ANTONIO ROSSIN:Mon Aug 20, 2007.
Of course I read The name of the Rose several times, and the movie too, and of course I enjoyed it very much.


GARY C. MOORE:
One key to the understanding of the novel is, relatively, how bad and misleading the movie is - in comparison. Obviously it is superior to movies of a similar type and subject. But, once again compared to the novel, it shows itself as a vastly inferior media by which to communicate ideas. This is relevant to education theory.

    Chapter *Nones* [142-154] is of great interest A movie is an abstraction of the novel controlled by the nature of the conversion from one medium to another. This applies not only to audio-visual aides in the classroom but also the very presentation verbally and textbook-wise to the student by the teacher. They do not - usually - DO what they teach, or, as the common American saying goes, If you cannot do it, teach it, referring to people who teach business and science. Things are vastly compressed and abridged for immediate though often highly confusing digestion. This is supposed to be the presentation of knowledge in a compact form that is still validly the same as the knowledge that is compressed.

    But just as I made the point about modern science not laboriously being worked through, in an *ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny* form, where one goes through the primitive laborious processes of doing something, for instance making fire from rubbing sticks or chipping flint to striking a phosphorus match, so as to understand how we came about the modern machine that helps in scientific research. This is not to denigrate modern science. In fact modern science is impossible without these machines. As the contemporary villain Robert Doniger says in Michael Crichtons TIMELINE [pg. 141, Ballantine paperback], *But today, no important scientific discovery could be made with such simple tools. The sciences are utterly dependent on advanced technology* [Crichton also says a number of very interesting things about Quantum mechanics - it is a very interesting book to read alongside Ecos THE NAME OF THE ROSE as both books demonstrate mixed interpolation of very modern science with moderate teachers modern science with medieval science].


    But with the educational compression and abridgement, crucial historical understanding of ideas - both Eco and Crichton make the same point in different ways - is wholly lost, and what knowledge the educator is trying to convey to the student is almost entirely lost or distorted in the process. Unless the student supplements his studies with a vast amount of reading - and therefore labor, the basic structure of *value* in both Adam Smith and Karl Marx - what he learns simply in class is mediocre at best. In some ways, military education - or variations of a similar theme such as hands-on-business to learn the real working of economics -is a far better model for educating in depth than academic education. In the military, the drill sergeant breaks the recruit down to nothing, no self confidence, no reliance on *previous knowledge* [mere assumptions]. Then the drill sergeant builds up the recruit again from nothing by learning every single material step needed for a knowledge of working military science. And it has always been a science, or appreciative of science, as Crichtons TIMELINE demonstrates. This is what they do at West Point. There you learn improvisation, technology and the limits of technology, and the philosophy of strategy which stands next door to outright politics. In France, after graduating from St. Cyr, the student does not become an officer automatically but rather becomes a buck private and for two years is expected to work his way up the ranks to sergeant before he can really become an officer. I think this is a methodology directly held over from the French Revolution, not the royal military schools like Napoleon attended. So they know how to clean and maintain a rifle, how to repair a tank, how to calculate artillery fire in the field, etc, before they get the privileged, but minimal, rank.


     So in contrast to this we might put modern education. How so exactly? Why specifically this contrast? What contrast am I referring to exactly? Military education actually reflects a much older form of education that has gone out of style since the formation of modern universities, specifically universities in the 20th century. First, what is the overall form of a modern university education? It is to teach you to qualify for a job, a mere blind process of life, according to other peoples demands. How so? The graduate is a person qualified to perform certain functions, not to determine ends or purposes - that is the employers right only. How is this different from a military education? The end purpose of an ordinary *job* is not yours, in fact, the end purpose has little or nothing to do with you. You may not even know what the end purpose really is, or it changes from year to year according to the newest catch words or form of corporate image. All that belongs to your employer, not you. This is true even of a university professor. Universities completely ceased to be repositories of tradition and overall recognized purpose in the middle of the twentieth century, if not earlier, and became mere job factories.
   
     But the basic values of the military man had to remain at least formally the same or the morale of the military declined drastically and publicly. There are numerous examples of this in newly independent countries as opposed to countries with an established military tradition. The basic values also were materially welded to a military education - essentially survival although the aspect of survival had to be forcibly changed from the individual - as in a modern university - to survival as a unit whether the smallest or the largest. This meant the identity of the members of a unit had to be maintained as a unit, and one way of doing this was maintaining the traditions of the unit either as a part or as a whole. I had a little bit of this when I was in the army - but I had unusual circumstances. Jud probably have much more of this in the British Army.


     What I am saying is that the military maintained aspects of the medieval guild system. That system was reflected in every aspect of learning a profession. The universities of the time also reflected this, and when you graduated from a university you still went into a master-apprentice relationship. Some professions today still reflect this as when a new lawyer joins a law firm. But not many professions operate that way any more, and there is little tradition in a law firm. You were apprenticed to a master and worked your way up starting at the most menial tasks until you were a master yourself. You learned all the traditions and meanings, the religious? Philosophical? symbolism of your profession, all of its history, a Why for everything you do that could change only if you achieved master hood yourself. The guild of architects, the Masons, is one of the most outstanding large guilds. Though little is known about the medieval guild of masons - keeping it, with difficulty since they were connected, separate from the Knights Templar and the later political aspect of Masons in the American Revolution and the Illuminati in its attack on the sovereigns of middle Europe during the approximate time of the French revolution - it is known, since it is carved in the hard to see corners of all the great cathedrals, they maintained the explicit symbolism of the Celtic gods and made common decorations like gargoyles still hard to explain being on purported Christian places of worship and wholly contradictory to the spirit and letter of Christianity. So essentially they were a society completely unto themselves. And most certainly, despite minor outward trapping at times, the military maintained a world view far closer to paganism than to the literal teachings of the Church. And every co-operation between the military, or politics, and the Church had a material reward usually for both but always for the military. So they also were a society unto themselves. The military and medieval guilds had members who shared a common purpose, a common understanding of the world from their professional point of view, and either kept it secret or assumed no one else would really be interested because they did not share the same values. So, where do we place scientists in this scheme I have described which is a public and established fact? They are products of the modern university. One might see a difference between academics and scientists working for corporations. But I find this ambiguous. What do you think?


