Thursday, December 29, 2005

On Paradox and Healthy Culture

On Paradox and Healthy Culture

The Life-Logic of Togetherness

By Piankhy

Healthy Culture is about Togetherness. It is about the Sense of Togetherness (Good Sense); Faith in Togetherness (Good faith); the Will toward Togetherness (Good Will), and the Taste or sensibility of Togetherness (Good Taste). And yet it is easy to misunderstand just what I mean by “Togetherness”.

For example, when I talk about the culture of Togetherness or about people coming together, its easy to understand this in a kind of simple minded way as referring any kind of coming together of people—for example, to watch a football game, or to shop, or to have a party. Of course I mean something more than this. Even war itself involves the mere physical coming-together of people (or used to), and I certainly would not regard war as part of healthy culture. What I mean by what I call healthy Togetherness is the coming-together of people outwardly, but in such a way that it facilitates there coming-together inwardly and (visa-versa.), I mean there coming-together inwardly in such a way that it facilitates there coming-together with others outwardly. But I also mean the separation of people outwardly, when this allows them to come-together inwardly. This dance of separating and coming-together on behalf of Togetherness is what I mean by the Life-Dance as the ritual aspect of the culture of Toghetherness.

Now it is no coincidence that in this culture, this kind of thing (and there are many of such kinds of things in Integral Science) is difficult to understand. The dominant Culture is itself a culture of Apart-ness and so its way of thinking, (its language and, more to the point of this essay, its logic) is also one of Apart-ness. Such logic is not only dissociated from experience, but is one-sided and dissociative internally. It is, in fact, based on axioms or “Laws” that, like the Law of Identity, are meant to maintain (just as many concurrent socio-political laws are meant to maintain) rigid dissociations, (in the case of the Law of Identity the dissociation is between A and Not-A). Any kind of thinking or being that would privilege “con-sociation” or multi-lateral Togetherness would be hard to understand from the one-sided and oppositional way of thinking and being of the dominant culture. All of that kind of thing is excluded, in the logic of Plato and Aristotle for example, an unacceptable paradox.

Yet Paradox is itself a kind of Togetherness; namely, it is the Togetherness of Opposites. And Healthy Culture is exactly about affirming and including just this kind of Paradoxical Togetherness. Even more than this, it is about affirming a healthy, Living Togetherness that is the togetherness even of Togetherness and Apart-ness themselves.

For the barely explicable truth of the matter is that an ultimate loyalty to Togetherness must include Apart-ness, since a rigid and one-sided separation of the two (a rigid rejection of Apart-ness) would imply an ultimate loyalty, not to Togetherness but to the Apart-ness that such a separation would exemplify. At the same time, to accept Apart-ness exclusively is to abandon Togetherness completely, and with it wholeness and Life. Is should be clear that true Togetherness can only be found in the inclusion of both itself and its opposite, and so on what is often called “paradox”. Yet I don’t want to call the togetherness of Togetherness and Apart-ness “Paradox”, since it doesn’t wholly exclude “dox” (that is, “doctrine” or Logic), and since it is not so much a principle as a condition. Rather than calling it "paradox", and for the time being, I want to call condition of the togetherness of Togetherness and Apartness, Existance. And I want to call the kind of Logic that includes, affirms, and furthers this Existance (in the direction of greater Life and Freedom), by the name Life-Logic.

Life-Logic

Such Logic can’t really be pined down or understood with your mind alone like static “dead” abstractions can be. It does not therefore amount merely to a kind of “fuzzy logic” which includes the binary opposition of Truth or Falsehood (of “x” and “not-x”) as only a rare special case of what is normally a matter of degree. Although a modified form of such a logic (one inclusive, metaphorically, not only of “shades of gray” but of “color” as well) is a part of this logic, Life-Logic as a whole, is pregnant with even more fundamental implications.

