Dodging Philosophical Systems for Behavioral Efficiency

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Dodging Philosophical Systems for Behavioral Efficiency

from the book, Post-Atheism

When the sun goes down
I close my eyes
When I am hungry
I eat

These are the unintended laws of Heaven

but in Hell, never so simple,

we are bored with God

and so spread out our charts and plans

The philosophical system, at its most responsible level, does not propose a physiological salvation from mortality, but it does attempt a subjective alignment to material reality.   The responsible philosophy however still does not represent the sort of orientation I propose.   With music, we find a convenient metaphor: Can one flay Handel's Messiah into dots and lines on a score and get to its "cause"?   Is the score the cause for which the music performed is the effect?   

When we take apart an engine we do indeed learn a little of how it works.   When we dissect a corpse we do indeed gain some insight into how the human works.   When that first doctor tapped the knee with the hammer he gained some insight into how a communication system worked.   In all respect to our practical needs, we are deconstructing toward an understanding of "cause" from a certain perspective ... but this sort of perspective would not even be the periphery of the complex of causes responsible for the existence of the Messiah.   The score is that sort of "cause" which enables another to reproduce only that music which has already been created.   The creation of the Messiah, however, was a different sort of mechanical resolution of the animal complex.

The philosophical system is not the reality of course but a human viewpoint of reality reproduced in the mind of a reader.   It is not without value, just as the score is not without value to the student.   However, only a behavioral strategy would clarify what former generations ignored: the gears and levers of production itself - and for this, if it uses the score, it is only using a stimulus to take advantage of conditioning, rivalry, physiological chemistry, and other mechanical influences for which "creativity" is only an advantageous resolution of the human complex.   Likewise, with this book the philosophical attempt is not refuted so much as set in distinction from a behavioral expediency.   

Understanding current philosophy would be a "conscious" secondary activity dependent upon "unconscious" primary machinery.   And even this academic study would be something wholly different from the act of discovering, on one's own, a philosophical system - that is to say, a delineation of one's own reality on one's own terms.   Even a so-called "behavioral strategy" would have to admit itself to be a "conscious" and therefore dependent, secondary effect, but one whose aim was to guess at the primary machinery so as to afford a little more self-control and clarity.   It would be a strategy to lie in wait for one's future mind for the sake of increasing its chance for success.

We thus dodge the "complete philosophical system."   Rather than propose a globe which is too comprehensive to work with, however accurate it may be, we must settle for the local map, with its winding streets and asymmetry.   The mechanical applicability of a smaller strategy will do more for us than the greater mentalism we refer to as the "ultimate nature of existence."   The system's inapplicability would not be overcome by even the achievement of its perfect accuracy.   

And let us not forget that even the philosophical system comes to us by accidental cultural inheritance.   If not, then it was our own production.   I read Plato, I read a score of Handel, but if I could produce my own system out of my own complex experience I would undertake quite another task, with quite another set of requirements.   Metabolism that rebels would be more important than that fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve the system's integrity rather than my own ... a fatigue also known as "obedience to authority."   

This "point" is the sort which points to a mechanical axle and not an ideological principle.   Handel is more like a child too full of energy to contain himself to inherited rules.   He builds upon them here.   He breaks them there.   The perfect student of Handel would be like the brow-beaten, fatigued, drilled servant.   He can do nothing but follow the score and would settle for immediate pride in this public achievement.   Often the creator only offends everyone with heretofore unknown, and therefore, strange behavior.   

The difference between the philosopher and the perfect student of philosophy is also what makes them complementary to each other's existence: the philosopher found himself managed into the creation of a unique view; the perfect student found himself managed into the re-creation of the philosopher's view.   The important point for us is not the perfect correspondence of the two halves of this single amulet we call "philosophy," but the manipulation of a self whose direction was settled by the very simple point of rebellion-obedience before philosophy comes into view.

At what point do we take upon ourselves the responsibility of becoming less accidental and more deliberate?   Did we imagine that philosophical understanding vaporized our behavioral machinery and with it our expedient interest in no longer being accidental thinkers?   Consider that a regular diet of lard and sugar will eliminate all possibility of that higher understanding which the perfect philosophy can only promise.   Once again, it is a blunder ... an intellectual fatality to mistake secondary descriptions, however complete, as substitutes for primary control over ourselves, however incomplete our understanding of the machinery.   It is also, however, a blunder to imagine that there is such a thing as "Primary Understanding" ( all understanding is secondary.   A sardine a day and a hundred such petty little strategies will do more for our understanding philosophy than philosophy can do for itself.   

A man throws a rock at my head and I dodge it, yet a thousand harmful stimuli bombard and injure my consciousness, sending "thought" in an accidental course, and everyday I take the full brunt of the assault without humiliation ( but only because ignorance of wrong precludes humiliation.   Despite outrageous expenditure, dignity does not yet comprehend its own bankruptcy.   Humiliation, here, would be a gift from a god.   Proud thought must bow so low that contact with reality becomes possible again.

