KARL JASPERS FORUM

SHORT NOTE 57 (Replies to N56, Editorial Question)

24 September 2005

[Alphabetical listing of authors]

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Fred Abraham <abraham@sover.net>

We face a nearly identical problem on the CHAOPSYC discussion list. Our executive committee kicked a person off, but I and several others was against it. I think your appeal should help improve netiquette, and minimize flaming. We have another spate of flames over the I Ching, but nothing we can't live with. As owner of our list, I will not cave in to the executive committee throwing somebody off again. People who are obnoxious are a pain for sure, but what the hell, 'sticks and stones'. It is the waste of space that is hardest.

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Bill Adams <bill.adams@bainbridge.net>

Filter Wood out. I agree with your assessment. I have been amazed that you, as moderator, have not exercised your discretion earlier. I have not contributed for over a year and automatically delete any message with Wood's name on it. Life is too short to listen to intolerant ravings, and experience teaches that it is a waste of time to even engage people who promulgate them. Rational discussion is a mutual inquiry that depends on mutual respect.

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Hugh Bone <hbone@optonline.net>

I don't think any of us take responsibility for opinions like those of the Flat Earth Society, nor should we.

Nor opinions re : mass hypnosis via the Internet.

We have accepted your judgment of what is fit to print for years, and I hope we continue to do so, but the opportunity to discuss this matter is appreciated.

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Andrew Brook <abrook@ccs.carleton.ca>

Even though I have just lurked on this list, interested but not contributing, I do have a view on contributors who are a pain in the neck. I'm inclined to stick to moral suasion so long as the misbehaviour is not causing immediate practical problems. We're all professionals used to dealing with difficult people so should be able to respond to offensive talk by simply leaning on the offender. If the misbehaviour becomes a practical problem -- so much of it that the moderator is getting swamped or so affectively charged that normal dialogue is becoming difficult or impossible -- then the blunt instrument of removal might have to be considered.

My two cents' worth.

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Dewey Dykstra <ddykstra@mac.com>

As a list manager of another list, I can sympathize with you. Having watched such things happen as you describe on this list and on other lists of which I am a member, my conclusion is that free and open discussion, only works if people are willing to respect each other and each other's ideas. I do not mean by this that they must agree, but they must respect the ideas of others. This requires, I think, working to demonstrate one understands the ideas of another to the degree that the other person sees in one's words evidence that convinces others that one understands their ideas. (I "sees in one's words" because words are the extent of the medium we have to work with on the Forum.)

What this boils down to is that open-minded discussion does not mean laissez-faire. I think your approach, to open reasonable discussion about how we discuss, is an appropriate first step. I have found in a number of settings that the outcome is much better discussion afterward because everyone modulates how they participate in the discussions in response to insights gained in the discussion about discussion.

It happens occasionally that someone is still not ready to respect the ideas discussed or in effect the group or members of the group. Such a person is not ready, at the present, to be a member and should be asked to come back later when they may be ready to respect the group. I know that on most on-line systems as I expect KJ Forum is on, there are ways that serve an individual out in order to enforce this if need be.

I value this Forum. I hope that it can continue open-minded discussion.

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D K Johnson <djohnson@mcla.edu>

I would say that you were infinitely patient with my often harsh critiques of constructivism (which others have been inclined to view as mere insults). Good luck!

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Maurice McCarthy <moss@mythic-beasts.com>

With regard to your note about Mr. Wood I must agree that I'm somewhat concerned about his recent writings. They confuse me because several months ago I had to completely change my mind about him as being a difficult cleric when I received a private email which appeared to expose a most affable character. I have always found it difficult to follow his train of thought in kjf but that communication gave me some encouragement.

However, if the ad hominem attacks continue then indeed you may have no choice but to censure him as it will ruin the forum.

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Gonzalo Munevar <munevar@ltu.edu>

If he dishes it out, he should be willing to take it. As long as not many people emulate him, I would leave it at that.

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Greg Nixon <docnixon@shaw.ca>

I may not be the only person who no longer contributes because of Wood's massive (as well as fanatic, irrational, & intolerant) tirades & ad homina. His clinging to his re-collected personal experiences as absolute evidence is self-indulgent & self-delusional to the extreme. The last straw for me, however, was when you disallowed a response I made on his level after he had directed personally insulting terms my way. Now that seemed hardly fair. The man has a mind like a disturbingly crowded walled city. The doors open & raging sorties stream out. But nothing, absolutely nothing, gets to enter in return.

