Logic as Rape vs. Truth and Love
By Kristo
Ivanov, prof.em., Umeå University
September 2022
(rev. 231109-1540)
(https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/LogicRapeTruthLove.html)
(https://archive.org/details/logic-rape-truth-love)
CONTENTS
From:
Information on: Christianism or Atheism
From:
Information and Theology
Case study:
Author at the service of Atheism
The motivation to
write the present paper arouse from reading a text written (in Swedish) by a colleague of mine where he defended himself from a criticism
of his published views on intelligent design and evolution(here, here, and here). The Swedish text can be fairly translated by the reader in e.g.
the Google-translator, in pieces of maximum 5000 characters (with spaces). I felt a profound
unease in witnessing my colleague’s proud defense against what I perceived as
an outrageous, dishonorable intellectual abuse, which unfortunately already is
common and characterizes much of what in going on in a decadent culture. Universal Darwinism and
selection had namely already been criticized as being a tautology: my outrage
in this context can be a symptom of my impression of the difficulties inherent
in the theory of evolution, including those inherent in its logical
justification exemplified in e.g. Reconsidering the logical
structure of the theory of evolution. Such objection are usually done away by means of logical
re-constructions, such as in Wikipedia’s Objections to evolution.
Only later, however, I became aware that
my deep sense of outrage was a reenactment of what the Russian author
Dostoevsky perceived also as a questioning of the freewill. It was famously and
furiously expressed in his novella Notes from the Underground (1864), especially the last chapters 7
to 9 of its first Part 1. Wikipedia describes them as covering “theories of reason and logic, closing with the
last two chapters as a summary and transition into Part 2”. It was written long
before the advent of analytical psychology and announced the turmoil leading to the Russian revolution, the
Soviet Union, and to the ongoing definitive secularization of the West. It
resonates with several of my own thoughts and texts starting with their
verbalization in Computers as embodiment of
mathematics and logic, and my reflections on the drive towards the computerization of society. It resonates
also with my comments on some of the motivations for the clash in Ukraine between Russia
and the West.
I will not enter a discussion about
Swedish texts whose translation would require an excessive effort of mine. The
discussion will start from my theological views that I have already advanced in
a paper on Information and Theology that will also be used here below. I
will only detail my view on the difficulty of debates that I have presented in
another paper on Information and Debate, and in Information on: Christianism or
Atheism. My
conclusion is that debates risk to be forcibly reduced to logic and that can be
perceived as forced debates where logic is a substitute for Christian love.
I will start with slightly edited excerpts from the
two last mentioned papers, which I will try to detail by commenting them
further.
(https://ia601800.us.archive.org/4/items/Debate_201801/Debate.html#Other)
My familiarity with
analytical psychology has probably prompted me to conceive a hypothesis on why
analytically, logically or mathematically gifted people, especially scientists,
usually display perseverance - not the least in private unending debates that
they even prefer, rather than public debates that follow publishing. My
hypothesis is that such minds peel off the emotional empathic content of the
debated issue. It seems to the essence of formal science as even advanced
in F. Cajori’s History of Mathematical Notations.
Logical-mathematical notation also allows the belief that any argument
is self-contained in that presupposes a common understanding of the used words
or concepts, as well their presuppositions about the context. Being so, it
presupposes no need of references to other literature or data, and the party
who relies on only logic can write briefly, increasing the expectation that
what he writes can and will be read. No only read but also understood unless
the other party is illogical, equivalent to less intelligent of stupid. If this
other party can afford to make an ulterior effort to explain his additional
data, literature, definitions of terms, presupposition and context, he will be
countered with the objection that he cannot expect to be read, and even less
studied, because he is prolix and requires too much time and attention.
Because of this, if in lack of faith in
any great religion and Christianism in particular, these extremely gifted
logical people may have great difficulty to establish a whole contact and merge
in trust with another mind, a contact which would be fulfilled in love or
Christian “caritas” or social benevolence. Many people cannot establish a
whole, intimate, personal contact even with other people, friends and
colleagues at work, and may have no spouse or “partner”, or are Incels. They may have no whole deep contact with
members of their own family with whom they cannot share their innermost doubts,
feelings, longings, fantasies and often not even experiences of their own daily
work or professional life. It will be partly evidenced by cases of domestic
violence and by the percentage
of marriages ending in divorce. This leads in turn to their need for a
compensation, attempts to forced repeated, supposedly intimate thought-contact
with another party on matters that are forcefully divested of emotions, as if
it were a sort of “rape”, as suggested by one main dimension of
the word perseverate and perseverance,
and interpretable in terms my Reason and Gender. An
opposite type of mind in this respect is the author or romances or of diaries,
who talks with the expected world of readers or with his own diary without
requiring a response.
