Occult Semiotics: Knowledge and Culture in a Multiverse of Meaning
Acknowledgments: These works are dedicated not only to all those in my life who have kindly talked to me about ideas but anyone who has ever taken the time to ponder the nature of existence. The great conversation of philosophy is made by us all, and every work owes its existence to each of you.
Personal thanks to Megan Denham, Michael Donikin, Gregory Desilet, Peter Wilberg, Douglass A. White, Debashish Banerji, Bruce Peret, Rachel Abrams, Gerald Sweat, Chad McCarty, Isaac Boatright, Sylvia Holmes, Melody Carr, Ryan Ponto, Elijah Ari, Walter Lossi, Charles Coxon, Niklaus Kamrath, Ry James, Bruce Gardner, Austin, Tim and Giordan Pogioli.
Contents:
Volume I:
I.Personal Prologue: Why Philosophy? Why this book?
II.New Age or Post-Everything: Aliens, Astrology, and Alternative Cosmology
III.Alchemy, Art, and Praxis: The Music and Medicine of Meaning
IV.The Real Gravity of the Situation: Science Fiction Saving Science
V.It Could Have Been Otherwise: Reality and Ethics in the Age of the Virtual
VI.Sacrifice and Repetition: From Cycle and Spiral to Fractal Pastiche
Volume II:
I. Signs and Scapegoats: The Viral Vectors of Science and Society
II. Power and Polarity in a Culture of Contradiction: AIDS, Aether, and Alternative Science
III. Creative Coherence: From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity
V. Karma, Control, and Creative Recurrence: The Endless Foundations of Infinite Meaning
Appendix:
The Problem of Power: Legitimate Authority and the Politics of Star Trek
Ozark: A Portrait of Power Post-Patriarchy
A note to the reader: The following texts were written to be part of this collection, yet also to function coherently on their own. They can be read in any order, even if they benefit from following the order in which they appear. Because they are each more or less distinct attempts at a sweeping survey or summary analysis of our culture, they form a kind of layered tapestry of subjects with many overlapping developments. There is unavoidably some repetition in this approach. However, it is never without some significant difference. At least that was the intent—to rhythmically return to important notes, but always on the way to an expansion of meaning. The rhythm and repetition of both the ideas, and when possible, the sounds of the words used, was kept in mind as a road to precision of felt-sense over distinct meaning. This follows a tradition in the metaphysics of India that can prioritize the intuitive and visionary experience of language and ideas over clear and concise rational denotation.
As the Indian thinker Ananda Coomaraswamy put it: “To have lost the art of thinking in images is precisely to have lost the proper linguistic of metaphysics and to have descended to the verbal logic of “philosophy”.” Western thinkers might make a similar distinction between poetry and philosophy. But trenchant categories can be denigrating and misleading. It is a central theme of this work that all things carry the potential to be experienced as sensible seed-ideas, visually rendered or otherwise. The attempt was therefore not to form a new philosophy, but to help make the important ideas of our time more sensibly resonate with each other and with all our faculties. Call the result metaphysics, philosophy, or just cultural theory. Whatever the case, a belief resounds throughout that connection is more important than novelty, and that the practice of following different ways of thinking is more important than acquiring information.
In that vein, the style of writing in this work represents a humble attempt to follow another Indian thinker, Sri Aurobindo, not known for his brevity, in using language, whatever the mode, including its rhythm and repetition, to reinforce the kind of sustained continuity of connection that is used in mantra and meditation, and is vital to illuminating the “metaphysical” reality of ideas within everything. The idea being that language and imagery do not so much communicate or represent discrete truths as much as entrain, invoke, and condition truth and consciousness. In which case, cultural practices that use their medium to form a flexible harmonizing rhythm and not just convince and capture, are ideal. Not that the following work is any paradigmatic example of harmonizing or conscious writing, just that it is an attempt and invitation to practice thinking through the ideas of our time, not through the transcendent and transfixing space of judgment, but by recursively deploying these ideas in time through different contexts, following them far enough to see where they lead and critically connect.
Attempting to poetically abstract, extend, and metaphysically recondition the rather prosaic ideas of a culture increasingly entrained to concrete sensational imagery was probably foolish, so please forgive any failures and the hubris of trying. This work naturally does not lend well to the contemporary trend of scanning for distinct information, but rather rewards a meditative immersion if it succeeds at all in its purpose. In any case, any effort is appreciated, immersive or not. Beginning each volume with passages from Aurobindo’s epic poem serves as fair warning of the barrage of abstract imagery to follow, even if what does follow is only a prosaic echo of the work of geniuses like him that inspired it.
VOLUME I:
“Arriving late from a far plane of thought
Into a packed irrational world of Chance
Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,
Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,
Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time…
An inconclusive play is Reason’s toil.
Each strong idea can use her as its tool;
Accepting every brief she pleads her case.
Open to every thought, she cannot know.
The eternal Advocate seated as judge
Armours in logic’s invulnerable mail
A thousand combatants for Truth’s veiled throne
And sets on a high horse-back of argument
To tilt for ever with a wordy lance
In a mock tournament where none can win.
Assaying thought’s values with her rigid tests
Balanced she sits on wide and empty air,
Aloof and pure in her impartial poise.
Absolute her judgments seem but none is sure;
Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal…
A master and slave of stark phenomenon,
She travels on the roads of erring sight
Or looks upon a set mechanical world
Constructed for her by her instruments.
A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust
To reach utility’s immense bazaar…
All was precise, rigid, indubitable.
But when on Matter’s rock of ages based
A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,
All staggered back into a sea of doubt;
This solid scheme melted in endless flux…
Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
A magic’s process in a magical space,
An unintelligible miracle’s depths
Whose source is lost in the Ineffable…
All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.
Ideas warring and fierce leaped upon life;
A hard compression held down anarchy
And liberty was only a phantom’s name:
Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed
On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;
All reeled into a world of Kali’s dance.
One chance remained that here might be a power
To liberate man from the old inadequate means
And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.
For Reason then might grasp the original Force
To drive her car upon the roads of Time.
All then might serve the need of the thinking race,
An absolute State found order’s absolute,
To a standardised perfection cut all things,
In society build a just exact machine.
Then science and reason careless of the soul
Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,
Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths
And a single-patterned thinking force on mind,
Inflicting Matter’s logic on Spirit’s dreams
A reasonable animal make of man
And a symmetrical fabric of his life.
This would be Nature’s peak on an obscure globe,
The grand result of the long ages’ toil,
Earth’s evolution crowned, her mission done.
So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;
Man then might rest content and live in peace,
Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked,
The world’s disorder hardening into Law,–
If Life’s dire heart arose not in revolt,
If God within could find no greater plan.
But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;
A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.
A sudden turn can come, a road appear.
A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.
Ascending from the soil where creep our days,
Earth’s consciousness may marry with the Sun,
Our mortal life ride on the spirit’s wings,
Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.”
