier; i.e. the upstanding citizens who become judges and juries are contributors [everyone is], through the relational social dynamic of the conditions that spawn child-soldiers, so that a system of justice that assumes local-in-space-and-time sourcing of ‘events’; i.e. assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past, is going to be blind to the real physical source of the violent eruption.
These are problems that arise when we impose ‘three dimensional space’ and its supplementary dimension ‘time’ as an intellectual staging ground for RE-PRESENTING physical phenomena which are, in the physical reality of our natural experience, far more complex; i.e. where ‘relations are all there is’.
The space of our sensory experience is one which can give rise to a continual becoming, delivering individuals that are unique by way of what is rubbing off on the canvas of their self from their uniquely situated experiential engagings. As in Derrida’s ‘différance’, the colourful things which are leaving paint on their canvas are also canvases gathering touches of paint from others, at the same time as they are leaving touches of paint on the canvases of others.
Of course, instead of paint, canvases, and relational engagements, we could talk in ‘wave dynamical terms’ of ‘pixels’ of energy-charged space that are continually transmitting and receiving energy, as in a fluid dynamic. Within the flow-plenum, a storm-cell (relational form) develops ‘locally’ and such notable relational features attract our attention and we photography them and note their ‘local location’ within the flow-plenum and their limits or boundaries, as far as we can make them out, and on this basis we can construct type (1) representations that constrain the thing to its locally visible aspect even though, a meaningful (type (2)) representation would have to take into account its inherently non-local nature.
It is not easy to capture its non-local essence because it is smeared over spacetime as a continual becoming; i.e. its local aspect is reflected in the nonlocal flow-field it is a dimpling in, and its dimpling is conditioning the nonlocal flow-field it is gathering in.
“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” – Mach’s principle
There is no way to separate the local relational form from other local forms, nor from the transforming relational continuum (flow-plenum), the various forms are features of. Therefore, it is impossible, in talking about a form in local information-giving terms, to capture the meaning of the relational form. Poetic allusion opens the door to speaking of the thing as a canvas on which the experiences of its continual becoming has been collected on. in this Lakota poem, even rocks can be given type (2) representation in terms of their experiencing of continual becoming;
”unmoved …from time without end …you rest… there in the midst of the paths … in the midst of the winds …you rest … covered with the droppings of birds … grass growing from your feet … your head decked with the down of birds …you rest … in the midst of the winds … you wait …Aged one.” – Lakota poem
The ‘Spectres’ of Identity Politics
Preliminaries;
While local, being-based ‘identity’ provides a foundation for logic and logical propositions [which are tautologies], there is no reason for us to get confused and start believing in the ‘reality’ of ‘local beings’.
This mistake, as Nietzsche points out, comes from our narcissist ‘ego’ that convinces itself (ourself) that it is the centre of the universe from whence all things commence. Thus the ego, in our thinking, splits us out of the world in which we are included relational forms. This has been recognized by many explorers of physics. As Schroedinger observes, consciousness is one field that pervades the transforming relational activity continuum and it is possible to give our ego a rest and get in touch with our one-ness with the ‘ALL’.
“Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge……It has nothing to do with individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two “I”‘s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents- their Karma.”
The ego serves as a model for us to build up separate local existence for any relational forms in the transforming relational continuum. As Nietzsche describes this;
“It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. 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’
When we use our own ego as the archetype for ‘independent being’, we are ‘set up’ for language games in which we animate the ‘independent entity’ by using it as a subject that inflects a verb, giving us the illusion of a ‘separate thing moving’ as in ‘the sun is rising’.
Many people have come to confuse these ego-being based language constructs for ‘reality’. For example, people who formerly believed that the stars moved around the sun were persuaded into the new belief that the earth and planets move around the sun, however, both of these models are based on ‘independent things and what they do’, which, while models of convenience using the tools of absolute space and absolute time that provides an independent space of residence and operation for independent being-things, and there is no notion of one being more ‘correct’ than the other, only that one is more convenient to us for arranging our thoughts. As Ernst Mach puts this;
“the motions of the Universe are the same whether we adopt the Ptolemaic or the Copernican mode of view” of celestial dynamics, … “both views are, indeed, equally correct.” i.e. the geocentric and the heliocentric views are merely two “interpretations” of a Universe that “is only given once.”. Mach goes on to warn; “we … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.”
What Mach has elsewhere pointed out is that the relations of the planetary forms [as in the three+ body problem] are in a natural precedence over the forms-in-themselves [suggesting that ‘field’ is the basic physical reality];
“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach
One could cite Einstein’s versions of the same basic understanding here, and Kuhlmann in his summarizing of an entire school of thought here in that ‘relations are all there is’;
“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013
By now it should be clear, that there is at least a common understanding among some, that any talk in terms of independent things-in-themselves and ‘what they do’ as if in a containing space that is independent of them, … is tool-talk, a language game rooted in type (1) representation.
Those are the preliminaries, and with that background in place, discussion of ‘spectres’ is facilitated.
Any form or entity one would like to speak of is, according to relativity and quantum physics and as affirmed by the physical reality of our natural experience, an emanation of the transforming relational activity continuum; i.e. there are no local independently-existing things-in-themselves, these being artefacts of visual sensing (which only sees the hurricane in its local aspect and not its global essence as a continually becoming relational feature.
Visual sensing goes hand-in-hand with noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar to construct an ‘operative reality’ based on notional ‘independently-existing local entities’ [‘things-in-themselves’] and ‘what these things do’ as fabricated by using the notional things as subjects and having them inflect verbs and generate predicates, as in ‘Katrina devastated New Orleans’. By occupying our mind with these reified foreground figure dynamics, we forget about or lose track of the physical reality of our natural experience; i.e. a world of relational forms in a transforming relational ALL.
The devastation of New Orleans was part of the continual becoming, the unfolding or transforming relational activity continuum, … “life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans” (John Lennon). It’s not that we couldn’t have strengthened the levees and limited the damage in New Orleans, … but it is that we can’t hold back the relational transforming because we are included in it, and if one wants to go with Emerson and Nietzsche and Stirner, we ourselves are agents of transformation, and certainly NOT independently-existing doers of deeds.
Ok, but lets get to this thing called ‘spectre’. If we take the type (1) representation of a form which captures it as a local, independently-existing entity, … we have to complete the representation by giving it some source of animating authorship to explain its development and behaviour, and this has to go ‘inside it’ since we have reduced the form to a locally existing entity that resides, operates and interacts in a space that is notionally independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. This is why it is a ‘spook’ or ‘spectre’ because we have notionally removed its real source of animation, its continual relational becoming and made it over into a local thing-in-itself, forcing us to complete the representation by ‘making believe’ that there is a God-like authoring power inside of it. This like taking a hollow form like a sheet and pretending that the sheet is animated by some spirit inside of it.
This is the ‘spectre’ and we can make any notional local entity that we signify with a word, into a ‘spectre’. For example, if people from around the globe are streaming in and out of a fertile oasis or fertile valley, we could give that Oasis (an unbounded portion of nature which gets featured by the way we orient our visual sensing) a name, e.g. ‘America’ and then make ‘America’ into a ‘spectre’ by making it the subject that inflects verbs and generated predicates. ‘America’ is very busy today’. ‘Many people entered into America today’. ‘Many people exited America today’. ‘America is a major producer of food products’. ‘America is a democracy’.
For the wise but illiterate elder sitting on a dune overlooking the Oasis, he sees a storm-cell like anomaly of people gathering and circulating through the oasis, much like ants converging in on a honey pot and dispersing with the goodies they have gathered, … a relational feature that gathers and develops within the transforming relational continuum, the attraction of the oasis sustaining its persistence over multiple generations of people ‘passing through’, the smooth contours suggesting, as with water flowing through and sustaining a curvaceous whirlpool, that relations are in a natural precedence over, and are orchestrating the behaviours of, the things moving within the relational influence field.
Of course, it is convenient, when we zoom in and look at the people, to re-start the representation from thinking of the people as ‘independent entities’ within their own internal animating source; i.e. as ‘spectres’ participating in a ‘spectracle’.
We just need to remember when viewing things using type (1) representation this way, that;
“we … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.”
The real world; i.e. the physical reality of our natural experience, demands the type (2) poetic representation that does not ‘forget’ that the world is a transforming relational continuum and the animated forms that gather within it are relational forms undergoing continual becoming; i.e. just becomes our visual sensing attention localizes and limits them does not mean that they are local and bounded. But when we do intellectually localize and bound them with type (1) representation, we turn them into spectres by imputing some internal animating spirits to explain the authoring sourcing of their development and behaviour, which is not necessary when we remember that, like the whirlpool in the flow, they do not possess ‘local being’, but like Katrina the storm-cell, … are intrinsically included features of the relational ‘ALL’.
William Blake latched onto how this practice of constructing ‘spectres’, which had been playfully conceived by poets, was being taken literally by ‘priests’; i.e. in Blake’s Plate 11 of ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (resolution of the binary). That is, the poetic infusing of ‘Gods’ into local features in nature’s relational continuum, taken literally, resulted in a belief in ‘spectres’, local God-animated things-in-themselves;
“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or
Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the
properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations,
and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city &
country. placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of &
enslavÆd the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the
mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from Poetic tales.
And at length they announced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forget that All deities reside in the human breast.”
–William Blake, ‘Plate 11, Marriage of Heaven and Hell’
Derrida, in discussing how Stirner had also pointed to this problem with ‘spectres’ and how Marx had picked up on this, although Marx had accepted the reality of the binary structures implied by spectres, … reviews this ‘table tournant’ of spectres, likening them to spirits in séance. This decalogue of spectres as discussed by Derrida is worth browsing;
* * * BEGINNING OF CITATION FROM DERRIDA’S ‘SPECTRES OF MARX’ * * *
One might read the whole German Ideology , we will not do it here, as the inexhaustible gloss on this table of ghosts. For one can take it in this way, as a table, a Table of the law in ten parts, the specter of a Decalogue and a decalogue of specters. The new table is presented also as a tableau, the ironic tabularization, the fictive taxonomy, or the statistic of ghosts. A table of the categories of the object or of being as specter in general. And yet, despite the stasis that is appropriate for the exhibition of a tableau or picture, this one knows no rest in any stability. This tableau of spirits moves on the model of a seance table (table tournante) . It begins to dance before our eyes, like a certain “table” in Capital which we will later see move, when its becoming-commodity opens up the dimension of secrecy; mysticism, and fetishism. For in this list of ghosts, in this new table whose capital categories stand like the counts of an indictment, the concepts cannot be distinguished. They are not added one to the other, they supplement each other and thereby pass in turn one into the other, each figuring a turn of the other. We cannot read here The German Ideology , which at bottom is but the developed exposition of this table. Without even quoting the mocking remarks in the exclamatory style (the curious reader is referred to them) with which Marx accompanies each one of the ten apparitions, we will limit ourselves to a few observations about this or that distinctive trait. Whereas in the “pure history of spirits” (reine Geistergeschichte), Marx had counted “ten theses,” here, a few pages later, in the “impure history of spirits,” he banks on (table sur) ten ghosts:
Gespenst no. 1: the supreme being, God. Not a minute is wasted speaking of this “incredible belief,” Marx notes. Neither Stirner nor Marx, moreover, stops to consider the essence of believing, here the essence of faith par excellence,which can only ever believe in the unbelievable, and would not be what it is without that, beyond any “proof of the existence of God.”
