Being and Becoming
My dearest Khalid,
Language is a "Bad" Substitute For Thinking
I surely enjoyed your letter, comments, especially your deliberations
and questions. Continuing our philosophic discussion, indirectly I will
try to explain some of your queries;
but as I already warned, the scope is wide, and we can only concentrate
on specific central issues at a time. Of course, all the ideas expounded
here are the intellectual and rational products of the daily experiences
and praxis of a lifetime. They are all based on and related to real life
experiences. Deliberately, I am using simple expressions and everyday language
to reflect the subject matter with scientific and philosophic incision
and precision.
However, because Thinking, Thought and Philosophy have
very little to do with Words, Sentence Construction, Grammar or
Language, - no matter how simple or complicated they might be,
- you will notice, that although very simple concepts are used here, also
a simplified teaching style, yet your brain cells will be strained to their
utmost by the time you are finish reading this lecture. The text
will get very boring, although it contains the same fire and brimstone
as in the previous three lectures. This has very little to do with the
subject matter; it concerns the damage which ideology and the havoc which
formal logics had caused in our mind. In fact, what follows is very exciting,
simple and straightforward; very easily, an energetic 15-year old with
a healthy body and a sane mind could immediately be able to understand
its train of thought and logics. If the contrary would have been true,
I would not bother to waste my time writing this lecture.
Introduction into Philosophic Basics
All across the process of human thinking, of philosophy, certain basic concepts were s e t , simply placed or put hypothetical. For this reason, Hegel placed Nicht (Not), Sein (Being), Werden (Becoming) and Nichts (Nothing); similarly Heracleitus put Panta rhei (Everything flows) or Parmenides set Hen kai Pan (One and All).
To be a n d to exist as a philosopher, you need episteme (Science) a n d logike (Logics), in other words, you must have an epistemology, a "theory of knowledge", a gnosis, in its original, archaic meaning, i. e., you must possess Knowledge, Kenntnis, Erkenntnis.
The Credo: "I believe ..."
Even in Theology, Christians, as belief,
set the Holy Trinity (God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost). And
as you know never ever any of the above scientifically or philosophically
can ever be proved, verified or discovered.
In spite of all the feudalist "proofs" of the existence of the Holy
Trinity, Religion, in any case, is not compatible with
Science and Philosophy. Believers need no proof, everything is revealed
to them. It is as easy as all that: no brain strains, no headaches. This
is why billions on earth are staunch believers, you need no brains to believe.
This is also the reason, why nearly everybody in discussions begin their
sentences with the Credo: "I believe
..." Just listen and look around, and you will be surprised how many believers
live on this godforlorn planet.
With "normal human beings", especially the "man on the street", nearly everything which they talk about are set, postulated; for example, human being, man, woman, love, democracy, justice, heaven, hell, destiny, good, right, time, space, etc. If you ask anyone to explain with precision what the above words mean, then you put them in shambles; the connotations which they use in everyday language are all simply taken for granted; they suppose that anybody knows what they talk about. And generally, even university students have no problems, unless somebody like me or Socrates asks them to explain what they mean; only then they stand there brainless and thoughtless. Some will run to a good dictionary - that is where they got the meanings from anyway -- ; others will appeal to general knowledge which they have received since the cradle; others will declare me to be crazy for asking such stupid questions.
Know Thyself! Know What You Talk About!
The fact of the matter is that the "world" and even the "human being"
are experimental, hypothetical. We do not know what Time and Space really
are or how they exist; and based on this ignorance, we still do not know
from where we came, when we came, what we are, how we exist, where we are
going, and when we are going there. If you know anyone who has answered,
can answer, and will be able to answer the above questions, then, of course,
everything which I ever wrote to you is pure hum-bug; pure nonsense. If
not, then this is the context in which you and I are experimenting, are
thinking about the questions and answers concerning Being
a n d Becoming, Essence a n d Existence,
Nature a n d
Society, Science a n d Philosophy.
The Odyssey towards Thinking
An important philosophic flowing "starting-point" along this Odyssey
of human enquiry was given to us by the "great" patriarchal thinkers like
Plato, Aristotle, Kant or Hegel.
All philosophers worthy of this designation A PRIORI
s e t their basic concepts, related
to concrete being a n d abstract existence, and as such they
need no explanation as yet.
Hegel does not need to verify his Being or Nothing, when he sets them at the beginning of his Science of Logic. And no thinker, no philosopher, would ask him to do such a thing. As I said before, an experiment, a hypothesis, needs no verification a priori, only a posteriori. Of course, the philosopher, from the very beginning knows what he or she or it is talking about; it is for the student to accept first, and then to verify later, as the debate continues. Who does not verify his hypothesis a posteriori is simply religious, an ideologue, a believer, a theologian.
