I.D. Greeks 0006
Transcendental Realm

DISCUSSION PART One. 21st of Oct 2002
(REVISED 22ND OF OCT 2002)

JUD EVANS:

Even if we DO have something very much like geometrical forms at the very basis of our most primitive thinking that is not to say that these circles, triangulates and squares exist in some transcendental realm like Plato's forms but simply that the forces of nature - the physics of the things that stand out from the nothingness deem that these particular shapes provide the easiest way to accomplish the cosmic symmetricality and dynamic equipoise which is the motor of re-creation and perpetual reformation.

GARY C MOORE:

If we step back and really try to think language as abstractions - symbols -pointers (I do not know quite what I am doing here), take old historical philosophical concepts as counters or pieces as if on a chess board while using their appropriate context as the proper rules of the deployment of each piece, and then set up a game where we approach an old concept like “transcendental realm” retranslating it as Plato at least partially must have approached it himself in his own context – something we really know next to nothing about because that would actually require the resources of a half-decent & rational sociologist or psychologist of our day but then, with this game, we must essentially make up the rules as we go, expecting to make mistakes while appreciating where they take us – and then see what results from comparing it to our own discursive concept “the forces of nature,” what results? (I may have lost the thread of my own sentence.) There are at least two common denominators operating in both concepts.


GCM: INSERTION 22nd Oct 2002:

I wish to make a counter statement to my own proposition. Knowledge is knowledge, whether old or new. Yes, context changes things considerably but only within the same ‘path,’ activity? process? Existence? Actually, let us stick to a broad and all-encompassing concept of “perception” – because that is and always must remain the bed rock of ‘knowing.’ It is fundamentally and absolutely NON-DISCURSIVE ,i. e., what words are for but in no way of words. This would automatically then question any sort of objectness or IDENTITY -- which, as Kant so well demonstrated with the “I-think,” one’s self-identity, projected as “object X,” an empty receptacle of “knowing” ready to contain ‘something’ as a basic element of knowledge, an “identity” which is a reflection and projection of MY ‘identity.’ “Identity” is then a construct of the fundamental transcendental imagination from which both understanding (reason, abstractions) and intuition (perception, phenomenology, experience) derive from.

This actually can be found in Plato’s TIMAEUS somewhere as khoura or something like that, an empty amphora which creates a form for what it contains. There are two different kinds of context. There is the specific context of individuals in a long stretch of space and time, i. e., classical Athens from 600 to 200 BCE. YET there is a much more basic context that ALWAYS is in place and that is the human body and its functions and the importance of those functions. A Lakota Sioux warrior may be trained to withstand incredible amounts of pain, hunger, thirst, and totally despise death – who wouldn’t after such an upbringing? – BUT pain, hunger, thirst, and death is where everybody originates as an identity and it is always exactly the same in every person (please don’t confuse me with exceptions, you know what I mean).

Now, to relate this to the below and make clear what I am getting at: Disliking, to put it mildly, the real situation of this life – with its pain, hunger, thirst, and death – people dream of a “transcendental realm” where these things are not a problem. Now, contrary to the way Heidegger developed the concept of theoretical science from practical tool using by “bracketing” the process of act, intention, and concept from its specific purpose of, let us say, of making a bed into the theoretical discipline of abstract bedeology, I am pursuing the possibility that your “laws of nature” have the same provenance as Plato’s “transcendental realm.” You have never seen an Idea, you have never seen an abstraction, you have never seen a god (I presume much), and you have never seen a natural law. You have seen specific objects (identities) act on other specifics objects (identities) repetitively, always the same way. But that is all it really means. As David Hume said, the next time something you have seen happen a
100,000 times, may not happen the 100,001st time. You've definitely never seen a “natural law.”

GCM 21st Oct.2002
Extreme Skepticism as a cultural mode (mood? State of mind?) and the need of people to ground a bedrock to social rules within that context of extreme Skepticism.

