As Featured in The True Isn’t the Rational
Korzybski’s (In)sanity, Gödel’s (In)consistency, Barfield’s Rainbow, Leibniz’s Monads, Žižek’s Hegelian Ideology, and Pynchon’s Mad Love
‘The proof of arithmetic’s consistency could not be relative [but] had to be an ‘absolute proof,’ ’ but after Gödel such a proof was impossible.⁶⁴ He succeeded at oddly ‘proving that there are true arithmetical propositions that are not provable,’ meaning “proof” and “true” are not similes, meaning “consistency” and “correspondence” aren’t, and that obliterates any dream for a formal system.⁶⁵ ‘For a system to be consistent means that it does not yield any logical contradictions,’ and if reality is contradictory (A/B) as Hegel teaches though, no “consistent system” can actually be about reality — except perhaps by removing humans from it (without humans perhaps realizing it) (as discussed in II.1; Land waits).⁶⁶ This is what Korzybski understood, and this is why he might welcome Gödel’s work as helping us move toward “a science of sanity” — though oddly through a theorem that seems to suggest madness is our destiny (irony can gift).
For sanity’s sake, a concern of Korzybski is for humanity to establish an accurate understanding of humanity itself, and that entails accepting the fundamentally “abstract” dimension of the human creature (A/B), which he associates with “time-binding” (and that the impossibility of a “formal system” can point us toward considering). He writes:
‘Now, it is perfectly clear that of all the things with which human beings have to deal, the most important by far is Man himself — humankind — men, women and children. It follows that for us human beings nothing else can be quite so important as a clear, true, just, scientific concept of Man — a right understanding of what we as human beings really are. For it requires no great wisdom, it needs only a little reflection, to see that, if we humans radically misconceive the nature of man — if we regard man as being something which he is not, whether it be something higher than man or lower — we thereby commit an error so fundamental and far reaching as to produce every manner of confusion and disaster in individual life, in community life and in the life of the race.’⁶⁷
Korzybski believed that where identification was present and “is-ness” allowed to spread like a virus, “a study and understanding of man” would be impossible, meaning we would fail in our most important duty, and the loss of sanity would be proof that we were so failing. We could say that Korzybski emphasizes “time” because temporality as fundamental almost by definition means “is-ness” (A/A) cannot be fundamental, but instead something like “becoming” must be (A/B), for time is profoundly a matter of change. Where temporality is stressed, it will be unlikely that we fully “define” humans according to a stable “is-ness,” precisely because time entails change. And definitions like symbolic schemas are very important to Korzybski, noting that humans used to think a lightning strike was an act of God, and that this definition had a large impact on how they reacted to this event. He wrote:
‘when lightning struck a house, the population naturally made no attempt to save the house or anything in it, because to do so would be against the ‘definition’ which proclaims the phenomenon to be a ‘punishment for evil,’ any attempt to prevent or check the destruction would be an impious act; the sinner would be guilty of ‘resisting the supreme law’ and would deserve to be punished by death’.⁶⁸
Definition has a large impact on how humanity acts, defines what constitutes “practical” and “impractical”, and so on (“truth organizes values,” as The Conflict of Mind discusses). To the question “What is Man?” Korzybski writes:
‘I hope to show clearly and convincingly that the answer is to be found in the patent fact that human beings possess in varying degrees a certain natural faculty or power or capacity which serves at once to give them their appropriate dignity as human beings and to discriminate them, not only from the minerals and the plants but also from the world of animals, this peculiar or characteristic human faculty or power or capacity I shall call the time-binding faculty or time-binding power or time-binding capacity.’⁶⁹
Korzybski calls plants “chemistry-binding”; animals, “space-binding”; and humans, “time-binding.” This is because humans possess:
‘the capacity to summarize, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; […] to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; […] to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; […] to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom […]’⁷⁰
To Korzybski, humanity is in ‘which the past lives in the present and the present for the future.’⁷¹ Humans have the unique capacity to unify events, experiences, etc. “through time” into and within the human mind (for example, I can experience a girl yesterday named Sarah, remember her name two weeks later, and call Sarah to see how she is doing).⁷² Through time, I can carry a memory that, two weeks later, I organize my actions around. If I see a house one day, a cottage the next, and a castle the day after that, I can unify all these experiences through spacetime into the abstract concept of “building,” an idea that can help me think about, and live in, the world. Humans can “unify” experiences together “through time” and organize their lives according to the unities they create, making them distinct from all other living organisms on Earth.
As we’ve already touched on, while using our maps, we are prone to confuse “the abstraction of x” with “the actuality of x,” to confuse “the signified” with “the signifier.” If directly asked, “Is the word ‘cat’ identical to the-phenomenon-of-cat?” we know the answer is, but in practice, when we’re not thinking about it, the mistake is easy to “practically make.” We can act as if a person “who is an athlete” is nothing more than “an athlete,” a person “who is sick” is nothing more than “sick” — constantly, we can treat humans as if they are limited by the signifiers used to refer to them. Korzybski suggested that a reason for this problematic confusion was that humans weren’t aware of how much they knew the world through abstractions (as following from “time-binding”), and so Korzybski wanted to train people to be “conscious of abstracting,” and he developed various methods by which human could achieve this awareness (with a focus on temporality). Korzybski hoped the more conscious humans were of their “time-binding” and/or “abstracting” nature, the more mathematical and scientific humans could be about the world, and consequently achieve greater sanity and happiness. Similarly, it seems to me that the more humans accept the “essential inconsistency” of thought, perception, etc. (A/B over A/A), the more accurate, skillful, and true humans can be in their approaches.
