I’ve already added a bunch more to this essay, like this one very dense note in particular on the “enigma of philosophy” viz. the birth of Knowledge and Reason, (understood as the birth of arkhe, or individuated, identified and sovereign autonomy/autonomies) focusing in on a rejection of a certain materialist reductionism implicit in the Marxist determination of the species-essence that would presume to account for it:
Another smallish addition or note to the passage in which I discuss Hume and Kant, and the notion of a connective medium needed to account for causality; it also relates to the above through the idea of the dispositif, an accumulation of ‘tear and whole’, ‘gap and suture’ that echoes what the above text calls an ‘endless ambivalence or oscillation’ of the Signifier and aporia, sign and chiasmus, language and silence, etc:
I had a list of examples of ‘artificial differentiation’ at the very end of the essay and added the following one, which I placed first in the list:
Too many additions to recall, but that’s what I do all day. I think, I write. Then I wake up and think and write some more. And texts grow beyond my planning or reckoning, like living organisms, like plants. I can only intervene slightly, trimming a few branches here, maybe watering one plant a little more over there, etc. A garden still ruled by Nature. Every door opens a thousand more. Every idea reflects a thousand others, funhouse mirrors. What the Zoharic sages call the DAAT, which brings those who bear it as the infinity of knowledge precipitously close to madness,-- if untrained in the ancient techniques for coping with and ‘diagrammaticising’ it,- techniques collectively known as kabbalah. But of course the model of the epistemes is itself precisely this technique, a diagrammatic with which to inhere the structure of all knowledge. The formula with which the epistemes are nested and iterated serves as a mathematization of language itself; a Piercean engagement and overcoming of Lacanian aporetic mathematical structures.
From what I can tell, the epistemes are more than just guiding ideas or ways of thinking, they are metaphysically existing structures of pure logic and information (meaningful, ‘meaning-full’ information) and which pre-determine and guide (by acting as a structure for) thinking and feeling. They determine what kind of ideas and feelings are even possible for us to experience, have, or be.
There is another important aspect of it, proprioception on a meta level which is more like the general background state of affect we all have at any given moment and which also includes the types of thoughts we are having and the ways in which we tend to think. Add that up and combine with it the proprioception body self-sensing, plus specified emotions, and you will get close to the sum total. That total is what is being pre-determined by the epistemes, at least as far as I can tell.
Epistemes also fight with each other, or clash, or resist each other in order to maintain themselves against too much change. So many of them are mutually exclusive and probably all of them naturally tend to concretize their contents around an ever-increasing center of gravity of meaning as defined exclusively by that episteme (and probably also by its necessary or meaning-sustaining/expanding references and relations to aspects of other epistemes that aren’t entirely incompatible with it) itself. Multiple systems of relations between different epistemes would occur but ultimately only a single episteme would operate as the structure of (the human) being (at any given moment or meaningfully related series of moments). --Edit, or perhaps it is the case that ‘epistemes’ are merely loose clusters of what are for them basically just aspects, more individuated meanings and points within meaning-networks. In that case the episteme can be thought of as an attractor, or a generalization-concretization vector within the overall field and it would be therefore the case that the many different epistemes interact with/in/through/as each other in varying and shifting ways depending on situation and context, depending on what points in the field are salient and operational at a given moment in time/space.
Question: are the epistemes concrete, defined things or are they more like loose clusters and attractors within meaning-networks?
Then epistemes would evolve over time based on their interactions with humans and within an overall context of both the logical development of truth as such and for its own sake as well as with regard to natural selection.
With all of that of course taking place upon the foundation of biology, genetics etc. which will all partially incorporate and interact with/in/for the epistemes. This imperfection and partiality is itself also predeterminative structurally-speaking. ‘Gaps’ or holes in the system’s operations act as new points for the introduction of new or reinforced meanings, as well as bridges or buttresses allowing for expansions or adaptations in the structure over time. So we can see how the imperfection is helpful and probably necessary when it comes to the reality of this entire apparatus existing within a larger naturally-selective context and upon the biological framework. Systemic imperfections/gaps/holes (the partiality of the interactions between the layers within (human) being (i.e. layered from the biological-genetic all the way up up up to the highest super- or meta-episteme)) are analogous therefore to random mutations in our genes, which “imperfection” or error is what allows for the existence of the being itself and what is required for it to come into existence, as well as to a large degree what is required for it to continue to exist forward into the future.
Sorry for a late reply, but I often get bound up in insolubles.
You are exactly right; the epistemes, not merely guiding thought, define what it is possible to think. They determine what kind of ideas it is possible for us to have, as you said. Any iteration of the epistemes has a reactive potential; the epistemes have a measurable connectivity in any given configuration, and that measure is the measure of possible thought given that particular iteration and configuration. More connected arrangements of the epistemes have greater possibility of thought, a greater reactive potential, but they are simultaneously more difficult to work out and differentiate into something conscious and articulable in human language. That is the conundrum of philosophy and why, following Plato’s Phaedrus, philosophy finds such difficulty in enunciating its own origin. (As you said: “Multiple systems of relations between different epistemes would occur but ultimately only a single episteme would operate as the structure of the human being at any given moment or meaningfully related series of moments.”) This continuum of possibilities, this continuum containing the entire possibility of Thought in the universe, is actually named by Pierce: he called it the phaneron. A kind of matrix defined by the interactions of the epistemes from which all possible cognitive structures are generated- generated not by any external ontic reality, but by their own internal interactions, their geometrical lattices, their inner network that can be explicitly mapped out with the A,B,C; D,E, F, etc. diagram near the beginning of my original post. Philosophy becomes a kind of ‘phaneroscopy’, a reading and prognostication of the phaneron… Whoever sees more deeply into the phaneron: that is the height of philosophy.
