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Tag: dimensions

April 6, 2013

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (17 )‏

Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:08:23 +0000
To: richibi@hotmail.com
From: comment-reply@wordpress.com
Subject: [New comment] “Ennead I” by Plotinus
 

Richard,

You wrote, ” should there, in the instance, however, be a One, an Absolute, we would not, nor can anyway ever, from our intrinsically divergent perspectives, be able to, in any meaningful way, know It”

Our opinions are not “intrinsically”, but “accidentally” divergent. If they are intrinsic, they would not be affected by changes in our circumstances. But often times our opinions are affected by external circumstances. Therefore, they are not “intrinsic”. For instance, your story about the color of the wall reminds me of a similar story of how the English chemist John Dalton discovered color blindness. He himself was color blind but never realized it until his mother (or aunt) disagreed with him on the color. Without such a defect, there would be no disagreement.

Truth cannot be a sum of opinions or even an unanimous decision of all people. Why? Because the sum of contrary opinions amount to nothing, and the sum of contradictory opinions only lead to confusion, since people are never unanimous about anything.

To use a classic Platonic analogy: If you have a serious disease and want to be healed. Will you call everyone in from the street, hold a public assembly and have them vote for a treatment of your disease? Of course not. You’ll seek out the specialist in the field and have him examine you and give you the proper diagnosis and treatment. Because he possesses the knowledge, whereas the others don’t. Even a grain of truth is worth more than a boatload of false opinions.

Having said the above, however, I agree that the truth may be multifaceted, like the color of light shining through a prism. Because our senses have their limitations, we can only see part of the spectrum, similarly, our rational faculty may also be limited, and we only see the Truth in part. This is why dialogues such as we’re having are meaningful. That we may see the rainbow, while not losing sight of our own color.

“So please your majesty
That we may wake the king: he hath slept long.”
King Lear Act IV Scene VII

 

 

oof, Nemo, again where do I start, I’ll try to
tackle merely Truth here, deconstruct It, so
that we can know what we’re even talking
about
 
what do you mean by Truth
 
 
something corresponds to what it is that
we see, hear, feel, I would think, to be
locked in my head, my spirit, a fundamental
unity, without the support of an underlying
Reality, would be horrible, a profound, and
unbearable, solitude, I don’t want any more
to even try to imagine it, though, in my
youthful invincibilty, I once did, it would
nearly drive me, sometimes, I remember, 
crazy 
 
I would try to guess what people would
say in their next breath and found that
mostly I could do it, that mostly I could
get it right, which didn’t do much for an
outside Reality
 
but, again, babies must learn to separate,
not easily, their suddenly unfamiliar world
from their initially undifferentiated senses,
their identity from what we understand to
be Reality, I’d been merely atavistically
revisiting that fundamental experience 
 
I first fell in love, incidentally, when I met
someone I wasn’t able to preempt, to my
utter fascination, at which point I was
forced to acknowledge not only Reality
but also probably a Heaven, it has
become a condition, I fall in love with
only people from other planets, or, if
you like, dimensions
  
 
so, Nemo, I am also subservient to an
ideal, or even an Ideal
 
but it, or It, is my utter fabrication, though,
manifestly, not an uninformed one
 
my Truth is that ethereal, a bedrock, 
however, of my nevertheless basically 
nebulous view of life, made out of,
indeed, thin air
 
my opinions are therefore entirely
speculative, except for my
understanding of myself
 
I think, according to Descartes, therefore
I am, and of that, of myself, I am not at
all speculative, for I think, listen   
 
 
Truth, incidentally, is a function of our
species, assuming that it is a formal
Reality is akin to placing ourselves,
as we once did, at the centre of the
Universe, we were apparently
egregiously wrong about that, it
seems to be generally now agreed,
I suspect an Absolute, or Idealized,
potential Reality, is asking for hubris,
and too often, incidentally, we get it,
see wars, torture, man’s inhumanity
to not only man
   
 
about the world which has mathematical
dimensions we are mostly in agreement,
two plus two will always equal four in our
rational construct, and Science seems to
flow pretty smoothly from that
 
therefore Truth with respect to matter I
will not question, it is the grid we are all
at least comfortable with, like speaking
the same language, despite its even
basic insufficiencies, these fairly easy
mostly to patch up with persistence
and ingenuity   
 
but Plato’s Truth, Ideal, or Absolute, is
of a more noumenal, spiritual, which is
to say, abstract, order, and as such, like
Beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,
Truth is what we think it is
 
is John Dalton wrong to have seen a
divergent colour, and who could tell
him that his blue was green, his red,
orange, when these were categorically
his impressions, dissent is a matter
merely of concensus  
 
