July 26, 1985
by DK Toteras
Modern man really begins with the Athenians, it doesn’t begin today, this isn’t what modern man is about, modern man began then. The ability to question, that is what starts man off on his modern trek. We have been on a modern trek for 2400 years. Previous to that we have causatives, even polytheistic causatives, many gods are taking care of things. Then around 600 BC monotheism starts taking up in Greek as one causative. The philosophy, they weren't philosophers yet, we start saying philosophy and we take for granted philosophers but what we are checking is philosophy itself.
Once the thought, the awareness is actually made as to how philosophy kept developing through the centuries, we start realising it’s developing because the previous is inadequate to the explanation that we find necessary. So the previous philosophies are always inadequate. Somebody tries to fill in something that made that inadequate. And that becomes today’s philosophy. Moderninity begins with that, it was inadequate.
The propositions that were based previous to Plato were really inadequate, because during Platonic times they wanted to raise the issue of thought itself. We have the beginning, we have perception, we have thinking. You can’t miss this. Must perception precede? Some philosophers say no. Some like Plato say you are born with it. He followed a middle of the road. Plato said (a nom' ne sis), it is something that you are born with, a memory that you can perceive. Because the question is, of that which you perceive, how do you know what you should keep? How does it filter into your head? How was it that you remember this and don’t remember that? Is it your environment?
Aristotle asked, is man a social creature? Does society make him or does he make society? So the thought perceptions that come in and start moving inbound have to be evaluated. Axiology, value systems are placed into making choices. A society that can’t make a choice is actually living from hand to mouth. You find primitive societies live from hand to mouth. Choices only come from situations that have other possibilities, tied to need, but all of a sudden in Greek history, choice is possible.
Farmer raises the theory of the leisure class. The leisure class was capable of having philosophy. This is in summary. In the leisure class concept, you couldn’t have philosophy in the north pole, in the arctic circle, because the rigours of survival were so austere that you didn’t have much to chose from. You ate what was there. You had to plan it...
At the other end it became bourgeoisie. They discovered the silver mines at Paltos, 500-600 BC. Portugal discovered silver, Spain did. Thales is an astronomer, a business man, he had loot. The Ionian Islands were blessed, they had excellent climate, small community... society, mankind existed in a social sphere 2 1/2-3000 years before the advent of philosophy in Greece. That part of the world is put together. It is not primitive people, people are thinking. The Egyptians are thinking. They saw the need for math, they saw the need for geometry.
We must see what we see. When we look at the heavens, when we look at the stars we are looking for causatives. How did they get there? That question is always in man, no matter what period of history you look at him. They tried to give reasons for what is there. That took place in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, it took place all over the world. That took place when agriculture started defining seasons, when the clock became more evident. With the recognition of regularity and predictability it became more evident. This has spread all over the world. It is in the Orient, it is in the West, it is all over.
The farmer sees the world. He see the whole cosmos as regularity. Why this is depends on another level of thought. It is put into the theoretical terms. What happened in Greece during that specific period is a development previous to the philosophical development between 1000 and 700 BC, There is a development in Greece of a deterministic theology. Deterministic in the fact that it states it, it puts it down. Not the same type of theology that we have today. They followed theology as first cause. The minute you find first cause has anything to do with what is around, you have theology. Because theologis is that which is first cause.
Theologi. Once you have this and it becomes dominant, you also have other things taking place. Number one, the Greeks are interested in geography because they are sailing a lot. So they have to look at the sky not only as mystical properties and theological properties, they have to look at it from the practical end, navigating. How do I navigate? We stop at first cause and we leave it there. We don’t argue first cause anymore. We look at the stars like Thales did. He lived on an island, and they have to sail. They have to understand stars, to know where the North star is at. Astronomy had developed already in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. The triangulation that was squaring things was actually done with stars since they didn’t have theotoscopes. We see the practical application.
The practical and the first cause advocates became adversaries. They have to be adversary within that period. Time overlaps, historical time overlaps, it doesn’t break itself down into A, B, and C. A overlaps B, B overlaps C, A overlaps B and C. We peel another skin off. If periods overlap, that means the philosophical periods overlap also. For example, the period of Thales and his school, the Meletian School overlaps with the Parmenidian school of philosophy. And both of them overlap with the Hericlitian school of philosophy... It is not sequential in that respect, you can’t open it up and say History 1A, 1B. That separation takes place in modern times, it doesn’t take place in antiquity. So when Aristotle is looking at antiquity, he is looking at the present. When we look at philosophy now, we say ancient philosophies. I don’t use ancient philosophy, that is modern philosophy. It is modern in the respect that this is what you are a product of....that. You are not a product previous to it, you are a product post.
