This is an interesting and deep question.

There are actually three things to be concerned with:

• Logic as the core  of Language
• Various possible foundations of Mathematics
• Mathematics proper.

The basic answer is that no one knows what the relations between these things are. Does language or numbers come first, and then what is the relation between the logical core of language and the foundations of mathematics, and finally what is the relation of the foundations to all forms of mathematics which seems to be expanding very rapidly over the last few centuries but almost exponentially in the last century.

I have written quite a bit about this question in response to Badiou’s Being and Event where he claims that Ontology is Set Theory. There are a lot of problems with this position, but something it forces us to do is take seriously the relation of Being to Set Theory and other foundations of Mathematics which is something we are not forced into. Mainly this is because the Ontologists don’t know enough math and mathematicians do not think about ontology. But Badiou prides himself on having gotten the mathematics down well enough to philosophize about it. What is wonderful about that is that Badiou uses Cohen’s work and generalizes it to give it an ontological bearing. And that helped me because at the time I was trying to figure out what the next level up of abstraction beyond General Schemas Theory and wondering if I needed to define that in order to ground General Schemas Theory. Basically using Cohen’s result in Set theory that says that there is some independence between certain axioms and the others, we can generalize this method and see that if something does not matter at the level of abstraction you are at if you changed it, i.e. if you cannot tell the difference if it changes, then it is not a transcendental constraint that you have to worry about at that level, and that frees us from being concerned with upper level transcendentals if they have no lower level effects if they are changed. This is an excellent point. So if changing the worldview structure did not change anything at the General Schemas Theory level then I did not have to worry about grounding General Schemas Theory in a higher theory of the structure of the worldview. And I decided that was the case so it freed me of a lot of work that would have been probably unnecessary.

But what you see in Badiou is the focus on Set theory as the basis for mathematics when there are actually several contenders like Category Theory (my personal favorite) and Mereotopology, etc. Seems to me we have to consider all the various possible foundations of mathematics and their intrinsic variety and then generalize from that. Badiou wrote a companion volume to Being and Event which I have not read yet but it applies Logic to Worlds. This seems implausible but we will have to wait to read it to criticize it.

But my view is this which I have formulated on my website at http://holonomic.net. Logos and Physus are the most important duals in the Western worldview, and Nomos is the non-dual interface between them. Logic is the Core of Language (the Physus of the Logos) and thus we can see that schematization is the core of the Physus (the Logos of the Physus as what Kant calls an A priori synthetic projection of order as the singular of spacetime). Thus Logic appertains to Language (the Logos) and its opposite is schematization which structures both language and also our apprehension of the intelligibility of organized things in spacetime. But the nomos is separate and that is where the math is. And by the way it is only Indo-European languages that have Being, so it is a special anomalous case. So to identify it with set theory is obviously wrong. It seems to me that mathematics comes first because Nomos is the nondual that is there before Logos and Physus come into existence and separate from each other as a duality. And we can represent logics as Topoi (the category for logics) and that means that we can have a purely mathematical view of the structure of logic prior to the existence of Logic as the core of Language.

However, once Logic itself exists then it plays over the various possible foundations of mathematics that make up our meta-mathematics. Meta-mathematics comes back from Logic toward Math and tries to understand its foundations, and so both Logic and Math each help us to understand the other. Both make sense of each other by providing a different context in which the other can be explored.

However, it is not that Logic and Phusis come from Mathematics as much as they are pre-constrained by mathematics. For instance, in Science we look for mathematical foundations of our theories and then look for anomalies that disprove our theories that are structured based on the mathematics. Theories that withstand this kind of disproof tend to have a very close operationalization through their connection with the math. Similarly, there are myriad logics, and understanding those logics and their differences help us to find different ways to interpret the math and to see the possible foundation for the math, and it helps us structure our theories better so that they are logically consistent, complete, clear, verifiable, validatable, and coherent.

Hope this helps to clarify the mutual elucidation of Math and Logic which happens in the context of philosophy of Science and in the pursuit of science. This is really at the core of our worldview. And it is something we really need to understand, and don’t completely understand as yet.

Something you have to understand about Hegelian dialectics is that there is two forms. One is what is in the Phenomenology of the Sprit/Ghost/Mind and the other is the formalized structure in the Logic. So what is happening in the phenomenology of mind is not exactly formal, not exactly perfectly dialectical in terms of format. So what is in the Phenomenology of Geist is so much more interesting than the later formalize of ‘Dialectics’ that we get in the Logic. It is clear that History does not follow any formal rule. So the idea that History is dialectical in the formal sense clearly wrong even if we can get approximations when we project it onto history. But the idea of History being dialectical in the looser sense is still of some interest. This is because the idea is that at a given time in intellectual history, all the possible permutations appear and ultimately cancel each other out giving rise to a deeper view, and then the same thing happens with the deeper view. The perfect example of that is the pre-Kantians and their dogmatic philosophies prior to Kant’s Copernican turn. Kant’s transformation of Philosophy has determined the direction of philosophy ever since. And if you look at the commentaries on Kant and all the post-Kantian philosophies then you can see that every possible interpretation of Kant has been tried out, without anyone escaping the limits that he set on reason that ground Science even to this day. He only wanted to ground Newtonian science, but ended up defining Science itself from his time till now. But there have been within this space he opened up some crucial philosophical developments within that conceptual space as philosophers grappled with the fundamental philosophical problematic he set up. So if we look at the different ideas and their relation to each other what we notice is that over time as the problematic develops all the permutations tend to cancel each other out, and eventually someone will come up with a fundamental transformation that will reset the playing field, and start the dialectical process all over again. In the formalized view given by Hegel later the driver of the process became negation, but the real driver is the fundamental human nature that produces variety, and the permutational exploration of the space of possible Science grounding philosophies. And it is possible to see when we study the space within the problematic that the various views are arrayed antithetically to each other in such a way that they ten to balance each other out. And this is natural phenomena according to Hegel with his idea of Absolute Reason. Absolute reason actually is just science applied to History and says that everything in history because it is in the universe governed by physical laws has a reason. So if you look at any phenomena closely enough you will see absolute reason playing itself out in all phenomena. Historical phenomena is just a horizon that is infinite and so it is turtles all the way down, i.e. there is reason all the way down, natural laws apply to everything and so whatever you look at no matter how detailed and minute has a reason. And part of that reason is the natural variation of our interpretations of history and events on which there are multiple perspectives that tend to cancel themselves out. When we realize this cancellation that comes from the human intellect producing antimonies we can see that it is superseded by a different view that is deeper and then the antinomies play themselves out at the next deeper level of understanding or comprehension of the phenomena.

