The Bishop Butler Society Ltd By David and Linda White The Bishop Butler Society Ltd was incorporated in the State of New York in 2008 in order to make the writing, thoughts and life of Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) http://sun1.sjfc.edu/~dwhite/butler better known to and understood by the general public thereby restoring an ethical and rational basis for human spirituality.
The BpBS is not authorized to maintain a library, museum, archive or historical society or to own or hold collections. Mentions of the Butler Collection in what follows refer to the holdings of a separate, for-profit, unincorporated entity known as Bishop Butler Books. All after-tax profits of Bishop Butler Books are donated to the Bishop Butler Society. The BpBS is dedicated to live performance (conference presentations and performative philosophy classes), web presence, and the close integration of the two.
David White http://sun1.sjfc.edu/~dwhite/biog.pdf has devoted his career in philosophy to making the writing, thoughts and life of Bishop Butler better known and understood by the general public, with an emphasis on conference attendees, church-goers and college students. Under the principle of message discipline, however, every prompt is a cue to begin discussing Bishop Butler. The aim of this teaching is not to indoctrinate but to motivate and assist those who have already been convinced by the evidence, in accord with the Platonic teaching that even if we can instruct those who have been released from mental slavery we can do nothing to effect the release. The release, if it comes at all, is by chance or grace.
There are no dues or conditions for membership. Anyone with an interest in redemption and the restoration of an ethical and rational basis for human spirituality is welcome to join the Facebook Group Bishop Butler Society Ltd. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?sid=3eea4b04cc3023f758828e4e007f9fb1&gid=49311563719 Those with a serious interest are encouraged to join the Yahoo group joseph-butler. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/joseph-butler Membership in joseph-butler is required of all students, credit or non-credit. Agnostics and atheists may prefer to join the Center for Inquiry http://www.centerforinquiry.net or the Bertrand Russell Society http://bertrandrussellsociety.com , and the more devout might want to join the Society of Christian Philosophers http://www.siu.edu/~scp or the Evangelical Philosophical Society http://www.epsociety.org. Some feminists may be more interested in the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation. http://www.matildajoslyngage.org Pragmatists may be attracted to the William James Society http://www.wjsociety.org , and those more interested in literature, the Charles Williams Society http://www.charleswilliamssociety.org.uk/index.html . There is no formal relationship among these groups, but because of interlocking directors, officers and members, they are networked as far as the mission of the Bishop Butler Society is concerned.
The Bishop Butler Society is dedicated to performative philosophy as a way of seeing the world as a compensational system. Once this vision is attained one feels relaxed, energized, and ready to carry the message to those who suffer. This social salvation is intrinsic to personal redemption.
As an educational corporation, the Bishop Butler Society claims to be the preeminent source for knowledge of the life, writings and reception of Bishop Butler, but no special prior knowledge is required of members.
The founders of the BpBS built on a foundation of many years experience with education, scholarship and retail marketing. It is too soon to say much about the difference the BpBS will make, but how the BpBS is different does now show up in a clear image.
(1) The BpBS mines the past for everything by and about Bishop Butler, down to long lost artifacts and brief, commonplace references. Much of this material never was related to the rest, and even that which had been configured for intelligent use at one time has not been curated for many years. The BpBS does not exercise editorial influence, let alone control, over any research or teaching. The research and the teaching are all done through independent organizations and are vetted as such. The mission of the BpBS is to make Bishop Butler better known, because we think it is by making him better known that we can restore the ethical and intellectual status of our spiritual life.
(2) The BpBS maintains a high level of archival awareness. Our archivist, David, is also the archivist of the Creighton Club, the St. David’s Society of Rochester and The Interfaith Alliance of Rochester http://www.tia-roch.org, and is a director of the New York State Archives Conference http://www.nyarchivists.org.
