Br16 Open Letter to Academic Philosophers
The young free and independent thinker is, by definition, on the main road to truth. He is also likely to be lonely, because most others have already turned off that road, diverted onto one of its many side-tracks. Along that main road are numerous obstacles to be either determinedly overcome or weakly avoided by taking one of those side-tracks. If he sticks to the main road, sooner or later he will meet a major obstacle in the form of Academic Philosophy (philosopy with a capital P,) an obstacle that is not so easily overcome for two main reasons. The first reason is that Philosophy is a formidable professional institution that confidently claims to be the authority on truth and is not easy to argue with, and the second that if he capitulated to this institution and joined its ranks at least the thinker would no longer be lonely.
Suppose our erstwhile free and independent thinker succumbs and is side-tracked. From the viewpoint of practitioners of Academic Philosophy, as they welcome him to the fold , he has been on the wrong road and must now study Philosophy as his only way to truth. He will be given learned books to read, written by academic philosophers revered by this ancient profession, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, but they do not provide the free and independent thinker with what he seeks. These books are revered by Philosophers because they plumb the depths of conscious reason in search of answers to the great questions. The fact that none of these great men has actually found those answers does not deter Philosophers but is taken to indicate that truth is beyond the understanding of the greatest human minds. The books do not trace the progress of truth towards fulfilment. Rather than present the thinker with the means to truth, Philosophy gives him complex and obscure arguments why it cannot be found. The discipline of Philosophy masquerades as the right road but is, in fact, both obstacle and side-track - a mind-game.
But the young apprentice thinker doesn't know this. He may never know it; never return to the right road. As he turns away from his original objective he is beguiled by the Philosophers' arguments and himself adopts the Philosophical profession and makes it his career. He too shall then retreat behind its obstacles to free thinking, take up the practice of eternal Philosophical debate, and, thus confined to the limits of the conscious arena, proceed not a step further along the road to humantruth. He shall now see it as his duty also to discourage subsequent naive and hopeful thinkers from taking the free and independent road but lure them, instead, into the endless maze that is Academic Philosophy.
The professional Philosopher does not realise that a straight but difficult supraconscious road to truth exists and that it is he who has been side-tracked. He is convinced that if truth is anywhere it lies somewhere at the core of his professional cogitation, to be found only by way of his contrived discipline. However, since he has not found truth after all these centuries, he is satisfied with the claim that it cannot be found. Nevertheless, he still believes his profession, Philosophy, to be the authority on true thinking, the teacher to which aspiring minds must submit. The authority of Philosophy is officially recognised and its discipline of thinking applied by leaders in their governance of the world. So the Philosophical way of thinking is bound up with our present powerful reality. Given such weight it is difficult to deny, until we realise that the reality which depends on this kind of thinking, and vice versa, is amoral and largely in chaos.
The professional Philosopher's view, then, is that young people emerge into the world starry-eyed and ignorant of reality, needing to be trained in the use of their conscious minds according to disciplines accumulated throughout our history in the conscious sphere. So the first stepping-stone on the Philosophical side-track is shown to be unsafe because it presupposes that the self contains another mind, another brain-faculty representing the 'I' that is powerful and clever enough to use the formidable conscious mind in this way. Philosophers never look behind the self in order to identify this other intelligent faculty. They could not identify it if they tried, for the good reason that it does not, and could not, exist. The self's relationship with the conscious mind is mainly that of chooser. Self-will may choose what it wishes from the conscious mind's thinking, but it cannot choose truth because that is beyond the most wise of conscious minds to embrace.
It is now vitally necessary to recognise a better view than that of the professional Philosopher, namely that the ideals of our youth accord with human truth, but are usually abandoned, knocked out of us by our elders, by the real world, and by the Philosophical discipline of mind.
Philosophy can make no further true progress until it acknowledges the proposition that humans have two minds; the conscious and the postconscious. We are familiar with the conscious because our selves exist within it. That we do also have a postconscious mind may readily be accepted because the postconscious does actually exist in every human brain, even if the only evidence of it is the still, small, but universal voice of conscience. Despite conscience, Philosophy's age-old debates have been arguments of the conscious mind which the self can see and pin down. The Philosophers have never acknowledged the postconscious, though this is our chief faculty, because its independent reasoning cannot be seen and pinned down. They need to perceive that the postconscious is not answerable to the conscious self and that its intuitions are true, not guesswork.
In this light, Academic Philosophers should also acknowledge that their profession is a conscious mind pursuit, a career, living, crutch, accolade, or occupation. In a time of dire, worldwide human need it continues going nowhere and achieving nothing. Humanity could not be criticised for expecting more from an institution - the world's only institution - that stands for love of truth.
No thinker should presume to teach philosophy unless privy to truth. Academic Philosophers should recognise that they require to learn new and different reasoning; supraconsciously to reorientate their thinking to the postconscious mind. They should be prepared to acknowledge that minds which, in their youth, did not succumb to the blandishments of Philosophy but continued along the free road to truth, guided by that idealism that comes from the postconscious, contrary to the lesser conscious - that such minds have much to teach philosophers.
Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that Philosophers have done tremendously inspired and complex work throughout the ages, especially when it is considered that they confined themselves to using only the conscious mind and, apart from conscience, denied themselves the guidance of the postconscious. To understand this complex work we require to know the Philosophical rules and to apply our conscious minds to the full. Unfortunately this gigantic task does not bring understanding of truth because, again, truth is beyond the conscious mind to discern. Our postconscious minds, however, can independently perform that gigantic task and bring its true conclusions to consciousness.
So the human conscious is the mind which both advises and guides the self and which the self directs, manipulates, and effectively chooses from,rather than actually uses, for the conduct of our affairs. Its aim is not to discover truth but to accumulate knowledge, advise, and both give and obey instructions. The wilful self determines which interests it shall pursue and what instructions it shall follow. It is this highly untrustworthy mind to which the conduct of Philosophy is entrusted.
The human postconscious mind, on the other hand, is free and independent, and its sole function (its only possible function) is the discovery of truth, in the widest possible meaning of that word. It cannot be entered, investigated or manipulated by the conscious mind or self. It can make its truth known to the conscious, at least in simple terms through conscience, but the self ought to be much more thoroughly, supraconsciously guided than that - it needs to be guided by whole truth otherwise it shall be a false self. Conscious selves are currently chiefly false, because they commonly ignore or reject postconscious truth.
List of Branch articles, in no particular reading sequence:
PREVIOUS :1. The Nature and State of the Human Race: 2 : Truth - No-Go Area : 3. Facing Yourself: 4. Explaining the Mind : 5. Moral Mind : 6. Great Men: 7. Comment Pinker : 8. The Way We Think : 9. Sanity for Humanity : 10. Evolution of Mind:11. Free Thinker View : 12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line : 15. Brain-Mind Relations:
CURRENT : 16. Open Letter to Academic Philosophers :
REMAINING : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds: 19. The Holographic Dimension: 20. Transhumanism Transcended: 21. Mind, Will and Self:
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