Forced logic can be
seen as a historic social tragedy as implemented in the ongoing computerization
of society and the problems of human-computer
interaction. It is also apparent
in judicial systems such as the Swedish one. Citizens arrested by the police
and suspect for having committed grave crimes are acquitted in court because “beyond
any reasonable doubt” is
interpreted in only logical terms. The courts cannot handle the combination of
a series of “probabilities” that incriminate the accused, while the defending
lawyers conceive the most improbable possibilities in the course of the
criminal event that “explain” their client’s innocence well within the range of any reasonable doubt. (Cf. in Swedish
language examples here and here). Logic precludes the
possibility of beyond any reasonable doubt in many practical cases. The committed
advocates of the theory of evolution that is accused for being a tautology (see above) work as the defending advocates of
suspect criminals who abuse of the principle of beyond reasonable doubt and can always reconstruct any objection to
the theory by means of tautological arguments. When “public opinion” or
political correctness finally reacts to such schemes that free arrested
suspects, the consequence as in the case of “rape” is that the judicial
definition of rape is changed to “sexual consent” (see here and here), switching from coercion-based to
consent-based definitions of rape and laws. Paradoxically, the difficulty of
proof beyond any reasonable doubt, is then bypassed by the court’s use of
testimony’s “trustworthiness” (Swedish: trovärdighet) by the assumed “oppressed” raped party. Not to mention the
analog to raped, i.e. the “oppressed” in hate
crimes in social media as well as in violence against women in
modern western nations, after decades of women’s liberation movements, and sexual
education replacing moral and religious education.
Is it the failure of such logic of positive
law, replacing natural
law, that leads to violence and wars as lately in
Ukraine?
From:
Information on: Christianism or Atheism
(https://ia802509.us.archive.org/27/items/renard-nn/RenardNN.html)
A perhaps meaningful
curiosity is that, as remarked by one reader, the integration of spirit and
matter is also the subject of a book by Matthew Fox and co-author Rupert Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet. I heard of Sheldrake long ago and noted the drawing of apparent
relations of his ideas to Carl Jung (and Hans Driesch), in matters that in turn partially relate to my
discussions in the essay on Quantum Physics, Computer and Psychology. In lack of finding something deeper in literature a
speculative intuition of mine, based on conclusions in the presentation of my
paper Reason and Gender. I suggest an apparently farfetched but classic
coupling of the relation of matter-spirit to theology in terms of the relation
between the masculine and feminine. And as a speculative curiosity for those
who can abide it, I may go further here and now, relating it to an
interpretation of the classic citation of humans been born Inter faeces et urinam
nascimur (cf. here and here):
spirited life’s production of dead matter (faeces et urinam) and matter’s (semen and ovum)
production of living spirit. An outright theological extension of the latter
can lead to the doctrine of Incarnation as in Christianism (and Hinduism) while modern secular
unconscious trivialization reduces it to the popular concept of avatar, (here and here), vastly used and misused in computer contexts. All
this while scientists in today’s secular western culture tend to also ignore
the meaning of Eucharist because
of missing consciousness of the relation between science and theology as mediated
by the philosophy of science. It is a mediation that barely dares to
acknowledge the challenge of quantum physics where Matter with capital “M” with its supposed
“particles” tends to (mathematically) disappear as Spirit with capital “S” has disappeared in the context of “spirituality”. One of the tragic consequences is that the Eucharist
is substituted by Satanism, which in turn tinges
the influence of paganism and atheism for the future of our youth. It is a Satanism that is represented by the
historical case of Maria de Naglowska, about whom Wikipedia relates that “the Holy Spirit of the classic Christian trinity is
recognized as the divine feminine. Her practices aimed to bring about a
reconciliation of the light and dark forces in nature through the union of the
masculine and feminine, revealing the spiritually transformative power of sex.”
Today, even the union of the masculine and feminine tends to disappear in the
shadow of LGBT movements.
From:
Information and Theology
(https://ia600905.us.archive.org/15/items/kivanov_informatik_Theo/Theo.html#Requests)
When discussing the question of existence
and its relation to love and agape mentioned earlier it is convenient to
consider also humans' requirement that God should give us (the capability of
constructing?) "proofs" of its "existence" or
"power" or allow himself to be "tested" in a
"trial". This disregards the philosophical problem of
"existence" (see above) and also disregards the fact that
Christian religion can be seen as differing from e.g. Islam in that it gives
priority to love over power. This is particularly interesting when noting that
feminism is often based upon the reference to, and the request for power.
Referring once again to the same book by Fichte as above, in one of the
appendixes of the book dealing with Sur les Intentions de la Mort de
Jésus [On the Intentions of Jesus' Death, pp. 195-216] the author explains
why Jesus is seen to be supposed to die in order to fulfill the Christian
message, relinquishing the recourse to power.
Conversion motivated by power does not square with Christianity. Jesus did not
found a political party or a terrorist organization (cf. my blog entry
on terrorism) in order to overthrow the Roman
empire, as it has been historically expected of a Jewish Messiah. A
"proof" would also imply a display of power instead of love, despite
the rhetorical differentiation between the force of argument and argument of force. It is also a display of (the pride of)
power to show that one does not need love, as the atheist who feels pride for
his super human "Nietzschean" intelligent disclosure of the religious illusion and capacity to
endure suffering without the illusion of false solace in a future afterlife
based upon dependence upon a supposed loving mighty God. This is analog to the
“existentialist” emphasis on a proud individual
“responsibility” that defines a supposed meaning of life and allows to declare
a “radical atheism”. The interesting thing is that proofs do
not appear to be valid or relevant not even regarding love between humans. The
lover who hopes to entice the loved one as humans who desire God' attention and
love will not start by requiring the loved one to give proofs of being worthy
to be loved, since loveliness cannot be empirically or logically verified. Who
is the God to be loved? The answer is: understand and feel the sacred books,
the Bible, which is the most discussed, challenged and tested text of at least
the Western world. Most genuinely faithful Christians and others learn to love
God by being passionately moved to love by the tales in the sacred books where
apparent grimness, harshness, hardheartedness and strictness, describe
humanity's progressive understanding of a loving God.