-Sri Aurobindo from Savitri, book II canto X: “The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind”
Personal Prologue: Why Philosophy? Why this Book?
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
-James Joyce1
Introduction: Why write a book?
‘To be understood is to prostitute oneself’
-Fernando Pessoa2
I love books. When I was young and insecure with a mind scrambling for powerful ideas, books seemed a singular sign that some activity could transcend the tumult and achieve, if not an authoritative force and security, then at least a more rarefied and lasting texture of experience. In reading, part of me could rise above the vicissitudes of life and achieve some semblance of immortality, at play with great minds beyond the bounds of time and the limitations of lesser minds.
So naturally I wanted to write one and achieve the greater sense of spiritual security that authorship seemed to grant. Though, as often happens with restless minds, I never quite worked out a convincing reason to do such a seemingly indulgent thing. For within that restlessness lay a sense that my desire for transcendence was still a vain and premature substitute for a strong movement within that “higher” reality of seemingly stable meaning itself.
A creative-writing professor in college was adamant that I should write for my audience, which, for a youth wrestling with a muse it did not understand, was hardly possible even if I had a real audience, and definitely not desirable. Immersed in James Joyce (whom my professor found to be misguided in his lack of concern for his readers), I thought only of following the inspiration of the moment. I had little interest in pandering to the tastes of would-be readers—even in the face of feedback from my confused classmates, who were forced to read my psychedelic scribbles.
It wasn’t that I was disinterested or hostile to the opinions of others. There was certainly plenty of that common youthful ambition masking over-sensitivity, but within these distortions lay not just some need to find, express, prove, or escape some sense of the self, but help us all escape the known self and settled world of appearance and opinion.
While the self-destructive overtones of this kind of adolescent passion certainly took some time to tame, it was clear to me even then that legitimate escape had to mean some kind of positive growth or transformation of the relations between things. If freedom meant a simple severance, leaving the world the way it was, it had to be little more than a change of scenery, not a meaningful transcendence. I strongly felt that for that to happen, for anything to truly change, all things had to change. On the other hand, if the relations of anything significantly changed, then that was a change in all.
What motivated me then as now is a call to experience and understand those mutating threads of connection between everything—much more than a desire to master any one definitive thing. Consequently, what I write is an attempt to helpfully develop the ideas of our time and the relations they engender. The hope is not only that it will be understood that way but that it can help one better see all things as a working out or evolution of our relations, not simply some more or less subjective selection from a definitive truth or meaning.
Another consequence of my passion for understanding the ephemeral structure of relations is that the desire to add to the seemingly substantial and lasting medium of books has somewhat abated, especially as the volume of books, good and bad, keeps expanding beyond anything conforming to my romantic notions about the printed word.
Nonetheless, even as just a medium of important changes in consciousness, writing to me still seems important, especially as thought becomes increasingly entrenched in even more fleeting mediums. So, indeed, I have continued to read and to write, pulled, perhaps, by the prideful daemon of philosophy, pedantically pontificating to people whenever I feel something important has not been properly understood or appreciated. But the hope is always for something more than this, more than a cock-sure communication of a prior understanding, more even than a spur for a speculative exchange of ideas.
To the mind no longer passively pulled by the pressure and politics of securing its place, what matters more than the security and power of dominant expressions or correct ideas, more even than the joy in the communal play of common culture, is in the creation and explication of the new—that is, in the formation of a new feeling or understanding, especially one poised poetically within the singularity of a moment and its unique potential for the universe.
Whether or not what I write approaches such a lofty goal, or offers anything useful for the reader, depends on them. The work that follows was written for no one in particular, but which hopefully maintains some kind of coherence and accessibility for a generally educated audience. It is the result of decades of contemplation and serves as an application of my evolving philosophical interests to themes arising in the popular media and the culture of my time. The result, I admit, is a rather strange and often rapidly shifting and digressive juxtaposition of subjects. But I hope, for some, an occasionally interesting one.
If not, that is okay too. Since it is not the explicit communication of ideas that matters, at least not to what my youthful mind sensed as the greater reality of thought. All that matters on that plane is the “event” of value creation, the very act of imaginative and intuitive thinking itself—or rather any act of sense-making, since that greater reality is not some separate realm of thought. Everything matters in so far as it creatively diversifies and extends the larger themes and events taking place through us, and, in some sense, by us, at levels hidden from our everyday focus.
Though being an unrepentant lover of the novel and fringe, I have come to think that what is important in life could never be reduced to any one measure of value or any set criteria of judgment. Still, whatever the value or criteria, beyond any possibility of judgment, is there not always the call for all beings to learn, to better understand, and to increasingly fulfill some unique value?
Inherent in this relaxing of absolute judgment comes the recognition that nothing is without value because at the heart of every “thing” or moment is a unique and endless potential. Even so, the whole fun, the whole purpose of life and learning, is to make the most out of the event of each movement’s singularity, to make more value or a greater difference, whatever the value may be.
For while there may be no absolute standard from which to judge the great from the small, every difference comes with its standard, and the difference between a creative leap and a generic application or imitation is not difficult to “judge”.
Even so, to the extent that judgment implies finality or absolute authority, it loses its grounding in the creative nature of truth. No process is ever complete, so even the most unproductive, sedentary, or regressive process may become, in retrospect or reevaluation, an important resting place or consolidation point, from which new value may spring.
For some, this seeming lack of absolute foundations may sometimes make the downward spiral toward relativism and nihilism difficult to avoid. However, a sustained will to understand the values we pursue delivers a richer truth, one that connects any value to others and paints a rich picture of mutual implication that, if pursued with sincerity, dissolves any desire for the poverty and self-importance of some isolatable sovereign truth.
And it is pursuing that understanding—beyond any measurable effect on the visible world—that makes the biggest difference within that richer domain of evolving truth, within which everything we know is moving, however much things may seem like just truth’s inconsequential expression or symbol. Everything cannot help but be a portion, however quaint, of the infinite process of experimentation and discovery that makes a final judgment made from any limited context a rather short-sighted gesture.
But how can one understand anything without judgment? How can one pursue any value without negating others? To anticipate the ideas explored throughout my work, I will say that the answer depends on what one means by judgment and negation. One certainly doesn’t want to get caught up in contradictions, in trying to “negate the negative”, which anyone can see tends to involve a vicious cycle. But is not contradiction inevitable, perhaps even essential to the movement of any process, indeed to the very concept of movement itself, as the famous paradoxes of thought have shown?
Well, yes and no. Again, it depends on what one means. If meaning depends on a kind of sense that cannot be tied to any single reference, then the consistency of meaning required for meaning to even begin demands a coherence that always already implies motion, and in fact, is a motion or movement itself.
Contradiction only comes about when trying to freeze this fundamental motion or represent it as the mere movements of or relations between already constituted things. As I am continually called to say—a fundamentally relational logic is required. Relation is best understood as primary so meaning can move with and across its metaphors—for it is such a movement of and between open-ended relations.
