30th December, 2015

      I cannot escape an epistemology of some kind. There is no such thing as true, Feyerabendian epistemological-anarchy available to me, or, I must suppose, to anyone. For the very reasoning that would allow one to accept the validity of the epistemological free-for-alls Feyerabend proposes is the very reasoning that betrays its own epistemological biases. We cannot dispense with our faith in, say, science, without putting our faith in an alternative system of knowledge that illuminates science as unreliable. For example, we may point out that science is, as Feyerabend puts it, "a complex medium containing surprising and unforeseen developments [that demand] complex procedures and [defy] analysis on the basis of rules which have been set up in advance and without regard to the ever-changing conditions of history," but to make this claim, we must put our faith in an epistemological framework that says that epistemological frameworks should not have rules that can be defied by unforeseen developments. 

       Let me try to put that more clearly. We may imagine an epistemological framework whereby 1+1=3. Every time we apply this framework to the empirical universe, the accuracy/validity of the framework is confirmed. This goes on for centuries, until one day we discover a Humean blip in our experience of things, whereby 1+1 doesn't equal 3. And perhaps we have many other epistemological frameworks that have also proven infallible throughout the ages, but are one day defied by the same empirical data that we had, back in the day, used to derive them. Objects start floating upwards in defiance of gravity. Dogs start giving birth to whales in defiance of genetics and biology. Events start happening randomly, with previously supposed effects chaotically preceding supposed causes. Apples are tasted before they are bought and bitten; trains arrive at their destinations before they leave their departure point; mothers fall pregnant before fathers ever make love to them. Rivers run with wine and tigers start growing on trees. If we allow these strange occurrences to overturn--or even simply to problematize--our epistemological frameworks, we do so because we put our faith in an epistemological framework that asserts: "if an epistemological framework asserts 1+1=3 and it is discovered 1+1 does not equal 3, that epistemological framework is flawed." 

     Overturn science, theology, philosophy, or any epistemological framework you please, you will not have overturned epistemological frameworks as a general category, nor will you have arrived at a state of epistemological anarchy. You will only have arrived at an epistemological framework that states, as a reliable fact, that any epistemological framework whose assertions prove unreliable aught not to be relied upon (or something of that general ilk). 

     So I cannot escape an epistemology of some kind. Is that an axiomatic statement for me? Possibly. And what does this amount to? What is the epistemological framework that persuades me that I cannot possibly escape from an epistemological framework, that the thinking process is necessarily bound up with an epistemological framework, and if one gets rid of the latter altogether, one gets rid of the former (the former as one knows it)? 

     Tautology and contradiction. I think that's it. I think, at base, those are my intellectual foundation stones. And what do tautology and contradiction amount to? Why do I judge the validity of all propositions on the basis that "1 equals 1" is truth/reality/fact/etc., while "1 does not equal 1" is false/unreal/non-factual/etc.? Why, despite all I can believe, can I not believe that A is not A? Why, despite all I can doubt, can I not doubt that A is A? 

     I'm not sure, other than to say that there is that in me that feels dissonance and agitation in the face of a contradiction, and is restless to overcome said contradiction (i.e. there is that in me that is restless to resolve the contradiction, and thereby render the contradiction a contradiction no more). (This is not to say that I cannot enjoy contradictions; it is only to say that I cannot directly cognize them without a feeling of mental agitation and a correspondent need to resolve/dissolve them). On the other hand, tautologies induce a sensation of harmony, ease, and rest within me. When I encounter a tautology, I experience a sense of cerebral satiation; I feel no need to overcome or somehow get beyond it. When someone asserts that an orange is an orange, I feel no mental agitation. On the contrary, I feel mentally at rest. When someone asserts, with all sincerity, that an orange is not an orange, I feel mentally agitated; my mind's rest is disturbed and it will do all it can to get itself to a place of mental rest again. Either my mind will try to find some way in which the contradiction can be dissolved (e.g. by showing that the asserter is using the one term "orange" to refer to two different entities or qualities), or my mind will turn its attention away from the contradiction and think about some other thing. Tautologies feel stable, eternal, unchangeable. Contradictions feel unstable, impermanent, mutable.

     But the point of these musings was not to discuss the nature of epistemological frameworks so much as to acknowledge my enthrallment in them, and to point to my inability to step outside of my own epistemological framework and assess my reasons for believing what I believe and thinking what I think from an unprejudiced, unblinkered perspective. I am as one who realizes she might be blind, but having no idea what sight means, really has no idea what blindness means. I cannot properly acknowledge my ignorance, as only one who has transcended ignorance can comprehend ignorance. Only the man who has experienced blindness and sight understands blindness. The man who has never seen does not really know what it means to be blind.