All basic philosophic concepts like Being, Becoming, Nothing, Essence, Existence, Quantity, Quality, Maximum, Minimum, Intensity, Extensity, Time, Space, History, Society, Nature, Cosmos, Repose, Movement, Relation, Relative, Absolute, Substance, Form, Phenomenon, Subject, Object, etc. have all been s e t by various philosophers across the ages; nobody has ever seriously, in a historic-emancipatory manner, verified these hypothesis. To use and abuse them to sow ignorance, to generate exploitation, domination, discrimination and dehumanization, this is certainly not scientific-philosophic verification.
Even Life and Death are such hypothesis; luckily never ever anybody
had died and had returned to explain to us how Death looks like.
Hence not even Death is verified a posteriori.
Whether we live or whether we are alive, not even this is scientifically
and philosophically cock-sure. That we live a n d die every
"millimetre" a n d every "millisecond", this is a hypothesis
worth scientific a n d philosophic verification. Who seriously
tried to verify it? And, if someone would do it, what would happen to our
conceptions of History and the Fatherland? And Globalization, Intellectual
Property Rights
and Mars Colonization? If, like in the case of God Almighty,
the Alpha a n d Omega, Life a n d Death are interrelated,
are two sides of the same coin, who still would be bothered about an End,
about a Happy End, about Death, about the End of History, Science and Philosophy?
Obviously, our apparent zig-zag and tic-tac "existence" determines
our unilinear Birth - Life-Death Nightmare, our Hen Kai Pan Vision. The
only problem is that it is another ideological, religious fairy tale.
As Horatio had put it:
"There are more things in Heaven and on
Earth than are
dreamt of in your philosophy".
Shakespeare certainly was smelling a stinking rat in this patriarchal Space-Time Unilinear Continuum.
As was noted in the previous lecture, not so long ago, for ages scientists
had taught us that the world is flat, and that the Earth is the centre
of the Universe. And we believed them. What do they teach scientifically
now? And again, billions believe this. And what will they tell us in the
next millennium?
And again, we will repeat the Credo.
Thus there is no problem in setting any concept, and in giving it its approximate hypothetical experimental content; not in a formal logical manner, but in an experimental hypothetical process. We can formulate maximal or minimal concepts; we can develop categories, axioms or laws; we can discover formal logics, unilogics, dialogics, trialogics, dialectics, and who knows what all. But all of them are based on our principal thought elements which we have set a priori .
Some philosophers set
a single thing, for example, Water,
Fire, Logos, God, Hen kai Pan, Idea, Absolute Idea; others
s e t two or more, for example, Earth,
Wind and Fire, Water and Air, Form
and Substance; Empedocles had four, Anaxagoras five. Well, WE for
the "time being" can postulate three basic "flowing
starting point" concepts: Cosmos,
Einai, Nothing.
(For further information: see our Web Sites).
Do a n d Think It Yourself, Here a n d Now !
Thus, if we want to think, we better "start" from scratch, as the Guyanese say: "We better do our own thing!"
Summing up: Although we PLACE, PUT or SET our principal concepts ourselves; nevertheless, we have not invented special words; in fact, we derived them from the major patriarchal philosophic concepts; but we have given them our own thinking content; our connotation you will only find partially in an excellent dictionary of philosophic work; we always try to include all previous meanings of a specific concept, but we activate, accelerate and surpass it, hence reproducing a new meaning and content. Also this applies to all our levels, degrees and mensions of scientific a n d philosophic expression.
Moreover, instead of Concept and Category, we operate with a Unigory, e.g., Cosmos, Essence, Object, etc. (our levels); with a Diagory, e.g., Cosmos a n d Einai, Essence a n d Existence, Object a n d Subject, etc. (our degrees); and with a Triagory, e.g., Cosmos a n d Einai AND Nothing; etc. (our mensions). With unigories you think simply and unilaterally; with diagories you are forced to think dialogically (dialectically), you think of two things "at the same time a n d in the same space", something which is simply impossible in formal logical ideology, because of its dualistic non-contradictory nature.
With triagories you think uni-, dia-, and tria- logically; all at the "same time" a n d "in the same space", which simply means that you drive the typical formal-logical, spatial-temporal ideological "thinking" ad absurdum ad infinitum.
The Invisible, Invincible Principle
Because all formal logical thinking, all ideology is accumulated, included, neutralized, atomized and surpassed in our own philosophy, we always know with exactitude what patriarchal thinking is all about, we see their visions in proper focus; but they, unless they become us, do not have the foggiest notion, no "idea" what we do a n d think. This is what We have called the "Invisible, Invincible Principle".
Evidently, We are still trillions of light years a n d zillions of atomic mega time units away from the " Invisible Invincible Emancipated Historian", but we are trying to excel, to surpass, to transcend.
My dear Khalid, I certainly "hope" that the above, somehow has
s e t you in the context of the complication and
difficulty to answer your serious questions. Surely this general philosophic
synthesis, will assist you in solving and resolving the problems all by
yourself. Definitely it will activate your neurons, deepen your thinking,
and reproduce even more complex questions. For now a n d here
a n d infinite, We wish you:
A Bad-Night a
n d Good-Day AND Experimental-Twilight!!!
Love,
Franz.
P. S. Separately, I am sending you a report on the current social, economic and political conditions in Venezuela. Please comment!