Truth, I believe, is our accommodation,
and is no more than the sum of its
collective parts, the truths that
scientists unearth are Science, not
Truth, Reality, not Wisdom     
 
other worlds would have entirely
different conceptions of the Universe
for being other than we, us
 
we are assuming we have the answer,
Nemo, to imponderables 
 
therefore, not Philosophy, I insist,
but Art, and metaphorical rather
than categorical imperatives
 
see Beethoven for that, and / or Proust   
 
 
Richard
 
psst: according to these two excellent
          programs,
 
                  Bernard Williams on Descartes      
 
                  Bernard Williams on Descartes (cont.)
 
           two parts of an interview with an
           authority on Descartes, I could’ve
           easily been a figment of his
           imagination for sounding nearly 
           word for word, to my surprise
           and delight, very much like him
 
           though he probably wouldn’t,    
           by my calculations, therefore,
           have loved me      
 
 
 
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March 17, 2013

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (12)‏

 
 
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:50:52 +0000
To: Richibi’s Weblog
From: comment-reply@wordpress.com
Subject: [New comment] “Ennead I” by Plotinus.
 

Richard,

I like your comment, “I won’t try to impose my perspective, I can only tell what I see”, which reminded me of a sentimental story that I had heard a long time ago. The story was in first-person narrative and went like this:

I [an art merchant] traveled to a far country on a business trip, and found lodging in a small family inn owned by an blind old man and his daughter. During an after-dinner conversation, I learned that the old man was actually a connoisseur of art with many famous paintings in his collection. Naturally I was delighted when he offered to show me the paintings. But his daughter was visibly distressed and signaled me to follow her.as she went to fetch the paintings. She explained to me that they had fallen on hard times and she had no choice but to sell the paintings to survive, in spite of the old man’s firm instructions that the paintings must not be sold, because they were his life. He had become blind due to sickness so he didn’t know that the paintings were all gone. When the daughter brought the blank frames to the old man, he proudly presented them to me, naming them one by one, while caressing them gently with his withered hands. Staring at the blank frames, I listened in silence and shock. Suddenly, the old man stopped, he sensed that something was missing, something didn’t feel quite right. What happened to his beloved painting? The daughter looked to me in desperation for help. I hesitated but finally mustered enough courage to speak. I picked up where the old man had left off, and, recalling from memory, I described the details of the paintings and complimented the old man’s taste. He beamed with pride and delight.
….
There are many ways to interpret the story, one of which is this: if the “paintings” were all in the old man’s mind, and “I” had not seen them nor anybody else, it would be impossible to carry out the conversation, and there would be no sharing, nor inspiration, nor delight.

This is the armchair Platonist’s answer to the demented Nietzsche: we are able to share our thoughts and feelings with one another, because we both behold the same underlying intelligible reality, both within ourselves and without. If we are only conscious of ourselves and nothing else, conversation would be impossible and pointless. Even Nietzsche, before he fell to dementia, couldn’t resist the desire for conversation since he published his works– as you say say rightly, philosophy is conversation. Otherwise, he could have kept all to himself, in his private notebook

 
your question is probing, Nemo, I’m not sure
that even Plato would have come to such
corollary conclusions as what you seem to
be suggesting, which is to say that Plato’s
absolutes, distant and distinct from us, as I
understand them, as God, yet received by
us a priori, or, inherently, at birth, as you
would have it, suggest the underlying 
existential commonality of our experience
 
you forget the pivotal factor of birth here,
Nemo, I think, incarnation, spirit, or
something, made matter, like buds in
spring, bursting with each its own
unpredictable, and wondrous, existence
  
my experience is that I cannot know even
dimensions before I formally deduce them,
before I enter this world, though the
dimensions themselves may indeed be there 
 
