May
13th
2018
Lewis Carroll Explains Post-Modern Semiotics · 9:49pm May 13th, 2018
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best –
A perfect and absolute blank!”
-- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876(Sorry for the codeblock, but there's no other way to format poetry on fimfiction anymore.)
The thing about a post-modernism map like this is the sea would likewise be absent, leaving naught but a pure field of blackness...
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And you would be expected to draw in your own land and water, which would be no more valid than anyone else's, it's all subjective, no matter what some elitist prescriptivists might insist.
...Hmm. The prime example I can think of for a "post-modern map" would be the upside-down one. Still works exactly the same as any other map, but challenges your traditional ideas of "up" and "down" on a map.
danielyeow.com/wp-content/uploads/upside_down_world_map.jpg
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No good postmodernist would simply invert the Mercator projection. Unless they were being tricksy with us by overturning one form of presentational imperialism while preserving another.
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Puddinghead is a postmodernist. She can think outside the chimney.
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/8/89/FANMADE_Rainbow_Dash_laughing_GIF.gif/revision/latest?cb=20141216163311
I would be rather interested in seeing post-modernists build a house while ignoring the convention of gravity.
4859932 Once again, then, post-modernism is a return to the medieval.
1001inventions.com/files/map-banner-01.jpg
I'm just kidding. Questioning the privileging of north as "up" is a good use of post-modern ideas. My eye was caught by the line "They are merely conventional signs!" That relates to the post-modern conception of how one interprets a map, which says that the markings on it are indeed merely conventional signs which cannot refer to the real world. The arguments of, say, Derrida, applied to maps rather than to texts, would say that a map can tell you nothing about the territory, and so maps are just geometry games and we shouldn't imagine they will help us get closer to Jerusalem.
This was, indeed, true of medieval European maps, which were not meant to depict the real world accurately, but to depict the "more true" symbolic world. So, for instance, cities or regions judged more important would be drawn larger; shapes would be warped to resemble objects with symbolic meaning; mythical monsters would be given geographic locations; Jerusalem would be in the center of the map; and "up" would be the direction from Rome (the center of the European world) to Jerusalem--hence, east was standardly "up". Anyone trying to travel to Jerusalem using a medieval European map made before 1290 would get hopelessly lost.
assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/lg/24782/image.jpg
Psalter World Map, 1260.
See the big red patch? That's the Red Sea. Medieval people knew perfectly well that it wasn't red, but this map's maker drew it that way anyway, because the name implied some symbolic association with the color red, and symbolic associations were considered more important than physical appearances.
Post-modernism is a return to medieval philosophy, so naturally it legitimizes practices like medieval non-representational map-making.
Most Islamic maps made at the same time period, by contrast, were considerably more accurate. Europe didn't draw accurate maps until they learned navigation from the Muslims, and then they drew only accurate sea maps, which I thought were called "portolinos", but Google tells me no.
4860507 You thought you were making a joke.
Remember my blog post on modern art & World War 1? Remember Soviet constructivism, the predominant early Russian Revolutionary modern art?
Welcome to Soviet constructivist architecture.
worldofleveldesign.com/categories/architecture/constructivist_architecture/images/barsch_planetarium.jpg
i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/5a/b9/6e5ab9764e681f69557031e440dca1ed.jpg
cdni.rbth.com/rbthmedia/images/all/2013/0709/29093/8.jpg
worldofleveldesign.com/categories/architecture/constructivist_architecture/images/constructivistwolkenbugel.jpg
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Ah but the joke still stands! As ridiculous as some of those are, they still account for the laws of physics. Otherwise they wouldn't have stood long enough even to take a picture. Ironically, it requires a deeper understanding of physics to build an upside down pyramid than one right side up.
To me, all those examples are perfect metaphors for the facade, the lie, the game of pretend that is postmodernism. It's right there in the brickwork.
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Honestly, I've tried for years to figure out what this 'postmodernism' stuff people keep talking about, and I still don't understand it. (And yes, I've tried looking up definitions. No dice.) Anyone want to explain? :P
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Post modernist theory and practice involved
The rejection of any and all systems of value and the narratives that allow that value. On a fundamental level they try to reject the subjective in practicality while embracing the subjectivity of reality in art.
Or, put another way- it's an artistic movement for people who are very pleased with themselves for having discovered that the universe doesn't care. The very worst of artistic and philosophical movements, because it cannot form a coherent philosophy that can inform everyday life in a practical fashion, and the art it creates exists, first and foremost, for the declaration that- yes, this is art! Thus, Voice of Fire.
God I hate post modernists.
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But... of course the universe doesn't care. I'm confused as to why this is a discovery. Values are thingies existing inside minds. Physics doesn't have any values... why should that make "rejecting systems of value" make any sense? We ARE minds... it makes sense for us to have values.
The thing is, I've seen definitions like this, and I could probably guess the teacher's passwords on this topic... but I couldn't look at a piece of artwork and tell whether it's "post-modern" or not. I don't actually have a sense of the actual concrete defining features to look for. Are there any, or does it just depend on the intentions of the artist?
Such a confusing topic.
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Right, but post-modernism rejects your personal internal system of values as subjective, and therefore without merit. That's what I meant- they got as far as "it's a cold uncaring universe" and somehow failed to reach the conclusion"so it is my job to build a meaning for myself" as well as "so I might as well kill myself". It's the most infantile form of nihilism and existentialism.
As far as what defines post modern art... Gosh, that's a hard one. Any time you find yourself asking "is this art" or "why does this exist", that's probably post modern(unless it's surrealism, in which case the answer becomes ever more complicated), but it's more about the idea behind it than the art itself. It's a philosophy, not an art style like cubism or the like.
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So... the reason I'm confused about this, is because the concept itself is so ill-defined? My confusion is intrinsic to the topic itself?
