Links: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Despair

I found a book online about Wittgenstein and Keirkegaard: Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method by Charles L. Creegan.

I am fascinated by the intersection of modern philosophy and religion and the questions of existential meaning that result.  I know something about (and respect) Kierkegaard’s leap of faith as one possible solution to the apparent absurdity of life, but I am only recently finding that Wittgenstein also confronted many of the same issues with the same deep personal conflict.  I flatter myself that I feel something of that  — or perhaps not flattery, perhaps it is merely the human condition (to strive and to strive and to err).  It is funny to me that these two great philosophers would approach the same questions from the perspective of Christianity–and that many among my spiritual peers would discard their experience on those grounds.  I have a hard time explaining.  There are some things that run deeper even than dogma and difference and politics… deeper even than revelation.  The questions of existence and meaning.

Some part of me is attempting to move beyond the shock leftover from the violation of the naive unexamined faith of my childhood (that some adults themselves never outgrow–lucky few that they are) to the realization that the end of examination is a cacophony of ultimately empty symbols that lead nowhere save the unrelenting grindstone of chance and natural law.  Emptiness unto death.  I am still in that process of examination, of digging ever deeper into one symbol only to find another.  With me are many who sneer at the naive faithful.  It may be that we will reach the wasteland together, though some never do (I cannot call them lucky, those who are eternally hungry and are neither fed nor given the cruel mercy of final starvation).  How many will look upon that devastation and see only license for ethical vacuity — like the man who responds to disaster by looting and pillaging — who will respond to absurdity by becoming slave to emotion?  How many already have?  Then there are those mystics like Austin Osman Spare who confronted that reality by embracing the void itself, but Spare could never live his philosophy (whose perfection would be annihilation).  I am too deliberate to make of my life an attempt to destroy self — a gun would be so much more effective.

The way I seek is perhaps something more along the lines of a deliberate innocence?  The question is existence.  If ultimate truth — that promise of all religion and science, math and logic — is but an endless chasm of self-referential symbols (the greatest of Hofstadter’s strange loops), then perhaps the best answer is to take control and author our own existence?  Is this, then, the essence of the magician?  Fool that I am… still talking of essences.  My hole grows deeper.

Links: A.O. Spare’s ‘Neither-Neither’ and Eastern Philosophy

Bobby of Perennial Thought discovered an interesting connection between Spare’s ‘neither-neither’ practice and ‘neti, neti’ (not this, not this) in the Upanishads:

The form of that person is like a cloth dyed with turmeric, or like grey sheep’s wool, or like the scarlet insect called Indragopa, or like a tongue of fire, or like a white lotus, or like a flash of lightning. He who knows this—his splendour is like a flash of lightning. Now, therefore, the description of Brahman: “Not this, not this” (Neti, Neti); for there is no other and more appropriate description than this “Not this.” Now the designation of Brahman: “The Truth of truth.” The vital breath is truth and It (Brahman) is the Truth of that. – Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad – The Divine is not this and it is not that” (neti, neti)….”Thus, the Divine is not real as we are real, nor is it unreal. The divine is not living in the sense humans live, nor is it dead. The Divine is not compassionate as we use the term, nor is it uncompassionate. And so on. We can never truly define God in words. All we can say, in effect, is that “It isn’t this, but also, it isn’t that either”. In the end, the student must transcend words to understand the nature of the Divine.” – wiki

I would like to try and explore the larger context of this idea in Eastern culture and philsophy.  Wu in Taoism (see D.C. Lau intro to Penguin edition of Tao Te Ching), Mu in Zen, Anatta in Buddhism.  I also think that Nagarjuna’s process of systematically denying the inherent existence of everything in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is possibly the best exploration of the negative in Eastern thought that I have yet come across.  I think there is some connection to Eastern monism — the lack of the ‘Cartesian Split’ that has colored Western thought?

Not that any of this necessarily will help illuminate Spare, but it’s a fascinating collection of ideas in its own right.

Links: Gödel, Formal Systems, & Absolute Truth

I came across an interesting blog entry this morning about Gödel’s and Wittgenstein’s discrediting of Russel and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (and thus discrediting all attempts to fully prove any logical system).  The post is from the diplomatic/political thinker Carne Ross and is in nicely accessible language.  Here’s a taste:

To these two refugees from totalitarianism, who were also the most incisive critics of total theories of anything, and to Russell, Hilbert and others who prepared the way, we owe immeasurable gratitude – and the duty of recalling, every now and then, the truth de profundis that they articulated – that there is no truth, but truths, as Albert Camus once put it in The Myth of Sisyphus. Our search for truth is never-ending; anyone who claims to possess it complete and absolute, secure from all challenge, is always wrong. This truth – the truth that there is no single truth – is perhaps the most important and deep-seated defence against the absolutists, fascists and all those – who seem troublingly many – who aggressively proclaim certainty.

