The word symbol derives from the Greek σύμβολον symbolon, meaning "token, watchword" from σύν syn "together" and βάλλω bállō " "I throw, put." The sense evolution in Greek is from "throwing things together" to "contrasting" to "comparing" to "token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine." Hence, "outward sign" of something. The meaning "something which stands for something else" was first recorded in 1590, in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. – Symbol - Wikipedia
All art is quite useless.
Poetry makes nothing happen.
the argument is that human beings and social systems composed of human beings are inherently, in Birhane's terms, absolutely unpredictable. And so any attempt by a technology to accurately predict human behavior, to accurately assess or represent human personality is essentially a doomed prospect that just won't work. And it will never.
Predictive models, due to their use of historical data, are inherently conservative. They reproduce and reinforce norms, practices, and traditions of the past
Given massive power disparity, those engaged in the practices of designing, developing, and deploying ML systems—effectively shoehorning individual people and their behaviours into prede- fined stereotypical categories
Ubiquitous deployment of ML models to high-stake situations creates a political and economic world that benefits the most privileged and harms the vulnerable.
They do not invent the future. Doing that, OʼNeil (2016, p. 204) emphasizes, “requires moral imagination, and thatʼs something only humans can provide.”
We have so far looked at how individual people and social systems, as complex adaptive systems, are active, dynamic, and necessarily a historical phenomenon whose precise pathway is unpredictable. Contrary to this, we find much of current applied ML classifying, sorting, and predicting these fluctuating and contingent agents and systems, in effect, creating a certain trajectory that resembles the past
Technology that envisages a radical shift in power (from the most to the least powerful) stands in stark opposition to current technology that maximizes profit and efficiency. It is an illusion to expect technology giants to develop AI that centres on the interests of the marginalized. Strict regulations, social pressure through organized movements, strong reward systems for technol- ogy that empowers the least privileged, and a completely new application of technologies (which require vision, imagination, and creativity) all pave the way to a technologically just future.
The film is challenging you to believe in magic. It's pushing you to the edge where science fiction bottoms out in fantasy, and fantasy asserts itself as the ground of dream, magic, myth, i.e. reality.... The horn of the unicorn is a middle-finger held at all the cynics, materialists, and ironists of postmodernity.
I see the unicorn as a direct challenge to the obligatory profession of disbelief and scorn before the possibility that the world may be grounded in the good, that meaning might override all our attempts to deny its existence, that faith and hope are better aligned with the Real than systematic doubt and despair, that culture is more than a function of memetic replication (as Dawkins argued).
This machine kills the fascist within.
— Slope of Function (@SlopeOfFunction) March 3, 2016
Los Angeles grew into a kind of theme park of the soul, a carnival of transcendence offering esoteric sources of entertainment, transport, and commodified wonder...There is a gnawing absurdity at the heart of this mystic carnival, this tacky tinseltown of snakeoil simulacra
According to Arkady Plotnitsky, images of thought realize themselves in scientific processes. His essay “The Image of Thought and the Sciences of the Brain” describes their influence on the disciplines of neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology (Plotnitsky 2010).
Locating truth as exterior to the subject, data science and Platonic thought both treat the vagaries of human interpretation as a barrier to their object. Per McQuillan’s argument, data science reinforces the Platonic vision which unites truth with totality, objectivity, and goodness, and discounts the value of the subjective and particular.
The digital mandate to representation seals off all terra incognita.
Because the digital image of thought idealizes representation, it heeds no limit to that which may be reconstructed in digital and mental formats.
Its effect on thinking may be likened to the infinite scroll, a web design technique which automates the renewal of content as one navigates across a website or application. The infinite scroll presents figures at an instantaneous pace that preempts the mental production of difference in itself. The thinker always remains within the remit of its offerings, which is to say that they cannot help but acknowledge its endless procession of prefabricated forms. The image’s relative infinity is taken as absolute, as no lines of flight are available to carry the thinker away. Computers “think” or yield information in this manner, as their outputs are indelibly linked (however contingently) with inputs.
These features have made digital information valuable in every conceivable sense. Digital capitalism is at least as dependent on the material world as the economic systems that predates it.
