To Know One's Limits

The whole purpose of posting my most recent "Idea seed" was to bring into focus just how thankless a task trying to figure how things work and what constitutes a "Primum Movens".

Look, it isn't a bad choice of things to fail at.  There is some damn fine company in the ranks of people have failed.  Truthfully speaking, there is no evidence anywhere that anyone has ever succeeded.  So what the hell.  Thinking about "whether not, at last, nature will be understood" is probably the best thing that a person can do.

So, lets talk about how things look from the inputs that the blob of tissue residing inside my cranium uses to make sense of the world..   Having spent the last 35-some-odd years thinking that I had a handle on things, I have come to the conclusion that the word fatuous best defined this misconception.  Oh, don't get me wrong, as stated before, I am in great company.  But it is time to take a stand down and resharpen the tools. 

In a sense, I have to get back to my roots.  I have to go back and revisit those certainties of twenty years ago, the ones that I discussed obliquely earlier this week.  Nature being understood isn't going to happen in a cage surrounded by artifacts of the mundane.  Simply put, the mundane is a drag on the spirit and the mind.

I think that the only way that I am going to get a handle on the way that the world works, my only chance of understanding nature is to continue my current choice of being a "Mad Monk" and remove the physical distractions in my life.

Now, I am not going to sit around, mumbling some nonsense about jewels and lotuses, I think that you have to still contribute to pay for your vittles.  So I will continue being the resident curmudgeon at the VAspa for the next little bit.  I will read things, and I will mix what I read around in that mass of tissue between my ears, and if I come up with anything interesting, I will write it down here and you are more than free to criticize. 

Initial Rebuttal

Working in the Netherworld between the Transcendental and the Mundane

Or

Shit Mike: I still work for a living, I can't stay up all night pondering stuff like this (or maybe I can)

Anyway, I have two dozen of the recreational cookies available for consumption at my place anytime anyone shows up.  However, considering the vagaries of the region between our current enlightened attitude here on the left coast and Jeff Seesions, and not discounting my lack of desire to be raped in a federal prison, I believe that I will allow any and all to to come and fetch them.

I guess that I am looking at this in a different way.  I think that A.S. is trying to tell us that our minds are structured around the mundane necessities of the world that we live in.  The categories that we use in analyzing the mundane are survival characteristics, hardwired somewhere in the regions between the basal ganglia and the neocortex. To be a human is to engage in pattern recognition, it is both a gift and a trap.

The mundane world requires this ability as the price that one pays for survival. We need the ability to recognize pattern and extrapolate from them is to be able to survive in a changing world. But that ability too colors our ability to analyze that of the transcendent, we keep wanting to use our patterns of this world to analyze that which is not.

Here is where the problem lies, that is why I wonder (but have in no way accepted) the roles of magic in the world. Our minds tend toward the appreciation and cataloging of phenomenon. In order to know “how we are to solve the riddle of this dream of life” something more is required. What that something consists of has been the source of heated discussions for millennia.

Religion and some flavors of philosophy have taken up the challenge and came up with some remarkably awful (at least in my mind) explanations of the origin and meaning of the world. Most of them posit mankind serving as a central, and perhaps dominant role in this worldview and explanation of the riddle. But these century-old explanations, built upon a western worldview and a Judeo-Christian mythology are looking shopworn. Other religions seem to dance around the problem and have equal problems.

Science and the general populace have taken an easy way out. With the insistence on experimental proof and “common sense” they have slyly taken religion and faith out of the game. They insist that the patterns that define the mundane are the only patterns that can be proved and that “matter”. But non-spaciotemporal “things” are difficult, if not impossible to understand in a way that is consistent with the patterns that our minds use to make sense of the mundane.

But Philosophy keeps trying to push past the constraints draped on it by these patterns. But to use language itself is to fall into the trap. To understand the transcendent, and to explain such to another meat-unit requires words. And words themselves come preloaded with meaning. To say things like bench and glass brings in a density of meaning and patterns. To say infinite opens up the universe for discussion. To say non-spaciotemporal merely brings sullen silence.

What I think A.S. is saying is; that we need to develop a set of tools to recognize a different class of patterns. The tools we have just aren’t up to the job.

Discussion Beginning

The Failure of Philosophy

by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders

THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY: A BRIEF DIALOGUE.

