Abraham Rotstein, Weekend Notes IV

Weekend Notes (Overview)

Text in English to type

G[eorge] B[ernard] Shaw

[…]

[3] Every major thinker has two opposite ideas e.g. Marx, Hegel, Rousseau, and also Jesus and Paul state opposites in an indissoluble unity of temperament. That's why innumerable interpretations are possible on one line or the other: life and logos. There are always some who embody the life force. There is the creation of a baby, but the imagination is also conceptual. Conception is both biological and logical - body and mind.

[…]

The whole mystery of saints is that there are saints e.g. Joan is an obvious situation discovers the obvious - the French nation. But the Roman church can't have nations and so sh's burned. She was [4]supposed to work miracles but didn't. She was beginning to do what every Frenchman had to do. We describe these as miracles by pretending not to understand. […]

[5] Man exists on three levels:

• The body. If you kick or pinch it hurts.
• Psychological mechanism. You may hit him in hi vanity in a psychological or emotional sense
• Life is nourished from internal sources of faith and conscience which he can't contradict without destroying himself.

The secret of Shaw…

[6] P. once wrote on Shaw, just about fifty years ago in 1906, ”The Drama of the Economic Interpretation of History”. He read all that Shaw had then written.

Technology and Utopia

P[olanyi] doesn’t take Owen as Utopian. He was full of realism but in one of his sentences he said that there are limitations and these would have to be accepted. [23]

Rationality

[35] What are ends of the rationality movement? (my question)

The nearest to a philosophy of rationalism ever built was the Enlightenment. It was only a counterphilosophy to a theologically interpreted world.

The Encyclopedists via the Enlightenment represented rationalism. They claimed that the universe and existence can be understood and is in harmony with reason. It probably means the unaided mind does not seek support in revelation.

It may organize itself as humanism - man is the ultimate explanation and value. This got terrific secret

The Revelations

[37] (From P.'s discussion of the dangers of science, my comment of Eve's apple to Adam).

P. is not really thinking of the symbolic expression of reminiscences. Man awakened out of his vegetative soul to the consciousness of death which created what we call man. The knowledge is here a reminiscence of man as we know him, being born and reshaping his consciousness. But to P. these revelations have always had meaning. Revelation does not come in a special or specific way or we wouldn't know it. The importance is its truth and we must know our life is limited. There is no use denying that and therefore the emphasize is its consequences.

Everybody knows he can extinguish the meaning of his life by denying his inner nature and it wouldn't be in the same sense as physical death. Revelation only means the consequences which are irreversible and that is true of the reality of society.

We can't say who told you or how do you know? That's why we speak of revelation, because once there, its irrevocable.

That's why the Old Testament or Babylonian story meant something different, such as whether sex is a danger and contradicts man's nature by his being ashamed. P. is not keen on this side of the matter. Other people might be concerned with the structure of human consciousness and the way it is linked here.

Both sex and hunger have this awkward character about them [38] and every human society deals with them. They are a basic danger to every society. In tribal society all are hungry and there is no shame and in the Odyssey hunger is never thought of as a terrible danger. But in the Odyssey the individual who is hungry is suddenly dependent on strangers. He begins to nurse his shameful belly and begins to ask for food. This is the first time that hunger is identified in the history of man.

P. doesn't want to decide what the O.T. scene reveals.

When P. and I talk about something we know what we talk about, but to answer questions we would need lots of educations. We talk about what we mean and how it relates to things belonging to Christianity, not what Christianity means. There are many doubts and unanswerable questions here. Even Tostoy and Schweitzer differ.

Tolstoy didn't regard the interim ethic as interim. If we accept the interim it would fit with P.'s view of the reality of society because Jesus would have disregarded it.

P. only argues about things which are certain, not uncertain things, i.e. the landscape before him. Maybe it isn't Ontario or on maps but P. talks about certainty and not second-hand knowledge. P. is suspicious of anything not obvious.

The one sentence of Owen’s says that we cannot appeal to the reality of society for disregarding the Christian commitment until the we try to see if the reality of society is a limitation for equality and justice. The reality of society is the third horror we are confronted [39] with – being a number of society and not doing anything about it.

Three times shivers were sent into man - three horrors and three pieces of advices:
1) Live as well as you can. This consists of doing works. "Allons labourer notre jardin" (Voltaire). There is no metaphysics. The garden serves the day.
2) Let us forget about ourselves − Jesus. This is excellent advice, for anybody who can, feels safe. Jesus also said don't accept the temptations: miracle, power and magic (the three temptations in the desert, bread from a stone, a jump from the roof of the temple. It offered power over all the realms of the world.)

P. thinks Jesus is justified in thinking he might have been Roman Emperor − the speech he wrote for Pilate and never delivered (P. saw it in bas-relief in the Roman catacombe).

This page contains question(s)
that we should discuss
in the Talk Page!

3) Our answer is to accept the reality of society and make our society as just, equal and free as possible. There must be power and compulsion. That is P.'s answer.

It is not a glorification of the totality of society but a commitment to the first and second revelations - to live and work in spite of society. P. really believes this but believes that the place of the economy in society should be changed.

[40] The reality of society is that limitation of some abstract free will which remains after you have abstracted from any kind of limitation of your free will in society in which you can abstract at all. After you abstract from every conceivable limitation you are limited.

You cannot […]

The reality of society consists in the conformity, and this is an expression of the reality of society. You can conform or not, but you can't contract out.

Rouseau said you could contract out − you go away. […]

The Mind

[59] The mind works as dialectic, and psychological phenomena act that way. Hegel was the only thinker to use dialectic.

This has a relevance to social phenomena for they are movements of the mind. The mind is an explanation of the action, e. g. if you have a class struggle with revolution, counter-revoltuion etc. Dialectic brought in phenomena that were no historical or social. That's the peculiarity of a philosophy: you can apply it to art, nature, and then you can play with these terms in a clever way.

Take the concept of a fact: give a negation of it and you have a delusion. Then negate that and you have art – a synthesis. You can say of art it's a delusion insofar as it's not a fact and vice versa. Therefore it has elements of both fact and delusion, and denies both. There is an artistic reality.

This is probably the way mind functions, in fact, delusion and art. The relationship of art delusion is part of a comprehensive metaphysics. Art is not nature. Only in disciplines is fact verified.

Take the statement “The grass is on the hill.” If he actually dreamt it you have a dream statement and this is the content of it. How if somebody says it's a poetic statement, it has a reality of its own and it's art. Art is a higher type of reality and a higher type of delusion.

[60] The dialectic is an ordering of concepts. Facts have other opposites: the lie, semblance, (process?) are opposites of fact in different directions, and you can reverse this again. You can put order into the terms of science, but if you apply dialectic to a process………

Drama is dialectic itself – in order to get change and reverse something.

People like Marx could play about with this. Dialectical Materialism is unreal. It is not a mind phenomenon. The mind works in contradiction. Hegel's dialectic is the way the mind works in its inner laws – the concept of fact, the concept of illusion, the concept of art.

There is no reason for nature to change accordingly − no reason to assume opposites, e. g. cold and hot are not. Hegel wrote an astronomy where stars move about dialectically. This is all nonsense. Engels makes matter move according to mind.

In history, for 'material' Marx meant that the economic and technological determine the movement of the spirit. There is much more truth in this than saying it is the change of ideologies. This is true for a change in economic circumstances.

History is things happening through human beings and so is partly a mind phenomenon, i. e. it suddenly turns the opposite way. By 'material' you don't mean dead nature. But "economic" could mean "process" and "motives" and this is complex.

Text Informations

Date: August 25/26, 1956 (Interview)
KPA: 45/05