Epicurus vs Plato

The philosophical justifications for scientific atheism in our tradition go back to the Epicureans. The Epicureans introduced us to the idea of atomism, which proposes that all matter is reducible to infinitesimally tiny particles they called atoms. I've always been curious as to what logical path led them to this conclusion, because it was a brilliant insight. We think of Epicureans now as being people who like to eat well and live the good life but it was originally a school of philosophy named after Epicurus who founded it. It would be a pleasant sojourn to digress into the history behind the idea but this blog isn't primarily concerned with history. Neither is it meant to be scholarly. What I want to do is extract some of the fundamental ideas that shape our culture and one of the main threads originates with the Epicureans which is a good thing to know.
In essence the Epicureans claimed that the only valid knowledge possible comes through the senses. Everything else in their thinking proceeded from this premise, and it ultimately led to the assertion that pleasure was the most important goal a man could strive for. One might ask how they could be sure, since the argument itself is an example of reasoning, not something that can be known through the senses. I'll give them a little slack, though, because it's been a pretty productive axiom upon which to build a sound observational science.
But science would also be impossible without reason, especially the highly abstract form of reasoning known as mathematics. According to tradition Epicurus was born seven years after the death of Plato, and Plato had an entirely different idea that was probably based on his thoughts on geometry. Geometry and philosophy were popular hobbies among the Greek leisure class of his day. The essential thing that Plato noticed about geometry was that it didn't depend on sensory input. In fact there is no such thing as a line, or a point or a triangle in the real world. And how do we know that a square plus b square equals c square? We know these things because we have the power of reasoning. But what is reasoning? Plato theorized that there was a kind of invisible, purer than earthly light, the light of pure reason, corresponding to the light that let's us see things in our sensual world, that illuminated our minds. This was how we were able to reason.
And ever since then there has been an antagonism between the two conceptions of reality, an antagonism that manifests itself in numerous controversies, but right now I would like to draw attention to these two theories of knowledge, and suggest that this is not an exhaustive list. There are other ways we have of knowing.
A third way of knowing was introduced to western thinking when the Graeco-Roman world came up against a group of Semites which occupied Judea. These Jews worshiped an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal deity, a creator of the entire universe who was not contained within the existence we humans know. This deity could not be seen by us, although in times past he had appeared to various prophets and ancestors; records of these visitations were kept by a priestly class which which arbitrated various rituals, practices, laws of behavior. If the god could not be seen, if the god presided over creation in some ethereal universe beyond the reach of our senses, then how could his existence be known? Through faith, a concept that grew to dominate human thinking for the next 2000 years.
One more way of knowing is the way of the artist, poet, composer, architect, even the philosopher and the scientist: the imagination. Imagination is the faculty we use when we wish to bring something new into the world. A song, a sculpture, a story, an airplane, a theory.
The present day theory of science privileges the senses and reason over imagination and faith. Faith is considered an outmoded, discredited form of ignorance rather than knowledge. Scientific theories are logical constructs that are validated by an appeal to the senses... observations, in other words. This is as true of simple mechanical calculations as it is of quantum theory.
While science is wildly successful at manipulating the forces that make it possible to send a rocket to the moon or develop strains of rice and wheat that are productive enough to feed our billions, it has been less successful at ordering human society. In fact, attempts to scientize social structures, as with the bolsheviks and the fascists who have caused more human destruction and misery than any previous dogmatics in human history.
The poor artists don't know what to do. If there is one segment of endeavor which has been decimated by the materialistic doctrines of scientific atheism more than religious institutions it is art. Without belief in transcendent reality then the artist has no idea where his impulse to create comes from, and so he turns to death. It is what he sees, and it is what he portrays in modern art. No longer can he see the transcendent in everyday things and activities. Instead of heroism he sees brutality. Instead of showing the beauties of the human form he tears it apart and reassembles it in grotesque ways. This is self mutilation. The sad little golem I photographed could not be a clearer expression of 'A portrait of the artist as a dead man.'
We live in an age of terrible demoralization. But why? And is there any way out? What if there has been some terrible misunderstanding? I think there has been. And although I don't claim to know all the answers I think I can raise some good questions and point to a new direction. God help me.

