Author: John

The modes of being as written about here are, as Kierkegaard thought, Stages on Life’s Way. The primitive man, the primitive mind, tends toward artistic expression and develops into religious, scientific, historical, and finally philosophical modes. I find it interesting to contrast this with the concurrent emergence of what I call the concomitants of consciousness and sentient life forms. Beauty, liberty, love, justice, wisdom, truth all have special niches of development corresponding to the Stages. They come into season and prepare the way for further seasonal changes. To me, and to thinkers like, e.g., Le Compte De Nouy, also written about in this space, these evolutes are proof enough to the doubting mind that divine providence is in play. They are, indeed, signposts along the avenue, the “way” to the transcendent. They are attributes of the divine creative spirit vouchsafed to us as evidence of the true meaning and purpose of life. So, since I am concentrating these days on Aristotle, I would note that these modalities considered extensively, as noted previously, by Collingwood, I find echoed in this statement of Aristotle in Posterior Analytics: “Further consideration of modes of thinking and their distribution under the heads of discursive thought, intuition, science, art, practical wisdom, and metaphysical thinking, belongs rather partly to natural science, partly to moral philosophy.”

Consider this quote from Plato’s Phaedrus:

“Now beauty [kállos], as we said, shone bright among those visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight is the keenest of the physical senses, though wisdom is not seen by it — how passionate would be our desire for it, if such a clear image of wisdom were granted as would come through sight — and the same is true of the other beloved objects; but beauty alone has this privilege, to be most clearly seen and most lovely of them all.”

And this from Kelley Ross on Aristotle and Kant regarding the role of faith versus reason:

“The picture of the relationship of rational knowledge to existence that emerges is just the opposite of that postulated by Plato and Aristotle, who believed that the most real was the most knowable. Here, the deeper that we get ontologically, and so the closer to the most real, the less knowable, or the less it can be rationally articulated, the matter is. This is the principal characteristic of Kantian philosophy. In the simplest terms, what this accomplishes is to separate religion from science, the former most concerned with ultimate meaning, the latter the most productive of rational knowledge. Thus, Kant himself said, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

Plato in speaking of beauty, wisdom, and “other beloved objects” is touching on the Greek concept of virtue (arete). Virtue is the genus of these emergent principles which, like the bud of the rose, foreshadow greater unfolding, apotheosis, to come. Socrates argues inconclusively and at length with the great Sophist Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue of the same name whether virtue is teachable and is in the end sentenced to death for exercising corrupting influences on the youth of Athens. Jesus Christ, of course, suffered a similar fate.

It seems to me Kant’s statement that to make room for faith one must deny knowledge echoes a sentiment of Aristotle noted earlier that knowledge is always knowledge of something. This is from his Categories. He goes on, in Posterior Analytics, to conclude “….we cannot through demonstration have unqualified but only hypothetical science of anything.” This further echoes Kant and supports the idea of Polanyi, for instance, that knowledge always breaks down as we approach the boundaries of a subject. Can knowledge exhaust the Real? Aristotle goes on a little later to state “…scientific knowledge through demonstration is impossible unless a man knows the primary immediate premises.” And then, he concludes in P.A., after bringing the function of memory and sense perception into play, and their retention in the soul, that we must “…get to know the primary premises by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive. Now of the thinking states by which we grasp truth, some are unfailingly true, others admit of error – opinion, for instance, and calculation, whereas scientific knowing and intuition are always true: further, no other kind of thought except intuition is more accurate than scientific knowledge, whereas primary premises are more knowable than demonstrations, and all scientific knowledge is discursive. From these considerations it follows that there will be no scientific knowledge of primary premises, and since except intuition nothing can be truer than scientific knowledge, it will be intuition that apprehends the primary premises – a result which also follows from the fact that demonstration cannot be the originative source of demonstration, nor, consequently, scientific knowledge of scientific knowledge. If, therefore, it is the only other kind of true thinking except scientific knowing, intuition will be the originative source of scientific knowledge. And the originative source of science grasps the original basic premise, while science as a whole is similarly related as originative source to the whole body of fact.”

So, the Real can be exhausted, by Intuitive knowledge. But reason alone deals only with facts, what can be measured scientifically. And the atheist, quite simply, denies intuition, denies the Soul and is thereby, in the end, dead to himself, dead to the world.

Got that title from Stanislaw J. Lec.

Walking out on the road today, the leaves were falling and skittering along the ground in the cold north wind. I remembered something I read or heard once that a flower is just a modified leaf. It occurred to me that a leaf was a modified branch, trunk, root. It further occurred to me that Virtue, Truth, Justice, Beauty, Wisdom, Liberty, Love, Consciousness itself, Life itself, were all just modified dirt which in turn is just modified hydrogen which itself is just the most simple thing that can be made of nothingness itself.

I’m still reading Aristotle these days and probably will be for a long time. I’ll likely have more to say about this great philosopher in the days ahead. I studied him in University; but not really. For someone like me such a study is a life long endeavor.

