We tend to think that we are extracting the maximum amount of information when we measure and tabulate everything, when we define and classify everything in sight so as to make everything definite or certain, so as to end up with a truck-load of hard data, but this just isn’t the way things work. We tend to imagine that the defined or positive world contains more than a fuzzy or undefined world because there is nothing left unsaid, nothing left unprocessed, but the complete reverse is true – the Positive World is a spookily hollow world, a world without meaning…
When we talk, for example, we might try to fit in as much as we can, barely pausing to take breath, but all that happens in this case is that we find ourselves babbling rubbish – it might all make perfectly good sense on one level but underneath that over-amped, over-emphasized level, what we find is Baudrillard’s Irremediable Void! We create this void of meaning by insisting on ‘saying everything and leaving no gaps.’ In the same way when we try to say what everything is which is an endeavour that we very much see as being a good thing we create the spectre of barely-repressed meaninglessness, which will haunt us to the end of our days…
We can’t ‘nail reality down’ and also get away with it and this – we might say – is the Mercurial Principle at work. We invariably put all our money on ‘catching Mercurius’, and this just happens to be the most counterproductive thing we could ever do! The more we chase Mercurius the faster he runs away, and yet chasing is all that we know; chasing is all we comprehend. If our chasing doesn’t work then we chase harder, we don’t give up our tactic, we chase harder.
Instead of talking about chasing we may speak in terms of defining and say that the more exhaustively we try to define the world around us the more it gets away from us in real terms. We are left grasping hold of something to be sure, but what we are left holding onto (with a death-like grip) is a hollow husk. It is sad sham, a corrupted or degenerate caricature of what we had our sights on. When we succeed in defining everything – as we absolutely do succeed, on a daily basis – then the outcome is that we ‘miss the whole point’, so to speak.
When we define everything in sight – and believe that we’re actually capturing the reality of our situation in this way – then what is happening is that we are creating the Irremediable Void, the Void of Meaning which can’t ever be remedied. ‘What kind of a thing is that then?’ we might ask, ‘what does the Irremediable Void look like when it’s at home? What are its characteristics?’ We can ask this question all right, but there’s no easy-to-understand answer because the Void of which we are speaking isn’t real thing. It’s a function of our limited way of seeing things: it is in other words our blind spot, which is to say, it is the basis from which we operate and which (therefore) we never can question.
What we’re actually talking about here therefore is simply entropy – we can’t see entropy ‘head on’ because if we did then it wouldn’t be entropy. The blind spot we can see is not a blind spot. Once we frame things in terms of entropy it becomes possible to see things more clearly and we can then make the following statement: When we define the world then the entropy content of that world tends to the maximum. ‘Knowing requires entropy’, as Stewart Kaufman says, so that when we ‘know it all’ (!) the entropy level hits the ceiling. The entropy content of the system hits the roof and that isn’t good news for us. [Entropy can be defined as ‘what we don’t know about and don’t know that we don’t know about’, or ‘information that we don’t have any information about’.]
Psychological entropy ‘isn’t good news’, we might say, because it causes us to ignore or neglect what is real and can successively caught up in what isn’t real. How can we argue that being ‘shunted into an unreal world without being able to know it’ is a healthy or helpful thing! This is what psychological entropy always does – it compels us to give our attention to the petty details at the expense of the Big Picture. Psychological entropy (ΨS) fixates us on the trivial at the expense of the profound – our attention is diverted from the Whole to ‘the part’, which then swells up and takes the place of the Whole. The part becomes inflated, and not only does it become ‘inflated’, it becomes meaningless as well.
So we can say that when entropy is at a maximum the Whole is invisible to us – it doesn’t actually exist as far as we’re concerned, and as a result of this conditioned blindness the fragment (or the part) then becomes ‘the Whole of Everything’, ‘the whole kit and caboodle’, the ‘All’, etc. We end up subsumed within the much talked-about ‘box that we can’t think outside of and this invisible limitation defines our existence from this point on. We’re in the box but we don’t know that we’re in the box; we’re in the box but we don’t realise that there even is such a thing! We are in the box without knowing it and so whenever we come across someone who isn’t invisibly constrained in the way that we are we see them as being a heretic, a dangerous deviant, a lunatic, a weirdo, and so on. Having our box punctured becomes the worst catastrophe ever and we live in terror of such an eventuality.
Already this doesn’t sound very good but it gets a lot worse – we can talk quite happily about ‘the part substituting itself for the Whole’ (or ‘the partial view replacing the all-encompassing view’), but this isn’t making the point properly – it isn’t making the point properly because the Whole can’t be subdivided – to break the hold up into parts or fragments is an impossible thing. It can’t be done. It’s not even meaningful to think about it being done – we think that it’s meaningful but it isn’t. On one level – the ‘nominal level’, we could say – we can of course divide and subdivide – we can do this to our hearts’ content. We can divide up a chocolate cake, for example, so that everyone can have a share, and this would appear to be an entirely unproblematic act. But it is problematic however – it is problematic because no matter how many times we divide and subdivide the cake it’s still the cake. We can only ever end up with the cake, no matter what we do. This argument is set out here in The Treatise Of The Golden Lion.
This argument doesn’t generally make any sense to us; it doesn’t make any sense because we don’t appreciate the subtle metaphysical principle which says ‘Even a small slice of the cake is still the cake.’ We could object to this ‘principle’ and say that by the cake we mean ‘the whole cake and nothing else;’ if we slice up the cake – we might say – then the product of this operation shall hitherto be referred to as ‘a slice of the cake’. In this case therefore there is ‘a whole’ and ‘a part.’ This is just word games though – we ourselves are defining what is meant by ‘the Whole’, this being the case we are indeed in a position to say what is, or is not, ‘the Whole.’ We can define anything as anything however and so this makes our argument entirely meaningless. The Whole actually can’t be defined – it can’t be defined for what we might call ‘technical’ reasons; when we define something we define it against something else but this – of course – just doesn’t work for Wholeness! There is a problem that we simply can’t get over…
The only thing we can never define – or say anything about – is Wholeness therefore and what this means is that we can’t make free and easy with regard to defining whatever we like as ‘a Whole’; there is only one Wholeness and it is completely beyond the scope of anything we can know about. Furthermore, we can say that ‘there is only one Wholeness and there is nothing that isn’t that Wholeness’… This is the Unus Reis, the ‘One Thing’ mentioned in the famous Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. This is ‘the One that can never be two.’
It’s not that this particular understanding is unheard of, therefore – it’s simply that our default mode is to take everything at face value, which shows us a reality that is made-up of lots of different things, rather than ‘the One thing’. However, as Erwin Schrodinger has pointed out, ‘The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real.’ In this connection Jung quotes the theologian Pelagius, ‘Why speak ye of the manifold matter? The substance of natural things is one, one nature that conquers all.’
The multiplicity of things is an illusion which comes about as a result of not examining what we are looking at closely enough, therefore. Whenever we pick up something some small ‘thing’ and examine it closely enough then we will always discover ‘Eternity in a grain of sand’, just as William Blake says. There’s no way that we won’t discover ‘the Whole hidden in the part’; we’ll discover it every time but rather than do this we play the game that there actually are all these different unconnected things and we go ahead on this basis, we let the game play out to see how it all works out for us. There is a problem here though – there is a very big problem here because none of these things are real, not even that very special thing that I call ‘myself’. None of the things that I am concerning myself with are real and so no matter how the game plays out for me it’s always going to come to nothing in the end…
Image – alexmcardel, artstation.com