With some such understanding of meaning, one can develop a feeling for the possibility of a greater journey. The passion for absolute truth and a justification of our lives becomes the will to evolve its expressions, to tune the vehicles and instruments of life and meaning to a level where they may carry a richer, more harmonious song or soul across the infinity of the spirit. The passion for unity can become a call to listen to differences and find the potential in each possibility.
As the call grows, the mystery of inspiration and the struggle for meaning may dissolve into the realization that meaning is inevitable—that we are all producing meaning whether we are aware of it or not. But, how much? For and according to whom? Those are difficult questions.
Suffice it to say, this meaning clearly isn’t just personal, or the mere aggregate of effects we all have on some linear historical process—which is often discussed in modern philosophy as a historical “dialectic”, a working towards resolution of those apparent contradictions (as if life had the same intolerance of the infinite that plagues the unsettled mind). Such meaning tends to reduce life to little more than a passage through to some cliched ideal, whether material or spiritual.
In contrast, when all isolated ideals and specific frameworks are set aside, or better yet, set aside each other—sunk into the smooth lines of life running through the “included-middle” ground of connecting contextual variations—all problems open out into a greater adventure. They are not so much solved, or all meaning finally made clear; the mystery and meaning of life is just freed from the need of anything beyond its endless exploration.
In the light of these endless potentials and purposes, every moment is already perfect and full as an infinite problem and eternal solution. We are all part of a grand experiment in value fulfillment where even our most intimate and seemingly isolated experience is already a complete and unique—even if ever-evolving—answer to some quality or question of potentially cosmic significance.
But how much do we partake in that perfection? That of course depends on who “we” are. For most of us on this planet, our world appears in pieces: meaning is dispersed among phenomena that seem at first disconnected. If we have any will to knowledge beyond the facts of existence we may attempt to cover the gaps with some kind of deeper thought. Or in our spiritual moments, we might just honor the mystery and symbolize a feeling of unity that transcends understanding. Yet our bodies or vitality fail us before whatever it was we were struggling to realize reaches any kind of definitive fulfillment.
Nonetheless, we carry on with a faith in continuity that even when it seems to fail cannot help but prop up the very sense of our world. And if we are open to it, part of us intuits that this sense of the world requires something if not within us than what we are part of continuing to carry on despite all evidence to the contrary.
Whether or not we are satisfied with our legacy, whether we are convinced of some tangible effect we had on the world, or of our part in some subtle spiritual process, something in us knows that somewhere, somehow, life’s tragedies will be redeemed, and the spirit of every thwarted effort will find some kind of fulfillment.
As our feeling of faith confronts the limits of meaning, however, it becomes clear that our efforts and their true significance can only have continuity on levels that far exceed the personal value and provincial meaning we ascribe to them.
And if one listens to those limits, perhaps beginning to sense the evolving ideas within things, one may see more clearly the threads of life’s deathless developments crisscrossing through our life and world—stopping short here, reemerging there in some other form—giving an impression that cannot help but compel a desire to follow those lines or give them a coherent field through which to manifest fully to our awareness.
Indeed, as one follows the spirit of any value long enough, one sees how deeply it is tied up with so many others—how much the fulfillment of any one ultimately depends on the fulfillment of all.
As one learns to inwardly cohere the scattered fragments of value we usually build our world around, pushing ever-further to find the larger arcs within which our short lives only stumble through here and there, we can begin to glimpse the spirit which connects the themes of all.
We may even hear its murmurs, its musically sonorous speech haunting the stunted staccato rhythms of our mental musings with the hopes of a worldly pattern that could match it, or at least build something in our little lives to become more faithfully an inroad to the infinite.
But to bring these scattered cross-purposed lines of life more into phase with the heart of the cosmos, coherent connections need to be made, not just within one’s self, but throughout our world’s frame of reference. What this means is explored throughout my writings.
Here I will just reassure you that it does not mean a monolithic culture. Quite the contrary. Coherence beyond isolated contexts is not a question of internal order, for every system has a complex relationship with others, and with the fundamentally relational nature of all things embedded in mutual co-determination.
While traditional cultures may have organized their small portions of the cosmic story to resonate with a certain amount of coherence as a microcosm of the greater world, what we call “civilization” has been the sign of the limits of tradition to maintain coherence through change. It is also a positive sign of a larger arc riding on the smaller cultural arcs as they have come and gone. That larger spirit has, in its own peaks and troughs, its dead ends and false starts, been striving to become more than just the quaint accumulating quirks of culture, more than just niche reflections of the greater cosmic process, of whose main currents our efforts are, in some sense, but tributaries.
One could say, perhaps, that our civilization has been instinctively striving to forge an instrument to penetrate further into the nerve center of the cosmic web of relations, to take a greater part in its trajectory. And while technology might be the most obvious manifestation of this development, technological achievements can also clearly lead to a further entrenchment of humanity in ignorance or worse.
To avoid this fate, the cultures of humanity clearly must not only make their form-languages more in tune with the rhythms of the natural world—as ancient cultures tended to be through their intuitive, fluid, and creative coherence—but also ground civilization in an understanding of the cosmos that transcends the idiosyncratic systems and languages of localized geographies and the unique problems that have birthed individual cultures. They must imbue each eccentric form of knowledge and culture with a continuity of truth that cuts across them all.
By writing, I can only hope to contribute to this kind of civilization. The hope is that by staging a dialog of diverse metaphors and knowledge traditions, we can better understand the relational principles underlying everything—helping build, not a universal language that erases differences or reduces them to any archetype, but an evolving knowledge of a collectively-created medium whose processes structure all form.
I can do little more than gesture in that direction and hope to hint at the infinity of contexts riding on and sliding by, forming and frequenting the forces of our amazing world. As our restless hearts find rest in the infinite, the mind finds its purpose as a partner in the dance of selves growing out of endless improvisations upon the themes of existence.
This is all to say that I write to further perspectives that will live on after me, not through a dialectic of history, not through any expectation of effect from these ephemeral projections into the media-sphere, but through the beings that live through me and of which my apparent life is just a small portion, a working out of conditions that will be used in developments that cannot be measured in the terms of this world.
For the world—all worlds—are still a kind of conversation. Yet their purpose is not so much to communicate or define a world, as it is the joy of an experimental and productive play with them, with worlds and words; with the beings we are, have been, and will be; with the variegated delight of relationship.
While personal conversation can only take a relation so far, it can be a helpful place to begin. So while I will mostly leave the personal voice behind, and attempt to eschew biased emotional interests as well (however much this may fail), a personal introduction and justification seemed necessary, especially since what follows may seem like quite the presumptuous critique of such a wide swath of culture, and from someone without much in the way of the accepted authority to make such pronouncements.
With some idea of my motivations and some shared sympathy for the open-value of ideas over the authority of their source, hopefully, you will forgive any pretense of authority present in the tone of this book.
