Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 21

Cause and Effect

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The effect cannot be the cause of its cause (Kant) – but the result can be an inspiration for beginning the process of its own creation. This causal nexus is true of anything that is created from an idea, or all things which are the products of visionaries. The cause of the thing comes from the fact that it has been imagined (nexus of ideal causes). In many cases, if there had not been an imagining of the result the initiative to create it would never have taken place. And so, in our technological reality, cause and result are closely intertwined, because most inventions are imagined and made to satisfy a perceived need: forks came about from an idea of the need to save our fingers from getting sticky when we ate.

But how does this help any metaphysical understanding? Can we apply this idea to the question of the first cause? Can intuition be enough to create something out of nothing? How can this relationship exist without a mind to start the creative process? For it to be possible the nothing has to be capable of intuiting something, which would imply that the nothing would possess awareness; and this suggests that the nothing is not nothing at all but awareness, which is something; even though, in the beginning it would be an awareness of nothing, which is a very poor form of consciousness indeed. Of course, next to nothing, any something is everything, so in the long run this intuition of something has limitless scope.

The dilemma might point us in the direction of the idea of God (before anything there was an eternal thingy that made everything out of itself); or perhaps we could assert that the primordial God is awareness (omnipresent in everything that is aware). Likewise, it brings up the concept of determinism (Awareness blending into purposeful Will), and also suggests a way of envisaging a purposeful universe without the necessity for God (unless a religion can be made in which God actually does become Awareness). Through intuition of a nexus finalis, in which entities-with-awareness (sapiens life-forms) are able to fully know the Universe in one great act of love (Being through knowing and being known, as well as appreciating and preserving what is known), a determined future opens up for us. An idea which can have enormous practical benefits for humanity, because it positions us in a purposeful place within the evolution of everything (the Universe).

But perhaps you think this is a pointless argument: that we are trying to prove the unproveable. In fact, we are not trying to “prove” anything: what we are aiming at is a pragmatical solution to the insalubrious effects of nihilisms; to wrestle with the ingrained pessimism that is debilitating humanity. Why do people prefer the non-purposeful over the purposeful?

Part of the blame for this must be heaped on the religions, for they dogmatise the purposeful universe and distort it in order to drive purpose in the direction of the interests of power. If purpose is a tool for power, then many will reject it. The irony of this is that even the resultant nihilism has itself become a tool for that power, especially now that power nurtures itself via an economic system of anarchic capitalism. For this system, purpose is too directional itself and offers too much clarity for the system which requires relativity in order to mask its real purposes. Purpose is therefore a threat to the system that can only be tolerated by allowing it to be projected through the distorting glass of religion.

In this way, we can see that there is nothing more radical in this world than real purposiveness; by which we mean the examination of a non-theological, cosmological, nexus finalis direction to the Universe.

Progress does not come about through cause and effect alone, but only through effect-driven causes inspired by purposive ideas. The Universe is the effect-driven result of the condition of nothing that allows for the possibility of everything. But our Universe is also a refined everything, stabilised through the filter of intuitive purposiveness. A purposiveness which is denied by the global money-driven civilisation we have now created, propelling us into a chaos of pessimisms and cynicisms regarding our own humanity. To find harmony in our lives, we need to harmonise our way of living with the same intuitive purposiveness possessed by the universe; we need to open our eyes and see where we are all going; where our ancestors will be at the end of time; and imagine what they will emerge as when the final evolution eventually takes place.

The Depth of Determinism

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If we accept the deterministic conclusion implied by Cosmological Fine Tuningthat our physical universe is geared towards the creation of life and that this creation of life is the purposive aim of a purposive Universe, then the next question to be asked is – Why is this so?

The Idealist reasoning of existence, that the subject only exists when there is an object to perceive it, suggests that existence itself is the aim of this cosmological plan.

If the Universe is purposive, then there is a reason behind evolution. A deterministic development of the Universe, driven to develop sapiens life forms, would indicate that the cosmos desires more than mere existence itself, it needs to be perceived and known in a state that we call Authentic Being.

What is the purpose of being known? How could knowledge, via these sapiens entities, be a necessary element in the cosmos?

