Cultural Epochs

 

There is nothing that can be said that can do more for understanding the full meaning and purpose of life (enlightenment) than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for 'seeing' the moon. Zen proverb

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of man (kings). Proverbs 25:2

You ere if you mistake mere measurement for understanding. Acquarius

Paleolithic man saw the birth of Art. There is a premonition of Religion in all art but it was Neolithic man that saw its emergence. In our own social memory it was the Greeks that brought the epoch of Science into the world. History found its feet a mere century or two ago so the next phase can hardly have begun. The diagram serves to illustrate the phases of man's becoming awareness, some would characterize it as his apotheosis.

Art doesn't, can't articulate that the real is a self manifesting first principle but beauty itself contains this germ. Being itself is a fundamental idea with the power to self manifest. It is potentiality with the power to actualize and the present is a realization or actualization of the past and future which are potentialities. Beauty is the primal element of the noosphere. Of art music lives in the moment but its yearning is for the next moment. It is the essence of restlessness, of finding completion in the infinite regress of the horizon beyond the now. This restlessness characterizes all subsequent modes of being discussed.

The christians generally can't get past their feelings of guilt. Guilt is the father of anger, hatred, self loathing. Salvation is the undoing of guilt through forgiveness, redemption. Guilt is self loathing and makes it difficult if not impossible to achieve blamelessness through self sacrifice, to accept the self as sacred.

Speaking of science, if knowledge is always knowledge of something, then only reason leads to knowledge. All knowledge is through sense perception and memory. Direct knowledge, intuition, noesis, is not based on experience. So, science is strictly material in nature and its main flaw is in the non-material nature of understanding. There is understanding not based on knowledge. Science would never postulate or understand that matter conveys individuality and form universality.

It may be true that the whole is in some sense the same thing repeated endlessly, as Nietzsche is said to have thought. After all, for instance, all words come from the same alphabet yet somehow its possible to infinitely rearrange them in order for the New to constantly emerge. It might be more accurate to say that every instance of the Real is an elaboration of its predecessor or antecedent, similar to fractals.

This scheme is of course the brain child of R.G. Collingwood. His book Speculum Mentis is a beautifully written discourse on the subject. I've written about him several times here. A search of Collingwood results in seven items so I won't link to them. I'm doing this addendum because I wanted to include the above diagram.

What is suggested by the stages is that there is an end within, Aristotle's entelechy. This end within manifests first as Art, then Religion, and so forth. With each stage the end within changes. The artist gives beauty while the religious aims at union with a deity. The scientist works for the most elegant theory, expression of understanding of the world. The idea of history is that by stages the culture of man is perfected over time. The original beauty of artistic expression is still there but has evolved to encompass all that culture entails.

The end within an acorn is, of course, an oak tree. But if you make boards of the oak then the end within the acorn becomes, for instance, a table, among myriad other possibilities. The end within an acorn is also a stump, or fire for the hearth. This is a decent metaphor for the cultural epochs which is our subject here. The oak dreams of the acorn. The acorn dreams of the oak. The stump lives in them both.

Sentient life forms are an end within. Of what is unknowable but some understanding might be possible. What is knowable, I guess, is that it just started [on this planet] and given the expected life span of the sun has 4.5 billion or so "years" to manifest. Who are we, or what? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is our purpose? Meaning? Any certain knowledge of these is not attainable. What is attainable is a gradual revelation of beauty, of truth, of love, of the end within. Cultural Epochs are expressions of the emergence of these qualities. How are we different from a rose in bloom..."such frost white felicity to shame the moon" * . Consider that before the emergence of man, of sentient life forms, beauty, truth, wisdom, liberty, love, did not exist but were in the rocks crying out, as it were. The whole of creation is an aspiration, a yearning, longing, a church spire reaching, a pine pointing, to these concomitants of consciousness to be made explicit.

Plotinus is said to have thought that existence, life, is a flight from the alone to the alone. Alone to alone equals a null. Yet even in this nothing exists flight, flight from one make believe to a somewhat different make believe. Its a journey, a process, so flight is all, totally encompassing, the point of departure being the same as the point of arrival. The Real is not a state, it is a becoming. Every attempt to own it begins from a false premise. One only owns things.

