In this division dies the ever dangerous freedom of dialogue; there remains only the peaceful certainty that it is necessary to reduce madness to silence. It’s an ambiguous realization — untroubled, since it is positive it possesses the truth, but worried about recognizing the confused powers of madness. Against reason, madness appears now as though disarmed; but against order, against that which reason is able to demonstrate about it even in the laws and things of men, it discloses strange powers. It’s this order that the practical awareness of folly feels as threatened, and the division it operates risks its fate. But this risk is limited, falsified even from the start; there is not an actual confrontation, only the uncompensated exercise of an absolute right that the conscience of folly is given from the beginning by being recognized as of the same kind as reason and the group. Ceremony trumps debate; it is not the mishaps of a real struggle which expresses this conscious folly of madness, but only the immemorial rituals of conjuring ghosts. This form of ethical consciousness is at once the most and least historical; it is given at each instant as an immediately defensive reaction, but this defense does nothing but rekindle all the old dread of horror. The modern asylum, at least if one considers the obscure conscience which explains it and forms the basis of its necessity, is not purely of the leper houses’ inheritance. The practical consciousness of madness, which seems to only be defined by the transparence of its teleology, is without a doubt the deepest, the most laden with dramas of old in its simple ceremony.

Deconstruction is the application, theory and practice of those ideas from within the sub-discipline of phenomenology in philosophy, with relevance for all manner of critical endeavor involving language, writing — philosophy as literature, and literature philosophically. (Phenomenology is the philosophy of perceptual reality in theory; they don’t, like, dissect eyeballs & shit.) Deconstructionists basically think that words have been used, around for so long, that all the ones which might actually mean anything are hopelessly impossible to agree on; except by a process of careful explication in context, usually with reference to their favorite book or mentor.

So to review — deconstruction is a literary and philosophical set of theoretical assumptions and practices of the text that hold not that reality isn’t ‘really real’, but that our understanding of it operates as though it were textual: made up of a series or sequence of signs, meaning in context, whose interpretation is contingent upon one’s position as subject and an observer. Basically: Truth exists, but it’s relative to one’s freedom to dec’de it as such, or refuse to (and that, to me, is pretty f-ing punk).

NB: One of the basic tenets of deconstructionism, if not postructuralism, is that truth or meaning can be so unstable things become their apparent opposite; for all you Sonny With A Chance fans out there reading this.

— (as if momentary titillation of perceptual vision taken disturbing in its inversion which will it assimilate to fantasy in the ruptured blank between existence, becoming…), a relatively modest reality before an initiate for whom it becomes basely objectified this Folly of Madness—just language’s game where “Man” encounters the moral truth of existence in light of drawing in the shadows of idiomatically essential reflectiveness—never fully apprehended in themselves… —  It isn’t the pretty writing that draws one in, but one’s attraction to the enjoyment of correcting self-made mistakes in them, Aristotle’s act of cognitive metaphor: It’s a big deal if you’re into it, perhaps not a ‘thrill’ (unless costumed) but by Shakespeare’s day and on the continent, a greater shift toward weights and measures of market-place value to be puzzled over foreign for currency to eat and the ‘capacity’ of communal, life-like fictions in representation—true and art—becoming diminished at the fracturing of socia strata; this is assuming that means somewhere it becomes familiar to our extension of this neo-’Classical’ era in history to the non-feasability of mental faculties requirement in order as confining human beings.—i.e. if insane

Outline
http://philologicumaequaevum.50webs.org/Archive/Theory/Foucault61/stultiferanauis.html

Morality, practicality, emotions—religiosity—derives from objective states of consciousness, which are not in doubt, as they are part of the human experience. These mental objects cause us to react in ways every bit as strong, if not more powerful, than more tangibly sensory objects. In terms of pragmatics, “material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.”

Divinity is always idealistic in the abstract never ideological. For the believer, this is a reciprocating attitude influenced by the determination of belief in divine beings, a matter purely of ideas, which cannot directly correspond to anything in the past history of a particular person: Objective idealism. However, there are also a number of abstract concepts equal in importance. These are qualities and states of being guaranteed attributes, the almighty; a means of making apprehendable truths higher than mere sense-perception affords. Such metaphysical potentialities, it is said, can not be the objects of knowledge because they do not have actual signification; they refer to no ascertainable and cannot said to either be or beyond existence. For purposes of practicality, one acts as though difference in conception as to what these may mean is fixed intuitively in determining what form they could take in the instance of particular circumstances. “The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.”

[that aether thing really didn't pan out]

The timeless abstractions of ideal philosophical concepts—truth, justness, the Good (pizza)—form the backround to which our recognition of facts adheres taking shape in. They allow us, as mental objects, to grasp the meaning of a subjective world and afford grounds for classification as a means to rationalize it. This must simply be granted as a fundamental truth of human experience; what they actually are, obviously, is quite controversial. But the “absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions” is as real as mere transitory objects of perception’s sense. But more often it’s easier to laud the achievements of science as if sprung from God (really, just what s/he left for us to see) and the pathetic fallacy abounds in “Laws of Nature” given intentionality.