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A little bit.
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This is avant-garde:
lh3.googleusercontent.com/Qwl85HeQVm_jA__tiBJzUCJBBbRZH4dQ4Y4qpk6DFWPM9WOPgY3n4DgEbg51_BDVKkZuKVEQjwXoV8ZThahMhCBFJ4HuPD5RQU0P6fRT1rPYCi3YhIiSlLfdFW00FEYovwCY9Myf
Alphonse Allais, Negroes Battling in a Tunnel, by Night, 1884 (source)
This is modern art:
lh5.googleusercontent.com/Ig-g9rCCmFtT0gqn4pv0qqXnBJKLUlnSstIK0jW3JIuW7vhCJswTz5vQkyESfXy5WLahJVvMx9xGevh_TMZvl0Wcv-kEE9nSVVhDZbNb_D9UAqF7P8d1Sm6GlgRT9omj6dBSWpMl
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915 (source)
This is post-modern art:
lh3.googleusercontent.com/bGy6vnH2Hxtxr7s7SFom8YfuV6NxMAolERi14mCJNfI5brVp7jCBNiLg4_5Ij6y5W_HrWZbs6CoEqv8x8ZsUGdU_A1ynIfMbmKOBjHOdI4yJyx-nAMH885o5iDeYVjkJ5pSHWEOd
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Print, 1966 (link)
Is it clear now?
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The difference is recursive depth?
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I love you bad horse.
I appreciate that the avante garde image is just an old timey "polar bear in a blizzard" image
4863141 Actually there is something to that idea. One idea in post-modernism is that a later artist can do the same thing as an earlier artist, but now it's a new artwork, because the later artist is making a reference to the earlier artwork. So interpreting the later artist means understanding the reference and what it means.
(This kind of behavior is encouraged in postmodernism partly because a core belief of post-modernism, and one which distinguishes it from modernism, is the belief that no one can do anything new, that all stories have been told, that there is no such thing as originality or creativity, that stories can only recombine elements from previous stories in different ways, and art is merely commentary on earlier art. This belief comes from the medieval metaphysics which postmodernism is based on, which says that only God can create new things. The nuttiness of post-modernism stems from the fact that modernists and post-modernists were entirely ignorant of science and modern thought. So they struggled to make sense of a world with no God, using medieval metaphysics which were deliberately constructed to prove that the world would be impossible and nonsensical unless it were run by God.)
This is part of the idea behind Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Quixote of Pierre Menard". Borges was a post-modernist writer (most of the time), but I love his stories. They're interesting, and in them he was considering important ideas, not dicking around making ironic references to show how cool he was.
In that story, Borges writes a (fake) review of a version of Don Quixote written by someone named Pierre Menard in the early 20th century. The gimmick is that Menard's Quixote is word for word exactly the same as Cervante's Quixote, written in the early 17th century. But Borges reviews Menard's Quixote and pretends to show that, as we know it was written in the 20th century, we interpret it as meaning something quite different than Cervantes' Quixote.
Cautionary note: I don't buy it. Borges is clever, but anybody reading the Quixote would read it the way Cervantes meant it, regardless of when they thought it was written. People don't read in the suspicious way Borges pretends they do (considering their suspicions about the motives of the author more important than what the text says, or dispassionately interpreting the events in a novel as they imagine the author would have, rather than as they would or as someone in the story would). So Borges' story is good for a smile, but if you read it as an argument--as many people do--it's an argument that fails.
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Sorry I'm so late, ad501! I'm glad Bad Horse jumped in, because he's much better to talk about postmodernism than me (doubtless Joural is too), because he's read up on a lot of it. I've never read any official sources. What I've picked up about it is from others discussing it. You're not alone in feeling confused! I nosed around real quick and this Encyclopedia Britannica article seems to do a good job summing it up.
What I've gathered of it over the last few years is that it seems to run on a few core principles: it seems to assert that everything has an infinite number of ways to interpret it, and so therefore it's impossible to know which interpretation is right. This brings an all-encompassing subjectivity to bear. Post-modernists seem to basically deny any real truth exists because of this. But I think they tend to focus more on "bigger truths", like worldviews, explanations that cover large portions of history or society or things considered universal to human experience or behavior. "Grand narratives" seems to a be term used here. Capitalism they would say is a grand narrative. Because "everything is subjective" they reject that any grand narrative has a higher claim to accuracy. It's all a level playing field. The only way then, they can imagine, that one narrative rises to prominence over another isn't because it's more true, but because it unfairly oppressed other narratives. This is something you've probably come across. Power and oppression. They seem to be tentpoles in postmodernism. Everything gets boiled down to power plays. They don't believe in seeking accuracy for accuracy's sake, as a historian might, but rather everyone has an agenda, hidden or otherwise, or something they want to use their ideas to justify or excuse.
There's a lot that's really weird about postmodernism, which I'm sure fuels much of the negative reaction to it you've probably observed. I myself don't hate it because I think there's nothing true in it. Rather, I think like any major philosophy it has many shavings of truth (there's often many ways to interpret something--but not everything--and no "grand narrative" is of course without its flaws). What I hate is that it goes so far beyond those truths that it becomes near endlessly self-contradictory. For one, postmodernism itself is a grand narrative. And while it tries to subjectify everything it makes absolutist moral assertions (oppression is bad, for example).
That, and things like this, taken from the britannica article:
which, to someone who studied physics in college, is just laughable. Clearly the literary theorist never spent ten minutes in a physics class, but has no problem commenting on aspects of the discipline.
But you can see some of what I mentioned in there. There's the hidden agenda/motivation: fluid mechanics is less developed because male physicists subconsciously feel it's feminine, and so they suppress it--which is the power play, the oppression of one group (women, or the feminine) by another (men, or the masculine). You can imagine the trouble this might cause if enough/the right people took it seriously.