Despite any tone of self-assuredness, I do want to speak to you as a friend: as a fellow student of life and inmate in the asylum of Earth as we plan its liberation, as a partner in the dance of theory and practice, and, if nothing else, as another lover of wisdom, even if you find none here.
For while I may not be writing for you, I certainly don’t want to waste your time repeating arguments with friends from my youth, which Yeats once suggested was the source of the writer’s musings.
I will do a lot of critique, and advance arguments of a sort, but only to suggest the value of a certain way of seeing things, and as a means to an end that has no end or final way of being understood (I hope).
For as I speak to you, I also speak to the other that exists as an alien to us all, to the unknown calling us beyond the cycles of reaction. May these traces carry through a being, may they connect old friends, may they be more than me—the ironically vain dream within all inspiration, but to which all sincere work is an offering, an offering which carries the intent for greater connection, but which only falls into the explicitly vain desire for a wide audience out of ignorance of the limited reality of all personal influence and causal agency.3
The more advanced kind of influence, just like the more deeply intimate of relationships, transcends the dyads of cause and effect, or self and other. The evolution of any relationship, influence, or affect, cannot proceed very far without eventually forming a pattern of connection that defies formal measures of force or simple causal effect.
I can only hope to achieve a “measure” of that immeasurable participation in the creative advance, even if it does not achieve many “actual” readers, which, again, is beside the point. For I know now why I write, why I think, why I am. My mind is no longer restless.
It does, however, still enjoy the play of life and the dance of ideas which animates it. Despite the passion with which I still believe in the value—or even dire importance—of certain ideas, as well as the pull I feel to help them grow, I do my best not to announce from on high, nor from any fixed abode, aiming rather to play disinterestedly within the context and conversation of philosophy, by which Pythagoras—the first to call himself a philosopher—meant a love of wisdom.
Why Philosophy?
“Philosophy can exclude nothing”.
-Alfred North Whitehead.4
Who in our times dares call themselves a philosopher? Have we indeed fallen into the dark age when men spurn wisdom as predicted in tradition? Or has the context of traditional wisdom so changed that anyone posturing its tenets be taken as a charlatan?
Who can blame us for developing a skeptical stance or an ironic smile when the label of wisdom—or love for that matter—is invoked? Love we may speak of in all seriousness, but its gravity comes more from its emotional weight, seldom from devotion to a higher principle or idea—the very thing we have lost faith in.
Of course the principles of scientific inquiry still secure devotion in those willing to stretch its character into a value sphere quite alien to its professed intent. Most of us end up supplementing the mounting data of an increasingly muddled scientific cosmology with some awkward importation of traditional symbols and meaning, however disguised as new and revelatory. In any case, meaningful engagement is nearly impossible, as the individual is left to merely choose what combination of floating signifiers they will fashion into an identity.
The result is less a coherent subjectivity resonating in a world of meaning, than an ideological covering over an abyss of incoherent systems and principles that prevent us from feeling the connection and truth a powerful metaphor should bring.
The depth we do feel is no longer the spiritual relevance of religious metaphor, but the black hole of 20th-century cosmology, now superseded by a host of competing interpretations of the singularities that punctuate and mirror our uneasy view of the void. Thus we are forced to either take science literally and become cogs in its lifeless machinery, or risk facing the monumental task of bearing the weight of its metaphors, feeling through the incoherence to a distant harmony.
But is this not always the choice between immature passion and true love? In one case we are fastened to our object of compulsion, and in the other, we become that object, we enter into its nature, and by doing so, we free subject and object from their slavish reflection, setting us on our mutual way towards a richer coherence—opening lover and beloved up to the greater cosmic activity.
Loving wisdom in our age, however, can feel like an unhealthy relationship. It can become difficult to fully resonate with a beloved so mired in uncertainty. Is it any wonder people embrace simpler paths, taking up devotion to principles no longer in phase with our own times?
What principle can guide us in a world of such wonderfully heterogeneous yet basically incoherent connectivity? It seems like any principle that can free us from the weight of our compulsions—yet lend us the soulful gravity which is less a weight or fall than the current of our chosen path—gets lost in the frivolous and solemn ventures of a soul unmoored from meaning.
Not that there is any shortage of meanings around; we are awash in prepackaged information and identities offered as meaning commodities. But wisdom is scorned and love considered merely personal precisely because we recognize the problems of a modern life dictated by a single tradition, by a principle that doesn’t acknowledge the already wide span of worlds active in the field of Earth at this time.
And despite all attempts at universality and integrality, the coherence just isn’t there. And after all, we have come to respect difference, and are rightly in no hurry to totalize the field of diversity into another grand metanarrative, no matter how inclusive. We have won a kind of individual freedom that seems to be one of the primary achievements and more or less successful products of civilization.
Yet in our liberation from the collective dogma we seem to have merely landed ourselves squarely back in the inescapable problems of interdependence. The supposed virtues of a life lived on one’s own terms have been revealed as a distorted image of the primordial responsibility for the making of our world.
And so the timeless questions arise again, with the same old metaphors of reciprocal relation reemerging in the contemporary study of complex systems as that which has inspired many versions of the so-called “golden rule”—dating back to another important era, what Karl Jaspers called the axial age, when we first seemed to glimpse the problems of rational, individual consciousness.
Far from revealing an argument for a perennial tradition of stock answers to universal questions, it should be seen by now that we have been set adrift for a greater reason, not just to re-bind ourselves to common denominators for the good of the whole, but because we are struggling to formulate a way of achieving harmony without succumbing to fixed ideologies and their final solutions.
So what “way” could there be beyond the dangers of fanatical devotion that can inspire a civilization towards truth, to not just believe in it, but understand the way it is formed? Is there some philosophy or principle that can guarantee smooth sailing within any context we may find ourselves without sacrificing critical reflection?
And even if such a purpose is found, is pragmatic utility left as our highest end? What is it all for? Relationships seemingly end. Great achievements are forgotten. And in the realm of knowledge, how relative and provisional it all seems at first glance.
If we follow these questions far enough to reach the realm where such problems start to converge on their mutual conditions, we may see answers that differ from our age’s paltry offerings in the way of purpose, bound as they all are to fleeting material developments. Yet no matter what the answer, no matter what the age or culture, human beings find reasons for acts of devotion and sacrifice to a process and a project that transcends their own life and pleasure— one that often defies their ability to rationalize to themselves or anyone else.
While countless cultures and people have labored on, whether for the good of the Gods, for their family, nation or planet, or now “the evolution of consciousness” (their own or some broader cosmic drama), the impulse to contribute to some kind of greater purpose for life and society has evolved from a primordial sense of responsibility for others and the future, and into a humanistic faith in the great potential of our species. And this persists despite and partly because of our awareness of the possibilities for messing it all up.
People everywhere still seem to believe, despite any evidence to the contrary, that they are part of some process of development that outlasts their death, no matter what the terms they use to justify the meaning of their lives. With traditional religious justifications losing their meaning in modernity, perhaps the need to make civilization savable or sustainable in material terms has had to bear too much of the burden.
