WALHALLEN (PRIVATE DETECTIVE) GROUP

THE RECOGNIZED LEADER IN CONTEMPORARY BUSINESS DETECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Global Emergency Detective Telephone-s:

+46 730 983 700 (Europe-Asia-Middle East)

+1 205 2583 700 (North America/USA-Canada-Mexico - South America/Brazil-Argentine, et seq.)

+380 737 583 700 (Russia-Ukraine)

+212 600 983 700 (Morocco-Egypt-Kenya-Nigeria-South Africa - General Africa)

Walhallen (Private Detective) Group is a licensed private detective firm with offices / associates in nine countries [USA - Brazil - France - Germany - Sweden - Ukraine - Russia - China - Kenya] and ten cities [New York - Dallas - São Paolo - Paris - Berlin - Stockholm - Kiev - Moscow - Beijing - Nairobi]. We specialise as private fraud / finance / business / matrimonial / commerce / industry investigator-s / detective-s. 

 

Walhallen's professional experience in security and investigations, and its global reach - geographically, the most extensive amongst private detective / private investigator firms - allows it to advise its clients in ways which are unique in the private detective industry. 

For private detective / private investigator inquiries in north/northwest/northeast Europe, i e Sweden-Scandinavia, Germany, Ukraine, Holland, England, Poland, Russia et seq., please visit and contact us at www.walhallen.com.

 

For private detective / private investigator inquiries in USA, Brazil, China, France, Italy et seq., i e global private detective / private investigator assignments, please visit and contact us at www.walhallen.net.

"TAKE EVERYTHING ON EVIDENCE. THERE IS NO BETTER RULE."

Charles Dickens, novelist.

AS A PRIVATE DETECTIVE / PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR FIRM, WE SPECIALIZE IN DELIVERING EVIDENCE / PROOF.

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR - PRIVATE DETECTIVE - PRIVATDETEKTIV 

LAWYERS / ACCOUNTANTS IN NINE COUNTRIES AROUND THE GLOBE.

USA-BRAZIL-FRANCE-GERMANY-SWEDEN-UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CHINA-KENYA

New York-Dallas-São Paolo-Paris-Berlin-Stockholm-Kiev-Moscow-Beijing-Nairobi

                                                                                                                                                                                                    1st January MMXXIV

Decline is not a condition but a choice, and instead of letting out a cri du coeur and eating humble pie, we would like to see finance less proud and industry more secure. A great many people are seduced en masse by politicians, and the pervading sense, increasingly widespread nowadays, is that companies are inherently immoral unless they demonstrate that they are the opposite - in effect, guilty until proven innocent; "der Zweifel ist's, der Gutes böse macht."

I am externally involved in only one other earthly enterprise - a strategic metals and advanced precision metal components group - and it is said that a man who has two women loses his soul, and a man who has two houses loses his head. Albeit, I faithfully believe focusing on a real industrial entity broadens my horizon at times; however, despite requests for additional directorships, I will abstain from any further managerial excursions.

The inadmissible truth is that the eclipsing of life's other complications - but a passionate practice - is part of an earthly reward. It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Passionate work is a wonderful refuge, and the enjoyable pain passes but the beauty remains. L'homme c'est rien; L'oeuvre c'est tout - "The man is nothing; The work is everything." 

Keeping your eyes on the ball-s is of utmost importance - particularly in intelligence work on the quiet one; flagds goti - and no man or no woman is worth more than any other, unless he or she achieves or performs more. No human is worth more than their deeds, maybe with the exception of an individual exercising and exploiting fata morgana. Many people actually believe what they say they believe!

The first commercial imperative must be to restore security; without security, running a business successfully, is like having “turtle soup without the turtle”. You can use words, call something something - something it is not. One can deny what is and explain what is not - "Ex nihilo nihil fit." To begin at the gentle end is to begin with the instrumentality of truth itself.

Occasionally, we find ourselves in the remarkable position that we do not know what we actually know. Things will not really be true until we say they are true. Intelligence / Investigator organizations must be built around a deference to the enormous difficulties which the search for truth often involves. This is by no means easy to achieve, but we see little merit in anything easy. 

Sometimes when you are looking hard enough at something, when you are ready for anything that might shoot down your hypothesis, and nothing comes ... lack of disproof begins to feel like proof. What all this leaves us with, as one private detective / private investigator puts it, is "tonnes of conjecture and very little evidence". We need to verify what is and separate what is from what might be. Conjecture gives way to fact.

The famous philosopher Immanuel Kant once said: ”All our knowledge begins with the senses.” Kant with this statement proposed that all knowledge commences from the senses but “proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered.” Culture overall – whether personal, professional or national - is about matters of the mind; behaviour and actions are the observable outcomes of these preferences and the adherent knowledge.

The rhetorical criteria by which knowledge is tested and accepted and is thus transmitted successfully are themselves social conventions that are subject to cultural evolution. To say that propositions are accepted when they are supported by evidence is not much help, since it has to be specified what “supported” really means and which kinds of evidence are admissible.

A society in which “evidence” is defined as support in the writing-s of earlier sages would be very different from one that relied on experiments, but even the latter has to determine what experimental design is regarded as permissible and what outcome is accepted as decisive. Unlike what happens in biological evolution, cultural selection is not natural but is mostly conscious. The questions are what happens during the acquisition process and how are such choices made.

 

Persuasion and the diffusion of new ideas depend on many factors. One seemingly unassailable factor is that when knowledge is effective (that is, when techniques or predictions based on this knowledge work well), beliefs can change quickly. "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge," as Stephen Hawking phrased it. I'd say human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

We may here distinguish between propositional and prescriptive knowledge, the former roughly corresponding to a genotype, the latter to an observable technique. There is no easy mapping between the two. Sometimes techniques are used with virtually no understanding of why and how they work. At other times, the necessary underlying knowledge may well be there, but the techniques fail to emerge. Moreover, there is no clear-cut casual between them; the best we can say is that they co-evolve.

All knowledge though is power, and the real test of "knowledge" is not whether it is true, but whether it strengthens us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. (Ask any renowned physicist about the Quantum Theory versus Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and you will get the answer that both theories are wholly true and correct, but they are not compatible with one another...) Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do, for example, new things constitutes knowledge.

Our knowledge, and especially our scientific knowledge, progresses by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems; in a word by conjectures. Not only our knowledge, but also our aims and our standards grow through an unending process of trial and error, which must be subjected to critical tests. 

A theory of experience may – and should – assign to our observations the equally modest and almost equally important role of tests which may help us in the discovery of our mistakes. Though, it should stress our fallibility, albeit, not resign itself to scepticism. It is vitally important to stress the fact that knowledge can grow and that science can progress – just because we can learn from our mistakes.

Anything that can not be reached by meagre knowledge and wisdom is beyond scientific control: it lays in the realm of genius, which rises above all rules. (Being aware that a tomato is in fact a berry is knowledge; not putting it in a fruit salad would be considered wisdom: a small reminder for those who can not differentiate between these two words.)

I share with many the penchant for delving into the genius of the past and asking how a similar knowledge spirit might guide the future. Knowledge is somewhat paradoxical. It is most productive when freely available. But the incentive to create it depends on the ability to restrict its use. The former consideration justifies dissemination. The latter justfies control. How, then, is this balance working? 

Historically, knowledge has been [considered] dangerous. One anti-intellectual diatribe published in 1526 went so far as to pronounce knowledge “the very pestilence, that putteth all mankind to ruine and hath made us subjecte to so many kindes of sinne”. Better, wrote the author, “to be Idiotes, and knowe nothinge” than to have one’s head filled with pernicious ideas. 

But although such thoroughgoing scepticism was an understandable reaction to the plethora of “knowledge” then on offer, it was a hard philosophy to stick to and nobody really did stick to it. It was more plausible to employ the weapons of Scepticism in a strictly limited way. Sceptical arguments were generally used to undermine outdated or overambitious claims to knowledge, not to attack all intellectual activity. 

We suffer to such an extent from the illusion of the primacy of knowledge that we are immediately ready to make the philosphical knowledge of knowledge an idea idea. Wanting to express the obvious, we might define reflection or positional consciousness of knowledge as: "To know is to know that one knows." This would then transcend itself, and like the positional consciousness of the world it would be exhausted in aiming at its object. And that object would be consciousness itself.

There may be explanatory knowledge that is correct but scarcely satisfying. A private detective / private investigator may offer a certain hypothesis that might explain a crime, being told that the hypothesis is possible but not interesting, because reality has not the least obligation to be interesting. Reality can forgo an obligation, but hypotheses can not. Really? Me ne frego! 

Often there are indubitable evidence. We sense it. We reason it. Maybe the pleasure does not lie in discovering truth, but in searching for it. "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free," as the saying in the Bible goes, and later adopted as mantra by the world's premier [public] intelligence organisation. The premier [private] one per eccellenza is ... another one.

Being able to develop Walhallen Finance / Business / Private Detectives into a truly integrated, global and robustly competent group is a privilege, and this mainly due to having the opportunity of gathering the most talented private investigators / private detectives available: from Russia-Ukraine-Finland-Germany-Sweden-Norway-Switzerland-France-China-Japan-USA-Kenya-Brazil, et seq.

 

Our private detectives, from armed forces - intelligence services - law enforcement - business - academia, will convincingly add value to customers and clients with positive terra firma ambitions for years ahead – and, not only in their own countries, albeit worldwide, which is our factual modus operandi: A Global Private Finance and Business Detective Group, specialising in industrial undercover work and counterindustrial espionage, including advanced Technical Surveillance CounterMeasures (TSCM) and computer forensics.

 

 

 

In this area of the world your enemy's enemy is probably your enemy too. A friendly feeling does not equalize a friendly intent; alas, often au contraire, a hostile intent blends very well with a friendly feeling.

 

Always use international, experienced private detective-s / private investigator-s in developing / transition economy countries when you need fast, accurate and reliable CCCI [Control-Command-Communications-Intelligence]. There are effective and efficient bureaus beyond Walhallen - that we can recommend - for a great many lesser undertakings.

