Sean's tonality ideas

[Sean]

Part of the trouble, Sean, is that you have no idea of what a muddle stuff like tonality's resources, art's most powerful force is.

Mmm, I'll have a think about it, it was a very old sentence reworded...
Best.

[karlhenning]

Attaboy.

[MN Dave]

Attaboy.

Attaboy, girl. Attaway to break my heart...

--Roger Miller

[karlhenning]

Attaboy, girl. Attaway to break my heart...

--Roger Miller

I still like "crush that dove."  Any chance the Buckeye boys will retcon their lyrics?

[MN Dave]

I still like "crush that dove."  Any chance the Buckeye boys will retcon their lyrics?

Maybe, since they have previoiusly performed under the name "Dove: The Band of Love".

[Cato]

Allow me to comment on the opening sentence: in general, Mr. Sean, you need to discover the Joy of Commas!  It would really perk up the readability of your prose.

"Life has fundamental dynamics, potentials or tendencies consisting in the gunas and providing meaning and structure from a necessarily pre-rational, intuitive and Dionysian base, lying in the interface between absolute consciousness and its experience of the relative world."

1. There is no evidence that "gunas" are separate from human tendencies: the term adds complexity where there is none. 

2. A tendency is NOT "necessarily pre-rational" but quite explicable: the tendency to drink when thirsty may not require verbal thought, but certainly is rationalistic.

3. How are "intuitive" and "Dionysian" different from "necessarily pre-rational"?

4. How can a "base" lie at an "interface" ?

5. "Absolute" consciousness?  As opposed to what kind of consciousness?

6. If the world is "relative," - and what does that  mean? - how exactly can there be any Absolute Consciousness in a Relative World?   

[Sean]

Allow me to comment on the opening sentence: in general, Mr. Sean, you need to discover the Joy of Commas!  It would really perk up the readability of your prose.

"Life has fundamental dynamics, potentials or tendencies consisting in the gunas and providing meaning and structure from a necessarily pre-rational, intuitive and Dionysian base, lying in the interface between absolute consciousness and its experience of the relative world."

1. There is no evidence that "gunas" are separate from human tendencies: the term adds complexity where there is none. 

2. A tendency is NOT "necessarily pre-rational" but quite explicable: the tendency to drink when thirsty may not require verbal thought, but certainly is rationalistic.

3. How are "intuitive" and "Dionysian" different from "necessarily pre-rational"?

4. How can a "base" lie at an "interface" ?

5. "Absolute" consciousness?  As opposed to what kind of consciousness?

6. If the world is "relative," - and what does that  mean? - how exactly can there be any Absolute Consciousness in a Relative World?

Hello Cato. Sure, thanks. The paragraph is about perfect though, and I must disagree about the commas...

Maybe your interest is stirred and there's something in you indeed, in which case I refer you to the entire Vedic tradition.

1. It's not to add complexity but give a definition, as I'm trying to relate some ideas about tonality to Vedic thought.

2. A tendency here is pre-rational in that it's only explained after it occurs: yes rationality can parallel it but it doesn't begin there.

3. I'm describing intuitive and Dionysian as pre-rational.

4. It doesn't, but my point is to underline Dionysian ascendency over the Apollonian & it's okay for present purposes.

5. Absolute consciousness is consciousness without content- just awareness on its own.

6. The absolute inheres in and is in fact the foundation of the relative world, and hidden from the intellect.

Best wishes.

[mc ukrneal]

Hello Cato. Sure, thanks. The paragraph is about perfect though, and I must disagree about the commas...

Maybe your interest is stirred and there's something in you indeed, in which case I refer you to the entire Vedic tradition.

1. It's not to add complexity but give a definition, as I'm trying to relate some ideas about tonality to Vedic thought.

2. A tendency here is pre-rational in that it's only explained after it occurs: yes rationality can parallel it but it doesn't begin there.

3. I'm describing intuitive and Dionysian as pre-rational.

4. It doesn't, but my point is to underline Dionysian ascendency over the Apollonian & it's okay for present purposes.

5. Absolute consciousness is consciousness without content- just awareness on its own.

6. The absolute inheres in and is in fact the foundation of the relative world, and hidden from the intellect.

Best wishes.

Errr, just a  clarification on my side - did you post this to be funny or in all seriousness. Sorry if I should know this, but I am not clear.

[knight66]

I think it is serious. It certainly contains some quotable quotes; vintage stuff.

Mike

[Sean]

When you're as great and staggering a genius as I am, and when your insight has such depths and profundity that even the likes of Knight have to bow and pay homage, you know you've arrived.

