Becoming Is the Alchemical Ontology, Jamming, 05/07/2018

The other day, I was revisiting a short book by my colleague Elizabeth Sandifer. Recursive Occlusion is a little book about the mysticism of Kabbalah and Tarot, in a framework of exploring the Doctor Who story Logopolis.

Her work has always been a bit strange, which is one of the reasons I like her work.

Anyway, it reminded me of one of the original thematic images of her ongoing epic work of commentary, TARDIS Eruditorum – the solution to alchemy as material social progress.

The vision of progress we’re talking about here is fundamentally rooted in freedom – overcoming the bullying authoritarian attitude of social, political, and moral conservatism. Fundamentally, it’s the freedom to transform – to live differently than others, experiment with different kinds of relationships and identities. A constructively queer identity – opposed to nothing but the refusal to accept difference.

Against the Day is a beautiful book. It
depicts, a tad fancifully, a time in human
history that amounted to a technological
and ethical crossroads. The years between
the 1889 World's Fair and the outbreak of
the First World War was a moment where,
but for a few contingencies, we could
have ended up living in a very different
world. Would it have been better? I
have no idea, and I don't think Pynchon
does either. But given where we've
ended up, any possibility is worth
trying. Or at least imagining.

To jump from this to ontological thinking seems utterly barmy, but it can be done. Jussi Parikka gives it a very good shot when he weaves his concepts for a geological philosophy using, among other tools, artistic criticism and commentary.

Alchemical thinking is an attitude of awe, fascination, and love for the powers of substances to transform into one another.

Parikka illustrates this with images from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is one of my favourite novels. He chooses images that show a transition in society that’s ethical at its core, but also political, moral, economic, and ecological. It’s the transformation of alchemy as our attitude to the world, into chemistry.

He interprets these images to mourn how contemporary attitudes that embrace industrial technology refuse the need for magic. The transformation of one substance into another now requires no mysticism, no ethical consideration at all. You routinize it, regularize it, and industrialize it.

The shorthand that’s often used for this is the transition to full capitalism. But that’s not quite accurate. Parikka describes a transition that I think has already changed by now.

Alchemy was a research discipline that included mysticism and ontological philosophy alongside its empirical studies of how to transform substances. Chemistry – and the capitalist economics that fuelled the institutions of industrial chemistry – stripped the divine and philosophical from its research discipline, replacing it with a techno-industrial framework of understanding and practice.

Parikka gives us a quick description that offers a shade of Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. As work became labour, alchemy became chemistry, and a practice of mysticism becomes an assembly line.

Yet care wasn’t entirely stripped from chemistry. You could argue that ethics was transformed, but that the ethical still emerged from the practice. We were offered “Better living through chemistry,” after all. The goal of industrial chemistry was to build a better life for people, to build some kind of material social progress.

There are different capitalist economics in place now. Ask the folks who used to work at Dupont Labs, until a few years ago. We might need other concepts.

The Dreamtime Is Real Places After All, Research Time, 27/02/2018

I said I wasn't going to talk much about the review I’m working on – for Bryan Van Norden’s polemic, his gauntlet throw-down, pistol-packing, Crip-walking graffiti on the university walls, Taking Back Philosophy. But I am a little bit.

There's one idea that I don’t quite have the room to fit into my review, but that actually converges with some of the research I was doing on Félix Guattari’s thinking. Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist and former colleague of Guattari’s, wrote an essay for The Guattari Effect volume about a disagreement they had over the ontology of the Warlpiri worldview.

The Pleiades, by Alma Nungarrayi

Van Norden’s book is a call to globalize university philosophy in a very literal sense – change the curriculum of degree programs to include thinkers in traditions other than the Western. Van Norden writes about the Chinese and Indian traditions in more detail because he knows them best.

But Indigenous philosophy is one – actually very, very many – traditions that need to be at the philosophical table. I feel lucky in Canada that my country’s universities host brilliant Indigenous thinkers – and that many other philosopher-activists thrive outside that system too.

The Warlpiri are an Indigenous Australian people. We often think of Indigenous Australians as all having one culture, or being one people. Generic Aboriginie. Or as they say less formally – Abos. Or the most awful one – Boong. As in, Bung. Australians call their continent’s Indigenous “Shit-people.” As in “people made of shit.” Literally.

So Australia makes me cry a little, but the Warlpiri ontology is very interesting. See, we typically think of Indigenous Australian spirituality as revolving around Dream Time – the entry into an eternal or literally time-less astral world.

The real concept is much more complicated. Not only are there many distinct Indigenous Australian cultures, languages, spiritualities, religions, and philosophies – even the Warlpiri Dream Time concept is different from this simple popular concept.