All in all, it can get kinda crazy. But again, I've never read the official sources of postmodernism, so I may not be very accurate here. :P
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Actually, you seem very good to speak to on this topic! Thank you for your input.
I notice lots of mysticism associates (fe)male concepts with various random categories -- usually those considered opposites. Perhaps Luce Irigaray confused mysticism with science there.
(That said, more female participation in the sciences would be nice, speaking as a feminist...) (I refuse to let the radfems steal that word for their own misandristic bullshit.) (PROPER FEMINISM IS JUST A SUBSET OF EGALITARIANISM, DAMN IT)
It also sounds like postmodernism is pretty much the opposite of methodological rationality. They got the whole "truth is difficult to attain" thing right, but they seem to conclude "therefore, you might as well give up" or "truth is nonexistant". I'm not sure which one of those they propose.
Honestly, the concept that truth isn't real is something I find profoundly disorienting and self-contradictory. There are complex things in the world, things they would categorize as "grand narratives", that one ought to be able to expect to exist, with pretty much no inferential steps needed. Whether they can be discovered with certainty is an entirely separate question -- but if you expect the universe to run on consistent rules, I don't see why you wouldn't.
As for "infinite ways to interpret" it, that seems false too. I'd say everything that's vague has like 20 ways to interpret it (given a large enough mental database for basic subconscious crossreferencing), and then it has 10 ways after a few more pieces, and then 5 ways... inference is a process of narrowing down the possibilities. Of course, there will always be some possibilities you can never theoretically eliminate (for instance, Descarte's demon) but it's not like you can't make progress toward truth, such that you reach the correct answer in as many possible universes as you can.
Perhaps the postmodernism cluster just has really bad thinking skills, and perhaps cannot imagine that others might have better thinking skills than they do?
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You are onto the key issues.
First, post-modernism is rational--purely rational. The problem is that people in the sciences use an entirely different meaning for the word "rationality" than everybody else has used for the past 2400 years. "Rationality" doesn't mean "using reason". It means, quite specifically, Platonist philosophy which says that observing the real world is useless, because the real world isn't actually real, but some reflection of a transcendental, eternal world--such as that of geometry. A rationalist begins with a set of axioms, and constructs logical proofs from them, and never performs an experiment, makes an observation, or builds anything in the real world.
The opposite of rational is empirical.
Rationalist never take measurements, because the only numbers they use are integers and ratios of integers. (The term "rational number" was derived not directly from the word "rational" (reasonable, thinkable), but as meaning the opposite of "irrational". When the Greeks discovered there must be numbers that could not be expressed as a ratio, they called them "irrational", meaning "unthinkable". Oddly, though they proved such numbers existed, they pretended in their philosophy that they could not. It's possible that the Pythagoreans succeeded in keeping the existence of irrational numbers secret, as the earliest reference I've found to them in writing was about 200 years after their discovery.)was called that because "rationation" (in Greek) meant "to think", and irrational numbers were unthinkable.)
To a philosophical "realist", numbers must exist somewhere, and rationalists deny that an infinite number of things can exist. (The integers don't all exist; each number only potentially exists until someone uses it. That's a doctrine of Aristotle's.) So if they wanted to measure the length of a fish, they would be confronted with the problem that whatever the length "truly" is, they can only use numbers that are ratios, like 17541 / 23409. They don't understand the concept of "accuracy", e.g., of saying that 22/7 is pretty close to pi; they think claims like "this fish is 12.3 cm long" is either right or wrong--and if it isn't EXACTLY right, it's wrong. So they don't measure things because they think it is theoretically impossible to measure lengths in the real world.
Nor can they have a theory of error, e.g., what happens if you measure the same fish twice, and the first time you get 12.32 cm, and the second time you get 12.33 cm? They can't deal with that. That, to them, just means that measurements are useless and can't access the real world, as Plato said.
Europe escaped the doldrums of the Middle Ages, and began becoming modern, thanks to 2 mental revolutions in the 14th century:
1. Nominalism--the theory, invented independently in Europe and the Islamic world in the 14th century, that words are just labels, and using a word doesn't mean that a thing actually exists. For instance, we made up the word "electron" to label a concept which is part of a model to explain experimental observations. A nominalist understands that doesn't mean the concept electron--or even individual electrons-- actually exist. It's a label referring to a theoretical construct.
2. Measurement. The measuring stick, believe it or not, was lost after the fall of Rome, and not brought back into common use until the 15th century (as far as I can determine). Europeans started measuring things very close to the year 1300. This was partly because Fibonacci had just told Europeans about these Arabic numerals and the decimal system, that they could use to represent numbers. Until then, Europeans had no technology for doing arithmetic other than keeping all measurements as ratios. Another key reason was that they had just learned navigation and ancient Greek astronomy from the Muslims, and had to take measurements to use them.
Historians say the crucial event was the recovery ~1150-1250 of Aristotle's writings from the Muslims and Byzantines--but I find no direct link between the writings of Aristotle and the development of modern metaphysics and epistemology. The writings of Aristotle shook things up and made it conceivable to look for new answers and new questions.
Platonist philosophy is fundamentally, irrevocably opposed to both of these concepts.
Post-modernism is fundamentally Platonic. It begins with the Platonist or Aristotelian concept of Truth with a capital T. When Plato says something is "true", he means it is eternally true--it always was true, and always will be, in all contexts. You can see this even in his early Socratic dialogues--he's always looking for the true definition of a word, and he assumes that a word means the same thing in all contexts. This is obviously not how words work.
Plato believed you could state non-eternal claims; he just didn't think they were worthy of the attention of a philosopher. Aristotle talked about non-eternal claims sometimes, which is one reason post-modernists usually want to reject Aristotle and go back to Plato. They don't know this is what they want to do; Plato and Aristotle are the water, and they are the fishes.
