Liebniz & the Struggle for Existence

In The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes of Liebniz's theory "as to why some things exist and others do not."

According to this view, everything that does not exist struggles to exist, but not all possible can exist, because they are not all 'compossible'.

Firstly "as to why some things exist and others do not." To talk of 'others', as in other things, is to talk of things which exist. That is what a thing is - something which exists. It is a senseless question to ask why do things which do not exist not exist. The framing of the question is necessarily to talk of these non-existents as if 'they' do exist. There is no they to which you can refer. Some thing which doesn't exist is meaningless language; some thing being a thing which must exist.
And as for Liebniz's response to the question, being that everything that does not exist struggles to exist: he is continuing to talk of non-existence as if it were existence. For something to struggle - to struggle to exist, or struggle to climb a mountain or whatever - is for it to exist in the first place so as to be able to struggle. Only things which do exist are capable of struggle or any kind of activity.
Whatever 'compossible' means is irrelevant since everything that has gone before its appearance is nonsense, and so the 'conclusion' to, or inference of, a stream of nonsense can only be more nonsense.

The Appeal of Fascism

Vile ideologies like fascism 'work' or succeed in incarnating themselves by harnessing foot-soldiers to the developing movement. And these foot-soldiers - the necessary weight or mass without which the movement's leaders are utterly impotent - are drawn in by means of an appeal, not to the intellect or a desire for truth - though superficially this area will be dealt with - but by satisfying the two most forceful dichotomies and longings of the spirit: firstly the yearning for love and belonging, and secondly by legitimising and utilising hatred and its direct physical expression. 

As an ideology fascism is very simple: power and glorification of ego in some kind of fancy dress, so onto its successful enrolment of acolytes. Love as a force or feeling by its nature is not solitary, it brings us out of ourselves towards life beyond us, and so fascism will tap into this by pointing the individual towards the nation as the most powerful and true form of precisely this love, towards which ideal form all aspirations should be directed. In this bizarre cult, the nation is both that which is most worthy of the individual and collective mass of individuals' sense of love, but also is necessarily in itself the source of this love - while the leader and party are something of the Word made flesh. And along with this excessive and morbid focus on the holiness of patriotism is, for the active rank and file of the fascist movement, more intensely than the love of nation because less abstractly, the desire for love and belonging satisfied by the dwelling within a brotherhood of ardent fellow believers. This is the ancient tribal sense of belonging, which is of course very natural, and indeed should be satisfied healthily by society.

 The other drive satisfied is the legitimisation of hatred. The reason someone will be drawn into such blatantly toxic bodies, as fascism or communism, is that he is lacking greatly in self-worth, happiness and a sense of belonging, and thus the enormous bolstering of these facets by belonging to a strong group, united by not just beliefs but uniforms and dramatic spectacle! But beneath the exterior of such unhappy people lies - because human nature doesn't simply meekly dissolve in meek circumstances - very twisted and thwarted souls, seething with frustration and hatred which society doesn't ordinarily permit it to express; and now the fascist movement encourages precisely its expression in the most absolute physical forms directed against those external causes it can persuade itself is responsible for all this frustration and self-hatred in the first place. And thus the most ordinary and sad individuals within those SS suits are able to gain revenge, not so much on elements within life, but on life as whole. Where once they were small and inconsequential, now life quakes beneath them.

Much later edit: 

Of course all the above applies exactly to supposedly “anti-fascist” groups like Antifa, which are more or less indistinguishable from the fascists which allegedly gives them their whole reason for existence in the first place.

God, Time, Idolatry

Intellectual thoughts about God can only be emanations of the thinker of those thoughts, and so to make declarations about God is ultimately for the thinker to make himself in the form of his/her thoughts God, that is he sets the limits of God to be his/her thoughts on the matter. He deifies his own thoughts, however contrary he may imagine his intentions.

One example of this is in Russell's History of Western Philosophy, where he says that while Occam and Aquinas differed in some related notions, both "admit the universale ante rem, but only to explain creation; it had to be in the mind of God before He could create." I presume the universale ante rem to mean the idea of existence. So God conceived of existence before effecting its actual creation.