(3) The BpBS was founded with the intention of maintaining a strong web presence. Since the BpBS is not authorized to maintain a library, museum, archive or collection, the very existence of the BpBS is ethereal. The use of volunteer labor combined with the ethereal nature of our physical plant means that the operating budget of BpBS approaches zero. The lower our overhead, the higher the percentage of donations that can be pasted on to activities directly related to mission.
(4) The quality of our volunteer work is high for two reasons. One is that we only take experienced professions as volunteers, and the other is that as much as possible we try to integrate their professional work with the work of the society. Thus, we do not train or pay people to teach the public about Bishop Butler, rather we look for those who are already teaching Bishop Butler and make them aware of the work of the BpBS. In general, we curate and administer the whole body of Bishop Butler material by means of moral suasion rather than by appeal to ownership or legal authority.
(5) The BpBS is not a membership organization and therefore does not charge dues.
(6) The BpBS is not endowed, does not make long-term investments, has no recurring costs, and therefore does not have to worry about the ups and downs of the economy.
(7) The BpBS does not solicit contributions, but welcomes gifts of gratitude in any amount. Property donated to the society is sold through our for-profit affiliate, which maintains the Bishop Butler Collection, with all of the after-tax proceeds returned to the BpBS. Money held by the BpBS is held for no more than one year and is distributed by action of the Board and on advice of the appropriate vice-president, to such certified projects as the Board sees fit. Money is distributed with a guarantee of full academic freedom.
(8) In accord with the primary mission of the BpBS, projects are certified only if the President has supplied in writing a statement of how the project relates to the life and thought of Bishop Butler. In almost every case, the statement of certification will indicate that a reference to the project has already been added to the online revision http://sun1.sjfc.edu/~dwhite/butler/revision.pdf of the notes to the URP edition of the works of Bishop Butler http://www.urpress.com/80462103.HTM . Students at St. John Fisher are trained to post their assignments in the form of annotations to passages in the works of Bishop Butler and other related works of philosophy.
(9) The Board of the BpBS is small, but more reflective of the whole community than of just the world of Bishop Butler scholarship and teaching.
(10) More so than most intellectual societies, the BpBS is keenly aware of the philosophical importance of landscape. Much attention is paid to the places http://sun1.sjfc.edu/~dwhite/butler/places.html in England associated with Bishop Butler, and even more attention is paid to Rochester’s location in the famous Burned-Over District http://www.freethought-trail.org of western New York State.
(11) May 18 is the date of our annual meeting and is observed as the joint birthday of Bishop Butler and Bertrand Russell. David david@bishopbutlerbooks.com can provide news of the meeting throughout the year.
(12) Through interlocking directors, officers, and members, the BpBS works in close coordination with the Bertrand Russell Society, The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, The Rochester Row Sherlock Holmes Society, the William James Society, The Association for Popular Culture, The Creighton Club, The Society of Christian Philosophers, The Evangelical Philosophical Association, The Jonathan Edwards Society and the International Institute for Field-Being.
(13) Some directors and officers of BpBS attend St. Paul’s Episcopal Church http://www.stpaulsec.org and volunteer in its education program.
(14) Several directors and officers of BpBS are employed at St. John Fisher College http://home.sjfc.edu or as independent contractors to Writers and Books http://www.wab.org
(15) The BpBS is also closely linked to several poetry organizations and actively participates in the reading and publication of poetry on and off campus, with a special emphasis on the integration of poetry into the philosophical curriculum and the promotion of public knowledge of Bishop Butler.
The most frequent question asked about the BpBS is Butler Who? And once that is answered, we are repeatedly asked whether there is any reason to think Bishop Butler matters that much. Our answers sometimes demonstrate our sincerity, but they rarely convince. And this with good reason. Life is fragile in the extreme. We must constantly seek out new and better ways of surviving in an environment we can neither control nor escape from. To do this requires energy and skill. Historically, philosophers have mastered the skills of living, what Butler called the right conduct of life, but they paid too little attention to the sources of the energy needed to pursue the proper business of living over the whole of a career. People get sick, die, become depressed, lose their way in midlife, become abusive of others, leave self-destructive addictions untreated, injure or kill themselves, go insane, burn with desires they are unable to satisfy, expend great amounts of money and effort in seeking the happiness that was in their own garden all along, and in today’s society, burn themselves out worshipping the bitch-goddess, success.