Perhaps these particular questions are irrelevant within the cosmological plan, nevertheless, they are essential for any desire to establish deep human purposiveness and combat nihilism. A school of study and debate on these questions and the purposiveness enshrouded in Authentic Being could create more human progress in ten years than capitalist ideology has managed in five hundred years.

Human purposiveness can only truly be appreciated once we examine the role of life in the Universe. Why is the Universe here? Why are we here? Once we have accepted these queries as valid concerns for all of humanity, we will start to see the authentic purposiveness in our art and technology, and the retarding effects of our economy.

An explanation of the basic principles of Cosmological Fine Tuning can be found on our entry The Importance of Metaphysics @ https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/the-importance-of-metaphysics/

On Taste

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In logic, antinomy is the term used to describe a “real or mutual incompatibility of two terms”. It could be regarded as a synonym of paradox. The statement “there is no absolute truth,” is antinomic because the statement declares a truth that it also claims to be impossible. Likewise, the concept of Fake news is an antinomic entity, if we consider news to be reports of what has actually happened, and, therefore, inherently true.

Antinomy is not only resolved when its conflicting propositions are found to be not in in fact contradictory, it is also seen to be one of the more profound insights into the apparently contradictory structures of truth. These conflicting propositions are capable of existing together, although in a way that, as Kant says: “transcends our faculties of cognition”. Likewise, we have discovered how often conflict can be resolved by finding the middle way between them, and this middle way also possesses a certain transcendental quality that, when applied to the conflict, can take hold of these two antagonistic forces and, through its own possession of qualities in both of them, resolve their otherwise internecine obliteration of each other.

Between the objective opinion and the objective judgement comes cultural taste, which is an opinion formed from a combination of objective study and personal feelings towards things. As such, we have taste standing between opinion and judgement, transcending the negative qualities of both.

For Kant, the judgement of taste has its determining ground: “in the concept of what may be regarded as the supersensible substance of humanity.” In Jungian terms, we could say that taste is powered by archetypes which, if they are nurtured, will pull the subjective into the realm of the human, allowing for humane judgements that equally transcend the cold calculations of purely objective meaning.

As Kant said: “it is the supersensible, through taste, that brings reason into harmony with itself.”

And yet, in terms of the human and universal, there is hardly anything more untrustworthy than taste. But: how can a thing that is so untrustworthy be the harmonising agent of reason? And, what are the consequences of this untrustworthiness of taste?

TASTE AND IDEOLOGY

To answer these questions, we need to examine how ideology uses taste to perpetuate itself. Here, perhaps, a viral analogy can be used: The viruses of ideologies insert themselves into the cells of taste in order to propagate themselves throughout the System. And as ideology is a divisor and anti-human force, the harmonising and humanising potential of taste is constantly mitigated.

Yet, it remains our only hope – and for this reason taste must be cared for and cultured towards the human, away from the ideological. It is ideological taste which perpetuates the social and environmental antagonisms we are faced with today. Refinement of tastes is, therefore, a humanising process concerned with universals and archetypes; with what connects us to each other and to the world, rather than what separates us.

TASTE

Taste is a mixture of both the aesthetic and the rational. The aesthetic is intuitive by nature, the rational is analytic, and taste is intuitive and analytic at the same time. It is in this combination of intuition and analysis that makes taste so important. But in order to be effective as humanising agent, it needs to be carefully refined. Perhaps there can be no more important labour for humanity than this refinement of our personal tastes.

REFINED (UNIVERSAL) TASTE

A universal taste, for example, is one that still believes in good and beauty, but good and beauty themselves are universal and ideal concepts. For this reason, and in order to anchor the ideal in a coherent world-view, it is necessary to see the Universe as a purposive thing. It is only through this anti-nihilistic world-view that human progress is possible. Within our economy-obsessed System, progress is taken away from the domain of the human and invested completely in the realm of the economy under the guise of growth. But growth is not progress, because growth in the economy is always quantitative and never qualitative, whilst human progress must always be seen as an improvement in the quality of life for all human beings.

Aesthetic and moral concepts are purposive things. Things we are striving to make; discover; be: and all of them carry a sense of improvement in them.

The purposiveness of taste is both realist and idealist: the real is a process we are necessarily moving through before the ideal can ever be realised or attained, or, perhaps, even discovered. Accident is part of the real, but it is the real that makes the accidental possible.