[…]

In discovering that there is no bedrock of mathematics and indeed of logic itself, and that therefore nothing is completely certain, these heroic and often troubled figures instead showed us something of equal if not greater importance – the necessity of pluralism, of tolerance, and thus the very bedrock of that uncertain venture, a worthwhile civilization.

I’m not sure that equating Gödel’s and Wittgenstein’s critique of formal logical systems with claims to absolute truth–especially truth claims in the realms of politics and religion (ethics)–necessarily works, but I sure don’t have the background yet to articulate why it wouldn’t.  Just a sort of gut feeling that it’s a lot more complicated to reconcile the two.

~~~

I’m slowly making my way through Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.  I’m finding it difficult to work in the realm of mathematics and abstract logic, I think because of baggage left over from grade school as much as anything.  Still, Hofstadter’s use of juxtaposition of math, art, and music to point at larger issues of human consciousness is very engaging, even if I occasionally get bogged down by the math and logic puzzles that he presents along the way.

And now Ross’s blog entry has turned me on to another interesting read: Logicomix.

The Purity of Memory

In June 2007, WNYC Radio Lab did a show called Memory and Forgetting.  The first segment of this show featured the work of NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux.  The show sort of made a hash of the plain-language results of LeDoux’s research with rats and the protein-inhibiting drug Anisomycin.  They said that memories are not stored in any permanent way at all but are instead fully created or invented every time we remember them.  As a consequence, they said that the memory is “degraded” with each remembering.  What really piqued my attention was when a scientist (whose name I missed) was quoted as saying, “the purest memory would be in a patient with amnesia.”

What astounded me was hearing an obviously highly intelligent person make the completely nonsensical statement that the ‘purest’ or best memory exists in a person who cannot access or use it at all.  I think I would try to evaluate memory based on its utility.  A memory is ‘good’ if it is useful in some way — if it engenders positive emotions, provides meaning, etc.  By that standard, a memory that is inaccessible would be useless thus without value.  I can only assume that memory for many people has become confused with some sort of empirical, objective truth.  In that system, a memory is valuable only insofar as it accurately represents ‘what really happened.’  The more a memory is used by the mind, the more it is ‘degraded,’ the less ‘pure’ it is.  In other words, the most ‘pure’ record is one least contaminated by point of view, relativity, or the way that a person filters reality to make it relevant to their self.

To make the implications of this easier to grasp, let’s talk about it in terms of photography rather than memory. Cameras are designed to mimic a single point of view, but imagine if they weren’t. What if a picture of a room was composed of the light reflecting off of every surface in that room irregardless of the need for that light to converge on one point. That data to a human would be completely unintelligible — without any meaning or value, it would be visual noise.  Yet from the point of view of one who values objectivity over utility, it is vastly more ‘pure.’  It is true that such a photograph would contain many times more data than a standard photo.  With the assistance of a computer and some method of mapping the data, you could conceivably generate a standard, intelligible picture from any point of view within the room (or do any manner of other things).  Now that would be useful, but it would only have utility or intelligibility once it has been filtered to approximate a relative human point of view or narrative.

The same is true of memory — the value of a memory is not in how accurately it reproduces external reality but in it’s utility to the self.  This is perhaps why memory developed.  It is less an accurate witness to objective, external reality than are our senses (themselves highly suspect).  While it may be very difficult for scientists to uncover truths about the world around us without making an effort to objectivity, it will always be necessary to return to our self to provide that data with utility.  The relationship of data to utility and the inescapable necessity of point of view says a lot about what we consider ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge.’  Our truth is constrained by the limits of our humanity, which is as it should be.  Outside ourselves, from an unlimited perspective of omniscient objectivity, the universe would be infinite unintelligible noise.  Our mind filters and discards far more than it retains and uses, and what we choose to discard says as much of us as what we retain.

Memory is only about ‘what really happened’ as an afterthought, and trying to measure its ‘purity’ by such a standard invites frustration.  Instead, memory is about us.  Science is little different — what we choose to study and the applications to which we put scientific data bear no more of a relationship to “what really is” than our memories bear to “what really happened.”  We study what has utility, what is interesting, what helps us survive and thrive.

[Side thoughts: Does language predicate point of view and narrative? Is it possible to make a statement completely devoid of narrative? English sentence structure (subject, verb, object or just subject, verb) is built around narrative — it is sort of narrative condensed to its most basic form.]