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The timely and untimely adventures of Mister Groundhog. Author's Profile
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Re: Yam=Yam
Sunday, August 01, 2004
“I have often wondered where you stood on the crucial question: What would your reaction be if a demon were to prove to you that your whole life with all its goods and ills will be endlessly repeated? I pray you will take the question seriously even though it is hypothetical - eternal recurrence is plainly impossible or at least highly improbable given the fact that our incredibly complex system is open, subject to all sorts of external influences, inflows, outflows - the vast number of elements involved would virtually preclude any exact repetition of any cosmos or life therein. I look forward to hearing from you before the shadow falls.” — Mister Groundhog
Dear Mister Groundhog,
If a demon should prove that I’m doomed to repeat my life endlessly, I might be obliged to ask him a question or two. For example, I might ask him to expound on the philosophical relevance of the following statement, I YAM WHAT I YAM, within a closed system of existence evolving toward a state of maximum entropy, i.e., one’s life repeating itself ad infinitum. I daresay he could not categorize the latter statement by fitting it within a contained (closed) circle we might call “Z”, i.e., one’s life with all its goods and ills will be endlessly repeated, without first proving that all things matching category “Z” fit completely inside of the larger category of “Y,” i.e., eternal recurrence is highly improbable given the fact that our incredibly complex system is open, subject to all sorts of external influences, inflows, outflows, and that the vast number of elements involved would virtually preclude any exact repetition of any cosmos or life therein. The demon would also have to prove that all things matching category “W,” say, the effects of consuming X cans of spinach per week for the duration of one’s lifetime, also fit inside the category of “Z,” that one is doomed to repeat life endlessly and therefore consume X cans of spinach per week for eternity (mind you, the same damn cans whether or not the manufacturer has long since gone out of business).
From these two statements (category “Z” into category “Y,” and category “W” into category “Z”), we can conclude that all of “W” must fit inside of category “Y”—BRAIN WRECK! I trust you see the enormity of the problem here and why I might think twice before conceding to such “proof” as a demon might put forth.
In all seriousness,
Madame Me
http://authorsden.com/melinacostello
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
RE: YAM=YAM
Dear Madame Me:
I think we see I to I on the unlikelihood of the identical recurrence of any particular event, for that would require the cooperation of the universe in the identity. I think I mentioned heretofore that Ouspensky, who was among other things a mathematician, pointed out that Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence posited a virtually impossible repetition if probability theory is our guide, because the greater the number of things to be combined, the less likely it is that they will combine in any particular way, and the complexity of the universe is such that the possibility of a single repetition of its history is exceedingly remote.
It could happen, I suppose, and an infinite number of times, I suppose, hence the repetition would be an infinite series within infinity, just as the number of even numbers is infinite within the series of all numbers, but I doubt it would happen, for I do not think the spacetime universe works that way, time being directional for the sake of motion - the repetition of everything endlessly would be no repetition, perhaps, just a static eternity. Of course every insurance company no matter how large is bound to fail, and the bigger they are the harder they fall...
The Stoics, like other traditional societies in their longing for a return to the Great Time, rebelled against the tyranny of historical, linear time. But the Stoics took the easy way out, I think, by presuming that the cosmos as a whole is periodically consumed by the 'Fire' and proceeds therefrom once again in the same order. I think palengenesia is the term for their concept precise, literal, cyclic repetition. Nothing within the cosmos would have to finish its particular cycle, for the whole kit and caboodle would perish at once, then IT would repeat itself, and so on. I believe Plato imagined a cosmic regeneration, and the Stoics took the notion to the extreme.
As for those traditional societies who imagined a return to a golden age or original epoch, and resorted to repetitive rituals to recapture the Great Time for personal and social regeneration or revitalization; - their revolutionary movement to the radical roots appears to progressives to be rather regressive, don't you think?