Should one conceive of ability to sense ‘the real’ in one’s psychical consciousness, an objective presence made manifest, that does entail greater attention to the modes and expressions of one’s conscience—not Matt Damon to the Sister, ‘Do it, do it and I’ll fucking spank you!’—but by curiosity in sense of alert reality made sharper through substituting ideas for truth in proceeding infinitely, believed in spite of criticism and made stronger for addressing such: To arrive at the presence of unimaginable and vague abstraction.

The most immediate example of this phenomenon is that of hallucination in which the presence intuited constitutes “an undifferentiated sense of reality” but solely as the a-religious instance of this same experience, albeit one of folly. This can, at times, approach states of sublimity, quite a positive experience for the subject. They need not even be interpreted as experiences of the divine, though they of course can be, perhaps could have been; but the subject of mystical experience takes on a fully different character in analyzing its qualities. These span the spectrum from visualizations (if not, “visitations”) to the fully subjective knowledge of connection with ideas and their referents. Medicine, however, tends not to lend itself to the non-quantifiable presence of objective states; even if these have saved far more lives than pills.

So even if it’s not deluded apparitions, certain people hold their belief content as a personally sensible realism.

But no one can sustain “lively and difficult” faith uniform forever; sometimes things start to go south and even then everyone may know how it’s like to feel swept up and awash in the direct recognition of actual truth. The always verging on not quite having arrived (“meaning: ‘God is with us’”) presence immanent of a spiritual feeling—which as stated before need not derive solely from traditional belief in god—a form of perception beyond visibly testable evidence to know.

This is most often called a variety of mystical conception when it is not of a particularly lasting duration of which feeling endures. In particular cases these need not even be prefaced with suggestions of the transition to inspired state. This does, of course, consist of feeling oneness in the egotism’s melting self away that gives rises to the awareness of deeper, a more rich and fully sensible meaning by which one communes with a universal entity beyond ordinary experience to such extent its absence of all time would make meaning away. Or the experience need not be quite so abstract often taking the form of practical impetus to care of one’s self in habit or thought, practices of various formal devotions, it’s commitment, derived from a deeply held conviction of their innate and goodly worth sprung of forceful impressions in the mind. Their differences, though vast, are comprehended from within the realm of a non-delusional (because entirely subjective) process in order to arrive at total synthes’s of thought as felt in one’s metaphorical relation to a sense of divine purpose, intention or significance in excess of the self but which is, nevertheless, wholly contained within it even if this is not the belief which is held (i.e. one may imagine, and even hold God’s own platonic firm conviction in the realitly of non-verifiable mental states without these being subjected to delusional interpretation) as it were, a factual occurrence.

People have a capacity for conceiving abstractly, imagine!, which guarantees its own belief in certain truths. Things need not be picturable, or even things, in order for us to grasp the essence of their idea mentally. It is a sense developed with familiarizing intimacy over time in which two beings come to associate with one an-other while remaining their own stable identity reinforced by the unforgetting image of truth proposed of their divination to each either’s reality. “They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are.” Those who deny, or refuse to acknowledge the possibility of experiencing, these sublimated states of life-as-force generally tend to object to any and every occurrence of their expression; the motivation for evil, however, remains a bottomless chasm. Rationalism does have its place in mediating experience and determining the truth from its appearance, even in cases of religious and/or its mystical incarnations; but you’d better be able to justify that with recourse to what is practicably logical by means of a damn fine explanation from abstract principles, some definable facts of senses’ perception, a way of mitigating the copiousness of such acts, inferentially, some method to make sense of conjectures formed thereby: Otherwise your ‘rationalism’ is really just relativistic under Enlightened-’meant’ cover of false positivism’s tyranny—at best only a really aestheticizing logical construct bearing no relation whatsoever to the real world except under incredibly controlled circumstances which are a major problem to make adhere to your hypotheses. “The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.”

So to review: Religious experience is the solemn and quintessentially distinctive form of joy in self-surrender derived from its sensibility that the various configurations can never be fully prescripted a priori because, in its relation to the universe (if not universal divinity Almighty—whether or not made flesh), the actual totality of religious experience is far too vast for one human being to fully conceive. However, thereupon it follows that, although impossible to fully uncover in all its knowable depths, therefore the motivation for reflection of the religious and their modal conceptions of reality is oriented not towards the end of systematic or ultimately definable knowledge with which one might seek to classify and judge the various mystical empiricities as subjective rationales of human mentalities and acts, but merely as the more worthily practical means to derive some solace from infinity’s divine and realizing transcendence—going afield of construed and present categories beyond definitions of sense—in order to arrive at the true appearance of one’s metaphysical self, soul related to the universal all.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience/Lecture_III

There however remains a gulf between the institutional and personal sides of religion. Formal concerns of doctrine and precsriptions of practice, devotion comprise the former of which their latter involves in the human equation dispositions of attitude, moral and feelings of despair, unfulfillment. These are interpersonal and private between one soul and another, god. The philsophy of religion ought appropriately confine itself to the latter; for this is the sole aspect of religion questionable in terms of its social character (i.e. it isn’t true by definition with reference to its own rules of theological speculation); there’s room for a believer and even one not of their faith to discuss and debate over these experiences.