‘Civilization is a creature, its creator is the time-binding power of man. Animals have it not, because they belong to a lower type or dimension of life.’⁷³ In a world without humans, “unified abstractions” would likely not exist, for they are made possible by a brain, and yet at the same time these abstractions could mislead us if we organized ourselves according to the wrong definition, framework, symbolic, or the like. ‘It is the counsel of wisdom,’ according to Korzybski, ‘to discover the laws of nature, including the laws of human nature, and then to live in accordance with them. The opposite is folly.’⁷⁴ To ignore Gödel is to guarantee folly, and we will miss understanding the ways which humans are “incomplete” and even “unnatural”: our “time-binding” capacity is ‘inborn’ and ‘a gift of nature.’⁷⁵ ‘Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings,’ he wrote, adding stakes to his concerns, and considers the idea that humans are ‘supernatural’ as one of those poisons (it can still be A/A, as Hegel understood).⁷⁶ Korzybski wrote:
‘The time-binding capacity, first manifest in [humanity], increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself, “If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thing supernatural.”
‘With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the ‘supernatural’ which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the ‘animal’ which he scorned. Having put himself outside the ‘natural laws’, he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.’⁷⁷
The supernatural has alienated humanity and left it with a false definition of “what is man,” leading to poor thinking and action (as depicted in the lightening example from earlier). Korzybski laments that ‘millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural,’ and that humanity ‘has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him […] [and consequently] he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it’ (as needed for dialectical A/B).⁷⁸ But wait, doesn’t Korzybski stress that the word “cat” isn’t the-thing-of-cat? Isn’t that supernatural? Not for Korzybski, because nature and reality are “dialectical” and consist of different ontological levels working in relation with one another. What we think suggests “the supernatural” rather for Korzybski suggests nature is more complex than we thought (not simply A/A), and Korzybski is adamant that we make multiple ontologies part of this world and nature, not project them away (as tends to occur when people discuss “the supernatural”). (He wants a “true infinity,” we might say, not something spurious.)
Korzybski seems willing to critique anything that keeps humans from seeing their uniqueness in this life, which is to say anything that keeps us from coming to terms and integrating with our uniqueness, which Korzybski describes as “time-binding.” He wrote:
‘Among animals, as all evidence shows, the enormous majority have, without human interference, nervous systems working usually in the ‘normal’ way; that is, according to the survival structure. ‘Insanity’ and kindred nervous disturbance are known only among ourselves’ (with “time-binding” capacities).⁷⁹
Because we can time-bind, we can go insane, and the key to sanity is “right ordering” which require “the right framework.” We extend ourselves through time, which means we must consider order and how we might order ourselves (‘[e]xtension and order cannot be divided. When we speak about ‘order,’ we imply extension, and, when we speak about extension, order is implied’) — according to A/A or A/B?⁸⁰ Korzybski believed that ‘the problems of order and extension are of paramount structural importance for sanity and our lives,’ and the only way we could address this problem was by taking “time-binding” seriously, which would mean we had to hunt down “is-ness” and rid it from ourselves in all areas (a move from Understanding to Reason in Hegel).⁸¹ Have we done this work yet, work which Gödel justifies? Have we gone insane?⁸² Whitehead warned that ‘the chief danger in philosophy [was] narrowness in the selection of evidence’ — perhaps why is found in Korzybski, connecting the question of sanity to the question of identification…⁸³
VI
For philosophers like Schelling and Whitehead, ‘[n]o system of philosophy can ever claim competition because reality itself is not a closed system.’⁸⁴ Gödel and Korzybski would agree, and furthermore “practically living” this way (versus just knowing abstractly it is the case) is central for sanity, and even ‘to prevent a civilization bedazzled by the mechanistic world view from committing ecocide,’ as Matthew Segall writes.⁸⁵ Furthermore, ‘[t]he mechanistic mode of thought [(A/A)] leaves sensitive, value-seeking, purpose-driven human organisms feeling like aliens on our own planet [(insane)]. It’s no wonder we’ve gone about destroying it for several centuries.’⁸⁶ In our current state, ‘[s]cientific materialism leaves us in the impossible position of having to deny in theory what we cannot help but affirm in practice,’ courting pathology.⁸⁷‘The universe endures,’ Bergson stresses, suggesting time is fundamental; it is against experience to say everything the universe “is” is either deterministically already finished (Einstein’s “block universe”) or reducible to atoms.⁸⁸ “The truth is the whole,” Hegel told us, and the whole strives to keep going versus rest in already being done. So goes our lives. So goes us. (Let us align with actuality. ‘[T]ime is being inscribed.’⁸⁹ ‘The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress.’⁹⁰ ⁹¹
‘[T]he problems of order and extension are of paramount structural importance for sanity and our lives,’ Korzybski argues, and yet it is unlikely we will approach this problem well when infected by “is-ness.”⁹² We require ‘a complete elimination of ‘identity’ and identification,’ which will be incredibly difficult give our habituation.⁹³ ‘Identification is found in all known forms of ‘mental’ ills,’ even those we don’t recognize as “mental ills.”⁹⁴ To resist this, Korzybski speaks of a need for us to train ‘consciousness of abstracting, or the remembering that we abstract in different orders with omission of characteristics’ (which we might describe as a movement from Algebra to Geometry, “things” to “situations” — and very Hegelian).⁹⁵ This would make us A/B, for a ‘consciousness of abstracting eliminates automatically identification’ (A/A): if we take seriously that we require words to know things, and that abstractions are real, the world cannot be a place of linear and simple identification.⁹⁶ It is always relational, processing, structured, and ordered, which means we are always dealing with “situation,” a term that often comes up in O.G. Rose to describe Leibniz (which suggests that Bergson is right when he claims that philosophy is ‘the study of becoming in general […] true evolutionism and consequently the true continuation of science’).⁹⁷
