Finding out that Newton devoted much of his time to alchemy and biblically inspired mysticism was eye opening for me. This overlap between esoteric mysticism and the sciences isn't only a feature of the proto-scientific age, either. It continues right up to the present time. Jack Parsons, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was up to his neck in ritual magick. Tsiolkovsky, who laid the conceptual foundation for space travel, was a cosmist - a really strange Russian mystical school. Then you have the quantum physicists, Bohr, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bohm, whose worldviews aligned rather explicitly with mystical takes on reality. The great cosmologist John Wheeler certainly falls into this category.
Once you know to look for it, it's everywhere. Even the practice of science relies implicitly on creative inspiration, which the best scientists cheerfully admit comes from they know not where.
And yet despite all of this, all of it remains hidden from public view, as though it is dirty and embarrassing. Like Victorians politely pretending that sexuality does not exist, even as it rages under the surface.
Indeed, indeed. Even the logical positivists... Bacon... Even Freud... German romanticism... Freaking Diderot... It is quite amazing. And I'm still trying to figure out how this superficial layer of narrative emerged that covers and hides all of that. By all accounts, this shouldn't, couldn't have happened. Like a strange magical zeitgeist ray super-imposing a narrative, some sort of MIB neuralizer distributed in history. Or rather some nested dialectic playing itself out...
Steiner talked of what he called Ahriman, the spirit of matter that wishes the universe to be only dead mechanism, becoming dominant in our age - an intuition he expressed in the early twentieth century. It often seems to me that some dark egregore took hold of public life, which has convinced us all that we must "live by lies" in public ... with the greatest lie of all being that we must distrust our intuition.
Perhaps it is as simple as McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis. The industrial age establishes a context that hyper-activates the left hemisphere, and the LH view of the world pushes the RH understanding out of view.
I'm not sure "go off your gut feeling" is really the proper rebuttal to the corruption of scientific institutions. There's plenty of empirical evidence for the falsity of blank slate beliefs that I wouldn't say is intuitively obvious, and much of political leftism is driven by collectivist instincts ranging from compassion to envy. Some intuitions are just wrong.
Intuition is correct far more often than it is wrong. Cultivating the perception that that this is not so has been a major propaganda success of the popular scientific press.
As for leftists, they are the party of deranged rationality built upon incorrect but unfalsifiable and therefore unchallengeable axioms. Not the party of instinct and nature.
Blank slatism is as schizo as full-blown genetic determinism. Once you switch off the calculating brain machine and step back, it's obvious what's going on: what everybody has always known.
It seems highly intuitive plausible to many people that either inherited wealth and privilege and/or parenting style has vast effects on long-term individual life outcomes. We know from twin and adoption studies that, at least in the context of modern WEIRD societies, this is mostly wrong- not only are genetic influences large but environmental factors are mostly idiosyncratic and/or random. Vast numbers of people have powerful intuitions on this topic that are just flat-out wrong.
There is nothing 'unfalsifiable' about the blank slate- how else would you know it to be incorrect except by falisification?- and there is nothing intuitive about quantum mechanics or relativity, which are laws even more fundamental than genetics. The desire to distribute resources to the needy and/or tear down your rivals and superiors is also a human instinct- the left would not exist otherwise. (The latter may be more common than the former, of course.) So... I'm sorry, but I really don't see the case for "intuition" being especially reliable here.
You are also thinking yourself into a corner here, which is the reason we sometimes need to step back and take in reality as a whole. For example, when you say quantum mechanics is more fundamental than genetics, while in some sense this is true, in another sense it's wrong: genetics has much more to do with us than QM. And even genetics is not necessarily more "basic" than human emotion: human emotion is a direct experience, which we can judge and work with directly.
Intuition breaks down when dealing with hyper-abstract, isolated questions. The good news is that life is neither hyper-abstract, nor isolated.
First, relativity and QM are theories, not reality. They're also theories dealing with aspects of reality far removed from human experience; precisely where intuition is not well suited.