Basically, they're Dark Age Roman Catholics who don't believe in God. As medieval theology was designed to prove that nothing exists without God--poof!
Plato's misunderstanding of truth, and of language, is at the root of vast stretches of Western philosophy, religion, and art.
When Plato says that we can come to know the truth, that should also be Know with a capital K. It doesn't mean we can arrive closer to truth, or have confidence--it means we can have a logical proof in which we can be absolutely certain. Plato took geometry as his model for philosophy, and wanted to be able to construct logical proofs to answer philosophical questions.
Post-modernists are genuinely unaware that when scientists say something is "true", they mean it is a claim which increases the accuracy of our predictions. They insist--repeatedly, emphatically, incessantly--that scientific truths claim to be absolutely certain and eternal and context-free. This is the basis of their attacks on science. They haven't got a clue as to what science really is. They ignore scientists who try to correct them.
One of many examples of this is in this paper, which proves Derrida was jaw-droppingly ignorant of the things he claimed to be an expert in:
John R. Searle. Literary Theory and Its Discontents. New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 3,25th Anniversary Issue (Part 1) (Summer, 1994), 637-667.
So this is the core of post-modernism:
Post-modernists are humanities scholars who have never studied any math other than geometry and logic, and no nothing about science. They think that "science" means "Aristotelian logic", because that was the closest thing to science they studied, and the people who taught them Plato and Aristotle believed them, and thought their theories about Forms and Essences were True.
In the 20th century, they re-discovered what scientists had discovered in the 19th: that if you take a question and construct a proof of an answer to it in Aristotelian logic, that answer sometimes turns out to be wrong. This rocked their world.
They concluded that Aristotle was full of it. They want to roll back the Aristotelian scholasticism of the 14th century--which they think is the same as science--and replace it with older metaphysics. The things that seem so strange to use about post-modernism aren't strange at all to someone who literally believes Dark Age metaphysics. It is difficult to wrap your mind around the degree to which they misunderstand reality. You have to study ancient and medieval philosophy and religion for years to understand how they see the world, and why saying "there is no reality" or "we can never access reality" doesn't seem unreasonable to them. Philosophical realists have begun by assuming that the physical world isn't real for the past 2,400 years.
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Thank you for your very in-depth answer. I'm learning far more about this than I expected to!
That... does not make me especially optimistic about our species' intelligence. :( One would think someone would popularize the idea after a few decades of annoyance when building things. Perhaps they just had trouble agreeing on a standard due to social chaos? That seems to be one of our weak spots as a species. That, and once a standard is established, getting rid of it when it's a bad one is impossible. See also: imperial measurements vs metric, alcohol proof vs alcohol percent, Microsoft Windows vs Unixlike operating systems, natural languages vs Lojban...
No kidding. It, honestly, seems so absurd to me that anyone could be this bad at thinking, that I briefly had to visit the possibility that you were exaggerating or otherwise trolling me.
Then again, this absurd white-black thinking would explain quite a lot of the profound confusions people have -- for example, those who can't accept transgender people (especially non-binary transgender people).
...so, basically, the Plato cluster don't know how to formalize the idea of a state space, and somehow therefore automatically assume that which they don't know how to formalize, must not be valid?
I'd like to see more examples of this... it frustrates me that there are types of thinking that aren't really that complicated, but that I can't seem to imagine very easily. Actually, one of the big problems with writing (and why I haven't published any of my fanfic prototypes) is that the only form of stupidity I can simulate is simple ignorance & the inability to comprehend things. Sort of like me when I'm super drunk, except minus the crystalized intelligence I've accumulated by running around doing nerdy stuff.
Building towers upon towers of ideas in the obviously wrong direction is not something I seem to be able to imagine. I need to get better at that. I need to get better at understanding the smart ways of being stupid, so I can write smartly-stupid characters. (If you have any recommendations on how to get better at that problem, let me know! Thanks.)
I've spoken with one rather pretentious PHD who insisted nonsensical things like "there are multiple realities!" and such. It sounds like, in retrospect, I might be able to explain our utter inability to communicate about the concept of metaphysics better. I was always like "sure, there's a subjective model of the world inside each brain, but that model is there because they're modeling something outside themselves... and I would lose them pretty much instantly.
I'm... profoundly confused as to how a person could even function, assuming reality doesn't exist objectively. I mean, what does that even mean? I mean, it doesn't sound like we're talking about Descartes' demon, are we? We're just talking about the whole concept of external reality somehow being invalidated. This is a different proposition entirely, yes?
For me, there is logical possibility, then physical possibility, then framework possibilities (possibilities that assume different frameworks, for instance "biologically possible" or "possible using the Linux kernel version 4.2"...). But for them... what? The only things that are 'valid' are the logical possibilities? Valid how? I get that they're rejecting things, but I don't understand what they mean to accomplish by rejecting it. Or what it even means to reject the validity of reality itself. Am I just unimaginative?
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They built cathedrals without them. I think the problem was that they had no good way of using measurements. They had only Roman numerals and no decimal system.
There's an old debate in medieval architecture over whether or not stonemasons took numerical measurements. At first people assumed they did, but no one ever turned up any measurements in old records. Many people believe they did everything using a measuring string. You stretch the string out along the thing you want to measure, and then clip or tie something to the string at its endpoints, and then you move that string over to the other thing that has to be the same length. They also had lots of ways to use geometry to divide a string into ratios. Unfortunately stonemasons kept their techniques secret. (Note the word "freemason" seem originally to have meant a non-guild mason, and many of the Freemason's symbols and myths involve architecture.)
Similarly, medieval clothing was so simple partly because they didn't record people's measurements; they measured them with string and then moved the string to the cloth and cut the cloth to the length of the string. The Vikings introduced pants--I wonder if they recorded measurements.