You ask if the epistemes are concrete or more like emergent attractors. I would reframe the question as: do the epistemes exist outside of humans? If humans never evolved, or even if the universe never came into existence because the matter-antimatter proportion was symmetrical; if there was nothing at all “physically”, would the epistemes still exist? My answer to that would be yes, they would still exist.But they would exist in an undifferentiated state, like Schelling’s God without the world, trapped in the “Night of Being”. This differentiation or transition from the unconscious to the conscious divine, as Schelling would say, extracts the “intrinsic content” of the epistemes, “… the intrinsic content of the epistemes is extracted through continuous trichotomous iteration, or what Pierce calls a meditative ‘phaneroscopy’.” [Note. I often write of zairjas. These are in essence mental devices like Giordano Bruno’s memory wheels, intended to convert knowledge into the active imaginative memory instead of the passive memory: they are not merely devices for remembering lots of stuff, as most think. In that era, the concepts of memory and imagination were not as divided as they are now. They had a concept of active and passive memory: not merely to remember, but to convert information and store it in active memory, was the point of the 'ars memoria; mental devices like those of Ramon Lull, etc.These devices had their goals: the zairja’s goal is to simply aid or bring about the process of phaneroscopy:
[size=85]" Where the logic of computation amounts to a linear algorithmic transformation of one form of information into another, like the conversion of the result of Boolean calculations into the position of pixels on a screen forming the images of a video game, the logic of the zairja connects local processes to extra-local ones, decoding the linear data-stream driven by an incontrovertible clock-cycle into a parallel network driven by stochastic events for which poetry, “'the great enemy of chance”, proves itself nonetheless a “daughter of Chance”, and, while striving against it with all her powers, (out of Calvino’s Memos) still recognizes the ultimate victory of chance-- so that, in having refused to blind itself, it might recover from the irreversible process of entropic degradation and thermal equilibrium those certain ‘privileged points’ that tend toward form, that is, the differential “minima” in which the existent “crystallizes into a form” and acquires a meaning, not hardened into “mineral immobility”, but still living and hermeneutically engaged with the very process that eventuates and obliterates it, that it would decipher. The zairja’s ultimate application is in the kabbalistic dream of metalepsis, that is, the act of connecting all knowledge to all other knowledge, all forms of information to all other forms of information." ]
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The zairja as the device, and the phaneroscopy which the zairja allows us to do, facilitates or aids, is just that; finding those ‘privileged points’ within the dynamic process of unfolding (and reacting, clashing, etc.) epistemes, and using them as initial conditions to plot new trajectories of Thought, to find new possibilities of thought that ‘tend toward form’: using them to find the ‘differential minima’ in which the existent crystallizes and acquires meaning. A great deal of work is required to find those points, and even more is required to use them as variables to work out new trajectories for thought to explore.
It is also good that you noted the resistance to change that emerges in the epistemes. But that goes into modelling history itself with the epistemes, the dynamic of change governing the formation of societies. I have for a long time been trying to develop a model of history based on the epistemes, modelling political processes in relation to the dynamics of change in the epistemes so I can try to predict future events, gaining inspiration for this task from Yeats. But such a model of history would do more than predict the future, it would reconcile theology and philosophy with it; it would correlate the invisible cycles underpinning our history as the product of the epistemes interacting and iterating.
Yeats traces his System to a double kalendar, that is, two symbolical suns and moons, establishing a tetrapole mapped geometrically by a twin-gyre and plotted out by the “dance of the four royal persons” at the court of that Arabic prince. [yeatsvision.com/Judwalis.html “The diagram called ‘the holy women and the two Kalendars’ in the ‘Appendix by Michael Robartes’ prefigures ‘The Dance of the Four Royal Persons’ (AV A 9), and the tale of ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ contains the tales of the three ‘Kalandars’ in Burton’s translation, where previous versions had referred to these dervishes as Calenders (Mathers also uses ‘Kalandar’, for Mardrus’s saâlouk, and the men in question are all actually royal persons disguised). The world of the Arabian Nights, both the framing world of Shahryar and Shahrazad (Scheherazade) and the world of the stories, often the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, stands behind much of the fictional apparatus of A Vision A.”] This four-part structure of double antinomies echoes the 1) Being per transcendentiam. 2) Being per privationem. 3) Nothingness per trans. 4) Nothingess per privationem. of the four epistemes.
The internal opposition of what the Greeks, following Plato, understood as the One and the Many, is expanded into a four-part series of antinomies in the epistemes. This likewise echoes Nicolas of Cusa’s metaphysics of the Sphere which, collapsing or falling into human cognition, is projected lower-dimensionally as a series of antinomies, oppositions, transitioning from a phaseless sphere into an object that becomes phasal in our thought.
In Ruthrof, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Natural Language”, “The Eidetic Reduction in Different Contexts, Language as Eidetic Reduction”, P. 43, we see that, in Husserl’s phenomenology, this transition of the Sphere, this ‘becoming phasal’, constitutes an ‘eidetic variation’: “Since empirical objects are always viewed from a certain perspective, and we have to make a special effort in actuality to explore their adumbrational character, once we turn it into an intentional objectivity, its full quasi-appearance is immediately accessible to the imagination, on condition, that is, that we are already acquainted with its empirical source object. In other words, free imaginative variation liberates us from the constraints of empirical data.” This creates an “in-spected quasi-perceptual cube” that is “an entity radically distinct from its empirical counter-object resting on my writing desk, as well as from the logical objectivity captured by its definition”, or a “quasi-perceptual phenomenologically reduced cube” that is neither a material entity or ideal object,- an “ontically heteronomous entity” to whose order there belongs all ontically compounded processes of culture, politics, language, etc. A true model of history must account for this ‘ontic heteronomity’.
This ontically reduced cube, neither material object or ideal object, must be paired to what Pierce calls the ‘source object’ which, through semiotic shock, returns a “primary object” noematically from the symbolic gap or chiasmus enunciated by Celan’s counter-word.
