Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 45

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Uboric Will, Hegel’s Spirit & The Godless, Purposeful Universe

We have already mentioned the Uroboros and the Uroboric Drive or Will on numerous occasions in these blog entries and it is an important concept for us. In our article “Ecology as Ideology and the Uroboric Drive” we stated:

“A vicious circle is already unravelling itself, only to take hold of its own tail again in order to swallow itself. But perhaps this most ancient image of the Uroboros, the tail-swallowing serpent, is the final revelation: that our drives are magnetic ones, folding us back toward the Uroboric state of an autarchic relationship with the world which is the perpetual result, if only in a perverted way, of any attempts to revaluate or reinvent our circumstances. Capitalism’s final end is to become a Uroboros, even if this is not its conscious eschatology. The System, whatever form it has, is manipulated subconsciously towards the Uroboric, autarchic paradise which we lost so long ago. But while for capitalism the Uroboric autarchy is a Utopian dream that can only end in a complete annihilation of the tail swallowing serpent, the ecological Uroboros has to be imagined perfectly intact and healthy.

The Uroboric drive is in Eros as much as in Thanatos. It is the ultimate unity, representing where we have come from – the autarchy of the foetus in the womb – and where we are going – our final conversion into dust or gas. At either end of the unity the condition is an ecological one. A return to the Uroboric state of being is the Being of the Great Mother, the planet Earth. As an Eros-driven force, our will to freedom is an autarchic will, as is our will for love; our sex drive; our will for community and our desire for isolation; our will to communicate; our creative drives; our willingness to share; and also our need to be protective and cautious. The essence of all of this is in autarchy.”[i]

We think Hegel was describing this Uroboric Will when he described the Spirit as “that which has being in itself,”[ii] or “that which relates itself to itself and is determinate,”[iii] or “it is other-being and being-for-itself and in this determinateness, or in its self-externality, abides within itself; or in other words, it is in and for itself.”[iv]

But this Uroboric nature of Hegel’s Spirit is only one side of its total substance. It must also be “the knowledge of the spiritual, and the knowledge of itself as Spirit, i.e. it must be an object to itself… a sublated object, reflected into itself.”[v] Which means, in our terms, it must be in possession of an intelligence.

A need for intelligence is, in the Uroboric universe, an instinctive drive, coming from an instinct for Being and a sense of the most necessary potential. Even though the matter being driven is blind, deaf and senseless. The Uroboric Universe wants to be perceived and known, even though it has no idea that it does. Nature wants to know, but does not know that it wants it.

It has to be blind and ignorant, if not there would be much more intelligent life in the Universe. If the Universe were driven consciously by a conscious Creator, there would have to be more success stories; more stars with inhabitable planets. Likewise, if Consciousness has existed from the beginning, then there is no pressing need for intelligence. That is the narrative of most religions: humanity is not at all necessary. In fact most of the time, despite Christ’s attempt to fill us with hope and self-esteem, we are a despicable species in the eyes of God, a failed mutation of something which should have been much better. But none of this makes any sense if the Creation was planned from the outset.

So, there is no Creator, there is no God, but…  there is most certainly a purposefulness in the Universe.

Our cosmologists tell us that the Universe is finely tuned and that it has to be tuned exactly this way in order for life to be even feasible. In a numerical sense we are positioned in the centre of the Universe, between the ultimate macrocosm at 1025 and the microcosm at 10-25, in a centre that we have to be in.[vi]This anthropocentricism is not an anti-nature one of human dominance and superiority. But it does imply purpose. We are here for a reason, and that reason has been determined, not by a God, but by the Universe. It implies a partnership, the partnership between the Object of Reality and the Subject that can perceive that reality, and make reality Being. It is a partnership between Sapiens creatures that know that they know things, and the Universe that allows a space for these knowing creatures to know It.

The fine tuning of the Cosmological Constant[vii] is so precise it could hardly have been accidental. But this does not mean that the fine tuning needed a Creator. Science does not need to embrace God on this issue, and nor should it – the idea of the Absolute has been a nihilistic, anti-life pessimism that has flagellated humanity for millennia. We know from thousands of years of experiences that the Idea of God does not make us better human beings, and that in fact it has been responsible for some of the darkest periods of history and some of the most violent, cruel acts that mankind has committed. If God exists, we’d do better just let It be and ignore all the power-driven dogmas that have been born out of the idea of the One.

