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THE "KARL JASPERS FORUM" WEB PAGE Update (12-23-05)

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email me. Notation 12-23-2005: This Update amounts to my application of Jaspers to Herbert Muller’s Website postings of December 17 (though actual-postings were found December 16, 2005).

1. PRESUMPTUOUS COUNSELOR/COUNSELEE MODE

2. BINARY-AGENT (double negative not positive), A SLICK QUICK CRICK SPIN AND VATIC PROSTRATION

3. JASPERS APPLIED TO IMMORTALITY

4. JASPERS ON “HOW ONE SHOULD LIVE LIFE”

1. Presumptuous Counselor/counselee mode

1.1. Hugh Bone in Comment 60 (under Target Article 78) while directing comments to Mr. Patlavskiy refers to points in history where religion and philosophy dealt vigorously with the question of “what is man’s life, and how shall he live it?  Religion offered God-given mandates.” Herbert Muller takes the symbol…“?”…as indicative of unawareness rather than the author’s awareness of the constancy of humankind’s capacity for living with learned ignorance (the more we know the more we know we don’t know). Herbert presumes an educative mode of counseling a counselee. This is the single-pole mode, the teacher-mode approach rather than the learner-teacher mode. The apparent assumption stands out and seems like a violation of the constructivist position on education.  

1.2. Moreover, as a reputed associate of a university teaching hospital, Herbert’s role as counselor augments an authoritative stature. In this institutional milieu, trainee status is necessary for there’s much to be taught. However when applied to a Jaspers’ atmosphere, that approach to the individuality and philosophical acumen of Hugh has a minimizing effect on communication.

1.3. A proper pivoting around a designed Karl Jaspers’ site would provide a special and general objectivity governing a disciplinary discussion. Herbert’s exposé reads like an edict and as such exposes some not obvious agendas. This departure from a pivotal point smacks of being aberrant enough to warrant the following consideration:

2. Ex-communicable binary-agent, dialectical atheism, slick Crick spin and vatic prostration 

2.1. Amidst the possible reasons that Herbert stepped outside the constructivist role is due to an aversion to even a possible indirect reference to historically given precepts such as the biblical Ten Commandments. It appears Hugh’s reference to “God given mandates” cannot be permitted unchallenged on Mr. Muller’s “Karl Jaspers” website. There is no adequate basis for taking that quote as less than rather than more objective. Jaspers in his works can talk about God from a biblical perspective; but any such tendency must be nipped with passionate rationalizations on Herbert’s “Karl Jaspers Forum”.

2.2. Hugh can be given the benefit of trust for having constructivistic potential. Normally one begins a dialogue with that trust rather than doubt. I mean there is no reason to think his Comment participates less in individuality and more in discreditable superficial popularity. One can easily interpret his Comment as representing a wholesome view of the benefits and limits of science (DNA, genomics) with regard to the generally known and knowable reality of human-longevity needs.

2.3. Hugh speaks empirically about our immanental immortality: “For those who believe in God…[any] new definition will not change their belief in life-after-death as the goal of life-on-earth.” As a psychology-proposition it is practically irreproachable. It accepts empirical historical evidence as real enough to not be dismissed. The subject of immortality and God is approached within the realm of acceptable data regarding conduct. This approach poses no immediate or obvious threat to immanental empirical earth-bound life. He perceptively speaks to philosophisizing about life as being observable “at least” at a certain time, and the “at-least” leaves origin-ends open and not subject, not having to fit a subjective spacetime tool. Historical records (textual, archeological) reveal differing styles of talking about immortality. It leaves the interpreter in a position of deciding which of these views is qualifying life most effectively. There is no reason to suspect a need here for decrees to avoid the absolute…ontic…conjealing of thought. There is no ontologism here unless one simply prefers to see one for some particular questionable purpose.

2.4. An application of Hugh’s Comment could easily be made to the works of Jaspers, but not as a case study for his textbook on general psychopathology; one can, however force a round peg into a square hole just to get rid of it. I think this is what Herbert does:

2.5. The slick quick Crick spin—On the above conjured ground, Herbert sets up F. Crick to attack. Crick has no Internet website and does not exploit the name of Karl Jaspers. Of course the decreased Crick has also…gone to the other side…of knowledge so to speak, and cannot defend himself. Herbert uses him critically, and let me paraphrase part of the quote. “I”, the existential “I” the empirical “I” self images is/are “in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…”

2.6. Herbert concentrates on “no more than” as the Achilles’ heal whereas “behavior” is the more operative muscle. What we can do here is immediately throw out whatever uses Herbert makes out this Crick comment. Why? Clearly one cannot think without a head, and the…guillotine-effect…silences the argument. Once the empirical foundation, a real substratum of behavior is removed, there is no Herbert-conjured difficulty or conceptual ramification for the “I”. That objective decapitation makes it hard for subjectivity to speak and say that the head doesn’t exist. It’s abnormal to think that the head’s final thump is not a mind-independent reality or even as an as-if mind-independent reality. Without humans with heads it is humanly impossible for that thump to be heard around the world—at least this dimensional world of our known and knowable encompassing reality.

