Tag Archives: scholasticism

08/1/26

Looking at E. Michael Jones’s Book (2025) “Walking with a Bible and a Gun”  (Part 27 of 27)

0337 The colonies expanded into the wilderness of the frontier west.

The states expanded into the wilderness of nature.

The United States of America expanded into the wilderness of empire.

Now, we, the people, expand into the wilderness of a house of mirrors.

0338 The final three chapters and the epilogue convey a sense of resignation.  Is the fiction that critical theorists write to be regarded as a comedy or a tragedy?  Or is it a liberation or a trap?  Nothing is as it appears to be.  Not even the author remains undistorted.

0339 Even though Jones does not label the house of mirrors that constitutes Critical Theory “the new postmodern American fiction”.  Jones’s treatment of Joe Ritchey tells of someone who was not only canceled, but ruined, because of his American Identity.

0340 Without explicitly asking the question, Jones poses the quandary, “Do the institutions that support critical theory as a way to turn their world into a fiction have historical precedent?”

Which of the following pairs of comparisons does it parallel?

0341 The student is left to formulate an answer to the question.

0342 My own epilogue begins with a cheer for E. Michael Jones for this thought-provoking exercise.

0343 My examination begins with the introduction of a model through which I (the reader in 2026) can appreciate contemporary meaning, presence and message within historic American literature.  This is discussed in points 0027-0042.

As it turns out, a big picture of his original model of “existence precedes essence” may be diagrammed as a two-level interscope where identity3b virtually situates structure3a.

0344 Here is a picture.

This examination has been informed by a postmodern version of Jones’s Thomistic insight.

0345 What about Jones’s provocative writing style?

Readers from Catholic backgrounds might have a little difficulty accepting the text as written, because it (sort of) sounds like apologetics.  My own difficulty?  The model application, although consistent, does not shine, as it does in this examination.  Jones applies the model.  He does not articulate it.  In this, my examination adds value to Jones’s text.

Readers from Protestant backgrounds may have serious difficulties with Jones’s text, in so far as the author does not respect Martin Luther, John Calvin, King Henry VIII and other founders.  Plus, there is continuous mention of Satan as the hero of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Plus, Jones seems to have no fondness for the situational import of sola fide, sola scriptura and sola gratia.  This slogan situates the title of Jones’s book.

0346 Indeed, the first historical step to the American Identity contains the Protestant slogan as situation level and the title of Jones’s book as content level, as shown below.

0347 A meditation on this nested form tells me that Jones presents a gift to the Protestant and the American.  Here is the first expression of the American Identity conforming to the scholastic ideation that existence precedes essence.  Existence associates to the content level.  Essence associates to the situation level.

At the same time, the esse_ce of scripture2a is contiguous with the essence of us2a, as Americans to be.

0348 And the gun?

Is it really a talisman for self-protection from those who pretend to be absolved of the doctrine of original sin, that is, from those who deny the fall of man?

Surely, this question will inspire future inquiry.

0349 Overall, Puritanism (Calvinism) ran its course for a century before the American Revolution.  Then the romantic rehabilitation of nature ran its course for a century before the Civil War.  Then, the nemesis and its mirror of abolitionist and northern aggressor, democratic theorist and voter-rights advocate, secular scholar and value-free administrator, aggrieved theorist and agenda-pushing educator, and (lest I forget) rabbi and jew, has run its course for a over a century.

What is a good title for the coming end of the current saeculum?

Here is my suggestion.

A Shattering of the House of Mirrors.

Or maybe, A Reconstitution of the American Identity, will do.

0350 My thanks to E. Michael Jones for this work.  I hope that this examination adds value to his exposition and serves as a companion for the student interested in the topic.

07/30/26

Looking at Peter Burfeind’s Book (2014) “Gnostic America” (Part 1 of 26)

0001 Peter Burfeind wrote Gnostic America: A Reading of Contemporary American Culture according to Christianity’s Oldest Heresy (Pax Domini Press, 2014).

This book is composed of four parts.  The first part covers the fundamentals of Gnosticism as a Christian heresy.  The second and third parts explore cultural manifestations.  The fourth part applies these fundamentals and explorations to contemporary American Neo-Evangelical Christian churches.

0002 Burfeind argues that two Gnostic movements contend for sovereign power, progressives and Neo-Evangelical Christians.

To me, big government (il)liberals (BG(il)Ls) beat these Christians to the punch.  The federal government has established a religion.  It is not Christian.  BG(il)Ls run Gnostic bureaucracies where authorities deny that they are religious at all.  BG(il)Ls are the self-anointed angels (or more accurately, daemons) of a New Age dawning in America.  

