Looking Ahead To A Hopeful Future

For a description of the above diagram see my The Voice Of The We Of Divinity Post 1 and 2.

Here’s a new post, well, not quite! I stopped posting because, basically, I don’t have anything more to say, but, in WordPress (my Yahoo 360 escape vehicle), I noticed I was not getting any reads on my structuralism paper’s most significant Foucault post (a paper not posted at Booksie). The problem, I believe, was/is that this post is separated from the other Foucault posts by other posts explaining my dialectic theory of freedom. The Foucault post in question, however, introduces the spiritual significance of my freedom theory, and this brings me to the reason for this post—it is the Foucault post and the post of spiritual significance combined—a post well worth reading. For the record, I want to thank both Booksie, WordPress, Blogger, and Multiply for providing the space and the opportunity for me to express my thoughts, hopes, and beliefs. Thanks!


THE PHYSICS OF A NEW EPISTEME-A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE

In so far as liberation occurs, power arrangements occur. And, in so far as power arrangements occur, they begin to dictate the terms of the liberation process. According to Foucault, these power arrangements become the defining force in the environment. As has already been pointed out, the liberation movement of freedom eventually liberated the “implied knowledge of the environment.” From that point on, knowledge became the most encapsulating vehicle of freedom and freedom became manifest in power relationships.

Social organization and social structure are born out of the power arrangements which best reflect the prevailing episteme. According to Foucault, man (as a conceptual entity) and scientific knowledge are also born out of these power arrangements. Blanchot describes the theme that surfaces “above the analysis” in Foucault’s books:

“Thus, already in The Archaeology of Knowledge, where we seem to indulge in the illusion of an autonomous discourse (an illusion with which literature and art perhaps bewitch themselves), there are announced the multiple connections between knowledge and power, and the obligation to recognize the political effects that are produced, at any given moment in history, by the ancient desire to disentangle the true from the false. Knowledge, power, truth? Reason, exclusion, repression?” [Foucault, Blanchot, 1987, p. 80]

These power/knowledge relationships, when considered in the context of the liberation process, become just another obstacle that stands in the way of liberation. These “pockets of power,” in the form of social structure and social organization, may be thought of as static elements in the liberation process; that is, from the point of view of the people who tend to benefit from these “pockets of power” they are static, but, from the point of view of the people who are “locked out” of these “pockets of power” they are oppressive. In other words, although power/knowledge relationships dictate the options available in terms of accessing one’s environment, ultimately, there is no preferred state of privilege and control; it all becomes an obstacle in the liberation process.

Of course, in the real world, I realize I have just described the stratification of the “haves” and “have-nots;” and, I suppose, Foucault would be content to leave it at that. One cannot deny that built into the power structure of social organization is the secured status and privilege of the groups that possess the most power. And further, this security, more often than not, becomes secured by denying power (access to the environment) to an “underprivileged” class of people. That said, it should also be noted that the power/knowledge consequence of the liberation process, as it becomes manifest in the highly differentiated attributes of society (Durkheim) contributes positively to the individuals well being, health, growth, and freedom–the freedom that satisfies needs, permits access, provides security, encourages aesthetic appreciation, provides moral examples, and, promotes justice,--attests to this fact. At the very least, in so far as change is inherent in the liberation process, this change may be for the better. In order to understand how this change for the better can come about, a whole new way of thinking must incorporate itself into the social fabric. A new episteme, in Foucault’s language, must arise. This episteme has already taken root, I believe, in the logical implications generated by the new physics.

The new physics speaks of strange and exciting phenomena. Where this physics will take us is presently unclear but, what is becoming clearer is that it is incorrect to think of our relationship to nature in terms of the three-term relationship of Locke’s mental substance, appearance and material particles. Berkeley, Hume and Kant addressed the inadequacy of this three-term relationship. In brief, John Locke did not have to choose this three-term relationship to explain Newton’s particles. He could have said that mathematical space and time is the vehicle which allows for an analytical account of the aesthetic continuum and that the observer and what appears for the observer are determinations of this aesthetic continuum.