The lover who hopes to conquer the loved one will modestly pass a
"proof" of himself by offering or sacrificing
something valuable in the hope to entice. The lover will not offer a supposedly
rational rebuttal to an "atheist" who questions his (her) love by
claiming that after all the chosen object of love despite of “existing” may not
be worthy of love because of its existence can be put in doubt (sudden death),
untrustworthiness, ultimate ugliness, or stupidity. For some (problematic) food
for thought, see the psychoanalytic vs. Jungian views about "regression in the service of the ego". So, it
will also be when a subaltern wishes to awake the attention of a manager or
master. Somebody looking for or hoping to employed at a company, as a human who
hopes for God's love and attention, will not go to the manager requiring proofs
that the manager is proficient and that the company is deserving his
contribution when it is his own responsibility to investigate and understand
that. On the contrary, the candidate will prepare himself fulfilling the
beloved's expectations, hoping for the best. If not, the project will be
doomed to failure from the very beginning, and the initial mistrust will
turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ultimate cause of it all is
related to "Ego inflation".
Case study: Author at the service of atheism
This is only for those who understand spoken and
written Swedish and happen to have the time and interest for the subject. Most
of the material is in Swedish but some of the written text is translated in
English in order to allow others to guess the import of the question.
It’s about a "summer talk" in 2005 by author
Lena
Andersson. It is a rhetorically violent atheist sermon
attacking the image of Jesus Christ, which can be listened (in Swedish) here or here
(about 50 minutes).
The content of the summer talk was later summarized by
Lena Andersson herself in the magazine Humanisten (17 May 2021) Jesus – självgod och arrogant.
[Jesus - smug and arrogant]. The English translation is now presented below:
Jesus
- smug and arrogant
Jesus
is considered good. He even personifies goodness. Reading the Gospels, it's
hard to understand how this image came about. If you go by the text alone, and
what else can you go by, Jesus is not good. Sometimes he is, of course, and to
some people, but who isn't? He is self-righteous, however, and arrogant. Not
infrequently, he exhibits overbearing and tyrannical traits. Only someone who
has already decided that Jesus is good can read that meaning into the text.
Though
it starts well. Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount in chapters five to seven
of Matthew's Gospel. It contains all the nice things we have been taught belong
to him. Turn the other cheek, love your enemies, don't be hypocritical, if your
right eye deceives you, pluck it out and throw it away, etc. But through the
story that follows, he doesn't live up to his own intentions but engages in
unrestrained punishment, condemnation and mockery of others who can't do it either.
When
he has gathered the disciples, he sends them out to heal the sick and proclaim
that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. "In every town or village you come
to," Jesus tells them, "find out who is worthy there and stay with
him until you go on. [...] If one does not receive you or listen to your words,
leave that house or town and shake its dust from your feet. Surely, it will be
more lenient on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for
such a city."
Joseph
Stalin? No, Jesus of Nazareth who recruits proselytes. He also immediately
admits: "I have come not with peace but with a sword. For I have come to
set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son's wife
against her mother-in-law, and the man's household will be his enemies".
Great sacrifices are necessary for the future kingdom of heaven, we understand.
"He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy to belong to me,
and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy to belong to me. Whoever
does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy to belong to me".
This
is how the dictator speaks to his creatures. Like all autocrats, Jesus silences
criticism. One day he asks the Pharisees whose son the Messiah is. They answer
incorrectly, of course, because they do not believe in Jesus as one must if one
wants to escape his contempt. Jesus gives the Pharisees another trick question,
after which we learn that "no one could answer him, and after that day no
one dared to ask him any more questions."
Is
this a good man? Have we not been taught
to be critical of authority? That no one is more important than anyone else? To
use reason and ask questions? Why, then, have we learned at the same time
that Jesus is good when in fact he exhibits all the traits we condemn in
leaders?
Anyone
who denies Jesus commits, as we know, the worst of crimes. The disciple Peter
does so three times just before the cock crows. We find him pitiful. Jesus
himself, on the other hand, may deny anyone he likes at any time, because he is
always the one who decides what is right
in a given situation. As Jesus stands and speaks to the people, his mother
and his brothers come and ask to speak to Jesus. "Who is my mother, and
who are my brothers?" Jesus says, pointing to the disciples. "This is
my mother and my brothers."
What
was that? Shouldn't you honor your father and mother, wasn't that an important
commandment? Yes, but first a few more pages, when the Pharisees ask Jesus why
the disciples are breaking the "rules of the fathers" and not washing
their hands before eating. Jesus knows that offense is the best defense and
immediately asks them why they themselves are breaking God's commandments.
"God has said, 'Have respect for your father and your mother,' and,
'Whoever reviles his father or his mother will die. But you say that if someone
says to his father or mother, 'What I could have helped you with, I will give
as a gift to the temple,' then he does not have to show respect for his father
or mother."