Christians who self-describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” accommodate BGL’s increasing sovereign power and aggression.

0003 Burfeind is not alone in this awareness.  Over 60 years ago, Eric Voegelin expressed similar ideas in his short but significant book, The New Science of Politics.

This raises a question. What is the meaning, the presence and the message underlying the word “Gnosticism”?

With this question in mind, I turn my attention to Burfeind’s text.

Students should read chapter 1 of Burfeind’s text before proceeding.

0004 From Burfeind’s introduction, I know that Gnosticism is a very old heresy.

How old?

From chapter 1, I suspect that Gnosticism predated Christianity.  Indeed, the death and the resurrection of Jesusrebuked Gnostic intuition.  Why would Jesus retain the evil material shell of His body?

Jesus highlights all the ways that the Mosaic tradition offended Gnostic sensibilities.  Both Christians and Jews are enamored of the material world.  Gnostics, not so much.

0005 The Judeo-Christians believe in one God.  So do the Gnostics.  But, the one God of the Judeo-Christians is not the same as the Gnostic Source.  The Source is a Monad, a complex singularity capable of putting everything into perspective.  The Monad is the source of meaning.

0006 The Monad plays a key role in the Gnostic origin myth.  The myth begins with the Source, beyond spoken language and in eternal time.  From the Monad, male and female pairs emanated, each according to its aeon.  The totality of the aeons is called the “pleroma”.

For the last era, our own, the female of the pair acted without her male consort.  He was missing in action, so to speak.  Sophia became pregnant with Yaltabaoth, half lion and half snake.  She thought to herself, “This is not me.” So she took action, ripping the monster from her womb and hiding him in a cloud.

0007 Born yet aborted, living in a fog, Yaltabaoth decided to build his own world.  He decided to create.  What else was this demiurge supposed to do?  He constructed his own world, which is our universe. He assigned archons (powers and governors) to rule his cosmos.

He was proud of his accomplishments.

Here I make an admission, there is more than one way to spell Yaltabaoth.  That exercise is left to the reader.

Okay, back to the story.

0008 What else does this builder god do?

He manufactures our physical bodies.  He steals a spark from the Monad (a soul) and pulls it into his world.  As the soul descends, Yaltabaoth adds matter.  At birth, each person is a spark wrapped in a mortal cloak.  The spark is not material.  The body is material.  The two will war with one another.

0009 Therefore, Sophia pities us and offers this myth. The Self has a mission: Return to the Source.  Sophia offers secret knowledge, gnosis, opening a path out of Yaltabaoth’s apparently all-encompassing cloud.

In fact, this myth, which joins cosmic and personal origins, contains a secret.  It describes a location where you can find your Self.

0010 Clearly, this origin myth provides meaning.  This meaning coincides with the model of social construction in Razie Mah’s How to Define the Word “Religion”.  This model is further detailed in A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form and A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction.

0011 The model is an interscope, a nested form of category-based nested forms.  The interscope offers nine slots.  Features in the above myth associate with different slots.

Here is the open interscope, before any associations.

0012 My intent is to associate elements of the Gnostic origin myth with slots in the interscope of social construction.

0013 My first association concerns the Monad.  The Source has the potential to put the situation into perspective, so it goes into slot 1c.  The pleroma automatically becomes the normal context of the perspective level (slot 3c).  The pleroma3c brings the possibilities inherent in the Monad1c into relation with the actuality of Sophia2c.

0014 So what is the secret about Sophia?

Sophia is Personified Wisdom.  It is not much of a secret.  After all, philosophy is rooted in love (philos) and Wisdom (sophia).

0015 If Sophia2c is the mother of the builder god, Yaltabaoth, then I should put the builder god into slot 2b.  Yaltabaoth2b situates our universe within the normal context of blind rationality (slot 3b).

Or should I say, “mindless rationality”?

The builder god lives in a cloud, isolated, without awareness of even his own mother.  Sure, he snatches sparks from the Monad.  He does this blindly.  Who knows what spark goes into what body?  Yaltabaoth operates in a fog.  His archons are like bureaucrats, always following their rulebooks.  His social norms?  They constitute the Establishment.

The Establishment is the social arm of Yaltabaoth’s evil material world of blind chance and mindless necessity.  For teenage Gnostics, that includes all parents.  For big-government Gnostics, this includes everything associated with the American Founding.

