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On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence (v. 2)

June 26, 2015 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, reviews, Theory / No Comments

On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence (v. 2)On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence by Baruch Spinoza
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps it is the repeated exposure to Deleuze’s Spinoza and readings of this slender collection that leaves me a little blank on what to say. Spinoza remains the imminent thinker of substance. Pre-Kantian, he shows us a world where relation and thought interact as pure geometry. His aesthetics for human understanding and interaction remain inspiring, even after all these years. While he encapsulates his system through the excessive nominalisation of God, Spinoza is able to return for us not a transcendental limit, of a lesser obscurity, one that reflects our limitation as beings of finiteness. This is different from a transcendental completeness, in which inconsistency is hidden through contingency. For Spinoza, there is only one manifold of infinite variety but of the same substance. Spinoza still preaches a completeness through God’s perfection but he shows us that inconsistency is only given our modality as finite beings.

Still strange and interesting is his conception beyond Good and Evil, in which these are layers of human localisation. This is almost Buddhist in conception. What makes Spinoza a philosopher is His calibration to the “faculty” of rationalism as the modality for emotion, understanding and modal being. His religiousity is instead, an extension of his thought, a characterization of the common mode of relation available for him at the time. If Spinoza were alive today, he might as well extended his geometric volume from pure relation of substance to algorithmic functionality.

His correspondence is interesting though, as it is able to show how he deals with a variety of different people and points of view.

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railing against the 2nd attention

September 6, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

i was thinking about the fakeness of souplantation along with its faux industrial look (at this location) when my dad decided to strike a conversation with me about the illuminati.  started by saying that george washington in a letter acknowledged their existence.

he went on a little bit about the statue of liberty — talking about first how the two men who built it were illuminati… talking about various symbols in the statue of liberty.

i wont repeat the conversation but frankly i found it vaguely annoying because i don’t care.  my reasoning as i explained was that such symbols do not do anything.  does the symbols on the U.S. dollar bill serve to make the sun shine?  guarantee the U.S.’s place in the world?  serve to hurry along the 2nd coming of Jesus?  when i explained this to my cousin she found it to be incredibly negative.  she retorted, saying that symbols are important because they serve to remind one of things.  i then mentioned the stain glass windows in catholic churches with the 12 stations.  things like that do carry meaning and can help improve one’s life, but the presence of symbols themselves are meaningless — one has to take them seriously and bring them into being with one’s own person, otherwise it’s as plain as decoration.  really if one lives it, why does one need symbols?

it seemed that my dad took the presence of such symbols (in some part) to mean the presence of a shadow government, i found that completely bogus.  governments and institutions are so ineffectual.  for there to be a shadow government ruling the planet for hundreds of years, one would need an incredibly tightknit organization — one completely disciplined and lean with near perfect information (some how).  how often do the local police solve crimes (for instance)?  i won’t get started on that but i will mention that belief in a masterful conspiracy is really unlikely.  government is so cumbersome.  and any kind of super secret government won’t be secret for long — because there is no elite squad with near perfect technical information, certainly not fifty+ years ago.

nonetheless, disproving conspiracy theories is kind of a ridiculous thing to do because it’s near impossible.  it’s an epistemologist’s field (which i am bad at) but how can anyone prove anything?  if we have a choice in what we believe in and how we organize anything then we should have a set of criteria to determine the most effective beliefs.

what i want to get to here, is what carlos castenada calls the 2nd attention.

i want to extend castenada’s thought as exposited in books like ‘the power of silence’ and ‘the fire within’.  he calls the first attention to be that of everyday man.  the 2nd attention is the shifting of awareness from the first attention into the other bands of awareness, like that of other animals or other creatures not of this world.  the 3rd attention is when the entire luminescent being lights up simultaneously, and that is analogous to near immortality or complete awareness or enlightenment.  i don’t want to go into detail about this but i will analogize the 2nd attention here.

in a sense there is no first attention…if there were, it would be common sense, or an everyday sense of things.  a shared reality of sorts.  when getting into the particulars it’s apparent that there isnt a shared reality.  there are clusters of shared realities in different groups that reinforce one another.  these groups verge into areas that castenada would define as the 2nd  attention.