Hegel justifies his view by saying we live in a law governed universe and that the natural laws apply to everything and thus all things have sufficient reason for their existence from the laws of nature. But just because we can say that in general, and we have even more reason to say that now, does not mean we know the reason, that is a speculative activity to produce interpretations that contain those reasons. The dialectics have more to do with our ways of seeing the reasons and our interpretation than the actual mechanism of history itself. For instance if a process is random the that is the reason it  is the way it is. But there are different interpretations of what randomness is and those tend to cancel each other out. What drives history is natural laws operating and emergent levels that articulate phenomena. When we look at that phenomena we know it is driven somehow by natural law at given emergent levels. But our different views of the phenomena tend to cancel each other out unless there is a symmetry breaking in which some new view supersedes all the others. Then we get the same variety production of view until a new symmetry breaking occurs. The succession of views based on the cancellation of interpretations and permutations of ideas is the expression of the dialectical development in the history of ideas. The phenomena does not necessarily change but our interpretations of it can change radically. Thinking this happens though negation only is just a reductionist and reified view of a interesting and dynamic process by which our understanding of the natural world and ourselves improves over time by a lot of hard work by a lot of people toiling at the business of science over the centuries. The justification is the lawfulness of nature. The workings of absolute reason as a reflexive self-consciousness about history can be seen in every field in which myriad theories are produced until one turns out to be either more interesting or better at explaining facts than others, and then we readjust and begin building from there. This process is absolute reason working itself out on history of consciousness and applied to a world in which everything is determined in some way by physical laws that hem in our expression of inner freedom.

[This answer needs improvement 2012.08.15 kdp]

The I Ching is a heuristic device for understanding the rolling over of opposites in creation.

First we must understand that Yang is a celestial cause and Yin is a terrestrial response. All things are Yin and some things are considered Yang by analogy only. If you look into the meanings of these terms it is quite clear that Yang mean some invisible cause issuing from Heaven and impacting earth. But earth is made up of myriad opposites, and these opposites all reflect the more general relation between yin and yang that appears as causation, and so there is a ramification of the analogies of yin and yang throughout existence.

In a sense Yin and Yang are like variables and given a level of permutation of a progressive bisection one may substitute any opposites from the myriad opposites in creation for yin or yang. Thus the first step is to consider your situation, whatever it is at the moment that you want to understand, and pick out the most important and dynamic opposites that are affecting your situation. Then what you do is you rank these from the most important to the least important. Best to pick out at least six opposites that are affective in your situation.

Next step is that you decide of these opposites which is yin and which is yang elements from each opposites. This is not easy, because by analogy it is not always intuitively obvious which is the Yang or driving or causal side of the opposition in a given case. But you must remember that the true yang element is an invisible cause that is hitting the situation from an unknown direction, and that the opposites you pick are only being moved by that invisible cause, so that all the pairs of opposites are yin with respect to the invisible cause descending from heaven to earth. However, in each situation there is one of the elements from each pair of opposite which is the more dynamic, and that is considered yang in each case.

Now once you have your six pairs of opposites and you have decided which elements of each pair are yin and which are yang, then you do the divination using the I Ching to determine what the starting hexagram for the situation, and what the ending or transformed hexagram is. You should use the I Ching that was found in the grave site more recently than the traditional I Ching as your first reference because it is more original. But they are similar enough that referring to the handed down version does not matter. Pick a good scholarly translation though, there are some pretty strange translations that are available.

Line up the first hexagram you get with the list of opposites that you have chosen to represent the situation you are in. Then read the I Ching commentary against that set of opposites. Then note the changed lines, and note the meaning of the transformed hexagram, in relation to the changes in the meaning between the two hexagrams. When you look at the changed hexagram you are looking at a possible permutation of the given situation into a different situation. This is not a prediction but indicates a propensity or tendency in the situation that your unconscious has thrown up to you as a state you have accessed in the divination process. Nothing is telling you the future, the tendency or propensity is in the current situation you are in and that you are wandering about.

But the secret of the I Ching is that it is like a house of mirrors in which each pair of Hexagrams are separated by another hexagram by which one hexagram, the situational one, and the other hexagram the propensity or tendency are separated from each other by an orthogonal hexagram. Work out what the orthogonal hexagram and that will tell you the barrier between the current situation and the psychoidal propensity that your unconscious has thrown up to you through chance. That hexagram represents the transformational value of the potential in relation to the current situation. Your read all three of these hexagrams in relation to the opposites you chose before generating any hexagrams, and what it is telling you is in a given situation what the likely path of the rolling over of opposites might be. So if you are in Hexagram H1 and your propensity is toward H2 but the traversed mirror between the beginning and end is hexagram is H3, then you will get some inkling of the potential transformation in the situation that you are considering.

Look at what the Great man would do in these various hexagrams and consider your approach to them based on what he would do. The hexagrams are a mirror for you in which you can see your own relation to the world. It is a mirror because it contains all the possible transformations. Whatever the rolling over of the opposites will be it will come from the transformations of the opposites you have picked out and aligned with the hexagrams, against which you are interpreting the hexagrams. By looking at a possible potential for change in the situation, your are prompted to consider the actual potential for change in the situation. By looking at the door way between the current situation and the potential transformation of that situation, you see the limitations on your movement in the situation.