Lost art

This morning after walking downtown this crisp and clear January morning, my eyes watering from the bright sun, I finally sat down for my coffee. What was playing on the house system was an especially obnoxious pop song, I think it was the vile Cat Stevens, aka Abdullah or something, whose whiny voice evoked images of a skulking sewer rat. Not what I want to hear in the morning. Amazing that a bookstore owned by a Jewish woman would display the work of someone who wants to exterminate the Jews. Sometimes I wonder if all those centuries of dhimmitude have left a permanent mark on the Jewish soul.
Anyway, thanks to the wonders of iPod and a nice set of Shure ear plugs I have a way of circumventing the crassness of the modern idea of music. And what a contrast. It was Jussi Bjoerling's turn to randomly appear, singing a duet from Aida with Jonel Perlea, La fatal Pietra. And all of a sudden I'm in a different world, a world of beauty and nobility. I understand hardly a word of Italian, and I don't know the story of Aida, but it doesn't matter. There has never been another voice like Jussi Bjoerling's, and Verdi's music can be incredibly effecting even without a knowledge of the words. (With opera I sometimes think I like it better without the words.) Just the music and the human voice is all that's needed to transport me to another and more perfect sphere of cosmic reality.
An acquaintance of mine asked me yesterday if I had heard the CBC program where the topic "Why we like jazz" was discussed.The answer to me was obvious: jazz is great music, a fresh and new musical idiom that extended the possibilities of music. Thus it will always be new, and thanks to the invention of recording technology, will always be available for rediscovery by a new generation. My reply posed the question of why anybody liked hip hop. I know a lot of people claim to like it, just like a lot of people claim to like broccoli, but I suspect they are lying and future generations will be incr4edulous that anybody listened to it.
I'm not doubting people believe they like hip hop or broccoli. People are capable of believing just about anything if they think everybody else believes it, and the more preposterous the belief, the more hostile they become towards a nonbeliever. Hence the loathing true Bolsheviks felt toward Trotsky, or the rabid Islamist toward the Jew. More than mere logic is involved. Our deepest, most irrational impulses govern the outpouring of hatred of the believer toward the apostate because his entire personal conception of reality, his sense of self, is undermined. Panic and fear bubble up from the depths and the believer loses his bearings. Instead of engaging the non believer in a rational and courteous conversation where he tries to understand the other's point of view, he sees only enemies who must be destroyed. I mention these points because I intend to insult some dearly held beliefs as I go along. But there's no way out of it, no way to be nice.
The deeper question is why we listen to music, compose poetry, carve images on mountain sides, wear color coordinated outfits, mow our lawns, and worry about whether one set of beliefs is true or not. Why do we plan for the future, for our children's future, or care about people starving in Africa? Isn't it enough just to eat, stay warm, seek pleasure, have sex, avoid pain and toil? Why worry about anything but my immediate needs, why worry about what anybody else does? Why do we need to be loved, have friends, crave self-respect? And why do we need beauty? None of these questions can be answered by a utilitarian/materialistic explanation...they don't even make sense.
Yet materialism is a belief system itself, one that has permeated western attitudes for the last few centuries. It's a system of belief that has produced casualties, the most recent being a disregard of beauty. Beauty is out. The grotesque is in. Hip hop is only one recent example in music (I use the term loosely) but you could go back to the early days of rock and roll. Poor Elvis was grotesque. Madonna copulating with a brass pole on stage is grotesque, an image not even Dante could have imagined for his Inferno. She, Alice Cooper, the Rolling Stones, and so many others have carried the grotesquerie way beyond anything Elvis could imagine. He at least still had some lingering attachment to melody and sentiment. With him the yowling school of singing first broke through to the mainstream. Now yowling is everywhere. There is rock and roll yowling, country and western yowling, "world" music yowling, in fact it's almost impossible to escape it. This is the real air pollution, not carbon dioxide which actually helps plants grow.
While it may be a mystery why people believe what they believe- as Will Rogers quipped, 'People know a lot. The trouble is, most of what they know is wrong.'- there's no doubt that what we believe is vitally important to how we act. What is it we believe now? I mean what are the beliefs that drive people to vote a certain government in, or to listen to obnoxious noises or to strap explosives to their bodies?
Last week when it was so sunny and clear I spent an hour strolling through Fort Rodd Hill near Victoria and thought about those suicide bombers. How is it they hate the world and their lives so much that they will connive and plan to kill and maim as many people as possible, I wondered. How could they ignore the overwhelmingly beautiful world we are lucky enough to awaken to when we are born? Life is an immersion in wonders to be explored, beauties to be contemplated and all they can think of is death. The suicide bombers are not the only ones who seem impervious to the beauties of this world. It's a disease of our age, as much in the children of the west as in the children of the middle east. It seems especially common in the art world.
I've never been especially drawn to the visual arts but on occasion I browse through a copy of Artforum magazine at the library. Apparently an up to the minute periodical of what's going on in the upper strata of the art world, it's chockablock with images of decay and mortification. Flipping the first few pages of the December '07 edition, the reader is regaled with two images, one of a man, one of a woman, superimposed on each other. Which image is which is made even more ambiguous by the prominent sexual parts. The woman holds a large, erect penis protruding from her genital area through the rear of the male and emerging from between his legs below a patch of penisless pubic hair. I think the name of the artist is Jonathan Monk who was having an exhibition of his work in Paris. An emasculated man and a defeminized woman is what he takes away from his ideas about sexuality. Of course when homosexuality, baby killing and so on become normal and accepted then humans no longer have organs of generation. Their purpose is reduced to those brief moments of ejaculatory pleasure. There is no connection anymore between the generations. Sex is no longer the bridge between the past and the future. Love means nothing, in fact is obsolete, except as an entry in the thesaurus under sex. A few pages further on a young man dressed in a black suit, tieless, with a baseball cap stands in front of a white fence. Untrimmed weeds, grass, shrubbery seem ready to devour him. In fact the suit suggests coffin attire as if he is about to become compost. What meaning the artist had in mind is not something I am interested in. A few more pages and I see a 'Chocolate Santa Butt Plug,' the brainchild of one Paul McCarthy. It is an advertisement. The product was for sale, the perfect gift for the hip metrosexual on your list. As I progress through the issue, it's too tedious to describe the sad scenes that unfold. In between the advertisements (it's all about money, you know- don't tell anyone) are articles covering various scenes across the country and around the world. What must it be like to inhabit a world of such sterility?
Taking the contents of this magazine as representative of our times, what am I to make of it? First, I should say that the artists seem to have just as good an eye for colour, composition and imagery as any generation of artists. But what is wrong with them? Why are their gifts dedicated to the service of what seems to be a death cult?
I've always thought that all art is religious. Again, we can't help it. It's a fundamental reality like gravity, time, space. So what religion do these artists follow? If there is any message to all the art presented in this magazine it is pain, a great desparate groan of pain. This is exactly like a scene from Dante's Inferno.
But the sin here is that they have no beliefs, except certain visceral ones: existence is evil. Life is a big mistake. Human beings are inherently savage. Death is truth.
Where did all this come from? Historically, art has dealt in the transcendent aspects of the material world and found beauty and hope there. The artists were our guides. Where are they guiding us to now? And who were their guides?