When data are able to move quickly, accumulate without measurable limit, and take on seemingly endless guises, they are ideally equipped to contribute to an economic system which presupposes limitless expansibility.
Their speed and modularity, which accounts for their economic value, is an effect of their immutable structure. In computer systems, this structure functions as a template for information processing. As an image of thought, it delimits mental activities in compliance with the technical requirements of computability.
The relationship between the rigidity of data and the malleability of digital media may appear as a paradox.
Yet the conceivable breadth of digital outputs does not exceed that of pen, paper, and other analog means of production. What distinguishes the digital from the analog is not the former’s range of expression, but the extent to which it is taken as a faithful bearer of the real.
Computers are granted the capacity for verisimilitude by the structural inflexibility of the datum.
As a precursor to human thought, the digital image would endow minds with the ability to function as virtually inexhaustible wellsprings of concepts. The currency of these conceptual outputs accords with the degree to which they accurately capture the external world, and their valorization transforms thinking minds into workers par excellence.
To characterize machines as “intelligent” is to conceal those aspects of mentality which cannot be translated into economic value. My presentation of the digital image of thought mobilizes Deleuze and Guattari against this campaign of obfuscation.
The fact that [Turing's] prediction has proven true does not render the figure of the “thinking machine” any less absurd.
For my part, I can’t imagine why anyone with real power over AI wouldn’t slam on the brakes so that we can try to integrate these extraordinary technologies at something approaching a normal mammal pace
With Altman, as with so many in this biz, the computational bias of computer engineering has bloomed into a totalizing psychology. As the CEO put it in a famous tweet, referring to Emily M. Bender’s critique mentioned above: “I am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” In other words, our brains are just running algorithms, making statistical guesses, and generating predictive processes that compose our reality almost entirely from the inside
Jobs increasingly fall into one of two categories: Either you tell computers what to do for a living or they tell you what to do.
Unlike humans, for example, who are endowed with a universal grammar that limits the languages we can learn to those with a certain kind of almost mathematical elegance, these programs learn humanly possible and humanly impossible languages with equal facility.
While scientists certainly seek theories that have a high degree of empirical corroboration, as the philosopher Karl Popper noted, “we do not seek highly probable theories but explanations; that is to say, powerful and highly improbable theories.”
True intelligence is also capable of moral thinking.
Note, for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, the moral indifference born of unintelligence. Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation.
Of the laws governing the mechanical slaves, I will menIon only three: automaIsm, uniformity, and anonymity
We are learning the laws and the jargon of our slaves, so that we can give them orders. And so, gradually and impercepIbly, we are renouncing our human qualiIes and our own laws.
Leibniz felt that the moderns had erred in ascribing this godless model to life itself. He set out to restore the uniqueness of life by positing that infinity was its defining feature. For Leibniz, even in their smallest parts organisms were machines – and therefore were machines ad infinitum, akin to onions that could never be completely peeled. Leibniz
If there is an origin trauma in Giger’s work, I suggest it is really the trauma of origins in the ancient Gnostic sense: of spirits who find themselves born, painfully, even hopelessly, into the world of matter, with all of matter’s pains, frustrations, and limitations.
While the “fall of spirit into matter” seems like a purely theological or mythic narrative, it has an uncanny reflection in what has become the accepted, fully materialistic account of the origins of complex life forms on Earth. The theory, first proposed by the Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowsky in 1926 and then supported by the discoveries of biologist Lynn Margulis (below) in the early 1970s, is now entrenched in biology textbooks: Over two billion years ago, changes in Earth’s environment such as an increasingly oxygen-rich atmosphere led bacteria to adapt in new ways, including by merging and coopting each other, sharing their genes and unique bacterial talents. Through a process called endosymbiosis, independent creatures engulfed each other and “grew together”—most often, perhaps, pointlessly and painfully, but every now and then forming mutually beneficial and stable unions that shaped subsequent life. This was the origin of the first complex, nucleated cells or eukaryotes.