If you use the I Ching as a guide for looking deeper into the situation you are in and its potential for transformation by the rolling over of opposites then it is hard to go wrong. If you think it is going to tell you what is going to happen then you are lost anyway, and there is not much that can be done for you, you will misread the situation and you will fail to understand what the oracle is indicating. But if you align the oracle with the dynamic opposites in the situation you are in, and you use the hexagrams as indicating aspects of the current situation and its propensity for self-transformation by the rolling over of the objects, then you may learn something about yourself that you did not know before. Whatever is thrown up to you from your look at the situation based on the I Ching, is merely a reflection of the mandala of your greater self-mirrored in the world. The I Ching is the mirror of that self because it contains all the possible permutations of the progressive bisection at the level 2^6 which is at a fairly high level of complexity. The opposites you identify in the situation will roll over into their opposites or jump to another state within the set of hexagrams in the next moment, then there will be a new propensity for that moment and a new mirroring by the transforming hexagram. Pick significant moments to take samples of this flux of existence. The I Ching is a model of the interpenetration of existence with itself, and you with it. When you look out at the opposites that are controlling the situation at the moment you are looking at a mirroring of your self in the mirror of existence in which you are completely immersed. The I Ching is merely a heuristic device to remind you of that mirroring. Look in the mirror occasionally to see if your tie is straight but avoid becoming narcissistic.

In effect if you read the opposites of creation and the rolling over of the opposite in creation directly then you do not need this heuristic, it is a crutch for the beginner to aid their learning about the rolling over of opposites in creation, or the sudden transformations of things into their opposite. Watching for the dynamic in the situation (the landscape’s self-transformation) is more important than consulting the map of the landscape (the I Ching). It is only telling you what you should already know, existence interpenetrates and you are not separate from that interpenetration.

In any given situation there is always some dynamic invisible cause at work, and the scattering of the opposites in creation indicates that dynamic. Look beyond the dynamic of the opposites to what make them turn and shift and that is where the heart of the matter lies.

Read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

We in general are given to Fast Thinking, it comes natural and is spontaneous and instantaneous, but unfortunately it is full of biases, unfounded assumptions, fabricated narratives that are implausible on reflection and in general it allows us to function in the world in real time but does not stand up to scrutiny. Hegel calls it sense certainty.

On the other hand there is self-consciousness, reflection, thoughtfulness, and general the working things out for ourselves that takes time and effort and is challenging. There is no guarantee of success even if we think slowly about things before acting or deciding. So for the most part we just do not do it.

So we are ruled by the seemingly rational BLINK economy of rash decisions, which for the most part turn out fairly well, but when it is wrong it is really wrong, and at times we pay a heavy price for not thinking before we leap.

For instance, who to marry. Do we recognize who we should marry or are we carried away by our illusions. There is no good answer to many questions. There are wicked problems whose answers are all bad.

To guide us Plato set up the divided line. He said there were two parts to that line one is ratio and the other doxa. Doxa is appearance and opinion. It is the largest part of the line. Ratio is the application of reason and the proper use of logos which is based on logic. Doxa can be grounded and ungrounded. Ratio can be representable or non-representable.

For each part of the divided line and its limits Aristotle said there were kinds of knowledge we should seek to acquire. They are nous, sophia, episteme, techne, phronesis, metis.

Basically Fast Thinking is involved in the production of Doxa and Slow Thinking is engaged in the Ratio.

Fast Thinking is easy and right much of the time but when it is wrong it is really wrong.

Slow Thinking is hard, and does not add much to what Fast Thinking surmises quickly, and what it produces seems impractical, or if nothing else useless rumination. But when it spots a major error in Fast Thinking then it is very worthwhile because it keeps us from paying dearly for incredible blunders that fast thinking would take us into if it were not checked. Like the financial crisis for instance, or that spur of the moment unaffordable purchase that will bankrupt you, for instance a sub-prime mortgage on an incredible house you know you is way beyond your means.

Why are we so quick to judge and choose sides? Because we are engaged most of the time in Fast Thinking that is full of biases and unchecked assumptions and which tells us stories that are for the most part fantastic fabrications.

And why don’t we check first, visiting fact check dot org in our brain, because it is too hard and takes too much effort and we are mostly right relying on fast thinking. But when we are wrong we are really wrong. For instance Heidegger the slowest thinker in history probably joined the Nazi Party, because he was caught up in the rhetoric of the Brown Shirts ideal of continual revolution within the Nazi Party. But then the Brown Shirts were massacred by the Gestapo, because they were seen as a threat to the personality cult of Hitler, who once in power wanted to jettison any thought of continual revolution that might be a threat to his leadership. Heidegger never recanted his Nazi membership. But he has paid a heavy price in his legacy for this flirtation with power. He was banned from speaking in public after World War II. Even Jaspers spoke against his being able to speak in public because of his popularity with students. So even the slowest thinkers can get caught up in things that can turn out badly for them in the long run.

The other answer which is actually deeper is that the Western Worldview at its core produces nihilistic opposites, and we get caught up in them easily, only later if at all realizing that these opposites are really the same. So it is not just that we make quick decisions but our worldview is continually presenting us with false decisions to take up, like the difference between Nazism and Communism as extreme ideologies whose warfare shaped the twentieth century. Or closer to home Democrats and Republicans. Even though it appears that the Republicans have sold their souls to the Corporations and have forgotten about people that are human beings beyond the moniker of the “American People” whom they exploit to justify buying what any given lobbyist has to sell. Democrats are no better, they just look better at the moment because the Republicans are so extreme. But it is really the incumbents that rule, of whatever party. Differences based on party lines are negligible in determining what actually happens in Congress. It is just that the congressmen and women use to talk to each other and cooperate on things sometimes in the past. Now the whole game is resistance on even the smallest point. Even if it was your idea in the first place like the Healthcare program. So the extremity of the nihilistic opposites only gets deeper as we go on, and the problem with that is that eventually it tips over into some form of populist totalitarianism. That is the way all other democracies have gone in history and we have done well to avoid the inevitable for so long in this country. But eventually the extremity of the nihilism will win out, and due to Fast Thinking we will jump right in thinking it is the best option which will solve all our problems as a nation to get someone in there who will do all the extreme things we want to happen. But living with the legacy of being caught up in some populist movement that ends up as a totalitarianism and recovering from the loss of democracy will be hard when it comes.

If we had a bit more slow thinking we would realize that compromise to solve our problems is best, but fast thinking wants quick answers and falls for the nihilistic choices we are presented with almost every time. God help us.

Knowledge, Truth, and Belief probably don’t have the kind of direct relation that we might think of at first.

