A Nonfiction Book
Preparing Attention Before “The (Lacking) Invisible” to Avoid Afflicting Plans of “The Visible”
It has been mentioned that we cannot avoid “maps” and “internally consistent systems,” which means the threat of Rational Impasses is everywhere. Affliction is Discourse, and its nature brings to mind something Joseph Heller wrote:
‘Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.’⁸³
“Spiritual warfare” is a topic which emerges throughout Christianity, and we might think of the battle between Affliction and Attention (Discourse and Rhetoric) in those terms. Spiritual warfare is strange though, for how do we plan for it? And where is it? It seems invisible. How do we plan for the invisible? It would seem we can only plan for the (“low order”) visible, and if we are naturally and “typically” orientated toward “the visible,” this would mean we are biased to plan at the expense of “the invisible” for which we can only prepare (with no guarantees). We must always be on guard and prepared, which will be notably difficult in a world that honors “planning” over “preparing” (as we’ll discuss), and at the same time we must be orientated “toward” something unclear and “lacking.”
The terms “lack,” mystery, the apophatic — these come up throughout O.G. Rose, and their centrality is hopefully clear. To touch on the topic which I will elaborate on further when I discuss the “nihilism” of Stanley Rosen, we will note here that the world today needs to “seek common paradox” more than “seek a common ground” (though this is difficult given the emotional and existential conditioning it requires). This has already been discussed, and the notion has political and socioeconomic ramifications which could help us describe a world in which democracy was more mentidivergent than neurotypical. The main point is that we cannot shift the “towardness” of a society unless we shift “the truth” on which that society is founded and organized, and this will in turn shift how the society’s rationality is “organized’ (as described in “Truth Organizes Values”). We have attempted to begin that movement by first showing how “rationality is essentially limited,” which then in O.G. Rose has led to us positing an “incomplete ontoepistemology,” which has implications for fields like sociology, politics, and economics. If Lacan is right that desire is also ultimately “lacking,” this should have significant ramifications for society — though it might not if we are stuck under Affliction and Discourse (A/A). We must think we need to change to change, and Affliction (with our “frenemy brains”) makes that thought difficult to entertain.
As we will later discuss, if First World Nations tend to fall into Affliction and Discourse (which is to say they slip from “high order thinking” to “low order thinking”), perhaps because material wealth removes the incentive to see beyond what’s in front of us (after all, what’s in front of us is nice, enjoyable, and makes us comfortable), and/or because we always have a technology, service, and/or good at hand which can solve our problems (as Illich discusses, and why would we want to “see beyond” our problem-solver?), then perhaps this sheds light on why First World Nations seem to fall into “The Great Stagnation.” Furthermore, if there are no religious “givens” (or “necessities” which would compel us to “look beyond” wealth in order to please God (or the like), a God who could also help us face the Lacanian “Real” we might also glimpse), then this contributes to us seeming to only have materiality by which to “orientate our eyes,” and what we seem to see in First World Nations is wealth. Where the category of “nonrationality” is missing, it would be irrational for us not to keep our eyes on that, and so we keep our eyes on what brings us Affliction. We give our Attention to what takes it away.