From the regressive perspective, I suppose the linear progression that we imagine for "civilization", and, perhaps, for the divine life hereafter, appears to be a decline rather than an advance, a decadent degeneration instead of creative generation. The evolution from a simple soup of virtually immortal cells to complex mortal mammals, or from a simple life to a highly organized life, is supposed to be progressive; yet sometimes we might wonder whether or not the division of labor and the reliance on machines to remember and think for us, along with the emphasis on equality of individuals, is atomizing us into virtually identical living units who automatically repeat the same hackneyed program. And then, if only we can overcome the fear of death, we shall be metaphorically immortal in the social soup. Somewhere in the Old Testament a prophet says, "I am a cattle."
What matter is it that a cattle or an amoeba dies? What matter is it that the one multiplies by sexual intercourse and the other by division? Sexual reproduction produces more opportunities for variation, but to what end? Toward the eventual simplification of every task until the highest form, man, becomes just another ant? Wherefore nothing is really lost if the species survives. Therefore, in a sense, individuals per se, as particles of the species, are ideally immortal; that is, "death", in an atomized humankind, is imaginary, for all units are indentical. The concept of Death, then, is irrelevant. Nonetheless, the units among us who still possess a vestige of personality fear that society in this atomization process is actually decaying, leaving everyone alienated and independent of the disintegrating machine, hence vulnerable to total annihilation.
It is in that context that I wish you would elaborate on your notion of "entropy," for I do not quite catch your drift. Nor do I understand the metaphysical significance the idea of entropy or the conservation of energy or matter and such ideas had on so many profound thinkers once the scientists raised the subjects. My father said that everyone will eventually be gray and make one-dollar an hour, and that that is entropy.
YAM=YAM. Precisely. YAM=YAM just may be the answer. Well, almost precisely. I have never seen the law of identity applied to sweet potatoes. I think you are alluding to the original YAM.
Mister Groundhog
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Antidote to Objective Materialism
Nicolas Berdyaev (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, 1874-1948), dubbed 'the Philosopher of Freedom,' was a religious idealist, a leading Christian existentialist and mystical personalist. His most important notion, of freedom, was derived from the ideas of the astute German businessman and great mystic, Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), whom Hegel identified as the first German philosopher.
Boehme of course was the subjective pantheist who took up the willing self, which he said was derived from life-feeling, as the source of all knowledge. For Boehme, god is the Ground of Everything, the willing Nothing that searches for something by means of its will and finds everything within itself. Conflict emerges from the differentiation produced by the will at the core of Nothing, wherefore nature, the outer reflection of the inner discovery, is the image of god, hence a mystical identity of god and nature abhorrent to dualists. The progressive elaboration of the either/or struggle in which one decides for/against god is via the Trinity. The meaning of this moving life is in Christ, and its purpose is to retrieve the lost unity by allowing the fire of love of Christ heart to embrace all. Boehme had a profound influence not only on Berdyaev but on many others including but by no means limited to Descartes, Newton, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, Blake.
As for politics, Berdyaev was a socialist who studied Marx, but he was not a Communist. He was in fact a foremost critic of the Russian implementation of Marxism (Marxist-Leninism or Bolshevism). Berdyaev was further influenced by such thinkers as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Jaspers.
Berdyaev studied law at the University of Kiev until 1898, when he was expelled for radical activities. That ended his formal education except for a semester in 1903 under the neo-Kantian professor Wilhelm Windelband at Heidelberg. Neo-Kantian philosophy was largely a "spiritual" reaction to materialism, another 'Romantic' reaction. It was a confused revival of either the human spirit or the transcendental spirit. Berdyaev's philosophy opposed both the human and divine spirit to nature. Berdyaev, like many other non-conformist European thinkers, was not satisfied with "objective" materialism, and attempted to merge Kantian with Marxist thought.
Berdyaev, student of the German idealism, was the best Russian representative of the Christian version of the new spiritualism. It was best represented in Germany by the Christian professor, Rudolf Eucken, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1908 over the objections of critics who said philosophy was not literature. Eucken is barely heard of today, and then as a neo-Kantian curiosity. He was disgraced, perhaps unfairly, by his patriotism - his devotion to the German cause in the Great War and especially his endorsement with other notable German scientists and philosophers of the infamous paper whitewashing the German atrocities in Belgium, where he sometimes addressed German soldiers.