First we have to understand that Plato’s divided line is the core of the Western worldview and it distinguishes between Ratio and Doxa. Doxa is both belief and appearances  Ratio is divided into non-representable and representable intelligibles and Doxa is divided into grounded and ungrounded belief. The limits of the divided line is the paradoxical on the side of belief and the super-rational on the side of the rational. Contradiction, Paradox and Absurdity are forms of mixture and the Supra-Rational is when two things are so at the same time without mixture.

Now Aristotle defines the types of knowledge and there is a kind of knowledge for each part of the divided line which are nous, sophia, epsiteme, on the ratio side and techne, phroneses, and metis on the doxa side.

So knowledge is not just epistemic, i.e. scientific and theoretical knowledge but there is a kind of knowledge for each type of experience within the interval of the divided line.

Associated with Doxa there are the aspects of Being where identity and presence is associated with ungrounded belief while reality and truth is identified with grounded belief. What is associated with the ratio is the nonduals where order and right is associated with representatble intelligibles and good and fate is associated with the non-representable intelligibles.

So there is a structure there which is quite clear. There are types of knowledge that cover all the types of experience identified in the divided line. What we call knowledge Episteme related to science is just one kind of knowledge, and so were have severely limited the extent of knowledge and forgotten many ancient forms of knowledge. So our worldview is more limited than the ancient Greek worldview in this respect. Belief is related to doxa, but doxa also means appearances. Belief is explicitly a reliance on and an interpretation of experiences that may or may not be reliable.

With regard to ungrounded belief we need to exercise judgment (phronesis) and we need to concentrate on identity and presence as the basis of our belief, and so in this sense judgment is phenomenological at this level. Husserl famously brackets anything beyond appearance. His slogan is “to the phenomena itself” as it appears. With respect to grounded belief our concern should be with reality and truth, i.e. validation and verification, and there are techniques and methods we use to attempt to ascertain the truth and reality of things beyond their mere appearance. This is what was bracketed by Husserl. Part of the relation to technique is also the poesis of the phenomena, i.e. its unfolding and production out of itself, i.e. its internal dynamic. If the phenomena has its own inner dynamic independent of use we tend to think it has a reality outside and independent of us, and then we can check our statements about this dynamic’s outcomes to verify their truth. If we can predict outcomes then we think we have causal understanding of the phenomena.

Truth is a ground in Logos and Reality is a ground in physus. There is also the nondual ground in Nomos, i.e. Order, and that is what takes us into the representable arena across the central line between doxa and ratio. With regard representations we distinguish between Law and the Spirit of the Law (Right). As we scale the divided line different criteria come into play. But the arena of representations is the realm of what we normally call knowledge in our society. But for Plato and Aristotle this is only one kind of knowledge among many the others of which have become downplayed in our tradition as it has strayed away from its Greek roots.

First we should identify the philosophical poets.

Here are some that I have found:

• T.S. Eliot
• Wallace Stevens
• William Bronk

Of these Bronk is the deepest.

There are of course others like Rilke and most poets that are part of the Canon may be interpreted philosophically.

Elliot took the problem of modern nihilism seriously and tried to express that problem for instance in the Wasteland, but also tried to solve that problem as in Four Quartets. Four Quartets is one of my favorite poems. Early Elliot really just sets the context for this solution to nihilism that he proposes by going back to the Mahabharata and within it the Bhagavad-Gita.

Wallace Stevens was an experimentalist and wrote modernist poems but was eclipsed by Eliot whose Wasteland came out about the same time as Harmonium. Wallace Stevens took the subject of Poetry itself as his problem and tried to express the essence of poetry itself philosophically, and thus was extremely interesting. This is what Heidegger said that Holderlin did. But Stevens did that much more purely and directly. Heidegger’s interpretation of Holderlin assumes that is what he is doing, but Wallace Stevens does it in a direct way and his aphorisms on the nature of poetry are extremely interesting.

So if we take these two examples seriously we can see that we can either take the fundamental problem of the western worldview, i.e. the production of nihilism as our issue or we can take poetry itself as the issue. Since the western worldview has as its fundamental duality the distinction between physus and logos, then taking poetry as an issue basically also attacks the heart of the worldview, just by a different route, because we wonder what is the nature of language, and what makes poetry the highest art, and what is the relation of language to everything else in our worldview. Both the subject of poetry treated in poetry, and the subject of the relation of nihilism to the nondual kernel of the Western worldview are core issues with infinite horizons to be explored. The thinking poet, Elliot treats the core issue of modernism which is the nihilism within the worldview, and the meaninglessness of life, while the modernist poetic thinker, Stevens, does linguistic experiments to stretch the poetic form, prefiguring much of contemporary poetry, for instance the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets who were inspired by Heidegger’s treatment of language as something obscure in itself.

Kant discusses beauty in terms of the beauty of nature and purposeless purposefulness, or disinterested pleasure, drawing attention to the preconceptual nature of aesthetic experience. Hegel of course thinks the paradigm of Art is the artistic expressions of humans and not nature. Heidegger talks about the structure of the worldview being Heaven, Earth, Mortals and Immortals following Socrates, but focuses on the unveiling of the obscurities of Earth which is brought forth by Legein, but the laying out which is part of the Logos. Heidegger discusses, as Deryfus and Kelly in All Things Shining point out that, how Earth comes to be made visible in the work of Art, and how the work of art gives shape to our worldview, bestowing meaning, and organizing the background practices which are what underlie everything we do within the foreground of our lives. Dreyfus and Kelly stop in their development of the story of the shifts in the nature of Being throughout the drift of our worldview through the centuries. Sharp transitions were made in the nature of Being in the various ages as seen in the central works of each age. They stop with Melville who was first to hear the bell toll for Monotheism and the OntoTheological Metaphysics it inspired. Bu we could continue the analysis down to the time of Elliot and Stevens and see how they each attempted to delve deeply into the nature of the worldview via poetry, either by expressing the fundamental angst of modernism, lack of meaning of the world, or lack of meaning in poetry. Elliot eventually goes back to the Mahabharata for inspiration to solve the malaise of nihilism, while Stevens appeals to the goddess of Necessity. Commentators read individual poets deeply, but very few recognize the conversation that they are having through the medium of the worldview, especially in the reaction of Stevens against the neoclassicism of Elliot. Stevens has the most modern voice, but it is eclipsed by poems with footnotes that start with quotes from Dante. So if we wish to read deeply we will read between them, and listen to the silent conversation they are having concerning the nature of poetry and its relation to the inner core of the worldview.