Gespenst no. 2: Being or essence (Das Wesen). Apparently,we are going down: from the highest, das höchste Wesen to the less high, das Wesen period. An old problem, at least since Aristotle. Descending hierarchy, from theology to ontology. Will it be so simple? Wesen remains the common concept, as we shall see, and the guiding thread of this classificaiton that therefore remains essentially ontological, in truth onto-theological.
Gespenst no. 3: the vanity of the world. Nothing to say about that, notes Marx, except that it serves to introduce what follows, to link “easily,” “lightly,” leicht with what follows. And what is lighter, in fact, more vain, precisely, more non-existent (here, no more Wesen) than the shadow and the vanity of a ghost? The vanity of the world, then, just to make a link with what follows, namely
Gespenst no. 4: good and evil beings (die guten und bösen Wesen). Das Wesen has come back but, notes Marx, Max has nothing to say on this score, even if there is so much to be said. It is just to make a link with what follows, namely:
Gespenst no. 5: Being and its realm (das Wesen und sein Reich). This is the first determination of Being. It possesses an empire, whence its metamorphosis (Verwandlung) into a plurality of beings. This is the first birth of the plural, birth itself; the origin of number and progeniture. Of course, the word “realm” already transfers the table of the commandments or the table of categories from Being to an evangelical ground.
Gespenst no. 6: beings, therefore (die Wesen). We have passed over into the Plural, into the proliferation of the progeniture from 5 to 6, through metamorphosis and spontanelous generation (daß es “das Wesen” ist – worauf es sich flugs in Gespenst no 6 “die Wesen” verwandelt).
Gespenst no. 7: the Man-God (der Gottmensch). In this descending hierarchy, this is, in sum, the moment of conversion or reversibility (descent and ascension). It is also the category of the third, the middle or the mediation, for the synthesis of speculative idealism, the hinge (charnière) of this onto-theology as anthropo-theology of the ghost. Does not the Man-God play the same role in the Phenomenology of Spirit ? This articulating joint also situates the place of the becoming-flesh, the privileged moment of the spectral incarnation or incorporation. It is not at all surprising that Marx, following Max, devotes his longest commentary to it, which is also, precisely, the most relentless (acharné) the most captivated. Is not the Christic moment, and within it the eucharistic instant, the hyperhole of acharnement itself? If every specter, as we have amply seen, is distinguished from spirit by an incorporation, by the phenomenal form of a quasi-incarnation, then Christ is the most spectral of specters. He tells us something about absolute spectrality. Stirner himself would be ready to grant him the singularity of this transcendental privilege. Without this incarnation, would the concept of incarnation have any sense at all, any historical chance? Jesus is at once the greatest and the most “incomprehensible of ghosts” (unbegreiflichste Gespenst). Marx insists on this:
Of him Stirner is able to say that he was “corpulent” (daß er beleibt gewesen ist). If Saint Max does not believe in Christ, he at least believes in his “actual corpus” (an seinen wirklichen Leib). According to Stirner, Christ introduced great distress into history, and our sentimental saint relates with tears in his eyes, “how the strongest Christians have racked their brains in order to comprehend him” – Yes “there has never been a specter that caused such mental anguish.”
It is thus easy to go from him to the “horrible being” (zum grauenhaften Wesen):
Gespenst no. 8, man. Here we come closest to ourselves but also to the most terrifying thing. It is of the essence of the ghost in general to be frightening. This is especially true of man, of the most “unheimlich” of all ghosts, a word Stirner uses that the French translations overlook most often and that interests us to the highest degree. It is the word of irreducible haunting or obsession. The most familiar becomes the most disquieting. The economic or egological home of the oikos, the nearby, the familiar, the domestic, or even the national (heimlich) frightens itself. It feels itself occupied, in the proper secret (Geheimnis) of its inside, by what is most strange, distant, threatening. We will come back to this in conclusion. If Christ, that absolute specter, causes fear and pain, the man that this Gottmensch becomes (and man only arrives at himself, here, in this becoming) causes even more fear as he comes closer to us. He is even more spectral than the spectral. Man makes himself fear. He makes himself into the fear that he inspires. Hence the contradictions that render humanism untenable. We see rise up here the logic of this fear of oneself that is guiding our remarks. The ipseity of the self is constituted there. No one will have escaped it, neither Marx, nor the Marxists, nor of course their mortal enemies, all those who want to defend the property and integrity of their home “chez soi”: the body proper, the proper name, nation, blood, territory, and the “rights” that are founded thereon. Marx exposes the fatefulness of this, but he does so in the other, precisely, exposed in the opposite, on the side facing, Saint Max. It has to do with the phenomenological fold, Marx seems to suggest, with that difference, both decisive and insubstantial at the same time, that separates being from appearing. The appearing of being, as such, as phenomenality of its phenomenon, is and is not the being that appears; that is the fold of the “unheimlich”:
Specter No. 8 man. Here our bold writer is seized with immediate “horror” – “he is terrified of himself” (er erschrickt vor sich selbst), he sees in every man a “frightful specter” (einen grausigen Spuk), a “sinister specter” (einen unheimlichen Spuk), in which something “stalks” (in dem es umgeht: the same word as in the Manifesto). He feels highly uncomfortable. The split (Zwiespalt) between phenomenon (Erscheinung) and essence (Wesen) gives him no peace. He is like Nabal Abigail’s husband of whom it is written that his essence too was separated from his phenomenal appearance
Everything always happens closest to the head and to the chief. This fear of oneself could have led the writer to suicide. The writer, the man-writer could have chased after himself, hunted himself down, Saint Max is ready to blow his brains out (once again the sign of the hunt: eine Kugel durch den Kopf jagt) from the moment the persecution is internal and the other makes him suffer in the head. What saves this man from man is still another ghost. He remembers that the ancients “took no notice of anything of the kind in their slaves.” He then thinks of the “spirit of the people” wherever it is incarnated. This leads him to deduce (Dies bringt ihn auf) the next ghost.
Gespenst no. 9: the spirit of the people (Volksgeist). There would be too much to say today about this deduction not only about the realm of national-populisms, but about what has always linked them, in the founding story they tell themselves, to apparitions of revenants. The founder of the spirit of a people, one could show, always has the figure of a revenant-survivant, a ghost-survivor. It always obeys the temporality of its realm. Its reapparition is awaited but obscurely feared. Marx speaks with so much lucidity elsewhere about nationalism, but here he remains very laconic. He merely remarks the necessary transition toward the final metamorphosis:
Gespenst no. l0: Everything. Max will have succeeded in transmuting every thing, the All itself, into a ghost (Alles in einen Spuk zu verwandleln). So we have to stop the counting. And the recounting. And the story, and the fable, and the gothic novel. And the numerological occultism that puts on airs of Aufklärung. One has to admit that, forthwith “all enumeration ends” (alles Zählen aufhört) once everything comes back to haunt everything, everything is in everything, that is, “in the class of specters” (in der Klasse Gespenster). One could throw it all together in any order, and Stirner does not fail to do so: the Holy Spirit, truth, law, and especially, especially the “good cause” in all its forms (die gute Sache, which Marx, who is as always a lucid analyst of modern times, accuses Stirner of never being able to forget, as if he too had made of good conscience, already, a vocation and of rightful law a technique of personal promotion).
Stirner’s exemplary fault, for which he must be judged, judged for the example, would be the vice of modern speculation. Speculation always speculates on some specter, it speculates in the mirror of what it produces, on the spectacle that it gives itself and that it gives itself to see. It believes in what it believes it sees: in representations. “All the specters that have filed before us (die wir Revue passieren ließen) were representations (Vorstellungen)” ( p. 160). In this sense, speculation is always theoretical and theological. To explain the origin of this “history of ghosts,” Marx refers to Feuerbach and to his distinction between ordinary theology which believes in the ghosts of sensuous imagination, and speculative theology which believes in the ghosts of non-sensuous abstraction. But theology in general is “belief in ghosts” (Gespensterglaube). One might say belief in general, the belief in this alliance of the sensuous and the non-sensuous where the two theologies intersect, the ordinary and the speculative.
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Jacques Derrida: Spectres of Marx, Routledge 1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf, p. 142-146
* * * END OF CITATION FROM DERRIDA’S ‘SPECTRES OF MARX’ * * *
The ‘spectres’ of Stirner and Marx are also identified by William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré and others in the field of modern physics who have expressed the view that ‘relations are all there is’, in which case there are no ‘local things-in-themselves’ to pop animating authorship force into and thus create a ‘spectre’;
“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger
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“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm
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“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday
In further exploring, here, the workings of ‘identity politics’, we can consider the differing views on the concept of a ‘set’ or ‘category’, as discussed by Henri Poincaré in ‘Dernières Pensées, Ch. V. Les Mathematiques et la Logique’.
Poincaré notes that mathematics (like people in general) are split on whether to consider a member of a set/category as (a) once defined, defining any number of members of that set, and (b) having to be redefined as each new member joins the set/category. Poincaré calls those who apply the (a) view in their real world representations ‘Cantorian realists’ and those who apply the (b) view in their real world representations ‘pragmatist idealists’ (like Poincaré himself).
The (b) view is like Derrida’s view of a word representing a category of multiple instances; i.e. its meaning derives from differences with/amongst related things and is deferred indefinitely; i.e. this is equivalent to saying that the meaning of the word or the entity is in a continual process of becoming via its relations with other things. Its meaning never finds closure since it is intrinsically ‘relative’ as it must be in the case of a relational form in a transforming relational continuum;
“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach
Fixed identity has no place in a relational world, a transforming relational activity continuum’ in which ‘relations are all there is’. One can think of ‘identity’ instead, as a ‘place-holder’ within a relational matrix of forms undergoing simultaneous mutually influencing [co]evolution.
