“The Mad Are Merely the Outvoted”
On closer phenomenological investigation of myself, the truth of the old adage gets clearer and clearer: ‘The made are merely the outvoted.’ Parmenides, the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher knew this when he asserted that the world was constructed by Nomos, or Convention, and not out of Physis, or what we now call physical Reality. (This was the beginning of the one-sidedness that led to philosophical Idealism.) The world is not discovered already in form, but its shape is hammered into it by Demiurges, or Worldsmiths. Blake depicts Newton as a naked Demiurge plying his calipers at the bottom of the sea. Thought and matter are shaped by the same movement. Our very perceptions no less than our conduct and ideals pass through the template of inherited metaphysics, which were originally thoughts arising in a private brain. Believe noone who tells you that is is all explained, that Science has all knowledge, even potentially under control. A false step may have been made as early as Aristotle. The ‘categories’ caused things to obtrude with so much definition from the flux of Being, in which consciousness and object were originally indiscriminate, that object acquired the full status of being, and consciousness vaporized, became invisible to itself, though it had once known itself quite palpably in the emerging out of concealment of Physis, of nature…
That was just one small segment of an unending scroll of speculation that continually unrolls in my brain and interferes with my getting a commonsensical foothold in everyday life. I am in much need of a butler to follow me about and buffet me with the pig’s bladders! Noesis and Noema he’s
concerned about and can’t tell his asshole from a boiled turnip!
You probably realize how susceptible I am to the charge of having nothing to say but everything to say about it. (Das nichts, as Heidegger would call it.) The first thing I could say about it (the Nothing, that is) is that it is nothing but a byproduct of abstract thought — there is, in other words, no such thing as Nothing, but it is merely a convention of mathematical calculation; (in that it could not signify any real entity, the Greeks excluded zero like a blasphemy from their world-loving, geometry-based mathematics. If nothing else has convinced me, however, that Nothing is more than a mere nothing, it is the fact that Nothing continues to be such a fruitful object for conversation: surely so much could not be said about what was really nothing but nothing…
This is really something like hanging the clouds in nets like Italian cheeses!
(I really should cut down on this self-mocking obscurantism.)
All kidding aside, though, our modern worldpicture, in its conception of the world as pure Object, quite irrationally overlooks the significance of its emerging into the light, of its being apprehended as object. The light which is our mind, one might say, belongs to the objects which achieve differntiate realness by it, and is the light of their being as well as that of the presumed subject or observer. This, I think, is the sense in which the Eastern sages experience oneness with (an) object: I and It rediscover that they are twiggings of one stem. Noesis and Noema. Beneath them, the unfathomable, the Ancient of the Ancient Ones.
This is called Ennumerating the Strands of the Great Beard. Or, St. Anthony’s Crochet Needles.
It is also called Weaving the Wind and Torus Hibernius.
Zu den Sachen selbst! To the things themselves. The banner disappearing in a fog.
Please forgive the little lurching siezures of obscurantism!