Notes from the Sandbox

by earthbound kid on 2005年10月08日 02:22 PM

@ Home / Essays / ESSAY4 (edit, history)

Philosophically, there are three things to get at knowing:

  1. What underlies the world (the ontological).
  2. What underlies other folk (the ethical).
  3. What underlies oneself (the phenomenal).

(Of course, I’m ignoring large parts of philosophy, but that’s the trouble with love of wisdom. It’s a pretty big area, and there are lots of ways to go about it. Some are scientific; some are descriptive; some are prescriptive. What I’m talking about is why anyone even wants to describe being qua being.)

Descartes said he knew himself (#3) then went on to describe God (#1).

Of course, he failed, but that he went about it in the way that he did is interesting to me.

The idea I got from Watsuji Tetsuro is that Descartes ignored that he was in a writer-reader relationship. Knowing that puts one on the track to knowledge of #2, which can be to get at #3 and #1.

So, for a while I’ve been working on this videogame model of human phenomenology:

Of course, Mario has no chance of getting to know the 1′s and 0′s of the game, no matter how much he studies any of the other items on the list. There’s no way to get to know the binary even from playing a million games of Mario… But the trouble is that if you don’t know the binary there’s always the chance that something crazy could happen under weird circumstances. Like maybe if you go into a level you know all about, but the time is wrong, suddenly you get sent to hell or something! Or what if the way to get to heaven is something really random like getting all the coins in 2–3 or holding the down arrow for 3 seconds while on a white block in 1–3. If you don’t know the underlying, there’s always a chance something could catch you totally off guard and destroy your life. Or maybe you’re missing out on a whole other level of existence since you don’t know some little secret.

All seemed hopeless for Mario until I read a journal article about Heraclitus. They mentioned that Heraclitus thought the Logos that underlies the world is rational and thus we can know it, because we share that characteristic with Logos. This idea that we are able to know things external to us, because we share some of their properties inside of us was later expanded on by Anaxagoras and Plato. Then I had entertained the idea that since we know #3 and probably know #2, we can know #1 through the same mechanism. So, the more confident one is that one knows other members of the community, the more it stands to reason that one knows what the universe is like.

But notice how American this Mario model of the world is. Mario is without ethical obligations, since he is the only character controlled by the player. The closest thing he has to an ethical obligation is his obligation to rescue the princess, who calls out to him by name. The lack of other player controlled characters creates other absurdities. Mario 2 ends with the revelation that the whole game was strange dream of Mario’s. But, how can dreams be distinguished from reality without the failure of some other ethically animated character to experience it? In other words, we know dreams are dreams and not real because they are private and not experienced by other people whose reality we accept.

(This kind of plays into some historical bullshitting on my part here:

In ye olden days [and still in other societies], people were really community oriented, so they believed in others more than themselves. Ie. I’m going to marry this person I don’t know ‘coz my parents say so; then I think I’ll go fight a war for my tribe, ‘coz my tribe rocks and everyone else blows. Then humanism kicked in and everyone started focusing on the individual. The trouble with focusing on one’s own happiness is, the more you think about it, the less you have. So when the Greeks starting making city states where folk could live for themselves, instead of their tribes, it sorta made them nuts. And philosophy had to be invented to help out. Then during the middle ages, people thought about God and feudalism, so there was no need for philosophy until the Renaissance restarted humanism. Now, we’re so super -focuses on the individual that there are TV ads for Paxil and whatnot. Now, the old system wasn’t really cool, ‘coz if your family didn’t like your girlfriend you had to die in a double suicide. But in the new system, your relationship to your lover o’ the week is equivalent to your relationship with your dry cleaner, except you trade fluids instead of currency. So both systems have problems, but liberalism is kidding itself if it says that you can choose any kind of lifestyle from within a liberal democracy. After a certain point, you’re either embedded in a community or not. Now, remember that America’s founding myth is the pioneer heading out West ‘coz they got bored with Philadelphia, and you’ll see if Americans can hope to remain community oriented.)

So nowadays, not only do people not know #2 but post-modern and science are coming at different angles to say we don’t know #3. First of all, you can shed your socially constructed identity like Madonna and Britney. Second of all, you aren’t you, you’re DNA and Oedipus and nature and nuture…

So, why do I want to make a connection between knowing #1 and the increasingly dubious nature of knowing #2 and #3? Won’t that just make knowing #1 extra impossible?

