The New World and the Old Made Explicit: Excursus on the Meaning of Life

Only through time time is conquered. 

- Burt Norton

Exploration leads to new cartography. (Americas appear on the European globe; experiments modify theory; relationships lead to words of promise)

New cartography to new questions. (The antique globe suggests possible trade routes; theory has sudden holes; promises suggest future joy or incongruences leading to fissures )

New questions to further exploration. (Poking around for the Northwest Passage; inventing the Hadron Collider; kindling of passion, searching for betrayal)

The only real satisfaction is an entire world understood; the entirety of the terrain traversed, the relations of the whole complete and coherent. The pulling together of all joys, facts, and accomplishments. In every world we are to explore, every world we are given, there is a world to be achieved so that greater satisfaction is to be had. And this is where we find ourselves. Human beings are to explore to achieve satisfaction.

To obtain achievement in this direction is to obtain greater satisfaction. As is stated in The Good Book, human being's purpose is to cultivate a garden for their own enjoyment. And this enjoyment is life. Life is nothing other than complete satisfaction.

But this cultivation is a pain. For we must abandon our old conceptions, abandon everything our self clings to in order to survive. And this is death.

Hence as poets have long known, death and life are inseparable. To achieve life, one must go by the way of death.

Hence also, the scientists. A cell divides. A tree degrades into nutrients for other trees. Theories give way to better ones.

Hence also, the religious. Self denial leads to self fulfillment. And further than this: complete death, leads to complete life: death in service to The Way, leads to Resurrection. And Resurrection is no metaphor, it is the fullness of this process itself.

Truth is an Amoeba

Truth is an amoeba. You might take this to be metaphor; but so taking, you would be only half-right. I mean it literally as well as metaphorically: truth is an amoeba. Still my seriousness will be in doubt; how can a simple-minded (or rather, no-minded) single celled organism be related to truth itself, let alone be it?

There are many apparent problems with my identification. Truth is thought to be an abstract concept, not a concrete happenstance, not a living, changing organism, and not a humble thing. But all should become clear in consideration and meditation on what truth is. In reflection and in surprise (perhaps), we will come to see that truth is indeed literally an amoeba.

Since truth is literally an amoeba, we can start on either end. We can consider truth and, under the microscope, discover that it is a little organism; or we can go the other way: see in the amoeba’s grasping its environment, eating its prey, the entirety of all qualities of truth. But for a full identification, it seems necessary for both ends to meet; otherwise, we might think one might be fooled into thinking that an amoeba is truth, but truth is not an amoeba.

Truth => Amoeba

Truth is something we strive for, yes. And we don’t strive for an amoeba, certainly. Nevertheless truth is something recognized: we notice it when we have it. When we make a discovery, learn how to perform an action, realize a relationship; a rush of satisfaction, saying that the pieces of our life’s puzzle has come together. And when the pieces fit in any puzzle, we say we have gotten things correct. Our satisfaction tells us we have achieved truth.

Reality is a big puzzle however, and so truth is something we always pursue. So in what way do we pursue the truth? We use our bodies to probe the world around us, taking in ideas to digest pieces of digestible environment to satisfy our hunger for truth. This process is very ameoba-like, suggestive that truth is like an amoeba’s striving for mastery of its environment.

Yet some would say that this is metaphor. Truth-seeking is an ameoba-like process. But truth isn’t an amoeba. And I would say “no.” Truth is literally an amoeba. The way we should think about it is this. Truth-seeking and truth should not be strictly differentiated. They are in fact the same. When we see this, we see that “truth is an ameoba-like process.” But then! We see that being amoeba-like is very much being an amoeba. Then we realize what I’ve been saying all along: truth is an amoeba.

If truth-seeking and truth are utterly different, then it turns out these two words no longer have any meaning. For then how can we say our truth-seeking is real truth-seeking if truth is not an experience: namely, the satisfaction of achieving coherence in one’s world of experience? Thus truth is an experience, and part of an action, the action of seeking-truth. And we cannot refer to truth-seeking without an idea of truth. And again, the idea of truth cannot be separated from truth seeking. For how do we think of truth, or how do we realize what it is? It is only by reflection upon our truth-seeking endeavors. Thus truth is an ameoba-like process.

