Just Another Cultural Visionary

objectivity fact

2011-08-02T20:35:06Z

(esoteric / exoteric 15)

             Our premise throughout is the presumption of a radical change. But the essay here is not about its history. Objectivity alone is a simple and direct enough expression of how this change has emerged as ‘the modern’.
             Objectivity is a radical modern development. We try to project it back into the earliest records and cultures, but our efforts become anthropology. And while there is undoubtedly science at the center of anthropology, a significant aspect of its methodology is allegory. In other words, we see no signs of the factual certainties characteristic of science, in history prior to its modern roots in the medieval or in cultures apart from those in which objectivity has become a dominating intellectual perspective.
             What we will argue here is that objectivity radically alters the spiritual basis of the religious enquiry.

The only place where we can experience the possibility of religion, the possibility of the divine, is in the direct or indirect enquiry into the nature of our own consciousness. But the potency of perception and self-awareness, as we have defined them here, are necessarily grounded in the spontaneity of value, as it appears in the solipsistic field, and this can only be defined as ‘spirit’, and understood as always immanent and pervasive.
What we will argue here is that this now ‘dominating intellectual perspective’ also radically alters the modes of and approaches to ‘spirit’.

Kundalini is literally the Eye of the tail, the Eye of the body awakening as self-illumination. The experience was presumably rare, even among avowed practitioners. But if, as we are suggesting, the experience of objectivity radically alters the possibilities for approach toward spirit and its functional practice in the enquiry into consciousness, then obviously it is not only possible, but also necessary that much of the basic mode of spirit, culturally, has also changed.
That is, objectivity posits the possibility of radical changes in esoteric experience – what is commonly called ‘mysticism’.

             The ‘new’ experience is the radical validation of the separated Eye.
             Scientists who treat their validating experience of objectivity as an essentially religious experience – but deny religion and / or assert secular necessity – present the psychology of religious fanatics. What is projected is the hypocritical denial of the unique validation of the self inherent in such experience.
             But it is precisely the unique validation of the self as the corresponding member in the equation which ‘validates’ a given fact that constitutes the empirical basis of the experience as ‘objectivity’.
             And an enquiry into this equation will reveal something quite other than a simple validation of inert necessity.

To some extent, I view key moments of my own experience as a partial paradigm.

             I would say that Einstein’s Special Theory is now the paradigm for the experience of objectivity. What this paradigm points to is the moment. The moment is complete in itself. The only ‘real’ time is ‘now’. But ‘objectivity’ establishes that ‘time’ itself is also ‘real’. Sequence and cause are not simply intellectually adventitious.
             These are the actual empirical aspects for ‘experience’: the mutuality of wholeness and cause. In the wholeness, light is ‘instantaneous’, i.e., of an ‘infinite’ speed. In ‘time’, light has a discrete or ‘finite’ speed.
             This would appear then to suggest a purely ‘subjective’ cause for the paradox that light travels simultaneously at a ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ speed. What controverts that assertion is, on the one hand, the objective experience potential in the grounding Lorentz Transformations and, on the other, evolution itself. The ‘reason’ that we experience paradigm objectivity here is because this ‘duplicity’ of consciousness has ‘also’ emerged from ‘inert’ matter.
             The empiricism expresses the absolute nature of the equation in terms of the validating closure of ‘objectivity’, an experience which validates self and world, as well as the ‘given fact’.

But this profound intuition remained unrevealed for me until I explored the moment. Perhaps the fact that I explored the moment through oracles is very much time-conditioned by the environment of the 60s and 70s. But oracles are based in the premise of the moment as value, a premise necessary to experience as we practice and understand it. The immediacy of value response defines by wholeness and process; that is, it serves as the conditioning function for ‘moment’. Of necessity, any legitimate moment is a given value. The fact that this solipsistic whole is also ‘experience’ requires it.
What we are isolating, of course, is the moment as power. And this empirical abstraction of power gives us the key to reflexive consciousness, since the ‘power’ is not only embodied force, it is also ‘pure’ value. It is the ‘delay’ in the reflex – the necessary separation in awareness that reveals ‘the witness’ – made tangible at the level of both body and value awareness.

starting seven

2011-08-02T20:29:12Z

(esoteric / exoteric 14)