     Having never stepped outside of my own epistemological framework, I have never been in a position to adjudicate its validity, and I have no way of knowing whether is has any merit or not outside of its own, self-ascribed parameters. Even my supposition that I would need to step outside of my epistemological framework is a product of my epistemological framework, and possibly incorrect (or correct, or something else entirely).

      If there is no way of assessing the merit/accuracy/validity of one's own epistemological framework--if this is what one's epistemological framework inclines one to believe--all knowledge becomes a matter of faith, faith determined by feelings. My epistemological framework causes me to judge all on the basis of tautology and contradiction. And this is to say that I judge all on the basis of a feeling of mental dissonance/agitation and a feeling of mental harmony/rest. I call the agitated feeling falsehood (inaccuracy; non-reality; non-factuality; etc.), and the harmonious feeling truth (accuracy; reality; factuality; etc.). This is what it all boils down to. I cannot pretend to any more stable or transcendent or objective reasons for believing anything I believe than this. 

   And when I acknowledge this truth (i.e. this catalyst of a feeling of mental contentment/rest/harmony) about my epistemological framework, I realize the door is flung open with radiant wideness for me to accept Kierkegaardian, Cherstertonian, MacDonaldian, Trahernian Christian faith with every bit as much vigor as I accept mathematics, astrophysics, and the testimony of my five senses. Provided the propositions of Christian faith produce in me the same degree of mental harmony/rest as the propositions of those other jurors (mathematics, etc.), their validity  will be of a piece. For though I am not free to accept any proposition ever put forth, and cannot accept any that produce a sense of mental disharmony in me (e.g. the notion of an eternal hellfire in the traditional, Dantean sense), I am free to accept any proposition that produces a sense of mental harmony/rest (e.g. the idea of an omnipotent LOVE at the core of all things).

23rd November, 2015

What do the wordless write?

I want to write honesty. I want to write that which is not numbness or fear. And I would prefer to write that which is not vacillation. But I do not know if it is possible to write so without an inconsistency. Not yet. Not as I am. Not with my soul as it is; so other than I would have it be.

I am scared of the flux inside of me. The bursts of bravery that pull me out of the tarpits are good things, but my confidence fades a little with every repetition. The first time one is rescued, all hope and optimism is renewed. The second and the third time likewise. But let a person be rescued fifty times, and rather than feeling gratitude for their salvation, they are likely to experience only apprehension. The man who has escaped the lion's den once counts himself blessed. The man who has escaped the lion's den fifty times is more likely to deem himself cursed. It is hardly good luck to require rescue so many times. I lose faith in my resilience.

31st May, 2015

"And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight."

 -- Proust, Swann's Way--

I have today again been consumed by the question of Art vs. Nature, and how the two concepts differ, and which holds greater sway in my affections. In my foregoing post, I noted that, after an imaginary conversation with a professor on this subject, I had come to doubt the hierarchy (my hierarchy) in which Nature presides as a Hyperion over the comparable satyr Art. About three quarters of the way around Buhl Lake, and a good half-hour into the phantasmal dialogue, I was forced to concede that Art was the conduit by which I arrived at my exalted opinion of Nature. I stand by that concession even now, a week hence. Yet today's thoughts have asked further concessions of me, this time by virtue of Vivaldi. I am now requested not merely to admit a preference for viewing Nature through the lens of Art, but further to admit that works of art may on occasion trump works of nature.

Let us consider the opening Allegro of Vivaldi's "La Primavera." We may, for the sake of this discussion, elide (or, at least, substantially abridge) mention of the ritornello, for though the ritornello sets out the concerto's seasonal theme, it suggests Spring rather as an abstraction than as an actuality. The ritornello does not directly mimic any specific Spring characteristic as do the piece's subsequent elements, but rather evokes a general Spring mood--a sense of something buoyantly magisterial, like a young prince stately cantering over greening meadows (assuming one may stately canter; possibly a canter precludes stateliness; the ritornello in the above-featured video attempts a canter and does diminish somewhat in stateliness thereby). In its generality and abstraction the ritornello in "La Primavera" does not compete with any specific aspect of Nature and thus does not raise the question of Nature vs. Art.

The first violin solo, however, does compete with Nature. This solo is one of those mathematically-errant solos that typify the Baroque, whereby the Ante-Nicene riddle of the trinity finds itself orchestrally reenacted, or, to put it more mundanely, the "solo" comprises three instruments. These three instruments each speak or sing to one another in that prettily interruptive and overlapping way that typifies woodland soundscapes. One would be hard-pressed to listen to this violin solo and not bring to mind birdsong. Yet the violin solo offers not an imitation of birdsong so much as a translation, a translation that grasps something Nature herself has failed to grasp. In "La Primavera," Vivaldi presents his listeners with a seeming Platonic form of birdsong, a form that reveals actual birdsong to be only an imperfect copy.