But how is being an amoeba similar to undergoing amoeba like processes? Basically this can be said by turning the old phrase: “if it looks like an amoeba, smells like an amoeba, and talks like an amoeba, it is an amoeba.” Thus truth is an amoeba.

Amoeba => Truth

But literally? Ok, I exaggerated, in a sense. Truth isn’t literally that squishy single celled organism. But nevertheless truth is an amoeba, literally; and I do not speak out of both sides of my mouth in saying this. I am simply not using language in as strict a sense as you might like it. But my meaning is frank and clear, and though you may not like it, you know what I mean. And when language conveys meaning clearly, it is mere nitpicking and mere nagging to quibble over words.

And really, given the above, in what way is truth not an amoeba? In no significant sense. You might have the following objections. (a) Truth is disembodied, and an amoeba is embodied. (b) Amoebae are not sentient. Truth needs experiencers for it to be considered truth.

But we will see that each of these objections is ill-founded.

(a) We have seen above that truth is something we reach using whatever embodied faculties we have. And since truth-seeking is embodied, and since any strict demarkation between truth-seeking and truth is absurd, we must say that truth is embodied too.

Further if we see life as part of one big tree where what came before and what came after is all connected, where we are ourselves connected to the amoeba, our bodies are related to the amoeba, then even my “admission of exaggeration” was really unnecessary, and we really can say that truth is an amoeba. 

(b) A last objection would be this: truth is appreciated only by minds, and minds are not physical entities. Minds think. Amoeba don’t think in a meaningful sense; they don’t apprehend truth. In actual fact, this objection is the worst, and it has nothing going for it. For truth we have seen is an embodied affair,  and attempts to separate our minds from our bodies, our faculties of investigation, is futile. Sentience must then be seen as the purposeful investigation of the world. Both persons and amoeba do this, only at different levels and for different purposes.

In closing, I’ll repurpose an old proverb.

Go to the amoeba, you close-minded; consider its ways and be wise; which has no fixed position within its world, yet lives and dies, steadily gaining command over its world, striving to gain mastery, and not regretting its humble position.

EAIM: Can We Know Reality?

"Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality."
- T.S. Eliot in Burnt Norton

Let's suppose that we can't. This means we know something about reality.

Let's say we can't know whether or not we know something about reality. This means we're saying we know something about reality.

Looks like we're stuck knowing reality.

EAIM: The Nature of Truth

"What is truth?"
- pontius pilate

"The truth is out there," is the hope of the X-File's FBI agents. Perpetually foiled, they nevertheless strive to uncover the relationship between the government and extraterrestrial life. Various layers of secret society turn every new piece of evidence into merely greater enigma. In this way the story progresses continually leaving both the agents and their TV audience unsatisfied, wondering whether the show's mantra is merely a false hope.

In our most gripping life pursuits, we are driven by the idea that "the truth is out there." However, our answers lead to more questions, and we have to wonder if the forces of concealment will forever hold our prize from our grasp. After prolonged searching and frustration, a dark doubt may begin to creep: Can we reach the truth at all?

Into this doubt comes Michael Oakeshott's meditation on the nature of truth. First, he says, we have to stop thinking of truth as something that is "out there," not something we don't already have knowledge of. For if the truth is something we have no clue about currently, we will never be able to reach the truth. For we wouldn't know what would count as the truth.

Oakeshott would make this analogy, I believe. Saying "the truth is out there" without knowing what would satisfy our search is like saying the following: I want to get to a place, but I don't know what it would be like or when I would find it.

Even if we accept this answer, it seems to miss the point: the FBI agents really don't know the truth they seek. And in general we feel the strain of not having the truths we want. Our disappointment is that we don't feel satisfied in our particular pursuit. It does not matter that we know some truths, we want to know a particular truth.

To this, Oakeshott would rephrase things into something even more shocking, but after consideration, what can only be the case: yes, the FBI agents don't know the particular truth they seek, yet they do know what would count as an answer. They know that an answer must accord with the knowledge they already have. Thus they already know something of the truth, and it isn't entirely "out there" at all. This means that all the truths we could possibly know, we already know a little about them.

