Dupes of Non-Physical

LaROUCHE


Humanism, as a practical way of describing such notions of Freedom/Necessity, begins with attention to the creative individual, whose inventions make general progress possible. Freedom means initially the conditions favorable to the discovery and propagation of new fundamental laws, new ways of doing things, by individuals. Humanism is therefore also occupied with the conditions required to produce such gifted individuals, the material and political conditions necessary to produce the numbers and varieties of gifted individuals society requires for maintaining the necessary rate of general progress. As a corollary, humanism is also occupied with the material and political conditions of the population more generally, its mobility, cultural development, and material preconditions of cultural development: that new inventions might be realized for practice by a general society culturally qualified to assimilate the conceptions involved in such practice. BP-LL-43


The evolution of man is absolutely contrasted to the existence and behavior of any of the lower beasts, chimpanzees included. In the lower beasts, including the higher apes, virtually no alteration in the range of behavior occurs progressively from generation to generation. The per capita caloric throughput and the rates of potential growth of that species of biomass material are essentially fixed - at least in range. With man, the physiology of creative mentation, exhibited in a more rudimentary fashion by Koehler's chimpanzees, has led to deliberatively synthesized new technologies, equivalent in effect to a species' deliberatively turning itself (by will) into a higher species (higher negentropic values). It is, indeed, man's study of his own progress through such processes of deliberation which makes possible and is scientific knowledge. BP-LL-45


Reductionist psychology locates the primary data of mind in mental events which exhibit the form of logic, in terms of discrete images or psychological material susceptible of being made conscious in the form of discrete images. Like logic, reductionist psychology accounts for the motivation of those images (elements) in terms of metaphysical notions of relations (e.g., "instincts", "drives", etc.). Even those forms of radical behaviorist psychology which pretend to deny the existence of "drives", "instincts", etc., do nothing more than rather hysterically ignore the necessary implicit assumption of such axiomatic "drives" in their schemas. We insist, on the basis of the kind of evidence cited, that the process associated with creative mentation is the "primary substance" of the human mind, and that all other mental phenomena are determined (subsumed) by those primary processes. BP-LL-45


A certain crude, empirical conception of physical science did of course exist prior to and following Kepler, but the advantage of Kepler over, for example, the outlook of Galileo is qualitative, not one of degree. Before Kepler, as with those who maintained or regressed to the pre-Keplerian thrust toward empiricism, the notion of the study of the regular order of nature was "pluralistic". Various categories of phenomena were treated as if separate categories of the Divine Will, within which narrow confines man could explore regularity through observation and experiment, hoping thereby to adduce the specific regularity of God's Will (Dispensation) for such classes of phenomena. Kepler cut through such pathetic forms of inquiry, specifying that the entire universe was subject to a single principle of lawfulness, which subsumed all other, more particular forms of law. Kepler expressed this view in the argument that God's infinite (i.e., unique, comprehensive, existent) Will was rational, i.e., susceptible of being mastered as human knowledge of even human individuals. BP-LL-46


This has the most profound implications. From this standpoint, we cannot regard great art of any medium as either mere entertainment or indifferent to scientific criteria. Art, as a medium for the concentrated expression of the creative faculty by artist and audience, addresses itself to that in the individual which is human, those qualities of mentation upon which the advancement of society, even the mere perpetuation of society, depends absolutely. To the extent that any form of art contains and expresses creative activity of the form of Freedom/Necessity, it is a special and indispensable form of universal labor; the artist, as the great abstract mathematician does in a different way, arouses and shapes new creative powers in the audience at the same time his work celebrates and strengthens those powers which are already matured.
By contrast, any art which is merely an application of established artistic canons, mere repetition of sensuous gimmickry without creative development (bestialized art: e.g., Rock, "socialist realism", etc.), is anti-human, reactionary. Art could not be a matter of personal taste-preferences; it is not personal tastes which properly judge art, but art which judges the mental condition reflected by the symptomology of taste. To the extent that any individual prefers Rock or serial-composed music to Beethoven, that evidence alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the individual has been bestialized in his self-estimation; no person could "enjoy" Rock or regard serial-composition as honest music unless his alienation had become sufficiently pathetic that he no longer even desired to recover those human qualities he has been denied. As for the person who "likes both Beethoven and Rock", that is sufficient, too, to prove that he has lost the power to listen to the content of Beethoven's music. BP-LL-53


