Meaning Making: It's What We Do; It's Who We Are 9949323118, 9789949323111
Meaning Making: It's What We Do; It's Who We Are is a book about fundamental questions of contemporary semioti
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MEANING MAKING: IT’S WHAT WE DO; IT’S WHO WE ARE (A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH) floyd merrell
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Series editors: Kalevi Kull Silvi Salupere Peeter Torop Advisory board: Tatiana Chernigovskaya (St. Petersburg State University, Russia) Robert E. Innis (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA) Frederik Stjernfelt (Aarhus University, Denmark) Jaan Valsiner (Clark University, USA) Ekaterina Velmezova (Lausanne University, Switzerland) Vilmos Voigt (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
Tartu Semiootika Raamatukogu 12 Тартуская библиотека семиотики 12
Tähendusloome: seda me teeme; see me oleme (transdistsiplinaarne vaade) Создание смыслов: то, что мы делаем; то, кто мы есть (трансдисциплинарный подход)
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Book series Tartu Semiotics Library editors: Kalevi Kull, Silvi Salupere, Peeter Torop Technical editor: Ene-Reet Soovik Address of the editorial office: Department of Semiotics University of Tartu Jakobi St. 2 Tartu 51014, Estonia http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/tsl.html
Copyright: University of Tartu, 2013 ISSN 1406–4278 ISBN 978–9949–32–311–1 University of Tartu Press www.tyk.ee
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
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Chapter One: Introduction: The task ahead
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Chapter Two: Are we really masters of our signs?
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Chapter Three: Tentatively qualifying the process
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Chapter Four: From strange minutiae to concrete living
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Chapter Five: Is mind changing, or is it the world?
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Chapter Six: On knowing how to do what we do
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Chapter Seven: Rules are made to be broken?
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Chapter Eight: Never simply a ‘blind shot in the dark’: The mediating middle way
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Chapter Nine: There’s more to following a rule than meets the mind
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Chapter Ten: Coalescence processes in strange ways
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Chapter Eleven: On what we (think we) know
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Chapter Twelve: Sinking into consciousness: De-objectivizing
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Chapter Thirteen: Are we nevertheless born to objectvize?
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Chapter Fourteen: Playacting, as living knowing
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Chapter Fifteen: Playacting, from a different point of view
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Chapter Sixteen: When the lattice includes itself
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Chapter Seventeen: Becoming: The way of all forms of life
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Appendix
286
References
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Name index
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
7
Chapter One: Introduction: The task ahead
9
Chapter Two: Are we really masters of our signs?
18
Chapter Three: Tentatively qualifying the process
41
Chapter Four: From strange minutiae to concrete living
60
Chapter Five: Is mind changing, or is it the world?
83
Chapter Six: On knowing how to do what we do
101
Chapter Seven: Rules are made to be broken?
115
Chapter Eight: Never simply a ‘blind shot in the dark’: The mediating middle way
141
Chapter Nine: There’s more to following a rule than meets the mind
156
Chapter Ten: Coalescence processes in strange ways
173
Chapter Eleven: On what we (think we) know
184
Chapter Twelve: Sinking into consciousness: De-objectivizing
208
Chapter Thirteen: Are we nevertheless born to objectvize?
226
Chapter Fourteen: Playacting, as living knowing
234
Chapter Fifteen: Playacting, from a different point of view
244
Chapter Sixteen: When the lattice includes itself
262
Chapter Seventeen: Becoming: The way of all forms of life
273
Appendix
286
References
291
Name index
313
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Acknowledgments Yes of course, acknowledgments. Where can I begin? Whenever I’ve tried to articulate my debt to others after finishing a book I have the impression that it would be impossible to bring the task to closure. So, I end up with a few clumsy words opening out to a gaping void, and I’m left with a sense that it wasn’t me who should have his name attached to the pages that followed. Nevertheless, acknowledgments. This time I’ll simply offer a list of names. In the first place it will allow me as economically as possible to say what I need to say, and in the second place it will give me the opportunity to reveal my gratitude to those scholars with whom I remain personally unacquainted, but who have also helped me out in my struggle to get words on the pages that made up this inquiry as well as my previous books. Of course first and foremost is Charles Sanders Peirce; without him I would have never found any points of light at the end of the myriad tunnels I entered. Along with him, Peirce scholars and semioticists Douglas Anderson, Myrdene Anderson, Søren Brier, Eugen Baer, Joseph Brent, Phyllis Chiasson, Paul Cobley, Vincent Colapietro, John Deely, Umberto Eco, Claudine EngelTiercelin, Dinda Gorlée, Charles Hartshorne, Carl Hausman, Jaakko Hintikka, Nathan Houser, Helena Katz, Kalevi Kull, Mihai Nadin, Yair Neuman, Jaime Nubiola, João Queiroz, Susan Petrilli, Augusto Ponzio, Sandra Rosenthal, Brian Rotman, Paul Ryan, Stanley Salthe, Maria Lúcia Santaella, Bill Spinks, and, most especially, Thomas Sebeok. Within the field of Latin American studies which was the focus of my PhD studies, I must mention Juan Rulfo: conversations with him left me truly inspired, and humbled. Other writers and thinkers, a few of whom I’ve known personally, but most of whom unfortunately I’ve never had the opportunity to meet: Isabel Allende, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jorge Amado, Jéferson Bacelar, Lívia Barbosa, Roger Bartra, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Carlos Caroso, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Roberto DaMatta, Silvia Dapía, Gustavo Esteva, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Paulo Freire, Gilberto Freyre, Peter Fry, Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Galeano, Néstor García Canclini, Adrian Gimate-Welch, Guillermo Gregorio, Serge Gruzinski, D. Emily Hicks, Clarice Lispector, María Lugones, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Eduardo Mallea, Walter Mignolo, Carlos Monsiváis, Abdias do Nascimento, Edmundo O’Gorman, Fernando Ortiz, Elena Poniatowska, Antônio Risério, Renato Rosaldo, John Ross, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, Ordep Serra, João Ubaldo Rivera, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hermano
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Acknowledgments
Vianna, Leopoldo Zea, and Octavio Paz, and above all, of course, Jorge Luis Borges – yet, I cannot ignore John Barth, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, among a host of others. On structuralist and poststructuralist thought, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-François Lyotard, and Tzvetan Todorov. On the notion of re-enchantment, June Bennett, Morris Berman, Susan Bordo, Leonard Shlain, and Charlene Spretnak, and on novel philosophical slants on a number of issues, especially meaning, relativism and subjectivism, Richard Bernstein, Donald Davidson, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Norm and Skye Hirst, Saul Kripke, Joseph Margolis, Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, Williard Quine, Nicholas Rescher, Richard Rorty, Richard Shusterman, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On cutting-edge anthropological, phychological, and ‘bodymind’ issues, David Abram, Gregory Bateson, David Bloor, Jerome Bruner, Judith Butler, Antonio Damasio, Mary Douglas, Howard Gardner, Eugene Gendlin, David Howes, Luce Irigaray, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Jean Piaget, V. S. Ramachandran, Eleanor Rosch, Oliver Sacks, Mark Turner, and Thomas West. On the philosophical implications of quantum theory, mathematics, biology, and the social sciences, David Bohm, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Fritjof Capra, Newton da Costa, Tobias Dantzig, Howard DeLong, Arthur Eddington, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, Rebecca Goldstein, Ian Hacking, Norwood Hanson, N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Heelan, Werner Heisenberg, Mary Hesse, Norm Hirst, Skye Hirst, Douglas Hofstadter, Michio Kaku, Louis Kauffman, Morris Kline, Shimon Malin, Heinz Pagels, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigogine, Steven Rosen, Erwin Schrödinger, Charles Seife, Wolfgang Smith, George Spencer-Brown, Ian Stewart, Géza Szamosi, Stephen Toulmin, Jakob von Uexküll, Francisco Varela, John Archibald Wheeler, and Eugene Wigner. On art and creativity as process, Roger Caillois, James Carse, Paul Cézanne, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Maurits Escher, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Arthur Miller, Stephen Nachmanovitch, Pablo Picasso, David Sudnow, and Diego Velázquez. And finally, on the implications of Nāgārjuna, the ‘middle way’, and alternative ways of sensing, perceiving and conceiving oneself, others, and the physical world, Jay Garfield, Gerd Gigerenzer, Newman Robert Glass, Jeremy Hayward, C. W. Huntington, Shotura Iida, David Kalupahana, Nathan Katz, Steven Laycock, David Loy, Victor Mansfield, Shigenori Nagatomo, Keiji Nishitani, Graham Priest, D. T. Suzuki, and Ken Wilber. My apologies to those deserving scholars I may have failed to include in this list. I am compelled to add, of course, that any and all the shortcomings in this volume are mine, and mine alone, as my companion, Araceli, knows so well.
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Chapter One. Introduction: The task ahead
Chapter One
Introduction: The task ahead Chapter One. Introduction: The task ahead This somewhat confessionary introduction compels me to offer some general assumptions underlying the pages that follow, instead of boring you with the customary chapter-by-chapter summary. So: (1) presymbolic (pre- or extra-linguistic) modes of feeling and sensing and experiencing and portraying ourselves, others, and our mental and physical ‘world-versions’, entail the process of consciousness-becoming; (2) linguistic signs are the culmination of this consciousness-becoming; and (3) consciousness-becoming is always in the process of nonlinearly becoming something other than what it was becoming; thus (4) symbolic (linguistic) signs are never complete and consistent, for they are always drawing from the fountainhead of more basic (pre- or extra-linguistic, iconic and indexical) semiosic processes. That much written, I continue with a set of questions appropriate for an inquiry into the nature of processing meaning, creatively. Becoming other?