Why
then did Jesus get away with denying his mother, and saying that anyone who
loves his parents more than they love him is not worthy to follow the leader?
Well why not when Jesus' hallmark is whimsy.
Just
before he is about to die, he is lying at the table and a woman comes up with a
bottle of expensive balm which she sprinkles on his hair. The disciples are
outraged, saying it is a waste of the expensive oil. It could have been used to
give a lot of money to the poor. Jesus thinks of the poor sometimes, when he
feels like it. But right now he wants this balm in his hair (maybe he wants the
woman too). In any case, he is not discouraged, but rebukes modestly. "Why
are you making the woman sad? She has done me a good turn. You always have the
poor with you, but you don't always have me."
That
was exactly what was suspected. One: Jesus is more important than the poor.
Two: Jesus has no ambition to make poverty disappear; the poor will always be
there, so that those who want to lighten their hearts by giving to them will feel
good.
In
the rest of the literature, this pomposity is matched only by Karlsson on the
roof. Both could have made the statement "learn from me, who have a gentle
and humble heart". It is not Karlsson who says it.
Lena
Andersson
This talk is probably important for understanding the
secular if not violently atheist cultural environment in which people have
lived and live in modern Sweden and which It also characterizes parts of the
Western world, which in turn characterizes how it perceives and acts in
politics, including foreign policy such as the attitude to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I
have experienced the latter also through the reactions to my apparently
controversial essay on the conflict.
The talk raised many reactions among listeners, which
in turn were reported by the press, as in Jesusbild vållade lyssnarstorm
[Characterization of Jesus caused a storm among listeners] Svenska Dagbladet, published 2005-07-14 (non-subscribers of the
newspaper can only read the initial lines of the text).
Reaction of some other readers (including myself) are
found in the lower half of page 27 of Svenska
Dagbladet 25 July 2005, under the title SYNPUNKT - Lena Andersson: Sommarpratare. [VIEWPOINT. Theme: Lena Andersson’s summer talk]. Two
analytically-logically more complex, apologetically critical reactions to
Andersson’s talk were published on the net by the already above mentioned
Krister Renard (in Swedish, here and here).
Their analytical, complexity, however, curiously enough suggested to me that if
logic is a sort of rape, a very sharp apologetics may be felt like a violent
reaction to violence, like a revenge, vengeance or “war” as an opposite to a
challenging forgiveness that, by the way, would hardly be expected by someone
challenging for one and half hour at the radio and in writing the evil or
historicity of the Holocaust or
the morality of the prophet Muhammad.
In this context I must mention the case I know, of a
woman who reported that once, when menaced with an axe by her drugged-up
husband, she spontaneously reacted by slowly stretching her arm and caressed
his face, with the result that he dropped the axe to the floor. I also listened
to a radio documentary telling about a hardened man sentenced to life
imprisonment for murdering a young woman, who upon being visited in prison by
her forgiving parents got moved and burst into tears, “understanding” his crime
upon his first life experience of genuine human empathy, mercy or compassion
close to Christian love. This does not mean that normal conversation and
elementary debate should not follow elementary logic, from which mathematical
logic as well as all science can be seen as having originated. Debate on
political and ethical issues, for not becoming
meaningless must, however, start from consciousness about the
meaning of logical systems and their
connection to theology. All this, of course, paradoxically problematizes the
evaluation of what I mentioned at the beginning of this paper regarding my “unease in witnessing Renard’s proud defense against
what I perceived as an outrageous, dishonorable intellectual abuse”, if my
“unease” is violent outrage, and his “pride” is violent logical reaction.
A most touching and profound, if yet opportunely
analytically simple, late attempt to discuss Lena Andersson's approach is
probably the article by earlier mentioned article by Börje Peratt on
2019-06-16, Lena Andersson i ateismens tjänst [Lena Andersson at the service of atheism] where he
also refers to his related "similar article" on Fullt möjligt förena tro och vetenskap [Fully possibility to combine faith and science]. In
this respect he does not go so deep and in detail as Renard does in his second
article linked above. Wikipedia reports that Börje Peratt died on 20
December 2021, but elsewhere he featured himself both as researcher and
in a biography.
A kind of public conclusion of the whole case up to
now can be sensed in Lena Andersson's relative development as revealed when
being interviewed in
June 2018 by Eric Schüldt in the
program "60 minutes - Podcast".
My own hypothesis is that Lena Andersson suffers from
being trapped by her own analytical-logical talent, according to my
explanations in Information and Debate, and Reason and Gender. They are consistent with the
message implicit in her above interview and her novel Egenmäktig förfarande: en roman om kärlek [Willful refractory behavior: A novel on love].
