Descartes / the Cards

Rene Descartes

Preface

This blog relates to the Lacan / Lycan blog. 

I unintentionally did the blogs backwards, possibly because this is retrospective. 

While Lacan heralds the next era (Postmodernism) after the Age of Reason and can easily be understood as a counterpoise to it, Descartes can be understood to be the foundation upon which the Age of Reason was built. Although it draws from previous sources (eg; Aristotle) who lived during the Age of Faith or whatever other name we ascribe to ‘Christian Europe / Islamic East’ both of which are Abrahamic religions and both of which superceded the previous civilisations which had a common religion; as archeological evidence has verified, for example Egyptian artefacts discovered in Mayan temples and that the Tibetan Buddhist and Indigenous American Medicine Wheels portray the same blueprint (my own research), has given rise to understanding cultural assimilation of the pre-industrial Americas and beyond. While this deserves further research and development, that is not what this blog is for. This blog is about Descartes.

“I think, therefore I am” Descartes 

You probably heard that quote before. 

What you didn’t know is the context and his own reply to it, which is perhaps more important. 

Descartes context is to ask “What do we know for sure?” 

It is usually framed alongside the cultural background as an attempt to answer “is God real?” which Descartes did ask in his writings, but his question simultaneously takes us outside of and beyond the Religious context into the purity of thought associated with Age of Reason consciousness. 

Unfortunately for us we are currently going fast toward the Age of Sansara (Delusion and Confusion). It is not the information superhighway we had hoped for, it is the disinformation super-sidetrack, a multidimensional maze of wasting our time and attention. 

As a spiritist I often ask the question; 

“If no form of energy ceases, it transmutes; 

then is the self-aware part of you, a form of energy?” 

That’s the best advice I have for navigating the Aquarian Age and our socio-cultural, interpersonal, mental-emotional evolutions. 

Unfortunately I encounter many hominids who do not and can not actively ‘think’ in the way which Descartes intended his use of the word. A great shock was a revelation that half of all people are less than average intelligence. I would put the book ‘Straight and Crooked Thinking’ by Robert Thouless and ‘The Games People Play’ by Dr Eric Berne on your reading list. 

Descartes response to his own assertion “I think therefore I am” was to produce and answer a short series of six logical questions relating to establishing ‘What do we know for sure?’ each aimed at a different area of our experiences of existing. 

Modernism answers with depressive humour “death and taxes”. 

Terrible joke is a sign of the times. 

The Cards

An exploration of studying Tarot.

[TBC]

Lacan / Lycan

Lacan

I studied Philosophy under Alan Ford at Cheltenham University for four years, including going back to do an extra module to my degree the following year to achieve a field trip I would otherwise have missed out on. 

Although not perhaps ‘my favourite philosopher’, Lacan is critical and thus an important part of that education regarding the transition from Modernism to PostModernism and beyond. 

I discovered how Lacan resonates with my extra-curricular studies of The Philosophy of Magic especially involving late 20th century development of Chaos Magic (Osman O Spare influence of Michael Moorecock, Ken St Andre, Peter Caroll) which is excruciatingly post-modern in its approach to cause-and-effect. 

This week a new book arrived. 

What I love most already about it is the 21st century Israeli psychologists from Tel Aviv are writing about 20th century French European philosophy, evidently having recognised its ongoing validity. 

Integration of East and West is a good thing. Multiculturalism is a good thing. In this day and age of segregation, the integration and recognition of universal affinities is a good thing. 

I’m going on a probability that these scholars have nothing to do with their governments regime, genocide of Palestinians nor the seizing of their lands. 

People are People regardless of colour, creed, gender, age, experience, language, etc. 

This humanitarian attitude is one thing which the majority of respected psychologists and philosophers do apparently accept and usually promote, with some exceptions. 

World Wars have been fought against the exceptions. 

The importance of recognising humanitarianism even against your own governments abject lack of it is something to be proud of. 

