Tag Archives: NASA

What is truth?

Posted on by under Aesthetics, creation, dialectics, G.W.F.Hegel, Neoplatonism, Objective reality, Objective truth, Plotinus
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NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans

‘Appearance…constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent.’

G.W.F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans., A.V.Miller, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1977, 27-28 (Preface, 47)

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There is nothing in the world but matter in motion

Posted on by under Aesthetics, dialectical materialism, Karl Marx, NASA, Objective reality, Objective truth

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Scumble and glaze – or what you can do with a fox fur, unicorn horn and Christmas tree

Posted on by under Aesthetics, astronomy, NASA
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Wide Field: Fox Fur, Unicorn and Christmas Tree

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This is not a hole

Posted on by under astronomy, NASA, Photography
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A Hole in Mars

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Male Parson’s chameleon eye, Madagascar

 

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From mysticism to materialism – ‘the tremendous power of the negative’, before which everything but change is doomed

Posted on by under dialectical materialism, Friedrich Engels, G.W.F.Hegel, Karl Marx, Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa, Objective reality, Objective truth, Plotinus, Proclus, V.I.Lenin

NGTS-10b: Discovery of a Doomed Planet

By arguing that Hegel was not only a mystic, but that he was specifically the consummate Neoplatonist, I address in my thesis the part his philosophy played in a continuum that was and is by its nature always open to development – running from the idealism of Plotinus (consciousness is primary) to its ‘inversion’ in the materialism of Marx (matter is primary). My thesis also argues that Hegel’s system, encapsulated in his Encyclopaedia, is based on Proclus’ triad of triads and that Hegel was fully aware of Cusanus whose De docta ignorantia was also structured on that triad, never mentioning him both because of the degree to which he was indebted to him and because of the implications of that acknowledgement. I provide evidence from Hegel’s own sources.

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Konstantin Yuon, ‘A New Planet,’ 1921. Tempera on cardboard, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I address Magee’s claim that Hegel was an Hermeticist and argue that Magee misrepresented both the Hermetica and Hermeticism in order to argue that claim. I also argue that the response of the ideologues of the bourgeoisie to the revolutionary core that Marx and Engels brought out in Neoplatonism encapsulates why Hegel’s thorough-going Neoplatonism is not acknowledged by them. With ‘the tremendous power of the negative’ – the source of all development, before which everything is also ‘doomed’ – as that core, this current is the greatest current in Western philosophy, and now, as dialectical materialism, is the epistemology of the future.

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The Crab Nebula and its pulsar

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‘Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist’ A

‘Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist’ B

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Coincidentia oppositorum

Posted on by under Aesthetics, astronomy, G.W.F.Hegel, Nicholas of Cusa, Plotinus, Proclus
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NGC 2392: Double-shelled planetary nebula

‘(Coincidentia oppositorum is) a state or condition in which opposites no longer oppose each other but fall together into a harmony, union, or conjunction…a unity of contrarieties overcoming opposition by convergence without destroying or merely blending the constituent elements…it…sets forth the way God works, the order of things in relation to God and to each other, and the manner by which humans may approach and abide in God’

H. Lawrence Bond in Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings, trans., H. Lawrence Bond, Paulist Press, New York, 1997, 335-336 

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Lenin: Is motion without matter conceivable?

Posted on by under dialectical materialism, Marxism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth, V.I.Lenin

8. Two Black Holes Dancing in 3C 75. Particle jets are moving at 1200 kilometres per second.

The fact that philosophical idealism is attempting to make use of the new physics, or that idealist conclusions are being drawn from the latter, is due not to the discovery of new kinds of substance and force, of matter and motion, but to the fact that an attempt is being made to conceive motion without matter. And it is the essence of this attempt which our Machists fail to examine. They were unwilling to take account of Engels’ statement that “motion without matter is unthinkable”. J. Dietzgen in 1869, in his The Nature of the Workings of the Human Mind, expressed the same idea as Engels, although, it is true, not without his usual muddled attempts to “reconcile” materialism and idealism. Let us leave aside these attempts, which are to a large extent to be explained by the fact that Dietzgen is arguing against Büchner’s non-dialectical materialism, and let us examine Dietzgen’s own statements on the question under consideration. He says: “They [the idealists] want to have the general without the particular, mind without matter, force without substance, science without experience or material, the absolute without the relative” (Das Wesen der menschlichen Kopfarbeit, 1903, S. 108). Thus the endeavour to divorce motion from matter, force from substance, Dietzgen associates with idealism, ranking it with the endeavour to divorce thought from the brain. “Liebig,” Dietzgen continues, “who is especially fond of straying from his inductive science into the field of speculation, says in the spirit of idealism: ‘force cannot be seen’” (109). “The spiritualist or the idealist believes in the spiritual, i.e., ghost-like and inexplicable, nature of force” (110). “The antithesis between force and matter is as old as the antithesis between idealism and materialism” (111). “Of course, there is no force without matter, no matter without force; forceless matter and matterless force are absurdities. If idealist natural scientists believe in the immaterial existence of forces, then on this point they are not natural scientists…but seers of ghosts” (114).

Thus we see that scientists who were prepared to assume that motion is conceivable without matter were to be encountered forty years ago too, and that “on this point” Dietzgen declared them to be seers of ghosts. What, then, is the connection between philosophical idealism and the divorce of matter from motion, the separation of substance from force? Is it not “more economical”, indeed, to conceive motion without matter?

Part one/to be continued…

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, 1908, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, pp. 246-254, 247

The one absolute – change

Posted on by under Aesthetics, astronomy, Creativity, dialectical materialism, dialectics, NASA

Why does the Sun’s surface keep changing? Solar granules at record high resolution.

‘The counter-thrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes perfect attunement, and all  things come to pass through conflict.’  

Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, LXXV

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The immaculate is made maculate

Posted on by under Aesthetics, astronomy, NASA
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The space station crosses a spotless sun

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From NGC 7052 to capitalism – all things are doomed

Posted on by under dialectics, G.W.F.Hegel, mysticism - the pornography of academic philosophers, Neoplatonism, Plotinus
The doomed dust disk of NGC 7052: thousands of light years across, containing more mass than a million Suns, probably the remnant of a titanic galactic collision, rotating faster than 100 kilometres per second at a distance of 150 light-years from its centre - a theorised massive black hole that may swallow the entire disk in the next few million years.

The doomed dust disk of NGC 7052: thousands of light years across, containing more mass than a million Suns, probably the remnant of a titanic galactic collision, rotating faster than 100 kilometres per second at a distance of 150 light-years from its centre – a theorised massive black hole that may swallow the entire disk in the next few million years.

Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic. We are aware that everything finite, instead of being stable and ultimate, is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by that Dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its own immediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite. We have before this (§80) identified Understanding with what is implied in the popular idea of the goodness of God; we may now remark of Dialectic, in the same objective signification, that its principle answers to the idea of his power. All things, we say – that is, the finite world as such – are doomed; and in saying so, we have a vision of Dialectic as the universal and irresistible power before which nothing can stay, however secure and stable it may deem itself.

G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, Trans., William Wallace, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975, Remark to §81, 118

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