     Adso is merely comic relief in the movie, whereas he is as crucial as William or Jorge in the novel. Those three represent three fundamentally different approaches to the same object of thinking. What this object is, is hard for me to identify. For one thing, a major - maybe THE major theme, in THE NAME OF THE ROSE is the identity of differences and difference within identities. One difference that MAY retain its form is the difference between the *simple* and the *philosophical*. Another major difference/identity is the love of God equal to the love of the flesh equal to the love of the mind [there are TWO, actually THREE, maybe four, different love scenes in synchronic and diachronic contiguity staring with Adsos conversation with Ubertino where the nature of sex is thoroughly confused, leading to Adsos confusion and rebelliousness against William that leads him alone in into the library where he remembers the religious ecstasy of a hertic burned at the stake in Florence, then his hasty departure from the library to the kitchen where he discovers a naked girl and confuses the mysticism of the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles with the discovery of real flesh - for Adso a mass of real and distinct differences made the same in actual experience - and it is explicitly stated as being such by Eco]. Jorge most definitely belongs to the later, the philosophical, and not the former, the *simple*. That is made clear himself as he himself distinguishes himself from the *simple* whereas William sees a similarity to them within himself, or rather his moral purposes, whereas Adso is a definite combination of the
*simple* and the *philosophical* - but then he is the one who most often finds identity in difference and differences in identity and therefore carries most of the burden of the central theme of the novel. In the movie Jorge is merely a narrow minded fanatic whereas in the novel one can see the rational necessity of his line of thought from his premises also accepted by the majority of people in the modern world, especially educators, politicians, and military leaders. William and Adso are out of place or out of date or simply contradictory to this way of thinking. It is Jorge who is most *Modern*. But you have to read the novel to understand why. Jorge is the *Organizer*, the CEO of the mind.



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
Yet Umberto Eco disappointed me, twice, both on the same point.
The first time, I sent to him a 45 page writing of mine, where I presented the rough main lines of my educational theory based on Dialectics. What I wanted to do, it was do deliver my pragmatic proposal about communication (of knowledge).
*** He answered me a 8 page thoughtful letter - at whose end, to my great disappointment, this sentence (I translate it into English from memory): "But finally, at a re-reading of your work, in front of the width of your project, I feel shy to give you further suggestions: I don't own the necessary competence"


GARY C. MOORE:
Considering how he has changed the major format of his writing to, at first, the novel where he can put both his own, *new* ideas [Eco has no illusions how *original* his ideas are - he is explicit about this in the POSTSCRIPT and elsewhere] next to old ideas of many different sorts - reflecting many different kinds of people, that is, a real world of people in contrast if not in outright conflict - with old ideas that have demonstrated longevity if not necessarily accuracy - although *accuracy* is shown to be, at least in part, merely a *point of view* of methodological application where many times an *old* idea that *failed* is now become a successful *new* idea, applied in a different manner - like Idealistic abstract thinking for instance. It does not have to be *True* in order to work and achieve its goal. This is a point William recognizes about his detecting method in his conversation with Jorge, that is, he arrived at the right conclusion from the wrong premises.
*** Eco has, secondly, changed the format of his *academic* writing to one with a great deal of humor and irony in it, both laughing at himself and laughing at the seriousness of the human beings around him. In a sense this shows his *academic* writing is taking second place in importance to his novels because the *academic* position now presupposes more fundamental propositions than it puts forward, propositions explicitly stated in the dramatic argument in the library labyrinth between William and Jorge where the ultimates of life and death are both literally and philosophically the issue and literally at hand, a debate that Adso in fact concludes with William in the midst of the horror and devastation of the monastery, thus insuring his ultimate importance in the novel completely ignored in the movie.
*** It is Jorge who perfectly defines the importance of Book II of the POETICS:


                                                ***QUOTE***

*Here the function of laughter is reversed [from being *base, a defense of the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebians . . . Elect your king of fools, lose yourselves in the liturgy of the ass and the pig, play at performing your saturnalia head down*], it is elevated to art, the doors of the world of the learned are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy, and of perfidious theology . . . .* [and from the preceding page] William: *Why does this one [POETICS Bk II] fill you with such fear?* Jorge: Because it was by the philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity has accumulated over the centuries . . . Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism . . . But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become . . . had become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary . [474 resumed] Then what in the villein is still and operation of the belly would be transformed into an operation of the brain . . . But from this book many corrupt minds like yours would draw the extreme syllogism, whereby laughter is mans end! Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But [475] law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for cancelling fear. . For the villein who laughs, at that moment, dying does not matter: but then, when the license is past, the liturgy again imposes on him, according to the divine plan, the fear of death. And from this book there could be born the new destructive aim to destroy death through redemption from fear. And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts? . . . But on the day when the Philosophers word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost . . . A Greek philosopher [whom your Aristotle quotes here, an accomplice and foul auctoritas] said that the seriousness of opponents must be dispelled with laughter, and laughter opposed with seriousness.*

                                               ***END QUOTE***
GARY RETURNED:

The problem, for Jorge, is not only laughing at God but laughing at death as Bakhtin show Rabelais doing with his characters. I do not think Jorge directly says it but I think Jorge, like Martin Luther, hinged the whole question of real human immortality not on anything God has done or will do or given us, etc, but hinged it purely on the fear of death. Not on Hell fire, though Jorge like Luther speaks a lot about damnation, but on the *blackness of darkness* [Jude], life simply ending and the erasure of the personality. He certainly accuses laughter of destroying the disciplining fear of death much as Hamlet did from the opposing point of view: *Who would put up with all this crap if one could end it with a bare bodkin.*



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
The suggestions he gave be, were about reading a lot of books and treatises which he surely had read: something like the Alexandria library! Indeed, KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE.