A little bit of nostalgia

I can still remember when horse drawn wagons laden with milk and bread plied the streets of my Edmonton hometown, sharing the road with streetcars. In the winter the motive power of those wagons provided us with free pucks for street hockey. I liked the bread wagons because they had a little step in the back that you could hop onto and ride. Not many of the side streets were paved, giving rise to great clouds of dust in the summer and muddy boots when it rained. People didn't walk their dogs. When Skippy had to do his business he went to the door and barked until someone let him out. When he wanted to come back in he used the same method. What he did while he was out was not something that worried us.
Children had similar freedom to roam. We were expected to fight our own fights and if we hurt ourselves doing stupid things we got little sympathy. For most of my childhood in the old neighborhood we spent a lot of time climbing the trees that lined our street. I don't know of anyone who broke a bone. Boys mostly played cowboys and Indians with toy cap pistols, and girls mostly played with dolls and tea sets. Most of the fun things we boys liked to do were frowned upon by adults; girls were tattletales who we avoided as much as possible. The other thing about girls was that they didn't like the games we boys played, but they always wanted to butt in. So we avoided them as much as possible. It was a great time to be a boy. We had bb gunswith which we pestered the rabbits in the ravine. We climbed on top of box cars down at the train yards. We made rafts to float on the ponds during the spring melt.
On the other hand in school we were expected to be quiet and listen and there was the strap if we didn't. It was considered sissy to cry when you got the strap and nobody wanted to be a sissy, even though we didn't know what the word actually meant. Far worse was in store for you if Dad got word that you were misbehaving at school. Nobody got driven to school, and we weren't let in until just before school started no matter how cold it was outside.
A desire to read comics motivated me to learn the alphabet and how it worked and so I knew how to read before I went to school. No teacher necessary. A comic book cost ten cents and had 52 colourful and intriguing pages. I also liked to listen to the radio--TV did not exist in the scope of my knowledge base. It wasn't until I was almost in my teens before TV came along and I didn't like it as much as the radio shows. My imagination conjured up an image of superman that was far superior to what I saw on the fuzzy black and white TV set.
I didn't know of any kid's mother in my neighborhood who worked. It was a man's lot to bring home sufficient funds to put food on the table and pay for the home. Women were first and foremost mothers and were loved and honored because of it. Most people grew vegetables in the back yard. A chicken was a large bird that would feed a whole family, arriving from the market with head, feet, and many interior items still intact. My grandfather liked the gizzard. The chicken had been plucked, but pinfeathers had to be burned off over the gas stove.
Most people went to church regularly, rules of behaviour, based on deeply held Christian beliefs, were strictly enforced in school, our history and moral standards were praised as an example to the world. Great men in history were admired and we were urged to emulate them. In my Catholic school saints and martyrs were especially revered. We were taught about the recent war, how our young men had sacrificed their lives to preserve us from a malevolent tyranny. We were taught about the secret police and the concentration camps in Soviet Russia and the relationship between Soviet expansionism and the Korean War. (It hadn't yet been dubbed a 'police action.') We had the best, wealthiest, freest society the world had ever seen, where poverty, disease and fear were vanquished. Edmonton was a new city, the fastest growing city in the world, a city with destiny and every day came breathtaking news of some new development.
As far as I knew this was how things had always been and how they always would be. Little did I know that under the surface of our collectivity of thought and belief big changes were brewing. The surface of the sea was calm but turbulence from below was welling up and it would soon generate a tsunami that would inundate the seemingly solid continents of conventional certainties. The tsunami hit while I was in the Navy between 1961 and 1965. When I went into the navy the world was still recognizably normal, when I got out everything had changed. The drama took place on campuses where students rioted in the name of free speech. Somehow, in the minds of these campus radicals the freest, wealthiest civilization in the history of the world had become something evil and tyrannical. These same campus radicals, who are now firmly tenured in their little academic domains thanks to the thuggish tactics they used, are now the most virulent opponents of free speech and they have seeded the media and the education establishment with their brainwashed graduates. It's lunacy, a lemming like dash over the cliff, a will to suicide. (I don't know how lemmings got that rap, but it's too good an image to let mere accuracy spoil things.)
