They are for the most part the Last Men . . . blinking . . . blinking . . .

http://www.quora.com/Which-users-on-Quora-can-be-thought-of-as-Nietzschean-%C3%9Cbermensch

In Heidegger we hear of the “Fourfold of the World” which is comprised on Heaven Earth Mortals and Immortals.

http://www.behance.net/gallery/pAlice/755918

And we wonder how Heidegger came up with that until we learn that in an obscure passage in Plato his Socrates defined the world as being composed of these four characteristics. But later we see that Plato in the Symposium gives Aristophanes a speech prior to that of Socrates which is that men and women were once whole and that they were cut apart, and that we continually search for the other half, whether it be man for man, women for woman or man for woman. These other possibilities for combinations of sexes were very much on everyone’s mind in Greece in the form of the Homosexual relations with young boys that was prevalent and also the homosexual relations between women as we see in Sappho of Lesbos poetry. The sexes were driven apart in Greece by the fact that there were so few women who were citizens that they become an extremely precious commodity. And the few Greek women who were not killed in at birth by their fathers if they survived spent their lives virtual prisoners in their husband’s home and symbolically married not to the husbands but to Hades and the to the family hearth which was also the place of the burial of the ancestors. There are many fine women scholars of the Greek texts that are the foundations of our society who have unearthed this dark sexual side of the plight of Greek women who were considered just somewhat better than the slaves of the household being prisoners in their own homes.

Now it is interesting that Plato includes Aristophanes and gives him the highest speech within the Symposium (but the way symposia were parties for men in the home where prostitutes were brought into the home to entertain the men at their drinking party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium). This is because Aristophanes play the Clouds which mis-represented Socrates as a natural philosopher was probably had a good deal to do with the reason that Socrates was eventually killed for corrupting youth. Plato’s dialogues were there to prove that Socrates was not corrupting the youth and that he in fact had Platonic relations with his the young men who were his followers. We hear of Socrates own wife only in his last words. So this inclusion of Aristophanes as having the second best theory of Love before that of Socrates which is the last and highest theory which talks about the love as a Diamon, might make us wonder about the contribution of Aristophanes. It turns out that his plays were spared because they were used as a way of teaching Greek grammar and we have his comedies, and if we read them we see that the idea of Aristophanes and those of Plato in for instance the Republic are very similar. In one play the women revolt and deny sex to their husbands in order to stop a war. And there are other extreme views that are fantasies of the Other in his comedies which for instance represent communism, and even the idea of free sex where women could choose their own partners freely. All this was clearly thought to be absurd in the context of the comedies but Plato took these ideas and incorporated them into the thought experiments of his cities. But as we read on we find that there are times in the comedies when the playwright speaks directly to his audience. In these interludes called the parabasis Aristophanes contends to be giving his audience not low humor but wisdom. If we reread his plays looking for that wisdom we find that in the Birds, which is about how the Birds are higher than the Greek Gods, that he tells a different Theogony from that of Heisod. In his theogony there was first the four primordial powers (night, covering, abyss, and chaos) and then the arising of Eros, and then the birds and after that the Gods and then everything else including humans. This other theogony sees four primordial goddesses (not one) and out of them comes Eros, which is the subject of Plato’s symposium. It turns out that the speeches in the symposium give an image of the Special Systems, but we will not follow that thread.) Rather we will see that we have finally met up with the dual of the Positive Fourfold mentioned by Socrates and celebrated by Heidegger. That dual is the negative fourfold attributed to women as the positive fourfold is attributed to men.

So the wisdom of the Aristophanes, at least one part of it, is the true theogony based on Egyptian sources, and that theogony sees the four goddesses as equi-primordial and together they give rise to Eros. Now this is where it becomes interesting. When we look at the negative fourfold we see it has always been there from the beginning hidden in our tradition. And if we reverse the attributes of that fourfold then we get Order (chaos), Grounding (abyss), Light (night), Uncovering which is aletheia, or Truth (covering). And so we find here the basic features of the worldview, which is the inner core of the worldview seen from the point of view of Heaven/Earth//Mortal/Immortal. Now interestingly enough Order is the first nondual between Physus and Logos within the worldview. And beneath that there are other nonduals such as Right, Good, Fate, Sources, Root.

All of philosophy has been a searching for the Grounds of belief and reason. Sophia or wisdom is seen as feminine in the Greek tradition. Philosophy is seen as the love of Wisdom, and love has several forms of which Agape and Eros are two. Agape is the higher love of reason, Platonic love, and Eros is the love that is ensnarled in opinion and appearance and which is difficult to ground, i.e. to find true love, love that when it is uncovered is still good. Eros always takes us away from what is prescriptively Right toward carnal or lowly sorts of pleasures. It was hard to believe that the relation between relation between Socrates and Alcibiades was a form of agape when for everyone else the relation of men and boys was one of eros, one in which baser needs and instincts ruled. Plato tells us they laid at night under the same blanket and nothing happened. Hard for the Athenian court to believe given the common practices of pederasty in Greece at that time.

There are also two other words for love in Greece Storge and Philia. Philosophy is Philia Sophia, love of wisdom. Storge means affection, as in family affection. Philia means friendship. In this series it is Eros that is problematic. When familial affection, or Friendship or Self-less love is mixed with Eros then there is trouble. But also Eros is the kind of love that quickens and gives life and assures the continuance of the species, or at least the Greek citizens, who must be born from a Greek man and woman citizen to be a citizen themselves. And since there are ten Greek citizen men for every Greek citizen woman, that is a problem, and that means that Greek women are incredibly precious, but too precious to allow out of the house in case they are kidnapped which was a regular form of the marriage rite, as we see in the myth of Hades and Kore (Persephone). So sexual relations in Greece was bound to be perverse, as women were locked up together and did not play a role in society, and men instead of their wives offered their visitors prostitutes, and where getting along in the world meant having a male mentor with which you had homosexual relations. Greek women were relegated to being merely a means for ones legitimate children to claim Greek citizenship. And many other kinds of social bonds were recognized beyond marriage.

However, this made Athenian Greek society one in which the nature of Eros and the good and bad sides of it, a matter of great interest beyond our natural carnal interests. It made it of philosophical interest, and it made it the first thing to be created out of the primordial negative fourfold.

Now if we look at the nonduals at the core of the Western worldview and the negative fourfold we find the following:

• chaos –>     Order           — Order   — Identity.
• night –>       Day              — Right   — Presence
• covering –> Uncovering  — Good  — Truth
• abyss –>     Grounding     — Fate   — Reality

If we look at Plato’s Divided line we see:

Supra-rational Limit {Nous} [Arche: Sources/Root]

———————————-> Meta-system – Dionysus / Artimis (Wilds Beyond the City)

Ratio – Non-Representable Intelligibles [Fate/Good] {Sophos} Agape – Alcibiades vouches for S.

·       emptiness (reflexive social special system) — Socrates – Diotima of Mantinea > Diamon

Ratio – Representable Intelligibles [Right/Order] {Episteme} Philos – Agathon Virtues

·       manifestation (autopoietic symbiotic special system) – Aristophanes Wholeness/Pairing

Doxa – Grounded Opinion/Appearance [Truth/Reality] {Techne} Storge – Eryximachus medicine

·       void (dissipative ordering special system) – Pausanias Lawyer/Universal

Doxa – Ungrounded Opinion/Appearance [Identity/Presence] {Phronesis} Eros – Phaedrus

———————————-> System – Apollo / Athena (Founders of the Law Courts in the city)

Paradoxicality Limit {Metis}  è [Ideas: Love as mixture of Pleasure/Pain as in Sappho] Negative Fourfold (chaos, abyss, night, covering)

The nondual sources are related to the two kinds of Ratio, and the Aspects of Being are related to the two kinds of Doxa.

The kinds of knowledge identified by Aristotle map to the parts of the Divided Line of Plato.

The speeches of the Symposium also map onto the Divided Line elements.

The key here in the Symposium is that Socrates give an opinion of a Woman Diotima of Mantinea not his own about the nature of Love. The gist of that view of Eros is that it is a messenger between the God and Men, a Diamon.

When Alcibiades bursts in then we have the advent of the God Dionysus within the symposium, who is the God who takes the women of the city out into the Wilderness, out of their houses into the wild mountains to become Maenads and who consorted three with Satyrs.

So the upshot of all this is that there is a single view of the nature of the worldview between Plato and Aristotle which is reinforced by the ideas of Aristophanes. In the divided line which is the arena of experience within our tradition, Eros appears and then is transformed as each point in the divided line is reached. And that transformation allows us to see how the Special Systems are the differences between the various places in the divided line. The divided line represents the relation of the aspects of Being which are the same as the aspects of existence, and how that relates to the nonduals approached by reason. Woman which the Greeks so distrusted, thinking of her as a traitor in their midst (cf. Ariadne, Medea, Helen, etc.) is ultimately the one who speaks authoritatively though Socrates about Love.

And this is for a very specific reason. Women are at the same time the embodiment of the negative fourfold, everything paradoxical and absurd in the worldview, and also the embodiment of the aspects and nonduals of which the worldview is constructed. Nietzsche famously said Truth is a woman. But we can expand that to all the other aspects of Being and Existence. Reality is a Woman. Identity is a Woman. Presence is a Woman. But more women are the holders of order within the aeconomy (household). Women are those who are the source of beauty, i.e. right proportion, the Golden Mean. Women are the basis of all Good, because they are the source of variety that comes from their wombs, which is human variety, and by our differences we know each other. Women are the sources of Fate because we are born from one particular womb and no other and that determines who we are more than anything else because it is our mothers that tend us when we are small and helpless. Women are literally our source and origin. The root of our existence.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andziadesign/6494184293/sizes/l/in/photostream/

In Egypt Nut was a goddess that spanned the sky and was over everything [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_(goddess)]. From the Greek point of view, the world was made of woman. Woman is the Arche, as negative fourfold out of which Eros arises, and then Eros transforms as it crosses the sky of the world, giving rise to each kind of feeling of love, and woman relates us to the Aspects of Being, and she relates us to the nonduals at the core of the worldview. When the song says – you are my everything – that is literally true of Woman in the western worldview – she is the matter out of which everything is made that is formed by man. She is the darkness that contrasts with the light of man, she is the covered that contrasts with the uncovering of man for instance the uncovering of truth by Oedipus. She is the one who rules the night, but is hidden in her house during the day, when men go out to meet the other men of the world, and to meet the enemy at the gate of the city. She is the chaos prior to all order established by men though laws. She is the abyss of incomprehensibility that we attempt to find foundations and grounds to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps to make ourselves civilized. She so easily is seduced by Dionysus and returns to the wild.

