The Mystic....

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Pye
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Pye »

Dennis writes:
moods are public.
there's a kind of mood police happening in the crowd.
gotta be 'up'.
smile through clenched teeth.
anyway,
there's mood fixers,
pills, booze, sugar, tv, poetry, sex
get the drift?
Ah, well if you'd like to have a discussion about the concrete conditions that have conspired in part to bring this about, sure. That would be capital optimism, or rather, capital culture in general and its aura of productivity and positivism. Capitalism - the profit model - is optimism on steroids: more, more, more . . . . Marx deserves to be here, he and his dialectical materialism: the concrete movement and distribution of the materials in support of life (i.e. conditions) will and do most definitely affect a 'public mood.'

Freud wrote one really good thing, and that was toward the end of his life: Civilization and Its Discontents. In it he says as you do that whole cultures can become neurotic, and that these neuroses, private or public, are there because of the disconnect between what we are and what culture models for us to be . . . . suddenly superego is hijacked into a kind of collective thinking that turns on its individual host, eating it from the inside . . . .
Cahoot: Hiya Pye & cuz et al.
Hi there fella :) Hope your cahootness finds itself well these days . . . .
Dennis:
Life is projected.
Try it on for size.
(:D)
Pye
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Pye »

Like when you fall in love,
something means something.
when you fall out of love,
the meaning's gone.
This deserves a little space of its own and a long time thinking about the way out of it, the way in . . . .
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Cahoot
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Cahoot »

Dennis wrote:Sort of.
Wisdom can only apply relative to there being form.
So finally empty is empty.
Like David and Dan declare there's nothing there.

You mightn't want to take it on,
that's a case of where it's at for you,
Life is projected.
Try it on for size.

Heidegger's dasein is a condition.
'fallenness'
'fell into a World'

Wisdom traditions indicate 'the fall'.

Like when you fall in love,
something means something.
when you fall out of love,
the meaning's gone.
I must say, an excellent answer. What is this excellence I impute?

The excellence lies in the logical progression following the premise: Wisdom can only apply relative to there being form.

And so, to discuss all in terms of this premise enquires into this premise, while changing this premise initiates another discussion. As the unchanged premise has been linked to at least three agreements (assuming you initiated the premise out of agreement), I’ll assume a fourth since it holds the highest probability for dialogue, with insights marking departure points.

Since wisdom can only apply relative to there being form, then the meaning arising from wisdom enlightens relative to there being form. From this arises the logical inference that the meaning arising from ignorance attaches relative to there being form.

This makes sense. Though mind suffers, suffering attaches via form. My baby left me, my dog died, and the truck needs brakes.

The non-specific nature of the word love, and the cling-on tendencies of the concept, can muddle clarity in dialogue. Since it’s been introduced, I’d say that if you think you’ve fallen out of love, you’ve actually just changed delusions. The meaning changes according to the delusion. Falling implies a vertical, or perhaps a diagonal drop. Though change can be vertically down relative to memory, changing also includes the levitation of the vertically up, such as ladder climbing, or the side shuffle of the horizontal, such as treading water indefinitely.
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Kunga
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Kunga »

i'm falling out of love with buddhism
it's all a dream... bullshit
it's empty... bullshit
live this life or be a fool dying before your dead
wake up and smell the coffee
drink the coffee
love the coffee
wallow in the coffee

soon enough
you'll be dead

life is for living

polish that butter knife
and use it
or give it to someone that
appreciates it
(another family member)
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

Quote:
Like when you fall in love,
something means something.
when you fall out of love,
the meaning's gone.

This deserves a little space of its own and a long time thinking about the way out of it, the way in . . . .
The notion of an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing,
desiring to attach for completion.
Where does one put this natural expansiveness to love wholeheartedly,
so that it doesn't backfire and cruel one's openness?
Surely, it's a risky gamble to place that love in what is finite,
given what is finite lacks inherent existence,
is constantly changing in the play of causality.

What an arrogant, misconceived demand it is to place the burden of 'love me, love me, love me' on another being.

Surely, our way is 'love of being' in all it's forms.
Since wisdom can only apply relative to there being form, then the meaning arising from wisdom enlightens relative to there being form. From this arises the logical inference that the meaning arising from ignorance attaches relative to there being form.
Good skill cahoot.
Does that then open up the possibility of formlessness.
Can that be our meaning?
Not finite?
Can we step assuredly with Good Heart through a finite world with our Reasoning of a Higher Order?
Is it crystal clear?