2.7. According to Herbert it causes conceptual difficulties to… think…the head is a pre-structured reality. But if the guillotine effect, whether suicide or not (the last human pulling the release switch), is proof of pre-structured mind-independent reality, and the argument, in empirical principle, corporeally and conceptually…dissolves. That one could think otherwise is classifiable at least as some complex and can be categorized as at least…undifferentiated. But we still must try to make sense of it.

2.8. Such lack of realistic thinking would qualify as a puzzling psychological problem, a…complex…and probably end up a psychologically unredeemable aberrant case of poor thinking and talking beyond the point. So much so that further intelligent talk about it would cease except as a dis-ease carrier-idea. So, the comments below are designed to stem the spread of the dis-ease. Distressed mental processes do have an epidemiological research side—e.g. some experimentation show some emotional symptoms of Schizophrenia are transmitted or learned in family situations. Jaspers addresses that phenomenon.

2.9. Unfazed by rolling heads, Herbert rolls all science categories into a variety of ontological spheres. They may or may not be concentric spheres, but they are confined or exclusively included within the operative word in his clause “results of evolution or of genomics”. We could call it the subtlety-spun saint clause. Remember, He is critical of Crick’s…apparent…reduction of human attributes to behavioristic connections with genomics. The symbol most operative is the word “result”. Here is where the slight-of-mind spin occurs, and if not detected it can affect subconsciousness out of which sane thinking can be flanked by base ideologies. Herbert has not yet distinguished consciousness from mind. Without that connection genomics is no longer pure critical research and study about phenomena and behavioral conductivity (conduct). Remember Crick uses the word “behavior”.

2.10. Herbert is affirming that disciplined genomic studies are the progressive…result…of an understood preexisting objective knowable origin of consciousness—one encompassing, which he calls “mind”. Genomics is an as-if ontological sphere and only as-if exists—to him. What can be “more than” the “not more than genomics”? For Herbert it is  “evolution”. Herbert is objecting to reducing “evolution” to the substratum of genomic behavior studies. He appears to be doing the opposite by equating evolutional theories to theories about the symbols used for “God”. In reality popular evolutionism is introduced and induced as a mind independent reality in the first term of the terms “evolutionary results”. We can be certain of “evolution” he reasons because the…results…are revealed in genomics.  “Evolution” in this sentence is the prime conceptual-antic, and minor status is given to all these other ontic spheres where special cause and effect are empirically essential. Notice how some supposed absolute knowledge is substituted for mind’s consciousness. Where and when most vital, Herbert does not penetrate his mind and violates his own zero derivation precept.

2.11. Both Herbert and Crick are atheistic. Jaspers, as much scientist as philosopher and theologian, is theistic. We must make educative guesses as to why Herbert would attack someone like Crick who has come to be known as an outstanding militant atheist. Why would Herbert object to a genomic atheistic “ology”, a Crick a-theology? Herbert’s position is that God has been structured. The God concept has “evolved” conceptually. To Herbert “evolved” entities conjure up God for comfort.

2.12 A workable hypothesis (falsifiable) for the attack is that Herbert is in trouble with the church of his upbringing. One cannot speak as an expert on a vatic (prophetic seat of authority) and remain a talking atheist. One must be able to assent, yield, and obey a corporealization and codified representation of God. Herbert has overstepped his pure constructivist bounds, as a spokesman for the constructivist collective, and expressed himself publicly as an anti-biblicist just to get credit for getting at protestants. He must ameliorate the atheistic image and enhance the anti-protesting image.

2.13. He does this by finding a deceased “militant atheist” and attacking. Standing as a slayer of an aggressive ontologism, the slayer of Crick’s militant antithesis to radical as-if ontologism, Herbert hopes to be seen as a crusading defender of the world’s need for catholicity with a capital “C”.

