I.D. Greeks 00017

Authority encases context. It does this to establish there is nothing beyond its authority and therefore is unquestionable. This is how morality works. Morality determines truth, not the other way around. Truth is what should be. The answer to two plus two should be four. The oldest etymological meaning of “should” is “debt.” Let us postulate, arbitrarily for the moment a difference between “morality” that is pulled far more strongly from semi-conscious, inherited emotional overtones, literally a debt to tradition, to real ‘ghosts,’ from “ethics,” usually spoken of as if more objective and based on rational structures, yet still grounded in traditional emotions of debt. Everyone knows they are bound, indebted to be moral. I know of no one, unless a conscious effort is made, or they are made by others to make a conscious effort, distinguishes “moral” from  “ethical.” Another arbitrary postulate: “morality” in every case has magical or religious presuppositions about it. This comes directly from tradition which, in mechanical act, is the hauntings of ancestors, what your parents ‘taught’ you, except it was not a rational demonstration. The “ethical,” self-consciously, wants to rise above the irrational. But what makes ‘rational’ ethics more “good” than irrational morality? Rational laws in themselves imply no “good” or comparison of “bad” with “better.” Things just are the way they are. Some magically think they can manipulate things from what they are to something else. But to an objective scientist all that is revealed in this process is the new laws of potential powers actualized by rational, physical causes, of which you are a part (the right person with the right abilities at the right place at the right time – all of this the result of a chain of causes), and has absolutely nothing to do with being created ex nihilo by a manipulator.

Everyone also knows the universal binding of the powers of morality is perfectly untrue. But no one questions their authority. For some because they do not dare to but acknowledge these powers have actual force behind them. It is the force they acknowledge, not any hyper reality. Most, however, never even think of fundamentally questioning morality as such at all, it is  something due people, an indebtment.  It is merely of judging who is right and who is wrong, usually translating into action but never fully as words as “I am always right and your judgment is always open to my righteous questioning and condemnation,” i. e., morality on the whole as actually practiced and totally non-theoretical, is a trivial social technique of empowerment. As Theognis says, only the nobility tell the truth, commoners always lie. Only the honest are moral and moral are honest. Morality determines truth. Yet, in establishing Hesiod as a truth-telling former shepherd become bard, the Muses themselves leave the question of how “truth” is determined entirely ambiguous. This entails that morality is ambiguous as well as custom, tradition, religion. And when these things become ambiguous, then emotional valuation can be separated, for purely professional reasons. Others that are traditionally condemned as evil can be seen as real “Others,” reflections of the self as the same, i. e., “The enemy can be brave, open hearted, and generous on occasion,” “The enemy is defending his homeland and values and family also just like we are.” Then those who love Greeks and those who love Trojans can both listen to the ILIAD with involvement.

“A form of Luvian [related to Hittite] in the northwest may have been the language of the Trojans.” (Calvert Watkins, HOW TO KILL A DRAGON: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, Oxford, 1995, pg. 51).This book, as well as the whole study of Indo-European linguistics is highly recommended because the whole formation of the memory as such, that peculiar invention in its specific form of the ambition of homo sapiens originally and deliberately designed to control only the future originally, that is, graphically, how to live and how not to die, not just in language but in the poetics of language. It is the inherited structures of traditional phrases, thoughts, proverbs, moral judgments, beliefs, and even the ways of logical argumentation that seem mere common sense to us today, and only of importance in the present situation as very useful practical tools of discussion and explanation, where any reference to the etymological history of those phrases is considered ridiculously irrelevant. In actual fact, what one does is bring in constantly unknown, unclarified presuppositions that actually drag a great deal of their own traditional baggage with them. They do this because they are words formed in a structured poetic phrase (this also applies to traditionally formed so-called prose that is just as formulaic as poetry is) that gained its importance not from its so-called wisdom in itself but because it fit within a sacred structure of intense passion, power, ritual, that is, of magical manipulation of almost exact likeness to much technological manipulation. The reason I can say this is that both ways of thinking follow objective cause and effect manipulated to accomplish a specific end as opposed to the scientist’s desire to simply see what happens that is irrelevant to his desires (intent).