Margulis’s story about our merging bacterial ancestors is inspiring and cool … as long as you hold it at a 2-billion-year arm’s reach. Can you imagine the horror of being forced to live out your life immobilized inside another organism?
I am inclined to take Lacan’s jouissance as essentially the same thing—as spirit or consciousness, the thing that separates us from inert matter.
Giger’s world shows us this dark threat of cyborg endosymbiosis: not to be simply augmented by machines (or even simply replaced by them) but to be parasitized and engulfed by them in a kind of numbed ecstasy that somehow masks the violence being done.
Donna Haraway suggested that even to hope for such a choice could be a mirage, because we have always been cyborgs: Language, culture, tools, all act on and in the body so thoroughly we could never unplug from them.
For Bacon and Newton, sheath'd in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.
fissile core of Macbeth
a cinema of the seer, not of the agent (actant)
The proposition that governs this book, Starry Speculative Corpse, is that something interesting happens when one takes philosophy not as a heroic feat of explaining everything, but as the confrontation with this thought that undermines thought, this philosophy of futility.
What Kant doesn’t consider is that reason might actually be connected to depression, rather than stand as its opposite. What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires.
This is the crux of the “horror of philosophy,” which we see in Descartes’ demon, Kant’s depression, and Nietzsche’s wrestling with an indifferent cosmos. Put simply, it is the thought that undermines itself, in thought. Thought that stumbles over itself, at the edge of an abyss.
Far from dismissing philosophy, I would argue that this makes philosophy interesting. Particularly if one “mis-reads” philosophy in this way. If we were to adopt a method, it might be this: read works of philosophy as if they were works of horror...The proposition that governs this book...is that something interesting happens when one takes philosophy not as a heroic feat of explaining everything, but as the confrontation with this thought that undermines thought, this philosophy of futility.
mysticism of the unhuman
Importantly, Angela [of Foligno] qualifies this by noting that the divine is “dark” not only because it surpasses human comprehension, but because in so doing it renders the human insignificant.
The Cloud is an example of what scholars have referred to as “affective Dionysianism,” a mixture of poetic and theological ruminations on the divine as inaccessible, incomprehensible, radically non-human. At its most intense, The Cloud advocates for a spiritual exercise that entails a successive stripping away of the self, so that it may be ready to encounter the impersonal, formless “cloud” of the divine.
Therefore, it is my wish to leave everything that I can think of and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think.
Granted, while the possible reply “there is nothing” does not prevent philosophy from continuing – if anything, philosophy finds a new task, which is to state, with all the contradiction it implies, “there is nothing” – the reply “there is nothing” prompts us to question some fundamental premises of both the philosophical project and philosophical thought.
Being is not one being among other beings, but that which is common to all beings.
This in turn leads to the necessity of thinking the divine as unrelated to the ontological categories of being and non-being – the God beyond Being, the Godhead beyond God. Hence in another variation Eckhart notes: “God is a nothing and God is a something.” This is a recapitulation of the Dionysian assertion of the nameless God, the God without attributes or properties, the God to which no name is adequate. Eckhart, in other sermons, will frequently describe this God-beyond-Being as “the One.”
In his commentary and exegesis on “nothing” Eckhart highlights one of the central problems in medieval philosophy – the nature of the relation between human and divine. In so far as the divine is conceived of in radically non-human terms (non-anthropomorphic, abstract, inaccessible, and “dark”), the divine is, in and of itself, not some thing among other things, not a being among other beings – the divine is, strictly, “nothing.”The dilemma, then, is how the human being, which is finite, actual, discrete, and bodied, how this human being can relate at all to the divine, when the latter has been characterized as non-relatable.
But Eckhart, too, runs into problems. For one, any careful reading of Eckhart must acknowledge that this talk about God as nothing, the immanent Godhead, and the arid, empty, unhuman desert is always doubled by an equal commitment to the Trinity, the kenosis or self-emptying of Christ, and a Person-oriented mysticism of Father, Son, and Human.105 Put simply, the “philosophical” Eckhart is always correlated to the “theological” Eckhart. Both are, perhaps, brought into an uneasy relation, and it is this assemblage that constitutes the “mystical” Eckhart.
