THE “KARL JASPERS FORUM” WEBPAGE, UPDATE 11 (2-20-2006)--THE APPLICATION OF JASPERS' ENCOMPASSING TO COMPLEMENTARITY, AND BENDING THE KNEES TO LEAP

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Notation: This week’s 2-18-2006 postings on Herbert Muller’s inappropriately named Website  (“Karl Jaspers Forum”) includes: Herbert’s Comment, Peter Bussey’s Comment, Hugh Bone’s Comment, a newcomer Cedric Foellmi who joins in the flailing of Henry, and Richard Henry has a wise departing Response. (The following is not to be taken as a direct affront to Mr. Muller, for it’s suspected he is caught in the middle of something he is not fully…conscious…about for his ongoing experience might not be encompassed by a natural critical conscientiously enhanced consciousness. The reader is reminded that my objection is the misuse of the name of Karl Jaspers, and the even greater objection that in Herbert’s (and mine) ultimate absence the exploitation will continue even more radically. Also critical references to individual personages are not to be taken as prejudicial except for a normal “postmodern” healthy degree of skepticism essential for controlling institutionalism.)

For quick reference see: On Karl Jaspers Societies, item 4; Joanne Cho, item 5; Richard Conn Henry, item 7; Cedric Foellmi, item 8; Herbert on Jim Baggott, item 9; Serge Patlavskiy, item 10; Complementarity and Jaspers’ Encompassing, item 12.

1. The pressure to make Karl Jaspers relevant is apparently having some effect, for in Herbert’s Comment “Jaspers” is mentioned twice and twice more in a footnote—a footnote twice referred to. The footnote can be ignored for his “(Jaspers)” is parenthetically used immediately after Herbert’s catchall phrase “experience encompasses”; there are no supporting references but only name-dropping. The same footnote attempts to reduce Serge Patlavskiy’s epistemologically used word “enframe” to the namedropping tactic, i.e., Herbert says “enframe” may be “intended to mean the same as Jaspers’ ‘encompass’”. I have pointed out recently that Serge has not used or misused Jaspers name, so Herbert cannot share the risk of this namedropping-tactic with anyone. Jaspers’ use of the encompassing concepts includes more that of consciousness being enframed from without than the idea of enframing and suppressing consciousness. But this matter has been so often addressed and ignored by Herbert that only through a separate Website can it be demonstrated. Without a change-of-venue the critical-mass-point of a localized tower of Babel could not be controlled. Within a few days, when my Website manager can, all my contributions to his Website will be posted on Karl Jaspers Applied—approximately 300 pages with coherent titles and stylistic changes.

2. Conduct such as Herbert is displaying is symptomatic of a vatic-authority-syndrome. Below it will be shown that when toughies pounce Herbert seems to take refuge from the posse. When the times get tough the passive-aggressive get-going dropping names of book-authors and in a footnote kissing the pre-modernity big-toe of a capital vatic authority. He does this when he mentions Glasersfeld in footnote “{27}**”. When instability reaches a certain point, he, being personally practical and within the limits of his experience, seeks comfort in a vatic-induced social-cohesive sanctuary of force, such as is done in “{25}*” where any reference to realism is tolerated if meeting practical needs. He pragmatically saddles and rides the “Vatican”. He rides off in search of like-talent with regalia flowing in the wake of iconologicalism’s imagery (visual aids) that so easily emphasizes an upbringing-continuum of familiar ongoing exclusive experience,…experience in subjectivity to vatic authority. Here he apologizes for not being so obvious as to propagate the society of catholicity, but says it is in no way a “slight”. It is a slight slightly mitigated by the intentionality and fidelity demonstrated in the use of a title of distinction “the Vatican” and amounts to a call for mounting a crusade against independent Jaspers and the way independents might see Jaspers’ works.