This is to make of God, the alleged absolute ground of being and from whom all emanates, a temporal being, a creature dwelling within time; and so God as an inhabitant of time is limited by the nature and constraints of that time within which He dwells. So God's behaviour is constrained by the time God created. God has somehow become submerged within creation, and is another object of creation, subservient to its nature.

So this notion of God is of a limited being, divided between thought and action by time. First God has a thought, and then later acts on the thought.
And though I wrote that God created time, within this logical framework it would seem to make more sense to say that this God is a creation of time rather than time a creation of God. And from there, that time and the God within it are, or would have to be, the creations of another higher God.

For a religion - or perhaps rather institution, for I don't see much of the humility of genuine religious feeling in intellectualising about and defining God, in fact the opposite - which devoted so much of its intellectual efforts to rooting out heresies, it's interesting to see how utterly heretical or false, in the first place, are these limited relative notions of God which the heresies contravene; and all which notions are really merely the limitations of the thinker of those thoughts, but projected onto the alleged nature of God.

To add, if people had any notion of the magnitude of what they are talking about when God , or were in some sense brought into the presence of this magnitude, utter terror would consume them, but generally we are spared such consequences. The lines in Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush are resonant here where God tells Moses, “Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place you are standing is holy ground.”

Waiting-Room

A waiting-room, people in it, and more coming in all the time, if only at a trickle. Space must be getting at a premium. And what are they doing in there? What else - they're waiting. What else could they be doing? But they might be doing something else while they're waiting, but even so all they're doing is, it seems, encompassed within the waiting. They might, for instance, some of these inhabitants of the waiting-room, be talking to each other, but what is it they're talking about but the waiting - how long it's taking, how this is no way to be treated in this day and age, and so on. And what is it they are waiting for? Who said anything about waiting for? They're just waiting. This is a place you wait. Infinitely? Well, perhaps not infinitely absolutely, but infinitely so far. There may sometime, perhaps, come an end to the waiting, but not, so far, yet. 

 They must be fed up so, all these people waiting indefinitely, you'd think. And you'd probably be right. Though it depends, I suppose, on the mind of the person doing the waiting. If he or she gets too caught up with the idea of waiting for something - an end to the waiting - then it certainly must get tedious, extremely tedious, particularly with the absence of this end coming. If he could see people ahead of him in the queue being called forth from the waiting-room, their turn having come, then of course he too could feel hopes of a nearing end to his waiting, but no such departures arise, and so there's not much cause for such hopes. But how could it be otherwise than to be waiting for something? You can't just be abstractly waiting. Waiting isn't something that can stand in isolation, unlike say, running. You don't have to be running for something, you could be just running. Ah, but here at last we might be getting somewhere. 

What is waiting or waiting for something? It's not anything really, is it? The really bit is the standing or sitting or whatever it is you're doing while you're waiting. That's about as much as you, or an external observer at least, can say about waiting: you, the observed, are standing around or sitting, doing apparently nothing but this standing or sitting - or maybe also looking with stupid regularity at your watch and looking a bit at odds with the present as is. You're letting people know - or perhaps just yourself - you're not just some useless person standing around doing nothing. You're looking at your watch, again not just because you've got nothing else to be doing but looking at your watch, but because you're waiting for a change in circumstances of some kind, a more desirable future that you're approaching at some kind of temporal rate. You're not just here like a fool. You're implying the inferred absence of something, for example a bus. It's a kind of performance - a group of actions that create the impression of waiting. 

