Part 08: ‘Seldon’s Dialectics’ Series.
A Megalithic Dialectic.
Dear Reader,
It
is my pleasure,
and my honor, as an elected member
of the Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.] General Council, and as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, key excerpts from the internal writings, and from the internal sayings, of our co-founder,
Karl Seldon.
This 8th release of
this new such
series is posted below
[Some E.D.
standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors
of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia,
to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s
discourse].
Seldon
–
Background about this ‘Megalithic
Dialectic’. I am indebted to
Rupert Soskin of The Prehistory Guys, in their film, viewable on
YouTube, and entitled “Standing with Stones”*, for a discovery, and for a conceptualization, about
the “Pillar Stone”, found in the “burial chamber” at Anglesey, UK.
Rupert
noted that this “pillar” is not load-bearing, as it is not attached to the stone
“roof” above. Its tactility as well as
its ‘visual texture’ identified it, for Rupert, as that of a petrified
log. This log also had human(s)-made
markings on it, from the time before it became petrified.
Rupert further noted that its use, prominently featured and yet not structurally involved in the stone “burial chamber”, suggested that this was an object of great symbolic value.
This symbolic value was then explained by Rupert
in terms of the symbolic and ritual meanings of woods versus of stones for
the mythological symbolic systems of the Neolithic communities that built, and that maintained, the ancient megalithic
constructions of the British Isles.
For
those builders, wood – the living wood of trees, and even the dying wood of a
nature-felled or human(s)-hewed log – symbolized life,
aliveness, and the living.
Stone,
for them, represented death, deadness, the dead, and the afterlife.
Thus,
a petrified log combining features of both wood and stone, might have
represented magic of great power, potentially even a “shamanic” power to move between
the realms of life and death; between the "spheres" of the living and the dead – between life and
afterlife – in both directions?
The
NQ-algebraic,
systematic-dialectical, presentational model, for its step 1, depicted below, uses the Triadic Dialectical
Function to form its dialectical equation.
This
dialectic is also a special case that illustrates another general
point, namely, that ‘dialecticality’ is no guarantee of ‘scientificity’. Ideologies can, and often do, exhibit
dialectical forms. The greatest case of
this is, no doubt, that of the, dialectical, philosophical ideology of
Hegel. Nonetheless, the present case is
also a case in point.
Detailed explication of our model of this dialectic,
and of its ‘dialectogram’ diagram.
‘«Arché»-Category’. This kind of category is the first category of a systematic-dialectical presentation for a given Domain.
It is
associated with the q1 generic
NQ dialectical 'meta-number', e.g., with the 'ordinal
dialectical-arithmetical qualifier meta-numeral' that stands for the totality of
ontological categories that come, ordinally, first in their native ontological,
dialectical-categorial progressions, such that this «arché» category, denoted
here by qW, is asserted to be the special case of the q1 'ordinal qualifier generic category' for this, special, D = MOS Domain.
We take, as our «arché» or starting-category, for this ‘megalithic dialectic’,
the category of tree-Wood, taken as a symbolic, for the Neolithic builders
of the megalithic structures of the British Ilses, of life, of aliveness
and of the living, whether the units of this category were still-living
trees, still rooted in the ground, or severed logs, felled by
forces of non-human, of ‘exo-human’ Nature, or cut
by action of ‘‘‘human Nature’’’.
It
is believed that Stone henges, in ancient Britain,
representing the dead, were offset by the qualitative oppositeness of “Wood henges”, placed at contrasting loci
in the landscape, and symbolizing the living.
First ‘Contra-Category’. This second species-category
represents that category of this ‘MOS’
Domain which is
most immediately and most obviously omitted in/by category W – that other
category of this Domain which is
the extreme opposite category to that first category, of the living. This next-other category, this second
category, is, namely, the category of the dead.
The initially-unknown, in meaning, i.e., the '''algebraic''' ‘categorogram’ qWW connotes an immanent critique, or self-critique, of the W category of ‘Symbolology’, the qW critique of qW itself, critiquing the seeming and false claim of W to be the only category in the Domain named --
D = MOS
-- a critique that arises from within W or qW itself, and whose solution/fruition-of-self-critique is the ideo-physio-ontological category of 3-D physical symbol units denoted by S.
The,
sensuously, rigid and apparently non-self-changing quality of units of Stone, was seen
by the builders, we conjecture, as being in qualitative opposition
to the qualities of tree Wood, the latter as a ‘self-animate’ substance, [self-]changing and growing continually from within, as analogous
to the living qualities of self-changing human communities
and of human individuals.
In
step 2 of
a systematic-dialectical presentation of this ‘megalithic dialectic’,
the progression of ideo-physio-ontological categories
in view would consist, for a dyadic, not triadic, dialectical-function equation-model, of just two categories, for such a step 2 -
qW2 = qW ~Å~ qWW |-º qW ~Å~ qS.
First ‘Uni-Category’. This 3rd species-category represents a complex unity of our 1st category and our 2nd category, an ideo-physio-ontological category each of whose units is a complex unity of the Wood and the Stone categories, a category each of whose units combines Stone and Wood, as instantiated by the so-called “Pillar Stone” –
–
of the Bryn Celli Ddu barrow burial chamber
on
the Welsh island of Anglesey, located near
Llandaniel
Fab.
Perhaps
this particular object represented, for the builders of Bryn Celli Ddu, a bridge between the symbolic opposites
of The Realm of the Living
and The Realm of the Dead,
such that a shaman, using this tool, might pass repeatedly from one realm
to the other, both ways.
Note: Category P might possibly be a 'singleton category' -- a category '''containing''' only a single unit, «monad» or instance; a category that is therefore not also associated with an «arithmos», in the ancient sense of that term -- with which, typically, ontological categories are associated -- unless more instances of 'stone/wood hybrids' have been discovered, and/or are discovered in the future, in the context of Megalithic sites from the ancient British Iles, from ancient France, etc.
Of course, given the '''psychohistory''' of "modern" society -- i.e., of capitalist society -- and the massive impact, upon 'the human phenome'; upon the prevailing human «mentalité», of the overwhelmingly frequent repetition of exchange-value exchanges, in which heterogeneous, qualitatively different goods are exhcnage-equated, apparently by means of [monetary] "pure quantity" alone, impressing, unconsciously, but, thereby, all the more deeply, into modern humanity's biological, brain neural networks, the unwitting paradoxical paradigm that became the «arché» of all of Marx's four-volume, immanent critique of capitalist political economy, and of the Grundrisse before those four volumes, which Marx called "The Elementary Form of [commodity exchange-]Value, we now no longer flinch, as our ancient Mediterranean ancestors did, at the 'numerization' of a single unit, or even at the 'numerization' of the absence of any unit(s) -- at treating "1" and even "0" as "natural" numbers.
For us, the 'qualitativity' of a single «monad» is elided, and "quantity" no longer begins with two units.
For us, apart from critical awareness of the modern paradigm, of eliding qualitative differences in the exchange-equating of qualitatively-different goods, "quantity" -- "naturally" -- begins with no units; with no unit, with no thing -- with none of the kind of things that are in question.
*[The film “Standing With Stones: A Journey through Megalithic Britain” may be viewed via the URL: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Iq4xM8TLWc0.].
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian insights, please see --
For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books
published by
the F.E.D. Press, see –
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH
¡ENJOY!
Regards,
Miguel
Detonacciones,
Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];
Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;
Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;
Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.
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