While I wave the Palestinian flag but detest Hamas as much as the Israeli regime, the innocent and educated People of Planet Earth are on the We The People side of ‘the line’. 

That’s my philosophy. 

Let’s see what Lacan had to say. 

Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 

A Contemporary Introduction 

By Shlomit Yadun-Gadot and Uri Hadar

Published by Routledge

Preface (extract) 

“Lacan is not the first psychoanalyst to create inextricable ties between subjectivity and otherness.”

“Klein, Bion, Kohut and Winnicott had already deeply integrated contextuality into the subject’s makeup. Yet, their thought is embedded in a realistic epistemological framework that distinguishes fantasy from reality. Lacan was a unique and innovative contributor to postmodernism and may be marked as the first to recast psychoanalysis in an inter subjective epistemology. Accordingly, he predicated the constitution of self * upon otherness in fateful ways that our book describes.”

*”Lacan did not use the term ‘self’. We use it here as a reference to the concept of the first-person, as in colloquial speech.” 

Let’s look up that elitist word for a moment as the authors used it twice in the same paragraph it must be somewhat important to them. 

“Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It is concerned with the mind's relation to reality.”

-University of Sheffield 

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/philosophy/research/themes/epistemology#

epistemology

/ɪˌpɪstəˈmɒlədʒi/

noun PHILOSOPHY

1. the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.

mid 19th century: from Greek epistēmē ‘knowledge’, from epistasthai ‘know, know how to do’.

-Oxford Dictionary 

If I recall correctly, Lacan is about how we associate and construct mental maps built on concepts, illusions, delusions, rather than the hard existential reality we experience around us. 

That painting of an alien on an alien world is an idea. Technically it is a coloured dried pigment on woven fibers. Recognition of the abstract to make more sense to us than the practicality of the realism is what Lacan, to an extent Modernism and definitely PostModernism, are all about. 

If my memory serves correct. 

Let’s keep reading. 

[TBC]

æðhören cycle

3 Poems from the æðhören Cycle

Copyright 2023 Ordo Octopia

All Rights Reserved. 

EXPLAIN THE PAGAN HALL

A wisdom-keeper asked me 

to explain the Pagan Hall 

As I ask you the same. 

I stood before an open sky

As she began to rain. 

Words came 

WERE I A KING 

Were I a King 

What would to Want? 

What would I to Do? 

What would I Bring?

What would I Sing? 

I will not be held to answer to any other 

I will sit in front of a fire, which I alone tend 

or which those loyal to me tend. 

It will be my fire of change, of life, of warmth. 

I will stockpile endless supply of firewood from maintained forestry. 

I will sit before a spring of purest water. 

Those will come who seek fire and water, 

sharing food cooked of my hearth. 

We will sit in council to discuss matters, 

resolving them 

with critical and emotional thinking alike, 

by advice of relevant stories inherited from our ancestors, 

by stories from our own experience, 

told by the fashion of the stories of our ancestors.

The hearth to be such place where stories shared, 

as food enjoyed, as good company. 

There to be open vistas of broad, beautiful landscape

yet protection from elements, cold, wet, grime. 

It is not because I am a King I deserve such things.

It is because I have attained such things I am become a King. 

I shrugged away the entanglements of others 

To sit in contemplation, 

to tend my hearth,  

to nurture my being with pure waters and timeless simplicities. 

Were I King I would say to every one who can;

Do this.

Do this thing.

For most times you may find yourself alone. 

That silence is your Throne.

For some times you may find yourself with love. 

That blanket is your Home. 

After I have passed there will be ashes,

Some memories of stories shared to be retold 

Flowing of a pure spring, singing.

There will remain the landscape, 

unwatched now but for other Kings. 

To protect this Right

I must fight.

That is what it is to be King. 

BETROTHAL

By this Ring

I ask of thee 

the same. 

Explain the Pagan Hall. 

I ask the One 

She who is my spring

She who is my fire

Sing your Truth’s desire. 

Were you to be Queen

How dare you to Dream?

More from the æðhören cycle.