Cosmic Mind Jazz: Riffin' On the Aphorisms

He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach. --Dávila

As mentioned a couple of posts back, transcendence and immanence are not symmetrical concepts: choose immanence and you are shut out of transcendence. 

But not really, because the intellect is immaterial, so one can only pretend to deny transcendence. Ideology of any kind is always transcendence pretending to be immanent. Which is why 

Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools.

Note that the foolishness is not only located "in" the ideology, rather, prior to it, in the foolish choice to adopt one.

Now, choice itself is a function of transcendence and immateriality. Thus,

Determinism is ideology; freedom is experience.

As with transcendence and immanence, 

Necessity and freedom are not symmetrical concepts: in fact, if I affirm necessity, I deny any freedom, but if I affirm freedom, I do not deny any necessity.

And we affirm both freedom and necessity. Indeed, freedom in the absence of constraint is as unthinkable as determinism without freedom. If you think thinking is determined, think again, because the trinity of thought, freedom, and transcendence is irreducible to anything less. 

Which is another way of saying that we are condemned to freedom-truth-intellect, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. We just have to reconcile ourselves to this existential fact, regardless of how pleasant it is.

When the Aphorist speaks of fools and their systems, that's just another way of saying Gödel, whose theorems forever consign us to transcendence. Of course, some fools think they prove the opposite, but of course, they are fools and ideologues who actually prove our point:

no validation of our rationality -- of our very sanity -- can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person, operating within a system of beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? (Goldstein) 

This is reminiscent of Chesterton's gag about the madman having lost everything except his reason: 

Paranoia isn't the abandonment of rationality. Rather, it is rationality run amuck.... 'A paranoid person is irrationally rational.... Paranoid thinking is characterized not by illogic, but by a misguided logic, by logic run wild'" (ibid.).

Now, the ideologies of the left are nothing if not paranoid, nor will we bother to list them all, since You Know the Drill. And like any conspiracy theory, they are not falsifiable, which is to say, they magically transform any disproof into proof of the ideology. Neat trick! 

For example, if you point out that you are not a racist, this only proves you are one. 

Likewise, disprove the Existential Threat of climate change, and this only proves you are a tool of Big Oil. Prove that Brandon is a criminal, and you've only proven that you are spreading Russian Propaganda. Point out that biology proves the sexual dimorphism of male and female, and you are a Transphobe. Show that Marx doesn't know the first thing about economics, history, or human nature, and this only proves your False Consciousness. Etc.

It really goes back to the allegory of Plato's cave, on which our immanent friends are so many footnuts. They are hypnotized by the dancing shadows produced by the image makers of the state-media-academic complex. To transcend all that bullshit is to have left the cave. 

Recall what happens next in the allegory: the escapee returns to the cave to tell the prisoners the good news, but they're not happy to hear it. Thus, "Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave" (Prof. Wiki).

Which is why they treat us the way they do. No good deed goes uncanceled.

It is easier to convince the fool of what is disputable than of what is indisputable.

And it doesn't get more indisputable than Gödel. 

Along these lines, the Aphorist says

There are a thousand truths and only one error.  

Hmm. What error might that be? Must be the same one Chesterton talks about -- the "thought that stops all thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." 

Indeed, flipping through these two chapters of Orthodoxy -- The Maniac and The Suicide of Thought -- they might as well be a commentary on the Theorems, even though the book was published several decades before Gödel hatched them. Might be fun to review this in the next post, since there's nothing else in the pipeline.

Nor is there actually anything in the pipeline today. Rather, we're just riffin' on the aphorisms. Sometimes, when between books, I'll look to them for inspiration and hope for the best, today being one of those days.

Here's another good one that touches on the theme introduced by the first aphorism above:

Politics is the science of social structures that are adequate for the coexistence of ignorant beings.

Substitute ideology for politics, and we appreciate how ideology explains the ideologue, just not the restavus: we're not simple or small enough to fit into their absurcular cognitive prison cave. Indeed,

Within solely Marxist categories not even Marxism is explicable. 

Like any other ideological system, it can be consistent or complete, but not both. Which is why

Marxism turns the intelligence it touches into tenured stone.

I added the tenured part, but am I wrong?! Any ideology -- from materialism to identity politics to Darwinism -- adequately explains the man who adopts it, but imagine being such a simpleton!