             Undoubtedly, my teacher’s absorption emerged directly out of his yoga practice. But his realization apparently centered from the first on his knowledge as a physician, as a practicing endocrinologist, neurosurgeon and psychiatrist, that is to say, in the direct knowledge of the body and its instrumentality. From here, we could say that he ‘fell back’ into the tradition in which he was born and raised, his positions at major hospitals in Baltimore and New York suggesting the range of his acclimation to the western environment.
             His absorption was intense and final. In the last years before he died, crippled and aphasic with heart attacks and strokes, he still illuminated the room. But in the early years after the change, he wrote a text in which he suggested that the first chakra was aligned with sexuality. Later, when he was teaching the seven kundalini chakras out of the Arthur Avalon texts, if my memory is accurate, he corrected this on being questioned by a student.
             The visible intensity of his absorption always evoked a sense of finality in me, as if he should know all. But his insistence on deriving English radicals, like Sanskrit, from pure sound values always stood between us. Vedic Sanskrit, being meditated for the purpose, radiates value in the sound, based in the premise of an evaluative correlation between sound and the body. But language is a collective enterprise, the only valid ethnicity; and English presupposes the force of the radical, its purely linguistic history.
             But because of that endless luminosity to my Eye, it took me years to recognize how my teacher and the teachers who visited him were growing and changing, as well as the practical nature of their visits.

             Traditionally, of course, kundalini Tantra argues for seven principle centers, the first and seventh – beginning from the base of the ‘spine’ – below and above the body, respectively. In the traditional imagery or iconography, multiple symbols represent each center. In modern interpretations, correlations with the endocrine system have become commonplace, to which my teacher’s texts undoubtedly add a certain force. But the recognition that the first and seventh ‘stand outside’ the body poses an appropriate dilemma. Esoteric systems of varying historicity add three or even a second set of seven ‘centers’ above. And within the formal Tantric description itself, the ‘downward’ nature of the first chakra is self-evident. It is identified with the Earth as the essentially empirically ‘other’, the earth defining instance.
             The traditional kundalini description as we now have it assimilates the five elements to the first five chakras. And, undoubtedly, the downward nature of the lowest body defining experience suggests that the ‘first’ chakra is ‘earth’. And, if we assume the ambivalence of sexuality – which, of course, we naturally do, both by gender itself and otherwise – then the second chakra would seem to be ‘flux’ or ‘water’. And, again, there is a mirroring aspect to sexuality. But what we are seeing is a derived tradition for the elements. The gradual appearance of an appropriate number of elements – corresponding, during the historic development of Upanishad, with the sequential development of the elements in Greek philosophy – suffices as proof for me. And while the Indian tradition utilizes the description with great versatility and suggestiveness, the base tradition remains the Greek. And, in the Greek tradition, as we have said, the radical separative force is precisely contained within the elements.
             The Greeks undoubtedly never received any equivalent of the Upanishadic tradition, namely, that all the gods are in the body. But there is no question that the Greeks understood the elemental description as comprehensive.
             What is appropriate in the Sanskrit tradition is that the separation itself is defined by a doublet of ‘centers’. The first and fifth element – involving the Earth / Aether separation finally posited by Aristotle – each renders into a doublet: in each case, one ‘within’ the body and the other only ‘within’ insofar as the cogency of the body itself is also the separation.

Here we have the peculiar potency of the separation as the key to the psychological understanding of inference and analysis, and a proper understanding of the dialectical nature which is not only ‘thought’ but also ‘experience’.

first five

2011-07-29T22:54:00Z

(esoteric / exoteric 13)

Cognitively, the first five are cognition itself, the reflective activity of awareness. That is, from the ideational perspective, the first five are the principles of reflective awareness, beginning from sentience itself, and thence: volition, identity, separation and the symbolic potency of value consciousness that allows for the sustaining reflective structure.
But ‘historically’ the first five are the evolutionary functions or reversals now borne out in our body sense, the body being the whole instrumentality for reflection, where the accumulated skin functions and their correlated functionalities as awareness and memory ‘construct’ and sustain the reflective world.

We could say that for these five, sexuality forms the ‘base’. Sexuality, as we have noted, crosses both kingdoms, plant and animal. Thus, while we humans tend to view sexuality as one of the more intense activities, the creatures of the fixed kingdom commonly use it. Using smaller and larger ambulatory or airborne creatures to complete the transaction does not obviate the relatively non-volitional nature of the plant. At the same time, it suggests that sexuality is proto-volitional.