Beyond a simple morality, the religious subjectivity goes deeper than institutions because spirituality must always function on a personal level of communication with the divine. Sociologically, piety is rooted in cult and magical charm; but these are primal urges of a generally archaic nature. Religion then is, in fact, the actions and states of mind taken individually of people in relation to themselves contemplating ‘what is divine’? This is the source of which theology, philosophy and ideology comes to draw from itself. Since functional definition which temporarily fix a working sense to their term can be useful so long as one recalls their arbitarily assigned value, this religious meaning is not dogmatic. And they can be “religious” but also free from positing traditional ideas of God to exist.

Facts are subject to changing circumstance; the only one that’s not is that certain ideas of them aren’t. Sometimes dualist oppositions are the truth of the matter. They tell me god loves and also justice. Eventually your innate character must reveal itself; apparently because it’s there and you can’t forever hide. If you both are and do right, that is true, attains religious sentiment; jury’s still out on ” highest happiness” [I'll forego requisite pot joke]. These are the defintion of blessedness (which is a more permanent and achievable state than ‘happy’). Certain obligations of right, that of choice, being good and doing great are all a form of the almighty, wisdom and expressions of that fact attain a timeless character so long as they are of pure intent and meaning. Even the muslims dig Christ; not to mention Judaic Christmas Eve [Emerson really was the prototypical American: You have to be as open-minded as zealous, brilliant without really working at it—treat all speech as scripted, your writings like you speak—crazier than a cat in a shithouse, go be highly esteemed]!

Religion as a reaction to life is the sense, beyond existence, to the paradoxical sense of immanent presence everyone possess to a degree. Even seemingly non-religious reactions are often related in such was as to class them religiously, though they—technically speaking—are outside of this category of experience. The stoical sense of pragmatists or rationalism, for example, though including an ethics and an ideology, is similar, though hardly religion. Accordingly there is nothing wrong in disposing oneself to mutually satisfy seemingly contradictory dictates through creatively conceiving of a problem’s particular method of solution. The element of irreverence found in good humour is not improper when oriented to make light of nature’s universal:  ’We are resigned in advance to losing the interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely.’

But people do agree ‘religion’ does always intend seriousness in the universality of meaning; the gravity to silence inanity and sharp wit together at once (though no one likes it equally when too weighty and taxing of depressing complaint). “There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.” Divinity does not inspire cursing or jokes.

Trying to systematize terminology of religious understanding distorts the subjective nature of the experience to be learned of empirically. Heirarchy of the holy ought not over-define boundaries “and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree.” They are beyond doubt in dealing with what can only be called as such. But tend to be evidenced more in the extreme instance of complex and touching submission to grace. A matter of personal religion, in fact (though the sentiment is innately human).

At heart, religion and its morality is a matter of accepting the universe (in philosophy, this is a question of determining its conditional existence and modes of representation). Dull submission is forsaken in favor of glad peacefulness of enthusiasm. There do, however, result two general ways of this in application, namely, the detachment of the stoic and the happy suffering of the saint [think of Mason & Dixon]. It’s a critical matter to try and overcome that apparent split. ‘And so accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity of Zeus.”I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold there death and hell.’ “The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else.” But in the intensity of expression, philsophy and religions come to look indistinguishable: At heart it comes down to energy, its direction and motivations.

The ecstacy of a religious-type rapture, that “is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion,” in whose throes one’s own will ceases to have any valid relevance. The powerless and despairing don’t care much to hear of personal will and trying; they want someone to console with the reassurance that universe’s divine will both knows how to understand and keep you safe. “Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort.” True, religious types know the state of mind that is silence in awe’s respect. Not as a continual act of repressing intention, but of relaxing breathes too deep and present meant to last: Without fright.

Emotions. Are. Not. Rational: They’re relational too. They can be analyzed according to their effects, but not ultimately in terms of meaning, means, motivation. “Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life.” Religion thus is made the dimension of added meaning to emotion; a context which gives their expression form in its power, so to speak: Whose struggle’s end represents our freedom.

Some people, no doubt, are wholly lacking the awareness of this sense; but deep down there is some knowledge of this truth, as this most keen sense—that of human feeling—is present, in degrees, amongst us all. “This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion.” Even every culture has some form of worship to unite personal with communality. Laughter can be seen as an outgrowth of this drive. Whenever the response to adversity has taken shape as the expanded form of joy or hope in one’s own soul is the definition of religious. This is not at all purely escapism because it does not deny or ignore the challenges, choosing instead to meet their evil head-on. Perhaps a societal means of preserving life through faith. Religious individuals are not purely all happy and just, rather, they are able to maintain a higher consciousness of fulfillment which moderates a “lower unhappiness” held itself in check. “No other emotion than religious emotion can bring [one] to this peculiar pass.”

