Metaphysic, Intuition, Intelligence

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

To understand the term 'metaphysic', I have found, requires back-tracking over the development of our present manner of organising our perception of reality.

Without a grasp, even in skeleton form, of how our perception has been moulded over many generations, and the degree that philosophy, and also mystical means of apprehending reality and interpreting it, and indeed also romantic sensibilities (and romantic is used here to indicate a willed injection, as it were, of inner content into perception), and then of course the so-called scientific revolution with the empirical attitude (which might be said to be the obverse of the romantic attitude but which also has much to do with 'willed perception'), without that grasp I do not think that one can really understand what 'metaphysic' means and what it refers to. The more that one goes into the question, the more difficult it becomes.

Is it an illusion, though attractive and tempting, that one can somehow side-step all the mechanism of moulded perception and simply *see* reality? In the first place we are all of us *outcomes* of processes of understanding and explaining reality and we seem to come into this world with an equipment already formed (thinking of Chomsky's theories---'innateness hypothesis'---of language as preprogrammed into our organism). If this is so then it indicates a whole fore-structure that is there, somehow, before we cogitate and conceptualise, and certainly before we interpret, explain and speak.

One wonders then if the quest for a knowledge and knowing-system that precedes the human is, or must be, innate within the structure of manifestation, of the existence of the universe. It also leads to questions about holism and fragmentation of knowledge-systems. It is my intuitive understanding, and this applies to Western philosophy and religious concepts, that we seem to 'suffer' from fragmentation. In any case, that is one of Guenon's insights and part of his critique of Occidental philosophy which he traces to 'errors' made by the early Greeks. He is quite invested in the sense that his understanding of the ur-Hindu (Vedic) revelation offers a way out of the conundrum of fragmented and ever-dividing concept-structures.

I also think it is obvious, yet requires to be stated, that the GF programme was begun with and under the assumption that there is a way out of the conundrum of fragmentation. If it doesn't, then what is it really about? It also has to be said, I think, that the GF Presentation is---has to be in fact, or has to lead to---a defined ethical programme. In fact it would have to define ontology and everything that Occidentalism attempts to define. It would not be possible to propose a Total System, an Absolute System, that does not either remodel and improve (perfect) existent ethical propositions, or present a 'new' and better one. Yet my impression is that this does not and has not happened, and my impression is that the GF programme more of less attaches itself to an ill-defined scientific-materialist mode of perception. I would refer to jupiviv who could be seen as a representative of that view.

However, within Occidental philosophy and aesthetics (I know that is a naughty word here) the inner dimensions of these questions have been explored in a great deal of depth. It all requires a good deal of background of course, but suffice to say that there is a school of thinking that understands the human self, the soul, the entity itself, as an agent and actor empowered with imagination which is not a mere handling of or manipulation of received images and sense impressions from the world which are stored up, and assembled, into greater wholes, but fundamentally a creative force in se. I do not think that this is an understanding that would be or could be allowed by the QRS school (as it were) nor has it been allowed by many who flash through here like shooting stars careening out of the thighs of Chaos.

Take for example this View offered by Coleridge:

• "Newton was a mere materialist---Mind in his system is always passive---a lazy looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God's Image, that that, too, in the sublimest sense---the Image of the Creator---there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false as a system."

In all this, at least in my present view, a great deal hinges on how our present perception and the way that we imagine and visualise the world has been moulded, and the degree that we have received that understanding, and simply apply it or as I say 'operate it'. It seems that we have various alternatives that we encounter or that are presented to us: One is to simply build on and extend the Lockeian or Newtonian models, as these are 'inevitable' in our perception and part-and-parcel certainly of the modern world and its perception-structures, or we go back in time (if you will allow the turn of phrase) to moments when other descriptive-systems were possible and when they functioned.

In this sense then a notion of recovering metaphysic takes on a certain importance, and 'metaphysic' is not just perception (a dog perceives the same world), but a creative act, a spiritual act perhaps one would say. And it is in this sense that the notion in the word metaphysic takes on importance. It becomes an unknown essence, a mysterious quality and attribute, a possibility ...

This is a paragraph from 'Fancy & Imagination' by R. L. Brett which traces, for critical literary purposes, how imagination has been understood in philosophy and in poetry. The interesting idea here is the assigning to modern views enemy-status, as if they are mistakes or partials, which of course implies correctives, recovery, getting better, etc.

I think this points rather boldly to many modern senses that something must be 'recovered', that we have taken a wrong turn, and that there is a way to recovery. It is fundamental to the philosophy of this Forum and to almost every person who writes here, in one way or another.

These are far-reaching ideas which have tremendous import for how we perceive, how we live, what and how we value, and nearly everything that we could name ...

['Fancy & Imagination' by R. L. Brett]

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A question of you, movingalways! Look at these definitions about 'intelligibility'. There are a group of possibilities listed there between A and F. I am curious where you would place yourself?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

definitions of metaphysic sparked my definitions and Diebert's definitions and jupiviv's definitions, ultimately none of which can be shared absolutely or of which the universe cares a flying fig about.

Hey, you don't know that! I mean what the universe cares or not cares about in any larger sense. In the end we have to form some judgment of the consequences of our thoughts and actions. It's all happening very quickly normally, this gamble on what someone thinks is happening or not. Nobody can afford to claim zero knowledge (as he keeps acting upon it all the time) just as much nobody can claim omniscience. So what we can do is examining the little knowledge we think we have and seem to base so much upon.

Which when considered from this perspective has the potential to awaken the 'heart' and cause laughter and compassion at and for, the absurdity of the never ending story of defining. Perhaps philosophical laughter and compassion are two of those ideals of which you speak that would greatly benefit man's mental health, the lesson being "be serious re your definitions when survival depends on them, but when survival is not an issue, might as well love and laugh."