As Nietzsche might say elaborating on his statement that Truth is a Woman, and other less savory statements about women, that Woman is Beyond Good and Evil. In other words Women are not just Good or Evil, but are the source of the Good as nondual itself. And the other nonduals that are shunned in our dualistic culture. That is why men are so fascinated by her. She is in fact the source of our world giving birth to everyone in it as an archetype, but she is also the source each of us in particular and the aspects of existence, and the nonduals that govern our lives. So we turn the question about, and we say is there anything that exists of any meaning or significance in our worldview that is not directly the product of women at an archetypal level? And the answer is No. They are the material out of which our worlds are forged. And that material is essentially their reproductive function without which there would be no world because there would be no people in it. And when the reproductive function becomes scarce as it was in Ancient Greece which is the foundation of our worldview, then the importance of women becomes even more significant. They remain a commoditized resource to be traded in patriarchal kinship systems until they become too scarce then we revert to matriarchal systems where the father never lets the daughter out of the house and the brother raises the children instead of the husband (if there is a husband and not just incest).

The paradox of Woman that we see in the relation between Hera and Nephele is that she is at once a dominated commodity in most cultures, and at the same time the source of everything within those cultures. She is owned and at the same time the source of everything worth having including those who own her. And this is why it is the Mirror which is the accoutrement most important to women. When Hera saw Nephele she was looking at an image of herself made flesh which is the equivalent of women looking into mirrors, in order to see how they are seen by men and other women first. And our question is whether the source is Nephele or Hera and which is the commodity. It is really impossible to tell. And that is the situation we all find ourselves in, lost because this primordial Ordering, Rightness, Good, Fate as articulated in terms of Reality, Truth, Identity and Presence has a Mimetic quality that we cannot escape. Art imitates Nature, yet also Nature imitates Art. And both Men and Women are lost in this quandary, and having lost themselves have lost each other. And that is why the theme in the Odyssey is recognition. And the first to recognize Odysseus is Nausicaa, and then he travels with the help of Athena to appear in the Hearth of the King of Scheria but he presents himself to the Queen and not the King. And then upon return to Ithaca via the magical ships of the Scherians, he meets Athena who he tries to fool but cannot. And then he is recognized by his old nurse, and finally begrudgingly by his wife Penelope who has kept the home fires burning. It is Women who recognize Odysseus for how he really is. Nausicaa recognizes him as a Man. The King and Queen recognize him as a Hero unlike other men. Athena recognizes him as the man who embodies Metis. The old nurse recognizes him as the one who was initiated by his grandfather. And his wife finally are recognizes him as her husband and lord long missing in action. Women are the source of recognition of the Man within our tradition, and that is because they are our world and everything in it is mediated to us by them. And so they are more than merely good for something, they are good itself, and they are more than merely good they are beyond good and evil because they are the source of everything both good and evil. They give birth to the good and the evil alike. They are like Nut and they stretch from horizon to horizon to articulate our world for us as men operating in that world. Men decide which of them will be relegated to the status of prostitutes and whores entertaining at the symposia, and which will be relegated to the prison of marriage locked in the back of the house, and which will be slaves to be exploited mercilessly. But women themselves due to their precarious position, ascent to those distinctions imposed upon them and which they also impose upon themselves. There is no doubt that women are shaped biologically by the dominance of men, just as men are shaped by their biological dependence on their mothers and wives and myriad lovers with whom they have children out of wedlock. We all accent to these distinctions among women, by which we produce the distinctions that we create among men. The men with power and money can have as many young women as prostitutes as they like while other men have fewer, and so it goes as we constitute the economy of sexual relations and produce human suffering on an immense scale, and death. Let us not forget that pornography is death.

Is there anything good about women? This is an essentially Greek question to which the answer is No. But at the same time the Greeks knew that everything in their world, including citizenship came from the women who were the female children of citizens who were allowed to live. The negation of the female went so far as to Apollo denying that the woman has any role in the fundamental formation of the child, but said in stead she was a mere receptacle (Chora) as in Plato’s Timeous for the creation of the world by the Demiurge. This is woman as Nephele, the mimesis of man though difference. But there is also Hera, wife and sister of Zeus, and thus establishing Zeus on the model of the Egyptian royalty who always married their sisters because descent of the Pharaoh went though the female line. Zeus is the Alpha male and his rule is incestuous. Matriarchy preserves precious reproductive resources when they are scarce. And that is why all human beings trace their genetic heritage back to one female, because that scarcity has been a reality at various times in human evolution. And that scarcity such as we see in the Handmaiden’s Tale is the core of what it is to be woman as the source of Good. Reproductive variety is the source of all variety in the human world. And the woman to which we are born and her kinship relations determine our fate to a great degree within the course of the unfolding of the Indo-European patriarchal culture.

Women are not only good for something, they are the source of good of everything within our world, as well as fate, right (as proportioned beauty), order, truth, reality, presence, identity, etc. And to the extent that women are like Nephele rather than Hera, i.e. are merely images of what men want to see, (hear, smell, taste, and touch), and they fall into the degradation and destruction that awaits them in the clutches of the Animus, then their degradation and destruction is our own degradation and destruction. Women are closer to us than we are to ourselves. And the God, who unites the aspects and underlies the hierarchy of nonduals who judges us justly regarding our treatment of them, and our courage protecting them, and is the source of all wisdom concerning how we differentiate them from each other, from ourselves, and thus differentiate ourselves, is even closer to us still.

http://www.quora.com/Is-there-anything-good-about-women

through the jumbled furniture of faces
he lurches out to her to scream
‘i’ve been hit, been hit by mortar scrap’
he awakes to find her spinning dreams

‘my books are in confusion,’
was the wizzar wife at rest?
‘my mind a shattered vessel
where words like jumbled sounds infest’

she folded up her wings and said
‘tomorrow,’ with a smile,
‘you’ll go out side the sun will hasten
to stay with you a while’

‘you’ll see me rise upon fountains of air
wing out into the mists.’
where is your darkling spirit?
where lies it, under brutal fists?

‘the place is in a shambles
with all the doors and exits blocked
i smell the gas and hear the firing
i feel the building rock!’

opus 76
2/3/71

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Nature-of-Kent-Palmer

On the obscurity of the Western Tradition

I don’t know if you have had a chance to pick up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason lately, or browsed through Heidegger’s Being and Time, or just happened on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit, or perhaps scanned any number of the books in the Western Canon, the books recommended by everyone but actually read by very few. How do you get a handle on these books whose obscurity is legendary. And it is the obscurity of these books, like Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, or M. Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation, or J.P. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which makes our own tradition opaque to us. And you probably know this platitude but it is true that if you do not know what your philosophy is you are condemned to have one you yourself do not know. There are so many aspects to our tradition, but it is clear that Philosophy is its core, because it was from Philosophy that all other disciplines arose, and that philosophy was first and foremost Natural Philosophy which has spawned Physics today, and to which much of what passes for philosophy in these times is merely the handmaiden to physics, trying to justify science, who itself feels no need for justification. Physics is now the discipline which sees itself as the center of our worldview. But as we fall into String Theory and other imponderables it is hard to tell Physics from speculative philosophy these days. And so if you happen to pick up Husserl’s Logical Investigations, or Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, or Badiou’s Being and the Event, you are likely to find something you would consider utterly unreadable. However, I can assure you that with a little persistence and a lot of time on your hands it is possible to read something into these works even if we cannot very well read anything out of them.

What helps are the commentaries. There are a lot of commentaries on these various philosophy books, for instance John Sallis’ Being and Logos about dramatization in Plato, or Patton’s sentence by sentence commentary on Kant’s masterwork, or the various excellent commentaries on Blake’s Four Zoas. It is through these commentaries that access can be gained to these books, but that of course takes even more precious time to read the myriad commentaries that exist on the Canonical writers of our tradition. But if you just happen to find yourself at the British Museum where almost every book published in English exists, with some spare time and a lot of patience then you could set about reading many of these commentaries and through them come to terms with these very obscure works that plague our tradition. And then you might go on to read Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Levinas, Foucault, Zizek, just for grins.

But why, oh, why would you want to do that?

There are several reasons I can think of.

One is that you are really interested in other religions and other philosophies say those of the orient, but you realize that you are going to have to deal with the implicit understanding of Western philosophy that permeates Western culture, in order to make sure not to project it on those extremely interesting foreign philosophies and religion. You might have looked in the cultural mirror and realized that just as you are trying to escape your own culture, so others are flocking to the West to escape their cultures, but we all take our acculturated selves with us, and so we cannot escape projecting what we already know as something foreign and fascinating.

Or secondly, you might realize once you start studying Western Philosophy that it has its own interesting aspects in its own right that you discover are worth finding out about. This is because the dualistic worldview of which we are part, is perhaps even more mysterious and alluring than all those foreign religions and philosophies that exist in the nihilistic marketplace various forms of snake-oil, sold as if they were enlightenment to deluded Americans (See the magazine What is Enlightenment?).  Because Western Philosophy is the core of the tradition, then all the other parts of the tradition are accessible from it. And there is plenty of food for thought along the way. We love conspiracies but the greatest mysteries of all go without any one noticing them. It is often true that the greatest adventure is right at your own front door. How does the Western worldview continue to function when it is continually wracked by radical changes. For me the question of the nature of emergence is the key question that we can ask in our world. How does it occur without destroying the worldview?

And you are not going to solve this mystery absorbing more entertainment. Any mystery worth its salt is going to make you pay for what ever you discover about it. And that payment is going to be in ones life blood, in the time one spends reading, writing, diagramming, and note taking, and most of all thinking, deeply about what you have read, to try to put the various discordant pieces together.

