Philosophic — Part 4
The vocabulary of the “post-metaphysical.”
[Note: The “aphoristic prose” and “aporistic structure” of my principal work, Creative Obsession, is characterized by the independence and interrelatedness of its parts. Ideally, every sentence, phrase, paragraph, etc. should stand on its own and contribute to my explication of a fully “linguistified” and “post-metaphysical” philosophy. A lot of the vocabulary of “Part 4” is anticipated in other parts of the work, and vice versa. But Part 4 does stand on its own, particularly for readers with an interest (for or against) in the “neo-pragmatic” attitude that continues to stir obstinately within the analytic tradition.
Part 4 gets into the nitty-gritty of a philosophical vocabulary that, in my view, better serves to describe what a “post-metaphysical, neo-philosophic” world might look like. In my descriptions, I make much use of Peirce’s notion of triadic logic (induction, abduction, and induction), in particular, the primacy of abduction.]
Abduction vs. experience.
So if I observe, “the stone is hard,” that does not establish the stone’s hardness as something surpassing a physiologically abduced judgment on my part.[1] The recollection of hardness and other judgments of color, texture, size, unity, and so on, are constituents of the imagery elicited by the word “stone.” When I say “stone,” my listener subliminally imagines a “hard” object, or so I subliminally assume. And as my meanings become progressively universal, my assumptions get more subliminal. It would thus be presumptuous to conclude that, intrinsically, “the stone” caused that unforgettable and undeniably concrete sensation of hardness, or likewise, that YEE-aag! was the cause of “hot!” and “cold!” Still, unless I’m taking this to the edge, to the very frontiers of description, I don’t much care — it was hot enough already, forever and everywhere, I sincerely believe.
Substantive (relational) language.
Perhaps my sincere belief does chop the cosmos into convenient chunks, however, it perfects no agreement of mind and object. It is my unilateral knowledge without knowing, an intension with no extension, and a disjoined mental state, like the sound of one hand clapping. The applause lacks mutuality, no consideration (undertaking, relinquishment, exchange, etc.) signifies its substance. An unquestionable conclusion fails to state a cause of action, and my immovable belief (this matter of faith, and res judicata) follows purely personal, privileged hypotheses. It is merely a handy a priori, my advisory opinion to myself, the fruit of an unripe inquiry, and a demurrable prayer for a fractured form of judgment. Diction without restriction is a moot dispute. (Huh?) True faith transcends any “stake” in the case. It has no interest in the earthly outcome. My faith has no standing in a court of language.[2]
All thinking is linguistic.
Language is not a veil of words and syntax that might adequately describe perfectly pre-perfected, true objects getting bounced through menageries of mental mirrors. But language is a luminous catalyst of creativity. Ever since rational choice first carved into the cacophonies of possibility, and beginning with life’s most primal percepts, “language” has embodied the evolving tools (the modes of cognition, means of deliberation, and media of expression) that organisms on this planet have leveraged to transpose an incognizable cosmos into an aesthetically traced, probabilistic uni-verse (an inference of “the world”). Consciousness is intrapersonal language, communication is interpersonal language, and all thinking is linguistic. It ranges from the autonomic to the ultra-intelligent, and affects every niche of earthly life. From a mosquito’s life-or-death, direction-finding sense of carbon dioxide to the uniquely human search for a good cup of coffee, the apperception of a realness being “out there” is abduced from open sets of uncountably infinite, aesthetically molded, and grammatically transposed relations. And if it mattered, the world reduces further to a purely physicalistic realm, where atomistic, neurological impulses displace each instant of existence. The objects of thinking, from there being “light,” hard rocks, and Sherlock Holmes, to the immutable “logical constants,” are the continuous weavings of interrelating relations, and a real object is verified by its virtually invariable redescriptions effecting, in due course, the consensus of fact and our good, stable common sense.
The mind is a function of language.
