metonymy4u

What is your current relationship to the paradox of plurality? By this I mean the idea that if things exist, they must be divisible, composed of parts. But this leads to a set of (apparently) contradictory statements: either things are composed of parts of zero magnitude (which seems absurd) or things are composed of an infinite number of parts of finite magnitude, which means that things are infinite, never ending and incomprehensible (which also seems absurd).

1. Do you think this paradox is useful any longer as a topic of conversation? Why or why not?

2. If yes, what is your current relationship to it? How do you understand it? Resolve it? Re-describe it?

Here are my answers on this cool and foggy morning:

1. Yes. I think conversations about the paradox can help us become aware of the varieties of human behavior and thought, and stimulate creativity.

2. I’m not so impressed any longer with the laws of identity and non-contradiction, which seem to be at work here. There seems to be a tacit assumption that the whole is co-extensive with the sum of any arbitrary set of de-scribable parts. That to add an indescribable part would be to change the whole. And the paradox indicates to me that either this is not the case or my descriptions are not adequate to the resolution of my cognitive dissonance (anxiety). Anxiety being the dizziness of freedom, I realize that paradoxes are mired in freedom, and cooked up therein. So I’m free to deny the laws of identity and non-contradiction. For a long time I was loath to do this, until I read Basho’s poem about Kyoto. If your objection is “equivocation,” my reply is simply that dropping the laws of identity and non-contradiction is also dropping the fear of equivocation. Perhaps even embracing such.

Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.

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What students these days loose by not studying authors like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, is an experience of reading texts in which the supposition is that the language of science and rationality could lead us back to god. The assumption was the opposite of what I think we see these days, that science and spirituality were not just compatible, but in some way made for one another. More tragically, they loose the chance to grapple with the implications of these assumptions, and see their own in a new light.

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Writing thinking reading speaking dancing photographing living and breathing are one functional class for me. When I attribute, I think the activity bleeds over to another locale. I believe now that to attribute is to speak an object of thought, a thingified concept, a wish beyond. To speak is to dance. I could say, “if at every moment in time the arrow does not move, this must be impossible!” But this, for me this is delusion. Confusion, of signs and events. A predication of nothing. A word in the wind.

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There are, I think, things that can only be in-scribed, as well as things better off de-scribed.

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I do not personally believe that the truth will set us free. I think we can only behave our way into freedom from cruelty. I don’t believe we can think our way there. Try this experiment: the next time you find yourself hating or loving strongly, try thinking to yourself over and over again, “I don’t [hate or love] this,” and see if it changes the experience. Or, alternatively, just walk down the street saying over and over again, “I can’t walk, I can’t walk.” One of our most enduring delusions, I believe, is the necessity of speech.

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…One topic which seems relevant to the subject of conflict, is the question of author-ity and speaking. I have participated in several online communities in which speech appears to be regulated (shaped) by a small subset of the community. Certainly the powers of censorship have been put to dubious use in the past, as in the execution of Socrates for questioning the piety of the state and influencing the morals of the youth. And plenty of other times when entire classes of citizens at home and abroad were designated, because of their distinctive physiognomy, a clear and present danger. The dialectic between private irony and public hope has been a difficult one for millennia. The romans, during their republican years, solved the dilemma by providing for the appointment of a dict-ator in times that required seditionis sedandae et rei gerundae causa. And yet I wonder, in the time of online conversation over thousands of miles of planetary distance, what would constitute such a time of sedition or extreme need? And what advantages are won, by the amplification of homogeneity, that are offset by the dangers of cruelty and the loss of creativity often found in variation?

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