Volition, then, is also a ‘reversal’, since the first emergence of life has always been assumed to begin in the warm gentle flux of shallow seas. As far as we can see, the earliest movements toward life involved self-reproducing molecules, tending toward aggregations and tissue, but without propulsion. If the classical Greek philosophers were concerned with ‘first motion’, here is the issue. But the issue, obviously, is power: consciously directed motion. And here also, our unicellular creature suggests that directed motion begins in the proto-sentient ‘self’ which is the tacit cogency of ‘organism’.

             If we take ‘sexuality’ back to the self-reproducing molecule – since self-replication still involves a tacit otherness – and pick up the hint that volition, at least a protean volition, is inherent in sexuality as such (even if only self-reproduction), then these are more or less indigenous in the most primitive instances of transition between ‘matter’ and ‘life’.
             What changes this is skin itself.
             While we have paleobiologists assessing such hard residues as pollens, presumably the first emergence of skin requires speculative reconstruction. Skin gives us the first sign of the One. In this respect, of course, it is ‘first self’: not simply the abstract formalization of the ‘boundaries’ of the organism, but an expression of the self-nature which is life. Self-reproduction suggests self-preservation; but skin literally embodies self-preservation.
             Moreover, the organic processes begin with skin, the ingestion of ‘food’; the expulsion of ‘waste’; and ‘breath’, the transpiration of oxygen for the processing of the ‘food’: sustaining, reconstructing and reproducing the ‘cell’.
             Here, action as such begins.
             But the ‘self’ also suggests first sentience or seed awareness.

             This initial feeding and breathing, however, only extends as far as protective and sustaining reaction. We can assume an active element, but, apart from reproduction, the action is not necessarily the formal expression of the whole organism, as much as it is necessary for its survival. Rather, it is as if volition emerges from these conditions, as well as the protective reactions by which skin responds to the environment.
             What changes all this is the evolutionary development of the sensitivities of skin.
             We have pointed to the emergence of hearing and sight as primary reversals in terms of skin sensitivities. Within the frame of reflection, of course, all of the senses have their reversal aspect. We could say that the skin fact of volition is the first evolutionary reversal of skin sensitivity, a reversal indigenous in both perception and action.
             But consciousness of reversal necessarily begins in the reversal of specific sensory modes or sensitivities. And only hearing and sight supply these total reversals in terms of the potencies of awareness.
             Sound takes precedence, since the isolation of the vibration which is sound allows for the first volitionally directed protective responses. Sound at the outset is more easily differentiated. Light, at first, is only registered by its conversion to warmth.
             Perhaps oddly enough, the marker for this reversal is speech, since the development of speech is apparently subsequent to the paradigmatic nature of sight as the presentation of consciousness. But, then, the functional view of self-awareness cannot be sustained until a sufficiency of the field is defined by symbol or language. While all cultural products carry the force of sign, only the spoken and heard language constructs the full framework.
             Obviously, the conversion of hearing to speech and heard speech requires at least two basic reversals: first of all abstracting sound as value; and then assigning sound signs as values within the solipsistic frame of self-aware consciousness, thus identifying the framework as both body and world.

But if sound thus becomes the apparent mirror sameness or identity between ‘self’ and ‘world’, light is the prior context as well as the subsequent differentiating premise. The Eye finally ties all bodily senses together to ‘reconstruct’ the world within the frame of self-awareness. An object becomes an object because the Eye can take a value point, a spontaneous focal mark in the sensory ‘environment’, and bring body as skin to the identity / memory which is the first form of the ‘sign’ or ‘image’, the essential body ‘placement’ in which the sound sign now also simultaneously ‘resides’.

five cause

2011-07-29T22:46:29Z

(esoteric / exoteric 12)