Think of T.S. Eliot: "We shall arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." From Little Gidding

* G.V. Desani wrote this.

Thoughts

  

"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves. " Churchill

Category error: Every assertion has built in premises, assumptions about the nature of the Real. If the assumption is wrong, then the containing assertion or claim can't be right. In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management. Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means. Our experience, connection to the Real, as embodied, individualized, localized beings is the first of these. Dan Simmons

"This finding adheres to a general pattern that imagining a given action or sensation is likely to be neurologically analogous to physically carrying out that action or experiencing that particular stimulus." Link

"That's why we're here: the passing of time has no meaning unless experienced by conscious beings." James Lileks

…or consciousness, truth, beauty. Time and these are universal but must be individualized, localized to be meaningful.

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God hides in plain sight. He does not do the things man does, think, etc., but he is (there) when we do them.

Michael Hanlon on theory of "pocket universes" This sounds a lot like Aristotle: "If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. This idea from the Multiverse theory. And from Michael Hanlon on string theory: "The many worlds interpretation of quantum physics….states that all quantum possibilities are, in fact, real. When we roll the dice of quantum mechanics, each possible result comes true in its own parallel timeline. If this sounds mad, consider its main rival: the idea that reality results from the conscious gaze. Things only happen, quantum states only resolve themselves, because we look at them. As Einstein is said to have asked, with some sarcasm, would a sidelong glance by a mouse suffice?"

Me: The north pole can't be definitely located, seen, but we know its there.

Hawking: If Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct, the universe began with a singularity called the big bang. Now because it was a singularity, all the laws of physics broke down. And therefore we cannot predict how the universe began. A few years ago I was at a conference on cosmology that was held in the Vatican. And at the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. The Pope said it was fine for them to inquire into the early history of the universe, but they should not ask questions about the big bang itself… because that was the work of God. However, at that conference I proposed that Einstein's general theory of relativity would have to be modified to take quantum mechanics into account. And that modification would mean that there was no singularity. Space time would be finite in extent, but with no singularities. In this picture, space time would be like the surface of the earth. It's finite in extent, but it doesn't have any boundary or edge or singularities.

Interviewer: SO IT WOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE TO SAY THAT REALLY THE UNIVERSE HAS A BEGINNING OR END, OR WHAT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO SAY ABOUT BEGINNING AND CAUSATION?

The universe… the universe would have a beginning and an end in the same sense that degrees of latitude have a beginning and an end at the north and south poles respectively. There isn't any point with a latitude 91 degrees north. And similarly, there isn't any point in the universe which is before the big bang. And the, but the north pole is a perfectly regular point of the earth's surface, it's not a singular point. And similarly, I believe that the big bang was a perfectly regular point of space time. And all the laws of physics would hold at the big bang. And if that is the case, we can completely predict the state of the universe from the laws of physics.

ALL OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEEMS TO BE DIRECTED TOWARDS THE EVENTUAL GOAL, THAT'S A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY, AN UNDERSTANDING OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS THAT UNIFY ALL OF NATURE, INCLUDING MANKIND. WILL WE EVER FIND SUCH A THEORY, AND IF SO, WHAT COULD BE THE CONSEQUENCES?

I think it's an open question as to whether we will find a complete unified theory. All I can say is that we don't seem to have one at the moment.

YOU WERE SAYING THAT THERE MAY BE SUCH A THING . . .

We may never find a complete unified theory, but I think that there is a 50-50 chance that we'll do so by the end of the century.

WHAT WOULD BE THE CONSEQUENCES OF SUCH A THEORY? WOULD WE THEN KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT PHYSICAL REALITY?

In principle, but not in practice. Because the equations are very difficult to solve in any but the simplest situations. We already know the laws of physics that underlie the behaviour of matter in normal circumstances. So in principle, we should be able to predict all of physics, all of chemistry and biology. But we've not had much success in predicting human behaviour from mathematical equations.

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My commentary: Science posits the Real, the source of meaning and purpose, in an absolute other. It's over the horizon and is called something like "complete unified theory" and would resolve the general theory of relativity with the (theories of) quantum mechanics, the physics of the very large with that of the very small. There are no concrete objects, but waves in force fields. Every discovery leads to new postulates as the absolute other is approached but never quite reached. Like going the speed of light requires ever more energy as one approaches light speed, to make the final leap requires all the known energy in the universe. I postulate that to calculate the grand unified theory similarly requires ever greater calculus and that eventually you run out of calculus coincidentally at the same moment you reach the ultimate theory. Ironically the evidence can't be finally owned because it hides in plain sight. You can't find it because the premise you don't already have it is false.