What has clarified my thinking recently on much of this is the discovery of James George Frazer’s THE GOLDEN BOUGH: A new abridgement, edited by Robert Fraser, Oxford World’s Classics (therefore cheap), 1994. The reason why this particular edition is so important is that it is almost entirely drawn from Frazer’s twelve volume third edition of THE GOLDEN BOUGH of 1906-15 and is nothing like the popular abridged edition of 1922 “composed largely by Lady Frazer with Frazer’s assistance.” The easily available 1922 edition is immensely more conservative and extremely reserved in its opinions and its prose repetitious and turgid. Its intent is to offend the least amount of people while providing a popular exposition of Frazer’s ideas. As Robert Fraser said, it may have been necessary then, but what is needed now is what Frazer really said. James George Frazer was essentially a keen student of David Hume’s TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE, a daunting and formidable book far less easy of access than his popular essays, and was initially purely a philosopher at Cambridge. Becoming interested in cultural anthropology, he found a brilliant and original way to apply the lesson’s of Hume’s most difficult thinking to what other people still think are merely interesting anthropological oddments. His thinking about magic, religion, and science led not to a straight ascending line of progressive evolution but to something much more like Martin Heidegger and Calvert Watkins’ thesis. Magic represented a very practical relation to reality, essentially disregarding all the major premises of religion, where a human being sought to control the forces around him. Frazer notes the overall rough similarity to scientific and technological method but also brings out the obvious fact that magic was based on mistaken premises that, for various reasons (especially the fact there was no alternative way of thinking) seemed to have validity for a long while. But over time, its utter failure was completely evident to more intelligent people who then postulated the existence of invisible beings who did possess valid magical powers either because they really believed this or could use this belief to gain power as the intermediary between these powers and ordinary humans. But religion was essentially based on the same premises as magic, though it had a better evasion of the problem of failure in saying the god was displeased and wished to punish rather than the magic ritual was performed incorrectly or countered by a more powerful magician. The number of reasons for the failure of magic (while still assuming its overall validity) is finite. And when you run out of excuses, there is only one explanation left. Whereas the withdrawal of God has an infinite number of reasons and only fail when you tire of, or discard as logically invalid, the notion of God. Frazer makes it very clear the premises of science are far more solid than the premises of magic, but he says:

The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up our minds. But let an argument of precisely the same caliber be applied to matters which are still under debate. If such reasonings could pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder that they long escaped detection by the savage? (pg.59)

The failure of magic and the ascent of religion was fundamentally a total humiliation of the ideal of self-sufficiency of human being. The fundamental sense of loss of all control is evident in the overpowering dominance of fate that even controls the gods. The resort to the faith in divine beings was a last desperate grasp by people who wanted to be assured of some control (“meaning”) over their lives. This must be seen not from the viewpoint of the so-called enlightened and much more rational present – which it is not in the slightest – but from the viewpoint of the people directly involved for whom these movements of thought were movements of naked and desperate realism that they attempted to think through as logically as they could within their circumstances and total context. They were not, as we ‘moderns’ arrogate ourselves to be, divine beings of our own that know everything rightly. This may seem incongruous but it is not: Success always is defined by its opposite, failure, as Aristotle would do. Where there is success, failure is close at hand. Regard the phrasing of the quote from Frazer. It is very ambiguous and even evasive. One must remember his Humean descent, the extremity of Humean questioning of assumed ideas as truth like cause and effect, and the always present shallow of extreme Nietzschean, archaic Greek pessimism that is logically consequent. Once when Hume was playing billiards, he began thinking again of his disavowal of the necessary connection of effect to cause, and in a fit of anxiety had to leave the room to regain control of his thoughts and breathe. Frazer does not say we ‘scientific’ actually possess at hand certainty but says “facts about which we have long made up our minds.” The “matters still under debate” he subtly makes clear puts us precisely back into the same situation as “the savage.” There is no such God as “progressive evolution.” There is only the temporary, momentary niche of Darwin: It succeeds . . . . for now.

