Deus scitur melius nesciendo (ritual, mysticism, America, experience, eternal)

[doppelgänger]

A little over a year ago, I read Constantin Brunner's Our Christ: Revolt of the Mystical Genius. Though flawed, the book was a treasure chest of interesting and astute observations about language and epistemology, mysticism and religion - which Brunner calls the "ideation" of mystic experience. Ideation for Brunner is the destruction of relative experience by rooting it in absolute language. For example, "God" as the experience of not knowing is destroyed by imagining it to be an ideated thing with "existence" and other attributes. But it's not just religion and "God" that is subject to the mistake of confusing the relative for the absolute. Brunner writes:

Our ideas are useful, but they are not truth, however beautiful and subtle they may be; they entail as little cognition as the web which the spider skillfully weaves to catch the fly.

Like Nietzsche, Brunner recognizes that language is a tool for organizing our reality in order to improve our ability to further our survival and our biological interests, not to capture the truth. Moreover, both Nietzsche and Brunner understand that the genuine experience of the truth occurs outside of language. Language creates a useful world of "things" for me to grasp and control for my benefit, but the world perceived through words and symbols, no matter how useful, is not a true world. In Book Three of Will To Power, Nietzsche explains:

The meaning of "knowledge": here, as in the case of "good" or "beautiful," the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation - not some abstract theoretical need not to be deceived - stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge; they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service.

In a very similar vein, Brunner explains that the reality of the "thingly" world we experience is very useful to us, but there is no absolute reality or truth to the world we create and organize in language. For Brunner, our "thingly existence" is the ego as constructed in social reality. As I'll discuss in future posts, he also commonly refers to this as the "relative 'I'". Following up on the idea that a world of things is not really cognitive, Brunner writes:

[O]ur knowing only applies to our body and is only valid for the practice of living. It explains why, if our knowing tries to go beyond the practice of our thingly existence in a thingly world and attempts to render cognition of it, this whole thingly world entirely crumbles. Things are not being; they are non-Being. And non-being here does not mean "absolute nothing"; non-being means non-Being, i.e. not being absolute. It means that things, as they appear to us as things, are not "there" as absolutely as they seem; this appearance of things is only that grasp of absolute Being which is available to our thingly existence. In other words, things are a construction on the part of our thinking, serving our egoism. Our thinking in terms of things is the framework we construct in order to live, including the no less marvelous infrastructure of our language. Things give us a hold on Being; words give us a grasp of things. Things are an invention on our part, and this invention "invents" words. And we relative things, human things, simply have to think as if things existed externally to thought.

To understand that language doesn't represent reality outside the mind is the first and essential step off the beaten path and up into the mystic. If I cannot recognize my delusions, I shall have no real power in this reality.

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

A little over a year ago, I read Constantin Brunner's Our Christ: Revolt of the Mystical Genius. Though flawed, the book was a treasure chest of interesting and astute observations about language and epistemology, mysticism and religion - which Brunner calls the "ideation" of mystic experience. Ideation for Brunner is the destruction of relative experience by rooting it in absolute language. For example, "God" as the experience of not knowing is destroyed by imagining it to be an ideated thing with "existence" and other attributes. But it's not just religion and "God" that is subject to the mistake of confusing the relative for the absolute. Brunner writes:

Our ideas are useful, but they are not truth, however beautiful and subtle they may be; they entail as little cognition as the web which the spider skillfully weaves to catch the fly.

Like Nietzsche, Brunner recognizes that language is a tool for organizing our reality in order to improve our ability to further our survival and our biological interests, not to capture the truth. Moreover, both Nietzsche and Brunner understand that the genuine experience of the truth occurs outside of language. Language creates a useful world of "things" for me to grasp and control for my benefit, but the world perceived through words and symbols, no matter how useful, is not a true world. In Book Three of Will To Power, Nietzsche explains:

The meaning of "knowledge": here, as in the case of "good" or "beautiful," the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation - not some abstract theoretical need not to be deceived - stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge; they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service.

In a very similar vein, Brunner explains that the reality of the "thingly" world we experience is very useful to us, but there is no absolute reality or truth to the world we create and organize in language. For Brunner, our "thingly existence" is the ego as constructed in social reality. As I'll discuss in future posts, he also commonly refers to this as the "relative 'I'". Following up on the idea that a world of things is not really cognitive, Brunner writes:

[O]ur knowing only applies to our body and is only valid for the practice of living. It explains why, if our knowing tries to go beyond the practice of our thingly existence in a thingly world and attempts to render cognition of it, this whole thingly world entirely crumbles. Things are not being; they are non-Being. And non-being here does not mean "absolute nothing"; non-being means non-Being, i.e. not being absolute. It means that things, as they appear to us as things, are not "there" as absolutely as they seem; this appearance of things is only that grasp of absolute Being which is available to our thingly existence. In other words, things are a construction on the part of our thinking, serving our egoism. Our thinking in terms of things is the framework we construct in order to live, including the no less marvelous infrastructure of our language. Things give us a hold on Being; words give us a grasp of things. Things are an invention on our part, and this invention "invents" words. And we relative things, human things, simply have to think as if things existed externally to thought.

To understand that language doesn't represent reality outside the mind is the first and essential step off the beaten path and up into the mystic. If I cannot recognize my delusions, I shall have no real power in this reality.

Why do you hate America, Brendan?

[Sunstone]

In other words, things are a construction on the part of our thinking, serving our egoism.

I think one key to understanding the ego is to recognize how it attempts to escape "death" -- not just the physical death at the end of life, but the moment by moment "deaths", great and small, of daily existence. The ego wants to be eternal. It cannot be eternal in a world that is flux, however, since it essentially defines itself as its relationship to something. To be in a relationship to a flux is to be a flux. Hence, things are very convenient -- they give the ego the illusion it is something more than a process, something more than a flux, something potentially enduring.

Of course, if I ever manage to wake up today, I might make my ideas a bit clearer here. My apologies if anyone finds the way I've expressed myself as less than clear.

[Sunstone]

How one deals with the "Relative 'I'" of Brunner is, of course, a way to describe ones spirituality. Some people seek to annihilate this "I". Some seek to reinforce it. Some seek to transcend it, and so forth.

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

To understand that language doesn't represent reality outside the mind is the first and essential step off the beaten path and up into the mystic. If I cannot recognize my delusions, I shall have no real power in this reality.

Neither the mind nor the senses re-produce reality anymore than a thermometer re-produces, in its read-out, the motion of atoms that it in some sense measures. Normal consciousness, normal awareness, is petty.

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

Like Nietzsche, Brunner recognizes that language is a tool for organizing our reality in order to improve our ability to further our survival and our biological interests, not to capture the truth. Moreover, both Nietzsche and Brunner understand that the genuine experience of the truth occurs outside of language. Language creates a useful world of "things" for me to grasp and control for my benefit, but the world perceived through words and symbols, no matter how useful, is not a true world.

The ego, too, is no more than a tool that, in some circumstances, is highly useful to the organism in furthering its survival and biological interests. However, it is a tool that many of us -- perhaps most of us -- mistake for our core self.