What we have said on “identification” could be aligned with what Owen Barfield called “idolatry” in Saving the Appearances (another book and thinker we could associate with “The Modern Counter-Enlightenment”), which can be contrasted with the relational ontology that Barfield famously describes in the opening of the book through the metaphor of a rainbow (which Gödel’s work could further help justify). And if Korzybski and Barfield can be thought together, we might say that “the science of sanity” depends on convincing people to “see reality more like a rainbow than an idol,” per se (our sanity depends on something at first glance seems bizarre). Anyway, Barfield opens the book studying a rainbow and asking, ‘Is it really there?’⁹⁸ Rainbows aren’t illusions, dreams, or hallucinations, and many people could see the same rainbow, and yet the rainbow couldn’t be there without eyeballs part of the generative process with rain and sunlight. It’s “there” like a cloud or tree, and yet observer dependent, but not restricted to an individual like a dream or hallucination (it ‘is a shared or collective representation’).⁹⁹ Perhaps aligning with Wolfgang Smith, Barfield then invites us to consider something:
‘Now look at a tree. It is very different from a rainbow […] But if the ‘particles’ (as I will here call them for convenience) are there, and are all that is there, then, since the ‘particles’ are no more like the thing I call a tree than the raindrops are like the thing I call a rainbow, it follows, I think, that — just as a rainbow is the outcome of the raindrops and my vision — so, a tree is the outcome of the particles and my vision and my other sense-perceptions. Whatever the particles themselves may be thought to be, the tree, as such, is a representation. And the difference, for me, between a tree and a complete hallucination of a tree is the same as the difference between a rainbow and a hallucination of a rainbow. In other words, a tree which is ‘really there’ is a collective representation.’¹⁰⁰
Are “trees” and “rainbows” so different? Barfield by this does not mean ‘the solid globe is as insubstantial as a rainbow. The solid globe is solid. The rainbow is not. Only it is important to know what we mean by solidary.’¹⁰¹ Barfield suggests everything could be “conditioned,” “relational,” and “processed” like a rainbow, which doesn’t mean “insubstantial,” but instead would suggest that what we mean by “solid” might not be what we think (based on independent objects that function as their “own ground”), all of which might align with “the anti-identification” of Korzybski (favoring A/B over A/A).¹⁰² Indeed, Korzybski would prefer us to focus on “visualization” over “identification,” and thinking of the world as “collective representations” would better align with taking visualization seriously, which requires process and relation (A/B). That said, how things are “visualized” also matters, for do we see ourselves “in nature” or “as nature” (a critical distinction for Barfield)? Indeed, that distinction matters, and Korzybski seems to think that visualization is more likely to lead us toward a vision of reality “as” versus “in,” which Barfield might appreciate and agree is needed for “sanity.”
In contrast to “collective representations,” which gain their being from participation and multiplicity, there is “idolatry,” which Barfield aligns with belief in ‘objects […] unparticipated [in] to a degree which has never been surpassed before or since.’¹⁰³ Barfield noted that ‘when the nature and limitations of artificial images are forgotten, they become idols,’ which if it is true that we’ve lost sight of how reality consists of participatory “collective representations” and not standalone “objects,” this would suggest reality is now idolatrous.¹⁰⁴ Another way to think about this is that in religions “idols” can be things which humans treat as existing as “their own ground of being” (without God), and if we believe in “things” today, which is to say objects “that are the grounds of their own being,” then we believe in “idols” (and so ‘valu[e] […] images [and] representations in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons’).¹⁰⁵ In religious traditions, to believe in idols brought punishment, and if today Korzybski is right that we have lost sanity due to an “identification” we can associate with Barfield’s “idolatry” (a risk we were not ready for that came with ‘the priceless gifts of accuracy and precision’), then perhaps the religions had a point…¹⁰⁶ To quote Barfield at length:
‘The earlier awareness involved experiencing the phenomena as representations; the latter preoccupation involves experiencing them, non-representationally, as objects in their own right, existing independently of human consciousness. This latter experience, in its extreme form, I have called idoltry.’¹⁰⁷
Today, we are unlike ‘the man of the middle ages [who] was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo,’ which is to say the world and environment were possibly once like a womb birthing us through our lives; rather, today, we are “in” a world to which we do not relate (suggesting why we might be alienated and “insane”).¹⁰⁸ The answer for Barfield though isn’t that we stop using thought to draw distinctions, no more than Korzybski believes “identification” should never be used in any form (as I don’t feel that way about rationality): both thinkers admonish what we might call “autonomous entities” or “autonomous identification” — they are both calling for a sublation, a movement for Barfield from “original participation” to “final participation.”¹⁰⁹
Owen Barfield’s metaphysics might contribute to “a science of sanity” and awareness that ‘participation was dead’ in Modernity suggests why the mistake of “identification” arose.¹¹⁰ ¹¹¹ Furthermore, we have touched on Bergson, Whitehead, Hegel, and others to suggest what kind of metaphysics would align with Korzybski to help us gain “a science of sanity,” and here, informed by Barfield, I can’t help but momentarily discuss Leibniz (who Gödel praised), as the great Austin Farrer commented on in writing an “Editor’s Introduction” to Theodicy (as the great William Wilson of UVA brought to my attention).¹¹² ‘Leibniz’s system is not an unmitigated spiritual atomism,’ Farrer insists, but instead tries to take seriously that we cannot discuss “building blocks of the cosmos” without imagination and representation (which we might associate with Wolfgang Smith).¹¹³ How then can we assume that “the act of representation” isn’t part of the building blocks? Personally, inspired by Anthony Moorely, what “atoms” are to “things,” I consider “monads” as to “situations,” which is to say a monad is “the smallest of all possibility situations,” a position I think Farrer helps support when he writes:
‘monads, [as] the ultimate constituents out of which nature is composed […] stand composed together from the beginning in a minimal order which cannot be broken up. Each monad, if it is to be anything at all, must be a continuing finite representation of the universe, and to be that it must have a body, that is to say, it must have other monads in a permanent relation of mutual correspondence with it.
