As I get older, I find the energy which the universe has given me to do my work has become very narrow in its focus as I face its liberation back into the universe.
Everything I do today seems to focus on researching scholars which the universe has sent my way: Euclid, Spinoza, Boole, Seth Lloyd, Antonio Damasio, Moe Noman and most recently Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. My wife, Rose says she is jealous that the universe gives me books when I need them. She sees it as somewhat of a mystical process but I see it as a prcoess of what science calls, ‘entanglement,’ (what I think Spinoza meant by the third way of knowing).
I have always loved research and abhorred writing. (thus my non-productivity in the academic area). I only write when the semen of research evokes the pain of birth and then it is usually a still birth.
That idiot, Price, the anthropologist for whom I was a research assistant at York, told me the left side of my brain was undeveloped because I came from blue-collar roots. This was because I spelled ’sceptic’ with a ‘c’ rather than a ‘k.’ Anyway, I had spent a lot of time learning how to do the method of content analysis and applying it to the Toronto Native Times, an aboriginal paper. I never gave my results to him. We subsequently lost that paper on our many moves.
However, this method has become vital to my research and I suspect that this is because philosophers don’t know how to do content analysis so that they fail to recognize Spinoza’s indebtedness to Euclid in all of his philosophy (and why he was not a rationalist).
Deleuze & Guattari in ‘What Is Philosophy?’ say Spinoza is the ‘Prince’ and ‘Christ’ of philosophy. because he was aware that there is only immance and not transcendence. Nevertheless, these two magnificent thinkers, who I think understood philosophy better than anyone else, failed to see Duclid’s influence on spinoza and consequently they were only sophisticated, warmed up reationalists.
Philosophy is, as Spinoza understood, only our own work and not nature and thus only a ‘being of reason.’ I suspect it is this failure of Deleuze to understand Spinoxa that resulted in his suicide.
Jul
17