Banjo Paterson,
I respect your views too, and the others in this thread.
“I view the faculties of individual thought and experience as remarkable achievements of natural evolution”.
How did they evolve; as an adaptation to what?
Isn’t it logical that language evolved to facilitate group and social cooperation as a response to exigency—and that this is what’s made us so successful? Once the community provides for itself, produces a surplus and secures the present and immediate future, its denizens find time for leisure. What was before a rude system of practical signs and gestures, evolves into a sophisticated language of communicative tropes and taboos used to “make” sense and to maintain the cooperative order. This symbolic order is not “the mirror of nature” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty#Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Nature
It’s a superimposition on nature, and individual thought is a riff necessarily composed within those social/linguistic constrainst/conceptions.
Wildebeest don’t have the leisure to “make” sense of or embroider on nature, they’re busy responding to its direct assaults, flight being their adaptation strategy. Neither do they have existential crises, since they lack a sophisticated religion/philosophy with which they can become enamoured or disillusioned. The human animal has largely ceased being an animal and drags its fat body around as a burden—or fetishizes it and its functions.
Hume recognised how profoundly irrational we are, and that none of our “thinking” is based on raw data, but on one passion/prejudice or another (this is easily seen in that opinion almost always serves the best interests of those who profess an intellectualised, rather than interested, stake in it). Thus empiricism was born. The empiricist refuses to naively credit his common sense and instead looks only to raw data and objective experimentation.
tbc

..cont.

Yet Hume was naïve in crediting the data gathered by the senses “raw”; it’s mediated by the symbolic order, an evolved rationale “of” reality. Moreover there’s no direct correlation between any signifier and its signified; meaning is deferred and negotiated within language and by its interlocutors. Nor is the perceived object perceived objectively; it’s designation is pre-given, or “pre-scribed”. We see a thing not as it is, but in the sense we have of it. As soon as the object of bare perception is recognised it’s compromised.
The heart “yearning for awe” is mere credulousness. The “heart” (actually we’re just animals with delusions) yearns at the lack that’s by-product of symbolic culture. Cultured-being is the deferral of animal being; remember it started out as creative leisure, which gradually became our whole “reality”. We’re idealistic beings—waking dreamers. Reality now only dawns on us in extremis—a car crash, perhaps, that leaves you conscious but brings you violently back to earth.
In this conception, as I said above, empiricism is a kind of “asceticism of disembodiment”—tantamount to religion—as if the mind can finally break free from its bodily prison and read nature direct, or may think independently of this culture and its language games—such rationalists are both delusional and self-flagellating. This is what I dislike about Dawkins; he thinks his reasoning is impartial and apolitical.
There’s so much more that could be said to round out this post-Humanism—which I’m not convinced by. To quote Marx’s favourite expression “de omnibus dubitandum”.
But my scepticism is not based on reasoning, how could it be? But on experience that cannot be rationalised, of which I’ll say no more.

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Dear Poirot,

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Thank you for expanding on your previous post. I can equate to what you are saying and have no problems with that.

Bravo for the poem. For someone who has never been to Ireland you have certainly done your homework.

I guess my remaining concern is with Squeer's denunciation of "conceits about individuality" and "the vanity of individual thought and experience".

I shall deal with that in my following post.

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Dear Squeers,

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Thank you for filling in the details. I tend to have a telescopic vision of most things in life which some may feel is superficial.

The best explanation I can find is the hundreds of hours I spent as a boy lying flat on my back on the lawn in the backyard of my home in Dalby, gazing at the shimmering lights of the big fat jewels suspended above my head in the black, moonless sky on hot summer nights.

In those days, it only rained about once every five years. A cloud in the sky was a novelty for four or five year olds.

The Darling Downs are perfectly flat and nowhere else on earth have I had the impression of living in the dome of the cosmos as I did during my early life in Dalby. By lying on my back the earth disappeared completely. I was floating in space. My batteries are still charged up and running on that experience.

The other determining factor was probably that I totally withdrew from formal education just before my fourteenth birthday.

Perhaps this will help you understand what I see when I turn my eyes to your post. I see nothing there to suggest that man has, in some way, managed to extract himself from nature. Whether he crawl rather than swim, walk rather than crawl or talk rather than gesticulate, he is in nature and nature is in him, fashioning him, adapting him and making him more efficient. He is made of the same stuff as the trees and the rivers, the air and the mountains.

I see his individuality arising from the process of chance and necessity imagined by Democritus in 400BC and confirmed by the French biologist, Jacques Monod in 1970.

I see it as an evolutionary process towards ever greater autonomy which has nothing to do with egoism or egocentrism. On the contrary, it dissipates the fog that all too often envelopes consciousness and stimulates such noble sentiments as empathy, solidarity and altruism.

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Bamjo,

I've been having a peek at Ortega Y Gasset, who in comparing the life of animals who are perpetually harassed by and attentive to the environment - and man, who "acts" on the environment to arrange things so he can "...from time to time, suspend his direct concern with things, detach himself from his surroundings......this marvellous faculty which man possesses of temporarily freeing himself from his slavery to things..."

Ortega is talking here of "contemplation".

"Thanks to it, and its proportion to its progress, man can take a stand within himself. But, conversely, man as a technician is able to modify his environment to his own convenience because seizing every moment of rest which things allow him, he uses to enter himself and form ideas about his world, about these things and his relation to them, to form a plan of attack about his circumstances...from this inner world he emerges and returns to the outer, but he returns as a protagonist....- he returns with his plan of campaign: not to let himself be dominated by things, but to govern them himself, to impose his will and his design upon them, to realise his ideas in that outer world...Far from losing himself in his return to the world, he on the contrary carries his self to the "other", projects it energetically and masterfully on things...."

So for Ortega, contemplation is a device employed by man to "act" upon the world.

He's rather critical of what he calls "The Bigotry of Culture" - the intellectual aberration which isolates contemplation from action...but it's late tonight so I'll post some more on that tomorrow sometime.

I sympathise, Banjo Paterson, I live on the Darling Downs too--though closer to what I call the drop off--Toowoomba. One of my favourite metaphors too is Omar Khyam's "This inverted bowl we call the sky ...". But we're no closer to explaining anything are we? or addressing the ills of this world, and I prefer Khyam's lyric sober-realism to your romanticism: "where-under crawling coop't we live and die, lift not thy arms to it for help--for it rolls impotently on as you or I".
Having said that, I am convinced there's a much deeper mystery at the heart of life than the materialists can conceive, that there are more things in heaven and earth etc.
It does seem to me though that our situation is irredeemable, that we are cast out, at least for our earthly span, and that it should be our primary concern