The Trick of the Linguistic Turn |
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.by Dr. Peter Meier, MeaningGiving Informatics BGI AG Zürich
[Context]
[Substantiation in German"] [Introduction]
[853-WHAT IF - THEN or the struggle over Truth]
[583-WHAT IF - and we do NOT] [385-Historical Remarks] [642-The Fact is] [462-The Danger of
the Intellect] [264-Conclusion]
1) Introduction
Abstract: Life has so far risen above the seeming chaos of detached
objects (utmost complexity) of the unanimated world as well as beyond the space
allowed by intellectual virtuality and political correctness. Humans can raise above
animals by forming mobs and tribes (complexity=1). Then they
learn to share their desperation with their survival (complexity=9) and in their visions,
create rules, dogmas, ideologies and paradigms. In societies with a certain degree of
freedom, people can even unify their perception (complexity=63) of what is
and how it should be. That give rise to projects and ultimately, at this point in history,
to the market-driven society in which we now live. However, if we do not
go towards life-fulfillment for as many as possible (complexity=144)
we are bound to revert to where, according to the linguistic turn, postmodernists think we
come from, chaos. However, there is more than the intellectual self to be fulfilled,
thanks to God. That is why a science that can make the content-free natural
science and the personally neutral humanities relevant for
personal life-fulfillment, needs to be
introduced at this critical time in history. Chaos around the linguistic
turn, beyond the point of no return from virtuality has the potential of what used to be
called hell. That is
why a science, that can make the content-free natural science and the personally
neutral humanities relevant for personal life-fulfillment, needs to be introduced at this critical point in
history. This paper is thus going to outline the concept of overcoming the linguistic turn
based on Applied Personal Science APS®. Consequently this new science is not based on numbers (relevant
to deal with content-free, dead quantities) or on words (which allow reference to
personally neutral, man-made qualities). It is based on open-ended generative
principles,
The "linguistic turn" refers to a 20th century post-modern philosophical strategy to
As a form of art, the linguistic turn reflects upon absence of being, essence and underlying causes beyond what man can manipulate, and language; it drops the traditional philosophical focus, ontological questions. For if one cannot say that "reality" exists, at least one can say that "virtual reality" exists. In the post-normal mindset, virtuality negates reality similar to the Devil negating God in the pre-modern era. It is through contradiction with something that is denied existence, reality, that the virtual language can exist. Moreover, this artform is parasitical in nature: it needs a network of followers to manifest itself but it must ignore the communicational purpose on which the network depends for its existence, biological and technical reality.
The linguistic turn represents a virtual iconoclasm to mobilize iconoclasts to network as a mob similar to the way Nazi and other mass movements and sects form. Although developed to communicate discursive meaning through linear language, the inherent dynamic of language is thus allowed to gain an artistic and virtual momentum of its own to fuel the linguistic turn in which anything can be attributed to anyone so that nobody is responsible for anything.
In this mindset people can no longer convince themselves, let alone others, that for instance their religion story is the "true" one, or that their political ism is the "correct" one - and post-normal mind marvel that our culture ever had the arrogance to make such plainly nonsensical assumptions. All such people know is that their religious practices and "truths", like everyone else's, are socially constructed, made by human communities and not laid down by gods or ghosts or denizens of a supernatural realm. So the conclude, that since faith systems were man-made, created to fill certain needs at particular times in specific places, they know that they can remake them for their needs, in our times, in our place. Since even "God" and "heaven" cannot be understood apart from the language systems that created them, its is all a matter of remaking language as its is to genetically reengineer biological life or transfer it to another, say the chip technology to prove the point. That of course undermines notions of reality and subverts comforting certainties. In Nazi Germany those who did not go along with that were extinguished as outdated, while linguistic philosophers today celebrate the liberating effects of the twentieth century's revolutionary understanding of "the word made flesh".
The fact is no truths in the world that could be touched remained untouched by human hands, except the anti-spiritual nature of denotational language and its material equivalent, money. Now through the linguistic turn intellectuals have found another mission: to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation with their heart as well as their heads, imagination and reason in an inseparable embrace, heading for a creative adventure. They exclaim similar to any other sect: We may not be entirely sure where we're going, but we are having a great (hell of a) time getting there!
