Duality, hierarchy, or permanence: WHAT is the question?

by Narkissos 18 Replies latest jw friends

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  Narkissos

  Thank you all for your replies (including slimboyfat whose post I had the chance to read before he edited it out -- to his last summon I'll simply answer: NO, I haven't found any ground to support any universal "truth," especially of the ethical kind. I don't believe in "musts" and "oughts". And I don't think they "must" or "ought" be banned either.)

  ---

  I don't feel like arguing a lot here, but I can't resist highlighting the end of poppers' post:

  The primary reason why people who are on the brink of the conscious experience of enlightenment pull back is because they are about discover that their separate sense of self is a delusion; they don't want to face the reality of the illusory nature of the egoic sense. That scares the bejesus out of the ego, and the ego will do most anything from giving up its position of power. Fear drives the ego to remain in control and trapped in duality.

  Well, that does sound worse than the alternative option, i.e. "enlightenment," doesn't it?

  Let me translate that sentence into Evangelical English, for instance:

  The primary reason why people who are on the brink of giving up their lives to the Lord pull back is because they are about discover that their sin-based identity is condemned; they don't want to face the reality of the fallen nature of the sinful sense. That scares the bejesus out of the sinful ego, and the sinful ego will do most anything from giving up its position of power. Fear drives the sinful ego to remain in control and trapped in sin.

  I don't mean the two versions are semantically equivalent. But they do share the same structure -- a permanent, hierarchical, dualistic one -- even though the word "duality" has been made one term of poppers' super-duality.

  ---

  Another example I had in mind in showing how dualities can be reversed, again and again, rather than denied or surpassed, is the Gospel saying "whoever wants to save his psukhè will lose it / whoever loses his psukhè will find it".

  What is the psukhè to be lost? (I am in philosophical, not exegetical, mode here).

  You can understand psukhè, for instance(a)as "natural" or "animal" life/being or (b) as the construct, "psychical" human self, implying all the mental representations and relationships of the human ego / subject / "I".

  Because of this ambiguity the sentence can apply both ways.

  You definitely have to lose something of (a) to gain (b): education substitutes a series of artificial mediations -- language, writing, moral codes etc. -- to your immediate and instinctive relationship with your environment. Through it you become someone, a "person," a "subject"in the psychological and social sense, but something of your most natural and animal being has been lost and buried in the process.

  Then, at different stages of your psycho-social existence, you will feel the need to lose (b) to (re-)gain (a): your "nature," the "animal" in you, your body, your "guts," your "unconscious," your intuition, will call you out of your psycho-socially constructed self and put it at risk, or in question.

  There is a line. There are two sides. But none of them can be described as "good" and the other "bad". Being human implies crossing the border over and over again, without ever settling on either bank, nor reaching a third place solving the duality.

  Does that help or obscure the issue further?

  ---

  Btw I don't think (re: quietlyleaving's post) that even "fluidity" or "flexibility" is to be advocated. There is a place for everything, and for differences of nature. If everything was fluid as water we wouldn't have rivers. If everything was flexible as a grass blade we would never sit under an oak.

  Which reminds me, I also question the outrageous focus on the present ("now") in popular mystical speech. Weren't it for time, and especially the past, we would have neither stars nor mountains nor trees. What makes us different (and interesting) is the sum of past experiences (and desires and fears for the future).

  Iow I tend to accept whatever "is". The "ideas" in my mind just as the flowers in the grass. Nothing is "delusion," everything "is" -- onlydifferently.

  ---

  Edit: Welcome here DM, I saw your posts too late and now I've got to leave for a while... we'll catch up later :)
• 

  Leolaia

  I suggest that instead of questioning duality itselfwe rather question the hierarchy ascribed to it. Or more exactly its permanence, by acknowledging that it can be reversed, and reversed again and again. The borders which our thinking draws within the real can be crossed, over and over again, if they cannot be blotted out.