The internal division of this tetrapole organizes material history into these heteronomous processes, or a primary and secondary process. Yeats understood the primary opposition in terms of the Annunciation to Mary, or Jesus’ baptism symbolized by a hovering dove descending from the heavens, as contrasted with Leda’s rape by the god Zeus in the form of a swan, the one representing the forces of stability, stasis, organization within history, the return to the Unity of the One, etc. and the later symbolizing division, furor, differentiation, the degradation of the One into Multiplicity, the ‘daemonic’ eruption of the divine into the human ordo saeculorum, etc. As Yeats says: “What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw? What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of the balance, the dip of the scale, and so date the coming of that something?” He understands this as a doubled-cycle of religious dispensation and secular civilization:
" The cycle of the civilization and that of the dispensation are syncopated, in the manner of the double gyre, so that as one reaches its maximum the other reaches its minimum. Intrinsically the gyre of religion or dispensation is Solar or primary, since it seeks to connect us to the unseen world, while that of civilisation or secular life is Lunar or antithetical, since it is a fundamentally human creation. The religious cycle therefore follows the Solar pattern, sunrise to sunrise, full moon to full moon or March to March, while the civil gyre follows the Lunar pattern, sunset to sunset, new moon to new moon or September to September (viz AV B 197), so that each one starts at the middle of the other, ‘each solar period beginning and ending in the middle of a phase’ and each phase-group (Cardinal Phase or Triad) beginning and ending in the middle of a Solar period or sign of the Zodiac. Within the cycles, however, the religion is alternately antithetical and primary, as is the civilization. See Solar and Lunar Months in the Wheel of the Equinoxes."
Because the cycles of oppositions are folded into a spiral gyre, time is contracted into a present moment, with everything outside that moment being in ‘the past’. But present and past are constantly exchanging places:
“What does this mean? These Faculties are ‘four interacting periods’ or ‘four periods of time eternally co-existent, four co-existent acts’ (AV B 256 & 257; this last description refers directly to a longer period than that under consideration here, but the idea still applies). At the end of a cycle, whether 1925 or now, the periods that are outside current reality are all in the past, and Yeats goes on to say that ‘as seen in time we explain their effect by saying that the spirits of the three periods that seem to us past are present among us, though unseen’; as a corollary, at the beginning of a cycle the contemporaneous periods are all in the future, so that there appears to be a form of undertow towards the future at the beginning of a cycle and one towards the past as the cycle draws to a close. Although all time is co-existent in some senses, these three corresponding periods impinge particularly immediately upon any given date. It is also partly because the epochs are sealed from each other in this way, referring towards their own future or past but not, within terms of this cycle, reaching to other epochs, that the next dispensation is unimaginable.”
As the phaseless sphere collapses into phasal thought, time collapses into phasal history when cognized. He further understands the double opposition as a male-female opposition, in the following way: (What is called here Mask, Body of Fate, Will, and Creative Mind" are to be compared to the four epistemes, which of course model the same twin-gyre at a higher level of abstraction.)
yeatsvision.com/History.html yeatsvision.com/Tinctures.html
“He does, however, further symbolise the gyres in a form of conflict of the sexes, where those on the black wheel or cone, ‘Mask and Body of Fate are symbolic woman,’ and those on the red ‘Will and Creative Mind symbolic man’, together playing out a relationship of constant interchange and struggle. The relationship is not entirely normal however, and is compared to that between ‘the man and woman of Blake’s Mental Traveller’, where a male child grows up in the care of an old woman who grows younger, until they are the same age, he rapes her and leaves her. This man when old takes a young girl, and starts to grow young again while the girl ages, until he becomes a baby again, ‘The Babe! the Babe is born’ (cf. AV B 277) and is taken by an old woman, so that the cycle repeats itself. This strange, dream-like and violent world is based upon alternate ageing and juvenescence, and Yeats claims that the ‘student of A Vision will understand it at once.’”
“Both the ‘male’ and ‘female’ gyre contain one forward moving component and one backward moving component. During the current, primary dispensation, ‘Mask and Body of Fate are religion, Will and Creative Mind secular life’ (AV B 256), and this will be transposed at the next annunciation or revelation. What is not clear is whether the attribution or experience of time will change in the antithetical dispensation. We are, after all, accustomed to the idea of dates ‘going backwards’, in the way that we number the period before the start of the Common Era, the birth of Christ as fixed by Dionysius Exiguus. These peoples never counted their own eras in this way and, similarly, the placing of dates backwards need not imply an experience of time running in reverse, but a shifting of reference towards a future point. However, in another sense Yeats does appear to posit a reversed flow of time. It seems implicit, but is not clear, that when Will and Creative Mind are transferred to the Solar cones of religion, that the emphasis will shift to Creative Mind so that the ‘male’ gyre will start to run backwards in time and rejuvenate, while in the ‘female’ gyre of Mask and Body of Fate, which will move onto the Lunar cones, the forwards-moving Mask will dominate. However, no details are given. Possible clues from the Automatic Script are that, ‘Throughout recorded history the value of time rose. But during subjective periods it fell again’, and, in one of the more far-fetched elements of the whole enterprise, that the mission of the Yeatses’ son was ‘to change the quality of the idea of time in men’s minds.”
What is important is modelling and understanding the ‘principle of exchange’ governing when one cycle bleeds into another, when the minima of one gyre transitions into the maxima of the other gyre:
" Not the least fascinating part of the book is made of the 34 pages in which Mr. Yeats makes a pattern of Europe from 2000 B.C. to the present day, in a style which is dream, and in the dream diagram, and at that a diagram of greatness and terror.
In a period when our cleverest men may write wisdom but do not write English, the style is itself a refreshment. The sentence which refers to the Byzantium saints ‘staring at miracle’ is an example . . . . Yet perhaps, to some minds in a different stage of thought, the most thrilling sentence in the book is the one which Mr. Yeats quotes from Heraclitus. It is quoted in relation to the opposing cones: ‘dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.’ If indeed the world is founded on an interchange so profound that we have not begun to glimpse it, such sentences for a moment illuminate the abyss. If so, it is the principle of some such exchange that must be sought before all national and international evils can be righted. ‘A civilization,’ Mr. Yeats says, ‘is a struggle to keep self-control.’ Only by discovery of the principle of exchanged life can we keep our self-control by losing it, and without losing it we cannot keep it."