On December 28, 1906, William James delivered his address http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/energies.htm on the energies of men to the American Philosophical Association at Columbia University. Basing his thought on his recent encounter with Giovanni Papini , http://everything2.com/title/Papini%2520and%2520Pragmatism James did not so much identify the vital source of human energy as enjoin the assembled philosophers to make maps (Ken Wilber ) and seek out those sources. For the most part James’ charge to the philosophers was ignored, but we can see what might have been done by looking at Plato (as we have already), at Rousseau and at John Dewey. In particular, what we are looking for is the constructivist insight. In the classroom, the constructivist insight plays out as the project method. http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2337/Project-Method.html The project method has had a rough course, but the big last piece that had to fall into place for us to dare to think we have entered a new era is the realization that it is not enough for students to carry out a project in or out of the classroom. In addition to projects of that sort, the students must also construct the course itself. Nor is it enough for the students to construct the course with or without the professor. They must take as their project in and out of the classroom, life itself, their proper business in being here must be their only subject of study. Thus, the constructivist instructor must begin by making sure the students are properly motivated for inquiry.
The most important tools for bringing this about are excuse deprivation and total responsibility.
There is no reason to deny a resemblance to Deming’s Quality Management, just as there is no reason to deny a resemblance to Primitive Christianity, or Anarcho-Atheism. Ultimately, everything resembles everything, just as labels and categories matter not. We can be against all forms of oppression and hierarchy, but since we will not succeed in eliminating them in ourselves or in others, we might as well learn how to deal with them constructively.
Once we understand what the project method, the hallmark of education in America, comes to, we are ready to pronounce on the master question of philosophy: integration.
Moby-Dick is the great integrationist novel in American; Middlemarch in England. Novels generally are vital for philosophy, as we come to see the continuity between the prose narrative and the philosophical treatise, as Melville makes clear. There is an interesting connection between Moby-Dick and Butler.
The immediate and apparent problem for philosophy is to integrate the lives of the students into the classroom, the reading of the classics, and the professor’s research life, whatever that happens to be. Concurrently, we need to create a group dynamic that integrates each student with the others, and that brings the class together as a whole. On the face of it, it is impossible to create such an integrated system. Some guys just want to play and make crude jokes, and some girls are serious and shy, to invoke several stereotypes. We think the best that could be hoped for is behaviour modification on one side or the other or tolerance. That is far short of integration, as is any authoritarian solution. You do not have to be Sigmund Freud, let alone Bishop Butler, to see that the solution that does provide for integration, the fine woven integration that allows our unlimited reserves of energy to be released, is by means of the empathy principle. I have no desire to sit and listen to crude humor. I find it offensive and a waste of time, but if I become convinced that you sincerely enjoy such material, that it is as suited to your nature as my rejection of it is to mine, then by the principle of empathy I can enjoy the crude humor as much as you because I am enjoying it with and through you. My enjoyment will be greater than yours since you are enjoying it selfishly in front of me, but I am taking it empathically and feel no shame. Obviously, this is classroom stuff and can go on only in a laboratory of trust. The students have to trust each other in the expression of their feelings (post-post) and have to trust the professor that they will get as high a grade for wasting the whole time as for doing something useful. But if everyone is guaranteed an A no matter what, then why should anyone do anything? And once there are a few non-performers, won’t the others be demoralized?
