What is Philosophy

 Philosophy is a disquisition on the obvious. Staring at the everyday until it becomes uncanny. How does consciousness stick to itself? I don’t have to pay any attention to it. There it is self shining, enveloping every moment as I-I. There is no need to fix your attention on it. It is simply there. Samadhi must be where consciousness becomes self fascinated but without a definite content. It somehow locks on to itself and rests. The cache is cleared. It’s the final rinse.

A.N. Whitehead on Disorder and Order in societies (from Process and Reality)

 But there is not any perfect attainment of an ideal order whereby the indefinite endurance of a society is secured. A society arises from disorder, where ‘disorder’ is defined by reference to the ideal for that society, the favourable background of a larger environment either itself decays, or ceases to favour the persistence of the society after some stage of growth: the society then ceases to reproduce its members, and finally after a stage of decay passes out of existence. Thus a system of ‘laws’ determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates. (pg.91:’Corrected Edn. of Process and Reality’ eds Griffin and Sherburne)

I had to type out that paragraph in order to better get at the intricate meanings implicated in each other that have to be painstakingly unfolded and balanced against each other. It is a matter of subtraction and re-inserting. It seems to me that as he writes, the new ideas that occur are spliced in and do not fit neatly. He is not natively lucid.

His observations cover everything from the macro to the micro, from this ‘cosmic epoch’ to the adventures of protons. The same process is at work throughout though with the added boon of rationality in the human. There is an implication for political life there also. With mass migration you may have an element enter into national life that is antithetical to the culture, to what Whitehead terms its ‘satisfaction’. We may expect change towards adaptation or a mixed reception tending towards deterioration in the long run. When the majority of the receiving society has lost its sense of identity and the confusion that occurs with too rapid social change all kinds of demented adaptations will ensue. (Cf. Mattias Desmet ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ also ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’ by Norman Cohn)

Hundreds of years may pass before the culture stabilises into partial fusion or in the worst case, the domination of one sector over the others.  

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen ( Novel of the White Powder)

 Where were we with the Three Impostors?

Does it spoil the fictive aspect of the novel to know that all the stories told by the Three are pure fabrications purely designed to fool up their hapless auditors.  Dyson drawn into the world of yet another brother of Miss Leicester/ aka Leddy,  a victim of the white powder, at last suspects that he has  been wound up like a seven day clock.  Of course it just adds another layer of disbelief to the mix and embedded in their fictions is truth which we are told must come out.

Machen says somewhere near the end of the book that it is concocted out of unlikelihood and coincidence but such is the mystery of London that nothing is more improbable than what happens.  Anyway he may be exaggerating because there are connections within the novel.  Russell the egregious struggler who lives on bread and tea is a friend both of Dyson and ‘the man with the spectacles and the furtive scanning’.   Even in an impersonal city like London there are villages of artistic communities that know of each other, that meet and mingle.  All associates and the associates of associates are potential leads to the whereabouts of the hunted.   So it proves.

The gold Tiberius creates its own system of gravity.  For now  the sauntering duo, Phillipps and Dyson, who will exit the house down the drive will not cross the path of the killers who have escaped out the back.  However they have met the emissaries of Doctor Lipsius and if they report the grisly find in the abandoned manor would be wise to do so by way of anonymous tip-off.

'The Three Impostors' (novel of the Black Seal as told by Miss Lally)

 Must I remind you that it was the piquant Miss Lally that is leaving the house in the prologue with a dripping parcel?  And what that parcel contains? Her larky manner should not blind you to her thoughtful consideration of a suitable addition to the Doctor’s cabinet of horrors.  What unconscious confessions will the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ contain?

The format of the tale follows that told by ‘Wilkins’.  Poverty stricken in London about to expire meets a benefactor and employed by him goes on a journey leading to strange and terrifying events.  In a sense this is like those elaborate phone cons run by groups of thieves.  There is a script.  They follow it closely hewing to the fears and hopes of the ‘mark’.

Why are they doing it?  Wilkins tells that when he came back from America his fortunes changed utterly.  He now was welcomed everywhere and his bona fides were accepted without question.  We may conjecture that certain forces emanating from the dark side were looking after their acolyte.  

How did Miss Lally find Phillipps in Leicester Square?  The  rational sceptic is putty in her hands.  I see the coin is like a tracking device.  It brings earnest seekers to it to continue the slaughter that it commemorates.  The Three Impostors will themselves be confounded should they get hold of it.

Miss Lally is not a good girl.

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen (pub. 1895)

 There are books which you will have only read for the first time when you reread them.

