Materialism, Metaphysics and Music

[Skip]

"Skip" - If you want to make history more beautiful than it actually is, by all means, set it to music. -

I gather that you have a pessimistic view of history? Is that still your opinion?

After 100,000 years of carnage and 5000 of self-imposed misery, we're heading for the grandmother of all buffalo-jumps. Yup, that might be considered pessimistic.

Is 'history' [the present] now 'beautiful'?

To a few millionaires and techno-geeks, probably. To the other 7 billion and rising, not so much.

What makes it 'beautiful' in your view?

Turning it into opera.... and even that's a matter of taste.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Hi there Skip. I forgot to say hello! I hope things are well.

I find there is not a great deal to say, I mean as a response to your (if I may say) general pessimism.

I found myself asking, wondering, if your style of thinking is deductive or inductive. A good deal of the thinking we might critique, and do critique, in the Schoolmen was inductive: starting from a certain premise and extrapolating from that, from the lower to the higher so to speak. I also ask myself if the despair I note in Larkin is deductive despair or inductive despair.

I very much question your pessimism though.

It is strange: I haven't experienced much pessimism in my life. I mean as a general mood or an overall vision. I was reading, I think it was in 'The Great Chain of Being', about the notion of 'metaphysical pathos': an overall and determining sense of 'what is'. It seems to divide into something as simple as 'This and no more' and 'This and more beyond this'. There are some interesting parts of Plato's Seventh Epistle I hope to post selections from which speaks to that. Platonism, neoplatonist and Christianity are intricately woven together, as you likely know, and they are fibres that run through our culture, our selves, and our definitions. I find it interesting that they are being eviscerated. As with Scholastic thinking some part of this is necessary, naturally. But so much will get cut in the process. That also interests me because it is happening around us, now. Quite strongly, quite evidently. The blade of evisceration cuts in many different directions.

The point that I am trying to communicate (but not to convince) is that there is a 'conceptual pathway' available (either through strict reasoning or by intuition [music]) to the understanding referred to through the term 'intuition' and so many symbols that we [must] employ to refer to what is not immediate nor visible. 'It' is incommunicable (according to Plato anyway). One 'induces' to it, but then there is the other---philosophically unpopular?---notion of its revelation to us. That in itself is a very tough subject. But I bring it up in the spirit of Whitehead's comment: Science repudiates philosophy.

If this is so...science wipes out philosophy, significantly. Or scientism. I am curious if this is really so.

Strangely, it is impossible to convince and to persuade. Knowledge at that level (so they say) comes intuitionally. And if this 'metaphysic' is the stuff of 'intuition' all conversation ... collapses.

Similar to my other thread, I present to 'philosophy' some ideas and conceptual pathways that are not so popular these days. But more than to convince or win some sort of debate I find it more interesting to trace back over the world of thought and examine those axial points where understanding shifted. There are reasons and they can be traced. And as you see from some of the material I am presenting (most of it prior to WW2) there was a whole, quite interesting, range of discussion. I have no idea what is being discussed in ultra-modern philosophy (if such a beast exists).

If you are (I can't say) of the strict materialist school, I wonder if a pessimistic metaphysical pathos is inevitable, even necessary. Those of us who have the 'soul-escape' (as in belief in a soul that transcends the vicissitudes of 'becoming') do gain at least an apparent luxury as a result: optimism.

In case you are not immediately familiar with these somewhat technical terms Being and Becoming, you could take a look at this on becoming and then link to this on being.
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This one goes out to Terry...

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"Such ages, if they are to avoid mere ignorant oscillations between extremes, must seek truth in its ultimate depths. There can be no vision of this depth of truth apart from a philosophy which takes full account of those ultimate abstractions, whose interconnections it is the business of mathematics to explore."

I said you'd have two centuries to bridge the two opposed epistemes. Don't be embarrassed if you have to ask for more...

He refers to an abstract and mathematical depth. But what is its corollary in the intuitive?
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[Skip]

I found myself asking, wondering, if your style of thinking is deductive or inductive.