However, at the outset I must come clean regarding what I believe is an important issue. Sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling that I am comparable to an effete flâneur, idly meandering about, musing over his everyday coming and going. A contemplator gazing upon the crowd without mixing, wandering at random, apparently with neither destination nor purpose, within the flux and reflux of people and things and happenings. Something like those impressionist painters who resisted their convention dictating that they offer objective representations of what there is in favor of subjectively portraying momentary feelings and sensations. Something in the order of: ‘I feel (its becoming), therefore I am vaguely inclined to think (about its becoming process)’. Rather than simply: ‘I think, therefore I am (and presumably, it is)’. When Claude Monet (1840–1926) began painting his serial canvases, what did he end up with? Fleeting impressions during particular moments, the combination of which evokes the notion that everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. This is
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Chapter One. Introduction: The task ahead
to say that all that is, is not what it is, because it’s becoming: it’s process. Process is, as process goes, was going, will have been going. Is this tantamount to what is customarily dubbed ‘magical realism’? Or is it ‘reality becoming magical’? Or vice versa? It depends on how the beholder processes her sensory images. She wants ‘magical realism’? Fine, if she so desires. And with remarkable confidence she likely juxtaposes her ‘reality’ with her notion of ‘magic’ so as to create two relatively static worlds in conflict. She would rather sense ‘reality in the process of becoming magical’, or vice versa? Even better, perhaps. And she finds herself in a quivering, flowing and fluctuating, uncertain world, where everything that for the moment apparently is, it isn’t, and neither is it what it is nor what it isn’t, because it is always becoming something other. The problem smacks somewhat of Parmenides (born ca 515 BCE) pitted against Heraclitus (ca 540–480 BCE). Parmenides demands faith in the declaration that ‘What is, is’, against the untenable ‘What is, is not what it is, and neither is it what it is nor is it what it is not’. He reasoned that as all thinking refers to something that is, then there can be no is not. Thus, in a roundabout way, he bears out the authority of Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) logic as embodied in what goes as ‘Classical Logic’: (1) what is, is what it is (the Principle of Identity); (2) it can be nothing other than what it is (the Principle of NonContradiction); and (3) there is no alternative to the bivalent is and is-not (the Excluded-Middle Principle) (McKirahan 1994). In Heraclitus’s Cosmic Fragments (Kirk 1954) we have it that at one and the same time what is, is already becoming what it is not. Heraclitus denies the principles of orthodox logic by offering a premonition of the amorphous, pliable, ever-changing nature of a world of Becoming, rather than immutable Being. Or perhaps better stated, what is, is the perpetual Becoming of Being and at the same time it is the perpetually altering Being of Becoming. What is becoming complements what is not, and what is not complements what is becoming. There is no fixed is. What there is, is what it is not, for it is always becoming. In other words, what is, is always emerging to keep what was becoming, becoming. It was always becoming, it is becoming, and it always will have been becoming. Thus the impressionist painting. Thus the hopeful yet futile ubiquitous all-seeing eye of the flâneur, who, in the best of all possible moments, gets the feeling that he senses everything; but he senses nothing, for his sensing is within the process of becoming.
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What, then, is the problem?
We have become so accustomed to wanting a place for everything with everything in its place that we take the division of ‘reality’ into a non-paradoxical system of categories for granted. Packaging ‘reality’ into a desiccated, sharply honed set of words and fixed objects, acts, and happenings stringently confines our knowledge to our community’s particular ‘world-version’, which, we would like to expect, can be effectively reduced to purely theoretical, logical, and rational language.1 Consequently, concrete knowing at a particular time and place along a nonlinear processual trajectory is categorically excluded. We find an amusing parody of this idealized rendition of ‘reality’ in Charles Dickens’s (1812–1870) Hard Times (1854) when Gradgrind is filling his pupils’ heads with the facts and nothing but the facts. The episode merits full citing: ‘Girl number twenty’, said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’ ‘Sissy Jupe, sir’, explained number twenty, blushing, standing up and curtsying…. ‘Let me see. What is your father?’ ‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’ Mr Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand. ‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he? … Very well, then. Give me your definition of a horse.’ (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by his demand). ‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours’ … ‘Quadriped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring;… sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth….’ ‘Now girl number twenty’, said Mr Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’ (Dickens 1969 [1854]: 48–50; see comments on this passage by Leavis and Leavis 1970: 189–90) 1
As will become evident as this essay unfolds, objects, acts, and happenings offer a broader notion of what Peircean semiotics ordinarily conceives as the ‘semiotic object’, whether in the physical world ‘out there’ or in the mind, such ‘semiotic object’, along with the sign – or ‘representamen’ – and its meaning – or ‘interpretant’ – which emerges in collaboration with the sign and its object, act or happening, along with its makers and takers, other signs, and the physical world.
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Bitzer utters the relevant sentences: he knows what a horse is, categorically speaking. Sissy doesn’t – at least according to the professor’s thinking. Her knowing horses has been in the process of emerging within her over time through concrete contextualized experience during her everyday living. Blitzer’s knowledge of horses as he reports it is the product of fixed and fabricated dictionary and encyclopedic taxonomizing: he can methodically spout out words coming from convenient pigeon-holes. Sissy has over the years incorporated horse-experience in body and mind such that she has a personal and even an intimate feeling for the animals in question through those experiences; but this feeling resists clear and distinct expression, for as process, it is always becoming something different. Gradgrind will have nothing to do with experiential, sensuous knowing. As far as he is concerned, it isn’t real knowledge; it is of no use for the academically prepared mind; it isn’t good for thinking. (I recall once having heard Marvin Minsky saying something to the effect that you might be able clearly and distinctly to define a horse, yet know hardly anything about it; or, given your concrete experience, you can know what a horse is without the need of defining.) Admittedly, Gradgrind’s type of Aristotelian – or pseudo-Aristotelian – categorizing approach to the nature of the world has paid off well for us. Perhaps too well. For it has lulled us into a soporific slumber such that we more often than not accept it as the only valid approach. But it cannot concretely and adequately account for change, which entails the most genuine nature of our experience (the impressionists, of course, knew this well). In this vein, it behooves me in the essay that follows to illuminate, insofar as it is possible given my limitations, the idea of pure change. The problem is that, due to the very nature of the topic of change, a convenient hypotheticodeductive logical scheme for such illumination cannot be effectively forthcoming, for change transgresses the conventions of orthodox understanding. Change, or process-logic if you will, should give account of becoming; yet, when we examine the problem of change through the conventions of our customary understanding, we see that the dynamic process involving objects, acts, and happenings can never be coterminous with our conceptual system whereby all our categories and their definitions are authorized. The term ‘flux’ loosely labels what simply can’t stand still; yet the traditional conceptual scheme is grounded in the notion of relatively static identity. If I may repeat myself, identity implied by orthodox logic must be fixed, because in principle everything is what it is. Moreover, the standard laws of thought, especially in the guise of Identity, Non-Contradiction and ExcludedMiddle, are so centrally placed with regard to the order of our thinking, that
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in any legitimate use of language, we customarily apply these laws dutifully and inalterably. However, this dogma hides a one-sided prejudice. Despite the central position of bivalent logical laws, our actual concrete experience tells us that the ordinary notion of conceptual schemes is constantly disrupted. A possible way out?
So, in despair, where can we possibly turn? Above all, while looking for answers we should abandon the effort to find them non-paradoxically. For instance, at the outset it seems doubtful that what ordinarily goes as the state of being can be thrown in the same bag as the process of becoming; yet what appears as a tacit assumption occasionally has it that both of them are adequately covered by the same principles of logic. This puts us in a conceptual swamp when we attempt non-paradoxically to legislate for the fundamental idea of pure change by an appeal to bivalent logic, which is applicable only to its antithetical category of Identity. Such misplaced fascination with bivalent logic is exemplified by Zeno’s (ca 495–430 BCE) paradoxes of motion. Zeno’s Arrow Paradox tells us that since an arrow in apparent movement is at each and every instant where it is and nowhere else, then at each instant it must be at rest – as if we were to take a still photograph of it. But the arrow’s being just where it is and nowhere else reveals a particular limitation of our conceptual scheme: it bars any and all accounts of time and of motion. In Zeno’s Achilles and the Tortoise Paradox, Achilles moves with more than sufficient speed to overtake the tortoise within a finite increment of time. Yet, logically speaking, Zeno assures us that from within his conceptual scheme this is impossible. He argues that if the tortoise is twenty miles ahead of Achilles and travels at a speed of one-tenth of a mile an hour while Achilles travels at two hundred times that speed, then, in spite of his advantage, he will never overtake the Tortoise, for when he has reached the point originally occupied by the Tortoise, the Tortoise will be one-tenth of a mile ahead of him. Then, when he reaches this latter point, the Tortoise will still be slightly ahead of him, and so on, such that the distance between them converges infinitely but never entirely disappears, at least in our finite world as we ordinarily perceive and conceive it. In other words, Zeno alludes to the impossibility of passing through a space that has definite non-movable limits, in principle an infinite number of them. This supposes that Achilles’s goal of reaching and passing the tortoise, which in the concrete world of experience would be obviously a trivial matter, is in terms of abstract reasoning impossible. Zeno’s presumed iron-clad