You have certain steps that take place in the development and the distinction of perception and thought. Like that book that you have by Cartier? that the problems of knowledge, where you are talking about problems of epistemology. The problems of epistemology have to do with the problems not so much of the perception, but that which is using the perception... The rational aspect falls into actualogy, how in the fuck do you select that which you are going to choose? Aristotle had 30 things to choose from when he sat down, what does he choose from? What is the truth? What are you looking for? Previous to that the people who were in speculation called their activity, because it was an activity just like this is an activity, they called their activity ALETHEIA. Very important in the study of philosophy. Alethia means truth, it means uncovering, it means unmasking, it means denuding. It means all that. Alithos o kyrios is what they use in modern religion in Greece in Christianity, meaning that kyrios, the lord, alithos o kyrios, unmasked. He sits exposed. He sits illuminated to you. Now alethia is that process of denuding that which is in front of us. So that means that if we want to denude that disk, we have to say the properties of the disk, and keep denuding it until we get to its atomic properties. Because the Greek language was so magical, that once I said alethia, we could go forever. You could say the plate, not only does it contain something on it, it has certain geometrical properties to it, and descriptions.
Descriptions, proof, convincing. These are the 3 things that take place in the investigation of substance, matter. ELE, matter. The word ele, the word matter in Greek in Classical times meant wood. So in philosophy, wood, because it was dominant, became the word for matter, not stars, not this but the word for matter is ele. You see it is Aristotelean writing. Aristotle uses it. He wants to discuss matter. But the minute he discusses ele, someone pops up and says what the fuck is matter? So Aristotle says matter is what matter is. This is matter, ele. So you could describe ele. That means in the description, though, you have to use perception. But how do I know that what I’m looking at is what I am looking at? How do I know that? If I don't have any prior, apriori, attitude toward that which I am examining, how do I know it? The question has been posed. Say anything.
(Earl raises process of looking at matter.)
The method. The methodology. The minute you have a grouping of possibilities which is beyond need, you have 2 things, you have need and you have possibilities. Need is that which you require to survive, no exceptions, no choices at all. That is the nature of need. The nature of possibilities is also inherent with choice. But the minute you have choice you also have opinion. Because this is better than this, I have this and this and this. How do i chose between one and the other? Opinion. But inbetween opinion you also have the realm of doubt. Because opinion has the suspicion, maybe this is better. So I have to go back again to the apriori, (without prior) and investigate again ele. Matter. Is this ok, is that ok, how do I judge it? Plato raises the argument, he raises it as anomnesis, memory that you are born with. Apriori, people do not understand that term in philosophy, I have seen graduate students mess up with the concept of apriori, because if leads into the never-never land, it leads into trouble. One aspect of it is Plato, and the next is a comparison of Plato to Kant.
We will go though it again. It is simple, it is the simplicity that makes it beautiful not the complexity. Modern thinking and also Chardin's and Bergeson’s thinking has to do with complexities because it has to do with evolution. They say as things evolve they become complex. And more complex and more complex until you find man in such complexity that he can’t untangle himself. It doesn’t have a conclusion, it is still being made. It has a sense of still being in the process of being formed. So it leaves an open-ended situation. Now evolution is very comfortable to Heraclitian philosophy, because Hericlitus is ta pandari, everything is in a state of motion, a state of evolution, a state of flux. Flux and evolution are really the same thing. Nature doesn’t give a shit...
Notice one thing. Just to jump. When we look at modern times we look at things that require conclusions in order to be stored and to look up after. You you are looking at a need. watch the paradox that is created. The necessity to conclude, to type it, to put it into a stricture that is permanent. But as things move on and always in a state of evolution, because there are more things to synthesize, the exact opposite is taking place. By the time you put it and lock it up, it has changed already. By the time you put it into an encyclopedia, the information has changed. So you find a tremendous instability in modern times, an epistemological instability. We lack metaphysics totally. We have the doubt of epistemology because we know the things are in the process of change and information that you pick up today will be invalid tomorrow. There is a process of invalidity taking place. Doubt, now has become a predominant factor in modern times. Doubt. But doubt is a system. Doubt isn’t just doubt, it is a system. It is a methodology used for investigation.
In Decartes, this is something that you must accept and as you continue you will see the validity of it, all these philosophers were so embued to Classical philosophy and preClassical philosophy that what they are talking about is answers to the arguments that the preClassicals had. You can demonstrate it with every one of the philosophers in the Western world. Not to understand Classical philosophy, not to understand postClassical philosophy, you know nothing. You know cookbook medicine. You see the symptoms, you locate the cookbook, it tells you what medicine to give. They feel that preSocratic philosophy is primitive, it is not primitive. It is highly sophisticated. Up to that time the theology, the mythos was sophisticated. The mythology of the gods was so spohisticated that all of a sudden somebody decided that they would give Zeus the boot, you can see in The Clouds. Aristophanies begins The Clouds, Eeuo, Eeou O Zeffs Vasilefs, like saying Oh My God, it is an idomatic expression of the times. Vasilefs means king, vasiolio means the Supreme, O Zeffs Vasilefs, Oh Zeus the Supreme, what happened is wiped out by the time of Aristophanies, which is the time of Socrates. It is not polytheistic anymore, it is montheistic.
