Hard Facts

Quoth Harold Bloom: If you are aa hard rock empiricist, you must reject religion." Of course any sense of religion as some set of beliefs, some assertion about god (rather than man) can be jettisoned, but that is probably not what he meant.  He has accepted the unempirical stance that there is something  called objective knowledge versus subjective, that man can go  along with the views of a group rather than empirically  rethinking  any important questions for oneself.

Actually  there is no question of subjective knowledge, there is merely man's standard dreamy state, the cog like mental stance men must allow if they are to function as the efficient cogs that is the useful lot of most men.

That, and the individually won momentary  possibility of objectivity.  Individually won and individually realized, but that is not subjectivity -- for ALL who pursue  recklessly and relentlessly a  certain internal mental stance will glimpse, maybe revisit, maybe become accustomed  to, a certain scenery.  It is the same scene for all who stand on the same perch. This scene is the origin of all ideas of objectivity.

Of course these words are misleading.  But they are closer than most.

THAT Twentieth Century

How interesting that it was the century of pastiche, of patchwork classics, like Eliot's quoting Chaucer, and Copeland, folk tunes, how marvelous that it was the century of a paltry positivism (that "low dishonest decade"), of a recalcitrance to self reflection, how intriguing that it was the century when capitalism gave birth to communism, and is now finding it cannot live without it's opposite to define itself,  how enthralling that it was that twentieth century -- when thinkers pulled mysticism from the ashes of religion and turned an empirical ear to a universal harmony.
Note I do not call this scenario ironic. It was one of the philosophers in the last phrase, Jan Cox, who pointed out there was no such thing as irony.  Irony, he said, was a sign you did not know what was going on.  Not that acknowledging this means I do.

Mis---what?

The current news coverage of missing millions, in bonuses to executives, has the earmarks of classic misdirection.  As someone else said, it is missing trillions that should worry us.  But all that is a setup. Misdirection is a mainstay of the magician's craft. Decades ago, Jan Cox showed us magic tricks one evening--some of us never did figure out how he made coins appear out of nowhere.
At that time, decades ago, I had no idea of the extent to which life itself loves misdirection. To use current events again, the attention paid to a certain Ponzi schemster, has sucked up so much air time.  And this functions to distract us from the uncomfortable sight of real economists, guys who made it out of grade, oh I mean grad, school, talking about how they did not anticipate the current fiscal crisis.  Uncomfortable making because it is close to the ignorance we all want to avoid acknowledging on a personal level.  How long can we stamp our feet at those expert economists without wondering how far this ignorance extends... could it extend to my awareness of my ....
And yet, another level, if you keep pushing, could words themselves be a kind of misdirection?
What if everything we KNOW is a setup.

That's No Lady...

The following excerpt from a widely distributed story on scientology caught my attention:

"A Scientology spokesman has confirmed that Scientologists believe that mankind's problems stem from brainwashed alien soul remnants created millions of years ago by genocidal alien overlord Xenu. The admission follows years of attempts to dismiss the story, first leaked by defectors, as anti-church propaganda."

Of course at worst scientology is merely a religion, the significant thing is not what their beliefs are, but that they have beliefs.  That puts them squarely in the middle of the rational, binary, mechanical mind, and at that level "there is nothing that cannot be proved," and "the opposite is always true".  Those who have tried to grasp the thoughts of Jan Cox will recognize in my last sentence HIS thoughts on-----not religion necessarily, but his thoughts on "thoughts."  The statements are his attempt to wrench the mechanical mind of those who sense there is something beyond the ordinary play of opinion, in another direction.  I had first phrased that sentence with this wording...Those who have studied..., and then I realized, you really can't "study" the words of someone who actually has seen reality, you can only try to stay in the midst of his influences and hope some meteor hits you. 

But we are straying here from the point I had in mind. Not that we aren't going to get to how, to use an example of Jan's, "Yale" does not exist, but like, the topic of ordinary feminine intelligence, this is something I have hesitated to bring up.  But all in due time.  And back to Hubbard.  Gosh, his religion started like all religions, and if you gotta have a religion, his is nicely 20th century.  Still the excerpt I quoted also shows how hard it is to really 'start fresh' in your thoughts. Apparently we still have good and bad guys. If you want to get beyond that, who else is there beside Gurdjieff and Jan Cox.