 

Too tough a bargaining for low private detective / private investigator retainer fees could cost you dearly, indeed - nota bene! - more precious things. Free armchair advice is always rich and plentiful. All that is excellent is as difficult to obtain as it is rare.

The verb corrumpere means destroy in Latin, and having seen that [corruption], as plaintiffs’ private detectives in commercial and criminal courts numerous times, we agreed to co-found The International Intelligence Institute of Commerce (www.wiiic.org). The Principal Investigator of WIIIC welcomes any information of corruption, grand thefts, miscarriages of justice et cetera. “Shame and silence are cousins” – right?

 

The Institute will be able to provide unbiased Independent Business Resolutions Schemes - lightening the burden of courts, prosecutors, lawyers, accountants, who often miss the “red flags” that private investigators detect - as well as carry out Forensic Audits and Impairment Tests; and this in addition to hosting an academic research and education group focusing on Intellectual Property and Patented Technology.

 

The Romans used to assess situations metaphorically, e g: Cum catapultae proscripta erunt, tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt – "When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults". Their reasoning implies “rules replace common sense and reason”. Maybe some laws are like some sausages; better not seeing them being made.

 

In a fair and just society, with archaic European and American legal practices – often hiding behind procedure – and an international institutional machinery that grinds along at a pace that would shame snails, preparedness is the key to success and victory. Western governments also often “piggy-back” on existing national investigations rather than undertake their own probes, creating “double jeopardy” by triggering separate prosecutions of the same case in different jurisdictions.

 

In one respect, the science of logic differs from all others; the perfection of its method is chiefly valuable as an evidence of the speculative truth of its principles. To supersede the employment of common reason, or to subject it to the rigour of technical forms, would be the last desire of one who knows the value of that intellectual toil and warfare which imparts to the mind an athletic vigour, and teaches it to contend with difficulties and to rely upon itself in emergencies.

 

That which renders logic possible, is the existence in our minds of general notions, - our ability to conceive of a class, and to designate its individual members by a common name. The theory of logic is thus intimately connected with that of  language. A successful attempt to express logical propositions by symbols, the laws of whose combinations should be founded upon the laws of the mental processes which they represent, would, so far, be a step towards a philosophical language.

 

Regarding logic as a branch of philosophy, and defining philosophy as the “science of a real existence”, and “the research of causes”, and assigning as its main business the investigation of the “why”, while mathematics display only the “that”, we contend, not simply, that the superiority rests with the study of logic.*2)

                                                                                                                             ***

What is the difference between explaining "why" and describing "how"? Looking back, explaining "why" means to find casual connections that account for the occurrence of a particular series of events to the exclusion of all others. To describe "how" means to reconstruct this series of specific events that led from one point to another.

To comprehend phenomena in the purest rational way - i e, to deduce the why and how of things with mathematical certainty - is not only to see them "from the point of view of eternity," but in some sense to become part of the eternal. "Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers," as Voltaire so wisely advised us.

Any private detective / private investigator must elaborate on "Why?", which in its many variations is a question far more important in its asking than in the expectation of an answer. The first medieval punctus interrogativus (?) was defined as a mark that signaled a question which conventionally required an answer. In a ninth-century copy of a text by Cicero, a question is followed by a symbol that looks like a staircase, maybe implying that questioning elevates us.

What we want to know and what we can imagine are somehow, as well, the two sides of the same magical page. Curiosity in all its forms is the means of advancing from what we did not know to what we do not yet know. A vocabulary, a certain terminology, that we may face or experience, is nothing more than a means, a method.

Prior to experience, anything might be the cause of anything; it is experience - as well as abstractions of reason - which help us to understand life. Curiosity is born from the awareness of our own ignorance and prompt us to acquire, so far as possible, "a more exact and fuller knowledge of the object it represents." 

Whether or not a question leads us up the garden path may depend not only on the words chosen to ask it but on the appearance and presentation of those words. We have long understood the importance of the physical aspect of the text, and not only of its contents, to transmit our meanings. 

Every text depends on the features of its support, be it clay or stone, papyrus or computer screen. No text is ever exclusively virtual, independent of its material context: every text, even an electronic one, is defined by both its words and the space in which these words exist.

Every form of writing is, in a sense, a translation of the words thought or spoken into a visible, concrete representation. The question of the relation between the revealed word and human language is central. Language, we know, is our most effective tool for communicating but, at the same time, an impediment to our full understanding.

Nevertheless it is necessary to go through language in order to reach that which cannot be put into words. Language may materialize into something tangible, as "speech made visible". All writing is the art of materialized thought. "When a word is written," wrote Saint Augustine, "it makes a sign to the eye whereby that which is the domain of the ears enters the mind."

Writing belongs to a group of conjuring arts related to the visualizing and transmission of ideas, emotions, and intentions. Painting, singing, and reading are all part of this peculiar human activity born of the capacity to imagine the world in order to experience it. Language, even in Hell, grants us existence; and the intellect, the seat of language, is humankind's driving force, not the body, its vessel.

Readers belong to societies of the written word and, as every member of societies must, they try to learn the code by which their fellow citizens communicate. Not every society requires the visual encoding of its language: for many, sound is enough. The old Latin "scripta manent, verba volant", which is supposed to mean "what is written endures, but what is spoken vanishes", is obviously not true in all oral societies. That is also the meaning readers discover: only when read do the written words come to life.

Certainly the passage from spoken to written language was less an improvement in quality than a change in direction. Thanks to writing speakers are able to overcome the limitations imposed by time and space. Either as the inspiration that led to the invention of writing or as its consequence, the assumption that justifies the existence of writing as an instrument of thought is one of linguistic fatalism.

Just as everything in the universe can be given a name to identify it, and every name can be expressed in a sound, every sound has its representation. Nothing can be uttered that cannot be written down and read. Writing does not reproduce the spoken word: it renders it visible.

We use words to try to recount, describe, explain, judge, demand, beg, affirm, allude, deny - and yet in every case we must rely on our interlocutor's intelligence and generosity to construe from the sounds we make the sense and meaning we wish to convey. The abstract language of images helps us no farther, because something in our constitution makes us want to translate into words even these shadows, even that which we know for certain is untranslatable, immanent, unconscious. 'A picture may say more than a thousand words, albeit,...'

A language can be incomprehensible because we have never learned it or because we have forgotten it: either case presupposes the possibility of an original communal understanding. Not to be able to communicate with one's fellow human beings has been compared to being buried alive. 

The notion of a primeval single common language that was fragmented into a plurality of language bears a symbolic relationship to contemporary theories about the origins of our verbal capacities. Indeed, humans not only can learn an existing language but can take an active role in the shaping of new languages. These are words from Percy Bysshe Shelley in Prometheus unbound:

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,           Which is the measure of the universe.

Language is "the beginningless and endless One", the imperishable of which the essential nature is the Word. Language is continuous and co-terminus with human existence or the existence of any sentient being. Things perceived and things thought, as well as the relationship among them, are determined by the words that language lends them. (Further on we will delve deeper into the real meaning-s of words.)

We name things and images - in words. Socrates argues (or at least, puts forward the suggestion) that "names rightly given are the likeness and images of the things which they name", but goes on to say that it is nobler and clearer to learn from the things themselves rather than from their images.

A name defines us from outside. Even if we choose a name to call ourselves, the identity purported by the name is exterior, something we wear for the convenience of others. Names, however, sometimes encapsulate an individual essence. "Caesar I was, and now I am Justinian," proclaims the emperor who codified the Roman system of law in the sixth century, and sort of redefines himself as he acts and implements a new system.

In an effort to translate the idea that things are metaphors of themselves, that in an effort to translate the experience of reality into language, we sometimes see things as the words that name them, and the feature of things as their incarnated script. The question "Who am I?" is, however, no more fully answered by a name than a book is revealed fully by its title.

                                                                                                                             ***

The pursuits of the mathematician, or the technician, “have not only not trained him to that acute logical scent,” to that delicate, almost instinctive, tact which, in the twilight of probability, the search and discrimination of its finer facts demand; they have gone to cloud his vision, to indurate his touch, to all but the blazing light, the iron chain of demonstration, and left him out of the narrow confines of his science, to a passive credulity in any premises, or to an absolute incredulity in all.

The reason of which is cultivated by the abstractly logical is the only valuable form available, not reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths.

Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation - of form and quantity - is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart.*3; I,II)

It is an important observation, which has more than once been made, that it is one thing to arrive at correct premises, and another thing to deduce logical conclusions, and that the business of life depends more upon the former than upon the latter. The study of the exact sciences may teach us the one, and it may give us some general preparation of knowledge and of practice for the attainment of the other, but it is to the union of thought with action, in the field of Practical Logic, the arena of Human Life, that we are to look for its fuller and more perfect accomplishment.

 

If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without a confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought.

 

When we look at such simple forms of language, the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.

 

We investigate whether e g “Brick” means the same in the primitive language as it does in ours; and then this goes with our contention that the simpler language is not therefore an incomplete form of the more complicated one. We make it plain that words have the meanings we give them, and that it would be a confusion to think of an investigation into their real meaning. (We might refer to Humpty Dumpty for an ascending logical height: ”When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less!")

 

If you have not distinguished between a language and a notation, you may hardly see any difference between following a language and following a notation. But in that case you may well be unclear about the difficulties in connection with the relation between language and logic. Much of all this can be answered by emphasizing that speaking and writing belong to intercourse with other people. The signs get their life there, and that is why a language is not just a mechanism.

 

What is the meaning of a word? Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like? The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question “how do we measure a length?” helps us to understand “what is length?”

 

Asking first “What’s an explanation of meaning?” has advantages. You in a sense bring the question “what is meaning?” down to earth. For, surely, to understand the meaning of “meaning” you ought also to understand the meaning of “explanation of meaning”.

 

What one generally calls “explanations of the meaning of a word” can, very roughly, be divided into verbal and ostensive definitions. If the definition explains the meaning of a word, surely it can’t be essential that you should have heard the word before. It is the ostensive definition’s business to give it a meaning.