‘The wonders revealed by that new miracle, the microscope, suggested what the intrinsic divisibility of space itself suggests — whatever organization is broken up, there will still be a minute organization within each of the fragments which remains unbroken — and so ad infinitum. You will never come down to loose monads, monads out of all organization.’¹¹⁴
Korzybski also stressed structure and relation “all the way down,” and we might see in Leibniz’s possible replacement of “the atom” with “the monad” a move that aids Korzybski’s effort. To use Barfield to explain “the monad,” we could say that there is a “range” in which a rainbow, as a “collective representation,” can be experienced: we can’t just be anywhere with just any sensory apparatus doing anything we like. There are certain conditions that we must meet, or otherwise we will not experience the rainbow. A monad is a “range for collective representation” (RCR), and where one “RCR” ends and another begins is where a new monad emerges. To put this another way, Korzybski speaks of chemistry-binding, space-binding, and time-binding entities, and we could say that each “category of binding” designates a unique kind of conditionality and monad. It might sound odd to suggest that rocks have a unique RCR, but though blind, rocks are able to physically touch other physical things, as plants have a sentience and capacity to feel and grow toward sunlight. Both rocks and plants then have a way by which reality is representable, say according to proximity or sentience, and even if these “modes of representation” cannot be made intelligible or remembered, if rocks can touch other rocks, and if plants are sentient, reality must be such where things can so represent themselves and so represent the world to themselves (even if unconscious). Sight is not the only means of representation, even if for time-binding humans it is arguably primary, and even if it requires ideas to acknowledge space-binding-representation and chemistry-binding-representation, it does not follow that representation requires mind (even if representation is in a way “meaningless” without it). In this way, we might say Leibniz is more “pan-representative” versus a follower of some “panpsychism,” which is to say everything in the universe entails representation (hence relation, “situation,” and so emergent potential, which also means that Leibniz might address “the ancestorial fossils” of Quentin Meillassoux). What though is “representation” without mind? Well, what is mind without representation? For Leibniz, it makes more sense to make “representation” primary (and please note that when we try to think “mind without representation” we are trying to represent something to ourselves, as we also try to “represent the idea” with ourselves and our minds).
There are no monads where there is no representation at all, but that doesn’t mean everything must be equally “conscious” or have identical experiences, for experience can vary with “conditioning” and yet the universe still be “there” with its diversity of possible conditions. Each RCR of each thing is unique, even if other RCRs share its kind (as space-binding, chemistry-binding…), and yet RCRs are capable of interacting in their uniqueness because there is a “shared world” and/or “shared condition” (every RCR is uniquely conditioned as itself yet shares conditioning with other RCRs so that they might interact and “touch”). Now, the “nervous systems” or sense-organs of say a human cannot be divided from its RCR, but that does not mean every RCR requires a human nervous system, nor does it mean that there cannot be diversities of conditions which generate different RCRs. When we speak of “the conditions that make possible a rainbow” (RCR), for example, these conditions entail eyes, brains, bodies, and the like, so we should not think of “conditions” as “object-based” and/or “non-subjective.” The sensory apparatus which makes a representation possible is indivisible from the RCR-situation, and in this way a “monad” deconstructs “the subject-object divide.” Furthermore, what we can represent, and what representation we can experience, is tied to our body (is it chemical-binding, space-binding…); Farrer wrote:
‘A fuller power to represent the universe is necessarily combined with dominance over an organized troop of members; for the mind knows the universe only in so far as the universe is expressed in its body. That is what the finitude of the mind means. Only an infinite mind appreciates the whole plurality of things in themselves; a finite mind perceives them in so far as mirrored in the physical being of an organized body of members. The more adequate the mirror, the more adequate the representation: the more highly organized the body, the more developed the mind.’¹¹⁵
This is a point that I think aligns with Rudolph Steiner, who Owen Barfield praised, for Steiner saw humans in need of practices for us to gain new “modes of consciousness,” and that freedom was found in this effort (which might also align with the Hyperhumanism of Carl Hayden Smith and Gurdjieff of Layman Pascal). The conditions of our body condition nature, for we “are” nature, and freedom and the role of imagination can be found in this (terrifying/beautiful) space. This point brings to mind Thomas Jockin’s work on “beauty and virtue,” and suggests why we need to cultivate virtue to experience beauty: virtue is essential in making possible the RCR in which beauty can be experienced. “Monads” could also be the smallest possible units in a world where Systems & Subjects by Cadell Last proves right, and the “monad” also suggests that there is nowhere in the universe where it is possible to “not have a mode” of some kind.¹¹⁶ Furthermore, if everywhere there is representation, why not make representation as emergent of “real relation” what exists versus “objects” without subjects?¹¹⁷ The monad makes observation, relation, situation, experience, “modes of consciousness,” and the like fundamental to reality, which means it is “situation all the way down.”¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁹ If there are always situations, there is further always representation, for the situation must be “represented” to the entities involved according to their conditionality (“binding’).¹²⁰ And if there is representation and situation “all the way down,” that means things are in a way “embodied all the way down,” for ‘[we] will never disembody the monads, and so remove their representative power; [we] will only reduce their bodies and so impoverish their representative power’ (a point with which Rudolph Steiner might agree).¹²¹ ¹²²
To review, what an “atom” is to a “thing,” a “monad” is to a “situation,” and where one situation begins and another ends is relative to the range of a given mode of representation (“mode” and “monad” are similar). A monad is where a situation can be broken down no further without losing the mode of representation: the plant-monad, for example, arising where there is chemistry-binding, begins and ends precisely where begins representation of the world as a plant so “represents” it. What is that like and where does that begin? We can’t know as humans, but Leibniz would argue we have reason to think there are points where plant-monads exists, relative to “a situation of plant-binding.”