             We could say that the error of western philosophy begins in the presumption that cause is One, the formal integer as it expresses itself, backhandedly, in the tacit cogency of non-contradiction. If we begin from the integer, as we necessarily do, since we cannot analyze number until we are more or less fully lodged in the reflexive world – the world of abstraction, from the primitive tangibility of the object and first self-sense on up – then we begin from the first integer as no more than the residual cogency of the body, the abstract inertial premise. But this premise cannot arise from itself.
             As we saw, historically, the analytical integer begins from the unbounded, the wholeness we have been trying to grasp throughout history, from the Milesian ens to the unified field theory. But the whole is the first other as against any premise at all. Therefore integer is not enough. What we are trying to define by assimilation is the first other which produced the One, and this desire for assimilation is both the impulse for and the necessary consequence of the separation. The closed integer cannot stand for it. What the developmental process of Greek philosophy shows, by fact as well as allegory, is that the separation can only appear as a consequence of the sequence of numbers. Abstraction is the act of self-awareness. Substanceless self-witness is impossible. But, as Renaissance philosophy records, a single substance denies cause. How many substances are therefore necessary before the radical separation arises which allows for cause, and therefore for legitimate analysis?
             We can take the Aristotelian ‘discovery’ of the fifth element, with its radically distinctive substance, as simply a quirk of history. But history is also allegory. While we now ‘know’ that the circular motion of the heavens is in fact the empirical consequence of the rotation of the earth, and therefore ‘the heavens’ or aether does not in fact constitute a radically alternative mode of substance to the sublunar world, in which motion persists in a straight line.
             But, historically, this is the first inertial moment, the first definition of inertia. In other words, the allegory becomes the defining condition for substance as we now understand it.

             Let us revert therefore to the conditioning question of solipsism. Does inertia subsist in the world? Or does it subsist in consciousness?
             We have the ‘tangibility’ of the object. But without the reflexive definitions of time and space, the apperceptive response to an ‘external value point’ is only immediate. It does not involve an ‘abstractable’ inertia. The abstraction of inertia is a function of reflective awareness that we reapply to ‘the object’, the value point reflexively redefined as an intellectual as well as ‘tangible’ cogency. Cogency itself only emerges formally, whether perceptually or intellectually, through the reflex.
             Substance as we experience it is a reflexively produced abstraction, an abstraction necessarily incorporating the subtending elements of the sensuous brought into cogency by the Eye. But the fact of substance itself is essentially abstract.

What the five elements bring to this instance of inertia are the five ‘causes’ necessary for this instance of inertial cogency.

The One itself as Five is this ‘substance’ mirror, the only formal or substantive nature of the reflective mirror itself.

skin / Eye

2011-07-29T22:39:44Z

(esoteric / exoteric 11)

             If what we have said thus far is correct, the skin based ‘reaction’ of our exemplary unicellular creature in fact involves the potency of the whole of the subsequent sensory (and volitional) evolution. In other words, that skin is an Eye. It of course lacks any aspect of the reflexive (apart from the ‘reaction’ itself), and therefore fails of our ultimate definition of the Eye, in which at least a primitive ‘extraneous’ sense of the witness is present. But in the wholeness of its ‘reactive’ response – in the very simultaneity of ‘act’ and ‘perception’, it expresses the ultimate Eye potency: how the image making reversal of sight becomes the paradigm for awareness, both as the separable witness and as the value following focus which, when we turn back to investigate it, proves to be the ‘body of the Eye’.
             Which is to say that the separation inherent in the reflex, which we have thus far dealt with more or less objectively or in the abstract, is not only thoroughly intimate in the instance of awareness as the pure act of immediacy, it has an inertial ‘tail’ that directs the Eye as focus, and this inertial tail not only validates the ‘something’ ‘outside’ immediacy that leads immediacy to value, it is the body of consciousness itself.
             Now this body of consciousness itself bears some sameness with our ‘perceived’ body, if we largely exclude any ‘image’ we have of the body as seen in the mirror. That is, the body of the Eye is the inwardly experienced body.
             At moments, we automatically see the body as ‘other’; and, at other moments, we automatically experience the body as ‘self’, a moment when the body virtually ‘disappears’ into the Eye or witnessing sense.
             In other words, the Eye as pure witness and the Eye as the ‘tail’ or body sense are both intimate and the radical expression of the separation at the root of our present reflexive mode of experience.

In the intellectual world, the tail disappears when the Eye is fully intimate with its object. In other words, the focus of the Eye as ‘pure witness’ can nevertheless bring the body into identity within the given range of awareness. This, of course, is simply a fancy way of defining focus itself, since awareness is necessarily identity – solipsism requires it; and therefore that the volitional nature, as a consequence of the sequence of reversals which constitute human evolution, is both the standing identity of the given visual world and the moving and concentrating identity of the focus that moves within the frame of that given visual world.
But, of course, it is not simply in the intellectual world that the Eye can disappear into the tail. We can identify with the world in its immediacy, moments in which the driven nature of focus disappears into the whole, and separateness ceases, that emotional sense of the other which also disappears when the intellectual finds intimacy.