A: PHILOSOPHY has hitherto been a failure. It could not, indeed, have been otherwise; because, instead of confining himself to the better understanding of the world as given in experience, the philosopher has aspired to pass at one bound beyond it, in the hope of discovering the last foundation of all existence and the eternal relations of things. Now these are matters which our intellect is quite incapable of grasping. Its power of comprehension never reaches beyond what philosophers call "finite things," or, as they sometimes say, "phenomena;" in short, just the fleeting shadows of this world, and the interests of the individual, the furtherance of his aims and the maintenance of his person. And since our intellect is thus immanent, our philosophy should be immanent too, and not soar to supramundane things, but be content with gaining a thorough grasp of the world of experience. It surely provides matter enough for such a study.

B. If that is so, intellect is a miserable present for Nature to give us. According to your view, the mind serves only to grasp the relations that constitute our wretched existence as individuals —relations which cease with the brief span of our temporal life; and is utterly unsuited to face those problems which are alone worthy to interest a thinking being—what our existence really is, and what the world means as a whole; in short, how we are to solve the riddle of this dream of life. If all this is so, and our mind could never grasp these things even though they were explained to it, then I cannot see that it is worth my while to educate my mind, or to pay any attention to it at all; it is a thing unworthy of any respect.

A. My dear sir, if we wrangle with Nature, we are usually in the wrong. For Nature does nothing that is useless or in vain—nihil facit frustra nec supervaeaneum.¹ We are only temporal, finite, fleeting beings, creatures of a dream: and our existence passes away like a shadow. What do we want with an intellect to grasp things that are infinite, eternal, absolute? And how should such an intellect ever leave the consideration of these high matters to apply itself again to the small facts of our ephemeral life—the facts that are the only realities for us and our proper concern? How could it ever be of any use for them again? If Nature had bestowed this intellect upon us, the gift would not only have been an immense mistake and quite in vain; it would even have conflicted with the very aims that Nature has designed for us. For what good do we do, as Shakespeare says,

We fools of Nature,

So horridly to shake our disposition

With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.²

If we had this perfect, this all embracing, metaphysical insight, should we be capable of any physical insight at all, or of going about our proper business? Nay, it might plunge us for ever into a state of chill horror, like that of one who has seen a ghost.

B. But surely in all this you are making a notorious petitio principii.³ In saying that we are merely temporal, fleeting, finite beings, you beg the whole question. We are also infinite, eternal, and the original principle of Nature itself. Is it not then well worth our while to go on trying if we cannot fathom Nature after all—ob nicht Natur zuletzt sich doch ergründe?⁴

A. Yes; but according to your own philosophy we are infinite and eternal only in a certain sense. We are infinite and eternal, not as phenomena, but as the original principle of Nature; not as individuals, but as the inmost essence of the world; not because we are subjects of knowledge, but merely as manifestations of the will to live. The qualities of which you speak are qualities that have to do with intelligence, not will. As intelligent beings we are individual and finite. Our intellect, then, is also of this character. The aim of our life, if I may use a metaphorical expression, is a practical, not a theoretical one; our actions, not our knowledge, appertain to eternity. The use of the intellect is to guide our actions, and at the same time to hold up the mirror to our will; and this is, in effect, what it does. If the intellect had more to do, it would very probably become unfit even for this. Think how a small superfluity of intellect is a bar to the career of the man endowed with it. Take the case of genius: while it may be an inward blessing to its possessor, it may also make him very unhappy in his relations with the world.⁵

B. Good, that you reminded me of genius. To some extent it upsets the facts you are trying to vindicate. A genius is a man whose theoretical side enormously outweighs his practical. Even though he cannot grasp eternal relations, he can see a little deeper into the things of this world; attamen est quodam prodire tenus.⁶ It is quite true that this does render the intellect of genius less fit to grasp the finite things of earth; just as a telescope is a good thing, but not in a theater. Here we seem to have reached a point where we agree, and we need not pursue the subject further.

1Cf. Leucippus: "Everything that happens does so for a reason and of necessity."

2 Hamlet, I., Sc. 4.

3a fallacy in which a conclusion is taken for granted in the premises; begging the question.

4(to see) "whether not, at last, nature will be understood"

5 Translators Note. This is a favourite remark of Schopenhauer's. Some account of his interesting theory of Genius touched upon at the conclusion of this dialogue may be found in the concluding section of another volume in the series, The Art of Literature.

6Best I can work out is “It is still worthwhile to do it”