Signs without Substance
Anti-Humanism and the Denial of Being
Photo by Игорь Антипов on Unsplash
“Communism is anti-humanity”…
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Communism is just one effect of the denial of Being.That’s the root cause.This error was formalised by William of Ockham in 1323 in his Summa Logicae, the same year the articulator of the solution — St. Thomas Aquinas — was canonised”…
— Oliver
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Why is Marxism, Communism, Fascism and Socialism ideologies all anti-human [LINK]?
“To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being.Such a rejection is more than a political act.It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil”…
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Refer - Lost Souls [LINK]
“Fascismis the stage reached aftercommunismhas proved anillusion”…
— Friedrich Hayek
Why did the vast majority of modern and post-modern Western philosophers embrace Nominalism [LINK]?
“In short, there was a tidal wave of nominalism.Descartes was a nominalist. Locke and all his following, Berkley, Hartley, Hume, and even Reid, were nominalists. Leibniz was an extreme nominalist, and Remusat who has lately made an attempt to repair the edifice of Liebnizian monadology, does so by cutting away every part which leans at all towards realism. Kant was a nominalist; although his philosophy would have rendered compacter, more consistent, and stronger if its author had taken up realism, as he certainly would have done if he read Scotus. Hegel was a nominalist of realistic yearnings; I might continue the list much further,Thus, in one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
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Why was Humanity in the third decade of the 21st Century intent on creating a Technology Society [LINK] and Technology System [LINK] (i.e. a Globalist Technocracy [LINK])?
“The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.
It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it.The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common.
Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all.
When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet”…
―Jacques Ellul,The Technological Society
Why had Modernity and Post-Modernity inverted the primary mode of Being (i.e. a re-orientation towards abstraction to the Mind and a decoupling of semiotic signs (Saussure), rather than a Being in the World (Heidegger)) [LINK] and an embodied coupling of semiotic signs (Peirce) - an intentional conscious (Husserl))?
“Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed orderand so non-survival evaluation.If we use the nervous system in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival.Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction”…
— Alfred Korzybski
Was this leading to a modern and post-modern Reality anchored in more and more human abstraction (e.g. Cartesianism [LINK], Idealism [LINK], Artificial General Intelligence [LINK], Scientific Management including Taylorism and Fordism [LINK], Instrumental Rationalism [LINK], Virtual Reality [LINK], HyperNormalisation [LINK], HyperReality [LINK], Simulacrum [LINK])?
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The increasing retreat to the Primacy of Man [LINK], Primacy of Human Consciousness [LINK] and Anthropomorphism of Christian Theology, Philosophy and Metaphysics [LINK].
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.The desert of the real itself”…
— Jean Baudrillard
Refer - Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations [LINK]
Had the map become the territory?
… “Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation,
simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4.It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum”…
— Jean Baudrillard
Had we embraced a Simulacra of Being [LINK] where the representation (mediated via signs) increasingly bears no relation to Reality?
“The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing,marks the decisive turning point”…
— Jean Baudrillard
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Had the inversion in the primary mode of Being [LINK] resulted in the picture becoming the pipe (René Magritte)? [LINK]
“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe?No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!”…
— Rene Magritte
Signs without Substance.
The Emergence of Two Alternative Semiotic Theories
Could an understanding and comparison of the clear distinction between two alternative theories (i.e. Sausserian European Structuralism [LINK] and Peircian Triadic [LINK] ) of Semiotics that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th Century be useful in illuminating and answering the above questions [LINK]?
“Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself” …
— Jean Baudrillard
The dyadic relationships (i.e. Signified (signifié) and Signifier (signifiant)) of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Semiotic Theory that are grounded in the Primacy of Human Consciousness and the Primacy of Man.
“Coining a new language, either by giving new meanings to familiar terms or by inventing new technical terms,is one of the most effective devices for eclipsing reality”…
— Eric Voegelin
Signs without Substance.
“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula”…
― Ferdinand de Saussure
Signs (e.g. language) without a coupling to Being.