             Here then, we have a basic definition of the two selves in terms of the ‘organic’ structure of consciousness. But, of course, we have three principles. For, while the Eye is the pure witness, it is also not only the ‘tail’ of ‘focus’, it is also the ‘tail’ of the body as the world, the solipsistic correlation or identity of awareness and world through the generic instrumentality of the body.
             Evolution is the test of this sameness in terms of ‘substance’. But the ongoing test of this sameness is experience itself, with its ‘extraneous’ and undeniable experience of closure or validity.
             The problem for ‘science’ at this point, of course, is that such experience necessarily involves and cannot be divested from the uniqueness of ‘self’. The given fact that awakens this intimate understanding can generally be rendered into a common or shared knowledge, but by the very act becomes abstract principle, thus losing the intimate character of its first appearance, the moment when it awakened an individual to the workings of the ‘self’.

But what concerns us here is the ‘tail’, since this is both the ‘instrument’ of focus, apart from the shared paradigm wholeness of the ‘empty’ Eye of the ‘pure’ witness and the embracing field of experience in which Eye, body and world are merged.
Traditionally, esoterically, this tail has been identified with the spine, since the spine, not only in an abstract neural way, but as the core feeling of the body, concenters the record of the various evolutionary shifts or reversals which it in fact ‘records’ in the feelings as well as in corresponding physiological structures.

reversals 2: skin body reversals

2011-07-21T19:49:13Z

(esoteric / exoteric 10)

             At the outset of this discussion of ‘reversals’ I point to sexuality, first of all, because nothing in ‘inert’ matter points to the necessity of ‘the other’. An environment of ‘inert matter’ would only have ‘otherness’ in terms of the discrete differentiation of ‘inert’ particles. And while chemistry or molecular science still clings to the particle as the basic analytical function, physics has witnessed the ‘ultimate’ particles dissolving into ambiguity. ‘Particle’ is something of a discretionary imposition based on our own sense of cogency. Why does ‘nature’ resolve into ‘opposing’ bodily forms which require each other, and thus require mutual attraction, in order to reproduce the organism? As a poet, of course, I look at the symbiosis in the plant kingdom in which great ranges of the phyla have adopted mobile organisms as ‘pollinators’; and wonder at the fact, as if nature had transformed attraction itself into creatures, many of them, of themselves, of extraordinary strangeness and beauty.
             Also as a poet, of course, I witness the peculiar fact that what appears as beauty or attraction to an insect commonly also appears as beauty and an epitome of beauty to the human eye.
             As much as the Darwinian may dismiss this as frivolous, the nature of the reversal requires something more than an analytical reductionism that ignores the basic fact of reversal itself. Undoubtedly, we can subdivide any process of change to the point at which the change itself ceases to be visible, but this does not obviate the change. It only certifies the observer’s unwillingness to observe it.

             As long as we can treat the five senses as a parity, we can treat them as discrete but not radical. They are the equally differentiated functions of the body in terms of perception. But when we look at them in terms of their evolutionary origin, we must recognize that all begin in the embracing responsiveness of skin, the act / react sameness of skin sensitivity and the wholeness defining nature of skin, the original self-sense and precursor of consciousness. What links the senses together and allows them to produce perception is this original sameness, a sameness distinct, from the first, from their functional differentiation in terms of ‘sensation’ per se, their specific neural differentiation, finally. And, obviously, this neural differentiation does not obviate their original intimacy and cogency in the ‘wholeness’ of skin.
             At the same time, image, for example, is not necessarily implicit in the light sensitivity of skin, its responsiveness, first of all, to the warmth of light. Like sexuality, if we step back from analytical reductionism, we must ask how this ‘reversal’ takes place. How does the skin function of the eye produce image? I have no doubt that the evolutionary scientist can trace the sequence of incremental changes. But it’s not a question of responses to the external. It is, in fact, a question of the end result. Does matter ‘know’ that visual image is possible? The question is ostensibly absurd, since we have to use the allegorical ‘knowing’. But then, how is human knowing possible?
             I have said that the Darwinian pseudo-scientists and pseudo-philosophers sometimes deny consciousness in order to further their polemic. And this is perhaps the most specific case in point. Any intelligent child can see that Darwinian incrementalism of ‘inert’ matter cannot summate into knowing. But rather than acknowledge this peculiarly self-evident fact of experience or empiricism (the putative basis of science), the Darwinian scientist turns into a fountain of incrementalist ‘facts’ in order to deny that knowing is what it is. But, above all, this is where the Darwinian proponent reverts to the Humean argument that all ‘fact’ is only sensory. We cannot allow inference in science. Which, of course, is why we still assert the Ptolemaic rather than the Copernican system, since the Ptolemaic is empirical by this definition – an exact description of what we see – while the Copernican is inferential.