One of the distinguishing aspects of the Kyoto School is their unique combination of Mahāyāna Buddhism and German Idealism
This theory was developed by Suzuki together with the Kyoto School. That was a group of Japanese philosophy professors, founded by a close friend of Suzuki’s, devoted to synthesizing Buddhist and Western philosophy. Their work was world-class—brilliant. Unfortunately, the main Western philosophy they chose to integrate with Buddhism was German Romantic Idealism. That philosophy is long-since discredited in the Western world. It is also, in my personal opinion, mostly wrong and harmful. Suzuki presented this mash-up as the original, true, pure Zen; but also as not particularly Buddhist. Zen was, instead, the mystical essence of all religions; just as much a part of Christianity as of Buddhism.
Microbes existing in the conditions of the absence of light or oxygen – indeed, feeding off of the absence of light or oxygen – are an anomaly for biological science.
Life is elevated and raised up, beyond the human and beyond nature, even beyond the divine. We can call this kind of thinking ascensionism, as it denotes the process by which the concept of life is raised up to the status of a metaphysical principle. Ascensionist thinking has two forms, both of which we can still see today
Schopenhauer’s sentiments regarding German Idealist thinkers is well known. He despised them.
But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scribbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that had ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity
Schopenhauer distances himself from Idealism by opposing the ontology of generosity that it puts forth.170 As Schopenhauer comments, “everywhere we see contest, struggle, and the fluctuation of victory, and… we shall recognize in this more distinctly that variance with itself essential to the will.”171 Schopenhauer provides a veritable compendium of examples from the sciences, though they read more like scenes from a monster movie: insects that lay their eggs in the bodies of other host insects, for whom birth is death; the internalized predator-prey relationship in the hydra; the ant whose head and tail fight each other if the body is cut in two; invasive species such as ivy; giant oak trees whose branches become so intertwined that the tree suffocates. His examples continue, up through the cosmic negation of black holes, down to the basic chemical decomposition of matter in the decay of corpses, where life is defined by the negation of life.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment --that of looking down within the --had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition --for why should I not so term it? --served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.
Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene.
His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in ) to that species of energetic concision --that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation --that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.
And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization.
In this class, we consider how we might encounter the divine (in whatever guise) as it manifests in exotica music, professional wrestling, avant-garde Happenings, and other cultural forms. And we will consider the all-important pro-wrestling principle of kayfabe: maintaining and protecting the Inside of a divine encounter from a hostile and uncomprehending Outside.
The Otherworld is always imagined as beginning at the edge of our known world....Scientism recognizes no Otherworld, but, as I intimated in my 'little history of daimons', daimonic reality has a way of subverting it. Thus scientism constructs its own literal versions of a transcendent and and immanent Otherworld. The former appears in the weird models of the universe articulated by astronomers and cosmologists; the latter appears in the speculations of nuclear physicists.
The subtaomic Otherworld has its own elegance and a certain stark beauty, as the physicists are keen on emphasizing; but iut is grey and meaningless compared to the world William Blake saw in a grain of sand.
the Zone is usually a singular, often unmoving place of anomalous materiality. Importantly distinct from magical phenomena themselves, “[t]he zone is the region, spatial or temporal or both in which the phenomena may occur;” it is an “‘order’ that is outside order.”
Indeed, it is my contention that Zones are instances where the noumenal mixes with the phenomenal; where the Outside intrudes on the Inside. The beaches of Kant’s Island of Reason are littered with constantly evolving and changing tide pools.
systematization and standardization of the human experience in the understandable world of the phenomenal is our treasured Inside...Furthermore, this set of rules that organize our experience of space and time “consistently and predictably” produce a homogeneity, a sameness that determines what Amy Ireland calls our “anthropomorphic regime.” Such a regime, she goes on, creates a sense of normalcy and harmony amongst us insofar as everything is “ordered, familiar, comfortable, and homely.”
Through the fabulations of fantasy, we test the Real, sounding its depths and learning, again and again, that there is more to this universe than any dogmatic con- strual would allow.