But once you get started, in earnest trying to understand the worldview, beyond what you were taught in school, picked up in the headlines of newspapers, or just found lying around on the floor where ever you looked, then what you need to confront is its inherent obscurity. Not the obscurity of the writers who struggle to understand it, but the obscurity of the thing itself. The obscurity of the writers attempting to understand it is just a reflection of a deeper obscurity that is the nature of the Western worldview itself. We find that this worldview that has gained dominance over all other worldviews though its brutal subjugation and exploitation of the whole earth and all its peoples has a long history that stretches back into the dawn of time to the proto-Indo-Europeans, whose descendents took over the known world based on horsepower, and we can even trace them back to then natural bread basket of in Turkey where agriculture began. Using genetic mutation techniques that concentrate on words rather than grammar we can see that Hittite is the oldest of the Indo-European languages, and so that puts the origin of the Proto-Indo-Europeans in Turkey rather than in Russia which was thought earlier based on other evidence. In fact we are taken back to the confrontation of two unique civilizations which is the Indo-Europeans and the Sumerians. The Sumerians called them the Kur, and later we know that they built Kurgans (Burial Mounds) and they appear to have been always nomadic. And with the discovery of Çatalhöyük [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk] and then Göbekli Tepe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe and http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html] and Nevalı Çori [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevali_Cori] in Turkey of that appears to be confirmed and their history pushed back beyond the dawn of other civilizations. We know that the Sumerians and the Kurgan people interacted because each has loan words from the other language, but the Sumerians pushed out the Kurgans into central Asia and there they went from agriculture to raising horses that were bigger and bigger until chariot warfare was possible. And eventually the horses became large enough to ride, and then all hell broke loose and the Kurgans went everywhere. We see their remains in the Gobi Desert in the Tarim Basin region of Western China [http://www.ensignmessage.com/mummies.html] where the remains of their wooden burial structures can be found that predated the kurgans. So this nomadic people from which we draw our roots goes back into the dawn of time. The Sumerians have a unique grammar that is unlike any other language that is known and they created the first settled civilization at Ur between the Tigris and Euphrates which wrote in clay, and whose tablets have been preserved, and it was from the Sumerians that we received out idea of what a god is, and also many other accouterments of civilization. But the Sumerians always had problems with the incursions of the Kur on their northern borders, and we now know that the Kur are the Indo-Europeans which were pushed out and went from inventing agriculture to the invention of the horse, but genetic modification activities. And even today we are still fiddling with genetics. But as a culture we know that the Indo-Europeans themselves are unique because their language has something no other language possesses, which is Being. So what is the relation between the Nomadic (made an issue by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus) and the linguistic peculiarity of Being and genetic technologies which ultimately confer great power that allows for cultural expansion and political domination on scales not imagined by other peoples of the earth. The discovery of Agriculture in the breadbasket of grains that was in Turkey, led to civilizations like that of Egypt and Sumeria, and then when they were pushed out into central Asia, they applied the same principles to the breeding of horses which just happened to have the genetic possibility of being Big enough to carry a man, even though they started out the size of large dogs. Once horses were big enough they led to chariot warfare, and when they could be ridden they led to combat on horseback both of which gave incredible advantage over those who did not have horses that were big enough to play a role in warfare.

So the greatest mystery is concerns the nature of this very old Civilization that has achieved world domination via technology, and not just any technology but primarily genetic breeding of plants and animals, which provided the basis for agricultural civilization, and then horse warfare, and is now making it so we can modify our own and other species directly now that the genomes are being decoded. This domination via genetic technology and other power giving technologies that led to geek physical philosophy that led to Science eventually seems to be driven by the uniqueness of their language, and its possession of the unique concept of Being. This concept of Being gives a basis for saying things that are very different are the Same. It gives us Metaphor and via Metaphor we are able to say Odysseus IS a Lion. (And of course the Lion becomes Man at the same time). Odysseus is not just like a lion (simile) or analogous to a Lion, but IS a Lion. This projection of what Aristotle calls Substance gives a basis to understand how disparate things are the same which is more powerful conceptually than occur in other languages, and it gives us the ability to think though transformational changes based on underlying structure, which in turn gives us the capability of synthesizing technologies. So from the Indo-European Kergan’s unique nomadic life style we see that settled civilization came from Nomadism rather than the other way around, by the exploration of agriculture that occurred just because there was a natural breadbasket in the Kurdish homelands, but when they were driven out by the agricultural societies which they spawned they applied the same techniques to making horses bigger and that gave them power in warfare to come back and reclaim the homelands that they were pushed out of and eventually dominate the known world going into Europe and India as we well know.

[2011.02.10kdp to be continued]

http://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Western-Tradition-so-Obscure

http://bouguereauremastered.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/found-at-last-bouguereaus-invisible-man/
http://fx.worth1000.com/entries/288624/the-invisible-man

http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/What-would-be-a-friendlier-alternative-to-Quoras-creepy-hooded-Anon-User-default-avatar

I wish I could name a long list of such books, but I am not sure there are many around. But I will give at least one example which is excellent. It is Grendel by John Gardiner. It is written by the monster and the monster is an existentialist of the Sartrean variety, i.e. the monster is nothingness. And the monster goes and talks to a dragon occasionally that also appears as slain in the original tale Beowulf, and the Dragon is living time backwards, and so there are these very interesting conversations between the nothingness of the monster talking to the original enemy of the Western worldview, the dragon who reverses everything by living backwards in time.

Another example is the Carols Castaneda series, especially the second or third one where he talks about the tonal and nagual, which is very interesting philosophically despite being encased in a new age fantasy. Of course, the books about how Castaneda pulled the wool over the eyes of Garfinkel and destroyed ethnomethdology as a discipline are better than the books themselves as fantasies, but they did captivate a generation, and because of them we got to see what the real shamen of south america were like when anthropologists fanned out looking for the real Don Juan. Unfortunately the real shamen were not as interesting as Castaneda portrayed sophisticated and urbane Don Juan at home in both the old and new worlds.

Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.

We should at least mention Finnegan’s Wake, no more daring novel has ever been written. And I find it still fascinates me.

I recently read the Shadow of the Wind by Zafon and found the “library of lost” books intriguing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Wind

There is of course Tolkien and his work with Dunne’s theory of multidimensional time in Lord of the Rings.

There is existentialist literature and no one explains that better than the lectures of  Dreyfus which are available here and there occasionally on the internet or via ITunes.

In other genres:

There is of course Borges, the master of presenting ideas as short stories.

The Becket Play Waiting for Godot has a lot of subtle depth to it despite its seeming simplicity.

I like TS Elliot’s Four Quartets for its depth of ideas and its attempt to solve the problem of Nihilism set up in the Wasteland.

Blake’s Four Zoas which I mention all the time.

Dante’s Divine Comedy has the structure of the meta-system, how did that happen?

Plato’s Dialogues of course, especially when read against the plays of Aristophanes and along with John Sallis’ Being and Logos who brings out the dramatic character of the settings and action and who the characters were in real life.

Personally I like Science Fiction better than standard Literature, because it usually has more ideas per square inch on the page. I like David Brin’s dolphin novels especially the first one, and Greg Bear’s wormhole series. I like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Memory of Whiteness. I have already mentioned the Gameplayers of Zan in another post as a picture of the Uberman. For steampunk fans there is the Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling about Babbage succeeding with mechanical computers.

I am now reading the Map of Time b F.J. Palma that has promise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_of_Time

But it is even hard to find good science fiction with a good concentration of ideas.

I am afraid I take most of my literary inspiration from Poetry: Eliot, Stevens, Bronk, Thomas, etc.

Or from Movies like those that were being done in Europe and Japan in the sixties and early seventies.

The best “high-concept” literature is philosophy itself. Read the philosopher, then read the commentaries, then read the biography, then read about the time in which he lived and the influences.

There is the whole story of Peirce and the his life, and how he was thrown out of his academic career getting a divorce and marrying another woman. There is no telling what he could have done if he had kept his academic standing, he is a rival to Hegel, and later philosophers being perhaps the most inventive philosopher ever, and he was an American no less.

For instance, the whole story of the life and death of Walter Benjamin as told by Zizek and then looking at his works, and then seeing how his ideas are used by Adorno is something amazing.

Or take for example, the work of Joyce, and the criticism trying to deal with his work, and the influence of his work on everything and everybody.

Or take again Jung’s Red Book and its comparison and difference with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

Or the whole story of Descartes and his dreams.

There is Lacan, and his relations to the Surrealists like Dali but also to Heidegger, and his reformulation of Psychoanalysis based on Semiotics and Structuralism, and then his use of Freud as a foil for what Zizek says are his Hegelian views. Take Wilden’s interpretation of Lacan which is really brilliant, making the utterly obscure very useful and System and Structure.

And don’t forget Nietzsche and his fiery relation with the super star of his time Wagner. And the question as to whether his madness was feigned or real.

There is the betrayal of Husserl by Heidegger and the Nazism of the latter with Jaspers speaking against him after the war.

There is the falsification of what was in the archives of Husserl by Merleau Ponty.

There was the relation between Wittgenstein and Russell. And how Schlitz allowed Wittgenstein to be the figure-head of the Logical Positivist movement, yet Analytical Philosophers basically abandoned Wittgenstein because they could not understand his later work. Analytical philosophers worship Frege, but they ignore Husserl, even though Husserl changed his own philosophy greatly based on the criticism of Frege. Instead they trace though Moore who wanted a philosophy that the common man even ten-year olds could understand.

If you are looking for high faulting ideas per square inch then philosophy is your best bet. But of course due to that density one has to work a lot harder to see the literary qualities of philosophy and the drama in the interplay of ideas.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-great-high-concept-literary-books

See
God: Who is God?
What is the inner nature of absolute mirroring?
God: What is God?

I am afraid I think the question What is the nature of God is meaningless unless you are a pantheist.

Nature is Phusis which is one of the roots of Being.

So the question can be transformed into “What is the Is (phusis) of God.”

If like Spinoza you think God is nature then it is merely a tautology. It boils in that case down to a question of the nature of nature.

It is unlikely that nature has any nature beyond nature itself. In other words, nature is a term that does not ramify and is thus unstriated.

Nature is more or less just existence and existence does not ramify.

