”Scary Planet”
An Aphorism About an Alternative Axiom for Reality
“Dimensionless-ness” vs. “Uni-versalism” vs. “Multi-versalism”
[Note: The neopragmatist project involves the creation of a vocabulary that better supports an anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist, anti-authoritarian, instrumentalist, fallibilistic, and anti-representational notion of true knowledge. (This list of academic adjectives underscores the difficulty of such a task!) It’s a problem of rhetoric, and in my view, it begs a literary approach.
Pragmatism is a major paradigm shift. Western philosophy has been on the same, ancient track (more or less) since Plato’s description of some higher reality existing behind mere appearances and Aristotle’s theory that truth is whatever accurately represents reality.
It’s difficult to get your arms firmly around pragmatic notions, for example, that truth is whatever is good in the way of belief (James), or that our conception of an object is whatever practical bearings we conceive the object to have (Peirce), or that nothing can be known about an object beyond an infinitely large and forever expansible web of linguistic relations to other objects (Rorty). It’s all too easy to backslide into rationalist and representationalist descriptions, when our language has absorbed and still reflects 2,500 years of varities and offshoots of Platonism.
This next aphorism, Scary Planet, presents “dimensionless-ness” (or “Un-Order”) as the axiom of reality. It is an alternative, ontological postulate, which helps to absorb and internalize the ground-shifting insights of James, Peirce, and Rorty. Among other things, as I explain in my Afterword: “In dimensionless domains, we more easily envision the primacy of the aesthetic, the fallacy of finality, and ‘the myth of the given’.”
Scary Planet is taken from my “apomary,” Creative Obsession — Philosophic Life in Broad Daylight, which is a mosaic of interrelated aphorisms, apologues, and apothegms, and which facilitates a brazenly literary and exceedingly concise explication of philosophy.]
Scary Planet
Out of sheer chaos, the first idea is universal Order. For centuries our teachers and high priests have observed the unchanging stars. They have drawn circles into the sand and have dreamed of the boundless knowledge which lay within their grasp.
The second idea is cosmic Un-Order. Above us, surpassing the heavens, beyond the hundred billions of bright, predictable galaxies, eternally inconceivable, and inexpressible parsecs past any observation or cogent concept of analysis, a thousand trillion edgeless universes, unorientable, one-sided planes of reality (exotic existences, embracing ten thousand trillion, disparate symmetries enveloping the undulating waves and mixing folds of discrete dimensions of time) expand, collapse, bounce around and collide, like so many molecules in a hot balloon. Yet even this bottomless cauldron of universes is an event of complete insignificance across a continuum of ten thousand quadrillion unique cauldrons, a radiating infinitude subsumed in infinite, infinitely twisting storms of raging continua streaking randomly within and throughout evanescent, meta-dimensional ethers, and clustering into spiraling quanta cascading transiliently, forming further, fluidic fields of fusing, super-plasmic particles condensing unceasingly unto the über-cosmic, ultra-encompassing clouds of extra-unenumerable proto-realities and beyond, and…do you want this to be finite? Is it all “One?” (Do we have any choice in the matter?)
Even now, within this minuscule speck of a universe, we are encountering space, time, matter, and energy on a scale, both large and small, already stuffing the limits of human conceivability. Our visions are becoming unworthy of our mathematics. (Or is it the other way around?) There is a lot of catching-up to do.
So why must we envision that certainty and truth go hand in hand? Science has become quite comfortable with the understanding that “truth” conveys poetic meaning to the least disorganized, realistic apprehension of the most expedient, probable explanation of events. Science implicitly provides that only linguistic, wholesale generalities of the mind, like those of light, color, shape, name, and number, could render the objects of nature discernible, identifiable, and reasonably fixed. Once again, science has led the way — and metaphysics must follow. The infallible philodox and the armchair philosopher have every right to be embarrassed by the progress of science. Their stock-in-trade, those rock-solid demonstrations of Truth, the emanations of an everlasting Order, are beginning to appear like half-baked, adolescent fantasies.
Perhaps the emanations of Order are nothing less than humanity’s genius-fueled abstractions out of a supposed Un-Order (no less than our superbly human hypotheses steeped in very intricately evolved, neural-temporal fabrics) from the minutest of essences and immensurate totality of an unspeakable reality and un-singular cosmos — transcending “representation,” beyond “orientation,” and devoid of “correspondence “— from the crushing depths of an incomprehensible, timeless, dimensionless abyss.
Since the dawn of human reasoning, we have scrambled like bugs on a hot skillet to discover (factualize), out of primal formlessness, events of the world or events of the mind having various recurrences, correlations, and waves of probability. These assimilations, when given a sublime coloring, have served and will always serve as “the Truth.” And since this beginning, the unshakable faith of peoples and nations notwithstanding, the Truth has never stopped changing.
Meanwhile, within “the Un-Order,” first the appearance of things, and then language, law, logic, and consciousness itself have become known to us as metaphors, assimilates in themselves and harbingers of an unprepossessed, pragmatic paradigm — these life-enabling, flourishing filtrates of the brain, a glimmer of grammar embedded beneath a roiling mash of exceedingly unimaginable, exo-universal propensities and uncountably infinite, complementary modes of existence and equivalence.
The postulation of a dimensionless Un-Order, however remote, however close to us, is inescapable. Through these incipient intuitions of an all-too-human, universal law, and by the inexorably un-objective reality of quantum mechanics — and then (good heavens), from the extra-dimensional domains of material superstrings (un-affected by weightless theorems) — the intellect of humankind shall also, alas, be firmly cast out of Eden. In worlds of unrelenting change and interminable refinement, there are no more miracles, no gods worth remembering. Variation incites the inference of existence, fomenting facts grossly exposed to the ineffable geometries of an incognizable cosmos. We experience, irreconcilably, an endlessly stupendous, unfathomable reality, as diffused and grappled by the fleeting figures that float minds. (There “is” not much else.) Within the Un-Order, humanity subsists in a virtual void, like a speck of dust lost in intergalactic space — amazingly, profoundly alone. The aware, the creative, the intrepid homo sapiens!
No one could have asked for this. In our time, each revelation of Truth has become a new question, an unenduring probability, a smoldering afterthought. Human reason and moral temperament will never again rest so securely nor grow so fully within the well-tended incubator of the “metaphysical explanation.” (As if metaphysics could presuppose its own explanation!) It is our fortune to be among the first to seek life in this forsaken, cold vacuum — we the firstborn of the Third Millennium.