Yes! To an Idealist (a more-general term for people who think in terms of ideal forms rather than in terms of physical objects), transgender people break reality.
That's one way of putting it. They believed the world was defined by ideal Forms, which is where the word formalize comes from--to discover the Form of a type. Everything that exists must be form-alizable.
Part of the confusion is that when they say "exist", they mean to exist the way a Form exists. They don't mean reality isn't there. They mean the physical world is not causal. Remember most medieval theologians insisted that everything we saw "existed" in the mind of God. Post-modernism is something like believing that, and also that there is no God. Society takes the place of God; everything now exists in the mind of Society.
Aristotle is the fly in the ointment--he was a truly original thinker. He doesn't fit any scheme well. Most other ancient thinkers can be easily categorized as in the Platonist or the empirical tradition. Aristotle was both.
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Not causal how?
4869621 A key reason that idealism seemed reasonable before 1300 AD was that people had no idea why things moved. Stars moved, the sun moved, clouds moved, rain fell, plants grew, and most puzzlingly, animals moved. What made them move? How did a dog that had been sleeping suddenly get up and walk? The idea that some spirit was reaching inside them and making them move seems to have been universal among primitive societies. The Forms are in that way descended from animism. We can see a dog get up and move, but we can't see the thing that made it get up and move.
The Greek word for "ghost" (which Christians later translated as "spirit") was more often used to mean either "breath" or "wind"--their notion of a spirit was literally of a wind that pushed itself into a person and moved it around. And living people people breathed, and dead people didn't--clearly wind was the key distinction between living and dead.
That's also how the ancient Hebrews seem to have thought; when they someone was "moved by the spirit" they seem to have meant God's wind was blowing inside them (though I have never tried to translate the original Hebrew). Someone "filled with the spirit" spoke with God's wind / breath.
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Ironically, I think the view of the mind as something separate from the body is actually more accurate than how the average atheist intuitively thinks today. The 'spiritualists' just made the mistake of ignoring the possibility that it's made of tiny robots. With modern computers, in which it's possible to transfer a full operating system with configuration files between computers, one would think the analogy to the informational nature of the mind would be obvious. But apparently not, for most.
I have difficulty imagining how they would be satisfied with these explanations. If you're explaining it in terms of wind, you just have to explain how the wind works, and why it moves some things and not other things. It's not an explanation. More of a vague intuition that it's somehow related to the physical feeling of forces on the body (which I imagine must have been confusing, since people didn't even really know what air was at the time!)
But anyway... I'm still confused about what this has to do with people insisting on reality "not existing" in the casual sense that you've stated. Or how they even got to that conclusion.
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Plato spoke of the physical world as being the shadows cast by things in the transcendental realm. I don't follow how he mapped the single Form to its many instances in the physical world--perhaps that each dog in the physical world was a different shadow of the transcendental Dog?
But I know that some medieval theologians believed that the idea of there being laws of nature was heretical, because a law of nature would place restrictions on God. Take the idea that if one ball hits another ball and the second ball moves, the first ball caused the second ball to move. That seems to imply that God didn't cause the second ball to move, and that seems heretical. It might even be taken to imply that God couldn't prevent the second ball from moving, which would definitely be heretical.
They seem to have had some idea of laws of nature, though, since I think they had the concept of a "miracle". They didn't think of miracles as violations of the laws of nature--that definition was made by Hume in 1748. The word "miracle" meant something like "a wonderful event", "an extraordinary or remarkable feat" until at least the late Middle Ages. But they at least had the sense that some things, like stopping the sun in the sky or raising the dead, were remarkable in a way that a really nice leg of lamb was not. This would seem to imply that the operations of nature could be predicted.
Now I'm curious what the Greek said for verses in the New Testament that say "miracle".
Matthew 7:22: Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’
Greek: The word was dunameis, which is shown translated literally as "powerful deeds".
Mark 6:5: He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.
Same word used there.
Acts 2:22: “Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know."
Again, the Greek says dunamesin (same word, different inflection).
Checking perseus.tufts.edu, the Liddell-Scott Greek Lexicon entry for dunamesin says
So the Greek word that is translated "miracle" in the New Testament did not mean "miracle". All the entries at the end there that have the sense of "miracle" are from the New Testament or early church fathers.
This is quite common--it means the Catholic Church changed the meaning of a set of passages of the Bible by redefining a word. When a strange interpretation of a passage in Greek became dogma, the effect was to redefine that word. I've found this is the case for most Greek words I've checked--they came to mean something else after Jesus, in order to make it sound like the Bible agreed with Catholic doctrine.
A really important thing to understand when looking up translations of Greek words up is that the fact that the Liddell-Scott Greek Lexicon says dunamis meant "miracle" in the New Testament and in the writings of the early church fathers, does not mean that it meant "miracle" in the New Testament and in the writings of the early church fathers. It means that the traditional Catholic interpretation of that Greek word translated as "miracle" at the time the Liddell-Scott Greek Lexicon was made (19th century).
This is one reason why the Catholic Church adopted the policy that St. Jerome's Latin translation of the Greek New Testament is more reliable than the Greek New Testament itself. People reading the original Greek may notice the original meaning was different than the Latin translation.
If you go thru the New Testament and suppose that every Greek word in it means what it meant when that book was written, you end up with a very different Bible than we have today--one that is in many parts more like a work of philosophy than a religious text.
For instance, Ephesians 4:13 is translated in the NIV as "until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." It actually says something more like, "until we attain the All of The One, in the comprehension and realization of <the Son of God become man>, and thereby become perfect, becoming a part of Christ." So the original concept of "salvation" presented here was not of being saved from Hell and becoming Christlike in character; it was Platonic henosis, in which you meditate on the nature of God (not the Hebrew God, but Plato's God, the One) until you become one with God. This was declared a heresy early in Christianity; the interpretation of the words then had to be changed to prevent Ephesians from being heretical.