2.14. Again, both Crick and Herbert are atheistic evolutionists. Crick’s studies and his evolutionism are comparable to Teilhard Chardin’s; only Chardin was proposing the Catholic Church as the church of evolution unlike the evolutionism of Crick as seen in the expression “militant atheist”. Herbert can be understood as a delayed-urge to replace the theistic Chardin.  He feels he can do this by defending the vatic’s sanctification of a progressive evolutionism. That church’s development is comparable to progressive evolutional presumptions, but is threatened by a Crick-like reductionism of authority to the sum total behavior of quantum and molecular phenomenal behavior to be interpreted without vatic intervention. In such special studies a “church of evolution” doesn’t stand a chance. It has to remain in an ontologism head or sphere where it simply…evolved.

3. Jaspers on immortality (can scroll down to 3.9 to avoid details)

3.1 In a letter home to his parents Jaspers addressed the complex subject of life that Hugh starts out with above. Jaspers remembers a conversation with his father:

Papa doubted audaciously and in an honest manner in the idea of immortality and I could only agree with him in the sense that an endless, temporal continuity of life, as we know it here, is something that we know nothing about and for which there is not the slightest point of proof. The pain of things passing away and of departing is unstoppable. Yet all the same, we are only conscious that our being in this temporal process is not exhausted, even if we cannot see beyond the limit of our appearance. (p.236 Kirkbright’s)

Within two years of this quite typical family-conversation, his younger brother, Enno will have committed suicide. Regardless of the two distinct philosophical attitudes involved in the question of life-preservation, (the no proof therefore, and the no proof but…yet) there is the third and forth attitude. The third is the will to live only conditionally; fourth the will to live unconditionally or not at all. In this latter case--from a psychological standpoint one can will self-extermination at a certain point, but from an in-depth emotional irrational or non-rational perspective--release from dis-ease is sought.

3.2. Jaspers fought for life persistently due to his illness, but not life to avoid death, for he and Gertrud kept poison available in event of Nazi deportation. Enno risked death during his air reconnaissance service in WWI, and was wounded.

3.3. Hugh’s comment offered the opportunity for meaningful interpretation, and it opened up dimensions of thought and emotion the cipher language of which could result in meaningful dialogue. It involved the cipher language of life.

3.4. Herbert then introduces “mind” as something without which mind is unmindful. In other words there’s no thought without a thinker. No thinker can disagree with that, right? There’s sophistry here whether intentional or not. Mind is inductively distributed, generalize, to a human category from which is deducted, an inferential subtraction. The inference is designed with a purpose wholly…in mind. Here we have the misuse of induction, deduction, and resultant sophist conduct.

3.5. Easily undetectable, throughout this cognizing process “mind” is objectified at each step. Herbert didn’t define it because that would require at least linguistic-syntactic verification of objectification. It would then require comparison and differentiation with both consciousness and awareness of feeling states. Keep in mind (objective awareness) he must introduce cleverly the term “experience” which must be equivalent to mind in some poetical verbalized way. The inferential area of dialectical idealism is where the transformation occurs surreptitiously. It is hardly detectable.

3.6. Bracket yet another idea for later appropriate and timely recall: He is trying to speak authoritatively about science, and in this case it’s…genomics. He attempts to show the limits of that science by claiming it omits the mind. I suspect the attempt is an effort to recapture and take credit for Phillip Benjamin’s scientific objectivity. Phillip, like Jaspers, is theistic, and points at the limits of ontic causes regarding bio-human origins. In Herbert’s reaction he displays a sophisticated defensive rationalization system to regain offensive status in the form of an ontological evolutionism; he puts it back into the vague end of consciousness which he avoids talking about though verbalizations about “experience.” He’s not comfortable with this slick slippery area between experience and consciousness so an appeal to faith is done furtively through the authority and sanction of the “Vatican”. He feels guilty about this and on the other side of mind and experience the conscience part of consciousness manifests itself in talk about the rite of baptism overcoming any estrangement between humankind and God. Even his verbalization about baptism avoids feelings and consciousness of the need for inner transformation of fixated conceptions. Baptism is not related to a cleansing or washing of mind and the flushing away of guilt by forgiveness for personal experimentation rather than listening to taught precepts. But hold that thought also.

3.7. The authority he seizes for support is a vatican. Previously he used an infallible individual but since that proved to be a little embarrassing for radical constructivism and the implications of zero derivation, support becomes more the creedal consensus of a convention of clerics radically friendly toward the vatic. Part of the creed Herbert refers to contains the “evolution clause” and includes the idea that evolutionism is biblical. He refers to this fixating concept as “biological evolution”. But remember we don’t escape the dichotomy of thinking, or the shattering of fixation by consciousness. And the substratum of cells is in the constant state of flux and all contributing to the humility of learned ignorance. So it is understandable why Herbert now finds biblical support for his ontologism, indirectly, through a group, an affirmed theistic group.

