Sophia speaks - Bruce Alderman

[Neelesh Marik]

Six grammatical categories that underpin philosophical approaches: pronouns, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and prepositions – are understood individually and then woven into a quasi-holographic, integrally philosphemetic formulation of metaphysical pluralism, enacting the principle of non-exclusion. 

Some questions and comments that come up for me both for personal clarification from you Bruce and potentially useful for the discussion forum:

While the role of Integral calculus in dispelling the ‘myth of the given’ is commendable, does IT manage to avoid the epistemic fallacy which occurs wherever 'being' is reduced to our 'access to being.'? Students of Bhaskar may throw some light please. This was a stated objective of ITC 2013, was n't it? I wonder if any other paper covers this.

Is OOO, by virtue of its centrality of the object, positing that even heaps and artefacts have all four quadrant dimensions of being (proto-consciousness etc)? 

Adjectival philosophy treating quality as primary – here does a distinction need to be made between inanimate objects such as the 'warm, yellow sun', and a sentient person (3p) with essence (A.H. Almaas) that is both unqualifiable and a verb-noun? I think that distinction is made later with reference to Cittamatra and bundle theories?

Also the attributed nature of quality is necessarily linked to state (or the temporary mediating endo-structure) of the ‘attributor’ at the time of attribution? 

The differences in the emphasis on the person vis-à-vis the situation between the English and the Japanese could be a good indicator of the individualist/ collectivist tenor of the culture? (Hofstede’s IDV dimension, and perhaps even MAS and PDI)

If we subscribe to the ‘illusion of free will’ theory, then in some sense, all processes are ultimately non-owned processes in an individual level, but perhaps co-owned at an supra-individual level (dominant monad of a socio-cultural holon, which essentially self-organizes without an agentic central controller)? This also seems consistent with Being singular pluralism and centrality of the ‘with’ in co-essentiality. 

Big question: can the embodied and enactive role of grammar in being ontologically resonant and potentially revelatory, move the needle a bit on what is mystically referred to as the ‘ineffability problem’? Matters that need deeper study – perhaps while dwelling on other papers, include Whiteheadian concrescence, Bonnitta Roy’s processual model, Latour, and the effectiveness of Rescher’s process semantics and Bohm’s Rheomode in helping us create a new language to shift our narrative?

I have to say that personally for me, just dwelling on the adjective-noun-verb inter-linkage in silence offered a fabulous meditation experience in which all three parts of speech blended into a phenomenological experience enormously rich, multi-dimensional and ineffable beyond the grammatical categories themselves. Perhaps with some more state-and-stage training, the simultaneous contemplation of all six will take 'the bottom out from under the bucket'!

Thank you Bruce for this gift. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Recall this from the Latour thread:

A clue may be found in the Gifford lectures. At 44 he notes that we need a concept regarding the modes, "what in which they expand."  It is the non-formatted space, what James called the multiverse. That is, the multiverse is anterior to when actants are contextualized within a mode. And this speculation is of import: "The multiverse itself might be discontinuous" (52.) Which of course takes us back to the initial thread post, where "variation itself that has to be considered equivalent to true beings. Alterity alters yet another degree. Difference differs even more differently." And how this non-formated multiverse nonetheless, again using James (and Souriau), can be understood with prepositions which are "neither an ontological domain, nor a region, territory, sphere, or material." They are that which "prepares the position...to what follows." Remember how I compared image schema here, which are embodied and pre-linguistic, and upon which various linguistic and philosophic modes build. And my suggestion to Balder that indeed prepositions as extensions of image schema might indeed be not just another mode (or part of speech) but what 'integrates' them in a sense.

[Edward theurj Berge]

In this post of the same thread Balder replied:

As I understand Latour's use of prepositions, they do not demarcate a particular mode of existence, but rather prepositions are modal themselves, meaning they demarcate multiple and various modes of existence,  with their various and multiple ontologies.  Which suggests (as I think Layman indicated also in his feedback to me) that an approach which looks to parts of speech as organizing lenses and forms of ontology, as I did in my paper, is itself a kind of "prepositional" strategy.

I need to reflect on this a bit more, but initially, I think we can justifiably refer to prepositions both as just "one" among other parts of speech, and as "that" which pre-positionally (or adverbially) informs a parts-of-speech-as-ontologies model itself.  I say they can be considered the former because there are non-negligible differences between prepositional philosophies (based on "with" or "toward" or "in," or many of those together) and those based on other parts of speech.  On the other hand, it seems there is a prepositional (or adverbial) spirit or sense to the move which reaches out and "connects" the parts of speech in and as participants in the "dance" of onto-choreography.

[Balder]

Wow, thank you; I had forgotten making those comments.  Yes, I agree with me! 

(And with what you are suggesting...)

[Balder]

Yesterday, synchronistically, I came across an interesting passage on schemas and pre-positioning in Sallis' The Logic of Imagination.  I will type it up when I have a moment.

Balder said:

Wow, thank you; I had forgotten making those comments.  Yes, I agree with me! 

(And with what you are suggesting...)

[Edward theurj Berge]

Yes, I went into some of Sallis in this post. An excerpt:

"What is needed is a logic that addresses the originary openings in which things first come to show themselves, a logic of schemata, spacing, and imagining.[...] Sallis identifies several schemata (spatio-temporal determinations) such as simultaneity and spatial proximity that correspond to various logical categories. In each case the key feature is the yoking together of contradictory terms in a unity that neither destroys the terms nor cancels either of them."

