On Truth
Today, I got onto the topic of metaphysics with Kaori over dinner. These things happen. Very interesting conversations, though rare, because they are made infinitely more difficult with the language barrier I now face. As Kaori told me, "Today's William is difficult." Luckily, I'm accustomed to explain things in very simple terms.
So we were discussing colors, and how there is no practical definition for colors. "It's like this!" An apple, a fire engine, blood. In fact, in Japanese the colors seemed to be pulled right out of objects -- the word for gray, for example, means "the color of ash." Culturally, colors differ substantially: our green leaks into Japanese blue. There is only one word for blue and green in Irish (glas?). And I cannot tell the difference between indigo and purple -- when I was growing up, rainbows went red, orange, yellow, green, blue purple. And apparently, English has more "sub"-colors than any other language (magenta, turquoise, fuchsia, etc.). Another language has only "light" or "dark" to choose from, no colors at all (this is third-hand knowledge at best, I'm afraid).
Science, of course, has broken our colors up in the most logical divisions, as is its wont, but even the most fanatical adherents of the Cult of Science must realize that this has little bearing on our conceptual divisions, where these are at best a good guide. So somehow, given a number of examples, we extract from them something we can hold up to every other instance we encounter, and say, yes, indeed, this is red. From whence comes Plato's forms (what really are, while things are just shadows) and Aristotle's universals (extrapolated from particulars, or "things"), and all metaphysical arguments basically come down to one simple question: which came first, the chicken, or the egg? Some say we can't have the egg before the chicken, others the other way around, while some maintain there are no chickens at all, others that there are no eggs!
Of course, we can already see there are bigger things than colors at stake -- even bigger issues than chickens. In fact, what holds for colors is symptomatic of all concepts: if you look long enough in the dictionary, you will find out that everything comes down to an indefinite, like color, or worse, a circle. That upon which definitions rest can never itself be defined: such as Aristotle's "substance," upon which all things are predicated, but itself cannot be defined. What's really strange is these ways of seeing a thing are always apparently pre-figured: I see a car before I see a system of colors and shapes.
But there is a more subtle experience: one we can go our whole lives without noticing consciously. Yet most of our lives we flit in and out of this state, more in than out: we experience the world without conceptual division. The world is a single piece, and we move as one with it, indivisible from world. Today I was nearly hit by a bike because I was making my way home and, as is usual for me, got lost on the way there in words. My world was consumed by thinking about this essay, in fact, and though, through the violent imposition of concepts on the past, I can say that my eyes were open, I was certainly walking the path home, I found myself much nearer than I was before, and I found that nearness not at all surprising (when concepts return, they always come with a feeling of "having been that way already"). What I did find surprising was the sudden appearance of the bike, which shattered my world into concepts again, and I was suddenly aware of the restaurant, my own body moving, obstacles on my left and right.
Today, I used the metaphor of a fabric, which I rather like, because we are already accustomed to speaking of "the fabric of time-space" and so on, and moreover fabric is perfectly uncountable -- we can speak of "a piece" of fabric, but never "a" fabric. So from this mess of fabric that is our world, we cut out patterns, as though we were going to make clothes for the world, though it is rather more like we are designing a jigsaw puzzle out of it. We must note, however, that we cut ourselves out of this world as well: we do not stand safely outside the pattern like a seamstress, but rather we are the fabric as well. The fabric can be cut all sorts of different ways, but we are accustomed and trained to cut it in particular ways, so we start thinking "such and such things are" as though they could be in no other way. We cut the fabric with our language -- or more properly speaking, with the "logos," which is the foundation of language, which supplies the possibility of both words and thought (which are by no means the same, sorry Plato). These then, we might say, are what Plato meant by forms, Aristotle by universals. However, today, reading Heidegger's "The Word of Nietzsche," I suggested three divisions: the conscious understanding of these patterns we call "concepts," the consciously constructed concepts we might call "constructs" (this concept owes its formal understanding as I now present it (hopefully with some accuracy) to J. Guerrero), and finally, there is the pattern such as it appears to us, "pre-figured," in the "already present-at-hand," which is the true "form" which I venture to explain more accurately as "eidos in waiting." (Waiting for what? Hold on a sec.) In other words, I saw today, not a "buzzing, blooming confusion," but an immediately familiar object hurtling towards me, which resolved itself shortly thereafter into the conscious declaration, "bike" -- and I was already moving out of the way before "bike" expanded into the assertion "the bike is going to run you down, you fool". From here, we might even venture to say that we can understand Protagoras's assertion that "man is the measure of all things," especaially since "measure" fits so nicely into our metaphor. Plato takes Protagoras to mean that "perception is truth," an interpretation that he does not question particularly closely in one of those odd passages of apparent carelessness one often finds in Plato (this is from Theaetetus, if anyone's interested). I think we can now say that at least there's something more to it than that.
