A is for

Alcahuete is an interesting term. In Spanish it originally had the meaning of pimp, or procurer, by extension it has come to be slang for a snitch, gossip, butt-kisser, ass-licker, brown-nose, kiss-up, and so on.

However, Negro tended to use the term to refer to those whose empty erudition made them perfect pundits, public intellectuals, and others who trafficked in ideas, pimped for fashionable ideologies, or those high-level gossips expert in selling whatever idea the market favoured.

This term is also an example of Silo’s unusually rich ideolect. Some of this sort of private language consisted of vocabulary others were turns of phrase that gained particular significance. Often they were almost a code he shared with a few, or even one other person. Sometimes they filtered down to a more general usage among his friends. Alcahuete could be a good example of the latter.

His wonderfully colourful forms of expression led me to think about my own private or semi-private language and even more so about my private mythology. What, for example, were the metaphysical beliefs that I held unexamined about the nature of reality. It’s like asking not about the presuppositions or mental-form behind my beliefs, but about the early translations of that into allegory and images.

As an example of my own personal (or semi-personal) vocabulary consider this short phrase: monkey business. It’s a very rich and nuanced word that captures a constellation of ideas that are key to my vision of the world.

ALLEGORY

In a discussion of the Morphology of the Impulses his Psychology Notes Vol 1 Silo writes: “Allegories are plastically-transformed narrations, in which what is diverse is fixed or there is multiplication by allusion; but also where the abstract is made concrete. The multiplicative nature of allegories has to do with the associative process of the consciousness.”

In lesson 27 of Luis Ammann’s Self Liberation we read “An allegory is a concentration of many associations into a single represented object. This is quite distinct from objects which arise through simple association where the next object derives from the previous one without either object losing its original identity.”

I first heard Silo explain the morphology of impulses where he distinguished symbol, sign and allegory and their function in 1974 in a lengthy conversation with a small group gathered in a Mexico City cafe. A transcription of my personal notes can be found here.

ANTI-HUMANISM
Any practical and/or theoretical position that tends to support a structure of power based on the anti-values of discrimination and violence.

ANTI-HUMANIST ATTITUDE
This is not a doctrinal position and it does not refer to particular situations, or to the commission of specific acts that may well be reprehensible from the perspective of humanist ethics. Rather it is a behavior that in practice appears like an inverted image of the humanist attitude. In concrete terms, the a.-h.a. is a personal emplacement or stance in the world, an “objectifying” mode of relationship characterized by the negation of the intentionality and liberty of other human beings.

Based on the definition found in The Dictionary of New Humanism, in Silo; Collected Works Vol 2.

ATP
Can be:
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is considered by biologists to be the energy currency of life. It is the high-energy molecule that stores the energy we need to do just about everything we do. It is present in the cytoplasm and nucleoplasm of every cell, and essentially all the physiological mechanisms that require energy for operation obtain it directly from the stored ATP. (Guyton) As food in the cells is gradually oxidized, the released energy is used to re-form the ATP so that the cell always maintains a supply of this.
In this case it refers to an old material titled ATP “Actitud de Trabajo Permanente ” i.e. “Permanent Attitude of the Work” which I once saw.
For me this always referred to the vision daily life as a transferential process daily life, which Silo would later explain in many ways and in many places, e.g. i, , in the Canary Islands, various talks on valid action, and of course in The Internal Landscape among others.