On the other hand if you believe that God is not nature, then to ask the nature of god is a meaningless question, instead we should as the characteristics or essence of God, rather than questioning Gods nature.

God creates nature, and so God cannot have a nature himself.

I just cannot figure out what the nature of God could be in God creates nature.

If God is an absolute, i.e. is without ultimately characteristics, of the kind that things have, then there is no basis for God to have a nature beyond Nature.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-nature-of-God

I won’t get into Ayn Rand bashing here, but her so called “philosophy” of self-centered egotism being actually good is just not anywhere near in the same class as the philosophy of Nietzsche. Rand is an ideologist reacting against the communists in Russia by taking an opposite extreme. She fills the lonely role as the only “philosopher” of Capitalism, because capitalism is seems indefensible to everyone else and because Capitalism survived the twentieth century as the dominant ideology, there is a continued appeal by conservatives to Rand for “philosophical” backing. However, in philosophy no one takes her the slightest bit seriously. Like Democracy, Capitalism is the best choice out of a lot of very bad choices for government and management of the economy. Democracy with all its flaws is vastly superior to Sovereignty, or Totalitarianism like Soviet Marxism, or any kind of Marxism for that matter, or Fascism. And similarly Capitalism is superior to both Communism, and Fascist alternatives to market governance. However, we have learned that the invisible hand of the market just does not exist and so there is no spooky or mystical reason that capitalism is better. Capitalism produces free space within which things can be developed by individuals without to down planning that always fails. Yet Capitalism without government constraints will just go off the deep end as we found out recently. The fact that Republicans do not recognize the need for regulation after the recent financial crisis merely shows us the degree to which they have sold their souls to the corporations. Rand was doing anything but celebrating Corporate man. If Ayn Rand saw how todays politicians were selling us down the river by taking away our rights she would have a conniption fit. She would not associate her ideas with the puppets of corporate America or their lackeys (lobbyists). But she would be with the 1% all the way, mostly made up of CEOs of corporations for whom she is trying to formulate an approach to life that would allow them to sleep at night, after they did want Romney did which was buy companies and put them out of business destroying jobs but making lots of money. The idea that selfishness is a virtue is almost a contradiction in terms.  It is the fragmentation of individualism taken to its logical extreme. It utterly forgets what has been learned in the last century by the real intellectuals which is that there is a baseline situation in which the individual aries out of a fusion with others, and radical self-centered individualism is a betrayal of that social origin of everyone, and thus has an internal contradiction of denying ones origins.

The best thoughts on this problem are those of Sarte in the Critique of Dialectical Reason which is his forgotten but really most important work, because he develops in there the idea of the fused group as the proto-society (commune) out of which the revolution arises. This is very much like what Canetti calls the Pack. It is like what Castoriadis calls Magma in the Imaginary Institution of Society. But of course the more basic ur-society is what Heidegger calls the Mitsein which is prior to the subject object distinction.

Turning something into its opposite, NewSpeak, such as Ayn Rand indulges in is historically alled sophistry and since Plato philosophers have avoided that label as much as possible. Marxist philosophers tend toward ideological political correctness, and to that extent they are not to be trusted. The words of the ideologically motivated and true believers of what ever sort only speak words of death.

And this is where we can draw the best comparison with Nietzsche. He was the first to ask the question of the Value of values. And what he came up with is that the ultimate value is always life. What supports life has value what leads to death has no value. And so Nietzsche was radically anti-ideological. But in parody he generates a lot of seemingly ideological sounding statements designed to shock. For him even truth serves life, and truth is really like a woman he says ironically, i.e. full of conniving. If lies support our life then we more readily believe lies than the truth, and so that is why we tend to fall into unthinking ideological ruts.

Why is Nietzsche a real philosopher, unlike others who merely pretend. It is because he like other philosophers have thought deeply about the human condition in our worldview and spoke out early rather than kept silence. He called the Western worldview nihilistic long before World War One broke out, not to speak of the curtain call of that war which was even worse which was World War Two.

Ideology is always full of easy answers and ultimately that dogma is going to result in someones death or degradation who does not fit in. Philosophers pride themselves as foregoing the easy answers for a deeper exploration that questions. The best of them that avoid sophistry which are few end up questioning their own positions admitting their deep and abiding ignorance as Socrates showed us as the way to knowledge for those who love knowledge more than they love themselves.

Philosophers start off admitting their ignorance and end up questioning above all their own positions. And Nietzsche is the best example of this because he took upon himself the Terror that the Europeans had rained upon the earth through colonialization. He admitted that he was one and the same with the blond beast. For him those like Ayn Rand are examples of the Last Man, those who are blinking and blinking, i.e. don’t understand either their world or themselves. The Uberman on the other hand was one who was a steward of the earth, and clings to it going lower than Man could ever reach in his pride.

A great novel of the uberman is the Game Players of Zan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._A._Foster 
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/05/alien-immersion-course-ma-fosters-the-gameplayers-of-zan

We are still waiting for the Uberman. The Nazi and the GB Shaw version of the Superman was not it. Ayn Rand shows us a capitalist Superman.

The Uberman is the one who can affirm life without guilt, or shame, or the nightmares of reason. The Uberman is like Blake’s Albion.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ovc6OT9TQ2i8z4FpnOacWnE5EnJuEBnZe_wLYWIKCM4/edit

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-similarities-between-Nietzsches-philosophy-and-Ayn-Rands

Autodidact = One who teaches themselves and thus learns from themselves on their own. Fundamentally it means self-motivated, self-directed learning and self-organized learning.

Now what I intend to do here is connect Self-Teaching and Self-Learning with Self-organization and especially as related to what I call Special Systems Theory. In effect I have a broader theory that I intend to bring to bear on this subject, and in that why hopefully shed more light on it than might normally be possible if we consider it a topic on its own.

Basically we are going to consider autodidacticism in the light of Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Ordering Special Systems theory.

We can do this because Self-Learning and Self-Teaching, i.e. when a person acts as their own teacher and the learner pursuing knowledge under their own steam, has direct links to self-organization and autopoiesis which means self-production. And it is also clearly a reflexive practice where one person is both teacher and learner at the same time or serially.

I have an interest in this because I am mostly self-taught. And the reason one has to be self-taught is that it is easy to get out beyond where anyone else is that might be your teacher, in other words if you are exploring new ground within the tradition then you will end up an autodidact sooner or later.

This does not mean I eschew education, and in fact I have two Ph.Ds to show that I think studying in educational institutions is worth while. But they have severe limitations and basically if you want to learn anything deeply you have to do it yourself.

I have already written answers that talk about Bateson’s meta-levels of learning, and even extended that to the meta-levels of teaching. So we won’t go into that again here but that is an important part of the discussion.

Rather we will apply Special Systems Theory to understand the nature of the autodidacticism and the reflexive relation between self-teaching and self-learning within the context of the broader theory.

If you want to know more about the theory itself see Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer.

So let us begin as we must looking at the various levels of mirrors that appear in the Hyper Complex Algebras. There is a single mirror, and then two mirrors facing each other, then three mirrors facing each other in a triangular form, and then four mirrors facing each other in a tetrahedral form, these are related to the Real, Complex, Quaternion, and Octonion Hypercomplex algebras. And beyond that there is no more regular combination of mirrors we either have warped mirrors that are joined or we have separated mirrors at various angles in space, but there is no pentahedral mirroring structure that is regular which is in fact quite surprising, but in terms of the Hypercomplex algebras there is the Sedenion and an infinite series expanding like Pascal’s triangle of weak algebras which have lost most of the strong properties we associate with the Hyper complex algebras or the real and complex algebras whose properties are almost the same.

We establish this theoretical system from algebra so that we can climb into it and see what its implications are for autodidacticism. However we must keep in mind at the same time that what is sought in autodidacticism is knowledge, and knowledge is sought because in experience it is like gold, which does not rust but remains pure, in as much as knowledge has perdurance, i.e. it stays with us longer than anything else in our experience. And we must be aware as stated in other recent answers that Aristotle’s kinds of knowledge are nous, sophos, epsteme, techne, phronesis, metis which are equal to the various sections of Plato’s Divided Line which breaks Ration and Doxa each into two parts, and provides us with the limits of the Supra-rational and the Para-doxical. The divided line is the fundamental structure of the Western worldview which we have all inherited and embody in our experience of our world everyday. So the types of knowledge are many, and they span the spectrum of our experience. But knowledge itself is persistent, more persistent than anything else in our everchanging experience of our world.

So first we should talk about Adrian Bijan’s [http://www.mems.duke.edu/fds/pratt/MEMS/faculty/abejan] Constructal Law http://www.constructal.org/  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory].

The constructal law was stated by Bejan in 1996 as follows: “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.”

For a more detailed account see  also http://www.constructal.org/en/art/The%20constructal%20law%20and%20the%20thermodynamics%20of%20flow%20systems%20with%20configuration.pdf


Basically what Bejan is saying is that we can rethink thermodynamics and see it in terms of the design configurations produced by flows, and see that flows that remain viable over time produce either greater areas, greater volume, or they increase their performance in some way. The basic message is that viability in flow produces design in materials that maximize efficiency or effectiveness or coverage in terms of surface area or mass of the flow. This usually results in trees and the example that he gives all the time are the bronchia and their effectiveness optimization of area of the lung surface verses blood and air flows verses performance of absorption of oxygen into the blood stream. The Bronchia is an optimized architecture that is the results of flows that just naturally falls out as an optimal design based on the continuing viability of the organism and the optimization of these flows over the organisms development.