It makes no difference to seeing - and calling - the BS in this:

"Just as behind all religion and all spiritual philosophy there is a metaphysical assent---the affirmation of Being---so behind materialism and the materialist explaining away of history there is a metaphysical negation---the denial of Being---which is the ultimate and quasi-mystical ground of the materialistic position.

your opening paragraph. Just thought I'd point it out again, in case it got lost among the sheaves.

I very much question your pessimism though.

That's all right. Since you are a prolific advocate of one of the major symptoms of humanity's collective mental illness, you could hardly subscribe to my view.

Platonism, neoplatonist and Christianity are intricately woven together, as you likely know, and they are fibres that run through our culture, our selves, and our definitions. I find it interesting that they are being eviscerated.

Perhaps the entrails are required to foretell Culture yet to be; Being yet to cult.

...If this is so...science wipes out philosophy, significantly.

Knowledge wipes out speculation, yes, significantly. The quest for knowledge may be just as harmful to self-abasement.

If you are (I can't say) of the strict materialist school, I wonder if a pessimistic metaphysical pathos is inevitable, even necessary.

I have no 'school', strict or casual; am a semi-literate observer, merely: a member of the chorus in Act I; a spear-carrier in Act II; second gravedigger in Act III.

Those of us who have the 'soul-escape' (as in belief in a soul that transcends the vicissitudes of 'becoming') do gain at least an apparent luxury as a result: optimism.

And the luxury of keeping on keeping on, regardless. Sweet!

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

Since you are a prolific advocate of one of the major symptoms of humanity's collective mental illness, you could hardly subscribe to my view.

First, it is less a view than it is the end of the possibility of viewing. I have come across this *mechanism* before. Apparently, its function is to stop conversation. For in truth whatever could one say to your view which is Acute Pessimism? I suggest that you embody in a sort of disembodied sense a Christian apocalypsism. What do you talk about, at home, with your wife?

It is interesting to consider what happens inside a man if he holds to a vision that is thoroughly pessimistic. How does one live if one *knows* it is all futile?

But you know this is not exactly right, as a description of this effort. And it is in the subtlety of the difference of description that this thread arises. It is not at all impossible for me to understand man's existence---in trauma as appears to be the case---as being undergirded by what you are calling (from a modern advantage-point) 'mental illness'. Soren Kierkegaard wrote:

• "The whole order of things fills me with a sense
  of anguish, from the gnat to the mysteries of
  incarnation; all is entirely unintelligible to me,
  and particularly my own person. Great is my
  sorrow, without limits. None knows of it, except
  God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity."

I wish to focus on the Whitehead quotes, in the above sheaves:

• "We are entering a period of reconstruction, in religion, in science, and in political thought. Such ages, if they are to avoid mere ignorant oscillation between extremes, must seek truth in its ultimate depths."

It would seem, if I read you right, that if the problems of our existence are due to 'mental illness' that, as with the mentally ill now, we require 1) a good shrink, or 2) good chemical engineering of brain chemistry, and of course 3) a supervisory governmental system whereby the matter of materialism---coin and corn---is distributed equitably.

Those met, the curtain goes up on the Opera of Sane Society, for the first time ever. I think you would be forced, by the necessities of the premises, to place emphasis on the chemical engineering aspect, if indeed there can be no so-called 'spiritual' aspect, or that of 'soul'.

I only want to suggest that many elements will be part of a picture if indeed we were to consider 'a period of reconstruction, in religion, in science, and in political thought' as something real and considerable. If one really goes into the 'ultimate depths'---at the very least---the conversation about these things grows interesting. Personally, I don't really speak to 'the whole world' nor do I think in terms of solutions for the whole world (the '7 billion' as you put it).

Maybe that means that in view of such a large object my interests and aspirations are irrelevant? or meaningless?

Otto Rank wrote a book on 'The Trauma of Birth' and proposed that our initial trauma arises in that event. But a similar case is made in some eastern philosophy (many thousands of years older) in which 'incarnation' is focussed on---coming into this realm of existence, becoming subject to matter and the vicissitudes of becoming with all the sorrows of Kierkegaard. There are points of productive contact between 'old epistemes' and the newer ones and one does not have to become a 'subject' of either. Philosophy is, or should be, the tool of thinking and feeling which enables such fruitful dialectic.