After we digest this shock, we should come to realize that Oakeshott is using the word "truth" in a funny way. For him, truth isn't a "thing" at all. It's something that comes in degrees. We know more or less of it. It's a feeling about how the facts fit. It's satisfaction.

About "what is out there" the FBI agents know some truth, but they don't know complete truth. But we can turn the problem around. The evidence the FBI agents do have, that is, the concrete alien DNA samples, the creepy sound recordings, and the eye-witness accounts; all these! they only know partially. They certainly have the information, but they don't know what it means. In other words, they don't know the truth even about their evidence!

It is very important to let this sink in. We can apply this thinking to everything we know. We have information which we think are facts, but until we solve every question, we don't know the full meaning of these facts. In all actuality, what we think is important, might, when a new piece of knowledge comes to us, seem unimportant after all. And what is unimportant, might take on a whole new significance.

But in all this we might become dismayed. For this makes our whole reality topsy-turvy. Now it seems, we can't count on anything to stay still for us to surely reach the truth. Should we just give up on it all?

Not at all. Again as Oakeshott says, We do have knowledge of truth. Even though it is in degrees, we still have it. Though new information modifies what we know, the new information never implies that we should reject all of what we knew before. The only thing these realizations should spur us on to is humility. Since nothing is fixed for us, the only thing for us to do is follow what the experience says we should conclude. We are responsible for no more.

"There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced my monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
- T.S. Eliot
in East Coker

"I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth." - 1 John 

EAIM: The Character of Experience

Like many a good philosophical meditation, Experience and Its Modes begins with the definition of a key term: experience. Since experience is all-encompassing, it is important to note that whatever the definition, it is merely useful for a given purpose, and after my brief summary, I'll give my two cents as to what that is.

Oakeshott defines experience in an odd way. He says that all experience is coterminous with judgement. It is an initially shocking definition because we normally think of judgement as that which aids in formal deduction. We know we don't encounter the world in this way all the time. But further, it is strange in that judgement seems to be beyond experience: it is that force which moves us from mental state to mental state. Oakeshott's clarification is helpful and it broadens our outlook beyond these limited ideas.

Definition: Experience = judgement, which is a recognition of 'this,' not 'that.' It is a reflective modification of experience

In the likeness of a mathematical proof, this definition is demonstrated in the following way: he shows that experience cannot be either more than or less than judgment. Once this is shown we may conclude that experience and judgement are one and the same.

What is said to be less than judgement, is sensation; what is more, intuition. To be full, his argument must cover all of its bases: what is said to be more, and what is said to be less, must fall on the same spectrum, the same axis; and all that is experience must be imagined to fall on this axis. And the axis is said to be that of recognition of 'this' not that. In sensation, supposedly, we see a bare 'this.' It is not related to a background of 'not that.' In intuition, the 'this' not 'that' melts into complete union. There is no this or that, everything is seen as a mere oneness.

First, I'll give a justification of this spectrum as representative of all we could plausibly experience. In experience there are always things to experience; that is, there are always "this"s; and it appears, we have different "this"s which find themselves related within a world. These relations could go so far as identification, for even in two different "this"s, the relations of one to the other may be exhaustive: one completely defines the other. And these thoughts seem to exhaust what we mean by experience.

Now Oakeshott proceeds to say that the extreme ends of our spectrum are not actually experiences; at best, they are limiting concepts conceived by their likeness to certain features of judgement, but not actually concepts which can count as experience apart from all the features of judgement.

Sensation = Judgement. In imagining what we mean by pure sensation, we realize that we never in fact have this so-called experience. For in recognizing a "this," we in fact recognize the "this," that is, it appears identifiably within the field of our current experience. It is found somewhere within a whole in such a way that when it appears, it already bears relation to all within it.

Judgement = Intuition. [Here, I depart a bit from Oakeshott's train of thought. I don't understand it well enough.] In imagining what we mean by pure intuition, we realize, again, that we are dealing with an abstraction and not an experience (i.e. being confused).  Under this idea of intuitive experience, 'knowledge of' and 'knowledge about' are utterly distinct. So then, because judgement never gets at the reality, it is superfluous. So then "sensation" is superfluous. But this leaves only the process of identification for recognizing reality. We no longer have recognition. And it all seems to fall apart here. For all data is always given, nothing is added or removed. And reality is not in our experience static.