But underlying the lunacy has been a long evolution of thought and belief in the western tradition, one major current in an ongoing dialog, in opposition to another counter current. It's like a great wrestling match that's been going on in one form or another for centuries. The contestants represent two different and seemingly incompatible strains of thought, the idealist and the materialist, and for the last several centuries, and especially in our present epoch, the materialist has the idealist pinned to the canvas. It seems.
In my view all humans are idealists, or to put it another way, we are religious beings. We can't help it. But there are individual elements of society who fancy themselves atheists. They are misled. Caught up in arcane proofs and disproofs of god they are unable to see themselves, or the fact that the materialist world view they espouse is itself a metaphysical statement, and one that is just as impossible to prove as the claim others make for a supreme being.
It's not only in the arena of thought and philosophy this battle is waged, but also in the arena of politics. So many blogs are focusing on politics that the internet has, as somebody recently remarked, become an echo chamber. Or a suite of echo chambers, depending on which echo you prefer. I would rather avoid those and get back to where we were before the sixties came along. Not that many things aren't better now, but I think they could be a lot better. A lot of very good things are happening now...the internet, for example, and all the miracles of the digital age. And yet, I think our civilization, which engendered the digital age, is in real danger, and that its greatest threat comes from the inside. The exterior threats would be inconsequential otherwise, mere pinpricks. In particular, science, while it is the source of so much good, has adopted the philosophical construct of scientific atheism, and for not very good reasons. Furthermore, that philosophy, a pillar of our modern age, is ultimately self destructive.
But first, and this might take a while, I will try to show that Materialism, the basis of scientific atheism, is just plain wrong, and that it can be shown to wrong by simple observation. I don't know how well I'll succeed in this project. but I'll give it my best shot.

My new blog

My last (not final) post at Beyond the West was about The Green Knight, a late Medieval Arthurian story written in a conservative dialect of Middle English. Almost incomprehensible now, it is tough going for the best of readers, and yet it is such a fascinating story that it's definitely worth the trouble. The first verse, after briefly reciting the legend of the founding of Britain by a refugee from the Trojan War, dispenses with alliteration and takes up a new-fangled rhyming scheme:

...Felix Brutus
On many bonkes full brode Bretayne he settes,
Where werre and wrakke and wonder
Bi sythes has wonte therine,
And oft bothe blysse and blunder
Full skete has skyfted synne

,
and it is from this verse I have taken the name for this blog. Bliss and blunder, where blunder is more akin to terror than it's modern sense...the twin peaks of life in the mortal zone. But history is more a record of blunder than of bliss, probably because blunder is more exciting.
My reason for choosing this line as a title has more to do with metaphysics. It is a dialectical statement. Pleasure and pain are the bookends of living experience, and a good laugh helps to get us through our years of earthly existence. The opacity of Gawain's language makes it difficult to perceive the humour of the most exalted hero of King Arthur's court being made a fool of by a giant green man. We laugh, but it is a serious business. When we pause for a few moments in our daily struggles, sometimes we reflect. What's it all about, Alfie?
That's going to be the subject of this blog. There has been a drastic collapse of morale among those of us who are heirs to the European intellectual legacy with the result that we no longer believe in ourselves. One symptom of that demoralization is the the elevation of the grotesque to godhead by our artists. My next post will be on that topic.