Charles Williams, ‘Staring at Miracle’,
Yeats, Giraldus, Cusanus, and others attempted to provide that model, but none of their systems have predictive power. Thus the interest in the Zairja mystics, who focused on mastering prophecy. (Prophecy is replaced by phaneroscopy here.) What we do have is a model of history; we require a model to predict the future using these same principles of the double-gyre.
Abstracting all of this material, the epistemes are at once a model of history, philosophy, etc. All forms of human knowledge become translatable into all other forms of knowledge. That is the ‘goal’, if there is a goal; completing this correlation.
Integral to the epistemes is an overlaying on this element of Cusanus’ metaphysics with several different correlating systems, namely, from abstract algebra, Grothendieck’s group theory, homotypy theory, and in linguistics, Pierce’s cenopythagorean semiotics. But there are hundreds of others; many of them I have elaborated on. And many of them I have not. Yet this task, the task of using the epistemes to correlate everything, and produce a model of history that is simultaneously philosophy reconciled to theology, with the power to predict changes in these ‘gyrating cycles’,- the task of reconciling all human knowledge, in short, is a task beyond any one single person, even beyond me. It is the work of a new society.
I believe that much about the greatest philosophical works so far have been about finding these critical points, although that philosophy may not realize that is what it’s doing. Trying to derive down as deeply as possible to the fundaments, where absolutes occur and can only be reconciled with other counter-absolutes by way of what you call a daemonic process, a very real expansion-explosion of oppositions all sustained in their own difference (makes me think of Deleuze’s difference and repetition), and as human minds our understanding or our 'thought’s is precisely this very expansion-explosion of sustained differences-as-such and “reconciled” by way of our own individual cognitive faculty, our “mind’s eye” or imagination + concepts.
What you called phaneron or what Pierce called that is what I call the Universe of Ideas. Except that in my conception of it, it already exists in full and absolutely perfect differentiation as well as maximum unification/relationality regardless if there are humans or other thinking beings in existence to appreciate this fact or not. The “facts themselves” already exist, have always existed and will always exist – in other words thought/understanding is always a process of discovery, of mapping territory within the Universe of Ideas.
This is what I don’t understand yet, how the epistemes exist in a four-part series or geometry. Can you outline these four parts in more detail? And more directly described-explained as opposed to using religious or symbolic metaphors.
Hell yeah, this is why I like Husserl and why I moved from using an existential method to a phenomenological one.
My main focus behind and beneath philosophy and the phenomenological method I try to employ, is always on meaning. The ‘meaning of meaning itself’ I consider perhaps the deepest issue and question possible. Especially when we understand this also as relates to your notion of epistemes, how thought really works with respect to that, and to the entire apparatus/structure of the Universe of Ideas itself.
I am not discounting any of this at all, but I have a hard time understanding it. I am not very good with the religious-poetic and symbolic-metaphorical descriptions, for whatever reason my mind has transitioned or coalesced into preferring direct, unambiguous statements not depending on layers of representative or metaphrical meaning. I like using nothing but logic and my own direct observations/explanations, which can make things difficult if the words for what I am experiencing and trying to describe don’t really exist yet or have never been put together in the ways I need to put them together to sufficiently capture and express what I am seeing.
I too would like to be able to see history in terms of these deeper cycles, already I know of the common Malthusian one which is underpinned in large part by how accumulating genetic mutations in the population, this being a result of civilization having attained sufficient affluence and wealth via industrialization, territorial expansion and sophisticated politics, leads to decreasing fertility and decreasing physical and mental health, each generation declining in these ways from the previous generation. This cycle ultimately ends up contributing causally to some kind of civilizational breakdown/collapse, at which point Darwinian conditions reassert themselves and the cycle begins again.
What you are getting at is more in the area of mentality, ideation, symbols, the epistemes themselves and how different civilizations or groups will have access to different ways of thinking and emoting. Philosophy should be able to map this territory as clearly as we might understand how unpurged genetic mutations affects populations over time and within a broader context of natural selection and group competition.
Yes, mapping the Universe of Ideas including our own being and our own ways and means of relating to it. But we could never reconcile philosophy to theology until we gain literal, direct access to and understanding of what spirituality really is and which currently remains outside of our direct experience at least for the most part. At best what we tend to have here is a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive analysis of our own frameworks of assumptions and ideas regarding possibilities-as-such interacting with our very human wants, needs, social dynamics, historical cycles, personality and personal psychological factors etc. as well as group-level survival needs having arisen quite naturally and necessarily from the history of life on earth, natural selection etc. But when it comes to spirituality ITSELF, to the actual meaning content (what “really exists”) behind the ‘theological’ words and concepts we still seem to have very little access. This is one area I have explored a bit in my own work, and I can say for certain it seems to be the far deepest, most unexplored territory I can find. It is easy to write it off by reducing it to the symbolic order within our systems of conception and language, but that would be a gross error.
Until philosophy itself, as work and as method, finds it important to study this directly and for its own sake without false reductions, which is to say we need to perform the eidetic reduction-expansion method on every single datum of this as pertains to our own experience and we need to have absolutely maximal and sufficiently intricate speculative systems for sustaining every possibility as such and for its own sake with regard to every other, all mapped out necessarily and at once, then perhaps philosophy and theology (what it really means beyond mere surfaces and simple utilities) could begin to be reconciled. But even this is not something we can really properly conceive of, at least not as far as I can tell, because the nature of the spiritual is so absolutely foreign to even our most edified and expanded philosophical mind. How does one translate a “spiritual experience” into philosophy, assuming the experience in question was authentically true? How could we begin to grasp what this actually means? We don’t even know what happens after death. We are still very naive about so-called spiritual realities, and this is a big problem for our philosophy. A problem that as far as I’ve seen basically no philosophy has acknowledged or honestly tried to tackle.
That is the case. I believe that all genuine philosophy has unconsciously ‘repeated’ the structure of the epistemes and so they can all be organized into a singular schema, even those philosophies/philosophers directly opposing one another, they all fit into the scheme. That is why I freely use ideas in Marx when I am in fact an anti-Marxist; it’s why I use conceptual tools in Lacan despite my being an anti-Lacanian: even those I oppose are useful, as they have unconsciously repeated my own philosophy through history, for it is the only philosophy- and because I am conscious of that philosophy, I can freely use ideas that normally oppose one another and don’t work together. Not through a ternary three-part dialectic, which eradicates difference, but through a far more potent, as Harman calls it, “four-part logic” inscribed by the four epistemes and their ‘cenopythagorean arrangement’.
