Late stage Irony Wallace and Schopenhauer

Blue Convolvulus or Bindweed

 OK lets agree that in his understanding of Post Irony, David Foster Wallace was of the opinion that in it's maturing phase postmodernism had turned irony into an end in itself, it had become a cynicism (in the modern sense of cynicism not the Diogenes of Synope's meaning) a cynicism masquerading as irony and as such it had sort of got stuck with an assumption that authenticity, truth and commitment where just very uncool. He argued that it had go to the point where any suggestion of authenticity, truth or commitment received a sneer, a rolled eye, a cruel laugh and all those classic back row reactions which some of us took solace from and still do. Baxter and I do have to say that while we both love this Post Irony stuff, we are inclined toward the idea that Wallace's call for new and positive "guiding narratives for ourselves and our communities even while remaining mindful that any narrative is not altogether true or universal" is a sad marriage between abject snowflakeism and Starbucks didgeridoo-libtardism. However Baxter and I are right there when it comes to a general desire to engage with a narrative that avoids elitism, sentimentality, whimpering and whingeing. There's a suggestion that Our new Comrade David Wallace's critique of a white nationalist narrative would include the following wonderful words, "unchecked, self-aggrandizing fanaticism - dangerous attachment masquerading as an "enlarging" cause but is, in fact, a narrow, sentimental, and ultimately "pathetic" form of bondage to a chosen self-image." How beautiful, not at all ironic, but let's just say if you were a believer in white nationalism it might be deemed cynicism. Oh that he had lived to conjure a string of pearls for a critique of Christian White Nationalism. Our other friend Arthur Schopenhauer, if you asked him to give thought to a new and positive guiding narrative he would have laughed, or he might have laughed, more likely he'd have directed one of his Poodles to bite you in the leg, because Arthur Schopenhauer was anti-narrative philosopher. He didn't look at the world and ask: How can I be happy? Nirvana for him was Nothingness, an acceptance of the vanity of existence, understanding that the will was restless and born to suffer, no narrative or belief could stop that, so the rational answer to the human condition was stop dreaming and stop believing. Safe to say Schopenhauer had little faith in an objective love, and David Wallace couldn't find one

George Luis Borges' metaphysics, David Foster Wallace's Post Irony and Joyce's Ulysses

 

Purple Passion Flower Vine

If the back row can take this seriously and stop rolling their eyes I'll remind you that Borges took much of his metaphysics from Schopenhauer. A précis of Schopenhauer's work suggests: "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." Beware of what Schopenhauer understood by Will and by Creative Imagination, if you don't know, don't pretend you do. Borges's own thoughts on the subject included the idea that "Fiction is Metaphysics." Then, yesterday, we briefly played, ironically, with this understanding of metaphysics using the Modernist James Joyce's Ulysses, until overwhelmed by our own genius, Baxter and I sunk into a deep ennui with ill-temper that required lunch and a lie-down, which, according to Schopenhauer, genius is inevitably prone to. Our question this morning goes this way: "Does whatever comes after Postmodernism in the West, treat Plato and Immanuel Kant with respect, will these two giants of metaphysics become an example of really boring, soon forgotten and passionless or will they keep their place as tedious collectibles in one or other of the many Ivory Boarding Houses that does the laundry, serves breakfast, interesting lunches and dinner so no one has to think for themselves?" OK, as fans of Post Irony, what Baxter and I really need is for Kant to offer us an endless Critique of Postmodernism, then we might get a better understanding of this awful accusation that Postmodernism resulted in an all pervading cynicism where a buffoonish, snow-flaky understanding of authenticity defined as "genuine feelings and human connections" are impossible. Oh diddums, that's inches away from saying what we need is a good war.  Ask Baxter, try being on the receiving end of a radical Spleen's theosophical invective. Here we go, my good friend's still waiting for the Spleen's Jesus or maybe his Buddha to send him a manual. So let's just hold fast to the Chariot Theory of God and Men and assume an Almighty is an inevitable gathering place for Ideal Forms. Anyway, David Foster Wallace, was born in 1962, he was a depressed person, he threw coffee tables at his girlfriend, that sort of thing, he hanged himself in 2008 when he was 46. His critique of Postmodernism goes something like this: he reckoned the Postmodernism of the 1950's and 1960's used irony as a tool of rebellion. Good Lord! Beatniks, hippies, sex, drugs, rock and roll, pluralism, social safety nets, national health, unemployment benefits, mixed marriages, irony from the children of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernest Bevin. But on it went, in 1970's postmodernism, according to David Foster Wallace, who would have been a teenager at the time, became a fashionable cave, it was hip, it was super cool, people learned to love it, which resulted in a pervasive cynicism. David wanted a return to his ill-considered understanding of authenticity, he was a teacher looking for enthusiasm perhaps, maybe the back row really pissed him off and his solution to the cynicism he saw being promulgated by the cave of postmodernist irony was this new human condition referred to as Post Irony. The simpler answer might be to remain an existentialist by not parking the boat in a harbor of convictions that demands an enemy for an anchor. But there again we have the very ancient Chariot Theory of God and Men, a demand that experience precedes essence as well as an understanding of authenticity that suggests that like cats we people make our own meaning, so get over it. David Foster, who might not have grasped the fundamental argument of the postmodernists, which is that we're all better off without the wriggling around and lies meta-narratives require to maintain them, was born in Ithaca New York not Ithaca Ulysses' home Island or Dublin the birthplace of James Joyce's own metaphysics. Tomorrow an unironic introduction to hypocrisy. 