So if we take this basic constructal principle and apply it to knowledge acquisition then we can recognize that for a learner to be effective at learning they must also be efficient, which is to say both at the same time, which is called Efficacious. The flow we are dealing with is the processing of suchness, facts, theories, paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, existences and absolutes. In other words there are not just different kinds of knowledge traditionally recognized within our worldview but also different emergent levels of processing of configurations of eventities associated with knowledge at various scopes that are necessary for the flow of knowledge acquisition to remain viable. Thus if we want the flow of knowledge acquisition to remain viable there must be optimization of area, volume, or performance (efficaciousness). When we realize this, then we see that Academia is designed specifically to limit this construcal flow of knowledge in specific ways in the guise of increasing it. For instance specialization cuts up knowledge in to patches and demands depth in the specialty instead of breadth. So Academia limits surface area covered by a given scholar. Academia sets up blocks to the productivity of scholars, by giving them service, administration, grading, office hours, and other non-scholarly tasks and thus limits volume that they can produce. Academia has a model that the lowest common denominator rules and thus has peer-reviewed journals publication in which is essential for promotion, but by this means they make scholars rewrite papers over and over until they are acceptable to anonymous reviewers, and thus cuts down on performance of researchers. Or another ruse is to hamstring scholars in departmental politics, which if they do not play properly has extremely adverse consequences, and thus deflects a lot of energy into the political realm from scholarship. All these and more are the ways that Academia is set up to hinder the spread, or volume, or performance of scholars. Part of that inefficiency is that scholars are thought primarily of as teachers and must spend a lot of their time teaching others, which is good for both the teacher and student but does not contribute much to scholarly output. However, if some in academia did not take teaching seriously there would be no future scholars, and so this particular drag on productivity is actually a boon in other ways. Another Boon is in teaching you learn things you did not know you knew, or you get new insights explaining things to others that you would not have had on your own. So there are many positive side effects to teaching, but I am not sure that it compensates for the time spent reading and grading student papers. Academia acts as a vast filtering system for society, and establishes educational rank that may have ramifications in the careers  of students who do or do not pass their courses and get degrees. We are all aware of the limitations and the benefits of educational institutions so it is not worthwhile to dwell on that here beyond what we have mentioned.

But if we were to follow Bijan’s constructal law to its utmost we would instead of putting roadblocks in the way of scholars instead we would attempt to increase volume, area, or performance of the scholar’s work of transforming raw materials produced by the tradition such as those already mentioned by thinking of them as being transformed along the spectrum from givens, data, information, knowledge, wisdom, insight, to realization and beyond. The first set of emergent levels are those associated with society, and this second set of transforms are those associated with the comprehension of the individual. The individual must take what is available in the tradition and transform it into something that makes sense to them and hopefully in the process create new knowledge. The individual sets up this flow by identifying a problematic, and then pursuing the exploration of that problematic as an intellectual adventure via their own dialectical engagement with the materials offered by the tradition. In that process the scholar is remaking the tradition and himself at the same time.

Now it just so happened that I by accident in my career as a postgraduate had the opportunity to experience the full articulation of the constructal flow in scholarship, which I think is actually fairly rare. I went to England and did a Ph.D. there is sociology. Not thinking I had a chance of finishing the degree I decided to make the absolute most of the opportunity I had to study in Senate House and the British Museum any book or subject that caught my fancy. And so I applied a simple rule, after establishing a wide topic that could be interpreted broadly to cover where ever I ended up but which at the same time gave me a very good problematic. My problematic was the nature of Emergence in the Western Scientific tradition. My Ph.D. title was The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence. Once this basic direction was set I applied my rule which was read the most fascinating book I could find on the most interesting subject to me at the moment, and then use what I learned from that to find the next most fascinating book regardless of its subject area. So I set about reading everything I could within the tradition that impinged on my subject, and that basically took me to almost every relevant subject at one time or another. And this resulted in an almost pure application of the Bijan constructal theory. First of all in terms of area I covered many many different subjects delving into each as deeply as need be for the necessary understanding and over time returning to the same subjects over and over again deepening my understanding continually of various subjects. In terms of Flow that was measured by the number of books and articles read, the number of diagrams, notes and working papers done. However, in those nine years most of it was spent reading, and only at the end did I immerse myself in writing. So volume was measured first by the amount of books digested and then later the number of working papers produced. Performance in terms of efficiency or effectiveness was low in the sense that since I did not think it was possible for me to pass the course, I took my time and did a lot of thinking, discussing with colleagues, and pursuing the academic life of the student to the fullest extent, which in the middle of London included participation in as many cultural and aesthetic events as possible. So I went to museums over and over, for instance walking though the British museum by a different path almost every day. Long walks on the  Hampstead Heath in parks all throughout London. You can walk from Highgate all the way to Kew Gardens almost completely though parks, and I would do that regularly. I sat in on classes and lectures at the various colleges in London. I went to Cambridge and Oxford to explore on a regular basis. And generally I took my intellectual and cultural life afforded by living in London and going to University of London very seriously. I would say that I was not particularly trying to be effective or efficient but considered this a time of playfulness in the intellectual and cultural arena. For instance, I watched hundreds of movies from all over the world. With the National Film theater across the bridge from LSE this was fairly easy.

In the end I was encouraged to bring my studies to an end and so I stopped reading and started writing and in that time I produced more than 1000 pages of working papers, and finally a four hundred or so 488 page Dissertation including bibliography that had about 800 relevant books in it. Eventually I passed my orals with this dissertation and was awarded the degree. When I finished my advisor said “Now you have a general education, and you can go on to your real academic work.” If seven or so years reading in the British museum is a general education, then I wonder what kind of education others are getting. But regardless I found that there was no call for sociologists of any kind on my return home because the discipline had collapsed while I was away, and so I became a software and systems engineer in industry instead of an academic. But I continued my research vigorously and eventually did another Ph.D. in Systems Engineering this time at an Australian school, which I also enjoyed greatly. And because their system is similar to that of England I basically did the same thing again, only this time I started writing from the beginning, and wrote working papers throughout my studies so as to capture my ideas and their development better along the way. The second time around I was more interested in production of working papers and read to support my writing rather than the other way around. I also was more efficient and effective because I had been through it before, and also I could afford to buy the books that were important for my studies now, and also I was more focused on the goal of finishing, rather than taking it as an endless summer as I had previously.

Overtime I extended my bibliography many times what it was after the LSE experience, and I also wrote many books long and short as well as many working papers as I did my research, and much of this is available on my various websites.

But in this whole process I think I learned a lot about the Constructal nature of being an autodidact. I think of my life as an intellectual adventure, which has been very fruitful in the depth of the speculative theories I have ended up producing. The intellectual adventure is the flow. I am a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary researcher and thus the area of my studies being extremely wide expresses the optimization of the flow across the intellectual and cultural landscape. In terms of volume the number of books I have read and the papers I have written is quite large, and so volume is very great over thirty years or so. But we are here actually to talk about autodidactic performance. What is it that enhances autodidactic performance? Because by my own standards my performance is quite good, even though others are sometimes critical. I view performance by only one measure which is the number of ideas produced or processed and comprehended. And by that measure my notebooks over the years show this performance as well as my papers, and for that matter my answers to diverse questions on Quora that are advertisements for my other quasi-academic works but also contributes to my further intellectual growth by confronting topics that I would not normally write about in academic or working papers because I consider my expertise as limited in some of these areas. I tend to write my actual papers in subjects where my research has been such that I consider that I have mastered the literature and have something to contribute that is not seen in the literature as yet. But here I pontificate on all sorts of things I would never presume to write articles about.

Be that as it may, lets get back to the main subject with which we started this particular excursion. And that is the application of Special Systems Theory to the teacher/taught self-learning self-organizing relations that I have learned in my quest for understanding the depths of my problematic.

When the student learns or the teacher teaches and they look out on the face of the other they are looking into a mirror, because teachers were once students, and students in the future most likely to some degree will be teachers. And so there is the Lacanian mirror stage in which the infant sees and recognizes themselves in a mirror and that leads to the explicit understanding of the self, which until them was as Demasio says implicit in every experience. But there is a higher order mirror stage in which the teacher looks out at his class and sees himself as a student long ago, or conversely when a student looks at the teacher and sees themselves as a future teacher. But it is time that separates these roles and a great deal of learning and experience in the interim.

But no matter how good your teachers are, the best thing they can do is lead you to the cutting edge of your discipline and then bade you good voyaging. But they can give you tools to help you along your way, and basically that is what good education is about, providing good tools to support scholarship. Now the tools that I learned that I think were out of the ordinary were basically two. From C.K. Warriner I learned to write working papers, and from Alfonso Verdu I learned to express complex sets of ideas of a thinker in diagrams. So with these lessons learned as an undergraduate I went off the tackle learning the Western Scientific and Philosophical Tradition as best I could, which by the way is an endless task and which I am still struggling with.

Working papers allow you to express what you know and do not know, you write them and put them away, and then when you know more you get them back out and rewrite them, and they allow you to work out the meaning of your diagrams, and extend them into learning things from writing you would not have known otherwise.

Diagrams allow you to synthesize systems of thought so that they can be taken in at a glance, analyzed, transformed, transfigured, and remembered, and communicated.

These two techniques together with a lot of hard work trying to understand difficult books that are the canon of our tradition yields the first glimmers of understanding.

Another principle I would like to state is that when one is studying a thinker one must put away ones own thought and that of other thinkers and attempt to understand the given focus of ones study in their own terms attempting to understand what they have written as they meant it to be understood. In other words we want to learn to think like the thinker we are studying as much as possible while studying them, comparison with others or critique from ones own point of view comes later. And the measure of understanding is to be able to go beyond the information, or knowledge, or wisdom, or insights or realizations given by the thinker himself.

Another principle is to read the thinker themselves first before reading the commentaries. But for primary thinkers one should read as much of the commentarial literature as possible, or as feasible given what one is trying to achieve in ones study of that thinker. For the fundamental thinkers one should read the entire commentarial literature if possible. For instance a few years ago I did that for Blake so I could understand his Four Zoas. So when I say something about Blake I do so in the context of having read almost every major commentator on his work. If thinker is key to ones thought one must pay them and the tradition that respect.

So my key teachers Warriner and Verdu gave me some very specific tools of my trade, and I took those tools and applied them to the agreed upon cannon of the Continental Philosophical Tradition with minor forays into the Analytic tradition. So basically I spent my time reading difficult and long books, diagramming them and writing working papers about their interrelations with each other that I learned as I went along. And this was very effective over time in allowing me to come to terms with the Western tradition generally. Basically I wanted to know why the phenomena of Emergence existed in the Western tradition and what it meant within that context.