Allowing, then, for the moment, the inferential possibility that consciousness and knowing have their radical basis in experience, as much as they may be inferential in their own right, we can see that knowing and awareness are not simply tangential results. While reversals such as sexuality and the image forming function of sight emerge incrementally – since such is the inherent nature of evolution – they cannot be posited as the consequences of inert matter operating in an environment of inert matter. Their radical nature and the fact of reversal deny it.

reversals 1: evolutionary reversals

2011-07-21T19:41:21Z

(esoteric / exoteric 9)

             Our concern with skin, however, does not resolve into the five senses alone, much less into the five senses as commonly presented as a parity.
             I often wonder why we speak of five senses. Sight and hearing resolve into more or less discrete phenomena, as complex as they are anatomically and as physiological processes. But ‘touch’ is a known congeries of sensory functions. Even using our fingertips to define an object involves radically distinct responses. But not only have the other ‘four’ senses ‘emerged’ from touch, a sense of touch stands at the base of our purely subjective or ‘internal’ experience of ‘the body’. Touch involves the whole skin history of evolution, since the involution of the blastula makes the first skin not only the basis of ‘inner’ as well as ‘outer’ sensitivity, but also establishes the substantive basis for all tissue.
             From an evolutionary standpoint, we could perhaps consider this involution or ‘evagination’ of the blastula as a first reversal in the evolutionary process, if we do not consider the transition from self-reproducing molecules to living tissue to be a reversal. Nor does it elicit the peculiar force of some later reversals, although it appears to be the requisite change between a ‘community’ of cells and a ‘body’ proper. But evolution seems to be fraught with reversals which appear to have no purpose apart from what follows. Sexuality, of course, is the supreme early example.

             Why does evolutionary differentiation produce gender? The net force would appear to be in the result rather than the prior cause. That is, gender itself allows for greater differentiation, as if the basic evolutionary stimulus, differentiation itself, were pro- rather than re- active. Does ‘matter’ desire differentiation?
             But, of course, Darwinian incrementalism does not allow us to ask such questions. Or, rather, the Darwinian prepossessions which dominate incrementalism do not allow us to ask such questions. Incrementalism itself, in its basic form, is simply analytical reductionism, and as such does not necessarily include such prepossessions. But, presumably, even here we can reduce the evolutionary process to such tiny increments that we can deflect – that is to say, turn our backs toward – the larger question. Perhaps science is no longer about asking the larger questions.
             But the evolution of gender presupposes a potency ‘in nature’ for ‘the other’. The reversals throughout the evolution toward consciousness – the separation and evolution of both the sensory and the volitional, as well as the evolution of consciousness itself – point precisely toward an emergent function from ‘within’ matter, rather than toward the ‘manipulation’ of a matter – internally essentially monolithic and inert – by ‘accidental’ external events.
             The epitome of this potency for the other, of course, is self-awareness. While self-awareness is socialized, and while we see the development of incipient self-referencing functions of awareness throughout the animal kingdom and particularly in the primates, self-awareness nevertheless represents a pure and, at its inception, a spontaneous human act.
             That is, ostensibly, self-awareness stands outside the evolutionary purview. But the whole of evolutionary awareness points toward this reversal.

But gender crosses both plant and animal kingdoms. That the evolution of stationary organisms retains and develops in terms of gender separation – although some plants persist in pre-sexual generation – suggests the inherent potency of gender, quite apart from any Darwinian accounting

cogency as skin

2011-07-21T19:33:09Z

(esoteric / exoteric 8)