[i] http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/ecology-as-ideology-and-the-uroboric-drive/

[ii] Hegel, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, Preface, §25)

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Ibid

[v] Ibid

[vi] SEE Martin Rees JUST SIX NUMBERS (THE DEEP FORCES THAT SHAPE THE UNIVERSE), Perseus, 2000, pp. 6 + 7 )

[vii] http://space.about.com/od/astronomybasics/a/What-Is-The-Cosmological-Constant.htm

OUR SPECULAR SYSTEM

 

The System is a universal objectification of egoism in the guise of a great hall of mirrors down which we must all parade, some more enthusiastically than others. Some see themselves as a reflection of the system, others that the system works as if it were a reflection of they themselves, and still others who sense a two-way mirroring. But an increasing number of us stand before the crazy, image-distorting mirrors that flatten or elongate our image of ourselves, stretch us up or make us shorter. Nevertheless, for those who don’t identify with the reflection we see, this hall of mirrors is disconcerting, even maddening, and it is only the fear of being cut to shreds by the shards of the System that makes us resist the urge to smash our way out of here.

THE FOUR-CORNERED TRUTH

“What is truth?” said Pilate, and washed his hands.

What the Roman Prefect understood was the enormous relativity of the concept. Even if Christ says “I am Truth” it still remains ambiguous. What does this Truth actually mean? Well, it can mean whatever you want, and that is what Christ became… whatever his promoters wanted him to be. Nevertheless the concept of Truth itself does have a meaning and a function. It is the anti-lie. If truth is relative then Truth is that which discerns the lies embedded in all relativity. For relativity can be used for honest and dishonest purposes. We have uncovered “truths” embedded in paradoxes, but we’ve also seen how the paradox is a powerful tool for covering lies[i].

Yet despite its ambiguity and elusiveness, Truth has to concern us. It is a synonym of reality and authenticity and will believe that an understanding of the triptych Truth-Reality-Authenticity is necessary for any real progress on a human level to take place. It is what really is, and this makes it the prime subject valid for humanity in the world. Truth is in the Subject and the Subject is that which encloses us. We can call it the Universe or the World. But Truth seen as the subject-world becomes a duality in which Truth has to be shared between the world and that which perceives it and brings it into true Being, and this is Intelligence. In this way we get a four-cornered truth of the World-Intelligence as Subject-Object. The world is the Subject to Intelligence because it only becomes Being if Intelligence perceives it. Likewise Intelligence is Subject to the World by perceiving and knowing and reflecting it in its brain before projecting it forward. In the same way it is also the Object of the World as it is equally dependent on the world for its own being.

Real Truth is therefore not just the Subject but the Subject-Object Uroboros. The reality of existence is that its Being depends on a Uroboric vicious circle – a paradox.  This idea, that the truth is a nasty paradox, may seem like a terrible nightmare or a liberation, but in any case it is a necessity.

The idea is not new: quite possibly, if depth-psychology theory is correct, it is the oldest idea. But though we still know it from the alchemical Uroboros and the oriental Yin-Yang, its profound relevance is not relevant to or even consciously realised by most people or their cultures.

 

That which is  not perceived does not exist. Perception illuminates that which is not and makes it that which is. Perceiving intelligence exalts that being with its knowledge. The Big Bang did not exist until intelligence made it real.  The ultimate purpose of the Big Bang, the desire behind the movement, was to create an intelligence that would evolve into something that could discover itself. Is this such a wild notion? How can a non-intelligence have desires? How could it conceive something without consciousness? Must we talk about Will or Spirit? Can we talk about these things?

Science is divided, but there are cosmologists who would have to say yes. In cosmology they now talk of the Cosmological  Constant and the Fine Tuning of the Universe. The Universe seems constructed in a deliberate way to allow life to form, and evolution on our planet would indicate that the culmination of the life forming process is “intelligence”. The intelligence that knows that it knows. If this is the truth then immediate ethical consequences can be drawn from it, the first being that our historical process of the segregation of humanity has been a totally equivocal one. From the simple idea that the Universe has a purpose rooted in the creation of and the subsequent existential partnership with Intelligence allows us to find new authenticities: a new purposefulness, a new meaning.

Our relevant beginning, our Genesis, is the beginning of the creation of the life-support system of our planet Earth. The concept of Truth as Subject-Object is a World-Humanity concept. Quality of Being depends on being perceived and “understood”. The key to our purpose is our responsibility as cognitive entities to the World-Universe that needs us for its own quality of Being.

