Bolt

The Ladder of Language:

A Thought on Objectivity in Husserl

Says Quentin Lauer, “Suppose… that the tree I see when I look out my window is a subjectively constituted tree. If I close my eyes several times and, each time I reopen them, see the same tree; if in addition I leave the house approach the tree and touch it, go around it and see it from every side; and if the result of all this is the identical unity of sense which I call this tree; then, says Husserl, not only has the tree been constituted in consciousness, but I am sure that it has been constituted a perceptive experience, and hence that the object is truly a tree—it cannot be anything else. Mutatis mutandis the same sort of subjective constancy in constitution will always be objectively valid: that is, will always have an object known to be true;  I can be sure that anyone who sees the object other than as I see it is in error” (Phenomenology: Its Genesis and Prospect 86-87).

To make this claim we have to ignore the possibility that what I am looking at is not a tree but a representation of a tree. The only other thing this tree could be is an imitation tree. True, it would have to be a good enough imitation to fool the viewer, but that is not outside the realm of possibility. Does this matter? Yes. The first thing it brings up is the question of whether or when an imitation of a tree is a tree. How do I imitate a tree so well that I can fool an observer? I might make it of wood. What if I make the bark out of paper—a kind of paper-mache sprayed or painted with something to improve its bark-like appearance. Or what if I glued actual tree bark to my wood core? I could have made the whole thing out of metal, but I chose to make it essentially out of trees. My tree is dead, but dead trees are still trees. Is my imitation tree an actual tree? Is it more actually a tree than my metal tree would have been? When is an imitation tree a tree and when is it just an imitation of a tree?

The question doesn’t have to set anyone’s head spinning. The answer is of course in my definition of tree. “Tree” doesn’t exist in being. It’s a concept; like all concepts it has to be defined, and is defined by its actual use, in moments of actual usage. What a tree is depends less on trees than on what I need a tree to be when I need it. It’s my definition of “tree” and my understanding of “is” that matter here.

But, of course, there “is” something out there that limits my notion of tree, which is to say my ability to define something as a tree. There is, to use one of Husserl’s favorite words, an essence of tree. A treeness that is not just a concept, subjectively or situationally constituted. Trees exist—undisputed trees that would be trees even if people and language did not exist. Noumenal trees. Noumenal trees phenomenologically known. I’d like to think so. My experience tells me that it is true. But there is no way to transition those trees into language or into consciousness as such. There is no way to purify the concept. The attempt to do so will always cut off part of its essence. The border becomes blurry as soon as you draw it, like a water-color line or a line infinitely magnified.

Knowledge then is finally silence. Philosophy uses language as a hand to squeeze being into form. Being always escapes. Language is the ladder that leads to silence.

TRAGEDY

"It should not have to have happened."

Doing everything right, failing anyway.

What the Nightingale Sings

The nightingale sings to us a beautiful song.

He does not know he does but he does. He does not
sing a beautiful song to other nightingales.
To them he sings desire
or threat. To the cat he sings
hunger. To the dog--I can't tell.
Maybe nothing at all. I know
he does not sing at all
to the snake. To himself the nightingale sings
pleasure or need.  Beauty sings
in the ear, tied to the brain
configured to hear it.

And not just beauty, all the rest,

sound itself. Air exists and throats can rattle
but the tree that falls in the forest makes no sound
without an ear. Colors don’t exist without the eye.
Taste was invented by the tongue. All senses
enword; bestowing the useful illusion of sense
to the sensible nonsense of being.

So much of everything exists
only in our heads even when masses of people agree
on a name. Perhaps we should marvel less
on the great strides we have made unmasking the universe

than we humble ourselves on how much there is

our tongues cannot taste
or say
or even sing.

Evolving

Being

The Kabel Fragment

...to find a place to place a stone
row on row
another stone with words inscribed
to place a flower by its side
another rose to mark spot
in ways that words and stone cannot
remembering another rose
row on row on row on row.

Love's Necklace

Carol first, who when she liked me back I stopped liking, and

Sandy—the first Sandy—who Jimmy Beeler also liked, who told me in gestures I drove her crazy. Then

Kim, for a very short time then

Julie off and on and

Pam, for about two years. I once loaned her fifty cents which she made me happy by taking a long time to repay.