Now we come to Bronk [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bronk], who comes out of the middle of this conversation, and goes even deeper into the past, while referencing a different tradition as his escape from nihilism. What is amazing about Bronk is that he manages to take a position outside of life itself in what the Egyptians in ancient times called the Duat [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat] and from that vantage point looks back on life and poetry. His point of reference outside the tradition was Zen Buddhism it seems, but he goes deeper than that, perhaps accidentally, and he seems to take this deeper viewpoint from the Mayans instead of the Egyptians. But by reversing our view on life and looking at it from the outside, from beyond life he gets to a place that is so much deeper than either Eliot or Stevens. For instance, Dylan Thomas achieves his effects by mixing paradoxically life and death and sex. Dylan Thomas goes into the words themselves and treats the building material the earth of language as the means of expressing the crux of life. But Bronk reverses this and looks at life, death, sex from beyond life, from the Duat, a timeless time outside of life, but yet life is shot through with it. And of course since the Western worldview is made up of the Sumerian, Indo-European, Semitic, and Egyptian worlds, that possibility of accessing the Duat is always already there to be actualized. How it comes out when Bronk experiences the Mayan pyramids is a mystery. But Bronk makes it palpable. Plato expresses it as the fact that what we take to be the world is really a small pond around which we are like the small animals, but the actual world is something much larger than we expect. This larger world is what the ancient Egyptians called the Duat, and it was their entry into the Duat that they prepared for their whole lives and it is what drove their funerary culture.

Getting a glimpse of our lives from the inverse perspective of the Duat that Bronk affords us is something amazing that really should not be possible but somehow he accessed it consistently in his works. And so his work completely turns out worldview upside down and inside out if taken seriously. So in his case depth comes from inverting the entire worldview based on a hidden possibility within it. In a sense this is what makes Bronk the most essential poet of our time. He is speaking to us from what I call the Heterochronic era and is the surest sign of our transition out of the Metaphysical era which has lasted so long sing the break with the Mythopoietic at the time of Thales.

So taking these examples how do you become a philosophical poet? Know your worldview and write your poetry on the scale of the worldview itself and its large scale effects. It is the poets that reach most deeply into the worldview and give us a work of art which brings the worldview out into the open so that we can be aware of it and it of us. As Bloom said Shakespeare made us human by teaching us what human interiority might be, so the poets express that interiority now that it has arisen and its accommodation and dwelling within a worldview such as ours, i.e. one that amounts as Dante said to hell on earth, the city in strife tearing us apart from each other, and within ourselves. As these individuals Eliot and Stevens teach us how to live, as suffering from the hell of nihilism and perhaps overcoming it, or as modern artists who see the words like the material of abstract art which eventually devolves into just the display of the obscurities of language itself. Only Bronk shows us the way out, by inverting the worldview and giving us access to one of its ancient possibilities which is access to the Duat. He takes us out into the Heterochronic and shows us the worldview from the outside, as an existant, and thus gives us access to Ultra Being as a viewpoint on the worldview itself from within itself.

Become a philosophical poet by becoming profound yourself, first. Then say what is profound without becoming hollow men, without turning your words into art for art’s sake, as abstract art tends to become. Say the ordered word, the right word, the good word, the fated word, the source word, the root word. Say the words that well up from the primal word, which is always the name of a God.

For more information about the Duat  see the distinction between djet and neheh in The Mind of Egypt by Jan Assmann.

Women dream about the Animus in Jungian terms which is the dual of the Anima dreamt about by Men. But the Animus is some male energy that is out to get them and they are repulsed by it rather than attracted to is as Men are by the Anima. Phantom of the Opera is a perfect example of an Animus story, where the Phantom is the Animus. For the boyfriend of the girl who is entranced by the Phantom she is the Anima, but he is not the Animus, the Phantom is the Animus. The only reason the girl is interested in the boy in the story is that he might help her escape the Animus. The animus inspires Terror in the girl in the story. But to the young man who is the boyfriend in the story the Phantom inspires Horror. In Gothic literature Terror and Horror are very different and it is Terror that the girl feels for the Animus which repulses her, yet fascinates her and entrances her at the same time. The older man who is the perpetrator of violence and seduction, and rape who is also trusted by the family and uses that trust to assault the young girl, that is the Animus. The feeling concerning the Animus is repulsion. The Animus like the Anima for men are archetypes but they are the closest and most powerful archetypes and thus they tend to show up in dreams more than other archetypes.

Despair is part of life. It cannot be escaped. Those who have not despaired of themselves have only tasted the surface of life. But I reckon that those are few. The only way to deal with despair is to despair fully and completely. The problem is not despair but the problem is the opposite, not despairing enough. When you are in despair anyone who tries to cheer you up seems so superficial because the person in despair realizes just how bad things really are, and they know it with their whole being, and the realization of that despair causes many times deep and profound changes in oneself. So I am not here to cheer you up.

Here is a reality. One of the sources of despair is when one loses a child of ones own who is young, or even if they are older, one always feels as if children should outlive their parents. In that situation the only ones whose words of condolence mean anything are others who have lost a child. Only they know what it is like. Only their words have any significance at all. The rest try to say something but their words are hollow, because they do not know the depths of despair that one is pushed into by the loss of a child. It is close to the ultimate in despair because we invest so much in our children and to us they are worth everything to us, and we would rather die than have them die, we would gladly give our lives for them, if they could only live. But they are taken from us, and it is impossible to understand why, and it shakes our belief in God or whatever ultimates we believe in if any. Our children’s lives are closer to the wellsprings of our lives then our own life itself. So when they are snatched from us, we go insane with grief if we loved them fully as all children should be loved by their parents. This is real dispair.

If you have not lost a child, then what ever else might have happened to you is really nothing compared with this ultimate loss which is even greater than one’s own death. So count yourself lucky, if that is not the source of your despair. All other troubles are really just surface phenomena. Thus use this measure. If you have lost a child then there is nothing that can heal that wound. If you have not lost a child then everything else has a cure. For instance, bad health has the cure of one’s own death. Poverty has the cure of one’s own death. Everything that you can imagine can be cured by your death, except the wound of the loss of a child of your own who you loved, or by extension some other loved one dear to one’s life, like a spouse. But ultimately all other deaths can be reconciled except for the death of a child of one’s own. This is because we give freely without expecting any return from our children. And the debt they have to their parents is infinite. The love of a parent for the child is infinite. If there is any love that goes beyond the grave it is the love of a parent for their child.

