In reply to Wtf?
If I understand what you mean by ‘utilitarianist’, I think what you are sensing from my mode of expression, a kind of collection of de-valued words.
There is, in my writing a ‘devaluing’ of words as signifiers as associates with the relational view; i.e. the value that Western culture puts into ‘things’ kind of ‘fades away’ into the relational context that is the ur-source of value of the ‘thing’. The value and meaning shifts from the content to the relational space inhabited by the content, so that the words become 'humble' and simply there for their 'utility' [leaving the ineffable power of the relational space of becoming full credit for everything instead of using words pompously as if they signified what it is that makes things the way they are.]
This is actually what Machean physics suggests; i.e. that the ur-source of things is purely relational. Your question relates to other questions, which I shall get around to, by people who see ‘empiricism’ in terms of ‘tangible evidence’ such as;
“You really believe that empiricism is a sense? It's testing observable data! Nothing else.” this question is here.
This questioner assumes that he can jump from empiricism as ‘knowledge acquired from observation or experimentation [i.e. ‘experience’]’ to ‘observable data’. observing and experiencing is ‘sensing’ and it does not specify that ‘there is something out there’ that we are sensing. This is where the philosophical split comes in between ‘non-dualism’ and ‘dualism’. Berkeley’s empiricism is non-dualist as is the empiricism of Mach----Buddha-der-Wissenshaft, Nietzsche, Poincaré, Bohm, Schrödinger.
This is what comes of understanding the universe as a continually transforming relational, spatial plenum where the foundation of it all is ‘becoming’ as in energy-based field-flow wherein the tangible, visible, ‘lumps’ in the flow are concentrations of energy (recall that Energy = mass times the square of the speed of light; i.e. we can think of material things in terms of resonances in the flow of continuously transforming flow of energy).
In this view, these forms that appear to be ‘things-in-themselves’ are instead, flow-features or energy-concentrating resonance features. Anything that we identify as a material thing can be more deeply understood as a resonance feature within an energy-charged flow-field, whether we are talking about atoms or organisms. These ‘things’ [resonance features] are like storm-cells in the atmosphere; i.e. they are purely ‘relational’ rather than ‘existing in themselves’, therefore we cannot ‘measure them’ because they don’t exist [they are made of relationships], but WE CAN MEASURE THEIR VISIBLE FORMS. For example, we measure the radius of a hurricane as the distance from centre of the vortex [the vortex belongs to the flow-field or ‘plenum’] and we measure the pressure in the centre of the vortex which is a property of the flow-field or atmospheric plenum. Just because we impute ‘thing-in-itselfness’ to the ‘cell’ and give it a word-label name, ‘Katrina’, and speak of the changing radius in terms of ‘Katrina’s growth or development’, does not ‘make’ the ‘cell’ a ‘thing-in-itself’. As Nietzsche points out, IT IS US who upgrade the ‘Ding an sich selbst betrachtet’ (‘thing considered in itself) to a Ding-an-sich (‘thing-in-itself’).
THIS IS PURE ABSTRACTION THAT DEPARTS FROM OUR SENSING. In fact, this amounts to the abstraction of ‘absolute space’ because at the same time that we unilaterally declare the flow-feature to be a ‘thing-in-itself’, we declare its independence from the space it is living in, and thus, we declare space to be an absolute fixed, empty and infinite container or uninvolved theatre of operations for absolute ‘things-in-themselves’ to cavort and interact in. God is dead, we have murdered God (the sacred natural source) as Nietzsche says, and the new ‘sacred stuff’ is ‘material being’.
Whereas the ultimate source of everything was the purely relational ‘flow of becoming’ which the aboriginals call God or ‘the Great Mystery’ which is ‘immanent in nature’ [immanent in the continually transforming relational spatial plenum ... aka... ‘the becoming’], once we impose our abstractions of absolute thing-in-itselfness and absolute space, ... with the help of language or ‘linguistic idealization’, ... then we have ‘killed the ultimate source of everything, the purely relational influence that is immanent in the flow, and since it is no longer to be found in the natural world, the natural world now becomes purely mechanical and based on ‘what things-in-themselves do’ in an absolute fixed, empty and infinite container-space, the ultimate source must now lie ‘beyond nature’ in the ‘heavens’ beyond nature, hence ‘monotheism’ as in the Western religions; Christianity, Islam, Judaism, ... or, ‘atheism’ combined with ‘nihilism’.