Fitting philosophy together with history and theology goes in many directions. This is one of them I wished to note:
Protestant faith viz. Luther, drawing its most pointed attack against Pelagius, tells us that it is by faith alone that man finds salvation; not philosophy, not reason, not good deeds, not submission to the ‘body of the Church’. This is in direct opposition to Catholicism, where the body of the Church is supreme and salvation is reached only through service to the Church, great deeds that support the health of ‘the body’ of the Church. [Note on Pelagianism. Pelagians believe that the Fall (Adam and Eve’s original sin) did not corrupt or stain human nature; they believe human nature is fundamentally perfect and so we can achieve the divine state all on our own, through nothing but our own human powers- they think we can overcome all of nature and achieve transcendence without the help of God (that is why grace is so important to Protestants: if the Fall corrupted human nature, we can only reunite with the divine through holy grace, not through our own power, be it the power of our Reason or the greatness of our deeds in service to the Church). In modern terms, think of transhumanists: people who believe we can overcome all limitations of nature simply through the development and relentless improvement of our own technology, even the limitation of something like physical aging or death itself. This Pelagian attitude has infected all of society with the idea of an intrinsic perfectibility of human nature; even atheists are Pelagian in the sense that they believe we can overcome all limitation through only our own human powers viz. our science and technology.]
Starck and others believed that the Church had been accreted over time with impurities generated by the degrading movement of History. He believed in a ‘natural religion’ evolved directly from the mytho-religion of the Pagans, viz. the Greeks and Romans, and a true papacy along with it, a ‘holy mother-church’ that once existed but has been lost over time, such that the difference between Protestant and Catholic was erased dialectically, grasped as only an apparent difference, arriving upon a new idea: to purify Christianity and return to this mother church for which such differences would no longer be meaningful.
But the distinction between Catholic popery and Protestantism must not be lost- for Hamann. (And for me. Fucking Catholics, bunch of Pagan-imitating, heathen degenerates and weirdo rapists.) Thus Hamann argues that truth is never pure in its earthly appearance, it is always draped with ‘impurities’ that must be deciphered through the ‘dark glass’ of History. There never was any ‘mother church’, ‘natural religion’ or pure Christianity. Decipherment of these impurities is key. That is why, in the Cloverleaf of Hellenistic letters, Hamann writes that sensuality and reason are conjoined in language,- language as a kabbalistic art that brings life to the broken ‘potsherds and skeletons’ of history, a dry field full of bones from which no one but a prophet can conceive a dressing of living sinew and flesh and skin or breath- one needs the wind that sets the word of the Lord God to blow upon them.
Returning to Starck: how is this purification of the true religion to be made, how are we to return to his pure, ahistorical faith? By separating the inner and outer man; man’s religious dimension and his political dimension. And here comes Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment. For Mendelssohn, the church and state are separated in order to mirror a separation between the ‘inner and outer being of man’. Because the Church deals with the totally inward persuasion of the subject’s faith, it cannot be a body like the polis is, following the Platonic and Greek conception of politikeia: thus it cannot set up any external standards or laws. The church may set up doctrines, but it is the State which is the ‘body’’ of the polis, with the power to command and make laws. Furthermore, the cohesion of the State and the people in it rests on a Church supported by a natural religion like that of Starck’s,- a religion for which all differences of men, Protestant or Catholic or Jew or anything else, arise only from disputes of inner persuasion that are, in the political body, to be ignored and resolved by other means- by the exercise of free rationality. This is the idea of religious tolerance, (we hear a lot about tolerance in the Leftist politics of our own age, don’t we) and this view encapsulates the view of the Enlightenment in general. Returning to Haman, this is understood in the following way: we have, in following through on this idea, made religion irrelevant to political life and formed a state with no God to deliver it to. “Reason and wisdom are mere words if the state is turned loose to its own ends.” The Jesuit order supplied some resistance to this following-through of Mendelssohn’s vision, though they were misguided.
Contra that, Hamann rejects a separation of the inner and outer being of man. Accordingly, the separation of Church and State for the reasons noted above is untenable.
For Hamann there is an even more important distinction than that between Protestant and Catholic, namely Jew and Christian. He understands the decipherment of this difference as illustrating the ultimate question of history and faith, holding to a necessary connection between them, contra Lessing. Lessing, further developing the idea of a natural religion, believes that the only true basis of Faith can be found in facts discovered by reason alone, never by historical events. That is the question, to what extent a historical event like the life of Christ can relate to Faith. Lessing essentially bans God from entering into History, confining the divine to a metaphysical existence. For Hamann “this is a Gnostic hate of flesh. These philosophers are not human- i.e. historical beings, but super-historical; truth according to their canons cannot appear in flesh and blood, and be mediated to men through flesh and blood, i.e. historically through fallible sense-experience.” For Lessing, God is merely the ‘summus philosophicus’, merely the final culminating object of Reason’s introverted self-reflection; the dead-end of a dialectic. This echoes the following elevation of the lumen naturale [light of Nature, Reason] above the lumen gratia, [Grace a la. Protestantism vs Catholicism] which I extracted from a variety of sources:
The Jesuits, resisting this idea of a natural religion, banning God from history, and a separation of the inner and outer man, were nonetheless misguided in their strict adherence to the dead Letter of the sacred texts which stripped the Word of all life in converting it into authoritarian prescriptions. For Hamann, the word is living, and requires kabbalistic intervention, not mindless submission, not our passively obeying a Law derived from the text and imposed on us by other men,- by a Church.
Point is the epistemes- part of my goal with them- is to bring this century old debate back into the light and answer it, reconciling theology and history. I like Hamann but he did not develop his idea into anything substantial, he didn’t really answer the debate, he just wrote about it.