So this despair is the measure of all other despair. If you do not have this despair count yourself lucky and get on with your life. If you do have this despair then there is no cure for it, so all you can do is get on with your life. You cannot follow your child to the grave, so don’t even try. So many times the death of a child is the de facto end of the life of the parent because what they cared most about in life is gone, cannot be replaced, and is an absence that forever haunts them. Many cannot see their other loved ones anymore, but only see the absence of the one taken away suddenly without reason in an arbitrary decision of God, i.e. fate. If you avoid this pit and manage to live on with your silent wound then you are lucky. And if you have not lost a child you are even luckier. If you have children treasure every moment with them because it may be your last. If you have no children then you have nothing more precious than yourself to lose. Everything else is replaceable. Everything else is curable by your own death.

But now let us suppose that one is in such despair that one considers suicide. There is an interesting take on Suicide in Islam. In Islam the one who commits suicide actually experiences their suicide over and over again endlessly. That is the belief. Now this is the one explicit example of eternal return in Islam. The Maxim is do not commit suicide unless you want that suicide to be repeated endlessly. In other words the deterrent against suicide is what happens to the one who commits suicide after death forever. Suicide bombers are caught in that blast forever; there is no Garden for them even more so if they took innocents with them. So whether one believes in this or not Nietzsche says never do anything you cannot stand to repeat forever. Suicide is a bad trap to be in for ever. Suffering at least has an end in life. So if suicide is a bad option for the free spirit, think how much worse it would be if you believed religious mumbo jumbo. I don’t recommend it.

What I recommend is that you learn to live with your despair and get on with life whatever is the source of the despair. And then ask the Nietzchian question, do I want to spend forever in despair. I know from experience that the answer to that is NO. So the best we can do is immerse ourselves in life, do our best to generate meaning by our actions, intrinsic value for ourselves by cultivating virtue and self-worth for others and hope for the best.

Despair is a deep well, and out of it we can draw the waters of life, if we dare. Drink from those waters. Be healed by yourself from yourself by drinking those bitter waters that turn sweet in our mouths as we realize the profundity of life we have been given by some fluke in the nature of existence that gave us a singular opportunity to be the one who despairs and thus came to know ourselves in our roots, while others we meet normally only know the surface of life. Be happy for the depth you have been given access to in your life by the adversities that you have experienced. But don’t squander the opportunity. Remaining in despair over long when given the opportunity to move on is what squanders the opportunity to transform yourself in the face of your despair. If you do that then you deserve the suffering you bring down on yourself that is impossible to escape from. This state is called closed Yin, it is the nihilistic dual of Yang Splendor. Both of these states are to be avoided. See the Stone Monkey by Bruce Holbrook

My feeling is that this is a conflict in terms.

Happiness has to occur in time and the Eternal places us outside of time. So Eternal Happiness on its surface does not make sense, per se.

However, if one hypothesizes a soul, or something which is eternal within us, then we can get the idea of there being some part of us that could be in eternal happiness in heaven or eternal torture in hell. This is what Dante shows us in his Comedy. The problem with this idea is that it means one must postulate a transcendental that takes us beyond our place in the world in space and time. The difficulty is that it leads to nihilism. For instance, if you think that there is the possibility of eternal happiness in heaven or eternal suffering in hell that it has a tremendous effect on life, wich destroys the roots of happiness in life itself. In general, what happens is that we worry about going to hell, and we tend to not assume that we are going to heaven, and this transcendental worry or anxiety itself tends to distract one from life itself and undermines achieving happiness in ones life at any given moment. This undermining of happiness in life is a real problem, and so the idea of “Eternal Happiness” actually saps our existential happiness in life and that is its nihilistic effect, distracting us from our life as lived by a possibility that we hypothesize, but do not know if we will realize, because we do not actually know that these transcendentals exist — no matter what we believe. And this is the problem with religion in general — that it hypothesizes transcendentals which are believed but not known, and this tends to lead to suffering now, and perhaps missing the life that we are leading now, in the name of some out-of-time future state that may not occur, but whether it occurs or not is irrelevant to what is going on in our lives now. This is why Nietzsche thought that most religions are life denying and thus destructive to life itself.

Nietzsche thought life (our embodied immanence) was the most important thing and that we should affirm it rather than denying it, especially in the name of something we do not know, but only believe, is possible out of time, when all the things we know point to the fact that life is transient and there are no actual transcendentals beyond life. Thus, there is a conspicuous contradiction between what we know from science and what we believe in religions. We tend to be caught in this double bind in our lives and suffer paralysis due to it, often thinking we are going to Hell in a hand basket along with everyone else, when it is precisely this thought that prevents us from doing whatever we might end up in Heaven.

Protestantism which has the belief for the most part that “BELIEF” is all that matters and actions do not matter at all in the decision as to who is saved and who is damned is particularly extreme in this respect. Action is what we can do in life to try to assure that we will end up in Heaven, and if you take that away, and nothing can be done, then it intensifies the anxiety about future transcendental states to the utmost and thus produces an extreme nihilistic situation. Catholicism at least still believes that actions matter, but unfortunately it also has traditionally believed that you can buy your way out of future suffering, and that the Priests are the ones who can relieve the anxiety by giving pardon for sins done if they are confessed, and if one has made the proper remediations.

So, in the difference between Dante and Milton there is really an impossible trap. Either you believe in action and that it can make a difference, but also believe that there are representatives of God who can pardon you and from whom you can get reassurance that your sins are absolved, OR you believe that there is no power to absolve you as in Protestantism, but get the extreme intensification of anxiety that actions do not matter anyway, and that it has already been decided what your fate will be by God. If Catholicism is nihilistic for all the reasons that Dante cites when he puts the Popes in Hell, then Protestantism is even more extreme and the break with Catholicism in Protestantism brought an intensification of Nihilism along with the freedom from Catholic dogma and the Inquisition. If it does not matter what you do as most Protestants believe, then you can do anything and that is just as nihilistic as Anarchism because moral foundations of action do not matter to God.