Dream Time isn’t a no-space, or an eternal reflection of the ordinary world kept mystically separate. Conceive of it more like a collapse of all space and time – past, present, future, everywhere at once – into a single location. It’s a totemic marking of territory. Northern Australia itself becomes a topographical map of totemically staked places.

Dreamtime Sisters, by Colleen Wallace Nungarrayi

When Glowczewski shared a concept she’d used to understand the Warlpiri totemic experience space with Guattari, he was less than pleased. Instead of attempting to understand the Warlpiri concepts on its own terms, she’d introduced a Western mathematical concept to them, to explain their totemic spaces.

A hypercube. Guattari was worried that Glowczewski’s topological mathematics was erasing the details of the Warlpiri concept. When they discussed and explored Dream Time, their mysticism was integrated with a complex web of ideas and practices, networked together into a multidimensional multiplicity of meanings and manifestations.

They argued over this for a while. But at the same time, the Warlpiri elders that Glowczewski had come to know had their own answer to the dispute.

That's really the best way to find your answer, honestly. When you’re arguing about some complicated philosophical issue in another culture, a thinker of roughly your own skill from that culture is the best to set you on the right course. At the least, they’ll let you know which of you is the most wrong.

It turned out to be Guattari. The Warlpiri elders and shamans were well ahead of Guattari’s own hesitation. I can see where he was coming from – the white person well aware of the eggshell walkways of post-colonial conversations. You don’t want to risk telling an Indigenous person what their worldview is “really about” because that’s exactly the kind of cultural and philosophical erasure they’ve been dealing with for centuries.

Those Warlpiri philosophers had a surprise for Guattari, at least in Glowczewski’s telling. They liked topological mathematics. They liked the hypercube concept. It worked really well to explain some important aspects of their spiritual thinking and its ontological connection with particular places and place in general.

It wasn’t complete, of course. Topological math couldn’t explain everything, but it was a useful tool to put in their own philosophical bundle. They used it well.

What In the World Will People Think?! Research Time, 04/02/2018

When I was reading through that book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, one name struck me for an odd reason – it was totally unfamiliar to me.

Who are some of these guys?

Josef-Maria Hoëne-Wronski. Who the hell was this guy? He got a brief mention in a small corner of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s most dense book. But I’ve never come across him in all my research into the corners of Napoleonic-period German philosophy.

Here was his major project, in a few paragraphs.

It’s the 1780s. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason drops, and blows a lot of the intellectual scene in Germany away. It broke with long-established ways of thinking about human nature and thought, but did so by explicitly engaging with its major problems and solving them.

Naturally, Kant's solutions set up an entirely new set of problems. Wronski was a major figure in Polish mathematics and physics, so he had the knowledge base to approach many of the problems Kant’s work posed for the foundational principles of physics.

Kant’s first revolutionary book described how the structures of the mind – frameworks as simple and built into our experience as space, time, number, causality – conditioned experience. Human reason alone – as in logical reasoning – had no power to reach any foundational principle for why the frameworks of our mind were as they were.

Now, Kant would ultimately centre those principles in ethics and morality – practical reason. Wronski would move in a totally different direction – physics, particularly calculus.
• • •
Quick jump out of this to talk history. At the undergraduate level, the history of Western philosophy is usually taught as though there are clear boundaries in its development – classical, medieval, modern, critical, contemporary. 

Steve and I disagree on a lot of substantial ontological and
epistemological issues and debates. But we always have very
fruitful – or at least very entertaining – engagements and
conversations.

All too often, those boundaries settle into researchers’ thinking as they progress as a scholar and specialize. That’s why philosophical work that shows the continuity through all these breaks – the little differences and influences across what we think are distinct periods – is the most valuable history of philosophy to me.

I’m indebted to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller for having written books that taught me so much about those continuities that our oversimplifying undergrad curriculum paints over and erases. Of all the mentors, teachers, and elders I’ve had over the years, he’s taught me the most about this.
• • •
The choice made sense to Wronski. He was a physicist who came from the German-Polish professional world, where you learned Leibniz’s calculus alongside his complex and imaginative ontologies. So intensely creative, ontologically fertile metaphysics was an ordinary part of mathematical thinking for him.

In most of our undergraduate educations in philosophy, we learn that no one thought this way after reading Kant’s Critiques. That was the long-term effect, but just because it’s happened by now, doesn’t mean that it never took a long time anyway.

Wronski may have thought little of bringing Leibniz’s multivector hybrid approaches to physics, mathematics, and ontology. But the presumption got him into trouble, costing him a job at the Marseille Observatory.

It turns out that it isn’t always acceptable to develop a complexly hybrid ontology of the origins of the universe when you’re supposed to be mapping star movements. At least not outside your lunch breaks anyway.