The Big-Other narrative that we currently live in is a non-authentic one: it is a lie. The Truth is still to be discovered, but it is necessary for us to start looking for it “truthfully”, via our greatest tool for truth – science.

[i] See our article “Lacan, Poe, and the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories” published in the Australian journal Going Down Swinging, #33 http://goingdownswinging.org.au/site/showcase/going-down-swinging-33/

ON NECESSITY

Authentic necessity is rooted firmly within our relationship with the world. Because of this Ecology is a science of Authentic Necessity. It is time for us to stop treating this science frivolously: it is not a New Age fantasy, nor should it be the object of cynicism or disdain that the politics of capital often tries to turn it into.

Real necessity is a constant. Our environment can be affected, even changed, but such alterations will be catastrophic if they are not carried out through a science of Authentic Necessity-Ecology. Authentic Necessity is what the world needs to maintain its environment in such a way that intelligent life, that knows itself and the world and can act creatively accordingly, may flourish within it.

Of course we are not preaching to world or a God but to ourselves. Authentic necessity is our necessity. It is what we must do in order not to upset the balance and maintain the conditions needed for existence, the perpetuation of existence and real progress to happen.

 

REALATED ARTICLES ON THIS BLOG:

http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/the-abrupt-climate-change-scenario/

http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/sing-or-swim-how-to-escape-the-ocean-of-false-necessity/

THE WILL TO NECESSITY IS STRONGER THAN THE WILL TO SURVIVAL.doc

http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/freedom-and-necessity/

http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/162/

http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/the-ideologies-of-anti-reality/

http://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/ecology-as-ideology-and-the-uroboric-drive/

 

 

Post-quantum Physics and Growth

Reblogged from Pat Grayson Online:

It takes time to swing from non-success to success. From ignorance to knowledge. From non-awareness to awareness.

There has been much ado about quantum physics and that with the right attitude you will place yourself in its “slip-stream” and achieve immediate benefit. This will happen in literally the blink of an eye. Or in the same blink, you will have achieved success.

Read more… 218 more words

How often do we fail to achieve things because of our lack of patience? This short article by Pat Grayson gives a simple description and guideline to get us away from a problem deeply rooted in our consumer civilisation.

SING OR SWIM: HOW TO ESCAPE THE OCEAN OF FALSE NECESSITY

Where is humanity now? Once we unveil the pessimism inherent in power we find ourselves immersed in an ocean of false necessity. We are dog-paddling in a lie-full sea of false-reality generated by the power ideologies of the Moloch system who have given us floaties for our arms and waist, allowing us to keep our heads above water.  The realization is disheartening: what can we do to escape an ocean? Even if we swim properly, dry land is so far away, we would just exhaust ourselves and sink. Yes, we need a raft or a boat, but even if we were to find one, what we still lack is a compass showing which way to go in this mundane landscape of the seemingly eternal sea.

Of course we have learned navigation from the System. We know the rules: how to estimate our position from the sun and guide ourselves at night by following certain stars. But the star-system navigating methodology seems to always bring us back to the same place. We are swimming in circles, we realise.

The first key to getting out of this ocean is to recognise where we are. Remember, this is the ocean of false-necessity. To get out of here we need to inspire our efforts with an enthusiasm for real necessity again, an enthusiasm that will bring us back to reality again. An enthusiasm which will stop our hopeless imagining that we are treading water and feel the solid ground that is actually beneath our feet again.

Of course to find such an enthusiasm is by no means an easy task. Many who search become lost in pessimistic religions driven by the cynicism of power.  Others immerse themselves in ideologies: a vain task, because all ideology hides the truth from itself. If one is in-ideology the truth is imperceptible – but how does one get out of ideology?

Or perhaps it is not imperceptible: after all we have millennia of artists who have dedicated their lives to the unveiling truth and dragging it out from the drains into which it gets dumped.

The return to reality must be an artistic process:  the process of unveiling that which is obscured by the false reality. The first thing the artist does is take off his or her floaties in order to discover what it is like to really swim. The artist knows that the false-necessity ocean is full of floating jetsam that can easily be used to carry us forward. To where? The artist has an intuitive drive and an internal map: the artist’s love of the symbolic. Like aboriginal dreamtime paintings, the way forward can be found through poetry and song. Now it’s time for us listen to ourselves: not to our discourses but to our songs; look into ourselves and let the music out.