Wisdom is totally concerned with form.
Wisdom declares there's 'something at stake'.
What's at stake is Sanity.

polish that butter knife
and use it
or give it to someone that
appreciates it
(another family member)
I put it in the charity bin.
(handed it back to 'God')
someone else can infuse it with meaning.
hopefully that meaning is restricted to buttering.


Did you hear about the actress that was murdered?
No. who?
I can't remember. let me think. um, um, yeah that's it, Reece.
Witherspoon?
No,
With a knife.
(joke)
Pye
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Pye »

Dennis writes:
Where does one put this natural expansiveness to love wholeheartedly,
so that it doesn't backfire and cruel one's openness?
Surely, it's a risky gamble to place that love in what is finite,
given what is finite lacks inherent existence,
is constantly changing in the play of causality.
One walks among the metaphysicians who walk among us, and for whom impermanence has always somehow been in itself a problem, an internal 'contradiction' in need of a resolution into something that won't move, into an it. Everything of the temporal, the manifest, the appearance, forms, the meta-stable is of things is somehow suspect on this condition alone; nothing can be of value unless it doesn't move; unless it persists, stays, and until we locate such an understanding, we suffer; we suffer over this suffering, this suffering of our own creation, necessarily, pluck ourselves into a two-parted creature with a body and a mind, one part to stand for this concrete suffering impermanence, the other part (spirit, mind) capable of exceeding it . . . . This long, long schizoid hangover from a consciousness that wakes to the truth of its own concrete reality, of its own end . . . and cannot yet live with that.

What we have here is deep deep pathology and the long long waking from a dream that persists in delaying its own end; what we have here is the concrete reality of what we feel as two-parted: that of being both matter and energy. One misunderstands them if one doesn't see them in thermodynamic exchange, and sees this thermodynamic exchange as all that is. In this way the universe continuously manifests itself, transforming matter into energy and energy into matter, the human being standing as a momentary item (part)conscious of this condition in its everyday living. Those manifestations - those forms, those things that rise from this have nothing standing behind or before them: they are matter and energy and they move and transform because of each other's existence; existence being all there is. All apparent "law" that we locate about the movement of things in the universe does not precede the things in existence. Things in existence and in relation to one another create those movements themselves. There's nothing "behind" all this. Just this.

What we also have here is history sanitized of its political nature: a bundle of foci that encourages ig-norance of material realities; downplaying of one's concrete suffering and the socio-political reasons that might be bringing it about; take this spoonful of sugar for your existential angst; keep your suffering between yourself and your god; become more spirit than material (as if neither are actually both) . . . . we have here as well the mystification of 'knowledge' into the privileged purview of the few; those who can see the "unseen," etc. All temporality of form, appearance, you (and your suffering) have no value in this pathology. Because all things pass is reason enough to pass them by . . . .

There must be something behind all of this is the dream of every meta-physician; the assumption that there is an is that isn't (and every other form that thought can take). To place an essence to the universe Above, Apart, Beyond, Outside it, as Nietzsche said, begs the question of whether or not it is sickness that inspires the philosopher - sickness, as in poor relation with existence, everything that is . . . . that's the only place we need to 'get.' where we are.
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

Isn't it, Pye, that the recognition, the seeing and understanding, of temporary ever-shiftingness leads the mind to envision, both as rational postulate and romantic pipe-dream, some sort of stable place, or beginning, or end, or tendency?

In my own internal 'world' (intuitive, inner, indescribable, not understandable to me) I am MADE AWARE OF 'a world of being beyond this one'. It is not a story heard but an internal perception I can't get away from, though I do not try to reconcile it with 'material.science' (your view in a nutshell)(?).

What should I do? What therapy will cure it?
fiat mihi
Pye
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Pye »

In my own internal 'world' (intuitive, inner, indescribable, not understandable to me) I am MADE AWARE OF 'a world of being beyond this one'.
but, Alex . . . . this is the mere (and I use that word in all its heidegerrian nuance) consciousness of the end of you, who rises within an eternal all of rising and passing things . . . . of course you are being 'made' aware of being beyond yourself . . . .
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

about half a dozen times a day,
it will suddenly 'occur' to me that I am alive,
I'm filled with astonishment.
I'm filled with admiration.
woopee.

there could have been zip.

then I notice you.
It's completely extraordinary you're here too.
what a blast!
We can have a conversation.
Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou.
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

I don't know what it is the 'sense' of, and I wonder if it is a mighty delusion, because I cannot reconcile it with everything I know about this 'very real here' in which I am occuring. But I would have to say, if absolutely pressed, though with qualifications, that there is more to this existence than meets the eye. I hate to say that there is a 'special knowledge' about this (it is mega-metaphysical I know!) but that is what I think. However, I also am beginning to think that it is necessary and vital to negate a metaphysic for all intents and purposes and to act fully and consciously,in this 'here'. It is a really strange form.of dualism and is perhaps a symptom of MaDnEsS...