Good questions, questions that highlight the proper role of the professor. The professor does not lecture—push knowledge—because there are plenty of lectures in the library or on-line. A special treat for performative philosophy is when a guest lecturer wanders in. For example, a student brought a real detective to the Sherlock Holmes course. When the professor tries to organize the class, the constructivist intent is frustrated. Once the professor begins explaining things, all is lost. What the professor can do is to provide a model of growth. That means coming out of each course better and stronger than you went in. The professor can make lots of mistakes; mistakes are a natural part of growing. The professor of the philosophy of human relations takes on a role similar to specialists in the NYSE.
Contrary to what many educational theorists believe, one cannot begin to do serious constructivist teaching prior to literally losing one’s self in some area of specialist scholarship. Without full maturity in a research area, there is no hope of motivating the project of inquiry. Of course the students may have their own motives, grades, for example, but what is needed for a true constructivist project is to link one’s own deepest personal motives to the great motives that have moved people to act down through history and that will continue to move them in the future. These motives will be what they will be whether we understand them or not. It is a challenge to comprehend why people should have been so excited over things that no longer excite us or to sympathize with actions where the motives no longer move us. The stereotypes that are needed to navigate through day to day life are the shadows of imitations. The person who desires to live his or her own life as an adult member of the social system, must be willing to undergo the painstaking process of initiation into the dialectic, and must find authentic, i.e., competent, constructivist, teachers to have any hope of making the acquaintance of the forms. As Bishop Butler said, if the love of wisdom is the business of life, then one ought not to be ashamed to learn from anyone.
Two of the five directors are retail professionals, and two of the vice-presidents are professors of marketing. There is no mystery here. If the BpBS is to survive, it must grow, and in order to grow it must sell itself. That is the only way it can be self-sustaining, and to be self-sustaining is of the essence of its independent identity. The BpBS does not solicit contributions; it attracts contributions by being what it is and doing what it does. The marketing professionals, academic and practical, are as essential to our operation as are the specialists in the NYSE, at least according to the conventional theory of the specialist as supplying the capital and stability needed to maintain a fair and orderly market. To serve as catalysts in the marketplace of ideas, the Butler specialists must develop a fully transparent medium in which to communicate. We are tempted to think of business relationships as being at least somewhat different from personal relationships, just as we are skeptical of professors who claim to be a friend to their students. We should resist the temptation. Business relationships may be this, that or the other thing, but they are still personal relationships. Business relationships are what they are: relations between persons. Either they are going to be ethical and enlightened, or not. Serious philosophical work goes on among friends, ergo, serious teachers of philosophy must have students as friends and friends as students. Admittedly the type of friendship required for this context may be debated. The involvement of the marketing professionals is, for the pragmatist, essential. For the pragmatist it is not enough to blather on and on about some theory. For the pragmatist one must test the theory, and the testing must be done in real time and real place, not some artificial and inconsequential environment. While insisting that the BpBS is by its nature a network of friends, we are far from making any prior claim about how the network will be instantiated. It now seems that a closely integrated system of live performance and internet mediated communication is the optimum construct. The present system used at Fisher was developed long before Facebook, and even before any of the communication tools in use today. Since the Butler operation is a social system, it is by no means easy to make drastic changes in it, even though the system was designed to grow and to encourage more growth.
Constructivist teaching may end in the professor playing a part in opposition to the author of the primary text:
Be that as it may, Butler’s arguments for the harmony of virtue and self-interest seem to me pure wishful thinking. The anecdotal evidence that he adduces about the troubles of the various vicious ways of life provides only the flimsiest support to his conclusion. Moreover, a very little reflection will reveal the implausibility of what he says. Is it really true that “the temper of compassion and benevolence is itself delightful”? Butler himself takes the Biblical passage where we are told to “weep with them that weep” (Romans xii.15) as the epigraph to his two sermons on compassion; and he surely cannot have forgotten that the man whom he regarded as his Lord and Saviour “wept for Jerusalem” (Matthew 23.33–39), apparently out of a sense of compassion for suffering and dismay at injustice.
