Abraham Rotstein, Weekend Notes IV

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.

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[38] 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.