Could it be possible that I might prefer the birdsong of Vivaldi to the birdsong of Buhl Lake? No, no, I could not admit that. Paired side-by-side and out of context, I would, it is true, have to acknowledge the aesthetic superiority of the former, but actual birdsong does not exist independent of birds, and I would rather have my lakeside strolls bereft of Vivaldi's strains than bereft of Nature's. The same goes with the river-sounds and thunders that follow the latter returns of the ritornello. No river ever sounded so enchanting, nor so essentially river-like, as Vivaldi's stringed ripplings, yet beside an actual brook-bank I would rather have water. Zeus never conjured storms so striking as the Red Priest's, yet I would sooner retain the acoustics of Olympus at my window than trade them for the grander euphonics of Art.

I am not so very changed. I still persist, as a general rule, in loving Nature first and next to Nature Art. Yet I do now have to grant that, in some cases, if the Art is placed side-by-side with Nature, I am inclined to love Art the more. That is to say, if the formulation reads "Art, and next to Art, Nature"--then I, true to pseudo-tautological impulse, do now-and-then reverse my Landorian creed: when Art is next to (i.e. side-by-side with) Nature, I do now-and-then love Nature next to (i.e. after; less than) Art.

25th May, 2015

I have let myself be scatterbrained today. Indeed, I have let myself be so all days of late, and it will not do. This airiness of structure (this absence of structure) is time thrown to the zephyrs. I need to focus. Deliberate, careful, concentrational study, that's what is required. A program of paying attention. 

Seneca advises us to take one thought each day to consider deeply. Just one. One from all the thousands. Wise words. But the tragedy of wisdom is that it always operates so much more smoothly on paper than in practice. In practice it is impossible to know which thought one should concentrate on each day until the day and all its thought-production is through. And the thought that is one's darling in the morning is seldom the same as that which bewitches one in the afternoon, and neither of those comprise the cynosure of the night. 

This morning my chief candidate for thought-of-the-day had to do with the distinction between art and nature. I wanted to determine which of these parties reigned (or should reign) supreme, or whether both governed in coalition over man's aesthetic faculties. In the past I typically sided with Landor (Walter Savage) on this question and loved nature first "and next to nature art." Yet last semester a professor whose opinion I hold in high regard told me that, for him, nature must ever play second fiddle to art, and though this professor did not dilate upon his reasons for believing so, ever since that conversation I have found myself more uncertain of my nature/art hierarchy. Which brings me to my morning walk around Buhl Lake, whereupon, having been mesmerized for several minutes by the painted back of a fire-furred caterpillar on the pathway, I lapsed into a renewed imaginary dialogue with said professor, wherein I tried to win him round to my nature-championing point of view. Yet, much to my puzzlement given that I was both voices in the conversation and was thereby odds-on to succeed in my persuasions, it was not so much the professor that came round to my point of view as it was I that came round to his. I had engineered the ruse (in this imaginary conversation) of having the professor stop by some honeysuckle bush and read one of its leaves as if it were a poem (as if the leaf were the creation of a poet), thinking that this would apprise the professor of the superior complexity and beauty and compositional-perspicacity of nature. But my ruse backfired when the professor pointed out that, in the context of my experiment, it was precisely his familiarity with art that enabled him to recognize the splendors in the leaf in the first place. And dash it all, he was right. I had vowed nature was to art as Hyperion to a satyr, and yet without the satyr art my Hyperion looked set to become a mere mortal.

But these were morning thoughts and it is no longer morning and they no longer fit the hour.

24th May, 2015

The above image is a still life by Henri Fantin-Latour, titled Still Life, dated 1866. I do not know that any artist before or after has ever come so close to capturing what it is to look upon the world, to really look upon the world, to look as men and women look. A photograph does not capture what it is to look upon the world, nor yet does photographic realism. The world does not greet the eye of man as it greets the lens of a camera; the world is not experienced as unamalgamated matter. Nor, on the other hand, do abstract, impressionistic, surrealistic or conceptual works approach what it is to look upon the world. The world is not experienced as unamalgamated mind. Fantin-Latour's great genius is to have looked at the world and, steering clear of the Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of idealism, to have simply painted what he saw.

If Fantin-Latour had only been a little less successful, I would not so desire to push the tray further back upon the table. It makes me almost anxious to see it thus precariously arranged.