But if we have here denied that cogency is the sensory, what we have denied is that cogency is sensation per se, the atomizing function of the particularity of the nerves, in which every atomic instance of sensation is a function of the yes / no impulse of a single nerve cell; something which of itself cannot possibly imply coherence with any other neural report, whether by association or any other means. Something other than sensation itself, as thus defined, is necessary for ‘perception’. And yet, at the same time, the sensory is the basis of cogency if, by ‘sensory’, we mean that holistic act of ‘self’ we see in the ‘skin’ of the unicellular creature. In this, our language defies us, since we tend to speak of the ‘reactive’ nature of such a creature, tacitly denying it volition, since, of course, it cannot possibly be ‘conscious’. But then we apply the same linguistic predisposition to all ‘sensation’, assuming its essentially passive or reactive essence, a mere electro-chemical response transmitted by reactive sequences. But our example of the unicellular creature shows us that act and react are the same at the first ‘skin’, that sensation and action were originally inseparable.
It is time to assimilate the Kantian Copernican revolution with the fact of evolution. If ‘logic’ and ‘experience’ share the same origin, it is in the origin of sensation from this primeval ‘skin’ in which action and ‘reaction’, volition and ‘sensation’ are simultaneous and synonymous.

             The unicellular creature tells us that all modes of sensation originate from skin, that skin is the evolutionary basis: the varying sensitivities inherent in skin, its responsiveness to warmth or vibration, for example, evolving into sight and hearing. But the evolutionary differentiation not only does not radically separate the sensory except in terms of the differing sensory ‘objects’: the seen, the heard and so forth; it does not finally separate ‘sensation’ and ‘action’, except in terms of the apparent ‘bridge’, which we ultimately know as consciousness or the witness. While this apparently represents something ‘retained’ at ‘the center’, when viewed from the ‘perspective’ of awareness or witness, i.e., reflexively, it necessarily still ‘contains’ both the sensory and the volitional.
             However, the ‘separation’ between these ‘two sides’ is now apparently ‘real’. And the fact of self-witness is not only apparently this ‘reality’, the real itself now certifies the separation, not necessarily between perception and volition, but in terms of the witness itself.
             While consciousness apparently ‘emerges’ from this context and is somehow still entirely immersed in it, it is also now radically distinct.

Given the wall of opposing presumption in present intellectual culture, one hesitates to assert that awareness or the ultimate separability of awareness was an original predisposition or potency within ‘matter’, much less a ‘purpose’. Clearly, evolution itself shows that this ‘predisposition’ precludes anything except a probabilistic process of emergence; and therefore no ‘purpose’ in our common sense. And since consciousness, with all its foibles, is the apparent ‘object’ of this process in any case, one necessarily distances one’s self from all the apriori language of ‘believers’.
But the separability of awareness, not only tacit but radically necessary in the fact of reflective awareness, brings us forcibly back to the categorical subjectivity or solipsism addressed by Kant. But now the dialectic recedes from the shores of logic versus experience and immerses us in the new tidal surge between skin and awareness.

incrementalism

2011-07-19T21:25:13Z

(esoteric / exoteric 7)

Darwinian incrementalism has become the new mode of analysis. Within fifty years of the general accreditation of his evolutionary theory, this new mode of analysis became, historically, the genetic basis for analytical philosophy. The analytical philosophers claim their lineage from Kantian critical philosophy, but the critical philosophy is necessarily based in the absoluteness of subjectivity in the order of experience, a subjectivity in which, precisely, the thing-in-itself, as a philosophical premise, can have no necessarily independent subsistence. If we engage in any attempt to deflect or obviate this essential subjectivity, we have not only violated the critical philosophy, we are involved in a covert denial of solipsism, the only true sacrilege in philosophy after Berkeley. Kant’s validation of analysis itself depends on the whole of the transcendental dialectic. Remove any piece, and the structure falls; as the analytical philosophers themselves discovered when they tried to validate enquiry from the basis of ‘pure’ logic. Any but an analytical philosopher would have seen that this is a bootstrap or tautological operation from the outset.
The only real validation, finally, of analytical philosophy is the residual historical force of the incrementalist analysis first made popular by Darwin’s metaphysical methodology. Therefore, we must see analytical philosophy as the derivative and not the primary stream in the historical efflorescence of this analytical method. And the proof of this assertion lies in the fact that incrementalist analysis has now become both the metaphysical and linguistic touchstone for all academic discourse. For example, while there is a spreading Idealist resurgence in academe, it is hampered by the requirement that any research still express itself in incrementalist dialectic. Nowhere can it directly revert to the holistic premises which are the very basis of Idealism, both historically and metaphysically.