 And so all these people in the waiting-room - what's really going on here but they think they're waiting. That's what waiting is - thinking you're waiting. It's the thinking is the verb. So that's what must be our waiting-room. It's a waiting-room in the absolute. An existential waiting-room. Or at least it might be - it's a reasonable guess. So while you're in there waiting, there's no end to the waiting. That's what waiting is - waiting, which is to say thinking you're waiting, the same as you could be thinking you're flying or thinking you're jumping or thinking you're swimming or whatever. You might have to be a bit half-mad to be thinking those things, but that's another matter. But what if they really are waiting for something? Our man earlier, waiting for the bus: along comes the bus, on he goes - his waiting was not in vain. But his waiting had nothing to do with the bus coming on or not. His waiting achieved nothing. It was all in his head, whereas the bus - that was certainly outside his head. For our people in the waiting-room so, is there or isn't there a world of difference between waiting for something that does exist and waiting for something that doesn't? Not effectively anyway, so far. You couldn't really tell any difference between the waiting for something which really is and might but hasn't yet and may never appear, and something that isn't a something in the first place and so will certainly never appear. And given all this waiting, and the nothing but the waiting, surely they could be doing something better with their time than waiting, which is to say, as said, thinking they're waiting. So how do they get out of this waiting-room if it's all so apparently useless to be in there waiting? It's the how they got in that's more the issue - all this thinking they're waiting; and if they stopped thinking they were waiting then they wouldn't be in there in the waiting-room, for you can't be in there unless you're waiting. That's the nature of the waiting-room.

Transcendence

Can something transcend itself? Not, tautologically, while in the form of itself. The transcendence occurs by not being in the form of itself. So this transcendence cannot occur as a progression, a progression involving the movement from itself to not-itself. Transcendence cannot be something linear, a movement within time. Also if one is trying to transcend oneself, then this "oneself" is being accepted as real, the starting-point from which movement emanates, but if real how can it make any sense for reality to transcend reality?

Anselm's Ontological Argument for God

Back to Russell's History of Western Philosophy, and he mentions St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. We define 'God' as the greatest possible object of thought. Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist is greater. Therefore the greatest of all objects of thought must exist. 

According to Russell, "Clearly an argument with such a distinguished history, is to be treated with respect," having mentioned its influence on luminaries such as Liebniz, Descartes and Hegel. 

 Firstly if God can be meaningfully defined as the greatest possible object of thought, then this God is not God - that which produces all life, and within which all life truly is - but is instead merely an object or creation of human thought, and so does not autonomously exist outside of that thought. What Anselm is really trying to prove is the existence of "the greatest object of thought", which he dignifies with the name "God". However, this is before even getting to the substance of the argument; it instead being apparently the imagined uncontroversial introduction to the essential matter of whether God exists or not. 

Unfortunately, as shown, this uncontroversial introduction asserts God's non-existence by declaring God to be meaningfully capable of definition as an object of human thought. Also how could the absolute source of all being exist as an object within that being, and so again be an object of thought? Such an imagined entity may be called God, but is merely another object within existence. 

But anyway, to repeat the argument: Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist is greater. So the non-existence of the greatest thing is nothing to be worried at, as there will be something else exactly like it which does exist, thus satisfying the need for the existence of something greater than everything else. So to examine this a little. If something does not exist, then it is not something but nothing, and so is not an 'it'; an 'it' being necessarily something. And so if something else is exactly like nothing, then it too must obviously be nothing, and so also does not exist. 

 To go a little further with this argument: if something is exactly like something else, how could it be greater than it or different from it in any way? To be exactly like it is to not differ from it in the slightest. When using language in philosophy as a truth tool, all falls apart if words like "exactly alike" are allowed to mean something other than exactly alike; instead meaning "alot alike", or "superficially alike". So someone might say one mass-produced object- say an empty Heinz beans can - is exactly like another; but if examined through a microscope, obviously enough, they will be revealed to not be exactly alike but very definitely unique and different. The one thing exactly alike something can only be itself, and naturally it's meaningless to go talking of a substance being exactly like itself. Of course it's exactly like itself. It is itself. As for "the greatest object of thought", I have no idea what kind of parameters one is supposed to use, but what such people think they are dealing with leads back to the void, this apex of pure reason, examined earlier.

 Thought can hardly get more dangerous than when discussing God as something that can be enclosed within that thought; a dreadful false energy begins to unroll itself, and this so because this is not logic working itself out antiseptically on a blank page, but in the dynamic living medium of human minds, and with its unfolding repurcussions on into the broader physical environment.