Who are these guys, Kemo Sabe? Another inadvisable direction.

Wronski eventually became most famous in the intellectual circles of his day as a bit of a crank. As people were abandoning the approaches of Leibniz, he was carrying them forward. As it became less acceptable to motivate philosophical and scientific work using religious and theological principles, he was discussing how mystical visions helped inspire his metaphysical work.

The first major product of this exploration was his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics and Algorithmic Science. It was a massive synthesis of Leibnizian ontologies of calculus with Pythagorean numerological mysticism, all tuned to the problems of post-Kantian philosophy.

His correspondences and friendships with major figures in European mathematics like Joseph-Louis Lagrange meant that this first book was reviewed in high-rolling circles. This quickly turned into a problem for Wronski, since IPMAS was universally panned, including in the review by Lagrange.

Eventually, Wronski’s own faith in the universality of algebra and calculus ended up just as limited as the Pythagorean faith in flat-planed geometry. After ambitious mathematical papers were likewise panned, he spent the last 30 years of his life in poverty. Still grinding away at epochally-ambitious philosophy and mathematics. But fruitlessly.

Wronski’s work turned out to be a dead end. So associating him with Deleuze becomes incredibly dangerous. The insults Wronski received on his way out of intellectual prominence – mystic spewing madness and nonsense – sound very similar to the insults academician analytic philosophers spew at post-structuralist thinkers like Deleuze.

So an essay talking about the influence of such a reviled figure as Wronski on Deleuze – who is widely reviled as a charlatan in many university circles – has to be careful not to associate them too much. Lest you justify the haters.

When a Legendary Fear Is True, Doctor Who: Extremis, Reviews, 22/05/2017

As a story, “Extremis” is kind of old hat for Steven Moffat, as my senior colleague in Doctor Who criticism Phil Sandifer has said. Yes, there’s metafiction piled on deep in this episode. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

I want to talk about a demon. I want to talk about the most famous demon in the history of Western philosophy. That demon inspired “Extremis.” So

The Doctor decides that he will not give up in the face of his unreality,
his existence as a simulation of whatever the real thing would be. The
most accurate simulation would never give up anyway. That's what
"extremis" means in this story. That your virtue only shows itself in
moments of genuine extremity, in times of great risk and danger.
The refusal to meet your illusory nature with despair is, from an
existential perspective, the bravest thing you can do.

SPOILERS!!

naturally. The most philosophically intriguing part of this story is its central conceit. The evil demon is true. It’s usually one of the first problems that incoming university philosophy students learn. It consumes you when you first hear it – its imagery and implications are so powerful.

The power of that question – What if our entire reality is unreal? An illusion? – is immense. It can be a cornerstone of madness.

The moments of doubt that your existence matters at all can manifest as a dissociation, an all-too-common feeling of emptiness. What does it even mean to say that your existence is unreal?

Live the Revolution

In pop-cultural terms, it’s about living in a simulation. The Matrix is the obvious touchstone. Even when I was first studying René Descartes’ Meditations in my first ever philosophy class, my teacher Jim Bradley compared his evil demon problem to The Matrix. The two scenarios aren’t quite the same, though. But “Extremis” blends them both with a powerful ethical lesson.

The Matrix is a simulation of reality. So is the projected world we uncover in “Extremis.” The difference is that the world of The Matrix is a simulation for the people in it, but the people are real. The people of The Matrix are real people – organisms trapped in a simulated reality.

To realize this prompts revolution. You break out of the machine, build yourself a new life in this messy reality, and prepare to dive back in. Though there’s really no reason why you should dive back in, especially given how poorly the sequels went.

But this isn’t what “Extremis” presents us. Keanu still has one thing to fall back on – his physical body. That remains real, even if its nature is hidden from him in the simulated world. No, Steven Moffat is presenting us with something very different here.

A Prestigious Heritage

“Extremis” is based around the meditation on the evil demon. When you read Descartes, this is probably the most affecting thing he ever wrote. It goes something like this.

Philosophy, as a discipline and as a tradition, tends to make a fetish of
the truth. It's unfortunate, because truth is too important a matter to
demand fidelity to it or its apparent implications. Veritas in this story
is supposed to be the proof that your life is meaningless.

Descartes structures his Meditations on First Philosophy as an attempt to isolate some certain truth about existence. His first two (of six) chapters aim to break down our supposed certainties about reality, what we take for granted.

So he brings up the possibility that what we experience may be an illusion. All our perceptions could be based on mistakes or falsify the real nature of the world. So far, so Matrix. But Descartes goes further.