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proof from within what appears to be a formally irrefutable logic flies in the face of concrete experience; yet, within the parameters set out by the proof, it is impeccable. Enter Heraclitus (ca 535–475 BCE). His advantage over orthodox nononsense thinking is that he had no qualms about embracing paradox. He considered ‘reality’ as flux, and flux as paradox experientially realized and overcome. Philip Wheelwright tells us that Heraclitus focused not on that which is and that which is not, not on that which is included and that which is excluded, but rather, on coalescence, or in terms of this essay as I shall argue, coalescent complementarity, between something and something else. For Heraclitus, ‘nothing is exclusively this or that; in various ways he affirms something to be both of two disparates or two contraries, leaving the reader to contemplate the paradox, the full semantic possibilities of which can never be exhausted by plain prose statements’ (Wheelwright 1959: 92). Wheelwright (1959: 92) concludes that ‘the logicizing intellect will undertake to analyze each of these paradoxes into its elements, explaining in just what pair of respects, or in what pair of circumstances, or from what opposite points of view, something is at once such and not-such’. In contrast, Heraclitus ‘regards the paradox itself, and not its logical transformation, as more truly representing the real state of affairs’ (Wheelwright 1959: 92). Looking elsewhere Heraclitus’s thinking bears commonality with certain facets of Buddhist thought, especially, as we shall see, that of second-century Indian philosopher, Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna argued rigorously that from somewhat of a stuttering, vacillating, oscillating perspective, what is, is, and it is not, and it both is what it is and is not what it is, and it is neither what it is nor is it not what it is – for it is always becoming. One might wish to lodge a protest in view of such apparent nonsense: ‘Does this not make shambles of any form of Identity?’ Of course it does! Identity in the ordinary sense, at least. For after everything has been said and done, Identity is a convenient idea, a fiction, a social construct – which should come as news to nobody these days – so in this respect at least, Heraclitus, like Nāgārjuna, is quite in tune with our times. As a social construct, Identity is as fixed as we want to make it, for now at least. But we should bear in mind that this fixity, for now, is by and large more fashioned than found, since whatever we think we’ve found is always in the process of becoming something other. In a cultural world of incessantly shifting contexts, the notion of for now is never at a standstill. Hence any and all constructs within their respective
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contexts are never static, though we might like to make them so. This is also to say that something’s presumed Identity is never what it was, for now, since it was becoming something else, and it is becoming something else for some then that is no longer now. This is to say that the Principle of Identity falters and ultimately falls. It is also to say, once again, that everything is always becoming something different. Thus the Principle of Non-Contradiction and the Excluded-Middle Principle also lose their iron-fisted grip. And yet, Identity must surely be logically necessary, we would likely wish to continue believing. But because of our experiential coalescent complementarity within concrete everyday living, the effacement of Identity is necessary. Now we would wish to say that such ambiguity is unacceptable as far as rationalism goes, where the fundamental principles of logic operate. But such thinking is circular, since fundamental logical principles have been accorded a central place by virtue of the nature of rationalism, and rationalism is justified on the basis of fundamental logical principles. In order to define pure change inherent in the continuum of experience, then, we need to both confirm and abrogate the standard principles of classical logic with the concomitant creation of more general logical principles capable of tolerating some degree of vagueness and ambiguity. Let me offer a preliminary and tentative account of this assertion. And elsewhere, again In quantum physics – if I may so bold as to toss this topic in the mix – Werner Heisenberg’s (1901–1976) Uncertainty Principle decrees that there is uncertainty regarding the nature of a particle’s trajectory: both its position and its momentum cannot be precisely defined at one and the same moment (Cox, Forshaw 2011: 70–89). This might remind us anew of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion according to which we can know where the arrow is at an instant but we can’t know where it’s going, how fast it’s going, and when it will get where it’s going. Position and momentum, making up an enigmatic quantum of action, Louis de Broglie (1892–1987) tells us, involve: a formerly totally unsuspected union between the framework of space and time and the dynamical phenomenon which take place in it. The picture of space and time is essentially static; a body, a physical entity, which has an exact location in space and in time is, by the very fact, deprived of all evolutionary property; on the contrary, a body which is developing, which is endowed with dynamic properties, cannot really be attached to any point of space and time’. (de Broglie 1955: 121)
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Chapter One. Introduction: The task ahead
In quantum theory a particular beginning may or may not be exact, but it is in whichever case unknowable, because according to the Uncertainty Principle, as soon as we begin to measure it, this action itself ensures us that the system will be doing something different than what we expected. So we take another measurement to determine its position and its momentum, and the new measurement will bring yet more uncertainty. This uncertainty is not the product of human inadequacy; it exists at the very heart of physical reality. It suggests that if according to the suggestions in this essay we should get our thinking more attuned to process, to change, and in so doing we must become comfortable with paradox, we are at the same time also in the process of becoming at least a tad more attuned to our physical world, which, it would appear, is likewise paradoxical. In the ‘quantum world’ as well as in our concrete ‘world-versions’ within which we navigate, vagueness and ambiguity – and along with them, paradox – move hand in hand with uncertainty (Lindley 2007; Poerksen 2004)! A clear-cut definition of physical reality was shelved in quantum physics. For example, the quantum view entailing ambiguity, given its quantum-statistical nature, has it that the particle model and the wave model of light and subatomic events are mutually exclusive, yet complementary with each other. This notion of complementarity is associated with Niels Bohr (1885–1962), who held that neither the particle model nor the wave model can be regarded as a final explanation of physical reality. Rather, they are two models of physical reality that should be regarded as different aspects of the whole package making up the quantum world. This is in a nutshell the ‘Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory’. Quoting Heisenberg (1958: 55), this interpretation ‘starts from the fact that we describe our experiments in the terms of classical physics and at the same time from the knowledge that these concepts do not fit nature accurately. The tension between these two starting points is the root of the statistical character of quantum theory’. The Copenhagen interpretation disrespectfully enters into conflict with the concept of ‘reality’, traditionally conceived, which generally says statements regarding physical existence can and must be at least provisionally and ephemerally ‘objectified’. Heisenberg suggests that the rather dogmatic form of ‘realism’ played an important part in the classical development of physics, but quantum theory is considerably less dogmatically based; it is, rather, pragmatically oriented.
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To the heart of the issue
What is the upshot of all this palaver? The following, to be fleshed out in this essay: (1) everything is always in the process of becoming something other than what it was becoming; (2) such process can best be qualified as complementary coalescence; (3) any and all timespace contexts within their respective cultural worlds flow along with this process; (4) in light of the first three premises, lasting conclusions can be only tentative at best, for they are part of the selfsame process; hence (5) the dogmatic mind, the mind insisting on constructing definitive conceptual schemes, ordinarily strives to establish fixity, but such fixity is itself in the process of self-modification whereby it is not the same as itself, for it is invariably becoming something other than what it was becoming. What is present to itself is ultimately absent to itself. What is inside a conceptual scheme depends on what is outside the conceptual scheme for its full account. What appears here, now, is not here, now, but already there, then. Becoming aware of these rather uncomfortable conclusions forces us to realize that we must somehow break with the long-standing tradition based upon the precise and unambiguous nature of Identity and its legislation by the Principles of strict Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle. This does not imply that our traditional conceptual scheme should be simply tossed in the trash can. As we shall note, classical logical principles have their place within and as a necessary part of what Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) called a ‘more general logic’ capable of embracing vagueness and ambiguity. But,… I’m afraid I’ve talked myself into a blind alley; I’ve contradicted myself. But this is not so tragic, for actually I am not, and I’ll never be, an intellectual ‘flâneur idly meandering about’. During my better moments, I would like to think I am more like Sissy Jupe, girl number twenty of Dickens’s tale, in the sense that I’ve corporeally and mentally (bodymindingly) merged with the contexts within which I’ve been placing myself over the past 40 years or so. In fact, we, like our signs, are always in the process of becoming someone other than who we were becoming; we are always changing, which presents difficulties, for sure, but to resist change can be disastrous; we are always drifting, flowing, whirlpooling, and heaving and weaving and swaying with the twists and turns of the semiosic gush surrounding us, making do as best we can with what we have; we are always complementarily coalescing with our signs, with each other, and with our physical world, wherever and whenever. With the feeble and fallible hope that I may be able somehow to expound on what I’ve suggested in this brief introduction, let me begin.
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Chapter Two
Are we really masters of our signs? Chapter Two. Are we really masters of our signs? Availing himself of Humpty Dumpty and Mrs. Malaprop – the original author of that rhetorical device, the malapropism – Donald Davidson suggests that on occasion we are apparently masters of our words. But we don’t really know it, because we do what we do on tacit as well as conscious levels. Davidson’s ‘triangulation’ model accounting for our way with words brings to mind what Peirce calls the ‘pragmatic maxim’, which also involves both tacitness and consciousness, since one’s feeling, sensing, imagining, conjecturing, experiencing and conceiving develop along multiply nonlinear paths, from signs to physical and imaginary worlds and their interpretations. This process entails interdependent, interactive interrelatedness. An effort to pattern the process takes us through (1) key aspects of Buddhist thought, (2) certain aspects of mathematics and geometry, (3) the creation of world-versions, and (4) their interpretation by means of (5) our co-participatory role with respect to our signs, other semiotic agents, and our physical world.