 But in fairness to Anselm, if prizes were given for making statements that made no sense whatsover, then his here would be well rewarded.

Fumes

He was choking on the fumes.
"Fumes? He was lucky there were fumes. You could live on fumes. Fumes is something."
Yes, but he was choking on them.
"He was surviving on them more like. If you took away the fumes, what would he be left with?"

Presented

Reality was presented to them in black and white. Well no, it was presented to them in colour, but all the same, in black and white.

Order Disorder Decadence

I wrote a couple of posts ago on order and disorder, and while most of it I'd say was coherent enough, I think the description of decadence was, in being tempted by intellectual symmetry, pretty facile - what was written being: "totalitarianism (is) a manifestation of the the drive towards order at the expense of freedom, while decadence freedom, or rather a mistaken sense of freedom, at the expense of a wise order."

The overall idea was of two drives: one towards order and enclosure within structure, and the other towards freedom. The two forces in nature perfectly balance each other but yet the urge towards freedom is the superior one. You could say structure exists to facilitate freedom, not vice versa, and it is the pull towards freedom that ensures the upwards evolutionary development of structure - with organisms becoming more complex, refined and internally intelligent, and developing so precisely as manifestations of this drive towards realising a conscious freedom.

But back to decadence, where I more or less wrote that totalitarianism was a symptom of the urge towards absolute order, while decadence was a symptom of the excessive pull towards freedom. I think on the human level the movement towards freedom, if done coherently and wisely, looks after of itself the issue of structure and order. Basically: "Seek ye the kingdom and all else will follow." The issue of the personality and how to live is shaped as a by-product of immersion in, or surrender to, the greater whole, the boundless freedom into which one surrenders oneself absolutely.

Decadence rather than a strong but unwise urge towards freedom is something else. It is not too inaccurate to say that it occurs where an excess of existence within a stagnating and stultifying order leads to an atrophied sense of self, and where the urge towards freedom - which can never in a living being be wholly absent - is very weak, and what is there of it satisfies itself in wallowing in various forms of sensuality- and in themselves a form of this pull downwards into order. The urge towards freedom is just strong enough to rouse one to the expelling of some energy in return for very immediate gains, but it is all very much still life within very limited and recurrent patterns and order; perhaps even the most rigid of such patterns - patterns repeating themselves to the point of addictions. I don't think it bears any real resemblance to the notion of an excess of freedom, or freedom at the expense of order; rather that which fills the space of the movement towards freedom.

Eternal Recurrence

Reading his philosophical history, an idea, Bertrand Russell informs, of the Stoics in the person of Zeno is that of eternal recurrence, an unusual idea I've seen elsewhere described by Nietzsche; the idea of Zeno's being that at a cycle of life ends in a universal conflagration, whereupon the whole cycle repeats itself. "Everything that happens has happened before, and will happen again, not once, but countless times." I'd presumed in Nietzsche's case, the only awareness I had previously of this notion, that it was some way of trying to get people to focus on the importance of the life being lived now, and to hopefully act as an imaginative deterrent to condemning oneself to a conceived infinity of immersion in a life unworthy of oneself, so to speak. But perhaps they really are serious about this odd idea, and so to take a bit of a look at it.

Eternal recurrence purports to say that everything happening now has already happened. So this has all already happened. The key word here is 'this'. This has happened before. Well if something else has happened before, and so necessarily distinct from this, then this something else has to be as said something else, and so cannot be this. The very fact that you are talking of it as happening before means you are talking of something other than this. 'This' can only be itself exactly as it is, right now. To talk of something happening before is to introduce a 'that', i.e. something distinct from this, whereas this can only be precisely this. Also it makes no sense to talk of phenomena as if abstracted from the time element; and since one cannot effect this abstraction, then it makes no sense to talk of the same phenomena, including intrinsically the inseparable time element, occurring in a separate time.