Butler focuses on the extravagant forms of vice (intemperance, covetousness, and excessive ambition) which are no doubt very often conjoined with unhappiness. But he neglects one very common form of vice, which consists simply in a callous attitude towards those who are sufficiently distant from us that it is easy for us not to “feel the effects of their resentment”—such as the poor and the oppressed in faraway countries of which we know little, or the future generations who will have to deal with the environmental degradation that we have left behind us. It is hard to see how this sort of vice deprives us of many pleasures, but easy to see how it will spare us the anxiety that more virtuous people will feel.
In short, Butler’s claims about the harmony of virtue and self-interest seem implausible to me. Nonetheless, his claims about our “obligation to the practice of virtue” seem to me essentially correct. We must, I think, face the hard fact that a virtuous life is the right or proper life for us to lead—even though by living such a life we expose ourselves to various sources of pain and anxiety that the vice of callousness would spare us from. (Wedgwood)
Organization of the Curriculum
Introduction to Ethical Education
Philosophy -Letters
Ethics -Preface to Fifteen Sermons, Government of the Tongue, Diss on Virtue
Education -Sermons on Human Nature, Sermon on Schools
Love in Contemporary Literature
Love -Sermon on Compassion
Literature -Balaam, Self-Deception
Contemporary -Resentment and Forgiveness
Modern Religion as Poetical
Poetics -Love of Neighbor
Religion -Love of God sermons 13, 14; Analogy 2.1&2 import
Modern -Analogy 1.7, 2.3-4, ignorance
Logic of Medieval Metaphysics
Logic -Analogy: Intro, Conc I & II, 2.7 Evidence, 2.8 Obj to Analogy
Metaphysics -Analogy 1.1 future life
Ancient/Medieval -Analogy 1.2-5 Government of God, life as trial
American Political Media
American -Analogy 2.5-6 Redeemer, want of universality, Tucker
Political -Political and Public Sermons
Media -Public Sermons
Additional information for the study of Bishop Butler is available in two forms:
Hawaii13 , a handy guide to the basics in PDF
The Brush Up on Butler website, a hypertextual version of Hawaii13
Essentials
It is easy to miss the essential nature (form) of the BpBS if one sees it through the stereotype of the conventional educational institution. In relation to conventional institutions of any sort, BpBS might better be seen as a virus. Since the BpBS owns nothing and has no power or authority to control anything except so far as its directors control their own voice and vote, the BpBS can act freely as a moral virus. The host systems invaded by the BpBS do not lose their identity or undergo a change of mission, on the contrary, their identity and their mission emerge only stronger and with more integrity. BpBS is an integral system that tends toward integration. Unlike Wilber’s system, which is similar in many important ways, BpBS is non-hierarchic. Certainly Bishop Butler’s moral and theological systems were hierarchic, with all their talk of the supremacy of conscience and the governor of the world, but it is no part of the purpose or function of the BpBS to promote or advance the Butlerian philosophy. The mission of the BpBS is to make the life, work and reception of Bishop Butler better known. Those familiar with John Dewey’s doctrine in Art as Experience, the single most important work of American philosophy except for the rest of Dewey’s works, which are best understood as footnotes to Art as Experience, will have a leg up in understanding the point here. Everything that exists by and about Bishop Butler may be seen as a single extended and discontinuous art object, like Stella’s Moby-Dick. The work of the BpBS is to engineer the way people are able to experience this great work, so that it is presented as a personal performance and drives home the compensatory theme to the point that it has a strongly integrative effect on the personal system that experiences it. Thus the whole work of the BpBS is perfectly symbolized by the Rothko Chapel http://www.rothkochapel.org , especially when we remember that Mark Rothko was a Jewish atheist, who wrote philosophy as well as painted, and who took his Chapel commission from the Congregation of St. Basil http://www.basilian.org , the same order that founded St. John Fisher College, and whose work was rejected by Fr. Braden as president of St. Thomas, the same Fr.Braden who succeeded Fr. Lavery at Fisher, and along with Fathers Lavery, Miller and Marceau had such an effect on the unfolding of David’s identity as an unashamed Christian evangelical, fundamentalist and Baptist. These identities are not opinions that one decides to subscribe to but rather the Forms that guide one’s growth. There is no escaping them save by way of self-deception, and if Butler’s philosophy means anything in the practical sphere, it facilitates in the struggle against self-deception and in favor of a discernment of the compensatory system through personal (social) performance.