“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, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History (2001)
Imagine if one believes in ‘spectres’ such the spectre of the ‘American state’. The ‘spirit of America’ would then have to derive from ‘Americans’ seen as mini-spectres that together comprise the macro-spectre known as the ‘American state’.
If we remove all the labels from the world, the world dynamic continues on in some form or fashion, like a great spherical ant hill (unbounded plenum) in which the ant-forms are continually circulating gathering here and there in clusters and dispersing to form new clusters and dispersing again to form new clusters, which someone could pin labels on. Activity such as this, on a spherical or curved surface is simply a relational re-arranging of the ant-forms or ‘relational transforming’. That is, since there are no absolute reference points in this spherical space, we only know shapes, configurations, forms relative to the shapes, configurations, forms and there is no way of distinguishing between ‘forms dissipating’ and ‘forms gathering’ since these are conjugate aspects of one relational dynamic in which ‘divergence’ and ‘convergence’ are complementing reciprocals of one another. This is just to say that ‘destruction’ and ‘creation’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational transformation. It is impossible to construct a house in the forest without the destruction of some forest, that is the way things work in the physical reality of our natural experience. It is only when we talk about such activities that we manage to split apart ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’.
In other words, the splitting apart of ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ and interposing an ‘author’ to take care of this artificial splitting apart of relational transformation, is an ‘error of grammar’;
“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
Our ego has us giving type (1) representations to ourselves wherein we impute to ourselves the jumpstart powers of authorship of constructive results. This is intellectual machinery that we employ to represent the world on the stage of thought that should not be, but popularly is, … regarded as the basis of the real world.
“we … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.”
What we are doing, ‘we’ being the Western culture which spawns the praxis of cultivating institutional processes based on belief in ‘spectres’ (‘identity politics’) is kind of like hosting a global ‘séance’ in which all these spectres (see the list of 10 spectres) appear to be the movers and shakers of the real world dynamic [according to the intellectual machinery we employ in the representation of the world on the stage of thought]. This spectre-based worldview has become the popular worldview that is disseminated in socio-political discourse in the communications media.
The ramifications of such ‘spectre based identity politics’ is discussed in the essay ‘Against Identity Politics’ by Lupus Dragonowl which is narrated by Arabella Story Tella here and presented in written form here.
Dragonowl’s essay, of course, orients to the dysfunction that arises from spectre-based identity politics and how it manifests and does injury within our relational social dynamics. There are other stories that can be told, as to how a re-orientation to poetics can allow us to rise above this dysfunction spectre-based ‘operative reality’ which has taken over the global (as Western culture has become predominant around the globe).
The reorientation to poetics (Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values by rising from the Apollonian to the Dionysian) amounts to the subsuming of ego with the higher self (uebermensch). In other words, the ego is the archetype ‘spectre’ which we ‘tuck in’ behind every relational form to turn it into a local thing-in-itself with a built in God-like authoring power (no longer any need to look to the transformational power of relations for sourcing gathering/emergence/birth, development, dissipation, dispersal/disappearance/death.
Poetic expression comes from intuition while literal information-giving expression comes from logic. As Nietzsche suggests, we need to restore intuition and the will to harmony [‘power’ as in ‘resonance’] to their natural primacy over reason and the will to morally judge and purify.
* * *
Appendices:
Appendix I: Spectres in Biology
Appendix II: The ‘Self’ as Channel of Transformation
Appendix III: Identity Politics vis a vis Class Conflict
Appendix IV: Experience/Intuition vs Science/Reason
Appendix V: Recovering our Sanity
Appendix I ‘Spectres in Biology’
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The biological sciences also has its ‘spectres’ wherein it has ‘gotten rid of’ the relational sourcing of development (evolutionary/ecosystemic and relational form development) and substituted ‘spectres’ inside of each ‘cell’ and each ‘organism’ choosing to go with ‘classical physics’ rather than modern physics;
Classical Physics: God in the Beginning form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles. – Isaac Newton
Modern Physics: What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). – Erwin Schroedinger
Evolution in Darwinian terms invents a creative authoring source [reproduction with random-chance variation in partnership with ‘natural selection’], to keep the creative force issuing forth from the inside-outward as is the nature of the ‘spectre’; i.e. Darwinian evolution ‘plays ball’ in an all-hitting, no-fielding manner, crediting the hitter with full and sole authorship of ‘his hitting results’ whether prolific or meagre, as if he were operating in ‘empty space’ rather than hitting into ‘fielding’ that can make him ‘look like a profuse performer’ or ‘look like a meagre performer’.
In modern physics, space is an energy charged plenum, a relational field that is the mother of the relational forms in it, so ‘fielding’ is everything and it supplies ‘hitters’.
This is the evolutionary theory of Lamarck and it fits well with modern physics even though it was formulated nearly a century before Darwin’s theory.
In Lamarck’s model, evolution is orchestrated outside-inwardly, by ‘field’ dynamics that excite inside-outward asserting action in fluids, and this process is operative in nature generally, therefore there is no split into the organic and inorganic realms. The process is summarized by Lamarck in his ‘Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivants’ (never formally translated and published in English), as follows;
« Dans une pareille masse de matières, les fluides subtils et expansifs répandus et toujours en mouvement dans les milieux qui l’environnent, pénétrant sans cesse et s’en dissipant de même, régularisent en traversant cette masse, la disposition intérieure de ses parties, et la rendent propre alors à absorber et à exhaler continuellement les autres fluides environnans qui peuvent pénétrer dans son intérieur et qui sont susceptibles
d’être contenus.
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Ces autres fluides, qui sont l’eau chargée de gaz dissous ou d’autres matières ténues, l’air atmosphérique que contient l’eau, etc.. je les appellerai fluides contenables, pour les distinguer des fluides subtils, tels que le calorique, la matière électrique, etc.. qu’aucun corps connu ne sauroit contenir.
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Les fluides contenables, absorbés par la petite masse gélatineuse dont il vient d’être question, ne restent point sans mouvement dans ses parties, parce que les fluides subtils non contenables qui y pénètrent toujours ne le permettent pas.
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Ainsi les fluides incontenables tracent d’abord les premiers traits de la plus simple organisation, et ensuite les fluides contenables, par leurs mouvemens et leurs autres influences la développent, et avec le temps et toutes les circonstances favorables la compliquent et la perfectionnent. »
Translation into English;
In such a mass of materials [gelatinous fluid mixture], the fields [les fluides subtils] are always reaching out and permeating the materials around them, constantly penetrating and dissipating at the same time, conditioning in its permeating, the disposition of the interior parts, rendering them capable of absorbing and exhaling other fluids in the surrounding environs which are capable of being retained.
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These other fluids, which are water charged with dissolved gases or other substantive materials, the atmospheric air which contains water etc., I call them ‘containable fluids’ [fluides contenables] to distinguish them from the subtle fluids [Lamarck’s calls ‘fields’ les fluides subtils], such as heat flow, electrified materials etc. that no material bodies know how to contain [i.e. the fluids that contain but which cannot themselves, be contained].
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The containable fluids which are absorbed by the small gelatinous mass that has just been discussed, do not stop their movement into the parts, because the field flow [les fluides subtils non contenables] which are all the while penetrating, won’t allow it.
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Thus the ‘fields’ trace out the first designs of the most simple organization, and then the containable fluids, by their movements and their other influences develop it, and with time and where all the circumstances are favourable, complexify it and perfect it.”
Nietzsche was a strong critic of Darwinian evolution with its one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding asymmetry [the assymetry that ‘spectres’ are formed from] and conceived of evolution in the non-dualist relational dynamics of flow wherein the outside-inward orchestrating inflowing [sink] was in conjugate relation with an inside-outward asserting outflowing [source], as in Lamarck’s model and as in fluid dynamical convection;
“In developing this aspect of the will to power, Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of an obscure Anglo-German zoologist, William Rolph (‘Biologische Probleme’). … Rolph denies the existence of an instinct for self-preservation – or at the very least rejects the notion that such a drive represents the principle motivation of animal behaviour. Rather, life seeks primarily to expand itself. This elementary proposition is expressed as a law of assimilation, a law operative in both the organic and inorganic world. Growth, Rolph argues, is determined by a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis. All organic functions, from nutrition and reproduction right up to evolution, can be explained by, and reduced to, this fundamental activity; they are not, as most contemporary biologists assumed, a manifestation of the instinct of self-preservation.” – Gregory Moore, ‘Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor’.
Modern biologists whose experimental findings corroborate this Lamarckian view of evolution are marginalized by the Darwinian orthodoxy if they support their results to the point that contradiction of Darwinism is too evident. E.g. the work of microbiologist Douglas E. Caldwell et al (marginalized by the orthodox establishment and pushed out of his profession);
“It is normally assumed that the recombination of genes generates innovation and that this innovation is then judged as useful or not through natural selection. Genetic information presumably serves as a blueprint that controls the features of organisms and their communities. However, studies of bacterial associations in continuous culture (Schiefer, G.E. and D. E. Caldwell, 1982, Synergistic interaction between Anabaena and Zoogloea spp. in carbon dioxide limited continuous cultures. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 59, 3373-3377) suggest that innovation also flows in the reverse direction, from the structure of the community to the structure of the nucleic acid. In this situation, it may be the structure and architecture of the community that serves the initial blueprint.”
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‡ Excerpt from ‘Cultivation of Microbial Consortia and Communities by Douglas E. Caldwell, Gideon M. Wolfaardt, Darren R. Korber, Subramanian Karthikeyan, John R. Lawrence, and Daniel K. Brannan, Manual of Environmental Microbiology. 2nd Edition. ASM Press, Washington D. C. 2002. Edited by C.J. Hurst et. al. pages 92 to 100.
Orthodox biology continues to stick with the ‘spectres’ of plants as independent intelligence-driven systems, although stem cell research has opened the way for conceding, at the cell level, that outside-inward orchestrating inflowing [‘epigenesis’] works in conjugate relation with inside-outward asserting outflowing [‘genesis’] in evolving/reproducing cell structures.