If you think that having to consider it in depth such like this makes it mean less, perhaps you might read—again.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience/Lecture_II

A psychological explanation of the will to religion, in terms of its subject, is best done with reference to those documents prepared by the most accomplished and expressively descriptive authors of the subjective experience to reveal their idea of motivation. Religion and philosophy do not immediately lend themselves to speculation in each other’s logic, either synchronic or historically. But both can be thought of in terms diachronically and of descriptive questions in significance. The former is of a fairly ascertainable, factual nature; the other requires theoretical framework needed to orient its various details observed in order to form a spiritual judgment (rather than the existential one). So they both lend themselves variously to differing forms of judging.

The proper treatment of the matter lends itself to the original feelings experienced which are the foundation for more widespread manifestations of experience, those passionate about their religion. Now any existential examination into the conditions of religion’s experiences must also have recourse to the feelings of the masses. Oftentimes people are averse to seeing an intellectual treatment of something they hold dear; conversely, the intellectualizing mind tends to compare objects as if of a class. This becomes complicated infinitely when handling an object which is both important and unique. From there are causes assigned according to recognizable traits. But people who tend to make things all question of historical origin and existence inspire the contempt of their arrogance—in belief of such as sole cause—as well as that they threaten one’s subjective mental state by means of their constant, equivocal negation in reducing the totality of reality experience to their preferred form.

There are always those who wish to denigrate the sacred and pious by pointing out it comes of humble origins: The psychopaths who killed and torture Christ, for example. Our expressions and metaphors must, especially in abstract matters of religion, derive from somewhere immediate so that, when appropriate, their new sense may be applied to one’s daily life but also spiritually. However, on the supposed link essential to conceptions of religious sentiment as an outgrowth of sexuality, recommended by its novelty; as if one’s spiritual growth were innately akin to that of an adolescent reaching the age of sexual maturity. This elides the mental development of the individual in the formative period. The interpretation of any religion thus occurs within the context of a consciousness of the religious (i.e. it must remain a phenomenological process of empirical affairs).

Mental states are not subject to knowledge like doubtable facts.

In deferring all questions of psychological activity to the facts of organic, testable matter the reduction reaches the absurdity of denying, eventually, in some way we are conscious; or casts doubt on the assertions of sanity for anyone opposed. The simple fact is that existential questions are insufficient for describing answers to metaphysical categories of experience. But pleading all states of mind have a physiological basis, that they therefore cannot be of a great value spiritually or for one’s mind, is to impose arbitrary norms of pseudo-judgment upon a non-commensurate mode of understanding which leads to self-contradiction in the extreme application of negating abstraction. So materialism as well, though useful for ascertaining certain facts, is not the end of truth.

The proper approach for dealing with spiritual subjectivity is always with reference to a pragmatic goal of internal or external description. When these break down or become over-complicated it is best to look at one’s history in order to arrive at a contextual understanding. However, the relegation of any idiosyncrasy to apparent instance of aberrant illness itself misses this point in looking at the behavior and not into its effects in terms of themselves and surrounding facts. Basically, if your theories guiding practicality cause one to draw more inferences than are warranted to explain something which could be discoverable in less complicating, unfamiliar terms—for the sake of logical consistency—one has crossed into delusion in considering that theories and beliefs are the sole constituent element of reality: Those of a mind’s healthy constitution prefer rather to address the statements in argument rather than impugn the mental capacity, neuroses or character of whose arguments one hopes to refute.

Being immediately bright, open-minded and reasonable, helpful but moral—philosophical—are noble enough for theoretical practices.

Because ‘empiricism’ is a kind of theory too. Positivists want best to be right by excluding all error; this is, to be sure, insanity since one is incapable of conceiving all the variable possibilities in complex realife situtations: Just knowing where ‘it‘ comes from, or even how it went before you got there to look at, does not guarantee your conclusions as correct even if you’ve always been right before. The difference of course lies in whether differences are elided to destructive, immediate ends or being addressed sensitively in order to build anew upon foundations from the past. Origins are only relevant in how they work relating to the whole of which they are, admittedly often synecdoche, but a part; hence the affiliation of pragmatism to empiricists. Even DesCartes had problems distinguishing between his genius, an evil one, god’s. But if you believe in Christ, some prophet, even God: I doubt they’ll argue against.

Religious life, assuming adherence to its moral foundation, ought to be judged according to its results, solely. But the capacity to do this with sensitivity to context presupposes comprehension of its existential conditions (i.e. “what set of circumstances made possible development of this faith &/or in this particular way (instead of some contra-factual other)?”). Well, first you’ve got to want to know and next is the totality of picture derived from looking at phenomena in both real and more normative, then prospective modalities—if not, actualities—of deviant or supranormal instances. “To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations.”