But what, exactly, does this suggest? I mean, for "T"ruth, which if nothing else Plato points out is intimately tied up with this question. Ok, so how different are object and concept, anyway? This seems obvious enough...concepts are in our heads (conscious), objects are "outside" us. But wait, "before" we cut our pattern out, there was no "outside" -- before division there was (tautologically) no division between me and whatever object I have in view. In point of fact, that things are somehow "pre-figured" so that I can perceive them in the first place, rather than construct them one "pixel" at a time, suggests that the eidos in waiting is itself not "internal." Nor is it exactly external, until such time as it becomes suddenly this object, here -- this is what eidos is in waiting for, to become as some thing. In other words, it appears that we can pull chickens and eggs out of one another, like a rather messy magic trick. So if there is no difference, at this most basic level, between eidos and perceptio, perception of object and form of object, then isn't truth "perception" in a sense? Oh, but doesn't this get messy. Maybe more messy than our magic trick.
Ok, let's try something different. This is what occurred to (hit) me tonight, before I was nearly killed by my first test of my hypothesis: is the bike truly going to run into me? Heidegger, to put it in the simplest terms, defines truth as "unconcealedness," that which is "uncovered". And don't we suddenly "get it," sometimes after reading the same passage for the fifteenth time -- suddenly, something new is revealed in the words, and "it is true", even if, paradoxically, we later realize it was false. Oh boy. So how can perception be both true and false? Well, at the metaphysical level, haven't we already seen that all language is "false," insofar as it divides that which is an entirety, the "Same" in a sense? So all perception is false. On the other hand, all language (at the ontological level, from which words emerge at a second-level expression analogous to concepts) is cut from the fabric of World itself, and thus the substance of it is necessarily "true" if we are saying anything at all, but that truth is "concealed" by the very pattern itself, making it appear not as fabric, but as pattern. So in so far as language tries to say anything about the World ontologically, it will be un-truth, necessarily unraveling the very "thing" which it is trying to express. Yet pattern things in the right way, for example reading something the way it was written to be read, and the fabric can suddenly present itself, pattern vanishing if for only a moment, before reasserting itself into this or that "thing," the way we might at first see a woman in a beautiful midnight dress, realize that it is in fact made from the finest satin, before losing ourselves again in the appreciation of the beauty of "the dress," the way the satin has been fashioned. It is these sudden flashes of "fabric" we see when we suddenly realize the truth of this or that assertion: it is the way that images and parables such as Plato, Heraclitus, and even Jesus often use can reveal to us "truth" out of un-truth: it is the way myths speak. But of course, there are better and worse patterns for displaying fabric, so their falsehood often creeps back into our awareness. The most true statements, ontologically, are those which continually slip: the pattern is so suggestive of the pattern that we can't quite hold onto either, and we often find ourselves looking at a blank, dead page, unable to understand the words, however grammatically they may be arranged. Then we'll grasp it, suddenly the fabric will be there with in our reach -- and the harder we try to hold onto it, the more it will slide through our fingers. It is in this way that we are now trying to read Protagoras: Plato shows us how the words are, literally speaking, entirely ridiculous -- but is there a way in which they are true even still? Yet understanding that truth is quite slippery: we keep falling on "man," which has already been broken off into a concept, and of course Protagoras can't mean "man" in the sense of you or me. That would be tantamount to solipsism, which as far as I can tell is the concept Plato invented for refuting this view (though he did not coin the word). In some sense, he must mean the fabric itself, since there is nothing but that which is (by definition), so that which is must itself cut itself. Anyone else dizzy yet? The best answer I've seen to this is the massive, almost impossible "Being and Time" by Heidegger, where his job is in some sense explaining how the chicken and the egg can be different modes of the same thing.
Anyway, you get the idea. How "normal" truth gets derived from all this I'll leave to your own extrapolation, as it is more or less a matter of following the breadcrumbs from here. But just to say, it seems to me that this is a matter of fabric and pattern at one remove, such that we can now make comparisons, because we are not dealing with "that which is," but mere objects. So to say "I am flying" is not true, because in point of fact, the pattern I want to make "isn't cutting." The fabric does not yield to this pattern. So the concept I make does not match the pattern, and thus "falsehood" reveals itself to me. But in a certain sense, as we said, patterns are themselves false, so it is easy enough to find eidos become as object which appears to match our concepts, and so we see truth where there is "really" falsehood: I see a shadow, which is pre-figured to me as familiar, which comes to me as the concept "danger," and I recoil. Then I discover it to be a mere concept "shadow." It is the same fabric, what I saw was "True," but it was not "true," because the way my familiarness was figured was less correct than another way of figuring would be (that is to say, "harmless shadow" is less un-true than "horrible William-eating demon beast"). Quod erat demonstrandum.