It can be interpreted as showing how a logically
argumentative mind fails in convincing or
forcing a partner to retribute love. Remarkably, it turns out that the Swedish title,
borrowed from the legal code, is difficult to translate, being done in
Wikipedia as criminal conversion, that in turn offers only one meaning coming close to
the phenomenon at hand: taking without owner's consent, that in turn comes
close to “rape” but loses its applicability in our context when specifically
considered in Wikipedia. A sad association and analogy is, however, to the “Morning-after
pill” in the sense of “Emergency contraception is used to prevent pregnancy for women who've
had unprotected sex or whose birth control method has failed.” In our present
case, without my having studied Andersson’s book, I see it as meaning that
Andersson reacts to the fact that a man can court a woman and obtain certain
more intimate favors while she comes to hope for a more stable relationship,
maybe even a marriage, that later is not materialized. The courting interplay
may become a power-game and she may later accuse the man for a sort of
statutory rape committed while she was drunk or
asleep, as in the tragic case of Julian Assange. If the more
intimate favors have resulted in a pregnancy there is also the option of
morning-after pill or abortion but the bitter feeling for having been rejected
will persist in that logic argumentation has failed in understanding and
uniting each other in love. The political expression of this end-game may be
radical feminism that I consider in my earlier mentioned paper on Reason and Gender.
The disappointment for the courting
partner concludes in qualifying him with translations of the Swedish
“egenmäktig”, adjectives found in a dictionary such as arbitrary, high-handed, wayward, refractory, balky, willful. They
can be still better grasped by means of their antonyms amenable, compliant, docile, submissive, tractable. It reveals
what, for a logical mind, it all was about: to
control, without realizing that control is power, and that if hate is the
logical contrary of love, it is power in terms of logic or brute force (rape)
that is its psychological contrary. Or
better as I write in a paper on the ethics of research:
The psychologist and humanist, Carl Jung, writes (in his Collected Works 7, §78) that logically,
the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically
it is the will to power. Those who do not
understand this message are the same who misunderstand the essence of love and
believe that it may be forced through cognition and various forms of cognitive therapies, balance of power, emancipation and egalitarianism.
I see this as a classical philosophical problem in
that the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ethics of practical reason and the “ought” cannot guide the analytically
argumentative cognition of pure reason over or further to love. It is a problem that the
philosopher leaves to the aesthetics of the
critique of judgment that in a Western secularized culture is reduced to design or worse, to the creation and acquisition of beautiful objects and even (courting or rape of?)
human subjects. That is: in place of reciprocal understanding and love as
explained in my presentation of the essay on Reason and Gender. In a forced situation it is indeed more
felicitous that a woman writes a critical book penalizing in public the
anonymous willful refractory man, rather than that a man rapes the refractory
woman. In my view Andersson’s text
reveals the need of philosophical schooling, as well theological one at the
minimum level of Christian Catechesis. No
questions are posed about the origins and pre-requisites of the ideal of Egalitarianism and Human rights. The
socio-political framework is reduced to a supposed balance of liberalism vs.
socialism or at its best to a sort of theology of
liberation and divinization of democracy. That is: argumentative
Democracy as a substitute for God as lately shown in my review of information
about the Russia-Ukraine
conflict. Cf. the quotation above: “Have we not been taught to be critical of authority? That no one is
more important than anyone else?”.
What I wish to convey from these excerpts is that
(formal) logic being by definition purged from all that emotions and values
(except the assumed value of the logic process itself) it forces the receiver
of the message to be convinced, equal to agree. If this does not happen, that
is, the receiver of the message does not state an agreement, this receiver is
forced to put forward a counter-argument, all based on explicit or implicit
premises such as definitions of terms and suppositions about the application’s
environment. If the premises happen to be implicit the responsibility is force
upon the receiver to investigate and uncover the premises and formulate agreed-upon
definitions, and to put forward a counter-argument.
As I have put forward in another occasion, a quarrel
between spouses may then turn out to be that a logically-analytically gifted
man who expected to convince the counterpart may be countered by the answer:
“You may be right but I want to divorce”. In an essay on the Russia-NATO-Ukraine
conflict I show that this is what happens in the case of
armed-conflicts or wars, as well as in spouses who divorce and struggle for the
partitioning of home, money, goods and children. The conflict and war become
most critical when there is no possibility to divorce, like in the case of one
spouse who is not self-supporting, exactly as in the case of the adjacent
countries Russia-Ukraine when there was and there is a cold-war reminiscent
consisting of danger of installation of nuclear weapons next to the countries’
borders.
But a main question in the present text is also to
observe that the logical framing of initial diplomatic contact between the
spouses or countries is a simplification of what is to be understood as
“logic”, a logic that is basically valuable and necessary. In the study of the
foundations of mathematics and logic it can, and arguably must, be seen as
extracted from the structure of language. This is accounted in my paper on Computers and embodied mathematics and logic, which also recalls the failure of our scientific
culture in ascertaining the foundations of formal science leading to abuse of
mathematics and logic, and today: computers.
This may be a also be a paradoxical failure of the western culture inasmuch
the “crisis of westerns philosophy” uncovers the final predominance of formal
science in what came to be natural science and technology, which in turn lead
to secularization in
parallel with the development of industry, material if not spiritual wellbeing,
and the Military-industrial
complex after two world wars. All to be compared with e.g.
the values of Science and Civilization in China, which did not appear to excel in or exploit natural
science up to industrialism as in the West.
Mathematical-logical-analytical gifted humans tend to be considered as
polymath-geniuses since anything can be mathematized (as illustrated by Herbert Simon’s
career), gaining the most rewarding and influential positions in society as I
exemplify in the context of computers, achieving even
a position analog to a “saint”, as Albert Einstein. Such geniuses have a
giftedness and frame of mind that in later depth psychology can correspond to
one particular type among “Psychological
Types”. It may come to its place in the narrow context of
typical engineering work that today is also the same as in technoscience, and the invasion of such thinking all over society,
as expressed in technocracy and social engineering that in turn appears today in the “totalitarian” ambitions of
evolution theory in the direction of a Theory of Everything, which
in earlier times would have tersely corresponded to God. In antiquity and
earlier times this particular giftedness would have corresponded to manual work, and its limitations are
clearly described in the Bible’s Sirach (chaps.