 

I point this out to remove, once and for all, the idea that the words of the ostensive definition predicate something of the defined; the confusion is grave between the sentence “this is criminal”, attributing the [culpable] etiquette to some human behaviour or act, and the ostensive definition “this is called criminal”. 

However, the thought is not [always] the same as the sentence; for an English and a French sentence, which are utterly different, can express the same thought. A phrase or sentence has sense, if we give it sense. We know what a word, or a row of words,  means in certain contexts, at specific times and/or geographical locations.*4)

We can here also note a consistent conceptual dilemma. The meaning of a word often depends not just on its dictionary definition and the grammatical context but the meaning of the rest of the sentence. We realize that "the pen is in the box" and "the box is in the pen" require different meanings/translations for "pen": any pen big enough to hold a box would have to be an animal enclosure, not a writing instrument. 

Giving a reason for something one did or said means showing a way which leads to this action. At this point, however, another confusion sets in, that between reason and cause. One is led into this confusion by the ambiguous use of the word “why”. This when the chain of reasons has come to an end and still the question “why” is asked, one is inclined to give a cause instead of a reason.

 

The difference between the grammars of  “reason” and “cause” is quite similar to that between the grammars of “motive” and “cause”. Of the cause - cause in this context naturally only a logical one, not physical, nor medical - one can say that one can not know it but can only conjecture it. For a private detective / private investigator this is of vital importance de jure!

 

The double use of the word “why”, asking for the cause and asking for the motive, together with the idea that we can know, and not only conjecture, our motives, gives rise to the confusion that a motive is a cause of which we are immediately aware, a cause ‘seen from the inside’, or a cause experienced. Giving a reason is like giving a calculation by which you have arrived at a certain result.*5; I,II,III,IV,V)

In themselvselves, causes can be divided or refined into three sub-groups: in fieri causes, i e in becoming or in progress dittos; in esse causes, i e in actual existence dittos; and, lastly, in posse causes, i e in potential or in the state of being possible dittos. That causes can have deux origines - primary and secondary; and more - is another interesting observation. The sobering truth is that everything is determined by a cause "which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity."

As private detectives / private investigators - in language games, in philosophical investigations, and in reality - we often encounter what could best be conceived by the Greek word aitia, meaning both cause and guilt; a fact. And, as Mark Twain described the latter: "Facts are stubborn."*6; I,II,III)

 

Instead of “craving for legal generality” I could also have said “the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case”. If, e g, someone tries to explain the concept of number and tells us that such and such a definition will not do or is clumsy because it only applies to, say, finite cardinals I should answer that the mere fact that he could have given such a limited definition, of for example a crime sequence, makes this definition extremely important to us. (Elegance is not what we are trying for as truth seekers.)

 

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. Many questions can be raised. Socrates asked: “What is knowledge?” Saint Augustine asked: “What is time?” We ask: “How can we hang a thief who does not exist?” One answer to the latter can, by a private detective – private investigator, be put in this form: “We can not hang him when he does not exist, but we can look for him when he does not exist.”*7)

 

Our investigative method is purely descriptive; the descriptions we give are not hints of explanations. Think of words as instruments characterized by their use [...] “It is no act of insight which makes us use the rule-s as we do,” because there is an idea that "something must make us" do what we do. And this again joins on to the confusion between cause and reason. We need have no reason to follow the rules as we do. The chain of reasons has an end.

 

Many pundits will say, no doubt, please use the language of the law, [that] “to make out your case”. This may be the practice in law, but it is not the usage of reason. My ultimate object is only the truth. Reason feels its way, in its search for the true. Alas, as the philosopher David Hume formulated his experience briefly: "'tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence." Maybe he was right.*8)

 

Many find it sagacious to echo the small talk of lawyers, who, for the most part, content themselves with echoing the rectangular precepts of the courts. I would here observe that very much of what is rejected as evidence by a court is the best evidence to the intellect. For the court, guided itself by the general principles of evidence – the recognised and booked principles – is averse from swerving at particular instances.*9)

Participants in the system or legal complex will state that "we're doing what we're supposed to be doing - we're weighing the evidence, we're thinking it through, in a collective, collaborative, bipartisan way;" - and that is old hat. People don't have differences because they have different information or intelligence. We are often all looking at the same things. I think the differences depend more on your past experience, the contemporaneity and die Zeitgeist; and the old rule that "one can only be judged by one's peers" has great bearing and validity.*10)

The consummate philosopher Benedictus Spinoza, whom we venture to quote, says [post-mortem] in the discussion that closes Part I of The Ethics, that "everyone judges of things according to the state of his brain." In the same treatise he interprets the proverb, "brains differ as completely as palates," to mean that "men judge of things according to their mental disposition". It must be that one - or this or that particular - single brain, being wider than the sky, can comfortably accommodate a good man's intellect and the whole world besides. 

A theory based on the qualities of an object, will prevent it being unfolded according to its objects; and he who arranges topics in reference to their causes, will cease to value them according to their results. Thus the jurisprudence of every nation will show that, when law becomes a science and a system, it ceases to be justice. The errors into which a blind devotion to principles of classification has led the law, will be seen by observing how often the legislature has been obliged to come forward to restore the equity its scheme had lost.

Do we have revolutionary, or evolutionary, true justice; or the "Absolute paradox" of excessive cleverness? All professions are a conspiracy against the laity, and one way that conspiracy manifests itself - especially amongst lawyers - is in the use of jargon, so that outsiders cannot follow what is going on. 

Another tendency is to belittle the contribution that other professionals, more or less intelligent, make. In order to eradicate "inconvenient truths" we might fall back on a kind of nominal legalism, in which the law is less protecting the citizenry than being an instrument of power. Many human beings, learned as well as ignorant, smart as well as stupid, are led into some state of uncertainty and ambivalence. They are looking but not seeing, like fish living in the ocean without knowing of the ocean.*11; I,II,III)

In support of these and other charges, as a private detective / private investigator, both argument and copious authority are adduced. I shall not attempt a complete discussion of the topics which are suggested by these remarks. My object is not controversy, and the observations made are offered not in the spirit of antagonism, albeit in the hope of contributing to the formation of just views upon an important subject.

The expression of a truth cannot be negatived by a legitimate operation, but it may be limited. The equation y = z implies that the classes Y and Z are equivalent, member for member. Multiply it by a factor x, and we have

xy = xz,

which expresses that the individuals which are common to the classes X and Y are also common to X and Z, and vice versâ. This is a perfectly legitimate inference, but the fact which it declares is a less general one than was asserted in the original proposition.

Such is indeed the actual law of scientific progress. We must be content, either to abandon the hope of further conquest, or to employ such aids of symbolic language, as are proper to the stage of progress, at which we have arrived. Nor need we fear to commit ourselves to such a course. We have not yet arrived so near the boundaries of possible knowledge, as to suggest the apprehension, that scope will fail for the exercise of the inventive faculties.  

Language, symbolic or not, however, is an instrument of logic, but not an indispensable instrument. Every proposition which language can express may be represented by elective symbols, and the laws of combination of those symbols are in all cases the same; but in one class of instances the symbols have reference to collections of objects, in the other, to the truths of constituent propositions.

Now the question of the use of symbols may be considered in two distinct points of view. First, it may be considered with reference to the progress of scientific discovery, and secondly, with reference to its bearing upon the discipline of the intellect. It may be observed that as it is one fruit of an accomplished labour, that it sets us at liberty to engage in more arduous toils, so it is a necessary result of an advanced state of science, that we are permitted, and even called upon, to proceed to higher problems, than those which we before contemplated.

The practical inference is obvious. If through the advancing power of scientific methods, we find that the pursuits on which we were once engaged, afford no longer a sufficiently ample field for intellectual effort, the remedy is, to proceed to higher inquiries, and, in new tracks, to seek the difficulties yet unsubdued.

The scarcely less momentous question of the influence of the use of symbols upon the discipline of the intellect, an important distinction ought to be made. It is of most material consequence, whether those symbols are used with a full understanding of their meaning, with a perfect comprehension of that which renders their use lawful, and an ability to expand the abbreviated forms of reasoning which they induce, into their full syllogistic development; or whether they are mere unsuggestive characters, the use of which is suffered to rest upon authority.

The order of attainment in the individual mind would bear some relation to the actual order of scientific discovery, and the more abstract methods of the higher analysis would be offered to such minds only, as were prepared to receive them.

It may not be inappropriate, before concluding these observations, to offer a few remarks upon the general question of the use of symbolic language in the jurisprudence / the private or public investigative science. Objections have lately been very strongly urged against this practice, on the ground, that by obviating the necessity of thought, and substituting a reference to general formulæ in the room of personal effort, it tends to weaken the reasoning faculties.

However, logic must like, for example, geometry rest upon axiomatic truths, and its theorems must be constructed upon the general doctrine of symbols, which constitutes the foundation of the recognised analysis. It is no escape from the conclusion to which it points to assert, that logic not only constructs a science, but also inquires into the origin and the nature of its own principles, - a distinction which is denied to, for example, mathematics. (It is wholly beyond the domain of the mathematicians to inquire into the origin and nature of their principles.) 

With the advance of our knowledge of all true science, an ever-increasing harmony will be found to prevail among its separate branches, including the paramount value and importance of the study of morals. All sincere votaries of truth may meet and agree that it is the “characteristic of the liberal sciences, not that they conduct us to virtue, but that they prepare us for virtue." Die einfachen Wahrheiten des Lebens, however, is [as mentioned before, and worth repeating] that everything - including virtue - is determined by a cause "which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity."

On moral matters, and concerning the abundance of empty unintelligible noises and jargon describing virtue, one must beware of the hordes of journalists, politicians, and other “we-know-it-all”- pundits, who cover their ignorance with a curious and unexplicable web of perplexed words. With a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all, we must stay close to common sense, avoid raising [an existing] political paradox into profound truth, albeit, instead realize that full truth will not come in a flash (if it will ever come).

Beware, “no impression arising from something true is such that an impression arising from something false could not also be just like it.” In other words, an illusion could be just as convincing as the real thing (that, indeed, is the point of illusions), so you might not be able to tell the difference between them just by looking.

