a cultural end & little immanuel as sisyphus

Please acknowledge that I wrote these in the fall of 2023 and many of my ideas have changed... however.. for whatever reason i am still sharing them incase they have the potential to be turned to gold.

thank you...

1. On Bacon and Descartes: One Cultural End

At the previous iteration of the foundation, which Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon were attempting to renovate, time and God were merely observable and rigidly influential on human beings. Cycles, and their inescapability, were recognized, even though some of their points of rotation were miscalculated; such as, the Earth being the center of the universe around which all other cosmic bodies revolved. As the direction of entropy, nature’s tendency to push forward towards chaos, was felt, God was assigned the role of a “clockmaker”, ascribing to Him human-made laws which included little flexibility for change, forcing generalities to fit specificities, conceiving time as a spiral going inwards, a plummeting approach towards a singular truth. (credits to all and nothing by Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Hofer).  

In the years leading up to Descartes and Bacon, scholasticism had been the leading school of thought, composed of interpretations of Aristotle’s teachings fenced in by strict Christian beliefs and fed as a standardized dogma to people in medieval Europe. Then, in a near freeze by its stagnation, perhaps in the cyclical promise of gravity rolling Sisyphus’ boulder to the ground before reaching the peak, a series of synchronicities melted away some of the oppressive scholastic icicles, to create room for the spawning of new trajectories of thought. In a feedback loop operation between the discovery of alternative realities and the desire to further search for them, heliocentrism, along with other scientific and cosmological advances, gave a shake to the old basis of thinking and the disproven materials in its makeup. This propelled thinkers to look for the grounds of the next foundations. In preparation for the expedition, a full snip needed to occur in order to separate people from the line of belief they were forced to follow. In turn, this would enable their individual senses and experiences to be valid receptors and interpreters of reality; marking a point from which ideas could expand outwards. Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes completed this cut by deterritorializing the previous grounds of thought, and the bulky though shallow roots that upheld them, through their criticism of scholasticism and its resulting impact on academics (who they thought were just reaffirming pre-established faulty certainties). The two thinkers then commenced the motion of reterritorialization by sprouting new branches for their proposed methods of learning, science, and reason. 

In the preface to his Novum Organum, Bacon states

That the state of knowledge is not prosperous nor greatly advancing; and that a way must be opened for the human understanding entirely different from any hitherto known, and other helps provided, in order that the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it

summarizing the goal of his upcoming proposition. While not abandoning his belief in God as had been revealed to him by the Christian Church, Bacon aimed to expand the terrain of knowledge which would complement the notion of Him. He went on to advise people to utilize his eliminative scientific method of induction; through which hypotheses would be challenged by corresponding counter-evidence until falsified. With this process, people would gather particularities, exclude what has been disproven, and build up synthetic conclusions, which they could personally witness and formulate. He offered this as a necessary replacement to methods of enumerative induction, which established overarching assumptions from merely limited sets of instances, and scholastic deduction, which searched for particularities from weak and unverified generalizations of distant sources.  

Rene Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method and Meditations, shares a similar vision as Francis Bacon of the motion through which knowledge should travel. Also working with God in his mind, Descartes sets out to learn beyond what he has been taught in school and what has been presented to him as truth without much proof by choosing to rely on what he discovered in his travels, readings, and most importantly, the intricate structure of his own mind. 

Although Francis Bacon expressed criticism towards occultists of his day for their readiness to accept untested myths as truths, I cannot help but think of him and Descartes as wizards, similar in essence to more contemporary chaos magicians, due to their persistence and curiosity in multi-directionally guided investigations, and their determination to manifest change. However, a key difference I observe between the two searchers of a new foundation rests in the direction of their gazes when standing on the freshly laid grounds. Francis Bacon looks to the tallest mountain peaks exposed to humanity, while Descartes focuses on the deepest caves. Bacon always ties his new findings to the goal of influencing nature, an ability he considered innate to human beings that has been concealed from them largely by those untested dogmas he wished to abandon. By this, I understand that Bacon means people have a much further grasp on what they can affect onto the Creator of Everything’s Design, and this should be explored and promoted. Descartes, on the other hand, shares this interest, but concentrates on astonishing and changing himself in order to strengthen his confidence in proceeding through life and to free himself from the path that society might have predetermined for him.  

The two thinkers contributed to the arrow of time continuing its motion; now in a spiral going outwards, resembling the conical shape of their proposed methods for the acquisition of knowledge, with themselves, and other individuals, as the starting point from which searchful energies expand, while under the effects of nature and its cycles. Where these energies may land, the shape that they form, would be the origins of the new foundation. This was an important mission, as it seemingly granted time more kinetic energy and space for the discovery of new ideas, inventions, epistemologies, structures, which otherwise would have been repressed by the choke of scholasticism, its kinship with Christian theology, and the project of trying to keep it closed and resistant to change. However, it seems as if the timeline that followed Descartes’ and Bacon’s laying of a new foundation took reinterpreted versions of their ideas and turned them into a next system of beliefs. Science became the new religion, empiricism and rationality replaced the mysterious and ever expansive God, and people were to accept and follow this notion as the new standardized dogma.  (but there isn't an end here...)