Unfortunately, getting any of it to work will require one thing that no book can give you, ... This is the seriousness that is integral to real imaginal play. In magic, you play for keeps or don’t play at all.
From JF Martel : Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality
14:47:36 From Dylan Burns : The psychologist Nathan Schwartz Salant used an image of a [[Klein bottle]] (3D version of moebius strip) to describe the therapeutic encounter. Both parties are in the bottle and in participation, and both are outside it, reflecting on it.
If Weird Studies has an overarching theme, it may be the hunch that the fundamental principle of reality is neither inert matter nor pristine mind, but pure event—that is to say, drama, story, poesy, act. There is perhaps no better way into this thought space than with the philosopher Nick Land’s *hyperstition, *the notion that certain subjective imaginings can, in time, become objective realities.
We will argue that by embracing hyperstition, one can make life a transformative process on the cosmic scale, a sacrament that leaves nothing unaltered, not even the remotest star.
Wisdom is whole: the knowledge of how things are plotted in their courses by all other things.
Three years since Annihilation came out and that bit about Stalker still cracks me up. Roadside Picnic/Stalker are zero influence on the novels, but definite influence on the movie. Which minorly inconveniences me in interviews. LOL.https://t.co/rh7vy9kraL
— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) May 17, 2021
The term was revived around the turn of the 20th century by Hans Driesch, a German biologist and philosopher, in connection with his vitalistic biology to denote an internal perfecting principle which, he supposed, exists in all living organisms.
the moment of kairos; the moment in which god passes you the mic
Radical mystery holds that mystery is not merely a contingent flaw in the state of our understanding, some lapse in knowledge to be supplied at a later date. Radical mystery asserts that the unknown — the hidden, the obscure — is not a lack at all but a positive and unexpungeable quality of things and events. Mystery inheres even in saying there is no mystery: I have long suspected that Richard Dawkins is a trickster sage, whether he knows it or not.
Art is the name we have given to humanity’s most primal response to the mystery of existence. It was in the face of the mystery that dance, music, poetry, and painting were born.
art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms.
Art breaks down the barriers that normally stand between the physical and the psychic
Samuel Coleridge described the imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception." (in Biographia Literaria (1817))
Human consciousness has access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy. I will refer to it in this book as the “imaginal,” the name Henry Corbin gave to the intermediate realm, central to the cosmology of the Sufi mystics, between the rational mind of Man and the inscrutable mind of God.
Didacticism exists in the “high arts” as well. Conceptualism, to cite just one example, is art that gives the concept—that is, the intellectual idea—primacy over the affect. While it can produce works that make important political points, often in clever and ingenious ways (think of Banksy or the early Damien Hirst), it seems to achieve the aesthetic emotion that Joyce ascribes to proper art only in very rare cases. That is, it tends not to astound us with the ineradicable mysteriousness of things (in fact, many conceptual pieces come with a written explanation that spells out the meaning of the work).
The role of the artist isn’t to manufacture illusions of meaning in a meaningless world (as a Kantian might insist) but on the contrary to excavate the real meaningfulness that lies hidden from the egoic mind—and to do this even if the meanings uncovered aren’t things we can humanly understand...For Kant and modern rationalism, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. For Aquinas, Joyce, and Wilde, it is the other way around: beauty exists as a fundamental reality that we, as beholders, can come to witness as something larger than us.
Before the beginning, after the great war between Heaven and Hell, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man. And to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness. And great armies clashed by night in the ancient war between good and evil. There was magic then, nobility, and unimaginable cruelty. And so it was until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity, and man forever traded away wonder for reason.
The argument is that neoliberal market fundamentalism—the view that markets alone can resolve the problem of how to construct social life in the face of unforeseeable contingencies—is a perverse and disavowed colonization of archaic divination rites, the rituals through which human cultures, on the basis of chance, have perennially sought for more-than-human knowledge.
As the philosophical father of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek was explicit that markets not only contained but were in fact constituted by uncertainty. And yet, appropriately constructed, markets were supposed to be forms of cosmic order so powerful they would overcome the inability of human beings to foresee the future. Aware of the looming contradiction that markets must somehow transcribe knowledge of the unknowable future, Hayek argued that only disciplined market actors could appropriately channel this order. By implication, those who knew the unknowable would prove it through success.
