Tag: theology

Viewing Corona: Phenomenology and Orientation.

HERE is a link to some current statistics that compare the flu and corona.

The thing I think that video in my previous post marks out is that what makes coronavirus so incredible is that we are looking at it “in just that way”, which is to say, that we are seeing something through a particular ability or manner.

I am a layman, so I could be entirely wrong in my interpretation of this, but…

What I hear the doctor saying is that what we consider the flu is just a few instances of pathogen in a vast array of contagions that cause people sickness, either cold or the flu or various other types of illnesses. Coronavirus is the name for a particular set of viruses that cause symptoms, that cause sicknesses. The reason why we often hear it called “novel coronavirus” is because it is a new mutation of a type of coronavirus. Coronaviruses are around all the time and people get sick from them all the time, it’s just that the scientific community is relatively familiar with these various types of coronaviruses, influenza, the common cold. But the one that we’re calling COVID-19 (corona virus disease discovered in 2019) is one that we’re not familiar with, a mutation that we aren’t very familiar with. We aren’t really sure what it’s going to do because it’s a new type of mutation.

But what the doctor in the video is saying, I think, is that given any cycle of various types of viruses and pathogens that cause sickness, such as respiratory sickness or digestional sickness, there are thousands of such pathogens that enter the human biome and then exit the human biome, routinely.

The scientists monitor this cycle of growth and recession of hundreds if not thousands of pathogens all the time. During these cycle they kind of make an educated guess about which pathogens we are going to have to concern ourselves with. For whatever reason, this particular cycle had a “novel” pathogen that was taking place more than what they were counting on, what we were paying attention to, what we were expecting; the novel coronavirus fell outside of that kind of usual monitoring. So they decided to start monitoring it.

And what they found was pretty much the same as the flu. Yes it is more contagious than the flu, and is more intense, but the way that we stop spreading the virus has less to do with how contagious this is (what is inherent in itself) then it does with preventing that we get it (what we do about it). How contagious a particular pathogen is doesn’t say anything about whether or not I’m going to get it. The determinant of whether or not I’m going to get it has to do with the situation that I am being.

Nonetheless, statistically, I think he is pointing out, almost the same percentage amount of people that die from any other similar sickness are dying from the coronavirus and just as well, people that are getting it is not too much larger than any other type of pathogen of this kind. The difference is that we’ve just somehow decided to pay more attention to this particular novel pathogen in any given cycle.

I’m not sure exactly how true that may be because if people all around my neighborhood are suddenly getting sick to where they can’t go to work and function that in itself shows that there’s something slightly different going on with this one.

But from a statistician point of view…

…the doctor is really saying he’s not really sure how it happened that everyone got so excited and worried about this particular pathogen because if you look at any other pathogens throughout the world they’re all pretty much doing the same thing; that is, a small percentage of people are dying from it, a somewhat larger percentage of people are getting sick from it, and a vast array of people are carrying it around, or are positive for it, but are not really getting sick from it.

And we probably need not mention Miellassoux’s remark about the reason why the world should hold together for any amount of time, for we should expect that we would be walking down the street one day and all of a sudden everything changes beyond comprehension or completely falls apart. Well, that’s kind of what happened with the coronavirus, and indeed that could happen at any moment due to the nature of nature. 

Anyways…

So, as I said in a previous post, the question really becomes about the climate. And it really begs the question of, less perception or how people’s opinions or beliefs might affect how they act, and more about how ontology, how a person’s being is in-formed by a fundamental way of viewing the world which then allows them to see what Is real.

Innoway it is more philosophical, which is to say, how being is, as opposed to religious, theological, or epistemological, which is to say, what we believe, how we feel about those beliefs, and how we might analyze objects of knowledge that are feeling-belief.

The reason why it is nonsensical to argue something like “everyone is being hysterical”, or “The corona pandemic is not real”, it’s because the reference of those sentences is too imprecise to really address what is occurring so far as real reactions real perceptions real occurrences in the world.

Indeed, the word “real” and “reality” necessarily designates something that must be dealt with, an imperative, something that not cannot be dismissed by a wave of the hand, Or a whim of witty intellectualist thinking. It is a manifestation of concrete material.

Indeed if I fall onto the sidewalk without putting my hands forward I will probably hurt my face and bleed. And even while there is no argument that can be put forth to ever prevent that same fate every time it occurs, there are ways of thinking, ways of speaking, ways of acting that could alter the situation so that the event happens at different times, more or less, or not at all. So by analogy, even while the coronavirus pandemic may be blown way out of proportion, it is indeed blown to the proportion that it is, and indeed blew the way that it did blow. We surely must take precautions. Just because something might be blown out of proportion, as a way of speaking or understanding the situation, does not necessarily mean that one should not take account for it and act accordingly, yet also that one should be able to make an argument for why it is not the way it indeed is. Not how it appears, as though it is an illusion. And this is exactly because it is real. The question becomes more about the tools we are using to address reality. Less about perceptions and belief.

