logos redux

Christians in late antiquity lived in a cultural universe richly populated with invisible realities–a world in which symbol and ritual were not the counterfeit of reality but rather the privileged means to access reality. It is often stated that this worldview rested upon a Platonic theory of knowledge and being. This is true, but it is also somewhat like saying that contemporary individuals are Freudians when they employ concepts like “superego” or “unconscious motivation.” Such an attitude toward the world is not so much orthodox Freudianism as part of the cultural air one breathes.

John F. Baldovin, “The Empire Baptized” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, pg 90

James Jordan, in his Primeval Saints: Studies in the Patriarchs of Genesis, describes the rhythm of God’s work of creation, and its corresponding reflection in man’s work. God, in the creation week, took hold of creation by the power of His voice (“And God said…”), restructured creation (separating light from darkness, waters above from waters below, land from sea), distributed His work (assigning governance to sun, moon, stars, giving the sea to fish, the land to birds and beasts, and all to man), evaluated His work (“And behold, it was good”), and enjoyed His work (on the Sabbath). Man, as God’s image, was created to do the same: take hold (or name, as Jordan points out we can’t work with something until we’ve named it), restructure, distribute, evaluate, and enjoy. Jordan gives as his example something as simple as giving a glass of water to someone: 1) I take hold of the glass in the cabinet, 2) I restructure the cabinet by removing one of the glasses, and I restructure the water by separating out a portion of it (from the faucet) into the glass for consumption, 3) I distribute the water to you, 4) You evaluate the water at the first sip (determining whether it is drinkable or not, cold enough or not, though this is sometimes unconscious in the case of water; still, it is at this stage of evaluation that we will react if the water is contaminated and tastes funny.), then 5) You enjoy the glass of water.

This five-fold rhythm characterizes all work, God’s and ours. To make a meal I must take hold of the ingredients (both collecting them physically and naming them and their relationship to one another via the recipe), restructure them according to the recipe (whether chopping, basting, boiling, etc.), then I will distribute the food (either I will keep my food for myself or give it away to someone else, or even perhaps sell it as a way of exchanging my work for someone else’s), then either I myself or the person to whom I give the food will evaluate it at first bite (perhaps announcing their judgment of it, whether good or bad, or perhaps not announcing it), and then I/we will enjoy it by consuming the whole portion.

Economics, then is the “distribution” part of this equation: I choose to trade some of my work for the work of others (currency being the symbol that signifies work done and entitles me to then go out and select what type of work I would like to benefit from in return for my own—e.g., I get my paycheck in exchange for my work, then I go to the grocer’s and buy vegetables and beef, deciding that this portion of my work will be traded for the work of the vegetable farmer who planted, cultivated, and picked the vegetables and for the work of the farmer and butcher who raised, slaughtered, and butchered the cow).

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Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

“Sports are a species of performance, in the mode of what Gumbrecht calls ‘presence.’ Presence assumes an anti-Cartesian conception of life. When we think of ourselves as mainly minds, the world, including our own bodies, stands at a distance from us, and we try to make sense of it. Meaning is paramount. In sports, what the body knows is as important as what the mind knows, and the objects in the world are not ‘out there’ to be understood but are part of ourselves.”

Peter Leithart, “Ingested Words“

“Ionesco once remarked, ‘The French for London is Paris.’ (…I assume he meant ‘The French for “London” is “Paris,”‘…) What he meant was that in understanding situations, French people tend to translate them into their own frame of reference. This is of course true for all of us. If Mary tells Ann, ‘My brother died,’ and if Ann does not know Mary’s brother, then how can she understand this statement? Surely projection is of the essence: Ann will imagine her own brother dying (if she has one–and if not, then her sister, a good friend, or possibly even a pet!). This alternate frame of reference allows Ann to empathize with Mary. Now if Ann did know Mary’s brother somewhat, then she might flicker between thinking of him as the person she vaguely remembers and thinking of her own brother (friend, pet or whatever) dying. This dilemma arises for all beings with their own preferred vantage points. Do I map things into what they would be for me, or do I stand apart and survey them completely objectively and impassively?”

Holfstadter, Metamagical Themas, 23

An intriguing point. I do wonder, though, about the author’s strict division between things as “they would be for me” and things surveyed “completely objectively and impassively.” Though I acknowledge a distinction between imagining one’s own brother dying (in order to empathize) and imagining only the vague acquaintance one once knew as Mary’s brother some time ago; nevertheless, I’m wondering how the second conception is less subjective than the first. Granted, imagining the person she actually knew as Mary’s brother at least gets the right real-world referent, but it lacks empathy; it misses the intimate relationship that has been severed, represented when Mary says, “My brother died.”

What I mean is this: If Ann imagines her own brother dying, she is projecting, imagining what sort of event this is for Mary, and empathizing. If she thinks only of the vague acquaintance she knew as Mary’s brother dying, she does think of the actual person, but misses the empathy. Furthermore, imagining a dim, vague acquaintance dying is, to my mind, just as subjective and divorced from Mary’s point of view as the first, empathetic, imagining. For Mary’s brother is not to her a dim, vague acquaintance of years past; he is her intimate relative.

