The concrete self which believes in the power of controlling, and which therefore puts all its money on controlling, is – unbeknownst to us – a construct of that same ‘overvalued controlling’ and nothing more. The concrete self is that particular viewpoint on matters which is taken for granted by that controlling. Controlling has to operate out of a basis and because no basis exists ‘of itself’ one has to be assumed. What controlling does therefore is that it reifies its own assumptions!
The process of reification is a positive feedback mechanism – the more I insist that this one specific way of seeing things is the only way the more reified the view becomes and the more reified the view becomes the more our viewpoint seems like the only the ‘right’ one, the only ‘possible’ one. What we’re doing here is treating our viewpoint as if there isn’t any other possible way of looking at things and when we do this what happens is that the world shows itself to us in absolute rather than relative terms. Reification equals ‘absolutization’, in other words – the relative has now made absolute, with all that this entails…
This is obvious enough once we go into it – if I can see that there are many possible viewpoints that I might adopt then I am thereby acknowledging the essential relativity of my chosen viewpoint. Every position that I might take is the ‘right’ one, according to itself; each position is ‘true’, according to itself. Every concrete statement of fact that I come out with is ‘the only possible way of looking at things’, according to my absurdly narrow and rigid way of looking at things… We can of course apply this to our global picture of the world and say that the picture of the world which we obtain as a result of picking a particular viewpoint is also only relatively true. It is true in relation to the viewpoint that we are utilizing; the view is true in relation to the assumptions that we have had to make in order to produce it.
This line of argument isn’t particularly hard to follow once we start looking at things but if we persist in this line of inquiry we will very quickly see something else, something very unsettling. What we will see it that it’s not the case that every slice of perspective we obtain as a result of looking at the world only in the one way is valid within the terms of its own limits and that – therefore – we can assemble a complete picture by adding up all the different possible perspectives. That isn’t it at all – to say that ‘any particular view is valid only in relation to the viewpoint which gives rise to it’ is really to say that no view has any validity outside of itself. Any statement we make on the basis of any given set of assumptions is true only in relation to these assumptions and this is just another way of saying that there is that no literal statement can ever be true. All of our literal statements are simply ‘dead leaves being blown here and there by the wind’ – they carry no weight, no significance whatsoever, despite our absolute belief in them.
If no literal statement is ever true outside of its own taken-for-granted perspective, then this means that even if we were to add up every single little statement that is possible to make this still wouldn’t give us a valid picture of the world. No matter how many untrue statements we have, they are still only ever going to add up to nothing! All statements of facts are ‘only true in relation to the position they necessarily assume’ – logical statements are faithful extrapolations of the assumptions that they rest upon. Our logical statements are our assumptions, therefore. Our statements are our assumptions and so they can’t suddenly assume a validity that their original starting-off point didn’t possess. There’s just no way for that to happen – it’s like repeating a lie many times in the hope that it will become true.
All statements are logical extensions of the starting off point at the point of which we arbitrarily started off from and what this means is that we can’t validate our viewpoint on the basis of the concreteness of the view that it produces. We do however very much tend to use the concreteness of the view we obtain (as a result of only ever using the one viewpoint) as proof positive of the correctness of that viewpoint. This is an inference that we make all the time, albeit on a very unconscious level, but it is all the same entirely illegitimate. The fact that this statement presents whatever it is presenting in the most uncompromising concrete terms can’t be used to infer the truth of that statement – all it shows is that we’re ignoring all other ways on of looking at the matter. The only thing a concrete statement shows is that we have zero perspective on things. The commodity of ‘certainty’ – which we place such absolute faith in – translates as ignorance therefore. We have built our whole world on ignorance, therefore.
It’s not the case that some of our assumptions about the nature of reality are true whilst others or not none of our assumptions can ever be true and the reason for this is very simple. No matter what pity what the particularity of any given set of assumptions that we make might be they always come down to the same thing. They are in other words only trivially different. What we’re taking for granted in each case is that there is a fixed viewpoint some fixed viewpoint or other can be used to generate insight into the nature of the world around us. We’re taking it for granted that reality can be modeled or envisaged in terms of a fixed standpoint. Any viewpoint that we might utilise in order to produce a concrete view of the world is a structure. All structures are composed of fixed points; that’s what structure is – a bunch of geometrical points all strung together.
But suppose that the nature of reality isn’t a structural nature, suppose that it isn’t ‘based on rules’? Suppose – in other words – that reality isn’t rigid or fixed? It could be the case that the nature of reality is akin to that of ‘unbounded space’, as Buddhist metaphysics would assert. In this case, no inference can legitimately be made, no matter what viewpoint we select. We can obsess over this approach and that approach as much as we want but it won’t make a blind bit of difference – the bottom line is that there is no way to think about reality! A geometrical point never maps onto the Whole, after all – it only ever maps onto itself, it only ever maps onto its own extension, its own projection. Logic is always tautological in other words, and since thought is based on logic it can never show us the Whole. It doesn’t matter what way we choose to look at it – all of our ideas, concepts, theories, models, etc., are equally redundant. To quote the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna,
All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.
When we construct our view of reality on the basis of what we see from a single fixed viewpoint this gives rise to hyperreality, which is the equivalent to the Hindu / Buddhist idea of samsara. Samsara equals ‘our ideas reflected right back at us as if they were real’. Or – as we could equivalently say – ‘hyperreality is where the world we believe in is an extension of the geometrical point which is our basis for understanding it. Just so long as we put rationality on a pedestal and don’t give any credence to anything else, the hyperreal is going to be the only type of real that we’re ever going to know about. Hyperreality validates itself by its literality, by its uncompromisingly rigid nature, as we have just said, which means that anything else gets laughed at for being airy-fairy, vague, or fluffy. Hyperreality is a self-sealing system capable only of accepting itself and so this is how the Reified World comes into being. In the Reified World the only meaning things have is the meaning that the system itself gives them, and ‘the system’ is – by its very nature – completely arbitrary.
Saying that the type of meaning assigned by the by logical systems is ‘completely arbitrary’ is just another way of saying that it doesn’t mean anything at all. In the Literal World the meaning that things have in themselves is disregarded, disallowed, dismissed, etc., – only that meaning which the tyrant of thought provides us with is to be taken seriously and this type of meaning is hollow. It is something that exists only ‘on the outside’, only ‘on the surface’. This is how objects get reified as objects when really there’s no such thing. This is also how the ‘self-object’ gets verified as ‘the self’ and this too as a meaning that only exists on the outside. Assigned value is ‘meaning that only exists on the outside,’ but there is no outside! The outside (i.e., the quantifiable realm) is only ever an abstraction. Really – secretly, so to speak – ‘everything is everything’ and there are no things. That’s the bottom line – everything is ‘the inside’. As the anonymous author of the Liber XXIV philosophorum says, God is
An infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Geometrical points don’t exist anywhere outside of our imagination – only space exists and space is ‘an infinity of viewpoints in which no one viewpoint is given precedence over any other’. Our prejudice is to say that because this is incomprehensible to us it can’t therefore be real, but that’s just our backwards way of looking at things. Our (implicit) argument is that things have to make sense to us, and so if whatever it is that we’re looking at doesn’t make sense it can’t be real. We base this argument on the fact that the picture of the world that thought puts together for us (which is the only version we know) is always understandable. This is of course a false argument since we don’t know that what we’re basing our argument on is the output of a machine and isn’t – therefore – real. Reality itself (the original article) is profoundly incomprehensible to us and it always will be…
Image – wallpaperflare.com
