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IS NOTHING SACRED?

#68: May - July 2009 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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IS NOTHING SACRED?

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Nothing

Continuing discussion from http://www.booktalk.org/fiction-book-su ... 81-30.html
MaryLupin wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: “Like Someplace to be Flying, Carlos opens a hidden reality. The Yacqui ontology of the tonal and the nagual maps to Heidegger’s distinction of being and nothing.”
I am not sure I would say they open hidden realities as much as either invent them or more exactly, expose metaphorical connections that exist unconsciously and with the aid of the human narrative imagination and our tendency toward projection and anthropomorphization, act as if we have opened a previously hidden reality. Regardless, though, it is one hell of a fun ride.

Hi Mary. If the metaphorical connections exist unconsciously, it seems reasonable to describe them as a hidden reality. There is a problem here regarding the reality of ideas that are derived from construction rather than observation, which seems to me to be at the core of the question of the legitimacy of mythological thinking. Taking Gaiman’s example in American Gods of bringing Odin back to life in the contemporary USA, this seems obviously to be a construction rather than a description. I get the impression Gaiman strikes a nerve with his sense of Gods as a hidden reality. Either he is talking about nothing or something. This twilight world of the Gods seems to be a liminal mixture where the nothing of imagination intrudes into the something of ordinary life. Can an idea such as Odin be important enough to provide the name of a day of the week, but also so unimportant that it refers to nothing real?

Similar arguments apply for all mythological thought, with the popularity of myths serving as an indicator of their perceived or actual utility. People have a constant tendency to mythologise stories to make them easier to remember and more interesting, pushing history into conformance with the mythic archetypes. This ‘invention’ of hidden realities only operates where the ideas in question resonate with psychological needs, most clearly in religious mythology. These psychological needs are far from nothing, but represent the intrusion of an unconscious reality, perceived but not understood. If it doesn’t resonate, the myth goes nowhere.

Robert Tulip wrote: “Carnap said there is no meaning outside science, rejecting Heidegger’s openness to existential anxiety.”
Caesar is a prime number: Carnap's argument with Heidegger was that he used language in ways that were literally meaningless. That is the sentence " Caesar is a prime number" is neither true nor false; it is meaningless. Carnap argues that Heidegger's logic was based on a number of statements like this and so his argument is linguistically meaningless. I don't think that is the same thing as saying there is no meaning outside science. However, while I agree that many of Heidegger's statements in that particular lecture are meaningless in this way, they are meaningful if read like one reads poetry. I can create a whole series of images based on the sentence " Caesar is a prime number" that create new ways of perceiving the all the things that are metaphorically connected to " Caesar" and "prime number" in my head. So I can gather meaning from the sentence even though it is also meaningless. This points to another problem with language and with Heidegger's use of it that Carnap points out...that the same apparent word can carry very different meanings. Like Being. The fact that we can manipulate it to be a noun like Tree and make the connection that maybe Being and Tree are linked, and get a new way of perceiving the world from that, doesn't make Being existent, nor even if it is existent, does it make it a noun-like entity like a Tree. And I think you can have openness to existential anxiety without making category mistakes "real" even if those very mistakes are meaning producers. Having said that, I do think that Carnap does not go far enough in trying to understand what Heidegger is trying to do.
The distinction here between poetic and scientific meaning is a key one. Heidegger explored this in his comparison between meditative and calculative modes of thought, contrasting the meditative existential engagement with things for use, and the calculative scientific assertion that meaning is always objective and measurable. This question of the meaning of poetic language opens the door to mythological thinking, spurred by Heidegger’s description of nothing as a disturbing reality that pervades existence like a muffled gong.

The claim that being is real is not a category mistake. If being is the whole of reality, containing all entities, then the whole is just as real as the entities within it.
Robert Tulip wrote: “For Heidegger, openness to anxiety is the source of care, anticipating the future through the context of concern arising from being with others. It almost suggests an evolutionary sense of mutual aid, as discussed by de Waal from Kropotkin.”
I agree about this as a possible source of care (sorge). And I agree that there is an evolutionary tale to be told here.
The ethics of being in the world contrast to conventional rational objective ethics. It seems silly to worry about nothing, except that just in terms of psychology this worry can be a source of real empathy, with real evolutionary advantages. De Waal describes how the calculative Cartesian approach to animal psychology asserted a priori that animals do not feel empathy. I suspect Heidegger’s ontology of ‘being-with’ touches on some of the underpinning assumptions regarding de Waal’s scientific observations.