Both of these views led to the rape and pillage of the entire world in the name of Manifest Destiny and other colonial notions. In Catholicism it was justified by bringing true religion to savages, little did it matter we are stealing gold from them in the process, murdering them, destroying their world and sowing cultural destruction everywhere that Catholic colonialization went in the world. This colonial spirit was intensified by the Protestants who believed that their actions did not matter, and after they came back from the Entrepreneurial (Enter and Take) exploits overseas they believed that one may become “born again” and thus feel as if one is saved, regardless of what one had done in the Colonies to make ones fortune. So historically we can see that Beliefs in Transcendentals have had real world effects destroying the happiness of many though the exploits of a few good Christians who felt they were holier than thou,  and had the right to convert the world to the one true faith at gun point if necessary and this is what gave Nietzsche such severe doubts concerning religion.

Nietzsche said that we must question the value of Values, and when you do that you can become a Free Spirit who makes their own values, (values ultimately come from us not from outside sources) and the values we make should support life not death, because we are living creatures engaged in the flux of evolution. Whatever supports life should be encouraged and whatever leads to death should be discouraged, and our morality should reflect that.

But even Nietzsche resorts to the idea of “Eternal” in his idea of the ‘Eternal  Return’ to produce a principle for judging action. And that principle has as a criteria for judging action whether you can bear to re-experience that action myriad times. This is his equivalent to the Kantian Categorical Imperative. His idea is that life affirming actions can be re-experienced myriad times without tire, but that life destroying actions cannot be re-experienced without turning into torture. And this gives us a different way to see Heaven and Hell. Heaven is ‘eternal return’ of life affirming actions, and Hell is ‘eternal return’ of death seeking or creating actions where entropy is also considered ‘heat death’. From the Nietzschian point of view, then, Eternal Happiness is happiness in the moment from actions that are life affirming. Eternal Torture is anything in the moment that cannot  bear eternal repetition by the agent. Anything that would lead to the nihilism of monotony, or anything that one in re-experiencing it would lead to the happiness of the moment souring or anything that would cause one to suffer with the victim of ones actions, because he assumes in eternal repetition that one would become one with one’s victim, if ones actions were not life affirming for both. There is a lot to say for Nietzsche’s idea of life affirmation and using the criteria of Eternal Return to combat nihilism and evil in life, because anything nihilistic would ultimately be a torture if repeated infinitely, either via boredom or suffering. The idea of Eternal Return is to use the ‘Eternal’ to reinforce experiencing the moment and the actions we perform in the present, and bringing happiness into the moment to the extent one can manage, and also to diffuse transcendental beliefs that would sap the moment of its worth and meaning as all transcendentals tend to do.

In Islamic Sufism there is a different interpretation of this problem that is very interesting. Sufism reads all of the talk in Islam about the next world of the Garden and the Fire to be about the moment in which one is living, and thus we can distinguish for others and for ourselves who is in the Garden and the Fire in every moment. It places each thing that happens in an imaginal landscape and thus creates an apocalyptic perspective in each instant that is used to generate intense meaning within the world. Every action matters in an ultimate way because it is played out in eternity in the moment that it is done. Plato called this the WorldSoul, i.e. a moving image of eternity in time.  In this way the hypothesis of the ‘Eternal’ is used to reinforce what is going on in our lives and to heighten every experience so that we understand our experiences as ultimate in some sense, which they are because every act is our last act in that sense, Every moment could be our death and so in a sense this imaginal vision of the next world is like our whole existence flashing in front of our eyes. But Islam gives specific practical guidance on how to get out of the Fire and into the Garden, and if we interpret that as being applicable in every moment and not in terms of some indefinite future after death, then one gets something like the idea of eternal return, but with specific prescriptions on how to get out of the hell one is in and into the garden that is protected from that hell. This is the same effect that Hinduism and Buddhism get out of Samsara only in the Islamic view reincarnation only occurs once.

Of course, normal Islam as interpreted though Jewish (Philo) and Christian (Greek) theology has all the same problems as Christian approaches to life from the point of view of Heaven and Hell. it is important to realize that the whole idea of Heaven and Hell were not part of Judaism from the beginning and that it was an idea imported from Mesopotamia and probably ultimately from Zoroastrianism which was an extremely dualistic religion. So Heaven and Hell proper as absolutes are not Semitic ideas. And Judaism is at its root life affirming (be fruitful and multiply). In fact its word for existence itself is Life. So in some sense the more we can cling to those original Jewish roots the better off we would probably be in terms of applying the Categorical Imperative or the criteria of Eternal Return.

One of the best things I learned recently from the Teaching Company tapes on the History of Christian Theology was that each religion with its theology has its own peculiar anxieties that it produces. All the anxieties are different and they lead to different results in the world as people try to deal with those anxieties.

Here I pick on the Baptists as an example of things gone wrong. The Anabaptists believed that only the Baptism of Jesus was a true ritual of salvation, and it must be done as a consenting adult to count, and thus baptism as children did not count. The Anabaptists were hated by both Catholics and Protestants together, who both hunted them down and crucified the Anabaptists. When the Anabaptists took over cities and tried to put their utopian communist ideas into action, things did not go well under their rule, and eventually all those cities they took over were taken back. The Anabaptists who were not killed off but escaped northward became Quakers of some sort when they renounced violence. The same group arose again in England later and though persecuted did were not killed off, and eventually many of them came to America, where their religion was found to fit nicely on the frontiers because it could survive without organized churches. The good thing about the Baptist religion is that they believed everyone could interpret the Gospel for themselves and their worship meetings were full of lively discussion as various interpretations of scripture were debated openly. But as with most Protestants they believed  that God had chosen who would be saved already, and recognized that for most of us Hell was the destination, and so their message was mostly about Hell and why you were going there which might have some effect on the impressionable young mind.