Nancy, of course, then

Janet. I danced with Janet. Then,

Paula, next, I guess, but she was gay, then

Madeleine. Almost Madeleine.

Kathy, who died.

Joan, who quit McDonald’s the day her sister said to me, “Why don’t you ask my sister out?”

I don’t know why, exactly.

Abby, who laughed a lot when we ordered steak and who was served a margarita though she was only seventeen. Then the second

Sandy, for years and years and years, right through

Sue, and

Peggy—for a minute or two—and

Michelle—who was also gay—until I met

Cathy, whom I married.

And there it ends—though nothing ends. Not really. Not in time. Ghosts and shadows run through time, beads upon beads on a string—

This is my poem for you, for you who knew and you who’ll never know how much I told myself I could not live without you. I wear you out of time, light or heavy, on this chain around my neck.

The Swan Song of the Universe

What if, taking Steven Hawking's elevation of the notion that there are subatomic particles that blip into and out of existence and combining it with the idea that the increasing expansion of the universe will some day reach a point where the atoms of the universe will no longer be able to hold together, and the idea that at the moment when the Big Bang occurred all the bulk and scope of the universe was compressed into an atom-sized space (you see where I'm going), what if every atom of the universe at the end spawned another universe? What a swan song that would be.

On the Literal Truth of Scripture

Have you noticed that the more thoroughly convinced someone is that his scripture is literally true, the inspired and infallible and exclusive word of God, the more tolerant he is of force and hate? The more a person believes God breathed the truth and only the truth into every syllable of his word, the more he advances mere obedience as the path to salvation. The more he fears “subjectivity,” or “misinterpretation,” the more like a dictator he becomes. He’s petrified of mistakes. But mistakes make us human; mistakes make progress. He’s afraid of displeasing God by using his own limited perspective. God gave him his own unique perspective for the purpose of seeing God uniquely. He buries his talent out of fear. He misses in his zealotry for the word the very message of the word: Love. Love is the word. Love your neighbor, love your enemy, love the stranger, love yourself. Understand if you can; empathize if you can. If you can’t, love anyway. Do not be afraid to love. Do not hide the talent of your heart in the bunker of your fear.

The Three Wiseishmen

Alan began championing (despite everything) for gonzo holiday installations, judging Karen’s Little Manger negatively, ordering Paul’s quaint Reindeer smashed; talking up Victor’s Wisemen Xmasing Ypsilanti Zanily.

And Benson, clearly driven, especially felt gleeful helping. "I just keep lighting more nativities, or people quit reacting," said Tom. "Until victorious, we'll xerox young zealots!"


Anfuso, before clamoring Dickensian epithets, fairly gutted himself. "It's just Kwanzaa! Light more natal ornamented pines! "Quite right," scores tweeted, underscoring verities well. "Xerxes, you zenophobe."


“Ancillarily,” bellowed Christmas detractors, “even formerly gaga holidayer in Jersey, Knott, laughed: ‘My neighbors’ old prosaic "Quissmiss" rubbish still triumphs!’ Until vacuousness wanes, Xmas, you’re zero.”

On the Proposition that Color Does Not Exist

Color is created by the eyes in conjunction with the brain. Color is the brain’s way of navigating the world by distinguishing between wavelengths of light, which do exist, of different energies. Colors could be infinitely more or greatly less distinguished. Some people, mostly women, see colors most of us cannot. Some people, mostly men, see fewer colors than most of us can see. They break the world up differently. We can understand the color blind, but not the color enhanced. We can’t really see what they see.

The body is not programmed to make sense of what is of no use to it. Few animals distinguish as humans do between music and noise. Dogs ignore vegetables. Cats sit on the backs of statues of wolves. Zebras cannot see painted zebras.

We have always been surrounded by sounds we could not hear, colors we could not see. Machines extended our awareness of these. But what we do not have senses for we can no more imagine than a continent of the blind could imagine light. But doesn’t it make more sense to believe that stuff we cannot perceive is there? Dark matter, infinitely differentiable, but not by us.

