KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 20 (to R 3 to C 10 by Mancuso)

"THE THRUST OF KNOWLEDGE IS INWARDS"
(Paradiorthosed from Peter Borst on JCS)
by Adrian van der Meijden
21 January 2001, posted 27 February 2001

<1>
On reflection this post on MMCs and Vico raised an old ghost in my mind. At best I can exegese the issue in "proviso" because the scholarly work needed to fully articulate its overall both historical and metaphysical complexities are well beyond any one person to deal with. In essence it amounts to a synthesis of all knowledge as merely different by their styles of metaphor whereas we are "accustomed" to take our words literally. What is reported here are mainly surmises collected over years of research. At least "I" cannot cite authorities in support. Giambatista Vico is a mythopoeic and not an "intellectual". Further, my earlier query about how do we get from the 0-D of full symmetry or fluctuations where *nothing real* happens into the asymmetrical 1-D where something starts to happen, has to be elucidated.

<2>
In summary form the situation is that mind alone and matter alone are not viable propositions and mind AND matter is more so. It so happens that myth, as multi-media collages, pickled in experience and theory, pickled mostly in words, offer insights on this issue we need both of. That is, neither dualism nor monism can stand up to "reason" for which possibly the trinitarian opens up other possibilities. Karl Popper's three worlds simply rehearses a much older idea as body, mind and spirit. At its simplest the triune introduces a local reference as a here and now for a virtual, subjectively constructivist *reality* of which, by way of shared communication, we all partake. What I call para-subjective and Henry Stapp as an initial choice by way of "freedom" and Peter Mutnick refers to "will" appears to be the only way into an overall coherency by way of entry into our subjective labyrinth.

<3>
I steal a quote from Greg Nixon on JCS, which is also part of the same multi-media collage Henry Stapp mentions in comment to Searle, and which foregrounds complexity rather than Dominican simplicitas. And that merely to show the debate has been going on for a long time indeed.

"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from one to the other." (John Tyndall. *Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays. Addresses and Reviews*. London: Longmans, 1879)

So we are left with imagination and poly-constructivism.

<4>
It is that most all of the consciousness melee around currently concerns something done by Robert Graves in his "King Jesus" where two contenders [?theologians?] contrarily interpret a set of "stations of the Cross", a series of murals that tell a story. This also includes what one can find in the "Nag Hammurabi" Library and other such materials, myths and epics included and concerns exactly the difference between how 1st person experience does it versus 3rd person discourse. As Freudian "projection" makes clear we "blame" other people and events for things to which, to put it mildly, we contributed, as now also made clear by Quantum Mechanics' entangled participant and subjective observer, which is actually an oxymoron. We can no longer hold *paradox* at bay. What is happening is very like when we shifted from an earth to a sun centred and now a non-centred or poly-centred universe.

<5>
In *succinct* it concerns two "theogonies" or worldviews, occult and modern, to be reconciled. The occult comes as nous poietikos and this amounts to an ancient mythopoeic personified worldview. Occultism went underground in Greece, by way of the river Alpheus and re-emerged with medieval guilds & humanism in Europe. It is also found as Newton in England versus the illuminati & Weishaupt in Germany as contrary worldviews for science and alchemy. Alchemy is antiquity's theory of knowledge. Simply put it is about a personified model of the world versus our abstract materialistic, which should rather be called verbal. Around the Amarna period in Egypt, Greece and Israel, somewhere 3500 BCE, a crucial change came about between experience as real versus words as real and for language as the shift into the demotic. Altogether this is about an iconological interpretation of the world much modified by the arrival of mono-theism that comes together with Alexander the Great and Aristotle his tutor as a now dominant view. We're talking politicised "theology" here, not merely Logics.

<6>
This can be reconciled with the notion that it is all but a choice of which metaphoric style or mode one adopts as to how it comes out, whence we also like isomorphies for "models". Such choices of metaphor will "lead the way" of inference by the very one *gnosis* elected. A nice example I came across a while back, by a scientist, is that it does not really matter, the purpose being served, whether:

A: A local chief tells his people that near a cliff live nasty demons who will gobble people up, so they keep away B: It is high winds and gravity that does the dirty deed.

<7>
Since we don't really know anything much about Reality and QMechanics raises the issue of mind at large, the *unlearned* use this more natural first person mode whereas the learned do otherwise. It is not about what is "real" but what is useful and here science aligns better with how crafts had their own versions and gods, like Vulcan for smiths, where the people had a more *live* spirits and spiritual variety. And that is a near perfect match to that Parmenidean S.O. split for the material whereas MH's AS IF MIR lines up better with reality unified but appearance variegated version of it all.

<8>
If this surmise is anywhere near the truth then it's more about politics and rhetoric than philosophy and hence also the strongly defensive attitudes all around. I'd like to ventilate this with Mancuso as the constructivist approach aligns better with the ancient occult which has esoteric as what I call para-subjective, versus exoteric materialisms. I am in doubt whether putting the issue as bluntly as this would be very popular?