the analogy of the 2nd attention is best explained with the ‘sorcerers’ who search for the truth and power in the 2nd attention.  castenada talks about these men, heroically going through unknown areas of the psyche and going mad, or disappearing altogether, lost and unable to come back.  often, in castenada’s books, don juan and carlos get stuck somewhere overnight in the desert, because they are wandering through the 2nd attention (in a controlled way by don juan) when they are spotted by a creature of the 2nd attention (sometimes one who was once a man) and they must hide from it and wait until sunrise before they can escape.

in this analogy, the 2nd attention works for ppl who try to identify truth and gain power from it.  they are ordinary people like you and i but they are also people who are interested in politics, or religion, or philosophy.  they are world-builders, system-builders, mystics who try and find the source.  in reality, they are pretty much anyone who gets shaken up by reality, who experiences the death of a close one or a traumatic failure of some sort and comes to question life and existence and meaning.  we all wander the 2nd attention in some way, departing from the strict ‘middle way’ of the 1st attention to come up with our own conclusions about life and reality, of the people around us and whatever else that seems to need explaining and ‘fitting into’ with everything else.

in a way, meaning is used to formulate social hierarchies so that we can fit everything together in a way independent of any one individual or according to one individual.  we say this is how we should live, this is how society should be — we judge everyone and ourselves — whether it be from a perspective of economics, or a religion, or evolutionary psychology.  some kind of universal meaning is introduced to reinforce a social order so that we can say “this is how things should be and our place in those things”

so in that sense, all different theories and systems are equal — because what kind of objective metric for which we can possibly come up with which is ‘right’?

in what sense are things ‘right’?

is it arguable that a paranoid-schizophrenics’ daydream “works” for them as much as my paranoia about paying my taxes on time “works” for me?  there are consequences to both!  and while we can say well, most of us all pretty much believe in paying our taxes (as we also believe in the consequences) can we say also say that when reading a paranoid-schizophrenics’ exposition (say written in a notebook) about the nature of the universe when we understand that words can have inter-textual, slipperiness?  likewise, to capitalize on deleuze and guattaris’ schizo-analysis (which is not about schizophrenics at all, but a structure or a way of connecting things, a different kind of meta-epistemology) can we reject alternate modes of meaning make simply because they are unfamiliar to us?  most of us do!  that’s the point of meaning!  to find the big man, or who should be the big man on campus.

so it comes about that i think a criteria for 2nd attentions that ‘work’ should be whether or not those models are ‘dead-ends’.  i think in the ‘planet earth’ series, sponges were called ‘evolutionary dead-ends’ because they could not progress anywhere else.  likewise, in the castenada world, many of those sorcerers are dead-ends simply that because while they may gain power, they are also lost, or unable to return from their situation.  they are trapped in their own separate worlds, forced to focus and rely solely on the inhumane in the second attention.

example?

many some ppl who know me know that i like philosophy (or that theoretical shit) so that when dan brown’s book ‘da vinci code’ came out, quite a few recommended it to me, equating what i liked to what dan brown did.  i know many ppl won’t equate philosophy with whatever dan brown wrote about in his book, but if you think about it, abstractly the two do resemble one another.  esoteric knowledge, hermeneutics — systems of thoughts, abstract arrangements of meaning… much like what foucault’s pendulum by umberto eco was about with the knights templar, the crusades, free masons and what not.  connections of history and finding a meaningful connection/system in place by which we order the world.  the difference between philosophy per se, and this other stuff, is that philosophy isn’t tied so necessarily to individuals nor do specific time and places.

nonetheless such ‘master’ conspiracy theories seek to explicate events and order a grand narrative, much like fredric jameson’s the political unconscious, such that even ‘the end of narratives’ qua postmodernism is incorporated into an articulate structure which cannot but preserve the theory itself.  to get back to grotesque conspiracy theories such as those involving the knights templar, such theories often take real ambivalence and incorporate it into the theory so that one’s own ignorance plays a role in reinforcing the theory’s metaphysics of presence.

like the 2nd attention sorcerers, one then becomes trapped in that world.

and what then?

is the purpose of developing such a theory, one founded on history and specific events to continually find more information to support it?  even freud with his oedipus complex moved into a different direction as time went on.  it’s inevitable that one’s theorys and ideas should slide as one grows older, or changes location.  but isn’t it usually the case that ppl abandon their ideas, and forget them if they don’t write them down?  we are not our ideas and our ideas are not us.  but ideas at a particular time do suffice as the internal workings of how we orient ourselves among everything else.