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That's actually a fascinating notion. So there's a central prototype for each instance of a thing. I don't know how he wouldn't notice the wide variations of dog breeds were a sign that this model was a simplification at best.
I still feel confused about this, but I'm having difficulty articulating how I'm confused.
Each physical object has so many attributes, each of which can be considered an axis in state space. This clearly means there's literally trillions of possible variations. I just don't get how someone wouldn't notice that. And if you look further, you can notice that if you defined a universal system for translation objects into points in statespace, you'd find you could define no sharp boundary between one type of object and the next. The whole idea of type only works as a heuristic in the real world.
It's almost as if Plato... really... I don't know. I get that he was a math guy, and was really into the abstract stuff. So much so that he really really wanted the abstract to be Real somehow. But how does one miss the fact that you can, if you tweak the axes in statespace a bit, turn a vase into a cup, or a bowl? Or, in more extreme terms, turn a dog into a human? (Or turn a vase into a human, if you're willing to dance all over statespace!) (The point being, the each object has a proximity to other objects based on its characteristics...)
I get they didn't have the same terminology, but even if you quantify an object in terms of ratios relative to a unit selected on that object, surely you must notice that unit could be... in theory, carried off and used for other objects. Some people are taller than other people. The differences, even if you don't care to quantify them, have a mathematical existence and show the presence of a definable variable axis... I don't get it. It's so obvious. Why wasn't it obvious to them?
Did they not understand the basic notions of combinatorics, like if you have 10 possibilities for attribute A and 10 possibilities for attribute B, you already have 100 possibilities?
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I have 2 answers, a sympathetic one and a cynical one.
The sympathetic answer is that it was obvious to them, and they would say that it didn't matter. Individual people are temporary things, here today and gone tomorrow. Once you've realized that there is some eternal principle producing the many individual people, questions about individual people aren't philosophical questions. So Socrates was always asking about concepts like "justice" and "love", not about whether Peter was taller than Paul.
The cynical answer is to notice how they used this obliviousness to variation. Plato'sRepublic begins with a discussion of "justice", except it doesn't really. It used the word dikaisyne, which is translated as "justice" in English, but commentators often say it means something more like "righteousness" or "morality".
In Republic, Socrates talks with various people who propose different definitions of Dikaisyne, and Socrates shows all of them to be wrong. He then argues that a man has dikaisyne if every part or faculty of that man performs its function by doing what it does best.
If you drift along, it seems reasonable, but you should stop at the end and notice that you've arrived at a definition that has nothing to do with anybody's concept of righteousness, morality, or justice. Should a righteous man murder another righteous man, or break his vows, or steal from the poor to give to the rich? Plato's definition gives us no help with this question.
It gives us no help because Plato's purpose in writing Republic was to attack Athenian democracy and its fundamental principle of fairness. Socrates and Plato despised democracy, and resented the idea that the rabble should be considered equal with men such as themselves. Instead of arguing that fairness was bad--something the Athenians would not have agreed to--Socrates took a concept the Athenians would have agreed was of supreme importance, "justice/righteousness", and tried to trick them into accepting that it really meant injustice: that the great men should rule over the less great and everyone should stay in his or her place. At the end, Socrates essentially convinces the others that in fact he, Socrates, should rule Athens, while simultaneously destroying the Athenian conception of "justice" by redefining it to mean its opposite.
Most idealists do this. Marx wanted to create a system in which no one had any personal freedom--workers could not be free to choose their own work, nor to say that the pay was too little and decide not to work; owners of property could be forced to sell it at whatever price the collective chose, or forbidden from selling it; etc etc. So the concept of "freedom" was a big problem for Marx; people were pretty stubbornly attached to the idea that freedom was good. So Marx redefined "freedom" as "freedom from want", ignoring the fact that was a metaphorical usage of "freedom", and thus destroying the dangerous idea of freedom while seeming to endorse it.
Marx was just imitating Hegel, who wanted an authoritarian state (much as Plato did) in which people were basically ants who had no personal agency or even, one might say, consciousness; they were to take joy in serving the State. (This aspect of Hegel's writing was adopted both by Marx and by the Nazis.) Hegel redefined "freedom" to mean "absolute slavery to the government."
Hegel was copying Kant, who redefined "freedom" to mean some other kind of unfreedom which I don't now remember.
The Nazis, of course, gave us this:
lh3.googleusercontent.com/eO6dPcL0ZATrvP_F0BRgGar5i8tFb6qOMK3hFXxLep4Tg3FHZXF9zUBC-bINNimj0Yf4Im6u8m2V21Tj13keunxAx4tJ3BHRZhkZ8xIa_d7QPRT15ryA8pW-8yxKJgDEu57Aoh05
Similarly, Islam calls itself the religion of peace, by which it means its goal is to achieve peace by waging war until it conquers the entire earth. ("Islam" is short for "House of Islam (submission / peace)", which means "all of the Muslims". Everything outside the House of Islam is the "House of War". The House of War is called the House of War because it is the place where Muslims are supposed to wage war.)
Similarly, the far left today needs complete social unity to radically remake society and humanity. They redefined "diversity" to mean diversity of skin color and sexual orientation, in order to eliminate diversity of opinion while claiming to support diversity.
So the belief that words are not made-up things, but pointers to eternal essences, is very helpful to people with political goals at odds with the values of most other people. Instead of trying to convince people to change their values, they can say "let me help you here, you don't understand the true meaning of this word", and redefine it in a way that removes obstacles to their goals.
So Marx, who believed that the suffering of the poor is more important than the freedom of individuals, realized he could fit the concept "freedom" into his system as a positive value if he changed it to mean relieving the suffering of the poor. But what he thought he was doing was being the first to understand what freedom had always "truly" meant.