There’s a kind of secret society called the Orphanage that is heavy into this side of things, trying to revive this debate from a super-Protestant perspective. I’ve dealt with them but never swore the Oath they make you take to get let into the real meat of the project. You can look them up if you want, the May Day Mystery people call it. People have little idea of what it is or what they’re doing (most seem to think it’s either a joke or the Illuminati or terrorists) but it all has to do with what I’ve said here. They are basically trying to reconstruct a new Protestant society, eradicating the unconscious influences of those like Pelagius, whose ideas have been transmitted in the substratum of our modern philosophical underpinnings. Moreover, they hold to a supreme unity of the sciences like the one I hold to with the epistemes, (not becoming a member, I don’t know what exactly their own philosophy is, but it serves a similar function as the epistemes do for me; some kind of model of man’s total cognitive order that allows one to bring together seemingly unrelated subjects, to combine all forms of knowledge with all other forms, as I have combined homotypy theory, teichmuller-theory, Piercean semiotics, Lacan, linguistic anaphora, Platonic aporia, and economics, etc. etc.) such that they believe they can use seemingly unrelated things like Fourier transforms or stochastic p-adic dynamics or various other mathematical “stratagems” to model shifts in society and cultural trends- to model them and to influence them, which is mostly what they do. They have their members engage in experiments where they try to move society a certain way.
It’s all related to how we respond to imperfection. No one is perfect, everyone has limitations of knowledge and makes mistakes. We are intimately aware of our own imperfection. This fact can then go on to fuel other things, like religious sentiment and a desire for forgiveness and grace to become more holy (perfect, without sin), or it can go in a transhumanist direction and push people to embrace radical utopian ideas about the merger between humans and technology. I’m sure there are plenty of other directions this can go too. At bottom it’s a basic psychological operation based on our own awareness of the fact of our own imperfection and the imperfection of others/the world around us and what this all means.
More sane approaches will already work into themselves the fact that humans are not perfect, and there is no need to try and make humans perfect or to create perfect systems in society, politics, economics etc. These will always be “imperfect” no only because humans will always be “imperfect” but because life itself, nature, the world, physical laws, all of these imply a ton of limitations and contradictions not all of which get to be resolved together at the same time. Pushing too far toward perfection in any direction starts to generate exponentially increasing opportunity costs, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out about Americans with regard to their relative obsession with the notion of fairness-equality-rights. Utopianism is basically a non-starter and anyone who proceeds from a utopian assumption is pretty much refuting themselves.
Well the Catholics are the ones who created the Bible as a coherent book, which remained unchanged since its creation up until Luther removed 7 of its book because he didn’t like them. Catholics as an institution or church were pretty much the only Christians in existence for over a thousand years, and are solely responsible for the spread of Christianity to the point where it became a self-reinforcing cycle of religious growth in humanity at large. Just like how Islam was spread by the sword, so was Christianity back in the day. But each have their own intrinsic appeal and truth-value, so it can be debated to what extent violent conquest and forced conversions or the actual inner content and inherent value and truth of Christianity/Islam themselves were responsible for these religions becoming global and embraced by billions of people. Probably both things were needed to achieve a sufficient momentum to launch these religions into global status.
Not all of them are like that, at least not more so than the average person and regardless of their religious beliefs. Yes they do employ various paganisms such as for Christmas which is an obvious one, Easter too, they fused pagan behaviors and times of the year with Christian lore. Pretty cool if you ask me. They took over the pagan stuff and made it their own, used it to buttress their own new religion and to help sway people to join it.
The kabbalistic or otherwise over-emphasis on language is silly. Many of them literally believe in magic spells that can be performed using certain secret words. It’s a misunderstanding of what language is. Philosophy has this misunderstanding a lot too. The real heart of language is MEANING, not words. Not these utterances and sounds and scribbles we use to represent/convey meanings. All that really matters in the end is the meaning itself. Sure we can and should etymologically trace the meaning of words over time and understand the connections to how new words and new languages formed, that’s all really interesting. But that’s a secondary project and doesn’t primarily infringe upon or predetermine the study of meaning itself, directly and prior to all language usage.
Focusing on language directly often seems to be a way to attempt to gain power over others, whether in politics or esoteric circles. Most people can be fairly easily mesmerized, confused or hypnotized even by the clever use of language. Look at NLP for example. One more reason I don’t trust people who are so obsessive about words and language and who think the primary reality lies in them. These people are either pretty stupid to miss the key point of MEANING for which language only exists at all and only as a secondary system of expression and representation, or they are deliberately malicious. I have encountered people of both types, many times.
And this all goes for religion as well. Language-obsession can be seen as analogous to religion-obsession. Both betray themselves in their over-psychologism, narcissism, habitual ignorance and lack of intellectual honesty, and desire for power. Aristotle was right when he said men desire power over others because they lack power over themselves–once we obtain power over ourselves, which also means reaching a certain threshold of understanding about the truth as such and for its own sake, seeking power over others becomes meaningless, trite, banal and embarassingly childish.
Trying to reduce religion and politics to a fundamental opposition of inner-outer or instead a kind of unity between them, I don’t see the point of this. Religion and politics are their own things, and in fact this examples what I was saying above regarding the error of taking language and words at face value; this same error takes place when people take concepts at face value. The meaning behind a concept is all that matters, not the concept itself, not “what it looks like”. Religion and politics may “look like” this or that, but until we see beyond and behind the appearances we are just playing the “this or that” naming game… what most people play all the time when they try to think. “This is that, and that is this, and this over here has this name, and that thing there has this name which also means this, and then that one…” lol. It’s funny to see people doing this, like ants scurrying around in an ant farm. Not seeing how they are entirely trapped by a secondary, derivative and miniscule construct of language, words and concepts. Even if these are multiply iterated or made more complex they never fail to be basic in their nature.
Religion is religion, politics is politics, these things are what they are, they mean whatever it is that they actually mean. Their more isolated constitutive aspects are also “mean whatever it is that they actually mean” and should also be eidetically extracted and reduced-expanded in the proper phenomenological process of understanding. It’s a funny irony that once this process is performed, entirely “external” as it is completely focused on the experiential side of things with regard to concept formation and concept use, it yields exactly its own opposite: the null or vacuum-space left behind once all of that secondary and tertiary garbage is identified and symbolically removed, moved out of the way to make room for… the truth. Reality itself. What these things we are trying to analyze actually mean.