In order for taste to become something of worth again, we need to anchor it to the ideals of universal purposiveness in order for real to move at last in a purposeful direction.

Antinomy, Encyclopædia Britannica Online

Immanuel Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT, p. 168

See https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/the-middle-way/

Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT, p. 168

Ibid. p. 169

We are not advocating snobbism here, but a humanising process. Snobberies divide and are anti-human because of that. Refining our tastes towards appreciating what we all have is common and the archetypal forces that direct our collective subconscious has nothing to do with snobbery at all. What we are talking about lies closer to religion, but religion without ideology – and religion is now infested with ideology.

On Broadening our Minds & Morality

 

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The basic principles of education must be entrenched in some idea related to the broadening of the students’ minds. If we see education as a way of pulling society away from ignorance and we consider it to be a fundamental ingredient in what it is that makes us human, then the broadening of the mind is also a vital part of what it is to be human.

Likewise, this broadening of minds can also be seen as good for human societies and important, and therefore desirable and moral.

A narrowing of minds is therefore bad. When we see the media (mainstream and social) expressing an obsession for local scandals, or we see schools and universities concentrating in specialised areas of learning that often breed patriotic points of view at the expense of the universal, these practices are mind-narrowing and, as such, bad.

Broadening is an opening up and forward-directional process for humanity. It has a teleological reading in the idea of Becoming and, even though this ideal end-cause will never be achieved, it is, in the sense of being teleological, anti-nihilistic.

That which is concerned with its opposite, the narrowing of minds and the localisation of experiences as well as the obsession with the dictates of personal taste in opposition to universal laws, is nihilistic, anti-human, and dangerous.

On Good as Necessity via the example of a good meal

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All good, and therefore all true morality is inextricably linked with necessity. The more necessary something is the better it is. A good meal, for example, is good because (A) it serves its basic purpose (the eradication of a feeling of hunger); (B) it provides us with the vitamins and minerals our body needs to function, and (C) it brings us pleasure, and pleasure inspires us to keep living and to keep exploring life. Health requires balance and the art of gastronomy is also geared toward creating harmony. All necessity is related to life and all good is related to the harmony needed in order to preserve life and the inspire the purposiveness of life.  

Purposiveness and Beauty

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We all have our reasons for doing things, but what is our purpose? What is the purpose of anything? What is the purpose of the whole?

If we analyse purpose, we can discover the beauty of the thing. The beautiful is inspirational: it inspires purposeful activity – searching, discovery, creation and imitation of that which is purposeful and beautiful.

It is through beauty that we find the purposiveness of pleasures. All art is a searching for and a working within the purposes of pleasures.

 

Growth, Necessity and Judgement

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The capitalist system needs an accelerated rhythm of growth to function, but that pace is unsustainable for a healthy planet. Fully aware of this dichotomy, the same system creates the terms: sustainable growth and ecological sustainability. The basic idea contained in both concepts is that capitalism’s requirement for infinite growth can be achieved through the concept of sustainability, i.e., the exploitation still goes on, but in a way that doesn’t completely exhaust the resources without first allowing nature to replenish those reserves.

Herman E. Daly, when he was Senior Economist of the Environment at the World Bank, spelled this out quite clearly: “sustainable growth is impossible,” he asserted. But to palliate the effects of this anti-capitalist statement, the senior ecological economist of the system offered a semantical alternative that differentiated between the concepts of growth and development: “when something grows it gets bigger. When something develops it gets different.” The ecosystem develops rather than grows. Daly therefore coined the term sustainable development as an alternative to sustainable growth, insisting at the same time that it must be understood as “development without growth.”

Daly’s idea was presented in 1993 and it caught on: or at least his terms captured the imaginations of the politicians who love to be given new altruistic terms to bandy about, but they have taken little no interest in what Daly meant by that change in terms. Now sustainable development is used as a synonym of sustainable growth rather than an alternative to it, as no one at administration levels in the developed world seem to be challenging the virtues of growth itself. It is impossible for capitalism to relinquish the idea of growth, for that would mean betraying the fundamentals of its own ideology, but calling it development doesn’t make the problems of growth go away.

However, what is clear when we contemplate Daly’s paper, more than 25 years after he submitted it, is that capitalism has had a profound need for legitimising growth, and it has been absolutely aware of the inherent absurdity buried within its own ideology for decades.