He goes for a world-shattering image. He asks you to imagine that your entire physical body – everything you know even through your proprioception, your material selfhood itself – is an illusion.

As well, imagine that the fundamental rules of your entire universe are illusions too. I’m not just asking you to imagine that 2 + 2 = 5 or 763. I mean, imagine that even number itself makes no actual sense in the true nature of reality.

So if you can imagine it, then it’s possible. It may not be true, and in fact, it probably isn’t true. But it’s possible.

Cleaving Reality

Possible, but not true. We’re still in a realm of imagination here. It’s a powerful imagination that can revolutionize your way of thinking. Yet that’s always what the meditative tradition was for.

I didn’t always know about Descartes’ influences as a writer and a thinker. I had always been taught a story of Descartes that saw him as a transitional figure between medieval and modern ways of thinking. But that transition was in the form of a radical break.

Descartes was most remarkable for uniting mysticism and the new
discipline of scientific investigation, as it was developing in its
infancy. Mystic science didn't really take, unless that's what you
want to call philosophy.

I learned about Descartes as the inventor of modernity, as much as modernity can be said to have been invented by one man. His thought experiment in The Meditations was, according to the philosophy curriculum I experienced as a young man, the beginning of a distinctly modern idea – the separation of human rationality from nature.

We could call the reality of nature into doubt – even to the fundamental level of mathematical truths. But what we’re never able to doubt is the ongoing action of our own self-conscious minds. Whenever we’re thinking about ourselves, our own act of thinking, we know that this thinking is real.

So reality becomes separate from our minds. Our minds are always certain, are able to justify their own existence. Nature and material reality, on the other hand, is always subject to doubt. Potentially so, anyway. So human thought becomes more real than the world that produces it. At least, that’s how you understand it. Humanity develops one more sophisticated reason to tear our planet indiscriminately to pieces.

How you think that reality is unreal depends on a chilling proposition. What if some omnipowerful evil demon is creating the entire field of reality in which you exist as an illusion, including your body and history?

When Thought Meets Mysticism

But reality’s unreality, and the evil demon that causes it, isn’t supposed to be a terrifying proposition. It was originally, and in Descartes’ hands, supposed to be a foundation for justifying the existence of the divine.

You see, Descartes wasn’t the first one to develop the thought experiment of the evil demon and the unreality of reality. Descartes was the first to develop it in a scientific context, since he was a scientists first and foremost – a mathematician, geometer, and theorist of optics, as well as a philosopher.

In many ways, the monks are an embodiment of living death, the
emptiness of simulated existence. Even their appearance is as the
living dead.

In that sense, Descartes is the beginning of Western modernity. When you’re taught Descartes, he’s presented as the progenitor of modern philosophy. That’s a bit of a stretch when you know the real history. Medieval history.

Descartes didn’t exist in a vacuum. He grew up in a medieval cultural milieu. It’s a world that, in many ways, is very different from our own, obviously. Foremost among medieval European thought was the primacy of religion.

Investigating the world was seen as reading God’s writing and nature in reality itself. The early scientific innovators like Roger Bacon thought they were up to the same thing, developing experimental methods to find different ways of investigating reality, because to know nature is to know the mind of God.

Meditation was one technique to bring a person closer to God as well, to bring them into contact with divinity. The solution to Descartes’ problem was that God – the only source of our concepts of infinity and divinity themselves – guaranteed the reality of reality.

Because we could conceive of God, we couldn’t do it under our own power. Descartes argues this by relying on a medieval rule of metaphysical logic that nothing more perfect – like the concepts of perfection in divinity – could be developed by a less-than-perfect being. They had to come from God, because human being isn’t adequate to generating them.

The thought experiment of the evil demon leading to a communion with God in thought didn’t come from Descartes, though. It was developed by Teresa of Avila, a Jesuit nun who wrote meditative texts.

Because as far as even obvious simulations like Super Mario are
concerned, from their own perspectives, they're as real as Bob Hoskins.

Meditations were popular guides for ordinary people to explore mystical elements of their worlds, and their own minds, through inward contemplation. Being such a heavily Christian culture, the meditative text was a guide to uncovering God in your own thoughts and existence.

Descartes unified that mysticism with a scientific mind-set. That’s why we call him a modern thinker. But we could also call him a medieval man equally accurately.

The Demons Are Real

But I’m not thinking only about Descartes, Teresa, and the Wachowski Sisters. I’m talking about Doctor Who. Particularly the chilling scenario of “Extremis.” Literally, it’s the most extreme place you could take the evil demon problem.

It’s simple, really. The demon is real. He does control your entire reality, having created it as a simulation. Not only are your surroundings illusory, a program running in a massively powerful computer – you are too.

