Federica wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 5:35 pm
I finally decided to add this as a comment to the
geoengineering essay:
"Marco, supposing there’s agreement that, from the perspective of a post-material worldview, reality at its core is of ideal nature, and the material world - including the climatic events Earth manifests in time - is the densest layer of a unitary whole (as above, so below) only transduced in the heavily aliased “ideational byproduct” that the human physical five senses of today are able to record, a question has arisen from this reading. In your prefiguration of material solutions to the present human crisis, I notice that the reference to the suprasensible, conscious alignment of being that would constitute, in primal and crucial sense, a way out of the present crisis, is left out. What is the purpose with this take? Do you agree that it’s only when we become the change we want to see in the world, first and foremost in our consciousness, through active development of our suprasensible (thinking and feeling) faculties - individually and collectively - that we gain a chance to apprehend the higher orders of being, hence to orient our future deeds towards the good, through conscious moral action in the world, not when man merely attempts to impact the physical layers of reality through rational-logical devices, elaborated by the intellect, if the latter remains unaware of its depth structure?"
MM: "One should never judge looking only at one piece of the puzzle. Where could the other pieces possible be? "
Reply: "If you ask me, I love jigsaw puzzles, but I personally don’t find them to provide a viable analogy for reality. So I wouldn’t judge even if I had the entire game to look at."
MM: "Maybe you might like to take a look at some other pieces of the puzzle. For example, that I'm not that techno-freak I might appear, can be read here:
https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/techno ... -delusions
https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/toward ... -worldview
As to the environmental issue I suggest reading the "age of light" I wrote about here: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/its-ti ... llapse-b99
Moreover, the next post will be about the notion of Nature from a more spiritual perspective Stay tuned..."
Reply: "Marco, thanks for the references. I find your work outstanding, and especially the brave professional choices and quest for meaningfulness lying in its background. Nonetheless, in my humble opinion, the same point I made about the macrocosm of reality is applicable to the microcosm of our own human individuality. The puzzle metaphor misses the mark here. In the same way that reality evolves as an interconnected whole, wherein the material layer amounts to a stupefying panorama of collapsed and precipitated symbols, so in the microcosm of our individuality it’s impossible to be truly post-material by horizontally composing a puzzle picture where material pieces are juxtaposed to spiritual ones (un colpo al cerchio, un colpo alla botte). Rather, the only path is vertical. It starts from within our own thinking-feeling being, so that each and every element of our activity has eventually a chance to harmonize with the higher order designs. To squeeze that into a visual metaphor: a Sierpinski triangle, rather than a puzzle. By the way, in your piece on technological delusions, you seem to choose the same approach of *complementing* the outward material technological progress with the psychological, existential and spiritual perspective. We cannot *only* have a technological perspective, you say. We need to complement it with the spiritual. But again, the smorgasbord approach - while it has the merit of questioning materialism - only leads to an illusion of holistic understanding, as long as one has not made the free choice to engage the self-transformation of one’s entire being, starting from the augmentation of one's conscious cognitive potential. That the world - the universe - is on the same side as our spiritual being starts to become an experience then, rather than a conceptual add-on.
In anycase, I look forward to reading your next post on Nature from a more spiritual perspective!"
MM: "Federica, I wonder wherefrom you have the impression of a “smorgasbord approach” or read of a "horizontal puzzle composition." Nowhere do I feel of having done that. Complementing is not an exercise of addition. So, I can’t relate to this and, thereby, answer to your objection."
Reply: "It’s the dichotomy that appears between a statement of holistic understanding from the first-person perspective, and an elaboration that snaps back into third-person view, as it balances out the spiritual-psychological and the rational-material perspectives one against the other, as two puzzle pieces to fit into one another. But the wholeness of truth can’t emerge from holding the two pieces from the side and “complementing” the one with the other. They inevitably remain a nicely composed, very well balanced, smorgasbord of views. That is, there are eyes that hold those views from a seamless vantage point in the background. In this way, the first person-perspective can consist of a tag on an idea *about* perspective, held from a third-person perspective.
I hesitate to further elaborate, firstly because the phenomenology of human cognition has been already put in incomparably better concepts and words than I could ever come up with - by known as well as unknown thinkers, for example in the previously mentioned series of
phenomenological essays - which btw do not make use of any religious concept - and secondly because grasping it depends on the willingness to freely do whatever it cognitively takes to know the truth from within, including bringing the inquiry to the inside of one’s own cognitive activity, not experienced as a place for the boiling down of ideal contents, but as a force that can itself be observed, educated, sensitized and grown in consciousness. However, if one is satisfied within the 'homeyness' of a certain worldview and feels that progress is basically a matter of filling the boxes of the various life problems with thoughts, aligning groups of essays in a logical ensemble, then there can’t be any interest in setting sail for the progressive discovery of truth by learning to dive into the sea of consciousness from the pinhole of one’s own cognition."
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From here, either something extraordinary is about to happen (I have seen that someone has just been visiting the essay link) or a final rebuttal comment is about to be dropped