The central process, with a nod to Donald Davidson
But I begin suspended, knowing neither which way is up nor which is down, neither which is to the right nor which is to the left, neither which is forward nor which is backward. Niels Bohr once said much the same about the physicist’s suspension within language when making an effort to articulate quantum reality in a manner accessible to the lay public. Is that comparable to my own and other scholars’ beginnings, wherever and whenever we are? I’m not sure. Hesitatingly and stammeringly, I nonetheless turn to Humpty Dumpty. He tells Alice that he knows exactly what the sentences he utters mean, because it is he who makes them mean what they mean. But Alice has no inkling regarding what his utterances are all about. Obviously, little communication is going on. According to Davidson’s (1917–2003) estimation of Alice’s dilemma, there’s hardly any communication, because his model of ‘triangulation’ for
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ascertaining the meaning of utterances remains incomplete Davidson (1984, 1991a; also Cole 1993; Føllesdal 1999; Kent 1993). Proper Davidson triangulation entails knowing three details, geometrically speaking: the corners of the triangle, three angles where two of the three lines of the triangle meet, and the length of each line, all of which requires some measuring and computing. Here’s a concrete example. If you know the distance between yourself on a hill at the outskirts of town and the Court House dome in the center of town, that’s one side of a triangle (A). If you know the angle of the lines from you to the dome and from you to a mountain peak in the distance, but you don’t know the distance between you and the peak, you know at least one angle (X). Now if you walk over to the dome and measure the angle of the line from you to the top of the hill where you stood and the line from the dome to the peak, then you know another angle (Y). Your knowledge of one line of the triangle and two of its angles allows you to compute the value of the two remaining lines (B, C) and the third angle (Z). You now know all you need to know about the Davidsonian triangle. Obviously, Alice doesn’t have access to one or more of the communication triangle’s details. But this geometrical account of triangulation is so much abstraction, and that’s not really what Davidson is all about. Then what is he about? Communication, by means of three-way interaction between at least two agents of communication and some commonality between them. Triangulation in this sense consists of a speaker (or sign-maker) at imaginary point A, a listener (or sign-taker) at point B, and a third point, C, which, interacting with A and B, creates the wherewithal – metaphorically, the ‘angles’ – for ascertaining meaning. The lines between these three points consist of the triangle’s semantic component, which aids speaker and listener in their knowing the nature of the third point, and, metaphorically speaking, its ‘angle’, that is, its meaning. Therein we find Alice’s problem: Humpty Dumpty’s utterances offer her virtually no semantic component; his words afford her no meaning that she is capable of making out. Why is this? We play it by ear, and improvise
Alice can’t properly take advantage of what Davidson labels ‘prior theory’ and ‘passing theory’ (Ramberg 1989). An interpreter’s prior theory consists of how she is prepared in advance, given her knowledge of the language and culture shared by the interlocutors involved, to arrive at a proper interpretation of the messages she receives. Her passing theory is narrower. It involves ‘deviation from ordinary usage, as long as it is agreed on for the moment’, tacitly, between
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speaker and hearer (Davidson 1986: 442–43). Passing theory takes place in some timespace context within which a particular utterance is forthcoming and within which the interpreter must create her interpretation by adjusting, revising, or perhaps even replacing her prior theory in an effort to render it commensurable with the utterance and the timespace context in question.2 Both perception and meaning-making depend directly upon one’s prior theory – or prior belief if you will. Use of one’s prior theory is not a linear process like that which digitally creates an image on the window of one’s iphone or on a TV screen. Perception and meaning-making is a loop. In a linear interpretation of perception and meaning-making, energy as light or sound waves strikes the senses and gives one a clue about the physical world ‘out there’, and then one classes these sensory images and goes about creating perceptual judgments and meanings. This linear cause-and-effect sequence is now considered inadequate in many circles. However, regarding dialogic interaction, what actually happens is that when one perceives some object, act, happening, or set of utterances, one has expectations, and one makes a tacit mental bet in terms of what the object, act, happening, or utterances in question will most likely mean. This entails one’s prior theory or belief. Then one puts this prior assumption to the test, so to speak, by use of one’s passing theory. If the theories appear to coincide with one’s predicted outcome, one goes on to create what one thinks is a viable interpretation. If not, back to the drawing board. In other words, one begins with one’s thinking ‘in here’, then projects ‘outside’ to include one’s entire context, hopefully bringing coherence between what is ‘in here’ and what is ‘out there’. And meaning of one sort or another emerges. Now for a mundane example, if you will. Suppose you’re given the monotonous pattern of nine dots, as in Figure 1, and told to draw four straight lines connecting all the dots without lifting your pencil from the paper’s surface. The most common tendency, often motivated by a preference for some pathway of optimal simplicity, is to assume a prior theory that limits you to the space the nine-dot pattern occupies Figure 1. Nine-dot on the sheet of paper. So you give it a try according puzzle. 2
I use the term ‘timespace’ with respect to contexts, and contexts of contexts. We live in threedimensional space, along with one dimension of time. Our fluctuating, ever-changing contextualized coming and going cannot be reduced to relatively simple spatial coordinates, since, if we consider concrete everyday living a processual matter, time must become part of the equation (for timespace from the Einsteinian point of view for the lay reader, see Kaku 1994; regarding my use of the term in previous work, merrell 2010).
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to some particular strategy you have in mind, and you fail; then you try again,… but to no avail. You pick your ego up off the floor, and give it one last effort, but no dice. Then assume you revise your prior theory and bring it in line with your passing theory by expanding the space within which you attempt to solve the problem, as in Figure 2. Now finding success, you pat yourself on the back for your in- Figure 2. Nine-dot puzzle genuity. Your prior theory was modified after solved. your failures. Then you found a fit and brought about satisfactory coherence between some revised theory and your passing theory. Finally, you became a winner after re-interpreting the pattern of dots. So much for nonverbal problem solving. Consider a rather strange linguistic example. What if you’re reading an article in English and you come across this sentence: ‘The oredr of the ltteers in this sentnece ins’t very improtant’. You have your prior theory, guided by expectations regarding the way the letters of familiar words should be strung out. But the incorrect order of the letters in this particular sentence meeting your eyes gives you a slight jolt. How are you supposed to read them? No problem, not really. Your passing theory brings the jumbled words in line with what you would ordinarily expect according to your prior theory, you tacitly and nimbly dance through the jumble of letters as if they were reordered for your convenience, and you manage to understand the sentence without further ado. Prior theory is a matter of your expectations, and passing theory involves your ability tacitly to bring about whatever adjustments are necessary in order to make the signs before you meaningful. And you confidently move on. Finally, here’s a common everyday example. Assume a friend tells you ‘That’s a nice haircut’. Is she honest in her appraisal or not? Sincere or just joshing? As with the paradoxical case of ‘This sentence is false’, it’s often hard to tell precisely where truth ends and where playful teasing, a figurative device, deceit, or a lie, begins. Your job is properly to decipher the statement. Your prior theory could be based on fact, jocular ribbing, irony, or lie. What you take as the fact of the sentence’s meaning might be simply for the purpose of informing you;… mocking or friendly taunting might involve the matter of your judgment of the utterance;… you might consider the sentence’s irony in terms of the intent to amuse you;… if you entertain the notion that the sentence is lying, it could have been directed toward you as an attempt to mislead
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you, perhaps for some ulterior purpose. In whichever case, the underlying message might be, respectively, ‘Your barber is quite skilful’, ‘I like your hair’, ‘Actually it looks terrible’, or simply ‘That’s a lousy haircut’. What is your best strategy for interpreting the utterance? Most effectively, by expanding its context, as you had to do with the nine dots in order to resolve your problem, or with the order of the letters in the sentence you happened to stumble upon. You pay wary attention to the utterer’s eyes, facial expression, gestures, and body language – which is wise counsel with respect to the third example. This gives you certain cues in terms of whether the utterance is serious, a sincere or passing opinion, a rhetorical utterance, a gentle or malicious put-down, or deception so that the speaker can benefit from her praise in one way or another. Whatever prior theory you begin with, as the utterance comes to a close, you are hard pressed to arrive at some sort of viable solution. And you do so, for the time being at least, since as your conversation with the person in question proceeds, you might find yourself inclined toward revising your initial estimation. These examples involve interdependent, interrelated interaction with respect to you, to signs of all sorts, to some utterer, to the nature of printed English sentences, and to a puzzle to be solved.3 They involve vague and ambiguous categories, and also complementarity, by means of which you and everything in your repertoire of prior theories and your context coalesce to bring about the emergence of some meaning. The meaning is never static, however, but rather, at some particular timespace convergence it is subject to modification, while bearing witness to its becoming process. And what is of utmost importance, these examples involve context. Indeed, we have opened the door to… Meaning-making as process
Alice’s predicament comes about because she expects normal, grammatically correct language use; but Humpty Dumpty sends her sentences bearing impoverished grammar, incorrect word use, ironically coined neologisms, and 3
Interdependency, interrelatedness and interaction, with respect to signs, their makers and takers, and timespace contexts, are commensurate with the premises in this essay that everything is always becoming something other, which bears on and is inspired by Peirce’s process philosophy, current interpretations of quantum theory, and Buddhist philosophy, as well as physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s notion that we are co-participants with the world’s becoming. For various and sundry sources from which I’ve drawn regarding these concepts, see Aczel 2003; Balasubramanian 1992; Cole 2001; Gangadean 1981; Hall, Ames 2001; Hayes 1994; Huntington 1989; Iida 1980; Kalupahana 1986; Kothari 1985; Laycock 1994, 2001; Loy 1986, 1989; Malin 2001; Mansfield 1989, 1995; McCagney 1997; Nāgārjuna 1967; Odin 1996; Pagels 1982; Penrose 1994; Robinson 1957; Siderits 1988a, 1988b; Smith 1995; Wheeler 1980a, 1980b, 1994.
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strange rhetorical devices, all within a terribly strange context. How can she hope to translate these apparently nonsensical phrases? Once again, there’s not really any problem, at least as far as Davidson is concerned. He ponders over everybody’s ability to understand Jabberwocky, even though there are no ready-made rules for doing so. The interpretive strategy for such understanding is more like creatively solving a puzzle than categorically slapping fixed rules and meanings onto sentence strings. Armed with some prior theory, we provisionally create a passing theory that deviates to a greater or lesser degree from the standard rules of interpretation; then we improvise as we go along, until perhaps by more luck than management we stumble onto some satisfying meaning for the words in question. Metaphorically speaking, the third point of the interpretive triangle operates with a tenuously flexible angle, and the interpreter tentatively pins it down when she feels she has the proper interpretation in hand. Davidson describes triangulation between a speaker and a listener in strictly linguistic and what one might tend to take as neo-behaviorist terms, thus avoiding – or perhaps choosing to ignore – subtle nonverbal signs that inevitably accompany utterances: [E]ach of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli streaming in from a certain direction. If we project the incoming lines outward, their intersection is the common cause. If the two people note each other’s reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. The common cause can now determine the contents of an utterance and a thought. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate. Two or, of course, more. (Davidson 1991b: 159)
Notice that Davidson writes ‘verbal reactions’. But I would suggest that the reactions could be forthcoming from any type of signs, including the five fundamental sensory channels, plus a ‘sixth sense’, involving somatic, proprioceptive and kinesthetic sensations. Notice also that triangulation inevitably entails the entire timespace context of the signs in question. This includes the speaker’s and listener’s relative positions; their gestures and other forms of body language; whatever objects, acts, happenings, and utterances are available to their sensations; the interdependency, interrelations and interactions between those objects, acts, happenings, and utterances; and the changes available to them in the immediate vicinity. Moreover, we cannot ignore the speaker’s and listener’s past experiences and expectations with respect to what they take for granted will likely transpire during future moments as they
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interpret the sentence string in question. Semantic triangulation is no simple rule-driven affair, for sure.4 Put in terms of Davidson’s triangulation, speaker (A) sends a message to listener (B) about some sign and its meaning at (C). A book on a shelf in the local bookstore can be the third point. One person says something about the book, another person hears the utterance, and we have a ‘line’ between two people and their attention to the book, two ‘angles’ determining the interrelations between the two people and the book, and the sensed ‘distance’ between each person and the book in question. Once again, this appears as so much geometry. However, there is openness regarding the form. We might wish to interpret the triangle in terms of concepts of intentionality, reference, correspondence, or representation, or in terms of reacting to some object ‘out there’ when it comes to the attention of speaker and listener as the effect of a cause (incoming stimuli), and of speaker and listener beliefs and dispositions. The triangle obviously lends itself to a host of possibilities. Well and good. Yet, throughout the entire process, the triangle remains relatively unchanged; it is by and large fixed, or at least more fixed than re-fashioned as the context changes. If speaker and listener move about while engaged in the conversation, the triangle as a geometrical form – albeit metaphorical – changes, and the stimuli within the physical context also change; but no matter how many modifications there may be, everything stays virtually the same. There are two people and an object sensed from alternating vantage points, and there are messages passed back and forth between the two people who are registering those alternating vantage points as a consequence of the incoming stimuli. With respect to relatively stable prior theory and flowing and fluctuation passing theory, a more complex and processual level of pragmatic give-andtake than Davidson seems to be warranting might be advisable. Speakers and listeners: doing what one does, naturally
Peter Pagin (2001) makes an admirable effort to qualify Davidson’s triangulation by focusing on the speaker’s and listener’s intentionality, beliefs, desires, dispositions, and their reaction to messages and intended objects as the 4
It bears mentioning at this juncture that over the past years I’ve taken on the tendency to incorporate the terms somatic, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic with timespace contexts and interdependency, interrelatedness, and interaction. This allows for, and indeed requires, inclusion of nonverbal signs, beginning with icons and indices, in addition to verbal – largely symbolic – signs (merrell 1998a, 1998b, 2003, 2010).
