The Laws of Logic in Thelema

“Study Logic, which is the Code of the Laws of Thought. Study the Method of Science, which is the Application of Logic to the Facts of the Universe. Think not that thou canst ever abrogate these Laws, for though they be Limitations, they are the rules of thy Game which thou dost play."
 – Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph

 

Whatever is, is what it is. Whatever is, is not what it’s not. Something cannot be both what it is and what it’s not at the same time and in the same way.

Those sentences above are descriptions of the foundational laws of thought (or the “laws of logic”). The first thing that you’ll notice about them is that they are tautologies. They’re circular statements that are necessarily true because the contrary in each case is impossible. While it may not be possible to demonstrate in any absolute way that they are true (I’ll get to this in a moment), it would appear that these laws are true and applicable to everything (or, more accurately, to our conceptualization of everything).

Without these laws, thought itself would be impossible because each thought is what it is and is not what it’s not. Ditto with language: every word is what it is. That is to say, each word encompasses a range of meanings and uses, and these meanings and uses all together comprise what that linguistic building block is. Each one has to be what it is – and not what it’s not – in order for there to be language at all. The same holds true with logic: logic is built on the foundation of these laws, which establish that true, mutually-exclusive dichotomies are possible. Without dichotomies, it would be impossible to construct and validate syllogisms.

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about these laws, on the side of believers and nonbelievers alike. These laws are not contradicted by quantum mechanics, they are not contradicted by the fact that people can develop logical systems with different categories for ranking truth value (“Multi-valued logic”), and they cannot be argued against (because to argue is to invoke these laws).

Their place in Thelema is also frequently misunderstood. As Crowley clearly states, logic is the code of the laws of thought, which cannot be abrogated. Though he acknowledges that these laws are “Limitation,” they are also “the rules of thy Game which thou dost play." To use the analogy he invokes often in Liber Aleph, the laws of logic are like the rules of chess. So long as we’re playing chess, it’s absolutely true that bishops can only move diagonally. It is senseless to object to this statement on the grounds that it’s possible to pick up a bishop and put the piece in your pocket. Whether or not this “law” applies in contexts outside of playing the game is irrelevant. It’s one of the rules of the game, and within the bounds of the game it’s absolutely true. By agreeing to play the game we bind ourselves to it.

The laws of thought are very much like this. So long as we play the “game” of thinking and logical argumentation, we are bound by them, and there is no way to escape them. Whether or not they are “really” absolute is irrelevant because within the game they are as absolute as the rules of chess are in that game.

This remains the case even when thinking and reasoning about subjects that are irrational, counter-intuitive, and paradoxical. A photon of light may behave like a wave and a particle, but it’s something that behaves like a wave and a particle and it’s not not-something-that-behaves-like-a-wave-and-a-particle. An abstract painting may exist to defy our conventional notions of what art is, but it’s still an abstract painting and it’s not not-an-abstract painting. We may have a conflicted desire that partially wants to commit to a sexual partner and partially wants to remain single, but it’s a desire that partially wants to commit to a sexual partner and partially wants to remain single, and it’s not not-a-desire-that-partially-wants-to-commit-to-a-sexual-partner-and-partially-wants-to-remain-single.

So long as we’re playing the game of thinking and talking about stuff, you have no choice but to play by its rules. You cannot abrogate these rules, as Crowley tells us.

Read on for way too much more on this subject. Toward the end of the post, I start talking about the more direct relevance of all these ideas to Thelema.

The Soldier and the Hunchback

Aleister Crowley’s classic essay “The Soldier and the Hunchback” (1909) is a fun read that provides some interesting insights into Crowley’s take on skepticism and how it relates to Thelema. Throughout the piece, Crowley’s wit is on full display, as is his keen intellect. Students would do well to familiarize themselves with the ideas set forth in this short document.

The goal of this blog post will be to serve as a guide to Crowley’s essay in order to facilitate study of it. Below the cut, I provide an overview of the essay’s argument, along with some close readings of important pieces of the essay. It is my hope that a beginner will come away from this blog post with a greater understanding of Crowley’s essay and be better prepared to tackle the source material, which may be confusing to those who encounter it for the first time.

Read on for more.

Name That Fallacy!