The philosophy of neo-Kantian Christians was more or less a subjective philosophy of life, somewhat vague and obscure, one might say 'romantic' - Eucken was criticized for his indefinite Christian "activism," while Berdyaev's work is sometimes referred to as "impressionistic." Berdyaev attempted to elaborate a coherent philosophy, yet he like other neo-Kantian inclined philosophers rejected systematic or mechanistic thought in favor of a dynamic dialectic. He emphasized the freedom of the individual. He therefore was not averse to accepting the tag "existentialist" when the pop-culture sobriquet was eventually applied to him.
Berdyaev had welcomed the Russian Revolution of February 1917, but he detested the policies of the Bolsheviks who seized power in October. Despite his opposition, he was in good graces with the Revolutionary government for awhile. In 1919 he founded the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, and he became professor of philosophy at Moscow University (1920). However, in 1922, he and more than 100 other non-Marxist exiles were expelled from the Soviet Union for refusing to embrace "orthodox" Communism - they could only return to Russia on pain of death.
Berdyaev and other exiles in Berlin founded the Academy of Philosophy and Religion. He transferred the Academy to Paris in 1924 and soon became France's leading Russian emigre. He founded PUT - the Way - (1925-1940), dedicating the religious-philosophical journal to criticism of Russian Communism. He was Editor-in-chief (1924-1948) for the YMCA-Press in Paris, the main outlet for Russian religious philosophers.
For Berdyaev, truth is not the product of rational inquest but comes from a transcendental light. By virtue of the transcendental light human beings can penetrate environmental confusion and arrive at the truth. He prophesized the advent of a progressive era of divine-human "creation."
The reader no matter how "highly" educated will recognize the fact that the fundamental revolutionary notion mentioned above is timeless. Berdyaev's song is relatively modern and it is somewhat unique in the expression of its truth. We shall listen to a phrase or two, and return when we will with our reflections:
"The idea of the existence of eternal principles of life has a double significance. It is has positive significance when freedom, justice, the brotherhood of men, the supreme value of human personality as that which must not be turned into a means to an end, are acknowledged as eternal principles. And it has negative significance when relative historical social and political forms are made absolute, when concrete historical institutions, represented as organic, are given the prestige and authority of sacred things, as, for example, monarchy or some particular form of property.
"It can be expressed in this way, that the eternal principles of social life are values which can be realized in subjective spirit and not concrete forms which can be realized in the objectivization of history. The conservative tendency of the organic theory of society which defends the sacred character of concrete histoical institutions cannot be recognized as Christian, not only because it contradicts Christian personalism, but also because it contradicts Christian eschatology. In the objective historical world there are no sacred things which can be transferred to eternal life; there is nothing worthy of eternal life, and for this reason there exists a moral obligation that the world should come to an end and be judged by a higher judgment. Organic theories of society are anti-eschatological; there is a false optimism, a reactionary optimism in them." (1)
(1) Slavery and Freedom by Nicolas Berdyaev, New York: Scribner's 1944
Friday, July 30, 2004
Mister Groundhog: The Groundhog issue is too important to be held hostage to semantics, although I realize many would disagree with that last statement. For instance, Nietzsche put forth that our realities are linguistic creations; that is, we reify through language. Appearances that we appropriate through naming eventually become essences and things. T. Beckman (1995) wrote: Nietzsche supposes that there is not much difference between realists and idealists, objectivists and subjectivists, except for linguistic habit. At bottom, all of these stem from origins in our passions, fantasies, and interests. Now that's a sharp slap in the face of our rational underpinnings, or at least what we've psychologized of our rational underpinnings. Additionally, if we are to consider anything of Nietzsche's meditations on the nature of what we call reality, time notwithstanding, then we must also wrap our minds around his denial that we have any organ with which to fix reality and thus are indefinitely subject to untruth. Argh! Furthermore, Beckman writes, To the Apollonian [sic] scientist this is unbearable; hence, art is what makes our situation bearable because art, being playful with appearance, gets around its untruth. This is probably the most important aphorism of [Nietzsche's] Book II and it concludes everything that he has been developing about art. Is it possible McTaggart simply was not being artful, that is, playful enough when asserting his logical contradiction between past, present, and future, and therefore could not escape the tar pit of his own untruths? And is this the definition of a dunderhead? And then there is Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which I fear we will not be able to circumvent in our Groundhog musings. Madame Me
Nietzsche, despite the disease, rejection and grinding poverty that he suffered over the years, at least verbally accepted nature as it is, and believed that any superior person would embrace life, no matter how good or evil the world appears to one who loves or hates their nature as the source of pleasure and pain.
