Shut Up and Listen

We can all agree that the stars are aren't visible by day, but this doesn't mean they aren't visible per se, nor do the conditions or accidents of our vision have any bearing on the nature of stars. A star is a star whether or not we see it. Besides, the sun is a star, and each star is a sun.

And yet, a star is never just a star; I'm thinking, for example, of how human beings are composed of stardust, i.e., of elements that are cooked up in stars and propagated as a result of their "death" and explosion. In short, a star isn't just a pinpoint of light, but an evolutionary process very much present in us. No one knows where to draw these lines; rather, they are utterly conventional.

For example, where is the line between the sun and its rays that are gathered and transformed by leaves herebelow? The borders we imagine and impose are simultaneously useful and arbitrary; or, I want to say continuous and discontinuous. Our analytic minds notice (and often invent) the discontinuity, but this can only be in the context of a prior continuity; the converse is literally impossible and unthinkable.

Which is why I think human beings have left and right cerebral hemispheres, whether literally or figuratively. Irrespective of the underlying neurology, we certainly have two distinct ways of approaching the world, and these two in turn ramify into others. And I suspect these two modes proceed all the way up and are very much anchored in the Nature of Things (which is ontologically prior to the things of nature).

For example, the clear, distinct, and quantitative approach of science quite naturally branches off into physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, astronomy, and more. The question is, how do we put them back together? Obviously it can't be accomplished from within one of the posterior subdivisions, but this doesn't mean people stop trying.

There are thinkers at one end who try to stuff it all down into physics, others who draw it all up into reason (or mind), and still others who insist it can't be done and that it is foolish to try: scientism, rationalism (or idealism), and postmodern sophistry, respectively. 

Indeed, when you break it all down, there aren't that many options for considering the Totality: our experience spontaneously bifurcates into subject and object, and philosophies tend to do the same. 

But in our opinion, subject and object are ultimate complementarities, such that any philosophy that tries to reduce one to the other is like the Daytime Man who insists that stars don't exist, when he's just refusing to acknowledge the conditions or engage in the method that renders them visible.

In science, the method is determined by the object; every ology involves its own specific approach, but none of these applies to whole of reality. In fact, all bad philosophies end up reducing the world to one's method of interpreting it

It occurs to me that this must be why so many people have said to me, I don't see any method at all, sir.

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But there is a method, except it's a sort of anti-method that involves silence and vertical openness, or what I once symbolized (---) and (o), respectively. 

I would say that these are the only reasonable methods for conforming oneself to the Reality beyond reason. Nor am I alone in believing this.

But right now I need to make a Costco run before the lights go out in the rolling political apocalypse that is now California -- the horror -- so we'll continue this defense of my anti-methods tomorrow.