The Bloody Sword of Truth
Keynes
The Bloody Sword of Truth
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Ideally, logic as used in philosophy is precise and explicit.
It must be safely confined in words, and the words manipulated
in proper ways to be correct and convincing. So a good argument
must conform the the conventions of language in order to establish
truth or falsehood or undecidability.
Language depends on word-symbols that are defined in terms of
other word-symbols, the abstractions of abstractions. Clever as we
are, there are words for everything, actual or possible or conceivable
or inconceivable. If there is no word for a concept we can make a
new one on the spot and rigorously define it in terms of other words.
As Plato's Socrates pointed out, many of the greatest words, the
most lofty and powerful ones, defy definition to the extent that
they are virtually meaningless except to stir the emotions in the
speaker's desired direction, an appeal to senselessness. No doubt
such lofty words became common usage in the manner of the
Emperor's invisible new clothes, in that only the wise could
discern their meaning, and no one wants to be considered
too foolish to understand the grand ultimate propositions
such as 'truth', 'progress', 'wisdom', 'the good', etc. etc.
And so we get the various ethical systems that disagree on
so many points. Self consistent as any ethical system may be
true ethics must be written wordlessly in our hearts and not
elegantly presented in irrelevant papers that not even the
authors truly believe in or can practice themselves.
Any self evident 'truth' commonly agreed upon can become
an axiom on which is built a logical edifice of perfect validity.
Once a concept is common knowledge (God for instance)
then we can argue about His powers and the length of His
beard. So the soundness of an initial position is taken for
granted because everyone 'knows' it is so without the need
for proof. All logic must begin somewhere unprovable,
and so be built on shaky ground. The alternative would
be a sort of infinite regression that even if possible would
ultimately be circular and self supporting, floating on
the thinnest of air.
Many of the metaphysical questions are excursions launched
from hypothetical platforms of discernable unreality. So we
ask the wrong questions and arrive at predictably wrong
answers. As long as we are ignorant of human nature as
it is, we will project our false impressions on the universe
and logically assume we have arrived at a truth. The more
we are convinced of such a truth, the more we are mentally
bound by it, chained hand and foot by our own minds.
Beginning from false premises one wanders farther and
farther from reality. We assume that humans are intentional
actors (such is our cultural impression). From this premise we
may assume that every action is an intentional act of will, leading us
to assume intentional will in the 'acts of God' as seen in raw nature.
The nature of will appears extremely difficult to fathom, particularly
when we have a strong bias that we have free wills of our own and
adamantly refuse to reconsider the proposition.
Or we may deny intention in nature, making it an unconscious
mechanism, but at the same time divide ourselves from nature by
supposing that we have a conscious, active, and independent nature
apart from nature and miraculously free of cause and effect.
To put ourselves beyond nature is absurd and leads to the
multiplication of unprovable hypotheticals and a reason to
kill infidels of the religious or economic variety.
Or we may assume that chance and accident (the qualities of
unintelligible chaos) have somehow accumulated random events
in a true progression of intelligible achievement. Chaos must lead
to more chaos or it isn't chaos. Intelligibility must reveal intelligence.
That the world is intelligible means that it is 'intelligent' all by itself,
proven by the fact that it naturally produced us intelligent creatures to
percieve it.
Russel and Godel re-affirmed the Cretan position that
"All Cretans are liars", meaning that many self-referencing
propositions so common in thought and language are true if
and only if they are false, and false if and only if they are true.
(Godel showed that in mathmatical systems there are true
propositions that cannot be proved in that system. The
'truth' of such unprovable propositions can only be proved
in a higher more comprehensive system, but that system will
also have unprovable truths in it as well, ad infinitum.)
Escape from contradiction comes only by avoiding self-reference in
all it's subtle forms, and that only by a nebulous theoretical hierarchy
of meta-levels of reference. But the more efficient and complete such
a system may be, the more impossible to avoid self reference.