     My answer was still unanswered: what to do, with all of that knowledge? How to teach it? By making children read the same Alexandria Library?


GARY C. MOORE:
It would be much knowledge without form as I said above about modern universities versus medieval guilds. It is far too glib and easy dismissal of guilds as *outdated ideas* especially when those ideas keep being repeated piecemeal in contemporary history - and, being piecemeal, fail since their ultimate purpose is *out in the world* that does not care about context and meaning and not *in themselves* - for instance, labor unions. Guilds may have had less numbers in members but they had much more political influence in their time. Purpose asks what is the form of my life, its meaning, not in a supernatural way - other way to put your life in the hands of outsiders - but in the form of material accomplishment and practical actions - like avoiding death, surviving.



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
Now, coming to Eco's "the Name of the Rose". The book is a monument to KNOWLEDGE. For the abbey Library was "the greatest of Christianity". For the love of scholars for books.


GARY C. MOORE:
No, not scholars, monks, men religiously devoted to books as such, books of any sort whatsoever. Petronius SATYRICON was preserved in a Yugoslavian monastery, possibly an inspiration or source for Eco. They were devoted, firstly, PHYSICALLY to books. Secondly their reproduction - AND DECORATION which was related to interpretation- and then thirdly actually reading them. Never was scholarly work, in the modern sense of the term, ever performed by the monks other than casual checks for literal accuracy inefficiently carried out. And only around the Renaissance did they think to write their own books about these books unless they were being trained for an academic career like Thomas Aquinas - and then, much of the time, he did not himself write his books but dictated them to others.



ANTONIO ROSSIN:Mon Aug 20, 2007.
For William's method to match empirical reasoning with love for books.


GARY C. MOORE:
I do not think he is a book lover for the sake of the individual books like the other monks are. To them, the books are as much works of art in the very fullest sense of the term. In fact, the approach of the actual copyists does not simply reproduce the text - nor even simply decorate the text with pleasing art - but in the marginalia provides a space either for verbal commentary or pictorial ridicule of the seriousness of the text. Whereas William is an information collector. In this regard, he is different from both Jorge - who had been a former librarian and collected books, especially copies of REVELATIONS from his native Spain - and Adso who takes all images both in the books and in the church, including the inner library, with the greatest seriousness whereas William pays little or no attention to either.



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
For the damages knowledge could harm to the unprepared reader - up to the "hic sunt leones" dungeon where the worst book was carefully hidden, with the pages poisoned not to allow the whole knowledge to be spread.
*** All of Eco's novel is built around that secret book, and knowledge (of it.)


GARY C. MOORE:
Actually I would disagree. The book is an excuse to have a mystery. When Jorge and William have their final debate William admits he came to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. And, even more, it is difficult - I think very deliberately so - to discover the actual culpability of Jorge in the murders which at point poin the seems to admit yet at other points he seems to deny either wholly or in part. And this is when he fully understands that William has *caught* him so, as he says himself, there is no reason any longer to deny his part in the events. The question that remains despite all is, What were the events actually?


                                             *** QUOTE (page 492) ***

ADSO:
[in the face of Williams despair at solving the crimes]

*I could go on listing all the true things you discovered with the help of your learning . . .* WILLIAM: *I have never doubted the truth of the signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. I arrived at Jorge through an apocalyptic pattern that seemed to underlie all the crimes, and yet it was accidental. I arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we discovered that each crime was committed by a different person, or by no one . . . Where is all my wisdom then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well there is no order in the universe.*

                                             *** END QUOTE ***

GARY AGAIN:
There is much more of importance in that scene - William quotes Wittgenstein - but the point is the break down of communication - wholly - because there is no order in the universe [this is a simple way to put it - read the chapter to get the full meaning]. If there is no order in the universe, there can be no difference. No difference between heretic and orthodox. And especially no difference between the love of God as *spiritual* and the love of God as passion and sex. Ubertino really confuses Adso on this point. The passion of the Florentine heretic to be burnt astonished him. And then he meets a real woman and describes his feeling through the imagery of the SONG OF SONGS - which was a favorite text of monks and mystics - if there is any difference. I have known about the popularity of the SONG OF SONGS in the Cloister for a long time - but *scholar* wise it is always explained *spiritually* whereas poor Adso is confronted with real people who put real life into that text in the real world in one immediate event after another - the discussion of the Virgin Mary with Ubertino in the church, the rebellious trip to the library immediately afterward thinking of the passion of the Florentine heretic, then, frightened, stumbling into the kitchen upon a naked girl straight out of the BIBLE - a text proper people no longer read. But in his monkish tradition it was the most important book in the whole BIBLE - something the Catholics know very well today, but would like to forget. I find Christians absolutely amazing in their selective blindness.



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
Ok., Ok., also some thrilling, some sex too, to make the reading more delightful: but what remained, after the fire, it was the highest value of KNOWLEDGE ( witnessed by William, who risked his life to save two books from the fire, and the great mystery. What was the contents of the poisoned book?


GARY C. MOORE:
Theresa Coletti says the sex scene is the central scene of the whole book, and I agree. Unless you understand its importance, you do not understand the novel. And right in the middle of the debate Adso witnesses between Jorge and William, Adso thinks to himself:


                                          *** QUOTE ***
                                       ***pages 472-473 ***
*I realized, with a shudder, that at this moment these two men, arrayed in a mortal conflict, were admiring each other, as if each had acted only to win the others applause. The thought crossed my mind that the artifices Berengar used to seduce Adelmo, and the simple and natural acts with which the girl had aroused my passion and my desire, were nothing compared with the cleverness and mad skill each used to conquer the other, , nothing compared with the act of seduction going on before my eyes at that moment . . . Each fearing and hating the other.

                                         *** END QUOTE ***

GARY AGAIN:

What more proof could you need showing the centrality of passion in the novel over intellect, passion using intellect for its own purposes, than this? And where would a teacher, an academic go after realizing this in his own text other than to writing novels or papers couched in self-mocking humor?



