metonymy4u

In Plato’s time perhaps it made some sort of sense to think of the immutable forms of existence. Cause and effect. Justice and evil. But we don’t live in that world any longer. In our world matter is energy and particles are waves. In our world time slows down and space is curved. Reality is probabilistic. Cause and effect are no longer the most useful heuristics. Categorical thinking is a comforting bed time story, certainly. But how old are we now?

Read Full Post »

I believe I’ve been punished many times for espousing the view that words are merely events and not anchors to reality. The reaction seems to be one of anxiety – that set free like this humans will become nihilistic, valueless, wanton creatures. That we need the anchor of meaning. It mystifies me that this reaction itself never gets questioned. Is there no other way to imagine implementing what one holds dear in the world? Can’t effort simply emerge from within? Can’t we say: “please don’t do that –it makes me sad?”

Read Full Post »

The modern western world may be described as that period in the west when we became convinced of the need for…us! Prior to modernity, the universe was seen as the constituted whole creation of the mind of God, to which we were in debt. Indebted because through his wisdom we were set upon a path of endless discovery, to which we had no answer. And the dawnings of all our days were simply more of his endless order and grace. So modernity begins… with a fall from grace. In that the modern world is either unknowable or in chaos. And order is a fictio, a created thing. So we live in a world of poetry, which Plato—(maybe) said was inferior, a copy of a copy. For us, the copy is a copy of what we carry internally. That means: will to power, will to sex, generative grammar, chain of signification, internalized imperative, spark of God, self-certainty of existence. Whatever metaphoric tradition you are buying for the moment. But how would you answer a mystic poet who suddenly got in your face and told you it was the other way around? That the world was whole and only fractured by the prism of your mind? Who wanted to reverse entropy and re-cover the magic? What could you say to that? From your pedestal? From your hill-top?

Read Full Post »

I believe that the central innovation of Kant’s work (anticipated in important ways by both Plato and Aristotle) was the notion that cause and effect models are not always the most useful heuristic. And I think that we are still struggling to figure out what to do with this idea. Like Picasso’s cubism and Beethoven’s romanticism, the dethroning of reason is still being worked out. For example: modern psychologists often make a distinction between the outward appearance (form) of a behavior and its relation to other behaviors in a chain of events (function). Plato also made this distinction. He (ostensibly) criticized the obsessions of the poets with mere appearances (copies of copies) and lauded the philosophers for understanding the truer natures of things. Still the question remains: under what circumstances is aesthetic as vital as essence? Is there another teleological suspension of the noumenal contained within recapitulation? Our own contemplation? The contemplation of an-other….?

Read Full Post »

The question still arises of whether Kant sought to replace the ontological noumenon with the epistemological. Certainly the hint of that, that he sought to establish a tribunal of reason in the language of the synthetic a priori, could have led to the resurgence of rationalism in 19th century German idealism. It comes down to this: how did Kant understand his own method? As a useful heuristic that improves the probability of practical outcomes or as a gateway to truth? I rather think that the latter would imply that Kant, not understanding his own innovation, was a damn fool. And as one of my teachers once commented: “no good philosopher is a damn fool, with the possible exception of John Locke!”

Read Full Post »

The story of God is the story of the dance between reason and revelation. Do we know God or does God know us? Is God discovered in reason or revealed in mystery? The Hebrew testament is the first manifestation of disclosed, as opposed to inducted, truth. The stories of Yahweh do not have Abraham and Moses trying to figure out what God is all about. They do not cogitate. They vacate. They travel and they journey. They suffer. They persevere. They see, and return home. They bring nothing at all deduced or built with human hands. Not questions, nor debates, nor critical disquisition. Only a ready-made vocabulary of imperatives. For Abraham brought only the unquestioned covenant and Moses the unquestionable commandments.

On the other side of the dialectic is the philosophical tradition, with its logical proofs of God. This tradition is usually credited to St. Anselm of Canterbury, writing in the 11th century. However classical Greek philosophy contained earlier versions, that went something like this: Plato supposed that for every pattern we are aware of in the world, there must be an occurrent antecedent event (cause). For example, we notice that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is the same for all circles. Plato supposes that for this to be a real pattern in the world there must be a cause that makes the situation the way it is and not otherwise. There must be something that causes all circles to exhibit a constant circumference to diameter ratio, rather than allowing it to vary from circle to circle. In this way and in various places in his dialogues, Plato reasons from particular data to a general statement about what must be true for our observations to have the reliability that they do. Following this paradigm, one can of course abstract from all possible patterns in the world (number, extension, time, angle, color, utility, etc.) and arrive at the most general pattern of all: existence itself. Which Plato called “the form of the good.”