The absurdity of the ‘spectre’ of plants and insects (bees, moths, larvae, birds) conspiring intelligently together to co-construct ecosystems continues to be the position of biological sciences. This position has recently been summarized by a group of scientists brought together in ‘The Nature of Things’ by David Suzuki in a video entitled ‘Smarty Plants’ , which documents efforts by scientist in trying to figure out where ‘plant intelligence’ is coming from, since plants don’t even have a nucleus or central nervous system into which one can impute a centre-of-intelligence. This investigation does not question the basic science assumption wherein each plant is assumed to be an independently-existing thing-in-itself that resides, operates and interacts in a space that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.
Spectres abound in the biological science and in case of slime mold where a plethora of amoebates gather together and form complex worm-like and flowering structures, there is no place to go [while making the standard assumptions of independent existence of the individual amoebates] but to credit the amoebates with amazing engineering skills. In a Nova documentary entitled scientists report that;
The scientists are led, by the limiting of their own thoughts to the all-yang-no-yin space of the ‘things-first-relations-last’ option, to impute ‘complex decision-making intelligence’ to the ‘slime-mold’ and to make, in a Nova documentary entitled ‘Slime Mold Smarts’ , the following absurd ‘spectre’ is raised;
“The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without a brain, yet it can make surprisingly complicated decisions. In this animated video short, watch as a slime mold navigates through a maze and solves a civil engineering problem.” — Nova, ‘Slime Mold Smarts’
‘Intelligence’ is a locally authoring ‘spectre’ as is ‘evil intention’ and ‘good intention’. We live in a society that will put the child-soldier on trial so as to resolve the matter of his violent killing spree in local authorship; i.e. his internal intelligence and evil intention, … so that the sourcing ‘trail’ never leads back to the relational social dynamic in which he is situationally included. The imposing of three dimensional space renders the forms within the space ‘independent’, setting the stage for explaining nonlocal relational sourcing of dynamics, in terms of ‘spectres’, ‘ghosts’ in the local ‘subjects’ that were relational forms in the energy-charged relational plenum, prior to being absolutized by noun-and-verb language-and-grammar.
The séance that forms from an ever-growing matrix of spectres continues to provide the basis for Western public formulating of world view.
Appendix II: The ‘Self’ as Channel of Transformation
Emerson provides a poetic rendition of ‘us’ which transcends categories such as ‘human beings’. After all, in a world that is a transforming relational activity continuum, categories of things, which we invent by comparing visual appearances, seems backwards; i.e. relational forms arise from influences that are non-local, non-visible and non-material. This is the physical implication of ‘fields’ as in modern physics; i.e.
“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday
“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger
One can intuitively conceive of ourselves as a kind of field of influence [‘field influence’ is non-local, non-visible and non-material] which sustains our local, visible, material form in the manner that circulating currents in a flow sustain a convection cell (whirlpool, hurricane etc.).
material bodies are variations in the relational structure of space
If one accepts that the world is only given once, as a transforming relational activity continuum wherein ‘relations are all there is’, then we are not ‘spectres’, … ghosts that haunt the place where there is supposed to be a ‘thing-in-itself’, that is the jumpstart author of deeds. Instead, we are relational channels that transmit influences from the vast and universal to the point on which our transformative agency can act.
That is not a ghost story. The ghost story is the one in which we portray ourselves as local doers-of-deeds, … notional ‘independent beings’ or ‘things-in-ourselves’ that are inhabited by ‘spectres’. Emerson describes man in this non-spectre context, but notes how we have a mischievous tendency to regard ourselves as ‘independent beings’ (local doers of deeds);
“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, — is finite, comes of a lower strain.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’.
Appendix III: Identity Politics vis a vis Class Conflict
Dragonowl’s philosophical investigations show the contradictions and dissonances that arise from trying to deal with ‘single issues at a time’ as in gender issues, race issues, national issues, religious issues, all of which are identity or ‘category’ based. The Stirnerian view, also picked up on by Derrida, is that ‘subjects’ with fixed identity are ‘spooks’ or ‘spectres’ (ghosts) that we mentally put in place to impute jumpstart authoring powers to forms that are local, visible and tangible, but which are PHYSICALLY purely relational and thus non-local, non-visible and non-tangible and in no way ‘things-in-themselves’. a simple example is the storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere.
Noun-and-verb language, of course, allows us to make capture the notion that the local, visible, tangible form is a ‘thing-in-itself’ by making it into a noun-subject that inflects verbs, so that we can talk and write about relational forms (non-local, non-visible, non-material physical phenomena that ‘show up’ as local, visible, material entities on our sensory radar screens), … as if they are ‘things-in-themselves’ with jumpstart development and behaviour authoring powers.
This mental conversion of relational forms to things-in-themselves with jumpstart authoring capabilities, by way of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, has been hammered on by Nietzsche, Stirner, Mach and others, and while people are interested, the mainstream cultural belief system (the Western cultural belief system that is globally predominant in shaping our institutions of government, commerce and justice) remains firmly grounded in the concept of ‘material being’ and ‘local jumpstart sourcing of development and physical phenomenal behaviours.
The ‘anchor’ to local ‘independent being’ based belief system, according to Nietzsche, is the ‘ego’. The ‘ego’ in the sense that we believe that we, ourselves, are independent beings with powers of local jumpstart authorship of ‘our own development’ and ‘our own behaviour’ who reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it [euclidian space aka absolute space and absolute time reference framing].
Both Nietzsche and Stirner argue for a ‘higher type of self’, the ‘unique self’ or ‘uebermensch’ which, is the ‘ALL’ at the same time as it is a piece of the ‘ALL’. Schroedinger has the same model and expresses it in the Vedic terms that we are Brahman at the same time as we are Atman (the flow is at the same time the storm-cell in the flow; i.e. there is nothing in this worldview but ‘relations’ and ‘beings’ do not come into it since in a world of relational forms in a transforming relational activity continuum, there is no need for the concept of ‘being’. But we know that noun-and-verb language-and-grammar [but not flow-based languages] seizes upon the local visual aspect of the storm-cell or relational form, and imputes ‘being’ or ‘subjecthood’ to it, and thus formulates RE-PRESENTATIONS of relational dynamics [in which ‘relations are all there is’] in terms of local, material beings that have their own jumpstart authoring powers over their development and behaviour. As Mach says, this is convenient since it delivers great ‘economy of thought’ and sets aside (to be addressed later??? as kind of ‘fine detail’ or least significant digits) the natural complexity associated with mutual relational influence of all forms with all forms. there is a problem here called ‘the butterfly effect’ (chaos theory, sensitive dependence on initial conditions) in that a very small difference in some influence can lead to physical phenomena unfolding in a very different way so that prediction becomes impossible.
Our experience is, in fact, that “life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans” – John Lennon (probably Yoko Ono, also).
Ok, the problem that I have seen and experienced, from working within science, is that science is a form of superstition since it is founded on those ‘spooks’ aka ‘independent beings’.
Science is good for predictions BECAUSE it limits what it measures, as it must, and scientific thinking and theory and associated predictions are based on correlating quantitative measurements, and this can be as simple as ‘more DDT, fewer mosquitoes’, which gives us no understanding of what is really going on [i.e. the physical reality of our actual, natural experience is not equivalent to the quantitative measurement based scientific model].
Meanwhile, science ‘works’ but only in the sense that ‘logic works’ and systems of logic are inherently incomplete and certainly do not capture what is going on in a transforming relational activity continuum.
For example, in the Stirnerian and Nietzschean and Derridean view, the murderer and the rapist are ‘spooks’ or ‘spectres’ rather than physically real things [as with all subjects that imply ‘things-in-themselves’]. The way one can think of this is that society can be like a hell’s angel’s gang where the relational pressures you are caught in, induce you to kill male brothers and rape female ‘sisters’ to prove loyalty to the ‘gang’ (which is also a spectre that is purely belief-based). thus, the violent action manifests through particular relational forms (individuals) but is in no way jumpstart authored by them. Therefore a purificationist justice system like the Western binary moral judgement based justice system will always address the symptoms and never the source. in fact, the judge and jury and collective at large are all members of the hells-angel gang whose relational tapestry is the deeper source of the violence that erupts through the individuals, and since Western justice holds that a person is innocent until proven guilty, and that individuals are ‘independent beings with their own jumpstart behaviour authoring powers’, … there is no way to address what is really going in a system wherein, according to modern physics, ‘relations are all there is’.
as Nietzsche says, it is very difficult to get our minds beneath the being-based RE-PRESENTATION since our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar is continually repeating this explanation of what is going on;
“That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality …. 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 predicate not a great stupidity?” … “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 use of God here corresponds to Stirner’s use of ‘spook’ and also to William Blake’s use of ‘genius’ (or ‘genie’); i.e. the purported local authoring power imputed to a ‘subject being’ that allows RE-PRESENTATION to avoid accepting ‘relations are all there is’ and thus avoid the understanding that the source of actions and influence is ‘continually deferred’ (Derrida) as in ‘différance’, … the rape perpetrated by the hell’s angel’s brother deriving from influence from his gang brothers and their influence deriving from their parents or older brothers influence and the whole matrix of relational influences extending back from later to earlier in the transforming relational continuum, so that the authoring source never has to bottom out in particular authoring sources.
Getting back to science, scientists and amateurs of science are very much impressed by the precise logic of science that predicts exactly and brings closure to a proposition to questions such as ‘who raped that woman’? Forensic science will do a DNA analysis and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was that particular hells-angel brother X, … case closed! (apart from sentencing and incarcerating the local jumpstart causal author of the offense). Of course, the exactness with which science is able to draw conclusions is not coming from nature where ‘relations are all there is’, it is coming from the structure of science;
“For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement. … The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” – Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 107-108
What our cultural belief system has to let go of, is the notion that our behaviour derives from the internal processes of an independently existing thing-in-itself being, … which is how we mentally model ourselves, thanks to the assistance of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, as pointed out by Nietzsche (and Whorf and Sapir and Poincaré, Mach and others).
Logic lends itself to the precision and closure we find satisfying and reassuring (I know for sure what is going on here), as when we ask ‘who is responsible for this rape or murder or schoolhouse massacre’? There is no suggestion in this kind of logic that ‘we all are’, as is the only possible answer in a world where ‘relations are all there is’.
But no, we have the impression that we are in control of our own behaviour and we have the ‘right stuff’ inside us; i.e. we have a fixed identity and fixed traits that push forth from our interior no matter what kind of situation we find ourselves in. we incorporate this in our logical model of social dynamics.