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
Eco gives us some clues, to know what the poisoned book was. "the donkeys that flew, and the world topsy turvy", were the illuminations made by a (poisoned) monk who read last that book. Enough for us to understand that the book was Arisrtotle's "Comedy". A book that could have upset the fundamentals of knowledge. Yet Eco did not deepen this point, and it is the same point that I wanted him to collect, out from my rough 1973 typescript.

    This is why I despise the man Umberto Eco. He is a mastermind, true, he is a man with success, true, he is a top academic scientist, true, but he is shy, a coward as for how to question knowledge - what to do with it - and he has all the tools to do it.

     To Umberto Eco, like most academicians, knowledge is something to possess, to sip drop by drop, to enjoy from the power and fame and money it can procure.


     To get everything, except the criticism of the fundamentals of knowledge itself, and its owners. Except that which Aristotle's "Comedy" stood very likely for and which, far more humbly roughly and naively, my "Negative Language" stands for. See on this topic my "Dialectic Synthesis speaks Negative Language" attached, where I advocate systemic criticism (antithesis) of any truth funtamental (thesis); and a what to do with knowledge, to wit, my article "Democracy or Fundamentalism: which Education Model" at http://evans- experientialism. freewebspace. com/rossin08. htm


When I sent my typescript to Eco on 1975, I enclosed a check to pay for his answer, much like 1,500 US# of today -- otherwise he wouldn't have answered, he wrote in his courteous reply. What a shame.


ANTONIO ROSSIN:
I owe you some more explanations.

In my previous post with same subject I used the term "parasites" which use could appear inappropriate. Not so.

They are parasites not because they do harm, but because they do not the work that they are paid to do.

The fact is, here in our country (mine and U. E.'s) the academe and the universities are no private business. This means that the academicians, university teachers and institutional educators are paid with the money of taxpayers, so they are in duty to do what the taxpayers (PITS) ask them to do, and what the taxpayers are in need for them to do. BTW, in the Italy the average tax rate is 45% over, whilst in the U. S. it is about 20%, my daughter tells me from Missouri.

Well now, in my exposed case, I asked him for giving parents the information about a possible link between earliest language learning and mind-frame self-fixing in children, under parenting feed-back. As everybody knows as, today's parents are in need of such informations for a number of relevant reasons, and my question was clearest, and he understood it very well -- and I 've also paid him with my private cash to perform that institutional task of his own, which task he, unlike me, had at his disposal all the needed institutional tools to perform it.

But he did not do. So he results to have been paid twice (one with the university academic salary, the other with my money) for doing a work he should have performed because it was his job, but which he did not do just once.



RICHARD SANSOM:

Antonio, here is a general response to your post:

First you state that my remarks [and my questions regarding the criteria for *perfection*] are academic and theoretical.  I challenge you to show this is the case in light of what I said regarding the rearing of children.  In dealing with children only a fool applies some academic orthodoxy, and having raised six children I can attest to this fact.  Second, I respectfully suggest that it is you who are academic and theoretical in your structures of the four components you discuss.  Next, I asked the very straightforward question as to how one might go about establishing a criteria for *perfection,* [i.e. vis a vis child rearing and perfect people]  and what those criteria might be.  You did not answer except to get into how such a criteria could be communicated.  It seems simple enough to me: state them outright [e.g. one such criteria for the perfect boat would surely be that it must float!]  IMO, if one uses an abstraction such as *perfection* they must be able and willing to explain/defend its use – if not its utility.

ANTONIO ROSSIN:

   True. Since I was a simple parent in the street, about forty years ago, I had no special suggestion by the education officials about how to raise up independent, self-conscious, flexible children. Indeed, I had somehow come to considered that kind of mind frame to be the best one in order to prevent discomfort, psychical pathologies and drugs addiction in the youth – just the opposite of the fundamentalist mind frame. No education authority whom I’ve asked and urged for, gave me any reply. So I tried to do it myself. I drafted a theory.

Yet I am neither an academician nor an institutional educator, since I'm not paid by the collectivity for that task. I am a simply amateur who substituted himself to the institutional authority -- because I realized that there was a lack of any suggestion to parents by the qualified institution about raising up flexible children.

I but agree, children are raised up all the same, parents don’t need of any suggestion to do it but good sense only. But a number of mistakes are made by the unaware parents, and some hints to avoid those mistakes could be the case.

I've presented my findings in some writings of mine. Forty years ago, and thence on, I tried to engage the education officials (U. E. included) for filling-in to that empty parenting domain with the missing informations , how to deal awarely and responsibly with the zero-to-three aged children. I’m still waiting…

RICHARD SANSOM:
 

Regarding your response to my comments on the Nazi endeavors to create the perfect Aryan human, instead of simply refuting the endeavor as not only impossible, but horribly immoral, you said: *that is, they [Nazis] did perform no fair communication.* . No, that is not what they did not do.  What they did not do was to value human life.

ANTONIO ROSSIN: 

 They valued their own (human) life even too much, and managed to preserve it from any corruption coming from other people whom they were in communication with... Let's suppose, there is a number of ways in which we can understand and/or expose the Nazi craziness. Please notice, my above sentence, however insufficient to describe so monstrous a crime, was in order to explain communication and not to explain the massacre of so many innocent peoples.

Though here you make me remember of Cardinal Richelieu, whom is said he once stated: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him..."  


RICHARD SANSOM:
 

I recall in the excellent movie The Dead Poets Society, the text on understanding poetry had a diagram showing an X and Y axes on which some parameters of poetic value and meaning were assigned. 

Robin Williams, the iconoclastic teacher, who was later fired, tore up the text as being entirely unrelated to understanding poetry. We cannot, except at our peril, cast human behavior, characteristics, values, etc. in some functional form using lines and numbers.  Humans, IMO, are far too complex and varied – beautifully and interestingly so.