In the composition of poetry, a similar process applies. The initial conception of a great poem exists for development as a mood and a snatch of some line, usually the opening line. The conception of the whole poem exists at the initial point of elaboration as a kaleidoscopic fabric of feeling-states, a would be Gestalt of such feeling-state patterns identified by that bit of thematic line. This is the subject of the poem. The poet unfolds the poem from this, words marching in phrase-groups, feeling-states and feeling-state clusters seizing upon the appropriate cathexis which comes to the fore from unfolding association with the thematic snatch of line. The end-result has ostensible symbology, metrical and other prosodic subtleties, such that from those isolable features foolish, banal critics may indeed attempt to fashion a logical interpretation, but their effort is pathetic. The intent of the poem's elaboration was to communicate to the reader the Gestalt from desire for which the elaboration began for the poet. This is more emphatically the case for great music - as we have already emphasized.
The primary feeling-state is love, the affective content and form of recall of the creative process itself, the invariant human quality of the mind. To understand the dynamics of love, one begins by inquiring as to what practical expression can be given to the direct calling forth of the universal for all particular expressions of social creative activity. Every detail dissolves; the mind is dissolved into pure creative ferment, the universality of the creative act. What, then?
We have emphasized that thought is the demand for an act. The omission of the act for the thought is a denial of the reflected benefit of the act for the identity, and correspondingly a dimunition of the identity. The force (emotion) of the thought would therefore seem to be in direct proportion to the force of reaction against the sense of identity (anxiety) experienced by frustration of the act. Experience substantiates such an hypothesis. Furthermore, it is demanded that the act must be in proportion to the force of the thought.
Then, what is the act corresponding to the "pure emotion" of love? What, but the intensely sensuous concretized celebration of creative sociality in general? The mood must seize upon a concrete individual as its object. Either a concrete universalizing (social) creative act - as a great work of art, or sensuous loving of a concrete (universal) person. BP-LL-84


The most efficient way in which to identify the distinctions to be made is this. In abstraction of ordinary consciousness, the control of mental productions and communications is associated constantly with notions of one's self. Perhaps the individual ordinarily does not reflect on this, and ordinarily is therefore usually unaware of the existence of these executive controls; it is not difficult to provoke such awareness (indeed, a skillful operator in a "therapy group", or in any group which can be directed to act as a "therapy group", can readily force the attention of virtually all participants to such "feelings" very quickly. Once one has done this several times, the ability to replicate the effect becomes almost automatic.) In ordinary states, the form of these notions of ego-ideals is what one would best describe as feelings about attributes of a monad-like "little me". In general, the instant one succeeds in "cutting through the persona" of an individual to force his reflection on these "feelings", the usual sensation experienced by the "opened-up" individuals is "I am a fraud". ("Original Sin"?) There is a more or less immediate recognition that the self one presents to the outer world is a synthetic character, a mere persona, a manufactured (e.g., artificial) product created for the propitiatory edification of the credulous. Thus, one's self as presented to the world is not "the real me", not the "soul". Very quickly the affected individual can begin to discover and detail "how I operate". Accompanying this enlarged awareness there is usually a growing depression, associated with the sense that the "real self" is a kind of monad, a "little me". The fact that such a monad could only be an empty construct forces the individual to regard the criteria "by which I operate" as necessarily the only existent qualities attributable to the "little me". Consequently, these being the same qualities associated with the production of the "fraudulent outer self", the persona, the "little me" is a degraded thing, intrinsically "unloveable". ("How could God love my miserable little soul?")
At bottom, in this respect, the effort to get at the "inner self" brings us, in the ordinary case, to a little hard ball, a monad of sorts, from which apparently emanate the qualities, the "feeling-states", "instincts", etc., which one otherwise encounters in cathexis in consciousness and semi-consciousness. Ostensibly, any effort to probe the self more deeply, to "get within" the monad, results in locating only an "it", an Id. In fact, precisely such results can actually be obtained.
When the same self-analysis is effected in the case of individuals in a state of self-conscious creative production, the phenomena of the monad are not obtained. The ego-ideal and the notion of "inner self" are instead united in a single quality. Examined more superficially, one could obtain the apparent result emphasized by Kubie. At first inspection, the idea of creative activity for its own sake is the ego-ideal, a form whose content is the activity of "negentropic synthesis" itself. Accordingly, if one studied artistic and other personalities who are merely creative, or only yet potentially self-conscious, one would tend to concur with Kubie's argument that the creative process must be regarded as a virtue in itself. BP-LL-78&79