Even if a miserable life had to be endlessly repeated, Nietzsche would embrace it. And that is at the bottom of his version of the ancient doctrine of eternal recurrence. He must have known very well that, at least mathematically, the proposition that the cosmos endlessly repeats itself is virtually impossible if not absurd; for, the more complex the universe, the less chance there is of such a repetition, and the universe is almost infinitely complex. Nietzsche's interest in the doctrine of eternal recurrence was moral. His doctrine was a heuristic or self-teaching device, and was not intended to be a theory of physics. He raised a hypothetical question: If a demon came down and demonstrated to you that, beyond a reasonable doubt, your life as well as everyone else's would be repeated endlessly, would you rejoice? or would you despair?
Those who love life would perhaps react joyously and be willing to repeat the cycle time and time again, good and bad; they would stick it out, through thick or thin, for better or worse.
On the other hand, those who deny life would despair. They would probably, in their denial, have resort to the ascetic morality which negates life, the morality that says, "Nothing is good enough, therefore we must have progress, not a cycle, we must be saved from this life, we must have either eternal death of the self, when the body perishes, or we must have an immortal soul that progresses to paradise and eternally perseveres there, providing, of course, that we have blind faith in the god of paradise who booted us from the original paradise because we sinned, and, accordingly deny ourselves in this world,which is ruled by the anti-god, et cetera.
Of course, in the case of the desire for eternal life, or permanent death in contrast to the temporal dynamic life, Nietzsche refers to the religion he despises most of all, Christianity, for which life does not endlessly repeat itself but flies off the earth in a tangent, so to speak, a life that progresses. For Nietzsche, Christianity is a pathetic religion, a religion of pity. Pity for him is a disease, and he would have none of it. He wanted to survive in this world, not the next. The "truths" of Christianity, especially those derived from Plato's Apollonian idolatry of eternal ideals, which he idolizes as real, and the craving for permanent supreme being, which Platonic philosophy identifies with Reality, in fact negate or destroy the actual truth, that of truly sacred life, the real, the dynamic, Dionysian life.
"Plato is boring. In reality my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian - the concept 'good' is already the highest value with him, - that rather than use any other expression I would prefer to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the hard word, 'superior bunkum,' or, if you would like it better, 'idealism.'
"Christianity," further quoth Nietzsche in The Antichrist, has sided with everything weak, low and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservation instincts of strong of strong life: it has corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects, by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality are sinful, misleading and full of temptation. The most lamentable example of this was the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the perversion of his reason through original sin, whereas it had only been perverted by Christianity."
Nietzsche of course contemned Kant's moral philosophy, which did not depend on proof of god's existence but on automatic duty to his Kant's version of Christianity's Golden Rule:
"What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, to think, feel as an automaton of ;duty,' without internal promptings, without a profound personal predilection, without joy? This is the recipe par excellence of decadence and even of idiocy.... Kant became an idiot." (The Antichrist)
Nietzsche's fictional Zarathustra is the epitome of opposition to Christianity, the counter-ideal to the ascetic ideal which amounts to denial of life and a demand for another, imaginary life, which is, for him, really nothing, eternal nothingness or death, not temporal life, which is everything. His Superman transcends the ascetic ideal of denial. If life is hellish repetition, he will accept it. Yet he believes there can be a higher life, in this world, not in the next. The superior person reaches higher, but he does not at the same time dehumanize or condemn as sin his origin, the very ground he stands on. He does not destroy the old but presses himself into new forms, new values. His life, then, is an art.