The fundamental set of archaic memories preserved in formulaic language is very often formulaic when we actually think ‘we’ thought of it, created it all on our own, a “new” and progressive application of an old phrase, new wine in old bottles.  This structure of memory seems to be distinctly human in that it is almost entirely language, using language to reference experience and not the other way around. The poetic structures are sacred, whether we like that word are not (and usually doesn’t come in the discussion because we don’t think of it consciously), and as sacred bring with it a barely conscious scale of values giving human life what seems to be an inherent meaning, for instance, it is better to be alive than to be dead. However, there are cultures, religions, and philosophies that do say the opposite. Their seeming lack of being straightforward and explicit is most often because of our viewpoint and not theirs. We do not want to find people who truly value death above life. The Indo-European basic philosophy, though, is quite consistently the value of life over death, and all pessimism about life comes from a failure of achieving happiness, a fundamental goal of human being Aristotle quite explicitly defined.

A great deal of this has to do with the actual working, interacting concepts of “monotheism” versus “polytheism,” and the possibility whether one can really tolerate the gods of others, other beliefs or non-beliefs, and other ways of evaluating things within their actual context which, seen by an outsider, is limited, but seen by an insider is omnipresent. The “versus” is necessary here. Monotheism needs polytheism as a defining counterpart which, like good and evil which possesses no meaning outside that contrast, may seem historically and psychologically obvious. However, it is not at all obvious that such opposition operates constantly even in modern, ‘civilized’ thinking. We have a number of ‘gods.’ We call them by completely different name superficially without any connotation of divinity, but still constituting ultimate values that are in direct conflict with other ultimate values we expose. They operate as ‘gods’ because we can go directly from devotion to one to devotion to another with little or no feeling of conflict however obvious it might be to an outside observer.

And more, there is also a necessary but less obvious counterpart inherent in polytheism of a kind of monotheism that is almost silent compared with the everyday blatancy of contemporary monotheism. There is an overarching power in most or all polytheisms that is decidedly dark and unloved and implacable. It is also the only ‘divine power’ that is truly “everlasting,” for all the “living” Gods of monotheism and polytheism always have a distinct, even if unacknowledged, element of mortality. This power is fate, that which cannot ever be changed, that even rules all gods. Because it cannot be changed by any means whatsoever, it can be disregarded, in fact necessarily so, by any ‘system.’ But, on the other hand, it negates all systems involving any kind of choice or change or even effective purpose whatsoever. It easily becomes a logical paradox seemingly like the Cretan philosopher’s statement “All Cretans are liars” as “You are fated to feel you are free to choose.” But there is much more to it than that. The very judgment of something being real is founded upon its unchangeable identity. But Aristotle says that A=A ONLY “in the same time and the same place” and is just as logically defined by A is not B under the same circumstances of identity. It is the logic-ness of  logic per se, the necessity of it being forever unchangeably true that only comes from a bedrock sense that the ground of reality can only and always happen one way. On the one hand, this ssems gloom with doom. But, on the other hand, it is reassuring because at least you know “There is a way for sure!” even though you cannot know what it is. But bring back Frazer’s Humean Skepticism, and even that falls apart. And bring in Wittgenstein’s language games where each realm of linguistic connection and relevance is a historical accident, largely unknown and unexamined as it actually exists, and to a large extent untranslatable into under language games, though they may have boundaries that cross each other and provide a seeming but highly limited contiguity. The language game would be a fascinating realm in which to apply Indo-European linguistics where you will see vast varieties of partial inherited thought formulas from vastly different peoples and times (newer languages like Celt can sometimes preserve formulas older than those found in the most ancient Mycenean Greek or Old Vedic.