BTW, I think I added lots of text to my last reply after you read it. No need to read the big quote of a Greek dictionary, other than to scan it and see that the meanings given are mostly not "miracle".
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Also, Aristotle dealt with this by categorizing properties into accidental properties and essential properties. Accidental properties are those which can differ without changing a thing's category. Anything that varied on a continuum (any measurement) was necessarily accidental. Properties that usually had just one of a few discrete values, like sex, or the number of feet a species had, would usually be considered essential. The claims that gender is fluid, gender is a social construct, and that society should not use gender as a factor in eg division of labor, is the claim that we should replace the essential property "sex" with the accidental property "gender".
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I actually did see your additions. I was like "the hell? I thought for sure this text wasn't here the last time I looked". Glad it wasn't in my head.
This was not a political tendency I was very aware of, mostly because it seemed futile and absurd to me to try to redefine words as a means of... injecting code into a given statement of value. Is there a name for this? Seems like there should be a name for this. If there's not one, I'll name it "political code injection" or something. It's like SQL code injection, except with political words!
Interesting... while I am familiar with your other examples, with this one, I'm really not sure what you mean with redefining diversity to remove diversity of opinion. (Could you give me an example?)
...although, I've had some bad experiences with the far left myself -- mostly with their claim that it ought to be acceptable to shame people for being part of a majority group. I saw people talking about this sort of behavior on the far left's part, but I expected it to be a lie until I encountered groups in which people would get offended if you said e.g. that it was inappropriate to say things like "all cis people are bad".
It seems closely tied to the redefinition of, e.g., racism as a "system of oppression" such that somehow all white people are racist. These same people also seem to claim that nowhere in the world is their prejudice against white people -- which to me, has always seemed absurd (do they not realize that black people are not intrinsically nicer than white people? Do they not realize there are countries with predominantly black populations?)
I had told them repeatedly that redefining terms like racism was not going to help to maximize social justice -- it would simply make the word "racist" apply to good people, and thus corrupt its meaning and thus make it impossible to use it to shame people (which we SHOULD be doing. No one should want to be a racist or just be matter of factly like "I'm a racist. So what?")
I struggled quite a lot to understand the intent behind their redefinitions or why so many bought into them. Systematic racism is certainly a thing, but it's easy to imagine an individual case of racism too, even if you've never experienced it. So it seemed to me (and I later seemingly confirmed!) that the intent was to just label majority groups as bad, somehow as punishment for their privilege. These people would often say things like "such and such group has not been kind to us, so they deserve to be treated as lesser".
This to me, was absurd. Groups like "white people" or "cisgender people" are not collectives in which everyone has decided to give the minorities a hard time. They are just majority groups in which many individuals happen to cause problems because they're either idiots, assholes, or both. Because humans in general are idiots/assholes, and thus will often cause problems to people outside of their own subgroups. If we had flipped things and somehow had most people been transgender, the reverse prejudice would be visible -- because it's human nature. It has nothing to do with the character of these groups and everything to do with human nature being crap.
So their sentiments made no sense to me. They seemed just... spiteful and absurd. I am a mixed-race, transgender woman -- so it's not like I am in an "oppressor group" here -- yet somehow, I was still unable to convince them that this was unreasonable. They were offended by the mere idea that it might be, no matter how polite my attempts were. Like, what the hell?
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I'm mostly thinking of book publishing. There's a great push for literary press publishers to be more "diverse", by which they mean publish books by people who aren't straight white males. The books are more diverse in being about many different countries, and the plots present problems that Americans don't usually have. I think they're less diverse in theme, being increasingly either about (1) systemic exploitation based on race, gender, or colonialism, (2) alienation caused by modern society, or (3) post-modernist philosophizing about language or reality. They aren't a representative sample of books written by non-straight-white-males; they're books chosen by people who are concerned about the hegemony of straight white males, and so they over-represent the concerns of those people. The authors tend more and more to have master's degrees from Oxford, Berkeley, or one of those rich-person's colleges in Boston. The books tend to have protagonists with American middle-class values, and are sanitized of elements of the cultures they depict which would shock Americans or run against current important narratives. For example, Slumdog Millionaire has terrible scenes of Hindu violence against Muslims. If it had shown Muslim violence against Hindus, the book would probably never have been published.
In university admissions, "diversity" admissions at ivy-league colleges went together with a push to reduce the use of exam scores and other objective measures, which lets the admissions committee accept people on arbitrary criteria. The result of diversity polices:
Discounting test scores has also been used by conservatives to avoid admitting liberals.
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Sorry again for not responding! Just been too busy. The conversation moved on, but I do have a few quickie comments. :)
This had me very interested, so I looked it up too. I see where you're coming from with the "All of The One" clause, but the "unity in the faith" translation seems accurate to me. In Greek the clause is, if I'm right, ἑνότητα τῆς πίστεως -- henotēs ho pistis -- where ἑνότητα/ henotēs means "unity," which apparently comes from the root εἷς/heis, which seems to mean "one in number" or "one and the same." So there's definitely oneness there as you mentioned. πίστεως/pistis means "persuasion of a thing, confidence, faith or belief in one, etc" even a kind of financial credit apparently. It's the word most translated as "faith" in the new testament, not improperly it seems, and according to Strong's Concordance appears 240+ times.
So it seems to me that "oneness of faith/belief" or "unity of faith" is an accurate translation, and that the verse isn't forwarding an abstracted sense of The One. Particularly given the multiple references to Christ, and the larger context of the chapter. Feel free to rebut me, though, I'm no Greek scholar
The word I've seen used to describe that kind of thinking on the far left is Identity Politics. Which is basically tribalism. The right is reacting to it by resorting to their own forms of it. I think the question to ask isn't only "why are people growing more tribal?" but "why aren't people always tribal?" Both questions assume a different "natural" state for people, I think. Tribalism seems abnormal to us, but it might be the lack of tribalism in our society that's abnormal. The first question might assume (arguably) that the onset of tribalism is because we've taken on something which brought it along, or allowed it in. The second arguably assumes tribalism was always there, and we've lost something that restrained it. Though perhaps that's splitting hairs. I do feel we've lost something, however, a great deal of things. One of them being a move from accepting liberty as the highest political ideal, to protection from harm.
