[lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 16:53:38 -0600
ED:
>>Alternatively, one might simply say that not everything which is real must
>>obey the laws of logic (to wit: human experience of human emotion does not).
Logicians panic at the thought of such a conclusion because [a & not-a] entails
anything else, which is to say logic won't do the hoped-for work. I think this
is an over-reaction. The potential reality of self-contradictory things merely
means one has to be explicit about the scope of objects to which one expects
one's logical theory to apply. The fact that some real objects have
self-contradictory properties needn't mean that all real objects have
self-contradictory properties.
In any case, the assertion that all real objects must obey the laws of logic is
a substantive assertion, not merely an obvious formality; reasonable people, I
submit, may disagree with it.
This is among the many reasons I think the notion of 'transcendental' is so
dubious. The idea that conditions of possibility can be asserted for all of
reality is a generalization of the idea that all real objects must obey the
laws of logic. << And etc.
Amen. This is exactly what I would have written had I been intelligent enough
to write it.
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Dean
To: lit-ideas
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2008 4:06 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
I might add that the notion that real things must obey the laws of logic is a
substantive, not formal, constraint on the notion of "real" and for much more
mundane reasons than the abstruse questions of the status of quantum objects.
This constraint on the real means that if something appears to have
contradictory properties then either the thing is not real, or one (or more) of
its apparent properties is not real, or the contradictory properties are
resolvable into properties of parts (physical, temporal or both) of the thing.
The result is that when one asks whether the human experience of conflicting
human emotions is real, one is forced either to deny the reality of the
experience, or to deny the reality of one of the emotions, or to posit parts of
the experiencing entity which experience the individual and therefore
un-conflicting emotions (as Plato did in the Republic).
Alternatively, one might simply say that not everything which is real must
obey the laws of logic (to wit: human experience of human emotion does not).
Logicians panic at the thought of such a conclusion because [a & not-a]
entails anything else, which is to say logic won't do the hoped-for work. I
think this is an over-reaction. The potential reality of self-contradictory
things merely means one has to be explicit about the scope of objects to which
one expects one's logical theory to apply. The fact that some real objects
have self-contradictory properties needn't mean that all real objects have
self-contradictory properties.
In any case, the assertion that all real objects must obey the laws of logic
is a substantive assertion, not merely an obvious formality; reasonable people,
I submit, may disagree with it.
This is among the many reasons I think the notion of 'transcendental' is so
dubious. The idea that conditions of possibility can be asserted for all of
reality is a generalization of the idea that all real objects must obey the
laws of logic. But since the idea that conditions of possibility can be
asserted for subsets of reality is completely prosaic -- every conditional
asserts a condition of possibility for some subset of reality (if the sun comes
up it will be morning, i.e. the sun rising is a condition of the possibility of
the morning) -- transcendental claims must have a universal scope if they are
to be anything other than just plain old conditionals.
But since I think that the human experience of human emotions (and of a lot
else besides, I use this as a hopefully compelling example) is real and does
not (always) appear to obey the laws of logic, I also think that transcendental
analysis is resting on an unstated presumption about the nature of the human
experience of human emotion. That presumption, to preserve the laws of logic
for use in transcendental analysis, must resolve the apparent contradictory
nature of human experience.
I suspect that transcendental analysts have widely differing versions of that
presumption. Moreover, I also strongly suspect that each version of that
presumption, were it made explicit, would be seen to be a presumptuous
interpretation of what it is like to for others to live their lives. I make
that blanket statement because the presumption that has to be made explicit is
one which would answer the question: "why do I sometimes both love and hate
something?" Any answer to that question is going to be an interpretation of
what is happening when I experience both love and hate for something, i.e. it
is going to be an interpretation of what it is like for me to live my life at
such times, something which I think it presumptuous for anyone else to think
they can do.
The alternative, I believe, is to forswear the expectation of finding
transcendental conditions of anything and try to muddle through bereft of the
comforts such might have given...
Regards to one and all
Eric Dean
Washington DC
> Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 15:35:24 +0000
> From: donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>
> --- On Sat, 6/12/08, wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > From: wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
> > Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
>
> > No, logically contradictory statements cannot both be true
> > in "real" life or
> > any other kind of life characterized by rationality. Nor
> > can they both be
> > false.
> > It's just another one of them transcendental things.
>
> I don't have any objection to this apart from the claim that this is
something "transcendental". It seems to me it is rather that 'logical space'
(in Wittgenstein's TLP sense) cannot contain _both_ of certain kinds of object
- namely, both the 'object' posited by a proposition and its negation.
'Empirical space' also obeys the rules of 'logical space' or, at least, cannot
contradict them - that is, it is empirically impossible (just as it is
logically impossible) that at the _self-same_ point in space and time 'x' there
is both a swan and an emu. It appears that Aristotle stated this.
>
> If there is to be an attack on this long-held orthodoxy it might be best
coming from modern maths and physics, where some theorists seem to think
something can be two things at once [e.g. a particle and a wave] and so on.
Whether such an attack is valid is something that is unclear to me, especially
as there is an apparent divide between those physicists who accept the apparent
contradictions between Einstein's theories of big things and his theories of
tiny, quantum things (accept because both theories are so successful within
there own domain) and those (like Einstein himself) who take the position these
apparent contradictions need to be resolved within a more general unified field
theory.
>
> Donal
> London
>
>
>
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