As to the tabula rasa, there is more to leftism than that. In its contemporary form, models such as structural racism or frameworks like gender theory - and Critical Theory, much more generally - are indeed completely unfalsifiable, at least on their own terms. They reject even the basic notion of truth on which falsifiability rests.
Wokism is not the absence of reason, it's reason proceeding from bad axioms and generating absurd conclusions with utter reliability. Even when the axioms are eminently falsifiable, as I agree the blank slate is, they are de facto unfalsifiable because one is not allowed to change l challenge them.
Trying to do so purely on the basis of reason, saying "here's a peer reviewed study showing the blank slate is wrong", is mistaken. It accepts the premise that such matters are the proper domain of experts. The left will simply point to their own experts. Besides, it is unnecessary. One needs only one's eyes to know that there are only two sexes, or that humans are not all identical. Playing the academic game in which all aspects of reality must be adjudicated by expert opinion and tiny p-values simply reifies the leftist framework.
To be fair, it's not clear that much ever came of Newton's extensive work in the field of alchemy, and his theological work essentially denied the existence of the Trinity, as I understand it. But yeah, CS Lewis wrote about this in the Abolition of Man- that magic and science were born as twins, and one wasted away while the other grew strong and throve. But they were twins.
I'm starting to read Josephson's book right away, thank you. I searched for the book on Amazon and the Kindle version was so expensive that I started my free trial of Scribd just to read it and to try this platform. This whole discussion is amazing and simply necessary to understand the narrative of science and religion.
Indeed, and that's what the Enlightenment proponents don't understand: they thought they have arrived at objectivity and dispel with the notion of myth, only to create a new one.
The critical theorists understood it better, but then also went on to create new myths, to the point that they have become the laughing stock these days when many of them cannot see anything in history except through the lens of racism, LGBT rights etc. To his credit, Josephson-Storm is largely aware of this and avoids it, although he still lapses at times and brings up racial issues unnecessarily, for example. But it's very minor.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts--to me, quite a few light bulbs went on reading the book. I also like that the author weaves a new narrative that makes you challenge some things you thought you understood or judged this or that way. In a sense, it's postmodern thought at its best: challenging entrenched myths by consciously offering a different narrative without judgement, aware that even this new narrative can never be the whole truth. Quite educational.
The battle was never between reason and religion, myth, superstition, etc. but between reason and dogma.
Humans have a biological need for certainty that comes from living in an environment where you really need to be sure there is/isn't a tiger in the bush. We then (generally) apply that to absolutely everything, which leads to binary thinking.
Humans also have a biological need for tribal membership, because when it turns out there *is* a tiger in the bush, you generally need a bunch of humans with you to drive it off or kill it.
The either/or leads to systems of thought that are "good enough for now" which changes into "if it ain't broke don't fix it", becoming dogma.
The dogma prevents lines of questioning because tribes form up around the dogma, and are defended as if it's an existential crisis (in ancient times, that sort of outgroup behavior was indeed that).
This combo of "it's either/or" and "toe the line" leads to tribes of "you're with us or else your against us" and "science/authority believers".
IMO we need to understand this and be able to surpass it if we are ever to embrace our birthright and become whatever it means to be truly "human". This will require embracing uncertainty, and harnessing our tribal instinct to create one that does.
The real divide is between those who think for themselves and those who blindly follow their conformist drives, isn't it? Part of the mystical tradition is the claim to direct insights, so there is a connection there, it seems.
I have read/heard that ~70% of the population does not have an internal dialogue (where you debate a question internally in your own voice), and a similar number does not act on observable facts, but instead looks to what the larger group is doing. These two groups probably occupy the same circle in a Venn diagram.
To me this indicates that for better or worse, the masses actually do need religion. Unfortunately most religion is based on tradition (much of which contains falsehoods) instead of direct experience. IMO, those religions that do emphasize this direct experience should be defended, and individuals who seek this direct experience should be encouraged and protected.
Unless there is knowing of a life beyond death, despair, vice, and tragedy are the inevitable results. Humans absent a knowing of their eternal nature gives license to behavior which is below that of beasts. I am hopeful this age represents a transition into knowing for the mass of humanity.
