Georgios Was onto Something

 

The three propositions of Georgios:

·         Nothing exists;

·         if anything exists, it cannot be known;

·         if it can be known, it cannot be communicated.

Georgios was onto something. But so was Plato.

Plato was onto something regarding form, but he was wrong to believe that forms exist, that they exist as forms and not merely as concepts.

But what was Georgios onto? 

Language is a tool analogous to the senses themselves as the cave is analogous to the world and the world to the forms. But there are no forms. They exist as concepts but have no extension in being, neither here nor there. There is no there. The senses are tools. The are not windows. We do not see the world itself. “The world itself” is a concept without extension in being. We see as. We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. If we had other tools we’d perceive other things or we’d perceive the same things differently. This is the fundamental point. We see because our eyes respond to light. And because they respond to light in the way that the respond to light. Other lenses would respond in other ways. There may be lenses that could hear light or taste or to things to light we cannot imagine. There are creatures to who not respond to light in anyway at all. They don’t know it “exists.” I’m not saying that light exists. I’m saying that from the perspective of a human something exists that manifests to the machinery of our bodies as light, usually accompanied by heat, though there are conceivable or rather it is conceivable that there are bodies for whom heat and light never coincide or coincide more intricately. We perceive heat with our skin, light with our eyes. Imagine an organ the perceives both, that runs away from the danger of heat when and only when their eyes hurt. Our sense organs construct a world for us to occupy.

Does objective reality exist? We have no way of knowing but also no reason to think it does as such. We can say that God sees the world as it really is. I don’t think God could make sense of that sentence. What does heat look like? What does green taste like? What is the sound of cabbage?

It doesn’t matter. We posit, rightly, properly, an objective world, a world that would still exist if we did not occupy it. We know there’s no such thing. Existence would still be if we were not part of it. But the world we posit as objective reality would not exist if we were not in. The objective world is what is available to all humans with intact senses and expressible to all humans with intact brains. It is the thing we posit that we can all agree upon. That rocks are hard. That the sun is hot. (I use any illustration with reserve.)

Our language uses our perceptions and our bodies to image a more complex reality than our senses alone would do. There is the world as our senses perceive it and as our reasoning minds construct it from sense data. But then there is language that forms what we take in and what we project into less certain versions or visions of the world. This is where it gets tricky. And it gets tricky because there are many more ways to configure the world this way and no final way.

We could say our desire is another sense. When we perceive via desire, we perceive beauty. We perceive beauty via the sense of desire. Fear is another desire. Fear sees danger. As our five other senses can deceive us with optical illusions and jalapenos, so our other senses, call them our emotional senses can deceive us.

Organized this way all that comes to us comes to our senses. And language helps us make sense of our senses. And beauty has the same existence as, red or b-flat. What Galileo called a secondary quality. But we don’t usually organize perceptions this way. We don’t have to. Reality exerts no pressure that requires our minds to think this way. Our minds are not water to gravity that has to follow a certain path down the mountain.

Language is a tool that posits the general, the ideal, the logos. A useful way to measure being. Justice doesn’t have to exist any more than “mile” has to exist for it to be a useful concept. And we can make reasonable arguments based on statistical analysis of who the greatest hitter was in the history of baseball even though the stats don’t measure from year to year or even day to day or moment to moment the same thing. (By the way, it was Babe Ruth.) The general does not exist. Every moment is unique and unrepeatable. But the ruler is helpful. It is necessary. It is good, if well used.

Jesus was perhaps the first to see this. Perhaps it was a pre-Socratic whom I’ve not read. The distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is everything. The spirit is understood as love. The spirit is open to the moment. Creeds and schools eternally in abeyance.

Which brings me back to Georgios. Georgios turns out to have been wrong that nothing exists but right that what exists cannot be known. But wrong to suggest that the fact that what exists cannot be known is of any consequence whatsoever. What exists can be known insofar as it impinges on the human machine, on its senses. A version of existence or being can be conceived. Scientific conclusions can be trusted to represent what we can call the objective correlative of human subjectivity. It can be trusted, it must be followed. Georgios was right that reality as such cannot be communicated. But the human experience of being as it impinges on use can be communicated. We can measure the length of a piece of string even though a piece of string has no absolute length. It has a length whenever we want to use it, in whatever situation we need for it to have a length.