Teresa and Descartes could always rely on the act of meditation itself as the place from which the existence of reality could be justified as a mystic experience. Whether through communion or argument, it didn’t matter. The point was that the evil demon’s trickery could be overcome.

Not so for the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole in this episode. They themselves are also simulations. The horror of their existence is in realizing it. For them, the revolution against the terror of their situations seems to justify the mass suicides we see throughout the episode.

As the Doctor says, if Super Mario realized that he was a character in a video game, he’d delete himself from the whole program so he wouldn’t have to die anymore.

I suppose I should say something about the Master, seeing as "Extremis"
finally reveals that she really is the mysterious creature in the vault.
In a way, this is a return to one of the most sentimental lines in
Russell T Davies' Doctor Who, when the Doctor offers to keep the
Master a prisoner and take care of him, raise him to be a better
person. Faced with this imposition on his life, John Simm's
Master apparently shot himself to escape. Here, Michelle Gomez
answers that quandary: She embraces the possibility of that
change in character as a chance to save her life. The Doctor doesn't
impose that choice, as Tennant's did. He asks, and she says yes.

The Doctor’s solution is brilliant, in its way. Because there is still a material reality that exists. The reality of the actual Earth that the evil alien monks are simulating to aid their invasion. The Doctor of “Extremis” may not be real. But he has a better idea for revolution than simply opting out of the program.

It’s an act of outreach to himself. To speak to himself not by turning inward, as in a meditation, but by turning outward. He communicates to the material Doctor on Earth, as the simulated Doctor from inside the monks’ simulators. A mysticism of materiality.

The Doctor's conclusion about the illusory nature of his own existence in "Extremis" is different than pretty much everyone else in the story. Everyone who reads the Veritas dies by their own hand, having understood that their existence is merely simulated. The Doctor sees the crime and the terror of this idea and fights against that resignation.

To resign is to admit your powerlessness. To admit powerlessness is to forgo power. Not only is his existence illusory, but even the illusion is based on a crime – a simulation as an intelligence exercise before conquest and destruction. The Doctor knows that the response to evil is never to give in to it, but to fight in whatever way you can.

In the battle for justice and good, life is justified. Even a life that was never real.
• • •
My reviews so far of Peter Capaldi's last full season of Doctor Who.
Oxygen
Knock Knock
Thin Ice
Smile
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye

Into the Mystic III: Freedom, Research Time, 16/06/2015

Continued from last post . . . Yes, I know it’s the next day, but honestly, I think I’ll just guarantee an MWF series of posts, and if I have the time, I’ll blast a T or R or weekend post on Twitter. 

Oddly enough, I was at a networking session with the International Association of Business Communicators, and one of the more experienced folks there told me how generally impressive just maintaining a regular blog was. I may even volunteer for IABC’s newsletter and blog over the next while, adapting some of my communications theory ideas to their forum. It’d be good practice in maintaining my tone of an accessible intellectual. I think I keep a good tone balance on this blog, but I could do with the challenge of a bigger, more diverse audience than I get here.

So back to prophecy, my last post in this series. This is another concept that I think I’ll use in the Utopias manuscript, but only as a metaphor. Why has to do with the limits of my own expertise. The philosophy of religion has always been pretty tangential to my own interests – what fascinated me most were ideas in political thought and trippy metaphysics that adapt progressive ideas in science to everyday life (like determinism, chance, time, relation, and selfhood). 

Vox Day and the flaming
sword of devotion to God.

But religion is one of the most important aspects of modern politics, particularly what violence people will do in the name of their devotion. The stereotypical example is Islamic terrorism, becoming a suicide bomber or waging a war across most of Iraq and Syria to live out the dictates of your devotion to your god. And that happens.

But I could just as easily mention blowing an abortion provider’s brains out in the name of Christ. You get the idea.

Ultimately, it rests on the notion that the only genuine expression of faith is following the orders of your divinity without question – faith as submission. It’s weird that a dorky little fundamentalist sci-fi editor like Vox Day could call up such a terrifying spectre behind his discussions about pretentious Naria riff novels. But there you go.

Henri Bergson wrote one of the best books of philosophy about religion that I’ve ever came across, and which I and a few others whose perspectives I trust would say that it’s among the best that’s ever been. Two Sources of Morality and Religion. It examines religion as a phenomenon in the world, particularly its social and political power.

Religion and religious belief has two modes, says Bergson. One is the institutional. This is religion as a worldly authority that uses a common moral and theological belief system to maintain the social stability of a community. We needed this method of social control in the early days of our species, when we were first beginning to speculate about the nature of the world as well as live in it.

