Now, if we can have the same Copernican revolution around meaning—to finally unseat humans as the ostensible sole arbiters of meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos; to reveal that hidden anthropocentrism which claims that meaning and purpose are human qualities projected onto an unintelligent, mechanical cosmos. With any luck, this shift in thinking from seeing Earth as a pocket of life in a dead cosmos to a pan-vitalist approach which sees life (and perhaps even intelligence) as a ubiquitous facet of Universe might actually open some doors around meaning. I certainly dont espouse the view that meaning inheres in things, but I equally reject the idea that humans arbitrarily create meanings as coping mechanisms to deal with the sheer lack of purpose and pointlessness of it all, i.e. the nihilistic worldview. I reject the assertion that any given quality is distinctly human, even those we know most intimately in feelings of love and hate, happiness and sadness, pleasure and displeasure, and even the so-called higher feelings like wonderment or agape. None of these are human feelings, and just as we find a pan-vitalist approach which sees life as ubiquitous to the cosmos in the attached article, I think all of the things we have claimed as human will eventually be revealed to be independent of us. This is my underlying assumption in support of astrology: that the whole range of human experience is not human at all. Borrowing from Deleuze in BERGSONISM (1966), we might say that weve gotten it backwards with regards to feelings. We experience ourselves as pre-existing humans who are feeling a new emotion, but it could just as easily be pre-existing emotions feeling a new human. The idea of astrology is that it works through acausal orderedness as an explanatory, rather than predictive system. The acausal order of time is seen in certain tendencies, movements, motifs, Events (in the Badiouian sense) which act as disruptions—all of these phase shifts in the quality of time, these are the acausal order which can be seen as a network of affinities, likenesses, metaphors for each other and so on. There is a precedent for this type of analysis dating back millennia, especially as found in early Chinese philosophy. Indeed, even the history of ancient China is told in a way quite unusual to the contemporary Western historians compartmentalized (and rather linear) thought. Instead of separating events logically into different domains, early Chinese history groups things by likeness in meaning, so you find seemingly random events grouped together—random from one perspective, but congruent on another level. Astrology works the same way. Certain kinds of things like to happen together, and as above, so below, such that you can watch the synodic cycles for explanations of the thematic, mythopoeic narrative of that time. Now, this is different from a predictive system. Astrology wont make any concrete predictions as to real outcomes. All we can safely say using astrology is what theme will likely come to prominence. The reason I point out astrology is an explanatory and not predictive system is because it is entirely unscientific. Science is concerned with being able to accurately predict concrete outcomes. With this aim in mind, the scientist can look at a sample set of data points over time and, using the probability calculus and the technique of retrodiction (a.k.a postdiction), the scientist can come up with models for what is likely to happen in the future. Depending on the sample size, the scientist has more or less capability to come up with an accurate model, with accuracy increasing as n approaches infinity, although certainly with a point of diminishing returns beyond which more measurement is unnecessary for all intents and purposes. Divination does not work like this at all. Trying to prove divinatory systems like astrology, I Ching, palm-reading or Tarot is attempting to gain data points in a larger sample set to demonstrate predictive powers, but these efforts are doomed to fail. Divination works best when n = 1, and only when enough time has passed that the quality of time is different will the divination begin to work again. Furthermore, divination works better during times of strong emotional charge, crisis moments and so on. There are certain qualities of time when divination works, and others when it doesnt. The assumption of a vanilla time where we can expect to get consistent results one moment to the next may be perfectly valid for the purposes of scientific analysis, but it is completely inappropriate in the context of divinatory systems. In closing, I think that the pan-vitalist Weltanschauung espoused in the attached article is very much compatible with the divinationist perspective that allows for an acausal orderedness or synchronicity to be an operant principle in the functioning of the cosmos—something which eludes quantitative analysis, which requires thinking in duration, going beyond being able to describe things quantitatively in terms of their composition or configuration in space, to waiting for the sugar to dissolve (Bergson), so that we talk about things ways of being, the way things change over time and go through phase shifts, and the quality or even feeling-tone of a thing at a given time. All of these are attempts to perceive things in terms of qualities and not quantities, which is perhaps saying, an attempt to perceive things not as things at all, but as processes or becomings. I seem to be a verb (Fuller), and processes are ways of being instead of being itself. Indeed, all the great thinkers of being should perhaps better be understood as thinkers of the past, not just in the sense that they came before us, but that the very object of their thought was the past itself—being, or existence, as what happened already in the past, which goes on persisting despite having already happened. And what is the present? Pure becoming. If the past is a residue of the present, then we could even say that science is the study of the past for the purpose of prediction, and divination is the study of the present for the purposes of explanation or elucidation.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 18:28:54 +0000
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