What is thought? It is the judgment which is regulated by the increase or decrease of the sense of identity. One acts not merely to attain fixed objects, fixed sensuous acts, but to obtain those objects, actualize those thought-acts which mediate an increased sense of identity. In the pathological state, the force of judgment is regulated by an internalized babble of images, dominated usually by the mother-image. With small effort, one can bring up the mother-image either re-enforcing or reducing the sense of identity as an immediate regulator of "sincerity of feeling" in the adult. It is the same in politics.
In this sense, the neurotic adult must be systematically regarded as a pseudo-adult - either as the victim of individual neurosis or of that collective neurosis recognized as bourgeois ideology. His sense of identity is pathologically determined by childish fantasies, and not by self-consciousness of his positive basis for adult existence. By contrast, the revolutionary is essentially the only true adult by contrast with the pseudo-adult children about him. The neurotic loves his wife as a surrogate for his mother; the adult loves his mother and father not as internalized images, but as actual human beings, and loves his wife as an actual human being in her own right. He has put aside his mother and father, who become specially-loved peers on the outside of his identity, and locates his identity in the adult woman who has become the focus of his sense of identity. SI-LL-46


In the case of the individual clinging to the bourgeois infantile ego, either through the mediation of the mother-image or the love-object of a banalized sexual relationship, the experiencing of even a significant outpouring of the fundamental emotion is an experience of psychological near-death. The "threat" of the emotion is associated with the shrinking of the ego down to a "point", surrounded by a "Schwaermerei" of fragmented thoughts and feelings. In such instances, where they occur in a clinical setting, the problem is resolved by bringing the self-conscious identity to "wakefulness" at the same time that the individual is disassociated from whatever infantile preoccupations are causing strong attachments to the infantile ego.
One should add, for emphasis, that there is a direct connection between this sort of phenomenon and the remedying of even severe psychosomatic illnesses. Intestinal psychosomatic involvements and migraine headache syndromes are among the most accessible to remedy in this way. (Indeed, the variety of disturbances falsely deemed of organic etiology which are susceptible of remedy or significant improvement through analysis indicates that psychosomatic medicine is of far greater importance and engages much more of the realm of "organic" disorders than is usually admitted even by professionals. If the "organic" problem can be remedied or checked by psychoanalytical clinical methods, then the case for its probably psychosomatic origins has been strongly made.) The link between psychological disorders and somatic disorders shown to be connected to this psychopathology is through the mediation of the fundamental emotion, which is obviously linked to proprioceptive and ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) dynamics. SI-LL-63&64