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consequence of incoming stimuli. He also places priority on ‘interpersonal relations’ and ‘situations of interaction’ when offering an explication of Davidson’s triangulation. This is not to say that application of Davidson’s concepts must be restricted to such situations, but rather, application should usher in additional variables. What might these variables be? For one, an appeal to dispositions, or counterfactuals. We have beliefs that predispose us with a tendency to interact, or at least we would, could, or should interact in such and such a manner within a triangular situation if such-and-such a set of conditions existed within a certain context. In this respect Pagin (2001: 210) writes: Talk about dispositions is one way of extending the application of a concept – solubility, say – from situations with respect to which it can be explained, to situation[s] with respect to which it cannot. We can explain what solubility is by appealing to situations in which something dissolves; we cannot explain it by appealing only to situations where nothing dissolves.
This is to say, I take it that like what Peirce calls the ‘pragmatic maxim’ with respect to a simple example: the solubility of salt in water. We can quickly and casually infer, given the nature (disposition) of salt, that if we were to place a pinch of salt crystals in a glass of water and stir them, the salt would dissolve in the water medium. In other words, we apply the ‘pragmatic maxim’, which, in one of Peirce’s early expressions in 1878, tells us: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (CP 5.402; also 5.2, 5.9, 5.18, 5.427, and MS 327; see also Haack 1993; Hookway 2007; Nesher 1983, 1990, 2001)
We consider the effect of water on the salt, create an inference with respect to what would happen when the two come in contact, put it to the test, and we find our conception bears out our general idea regarding the nature of salt and water. The maxim is a matter of the subject’s making what appears to be a possible case the most viable actual case, at least for her at a given timespace convergence. It is a method not for determining whether a collection of signs, characteristically in the form of a sentence or set of sentences, is timelessly and undeniably true. Rather, it is an indeterminately variable method for interacting with signs in such a way that the semiotic world with which they interdependently interrelate and interact appears to be the case, and in
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the process their meaning emerges: the maxim enables signs – including the subject as sign – to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps as far as meaning is concerned. The maxim essentially stipulates that the meaning of a sentence regarding what appears plausible is the product of all conceivable consequences presented by other sentences – and their own consequences – engendered from the original sentence. This product of all conceivable consequences entails translation of the initial signs into a series of conditional sentences, the antecedents of each of which prescribe certain interactions between the interpreter and the signs in question. The consequences ideally consist of observable sign phenomena that should or would make themselves manifest in the event that the original signs are indeed true. But truth is not really the goal. Rather, the task at hand is to draw meaning from the signs being processed by way of interpreter-sign interrelations and interactions. The interpreter takes the initial signs and creates a hypothetical situation, and she puts it to the test in terms of a ‘thought-experiment in here’ or by interacting with the signs’ objects, acts, and happenings ‘out there’ in order to see whether she was right. If her hypothesis turns out to appear correct, at least for the time being, the possibility nonetheless remains that other hypotheticals may at future moments present themselves, compelling her to repeat the operation. If her initial hypothesis is eventually found deficient, then it’s back to square one for an alternative hypothetical, and she repeats the operation. And so on. This, once again I must concede, is so much generalization: presupposing, creating an imaginary contrary-to-fact situation, inferring the consequences, and putting it all within a practical situation. Let us, then, re-consider the simple concrete physical example of salt dissolving in water with respect to Peirce’s triadic sign processing in comparison to Davidson’s triangulation. Slightly Peirceanizing Davidson There is you (point A) and me (point B), a ‘salt’ sign and a ‘water’ sign, the actual substances, salt and water, and the concepts, ‘water soluble’ and ‘solvent’ (all making up point C). Thus we apparently have triangulation, which interconnects you and me, and it places us in interconnection with objects, acts, happenings, and utterances, and their respective signs. Putting this in terms of Peirce’s triadic sign processing, we have (1) ‘signs’ or representamens, ‘salt’ and ‘water’; (2) semiotic objects (or acts or happenings, as it were, the signs’ respective others), salt and water; (3) and, after the signs and their objects have been mediated and processed by their respective
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interpretants, meaning emerges (enSign Representamen tailing interdependent, interrelated interaction of the signs, their others, and their interpretants, while we, as interpreter-interpretants, are becoming more extensively interpreted Semiotic Interpretant during the process of our bringing Object about the signs’ meaning-becoming Figure 3. The Peircean sign. by way of our interpreting them) (see Figure 3). So, in actual practice following the pragmatic maxim, salt is placed in water and the salt dissolves, re-confirming the meaning of the signs in terms of ‘water soluble’ and ‘solvent’ as a consequence of their collaborating with us and our collaborating with them. In this sense, no categorical Cartesian split exists between my mind and your mind when we communicate, or between our minds and our signs and the physical world: there is you and your social other, including me, and there is our interdependent, interrelated interaction with our signs and the physical world we share. I must stress this important non-Cartesian assertion: (1) our signs, our physical and mental worlds, and our conception of it all (including sign meanings) are interdependent (we can’t have any of them without the whole of them; there is no autonomy); (2) we are, in addition, interrelated and mutually interactive with our signs, which is to say that we make distinctions, given our predispositions, presuppositions, proclivities and prejudices, as well as our inclinations, wishes and whims, and we classify, categorize, qualify and perhaps even quantify our signs, our physical and mental worlds, and our thoughts, hopefully in a more tidy and manicured than a messy and muddled fashion so as to preserve some modicum of order. Well and good once again, it might seem. But not entirely. Peirce created the pragmatic maxim as a method for ascertaining the meaning of signs, their interdependent interrelatedness with other signs, and their interaction with the physical world, including us, while Davidson never ceases talking about truth. For Davidson, truth is intersubjective, and ideally devoid of relativism. For Peirce, the maxim entails imagining what might be a possible response to a problem situation, creating hypothetical conditions the consequences of which would most likely be forthcoming, and putting these conditions to the test to find out what apparently is becoming, within some particular timespace context. This method also involves intersubjectivity, for sure. Yet, it is not entirely devoid of a tinge of relativism, given the necessary contextualized imaginary element, and, I must emphasize, ideally it ends up with sign meanings; it
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does not include the search for truth. Moreover, meanings, as I shall reiterate in this essay time and again, are always becoming something other than what they were becoming (for further, Davidson 1984, 1991c, 1991d; on Peirce’s element of subjectivity, Rosenthal 1994). More specifically put, in order that, in Peirce’s theory of the sign, genuine semiotic interactivity may be carried out, there must be (1) interdependency regarding all possible mental, social and physical objects, acts and happenings and their interrelated interactions; (2) signs, and their interdependent, interrelated interactions with those objects, acts and happenings; and (3) concepts and interdependent interactive interrelations between them and their respective signs and objects, acts and happenings. However, the problem that persists is this: Peirce’s triadic model basically occupies Davidson’s point C, while, thus far, it might appear that you and I are left out of the equation. But this is definitely not exactly the case either. Peirce’s interpretant is not simply the sign’s meaning or interpretation. In order that an interpretant might emerge, it must enter into interaction with some interpreter, who in the process becomes her own interpretant as she collaborates with the becoming of the sign’s interpretant, while that interpretant is becoming one with her as interpreter-interpretant. Which is to imply, more emphatically, that there is no absolute distinction or Cartesian cut between signs, the physical world, and the sign-makers and sign-takers. All are in the process of becoming One, in a certain manner of speaking – though also, in the Peircean sense, that One never stands a chance of absolute terminal becoming, thereby having become authentic, unadulterated Being (tantamount to Davidson’s Truth) (see Figure 3a). Thomas Kent’s interpretation of triangulation suggests a tentative, though vague and incomplete, happy meeting place between Davidson and Peirce. He puts Davidson’s process in terms of minds knowing themselves and knowing other minds:
We are also signs among signs
Sign Representamen
You
Me Semiotic Object
Figure 3a. The sign and its makers and takers.
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When we know our own minds, we invariably know the minds of others, for we could not know our own minds if we could not get in touch with concepts and objects outside ourselves (contextualization, no subject-object split). When we accept this Davidsonian point of view, the skeptic’s question “How do you know that you are getting in touch with something beyond your own mind” no longer makes sense, because no split exists between our minds and the minds of others. So, a Davidsonian would respond to the skeptic in this way: skepticism about the possibility of knowing an objective world occurs only when you imagine that a split exists between an “in here” and an “out there”; by understanding the nature of communicative interaction in terms of triangulation, you can stop worrying about this split, for you no longer need to fret about getting in touch with something beyond yourself; by knowing your own mind, you always already know the minds of others (Kent 1993: 52; also Wirth 1999).
