Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id IAA24929 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 11 May 2000 08:16:25 +0100 Message-Id: <200005110714.DAA12118@mail4.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 02:18:32 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable Subject: The Human Dialectic of Absolute Premises, Pt. III X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
IV. Church-State vs. People
Both of these systems of belief, as practiced by their dominant
organs, are monarchies - but not genetic ones. They are ideological
monarchies. Neither has much use for the criticisms of philosophy,
which they both distrust because they cannot control it. Both have
three dogmas that correlate nicely. These are: (1) the Statement of Faith
(Catholic - God is, and subsidiary dogma; Communist – God is not, and
subsidiary dogma), (2) the Personal Admonition (Catholic – love others;
Communist – labor for others), and (3) the Acknowledgement of
Authority (Catholic – the church/Pope is infallible; Communist – the
Party/President is infallible). One joins them only by publicly endorsing
their doctrines, and advances by being perceived by one’s superiors as
passionately conforming to them. The laity of each lack the power to
dictate the course of church-state actions; power issues from the apex –
the crowned head of the controlling minority of the ideological elite.
Each is plagued with the wide propagation of a more democratic
alternative (Protestantism, Socialism) which it regards as an obstreperous
and irreverent stepchild, for although each wants the world to accept its
views, each also desires the final disposition of them. Dissent is either
treasonous (contra people) or blasphemous (contra God); one punishes
it directly in this life, one indirectly through disposition of a believed-in
next. To join either is to forfeit it your rights. One is world negating, the
other is other-than-world negating. Each asserts that the only way to be
truly human is to embrace its faith. Both have collectively deterministic
views of history; one is determined by Mind (what happens is ordained
of God) and the other is determined by Matter (the evolution of the
distribution of material is the guiding force of history), and both
culminate in utopia. Both have a person to worship and a book to read,
and both have trained experts to communicate the orthodox meaning of
each to the mass herds, and to denounce forbidden concepts and
conceivers. The masses of each are constrained to take their words at
face value; the words of ideologues commissioned to propagate the
Faith.
That such similarities should manifest themselves in the relational
structures between these belief systems and their respective social
masses is not surprising. Correlative opposites mutually and
symmetrically define from a neutral or uncommitted perspective; us-them
only manifests itself after a Leap – in either direction. Marxism would
have to have a governmental system of absolute authority from below to
be in good faith with itself. Lacking time and a practicable paradigm from
which to develop such a system, the closest available, complementary
alternative was employed – a governmental system of absolute authority
from above, the model of its ideological antithesis and methodological
twin, Christianity. The adoption of this internal self-contradiction
festered in the heart of the Soviet system, and in the end, facilitated its
demise.
V. The Social Subsumption
Feuerbach’s work was brilliant and insightful, and at first one might
suspect that Marx had betrayed him by placing the God of Matter upon
the throne from which Feuerbach had only recently removed the God of
Mind. Actually, Feuerbach had only dealt with one side of the question,
and Marx embarked upon the first movement of the other side when he
crystallized Matter into an icon. That Apollo had been given away,
missed, and reclaimed by humanity was an incomplete resolution of the
situation; the same dialectic had to be traversed in Dionysian terms.
Chaos and Order are co-primordial, and neither can be apprehended
absolutely by humankind, only believed in (a major problem in computer
science is the inability to construct a truly random number generator;
any pattern – including the Kantian categories of space, time and
causality - necessarily begets pattern). At the same instant that
humanity became aware of mind, that is, when humanity began to
become human, humanity also became aware of body - a body that Marx
had enshrined and thus stolen from them. The thesis of Jesus, the
crystallizer of Mind, had been dialectically resolved by Feuerbach; who
would resolve the Marxian thesis?
It has been done, by Friedrich Nietszche. The majority of his work
concerns how humanity had divorced itself from its body. Nietszche
missed this body, and reclaimed it in his monumental work THE WILL
TO POWER. Nietszche did not write as Feuerbach did; he wrote not with
the Apollonian clarity of the dialectic, but with the Dionysian passion of
the hammer.
Feuerbach and Nietszche, the humanizers of Jesus’ God of Mind and
Marx’s God of Matter, the Promethean reclaimers of Order and Chaos,
formulated the restated thesis and antithesis of ‘God is’ and ‘God is not’,
which really said ‘Mindgod is and Mattergod is not’ and ‘Mattergod is
and Mindgod is not’. Their statements are, respectively, ‘Mindgod is
human’ and ‘Mattergod is human’. Now these must be combined into
the next synthesis, the synthesis not yet widely spoken but of which the
world is already implicitly aware. It is this: Mindgod and Mattergod are
the thesis and antithesis which are synthesized in humanity.
This can be intuited even in Aristotle’s hylomorphic composition of
the world, although he did not apply it to humanity. For Aristotle, things
are contingent phenomenal syntheses of noumenal absolutes. So are
humans, but incredibly enriched! Human contingency is the dynamic
and never-completed synthesis of opposing absolutes, which itself can
only apprehend in contingent terms, but in two opposing yet
complementary directions. There are in constant interplay with each
other and their names are intuitive right-brain synthesis into unity (from
Matter to Mind) and intellectual left-brain analysis into multiplicity (from
Mind to Matter). In these two modes of self-consciousness, which are
synthesis reflecting upon analysis (which assumes the synthetic whole
in order to analyze) and analysis reflecting upon synthesis (which
assumes the analytic parts in order to synthesize), the former views their
human conjunction as Mind ruling Matter and the latter views it as
Matter ruling Mind. Each, like Jesus and Marx, Feuerbach and
Nietszche, is partly right and partly wrong, for each focused on a single
aspect of the human coin. Neither rules and both do, each by consent of
the other. This is the paradox of contingency, which frees history from
the determinism of either side alone while still allowing for the interplay
of trends, and humanity from the imperative to follow one side of
existence exclusively, while still leaving humanity its humanness. The
bare existence or lack of same of either absolute is nonrelational to
humankind, which is free for each of its individual members to
subjectively and intersubjectively experience the plenitude of contingent
synthanalytic existence.
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