Of course our intuition taps into understanding that is deeper than logical constructs and argues that ‘situationism’ prevails over ‘intentionism’; i.e. that our behaviour derives more from the relational hells-angels matrix we are included in than from a notional fixed identity and set of internally resident behavioural traits. as Poincaré says;
“It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. … Logic, therefore, remains barren unless fertilised by intuition.”- Henri Poincaré
Science can prove that we raped that rape-victim and/or that we are the author of the highschool massacre, … and then the Western public and media will be asking ‘why did he do it’? When, in an indigenous aboriginal society with their flow-based language which does not give rise to ‘independent beings’, the question is ‘what is out of balance in our community that such conflict boils up within it’; i.e. the flow-based view is ‘relations are all there is’ hence the natural development of ‘restorative justice’ which does not have the binary offender-victim concept, but only recognizes the eruption of harm from out of the transforming relational continuum that of course manifests through particular stress points as with volcanics and earthquakes. We need to address the man who goes volcanic, but not to suppose there is a God-like jumpstart authoring power inside him which is sourcing the violence so that we need look no further than this ‘independent being’ for an understanding of ‘what happened’.
Could we who consider ourselves ‘things-in-ourselves’ be spooks? Could our relational situation over-ride who we are, in spite of our strong impression that we are coming from our own internal identity and internal fixed essences and traits?
Situationist psychologists have shown that this appears to be the case (Zimbardo’s prisoner and guards experiment and Milgram’s submission to authority experiment). More than this, our intuition screams out to us that since aboriginal babies raised in Christian European homes and Christian European babies raised in aboriginal homes take on the character (culture, religion) of the relational matrix that develop within, that situationism over-rides intentionism.
The dissatisfied people in forums such as the anarchistnews forum are not so stupid that they would accept the innocence of the ‘bourgeoisie’ every time an oppressed ‘prole’ becomes volcanic, … however, … most people continue to think in terms of independent being based cause-and-effect, and therefore they blame the ‘bourgeoisie’ and therein begins the process known as ‘identity politics’ and all one has to do is to determine if a person qualifies as a member of the set known as ‘bourgeoisie’ to assign blame (even if a particular member of that set is doing all they can to help oppressed proles).
This whole business of ‘identity politics’ and the problems that come with it is written up well in the article by lupus Dragonowl and narrated by Arabella Story Tella. this is useful for me in explaining my views, which are close to Dragonowl’s (one never knows without dialoguing and i have no idea who Dragonowl is).
My views align with Ernst Mach’s so that thanks to Dragonowl’s critique of identity politics, I can show how Mach’s ideas clashed with Lenin’s and Stalin’s ideas, the latter hatching the identity politics that led to class-based conflict and moral judgement applied to membership in a class. of course, a ‘class’ is another one of these notional ‘subjects’ or ‘spooks’ which don’t really exist other than as an intellectual concept lifted from relational activity patterns. Lenin captured Mach’s argument very well in his book written to put a wooden stake through the heart of Machian philosophy. here’s the basics on that topic;
lenin wrote a book designed to drive a wooden stake through the heart of Machian philosophy [which understands dynamics in hitting-fielding terms] which was being channelled into the revolutionary movement via Bogdanov and others.
‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’ is a major philosophical work by Vladimir Lenin, published in 1909. It was an obligatory subject of study in all institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union, as a seminal work of dialectical materialism, a part of the curriculum called “Marxist-Leninist Philosophy”. In the text Lenin argued that human perceptions correctly and accurately reflect the objective external world. … The book was written as a reaction and criticism to the three volume work Empiriomonism (1904–1906) by Alexander Bogdanov [a ‘Machist], his political opponent within the Party. In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris and expelled from the Central Committee. … Materialism and Empiriocriticism was published in over 20 languages and acquired canonical status in Marxist–Leninist philosophy.
Lenin writes in his ‘In Lieu of Introduction’, a very clear review of the criticism levelled against the ‘materialist’ interpretation of Marx; i.e. Lenin says;
“I shall refer to those arguments by which materialism is being combated by Bazarov, Bogdanov, Yushkevich, Valentinov, Chernov2 and other Machians. I shall use this latter term throughout as a synonym for “empirio-criticist” because it is shorter and simpler and has already acquired rights of citizenship in Russian literature. That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature, while Bogdanov’s and Yushkevich’s departures from “pure” Machism are of absolutely secondary importance, as will be shown later.
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The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable — “things-in-themselves” — matter “outside of experience” and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of “experience” and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our senseorgans, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the “unknown,” nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into “Kantianism” (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of “things-inthemselves,” i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they “double” the world and preach “dualism,” for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an “idol,” an absolute, a source of “metaphysics,” a double of religion (“holy matter,” as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the aforementioned writers.” — V. I. Lenin “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy” (1908)
i would say that the essay on identity politics by Lupus Dragonowl (narrated by Arabella Story Tella here and presented in written form here.) offers itself as a kind of Rosetta Stone to what i have been working on (or perhaps my work is the rosetta stone), since it allows the reader/listener to bridge from the dysfunction of identity politics, to the ‘relations are all there is’ view of Mach and modern physics.
Appendix IV: Experience/Intuition versus Science/Reason
In this note, which is as short and concise as I can make it, there are no propositions that the reader cannot validate with his own experiences; i.e. while there may be philosophical quotes, these refer to common experience and do not contain dependencies on some or other theory that one has spend years in university in order to be able to understand.
The note is intended to expose internal contradictions, common in Western thinking, that have been incorporated in ‘the way we do things’; i.e. our Western society’s dynamic including how we use authoritarian government, corporate structures and a moral judgement based justice system in the ordering of our everyday activities.
The core contradiction is the confusing of logical concepts and representations of the world dynamic based on logical structures and propositions, for the physical reality of our actual, natural sensory experience.
The example of the rebel serf who raids the granaries of landlords to feed his starving children can serve as a general example that is endemic in our Western relational social dynamic. I will put this example in point form for clarity;
1. In the physical reality of our experience, before we give humans logical existence in language structures, we understand humans as complex bundles of activity which involve inputs (ingestion) and outputs (excretion) and thus cannot be understood out of the context of a nurturing space which recycles its contents.
2. There are two views as to the relationship of humans and the space they live in.
(a) The understanding of some modern physicists is that space is an energy-charged fullness which flows like the atmosphere, inducing visible and tangible resonance features, which, like storm-cells are the confluence of influx and outflux (sink and source). ‘Substance’ and ‘matter’ are merely ‘appearances’ in this ‘non-dualist’ way of understanding the world, and ‘relations are all there is’.
(b) The understanding of Newtonian physicists is that the world is made up of material things composed of particles or ‘matter’ that are, logically, mutually exclusive of the space they reside, operate and interact in. ‘Substance’ and ‘matter’ are the primary reality in this ‘dualist’ way of understanding the world and space is an empty container; a non-participating ‘operating theatre’ in which the material entities do their stuff.
3. Noun-and-verb language-and-grammar is used to formulate ‘RE-PRESENTATIONS’ of the world of our experience by making forms, including human forms, ‘subjects’ and having them inflect verbs and generate predicative results; e.g. ‘the rebel broke into the landlord’s granary and stole grain’. By using the grammatical element, ‘subject’, the human is portrayed NOT as a visible pattern of relational activity (relational form) in a transforming relational activity continuum as in 2 (a) but as an independently-existing material entity as in 2 (b). In other words, noun-and-verb language-and-grammar ‘commits’ the RE-PRESENTATION of the physical reality of our experience to the binary, dualist view in which material bodies are logical elements in a binary relation of mutual exclusivity with the space they are included in.
4. “INDUCTION” is missing from subject-verb-predicate constructs of language; i.e. in the construct ‘the rebel broke into the landlord’s granary’, the implication is that the authoring source of the rebel’s behaviour must lie in his interior since the space he is in is mutually exclusive of the physical phenomena that transpire within it. INTUITION goes farther than LOGIC, in this case, and informs us that because everyone needs to draw in energy-giving nurturance from the space he is included in [the human IS the inflowing and outflowing in the 2 (a) view] and because the landlords have monopolized access to the essential resources, the rebels are trapped on the outside of a barrier depriving them of access to essential resources. Intuition informs us that while it is ‘logically true’ that the rebel is the author of the action, in physical reality, the rebel is not a logical unit [an independently-existing unit] but a physically real ingesting-excreting relational bundle of activity within the land-plant-animal [habitat-inhabitant] complex, and according to modern physics, “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” [Mach’s principle].
While logic allows us to construct representations in terms of ‘what things do’ as in the case of analytical views of local systems, intuition allows us an understanding that starts from the relational unum that includes the ‘local system’ in the manner that the atmospheric flow, in continually seeking thermal/pressure field balance, induces convection cells as agents of such transformation. Our experience-based intuition not only informs us in terms of the overall relational dynamic, it helps us separate the ‘figures’ from the ‘ground’ so that we can employ ‘logic’ to RE-PRESENT relational forms as if they were local, independent logical systems with their own internal components and processes with jumpstart powers of causally producing explicit results;
“It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. … Logic, therefore, remains barren unless fertilised by intuition.”- Henri Poincaré
Of course, the exactness that comes from our logical analysis is not an exactness found in nature, but derives instead from the assumptions built into logic such as the ‘existence of independent entities’ [‘identities’];
“For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement. … The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” – Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 107-108
5. Nietzsche, Stirner and others (check out your own experience to affirm or reject this) that we are creating ‘spooks’ (spectres or ghosts) by using the logic of language to imply that an identified ‘subject’ is the author of an action. That is, our intuition informs us that the serf’s action of robbing the landlord’s granary was INDUCED by the relational dynamics wherein access to essential habitat resources were monopolized and fenced off and access to them used to extort labours and other services from those desperate for access to them. As our experience shows, ‘famines’ only apply to those with limited access to essential resources. Many people starve to death while some, in the same land, continue to live in abundance and is in Irish potato famine, those with monopoly access to the fruits of the land (livestock and grain) were taking their fill and shipping out great volumes, a harvest that had been brought about by the labours of those who lacked ownership interest in this produced abundance and who were now starving. The point is that the action of the rebel breaking into the landlord’s granary cannot be fully understood in terms of a subject-verb-predicate construct without taking account of the inductive influence [akin to the electrified field in the body of a semiconductor that induces current flow] that is the deeper source of the rebel’s action.
