++> Continuing dialog between Frank Masingill and David Martorana
 ++> on "Value Measures etc. +"
 
 DM>> Again we have more the nice sound to meaning than THE nice meaning
 DM> itself.  There is NOTHING to indicate that even the process of man's
 DM> participation in a/the "flux of divine presence in eschatological
 DM> directions" has any significance at all, an even chance of being a bit
 DM> nothing-ish.
 
 FM> O.K.  I would have thought you'd examine the assertion a bit more
 FM> precisely. It doesn't take a whole lot of energy just to say "that's
 FM> what you think" or "that is all hogwash."  If history DOES have a
 FM> knowable meaning and Voegelin is wrong rush me the outlines of the
 FM> knowable meaning or structure we're all able to discern.  I'm not
 FM> averse to knowing how it's all going to turn out. But, I'm sure
 FM> you're aware that it will have to be so tight that nobody anywhere
 FM> can dissent and describe some other "knowable" structure.  I never,
 FM> BTW, EVER knew Voegelin to sacrifice intellectual energy for
 FM> "niceties." The Louisiana State University Press, where he taught
 FM> only a relatively few years, is not publishing his entire life work
 FM> because of a few "nice-sounding" utterances.
 
  "Niceties" can be most complex and difficult to isolate from self
  satisfied visions of truth. What is pleasing to thought has less
  trouble getting invited into truth than what is unpleasant. I believe
  you oversimplify the meaning some. "NICE SOUNDING utterances" are not
  always published, but wandering in the head of thinker/author, can be
  the quiet motivation of product. Bye the way, I do not think "anything"
  is all hogwash, but like perception itself, must be seen in its weakness.
  As you've gathered, I am not comfortable with absolutes and tend to
  squeal a bit when confronted by anything that even hints at it .
  I'm an open ended relativist at my best (on the mountain), and just
  plain careful in everyday life (in the anthill). As to history having
  "a knowable meaning", I **sort of**  believe that if it does, the "man
  twitch" is so small a part of it as to not count (except as in a
  possible role as intelligent robotic facilitator of an unknown agenda).
  It is hard for man to sense himself nothing, so he works very hard to
  invent a something to give him meaning. That such a role makes "rational
  sense" in my head, only illustrates my distance or even isolation from
  popular thought.  Voegelin might be right, wrong, or somewhere in the
  middle. *Many* think, muse, labor to write it down are quoted through
  history and actually know little more about the "aboutness" than you
  or I or the poor soul that spent his life in the mines of Tura, never
  even having seen the sun. My point is that in a transient circumstance
  of highly questionable consciousness, to feign much about knowing,
  teases the limits of humor. That does not say we cannot KNOW (or know
  some little something), only that we must wink at being serious about
  it. I know it is not easy to dialogue a moving target, but you try to
  fence me in a bit (not as bad as John does). It takes me a long time
  to unfurl, even to myself.
 
  FM> I don't think either Spengler or Toynbee came up with such a
  FM> meaning although Toynbee obviously gave some weight, finally,
  FM> to the world's four higher religions.  Jaspers didn't either.
  FM> Both Berdiaev and Chardin appear to have insisted on SOME meaning
  FM> but they were hesitant to describe it in any apocalyptic
  FM> extravaganza.  Both knew too much of philosophical studies.
 
 DM>> I hold the "nihil" as a valid point on a compass ....a serious
 DM>> direction. I also acknowledge the other compass points but am forced to
 DM>> overplay that particular point because it is so often pushed aside by
 DM>> positive ""opinions"" as to make it seem the compass only has three
 DM>> points .....kind of like your compass !
 
 DM>> Most move beyond the primitive "nihil" stages as perhaps one day I
 DM>> will also.
 
 FM> Nothingness as a point on a compass??  What, pray tell, is difference
 FM> between a "primitive nothingness" and a "sophisticated nothingness?"
 
