..Ergo propter hoc

…Ergo Propter Hoc

Adding Up the Flim Flam to date (8.10.’06)

Posted excerpt from the Philosophy of Completing Totalities on teleological causation

The Sequence of events

First Israel hugely over-reacts to a border-crossing abductions (7.12 NS 7.27). It declares capture of its three soldiers an act of war, begin merciless shelling of Beirut, creating conditions requiring ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon in order to defend its right to exist.

The U.S. plays the role of enabler, sending arms and stalling the UN cease fire resolution.

Next, 8.10, the U.S. and U.K hugely over-react to alleged plot to explode 10 air planes in flight. Airport traffic in major cities massively disrupted in response to highest alert EVEN THOUGH the ones charged in the plot were already in custody and no reason whatever was given why an imminent threat was posed on this particular day. In a short while we will be at 9.11, again, which will reconnect with what this highest level terrorist alert is said to be (“the most horrendous deadly attack since 9.11”, reported).

Both over-reactions show stunning indifference to the quality of human life and property. Israel’s, wanton and depraved massacre of civilians (“Hezbollah hiding behind women and children.”). It is as if the Big Scripster of these historical events thought America needed to feel the hurt Israel was inflicting – or receiveing; in any case, its suffering. So it somehow got arranged that the “common terrorist enemy” would attack us now.

Then, on cue, as if explaining the reason for the arrangement, the president proclaims this enemy is “Islamic fascism” following an “ideology of hate”. This itself is hard-line Zionist racist rhetoric of hate. Bush’s escalation of this 8.10 pseudo-threat event into to a religious war vastly exceeds his authority. And it is used to bring about an inversion of theological and moral values, as the irreconcilable differences of the “One God” of Jewish-Muslim are allowed by naïve Christians to co-opt and reverse the God of the Trinity.

President Bush has no right to refer to either “fascism”, as if that was a descriptive term for matters of state; nor “Islam”, which carries religious overtones. The bloody 30 year war in Europe between the Protestant north lands and the Roman Catholic/Hapsburg southern Mediterranean lands, ended at Westphalia with the understanding that confessional terms of all sorts were to be left out of state diplomatic language. There would be no “Your Holy Reverence”, or “Your Majesty” stuff from thenceforth. This is the conceptual origin of the separation of church and state. The language of statescraft must be secular; otherwise those with whom one would communicate are obliged to acknowledge an inner situation that imposes unwanted advantages and/or disadvantages. A free man acknowledges no other man’s God. This does not mean each cannot represent his own God to the maximum, as an inner quality, but it restricts public manifestation by “grafting”: using terms requiring acts of obeisance to this or that in order to communicate.

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Introductory college logic texts usually carry a section on a fallacy in causal reasoning known by its latin name “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”: “after, therefore because of.” This comes in in evaluating inductive reasoning. “Spring stretched; screed door slammed”: the cause of the sound of the slam was the spring pulling the door.” What followed was caused by what preceded. But “Fart knocked; shot blocked” is a before-after sequence not usually causally connected. Inductive reasoning uses the method of agreement and differences to weed out acausal vrs. causal sequences. From the classical scientific POV A. the law of universal causation holds throughout the universe; and B. the prior determines the subsequent; causation is an asymmetrical relation of succession in time. This is the basic worldview Newtonian/Kantian metaphysics.

However, there has always been a respected rival tradition and position of consciousness which reverses the order, putting the end as cause of the beginning. This reverse-causation, which runs barckward from the future to the past, is called “teleological causation.” When B follows A in teleological causation, it is because A is necessary for B, not the other way around as science assumes.

Different metaphysical grounds for teleological causal sequences have been offered. These can be laid out in a progressive sequence as follows.

1. “God’s plan”: history, including planet earth, the cosmos, and human species can be and is grasped as a unitary whole, created and completed by the actualization of a single spirit.

2. “Prophetic individuals”: there are supra-sensible experiences of special particular individuals in which past and future can be seen “transcendently”, connected in ways not known to others.

3. Aristotle’s concept of The Final Cause – that for the sake of which -- as one of the four kinds determining an individual member of the infima species (lowest order species of biological reproduction) is teleological.. The other three causes– Material, Efficient, Formal -- fall under the Final Cause in completing the natural unit through a continuous duration of time. The Formal Cause is closest to the Final, in the sense that the cycle of each thing as member of its species manifest its essence – in Man, the form of the human (male) – developmentally, providing a metaphysical continuity through the duration. The causal argument for the existence of God given by Thomas Aquinas sees the layers of ‘evolutionary’ development as lawfully subsumed under a hierarchy of laws of natural kinds actualized in the Form of totality completing in space and time. Whether it can be called a “proof of the existence of God” or not – the very notion smacks of the naïve, from a modern point of view – it is a perennial perspective. (Even called “The Perrenial Philosophy” in some quarters.) It traces a certain ladder of sign-uses through consciousness.

4. “Flowering seeds”: What is coming into existence at any given point in time and place is the unfolding of what has been, and what has been planted to unfold, in the places and times of humanity. This metaphysical perspective would add the layers of latencies manifesting in the hierarchy of sign-uses of consciousness as a separate and distinct “dimension” mediated by such sign-uses. This perspective perceives communication, itself, as a seething, turbulent stream of psycho-neural arousals each “bulb” of which belongs to the anatomy of a sign-use processor, where their brain is located.

5. The most comprehensive order manifest in consciousness is organized under the forms of forms of forms…of sign-use, each level of form being a level of predication on objects in sentences (as “living thing” of all members of every species). This hierarchy of Forms, from completing totality (Level S*7), downward to psycho-neurological origins (S*1 – origin of dreams), is the schema of the Transcendental dimension of consciousness.

6. The most compact, complete, total manifestation of conscious being in the individual is the teleological direction of the totality of his inner life toward completion, in the way a sentence completes a thought.

7. Stipulation: let “God” stand for what is communicated by/for each person as completing their totality.


Conclusion. The escalation of presidential rhetoric to “Islamic fascism” to designate an enemy of America … matching the unleashing of genocidal Jewish supremacist atrocity in Lebanon … plus (let’s add) the creaming of Snakeskin Joe, the Jew from Connecticut … and (adding further) the echo of Mel Gibson’s rage, taken as real …this pattern verifies the charge of willfully perverting the plan; thwarting the natural completion; foreclosing the higher dimensions of reality which are the natural end of consciousness as a totality. It is a false conjunction of the Final and Formal Causes. That is why it must be metaphysically rejected.
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Everything is two