promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:51 amI have been collecting ironies as a participant of various philosophy fora for twenty years, and of all the small minded, irrelevant garden variety philosophy tourists and wanna be intellectuals I've encountered, the anti-marxists are my favorite... and I'll tell ya why. I have never heard so much noise being made about nuthin but the substance of one's own terminal confusion and personal undeserved hubris, regarding any other subject, in my life... save perhaps religion.
There is more to be gained, in a general situation in which no agreements, of any sort, in regard to any topic, can be forged, by trying to locate and expose the core predicates that operate and determine the different views we have.
When the core agreements break down it is as if the glue that holds a community together unbinds. The result is, literally, dissolution. If I am not mistaken -- and here the reference is to the larger picture (what is going on around us and what is going on globally) -- all around us we see the symptoms of lack of agreement and of the dissolution I refer to.
If this is so, and it appears so, then this precedes a situation in which governing structures have to intervene. The reason is because though the people that make up the community are at each other's throats, and the conflicts rage, government, industry and business really do have very good reasons to forge agreements. And those agreements have to do with holding the polity together in order to protect and expand their portfolio of investment.
So, and this perhaps from my own provincial perspective, what develops out of this breakdown in core agreements is a rise in authoritarianism. The state becomes alarmed and the state, of course, is also a police, military and intelligence apparatus and it certainly has the power and the resources to attempt to *engineer* social conflict to some sort of acceptable end. (Chomsky referred to that as overcoming the 'crisis of democracy'. It is an interesting concept to hold in one's mind as one examines the present).
The *larger picture* involves (in my own view) noticing and describing how Power reacts to social chaos. In a way it is irrelevant to Power if *progressives* are lost in their battles with *conservatives* and vice versa. The structure and the power which undergirds the existing order is, in certain ways, apolitical. Yet it always seems to tend to seek to undermine any perspective that undermines its own power.
Turning to the essential, basic, and core disagreements that operate in this thread, the only thing that can be done is to try to locate the *core predicates* that operate, visible and consciously, or invisibly and unconsciously, in each protagonist. And the curious thing really is that the protagonists that have at least some reasons to be aligned with other protagonists for the similarity of their understandings and beliefs, do not agree enough to actually be able to forge, if I may put it this way, an alliance. Why? My answer is that because each view-structure is rather personal and perhaps even a matter of personality. Each one operates from a 'tendentious' perspective and, it seems, can only associate and network with those who think more or less exactly the same.
But the larger meaning of that can also be put out on the table for examination. And it seems to me that in a larger and general situation in which the core metaphysical agreements are breaking down, everyone scrambles to cobble out some defensive position.
This leads me to what, over the course of some years of attempts to *organize my perception* about what is going on macro- and microcosmically to a basic idea about
interpretation.
[The book
The Genesis of Secrecy: One the Interpretation of Narrative (Frank Kermode) helped me to forge this sense.]
From a
New York Times book review:
Hermes, friendliest of gods to men, bestower of windfalls and lucky chances, lord of those who do their business by night; O whiz-kid and wizard, patron of thieves, rogues and perjurers; O friend to travelers in obscure places, O guide and conductor of those who consort with the dead; O spirit of fluency and sly calculation, genius of ways and entries, ingenious deviser, nimble wit and agile explainer-away; O god of the main chance, O Hermes, preserve us from evil, for we are all engaged in hermeneutics, over which you preside. We are all interpreters, and the world is out text.
We interpret to survive, for although the world is our text, it is not an open book. The inconsequence of its signs is the motive of our anxious scrutiny and scrivening. We want to believe that everything is significant, that everything is in order, and therefore interpretable. And since the meaning of things is not manifest, we assume it is latent. The interpreter's first move is to discover that what has been taken for granted is in fact random, incoherent, full of gaps; his second move is to uncover occult connections, a secret narrative, a hermeneutic plot. The Genesis of Secrecy- to use the title of Frank Kermode's new book- is interpretation. (The book originated as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1977-78.)
Curiously, at least in my own view, the idea of Hermes (Mercury) runs through his whole presentation and that notion of course part of the term
hermeneutics. It requires (if you will permit me a poetic leap) a god's help to make sense of things. To see into the cores of things. Not to be dazzled or confused or overpowered by 'surface' (Plato's Cave and certainly *our condition*). What I find curious is that each person -- I believe this to be true -- resorts to some hidden hermeneutical tool that they've availed themselves of in order to order and make sense of what is very very hard to make sense of.
[To get a sense of this turn to the most outrageous, the most far-fetched, hermeneutical propositions (for example the sort of perspective that would allow one, seriously but
poetico-mythically, to believe that lizard-people controlled the world)(I insert a David Icke assertion simply because it is easy). Conspiracy thinking is extremely pervasive especially, if this way of putting it will be permitted, among the *lower orders*.]
The *lower orders* are, of course, people who in fact are deeply ensconced in what Plato's Cave symbolizes, are they not? They are 'fastened' to those columns and cannot do anything but observe the flickering shadows and confuse them for *Reality*. But they cannot see the *projectors*. Or, described in another way, they really are making the effort to *turn around* but, doing that, they *see* other levels of projection of their own minds.
This leads to the idea of 'clarifying vision'. What is it that clouds vision? What is it that clarifies vision? Once the question is proposed the difficulty of the task becomes large indeed. It immediately becomes metaphysical, and even those who say, or pretend, that metaphysics is phantasy, they are so very obviously bound up in defining a metaphysics and yet they cannot see it as such.
It is very interesting, then, to step back a bit (or even many steps back) from the position that Promethean represents. I focus on him because or his cranky, irreverent, ironical, *playful*, postmodern, and *acidic* position in regard to what seems to be his core predicate. He establishes his position through a sort of
dance. He weaves in and out, sometimes making *serious* statements, sometimes resorting to poignant irony, but always as a 'rebel', always as an over-turner of certainty. The predicate implied (but never expressed as such) is that whatever his position is that it represents some sort of strategy for advancement or betterment (?) It is implied that if more would see as he sees, and act as he acts, that the blocking forces would be pushed to the side and a new and necessary clarity would manifest. (I gather this is in the Marxian order (or utopia) which is envisioned but which, when it attempts to manifest, goes astray of itself). Is this his core *healing balm*? (I do not know, but because I am trying to examine *core predicates* it sure looks like this is his).
And certainly he really & truly believes that whatever this *Christianity* is it is an illusion, a false-belief, an obstacle, and obstruction, that must be overcome. In this, of course, he operates in concert with the others (Lacewing, Uwot, etc.) who have also established themselves within this *project*. As I say -- I am open to correction if I am wrong -- this *project* is not very creative in the sense that it does not propose anything (that I can discern) but is uniquely *destructive* to existing orders but in that ironical, irreverent, condescending & ridiculing manner very common among those who work this angle.