So while I recognize a difference between the two ways of conceptualizing the news, “My brother died,” I am not sure how to describe the difference. The second, “objective” and “impassive” conception seems to me just as unique to Ann, and just as different from Mary’s experience, as the first would be, albeit for different reasons. I even think the first, projective, conception is closer to Mary’s own experience, and in that sense “truer.” Both conceptions are necessary, however. Ann cannot confuse her own relationship to Mary’s brother with Mary’s relationship to him; but Ann also needs to understand Mary’s relationship to him, via projection (imagining her own brother dying) and empathy.

“Imagine that you could recognize only the lowercase roman letters, and that uppercase letters were alien to you. Then text printed in upper case would, for all practical purposes, be devoid of meaning or interest, whereas text in lower case would be full of meaning and interest, able to suggest ideas or actions to your mind. Now suppose someone gave you a conversion table that matched each uppercase letter with its lowercase counterpart, so that you could ‘decode’ uppercase text. Then one day you came across this piece of ‘meaningless’ uppercase text: YIELDS A FALSEHOOD WHEN USED AS THE SUBJECT OF ITS LOWERCASE VERSION

On being decoded, it would yield a lowercase sentence, or rather, a lowercase sentence fragment–a predicate without a subject. Suggestive, eh? What might you try out, as a possible subject of that predicate?

…Our seed–our genome–our DNA–is a huge long volume of inert text written in a chemical alphabet that has 64 ‘uppercase’ letters (codons). Our building rules–our enzymes–are short, pithy slogans of active text written in a different chemical alphabet that has just twenty ‘lowercase’ letters (amino acids). There is a map (genetic code) that converts uppercase letters into lowercase ones. Obviously, some lowercase letters must correspond to more than one uppercase one, but that is a detail. It also turns out that three characters of the uppercase alphabet are not letters but punctuation marks telling where one pithy slogan ends and the next one begins–but again, those are details…

[A]rmed with the genetic code, you can read the DNA book (seed) as if it were a sequence of enzyme slogans (building rules) telling how to write a new DNA book together with a new set of enzyme slogans!

…It is amazing how universal the mechanism of self-reference is, and for that reason I always find it quaint that people who rant and rave against the silliness of self-reference are themselves composed of trillions and trillions of tiny self-referential molecules.”

Doug Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, 30

“It is simply a consequence of representational power–as Kurt Godel showed–that systems of increasing complexity become increasingly self-referential. It is quite possible for people filled with self-doubt to recognize this trait in themselves, and to begin to doubt their self-doubt itself. Such psychological dilemmas are at the heart of some current theories of therapy…Indeed, psychotherapy is itself based completely on the idea of a ‘twisted system of self’–a self that wants to reach inward and change some presumably wrong part of itself.”

Doug Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, 19

“Epimenides the Cretan said, ‘All Cretans are liars.’…Kurt Godel’s famous Incompleteness Theorem in metamathematics can be thought of as arising from his attempt to replicate as closely as possible the liar paradox in purely mathematical terms…’This formula is unprovable within axiomatic system S.’…Notice that the concept of falsity (in the liar paradox) has been replaced by the more rigorously understood concept of provability…It turns out to be true, and for this reason, it is unprovable in the given axiomatic system. The revelation of Godel’s work is that in any mathematically powerful and consistent axiomatic system, an endless series of true but unprovable formulas can be constructed by the technique of self-reference, revealing that somehow the full power of human mathematical reasoning eludes capture in the cage of rigor.”

Doug Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, 8

This strikes me as intriguing. If it’s true that we can construct true but unprovable formulas in mathematics (by means of self-reference), I wonder if this has implications for more ordinary areas of life? Are there other true but unprovable things we ought to pay attention to? What is the value of proof?

“What would this sentence be like if pi were 3? …In a world where pi actually did have the value 3, you wouldn’t ask about how things would be if pi were 3. Instead, you might muse ‘if pi were 2′ or ‘if pi weren’t 3.’ So one’s first answer to the question might be this: ‘What would this sentence be like if pi weren’t 3?’ But there is a problem. The referent of ‘this sentence’ has now changed identity. So is it fair to say the second sentence is an answer to the first? It is a little like a woman who muses, ‘What would I be doing now if I had different genes?’ The problem is that she would not be herself; she would be someone else, perhaps the little boy across the street, playing in the sandbox. Personal pronouns like ‘I’ cannot quite keep up with such strange hypothetical world-shifts.”

Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, 14

This is precisely the problem with the idea of reincarnation. If I come back “as someone else,” or perhaps, as some turtle or bee or other animal, then in what sense am I still me? If I’m not me, then I haven’t come back at all. Of course, proponents of reincarnation must then draw a strict and total division between body and soul, wherein the true self is immaterial, and therefore capable of coming back in other bodies, whether human or animal. And so the old Gnostic/Platonic dualism confronts us again in the Hindu religion. Why, then, does a traumatic brain injury alter a man’s personality, his memory, his thoughts and feelings? The psychosomatic union is too impressive to ignore. Life, experience, and even science itself all defy the idea that any clean separation can be made between body and soul, material existence and immaterial.

And yet the answer need not be scientific materialism. Continue Reading…