0016 So, why does the builder god need a spark from the Source in order to animate the human body?

Yaltabaoth is so clueless.  He does not realize that the spark comes from the Monad.  It is just another thing at his disposal.  Obviously, there is no better way to animate humans.  He snatches an unwitting soul from its contemplation of Sophia and uses it to bring breath to a breathless body. Inspire. Hold it. Expire. I can feel it.

0017 Here, let me put my associations into the open interscope.

07/1/26

Looking at Peter Burfeind’s Book (2014) “Gnostic America” (Part 26 of 26)

0465 A type 1 Gnostic, who has been indoctrinated to be your Self, has an ego that says, “I am inadequate.” Otherwise, why would I need a Self-help book, or a drink, or a hit? Why would Sophia call to me?

Sophia says, “Escape. Return to the Monad.”

0466 A type 2 Gnostic, who may be so far into the conflict that the Self has won, projects her fallen ego onto others.  She demeans others as puppets of a rigid, doctrinaire, paranoid, traditional, Yaltabaoth-worshipping superego.

The ego of the Self-anointed is no longer responsible for the Self.  The Self may use her body for whatever purposes suits her proclivities.

0467 What do I mean by “her”?

I am “she” when my Self is my normal context.  My Self is an image of Sophia.

If everything is determined by culture, why can’t I declare my own culture?

My Self-wish transforms into a program for development.

My ego is like my ex-.  My superego is like his paranoid delusions.  My idreal is like a golden ring, serving as a gilded cage.

0468 A type 2 Gnostic sees others as marionettes of Yaltabaoth and the Establishment.  She stands beyond freedom and responsibility.  She serves another master.  She works for an institution.  She supports a cause. She stands righteous among the Self-anointed.

She knows about Freud.  She adores Jung.  She is a Marxist.  She is a big government liberal, demanding sovereign power.  Does that make her il-liberal?  Not in a world where “liberal” means “anything goes”.

Sovereign power constellates Personified Wisdom.

The type 2 Gnostic strives to grasp sovereign power.  She will master social evil. Her Self-wish is to control the builder gods and the Establishment, forcing them to work for her organizational objectives. Her Self-wish is to regulate and educate the pathetic ego-driven masses.

She is a post-religious social activist.

0469 A type 2 Gnostic will contextualize himself as a member of a New Age, the next emanation of the pleroma.

0470 What do I mean by “him”?

Is “he” the missing ingredient?

By “him”, I suppose, I mean Sophia-Self gives birth to… or rather, gives abortion to… the next Yaltabaoth.   She will put him into a cloud.   He will create the next age, even if he is a she, whatever that means.

0471 The next age comes in like a lion, then out like a snake.

Or, should it be, in like an ego, then out like a Self?

0472 Gnosticism is a religion of secret knowledge.

The Gnostic origin myth, itself, opens like lockbox, when the key is fashioned in truth.

0478 Ah, then, here we have it: What is truth?

On one hand, the words of the Gnostic are never to be taken literally.  They are symbols evoking fantasies that inform the Self.  The Self reads word-gestures. The Self relies on touch.

Sophia interpellates the Self through desire.

On the other hand, the possibilities inherent in the truth support the perspective-level actuality of the Holy Spirit. 

The Father virtually situates the Son [redeeming] me.

0478 I can put my hands together, with this conclusion:

The origin stories of Gnosticism and the Bible both point to a transition from the Lebenswelt that we evolved in to our current Lebenswelt.

The Gnostic origin story mythically re-creates a repetition disorder characteristic of unconstrained social complexity.

The Biblical origin story mythically portrays the transition as an actual historic event, serving as a fountainhead for disaster after disaster.

0480 Aren’t both these origin myths about Original Sin?

0481 If so, then what does that imply?

06/30/26

Semiotics and History – Baroque Scholasticism and Early Modernism (Part 2 of 2)

SaH0045 This strand of Semiotics and History considers the rise of capitalism in early modernism in terms of changes of political theology.

Oh, I meant to say “mercantilism”.

Okay, how about a label for whatever Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and income taxes in twenty-first century Americahave in common?

Also, I should have also said, “political economy”, instead of “political theology”.

Be that as it may, please enjoy the following commentary on Eric Santner’s challenging book.

This strand starts with of Looking at Daniel Novotny’s Article (2016) Izquierdo and Universals (and appears in Razie Mah’s blog in May 7-1, 2026, for orientation, see Razie Mah’s blog for May 7, 2026).

As well as Looking at Eric Santner’s Book (2016) The Weight of All Flesh (appearing in Razie Mah’s Blog in June, 2026, go to month and scroll down).

SaH0046 For a full list of strands in the course on Semiotics and History, see Razie Mah’s blog for February 3, 2026.