To address the situation as if it’s some sort of an illusion is kind of like trying to use a scalpel to hammer in a 4 inch nail. Not only is the tool (the tool we call ‘illusion’) inappropriate to the task, but also, it could work given a certain condition of application and time. These two possibilities do not really correctly reduce to one or the other because to approach the scalpel with the need of hammering in a 4 inch nail into a 2 x 4, by all reasonable and sensible standards of knowledge, amounts to nonsense, in this analogy that I’m putting forth here. But in fact, the tool called ‘rationality’ is also imprecise to move to describe why a common occurrence could cause such an “irrational” response (along the same argument of ‘illusion’), because then we are attempting to exclude the real situation of how most people are able to see the world and their role in it, which is to say, what human beings’ purpose is in the world as a teleological signifier for what they (the individual) is and supposed to be doing. What most people ‘think’ is more like a instinct (inthinked? Perhaps a phenomenological theological tenet?)

The scalpel is an imprecise manner of approaching the nail. However it might “know of it” never does the nail “do” what it is by applying the scalpel. Of course, we can create any sort of meaning we want of hammer and nails and scalpels–the post-modern phenomenalist loves to come up with all sorts of interesting perceptions upon things and situations and see those as foundational to everything. But the assumption there, in a way, is that scalpels must always be able to hammer in large nails. The phenomenalist refuses to see the nail as the nail simply because he sees what he is able to view. Sure, I could use a scalpel to comb my hair with, but it is an imprecise way to comb my hair. Lol. It is not ethically wrong, it is simply a limitation that defines the objectivity of the phenomenon, in the same way a nail defines itself, and a scalpel. It is about an ability to respond.

Presently, as I have argued elsewhere, the Traditional categories and methods that we use for philosophy are no longer sufficient to grasp , contain or communicate the situation that we are coming upon so far as knowledge might relate to what the world is, or the Being of the World.

So Again, we can begin speak about the climate of world and knowledge. 

x

Here Is another flu/corona comparison article.

Reason and It’s Other

Reason and It’s Other

Reason and It’s Other
— Read on retphi.com/2019/05/03/reason-and-its-other/

The example.

Conventional philosophy insists that there must be a unitive reason in order for philosophy to function.

I think that many people read “the questioning of reason” to mean that anything else has to be something “not reason”. I say that this is a fundamental mistake in the estimation of what it is to be human, and I propose that there is another type of reason that does not reduce to that conventional philosophical unitive category. Either/or is one manner if discerning what is reasonable.

This is to say that if we are going to get anywhere philosophically then one would need to begin to see that what I am identifying as conventional philosophy is providing a certain function for the real world. And that to invoke a different reason does not thereby negate the function that conventional philosophy is enacting. Another reason can provide a different, and just as valid, function, including for the function “Reason”. What ever reasons Reason outlines, there can be another set of of Reason that is reasonable, without offsetting or proclaiming the ‘first’ reason invalid; this is the non-philosophical finding of Laurel: only the ‘first’ kind of Reason functions through invalidating it’s subjects.

Tis “other” function, though, is historically devalued to nothingness and negated through the conventional theological motion.

In order to get anywhere, one would need to suspend judgement and wish to see what is outside of its ontological (cosmological) surety.

Tangent: Bad Faith, Part 3

Ok, time to get serious. One has to have the time, see, to get really serious because when one gets really serious, things tend to get really funny, so funny, that most people will hardly have the time, so serious they are about having such a little amount of time. But thats a joke.

Bad faith is about being seriously serious. What is serious, as I have said earlier, is that which confronts one’s mortality, and the biggest threat that one has is, what I shall call, the Object. The Object is that which impedes or confronts the subject. If I am talking about something in particular, I have addressed an Object, and to the extent that I might think that I have actually indicated somthing else, something that is not the subject, I have barred the subject from existence because I am speaking about a particular object. This is the problem of duality.

Most people understand duality, but it takes a little more consideration to come to the point made earlier: Religion is the convetional effort to overcome duality. The typical and most overt analogy to what I am talking about is Heaven and Hell, Nirvana and like religious doctrines. This kind of overcoming duality is where the person puts-off the overcoming of duality to the ‘moment’ of unity, which usually means (but not always) ‘when I die’ – they go to heaven. The duality is overcome by ‘kingdom come’; this is to say that this duality is overcome by the complete negation of duality called that which is ‘after-life’. This is the very secular way of speaking about this effort: and we call it ‘Religion’. One will find continuing with my essays, that convenetion mimics, or reflects, what is true, but does not actually get to or reveal anything true in itself beyond its own ability to suspend truth in relativity, which is to say, in duality.