Facts and things follow endless iterations of actionable hypotheses and settled assimilations, which in themselves constitute derivative, linguistic tools. In leaps and pirouettes of description, various percepts, inferences, and concepts conglomerate through processes oscillating from the incisive and adaptive (creative) to the deftly logical (critical). Various objects emerge within in the mind out of migrating meanings. They are not “given,” fully baked and “cut at the joints” by the Invisible Angels of Universal Reality, nor by any otherworldly, deus ex machina, magical metaphor. Interpersonally, intrapersonally, biologically, and metaphysically, adaptive linguistic behavior (from the preconscious to the sublime) transposes the neurological to the ontological. Fact follows meaning. The language is the concept. And so my talkative mind is not some truthful reflection of antecedent “Real” things (real enough, that is, to describe) getting “pictured” inside my head (how? by what means? whose agent?), where each new picture would be yet another distinct object for my uninterrupted cognition (ad infinitum), yet supposedly produces (a cappella!) an “adequate” description (presumably in English) for that “represented thing.” Actually, primarily and creatively, it’s the other way around. The mind is a function of language.[3] And the world flips outside-in. No heaven-sent belief explains “universal hotness,” let alone, the foundations of Truth and the essence of Reality. Human knowledge does not come so cheap. The cosmos is not that simple. It is the process of method, and not the features of somebody’s faith, that finds facts, builds Truth, and qualifies knowledge.
The trigonometries of thinking.
Whenever we seek philosophic understanding, a moment of clarity, or a sandwich, the cognitive irritation elicits further linguistic behavior (inquiry) that tends to attain a correlative behavioral equilibrium (judgment).[4] Cases and controversies induce ranges of changes in the mind. Life’s intrinsic adversity, which is given, pits the exigencies of the world against the sums of experience, as deliberative behavior follows psychological imperatives (ethic). When I approach a refined understanding (epistemic), it’s like I’m finally seeing a sharper image (aesthetic). The trigonometries of thinking shape the molecules and objects of knowledge. Triadic transpositions of an exceedingly problematic, natural environment form communicable realizations and abduce “the Mind.” It is the artistry of method banging heads with the aesthetics of existence that sparks-up useful and unwavering ideas (our “practical bearings”), which is the cash value of Truth. So my typically instantaneous intuition, no matter how certain (and beside the point) that things in the cosmos simply must have been “hot” before anybody ever talked about it, or felt hot, or thought hot, would be deduced from non-substantive (illusory), wholly inadmissible premises — it is an inchoate description, a stir-pot of ahistorical figments, and my categorically voidable explanation. (Calling an illusory explanation an “intuition,” or basing knowledge and science upon an indubitable “hunch,” is paradise for skeptics and a patently unwarranted shortcut. In practice, it is a convenience or apologetic nonsense.)
The anthropic uni-verse.
An inference is not an essence, and intuitions make flimsy foundations. In dimensionless domains, we more easily envision the primacy of the aesthetic, the fallacy of finality, and “the myth of the given.” We have little use for “metaphysical certainty.” We are done with the orthodoxic myopia and convergence of all Reason at the end of time. The new millennium would be better baked in contingent paradigms and historical authority, as the melding minds of humanity conjoin within the billowing cloud chambers of hyperbolically projecting, synaptic molecules forming the anthropic uni-verse. The philosophic is unfinishable (except by death), and like obsessed artists, we will “find” only what we have made. We resist repose and our souls move. Our knowledge of The Good, Truth, and Beauty is an earthbound ecstasy.
The philosophic is rough, also. You can’t put a bow on it. Whenever language squares off with existence, philosophy happens. What is existing, is humanity’s infinitesimal corner of the cosmos — an organic bubble of Cause and Effect, which is variously called nature, the universe, the world, etc. Beyond this tiny bubble is dimensionless-ness divided by nothingness (whereof one cannot speak). Existence is the sum of causes. Effect is the sum of language, and linguistic transposition culminating in behavior is the first sign and last trace of life on Earth.
What we mean is what we do.