Ever read Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death? Said in the voice of the Cowardly Lion: "I DO want to be an immortal hero, I DO want to be an immortal hero, I do, I DO!"

*shrugs*
fiat mihi
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David Quinn
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by David Quinn »

Talking Ass wrote: But I would have to say, if absolutely pressed, though with qualifications, that there is more to this existence than meets the eye.
There is certainly more to this existence than meets the ignorant eye.

And just as certainly, nothing escapes the wise eye.

-
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

Thank you, David. While I don't call myself wise---really for modesty's sake---nevertheless it is not hard for me to understand why you'd see me in that light.
fiat mihi
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

Anyway,
we've got the mood right OK?
rapture.
we're tuned in.

we can wax poetic on that.

there's still a situation, a condition.

let's look for probable cause, Sherlock might say.

Hello Reason.
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

A couple of thoughts I find interesting, derived more or less from Amos Wilder and his ideas on the 'theopoetic'. I think they are relevant here (kill me if not).

All ideation is orientation within the unknown.

To work with language, or within language, is to work with Defining Statement.

'Modern View' has no way, or rather has an afflicted way, of defining 'self'. Self is strangely disregarded.

An intellectual orientation is a juggling of ideas and structures for organizing perception. It is also an artistic work in the same sense that Art is artistic: it involves the whole perceptive self, not just that of a machine that has collected facts and like an intelligent computer cobbles together an interpretation that is, when you probe it, more symptomatic of disconnect from holism than a view that can rally the self. Each one 'recites' his Vision of the fractured soul: a discordant, non-melodious screech...
fiat mihi
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

All ideation is orientation in the unknown
.

That's ideation!

if a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?
what's that?
it's an idea.

all this ideation is like hanging wallpaper up between oneself and a clear blue sky.

it's like when one draws in hashish smoke and the mind drifts off into clouds of ideation, wandering here and there fascinatedly along blind alleys. tantalising, dreamscape,
picking daisies for a daisy chain.
would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?

come to the senses.
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

[I have considered taking you, dear Dennis, off of ignore. But I have read the things you write that others quote to respond to you, and see no change or evolution or expansion in your ideas. And I fully understand. I believe I could describe better than you why you have been forced to choose this strategy! I can only assume, as I have paraphrased before, that you write 'Empty & Meaningless' or some derivation? As you know, we simply have no common ground for communication.]
fiat mihi
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

Try and come up with concepts that match into the machinery of life please.
blowing bubbles out the ass don't do anything in the 'what's language for, what's it do' conversation.

'All is empty' is the big kahuna in the human transformation show.

the little apple seed won't grow to an apple tree if I keep it in my hand.
It needs soil, climate, Earth, Universe to happen as it's possibility.
All these things arise dependently.

causes/conditions
bits and pieces
gelling.
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

It seems to me, reading Pye's longer 'Walk among the metaphysicians' post above, that her essential view is an expression of and the logical necessity of 'scientific materialism' but that it also points fairly directly to (indeed it is expressed in that post) a Marxian analysis. This may be to state the obvious but Pye's discourse seems an amplification of the same reigning concepts that operate in Dennis. What Dennis expresses in a form of poetic allusion, Pye expresses in a more 'academic' prose. Still, unless I am wrong, this discourse is driven by one or in any case a very few core predicates. But what if major factors and givens are excluded from this procedure?

"The twentieth century may have its epiphanies but it is not a favorable time for the greater visions and wider circumspections. Its intellectuals are out of their depth in dealing with those dimensions of experience for which earlier.epochs have found a language."
...

"In a time like ours one must argue not only against those no-nonsense or cerebral types who identify the imagination with fancy. One must also awaken those who live an impoverished dream-life to the true dynamics of the spirit and to those impulses and poetries of the heart which orient us in the unknown."

---Amos Wilder 'Theopoetics'.

The other or another curious thing is that it is a great deal of this 'schizophrenic' symbolization of Reality through which.and with which our very selves have been created. How we see, feel, perceive and relate and especially how we value a given being, is a long religio-historical project that culminates in You and Me and this perceiving eye that says what it says, sees what it sees. One.cannot deny or dismiss all the apperceptions and antecedent symbolization processes, but must (I think) reinhabit them---rehabilitate them. They are part and parcel of the present and will not 'go away'.

