metonymy4u

If truth is what corresponds to reality, then certain things must be true (corresponding to reality) such as:

The law of identity (LOI). “Things are what they are.”
The law of non-contradiction (LNC). “Things are not what they are not.”
I think, therefore I am (the cogito). “I am a thinking substance.”

If everything is what it is and nothing else (LOI + LNC) then, beyond a certain point, everything is indivisible. Because if it were divisible, it would be something other than what it is. So let’s divide everything to the point where LOI + LNC are applicable. This also means that things at this level are unchangeable, since to change would violate LOI + LNC. Which means that change is not truth, since it does not correspond to reality. So when we see change, something changing from red to green or from stationary to moving, we are not seeing truth. Change is illusion. But we see change all the time. So we see illusion all the time. So we live in untruth. So we live in illusion. So when I believe myself thinking, that is illusion, because my thoughts often change, and change is an illusion. So I don’t think. So I am not. (LOI + LNC + cogito).

Works for me!

🙂

Much art trades on mystery and dissembling. In part I think because we are often trying to speak the unspeakable, which is quite often also the unpopular. As a result, many speakers have been ignored, locked up or killed.

Are we free? Is there a god? Do we have souls? Did the universe begin? How does life emerge from non-life? Are science and religion compatible? We can choose to stay with these questions or move more quickly to where they usually lead me, the question of whether the world, apart from our speaking, is absolute or changing? Where I end up is speechless, non-knowing, the agnostic. But that does not mean the lifeless, the skeptic, the nihilist. I don’t think the world vanishes because I can’t finally verbalize it. Why would I want that? Shall I throw something away, if it feels different than what I expected?

In a world for which the nihilistic myth of modernity means “do nothing, you don’t matter,” thinking itself is an act of political rebellion. Refusing to support the piety of the state. Corrupting the youth with new beliefs. “Time is how you spend your love” said Nick Laird.

What would the world be like without our current relationship to desire? Fearful for a time I suspect. But beyond…..?

Saying that I’m a skeptic about thoughts and not about the world does not mean that I think thoughts determine the world. Nor do I think the world is the way I think it. Actually, I don’t think I think the world at all.

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.

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.

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.