So to repeat a little, rather than being identical with Fuzzy Logic, or even with the Paralogy of Lyotard and others, the kind of Logic that is a consequence of the paradoxical Togetherness (the Existance) assumed and affirmed by Integral Science may be called “Life-Logic”. Life-Logic is the matrix-based paradoxical logic of Integral Science. It does, like “fuzzy logic”, affirm “shades of gray” between the black and white of absolute Truth and absolute Falsity, but it also affirms the traditional logic that excludes this middle (see footnote). But it is unlike those logics (or any other logic) in that it is not only about Truth but also about Goodness, Beauty, and Mystery (and so also about badness, ugliness, and bad faith). It is not only inclusive of “shades of Gray” but of “Colors”, “smells”, wonder, humor, and every thing else. Life-Logic is really only the logical or mental aspect of something that transcends Logic itself by including and involving the Heart, Body, and Intuition equally with the mind. In other words, Life-logic is an Integral Part of a Life-aesthetic, a Life-ethic, and a Life-mystique and as such, it is a way of thinking that both facilitates and arises out of our entering into and dancing with, the paradoxical wholeness of Life generally. Life-logic is distinguishable from this wholeness only relatively, as that part of a complete Life-Way or Life-Dance that has most to do with statements, with subjective and objective thinking and speaking.

A True statement in Life-Logic is therefore also equally a good (appropriate) statement, a beautiful one and in some way, an inspired one. In this kind of Logic the judgment of any thought/statement’s absolute or relative Truth-value is a subjective and objective judgment that is not made by the mind alone but also by the heart, body, and intuition of Individual-Persons as such. Life-Logic only posits an extrinsic, one-sidedly objective (or one-sidedly subjective) set of “facts” when it is useful (when it is good, and beautiful, inspirational) to do so in terms of the inner consensus of one or more individual-persons in a given situation. When fuzzy-logic serves Life better than traditional logic in a given situation, then that is used.

Moreover, a statement “A” need not even be a statement or assertion in the traditional logical sense in order to be True from the point of view of Life-Logic, it may simply be an appropriate, beautiful, and inspired utterance of some kind. It might even cross the boundary of utterance into gesture and still be “True” (or “Truthful” anyway) even while, strictly speaking, ceasing to be “Logic”. Life-Logic is only strict—indeed it is only “Logic”—when it needs to be. As for the issue of “proof” of a statement or thought or gesture “A” (the proof of its Truth-Beauty-Goodness-Inspired-ness); the Life-Logical proof of this is the Degree to which it furthers Liveliness and healing inwardly and outwardly. It is a subjective and objective proof involving some degree of both inner and outer consensus and it can only be arrived at through the Life-Dance of Individual-Persons as such.

Of course all of this will seem somewhat whimsical and frivolous to the “serious thinker” or practical person who has “work” to do for which the good old fashioned logic will suffice, or for whom fuzzy logic is a sufficient improvement. These would be relatively alienated individual-persons whose sensibilities have been strongly informed by the sick culture into which they were born. The “work” that they refer to will doubtless be the “work” of sick culture, the work of dissociation, or self-other exploitation, of fear, of addiction, of image, of death. The “work” of those with an affinity to healthy culture and to Togetherness is the “work” of learning how to dance—that is how to express and negotiate paradoxical, inner/outer Togetherness so as to invoke and enter into a Field of Belonging as whole Individual-Persons in a living world. It is for the doing of this work of Healthy Culture that the Life-Logic of Paradoxical Togetherness is indispensable, nor should it be surprising by now that this Logic is both a part of the work of Learning the Dance of Healthy Culture and an ever more effective expression of that Dance itself.

What all this implies about the learning of Life-logic is the following. You can not learn it from the point of view of the logical and cosmological assumptions of the dominant culture or from the stand-point of what is in all probability, your present understanding of who you are (your present Identity politics), or in the context of the rituals you perform every day to re-affirm that identity and that cosmology. Life-Logic can only be really learned (rather than indirectly described) in the context of the practice of the whole of the Healthy Culture of Togetherness, inclusive of cosmology, identity, ritual, and infrastructure. It is not a tool to tempt the ego with fantasies of absolute security, absolute control, absolute knowledge, but a Mind-Dance and an aspect of the return of that ego to proper relationship to the whole of Being. The axioms of Life-Logic are neither induced nor deduced but educed (drawn out) by the resonance of inspired living example. Life-Logic cannot be taught or learned publicly or privately but only Individually and Personally.

