On Physical vs. Abstract Universals
This post is me thinking out loud. Expect logical flaws, and feel free to point them out….
One of my favorite things about my lovely fiancée, sadeyedartist, is that she is a thinker - even if we do not think alike on every issue. (Things would get dull if we all thought alike.) Two of her recent (if you do not count her computer deaths) entries[1, 2] actually link well with some of my thoughts based on reading Schaeffer and getting interested more in philosophy.
In the 1st, she asks whether colors have inherent emotions to them. (I say no, but see below.) In the 2nd, she discusses what makes someone feminine or masculine.
Plato is credited with being the 1st to understand that for anything to have meaning, there must be universals. For example, a specific tree means nothing unless there is a universal idea of “tree”. A car is clearly not a tree, yet palms & oaks & birches - though being very different from each other - are all trees. They all share some idea of “treeness” that makes them trees. (I have talked of this before.[3])
You can see the connection to her 2nd entry. What is it about women that makes them women? Or men men?
Plato sought for these universals. He sought for the ideal tree, a tree that could encompass all other trees. He sought for it in the polis, the society. But this failed, because then reality became nothing but an average of perceptions of multiple people, and thus, became no reality at all. (Note how similar this is to postmodernism.)
(One can also extend this into morality. Without there being moral absolutes, morality becomes meaningless averages; morality no longer exists at all.)
That having failed, he turned to the gods. But the Greek polytheistic view also fails here. May gods with differing desires and portfolios could only give averages, not absolutes, not universals.
He never found the answer, but he nailed the problem right on the head.
How then is a woman defined? What is the ideal woman? What is inherently woman about all women?
I don't know.
Now to ramble….
Certainly, some questions are easier to answer. I would guess that it is possible to figure out what is absolutely and universally required to make a tree a tree. Abstract things are more complicated. (You may say here that a human woman is not an abstract thing, but a concrete thing. Women are biologically different then men. Unfortunately, there are many cases where things go biologically wrong, and children are born with male chromosomes, but female organs. Those are the things that make the question difficult.) I think that there is more to humanity - mankind and womankind - then the physical. So with human beings, we begin dealing with abstracts. I think that there is something intrinsically human about humans. I am not entirely sure of what all that is. However, I am not sure if there is anything intrinsically feminine about women or masculine about men. To clarify, I think that if all goes correctly - that is to say, if it all goes the way it usually does - biologically, the physical part of men and women, the nature part, as well as the nurture from parents and culture part, then the average woman will have certain traits we term feminine, and the average man will have certain traits we term masculine. I am glad that it usually works out this way. I think men and women are very different and that nature plays a huge role in this. But sometimes, outliers occur in nature (because nature is in a state of decay perhaps). Some men have feminine qualities; some women masculine ones. (I, for one, am very glad to have many "feminine" traits.)
But we still end up with averages here. Is there even one trait that all women universally share? What about humans?
(For the latter question, I think we could find some, but I'll leave that discussion for later.)
So, to put it another way, perhaps women and men are to humans as palms and birches are to trees. They are different, yet not universally so.
What of colors? Is there a universal “blue”? It is known that depending on the language you speak, the range of wavelengths of light considered to be a color vary. English has many words for color, but some languages only have a few. In some languages, there is never a distinction between green and blue, for example. There is a word “blue/green” that encompasses the whole range of wavelengths that we would consider two different colors.
So already, our search for universal qualities of “blue” is facing difficulties.
In the entry of mine cited above[3], I spoke of science's search for universals. One of the nice things about science, in my opinion, is that it can provide some nice universal definitions to work with. Even if those definitions are only models of reality, they are still helpful. Let us then ignore the fact that not all people will distinguish what we call “blue” from other colors and define a specific, measurable range of light as “blue”. Now that “blue” is defined to a very particular wavelength range, one can ask questions about it. Do all people perceive “blue” the same way? We can never know[4] and how would we describe this. We must make observations of other things then. Does “blue” cause all people to react a certain way? Or to emote a certain way? The way I see it, it is hard to assign any other inherent qualities to “blue” apart from strictly physical ones. Now, it is possible that the physical photons reflecting from “blue” will physically affect a “normal” human being in a physical, biological way. But we have already stated that biology has exceptions. If our perceptions are the result of first being filtered by our bodies, the only way I can see for a color to have a universal, abstract, and inherent quality is for colors to have the ability to directly affect one's soul in a non-physical way. Choosing to believe this pushes us into pantheism of sorts.
So, basically - and to (finally) wrap-up - I think that colors are limited to physical universals, whereas people seem to be defined by abstract universals: all light of wavelength = x nm is identical; no two women or two men are.
