A Note on the Use of Style as a Reaction To Positivism

I am not writing for the current audience. I can’t. The current audience is somewhat poisoned by the equivalent of a mystical set of assumptions about the nature of rational discourse. Instead, I’m taking a cue from Nietzsche, who tried a number of styles to get his point across, and settled on a style that is polemic, heroic, and mythic.

So the voice I’m using on and off is that of the heroic mythic which is action oriented, versus the subjective mythic style, which is submissive, at least in the sense that it waits to seize opportunities in response to others rather than compels us to create them by cooperative action in advance of others.

And I’m doing it on purpose, because the heroic is by definition mythic, the mythic is by definition narrative, a narrative by definition social, social is by definition cooperative, and cooperative is by definition a set of statements about action.

I’ve taken this stylistic approach partly because I understand that Anglo analytical philosophy and its empirical branch, scientific rationalism, are at their core possessed of an error in reasoning we commonly called positivism that is so habituated in our theocratic educational system at all levels that I have to create an intentional break from it.

I’m not sure if it easily comes across why such a style matters.

In simple terms, these systems of positivist thought ignore and fail to account for the necessity of human comparative calculation, property, opportunity, choice, action, and time. And these systems abandon these necessities in favor of a process that attempts to use time as a constant, an error which we call “Newtonian time.” Next, in their attempt to remove subjectivity in an attempt to create argumentative certainty for the purpose of political persuasion, by use of the argumentative device that produces a law: that of determining a finite causal state. They attempt to make a final state exempt from future discourse rather than feeding a process of evolutionary debate that has no final state, and, in doing so, remove the very process that determines the means of choice: subjective preference given the awareness of opportunity made possible by the distribution of responsibility for calculation made possible by the division of the material universe into forecast-able elements that can be acted upon: property.

Our primary “number” system is property. We calculate the future using property. Our rational-number system simply functions as the decimal points we use to make sure pieces of our conceptual carpentry will fit together the way we think they will.

Numbers enhance our perception and memory so that we see how our primary number system, property, actually fits together. You don’t envision numbers. You envision a living room and try to fit furniture in it. Numbers help test your conceptions. In fact, if you want to know why modern architecture often doesn’t seem to feel comfortable, it’s because someone inverted the reasoning process and that’s why it simply feels inhuman. Noah can build an ark with just a stick, but he can’t build one with a number independent of a stick. Nothing can be learned from the number twelve, only what you do with it to transform the material world.

In less dramatic and more realistic terms, we perceive objects or collections of objects that fit together to form either more complex objects or systems. Numbers help us compare similar things or measure things that cannot be perceived either because they are too large, too small, too numerous, or incomparable by other means. Just as money makes incomparable things comparable by prices, so do numbers make things comparable. It is the use of things together that forms some other thing, by allowing us to transform some thing into another thing. However, in any circumstance, we are comparing an object for particular use. In that use it must have exclusivity, if simply in space and time, if not in space, time, and consumption or transformation into something else. Therefore property must be unique, at least in use, in space and time.

Measurement can test a theory, but it cannot make one. In practice, humans cannot calculate their world without property. It is not possible to invent a future without dividing up the world into actionable elements.