Nature had been unified with the first cause. The separation wasn’t evident to the philosophers, the separation between god and nature. That separation took place in modern theology. With us God and and nature are separate. Pantheism became heretical because it didn’t allow god to transcend. Pantheism, that god is embued in everything, in the trees and the flowers, like Spinoza said, became heretical because it didn’t allow god truth. The argument of choice is involved again. Transcendence is an argument of choice. The argument of transcendence brings to us choice, it brings to us opinion, it brings to us doubt. And doubt, now in order to escape from its position of doubt, has to develop certain methodologies. Descartes tried to do this with his methodology of doubt. It is a specific small area in Cartesian philosophy. All the philosophers have dealt with it because they are all involved in preSocratic and Socratic philosophy. They know the preSocratics. They make references to them, the way we are making reference to them also. It is just that a specific area questions them. A specific area of reality is raised, and that specific area of reality is raised between perception and thinking. I don’t give a shit what it is in the West, this is the argument that you are going to find.
Somebody would say hey, you can’t make it that dogmatic. You can’t reduce philosophy to that kind of a simplistic term. Why not? I don’t find philosophy a holy ground. I find it to be something, I find it to be a tool to attack with, I don’t give a fuck if I am right or wrong. Why? Who is going to tell me if I’m right or wrong? Somebody else who is involved in philosophy? That’s great. Philosophy survives in argument. It doesn’t survive in some area of godly truth. Philosophy is not really interested in truth really, it is interested in the beauty of the argument. Its essence, that’s what it is. People might say we are looking for the truth, I’m not looking for the truth. I wouldn’t know if the truth popped up in front of me and bit me. What truth? Alethia? Alethia is not a state, it’s a process. It is not a cup, it is not a barrel, it is not a house, it is not a noun. Alethia is a verb. Truth is a verb, it is not a state of Being. So somebody says what are you talking about, you spend your time searching for the truth? No. I’m not searching for the truth. It is the beauty of the argument. We follow it as if it was truth, when something is established like decades, generations, centuries, people followed Newtonian physics as it was truth. And all of a sudden it has been destroyed. Newtonian physics doesn’t really exist anymore. So another truth popped up, but it is no more truth than Newtonian physics was. It is an explanation. A part of something. It allows something to fit, like a shoe salesman tries to fit a shoe on.
(Billy comes in.)
These elements that we are looking at now are evident still in these cultures. In this culture, because of the language, the same language, the compound language that developed that system previously is still in existence today. The language hasn’t changed, of course it has changed, but the capabiltiy of the language is still a compound language. People say how do you dream up the things you dream up? It is because I dream them up in Greek. And I translate them over to English. I could not have done this just in English. With English you need some kind of...the system is not in the language. It isn’t there.
You shouldn’t draw a conclusion. Demonstrate it enough to be proven. If you conclude something that is not developed enough, it is pontification. We are all guilty of that. You rush. You try to put it together, but your conclusion is a spaceship you made and flew to another planet. You don’t get rid of that. When we develop the ability to think as children, the ability to think is registered with your senses. To get that, to reach that, to put that away. Put this here, put that there, drives me nuts. These are spacial conclusions. Filing conclusions. It is that type of thought. A different class of thought, it has to do with expediency, it has to do with practicality, with all these things.
What we are talking about now is the first kind of thought, thought-one, as a class. Then we move into thought-two, we go to school, we learn how to count, to read, how to extrapolate. Thought number two. Then we go to step three, thought number three, when we are dealing with knowable objective thought, then abstract thought. These are our fourth and fifth state. Finally we get into the exposition of one or the other. So number one goes to school and learns to become a mechanical engineer. The other one doesn’t go anywhere. He just tried to express that realm with the shit that he has learned in 1,2,3 and 4. Now you tell me how can the engineer go to school and learn the exposition, the description, the proof that the conclusion. The other one that is dealing in abstraction doesn’t have that kind of benefit.
Therefore abstract thought seems to go unattended. It is not even obvious that your thoughts, like the degrees that are given in the karate dojos, go from white belt to black belt. In Europe the educational system don’t have the system that the German and Amercan’s have, which is BA, MA, PhD. What happens after PhD? You stop there? Is there a red belt now? there are other elevations. So we feel like this, that our development isn’t an ongoing thing, our develpmemt is determined in a specific distance. So if you go to school for 8 years you are capable of unlimited thought. That is not true. Even if you went a million years, a billion years, a quadrillion years... it is a ridiculous thing we are saying.
