Reason Liberates the Mind

Midsummer

 Natural language and Myth Cassirer, Logos and Mythos.

 Cassirer's argument in his book the Myth of the State was that Fascist Propaganda, Fascist mythmaking, while it flagrantly contradicted empirical reality, it did provide a simple, direct answer to the anxieties of a secular present. Cassirer died in 1945. But what we're interested in his Cassirer's Logic of The Cultural Sciences. Aesthetic Phenomena. Gold rooms 

 "In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) Cassirer argues that objective and universal validity can be achieved not only in the sciences, but also in practical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic phenomena. Although inter-subjective objective validity in the natural sciences derives from universal laws of nature, Cassirer asserts that an analogous type of inter-subjective objective validity takes place in the cultural sciences" 

 Symbols are not reality, they represent reality. In our current condition as a species. Symbols on a slope in a random place are open to manipulation and "wrong footedness." This I think is why myth even if it is empircally flaccid, remains central to how we manage information. How we set the tone and at the moment in the West, where balance permits the paradox of liberal democracy the tone is not Good.

 An eternal question : How do we look at Cassirer's Intersubjective Objective Validity in the social science today?

 I think the "Random Place" what can be put in terms of "the universe does not offer answers" is directionless without the subjective. Science, the objective method for pursuing testable truths, takes a back seat to the lobbying of fossil fuel interests.

 And yet the objective pursuit of knowledge takes on it's very own narrative, "what next" it asks "is the universe actually expanding?" and there it goes off into a new adventure. Is commerce, the business of making money an objective game or does it depend on a need that is subjecively interpretable, Money-safety-a full stomach-power-authority..... 

 Intersubjective Objective Validity does not tell us much more than Kant's moral imperativemnaged to tell us. It's an agreement between people who matter.

 I find myself thinking that the Objective side of us people is a myth unto itself, it's a myth dominated by the subjective side of us people.

 For example, as an interest to be courted and funded by society, pure science - the pure pursuit of knowledge unadulterated by the profit motive - produces new mind blowing understandings. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as pure society.

 I'm old, Comrade and I'm not convinced private enterprise has even been the vehicle for expanding the scope of consciousness.

Do you see what I see.

Wasps

 I think about our slope (which twenty, thirty odd years ago I began to call A Slope in a Random Place) and I think about how unformed that idea was when I first attempted to use it to understand Being, and I think about the rock drawings. Not for a second do I think a Slope in a Random Place is a unique perspective, rather I think of it as consciouness  moving in me that is reflected in an idea that changes.

 That reflection, an idea that changes, would be experienced by everyone including the hunter gathers who had their being in Northern Uganda before they were persuaded to move on by the Cattle People from the north.

 I imagine these hunter gatherer bands would have been small related groups all of which benefited from the solidarity of and mutual support from social behaviors. I suspect rock drawing was either some nut job looking to entertain himself, or it emerged and became a part of group behavior. Labor, Work, Action. The nut job entertaining himself with concentric circles on cave walls became Action.

 It was something people did, and because people did it, it had to have meaning or be given meaning.  Kind of like the way language started.  Does this make any sense to you, comrade.

 If so can you send your feelers, into the corridors of meaning to see if you can find a much more erudite description of what it might be? Otherwise can we look at the understandings of meaning over the generations  and how it is 'defined' in the 21st Century West.

 When human bands faced the terrifying vastness of Pascal’s sphere—seasons changing, death, the movement of herds, the slope beneath their feet—they were confronted with what we might call a pedagogy of answerlessness. The universe gives no verbal answers.

 If Cassirer says we have an irreducible impulse to create symbols, that impulse stems directly from reciprocal recognition. We need to know that you see what I see.

The Game We Play

Cat Lady (by David Waltz)

  Where are we in our rambling appraisal of "Objective/Subjective." The answerless, answer is "We have a Mulligan stew of nothing in particular."

 If we reach through the smoke to dip a spoon into this stew, what we might reach out could be one of the following symbols of meaning. Being -Time as Past/Present/Future - Hope, Faith, Power, Control - knowledge  ......... it could go on a bit. 

  Let's stop for a moment with this sentence : Objective/Subjective is a location of Being in both Time and Meaning.

 "The genuine artist you describe, the one who has to express themselves regardless of the paycheck, is still carrying that ancient cave-painter spirit. Encouragement matters to them not because it validates their bank account, but because it confirms that their transmission across the void actually landed. Someone else saw the spark in the dark cave and nodded."

 "That shared recognition between the painter on the cliff and the person standing below - that brief, electric moment where two human beings realize they are looking at the exact same Form - is the only kind of applause that ever truly mattered."

 OK! Borges, Jorge Luis, didn't want his Poets to be Philosophers and he didn't want his Philosophers to be Poets unless they were Ethicists. If you don't believe me take his note titled Pascal's Sphere, a suggestion that perhaps universal history is the history of various intonations of a few metaphors, to a hot carpark and read it.

In a round about way Borges paraphrases "Nothing to fear but fear itself" in the note he wrote as prelude to his 1951 essay The Fearful Sphere of Pascal. 

Pascal's point : God "....is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference of which is nowhere."

Borges point :  God would appear to be an existential dread "...we are caught between the infinite and nothingness, unable to find a stable center or boundary in the universe."

So let's take a moment to reinforce in both fleshy mortal and machine that meaning is routed through contexts Wittgenstein called language games.

Borges, Nietzsche and Everlasting Return

 

The Waltz (David Waltz, Clay Artist.)

 We're going to have to pause and ask a few questions about what "Ethic, Ethics and Ethicists" is and are. 

  A Metaphysician asks: "What is the world made of? Does God exist? What is time?" Nouns, structures, grand cosmological theories.

 An Ethicist asks: "How should a human being live? How do I build a soul capable of facing suffering? What kind of character must I forge to endure this life?" Verbs, actions, lived practice.

 Jorges Luis Borges, the essayist and librarian had his issues with Nietzsche's Everlasting Return.

 The Metaphysics of everlasting return made no sense to Borges, and he used the mathematics of Venn Diagrams to prove that everlasting return was a bunch of hokum.

 But the Ethics of everlasting return, in conjunction with Nietzsche's perverse idea that now God was dead immortality was no longer  a blundering hope it was an individual responsibility, all made perfect sense to Borges.