In the meantime I look for the humor in it all while entertaining I may be wrong. ; )
Very true. Perhaps the worst consequence of the 'Enlightenment' is the rise of materialism, especially the denial of the human spirit. There was a good convo yesterday or the daybefore on the Enflamed Skeptic about how so much of the covid deception depended on the fear that came from unreflective people confronting their own mortality, and this seems to be the mechanism of the 'mass formation psychosis' to me.
True, although I think that what we call materialism today is more of a brainchild of the late 19th century, although there were precursors. Part of the blame surely must go to Descartes and some of the religious thinkers who split the world into spirit and dead matter, which made it easy for later atheist-materialist to simply strike the spirit part. At the cost, of course, that nothing makes sense a anymore in that view.
Yes. That is it exactly. There is a sort of magical thinking behind it all, that if you call things by two different names then they must be separate things. Perhaps we should blame the Scholastics, Aquinas and Peter the Lombard I mean, for modernity? I'll have to think about that.
The idea that a division in concept means that the things are really divided seems very much of a piece with the debates on Nominalism vs. Realism and the rise of the Transsubstantiationists.(sp?)
The hilarious thing is that materialists need to constantly change the definition of "materialism" to keep up with advances is science.
Newton's theory of gravitation with its action at a distance, whether the original version or the later "force field" version would not have been recognized by the Classical materialists like Demosthenes and Lucretius.
And if you attempted to explain Quantum Mechanics to the 19th century materialists, they would have thought you a mystic.
Indeed. The core of their belief is that there is no intelligence above (behind/within) it all, so whatever fits the bill. But their cope still has become hilariously bloated in the face of the bizarre findings in physics. A clockwork universe this ain't!
Good point. Materialism completely makes a fool of itself over Einstein. For millenia the heart of materialism was the belief in an eternally existent, uncreated universe and their great mockery of humanity was that we believed the universe had a beginning. When the expanding universe proved to them that this could not be so, they started making fun of us for not believing in their Big Bang, not realizing that this is our position from the start. It is very telling though that in the Creative Word they only recognize a 'bang' without meaning.
💬 tribes form up around the dogma, and are defended as if it's an existential crisis
The roots of dogma-attachment seem to reach much deeper: killer whales might be the puritans of animal kingdom 🤭
🗨 All orcas have the equipment to feed on each other’s preferred food, but they don’t even try.[...C]aptive animals of one ecotype refuse unfamiliar food to the point of starvation.
A few points that arise in my mind in response to this project:
1. The roots of something valuable (the necessary condition of its value) are not necessarily themselves valuable, let alone ‘therefore’ valuable. For example, the history of suffering from infection makes penicillin valuable but this does not mean that infection is therefore valuable. (I am not implying that this is the argument being made in the piece above.)
2. Science is not equivalent to Reason/Rationality/Logic; science is a procedure/activity/trade that is subject to the laws of reason like any other activity. Most, (perhaps all) science contains irrational claims and premises, and as such is at least in part contrary to reason. One of the most obvious examples is the making of claims of ‘empirical proof’, or ‘scientific knowledge’ of reality; empirical/observational information is only evidence of some alleged aspect of reality, but never a proof, since observation is inherently subject to error, as is the interpretation of what we observe, and liable to possible future refutation. Science is at best only the truth of scientific record.
2. The revolutionary essence of the Age of Enlightenment seems to come down to Kant, and his formalisation of the concept of Human that includes all tribes/races/nations on accounts of their capacity to apply the laws of logic (often intuitively) to their own thoughts and actions. At this point humanity was universalised, and until then, as far as I know, the idea of humanity was still only subjectively determined on the vague basis of ‘likeness’ to oneself (anthropos). The Enlightenment is also Kant’s re-affirmation of the laws of sense as the fundamental structure of meaning and therefore morality.