Why This Definition

Since it encompasses everything that we know, "experience" seems to thereby be the broadest term possible. Thus, there would seem to be an infinite ways of defining it or getting it across. In a sense, since intuition, judgement, and sensation are distinctions without differences, we could have defined reality as any of these.  So then we may ask why "judgement?" It primes the mind to understanding what we mean by truth; and truth is a domain in which judgement has a natural home: criticism has been the way of the west since Descartes.

Personal Knowledge: Summary

Personal Knowledge is a simple book with a simple plan. The whole is this, understanding the world is a practical endeavor. As such, we need to practice the art of understanding the world. And as practice, understanding the world is neither a skill nor knowledge we can understand through the mere reading of books.

He describes this view of the world through the history and psychology of science. And to the end of this world-description, the book has a very natural four-fold plan. (1) We note that skillful knowing is present in even the most objective of sciences. (2) This note spurs our considering the relationship between objective articulated knowledge and our subjective tacit skill in knowing. (3) These meditations now beg the question, How can we be confident in our knowledge, seeing that it relies on our temporary finite and error prone selves? And (4) our answers point us to an understanding of all of life, which shows the same process of personal knowledge. This understanding is reflected upon and gives us direction in understanding how we must relate to other knowing selves and what our relations say about our place in the universe.

Because we are discussing the nature of knowledge and our place as knowing agents, it is natural to look at all aspects of our lives, from science, to politics, to religion. And these diverse reflections bolster and support and help us understand the main idea: knowledge is personal, communal, and essential for the fullness of life.

Experience and Its Modes :: Introduction

Never have I liked the term "Nerd." In its own right, the image of a prototypical nerd is repulsive. A nerd is a pocket-protector-wearing, glasses-pushing, nasal, winy, weakling who knows all the book facts, but knows nothing of sometimes-stupid, in-the-moment fun of actually living. At a party, or during work, or inside the church, the nerd breaths his athematic breath neurotically and obsessively classifying things in a thin mutter, "this, not that. A not B." His frail being has no relevance, no gravity, and he is a wisp, the ghost all men wish to avoid becoming. Ghosts don't leave a mark on the world, and those with asthma are neither feared nor respected. They don't do the world good, except indirectly, a la silicon valley. And so even to think of the nerd is unpleasant.

Who are the nerds? Every university professor who actually does his work. Every science-lover. Every historian. Everyone with the least bit academic bent, and everyone who dares to enjoy what he finds in a book as a form of art.

But the application of "nerd," this is where my real dislike comes in. It's an irritating word because it is useful. It describes our situation, what exists in our collective imagination, our collective unconscious. Where is there a man who knows a lot and isn't a nerd? Not near and hard to stumble across. And it is difficult to think of an actual scholar living in the popular imagination who is not really a nerd. Only in myth do intellectual non-nerds find our respect: Aristotle or Indiana Jones. But! These men live respected only in the imagination of the nerds!

I read Michael Oakeshott's Experience and It's Modes as a restoration of the intellectual in the life of the world. Oakeshott gets at what really drives everyone crazy about the nerds, what causes us to deride the nerds, and what tempts us to flee the love of knowledge which would make us a nerd. This is what Oakeshott says, There is a place for the nerd to be a nerd, and there is a place for the doer of things to be a practical man. We can live harmoniously if we learn to appreciate the differences of living like a nerd means against that of living like a liver of life. If we don't appreciate these differences, nerds' egos will tempt them that their bookish knowledge means they are qualified to be a liver of life, and so they will boss everyone around like know-it-alls; this will cause resentment by practical men, because they actually know how to do things and to live life. Thus practical men will be tempted to think there is nothing to books and learning. This is clearly a bad situation. All to often this is our situation.

Experience and It's Modes says that such distinctions in our outlook exist, and if we don't recognize them, we get into trouble, because we are confused. This book, which I will outline in a few posts, is a clearing away of basic confusions like these.