06/29/26

Looking at Eric Santner’s Book (2016) The Weight of All Flesh (Part 1 of 28)

0001 The following 2017 essay comments on a recent book by a Professor of Literature about the subject matter of the political economy.  Eric Santner tries to figure out its immaterial measure.

Why do I say immaterial measure?

Consider the complete title: The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject Matter of Political Economy.

Weight is a measure of something material.  However, weight itself is not material.

Similarly, matter ought to be material.  But, subject matter is not.

Also, the economy processes materials.  Politics does not.

Will literalism do under these circumstances?

Once the flesh has weight, then it is no longer simply what it is.

Once matter is taken to be a subject, then it is no longer merely what it is.

Once the economy is taken to be political, then it is no longer only what it is.

0002 To me, the category-based nested form applies.

The actualities of flesh, matter and economics exist by themselves.  But, humans evolved to consider more than what is at hand.  We are designed to put actuality into a nested form.

So, these actualities exist, for us, in the normal contexts of weight, subject and politics.  These are not the only normal contexts.  They are the contexts raised by the author.

The contextualization of actuality raises another question.

What potentiates the weight of flesh, subject matter and political economy?

You may already know the answer.  I do not.  Consequently, I turn to this text to see what I may discover.  This will be a fairly close reading, so have Santner’s book at hand.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

0003 Eric Santner wrote The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016).  The main body of the book consists in a preface and two lectures.  The two lectures constitute chapters 1 and 2.  These chapters are broken into parts.

Santner’s presentations are works of art, composing the 2014 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley.

0004 The front piece is an introduction by Kevis Goodman.  The end piece is a suite of comments by Bonnie Honig, Peter E. Gordon and Hent de Vries, followed by a reply by Eric Santner.

The responses are very challenging.  How does one reply to something that sounds like free association?

Unfortunately, the front and end pieces will not be covered in these comments.  However, the end piece may be used as an exercise in the methodology that composes these comments.

0005 Why is this interesting?

My interest is obvious once one looks at How To Define the Word “Religion” plus the first ten associated primers.

The tenth primer ends before the majesty of sovereign power.  Primers 8, 9 and 10 tell of the difficulty of seeing beyond these mountains.  Anyone who argues about politics can stir up an avalanche.

What does Primer 8 tell me?

Infrasovereign religions grasp for sovereign power in order to impose their organizational objectives on those outside their organization.

What about Primer 9?

Socrates had to drink hemlock.  Why did he have to do that?

Primer 10?

Rene Girard proposes that a scapegoat mechanism is apparent in all civilizations.  Plus, the mechanism comes into play when power structures try to preserve themselves.

Overall, politics and religion map a dangerous landscape.  Eric Santner walks where angels fear to tread.

0006 Primers 8, 9 and 10 explore the presence underlying the word “religion”.

Institutions occupy the content level of the society tier.  They contextualize the organization tier.  These institutions harbor organizational objects, objectsorganization, that call the individual into organization.  These objectsorg are virtually situated by sovereign acts, laws and decrees.

0007 Eric Santner reads literature.  He observes art.  He sees that something changed in the West over the past few centuries.

What is this something?

It is completely missed by the current social and political sciences.  However, it appears in Western paintings, poems, novels, plays, and other artistic works.  This is the stuff that Eric Santner studies.

0008 Subject matter.  What is it?

“Matter” is stuff.  “Subject” is something that ends up objectified.

Okay, now what?

Does subject matter signal the objectification of matter?

Or does subject matter signify the objectification of something that matters?

0009 At the end of the Latin Age and the beginning of the Age of Ideas, around the 1600s AD, the subject matter of political theology was the king’s two bodies.  One body was mortal.  The other was sublime.

The object of the king’s glorious body supplemented the subject of the king’s mortal body.  Santner labels the process spectral (glorious body) materiality (mortal body).

0010 To me, the glorious body is the normal context for the actuality of the king’s mortal body.

The nested form looks like this:

Sublime body3( mortal body2( potential of kingly being1))

0011 Does this express the character of the subject matter?

The mortal body is matter.  The sublime body is the normal context that objectifies the mortal body.  Thus, the king’s mortal body becomes a subject for political theology.  The something that underlies the mortal body, giving its flesh weight, is the quality of being king.

0012 Moving to the present day, the matter of political theory falls to the people, rather than the king.  The subject gets dispersed from one king to many citizens.  The glorious body translates into what Michel Foucault calls “discipline”.  The qualities that weight the mortal body of the king turn into “biopower”.

