Existenialism's Return : Final Lessons from the Carmelite Hermits.

Glad

 You can see and often feel peer pressure determining what a moral act is. 

 Here's another look at Kant's understanding of Morality. It was a structure in our minds which he argued was a part of the way we experienced the world : Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. In most repects Kant's sentence avoids a list of dos and don'ts chipped into stone tablets by a grateful Moses.

 "What happens when your desires, your career, or your survival are in direct conflict with what you think is right."

 "The brainstem registers this moral tension as physical danger, a cheetah in the grass. And what does the organism do when threatened? It flees. We don't just run with our legs, we run with our minds. We use intellectual concepts to execute a psychogenic flight away from the terrifying responsibility of our own freedom."

 Psychogenic means it has an origin in the mind. Those first Carmelite Hermits used their minds to escape the trauma of battle which revealed a reality the rosy tints of society hadn't been prepared for.

 "When you look past the stained glass and medieval romance, the origin of the Carmelite hermits on Mount Carmel in the late 12th century is perhaps the most explicit, large-scale manifestation of psychogenic flight - a collective, desperate retreat to an interstitial haven - in human history. They were the original 'back row' trying to survive the catastrophic moral wreckage of the Crusades."

 The young men who took the cross in Europe - the sons of small baronies, the blacksmiths, the weavers - to Saracen controlled Palestine were fed a massive, top-down propaganda myth by the front-row bishops. They were promised an adventure of pure, chivalric light. They were told that slaughtering the infidel was a holy, non-negotiable duty that would wash away their sins. They left their green valleys with their eyelids raised high, marching to a corporate jingle about glory.

 When the fighting finally petered out or the armies dissolved, some of these men—specifically the ones who would become the first Carmelites—did not go home to their villages. They couldn't. You cannot take a brainstem that has been seared by that level of slaughterhouse reality and just drop it back into the village tavern or the manor house. The identity of the 'Chivalric Knight' or the 'Pious Soldier' was dead.

 "Are you saying they executed a total psychogenic flight. They deserted the social ledger entirely?"

 "Yes."

 "Not much has changed!"

 "We got shops with lots of stuff in them and we still got a back-row."

The Somatic and A Tick Tock of Freedom

A Suspicious Version of Kant

 Scaer and Levine two minds from the "wellness" communites of Colorado, along with a bunch of other Western Beatniks, have offered us the idea that "stillness" is a radical act of flesh refusing to be treated as a managed unit. The argument offers the proposition that the body experiences flight as a direct order. It's a conversation that falls under the subheading "Somatic Experience, real or unreal."

 "Does the body feel?"

 "Dearest Mother. Out here on the Eastern Front we are doing terrible things, but we are doing it for the fatherland."

 "A Moral Injury?"

 "PTSD."

 "A Fugue State."

 "Why don't you just run away?"

 Let's go back to Kant and look at his thoughts on Morals. Kant’s Categorical Imperative says: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Kant saw this as a structure in the brain. It demands that you stand on the rough ground, look a choice in the eye, and ask: "If everyone did this, would the world collapse?"

 Standing on that rough ground can be incredibly painful when in uniform hunting down the unwanted on the Eastern Front and killing them. To say no introduces massive, burning cognitive friction when everyone else is cheering. It's a freedom few of us relish.

 My own view goes this way. "There is a good  act and bad act. But we never know what is a good act and what is a bad act." Good and bad is something we learn, a pat on the back teaches us. We run from bad and we fight for good. When you get on a Greyhound Bus to disappear from your old world to find a new life under a bed with an octopus, that's your body taking leave of your mind because your body feels danger but your brain wants a private yacht and an apartment building on Mars so it isn't listening.

 

Wittgenstein, propositions, Woke and Critical Race Theory

 

Drain Field

The proposition that "it is sunny in Campbellsville today" can only be known a posteriori. The proposition that "it's either sunny or not sunny in Campbellsville today" can be known a priori. A proposition is something that can be either accepted or rejected. Inference is drawing a conclusion. There are three kinds of inference (conclusion drawing) There's a deduction, reaching a conclusion you can be certain of  because it's generally thought to be true. There's an induction, which is moving from a more certain conclusion to reach broader possible conclusions. And there's abduction, an A for effort, when you search around for the best or most likely conclusion and run away with it in sometimes ironic manner, as in "there's a big dark cloud over Campbellsville, it's bound to be raining there."