Also, an advanced theological dialectic comes to similar conclusions as does Pye and people who think as a result of functioning within those predicates, but is (I think) much more encompassing and fluid in including and dealing with 'all that we are'.
fiat mihi
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

it's empty and meaningless.
geddit
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Tomas
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Re: The Musty....

Post by Tomas »

Dennis Mahar wrote:it's empty and meaningless.
geddit
I'll tell'ya, Alex. I kinda see why you have Dennis on ignore. I think he is a highly-depressed individual. It's like a broken record*** with him. All talk - no action.

Next time you're in Colombia, you might want (may care) to sit down face-to-face with a mynah bird. At least, you'd have a more-educated (and well-reasoned) discussion about the meaning of life.......

Mynah birds have more fun.

***RIP - Dick Clark
Don't run to your death
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

Esteemed Colleague Tomas,

I found myself so irritated at times that I felt there had to be something suspect in my irritation. I suppose I think that each of us has inside of us someone at times so damned exasperating that we have to put OURSELVES on ignore so not to have to face him. On the other hand, there are very strong and very dangerous currents that move us toward the annihilation of self, which is a very real form if slavery and subjectivity that is an outcome of mechanization. If we feel distressed about that we likely have very good reason.

Still, I think people cling to defining ideas because.they genuinely feel they NEED them, that is, to keep themselves from being annihilated by those same exterior forces (if that is not too paranoid sounding) that attack the individual and destroy value in life. It is interesting how Dennis equates my ideas also with a kind of 'death' and 'poison'. We seem to live in a time of heightened paranoia---but justifiably so (or does that sound paranoid?)
  • I have noted that a theopoetic or plea for the religious imagination has to defend itself on two fronts.

    It has to defend itself on the one hand against a pragmatic no-nonsense type of mentality, representing a kind of devastated area in culture whose aesthetic and spiritual antennae have been blighted. In this camp also are rationalists and religious dogmatists for both of whom experience lacks its deeper creative registers. There are, indeed, genuinely vital religious groups today besides these which downgrade images and the symbolic order for their own reasons: thus many existentialists concerned with what they think of as a more immediate kind of encounter, or those mystics who would transcend images in the quest for ecstatic emptiness.

    On this front any plea for the religious imagination opens the critic to the charge of mere aestheticism. His concern appears to be fanciful and frivolous.


    ---Amos Wilder 'Theopoetics'
This book, which I have just gone through fairly carefully, has been for me extraordinarily useful. It is a wonderful book and one I'll refer to for a long time. I'm surprised it isn't better known. I have been groping around trying to locate and pull up again ideas and images that can be used as a sort of 'protective wall' against some of the destructive ideas that Q-R-S play within. I have, as you know, seen it and described it (their ideation) as a symptom of nihilism, which I still think it largely is (though that is not all it is). I am discovering that we have no language with which to talk about this 'nihilism' because we are ourselves half sunk in it! We are being consumed by it! If there is meaning to the symbol of 'resurrection' (also currently a meaningless, devalued term) for the individual, it appears it has to be fought for tooth and nail against a whole array of 'mechanisms' that rise up to to destroy a certain group of 'conceptual pathways'. So, this 'resurrection' is the construction of a new sort of 'body' (within thinking) through which one can have relatedness with 'the Spirit'. And that term, again, has been vacated on meaning! But yet which to find the isness of it requires a great deal of creative work. Oddly enough, it has taken me some years of work to find this 'invisible bridge' so that now I can say, nay I will shout it on the mountainsides: It IS NOT 'empty & meaningless'!
Last edited by Talking Ass on Sat Apr 21, 2012 5:08 am, edited 4 times in total.
fiat mihi
Dennis Mahar
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Dennis Mahar »

it's empty and meaningless.

you haven't seen it, that's all.
in your 'don't know' you fill the space with junk meaning.

Take look at it.
resistance is futile.

mighty civilisations rise and fall like confetti in a stiff breeze.
capitalism, marxism, theopoetics,
grabbing at winning formulas,
as significant as a pimple on a gnats bum,

moving always.
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Pye »

Alex writes: Still, unless I am wrong, this discourse is driven by one or in any case a very few core predicates.
No predicates; just consequences of existence. There is only existence. Everything about it comes after that, as a consequence of that. Everything is consequential, not intentional.

No predicates; as in things-before existence (that direct, or formulate, or pre-determine, or intend for this or that something to be) are logically, linguistically or reasonably possible. It is incoherent to speak of things pre--existent to existence; for if indeed something is, then it exists, linguistically at the very least.