The genealogy of human language is spurred by varying admixtures of the individual (my brain being a nonstop network of assimilating predicates and decomposing memories) and the societal (people talk, communalize concepts, believe and act conventionally, or not, enculture civilizations, and so forth). Meanwhile, consciousness congeals out of galaxies of grammar, stretching from the intuitively internal (mental, subjective, personal, and intensional) to the indubitably external (physical, objective, communal, and extensional). And along the way, we traverse dense continua of creative to critical modes of contemplation. (In the throes of creativity, we ponder critically the “meanings and texts” of language, and upon the secure path of criticism, we create more perfectly adapted worlds.) But even with such distinguished distinctions, linguistic meaning is not so exalted, that only philosophers and lunatics may grasp the illustrious essence of the Really Real. Nor does meaning reduce to terms of analysis for a stripped-down language of fact-based (synthetic) words and judgments.[5] Instead, language and existence resonate expansively, aesthetically, and at the speed of thought, coercing the correlative rhythms of ameliorative behavior. Through it all, what we mean is what we do. Seeking a truer, newer knowledge is a dangerous road, and the meaning of life evolves by natural selection, while we organisms keep scrambling over this biospheric pressure cooker of a blue planet, provoked by an unbelievably merciless and absolutely indifferent, cosmic resistance.
Behavior is “the mirror” of language.
When the whipsaws of contemplation begin to defy description, words start humming. With language, we relate the objects of each “game” meaningfully (usefully) and in synchrony with the complementary, rhythmic structures of each “world.” The endless frictions of thinking (language) and nature (existence) effect a knowledge of predictable change, and radiant ideas progress from primal predilections to the budding apperception of abstract possibilities. Life-affirming choice (rational behavior) ensues, as experience underwrites the aesthetic.[6] That is, behavior is “the mirror” of language — and in the cognitive heat, the expansive pressures continue. Newly patterned percepts transpose abductively and reconcile rhetorically. They reconceptualize like lightning, from the middle out. Then maybe, at the far edges of the roiling hodgepodge, from the sumptuous abyss of humanity’s incessantly incubating preconsciousness, we sense creative stirrings. Impulsively, we move to evoke it. But we don’t have “the words.” We possess the linguistic means of experience, but not yet the means of expression.
Adaptive knowledge.
“Method-ing” extrapolates from thinking and talking, and it is likewise staggeringly complex behavior. Method-ing is the function of intelligence. It is selective, systematic activity that delineates an aesthetically restricted order out of un-order, that draws life out of a virtually Real (humanistically conceived), natural environment. From the primitive to the philosophic, our hardwired predispositions for unity and order favor ever more metaphorical beliefs and behaviors. The transposition of a “dimensionless-ness” unto the “uni-verse,” produces psychologically compelling propensities of action, which may prove conducive to life on Earth. Adaptive knowledge is mind-and-language in blessed synchrony with the rhythms of the world, from rainy seasons and rotating stars, to an infant’s beating heart.
Language enables possibilities for more flourishing lives and nurturing cultures. Self-creation, justice, and social hope are intwined in an unfinishable tapestry.
Traces of the aesthetic are laid bare by the abduction of opulent memories into refined understandings. Intelligent selection generates precise interactions with the environment. The penetrating redescriptions herald the consequences of creativity, and show the value of a finely restrained language. They weigh by words our place in an incognizable cosmos.
What is “given” is no longer the foundation, essence and substance of Being, nor some prepackaged diorama of a convergent Reality, where all Truth is out there. Instead, a few billion years ago, life spawned randomly upon the Earth (thinking exists). We got life. That’s it. The rest is language.
[1] Nietzsche, F. W., Description of Ancient Rhetoric, op. cit., p. 25; Pierce, C. S., Chance, Love, and Logic (Bison Books, 1998), pp. 42–47.
[2] See James, W., Pragmatism (Dover, 1995), pp. 17–48 (pragmatic truth and method).
[3] See Wittgenstein, L. J., Philosophical Investigations (4th Ed.), (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), §§ 19, 75, 109, 119, 135, 139a, 194, 241, 295, 329, 335, 339, 355, 367, 370, 381, 400, 520, 610, 649, 665, 693.
[4] Burke, F.T., Dewey’s New Logic, op. cit., pp. 136–146.
[5] See Quine, W. V., Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 60 Philosophical Review, №1, pp. 20–43 (1951).
[6] See Dewey, J., Art as Experience (Perigee, 1980), pp. 36–84 (experience and expression).