I must first view life from an efficient distance, and a complete and perfect philosophical description of "reality" is as useful to my day-to-day predicament as astronomy would be to a bus driver.   Just as our former material God dwelt in a beyond, the philosophical system too is a world beyond efficiency.   Too much of philosophy survives only as an idolatry of description.   There is a difference between philosophy and Epictetus, who had not so much a system as he had a strategy ( and the applicability of this strategy outweighs any possible description, however grand, even of The Complete Reality.   This is not to say that Epictetus had no respect for what we call today "philosophy."   It only says that for Epictetus managing impressions was more fundamental than even the elucidation of his own ethical principles.

The realist's view is conceptual.   It is hypocrisy.   Like popular Christianity, it is a tribute to materialism that has not carried itself far enough.   It is a material orientation ( not only to material, but also by material.   Materialism is impossible unless it is the constant perfecting of our orientation.   Materialism then is a dynamic human process and not a collection of static things or facts.   This road is only traveled by the passive idealist ... by the Doubting Thomas - that austere, unflinching, fearlessly honest attempt at materialism that discovers the divine futility of all else but the evolution of one's own mind.

We could look at the relationship between self-strategy and philosophy as parallel to that between Handel and Christianity.   We do not look to Handel's evolution ... his cultural inheritance, his years of training, his disillusionment, the fact that his influences are essentially pagan.   We certainly would never desire to look at Handel in the same manner as we would look to the training of talented pigeons ... and yet Handel's "cause" must be Christian!   How did he create such a score sheet?   

We would even rather find the "cause" in Christianity and not in the indecent prospect of "Handel as machine."   That Handel remained with the Italian Opera until it threatened absolute bankruptcy ... that his Chandos Anthems fawned the Duke of Chandos contemporarily, but so as to overtake that Duke in history ... permits us to ask a corresponding question,   "Does Handel pay tribute to the Duke as cause?" Certainly, the Duke would appropriate himself as worthy of being the "cause."   Would Christianity do the same?   But even the fact that the Duke was incidental, dispensable ... that Handel would have reached for a different vehicle, a different set of symbols to display his "Will" does not suggest the autonomy of Handel's Will.   Thus it was with Handel's Christianity.   And thus it is with the popular notions of philosophy: force requires a conduit and that it can do nothing and measure nothing without this conduit does not make the conduit itself the singular "cause" of our efforts.

In distinguishing the private science from the public, or the transcendental from the material, I do not suggest their incompatibility, rather that the one is responsible for the other - as when an astronomer rides his bicycle to work, increasing his heart's capacity to pump oxygen to the brain, and thereby increasing his capacity for problem solving.   The one science has everything to do with the success of the other.   His bicycle is more sacred to him than a Japanese Portable Shrine.   Still, he would not submit his bicycle to the Quarterly Journal of Astronomy, however indispensable its contribution to his science.   

Even the poet has such a division of method from product - if he will accept all of the implications of material reality.   Unlike the astronomer, he can put a star between the horns of the moon, if he paints an accurate picture of what it "means" for a human to live in the universe.   He can set either shaft, "God" or "atheism," to the string and pull with the best of form and grip.   It matters little the trajectory; we know at last the tension behind the word is temporary and will spend itself and return the arrow back to the Earth.   Every idea, every word, and every puff of breath, cannot help but show reality.   But we must watch and no longer listen.   What the speaker intends to say is almost irrelevant.   Sometimes when I hear the word "atheism" I see a cultural war.   Sometimes I hear the word, "God," and I see a trembling man who does not yet know what or how to believe in himself.   Other times I hear the word "atheism" and I find greater honesty ... spirituality than that within the man whose belief depends upon his inability to pose a single honest question.   And still at other times I hear the word "God" and find myself not carried off into abstraction as much as lighting softly on the providence of nature.   I love most of all the pantheist's word, "God."   It sums all up with a single aim: God is compatible with God-created reality.   Or, to use a different set of air-vibrations: The invisible power of repetition is compatible with its own instances.   Within this definition, I find another self-mechanic with his back to the Bible but on his knees before his God-created reality.

The responsible philosopher wants the words we hear to suggest the reality we see.   He deconstructs consequence and provides a description.   The most responsible philosophers today are probably ethologists.   Nonetheless, after the successful description, the crucial step remains for the self-strategist to engineer advantageous consequences ... to engineer mind.   This crucial step can only be undertaken by the private, subjective human.   Science and spirit, behaviorism and self-behaviorism, ethics and poetry - call them what we will - when these two disciplines are held to be incompatible, we blunder.   The responsible student of philosophy wants to find the cause and the effect ... to snatch the tune, flay and hang it up to dry.   The explorer wants to be the effect ... to catch himself, not to flay, but to nourish and condition, to find himself in an extended rational response for which there can be no conscious guide.   He would find his death if asked to step through a tune in obedience to a master's score.   

No doubt the musician is happy in the performance, but who would not rather be the composer in the act of composition?   The composer does not spurn the Devil but uses him in the ascent to God.   He sings not in spite of the world, but by it.   He does not follow a score sheet, but deviates ... gets it wrong ... composes new music for those who, having come after the breach with propriety, will deconstruct this new music and demand the obedience of all students to this new, righteous score ... tempting the next disciple of the Devil's to break and run up the mountain of God.



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