No predicates; sees human meaning as only belonging to humans, and human reality bound only to conditions, and the whole "human" world to be a pattern of human values that refer only to human life. We cannot exceed our own instrumentation in order to measure the world. (This renders "man is the measure of all things" a new orifice).

No predicates; there is no human nature preceding us, pre-existing us, destining us. We are free to self-determine. At one in the same time, we are also bound to and formed by living and lived conditions and we are nothing else besides. This is not philosophic inconsistency, but absolute reality - the ambiguity, as Beauvoir names it. Both free and bound. "Condemned to choose," as Sartre had it, a part of the pattern - as a consequence, as a result, we make the shape of humanity; "humanity" is not a thing ahead of us we are fulfilling. We are making what it is as we speak, by default of our actions, conscious or otherwise.

So why not consciously . . . .

you know what I mean Sherlock :)
there's still a situation, a condition.

let's look for probable cause
conditions, conditions. yes. And when our vision is acute, and we suss out what conditions/causes are bringing about what kinds of effect, we can consider what monkeying with those conditions might bring about. We're free, you see, to do that. Bound to the concrete world and waking up to its plasticity . . . . unobliged to any metaphysics; focused upon a malleable self rooted entirely in the 'earthly' world, rejecting the conditions of temporal life no more, becoming what we are. the hardest thing, as Nietzsche said.
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Talking Ass
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Talking Ass »

'Predicate' in the sense I am using it only means some 'driving ideas', and it would not be honest to say either de Beauvoir or Sartre did not establish certain 'driving ideas' and were not pushed along by them.

And with that softward installed (a certain reading of their philosophy) I too would be compelled to say what you say. And I am certainly not disinclined to employ those ideas, either. But there is one slight catch: if we 'invent our reality' we also have to accept that we have a certain history in 'inventing' it, and all that previous material is there: considerable, relevant. And so with that one could again say: 'The twentieth century may have its epiphanies but it is not a favorable time for the greater visions and wider circumspections. Its intellectuals are out of their depth in dealing with those dimensions of experience for which earlier epochs have found a language'.

In an attempt to revitalize a 'theopoetical' language, in no sense is it required---I don't think---to negate the immediacy or the power of such statements as: "We are left alone without excuses".

Anecdotally, Sartre said once of The Talking Ass: "Not only an intellectual but also the most complete being of our age!" (Actually, he said that about Ernesto Guevara, and it is interesting to note the heavy romanticism in this assessment, since Che turns out to be quite a little totalitarian, an arch-authoritarian, the founder of labor camps for the errant, who had a thing about summary executions. Who wrote: 'Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.' To understand Che, you have to understand the Argentine psyche, a terrifying prospect...)

But all humor aside: the thing is to see how these philsophical ideas are tied to a certain period of rebellion and rather flippant dismissal of vast areas within human experience. With this---or am I pushing it?---I would place Pye within a similar camp of 'nihilism' as many who write here. Is that unfair, Pye? (I'll retract if so...)

And it is true: L'infer, c'est les autres. Vous! VOUS! Oh God, Oh GOD, these people are driving me cRaZy!
Last edited by Talking Ass on Sat Apr 21, 2012 10:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Pye
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Re: The Mystic....

Post by Pye »

Tomas (on Dennis): I think he is a highly-depressed individual.

Alex: I found myself so irritated at times that I felt there had to be something suspect in my irritation.

Oh there is something suspect alright, not just for you here, Alex, but for every positivist human who has searched in vain for the "essence" the "nature" of human-being, from the bumpy phrenologist to the hard determinist to the soft astrologer, and even when we keep running smack into nothing beneath, behind us, we persist in our optimism that there is something there; we just haven't found it yet. Centuries and centuries of humans looking for their being when they can only ever become, giving this thing and that over to human "nature," when we fail to find it in every human (for what else does one mean to speak of if they speak of something definitive to human nature?). There is no human nature ("free"); only human conditions. Most metaphysics is too chickenshit, imo, to take on something as profound as this irreducible ambiguity.

All of our descriptions fail to wrap their arms around the whole thing because there is no thing for them to wrap around unless it can take into account every single individual human life. Even if we can come to account for every cause, every synaptic impulse, every mechanical reality to a human effect, we will only ever see it converging and playing out individually; each will always be under their own convergence of conditions, a sui causa in a manner of speaking. A personal agency in an impersonal world . . . . We have a self, alright. And these are its ambiguous conditions.

All this, too, in a universe completely indifferent to our projects and aims . . . .

I can't speak for Dennis' mood, but I can understand why people can become uncomfortable around some of his thoughts, do I ever. It isn't fun to suck in a lungful of terror your first breath away from the nipple . . . .
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