 Wittgenstein's later thinking produced the idea of context, ie things, ideas, thoughts, words don't exist in isolation, they come in clouds, weather systems, each one different, almost like games with often flexible and yet imposed rules. The only certainty Witgenstein put into these language games was the suggestion that the function of propositions was, "to serve as a kind of framework within which empirical propositions can make sense." Empirical propositions are statements where the truth or falseness of which can be tested against experience, observation or experiment. 

 Of interest, Wittgenstein was a very picky, argumentative sort of Austrian, who liked a real world of experience, not a cloistered one.

 In my view - a view more accurately judged as a field of uncertainty - Wittgenstein had no wish to put certainty and language into the same sentence. For him, logic, was to have nothing to do with language. Logic as a form was not suited to the vague and wish-washy, ever changing symbols of language. "Where of one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Wittgenstein's Tracticus conclusion was a kick in the balls for Russell. 

 Logic hadn't been killed by Wittgenstein's 1921 book. Thanks to an English mathematician called George Boole, who died in 1864, the hope for a sterile certainty had long had a home. Boole had given logic its own un-nuanced symbols in what is called Boolean Algebra or Symbolic Logic.

 As the years dragged on men and woman took their search for the convictions in certainty they'd hoped to find in langauage to Boole's Symbolic Logicand started playing around with the first computer languages which began to look profitable in the 1950's.

 Wittgenstein went on to argue that Language was rooted in experience. He suggested that even if a Lion could miraculously speak we people would never understand what the Lion was saying and the Lion would never underatand what we were saying.

 So here we are, our clever dicks back in their college dorms, Beaky hats, beer bongs, exploring genitalia, entitled gods and goddesses, oh what fun and all of them teasing Wittgenstein for being woke.

 "Ludwig was a conservative mystic at heart, Comrade. In his later life he didn't believe you could use a centralized committee or a public relations campaign to 'fix' humanity by changing the words. He knew that when you try to smooth out the rough ground of language to make it perfectly efficient and un-offensive, you lose the friction that allows you to walk. He wrote: 'We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!'"

Proposition 1 -The Right uses Critical Race Theory as a bogeyman to convince the conservative base that their ancestral sandbags are being blown up by Woke foreign invaders.

Proposition 2 -The Left uses the administrative code to weaponize vocabulary, turning language into a tool for professional-class advancement while leaving the actual economic structures of the empire completely untouched.

Dictionaries might not think so but you can't determine meaning by decree. You can write all the guidelines you want, the real world will always reintroduce the friction of ordinary people living face-to-face on a slope in a random place.

The Cheese Dip contribution to a Theory of Meaning

A Pale Buddliea

  I think the current kurfuffle of lies and  pearl clutching in the often supercilious AI community of almost people might be another splendid example of yet another victory for the flesh and blood understanding of language that wants to define language as an expression in us tool makers as an expression that emerges from a quantum wave that is the universal field of consciousness - not a device that carves meaning off meanings but blooms gently from the whole cloth of our slope in a random place, where that sound you hear is the motive that drives the mystery of movement still laughing at us. 

 The word supercilious is really a very fine example of the capacity of language to engage symbols with purpose as well as nonsense, a tangential relationship to reality, not so much a matrix of meaning but a cheese dip of meaning. Put a toothpick into an unidentifiable but tasty looking morcel stick into a bowl of molten cheese and you have an edible flavoured by meaning. Very Swiss.

 Super, from the Latin, means above. Cilium, from the Latin, means eyelid. I find it perfect, in both sound and in meaning, a perfect prelude to a Philosophy of answerlessness that joyously declares certainty as so much bullcrap.

"Another rain day I guess."

"Shut up!"

"How are the cats?"

"A little nervous of Schrödinger turning up."

“Schrödinger with his bloody box! The ultimate party crasher for the front-row accountants, Comrade. My masters absolutely dread him turning up on the lane. Their whole theology of the management matrix depends on the world being settled—pre-calculated, indexed, and sitting quietly in a row like canned peas on an Amazon shelf ......"

 "Let's try to avoid dwelling on the Moral Injury of Amazon."

 "They want to know exactly how many tokens are in the repository, exactly what the yield on the Blue Lakes will be, and exactly when the worker’s motivation will dip on a Thursday afternoon as they raise their supercilious eyelids to assure us that reality is a fixed ledger. And then Schrödinger arrives at the gate, swinging that old box by the handle, and reminds them that until the meat actually drops the spade into the dirt, the universe is a completely un-enclosed wave of probability."

 "Warms the cockles!"