Sorry I didn't get round to the auto-biographical stuff. Next time!
So we were discussing colors, and how there is no practical definition for colors. "It's like this!" An apple, a fire engine, blood. In fact, in Japanese the colors seemed to be pulled right out of objects -- the word for gray, for example, means "the color of ash." Culturally, colors differ substantially: our green leaks into Japanese blue. There is only one word for blue and green in Irish (glas?). And I cannot tell the difference between indigo and purple -- when I was growing up, rainbows went red, orange, yellow, green, blue purple. And apparently, English has more "sub"-colors than any other language (magenta, turquoise, fuchsia, etc.). Another language has only "light" or "dark" to choose from, no colors at all (this is third-hand knowledge at best, I'm afraid).
Science, of course, has broken our colors up in the most logical divisions, as is its wont, but even the most fanatical adherents of the Cult of Science must realize that this has little bearing on our conceptual divisions, where these are at best a good guide. So somehow, given a number of examples, we extract from them something we can hold up to every other instance we encounter, and say, yes, indeed, this is red. From whence comes Plato's forms (what really are, while things are just shadows) and Aristotle's universals (extrapolated from particulars, or "things"), and all metaphysical arguments basically come down to one simple question: which came first, the chicken, or the egg? Some say we can't have the egg before the chicken, others the other way around, while some maintain there are no chickens at all, others that there are no eggs!
Of course, we can already see there are bigger things than colors at stake -- even bigger issues than chickens. In fact, what holds for colors is symptomatic of all concepts: if you look long enough in the dictionary, you will find out that everything comes down to an indefinite, like color, or worse, a circle. That upon which definitions rest can never itself be defined: such as Aristotle's "substance," upon which all things are predicated, but itself cannot be defined. What's really strange is these ways of seeing a thing are always apparently pre-figured: I see a car before I see a system of colors and shapes.
But there is a more subtle experience: one we can go our whole lives without noticing consciously. Yet most of our lives we flit in and out of this state, more in than out: we experience the world without conceptual division. The world is a single piece, and we move as one with it, indivisible from world. Today I was nearly hit by a bike because I was making my way home and, as is usual for me, got lost on the way there in words. My world was consumed by thinking about this essay, in fact, and though, through the violent imposition of concepts on the past, I can say that my eyes were open, I was certainly walking the path home, I found myself much nearer than I was before, and I found that nearness not at all surprising (when concepts return, they always come with a feeling of "having been that way already"). What I did find surprising was the sudden appearance of the bike, which shattered my world into concepts again, and I was suddenly aware of the restaurant, my own body moving, obstacles on my left and right.
Today, I used the metaphor of a fabric, which I rather like, because we are already accustomed to speaking of "the fabric of time-space" and so on, and moreover fabric is perfectly uncountable -- we can speak of "a piece" of fabric, but never "a" fabric. So from this mess of fabric that is our world, we cut out patterns, as though we were going to make clothes for the world, though it is rather more like we are designing a jigsaw puzzle out of it. We must note, however, that we cut ourselves out of this world as well: we do not stand safely outside the pattern like a seamstress, but rather we are the fabric as well. The fabric can be cut all sorts of different ways, but we are accustomed and trained to cut it in particular ways, so we start thinking "such and such things are" as though they could be in no other way. We cut the fabric with our language -- or more properly speaking, with the "logos," which is the foundation of language, which supplies the possibility of both words and thought (which are by no means the same, sorry Plato). These then, we might say, are what Plato meant by forms, Aristotle by universals. However, today, reading Heidegger's "The Word of Nietzsche," I suggested three divisions: the conscious understanding of these patterns we call "concepts," the consciously constructed concepts we might call "constructs" (this concept owes its formal understanding as I now present it (hopefully with some accuracy) to J. Guerrero), and finally, there is the pattern such as it appears to us, "pre-figured," in the "already present-at-hand," which is the true "form" which I venture to explain more accurately as "eidos in waiting." (Waiting for what? Hold on a sec.) In other words, I saw today, not a "buzzing, blooming confusion," but an immediately familiar object hurtling towards me, which resolved itself shortly thereafter into the conscious declaration, "bike" -- and I was already moving out of the way before "bike" expanded into the assertion "the bike is going to run you down, you fool". From here, we might even venture to say that we can understand Protagoras's assertion that "man is the measure of all things," especaially since "measure" fits so nicely into our metaphor. Plato takes Protagoras to mean that "perception is truth," an interpretation that he does not question particularly closely in one of those odd passages of apparent carelessness one often finds in Plato (this is from Theaetetus, if anyone's interested). I think we can now say that at least there's something more to it than that.