People are only rarely aware of when survival would be at stake, of theirs or others they are connected to, especially when consequences would take their time to envelop. There's also the ongoing conflict between several definitions of identity and its survival, in our mind just as much as in the world at large. But most of us have the luxury to briefly forget about the war. It's the ability to sleep and perchance to dream -- not something I'd advocate taking away from anyone.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

[Bobo]

Now, if you just link John Locke to the Frankfurt school I will be satisfied.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I regret to inform you there is no connection. Locke may have helped turn the Universe into a Universe of death, but he was no Commie ... :-)

[Pam Seeback]

Gustav, rather than answer your question about the intelligibility of the universe in relation to humanity as laid out in the link you provided, I am more attracted to the ideas in your submissions from R. L Brett, "Fancy and Imagination" and Robinson Jeffers, "The World's Wonders", so it is to these submissions that I will respond.

R.L. Brett compares John Locke with William Blake, philosophers with seemingly polar ideas of the nature of reality. First, I'll address Locke's theory of mind that blends continuity of consciousness with the idea of the blank slate void of innate ideas determined solely by experience based on sense perception. For me, this theory is void of even a shred of logic, my reasoning being that a consciousness that continues cannot produce a blank slate, it can only produce what it is. Logic aside, my own experience as a parent, a grandparent, a child care worker and an aunt has revealed to me that the blank slate theory belongs the way of the dinosaur.

What is my “cosmology” of consciousness? The concept that fits best for me is the concept used by St. Paul, that of the law of the spirit of life. Why I believe this concept is a perfect fit is that it removes the idea of a dualistic (separate) self out of the equation of "God/man" and instead, presents consciousness of things as effects of causal laws. What prevents this cosmology from being a universe of death as you put it, is the inclusion of the concept of 'spirit', a concept suggesting the life giving-force 'acting on' causal law.

Which means my wisdom story fits much better with Blake than with Locke. Since you have imposed upon yourself the limitation of posting only in this thread, what do you think of my wisdom of the two spirit-caused aspects of human consciousness, male (logic, reasoning) and female (feeling, energy, body awareness) and of my definition of enlightenment being conscious expression of both? A philosophy of female consciousness that is not, as the “house” philosophy presents the concept of Woman to be, that of sleeping or dreaming (unconsciousness).

Which brings me to the piece you posted by Robinson Jeffers, “The World's Wonders,” a piece that to me is an example of a mind at war with itself, a mind that confuses knowing with imagining which relates to my wisdom of conscious expression of the male and the female. I have pulled this stanza to support my reasoning:

“It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm and mountain; It is their soul and their meaning.
Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we have to harden our hearts to bear it.”

Contrary to Jeffer's reasoning, it is not easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm and mountain, rather it is easy to imagine the beauty of inhuman things. One has to be the sea or be the storm or be the mountain in order to know sea or storm or mountain. Clearly, man cannot be these things which is why he uses his imagination to think upon these things. This logic, by extension, points out Jeffer's further confusion when he states that man's knowing of the beauty of inhuman things is their soul and their meaning. Perhaps it is Jeffer's confusing of knowing with imagining that caused him to believe humanity has to harden its heart to bear its "lesser beauty."

I return again to the intuitive logic (I do not separate logic and intuition) that because one cannot know a thing because one cannot be a thing, one reasons things or imagines things, two aspects of consciousness that are distinct but not separate from one another.

[Pam Seeback]

Diebert: Hey, you don't know that! I mean what the universe cares or not cares about in any larger sense.

Touche.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Note:

Since you are limited by admin to posting in this thread...

It is a self-limitation, self-imposed.

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

R.L. Brett compares John Locke with William Blake, philosophers with seemingly polar ideas of the nature of reality. First, I'll address Locke's theory of mind that blends continuity of consciousness with the idea of the blank slate void of innate ideas determined solely by experience based on sense perception. For me, this theory is void of even a shred of logic, my reasoning being that a consciousness that continues cannot produce a blank slate, it can only produce what it is. Logic aside, my own experience as a parent, a grandparent, a child care worker and an aunt has revealed to me that the blank slate theory belongs the way of the dinosaur.

It is interesting to look into the new empiricists as they may be called and attempt to understand why they began to think as they did. Some have suggested that there is one, overarching reason: They needed practical ideas and methods for use in gaining power in this realm and thus broke ranks with the predominant, even if declining, scholasticism of the previous era. It is a question of idea-tools and for what and also how they are used. The intellectual tools of the schoolmen, at least in a pure(r) form had a very different function. Thus rational tools are of one order, and intellectual tools of another. To gain clarity of the Two Domains has been quite useful for me.

Blake freaked-out when he came to understand what the empiricists were up to! Paraphrased, he said that such knowledge will bring those thinkers down into the domain of Satan and entangle them in that realm. He was a brilliant man, no doubt, quite unschooled, and zealous after his fashion and yet there is even from the vantage of the present a good deal of prescience in his augury.

And this interests me tremendously: We have no 'conceptual tools' to grasp, nor even hardly to *see*, that higher 'world' in relation to which the Schoolmen (attempted to) orient themselves. If we cannot describe a 'conceptual pathway' to *it*, *it* is not an 'object of consciousness' and cannot be considered even if it 'exists'. This leads to a cognitive discordance since, I think at least, the notion and the *fact* of 'higher worlds' is really a part of the Self. So, when a given person cannot is locked out of the possibility of perception, and yet that perception is a fact of consciousness, it seems to me that that person divides from themselves.

But, to understand the New Empiricists one also has to understand that they were in reaction to a whole school of thought which, also, had become and perhaps always was very rigid. In their way they controlled the avenues of perception, and deviation from their defined royal road was a serious affair.

At least in some sense, perhaps a large sense, as men have desired to become comfortable in their bodies, and as they have gained tools and technologies to make living in the body largely pleasant, men have indeed desired to 'come back into the body' and inhabit it. It has to be taken into consideration that for long stretches of history living in the body was rather intolerable: sickness, rotting teeth, vermin, skin disease. There was a moment of youthful well-being and then a long twilight of physical pain and ugliness---and it was understood that 'the entire realm' was Satanic: just under us is the Satan Realm, and that's just one step down.