Submission to Life and Happy Endings

Clematis Paniculata

We've had a rather feeble shot at saying hello to George Luis Borges. Within the context of a temporal reality, today I look up at him as an early Postmodernist with Post Ironic tendencies and Magical Realist leanings.  Baxter and I loath those sort of categories, but to make ourselves sound important we still use them. Meanwhile, off and on, I've sat on Borges foot stool since the post office days, a good fifty years ago, and I still have a slight grudge against Tolkien, Frank Herbert and perhaps JG Ballard for distracting me. But when you get your books from second hand shops in a welsh city that boasts a university and hard drinking Welsh Nationalist Poets, what do you expect, you can't pick and choose! Either way, George Luis Borges had respect for our man Arthur Schopenhauer, for both his pessimism and his metaphysics. He embraced Schopenhauer's understanding that can be précised this way:  "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." You have to love that simple summary of an exceedingly complex set of ideas. Borges own understandings included the suggestion "metaphysics is fiction," and indeed his blurring of the real with fantasy is beautifully ironic. I know, Baxter is also wondering whether he exists and if so why hasn't the Spleen been given a kinder, more generous personality. As for James Joyce, Borges, like so many, Borges went love hate on him. He loved Joyce's blurring of dream and waking and he hated Joyce's lack of respect and somewhat cavalier attitude for those of his readers who have struggled to battle through the ridiculously long sentences at the end of Ulysses. Just to be sure on our shared definition of ironic. In 1502 it meant: by which a man sayeth one thing and giveth to understand the contrary. These days in the world of Giant Electricity Guzzling Language Modes, Irony means: a contradiction between what appears to be true and what is actually true, or between what is said and what is truly meant. It's easy to forget that all of Joyce's Ulysses happened on one day, meanwhile all of Homer's Ulysses was a ten year odyssey. And here I think my point would be Joyce's Penelope, Mrs Molly Bloom, definitely had a large number of admirers, including a possible lesbian attachment, as well as an abandoned singing careers, and on that one day, the 16th of June 1904 while her husband Leopold was having a Merry time out with menfolk and barmaids, Molly had joined with her very good looking lover, Blazes Boylan. And there she was at the end of Joyce's Ulysses, lying in bed with her husband Leopold, wandering about the meaning of it all and not finding a great deal of hope. Homer's Penelope, in most accounts, not all, had remained faithful during her husband's ten year absence, had done rather well with the family business, and was happy to see Ulysses back even if he had changed a bit and may have been suffering from post traumatic stress and a sort of narcissistic paranoia. Sadly for Molly, and in my view a tad cowardly of him, Joyce had given Molly the responsibility for the final word of his very long Ulysses. That word was "Yes." It was the word Molly had used in her answer to Leopold when he plighted his troth on a day out to a fishing village north of Dublin, many years before. Joyce thought Molly's "Yes" was a female word, whether good or bad, Molly accepted her lot, submitted to it, her "Yes" was an affirmation of her life and her place in the world. It was happy word, a happy ending.  Born in Dublin James Joyce died in 1941 in Switzerland, he was called a modernist. 

George Luis Borges and Post Irony

George Luis Borges, 1951 portrait by Greta Stern

George Luis Borges, no relation to the Danish entertainer Victor Borge, when he was a young man had a wonderful approach to personality. In a bit of writing he called The Nothingness of Personality he suggested and this is the quote: "I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He wrote this in 1922 when he was 23 years old. I'm tempted to suggest he was thinking about his own approach to the characters in his stories, I'm probably wrong. But he doesn't stop there, he goes on to say a few slightly cruel things about the "...general acquiescence conceded by a man in the role of reader..." who makes massive assumptions about and pays only a "slothful" attention to the "rectitude" of the "rigorous dialectical linkages" in the story, account, or whatever it is the writer has written. His use of the word "dialectical" is particularly enjoyable. The original meaning of dialectic began with the Greek for "conversation or good at debate." Aristotle saw the dialectic as a word that described a form of reasoning that produced conclusions from a premise assumed to be true. Two thousand years later Hegel used the word dialectic to describe a form of reasoning that resolved the internal contradictions within an argument through a three step process of thesis (a dubious premise), antithesis (another suggestion) and the third step was synthesis (a new premise.) Then when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels started waxing dialectical, in some quarters the word dialect quickly became another word for Mephistopheles. Which is about where we are at the moment with The Nothingness of Post Ironic Discourse. Is it Irony, is it a search for purpose, an operatic addiction to displays of passion, a resurrection of Swiss Dadaism? George Luis Borges point in his Nothingness of Personality had something to say about these sorts of conjoinments. As someone who wanted to write he was aware that he wasn't a whole person, when seated by his window with pen in hand he was a self who wanted to write words that gripped the attention of the reader, then when he was elsewhere, in the park or walking to the café, he was someone else. The temporal nature of being a person, includes the temporal nature of personality, we change from second to second. His other point in the essay was to point out that given the mostly passive role the reader played, a writer's words had to follow a custom of writing if they were going to retain attention and not stretch the reader too far. In another way, the writer had to latch on to mental heuristics in the minds of his or her readers. The thesis achieved (boy meets girl), an antithesis resurrected (girl doesn't like freckles), the synthesis was more or less predictable (boy throws himself from balcony). George Luis Borges found himself blurring the lines between speculation and reality, he embraced the postmodern understandings, it was back then when the demise of the modern and the emergence of a new truth seemed as terrifying or as ridiculous as the Post Ironic children of today and as ludicrous as the waddling and geriatric political classes attempting to incorporate or seduce them by reducing their passions to dollar bills. George Luis Borges went blind at the age of 55, he died in 1986 at the age of 86.  