Robert Tulip wrote: “The abyss for Heidegger is a problematic thing – almost the terror of the unknown. Carnap’s assertion that human rationality can stare down the abyss of being has a certain arrogance, claiming a level of understanding for empirical science that it does not really possess. These positions seem to me to illustrate the conflict between linear and cyclic theories of time. Carnap interprets time as linear progress, while Heidegger sees cyclic return. Heidegger’s effort to enframe the cosmos in the fourfold of earth and sky, man and gods indicates his sympathy to an older cyclic method of thought, attuned to the natural rhythms and harmonies of the universe.”
I'm not sure what I think about this terror of the abyss. I have written stuff on other writers who contemplate the abyss with existential terror. I have a hard time understanding it. I'm thinking specifically of Simone Weil at the moment. I think that with Weil, the fact that she read the abyss as "real" - that is, as a noun-like entity - was part of the source of her terror. By constituting it that way, the nothing becomes (like Heidegger says) a counter-part of being. Just as the devil is a counterpart of the god. Of course the human body responds to that with terror. But if one doesn't constitute it that way, if the abyss is more like the space between particulate matter, then the body doesn't respond the same way, fear is not generated, but rather a kind of awe, and so looking at the abyss becomes something profound but not impossible to sustain.

For me, this is part of what sorge is - how we constitute our attachment to the things in themselves. It matters what stories we tell to explain the world because they constrain how we experience our lives. So we get a choice - the abyss or the space between (and myriad other possibilities.) I think both Carnap and Heidegger missed the choice-bit of experiential meaning, although Heidegger did have lots to say about doingness.
I tend to interpret the abyss in terms of apocalyptic destruction, the hidden fear that our civilization is ephemeral, and could be wiped away in a moment. By opening a path to a phenomenological eschatology, Heidegger provides some useful analytical tools to interpret the nature of time.

Abyss as interstices is also a valuable idea – if the earth was crushed to make a black hole it would be only two inches across. We are mostly empty space. It illustrates that our common sense perceptions of solidity are illusory. But I don’t think this melting into air is as important a meaning for abyss as the fear of catastrophe.
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Robert Tulip wrote:If the metaphorical connections exist unconsciously, it seems reasonable to describe them as a hidden reality…the question of the legitimacy of mythological thinking…Can an idea such as Odin be important enough to provide the name of a day of the week, but also so unimportant that it refers to nothing real?... These psychological needs are far from nothing, but represent the intrusion of an unconscious reality, perceived but not understood…The distinction here between poetic and scientific meaning is a key one… This question of the meaning of poetic language opens the door to mythological thinking, spurred by Heidegger’s description of nothing as a disturbing reality that pervades existence like a muffled gong….The claim that being is real is not a category mistake. If being is the whole of reality, containing all entities, then the whole is just as real as the entities within it.
I am a human being. Being in this sense has a set of properties that include the substance of which I am composed. Being in this sense also contains the non-substantive “components” of my person, including memories, social needs and other dispositions and capacities. This is a common understanding of what it means to be a human being and it works for a finite entity such as a human person. What happens though, is we recognize fundamental differences between those kinds of “being” which are usually classified with the “body” and those usually classified with the “mind.” When we separate them but still call them both “being” as if they are the same type of “substance” this is exactly what a category error is – at least according to Ryle.

We do the same thing with “real.” It is not to say that the dispositions and capacities that I call “mind” are not as real as those I experience and call “body” but they are “real” in quite different ways. For me the crux of this difference has to do with measurability, although I am not sure this is right. So I can accept the notion of being because my dispositions and capacities are measurability linked to the body-brain complex. This makes my mythological and poetic “realities” real because they are part of the emergent components of my body-brain complex. They are real just exactly in the same way that the sky is blue is real. "Blueness" is an on-going perception that is a “reading” of some substance in the shared universe, where the “reading” is made possible by another substance in the shared universe. It would be an error though to make the “blue” “Blue.” That is to separate the perception from the matrix of its creation and see it as extant outside that matrix as something that predates or preexists the matrix of the shared reality of body-mind-sky. This is what I think we tend to do with our unconscious myths and religions. We make our inner “god” “God.”

