Dumb&Dumber, Aristotle&Descartes

To my mind

Aristotle and Descartes stand out as outliers rising, sharp and steep, above the baseline of the ethics, reach, scope, innovation, integrity, and enlightenment of western abstract, philosophical thought…

• though, not in a good way…

Aristotle

Trusted ethos, authority (his own) over observation. 

• Women have fewer teeth…(married twice, didn’t check once)…
• Women are defective men…(takes one to know one…)
• Women are more emotional than reasonable…(quite an own by the common denominator)..
• Reason is above emotion…(didn’t make it right…)
• birds metamorphose over winter…(Pfeilstorch… see Appendix 1)
• heavy things fall faster…(they don’t… took Galileo a few seconds from the top of Pisa tower- he tilted it for ease of observation…)

(Note: my PG version’s cleaner than tilted planes and rolling balls…hmnn…tilted towers though…)

An early and higher IQ forerunner of the Trump school of didactic thinking; just as Mark Twain urged us to never allow education to get in the way of learning; so this August school urges never to allow experience to get in the way of a good theory…

The ‘ipse dixit’ (he, himself said it) aspect of his ethos cast a long, dark shadow, died 322 BC; Galileo 1590; planes, towers and balls…

• a scandalous, 1,910 years into the future, stifling learning and innovation on the grounds of a dogmatist’s stupid, untested, unquestioned, unverified bullshit… one of the most compelling examples of the power of language over reason… a trumpian scale harm on the western social psyche…
  • eastern thinking was never that self-satisfied with logic; 
  • Solipsism is the ouroboros of western philosophy; mind so convinced of its own primacy, so very Cartesian, it eats itself…
• a powerful testament to Aristotle’s one true skill, one that achieved the status of high art; that of rhetoric; who else knew better, how best to establish themselves as the dog’s bollocks of logical thought, of rational methodology; ethos, logos and pathos… as bulwarks of narrow dogma… (don’t hold back mate; say what you really think);
• and, as a sad reflection that it took almost 2,000 years before one stepped out of that shadow of blind obedience; an edict reinforced by the early Christian church’s acceptance of his bedrock of gender bias and teleological reasoning; as the shoddy logical scaffolding around a shaky, twin-pronged, male drive to consolidate supremacy by gender and creation myth…flawed in its very DNA…

Descartes

Reinforced the Aristotelian tradition, and celebrated introspection over integration… he saw the logical end point as his own Cartesian epiphany…mind/spirit independent of flesh.. very like a heroin or morphine tripper ignores natures calls and screams…

Cogito ergo sum; I still don’t see how an affirmation of existence is evidence of mind body dualism; however he got there (he really shouldn’t have applied coordinate geometry to the self) it severed the western self in 2 planes; one to philosophy; t’other to medicine, and neither has managed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again…

• apocryphal nursery rhyme that; a society’s psychic self-diagnosis…
• Like the man always bragging about his sex life; lamenting his doctor’s instruction to give up half of it; which half, thinking or talking about it?…

Descartes’ mind body duality, through the resulting embuggerance of the western psyche, was the the making of Freud, Jung and the entire edifice that is the western psychiatric industry today; 

• bit like the digital virus industry or big pharma; both offer remedies to ills they created… 
• so psychiatry leveraged this insight into a compelling business model…

Descartes didn’t just split mind from body. He split the west from 3,000 years of integrated practice that the east never abandoned. The western psychiatric industry isn’t treating a disease; but a self-inflicted, Cartesian wound; by the hour.

Both Aristotelian and Cartesian thinking share the same root: mentation and logical evidence-free, edifices are elevated above epistemology, experience, or simply…

• open your eyes and take a gander, squire…

The polymath as armchair theorist. 

Appendix 1

A Pfeilstorch is a white stork that is injured by an arrow or spear while wintering in Africa and returns to Europe with the projectile stuck in its body. 

As of 2003, about 25 Pfeilstörche have been documented in Germany. 

• 25 of them; that still gets to me. Who the fuck is using storks as target practice?
• Haven’t they heard?
• That’s how babies get here..
• Perhaps that’s the reason…
• population control by spear, one delivery bird at a time...

The first and most famous Pfeilstorch was a white stork found in 1822 near the German village of Klütz, at the time in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

It was carrying a 75-centimetre spear from central Africa in its neck…

The first and most compelling evidence for migration rather than Aristotelean metamorphosis…

Ok! I agree… on the evidence of most every bird evaporating over winter and reappearing, one assumes, the same that evaporated, in spring…

Is not easy or obvious, even to Deep Blue… but metamorphosis!!

• That’s RIGHT up there with hearing hooves and thinking unicorns… at least try zebras first…perchance, even fing horses!

The specimen was subsequently stuffed (as Aristotle should have been) and can be seen today in the zoological collection of the University of Rostock.

Bruce's Philosophers Song

by Monty Python

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant

Who was very rarely stable

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar

Who could think you under the table…

David Hume could out-consume

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine

Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel

There's nothing Nietzche couldn't teach ya

'Bout the raising of the wrist

Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will

On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill

Plato, they say, could stick it away

Half a crate of whiskey every day

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle

Hobbes was fond of his dram

And René Descartes was a drunken fart

"I drink, therefore I am"

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed

A lovely little thinker

But a bugger when he's pissed…

Writer/s: ERIC IDLE, GRAHAM CHAPMAN, JOHN CLEESE, MICHAEL EDWARD PALIN, TERRY GILLIAM, TERRY JONES 

Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Group

Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Appendix 2

Western and Eastern Psychotherapy Markets Analyses

West

Psychotherapy is a massive, professionalised industry; built on the Cartesian dualism split. Treat the mind in one room, the body in another, bill separately; to the tune of $0.5 trillion dollars (by 2032) with close to 60% in the US market alone. 

The very first medical marketing slogan

• Cogito ergo sum; 
  • trinity of mind, body and therapist…
    • kind words, chemical comfort, and cold cash…
      • $0.5 trillion / year

The model assumes an individual self that can be isolated, examined, and fixed through talk. CBT, psychoanalysis, pharmacology — all premised on the mind as a separate mechanism that breaks and needs a specialist to repair it.

Descartes’ cogito was the most profitable poisoned chalice in history, a $460 billion industry built on treating a separation that doesn’t exist, in cultures that never needed it.

East

Mental health was never separated from physical health, family, community, or spiritual practice in the first place. 

Buddhist meditation, Taoist balance, yoga, tai chi; these aren’t “alternative therapies,” they’re the original, full mind body, training and awareness practices.

I do yoga most days; and I have to pay attention to my mind state, heart rate, both back muscle layers fully relaxed under pose tensions; the precise geometry of the pose, which I have to give myself permission, mentally, to do…they’re in harmony; not at odds…and 

• I’m not working at keeping them together…
• it’s the default state… 
• no more than most pay attention to breathing…
• Autonomous.

Japan developed Morita and Naikan therapies from indigenous traditions. 

China’s community mental health services are increasingly dominated by talking treatments and folk practices rather than western pharmacology. 

The family is the unit of treatment, not the individual.

The Intersection 

Western therapies transplanted to Asia often fail because they assume an individualistic self. 

A Chinese patient told to “identify and discuss your thoughts” refused — “I don’t want to talk about it. It’ll make me upset.” 

His depression improved anyway. 

• the western protocol of excavate, verbalise, process, is culturally specific, not universal.

No mind body separation in fact or in eastern philosophy; 

• riding an ox in search of an ox. 
• Mind, body are no more separate than a dog and its fleas…

The east never made that error; observation, practice, embodiment came first, theory second. 

And, they observed- 

separation is the illness;