In his 1848 lecture on Wagner, Nietzsche scribbled, "I believed that the world was created from the aesthetic standpoint, as a play, and that as a moral phenomenon it was a deception: on that account I came to the conclusion that the world was only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon."
Havelock Ellis (Dance of Life), during the course of his sympathetic discourse on Gaultier's philosophy of illusionism, Bovarysm, a philosophy Gaultier derived from a study of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, opined, "Our picture of the world, for good or evil, is an idealized picture, a fiction, a waking dream.... But when we idealize the world we begin by first idealizing ourselves."
Gustave Flaubert, frustrated Romantic yet acclaimed pioneer of modern French realism in literature, personally felt that reality was "shit," a disgusting thing he put in his mouth to fashion fiction. His family was well endowed, which allowed him to avoid the detested office work which his legal training might have lead, and to withdraw to his family cottage at Rouen and write novels. He was the literary idol of the art for art's sake school of thought. Whatever art was, it was a way to avoid reality if one could get away with it. It could be easily justified by reversion to the ancient ascetic view that the real world is really an illusion. But this sort of artist would not be an either/or monk in a cell, but would live an aesthetic life in his studio. The aesthetic life has several advantages, one being that artists and those who appreciate their are can enjoy things without actually possessing them, just be looking at them. Of course a starving artist would relish a study of a ham sandwich and bowl of fruit more than a bulging-belly, bourgeois patron of the arts.
Would the world not be more beautiful if more people withdrew from the mad competition for the actual possession of things and enjoyed artistic representations of those things at a distance? Better yet for the greedy world if the art was abstract. Such a better world would be a great market for artists to sell their wares. Others, not so inclined to be painters as such, could instead live artfully, could they not? As for the artists, they need not mix with the crowd and try to prove some version of the 'truth.' No, the artist should lay aside the ideological arguments, the attempt to make the truth, and simply take up a fragment of existence and reveal its truth. If artists would only focus on their art in solitude, they would pose no danger whatsoever to society, and their creations would greatly benefit a society that could then enjoy beholding things presented or represented rather than possessing the things in themselves.
Alas, as Ice-T screamed of Ozzie and Harriet, "The world is not like that!" Creativity is revolutionary. Arts of all sorts including literary art have a reputation for fomenting rebellion, "corrupting morals" and the like. Furthermore, we admit that reality sometimes tastes like shit, but so does artifice. There is something distasteful in the view that the world is just a stage upon which hypocrites (Gk. 'actors') play, that life is just a Machiavellian "game" of power plays.
"What is good?" asked Nietzsche. "All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing, that resistance has been overcome." Wherefore Nietzsche was much admired by the militant Prussian 'realists' to whom Germany's economic prosperity tasted like shit.
Finally, although there is some truth in it, there is something insincere in the perspective that the world is phony.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Mister Groundhog, To be fair to McTaggart, I must ask you to supply a quote or two from the man on said issues of time, past-present-future, in order to measure for myself whether he was duped by linguistic machinations and failed to see through the transparency so obvious to you and me. Madame Me
Time is hard to think about because we are not used to considering it as separate from the contents we call events. And therein is a clue to understanding what in tarnation McTaggart is talking about when he says, on the one hand, that the series, past, present, future, is essential to time, and, on the other hand, that time is unreal.
McTaggart's philosophical study, The Unreality of Time, is obtuse to those of us who are uncultivated by the philosophy of time. We wish he would have written the paper for us in the form of an extended brief setting forth his Proposition up front; giving us a History of the Question so that we may see what others have contributed to the subject; letting us know what the Occasion for the Question is and why we should even be interested; listing important Issues to consider; providing us with a clear and cogent Argument supporting the Proposition; and summing it all up with a short Conclusion. But the professor ploughs right into the subject as if he believes we are familiar with it. Perhaps not, so we must either wrack our brains over it, or turn to other professors for an explanation, or drop what some philosophers say is the most important subject of all time! Let's wrack our brains.