So I went from a student who learned some unique techniques of scholarship from my teachers, to someone who knew the tradition based on the use of those techniques, and thus could teach others, as I am attempting to do in my written works, and in these answers on Quroa. My teaching is based on my own synthesis and synopsis of the tradition forged over many years of struggle with it. My teaching is about how to go deeply within the Western tradition to understand what is at its structural core which surprisingly is nonduality. Thus the one tradition that has pursued duality to the utmost and killed off or fought to a standoff anyone who tried to introduce the nondual for consideration turns out to have an inner kernel which is nondual that most people in the tradition do not realize is there and that is because it this kernel is covered by a radical nihilism as has been said by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

But this is only considering the mirror that the teacher is for the student and the student is for the teacher. But there are other levels that we will enumerate as follows:

Learning to Learn to Learn to Learn to Learn – Ultra Knowledge
·   Meta-system
Learning to Learn to Learn to Learn – Wild Knowledge
·   Reflexive Social Special System – four mirrors
Learning to Learn to Learn – Hyper Knowledge
Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System – three mirrors
·   Learning to Learn – Process Knowledge
Dissipative Ordering Special System – two mirrors
·   Learning – Pure Knowledge
System – one mirror seen by student or teacher but not both at the same time.
·       Experience in the lifeworld with what one knows at a given time.

Here we consider the learning to be striated and the teaching to be unstriated. So teaching is unified while learning is discontinuously emergent.

So lets start walking up this ladder to nowhere, i.e. to existence as empty or void.

The Academic System gives the teacher a mirror in his students and the students a mirror in their teacher, but not at the same time. Each looking into their separate mirrors, in the other, allows learning to take place and gives us pure knowledge. That is to say the students think that the knowledge derived from what is taught was some how written in stone merely to be memorized by earlier generations of scholars via an objective method that yielded perfect knowledge such as you find synthesized in any text-book. The teacher teaches from the text-book containing the knowledge pre-digested, and the students memorize what is in the textbook augmented by the lectures, and then the teacher tests the student, because the knowledge thus attained is an objective measure of the student’s performance and intrinsic worth. Good students do not question what is being taught, and good teachers teach by the book and do not deviate from the established curriculum. And so it goes on each generation testing the next generation and acting as a living filter for excellence in the students for learning matched by the excellence in teaching by the teacher. OK, all this is a fantasy, but it is based on this fantasy that each generation is tested and filtered by the previous generation as if any of that actually mattered. Learning by rote, teaching by the book – these do not really yield knowledge except of the most superficial type.

Next we enter the Dissipative Ordering Special System described by Prigogine. In this situation we have Progress, apparent or real where Knowledge is advanced. A dissipative structure re-orders its environment with an expanding wave of negative entropy. Here we get schools of thought articulated and vying with each other for dominance. But from the point of view of the student it is as if they were caught between two mirrors and the knowledge were seen as the infinitely ramifying series of representations that appear in the mirrors. Here suddenly teacher and taught become unified, and the roots of auto-didacticism begins. Here we find learning to learn to be the rule, i.e. we continually are learning new ways of learning as Bateson says. Sitting in ones Barber chair one sees an infinitely ramifying set of images unfold in a virtual space within the mirroring in which representations give rise to other representations endlessly. Each generation of scholars writes books that are read and these lead to new books being written. Earlier scholars have ideas that are picked up transformed into new ideas, and among these are “memes” that are the equivalent of mini-ideologies that serve as the basis of schools of thought all with their adherents. What ideologies you pick up is based on the prejudices and insights of ones teachers, and ones own proclivities. Knowledge itself is ever expanding as scholars look in greater detail at ever so small subject matters, and experimental evidence piles up, is interpreted, and conclusions are drawn. New facts emerge, and new theories are proposed, new paradigms are embraced with their inherent assumptions that make some things more clear and other things more obscure. Epistemes are established that are fundamental sources of categorization, and occasionally we get a new interpretation of the absurdity of Being, or new glimpses at the underlying substrata of existence beyond our illusions, or hints of other absolutes to be pursued.

Man as the one who teaches himself and is taught by himself stands between the mirror of the future and the mirror of the past, and all the representations that ramify between future and past as progress occurs are images of man himself who inhabits the interstice which is the current period within the evolution of the scientific community. The scholar realizes that knowledge evolves and is somewhat fragile, and takes on some of the characteristics of a witch hunt, i.e. of self-fulfilling prophecies which drive the evolution of thought. Suddenly there is old knowledge and new knowledge and god help anyone who embraces new knowledge too soon, or creates it, or who hangs on to old knowledge too late. Here the negative image of the auto-didact is realized where everything is the image of oneself, and one merely feeds the expansion of that image of Man himself who is the teacher of himself and the one who learns from himself, and everything is a closed circulation of the same information merely reprocessed over and over again. The illusion of progress is very strong, but the reality of progress is even stronger. The winners write the history. Those who pass the test, in turn make up the next set of tests. Everywhere we look all we see is ourselves in various guises.

The image of this level from Plato is the Republic, i.e. hell on earth. Socrates has gone down to Piraeus to see the advent of a new goddess entering the city. Emergent events are self generated and then we see them as coming from the outside and as something new replacing the old Gods as objects of veneration.

At the next level is where the true auto-didact appears along the analogy of the autopoietic system, i.e. the system that is self-producing and thus self-organizing. The image of self-organization is knots that are organized against themselves, provide resistance to themselves by their self-interference. All the various ideas that are generated in the tradition interlock at a structural level once you see that they are all recapitulations of the same underlying pattern that creates a network of influences and counter influences. The Auto-didact is the one who teaches themselves the underlying patterns that are ramified throughout the various disciplines but is actually variations on the same themes. Once one realizes that the same basic ideas form the groundwork of all disciplines then stability is reached and structural models appear that allow the translation between all the disciplines, and the tradition becomes a single web, whose weaver is not the individual self-made scholar, but rather the community of scholars who make each other by their mutual recognition. Disciplines merely borrow from each other and build up the same pictures with the content of their various subject areas informed by similar ways of thinking such that all knowledge interlocks and becomes a single fabric, the motifs of which repeat endlessly.

And here the focus is on not just new techniques of learning that the student can employ, such as working papers or diagramming, but rather on the creation of those new techniques oneself. This is the level where the tools of the trade transform in our hands and new tools emerge and this forging of new tools out of old tools based on their application to the materials of our study yield genuinely new results.

In Plato this is the City of the Laws. It is inland away from the coast of foreign influences. Here the city of the tradition stabilizes, because there are only so many permutations of basic structural patterns of thought that underlie the web of the tradition. Suddenly instead of everything ramifying out of control the tradition becomes one set of repeated underlying patterns, and if you teach yourself those patterns then you have the keys by which all the doors of the labyrinth of the tradition can be unlocked. The true auto-didact is the one who can teach himself and learn these underlying patterns of thought by which the tradition itself is woven becoming at the same time the master of that tradition, and its weaver. But this is done by continually learning new techniques of learning what one has learned. The tradition is one web or network of fundamental ideas and approaches seems everywhere, but that is based on ones own continuing to sharpen ones tools of scholarship and the creation of new ones that delve deeper into the underpinnings of the tradition itself. That tradition is wracked by emergent events of various scales and scopes, but even these emergent events are merely the same thing occurring again and again, which is what is happening here, that is the combination of the kinds of Being in a new face of the world. The teacher who teaches themselves new tricks in order to keep up with the emergence within the worldview of new theories, paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, existences, and absolutes, and who sees the same process occurring everywhere, i.e. emergence appearing as too light on the too dark of nihilism within the tradition, has obtained the keys to the kingdom so to speak, and those keys and their locks are constantly changing, but in that change there is an abiding and perdurance that is unexpected given the drastic differences produced by emergence, and the unbearable sameness produced by nihilism. At this level the number of real differences that make a difference are few and extremely few, but they are genuine differences that give the tradition new life from within itself. To step into that tradition completely is to know its cutting edge, to go beyond that edge and to bring back what is genuinely new contributing to the genuine advance of the tradition, rather than the apparent advances that merely turn out to be new versions of the same thing, that only appear different.

Hyper-knowledge is of course what Heidegger calls de-construction which was taken up by Derrida. It is knowledge of the changes to knowledge that in the very act of knowing changes knowledge, because change changes change within the tradition. From the time of Plato this was called the third kind of knowledge which is the type of knowledge that the Demiurge knew that allowed him to give rise to the world. And it is that kind of knowledge that Plato calls the Worldsoul which is a moving image of eternity within the tradition itself, which remains the same despite continuous radical emergent change within the tradition. The deconstruction of the tradition of itself by itself is real. In that reconstruction the Phoenix arises from its own ashes. In the city of the Laws (NOMOS) the seemingly random emergences of new gods and foreign influences turns out to be in fact a meta-stability, and the city prospers because it has self-imposed laws, that are right, and maintain the good, and establish that the city has a shared fate. This is a vision of the city of knowledge similar to that created by Herman Hesse in his Glass Bead Game, in which understanding the tradition of the history of culture and ideas was a great game in which there were only so many moves available because actually the genuine emergences were few, and the structural underpinnings of the whole tradition were understood so that one might play a sort of intellectual chess by manipulating the structural permutations of the ideas within that history. This is the view that the intellectual tradition of the West is much like the Catholic church in which a few structural permutations play out in the dialectic between heresy and dogma. Even though there is a teleonomy (Monod) to the development of dogma in the face of heresy there is still only one universal church who is the body of Christ and that holds within it the holy spirit embodied on earth doing the will of God the Father. What the Catholic Church and its protestant images are to ungrounded belief, science is to representations and empirically grounded opinion, i.e. the central parts of the Divided line. What they both share is the impossibility of reaching the non-representable intelligibles that they share and what makes them two faces of the same tradition. Hesse’s academic monks studying the history of the western tradition and playing their game was giving a picture of the absolute reason working itself out in the tradition. Given Aristotle’s metaphysics that affirms non-contradiction and the excluded middle, there are only so many permutations of the basic structural concepts underlying the tradition, and when those are exhausted in their combinatorics then only genuine emergence can reset nihilism and start the cycle over again by contributing something genuinely new, which is really merely as Dreyfus says taking something marginal and making it central and taking what is central and making it marginal. Once the game has played out we merely change the rules, and as Anthony Wilden says The Rules are no Game.