Myself, I tend to see that man in his 'imagined self' (his self when it reflects on himself) is like a pained being at the bottom of a deep and murky pool. Where he is, how he got there, what it all means: he does not seem to know much of this, and like in a repetitious nightmare...

• "He wanders among misty bogs turned surreal, he talks to the wee folk of his own bad dreams, he files reports on introspected black visions with a kind of blarney eloquence. Like an actress cradling a doll for her stage baby, his language keens and croons about tales that are not quite there."

...we are all sort of jibber-jabbering. We do seem to sense---and you do too---that there is a *light* shining in through the murk and that the *light* can be apprehended, but 'we' (The World) have no way to agree on the terms of a conversation. And thus even in your Vision we will bicker until just before going over the cliff.

...so behind materialism and the materialist explaining away of history there is a metaphysical negation---the denial of Being---which is the ultimate and quasi-mystical ground of the materialistic position.

Yet thinking about this statement, which you take issue with, and holding it up and comparing it to some of the assertions about the *undermining of the materialist position* in which it is asserted that we are no longer capable of saying, really, what is matter nor what really is going on here, which Whitehead is exploring in the pages presented above when writing of the utility of mathematics in exploring *ultimate abstractions*, it then seems possible to see and to understand that the materialist position IS a quasi-mysticism! And what I mean by that is the dominant and so-called materialist position, whether we are precisely conscious of it in us or not. This is something 'the age' dictates, no? It seems fair to say it is not chosen, and not rationally. In fact the position is oddly non-rationalist.

I have no 'school', strict or casual; am a semi-literate observer, merely: a member of the chorus in Act I; a spear-carrier in Act II; second gravedigger in Act III.

I think we have to see that a 'school' lives in us, resides in us, inhabits us: operates us. If a man becomes capable of seeing what has informed him, he has become in a very real sense a metaphysician! 'Literacy' strangely enough becomes important if not key. It isn't being 'clever-smart' that offers us a key but an intelligence of another order. Bringing us back---and I think we will always come back---to some of the metaphysical notions.

Because in 'materialism' one is not really dealing in *facts* but in assumptions, in arbitrary descriptions, in moods, in 'pathos'. A story has been cobbled together which has no real base and is in its own way 'metaphysical'. Curious! It seems to me that it is this that we need to examine, penetrate, and move through. But how?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Reading the above I was reminded of the narrative called 'Wizard of the Upper Amazon' (by Manuel Cordova-Rios) and this man's story of coming into contact with the Anaconda spirit that ruled the jungle when he lived among the Indians in the Amazon.

In nighttime sessions with ayahuasca in a shamanic setting he came into contact with something completely alien to his experience and indeed overwhelming to it. For his time in that world, surrendering his known referents, and to survive and to 'be' there, required a surrender to a radically different episteme. He described his experience after taking the ayahuasca as waiting in the jungle night totally alone and then *feeling* the arrival of the Anaconda spirit which, snake-like, slowly approached from a long way off, but huge and undeniable.

It is not at all hard for me to understand, by way of comparison, say, the experience of a Catholic monk in a monastery having turned himself over to his God in the most intimate sense possible and spending years in his apprenticeship to 'that'. Mental illness? Psychosis? Schism? Contact with Self? Contact with high metaphysical force? Delusion?

The Anaconda spirit: an intense and conscious potency that demanded respect and a turning over of self. What is happening there? The Indians of the tribe, naturally, regard it as the most normal thing. Intense, demanding respect, but a 'feature of their world' and normal.

As it was the source of all knowledge about the jungle it taught Cordova-Rios, an outsider to the tribe, the mysteries of the jungle and of course especially about medicine plants. I relate to this because, by and large, all my experiences have been of this sort but I don't mean drug-induced (though I have taken some psychedelics). All of it nearly impossible to explain. I approach 'religion' less from an intellectual standpoint and more from an experiential standpoint. The intellectual organization comes later. It is a way of making sense of it.