Exactly! Broadening the usage and redefining it only hurts those these very same people are trying to help. It's terrible. It's tragic irony, really. In my personal opinion, a little self-reflection would show they're less interested in actually helping those they consider victims and more interested in the idea of helping them, or getting to say they've helped. In other words, I believe what's (partly) driving them is the feeling of being moral, instead of actually managing to be moral. It's self-righteousness. Which, if you're not careful when you're deliberately trying to be a good person, will absolutely take over you (it did me). Now granted, I'm not in their heads. So who really knows :P
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I've already written a big section of one blog post on πίστη. Dictionaries today translate it as faith, and this isn't "wrong" so much as it is very misleading, because the Catholic Church changed the interpretation of the word after the New Testament was written. It wasn't used to mean the Christian interpretation of "faith" as trust without proof--on the contrary, it specifically meant trust with proof. At the time of Christ it meant proof, as one speaks of proofs in geometry, or as an evaluation of a person's trustworthiness (that's the financial credit meaning; it was the proof that you had to have before giving someone a loan).
When the anonymous author of Hebrews speaks of "faith in things unseen", people today think the speaker is saying "things unseen" to imply that the Christian believes without having evidence--e.g., because they took the New Testament as a reliable authority. That could not have been the case at the time the NT was written, since there was no canonical NT then. Also, that would have been faith in scripture, not faith in the things unseen. I think it was an affirmation of rationalist rather than empiricist epistemology, which was the big philosophical debate at the time. "Faith in things unseen" meant "beliefs justified by rational proof, as in geometry and Plato, rather than by physical observation, as in Hellenistic Greek science or some of Aristotle". That means you're pursuing Platonic henosis rather than Aristotelian / Epicurean / Stoic virtue.
I believe that much of the New Testament, interpreted using the meanings of the words at the time rather than the meanings that the Church imposed on them in the 3rd & 4th century, was Platonist philosophy. Look up any ancient Greek theological word in any dictionary that lists specific usages, and you'll often find that either (1) its meaning changed entirely sometime around the 3rd century AD, or (2) the only person to use it in the Christian sense before Christ was Plato. That's because the Church changed its meaning by interpreting it in a new way, to change scriptures which originally were a blend of equal parts conservative Jewish apocalypticism and Platonist philosophy into something else. Salvation / being saved / being justified / being right with God / etc. in many writings was either Platonic henosis (eg in the writings of Clement of Alexandria or the Gospel of John), or the Judaism of Matthew-Jesus and the imminent establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Paul is the major exception here; he invented his own thing about blood and redemption.
Right about now you're probably thinking of the "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me" litany that appears in 3 gospels. But Paul claimed to have received revelation of that doctrine (apparently directly from God), and to have passed it on to the Corinthians--which he could not have done if Jesus had actually said it at the Last Supper, as every Christian in existence would already have known it. So I believe that was copied into Mark from Corinthians, and from Mark into Matthew and Luke. There is also some talk of Blood in John, but I consider John a later fabrication. The whole saved-by-the-blood thing is one of Paul's inventions, I think.
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Oh yeah, definitely. I should have mentioned that, but yes, scripture doesn't argue blind faith, or trust without a reason, and I never express faith in that sense. The word comes with a lot of baggage these days. A lot of confusion.
On the point of Platonic Henosis: you may be right. What cautions me is "correlation doesn't equal causation." I think more is required to demonstrate a link--regarding any tracing of philosophy, not just scripture. When I consider that we're all discussing the same universe, it makes sense for there to be non-causal overlaps.
Either way, my primary contention with scripture is whether its historical assertions are true. If they are, and there is alignment between say Plato and biblical philosophy, which stands on that history, then to me that simply means Plato got some things right, or had shades of right. And this I consider apart from the question of whether his method was good or not. Also, that scripture shares conclusions with Plato doesn't mean it shares methods with Plato. So again, you may well be right. I've not read Plato. To be honest, I find most belief systems to share ideas with the bible, and not because it predates many of them. Steven Universe for example has an extraordinary explanation of the trinity.
(As an aside, I don't require scripture to be 100% original in everything it says. I don't see why it would have to be. That's not a test for accurracy or truthfulness we apply anywhere else, that I know of.)
I absolutely agree that when translating you need to know what the words meant at the time the scriptures were written. But you also need to allow room for scripture to redefine its own words and concepts within context, too. The same we allow for anyone, or any field of philosophy or research. The real question is what the author meant, right. In my opinion you have to take both contemporary meanings and context into account. We should also compare how other verses use the same word.
Well, only if the twelve told other believers about it. We might think 'of course they would have,' but that's looking backward with the perspective of communion already being important. It was two lines out of a dinner that lasted probably 30min to an hour if not longer. Jesus was always doing and saying weird things (the weirdo), and given their lives were turned over multiple times during the next fifty days, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they forgot that little detail of a very long night.
And Jesus did say the Holy Spirit would remind them of what he said and did over his ministry. So it seems Paul learned it from God and not the disciples. Though given the context, in which he's criticizing the Corinthians for not practicing the Lord's Supper properly, I suppose it's also possible he means the Lord showed him what follows in verses 27-34 of that chapter. It's tough to decipher. Which I often experience with Paul. But then again, so is Quantum Mechanics, so there ya go I guess :P
Also, the ideas linking sacrificial blood and sin and salvation weren't new to the NT or Paul. They stretch all the way through the OT.