But what, exactly, does this suggest? I mean, for "T"ruth, which if nothing else Plato points out is intimately tied up with this question. Ok, so how different are object and concept, anyway? This seems obvious enough...concepts are in our heads (conscious), objects are "outside" us. But wait, "before" we cut our pattern out, there was no "outside" -- before division there was (tautologically) no division between me and whatever object I have in view. In point of fact, that things are somehow "pre-figured" so that I can perceive them in the first place, rather than construct them one "pixel" at a time, suggests that the eidos in waiting is itself not "internal." Nor is it exactly external, until such time as it becomes suddenly this object, here -- this is what eidos is in waiting for, to become as some thing. In other words, it appears that we can pull chickens and eggs out of one another, like a rather messy magic trick. So if there is no difference, at this most basic level, between eidos and perceptio, perception of object and form of object, then isn't truth "perception" in a sense? Oh, but doesn't this get messy. Maybe more messy than our magic trick.
Ok, let's try something different. This is what occurred to (hit) me tonight, before I was nearly killed by my first test of my hypothesis: is the bike truly going to run into me? Heidegger, to put it in the simplest terms, defines truth as "unconcealedness," that which is "uncovered". And don't we suddenly "get it," sometimes after reading the same passage for the fifteenth time -- suddenly, something new is revealed in the words, and "it is true", even if, paradoxically, we later realize it was false. Oh boy. So how can perception be both true and false? Well, at the metaphysical level, haven't we already seen that all language is "false," insofar as it divides that which is an entirety, the "Same" in a sense? So all perception is false. On the other hand, all language (at the ontological level, from which words emerge at a second-level expression analogous to concepts) is cut from the fabric of World itself, and thus the substance of it is necessarily "true" if we are saying anything at all, but that truth is "concealed" by the very pattern itself, making it appear not as fabric, but as pattern. So in so far as language tries to say anything about the World ontologically, it will be un-truth, necessarily unraveling the very "thing" which it is trying to express. Yet pattern things in the right way, for example reading something the way it was written to be read, and the fabric can suddenly present itself, pattern vanishing if for only a moment, before reasserting itself into this or that "thing," the way we might at first see a woman in a beautiful midnight dress, realize that it is in fact made from the finest satin, before losing ourselves again in the appreciation of the beauty of "the dress," the way the satin has been fashioned. It is these sudden flashes of "fabric" we see when we suddenly realize the truth of this or that assertion: it is the way that images and parables such as Plato, Heraclitus, and even Jesus often use can reveal to us "truth" out of un-truth: it is the way myths speak. But of course, there are better and worse patterns for displaying fabric, so their falsehood often creeps back into our awareness. The most true statements, ontologically, are those which continually slip: the pattern is so suggestive of the pattern that we can't quite hold onto either, and we often find ourselves looking at a blank, dead page, unable to understand the words, however grammatically they may be arranged. Then we'll grasp it, suddenly the fabric will be there with in our reach -- and the harder we try to hold onto it, the more it will slide through our fingers. It is in this way that we are now trying to read Protagoras: Plato shows us how the words are, literally speaking, entirely ridiculous -- but is there a way in which they are true even still? Yet understanding that truth is quite slippery: we keep falling on "man," which has already been broken off into a concept, and of course Protagoras can't mean "man" in the sense of you or me. That would be tantamount to solipsism, which as far as I can tell is the concept Plato invented for refuting this view (though he did not coin the word). In some sense, he must mean the fabric itself, since there is nothing but that which is (by definition), so that which is must itself cut itself. Anyone else dizzy yet? The best answer I've seen to this is the massive, almost impossible "Being and Time" by Heidegger, where his job is in some sense explaining how the chicken and the egg can be different modes of the same thing.
Anyway, you get the idea. How "normal" truth gets derived from all this I'll leave to your own extrapolation, as it is more or less a matter of following the breadcrumbs from here. But just to say, it seems to me that this is a matter of fabric and pattern at one remove, such that we can now make comparisons, because we are not dealing with "that which is," but mere objects. So to say "I am flying" is not true, because in point of fact, the pattern I want to make "isn't cutting." The fabric does not yield to this pattern. So the concept I make does not match the pattern, and thus "falsehood" reveals itself to me. But in a certain sense, as we said, patterns are themselves false, so it is easy enough to find eidos become as object which appears to match our concepts, and so we see truth where there is "really" falsehood: I see a shadow, which is pre-figured to me as familiar, which comes to me as the concept "danger," and I recoil. Then I discover it to be a mere concept "shadow." It is the same fabric, what I saw was "True," but it was not "true," because the way my familiarness was figured was less correct than another way of figuring would be (that is to say, "harmless shadow" is less un-true than "horrible William-eating demon beast"). Quod erat demonstrandum.
Sorry I didn't get round to the auto-biographical stuff. Next time!