Here to this world. We are finding definitive terms of abstraction. You have the benefit of involving yourself into an area that is so obscure that it is almost invisible and nonexistent. Billy says it is designed that way. In one essence Billy is correct. The capitalistic system, needing product, and not abstraction, thwarted the development of that. They thwarted the development of defining abstract. Of defining, if you will, metaphysics. You are dealing with people in the world that have no concept of the metaphysics of Being.
Watch. The study of the verb - Is - between the subject and the predicate, that defines between good and bad, he is good, he is bad, but the word Is in Greek is also the word for Being. Being. So instead of distinguishing between good and bad, being includes good and bad, it includes all things that make being possible. Because this is repugnant to the disciplinary attitude of the modern world, meaning today. Because it doesn’t cut things into various disciplines *where the fucking money is at.* The money is in the disciplines that are split apart. I go to Dr. Pea, and he is going to check my heart, and I say do you happen to know Ale, Hermando Ale? the cardiologist. Pea says He was my teacher. Hey these guys are my buddies, so I say to myself, what am I doing here? I can go see my pals, this guy’s teacher. What it was, Pea was in a discipline that tries to unite all these separate disciplines, internal medicine. He was posing as the thinker, taking all the disciplines of the throat doctor, the cardiologist, and putting them all together. He was trying to put a collective whole to it. He would find something wrong and would get back to the discipline. So now we have interdisciplinary, holistic thinking taking place. Which supports the fragameted view by fragmenting it into one more discipline. Then there will be one more discipline. This has become profitable in modern times.
But the argument is and the observation still is concerning conclusions. We are still within that realm. It is not our job to draw conclusions, it is our job to point things out. To fuck people up. Philosophy isn’t to make you happy, philosophy agitates you. Philosophy makes you unhappy. Philosophy is the exact opposite of what it pro ports. It is at the hands of these romantics. There is nothing more distressing that philosophy. The subject is absolutely painful. There is no truth. The comfort of truth isn’t there. We see the worst sides of everything. It is not for the mealy mouth, it is not for peolple who want a comfortable attitude, therefore it is not popular. This discipline is not popular.
Within the same overlapping period of history, not the sequential aspects of history, you have tyranny, philosophy, and science all born at the same time. You have Periander, the first tyrant, which ushered in the period of tyranny in Greece. You have Thales, the first scientist.
How did the tyrants appear?
Legislative law, emanating from man himself, not emanating from god. Legislative law emanating from man. Legislative law comes from me. The laws of Solon were laws of draconian proportions. Legislation now comes from an individual, men are legislating. Men legislate for men. But how do they legislate? They have to be somehow or other governed in the process of legislate. It became important that certain ethics be developed in Platonic times, because philosophy is allowing for the tyrant to become a philosopher. Isn’t this what he is talking about? This is where people should rule who have an understanding of philosophy? By the time of Plato it is already exposed as to what it is, it is professional. Philosophy now became professional. There was somebody called a thinker, there was a school you could go to learn to think. Previous to that there was no such place. Did Egypt have a place like that? A place to go to learn how to think? No, it was confined to theological tradition. Tradition doesn’t encourage thinking at all. It is the exact opposite, tradition forbids thinking.
So modern man was ushered in when he said fuck you. You had in Greece at that time too many proto-things taking place. You have proto-everything taking place. Now you have the possibilities. It is past the period of need, the need for absolute survival, and it’s gone into the overall need. Need of possibilities overlap each other all the time. They overlap themselves within periods of history, within periods of biographical and autobiographical information. What are the physical possibilities and what are the psychological possibilities that are there, once these needs have been taken care of, then those needs appear, because of each possibility. The minute you solve one need, there is a possibility that creates different needs. Once you solve the need of eating by agriculture, you have also created possibilties of leisure time, which also created possibilities of other things happening because of the needs that are necessary. As people started sailing away from their home ports they needed...astrologs, they needed sextants, they needed the better understanding of astronomy. The evolution of need coupled with the evolution of possibility.
What happened in modern times is that there are so many opinions at hand, the same thing that happened to Rome, the same thing that happened to Athens, there are so many possibilities at hand that it paralyzes the society itself. The complexity has become the problem. The complexity, not any one aspect, the complexity itself. It has become paralyzed. It is easy in Nigaragua because it is identifiable. It is the USA, it is CIA, it’s the Somositas, it’s in the firewood, you can’t identify the ?? What can you identify? ?
Erica Jong makes a big portrayal of an area that is so tiny that we are talking about us changing, having to name every decade. A whole big thing of expose-ation.