Philosophic — Part 3
Consequences of Pan-Relationalism
All description is metaphorical
All that is known and knowable, like facts, things, fictions, and hallucinations, in other words, the objects of thinking (including me), from this red chair, to redness, to life’s crimson dreams, are a bundle of properties, a bucket of objects relating to other objects, describable in words, grunts, gestures, mental activities, etc. weaving through all kinds of contexts and activities, that is, into sentences (unsettleable sets of possible propositions), so at rock bottom, all description is metaphorical. Amassing memories meld simmering similes into literal language, and from the primitive core to the bleeding edge, knowledge is “a flux of continually changing relations.” It is “an infinitely large, and forever expansible, web of relations to other objects,” which goes “all the way down and all the way out in every direction … [everything is] just one more nexus of relations.”[1] This frameless web for an objective mode of knowledge is anchored in preconscious apperceptions of aesthetic cohesion among the crystalizing impressions, projecting bell curves of belief out of probabilistic peculiarities (shaping habits of behavior for a precarious world). The impression is inductive, the object is deductive and in between, the crystallization (the hypothesis as metaphor) is abductive. An ever-diverging knowledge is grounded by the endless issue of interweaving tendencies (riddled with randomness), and not by preemptive, indubitable distinctions. Such knowledge congeals out of resonating effects, it is the culminating consequence of triadic, logical relations, and every relation is an implicit predicate. “[There] is nothing to be known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing it.”[2] Language relates relating relations, like cascading reflections trapped in flowing fields of facing mirrors. Human knowledge is a thoroughly linguistic portraiture, perfected by the labyrinthine progressions of communication (i.e. rhetorically). It begins abductively, and it builds pointillistically. We create knowledge aporistically with subliminal symbolism, “ostensive description,” and effective figures of speech.
Thought itself is naturally selected
Experience is not knowledge, and Reason makes nothing true. Nor is Being the converging essence of it all. Meaningful (useful) behaviors (walking, talking, thinking, etc.) resolve organic needs — and that’s it. But, like a whack on the head or a consciousness-altering epiphany, the nonstop confrontations of life-in-nature (the earth-moving, mind-molding matrices of behavior) cause our perceptions of change and conceptions of choice (from the purely physiological to the radically creative, whether beautifully attractive or grotesquely repulsive) and engender our grammatically structured, consistently coherent inferences of The World. Thought itself is naturally selected and species-specific. The intrinsically linguistic objects of knowledge are patterned by particles of cognition conjoined in aesthetically constrained waves of understanding, e pluribus unum. In the end, a “common preconsciousness” (the residuum of our reassimilating assimilations) further infuses and amplifies a fragile domain of humanistic holism, unspeakably suspended in cosmic dimensionless-ness. From the “post-metaphysical” perspective, “empiricism” is simply a simplifying rhetoric, and “realism” remains a waning myth. Every fact is refinable, any judgment is fictive, and for us to live and thrive in un-universal, neo-philosophic worlds, if we shall act, then first we must believe (each to their own), as much as we must breathe.[3]
And then, I exhale. Beyond my fleeting faith, there is no “question of Being.” Existence-in-Fact is a concert of the living.
Billions of intercommunicating souls, enduring the tears and terrors of untold millennia, all desperately seeking Truth (as much as they love life), will presumably leave tracks of surging ideas and dissipating webs of meaning. And so a historical hypothesis is the first impetus of the philosophic. The question now is our description of an adaptive knowledge for a distressed species on an increasingly inhospitable planet. The matter is ripe, it is at-issue, and humankind must proceed, utterly unprepared for trial. The artists have scarcely begun to reveal vague outlines for a more predictive and not so conclusive Truth for the impending epoch. Undaunted, their constant incursions, far within the extradimensional purviews, along the murky pathways blazed beneath a virtually singular universe — their incessant spiraling into the shimmering centerpoints, and through the reciprocating vertices of linguistically attained proto-cognitions — engender arduous, mind-expanding engagements with the common preconsciousness of creative consequence (what?), comprising immeasurable nebulae of “heavy” (vision intensive), poignant possibilities and potentially communicable figments, all re-circling and re-crystalizing, relentlessly and inescapably, and unearthing an interminably ever more complex cosmos (an encounter with Reality limited only by the conceivable). The common preconsciousness of creative consequence is the manifest medium for an impassioned, meticulously examined experience of a not-so-dismissably “instinctive,” intergenerational knowledge of the knowable that we Moderns call humanity. Existence-in-Itself is weightless and merely eternal, however an overarching grammar of veritivity is effective and temporal. The churning crystallizations imbue the brain (as they are informed by the mind) immediately (“irreducibly”), consistently (“probabilistically”), and immersively (“aporistically”). Grammatic transcendence is a window into the soul of a living, growing species of mind — I’ll be long dead before I distinctly behold this mastermind-in-reflection (if ever), but the exclusively human experience of humanity also has a heavy name, “the aesthetic.” And every baby, philosopher, and litigant has felt it.
The cathedra of Reality
Indubitability is an annoying fetish. This much is given: Thinking exists, and that’s enough, in particular, for postmodern (let me know when we get there) philosophic life. The formerly fundamental firmament of super-evident Truth is stale, thin air, wafting into a new millennium, dangling like an inactionable ornament, and patently useless to the logicians, rhetoricians, and poets of the finer arts.[4] Instead, a sub-theoretical, meta-metaphorical notion of veritivity, illuminating each functioning vertex (the extradimensional “black box”) for the perfectible, reflecting vectors — the mind’s triadic, emanating fusions of past and future (the present), inquiry to judgment (logic), induction/deduction (abduction), subjective vs. objective (who, me?), mind-behavior (language), “Cause and Effect” (existence), and I’ll bet there’s more — presents an immense and communicable, creative framework, a seemingly everlasting well of originality, and a wide-open path to a boundlessly astounding, nurturing, and flourishing human culture, in effect, a refined understanding of the aesthetic. Each human being’s grammatic crystallizations interpolate swaths of coalescing phenomena and enmeshed “intensions” (where am I?), further propagating protolinguistically and inculcating in parallel a communal mind, reason, conscience, and consciousness, ex post facto (which almost means “a posteriori,” except now there’s more action and less backside), and forming a wholly human Sitzplatz, this sacred (and I mean just that) cathedra of Reality.
This is how we create Truth: rationally. Which also means selectively, communally, lovingly, and obsessively. Veritivity is rational adaptation. It is our survival. We compare and we choose. (In God we trust.) In our time, during these few, mortal moments that homo sapiens shall walk the Earth, our place in an incognizable cosmos has been irrevocably, invisibly handed to humans by humanity, like a cold slap in the face. And at last, a quasi-magical contrivance (a servile Existence-in-Itself), this bloodless “Be-ing” through time, becomes known to us here-beings as a lame, bootstrapped tautology (in a single word!) — a nonjusticiable, yet utmost fictitious affair.