This is the ontological proof. Noticing that things are, that things exist following a pattern of being we call “existence,” we can come up with a hypothetical cause of all existence (God). And in order to be a real cause of all that exists, God must of course exist, because to talk of a non-existent cause of something that exists would be utter nonsense. ¹ Thus the existence of God is guaranteed by the fact that we clearly perceive our own existence and this, conveniently, also guarantees the immortality of the knowing mind (the soul). Proofs of this sort crop up throughout the literature of Europe, from the middle ages until the 18th century. Some of them affirm the immortality of the soul (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz) while others concentrate on proving just the existence of God (Anselm, Aquinas).

In this way we have the Abrahamic tradition in which God simply is, and appears to his chosen prophets on earth, and on the other hand the philosophical tradition in which God is a necessary product of reason.

So what’s the problem?

Well, the problem for us is that in 1781, Immanuel Kant pretty much killed the ontological proof by showing that it leads to mutually exclusive conclusions. Which is exactly what Nietzsche meant when he said that God is dead. This led to a strange situation: the loss of all meaning in the west.

Oops.

Because if God as an object of knowledge is dead, and knowledge is meant to be the arbiter of truth and meaning in the world, well…then what? …. Is this the ghastly conclusion of two thousand years of rational inquiry? Does reason lead to unreason? Rationality to irrationality? Order to chaos?

Of course the question does not seem so remarkable to us, 200 years later. What the early existentialists found so astounding, namely, that the entire western world could suddenly find itself foundering on the cold hard rocks of (so called) scientific nihilism, that “enlightenment” could lead to despair, is not quite so surprising to the children of the atom bomb, the car bomb, the plane bomb, the cyber-attack, and the razor blade.

God as object was dead. In its place was: Enlightenment. Reason. Hierarchy. Obedience. Immanence. Tradition. And habit.

But what about the other side of things?

If rationality could not secure the divine essence through deduction or logical prescription, what about divine visitation? If reason of logic was untrustworthy could we not still have recourse to an alternative reason of wonder? Of seeing? Of discovery? Of unfounded delight?

After all, everyone has had the experience of going on a journey and finding something unexpected along the way…right? That’s not so strange to contemplate…is it? So perhaps God is not to be calculated, but found….Perhaps when God dies in “objectivity,” she is yet reborn in “subjectivity?” What I think remains unanswered, even today, is whether there is yet still a way to dis-cover…revelation…?…carried for a moment in the winds of memory…?….Is it…pure courage? … Or poetry?

¹ Actually, it was Anselm who introduced this little wrinkle into things. Plato mysteriously just claims that God must exceed existence, which is ambiguous. Does something that “exceeds” existence still exist as something containing existence, but also containing much more? Or is God, as that which exceeds existence, something entirely other than existence?

Read Full Post »

One of the knottiest philosophical questions of all time is this: do ideas actually exist?

Well, of course they do! If they didn’t, then none of the things we see every day would be real.

I mean think about it: If 2+2 did not really equal 4 then all our buildings, bridges, houses, cars and space ships would just fall apart, wouldn’t they? How could we ever actually accomplish anything in the world if all our ideas didn’t actually correspond to some sort of reality out there independent of our thoughts? So clearly at least some of our ideas, like the ideas of mathematics, or the ideas of space and time, for example, must in fact be “real” in some sense. And this suggests that it is possible, at least in principle, for us to define ideas that are really real, so perhaps all those other ideas that seem less precise, like love or beauty or morality, might also be able to be defined in some real way, if we just had enough time and energy and creativity to figure out the best way to define them that everyone could agree on. In principle. So it seems that in fact ideas actually do exist “out there in the world” and are not just mere “matters of convention.”

Right?