Also: In the process of triangulation, we cannot know our own minds – the concepts that form our thoughts – without knowing the minds of other language users; consequently, no split exists between our minds and the minds of others or between our minds and objects in a shared world. Thus, for example, my concept of a table must align – or must be able to align – with another language user’s concept of a table and with an object in the world, or my concept of table cannot be said to be a concept. (Kent 1993: 51)
As will become more apparent below, Kent’s interpretation of Davidson’s triangulation bears on the notion I’ve qualified as co-participation between signmakers and -takers, sign-makers and -takers and their signs, and sign-makers and -takers and their physical universe as they know it. Both Peirce and Davidson, then, erase the Cartesian ‘split’. But there’s a snag. It entails Peirce’s triadicity and Davidson’s triangularity, though in a special way, for (1) the triadic nature of the sign begins unfolding within the triangle’s point C; and (2) when in the process of becoming a genuine sign, it begins merging with its perspective sign-maker(s) and -taker(s); however, (3) Peirce’s triad cannot adequately be represented in triangular form, but, more properly, as a three-dimensional tripod (depicted two-dimensionally as in Figures 3 and 3a). This calls for a move … From Davidson’s triangle to Peirce’s tripod
For some time I’ve been a proponent of the idea that the triangle holds no more than a set of three binary relations: A-B, A-C and B-C. There is no genuinely triadic interconnection. This dilemma dissolves when the sign is given a CEEOL copyright 2020
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tripodic rendition. The tripod is especially significant since, in view of Peirce’s processual concept of signs, it cannot rest comfortably on a two-dimensional plane; it needs an image projecting three spatial dimensions, plus time.5 In this manner the tripod: (1) has a central ‘point’ – call it the ‘zero point’ – rather than three ‘points’ at three corners, as in a triangle; (2) links all three of its lines at the ‘zero point’, affording the image of genuine triadicity, since each of its legs is equally connected to its other two legs in the same manner in which they are connected to it; and (3) processually, so to speak, gyrates, wobbles, and undulates within four-dimensional timespace – three dimensions of space and one of time – the timespace of our concrete everyday living. The tripod sports a ‘zero point’ as promise and foreshadowing of the possible emergence of a virtually unlimited number of possible nonlinear, multivalent interdependent, interactive interrelated context-dependent communicative settings and their respective signs. This ‘zero point’ is obviously crying out for further attention. The possibility of possibility I’ve often illustrated the ‘zero point’ as the ‘central vortex’ implying the range of all possibly possible signs that give rise to merely possible signs, from which possible actual signs can emerge (Figure 4 – see merrell 2000, 2007, 2010). In this manner, the ‘zero point’ entails no more than myriad possibilities for signness. This range of possibilities, in other words, can give rise to merely possible signs, from which an iconic sign of merely possible resemblance can emerge, then an actual indexical sign comes forth, suggesting a possible other the icon’s resemblance is a resemblance of, and finally a set symbolic (linguistic) signs appears, accounting for the ‘nature of the possible resemblance’ of the icon to the indexical other. There’s a necessary time-bound distinction between possible possibility and mere possibility insofar as (1) the range of all possible possibilities implies that whatever might have been possible was never actualized; (2) what is possible in the present timespace context hasn’t (yet) been actualized; and (3) what will have been possible within some future timespace context is at present less possible than other more probable possibilities. Quite conceivably, the distinction between possible possibilities and mere possibilities might simply 5
I should interject artist Max Beckmann’s words at this juncture: ‘Transforming three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking’ (in Chipp 1968: 190). The sense I wish to evoke with the three-dimensional tripod on a two dimensional sheet goes in the reverse direction: from two dimensions the magical process begins whereby three dimensions emerge, giving rise to implications of a fourth dimension, time, that incorporates the very becomingness of the three prior dimensions.
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Icon
‘Zero point’
Possible possibility Index (possible other of resemblance)
Symbol (nature of the possible resemblance)
Figure 4. Three basic sign types.
have been between possibilities and probabilities; but I would prefer to avoid cantankerous problems of induction and statistics when considering probabilities (see Rosenthal 1994). This range of all possibilities, I would suggest, is metaphorically comparable to the mathematical zero – thus the name, ‘zero point’. Zero, though not exactly a number since it has neither a positive nor a negative sign nor any counterpart in the number system, nonetheless contains, like the ‘zero point’, the wherewithal for engenderment of all numbers along the infinite stretch of integers on the positive side and along the infinite stretch of integers on the negative side. The ‘zero point’ and its semiotic function Regarding the ‘zero point’ at the apex of the sign tripod, see Figure 5. It sports the mathematical ‘zero’ (pure possible possibility), from which the ‘empty set’, ‘Ø’, containing mere possibilities or the ‘noticed absence’ of possibilities, emerges; then the square root sign and the ‘zero point’ bubble up from these possibilities, which, with respect to imaginary values – the possible sign is at this ‘point’ no more than imaginary – bring about an oscillation between positive and less positive or negative values. Like the imaginary number, ‘√–1’, the square root sign, ‘√’, combined with ‘’, encompasses a swirling vortex of possibilities represented by the ‘zero point’, the timespace singularity, which is irresolvable if we are limited to bivalent logical principles (the answer can neither be +1 nor −1). Hence the need of a semiotic mediator in order to bring about some alliance between the antagonistic poles of the plus and minus legs of the tripod; hence ‘’, whose task involves bringing about such mediation. And through Figure 5 we have the abstract makings of a possible sign, now ready and waiting to emerge into the light of day and enter into the process of actual sign becoming.
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There is, in this manner of putting it, the + possible possibility of Peirce’s three categories of signness, ‘+’, ‘−’, and ‘’, and of sign-making and -taking within the mind or with respect to what is perceived and conceived as the physi< cal world. There is Firstness – what is what it is о (becoming) without (yet) having entered into Ø interdependent interrelated interaction with 0 any other. There is Secondness – what is what it is Figure 5. The possible sign. (becoming) in addition to some other (becoming), something that is not what is (becoming), with which it has entered into interdependent, interrelated interactivity. And there is Thirdness – what is what it is (becoming) in addition to its mediating Firstness and Secondness and at the same time mediating itself through interdependent, interrelated interaction with both of them. In brief, then, we begin with no more than the ‘zero point’, the possible possibility of: (1) an unmediated icon as possible resemblance with some other, some semiotic object, act or happening; (2) an index by means of which the iconic possibility can enter into the processual fray with some other, without their (yet) becoming mediated; and (3) a possible mediating and mediated symbol, whose role can bring iconicity with indexicality into coalescent complementarity with one another in the same way that it brings itself into coalescent complementarity with each of them.
Mediating mediation To the question ‘Who or what mediates the mediating , or Thirdness, with Firstness and Secondness?’, the Peircean response would be: ‘We do, as a community of sign-makers and -takers! And we do, as co-participating signs among signs, as interpretants and interpreters of the signs we make and take, and as interpretants and interpreters of ourselves as signs!’ In other words, we as individuals, our socially constructed signs, and our physical ‘reality out there’, are co-participants with our signs within the world’s process. Properly synthesizing this tale I’m telling in order to render Figures 3, 3a and 4 more and more faithful to the processual point of view, I ended up with Figure 5, which involves the entire (radically nonlinear, nonbivalent) sequence: ‘0 √ + − … Signness’ (where ‘’ indicates nonlinear becoming). From zero – possible possibilities – mere possibilities emerge; then one begins taking on some particular virtual countenance; it is a possible something, a possible sign or representamen; then, through mediation between that possible something and some other, some semiotic object,
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act, or happening can possibly enter into interaction with the possible sign; and finally the possibility of full-blown actualized symbolic sign (including the interpretant) can make itself manifest. ‘But what, more specifically, is of special importance regarding the zero (“0”), the empty set (“”), and the “zero point” in the Figure 5 image. And what is the relevance of “+” and “−” with respect to the mediating third party (“”)? Is all this nothing more than another lesson in ethereal intangibles? Does it have any crucial bearing on signs and their meanings, and more concretely, with learning and knowing?’ Actually, Figures 3, 3a and 4, as well as 5 are not as abstract as they might appear at the outset. They bear on our concrete mental and physical coming and going during our everyday living. In the first place, the concept of zero is not originally Western. It comes from Buddhism through Hindu thought. In Western mathematics, zero is commonly construed as ‘nothing’ (Dantzig 1930). But it does not merely imply something that is nothing, or empty. ‘Emptiness’, as the word is now more commonly used in English with respect to Mahayana Buddhism, is in a paradoxical manner of speaking absolutely empty of all emptiness. Even to say ‘emptiness is emptiness’ is to say ‘something’, which is not what ‘emptiness’ is; and to say what ‘emptiness’ is, cannot but be nothing other than to say what it is not. ‘Emptiness’ is not simply ‘emptiness’ as we ordinarily use the term in English: it is well-nigh ineffable. However, ‘emptiness’, though ‘empty’ of ‘everything’, nonetheless has engendered, is engendering, and will have engendered all that ‘is’, in our everyday world. In a manner of putting it, ‘emptiness’ is at once ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’.6 An example – however impoverished, but, alas, it’s the best I can do. Imagine ‘emptiness’ as pure whiteness. I might assume that whiteness is the absence of color; hence it is metaphorically like ‘emptiness’. But whiteness is actually fullness; it entails the combination of all visible frequencies; it reflects all frequencies, which is to the human eye no color at all. That leaves me with blackness. But blackness is black because it has absorbed all visible frequencies; it is the combination of all our colors, and reflects no color for the eye to see; it is no color; yet it is the absorption of all colors, so it is in a manner of speaking all colors, not simply no color, and hence it can’t be like ‘emptiness’ or nothingness. In a way of putting the issue, whiteness reflects everything, so it is nothing; blackness absorbs everything, so it reflects nothing that can be seen. Like whiteness, blackness is everything, and nothing; like blackness, whiteness is nothing, and everything. Their combination is ‘emptiness’, and 6
An often ignored aspect of Peirce’s thought is found in his occasional use of ‘nothingness’, in conjunction with references to Buddhism (CP 6.193, 6.215, 6.265, 6.490, 9.317).
