Language, music, and gesture

I ran into a quote by Nietzsche in his book 'Human, All to Human' about Language.

The whole phenomenon of metaphysics is based on the use of language in a particular way. But the question is: is there anything 'older', 'further back', 'more primitive' than Language? Keep in mind that Language too is the voice of Rationality and Reason. But if we can find something 'more' or 'bigger' than Language, we might find a clue to the meaning of life.

Nietzsche says:

"The imitated gesture led the imitator back to the sensation expressed by the gesture in the body or the face of the one imitated. This is how we learned to understand one another; this is how the child still learns to understand its mother."

Think of the polarity between saying, "I am in despair.", and the 'look' of despair on a face. Doesn't the 'look' communicate something more than any description in language? Isn't this pre-rational language our original tongue?

This 'gesture' is not mediated by subject/predicate language; it's the same with music. It is pure immediacy. And music and gesture are tied to one another. For music leads to bodily movement, dance, etc . . .

In 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', Nietzsche says:

"Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things: and now my highest parable remained unspoken in my limbs."

Also,

"The self does not say, 'I', it DOES I."

Chesterton, Art, and Rationality

This is from Chesterton's book Orthodoxy. I almost want to make this quote a major pillar in my own philosophy.

"We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget."

All our faculties have the right role here. Common sense is of practical value; it can help us get on in the world, it can help us survive, make money, and have all the goods that come from material comfort. Rationality can help us with logic, thinking clearly about things we were meant to think clearly about. But we can't help but think that a pure life of rational contemplation sucks the sap out of the tree. We feel that there is something more primitive, primal, further back, on the other side of the world (almost), which we must feed upon so as to perserve spiritual sanity. This is hard because our minds are constantly daming this current. Everything has to pass the test of intellectual scrutiny. But there is something about who we are that isn't satisfied by pure rationality.

It does sort of feed into the idea that we forget that we've forgotten. The whole point of our existence is to remember who we are. Throughout our lives, we're supposed to find out more and more who we are by finding out more and more who God is. We have the wool drawn over our eyes when we have this pathological desire to engage in all these activities that are designed - by their nature - to not assist us in our quest to find ourselves.

But "spirit and art and ecstacy"! "For one aweful instant we remember that we forgot." Doesn't this just resonate with you? I have to remember that I cannot enter into the least bit of imaginative sympathy with the person who cannot feel this in his bones, or the person who has no desire for anything having to do with spirit, art, or ecstacy. I know these gods take on different forms, and I'm only directly acquainted with the way they manifest themselves in my own consciousness.

This all, again, supports my point that something is prior to rationality, something is there prior to the Logos, something or Someone begets this Logos, and it is a sublime mystery to me to ponder the mode of existence the Logos spawns from. My imagination can only cling to images of tempests, ocean waves, galaxies, canyons, mountains, or feelings of awe, fascination, and dread, or things associated with the other-worldly, the ghostly, the alien, even the uncivilized, the barbarous, the primitive, the amoral, or pre-moral, a maelstrom, of which the tortured genius is a fleeting shadow, intense, undomesticated, unpredictable, like a lion.

Philosophy, the Arts, and Richard Rorty

I bought a book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty. I am excited to read this book because I think he is the clearest and best defender for various feelings I've been having about the analytic tradition in philosophy. To say the least, I haven't really favored the analytic tradition. I've had a falling out with it. But it hasn't been a complete divorce. It's almost like I'm telling it, 'It's not you, it's me.' Let's not get married; let's be 'just friends'. I want to make it a tool in my tool-box. Analytic philosophers want to make their philosophy the actual tool-box! They want it to be 'the privileged discourse'. More and more, I've wanted to make analytic philosophy a branch of something else, of something more ultimate - as long as it's not the trunk of the tree, or the roots from which the trunk grows.