When one examines the concept as the linguistic construct that it is, eternal recurrence of identical phenomena can only imply the present simply in its present sense. To try to talk of this recurring of previous time as though this something recurring is other than this here right now would be to defeat the concept, as then the phenomena would be different rather than identical as is necessary to the concept. And so for what is recurring to be, as is necessary to the logic, identical with what is happening, then it would have to be precisely and inseparably this, and so being precisely this cannot have occurred at a previous time, and so the recurring idea is rendered senseless. For something to be exactly like itself without the tiniest deviation is not actually to be like itself, but to actually be itself.

With eternal recurrence one is talking, or rather trying but failing to talk, of two different phenomena - something and its later exact recurrence - and progressively onwards to an endless number of different phenomena, and so these separate phenomena are not 'this'- what is now which can merely be one unseparated phenomenon - but separate phenomena, and being separate cannot be the same. Its apparent existence as an idea owes itself to people not looking closely at its actual logic, itself as meaningful language, and then seeing that the logic or the meaningfulness of the language quickly falls apart.

In essence, the word this implies something different than the word that, while the faulty language construct of eternal recurrence tries to assert this and that as referring to the same phenomena. The logic of eternal recurrence all merely leaves us with the present as is.
And so eternal recurrence is just a mad notion possessed of a certain kind of infuriating but senseless artistic merit.

Order Disorder

The elements of existence possess an intrinsic compulsion towards order but not towards an absolute order... or actually it would be better to say there is precisely this compulsion towards absolute order, but were it not countered by some contrary force, pulling towards absolute freedom, then life would end in a state of total stasis; everything compelled by this gravitational pull towards total order, and having attained this pole of centrality, all bound in a state of utter and immobile compression and so of course no further development possible.

And on the other hand without this force inwards working against the outward directed force towards freedom - and absolute freedom being freedom from all structure - life would proceed to one uniform, formless chaos, again without any possibility of development, devoid of any evolutionary dynamic. So the  life-forms which comprise life are dependent on these two forces in a dynamic relationship of creative tension.

One could certainly look at art through this lens - the tension between the movement towards structure and freedom - and sometimes, as with great late works by Goya, where the equilibrium is disturbed, and the two forces of order and chaos visibly and dangerously wrestling for dominion; this disturbance hardly surprising given the nature of Goya's genius, his personal circumstances and the nature of the political times he inhabited.

So also obviously with an individual human life. For example, if the attraction towards the centre in the form of a society's constraints is excessive and dominant over the individual's contrary drive towards absolute personal freedom, then ignorance of what this freedom constitutes will result, when this drive manifests itself, as a destructive force rather than constructive, bound up neurotically with reacting against some perceived forces which deny his freedom rather than as an independent free-working force operating along its own natural lines. Thus arise obviously enough the various forms of seemingly mindless vandalism.

This seems to be an endlessly helpful lens over all kinds of phenomena, with for instance totalitarianism a manifestation of the the drive towards order at the expense of freedom, while decadence freedom, or rather a mistaken sense of freedom, at the expense of a wise order. If anything is made an idol of, the results are going to be the collapse of the false nature of the idol in upon itself, with its faulty logic inevitably working itself out in the field of time.

Follow-up here.

Aristotle's Third Man

Again dipping into Russell's History of Western Philosophy, Russell writes that:

Aristotle advances against the theory of ideas a number of very good arguments... The strongest is that of the 'third man': if a man is a man because he resembles an ideal man, there must be a still more ideal man to whom both ordinary man and the ideal man are similar.

A problem with applying logic to gibberish is that gibberish is intrinsically illogical, but anyway...

Take the idea that 'A man is a man because he resembles an ideal man.' The only sensible portion of this is the first two words, 'a man.' It is ludicrous to say a man is a man, or a chair is a chair; the very words 'a man' or 'a chair' establish the fact of its existence as itself. And as for 'a man is a man because...'; if Plato had said: 'A man is a man because he is a man' - idiotic though it would be it would still cling to some kind of sense, but unfortunately Plato departs even from this modicum of reason and instead decides a man is a man because he resembles something else that is not a man - an ideal man, that is, an idea of a man.