who knew love, Nemo, before experiencing
it, the thing that more than anything else
moves our world, remember the adolescent
who had to put it all together piece by
disconcerting piece, we had to learn it all
at the movies to finally make any kind of
sense of it, playing out our battles in water
too deep for most of us most of the time,
and ultimately too treacherous for many  
 
there is mathematics, there are probably
even dimensions, Nemo, but I don’t know
about any other merely abstract world
beyond this one, for better or for worse    
 
therefore Proust
 
and therefore Beethoven  
 
 
Richard
 
psst: your parable is delightful, even
           unforgettable, and it merely
           bolsters my recommended
           literary and musical advice
 
 
 
 
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March 12, 2013

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (9)

 
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2013 16:20:33 +0000
To: Richibi’s Weblog
From: comment-reply@wordpress.com
Subject: [New comment] “Ennead I” by Plotinus
 

Richard,

You wrote, “I am at the most aware of only one thought, that thought being that
something is thinking,”

Unless you argue that something can think without a thought, there are at least two thoughts here. First, the awareness that something is thinking. Second, if something is thinking, that something is thinking a thought. As you said, “consciousness of my consciousness”. There are two “consciousness”:

There is a thinker who is thinking a thought, and there is an observer who is thinking of the thinker. If the thinker and the observer are the same, the thought becomes an infinite recursion, like an image reflected in two parallel mirrors. This is partly why I said people who speculate this have way too much time, in fact, only eternity would suffice.

the world and everything in it is in the eye of the beholder

Where is the beholder himself, if everything is in his eye? Does the world exist when the beholder closes his eye?

 

 

you’ve grasped the Cartesian dilemma,
Nemo, the solipsistic circumference – see
“This is the census“ again on that last
series of sibilants – that defines our, not
eternal, as you suggest, but very “mortal
coil“, our incarnate cage, or soul, if you
many parts“, or woman, solipsistically
and fatally, however remarkable, or
even historic, their contribution
  
Plato died, Proust died, either leaving
merely ephemeral ideas and, however
celebrated and honoured, dust
 
it is a frightening, and sobering, conclusion,
we cannot escape the prison of our reason
but with the key alone of our imagination,
for everything beyond the logic of that first
statement is conjecture, the play of our fears
and desires 
 
something is thinking, I think, then identify
with, become the vessel of, that idea, or, if
you prefer, that thought
 
that thought is still a conjecture, but it has
an immediacy you can’t deny, it is your
entire, quite literally, reality 
 
but any other thought is of course also
conjecture, just without the manifest
incontrovertibility of the idea of one’s own
existence, my orange might be your red,
but I’ll never be you, or what I interpret as
you, which is not at all how the other guy
sees you either, my lens is merely my
picture of the world, what is real 
 
reason has done a great job of holding it
all together for most of us, but it rests
fundamentally on the wings of our fallible,
of course, imagination, but for the absolute
apparently miracle of mathematics, which
seems to subsist even without our
speculation, popping up like signposts
everywhere, an existential guardian angel,
Pythagoras, maybe, was right  
 
not even dimensions, Nemo, I woke up
after a week in a coma, a car accident, in
a white room, quiet, empty, with only what
seemed like motes floating on a ray of light
coming in from a window, still, ethereal, and
perhaps, I wondered, part of a new afterlife,
who knew, I couldn’t assume I was alive, I
only knew that I existed in an unfamiliar
environment  
 
height, I reasoned, and width, I thought,
were evident, there are at least here two
dimensions, and calmly contemplated
the possibility of the same exile the villains
had felt early in “Superman“, cast away in
their two-dimensional prisons
 
Kant was wrong, I concluded, we do not
assume time and space as initial certainties,
I don’t have depth yet   
 
later a nurse came in from the centre of my
frame creating at least the impression of a
third spatial element, after which I
concentrated on getting better
 
that my first thought was of Kant after a
week in a coma has remained for me a
searing example of my essentially
cerebral proclivities, be they ever
nevertheless so fundamentally
unsubstantiated, I think that’s a riot
 
 
“Does the world exist when the beholder closes
his eye“, you ask 
 
who knows
 
though I would think so
 
 
Richard   
 
 
 
 
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