Medieval cosmology, then, paints a picture in which the Earth is close to the sewers of the Universe. The Earth itself was understood as a sort of demon but that within the Earth were 'omens' that reflected the freedom and deathlessness of an upper world: gems and minerals and flowers of course reflecting the deathless and perfect celestial orbs.

We live in the conceptual outcome of a falling away from these Olde Concepts and in a very real sense we are newly arrived in this Brave New World.

To become 'sober' in this newly achieved physical world, and fully located within bodies, is both the task before us, and the sea to cross.

...what do you think of my wisdom of the two spirit-caused aspects of human consciousness, male (logic, reasoning) and female (feeling, energy, body awareness) and of my definition of enlightenment being conscious expression of both? A philosophy of female consciousness that is not, as the “house” philosophy presents the concept of Woman to be, that of sleeping or dreaming (unconsciousness).

Well, aside from the internal aspect (i.e. alchemical and psychological), I think it fits into the model I just described: that of 'recently coming back into the body'. However, 'enlightenment' as a word is not one that makes much sense to me. But then this switches back to the question---which is still a good one---about how 'intelligible' the world is to us. If the world is 'intelligible' to us, then we can 'penetrate' the world and 'have a home in the world'. But if 'intelligibility' teaches us, or suggest, that we cannot have a home in this world, then (but I have to guess at the meaning of 'enlightenment') we would do well to seek and attain some state of mind above it all. So much seems to hinge on these issues, questions, and problems.

[Pam Seeback]

Gustav: However, 'enlightenment' as a word is not one that makes much sense to me.

To me, enlightenment is the same thing as one's subjective metaphysic or cosmology or philosophy. And you're right, we're back to the question of how 'intelligible' the world is to us. All I can say at this point is that I have reasoned the idea of an objective metaphysic that I can penetrate so I can, as you say 'have a home in this world' and I have come to the end of this reasoning exercise and concluded that since the intellect is an expression (an effect) of the law of the spirit of life (the law of causality), it cannot therefore, come to know its cause, ergo its cause is, and shall be, an ever-concealed mystery to the mind. At first, this discovery was most disconcerting and troublesome to me but no longer. What I am left with then is my acceptance that everything that I am aware of is an effect of an unknown ultimate cause, reasoning included, feeling included. Having said this, I realize that a) I could be wrong, I shall stay tuned to your posts to see if you are able to discover something I was not able to discover and b) that if I am right, each person must reason out this conclusion for themselves, there is no other way.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I have gotten hold of Martin Jay's 1973 book The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 and made it through the first chapter. Despite the temptation to see the work of the FS and the influence of these men in too broad terms, it is clear beyond doubt that they are exponents of a 'revised Marxism' with a clear critical-Marxist agenda. The ironic thing is that they were all direct outcomes of high-minded bourgeois culture, and bourgeois money, and never left nor desired to leave that world.

The blanket term 'Frankfurt School' and 'cultural Marxism', as always seems to happen, and certainly in American discourse, become part of terribly polarised discourses with misstatements of positional politics, such that it is hard to sort through. Yet the question stands, and it is a good one: What is and how pervasive has been the influence of the ideologies represented by the FS and to what degree do they now shape an emergent post-Christian occidental ideology? And if the 'FS' represents one pole of ideology, and if it can be considered genuine and considerable, what (cogent) ideology opposes it? What ideological structure could one refer to to oppose 'cultural Marxism' (a blanket statement for 'extreme liberalism')(?).

From an article in The American Conservative:

• In this case I had to share the spotlight with my friend of many years, Bill Lind, who is introduced in Wikipedia as a one-time spokesman for the Free Congress Foundation and a reviewer of my book The Strange Death of European Marxism. Just about everything ascribed to the two of us in the entry is inexcusably misleading. Neither one of us has argued that there is a Frankfurt School or Cultural Marxist “conspiracy.” Indeed we have stressed the opposite view, namely, that certain Frankfurt School social teachings have become so widespread and deeply ingrained that they have shaped the dominant post-Christian ideology of the Western world.

Martin Jay writes against such conspiritorial views in this article, but reveals much of his own position. He writes:

• It is very disheartening to see how robust this phenomenon ['demagogic propaganda' by the Right] remains today, and a source of bitter irony to observe how the School itself has become its explicit target. But if there is one positive implication of these developments, it is the perverse tribute today's radical right pays to the School's acuity in revealing the workings of their deplorable ideology and its origins in their political and psychological pathologies. In looking for a scapegoat for all the transformations of culture which they can't abide, they have recognized the most acute analysts of their own condition. In the fog of their blighted understanding, they have discerned a real threat. But it is not to some phantasm called "Western civilization," whose most valuable achievements they themselves routinely betray, but rather to their own pathetic and misguided worldview and the dangerous politics it has spawned in our climate of heightened fear and despair.

The question, from my angle of view, is: How is it possible to cut through the haze and the distortions on both sides of polarised discourse to see clearly, and to make decisions about, what really is happening in the general political and social landscape? Because it seems evident, and especially when important issues are at stake, that when polarised positions form that the prospect of 'productive dialectic' goes up in emotional smoke.

Obviously, my concerns here are only a sort of cloak to hide what, according to Jay, can only be an example of a 'perverse tribute' [...] paid to the School's acuity in revealing the workings of [my] deplorable ideology'. (Soon I will bring forward, in disconsideration of 'our climate of heightened fear and despair', my defence of noble Sepp Blatter).

It is always interesting to note how quickly each side demonises the other---that in itself reveals a good deal.

When Hell was closed, by logical extension Heaven also faded into a dream, and thus we are left on the face of a monodimensional Earth where we can only know and understand, horizontally, that l'infer, c'est les autres.

[Bobo]

Repeat after me, "Marxism is not liberalism".

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Oye, Bobito: There was no insinuation that Marxism is liberalism. (Do you use drugs?) The present conversation, allow me to make this more plain to you, touches on how Marxist critical theory was consciously modified between the 1920s and the 1960s (and certainly beyond) from its harder form into a softer and more flexible form that---if the assertion is correct---has penetrated very profoundly into Occidental thinking and social forms.