There is no identification only representation, and each monad marks an area of representation (RCR). As there are different “bindings” for Korzybski, there are different “monads” for Leibniz, and we could say there is a plant-monad wherever there is “chemistry-binding” of plants, an animal-monad wherever there is “space-binding”; a human-monad wherever there is “time-binding.” This is not language Leibniz uses, and I might be writing a little too freely, but I find it helpful to understand “monads” when I think of them as areas of kinds of representations (generating phenomena unique to those conditions like Barfield’s rainbow), relative to certain kinds of “bindings.” Where there is an entity engaged in “time-binding,” the way reality is “represented” to that entity will be different, and hence this is a unique monad, distinct from the monad which arises where there is “chemistry-binding” and a different kind of representation.
Alright, great, but what was the point of all this metaphysical speculation? Well, that if reality is situation and Geometric, that means reality can never be “broken down” less than a monad without ending up in fantasy, and so that means at no level of reality can we avoid “consistency” and/or “relations,” which means we must always deal with maps (and so “the problem of internally consistent systems”) — hence, “the map is indestructible,” because situation is reality. We must live amidst conditions which can cause madness. We cannot avoid the need for “a science of sanity” (Korzybski) or “science of the subject” (Cadell Last, Hegel), and this might or might not be scalable (Belonging Again, Part II). If reality is relational, maps are unavoidable.
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Notes
⁶²Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 101.
⁶³Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005: 135.
⁶⁴Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005: 142.
⁶⁵Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005: 165.
⁶⁶Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005: 140.
⁶⁷Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 3.
⁶⁸Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 47.
⁶⁹Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 3–4.
⁷⁰Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 59.
⁷¹Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 60.
⁷²Please note that we might say “no formal system” is possible because “no non-temporal system” is possible, for time is relational.
⁷³Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 123.
⁷⁴Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 5.
⁷⁵Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 143–144.
⁷⁶Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 71.
⁷⁷Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 68.
⁷⁸Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood Of Humanity. New York. E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921: 69.
⁷⁹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 177.
⁸⁰Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 179.
⁸¹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 182.
⁸²Is insanity the cost of missing how ‘Schelling re-imagined Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a new inauguration of the transcendental method, releasing philosophy from the dualistic determinations and duties of pure and practical reason by rotting it instead in our aesthetic feelings of living process?’⁰¹ Gödel defends “intuition” against “formal systems,” as does Korzybski against A/A, and in this we can see an opening for thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, Barfield, Whitehead, Bergson, and others, who Matthew Segall well elucidates (which is fitting if all of these thinkers could align with “The Modern-Counter Enlightenment,” that critique of Kantianism which doesn’t assume Kantian metaphysics, as can Postmodernism). Korzybski seems to have known of Whitehead and might have liked his metaphysics (given for example that ‘Whitehead’s ontological account of concrescence does not include a kind of ‘immortality’ ’), for Whitehead is in the business of a philosophy that ‘strives to increase the generality of our metaphysical categories beyond their applicability to the tables and teacups of our everyday experience,’ possibly toward A/B.⁰² ⁰³ According to Segall, we can say that for Whitehead ‘[t]he universe is a living, self-making work of art,’ and might we say that humans as “time-binders” are artists?⁰⁴ (‘The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty,’ Whitehead writes, bringing to mind Thomas Jockin’s work).⁰⁵ (Didn’t Whitehead write the Principia Mathematica with Russel? Yes — is that not the life of an artist?)
It is interesting to consider Whitehead here, who can be brought in with Bergson, for both thinkers had critiques of time as popularly understood after Einstein. ‘Mechanical clocks quite literally flatten the passage of time into discrete unites of distance meant to represent seconds, minutes, and hours,’ and if we think of Korzybski’s “time-binding humans” according to this notion of time, we might be stuck in A/A, for space and time are basically equal to one another (perhaps because time is basically an illusion).⁰⁶ For clock-time, we define “aging” as a characteristic of things, as if some ‘accidental property of an underlying substance. Rather, the very essence of an entity is to arise, age, and perish’ (that’s what a thing “is”).⁰⁷ Time is fundamental and spacetime something more emergent from this capital-T-Time, which better aligns with A/B and Korzybski’s relations, in suggesting nature to be ‘an irreversible process of becoming, a creative advance.’⁰⁸ On Whitehead, Segall writes:
‘We are finite creatures with limited sensory organs and processing capacity. We do not experience the world of spatial relations in terms of infinitesimal points or the geometrical schemes built upon from such points. Rather, what we intuit in our immediate experiential field are whole-part relational structures, which Whitehead attempted to formalize in terms of a non-metrical topological scheme […]’⁰⁹
If we think otherwise, we will go mad (and please note how we might overlap this with the “nervous systems” that Korzybski often discusses). But what is sanity if ‘scientific models are always wrong? That’s the name of the game, after all: build a model and throw it against reality until it breaks.’⁰¹⁰ Well, sanity is this process of theorizing and breaking and theorizing again — that keeps us A/B, ever-relating and ever-processing. ‘Science is not ontology,’ Segall stresses with Whitehead, ‘[but] the making and breaking of toy models’ — it is in realizing and accepting this that sanity is found.⁰¹¹ And a cosmos in which we see ‘[s]pacetime [as] rather an emergent product of the relations among actual occasions’ seems better positioned to help us find sanity.⁰¹² There are many models in which this might be possible, between Kaufman to Whitehead (for who ‘nature must be an agent of its own evolution’), but arguably any model that moves us closer to A/B is better for sanity.⁰¹³ May a thousand such models grow…
⁰¹Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 68.