This is the religion of Vox Day, John C. Wright, and many others who commit much more violent and horrifying acts of devotion than writing pretentious sci-fi literature and hijacking awards shows. I look at religious extremism around the world and I wish they were all satisfied with Day and Wright’s level of general dickishness.

That conception of religion as social control is a primal aspect of the totalitarian impulse. After all, few other things govern human behaviour as comprehensively as a set of religious duties. Applied in the name of control alone, to the fullest extent of its powers, and you have a totally universal form of social control. A militarized theocracy. A literal sun king who’s worshipped as a god.

Utopias will confront this drive for total, comprehensive control of an entire human personality, life, and mind as its central enemy, along with the authoritarian impulse wherever it appears. 

Another aspect of Utopias will be
exploring the complex and weird
philosophical legacy of Henri
Bergson himself, as well as his
concepts on their own.

Bergson’s second function of religion in human society is the antidote to this authoritarian drive, the mystic. Bergson has a complicated ontology, where there’s a vital force in the universe itself driving complexification and progress toward higher and higher powers of mind, a drive within matter to make itself energy again. At the end of his philosophical career,* Bergson conceived of the human as the highest articulation of this force in the universe so far, and mystic prophecy was this force’s way of progressing humanity.

* That is, near the end of his life.

Not quite where I’m going with it, of course. In my own conception, as this metaphor will play out in the Utopias manuscript, the mystic is the agent of freedom, the one who calls upon a higher power than the richest, most vile and corrupt factions of his society can summon, to end their regime of injustice. It’s the ragged, old woman who calls on a king to cower before her. 

Ezekiel against the theocracy. Jesus against Rome. Luther against Rome. Bonhoeffer against the Leader. King against Wallace. That sort of thing.

It’s interesting (in that existentially unsettling way) to see the Christian tradition Vox Day described in his interview with Phil Sandifer as mysticism that urges you to follow, submit to authority. It’s an aspect of the mystic that I’ll have to think about.

The Materialist Mysticism of Clarice Lispector, Jamming, 11/12/2014

This week, I finished reading a novel that depicts serious spiritual ecstasy without any religion whatsoever. Let me set the context first.

You know what bugs me about the “New Atheists” that too many people find impressive? I mean, aside from all their racism. It’s the sheer reductive blandness of their ideas. They commit the juvenile error of believing in a vision of science as a perfect system of knowledge that discovers only absolute and perfect truths about the world, which is bad enough. 

But even beyond this, the New Atheist picture of the world is as a place of pure, simple existence. The only events in the world are the trivial and mundane. Scientists tell us how the world works, and it’s the simple collisions of billiard balls. Anything more profound than that is an expression of their hated religion. For Dawkins, Maher, Harris, et al, understanding your identity through any kind of conception of the divine is a sign of idiocy.* They’re the kinds of dunderheaded atheists that unfortunately arise in an era where moronic Biblical literacy is more popular than it’s ever been before.

* Even here, I’m tactfully leaving aside their contention that anyone who steps inside a mosque is a mass-murdering child rapist. 

If you read Lispector's The Passion According to G. H.,
and I strongly recommend you do, it seriously helps to
imagine the narrator as a Brazilian Lucille Bluth.

Religion is most profoundly about frameworks to develop your identity through dialogue with the divinity of existence. This ethical dynamic accepts (like all sane religious thinking) pluralism of religious tradition and belief. How each person understands divinity in existence is unique to each person. Both oppressive religious institutions and New Atheists understand religion only as a series of doctrines for the masses to swallow whole for the sake of social and political conformity. Understanding the divinity of life is a more mystical path.

I recently finished reading a landmark novel of Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., a short, dense work that consists entirely of an interior monologue of a mystical experience in the most unlikely place. The G. H. of the title is a wealthy woman on the cusp of middle age who lives in Rio de Janeiro. I already felt happy to read an existentialist story whose "generic human" was a different kind of person than an early-middle aged white male. She begins the story in a typical moment of self-absorption, annoyed at having to clean her apartment herself for the first time in a while. Her live-in maid, whose name she has trouble remembering, has left her job and moved out. She’s stuck cleaning her room.

G. H. realized, on discovering a large wall-drawing, that her maid hated her. When she discovers a cockroach crawling out of an armoire and collapses, she spirals into an experience that I can only call a communion with matter itself. The cockroach’s empty black eye reflects its entire species’ history. She understands how disgusting living matter, indeed the very nature of even being alive, is. Squishy, moist, and oozing. 

Everything is pardoned because everything is alive, and life requires the consumption of other life to continue. The inevitability of death and grotesque violence is a casual revelation. She crushes the cockroach in the door, and through the long moment of its death, she begins to experience what feels like hours in seconds. Death is inevitable, a fact that deserves neither blame nor punishment. Reality is, in Lispector’s words, neutral, and the universe is a profound indifference to both suffering and joy. 

