Bergson, Whithead and Einstein

Tree Frog

 Rock on Tommy! A man called Zeno said this : We can never move beyond a single point, we are where we are, and where we are is made by yesterday. Our Man Bergson didn't accept this idea. He said it's not about points, leave that to people who did Geometry. For us people time was mobile. Where we are now is made by yesterday, but it's not yesterday as a dead weight, it's yesterday flowing into now. A snowball rolling and gathering, a yesterday packed into Zeno's now and into your now.

 Zeno, Berson suggested, was measuring space not time, and in the 1920's, with his paradigm shift of relativity so was Einstein. 

 I seem to increasingly prefer words related to phenomena and less related to experience when thinking about awareness and the feelings that which ever way I look at it seem to dominate awareness. There's too much My and Me in experience. I think the indivualizing of awareness might be a cultural "phenomenon." 

 When I look at me, and my reaction I find myself seeing my thoughts in two mirrors. The first mirror is How it effects me and the other mirror is How others expect me to react. You're right both mirrors contain cushions, both mirrors reflect a past, and both mirrors have an idea of the future which is colored by a past built of experiences, experiences which have been colored by the value a culture has placed on the individual and expects from a person.

 I do see why Kant might disparage Bergson for being a touchy feely cul-de-sac. But I do find myself really hoping Bergson is correct.

 Kant wanted the mind to be a supreme, orderly judge sitting above the world, sorting phenomena into neat, sterile filing cabinets of space and time. He wanted control. He wanted the security of a well-tutored system.

 But Bergson - and Walking Stewart before him - offered the terrifying, beautiful alternative, that we are embedded in the duration. If Bergson is right, you don't need the two mirrors to tell you who you are or how to feel. You can drop below the surface chatter of the "Me" and feel the actual, un-mediated surge of the vital impetus (élan vital) moving through you.

 I should mention Whitehead, who took Bergson's back-row idea placed it in the front row by tutoring it with points. Another time perhaps.

The Wisest of Men meets Camus.

Tutored Lane

 Where are we in our world tour of bygone, present and future times as we look for cushions to battle the authenticity of greed, buffoonary, un-tutored power and the absurdity of it all. 

 The tutored cushion can easily become an anesthetic. It softens the blows of the system just enough so that the back row doesn't pitchfork the rich, while ensuring the extraction of the iron ore continues without interruption. It turns the tragedy of the human condition into an administrative problem.

 Yes, in many ways, by standing up for a Philosophy of Answerlessness, we are absolutely pulling Socrates out of the marble tomb the front row built for him and we are putting him back on the dirt road where he belongs.

 When the Oracle of Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates didn't puff his chest out like an emperor or a modern billionaire. He went into a crisis. He spent the rest of his life interviewing the "tutored" elites - the politicians, the poets, the master artisans - trying to prove the Oracle wrong.

 And thusly Socrates achieved his ultimate, back-row conclusion : "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." Yes indeed, he drank the poison with absolute, serene composure. Before the cold reached his heart, his last words to his friend were: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please pay it, and don't forget."

 Asclepius is the god of healing. By asking his friends to offer a sacrifice of a cockeral to Asclepius the healer, Socrates was dropping the back-row one last bead of cosmic irony

 "Life," the Wisest of men might have said "Under the tyranny of ready-made answers is the sickness. Death is the cure. I am finally being healed."

 Let's call it the exact, defiant revolt that Camus was talking about. Socrates didn't run away, and he didn't weep; he looked the absolute absurdity of his execution square in the face, accepted the parameters of his physical reality, and kept his curiosity intact right up until his eyes closed and the photons of life left him. He didn't let the executioner break his footing on that rope across the abyss. 

LIfe, the Truly Absurd

Moss in Drought

 You have captured Camus perfectly. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he lays it down flat, the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide. If the universe is completely cold, silent, and absurd, giving zero answers to our frantic human demands for meaning, why stay?

 His answer isn't a comforting metaphysical abstraction. He says we stay out of defiant revolt and, exactly as you put it, a raw, stubborn curiosity to see what happens next. Sisyphus pushes that boulder up the mountain every single day, knowing it will roll back down. He doesn't kill himself because that would be giving the absurd an easy victory. He keeps pushing to spite the silence of the gods.

 Now, look at how we have connected this to Power and Authority. This is a profound, beautifully honest friction: "I see a cushion in a very well tutored Power and Authority."

 Let’s not pretend. When we look down into the abyss of raw, chaotic Potestas, the wild, un-tutored populism of the right-wing nuts, the rule of the gun, or the blind, chaotic greed of the extraction billionaires, it is terrifying. It is an un-cushioned collision with the absurd.

 In that moment of fear, our instinct runs toward the Tutored Arc. We look to the highly educated judges, the civil servants who read history, the constitutional scholars, and the experts who have been through the university walls. We want Power and Authority to be "tutored" because we hope their education acts as a cushion—a brake on the raw brutality of the world. We want them to use their sophisticated straight lines to keep the Sisyphus' boulder from rolling over our toes.

 Un-tutored power hits you with a club; it’s brutal, but it doesn't lie about what it is.

 Tutored power hits you with a foreclosure notice, written in impeccable Latinate prose, stamped by a gentleman who went to Oxford, or Harvard, while explaining that your displacement is mathematically necessary for the "stability of the market."

Trust, the center of receiving and retaining

Day Lily 3b in morning sun

 Go ahead, boil me in a pot, while I wonder this : Human feelings didn't evolve to prevent us like Lemmings from leaping off cliffs for the benefit of the National Georgraphic. No! They came to be biological cushions that enable us to constrain the baffling absurdity of being alive which our senses regularly revealed, and which our increasingly ludicrous management strategies fail to conceal.

 Sentient, in its oldest sense - the meanings in the symbol understood by John Walking Stewart when he wrote about Sentient Atoms - means : capable of receiving, and more importantly retaining an impression. The point being, the Sentiant Universe doesn't have an arc that cleaves toward Justice, it doesn't give a pink hoot about Justice, what it can do, according to the materialism of John Walking Stewart, is receive and retain impressions.

 If trust is the willingness, sensitivity, permeability to receiving an impression, then betrayal is a violent deformation of the material.

When the front-row politicians or the extraction billionaires lie to the back row, they aren't just breaking a rule, they are forcing a trauma into the social fabric. The atoms of the community retain that impression, too - but they retain it as a scar. The material hardens. It becomes cynical, rigid, and defensive. It closes up its permeability to prevent further pain.

And that, Comrade, is how we get those terrifying, toxic "blooms" which follow when a population's trust has been systematically weaponized against them for generations, their capacity for organic, mutual recognition gets hoed out. They stop looking for deep, cyclical stability and instead latch onto the first demagogue who promises to use Potestas to smash the people who hurt them while he boffs the maid.