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we learn more by constraining the conditions under which we make our observations, in other words by carefully designed experiments, than we can do from casual observation of Nature unconstrained – an acknowledgment that, in Heraclitus’ phrase, ‘Nature loves to hide.’ He was deeply respectful of Nature, and wrote that ‘Nature to be commanded must be obeyed
Consider the art pieces that rely on a structure being constructed around th sections of nature to be 'exhibited' or observed; the clinical contrast of object and setting within the structure and the curiously foreign nature of the structure itself when it essentially becomes the object withijn the context of the broader natural environment.
i.e. Fabian Knecht's 'Fictional Nature'
Thus it is not that A (reason) → B (rationality), but that A (reason) → B (rationality) → A (reason) again.
Reason depends on seeing things in context, a right-hemisphere faculty, whereas rationality is typically left-hemisphere in that it is context-independent, and exemplifies the interchangeability that results from abstraction and categorisation.
Reason is about holding sometimes incompatible elements in balance, a right-hemisphere capacity which had been highly prized among the humanist scholars of the Renaissance. Rationality imposes an ‘either/or’ on life which is far from reasonable.
oneself from one’s surroundings, refrain from normal action and interaction with them, suspend one’s normal assumptions
the fact that the nature of the attention we bring to bear on anything alters what we find there.
this, this kind of vision, is what the rationality he has embraced leads to.
‘Reason is imaginative in that bodily inference forms are mapped onto abstract modes of inference by metaphor.’
this process of objectification is that it escapes our control, and we ourselves become its victims, simultaneously reduced to the being-available of mere objects and reduced to the being of a purely inner subjectivity that is no longer recognised as enjoying any truth, any reality.
There is a characteristic combination of omnipotence and impotence, of being all there is and yet nothing at all, which again follows from the lack of betweenness with what is, with the shared world of common experience.
unnatural detachment induces boredom
‘the three propositions … upon which the whole Western tradition rested’: namely, ‘that all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question’; ‘that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learnt and taught to other persons’; and ‘that all the answers must be compatible with one another’.
the banishment of wonder; the triumph of the explicit, and, with it, mistrust of metaphor; alienation from the embodied world of the flesh, and a consequent cerebralisation of life and experience.
reason, in which opposites can be held in balance,
The impulse towards harmony was replaced with the impulse towards singleness and purity.
Where reason respects the implicit, the ambiguous, the unresolved, rationality demands the explicit, the clear and the complete.
for 150 years performed, believe it or not, with a happy ending, and other of Shakespeare’s tragedies were performed with comedy resolutions.
to be without the capacity for sadness would mean a degree of detachment from the manifestly suffering world around one which bordered on the psychopathic.)
Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world.
they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness.
for a kind of comprehension which no science could ever provide. An emotion, for example, which everyone can now perceive in himself, must once have been wrested by some ‘poet’ from the fearful inarticulacy of our inner life for this clear perception of it to be possible: just as in commerce things (such as tea, coffee, pepper, salt, etc.), which were once luxuries, are nowadays articles of everyday use in general supply.
great artists will always rebel against the limitations of the medium, which nonetheless are the condition of their mastery,
And, though it is often stated that animals find symmetry in a mate attractive, humans appear not, in fact, to share such preferences.
In fact symmetry in living faces, because it suggests something mechanical and unreal, borders on the uncanny, a perception that lies behind ‘the fearful symmetry’ of Blake’s tiger.
when one accepts that the things or persons themselves and the context are continually subject to change, no two entities are ever equal in any respect.
while the individual variations of living things are flattened out, the differences between categories become where the inequality resides.
the left hemisphere cannot bring something to life: it can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’ to what it finds given to it by the right hemisphere.
‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’
anything that is not founded on rationality, but on bonds of reverence or awe (right-hemisphere terrain), becomes the enemy of the left hemisphere, and constitutes a bar to its supremacy; and so the left hemisphere is committed to its destruction.
the need to mutilate an image indicates belief in its power.
The appeal to reason can lead to sweetness and light, but it can also be used to monitor and control, to constrict and repress, in keeping with my view that the aim of the left hemisphere is power.
It represents the possibility, terrifying to the rational, left-hemisphere mind, that phenomena beyond what we can understand and control may truly exist.
Frankenstein, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s story of the left hemisphere assembling a living whole – a man – from dead parts and bringing it to life, ends, as we know, rather less obligingly. But that was the message of Romanticism, not of the Enlightenment.
The best of Enlightenment values were not negated, but aufgehoben, by Romanticism, and persist not only into the coming era, but in fact to this day – along with some of the Enlightenment’s more damagingly simplistic notions.
the clashes of theory with experience that showed up the cracks in the edifice of rationalism.
Its weakness, therefore, will be exposed when attention is turned to those elements within the system that point to something beyond it.
Since the foundation of Enlightenment thinking is that all truths cohere, are mutually compatible, non-contradictory, ultimately reconcilable, its weak place is where incompatibilities are found; and indeed in general we are, and always have been, liberated into another way of looking at the world wherever irreconcilables are brought into focus.
Hegel’s thesis, antithesis → synthesis).
das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne,
in Gödelian fashion, to the truth that every logical system leads to conclusions that cannot be accommodated within
Axioms bely their systems own limited explanatory capacity when their system fails to explain the axiom.
‘The ultimate achievement of reason’, he wrote, ‘is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as understanding that.’
‘every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual, as those in Life itself’.
‘like roots, like sap and forces working underground … Speech is great; but Silence is greater.’
In Shakespeare, tragedy is no longer the result of a fatal flaw or error: time and again it lies in a clash between two ways of being in the world or looking at the world, neither of which has to be mistaken. In Shakespeare tragedy is in fact the result of the coming together of opposites.
The difference between greek tragedy and shakespearean tragedy.
Fact and theory, like particular and universal, were not opposites.
“not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable”.’
Fractal theory of existance
‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’
All our problems are interpersonal problems and in their solution we discover ourselves as much as we discover the other.
ConsIder post session debriefs during ayahuasca retreats. Each is mirrored in the experiences of the others. Their story and revelations are a reflection of my own.
Some things have to remain obscure if they are not to be forced to be untrue to their very nature: they are known, and can be expressed, only indirectly.
‘the more capable the body is of being affected in many ways, and affecting external bodies in many ways, the more capable of thinking is the mind’,
The neural structures of our brains produce conceptual systems and linguistic structures that cannot be adequately accounted for by formal systems that only manipulate symbols.’
