Friday 25 May 2007

A post-structuralist understanding of reality.

Re: Astronomy vs Astrology. As the 12 constellations no longer match up to the designated divisions of the solar year, does this discredit the Ancient art of astrology?

Again here the physicalist paradigm must be brought into question. The last 400 years have seen an increasingly rationalist interpretation of reality and the human experience. But this does not mean that we can disregard the structures which emerged from the prerational 'dreamtime'  of early human consciousness. To do so is to retroactively enforce our modern belief system onto the past. It is a grand mistake to think that the ancients drew up these beliefs as a rational interpretation of the cosmos...they have a much deeper significance. One that goes beyond the reductionist-materialist lens we in the 21st century have chosen to wear.

If we can accept a post-structuralist understanding of literature,we are saying that the intention of an author is irrelevant to the relation between text and reader. That is, the author alone does not determine the correct meaning of a text: the reader creates anew the text as she interprets it, using her subjective apparatus, the filters of her past experience and belief systems/personal mythology. The intention of an author is in fact not an intrinsic part of the text at all. That is due solely to the reader. The question I ask is, why can we not also accept this of reality? The individual creates anew the world through their own experience of it, and their subjective relationship to events, placing a unique and unchallengable sense of meaning onto the mere 'fact' of matter.

To claim that an atheistic physicalist universe can only be correctly understood in atheistic physicalist terms is to run counter to the very implication of this cosmology...if there is no 'creator', no deity to enforce an absolute "intention" behind facticity (that is, no deity to assign one and only one true interpretation of the facts; to make true a single claim "this happened because of this...", "if x then y", disallowing - negating - any other interpretation), if there is no such dominant power in reality then there is only subjective awareness to place the multitude of perspectives, opinions and interpretations upon the soulless facticity which exists nebulously 'outside' of us.

If there is no objective viewpoint, then we cannot subsume individual interpretations under a hierarchy of correctness. There is no 'correct'. It is the responsibility of each individual to create the meaning and the relationship between events in their reality. Causality is something we must actively create ourselves. Mythology is our own responsibility. Living is an activity, something we do creatively and must take responsibility for.