You have been introduced to the impostors in the prologue which in reality is more like an epilogue to this palindromic storey.  Don’t be fooled by their insouciance, their lightness.  These are killers, after their prey whom they feel has stolen the gold Tiberius, a coin the only remaining of an issue struck to commemorate a great slaughter and thus imbued with a unique malignity.  Though gold it is magnetised with great evil and thus apposite for the aims of the doctor who had set the hounds of hell after the young man with spectacles, whose hand, right hand is in a dripping parcel.  “It comes from (the oozing) the right hand that took the gold Tiberius.”  The Doctor will appreciate this grisly token for his museum.

Bear in mind that this coin draws its seekers and its finders into a reticulation.  They must meet each unaware of the power that draws them together.

Dyson meets Wilkins:

The lies flow smoothly, glibly and with a malicious pleasure in their inner coherence.  One might say that Dyson’’s epistemic fidelity was flawless.  A liar sees only lies but might there be an occasional islet of truth in the sea of lies?

Who is Smith?  Is he the Doctor muffled in fable?  What was Smith’s mission in the Far West of the States?  It seems to draw the hostility of the natives.  “For every pound of gold upon the scales, a life.”  This sounds like an occult Murder Inc.  Who is availing of this service?

Remember that the prologue is more of an epilogue.  The young man with the spectacles has been found and despatched with extreme prejudice quite as awful as was done in the States.  That would refer to the story told by Mr. Wilkins.  Note that Phillipps and Dyson are approaching the house where the torture has taken place as the Three Impostors have just left.  They are likely to encounter them as they go on their way and thereby the spell of the gold Tiberius will be consummated.

Now read on:

Ernst Cassirer on 'Myth and Religion'

 The question I ask as I attempt to plumb some philosopher is ‘what is his doctrine, what is the mainspring, the assumption, the very clearly indisputable central fact for his thought.  It might be something like evidence: how do I know what I know:  It might be: what am I immediately aware of?  This ‘pole star’ as it were, can be so powerful a true north that other ways of thinking languish, shunned as unpresentable.  Ernst Cassirer whose ‘Essay on Man’ I have been reading does not consider some very important thinkers in his section on ‘Myth and Religion’.  Who and why? Leaving the former aside for a later post (James, Otto, Bergson only to controvert him) the principle behind his exclusion, what Coleridge would have called ‘the understanding of his ignorance’ is to be discovered in his neo-Kantianism.  Writing in the first book of his trilogy on ‘Symbolic Form’:

“Every genuine, basic spiritual function has one decisive feature in common with cognition: it is inherent in an original-formative force and not merely an imitative force.  It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but rather contains an independent energy of spirit through which the simple existence of the appearance assumes a determinate “signification”, a distinctive ideational content.  This is as valid for art as it is for cognition; it is as valid for myth as for religion.  They all live in distinctive image-worlds, which do not simply reflect an empirically given but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle.” (pg.7)

Upamana and Vedic Words (yet again)

 What can we do to naturalize the Vedic Words doctrine?  Why do I call it a doctrine?  It is a firmly fixed rock to which the crampons of epideictic thought are attached.  The Vedas are there forever, with each emission of the universe they remain unchanged.  They are apoureesha (not of human origin).  They act as the secret core of things that makes things to be what they are.  In a sense they are the esoteric Godelian axiom.  All this mundane reality rests on them, the secret seed of things.  They are the ground of grounding. (cf. general post on the topic of 'vedic words' etc: vedic words )

It is then not a surprise to find that Sankara’s teaching is similar to that of Plato’s.  There is a realm of ideas.  There must be. That doctrine to be naturalized must be put to the test of empiricism.  What do we actually do?  What is the procedure by which we gain the use of general concepts, ideas, universals or whatever you are having yourself?  

The pramana upamana (comparison) is a good place to start.  What make comparison possible, a procedure that we can operate?  May I suggest that the ultimate comparison is identity as paradoxical as that may sound.  A thing is found to be the same as itself.  It is what it is.  We know a thing as that thing by the fact that it is that thing.  Our first encounter with an entity is to accept that it is.  That is the default position true for all awareness even mistaken awareness.  Next step ontologically is to recognise it as a ‘some’ thing or as having an identity.  Does that not seem in-duh-bitable?  Such is philosophy with its fascination for the process of turning the obvious into the mysterious.

A thing is what it is.  The being or existence element though never found un-composed is the ontic, the ( ti on: Gk) what it is the ontological.  This initial identity spawns other non-numerical identities using as aids the striking qualities of the original.  The ur-thing is the natural kind that is not a composition of its qualities or attributes.

Identity does not arise in a temporal sense.  It is now and for all time the ground of upamana.  The identity of a thing with itself is eternal, has no beginning and does not last.  Vedic in short if we take that expression as a metaphor.