To me, modern political theory translates into the following nested form:

Discipline3( citizen2( possibilities inherent in biopower1))

0013 The two nested forms are shown below:

Normal context3 and possibility1 surcharge actuality2.

0014 The mortal body of the king is more than it otherwise would be in any other context.  Its actuality possesses a surplus of immanence because it now has potential.

Similarly, one citizen may heroically rise above others as an expression of the biopower released by discipline.  Other citizens are weighed and measured in the exercise of biopower.

0015 The pressure cooker of the royal person expanded to the business of the citizen.  Medieval and early modern political theology gave way to modern political economy.

0016 Take a look at a painting.  Jacques Louis David painted the extraordinary Death of Marat, during the French Revolution.

Compare this image to a wax effigy of a dead medieval king, or some other memorial, placed on the throne during official mourning.

0017 Jean-Paul Marat, the citizen, dies in his tub.  David paints the death scene.

The king’s mortal body is buried.  An icon of his sublime body is placed on the throne.

Clearly, David paints the equivalent to the sublime body of the citizen, Marat.

0018 One could say that this represents a loss of enchantment.  After all, Marat, the revolutionary, hardly behaved royally.

This lack of royalty aligns with the emptiness above Marat, the corpse.  The upper half of David’s painting is empty.  If Marat had been royalty, the upper register would be full of angels and saints welcoming the glorious king.

What happened to the angels and saints?  

0019 Heck, not even Marat’s fellow citizens are in the upper frame, registering the emotions of shock, grief, and, perhaps, relief.  Critics have called the nondescript space above the dead Marat oppressive, abstract and unmotivated, characteristic of a representational deadlock.

0020 Perhaps, the cunning and ambitious artist was saying, “Do not let this be you.”, while painting, “This fellow was a citizen hero.”

Santner does not tell why Marat got knifed in his enclosed bathtub, filled with medicinal waters.  Marat was a radical agitator.  He named his newspaper, “The People’s Friend”.  He was murdered by a woman who had come to him, claiming news from one of the districts of France.

During her trial, she testified that she killed one man in order to save one hundred thousand.  She was found guilty.  Her head was chopped off with a guillotine.

0021 Jacques-Louis David was charged with organizing Marat’s funeral.  Surely, Marat was a martyr for the Revolution.  Yet, despite the acclamation, no other figure appears in the painting.

0022 Why?

The reason is simple.

No sane person (whether angel, saint or fellow citizen) wanted to be associated with this crazy person, who was typical of the Jacobins, the party that celebrated the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being.

0023 David’s painting is both a warning and a paean.

0024 To Santner, the empty upper register of the painting associates to the impossibility of transcendence in the modern age.  Business is busy-ness.

06/1/26

Looking at Eric Santner’s Book (2016) The Weight of All Flesh (Part 28 of 28)

0547 I now move to Lecture 2.10.

In the preceding section, Santner dwells on the word “doxologies”.

0548 There are two doxologies flowing upwards in the following figure.

This pair of doxologies is glory and money.

One is societal.  The other is organizational.

0548 Santner coins the word, paradoxology, for exploring this double flow.

The subject matter of the political economy is a paradoxology.

0549 There are two movements flowing downwards in the preceding figure.

The pair of condensates are busy-ness and identity / purpose.

One is societal.  The other is organizational.

One is enforced through sovereign laws and decrees.  The other is inculcated through broadcast advertising.

0550 Santner recounts a debate about how to interpret Kafka’s writings.

Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem expressed different views of the theological tracks of Kafka’s stories.

0551 Scholem argued that Kafka’s work shines like a revelation.  But, it’s a tricky revealing.  It does not lead the reader to God, but to some originating nothingness.

0552 Benjamin countered that Kafka’s work has a message: The gate to justice is study.  But the question is: What to study?  The Torah has been brushed over by modern inquiry.  Students have lost the Holy Writ.

0553 Scholem replied: No, those who study have not lost the Scriptures.  They have lost the ability to decipher them.

0554 Does this conversation fit into the previous figure?

A suprasovereign religion was brushed over by the time that Marx projected the transcendent (a political theology) onto the immanent (the machinations of the organization tier).

0555 Santner concludes with Walter Benjamin’s tripartite image of capitalism.

In one panel, capitalism is a purely cultic religion.  It has no doctrine.  It has no dogma.  Adam Smith’s theories of the self-regulation of markets are exemplar.  What is the invisible hand?  It is dogma?  Or is a way to describe events that cannot be reduced to cause and effect?

In the next panel, capitalism is always “on”.  It never takes a holiday.  Santner associates this to the doxologies of everyday life.  Work is always waiting.  Duties are never completed.