Christian Andersen prepared the confrontation with post-modernism, when he wrote "The Emperor's New Cloth". In order to deal with it we obviously need a framework that embeds modernism, understanding and orientations knowledge, post-modernism, pure know-how to manipulate and life-fulfilling wisdom to balance the two (check for yourself who uses "lifefulfilling" to qualify their sites). From the point of modernism, post-modernism is a degeneration in what preceded it while wisdom would transcend it towards a sustainable development. According to the pre-trans-trap, modernists are more afraid of the transcendence that of degeneration and that is where the mainstream science thus goes...
The fact is real persons such as the author, Clinton etc. as well as human systems such as the USA have a definite innate IS-SHOULD pattern relating to what is perceived to be and how it should be, in trying to fulfill their lives or purpose in terms of the nine Cw-life functions 1-9. However, the 246 and 358 fields, both in themselves closed systems, are left to the collective intelligence and the pure intellect. The remaining closed 179-system is open for personal contribution to trends, fashions and mobbing - the global trendsetter being the big business Wild West mentality of the USA...
| 9 | 7 | 1 | 9 | ||||||
| 7 | Content | revitalize | 9 | 7-Wisdom | 1 | ||||
| 1 | 1 | USA | 7 | ||||||
| 8 | 5 | 3 | 8 | ||||||
| 5 | deregulate | author | 8 | 5-MODERN | 3 | Quality | |||
| 3 | 3 | 8 | 5 | ||||||
| 6 | 4 | 2 | 6 | ||||||
| 4 | 6 | 4-POST-MODERN | 2 | Quantity | Meaning | ||||
| 2 | 2 | 6 | 4 | Saddam Hussein | |||||
| 2 | 4 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 7 | 9 | |
Cw-SHOULD |
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| collective commitment intolerant equanimity and courage |
individual awareness consciously relating with integrity |
meaningful concern discontentment with introversion |
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The pictures have been taken from the game "Erkenne Dich selbst" (ISBN 3-925645-00-4) with kind permission of the Burk Verlag to address the right brain
2) WHAT IF - THEN or the struggle over Truth
| IS/v | I=Cw, Communication worked out about what IS, S=Cw about what SHOULD be, v=underlying vision |
| 88/8 | What happens if we move away from
the subject-object, cognitive model of reality where truths were
readily apparent either through the senses or as deductions from previously established
truths? What, when we deny that truth can be within man's reach assuming
the existence of the mind capable for it and it is actually necessary to become free to
fulfill one's life? What, when we do not realize that the problem the modern subject/object mind couldn't reconcile, the gap between itself and reality, has another cause that then one conceived by the mind itself in its far-fetched descriptions of how it connects with reality? What if the modern mind is nothing but the mental operating system, MOS of the time under which people try to given meaning to reality in order to fulfill their lives? What if this MOS is in reality simply outdated and badly needing a redesign? What if you are not your mind and "mind" is just an intellectual fiction while God the Creator is none and not vice versa? |
| 85/3 | If you can understand that a mind is more like an operating system and you more like its user, then you can take part in a Timely Exchange of Project-Orientated Competence, TEPOC© to become part of the solution rather than having to go on dramatizing the problem. |
| 83/5 | On the other hand, by focussing your
thought on how to manipulate the concepts of truth say by making it arise
from the |
What-if-then considerations are normal modern questions driven by the 8-necessity to survive in a hostile environment, aiming at considering the consequences of doing what appears necessary (8), what one would like to strive for (5) or to obtain (3) in order to minimize the collateral consequences. The trap of such a philosophy is that it gets stuck in the those
functions F8,5,3 in its perception of what is, what should be and the corresponding vision. Around 1968 that trap snapped and since then the intellectuals panic and try to dump the baby (F8,5,3) with the bathwater (the collateral damage such as thinking catastrophes, pollution, war, genocide etc. unavoidable by ignoring F1=sustainable resource management, F2=life-fulfilling productivity, F4=transparency, F6=accountability, F7=open for adaptation based on proven insights and F9=understanding the relevant laws of cause and actions in a truly holistic sense)3) WHAT IF - and we do NOT
| IS/v | I=Cw, Communication worked out about what IS, S=Cw about what SHOULD be, v=underlying vision |
| 58/3 | We can destroy the 5-IS-idea of the objective world, driven by the 8-SHOULD necessity to have a source for the undesirable reality that can be manipulated with the kind of truth that, as a 3-vision, evolves from the inherent dynamics of the language. This has opened people's mind for World Wars I and II, where it was a matter of destroying the enemy's hardware and then his ideological soft- and peopleware. However, we can refrain from learning it the hard way and redesign the language in order to close the gap between the map and the territory so that we can cope with the truth, as how things are! That avenue has been opened in more and more fragments of life with the rapidly growing and globalizing of computer technology and its application in form giving infomatics that increase the repertoire available for mapping and dissemination giving informatics to make results globally available in real-time. |
| 55/5 | After all, that is how physics evolved, e.g. by adapting its underlying mathematics to the phenomenon observed and not by reducing it to the established mathematics as post-modernism suggests! |
| 53/8 | The humanities, however just copied the
nice side of this success story and sadly enough even physicists are now borrowing their
distorted success model from the postmodernist's |
These kind of modern considerations give rise to "helping" "under-developed" people and countries to catch up with the world standard. It nourished the believe that it is all matter of rising the IQ and having people properly trained. This movement has risen the intellect and its proponents up to the linguistic turn where science is leading not just people but itself ad absurdum. Many leader in politics such as Hitler and recently Milosevic have demonstrated that to everybody who still has eyes to see and ears to hear. What is more, today's intellectuals meticulously describe their path to the abyss and invite everybody else to go a step further meticulously describe their path to the abyss and invite everybody else to go a step further as guinea pigs for them and their fading away "science".
