The scope, along with the format, of this project presents a few difficulties. One of these difficulties is making the coherent thoroughgoing structure of the argument accessible to the reader. In order to ensure this it is crucial that the reader read the essays in the order of their publication. The manner in which I propose to resolve this difficulty is by breaking the main project and the relevant side projects up into categories and sections. I consider the side projects a mix between variations on a theme, relevant modern application and important supporting information to the main project
I will do my best to maintain a schedule for the release of essays and the first keyword of each essay will identify it with the series with which it belongs. For instance, the main project articles will be published on Sundays and the first keyword on these articles will be “Main Project.” The category terms will be links which will take you to all of the categories under that keyword which can then be viewed in order of release date. While this does not ensure continuity for the reader the way a book with a linear structure would, it will at least make it possible for someone, should they decide to invest the time and energy, to follow along in the order intended allowing for the thesis to emerge over time.
Because there is the main project and several related sections and side projects, each building on the one before, maintaining the continuity is important for cohesion. Below please find the list of sections along with a short summary.
Sections
Main Project: The main project is, as the name suggests, the heart of what I am working on. The question which underpins this project is: what happens when the artificial framework laid on the human consciousness in the west by the enlightenment finally collapses into absurdity under the weight of its own contradictory axioms.
To this end we will look all the way back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), roughly four billion years ago, in order to discern biological, cognitive and behavioral patterns which emerged even as we split from the universal ancestor. Following this line we will look at those patterns and how they evolved though the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor (CHLCA) when we broke from other primates about eight million years ago. From here I will continue to follow the gradual process of sophistication leading up to the end of the last ice age roughly 14,000 BC up to the earliest written records of human civilization around 6,000 BC. From here I will move, piece by piece, through the ancient wisdom to the scientific revolution in the early 16th century, the Enlightenment in the 17th Century straight through to the current day.
The investigation will look at what I am calling Epistemological Epochs, large spans of time where all human consciousness is characterized by the prevailing mode of thought.
Over the course of the articles on this website it is my intention to walk the reader through my thought process from the birth of the question all the way to resolution.
Main Project essays will be posted every Sunday.
Vocabulary: I already know what you are thinking, but yes…there will be a section on vocabulary. The fact of the matter is that the vocabulary necessary to truly engage this material is not every day vocabulary no more than a technical manual has the same vocabulary as a mystery novel or the back of a cereal box.
In college I took a course on the Oedipus theme in literature. On the very first day the professor put vocabulary words on the board and told us there would be a quiz once a week. Here I was, a young student…so clearly I knew everything….astonished and offended by the idea that at a prestigious university a well regarded faculty member would employ pedagogical tactics proper to an elementary school. I was absolutely going to voice a complaint until I looked at the words. Out of ten I didn’t know eight. Humble pie!
The fact is, there is a language appropriate to all forms of writing and the language of philosophy is not complicated for its own sake…despite claims of ‘word salad’ from the uninitiated. If one is going to read these essays and get the most of them they are going to need to understand the vocabulary as well as the usage. Because I can’t, and frankly do not wish to, assume the reader has a background which would lead them to having a mastery of technical philosophical or theological (or, for that matter, scientific) jargon my choices were to neuter the essays by trying to make them easily accessible or to put them out in the way I feel they appropriately address the subject matter and make myself available to anyone who wants to better understand something they have not encountered before.
My goal here is to make something anyone, so long as they are curious enough to put in the effort, can understand. This will require some measure of effort on the part of the reader with regard to, amongst other things, the vocabulary. The words are not decorations. Words are manifestations of how we think and some form of transformative thought will be necessary. I promise you, this will be a good thing.
To this end, each Friday before Sunday’s Main Project post I will publish an essay under the sectional keyword “Vocabulary” which will be relevant for the upcoming essay.