In the final panel, capitalism creates guilt, not atonement.  In other words, it creates more debt, more burdens and more work.

Does the sovereignty of debt become sovereign debt?

Not necessarily, but it happens often enough.  After all, who pays for the political entrepreneurs?  Who pays for the busy-ness of citizensMarat?

0556 Does each of Benjamin’s panels describe a level of the organization tier as understood from the communist perspective?

How curious.

0557 Certainly, capitalism is a religion worthy of contempt.

Too bad it is a projection of Marxist ideology.

Walter Benjamin’s career as literary critic expanded the cognitive space opened by the Marxist religion. 

This is the nature of religions.

0558 Marxist ideology projects a plausible theology onto something in the organization tier that everyone encounters.

0559 Marx selected one of the best encounters.

In every purchase, I, the buyer, encounter a corporation that I do not belong to.

Is this alienating, or what?

0560 My money goes up from the product (content) through the price (situation) and becomes surplus value(perspective).

A quality of the product comes down, from the brand name (perspective) through the abstract material guaranteed by the brand name (situation) to the aspects of my identity congruent with this abstract material (content).

0561 Following this pattern, I only purchase bread from The Staff of Life Bakery.

It is my paradoxology.

My devotion increases the glory of the bakery.  The bakery provides me with a mission, “Eat the bread of life.”

My money keeps the bakery in business.  The brand name makes my mouth water.

0562 When Adam Smith attempted to describe this process, he saw an invisible hand, guaranteeing high quality products for low price.  There was no dogma.  There were no doctrines.  There was only rational self-interest.

0563 When Karl Marx passed judgment on this process, he reified the theological dogmas of mercantilism.  Everywhere that Marx looked in the organization tier, he found religious expression.

If he were to start his own religion, then what better way than to project the theology of mercantilism onto the operations of the organization tier and then declare it evil?

Indeed, the organization tier becomes evil when viewed as an unholy ascent of money and a devilish descent of brand names.

0564 Thus, the paradoxology of Marxism becomes clear.

A doxology of communist power rises through the society tier in response to a projected evil doxology, called “capitalism”, arising in the organization tier.

0565 The organizational objectives of Marxism become inevitable once its projections are assumed and never questioned.

0566 To me, this conclusion makes the works of Eric Santner and Giorgio Agamben fascinating to behold.  Here is the subject matter of political economy.

03/26/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2016) “A Natural History of Human Morality” (Part 1 of 22)

0389 The book before me published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.    The question?  What makes humans unique?  The approach is scientific.  Humans think differently than great apes, their closest biological kin. One way to understand that difference is to observe and measure the cognitive capacities of human newborns and infants, as well as the cognitive abilities of adult great apes.

This book belongs to a decades-long arc of inquiry by the author.  During much of this time, Michael Tomasello serves as co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I cover two decades in my examinations.  Here is the fourth book in the list.

0390 What has this semiotician found so far?

First, from the very start of his journey, the content-level of Tomasello’s vision corresponds to the situation-level of Razie Mah’s hypothesis.  The ultimate human niche consists of the potential of triadic relations.

Razie Mah’s hypothesis applies the two-level interscope for Darwin’s paradigm to human evolution.

0391 First, the general Darwinian paradigm looks like this.

0392 In The Human Niche (available at smashwords and other e-book venues), Razie Mah proposes that the ultimate human niche1b is the potential of triadic relations.

Tomasello’s hypothesis that joint attention2b and shared intentionality2b are behavioral and cognitive adaptations to the niche of sociogenesis1b reconfigures the situation-level of Darwin’s paradigm, resulting in what I call the “Tomasello-Mah synthesis”.

0393 Yes, fortune turns her wheel.  Tomasello does not know Mah’s hypothesis.  Tomasello’s arc of inquiry is underway in 1999.  Mah’s hypothesis first appears online in 2018.  So, Tomasello configures his insight, corresponding to the situation-level of the Darwinian paradigm, as the content-level of his vision.

Tomasello’s vision offers a way to bring a phenotype (of human ontogeny2c’) into relation with a foundational adaptation (of joint attention2a’).  But, according to Mah, phenotype and adaptation are two independent fields of evolutionary inquiry.  One does not situate or contextualize the other.  Rather, the two intersect.

Consequently, Tomasello’s vision resolves the internal contradictions of the intersection of genetics and natural history,by assigning the phenotype to the category of thirdness and the adaptation to the category of firstness, while maintaining the actuality of both.

0394 Here is a picture of Tomasello’s vision.

0395 Of course, this examination appears precisely 25 years after Tomasello’s vision is cast in 1999 AD.

His vision is maintained throughout his arc of inquiry.