4) Historical Remarks - how can we learn to learn from history?
| IS/v | I=Cw, Communication worked out about what IS, S=Cw about what SHOULD be, v=underlying vision |
| 38/5 | Buddha's exit strategy from the two, life and
its unavoidable suffering was nirvana as the second best to life's
fulfillment. Similarly Habermas' new out of the two, the one and the many
is the inner dynamic of language, the second best to redesign it to allow the one to be
understood by the many, the very claim of human culture! In the information society On April 7, the Serb's head line was, that Albanians could not live with them and left and now they come back with NATO. The NATO's view is that the Serb's human bomb, the deported Albanians, is a deliberate attempt to destabilize the region in order for Milosevic to keep his position in the web of power. Can Habermas' approach defuse such bombs or is it rather a utility of the MOS that makes it possible? If the latter can be proved, Habermas should be a case for the International War Tribunal as Karl Marx and other false prophets should have been. Habermas is said to have utilized a remarkably dense analysis and evaluation of the metaphysical tradition from its beginnings with Plato in order to show the general progression of metaphysical thought from the rational unity of the one and deductivism to the plural relativism of the many and comes up with a new conception of dialectic between the one and the many: |
| 35/8 | Was it really Planton who came up with the notion of the one and deducing the whole of existence from simple beginnings or was it the Bible? Anyhow, since Habermas the concept of an all-encompassing one from which the remaining truth could then be deduced fell into question and with it, of course atheism got a new "justification". As long as those who call for a return to reason don't have a better basis than "I think, therefor I am" or other mind stuff, they have no chance against the better-sounding plural points of view and diverse historical perspectives, the relativistic perspective of diverse ethnicities and religious creeds obscuring its normative content, that abstract collectives are more important that any single human creature. It is easy to accuse them of having an especially vicious point of view, which denies the validity of most conceptions of reality and they have themselves little to offer to substantiate that the post-normal normative content destroys individuality and a genuine plural perspective based on understanding and life-fulfilling care. |
| 33/3 | So what is the contextual
truths evoked by postmodernists? it is claimed to necessarily arise from plural
perspectives as history was once intellectualized from Marxism. It rejects
personal reason as hopelessly dehumanizing and dogmatic with nothing but its own
collective dogmatism. Where does culturally-determined truths lead? To the inhibition of
one rational, overawing unity and of personal insights. This despite the fact that due to
all accounts that is where all the cultural progress stems from. Since collective
truth destroys the dialectical link between the one and the many what is it but mobbing,
fascism? What societal progression has it achieved, what possible goal other than
preaching its dogma of undermining the process of standards by declaring that no
single worldview is more valid than any other, does its have? What does a
pluralist gain from choosing the destruction of his or her personal standards and replace
it by a meaningless void or an unfortunate slide into "admitted ethnocentrism"
as the participant again embraces their own worldview and rejects others by their standard
of having none, believing in testing all alien conceptions in that light. And yet
Habermas' claims to have found common ground in his language centered approach
without saying how that can be used to bridge the gap between different languages -
probably in the New World Order, in English, disseminated by CNN. Let us face it,
postmodernism is just a weird attempt to substitute God the Creator not just in the world
as modernism did with the |
After Philosophy as such failed, philosophy of language is now positioned as the bridge
between individual idealism and collective materialism setting contextualistic
priority of plurality above unity and that above genuine understanding, with
which introspective access to consciousness becomes unnecessary. Hitler
used plain words to say much the same and we can now watch online how
5) The Fact is
| IS/v | I=Cw, Communication worked out about what IS, S=Cw about what SHOULD be, v=underlying vision |
| 66/6 | The fact is philosophically based mental operating systems, MOS and their mutations only create links between the individual and the plural on the basis of demeaning the individual purpose of life-fulfillment reduce to a subjective claim for truth and backdrop people to accepted commonalities and trivialities. Such MOS create dependency of the plural on the united and vice versa and since the former is dead, the latter becomes endangered. |