38:24-34 and 39:1-11) as I
already remarked in my paper on Information and Theology.
When elementary, if yet mathematical, logic is used as
a substitute for language it means that the receiver of the message in practice
must agree if not able and willing to
work out the laborious translation of the whole issue back to ordinary
language. A logically gifted colleague of mine illustrates paradoxically his
psychology of flight from ordinary
language to logic by claiming that all criticism of logic is a
cowardly flight from logic to psychology, a miserable psychologism. It
illustrates a tragic shortcoming in our culture, which is exemplified in the
breakdown of ordinary-language communication before wars and armed conflicts
such as lately between
Russia and Ukraine. The very same colleague of mine is fiercely angry at
my own essay on
the crisis of information about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and has
repeatedly requested me to “withdraw” its publication on the net. He himself
did not write any essay on the subject but mails to me excerpts from Westerns
sources of news. It all shows to me what all this is about if he were in
position of political or entrepreneurial power: dictatorial censorship in the paradoxical
context of Western claims of democratic “freedom of expression”.
If I had been a faithful enthusiast of Freudian
psychoanalysis rather than of Jungian analytical psychology I would have
recurred to counter such accusations of psychologism for being examples of the
criticized concepts of resistance and rationalization, as
it is done by the stout defenders of the theory of evolution, or
of fact resistance (or of alternative
facts, as opposed to my dissertation on quality
of information) as well as by the defenders of its opposite, intelligent
design. An
example is given by an analytically gifted colleague who read an early version
of the present paper and wrote to me (here in a slightly edited anonymized
form):
I
don't think that your justification for equating logic with rape is justified.
It's relatively easy to defend oneself against bad logic, it is enough to answer
a little nonsensically and on a high tone, and everyone will understand that
the dialogue has broken down and no one is right. It's worse with bad
psychology. When a person psychologizes another person by putting himself above
and judge the other, it is not possible to defend oneself because whatever the
second one says, the first one will not answer immediately but will also
psychologize the answer. The other can never defend himself against it. There
is a good example of this in your debate article.
On
further reflection, I find that one could rewrite your "rape" article
by replacing all mentions of "logic" with "psychology" or
"psychologizing". Then it will be much more accurate. Psychology as
rape.
Oh really? “The other can never defend himself against it”? Defend himself from a psychological attack? What about
defending oneself by complaining for psychologism. And how can one defend
himself from a logical attack, a
“logicism” with perfect logic using
undefined ambiguous terms that are applied in indeterminate or inappropriate
circumstances? It is the same logic and mathematics that motivated a cultured
mathematician like Paolo
Zellini to write (in Italian) The Dictatorship of Calculus, along the lines of another book translated into
English, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men. It is here that appears the question of power vs. love
mentioned above in the form of the power of logic for handling physical nature
when there is no room for talking about Spirit.
This is the case of Blaise Pascal’s famous talk about esprit de géometrie et de finesse (check here and
e.g. “geometry”
in his work, also here),
long before Jung conceived the psychological types and its more or less mindful,
criticized derivates. It
is the power of mathematics and logic that allows to manipulate and force
spiritless nature, up to the rape of nature represented by (climate warming and)
the application of quantum
physics for nuclear weapons, while humans are seen mainly if not only a part of
nature. It is to do what “we” want, it is coarse “pragmatism” while erudite “critical
pragmatism” goes astray in the “crisis of western philosophy”,
refers to “ethics” but does not dare to try to be applied to ongoing
controversial societal problems such as consumption of drugs and wars like the
latest in Ukraine. There is no talk about integrating matter with spirit,
Christian Spirit instead of anthroposophic spirit, or feminine with masculine
instead of caring for LGBT. At this
point I do propose that such behavior can be seen as an analog of rape with no
possibility of divorce, only of keeping
silent. It would correspond to not being able to axle with the
responsibility to frame a “convincing” counter-argument, because of weakness or
stupidity. The extreme situation is the rape committed in the case of abusive
popular problems of daily human-computer interaction that I explain and concretize
in an essay with the specific title of The meaning of human-computer interaction. The refusal, inability or impossibility of framing a
counter-argument turns the whole event into a “rape”. Silence is taken as a
looser’s agreement, mediocrity or stupidity. The more so when the logical
attacker is fueled by, or turns himself also into being a victim and aggressor
according to the analog of the “INCEL philosophy”.
I find that the victims of such a rape, seen against
the excerpted material above are e.g. in a democracy the police and the
prosecutor in a tribunal working with the principle of beyond any reasonable doubt, while the opposite may be the accused
in a tribunal, in a dictatorship where justice is subordinated to the executive
power of government.