ANTONIO ROSSIN:

Humans are six billions over of different persons. But I was speaking of the barebone structure of communication. Let me recall: When you communicate with another person, you can either give or receive a given information, or a given object. When you discuss a given information, you can either agree (i. e., by speaking of it into positive language) or disagree (i. e., by speaking of it into negative language.) Plainly, to agree with a given information, you can write an entire treatise – or say a simple YES. Countless variations in between.

GARY C. MOORE:

Dear Richard, In the *First Thought* I wanted to delineate the stages of human efforts to understand the world VERY SIMPLISTICALLY.
*** I can see, now, what is happening here is an ongoing change in the paradigm of *reality*. I want to relate it to the psychology of how human beings actually think in the world of everyday life, *everyday life* being that for every individual in which they necessarily are forced to fit all their actions including all their thoughts however purportedly specialized in a theoretical fashion and deliberately intended to be separated from everyday concerns and motivations.

I think Jud would agree this can never be done realistically at any level or situation, that the purportedly most abstract scientific theory or experiment can never be divorced from the everyday reality around it but merely segregated to an extent by acknowledging and trying to define approximate boundaries where one starts and the other stops but that there never is an absolute divorce and that at some point in time, no matter how theoretical the endeavor, its place within the everyday world of concerns, motives, and average abstract thinking has to be taken account of. If nothing else, when the bills have to be paid.


RICHARD SANSOM:

Gary, as I mentioned in a post to Antonio [I think] the conceptual or what he called the *academic* has its roots in the practical and the *every day.* How could it be otherwise? As I mentioned, even the most complicated and arcane problems of physics and mathematics can be traced to simple [and practical] situations that, over time, have grown into what I call *knowledge problems,* that deal with abstractions. As for everyday concerns and motivations being involved, I agree; our motivations related to achieving success in any endeavor have fundamental and common ingredients – finding out why something is the way it is; discovering how to use or change it; absorbing the lessons learned, eventually into a canon of experience-based rules and theories.

GARY C. MOORE:

Then, with the invention of observational machines like electron microscopes, crystallography, and spectrometers and so forth we have information that is either not obtainable at all by any other means or which saves tremendous amounts of time, labor, and money. This is undoubtedly a good thing except that, for the common scientist, they forget the real limitations of the medium they are using or never even really learned what they are or never experienced the labor of working through the old timey way of analyzing amino acids like an Alexandrian student of Euclid would have to work through THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY page by page. In other words, unless he is the exception, he does not know how the machine gets its results, he just trusts them as long as they remain within expected parameters - and if not runs them again, tests the machine, and maybe calls in a repairman. In material fact, then, he really does not know how he gets his results - just that they do or do not fit his expectations in which he has a religious faith reflects reality. Now someone like Thomas Kuhn or Albert Einstein have devoted their lives to pointing out the utter inanity of approaching science in this fashion, but it is the average way the average scientist approaches science.


RICHARD SANSOM:
Gary, I think we must separate the user of surrogate technologies, whose interest lies in solving one kind of problem [are the red blood cells shaped like sickles?] from the researcher who inspires and even designs such technology. What is important is establishing the purpose of the use and the sought objectives. There is little need for the orthopedic surgeon to know the intricacies of the MRI machine design – only its use and its limitations. However, I believe that most highly complex medical technologies are designed by those who know what is needed – i. e. those who use or wish to use them, and also possess the necessary skills to design the equipment..


GARY C. MOORE:

Now, the reason John Duns Scotus is important to me is that he stands midway, both temporally and intellectually between Aquinas and Ockham, between *modified realism* and *nominalism*. Learning from Eco not to read Aquinas as if he were anticipating objections to his thought from the Enlightenment and the Age of Science but rather, in common sense, confronting at-hand problems wholly of his own age and place without any anticipation of readers in the distant future, you can see him as trying to bring philosophy out of the mysticism of Neoplatonism into the real world of real people dealing with the only thing they really know and all they can know - material objects. Eco is the first scholar that has ever made this clear to me. This should automatically raise a red flag that what Aquinas regards as *supernatural* and what we regard as
*supernatural, though still the same thing, are being approached from an extremely different point of view from our own. Eco points out, unfortunately rather subtly, a number of real problems to such an approach to philosophy - but if you read THE NAME OF THE ROSE you can understand the political and economic pressures already evident in Aquinas time of having to put theology on some sort of realistic - in our sense of the term - basis.


RICHARD SANSOM:

I liked what Eco said in the postscript regarding the intended style of the novel; to have the voices be those likely to have been spoken in the milieu of the period. I think he took some liberties in this regard, but I assume that he knows far more than I do about that subject. I have an excellent book --*The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History* by C. W. Previte-Orton, as well as the Heer, that I have mentioned recently. If one reads the history of that age it becomes quite clear that folks then did not see the world anywhere close to how we see it today – in all areas of life. I think Eco tried hard to infuse this sense into the book while at the same time making it readable, and exciting as a mystery, to modern audiences. Even as detailed and explicit as Previte-Orton is, it is still difficult for me to visualize [and feel deeply] the daily life of a peasant, clergyman, royalty, scholar, artisan or merchantman of those times.. Life then seems to have been shrouded in a continual confrontation with death, sickness, ignorance, superstition and the many warring factions that abounded. Since the life spans were usually very short compared to ours today, this alone must have had a serious effect on the psychology of the individual. Hope was probably a rare commodity and concern for anything [e. g. the future – as in global warming!] but one’s own life and that of their family was no doubt absent except for the very few.

Incidentally, I read that the 12th and early 13th centuries were far more accepting [or forgiving] of *progressive* ideas, than the following two or three centuries, in terms of the Church. I am curious to know what happened to begin the great focus on heresy. Any thoughts on this matter?


ANTONIO ROSSIN:
You make me think of the thinking brain function in order to acknowledge, and relate with, the components of the reality existing in the outside.


