The text is from effemm's epistle to the clodhoppers "YOU CANNOT REASON WITH ANYONE WHOSE BELIEFS ARE NOT INITIALLY ARRIVED AT BY REASON."
Which is very silly because beliefs are not to be subjected to reason by definition and thus the text is ideal for a dizzyingly daffy mini-dissertation.
What this statement actually is is a bolthole for bigoted control freaks. A place in which to hide.
Professor Erich Heller wrote this in justification for his translation of the German word "Geist" as "spirit" rather than "mind". He admits that Geist is rather more mundane and secular than "spirit" but adds that it is more spiritual than "mind".
Quote:For in common usage the word 'mind', just like 'reason' or 'intellect', appears to claim for the faculty it denotes merely the kind of superiority over the world of matter which enables it to recognize, understand and control. 'Geist', on the other hand, suggests more than this. It suggests freedom and independence, and thus, being akin to 'genius' or 'creative imagination', man's share in a freely creative power.
Notice where "reason" appears in this. It is linked to claims of superiority and control and to subjugation and lack of imagination. Hence anti-science.
Spirituality is linked to the opposites and, as I have maintained throughout, to science.
What effemm's signature expresses is a fear of T.S.Eliot's "undisciplined squads of emotion."
The chthonic dark forces of the mysterious inner life are not to be discussed except in the context of the confidence of reason. (effemm's reason of course). And reason can never be applied to those forces.
It is a general criticism of the psycho-mythology of Freud, the bio-mythology of Darwin, even its state-of-the-art forms, assuming they can be distinguished, and the mythologies relating to science and art, that they all pretend to articulate the dark chthonic forces and, by this pretence, which can be quite persuasive and satisfying to the average person and which is invariably cloaked in an esoteric language which lends itself to status and careers, that they advance the imperialistic claims of "reason". And anti-IDers are noted for their imperiousness. So much so indeed that they actually believe things they have asserted to be true solely on the evidence of them having said them.
The notion of the psychosomatic realm is dismissed out of hand which requires of necessity that emotions themselves are also dismissed. These areas of human life, despite their implied presence in art, are thus no-go areas for effemm and his legion of fawning disciples and particularly regarding sexuality which is the motor of evolution.
That a person might cease to be a student or a daughter or a teacher or an electrician, even temporarily, or have a name, and become something as rudimentary and natural as a pure nexus of uncontrollable and incomprehensible being in the chain of existence cannot possibly be allowed by someone who stands behind that signature line and lives by it.
And Lawdy lawdy Miss Claudy- if it isn't stood behind and lived out then what is it? It is then bullshit- and nothing else. And it's on effemm's every post despite my informing him that the idea of "reason" has been rubbished since before Kant. And is laughed at by the Materialist Theorists of Mind. Especially the state-of-the-art ones.
But effemm doesn't bullshit I hear you assert. Well then--he has to be, logically, unable to ever escape for a waking moment, dreams are something else, from the role as an isolate, self-directing individual to become a part, a blind agent of a great force, Bergson's
Elan Vital say, of a large vibration of pulsing life, a pure physicality, which is precisely what sexual and religious ecstasies seek in order to extinguish the self in something transcendent and thus, like in Zen, participate in a larger order of being. Trapped without rest in the self it is impossible to understand Emily Bronte or Lawrence Stern or even Picasso and Dylan. And many others whose works the reason has no handle on. Religion most of all.
Reason goes in mortal dread of what Freud called the Id. Reason is all Ego and Superego. Religion wrestles with the Id. Reason won't even get in the ring with it. It pretends it doesn't exist. It has it on Ignore. Therefore it has no hope of managing it.
The end of religion leaves the chthonic forces of the Id to strut their stuff in unhindered anarchy except for the law which can be evaded.
Scott Sanders is a distinguished professor of English at Indiana University, where he has taught since 1971. During his career, he has spent sabbatical years as a writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, and as a Visiting Professor at University of Oregon, MIT, and Beloit College . He wrote in his book on D.H. Lawrence--
Quote:Psychoanalysts have consistently distinguished this social self, the being-in-the-world, from some primary natural self. For Freud of course the socially-imposed self was the superego; for Jung it was the persona; for Wilhelm Reich the "character defense structure;" and for R.D. Laing the "false-self system." Lawrence's own view was closest to that of Reich, who considered the social self a crippling and vicious imposition upon the spontaneous animal self.
And Reich is mentioned in Dylan's lyrics positively. Joey.
Emotion is not subject to reason and therefore effemm's signature eliminates emotion in the service of his interest. And he waves such nonsense in your face in his every post as if it is some sort of scientific law and it is actually a total cop-out involving your money, your dignity and your innocence.
It is as if the natural dynamics of sexual politics are determined by the social forces existing in 2009 in effemm's rooms rather than in the remote past of the organic world which, despite the foggy ruins, is where they are located.
And the Dover trial never even touched upon these matters and it was therefore inevitable that "reason" would win the day over the unspeakable pulsations of life itself. Apart from the fees etc.
All challenges to the teaching of evolution will fail if they are based on reason. effemm's signature is a demand to join issue under his conditions. Any other conditions and he reaches for Ignore.
And what Reich meant by vicious was that the cells of the body would rebel against the "social self" imposing itself on the "spontaneous, animal self." Perverted religion is open to the same charge. But perverted religion is not religion.
According to Levi-Strauss mythic thought proceeds by accommodating human affairs to patterns in nature.
Reasoned thought proceeds from the person doing the reasoning.
The biggest joke is that the greatest challenge to teaching evolution is the theory of evolution itself. Only those with no understanding of the theory and its implications, the importance of which is proved by the debate, could possibly think otherwise. The theory demands, by showing us the beast in ourselves, that we must do something to set it aside. And science cannot do that.
