Danek: Spirit and planet II

Power my heart, the fear of God, that thou mayest be my love, that I may do thy will.

Old Irish Prayer [1]

In the late written text “The Spirit and the planet (Tradition)” I tried to make the reader approachable the way they perceived and felt the planet of conventional societies, by historians called archaic [2]. But traditionalism present cannot trust simply on historical description, on theoretical reconstruction of the mentality of conventional man. It must indicate a way to reconstruct it.

In another place, I wrote that the doctrine of empathy was approaching the conventional worldview [3]. It might seem like a paradox. But the paradox was empiriocriticism itself: he buried positivistic doctrine and its ontology of the world, even though he himself was born as a radicalized version of positivism. Let us briefly callback his main thesis. They were developed primarily in the work “Analysis of the feeling and attitude of the physical to intellectual sphere” (1886) by Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and in the works “Crytics of Pure Experience” (1888–1890) and “The Human Concept of the World” (1891), written by the nephew and Christian composer Richard Wagner, Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) – in the photo.

Ernst Mach

For Avenarius, discipline was a totaliztic nature: in a natural way, it sought to satisfy the desire of unity in the human mind, and thus to the monist worldview, to the eventual and ultimate concept. specified a concept according to the German thinker was experience, the only and final reality. Avenarius rejected all forms of dualism: division into spirit and matter, mentality and physicality, work and existence, subject and object. In his opinion, all of them were the product of introjection, that is, the artificial process of constructing their own interior in the other to the outside world. The outside planet did not be towards the human ‘I’ due to the fact that categories specified as ‘thing’ or ‘substance’ are only linguistic conventions utilized to denote the components of the experience more durable than others. There was besides no ‘me’ as experience involves the interaction of the central tense strategy and the environment between which nothing mediated. Both things and thoughts arise within the framework of experience.

Mach's findings besides hit the modern imagination of the world, with its belief in rational advancement and supremacy of science. According to this Darwinist, there were no qualitative differences between pre-scientific experience recorded in common language and technological theories. Mach admitted that discipline always consists of “prejudices” – prepared and formulated previously, but verified by continuous experience. Like Avenarius, Mach considered experience to be the only reality. He proclaimed that in experience there are collections of “elements”, specified as colours, sounds, spaces, or times that we call “things”, if they are associated in more or little durable and repetitive bands, and “impressions” if we mention them to each another as perceived. Physical bodies are only symbolic thought characters utilized to separate sets of elements with a certain degree of durability. besides categories specified as space, time, atom, molecule, personality, cause, etc., stay symbols for grouping certain elements, if useful.

In the doctrine of empiriocritics, positivism came to an end and self-destructed. Modernity as a cultural formation was based on the presumption that there was a rational entity capable of getting to know and master the planet more and more. Empiriocriticism crashed and annihilated the cognition entity, dissolving it in a planet that in turn proved to be a fluid vortex of impersonal experience. In his characteristic negation of demarcation between spirit and matter, in the quest to gain a direct view of the eventual reality, to radically delve into it and unite with it, we see something like secular mysticism – which I will besides mention.

Let's get back to the right subject. The restoration of the mentality of a conventional man must consist in the return from the planet of concepts to the planet of elements, strength and power – due to the fact that that is how the planet of archaic society sees. This is supported by Mach's philosophy, and is complemented by the doctrine of Avenarius, especially in the Human Concept of the World. It's not by accident that both authors were physicists.

As mentioned, Avenarius treats experience as the eventual reality. Experience means taking impressions; impressions are changes in the central tense strategy caused by the environment, which affect the tense strategy by external stimuli or by the process of nutrition. The more the brain develops, the stronger it is affected by permanent elements of the environment. This creates and strengthens the feeling that the planet is simply a safe place, that it is favorable to man. At the same time, the feeling that the planet is simply a mystery, a mystery is fading and fading. Since the interior planet and the external planet come down to the same – to impressions, the divide between the subject and the object disappears. Man achieves unity with the world. Unsolved metaphysics problems disappear, and with them the anxiety they bring with them.

Born from the decay of modernity, the doctrine of empiriocriticism despite scientistic housing and jargon leads to what in the conventional worldview is simply a average state: to unite man with the world, to melt man in the world. This is the other of the worldview of modern man, who sees himself primarily as a separate being, separated from the world, separated from him, even if he is simply a spiritual man, a believer, a Christian.