So, the philosophical question of ‘non-dualism’ and ‘dualism’ crops up in the question, ... er, ‘truth declaration’, on empiricism
“You really believe that empiricism is a sense? It's testing observable data! Nothing else.”
The word ‘data’ in ‘observable data’,... is that not ‘the plural of datum’?
“The word data is the plural of datum, neuter past participle of the Latin dare, "to give", hence "something given"” – Wikipedia
Who or what is the ‘giver’?
If we observe the atmosphere from the viewing instruments of a satellite, we might count one hundred or more ‘storm-cells’, but are these cell not ‘features’ of a more complex tapestry or ‘continuum’ that is interdependent with ocean currents [as in la niña and el niño] and the circulating lithosphere and its volcanics and solar irradiance cycles etc.
We can observe the cells because of the water vapour that serves as a ‘tracer’ that gives visibility to a purely relational swirling in the flowing relational-spatial plenum. The water vapour shows up mostly where the turbulence is [invisible water vapour condenses in a pressure drop]. There is also ‘clear air turbulence’ that we can’t see, with the unassisted eye. This turbulence is purely relational as in fluid flow, it arises from the interference of flows in different direction. It is part of the overall ‘tapestry’ of space that is interdependent with those parts of the tapestry that we can see with the unassisted eye. In other words, the fragmentation that we mentally interpret from our human sensing continually moves towards the ‘tapestry view’ as develop new sensing tools that are capable of seeing more than human sensing can, suggesting that the world of our human sensing it fragmented due to the limitations of sensing which only informs us very spottily, so that we use language to convert the spots into ‘things-in-themselves’ and economize on our description of the world by starting with the spots and re-rendering dynamics in terms of ‘what spots do’ [‘what things-in-themselves do’].
The ‘clear air turbulence’ to someone in an airplane is like God-jerking-you around, but with a laser beam and using the doppler effect, you can map out a visible image of various types of purely relational physical ‘cells’ of turbulence, ... which continue to fill in part of the relational tapestry that we can’t see ourselves.
So, giving names to those things our senses inform us on so as to impute ‘thing-in-itselfness’ to them and then re-rendering dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ is going to put some warps in the physically real tapestry, to be sure.
THE ECONOMY OF SCIENCE.
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i. It is the object of science to replace, or save, experiences, by the reproduction and anticipation of facts in thought. Memory is handier than experience, and often answers the same purpose. This economical office of science, which fills its whole life, is apparent at first glance ; and with its full recognition all mysticism
in science disappears.
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Science is communicated by instruction, in order that one man may profit by the experience of another and be spared the trouble of accumulating it for himself ; and thus, to spare posterity, the experiences of whole generations are stored up in libraries.
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Language, the instrument of this communication, is itself an economical contrivance. Experiences are analysed, or broken up, into simpler and more familiar experiences, and then symbolised at some sacrifice of precision. The symbols of speech are as yet restricted in their use within national boundaries, and doubtless will long remain so. But written language is gradually being metamorphosed into an ideal universal character. It is certainly no longer a mere transcript of speech.
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Numerals, algebraic signs, chemical symbols, musical notes, phonetic alphabets, may be regarded as parts already formed of this universal character of the future ; they are, to some extent, decidedly conceptual, and of almost general international use. The analysis of colors, physical and physiological, is already far enough advanced to render an international system of color-signs perfectly practical. In Chinese writing, we have an actual example of a true ideographic language, pronounced diversely in different provinces, yet everywhere carrying 'the same meaning. Were the system and its signs only of a simpler character, the use of Chinese writing might become universal. The dropping of unmeaning and needless accidents of grammar, as English mostly drops them, would be quite requisite to the adoption of such a system. But universality would not be the sole merit of such a character ; since to read it would be to understand it. Our children often read what they do not understand ; but that which a Chinaman cannot understand, he is precluded from reading.
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2. In the reproduction of facts in thought, we never reproduce the facts in full, but only that side of them which is important to us, moved to this directly or indirectly by a practical interest. Our reproductions are invariably abstractions. Here again is an economical tendency.