McTaggart proposes that time is unreal. Time as we think of it requires change. There could be no change without this series: past, present, future. The terms of that trinity must be incompatible with one another if there is to be change, but the terms are also compatible and that is self-contradictory. Therefore time is unreal.
Here are some choice statements from McTaggart.
"Having, as it seems to me, succeeded in proving that there can be no time without an A series (past, present, future), it remains to prove that an A series cannot exist, and therefore time cannot exist. This would involve that time is not real at all, since it is admitted that the only way in which time can be real is by existing....
"Two events are exactly in the same places in the time-series, relatively to one another, a million years before they take place, while each one of them is taking place, and when they are a million years in the past. The same is true of the relation of the moments to each other. Again, if the moments of time are to be distinguished as separate realities from the events that happen in them, the relation between an event and a moment is unvarying. Each moment is the same moment in the future, in the present, and in the past....
"Past, present and future are incompatible determinations. every event must be one or the other, but no event can be more than one. This is essential to the meaning of the terms....
"For time, as we have seen, involves change, and the only change we can get is from future to present, and from present to past....
"The characteristics, therefore, are incompatible. But every event has them all. If M is past, it has been present and future. If it is present, it has been future and will be past. Thus all the three incompatible terms are predicable of each event, which is obviously inconsistent with their being incompatible, and inconsistent with their producing change...."
To be continued in the Name of the Past, the Present, and the Future, as Time.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
McTaggart's Dunderheaded Category of One
Mister Groundhog, I couldn't agree with you more, but even though I agree, the argument you put forth makes McTaggart somewhat of a dunderhead, and what are we to make of that? Is it possible to be brilliant and dunderheaded simultaneously? Madame Me
A Man's Intuition tells me that McTaggart's mystical predilection disposed him to find his conclusion ("Time is unreal") in his premise ("Time is unreal"). The fundamental presumption or aim of mysticism is Unity. Say, the unity of God and World including its inhabitants; to wit: One. Deists of course insist that such a unity is no unity at all, but is perverse pantheism because the deity is identified with the time-space multiplicity of finite things; but as deists they are in fact dualists who would divorce a personal God from Her creation, and that gives us due cause to think they love the world more than they would admit in their profession of love for God.
The mystic wants One, whether that be Being or Nothing. God versus World (including humankind) is a psychological projection of Individual versus World, or Subject versus Object. The mystic wants identity of perceiving subject and perceived object, and calls that identity Reality or One. Of course such an identity precludes the time-space continuum from the ultimate Reality. Hence McTaggart, following the traditional mystical path, posits, "Time is unreal." All else besides Reality is illusion, or, as the Hindus say, maya.
But we must beware of the semantic traps, and not try to leap through brick walls, or off cliffs to gain the universe but lose oneself. For all practical intents and purposes, those walls are real; that is, if you wish, real illusions. Please note here that McTaggart's need to make the real/unreal dichotomy is representative of the traditional "knee-jerk" either/or evaluation, which ironically separates him from the One.
Wherefore it would seem that McTaggart had a single a priori (prior to illusory experience) category; to wit: Being - which is to say, on the other hand, Nothing. As brilliant as he was, he was, in my opinion, confused in respect to this ultimate object of thought because, wrapped up in his subjectivity, he had confused subject and object. Further, his logic in relation to reality is Aristotelian, and is not up to date with the revolutionary scientific thought of his time; by the way, his protege, Bertrand Russell, broke ground. Ironically, McTaggart, mystically inclined, might have been better off resorting to the dynamic logic of modern science rather than reverting so often to the static classical logic to make his points; in doing so, he actually defeated his "mystical" processes, some of which are now upheld by modern or postmodern science.