Tying all meaning to the progress of society is indeed a misguided endeavor. Yet, the impulse to make human civilization some kind of materialization of whatever deeper learning process is happening on the still at least tacitly felt level of becoming beyond visible history, is perhaps a natural and important part of the story.
The modern belief in the evolution of society as important, either in itself or as a vital part of some spiritual development, cannot help but (at least to us moderns) seem like a necessary step for our collective consciousness, even if the dangers inherent in progressive idealism are growing in tandem with its potentials. This is not to say that there can be no vital steady-state for society, or that tradition is meant to be shed in inevitable progress.
There could be and perhaps have been societies on this very planet that were more or less ideally organized for their time and place. But times and places change, and with change comes a desire to understand that change, to be able to make one and all ready for anything, to truly sustain what is important in one’s self and society, beyond fleeting forms and conditions.
While so many peoples—and the Gods and dramas they have worked for—have come and gone, the seeds of their spiritual, genetic, and cultural fruits, for better or worse, have not disappeared completely; they have been layered and sown into a patchy wilderness of an emerging planetary civilization. Now more than ever we must see the forest through the trees, and fashion a garden of theory that can nourish us through this transition and for generations to come.
While “theory” and philosophy have, for the average Westerner, come to mean idle speculation, attempts at freeing ourselves from the tyranny of theory have only gotten us a terribly unconscious civilization, beholden to theories it doesn’t acknowledge or examine. The scientist has succeeded in convincing most of the world that the only theory needed is the heuristic algorithms of expert technicians, or perhaps a master equation that will secure us all to its law of truth.
Sure, there are many alternative and countercultural visions, but how can any of these alternatives become a new dominant worldview? And in this age of inescapable material connectivity, is not more required than another alternative, another iteration of difference for Capital to turn into a lifestyle commodity? Have we not learned a deeper game—one that transcends the form of its gesture and embraces an occult economy of values and its different potential paths of evolution?
Without an understanding of deeper principles that go beyond specific formalization, any new idea just gets lost in the noise of information overload—another fetish to be tried and tossed aside like any other cultural product in consumer society. And if all cultures have their day and there is no greater plan past the circle of life and death, who can blame the general public for—despite what they may believe—mostly living for the moment’s fleeting pleasures?
Even if we are motivated to “change things”, the sheer scope of the disaster of our society, and the even more frightening response of our leaders to it, is such that it gives most forms of protest and activism an ecstatic “Dionysian” quality so characteristic of our age’s separation of its vitality from its “Apollonian” structure building. Our problems are just too complicated for most people to come to terms with in any vital affirmative way, leaving no one but the Apollonian intellectual to ponder and dream on structures he cannot change.
So on we fight with each other, struggling for recognition and identity, sometimes sincerely working for justice, or one cause or another. Yet, few people take the time to understand the connections between different causes, between their values and all the others, or between their desires and every desire’s opposition.
For that we need more than just the rules and codes of supposedly “expert” knowledge. For that, we need more than “knowledge” in any sense that is limited by its specific and contingent forms. We need wisdom, and to approach such a thing we need a love of it; we need philosophy. We need a love of wisdom that can create new worlds and sustain them through every seeming end.
However, the etymology of the word philosophy suggests something different than what people today think of when they speak of love or wisdom. In our times, love seems somewhat restricted to what the Greeks called eros, too close to the restless desire of a subject for an object, rather than philein, which suggests a harmonious friendship. Harmonious love is not easy to come by in our times.
Philosophy too has had its share of conflict. But its willingness to be a friend of wisdom, to not claim to possess it, or the final form of it, but rather to travel down the path alongside it, learning from it and helping it emerge anew as each of its constitutive problems are revealed, makes philosophy something different than the wisdom traditions that preceded it, and the dogmatic sciences that are attempting to replace it.
Science, of course, has its place, and the spirit of friendly rivalry that science holds up as an ideal owes much to philosophy’s early concern with the problems of diverse interests that animated ancient Greek cities and made it essential to know how to judge the relative value of competing claims (which also nourished early experiments in democracy).
Unfortunately, the passage from innate love and wisdom to the problems and trials of power struggles has often made both love and wisdom easy prey to the seeming necessity of an exclusive logic of judgment, and its destructive effect on both love and wisdom.
Yet, along with the repressive dominance that accompanies judgment—and which difference and rivalry seem to make necessary—comes the inspiration for an alternative strategy to tame the chaos. For the true lover of wisdom finds something stifling and artificial in exclusive judgment.
Calling beyond or through each seemingly necessary sacrifice is a path of evaluation that all true friends are familiar with.5 Rather than judgment and exclusion, we play and test our perspectives and the connections we make between them to find the right arrangement and proportion, more than any final rule or cut.
In philosophy, more so than in traditional wisdom, it is concepts, not just words or symbols, that are the medium of wisdom’s inscription.6 With the creative use of concepts, it is possible to find a path for all, where none are left behind because all are transformed and connected to other concepts and paths in all directions, not just to the one or the exclusively true from which we might judge.
There is no need to submit to a monolithic resonance because a relative harmony is always just a dance of thought away, and harmony need not submit anyone to anything but the dance of difference. In this way, the world becomes more divine the more we understand it and each other. The more we find the right modulations of the medium that allow all beings involved in the dance to constructively interfere, the more we can then find the music in the patterns and a creative order in the chaos.
The love of wisdom then must be a truly spiritual love, or as Rumi might have characterized it, a love without an object. That isn’t to say a love that rejects the object, that turns its back upon the insular and obdurate relations that so desperately need healing, but a love that finds with its beloved a sympathetic resonance, which transforms love’s annihilating gravity into an open field of play, pulling all values towards fulfillment. We then easily surrender attachment to our knowledge forms and find the connections between perspectives.
And as judgment fades in importance, so does speculation. A true love of wisdom does not speculate about any object of knowledge, just as a true lover doesn’t wonder at his beloved’s nature. Love unites him with her, and through love, they create a home in which to grow. For philosophy, that home is not just language, what Heidegger called the “house of being”, but thinking and culture in all their forms.
And through philosophy, or rather, through the philosophical transformation of “thinking”, the house of culture can become a true home; it can become a medium within which beings grow into ever richer harmonies. But to do so, it must not be built of mere speculations guided by precarious hypotheses, but of concepts created from a sense in tune with the best possibilities available to our species.
The true philosopher, like any great artist, is not the judge separating the true from the false, but the cultural physician, guiding us towards the truth of a more illuminating arrangement than the confused knot of relations we call ignorance or error.7 A good physician does not cut this knot of struggling adaptations as some meaningless anomaly but untangles the confusion, building better conditions for the true, good, and beautiful.
Any improvement must illuminate the truth of previous errors and the adaptive value of every illness if it is not to trigger even more serious illness or error. Even the shakiest of structures may concentrate and conjugate the flows of life, may work as a truth for a time. But if one does not understand the conditions of every truth and error—does not realize that every truth can become an error in different conditions—the structure will lose its way in the wilderness of abstractions.
