David wrote:Science is inherently progressive in nature. It is restless, always seeking to develop its understanding. It is willing to cast aside any traditional certainties if they prove to be false. It relentlessly challenges and undermines conservative myths and beliefs. So it is no surprise to find that science and the left are a natural fit.
As I have often said and still say: you require
interpretation. You are a 'hermeneutical project'. And the Genius Forum with all its assertions and choices -- in all its tendentious glory! -- requires the same.
And there is no one here capable of providing it.
What you have done in this paragraph is to have given 'entity' to 'science'. But science, looked at coldly, has no entity, no project, offers no 'understanding', and cannot ever and at any point provide 'understanding'.
It is not that it 'casts aside traditional certainties', it is that it in itself can form no
certainties in the specific sense in which you use this word. If you were to say 'life has value' or 'love has meaning' you would be making a 'traditional declaration' based absolutely in an older, traditional metaphysics. And traditional, defined, expressed value, and all those that deal with sentiment and idea at what are understood to be 'higher levels', very simply cannot appear to science, since only a man who is aware of those other categories of perception, who has been raised up in them to one degree or another, could see and understand what was being spoken of.
Men
employ science, and only men can be 'inherently progressive' or 'inherently regressive' or use science in any specific way. And any 'interpretation' of science will have to take place in a 'metaphysical mind', which is by its nature thoroughly outside of the terms of analysis of 'science'.
If a science-oriented man 'casts aside' an idea, a traditional understanding if you wish, a concept or a sentiment that is best expressed in an allusive or poetical means of communication -- such as is all art and nearly all communication between men -- it is not the methods of science or the tools of science that have done this: it is a specific man who has chosen to submit himself to the dominion of discreet facts about objects. The *true scientist* would have jettisoned all meanings, insofar as all meaning is metaphysical and non-scientific, out of his conceptual sphere. This chemically pure scientific man would eschew interpretation of all things that do not pertain to catalogs and to lists of pure scientific fact.
You are right when you say that such a mind, stripped as it were of the capacity to assert value or meaning, would naturally 'challenge and undermine conservative myths and beliefs', if by 'conservative myth' you mean all meaning encapsulated in symbols. It comes down to that. In fact, language would have to be stripped of all charged words, words that are the product of metaphysical thought and that are 'capsules' which open back into levels of meaning which, to the science man, can have no meaning.
'Meaning' itself becomes meaningless.
When you refer to this exalted project of
challenging conservative myths and beliefs, it is unfortunate that you do not
understand what the implications of this are. You could not understand
by definition. Time and again, in tens and hundreds of different ways, I have tried to bring to your attention what your 'project' ramifies
to. Not just with you but with dozens of headstrong children who respond to something in your message and desire to imitate you.
The end of your project is the destruction of intellect.
Just as you reveal when you speak and indicate, with no uncertainty, that you do not work with intellect! What then do you work with? The definition is not easy to come by because what you do is bizarre and multivalent. You clearly can *rationalize* but in this you have turned your mind into a machine-like tool. You do not
intelligize, you
calculate. Your calculations, by their nature, inhibit intelligent conceptualization and the making of connections in all areas that, to you, 'do not compute'. You show what happens to a man's mind when he resolves through a strange series of causal events to turn himself into a machine. I am sincerely trying to avoid exaggeration and unnecessary embellishment.
Your 'spirituality' is a radical, reductive process carried out by a hyper-rationalizing machine-like mind.
But something powers it, something gives it energy. What is that? It might be that which Nietzsche refers to: will to power. When there is no longer directing 'intelligence' (in the sense of the word '
intellectus'), and when the very possibility of making connections between metaphysical notions perceived in the 'higher mind' are brought to an absolute halt, I guess that this is the point when an unconscious will is 'left standing' so to speak. Maybe it is 'vital energy' or just 'biological machination', but I suggest that in you, David, will-to-power is essentially what motivates you. Not idea, not higher idea or ideal, but what I would have to describe as the 'end result of certain processes of
calculation'.
And under the spell, as it were, of this self-imposition you charge into the intellectual world, a world to which you have no relationship, in which you have no foundation -- in fact no interest at all! -- and you literally muck up the place with the results of your miscomprehensions. Your 'project', driven by will-to-power, is toxic to *meaning* and eats it apart like an acid. You become not a creative agent but an agent of destruction.
This is what 'nihilism' can only mean. It is what results from the destruction of higher levels of meaning which, and you cannot grasp this because *it does not compute*, actually have sustaining and nourishing value.
To what, for what?! you ask. And you have no idea. It is meaningless to you. And the machine revs itself up and off you zoom, propelled by a determinism which you cannot see because
you cannot intellectualize.
You simply cannot understand what traditionally-minded men (to borrow your term, a fuller one is necessary), or those who are interested in and understand higher dimensions of thought and have experience with meaning, and grasp what it is to lose all that this connotes. You do not comprehend what it is to lose 'the intelligible world'. It makes no sense to you.
Therefore, you can only condemn those who through imperfect and even somewhat desperate clinging to
symbolical forms (
myths & beliefs is your term), try to hold on to value & meaning being wrested away from them as they become subsumed in a *machine-world*. It is in a sense grasping a shadow, and doing so at 'dusk'. But the mistake that I believe you make, and this through immaturity and an excess of
will, is to destroy the conceptual pathway to higher meaning, and thus to condemn others to a subsuming nihilism.
There is an alternative, of course. And what is interesting -- (from my perspective which is so many times beyond your capacity to grasp and which severely challenges all who are participating here now) -- is to then conceive of GF not as a place and space through which a person will be (
could be!) brought to 'freedom', but rather one that drags people down into endless dead-ends; to mistakes; to rehearsals of error through mis-directed
will.
Or, in Diebert's case to a
never-ending dusk but a
never-rising sun.
Again, the most comprehensive way to understand Jupiviv is to picture
will, jacked-up with a sort of hysterical mental priapism
in a man who has no penis, coursing about in a desperate struggle to find a suitable *topic* for that argumentative will.
Once you get it, once you grasp the underlying motive -- unconscious though it is -- one has then the key to get what goes on here. That is, what you-plural set in motion. It also explains or in any case reveals why the communication between the 3 of you has fallen asunder, and why, here, all communication only ends in the end of the possibility of communication -- ah, excerpt for in Diebert's case, the crepuscular Hunter Gracchus who lives in perpetual duskiness,
'in the deepest regions of death'.
But I will never abandon you.
Never!