The same can be found, in fate’s grounding sense, in mathematics where, though the numbers may change and even the context may change, the mathematical formula itself, within its distinct context, always stays the same. But even here there are mathematical systems that, at best, can only arbitrarily be integrated with other mathematical systems. As Wittgenstein said, calculus is based on an irrational premise. However, it ‘works.’ But it ‘works’ in an entirely different language game. Mathematics is, by historical and contextual necessity, imbedded in language. There is the same sense for time where, though from moment to moment there is always a different event or a difference within event, time itself has always in every case one singular motion. We occupy ourselves with the parts, the transitory differences, since we seem to effect those whereas we never effect the whole, and yet it is necessarily the whole of  infinite and incalculable chains of causes in time and space that provide each and every one of those parts and our ‘ability’ and current context of such ‘choosing.’ It is to bypass this specifically that monotheism and polytheism were invented. They are religions. Religion came about from the failure of magic and ritual and sacrifice, forms that the magician or priest said he whereby controlled the forces of both nature and demons or the gods or God himself. The personal practitioner of infinite power is transferred from the failed magician to an inscrutable force beyond keen they might be swayed by our wishes. Nobody wants things to just be as they are even if you can understand them more and more over time with accumulating knowledge. But, remembering Humean Skepticism, this one way direction of time is confirmed by experience – which, pure, is without words and therefore not logically even relevant – and the traditional interpretation of experience which seems quite logical and inevitable, but is a cause and effect relation which is ontologically practical, not truly logical, and fails again under Hume’s scrutiny. And then on top of that you have Heidegger’s analysis of time, quiet largely based on Paul as Bultmann has shown, where it is emotion, desire, expectation that truly constructs time as human beings experience it. And this would automatically bring in Heisenburg’s Law of Uncertainty. The observer can determine objectively one aspect of the observation at the expense of ignoring all other aspects that necessarily compose the context that in turn one – ‘assumes’ – determines the aspect scientifically observed. But the whole context cannot be scientifically examined because examining any part negates the whole. Humean Skepticism would proceed ahead with what we can know. But a true Skeptic would also be fully aware of what we do not know.

“Monotheism” as a operational concept, i.e., a concept that operates in forming thought without any necessity to be fully conscious of itself or focused upon as an objective element in one’s thinking, establishes the whole ground of self-justification in such a way that it itself will never become an object to be examined. In other words, it simply becomes an accepted part of what “reality” is and reality, by definition since one cannot stand outside reality by definition, is only questioned by someone “insane”, i.e., someone detached from “reality.” It makes itself self-validating as that is the only way it can rationally exist. The full implications of the concept “monotheism” need never arise again in one’s lifetime though small parts may be ‘adjusted.’ There literally cannot be anything that can stand outside the unconscious authority of reality. A polytheistic way of thinking, however, would necessarily have to acknowledge numerous other sources of determining what is “real” that would of necessity include variety, contradiction, and conflict. And since each source is a reality itself, and therefore its own source of authority, cannot be judged by an authority outside of it since both claim exactly the same level of authority over which nothing else can supercede (“fate” is not an ‘authority,’ it just is). That is actually very hard to maintain with logical exactitude and emotional honesty, in Western culture, because language itself has an overriding tendency to establish overarching authority. But language is just words whereas experience is always multiple and unlimited in number of possible occasions and cannot be overridden by any conceptual framework. It just happens. What it is and what it means is a matter of words. Experience per se has nothing to do with definition, meaning, or any limitation that necessitates an objective viewpoint. Its only limitation is the time and spatial functioning of the personal body. Authority has no place here since authority is a matter of words, and mostly presupposed and unconscious words at that. That might justify calling the “unconscious” literally a “mind” since there is established context, judgment, and intent. It is just not in objective control by “oneself,” whoever or however many “oneself” is.

“Objectivity,” as it actually exists, lives, is a very strange thing: Its fundamental intent subverts itself. But that is “objectivity” as thought, as abstract, as word. And even though we have also abstracted, thereby putting under ‘cultural’ control (to some extent an actually determinable set of specific people), our personal body, its parts and functions, although logically each person is the only person possible that can ‘know’ their body, it is through the body we begin to understand the experienced strangeness of inside and outside beyond the defining and identification of  words – just barely, and maybe not at all, maybe even all ‘physical’ experience is more words than ‘physical’ – except for the desperately desired deniability but undeniable reality of pain. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain. Pleasure is different for each person and is almost totally defined by words. But Epicurus gave the best and most illuminating definition here: Pleasure is the absence of pain. It is like Aesop’s truths of the fox and the hedgehog: The fox knows many things and the hedgehog only one thing. But that one thing is  most important.