Debriefing the Gurdjieff work
Reductionist Darwinism, Essentialism and the Evolution of Freedom
This post from Darwinia shows the kind of defense against scientism that was intended in Bennett’s psychological framework. That’s why the flaws, and metaphysical presumption, leave it unable to do the job;
But the issue of essentialism is at least broadly resolved in his matrix of ideas. A pity it is all mixed up in Gurdjieff chicanery
Evolution, naturalism, and consciousness
We have discussed here, of course, the way that Bennett, in theory, goes around this problem, in practice…
But Bennett sees no problem discussing evolution and spirituality together.
Comments on Bennett the spy
nemo said,
16.10.09 at 12:02 pm
Bennett worked directly for British Intelligence
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daisy said,
18.10.09 at 2:21 pmUntil 1921, when he was sent back to the UK, partly for overstepping his authority in his dealings with the Kemalists, and partly through exhaustion, it seems (from Witness). Back in the UK he canvassed for MacDonald in the 1921 Woolwich East by-election; and was offered a post in a future Labour government, which he turned down.
It might help to look at Schopenhauer who simplified Kant’s categories, and is much clearer on the connection between science, transcendental idealism, and, indeed, Indian mysticism
daisy said,
18.10.09 at 12:15 pm ·
I agree that this is what Bennett wanted to do. Do you think that, though, while his attempted replacement of the categories by the dodecad is dubious, Bennett’s own criticism of Kant’s categories is valid? (as I recall, he calls them something like “optimistic guesses” – I don’t have a copy of the DU available.)
It is easy to criticize Kant, but the results are always off. Thus with Bennett.
The issue arises as to whether Bennett really studied Kant at all??
He has not really understood what Kant was doing with his categories.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology.
It is amusing that this article mentions the issue of the soul and the ‘when’. Bennett is one of the few people to address this question directly, one of the reasons for his strong anti-Darwinism. His language is a little different, and he speaks of several phases, the beginnings of consciousness, the beginnings of creativity (soul?), etc…
Daisy has seen through the pretenses of Bennett’s Systematics. I am not Bennett’s defender, and share Daisy’s feeling, but it is also true that there is a hope behind all this to really put on paper a set of concepts on the subject religion that can help people to sort out their evolutionary psychologies. It has never happened, although many have thought that Gurdjieff, with much borrowed material, succeeded in that. Ditto for Bennett.
We can stand back from Bennett’s DU (forget Systematics) and see the rough architecture as significant. In that sense I have found it useful at any earlier period in my life, once the chaff was discarded/
Beyond that is the fact that Samkhya, which Bennett/Gurdjieff are borrowing, can’t be judged just because Bennett made a mess of it. Samkihya is an entirely ancient discourse, whose history is needed to assess the attempts to borrow from it (without ancknowledgement) we see in Gurdjjieffianity.
Danielou, cited here many times in the last month, was representative of this tradition is off quite hostile to monotheism.
Comment on Kantian issues
Are you using ‘noumenal’ correctly here?
daisy said,
15.10.09 at 2:30 pm
“The epistemology of Bennett is constructed around a kind of Kantian fraud: conceal the metaphysics behind his new ‘categories’.”
Give us a longer post on what you mean here, Nemo.
I know you said don’t read Deeper Man . . . but that only prompted me *to* read it. It starts with picture of the world of function which corresponds to Kant’s noumenal world. The noumenal world (of physically interacting objects bearing only primary qualities) is causally closed; Kant is trying to show how the experience of freedom and duty can be consistent with the fact of causal closure; and he argues that the freedom and duty exists in the transcendental world – but that it still can’t have any effect on the noumenal. (So Kant too thought we live in many worlds.) Then Bennett cheats: first, when he says that in the world of function things happen “largely subject to causal laws” (p. 13, Bennett Books edition; cf. Kant for whom it has to be totally subject); and then when he allows will to interact with function, but obscures how logically problematic this is, basically by obfuscation: “Will does not do things; it is that which *decides the action*” (p. 19): but the point is that the logic of the function/noumenal world is that there is *nothing* that decides the actions. There aren’t any actions; or else “action” has to be redefined along the lines of A.J. Ayer so that you can allow for the existence of a sort of shell caricature of action, with all its guts removed as as not to contradict the determinist premise. Bennett would certainly have known all this; but he seems to be rushing by it all so as to get on to the Gurdjieff stuff.
G and B they accept enough of the bleak Cartesian starting point to get us all jumpy; and then claim to have a back door out of it. There ain’t no back door – if you accept the starting point, that is.
daisy said,
15.10.09 at 2:55 pm ·
Andrew’s statement of Systematics reflects how I understood it; but I’m no longer in the mood to give the benefit of the doubt as to “how successful it is in practice.”A structural framework justifies itself superficially if it makes true predictions; and vindicates itself deeply if it can be shown that the true predictions are based on a compelling metaphysical framework which meshes with other frameworks, and so has a good claim to be true.
