Power of Closed Mind
“Open mindedness” … such a common place epithet. Yet, as with most common place epithets it conceals a more deeper cause within it. In this podcast we’ll shed some light on the fact that mind is by its very nature open and how this can become impediment when confronted with its ultimate opposite – systemic thinking; a veritable epitome of “closed mind”, encompassing phenomena from political correctness to Internet mediated intellectuality seemingly opposed to this prevailing ideology of our age. We attempt to demonstrate that conflict between the open and closed mind is in effect an activity of differentiating between Intellect and Ego as metaphysical realities.
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Branko Malić
Very interesting! Could you please elaborate on the notion of the ego being unable to be identical with itself and having an urge to mirror itself? Is there a more precise philosophical or, ultimately, theological reason for this striving to become extrinsic, that you could lay out? And if somehow possible also on how ego and intellect relate to each other in more detail (e. g. does the intellect become aware of the ego leading it astray?).
There is certainly a detailed metaphysics behind this, some of it elaborated by Croatian philosopher Cipra, whom I tend to quote sometimes. But its not something I could lay out in a comment; I will work on this in more detail, but nevertheless I think that, in short, I could point out few things.
Ego is closely related to the notion of atom, i.e. a material thing without parts. Such thing, however, is logically inconceivable. If we think about the indivisible atom in movement, then in a given moment of time it crosses the certain distance. The question is: can this distance be crossed by the whole atom at once or first by its part, than another part, etc.? Obviously, neither is possible: if it is atom or individuum, which is just a Latin paraphrase of atomon, it can have no parts; on the other hand if it has no parts it can’t move, because all physical movement presupposes parts. No matter how strange this can appear, when we consider that atomism is still something taught in schools, it is a self evident analytic resolution of the proper notion of atom or individuum.
Now, the thing with ego is that it in fact does fulfill the demands of this notion: it is a pure point whose physicality, however, is not that of mechanical movement, but persistence in time. Ego is a ‘now’ after ‘now’, after ‘now’ and so on into infinity, i.e. it is measured by its identity with itself. The isolated presence of ‘now’ is the only true notion of atom or individuum the mind can reasonably conceive, so when we talk about atomism we are, strictly speaking, not dealing with theory of physics but of metaphysical egoism.
This egoism is radically subjectivist but it initially comes in the guise of materialism because one peculiarity of ‘ego’ is that it has no substance – it does not persist in the fullness of time, having a necessary recourse to past and projection into future, but exclusively in the succession of pure moments of presence. Therefore, in order to explicate itself, it has to externalize its own nature; being isolated, it conceives everything as reflection of itself, so it conceives nature as being constructed of indivisible units, time as not being determined by its fullness but only succession, etc.
Finally, ego fulfills the requirements of pure materiality also. This is so because it in fact has no stable form as things in nature do, but is in itself a pure negative activity or, one may reformulate: passivity that is so pure that it can appear as acting. Something quite akin to what astrophysicists conjecture to be a black hole – an utmost extreme of inertia that ends up being massively powerful.
That would be a short primer on the subject. I’ll write and talk more about it, I promise.