The Plain or Gathering Place of Ideal Forms

Gray Tree Frog

On this first day of a possible rapture, Baxter has volunteered a word of two about Plato and chariots. It begins with a parable, allegory, haggadah, whatever you want to call it, this one is about people, gods and ideal forms. And yes, to give this particular exemplum from Plato a degree of juj I have run rather loose with the details while retaining the basic distinctions Plato makes between men and gods, as well as his approach to what knowledge is, where it is, and how we people get our fingers on it. We all, men and gods, start out the same. Dumb as bricks yet beady eyed and blinking in the light surrounded by Ideal Forms of everything there is. And lo as we become less and less adorable and more and more obnoxious we begin to outstay our welcome, so the power from beyond, the origin of all, what Schopenhauer might have called the Blind Irrational Universal Will that exists outside of space and time, what Plato thought of as a non-physical eternal realm, this power from beyond produces chariots to send us on our way. Not sure whether you get a weeks training, whether there's any classroom work, or whether horse management and chariot driving literacy is assumed. What does happen is that some of us are more adept at chariot driving than others, some of us have well matched horses who get along with each other. But some of us have no idea what we're doing, we're a little nervous of horses, their teeth and their hooves, we're given ill-matched horses who have little respect for each other. And off across the plain we go to explore the host of perfect forms, absorb every ounce of perfect knowledge that's been laid out on display for our benefit. Lucky for you if your chariot gets manageable horses, you can take your time, explore, maybe pause get a closer a look at the ideal form of feminine beauty, the perfect carpenter, perfect table, an interior designer or an ideal lemon tree. But if your horses are Ill-matched and uncontrollable, charging around like mental patients, good chance you'll hide in the bowels of your assigned chariot waiting for it to be over. In time the more confident charioteers cheer on their steeds and up they go toward the clouds where they become gods. It's like a rapture. Sadly the less confident charioteers get flung around, this way and that until they get tossed carriage-less out of the Realm of Ideal Forms, they fall to earth were they wake up in a birth canal, find themselves kicking and screaming as they enter the world as mortals. It sucks even worse, because as a new born mortal even though you had your chance to fully grasp and understand the totality of knowledge you remember nothing. You're an empty bucket that leaks. For us mortals, knowledge will never be learned, if we're lucky, and there's a slim chance, with a little help from Plato telling us how to think properly we might remember something from our visit to the Plain of Ideal Forms. The point to keep a hold of, whether you call it Will or Eternal Realm, for both Plato and Schopenhauer this whatever it is lies outside us. For Kant, the plain of the ideal forms is inside us. The European Enlightenment strove for the idea that for us consciousness was our individualized special place, it was time for us to master ourselves, become the self overcoming Übermensch. Now and then a wacko like Schopenhauer popped up, occasionally physicists in their dotage made the odd sinister suggestion about a universal consciousness. The well-off, god bless them, in the West, the comfortable, those subject to aggressive tutelage and the threat of career, while struggling with third generation wealth, feeling overwhelmed and disenchanted by The Enlightenment looked to the East for solace from a wider perspective on the subject of being alive. We wanted cold baths and the whip in the drive to define our frightfully special me.

Will and the Ideal Forms for Schopenhauer

Waiting for Rain

The great sadness in life, and Baxter is trying to be brave, is that you can't talk about Kant or Schopenhauer or any of Kant's disciples, without mentioning Plato's metaphysics. When I was a callow youth, back when The Spleen was a cheerful, a happy go-lucky and confident atheist and when Baxter was no more than a distant glint in an abdominal aorta's eye, the word metaphysics was something Doctor Faustus used to pick up chicks who he could never marry because marriage was apparently a solemn Christian rite and Mephistopheles didn't approve of solemn institutions. Soon enough I realized that a majority meaning for the word metaphysics had less to do with the physical and legal conjoining of boys and girls and more to do with an understanding of the origin of the physical world. Certainly Plato wasn't the first to venture into the role of educating the youth and anyone else who would listen, but it was his metaphysics that had a profound influence on the western world. Even Foucault had to join the other postmodernists and reckon with Plato. And there's a chance the brothers and sister of Post Irony might one day ask a large language model to explain Plato's building blocks of reality, his Ideal Forms, before the data banks are subsumed by passionate and fashionable warbling of a Post Irony Aesthetic, a mid twenty first century Punk, a reincarnation of Siouxsie and the Banshees, what fun, and mindbogglingly First World, where's Pontius Pilate when you need him, but I have promised Baxter we'll try to live long enough to see it. Anyway! What on this good earth is an Ideal Form and why didn't Schopenhauer agree with Kant on what Plato said about Ideal Forms? It's a massive question that's put the shakes into Baxter who's already been accused of anti-antisemitism by the Spleen for saying that Ivan gave him the heebie-jeebies. Plato had decided that everything that happens in our brains was subject to our flawed perceptions and as a result was fundamentally imperfect. His Ideal Forms were the perfect, nonphysical archetypes of everything that exists. For Plato these perfect, non physical Archetypes existed outside our brains, they were in the universe, not in our minds. Kant decided that Plato had made an error, Kant argued that these perfect non physical archetypes were not in the universe they were in our brains. Schopenhauer dismissed Kant's idea that Ideal Forms were in our brains. He dismissed Kant's idea that Ideal forms were a priori structures of knowledge which our superior and unique cognitive abilities allowed us to access. Instead Schopenhauer insisted that of course ideal forms existed outside our brains, he rather denigrated Kant's positive attitude to cognitive ability, and Schopenhauer was determined that the timeless essence of all things were a manifestation of will, or more accurately Ideal Forms were a first level manifestation of will. For Schopenhauer, what he meant by Will was a metaphysical primal energy that exists outside of time, space and causality. Hold on, didn't Plato have his own thoughts on primal energy. Yes, I think he did, sort of. Plato put it together in a parable about the difference between the obedient horses that drew chariots for the Gods and the unruly horses that drew the chariots for men. Either way Baxter's yawning and we have a life to live.  