  Personally I think of apparent permanence or staticity as an illusion not too much unlike the persistence of vision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision. I don't think anyone really has the ability to conceptualize the full "landscape" of social choices and contexts that these reversals gain their meaning from. Our perception of our "self" and the binary moral categorization of our choices is narrowed by the dual lenses of attention and memory....how well do we even remember our evaluations from one situation to the next?
• 

  quietlyleaving

  thankyou nark - on the whole yes its much clearer now (gulp)
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  Narkissos

  OK I'm back...

  DM, I didn't mean to suggest that all three-term systems in the Western history of thought are practically equivalent to each other -- they are clearly not. I just expressed my impression that they tend to be more stable in that they generally include actual (or potential) events within the conceptual frame. Once motion is included in the system the system itself is motionless -- a bit like adding the "time dimension" to the Euclidian space "freezes" the picture: in a 3-dimensional universe everything can "happen," in a 4-dimensional universe nothing "happens," as time has been spatialised. Sub specie aeternitatis, events are forms.

  In Platonic anthropology as I understand it, the soul as the "third man" is the charioteer steering the horses of body and mind, and within the soul the thumos decides between the opposite thrusts of appetites and reason. This is not (yet) an all-embracing and motionless system, but the principle of decision determining actual events is already included.

  Now my question: you speak of 'reverting again and again' (fitting, because deconstruction is supposed to reverse dichotomies) - are you not trapped in the same system then? Let's take you by your word and deconstruct 'to reverse' by etymology: < Lat. revertere 'turn back'. Now this movement is the opposite (or reverse :) of différance (constantly going further) - And there we have another dichotomy.
  Perhaps it's no coincidence that we talk about the reverse side of a two-sided coin. If you flip/reverse the coin (meta-duality-system) again and again it will still have two sides and two states. It's not that you're creating infinite possibilities.

  Fully agreed. Siddhartha is not the same man crossing the same river (a pinch of Heraclitus is in order here) even though he is the same man crossing the same river (cf. Ricoeur's distinction between identity and ipseity). The narrative continuity may ultimately rest on some kind of "persistence of vision" as Leolaia suggests, yet without this "optical illusion" there is no sight and no story. Kierkegaard is more convincing when he tells us about the failure of actual repetition than when he expresses his belief/hope in the possibility of (religious) repetition, but I feel the latter for not being actual is not exactly false. Perhaps the myth of eternal recurrence is to endless différance what the ideal circle is to each successive curve of the winding Holzwege?

  The answer Hesse seems to give is quite morbid. After 'reversing' his position by 'going back' to the world, Joseph Knecht drowns on his first official day. Only loss of self leads to loss of dichotomies.

  I don't read it so negatively. Joseph Knecht drowns with the confidence that his pupil will make it to the other side. And that makes his existential shift from one interpretation of magister ludi (Master of the Game) to another (schoolteacher) worthwhile in his own eyes. Loss of self, but to the other.

  At the end of the walk, stern Hegel awaits us again.

  Sure, but haven't we enjoyed the walk in the meantime?
• 

  Twitch

  Ever get the feeling you're not in Kansas anymore?
• 

  quietlyleaving

  Btw I don't think (re: quietlyleaving's post) that even "fluidity" or "flexibility" is to be advocated. There is a place for everything, and for differences of nature. If everything was fluid as water we wouldn't have rivers. If everything was flexible as a grass blade we would never sit under an oak.

  Which reminds me, I also question the outrageous focus on the present ("now") in popular mystical speech. Weren't it for time, and especially the past, we would have neither stars nor mountains nor trees. What makes us different (and interesting) is the sum of past experiences (and desires and fears for the future).

  Iow I tend to accept whatever "is". The "ideas" in my mind just as the flowers in the grass. Nothing is "delusion," everything "is" -- onlydifferently.

  glad you mentioned flowers cos think I'm understanding what you are saying through nature. The various stages and cycles of life - nothingness (before the seed is formed), then the seed, after that lost and looking for soil, germinating, occupying a stable form as a plant, blooming and dying. So a place for everything, the struggle, the stability, the joy, the sadness etc
• 

  RAF

  Yeah ... That's why laws do not help (question of perspective nor contexte - nothing is all black or white) that's why I found the Gospel very interesting (even when some things looks wrong from our perspective today we still have to remember that if anything looks like a law to apply it just can't be the absolute right law depending on context which have something to do with the periode of time and civilisation and mentality evolution).