GCM: INSERTION 22nd Oct 2002:

Just like with the concept khoura, similar situations invent similar responses. Yes, they have differences but the also have the same basic reality as their base. “Gods” in the real political world are hard to believe in since they never make either an appearance or their unmistakable presence felt. Men do selfish evil and the gods do nothing, repetitively again. For those who must suffer politicians, for many, this reinforces the desire to find another world. This reinforces Plato’s desire to invent a “transcendental realm” of Ideas. And this reinforces a theoretical scientist’s desire to play innocently in the beautiful fields of “laws of nature” uninvolved with the miserable goings on around him in ‘real’ life he can do nothing about – or if he does makes a fool of himself or gets himself killed – or fired. That studying the “laws of nature” has substantial results -- NOW – geometry may have originated in the need to reestablish property lines after the Nile flood, but the Greeks made it abstract and essentially useless -- the Greeks did take astronomy (more or less) away from astrology but also it was made useless (but this can be seen more clearly than the uselessness of geometry, conics, mathematics in general Pythanogoreanized) – Archimedes invented the laws of the fulcrum – for abstract mathematics – and the method of measuring by displacing water volume only incidentally had practical relation – someone invented a steam engine to ‘magically’ open the doors of the temple of Serapis in Alexandria miraculously (that’s all, end of project) -- but only in ‘modern’ times, with the invention of gun powder and the necessity of calculating the trajectory of artillery shells, has theoretical science been INTENSELY involved in having ‘real’ world results in a world most scientists minimally or not at all want anything to do with (Ivan Pavlov’s dogs and Stalin’s human stimulus response – Pavlov hated Stalin but Stalin loved him).

GCM 21st of Oct 2002.

There is one major difference that comes directly to my mind and that is Plato’s “transcendental realm” has absolutely NOTHING in common with Judaic/Muslim/Christian interpretations of that. The first reason is obvious. In Plato’s time, even the Jews had no concept of a “transcendental realm.” All relations with God, the only thing they could have possibly considered transcendental in any fashion whatsoever, were ALWAYS here and now, effecting the present moment and the immediate future within a person’s lifetime.

The Jews believed in no real afterlife at the time. At best, at the time, they believed in eternal sleep of the dead where they DID NOT LIKE BEING AWAKENED AT ALL (Samuel being raised by the Witch of Endor at Saul’s request, I SAMUEL 28:7), or where they plead for God’s help in the present because, once dead, they can do nothing and are silent (ISAIAH, PSALMS, one of the kings of Judah). Prophets like Ezekial did invoke judgement and flames for the evil after death, but – considering the example of Martin Luther whose whole theology revolved around BELIEF in eternal life OR death as a total finis, and his condemning his enemies to eternal flames seems not to have been actual doctrine to be believed but just bad temper – Ezekial did not develop this as doctrine himself which, considering the common belief of the orthodox Jew at the time that immortality was of the group, the ‘race,’ Jews as an entity in the world, and that there was no immortality of the individual, if he was serious, instead of being metaphorical like Luther, he would have to have made explicit.

Strangely I have never thought of this before, and some would probably hate it, the concept of individual immortality really only started developing amongst the Jews AFTER ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS!!! I would say, then, the Greeks gave the idea of individual immortality to the Jews. The Orphics, the cults of Dionysios, and Pythagoras had developed this concept long before the Jews. The common Greek, on the other hand, believed either like the Sophists it was all bullshit or, as in the ODYSSEY, it is similar to the Jews of the same contemporaneous time, a semi-conscious life of shadows, the twittering of bats (whereas in the older ILIAD death is just the end even for the semi-divine hero Achilles, though Socrates puts him in the “Blessed Isles”, SYMPOSIUM 179e-180a, an place Pindar created for “immortal heroes,” OLYMPIAN ODES 2.79, based on Homer’s Elysium, ODYSSEY 4.561-9 [I used the Cambridge commentary for some of this info]). Gershom Scholem, in his book on Sabatai Sevi, said the idea individual immortality really did not ‘take’ until after the expulsions from Iberia in 1492 and the Cossack massacres of 1648-50 showed for sure and finally the very ‘race’ of the Jews was a contingent thing. And so it became a belief as a last resort when traditional faith completely fell through.

“Transcendental realm” in Plato, for whom another reality is a pleasant idea but mainly mythical and thoroughly open to doubt (PHAEDO, 114d, “No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale.”)

Gary C. Moore