How Language is Objective

"I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."
- Burnt Norton

The other day I listened to Radiohead's Kid A, digesting it's meaning.

What's confusing about the album, and a lot of contemporary music, is that it's very hard to delineate meaning. By their own admission, Radiohead cut up lyrics, put them in a hat, and drew them out randomly to what what formed Kid A. In a similar way, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland is a jumpy mess; what had a coherent structure, was thrown into random pieces by Ezra Pound. He told Eliot that it did the poem better. Eliot agreed.

An aim of music and poetry is to convey mood. At their hight, music and poetry needles you with a very sharp point, striking the heart with a very refined, cutting meaning. But just because the meaning is very clear to feeling, it doesn't follow that it's easy to communicate. Observe the volumes written on Eliot's poetry, look at youTube commenters on Yorke's lyrics. People are in awe, they return to a definite mood trying to understand an experience they count as significant.

What is cause for wonder is that language can convey significant meaning that can't easily be analyzable, if at all. But no one who has had this experience can tell you that the poetry means nothing for being hard or impossible to dissect.

Now what's fashionable in American philosophy is seeking knowledge through clear reasoning, where propositions can be lined up like dominos, ready for the mind to follow the chain to a certain and well defined effect. This certainty is taken to be the surest vehicle to arrive at truth. If all men are mortal, and if Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. Not even Socrates could doubt that chain of logic! Right?

But if we were to be given something like Radiohead's lyrics,

"Red wine and sleeping pills 

Help me get back to your arms
Cheap sex and sad films
Help me get back where I belong

I think you're crazy, maybe
I think you're crazy, maybe

Stop sending letters
Letters always get burned
It's not like the movies
They fed us on little white lies

I think you're crazy, maybe
I think you're crazy, maybe

I will see you in the next life." 

- Motion Picture Soundtrack

Or Eliots,

Ash on and old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air. 

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth. 

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire

 - Little Gidding

Or the Bible's,

"The day you eat of it you will surely die."

we're left knowing what death is and believing not only that we will die, but that we do die, and are already dead(!); whereas, if we know Socrates at all, he doesn't believe that all men die, and will contest premises upon premises till he's blue in the face.
But we're told that the more poetic stuff is not clear; since it hits our subjective self in a way that isn't easily put into propositions, we're left without a very clear way of arbitrating mis-interpretation. We might be lead astray by our private whims into error.
But for anyone who has read a particularly forceful piece of writing, he is sure that the understanding he perceives is correct; though not completely specifiable. Since the meaning he perceived is not completely known to himself, he is also open to other's thoughts to add to his comprehension; however, he knows what is true and false, what goes and what doesn't.
What's going on is that readers are perceiving a meaning. And this meaning is real and objective to anyone who has experienced it.
Now let's look at those who insist on precise argumentation. Their motivation is to find a way of arriving at truth that is completely objective, through a series of formal propositions. It's perfectly clean and incontestable. And surely there are ways of being formal and precise in language that's more organized and easier to follow. However! Nothing will ever convince someone of the truth in language who either does not want to experience it.
So even though language is intensely subjective, it also has objective meaning. And we should be comfortable with any sentence that conveys our point, poetic or prosy. Those who insist on complete objectivity find themselves defining their terms without end (a la Socrates), and falling into complete skepticism (a la Socrates).

Objectivity

Objectivity is often thought of as a virtue in it’s own right. The more objective we can be about a situation the better.

What I want to show is that complete objectivity (in any given situation) is impossible, and that whoever seeks it is corrupt.

Now, what do I mean by the word objectivity? A statement is completely objective if it does not depend on a single frame of reference. In particular, the more independent a fact is on a person’s own point-of-view the more objective it is.

To clarify let me give some examples.

A scientific theory is said to be objective insofar as it can be confirmed by experiment and can be described by mathematics. Experiments show that the result does not depend on a particular observer, and mathematical descriptions tell scientists exactly what a theory predicts.

Whenever we are graded on a test or assessed on our job, we should get an objective report. This report is objective insofar as we have formalized criteria for grading. This way the rightness or wrongness of a test is less dependent on the student’s personal quirks, and it is less dependent of the teacher’s mood.