 

THE IDEOLOGIES OF ANTI-REALITY

The inner meaning of ideologies must be expressed in their long term or final aims and results, which should be anchored in some way to reality. If there is no anchoring then the ideology must be considered to be avoiding reality, or ignorant of it.

What these false-reality ideologies do is create an impression of commitment to a reality while actually avoiding reality at all costs. What these false commitments do is sway our sense of reality toward the fantasy of the ideology itself, which becomes a cruel lie, operating under false pretenses in order to foster its own selfish aims.

Instead of working in an involved way with reality the false-reality ideology is always attempting to go beyond reality in order to create an alternative reality through the fantasy of a Utopia or a Heterotopia.

The false-reality is false because it is unreal, as are all Utopias and Heterotopias. Reality is necessity and the false-reality ideologies create false necessities in order to vindicate their claims. Ideologies posit themselves as “alternatives”, but we cannot create an alternative necessity to real necessity without lying to ourselves. That would be like being in the desert and affirming that although I need to drink to stay alive, instead I will just eat sand. After all there is so much sand around and not a drop of fresh water to be seen.

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OUR REALITY AND HEGEL’S FRUIT

It is the very fluid nature of human existence in the world that creates our uniquely human problem with “reality”. The human experience is enclosed within our  passage through time, our present is embedded in the historical movement through the ages of our technological development both in the past and the future. Of course this must be considered enriching, but we become so enamored by the motion of the historical phases that we lose sight of the constant and this creates a very dangerous condition: for it is when the continual is no longer consciously conceived amidst change that reality becomes a lie.

Hegel’s metaphor of the flower works here[1]. Imagine that reality is a tree. On the branch of this tree there appears a new, green bud which draws our attention to it. The tree had always seemed so dull and tedious before. Now it seems that there might be some other, more interesting, reason for its existence. This seems to be affirmed when the bud suddenly explodes into a colourful blossom, so beautiful that the flower itself refutes the significance of the bud and claims all attention for itself. The purpose of the tree is now so obviously to make this flower, we think. And in making this logical deduction we imbue the flower itself with the idea of Reality. But this is a mistake. The flower itself is merely an ephemeral phenomena and it will soon be replaced by a new truth, the manifestation of fruit.

Hegel uses the fruit metaphor to represent truth rather than reality, but if we were to implement our geometry of erroneous judgements on this (see our essay REAL DEMOCRACY AND THE LINE OF ERRONEOUS JUDGEMENT) we would be able to draw a triangle with a vertical axis of “truth” sprouting from a horizontal line of “reality” and linked by a hypotenuse of “ideology”.  Through understanding this relationship between ideology, truth and reality we can also see how Hegel’s metaphor works to describe the blossoming and fruition of ideologies that dazzle us, convincing us of themselves as the purposeful aims of humanity, until they themselves, explode, wither or just drop off. Of course it is the tree itself which is the constant source and power of all ideologies: but who can say they know now, with all the stentor, commotion and partitioning violence that the ideologies have thrown at us, what singular truth could possibly be the source of so much division? Where is the constant trunk from which all this diversity has grown?

As for our current, Western-world system it is very much a “fruit ideology”. We find it most often at the market-place and hardly ever on a tree. We may walk through a greengrocer, peruse the fruit and have no idea at all what the trees that they were plucked from may look like. We hardly even consider that the most essential component in the market is actually the trees from which the fruits were picked: we cannot see where the fruit of our reality came from any more. Reality has become too alienated from the real source.

[1] G.W. Hegel PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT, Forward.

 

REAL DEMOCRACY AND THE LINE OF ERRONEOUS JUDGEMENT

Basic to our philosophy is the idea that an authentic human history has to be measured by its achievements or failures as a process benefiting the human race in its totality. Because of this we have to affirm that what has been considered until now as the historical process is in fact an anti-human one and that the idea of human progress is only barely perceptible. This anti-history is a separating and segregating process, resisting all movements towards real human development. In the same way very much of what we consider to be “human nature” is in fact a kind of anti-human nature which, rather than defining the authentically human experience, drives us away from enjoying that authenticity. Of course this turning away from humanity needs to be further examined and will need special tools in order to carry out the deconstruction that our revaluation needs. One of those tools may be found in what we will call the line, or the hypotenuse, of erroneous judgement.