A comprehensive system must reference itself, or be but a part
of an infinite hierarchy that never can be resolved for truth value.
Therefor paradox must be built into any personally-humanly
achievable system, and the notion of discriminating true from false
must be a logical fallacy.
Logic is the tool we rely on to determine truth and falsity.
Everything must be one or the other in the game of logic, or
a proposition may be undecidable by logic and thrown out
of the game for fouling the system. Illogical propositions are
not to be considered because the system can't deal with them,
even as apparently important as they may seem to be. This
exclusive duality is the supposed strength of logic that pretends
to nail down ultimate truths and expose absolute falsehood.
Duality is the means and the ends of logic, therefore duality
must be the logical truth, a primary unprovable assumption.
(Although duality is not so difficult to refute.)
Ultimately, logic is an abstract word game that depends on the
validity of words. This is the primary assumption, but it obviously
cannot be supported. Words certainly are not the things that
they reference. Words are symbols abstracted from a great
deal of available information pared down to minor differences
of distinction. For instance, nothing is visually red. That only
refers to the chemically defined color of paint. Artists know
that a red-seeming object contains many shades of red as well
as reflected blacks, blues, greens, whites and yellows. Even
non artists can see this at a glance, as the difference between
a poster and a painting or a photograph.
The unprovable foundation of any logical proposition, and the
inadequacy of abstract word-symbols that make it, ought to make
one suspicious of any logical claim, particularly if it is used self-
righteously against himself. Nothing in the world is really black
or white exclusively as dualistic logic claims.
The sages of Taoism (500 BCE) point out that all dualities
are not only not absolute, but that they depend on their
apparent opposite for meaning or logical existence. Can
there be up without down, long without short, or dark
without light? Dualities arise together or not at all. To see
one is to admit the other. Good and bad, right and wrong,
are human distinctions that must include both poles of
opposition. Therefor the 'perfectability' of existence is a
vanishing mirage. Pursuit of the good, as far as it succeeds,
must produce an equal but opposite effect in our own
estimation, as long as we suppose we can distinguish one
from the other. The better a thing may seem, the greater
it's loss will be. And vice versa of course.
The same insight applies to true and false, which are only
valid in the most limited and blatant of cases, (and not so in
other cases) and then only from one's own personally biased
viewpoint. To so discriminate is to create the disharmonies we
futilely attempt to escape. The attempt to escape by itself
manufactures the painful conflicts.
Dualism leads to the idea of progress, a perpetual ascent
toward the good leaving behind the bad. This is a secular
and even a religious proposition of the most absurd sort.
God and Heaven are all good, so we must have Satan and
hell to account for the problem of evil. Our reward for a
life of suffering and strife must be eternal pleasure or eternal
pain, disregarding the fact that pain and pleasure are inseparable
poles of a percieved but an unreal duality. The fault is in our
perceptions, not in nature.
We know more than we can possibly say. No sight or sound
or feeling is reducable to words. Words are piffle and chaff
in our actual living experience. So why should we accept and
worship the perpetual word games of logic in our own heads and
accept from them bad rulings and an ultimate death sentence?
In fact we don't. We live by the heart, and only invoke the mind
in extremity as a weapon of last resort. But logic is a sharp sword
without a handle. It can cut in any direction, for us or against us.
To take it up is dangerous.
Jesus gave the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven to Peter,
to bind and release on earth what is bound or released,
and the same in heaven. This is the ultimate power that
everyone has. With our own minds we bind and release
our own realities, real or unreal as they may be.
The knowability of knowledge is an illusion, a screen between
what truly is and what we imagine it to be. Certainties are
prisons without a door or window. Is this true?
Who can ever 'know' anything about it?
Knowing is a self-limitation.
Not knowing is freedom at last.
Bret Cahill
< Not knowing is freedom at last.
Cosmologists are a few knowing cards short of a full self-limitation
deck.
Bret Cahill