Every esoteric school, every philosophy, every academic, every politician, these are all going to be the same in the end: each of them thinks they have the one answer, that their particular perspective and way of using language/words/concepts is “The right one”. I have yet to see any of these people dive beyond appearances and into substance, which is meaning and what meaning MEANS and what is the meaning of that, etc. etc. and etc. Truth/reality quickly recedes beyond our easy ability to express in words. I’m not interested in those seeking power, I find it disgusting and hopelessly trivial. And I take as equally power-seeking the consistent method of reduction-to or what I called the naming game being used as a substitute for real, authentic truth-seeking. That’s why you won’t find me reading or studying much of anything in philosophy, psychology etc. anymore. Big waste of time, and not only a waste of time but even worse, a failure of time.
Moreover about the epistemes or rather regarding the situation and context in which they exist, two things: 1) the “holographic” nature of our reality, and 2) the (for lack of any words to easily describe this) near-infinitely scaled-measured consciousness-as-perspective-in-sum in which we all exists as minds, as immaterial living beings set somehow inside what to us is a physical flesh existence.
Epistemes exist in (2) above and as ultimate points or peak sums, massive aggregates forcing everything around themselves to bend to their own logic. A reverse temporality even, a backwards motion in time; we are shaped by what we have not yet been able to experience, and this not-yet calls us and guides us toward it. The more we make ourselves think and live in this future not-yet the more it becomes our right-now.
The holographic reality is tricky because we can’t explain why the holograms of this reality are so dense, why do they interact with each other the way they do? Real holograms are made of light, not particulate matter. But somehow being trapped inside the hologram seems to give it different properties, it becomes more solid, self-resistive. If everything is made of light, would that light seem solid to itself? I don’t think so, perhaps only if the light spread in a given area was so massively dense and trapped there in certain holographic forms, that it would begin to seem “solid”. Someone should set that up as an experiment, pour so much light into a very small space and see if the light itself begins to take on properties of physical material. Almost a reverse e=mc^2.
Consciousness being the immaterial that is ‘trapped’ in the physical-holographic reality is more subject to immaterial laws, which is why despite that you can affect the mind by changing physical things about the body you can never understand the mind on those terms. It would be like trying to understand a building by throwing bombs at it and seeing how the building changes with each bomb impact; sure you can change the building a lot, you can make it sort of look like how you want in a crude way, you can even destroy it entirely. But you would never be able to understand what the building actually is, why it is there, how was it made, what are its functions, what are its future possibilities etc. etc.
The simplest way to live is to immerse in the physical-holographic and be a sensory animal. Lots of people live this way, and lots of so-called philosophers advocate for this. They mock anything beyond sensation, for example. That is fine, it is simply an example of entropy at work. Things take the path of least resistance unless something alters them or this path and causes them to behave differently.
What generates the hologram, and can we discover this somewhere in the episteme-space? I have no idea. But what we can discover there are the logics and rules and laws governing the mind and consciousness itself, the immaterial which is purely phenomenologically experiential. The self is ‘carried away’ upon this crest as its perspective becomes more and more massive, taking in far greater and more comprehensive swathes of experiences than it could have before or than tend to be common for a human to process and ‘see’. This changes the mind, opening it up to more of the epistemes or at least bringing it closer to them. At this point it starts to become second nature to read people’s minds, to be able to directly infer-deduce and logically derive what is going on inside their mind from the most basic details of what they are doing, saying, how they act, etc. In terms of philosophy and ways and contents of thinking this becomes the easiest of all, since reality itself is already “made of philosophy”.
Regarding (1) or the holographic nature of our reality (I realize this is a bit off-topic but I am going to relate it to the epistemes) one way to think about this is to combine things like the notion of multiverse, parallel dimensions, 5D+ realities and meta-dimensions also collapsed down into the minimal 2D (three axis or degrees of possible freedom i.e. forward, backward, sideways; also therefore allowing for the 1, 0, and 1and0 i.e. the quantum bit for quantum coding), D-wave and Mandela effect, then think from a purely logical speculative position that what seems to always be reoccurring and being preserved underneath it all isn’t life per se but rather the meaning that life allows into being. What is meaning, what is the meaning of meaning? And what does THAT mean? Precisely. Presciently positively purposeful and with absolute fucking precision. I mean just imagine trying to code for something like a DNA molecule. Let alone the human mind. Maybe there is a programing language beyond the qbit level, who knows. Most likely there is, something to stabilize and found the quantum code. That code is producing recurring phenomena which cause meaning to appear in reality, and meaning aggregates in space and time while also remaining extremely localized. Meaning is like the recursivity of life into itself, not in any dumb Nietzschean way but in the exact opposite way as that. Meaning is precisely what Nietzsche and most of philosophy aims to subvert (as communism subverts society, economy, history and the structures-meanings in these senses in order to entropically release energy and capitalize (lol) upon this energetic release; similarly also to the dopamine-hacking of drug-induced euphorias or to stealing from the future by borrowing massive debts) and ultimately wound fatally and kill. But why? Because negative meaning exists opposite positive meaning yet both classes of meaning ARE STILL INTRINSICALLY MEANINGFUL. Therefore they are one and the same type despite also being polar opposites.
What is also interesting is how positive meaning is balanced against negative meaning in the net sum. Clearly there is a balancing mechanism or algorithm written into the code such that the tendency exists to not only balance both sides but to prioritize a situation in which there is more positive meaning than negative meaning, yet this preference is limited such that it does not become an opportunity cost upon positivity itself. We all know about the whole platitude the light needs the darkness thing. A life with no negativity would quickly become meaningless and positivity would lose its polarity and therefore its potency. [Also consider the notion from The Matrix movie that negativity naturally occurs and accumulates or tends to grow over time as the errors in the system, and therefore these can also be collected and eventually purged back down to a minimum level by allowing them to ‘explode’ into being all at once (think nuclear war or the world wars for example).] It is this balance and its refined prioritization mechanism that causes me to give serious thought to the idea of a designer, an intentional mind or being that somehow caused all of this to occur. But it is also possible that we are dealing with a natural phenomenon too, because for example it could be argued to be the case that any holographic realities that emerged into being which did not happen to have both this balancing algorithm and its refined prioritization of the positive over the negative would possibly collapse into chaos and entropy in fairly short order. I don’t know. No one has really studied these dynamics so the rules involved aren’t well known yet. Philosophy is still a baby struggling to even learn how to stand up on its own.