| 64/2 | The aim of the game is to inhibit individuality from objectification as was typical for communism. That system crashed by deflating the creative differences between persons, and submerged the many under the whole. For simple minds Habermas' assertion that the unity of reason created through intersubjective communication and a totality of collective commonalities appear as essential for the development of differences and plurality, while in fact it is just the same old poison in new skins. How is this possible, after modern, conventional thought has emphasized conformity and our natural reaction has been to flee from it and find fulfillment in subjectivity? There must be a missing link! Is it the necessity for the individuals to find and create universal agreements in order to realize their personal differences and irreplacability as Habermas claims to substantiate his dogma? The differences in plurality are not to be presupposed so they can be manipulated; they are created! If that is true, the attempt to expand the notion of what is 'for us' in order to realize the unique qualities of what is 'for me' will fail and instead I need to relate to my Creator as the Creator of al of us with whatever that entails. The former sounds and is simpler and that is why it detracts so many people to what in the end is far more complex, chaotic and inherently without fulfillment. |
| 62/4 | Not being understood by others or even by oneself highlights the differences between one's map and what is and if the mapping technique used is fixed and as such inadequate, then any unity found in communication is an illusion which has consequences such as the humanitarian catastrophe in the Balkan. Thus Habermas' system like any assumptions one undermines the individual under a totality of politically correct commonalities. The argument that it is important to grasp that the totality is necessary to save the inhabitants of the postmodern world from losing themselves in complete contingency is just like pointing to the idea of having a shower to move people into a gas chamber. Thus Habermas and other such intellectuals' concepts fulfill themselves through the chain of their teaching in the useful idiots who discover nothing but self-justifications for their atrocities in it such as the painter Hitler, the psychiatrist Karatzic and the lawyer Milosevic. However, on some level those people have more integrity than intellectuals; they try things out and give the world a chance to assess what they really mean while intellectual submerge into virtuality when faced with transcendence (MAT 12:31)! |
6) The Danger of the Postmodern Intellect
| IS/v | I=Cw, Communication worked out about what IS, S=Cw about what SHOULD be, v=underlying vision |
| 46/2 | To be fair, intellectuals usually warn us of the consequences of their doing; though not because they care, but to be able to wash their hands in innocence. In the Habermas case they state: The totality created through intersubjective communication would collapse if attempted to be objectified. It is in fact an idealization of what actually happens and not in a form that can be attained or fulfilled in the future. However, to save their status, they insist that it is a critical reference point, without which the conventional individual could never assume a critical position toward accepted norms and for that matter towards God. In short, their idealizations are declared to be necessary in that they enable the individual to develop an identity, mind you changeable identity in order to not solely conform to the world as it is. This is in fact the essence of a strategy to both screw the individual and the whole and reminds us to "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis. It prepares the individual in learning to cope with increasing concrete diversity to create more and miss the point of no return... |
| 44/4 | Along these lines, Habermas is supporting increasing abstract agreement among the people as 'vulgus' (the crowd) in order to generate increasing acceptance of individual disagreements (on April 8 the US President and the Chines Prime Minister agreed to disagree) with each other and differences between each other. Whereas our postmodern world is characterized by repulsion of unity of reason as the enemy of individualism, it is actually the source of the diversity that leads to chaos! The unity found in linguistic communication provides us with standards by which we can come to understand and perceive nothing but distortions of communication. The postulated sheer impossibility of mutual understanding becomes the horizon for different voices to exist alongside each other, joined in accepted validity even if they feel they are not communicating. Consequently, the common aspiration toward objectivity is replaced by an aspiration toward solidarity within the context of linguistic communication. This typically leads to mobbing, scapegoating and eventually genocide, anarchy or collective suicide (as in the sects) when the bluff is called. A party slogan of that order said: "Our cars run without trees!" This solidarity within the linguistic context thrives on increasing discourse amongst the members to enable the development of external the self's differences up to loosing touch with the inner self when this approach is internalized. Here the transcendental gap commonly seen between the individual and the collective and its gap to the Absolute Truth is transferred to a tension between the self's mere assertion to personal validity, saying yes or no to things, and the accepted validity in the collective. |