Consequently, his conclusions carry an awkward emptiness.  The emptiness compares to the basement of a house.  The basement is dark, cool, foundational and ignored, until of course, one must seek refuge in a storm.

0396 The previous examinations of Tomasello’s works demonstrate that the house, the abode of his vision, is furnished with morality.

Tomasello can ignore the basement, haunted by immaterial beings called, “triadic relations”.  Yet, in that place, where a family might store potatoes, onions, smoked meat, along with luggage and Christmas ornaments, dwells something that Tomasello may safely ignore.  I call that ghost, “religion”.

03/1/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2016) “A Natural History of Human Morality” (Part 22 of 22)

0588 The Tomasello-Mah synthesis shows the ghost in the basement of the house of Tomasello’s vision.

Indeed, as this version of Darwin’s paradigm begins to haunt the entire edifice of human evolution, then Tabaczek’s housebecomes more than a house with a basement.  If sociogenesis1b is the potential1b of triadic relations2a, then Tomasello’s arc of inquiry may be re-articulated using triadic relations.

0589 For example, Razie Mah’s Primer on Sensible and Social Construction may be used to re-label the eras of individual, joint and collective intentionality.  Individual construction associates to the category-based nested form. Sensible construction associates to the two-level interscope, containing content and situation levels.  Social construction associates to the three-level interscope, containing content, situation and perspective levels.

Here is a list of what that might look like.

0590 To continue, the re-labeled eras may be regarded in terms of the evolution of talk.

The evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language.  Language evolves in the milieu of hand talk.

0592 Next, I would like to focus attention on the era of collective intentionality.

Here is a list depicting the timeframe.

0593 Before the era of collective intentionality, hand talk is confined team activities.  Hand talk produces sensible constructions.  Each team develops its own way of hand talking.  

After the domestication of fire, team-tradition hand talk starts to be used generally, eventually producing fully linguistic hand talk.

The situation is very dynamic.  Since cooking with fire increases the number of teams, fully linguistic hand-talk is re-appropriated for specialized use in more and more teams.  Fully linguistic hand-talk influences all social circles.  In some of these circles, grammatically correct, yet apparently nonsensible statements, generate social constructions that open new cognitive spaces.  These novel cognitive spaces become sites for more sensible construction.

0594 The voice comes into play during community meetings (150), seasonal mega-band round-ups (500) and special occasion tribal pow-wows (1500).  The voice is used for synchronization.  Song brings a large gathering of hominins into synchronization.  Once this cultural habit starts, then singing joins other traits in sexual selection.  The voice comes under voluntary control.

0595 Most likely, the early speciations of late Homo erectus produced species that could sing and hand-talk.  But, they could not speak.

Speech is added to hand-talk with Homo sapiens.  Anatomically modern humans practice a dual-mode of talking, hand-speech talk, for the next two hundred-thousand years.

0596 Hand-speech talk would still be practiced by anatomically modern humans today, were it not for the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.  The hypothesis of the first singularity proposes that the Ubaid is the first culture on Earth to practice speech-alone talk.

Here is a picture of the era of social construction.

0598 Today, all civilizations practice speech-alone talk.

This brings me to the limit of Tomasello’s vision.  I open the door, and step out into the realization that our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.  I step into the vision of Razie Mah.

0599 The arc of Tomasello’s inquiry, spanning from 1999 to 2016, opens onto three masterworks by Razie Mah.  These electronic books are available at smashwords and other e-work venues.  This examination relies primarily on The Human Niche, along with books contained in the series, A Course on The Human Niche.  A related series is titled, Buttressing the Human Niche.

Here is a list of Mah’s masterworks.

Still, there is more.

A Commentary on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) is available at smashwords and other e-book venues.  This commentary includes Mah’s blogs for January, February and March, 2024, along with an examination of Becoming Human (2019), the fifth book in a sequence of five books.

0600 My thanks to Michael Tomasello, who writes the books under examination while Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for conducting a scientific inquiry, from which I have examined only several works.

02/29/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2014) “A Natural History of Human Thinking” (Part 1 of 22)

0187 In the preface, the author notes that this book is a prequel to The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999, Harvard University Press).  The question is the same.  What makes humans unique?  The answer is the same.  Humans think differently than great apes, their closest biological kin.

In 1999, researchers in evolutionary anthropology could say, “Only humans think of other humans as intentional agents.  Plus, my cat and my dog are intentional operators, as well, say nothing of the weather.”

Okay, I added the second sentence for dramatic effect.