Understandings of Myth and Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer. Portrait by Johann Schäfer 1859

Conway's 2017 approach to a myth of Crowd Size now feels like a hundred years ago, but in another way something as intense as the origin of Christianity, or even the origin of the word Zoroaster, instead of Zarathustra, is rife with alternative possibilities, or alternative facts. Here I'm happy to argue that years and years ago, without myth we people would have failed, we'd have been canned food for the Saber Tooth Tiger, it's just that the Conway version of myth making remains fundamentally pathetic, a tragic misunderstanding of venerable and ancient myth making protocols. To dwell a while longer with myth, I always thought our generation of thinking emerged from the understandings drilled into us and our teachers by the influential Immanuel Kant. Kant enjoyed the idea that the enlightenment was a chance for us people to finish our apprenticeship, he saw our chance to "emerge from a self-incurred tutelage." His view of myth was: because of it, we people remained in a sort of bondage. At the same time, for the sake of his Lutheran students, he added the suggestion that God was mostly about morality, he went on to suggest that the pursuit of moral behavior within a society was an entirely reasonable search by reasonable creatures. Indeed that pursuit of morality was a Categorical Imperative about which we could do nothing, we just couldn't help ourselves but want to be nice, it was a Universal law in a Kingdom of Ends - we're talking The Metaphysics of Morals published 1797. Mind you Kant wasn't totally averse to mystery. Uniquely blessed as he thought we were  by reason, he nonetheless reckoned we remained cave dwellers who could never fully grasp everything. Yet Kant had a reverence for the sets of emotions assigned to the word Awe and the word Beauty. He knew not why the starry night evinced both awe and a reverence for the beautiful in him and yet it did. It may have been a union of Georges Sorel's writing on the power of myth and Arthur Schopenhauer's understanding of myth and religion that opened a reverential door for me, or at least struck me with a liking. Sadly this side of the Appalachians, the more delicate English speakers are made nervous by something as harmless as the Frankfurt School's thoroughly reasonable, almost an embodiment of reason, collection of suggests that have been given the two words Critical Theory. This, shall we call it a gang land intolerance, does rather taint an environment increasingly dominated by the current iteration of state employed Brown Shirts, who presumably are beneficiaries of the very latest managerial Approach to the opportunities of Purity through Privatized Internment Camps. So instead of considering the role of myth in Sorel's Revolutionary Syndicalist views, his oligarchy of syndicates which for Sorel was to benefit the working man not the Indolent Capitalist, it's probably best all round if I wax more than somewhat on the Poodle loving and delightfully bad tempered Schopenhauer's understanding of myth. For those who may be temporarily disabled by a Post Irony Condition, yes, Schopenhauer's Poodles were a dog breed that originated in Germany, not, as some still believe, France. And for goodness sake, look at Arthur's face, you can sort of see him leading his people into the wilderness. Rest assured our guide Schopenhauer did indeed find humanity a constant source of "vexation and disappointment."

Meta-narrative Movement

Autumn Clematis

Postmodern thinking would suggest that controlling the language used to interpret reality controls the narrative that supports this or that idea of reality. The Goebbels's quote "We shall go down in history as either the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals," is unsourced, and because of that it's suspect. The quote suggests Goebbels was aware of how the narratives the Nazi Party propagated would be judged. But is this unsourced quote something Goebbels actually said? Is it something he actually believed. Or is it a something the author of the quote, when all the information and motivations supporting the author's understanding had found their way into this interpretation of the Goebbels meta-narrative chose to promote as something Goebbels's might have said? Inevitably it's accurate to question the extent to which Goebbels deserves the word meta-narrative all to himself, instead of a more straightforward "The Goebbels Story." It's also probably accurate to suggest that in our current climate the environment is rich with attempts to modify the meta-narrative, there are so many fine examples of attempts to rewrite or re-inform us people. To this end the word democrat is being used as a synonym for the words bad, evil, insane, libtard and dangerous snowflake. But don't hold back, Roget's has some interesting and equally dehumanizing additions for the word republican conjoined with the word patriot. To my mind, the most entertaining of these synonyms is Švejk-like, after Hašek's character, that congenital idiot, The Good Soldier Švejk. Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech, in 1923 he died at the age of 39 of heart disease. His unfinished book on the cretinous nature of authority figures, has been translated into at least 60 languages. Hašek has been called a Satirical Realist, and he's been described as having a passion for writing. He was someone who may well have approved of the Poet Charles Bukowski's epitaph "Don't Try." Bukowski's point was that authenticity before the muddle of pretension was the honorable way to express story and emotion rather than reduce emotion and story to a product. So what is satire? Merriam Webster suggests: trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly. Oxford English suggests: The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics.  Easy to suggest in this day and age of us against him that whoever said "We shall go down in history as either the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals," already begins to sound like a satirist.  