Lost in thought, ignoring the limitations of abstractions, prejudiced to find the conclusion already embedded in his premise, that time is unreal, McTaggart became preoccupied with mere abstractions, and wound up confusing symbols with the realities for which they should stand. In essence, he actually denied the reality of our perceptions of the world, and, in doing so, it follows that he unwittingly denied that language can have any meaning at all. Hence, to be facetious, we might logically conclude that everything he said in respect to Reality was quite meaningless, and that we can safely ignore his statements. After all, his a priori is... Nothing.
Further, as to his logical proof of Nothing, McTaggart not only confused subject and object, and symbol and reality, but he confused objects of thought with predicates, in holding that past, present, future, which are predicates of time, are identical with the object of thought or idea he speaks of, namely, time. That is, he relied on the so-called law of identity, the claim that object and predicate are identical - I mean the "is" of identity. Even an equality statement such as 2+2=4, which means 4=4, implies a minimal, formal difference necessary to make the statement. Of course 'is' does not necessarily mean 'equal.' Past is not equal to time nor is it time, but is a predicate of time - time is an adjective refering to motion, and is, loosely speaking, adverbial. The past simply refers to a past time, and the past time of existence of an object does not contradict time simply because time has other indexes - present and future. Again, the tenses are predicates or indexes time. Similarly, in dating, we have Me in 1960, Me in 1980 - Me is not the date: the date is a predicate, or what can be said about Me, that I lived in 1960, 1980 (etc).
I propose that our language necessarily refers to the world in order to be meaningful, for as subjects we have only the objective world in common to compare. Following Adam Smith's thinking, dunderheads might primitively divide language into nouns and adjectives - some adjectives refer to static qualities of things, others to dynamic qualities (verbs) of things. Of course the word 'time' refers to our contrived descriptions of motion. The word time may be a noun referring to an object of thought or idea, but it is really not a "thing" or a substance in itself, despite all the books written about it as if the ideal were "real." To identify the notion of time is to idealize it, to make an ideal "real" - the great mistake of Plato. Time is a word referring to duration, a comparison of processes for the sake of measurement. Time (etc) as a word referring to our descriptions and understandings of processes (etc) is an adverb. "He walked swiftly. He walked five miles in an hour."
Again, McTaggart has Nothing or Being for his a prior. Now he was familiar with Kant. We know Kant defined time and space as a priori (prior to experience) categories, upon which the illusory intuition, or perception of sensed things by a unity of consciousness, depended - perception is illusory because the things-in-themselves can never be known. In fine, The Thingie is unknown, is The Unknown, or, if you will, the Supreme Being.
Persons who styled themselves "transcendentalists", especially the New England Transcendentalists in America, mistook Kant's effusions about intuition and a priori categories as an argument for direct individual access to God; that is, for non-sensory, spiritual intuition of the Supreme Being. But Kant warned us about the faults inherent in reasoning divorced from experience, the sort of abstract reasoning based on mystical, wish-fulfilling prejudices. The further one strays from "worldly" experience with abstractions, the more illusory the transcendental logic becomes. Logical systems of thought are designed to prove or to demonstrate that certain arguments are false; that is obviously a handy tool to own whenever the falsity has a direct bearing on practical life. However, systems of logic do not prove that any proposition, no matter how logical, is true to any other reality than that of the particular abstract logical system itself. Hence Kant warned us to beware lest we get lost in thought, that transcendental logic is illusory, lest we leap to absurd conclusions - faith for Kant was a practical presumption, with attendant ethical-moral duties.
Finally, I propose that we are all dunderheads when it comes to the One, and, for that matter, the Many. But if we are to know anything at all, we must have more than one, or many.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Dear Mister Groundhog,
I couldn’t agree with you more — but even though I agree, the argument you put forth makes McTaggart somewhat of a dunderhead, and what are we to make of that? Is it possible to be brilliant and dunderheaded simultaneously? If so, there goes any hope I might place in seemingly brilliant mortals. Therefore, to be fair to McTaggart, I must ask you to supply a quote or two from the man on said issues of time, past-present-future, in order to measure for myself whether he was duped by linguistic machinations and failed to see through the transparency so obvious to you and me. After all, the Groundhog issue is too important to be held hostage to semantics, although I realize many would disagree with that last statement. For instance, Nietzsche put forth that our realities are linguistic creations; that is, we reify through language. Appearances that we appropriate through naming eventually become essences and things.