and if orientation is what’s at stake, then truth is less important than we feel it to be absolutely.  i say it is best to have an out look which does not force us into any kind of intellectual, emotional or otherwise ‘dead end’.  one should, aesthetically and on principle, seek to come to terms with one’s surroundings… and as we are imperfect beings, in the spinozan sense, we always will have partial knowledge, incomplete and inaccurate.  we must continue to absorb, be flexible and evolve.

even when choosing a career, who wants to be hemmed into being just a customer-specialist?  it’s true (in nature and in today’s world of specialists) that to survive well, one should pick a robust niche that will exist regardless of market forces, and narrow in on that niche to ensure one’s employability.  but that’s only if you want to stay still.  staying still though, is much like a mollusk or clam.  we can’t direct the environment — it’s too big — so it’s best to just ride along within its shadow.

i think of the energy used to lodge and unlodge one’s self from a position to be analogous in structure to the pianists who practice for hours daily to become virtuosos.  when you play a passage, your hand does the motion in the most efficient way for it.  but that’s not going to help when you have a variety of complex forms to perform which require a different motion.  so to be efficient in those complex forms you need to undo the easiest hand motions repertoire in your subconscious and mold your virtual hand (stored in your head) closer and closer into the shape of a keyboard.  and to do that you must transverse the keyboard.

the energy to unbind and re-train one’s hands can be thought of in terms of activation energy.  to transition to a lower energy state (smoother motion and thus, more efficiency).  this is much like the energy it takes to unravel ‘bad habits’ or in our case, to utilize complex hermeneutical pathways to satisfactorially explain phenomenon.  theories which do not explain phenomenon well, require continual maintenance and continual upkeep.  it takes a great deal of energy and anger to be a racist or a bigot.  it takes a great deal of emotional investment and risk of suffering to be self righteous in the face of society.  the harder one solidifies a theoretical apparatus the greater the risk to the thinker if it fails.

i don’t know if enlightenment is ‘real’ in the way of stories.  certainly buddhist enlightenment is real, in the sense that is a publically acknowledged phenomenon within various religions.  i won’t speak of it, but i will mention that it’s difficult to discern how if ever anyone were to understand that one was not in fact lodged in the 2nd attention and that one ‘got it’.  this brings back the question of metrics — or i should say, the lack of metrics.  there are so many different systems and ways of understanding.  for instance, to bring ‘karma sutra’ back to its origins, there is a warning in many tantric traditions of looking up and trying esoteric meditations and yogic practices by ones self. without the proper teacher, one runs the risk of invoking pain and wandering off the path these practices were designed to follow.  the risk in this reminds me of much in the end of the yoga sutra which warns against indulging in the powers that arise from getting close to the unpolished mirror.

when one closes in on the sun, one risks blindness.  the closer one gets,  the increase in the risk of permanent blindness.  if one were on the path to becoming the perfect pianist (assuming such a thing were possible), if one were to stop when one were close, the habits that one has acquired only solidify all the more so, for all the energy and work one has sunken in would help emboss the structures one currently has.  it takes more energy to undo errors done in the extreme than it does errors early on.

this warning, of course, only explicitly functions within the context of there being a given path to follow.

real life — naked life, i should say — is fuzzy and without clear boundaries.  within the context of organized religion, there is always a direction to tread (as it’s organized in a certain way).  slavoj zizek, true to his hegelian loyalties has written extensively that one should follow a given (and perhaps seemingly arbitrary) path as such a path is the best way to guarantee one access to the universal.  if one follows the hegelian dialectics for synthesizing meaning, then one should!  and so zizek has written a good number of books on why the christian legacy should be protected, and what such a pathway has to offer.  aesthetically it’s also consistent that zizek is in fact an authoritarian.  the best way to ascend to a universal guarantee of some sort (any sort, for with zizek all roads lead to the hegelian-esque Notion) is to follow a path as deeply as it goes.  sufis, as well, have an added requirement that one should master at least two different disciplines in order to understand how mastery extends beyond the prohibitions of a medium.

i have waxed about hegel before, so i won’t do that now, but it will suffice to say that if one reaches beyond the mode of the medium one can encounter analogous structures unbound by a particular medium.  we master painter and a master musician can talk!  we don’t need to use the language of a particular language to understand that literature of one culture has analogous movements and tropes possibly found in other literatures… and that syntax in computer languages can invoke syntax in non-computer expressions.