In both these cases individual frames of reference are removed from the facts so that the facts may be judged apart from our subjective quirks.

And it is clear that this process is a good thing. If we didn’t have any objective standards for talking with other people, we couldn’t talk with other people at all!
We couldn’t even make sense of our own thoughts! (More on this in another video.)

Since this is a good thing, we’re tempted to think that the more of it the better. But this is not the case. If we try to be completely objective about any subject, it turns out we can’t know anything about it at all.

Let’s pretend that we can be completely objective about say some subject. The first question we must ask is where do we begin? And the only answer we can give is, “Where it seems to us it is important to begin.”

But in order to say this, we include our own subjective appraisal of importance. And there is no way out of it. If we want to know something, we have to consider what is important about it, and it’s importance is always something relevant to ourselves, our own subjective selves.

Therefore whoever is seeking complete objectivity is seeking something that is impossible. In fact, following an implication of this argument, this pure objectivity seeker is seeking to remove all value from the world, and this is the definition of nihilism: to say nothing matters. Further, we have also seen that this person who says nothing matters, can never completely objectively begin learning things. So he must even say that true knowledge of the world is impossible. So he is a complete skeptic and nihilist. And insofar as he truly seeks complete objectivity he is utterly corrupt.

A Whim and A Prayer

Jacob wrestled the human form devine

Struggling among the earthen shards in dust

Grasping and gasping, rasping: “it is mine”

Along broken skin

Blood ran sanguine

Descending lower, descending only,

Into a valley of this world,

Falling and brawling, calling: “give it me.”

Grinding to rust

The body to dust

The near forfeiting hand lifted to ether

Plunging down to the ground, the place it found,

Tearing and blaring, swearing: “I better.”

Though sinew collapsed

Jacob surpassed.

Rosy fingers spread over the sky’s vault

Pointing to the end of the night’s trouble.

He, breathing and seething, “I shall exalt, for

Along broken skin

Blood ran sanguine”

*Open Mindedness* and *The World as It Is*

Introduction

This essay follows my previous essay. In this I want to express how we may be confident in our apprehensions of reality, apprehensions we grasp as a consequence of true open-mindedness.

The "how" of the previous paragraph is meant ambiguously. It has two senses, both of which I shall chase down in this essay.

1. "How" as in "what justification we have for saying our perceptions are true."

2. "How" as in "the best method for coming to know the truth."

In the end we shall find that these two "hows" are actually one: our justification and our method interweave kaleidoscopically at many points, the name of all of which may be drawn together into one called "faith." That is, at the end, we shall see why and how the "how" of truth is "faith."

"How" as in "what is our justification for saying we know *The World as It Is*?"

As for our seeking justification for our open-minded attitude, the one that takes what it sees as true, with affirmation, we must reflect on our perception. Is what appears to me to be true *really* true? To this question are only two answers.

(1) We may have no certainty to the degree which our perceptions reflect what is really "out there" in reality. We have no way of knowing how firm a grasp our perception has on what is "really there."

(2) All that we perceive is really there.

To first appearances, (1) has the upper hand. The reason is simple, We've all been wrong. In other words, the appearances we apprehended did not do justice to reality ultimately. So it does not seem that all our appearances are "really there."

But on further investigation, we find that (1) leads to consequences that are unacceptable and undermine all ability to affirm knowledge of reality so long as we simultaneously entertain it. There being only two options, the untenability of (1) forces us to adopt (2), which despite its apparent strangeness, actually proves to live with us congenially.

The reason (1) undermines all confidence in knowing *the world as it is* can be discovered on a moment's reflection on what (1) says. Since we have no certainty that our perceptions reflect what is really "out there," we have no confidence in knowing the world as it is at all. In any respect.

We may think that our knowledge of our thoughts are safe; and therefore we may still know that we exist with certainty. As Rene Descartes said, "I think therefore I am." But this is actually confusion, and under belief in (1), we cannot trust our perceptions of our thoughts or (however indirectly) of ourselves. This is because, under (1), we have no confidence that our perceptions reflect the reality they purport to represent. This includes the perception that our thoughts are our thoughts or the perception that our being is really our being.