The problem, of course, is that when the pretense of a basis in the critical philosophy falls away, we are only left with logic as defined analytically, the last bastion of which is a premise of cogency, a tacit or overt reference to the principle of non-contradiction: the assumption that we are dealing with a self-consistent and therefore closed system. But, of course, the analytical philosopher cannot acknowledge this ground, since even his own ‘logical’ researches have shown, at this point, that cogency is essentially ‘empirical’ or experiential and not a priori or self-validating. At its height in the middle of the last century, analytical philosophy therefore found itself in a profound state of denial, simultaneously asserting and denying its own grounding in this ‘pure’ cogency; insisting on the self-validating primacy of logical enquiry while simultaneously asserting that all other approaches are ‘monistic’ and hence anathema. Only the residual historical force of the incrementalist approach sustains the apparent validity of this method of enquiry, but its hollowness is everywhere evident. The moral consequences of this paradoxical anti-foundationalism are now self-evident in a predatory greed at the top and the all-pervasive lawlessness on the streets.

value as feeling

2011-07-19T21:20:50Z

(esoteric / exoteric 6)

             My first impulse against academic philosophy began with my first and only philosophy course: ‘modern philosophy’ as taught by an epitome analytical philosopher and Humean scholar. I have not only detested Hume ever since, I have always assumed his ‘philosophy’ was erroneous. While solipsism requires that all experience is necessarily a ‘representation’ in consciousness, Hume’s definition of experience negates experience, since nothing whatsoever can be experienced from sensation as he defines it. That is, if his imputation of validity to ‘the sensory’ alone is correct, representation itself cannot appear in consciousness. He denies any validity to abstraction – that is, to ‘inference’ – which, being the necessary condition not only for analysis, but for ‘representation’ itself, his skepticism not only negates ‘matter’ and ‘mind’, it denies awareness and experience as well. ‘Representation’ requires that perceived objects be assembled from the sensory; and nothing in sensation itself, which is totally atomizing, could thus produce perception. Inference itself is the necessary condition for perception.
             What Hume does allow, however, is feeling. And he asserts that we can construct a valid moral framework on the basis of feeling or emotion alone, as the grounding orientation for social transaction. This, of course, is the historical condition for the evolution of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ within his framework for ‘practical judgment’. But neither Kant nor Hume takes this question back to its radical conundrum. Both speak of ‘feeling’ primarily as ‘emotion’, which, while not altogether a reflexive category, is necessarily a reflexively defined, more or less whole body response.
             Thus far, we have distinguished between the immediacy of value response and the primitive moment of reflection in which the spontaneous value response begins to appear as a cogent perception as against the inherent cogency of the witness, the most primitive instance of the reflex, prior to the formalization of ‘object’ and ‘self’. In this instance, ‘value’ itself begins to emerge as a potential experience, but obviously has no discreteness in its own nature. And it is only when ‘value’ has emerged as a ‘fact’ which is ‘simultaneous’ with ‘object’ and ‘self’ that we can assess it in terms of cogency, the discrete nature of the value.
             Prior to that point, the value itself can only have been, or be defined as, a feeling.

It is this function of immediate value response as a feeling that stands at the base of Hume’s assignment of value to ‘the sensory’. But, obviously, his assignment is erroneous. The value feeling appertains to the representation precisely in terms of the value response which is the representation, quite apart from its specific ‘sensory’ content. The value response is not only the validity, it is the representational act that ‘assembles’ the perception in its most primitive form; and it is the simultaneity of feeling and act; and hence the simultaneity is precisely the sense of validity which ‘attends’ the act.
Therefore, the validity itself, in its most ‘primitive’ form, is already an ‘inference’ or inferential basis, a ‘reference’ to the instrumentality of the body as the ‘instrument’ of sensation, since ‘sensation’ as such is essentially a whole body response, the basis of the act of consciousness. And while, clearly, the context for this response is the ‘field’ of sensation, the field of sensation is first of all defined by the instrumentality of the body. Sensation is of the body, and not first of all of the world. That is, touch, sight and so forth are first of all functions of the body. If we have cited the cogency of response in the unicellular creature prior to the development of the nervous system, we could say that we are first of all pointing to ‘skin’, since, from an evolutionary standpoint, all of the senses originate from this ‘skin’, not only as the defining condition for ‘cell’, but also, at that evolutionary point, as the basis of ‘act’ or ‘response’. Skin is not only first cogency, it is also the premising instrument for both volition and perception, and ultimately for consciousness itself.