Here’s where Anaxagoras’ assumption is interesting: As super-arrogant as it is to assume the universe is like us, it’s way, way more super-arrogant to think we’re so cool that we can understand the universe though it’s not like us. Sure, horses would have a horse god, but wouldn’t we really laugh at them if they thought that god was a mouse? Or what if they thought God was algebra or something else they can’t do? It would be ridiculous of them to try to be something other than horses with horse gods. But horse gods though they are shaped like horses must go beyond the limits of horses as well, if they are to be true gods. A horse god could only be useful to horses if it surpassed the limits of horses, even as it resembled them. Maybe it could be horse-shaped algebra, but never just a horse or just algebra. All gods must share with Christ the ability to must follow in the beginning was the Logos, the unassailable essence of being itself with and the Logos became flesh and dwelt among men.

But, on a functional level, we do know the universe: We know that doors don’t melt into puddles. We know that there are pyramids in Egypt, and the sun rises everyday, and there are no unicorns. We know all these things (or at least act like they’re true) on account of our attachment to the world. My experience of the world is mine, and I care about it, existentially. I’m way too wrapped up in living life on earth to pretend like I don’t know 99% of what’s going on. Sure that 1% could bite me in the ass, but…

Then I realized that though Mario couldn’t learn his own 1′s or 0′s, but he might know something of Shigeru Miyamoto via their common humanity.

So, we know enough about the world for ordinary purposes, because we’re wrapped up in the world (henceforth “the mineness of the world”), and one of the things that gives the world mineness is our relationship to other people. Being involved in relationships with people makes the world more mine. Once you’re wrapped up enough in the tribe, you can get pretty stuck in your thinking, since your so insistent that the world is how you think it is. (Ex. Preachers who “prove” scriptural infallibility by using the Bible.) So, once a community gives us enough #2 knowledge, knowledge #3 comes naturally (since the self-knowledge becomes reduced to knowledge of one’s place in the community) and #1 comes from extrapolation. One figures that the universe must be run the way one’s group sees it. It is as natural for members of the same tribe to believe in the same gods as it is for scientists to believe in materialism. One should pity equally the biology majors who are incapable of believing in God and the medievals who are incapable of doubt. Their answers to #1 comes from their immersion in #2.

Conversely, the goal of Buddhism is to make life not hurt by taking away all the mineness of it. (Of course, I’m misusing the word Buddhism in the same way that I’m misusing the term philosophy. I’m only here concerned with a certain aspect of it.) The idea is, once life doesn’t concern you, you’re bulletproof, since bullets are equally acceptable to you. As a result of stripping out #3, Buddhism also sees the world (#1) as an illusion. Rather than nail things down, Buddhism tries to dissolve everything. The whole of life is just a dream. Nothing counts. Life is meaningless. Even the question of why the Buddha wants to be enlightened comes up. (He says that compassion, etc. are the ways the universe happens to move when one acts without intentionality… That sounds unlikely to me.)

So, why do people want to know the answer to #1 at all?

I’ve talked before about my own changing on myself.

Today, Okeihan.net announced that they would be changing to a new poster girl. Last night, my host family sent me an email where they asked me to send them some American Nestle’s coffeemate. No, “we’ll always remember you, E. B. K.” No, “I was thinking fondly of you.” Not even an honorific request form. It sorta stuck in my craw for some reason…

So, yeah, knowledges are all fucked. People wanna know number one, ‘coz then God can’t make it so that the level loops around or clouds throw shells down on you or fireballs fall from the ceiling without giving you proper warning, but really there’s nothing that we can do about any of it.

We have this mineness that keeps the world from being a Buddhist vapor, but ultimately it doesn’t work as planned. Mineness makes the world concrete, but since the world isn’t like how we want it, it also makes the world unsatisfactory and thus unreal. We have these worlds inside our head that are the way we want or how we see it, and then there’s the way things actually are, which is unlike any of worlds. I can imagine this unchanging relationship with my host family or an unchanging Keihan trainline, but that turns out to be as vaporous as if I hadn’t felt towards those things in the first place. We try to nail stuff down, but all we do get two slide projectors aimed at the same screen. When the screen blows away…

Richard Rorty tries to get out of the whole debate by saying that we can just be pragmatic. Do what is seen to work, ignore the why. Except, there’s the pesky question of what is really seen to work, and what only seems to work. As soon as its imagined, suddenly the issue of “what is the underlying?” rises again to the surface, like an indomitable Cheerio.

Probably, the best bet is to find some people, start a micro-community, have some mineness to keep life from meaninglessness, but be willing to change them when they get toppled. Of course, admitting that your goals are subject to change makes them less meaningful.

It’s a muddle; I tell ya.

All my philosophy is notes from the sandbox. 21 years and counting, and I’m trying to figure out how to do what everyone is always already doing: Living a life of meaning.

2,500 years of philosophy and we still haven’t found what we’re looking for.

Still, there’s no point in quitting while there’s hope, and there’s always hope.

—the earthbound kid

Comment: