Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id CAA05896 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sun, 14 May 2000 02:40:29 +0100 Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.20000513213249.0079dce0@megalink.net> X-Sender: abyss@megalink.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.6 (32) Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 21:32:49 -0400 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: Kurt Young <abyss@megalink.net> Subject: Re: The Human Dialectic of Absolute Premises, Pt. III In-Reply-To: <200005110714.DAA12118@mail4.lig.bellsouth.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Would you be Kind enough to send Pt 1 and Pt 11 again please
abyss@megalink.net
At 02:18 AM 5/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
>Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
>For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
>see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
>
===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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