My personal philosophy is very nascent, but I have strong intuitions about its truth. I can't put it into words to my satisfaction, but I can hint at it by saying how I priviledge certain modes of expression over others. Music is high on the list; but then another part of me wants to call it Art in General, where Music can be branch. This view is highly influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote the Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. I have trouble relating to 'Tragedy', but I don't think it's too far off from a Movie, which I am very acquainted with. I want to say that these kinds of things 'come first'; but I have trouble putting into words exactly what I mean by this. Is it the very nature of my scheme that I can't analytically justify the order of the scheme itself? For if I could, the scheme itself is subsumed under the analytic tradition, and the tradition isn't a branch of something like I intially wanted it to be.

There is something very real in Music, however: something so real that when I am immersed in musical rapture, Descarte's demon almost seems like a harmless mirage. It's almost like the demon is only meant to haunt a mind dominated by the tyranny of the analytic tradition. But I want my philosophy to transcend that tradition's shortcomings: over-reliance on the mind, neglectful of intuitions, the arts, music, and movies. I really want to incorporate movies into my philosophy of life. For everything seems to come to a head in the movies: we can be moved by music, we have the visual representations who act, we have the arousal of emotions by the actor (which are feigned) and the audience (which are real), the themes and motifs which the film might want to indirectly transfer, and a host of other things.

Literature seems like a good candidate for making philosophy a branch of. But then Literature is a form of Art.

It's so funny to hear about the vexation people feel when a philosophy isn't direct and clear. But, as Nietzsche mused: what if truth is a woman? What if it really is? What if truth has to be coaxed out of us, or aroused in a certain way, and what if the most efficient way to do this is through the Arts? Even Rudolph Otto, in his 'The Idea of the Holy' admitted he was going to be talking about things which couldn't be directly mentioned. He had to invent or point out analogies and metaphors that were meant to arouse in us certain emotions. Why? Because the next step is to say that these emotions - the ones you feel now as a result of the metaphor - are analogous to the emotions you'd feel if you were in direct contact with that X of which we can't directly describe or communicate. He says that things of the Spirit have to be awoken in this way. Spiritually, we are all asleep, trying to wake up with the illusion of Reason, not realizing that such an illusion may be a part of the dream.

I'll see how Rorty can help me on my trek.

God's Hiddenness and Psychology?

I've been thinking about why people think that religious truths should be more obvious. If something as important as my personal damnation hinges on whether I know certain facts, why wouldn't God make more certain that I know these facts, or that everyone knows them? Now, I can't honestly ask this question with a straight face, because I think I have good reasons why the question doesn't make sense. Of course, I could be wrong, but I only have my mind to work with.

Surely God knows everything. That's what omniscience means. We also know that everyone's psychology is unspeakably complex. Who knows what lurks beneath our own conscious lives, let alone everyone who has ever lived. For me, it seems entirely possible that for some people, people with a certain kind of psychology, a direct and obvious relevation from God would be met by revulsion, fear, rationalization, or perhaps even indifference, or even puzzlement. But then perhaps an omnipotent God can remedy this. But I don't see how He can do this without direct manipulation of thier psychological constitution, which would tamper with their free will, which is linked up with their psychology. It is intuitive to me that we have to perserve freedom.

So, it is possible that a direct revelation yeilds less saved than an indirect one. And it doesn't seem like we can overturn this possibility from the standpoint of our finite perspectives. I mean, what reason could we possibly appeal to so as to prove that God ought to have made Himself more obvious, or Christian Truth more obvious? It seems we extrapolate from our own expectations or our own idiosyncratic predicament to foist that upon everyone else. But there doesn't seem to be a good reason to engage in such an extrapolation. It doesn't even seem like we have a good reason to apply it to the case we know about the most: our own. For the psychologists are the quickest to let us know that our knowledge of our selves is extremely limited, the vast portion of what may be called 'our naked personalities' submerged - like an iceberg - beneath a vortex of competing wishes, desires, and fears: what Freud might call the Id.

