metonymy4u

One of the ironies of the so-called postmodern world seems to be that, in the name of guaranteeing freedom, we have determined that we must stand for nothing in particular. The problem is that when one stands for nothing, it makes it very hard to stand up for anything. Including freedom.

Humans commonly assume that we are superior to other species in our communicative abilities. That human language is more complex, more abstract, more precise, more useful, and more sophisticated in some fundamental way than non-human language. But does the data support this assumption? In what way is human communication essentially more advanced than animal communication? Elephants and whales perfected long distance communication millions of years before humans invented email and text messaging, canids are some of the most gregarious species on the planet, and were probably that way long before their domestication by humans 16,000 years ago, and birds and spiders regularly complete astonishing feats of engineering that would challenge the most advanced graduate student in our most prestigious universities. I think that the problem is that animals that seem to have a predilection for human study, like cetaceans, apes and elephants, just haven’t figured out how to teach us the complexities of their language yet. That, or they’re not sure yet whether they really want to have anything to do with those bat-ass crazy humans.

One of the harsh facts of modern inquiry is the professionalization of the academy. Teachers must become more and more specialized in order to publish or perish and students are increasingly inclined to see their education as one commodity amongst many. And what has this produced? A world of specialists and certificate holders, many of whom have little inclination to encompass a broader sweep of human knowledge or the genealogy of such. The question of where our knowledge originated, and where it seems to be taking us is as little valued today as it is understood. All the while, ideas are used wholesale: for political advancement, for monetary gain, for terror, for destruction. What I regret is that we forget that every idea, which is a habit of thought, was ushered along by a person, and may represent, if we could only spend enough time with it, the one instance of enlightenment that each of us may bring into the world with our fears, our hopes, sufferings and joys. And what a thinking animal is these days seems to concern very few. So people, and their ideas, are shot en masse. And yet each idea has a history like a person: unique, significant, in every way important and remarkable to me. If it were not so, then it would no longer make sense to think or to love.

How long has it been since we first discovered our biochemical nature? And still the dogma of human exceptionalism continues….

The question I’m coping with is the question that motivated the existentialists: how do we learn to live with loneliness. Being cut off from any noumenal (helpful) reality, how do we live with just ourselves? For example, love, for me, is a noumenon: a beautiful concept of the imagination that can never be directly experienced. How does one live with that?

It seems to me that one of the most invalidating experiences of everyday life is the question “how are you?” Because for many of us, if we were to answer the question truthfully, we would be instantly incarcerated for harboring evil desires. At least 50% of the human populace has thoughts that would scare the tar out of the average citizen. This is why when I greet someone, I believe the most compassionate thing I can say to them is simply “hey…whaddup…?” The unanswered question for me these days is…whatever happened to hope? Where does it live. What… is it doing.

In this time of faith, the concept of god is discussed quite frequently. But discussing god often involves us in intellectual contradiction. For example it is difficult to understand why an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god would allow the slaughter of innocent babies. And yet it happens every day. It is difficult to understand why god allows the compassionate, loving and the kind among us to die and preserves the brutal, the violent and the hateful. We are told that god works in mysterious ways. That he gave humanity free will. That we will never understand his ways. The contradiction is already apparent: we affirm the mystery and the certainty. The mystery of evil and the certainty that we are given free will.

Of course, many will say that it is at just such a point of contradiction that faith has to take over from reason.

But let’s not leap to faith just yet, so that we may see if reason can take us a bit further.

Immanuel Kant proposed a solution to the problem. Kant said that our idea of god is an idea of an absolutely necessary and free being whose actions inevitably manifest its intention, unaffected by the contingencies of material existence. Moreover, he said that such a concept is bound up with our ideas about moral agency which in turn motivates our understanding of good and evil, crime, punishment and merit (as opposed to mere prudence). In short, in order to conceive our own freedom, Kant said we need to think the existence of some sort of cosmically ultimate and necessary type of freedom, and we call this god. And the contradictions that we experience in our discussions of god are a natural consequence of conceptualizing something that can never be had in actual experience. Because no one ever experiences absolute freedom from contingency. Our actions are always subject to external influences of some kind or other. So the idea of god is like the idea of all circles or all natural numbers – a useful notion to poeticize our understanding of life. And, we don’t seem to be able to live without it. But that does not mean that it is actually out there in the world. That which our reason finds unavoidable is not thereby guaranteed existence. Necessity does not imply reality any more than speaking implies knowing.