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Or, the triadic relationships (i.e. Observer (interpretant), Sign (representamen), Observed (object)) of Charles Sanders Peirce’s Semiotic Theory (i.e. where the meaning of the sign is guided by the normative principle - the Pragmatic Maxim) that is grounded in the relationship between a Primacy of Human Consciousness and Being (a Primacy of Existence).
“The entire universe isperfused with signs, if it is notcomposed exclusively of signs”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
A relationship anchored in the Univocity of Being [LINK] that at the same time recognises the distinction between the Necessary Being of God (Creator) and Contingent Being of Man (Created).
Modernity and Post-Modernity’s Gradual Liquidation of Semiotic Sign Referentials and the Anti-Human Denial of Being
“the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials”…
— Jean Baudrillard
Why was Modernity and Post-Modernity increasingly ignoring St. Thomas Aquinas’s The Real Distinction [LINK]?
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The Foundational Doctrine of Thomism Metaphysics [LINK] and Human understanding of the nature of Intelligence and its relationship to Existence (i.e. act of Being).
“As simulations proliferate, they come to refer only to themselves:a carnival of mirrors reflecting images projected from other mirrors onto the omnipresent television screen and the screen of consciousness”…
— Jean Baudrillard, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[ LINK ] - The decoupling of Semiotic Signs from Being in the World
Was the decoupling of the meaning of Semiotic Signs from Substance [LINK] (i.e. Peirce (Semiotics - Semiotic Triadic - Pragmatic Maxim) & Aristotle (Substance) ) and Being in the World (i.e. Heidegger - this Being’s (Dasein) relationship to Being (Sein)) inherently anti-human and a denial of Being [LINK]?
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Was the Universality of Reason triadic in nature [LINK]?
In other words, abduction (Peirce), induction (Bacon) and deduction (Aristotle) [LINK] combine and at the same time reflect three distinct modes of Being - From Firstness to Thirdness [LINK].
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The mediation of meaning from Being in the World to abstraction to the Mind.
From Being to Knowing.
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From Firstness to Thirdness.
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If Reason was triadic in nature [LINK] and reflected three modes of Being [LINK], how could a Computer be a form of Artificial General Intelligence [LINK]?
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Was this prevailing AGI narrative an Obfuscation of Intelligence - a modern-day Tower of Babel? - Part 1 [LINK], Part 2 [LINK], Part 3 [LINK], Part 4 [LINK] and Part 5 [LINK].
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Or alternatively, was this another example of Western Civilisation entering the Theatre of the Absurd [LINK] via the anthropomorphism of Theology (e.g. endemic Marxism [LINK]), Philosophy and Metaphysics [LINK].
“Europe for five centuries & more has been deceiving itself, trying to establish a reign of humanism, liberalism, and supposedly Christian values on the basis ofan increasingly sceptical attitude towards Christian truth. Absurdism is the end of that road; it is the logical conclusion of the humanist attempt to soften and compromise Christian truth so as to accommodate new, modern, that is to say, worldly, values.Absurdism is the last proof that Christian truth is absolute and uncompromising, or else it is the same as no truth at all; and if there is no truth, if Christian truth is not to be understood literally and absolutely,if God is dead, if there is no immortality — then this world is all there is, andthis world is absurd, this world is Hell”…
— Fr Seraphim Rose
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“Absurd isthat which is devoid of purpose…Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost;all his actions becomesenseless,absurd, useless”…
— Martin Esslin quote from Eugene Ionesco
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“Those who can make youbelieve absurditiescan make you commit atrocities”…
— Voltaire
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A Modern and Post-Modern denial of the Christian Trinity [LINK], Plato’s Hypostasis [LINK], Thomism Philosophy [LINK], The Real Distinction [LINK] and the Triadic Relationship [LINK] between Conscious Man, the Natural World and God [LINK] grounded in the Univocity of Being [LINK] (Necessary Being of God (Creator) and the Contingent Being of Man (Created)).
“European civilisation rose on the principle of a world of universal and eternal truths, in whichall men participate– on theprinciple of the Logos, in other words” …
— Augusto del Noce
A Metaphysics anchored in Christian Theology and Ancient Greek Philosophy that triangulates Reality.
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