3. An example of Vatic-Authority Syndrome—Kierkegaard’s criticism of the Danish State Church “naturally…has been seized upon by Catholics as proving that [Kierkegaard] might have found his way into the true Church, had he lived a few years longer” (Lillian Marvin Swenson, A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, 1946, Princeton University Press, p. 281). This sort of seizing or harvesting of forces is catholicity on a roll wherever personages standout as ripe for harvesting. If the outstanding are of the protestant ilk, the harvesting is usually posthumous. A notable such as Galileo can be stored like farmers store grain until more profitable. He was spared worse fate because he was Catholic, and the fact of punishment is taken for proof that he was what he was because he was Catholic not protestant. That is a symptom of catholicity, i.e., universal control. The same is done with the great protestant Kant. If he cannot be claimed otherwise, his posthumous notes made when elderly and sick are used. This is the tactic Mr. Glasersfeld and Mr. Muller are using with this search for a universal constructivism in the elderly Kant. Jaspers prevents this by his in-depth grasp of the great scientist and philosopher and his reminder that Kant said: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness….” One might wonder why it is that when some grew old, formula or doctrinaire efforts seem more tempting. It seems similar to how, when old, bending over once for several things, replaces bending over as immediate needs require, and youthful flexibility and energy allows. If Kant and the likes of Kierkegaard can be scooped up in a radical construction and dubbed “radical constructivists” it can be easier than having to stand-alone with one’s weakening ability to argue. When a teacher gets old it is easier to recite a formula then to effectively teach. As the end nears so does the frantic search for the one-liner epithet.

4. Jaspers cannot be harvested unless there is a conjured atmosphere of consensus regarding the rights to reductionism through translations etc. So there is no limit to the propagation/propaganda tactics that catholicity wills, and includes the circumventing of Karl Jaspers if he cannot be handled through reduction. Consensus and reductionism can work through such organizations as Societies formed in the name of Karl Jaspers. One would not be surprised to find then such societies being infiltrated with the spirit of catholicity to either circumvent or conventionally discredit his influence. Conventions can be held and policy determined by consensus in the name of proper democratic empowerment. It would not be surprising to find prominent Catholic institutional/entities in executive positions like President and Vice President of a Karl Jaspers Society. There is no doubt about the tension manifested in Jaspers’ confrontations with Catholicity. It is real and not as-if real. Radical reaction to it, i.e., confronting his opposition to vatic authority is the…duty…of those not independent of institutional/societal affinities. Institutional personages may find something approvable in Jaspers, but in the end commitment to vatic authority wins out over the antinomy of protesting reason. In those Karl Jaspers’ societies there may be some who say, “I am a Catholic but not a practicing Catholic”. That simply could mean one has become an infiltrator into and from the ecumenical movement to establish a holy-wholly evolving church. 

5. Another Sampling Comes From The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 37, Issue 1, Winter of 2000. Joanne Cho has an article A Cosmopolitan Faith In Jaspers: Decoupling Commitment and Narrowness.  Now there’s a title and distinguished author worth harvesting. Catholicity would certainly welcome a worker’s work that meets the ecumenical efforts at catholicity, if Jaspers can be deconstructed, i.e., uprooted from his affirmed and confirmed protestant ground and the reformed ground of Gertrud—a meaningful complement. Within a few months of that publication it appears the author received a Fellowship/Grant (June-July Seminar) award from Boston University. One of the editors is Eugene J. Fisher of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Executive Committee Officers of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, President and Program Chair Alan M. Olson, Department of Religious Studies, is an associate of Boston University the history of which is obviously Jesuit. The Vice President is Raymond Langely, Department of Philosophy, Manhattan College, identifying itself as a Catholic College. All this is either worthy of honorable mention or worthy of mere information to be bracketed for easy recall.

6. Newcomers to Herbert’s Forum are needed because of the attrition rate; a turnover resulting from arguments ignored by incomprehensible verbiage and carefully selected cross-references. Newcomers are needed so Herbert can repeat his formulae anew making references to his personal and preferred postings, which easily can bog one down. One saddles and rides with him into the bog due to the respectability of the McGill association, the increasingly powerful influence squeezed from Jaspers, and the popularity of Glasersfeld. Ridding in the borrowed saddle from McGill University, new contributors are pursued and once having contributed they are fane to take leave for it would be like a blight in an academic’s portfolio if a critical comment is not answered. Generally they do not object to complimentary comments. It would be better to do what Kierkegaard did and rebuff accolades, which leads now to considering Richard Conn Henry’ Response.