⁰²Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 76.
⁰³Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 80.
⁰⁴Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 83.
⁰⁵Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 83.
⁰⁶Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 99.
⁰⁷Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 100.
⁰⁸Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 100.
⁰¹⁰Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 102.
⁰¹¹Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 104.
⁰¹²Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 105.
⁰¹³Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 106.
⁰¹⁴Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 118.
⁸³Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 129.
⁸⁴Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 6.
⁸⁵Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 7.
⁸⁶Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 15.
⁸⁷Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul. SacraSage Press, 2021: 34.
⁸⁸Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 11.
⁸⁹Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 16.
⁹⁰Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 27.
⁹¹‘A perfect definition applies only to a completed reality,’ Bergson writes, and Korzybski noted how much of our fates are tied to definitions, and oddly a “perfect definition” as Bergson described is spatial and A/A, and so “perfect” functions as a simile for “self-effacement”⁰¹ Overall, Creative Evolution by Bergson is a work that provides a metaphysic which seems more “fitting” for “time-binding humans,” helping us gain sanity through a vision of ‘[t]he real whole [as possibly] an indivisible continuity’ (‘life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines’).⁰² Unfortunately, we can be our own worst obstacle for realizing this vision of the cosmos that can help with sanity, for ‘[t]he intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.’⁰³ We can never grasp “the whole,” and yet if we cannot at least be “toward” it, we will risk sanity. Furthermore, “greater sanity” and “greater intellect” might not correspond, for ‘[t]he more consciousness is intellectualized, the more matter is spatialized.’⁰⁴ Infected by “is-ness,” this makes sense, for we would need A/B in order to “temporalize” consciousness via intellect (suggesting that self-reference changes dramatically based on if under A/A or A/B). Could science help us avoid this problem of intellectualization and self-reference? Not necessarily, for though ‘[i]t is undeniable that […] no entirely isolated system [seems possible], yet science finds means of cutting up the universe into systems relatively independent of each other, and commits no appreciable error in doing so’ (science does not stop map-making).⁰⁵
It is possible to correct the intellectual through ‘the very inwardness of life that intuition leads us — by intuition [Bergson] mean[s] instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely’ (which we could associate with “consciousness of abstraction,” as Korzybski discusses).⁰⁶ Without this move, we are likely to “practically forget” that ‘form is only a snapshot view of a transition,’ treating “form” instead as “complete” (and hence “a perfect definition,” arranging us for insanity).⁰⁷ But if we orbit A/B, ‘if we treat becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms are no longer [just] snapshots taken of […] change, [but rather] they are its constitutive elements [and] represent all that is positive in Becoming.’⁰⁸
⁰¹Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 13.
⁰²Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 31.
⁰³Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 165.
⁰⁴Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 189.
⁰⁵Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 203.
⁰⁶Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 176.
⁰⁷Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 302.
⁰⁸Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 317.
⁹²Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 182.
⁹³Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 187.
⁹⁴Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 196.
⁹⁵Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 417.
⁹⁶Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 417.
⁹⁷Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1998: 370.
⁹⁸Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 15.
⁹⁹Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 16.
¹⁰⁰Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 16–17.
¹⁰¹Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 22.
¹⁰²We might think of ‘[t]he relation, raindrops: rainbow, [as] a picture or analogy, not an instance, of the relation, particles: representation,’ which is to say that we experience analogies and “pictures” of relations, which are not reducible to relata (“entities relating”).⁰¹ All of this makes “participation” essential, which suggests why “idolatry” is so problematic for Barfield, for ‘the practice of idolatry [creates an] impulse […] to destroy, not merely that which participation may become, but participation itself’ (at which “hard materialism” today might have succeeded).⁰² Unfortunately, aligning with Hume’s warnings against “autonomous rationality” (another idolatry), we have uncritically and as A/A (not as A/B, as Hegel understood was needed for this step) taken ‘the last and greatest step in idolatry which we call the scientific revolution’ (Vico weeps).⁰³
⁰¹Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 17.
⁰²Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 111.
⁰³Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 185.
¹⁰³Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 61.
¹⁰⁴Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 39.
¹⁰⁵Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 110.
¹⁰⁶Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 185.
¹⁰⁷Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 142.
¹⁰⁸Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 78.
¹⁰⁹I might be wrong, but Barfield seems to suggest that “drawing distinctions” and division was necessary for Israel to separate themselves from idols and “false gods” which arose in the nations around them: if Israel couldn’t claim “we are not that” and had to “participate” in everything equally, they could be corrupted. Likewise, without the capacity to deny relation, we might be defenseless to evil, similar to how Hume suggests philosophy is risky but also necessary for “self-defense” against power, manipulation, and so on. Unfortunately, the capacity to draw distinction to protect us from idolatry can itself become a means of idolatry if we were come to live in a world of “things” versus “relations,” similar to how philosophy meant to protect us from tyranny can become a source of tyranny in Hume.
¹¹⁰Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 63.