Growth is impossible and absurd, and that means capitalism is impossible and absurd. Growth is profoundly dangerous, and that means that capitalism is profoundly dangerous.

The capitalist argument pitches nature as an enemy of freedom, and this is obviously another false premise of its ideology. Freedom for the capitalist of course, means freedom to accumulate wealth. For the poverty-stricken, working but anti-socialist classes who support the freedom ideal of capitalism, the growth-freedom idea offers them the illusion of being able to get to the top of the pile themselves. In fact, an economics of un-growth has far more chance of closing the vast gap between rich and poor and hence create a feeling of empowering the poorer classes. An empowering that would itself engender a greater sensation of freedom.

The principle of the goodness and necessity of economic growth is not a valid one. All necessity rests on the eradication of all ideologies of growth. We cannot afford to keep toying with the capricious whims of those who have engendered and who perpetuate the capitalist lie. It must be judged in a fair trial, and a verdict must be reached.

Of course, the case is so strong against the unsustainability of growth that its advocates will feel that a fair trial is impossible, but that is no reason not to pounce on the assassin who is holding the smoking gun. Did I say pounce on them? Well, in this case the murderer owns the police force and the press, so: who will make the arrest? That is our real dilemma.

See the article SUSTAINABLE GROWTH: AN IMPOSSIBLITY THEORUM by Herman E. Daley http://dieoff.org/page37.htm

Ibid

Ibid

PEACE AS A SUBLIME STATE

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Philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have often extolled the virtues of the spirit of war against the weak and cowardly condition fostered by perpetual peace. Kant went so far as to call war ‘sublime’, and one of the most sublime eulogies of the warlike spirit was uttered by Orson Welles in the famous cuckoo-clock speech in The Third Man. In that film, Welles wrote his character’s own monologue in which he compares the cultural achievements of the war-torn and strife-riddled Renaissance in Italy with the lack of accomplishments born from two centuries of peace in Switzerland. Welles’ argument is that war created Botticelli, Da Vinci and Michelangelo while the best thing that peace has come up with is the cuckoo-clock.

Nevertheless, the comparison is a false one: it is not ’peace’ but the mediocrity created by an emphasis on conservative values and the commercial spirit that makes Switzerland culturally insipid. Switzerland is an economy of clocks, but also of banks. And banks that have made themselves very rich through the wars in other countries.

Yes, the vulgarity of our economic lives in peace could be seen as a spiritual travesty, but that is not the fault of peace. It is consumerism, not peace, that deadens our own spirit with its vulgar want-more will. What is bad in our societies is the lust we have for acquisitions, not our endeavours to live in harmony together. Capitalist harmony is always based on competition which is a war in itself. A nihilistic competitiveness that has made us spiritually and creatively numb, and breeds more depression than exultation. Money inhibits creativity and ends up suffocating it. What we have to learn is how to see the great sublimity in our own human creations. Our power to create must always be more sublime than our will to win by defeating and destroying.

For humanity there can be no greater flaw than our tendency for war and the ease with which internecine conflicts start. War, an instrument for profit and a way of producing and expanding power by maintaining and escalating the capitalist system, has now lost any moral ground that it may once have seemingly possessed. Moral reasons have always been fabricated to justify the needs for wars, and governments will continue to falsify such reasons to dupe the public with flag-waving patriotisms. Without the false-morality, war is impossible in democratic societies.

But, in order for war to disappear, peace has to be elevated to a much higher moral pedestal. It is ‘peace’ that needs to be considered sublime, not war. The first casualty of any declaration of war is peace; the two concepts cannot coexist. If there is a little war somewhere, then peace does not exist.

Contrary to popular belief and a lot of philosophical ranting, peace is not a static state but a dynamic one. For peace to exist it needs to be sublimely creative, and it needs to transcend the false façades of peace created by consumerism and capitalism, which are their own kinds of wars.

Only through peace can purposeful dynamics be nurtured. Only through peace can truly creative progressive incentives, liberated from the distractions of conflicts, properly deal with the world’s most pressing problems – poverty, famine, violence, oppression, the climate emergency, and … war.