in this way, one can seek the various territories of particular fields, as they are woven with their tropes and their memes and their intensive structures to alight on more primary principles.  such principles posit indexes which can become expressed in a particular discipline.  folks, i am talking directly on deleuze and guattari’s combined notions of plateaus, machinic indexs and territory.  deleuze and guattari are right to repeatedly invoke the success of man not only of his hand as a de-territorialized paw (which can become a hammer in holding a hammer, or a screw driver when using a screw driver) but also in his ability to abstract beyond aesthetic and sexual beauty — to combine abstractions in fomulations of bodily meaning, philosophy and the literary arts.

we can be affected!  and we can affect!  highly developed sensibilities follow the most human of us.

while in the abstraction of so much internal semiosis eventually allowed each of us to experience the reterritorializing of that internal phenomenal space as ‘consciousness’, the process does not guide us in a given direction to further de-territorialize the signs which are re-terrtorialized along specific expressions originating from specific contexts.  perhaps a word ‘allegory’ will always remind you of your 8th grade english teacher, or ‘meta-physics’ will always be the astrology and tarot card section in a bookstore.  and the sight of lingerie will always afford a sexual or ‘naughty’ sensation.  we respond to that with our vaguely deterritorialized bodies, smitten with tattoos and panty hose and other trappings of social signify-ance…  and for all our abilities to abstract, build bridges and realize that a pen is also a weapon… remain trapped in the inner workings dependent on the inherited contexts of our social bretherian.

is it enough then, to realize an illumaniti conspiracy theory as a way of gaining access to social order?  is it enough to work out a ‘pick-up-line’ system to get laid only to have to invest into that system over and over, and refine it and work it so as to be able to work it?  or to vote for a particular political party and rally under that party with the trappings that this is the only way to clear up society and make it ‘what it should be‘ so that it is the ‘best possible world’?  to clothe julian assange with the trappings of christ or satan when he is still a man?  or in some cases, to claim our less fortunate as ‘mere animals’ for living off welfare?

i don’t write this so much for you, because i don’t doubt that this doesn’t apply to you.

in fact, you already know how things should be, and that it’s very apparent this or that style is the right style and that the order inherent in credit cards and drivers licenses are in fact one of the real orders of things.  this is not far from the truth, and if you are thinking i am saying there is a way of mastering reality then you are a bit mistaken.

lets go back to aristotle with his seemingly minor distinction between artificial and natural.  aristotle posited an order of things which says that natural things have essence.  he aligns the state with natural things, as it is supported by people.  artificial things, like wooden statues, do not have that essence, they do not ‘belong’ to the primary motion.  and of course, aristotle brings about a taxonomy to get us closer to true immaterial being… a like a great-grandfather of the biological taxonomy we use today.  but if aristotle allows the state to have essence because people make the state up, and the state changes over time, so then do all items and things of people.  and it is not the objects themselves that we make (artificially) which have essence, but their meanings and ideas.  in a very real way, we then go back to the earlier idea in this entry — meaning is what allows us to create social hierarchies for us to orient ourselves to everything (including each other).

reality as such, is all that, by definition, a meta-state of orientation: any kind of grasping or inclusion of another piece is also reality.  we cannot unthink reality.  very lacan!  and given that all our positions, experiences and bodies are different, it makes sense that there be as many Real(s) as there are people.  beyond that social criterion of orientation, we do have some abstract ability to understand non-people orientation, such as with chemistry or math.  to understand how we fit in with them, however, is to mistake a rock for having the same kind of meaning as a spoon.  natural things have essence as they were, but artificial things only have essence by virtue of how it functions (pragmatics — interesting aside but this does suggest that everything is pragmatics in the the deleuze and guattari schizo-analysis sense).  in a real way, how you understand things is who you are.  and how you change, when you do change, incorporates those alterations in a worldview.

but — wandering in the 2nd attention is not pointless!  and to find commonalities in how various relations work in the inexpressible beyond specific signifying processes internal to us is in some sense to grasp the noumenal skin by which we generate context and meaning.  certainly not a pointless endeavor!  after all, to forgo such a process is to strongly risk being ruled by a 2nd attention dead-end, to be required to bring energy to maintain a world-system, which only asks everything of you — and takes away your free choice as a de-territorialized mammal, denying you much of the energy you might have otherwise, to grow.

wander free and easy.