GARY C. MOORE:
I am glad you brought this up. There cannot be an outside or inside – actually of anything! All knowledge is necessarily knowledge viewed. Reading is viewed. Thought is viewed objectively. Dreams are viewed – sometimes from a strange slant but still literally viewed. One presupposes there is an *inside* to something till you open it up, and then – guess what! – it is now outside and viewed.


ANTONIO ROSSIN:
As regards to this function, let's imagine that the thinking brain barebone structure, at birth, is "tabula rasa". But not completely. Understandably indeed, it presents like a cross with four main components: To Give (top), To Have (below), Positive-equal and Negative-contrary in the sides. These four components, at one's birth are still empty slots, which everyone of us goes to fulfill with the knowledge we need of to live.


GARY C MOORE:
Actually they are necessary components of sight and therefore have nothing to do with built-in, innate knowledge. It is simply the directions of sight from an upright position. Now, as to someone staying upside down from birth, I would expect severe problems in adjusting to a right sided world - *right-sided* being standing upright as the standard of proper visual judgment. And I have heard of this and you probably know much, much more.
    Now, your categories, however, as categories are VERY interesting and I will have to think about them some more.



ANTONIO ROSSIN:
Accordingly, we have at the top of our thinking brain barebone structure the "To Give" slot which we look at from a "to Have" position, of course. From birth on, we have fulfilled it with a number of analogous ideas, all of which are necessary to our understanding- acknowledgment of the reality we live in.

   The idea of God (however you or Aquinas may define it) is one among the more common ideas inside the "To Give" slot, together with a few other analogues: money, powerfulness, knowledge, etc. Not so many items, indeed, but one at least of these analogue items inside our "To Give" slot is necessary as the reference point for us to look upwards at.


GARY C. MOORE:
I see your point and it has its validity that I need to think of more. The *to give* aspect of *necessary* as opposed to contingent is interesting. There is in fact a *giving* of sorts. We like to place all our concepts in pairs of opposition except the opposition of necessary and contingent is highly problematic and directly related to the analogical language that Aquinas, through Coplestons highly competent eyes, is trying to justify. For instance, IF we have sight, there is an up and down and left and right and a necessary oppositeness between all four. True, this is *necessary* knowledge – sight cannot be viewed, or conceived, in any other fashion. But it is based on the contingency of actually possessing sight. So, here, contingency is more *necessary* than *necessity* is. One things necessity is another things contingency.


But Aquinas defines *God* as *He who is*, that strange and anomalous statement out of one of the most ancient of all documents EXODUS, out of the burning bush. This Aquinas relates to his definition of God as that whose existence is his essence. There are lots of problems with this, but the initial blunder of creation of the universe at a specific point in time [and space?] is not something one can blame Aquinas for. Aquinas/Copleston locate the problem squarely where is belongs, that is, Is there an ultimate opposition between contingency and necessity and which one comes out on top? Thereby bringing in *common ideas* like money, power, knowledge – though very important – and I am glad you brought in money – that is a fascinating subject in the abstract which, like God, postulated as Pure Act, that is, *Money talks, bullshit walks*  - maybe a law of physics all of its own if given due recognition – are irrelevant because we are talking in Aquinas about the ultimate ultimates - *Why is there anything, anything at all, rather than nothing?* - a question asked by Liebnitz long before Heidegger and maybe before Liebnitz because I seem to remember a Latin source.

    So, what we need here is the proper question before we state an answer. What I have tried to say in the past is that if one believes in fundamentally necessary things, one is thinking theologically. Also, in actual experience, one cannot experience anything as fundamentally *necessary* except as *necessary* by definition as in sight. But I have shown how this *necessity* is actually dependant upon a contingency.

    If one thinks the universe is experienced in such a way that a greater necessity is implied in its contingency – as in the *question* - may be – then the answer lies in the belief, and that is what it is, in *natural law* and *determinacy*. The necessity of such things is beyond our finite experience. More than that, since we cannot experience them, they cannot in fact be presupposed. The rule of repeatability of scientific experiment takes their place. Incomplete, yes – conducive to extreme insecurity, yes – true, yes. But the existence of the universe? All we know are accidents, once again, and worse – Is there order in the universe?

     No. This came to me as something of a surprise because, once again, it is a visual fact we manipulate to fall into our presuppositions about *natural laws*. The *big bang*, though a fruitful idea, is extremely misleading since [A] the universe as seen is extremely chaotic which is *heresy* to an astrophysicist but obvious to line of sight, photographs, micro-theories opposed to macro-theories. Most of the purported conclusions about the *big bang* are obviously fallacious. For instance, in a regular explosion in human physical experience there is a fundamental difference between what is contained in the shockwave and what happens at the site of explosion. Things are thrown out at a more or less regular distance and debris or a crater are left at the center. None of this shape in explosion is viewed in the universe. The edge of the universe cannot be older than the center of the universe because both edge and center happened at the same time no matter what form they took on. There is absolutely no regularity whatsoever in the shapes of the universe that we see though theories are abundant to account micro-theoretically for their unique shapes. One wonder in fact how much mythology has accumulated in astronomy.


Everything we know, because that is all we can know, is accidental. There is no physical evidence of a *greater* necessity. However, I love the fact that a *necessary* doubt about the matter *necessarily* remains behind. So, is this also merely a necessity contained within a contingent situation or is this contingency actually contained within a greater necessity? And what would one call it?