7. Richard Conn Henry Responds with wisdom by genuflecting with greater kindness than needed. He is backing off having no “coterie”, in the Kierkegaardian sense, amidst surely what Mr. Muller predicted (for he knows what makes sparks fly and what use can be made of it), the accosting, some who fell into the situation not knowing the dynamic intricacies. But, true to meaningful form Mr. Henry is not abandoning physics. Anyone having the consciousness and conscience for and about nuances relative to special fields   could have interpreted Mr. Henry’s Target Article from the Encompassing of the encompassings perspective, rather than from Herbert’s “encompassing” experience, which is more circumscription than being encompassed. Mr. Henry could easily have been interpreted as meaning that there is no limit to the expanding frontier of science. In speaking of Heisenberg’s view that “a quantitative calculation of the qualities of matter [is] possible wherever mathematical complexity does not prevent it in practice” Jaspers adds meaning by wondering if not being able to measure by current means points toward temporary insolubility or whether insolubility is insoluble in principle, the principle being the need for endless research; (173.) Jaspers says, “research proceeds ad infinitum” (175 Philosophical Faith and Revelation). This sort of research proceeds in spite of vatic dictates, i.e., that there is less infinity in body than soul, or less materiality in material. So Richard Henry leaves and goes on to do a longer paper for the Journal of Scientific Exploration. But he departs demonstrating a failure to grasp an appreciation for the dynamics and intricacies involved in evolutionism and how it has been and is being used in the quest for power. And it does appear Richard’s Deistic declaration is a world apart (pun intended) from Jaspers theistic Transcendence relative to transcendental immanence, and the Encompassing of all encompassings, and especially to the meaningfulness of Jaspers Existenz (a self suspended between itself and the Transcendent).   

8. A Newcomer Cedric Foellmi—He is “a Swiss astronomer, presently in Chile” (notes Mr. Muller). He manifests an attitude of scientific-religiosity, a superiority complex manifested toward any cipher of reverence for nature and/or “basic ciphers of the Deity” (Jaspers).  After criticizing Mr. Henry for the use of “us” regarding the statement that “many of us” look to intellectual leadership, not excluding religious leaders, Cedric reacts and says <2> “many of us” live…in upright position, and not with a knee on the ground.”  Cedric now comes and stands with “plenty squad-like” backing from prior contributors and uses “us” in no abstract but rather measurable manner. He stands not with an editorial use of “we” but stands behind other contributors, and declares his obvious aversion to religion.  Jaspers has something to proclaim:

The personal God has been termed a creation of man, who produces the concepts he needs. The term does not fit, for transcendent reality is not to be grasped by taking human creative reality for the one and absolute one. We would put it this way: transcendent reality is the encompassing which in self-illumination shows us simultaneously the objectivity of the cipher ‘personal God’ and the subjectivity of our personal self-being. The encompassing itself, the transcendent ground, stays hidden. (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 142.) 

8.1. In <3> Cedric employs an encompassing concept regarding some particular universe while disregarding the encompassing of encompassings essential to healthy conceptualizations. He corrects, unnecessarily, Richard’s use of encompassing sun/earth phenomena. Cedric then gets caught up in a milky-way swirl of mental epiphenomena in talk about Galileo’s enforced confinement (house-arrest within the “catholic church”). Cedric avoids the opportunity to express some responsible thinking regarding the world politics and forces of the times, and walks away with a question (which will appeal to Mr. Muller to which he will certainly respond…more then his response already in 84 C11), “May I propose that the world is what we want it to be?” <5> It is preceded by the expressed idea that the damage done to mankind is due to premature and wrong conclusions concerning physics and religion (religion is accentuated by parenthesis).

8.2. Cedric then more than hints to Mr. Muller that he could do a Target Article and that it would be far superior to Richard’s--which Cedric depicted as having a religious posture, i.e., an eat drink and be merry for tomorrow brings the teleological end of fractal-space and within scales of relativity (Cedric Capitalizes S and R). Cedric is speaking adulterated glossolalia, but Herbert needs contributors and surely has already told Cedric to do the Target Article.  He’ll give Cedric the opportunity to correct “wrong conclusions concerning physics and religion [paraphrased GW]”.

