The Great Gatsbys of the 2020's, Benjamin's weak messainic force, and the Cat's Whiskers.

Timothy Grass

 Walter Benjamin used the words 'wreckage of history' to describe an understanding he saw in a painting by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus (New Angel).

 Benjamin called the painting Angel of History and it seemed to him that Klee's angel was looking back at a history that wasn't a chain of progressive events but a single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage, an accumulation of ruin, broken promises, fragments of unrealized potential and silenced voices.  The nervous expression on the angel's face suggested the storm of progress was nonetheless propelling the angel forward, nothing anyone could do about it.

 It was 1940, the world was at war, pretty natural that a Jew looking to escape the concentration camps should have a fairly unhappy view of the world. Benjamin's understanding of Self wasn't framed around Jewishness, it was framed around a Self that was a struggling German Intellectual, his contribution to literary criticism, politics, philosophy and sociology slowly becoming established.

 In his Thesis on the Philosophy of History, as though to find comfort somewhere Benjamin looked at the New Angel and he introduced his idea of the past as a "Weak Messianic Force." The past was there, it was grumbling, sometimes writhing in agony, re-written perhaps, but not forgotten.

 In discussions with my alter egos, as we share opinions about the future, I have found myself questioning and in opposition to the inglorious, thick witted nature of the people dominating the process. The Cat's Whiskers, they are not. And indeed, you can always see Eden until God takes it away.

 

Transendent Value, subjective, coincidence Jung and Pauli

Rain on Oakleaf

 A rain day is the perfect time to think about the meanings in Transcendental. The German Idealists, including Carl Jung, in my understanding, used transcendental to describe that area of mind that cheerfully engages in sifting through the possibilities most of which are probably but not definitely impossible.

 Kant had the big book on the subject, where he advised men and women of wisdom to be wary of Pure Reason. He suggested that when engaged in thought processes, the temptations to make fantastical and often entirely romantic possibilities real were ever present and if allowed to would quickly put the boot in reason, kick it to the curve and wander off into something like The Virgin Birth.

 In 1850, Schopenhauer put together a title called "Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual." This is a passage from a translation of that book: "All the events in a man's life would accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams."

 This reading of Schopenhauer's "Objective" and the "Subjective" caught Carl Jung's imagination, caused him to read the I Ching and, along with the quantum physcict Wolfgang Pauli, come away with "The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche" which explored the idea of Synchronicity and the subjective impacts of coincidence on the psyche.

 The point being that a majority of Analytical Psychologists agree that synchronicity experiences, acceptance of coincidence as opposed to dismissing it could be useful for therapy. Analytical psychologists hold that individuals must understand the "compensatory meaning of these experiences" which enables them to explore the widerness of consciousness rather than get all worked up in crazy talk about obsessions such as neurotic and dominating superstition.

 The question of course is when it comes to the psyche where is the difference between subjective and objective

 

Russell and Planck's Grasp of Consciouness and the Infantile State of Hubris prone to f-ing with it?

Blooms and Stuff

 Welcome to Planck's Matrix. 

 When Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, made his famous 1931 declaration "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness," he was laying claim to the idea that the universe without consciousness isn't a finished, clockwork machine, nothing more you barn rat.

 In a Field of Randomness, without the observer, the universe is just that shimmering, un-collapsed wave function we talked about—a field of pure probability, potential, and mathematical "noise."

 Planck was arguing that consciousness is the fundamental bedrock. It is the matrix of reality. He didn’t mean that a human brain physically "creates" rocks out of nothing, but rather that "Matter" as a stable, defined noun cannot exist without a conscious matrix to perceive and measure it. To put it in our language, Consciousness is the ultimate sieve that forces the chaotic, random and beautiful "Verbing" of the universe to settle into the solid Nouns of physical matter. Were it an orchestra the conductors downbeat would send the verb running for our benefit nothing else.

 So what might Life be?  Bertrand Russell gives us an Anchor:  He declared that when life (that's us) is discovered it would be revealed as "A Special Sort of Matter."

 Russell was a defender of a view called Neutral Monism. He looked at the bungle of people spliting the world into two separate magical kingdoms, "Mind" (ghostly, spiritual) and "Matter" (hard, cold bricks) and said the division is a lie.

Instead  Russell argued that the universe is made of one fundamental "stuff" that is neither purely mind nor purely matter.

Then what is the Special Matter as we experience it? When that fundamental stuff gets organized in a highly specific, complex, porous way—like a brain, a nervous system, or a fleshy body—it manifests as life and consciousness.

So Consciousness for us isn't a ghost hovering over the orchestra; it is what happens when the instruments themselves become so complexly tuned that the music starts listening to itself. 

Weber's Rationalites and the Critical Theorists

Horkheimer and the Enlightenment

 Max Weber, the man of reason, in his list archetypes of rational, and therefore likely to be predictable behaviors identified Instrumental Rationality and Value Rationality.

 Instrumental Rationality was the type of social action where the means are rationally chosen to achieve a specific end as efficiently as possible. Examples of instrumental rationality abound. I could mention Internment Camps, often called Concentration Camps or I could mention Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.

 Value Rationality is driven by a conscious unconditional belief in the value of the action itself independent of the actions success or failure. An exmple of this would be refusing to force March 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation from the homeland to Oklahoma, or working the gas chambers in a concentration camp.

 In Adorno and Horkheimer's book "Dialectic of the Enlightenment" their argument in the 1930's and beyond was that the two opposites of the enlightenment Dialectic had resulted in a synthesis that had resulted a myth that reason was invincible. The result being an ascendence of Instrumental Rationality.