Market expertise...has come to occupy an ancient and perennial place in human culture, the site where human cultures have, from time immemorial, practiced many forms of divination: procedures by which human beings attempt to access knowledge of the unknown.
This book is an invitation to challenge neoliberal claims for the superiority of markets as a mode of dealing with chance, and to suggest that there have always been and can be again less deadly and more creative ways to engage with the unknown.
In this revolutionary book, Elie redefines the components of the technology needed to price and trade derivatives. Most importantly, and drawing on a long tradition of philosophy of the event, from Henri Bergson, to Gilles Deleuze, to Alain Badiou, and on a recent brand of philosophy of contingency, embodied by the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, Elie redefines the market itself against the common perceptions of orthodox financial theory, general equilibrium theory and the sociology of finance.
These things do indeed show us how superficial our science still is; but its littleness is made even more manifest when we consider within how narrow a range all our inquiries have hitherto lain. The instincts con- nected with the need of nutrition have furnished all animalswith some virtual knowledge of space and of force, and made them applied physicists. The instincts connected with sexual reproduction have furnished all animals at all like ourselves with some virtual comprehension of the minds of other animals of their kind, so that they are applied psychists. Now not only our accom- plished science, but even our scientific questions have been pretty exclusively limited to the development of those two branches of natural knowledge. There may for aught we know be a thousand other kinds of relationship which have as much to do with connecting phenomena arid leading from one to another, as dynamical and social relationships have. Astrology, magic, ghosts, prophecies, serve as suggestions of what such relationships might be.
Beans. Could it all come down to beans? We all wonder what that extra ingredient might be. If I had this extra ingredient in my makeup would I be a great composer, a great musician or a great mathematician? ... What is it that allows me to play? Could it be taken away? Could it suddenly vanish? Is it some property of my mind or brain? Could it be something external to me altogether?
Part of the genius of human intelligence is that we’re able to discern boundaries between ourselves and the world. But we could be wrong. About everything. Perhaps the boundaries we have imagined are not really there or have been incorrectly placed. Our cartography of the universe could be false, incorrectly imagined. In one of his last poems, Nerval wrote: “Often the most obscure of beings houses a hidden God; and like a nascent eye veiled by its lids, a pure spirit buds beneath the husk of stones!"
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. — D H Lawrence, quoted in The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote | by Simon Leys | The New York Review of Books
no trace of "mind" can be found in the natural instincts of animals
But a work of art is not transmitted or derived - it is a creative reorganization of those very conditions to which a causalistic psychology must always reduce it. The plant is not a mere product of the soil; it is a living, self-contained process which in essence has nothing to do with the character of the soil. In the same way, the meaning and individual quality of a work of art inhere within it and not in its extrinsic determinants. One might almost describe it as a living being that uses man only as a nutrient medium, employing his capacities according to its own laws and shaping itself to the fulfilment of its own creative purpose. (emph added)
They come as it were fully arrayed into the world, as Pallas Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. These works positively force themselves upon the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. ... He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were - a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will.
We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex. It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness. Depending on its energy charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or as a supraordinate authority which can harness the ego to its purpose
It is our intent to furnish evidence that the aperspectival world, whose nascence we are witnessing, can liberate us from the superannuated legacy of both the unperspectival and the perspectival worlds. In very general terms we might say that the unperspectival world preceded the world of mind- and ego-bound perspective discovered and anticipated in late antiquity and first apparent in Leonardo's application of it. Viewed in this manner the unperspectival world is collective, the perspectival individualistic. That is, the unperspectival world is related to the anonymous "one" or the tribal "we," the perspectival to the "I" or Ego; the one world is grounded in Being, the other, beginning with the Renaissance, in Having; the former is predominantly irrational, the later rational.
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within
Freedom just around the corner for you But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.
