1. There is an underlying reality whose true nature we cannot know.
2. We construct our world through more or less effective manipulation of signs or symbols for things.
3.
The most effective form of sign and symbol manipulation is science
expressed as technology (the actual manipulation of matter for proven
effect) but other manipulations include arts that manipulate the signs
and symbols themselves and which manipulate the minds of others.
4.
Technological change and individual creativity and needs have an
iterative effect on the signs and symbols inherited from generation to
generation of persons through tradition. All culture is thus contingent.
5.
Each person is faced with a world of signs and symbols that have not
been chosen by them but have been given to them. In this sense, ‘they
have not chosen their parents’. This world of given signs and symbols
continues to impose values on them at every moment of their existence.
6.
Each person has an underlying reality of bio-physical processes for
which signs and symbols are necessary in order to function in the world.
7.
Each person struggles between self-generated signs and symbols on the
one hand, making use of what is given, and signs and symbols given to
them in the interest of others. Each calibrates himself or herself
between the two in order to function in the world.
8.
Individuation is right calibration but the signs and symbols of the
world are dysfunctional in this context to the degree that they are not
ordered either in relation to scientific principles or not calibrated
with the biological reality of the person as a mind embedded in a body
and a history.
9. Signs and symbols may be very functional for
society in the aggregate yet be dysfunctional in relation to nature or
the individual – it is a political act to demand that signs and symbol
manipulation accord with discovered nature and with individual
aspiration or need.
10. A poorly calibrated society is one in
which signs and symbols are not calibrated with technological and
natural phenomena (i.e. are revealed or traditional religion) or with
the signs and symbols of choice of free persons (i.e. are totalitarian
or ideological).
11. The signs and symbols of the person are
dysfunctional to the degree that they are not in alignment with the
needs of the biological person in its form of consciousness at any one
time.
12. In order for individuation to take place, the
biological person needs to create signs and symbols that express its own
reality but which are still in accord with the technological and
natural reality of the world in which it inhabits.
13. A poorly
calibrated person is one who either accepts the signs and symbols of a
society without calibrating these with his own ‘true nature’
(‘repression’) or one whose personal signs and symbols are disconnected
from natural or technological reality (’madness’).
14. A person
who does not accept the signs and symbols of society but is in accord
with natural or technological reality is not mad – society is mad under
such conditions.
15. A society is repressive if it accords with
natural or technological reality yet refuses to accept the right of
persons to calibrate their own signs and symbols within that reality.
16.
There is nothing universal in the process of calibration. Society is
contingent and persons are contingent in space and time. Finding the
universal as sign or symbol for individuation is a contradiction in
terms, an abnegation and a determination by the individual to choose
signs and symbols that are disconnected from underlying material
realities.
17. This is not to say that there is nothing that is
not ‘universal’ but whatever is universal and is not scientific is
beyond the human and is unknowable - to claim to know is to promote an
illusion.
18. It is a presumption to think that any mind can
escape a world of contingent signs and symbols. A temporary but possibly
transformative discovery of one’s own reality (but not that of the
universe) is the most that transcendent strategies can achieve – such
strategies may tell you nothing about the universe but a great deal
about yourself.
19. All persons are equal in their right to their
own construction of signs and symbols even if some are more able to do
so than others. All societies are oppressive to the degree that they
dictate the acceptance of signs and symbols that are not scientific
facts of matter. Religion and culture are not facts of matter. They
cannot be rightfully dictated.
20. The greater the number of
signs and symbols in a society, the greater the choice for individuals
and the more language there is available for individuation.
Individuation can only take place in a free society in which religion
and culture are tools for (and not the masters of) individuals.
21. The three platforms of individuation are:
• Understanding all things as contingent and not universal
• Understanding the ultimate material base to all consciousness
• Seeing individuation as a process or calibration in relations between the given and the chosen
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Universalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universalism. Show all posts
Saturday, 20 June 2015
Saturday, 20 September 2014
'Here I Stand" - The Problem of Universalism
How does one win hearts and minds to counter an imperialistic universalism when universalism is the faith of the intellectual class that dominates the modern West? Where is our Luther?
I suppose the claim that universalism is a problem will bring some readers up short almost immediately. The idea that there is a universal quality to a humanity of fixed and equal natures is the over-riding assumption of Western culture, especially in its dominant American form.
