Harry Waton

[No Robots]

Harry Waton was a Russo-American Spinozist/Marxist/Kabbalist. He has attracted the attention of Internet antisemites due to his doctrines regarding the inevitability of Judaism's ultimate universalization.

A number of his works are available online.

Many of his works are extremely difficult to come by. An Israeli friend of mine photocopied for me his Bible lectures from the print version in the National Library of Israel. I have made this work available.

I have also made available a copy of his lectures on the history of Ethics. I made the copy from the only print version in existence as far as I can ascertain.

I have also made available his Philosophy of the Kabbalah. This is the first part of his two-part The Kabbalah and Spinoza's Philosophy as a Basis for an Idea of Universal History. The second part, The Philosophy of Spinoza, is available in a reprint edition.

Waton’s primary audience were the working people, primarily Jewish, of New York to whom he delivered his lectures. His work is therefore very clear and easy to follow. The breadth and depth of his effort is frankly astonishing.

 

[No Robots]

Here is a quotation from Waton on life as a general property of reality as a whole:

But in the realm of life, modern science accomplished nothing. Biology—this is the science of life. What shall be said about a biology that does not know what life is? And this is the biology of the Aryans? Study the thousands of books that were written on biology by the Aryans, and in all of them you will not find a single statement as to what life itself is. For instance, Spencer defines life to be a continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations. Is this a definition of life? This only tells us of a function of life, but what is life itself that makes this adjustment? Spencer himself admits that he does not know. And in all cases in which the Aryans come to the ultimate aspects of existence, they draw down the curtain on which is written: The Thing in Itself, Nihil Ulterius, The Unknowable. And ask no further questions. Now, the basis of the nazi philosophy is the blood theory, and we already saw that the nazis do not know what blood is, and they know absolutely nothing about life itself. What is life? We already saw that the Bible knew what life is. Life is what the Bible calls nephesh, it is the soul in its implicit state. Life is the Absolute, it is the cause of itself, it is the substance of all realities, and all infinite existence is a living reality.

 

[Jarhyn]

So I'm going to start off by saying that the idea that the universe as a whole is "alive" is a misnomer.

"Life" relies fundamentally in it's definiton on being some arbitrarily demarked subset of cyclic phenomena.

It's not even a real category per SE.

Minds are a much more understandable subcategory of cyclic systems, but for minds to exist there needs to be correlation of switch states, and they only exist to the extent of the correlation.

There is not organization to the motions of the planetz or their ultimate influence upon us, however. It is not correlated but rather is clearly chaotic.

While minds can drink in and use chaos to create calculations, chaos creates a disjoint at which the boundaries of the very concept of mind must abut against.

So while the universe contains minds, its own chaos on all levels of it's scale much larger than us deprives anything of that scale from having a mind, in it's division along these clear boundaries of vast chaos.

Fortunately, we are, as cellular automata supported by this system, as many systems are liable to support, driven by our nature to be as we are and eventually that comes to the reality wherein eventually there will be a system which, as a feature of this chaos, comes to contain an engine that imperfectly replicates, and in any such system of imperfect replication, darwinistic evolution is born, and with it, the most primative concept of mind. In some respects this whole thing relies on execution in some manner of a system of instructions and this process can and clearly does arise spontaneously of a vast array of systems that feature such cellular automata.

If you wish to equate "mind" with "life" in these terms, be my guest!

However, it still doesn't follow that vast disparate chaos with no leverage on itself in this vast gravitational dance is such a thing as is organized to mind some set of instructions.

As it is, all such things of mind born out of such chaos are observably born in ignorance, so it does not really follow to assume any mind, even one as vast as is claimed the universe itself could be, would have anything approaching wisdom, especially at the beginning.

Instead, such would be more along the lines of infinite insanity, a chaotic writhing mass of something far less understandable than "agony". There is simply no tether upon which something so vast can meaningfully have "thoughts", and such is not necessary to still understand the utility of radical love.

So while some people view the universe in some pantheistic way, this is simply unnecessary. Indeed, "god" can be an asshole. I'm a god and I'm an asshole and my universes that I produce are not "alive"... Even though various things inside them happen to be alive.

It's just not useful to anthropomorphize that and it's not  honest to use  that concept to sell the idea of radical love.

You can get there, no doubt about it, but getting wishy washy over whether all this grand chaos correlates with a mind or must for truth to exist of and about it, it's just not necessary.

 

[Hermit]

Here is a quotation from Waton on life as a general property of reality as a whole:

...in all cases in which the Aryans come to the ultimate aspects of existence, they draw down the curtain on which is written: The Thing in Itself, Nihil Ulterius, The Unknowable. And ask no further questions.

What exactly is wrong with staying clear of the unknowable?

Life is what the Bible calls nephesh, it is the soul in its implicit state. Life is the Absolute, it is the cause of itself, it is the substance of all realities, and all infinite existence is a living reality.

Talking gibberish about the unknowable does not make it knowable.

 

[No Robots]

Thanks for participating in this thread. I hope we can keep the discussion as free form as possible.

Jarhyn, my position is one of opposition to chaos theory and in favour of complexity theory. In this approach, distinctions between systems are strictly quantitative. The organic is a special case of the inorganic, the sentient is a special case of the organic and the rational is a special case of the sentient. In order to for organic life to manifest itself, it must exist already in implicit form in the inorganic. As I've said previously, even the greatest magician in the world cannot pull a rabbit from the hat unless there is already a rabbit in the hat. (This is actually a line in a great movie, "The Red shoes.")

Hermit (I seem to remember you from the old days), what Waton is saying is that the dominant scientific paradigm (what he calls Aryan science) refuses to investigate the nature of life itself, and in fact refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of any such investigation. The reason for this refusal is that it involves concepts that our science has decided are outside its purview, in particular the concept of the soul. Our science is caught by this refusal in an endless futile loop, confining itself to empirical observation and refusing to grapple with the actual operations of the soul: reason, emotion, desire, intuition and intellect. Mankind thereby stands bereft of tools to grapple with the psychic and social distress that plague it.

 

[Hermit]

...what Waton is saying is that the dominant scientific paradigm (what he calls Aryan science) refuses to investigate the nature of life itself, and in fact refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of any such investigation. The reason for this refusal is that it involves concepts that our science has decided are outside its purview, in particular the concept of the soul. Our science is caught by this refusal in an endless futile loop, confining itself to empirical observation and refusing to grapple with the actual operations of the soul: reason, emotion, desire, intuition and intellect. Mankind thereby stands bereft of tools to grapple with the psychic and social distress that plague it.

Science does not refuse the legitimacy of investigating "the nature of life itself". It regards the endeavour to be, as you noted, beyond it purview and rightly belonging to theology or associated flights of fancy. It is not caught in an endless, futile loop precisely because it does not see its task as delving into ultimate aspects of existence, das Ding an sich, noumena, the Absolute, the soul, or abiogenesis.