Weird Studies/Radical Mystery

15 Apr 2022 05:19 - 25 Nov 2023 05:58
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    • One of those more philosophical episodes where I have this reaction of extreme frustration; I feel like the hosts are onto something very close to my own views but just different enough that it causes dissonance, like if you play two adjacent piano keys.
    • In this case they are dealing with one of the fundamental principles of Weird Studies, Radical Mystery, which seems to be something like: the cosmos is inherently mysterious, and in a way that goes beyond mere unknowability. Some quality baked into the foundations of reality makes it weird, or mysterious (not quite the same thing but related). This manifests in paranormal phenomena like UFOs.
      • Taking that stuff seriously is where I get out of the boat, but OTOH the hosts take great pains to emphasize that the paranormal can't be studied by science, because its too idiosyncratic and unrepeatable. Given that, my science-nerd self can't really object, although I'm not sure what you are supposed to do about it. Weird shit happens, it can't be predicted or reasoned about, so, what are you supposed to take from it?
    • They were talking about a certain kind of experience – forget the term they used, but when objects take on a certain intensity, a thisness, a presence to them. I've experienced that on psychedelics, and its one of the more striking phenomena, I've always wanted to understand it better.
    • First there is a mountain Then there is no mountain Then there is
    • Plotinus, the problem of the undescended soul.
    • In Soto Zen, no awakening , just practice (but there is a diversity of opinion)
    • Spiritual practice should be a confrontation with death with no guard rails. Has to be dangerous to be a real initiatory experience.
    • Listening to the podcast itself is such a dangerous act – to be born and die to oneself... This Is It. Um, OK, this doesn't feel that dangerous but maybe it is, maybe I am risking my sanity (or at least my identity) by ingesting all this stuff and trying to take it seriously.
    • Elsewhere

      • Radical Mystery: A Preliminary Account | Patreon
        • Radical mystery holds that mystery is not merely a contingent flaw in the state of our understanding, some lapse in knowledge to be supplied at a later date. Radical mystery asserts that the unknown — the hidden, the obscure — is not a lack at all but a positive and unexpungeable quality of things and events. Mystery inheres even in saying there is no mystery: I have long suspected that Richard Dawkins is a trickster sage, whether he knows it or not.
      • JFM's Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice book, the very first sentence:
        • Art is the name we have given to humanity’s most primal response to the mystery of existence. It was in the face of the mystery that dance, music, poetry, and painting were born.
        • art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms.
        • This exaltation of art makes me want to go all Henry Carr
        • Art breaks down the barriers that normally stand between the physical and the psychic
        • Ah OK this means AI and computationalism is a competitor; it breaks down those barriers in a different way, or aims to.
        • I guess my problem with this book is, OK, art is great, important to human life. That's not a very original observation. Nor is it that there is a lot of crap (aka artifice) pretending to be art and displacing it. All else being equal, yay art. What is this book telling me that is new?
        • Samuel Coleridge described the imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception." (in Biographia Literaria (1817))
        • Human consciousness has access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy. I will refer to it in this book as the “imaginal,” the name Henry Corbin gave to the intermediate realm, central to the cosmology of the Sufi mystics, between the rational mind of Man and the inscrutable mind of God.
        • Something in me resists (a bit) the idea of the imaginal as a realm, a space analogous to phys space that you can explore. I mean, I suppose it is a good metaphor but it is at best only a metaphor.
        • Didacticism exists in the “high arts” as well. Conceptualism, to cite just one example, is art that gives the concept—that is, the intellectual idea—primacy over the affect. While it can produce works that make important political points, often in clever and ingenious ways (think of Banksy or the early Damien Hirst), it seems to achieve the aesthetic emotion that Joyce ascribes to proper art only in very rare cases. That is, it tends not to astound us with the ineradicable mysteriousness of things (in fact, many conceptual pieces come with a written explanation that spells out the meaning of the work).
          • He's down on conceptual art, I guess unsurprisingly. A bit midwit? My own first and only artwork The Ultimate Lesson is conceptual, but not particularly moralistic, didactic, or political.
        • Ch 3 gets into Kant which is where I get off the train. JF is not a Kantian:
        • The role of the artist isn’t to manufacture illusions of meaning in a meaningless world (as a Kantian might insist) but on the contrary to excavate the real meaningfulness that lies hidden from the egoic mind—and to do this even if the meanings uncovered aren’t things we can humanly understand...For Kant and modern rationalism, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. For Aquinas, Joyce, and Wilde, it is the other way around: beauty exists as a fundamental reality that we, as beholders, can come to witness as something larger than us.
        • Modern art mutated the idea of beauty in a good (radical) way.