And with listening too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs that act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears
I cannot escape paradox when I look deep into things, in the crafts as well as in poetry in metaphysics or in physics. In physics, matter is immaterial. The physical world, it turns out, is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable; supersensible and unpredictable. Law exists; and yet freedom is possible. In metaphysics, life and death in the commonplace sense collaborate in rhythms which sustain life. The birth of the new entails the death of the old, change; and yet the old does not literally die, it lives on, transformed.
The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church.
An act of the self, that's what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center. We must mean what we say, from our innermost heart to the outermost galaxy. Otherwisewe are lost and dizzy in a maze of reflections. We carry light within us. There is no need merely to reflect.
They have never heard of e. e. cummings, who lived in their city, nor of the New York painters. ... But they know well the life of the subway, the office, the factory, the union hall, the hassle for employment;
I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materializes and de-materializes grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter- of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them.
I, like everyone I know, am instinctively motivated toward symbols of wholeness. What is a simpler, more natural one than the pot fired? Wholeness may be thought of as a kind of inner equilibrium, in which all our capacities have been brought into functioning as an organism.
In pottery, by developing sensitivity in manipulating natural materials by hand, I found a wisdom which had died out of the concepts I learned in the university: abstractions, mineralized and dead; while the minerals themselves were alive with energy and meaning.
Some secret center became vitalized in those hours of silent practice in the arts of transformation.
The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things.
One is supposed to be ... Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the seat of true power.
Well, and what is freedom? First of all, freedom seems to mean the absence of external restraint, the freedom to play. When we are free from external tyrannies, we seek freedom from our inner limitations. We find that in order to play we must be nimble and flexible and imaginative, we must be able to have fun, we must feel enjoyment, and sometimes long imprisonment has made us numb and sluggish. And then we find out that there are, paradoxically, disciplines which create in us capacities which allow us to seek our freedom. We learn how to rid ourselves of our boredom, our stiffness, our repressed anger, our anxiety. We become brighter, more energy flows through us, our limbs rise, our spirit comes alive in our tissues. And our gratitude is immeasurable for all the hours of labor that carry us forward.
he surrealists in France called it le point supreme and found it also at the center: le foyer central. When the sense of life in the individual is in touch with the life-power in the universe, is turning with it, he senses himself as potentially whole
We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do. Certain kinds of egotism and ambition as well as certain kinds of ignorance and timidity have to be overcome or they will stand in the way of that creator.
Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.” . . . In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark against what?” To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud”— and here he hesitated for a moment, then added— “of occultism.” C. G. Jung, Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, 1963
The hypothesis that the universe is a digital computer was proposed by Konrad Zuse in his 1969 book Rechnender Raum
I believe that consciousness, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff "pure experience", then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.
Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind. Representative theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.
What are the two processes, now, into which the room-experience simultaneously enters in this way One of them is the reader's personal biography, the other is the history of the house of which the room is part. The presentation, the experience, the that in short (for until we have decided what it is it must be a mere that) is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar inner operations extending into the future, on the reader's part. On the other hand, the very same that is the terminus ad quem of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc., and the terminus a quo of a lot of future ones, in which it will be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a physical room.
The bizarre fact that psychical research has made little progress since its inception lays the ground for an engaging discussion on the limits of the knowable.
These visions are both 'real' and 'unreal' (in a strictly materialistic sense). They emanate from the 'world soul' and the individual counterpart, the intuitive ego. They are an integral part of our existence which manifest themselves in different guises, based upon the prevailing culture of the percipients.
Through experience I have come to the realization that being understood is overrated. Once you are "understood" you are, in a sense, already dead. Mystery is at the heart of all great works of Art – and in the magical throes of the creative process one often finds oneself proceeding by intuition, by instinct – feeling one's way – thereby creating works that one never thought possible, and perhaps that even you do not fully understand. It doesn't really matter whether the audience likes or understands this kind of work, because the sublime has a life all its own, an integrity all its own. It defines its own form and fulfills its own purpose. And its very existence (whether society understands it or not, appreciate sit or not, wants it or not, loves it or not) can change the firmament of the universe.