Clever computer algorithms are indeed patrolling the frontline of truthfulness, and can already outsmart a great many digital practices. The need to understand their interactions is becoming ever more urgent as they – “algos” – become so central in areas as varied as social media, financial markets, cyber security, autonomous weapons systems and networks of self-driving cars. 

It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say we are reaching a critical juncture. Is truth, in some senses, being electronically determined? The scale, speed and efficiency of some of these algorithmic interactions are reaching a level of complexity beyond human comprehension. We have let loose the most phenomenal power, although we are far from reaching a critical situation. 

The obvious principle that a proposition is either true or false – with the exception of the occurrence of future events – means that it is possible to arrive at a system of methods and processes for the treatment of hypotheticals: unconditional truth (categoricals) and probable truth meet together in the constitution of contingent truth, (hypotheticals). If you seek the truth, it is vital to define your terms, or else you will find yourself "entangled in words..."

Never accept anything as true if you do not have evident knowledge of its truth ... and include nothing more in your judgements than what presents itself to your mind so clearly and so distinctly that you have no occasion to doubt it. If you will begin with certainties, you will end in doubts; however, if you are content to begin with doubts, you might end in certainties.

There are three obvious alternatives when you look into the subject of finding the truth: Primo, you can think that you have found the truth; Secondo, you can come to the conclusion that the truth cannot be found; Terso, you can just carry on looking for it. "Truth, truth: how in my inmost being the very narrow of my mind signed for you," as Saint Augustine wrote of his immense quest millenia ago.

This eternal thing: truth. Is truth ever barren? Truth (we say) is the daughter of time. When is the truth approaching from the dim horizon? How will it look? Why is it hiding? How will it appear, now and then; in the future, when we need it so desperately? We should insist on probing, seeking, enquiring for deeper and deeper truths.  (We might again quote Lewis Carroll, and now the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark: “What I tell you three times is true!”)

The well-disguised truth about truth - and about nature as a whole - is that its properties depend on underlying motion or change; pantha rhei - "all things flow - and you can not step into the same river twice". Thus and hence prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. Things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don't move seem to have some experts. "Not even the future is what it used to be." 

(Verbs, which seem on grounds of vocabulary, to be specially performative verbs serve the special purpose of making explicit – which is not the same as stating or describing – what precise action it is that is being performed by the issuing of the utterance. Other words which seem to have a special performative function – and indeed have it – such as “guilty”, “off-side”, et al, do so because, in so far and when they are linked in “origin” with these special explicit performative verbs like “promise”, “pronounce”, “find”, et al. 

Are we floundering here? To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges. Let us take an example: the uses of “I bet the Polish woman committed the murder” as opposed to the use of that verb in another tense or in another person. “I betted” and “he bets” are not performatives but describe actions on my and his part respectively – actions each consisting in the utterance of the performative “I bet”. 

If I utter the word “I bet...”, I do not state that I utter the words “I bet”, or any other words, but I perform the act of betting; and similarly, if he says he bets, i e says the words “I bet”, he bets. But if I utter the words “he bets”, I only state that he utters – or rather has uttered – the words “I bet”: I do not perform his act of betting, which only he can perform: I describe his performances of the act of betting, but I do my own betting, and he must do his own.

When it comes to the crucial questions of ethics and values and morals, our contention is that, in our language, sentences which contain normative ethical symbols are not equivalent to sentences which express psychological, or indeed empirical propositions of any kind. We admit that fundamental ethical concepts are unanalysable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgements in which they occur. 

The reason why they are unanalysable is that they are mere pseudo-concepts. The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if we say to someone, “You acted wrongly in stealing that money,” we are not stating anything more than if we had simply said, “You stole that money.” In adding that this action is wrong we are not making any further statement about it. We are simply evincing our moral disapproval of it. 

It is as if we had said, “You stole that money,” in a particular tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. 

If now we generalize our previous statement and say, “Stealing money is wrong,” we produce a sentence which has no factual meaning – that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if we had written “Stealing money!!” – where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed. 

(The meanings of words – in the right context: In a typical criminal linguistic diversion, the Georgian Joseph Stalin, who commenced his revolutionary career as a bank robber, slyly called/named his robberies not stealings/thefts, but confiscations.) 

It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false. Other people may disagree with us about the wrongness of stealing, in the sense that they may not have the same feelings about stealing as we have, and they may quarrel with us on account of our moral sentiments. But they cannot, strictly speaking, contradict us. Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feelings and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. 

They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable – because they do not express genuine propositions. This may seem, at first sight, to be a very paradoxical assertion. For we certainly do engage in disputes which are ordinarily regarded as disputes about questions of value. But, in all such cases, we find, if we consider the matter closely, that the dispute is not really about a question of value, but about a question of fact. 

We find that argument is possible on moral questions only if some system of values is presupposed. It appears thence, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge and/or truth, is nothing more than a department of sociology. Hence, neither ethics, nor empathy or feelings, have anything to do with truly analyzing criminal cases in a broad sense. "Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer still," as Aristotle expressed in his desparate search for a final verification.  

Personally, I believe you can often be too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek the truth, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.*12) 

I have concluded that in our [each one's particular] lives ... every act almost inevitably meets with opposition; everyone who is active rather than passive has rivals and unfortunately also enemies. Not because people want to be obstructive, but rather because they react differently to the particularly taxing pressures and relationships of our working lives.

I believe in competition and contention - as means of encouragement - but not only. The simple concept is not always the best, but the best is always simple. What and whom we encounter in a great majority of grave criminal and fraud situations are envious men - and women, individuals without character and empathy and firmness, and this for a variety of reasons. Envy is the eternal worm that never rests, and each worm has its own individual terroir.*13)

What really determines the course of human affairs is finally never logic, truth, talent or intelligence. It's feelings, isn't it? Good and bad; behind what often lays a nightmare of unavowed knowledge, a mine field of unalleviated guilt. Hardships in the early years, it seems, often instill both discipline and strong ethics - up to a point. The human who will reach their desired goal must, while a child, suffer and labour much, and bear both heat and cold - "Qui studet optatam carsu coningere metam."*14)