Especially capable individuals often share many traits common with total psychopaths; but one must not defer to merely facile,  metaphorical equivocation in collapsing the distinction: As with religious feeling and philosophical argument; but most schiz’s are not the most particularly penetrating of intellect (the brightest among them are most studied in penetration of a sorts, but in a relentlessly focused way that excludes all but the most immediate, ‘intended’ goal).  Sensitive people are extremely susceptible to observation and sentiment, but are often unable to re-assess their assumptions and can persist, for it, in error. Sometimes you get a genuine genius who is also a total and raving nutbag; ol’ W.J. here seems to suggest these are the types most likely to make it on A & E – Biography. Maybe he’s advertising his wiki-?

One might claim all religious experience is derived from a mass delusion, even if God were to come down and approve some faith or belief.—since that’s basically what Christians say was done. It is impossible for any mortal creation to conceptually encompass the entire universality of Truth. You have to be a little crazy to have emotions and perceive, observe moral standards because these are non-logical; so if every other aspect of life is based around some locus of rationality, you’re going to end up pretty far off from either of those. They may even be the a-rational foundation of the love for ideas or of that which is beyond physicality (metaphysics) and the nature of religious experience (mysticism): You have to use your neuroses to get around themselves. A wider concept of context is most salutory toward that end.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience/Lecture_I

So for the actual system of a language (pushing it a bit here) requires: 1) A vocabulary classifying its symbols needed for 2) rules of formation which stipulate the quality of expressions, including that of an expression sufficiently well-formed to constitute a sentence. 3) There must be a set of guidelines for inferring a conclusion from a particular assertion of a sentence’s premises. 4) Which entails that some of these are foundational ["Certain asserted sentences, the axioms (exist)."]

So, if you want to formalize this into an actual application of linguistic usage (accepting an Analytical equivocation here, assuming one can), syntactical and semantical rules are required for the logistical system and its expressions, respectively. ‘Meaningul’ is not always an instance of well-formed,—this is where trouble begins: “The character of the semantical rules will depend on the theory of meaning adopted, and this in turn must be justified by the purpose it will serve.” So let’s assume that everyday linguistic communication is based on an idealized ‘norm’ (the Bostonians perk up) of which all its instances function imprecise approximation: Has to be able to handle what’s real, as a belief, levels of modal reality; or relate them (in theory) to some other terminology. There should be some way to solve apparent paradoxes.

Here’s the deal: In going from a purely analytical (i.e. universally valid) proposition, such as Tarski’s (or even Searle’s scholastically imperial taxonomies) there has to be a theoretical means of mediation between empirically verifiable and pure abstraction; for JRS, it’s a highly controversial synthesis of formal discourses borrowed from the sciences in the style of pragmatism; with a lovely style of prose. Frege’s deal was an innovative, but nascent (bested by Saussure), catalog of basic linguistic and grammatical structures. Basically, there must be a series of notations which take their meaning relationally in expression; but all ‘notations’ do this to a certain extent. Collapsing them into naming and forms help mitigate their totality.

A name, even one of an object or noun, has its most clearly defined sense,—the denotation. included in its meaning is, of course, the practical relations of metaphorical sense which are acquired through usage and can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could be rigorously called a precept: This is why hermeneutics is indispensible in conceptualizing reality, but wholly irrelevant to pure research applications in philosophy of language. “Thus anything which is or is capable of being the sense of some name in some language, actual or possible, is a concept.”

The actual form is the distinction between these two conceptual functions which allow an analysis to proceed.

Now where peeps start getting their noodle twisted is in forgetting that the original distinction bears to essential validity in truth; it is purely an arbitrary division based on convenience to make apprehended the range of concept values assignable to an abstract potential for meaning made definite. As relates to the self-referential, but valid (analytic, but I didn’t read my Kant that well), definition of a word (assuming the nominalist interpretation), every formal system (included: Concept of ‘human language’) has an actually assigned truth value for every corresponding system possible in fixing its variable terms. That is, different theoretical systems imply each other in fact and actual discursive applications can be made to correspond in theory: But it’s really a pain in the ass (like Hawking with his galaxies and quarks—charming!).

There’s also this crap here on sense value which is too technical for me and I’m told irrelevant to natural languages. For ‘common’ usage, one assumes that these are the same in denotation and leave it that.

www.ditext.com/church/nae.html

www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Culture_industry_7.shtml

www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_1984.html

2. Christianity is always a bit already speculative: “Sucks now, but we’ll hook you up in the end.” Martyrs died happy for it. All defeats were evidence of the heathen need for supressing God. Every man having been formed in image of god, even Nazis used to go to church and pray. The “poor souls” in unbelief used to be included and life was to be turned not toward riches and in power. Christians, at first, could follow the gospel directly free from alternative or choice; but as their faith attained worldly dominance it had to abide by dictates of preserving its own authority—in subverting its original critique of temporal power—it gave way to the ideology its doctrine had purported to usurp.