Postmodernism through Ironic Detachment to Post Irony

 

Tie Dye

Post Irony can be defined as a "state in which earnest and ironic interests become muddled." The earnests of our world yearn for an intense and all consuming conviction as opposed to what some might call the skepticism of the ironically detached. Me, as a soul delighted by the Postmodernist Perspective, an irony rich environment, it would be easy enough for you to suggest that I struggle with Ironic Detachment. It's not a disease, it's a tone, the elements of which include the following: an appreciation of bombast which enables me to think I'm sophisticated. A dry and some might say cynical perspective which I have in spades. I prefer to avoid the responsibility of a moral judgement because I'm pretty sure I'd just be making it up to suit my interest, or, being a boy, to get laid. Luckily I enjoy the authenticity and passion of the dedicated existentialist, Camus' absurd is good enough for me, call me Jaroslav Hašek's congenital idiot, The Good Soldier Švejk. But being an old fart I'd prefer the title "An Ironically Detached Postmodernist." There again, if I wanted to be authentic within my peer group and passionately engaged, believe me, I'd be food for those new evangelists the Conflict Entrepreneurs, you know who they are, they're the ones who monetize Post Irony and talk about "our" savior as they point to a passing star while using flash fiction bombast and the invented convictions of the earnest to feed their own bank accounts.

Schopenhauer's Hedgehogs

Sweet Annie and her Ladybird

Before talking about his hedgehogs I wanted to quote from a biography of Arthur Schopenhauer by a professor of philosophy and religion at Wisconsin University. He reproduces a letter addressed to a young Schopenhauer from his mother, who was apparently "vivacious and sociable." The letter to her son contained a character assessment: "You (Arthur) are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people." Yes indeed, no wonder I share Arthur's understanding of myth. Anyway, it was a cold winter's day in the wealthy and free-wheeling Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth when a "prickle" of hedgehogs, sometimes called an "array" or a "kribbeln," pronounced kri-ben, of hedgehogs, decided that instead of freezing to death they'd risk their reputations and cuddle together for warmth. But the closer they tried to get to each other the crueler their prickles began to feel. So they moved apart and of course the further they moved apart the crueler the freeze began to feel, a circumstance that persuaded them to move closer to each other. Being practitioners of a Zoroastrian sense of wisdom they'd long ago grasped that Reflection and Choice was the Hedge-Dweller Way, not accident, yellow faced lies or brute force. There was no hawking and spitting, no yelling on television, no raging podcasts desperate for the subsistence of subscriptions and likes, instead they calmly determined a compromise distance between the discomfort of prickles and the comfort of warmth. Is this about Ivan? I hear the call. Sort of, it was a parable from Schopenhauer about us people in which he described the "unbearable burden" of social situations along with that complement of the "vivacious and social" that such situations encourage. Schopenhauer went on to argue that a rich inner world makes us people much less dependent on the outer world to provide entertainment and validation. Arthur was born in February 22, 1788.  He was very much a Pisces and like all fish he was prone to escapism. He was 72 when he died a hundred and sixty five years ago.

Planck, Kant and Schopenhauer on Mind

White Snakeroot

The issue Max Planck raised with his 1944 sentence - This mind is the matrix of all matter - remains somewhere in an answer to the question: what does Max mean by mind? It seems he gives this mind intelligence, sees in it a source of design, order and pattern. He claims this mind is a consciousness that was the reality from which all physical matter arose. And he argued that matter as we understand it is not a solid, rather it was a manifestation of Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness and continues to be so. If you think of our mind through Immanuel Kant's teetotaler eyes you'll find an understanding of a Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness that has structures which enable us to look around, feel stuff and otherwise enjoy perception. However our mind doesn't allow us to know reality, instead our mind allows us to transcend reality sufficient to make reality intelligible. The mind, Max chose to believe was behind the matrix of all matter, could touch those places Kant claimed our mind could only reach through transcendence or intelligent guesses. The mind behind the Matrix of Matter that Max talked about, knew reality, indeed it forged reality, it was part of reality. And to Max's own mind, whatever it was the Mind behind the Matrix thought it was doing, it wasn't Schopenhauer's blind irrational metaphysical Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness that thrived on endless suffering. Oh no! It was intelligent, it had a plan that was fair, balanced, reasonable and it was comforting so we could all relax and take less notice of Schopenhauer's suggestion that the best we could do was wave to each other while keeping a polite distance from each other. 