The sciences of the time held, more or less, to the following schema: if we wish to know the mechanism of a clock, the fact of whether or not there are bacteria on its cogs and counterweights has not the least significance, either for the structure or for the kinematics of its works. Bacteria certainly cannot influence the movement of a clock! In precisely the same way it was considered that intelligent beings could not interfere in the movement of the cosmic mechanism, and hence that that mechanism should be studied with complete disregard for the conceivable presence of beings in it.
This unpleasant, even vexing impression derives, I think, from our regarding any synthesis of physics and the will to be inadmissible—I would even say, indecent—to the rational mind. For myths are a pro jection of the will. The ancient cosmogonic myths, in solemn tones, and with a simple-hearted innocence that is the lost paradise of humanity, tell how Being sprang from the conflict of demiurgic elements, elements clothed by legend in various forms and incarnations, how the world was born of the love- hate embrace of god-beasts, god-spirits, or supermen; and the suspicion that precisely this clash, being the purest projection of anthropomorphism onto the blank space of the cosmic enigma, that this reducing of Physics to Desires was the prototype the author made use of—such a suspicion can never be altogether overcome....the attempt to expound it in the language of empiricism smacks of incest, of a vulgar inability to keep separate concepts and categories that have no business being joined in an indiscriminate union
He converted me; I can even point to the place in A New Cosmogony that accomplished this. I refer to Section Seventeen of the sixth chapter of the book, the one which speaks of the marvelment of the Newtons, Einsteins, Jeanses, and Eddingtons at the fact that the laws of nature were amenable to mathematical expression, that mathematics— the fruit of the pure exercise of the logical mind—could prove a match for the Universe. Some of those greats, like Eddington and Jeans, believed that the Creator Himself was a mathematician and that we descried, in the work of creation, the signs of this His characteristic.,,Mathematics, an approximation of the structure of the Universum, somehow never quite manages to hit the nail squarely on the head hut is always just a little of! the mark...Mathematics and the world will converge,... when the work of creation has reached its goal, and it is still in progress. The laws of nature are not yet what they are “supposed” to be; they will become such not as a result of the perfecting of mathematics, but as a result of actual transformations in the Macrocosm!
For it is purely by reflex that we think of the entire material world as yielding to the following sharp logical dichot omy: either it was created by Someone (and then, standing on the ground of faith, we name that Someone the Absolute, God, the First Cause) or, on the other hand, it was created by no one, which means, as when we deal with the world as scien tists, that no one created it. But Acheropoulos says: Tertium datur. The world was created by No One, but all the same it was created; the Universe possesses Makers.
such disciplines as game theory or the algebra of conflict structures
At last a state of cautious neutrality was reached between Science and Faith, the one endeavoring not to get in the way of the other. It was as a result of this coexistence, touchy enough, tense enough, that the blindness of Science came about, evident in Science’s avoidance of the ground on which rests the idea of the New Cosmogony. This idea is closely connected with the notion of intentionality —in other words, with what is part and parcel of a faith in a personal God. For intentionality constitutes the foundation of such a faith. According to religion, after all, God created the world by an act of will and design—that is to say, by an intentional act. And so Science declared the notion to be sus pect and even forbade it outright. It became, in Science, taboo; one was not permitted even to make the least mention of it, lest one fall into the mortal sin of irrationalistic deviation. That fear not only sealed the lips of the scientists; it sealed their brains as well.
The Cosmogonic Game proceeds differently from that of chess, for in it the rules change—that is, the manner of the moves, and the pieces themselves, and the board.
My procedure was heretical in the extreme, because science’s first premise is the thesis that the world comes “ready-made” and “finished” in its laws, whereas I was assuming that our present Physics represented a transitional stage on the way to particular transformations.
Gödel’s proof could not have been drawn, because then the laws governing the constructibility of mathematical systems were different from what they are today.
"Yes", said Raphael. "Here you can only see a representation of a river or a muntain, but in our world – the other world – you can see the actual river and the actual mountain." This annoyed me." I do not see why you say I can only see a representation in this World", I said with some sharpness. The word "only" suggests a relationship of inferiority. You make it sound as if the Statue was inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all; Iwould argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal, and not subjec to decay." "Sorry" said Raphael. "I didn't mean to disparage your world" (p 222)