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Nature is composed of sensations as elements. Primitive man, however, first picks out certain compounds of these elements --- those namely that are relatively permanent and of greater importance to him. The first and oldest words are names of "things”. Even here, there is an abstractive process, an abstraction Even here, there is an abstractive process, an abstraction from the surroundings of the things, and from the continual small changes which these compound sensations undergo, which being practically unimportant are not noticed. No inalterable thing exists. The thing is an abstraction, the name a symbol, for a compound of elements from whose changes we abstract. The reason we assign a single word to a whole compound is that we need to suggest all the constituent sensations at once. When, later, we come to remark the changeableness, we cannot at the same time hold fast to the idea of the thing's permanence, unless we have recourse to the conception of a thing-in-itself, or other such like absurdity. Sensations are not signs of things ; but, on the contrary, a thing is a thought-symbol for a compound sensation of relative fixedness. Properly speaking the world is not composed of "things" as its elements, but of colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.
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The whole operation is a mere affair of economy. In the reproduction of facts, we begin with the more durable and familiar compounds, and supplement these later with the unusual by way of corrections. Thus, we speak of a perforated cylinder, of a cube with beveled edges, expressions involving contradictions, unless we accept the view here taken. All judgments are such amplifications and corrections of ideas already admitted.
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3. In speaking of cause and effect we arbitrarily give relief to those elements to whose connection we have to attend in the reproduction of a fact in the respect in which it is important to us. There is no cause nor effect in nature ; nature has but an individual existence ; nature simply is.” --- Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development’
So, Mach does an able job here, of exposing what is going on in beyond our initial ‘sensing’ of the tapestry-continuum that we, the sensing observer-experient are included in.
‘Empiricism’ only means that we are basing ‘what we know’ on what can come by via our sensory observing and experiencing. Mach’s point is that;
“. Properly speaking the world is not composed of "things" as its elements, but of colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.”
Berkeley held a common view.
So what is the complaint about Berkeley and Mach’s empiricism all about; i.e; the complainer cited above, goes on to say;
“Point is, if you're going to claim empiricism I don't care how famous of a loon you are you need to demonstrate your claims empirically. Berkeley didn't, he was trying to use empiricism as a way to hide from the fact that the immaterial could not be justified, and so he used the most ridiculous claim in the world that the material doesn't exist. Well, every sense tells us differently so, that's a pretty shitty empiricist. Now back to getting us empirical data of all of your claims!”
Evidently, this complainer believes that ‘material exists’ without ‘sensing observer/experient’. If it exists, we can put a name label on it and call it ‘the God particle’ or the tree or whatever, ... spots of the tapestry [the purely relational flow of becoming] that are of interest to us, partly because we can see and touch them, which doesn’t meant that they are ‘things-in-themselves’ aka ‘material objects’, as Mach points out. There is lots of stuff we don’t see, like ‘clear air turbulence’ which obviously has its place and its influence within the overall interdependent connectness of the tapestry of continual relational spatial becoming.
Of course, the complainer who is assuming that ‘material objects’ or ‘things-in-themselves’ exist without any observer arriving to observe them is the ‘materialist’ or ‘realist’ view which dominates in the rationalist Western world and which places ‘Mach’ on the other side of the divide as a ‘heretic’, ... as ‘Buddha der Wissenshaft’, who deconstructs the ego and would have us see ourselves as purely relational units of perception rather than as units of absolute being.
It is not that Berkeley or Mach are saying that ‘nothing exists’ until we perceive it; i.e. as if the world were totally invented in our minds. Mach clearly states that;
“nature has but an individual existence ; nature simply is.”
What they are saying is that ‘sensible objects’ do not equate to ‘local material things-in-themselves’. Instead, they are a relatively persisting basket of qualities available to our senses. What the world is beyond those relatively persisting baskets of sensable qualities, we do not know, but all indications are that what our senses inform us of isn’t the half of it, and that if insist in trying to do what Humpty Dumpty could not, to impute ‘thinghood’ to all the fragments [things-in-themselves] that we have concretized ‘sensible objects’ into, and figure that we are going to be able to make up a story that will bring all of these things back into some purportedly meaningful ‘mechanics’, we are nuts.
