The Tension of Tenses

Jan Cox once wrote that about 500 years ago a change of some kind happened so that human life had a value.  I am sure his original phraseology was clearer-- but my recollection is that he was referring to a sense that every human life has a worth.  He was pointing to something other scholars have delved into the fringes of, and call the Renaissance. One thing that also happened around this time frame in Western history has been called the 'discovery of the past.'  What this means is that people in what we call the medieval period in western Europe,  assumed that everything around them had always been the way they currently observed it. The church was a big factor in this perception, one church, supporting a clearly structured society.  People were born into a certain class and did not consider it unfair if they were not rich, this was where God had meant them to be.  Then all heck broke loose, with the printing press making books more widely available, and many other factors of which I am unaware going on -- but now, as the historians would say, a perspective of change was pressed on people's attention. Old books, old art, for instance made it apparent that society had not always been arranged the way it currently looked. And if things had not always been a certain way, perhaps change in the current structure was a possibility.  In the words of certain malcontents: 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?'  Change had become conceivable.
The above is pretty standard stuff in history books. (Except for Jan's comment.) What it brought to mind is that, you would think a discovery of the past would mean a discovery of the future...Yet this little essay argues that in fact, there was not then, nor is there now, a real discovery of the future. By discovery of the future I mean a sense of the future as real, as in the first paragraph, I tried to show what people mean when they say the past is a real factor.  Of course, I do not mean the future is real as in currently existing, that would be contradictory. But the future as real in the sense of something unknown which impinges on us, an arena of the new, the possible new --that future is not part of the ordinary machinery of man's mentation.
WERE the future a reality in the mind of man, then there would have been no amazement that we could have planes crashing into office buildings in a city arguably the capital of the world. Okay---it would have been amazing, but there would have been no sense of how could this happen, how could our intelligence have let us down?  Because a sense of the future would give to man's ordinary mind the flexibility that an awareness of areas of which we are ignorant would lend it. 
It is possible, it seems to me, that ordinary human mentation could include a sense of the future, and does not now.

And It's Not Called The Artemis Mission Because...?

The mechanical mind is marvelous to the very edge of words and the moon missions are vibrant examples of what rearranging pieces of the external world can accomplish. This phraseology is that of Jan Cox, to describe the proper functioning of the mechanical mind. But imagination hovers at every portal and one evidence of this is naming the missions Apollo. Besides, Apollo was the Greek god of the sun!!! Not the moon. The god associated with the moon was a goddess----named Artemis, Diana, Selene.
Yet the (mostly) men, bright men, who thought out, calculated, trouble shot, bravely believed in what the words predicted, named their goal, not after the thematically appropriate, goddess of the moon, but the god of the sun----emphatically NOT where they were heading.
It seems to me that we are not dealing here with any rinkydink bias, but have, in this example of a misapplication of old stories, the fact that ordinary knowledge is about the knower, not what is known, or the hoped for goal. The proper goal of the mechanical mind of man is rearranging the environment to enhance the survival of our species. The goal of the mechanical mind is NOT knowledge per se (though this sounds shocking, and is rejected by that mechanical mind itself). Actual knowledge of the world and man in that world, is not within the grasp of the verbal mind. The proper use of the mechanical mind is protecting --- mankind. The knowledge available to the ordinary intellect is not about the objective world of which we are apart, the knowledge available to the ordinary intellect is about the external world of the knower. So it is proper that the Apollo mission was named for those bright men who are laying a way for our species to leave our ancestral home, this planet we call dir--, I mean, earth.

The Limits of the Human Intellect

Recently we have pointed to logical gaps at both ends of the intellectual range of man. (Our last two blog posts).  Our point here was to raise certain questions regarding the nature of man's mental faculties. Obviously man has a desire to know---we can look back on a history of technological achievement over the past two thousand years, and an artistic heritage which suggests man can deal on the symbolic level.  Yet this desire to know has a limit, and this is what I am pointing to. Man typically will NOT pursue a question to its logical ultimate. How interesting is this!  Just keep questioning and man may reach, (I suggest you experiment with this) a surprising awareness. But this persistence in intellectual questing is exactly what man, homo sapiens, will not, and certainly, typically, does not, maintain. One reason is perhaps that there is, at some level, an awareness that persistent questioning, a pushing to the borders of the human intellect, would destabilize that intellect.  At least on a scale larger than a few people, this questioning would be destructive to the larger machinery of which man is a part. There may be a good reason that man's intellectual can be defined as one which is not characteristically persistent.