On the other hand, since all learning is built on failure, if there is continual attention to the ground of confusion and error in which any structure grows, even the most precarious adaptation may produce a seed of knowledge from which sprouts a healthy culture sensitive to the changing environment it learns to cultivate.
To do so one must find the right context for each seed to grow beyond itself. To make a lasting garden of civilization, we must not only sow the seeds in the right contexts, but we must also sew together the subtle threads of life, with a knowledge sensitive to the rhythm of their woof and warp, vigilantly attentive to the adjustments needed for a smooth path of development.
We must help life embed more and more within the sustainably structured design of its highest evolutionary potential—help transform its conflict and suffering into an ever-more frictionless path of modulation, the endless river that is the secret sense of existence, and to which life here has always longingly reached.
To do so we must not impose our own need for static stability, but rather learn life’s form-language in the dynamism of expansive experimentation and creative differentiation, even as we carefully help harmonize its various rhythms, proportions, and intensities. We can connect and transform life’s various flows and forms through the process and experience of intentional living, by listening and lovingly guiding its potentials into new vital mediums, always open to the building and growing of meaningful context that happens when thought unites with life.
If, however, our cultural forms do not grow into the field of knowledge, they become merely the husk of life’s forms, or life-styles, doomed to follow the cycle of growth and decay, as all metaphors and cultures have done so far. Yet as in life, so in culture, nothing is ever really lost, and the path of knowledge could be seen to be a way of reassembling the values that life has produced, having been seemingly scattered to the wind.
In this sense, organized knowledge need not be about ossifying the complex dynamic of life into the rigid structure of an abstract system. Nor need our knowledge be merely a chaotic mirroring of the disjointed mechanisms and processes that the uninspired mind carves out of nature’s surface features, merely tracing along the joints inherent in its predisposition.
We may instead, build knowledge to achieve life’s fulfillment in the immortality of a creative coherence—allowing that long-lost memory and meaning to find new life and consistency in the continuity of greater context. In the debate between life and mind, their integration depends on finding their harmony and embedding life and consciousness coherently within the changing rhythms of the cosmos at large, matching the Earth’s rhythms to a path of greater cosmic destiny.
To this end, ideal knowledge structures must not merely integrate disparate forms but critically reform and recontextualize to reveal a deeper relatedness. And they certainly should not presume to create any final universal system. Wisdom sees the potential in every form and weaves its signs and symbols into paths of further development to be embodied by communities—which in our time so desperately need a living fabric of knowledge that ideally all, at least at some level, can draw from and contribute to.
As to whether or to what extent what I write represents any therapeutic value to our culture, or more to the point here, is worth anyone’s time, I can only say that I did my best. I have spent decades studying culture, seeing what was out there, and thinking long and hard about what might still need saying, despite the bloated marketplace of a culture obsessed with having an opinion and wanting it recognized.
Recognized or not, I could not do otherwise than ponder the questions addressed in the texts that follow. The thought they signify at least intends to be not a speculative opinion, but a cluster of paths through the wilderness of our contemporary confusion, whether people engage with them or not. To say that philosophy is a struggle against opinion,8 and that one is not only attempting to do philosophy—already considered a vain activity in the current era—but to overcome opinion altogether, one risks going beyond mere misunderstanding into to demonized heresy.
More likely one will be dismissed as claiming knowledge in a factual sense that is normally reserved for institutional scientists who distance themselves from any perceived hubris by citing consensus—a mere provisional and collective, but tested opinion, yet opinion nonetheless.
This is precisely the problem and the point in rising above opinion: not to claim another’s interpretation is mere opinion, while yours is a fact, but to collectively transform the whole cultural structure so addicted to judging subjective opinions on an already assumed object of consensus, into one better at creating ever-new paths of connection between subjects and objects. For in doing so, we create new subjects and objects—a new world, to the extent that world has any value.
If this sounds even more vain than attempting to simply state the truth, I can only say that it is necessarily a collective endeavor. While new ideas are all well and good, again, what matters more is new connections. Novelty, however, even in the realm of relations, can take many forms, and the more helpful and creative connections tend to leave less of a trace than the texts and artifacts of culture that are their most obvious signs.
Consequently, in writing, I do the best I can to address not only the thoughts of our culture taking place all around and within me—and across the minds of the past that have made their way to me through books and struck me with new or continued relevance—but also, if possible, do some justice to the phantom traces of boundless conversations that have never been written down or even said out loud in the world I seem to wake up in every day.
To sense the immensity of ideas and yet circle around the cliches and tropes of the times may be the struggle of every creative impulse or artistic act, but as this process grows deeper into the mystery, into what has often been called “the occult”, the difficulties only grow.9 It is easy to see why the ascetic chooses to turn from the world of action into a more stable union with higher consciousness, forgoing the endless and ultimately inadequate task of translation and worldly contextualization. But this discord between worlds is not a necessity of life.
Conclusion: Philosophy in the Multiverse
“We are all adolescents at the threshold of a new age of maturity. Perhaps one of the ways leading to the wisdom of maturity is the pathway of proportions, of shared limitations, which we need to find beneath the weeds and underbrush that have overgrown it. Proportions are shared limitations. As relationships they teach us the mana of sharing. As limitations they open doors toward the limitless.”
-Gyorgy Doczi10
It is up to people of every age to evolve the form-language of their culture to meet the demands of the time. Technological innovation has, in recent times, so outpaced the creative mind’s ability to meaningfully contextualize these changes, that creativity has become mostly a romantic reaction to a total “enframing” by technology.
The creative mind has few options given the complete impracticality of understanding enough of modern science and technology to creatively determine it. It therefore retreats into a search for novel experiences or unique expressions that may be richly textured enough to splash some color on the walls of an increasingly mechanized world.
The individual in our times, no matter what their bent of character, cannot help but feel deep down that their life, in some crucial aspect, is not their own. But given the pressures of our culture, this is mostly felt as an alienation.
It is only natural that we then are driven to assert our character ever more forcefully—maybe in the process fighting for others’ right to do so as well, to do something to escape the collective alienation, but in the end, feeling all the more dissatisfied with the chaos of personalized reactions to niche aspects of an immense problem that escapes comprehension.
Most of us concede the impossibility and rest content identifying with a subjectivity that has lost any grounding coherence, and which finds its most meaningful symbols in the various creative media it considers mere fantasy or fiction—displaced projections from contemporary confusions that may intuit the greater cosmic drama behind the dull daydream of our conditioned reality, but in the end are considered merely idle entertainment.
Surveying our artistic media, one cannot help but see on one hand that there is something old and tired looming over the 21st-century imagination. There is much energy being expended as each new medium offers new life to our dying symbols, but it all in some sense misses the mark—as if we are too weary or defeated to make our art do more than comment on a reality we have left for science to create for us.