Meaning in the Face of Annihilation

February 22, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, universal nothing / No Comments

A few days ago, I was showing houses to an old friend who is now a client. It was raining and we had passed by a smaller duplex. The pictures on the MLS aren’t the same as seeing the context of the property with your own eyes. After seeing it, he decided he didn’t want to gos in and disturb the people in there. There are better deals around. We were talking about life in general — catching up as it were — since we hadn’t really talked in a long time. In showing houses, you inevitably turn towards the topic of the future. Let’s call this future-talk.

Future-talk is odd, it’s not often grounded in the present even though we talk about the future by way of the things we do during the present. But sometimes it is, and you can see that doesn’t just contain hopes and dreams that people have for the future. The future often also contains a justification of the present (current actions, current statuses &c). The present then, acts like a bridge that links the past and the future… even though it’s really disjunct (the present belongs to neither past nor future). And yet, looking for a home does this past-present-future connection quite well. People who want to buy a home, who have money are serious. It’s not chump change to drop close to half a million… It’s something to want a place to call your own, to START A FAMILY

What people want in a home is about as important as who they are, and what their priorities are. Buying a house, even as an investment, represents a whole-lotta-commitment, (in a Led Zeppelin kind of way) and as old friends we were genuinely interested in what the other was doing. This is the best kind of relationship building anyway, and the best sales people do it well. They are interested and understand their client — at least they can appear to be to the client. And that’s what’s important, to orient yourself. Not just what the inside of the house looks like (which is where most of us see the house anyway)… but also the outside, the kind of neighborhood, the people, the schools, the local businesses, if we can see our parents coming over (or not), or friends… in American Literature, the home is a very important character. It’s kind of like the over-shadow, even if the home is also the town… where someone runs from, or runs to… And in that way it acts much like how God acts for people’s lives. It orients them, it becomes an attractor (or repellent)…

So fast forward a bunch of particulars, when we got back into my car, he asked me if I believed in God.

Now I don’t know what he thinks, and I didn’t ask — but I told him, yes I believe I do. Although if most people ask me if I do, I usually say No because if I say Yes, then I appear to be very misleading. The fact is, what I am thinking of in my head probably in no way resembles what they are thinking of when they mention God..

This needs elaboration so I said very directly, I don’t really believe in the supremacy of a particular entity, per se, at least not one that is separate or dis-contiguous from everything else. I also don’t believe that I am (or that human beings are) central to the workings of the universe or that my actions (or that human actions) have any centrality to what’s actually going on. The universe is indifferent.

My friend then said, Yes, that’s really not in agreement with most people.

I also added I don’t believe that the meaning in my head has any bearing whatsoever on the universe at all. Meaning makes no difference to anyone except myself and vis versa.

A good short article on the uncentrality of Das Sein can be read by Paul Graham. He wrote an essay called See Randomness. I realize now, after I’ve put it in here, that the article itself exists in a vacuum much unlike future-talk and houses but very much like the present. In other words, this article does not attempt to bridge any kind of relationship with a point of view that we are in fact central to the universe, or that the meaning we take for granted is inscripted in the very core of the universe. Rather Graham argues for consideration of alternate understandings of events. He grounds his appeal for personal distance on an evolutionary foundation — that our ‘identity’ of a cohesive, rational self is an indeterminate fiction — that we should not take central our own needs and desires when orienting the ‘meaning’ of the things that happen around us. He would agree with me then, that meaning is the way each of us navigates what would otherwise be ‘randomness’. This meaning is not a universal principle in which our suffering or joy has any bearing in the cogs of the cosmic machine. Our suffering or joy is, rather neutral, much like how chemical reactions are neutral.

Gilles Deleuze in Practical Philosophy wrote very elegantly on this topic. I read his book twice to understand how he dismantles notions of ontology and instead recombines (and yet includes them) from a ground floor up so that they retain their parts, their sums, essences, attributions and conjugations. The first reading only served to confuse me, as the orientation wasn’t around a metaphyics of presence even while he preserves ‘essence’ as a central mode of anchoring meaning. The difference lies in the supposition that essence is constructed as “a relation of reciprocity” even while “Essence — Necessarily constitutes the essence of a thing …, a thing can neither be nor be conceived without, and vise versa, what can neither be conceived without the thing” (64). See how Deleuze has his cake and eats it too? Essence is the thing and the thing, essence. Likewise, what overrides the interactions of what we would understand both in a physical and a mental way is abstracted as a neturality of the interplay of relations — the exposition of Spinozan Ethics — without consciousness as being at all primary. In fact, it’s closer to epiphenomenalism if anything, although what Deleuze does does not push a metaphysics of presence of anything, nor does it sustain that heavy mutuality of dualism…