[Footnote. This and the next couple of paragraphs are meant to be a very brief summary of a theme developed in F.S. Northrop’s book, The Meeting of East and West, see chapter entitled The Solution of the Basic Problem, p.436]

He could have said this but he did not because it would have been extremely difficult, given the interpretation of Newtonian physics at the time.
Now we know that it is more accurate if we describe our relationship to nature in the form of a two-term relationship. The first term of the two-term relationship is the theoretically postulated, hypothetically designated, component of experience while the second term is the immediately sensed determinate portion of the aesthetic continuum. This aesthetic component of experience is relative to every individual while the theoretic component occurs in a public space characterized by repeatable experiences. Confirmation of the theoretical component of our experience becomes the key word here and this confirmation may be formal, as in a scientific result, or it may be informal, as in the best that pragmatism has to offer – if it works, use it.


In The Eye Of You And Me We See The Eye Of God

What We Have Here Is A Spinoza Monism With A Mobius Twist- God Existing Inside Out


In the process of writing this paper I have deliberately refrained from using spiritual connotations to describe freedom’s synchronic axis. And, indeed, I suppose one of the beauties of this idea is that one is not forced into making the “leap” to a more spiritual interpretation of freedom (the humanism of James or Dewey will do just fine here). But, the fact remains that my description of freedom is based in two logical primitives, one being found in the logic that something has to first “be” before it can be negated i.e., the principle behind Descartes Cogito, and the other, the affirmation that follows from the negation of a negation. In self-consciousness (discontinuity occurring in continuity) we see the affect of the first logical primitive and in not, not being we see the logic of an affirmed wholeness, affirmed God. It is also in self-consciousness where Piaget’s functional center emerges, where the constructive process begins, and where identities are created/discovered, and all of this is based upon the structural transformations of not, not being as it evolves into the self-consciousness of human consciousness (or the answer to the questions–“Who participates?” and “What is participated in?”).

This implied wholeness is outside of experience, but it only requires a small “leap of faith” to conclude that God exists in this affirmed indeterminate wholeness, exists in this “ground of being,” exists in the “affirmative ideal” that is at the center of structuralism and logic, which, in turn, permits the freedom to ask the question: Does God Exit?

And, operationally speaking, the answer to that question is that in the liberation of self-consciousness, given the logical relations implicit in self-consciousness (God and freedom are One), God not only exists, but God is also all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-present. What we have here, ultimately, is a Spinoza monism with a Mobius twist, a God simultaneously existing inside out.

In what follows I will not evade the spiritual content that the synchronic axis of freedom generates. In this Mobius twist we find the final answer to the questions, “Who participates?” and “What is participated in?”

In the immediately grasped indeterminate, all-embracing oneness of God’s freedom lies the source of the knower and consequently the knower’s freedom. F. S. Northrop tells us how wondrously close we are to God when he says:

“Now it is precisely this ineffable, emotional, moving quale that constitutes what is meant by spirit and the spiritual. Thus in order to do justice to the spiritual nature of human beings and of all things it is not necessary to have recourse to idle speculations, by means of which one tries to pierce through the glass beyond which we now see darkly, to supposedly unaesthetic material substances behind, or into some unreachable and unknowable realm where mental substances are supposed to be. On the contrary, the spiritual, the ineffable, the emotionally moving, the aesthetically vivid — the stuff that dreams and sunsets and the fragrance of flowers are made of — is the immediate, purely factual portion of human nature and the nature of all things. This is the portion of human knowledge that can be known without recourse to inference and speculative hypotheses and deductive logic, and epistemic correlations and rigorously controlled experiments. This we have and are in ourselves and in all things, prior to all theory, before all speculation, with immediacy and hence with absolute certainty.” [F.S.. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, p.462]

All intuitive sensitivity and religiously felt compassion flows from the all embracing oneness common to man’s nature and nature’s creatures, up through the many levels and transformations of freedom until it finally becomes manifest in the self-realized aspect of human freedom as love, caring, happiness and reverence. The telling factor behind this whole process comes with the knowledge that the “I” of God and the “I” of you and me are one in the same. Here I am reminded of the penetrating words of the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart who is reported to have said, “The eye in which I see God and the eye in which God sees me are one and the same.”

In other words, the liberation of God’s non-being becomes God’s immanence in the here and now while, at the same time, there exists an implied transcendent God (the ground of everything, the source of all becoming). Divine immanence, however, is particularly important to all living creatures because it encapsulates all the “reality” that can be experienced and known.