So for instance people who were brought up as Baptists and listened to Hellfire and Brimstone sermons when they were young and impressionable are going to have certain anxieties that no amount of thinking are going to erase, no matter how much one realizes that this is a wrong approach to life. And with Catholic, or Islamic training in one’s youth different but perhaps similar religious anxieties would be instilled. Nothing is going to free one of the religious worldview one is given in one’s youth no matter how sophisticated one becomes nor how much one thinks one has gotten beyond those primitive ideas in one’s sophisticated outlook on life that comes with education and refinement of one’s knowledge and experience, nor by understanding of religion in general as many different perspectives by which one has reconciled the mortal and the immortal standing between heaven and earth, i.e. as Heidegger says in the midst of the Fourfold.

If one has had Protestant, in particular Baptist, Hell Fire and Brimstone lectures when one is a kid one is going to think one is destined to go to Hell no matter what other religion one has adopted later. These sermons are supposed to prompt good behavior, but if behavior does not matter and only belief matters then one is basically screwed, and the result is probably ‘FREEZE’ in the Fight/Flight and Freeze responses to traumatic situations. I think many of us can attest that these religious teachings of our youth have done more damage than good in our lives. There is a dark side to Eternal Happiness, which is Eternal Suffering, that shadow of doubt haunts our lives if we were indoctrinated into that harsh and unforgiving kind of belief system very early. No amount of Belief is going to do anything about that Doubt, and no amount of Action is going to be enough to assure our being saved, and knowledge cannot help because that knowledge was not there when we were a child and we were being indoctrinated with these insidious beliefs.

When one realizes that much of what goes on in the world is driven by these anxieties over transcendental beliefs, then one comes to appreciate Nietzsche who very seriously tried to solve this problem set up by religions history in the West, which had consequences for the whole world though colonialism which was the ultimate expression of the nihilism of this Belief system. There were perfectly good belief systems out there like Buddhism for instance or Taoism that were essentially nondual that were sapped of their strength through colonialism. Now Christianity is growing fastest in the Third World (Rapidly becoming the First World, as European nations sink back into Third world status). These Third world religions are gaining popularity in the West today, but the problem is that pointed out by Jung, which is that we need to deal with our Christian origins on its own terms, and that skipping to some other belief system does not actually deal with the root of the problem, which is inculcated by our culture early on and is merely transposed into whatever personal Orientalism we are engaged in. Of course, Buddhists also had ideas of Transcendentals late in the development of Buddhism, as did the Taoists. So it is not as if these religions were any different taken as a whole. But the parts of them we are interested in are the parts that allow us to seemingly escape the traps of Christian religion. Yet, no matter how deeply we know the truth of these other ways of approaching our existence, the fundamental training that envelops us when we are young is actually what casts a pale over our lives that is palpable and haunts us regardless of what we know and what we think later in life. The only way to deal with that is some kind of Trauma therapy that reaches deep into the bedrock of the self to remove those early wounds to the Psyche when we are children.

Religion in general is the intentional instillation of Trauma in the young for the purposes of social control. The idea of Eternal Happiness is really the surface that glosses over that trauma. It is a wound that was healed over too quickly and must be reopened in order for the actual healing to occur. If not Gangrene can set in. And this is because the nihilistic opposite of Eternal Suffering always haunts that thought of Eternal Happiness and ruins our lives in the process. Essentially, the Wounds of Christ on the Cross are our own stigmata that come from the Roman swords of trancendentals piercing our immanent flesh.

Healing those wounds produced in our childhood is not easy regardless of what we know as adults. But that is the path we must endeavor to take toward health within our own worldview that rises up from within the worldview itself. Like Jung I believe that no foreign doctor is going to understand or be able to heal this illness. We see in Jung’s Red Book his own struggle with these issues. We must figure out how to struggle with them ourselves, in our own way, with resources from the tradition in which we were born. If we can heal this trauma in ourselves from ourselves, then perhaps we can do less harm to the world and begin to undo some of the harm already done, before the hothouse of Venus eclipses our still green and blue Earth.

Merleau-Ponty is by far my favorite philosopher. His contributions inhere in the way he transformed phenomenology. Phenomenology is the key development in Western philosophy. Kant in the Copernican Turn established that the only way to know what is objective is through the subjective, and thus established Idealism as the most significant philosophical approach within the Western Tradition based on Kant’s key insights which no one has managed to supersede in all this time. We are still operating in the envelope created by the Kantian Critiques. I recommend the BernsteinTapes.com recordings in order to get straight precisely what this means and the Hegelian ramification. Bernstein says that all of Continental Philosophy is operating within the Hegelian transformation of Kant. He also says that Hegel and all the others read the Third Critique as a meta-critique of Kant by himself. If you place both of these observations together we see that the envelope of Western Philosophy although it is established by Kant and transformed by Hegel and then reacted to by the Pragmatists we never left that envelope, and that is why the Analytical Philosophers still go back to Kant as does Continental Philosophy. There is a reason the line of Frege, Wittgenstein, Moore, Russell etc. goes back through Kant to Descartes. On the continental side the stream goes back though Husserl via Heidegger via Merleau-Ponty & Sartre via Deleuze / Bataille / Lacan / Derrida via Zizek and Badiou.

Merleau-Ponty plays a key role in the interpretation of Heidegger. His Phenomenology of Perception attempts to interpret ready-to-hand and present-at-hand modalities of Being in psychological terms as grasping and pointing. But in the process Merleau-Ponty discovers for himself Hyper Being which is called by Heidegger Being Crossed Out and by Derrida as DifferAnce. But Merleau-Ponty’s greatest work is the Visible and Invisible in which he in turn descibes Hyper Being as the Hyper Dialectic between Heidegger’s Modal Being and Nothingness of Sartre. But he goes on from there to describe Wild Being. And this is the key transformation which Deleuze picks up on and attempts to exploit. Just as Derrida is building a philosophy at the level of Hyper Being, so Deleuze works (Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus) to build a philosophy at the level of Wild Being. There are other attempts like that of John S. Hans in Play of the World, and Cornelius Castoriadis with his term Magma. So Merleau-Ponty kicked off a gold rush to create a philosophy that could exist at the Wild Being level of the meta-levels of the Kinds of Being. in effect this defined the opposite of DifferAnce of Derrida. To me this is the real value of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Without him I don’t think we would have discovered Wild Being for a long time. He got there by a very simple path. If Hyper Being is the expansion of being-in-the-world then there must be a counter Being which embodies contraction as well.