Thank you! Honestly, I'm not well versed in that regard and so I'm not even aware of this increased attention. I did notice though that neo-Platonism and the German mystical tradition (Böhme etc.) seem to be of interest to more people, which I think is great since it opens up new thought forms that had been long buried.
As as Communication Studies grad, I love all this intellectual stuff! I just want to offer one thought, take it or leave it:
Rather than "understand," I prefer to "inner-stand" and to "comprehend." I do not like the obligation to — or even the concomitant feeling of — "standing under" any concept, conclusion, person/group, religion, or academic/medical/historical perspective.
Very psychoanalytic interpretation of language - it honestly never occurred to me, but perhaps that's because I'm not a native English speaker? "Understand" seems to have a more direct, hands-on ring to it, whereas "comprehend" as a Latinism sounds a bit more abstract and scientific, although more accurate. The German "verstehen" has roots in "encircling", which seems rather apt, although violent. "Grasp" sounds a bit too definitive, too closed - comprehending is always a process in my experience. Well!
That is interesting isn't it? Comprehend has the same 'encircling'built into it I believe. The question of whether we would rather have our thoughts under or encircling I guess is context dependant? What I don't like about comprehend is that it seems so comprehensive, so complete. Whereas, it is easy to say 'I understand partially.'
"...comprehending is always a process in my experience."
Indeed! That *process* for me involves intuition and one or more of my other senses. It's very much a spiritual + physical + mental process of perceiving and integrating into my existing repertoire of knowledge.
Walk into Watkin’s Books in London and you’ll see belief I “spirits, telepathy, mystical connection and the like. “ is hardly dead. Indeed by sheer numbers if you include the non-western world it’s probably never been more popular. The question seems to be why is this not acknowledged?
Thank you Luc as interesting to learn about science against religion mysticism esotericism which used to be all combined but then was replaced if I understand you correctly. I see the sense of knowing our history to help with our gaining understanding of where we stand today. Based on where we stand today it sounds like we need major revisions alright!
The obvious answer seems to be that someone has gone to great lengths to stamp out these ideas from the mainstream. Why? Because these ideas, when correctly understood, are empowering. If someone wants to enslave people, weakening them is a good start.
In other words, it is A LOT easier to control people through fear and greed if they scoff at the idea of an afterlife and a spiritual realm - YOLO and all that. "Get yours while you still can, morality is for suckers!". And the fear of death has a lot less impact for people who are not materialists - thus they are harder to coerce.
It is no coincidence that all primitive cultures, bar none, had ideas about demonic spirits and mystical realms. Demons are real entities, and to know this makes it possible to defend oneself against them. Same with black magic, which is a big thing among various "elites". It is much more effective if people don't know about it.
Basically, predators have an easier time if their prey are unaware of them.
(various clips of demon-aided modern magicians gathered by an insightful observer - there are 12 episodes of around 10 minutes each - worth the watch!)
"...namely that history is often best seen as a multi-layered myth created in a certain period and then retrojected back into the past and our job is to “deconstruct” these myths in productive and intelligent ways, then I’m all for critical theory."
I'm with you there.
But as for purchasing and reading another leftist scribe, I'll pass, thank you. My eyes have rolled so much over the last few years, I'm afraid they'll roll right out of my head.
Jack Parsons, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation, was a practicing Thelemite follower of Aleister Crowley.
Finding out that Newton devoted much of his time to alchemy and biblically inspired mysticism was eye opening for me. This overlap between esoteric mysticism and the sciences isn't only a feature of the proto-scientific age, either. It continues right up to the present time. Jack Parsons, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was up to his neck in ritual magick. Tsiolkovsky, who laid the conceptual foundation for space travel, was a cosmist - a really strange Russian mystical school. Then you have the quantum physicists, Bohr, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bohm, whose worldviews aligned rather explicitly with mystical takes on reality. The great cosmologist John Wheeler certainly falls into this category.
Once you know to look for it, it's everywhere. Even the practice of science relies implicitly on creative inspiration, which the best scientists cheerfully admit comes from they know not where.