Auto-didacticism in this context is merely understanding the basic game being played within the tradition and the mechanism by which the rules change. This is not a rote understanding but a realization of how to create new tools for learning and new techniques for comprehending the tradition so that one may stay in tune with the self-transformations of the tradition itself, out of its own structural underpinnings. At this point one realizes that there are only a few books in the whole tradition that matter and they are the canonized books because in their time they were the fundamental game changers. The ideas they brought merely spread though the tradition establishing the new norm before the next fundamental change occurs that takes the tradition by storm, but in this transformation the fundamental structures of the tradition do not change because it is those structures like the dialectic of emergence and nihilism itself that make those radical changes possible.

The triangular configuration of mirrors produces in the virtual realm a series of hexagonal cells, like the cells of a beehive. That is a stable standing wave pattern within which all the changes within those virtual realms occur.

The true auto-didact is learning what the tradition itself has to teach. The Tradition is self-organizing and re-organizing itself based on basic principles, it is establishing for itself principles and then breaking those principles to establish new ones on a continuing basis. The Tradition is teaching itself by learning about itself at deeper and deeper levels of comprehension and profundity, and the true auto-didact is merely learning from that fundamental transformative movement at the structural level within the tradition. The tradition learns from the auto-didact as new techniques for learning are created. The auto-didact learns from the tradition as it structurally transforms itself though emergent events on the background of nihilism it produces thus producing radically new contexts for learning while at the same time remaining fundamentally the same.

At the next level one is moving into the reflexive level where the auto-didact must recognize the Other in order to be self-conscious and know himself. At each meta-level of learning we approach more closely to absolute emergence. Here we reach the place where the auto-didact cannot go any further without recognizing the other as Other, in order to know himself. We suddenly leave the realm of Kant and enter the realm of Hegel which is a fundamental transformation within the tradition. Here the auto-didact becomes reflexively aware of himself, as one of the Names that the tradition revolves around. There is a community of the canonical names within the tradition, and there is a conversation over time between these names of the fathers (and mothers) of the Tradition. And at the reflexive level one becomes oneself one of those Names that father the tradition. Of course, there is a lot of Lacanian Ink to be spilled over this in true Zizekian style as we reduce Lacan and all the other Continental Philosophers of recent vintage to Hegel and ultimately to the Kant of the third critique, at least as far as Bernstein is concerned. Note the “Names” in the last sentence. We are assuming one has read and knows what these figures have said and we are allowing them speculatively in our mind to converse with each other and we are taking up that conversation ourselves and playing  key role of bringing the conversants across time together to discuss in our dialectical investigation the nature of the worldview itself. We are not merely mimicking their positions, or twisting them to our own ends but hearing their own voices within the ultimate conversation that is taking place in the tradition and we are participating in that conversation ourselves.

The image of this emergent level of the tradition knowing itself is that of Atlantis, the great sea power that fought ancient Athens (which looks very much like the Republic). At this level we are part of a tradition that is a dominant world power and whose language everyone wants to know in order to be heard themselves. But this is also the level at which language is no longer a barrier because they are all Indo-European languages in which the tradition was forged. At the reflexive level we are having a genuine conversation across time and space and language barriers with other thinkers from the past and perhaps from the future. This is because in Old English there are only two tenses Complete (Peterite) and Incomplete, and past and future are both images of the Peterite these one projected backward and the other projected forward, but representing in both cases the OrLog, the sedimentation of the tradition which is based on its fatedness. At this level the Auto-Didact takes up the conversation between the Canonical names of the Fathers himself and participates in it actively. And so there is a sense in which they animate him, and another sense in which they are animated by him. And this conversation informs the conversation with the contemporaries, while the conversation with the contemporaries informs the conversation among the Canonical Figures which stand in as the Names of the Father. In a sense we are that self-conscious conversation of spirit across history and nothing else. But if we do not know what the others would say based on their canonical writings then we cannot participate in that conversation, nor can we contribute ourselves. So we have to know the tradition in order to truly be a part of it. And how many of us have gotten into that situation. Very few. Mostly those who have gotten into that position are those who have completely in their own way internalized the conversation of the tradition, and attempted to advance the agenda of that dialogue by bringing back from the cutting edge what is genuinely emergent for our tradition. Atlantis is the fantasy empire in the midst of the sea, at war with the Republic (ancient Athens). Today we belong to this fantasy empire set in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules called America whose empire supports the neo-colonial policies of corporatist globalization. But because of this sustained Imperialism of the European powers and the shift of economic if not cultural power to America the internal conversation among the canonical names within the tradition becomes a global conversation of interest to everyone as Absolute Reason plays itself out globally and Absolute Spirit encompasses all the people of the earth as our Manifest Destiny to bring Corporatism to the whole earth and its inhabitants (now shareholders, customers, and employees) and its resources to be exploited.

As Zizek explains parodying Lacan and at the same time making him comprehensible perhaps for the first time as the anti-Derrida, the names of the Father are signifers of empty placeholders within the series of signifiers. So when we refer to the name we are referring to the displaced (differing and deferring) signification of the works of those thinkers within the tradition, and what has become infinite are the interpretations of the terms used by those canonical figures. But all the interpretations taken together as the set of existing commentaries merely work out the structural possibilities for interpreting each name within the successive contexts of the history of the tradition. So the works plus the commentaries, plus the biography and the history of the times of the canonical figure together constitute the voice of that figure, but still it remains an empty floating signifier, a name of the father, by which we communicate by bringing these figures into dialog with each other virtually via our own internal conversation in our thoughts. At the reflexive level which is social this group of canonical figures form their own community which is the tip of the iceberg of the work of myriad scholars over the centuries that has served to focus the problematic to be addressed in this dialectical discourse. We stage the Platonic discourses in our own thought-stream and the discussion across time and into the future is lively and engaging, and at this level the auto-didact has found his true peers. He appears with them in their symposium. He gets his own name as the facilitator of their continuing conversation. And thus we find our home within our tradition and our own voice among the canonical voices.

Wild knowledge is not to think outside of the box but to think where there were no boxes in the first place prior to the imposition of all our conceptual boxes.

But there is a final layer, which is the meta-system within which the Western Tradition as dominant operates. That is the environment of world intellectual history. It turns out that the most sophisticated thoughts were had elsewhere already and that we are still striving to attain what others in other traditions have already attained previously. When we put the Western tradition into the context of India and China and their traditions and we understand our tradition in relation to those then we begin the true dialogue with the Other, not just as another voice within our own tradition, but in a higher order conversation between intellectual traditions. This does not really occur as long as we are embroiled in Orientalism, i.e. as long as we are projecting our ideas on the other cultures and civilizations and their intellectual traditions. At this highest-level conversation is where we find the themes of nonduality verses duality and we recognize that different civilizations have encountered and responded to the nondual in various different ways. How we handle dualism in relation to nonduality within our tradition is the future of this conversation among civilizations. If we can overcome the clash of cavitation’s then we have a lot to learn from other civilizations that were more sophisticated than ours in the past. We are barbarians and newcomers to dominance, and many have held that position before only to lose it. Our fate as a civilization and the fate of the earth and all the species on the earth hinge on our self-understanding and we cannot understand ourselves without an other, and our other must be other unrelated global civilizations. The conversation among civilizations over ultimates holds the fate of our species and all other species in the balance. And the auto-didact at this point has entered the sea itself from which Atlantis claims power prior to the cataclysm. The sea of the ebb and flow of civilization and intellectual traditions across the globe is vast. Our dominance has lasted for such a short time. Yet if Earth ends up like Venus then there may not be any other civilization after the first global empire. So it behooves us to listen carefully what those other civilizations have to teach us. The auto-didact at this level is taught by the conversation among thinkers from diverse civilizations some way more sophisticated than our own. This auto-didact speaks these voices of the other and indicates the Homeward path. It is the path by which the most virulent of destructive civilization in the slumber of dualism and nihilism can wake up and make non-nihilistic distinctions necessary to avoid global destruction and save itself and all others from its own environmental suicidal terrorism. It is the path by which the most ardent and vehement of the dualistic civilizations recognizes the necessity of the nondual kernel of its own tradition beyond the generative core that produces the meta-nihilism of the duality of nihilism (too dark) and emergence (too bright). Meta-emergence is the advent of the novum of nonduality out of the kernel of the Western worldview itself. The voices of the other worldviews are their sages that speak with a nondual voice and teach how to make non-nihilistic distinctions. We have put to death those in our tradition that spoke to us with such a voice which is not tied to the permutation of structural opposites underlying the tradition and out of whom the tradition is built-in a random walk though the combinatorics. Those speaking from that unexpected direction that has no from or to in our own tradition are few but we will mention Meister Eckhart as a rare exception to the rule of the Inquisition (he died before they could reach him).

Ultra Knowledge is the knowledge of the singularity of the arising of nonduality within the Western tradition, which will be the most radical change yet to this tradition, which other traditions have undergone and survived. The problem is that if we do not undergo this meta-emergent event we may not survive as a civilization, let alone as a species, let alone helping other species to survive, let alone letting the earth survive its heat death and its transformation into a sister planet with Venus. Methane stores at the bottom of the Arctic ocean are already starting to vent.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-an-autodidact

God as absolute is a mirror to us. This was stated in a previous answer, but of course that raises the question as to what is mirroring. Of course, the mirroring of ourselves in God, which we project, and which projects us is perfect mirroring, i.e. is the limit case of mirroring. It is even beyond infinite mirroring. But let us return to basics and look at our theory of mirroring.

Of course, our theory of mirroring shows up first in mundane mirrors. And what mirrors underline is the chiral nature of our experience. Kant remarked on chirality saying that it showed that space was itself and independent singularity. And the most significant thing for us to understand  is that the fourth dimension is anti-chiral in the sense that anything that is enantiomorphic can be rotated through the fourth dimension to become its own Chiral opposite. So that mirror image that confronts us that is anti-chiral can be turned into though a four-dimensional rotation.

When we confront people, facing them there is a completely different experience to the confrontation with our own anti-chiral image of ourselves. So there is a fundamental difference between mirroring in which we see ourselves and the confrontation of the other in the flesh, i.e. experientially in daily life.

