metonymy4u

Consider this: when you stand up to cross the room to get your morning coffee, first you have to go half way, right? Continuing your journey, you then go half of the remaining distance, finding yourself now a quarter of the way to your destination. To continue, you then travel half of this quarter of the original distance, completing 7/8 of the trip (1/8 left to go). Thinking about it this way, one wonders how anyone ever gets anywhere, since you always have to travel half of the remaining distance to get anywhere, and then half of that and half of that and half of that. It seems as if to get where you want to go you have to travel over an infinite number of “half distances” thus leading to the perplexing conclusion that to get “anywhere” you have to travel “everywhere” which would, of course, take “forever.”

Such were the paradoxes considered by a group of ancient Greek philosophers 2500 years ago (the “Eleatic School”). One could choose to model this set of cultural habits by stating the following heuristic: “The most knowable is the most real.” Since based on our previous analysis, we cannot give a rational account of how to travel an infinite number of half distances in a finite amount of time, motion must therefore not be knowable and therefore not real. Welcome to the cave of the solipsist – the one who believes in nothing but her or his own existence. We’ve been practicing these habits for a long time. Practicing other habits is going to take some real effort.