8.3. Cedrics postering-posturing does give Herbert the opportunity to defend his “mir” and “0-d” creedal-like formulae. He has already begun this in his TA84 C11 Dated  “received” 14th posted the 18th. Note that Cedric’s is dated received 16th.  Researchers of Herbert’s Website are apparently expected to infer that because he dates he received his own pieces prior to the date others’ contributions were received, that his comments and responses have not been revised in a controlling and designing fashion.

9. Herbert Muller is obligated to Jim Baggott for contributing and points out that his comment is worthwhile for he has written a couple books, and he is therefore popular enough to be considered worthy of Herbert’s epistemological critique. Jim does not relate to Jaspers, and so Herbert, hard put to do so, ineffectively mentions Jaspers in {17} and {27}. He continues to misunderstand Jaspers encompassing concepts and sees only a dimensionality of experience.

9.1. In {5} he distinguishes himself from Mr. Henry by not understanding that Jaspers’ encompsssings include comprehension/comprehending more than apprehending, in the sense that things are revealed indefinitely to individuals, revealed in the real sense and not dependent on my consciousness or the compendium of others’ consciousness. The difference is the difference between atheism or being theistic. We can eliminate the system of rationalization after Herbert says, “to start with it is clear at least since Plato that…postulated MIR CANNOT BE KNOWN (mir stands for mind-independent reality, i.e., he believes there is no reality independent of mind, which he recognizes now to include individual and collective minds). Whenever he has these emotional flare-ups (the high case letters) we can only observe with fascination the rationalism to follow. Footnotes are generally added later after one reviews a work and sees there is something unclear. Finding this unclear even to himself, he interpolates a footnote shifting the absurdity to the “Vatican’s” paradoxical treatment of body and soul. It is not reasonable, so it is impossible to follow unless one is given to an upbringing that allows one to quit thinking critically if a vatic authority’s utterance is not to be questioned.

10. The Serge Patlavskiy switch --In {8} he manages the reference to Jaspers in a footnote. Here he covers his uncertainties about Jaspers encompassing concepts by dropping the name of Glasersfeld as a companion-supporter for talk about the difference between “invent” and “construct” (concepts plagiarized from Genesis). He again reviews and finds the need for a footnote where he parenthetically associates experience with Jaspers’ encompassing, and further switches responsibility to Serge Patlavskiy (TA84 C8). Here Herbert uses one paragraph Serge uses to show that a tree has to be pulled out of the manifold encompassing to be defined for some purpose. I do not interpret Serge as saying that the tree has no existence independent of cognizing or consciousness either others’ or mine and whether vegetable, animal, or human. By existence in that enframing he is referring to what we have pulled up by the roots out of the environment, and it exists in that sense; that is, it has exited the complex unity of reality for some particular purpose. We are encompassed by crowds and clouds, epiphenomena and phenomena, and they are invented and structured but always largely in a dependent sense on forbearers who have no less potential for handling the tree that every normal being has or had. As regards the numinous there is always the Encompassing of encompassing and Transcendent of transcendence, or “That the Deity is suffices” (Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie 169).

11. Clear Cluelessness About Jaspers’ Encompassing of encompassing concepts is in {16} where Herbert says, “The conscious mind (phenomenology) is always primary, and encompasses (includes) the tools within it…Consciousness differs from the encompassed tools because it cannot itself be encompassed within itself or within anything else….’ This dogmatic utterance smacks of incorrectness to the degree commensurate with the certitude. Correctness is more tolerable in the antinomy, the reactionary dogmatic words that essence is prior to existence or Being prior to being. Events are prior to experience, consciousness prior to what stands out of it and is termed “experience” and/or “existence” when nearing the center of a scale measuring sensational intensities.

12. Muller’s counsel: “Consult Jaspers” on Complementarity--In {17} Herbert Muller mentions the effect of consciousness upon subatomic experimentation such as with the “collapse of wave function”. Now Muller is criticizing Neumann (careful not to mention Baggott) for not consulting with Jaspers. He says that Neumann’s statement that “the wave function collapses when it interacts with consciousness” comes to terms too complex compared to Muller’s “the encompassing nature of experience (or consciousness) was missed” and, Muller says, Jaspers should have been consulted because Jaspers uses the word “encompassing”--which Muller restricts to the least of encompassings (probably because his early experiences have been traumatic and restraining, and all consuming).