So for me the whole of reality does contain a god (actually thousands and thousands of them) but only in the same way that it also contains blue. Blue and god are experiences made possible by the biological emergence of body-brain complexes that can “read” the sky and the body-brain itself and because of that “reading” perceive “blue” and “god.” So they are real but they do not predate the emergence of the b-b complex.

Blue is not a property of the atmosphere but an emergent property of the body-brain-sky complex. God is not a property of the universe but an emergent property of the primarily_unconscious_body-brain_social_mind_with_the_emerging_property_of_self_awareness complex. – Nasty.

Robert Tulip wrote:The ethics of being in the world contrast to conventional rational objective ethics. It seems silly to worry about nothing, except that just in terms of psychology this worry can be a source of real empathy, with real evolutionary advantages. De Waal describes how the calculative Cartesian approach to animal psychology asserted a priori that animals do not feel empathy. I suspect Heidegger’s ontology of ‘being-with’ touches on some of the underpinning assumptions regarding de Waal’s scientific observations.
Having said all of the above, I want to restate that I do think that mythological-poetic meaning is real, but in the sense that I understand it to be part of the b-b complex. In that sense “nothing” is as real as “being” because both are ontological categories created by the capacity of the b-b complex of social animals to recognize the “other” as separate. It is that space between, I suspect, that gets “read” as the nothing-seed. Not only is there death and the ending of being, but day to day there are the gaps of meaninglessness that exist between two people trying to stay connected across the skin barrier. As de Waal shows with his behavioural studies, we deeply need to stay connected, to understand each other's motives, to make and maintain alliances. We have all kinds of neuronal and social tools to accomplish that but the stakes are really high (which means it comes with a high degree of emotional prompting to push for more and more understanding.) The result is that when faced with regions of non-understanding or non-comprehensibility (like the “alien” or aspects of the non-readable world) we are pushed to make it understandable, to try harder to “read” into it meaning. And our source of data? Ourselves. Our experience. Our histories.

Whether this works or not depends on what we are reading. As de Waal suggests, it probably works just fine when we are reading the faces of chimps. But it doesn’t work when we are reading clouds. It may look like an angry face but it isn’t one.

Robert Tulip wrote:I tend to interpret the abyss in terms of apocalyptic destruction, the hidden fear that our civilization is ephemeral, and could be wiped away in a moment. By opening a path to a phenomenological eschatology, Heidegger provides some useful analytical tools to interpret the nature of time.

Abyss as interstices is also a valuable idea – if the earth was crushed to make a black hole it would be only two inches across. We are mostly empty space. It illustrates that our common sense perceptions of solidity are illusory. But I don’t think this melting into air is as important a meaning for abyss as the fear of catastrophe.
Taking the abyss (or nothing) to be real in the emergent property sense, I agree that it is a critical point of enquiry with respect to understanding what it means to be a human being. It’s why I studied religion when I first went to university. I’ve never been a believer but have always recognized the centrality of the mythological-religious-poetic mind in the lives of human beings. However, reading the abyss through phenomenological eschatology is only one way (a culturally-religious specific way) to read the nothing. I moved to Anthropology from Religious Studies when I realized that a great deal more effort was going into understanding the nothing if the nothing was constrained by a Judeo-Christian-Islamic set of expectations – and the (to me then) unbelievable mistake that many of the writers were making of assuming that just because they experienced the nothing in a specific way that – 1) it was the “truth” about the nothing and that 2) the nothing they experienced was really the Nothing (i.e. had an independent reality that preceded the b-b complex). The nothing is something very different when experienced by a Navajo or an Interior Salish person or even a European with a very different cultural origin story.