¹¹¹Where participation was gone, ‘[t]he appearances [became] idols. They had no ‘within.’ Therefore the evolution which had produced them could only be conceived metamorphically as a series of impacts of idols on other idols.’⁰¹ History becomes a story of idols “bumping” into one another, not things relating, participating, and influencing one another (a universe of a share “Dance” like described in Dante becomes impossible). But if instead relations are real and metaphysics participatory, then we must change how we think about “appearances.” ‘And if appearances are […] correlative to human consciousness and if human consciousness does not remain unchanged but evolves, then the future of the appearances, that is, of nature herself, must indeed depend on the direction which that evolution takes.’⁰² But wait, if Korzybski is right about “the virus of identification,” and that is something we have evolved into, is “the evolution of consciousness” a change into a mistake? An excellent question, a point on which I think we might be able to incorporate the likes of Lacan, Hegel, and Žižek, for we should not assume that “evolving consciousness” means “better consciousness”: the process could be a contradictory process (generating a tension within itself that forces movement — Hegel’s dialectic). This doesn’t mean there can’t be opportunity, but it does mean that every evolution of consciousness could be marked by new tensions and challenges we have to face and “lacks” we must learn to “integrate with.” In other words, “evolutions of consciousness” (and please note that ‘the evolution of nature [could be] correlative to the evolution of consciousness’) might only happen one “encounter with the Real” at a time.⁰³
⁰¹Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 63.
⁰²Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 144.
⁰³Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988: 142.
¹¹²Perhaps like Barfield trying to think according to prior modes of consciousness, as suggested by different literatures, Farrer seeks to elucidate Leibniz from the position of his historical age versus our ‘present metaphysical position’ (which was in decline for him, and also if current metaphysics is contributing to insanity, following Korzybski, a different starting point would be desirable).⁰¹ ‘If the body is represented as unity, it must surely be because it is unity, as the old philosophy had held,’ Farrer notes. ‘It is at this point that Leibniz produces the speculative postulate of his system. Why not reverse the relation, and make the members represent the mind as the mind represents the members? For then the unity of person represented in the mind will become something actual in the members also.’⁰² Leibniz’s move is to say that the unity of things is real in the mind and thus real in the world, versus say the universe is in the mind because it is in the world. Is this madness? It can sound that, like some Radical Idealism, but Leibniz is suggesting not that “the world doesn’t exist,” but that the emergent evidence of their being a relation between us and a world, subject and object, is the “representation” which arises and we experience. It is perhaps like Rudolph Steiner’s emphasizes how ‘[t]he conceptual system which corresponds to the external world is conditioned by this external world,’ and furthermore we aren’t “in” nature but “are” nature, and nature is representation, manifestation — a relation and process between mind and matter.⁰³ There is nothing humans can consider without representation, and if we imagine a world without humans, we are representing to ourselves through imagination a world without humans: there is “always already” representation, but this representation is not purely subjective, but instead more like Barfield’s rainbow, an RCR.
⁰¹Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
⁰²Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
⁰³Steiner, Rudolf. The Philosophy of Freedom. Kings Road, Whithorn. Anodos Books, 2019: 58.
¹¹³Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
¹¹⁴Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
¹¹⁵Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
¹¹⁶Could the monad by its own logic emerge to itself? Might something like “a formal system” based on the monad be possible, seeing as this system would entail an “incompleteness” in entailing a necessarily self-referential monad? What is a “formal system” that is monad-based versus atom-based? Would it still be a system if we couldn’t make any predictions based on it?
¹¹⁷The universe might have a drive to “represent” versus merely “survive,” to generate ever-more and ever-creative RCRs and monads? This might suggest Whiteheadian Creativity, as Matt Segall discusses. Might ever-new “representation” be the meaning of life?
¹¹⁸Please note that if it is “situation all the way down,” we can understand where evil can come from, because relation means there must be order, and order can be disordered, and furthermore different things can “bump” against each other if they exist in situation (a rock can fall and hit me, for example). William Wilson and Julian N. Hartt expand on this point in “Farrer’s Theodicy,” as can be found in Captured by the Crucified.
¹¹⁹“Situation all the way down” is a view I would align with Hegel, and if “the monad is a situation,” then we might think of the monad as a description of the ontological dialectic things entail which causes them to “become” (dialectics for Hegel is not merely an epistemological method but an ontological condition which causes tension and hence change). ‘What in the presupposition was original, becomes in causality, through the relation to an other, what it is in itself,” Hegel writes, suggesting the essentialness of relation for a thing to be itself, and hence a situation (‘it is now power in relation to an other and thus appears as a cause, but is a cause only in virtue of this appearing’).⁰¹ For Hegel, what manifests has more reality than that which does not, which means that which can be “situated” and “come into representation,” is more real and hence infinite (“the infinite” represents versus transcends representation, suggesting playfulness when Hegel writes ‘[i]t is not the finite which is the real, but the infinite’).⁰² Things come to realize a “self-related negativity” in themselves, which we might associate with “their impossibility of not being situated,” and yet thing experience themselves as “things” independent of “situation” (poising us for “insanity” and self-effacement). This contradiction (as Todd McGowan stresses in Hegel) hence drives “becoming,” and perhaps what entities are “toward” is precisely an RCR (A/B) which better accounts for themselves (like un-addressable anomalies drive paradigm shifts in Kuhn).⁰³
‘Thus the dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocity,’ Hegel writes, ‘is the immediate genesis of the Notion, the exposition of the process of its becoming.’⁰⁴ I might be entirely wrong, but this seems like “the becoming of a monad” to me, and what we might see is a movement of monads “toward’ an RCR in which they better “fit” in/for themselves (and hence a change in “mode of consciousness” which for Steiner is necessary for freedom). Each monad is driven by its contradiction (A/B) “toward” an ‘infinite reflection-into-self […] [a] consummation of substance.’⁰⁵