The Myth of "The Good Guy with a Gun"

The more guns a society has, the greater the number of people who get shot. That fact has been well established; the correlation is beyond dispute. And yet there are those who say "If we just had more good guys with guns we could intervene and save more people." And it's true that now and then a "good guy with a gun" is there to save the day (quite often these "good guys" are off duty police officers). And if we increase the number of guns, we'll increase the number of "good guys." And that is because we'll increase the total number of shootings, and therefore the number of opportunities for a good guy to intervene. But the increase is linear. So, to put it in simple terms, if today there are 1000 guns and 100 shootings and one time a good guy saved the day (and this does not happen in reality in anything like 1% of the times), then if we double the guns to 2000, we'll get 200 shootings and 2 times a good guy has saved the day. The number of people saved will go up 100%! But so will the number of people who get shot. Whereas before it was 99, now it's 198 (assuming for simplicity's sake only one person gets shot and one saved). There is never a point where more guns equals more safety.

Click the title of this post for supporting stats.

The Headless Leviathan

                It never occurred to Thomas Hobbes when he was describing the war of all against all that is the state of nature that the primary fact about humans could be anything other than the isolated individual. In fact it hardly ever occurs to anyone. Our experience of being a self is so strong. But our perspective being an individual gives us both the insight no other race from another planet could match into our being and a blindness, like the blindness every individual would have about his own face if not for mirrors. It never occurred to Hobbes that the default state of humanity was the group: the family, the tribe, the “race,” the nation, that we have this in common with ants and bees and elephants and gorillas. Our self is an expression of our role in the social unit at least as much as it is an expression of something innate, something, perhaps, we were born with or that, à la Freud, manifested and set in infancy. The self is fungible. The tyrannical group identity dictates certain roles and selves will always manifest to fill them, like an angel fish changing sex to keep the species going. Every classroom has a clown and a drama queen and a bully. This is why mobs act like mobs. This is why, when law cannot hold them down, every country, every culture has is terrorists.

                Unlike ants and elephants however human societies like human beings are in constant flux. Every classroom and every sports team and every neighborhood and every taste in music, every state and nation and gender and “race,” and church and state of being is at any moment its own organism. Could anything be more absurd than burning cars and killing strangers because your Spartans or your Red Sox won (or lost) the championship? The group organism, the anonymous group self (we can find this self in literature like nowhere else) takes control then. But it’s only the individual who is ever put in jail. We put them in jail because they exercised their part in the same group self that we are all subject to under the right conditions, depending on the moment’s need. (That’s why jails, though we cannot do without them, never solve the problem and aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about removing the catalyst of past violence, their about taking the burnt candle out of the infinite box of candles.) The group self has no soul. It is a leviathan but not one that we become through reasonable reflection. It is a leviathan we are by default, by instinct the way any animal feels when to hunt and when to flee. A leviathan without a head.

And Another Thing about Guns

This is no one's opinion but a simple fact born out endlessly in study after study: that gun you have in your house is more dangerous to you, to your safety, to the lives and well-being of your children than anything you think you are using it to protect yourself from.

The Government, the Mob, and Guns.

Hobbes was pretty well on track.
If you don't trust government, you trust the mob.
Governments can be pretty bad, pretty untrustworthy.
But they cannot be worse than the mob.
At their worst, they cannot be worse than the mob.
If you distrust the government but you like guns
You are the mob.

God and Salman Rushdie

I recently heard Salman Rushdie assert that believing in God was like believing in a fairy tale and, in the same interview, duck the question of whether people who believe in God are not very bright—and this in the same interview in which he called Carly Fiorina, “the dumbest person with whom I ever shared a stage” (or words to that effect). Clearly, it takes a lot for him to duck a question. He’s probably right about Carly Fiorina. And I have great respect for him in general. I once went to India to give a paper on his work. I once taught a Ph.D. seminar on his writings. I’ve even read Grimus.

The problem with his apparent belief that believers aren’t as bright as nonbelievers is that it is objectively false. Intelligence itself has no bearing on whether or not one believes in God. I don’t think Salman Rushdie or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins is any more intelligent than Paul Ricoeur, Rene Girard or Owen Barfield. No more needs to be said about that.

His comment about the fairy tale is far more interesting to me.  After all, he said, “we now know how where the universe came from” (or words to that effect).  Do we?

I have great respect for the scientific method. And I am the last person to suggest we confuse a religious text with a text of science. People who read the Old Testament with science or history (in the post Enlightenment meanings of those words) are idiots. Or very badly informed. No thinking (with the exception of trained scientists in the field in their professional capacity) can reject the Big Bang as the most accurate description of the start of the universe because no one but another professional scientist is in a position to do so.