So Plato's line, to be a little more clear, should read, 'A man is a man because he resembles an idea in his own head, and this idea in his own head is an idea in his own head because it is conceived of by a man, namely himself.'
He might as well say, 'A man is a man because he resembles a horse.' And at least a horse indubitably exists; you can point to one, whereas all one can point to with the words 'the ideal man' are those very words. That is as far as their independent life extends, and remove an actual man and those words remove themselves as an obvious matter of course, since words cannot exist independently of their user.

At this point Aristotle enters the arena and says that for some reason or other there would have to be a more ideal man than the ideal man. Whatever implications this is supposed to have, Aristotle, and presumably Russell, have failed to notice that 'ideal' denotes an absolute. It means a state of perfection. It makes no sense to talk of something being more ideal than an ideal, more perfect than perfection; and so Aristotle's Third Man, who is more ideal than the ideal, is merely linguistic nonsense.

People

A person and another person. Two people.
'Different?'
Different what?
'Are they two different people?'
Of course they're two different people. What other kind of people could they be?
'No, no. I mean are the two people different from the person and the other person, or are they the same two people?'
The same two people.
'Right. So the person and another person are the two people that came after them?'
There was no coming after them.
'Yes there was. You said: "A person and another person." And then: "Two people." The two people came after the person and another person.'
Okay, but they're the same two people.
'Right.'

Past & Proof

It is impossible to prove the past existed, as all one's proofs can only inhabit the present, even when, as in the case of a video recording of this past, they naturally claim to be such proofs. One's proof is still, whatever it alleges, an element of the present.
This is perhaps much more serious than might appear. The past and future are merely and ultimately words existing within the present, and the only serious intellectual or spiritual concern is immersion within this present; for example, while engaged in a 'mundane' actvities being wholly apart of whatever it is one is doing rather than one's body somewhere and one's mind off rambling somewhere else. How such mundanities become real and interesting, and the category of mundane to which they had mistakenly been condemned resulting in the most far-reaching of essentialy schizophrenic results; life divided by a scattered mind.

Flanking

One man with a sign saying stop, another with a sign saying go.
"Who the hell did they think they were?!"
I have no idea who they thought they were. All I'm saying is one had a sign saying stop, the other go.
"No, you misunderstand me. What I mean is, who did they think they were to be ordering people about, telling them whether to stop or go?"
Functionaries. People performing a function. And the nature of the function? They were flanking a machine, a machine belching out big ugly volumes of noise into the public arena.
"Why would they be flanking that? It must have been doing something other than belching volumes, surely."
It probably was. In fact if you went over to have a look, it's most likely you'd find it was digging a hole.

Where

"Sorry, could you tell me where I am?"
"I can. You're here."
"Oh I know that, I know that. I'm aware that I'm here, but what I was hoping to know, what I was wanting to find out, was where I am in relation to somewhere else."
"Where you are in relation to somewhere else? Oh I don't know. I doubt I'm the man for that at all. If you want to know where you are in relation to where you are: that's what I'm good at, that's my kind of thing; but where you are in relation to somewhere else - I'm practically useless.
"I could pretend, I could let on. I could say, 'Jesus, this is your lucky day. I'm the right man for this.' And I'd say this is where you are, point A, this is where this somewhere else is, point B, and so this is where you and the points are in relation to each other. I'd even map out for you how to get from one point to the other- A to B or the other way round.
"But all that would happen, apart from coincidence, is I'd be setting you all wrong, because I might know where you are in relation to where you are all right, but where where you are in relation to this somewhere else I wouldn't have a clue. Your coordinates would be all over the place. And on top of it all, to make it worse, I'd be fierce convincing. You'd have no doubts about these coordinates. Not even the doubt of a doubt. So away you'd go telling yourself how your luck was in, how wonderful I was, and if you'd met me earlier on in your life there's no knowing what you might have done."

Some

Some derive alot from very little. Some derive alot from alot. Some derive very little from very little, while others derive very little from alot.

Bridge

"If that big bastard of a bridge fell on top of you while you were going under it, you'd be in right trouble."
"You would. But in all likelihood it wouldn't fall on top of you while you were going under it."
"No, but that wouldn't be much consolation to you if it did."