3. Theology mediates religion and power. But permanence requires dominance. Great and lower beings were put into the respective positions and compromises had to be made with a savage late antiquarian and medieval world. It’s a matter of Christianity vs. Christendom. Theology, however, did give rise to various forms of philosophy, a belief in universal human rights—the edifice constructed atop the enlightenment ideal. Medieval scholasticism led directly to Renaissance humanity, which resulted in the fraying of unified views of Christian doctrine.

4. Scholasticism, of course, derived from Classical continuity of philosophy; essentially an idea that abstractions of truth are readily apprehendable by all prepared to see and accept them as in intelligent structure of design: This came to be considered as universally valid and a heirarchy was elaborated as new entities came to be accepted in subverting their relation to the inherited pantheon. “Men had a picture of the universe in which divine and natural knowledge, divine and natural laws were one.” This supposedly applied to all men, or came to at some point. Politics split divisions, medievalism was succeeded in continual wars and mass migrations, economic upheaval and conservatism. The link between secular and religiou authority was criticized and dismantled, culminating in humanism and Protestant skepticism, which villified abstract and speculative systems (If you had that many Catholics spying on you might have too.); reason became sovereign overall. “The interest of the individual and the state became the criterion of action in this world.” German idealists (go figure) framed all of society as a competition “between individuals and nations” as the inexorable end ancillary to religious doctrine. Nationalism came to fill the gap left by the split between secularism and detached spirituality: A matter of allegiance to nation as self over learning of yourself through god.

5. Modern Europe has craftily avoided addressing the direct antithesis between rationality and still-prevalent religious doctrines until recently. Certain states have balanced religious devotion with that of political liberalism; others have tended to make it a more private, subjective affair. The Americans have actually accepted the equivocation like the former under the guise of the latter’s devotion. Rationalist atheism posed no serious threat until its political ascendency permeated sociological structures and consciousness coming into conflict with production and commerce: Foucault’s noted classical period. Religion addressed basic subjective needs more thoroughly than philosophy until nature and its selection came to dominate as a more absolute and empirical paradigm than theistic speculation; the divorce was, at first, quite very radical. “Science” and ‘objective’ expertise usurped their place as the primary mode of authoritative discourse (but only with reference to describing how nature ‘really is’).

6. “The upheavals which began with the present century—the era of world wars, of nations awakening all over the globe, of stupendous population growth—can only be compared with the decline of antiquity or the middle ages.” These naturally lead to some doubts as to the presence and nature of Almighty. Pedestrian uncreativity, called “consistency”, and being efficient—not just at work, but in every aspect of your life as if personal—are our new standards for God of the Day. “Democracy is being undermined… as a conflict between the different commercial, industrial and agrarian interests of independent groups.” Generally speaking, anyone who’s not a part of making the decisions now tries to usurp their power by refusing to sign your form. In important affairs, the systematic operation of administrative machinery devolves onto the spectacular efforts of a few talented, charismatic individuals (since just being professional enough isn’t good unless they are able to persuade convincingly by charm): You can see how this made things prone to fascism in the century previous.

7. In some, perhaps every, way the contemporary tensions resulting from these historical progressions are represented as products of their development in time.—in matters of religion, perhaps as the Platonic example of that fact.

8. It’s my belief that the fracturing of Christian unity and challenge (which is not essential, but a fact since the mid-19th Century) of scientific rationality—which is the definition of non-humane objectivity discoverable by subjective interpretations of verified fact—has led to an over-emphasis on the concept of love to atone for this radical split.—But the materialist conceptions of science and theoretical speculation in the previous century had so destabilized any notion of certainty with reference to a nature of the subject (which Foucault did all the work to subvert, and not one single bit of it once in any way ever directly) that—generally speaking in sociological terms—the actual act of loving in the Christian west came increasingly to be equated, particularly as our political structures became identified with the will-to-economies, with the act of physical love; hence the contemporary inability to distinguish between rationalist theism and dogmatic atheism having subsumed the full force of guiding both ideology and conduct—free from all philosophical handwringing and ethical “speculation” (‘what’s done is done; just stop killing muslims after we get the ones you want and the Global War of Terrorisms will cease to make you threat‘)—without recourse to mediation through the mutual re-interpretation of disputed concepts as termed.