There is no intrinsic "competition" between man and the biosphere of which he is a hegemonic part. Quite the contrary. The phenomena of "ecological crises" which we witness today are accounted for primarily by the dysfunctional primitive accumulation characteristic of capitalist development, and are not intrinsic to the industrial expansion and technological development otherwise characteristic of the social-reproductive process.
The development of society has brought us to the point, during the past ten thousand years, that human social-reproductive processes have taken over the biosphere to the extent that the very existence of that biosphere depends essentially on its willful maintenance and development as a part of social-reproductive processes. The notion that the ecology would prosper if man were to abandon it to freely resume some hypothetical "wild, natural" state is a simpleton's absurdity. Pull man out of the ecology, and a disastrous ecological collapse would quickly ensue.
Man has transformed the biosphere from a pre-human lower level of negentropic values to higher forms. In this process the earth has been transformed from a lower level of existence as a wild state into a higher level as man's garden. The higher state of the ecological processes represented by that garden could not have developed without man, and cannot maintain themselves without appropriate human activity. Remove the gardener or reduce his gardening activities to a level below that required, and the garden will deteriorate. To remove man or reduce his role is to deprive the biosphere of the key species on which the balance of ecology depends.
The problem is not maintaining the garden in some fixed present state. The present ecology as a whole is subject to the same essential principle as the first phases of the development of the biosphere. The free energy characteristic of living forms demands that the process of further development must continue or the ecology must turn into an auto-cannibalistic phase. Since the only means by which the ecology generally is able to effect the necessary progress is its human agency, a reduction in the negentropic activities of mankind (such as putting society into a "zero" state of negative, auto-cannibalistic reproduction) must result in a corresponding onset of auto-cannibalistic processes in the biosphere generally.
The general way in which ecological auto-cannibalism occurs is well known. It is broadly analogistic to the heuristic outline we gave for economic auto-cannibalism. The weakening of the conditions for the maintaining of higher forms of life in the ecology shifts the ecological values to emphasize the proliferation of relatively primitive forms which mediate the obliteration of the thermodynamically doomed higher species. The actions of insects, fungi, bacteria, and viruses as lower forms performing this mediating entropic function of auto-cannibalism are generally known, the elaboration of that here would be more entertaining than essential.
The essential point is that for thermodynamic auto-cannibalism, the process of decay is not a matter of the appearance of just one mode of auto-cannibalism. The action of the initial mode is to reduce the thermodynamic value of the ecology as a whole, lowering the "temperature", and shifting the mode to a lower, less efficient form of auto-destruction, and then to another. Like the economic model for fascist economy, the process of ecological auto-cannibalism is a chain-reaction. RF-LL-31&32


Reductionist biology locates the evolution of the species in the isolated biological individual, a hotly defended opinion in defiance of the relevant empirical evidence. An array of species (to put the point in broad terms) corresponds to a negentropic state of an entire ecology. The effect of shifts in populations of included varieties is to alter the negentropic state for better or worse. (The analogy to variations in specific commodities is slightly strained but not otherwise inappropriate.) An adverse result lowers the negentropic state, with corresponding effects on the plenum of species; an enhanced negentropy mediates further variations, which mediate further variations. Thus, the universal, the entire biosphere or specific ecology, mediates its own negentropy through the determination of the individual variety.
In economy, the determinant of negentropy is immediately located in the single creative individual. This individual is variously creative either in synthesizing new conceptions whose realization increases the negentropy of the economy as a whole, or "more passively" develops conceptions which enable him to master the conceptual innovations created by others. The material-cultural conditions of life determine the kinds of creativity of this import available to the society. In this way, realized inventions, by enhancing the negentropy of general material-cultural existence, foster the advancement of the creative powers of the population, which is then a potential for new inventions which are realized as further advances in the material-cultural negentropy of the society as a whole. CT-LL-4


Obviously, not every invention which might be made at any point is a useful solution to the problem of technological progress. Not only must the amount of useful energy per capita be increased by inventions, but we have to compare such an increase with two offsetting increases in cost of production. First, the cost of labor per capita is increased doubly: the ratio of productive workers from the entire population is reduced, in tendency, as by increasing the years for child-rearing, and the rate of consumption by each individual is absolutely increased in energy equivalents. Second, there is generally an increase in the absolute cost (energy equivalent) of maintaining the means of production. If we designate the cost of labor from households by its equivalent for a capitalist economy (V=Variable Capital) and the cost of maintaining means of production in a similar fashion (C=Constant Capital), and the residue after meeting those prime social costs as S or social surplus, we have again the now-familiar expression, S'/(C+V). The invention which satisfies necessity for development must at least maintain the value of that free energy expression, which it cannot accomplish unless the innovation has the universal content (as a reflexive chain-reaction) of an impulse for an exponential increase in that ratio.
Except to the extent that any society exists by looting nature without developing an equivalent resource, or that one section of society exists by looting another, exponential expressions for an increase in the impulse-value of the ratio S'/(C+V) are ultimately in correspondence with what we shall term a trans-invariant or "world-line" for human progress. Those innovations which satisfy that invariant or characteristic requirement have the effect of representing evolutionary solutions for the perpetuation of human existence. They have, therefore, the immediate content-value of free energy expressions satisfying positive exponential values for functions of S'/(C+V). These innovations satisfy the requirement of negentropy, and satisfy the rigorous definition of what we otherwise term freedom. RF-LL-33&34