12.1. Whether he knows it or not Herbert is saying that if complementarity involves affecting reality, then his mind-independent reality (“mir”) prohibition-formula is in question and subject to accusations of faulty execution and judicially challengeable in the higher court of reason. To show the mind cannot affect something, he uses a vatic authority and now it is a misrepresented Jaspers. What Herbert is saying is that if Herbert’s deconstructed and constructed Jaspers had been consulted he would have told them that mind and consciousness couldn’t affect mind-independent reality for it does not have being. He then is uncomfortable with putting Jaspers in that vatic position, and having no more footnote simply says “but then I am also not sure whether Jaspers would have pointed to the relevance of his concept of the encompassing for the probability wave. But Jaspers does in fact speak to complementarity in subatomic physics and chemistry, and his encompassings relate clearly to probability and insolubility in subatomic physics and other fields of natural science.

12.2. The first argument against this denial of empirical reality (“mir”) should eliminate further argument. In Philosophical Faith and Revelation, after addressing the matter of unified energy such as involved with the conservation of energy from a chemistry and atomic physics perspective Jaspers says:

The concept of reality in which atomic physics comprehends the unity of nature fails to cover natural reality as a whole. It [atomic physics GW] covers a specific side of this reality, a side whose universality—as Heisenberg has impressively shown—is bought at the cost of dispensing in such cognition with the abundance of natural phenomena. These [natural phenomena] remain outside the realm of explicability [always encompassing any point or/and wave] or of questioning [realized efforts at grasping in total any encompassing], even. The one exact science covers only a unity in nature, not the unity of nature. (p 172)

Here we see how Jaspers’ Encompassing of encompassing as perpetually complemented. There is a perpetual Transcendence involved in the Encompassing, and a complementarity likeness in humankind being affected and having in return an effect. Jaspers is saying (in this section of “ciphers of nature) that there is a lesson chemists can learn from the atomic-theoretical transcending. It is the lesson of unending questioning, and the place-of-faith relative to Transcendence rather than immanence. One kneels before a particle or a wave but not due to the preeminence of either or the complementarity of the two, nor the complementary affect on the observer or the observer on the observed; one kneels to take a leap [Jaspers does not use the word “kneels”; it is my adoption of the image used above by Cedrics’ standing boldly rather than bending the knee].  Jaspers suggests the most appropriate idea might be that leaping lies in matter itself: “…a leap, unsurmountable by quantitative derivation, lies in the matter itself?”. So if one bends the knee, it is more like what Nietzsche said about a person going backward: The person going backward is getting ready to leap forward.

13. The Vatic Frantic Feed-off Kneelers--But here is the clinker. It is not a vatican authority that canonizes the “leap”. Jaspers used it first not Herbert’s Vatican! A major personage within a vatic system read Jaspers’ Philosophical Faith and Revelation and decided Jaspers concepts cannot be encompassed by authoritative certainty but yet worth appropriating. A vatic personage or vatican consensus cannot make a Catholic out of a protestant’s protestant, but when the personage is committed to Catholicism, that institutionalism must convert Jaspers with missionary zeal even if it means reverting to inversions and plagiaristic perversions of another’s concepts. Someone kneeling can be claimed as Catholic for none can bend the knee before the imageless! So, there is no question that the informed do not kneel to kiss any…thing, but more than that any faith- leap is not by vatic fiat. The faith comes vertically from the…periechontological and not ordered from within the ontological. If Heidegger could not respectfully conjure a fundamental ontology, the vatic authority steps in using Jaspers’ concept of the periechontological leap. The leap is inappropriately leaped upon and leaped off of and away from its source. The pomp and regalia are supposed to suppress the source.

14. Herbert as “Psychiatrist” Misses Pertinent Perspective--It is in the reality of atomic physics and empirical research that Jaspers can and does ask the question whether the insoluble is not only relative to physics but also chemistry, and suggests that the task of quantitative determination is endlessly insoluble, and, wonders if leaps at a distance lies essentially in matter itself.  Jaspers is talking about what lies beyond mere/clear experience in any category, but still empiric. Therefore his encompassing concepts cannot be used by Herbert to establish as absolute what can be clearly and distinctively experienced and structured. Herbert, as a “psychiatrist” needed to ask about complementarity from a medical perspective to get the proper form of Jaspers’ .thinking for approaching reality.