This connects to the epistemes because we can understand the structure of the epistemes in two ways, both as aspects fundamental to the code itself in a spiritual sense analogous even to DNA, as well as both symbols of and literal real manifestations of meaning itself. If you look at an individual episteme in its entirety what does it look like? It looks like one huge vast fucking structure of pure meaningfulness. It looks like a god of meanings. Almost like the ancient Greek mythological gods, which now that I think about it are probably each representing individual epistemes. No wonder that culture was able to create so much knowledge. Their entire mythologico-religious structure was actually modeled directly on meaning itself (as Christianity is also, with its equation God=Love=Truth) but in such a way as to attempt to isolate the epistemes or at least something inherent to the epistemes, if not them directly. The epistemes being more like master-ideas, the highest comprehensivity of platonic ideation occurring factually in reality and informationally organizing possible thought and certain types of our experiences. So the epistemes are much more complex, deep and wide compared to what the Greek gods represent, however that ancient mythology still got it pretty much correct. They pushed closer than probably anything else except for Christianity.
Then there is the moral aspect of all this, and that has somewhat to do with the question of whether or not this whole thing was deliberately put here for some reason(s) or instead just happened to evolve naturally. The morality of it all depends somewhat, not entirely, upon how we wish to approach and possibly answer that question. Think about the question of suffering and evil: first from a Christian perspective, then from the perspective of the holographic simulated reality both as natural evolved and as intentionally created, then realize that the refined prioritization within the balancing mechanism can in fact be seen not only as an ontological stabilization but also as a moral invention. This gives us a way to answer the criticisms against God, as in “Why does God allow evil and suffering? Why are some human lives brutal, short, horribly suffering and have no goodness to them?” Or “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Well just looking at the balance and its ontological function alone can answer these questions, plus we find a moral and thus more satisfying answer once we factor in the refined prioritization. Especially with the assumption of intentional creation as opposed to naturally evolved. So even though some lives are full of only or mostly negative meaning THIS IS STILL MEANING and it is always already the case anyway that the total sum of all meanings everywhere at any given moment is net positive, and it would represent an extreme fallacy of diminishing returns and exponentially increasing opportunity costs for there to exist any attempt to radically reduce negativity in such a way that either no lives experienced only or mostly negative meaning OR that all lives at least possessed some meaningful degree of positive meaning despite whatever amount of negative meaning that life also experiences. So this argument from necessity seems solid but also morally unsatisfying, although if we look at it purely from an aesthetic lens I think its ontological necessity does actually become morally conclusive in a way that is not entirely unsatisfying. However if we factor in an assumption of intentionality then it becomes possible to recreate the Christian God as well as perhaps the Greek Mythos almost from the ground up. And this also shows how Christianity supersedes the Greek Mythos in terms of requiring intentionality as opposed to simply being able to be reduced entirely to things like evolution and mere psychology.
I was a bit inaccurate with the whole simulation thing, yes it is a simulation so-called but really that isn’t the proper term for it. The right term is a saturated substance or massive multi-layered construct comprised of pure spirit, spiritual energies operating on many levels. Using the analogy of a computer game is less accurate than simply saying directly that reality is a purely spiritualized construct, created in the mind of God and “simulating” this planet and these lives we have. When we die and our souls leave our bodies there are numerous things that might happen, probably depending on lots of factors only some of which we know or can guess at. But this remarkable life, nature, planet that we have was created by God out of pure spiritual energy, reduced down in layers and ‘frequencies’ into more and more ‘solid’ forms until our material world appeared. Think about this: when people have Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) they are often clinically dead for many minutes, with a flat brain EKG. No brain activity once they are truly dead; heart stops, breathing stops, blood flow stops, brain activity ceases. Yet in that moment where no conscious experiences should be able to occur, is precisely when the most incredible NDE’s happen.
This world is a construct and for whatever reason we decided to inhabit it for a while. God is always there and made all of this “simulation”. We could rise above it and back into more spiritualized layers of existence if we could remember how to do that.
So simulation and Mandela and all that is still correct, but we should shift the way we think about and visualize this. Once scientists gained the ability to tinker directly with genes as well as with the quantum dimension itself using quantum computers and places like CERN, things started to get extra weird. Yet God clearly built this reality for us knowing that someday we would develop the technology to begin to hack into it in small ways. It makes me wonder what his plans are for that. The level of technology is now so advanced yet people have no clue. Injections that mess with our genes and try to cut us off from God, directed energy weapons (DEWs) from space, 5G targeted kill systems, HAARP-related weather weapons creating earthquakes in places like Japan and now Turkey, CERN and quantum computers able to cause splits or “bleeding energy” in the parallel dimensions. Crazy stuff out there that we barely even understand. But once you realize that a simulation, built up purely by spiritualized energies of varying types and ‘frequencies’ (vibrations maybe) is able to accommodate just about anything in theory, like you could create a computer game for just about anything at all, any kind of game and graphics and weird physics that violate the laws of nature, because its all “code”. At bottom we are in this holographic experience that underneath has been created delicately and intricately to create a life and existence for us following certain patterns and rules, but there’s nothing saying those patterns and rules cannot be altered or broken. Anything is possible. And people had better start getting right with God because things are not looking too good in this Earth reality we currently inhabit. Evil has been allowed to culminate and get way out of control, in part because we (the average person) has allowed this to occur. Why? Because they (most people) don’t want to know about it, they want a comfortable life ignorant of such things. That ignorance has a cost, and it looks like pretty soon we will all be paying that cost.