If you had been paying attention even minimally it should have been clear that the manner in which Marxist or neo-Marxist theory has influenced Western liberal culture is one of the subjects of this thread. At the very least, although I have some doubts now, you should have been able to connect the current meme that circulates that decries 'cultural Marxism' and its influence at all levels of society, with the loosely outlined inquiry of this thread.

What ideological structure could one refer to to oppose 'cultural Marxism' (a blanket statement for 'extreme liberalism')(?).

So-called 'cultural Marxism' is not, nor could it be considered even to a mildly disorganised mind, to be a strict Marxism of any form.

You have troubles reading---well you are not alone. But were you to listen to Bowden's mantra you would have grasped what he is getting at, and what I am attempting to investigate. Here is it again.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A couple of thoughts about the word 'metaphysic'.

The more that one looks into the word, the more complex it becomes. But here is a twist:

Marx spoke of the condition of 'alienation'. The cultural-commercial world, especially when we see it and describe and and feel it to be irrational and absurd if not outrightly immoral, generates a condition of alienation. Structures, like enormous machines, directed by intelligences we do not know and never see, comprise the surrounding in which we live and exist. When these systems are driven and operated by intentions with which we have no relationship, we naturally disconnect from relatedness with them into our own innerness. Since we cannot enjoy and feel relationship on an outer level we quite naturally retreat into interiority. The converse of this condition would be one in which the individual was indeed connected with his culture, his world, and his reality: socially, economically, and also religiously if religio is taken to mean a complete relatedness on all human levels (including the psychic). This man would not live in alienation. But all manner of different conditions of alienation have become the possession and condition of man in Occidental cultures, or perhaps it is Occidental man, as distinct from others, who developed the consciousness to become acutely aware of it. (Yet it is also possible that Occidental man, through some missteps, is living in an outcome of 'wrong choices' or mistaken choices ... another topic).

My rather incomplete definition of 'metaphysic' is better described by the term 'metaphysical dream of the world'. Although some may say that this was not the case, it is my understanding that there have been times, even in our own history, where a unifying structure of belief existed. We lived within a 'dream', if you will, that made sense. Heaven and a superior upper world existed and was real. Hell, a devilish underworld, also existed and was real. Man existed within a total world that he visualised at a most internal level. Moreover his actions had meaning and consequence, and thus valuation had a base on which it was constructed, though we now see this as irrational. Really, our entire conceptual order was constructed on this platform. Guenon examines a similar but perhaps more complete and more fully developed metaphysical structure through his description of the Hindu-Vedic cosmology. It is in many ways a superior vision and description. But the point is that men lived within an encompassing metaphysical system, and it held and contained man, and man made sense of his existence because he knew at a fundamental level that he was a part of something and what he was a part of. His role was attainable.

But for us, who have experienced so many different ruptures and fractures (I mean our Occidental trajectory) and for us who have felt (because this is something both under and over rationality) our connection to an intelligible metaphysic dissolve, we are left, strangely enough, not in 'the material world', but in an abstracted, an attenuated, a twilight metaphysical mind-frame. We do not feel our connection to a cosmic structure. We cannot in any sense at all rely on a solid knowledge of where we are, why we are here, who we are within 'all this', nor really any certainty about what to do.

But we are not in the 'material world, we are in a mental world, and it is in the mental faculty that we have in this sense been isolated (alienated) and from which we peer out, not so much on 'the world', but toward and through systems of ideas. Ideas mediate our existence. In this sense we live in a metaphysical (abstracted) relationship to the world, but it is not really such a happy state. It is a frustrating state. And this is not even to consider all that clamours for our attention and for our allegiance, all that fights to dominate and control us.

So this Occidental man I am speaking of, because he is rational, capable, and highly intelligent (one might also say highly clever), is able to recognise and identify other, similar metaphysical systems--in other cultures for example, or in early Christianity, or in paganism. But each of them have a ghost-like quality: they are not really real for him, just as his own is no longer real. He relativises therefor each system, and weighs the cultural systems that each metaphysical system produces. If this is critical analysis according to the Marxian school he has really the entire toolbox of Occidentalism at his disposal for his analysis. And yet he himself stands in an alienated state, a hyper-rational man in a hyper-intellectual world, seeing every rough edge and every sharp corner, and all the agony of life in any cultural or economic system, but he stands outside of relationship to the possibility of actually living in an encompassing, and a supporting, metaphysical dream of the world.

A metaphysical relationship---but a peculiar metaphysical relationship to an abstract world-of-ideas---thus takes shape as a general state, but must not living in such a state be like nourishing oneself on cardboard or wood-shavings? One hovers over all of it and has no place in any of it. Yet one assumes that one is in the more relevant and powerful position: the one who sees and understands all.

[Bobo]

When alienation is described as the condition religion becomes the 'opium of the masses', religion fixes alienation as a dose of drug fixes addiction. It's not only the case that it is innefective in treating the condition, more than not it is alienationing itself. As your 'metaphysical' solution to the 'acid' is yet more acid.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A larval idea. Did you have help?

Classical Marxism makes that claim. In a flexible 'Frankfurt School' dialectic one's 'progressive' religious sentiments and commitment could easily be revamped and reintegrated into a holistic praxis. Horkheimer et al are more fluid thinkers and their philosophical grasp is wide and impressive. I haven't considered the issue much but a Frommian psychology combined with a progressive Christianity or Judaism with an emphasis on 'social justice' would readily become religious. And indeed this seems to have been one of the influences of the FS philosophy: It's influence in faith communities should not be underestimated. Think Norman O. Brown, Eric Fromm, Paul Tillich ...

(You are just repeating a reduction you picked up. This fits wonderfully into the reductive system of the House Philosophy. How sad to have a brain oriented to that level. However you could find a satisfying life as an elevator operator or doorman ...)

Additionally, religion---from religio, not a simple word or concept---is defined by Guenon at its more social level. In the widest sense a culture's religion has to do with normative and regulative social customs. The religiousness of a people does not necessarily have to do with their holding or even knowing of a 'higher metaphysic', and metaphysic is not synonymous with religion.