The Three Levels of Human Consciousness:

Simple Belief is the level of individual judgment defectively based on narrow experience and informed chiefly by prejudices and mythologies, corresponding to the "man of woman born" of Christian doctrine, and the image of "donkeyness" common in the Renaissance. It was illustrated by Renaissance humanist artist Albrecht Durer in his Offer of Love, 1495.
Understanding is the level of judgment which comprehends fixed categories of scientific knowledge, corresponding to Christianity's enlightened state of knowledge effected by the Holy Spirit (Logos). Illustrated by a Durer woodcut showing two artists studying perspective, from his 1525 Treatise on Measurement.
Socratic Reason is knowledge based on the self-conscious comprehension of the process which characterizes the historical progress of scientific knowledge, a process identified in Christian theology with atonement in outlook with the Godhead, the creator. The humanist Durer depicted this level of mentation in his 1514 print, St. Jerome in His Study. SE-LL-13


The point of the Platonic dialogue is not to compare different views; if one attributes such a trivial significance to the Platonic dialogue, one condemns oneself to benighted ignorance forever. The object is to make one's own consciousness an object for, a subject of one's willful consciousness, to make consciousness an object of willful consciousness for itself. SE-LL-28


It is the ordering of the evolution of human culture according to the principles internal to scientific progress which is the primary feature of competent historiography, the standard of reference with whose governance we comprehend inclusively the failures of human history.
The key to scientific method, and thus to the mastery of both science and history, is the method of the Platonic dialogue. This is also properly termed the dialectical method, as such a method is associated with Thales, Heraclitus and Plato. SE-LL-36


The Platonic method rightly distinguishes three qualities of knowledge, mental levels, among people.
The first, lowest condition of the human mind is the level of simple belief, belief premised on popular mythologies and prejudices, and on the state of ignorance concerning individual experience otherwise known as "common sense".
The second, next-higher level of knowledge is equivalent to the condition of understanding defined by Immanuel Kant, the mere understanding. Persons at this level have consistent knowledge of the ostensibly lawful features of practice in certain, various categories of human practice in general. This is a condition corresponding to the lowest level of what may be termed scientific knowledge. Such persons do not know why such categories exist, or how or why the ostensibly lawful principles appropriate to such categories are determined. They have merely practical knowledge of consistent cause-and-effect features of practice in those categories of experience in which they have been educated.
The third, highest level of human knowledge is reason, otherwise termed Plato's Socratic reason. It is only on this level that truth can be efficiently comprehended.
The knowledge of the two lower levels is necessarily mythological, false, or, as Spinoza specifies, "fictitious".
For such reasons, the Platonics judged mythologies twofoldly. All mythologies they knew to be inherently false (fictitious), but no person could rise above mythologies except by attaining reason. Therefore, in dealing with masses living at the inferior levels of mental life, it was deemed necessary to deal with them on the terms of mythological beliefs. The issue of practical politics therefore took the task-oriented form of distinguishing among destructive and useful mythologies. Those forms of simple beliefs or mere understanding which tended to allow society to move in directions otherwise required by reason were deemed the tolerable class of mythologies. Those other mythologies, which tended toward evil consequences, were evil beliefs, which must be fought accordingly.
It is impossible to understand the central doctrinal issues among leading Christian theologians, from the apostolic period to present times, without taking that Platonic view inclusively into account. These theologians have been concerned for themselves and for determination of policy with the issues of truth according to reason. They have been, at the same time, otherwise concerned with popular mythologies, respecting chiefly whether this or that popular belief led away from or toward the realization of the dictates of reason. Although the objective has been to bring all of mankind into the state of reason (atonement), for immediate purposes the rule has been that this effort must be situated within terms of the problem defined by the simple beliefs of the ignorant.
The Aristotelians and their heirs, notably including Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther and the Presbyterian leaders, had and continue an opposite policy concerning mythologies. The original Aristotelians were the intelligence-services arm of the oligarchies jointly controlling the court of Philip of Macedon and the contemporary Persian court of that time. Their objectives were to stop technological and scientific progress, and to create zero-growth synthetic mythologies as the simple beliefs of the ignorant masses. These efforts they regarded as the means to establish permanent world-rule by a landlord-based oligarchy, deemphasizing cities in favor of the countryside, and maintaining "Malthusian" zero-growth, antitechnology policies against scientific progress. They have not altered that method or purpose to the present day.
The innermost belief of the leading Christian theologians with access to reason is typified by the outlook of the famous Abelard of the eleventh century A.D. Where strict Aristotelians argued that God made himself impotent by creating inalterable laws for the universe - and hence only omniscient - Abelard defined the function of man's existence according to reason to be the helper of God in the continuing work of creation. Abelard located lawfulness in the lawfulness governing the ordering of continued creation. The exact opposite position was classically argued by the twelfth-century Bernard of Clairvaux, a point of importance we shall cover in the course of this report. SE-LL-12,13&14