<9>
In essence this new constructivist approach concerns the taxonomy or syntax of a world model and knowledge. Where we find communication we will find a world model as a means to communicate, much as science uses Kepler's xyz axes to devise a centre or locus of rerefence as a zero "here and now". Whereas concepts and intellect correlate with this xyz version in "abstract verbal", occultism does this poly-synaesthetically in personified mode as experience. This started with the "numinous" everywhere, localised as nymphs and spirits of a kind and was converted into the gods with the arrival of this centred model Einstein showed us does not apply as nor do Euclid's straight lines. Thus the "abstract" is not a true abstract but merely re-metaphorised anti-personification together with but one only god for all. If we compare the Pa Kua I-Ching, it lacks a centre and Tao is best rendered as "meaning". Words are said to be abstract whereas our mind can think in aniconic mode with now abstract *verbal* as more familiar.

<10>
Such models reside in the unconscious and by which we intercalate personal with social and metaphysical meanings. Thus for gods one can read both projective forces and psychologised meanings to be captured with words. For myth one cannot speak of concepts as well defined with singular meanings but gestalt complexes which function very like dream imagery and stories as ambiguous and multi layered. Thus we can hardly say what a "god" IS or amounts to unless we have a specific context in mind where it all turns into the similetic and otherwise they "remain" as symbols.

<11>
This nicely matches how literature presents stories and science theories. In literature we have a plot, theme, setting and characterisation as the four corrners of our world and no two readers will get quite the same interpretation from a story as we are assumed to do for theory by which all the same "schools of thought" do introduce variety of interpretation, just as literature allows. Story equals a dynamic multi-media collage. Unless we can "imagine" things concretely it makes no sense and but few people can do so aniconic fashion. Here synaesthesia comes into play in being able to represent or re-pattern one sensory mode and figurae one into another, which implies thinking in aniconic in a first place.

<12>
This is very much a function of ancient rhetoric, non and pre-Greek. Einstein so imagined how a particle can hitch a ride on a lightbeam versus exists, Kantian fashion, in its own right. His famous lift experiment is how it senses as a passenger in a lift and what he CAN observe, by das Ding an sich, whereas the only Ding an sich is the entire cosmos. Similarly his thought experiment places one to watch a train sitting inside another train. This amounts to a shift back from yardsticks to experience, however translated. All considered, theory is just as fictional as is story. We might as well call story non-linear and theory linear, except what is ascribed to one is by aesthetics and taste versus consistency and logic for 1st and 3rd person. Before Aristotle logic is poly-modal and namable as aesthetics and rhetoric. For a "perfect" story every word counts as well connected and so too for any painting. Thus the difference between aesthetics and logics amounts to non-linear or holistic versus linear.

<12>
Having stewed on this for a few days I think I may have the right metaphorical lever to get into the matter. Kabalah, myths, epics, Tao's Pa Kua are not world models but world skeletons that summarise one's relation with the universe or reality, to be variously fleshed out. What has confounded me is that we are told symbols are ambiguous. They're not, one fleshes them out by embedding or entangling them with a given context of application, just as is the relation of epistemology as *pure* knowledge, ie relations only, versus applied and embedded in a context {with paradox removed, and what is paradox but enantiodromic ambiguity?} such that the symbol changes into metaphor and simile. For instance one can so reduce the I-Ching and Kabalah to a man = micocosm [earth, mundane] to universe = macrocosm [Sky, intangible], for which man's soul is a mirror reflection of the world soul - Emersonian - and by which a part and whole can interact. This is patterned by the David's 6 pointed star. Now in the Rg Veda one reads "From between her legs emerged the six directions" [usually "done over" in Latin] one also has on Kepler's 3 D Cross". This is quite accurate as sexual metaphor is used to portend how the *opposites* can interact, as success, failure and getting nowhere with one's thinking, or true, false and muddled or, again: And, Or and Not by parts and wholes. And this is merely can-opener to how it portrays in contextual detail by appearances. I was further fooled by the general notion around that "primitive" man did not think abstractly, well, he did. And where nous pathetikos is done on "a plain playing field" nous poietikos has many gradations.

<13>
The number four is signicant here because in R.V. 1.164, the most exegesed misunderstood hymn ever, we are told that language has four levels, ordinary folk only understanding the fourth as the literal or similetic. This we find reflects in language as the universal, symbol, metaphor and simile [vide Dante and Champollion] as four stages or steps to take to get from a gleam in the eye of the beholder, not even a skeleton yet, merely the yet inarticulate seed of an idea, into a sharable commodity. Thus the giant Creator god of the world begets himself on himself by a usual masturbation or spittle which creates the skeleton of an idea, fleshed out as like a theory and clothed in a method and application. Only the Greeks thought of the Gods as "out there". If we think about it that is what we do when we devise a theory too. Thus we are told not only the result or product but also how it is created or thought out. "The Well Defined" word [VAC] allows only the end product as "the fact" and then treats the simile [ie A = B] as "real" and symbol as imagined, which is valid enough, after its fashion, but not very useful to get into the creative mind. Shakespeare mentions that "The poet gives to aerie nothing a local habitation and a name", also a rather old sentiment. I mention all this only because it is directly relevant to the Quantum riddle as pursued by Stapp, Searle, Mutnick and others. And since man was a hunter before he was a farmer we can hardly deny him a detailed knowledge of anatomy. Hence also the "anatomy of knowledge".

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Adrian van der Meijden