metonymy4u

We in the west are frequently confronted with dialectcs: “good” vs. “evil,” “just” vs. “unjust”, “us” vs. “them.” Many of these come to us through the western tradition of Platonism and the scholastic tradition, which saw the world as something faithfully captured by our philosophical models. For them, the observation that A=A was an indisputable principle of God’s universe, from which all else could be deduced, captured in the eternal dialectics of philosophy. However, it seems to me that their models may not exhaust the field of possibility. If a word is an event, the question for me is what precedes the event and what follows it. Because i don’t think justice or revenge name something that exists, any more than a supernova or a hand-clap names something that exists. They are merely events. Calling a killing justice may merely signal to me your disposition towards your own behaviors. Perhaps it also serves to calm the aggression of conspecifics and decrease the escalation of violence. Great. But a person is also still dead regardless of the speech act that follows (“justice” vs. “revenge” or “murder”). So i would say that neither do words change what we’ve done (they have no ontological power to change other occurring events) nor are they merely semantic reshufflings of the deck (they do have ontological power in that they are themselves occurring events, not merely epiphenomena). I think this is why Wittgenstein encouraged us to throw away our ladders once we’ve climbed them. He was pointing already towards the theory of language games and forms of life. The language games of the west have bequeathed us such dialectics. But that does not mean we cannot invent new “ones….”

when temptation ends

unfill your empty hands
my heart is a cold cold room
that sues for a better part
in the play of an afternoon
i heard your way was after all
a dance, shining alone
in a long lonely hall filled
like an empty empty balloon
once, twice my voice wandered
without my will that way
craft without production
is how your several games
sent joy to its mountain home
bound for a time to remember this
never again the bitter pill
never hearts again to sway

i understand the death of dreams
witnesses taken hostage
beyond reach of a winter night
streams of lies invented and
disgorged while we broke camp
for another feint at the heights
it was a mountain like any other
to be climbed because it was there
orchards left behind i am
now apprentice
to such wonton faithless fare

The recent press conference by the NRA is a perfect example of what happens when unarmed minds get access to a bully pulpit.

For me the holiday season is about attending to the needs of others while constantly being reminded that the environment has never been able to respond to my most significant needs.

Living cells require huge amounts of energy to support their continued integrity. The physical principle involved here is called entropy, which is an expression of the idea that the universe is tending towards randomness. To reverse this trend requires work (energy). For example, living cells must often maintain a gradient of ions across their membranes in order to perform their functions: neurons are dependent on an influx of sodium ions to trigger an electrochemical signal down their axonal processes, muscle cells are analogously dependent on calcium ion fluxes to initiate contractions. Mitochondria are the suppliers of this energy and are themselves dependent on a steady influx of oxygen, brought to them by the actions of our nerves and our muscles, which they burn to release and store energy for those muscle and nerve cells in the form of ATP. So the natural question is: how did the whole system get going? How did living creatures, the “anti-entropy machines” get going in a universe ruled by entropy? One traditional answer has been that the universe must contain some sort of anti-entropy force or substance. This is what we traditionally think of as “God.” Another approach is to simply accept that we live in a universe of both entropy and anti-entropy and leave it at that. When we start out assuming that something cannot come from its opposite, why are we surprised that we then have to start inventing all kinds of divisive categories like “God” and “Evil” to make sense of the world?

Like Wittgenstein, I’m an agnostic, which means I believe these things are very difficult to speak about, yet become manifest in our actions. Would I kiss a photograph of someone I loved in memory of how they were once present for me? Yes I would.

Following Augustine and Rousseau, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both accepted the risk of writing their own philosophical legends. Why did they do this? I think it was because they realized that the time had come for the individual to step onto the world stage. The categorical imperative for them was an imperative for an individual. A real living breathing individual and not just an individual as a representative of an ideal category or universal world spirit. For them, to kill reason and save belief intimated a faith that required the individual to risk everything in an uncertain universe of brute force. It was (and is) time for Aristotle’s hero of individuality, the epiphany of each and every singularly unique substance, to climb out of the shadows. For “what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and people — each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature — are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.”

Once upon a time our view of the world around us was very different. For example, we humans had the notion that space and time were either unchangeable features of God’s universe (Newton) or a priori essential principles of reason (Kant). But then some new data was discovered that was inconsistent with these notions and Einstein decided to build a new theory that rejected the idea of the constancy of space and time. Rather than trying to fit new data into old models, he simply proposed new models. The fact that the new models contradicted all of our traditional prejudices about the way the universe worked was not an impediment to him. Likewise, modern psychologists have discovered that it is more useful to fit concepts to contexts rather than the other way around. In this approach, concepts (words) are simply events which are more or less useful in a given context. They are not gateways to an eternally anchored truth. It’s kinda like what Audubon said about birding, “When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird.”