And yet despite all of this, all of it remains hidden from public view, as though it is dirty and embarrassing. Like Victorians politely pretending that sexuality does not exist, even as it rages under the surface.
Indeed, indeed. Even the logical positivists... Bacon... Even Freud... German romanticism... Freaking Diderot... It is quite amazing. And I'm still trying to figure out how this superficial layer of narrative emerged that covers and hides all of that. By all accounts, this shouldn't, couldn't have happened. Like a strange magical zeitgeist ray super-imposing a narrative, some sort of MIB neuralizer distributed in history. Or rather some nested dialectic playing itself out...
Steiner talked of what he called Ahriman, the spirit of matter that wishes the universe to be only dead mechanism, becoming dominant in our age - an intuition he expressed in the early twentieth century. It often seems to me that some dark egregore took hold of public life, which has convinced us all that we must "live by lies" in public ... with the greatest lie of all being that we must distrust our intuition.
Perhaps it is as simple as McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis. The industrial age establishes a context that hyper-activates the left hemisphere, and the LH view of the world pushes the RH understanding out of view.
I'm not sure "go off your gut feeling" is really the proper rebuttal to the corruption of scientific institutions. There's plenty of empirical evidence for the falsity of blank slate beliefs that I wouldn't say is intuitively obvious, and much of political leftism is driven by collectivist instincts ranging from compassion to envy. Some intuitions are just wrong.
Intuition is correct far more often than it is wrong. Cultivating the perception that that this is not so has been a major propaganda success of the popular scientific press.
As for leftists, they are the party of deranged rationality built upon incorrect but unfalsifiable and therefore unchallengeable axioms. Not the party of instinct and nature.
Blank slatism is as schizo as full-blown genetic determinism. Once you switch off the calculating brain machine and step back, it's obvious what's going on: what everybody has always known.
It seems highly intuitive plausible to many people that either inherited wealth and privilege and/or parenting style has vast effects on long-term individual life outcomes. We know from twin and adoption studies that, at least in the context of modern WEIRD societies, this is mostly wrong- not only are genetic influences large but environmental factors are mostly idiosyncratic and/or random. Vast numbers of people have powerful intuitions on this topic that are just flat-out wrong.
There is nothing 'unfalsifiable' about the blank slate- how else would you know it to be incorrect except by falisification?- and there is nothing intuitive about quantum mechanics or relativity, which are laws even more fundamental than genetics. The desire to distribute resources to the needy and/or tear down your rivals and superiors is also a human instinct- the left would not exist otherwise. (The latter may be more common than the former, of course.) So... I'm sorry, but I really don't see the case for "intuition" being especially reliable here.
There's instinct, and then there's instinct.
You are also thinking yourself into a corner here, which is the reason we sometimes need to step back and take in reality as a whole. For example, when you say quantum mechanics is more fundamental than genetics, while in some sense this is true, in another sense it's wrong: genetics has much more to do with us than QM. And even genetics is not necessarily more "basic" than human emotion: human emotion is a direct experience, which we can judge and work with directly.
Intuition breaks down when dealing with hyper-abstract, isolated questions. The good news is that life is neither hyper-abstract, nor isolated.
First, relativity and QM are theories, not reality. They're also theories dealing with aspects of reality far removed from human experience; precisely where intuition is not well suited.
As to the tabula rasa, there is more to leftism than that. In its contemporary form, models such as structural racism or frameworks like gender theory - and Critical Theory, much more generally - are indeed completely unfalsifiable, at least on their own terms. They reject even the basic notion of truth on which falsifiability rests.
Wokism is not the absence of reason, it's reason proceeding from bad axioms and generating absurd conclusions with utter reliability. Even when the axioms are eminently falsifiable, as I agree the blank slate is, they are de facto unfalsifiable because one is not allowed to change l challenge them.
Trying to do so purely on the basis of reason, saying "here's a peer reviewed study showing the blank slate is wrong", is mistaken. It accepts the premise that such matters are the proper domain of experts. The left will simply point to their own experts. Besides, it is unnecessary. One needs only one's eyes to know that there are only two sexes, or that humans are not all identical. Playing the academic game in which all aspects of reality must be adjudicated by expert opinion and tiny p-values simply reifies the leftist framework.