A reader recently posted a comment to this post of mine – regarding my lengthy debate with Donald Michael Kraig on his blog – that contained the following point, attempting to draw an analogy to claims about magical “results”:

I have never seen Paris.  All I have is admittedly massive amounts of anecdotal evidence that it exists. You could, I am sure, tell me how to get there, and if I followed your directions, and they were correct, and nothing unforeseen interfered, I could go to that location myself.  However, if I had decided beforehand that it did not exist, I might not see it then, even if it were there.

What this commenter is arguing, essentially, is that he (and everyone else who has never personally seen Paris) is accepting the claim “Paris exists” on the basis of anecdotal evidence. For that reason, the implied argument here runs, it is inconsistent to accept one claim (“Paris exists”) on the basis of anecdotes (lots of people who claim to have seen Paris) yet deny another claim (“Ritual magick can cause coincidences to happen”) on the basis of anecdotes (lots of people who claim to have had ritual magick “work” to cause coincidences).

Perhaps I’m overstating the argument. The commenter might not claim that it’s “inconsistent,” per se, but he is suggesting that most people accept a large number of claims not on the basis of personal experience but anecdotes. Therefore, it is at least unfair – if not completely inconsistent – to object so strongly to a claim that only has anecdotes to support it.

Well, I’ve done my best to give this argument its due. Needless to say, it’s a very flawed argument, so it’s time to play…

NAME THAT FALLACY!

See if you can figure out what’s wrong with the argument. Read on for the correct answer.

Success is your...wait a second, how do you know it's a success?

My somewhat lengthy discussion with occult author Donald Michael Kraig over on his blog (read it in the comments section of this post) seems to have come to an end. Looking back over it, I see a number of curious strategies on Kraig’s part that deserve some analysis and examination here.

Much, much more after the cut.

That’s What He Said: Crowley on Skepticism

Announcing a new feature on this blog: “That’s What He Said” – an article (or, hopefully, a series of articles) looking at what Aleister Crowley said about a variety of issues.

Crowley is so little read and so poorly understood by many people calling themselves Thelemites that the purpose of this series is to bring together the disparate threads of his thoughts and elucidate his writings on matters on which he was consistent and emphatic across the decades of his career.

I’d like to turn today to the topic of skepticism (who would have guessed, eh?). While most Thelemites admit – sometimes begrudgingly – that Crowley advocated skepticism, a good deal of them seem to be under the impression that Crowley only expected “students” to begin from a skeptical position and to discard skepticism as they gained more experience and could “prove to themselves” that the supernatural was real.

Take, for example, this line from the Wikipedia entry on Thelema (retrieved March 19, 2012): “Crowley taught skeptical examination of all results obtained through meditation or magick, at least for the student.” In the final phrase of this quote, we see the author attempting to salvage belief in the supernatural from Crowley’s system: the implication is that Crowley must have thought that skepticism was just fine for the student (oh, those poor profane fools who have yet to acquire experience!), but for those who have done the work and “experienced” the supernatural (that is, gotten warm and fuzzies in the belly, encountered ooky-spooky coincidences, or had daydreams about being on an episode of Tales from the Crypt)…for those folks, they can rest assured in the fact that they’ve proven (“to them,” of course) that the supernatural is real. That must be what Crowley was saying. Right?

Wrong.

The above interpretation of Crowley is completely and totally off-base, rooted not in the words of the man himself but in the desires and fantasies of the person doing the interpreting, who reads into those words things that aren’t there.

Read on for a very full explanation.

That’s Me in the Corner….

The process of a religious believer losing his religion is known in atheist circles as “deconversion.” A few years ago, John Ash Bowie posted an interesting article on his livejournal announcing his deconversion from Thelema and offering critiques of his former “religion.”

You can read his blog entry here.

Bowie, for those who don’t know who he is, is a former OTO member and a “naturalist” Thelemite, whose website Eidolons of Ash has a number of interesting essays on Thelema from an atheist perspective. His more recent work concerns “religious naturalism,” and you can read his website on RN here.