On the other hand, while this kind of tired desperation certainly haunts much of Western cultural production, within a view that sees “civilization” not as a decadent phase of culture, but as a discontinuous groping towards a wider and more sustainable coherence, this time in culture, this arc of Western civilization, takes on a more quaint color of a struggling youth.
Our weariness is more of a frustration with the limits of our body (of knowledge). We sense we are capable of great things, that we are just getting started on some greater path, yet the body we are used to isn’t working the same, and it is changing in ways we haven’t yet understood or adjusted to.
There is nothing more sad than an old man trying to act young, but it isn’t because he should accept his decrepitude. It is, like all tragedy, a confusion in the boundaries of archetypal principles, a mismeasure of the ratio of complementary forces, of the Gods on whose proportional relationship man’s destiny depends. Man keeps chasing the pleasure of Dionysus—keeps trying to play on the structures he was born into, long after they have lost their vitality.
He needs to grow up—needs to unite the structure-building dreams of Apollonian creativity and individuation, with the collective dance of Dionysian vitality. That is, he must learn to build and tune his instrument if he sincerely wants to learn to play a different song, especially if he wants to play a sustainable one.
For technological science seems to have replaced any truly creative system building. It is a mechanical prosthesis for a struggling social body that could, through a more philosophical science and spiritual society, guide nature, art, and meaning into the higher dimensions of experience.
Instead, we are harvesting nature to shore up our cultural corpse, struggling to extract pleasure from a life lived for our increasingly boring concepts, symbols, and images. Though we have not lost our love for dreaming, our zest for building new forms, that zest is disconnected from its roots in Dionysus, from the earth, from any sense of the realities of time and challenges of death.
We have, much like late Classical culture, turned the transformative, destructive power of Dionysian ecstasy into the mere pleasure of civilization. We have, like the Romans did by destroying the Dionysian cults, muted the revolutionary ecstasy of the counterculture by diverting it into the mere pleasure of spectacle. Oswald Spengler was right to see the West as in decline, for we are certainly past our prime, though still chasing pleasure and building structures to shore up our failing vitality.
Civilization could collapse, or more likely, continue to turn nightmarishly dystopian, but there are other forces at work, and longer cycles of development than what we can surmise from the materials of culture and recorded history. We are only dying if we cling to our culture and our cultural selves. The greater spirit growing through our civilization is still a struggling adolescent. Science—in the broad sense of organized knowledge—is still discovering the creative nature of its medium and its destiny as the caretaker of the forms of the spirit’s song.
Western culture, which has always been possessed with this spirit of civilization, must learn to stop straining to suck the last life out of our structures and start putting our creative minds to the building of a society more sensitive to the worlds and the dimensions of possibility our structures repress, (and through inversion express).
Then the dialectic of culture and counterculture, Apollo and Dionysus, the arts and sciences, and every other antagonism can give way to an innovation that displaces any single dialectic of history (which Nietzsche considered a process of reactionary negativity), with a cooperative and reciprocal symbiosis.
Rudolf Steiner, explaining a spiritual metaphor no doubt influenced by his reading of Nietzsche’s aesthetic ideal of a formal coupling of Dionysian and Apollonian powers, spoke of two types of spiritual beings, related to the vowels and consonants of language, fusing their activities in the highest art:
From the consonant element extracted from the human being, the form arises, which we must shape sculpturally. From the vowel element extracted from the human being arises the musical, the song element, which we must sing. Man, as he stands before us, on earth, is really the result of two cosmic arts. From one direction derives a cosmic art of sculpturing, from the other comes a musical and song-like cosmic art. Two types of spiritual beings fuse their activities. One brings forth and shapes the instrument, the other plays on the instrument.11
This creative symbiosis is different from a mere peaceful balance of cliched essences—one of the main themes of the commercialized “New Age” counterculture that often means little more than a romantic return to an uncreative equilibrium—always a precarious and somewhat contradictory state for life, and one certainly out of tune with the frequent emphasis of the New Age on each individual’s self-determination.
The proper productive principle of an evolving, creative coherence has always been the true soul of the Western counterculture, and indeed of all historical cultures to the extent that they put their countercultural margins to use. The modern West most clearly approached and articulated this in its Romantic era, but it is still present in the consciousness of our day, despite contemporary spiritual culture’s frequent reversion into some kind of inversion or reflection of the mainstream’s conformist individualism.
That principle of open, ever-renewed coherence depends on the maintenance of productive differences—a fostering of the conditions for and awareness of not atomized differences pursued for their own sake, but their creative tension and polarity.12 Such conditions and awareness require not just an openness to differences, but a will to understand how their relations reflect, reveal, and fundamentally form each thing’s very identity.
This kind of inclusive understanding catalyzes a cooperation of contrasts that can then be variously and variably channeled into sustainably syncopated circuits of differentiating power, rhythmically reformed again and again as new pathways demand.
This is what New Age thinking often trivializes into a progressive evolutionism, but which it sometimes rightly renders in its metaphors as a possible greater destiny of civilization, and the earth itself, as Divine instrument, a material and medium evolving to be a fitter vehicle for a more richly harmonious but spontaneously experimental symphony of existence.
In the prophetic tradition of modern theosophical thinkers like Rudolf Steiner, this destiny is not guaranteed, nor are we anywhere near some purely positive consummation. Quite the contrary; our present era is thought to hold one of the greatest dangers.
But as many great minds have reminded us, the goal is not the point, even if there is still, of course, some point to it all. The point may be, in the end, simply to be who we are, to enjoy, develop, and express that unique slant on existence that is our essence, as relative and relational as any essence may be.
Yet, because that essence is ultimately not discrete, not separate from others, the greater joy, the greater expression of our highest selves is a horizon dependent on the medium of its expression, on the condition of our collective instruments, and the consciousness of our fellow beings with whom we have incarnated.
The endless work of shaping and tuning what can be made a harmoniously coordinated instrument of a greater being is indeed the highest art. Indeed all art—and really any activity—is both play and work, both expressive and formative.
Each of us is both an actor in the drama of creative evolution and one of its authors, both a singer of the divine word and an architect of its meaning. Is there any other game around besides making this life more fully reflect the high art of existence? Steiner, continuing the previously quoted passage, remarks:
No wonder that in ancient times, when people were still aware of such things, the greatest artist was called Orpheus. He actually possessed such mastery over the soul element that not only was he able to use the already formed human body as an instrument, but with his tones, he could even mold unformed matter into forms that corresponded to the tones.13
The great artist at the mythical origins of Western culture, Orpheus was also the prototype for Pythagoras, our great seeder of Western science and philosophy.14 And though what has grown from that seed seems more likely to end all creative life than to achieve such a mystical mastery of life and matter, I hope the following texts will help seed some ideas on how it still might be possible, and perhaps even shed some light on what we all know deep down to be true. That despite surface doubts, we all live our lives because we know there are reasons to do so.