Idealism or Making Stuff Up

I wandered lonely as a cloud when all at once another host of Golden Wingstem

Cato the Elder, who was a Roman Senator and author of a book on Farming, disliked the Greeks. He thought them the equivalent of an ill-disciplined bunch of wishy-washy hippies. Cato the Younger, who was Cato the Elders great-grandson, another Roman  senator, following the defeat of Pompey the Great at the final battle of the Roman Civil War in 44 BC, the Battle of Pharsalia in Northern Greece, killed himself rather than submit to that tyrant and odious human being Julius Caesar. The Poet Lucan in his epic about the Battle of Pharsalia, gave us a line that has a sort of eternal relevance: "The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause was pleasing to Cato." As inevitably happens, even two thousand years later, the losers often look to Lucan's line for solace. Here in the USA the Confederate States, following the events at the Court House in Appomattox in 1865 used Lucan's line to reassure themselves that their defeat by the Union was a loss of liberty, certainly not a moral failing. In my view, and I am biased, the Confederate States, being a little desperate, were grasping, frightfully Anglo-Saxon, loose minded, were as bad as podcsters and bloggers in their quest to discover comfort in Lucan's sentence. So what does Max Planck mean when he claims: "There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter." In my view, assuming the force behind the existence of matter is a conscious and intelligent mind is an equally grasping assumption. But I at least can forgive Planck his idealism. He made this remark in Italy in 1944. The Italians had surrendered, the German army was holding on to the north of Italy and in the middle of it all Plank was attending a conference. Meanwhile Planck's home had been bombed, his son had been brutally killed for the role the boy had had in an assassination attempt on the Tyrant  Adolf Hitler, and Planck, who'd devoted his life to physics, was endeavoring to find relevance in a world that made less and less sense. Myself, I draw comfort from the misery of Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860 and was much smitten by Buddhism. In Arthur's book The World of Will and Representation he explored the idea of a world driven by a Blind and Irrational Metaphysical Will that thrived on Endless Suffering. It's good stuff, the Ancient Greeks would have loved it  

Planck's Constant

 

Giant Sumpweed???

In 1900, to solve a dilemma in physics Max Planck derived a bold solution through mathematics. The problem was in the relationship between a particle's energy and its frequency. Planck's calculation determined what he called the Quantum of Action. By Action he referred to energy moving along a path. Lend your mind to the image of waves on the screen of an oscilloscope, or the heart monitors in a coronary intensive care unit. The classic view of Action was that energy moving along a path could change in a smooth and continuous manner. Trouble was energy didn't seem to be moving along a path in a smooth and continuous manner, which suggested that energy might not be an infinitely divisible stream of whatever it was flowing into endless and mysterious wonder. Instead, Planck suggested, and this was radical, that energy and all other physical things comprised of tiny indivisible packets, that could be measured. Planck's Constant is his calculation of the size of the smallest possible unit or packet of energy or action in the Universe. Pretty, bloody bold, but lo, since 1900 Planck's Constant has been "measured with increasing precision." The question I'm hearing: "Does this have something to do with Ivan of the Left Artery or Baxter of the Abdominal Aorta?" Certainly not Ivan, he's a savage, he's a proponent of a flat-earth and he's in deep denial, so he has to grow up a bit, but Poor Baxter, encouraged by our Spleen and his cult members, is laboring under the illusion that despite claims by the laws of entropy which suggests that as energy dissipates and everything cools down time comes to an end producing the blessed release we all yearn for, Baxter, however, has been persuaded that when we die, he personally will be tried by God's Department of Justice and sentenced to what's laughingly referred to as "The Eternal Flames." The point about Max Planck, a blue-eyed German Idealist, the founder of quantum theory and a Lutheran, he's one of those fiendish physicists who has a number of very neat, and often incomprehensible suggestions about consciousness. At the end of his life, perhaps contemplating his legacy, he suggested in what to my mind was an off hand manner that Consciousness was the underlying matrix from which all matter came. He went on a bit, then some more and in so doing he sounded guilty of something, but we'll look at where that came from tomorrow when a rather special Clematis Paniculata achieves a slightly fuller bloom and after we've all been forced into a better understanding of what makes a young Mormon tick.

Soma Holidays

Shitke Mushroom

Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" told a story of a blissful land sedated by entertainment, sex and a drug Aldous named after a Hindu Nectar of the Gods called Soma. Oh yes! Becoming the Master of Happiness, having a finger on the dopamine switch, allows you to choose, make all the decisions for the simple folk. But can you say controlling the anarchy of Instagram, Ticktock, Puddle and Dimwit in the Morning, Podcasters, Television, Facebook, Hollywood Award Ceremonies, long tedious accounts of the Mitford Sisters, as well as all other impositions of the Internet, if all that was yours to control, would it make you Lord of All. Not really. Why? Three things to think about. One, without the element of religion, a willing embrace of myth or a lobotomy, oneness for us living things becomes basically boring. The second area to think about: the Almighty One must have eternal life! It's just a sad fact that power is an addiction for which there is no twelve step program and offspring tend to be very unreliable. Thirdly: Aldous had convinced himself that the happiness which had been defined for the citizens of the World State was dehumanizing, it had lost touch with the important things that made life worthwhile like love, the plays of Bernard Shaw, Jane Austin, German Romance Novels, charades and other parlor games. Indeed, the World State had convinced itself that Truth and Happiness are incompatible, which in the current age rings a rather loud bell. Aldous himself insisted a happiness/unhappiness duality is good for us, it's healthy, creative and fundamentally awesome. So if the Nectar of the Gods, from which there was no hangover, is bad for us, it makes you wonder why fentanyl's been declared an Extreme Emergency. Let's all yawn and enjoy the cooler evenings before Huxley's books are declared seditious and banned, I guess.