9. I could tell you what this says; but you’ve got the link below. So: Real, the problem at heart here is a mutual discrimination to the exclusion of denying the place of Islam in the history of ideas developing as West. See, the muslims don’t want a damn thing to do with R-rated sexy and gut flicks, chicks in little shirts flipping their hair on stage and Lots of Feel-good Nonsense on Christian precepts; they’d prefer to be left alone to pray, argue about whose Koran looks righter, prepare elaborate meals and stories, conduct business in face to face exchange with people they can verify aren’t slippin’ hushushit to strangers marked [ S E C R E T ]…etc. Granted, they really do like Western gadgets and gizmos (would not mention `Gitmo’), when something’s screwed up internally they get our professors to perform surgery and generally just let us kill each other by taking our own drugs; but more to the point, since the post-Renaissance, the Christian idea of The West has been marked by a definitive, insular ideology which over-interprets its own development relationally as (if rational) an unavoidable historical necessity. Just because it went some way before doesn’t follow you ought to keep letting it do that. Even by silence. Since Islam previously functioned either in opposition to this rationale, or indirectly through contact mediated by various ethnic or religious minorities (including Judaism), you’re dealing with an entire swathe of globe—centered on Mecca—which doesn’t really want anything to do with our MTViewing, religious preacher-watching, visually fetishizing, ‘objective’ democraticapitalist ass because the entire “history” (i.e. what the historians have written) of our ‘civilisation’ is based around eliding certain periods in which their culture, its religion, were formative in the influence and development of our own—in particular, the middle ages. So theism, atheism, simply a theism—all that crap aside—there are historical realities to be dealt with, particularly in light of religious doctrines and the diachronic analysis of their application, but, as these do include a theological component to them, it’s a particularly good idea to recall that “history” is absolutely nothing but dead books and their Jeopardy! answer-as-question if one bothers not to re-assess the basic interpretation of facts based on their relational context of relevance.
 

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/horkheimer/1963/theism-atheism.htm

www.whitehouse.gov/government/fbci/

2. ‘Normal’ is generally based on a biological conception of the human subject according to which measurable processes, quantifiable in their relation to others of their kind, can be compared to determine the pre-defined level of correspondence with conceptual criteria for judging relative ‘health’ against the abnormality, or “disease.”

3. Those in mental health, however they may defer to the same standards of the physician in determining normalcy, according to an individual’s socio-economic demographic, must take its standards from the societal context surrounding the individuals in questions; thus, ‘normal’, as a social construction (i.e. one which derives its objective status as the abstraction of human relations’ interpretation), it is based on a subjective context.

4. Since environment is necessary to therapeutic treatments of the abnormal, a certain level of arbitrariness may be present in determining the appropriate functioning of any member of a social class based on differences which may require one to conform under improper circumstances.

5. Society’s standards of normativity-as-health could, in isolation or free from outside contribution (because inefficient in misdirecting particular impulses as ‘non-desirable’ according to one set of assumptions in conflict with other necessities), require adjustment under threat of discipline.

6. To compensate with the pressures of the split between ideal potential and actual, human experience, the individual might bear a disproportionate share of the strain opening up a dichotomy between being manipulated and controlling to the point of subsuming even subjective necessities of instinct to the general dictates of technological, administrative and scientific discourse in preference to that of the individual’s health unconsciously.

7. ‘Control’ in advancing industrial society must of course always be practiced with an end in mind and by whom; but since healing this gap requires the concentration of a good deal in mental energy’s spirit re-directed to the acquisition and trade of goods and capital needed to perpetuate the cycle of treating these ailments and maintaining that, the needs of standardization for projection are centralized diffusively through community, groups, media, companies—in de iure fascist states, government: The human sciences and industries which treat and supplement their various abberations and manifestation become bound up in the business of their own representation.

8. So the social world becomes intertwined with people’s psychology in a manner directly related to the basis for judgment of what normal may be.

9. This leads to uniform health for the individual’s mental in state only in the event that societal relations and distribution of resources are directed toward being free in peace and happy; when certain aspects, perhaps one, of these break down, the continuing repression of the wider populace needed to contain their natural instincts at the cost of normalness more generally in appearance of social conformity ignites the psychologically motivated release of aggressive behavior.

10. Since normative development is that of reaching one’s full emotional and mental capacities to fulfillment, the stifling of individual development is in fact promoting a non-justified use of aggressive, if not violent, force.

11. As the pace of technological development quickens, new ways of recreating and labor come to bear on social relations; values become associated with each other through metaphorical interpretation; physical work is de-emphasized by technology proceding and service-oriented or ‘administrative’ efforts take precedence; the establishment re-orients traditional values while retaining conservatism’s facade: An increasingly less personal space.

12. Technology is ideological because it can be used or pursued in different ways according to varying logic by multiple individuals all applying their own interpretation of its use valued intention; that which trains can be used to enslave.

13. The possibility of a world based on competition, but not on beating the opposition, to get ahead is the real threat to the established system.

14. When this logic is internalized amidst the ‘people = corporation’ psychosis of capital: That’s when people become destructive of themselves and/or those around you because those same impulses can be directed into the labor system or social relations to sustain achievement; though to an extent unavoidable, when urges are systematically preyed upon and controlled to maximize profit in a disregard for human life or that of the environment—things get chopped up into only either subversion or repressive.

15. The balance between these two poles maintained in a system based solely on dehumanizing competition devolves onto factional aggression, mob mentality, leads to excessive force of violence.

16. Militarization takes places in conjunction with the desensitization to the glorification of various methods to annihilate human beings, even at times comical, as if these acts were on the same level as sports, news and less serious offenses.

17. Killings are commodified as human life is devalorized and their images perpetuated in sensationalistic depictions of mutilation, torture (i.e. “interrogation”) and rationalized violence.