 

Kant complained in his Critique of Pure Reason that “the subjective grounds of a judgement blend and are confounded with the objective and cause them to deviate from their proper determination,”[1] and proposed that “it is necessary to consider the erroneous judgement as the diagonal between two forces.”[2] Pouncing on this anecdotal idea we have begun a new creative investigation based on the drawing of triangles. To find this erroneous judgement diagonal we must first of all create the right-angle of fantasies of which this diagonal will be the hypotenuse.  The ninety degree angle we want will be the meeting point of two converse, but also juxtaposing, fantasies, themselves running out of a centre which is a hypothetical idea of authentic humanity. These lines, which are escaping from the core of humanity, are in fact our same fantasies about the human condition. In order to draw our lines therefore we need to look for concepts which are erroneously considered the pillars of what all human cultures are: erroneously considered because, rather than unite us, they actually cut through the human and divide us. Once we have a concept we need to find a partner for it in order to create our right-angle. These are to be discovered in converse juxtapositions, contradictions and paradoxes.

In diagram 1 you will see described the relationship of one of our greatest human-culture fantasies[3]. In the core of the triangle is the 360º circle of authentic humanity. Within this circle lies both the essence and the fulfillment of humanity as a real possibility. It is the hypothetical space in which the universality of humanity is seen as a single concept. Ironically, for almost everyone, this authentic space is considered the most unreal and fantastic space, where the errors of all Utopias lie. And yet, the truth is quite the opposite.

Now let us draw a line upward from this centre that represents one of our authentic human-culture fantasies. In the case of diagram 1 we have chosen the concept of “power”.  This line, according to its own nature, must cut out of the circumference of humanity. It has to thrust upward, breaking away from the circle: power cannot be enclosed and it won’t be restrained. “Power” cannot bare humanity: it must reduce it to the dialectics of leader and follower, or master and slave. It is the driving force of all individual ambitions and the destroyer of all collectivisms. Its purest political manifestation is in autocracy, and its antithesis is anarchy. In the same way that autocracy is power, anarchy is related to “freedom”.  “Freedom” will therefore be our juxtaposing contra to “power” and it will be our second line that runs away from power on the horizontal plane.

“Freedom” also finds humanity restrictive and must push away from it. But freedom really finds everything restrictive and is essentially doomed to a constant condition of wandering and fighting against everyone and everything that oppresses it. It separates human existence between the free-spirits and the oppressors, and inevitably realises that its only way to come to terms with “power” is to be powerful itself. Thus “freedom” and “power”, whilst seeming to be antithesis, very often become entwined. But how is that possible in a political sense? And so our next question is: what links freedom with power? What can bridge the tension caused by these two humanity-fleeing concepts and their dismembering effects on humanity? What will the hypotenuse of this right-angle triangle be?

The answer is “democracy”. And here we see what democracy really is:

a) a limit to the extremisms of power and freedom. By drawing the hypotenuse we have put a limit to the extent of the antagonistic factions.

b) a conduit between freedom and power. The hypotenuse permits a running between the two concepts and a facilitating of the realisation of both fantasies at the same time.

Of course this hypotenuse has a very positive function, but our point is that it must also be clearly recognised for what it is: as a braking tool and conduit between two internecine human fantasies. Because of this, what it actually does is perpetuate the fantasies, and erroneously perpetuates the idea that the fantasies are real aspirations for humanity when in actual fact they are anti-human drives that can go nowhere. Democracy therefore mitigates the destructive intentions of the power-freedom drives by bonding them, but it does nothing to transcend them or reign them back in to the circle of humanity.

In the political-geometrical sense, the circle is an autarchy. This can be better understood through the image of the Uroboros and the human Uroboric drive which we dealt with in early essays, especially ECOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY AND THE UROBORIC DRIVE. To make positive sense, our geometry would have to be able to draw the triangle within the circle, with the opposing concepts feeding the core, which is always autarchy.

In this conceptualisation “democracy” becomes a positive force, holding “power” and “freedom” in and keeping the political model within the confines of the autarchy of authentic humanity. To do this the concepts of “power” and “freedom” must both be reduced, or, perhaps more feasibly, the idea of “humanity” expanded. Once within the circle of humanity the hypotenuse is no longer an erroneous judgement, it is an authentic one, and we can talk about “real democracy” again.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Everyman’s Library Edition, Trans. by J.M.D. Meiklejohn, 1991 edition, Transcendental Logic Second Division – Transcendental Dialectic – Introduction, I

[2] Ibid

[3] For a deeper explanation of what we mean by the term human-culture fantasies see our essay HETEROTOPIA