Thoughts on the Argument from Reason

Victor Reppert popularized one of my favorite arguments for some sort of dualism. The argument first appeared in the 3rd chapter in C.S. Lewis' book Miracles called 'The Cardinal Difficulty in Naturalism'. I can't reproduce it here perfectly from memory, but I'll write what I remember.

According to Naturalism, we are purely material objects. There is no part of us that is not made of matter. But then a question arises: how is it that we come to call our own thought rational? For, presumably, if something is purely material, all of its parts are non-rational. If we have 10 grains of sand or a billion grains of sand, we still have a bunch of sand.

Now, the scientists tell us that matter is completely governed by the law of cause and effect. This law governs certain bahavior of matter called events. Thus, if our minds are nothing but matter, then our minds are nothing but various events governed by the law of cause and effect. By definition, if X is wholly material, and therefore nothing but events, and therefore governed by the law of cause and effect, then X, and anything that X causes, is non-rational.

But if all this is true, we have lost all grounds to suppose that anything that I've typed so far is rational. We'd be reduced to saying that we should just call it rational for pragmatic reasons. So, what would have to be the case for our arguments to have rationality or validity?

Lewis here introduces another relation - along with the cause and effect relation - called the ground/consequent relation. I assume this relation is a universal that is in time, but not in space (can't expound on that anymore right now), for I have other reasons for thinking that our minds - or more exactly our mental properties - are in time, but not in space. That is, these properties have no extention, and so they are spaceless; and yet we seem to be related to this relation, and so the only other dimension I know of is time. When we argue validly or rationally, our minds hook up with or link with this relation in another dimension - a rational dimension - which is sufficiently free from the causal nexus so as to be determined by what it knows. Since we defined being non-rational in terms of being a lump of matter governed by the law of causality, we can in turn define the rational in terms of being a lump of matter with mental properties which allow the brain to link with the relation of ground and consequent, residing in a non-spatial, temporal dimension, so as to be free of the causal nexus; for if it not free of such a nexus, it is determined by physical causality, which will make it non-rational.

If the mindless process of events driven on by causality determines a particular event to be, what other conclusion can we draw other than that the particular event is a non-rational, determined product of blind determinative processes which came about like the millionth domino falling after the first was pushed over?

If you are a naturalist, you have no ground to believe anything you say is rational.

Thoughts on Kant . . .

I had an interesting conversation with a woman at CCU. We got to talking about an assignment that was given to us in our Metaphysics class. She seems like a smart person, but she hasn't read very much, which she admitted. Since she hasn't read very much, but what she has read has alarmed her. For example, she said Kant jarred her - even made her feel like she couldn't look in a mirror. She needed the assurance that what she was looking at, what was reflecting back to her, was something real. Kant would, of course, admit it was real; the only catch is that it is real in the sense of being a part of the 'phenomena', or 'things as they seem to us', or 'things as interpreted through our 'categories of perception'.

Without any other philosophers to help her, she becomes disillusioned, trapped in the cacoon over own senses. I mentioned the Medievals, and how they regarded the senses as doors to true reality, rather than prisons within which we don't get at reality at all. But she scorned the Medievals because she doesn't think them critical, or because they believed in God.

She doesn't want to invoke God in any philosophy for her. I told her I have no problem doing this as long as I have some rational assurance that it is true. She looked at me rather strange, as if to suggest that the very possibility of it being true was a foregone conclusion. It wasn't even an option, which is a frame of mind I have trouble relating to.

I did get a chance to introduce her toƒ the philosophy of Kierkegaard, and other Continental philosophers. Continental philosophy is disdained by much of the faculty at Coastal. I mentioned that Kierkegaard's conception of God is much more attractive - from my experience - than that presented at your Church on the corner, or that which tends to be presented by institutionalized Christianity. Her face was peculiar at this point. Much of what I was saying was met by raised eyebrows, but not the kind that would suggest smugness, but that which might suggest shock. But not the kind of shock that is sometimes accompanied by disgust. It was accompanied by a sort of 'newness', a new fragrance, alien, and yet - perhaps - desired. But her guard was up because there was still a lot of talk about God, which was off limits.