I am *certain* that Systematics, with its laws of 3 and 7, makes no significant successful predictions. Further, the framework does not mesh with anything else (though Gurdjieff claimed, essentially, that it meshed with theoretical systems *that you and I don’t know about* – which is a trap to enslave the intellectual); it is compelling partly through force of personality by G and B; partly because it appeals to the dumbest part of our intellect, the desire to see a simple pattern in complexity. This is the basis of a con-trick: we are led believe that what has prevented us from “Understanding the Universe” has been our failure (no doubt because we masturbate, and have damaged our subtle inner workings) to see that it is really much more simple than we believed.
daisy said,
15.10.09 at 12:47 pm
- Andrew: I strongly agree with your view in the first para of your comment. I had partly regretted my post (above) for having reproduced the awful trope of the “disciples who undermine their teacher’s work through misusing his (/her?) insights”. Disciples, teachers: they’re all on the same level. But, then again, what you describe as “foisting magical perceptions on others” is *exactly* what I have experienced from some Bennettites: totally disarming me, since Bennett is no longer around to quiz as to what the content of his insight actually was. All I can do is decide whether or not to hurt the Bennettite’s feelings by dissing the man, and since Bennettites are usually really nice people, I don’t want to.
Re. pushing it into new areas, though. It’s not extending it which is needed, IMHO: it’s grounding it! Prompted by this discussion, I’m re-reading Deeper Man. The three-world philosophy (Function, Being, and Will) as a way to get out of the moral and agency problems generated by Enlightenment metaphysics, doesn’t look very plausible. Instead of a two-way interaction problem (spirit-function, as in Descartes), we’re going to get a three way interaction problem (Function-Being, Being-Will, etc.). I can’t see what help it is to assert the existence of Being as the energy which connects Function to Will. But I respect Bennett too much to think that I can quickly check-mate his philosophy in a blog post. He was dreadfully intelligent – but great intelligence is a mixed blessing, perhaps.
Comment on Consciousness, etc…
Andrew said,
15.10.09 at 4:34 am ·
Bennett could certainly be both extravagant and gullible. He also says that he had visionary experiences, for example he describes somehow seeing the action of triads. I don’t quite agree with your view of “magical perceptions”. If I accept that people can have magical perceptions, my own relationship to those perceptions must still treat the described perceptions as speculation or approximation or as requiring the same testing as any other statement. If one has them oneslef then they are part of one’s subjective inner life. If one foists a magical perception on another, it’s instant spiritual authoritarianism. And of course, people can have overwhelming visionary experiences and magical perceptions that are erroneous, or paranoid, etc.Anthony Blake is someone who has tried hard to avoid treating Bennett’s work as dogma and instead stripping it of some of its trappings and pushing it into new areas.
The result must, however, be beyond reproach: The Gurdjieff gang is ALWAYS under suspicion of making things up in order to hypnotize the gullible and make them passive followers, and ‘school cattle’ for a group of vicious ‘cannibals’.
Andrew said,
15.10.09 at 4:18 am ·
The n-systems approach seems to be fundamentally bottom-up rather than top-down. The laws of 3 and 7 are presented by Gurdjieff/Ouspensky as objective laws–that is, they are really out there, part of the fundamental construction of the universe and that’s that. Systematics seems to be more a way of looking at things, based on the properties of integers. If you identify something as a 3-term system Systematics gives you various tools to model it and get some understanding of what’s going on. How succesful it is in practice, I don’t know. Also, I would agree that Bennett wasn’t working it all out from pure fundamentals, but blended in the Gurdjieffan laws of 3 and 7 and that sketch of the significance of the numbers.
It is easy to set up a something called Systematics, but the assignment of properties becomes a bit too facile.
Comment on consciousnees/8-term systems
daisy said,
14.10.09 at 2:11 pm ·
“. . . it is a question therefore of the rigor of his overall argument . . .”Not just of the argument: also of the evidence base.
Bennett and his followers (some, at least) sometimes say (with a slight sense of embarrassment) that Bennett had extra-sensory perception: discerning the true role of Judas at the Last Supper; mentally time-travelling to observe the inner emotional life of Neanderthal man.
His prouncements aren’t taken as interesting speculation, but as magical perceptions. Which is a very bad thing; since they ARE interesting speculations, but they are not magical perceptions (Because there aren’t any magical perceptions (or, as Hume said: it’s never rational for me, as someone without magical perception, to believe that there is magical perception, since it’s always more subjectively probable that some kind of trick is being pulled than that there is magical perception)).
But if Bennett didn’t have magical perceptions, he can’t go making such confident pronouncements about the “Higher Structure of the Universe”, the relationship to the life realm, etc. Not all the fault might be his, though: perhaps he did see these things as interesting suggestions, which might one day have some use; or might be useless; but the only way to proceed with integrity was to push the exploration as far as one could in one’s lifetime (thus, perhaps, he starts the DU by saying that the task is impossible, but nevertheless obligatory). But followers who elevate these interesting suggestions to the state of immutable truths are doing the enterprise a disservice.
The epistemology of Bennett is constructed around a kind of Kantian fraud: conceal the metaphysics behind his new ‘categories’.
On the other hand, he did produce some useful insights, if these can be sorted out from the grosser speculations.