The spirituality of a conventional man developed on the basis of a sense of unity with the world. This feeling was a origin of interior strength and peace. In conventional societies people felt the planet as part of themselves and themselves as part of the world. This can be described as naturalism on the 1 hand, but on the another hand, it must be remembered that a conventional man does not separate precisely between spirit and matter, in his eyes nature is simply a "sudden" nature—the planet of spirits and the planet of men are densely entangled together or just 1 planet (4). Empiriocritics effort to pave the way for man to return to the image and way of perceiving the planet before making a theoretical division into spirit and substance that yet led to Descartes philosophy. Stanisław Brzozowski summarized Mach's thought as ‘scientific mysticism’ [5]. From Brzozowski's side, this was to be partially a pinch, but we gotta admit that it hit the nail.

Archaic societies known to us from the ancient planet were mostly pagan; similarly, conventional societies that survived in modern times and in any parts of the planet even today. But the unity of man and the planet described above can besides be achieved in Christendom. French mathematician and philosopher Édouard Le Roy (1870-1954), 1 of the most crucial Catholic thinkers of the 20th century wrote: “Our actual body is the full universe we live in. However, what common sense in the strict sense calls our body is only its little conscious area, a more independent area of action, a part that we straight control and through which we can influence the rest.” [6]. Le Roy was, alongside French physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), co-creator of conventionalism – the second alongside the empiriocriticism of direction in the doctrine of science, which, coming out of positivistic assumptions, abolished the doctrine of positivism along with its imagination of the world. At the same time Le Roy was among the loudest theorists of the alleged Catholic modernism from the early 20th century.

Exactly. It is besides possible to regain the right man’s conventional unity with the planet through Catholicism. However, it requires going back to old sources, moving distant from the late deformation of the worldview of conventional scholastic doctrine and its associated concept of metaphysics. Pope Gregory I the large (540-604) says: “(...) due to the fact that man has a combination with stones, life with trees, and reason with angels is rightly called the world.” The method of scholastics was to effort to wrap reality in a chain of increasingly narrow concepts, to precisely divide the planet – besides supersensory – into parts and delegate each name. As a result, Western (so-called classical) metaphysics does not see the planet as a surviving whole, due to the fact that all surviving full divided into parts ceases to be alive. And this is what we want to see – so that man can see again this surviving full around himself and at the same time within himself.

Adam Danek

[1] Published in: Kuno Meyer (ed.), Selections from ancient Irish poetry, Bristol 1928. I quote the Polish translation for: David Adam (ed.), Celt PrayersThu. Grażyna Pilkowska, Częstochowa 1997, p. 24.

[2] Adam Danek, The Spirit and the World (Tradition), "Myśli Polska", 2022, nr 37-38.

[3] Adam Danek, spiritual Culture of Positiveism, “Think Poland”, 2022, nr 51-52.

[4] In his work The end of modern times. Orientation test (1950) was noted by Romano Guardini (1885-1968). "The planet is considered divine in ancient times. It derives from an arche, an interior beginning, and there is simply a way that is determined by law and destiny. But besides this beginning, and the law, and destiny belong to it. The planet is an omnipresent, all-filled, absolute reality, not only empirical or historical, but besides divine. This divinity is the first and mysterious part of the world. Man is in the world, and the planet in man; the fundamental spiritual attitude is to experience and accept this truth. All things in the planet and his powers are besides divine. That's where myths come from. Myths are characters and events that explain the planet and its elements, as well as the man who, by the power of his spirit, meets him, and yet belongs to him. So myths give a man the chance to see the world. Although myths form a certain whole, it is not rational and systematic, but it is living; they are in constant motion, they develop, they move, they melt and transform." The end of modern times. The planet and the person. Freedom, grace, fate, Kraków 1969, p. 23; trans. Zofia Włodkowa).

[5] Stanisław Brzozowski, Legend of Young Poland. Studies on the structure of the cultural soul, Lviv 1910, p. 460.

[6] Édouard Le Roy, Dogme et critique, Paris 1907, p. 239. I quote the Polish translation for: Georges Sorel, Reflections on ViolenceMarek Mosakowski, Warsaw 2014, p. 38.

Think Poland, No. 43-44 (22-29.10.2023)