Yet another cave

The ***** must coax, trick, tear you away from your fears, loves and hates. No one can accomplish this for oneself, and all must desperately resist until the operation is complete.

Against Evolution

Doubt all accounts that smack of unilinear progress, whether from biologists, theologians or humanists. Retell their stories as messy differentiations.

Neither have lower lifeforms evolved into higher ones, nor are we humans their culmination: all forms of life still exist; higher species have not replaced lower ones but merely added to them.

Our view of God has not progressively refined itself over the ages. New gods and ideals have demultiplied, but rarely do the old ones die out: we still sacrifice people to God; we still worship mute, lifeless objects; we still preach apocalypses and mythical beginnings; we still punish sinners.

Our knowledge and wealth have increased exponentially, but many still live and think (happily perhaps) as some already did eons, millenia, centuries or decades ago. The poor and simple never disappear — it is only that others leave them ever further behind.

Manifold time

Do not think of your or the universe’s life as fitting atop an inexorably straight line of time, but freely imagine it instead as any number of curved trajectories, the myriad possible and truthful views of what has been, is and might happen, none of which will ever be so certain as to exclude all others. Time is neither linear nor singular; we’ve only come to perceive it as so:

Imagine time is a flawed concept.

Impossible opposites

“A” only excludes “not A” if that concept will never prove to have been inadequate — in any other case “A and not A” might be less wrong.

The Meillassoux Machine

A young Frenchman was the talk of his town. Every day at exactly noon he could be found strolling along the streets and, as the bells tolled, he would perform some novel & absolutely unusual deed no one had ever seen performed before. Sometimes it was almost nothing; at other times he would be arrested for breaking some law; but regardless, he invariably continued his aberrant practice.

One day, as he strolled down the street shortly after noon, someone walked up to him and asked why he behaved so oddly? He answered: “I have created a new contraption i call the Meillassoux Machine, which every morning invents an entirely unheardof act for me to perform. One day, i expect it will suggest a deed so unimaginably good, it will change the world for ever.”

Slices of reality

We live, think and act inside thin slices of reality. Another slice, intersecting at an angle the exact point where i now exist, might look entirely different from the ones i am used to. Its truths and goods will seem like foolish errors, if they are even comprehensible. We must learn to travel between these slices of our reality, speaking of one truth with opposite words.

Try to imagine at the same time that there is a god and that there isn’t. Use this seeming contradiction to stretch your mind until it realizes that neither position is true (nor hence contradictory) and thus learns to make out much better forms of what it once thought of as god or godless. Your view of the world will open up, no longer in thrall to a specific but inevitably flawed idea of God, nor the gaping hole where such a god was said to not exist.

Liberal unbelievers

The liberal unbeliever of today imposes upon eself one or more of the following food restrictions: sustainable, fair trade, organic, vegetarian, vegan or raw only. The attendant casuistry (specific good deeds) includes: reducing, reusing, recycling, polluting a strict minimum, favoring renewable energies, fighting deforestation and rampant capitalism. The soteriology is corporate, as either all people or none will be saved in the end, and based on deeds (instead of faith). The hermeneutics is scientific, the unbeliever accepting the (liberal) pronouncements of (in particular climate) scientists as true and binding. The ecclesiology encompasses the entire human race as well as all or most living things on this planet. The eschatology is pessimistic and catastrophic, believing the end times are near, namely that the world and perhaps humanity itself will soon be irremediably destroyed unless almost everyone continuously performs most of the above-mentioned good deeds.

Imagining other selves

The following reflection might help you imagine how it could be that you have another self at a different level than your individual self:

When we are born, others teach us how to speak, how to think, how to reason and how to interpret our feelings and emotions. Every concept and idea we have about the world (trees, houses, parents, good & evil, joy, science, color, beauty, truth etc.) has been foisted upon us by our parents and teachers, broadly speaking. None of our thoughts originated with ourselves, but rather were directly or sometimes indirectly implanted in our brains by a pollyty, that is, by some other self that has our own self as one of its many parts. What we consider to be true, the methods we use for reasoning, the things we consider good or bad, the direction in which our desires lean, the accuracy of our emotional knowledge — all of these intimate aspects of who we are were given to us by the pollyty (except in those very few instances where we inventively gave them to the pollyty). We needn’t believe any of this was intentional, that some other foreign self is controlling us (intentions as such might  be only something individuals have), but we can imagine that we are unavoidably part of something that exerts a very great deal of control over us as individuals — like our brains exert a great deal of control over our bodies. We would then be a small node doing some of the thinking & feeling of this distributed pollyty. So, you are not only an individual but also another self, one that existed long before your individual self appeared and which will continue to exist long after you individual self disappears.

This other self is, however, very much your self, in a very practical and moral way. You just have more than one self, some extending much further than others, but all being ultimately important to you.