Of course, readers of my blog will be aware that I don’t treat Thelema as a “religion” in the sense of being a collection of undemonstrable doctrines about the universe. But many Thelemites *do*, as apparently Bowie did. [See "Skeptical of the True Will?" for an instance of a Thelemite trying to reduce Thelema to a position of faith, along with my refutation]

What’s so striking about Bowie’s account of his deconversion  is how similar it is to other stories of atheists, who ironically deconverted from their former faiths because of their very attempt to confirm the truth of their beliefs. Bowie writes:

So what happened? In about a two-year time span I went from being a zealot to an apostate. This essay is not going to retell that tale, however, since my primary interest is in offering a critique rather than a biography. I will say that it primarily involved a project that required examining many of Crowley's core documents with an analytical eye. Although I initially went into that project fully expecting the examination to support my Thelemic faith, it was eventually to dissolve it. I fought it tooth and nail until the very end, performing all kinds of theoretical contortions to justify holding on to Thelema, but it just wasn't enough. I came out of that tunnel a non-believer. (emphasis added)

This account strongly resembles many other deconversion stories floating around on the internet, and it brings to mind for me particularly the story told by Matt Dillahunty, host of the public access show (and internet show) The Atheist Experience. Dillahunty has frequently spoken on the show of his time as a fundamentalist Christian, which he was from the age of five until sometime after thirty. Like Bowie, he reports that he engaged in a process of examining his faith – in his case, as a preparation for attending seminary, as he felt he had a calling; his study was to enable him to justify Christianity to himself *and* to enable him to better win souls for Christ. And just like Bowie, Dillahunty found that his study had destroyed his faith and convinced him that Christianity, along with all other religions, was not justified and that no one had good reason to believe it.

The point of both of these stories is one made by Bowie in the comments section of his post: "Free inquiry and curious investigation are generally not compatible with stable religious belief."

[Amusingly, the person he is conversing with responds by observing “I don't want to live in world where there's no magick,” demonstrasting (once again) a point I have frequently made on this blog: religious types think that preserving the feeling of magic is more important than figuring out what’s actually going on.]

In his post, Bowie offers a  rational critique of the “religion” of Thelema, and in my post here, I intend to critique Bowie’s critique and demonstrate that he is in fact objecting not to Thelema, but to a religion, one loosely based on Crowley’s writings and on a murky interpretation of Thelema. The point that I intend to make by this is simple: that the supernaturalist religion that some people mistakenly insist on calling “Thelema” cannot withstand rational scrutiny and that – unless the Thelemic community gets serious about defining and talking about Thelema – the nonsense that some people call "Thelema" will drive intelligent seekers, who absolutely will think along the lines that Bowie does, away from Thelema.

Read on for more. 

The Enemy of the Enemy of My Enemy

A few years ago, occult author Donald Tyson published an article online entitled "Atheism, the Real Enemy," and its argument should be very familiar to regular readers of this blog: that pagans – and, as Tyson makes clear, supernaturalist occultists of all stripes – have much more in common than Christians (and other religionists) than they do with atheists and skeptics.

Though several members of the pagan community who commented on this article – and the several people who wrote “responses” to this article – took issue with its argument, what’s striking is that Tyson perceives very clearly a point that I have been insisting for some time: that occultism and paganism are religious orientations, at home with (and ultimately make claims whose truth values are indistinguishable from the claims of) other religions like Christianity, and strongly opposed to rational investigation, skepticism, and methods of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

Though Tyson would probably not phrase his position quite like that, that is precisely the argument of his article.

Read on for a few thoughts on this article.

Pseudo-Skeptics

I stumbled across an article written by Donald Michael Kraig on Llewellyn.com entitled "Cold Fusion, Pseudo-Skepticism, and Magick."

Kraig, for those who don’t know, is probably best known as the author of Modern Magick, which was the first book I read on ceremonial magick when I was a teenager. I recall the book being a good introduction to the subject, and I also recall a handful of incredibly silly and laughable claims made in the book, including the claim that the author saw “astral junk” in the form of a snake leap out of his floor one day while he was watching TV and the claim that the ritual of the rose cross caused the author to avoid getting pulled over by the police for speeding.

Read on for an anlysis of Kraig's approach to evaluating claims and an illustration of where his logic goes wrong, rendering his approach nothing more than a mechanism to assist with self-delusion.