6. The ‘spook’ impression comes when we look at the demeanor and behaviour of the rebel from the point of view of the landlord defending ‘his property’ and what we see is the intent to do violence that manifests within the individual. However, our intuition informs us that while this ‘comes from the individual’, it does not originate within the individual but is induced by the relational social dynamic, and the more the relational social dynamic becomes unbalanced, the more such faces and the greater their intensity. Thus, by creating this ‘identity’ called ‘rebel’ we have created a ‘spook’ or ‘spectre’ and this defines how ‘identity politics’ works, and ‘IDENTITY POLITICS IS FOUNDATIONAL IN OUR MODERN WESTERN CULTURE BASED SOCIETY’. That is, we have used noun-and-verb language to convert a relational social dynamic that includes induction, into a logical proposition using logical elements that limits the sourcing of dynamics to independently-existing things or ‘logical identities’. This amounts to an ‘error of grammar’, as Nietzsche observes;
“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
As the imbalances, tensions and conflicts rise in the relational social dynamic, so does the incidence and intensity of anguished faces and desperate actions. This is all ‘one activity’ where the dynamics of the figures are reciprocally complementary to the dynamics of the ground [relations are all there is]. Meanwhile the logic incorporated in noun-and-verb language and grammar allows us to RE-PRESENT this by selecting out figures from the ground and ‘framing them’ as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’ so that, without being able to see the relational context, we impute the sourcing of the anguished faces and desperate actions to the ‘subject’ by way of having the ‘subject’ inflect verbs.
The expressions and actions of the figures are intuitively understood in the context of the relational dynamics they are included in;
However, logically and scientifically, the figures may be understood as local, independently-existing systems with internal process driven and directed behaviours. That is, ‘induction’ is left out of ‘analytical investigation’ since the logic of analytical investigation seeks to understand dynamics in a purely ‘subject-verb-object’ RE-PRESENTATION; i.e. in a one-sided, all-hitting, no-fielding re-presentation.
expression and behaviour as reflections
oppression, rebellion and the chicken and egg question
Science is based on this reduction of the relational continuum to terms of local material subjects and what these subjects do.
“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” —Ernst Mach
By reducing the scientific RE-PRESENTATION of dynamics in one-sided, non-relational, all-hitting, no-fielding terms of ‘subject-verb-predicate’ where causal-agent-produces-results, the one-ness of the relational world is broken into the binary two-ness of ‘doer’ and ‘done-to’, and the subject becomes a ‘spook’ that is inhabited by an invisible power that we purport to be the authoring source of his expressions and actions.
Our intuition informs us that it is impossible to separate out his assertive behaviour [hitting] from the relational dynamic he is situationally included in [fielding] as there is, in the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, only one dynamic, the transforming relational activity continuum which spawns within it, many different relational activity patterns that are visible and tangible but in no way ‘locally self-authoring’.
7. Science and logic’s omission of ‘induction’. In a flow-field, the ‘fielding’ induces the ‘hitting’. As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, the ‘fielding’ (genius immanent in nature) not only inductively shapes the behaviour of the forms in the flow [organs, organisms] but creates the forms.
Science and logic, substitutes for this inductive genius of nature, the ‘intelligence’ of the forms within nature. Thus, the pear-tree is credited with the intelligence of producing pears, and if that was its strong-point, why not produce as many pears as one could, as in the Darwinian theory where reproduction aimed at survival of the species is depicted as the animating force of evolution and individual development. Modern biological science continues to maintain that ‘plants’ are amazingly ‘intelligent’ since ‘how else can you explain the complex ecosystemic relations across diverse varieties of plants, insects, birds and animals’ once you have defined plants as ‘independently-existing local systems-in-themselves’? The logician has no choice but to impute to the independent participants in the ecosystem, the ‘intelligence’ that authors this complex cooperation without which the ecosystem would not work and the members of the ecosystem would not survive. The intuitionist’, on the other hand, can acknowledge that the world is only given once, as a relational activity continuum permeated with ‘genius’ (the immanent genie like power of nature) so that, as Emerson says, it is we-the genies or ‘the genie-us’ of the relational continuum that not only inhabits the organism but creates it.
‘Intelligence’ is imputed to ‘individual plants’ because we have RE-PRESENTED plants as independently-existing ‘things-in-themselves’, so that after taking the ecosystem apart into separate pieces, we are compelled to put it back together and explain its amazing cooperative features without which it wouldn’t work and without which its independent participants could not survive or even exist, hence the ‘intelligence of plants’.
If we go with science and logic, we have to relocate the ‘genius of nature’ or the ‘harmonies immanent in the world as a transforming relational continuum’ and parcel it out to the ‘independent local systems’ and call it ‘intelligence’ to explain the source of the amazingly complex ‘co-operation’ that enables the ecosystem to work and the ecosystem participants to persist.
Science deliberately ‘left out induction’, for reasons of simplification/convenience, even though ‘induction’ is a recognized phenomenon in the physical reality of our natural experience. As Mach observed in his critical review of ‘the Science of Mechanics’ [he is criticizing the building of science purely mechanical foundations];
“1. Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist. The production of mutual accelerations in masses is, to all appearances, a purely dynamical phenomenon. But with these dynamical results are always associated thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical phenomena, and the former are always modified in proportion as the latter are asserted. On the other hand, thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical conditions also can produce motions. Purely mechanical phenomena, accordingly, are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things. The same thing is true of the other classes of physical phenomena. Every event belongs, in a strict sense, to all the departments of physics, the latter being separated only by an artificial classification, which is partly conventional, partly physiological, and partly historical.
2. The view that makes mechanics the basis of the remaining branches of physics, and explains all physical phenomena by mechanical ideas, is in our judgment a prejudice. Knowledge which is historically first, is not necessarily the foundation of all that is subsequently gained. – Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development’, Chapter V, ‘The Relations of Mechanics to Other Departments of Knowledge (Physiology)’
This reduction of the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, to terms of pure mechanics removes inductive influence and imposes the LOGICAL constraint that the authoring sources of action derive fully and solely from the independent material contents of an empty and absolute space, contents which are changing bit by bit over increments of ‘absolute time’ (something that entire universe experiences and which explains the changing form of the universe; i.e. the self-evolving power of the universe-as-transforming-relational-continuum has been taken away and notionally re-allocated to a transcendent [metaphysical] change authoring influence called ‘time’).
That inductive influence is immanent in a relational world wherein everything is mutually dependent on everything is implicit; i.e. there are no ‘independent parts’ to provide a foundation for reconstructing the world dynamics on the basis of independently-existing material entities;
“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach
Science, through physics, the ‘queen of sciences’ which establishes the basic modeling foundations for science, has simply imposed on science itself, the simplifying assumptions that allow science to reconceive the world in terms of local parts with local powers of authorship;
“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.
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First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.
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Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space. — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”
Scientist-philosophers like Poincaré and Mach have ‘put out warnings’ about pushing the models of science beyond their built-in limitations, or ‘building twenty pound theories from ten pound axioms’;
“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach
8. There are implications re our ‘sense of self’ associated above item (7). The above item reviews how induction is removed from the world dynamic by relocating the authoring sourcing from non-local, non-visible, non-material field influence which involves reciprocal complementarity between induction/fielding and assertion/hitting, as is the nature of wave dynamics. The inductive aspect is simply ignored and denied in this case, so if we have a scientific view of our ‘self’, we too may deny that ‘the fielding we are hitting into has fundamentally greater influence on ‘our hitting results’ than ‘our locally sourced hitting actions’.
Or, in other words, we substitute material dynamics for wave dynamics [both are possible at the same time but waves are more comprehensive in that the do not reduce the conjugate hitting-fielding (transmitting-receiving) dynamic into a binary opposite pair but retains them as conjugate [reciprocally complementary] aspects of one dynamic. The conjugate relation of sink and source in a convection cell is a relational form in continual becoming rather than a ‘thing’ that is ‘developing’; i.e. there is no ‘being’ and no persisting ‘identity’ there [‘becoming’ is non-representable]. The error of grammar that Nietzsche points to in his ‘lightning flashes’ example, which breaks apart such activity into ‘being’ plus ‘behaviour of the being’ by way of noun-subject and ‘action-verb’ grammar, is the source of the ‘spectre’ or ‘ghost’ in the local machine. The storm-cell may ‘look like’ a local thing-in-itself’ that is its own authoring source of behaviour, but once we adopt that way of thinking about, according that subject-verb RE-PRESENTATION of it,
Think of how this fits into Western moral judgement based retributive justice; i.e. the rebel is not really a ‘thing-in-itself’ but a relational behaviour that is expressing conflict/imbalance in the transforming relational activity continuum. The rebel anguish and desperate behaviour is induced by the relational dynamics he is included in; i.e. ‘what shows in his facial and body expression cannot be other than a reflection of the relational dynamic he is included in’. Only logically, is such action jumpstarting from the individual and that is only because logic assumes independence of the subject and a binary split between inhabitants and habitat. Logic makes man as a relational form into a self-authoring, self-powered ‘spook’. Intuition comes from our relational experience [from physical reality rather than from logical ‘operative reality’ that employs metaphysical reference framing]. Intuition informs us that the rise in the incidence and intensity of ‘rebels’ (robin-hoods, protestors, terrorists, outlaws, rapists, murderers, schoolhouse massacre authors) is an expression of the relational collective that is looking at ‘itself’ through the logic-conditioned eyes of judges, juries and judgemental media and the ‘general public’. The imposing of ‘independence’ on the ‘rebels’ is a logical operation which, while it is imposed on science, which could not exist without it, is not imposed on the physical reality of our natural experience.