Unfortunately, research conducted after 1999 introduces a problem.  It turns out that great apes recognize intentionality in others.

Uh oh.

0188 This book is the third marker in Tomasello’s intellectual journey.  I start following his trek with Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (1999) “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” (appearing in Razie Mah’s January 2024 blog).  The second marker that I examine may be found in Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (2008) “Origins of Human Communication” (appearing later in the same blog for the same month).

0189 In the publication before me, A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts), Tomasello explicitly abstracts three cognitive processes in order to distinguish humans from apes.  The processes are cognitive representation, inference and self-monitoring.  He then proposes that all three components were transformed in two key steps during hominin evolution.  He labels his claims, “the shared-intentionality hypothesis”.

0190 Does this follow the trajectory set by previous works?

Here is a theme that appears in the second marker, pre-emptively modified with the above propositions in mind.

0191 This modified picture allows me to offer slogans for movements zero and one.

For zero, the slogan is “I work for food.”

For one, the slogan is “We work for food.”

01/31/24

Looking at Michael Tomasello’s Book (1999) “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” (Part 1 of 12)

0001 In 1999 AD, Michael Tomasello, then co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, publishes the work before me (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

To me, this work marks the start of the author’s twenty year journey, culminating in a theory of human ontogeny, published in 2019.  The word, “ontogeny”, refers to human development and associates to the human phenotype.

0002 What interests me in Tomasello’s journey?

As noted in Comments on Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Book (2017) Adam and the Genome (available at smashwords and other e-book venues), “phenotype” and “adaptation” are not the same.  Instead, these labels apply to distinct actualities that coalesce into a single actuality.  One may call that single actuality, an individual, a species or a genus.  One may also call that single actuality, “a mystery”.

I am interested in the natural history side of the mystery of human evolution.  However, the genetic (or ontogenetic) side cannot be ignored.  Plus, natural history cannot be reduced to genetics, or visa versa

0003 Chapter one of Tomasello’s book is titled, “A Puzzle and a Hypothesis”.

Of course, a puzzle is not a mystery.  A puzzle can be resolved.  A mystery cannot.

The puzzle starts with genetics.  Geneticists have examined the DNA of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans and predict that the last common ancestor lives 6 or 7 Myr (six or seven million years ago).

In contrast, physical anthropologists (natural historians) propose the fossil record noted in the following figure.  With terminological sleight of hand, they refer to human ancestors as “hominins”, even though the old term for any bipedal primate (ape or human) is “hominid”. 

0004 Hmmm. Does the puzzle concern time?

According to genetics, the last common ancestor (LCA) between chimpanzees and humans lives 7 Myr (millions of years ago).  But, little significant shows up in the fossil record until 4 Myr.  Our lineage obviously evolves feet first.  As it turns out, starting around 5 Myr, the extent of tropical vegetation in Africa decreases due to desiccation.  Bipedality is an adaptation to mixed forest and savannah.

0005 The fossil record provides other clues, especially stone tools.

The first stone tools are Oldowan.  Oldowan stones tools are constructed on site.  They are used to scrape meat off of bone and to crack long bones (that are full of fatty marrow).

Acheulean stone tools appear later in the archeological record.  Acheulean stone tools are made beforehand and carried with some intention in mind.  They have the appearance of a giant tooth.  Notably, Acheulean stone tool technology remains unchanged for over a million years.  Innovations in stone-tools follow the domestication of fire.

0006 Surely, these two tables are puzzling.  In the first, the fossil record pertains to changes in hominin phenotypes.  In the second, the fossil record pertains to hominin adaptations, but these adaptations are not phenotypic. They are artifacts.  Are these adaptive artifacts cultural?  Are they behavioral?  I wonder, “Do the words, ‘culture’ and ‘behavior’, capture the matter and the form of these artifacts?”  It is as if an adaptation recognizes matter and generates form.

0007 What is the nature of the adaptation that maintains (and occasionally changes) artifacts, as if these artifacts are phenotypes?

Tomasello suggests that an adaptation is a novel form of social cognition.  Our lineage adapts to a new way of thinking about one another, eventually allowing sociogenesis, new styles of learning and cultural evolution.

0008 Tomasello proposes that there is one adaptation that potentiates subsequent adaptations.

Razie Mah proposes that there is one ultimate niche for our lineage.  The hypothesis is presented in the e-book, The Human Niche (available at smashwords and other e-book venues).

0009 Do Tomasello (in 1999) and Mah (in 2018) propose that our lineage is defined by the same adaptation… er… niche?

What is the difference between an adaptation and a niche?

To these questions, I next attend.