     Not sure we're on the same vibration here! "Nothingness" is a
     dilemma I'm still unable to grasp ...and may always. I assign it
     a compass point as to know its a direction not to be forgotten.
 
 FM>> I can fully understand.  The gnostic mass movements of the centuries
 FM> since "enlightenment" have filled the horizon massively and they are
 FM> both political and intellectual. Renunciation of them was made
 FM> intentionally difficult because reality DOES clearly involve the desire
 FM> to know and so it furnishes in these confusions of symbolisms competing,
 FM> attractive "totalities" or "systems."  It is difficult to approach the
 FM> conclusion that they may be, like Nietzsche's "changing of masks"
 FM> something of an invitation to turn from the "disputing with shadows"
 FM> toward the more uncertain realm in which gratefulness is entertained for
 FM> the blessing of science and faith (not as assurance) permits an escape
 FM> from the "institutions, secular or religious" and a search for
 FM> existential order beyond "mere opinion."  There is certainly no escape
 FM> from history for history is the reality which must be lived and died.
 
 DM>> Yes! well understood and well said...... Now you catch a glimpse of my
 DM> cantankerous need for room and balance to move around in ...away from
 DM> popular positive mind-candy  however sacred, or draped in historical
 DM> robes, or even mystified by "faith".
 
 FM> Well, you do not analyze far enough for much of a glimpse.  What
 FM> is meant by "positive mind-candy."
 
      Mind candy would be that complex of goads behind nature's masks
      to keep us intellectually healthy (on it's own alien scales). We,
      as mind, are squeezed between evolved chemistries and highly selected
      forces of input almost all determined mostly beyond our control,
      permitting precious few, if any, to actually think anywhere near
      free. I believe our comlex of self delusions so powerful as to be
      evolution armed/born.
 
 FM> Is this a critique of Comte, the father of Postivism or not.
 FM> It is a bit difficult to know because you seem, David, only
 FM> to make brief statements that are designed for what?  Shock?
 
   My comments sometimes hope for serious humor, but as far as I
   know, are not destined to shock, most especially as I see you
   serious in dialog.
 
 FM> Nothing, as far as I know can be mystified by "faith" unless one
 FM> gets to form some special meaning for faith.
 
     Having grown up in a large Catholic family my best feel for "faith"
     is in itself the grand "meaning of meanings"  all of knowing and
     God, into a single mega focus bigger than any human definition. In
     it, the entire "life experience" can be mystified. Your more cautious
     use of the term might be more dictionary or even have other points
     of meaning. I personally hold it away as too seductive in its
     kinship to illusion ... But! would in the future limit myself to
     Webster. I had somehow taken the notion through your postings that
     your knowing of faith was like the Catholic mega focus, much larger
     than an everyday meaning.
 
 FM> Do you imagine that I'm intellectually cramped?
 
     NO!!! Not cramped, but you are your best when you soar on those
     few occasions when you can be what you've learned without quoting
     it!
 
 FM> It may be true.  I prefer to think of it as a bit of discipline
 FM> and unwillingness to buy into the possible validity of every wind
 FM> that blows.  I prefer History as something of an anchor.
 
    Yes!     We pick and choose our winds and anchors......
 
 DM>> Philosophy and its many cousins of evaluation, have a good mind-feel;
 DM> and has been brightened by evolution into a hungry button in our nerve
 DM> system. Also?  the "nothing-ish" conclusions might be in error or partly
 DM> so. There are ever even third-ish possibilities that meanings may be
 DM> other than  "nothing" or the "somethings we have invented them to be,
 
 FM> Sounds like an assertion that no one should ever leave the realm of the
 FM> figures on the shadowy wall disputing shadows because it might be more
 FM> fun than an existential tug in the direction of more reality than is
 FM> found there.
 
