Tag: Via Negativa

What Is Self Knowledge?

negativegeography4 Comments
Photo by Maksim Goncharenok on Pexels.com

1) Self-knowledge as a positive list of characteristics


How do I know myself?

I begin by knowing myself as an objective list of characteristics: Likes, dislikes, opinions, habits, values, skills, professions, political orientations, and every other quality imaginable.

I also know myself reluctantly as a list of shadow characteristics, which others often perceive first: impatience, clumsiness, self-obsessions, talking to myself even when others are in the room, a hypocritical love of boxing, etc.

There’s a necessity for these differently sourced lists of self-knowledge. If I don’t notice a tendency to be selfish, lazy, thoughtless, you name it, then self-knowledge is distorted in the preservation of an illusion.

In fact, I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.

If I’m rolling an issue over and over again in my mind (as I tend to do), then some image of myself must have been made to wobble from its pedestal. Even if I’m self-righteously convinced of my own innocence, the emotional and mental energy dedicated to preserving this image indicates a wobble.

The voice is like a press-secretary and press corps rolled into one. And I hardly notice the exhaustion this causes, because it’s standard practice in this culture: conversing with non-existent people in order to convince imaginary people that this list of qualities remains accurate and impeccable.

Or, call it an effective air-defense system that shoots down any speck of honest evidence undermining the falsely idealized Self it claims to be.

But now and then some honest revelation hits home despite this diligence. And the accidental surrender to reality generates a soft breeze of sanity, which cleanses the air momentarily from the fumes of bullshit that the brain produced during the course of the day.

But almost immediately I’ll start downplaying the impact of this moment of truth, trying to steady the wobble or clean up the damage to the fallen icon. And I’ll employ a clever tactic to do this — acknowledging a portion of the exposed corruption by saying something like, “I wasn’t being myself” or “that’s not who I really am”.

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Science, Religion and the Pathless Land

negativegeography5 Comments

 

Justin picture 3
Painting by Justin Adair

Kant described that “pathless land” (that “negative geography”) as a freedom to speak for oneself, trusting one’s own intelligence. And this implied that science at its best recognizes that its theories remain shadows on Plato’s cave. At its best science is attentive to deviations from what is believed to be real. And not in the way Karl Popper conceived of falsification, which is still reductive in its quest for a perfect theory. But rather, at its best science remains alert to what is “false in the true, and true in the false”, as Krishnamurti phrased it.

Creationists have an especially hard time with this. A mentality alert to anomalies in what is true and false doesn’t have a vested interest in defending its stories. The theories of science are not weak because they’re perpetually changing. They’re intended as provisional sketches of a universe wildly erring from anything we imagine. Or as the physicist Hans-Peter Dürr phrased it, “Science also speaks only in parables.”Read More »

The Radical Derelict: Giving Up the Work Ethic for Peace

negativegeography11 Comments

This appeared on Counterpunch and Dissidentvoice.

The same relentless energy driving a toddler in its Terrible Twos still drives that voice in my head. However, when I see a toddler, I know I’m in the presence of a genius, albeit a naïve one. It’s not the size of the intellect, but the velocity of learning that describes its intelligence. I, on the other hand, tend to move in well-worn circles, constrained by prejudice and vested interest. I’ve learned to “circle the wagons”, so to speak, around particular conclusions.

Essentially, I’m what happens when a toddler’s unstoppable urge to learn gets diverted into supporting a predatory status quo. Open-ended learning gets replaced by a narrowing framework of instruction as the driving force; and a dawning sense of some innate order or intelligence in the world gets short-circuited by dependence on authority and by conformity to the culture’s creeds and isms.Read More »