When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. This is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature. But as conscious beings, we ever apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence. [. . .] In short, the conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemn us to have only inadequate ideas, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated from their real causes. That is why it is scarcely possible to think that little children are happy, or that the first man was perfect: ignorant of causes and natures, reduced to the consciousness of events, condemned to undergo effects, they are slaves of everything, anxious and unhappy, in proportion to their imperfection. (19)

I believe that to most people who would orient themselves (or at least humanity) in the universe, and understand that there is an intrinsic place for them, for an I to wait and stand in luxury, as the children of the universe — either in this life or the next. I suspect that many of us feel (even if we know otherwise) that we are some how important — or that we are somehow deserving of all good things. So many of us, after Deleuze’s reading may feel that this point of view is horrible burden. Without that grounding of I or even God, there is no reason for anyone to behave or be good. Without God, many would insist that we get ultimate freedom but you also get ultimate responsibility. The universe won’t take care to preserve you, or transmogrify you based on karma… It is as though, without a direct core to the center of the universe, we should all eat each other and be terrified that others can do to us as they will.

Many thinkers and writers have written that exposure to the Scared Other, Big Other, the Eagle are all terrifying experiences that would destroy small others like ourselves. To experience God, as it were, is to become annihilated. I don’t believe this to be the case though. Yitz Jacob who ponders the mystic musings in the Jewish tradition has a particularly applicable story here about one’s relation with the Sacred Other on Heaven and on Earth. The point of the story then, I think, has to do with being able to relate to HaShem, which is easy in Heaven but not so much on Earth. While being stifled on a “Heaven that sees all” makes much sense to me, the radical view that our essentiality is not at all cohesive (that we disintegrate) when faced with the Cohesion of the Almighty jumps too far. Now, Jacob does not claim we disintegrate in his blog post, but he does note that when in Heaven, everything is visible — by this, I took it to mean that HaShem is visible too. And if God is apparent then it also becomes very apparent what we should do. This doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t exist in Heaven, but it does mean that we lose our free will.

I am not so sure that is the case. After all, should not the Cohesion of the Almighty must in fact include the cohesion of all our little partial essentialities as well? So it’s not so much that without God we get everything. Rather, it’s with God that everything is allowed.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov explores this topic through Ivan Karamazov — this is related to Ivan’s struggle. The brunt of it is that only with God can we have anything — only with God is everything allowed. The naked weight is that God is necessary — He does define for us what is allowed, but only because without God we would be an indistinguishable mass from everything else. Ivan, ever so rational, insists on the sheer the perversity of human beings that the Devil is made from Man’s image even though a God may or may not exist. I don’t know who Dostoevsky found inspirational enough to create a character like Ivan from, but I do feel that Ivan is under-developed. Ivan’s main source of torture is that he isn’t sure if there is a God or not — he seems to think there isn’t actually a God because of the vast cruelties that people play on one another — because bad people get away with so much! Ivan is getting two things confused though. Ivan continues to serve in a religious institution, so not believing in God is a terrible burden for him. Nonetheless Ivan sees the reasoning for expressing a belief in God — unity and singularity in the physical sense, not withstanding, but also for human society. People need God. People need to be put into their place — his poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ uses the tools of the Devil to do the work of God. And it’s through the Devil that the goodness of God can become apparent… that we then can see that we do have a choice. God becomes then, a field that anchors it all, Devil, God, everything. This field contains everything actual and anything possible — while containing an inscripted navigation as to what is good and right for people.

So to go back to Deleuze, what is right and good for people as a society is what mutually increases their power — what allows them to coexist in harmony. It is of no small coincidence then, that this relationship is much like the Cohesion of the Almighty. On the one hand, the big picture is necessary — for us to be one, but to ride upon the Law and live it to its fullest extent would force us to lose our ability to have freedom. To use Jacob’s parable, the Earth is curved so we can’t tell what’s all around us — so we can do what we like, in a limited scope — even if it is to make mistakes. It’s only in the firmament where we can see all around, and experience the full blunt of it. Keeping the big picture in mind is difficult — as material creatures we are made to get what we can now, enjoy ourselves and satisfy immediate urges. Why wait? We don’t know what will happen to us next! So we end up with conflicting behavior that satisfies one aspect of our person but not another or we short ourselves in the long run for short term gain… and where does meaning fit into this?