“To the superficial observer scientific truth is unassailable, the logic of science is infallible; and if scientific men sometimes make mistakes, it is because they have not understood the rules of the game. Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident propositions, by a chain of flawless reasonings; they are imposed not only on us, but on Nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered, as it were, and His choice is limited to a relatively small number of solutions. A few experiments, therefore, will be sufficient to enable us to determine what choice He has made. … For here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’
To explore this imposing of ‘independent subjecthood’ a little deeper, … we can recall that we like to say that ‘the earth rotates’ and ‘the sun rises’, ignoring the relational interdependence immanent in the universe as earlier stated;
“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach
Logically, we can ‘truthfully’ say ‘the earth rotates’ as is the typical way of assembling ‘meaning’, by subject-and-verb constructs, but ‘logic’, as we know, is inherently incomplete, and without contradicting that logical truth, our intuition can bring on the enlarged view in which the earth and sun as ‘local systems’ are included within a relational continuum, the physical reality of which does not allow us to RE-PRESENT their dynamics in subject-verb terms as if they were the authors of their own action, … but use language to construct an ‘operative reality’ in which we imagine that forms, rather than being understood as relational patterns incipient within a relational activity continuum, are ‘things-in-themselves’ that reside, operate and interact within a containing space that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact with it aka ‘science’s absolute space and absolute time reference frame’. Therefore the logical ‘truth’ in ‘the earth rotates’ and ‘the sun rises’ are incomplete truths;
“The motions of the Universe are the same whether we adopt the Ptolemaic or the Copernican mode of view” of celestial dynamics, … “both views are, indeed, equally correct.” i.e. the geocentric and the heliocentric views are merely two “interpretations” of a Universe that “is only given once.”. – Ernst Mach
Our imputing of ‘being’ to ‘the earth’, which strips it out of its relations with other things, which are pulling it into blossoming form [“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.”] and re-presents it as a spook with its own internal powers of sourcing itself, driving itself and directing itself, arguably comes from our own view of our ‘self’ as an ‘independent being’, … a view that fits the logic of noun-and-verb language, as Nietzsche points out, and which Whorf argues derives from language;
“It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. 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’
Whorf argues that only those cultures with noun-and-verb language-and-grammar ‘got science’, so that language is not only the source of science, it is the source of ego which is essentially the scientific view of self (the view of an independent thing-in-ourselves that has the local powers of authorship of drive and direction);
“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’
Since all of the cultures with monotheistic ‘Creation’ stories that depict an all-powerful Creator constructing man as an individual tailor-made item endorse this subject-verb being-based ‘scientific’ worldview, there is an ‘aligning’ of Western religions and Western science that reinforces acceptance of subject-verb-predicate constructs which are tied to together with binary moral judgement.
To return to the example of the rebel, … with in the inductive influence in the relational dynamics removed, by re-presenting them in all-hitting, no-fielding terms given by subject-verb-predicate constructs, we say ‘the rebel robbed the granary’.
What makes this logically true? What makes it logically true is the assumption that the rebel is an independent reason-driven system that is fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour. Intuitively, people support the Robin Hood understanding which acknowledges the physical reality of inductive influence that is immanent in relational dynamics. As the valley forms by land subsiding into a concave collection basin, the run-off from precipitation and snowmelt is pulled into collective confluence and what becomes visible is ‘the raging river that is eroding the valley floor’. The natural world is only given once and this forming of a collection basin or ‘sink’ and the convergence of runoff that produces a firehose-like fountaining source that rips up the floor of the collection basin is all one dynamic that is known as ‘relational transformation’. Noun-and-verb language constructs allow us to RE-PRESENT this one dynamic by mentally separating out and ignoring the inductive influence that collects the runoff and providing a one-sided [all-hitting, no-fielding] mental picture in terms of ‘the raging river’ and ‘how it is eroding the valley floor’.
This is the same sort of thing our ‘ego-self’ imagines it does, and it is easy to speak and write in these terms because that is what a noun-and-verb language-and-grammar is architected to do; e.g. ‘I produce wheat’ gives God-like powers to a relational form (man) that gathers in the relational space together with other relational forms such as ‘wheat plants’ and ‘soil’ and ‘water’ and ‘air’ and ‘solar energy’ all of which are ‘conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” [Mach’s principle]. That is, the fact that the habitat included sun, soil, water and air and seasonally developing wheat plants induces the development and sustaining of farmers.
We are ‘dreaming’ when we see humans as having the power to ‘produce wheat’; i.e. this notion is an ‘economy of thought’ [Mach] as is the very nature and value of science.
“When we dream together, it is reality” – Cervantes, John and Yoko
9. While logic and scientific thinking make use of being-based mental constructs, intuition informs us of our inclusion within a transforming relational continuum. This intuition leads philosophers of science such as Schroedinger, to understand his ‘self’ as a relational form in a transforming relational continuum, which is the same relation as understood by the Vedics (in Advaita Vedanta) where in Atman, our temporary personal life is at the same time Brahman, the whole ball of wax [transforming relational continuum] so that while our temporary life experience is unique and particular due to our unique situational inclusion within the transforming relational continuum, we ARE, at the same time, the transforming relational continuum [Atman = Brahman];
In July 1918, Schrodinger wrote the following:
“Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge……It has nothing to do with individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two “I”‘s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents- their Karma.” On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself. The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West.”
Emerson and Nietzsche and others also hold this same view that the world of nature is only given once and subject and object are really one, not two, just like matter and space are really one, not two [matter is local, visible, tangible relational form in a non-local, non-visible, non-material field of influence]. This makes a human into an ‘agent of transformation’ or ‘God-in-distribution’ or ‘the ALL in distribution’;
“The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature. Not the cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends always from above. It is unbroken obedience. The beauty of these fair objects is imported into them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ. …
… Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, — is finite, comes of a lower strain.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’.
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Conclusions:
As in the example, ‘rebels’ are defined on the basis of ‘their actions’ as is the rebel category ‘terrorist’. In creating this definition, we break the relational figure out of the relational ground and declare its ‘independent existence’, in which case we attribute its hitting results fully and solely to its hitting actions. Not matter if our intuition is screaming out that the rise in anguished faces and desperate behaviours is deriving from rising oppression in the transforming relational social dynamic [rising insensitivity leading to incessant humiliating of the less powerful by the more powerful, … it will remain logically and scientifically true that the rebel is responsible for the results of his actions, setting him up for a ‘guilty’ conviction in our Western moral judgement based retributive justice system, as surely as the sun rises and the earth turns.
If we suspend our scientific imposing of absolute space and absolute time in representing the world of our experience, as we do when we formulate representations using subject-verb-predicate constructs of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar, our understanding ceases its excluding of ‘induction’ and how everything is simultaneous mutually influencing everything;
“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” – Mach’s principle
This puts us back into understanding our relational social dynamics in hitting-fielding mode, wherein superior or good hitting and inferior or evil hitting may just as easily derive from fielding as from the hitter and puts us in ‘beyond good and evil’ viewing mode. The judge and jury and media and public no longer has justification in attributing bad behaviour to individuals through which it manifests, and likewise ‘good behaviour’. Those that bask in public admiration and respect for ‘superior performance’ tend to be lifted up into positions of great influence and power, regardless of whether their success derived from extorting labours and services of those without influence and power.
Very powerful people tend to operate in very different venues from those without power and thus the sensitivity of the former to the plight of the latter tends to decline (e.g. a populace that is safe and affluent may have a military that is persistently humiliating and oppressing those without power in foreign fighting arenas, and becomes disconnected and insensitive to the plight of those humiliated others). People who are without power and affluence are exposed to extortion from those with power and affluence [e.g. prostitution is rife where the gap between wealthy and poor is great since all portals to essential resources may be closed other than those where access one gains entry by offering sexual favours or criminal services. While the rise in prostitution with the rise in the gap between wealthy and poor leads us to intuitively understand that the inductive influence of the ‘fielding’ predominates over the assertive action of the ‘hitters’, our logical presentation is only capable of presenting these dynamics in all-hitting, no-fielding terms, thus the collective that allows this power and wealth gap to arise, while itself the source of the rise of the desperate behaviours such as prostitution, is considered ‘neutral’ or ‘innocent’.
In Western justice, only the ‘hitters’ will be prosecuted since they will be seen as ‘fully and solely responsible for their own actions’. The ‘neutrality’ of the collective and its moral judgement imposing judges and juries is the denial of inductive influence that our intuition affirms is the primary mover and shaper, that derives from the relational social dynamic. In the flow-of-becoming based relational languages of indigenous aboriginals, for example, ‘relations are all there is’ and the concept of ‘independent being’ has no meaning. For this reason, ‘restorative justice’ which is ‘beyond good-and-evil’ makes sense and binary moral judgement makes no sense, other than in a pragmatic idealist or figurative rather than literal sense.
In the logical and scientific views, while it is acknowledged that ‘oppression’ and ‘rebellion’ go hand in hand, there is a chicken-and-question since, when rebellion rises, it is quickly addressed by rising oppression (suppression), the rebels will be seen as ‘starting the conflict’ since oppression is often inductive [denial of access to essential resources] and thus non-local, non-visible and non-material; i.e. the monopolizing of wealth and power which sets up a desperate need for access to essential resources that can be ‘exploited’ by extorting labours and services with minimal compensations; i.e. humiliating the desperate. The rebellious actions will be the only visibly manifest aspect, therefore it is up to intuition to set the record straight and intuition is not allowed in scientific proofs;
“It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. … Logic, therefore, remains barren unless fertilised by intuition.”- Henri Poincaré
As Nietzsche observes, what is required is the devaluation of the highest values; i.e. ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, ‘self’ and ‘other’.
In their place, intuition and the harmony and balance seeking that are immanent in the transforming relational continuum aka ‘Nature’ wherein the dualist binary opposites are resolved within a non-dualist flow of becoming.
Appendix V: Recovering our Sanity
My considered view of Western society is that it is insane.
By ‘Western society’, I mean the relational social dynamic that gives rise to partitioning into ‘independent sovereign states, authoritarian governments, hierarchical corporate enterprises and moral judgement based retributive justice.
By ‘insane’, I mean that the popular way of understanding the world dynamic bears little relation to the physical reality of our actual experience, yet we use it as the ‘go by’ for organizing our individual and collective actions.
In my view, the problems begin with this crazy belief in the existence of independent things which is promoted by noun-and-verb language-and-grammar and legitimized by ‘science’, which in turn gives credence to the sovereigntism, authoritarianism and moral judgement, all of which are based on ‘binary concepts’, like ‘independently-existing things’ [an independent thing EITHER ‘is’ OR ‘is not’].
The impossible of independent things has been discussed in philosophy and physicists like Schroedinger have bantered on about the thingless-connectedness of nature and the impossibility of plurality (nature is given just once, as a transforming relational activity continuum), but Western society uses the intellectual idealization of independent objects in a foundational role, so that social institutions (soverigntist, corporatist, moralist), backed up by regulatory and enforcement agencies are there to ‘make believers out of everyone’. The world has been ‘colonized’ by force, … by European colonizers that impose this insane belief in ‘independently-existing things’, and if you are an indigenous aboriginal, you can call bullshit all you want but the colonizers with their powerful armies who now control the world through 193 sovereign states based on the belief that they are ‘independently-existing’, are going to have the way with you anyhow. It is all happening, in the mainstream social dynamic, according to the belief in locally existing beings.
In science, this notion of independent things is supported by quantitative measurement (this is crazy). For example, scientists investigate hurricanes out of the context of the flow-plenum they are relational features in. As one makes measurements of the hurricane, moving away from its centre, there is no discrete boundary one crosses where one can say that we were still in the hurricane back there and we are not out of the hurricane, … there are only quantitative measurements of wind velocity, pressure etc., so the passage from where the hurricane ‘is’ to ‘is not’ is determined by specifying some threshold wind velocity.