“Nietzsche supposes that there is not much difference between realists and idealists, objectivists and subjectivists, except for linguistic habit. At bottom, all of these stem from origins in our passions, fantasies, and interests.” (T. Beckman, 1995)
Now that’s a sharp slap in the face of our rational underpinnings, or at least what we’ve psychologized of our rational underpinnings. Additionally, if we are to consider anything of Nietzsche’s meditations on the nature of what we call reality, time notwithstanding, then we must also wrap our minds around his denial that we have any organ with which to fix reality and thus are indefinitely subject to untruth. Argh!
“To the Apollinian [sic] scientist this is unbearable; hence, art is what makes our situation bearable because art, being ‘playful’ with appearance, gets around its untruth. This is probably the most important aphorism of [Nietzsche's] Book II and it concludes everything that he has been developing about art.” (T. Beckman)
Is it possible McTaggart simply was not being artful, that is, playful enough when asserting his logical contradiction between past, present, and future, and therefore could not escape the tar pit of his own untruths? And is this the definition of a dunderhead?
I await your reply.
Madame Me
http://authorsden.com/melinacostello
P.S. And of course there is Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrence of the Same,” which I fear we will not be able to circumvent in our Groundhog musings.
Monday, July 26, 2004
McTaggart's Series A Contradiction
Dear Madame Melina:
McTaggart's logical contradiction - between past, present, and future - which he asserted to prove that "time" is "unreal", is based on an linguistic error. He posits that the three tenses are three different things which simply cannot exist at the same time. But the tenses are not things but are something that can be said about things. I mean, the tenses are adjectival, or predicate classes indicating or indexing the relation of a continuously existing thing to a particular point in time, say, the time you might speak of it as something that existed, exists, or will exist.
Do you agree?
In other words, the thing which you might refer to might be a past thing, a present thing, or a future thing in reference to yourself as you read this note. That a thing was red, is white, and will become blue, does not contradict the existence of the colored thing itself simply because the qualities or colors changed. The categories past, present, future, do not contradict the existence of the continuant or thing existing in time in reference to your perception at a certain time.
Do you follow me on this?
In other words, I think McTaggart errs in ignoring the three tenses as tenses, or categories of existence in time. But to ignore the tenses is absurd because that defeats their purpose, which is to serve as indexes. Why McTaggart, a master logician, did not recognize his error I do not know. Perhaps, being the mystic that he was, he proceeded with a prejudice or foregone conclusion, that the changes we describe when we use the term 'time' do not really exist, that all action or motion is some sort of illusion. Since that is contrary to common sense, perhaps he contrived an abstract logical argument, one unconsciously designed to fall into a contradiction in order to avoid change and embrace eternity (hence avoid the implication of death). Such a trap might be easily constructed, since "time" does not exist as a thing but as a general term referring to change in general. A time refers to a change of one process in respect to another, say the rain which began to fall when the clock read 0745 yesterday.
If McTaggart said, What we mean by time is 'unreal' because it is an ideal, I might agree with him, for time is not a concrete thing, but is a notion of change. Time is not some-thing that passes us by. Perfect or metered time is an abstract ideal. Furthermore, time is something which cannot be rightly said to exist in itself or to refer to itself as a passage or flow, as if we could measure time with time, or compare a change to its change, or have a ruler measure itself, and so on. To say that change changes, or that what becomes becomes, is redundant. I mean to say that the "passage of time" is a myth.
Of course I might be mistaken, wherefore I look forward to your advice, in the name of the past, the present, and the future, as one.
Yours truly,
Mister Groundhog