Meaning fits into everything as the justifications, explanations, short-circuits in our daily lives that smoothen over the otherwise random assortment of information that would bombard us, distract us, vex us or otherwise provoke perhaps too much uncertainty in our lives. If we were terribly uncertain, it’s doubtful we would ever have children, or ever buy a house, or ever do anything. If we didn’t think we could finish what we wanted to do then most of us would probably never do it. I believe meaning is the tactical moves that assure us coherency in our personal internal lives.

In other words, meaning isn’t the inner workings of physics or math, or biology. The knowledge of science explores actual relations, insofar as we can test them. But that’s not meaningful. Rocks are not meaningful. Plants are not meaningful. Being alive is not meaningful. Being alive is biological. Evolution is not meaningful. The movie A Serious Man, one of my favorite movies, explores this issue. Larry Gopnik understands the math that he teaches in his class but he does not understand the story behind Schrödinger’s cat. He is always caught up in a series of diversions, wondering what the ‘truth’ behind any event is. Knowing or not knowing the truth is not important — the Coen brothers continually sink us into ambiguity, delay our reception of what anyone actually means or the actual intent of any character’s action. Gopnik then gets caught up in how that ‘truth’ of anything is both hidden and not at all meaningful. He can’t ever decide what he wants because he thinks he needs to know ‘what the intent of everything’ must be before he can figure out what he should want. It drives him to the brink, where he comes speechless, and only stares ahead.

This is very much the serious philosopher’s problem is. We think that the universe should somehow have a place for us, that what we want should somehow be apparent to us, written for us in the stars, in our surroundings, in life. We may come some day to understand how life works, how to stop death, how to create beauty and art — these things may become possible through science. But that kind of knowledge isn’t meaningful because it won’t tell us how to live or deal with all things personal.

This means then, that meaning is not universal. Meaningfulness is for US… each of us… independent of one another. It makes sense then, that our mental worlds are coexistent but also incompossible — that a gull of incommensurable, indefinite and indeterminate difference separates one mind from another … and that we aren’t privy to one another’s minds… even if we are all ‘made the same way’. We aren’t made to read each other’s minds. It would be bad for us if everyone else could read our mind… because we would be manipulated and abused. Our individual survival would be uncertain… yet ironically, as humans we are incredibly social and we DO need each other. Together we are strong. Under an Almighty, we are all the more Mighty. As a society, we do need those ‘universal’ inscriptions that having a God would define for us. It’s just that, while there is always a Big Other in any human culture who judges each of us small others (even if it is a reciprocity such as the Asian notion of ‘face’) only the Judeo-Christian-Islam traditions so directly gave Him a Voice, or should I say, the Word. And it seems that traditions in this tradition, such as Protestants, so individuated this Word so that it wasn’t a complex system like Confucianism or the Hindi-castes, but rather it was tied to a single soul, for each of us, waiting for us to become ripe, to gain awareness of it.

And that’s where I can’t follow. Personally, that’s too much like a road written in the firmament (although to some it isn’t…). To project such a path seems to me to prompt a kind of Lacanian hysteria — much like Star Trek — we would zip around the universe looking for something but not knowing what. On the one hand then, Protestants, especially Puritans, have a very dour outlook. They are serious. And now, we get to the most deadly of future-talks. After all, everything, all responsibility for their own relationship with God rests on their shoulders. What about their past? Their present? Their future? It’s all written in the sky. Without that relationship with God, there can only be nothing. But now that I wrote this, I don’t think that responsibility rests only with Puritans… In any group, understanding how responsibility is divided is important; be it on an individual, a family or a collective of some sort, any group needs its members to be responsive in a way that is coherent. I suppose though, by separating any kind of Word from meaning means I am writing this entry as a philosophical dead-end. There is neither impetus nor universal appeal because this kind of meaning is too individual. (It is, after all, one philosopher can hardly talk to another!) Nonetheless, what I have put here works for me (at least now)… although it is written mostly as a universal statement about human kind.

Perhaps ironically, as such a ‘universal’ statement, it must encapsulate an unnavigable void and include other minds… even though this statement most likely, is not meaningful for you.

Yet at the same time, it becomes a very special thing, when a home speaks to you about your future.