Meanwhile, our intuition is screaming out to us that the entire flow of the atmosphere is like a swimming pool wherein everything is influencing everything [that is the nature of fluid dynamics] so the relational influence is unbounded even if the visibility and quantitative is bounded; i.e. the tides and solar irradiance and el niño and the lot are bound up in the celestial dynamic and thermal flows are fuelling the hurricane, … so just because something is only ‘locally visible’ and ‘locally tangible’ does not justify the claim that it is a locally existing thing. Once we impose this local being on it, we move on to using the now locally existing thing in subject-verb-predicate constructs such as ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, ‘Katrina is heading north towards the Gulf Coast’, … ‘Katrina is wreaking destruction on New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is moving overland and dissipating’.
Science even establishes the spatial and temporal extent of the hurricane; i.e. according to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), Katrina was the 12th Tropical Depression of the 2005 season; 21:00 UTC Tuesday, August 23 to 15:00 UTC Tuesday, August 30, 2005.
“The Birth and Death of a Hurricane: Step 1 – Tropical Wave: “bump” or disruption of normal tropical easterly flow. … Step 2 – Tropical Depression: closed circulation of air in the low levels, Step 3 – Tropical Storm: sustained winds of 39 mph., … Step 4 – Hurricane: pressure differential of .60 inches of mercury between centre and surrounding pressure field, Step 5 – Disintegration: interaction with land or colder air disrupts processes driving the storm.”
There is nothing here to contradict the understanding of nature as a transforming relational continuum. The concept of an ‘independently existing system’ as in the case of the hurricane, is created by subjective fiat of the observer, measurement taker. As John Stuart Mill observed;
“Every definition implies an axiom; that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined”.
The point is that it is the limitations of our senses of vision and touch that give rise to the concept of ‘independent objects/systems’. Our intuition does not recognize, in a fluid dynamic, any ‘independence’ of a local relational feature (convection cell etc.) from the flow-plenum. It is our logic and definitions of logical elements that underlie the elevating of a relational form in the transforming relational continuum, to a notional ‘independent system’, notionally with its own local powers of authoring development and behaviour as RE-PRESENTED using subject-verb-predicate constructs, as mentioned; ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger’, ‘Katrina is heading north towards the Gulf Coast’, … ‘Katrina is wreaking destruction on New Orleans’, … ‘Katrina is moving overland and dissipating’.
In the physical reality of our actual, natural experience, there is ‘one-ness’; i.e. the one-ness of a transforming relational activity continuum which induces within itself relational features that serve as agents of transformation.
Relational influence responsible for Katrina is unbounded. The local limits to Katrina are established subjectively by the observer and influenced by the limits of his visual and tactile sensibilities and measurement instruments. Noun-and-verb language does the rest; i.e. it synthetically breaks relational figures from out of the relational ground and RE-PRESENTS them as if they were ‘independent entities’ with their own local powers of authoring development and behaviour, … that reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.
This is the ‘crazy-maker’ since it encourages people and people-collectives (nations) to see themselves on this basis, as if they have powers of authorship (of development and behaviour) that they do not, in reality, have. Language asserts that they do have these powers and they talk themselves into believing what they are saying.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the medium of language” (“Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandnes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache”)
Instead of ‘humans’ as ‘relational forms in flow-plenum’ [Emerson, Schroedinger, Mach etc.] we have ‘human beings’ whose behaviours we can portray using subject-verb-predicate constructs, as in the ‘Katrina’ example.
There are no such things as ‘human beings’ because there is no such thing as ‘being’, … not in the physical reality of our natural experience as relational forms included in a transforming relational activity continuum.
“It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. 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’
There are no ‘beings’ and therefore there are no ‘subjects’ that are the causal authors of results. As Emerson says, we can speak of relational forms and their behaviour in terms where “they are transmitting influences from the vast and universal to the point on which their genius can act”, … which represents them as currents within a flow-plenum [channellers of influence] without splitting them out of the one-ness and portraying them as local beings that possess the powers of authoring their own development and their own behaviours. In the relational view of the world (modern physics) where ‘relations are all there is’, change is by way of relational transformation and we do not have to hunt for ‘doers-of-deeds’, … ‘independent beings’ acting as ‘causal agents’ that are responsible for the changes that manifest.
Just because we have noun-and-verb language-and-grammar which gives us subject-verb-predicate constructs whose representations speak of ‘things’ that author cause-and-effect ‘results’ does not mean that we have to [mis]take this for reality.
“That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality …. 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 predicate not a great stupidity?” … “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 sailboater can say that it was his doing that took him from A to B but the truth is that he derives his power and steerage from the relational dynamics he is included in, and what he implies are his powers of transportation, are revealed by a becalming, not to be his at all. And the same holds for the farmer who claims he produces wheat. When the dustbowl conditions come, as in Oklahoma in the 1930s, his emperor’s new clothes are revealed as he moves his household to California to see ‘if his powers of authorship’ will be ‘revived’ there.
Fertile fields are like accommodating fielding in baseball, … they can make you into a ‘big hitter’ but when the fielding gets tough, the authoring powers of the hitter go into decline, raising the question as to whether he has any authoring powers of his own. The implicit question here is whether we are justified in conceiving of the hitter and ‘his results’ as independent of the fielding as our noun-verb-predicate language-and-grammar structures contend.
If a relational form is not really a locally existing thing-in-itself with its own powers of authoring development and behaviour, what is it?
What if a person takes on meaning like a word takes on meaning, through relational influence with other things? Relational influence goes on unendingly. ‘Situationist psychologists’ maintain that the outside-inward influence of the relational situation a person finds himself in has a predominating influence in shaping his persona, and that his internal inside-outward asserting traits will conform. Zimbardo’s ‘prisoners and guards’ and Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’ experiments seemed to confirm this hypothesis. This is also evident in the case of infants whose social persona’s are shaped by the cultural and religious situations they are situationally included in.
“Children model their behavior primarily on the behavior of their parents and other authority figures. Whether or not this behavior is effective at producing happiness doesn’t prevent the child from modeling it; the modeling is not a result of reasoning, but is due to simple observation and imitation. This mimicry is illustrated in the old saying “Like father, like son,” or now better put, “Like parent, like child.” Whether parents are happy or not doesn’t stop a child from imitating what he or she observes; children are like dry sponges ready to absorb the first water they come in contact with.”
Situational-relational context rules, in shaping who we are, just as in the case of the storm-cell in the flow-plenum.
As Jacques Derrida contends: “there is nothing outside of context”.
The local ‘thing-in-itself’ appears to be a ‘thing-in-itself’ based on our vision and tactility, but as our intuition informs us, the ‘meaning’ of a local form may have roots which are non-local, non-visible and non-material (relational-context based).
“As Rorty contends “words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words…no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)”. As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the, in this view, mistaken belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing,
.
… For example, the word “house” derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from “shed”, “mansion”, “hotel”, “building”, etc. than how the word “house” may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e. the relationship between signifier and signified) with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms rather than by an ostensive description or definition: …”–Wikipedia
Thus, complete meaning is always “differential” and postponed in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word’s definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries from different periods in time, and such a process would never end. Hence Derrida’s term ‘différance’.
In the continually transforming atmosphere-plenum, the relational form is like the word; i.e. it looks like a ‘thing-in-itself’ that should have its own local meaning, but it is part of everything influencing and pulling on everything, therefore its meaning is never fully locally present.
Our intuition (my intuition) suggests that we are ‘nonlocal’ phenomena rather than ‘local beings’, in the manner that relational forms in an energy-charged flow-plenum;
“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger
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“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm
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“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday
In fact, not only does my intuition resonate with Mach’s, Nietzsche’s, Schroedinger’s, Bohm’s, Faraday’s, … but like Nietzsche and Stirner, I feel like it is important to ‘mock’ this ‘crazymaker’ of a being-based worldview, and I agree that imputing local God-like powers of authorship of development and behaviour to a notional ‘being’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ produces ‘ghosts’ or ‘spectres’ and leads to ‘identity politics’ which are the source of conflict and injury.
These ‘spectres’ include sovereign states, property tracts, human beings, corporations, races, religions, criminals, terrorists, rapists, murderers and pretty much anything that is used as a subject in a subject-verb-predicate [doer-deed] construct. As with the example of the child-soldier, it is not that the violence does not manifest (channel through) the child-soldier, the crazy-making aspect is to impute jumpstart authoring powers to the child-soldier seen as a ‘human being’ aka ‘independently-existing material system with internal process driven and directed behaviour that purportedly reside, operates and interacts in a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.
Is it too far out to acknowledge ourselves as relational context that whose rootsourcing disperses out into the transforming relational continuum farther than we could ever trace it? Not to Emerson who sees man as “God-in-distribution” nor to Schroedinger who sees man as Atman = Brahman; i.e. as relational forms within a transforming relational activity continuum and therefore as ‘agents of nonlocal relational transformation’ and NOT as local beings that causally author particular results.
“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, — is finite, comes of a lower strain.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’.
Again, the crazymaker is that in our Western society, it has become habitual to RE-PRESENT relational forms, such as humans, as ‘spectres’, notional local, independently-existing ‘beings’, notionally equipped with their/our own powers of authoring our development and behaviours. This concept of ‘being’ is our ego speaking, as Nietzsche points out. These ‘spectres’, primed by our egotist archetype of self, include sovereign states, property tracts, human beings, corporations, races, religions, criminals, terrorists, rapists, murderers and pretty much anything that is used as a subject in a subject-verb-predicate [doer-deed] construct.
The non-literal ‘poetic listener’ can take all of this subject-verb-predicate talk in with a grain of salt; i.e. he knows that ‘the child-soldier’ shot and killed the villagers, but he also knows that the child-soldier is a situational relational form and in a hell-angels like ghetto community, there is no way to constrain the authoring source of his behaviour to himself as an ‘independent being’, imputing non-involvement to the relational dynamics in which he is situationally included; i.e. imputing ‘innocence’ to the public, the judges and juries who will be applying binary moral judgement to what they see as a subject-verb-predicate act that he is fully and solely responsible for. The poetic reviewer will remind the collective that ‘it takes a whole community to raise a child-soldier’, and that the scientific thinkers who impute ‘independent being’ to the child-soldier, are a metaphysical priesthood that can’t see the poetic context for the literal content.
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