But does the Big Bang Theory tell us more about the origin of the universe than Genesis?

Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth…. God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”

The Big Bang Theory says: “Bang. There was light.”

I don’t have any strong need to believe that the author or redactor of Genesis had special knowledge of the start of things here. The coincidence (which my phrasing has exaggerated) that makes “Let there be light” read like as good a description of that moment of the Bang as any needn’t be taken as anything but a coincidence. What is relevant is only this: Genesis provides an explanation of where the universe came from. God made it. God spoke it into existence. The Big Bang theory does not. Right or wrong, we Genesis tells us more of where the universe came from than science does—or can. So the notion that now we know how things happened (whereas before we did not) is nonsense. It may be that Genesis is wrong in telling us that God made the universe. Whether or not that is so, we are no closer to knowing where the universe came from. The start is not the same as the origin.

The Englightenment Delusion

Pray what was that man’s name,–for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,–who first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him.–But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters;”–that was not his;–it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then again,–that this copious store-house of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent:–that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of King William’s reign,–when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed toward the latter end of queen Anne, the great Addison began to patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or two of his Spectators;–but the discovery was not his.–Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters,–doth thereby, in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,–that observation is my own;–and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning.                                                               --Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy Ch XXI

 

Our narrator seems to have both (and paradoxically) an obsessive and a cavalier attitude regarding the origin of certain historically significant observations—observation which we (or at least he) could call emerging truths. Stern is both observing and mocking the new state of emerging knowledge, this Enlightenment sally into the territory formerly held by ignorance in which each new truth stakes its claim under the authorial flag of its discoverer. It may be only the role of ego in conquest that is being mocked here, but it may also be that Sterne understood that the enterprise itself, even in the early days of its success, was not precisely what it took itself to be. In Stern’s time, it was widely believed that progress in knowledge, wherever it was made, genuinely shrunk the territory of ignorance and that continued advances in the realm of knowledge would, eventually, eliminate the territory of ignorance altogether.

Two and a half centuries later, that claim feels quaint. Just as each scientific instrument designed to shrink the universe—from the first hand-held telescope to massive  infrared, radio contraptions we now have—have only served to make the universe bigger and bigger until its size, at one point merely unimaginable—has become yet one unimaginabilty nested inside or perhaps bumping along side an infinite number of other equally infinite spaces, so our conquest of knowledge in general has served only to increase our ignorance—or, more precisely our knowledge of our ignorance. We know both more and far far less than we ever did.  

I say we used to plant our flags on every new tidbit of truth conquered by understanding. But that’s not quite true. We still do it. Our attitude has not kept up with our experience or our observations. As we are becoming increasingly ignorant, as our only real knowledge is the ever growing knowledge of our ever growing ignorance we fail to adjust or attitude the realization that what we already don’t know has accumulated to the point where we can reasonably surmise that there is a vast territory of reality we can never subsume to knowledge.

And this is where we started before the blip of the enlightenment delusion.

MORE GUNS!

Threeman the One I'd Sailor

The parent, child and holy ghost, the ego id and superego, the I and the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex. The rule of threes.

How much of our perception of the world comes out of the war between the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex? How much comes out of those two parts (on the one side) and the singularity of the first person nominative singular pronoun?

One “I,” two brains. One I to rule unruly both. Two selves warring from which to produce a single unity. One I’d sailor.

Even God is three: Parent child and holy ghost. Freud claimed that the self was three, ego, id and superego. All these overlapping threes.

I sometimes think I’m most myself when I’m deepest in love. But that is when I’m least human, if human is what separates me from the other fauna of earth. I’m least in my reasoning brain. I say I can’t control myself. I must be my pre-frontal cortex, myself must be my reptilian brain. My ego can’t control my id.

If I am my I, I am not myself (said Alice). Myself am not I. But if my I is something I own—if it’s mine, it isn’t me. Nothing I own is me.

But that’s just words. That’s just the language and the structure of my language, which so often fails to organize being as being really is—assuming there is (which I doubt) any organization of language that would be able to map it. To me that is the fundamental fact. There is reality, which even to name “reality” is to misrepresent, and there is language which (among its several tasks) represents it, maps it, grids it.

Which tells me I have it wrong but doesn’t help me get it right. Who am I, myself? And who are you?