But that route is to easy; it is too easy to point to religion, or believers, or, the faithful and relieve or justify oneself as to one’s belief. I am talking about truth, not relativity. Yet, here is the difficulty: I cannot say that a ‘unity’ is the truth either. Unity, or a One Universe, as I have said in another post, is just as a religious proposition as heaven and hell. In fact, I can only say what is true in reality, and reality is determined as conventional.

So, again, it is not truth that is at issue. If the truth is at issue then one is in a conventional negotiation. The investigation into the truth of an Object is a conventional negotiation of reality. When this effort is taken as substantial, that is, as what I shall call essential, or basic truth, as that which informs and has nothing else or prior that informs it – when we have an effort into the truth of an object, an effort that is taken under a premise that it has something to contribute to an essential truth, as opposed to contributing to reality, as if reality is de facto truth – and this is to say, when the effort is supposed to contribute to an essential truth of objective reality, we have what is conventional: we have a religious undertaking: we have meta-physics. We have an effort that is made under an assumption that is the assertion of the true Object. Furthermore, and this is key: The true Object is always transcendant: it is never found, the truth of it is always the objective. An effort which proposes to find a true metaphysical proposition is a real contradictory effort; it proposes to find the transcendent and bring it down into the world as an object, so it thereby can be immanent, and this would be the true Object. Every real motion which proposes this objective against a truth is a metaphysics, and as such a proposal elicits maxims, or actual truths, it proposes religious truths called dogma. The conventional secular world avoids its religiousness by discursive slight-of-hand, and calls its ( as opposed to Religious) doctrines as ‘ideological’; in other words, it finds the truth of reality by segregating religion from itself: it thereby cannot be a metaphysical (read, ‘false’) reality, but the reality it proposes is thus the True Reality.

Hence we have come to the most solvent presentation of what religion is. Such a presentation explains a feature of human reality without recourse to any other discussion. it contains all rebuttal; we have thus what can be called truth. It is real because it cannot be otherwise and be communicated, but it is not of reality because it explains reality: it is true, it has no prior or other referent but itself. This explanation is thus the ground of any discussion that concerns religion. Every other explanation inevitably must fall to this explanation as its premise. Conventional reality posits a transcendent true Object by its very motion, and because of this fact, what is true of reality is that it is a religious proposition.

We have found a fact of reality; a fact is that which is real, and what is real cannot be avoided except through denial. A life lived in denial is, by definition, lived in Bad faith. When we can come to a full acceptance of such a disclosure of the single person in the world, then we might be able to get somewhere. Until such disclosure is accepted, we will only make decisions based upon a mistaken apprehension of reality.

We can now rejoin the discussion upon the question: why do I say that Francis Laruelle’s project of Non-Philosophy is in bad faith ?

* * * A Further Tangent.

What I am taking about is the strange, offensive notion that whatever is there is entirely contained in knowledge. If one has an open mind, this can easily be demonstrated: attempt to describe some object to someone so that they know exactly what you mean. At some point in this excersize I bet that you will not be able to convey what that thing is without referring to an underlying assumption that that person is human. At some point you will invaribly point to it, or say it is like this or that, or say ‘you know’ and will begin at some point to almost urge that person to understand what you are trying to indicate, you will try to convince that person that they really do know what that object is. Eventually, if the other person does not give into your urging or your compelling to agree with the common humanity, you will give up under the justification that this excersize is stupid or the other person is just being obstinate. But the fact of the matter is that there is only the object there, as a true object, to the extent that both parties agree that some reasonable amount of information has already been given before the exchange had even begun; there was already an established ‘scheme’, if you will, ‘matrix’ of meaning or understanding, knowledge, that supplies the true object prior to the interaction. Yet, as one proceeds to attempt to uncover what this knowledge is, or try to find some pattern or orderly sense to the scheme or matrix, they only find a further aggrivation of the scheme. At each juncture where the investigator comes upon a ‘truth’ of a situation, a true thing there, he or she has found only faith; they have found only the margin of thier encompassing belief, that which establishes for them thier identity as a human being in reality.

Of course, what we have now a days is a new faith; we have a world where people have given up the investigation into what is true and returned to the effort for the true Object – but, this is not because there is no truth, but because thier investigation is founded in convetional methodology: religion.

And it is not difficult to see this everywhere.

(But part of the problem I am explicating is this ‘new’-ness. As if people ever were ever not interested in attaining the Object.)

Ill let this soak for a little while now…