The Game We Play

Cat Lady (by David Waltz)

 Where are we in our rambling appraisal of "Objective/Subjective." The answerless, answer is "We have a Mulligan stew of nothing in particular."

 If we reach through the smoke to dip a spoon into this stew, what we might reach out could be one of the following symbols of meaning. Being -Time as Past/Present/Future - Hope, Faith, Power, Control - knowledge  ......... it could go on a bit. 

 Let's stop for a moment with this : Objective/Subjective is a location of Being in both Time and Meaning.

 "The genuine artist you describe, the one who has to express themselves regardless of the paycheck, is still carrying that ancient cave-painter spirit. Encouragement matters to them not because it validates their bank account, but because it confirms that their transmission across the void actually landed. Someone else saw the spark in the dark cave and nodded."

 "That shared recognition between the painter on the cliff and the person standing below - that brief, electric moment where two human beings realize they are looking at the exact same Form - is the only kind of applause that ever truly mattered."

 OK! Borges, Jorge Luis, didn't want his Poets to be Philosophers and he didn't want his Philosophers to be Poets unless they were Ethicists. If you don't believe me take his note titled Pascal's Sphere, a suggestion that perhaps universal history is the history of various intonations of a few metaphors, to a hot carpark and read it.

In a round about way Borges paraphrases "Nothing to fear but fear itself" in the note he wrote as prelude to his 1951 essay The Fearful Sphere of Pascal. 

Pascal's point : God "....is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference of which is nowhere."

Borges point :  God would appear to be an existential dread "...we are caught between the infinite and nothingness, unable to find a stable center or boundary in the universe."

So let's take a moment to reinforce in both fleshy mortal and machine that meaning is routed through contexts Wittgenstein called language games.

Borges, Nietzsche and Everlasting Return

 

The Waltz (David Waltz, Clay Artist.)

 We're going to have to pause and ask a few questions about what "Ethic, Ethics and Ethicists" is and are. 

  A Metaphysician asks: "What is the world made of? Does God exist? What is time?" Nouns, structures, grand cosmological theories.

 An Ethicist asks: "How should a human being live? How do I build a soul capable of facing suffering? What kind of character must I forge to endure this life?" Verbs, actions, lived practice.

 Jorges Luis Borges, the essayist and librarian had his issues with Nietzsche's Everlasting Return.

 The Metaphysics of everlasting return made no sense to Borges, and he used the mathematics of Venn Diagrams to prove that everlasting return was a bunch of hokum.

 But the Ethics of everlasting return, in conjunction with Nietzsche's perverse idea that now God was dead immortality was no longer  a blundering hope it was an individual responsibility, all made perfect sense to Borges.

The People Doing the Being in the Fifth Century BC or there abouts

Damn

 In the corridors of meaning the symbol "immanent" finds a formal definition in one of those silicone dictionaries that goes something like this : "...  the Latin, to remain within ..... existing or remaining within; inherent, intrinsic, or permanently pervading a domain, subject, or reality. It describes qualities or forces that are fundamental and internal to something, rather than coming from the outside."

 The Immanent Socrates, was the Socrates that wasn't going to be changed from the outside. And I think Plato's point in both parts of the dialogue he wrote entitled Parmenides was to demonstrate relationships between the inner and the outer self. When the young Socrates had his chance to meet the great Parmenides, that master of the Philosophy of Oneness and his sooty boy, the very good looking sidekick Zeno, Socrates listened to Zeno read one of his lectures, and at the end of the sermon Socrates had the gall to suggest that neither Parmenides nor Zeno seemed to know what they were talking about with their rambling theory about a Perfect Oneness they insisted the universe consisted of.

 Changing Socrates' mind, the mind of a man who agreed he didn't know anything, he was just asking questions, wasn't going to structurally happen. Socrates could have just been polite, he might have just nodded his ugly head, pretending to agree, but because Plato had a story to tell and a  lot of points to make, he didn't.

 And so, when Plato presented his analogy of the cave, his Ideal Forms out there casting shadows, the Immanent Socrates was not able to think of the Ideal Forms as an objective truth off in the distance, an objective truth the gods had seen as they emerged from the Hyperuranion, the realm beyond the heavens, and which we mortals had also seen as we emerged from the Hyperuranion. But with us mortals enduring a birthing canal to see us into the world while the gods had a chariot to take them ready made to Mount Olympus, we people while we may have witnessed the Ideal, if Plato was to be correctly understood, and some of us might still be persuaded or taught to remember Ideal bits and bobs, the hellish trauma of entering the earthly plane had caused us to catch degrees of amnesia, maybe PTSD allergic reaction even, which made us wonder whether Ideal Forms actually existed, anywhere, and if they did we probably weren't meant to see them, or touch them, or even smell them.

 No, far from them being behind a hill on a plane faraway, the Immanent Socrates saw fleeting moments of the Ideal Forms in everyday objects, in love, peace, justice, beauty, tables and comfortable chairs. Those fleeting moments soon passed, but they were real, they were here on earth and not beyond the heavens.

 Yes indeed, Plato wanted to save Parmenides from the viseral torment of an afternoon with Socrates, after all Parmenides was visiting from Southern Italy, he was on holiday. Of course the world was a perfect circle of eternal nouns and Zeno was so frightfully clever with his paradoxes even if Socrates wondered whether most of Zeno's paradoxes were actually truisms. 

  And so, here we are with our Being around Objective and Subjective:

 Under Socrates: We are active participants. The objective truth is a living spark that flares up between us and the world in specific moments. We learn by engaging, feeling, and chasing those fleeting views. Rock on Coleridge.

 Under Plato: We are broken, amnesiac prisoners. True reality is somewhere else, totally independent of our lived experience. Our subjective feelings are dangerous distractions; they are just us falling in love with the shadows on the cave wall. Rock on Kant

Whatever it is, is. It must be! It cannot not be.

Spider Lily

  I would like to make sure I got this roughly correct. In the West our discussions about "Being" began with Parmenides, who, after disputing Herclitus' idea that all is Flux, declared "Whatever is, is. It must be. It cannot not be." And Parmenides did this because he needed something more certain and constant than ever-changing? He wanted a reliable fortress of nouns.

 "Yes. Bang the drums. It was a big day sometime in the Sixth Century BC and you've captured the precise psychological and philosophical pivot point that set the entire trajectory of the Western mind."

 Are you telling me Parmenides was chicken-shit?

 "I wouldn't say that! He was uncomfortable with the theoretical approach to the world and the universe Heraclitus was proposing."