But how do we keep Attention? Well, based on everything we’ve said, everything which is “visible” in the world is precisely what can lead us to Affliction, so ultimately we must “keep our eyes on the unseen” (to allude to Paul), and what is something which can always and unconditionally prove to be “invisible?” Lack. Mystery. The Apophatic. Such is what we must orbit around to assure that Attention (A/B) does not fall into Affliction (A/A), but taking this seriously would require us to profoundly change how we live our lives and approach reality. We must make paradox and Hegel’s “contradiction” central after centuries of habituating ourselves to making equivalence and non-contradiction central (the profundity of the change required to “spread Childhood” cannot be overstated).⁸⁴
Due to “the loss of givens” and gradual loss of the plausible deniability that “an ultimate ground is possible,” increasingly more and more people find themselves reacting to existential anxiety in a way that tends to be either fascist or isolationist. We are all increasingly philosophical and existential, and in the midst of this transformation the social ends up sacrificed, for as Donald Livingston taught in light of Hume, ‘[t]here cannot be a community of philosophers each instantiating his own heroic act of total transcendence.’⁸⁵ There are Children here and there, but this isn’t enough: we need more so a milieu of Children (as Dave at Theory Underground discusses), which means we need to “spread Childhood.” To quote Dr. Livingston again (as also discussed in The Absolute Choice):
‘This discovery that philosophy is inconsistent with itself and with the critical thinking which achieves the reform that renders philosophy self-coherent is expressed by Hume in a dialectical circle of thought. Philosophers who have passed through this disturbing circle [emphasis added] of philosophical self-understanding Hume calls ‘true philosophers.’ Those who have not reached the level of self-awareness in which philosophical reflection itself is seen as a problem and so have not themselves instantiated the dialectical circle are ‘false philosophers.’ ’⁸⁶
To “spread Childhood” is to “spread true philosophy,” which is a philosophy that moves through Being, Essence, and Concept (to allude to Hegel). Hume is a friend in this effort, who defended “a science of man” as foundational, which is a defense of Attention over Affliction, but this is hard to stay true to, precisely because reality has given us ‘a mixed kind of life,’ which is why it is so difficult to ‘[i]ndulge []our passion for science [yet] let []our science be human.’⁸⁷ Even if we engage in philosophy, there is no guarantee we will avoid Affliction (A/A) in favor of Attention (A/B), as Hume understood, for he suggested we should be rightfully punished if we fail to bring our philosophical reflection to the realm of “common life” (‘profound research I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce […]’).⁸⁸ “Philosophical Melancholia” is what awaits those who engage in philosophy separate from “common life,” and this is what is spreading around the world with “the loss of givens” (Global Affliction).
Under this Affliction (and Discourse), since “truth organizes values,” what we do that we believe is practical, wise, moral, enriching…are all suspect and easily corrupted. If we make a plan that, for all practical purposes, is a good plan, we may “for good reason” simply end up deeper in Affliction, at which point we will easily become increasingly Fragile and yet sure we are Antifragile (to allude to Nassim Taleb). And then when the unexpected occurs, we’ll be broken. It’ll be too late. And because of Affliction we might not even realize we were in a trap (the worst traps are those that, even when they are sprung, we don’t realize we fell into, for those are the traps people after us can walk right into). To this point, in “The Parallaxed View #105,” Andrew Sweeny and Tom Amarque discussed how there could be a “life drive” just as much as a “death drive” (a point which suggests negentropy versus entropy, as Cadell Last discusses), and given the trouble with Affliction and Rational Impasses, we might say that “neurotypical thinking” might be a “self-effacement drive,” while engaging in “neurodiverse thinking” is a “creative drive.” If we are not intentional about neurodiversity (A/B), we naturally slip into living according to a “self-effacement drive” (A/A), which is to say we slip into Rational Impasses without realizing it or ever realizing it. We tend to assume that, in the end, we will receive a “final revelation” in which everything will be clear, but, at least in this life, this is not so, but this belief can still remove from us incentive to check ourselves to see if we slip into Affliction. After all, why go through the trouble and try to “spread Childhood” if “in the end” we’ll ultimately know the truth and be “dragged out of Plato’s Cave?” (Would Affliction let us think otherwise?)
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Notes
⁸³Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004: 409.
⁸⁴Worldviews are not alone in structurally consisting of paradox: justice, goodness, and perhaps all human values find themselves in similar situations. Justice is realized by processes which threaten justice (court systems can be corrupted, lawyers can fail, etc.), and yet without these processes, justice could prove oppressive. Goodness is defined based on “ideas of what constitutes the good,” but to those who don’t agree with these ideas, those who are “trying to do good” can be seen as forces of injustice. Truth is likewise arrived at through subjectivity, which means truth must be defined out of that which could make it a falsity. Values are often if not always in tension with the means by which those values are realized, practiced, and preserved, and so it goes regarding the society in which worldviews are situated and organized. We are always at risk, but that is perhaps also why we can realize value. A mentidivergence Child-like Simone Weil would see that possibility: they would not be stopped by “The Rational Impasse” we have described.
⁸⁵Livingston, Donald. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998: 25.
⁸⁶Livingston, Donald. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998: 19.
⁸⁷Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, Company, 1993: 3–4.
⁸⁸Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, Company, 1993: 3–4.
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