"A fanatic dare not change his mind and will not change the subject." (Winston Churchill)

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Adrian van der Meijden <adrf@orcon.net.nz>

<1>

By all means let us avoid ad hominems. It's all a conflict between POVs or philosophical stances. Now Weedon and myself operate from a non-compartmentalised mind condition, which is rather ambiguous so one has to make up one's mind for every occasion as to which specific meaning of many is entailed on this or that POV. Muller, f i, has a pedagogical POV which, I researched it, goes back to archaic initiation rituals, which have the archetypal script well elucidated by Plato and the slave by way of a distinction between self-acquired and teachable knowledge versus native understanding, held by pedagogues [sic: mild pun on demagogue or dogmatic, NOT a typo]. The drama first reduces the initiand to a zero state of knowledge, then proceeds to dramatically show how one is to be a proper social member of society, in 3rd person modality off course. Any visit as a newcomer who joins to a Masonic Lodge will demonstrate the point. The initiator self authorises as a knowall who shows the way. The dialectics of Plato's "Meno" show the plot structure where he makes out Socrates as the vdM, Weedon type, who is good at introducing ambiguity where the initiator is into reducing it to social simplicities using others as foils of the non-pop, unapproved social bad eggs. Meno tries hard but fails to make it to Socrates purported stand that virtue has to be "always" or unconditional and S. finds the undecidable proposition that one can point out a failure of virtue - meaning mostly the ability and willingness or belief in social conformity and compliancy - but one cannot teach a person virtue, it has to be self acquired and imposed. The I-Ching, for one example, elucidates this anfractuous issue as the superior person, who self operates a virtue & ethics of care for others versus the inferior person who has to be controlled by laws. This both to elucidate and show it is an age old issue. In this connection modern societies ASSUMEs everybody to be the inferior type who has to be controlled by laws, like homogenised milksops. Transcendentally to that we get the sage, detached from worldly concerns or socialised attitudes, who, so to speak, does not try to make things happen but observes the social charade. For those interested I nitpicked this in an 8000 word essay'paper, which I'll email to those who ask and once and after I get the newly bought memory stick and driver to copy cum ethernet it from my laptop to PC tower so I can email it. Muller's mask, facade, persona, is not a "self" but a professional image, his social role rather, with which he identifies at least in an exopublic sense, we don't know how he comports at home. How he can reconcile that with a refusal to tolerate that MIR is a mystery to me. But then who really or fully understands the vagaries of mind? Archetypes are NOT individuals but story plots. Alternatively they are individuals who put other people into THEIR story plot.

<2>

Wood is firmly into Jaspers experiential existentialism, which is a first person game and gambit where the dramatic plot, setting, theme, action personified as character, to especially not ignore the purpose and intent of the action by way of assumptional beliefs, attitudes and POVs. This is a first person game, not as above a 3rd person game. IOW Wood prefers understanding experience as primary and before reporting in linguistic metaphors, NOT to be taken personally so he cannot call people who disagree with him mentally sick, though perhaps mentally confused rather. The drama is here that one speaks for oneself in one's own authority being, so to speak, the only resident of one's own mind and being, hoping others will and can do the same. This raises issues of diversity in human unity ASSUMING we all are different, so what - sort of; cannot we get on together? Right now I'm playing the 2nd person tritagonist, saying things probably thought irrelevant by the type elucidated in paras 1 & 2, not unlike a Shakespearean soliloqui, seeing how neither party could possibly come to terms with the others' miscalled POV. Type one ignores and puts down any one not fitting the above para 1 drama. Type 2 tries to get shared communication going, so, by comparison with "Meno" one could call it an anti-dialectic dialogue. And how one can name a dialogue held a monologue by each party of the other, correcting each other's sins, so to speak, as a failure to secure proper 'virtue' for the other.

<3>

One can simplify, reduce, categorise, analyse, portray or represent, with apologies to EvG - take your pick of metaphors - in the grammatical frame of a society's language. OURS, formally and officially is SvO, sobject, verb object. "I eat food". This permutes as 3 items into 6 varieties of which Svo is western mode held most dominant though OSv " apple boy eats" and "vSO, appear most commonly found, "eat boy apple", whether of Hesperides or of Edenesque conflict I'll leave you to contemplate. And like Uncle Toby you may imagine boy as you like or not. The verb lacks an image or sensory eidolon. While of course the formalists ASSUME that obviously everybody will use the prevailing western mode SvO and therefore thinks that way, it is a mere convention nominalised or entelechised and believed with no proof whatsoever. It follows that in their own mind people can use any of the six possible modes. As in vSO" "thinking I do" or again, "thinking occurs" as vO totally depersonalised, or again, in conformity with our prevailing convention: "There occurs thinking", which in the context, where the 'there;, sort of, depersonalises the vaunted ego into a mere location, "I" or intellect into a "there" presumably of a present here and now, but that does not exclude a Platonic Ideal either as a mere twist of the words can show. It should be noted that in SvO variants the gerundial tends to foreground, or that could just be me, as "think I do" is equally possible. Next 3!= 6!=720 and 720! at which my calculator goes blank with a zero so it is a monster number good enough to call infinite as a 3rd order derivative variation on a sentence, oops, mindset. One should further note that, contra Descartes, ANY verb can be fitted in as in Aldous Huxley's "Caco, ergo sum", with a strong dig at hot, methanoid air. I'd prefer cacoethes.

