There is a Fundamental Stance such that every person may guide her or his life and decision making in a coherent and complete way, a good way attuned to the Good. In the past, this function was aligned with religious doctrines and practices (in the sense of institutionalised Religion) in the West, later replaced by progressive-scientific liberalism and several varieties of ideology and belief.
From the religious point of view, it was easier to identify the negative, the evil or demonic, i.e. that what lay outside of the good, at least that which was outside of the validated and accepted shared knowledge, but now we do not have a single, coherent nature of the evil-negative, so that our choices are marked by opportunity and circumstances. raw empirical evidence (sustained by some metaphysical unquestioned principles holds sway as the only communicable form of knowledge).
Is it true that we will identify the demonic only if we have a concept of it, hence if we can identify at least part of our life world with it. So it is not strange that the essential evil (erroneous) has lost social and even ethical status. Without a cultural context, in the post-national and post-cultural era, evil cannot be defined.
In the present world, the tyranny of bare factuality is not so much a voluntary way of doing things, or a fashion of thought, but the inevitable and in a perverse sense a necessary and poor, paradoxical survival mechanism of human sociality. The tyranny of empiricism is not a conspiracy of liberal ideologists or of totalitarian masterminds, but the tyranny of facts in a world that has become empty of meaning.
We face –more clearly speaking– the tyranny of those facts that can be brought forward from the narrow perspective of the individual observer (the mono-ocular perspective). Within this framework, the demonic disappears. Not because it cannot be proven but because is seems to have no meaning, no direction and no importance. Evil is socialised.
The post-cultural liberal individual uses part of the facts and selective, corrupted “evidence,” evidence without the context. Uses “irony” and “sarcasm” to always reaffirm and mark out his or her territory. In a perverse manner, though, this lack of insight into the context transmutes into a fanatic defence of “reality,” a poisonous paralysis of the Rootless Mind.
In the world of the Rootless Mind, the standards of science are equal to to pathetic undisclosed and unquestioned assumptions, where things are “linked” to other things as the key to understanding. Simple coincidence in time is sufficient for the researchers to launch not anymore hypotheses, but scientific “revolutions.” Again and again we read: “if this is true then…” –in statements brandishing a false logic that is always inductive, pretending to arrive at conclusions from loose items and unprincipled impressions (where the personal choice, the ego-centred framework is always the last if not the only warrant.
In reality, despite its appearance of freedom and independence, of devotion to “choice” the post-cultural mind (the Rootless Mind) always appeals to social consensus, to “communicable knowledge” (i.e. empiricism), and is always appealing to authority and received truth, even when it appears to be innovating.
Despite all of this, or perhaps because of the extreme examples set by the Rootless Mind, it is possible to think of a Fundamental stance of sanity, where the axis of judgement is not the ego and where it is possible to override the suffocating atmosphere of empiricism. If the Person has a place, then it exists in the articulation of the possible, the reality and the actual; of better, in that point of encounter where each focus of decision (each Person) is the origin of a context. This, in turn, calls for a multipolar logic (or a “polycontextural logic” in the terms of Gotthard Gunther and Rudolf Kaehr).
The Fundamental Stance is then multipolar and polythetic. Which is best expressed by Donald Kunze in the following text:
“Frame Theory is a method that disavows, from the beginning, what most methods regard as essential: the guarantee of consistent outcome. Such methods are called ‘monothetic’, partly on behalf of this goal. Polythesis deals, however, with an ‘imperfect’ world where single effects can be the product of multiple causes, where single causes have multiple and changing effects, where some effects become causes and vice versa. Human experience is disjointed and discontinuous, placed in its own perilous position between the realms of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real. We do not, technically, ‘have’ our own identities, our own thoughts, or our own pleasures. The dividing line between subject and object, inside and outside is continually blurred; the polarities shift. Yet, while things seem to flip and dissolve, other things manage to coalesce. And, in the realm of the arts, we see the greatest evidence of stability. Audiences still laugh at jokes written hundreds of years ago; the Coptic face painted on the ancient casket is still beautiful; Odysseus’s exploits are still exciting. Certain symmetries built in to human consciousness manage to preserve a Rosetta Stone of effective design, despite the contingent, changing conditions that continually redefine standards, techniques, and paradigms. The polythetic method notes that these symmetries have mainly to do with acts of framing.” —- Donald Kunze, “Frame Theory – A Polythetic Method” – http://art3idea.psu.edu/locus/index.html