A human-monad is according to which ‘the manifold of given representations is so determined as to be brought into the unity of consciousness,’ which is to say in relation and situation.⁰⁶ Perhaps I am overreaching in bringing Hegel and Leibniz together like this, and if so I apologize, but if monads are fundamentally representative in a way akin to Barfield, the emphasis of Hegel on ‘Appearance’ as a kind of point in which ‘Existence has reached its completion’ (which is oddly also a point of its ‘own nullity’), I believe the comparison is at least plausible.⁰⁷ Critically, this “Appearance” is not ‘pictorial thinking’ but far more Geometric, something participated in and part of us (A/B).⁰⁸ Furthermore, “Appearance” is an emergence of contradiction (like Barfield’s rainbow emerges from/as relation); Hegel wrote:
‘But spirit is not the contradiction which the thing is, which dissolves itself and passes over into Appearance; on the contrary, it is already in its own self the contradiction that has returned into its absolute unity, namely, the Notion, in which the differences are no longer to be thought of as independent, but only as particular, moments in the subject, in the simple individuality.’⁰⁹
“Appearance” emerges from contradiction, and it is the tension of contradiction which makes an “Appearance” “come forth” into representation. Using Barfield’s rainbow example, we might say that my eyeball not being the raindrop or the sunlight, yet nevertheless unified via relation in a situation, is precisely the contradiction which makes possible the arising of the rainbow. Things that are not one another nevertheless function as if one another, and consequently something “Appears” that otherwise would not (which hence marks a monad). And it is this emergence which unveils or suggests the deeper essence of existence (‘Existence as essential Existence is Appearance’).⁰¹⁰ ‘It is when Existence passes over into Appearance that it ceases to be essenceless,’ and we might say that it is when the eyeball, rain, and sunlight “pass over” into a rainbow that they gain essence in being a situation, monad, and/or RCR.⁰¹¹ There is no essence where there isn’t a monad, for there isn’t “representation” or Appearance, as needed for “Essential Existence.” A paragraph to close from Hegel might elucidate “the monad” a final time:
‘What something is, therefore, it is wholly in its externality; its externality is its totality and equally is its unity reflected into itself. Its Appearance is not only reflection-into-an-other but reflection-into-self, and its externality is, therefore, the expression or utterance […] of what it is in itself; and since its content and form are thus utterly identical, it is, in and for itself, nothing but this, to express or manifest itself. It is the manifesting of its essence in such a manner that this essence consists simply and solely in being that which manifests itself. / The essential relation, in this identity of Appearance with the inner or with essence, has determined itself into actuality.’⁰¹²
“Actuality” is always a “situation,” and if Existence entails contradiction in itself that compels it into Appearing, which is compelled into Actuality — might we speak of a “telos” for monads and RCRs?
⁰¹Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 578–579.
⁰²Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 149.
⁰³Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 578.
⁰⁴Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 577.
⁰⁵Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 580.
⁰⁶Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 584.
⁰⁷Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 496.
⁰⁸Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 497.
⁰⁹Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 498.
¹⁰Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 499.
¹¹Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 499.
¹²Hegel. G.W.F. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990: 528.
¹²⁰This though brings us to a paragraph Farrer wrote:
‘But,’ our common sense protests, ‘it is too great a strain on our credulity to make the real nature of things so utterly different from what sense and science make of them. If the real universe is what you say it is, why do our minds represent it to us as they do?’ The philosopher’s answer is, ‘Because they represent it. According to the truth of things, each monad is simply its own mental life, its own world-view, its own thoughts and desires. To know things as they are would be simultaneously to live over, as though from within and by a miracle of sympathy, the biographies of an infinite number of distinct monads. This is absolutely impossible. Our senses represent the coexistent families of monads in the gross, and therefore conventionally; what is in fact the mutual representation of monads in ordered systems, is represented as the mechanical interaction of spatially extended and material parts.’ This does not mean that science is overthrown. The physical world-view is in terms of the convention of representation, but it is not, for all that, illusory. It can, ideally, be made as true as it is capable of being. There is no reason whatever for confusing the ‘well-grounded seemings’ of the apparent physical world with the fantastic seemings of dream and hallucination.’⁰¹
The world “appears” to us like it does because it appears to us (we “condition” it as part of its “situation,” as we ourselves entail necessary conditions for experiencing a rainbow). So it “appears” to animals and plants differently (according to their unique “bindings”), and so we could say that an animal-monad is “the smallest possible situation in which animal-representation manifests,” which is distinct at the point there is say a human-monad, which is “the smallest possible situation in which human-representation and/or time-binding manifests.” If there is a move from space-binding (animal) to time-binding (human), for example, there has been a change in monad, as evident by the change in representation and the way the world “appears” to us (to allude to Hegel) (which perhaps means “a change in relevance realization,” as Dr. John Vervaeke discusses).
‘It is useless, then, to conceive representations as simply coming into existence in response to environment, and modelling themselves on environment. They must all mutually reflect environment or they would not be representations; but they must also exist as themselves and in their own right or there would be no environment for them mutually to represent. Since the world is infinitely various, each representor must have its own distinct character or nature, as our minds have: that is to say, it must represent in its own individual way; and all these endlessly various representations must be so constituted as to form a mutually reflecting harmony. Considered as a representation, each monadical existence simply reflects the universe after its own manner.’⁰²
⁰¹Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
⁰²Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
¹²¹Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
¹²²Furthermore, for Leibniz, ‘what the monads do is to represent, and what they are is representation; there is no ultimate distinction between what they are and what they do: all that they do belongs to what they are. The whole system of action in each monad, which fits with such infinite complexity the system of action in each other monad, is precisely the existence of that monad, and apart from it the monad is not. The monads do not achieve a harmony, they are a harmony, and therefore they are pre-established in harmony’ (there is “always already” situation).⁰¹
⁰¹Allusion to Austin Farrer, as featured in Theodicy by G.W. Leibniz (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 24, 2005 Release Date), as can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm
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