In this post is Sallis ruminations on khora, akin to my own. For example, in this passage he is discussing khora's relationship to 'elementals,' aka image schema:

"Khora hovers on the very edge of nothingness, never showing itself as itself, but only in conjunction with the presence of the elemental bodies, as a trace of 'something,' which can never itself be made present. It is thus 'something' very much like what Derrida named différance: an originary spacing and 'differencing' that presence presupposes and that, as a condition for the possibility (and paradoxically the impossibility) of presence, can never itself be present."

[Edward theurj Berge]

From the first link in the last post:

"Elementals are neither things nor properties thus 'the law [traditional logic] that would govern the belonging of properties to things has no bearing' (151). Instead elementals provide jointures and horizons of things, disclosing their fundamental event-like nature. Thus the elementals and imagination share a special bond, as the imagination gathers and holds together the spatio-temporal dynamics of the elementals."

[Edward theurj Berge]

The word horizon then associated with this poetic expression:

I see a ghost on the horizon
calling me to follow.
When I get there
loose rags on a tattered fence.
I look up and he's still there
on the horizon, beckoning.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Definition of event horizon:

noun Astronomy
the boundary around a black hole on and within which no matter or radiation can escape.

[Balder]

Yes, the passage I plan on typing up deals particularly with the role of elementals in imagination.  As you likely recall, Michael Schwartz first recommended Sallis to me when he reviewed my paper, seeing in his work (namely, The Force of Imagination and The Logic of Imagination) a particular affinity with the grammatical model in "Sophia Speaks."  I've yet to fully explore or digest either book, but will try to better integrate them into my further work on this topic.

[Edward theurj Berge]

And of relevance from this post, which of course reminded me of the Sallis material in the very next post:

So here's what Museque said to me:

"You're still seeing ISs as a fixed entity within a hierarchical relation. Whereas what you're calling ISs is a much more particular and general process between each and every level of any holarchy. It is that space between the boundaries of any two suobjects, that place where they exchange material and information. It is general in the sense that it is at every boundary, and it is particular in that it is specific to any given relational exchange. We might even call it, per Edwards, that mediating sign (Word) the allows communication between each. In humans it expresses as ISs; between other suobjects we'd call it something else."

A semi-accurate image for this is those fractal thing-a-ma-bobs that are so popular. Except that they are too pretty and symmetrical. Museque tells me that like onticological mereology each interation of a fractal boundary between suobjects is not the same, so the picture would be much more rhizomatic, diverse, each sign unique yet still a sign. A unique particular while also being a like general. A same/difference, as it were.

Still, how this expresses as an endo-structural organization is not clear, since the latter is supposed to be on the inside of a suobject, not in its exo-relation. But as I argued in the OOO thread, this inside/outside, endo-exo distinction is too crisp in Bryant, that perhaps ISs themselves are not just on the inside but are in fact in this boundary between. Where differance* is that transcendental pre-condition betwixt in and out, up and down, inside out and back again. Which of course changes everything. How though this can be 'structured'** is still beyond me. More consultation required.

* Aka my gal Khora, another name for Museque, the former being the more general, the latter specific to me.

** And perhaps it is not at all structured, being the unstructured space for Spenser-Brown which can only be inferred via the most tenuous of traces.

[Balder]

I posted this elsewhere a few weeks ago, but I will share it here as well.  (We're touching on points 4 and 5 right now):

One of my main questions now is, where to go from here?  I expect (or, at least, I hope) I will get some feedback from the larger integral community on this once the paper appears in Dancing with Sophia, and that may help set the direction for what follows.

For now, I have several things I would like to work on:

1) Identifying more exemplars for each of the Six Views.  (For instance, I had considered including Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality as a modern example of an adjectival integrative theory or meta-theory -- and I did mention it in my presentation -- but I need to learn more about it before I can do so [and before I decide if it really qualifies as such].)

2) Playing with, and developing, the graphic examples I provided at the end of the chapter -- interfacing the quadrants with different grammatical philosophemes, for instance.  What would a more developed and detailed AQAL prepositional analysis look like?  How useful is it?

3) Beginning to define some heuristic principles for onto-choreography. 

4) Reflecting more on the special role that prepositions play.  In a previous paper, I had already noted the prepositional orientation of AQAL (tetra-enaction as embodying Nancy's "with" and "being singular plural").  Layman suggested early on in his feedback to me on "Sophia Speaks" that a prepositional view seems essential to any integrative orientation.  Joel Morrison, after reading "Sophia Speaks, "said he would identify his own integrative model (Interface Philosophy) as prepositional in deep spirit and nounal in "frontal" languaging.  Theurj has found affinity, too, between a prepositional view and his own post-Derridean reflections on khora and differance...

5) Further exploring the relationship between my grammatical-philosophical "elements" and "elements" as they appear in Sallis' work.  (Michael Schwartz has pointed me in this direction.)

6) Simply trying to "test run" the model as developed thus far and then make adjustments as needed... 

There are other things I'd like to do as well (as I've been thinking about a book on this topic), but this is a good start...

For those who have read this paper, do you have any suggestions for further exploration or development ... for "what's next"?  Are there any ways that you might want to use the ideas introduced here?

[Edward theurj Berge]

I've been posting my own reflections of material similar to yours which would fit more into the 'what next' category rather than focusing on direct feedback to your paper. I did the latter more in our email exchanges and if you can find and post them here that would add context to my tangents.