We are feelings. Philosophy has its origin in something healthy. Psychology has its origin in something unhealthy, something malady or malaise. The established practice historically was to regard feelings as out of the scientific picture. Until quite recently science studiously avoided the assignment of feelings to any brain system; feelings were just out there, vaporously hanging in or around the brain. For me, however, the study of affects - the two ingredients of feelings and emotions baked together - although not understanding every nuance of them, makes you feel as though you are taking a witch ride or wrestling with a cobra. The scientific study of feelings comes - almost like Fred Astaire described his (one of them) favourite woman: "She came at me in sections; she had more curves than a scenic highway." The subjects - the nature of emotions and feelings and the relation of mind to body [and actions] - are those same subjects that have preoccupied many other thinkers of the past. Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because in mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states. One of the values of philosophy is that throughout its history it has prefigured science, criminal and other ones. In turn, I believe, science is well served by recognizing that historical effort. The fact is that the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline. The traditional image of it as a sort of meditative science or pure thought, strangely cut off from other subjects, is largely a trick of the historical light. The illusion is created by the way in which knowledge tends to be labelled, chopped up and re-labelled. Philosophical work is regularly spirited away and adopted by other disciplines. Yesterday's moral philosophy becomes tomorrow's jurisprudence or welfare economics; yesterday's philosophy of mind becomes tomorrow's cognitive science. And the road runs in both directions: new inquiries in other disciplines prompt new questions for the philosophically curious. Tomorrow's economics will be meat for the moral philosophers of the day after. One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise. This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress. Who remembers, by the way, that Sir Isaac Newton was not a professor of physics, but indeed, a professor of natural philosophy? In the attempt to understand the various parts of a human mind, we analyse feelings and emotions. Is the attempt to understand feelings of any value beyond satisfying one's mind? I do believe so. What comes before emotions for example? In the beginning was emotion, but at the beginning of emotion was action. Even Shakespeare in his time announces that the unified and apparently singular process of affect, which we often designate casually and indifferently as emotion or feeling, can be analysed in parts. It is true that the common usage of the word emotion tends to encompass the notion of feeling. But in our attempt to understand the complex chain of events that begins with emotion and ends up in feeling, we can be helped by a principled separation between the part of the process that is made public and the part that remains private. Emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviours. Feelings, on the other hand, are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner, the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur. Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind. As far as the mind is concerned, feeling is what really counts. "There lies the substance." We suffer or delight from actual feelings. In the narrow sense, emotions are externalities. But "principal" does not mean "first" and does not mean "causative". The centrality of feelings obscures the matter of how feelings arise and favours the view that somehow feelings occur first and are expressed subsequently in emotions. This view is not entirely correct. One of the main aspects of the history of human development pertains to how most objects that surround our brains become capable of triggering some form of emotion or another, weak or strong, good or bad, and can do so consciously or unconsciously. Some of these triggers are set by evolution (height, darkness, snakes), but some are not, instead becoming associated by our brains with emotionally competent objects by virtue of our individual experiences. Emotions are instantaneous, but feelings, recent evidence suggests, occur over several seconds, two to twenty seconds being common. In normal conditions the speed with which emotions arise and give way to feelings and related thoughts makes it difficult to analyze the proper sequence of phenomena. As thoughts normally causative of emotions appear in the mind, they cause emotions, which give rise to feelings, which conjure up other thoughts that are thematically related and likely to amplify the emotional state. The scientific value of single-subject studies is always limited. The evidence usually is a starting point for new hypotheses and explorations rather than the end-point of an investigation. Nonetheless, the evidence in this case is quite valuable. It supports the notion that the processes of emotion and feeling can be analyzed by component. Emotions and feelings are often taken as synonyms. My view is that feelings are functionally distinctive because their essence consists of the thoughts that represent the body involved in a reactive process. Remove that essence and the notion of feeling vanishes. Remove that essence and one should never again be allowed to say "I feel" happy, but rather, "I think" happy. A feeling in essence is an idea - an idea of the body and, even more particularly, an idea of a certain aspect of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances. We can use the body to explain joy, sorrow, and fear, of course, but certainly not desire, love, or pride. It also is apparent that the brain can simulate certain emotional body states internally, as happens in the process of turning the emotion sympathy into a feeling of empathy. In keeping with Spinoza when he discussed sorrow (tristitia), the maps of sorrow are associated with the transition of the organism to a state of lesser perfection. The power and freedom to act are diminished. In the Spinozian view, the person in the throes of sadness is cut off from his or her conatus, from the tendency for self-preservation. Feelings are the mental manifestations of balance and harmony, of disharmony and discord. They do not refer to the harmony or discord of objects or events out in the world, necessarily, but rather to the harmony or discord deep in the flesh. Joy and sorrow and other feelings are largely ideas of the body in the process of maneuvering itself into states of optimal survival. There is growing evidence that feelings, along with the appetites and emotions that most often cause them, play a decisive role in social behaviour. Thus, when men say that this or that criminal- or physical action has its origin in the mind, which latter has dominion over the body, they are using words without meaning, or are confessing in specious phraseology that they are ignorant of the cause of the said action... Remember that actions - as when a mouse takes the cheese in a trap, a frog snaps an insect, or even when an immature, short-tempered human culprit commits manslaughter - come first; before emotions and feelings. But one wonders how the world would have evolved if humanity had dawned with a population deprived of the ability to respond toward others with sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, and other social emotions that are known to be present in simple form in some nonhuman species. (One might be tempted to dismiss this thought experiment summarily by saying that such a species would have been extinct soon.) In a society deprived of such emotions and feelings, there would have been no spontaneous exhibition of the innate social responses that foreshadow a simple ethical system - no budding altruism, no kindness when kindness is due, no censure when censure is appropriate, no automatic sense of one's own failings. In the absence of the feelings of such emotions, humans would not have engaged in a negotiation aimed at finding solutions for problems faced by the group, e g identification and sharing of food resources, defense against threats or disputes among its members. There would not have been a gradual build-up of wisdom regarding the relationships among social situations, natural responses, and a host of contingencies such as the punishment or reward incurred by permitting or inhibiting natural responses. The codification of rules eventually expressed in systems of justice and sociopolitical organisations is hardly conceivable in these circumstances, even assuming that the apparatus of learning, imagination, and reasoning could be otherwise intact in the face of the emotional ravages, a most unlikely possibility. The essence of ethical behaviour does not begin with humans. Evidence from birds (such as ravens) and mammals (such as vampire bats, wolves, baboons, and chimpanzees) indicate that other species can behave in what appears, to our sophisticated eyes, as an ethical manner. They exhibit sympathy, attachments, embarrassment, dominant pride, and humble submission. They can censure and recompense certain actions of others. Nonhumans can certainly cooperate or fail to do so, within their group. This may displease those who believe just behaviour is an exclusively human trait. As if it were not enough to be told by Copernicus that we are not in the center of the universe, by Charles Darwin that we have humble origins, and by Sigmund Freud that we are not full masters of our behaviour, we have to concede that even in the realm of ethics there are forerunners and descent. But human ethical behaviour has a degree of elaboration and complexity that makes it distinctly human. Importantly, situations that evoke emotions and feelings call for solutions that include cooperation. It is not difficult to imagine the emergence of justice and honour out of the practices of cooperation. Yet another layer of social emotions, expressed in the form of dominant or submissive behaviours within the group, would have played an important role in the active give and take that define cooperation. As conscious, intelligent, and creative creatures immersed in a cultural environment, we humans have been able to shape the rules of ethics, structure their codification into law, and design the application of the law. We will remain involved in that effort. Yet it is apparent that, as human societies became more complex and certainly for ten thousand or more years since agriculture was developed, human survival and well-being depended on an additional kind of nonautomated governance in a social and cultural space. I am referring to what we usually associate with reasoning and freedom of decision. It is not just that we humans show compassion for another suffering being as chimpanzees and other nonhuman species can. We also know that we feel compassion, and, perhaps as a consequence, we have been doing something about the circumstances behind the events that provoked that emotion and feeling in the first place. And what about good and evil actions? Good actions and evil actions are not merely actions that do or do not accord with individual appetites and emotions. Good actions are those that, while producing good for the individual via the natural appetites and emotions, do not harm other individuals. The injunction is unequivocal. An action that might be personally beneficial but would harm others is not good because harming others always haunts and eventually harms the individual who causes the harm. Consequently such actions are evil. "... our good is especially in the friendship that links to other humans and to advantages for society" (The Ethics, Part IV, Proposition 10.) It is reasonable to hypothesize that the tendency to seek social agreement has itself been incorporated in biological mandates, at least in part, due to the evolutionary success of populations whose brains expressed cooperative behaviours to a high degree. Our route to understand human development is through the use of reason and feeling. Reason lets us see the way, while feeling is the enforcer of our determination to see. We are out to make free humans of ourselves ultimately. Freedom is what gives us dignity. "Let every human think what he/she wants and say what he/she thinks." There is a struggle between control, power, and freedom, but whatever the intensity of this - often open - conflict, a spark was needed to light the fire of human creativity, and that spark was freedom. The importance of feeling free is vital; it gives any sentient being grace and honour. The moment you give that up, you give up a great deal. You basically - as a human - give up the pleasure of looking yourself in the face in the mirror saying "that is me". Do we have joy and freedom, rather than human tragedy and anguish? Do we experience sorrow because of our feelings, in addition to having consciousness and memory, two biological gifts we share with other species but that attain their greatest magnitude and degree of sophistication in humans? In the strict meaning of the word, consciousness signifies the presence of a mind with a self, but in practical human terms the word actually signifies more. With the help of autobiographical memory, consciousness provides us with a self enriched by the records of our own individual experience. What we do not know cannot hurt us. If we had the gift of consciousness but were largely deprived of memory, there would be no remarkable anguish either. Were it not for this high level of human consciousness there would be no remarkable anguish to speak of, now or at the dawn of humanity. What we do know, in the present, but are unable to place in the context of our personal history, could only hurt us in the present. It is the two gifts combined, consciousness and memory, along with their abundance, that result in the human drama and confer upon that drama a tragic status, then and now. One, or perhaps the greatest, question posed to science is: what is consciousness? Other phenomena - time and space, matter and energy, even life itself - look tractable. They can be measured and objectified, and thus theorised about. Consciousness, by contrast, is subjective. A conscious being knows he is conscious - "Cogito, ergo sum" - but he cannot know that any other being is. Subjective though it is, consciousness looks like a specific phenomenon, not a mere side-effect of something else. That suggests it has evolved, and has a biological purpose. These things - specificity and purpose - give researchers something to hang on to. A crucial property of consciousness is that it integrates many sorts of experience, both sensory and internally generated. Discovery how this integration happens is known as the "binding problem". A phenomenon correlated with consciousness, which some think may help solve the binding problem, is a pattern of electric impulses, known as gamma waves, which beat at an average frequency of 40 HZ, in synchrony in different parts of a person's brain. These waves are strongest during conscious concentration on tasks, are always present when someone is conscious, and largely disappear when he is asleep, unless he is dreaming. Many neuroscientists suspect gamma waves' synchrony means they are acting like the clock in a computer processor, co-ordinating the activities of disparate parts of the brain - in other words, binding them together. Seeking an evolutionary explanation for consciousness, we might suggest that an animal which can model another's behaviour can gain an advantage by anticipating it. We further suggest that, since the only model available to a mind that wishes to understand another's is itself, a theory of mind necessarily requires self-awareness. In other words, consciousness. It would be impossible, for example, to define a [conscious] being, or rather generally being, as a presence since absence too discloses being, since not to be there means still to be. The object does not possess being, and its existence is not a participation in being, nor any other kind of relation. That is the only way to define its manner of being; the object does not hide being - not for the wonder private detective - private investigator de nos jours; nor for a poisson d'avril - but neither does it reveal being. Consciousness is not a mode of particular knowledge which may be called an inner meaning or self-knowledge; it is the transphenomenal dimension of being in the subject. The existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself. By that we need not understand that consciousness "derives from nothingness". There can not be "nothingness of consciousness" before consciousness. "Before" consciousness one can conceive only of a plenum of being of which no element can refer to an absent consciousness. If there is to be nothingness of consciousness, there must be a consciousness which has been and which is no more and a witnessing consciousness which poses the nothingness of the first consciousness for a synthesis of recognitions. Consciousness is prior to nothingness and "is derived" from being. That certainly does not mean that consciousness is the foundation of its being. On the contrary, there is a full contingency of the being of consciousness. We wish only to show (1) That nothing is the cause of consciousness. (2) That consciousness is the cause of its own being. As a private detective - private investigator, not using haut en bas verbiage but legalese, describing consciousness as ipso facto or mutatis mutandis or sui generis might be proper. Consciousness has nothing substantial, can not be compared or related to anything other than its opposite; it is pure "appearance" in the sense that it exists only to the degree to which it appears. But it is precisely because consciousness is pure appearance, because it is total emptiness (since the entire world is outside it) - it is because of this appearance and existence within it that it can be considered as the absolute. Il faut en finir. Finding the neural correlates of consciousness, or even understanding what it is for and how it evolved, does not truly address the question of what it actually is - of what it is people are experiencing while they are conscious. This question has come to be known as the "hard problem" of consciousness. The nut of the hard problem is to make ineffability effable. Some scientists concede that consciousness is real and may actually have great moral and political value, but that it fulfils no biological function whatsoever. Consciousness might just be the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes. Consciousness might be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It does not do anything. It is just there. The worm of consciousness mines but also proves our existence; it is no use denying it, even as an act of faith. "The myth that denies itself, the faith that pretends to know: this is the gray hell, this is the universal schizophrenia," as one philosopher wrote a long time ago. However, unconsciousness, or subconsciousness as I would prefer to name it in this context, is another matter altogether - not directly the opposite of consciousness - but rather as Carl Gustav Jung defined it, "reality in potentia." We question ourselves throughout our lives, seeking for clues. The unconscious feeds us with such clues in our dreams, "backward-looking dreams or forward-looking anticipations," which have always, in all cultures, been read as intimations of the future. As images from the unconscious become conscious, telling us something about ourselves, they add to our sense of who we are, like the pages that are already read in a book.  The fathoming of the unconscious is never exhausted. That lifelong quest, the embodiment of intuitions and and revelations about ourselves, we can call "individuation". Jung defined individuation as "the process by which a person becomes a psychological 'in-dividual,' that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole'" of all parts assembled and coherent, including those that feel unfathomable and unfamiliar to the person. Other fields of scientific endeavour circumvent ineffability with mathematics. No one can truly conceive of a light-year or a nanosecond, let alone dimensions or wave-particle duality, but maths makes these ideas tractable. No such short-cut invented so far can take a human inside the mind of e g an animal. Indeed, for all the sophistication of theory-of-mind it is difficult, as everyday experience shows, to take a human being inside the mind of another human being. The hard problem may thus turn out to be the impossible problem, the one that science can never solve. Knowing oneself is important - and difficult - however, knowing others, not only treating them like oneself wants to be treated, is a worthy objective, aim, and goal on this great planet. To behave "authentically" is to understand that we can make and remake ourselves by our actions and thus become what our acts define us as being. To talk rather than act is moral self-deception - "mauvaise foi" (bad faith) - which involves our behaving as insensate things rather than "authentic" human beings. In bad faith, we evade responsibility by not exploiting the possibilities of choice; in short, by not being fully human. When considering the degree to which "authenticity" is marketed as a substitute for value, echoes the words of George Burns. When asked his secret to success the sage and screen deity replied: "You have got to be honest. If you can fake that you have got it made." A cynik - one might say - is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.   People are capable of Bad Faith to the most important general characteristic of consciousness itself, namely its being separated from the world of things by a gap or Nothingness. It is the experience of this gap which reveals itself to us first and foremost by our ability to negate propositions, to deny the truth, and to describe things not only truly but also falsely, which makes us conscious of ourselves as different and distinguishable from the world which surrounds us. In being thus conscious of ourselves we are thereby rendered conscious of the world. Consciousness therefore, as well as imagination and freedom are all brought into being by the emptiness of Nothingness. Since we have restricted reality to the phenomenon, we can say of the phenomenon that it is as it appears. Why not push the idea to its limit and say that the being of the appearance is its appearing? This is simply a way of choosing new words to clothe the old "Esse est percipi" (To be is to be perceived) of Berkeley. The percipi would refer to the percipiens - the known to knowledge and knowledge to the being who knows (in his capacity as being, not as being known); that is, knowledge refers to consciousness.   There is no doubt that the methods of arguments used can appear grotesque and absurd. But they arise out of the existentialist conviction that to understand, a man - or a woman, as is nowadays important to emphasize - must find out and experience for him/herself. For consummate philosophers as Kirkegaard and Sartre alike, it was of no use to tell people that something was true; they had to feel that it was so, and accept it for themselves. Sartre even construed and concocted the expression Verité vecué meaning communicated truth - in its origin, lived truth, experienced truth. Many, or I would argue even most, metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire to venture outside the limits of experience. We are, however, entitled to have faith in our procedure just as long as it does the work which it is designed to do - that is, enables us to predict future experience, and so to control our environment. Of course, the fact that a certain form of procedure has always been successful in practice affords no logical guarantee that it will continue to be so. But then it is a mistake to demand a guarantee where it is logically impossible to obtain one. This does not mean that it is irrational to expect future experience to conform to the past. For when we come to define "rationality" we shall find that for us "being rational" entails being guided in a particular fashion by past experience.  Human understanding is so constituted that it will lose itself in contradictions when it goes beyond the limits of possible experience and attempt to deal with things in themselves. This may, or may not, be a matter of logic or a matter of fact. Our minds can not conceivably have the power of penetrating - as it appears - beyond the phenomenal world, but they are merely devoid of it. How then, asks the attentive critic, is it possible to know only what lies within the bounds of sense-experience; and how can any wise pundit tell what are the boundaries beyond which the human understanding may not venture, unless he succeeds in passing them himself? Well, "in order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit." Es kommt drauf an, und es ist ein ganz einfaches Ding... The fruitlessness of attempting to transcend the limits of possible sense-experience will be deduced, not from a psychological hypothesis concerning the actual constitution of the human mind, but from the rule which determines the literal significance of language. The sentences produced will fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant.  Finally, recent evidence and wisdom supports the view that cooperative human behaviour engages pleasure/reward systems in the brain. Violation of social norms causes guilt or shame or grief, all of which are variants of unhealthy sorrow. 'Therefore, in life, more than anything, or anywhere else, partner-up with a strong, happy and unselfish rather than with a weak, sad and selfish person - the former all necessary qualities for a cooperative, mutually beneficial existence, ...'  Easily written... Are mind and body two different things or just one? If they are not the same, are mind and body made from two different substances or just one? The above reasoning reveals the connection to the almost ultimate private detective / private investigator mystery, but not the mystery itself.