[mc ukrneal]

When you're as great and staggering a genius as I am, and when your insight has such depths and profundity that even the likes of Knight have to bow and pay homage, you know you've arrived.

Ok, I got it now!

[Cato]

Hello Cato. Sure, thanks. The paragraph is about perfect though, and I must disagree about the commas...

Maybe your interest is stirred and there's something in you indeed, in which case I refer you to the entire Vedic tradition.

1. It's not to add complexity but give a definition, as I'm trying to relate some ideas about tonality to Vedic thought.

2. A tendency here is pre-rational in that it's only explained after it occurs: yes rationality can parallel it but it doesn't begin there.

3. I'm describing intuitive and Dionysian as pre-rational.

4. It doesn't/b], but my point is to underline Dionysian ascendency over the Apollonian & it's okay for present purposes.

5. Absolute consciousness is consciousness without content- just awareness on its own.

6. The absolute inheres in and is in fact the foundation of the relative world, and hidden from the intellect.

Best wishes.

IF you must disagree about the commas, you must be wrong.

1. In which case it adds complexity and defines nothing.

2. Where is "there", i.e. the source of rationality?

3. In which case they are again redundancies.

4. So you accept an error as correct in an attempt to define concepts full of contradictions.

5. And so what would be non-absolute consciousness?  Awareness incapable of existing on its own?

6. If the absolute is the foundation of the relative world and is "hidden from the intellect," how can you explain anything about it?

You must therefore admit that you understand nothing about the "absolute" and the "relative" since the former is "hidden from the intellect."

[eyeresist]

Part of the trouble, Sean, is that you have no idea of what a muddle stuff like tonality's resources, art's most powerful force is.

Don't be obtuse, Karl. It means that the resources of tonality are the most powerful force in art.


EDIT: I can see what Sean is getting at, but he really needs to express it with more semantic rigour. The weasel words of mystical exogesis are easily blown over with a puff of logic.

[Sean]

Regarding Karl's objection, I actually thought he'd got a point and I changed the sentence on my file- maybe I was having one of my occasional meaker moments.

Cato, you're a linguist for sure, and I share your interest in English, but I think a great deal about my style and proof read serveral times. The placement of commas is a sophisticated matter and if you just chuck them in at any slight semantical pause you'd have a much more confusing situation.

Rationality begins in the intellect, associated with the functioning of the left hand side of the brain- and which unfortunately for Western thought isn't fundamental. As for consciousness, it can have content ie thoughts and impressions or it can indeed be self-referentially aware only of itself.

You can't explain anything about consciousness directly as it's what we are and in that sense systematically elusive to empirical study, but in fact there are no epistemological gaps to bridge between mind and its self-understanding, or our experience of reality and the outside world because all has the same underlying base.

The absolute or Brahman underlies the relative such that the relative is only the absolute in relative form. Brahman is hidden from the intellect that wants to foreground, objectify and make transparent all things, ie when truth is necessary hidden behind the propositions and their infinite regressions of justification. Etc etc.

[drogulus]

Part of the trouble, Sean, is that you have no idea of what a muddle stuff like tonality's resources, art's most powerful force is.

      I'd put it a little differently and say that a good many highly abstract formulations don't refer to anything. Have you ever read the winners of the bad writing contests? This is perhaps the most "celebrated" example from Judith Butler, an academic writing in 1997:

     The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

     Pretty gripping, eh? Do these shards of ideation refer to anything outside themselves? It's hard to say....one catches wisps of meaning here and there, perhaps. I think this is more extreme than Seans's post. The problem there is one of intermittent sense jumbled with Butlerian abstraction which obscures it for the reader and perhaps the writer. I often wonder if obscurantist argument is deliberate or inadvertant.

[karlhenning]

"Shards of ideation" is very nice!

[karlhenning]

Reminds me of a student's quip which my Wollongong buddy was fond to recall, in response to a particularly dense (to use the adjective neutrally) extrusion from one of her professors:

Communication is so overrated, isn't it?

[Luke]

"Shards of ideation" is very nice!

Shards of Ideation, for piccolo and flexatone. I'll race you to it!

[mc ukrneal]

Shards of Ideation, for piccolo and flexatone. I'll race you to it!

Somehow I imagine a continuo with that one...

[Florestan]

        The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Isn't this the prevailing academic jargon of the social sciences? I should have thought that after the mortal blow Alan Sokal administered, they would have at least the decency to shut the f^%$#k up for a loooong, loooong time. But I guess academic world nowadays is the last place where one must look for intellectual honesty.