Once it is understood how the essential Form David White, who is an evangelical, fundamentalist Baptist, turns out to be best expressed by the work (not object) of art known as the Bishop Butler Society (a work which is educational rather than religious, and in any case has no more relationship to evangelicals, Baptists or fundamentalists than anything has to any other thing), once the compensatory nature of this aspect of the system is understood, then it becomes much easier to see why Dewey wrote and taught and lived the way he did and why Wittgenstein wrote and taught and lived the way he did. Dewey and Wittgenstein wrote and taught and lived as art, which is to say in distinction from the impersonal workings of a machine or a robot. The danger of our time in history is not tyranny or terrorism but the manufacture of consent within democracy. Unless we can find a way to drive the whole system back to one of hand-crafted opinion, the defeat of tyranny and terrorism yields no gain. Linda has presented a tactical history of the BpBS at the 2009 meeting of the Association for Popular Culture http://www.pcaaca.org/.
The BpBS is all about free expression, but free expression in a particular kind of social context, a context that tends toward growth of both the individual and the larger social group. Thus, the highly integrated system looks down, so to speak, into all the parts and workings of the individual person as micro-system, and looks up, so to speak, into the vastness of the macro-systems. We believe it is entirely by coincidence that the average height of a human being is also the mid-point between the largest and the smallest objects known to science.
This understanding of systems was introduced into philosophy by Bishop Butler, under the influence immediately of Newton and Clarke, and ultimately of the Stoics and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. As a pragmatist, Bishop Butler took his place as the missing link between Pacal’s wager and James’ “Will to Believe,” essential writings in the history of apologetics. This understanding of part one of the Analogy, is set out in David’s doctoral dissertation.
The fundamentalism David supports is little more than the hermeneutic principle that what the Bible kjvbiblea.pdf means is most likely what the Bible says, likely in the sense of a Butlerian probability, and that academic study of scripture may have all the value in the world, but has little or no religious value, so that conducting the critical study before the public or among the uninitiated is likely to do more harm than good. The study of Sherlock Holmes is essential not only because of Holmes’ great affirmation of compensationalism, and not only because Ronald Knox demonstrated such enthusiasm for Bishop Butler, but primarily because what Knox and then Morley and a host of others did to and for Holmes is what the BpBS seeks to do for Bishop Butler. As Lewis so often insists, we are only trying to have a good time meeting people and making friends. The Gospel truth, the Trinitarian truth, that agapeistic being is the telos of human life obviously cannot be preached enough. In a fully and finely integrated system, one preaches without preaching, but by being and doing. Some evangelicals believe it is necessary to relentlessly invoke the name of Christ in order to express his presence. Butler’s view was contrary to this. In Butler’s view, repeated use of symbols and of symbolic action was necessary to remind us all of the divine presence, but the only test of the type of symbol to be used is the pragmatic test of whether it works, and by works here we mean not works to get people to affiliate with a particular religious institution or to give money to a particular preacher but only whether it works to bring people into that agapeistic being which is the telos of human life.