What's interesting is the notion that if its possible it will eventuate. Aristotle postulated this, too, and noted that unimaginable horrors were necessary conditions. Also notable is the absence of anything not quantifiable from these types of proceedings. Sean Carroll, for instance, dismisses philosophical insights relating to consciousness, the soul, and religious notions of transfiguration, for instance, as flowery speech. Science generally doesn't consider anything that can't be measured. Thus measurement becomes the sine qua non of knowledge. But knowledge isn't the only path to understanding. Indeed it can be an impediment. It seems to me a grand unified theory would actually account for time, beauty, love, truth, and such coming to have meaning when actualized in a field of consciousness of a sentient life form. My personal grand notion, call it theory if you want, is consciousness is the instrument of the soul and the issue of Grace working through the emotions, through mind, to affect the apotheosis of matter.

If that's too much to swallow then here is a simpe formula that is known to work: "Praise no day until evening, no wife until buried, no sword until tested, no maid until bedded, no ice until crossed, no ale until drunk."

Is it really cold empty nothingness? When we "Gaze steadfastly at stars which though distant are yet present to the mind" do we bring the star to the mind or realize the star where it is as already in "our" mind? I've lost my note on who first made this observation though Parmenides made a similar statement. Another interesting notion in this regard is from quantum physics, reality results from the conscious gaze. I'd suggest James Lileks has it right when he says "Thats why we're here: the passing of time has no meaning unless experienced by conscious beings." Replace "time" with space, or for that matter beauty, truth, love, God, or, The Whole Universe, and we might realize we confer individuality on much more than just this body in which we find ourselves. The Universe might consist mostly of the void which, as Nietzsche sagely observed, begins to stare back at those pondering, at length, its depths, but its an interesting void.

Ponder the incomprehensible Otherness of the opposite...
woe has its wisdom, sorrow enlightens the soul.

We are all Don Giovanni

 

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Vol. I

The overture begins with certain deep, earnest, uniform notes. Then we hear for the first time, infinitely far away, a hint which yet, as if it had come too early, is instantly recalled, until later one hears again and again, bolder and bolder, louder and louder, that voice, which first subtly and coyly, and not without anxiety slipped in, but could not force its way through. Sometimes in nature one sees the horizon thus heavy and lowering; too heavy to support itself, it rests upon the earth, and hides everything in the blackness of night; a single hollow rumble is heard, not yet in movement, but a deep muttering within itself-then one sees at the farthest limit of the heavens, remote on the horizon, a flash; swiftly it runs along the earth, and is instantly gone. But soon it comes again, it grows stronger; for a moment it lights up the whole heaven with its flame, in the next the horizon seems darker than ever, but more swiftly, even more fiery it blazes up; it is as if the darkness itself had lost its tranquility and was coming into movement. As the eye in this first flash suspects a conflagration, so the ear in that dying strain of the violin has a foreboding of the whole intensity of passion. There is apprehension in that flash, it is as if it were born in anxiety in the deep darkness-such is Don Juan's life. There is dread in him, but this dread is his energy. It is not a subjectively reflected dread, it is a substantial dread. We do not have in the overture-what we commonly say without realizing what we say-despair. Don Juan's life is not despair; but it is a whole power of sensuousness, which is born in dread, and Don Juan himself is this dread, but this dread is precisely the daemonic joy of life. When Mozart has thus brought Don Juan into existence, then his life is developed for us in the dancing tones of the violin in which he lightly, casually hastens forward over the abyss. When one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it ceases to skip, it instantly sinks down into the depths; so Don Juan dances over the abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.

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Dread is our energy. It is substantial dread. Despair is not what we feel it is our life powered by sensuousness born in dread. Our joy of life is the daemonic joy of life hastening over the abyss. On cessation we sink into the depths our joy not even a bright memory.

This is the gift of Christianity positing, as it does, personal fulfillment on an ever receding horizon infinitely removed from who we really are.

 

Without memory there is no Real.