18. The craftiest part, of course, would be the specification of tolerable allowances for puppet forms of criticism which further perpetuate the discriminatory rhetoric, reduplicating itself, to cover these atrocities under the illusory banner of necessity or choice. 

19. This logic of psychosis frames itself in non-reconcilable, oppositional dualities designed to prefute all dissent in advance.

20. The actual kernel of fact these paranoid depictions of ‘threat’ are based around is generally misrepresented as a threat or impediment to continued progress rather than having the capability to actually conduct full-scale aggression; rather ironically, I’d add.

21. Aggressive action throughout the modern west has heretofore been quite successful in promoting progress and affluence, leisure time for active pursuits (painting, science, provoking wars; writing books) but at the cost of continual, but non-sustainably, growth to occupy a disproportionate share of resources towards futile ends in maintaining its decadent means of livelihood: This makes for overstratification socially a level of competition within class and between individuals that creates its aggression.

22. The ‘marxist’ bit here that makes the squares all hot and bothered hankering for the Soviet days when their major fear was that the damn commies might nuke every one of us—even worse should nothing happen—vs. the palpable sense of breathing terror that AQ might down your plane or pop your ass for dealing trade with the wrong hand signals overseas is actually a historical form of rather moderate materialist means (basically, technological ones of production) rather than an anti-capitalist rhetoric of critique which is implicit in its psychological reformulations (à la Sartre) but that I’ve had to over-emphasize to make each paragraph’s propositional thesis in series (i.e. argument) concise.

23. Technological aggression is satisfied by a physical act perpetrated with an automatic device (more powerful by far than s/he that employs it) for various purposes in expending energy to be consumed—aside from that of human intellect or interaction, ingenuity—which is mediated through the object in question to which the ostensible subject surrenders agency in order to obliterate someone as a thing made hatefully inconvenient to the point of constituting a non-immediate threat (i.e. one that makes the terrorist feel threatened by); the illogic inherent seems that “instinctual satisfaction” is thwarted, but as the basic drive remains unaddressed, the ‘super-sublimated’ frustration (I assume means “pre-conscious, animal drives made unconscious, left denied, so elevated to one’s psyche—a subjective control to defeat it“) leads to “repetition and escalation” in a manic equivocation that “more force = desired result” (with the September 11th example, retaliatory acts of Al Qaeda and Intelligence Community-sponsored terrorism that people thought wouldn’t count as long as no one knew or talked of them): Personal responsibility is bracketed as irrelevant to the material fact of the issue, some variety of institution or object, idea alleged as the actual culprit and pawned off as a slightly more representative variety of minor incontinence we deal with everyday.—feelings of guilt get displaced, thus reinforcing this strategy of terror-for-profit, to be re-focused on a removed sense of self providing the illusion of accountability with none of the requisite admission of oneself in negotiation of interpretations with an other (negation of an author, if you will) as the expansion of advanced capitalism becomes involved in a fateful psychical dialectic which enters into and propels its economic and political dynamic

24. Previous forms of aggression required some means of engaging instrumentality by means of the body, whereas modern types justify their use of force through solely the technology used to perpetrate them and are absolved at all responsible action.

25. Aggression mediated through technology, being especially easy to incite amongst the short-sighted consumerist and anti-erotic tendencies of Puritanism (this is what Gravity’s Rainbow was about—and just because it’s really hard doesn’t mean it didn’t have its point), now leading to wide-scale destruction without any personal involvement at all: Especially for subjective interpretations of alleged ‘defense’

26. American ‘war’-logic: Well if they’re going to do things don’t look to US like human, it’s not like corrupting a virgin to go dehumanize ‘em a little more (thus learning the proper, Enlightenment-spawned, capitalist method of violating human rights).

27. ‘Truth’ gets turned into what’s on the news and which conspiracy theory you believe refutes the most dominant paradigm.

28. The continued mania of competition ‘impersonally’ needed to get ahead in business, when applied to other areas of life, leads to the devaluation of human beings, as outlined above; but also makes fail the inter-personal subjectivities in love which Marcuse here seems to be implying is the foundations for aesthetic appreciation of beauty… Leading to forms of repression.

29. So a glut of aggression may underlie even ‘normal’ behavior in publicity, media—publication—and this can be recognized by means of its insistence on repetition of phrase & image, false confessions—forms of compulsion,—all lies: It leads to a complete divorcing of thought from feeling and, though effective in calming certain neuroses resulting from intellectual (“tax-farmer”) endeavor, it is ill-suited—likely by some form of un-intelligent design—to encouraging empathetic, critical and humane capacities.

30. Any time you’re talking about people, there is also a mental component—as important as the political—to be addressed; just because something is useful to society does not follow it is a good idea to perform that action—even if just once—because what is useful right just now may not be very good beyond that immediate application: A form of categorical imperative, I s’pose.

www.wbenjamin.org/marcuse.html

On Gravity’s Rainbow

www.dod.gov