Our 'religion' is the sum of our perceptive structure and includes our daydream-world, or nightdream world, and something like our 'perceptive understructure' that we carry with us, or more properly in which we reside and have our being. What is that? And what about when something---What is it?---bursts through the fabric surrounding us and makes itself known? What is that?

So, in the above pages (Whitehead), when he says that 'we cannot think first and act afterwards' and that 'from the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought', I am reminded that all people live within their episteme (a tiring word perhaps--my spellchecker wants to change it to epitome!---but I don't have another, better one) and it is I think terribly difficult for any one of us to turn around, metaphorically speaking, and assess and capture the idea-system that has produced us, in which we move. And we have little choice but to 'adopt those ideas which seem to work within those spheres' and that we have no choice but to place trust in the idea-system which we have.

Now, when someone says Well, you're sick, or that is 'disease', but it is in fact our operative system, like some sort of existential software, what shall we do? And there we see, of course, various forms of violence, imposition, power-plays, mind-games, etc. and these things go on in all different spheres. It is an atmosphere charged with psychological poison, isn't it?

Who can move through all the spheres? Who has that sort of integrity ... or is it self-knowledge?

In a sense, and especially in our highly complexified modernity, we all suffer an acute postmodernism and our thinking is all fucked up: too many contradictory currents flowing into the same vessel, and often one set which cancels out another set, or seeks to render it inoperative, or to undermine it. Is the only hope we have to take so many steps back from all of it that we can then SEE it in some sort of panorama?

'You may preserve the life in a flux of form, or preserve the form amid an ebb of life. But you cannot permanently enclose the same life in the same mould'.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

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The background to understand the Seventh Epistle is that Plato (if indeed the letter is authentic: it has been doubted but now, it is said, it is considered to be authentic at least according to the sources I have read) makes a trip to Sicily in the hope of 'enlightening a tyrant' and training him up in philosophy. His object: to influence the man and thus to have an effect on the world of men over which he (Dionysius) ruled. However, that man himself, unruled, proved a danger to Plato himself, and so he begins in the part I have selected by referring to the danger Dionysius, and those surrounding him, posed.

What I find interesting at first blush is the idea presented that it is the constitution of the man himself---and I would extend the tyrant Dionysius to be Everyman---that in himself represents the block to the higher realm of perception which, apparently, Plato understands himself. It is pretty clear, from The Republic of course, that such knowledge and realization is for 'the few' and not for the many. And if this is so it indicates something that I believe must be accepted without question: 'The Many' are a mass of men who require an organizing system of perception into which, and subject to which, they incorporate themselves. They require a whole symbol-system through which they can visualize their world and gain a 'metaphysical dream of the world' to use Richard Weaver's intriguing phrase. And stripped of that---and by that I mean, for example, the symbol-system that is classical Christianity, or the more total organizing system that is (or was) Catholicism (or that of Hindu religious and political doctrine, of Confucian, etc.)---this mass of men very quickly gets lost, and these lost men are a great danger.

In exactly the same sense, I think this is also true, we are precisely that danger, and this is a fact we don't wish to and perhaps cannot squarely face. The term that Skip referred to was 'semi-literate', and we are all in truth 'semi-literate'---unhappily---but in the platonic sense, if one considers it real and considerable, we exist so much in the shade of knowledge that we simply have no qualification to really say much of anything! And if that is so, what really is the value of our discourse! To what exactly conduces our 'cozy-chatter' to borrow a term from another thread? It seems to me that THIS is the place that we would have to begin from if we were to attempt to really get to the cores which are said to *exist*, in the platonic sense that is.

But what is interesting is that our whole scheme of knowledge and

• "The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning but not interfering, has foisted on to philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact".

...drives and directs perception, controls it to put it another way, really quite radically, in one specific direction. It is as if we have gotten off the train at a certain point and become fixated with the scenery. But yet, if we consider the words of Plato as holding any water at all and thus being 'real and considerable', there is something else altogether to realize and to understand. What is that?