We have always lived alongside evil, but it has never been so patient, so avid for carnage, so eager to carry innocence along with it into oblivion. Western civilisation must rout out this evil wherever it hides, or she risks defeat at the hands of global terror; in the nuclear age, unimaginable.

People do not think any more. They feel. One of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas. Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become habits. Watch your habits for they become your character. Watch your character for it becomes your destiny. What we think, we become.

Consciously, and unconsciously, we enter the world of things shared, but here, we realize, communication, full communication, is no longer possible. Through perfunctory verbal excuses we allow ourselves to commit terrible deeds because, we say, others committed them [first]. In the world at large, we repeat the same justifications endlessly, doing violence to the violent and betraying the traitors. We set ourselves up as actors and as witnesses, each a "single individual" and each part of "humanity as a whole".

This continent - this whole civilization - is running huge budget and current-account deficits. Investors find its courts stacked against them. The bureaucracy is unaccountable and sclerotic, and we may appear nonconformist, but nobody is asking us to embrace the "Madman Theory", feigning craziness to keep foes off-balance.

Our system of justice - especially corporate and taxation - is like the one set up to judge the Knave of Hearts, in Alice in Wonderland, incomprehensible and unfair. Few of us, however, has Alice's courage at the end of the book, to stand up (literally: - addressing the legal bunch with "stuff and nonsense; abuse of authority; the impotent knowledge of unpunished crimes and unfair punishments.") for our convictions and refuse to hold our tongue. Because of this supreme act of civil disobedience, Alice is allowed to wake from her dream. Many of us, unfortunately, are not. 

We believe, for instance, with the Duchess, in punishing the annoying behaviour of the young, but we have little interest in the reasons for that behaviour. We should be interested. Alice sees herself as the hand of ghostly justice, she never insists on proof of what is crystal clear, she believes in immediate action. 

Alice confronts unreason with simple logic. Convention (the artificial construct of reality) is set against fantasy (the natural reality). Alice knows instinctively that logic is our way of making sense of nonsense and uncovering its secret rules; and we must communicate our demands, for otherwise we are dependent upon the demands of the world.

If one does not wish to despair and if one recognizes that the battle is on many fronts, then one knows that the first victory is to say time and again "Yes" to individual human beings. However, I personally stem solely from an uninterrupted centennial+ line of jurists / police commissioners-police commissaries - paternal as well as maternal - and I think I understand about the world's so-called compassion or conscience. 

At times, combining hereditary traits with tradition and socioeconomic factors produce something ... good. The best, the excellent, albeit, is often the enemy of the good. That the Swedish police force is primus super pares relative all other law enforcement departments globally - perhaps on par with dittos in Finland, Russia and Germany - remains in no doubt [with us], however constrained by naïve political splashes that have little underlying logic.  

The term criminal is a value judgement, and given that empathy is finally a gift, and cannot be learned, we must not forget that, even in an enlightened and contemporary world, clemency is a matter of grace, not of right... "Let right be done even if the world perishes" - Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus.*15; I,II)

Penalties have been deterrents to crime, but no matter how severe, penalties have not obviated crime. There will always be [culpable] people to whom the penalty is a secondary consideration. Some would choose to disclose state secrets of a given order of importance even though the penalty were death.

There is little evidence supporting behavioural and psychological therapies of grave criminals. But most studies have been small, amateurish and poorly designed - and on convicted felons, who are likely to be more impulsive and anti-social, and less intelligent, than those who have not been caught. As a well-known practical philosopher in New York recently stated: "Our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught." True, true.

Now I am only speaking of culpable morals, not minds, although the more one sees the less one feels the two could be separated, albeit, as René Descartes wrote: "Doubt everything." Humans are naturally governed only by a principle of self-love, and this is a difficult thing, to corrupt nature, for us humans, to deny ourselves of our present interest, trusting in providence to make it up to us.

Our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. We argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. 

As a private detective / private investigator, I am not advocating a morality based on evolution (I have seen that on one too many occasions), but rather telling how things have evolved. A human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness is indeed a very nasty society, however, we may deplore something, but it does not stop it being true. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. 

However, there are those who say "we are in times where there are no human heroes" and I would retort, saying "these people just do not know where to look". I meet heroic people on a regular basis, people who consider spineless appeasement a "no, no", individuals who would say "I will do my utmost as if the whole issue of this rightful struggle depended on me alone". There are persons - close, and amongst us - who want to make that difference...

 

Investigating serious crime and fraud globally, I can not abstain from reflecting over that a man is not what he does so much as what he is allowed to do; otherwise what would each of us not do to change the world and our lives? Whatever the mix of motives, we are all, through our upbringing, entombed by reinforced structures of dogma and reason. Fear buttress the system overall.

Does crime pay? Newspapers report on the criminals: murderers, fraudsters, thieves, terrorists, burglars, some politicians, a few bureaucrats, a dozen-lawyer here and there, a number of Polish policemen, an array of myopic accountants, a palette of banksters, et al - who get caught, but once we seep ourselves into the notion of silent evidence, so many things around us that were previously hidden start manifesting themselves. (Ad hominem? I think not.)