Now what special systems tells us is that this mirroring ramifies. So the most basic level is that there is one mirror in which we are looking at ourselves rather than the different other. And in that mirror we are seeing ourselves as anti-chiral which only the fourth dimension can render symmetrical. But the Dissipative Ordering Special System has as its analogy two mirrors facing each other. And most of us have experienced that in a barbershop or solon when we have mirrors before us and behind us, and we see the ramification of our image. But both of these images, front and back are still anti-chiral with regard to our bodies. But this anomalous experience is the analogy for the neg-entropic system as described by Prigogine as Dissipative Structures via the complexnions called normally complex numbers. Onar Aam pointed out this analogy long ago during our collaboration with Ben Goertzel and Tony Smith.

He noted that each hyper-complex algebra had an analogy for a configuration of facing mirrors. Thus the Autopoietic Symbiotic special system had the analogy of the for the quaternions of three mirrors facing each other, and the Reflexive social special system had the analogy of four mirrors facing each other or an inwardly mirrroring tetrahedron which is related to the octonion. After that you either had to have warped mirrors which Onar Aam called the Funhouse of circus fame or separated mirrors like those we see in light experiments in physics. Since the quaternions are the group of four dimensional space then what we see is that with the second mirroring level which is analogous to the theory of Materana and Varella concerning autopoiesis actually embodies the anti-chiral transform itself. And the reflexive social special system embodies two of these anti-chiral transforms in relation to each other which is what we experience in embodied experience facing another human being, hence it is the source of what Sartre calls the fused group and Canetti calls the fact and it is what Castoriadis calls the Imaginary institution of society which he describes in terms of magma.

In essence the Autopoietic Symbiotic special system grabs the generator of the anti-chiral transform, and the Reflexive Social special system places two such embodied generators in a mirroring relation with each other which then simulates the actual confrontation of the other whose chirality is independent of our own. The sine quo non of this is Marriage. And since Gender is not a kind of a kind as Smith has said but in fact a modification, we see in marriage a mirroring across the category theory modification divide. So that means that there are probably mirrorings across each of the categoric theory divides such as the series of elements, arrows, functors, natural transformations, modifications and fluctuations.

For instance we know that the SET category has Anti-Set which is just the set, and so it is self-dual. But there is an actual inverse dual of the SET which is MASS, that is also self-dual under a functor, so the difference between SET and MASS and their logics (syllogistic and pervasion) must be a natural transformation. To go up to the next level of mirroring across the categorical divide would be to find an equivalent of gender for SET and MASS. Such an equivalent if we consider them to appear in spacetime, i.e. as schematized might be chirality. Thus for a SET there is a difference between it and its chiral opposite, and the same with a MASS. Not sure anyone has thought this through before. It might not be chirality but some other property like that. But let us stick to our guns for the moment and consider that there can be left and right-handed sets and masses at the level of modifications. If we want to go up to the next level of fluctuations then there would be some other even more subtle characteristic that is fractal ramified throughout Sets and Masses. We know that the difference here is something like the difference between Hue and Saturation, as color has these fine distinctions worked out. If Hue is like chirality which is like gender, then saturation is like X which is like individual personal differences.

The problem is that chirality implies self-order, which sets do not have. In order to have self order we must allow for a list, in which case you can think of the beginning and end of the list and you can think about them as having start and end, and being configured in space such that we could differentiate right and left-handed lists. So if we take away internal ordering what is the equivalent of the chiral for a SET.

We know that the first step way from the set of particulars is a bag which allows repetition but no ordering.

After the Bag then we can have various orderings which are called by Klir Methodological Distinctions in his book Architecture of Systems Problem Solving. These possible orders form a lattice which goes as follows:

No order = SET or MASS

Partial order = BAG (times two called a DOMAIN) or SOLUTION

Either Partial Order with Distance TOPOLOGY or Linear order with no distance LIST

Full order with distance NUMBER THEORY or DIFFERENTIAL TOPOLOGY

[Combinatoric Order] Power Set ARITHMETIC or MATROID

Real Number line, i.e. continuity hypothesis an infinity of infinities. ALGEBRA or GEOMETRY

[This is speculative, any help from a mathematician would be appreciated]

What we do know about SETS however is that they themselves are bland but they are a collection of particulars, and those particulars have characteristics and they may have the internal organization necessary to have chirality, and on the other hand with Masses instances are all the same, but the mass level (unlike the set) has all the interesting qualities so it may have enough internal order to have chirality. The interesting thing about chirality is that it is dependent on the internal ordering of things not on external ordering, and it is fully contextual in that it only appears locally within a space.

So although the SET itself might not have enough structure to be chiral the particulars that make it up may have chirality, and similarly although the instances of a mass may not be chiral the mass as a whole with its global characteristics in a structure may have chirality.

Particulars and Masses may be chiral, and Sets and Instances are too nondescript to have chirality because they lack the requisite internal structure. But what we know is that for chirality to appear there must be at least a local spacetime in which things express some inward structure.

So for the moment we leave as an open question what might be the fluctuation of the Set and Mass differentiation in themselves without the differentiation outward that we note above, except to note that just like we think of fluctuations in people at individual differences, we can also think of many individual structural differences in particulars and masses that differentiate them from one another. So these differences hat make a difference (ala Bateson) between the particulars in a set or the masses that emerge beyond their instances may be seen as these fluctuations.

Now when we look at mirroring within facing mirrors we note that they appear to be quasi-infinite regresses. And this holds up for each level of mirroring in the special systems. So the approximation of the infinitude of the mirroring appears in the special systems. With the derivative we note the points of incidence of the beams of light on the mirrors as the images ramify, and the integral is the space volume within which the ramification occurs. And of course no mirroring would be seen without the light which can ramify bouncing off the reflective surfaces. Conway showed that there is always at least one path which is closed in such a system, so that the light path closes on itself to produce a circuit. So within all the dispersed ramified light there is also a circuit of light which does not scatter from its series of incident points. So the dispersion of the ramifications has as its opposite the closed loop of self incidence of the loop of light within the mirror configuration.

This loop is different from either the identification of the points of incidence that are the derivative of the path, or the area of dispersion that is the integral. We might call the loop a hypercycle of reflection or a circuit, or self-reinforcing of an auto-catalysis. This cycle is in acupuncture called the five Hsing with their production and control cycles. Famously this circuit is called the Jing Chi. So mirroring itself has an inner relation to infinitude and its description in terms of limits in the calculus, but also there appears the nondual between the derivative and integral which is the self-creating cycle, what is called psychologically “flow”.

So now that we know something about mirroring at the mundane level that appears in the world as anomalous special systems we can consider absolute mirroring. In mirroring we look at ourselves, and this is a special anomalous situation because normally we are facing others. Lacan famously identified the mirror stage with the childs self-development. When the child recognizes itself in the mirror then it forms a concept of itself as different from the Mother and the name of the Father (floating signifier). We hardly think that looking into mirrors is a necessary condition for developing an ego, but this is merely an analogy. Essentially you must have a self-concept in order to have any experience as Demasio tries to show. So the self is built-in to experience itself. But the mirror anomaly serves to give the illusion of self. It is the subjunctive mood that goes beyond indicative or imperative moods.

We latch onto this anomaly of mirroring as a simulacrum for the ego itself and from it Lacanian psychoanalytic theory unfolds structurally and semiotically. Zizek reads Lacan as merely another version of Hegel. And in Hegel we confront not just the idea of the transcendental from the human perspective (necessary condition for the possibility of experience) but the idea of the absolute. This is seen in religion as the Nirguna Brahman of Hinduism and the Godhead in Meister Eckhart closer to home. The Absolute is beyond all characteristics. And when we look into the absolute there is absolute mirroring rather than contingent mirroring. Every aspect of our own finitude is contrast sharply with the absolute mirroring of our finite characteristics in the characateristiclessness of God as absolute. This absolute mirroring is beyond what we can bear. We latch on to mirrors as anomalies in the world, and then recognize that the fundamental organization of consciousness, life and the social is based on a kind of self-mirroring that compounds that initial confrontation of with a mirror in our experience. By the mirror we realize the nature of the chiral, by its violation of it, and we realize that the anti-chiral can only be resolved via four-dimensional rotations, which the special systems allow us to appropriate to ourselves, and our relations with others. And within mirroring we recognize that there is an infinitude of ramification, or recursion that is possible. And we deal with that infinitude via calculus which is our means of handling infinitude. But we recognize that the circle of auto catalysis goes beyond the dualities of the derivative and the integral. But all this does not prepare us for absolute mirroring.

What it prepares us for is to understand the mirroring which is interpenetration, i.e. the mirroring of all things in each other which is the jeweled net of Indra of Huan Yen Buddhism and mentioned by Fa Tsang that set up a hall of mirrors for the Empress in order to give her some idea of the nature of interpenetration. In Interpenetration each thing is what it is by its difference from everything else. We realize our place in the golden fabric of  all existence. But beyond existences are the absolutes. And the difference between the mirroring of interpenetration and the mirroring of the absolutes is radical. But we can only approach the mirroring of ourselves in the absolute by means of the mirroring in existence.

Now we know that all the special systems and the normal system ifs into the Emergent Meta-system. And we know that there are both Supervenient and Emergent Systems and Meta-systems. But absolute Mirroring goes beyond all those differences as well. Absolute mirroring cuts to the core of our finitude, but also goes beyond the infinitude of mirroring.

So here is something to my mind which is strange. We note that mirroring is an anomaly. If that is the case then absolute mirroring must be an absolute anomaly. And we have seen that mirroring occurs across all the levels of category theory unto and including fluctuations, that are individual differences. So absolute mirroring must be related to a certain subset of fluctuations that are unique. In this sense then calling it God as an abstraction cannot be right. That is why we talk about the name of the monotheistic God, like the name of a person as Yhwh/Allah/El. And in the bible we learn that Seth was the first to call on that name. He was the third brother after Cain and Able. The unique non-representable yet nameable nature of the anomalous absolute within which we find our absolute mirror is an aspect of the mirroring of God that we have not taken into account enough. This Absolute in which we find our ultimate mirroring cannot be an Abstraction, nor an essence like the essence of things. As we mount the stairs of the divided line eventually we reach the whoness of the unique absolute, and it says to us Where then are you going?

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-inner-nature-of-absolute-mirroring