This is deep skepticism. And it in principle, it undermines explicit affirmation of even the proposition (1). It is imaginable, though, that one may live in deep distrust of all thought and perception without explicitly affirming (1). Those who do so are complete nihilists. They believe in nothing, and their whole world is meaningless. It is safe to assume no one actually takes this route. But because it is an inherently possible attitude to take, it means that belief in (2) is based on a leap of faith.

In other words, our reasoning says (2) is the only thinkable option, and it even represents the attitude of each man insofar as he is not a nihilist. Thus all perception is real; the perceptions themselves are directly true reality. To put it more strongly, all that we see, taste, touch, feel, hear, intuit, think, and otherwise perceive, all this is equally real and fundamental. This means that our own experience is fundamental to living a life of justified knowledge. And again, by the previous paragraph, we can only assent to this reality through faith, a personal commitment to an unprovable experience.

"How" as in "what is the best method for coming to know *The World As It Is*?"

This conclusion will be met with an objection, which illustrates *how* faith brings us from knowing *the world as it is* to knowing *the world as it is* even better.

There is our earlier objection to (2): We've all been wrong. What appeared to be there actually turned out to be a mirage, and after the mirage was cleared, we saw what was *really there.* But the appearances were not really there, and so they were not true.

The force of this objection lies in a misunderstanding of what is meant by "reality of perception." When the misunderstanding is cleared, a fuller appreciation for (2) shall be plain.

By "all perceptions are all equally real and fundamental," I do not mean that all relations between perceptions are true. A mirage is a perception. By the argument above, it is "really there," but it also coexists with our later perception that it had no physical "hard" substance. Both the "hard" substance and the "mirage" are perceptions, and on this level, they are equally real; in that they inform us of reality, as it really is.

However not all relations between these perceptions are true; that is to say, intelligible, or in other words, perceivable. We cannot imagine, and so it cannot be true, that the desert mirage is a perception that has the tactile sensation of, say, the cool undulation of water. Rather the mirage's perception is of the sort that if we move close to it, it vanishes. Thus, while real, it has properties that change as all our perceptions change, and *what is really there,* in this case sand, has the property that it is hot to the touch at midday.

By extension, knowing a collection of perceptions is there and *is the world as it is,* but in correctly understanding the relations between the perceptions grows us to understand *the world as it is* to an even greater degree.

Thus to plainly answer the objection, when we are mistaken as to the relationships of our perceptions, we are not perceiving a thing at all; rather we experience a confusion, and a confusion has no reality, just as the term "married bachelor" is a confusion which cannot possibly have reality.

Our faith in the truth of the appearances, their reality, leads us into living in this world of appearances; and this living leads us to make this *world as it is* into even more the *world as it is.*

Conclusion

Hidden within this discussion are many implications. Since experience is fundamental, it precludes any theories that deny experiences in toto. Insofar as a theory obscures what one truly apprehends, it confuses things; because it serves as a prejudice to say that an experience is not an experience, that it does not belong to reality. But this we see is a contradiction, to have an experience one does not experience.

The consequences are vast. It urges every knowing person to cast aside everything that holds him back from understanding truth. It encourages us to strain forward to know *the world as it is* to greater degrees.

At the same time, it affirms the objectivity of truth. Perceptions are not "just in our own mind" but are existentially connected with *the world as it is.*

For those who believe that the truth will set them free, this is reason to be truely *open-minded*: to see *the world as it is.*

The Air

Without a while; within a while; we while a worn wind:

Turning out, our tremoring teeth toothweeze a tune

Timed to the tappings of treachery and tessellates,

Tried and tired tilings for torn time, tracts, and trists;

And gorging, inward gulping, gaping: a gathering grin,

Grinning at guiles and games, gusto and guilt, girls and gams

Growing our groaning gaffes, but giving great guffaws.

Truth and Open-mindedness

In this post I want to encourage openness to truth found in experience, any truth; even those that conflict with doctrines and dogmas that are well established in our communities, central to our understanding of our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to God, threatening what we see as our sources of life.