On a side note NASA announced today they had discovered microorganisms that are “able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic.” Why am I not surprised? Please let me know when a sentient life form is found based on this chemistry that has an appreciation of the above listed concomitants on a level with Human Beings. I am sure “they” are out there. For all I know the Sun itself is teeming with “living” entities. That is, my argument is that the WHOLE thing is an Apotheosis.

Reading Aristotle, Organon, De Interpretatione is like reading computer code at the machine level, the code, e.g., in CMOS. Not that there aren’t nuggets that jump out at me, like, “knowledge is always knowledge of some thing.” Knowledge is limited to what is perceptible. Perceptible means that which is delivered by the five senses. This precept is well known and it dovetails nicely with Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things,” also. It is the basic tenet of my epistemology.

He goes on to the conclusion “…that necessity and its absence are the initial principles of existence and non-existence, and that all else must be posterior to these.” He then states “It is plain from what has been said that that which is of necessity is actual. Thus, if that which is eternal is prior, actuality also is prior to potentiality.” I think he is in this building up to his later concept of entelechy which doctrine I have adapted to my own philosophy and have written of previously in this space. I have an idea that the Universe is infinitely malleable, which idea, I think, has its roots in the principles stated here. My notion that the Real is akin to a fractal, I think, is also bound up in these concepts. It is infinitely self-inventing, and every instantiation increases and enriches the pregnancy for ensuing evolution. All that will ever be is already actual in the “beginning” even though all that will ever be is an elaboration on the infinite stream of prior instances. Every new instance is a new beginning and a new boundary for the new. Every new instantiation is an elaboration of its predecessor. And, our heavens are self made as are our hells. It’s all about individual responsibility and self-reliance. Belief in nothing gets you just that.

Here it all is in the language of mathematics:

Genesis. They ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden them. What does it mean? The original sin is putting knowledge above faith. Man’s knowledge is his alone and is limited and incomplete. A wise man is full of doubt and in that way keeps an open mind. The fool projects himself, and incidentally closes his mind, on the whole of creation; he takes the place of God. The bigger fool claims ownership of God, of the creative force or principle. Atheism is such a claim. It is the projection of the finite onto the infinite. While the whole of creation might be a kind of apotheosis, this can go horribly wrong. The beginning of true understanding is realizing that knowledge is always limited, always dependent on anthropomorphic modes of measurement. The biblical “knowledge that surpasseth understanding” is a way of stating this principle. It is got to by going into the “upper room.” In another tradition, Raja Yoga, this meditative practice is described as focusing the breath between the eyebrows. What results is the discovery, ultimately an action of the unknown, that the “kingdom of heaven is within you.” It is not a destination. And, the journey IS the destination. The journey IS the apotheosis, the transfiguration of existential mass into self-realized spirit. One might say that we exist so that “God” can have self experience. When we live within the guidance of virtue, Greek arete, our lives are conducive to its various components, such as beauty, truth, wisdom, courage, compassion, liberty, and love. These are like petals of a flower; the flowering of self-realized spirit. The end within, entelechy, is endless, the universe infinitely malleable. If you believe in nothing, that’s likely what you’ll get. Faith is the key. Knowledge without understanding is the bondage.

One of my comments in this thread.

“Their soul is warped with selfish desires, and their heaven is a selfish desire. They have prayers for pleasures and power….”

Usually it is because we are to close to something that we can’t see it. So the problem becomes, for instance, how to distance oneself from reality. To Know the Real you can’t be the Real. If you are what you would know then you’re stuck with tautologies. From self identification (1=1) no knowledge is available. It conveys no information. Isn’t it interesting that nonetheless understanding is available. Everything that is begins and ends with our body consciousness. Hard to break out of this. That is why in ancient Greece, for instance, we have Protagoras proclaiming that man is the measure of all things. On the basis of this it seems to me that the supreme good is taking responsibility, ownership of one’s life. In a sense, then, to own yourself is to own it all.

What exists does so in space and time. ‘Things’ exist. God does not. He’s not a thing, though most conceive him as such. They are ‘things.’ God must be too. Anthropomorphism. God does not exist, he creates.* His Reality is only available through faith. No faith. No God. For the denier of faith only the body exists, that which is our material self. This also helps explain the fall from grace.

*Soren Kierkegaard

The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras famously said man is the measure of all things. This is in essence the heart of my previous post here. I would elaborate a little. We tend to project our being as an “object” in the world onto the whole of reality. So reason pertains only to the material aspect, principle. When Blaise Pascal , the great Christian philosopher of the seventeenth century, said “The heart has its reasons which reason can never know” he is saying that the heart is the faculty of spirit and operates through intuition. Clearly he places heart above. Spirit over matter. When we “give” attributes to God, for instance, we might say, “God loves me”, we are projecting our humanity onto the whole of creation. That’s fine but we need to have a full understanding that this is in actuality a form of self aggrandizement which I take to be the essence of the “fall” from Grace in the Christian sense. Isn’t it better to just “wait” on the deity? I, personally, can’t arrogate the status to myself that God loves me. My DUTY is to LOVE him! Then, I wait. This is a touch on infinite resignation, the task achieved by Abraham in the primordial act of faith as described when he takes his son Isaac to the mountain as a sacrifice.