What confuses us is the freedom we have developed to help shape those reasons. This freedom opens up a space where we must confront the fact that nothing lasts, memory is fleeting, and learning is provisional and context-bound. But we somewhere sense there is something in us, that is all of us, that is gaining something valuable and imperishable. We sense a being in us that puts everything to use—where no act is a waste, and all gestures feed into a greater meaningful activity of lasting applicability.
What becomes clear through a true love of wisdom is that while no form may live forever unchanged, everything lives on through new forms, through what popular culture has come to call the multiverse. The continual death and disappearance of the discrete and disparate is only a truth relative to the ossification of our spiritual vision and its bodily instruments, our futile attempts to contain and master an infinite field. In the greater field of our imagination, all is redeemed.
While the mind of man has dreamt of tempering this field as he tempers musical instruments, there are prices to pay as there are in music when we commit to one system of tuning. The answer is not to give up our desire for knowledge and benevolent power as so many have done when this truth of incommensurability is realized—since there will always be those who have no problem creating a closed system of limited possibilities to contain us all. Nor should we rest content with a utilitarian pluralism that has no deeper vision of metaphysical unity.
Instead, we must imbue our civilization with a learning that goes deeper than the contingent knowledge forms and niche narratives that we may use in our cultural infancy, a learning that illuminates those very forms and stories with the light of their infinite variations.15
If you continue to read, I hope you will see that philosophy is not dead, but rather it has merely discovered the infinite multiplicity at the heart of reality. Consequently, thought’s powers have been dispersed into so many directions that only the more inwardly-tuned thinker can hope to find the multiversal threads that tie things together. And since no single form or vision can hope to represent that infinite tapestry, any hope for the future hinges on many of us intuitively finding those threads and working together.
Regardless, collective consciousness is coming in some form, inwardly tuned, or otherwise. Everything depends on the proportions of this convergence and the wisdom we bring to them. There may be dark days ahead, but with conflict comes opportunity, a potential and power to rise from the rut of well-worn earthly rhythms and enter a deeper cosmic game.
1. Joyce (pg. 253)
2. Pessoa (pg. 128)
3.“Because thought molds itself as a more or less distorted icon of the process of its production, we human thinkers tend to accept far too readily a self-authorised role of sovereign intentional agent disposing freely with objects splayed for inquiry and use before our gaze. But thought is not only a picture-tool; it is both more delicately and more profoundly, the real intrication of a determinate trajectory and a structural milieu through which that trajectory passes. Thought’s essential displacement always harbours within the continuity that tracks it infinitely more than the local connections that nonetheless define it. Every movement of thinking finds itself absorbed into a space of variable pathways and at the same time marks discrete concretisations of possibility and real futurity as selectably determinate events for further thought.” (Gangle p.132)
4. Whitehead (1968, lecture one)
5. “Oh friends, there is no friend!” Aristotle supposedly said on his deathbed, and though some think he may have meant something more like “He who has many friends, has no friend”(Hsu 2019), like Derrida (2020), I find the former, paradoxical interpretation more interesting. For the true friend is he who overcomes the discrete binary judgment of friend/enemy, and becomes capable of a higher kind of evaluation (Nietzsche’s transvaluation affirmed in his addition: “Oh foes, there are no foes!”). As Carol K. Anthony(1988) often put forth in her interpretation of the I Ching: “one must never decide for or against people”.
6. At least according to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1991), traditional wisdom used symbols, not concepts in their sense of the term. Building on Deleuze, Spinoza, and Peirce, philosopher Rocco Gangle (2016) reveals how relational diagrams like those found in mathematical category theory can go beyond language and abstract the topological essence of a concept. In a way, this could return to us the intuitive power of images upon which the esoteric tradition has always thrived, while keeping the power of abstraction unique to philosophical concepts, that is, without the transcendent structure of discrete essences characteristic of the Platonic tradition.
7. “Cultural physician” was a metaphor of Nietzsche. Deleuze and Guatarri make explicit why a philosopher acting in this capacity should not fall into decontextualized judgments of the ideas he evaluates:
“…when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy.” Deleuze and Guattari (1996, pg.2)
8. For the general development of the concept of philosophy as the struggle against opinion, see Deleuze and Guattari (1996). But here is an excellent related passage from Deleuze: “These days, information technology, communications, and advertising are taking over the words “concept” and “creative,” and these “conceptualists” constitute an arrogant breed that reveals the activity of selling to be capitalism’s supreme thought, the cogito of the marketplace. Philosophy feels small and lonely confronting such forces, but the only way it’s going to die is by choking with laughter.
Philosophy’s no more communicative than it’s contemplative or reflective: it is by nature creative or even revolutionary, because it’s always creating new concepts. The only constraint is that these should have a necessity, as well as an unfamiliarity, and they have both to the extent they’re a response to real problems.
Concepts are what stops thought being a mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip. Any concept is bound to be a paradox” Deleuze (1995, p.136).
This perspective helps illuminate the value in creative thinkers like Rudolf Steiner, especially in comparison to the helpful but excessively dismissive critiques of sociologists of esoteric thought like Olav Hammer (2001), who sees Steiner as merely “claiming knowledge” in an authoritarian sense. However, there is a tension between these two tendencies throughout Steiner’s work.
9. “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more” Nabokov (1991, pg.45).
10. Gyorgy Doczi (pg. 139)
11.(Steiner, 1983. pg.44)
12. For the connections between Romanticism and the New Age, see (Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 1998). For Romanticism and Steiner, see Barfield (2012), and for Romanticism and science, see Cunnigham and Jardine (1990).
13. (Steiner, 1983. pg.44)
14. Bamford, Christopher (1994)
15. “The reason thinking is experimenting, for Deleuze and Guattari, is because the determinate, individuated fact or state of affairs is not assured or predetermined. The determinate, to put it bluntly, is metaphysically indeterminate and it is the indeterminate relations of the elements brought together that allow for the becoming of that which is determinate. To think is therefore to encounter the objectivity of a problem, the metaphysically indeterminate, and if the thought is successful, the result is not a true proposition but instead a new, determinate way of thought that only later becomes part of the game of giving and asking for reasons.” (Bell. pg.141)
References:
Anthony, Carol K. A Guide to the I Ching. Anthony Publishing Company, 1988.
Bamford, Christopher (ed). Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science. Lindisfarne, 1994.
Bel, Jeffrey, A. Deleuze & Guatarri’s What Is Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press, 2016
Cunningham, A., Jardine, N. (eds). Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations 1972-1990. Columbia University Press, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Verso Books, 2020.
Gangle, Rocco. Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
The Power of Limits Shambhala, 2005.
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin Books, 1977.
Hammer, Olav. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Brill, 2001.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. State University of New York Press, 1997.
Hsu, Hua. “What Jacques Derrida Understood About Friendship.” The New Yorker, 3 December 2019, pp. 16-30.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. Vintage, 1991.
Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Penguin Books, 2002.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone. Steiner Books, 1983.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought (Lecture One)