Kant seems like a big obstacle to her. He hasn't bothered me much. I disagree with him at the threshold. We have different starting points. But she is trapped because her and Kant share the same starting point. Why should I grant Kant's initial assumption: the distinction between the world as it is and the world as it appears to me. I know my senses sometimes deceive me; but then sometimes they don't. And when they don't, I'm getting at the world as it is in itself. And even if my modes of perception confine me to the world as it seems to me, why sink into despair? Perhaps Heaven is a place where we have different kinds of cognitive faculties, which enable different modes of perception, allowing our minds to have varied categories of thought through which to perceive reality. But that I don't have it right now doesn't make me despair.

Besides, I see no argument for Kant's assumptions. I have no problem siding with the Medievals. I think our senses put in touch with reality. I have no reason not to think this. And Kant hasn't given me a good reason.

Just some thoughts . . .

Brief explanation of the Morgage crisis

Sheep: Hey, can I have a loan?

Lender: Hmmm. We used to want proof that you can pay it back, but we don't need it. The cost of your house is going to keep going up. So, we'll just give everyone a loan, no matter how much. And no one will have to prove they can pay it back.

Sheep: Really! Cool! My job sucks, so that works for me. Those morgage payments would be a pain in the butt!

Lender: Here's a cool deal. No morgage payments for 2 years! Don't pay any loans.

Sheep: 2 years?! Wow. That works, because . . . uh . . . I can pay it then. I'll probably move up the ladder at my job by then. And . . . my house will be worth 50% more . . . so there's nothing to worry about . . . .

Lender: Nope! No worries. Here's your loan.

Sheep: Thanks!

Sheep leaves.

Lender: Should I secure the loan? Nah . . . the bank will take care of it.

Bank 1: Wow! That's a bunch of loans you're giving there. I don't see any income from the loans, though. So, let's give out more loans! How do we get more capital to give more bad loans?

Bank 2: Well, we can sell the loans we've got already as assets. Let's promise that the loans 'will be' paid back, since the houses are going to be worth more in the future anyway. If the houses are worth more, the loans are worth more! So, we'll sell them, and people will buy a bunch, since they're worth a bunch. Also, we'll call the best of the bad morgages AAA, and give all the morgages different names! The really bad morgages are BBB. AAA and BBB sound better than just saying 'really terrible morgages', anway. The worst morgages don't get a name. Let's give people great interest rates on those securities!

Bank 1: Good idea! So as people buy more and more of the loans, we get more and more money. And the more money we have, the more money we can loan again! But wait a second. If all the morgages really are bad, aren't we just slitting out own throats? In the short-run, we make money by selling the loan; but in the long-run, it seems like we're digging our own graves!

Bank 2: Stop with your worrying. We don't think about the future! We think about next quarter! Why? That's what OUR investors think about. And keep in mind that the price of houses will always go up! If not, the government will be our safety net.

Bank 1: How do you know the government will be there?

Bank 2: Well, duh! We and government are in this together. If we go down, we all go down.

2 years later . . .

Sheep: Hmmm. I still can't pay this darn morgage payment. And my house isn't worth more; it's worth less! Wait a minute. My morgage is worth more than my house! So, let me get this straight. I can default on my morgage; I can then get another morgage for a BETTER house for the SAME price. I'm not paying these stupid morgage payments.

Back at the bank . . .

Bank 3: I just bought a bunch of morgage-backed securities, but their not worth anything. What the heck is going on!

Bank 1&2: Oh. Yea . . . A bunch of people bought those. People all over the country and the world. Ummm . . . . We might have started a tiny, massive global recession.

Great.