Since the internet is a very public/private medium of communication it follows that the present essay—and all the other essays of my two web logs, amount to a somewhat inadequate invitations to a party that is going on elsewhere. I hope that even so they are at times an effective expression of Life-Logic, or at least constitute Healthy Information, though I have my doubts. Perhaps, to the extent that the reader thinks they agree with and understand what I am writing, they also are putting me on some kind of elevated, public/private pedestal in their mind from which I will doubtless fall as I reveal this or that aspect of the sick culture that I myself still suffer from. Both the elevation and the subseqent reversal would just be evidence of the static, one-sided, alienated-spectator way of looking at things that is the primary expression of the dominant culture of apartness and death. In such a case the main thing; the gesture of egalitarian mutuality and of living friendship that these blogs constitute, the offer to both help and be helped in this work and dance of Healthy Culture (in part the work learning to be true to the relationships and responsibilities inherent in existing at all), will have been missed altogether. For those readers, the song of Life-logic that these blogs try to sing (or at least to publish the words, music, and choreography for) would have fallen on deaf ears. Still, if this, or some other such gross misunderstanding is not the case with even one or two of the people who will read these lines, then I gratefully look forward to hearing from them.

Footnote: Life-logic accepts and includes both Fuzzy and traditional logic just because it is grounded in the trans-logical togetherness of the condition of Existance itself. Traditional Logic, on the other hand must reject and exclude paradox (and thus fuzzy logic), but this does not create a problem from the point of view of Life-Logic, and in fact it is how it should be since, were it not so, the living togetherness that Life-Logic affirms and constitutes could not be manifest. What is needed is only the ability to take the point of view of Life-Logic and to return to it once the point of view of traditional (or even Fuzzy) logic is no longer useful.

Supplement:

As a supplement to the previous post I want to write something about logical and cosmological degeneration. As human culture degenerates so does human logic and “cosmo-logic”. For that matter so does the average conception and acting out (the identity-politics) of Human Nature itself. How could it be other wise? Degeneration, like regeneration and healing, is something that takes place as a whole, and that whole includes the mental as well as the physical, emotional, and intuitive levels of existence.

Rationalizations such as Manifest Destiny, explanations such as “the selfish gene”, the acceptability of the concepts of “value free” and the “purely objective”, are all examples (taking over and extending, in their rigid one-sidedness, older ones such “original sin” and the “pure subjectivity”, platonic Ideals and mathematical entities), of such degeneration. They are all symptoms of the progress, in the area of the logical/cosmological, of the general disease of the culture of Apart-ness.

One need only give credence to the Idea that our culture is disintegrating as a whole (and how else does anything disintegrate?) to presume the Truth of something like the above. (See footnote)

Of course someone committed to— or more accurately—someone deeply suffering from, the dominant culture and its assumptions of fundemental Apart-ness and alienation, will be quick to point out all kinds of “objective facts” justifying their nihilism or fatalism or even naïve optimism, all the while completely ignoring (or perhaps completely numb to) the “subjective “fact” of the aversions, fears, dogmas, and prejudices etc… that are, in that very moment, directing there attention to just such worldview-confirming facts and away from both potentially worldview-challenging facts and (even more so) from potentially fact-challenging-worldviews. It is just the Togetherness of “world-views” and “facts” (along with that of Subject and Object) that such people are unable to sufficiently perceive as the Living Truth of the Matter.


Still, to say all this is not to suggest a Uniform degeneration. To degenerate as a whole does not mean to be totally degenerate. There are different degrees of wholeness even in a relatively sick body (which is why it is only sick and not completely dead). Even so, the sickness that is there has mental, intuitive, and emotional as well as physical effects. In the same way, although there must be some degree of health even in a culture that is actively eroding (since it is not completely eroded), nevertheless, all aspects of such a culture  (cosmology and logic included) are adversely affected by its relative sickness.

The point is that we all suffer from sick culture though possibly not all to the same extent and, certainly, not all to the same extent all the time. Both sick and healthy culture, both Alienation and the inner and outer Belonging of Individual-Personhood, exist in all of us in varying changing proportions at all times.

Because of this, the prevailing half-baked, alienated religio-scientific rationales, excuses, and cosmologies of apart-ness are not going to suffice all of the time even for those who promulgate them. This seems a good, though sometimes difficult hope to me. So does my hope that many other, healthier people (at least people who are more healthy more of the time) will be moved by there own consciences to adopt the  “counter-cosmology” that affirms and so can lead to, wholeness and living, paradoxical Togetherness, once they perceive both the possibility and the necessity of this. Of course such an integral “cosmologic” must be grounded in corresponding Identity-politics, Ritual, Infrastructure as a part of a healthy culture as a whole to be viable.

posted by: piankhy | 21:28 | comments (1)