So again, the word metaphysic reveals itself as having a good deal of complexity. But, even in these brief outlines it should be seen that no person is without a metaphysic since metaphysic refers to an order of ideation, an order of conceptual imposition or overlay, a stance or relationship to Being. It is impossible that a man not have one, however ill-defined or of whatever form. In this sense the absence of a metaphysic would be a pure physic, which is impossible.

This from Martin Jay's book on the FS, cited above:

[jupiviv]

]Please clarify - so physical things do not fall within metaphysics' purview?

As topic or discipline it doesn't deal with any rules and laws governing physical things occupying space and time, exposed to physical inquiries and conjecture based on measurement. That's what came before before while this came after, meta, remember? It's like calling an adult a "metachild".

If metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental nature of things, it should apply to all things. If it excludes certain kinds of things from consideration, it's just a branch of science.

I can't think of anything that is non-material.

If everything to you is material then there's no need for "non-material" as concept. What or where could it be? And then there would be no need to have the word "material" present at all. It's lying in the garbage bin together with "is as it is".

Well, I was thinking within the context of this discussion, where non-material is supposed to mean something inherently distinct from material things. In the sense of "material" being distinguished from, say, "spiritual" for the sake of convenience or clarity, I can in fact think of non-material things.

Only material things have appeared to me so far. Only the All is beyond the material, but it's also beyond the non-material.

You mean things that you believe are material since there's no clear path, empirical, to make sure in each and every instance. Unless you define "all that appears to me" as being material in nature. And that's metaphysics right there, a statement on the material nature of whatever exists to you.

Appearances are all we have. I can't think of anything that didn't appear to me as something that would fit the definition of "material" as used in science, i.e, composed of matter-energy. As for being empirically observable, not everything material is empirical in that sense. The past and the future are necessarily beyond empirical observation, as are the truths of philosophy. This doesn't mean that they are somehow different, beyond, or more real and fundamental than material things.

I concur I may well be wrong about the things being material, but in the present context that doesn't matter.

Science can never discover anything about the nature of existence. It's just the exercise of making it easier to interact with our environment. The idea that science, and especially physics, is getting closer to an understanding of the universe is a byproduct of human pride reacting to failure.

You're making a distinction which in this context doesn't matter at all. The point was that you are stating knowledge about the nature of existence. Since each and every of your views as well as the concepts being addressed here are "inferior to the All", in your own lingo they would fall under physics.

If my views don't rely on empirical observations for their veracity, they do not fall under science.

[jupiviv]

So again, the word metaphysic reveals itself as having a good deal of complexity. But, even in these brief outlines it should be seen that no person is without a metaphysic since metaphysic refers to an order of ideation, an order of conceptual imposition or overlay, a stance or relationship to Being. It is impossible that a man not have one, however ill-defined or of whatever form. In this sense the absence of a metaphysic would be a pure physic, which is impossible.

The word metaphysic has a good deal of complexity because people do not want to state clearly what it means. The concept is complex because it is turgid and slippery like an oedematous carp. Its complexity cannot be pierced and traversed without losing one's way and eventually pretending one has done so.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Oh they state what they mean but isn't it more accurate to say that you don't agree with what they mean? You mean something else. It would seem too that you desire your definition to become ascendent. You Fichtean you!

To my view, the concept is complex because different schools of thought employ it to describe whatever it is they mean. Take for example your 'school' (which may be most akin to the House Philosophy of the forum founders). You choose to do without the term and you have your route of explication to carry this out. The classical Marxists had their own reasons for villifying metaphysics.

From a recent NYT's article on the corruption of language in China and is rather funny:

• Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”
  
  Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.

Sorry to take such a cold jab but the Genius Forum, and the philosophy of the Founders, has a whole group of terms that are used similarly, whether for pejorative purposes or as vague tautological formulae which express really nothing at all! This is an important point to internalise ...

But even if you were able to purify it, and to render it non-slippery, that would not change that the term has meaning beyond your particular endeavour. Yet your purpose is to undermine or to dismiss other endeavours ... and to establish your own as the 'truly considerable one'. And thus your project could, in its way, be described as metaphysical insofar as it is operational, and seeks to modify an overall concept, even if through extreme limitation. Q-R-S are quite metaphysically engaged in this sense, which I think should be obvious.

I don't find it that incompatible with my own views to employ the 'FS'/Horkheimer understanding of metaphysic. It sounds pretty sane, pretty grounded, and useful.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

If metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental nature of things, it should apply to all things. If it excludes certain kinds of things from consideration, it's just a branch of science.

When addressing the fundamental nature of things it necessarily will apply to all things. That's kinda what it means. I'm not sure why you made the remark. Are you suggesting philosophers should also be at the same time doctors, engineers and bean counters because they should concern themselves with "all things"?

Well, I was thinking within the context of this discussion, where non-material is supposed to mean something inherently distinct from material things. In the sense of "material" being distinguished from, say, "spiritual" for the sake of convenience or clarity, I can in fact think of non-material things.

So you create a straw man (the non-material as something inherently distinct from the material) which you then gleefully knock down as a contradiction. It's not like I'm disagreeing with you here but more would call it a pointless exercise. It's not clear to me that people are making those inherent distinctions, like saying heaven is an actual space in the sky or god being some entity like a human inhabiting a location and personality. Some extremely simple folks might reason in those terms but not worthy of attack. Even a term like "supernatural' is generally used to point to a "beyond" with all kinds of connections to the natural world in terms of cause and effect. Thus a superimposition of some kind. So even those definitions are not implying "inherent distinction", much like string theory in physics is not implying something distinct from the natural world either and yet we could never access the potential reality of it. Here you see also how philosophy and theoretical science are not that different. Perhaps just a higher order, a more universal way to address existence is applied? Supernatural stories are more of a lower order, depending on personal impression, unverifiable and fantastic, yet meaningful to the one wrapping himself in such things. It might even have some function, some crude form of organizing impressions?