| 42/6 | It is no longer love but tension that makes a relation of the self to an other one or a thing possible in the first place as long as it does not undermine the individual to the point of cynical impotence. However, it is said to prevent individuals from falling into complete subjectivity, in which the process of creating a different identity from the common would be impossible. The tension between the self's claims to validity and truth on the one hand and the validity of commonly accepted norms on the other hand allows participants in linguistic communication to be able to understand, as such, solely the propositional content of assertions, not any type of absolutivity, truth or certainty. Thus, individual essences are no longer able to be objectified, for how can an objectification take place if the only validity available is propositional? The idealized propositional content is not an absolute at all and therefor has no meaning beyond Social Darwinism. |
In short Harem's meaning-theoretic position seeks to transform conventional conceptions of reason, claiming that communication unites the diverse without canceling their diversity. It is the kind of unity in which the appeal to a larger community is essential and thus becomes the driving force for globalization of thinking catastrophes. The radical contextualist 358-stance as well as the extreme conventional 246-rationalistic stance have become intolerable, and yet Habermas does not create a path between the two poles, he just suggest to disappear in the virtuality of the trading zone between them - sim - sa - la - bim...Ant he intellect is where it came from, magic to cover up impotence.
7) Conclusion
| IS/v | I=Cw, Communication worked out about what IS, S=Cw about what SHOULD be, v=underlying vision |
| 26/4 | Habermas removes the idea of consequences and consciousness from the structure these two stances have formerly taken, namely beginning with the phenomena, and begins himself with the language that represents intended phenomena. The subject entirely loses the extreme positions of one over many or one among many, and attains the position of innerworldly practices constantly subjecting validity claims to critique. Functionally speaking this reminds to hell run by the Great Disagreer. The circularity of this process is a new one, in which the created 'lifeworld' of commonalities becomes the source as well as the product, in which the removal of a transcendental subject always adhered to in the past leaves no hole in need of patching, thus replacing both the ideal/theoretical and the empirical within the virtual reality of language; You can just as well order a coffin... |
| 24/6 | What occurs when the individual develops differences
that disagree with the Habermas' ideal reference point otherwise
internalized by the intellectual world? Do such individuals remove themselves from such a mutual
admiration society, or does it outcast such individuals with
their ignorance? Are we allowed to create new and unusual abstractions or simply word
games from commonalities and add them to the collection of what is still called science?
Or in order to keep our personal integrity, must we develop into detached beings
that feel radically different from the unity of those who defaulted to the collective? As it is, these essential questions are left open for discussion by intellectuals and their institutions that still pretend to be objectifying in order to get budget and the position power associated with it. Thus the route toward transforming postmodernism into a unity of reason within language is presented as an insurmountable task and striving for it to cause the alienation of individuals as well as the feeling of being faced with merely contingencies. If we are living in alienation and handing over control to objectifying social institutions and defaulting to the language dynamic, how we gain some control, not to speak of life-fulfillment? By internalizing what contextualism is trying, to regain from Metaphysics what has been lost by philosophy, all we we need to do is solely regain the control of power that has been taken away by objectifying institutions. But what if they are stripped to nothing as in Kosovo? |
| 22/2 | The fact is more and more university institutions and human resource department are getting paradigmatically cleansed on the bases of Habermas' nice-sounding third way and that opens an incredible gap between theory and practice in dealing with human systems. If we do not want to go along with the otherwise unavoidable collective suicide, we are faced with the task of endeavoring yet a new approach of getting unity of reason in the plurality of voices freed within our largely postmodern world. That task is within our reach with insight objectified with Applied Personal Science APS®.. |
[Context] [Introduction]
[853-WHAT IF - THEN or the struggle over Truth]
[583-WHAT IF - and we do NOT] [385-Historical Remarks] [642-The Fact is] [462-The Danger of
the Intellect] [264-Conclusion]