Again, the only aspect of human consciousness which is in correspondence with such a transfinite - or transinvariant - principle of the universe, is the quality of progress in human scientific knowledge, rather than any specific, subsumed scientific knowledge as such. The adducing of that principle, in turn, provides the methodological principle for ordering thought to the effect of willfully "energizing" the progress of scientific knowledge. That is the method of rigorous hypothesis. That is the meaning of the dialectical method, the method of rigorously developing valid hypotheses.
The method employed is the Platonic method of negation, as applied from the standpoint of the level of reason. The method of negation means to isolate those axiomatic fallacies of existing knowledge (understanding) which bear upon crucial-experimental problems confronting us. The qualitative elimination of the axiomatic fallacy permits the defining of experiments which can be represented in terms of quantitative relationships. The essential, underlying test of the validity of an hypothesis (as an hypothesis) posed in this way, is the test of whether the hypothesis, if successfully demonstrated, implies a means for increasing the negentropy of human practice.
Such hypotheses are defined by Riemann as "unique hypotheses". Their distinction in effect is that they test the laws of the universe for a category of knowledge, rather than merely testing the applicability of extension of established principles to a problem without involving a testing of general laws. Such hypotheses are more commonly, less rigorously, termed "crucial-experimental hypotheses".
In the case such an hypothesis fails experimentally, no loss. The failure of the hypothesis narrows qualitatively our approach to the axiomatic fallacy it attacked, and thus acts as positive progress in knowledge for attacking that axiomatic fallacy in a more effective way. SE-LL-59


One cannot spin out concrete physics from a philosopher's chair. The relationship of philosophy to physics is, more narrowly, to discern which philosophical statements by physicists are intrinsically, methodologically absurd. On the positive side, given adequate knowledge of physics to date, philosophy shows us how to select the experimental conception which will be most fruitful in gaining the next step of progress in mastery of the principles appropriate to physics. That, in general, is all that philosophy can accomplish with respect to positive sciences. That is all, but that is indispensable to the progress of science. That is the means by which the approach selected by the creative scientist is properly determined - just the approach, just the indispensable matter of approach.
The case of the electron paradox is appropriately illustrative. Confronted with a problem involving "elementary particle" experimentation, knowing that the electron doctrine of accredited physics is intrinsically absurd is representative of that kind of philosophical knowledge which guides the experimenter to the most fruitful experimental hypotheses. That illustrates the method to be applied in a more generalized way to order the progress of science in general.
Reason, which is definable in a consistent way in principle over the ages, is thus a kind of "constant". However, reason is not otherwise constant, not linearizable. As it assimilates to itself the fruits of its own accomplishments in mastering the lawful ordering of the universe, reason develops itself in its particular powers. In this process of self-development of reason, mediated through the practical scientific progress effected by efficient action of reason, reason parallels and intersects the fundamental, also self-developing, lawful ordering of the universe. SE-LL-66