The feeling of a rape arose in my mind when I read
what I mentioned initially (above) the text written by a colleague of mine
where he defended himself from a criticism of his published views on
intelligent design and evolution. Upon further reflection I felt that his stout
defense sounded a little like a self-inflicted abuse of his dignity. It looked
also as a forced attack on his opinions, and attack that could or should not be treated in terms of
logical arguments and counter-arguments. This in turn made me question what
dignity is or should be, something akin to integrity. A search for dignity in the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary in my view
comes closest to my feeling in item #1: formal reserve or seriousness of language. In turn reserve in this context
does in my mind come closest in the core meaning of our context as item #4:
restraint in one’s words and actions, forbearance from making a full explanation, complete disclosure, or free
expression of one's mind. And I mean that all this means a necessary respect in
extremely complex issues and thoughts that other logical-analytical people who
dislike ordinary language (or in the worst case are emotional or philosophical
analphabets, cf. emotional
intelligence, BPD, psychopathy). They want to force,
manipulate others into a distorting, apparent simplicity. It is a meaningful
curiosity that the “See
also” section of Wikipedia
on Psychopathy lists both “Moral
psychology” and Serial rapist” (!). The view that is
most dissenting from this one above is obviously very simple: the fellow who is
not analytically, logically and mathematically skilled is assumed to be stupid or suited with something else than talking about
these matters. On this track it is also possible to speculate whether the line
of demarcation between giftedness for languages and humanities vs. the same for
formal sciences (and music) is dependent upon the degree of inborn ability to
abstract from the emotional content of language communication (cf. Cajori, above). This leads in turn to the Psychological Types of analytical psychology.
Finally, we have the question of why people go and
sometimes keep together discussing with each other despite of rape or
reciprocal rape that can be figuratively and blandly correspond to BDSM, if it is not
taken as an entertaining sport between individuals as tennis, or then as soccer
notwithstanding the need and meaning of entertainment. If
not, it can be a frequent source of estrangement: among friends as co-dependency or
litigation, in marriages as estrangement and divorce, in diplomacy as war.
I had told to a couple of colleagues of mine who like
and seem to need private intimate debates, that had given me the impression
that they need to communicate with humans in order to win debates and prove
themselves to be right. This to the point of one of them having given me the motivation
to write a whole paper on debates. He complained that the two of us could not
sustain extensive debates, and told me recently by e-mail (in Swedish,
translated by me) about his discussion with his other counterpart XXXX (items
1-4 below), while finally quoting (item 5) what his counterpart expressed about
his own motivation for continuing the exchange:
1) “XXXX and I do know how to debate. We are now in about the fifteenth
round with posts of between four and seven pages.”
2) "The discussion with XXXX was instructive even if we never reached
the end before the forum [ref. Christianism and evolution in the spirit of IFES] was closed. By the way, the discussion about Intelligent Design and
evolution is impossible to conclude because the theory of evolution is so young
- there is so much left to explore.”
3) “In the discussion with XXXX, I will never be right or wrong, we will at
best agree to where we disagree". [Cf. disagreement in divorce or cancel culture, and
in the case of the “seventh
reader” in the appendix of my paper on the Russia-Ukraine
conflict.]
4) “I am interested in finding out and evaluating the arguments for and
against my opinion. This is generally considered important for not to get stuck
in a bubble, as many do.
5) Why I keep in the dialog: I think it partly depends on the purpose of
the discussion. (I am now referring to the kind of discussion that you and I
have, where we start from different worldviews.) I don't think we can
intellectually convince each other - at least it would be extremely rare - but
there are others purposes, to better understand others, to sharpen one's own
thinking, perhaps even to arrive together at certain positions that we in all
cases can share.
The first quotation can be seen as compared with an
earlier message in which my colleague mentioned that he and XXXX had an earlier
tour of written discussions whose volume corresponded to two filled binders.
The second and third quotations above show how it is
possible to justify that no conclusions were reached when nobody “wins” de
debate because they are equally gifted, while rebutting the allegation that one
wants to “win” and prove oneself “right”.
The third quotation repeats what an acquaintance of
mine who was more diplomatic than some others told me as criticism after
reading my paper about the Russia-NATO-Ukraine conflict (cf. the quotation from
the “seventh
reader”, in the paper).
The fourth quotation puts into evidence that there is
no “why-because” of the “interest”, and that getting stuck in a bubble reveals the need for a lacking deep
communion of love with somebody other than the logician-counterpart.
The fifth and last quotation
reveals a hidden unconscious assumption of what (disregarding what “intellect”
is or may be) intellectually a worldview is or should be if the latter is not borrowed from a
philosophical system of thought such a Hegelian Weltanshauung. That was the
interpretation offered by the systems philosopher West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systems (DIS, chap. 7 on dialectic, cf. index here). Much more
serious is the question of sharpening rather
than buffing or rounding, if it does not mean only or mainly sharp logic (idem, DIS chap. 2 on
fact-nets). And still more serious is the question of what understanding (others) is, beyond sheer agreement or sharing of positions (idem, chap.5 on
consensus), when it is not Christian love and charity.
But the most important thing
appears to me to be why debates are felt to be important even when “rapes” are
committed, that is, why do people usually continue to discuss, and
paradoxically why and how they stop as illustrated in two case studies in my
essay on information on: Christianism or Atheism referred to above. They stopped after no longer
finding a “common ground” for continuing. The question is what is or should be
such common ground that else may correspond to the mentioned worldview, which in turn may have been
religion and forgotten Christianism. And in psychoanalytic terms and in terms
of my experience I wish to advance the hypothesis that it is a question of the
very complex phenomenon of countertransference, which
because of its complexity motivated Carl Jung to recommend to recommend that
the education of psycho-analysts should include their undergoing a
psychoanalysis by an elder experienced analyst.