"Like a strange magical zeitgeist ray super-imposing a narrative, some sort of MIB neuralizer distributed in history."
You're more accurate in that observation than most are willing to admit.
To be fair, it's not clear that much ever came of Newton's extensive work in the field of alchemy, and his theological work essentially denied the existence of the Trinity, as I understand it. But yeah, CS Lewis wrote about this in the Abolition of Man- that magic and science were born as twins, and one wasted away while the other grew strong and throve. But they were twins.
The absence of myth is also a myth:
the coldest, the purest, the only true
myth.
GEORGES BATAILLE, “L’absence
du mythe,” 1947
I'm starting to read Josephson's book right away, thank you. I searched for the book on Amazon and the Kindle version was so expensive that I started my free trial of Scribd just to read it and to try this platform. This whole discussion is amazing and simply necessary to understand the narrative of science and religion.
Indeed, and that's what the Enlightenment proponents don't understand: they thought they have arrived at objectivity and dispel with the notion of myth, only to create a new one.
The critical theorists understood it better, but then also went on to create new myths, to the point that they have become the laughing stock these days when many of them cannot see anything in history except through the lens of racism, LGBT rights etc. To his credit, Josephson-Storm is largely aware of this and avoids it, although he still lapses at times and brings up racial issues unnecessarily, for example. But it's very minor.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts--to me, quite a few light bulbs went on reading the book. I also like that the author weaves a new narrative that makes you challenge some things you thought you understood or judged this or that way. In a sense, it's postmodern thought at its best: challenging entrenched myths by consciously offering a different narrative without judgement, aware that even this new narrative can never be the whole truth. Quite educational.
The battle was never between reason and religion, myth, superstition, etc. but between reason and dogma.
Humans have a biological need for certainty that comes from living in an environment where you really need to be sure there is/isn't a tiger in the bush. We then (generally) apply that to absolutely everything, which leads to binary thinking.
Humans also have a biological need for tribal membership, because when it turns out there *is* a tiger in the bush, you generally need a bunch of humans with you to drive it off or kill it.
The either/or leads to systems of thought that are "good enough for now" which changes into "if it ain't broke don't fix it", becoming dogma.
The dogma prevents lines of questioning because tribes form up around the dogma, and are defended as if it's an existential crisis (in ancient times, that sort of outgroup behavior was indeed that).
This combo of "it's either/or" and "toe the line" leads to tribes of "you're with us or else your against us" and "science/authority believers".
IMO we need to understand this and be able to surpass it if we are ever to embrace our birthright and become whatever it means to be truly "human". This will require embracing uncertainty, and harnessing our tribal instinct to create one that does.
I may be wrong. ; )
The real divide is between those who think for themselves and those who blindly follow their conformist drives, isn't it? Part of the mystical tradition is the claim to direct insights, so there is a connection there, it seems.
Indeed.
I have read/heard that ~70% of the population does not have an internal dialogue (where you debate a question internally in your own voice), and a similar number does not act on observable facts, but instead looks to what the larger group is doing. These two groups probably occupy the same circle in a Venn diagram.
To me this indicates that for better or worse, the masses actually do need religion. Unfortunately most religion is based on tradition (much of which contains falsehoods) instead of direct experience. IMO, those religions that do emphasize this direct experience should be defended, and individuals who seek this direct experience should be encouraged and protected.
Unless there is knowing of a life beyond death, despair, vice, and tragedy are the inevitable results. Humans absent a knowing of their eternal nature gives license to behavior which is below that of beasts. I am hopeful this age represents a transition into knowing for the mass of humanity.
In the meantime I look for the humor in it all while entertaining I may be wrong. ; )
Very true. Perhaps the worst consequence of the 'Enlightenment' is the rise of materialism, especially the denial of the human spirit. There was a good convo yesterday or the daybefore on the Enflamed Skeptic about how so much of the covid deception depended on the fear that came from unreflective people confronting their own mortality, and this seems to be the mechanism of the 'mass formation psychosis' to me.