The past and the future are necessarily beyond empirical observation, as are the truths of philosophy. This doesn't mean that they are somehow different, beyond, or more real and fundamental than material things.

That's just stretching the definition of "material" to mean just about everything. And then denounce the notion of anything being "immaterial". Isn't it easier just to talk about existence or reality? A notion like "material" seems very limited to apply universally while we already have powerful ideas like causality ot make the same point of interconnection.

If my views don't rely on empirical observations for their veracity, they do not fall under science.

To me, what is called science is just a limited application of general philosophy. It's that strict limitation which provides modern science all the power as well as the downsides. And I take philosophy by its common definition as "study of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning" and science by any "systematic method or body of knowledge in a given area".

[Diebert van Rhijn]

The question, from my angle of view, is: How is it possible to cut through the haze and the distortions on both sides of polarised discourse to see clearly, and to make decisions about, what really is happening in the general political and social landscape? Because it seems evident, and especially when important issues are at stake, that when polarised positions form that the prospect of 'productive dialectic' goes up in emotional smoke.

But that would put you back in exactly the thing you are questioning: critical theory and some "productive" dialectic. You are using the phrase "making decisions" here but your usage of the word "productive" and earlier posts about health and improvement of lives would place you firmly inside the attempt to form critical social theory (and praxis) as opposed to traditional theorizing geared to describing or understanding without any call for more.

My critique of the Marxist "spirit" would center around abstracting categories gone mad. The "Hegelian" love of the formulaic and the ideal of any "historical movement" including of course any materialist conception of history. Necessarily every theory or analytic method arising out of this, sets itself up for failure and ascends to the realm of vaguenesses and generalities: they never do materialize but are upheld instead like the old religions still are in their ancient cathedrals of definitions.

Marx his critique as well as the man's philosophy naturally both are grounded in his view on human nature or in his word Gattungswesen. It's labour power as essential to human nature in whole of his thinking and critiquing:

• By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description." -- Capital I, ch 6

Mainstream Marxism in my view suffers from a complete mis-perception of human nature, philosophy and love, as well geography, genes, randomness. But that's also a problem of all 19th century "materialist" science and its counterpart Romanticism. While Marxism might have been largely abandoned but the ideas on love and nature certainly have flourished.

Here's is one of the rare writings of Marx on human nature

• "Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society". -- "Private Property and Communism"

The postulation of "real existence of man and nature" only "through sense experience" is a typical position as "real" is here just a self-referring truth of Marx and 19th century concepts of human nature Here is Marx's new "essence": the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature. Of course every ideology needs a eschatology, for Marx it's the "actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development".

By postulating against alien-as-cause and abolishing atheism Marx just created ideology, as apostle of a secular creed, full of religious sentiment, like Nietzsche's definition of opposite thinkers, " those, in who continuous opposing and objecting is taken to such an extreme, that they end up positioning against an existing system, a different one". But then read ideology or religion here. This is possible because Marx is nearly always wrong when analyzing religion since the philosophical and wisdom aspect, the whole of the spiritual is rather alien to him. It's mainly analyzed as social movement and response, not about any more fundamental ideas on human nature or the mateiral because it has to be, right? For example:

• In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven… We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-proces

Yes, we set out from the "real" which he just defined for us in some predefined material historical sense. But such "heaven" one creates to ascend to, will crumble with every step. It ends up not having any base simple because simply the material hasn't that philosophical base with him. Marx his "real" and his productive forces do not have any deeper reality, not beyond a cultural framing. Well, in his own analysis they can exist since there's this ideology to fuel its reality! This is the fundamental problem with Marx and his method of analyzing. It's very difficult to explain because generally a Marxist thinker already signed on to various religious or ideological elements underling all the definitions. One is generally "too late" for debate to happen.

Or perhaps we can see here the outline of the mentioned 'cultural Marxism' -- older than Marx and certainly outliving Marxist methodologies as it is. Karl Popper was once accusing Marx of obscurantism. Hegel, being accused of the same by Schopenhauer for example, replied pretty clever, perhaps too clever, that it is:

• ...not the philosopher who thinks abstractly, but the layman, who uses concepts as givens that are immutable, without context. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because he transcends the limits of quotidian concepts, in order to understand their broader context. This makes philosophical thought and language appear obscure, esoteric, and mysterious to the layman" (source Wikipedia).

And yet I do think Hegel ended up obscuring more than enlightening, not engaging in philosophy but more as speculative mode of thinking, materializing a religion-as-system; ideological at root with truth being "continuous world-historical process".

Note: most of the the passages above were in part taken from my earlier thoughts on Marx as written on this forum.

[jupiviv]

To my view, the concept is complex because different schools of thought employ it to describe whatever it is they mean.

And all of those descriptions are needlessly complex because the propounders don't want to clearly state what they mean.

How about you give a concise description of metaphysics as you define it so I have an easily accessible reference?

Take for example your 'school' (which may be most akin to the House Philosophy of the forum founders). You choose to do without the term and you have your route of explication to carry this out. The classical Marxists had their own reasons for villifying metaphysics.

Are you Laird? I never conversed with him, but I recall reading multiple instances of "the House Philosophy" phrase in all/most of his posts. Also, what do you believe is my 'school'?

Sorry to take such a cold jab but the Genius Forum, and the philosophy of the Founders, has a whole group of terms that are used similarly, whether for pejorative purposes or as vague tautological formulae which express really nothing at all! This is an important point to internalise ...

You are Laird. I just don't see how a genuinely new member to a forum can be interested or capable of forming these notions about the views and psychology of its founders and denizens. Did you read and ratiocinate the content of 90000+ posts within a couple of weeks?

But even if you were able to purify it, and to render it non-slippery, that would not change that the term has meaning beyond your particular endeavour. Yet your purpose is to undermine or to dismiss other endeavours ... and to establish your own as the 'truly considerable one'. And thus your project could, in its way, be described as metaphysical insofar as it is operational, and seeks to modify an overall concept, even if through extreme limitation. Q-R-S are quite metaphysically engaged in this sense, which I think should be obvious.

