(for Professor Bradshaw’s PEGS & BIBBS
undergraduate
seminar.)
We stand before the secret of the world
where Being passes into Appearance,
and Unity into Variety. The Universe is
an externalization of the soul....
“Who’s your favorite philosopher?”
Two people asked me, this week, a student
and a colleague, when I confessed philosophy
was my Undergraduate Major & Research
research..
The state of society is one in which
members have suffered amputation
from the trunk, and strut about so
many walking monsters—a good
finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow,
but never a myn.
Not “English,” I said. Didn’t major in English,
and I wonder: do Germans major in German?
Chinese in Chinese?
Socrates, I guess—having mostly only hear-said
acquaintance with post-moderns —though
Gregory Bateson (biologist & anthropologist)
and Douglas Hofstadter (computer scientist)
have had most impact on the devious way
I think I think.
The highest minds of the world have
never ceased to explore the double
meaning, or shall I say, the quadruple,
or centuple,or much more manifold
meaning of every sensuous fact.
Plato, then.
(when I remember no one comes to Socrates
but by the son, so to speak: Platonic love.)
Sitting beneath a lecturer ln Silliman Strathcona Hall
one autumn Saturday morning in the late 50's, snoozing
with a couple hundred undergraduate researchers, a
little birdir or some small winged messenger flew into
my ear:
Samuel! Samuel!
Either Plato or Aristotle:
These 2 stand-for the whole
divided House of Usher & the
rest is all variation, surface diversity
& relativities. You got to chose. No myn
can serve two magisteries. & don't be fooled
by differance, Sammy: IT's all ONE and the Many
Our science is sensual and therefore superficial….
The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics and
chemistry, we sensually treat as if they were self
existent; but these are the retinue of that Being
we have.
I voted for Plato & the Intangibles,
then: that team right there on the spot.
Ideas. Forms. Higher Laws & distant
drummers. No Things for me. Angels
dancing on a pinhead as many as I might
could immaculately conceive: Dominions,
Virtues, and Powers as it were, the unseen
& invisible university so to speak and who
knows what’s round the bend?
The chemist finds proportions and
intelligible method throughout matter;
and science is nothing but the finding
of analogy, identity in the most
remote parts.
Oh, sure: I can imagine.
I can reduce.
Manifest.
Embody.
Reify.
Personify.
Deify.
And then characterize &
mythologize so as to suit
my understanding.
The ambitious soul sits down before
each refractory fact, one after another,
reduces all strange constitutions, all
new powers, to their class and law, and
goes on forever to animate the last
fiber of organization, the outskirts
of nature, by insight.
I have to—I’m also an Aris-totalitarian. I classify &
categorize & taxonomize, systematize and organize so
as to use & abuse and make me some sense, damnit.
The devils in the details and I got to pay his dues.
Classification begins.
To the young mind, everything is
individual, stands by itself. By and
by it finds out how to join two things,
and see in them one nature; then three,
then three thousand, and so, tyrannized
by it's own unifying instinct, it goes on
tying things together, diminishing
anomalies, discovering roots running
under ground whereby contrary and
remote things cohere and flower out
from one stem...
But Plato's my boss, I say: deep grammarian &
eco-logician, him and his cerebral Socratic meat
puppets de-constructing common sense to a point
of no return, no openings, no pores, no exit so as
to say: THERE--how do you like them apples? .
But what is classification but the
perceiving that these objects are
not chaotic, and are not foreign,
but have a law, which is also a
law of the human mind?
Bottom line bottoming out and now what? Stunned
stupid as if struck by a stick and just right for the
beginning of study & the origins of philosophy.
Therefore science goes abreast with
the just elevation of the man, keeping
step with religion and metaphysics; or,
the state of science is an index of our
self-knowledge. Since everything in
nature answers to a moral power, if
any phenomenon remains brute and
dark it is because the corresponding
faculty in the observer is not yet active.
Italicized passages are Emerson, from “The Poet”
and “The American Scholar”
“Transcendentalism” and “Nu Age” represent close
to current manifestations of what Huxley called
perennial philosophy & they unsystematically
extend the Platonic conviction that Ideas (archetypes)
are like a deep generative grammar—not to be
collapsed, conflated, or confused with (say) the
structural and surface grammars that transform rules
into proper surface play & convention like
( X) the IDEA of basketball generates
(Y) structures and contexts for
(Z) performances of any
particular game going on
right be here now, say.
X Y Z & what are you going to focus on?
Just the game happening right now?
deck chairs on the Titanic?
Or something like it’s deep eco logic .
and surface contextual structures?
(If w could.)
What’s the difference?
What’s the relationship?
Are you idealist or materialist by nature?
“Transcendental” or Empirically inclined?
Not that you aren’t both, but which is boss?
Pretend there’s a gun to your head & you got to
choose. Vote. (No myn can serve 2 magisteries!)
See where you stand to lever the universe. On which team?
Or improve my terms and images. We can argue.
xxxooo, Sam
__________________
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