That is, ... and this is where ‘utilitarian’ may be coming back into it, ... in a world of continual becoming where all ‘sensible objects’ are purely relational flow-features [resonance structures] within the flow, like ‘clear air turbulence’ or convection cells, Western society has invested its values in ‘local material things’ as if they were the meaningful things. As Mach observes;
“Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view. He can at one time disregard the most salient features of an object, and immediately thereafter give attention to its smallest details; now consider a stationary current, without a thought of its contents (whether heat, electricity or fluidity), and then measure the width of a Fraunhofer line in the spectrum; he can rise at will to the most general abstractions or bury himself in the minutest particulars. Animals possess this capacity in a far less degree. They do not assume a point of view, but are usually forced to it by their sense-impressions. The baby that does not know its father with his hat on, the dog that is perplexed at the new coat of its master, have both succumbed in this conflict of points of view. Who has not been worsted in similar plights ? Even the man of philosophy at times succumbs, as the grotesque problem, above referred to, shows.” --- Ernst Mach, ‘Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical’
Has a Western man never become so fixated on pussy and tits that he misses seeing the spirit of the woman? Are there men who would put their cock through a slit in a tent, lured by a sensuous female voice coming from inside the tent, and proceed to ‘make love’ to whatever animal the woman inside has backed up to that slit in the tent? Vagina or anuses are all the same if you put a tent over them. Is a woman a bag of skin built over and around a vagina, to give you something to grab hold of and get some leverage as you deal with the vagina? Is a woman a vagina with handles on it, some parts of which prove to be annoying distractions like the noise-making hole in the front of the head?
My point is that we have ‘context’ and ‘items of content’ and we have this philosophical problem as to whether context [purely relational] defines ‘content’ or ‘content’ defines ‘context’. This gets back to the ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ problem.
If we think of the woman in terms of her being outside-inwardly created, as in ‘heaven in a wild flower’, or as Emerson says;
“Whilst a necessity so great caused woman to exist, her health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which she transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which her genius can act.”
Our sensory interaction with her or any ‘other’ becomes a cosmic experience.
Watch what happens to the words of language as relational context becomes ‘the thing’ that ‘relates onward and outward’ into the universe in which we are all included. The local ‘words’ lose their ‘local’ power and value.
In our Western mode, we are ‘celebrity worshipping flag-suckers’ as Hunter S. Thompson puts it. That is, we impute value to the ‘local thing’. But the celebrity icon is not the source of her own value; i.e. she is not a powerful thing-in-herself, but such power “consist in the fidelity with which she transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which her genius can act.”
Nietzsche captures this sense of outside-inward sourcing of the flow-feature or ‘sensible object’ in his criticism of nationalism and racism;
“256. Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality-craze has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe, owing also to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who with the help of this craze, are at present in power, and do not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude policy--owing to all this and much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most unmistakable signs that EUROPE WISHES TO BE ONE, are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted. With all the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the real general tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls was to prepare the way for that new SYNTHESIS, and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future; only in their simulations, or in their weaker moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong to the "fatherlands"--they only rested from themselves when they became "patriots." I think of such men as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: it must not be taken amiss if I also count Richard Wagner among them, about whom one must not let oneself be deceived by his own misunderstandings (geniuses like him have seldom the right to understand themselves), still less, of course, by the unseemly noise with which he is now resisted and opposed in France: the fact remains, nevertheless, that Richard Wagner and the LATER FRENCH ROMANTICISM of the forties, are most closely and intimately related to one another. They are akin, fundamentally akin, in all the heights and depths of their requirements; it is Europe, the ONE Europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly, outwards and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art--whither? into a new light? towards a new sun? But who would attempt to express accurately what all these masters of new modes of speech could not express distinctly? It is certain that the same storm and stress tormented them, that they SOUGHT in the same manner, these last great seekers! All of them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears--the first artists of universal literary culture--for the most part even themselves writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the arts and the senses (Wagner, as musician is reckoned among painters, as poet among musicians, as artist generally among actors); all of them fanatics for EXPRESSION "at any cost"
This ‘expression’ that Nietzsche speaks of, does not come from ‘within’, but from ‘without’ as in Emerson’s statement. In his review of different types of people in Europe, and in his criticism of anti-semitism, he points to this same need to define things from the outside-inward; i.e. the continual shaping of things is from the outside-inward;
“The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe, they know how to succeed even under the worst conditions (in fact better than under favourable ones), by means of virtues of some sort, which one would like nowadays to label as vices--owing above all to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before "modern ideas", they alter only, WHEN they do alter, in the same way that the Russian Empire makes its conquest--as an empire that has plenty of time and is not of yesterday--namely, according to the principle, "as slowly as possible"!