Give it Time

Leafy Elephant's Foot

You can't disentangle Politics and Religion. Why? One answer is: we people are fundamentally irrational, our motivations are unattached to those structures of reason which have so dominated the thought processes of Enlightenment Thinkers. The other answer runs this way: Don't you dare tell me what my self interest is. A stern warning wrapped in rugged individualism and very healthy, and a sad day when the serried ranks of stalwart legions disgrace themselves and runaway. At times like this we wait for our leader to admit we are not worthy of his magnificence so we can take no notice rather than face the shame of admitting we were wrong to follow him. Give it time.

The Perils of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and syphilis.

Sweet Annie and her Spider

No doubt some parts of Hollywood and Madison Avenue prefer a Jungian interpretation of myth. A follow your heart, personal growth, discover a true sense of self, the assurance that vulnerability is strength, blubbing like a baby is healthy and on into other cringe worthy expressions of sobriety. Other parts of Hollywood and Madison Avenue would prefer to reaffirm male authenticity by sending Clint Eastwood or John Wayne to prove their metal on the Eastern Front to look tough and smoke cigarettes in Stalingrad rather than endure the alternative of dying in a kitchen while making a vegetarian quiche. My own view, the Paleolithic Age started coming to an end about twenty thousand years ago, yet still lingers around like a mother's boy who misunderstood that head stone for the Paleolithic, that book for all and none, Thus Spoke Zarathustra which came from the devious mind of Friedrich Nietzsche who after eleven years of mental issues died childless at the age of 55 from complications of syphilis in the August of 1900.  The final eleven years of his life and his legacy was left to his sister, Therese Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to manage. Therese's husband was a teacher and an anti-Semite activist who'd dreamed of creating an Aryan colony in Paraguay. He killed himself in San Bernardino, Paraguay, in 1889 at the age of 46. Mr and Mrs Förster were not exactly Joy to the World and bunny rabbits. As Lutherans they fundamentally approved of eternal struggle and the value of the end times. More exciting, Therese's selective misinterpretations of her brother's work supported her husband's activism and finally achieved a moment of fulfillment in 1933 when President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. The result, trains ran on time and Germany not Paraguay was hedged to become a blue eyed blond Aryan paradise. Therese had no children she died of a stroke and either syphilis or dementia in 1935, she was 91. The German Chancellor and a number of other fascist big-wigs, to add a veneer of veritas to their frail and unsupported understandings attended her funeral. Of interest, usually it takes about twenty years to die of Syphilis, which means, if it was Syphilis, Therese would have contracted it sometime in the First World War when she was around 71.

The harvest of Individuated Jackasses.

Ironweed Bloom

Freud died of mouth cancer in London, two days after Germany invaded Poland. For those in doubt or who may have been persuaded otherwise by conniving and devious men in suits sitting behind desks, the invasion of Poland occurred on the First of September 1939, it was the beginning of a World War that ended on the Second of September 1945 with the surrender of Japan. Oh Goody! In 1961 Karl Jung finished his last book, "Approaching the Unconscious," and in that same year, in Switzerland, on the anniversary of D Day, he died of heart problems. I was about nine or ten when he died and he was 85. Why now? The answer lies in the following sloppy précis of Jung's work:  "...integrating the unconscious into the conscious to raise a well balanced authentic self...." Worth noting that this account, for Jung, the authentic self was to be realized by integrating the unconscious self into the conscious self. But at the same time Jung probably never used the words authentic or well balanced. Those words may have come when the clear and rather obvious employment opportunities in head doctoring became more and more apparent. A name, a glass framed certificate, a title, an office with a leather couch, a pretty word and bang goes the unconscious self in this search for a happy and sterile authentic. There is nothing authentic about a well disciplined, hard-working mind managing something like a Department of Health and Human Services or anything else. No sir! Banjaxed, half witted and kettle drum crazy, that's closer to the free willed authentic of the unconscious and woe unto ye should such a deranged individual sit behind a resolute desk. What Jung suggested was, the unconscious self and the conscious self were engaged in a process of individuation. Freud didn't mess around either. He offered no cure, like a boarding school matron what Freud gave you was a couple of bandages before he kicked you back to the front lines. All the same, if we live long enough, happy days will be here again for us old people when casting a net across the political and theological spectrum fails to yield a rich harvest of individuated jackasses

The Consequences of 1983

We Twine to the Left

All right, rock on Tommy, it's Friday! Baxter might have moved a couple of inches to the left, Ivan's porking up more than somewhat, and by most accounts we should have been following the Lead Bull into the night at least two months ago. But no, looks like we're going to have to endure another cardinal error by the Church of Rome. You can't claim responsibility for a couple of "Meaningful Coincidences" on the internet, die of galloping leukemia at the age of fifteen and then five years later become a Saint without some sort of underhanded and untoward politicking. How did this happen? I'll tell you! 1983, a year that will live in infamy, and at the time I remember being asked to leave a bar for warning anyone who'd listen that this is exactly what would happen if Pope John Paul in a most thoughtless and uncaring manner demoted Saint Winifred, did away with the venerable full time position of Devil's Advocate and replaced it with someone who's given the washing powder title, Promoter of the Faith. Talk about playing a guitar in the Sistine Chapel to keep the youth out of the pinball arcades. The beautiful Saint Winfred is Welsh, she died in 660 AD, in her time she caused a great many genuine wells, she is the patron saint of virgins, martyrs, victims of abuse, incest, and unwanted advances, as well as healing and integrity, and frankly so what if in the course of her saintly career she might have bumped off a number of overly amorous princes and the odd price gouging grocer. We're all doomed! 