Ok, let’s look at it from another perspective. Take the idea of a circle. A circle has a very precise definition. It is the set of all points in space that are the exact same distance from some central point. That exact distance is called the radius, and is the distance from the circle’s perimeter to the center of the circle. But think about this: even though we can come up with a very precise definition of a circle, we also know that it is very hard to draw a perfect circle. Even with a compass and a very steady hand, if we zoomed in on the drawing on the page there would be little irregularities in the pencil tracing which would cause some parts of the line to be further away from the center than others. So it probably is in fact very hard to draw a perfect circle. Nevertheless, we can distinguish between a drawing of a circle and a drawing of a square, right? So if we think of all the drawings of circles we’ve seen or could see, we still are seeing some type of similarity, even if the particular token examples of circles are all imperfect in some small, even microscopic, way. So there must be something causing this similarity between the particular token instances of circles, call it the “circle-type.” As I said above, there must be some real, actual circle-type out there in the world independent of our thought processes, or all our technology would come crashing down around us.
Of course, this circle-type must itself be circular, since if it wasn’t, how could we recognize it as the cause of all the token instances of circles we see every day? If the circle-type were more square than circular, one would not think that it could be the cause of all the circle patterns we perceive, right? So the circle-type itself must exist and must be circular in some recognizable way.

But hold on: if the circle-type is circular, and circle-tokens are circular, then there must be some third thing causing them to be similar in this way (i.e. they are both circular). So in fact this circle-type is itself just another token example of some other more “essential” type, call it circle-type2. And so circle-type2 must be the cause of the similarity between the first circle-type and all the actual concrete token examples of circles we see around us every day. But of course circle-type2 itself must be circular, so in fact there must be yet another circle type, call it circle-type3. But of course…etc, etc, etc. Right away you can see that to identify any sort of type-token relationship instantly gets us searching for an infinite number of circle-types, and we can never really get to the end of the series. That is, we can never get to the “final circle type” which causes all the other token instances of circles. So it seems that, in fact, there is no one existing ideal type of circle that can be identified, which is the opposite of what we originally concluded when we first asked the question about whether ideas actually exist. Or maybe it does exist, but we can’t actually identify it? But how can we know that something exists if we can’t even come up with a precise way to identify it or locate it? So to say that it exists but we can’t identify it seems ridiculous, so perhaps ideas don’t in fact actually exist?

This objection to our earlier proof that ideas actually exist is called the “third man argument” against the actual existence of ideas.

Where does that leave us?

It seems as if we have proven that ideas both exist and don’t exist. On the one hand we suppose they must exist in order for us to explain the efficacy of our actions in the world, particularly technology which is quite effective at building things and getting things done, and which depends on the absolute truth of ideas like mathematics and geometry. On the other hand, even mathematics it seems can’t lead us to any final discovery of the ultimate causes of these patterns, because as soon as we start looking for the cause of anything in particular, we end up in an infinite search for the ultimate cause.

The way out of this dilemma was proposed by Immanuel Kant in 1781. What he said was very simple: we can define types like circles and the technique of defining such types is very useful to us for accomplishing the things we want to accomplish (like building things, organizing things, or figuring out things). However, we can never completely and absolutely verify the independent truth of these conceptual models, because as soon as we try to do so, we end up in an infinite series of possible candidates for the ultimate truth. So what we learn from this exercise is not that all knowledge is useless illusion, but that knowledge is no more than a useful way of living our lives. It is not a path to any sort of ultimate truths about the universe, our selves, or the nature of freedom or the divine. While we can certainly continue to build houses, write poetry, appreciate beauty or discuss good and evil, these more ultimate truths are best passed over in silence.

Read Full Post »

Kant proposed that we think about teleology as part of a wired in heuristic of reason. Even a theory like Darwin’s, whose advance was ostensibly to eliminate teleology from biological mechanism, contains the idea of competition as a driving tendency. Competition, gravity, electromagnetism – all of these are force based models which have a teleological flavor. But this sort of thinking is merely an historical accident. I say this because I know it is not logically impossible to suppose we could think another way – even if we can’t actually think it.

Read Full Post »

This notion that we seem to have that we can run our bodies into the ground with endless exhaustive activities, pollute them daily with toxic ingestions, and that our minds “should” just keep going somehow unaffected by these daily insults….I don’t think it’s working out so well. And the response? To judge those minds that finally break down as somehow “morally inferior”…?….yeah that’s not gonna work either.

Read Full Post »