True, although I think that what we call materialism today is more of a brainchild of the late 19th century, although there were precursors. Part of the blame surely must go to Descartes and some of the religious thinkers who split the world into spirit and dead matter, which made it easy for later atheist-materialist to simply strike the spirit part. At the cost, of course, that nothing makes sense a anymore in that view.
Yes. That is it exactly. There is a sort of magical thinking behind it all, that if you call things by two different names then they must be separate things. Perhaps we should blame the Scholastics, Aquinas and Peter the Lombard I mean, for modernity? I'll have to think about that.
The idea that a division in concept means that the things are really divided seems very much of a piece with the debates on Nominalism vs. Realism and the rise of the Transsubstantiationists.(sp?)
The hilarious thing is that materialists need to constantly change the definition of "materialism" to keep up with advances is science.
Newton's theory of gravitation with its action at a distance, whether the original version or the later "force field" version would not have been recognized by the Classical materialists like Demosthenes and Lucretius.
And if you attempted to explain Quantum Mechanics to the 19th century materialists, they would have thought you a mystic.
Indeed. The core of their belief is that there is no intelligence above (behind/within) it all, so whatever fits the bill. But their cope still has become hilariously bloated in the face of the bizarre findings in physics. A clockwork universe this ain't!
Good point. Materialism completely makes a fool of itself over Einstein. For millenia the heart of materialism was the belief in an eternally existent, uncreated universe and their great mockery of humanity was that we believed the universe had a beginning. When the expanding universe proved to them that this could not be so, they started making fun of us for not believing in their Big Bang, not realizing that this is our position from the start. It is very telling though that in the Creative Word they only recognize a 'bang' without meaning.
To your point about morality: you might enjoy my thoughts about the possibility of an afterlife: https://luctalks.substack.com/p/is-there-an-afterlife
💬 tribes form up around the dogma, and are defended as if it's an existential crisis
The roots of dogma-attachment seem to reach much deeper: killer whales might be the puritans of animal kingdom 🤭
🗨 All orcas have the equipment to feed on each other’s preferred food, but they don’t even try.[...C]aptive animals of one ecotype refuse unfamiliar food to the point of starvation.
spectator.co.uk/article/the-cultural-life-of-orcas
A few points that arise in my mind in response to this project:
1. The roots of something valuable (the necessary condition of its value) are not necessarily themselves valuable, let alone ‘therefore’ valuable. For example, the history of suffering from infection makes penicillin valuable but this does not mean that infection is therefore valuable. (I am not implying that this is the argument being made in the piece above.)
2. Science is not equivalent to Reason/Rationality/Logic; science is a procedure/activity/trade that is subject to the laws of reason like any other activity. Most, (perhaps all) science contains irrational claims and premises, and as such is at least in part contrary to reason. One of the most obvious examples is the making of claims of ‘empirical proof’, or ‘scientific knowledge’ of reality; empirical/observational information is only evidence of some alleged aspect of reality, but never a proof, since observation is inherently subject to error, as is the interpretation of what we observe, and liable to possible future refutation. Science is at best only the truth of scientific record.
2. The revolutionary essence of the Age of Enlightenment seems to come down to Kant, and his formalisation of the concept of Human that includes all tribes/races/nations on accounts of their capacity to apply the laws of logic (often intuitively) to their own thoughts and actions. At this point humanity was universalised, and until then, as far as I know, the idea of humanity was still only subjectively determined on the vague basis of ‘likeness’ to oneself (anthropos). The Enlightenment is also Kant’s re-affirmation of the laws of sense as the fundamental structure of meaning and therefore morality.
Nice piece, Mr Koch, and I've bought Mr Storm's book on your recommendation!
What do you think of the increased scholarly attention given to figures like Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa?