<4>

What seems nohow realised is the experiential, psychological, sociological, philosophical, etc blahh, effects of this distinction between SvO variants of a person happenstancing into such modes at an age well before the 3 word sentence pattern turns habitual, which I guess to be around age three to four. There's no data on it, as even Piaget is into the quantitative and used his own children which neither makes a sufficient sample nor proof validated evidence of a qualitative conflict between outer persona and inner being mode or how one represents oneself to others AND/OR to oneself. The further problem arising is that, obviously our mind'brain can handle this as any search into linguistic schemata will show these first order variations to occur in other cultures. Couched in binary logic, used as a metaphor, simply to enable to make the point, "it occurs" that our brain multitasks such that for ANY solipsistic closure of a particular mindset and event frame conjoint it ipso facto and de jure follows that for any such Inclusion, there will be a data EXclusion conventionally held irrelevant to conscious, intellectual thinking. Science has has major problems by its axiomatic inclusion of ONLY the local where Quantum findings clearly show NO such isolated distinction in words between a mereological whole versus part is justifiable or provable. I can frame another 8000 word paper on that as well in more detail. One example is a typical child's statement "This needle bit me" which reifies the object as the child will/can not accept it does it to itself or that it can make clumsy mistakes thus actually doing it to itself without intending to. It objectifies itself by intent, not execution of an action. THAT would take an adult addled 3rd person view, which is nevertheless NOT believed to be schizoid but intellectually correct.

<4a>

I shall now go through this again in terms of my pet aversion, Neurology and its linearised causality. I put it to you that unless and until such enquiry as outlined here is undertaken to show our minds poly-multi-tasking of Gestalt type foreground to background analogic to conscious intellectual pathing versus unconscious non-verbal ongoing concurrent processing of which we are not held to be aware. But I put it to you that in neurosis of the hallucinatory fantasy kind does occur which confuses the victim. I further put out to you that hallucination is a misnomer BECAUSE nowise could our mind'brain imagine OUTSIDE whatever the rules that govern reality could be. So they are alternative possibilities I metaphorise here as The sage, which includes the Creative and poetic variations on a theme, which the sage can rationalise but the neurotic lacks the knowhow to rationalise. The sage, so to speak, as objective to his own subjectivity, finds positive uses for such things which in the neurotic tend to the self negating destructive. Mostpeople, so to speak, take the SvO convention for granted as *real* for lack of curiosity or ability whereas in some members of the human race it cannot be taken for granted. I don't have a clue about percentages for the same reason as given above for Piaget. IFF, fi I could Persuade Muller to give up on his usage of "subjective' and could adopt Claude's eso and exo, without or without the adjectival for body as corporeal, it might clear some air. I don't really care whether it is *real*, imaginary, projective or fictitious by way of Muller's MIR antagonism. In any final analysis it is what people DO rather than what they should do that matters. It is also the degree to which people accept that language represents *reality* that is into play.

<5>

To perhaps elucidate somewhat further, one can have mindset

A: vaunted intellectual, but also very common in a monist culture, with a fixed POV which come in endless specialist and personality modes, commonly namable as archetypes, though often unrecognised as such.

Versus B: the sage's more open mindset of the unitive all inclusive where exactly what Q Physics prescribes applies as a closure of "everything all together" into a specific here and now event set by way of Planck's constant and consciousness, which is NOT permanent or absolutised but a relativistic dynamic. It tends to occur by way of a mystical experience, so called, although possibly other means lie open. Whether a person *knows*, in an intellectual and categorical sense, it IS a mystical experience does not matter. There's a certain empathetically elective affinity between the kind which does not occur for type A. I shall ignore other possibilities as I am not writing a book. BUT it follows that those who fit type B tend to prefer the non-epiphenomenal mind. IOW I put it to you that the initial elective by a child leads to one's philosophy through this conflict between pre-verbal options and post verbal events. It would seem to be the case that type A is a dominant verbaliser while type B is an experiential non-verbaliser. This, more or less, abides with the Sapir Whorff hypothesis that language CAN decide one's lifetime attitude if not also a lifetime's conflict. Type A is into "knowledge" while type B prefers understanding more, each relatively to an eso or exo projective dominant. There is a new neo-linguistic trend - not into memes or colors - developing more into this kind of analysis but not yet too dominant and still hotly debated and mooted. Language itself, in itself, allows for all these modalities but our society insists only type A is *real*, the better to manipulate you as the Wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood. Of course were I a Bishop I'd call type B a heretic. Aristotle dubbed it the arty type of which he was not one. Since everybody reckons they *know* how language works it might serve as a medium or perspective of conciliation, who really knows? I notice Muller has transformed, oops reframed NLP fashion, himself from a moderator into an editor; funny that. Are we all going to be poked into flat characterisation in a Book?

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