One of my favorite things about my lovely fiancée, sadeyedartist, is that she is a thinker - even if we do not think alike on every issue. (Things would get dull if we all thought alike.) Two of her recent (if you do not count her computer deaths) entries[1, 2] actually link well with some of my thoughts based on reading Schaeffer and getting interested more in philosophy.
In the 1st, she asks whether colors have inherent emotions to them. (I say no, but see below.) In the 2nd, she discusses what makes someone feminine or masculine.
Plato is credited with being the 1st to understand that for anything to have meaning, there must be universals. For example, a specific tree means nothing unless there is a universal idea of “tree”. A car is clearly not a tree, yet palms & oaks & birches - though being very different from each other - are all trees. They all share some idea of “treeness” that makes them trees. (I have talked of this before.[3])
You can see the connection to her 2nd entry. What is it about women that makes them women? Or men men?
Plato sought for these universals. He sought for the ideal tree, a tree that could encompass all other trees. He sought for it in the polis, the society. But this failed, because then reality became nothing but an average of perceptions of multiple people, and thus, became no reality at all. (Note how similar this is to postmodernism.)
(One can also extend this into morality. Without there being moral absolutes, morality becomes meaningless averages; morality no longer exists at all.)
That having failed, he turned to the gods. But the Greek polytheistic view also fails here. May gods with differing desires and portfolios could only give averages, not absolutes, not universals.
He never found the answer, but he nailed the problem right on the head.
How then is a woman defined? What is the ideal woman? What is inherently woman about all women?
I don't know.
Now to ramble….
Certainly, some questions are easier to answer. I would guess that it is possible to figure out what is absolutely and universally required to make a tree a tree. Abstract things are more complicated. (You may say here that a human woman is not an abstract thing, but a concrete thing. Women are biologically different then men. Unfortunately, there are many cases where things go biologically wrong, and children are born with male chromosomes, but female organs. Those are the things that make the question difficult.) I think that there is more to humanity - mankind and womankind - then the physical. So with human beings, we begin dealing with abstracts. I think that there is something intrinsically human about humans. I am not entirely sure of what all that is. However, I am not sure if there is anything intrinsically feminine about women or masculine about men. To clarify, I think that if all goes correctly - that is to say, if it all goes the way it usually does - biologically, the physical part of men and women, the nature part, as well as the nurture from parents and culture part, then the average woman will have certain traits we term feminine, and the average man will have certain traits we term masculine. I am glad that it usually works out this way. I think men and women are very different and that nature plays a huge role in this. But sometimes, outliers occur in nature (because nature is in a state of decay perhaps). Some men have feminine qualities; some women masculine ones. (I, for one, am very glad to have many "feminine" traits.)
But we still end up with averages here. Is there even one trait that all women universally share? What about humans?
(For the latter question, I think we could find some, but I'll leave that discussion for later.)
So, to put it another way, perhaps women and men are to humans as palms and birches are to trees. They are different, yet not universally so.
What of colors? Is there a universal “blue”? It is known that depending on the language you speak, the range of wavelengths of light considered to be a color vary. English has many words for color, but some languages only have a few. In some languages, there is never a distinction between green and blue, for example. There is a word “blue/green” that encompasses the whole range of wavelengths that we would consider two different colors.
So already, our search for universal qualities of “blue” is facing difficulties.
In the entry of mine cited above[3], I spoke of science's search for universals. One of the nice things about science, in my opinion, is that it can provide some nice universal definitions to work with. Even if those definitions are only models of reality, they are still helpful. Let us then ignore the fact that not all people will distinguish what we call “blue” from other colors and define a specific, measurable range of light as “blue”. Now that “blue” is defined to a very particular wavelength range, one can ask questions about it. Do all people perceive “blue” the same way? We can never know[4] and how would we describe this. We must make observations of other things then. Does “blue” cause all people to react a certain way? Or to emote a certain way? The way I see it, it is hard to assign any other inherent qualities to “blue” apart from strictly physical ones. Now, it is possible that the physical photons reflecting from “blue” will physically affect a “normal” human being in a physical, biological way. But we have already stated that biology has exceptions. If our perceptions are the result of first being filtered by our bodies, the only way I can see for a color to have a universal, abstract, and inherent quality is for colors to have the ability to directly affect one's soul in a non-physical way. Choosing to believe this pushes us into pantheism of sorts.
So, basically - and to (finally) wrap-up - I think that colors are limited to physical universals, whereas people seem to be defined by abstract universals: all light of wavelength = x nm is identical; no two women or two men are.