 

Having interviewed inmates a great many times, I might be a person that may combine an insider’s feel and an outsider’s ability to challenge the status quo. Overall consensus mostly stifles creativity and initiative. In an ever-shifting world, dispute and argument are not just inevitable, they are welcome because they lead to renewal.

 

The future will tell us what to do; more than ever we live for the moment, and no amount of looking back or forward offers any explanation or interpretation, only a wall of impenetrable darkness. However, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and, as Marcus Aurelius stated millennia ago: "Bad natures should not lack crimes and errors, and this should console us when bad people wrong us; it is natural that they should."*16)

In an attempt to maintain the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the idea of man’s perfection, natural law can be deduced from how men – and/or women – actually live; from the most powerful force that actually determines all men, or most men most of the time, can it be effectual or of practical value. 

The complete basis of natural law must be sought, not in the end of man, but in the beginnings, in the prima naturae or, rather, in the primum naturae. What is most powerful in men most of the time is not reason but passion. Natural law will not be effectual if its principles are distrusted by passion or are not agreeable to passion. Natural law must be deduced from the most powerful of all passion. 

But the most powerful of all passions – the desire for self-preservation - will be a natural fact, and we are not to assume that there is a natural support for justice or for what is human in man. The desire for self-preservation is the sole root of all justice and morality, and this fundamental fact is not a duty but a right; all duties are derivative from the fundamental and inalienable right of self-preservation. 

There are no absolute or unconditional duties; duties are binding only to the extent to which their performance does not endanger our self-preservation. Only the right of self-preservation is unconditional and absolute. By nature, there exists only a perfect right and no perfect duty. The law of nature, which formulates man’s rational duties, is not a law, properly speaking. 

Since the fundamental and absolute moral fact is a right and not a duty, the function, as well as the limits of civil society must be defined in terms of man’s natural right and not in terms of his natural duty. The state has the function, not of producing or promoting a virtuous life, but of safeguarding the natural right of each. And the power of the state finds its absolute limit in that natural right and in no other moral fact. 

If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection of the safeguarding of those rights, we must call that the human foundation. For Kant and Hobbes alike, it was already a question why moral philosophy was called the doctrine of duties and not the doctrine of rights. 

The tradition which was opposed had assumed that man cannot reach the perfection of his nature except in and through civil society and, therefore, that civil society is prior to the individual. It was this assumption which led to the view that the primary moral fact is duty and not rights. One could, however, not assert the primacy of natural rights without asserting that the individual is in every respect prior to civil society: all rights of civil society are derivative from rights which originally belonged to the individual. 

Who is then to be the judge of what means are required for a man’s self-preservation or as to which means are proper or right? The classics will answer that the natural judge is the man of practical wisdom, and this answer will finally lead back to the view that the simply best regime is the absolute rule of the wise. 

However, everyone is by nature the judge of what are the right means to his self-preservation. For, even granting that the wise man is, in principle, a better judge, he is much less concerned with the self-preservation of a given fool than is the fool himself. 

But if everyone, however foolish, is by nature the judge of what is required for his self-preservation, everything may legitimately be regarded as required for self-preservation: everything is by nature just. We may speak of a natural right of folly. Furthermore, if everyone is by nature the judge of what is conducive to his self-preservation, consent takes precedence over wisdom. 

One could simplify moral philosophy by reducing morality either to magnanimity or else to justice. Moral law is greatly simplified by being deduced from the natural right of self-preservation. Self-preservation requires peace. The moral law becomes, therefore, the sum of rules which have to be obeyed if there is to be peace. 

Justice (in conjunction with equity and charity) does remain a virtue, but its meaning undergoes herewith a radical change. If the only unconditional moral fact is the natural right of each to his self-preservation, and therefore all obligations to others arise from contract, justice becomes identical with the habit of fulfilling one’s contracts. Justice no longer consists in complying with standards that are independent of human will. 

Natural public law - jus publicum universale seu naturale – is a fairly new discipline, emerging in the seventeenth century. It emerged in consequence of that radical change of orientation which we are trying to understand. Natural public law does not supply an answer to the question of what is the just order here and now, but an idea of the just social order once and for all, i e, regardless of place and time. 

We may call this type of thinking “doctrinairism”, and we shall say that doctrinairism also made its first appearance within political philosophy – for lawyers are altogether in a class by themselves – in the seventeenth century. This whole philosophy is the first philosophy of power. 

“Power” is an ambiguous term. It stands for potentia, on the one hand, and for potestas (or jus or dominium) on the other. It means both “physical” power and “legal” power. The ambiguity is essential: only if potentia and potestas essentially belong together, can there be a guaranty of the actualization of the right social order. 

The state, as such, is both the greatest human force and the highest human authority. Legal power is irresistible force. 

The sound use of “physical” power as well as the sound exercise of rights depends on prudentia, and whatever falls within the province of prudentia is not susceptible of exactness. There are two kinds of exactness: mathematical and legal. From the point of view of mathematical exactness, the study of the actus and therewith of the ends is replaced by the study of potentia.

 

Can the mind of the individual be capable of liberating itself from the opinions which rule his society? I think that the natural inequality of human beings in regard to intellectual gifts is inconsiderable; if the common people are properly taught, the ambition and crookery and avarice of the few will become powerless.

On full justice one might quote Matthew 5: 45: "For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust," brilliantly and ingeniously and wittily rewritten by Lord Justice Bowen as follows:

The rain it raineth on the just,           And also on the unjust fella.           But chiefly on the just, because           The unjust hath the just's umbrella.

As the famous Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna told his son during the seventeenth-century Thirty Years' War: "You see, my son, by how little wisdom the world is ruled." Appearing positive is, though, as always, a self-serving argumentum e silentio. There is always one last stratagem left, because Fortune persistently leaves one door open in disasters to admit a remedy, and men meet men before mountains meet.

One should not give advice unheeded, however, since you have read this far I shall offer an essential ditto: 

"When in a conflict amongst humans - and conflicts are natural to occur for any substance of existence - you should side with the part asking for it. That individual is your friend. The one part asking for your neutrality is not [your friend]. 'Small wounds and poor relatives/companions' usually do not remain static, and in the long-haul you will end up being treated irredenta and with indifference - despised by all parties - using neutrality as your modus vivendi. Bear in mind that great personages do not forget old injuries in lieu of new benefits, and vice versâ, they do remember overt tokens of loyalty; in particular if written in or shown with blood, i e with great sacrifice."

Becoming a whole-hearted human being implies understanding the principles of emphatic reciprocity. Good guys do not start wars, and the guys starting wars seldom end up with the wars they wanted or wished for, because, as the greatest president of any country in modern times formulated it: "When someone shoot at our [good] boys, they shoot back." 

Amassing enemies overall - being a successful private detective/private investigator, or showing advancement in any area of activity - is, however and lamentably, often a sign of progress. Able men - and women - carry many burdens. People do not hate other people for their weaknesses, they hate them for their strengths. Assez minable!

We need to emphasize that organizing a life that is well-balanced, well-tempered, and above all, well-intended, is rewarding. Some of the regulatory devices available to humans have been perfected through millions of years of biological evolution, as are the cases of the appetites and emotions. Others have existed for just a few thousand years, as with the codified systems of justice and socio-political organization.

Asking, as Hamlet's disquieting, inaugural question, "Who's there?" - meaning who is out there to let us persist as our endeavour of self-preservation mandates - the answer by and from a seasoned private detective / private investigator is unequivocal: "No one." Only the blind hand of evolution lies behind the ascent of man. Aloneness is the stark reality...

The Cognitive Revolution amongst humans - it is estimated - took place some 70.000 years ago. Ever since there has not been a single natural way of life for us. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. When the next evolutionary step or mutation will take place is completely beyond our reasoning power, as ludus naturæ is completely unpredictable.

Any reasoning will have to be an act of faith, a spiritual thing, producing mere acedia. Any worthwhile prediction must also take into account the eventual ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. Hearing this resounding trumpet blast for truth may appear refreshing, but here "ich untersuche nicht, ich fühle nur; ich hab' mein Sach auf nichts gestellt". Some thing-s will happen, or rather, some thing-s will happen that have not happened before, but what is a coin-flip or a toss-up. 

Most people do not realize that we are dawning into a new epoch. We have propelled earth into a novel episode of geological time: The Anthropocene. The Holocene – the present geological epoch, which has lasted for 12.000 years – is giving in to a new one which, as its name suggests, is to acknowledge that humans, far from being mere passengers on the planet’s surface, now fundamentally affect the way it works. We have unexpectedly been promoted to the status of geological movers and shakers.

Markers of the Anthropocene will surely be visible in the fossil record. On present trends, numerous species will vanish from that record – exterminated by human activity. Fallout from nuclear-weapons testing scattered plutonium, an element vanishingly rare in nature, far and wide across the planet. We might even vote these “bomb occasions” to be the marker of our new age, making the Anthropocene more than half a century old already.

Alas, nature might indeed itself be even more cruel and indifferent than we previously thought, albeit, while humans are equal opportunity victims of this casual, unpremeditated evil, we are not obliged to accept it without proper response rather than hope.

Hope is nothing else but an instant joy,           Arising from the image of something future or past,           Whose outcome to some extent we doubt.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Everyone by nature desires to know, albeit there are always true statements that the system is not strong enough to prove. Where does this leave us? There may be things people will never know, and/or perhaps they do not even know what they are, these unknown unknowns. It is the desire to know the unknown that inspires humankind's eternal search for knowledge in the first place.

The everlasting quest for truth is surely not an easy one, and it has no limits or boundaries in neither time nor space. We might define eternity as the existence of eternal truth, the essence of a thing, rather than a continuance over time. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in Crime and Punishment, had his own thoughts on eternity, as follows:

We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast. But why must it be vast? Instead of           all that, what if it is one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and           that is all eternity is?

If we fantasize about eternity, truly then, what really is infinity? If we remove the notion of finitude - that which surrounds us with its manifestations of mortality, incompleteness, imperfection - we are left only with its absence, or its opposite: id est, infinity, which we then can attribute to the One, Wralda. Most likely there will never exist a full truth about everything, about the universe and human conditions, for there is a crack in everyting; that is how the light gets in.*17)

Maybe the best approach to it all is by "denying or removing all things that are". The point of this is to plunge us into a "super-essential darkness of general investigation" in which we are stripped of our ordinary ways of thinking and so try to grope beyond them. And then and there, like in complex private detective / private investigator capers, perhaps, just perhaps, Heureka!!!