The system outlined by Bishop Butler and developed in Lippmann’s theory of public opinion (based on Plato’s myth of the cave) and in Dewey’s educational program, all failed to make explicit one critical point. This is a shame because they all understood this point tacitly. Whether we are talking about conventional Christianity, or Dewey’s common faith, which is an extension and development of the social gospel, or a system not related to Christianity at all such as Sashi’s marketing of trust, if the system is to be performative (dynamic) , http://www.dynamictao.com/pdf_files/preface.pdf the whole structure has to be informed with the distinction not just between peak experiences and stabilization on a plateau (level) of living, but also between those stabilizations that are dynamic, and not only dynamic but aggressively dynamic so as to tend toward non-hierarchic dominance (mutuality), http://buber.de/en/ and those that are “frozen” or “encrusted.” In China, Lik Tong’s Field-Being http://www.iifb.org and in the U.S. the work of Ken Wilber http://integraltheology.com/ are the systems that have been of most use in developing the survival and propagation strategy of the BpBS. David and Linda are active members of the International Institute for Field-Being, http://iifb.org and Karen Beck provided a helpful critique of David’s shallow grasp of Ken Wilber’s thought. Obviously, in studying the history of philosophy we want to give most attention to the successes. In Bertrand Russell http://users.drew.edu/~JLENZ/BRS.HTML we see an incredible mix of success and failure, as Russell himself acknowledged. The James, Schiller, Papini triangle contains most of the design features needed to take us from Bishop Butler’s life in the landscape of early eighteenth-century England to the life of the BpBS in the landscape of the Burned-Over District http://www.freethought-trail.org of western New York State. In the present rendering, the BOD is understood to extend back in time to the earliest inhabitants who engaged in philosophy of any kind and forward on to the present. It is also extended forward to the moving line of the present. This field (seedbed, nursery, seminary, entourage, landscape of growth) is also extended north into Canada so as to include the Bertrand Russell Archives and study center in Hamilton, west to Indianapolis and Cincinnati to include as far west as Bishop Butler has been published, south to New York and Philadelphia for the same bibliographic reason, and because of the many close associations with Brooklyn, and east to Pittsfield for Melville, Northampton for Edwards, and on to Boston, where the first editions of Butler’s work were published in the New World. The only portrait of Butler in the New World is in Hartford, Connecticut.
When we coordinate the prior systems and absorb them into our own, as Wilber urges, we get something like a new era experience by reading Butler, or by seeing a performance by someone associated with BpBS. As Wilber insists, attaining a peak experience is not difficult, it is the maintaining that is difficult. Admittedly, those who are bi-polar or alcoholic, or addicts of any sort have a leg up in this business, but for that reason and because the peak is readily attainable, we prohibit alcohol and drugs entirely in connection with Society business, and require that anyone showing bipolar symptoms have a competent personal physician. There is no objection to the use of professionally prescribed drugs or chemicals. What people do on their own is, of course, up to them. Attaining stabilization at one’s highest or most comfortable peak requires a lot of work, but anyone who follows Wilber’s four-prong strategy of the right mix of intellectual, emotional, and bodily exercise in some ritualized or traditional form, is likely to meet with success. There are two main differences between what the BpBS is trying to do and what Wilber is doing. For one thing, David, following Wittgenstein, rejects the possibility of a private language. Wilber, especially in the upper-left quad, seems to accept and appeal to a private language. Even if Wilber does not commit this error personally, he has misled others and left himself vulnerable to the charge. More importantly, since a private language is impossible, the things Wilber tries to do with the upper-left cannot be done. The second differentiation between Wilber and the BpBS is perhaps related, and that is that while it might be possible to achieve some degree of stable integration at an appealing level as an individual working in one or more of the traditions that Wilber so skillfully outlines, it is meaningless to speak of individuals with regard to a dynamically progressive stabilization. This, of course, is what the holon http://www.mech.kuleuven.be/goa/hms-int/history.html is all about, and Wilber’s remarks on Denver are much in line with our understanding of the BOD, but it still seems that Wilber is not quite a full-blown physicalist in the sense needed to make us humans an integral part of the system of nature. The necessity for physicalism, then called materialism, is presented in the Belfast Address http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html , where the ghost of Bishop Butler encounters a follower of Lucretius.
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