More Unfashionable Observations: In the early 1870s, German Philosopher and Classical Philologist Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book he titled Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen which is notoriously difficult to translate — and for that matter to say. Unfashionable Observations is the translation most often used and the one I find the least unfulfilling though it is also translated as Untimely Meditations and Thoughts Out of Season, both equally correct, but, I believe, less so.
The book was a series of essays he was writing concurrently with his larger projects contending with issues of the time he was living in. In this spirit I intend to write a series of essays coinciding with the writing of the main project which will, in a manner relevant both to the current day and the work being done on the main project, afford me the ability to make philosophical commentaries.
What is important to remember about the main project and what, I believe, makes it valuable is that it is not merely esoteric hermeneutics. What we are talking about, fundamentally, is who we are as human beings, how our consciousness works, how we got to where we are and where it is we are likely going. In short, this project — stripped of all its particulars — is the story of us. The relevance of what is going on in our philosophical musings to our daily lived experience is absolute. As such, like the chain which held Laputia to the earth, there is a grounding of the metaphysical and ontological work being done to what is going on in the world which we inhabit.
While I do not intend to publish an article in this section weekly, as I will with other sections, when I do they will be released on Wednesdays and labeled with the keyword “More Unfashionable Observations.”
Analogismoi: The Greek word Analogismoi (ἀναλογίζομαι) is tricky to translate which is why I am using the Greek. It could be translated as “meditations” but I fear this drastically misrepresents the depth of this word as well as its connection through the logos to the topic at hand. The Ancient Greek language, as you will see over the course of the essays to come, is a phenomenological one where the meaning of a word is not just a 1:1 correspondence but is packed with significance which unfolds given context. Our language reflects our epistemic nature and our modern language is, at its core, related to the mode of thinking which assumes that the ultimate reality is the stuff the world is made of and not the deeper phenomenological meaning. This is why the ancient languages, when properly understood, owing to their meaningfulness and our natural cognitive structure of narrative, are more philosophically rich.
The word is broken up into ana– (ἀνα) which is a preposition that implies repetition and intense action as in “thinking through” or “carefully considering” and logizomai (λογίζομαι) which is the plural of reasoning, calculation, consideration or rational thinking and is derived from the root logos (λόγος) which means “word,” and is also the root of our word “logic,” but is also one of the most complicated words to fully understand and articulate and will have an entire essay early on regarding its meaning.
In this section, which I will also publish on Wednesdays when there is not an article devoted to Unfashionable Observations, I will attempt to write a meditative essay outlining relevant material from other disciplines which will connect to the main project.
Philological Concerns: Philological Concerns will be a post each Monday which will take apart a word or words from the Main Project article the day before. Unlike the vocabulary section, this will focus on the structure, historical evolution and relationships within words and languages. Many of the key ideas and terms I will be using come from ancient sources and it is important not just to know what they mean in terms of vocabulary, but understanding the fullness of their meaning to the people of the time and at other critical junctures through history and cross-culturally.
Pop Culture: In this section I will attempt to look at relevant examples of the underlying spirit of the Main Project as it makes itself manifest in the world through Popular Culture. Popular culture an artifact of its society and times as well as the patterns, archetypes and meta-narratives which point to incredibly ancient modes of being in which we remain necessarily connected to. Full disclosure: part of this is just pure fun for me…but only part. The relevance of popular culture to consciousness as such, despite being frequently overlooked or only considered in the most facile of ways, is something we underestimate at our peril.
It is important to remember that what we are doing in essence is taking a look under the hood of the human mind and patterns that have been repeating for billions of years in everything from primitive hunting and gathering to cartoons. Popular Culture, when it is done well, is reflective of the way the primordial patterns of human cognition, meta-narratives and archetypes manifest themselves at a particular time with reference to a particular culture. By finding these common patterns we can extract out not merely the meaning of the works themselves, but in their reflection on those patterns we can learn who it is we are.
While there will not be a weekly Pop Culture essay, when there is one it will appear on Thursdays.