I don't want to force my conception on anyone because it won't work. They will understand it by themselves or not at all.

[jupiviv]

If metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental nature of things, it should apply to all things. If it excludes certain kinds of things from consideration, it's just a branch of science.

When addressing the fundamental nature of things it necessarily will apply to all things. That's kinda what it means. I'm not sure why you made the remark. Are you suggesting philosophers should also be at the same time doctors, engineers and bean counters because they should concern themselves with "all things"?

My point is that metaphysics should apply equally to all things, whether physical or material. So you don't really need to look "beyond" to do metaphysics of the kind you described, since the things around will suffice. If people need to look beyond and call that need "metaphysics" then it isn't that kind.

Philosophers should formulate a worldview that will be at home anywhere, which wouldn't make them omnipotent. Just because you can see the moon doesn't mean you can build a spaceship, fly to it and found a cheese business.

It's not clear to me that people are making those inherent distinctions, like saying heaven is an actual space in the sky or god being some entity like a human inhabiting a location and personality. Some extremely simple folks might reason in those terms but not worthy of attack.

Almost all people who take an interest in those things are making those inherent distinctions. It's just more blatant in simple folks. It's like the difference between a game between rival football clubs and a debate between rival universities. The same delusions are operating but in the latter case they are fogged with intellectual vapours.

In fact, the people who don't believe the distinctions are inherent and yet still use them are more likely to sound like the simple folk than the metaphysicians. For example, contrast the sophistry of C S Lewis to the direct style of Kierkegaard's late writings.

Even a term like "supernatural' is generally used to point to a "beyond" with all kinds of connections to the natural world in terms of cause and effect. Thus a superimposition of some kind.

Except that the connections between the supernatural and the natural realms work exactly how the speculator of such wants them to, and involves the former being somehow more important and essential than the latter. Even when a supernatural world equal in terms of value or realness to the natural world is postulated, there is still the question of why it was postulated to begin with.

So even those definitions are not implying "inherent distinction", much like string theory in physics is not implying something distinct from the natural world either and yet we could never access the potential reality of it.

If it isn't distinct from our world then we are accessing its reality right here and now. What may be lacking is specific information/knowledge - the domain of science. For example you may not know anything about your pancreas or even know that you have one, but you do have one nevertheless. It influences you and vice versa regardless of your knowledge or understanding.

Here you see also how philosophy and theoretical science are not that different. Perhaps just a higher order, a more universal way to address existence is applied?

Yes, science is a branch of philosophy. But science doesn't deal in absolutes and universals like philosophy does, no matter how wide its scope. If it does it ceases to be science.

Supernatural stories are more of a lower order, depending on personal impression, unverifiable and fantastic, yet meaningful to the one wrapping himself in such things. It might even have some function, some crude form of organizing impressions?

Sure, I like Tolkien's books, fairy tales and the like. As long as people don't perceive them in a deluded way there's no problem.

The past and the future are necessarily beyond empirical observation, as are the truths of philosophy. This doesn't mean that they are somehow different, beyond, or more real and fundamental than material things.

That's just stretching the definition of "material" to mean just about everything. And then denounce the notion of anything being "immaterial". Isn't it easier just to talk about existence or reality? A notion like "material" seems very limited to apply universally while we already have powerful ideas like causality ot make the same point of interconnection.

It seems to me that "matter" isn't very clearly defined by science, and it doesn't need to because science is concerned with speculation and prediction. "If it works, don't fix it."

If "material" means something specific, then there is a "non-material" as well. However, since the definition is so vague and general, one might as well equate it with reality itself in order to prevent people from indulging their delusions by interpreting it to mean whatsoever they like.

If my views don't rely on empirical observations for their veracity, they do not fall under science.

To me, what is called science is just a limited application of general philosophy. It's that strict limitation which provides modern science all the power as well as the downsides. And I take philosophy by its common definition as "study of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning" and science by any "systematic method or body of knowledge in a given area".

Agreed.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

But that would put you back in exactly the thing you are questioning: critical theory and some "productive" dialectic. You are using the phrase "making decisions" here but your usage of the word "productive" and earlier posts about health and improvement of lives would place you firmly inside the attempt to form critical social theory (and praxis) as opposed to traditional theorizing geared to describing or understanding without any call for more.

There are certainly ironies here. The most obvious is something I have always stated: anything that I criticise, generally speaking, is something I can or have located in myself. I come from a culture and even a community that interiorised, along with much else, this form or transformation of Marxian praxis. I am personally fascinated by Bowden's mantra because it quite perfectly describes what produced the culture and community which produced me. In that sense though, and this is likely true for all of us in one way or another, I absorbed those ideas, I did not necessarily assent to them. What this means is that as I move toward the dismantling of a certain 'grammar' as Bowden says, I am dismantling certain things that I did not myself choose and restructuring myself with those ideas I have chosen, or desire to choose, and thus those I can and desire to give assent to.

It would be impossible and I think also unwise to categorically reject the methods of the FS, yet it is the ends that certainly can be, and have to be, examined. It would be unwise to dismiss them as bad academics or to say they are not philosophers. Indeed, they are extremely well-prepared people.

When you say 'critical theory', and when I say it, we mean something specific and this can be located and defined. But critical though cannot be the possession of anyone, can it? One could chose to define oneself as an Aristotelean engaged in 'critical projects'. Do you really think that 'traditional theorising [is] geared to describing or understanding without any call for more'? I think that so-called traditionalism, as in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, is continually forced to respond critically, and thus is drawn into the critical project. But as you know early Christianity began in apologetics and polemics against paganism and so was forced to define itself and explain itself from the early days. It is part of our structure, isn't it?