3.8. Now “soul” or “God” is introduced into his paradox because a vatic objectifies it. A vatic leaps on the miracles of science, the healings, all good works, and sanctifies it, puts it in a body and calls it “evolution” thereby elevating whatever good has resulted from research to a state of sainthood.

3.9. Not only is “soul”, “God”, and now the “Bible” called to witness his ontologism but also Karl Jaspers. As is customary, Herbert defers to creeds of his own making. This time rather than referring to his Forum’s pieces, he uses his first “Constructivist Foundation” Journal’s piece. It almost seems an effort to vindicate himself in his new community or lose credibility as one of its officials. He more than implies that he has shown that Jaspers is given to biological evolutionism, to a biological ontologism like Herbert’s. The only proof he has is that no one has forced him to recant, and his writings not having been burned, banned, or deleted somehow validates them. The reference is item 64 on page 41 of the first Journal’s publication. The implication in that reference is that anyone reacting to the misuse of his evolutionary ontologism is simply a curiosity. Of course he includes me and Jaspers and anybody who is critical of what passes for science in the name of “evolution”. Herbert does it parenthetically. The parenthetical statement includes quoting Jaspers in German (which is like a parenthesis within a parenthesis). Now, it seems to me that the Editor of the constructivist foundation’s Journal had requested submissions in English. Herbert might have thought this case to be exceptionable because another major figure in the constructivist community, Ernst von Glasersfeld, seemed to have attempted to come to Herbert’s rescue regarding the possible interpretation of a certain German word taken out of Jaspers’ context.  

3.10. My concern here is to show that no one who has a basic understanding of Jaspers can make such a claim of holding a fixed concept of biological evolutionism. The fabrication must be laid to rest. I’ve read that Crick had threatened to take legal action against anyone spreading the rumor that he had used LSD for conceptual purposes. Jaspers should not be accused of having his thinking intoxicated by an ontologism the likes of which Herbert proposes. It is obviously not done consciously, and whatever part is mentally experienced can in part be blamed on religious sanctification.

3.11 So returning to the Hugh’s life-preservation statement relative to scientific contributions to that end; regarding life in general Jaspers says that:

…a geologist asked me to deliver a lecture on the origin of life. I replied: The greatness of biology is revealed by the fact that in contrast to earlier unclear conceptions of transitions, it is coming to an increasingly definite realization that this origin is unfathomable. The geologist: But either life must have originated on earth, that is, from the inorganic, or its germs must have flown in from the cosmos. Myself: This sounds like a perfect disjunctive proposition, but obviously both alternatives are impossible. The geologist: Then you take refuge in miracles? Myself: No, but in knowledge I seek to gain only the essential nonknowledge. The geologist: That I do not understand. You are pursuing something negative. The world is after all understandable, otherwise our whole science would be meaningless. Myself: But perhaps what gives it meaning is precisely and solely that which is authentically ununderstandable. And perhaps it is meaningful to express the ununderstandable through the play of thought at the limit of cognition. To conceive of life germs in the cosmos, flying everywhere, creating life, seems just such a play of thought, because life of this kind has always been. But that is trivial and meaningless play of thought. …Man cannot be understood on the basis of evolution from animals. (The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, pp. 58, 61.)

3.12. Now if Herbert wants to equate his own constructions, his trivial play about Jaspers, with “God” and the “Bible” and include as not out-of bounds the deferring to the in-effect-decrees of his Church (admitting that the deference amounts to objective knowledge) at least one could be candid enough to admit it’s fictitious and not made real by his Church’s sanction. However that would mean he would have to stand with other protestants, and stand-down and away from that Church’s special dispensation of grace to those wanting to believe that humankind “evolved” from animals. Here is where his vatic is now being established in state school systems supported by taxpayers. Now whenever the word “evolution” is uttered to compulsory-aged student, a religion is being established. 

3.13. One can see the damage the decrees, the “evolution” creed or clause can have. It convinces Herbert that evolution is a canonized science established by a Church and something about it is to be accepted without further question. Evolutionism has been made the creed of catholicity. It is to be universally complied with. Herbert bemoans the fact there are still nonconformists, non-protestants such as high public United States Officials, and “protestant clerics”. Not being a qualified analyst he cannot see that protesting evolutionism as an ontology and the stealthy intervention of his Church is de facto Catholicism and must be protested in the true spirit of constructive thinking. One is almost obligated to participate in a polarization on the protestant principle of equal rights in the struggle for power. In the spirit of Jaspers, we look beyond protestant and Catholic behavior to objective stimuli.