FROM THE AIRPORT TO THE ABOLITION OF MONEY

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And so we’ve arrived at the self-service airport with its do-it-yourself check-in. It should be easy, for we’ve already been well trained: we’ve all learned how to manage the tactile-screen world that we are ever so deeply enveloped by. Doesn’t it make everything so easy now? We used to speak metaphorically about having the world at your fingertips, but now it is a literal fact.

Nevertheless, the self-servicing of services at the airport, has definitely complicated rather than eased the consumer’s experience of catching a flight. The host at the check-in counter has been theoretically obsolete, although he or she seems to be just as busy as ever, and, perhaps even more stressed. Stressed, yes, because those of us checking in are definitely more stressed. Now, we must do all the work, and if there is an error … if there can be an error in the perfect self-service world … then it is we who are to blame.

The companies that have implemented self-service check-in will argue that by doing so they can keep ticket-costs low, but how much of that idea can we really believe. What self-servicing does indicate is that technology can effectively replace most kinds of customer-contact labour. There are restaurants that have made waiters obsolete by introducing tablet-app menus: just press the items you want and wait for the signal to go and pick your food up from the counter. Robots have automized industry: almost anything can be obtained from Amazon.com and the human-factor involved in the process of delivery is practically null.

Of course, Amazon delivers books, and the books are not (yet) written by machines. Did we say “not”? Woops. Correction: they already are, and for the pulp-fiction editorial world the temptation to pre-programme a book with all the ingredients they “know” the readers want will be much more appetising than the traditional procedure of accepting manuscripts from cantankerous authors, that must be tediously edited in order to come up with the publishers’ needs.

Technology is destined to replace human labour – that is really part of its purpose – but what is the end-result of this process of “alleviating” labour? Surely, the ultimate goal is a society in which services and production-orientated work no longer has to be endured by the human members of society themselves.

Nevertheless, civilisation is still not geared toward, or even particularly conscious of this end-result. While the technological revolution unfolds, the political and economic fabric of the nation-states and the global economy enveloping them, remains the same. This is probably because the profits engendered from the tech revolution are immense for the few empowered with the control of that revolution. Whilst huge harvests can be reaped and the bubbling unrest from the non-privileged classes below doesn’t burst into revolt, Wealth has no intention of letting society develop into the technologically revolutionised Utopia that it should be evolving toward. Why would it? The self-servicing implied the complete technological redrafting of society suggests an evolution towards the non-necessity of money, and unto the abolition of Wealth itself. Of course, Wealth understands this. Technological progress is inevitable, but carries within it the seeds of Wealth’s own annihilation. We are governed oligarchically now by the empowered wealthy classes, but in that government lies a subliminal fear of this paradox. Only the creation of a Dystopia for humanity will ensure the existence of Wealth after the complete technological redrawing of civilisation has taken place. For Wealth, the only way forward is toward Big Brother. For wealth, survival implies absolute control.

THE ALTERNATIVE

 

For the moment, the revolutionary idea of a complex society that can function without money, is a sublime, if Utopic, one. It transcends any faculty of the senses. The idea seems like nonsense, or we are awestruck by it. We just cannot perceive it properly. Money is not just a part of the status quo, it is a seemingly essential ingredient in our own being. But this is a misleading perception.

The shadows we see flickering on the wall in Plato’s cave, are the shadows of the monetary system. In the real light that illuminates the human condition, money is by no means an essential ingredient. Rather it is a transitory phase that has enabled the development of technology but which needs to be abandoned at some point if technology is ever allowed to fulfil itself in its final purpose.

But the revolution is happening, and the point of abandonment from the control over our lives that money engenders can now be seen. Our politics can now be geared towards the technological revolutions complete realisation as a Utopia – the only alternative is the Dystopia that we are currently being shoved towards.

SEE THIS ARTICLE FROM SCIENCE ALERT, 2016: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-novel-written-by-ai-passes-the-first-round-in-a-japanese-literary-competition

The Will for Permanence

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A healthy person, well-equipped for achieving things in life, would not, under normal circumstances, want to die. The same should be expected to be true of a healthy civilisation or culture, or a healthy human outlook of itself.

The will for permanence has always been a powerful drive in the human psyche: it is the reason for religions, and it is embedded in all art and technology. It’s enemies are, what Freud called, the pleasure principle and the death drive.

From an aesthetic point of view, it could be said that the will for permanence brings out the best in us, and makes us beautiful. Permanence is our beautiful dream.