Modern business and private lives are complex, and many sang-froid judges realize not even they are equipped to parse the facts; proximity to real power, though, is intoxicating – and misplaced pride melts away. Retaining an International Private Detective should be a “game-changer” – levelling the playing field; not looking sheepish, or even harebrained – without proof or evidence. 

Throughout college- and university, I trained and served as an air artillery aviator, worked as a shop/department store detective, ordinary guard, heavily armed body-guard for Ambassadors / Charge d’Affaires from Germany, England, Yugoslavia, the U.S., Iran and Russia, as well as within the Swedish Penitentiary / Prison Authority; later as chairman of an authorized guard- and patrol company, and as an international legal administrator, approved by Swedish courts, in Poland, Russia and Ukraine.

As a teenager I flew solo (myself) to Paris - and also London for that matter - six years Charles Lindbergh's junior, although covering a shorter distance, in a more modern aircraft, and far better and more broadly educated, however, under far worse wintry climatic conditions; a Scandinavian/European youth flying record that still holds, and ever since I worship boldness, boldness, and boldness, more than any other human trait.

Reading about Scandinavian air forces not flying at night - or some of them; not even following Russian atomic bombing exercises nearby country capitals, but leaving surveillance to NATO's Baltic team - is that so more tragic. No initiative, less Viking boldness than we have seen for a milliennium, or two millennia - a "Commander-in-Chief" / ein Oberbefehlshaber even admitting overtly having less than a week's supply of combat munition. Maybe energetic domestic officials are more occupied with immigration issues than securing peace at its origin - whether in northern Europe or in the Middle East - or for sure so.

I do not know what this particular individual - the "C-in-C" - was seeking at the time, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment, but rather that peace - and/or funding - will atrophy. Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato - "If not true, it is well conceived", and, as always: "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."

This seemed to me a hypothesis dictated by crude common sense, but I have learnt subsequently that the men - and women - of his trade often define things in ways in which it seems that the enlightening power of reason has scant function, and the [campaign] appeared lamentably vacuous. Instead, show some old-time Libido!; show some old-time Ardore!

I am not anti-Russian - some even "accuse" us of being Russophiles, considering it (Rossiya) a great civilisation, with history on its side, free of the growing decadence and weakness of the West, and with a solid, extremely well-educated, political leadership - nor am I anti-NATO, or [almost] anti-anything, but pro-independence and pro-free enterprise.

However, for the future, we need Russlandverstehen, nicht Russlandangst. Political visions must entail an acknowledgement of a common human heritage amongst neighbours, not necessarily due to remote racial and religious disasters. Making sense of the contradictory, whimsical and largely evidence-free doctrines present-day politicians espouse is difficult, and their latest immigration actions will foment chaos - and widespread alienation; causing havoc - in due course.

No man is an island, and we're born not alike, but with different talents. "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots" is an old adage that we in our modern world can disregard. Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. The only thing in life achieved without effort is failure, and surely, we'll always find the good people on the rough road.

Admiration is a form of inverted envy, and this is what I have and feel for all those entrepreneurial individuals out there in the ball-game of life, being bold and taking risks, on behalf of us all, intrinsically not hurting anyone else, and at the behest of no one ... but themselves. Despite dodgy odds, the best entrepreneurs push on. People often persevere, from what I can tell, because they have an almost irrational commitment to a cause.

An entrepreneur - from the French entreprendre, meaning to undertake - is defined as a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable intitiative and risk. We care about entrepreneurs - they may be inventors, but more often than not innovators - and we care especially for young entrepreneurs. There are forces at work in young people, the greatest of which is growth, and they may experience a certain hopeless helplessness, leaving juveniles bitterly acrimonious.

Instinct and law demand of young people obedience. But growth demands disobedience; and here truth and myth may collide, if we are not misreading our meek compatriots completely. Any government or state of society which fails to win for itself some measure of the generosity and loyalty natural to youth is in for grave trouble. And, indeed, experience has proved it: of all forms of breeding, that of human cattle is one of the hardest. The young West glows white-hot with talent, and they are indeed our most valuable asset, surpassing all others by a wide margin.

Why rely on belief and tradition when you search for evidence? Should we rely upon European/American indigenous youth and free enterprise for the future; or [mass] immigration and bureaucrazy on a Brobdingnagian scale? Politics and human affairs are not inscrutable mysteries, instead they are a bit like weather forecasting, where predictions/analyses are possible and reasonably accurate; also longue durée.

                                                                                                                             *** 

Research show that the average expert, on the basis of a 20-year forecasting tournament, is "roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee". But the future can indeed be foreseen, at least in the near term. And, crucially, prophecy is not a divine gift, but a skill that can be practised and improved.

Excellent forecaster are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. More important than sheer intelligence is mental attitude. Humility in the face of a complex world makes excellent forecasters subtle thinkers. Excellent forecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new information, and the ability to synthesize material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations.

Excellent forecasters have a "growth mindset": a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one's mistakes. The best forecasters are less interested in whether they are right or wrong than in why they are right or wrong. They are always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable.

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Getting rid of discrimination against indigenous minorities - etwas ganz anderes - represents a triumph for natural justice, as well as a chance to make society as a whole stronger. Alas, if we do not have political awareness enough, we might become minorities ourselves, and the women will become the men they wanted to marry. "Cherchez la femme?" as the historically famous detective question was formulated. Western women are not downtrodden, and the aim to make women and men interchangeable is ... questionable. Only [perceived] and real self-interest may drive us all together.

Competitive war is part of nature, and struggle breeds greatness. It is Mother Nature's way of testing her creatures; sort of refining the pecking order. Doing well is not enough; we also always want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety - unfortunately and sadly I must add - runs [too] deep. True humbleness comes from not comparing oneself with others, in each and every single area. From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, alas, man is moving fast to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.

My partners and associates may on occasion exceed me in experience and ability, albeit, the private detective team courage d'esprit will always be decisive and of paramount importance. The International Corporate Detective Process is one of group - as opposed to individual - effort; there must [almost] always be a complicated and careful division of labour, which is peculiar to the nature of the enterprise, and by no means characteristic of all familiar and homely searches for the truth.

When we search for consummate, state-of-the-art private detective / private investigator partners, we always look for persons who - beyond having shown verifiable boldness and initiative - can find things out for themselves; for no one without imagination was ever very great in his / her profession. If imagination makes for honour in many things, it will, above all, honour you in the private detective / private investigator competition; a sort of war with words, action and information / intelligence.

Genius nor fortune are altogether necessary to attain excellent investigation results, but rather imagination, creativity, and a happy shrewdness. We should and must also: "Try! Fail! Try harder! Fail again!" We must have perseverance -showing grit - and be undismayed in adversity. A "little shot that keeps shooting" - or an Edison trying and probing one thousand experiments - come to my mind. Success does not always breed success, and alas, we often sort of conceive it as ... conclusive.

And it is to be observed, that every creation (applied fantasy; imagination), even though minor, is celebrated by historical writers, as is seen where they, for example, praised Alexander the Great, who, in order to break camp more secretly, did not give signal with the trumpet, but with a hat on the end of a lance.

Information, or Intelligence, is in essence like any other commodity, and collecting it might demand a huge investment - but it gives you a [much] freer hand, and finally victory in markets, domestic and global; or likewise in private affairs. Investigation and Intelligence are the life blood of each other. The two are mutually exclusive, and we are a corporate private investigation firm - or a corporate-investigations firm - focusing, with commitment, competence, and sheer will, on private-sector intelligence.

We produce knowledge - or objective information; a reasoned opinion - in prophecies or hypotheses, our most deeply and carefully considered estimate, but I argue that in the ever murky world of intelligence, the truth is never simple or singular. Many facts must be considered. It is very easy, in secret work, to draw two vastly different conclusions from the same set of facts; one right, the other wrong. 

When there is a will, there is a way, however, we are not telling individual or corporate clients under duress what they are going to think and do before they had even thought of doing it. Private detective / private investigator missions betoken both care with detail, love of truth and modesty about what we can not know or should not ask; at all times decidedly withholding, or suspending, premature, biased judgement.

People who can do, people who can not teach and tell, and we sometimes make and do unpleasant things so that ordinary people can rest and sleep assured. Intelligence should never forget that the attainment of the truth involves a struggle with a human enemy who is fighting back - or that truth is not the goal, but only a means toward victory.

Detective intelligence work remains the simple, natural endeavour to get the sort of knowledge upon which a successful course of action can be rested. If the information is there, we'll find it (and exploit it), as much as Carl Hempel stated: "All ravens are black. What is not black, is not a raven." A deeper look at this particular puzzle, however, reveals that the Raven paradox is not just a philosophical test-of-wits, but has implications for the way we think about observation and proof.

What is not only a paradox, but indeed a case of non distributio medii,  is the wrongful and deceitful assertion or supposition or ratiocination of, for example, [that] since all fools are poets, thence inferring that all poets are fools.

If the preceding text contains words new to the reader-s, if they seem unduly concerned with semantics, I plead, as once John Locke, that, "It may perhaps be censured an impertinent criticism in a discourse of this nature to find fault with words and names that have been obtained in the world. And yet possibly it may not be amiss to offer new ones when the old are apt to lead men into mistakes, ..." 

On the other hand, I don't suppose there's anything in here that somebody somewhere doesn't covet. The Detective Underworld is not only queerer than we suppose; it is quereer than we can suppose. When you enter the shady world of criminality, you will discover that there are layer upon layer of deceit, and you have to be both clever and persistent to find out the truth. 

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste – and should worse come to worse – it’s not part of private detectives’ job description to add mirth to the party, but provide and demonstrate solid, tangible, admissible evidence and stark proof...

 

  

Yours sincerely,

Claes Reinhold Ekman

www.walhallen.net