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yet it’s fullness; hence it’s ‘emptiness’; but it’s fullness…; ‘emptiness’ is everything as possible possibilities, and it’s nothing, no possible possibility that has become something. ‘Emptiness’, I repeat, is virtually unsayable. Now, like ‘emptiness’, zero is the possibility for the engenderment of all numbers. But it is not itself a legitimate number; it has neither positivity nor negativity. It just is. At the same time, like ‘emptiness’, it is the source, the fountainhead, of all the numbers. This is comparable to what we hear from the Dao: from zero or ‘emptiness’, one emerges; one subdivides to create two; two becomes three; and from three, many (see Lao Tzu 1963; merrell 2002, 2003; Nāgārjuna 1967). By the same token, the semiotic ‘zero point’ is the fountainhead for the engenderment of all signs: ‘0 √ + − … Sign1 Sign2 Sign3,… ,… n’.
Actual sign becoming Now, if in the Peircean sense a sign begins its becoming out of ‘emptiness’, or ‘nothingness’, then it must enter into the range of our anticipations and expectations and hopes and desires and fears. We initially experience it as ‘some-thing’ that is like ‘some-thing’ else that might bring on some degree of meaning or meaninglessness, of significance or insignificance, depending upon the sign-maker or -taker’s mental and emotional state and context. But when we are barely entering the moment of gathering consciousness of our signs, we are already a far cry from mere ‘emptiness’.7 It is like going from zero (‘0’), to the ‘empty set’ (‘’), and to the possibility of some emerging sign to an actually emergent sign. Zero is just zero. It is emptied of everything, including even the memory of numbers. Not much to get excited over, one might wish to think. The ‘empty set’, in contrast, is just that: something that happens to be empty. It is the noticed absence of something that was or could have been or might possibly be there partially or wholly to fill the unoccupied space. So we have pure emptiness (‘0’), the ‘noticed absence’ of somethingness (‘’), which spills into the ‘zero point’ (‘‘), and then we have the pluses 7
I use the phrase ‘gathering of consciousness’ (or ‘becoming of consciousness’) in line with the premises underlying this essay according to which consciousness is not ‘epiphenomenal’, as materialist mechanism teaches, lodged as it is in the concept of non-conscious matter that somehow – miraculously, perhaps? – squeezes our consciousness in sentient humans. Consciousness in this essay, as will become increasingly apparent, follows post-materialist thought insofar as it posits: (1) events, not ‘things’; (2) noncausality – in the linear mechanistic sense –; (3) uncertainty arising out of vagueness, which for Peirce pervades the universe; (4) complementarity, in the quantum theory and Asian philosophy sense; (5) co-participation of knower and known, subject and object; and (6) the complexity theory ‘order out of chaos’ concept (see, for example, de Quincey 2002).
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and the minuses indicative of what some emerging sign possibly is and what it is not. I should point out that the ‘empty set’ (‘’), is the noticed absence of something that was there or can be there; it is somewhat like Karl Popper’s (1902– 1994) ‘bucket theory’ of knowing (Popper 1972). The ‘bucket theory’, unfortunately, was at one time appropriated as a model for education in many school systems. There’s the ‘bucket’, little Johnny’s head, and here are the ‘facts’; so let’s put the ‘facts’ in the ‘bucket’, and presto, little Johnny’s educated. However, a ‘set’, or ‘bucket’, is never simply empty, for there is always some residue of premonitions, presuppositions, prejudices, proclivities, and expectations, all of which imply past learning and knowing, present learning and knowing, and assumptions concerning future learning and knowing. There is always something hanging around in the ‘bucket’, and the ‘bucket’ is an amorphous rather than a fixed form, whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. Pure emptiness (‘0’), in contrast, is something altogether different. It is the vast possibility of all possibilities for becoming. Learning and knowing through teacher-student interaction in the best of conditions should bring about the emergence of spontaneous, improvised, awareness from this range of possible possibilities. With such awareness, or ‘conscientization’ in the words of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970, 1994, 1998a, 1998b), teachers and students can take hands and dialogically enter into the process. In other words, the notion of the ‘empty set’ without zero or pure emptiness remains vacuous, completely divorced from the concrete becomingness of life’s processes, and totally removed from spontaneity, from creativity, without which there can be no learning or knowing. The center (‘point’) is the source
What has been left out of the picture is an adequate foreshadowing of the sign’s interpretant at the lower right side of Figure 5. I have discussed positivity (‘+’), precursor to some representamen, and negativity (‘’), precursor to some index or semiotic object, act, or happening. The interpretant – and its meaning emerging by way of the psi symbol (‘‘) – is now calling out for further clarification. Let me begin with renewed focus on the central portion of Figure 5 (‘‘). As mentioned, it bears affinity to the square root of minus one (‘-1’). This sign was an embarrassment for various centuries, given the all-too-obvious impossibility of its solution. So it was conveniently stashed away in the closet. Finally, when it could be ignored no longer, it was brought out for use
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in certain branches of mathematics. But the uncomfortable anomaly remained. The square root of minus one had no solution, and it apparently enjoyed no comparison with anything in the physical world. Eventually the sign, ‘i’, was used in its place. Like zero, ‘i’ has no ‘value’, either positive or negative. It just is what it is. This was more to the liking of the mathematics community. They could use the sign as if it contained no cantankerous ambiguity, and go on with their work. In due course, ‘i’ found its way into equations in relativity and quantum theory, and in certain engineering and computer problems, to mention only a few of its uses (Seife 2000). This is astounding when one thinks about it. The square root of minus one has no direct re-presentation in the physical world; yet, within mathematical equations it has found its way into the physicist’s account of the nature of that selfsame physical world. In other words, ‘-1’ embodies both what is and what is not, or neither what is nor what is not, without any possibility of deciding which should be foregrounded and which backgrounded. There can be only oscillation between two contradictory values, ‘+’ and ‘−’. For what is the answer to the square root of minus one? Is it -1? No. Is it +1? No. Yet we can say that, paradoxically, it can be conceived as both, and as neither (Nahin 2010). In a comparable manner, the role of the interpretant, through ‘’, as mediator and moderator and media-minimizing agent, is, in and of its own accord, neither positive nor negative, and at the same time it is both positive and negative. In this respect, ‘’, in a metaphorical sense which is from another point of view literal, provides the semiotic ‘i’ function as mediator between ‘+’ and ‘−’ (between a possible representamen and a possible semiotic object, act, or happening). But how can there be such apparent illogic if interpretants and meanings always entail slapping some sort of prioritized, privileged, hierarchized, prejudicial, discriminatory values on any and all signs by way of logical justification and rational legitimation?
Of the nature of the process I would conjecture that in spite of our wish for logical cogency and rational aplomb, we invariably fall into inconsistencies at one step or another in the long walk of our everyday affairs. That is what makes us human, perhaps all too human. But let’s try to leave our abstract cogitation aside and just let ourselves become within the process of becoming, that is, just let go. Upon our so doing, nothing has any real, existent, necessary, self-seeking, self-indulgent, egocentered value. There is nothing, no-thing at all, for everything, every-thing is
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mere possibility; that is, every-thing just is or is possibly in the process of becoming, without any-thing having actually become. It is all like ‘i’, that is, ‘’. Now attend once again to Figure 5. What is, in the positive sense, is related to what is not, in the negative sense, though under other circumstances, is not could have been is, and is, is not. Positivity and negativity enter into an undecidably oscillating ‘+//+//+//+// ... n’ at the core of the sign map where ‘’ is found, which just is. It is, by way of the mathematical ‘i’ (or the mediating semiotic ‘’), neither positive nor negative and at the same time it is both positive and negative. This is comparable, if I might suggest, to T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) ‘still point’ about which the dance unfolds: Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered [...] […] Except for the point, the still point. There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. (Eliot 1971: 177)
Around the timeless ‘still point,’ where there is ‘neither arrest nor movement’, ‘+’, ‘−’, and ‘i’ (or ‘’) gyrate.8 They are dance; but they are only dance, feeling without form, form without content. Within this pure dance, we have counterparts to the possibility of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Therein rests the key: from pure dance, everything we take to be what is, is in the process of emerging and then becoming something other than what it was becoming. Figure 5 precedes the concrete world; it precedes any and all actual signs, and it precedes learning and knowing. Without the ebullient, rhythming, flowing dance, there is ‘nothing’, ‘emptiness’.
8
The psi symbol, I should point out at this juncture, ‘’ is used in Schrödinger’s ‘quantum wave function’. According to physicist Louis de Broglie (1955: 131): The function, in fact, does not represent something which would have its place in a point of space at a given instant; it represents, taken in its entirety, the state of knowledge of an observer, at the instant considered, of the physical reality that he studies; there is nothing surprising, therefore, in the fact that the function varies from one observer to another. If I replace de Broglie’s ‘state of knowledge’ with ‘knowing process’, ‘observer’ with ‘teacherlearner’, and ‘physical reality’ with ‘object of learning’, his words fit nicely within the context of this essay. I by no means wish to imply that learning-knowing in some fashion follows quantum theory principles. I do wish to suggest that in its most basic form learning-knowing is somehow in tune with life processes and physical world processes.
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Another step toward the whole picture
Figure 6 gives us an image of the entire process. For the moment I will focus exclusively on the lower portion of the figure, sign possibility, while leaving the upper portion, which depicts actual sign becoming, for later ruminations, when the terrain has become more sufficiently tilled.
Figure 6. General sign processing.
At this lower portion of the figure we have the now-familiar sequence. The enigmatic ‘zero point’ becomes ‘’, followed by ‘’, embracing the nonlinear oscillating dance depicted by the complex, spiraling ‘knot’, which is not simply static, but an effervescent, scintillating, vibrating field of possible possibilities becoming mere possibilities and then pairs of options, ‘ + ’, and then ‘ ’9. This range of possible possibilities gives rise to the tripodic depiction of no more than a possibly possible sign; it is not (yet) a sign in the process of becoming. It consists of a possible representamen (R x), or what usually goes 9
I have replaced the ‘static’ ‘’ with the ‘dynamic knot’ in order to emphasize its processual nature as the fountainhead containing all possible possibilities from which all signs, past, present and future, emerge.