Countertransference is an explanation of why people
willingly continue to be “raped”, besides and beyond possible social advantages
in what regards career and prestige in the profession or community. In my case
I have conceived that such debates amount to wishing to teach and learn from
each other. In my experience it was a surprise for me when my counterpart XXXX
repeatedly did not understand my texts, as it often happens when educated
adults do not understand texts the require prior study or lack a very specific
gift as for mathematics and formal sciences. Quite early he began to see me not
as colleague but as “teacher” complaining that if he did not understand
something then it was my fault because of my shortcomings in explaining, in my
educational skill or worse (stupidity). This emboldened me to try to act and
affirm myself in the role of “teacher”, which led him to freeze into the
position of challenging, revolting and aggressive “pupil” who, in turn, would
arise my own aggressiveness. In Wikipedia’s terms this is a situation where
there is a “redirection of a psychotherapist’s feelings toward a client – or
more generally a therapist emotional entanglement with a client”, indicating
the possibility and need of a deeper understanding of the whole issue, along
the lines exemplified in some
available literature.
Since both colleagues act as “besserwisser” in
different aspects of the discussed issue, they get emotionally entangled with
each other, both feeling like children inculpating the other who is seen as a
teaching father, instead of confessing in sorrow their own shortcoming in not
being able to understand. They both, incapable of seeing or confessing their
own “shadow”,
wish to be teachers treating the other as a pupil or child, according to the
archetype of the “father”. Meanwhile they paradoxically regress into the role
of an aggressive child revolting against the authority of its parents, in order
to be able to inculpate the counterpart for their own shortcomings. The
corresponding figures in rape is the woman who wants to be attractive and able
to manipulate the man for her own advantage, but does not want to be chased and
raped, which raises her later aggressiveness. For the man it is the wish of
appearing strong, smart and attractive, satisfying his lust but not wanting
commitment and responsibility for the consequences, which raises his
counterpart’s aggressiveness.
An equivocal apparent solution and substitute for
“traditional” love in a decadent culture is to avoid been confronted with the
challenge of resistance, oppositeness or difference, to see oneself and a LGBT, non-binary or polyamory, and
an effortless auto-didact, do-it-yourself,
after having hoped in vain for the psychoanalytic “critical insight and
rationality” of the Society without the Father, within a permissive society which is unrealistically
expected to act like an unconditional caring mother where “anything goes”. Then
logic’s discipline is hoped to rescue from anything goes.
It becomes then difficult to retreat from the role of
all-knowing father and from needy child that is taught without effort. That is,
to accept our own ignorance in certain issues and our impotence in teaching and
learning things that we or even others in our culture barely understand. But
countertransference is a psychoanalytic concept that should be translated in
its correspondent terms in analytical psychology, but ultimately in Christian
doctrine, if one does not wish before that to read The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Eds. Hamilton & Cairns, Princeton Univ. Press)
that exhausts the meaning of debate and friendship (cf. Lysis) while its index curiously and symptomatically
relates conversation to intercourse.
Since the Christian message that love is related to
will (to love), I do not refrain from quoting for a third time in my writing a quotation
from Jan Brouwer’s Life, art and
mysticism:
[R]idiculous is the use of language when one tries to express
subtle nuances of will which are not part of the living reality of those
concerned, when for example so-called philosophers or metaphysicians discuss
among themselves morality, God, consciousness, immortality, or the free will.
These people do not even love each other, let alone share the same subtle
movements of the soul; sometimes they even do not know each other personally.
They either talk at cross-purposes or each builds his own little logical system
which lacks any connection with reality. For logic is life in the human brain;
it may accompany life outside the brain but it can never guide it by virtue of
its own power. Indeed, if there is a harmony of will, logic may well fall by
the wayside ...
I think that the final translation of
countertransference to the language of Christian doctrine is the most difficult
final obstacle to surmount, besides love as in Matthew
22:37-39). It is “The Mote and the
Beam” (Matthew 7:1-5) with which I terminate my text
below. My conclusion is that debates risk to be forcibly reduced to logic and
that can be perceived as forced debates where logic is a substitute for
Christian love. It may also be the reason of why one of the most insightful if
yet otherwise problematic pioneers of Swedish feminism, Ellen Key [commented in
my texts here and here],
wrote her original book on Kvinnopsykologi och Kvinnlig Logik [Feminine psychology and feminine logic] . Rape and
power or, rather violence, are substitutes for love. It is a main aspect of the
age old, historically rooted concept of HUBRIS. It is as if the belief that right and good
communication can be enforced by means of a logical police or human-computer
interaction, as daily crimes today are often supposed to be fixed
by laws, police and prisons. Forced
debate can be conceived as a spiritual rape where the raped is co-responsible
for being raped because of accepting to discuss and hoping to understand other
humans, complex and holy issues in logic terms, without courage to confess his
sins and to struggle for truth and love in his mind.
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye
mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest
not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine
eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt
thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.