Quite curiously he refuses to speak about it and says simply it is not possible to explain 'for it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies'. Well. That renders the whole topic a bit difficult. And at that point, of course, what we describe as 'metaphysical' becomes in fact 'mystical'. It is not unknowable---no. But it is knowable by other means. And what are those means?

But here is another interesting notion: If this so-called knowledge is attainable then who attains it? And attaining it what do they do with it? Yet prior to approaching that topic, or prior to not approaching that topic [!], it seems to me that we would have to mention an important truth, and that truth is that 'the voice of the world' and the power of 'tyrannizing discourse'---that is, the expressions of men who are in the platonic sense tyrants to themselves---so dominate the atmosphere, and thus so dominate our minds, that we can in no way *hear* what is there to be heard. And with this I make an allusion to the overpowering domination of the 'materialistic vision', which is (according to my train of argument) a discourse so powerful and so apparently factual that it steamrolls any other and renders it inconsiderable and stupid.

Trippy, eh?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A. N. Whitehead is an intense philosopher. Well worth the reading, but difficult. I think that his 'method' if I can call it such may hold some part of a key for synthesis between 'the Old Metaphysic' and the forging of a 'New Metaphysic'. I know that for most this term 'New Metaphysic' can only be seen as a mystifying phrase since, in our present viewstructure of so-called materialism and 'object realism', the notion of a metaphysic has ... vanished. It is not really a category of thinking.

It is certainly not a part of modern rationalist thinking, which is the stuff out of which scientific materialism and object realism has been crafted. The curious idea that Whitehead proposes is that a whole world of science, a whole world of assemblage of facts, a whole world of invention, a whole world of material and technological power, is ONLY the stuff of a lower order of ratiocination. Really, anyone can do it.

Strangely, he locates very advanced intellectualism, and high use of intellect, among the Schoolmen!

The genius of the age that confronted the wrong-headed intellectualism of the Schoolmen was certainly brilliant, and certainly led to a shift in power-relations and a vastly dramatic shift in the focus of consciousness. But it is a rather mechanical use of the mind and of consciousness.

And thus we stumble into one of the essential problems. But could it be called 'the problem of our age'? In a sense, yes. Mechanical thinking can become quite ingenious in the sense that an advanced tinkerer may astound us with his tinkerings. It is a probing sort of thought that follows mathematical abstractions to a certain level of abstraction. Or employs abstractions up to a certain point (?)

But should it be said that it stops on a lower rung? That it gets 'trapped' in materialism? In the mere manipulation of matter? And with that it amazes and captivates not just an elite (who have the mechanical training to understand the inside of what is referred to) but the whole world. And with this it reveals its mass-appeal. And the 'mass' also speaks back to it, and through it. This is the part that is hard to talk about. It is the low or inferior end of democratic processes and philosophies.

But our 'applied sciences' are in the hands of men with the lowest of low concerns and interests. Not that what they do is not relevant or important--or useful. But utilitarianism is problematic, and should be seen as such.

But the 'true intellect' of the age---where is it? Synthetic intelligence that resists thralldom to mere mechanical, insect-like manipulations and the construction of a mechanical, mechanized reality.

And here the notion of 'free intellect' and even the capability of thinking freely comes to the surface again. "But wait! I thought all our modern thinking, our scientific materialistic thinking WAS free thinking? Didn't they take a stand against restrictive, indeed obscurantist tyrannies of thinking?"

Unfortunately, rationalism is distinct from intellectualism, or so seems to say A. N. Whitehead. Rationalism is immensely powerful but it seems that it has great difficulties in becoming 'synthetic'. The 'rationalistic tendencies' of our age, perhaps it is possible to say, actually dominate and steer thinking only toward certain channels, or within certain grooves. Our 'rationalism' then constructs imposing edifies of thinking which become, in a non-intellectual environment, politically correct edifices and excuses not to think! Or only to be able to think along certain pre-defined lines (which amounts to the same thing).

And so: there is a vast array of predicates that are out there, which we buy into, that have been installed in us. And these are the very 'terms of our thinking'.

'Politically correct edifices and excuses not to think!'

Hellllooooooooooo!