A Random Book Title

While I was  browsing a shelf of books, a title caught my eye -- What We Owe Each Other.  I was not interested enough to pull out the book and read further, but the title caused some thoughts on the whole weirdness of a kind of knowing which is beyond words and ultimate.  It is the knowing that Jan Cox (unavoidably) "speaks" of, because he, one of the few forthright mystics of the last century, no more than anyone else, can capture reality in words. But what else is there to do, but try to point, especially for those, (if I say 'burdened' I am so guessing) burdened with a sense of responsibility (so not the words) to try to help others look in the direction he looked. And in the case of this title on a book spine, "What We Owe Others," it hit me that that topic cannot be answered in words, and one reason is that the "correct" answer to what we owe others, will vary from person to person and from moment to moment. It is NOT the point that there is NO answer, -- oh, there is an answer, -- but it cannot be put in words, and one reason it cannot be put in words, is its changeableness. This eternal changeableness does not infer that there is no absolute.  No doubt philosophers would argue that you cannot have absolutes if eternal flux prevails. What to say to that: take a look.

Freud as an example of the average intellectual

Freud is held up as an example of the blows to his ego man has received in western science.  The thinking I assume is that the (so-called) discovery of the unconscious made man's rationality suspect. Freud's contributions have had the reverse effect.  I am not the first person to wonder if something was unconscious how Freud could have specified it at all.  The import of Freud's ideas is that the rational mind can specify and deal with everything in the world----there is nothing that cannot be labeled in words.  Words will cover everything and so actually the rational mind is triumphant in a complete way --a claim which would have puzzled the serious thinkers of an earlier era.  The picture that comes to mind from Freud's writing is of a closet, packed to the ceiling, and so overfull it spills out whenever the closet is opened. Interesting but hardly the unconscious.  Words are the solution to a man of Freud's ambitions.

As it is, the empirical mystics of the modern, men like Georges Gurdjieff and Jan Cox, don't find Freud even worth mentioning. They notice that the silence of the hormones is a relevant arena for the sober quester to turn to.  This attention though, is speechless comprehension which is beyond the purview of the average intellectual.

Hunting Historical Assumptions

The idea that man had endured a series of blows with modern discoveries is so silly as to need another elaboration.  It may be a cliche to mention that Galileo displaced the earth from the center of the universe, that Darwin moved man from a special place in the natural world and that Freud rattled man's confidence in the rational mind. None of these takes on modern  history is accurate and the persistence of this myth is so durable as to need an explanation. That explanation is not one I can imagine yet, but a few more thoughts about the general hypothesis sketched out here is fun.  Galileo's ideas certainly did nothing to shake man's confidence, that confidence in the rational mind has in fact increased in the preceding centuries and this INCREASE is in part because of the scientific discoveries characteristic of modernity.  The medieval period was an era when man experienced himself as a part of a greater whole, and this sense of being a part of something larger is a superior and lost parallel to the confidence of modern man. 

Darwin's indeed exciting new idea was that species themselves could change, and that included man.  The Darwinists though never think through logically the implications of Darwin's thought. If man the species can change, then the human mind itself is quite possibly a subject for evolution, man's very thinking ability, his rationality, may be in the middle of  an evolutionary trek.  This at least is the most consistent view of the human mind which is plausible based on Darwin's ideas.  Yet the variability of human thought is something that is vigorously denied should this prospect even surface in some scientist's scope. And you can see why this thought is scary----the idea that human thought itself is not the measure and measurer of the world around it leaves the mechanical mind of man quaking (should the mind be forced somehow to consider this idea).  Because----the confidence of mechanical thought has to assume the mind is complete. Otherwise any one thought would have to, wonder what a future thought would find inferior about it. Surely I can find a better way to express this.  If the mind is incomplete that throws all its conclusions into confusion because the unknown element, being unknown, prevents that boxed edge from resting in thought, that completeness which is part of the nature of binary thought. The evolutionary nature of human thought, if recognised, mediates against the limitations of binary thought, and the idea that words can ever describe reality.

The infinity of detail that characterizes the present does also the past. So any conclusions claiming to be of an historical nature are like the constellation star pictures. Interesting, sometimes lovely, helping us to keep some things in mind, reflecting in our choice of subject our values, but not what they claim to be.  "Orion" is just an accidental conjunction, the details of which overwhelm and do not even graze a hunter's reality.  This may be what Jan Cox meant when he said "history is dreams."  Any readers of this blog need to keep that in mind, for my purposes in playing with historical assertions have a personal use also. With an infinity of detail anything can be proved, or disproved. Next time we'll get to Freud.