The starting point must be to show how the 'universal' is a fraud and that, once this fraud is exposed, not only universalist politics but identity politics, the politics of gender and ethnicity, of class and nation, are equally fraudulent.
Toleration shifts from that toleration that arises because we are all allegedly the same (when we are clearly not) to a toleration of each precisely because they are different.
Commonality will no longer be imposed to meet a pre-set theoretical and intellectual standard of universality but can arise from below through the co-operation of free individuals as their similarities and shared desires become clear.
Back in the early nineteenth century, Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Coleridge understood that universalism operates against the instinctive aesthetic of humanity, against the inner spirit of the individual and the weight of history.
This mentality fuelled the romantic European Right but it need not necessarily be that the instinctive aesthetic is not progressive - quite the contrary.
Universalists socialise humanity into normal behaviours, chopping off the far sides of the Bell curve, in a way that represents no single person alive. They make the universe into something that exists so far from really existing humanity that no space is left for the inherent complexity of the individual.
And this critique (although the nineteenth century anti-universalists would disagree with their penchant for obscurantist philosophies) extends to the universalism of religion as much to the universalism of the philosophes and the aufklarer.
Above all, to be anti-universalist is not to be anti-rational - on the contrary, it is universalism that works against human reason by depending on an abstract, manufactured, Kantian Reason. Human reasoning is fitted to the human condition. It is a tool, not an end.
'Objective' abstract Reason is a poor thing, a simulacrum of the real. Human level reason still has room for intuition and for instinctive judgements that may not be pure but are, nevertheless, human and oftentimes right. Our human reason lies in openness to our dreams as much as to our calculation.
It is something of a cliche that Reason is totalitarian in concept (as opposed to reasoning which is just one, generally essential, tool amongst others). Reason fakes reality much as scholasticism once faked spirituality. Scholasticism proved to be dysfunctional and so, now, is Reason.
Which brings us back to our Luther. Luther asserted a different spirituality against a degenerate scholastic culture. A new Luther might assert a different social reality against a degenerate universalism. Here may someone stand.
I suppose the claim that universalism is a problem will bring some readers up short almost immediately. The idea that there is a universal quality to a humanity of fixed and equal natures is the over-riding assumption of Western culture, especially in its dominant American form.
The starting point must be to show how the 'universal' is a fraud and that, once this fraud is exposed, not only universalist politics but identity politics, the politics of gender and ethnicity, of class and nation, are equally fraudulent.
Toleration shifts from that toleration that arises because we are all allegedly the same (when we are clearly not) to a toleration of each precisely because they are different.
Commonality will no longer be imposed to meet a pre-set theoretical and intellectual standard of universality but can arise from below through the co-operation of free individuals as their similarities and shared desires become clear.
Back in the early nineteenth century, Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Coleridge understood that universalism operates against the instinctive aesthetic of humanity, against the inner spirit of the individual and the weight of history.
This mentality fuelled the romantic European Right but it need not necessarily be that the instinctive aesthetic is not progressive - quite the contrary.
Universalists socialise humanity into normal behaviours, chopping off the far sides of the Bell curve, in a way that represents no single person alive. They make the universe into something that exists so far from really existing humanity that no space is left for the inherent complexity of the individual.
And this critique (although the nineteenth century anti-universalists would disagree with their penchant for obscurantist philosophies) extends to the universalism of religion as much to the universalism of the philosophes and the aufklarer.
Above all, to be anti-universalist is not to be anti-rational - on the contrary, it is universalism that works against human reason by depending on an abstract, manufactured, Kantian Reason. Human reasoning is fitted to the human condition. It is a tool, not an end.
'Objective' abstract Reason is a poor thing, a simulacrum of the real. Human level reason still has room for intuition and for instinctive judgements that may not be pure but are, nevertheless, human and oftentimes right. Our human reason lies in openness to our dreams as much as to our calculation.
It is something of a cliche that Reason is totalitarian in concept (as opposed to reasoning which is just one, generally essential, tool amongst others). Reason fakes reality much as scholasticism once faked spirituality. Scholasticism proved to be dysfunctional and so, now, is Reason.
Which brings us back to our Luther. Luther asserted a different spirituality against a degenerate scholastic culture. A new Luther might assert a different social reality against a degenerate universalism. Here may someone stand.
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