This post is a response to a conversation my friends and I had on a road-trip. My friends are philosophers, and one of the marks of contemporary academic philosophy is careful questioning of all terms we use, seeking precision of thought. The leads to reconsidering what we think about all things, and it can breed a kind of liberalism of mind when it comes to examining one’s beliefs.

Now my friends see this questioning which is instilled into their everyday thinking as a hinderance to productive living. And this is for a natural reason, if you’re questioning your assumptions, you can’t use those assumptions to live your life. In addition, it doesn’t make a man a good leader; for good leaders need to have a firmness that gives their followers direction, and it is hard or impossible to be a good leader while questioning your foundation.

This reasoning lead them to conclude that it is desirable to have a closed mind. So in theology, it would be better for them, they would say, to eventually decide on what is orthodox and firmly stand on that point without budging. No more developments would be made from that point on.

And I believe they make a fundamental and disastrous mistake. The reasoning is faulty for it confuses things. It misunderstands how we come to know truth, and it encourages avoidance of things our conscience may press us to change our minds about.

To avoid confusion, I should speak of a good kind of close mindedness; and it is this I suspect my friends are partly concerned about, and I can commend it. However, I must later speak of another kind of close-mindedness I condemn.

The good kind of close-mindedness is skeptical of charlatanism, of a kind of linguistic magic, where intelligence weaves a spell of argumentation around our heads to move us in a direction we know in our gut is wrong, or at least a direction we do not understand and we feel an inner distrust in moving towards.

An example may be taken from the movie Idiocracy, a future dystopia, where the earth’s population’s IQ has dramatically fallen, and everyone lives according to the most inane commercialization. In the film, a gatorade type product is sold as containing electrolytes. And the citizens of this future love it and always praise it’s having electrolytes. But when asked why this should make the drink a good product, they have no idea. The goodness of the product is a blank concept. They are fooled by sophistry where they ought to have been skeptical.

But on the flip side, we ought not to invent or rely on sophistry to obscure what we intuitively feel to be true. And I cannot see this to be otherwise than exactly what is commended by my friends. Again, their view, and I believe this a charitable summation, is this, “We ought to trust our systems of reasoning that have proved to be true over against our momentary intuitions of what is true, even when the system seems to fail for the intuitions.”

And again, this is true insofar as it avoids intellectual charlatanism and sophistry as I said before. But let me show that it is disastrous when it comes to what we intuitively feel to be true. It is disastrous because my friends’ sentiment is self-contradictory.

They put the cart before the horse. We see this immediately when we suppose the following. Suppose that we have reached a system of belief that is reasonably true and safe. How did we reach this system? By a series of arguments the truth of which never intuitively struck us as true? By no means! No, we come to believe in systems such as mathematics or a political ideology because they strike us as true, good, or beautiful. This is how we accessed what we believed to be true in the first place.

If we then abandon the truth we have heard, and close our hearts to its goodness in favor of old ways of thinking, we actually reject the means by which we came to some truth originally. So if we are to seek consistency, we ought to keep the same method. And the method for finding truth is this, we meditate on our experience of the true, beautiful, and good. We articulate it in a more or less structured manner to show of fellow men what we see; and then we again see how much further our perception may perceive truth.

Further, if we should consider this view from a practical view, we shall find it no hinderance to strength of conviction and fortitude of mind. To outline with very simple examples, I do not have to become close minded when I use the world practically or consider mathematics. It is absurd for me to say that I am closed-minded in my view of how to drink from a cup, if I say that I should drink from a cup by either using a straw or lifting the brim to my lips. It is equally absurd for me to say I should become close-minded about mathematical axioms and theorems lest I be tricked into believing false things by arguments. No! In both these cases I can, must, and do judge what is true for myself. I just know how to use a cup. I just can assess what is true in mathematical phenomena by following a proof carefully. Openness to experience in this way is obviously no hinderance. The same goes for how we use other systems of thought or live in other modes of experience.

There are many applications to our lives this method should bear on our lives. But I have written already long enough for a blog post. In the future I will relate these ideas to other modes of thought such as religion and politics.

Famously, G. K. Chesterton said “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” But “I say to you, Be wise as serpents but innocent as doves. Indeed no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he be a little child.” And little children are not ones for convoluted argument, but see what is with wide and unapologetic eyes.