RICHARD SANSOM:
You asked about Copleston – I have only his Vol. One, *Greece and Rome,* that deals with the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle In his lengthy comments on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he uses the word God as if Aristotle used it in conjunction with his ideas regarding the unmoved mover, etc. Does anyone know if Aristotle actually ever used the word *God,* in its original Greek form – which I suppose would have been Qeos or Theos, while gods would have been qeos, or theos? [I do not know Greek, and I am assuming that the capitalization of the theta is significant?] This matters, IMO, since it is an interpretation of Aristotle’s intent regarding what the unmoved mover, or first cause mean. For example, Copleston says, regarding Aristotle’s Metaphysics, *As we have seen, God moves the universe as Final Cause, as being the object of desire.* The following is a telling quotation from Copleston’s chapter The Metaphysics of Aristotle:

*Is the God of Aristotle a Personal God? Aristotle sometimes speaks of God as the First Unmoved Mover…….Like most Greeks, Aristotle does not seem to have worried much about the number of the gods, but if we are to say that he was definitely and exclusively monotheist, then we would have to say that his God is personal. Aristotle may not have spoken of the First Mover as being personal, and certainly the ascription of anthropomorphic personality would be very far indeed from his thoughts, but since the First Mover is Intelligence or Thought, it follows that He is personal in the philosophic sense. The Aristotelian God may not be personal secundum nomen, but He is personal secundum rem. We should add, however, that there is no indication that Aristotle ever thought of the First Mover as an object of worship, still less as a Being to Whom prayers might profitably be addressed. And indeed, if Aristotle's God is entirely self-centred, as I believe Him to have been, then it would be out of the question for men to attempt personal intercourse with Him. In the Magna M oralia Aristotle says expressly that those are wrong who think that there can be a friendship towards God. For
(a) God could not return our love, and (b) we could not in any case be said to love God.*

It is obvious, and no doubt unavoidable, coming from a Jesuit, that the belief in the existence of *God* is a taken-for-granted substrate of all comments on both Plato and Aristotle. This is of course true in the case of Aquinas. For Copleston, there can be no truly unvarnished explication of Aristotle since God is an unquestioned aspect of all discussion and thought – no matter the subject. This is not to say he is not a good historian and his discussion on Aristotle’s causes is clear and far easier to comprehend than when Aristotle discusses them!

At the end of the chapter on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Copleston sums up and gives away a bit of his Platonic sensibility:

*The Aristotelian God is efficient Cause only by being the final Cause. He does not know this world and no Divine plan is fulfilled in this world: the teleology of nature can be nothing more than unconscious teleology [at least this is the only conclusion that will really fit in with the picture of God given in the Metaphysics.] In this respect, therefore, the Aristotelian metaphysic is inferior to that of Plato.*

If anyone doubts the influences of Copleston’s faith on his writings and interpretations of the ancient Greeks, one need only read his remarks in the concluding chapter, one of which is:

*Christianity, with its doctrine of salvation, its sacramental system, its dogmas, its doctrine of incorporation with Christ through membership of the Church and of the final version of God, its offer of supernatural life, was the *mystery religion*; but it had the inestimable advantage over all pagan mystery-religions that it was an historical religion, based on the Life, Death and Resurrection of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, Who lived and suffered in Palstine in a certain historical period; it was based on historical fact, not on myth.* [!!!!]

In reading how the 12th century scholars first discovered the Stagyrite, we see that they read translations of the Greek by Muslim scholars that were no doubt colored by elements of the Muslim faith. Only later were direct translations from the Greek to Latin made that apparently washed the original clean of these elements; but who knows that other elements were inserted – i. e. flavorings from the Catholic faith, influences from Augustine, etc?.

JUD EVANS:

I get a bit peeved about Christianly's usurpation of the Greek pantheon and the rendering down of the individual prunus domestica insititiaian godlets into one monotheistic sourish damson wine. From what I can see the Greek conception of the gods was utterly different from Yahweh's petulant moodiness. Where at one moment the temperamental lurker in the burning bush favours the liberation of the Jews [as the *chosen people*] from Egyptian bondage and drowns thousands of the unchosen conscripts of the army of the pharaoh, a little time later by the Godly time-scale, he changes in his mind and arranges that other elements of the *unchosen* dispatch the chosen ones from this world in the most hideous way possible in the Europe of the twentieth century.

      The Greek gods were all different, much like the current Hindu ones. Some were incredibly vicious, others kindly and forgetful. At least you knew were you where with a Greek god - you were aware of his or her track record and his or her *form,* not in the spurious Platonic meaning of the word
*form,* but the meaning of the term as used by the police department. With the god of the desert wanderers however, you couldn't be sure from one moment to the next whether it was going to be *milk and honey* time, having your eyes removed time, being turned to a pillar of salt time or be nailed to a cross with mindless cruelty of a little boy pulling the appendages off a daddy-longlegs time.

Richard: I understand, from the back jacket remarks, that Copleston and A. J. Ayer had a debate about the existence of God and the possibility of metaphysics. I wonder if this was recorded and is available? Anybody know?

Jud: It has been posted in the Athenaeum library for years. You can read it here: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/copleston.htm


ANTONIO ROSSIN:

You make me think of the thinking brain function in order to acknowledge, and relate with, the components of the reality existing in the outside.


GARY C. MOORE:
I am glad you brought this up. There cannot be an outside or inside – actually of anything! All knowledge is necessarily knowledge viewed. Reading is viewed. Thought is viewed objectively. Dreams are viewed – sometimes from a strange slant but still literally viewed. One presupposes there is an *inside* to something till you open it up, and then – guess what! – it is now outside and viewed.

ANTONIO [ in a previous post]
I agree that all of what I acknowledge is inside my brain. But I also know about self-consciousness -- which runs inside my brain as well -- but which distinguish myself from what is therefore not-myself, thus outside. Btw, I suspect that that of self-consciousness is not so practiced an activity :-)

ANTONIO ROSSIN:
As regards to this function, let's imagine that the thinking brain barebone structure, at birth, is "tabula rasa". But not completely. Understandably indeed, it presents like a cross with four main components: To Give (top), To Have (below), Positive-equal and Negative-contrary in the sides. These four components, at one's birth are still empty slots, which everyone of us goes to fulfill with the knowledge we need of to live.

GARY C MOORE:
Actually they are necessary components of sight and therefore have nothing to do with built-in, innate knowledge. It is simply the directions of sight from an upright position. Now, as to someone staying upside down from birth, I would expect severe problems in adjusting to a right sided world - *right-sided* being standing upright as the standard of proper visual judgment. And I have heard of this and you probably know much, much more.