   NOT SO! I love exploration and quest ......Its more that I realize that
   one notion of fun shadows on a wall will likely be different but no more
   of value than finding a new cave with different shadows ....or even a
   bright "CAVE" where you might see the images full face.  You have some
   difficulty separating my reason from my reach. It is fun to know more,
   but I'm not greedy ....and every morsel is pleasing!
 
 FM> That is a bleak prognosis for education but perhaps no more bleak
 FM> than the actuality, come to think about it.  I prefer to help the
 FM> golden cord with a slight push.  It doesn't hurt anything or anybody
 FM> as far as I can discern.
 
     Yes .....sounds good to me....  I especially like your
     "love of wisdom",  though I'm not far enough along the learning
     curve to know what "wisdom" actually is.
 
 DM> "Attunement to an order of being" is relative to all the slippery edges
 DM> of consciousness. To say it has nothing to do with "mind-feel",  is at
 DM> best optimistic and at worst naive . Also! I may be incapable
 DM> of seeing your "faith" reach more than "sugar-plumish", but time might
 DM> well expand my vision. As I have said, or will, I don't have it all
 DM> together .....yet!  The only one that "scratched"  my thinking some
 DM> along such lines was Teilhard de Chardin, who still  after many years,
 DM> whispers into my thoughts (much as I TRY to keep him  out!).
 
 FM> "Optimism" and "Pessimism" are words along with "Altruism" beloved
 FM> of the Positivists because they sound as though they have reached
 FM> beyond the confines of a restrictive past.  Faith, however it is
 FM> defined, is not MY faith as though it was some invention of MY mind.
 
     I believe it is a quality of YOUR mind however invented or
     placed there .....and not simple to say of.
 
 FM> It is what led Chardin to be intellectually quite comfortable in
 FM> quieting any libido dominandi that would DEMAND a MEANING in ULTIMATE
 FM> REALITY that had to be PERSONAL.
 
     I am comfortable with Chardin and his prism of insights, though
     I find him scary ...his being able to reach out ...to touch me!
     .....a rather rare and awkward experience for me.
 
 FM> He said he was quite satisfied to be only a part of ultimate reality -
 FM> not necessarily a recognizable separate personality.  He felt no need to
 FM> "personalize" the extending of "salvation through grace in death."
 
     Like said, he is the best mind I've ever encountered. If ever I
     was to choose as a way of thinking ....his words would choose to
     mentor what might grow from me into soul .........but not yet!!!
 
 FM> I find that admirable in a confessed Christian - something I'm not
 FM> certain I could claim to be.
 
 FM> You place a great deal of emphasis, it seems, on "feeling."
 
     NOT really so much .....it is just that I sense it as the
     dominant pigment in the paint recipe we coat upon the realities
     in our sand box.
 
 FM> I would join with Goethe in saying that such enters into a full
 FM> experience of the world (he said it in so many words when he said,
 FM> in effect that whether or not he might be a monotheist, a polytheist
 FM> or a dualist depended on whether art, morality or something else
 FM> predominated at any given moment.
 
 FM> I sense that you take the position more often than not that YOU are
 FM> carefully analyzing matters while the other party is merely following
 FM> some favorite and nice-sounding feelings. If that is more comforting
 FM> for you then you should declare that up front and at the beginning,
 FM> David, so that the other person in the dialogue will know what to
 FM> expect and that her/his/its thought is not going to be measured very
 FM> carefully or analyzed very much in detail but is going to be more or
 FM> less shrugged off with a few well chosen phrases.
 
     Yes! "up,front" I read and reason what you say as best I can,
     in hope my responses are returned in kind.  Perhaps!!!  you
     expect more from me than I am. You are much further along an
     academic learning curve that at my age, I'll never reach. You
     have already forgotten what I have yet to read.  If ??? I can
     achieve some "well chosen phrases", I am most most happy for
     that ........!
 
         Perhaps one day i would also "love wisdom",  __
         or at least like it alot ...........!!!  /cc\ ... Dave
--- Maximus/2 3.01
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