On essentials

In these past few weeks, my train of thought has been tossed mercilessly between tracks by each new reading, conversation, encounter; veering off its initial course into novel terrain.

It began with the notion of inherency, and a consequent paradox - by which extrinsic measure do people use to ascertain intrinsic value? How have we come to hold belief in the intrinsic value of life (human or otherwise) - a concept so strange, so contrary to what the natural laws of survival dictate? To think, if something as basic as one's right to existence rests on one's individual 'fitness', we could hardly proffer the argument that life in all its forms - weak and strong, sick and well, young and old - is inherently worth preserving.

And next, an onslaught of anthropological concepts that brought the discussion into the realm of universals. Is what is intrinsic, intrinsic to all? Do all human cultures abide by the same basic rules (-assuming the universality of an internal system that guides individual behaviour)?  How do we free ourselves from the very biases that enable us to gather with our senses some symbolic understanding of the world around us? Impossible as an attempt to rid thought of language. 

First, despair. Realising one's necessary partiality, a handicap inextricable from our very nature - an inability to take things at face value, to see things for what they are. Second, hope. Relief at the inconsequentiality of our efforts to understand everything, believing that omniscience lies boundless, wide and deep and far beyond the most foreign of borders.

***

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note.

I cannot be sure what the author's (Sartre) intent was, but only of what it impressed upon me - that there is a superfluousness to life that detracts from what we feel to be essential - precious, pure and true. We pore through thick layers of styrofoam and bubble wrap, before finally arriving at the tiny weight, transparent as gold, encased within.

***

And again, it arose: the need to shed
To strip the skin of culture off its seed, each shred
To lay life bare, fresh, bruised and plain
To devour it whole: flesh and pulp,
kernel, shell and grain.

On reductionism

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the subChristian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.   

C.S. Lewis (1944). Is Theology Poetry?

On knowing and truth, pt. 2

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky remarks of our instinctive - and violent - aversion towards pure (scientific) objectivity:

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point... I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?

One of my favourite bits from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey goes:

“It was the worst of all in class, though,” she said with decision. “That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head – and I could not get it out – that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping – and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” 

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Because truth, in its purest form, offends us. Its specificity startles us; it harbours an extreme devotion to itself - a degree of particularity unrivalled in all of nature. How can we know it? Surely in the face of such exceeding singularity we would cease to be individuals; we would be consumed whole, what would be left of us to call our own?

How narrow a way it seems from a distance! But if we dared approach it perhaps we would catch a glimpse of the broad expanse of path that lies just beyond its gate, stretching far and wide and deep into an infinite horizon (made up of many lines, all forming just one).

On knowing and truth, pt. 1

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I
 lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 - Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

Two things, or maybe three. How fragile our minds - how fragile our world, in which we experience only through our minds. How limited. How incapable of reaching that great height, from which we can know anything to be true - except through faith of some sort. A leap. A knowing beyond knowing.

And can even the truest skeptic live without belief in the possibility that there are things worth knowing that have yet to be known?

***

Started thinking deeper into the concept of objectivity upon encountering R.D. Laing's The Divided Selfn. Laing writes:

In contrast to the reputable 'objective' or 'scientific', we have the disreputable 'subjective', 'intuitive' or worst of all, 'mystical' It is interesting, for example that one frequently encounters 'merely' before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being 'merely' objective. 

The first definition of subjectivity I came across online was this:

existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.

But what, then, isn't subjective? If it is only through our mind that we perceive anything at all. If our very existence is a purely subjective one, if subjectivity is not a crutch but the crux of all experience - how can we lay claim to any form, shape or type of objectivity?

Again, Laing writes:

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.

And I cannot help but think: Perhaps one day we will really come to believe we know all the answers, all the explanations, all for the reasons for everything, and I will be able to explain everything away - to science, to reason, to the laws that govern nature - but then, who and what will be left in all the universe, to explain me? 

***

Because now, what does it mean to know anything? It seems that to lay claim to knowledge one has to either admit ignorance, or be found guilty of it.

But what about things that can be assessed objectively? Studied, measured, calculated, deduced. In the grand court of Reason, is everything false until proven true?

If you were to make the claim that objective knowledge - quantifiable knowledge - is the only knowledge worth knowing, what evidence would you call up to the stand? Even if one could acquire the dimensions of the universe or a formula to predict every possible trajectory of the human mind an objective case would not be made.

Maybe we all have a little more faith than we realise.

On wordlessness

"A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dragon Princess

As I wrestle now with words, straining inwards to reach adequate expression, in my native tongue, for these foreign symbols - I think now of all the thoughts in the world left latent, laid in crevices beneath the surface (as unformed as man first lay in the ground), of all the beautiful and brilliant sentiments that have only ever had substance in the mind of one; substance charged with a vigour that was never reciprocated by any other - no language, no form of agency, no outlet.

And thus contained, unexpressed, suppressed by the weight of their own immensity, made void, lost forever to a collective invisible consciousness - they created something else entirely; that which haunts - and yet, escapes - us: the inexplicable.

It collapses like a candle, folding into itself in the same way 

a starving man would eat himself alive 

and nothing would be accomplished.

- "Fragile", 14 June 2012