3.14. Since earliest known records the conflict between two worldviews--like germs of life--has always existed. Nietzsche observed the dichotomy, that one is evolving from an animal or into animal. There is as much proof for one as the other. That is the conceptualization-dichotomy that Herbert escapes into through his single poled subjectivism. That ontological polarization process necessitates a decision regarding my own or another’s behavior. The other person is either one or the other, and if another is judged to be moving toward animal then…sacrifice it to make an example. The bible cannot be made to support the view that man evolved from animals regardless of vatic infallible decrees designed for universal acceptance. That vatic “evolution” clause has clerically attired what should be pure science and we now have in fact the establishment of that canonizing Institution, i.e., the establishment of that religion by the State compulsory education system in the name of science.

3.15. There is a third worldview. It’s captured in the idea of learned ignorance and proceeds with living life in greater humility, and one that is not unfaithful to illuminating and sublimating reason. It walks rejecting out-of-hand vatic intervention. But it remains open individualistically to the cipher language of life.

4. Jaspers on “How we should live life”

4.1. Herbert, though through vatic intervention, finally got around to using the bible as the final solution to his paradoxical approach to proclamations about the necessity of believing in evolutionism. He sees not, nor does his vatic source of revelation admit to seeing the ageless controversy between known sources vs. unknowable source. He fails to see the economic connections to trade as well. His vatic source understands it clearly in the struggle for territorial control of trade routes but that’s another area. In short, you cannot have equal trade opportunity if a territory is plagued by behavior that crucifies strangers as animals. The attitude encompassing objectively the subjective dichotomous polemic that humankind is either evolving or devolving is an attitude that sublimates existence. It is a suspension by direct given faith and not a faith ordered by a centralized authority. Jaspers’ word for that life is Existenz, and he gives his view about how life is to lived:

4.5. First, if the catastrophic end of humankind is to be avoided each individual must honestly hear the symbols of existence. One must listen.

4.6. Second, one must actually believe by distrusting the world and any particular static self-image. “…Truthfulness calls for distrust, but for a distrust arising from trust in the possibilities of freedom.” (p. 326, The Future of Mankind).

4.7. Third, one must repent now. “I am to change my life. Without this change I cannot be worthy of trust and capable of unreserved communication.” (Ibid.) It is urgent and of universal necessity that this change occur, for, “without this change in countless individuals, mankind cannot be saved either”. (Ibid.) This sort of repentance is the cost of freedom.

4.8. Fourth, just as an “I” is standing in this state of suspension I am  “to make my own choices”. To decide in the timelessness of now means to shatter self-images and unload a racked conscience. Whole addictive concepts are to be shredded. “What must be done is not set in motion by general precepts; it needs a substantial foundation in the historic existence of every individual.” (Ibid.) One must be immersed in the world of reality. This is not only an immersion of a one-time thought but it is a constant immersion not a sprinkling by vatic-dispensed grace. This is the sort of immersion in which all great reformers participated. The cipher language of baptism is not to be misread as a special dispensing of immediate salvation but rather it involves a constant working out one’s salvation as though there are no more sacrifices for our failures, no surrogate intercessors, only my own personal involvement.  Herbert will please note that this baptism though it might cleanse from past habitual ontologisms, it does not release any individual from responsible behavior conceptually or actually. One might find temporary comfort in belonging to an acclaimed universal club but yet still have to fearfully stand in judgment responsible for all deedlessness and misdeeds.

4.9. Five, “I am to realize that my purpose—saving the life of mankind—cannot be attained as a purpose, only as a result.” (Ibid.) In other words, without the ground and medium of inner change (transcendence and the Encompassing) I can do nothing. Thinking self to be sufficient is to identify result and purpose. I always fail my better self, and we fail one another. The transformed person is the result of “more than” purposes permit.

If those who determine the course of events have changed their lives to accord with encompassing reason, their activities in the world—in pursuing material interests, in personal intercourse, in every day living—will preclude actions that lead to general ruin and will facilitate actions for a common human ground. (Ibid.)

4.10. Herbert will be happy to realize that these five steps to humankind’s conditional survival can also be found in the bible. “What counts is the reality of the eternal, the way of life and action, as an encompassing immortality” and for Jaspers the presence of the eternal may result in humankind’s rescue from inevitable humankind-genocide as it continues on its broad path to mental fixation and emotional confusion.

4.11. Finally, Herbert can take pride in knowing that his website domain name contains the name of Jaspers who, in his last paragraph of The Future of Mankind says: “Jesus told his disciples: ‘Behold the kingdom of God is within you’—it is here”. (Ibid. 342.)
 
 
 
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