Thank you! Honestly, I'm not well versed in that regard and so I'm not even aware of this increased attention. I did notice though that neo-Platonism and the German mystical tradition (Böhme etc.) seem to be of interest to more people, which I think is great since it opens up new thought forms that had been long buried.
As as Communication Studies grad, I love all this intellectual stuff! I just want to offer one thought, take it or leave it:
Rather than "understand," I prefer to "inner-stand" and to "comprehend." I do not like the obligation to — or even the concomitant feeling of — "standing under" any concept, conclusion, person/group, religion, or academic/medical/historical perspective.
Nevertheless, I like reading your posts!
Very psychoanalytic interpretation of language - it honestly never occurred to me, but perhaps that's because I'm not a native English speaker? "Understand" seems to have a more direct, hands-on ring to it, whereas "comprehend" as a Latinism sounds a bit more abstract and scientific, although more accurate. The German "verstehen" has roots in "encircling", which seems rather apt, although violent. "Grasp" sounds a bit too definitive, too closed - comprehending is always a process in my experience. Well!
That is interesting isn't it? Comprehend has the same 'encircling'built into it I believe. The question of whether we would rather have our thoughts under or encircling I guess is context dependant? What I don't like about comprehend is that it seems so comprehensive, so complete. Whereas, it is easy to say 'I understand partially.'
Very good observation. I feel the same - understand seems less analytical, less closed, less left hemisphere thinking.
"...comprehending is always a process in my experience."
Indeed! That *process* for me involves intuition and one or more of my other senses. It's very much a spiritual + physical + mental process of perceiving and integrating into my existing repertoire of knowledge.
Walk into Watkin’s Books in London and you’ll see belief I “spirits, telepathy, mystical connection and the like. “ is hardly dead. Indeed by sheer numbers if you include the non-western world it’s probably never been more popular. The question seems to be why is this not acknowledged?
Thank you Luc as interesting to learn about science against religion mysticism esotericism which used to be all combined but then was replaced if I understand you correctly. I see the sense of knowing our history to help with our gaining understanding of where we stand today. Based on where we stand today it sounds like we need major revisions alright!
Hi there;
The obvious answer seems to be that someone has gone to great lengths to stamp out these ideas from the mainstream. Why? Because these ideas, when correctly understood, are empowering. If someone wants to enslave people, weakening them is a good start.
In other words, it is A LOT easier to control people through fear and greed if they scoff at the idea of an afterlife and a spiritual realm - YOLO and all that. "Get yours while you still can, morality is for suckers!". And the fear of death has a lot less impact for people who are not materialists - thus they are harder to coerce.
It is no coincidence that all primitive cultures, bar none, had ideas about demonic spirits and mystical realms. Demons are real entities, and to know this makes it possible to defend oneself against them. Same with black magic, which is a big thing among various "elites". It is much more effective if people don't know about it.
Basically, predators have an easier time if their prey are unaware of them.
This is interesting, in the regards:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mI7uHI1x09A&feature=shares
(various clips of demon-aided modern magicians gathered by an insightful observer - there are 12 episodes of around 10 minutes each - worth the watch!)
Have you noticed that the people with the most stuff including fame have dabbled in the occult? Elon Musk, Bob Dylan, etc.
Also, it appears the evil doers that perpetrate harms on others also have the most money, success and fame. Clinton’s, Epstein clients, etc.
I linked your piece here. Glad to see more people thinking about this.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/the-magician-archetype
"...namely that history is often best seen as a multi-layered myth created in a certain period and then retrojected back into the past and our job is to “deconstruct” these myths in productive and intelligent ways, then I’m all for critical theory."
I'm with you there.
But as for purchasing and reading another leftist scribe, I'll pass, thank you. My eyes have rolled so much over the last few years, I'm afraid they'll roll right out of my head.
Instead, I look forward to your savvy analysis.
Jack Parsons, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation, was a practicing Thelemite follower of Aleister Crowley.
Your comments a per pro the unity of religion and science reminded me of this author / work, which I have only just begun exploring. https://www.abarim-publications.com/index.html
💬 a battle between science and reason
🤔 *between religion and science/reason?