Hi David, congratulations on launching your site. You have quite a task before you of filling in all the boxes in your schema.
I think that your presentation of the various a/b choices may be a bit too schematic. Maybe I don't travel in the right circles, but I don't know any actual nihilists or totally rigid authoritarians. I suppose some people cling tightly to one stance or another, but most of us partake of bits of both depending on circumstances, and try to cobble together our own ad hoc syntheses.
But it's very valuable to have these dichotomies laid out clearly and (the hard part) have a sketch of how a synthesis might be achieved.
Hm, maybe you could call this the three bears model of meaningness -- there's being too much in one direction (too constrained, too rigid), or the other (too loose) and then there is baby bear's stance which is just right. For the children's version.
It's seriously odd that your comment arrived while I was in the middle of responding to Miikka's one about Robert Anton Wilson—inasmuch as you introduced me to his work, if I'm not mistaken. This coincidence must have something to do with the quantum wave function collapse. [Not.]
Anyway, thanks for stopping by...
It won't really be clear what the point of this project is until I've put up a half-dozen more pages that are meta to the work itself. Those will describe what I mean by a stance and how they work. One aspect of that is that, as mind-states, confused stances are highly unstable, because at some level it is obvious that they are wrong. As you say, no one can actually adhere to nihilism for long. But I think pretty much everyone falls into it briefly occasionally. More generally, as you say, people flip-flop between polarities and try to find middle ground. This instability is one reason stances trump systems. It's easy to maintain official adherence to Christianity, or anarchism; it's hard not to momentarily adopt stances that contradict those (like nihilism or "reasonable respectability") from time to time. Especially if you are a parent, in the latter case...
The Buddhist philosophy that influenced my work here is called Madhyamaka, or the "Middle Way" between extremes. Robert Ellis, whose work is closely related to mine, uses "The Middle Way" to name his core method. Three Bears; "not too tight nor too loose" is another famous Buddhist slogan.
But I deliberately don't use that term. My approach, based in the Dzogchen interpretation of Madhyamaka, is that correct views incorporate both sides of a polarity, rather than one that steers down the middle. "Dzogchen" means "entirely complete" in Tibetan. It is not a Middle Way—it's a Complete Way. So I use the term complete stance for those that cover both sides of the false dichotomy. Maybe that is more like a synthesis, although I am wary of the Hegelian implications of that term.
As you say, filling out those "schematic overviews" will be a lot of work. Probably a couple years' worth. I have a 300+ page draft from a few years ago, so much of the work of thinking through the logic is finished. But that draft was written only for myself, and re-presenting the material in language that communicates to a broad audience will be a big job.
Best wishes to you and Sam-the-future-of-anarchism,
I may have introduced you to RAW, but I think I learned from you to take him more seriously than I would have otherwise.
The bit about Dzogchen is interesting. I ought to have figured that whatever method you have for getting beyond the various dichotomies you outline was going to be a bit more complex and interesting than the mere middle-of-the-road-ness. I'll look forward to your explanations.
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Comments
Meaningness and the three bears
23 Oct 2010
Hi David, congratulations on launching your site. You have quite a task before you of filling in all the boxes in your schema.
I think that your presentation of the various a/b choices may be a bit too schematic. Maybe I don't travel in the right circles, but I don't know any actual nihilists or totally rigid authoritarians. I suppose some people cling tightly to one stance or another, but most of us partake of bits of both depending on circumstances, and try to cobble together our own ad hoc syntheses.
But it's very valuable to have these dichotomies laid out clearly and (the hard part) have a sketch of how a synthesis might be achieved.
Hm, maybe you could call this the three bears model of meaningness -- there's being too much in one direction (too constrained, too rigid), or the other (too loose) and then there is baby bear's stance which is just right. For the children's version.
Speaking of children, here's one of my efforts to transcend the authority/rebellion dialectic.
The Middle Way ... not really
23 Oct 2010
Hi, Mike,
It's seriously odd that your comment arrived while I was in the middle of responding to Miikka's one about Robert Anton Wilson—inasmuch as you introduced me to his work, if I'm not mistaken. This coincidence must have something to do with the quantum wave function collapse. [Not.]
Anyway, thanks for stopping by...
It won't really be clear what the point of this project is until I've put up a half-dozen more pages that are meta to the work itself. Those will describe what I mean by a stance and how they work. One aspect of that is that, as mind-states, confused stances are highly unstable, because at some level it is obvious that they are wrong. As you say, no one can actually adhere to nihilism for long. But I think pretty much everyone falls into it briefly occasionally. More generally, as you say, people flip-flop between polarities and try to find middle ground. This instability is one reason stances trump systems. It's easy to maintain official adherence to Christianity, or anarchism; it's hard not to momentarily adopt stances that contradict those (like nihilism or "reasonable respectability") from time to time. Especially if you are a parent, in the latter case...
The Buddhist philosophy that influenced my work here is called Madhyamaka, or the "Middle Way" between extremes. Robert Ellis, whose work is closely related to mine, uses "The Middle Way" to name his core method. Three Bears; "not too tight nor too loose" is another famous Buddhist slogan.
But I deliberately don't use that term. My approach, based in the Dzogchen interpretation of Madhyamaka, is that correct views incorporate both sides of a polarity, rather than one that steers down the middle. "Dzogchen" means "entirely complete" in Tibetan. It is not a Middle Way—it's a Complete Way. So I use the term complete stance for those that cover both sides of the false dichotomy. Maybe that is more like a synthesis, although I am wary of the Hegelian implications of that term.
As you say, filling out those "schematic overviews" will be a lot of work. Probably a couple years' worth. I have a 300+ page draft from a few years ago, so much of the work of thinking through the logic is finished. But that draft was written only for myself, and re-presenting the material in language that communicates to a broad audience will be a big job.
Best wishes to you and Sam-the-future-of-anarchism,
David
yellow stripes and dead squirrels
23 Oct 2010
I may have introduced you to RAW, but I think I learned from you to take him more seriously than I would have otherwise.
The bit about Dzogchen is interesting. I ought to have figured that whatever method you have for getting beyond the various dichotomies you outline was going to be a bit more complex and interesting than the mere middle-of-the-road-ness. I'll look forward to your explanations.
Mike
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