Civil Discontents Part II

So we noticed last blog some incoherency among those who assume extraterrestrials explain anything. Perhaps the academic chaps avoid certain glaring logical gaps. One hopes those sagging library shelves hold something of value.  Still my example here won't support that last hope. There is a philosophical question about the nature of man: is there any validity to the idea of a mental or spiritual realm. The extremely common view is that man has a spiritual dimension.  Some philosophers assume man has a physical and a mental nature to explain their observations, and experiences. Without this duality they are lost to explain what they consider the human dimension---man's values, spiritual worth, etc. What these folks fail to notice is this: if you assume a second layer of reality, you have to then explain how these two dimensions interact.  The addition of a spiritual, or mental realm merely moves the problem of explaining man, around, it does not solve it.  With two dimensions the consistent thinker then has to explain how these diverse realms coexist and intercommunicate.  A mental realm as a separate world just confuses the reality of man's world. Typically if you are explaining how two diverse things communicate you wind up with a third realm -- one which connects the physical and mental. Yet what does this gain us??? You really need another realm to connect the third to the other two, and, this could go on infinitely. Kind of like those who think extraterrestrials on this planet explain anything, when you step back and realize the questions are just moved around, not really explained.

Civilization and its contents

There is an interesting continuity between the explanations of those liable to a certain hysteria, I mean those who give credence to extraterrestrials, and those typically found in academe, the ivory tower billed birds.

The first group crave a certain gross excitement in their mechanical mental lives, nothing too subtle. Flying saucers serve a purpose in their imagination, satisfying a unviversal craving for an exciting edge, but one which can be oh so concretely described.  At one time angels were seen in the heavens, now it is household utensils. This coarse profanity serves other purposes---one of these functions is to explain human development, and human origins.  The visits of extra terrestrials have been used to explain both the advance of man's civilization and the origin of humanity itself. The idea is that visitors either produced a new species, and or, helped along an extant one, to produce the world we know.  The question of the ET motives is left open.  The illogic behind the E. T. scenario is unrecognised. Illogic in the sense that an explanation is produced which actually does not answer the basic questions for which the explanation is put forward.  A visit from people from other planets does not explain the origin of life----one is just pushing back the question---from where did the life on other planets derive??? And what promoted the developments in civilization, the technological superiority, on these other planets? The popularity of stories of extraterrestrials fills a gap left by the declining interest in traditional religious explanations of such questions. 

 

These objections to the E.T.answer to life's mysteries seem obvious once outlined.  How is this kind of thinking related to the typical thinking of the academic writer of books?  We will return to this question soon. 

After Dinner Dents

My sense is that the writings of Jan Cox, now that he is dead, are serving as digestive aids, after dinner mints, so the ordinary can better digest, and live on, the hostility of life, without ever seeing that Jan rejected all and every system, philosophic label, hell, all labels, and that was just to get started. His only interest was in the freedom available to our species, and nudging people to look in the direction he did. Ideas, labels----all words, all that you must learn to look beyond.

Hey, it's just a thought....

Is cyberspace a medium for sharing, learning? You could make a case that cyberspace is less so than is commonly thought. As an attenuation of man's mental realm it shares the status of what Jan Cox calls the yellow circuitry of man.  For many cyberspace is I suspect a kind of heaven because it removes the physical element from relationships.  This leads to encouraging, enlarging, the dreaming portion of man's life.  The awareness that the mystic seeks however involves full frontal reality, and I cannot see how cyberspace, with its hygienic debodying of reality (what IS the opposite for decapitation), with the lack of, oh say, smell, can be anything nourishing. Cyberspace rather, may share the cotton candy quality of man's mental realm.  Of course this realm plays a larger part in humanity's life as centuries go by, and the birth and expansion of cyberspace could be one way the larger growth of Humanity, rather than the individual cells we call humans, is kept intact as a single organism.