As to Weil - her time and place constrained her reading of the abyss to be something of the divine world. Because of her circumstances the abyss came into her writing taking on the shapes of war and god and the supernatural “reality” that are the metaphorical constants of her time and place. In our world, the abyss does take on a sense of the end of civilization because those are our metaphorical constants. You see them in zombie movies, especially recent ones, and in apocalyptic stories like McCarthy’s –The Road.

Have you read The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode? It is one of the best books I have ever read. It is about the relationship between narrative structures in the West and the apocalyptic mind. It explains quite a lot about phenomenological eschatology – that is, why it is such a powerful meaning maker in the West.
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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Please consider

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Hello Mary and Robert:

I have enjoyed reading your conversations. I now have another book on my night stand, "Being and Time", Heidegger.

Robert, do you have any interest in becoming the discussion leader for "American Gods"? From the posts I have read I think you have much to offer and could steer us into some interesting conversation.

I have not gotten to Odin yet in AG's but I did stay up quite late last night researching the Queen of Sheba.
"What's your name?" he asks her.
"Bilquis," she tells him . . . "with a Q."
"American Gods"

Kinda like Kandy, with a "K".

Just a thought Robert.

Suzanne
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Re: Please consider

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Suzanne wrote:Robert, do you have any interest in becoming the discussion leader for "American Gods"?
A great idea Suzanne. Robert?
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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What do you think?

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Well Robert?

Please, pretty, pretty please,

:mbounce:

Suzanne

PS
I promiss, I'll stop annoying you with the bouncing if you say yes!
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Robert Tulip

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Re: What do you think?

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Suzanne wrote:Well Robert? Please, pretty, pretty please, :mbounce:
Suzanne PS I promiss, I'll stop annoying you with the bouncing if you say yes!
I would love to lead the discussion on American Gods. I bought a copy yesterday in Borders. After I checked on their self-service in-store catalogue which said it was out of stock, an assistant came up to me and told me the catalogue was wrong, and found me a copy. I am off work at the moment sick with bronchitis, so I spent the rest of the day reading and am now at page 230.

The book was first published in 2001, but a revised edition, including material deleted from the original, came out in 2005, with the subtitle 'Author's preferred text''. Please try to get this revised edition. It is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to every one.

I liked the bit where Shadow (just released from prison) is in a hotel room and Lucy on the Here's Lucy show on TV starts talking to him to convert him from working for Odin to joining the modern matrix. She corrects him when he calls her Lucille Ball, and says her name is Lucy Ricardo. Shadow says this is "weirder by several orders of magnitude than anything that has happened to me so far."

Odin reminds me of Juan Matus, and his sidekick Mad Sweeney reminds me of Don Genaro.
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Re: What do you think?

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Robert Tulip wrote:I would love to lead the discussion on American Gods.
To quote Suzanne and indicate my own happiness at this state of affairs:

:mbounce:
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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IS NOTHING SACRED?

This is the question asked on the back cover of American Gods. It opens the rather intense irony of Gaiman's writing. He is, in fact, using the book to show that the loss of soul in the USA results in large part from forgetfulness of the sacred, while also tapping in to a new/old philosophy in which the idea of nothing serves as a prism to assess the worldviews of modern times. When everything is profane, nothing is left to revere as sacred. Materialist culture, with its highest values of pleasure and possession of property, regards nothing as sacred, hence Gaiman's sense of a gathering storm. Turning this popular view around, Gaiman almost makes nothing into something - by regarding the myths which formerly provided meaning as something real. His contemporary anthropomorphising of Gods such as Odin, Thoth, Kali, Horus and Anansi brings these nothings into focus as genuine sources of meaning. Is nothing sacred? Yes and no.

Wikipedia for American Gods is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods
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Thank you!

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Hello Robert:

Thank you for accepting, I am really looking forward to it.

Robert Tulip wrote:
The book was first published in 2001, but a revised edition, including material deleted from the original, came out in 2005, with the subtitle 'Author's preferred text''. Please try to get this revised edition. It is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to every one.
This is not the edition I have, drat! I have the edition that is advertised on the front page of BookTalk.

Suzanne
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shout out

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Should we shout out to Chris that Robert Tulip has become discussion leader for "American Gods"?

He needs the title to alert readers.

Suzanne
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