      Now, your categories, however, as categories are VERY interesting and I will have to think about them some more.

ANTONIO [ in a previous post]
True. But one must have built-in, innate knowledge of what one's upright position stands for, and relates with other posited objects in the outside. I mean, one must have in one's inside the barebone scheme of what the directions of one's sight can be. I see this as if one were in the middle point of the four direction (upwards, downwards, leftwards and rightwards) cross. At each direction end of this cross there is... what? maybe, at one's "tabula rasa" age, an empty domain, a slot into which one fulfills, with the time passing, some basic ideas. The very idea of God does usually fit the upwards slot. Hence *a God in the outside* becomes a necessity for one's self-consciousness. Or some analogous of God...

ANTONIO ROSSIN:
Accordingly, we have at the top of our thinking brain barebone structure the "To Give" slot which we look at from a "to Have" position, of course. From birth on, we have fulfilled it with a number of analogous ideas, all of which are necessary to our understanding- acknowledgment of the reality we live in.

      The idea of God (however you or Aquinas may define it) is one among the more common ideas inside the "To Give" slot, together with a few other analogues: money, powerfulness, knowledge, etc. Not so many items, indeed, but one at least of these analogue items inside our "To Give" slot is necessary as the reference point for us to look upwards at.

GARY C MOORE:
I see your point and it has its validity that I need to think of more. The *to give* aspect of *necessary* as opposed to contingent is interesting. There is in fact a *giving* of sorts. We like to place all our concepts in pairs of opposition except the opposition of necessary and contingent is highly problematic and directly related to the analogical language that Aquinas, through Coplestons highly competent eyes, is trying to justify. For instance, IF we have sight, there is an up and down and left and right and a necessary oppositeness between all four. True, this is *necessary* knowledge – sight cannot be viewed, or conceived, in any other fashion. But it is based on the contingency of actually possessing sight. So, here, contingency is more *necessary* than *necessity* is. One things necessity is another things contingency.


     But Aquinas defines *God* as *He who is*, that strange and anomalous statement out of one of the most ancient of all documents EXODUS, out of the burning bush. This Aquinas relates to his definition of God as that whose existence is his essence. There are lots of problems with this, but the initial blunder of creation of the universe at a specific point in time [and space?] is not something one can blame Aquinas for. Aquinas/Copleston locate the problem squarely where is belongs, that is, Is there an ultimate opposition between contingency and necessity and which one comes out on top? Thereby bringing in *common ideas* like money, power, knowledge – though very important – and I am glad you brought in money – that is a fascinating subject in the abstract which, like God, postulated as Pure Act, that is, *Money talks, bullshit walks* - maybe a law of physics all of its own if given due recognition – are irrelevant because we are talking in Aquinas about the ultimate ultimates - *Why is there anything, anything at all, rather than nothing?* - a question asked by Liebnitz long before Heidegger and maybe before Liebnitz because I seem to remember a Latin source.

     So, what we need here is the proper question before we state an answer. What I have tried to say in the past is that if one believes in fundamentally necessary things, one is thinking theologically. Also, in actual experience, one cannot experience anything as fundamentally *necessary* except as *necessary* by definition as in sight. But I have shown how this *necessity* is actually dependant upon a contingency.

     If one thinks the universe is experienced in such a way that a greater necessity is implied in its contingency – as in the *question* - may be – then the answer lies in the belief, and that is what it is, in *natural law* and *determinacy*. The necessity of such things is beyond our finite experience. More than that, since we cannot experience them, they cannot in fact be presupposed. The rule of repeatability of scientific experiment takes their place. Incomplete, yes – conducive to extreme insecurity, yes – true, yes. But the existence of the universe? All we know are accidents, once again, and worse – Is there order in the universe?

     No. This came to me as something of a surprise because, once again, it is a visual fact we manipulate to fall into our presuppositions about *natural laws*. The *big bang*, though a fruitful idea, is extremely misleading since [A] the universe as seen is extremely chaotic which is *heresy* to an astrophysicist but obvious to line of sight, photographs, micro-theories opposed to macro-theories. Most of the purported conclusions about the *big bang* are obviously fallacious. For instance, in a regular explosion in human physical experience there is a fundamental difference between what is contained in the shockwave and what happens at the site of explosion. Things are thrown out at a more or less regular distance and debris or a crater are left at the center. None of this shape in explosion is viewed in the universe. The edge of the universe cannot be older than the center of the universe because both edge and center happened at the same time no matter what form they took on. There is absolutely no regularity whatsoever in the shapes of the universe that we see though theories are abundant to account micro-theoretically for their unique shapes. One wonder in fact how much mythology has accumulated in astronomy.

     Everything we know, because that is all we can know, is accidental. There is no physical evidence of a *greater* necessity. However, I love the fact that a *necessary* doubt about the matter *necessarily* remains behind. So, is this also merely a necessity contained within a contingent situation or is this contingency actually contained within a greater necessity? And what would one call it?


ANTONIO ROSSIN:
See, Gary I never read about Aquinas and Coplestone. In my first three decades I lived inside a consciousness limbo (as I realized later). I did simply do what other people did. But as a psychiatry practitioner I had some background of how the people think and what the sick results of an unbalanced thinking way could be. Of course some other contingencies occurred. Among these, I was a stammerer still, so I had to "synthesize" (reduce) my own language relationships with other people to a -- so to say - barebone structure (stammering offers really a privileged point of view to observe and acknowledge human communication)

My troubles with self-consciousness arose when I became a father of children, and I felt it heavy the responsibility for growing-up my children, for "To Give" them my best. But what had this "my best" to be, in terms of self-consciousness?

I realized that making them acknowledge what the four directions of one's sight
(mine included) could be, in order to allow a well-balanced knowledge of one's own relationships with the outside reality (ok., ok., all of knowledge is inside ;-) ) was the best I could give them. And I behaved accordingly, thence onwards.

Yet the work is a family hard necessity... as you can see.

cheers, antonio