Over the years, the question often arose, what is the basis in authority for imposing certain criteria of hypothesis upon work in the physical sciences. To this question, the consistent answer given was, and rightly so, the proof of that method in political economy. The fact that the order of the universe appropriate to the above-indicated features of the physics of Riemann has been crucially proven once in the domain of political economy proves also that the entire universe is ordered according to such principles. Political economy, viewed and developed in that way, is the highest form of science, the crucial source of authority for scientific knowledge in all domains.
The crucial experiment upon which human knowledge is essentially dependent is human existence itself. Since all particular knowledge is ultimately and necessarily superseded, no form of knowledge as such (understanding) can embody proof of the validity of scientific knowledge in a lasting way. What is proven by human existence is the efficiency of creative reason in ordering the progress of knowledge to the effect of maintaining and advancing the human species's ecological population-potential. It is as political economy situates the direct connection between progress of knowledge and changes in the ecological population-potential of human practice based on advancing knowledge, that the essential connection is made, and uniquely so. It could not be otherwise. SE-LL-68&69


Poetry (and great musical composition) is the concentrated expression in communicable forms of the most direct and intense expression of synthetic a priori mental activity - preconscious creative activity. For example, Poe's explanation of the composition of The Raven in his essay, The Philosophy of Composition, is identical in outlook with Beethoven's method of musical composition.
Continuing with the moment that thought whose name is sought in memory is still "on the tip of my tongue", this condition is not merely the desire for a thought, it is the Gestalt form of a definite thought. It is a definite thought, distinguishable from other preconscious thought, and able to recognize appropriate predicates (words, communicable images, and so forth). It is a universal with respect to all the predicates which might properly be attached to it. It is the interplay of two or more preconscious Gestalts which selects predicates determined by their conjunction, their interplay - an interplay which is also a Gestalt.
This configuration leads to orders of such Gestalts, orders which are in correspondence to George Cantor's notion of transfinites.
It is the reality and power of preconscious thought, that conscious thought is merely the ordering of communicable images of communication and other practice by preconscious thought, which makes the preconscious processes empirically recognizable as the "self", the inner mind. It is the preconscious processes of mind which define the ambiguity and agreement of the terms "mind" and "soul".
There are, however, three qualities of "souls", as Plato's Socrates, in particular insists. In the doctrine of "Phoenician lies", the lowest order of souls are "iron souls", the next higher order, "silver or bronze souls", the next higher order "golden souls". Poetry is the language of "golden souls". But that is to disguise the truth of the matter by "Phoenician lies".
The three qualities of souls - lies put aside - are the infantile or Dionysian, the adolescent or Apollonian, and the adult-human or Promethean. These are otherwise expressed respectively by irrationalism-Sophism-Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and Platonism-Neoplatonism. In Poe's satire against the traitor Martin Van Buren, Mellonta Tauta, the three qualities of soul are respectively characterized by the method of crawling (Baconian Hoggishness, or inductive method), by the method of creeping (Aries Tottle, or deductive method), and by the method of soaring (Platonic method, or reason).
The Platonic method - the method embedded in the Platonic dialogue - is a rigorous method for evoking creative mental activity to act upon the preconscious processes to the effect of transforming the infantile mind into the adolescent mind into the adult-human mind, to transform the sense of personal identity and world outlook from the existentialist to the Kantian to the Platonic-Neoplatonic, to the condition of reason.
Reason is nothing but the creative mental process (preconscious creative activity) deliberately conscious of itself. Those are no mere words, represent no mere construct. That is an empirically demonstrable actuality. That is the subject of poetry.
Preconscious processes in one person do not communicate preconscious conceptions directly to the preconscious processes of another person. They communicate indirectly; their communication is mediated. Words, communicable images are the forms of the mediation. Poetry and musical composition ordered by Platonic-Neoplatonic principles are the fundamental modes of intensified communication our species has developed for achieving the relatively most immediate kind of mediated communication among the preconscious processes of persons. PP-LL-8,9&10