  So when it is said that God's wisdom = Christ 1 Corinthien 1:21 (WHAT) 1 Corinthien 2 :7 (WHO) gets the law out of the way for us to really think in taking love/charity/mercy into considertion first and over all ... it make sense spiritually talking.
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  slimboyfat

  That doesn't mean that "good" and "bad" are meaningless -- to the contrary, they are completely true in their relative own place and time. What we have to dispense with is the absolute -- the perspective from everywhere or nowhere, from always or never -- because it does not exist.

  Narkissos, from whose perspective does such an absolute not exist? From your perspective? Does that mean it is true to say the absolute does not exist from your perspective, but may conceivably from someone else's? I know I am not saying anything new, but it is good to highlight the irony. Postmodern relativism is self-contradictory, but hey why should it not be! But don't ask us to believe it.

  If "good" and "bad" are only true in their own relative place and time, then it follows that they are false outside their own relative place and time. How big is this place and time inside which each moral framework is true? If we admit relatively long periods of time over which a framework of "good" and "bad" holds true, then we must be very fluid with our conception of "good" and "bad" since it will be subject to variation and flux across social networks and over time. In fact our conception of "good" and "bad" must be so vague as to be meaningless. The statement therefore that "good and bad are completely true in their relative own place and time" is not even wrong, it is meaningless.

  But okay can we get around that by reducing the time and space over which it is claimed that a certain framework of "good" and "bad" stays true, thus preserving the integrity and stability of the notions? We could try, but by how much do we need to narrow our prospectus? In fact can it be demonstrated that any two people have exactly the same understanding of "bad" and "good" at any given moment, or that any single person's apparatus for judgement remains unaltered from the time of his restful setting it aside until the next time he takes it up again? Rather all we can claim is that certain view of "good" and "bad" is only true while a person is conceiving of it or when he is giving it expression. Its truth value external to that confine will vary and never match perfectly the construct internal to the thought/expression itself - not even similar thoughts that the same person may later have along similar lines.

  Given that meaning relies upon understanding across consciousnesses, it seems presumptuous to say that "good" and "bad" are meaningfully true in any relative context, since conscious perceptions vary from person to person and over time. Since the single point at which a conception of "good" and "bad" holds strictly true - that is while the thought is being formed and/or expressed - is not a unit of space and time over which meaning can reliably said to be formed, I conclude that it is meaningless to state, as you have done, that "good" and "bad" are true in their relative own place and time. It seems more meaningful to state that "good" and "bad" are false outside their own place and time. And so infinitely large is that space and time in which that conception of "good" and "bad are false, we might almost be justified in saying that "good" and "bad" are always false.

  We are doomed to misunderstand each other.

  Slim
• 

  Narkissos

  slim,

  You remind me of Vladimir Jankélévitch's anti-concepts of je ne sais quoi ("I know not what") and presque rien ("almost nothing"). Seems that the only worthwhile subjects left to discuss (although definitely not above misunderstanding) fall under those headings.

  I also like Jaspers' existentialist motto "truth begins with two" (although I am tempted to add "and ends with three"). There are, I feel, "relative truths" which may emerge from intersubjective encounters which are both more and less than an "individual perspective". More, because they take more than one mind to be seen. Less, because they are usually more elusive and shorter lived than any of the individuals involved. They certainly don't meet the standard of objective and absolute "truth" but they are not exactly nothing either. Almost nothing will do, I guess.

  That may seem to you like an easy exit, but I do think that the burden of proof for the "non-local perspective" -- be it that of "God" or of the "Universal Observer" of modern science -- rests on those who posit it to declare anything as objectively "true" or "false".