As a toddler, Clarice Lispector fled
Ukrainian pogroms with her family
to Brazil, where she grew into one
of her country's greatest writers.

We are interdependent bodies that eat and are eaten, are consumed to be reformed in a new form. This is a world without fear, because nothing is ever truly destroyed. The world is a vast and complicated continuity of change, its renewal a constant now. Humanity is a sad over-complication of reality, creating angst and terror from the egocentric songs of self-consciousness. Even the nature of our existence as individuals separate from the world around us is a mistaken perception, an error in judgment resulting from our over-complicated nervous systems. If there is a hell, says Lispector’s G. H., it’s an all-too-human life of constant worry and fear.

All of us will die eventually, and dying will be a relief from our anxiousness. Existence as dirt and rocks lets us experience slow, calm attitudes, the relaxed existence of simple bodies. Humans have so many ways to be irritated that everything in the world constantly annoys us. Death, simplifying our material, is a welcome calm after the continual busyness of organic living. 

“The world interdepended with me – that was the confidence I had reached . . . Life is itself for me . . . And therefore, I adore.”

I don’t really think my spoilers tag was appropriate for that.

Lispector’s Passion should be read if you ever feel yourself agreeing too much with a Richard Dawkins or a Bill Maher. Instead of an atheism that’s moronic and simple, Lispector can give you the foundation of an atheism that delivers all the profundity of religion at its best, even as popular religion falls into the idiocy of literalism. Biblical literalists and New Atheists deserve each other, and in my more resentful moments, I'll be glad to watch them can snipe each other to death for my amusement.

I’ll be with the mystics.

Really Good Science-Fiction, Composing, 07/12/2014

As I’ve written before, I’ve always been into science-fiction throughout my life. It isn’t really, when you think about it, a big deal because so many popular culture involve sci-fi forms and ideas. But even though sci-fi ideas basically are popular culture now, actually identifying yourself as someone who likes sci-fi per se has, at least until recently, put you pretty solidly in nerd cultures, with everything that entails.

But I’m also a published novelist in sci-fi now. Even though I won’t be able to get fully into promoting Under the Trees, Eaten until the new year (it was always going to be a slow build sort of thing anyway, as I’m trying to get my new career in communications and network science off the ground at the same time), I’m still actually part of the field.

So whenever my friend Philosojaysfan* tweets links about his Stanley Kubrick fandom, I’m usually interested, especially when it’s about 2001, which is one of the greatest science-fiction movies ever made. This time, the British Film Institute posted a scan of Kubrick’s original letter to Arthur C. Clarke that started their collaboration on what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

* Yes, that is seriously his Twitter handle. Don’t judge him, because you know it’s actually kind of brilliant.

So many pictures of Kubrick make him look intense or
manic, but I prefer the images of him as amused or
bemused.

Kubrick’s movies were really influential on my thinking when I first started to consider seriously the possibility of creating art as one of the major things I did with my life. My own styles and priorities have since become very different than his, but that formative influence, admiration, and love is still there. As well, there are attempts throughout my work to make what I’d call “really good science-fiction.” 

So I thought this and the next few Sunday/weekend posts would discuss some of my ideas about what makes “really good science-fiction” and how I put these into my work. Right now, my two major projects are Under the Trees, Eaten and the Alice script that I’m developing with Lee Skinner. I’ll discuss an idea I had for a comic series a few years ago, and how that developed in my thinking after meeting a possible collaborator in Toronto this summer. And maybe I’ll talk about some ideas I’ve had about a dream project of mine: what I’d do if my writing career ever gets to the point where the BBC would commission me to write an episode of Doctor Who.

What do I think generally constitutes “really good science-fiction”? A lot of it is in that letter Kubrick wrote to Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. There should be a thoughtfulness to it, considering a question that could (or perhaps should) reorient how we understand the universe and our place in it. I ultimately don’t like what Clarke did with the 2001 concept of extra-terrestrial life in the novels that followed their collaboration. He essentially made them superpowerful gods whose mission was to seed the universe with life of all kinds. 

There was a naïveté in those Clarke novels that depressed me at the time I read them without entirely knowing why. Kubrick and Clarke’s original collaboration didn’t get into the aliens’ motives for what they were doing at all, letting their actions remain mysterious, and our encounters with them taking on an almost mystical character. Aliens would be so different from us that encountering them would require a temporary suspension of your own humanity, an experience that only our religious mystical traditions have come close to preparing us for. When aliens that were once the causes of world-shattering encounters are treated as technical problems to solve and tinker with, a lot of literary and philosophical majesty is lost.