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...Meanwhile, they rather wish and desire, even somewhat importunely, to be insorbed and absorbed by Europe, they long to be finally settled, authorized, and respected somewhere, and wish to put an end to the nomadic life, to the "wandering Jew",--and one should certainly take account of this impulse and tendency, and MAKE ADVANCES to it (it possibly betokens a mitigation of the Jewish instincts) for which purpose it would perhaps be useful and fair to banish the anti-Semitic bawlers out of the country.
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...It stands to reason that the more powerful and strongly marked types of new Germanism could enter into relation with the Jews with the least hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from the Prussian border it would be interesting in many ways to see whether the genius for money and patience (and especially some intellect and intellectuality--sadly lacking in the place referred to) could not in addition be annexed and trained to the hereditary art of commanding and obeying--for both of which the country in question has now a classic reputation.”
Emerson made a strong impression on Nietzsche, and their non-dualism permeates in all of these thoughts, captured by Emerson in terms of the individual forming out of the transmission from the vast and universal to the local point; i.e. the individual IS the universe expressing itself, in the manner that a tornado manifests energy and power from the vast and universal transmitted to the local point on which the powers of the vast and universal can act.
Relational context defines content. There are no ‘items of data’ sitting there waiting to be picked up on our ‘sensory radar screens’, there are only the continually transforming spatial-relationals that our sensory radar imputes ‘being’ to, when we cast our eyes on it and take the package of sensings to imply ‘someTHING’.
So, as far as utilitarian goes, in our Western culture we invest value in ‘things-in-themselves’ so that we impute the source of the celebrity’s power to ‘them’ just as we impute the power of the tornado to ‘it’, as if the source of the power resides ‘within it’, when the physical reality is that the power derives from the relational space it/she is included in. If you insult a powerful celebrity, their fans or goons will rip you to pieces, not them. It is not the eye of the hurricane that the source of the beating it is going to give you, it is the power that the hurricane is transmitting from the vast and universal that is going to get you.
Picture a matrix of words where certain of them shine brightly like bright stars and others are lack-lustre. The Western view is to focus in on those ‘bright things’. But as with storm-cells in the flow of the atmosphere, picture instead that the many relations the ‘star’ is included in are the source of the star’s brightness. This is the ‘transvaluation of all values’ that Nietzsche is talking about,... and Mach. The powerful man at the centre of authority is transmitting power from the vastness of you and the rest of the herd to the point on which his agency can act. But we say ‘he is a powerful man’.
Utilitarianism makes items of content ‘look drab’; i.e. it takes the piss out of authority, or ‘it takes the ‘mickey’ out of authority, where ‘authority’ is the ‘item of content’. [‘take the piss out of’, to humble or belittle] . As Mach and Nietzsche maintain, one has to demolish the ego to see the ‘brightness of the local star’ as deriving from the web of relations in which he is included, wherein he derives power in the sense of transmitting from the vast and universal that which can be applied locally.
“We can only truly respect highly the man who is not seeking himself” Goethe to Rat Schlosser. ... There is a saying among the Chinese that mothers really teach their children: siao-sin, “Make your heart small!” --- Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’
What happened to all the good stuff that was in the bright stars of local content? It didn’t go away, it simply retreated into the relational space that is the primary ground of physical reality.
These ‘items of content’, these ‘bright stars’ of ‘local things-in-themselves’ for whom ‘the sun shines out their arse’ are mental illusions that we invent by RE-PRESENTING our sense-impressions, using linguistic idealization. These local factual ‘data’ are not out there waiting for us to pick them up on our radar equipment, ... we make them up in our mind as economical ways of presenting the much more complex 'relational' physical reality.. Mach has described the process above. It is an economy of thought which is very useful, so long as we don’t confuse it for ‘physical reality’.
If we confuse our sensings THAT WE RE-PRESENT as local facts, ... for 'physical reality', ... then we get the 'materialist' view of 'empiricism' of the above-mentioned complainer, who sees our knowledge as deriving from sensing TANGIBLE LOCAL DATA that he imputes to be 'local material facts that are already out there. There is no tangible local data out there [this would split apart our 'sensing-mind' from 'the material world out there', there are bundles of sensa or relational nexa. That's the way it is in a relational world, a world of continual becoming, a transforming relational spatial plenum.
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