Synchronicity and Jung, a layer or a field.

Coincidence, maybe?

Let's talk Jung on what he called synchronicity, but first let's mention syncopation, the unanticipated offbeat which puts a bounce into a musical score that turns waltz into the wide eyed intensity of groove, jitterbugging, clash, cold weather swing and Doot. Why mention syncopation? Because in quantum physics there are currently at least 17 quantum fields. A field in physics is the word that describes an influence that isn't confined to a point but can be felt here as well as a billion miles away or in the case of an electric gramophone record player can be heard or felt 50 yards away by an average human ear. In a dance hall a gramophone record of the Merry Widow's Waltz, followed by a recording of the band Freur's Doot Doot, will fill a field with two rather different influences, moods, stories, cultures. With respect to synchronicity, it's Jung who suggests that in interactions between the internal mind and the external world there are sometimes moments of synchronicity. What's that? Jung offers this definition, synchronicity is a "meaningful coincidence" of events without a clear and obvious causal relationship. Along with a number of other possibilities, Jung suggested an acausal series of events that qualified as a "meaningful coincidence," might well come from a layer within reality where the psyche and the material world are intertwined. Jung didn't use the word field, he used the word layer. If he'd added the words or field to layer it would have made good sense to me.

Bias in Discourse

Sunflower

One of the most unattractive words in the current universe is the word Proto-Consciousness. One of the most obnoxious sentences in the English Language, and I have to paraphrase: "The warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain is hostile to delicate quantum states." Sure, anything like the word moist suggests some kind of Christian Mingle and should be avoided, but we're not Milquetoast for god's sake. We people are an out of control example of the anomaly that is life. And yet, thanks to Descartes and whoever else he might have slept with, the offering from Process Philosophers that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, not an emergent property, does seem very wacky. So it's inevitable that words like moist and prefixes such as proto will enter the discourse.

A Cocklestove Event

Scandinavian Art Nouveau Cocklestove 

November 10th, 1619. René Descartes was alone, he was frustrated, he was looking for solitude and warmth. He found it in a small room heated by a cocklestove. He went to sleep, and according to Descartes himself he had a vision from God about Algebra and Geometry, the Cartesian Way and a mechanistic model of the future which laid out how best to pursue thinking about stuff through the interactions between causes and effects.  And lo, no one yawned, instead the world soon became plodding and mechanical, magic was hidden under a rock, shopping became therapy and unless you were someone like Thomas Aquinas or had a hard on for choir boys or you were a con artist the church became a less and less attractive career choice. Thank God for Alfred North Whitehead, who was born in 1861, and who might have described Descartes' vision from God through the concept of Concrescence. A word that means: a growing together of parts originally separate. For Alfred, concrescence is a subjective process that allows a new Actual Occasion to come into being. During concrescence, the actual occasion, Prehends or Feels information or data from all past occasions. Guided by the Actual Occasion's subjective aim, the actual occasion synthesizes this prehended or felt information from the past into a new whole. Then when the Actual Occasion's moment of consciousness achieves a Platonic satisfaction, it dies. Whitehead called this corpse a Superject. A superject is a new solidified fact of the past waiting around for another actual occasion to give it a wink. And yet probably the most valuable point about Descartes Actual Occasion when he woke-up beside a cocklestove was that he reintroduced rigor and skepticism to western discourse, something we're constantly in danger of losing to the power hungry, the indolent trickster and the retarded.  

Whitehead's "Drops of Experience."

Path as insight

What's the difference between a Narrative and a Theory? A narrative is a sequence of events, people, emotions, a happy ever after until Trey  dies from eating a bad shrimp on the honeymoon. For pedants a narrative has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. A theory is an explanation for why something happens. A theory has to be testable, otherwise it might just as well be a narrative. The criticism brought against both Whitehead and Bergson is that the metaphysics of their Process Philosophy was more like a narrative than it was anything like a testable theory. In a very real way, the Book of Genesis is a narrative, it's not a theory.  In their understandings both Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson made a connection between matter and consciousness.  Whitehead's metaphysics has been called the Philosophy of Organism, he suggests that reality isn't a bunch of substances and objects, it's not stuff, it's a series of interconnected dynamic processes, it's the "drops of experience" constantly becoming that make up the universe. Whitehead's been praised for doing away with the mind body duality and he's been accused of coming up with a jumble of ill defined, incomprehensible words, such as "actual occasion," "prehension," and "concrescence." In the end the thing to understand is his claim that every actual occasion has a form of subjective experience. Excited? Me to.