This is a problem that I have with a lot of sci-fi influenced by the Golden Age period anyway, as Clarke’s very much was. The stories were not about character, ethics, or any deeper meaning, but simply puzzle boxes. Culturally, we’ve figured out how to combine puzzle boxes with all that now, and so the quotidian triviality of puzzle box storytelling only becomes more frustrating to encounter.

What Is Trustworthy About a Visionary? Research Time, 11/03/2014

Through the random posts of a couple of Facebook connections, I came across a remarkable little essay, just over ten years old, by a pair of otherwise unremarkable scholars named Mark Van Atten and Robert Tragesser about the nature of mysticism. In particular, they took a left-field, but deceptively simple, tack on the Common Core Thesis in the philosophy of mysticism. This idea is that, underneath all the divergence of mystical visions, there is a common set of truths at the core of all mystical visions and visionaries.

The notion speaks to our contemporary spirituality of the market of everyday enlightenment. When spirituality can come in a pill, there’s a shaman in every drugstore and on every street corner. But mysticism has played its role in all of humanity’s spiritual traditions. A mystic vision is described as an experience of the Absolute Good, and so that Common Core Thesis would seem to be the only way mysticism could offer genuine guidance in life. When Van Atten and Tragesser discuss contemporary mystics, they’re comparing two people in a profession that’s rarely associated in its popular image with such thinking: L. E. J. Brouwer and Kurt Gödel, the logicians and mathematicians.

I think if I had ever decided to pursue contemporary
philosophy of mathematics itself in any substantial
way, I'd build on the concepts of Kurt Gödel.

Not all visions of an Absolute Good are defined in mystical terms; sometimes they’re couched as political movements, ideologies based on the realization of a single core concept. This is how theories of mysticism can operate in my Utopias project. But I don’t think they’ll play a very central role, and perhaps can play only an underlying role to avoid bogging down my analysis of the religious fervour of politics in the fervour of a singular vision. Singular visions are at the heart of both phenomena, but for an ideologue, that vision can be shared and acted upon, while the mystic vision would appear incommunicable.

Their essay analyses Brouwer’s and Gödel’s different conceptions of the Absolute, and examine the implications of that comparison for the Common Core Thesis. They describe Brouwer as a pure Kantian in one pivotal way: he considered time to be a construction of subjectivity. Going beyond Kant, Brouwer considered mathematics to be an elaboration of the intuitions of discreteness (moments) and continuity (passage or flow) of time. But Brouwer considered this a falling away from the Absolute in which time is not sensed. We are able to achieve practical actions, but in doing so, we are isolated from the true nature of things.*

* In conceiving of the faculty of intelligence or intellect as the ability to quantitatively take stock of the world and focus our thoughts for practical action, Brouwer greatly resembles the ideas of Henri Bergson. Of course, he differs from Bergson in a variety of other, more fundamental, ways. Bergson is an interesting figure in the philosophical tradition of trying to understand mysticism. His treatment of the subject in his last major work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, is fascinating and nuanced. I don’t quite have the space to go into it here, and I don’t even have a solid enough memory of it to put anything in pixels again just yet. But his entirely immanent conception of what the mystic intuits or experiences wildly differs from virtually every other mystic or analyst of mysticism I’ve ever found, who focus on mystic visions as contact with a transcendent Absolute. It also has no room for any version of the Common Core Thesis. If mysticism becomes an important conceptual pillar of the Utopias project’s analysis of ideology, Bergson’s concept may be a critical alternative to the political absolutisms.

Gödel, meanwhile, conceived of mystical insight as an intellectual matter entirely. His Platonic conception of mathematics made mystical contact with pure mathematical concepts the centrepiece of his epistemology of math. Mysticism was Gödel’s path to intellectual enlightenment, the truth of mathematics. He considered himself extremely influenced by Schelling in this regard.** Contrasted with Brouwer, our trusty co-authors saw them together as disproving the Common Core Thesis. Their concepts of mystical experience, and how they described their own experiences, stand in total opposition and contradiction to each other. There could not be a single universal truth underlying every mystical experience if the content of each of those experiences includes incompossibles, notions that can’t both be true, where the truth of one falsifies the other.

** I’ll say it right now. I’ve never read Schelling. Not one iota. I don’t even really know where I’d start. If any of my friends who have read Schelling have some recommendations on his best books (I don’t want any ‘introductory’ or ‘the easy stuff’ first; I can handle the pure shit), let me know.

If I decide, for at least one dimension of analysis in the Utopias project, to understand ideological absolutism as the worldly articulation of a mystical vision of the Absolute, this paper has been remarkably valuable to me. It offers grounds for the discord underlying all absolutism.