2. On Little Immanuel (Kant): As Sisyphus

Several motions of thought continuously permeate throughout the make-up of our contemporary systems of understanding. If we were to flatten and diagram some of these movements in knowledge, I believe a general pattern would be revealed to us—something that resembles a sine wave. Each wavelength is composed of both an analytic/clarifying and synthetic/amplifying motion, with sequential permutations of these two basic components. Perhaps this is the manifestation of the Sisyphean fate: each thinker attempts to roll the boulder up the hill, some more than once, some even meet each other along the ascending way, until gravity humbles their strengths and rolls the boulder back down. The descending travels, however, are not to be seen as a mark of failure but a reminder of the persistence of human effort to continue the push despite the unyielding cyclical designs of the Creator of Everything. 

When the time came for little Immanuel to attempt his upward climb, his approach to handling the boulder was prophetic and revealed the recipe to an antidote to a common affliction of thought. Immanuel, a man of strict piety and self-restraint, followed his freakish instincts to explore a divergent path previously only tiptoed by his forerunners. He had been warned about the quick exhaustion of a boulder raised with merely dogmatic forces and of the inevitable stagnation that occurs when one’s energy is too dispersed and too unsure of its own power during the push. So, little Immanuel Kant combined the strengths of his internal beliefs with what he learned from experience to grant himself extra acceleration to move and imagine along the deviant path while discovering it at the same time. His success was marked by his embrace of his limits and of the impending downward roll of the boulder by the hands of nature. Inspite of the challenges in his way, he proceeded the journey in a lively delusional manner to which no potential obstacle or deterring force could catch up. When describing his expansion on the hill of understanding, he left his contemporaries and the forthcoming transformations of culture with the necessary methods to uncover their own unique motions and withstand the infiltration of external intruders who may try to persuade them against it. 

...

In today’s rapid and widely interconnected culture, there is a multiplicity of sine waves traveling at various speeds simultaneously. They have different forms of interaction with individuals and larger communities. Some people proceed smoothly from crest to through, some are out of sink, and some meticulously study the waves in order to use them to their authoritarian advantage by creating deceiving waves of propaganda. 

Propaganda relies on the frequency of the most observed sine waves to set its own trajectory. In order to keep people subscribed to the propaganda's mission, its operation must already have its next moves planned and its multiple furcations, as people will eventually break through the surface of the current illusions and look for the next line of belief. Intelligent forces with little compassion have examined the sine waves and their trends enough to be able to predict the currents and plant messages in the minds of populations at precise moments. In the sphere of present-day geopolitics, this is how occupier-backed platforms target demographic groups by using buzzing language and rhetoric to relay a narrative that will ultimately distract them from more nuanced realities. Given that with time, enough people will catch on to the ways in which their thinking has been manipulated, forces serving occupational authorities must plan the next way to hook people’s attention. However, there are numerous active parties in the propaganda battle. Many teams are competing over domination of the collective cognitive domain, setting a long chain of obstacles on the individual’s path to "truth.”

Becoming aware of these perplexing systems could easily freeze an individual in an operation where their beliefs and their doubts are constantly forced to cancel each other out, with no remedy to the persistent hijacking of their autonomous drives by external forces. Some are more predisposed to this condition, while others are equipped with or obtain the immunity to withstand it. To remain in such a suspension, however, is to give up the pushing of the boulder altogether and to imburse the oppressive authorities with the exact power they were hoping to gain. 

The reality I have experienced once urged me to turn away from myself, convinced me that there is such a thing as objective truth but that I am not a sufficient vehicle towards its recovery/discovery. I had to accept arbitrarily determined systems as the ultimate ones, even though the orders they imposed were in disagreement with many aspects of my existence. This turned me skeptical, and I became susceptible to accepting answers that were general but charged and ultimately shortsighted. Eventually, I reached some writings describing the Kantian approach to the pushing of the boulder and the benefits of continuing the push even if it is bound to roll back down. I regained the belief and knowledge to move through time in completed sine waves by my own accord, with significance reinscribed to my own subjectivity, a curiosity for all that I do not yet know, and an acceptance of all that I might never know. 

Little Immanuel’s enactment of Sisyphus offered a pursuit to freedom out of the restrictions of external and predetermined forces, unchallenged beliefs, and the limitations of our tools for observation. 

xoxo