The notes you hear about 'health' and 'productivity' come, to be quite honest, in large part from an early Oriental 'indoctrination'. From mid-teenage years and for about 15 years thereafter I used the Wilhelm-Baynes edition of the I-Ching a great deal. I had all the 64 hexagrams and all the lines memorised.)(I still do except sometimes a specific line escapes me). Wilhelm was sinologist but an Occidental product and he fused or wedded Occidental though to Confucian-Taoist thought, or Confucian categories with Occidental philosophical and religious categories, and I internalised a good part of the ethical and moralistic message. You will remember that I once referred to the Hexagram 48 The Well as a model for human organisation. I still am fundamentally organised to such a concept:

• In ancient China the capital cities were sometimes moved, partly for the sake of more favorable location, partly because of a change in dynasties. The style of architecture changed in the course of centuries, but the shape of the well has remained the same from ancient times to this day. Thus the well is the symbol of that social structure which, evolved by mankind in meeting its most primitive needs, is independent of all political forms. Political structures change, as do nations, but the life of man with its needs remains eternally the same-this cannot be changed. Life is also inexhaustible. It grows neither less not more; it exists for one and for all. The generations come and go, and all enjoy life in its inexhaustible abundance. However, there are two prerequisites for a satisfactory political or social organization of mankind. We must go down to the very foundations of life. For any merely superficial ordering of life that leaves its deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no attempt at order had ever been made. Carelessness-by which the jug is broken-is also disastrous. If for instance the military defense of a state is carried to such excess that it provokes wars by which the power of the state is annihilated, this is a breaking of the jug. This hexagram applies also to the individual. However men may differ in disposition and in education, the foundations of human nature are the same in everyone. And every human being can draw in the course of his education from the inexhaustible wellspring of the divine in man's nature. But here likewise two dangers threaten: a man may fail in his education to penetrate to the real roots of humanity and remain fixed in convention-a partial education of this sort is as bad as none- or he may suddenly collapse and neglect his self-development.

I find this all very interesting to the present conversation. If one is going to broach a conversation that will touch on 'the truly important things' then one will have to take responsibility for such a decision and undertaking. And just as it says: The danger is not getting to the real root, or to the real water; and then also simply giving up and 'floating' as some here have said.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

And all of those descriptions are needlessly complex because the propounders don't want to clearly state what they mean.

Many people have made an effort to define metaphysics or their own metaphysics. And you are saying that no one of them wanted to state clearly what they meant? Since you can't mean that, I have to guess at what you do mean. Are you saying that no description is intelligible to you? Or that no description is intelligible to anyone? Or, is the obfuscation intentional and really and truly a desire to hold back a statement that would clarify, and that for some ulterior purpose, possibly in bad-faith?

Myself, I have a few ways to describe my concept of metaphysic. One is simple and yet it is non-communicable. It has to do with the question of intelligibility that came up a few posts back. In my view here is much that is intelligible about this reality where we find ourselves, but there is more, or I should say there is a larger piece of it, that is non-intelligible and non-communicable. The part of myself that *knows* this (feels it, understands it, believes it) is the part of me that is 'metaphysical to my existence'. My existence is intelligible--my birth, the place I grew up, the people I knew, the things I did, the experiences I had, and also what I have (house, money, what-have-you)---but in an 'ultimate' sense, or in any case in most larger senses, what I am and who I am and how I came to be here and what I am doing here, and then what comes after, or what occurred before---and all the possibilities of larger dimensions of questions and considerations (facts or possibilities or intuitions)---is not intelligible in the same way. The 'other way', or the other side of the question of intelligibility, is clearly mystical and intuitional, non-empirical, and knowledge about it arises from other sources, or perhaps one would say through other methods or doings.

So, intelligibility depends on one side on rationality. To seek and to remember facts. To organise and cultivate the mind so to be able to do that. But on the other, intelligibility depends on intuition (and intuition stands over reason). And it is this skill or in any case this endeavour (of cultivating intuition) that is not rational, or it is not in the same domain as 'logical thinking' and what we normally understand as ratiocination. However, as I define it, that is the point where metaphysic comes into play. It is on one hand the *sense* that there are higher dimensions of knowing which transcend physicality, or body-specificity (in time, in a given place, etc.), and a *sense* of connection to other, distinct, and 'higher' dimensions of thought or perception.

Metaphysic definitely implies a 'rational soul' in the Aristotelean and Thomist sense---in other words we are not mere mechanical robots and we have the unique capacities of volition and the sort of motion that conscious volition allows. As one develops the notion of what is meant by 'metaphysic', one would begin to describe what a 'rational soul' is capable of doing, and indeed what the psyche really does do in our world, and to begin to posit a nomenclature about that would, I am sure, involve metaphysical concepts and even postulates.

On a more simple level I see simple mental activity---that anyone has a mind (and even I would include dogs and birds who seem really exceptionally aware, in some ways: shining awarenesses and often with something like a sense of humour)---as being metaphysical to mere inanimate matter. Because I do not see human consciousness as being a full product of physicality or material processes, I am inclined to see animal awareness as also 'metaphysical' to pure materialism and physicality. (I do not deny that whatever our consciousness is, is bound---as a tree is bound by roots---to the physical matrix. But biology and matter alone do not produce it, nor explain it. And therein is the impossible aspect of the mystery of life and awareness). But especially in thinking human beings I see our mind and mind-space, and as I said in a post above, our intellectual space, as being essentially 'metaphysical'. We do not in this sense really have a grasp on what we are and what we are doing (with our awareness). Metaphysic at that level of description is somewhat but not entirely synonymous with 'mind' insofar as the mind holds a picture of 'reality' and projects itself into that reality. That is another definition of metaphysic and metaphysical: the capacity to have a 'metaphysical dream of the world' and awareness on numerous levels that interweaves our physical location that I would define as metaphysical. (For example, reading a novel is a metaphysical act and engagement. That is just one example among thousands possible).

Note: House Philosophy was a term invented by Pye to describe the philosophy of the Founders. It is a useful term to designate something that, in my view, requires designation. But, at least now, my project in regard to designation is not negative or sharply critical (or with intention to ridicule)(with the exception perhaps of Bobo), but rather constructively critical. I think a great deal of it needs to be better explained.
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Etienne Gilson, 'The Unity of Philosophical Experience':