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as a sign, a possible semiotic object (or act, or happening) (Ox), and a possible interpretant (Ix), which involves interdependent, interrelated interaction with its interpreter, the sign-taker, and the sign’s source, its maker. The subscripts indicate the sign within possible variable timespace contexts, as illustrated in the upper portion of the diagram, and the broken line extending upward integrates the possible possibility of a sign with a sign in the process of becoming, from the ‘zero point’. In other words, the entire lower portion of Figure 6 is tantamount to the initiation of the upper diagram. If we wish, we can integrate Sign-Maker R1-O1-I1 and Sign-Taker into the tripod to yield Figure 7. This figure actually implies three tripods: (1) R1-M-T (interrelatedness of the sign or representamen, the Sign-Maker, and the -Taker), (2) O1-M-T (interrelatedness of the M T Sign-Maker and -Taker with respect to the semiotic object), and (3) I1-M-T (the Sign-Maker Figure 7. Sign-Maker signand -Taker and their interrelatedness and mu- taker tripod. tual mergence with the sign’s Interpretant). This depicts interaction between the three components of the tripodic sign, and in addition the Maker and Taker, in interaction with one another and with the sign as possibility in the process of signification becoming. Figures 3 through 7, mapping out the possible beginnings of a sign, are germane to the general tenor of this essay. The map is necessary, for a sign cannot emerge in and of its own accord, because at every step of the way in our concrete living we are also signs collaborating and co-participating with signs, wherever we are, without retrievable beginning or conceivable ending – Peirce often implied so much (Burks 1980; Fairbanks 1976; Ponzio 1990). Image 1. The processual Thus the entire map, ‘0 √ + semiotic ‘knot’. − … Signness’, is a spiraling, undulating, swiveling, swerving, scintillating maelstrom of change, as depicted in the passage from the lower tripod to the upper portion of Figure 6. ‘But why in Figure 6’, one might wish to ask, ‘is the “zero point” not merely a point? Why in the initial sequence is it expanded to “√”? Why complicate the issue with the expansion of the point sporting a sort of Belousov-Zhabotinsky
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dissipative structure?’10 This expansion of the point reveals that if ‘0’ is ‘emptiness’, it is just that, pure ‘emptiness’, and yet, if it ‘contains’ the wherewithal for the spontaneous self-organization of all that has been, is, and will have been becoming, then the infinitesimally minute point is by no means a static point in space. It is an effervescent point that, like ‘emptiness’, is capable of bringing about the emergence of possible possibilities into the light of day (see Image 1, depicting the slithery processual ‘knot’, the center of which is the infinitesimal ‘point’ offering infinite possible possibilities). Let us briefly return to Davidson’s triangulation in order to give images suggested in this chapter more concrete value.
10
Dissipative structures are chemical systems capable of exporting entropy (disorder) and maintaining themselves in ‘far-from-equilibrium’ conditions through self-organization. They are prime examples of an internal, self-contained ordering principle (order through fluctuations resulting from these far-from-equilibrium conditions), that, in a manner of speaking, subvert the classical definition of the entropy principle, or the Second Law of Termodynamics according to which the universe is evolving toward total entropy, disorder, or heat death, when energy will be equally disseminated throughout the universe as a system and everything will be homogeneously distributed. Dissipative structures go against the grain of this development. They are self-organizing; they lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, so to speak, by expelling more disorder that would ordinarily be the case, thus enhancing their possibility for ordering themselves spontaneously (Prigogine 1980; Prigogine, Stengers 1984; also Bird 2003). For example, what is called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction consists of a certain combination of inorganic chemicals that, if the conditions are optimal, begin oscillating in a pattern comparable to the expanded ‘zero point’ in Figures 5 and 6, giving rise to spontaneous nonlinear, periodic self-organization, that manifest life-like principles, leading chaos physics theorists to believe that there is no absolute distinction between living and nonliving substance in terms of birth, growth, and death (Capra 1996). However, I do not wish to imply that the ‘zero point’ is the product of dissipative structures; the ‘point’ is mere possible possibility; nothing is actual; however, given the premises of this inquiry, this possible possibility includes the possible actualization of dissipative structures, which give rise to the world’s processes.
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Chapter Three
Tentatively qualifying the process Chapter Three. Tentatively qualifying the process Co-participatory mediation of signs and their respective others and their makers and takers in the creation of meaning reaches a rapid-fire pitch in this chapter. If indeed all that is, is interconnectedly processual, and if everything interdependently interactive with everything else, then it is, complementarily coalescent. Complementarity, in light of Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory, allows for ambiguity and multiple perspectives that, when considered in terms of possibilities, reveal vagueness and ambiguity – which is also the implication of Peirce’s concept of the sign. The Peircean processual flow of sign-making and -taking as complementary coalescence is illustrated by way of split-second decision-making in sports, when athletes – the examples are chiefly from baseball and soccer – have no time to think and then act on their thinking. Their decisions must be made in the blink of an eye, and they must be spontaneously acted on. This involves semiotic transition from feeling to sensing to interpreting all in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, the process is customarily considered as though it were product, not process. Many becoming One becoming Many
Two people are communicating. They are co-ordinating their messages, coparticipating with themselves, with their signs, with everything in their immediate context, and with their entire social and physical world milieu. They are communicating about something from some part of their physical world, social world, and/or individual physical and mental worlds of beliefs, dispositions, presuppositions, premonitions, and prejudices. If they are communicating effectively – and let us suppose they at least think they are – then their worlds complementarily coalesce toward becoming one and the same world, though that becoming process never stands a chance of reaching fixed, endurable, absolute finality. However, it might be the case that person A lives in her set of pragmatic everyday worlds making up her general world-version, which is for her what it is (becoming) in spite of what person B thinks, and it might be the case that B lives in his set of worlds making up his world-version that for him is what it CEEOL copyright 2020
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is (becoming) in spite of what A thinks.11 This situation can be construed as Davidson’s triangulation (A, B, and the third corner, C) consisting of A’s world-version and B’s world-version, and for all intent and purposes one might be inclined to assume that the two worlds are well-nigh incommensurable. Yet Davidson insists that they usually manage to bring their worlds together at least to the extent that they are with some degree of success communicating. A question, then: If they are coming from radically distinct world-versions, then how can they find some point of contact; how can they manage to get out of the starting blocks so as to bring about a coalescent process of their world-versions? A possible answer: If they are indeed communicating – in the Davidson sense – then (1) there may be certain points of contradiction or inconsistency within and between their respective world-versions; (2) but these points are not bivalent, either/or matters; rather, they are complementary in the sense that there is some facet, however minute, of the one in the other and the other in the one, metaphorically speaking; hence (3) to a greater or lesser degree the contradictory or inconsistent points are always in the process of coalescing, of becoming one, though, as process, such 11
The term ‘world-versions’, according to the premises underlying this essay, all of them interdependent, interrelated, and interactive with one another, is originally from Nelson Goodman. He writes: If there is but one world [version], it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them […] is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking. (Goodman 1978: 2) World-versions, interrelated, interrelative and interactive with one another, arise through a constructing process, suggested by a later Goodman remark: Worlds not differing in entities or emphasis may differ in ordering: for example, the worlds of different constructional systems differ in order of derivation. As nothing is at rest or is in motion apart from a frame of reference, so nothing is primitive or is derivationally prior to anything apart from a constructional system. (Goodman 1978: 12) With respect to the truth value of world-versions, he tells us: Insofar as a version is verbal and consists of statements, truth may be relevant. But truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with ‘the world’; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous. Rather […] a version is taken to be true when it offends no unyielding beliefs and one of its own precepts. (Goodman 1978: 17) But, he judiciously warns us: [W]hile readiness to recognize alternative worlds may be liberating, and suggestive of new avenues of exploration, a willingness to welcome all worlds builds none. Mere acknowledgment of the many available frames of reference provides us with no map of the motions of heavenly bodies; acceptance of the eligibility of alternative bases produces no scientific theory or philosophical system; awareness of varied ways of seeing paints no pictures. A broad mind is no substitute for hard work. (Goodman 1978: 21)
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coalescence stands no chance of attaining completion; and (4) if the assumption has it that completion can be or has been attained, then there must still be some possibility for inconsistency lurking around somewhere, which will make itself known within some future timespace context; in either case, the two presumed complementary world-versions will always remain open to the emergence of possibly possible alternate worlds (this collusion of incompleteness and inconsistency will be addressed in Chapter 15). Yet, in spite of all these ifs, the two people in question are somehow apparently communicating about something regarding some aspect of their respective world-versions. Since this something is never fixed but always in the process of becoming something other, this aboutness is never static and never complete; it is also in the process of entering into inconsistencies of one form or another, or into problems arising from tensions that never cease emerging and which must at least provisionally be resolved, however ephemeral their solution. And the process goes on. ‘But how, more precisely’, one is surely asking, ‘does this process go on?’ This calls for a moment of increased attention to the upper portion of Figure 6 in order hopefully to formulate a response. Let us think latticely What you see in that upper portion of the figure is a variation of what has been called a nonlinear, non-Boolean, context-dependent lattice of possible interdependent, interrelated interaction (and, to boot, it entails complementary coalescence, in the terms of this essay) (Heelan 1983; merrell 1995, 1998a, 2007). It is nonlinear in the sense that it accounts for a condition that: (1) At any timespace contextual moment – tantamount to a ‘point’ along a weaving, wavering, and in principle unpredictable trajectory – there is an indeterminate number of possible steps tangentially leading off into diverse directions; hence the Principle of Non-Contradiction doesn’t necessarily hold, since the next step is not simply a matter of some bifurcated path, consisting of an either/or choice; (2) at any timespace moment, possibilities for the next step are not simply the effect of past timespace moments as ‘causes’, but rather, those possibilities include hitherto unknown, and unforeseeable, future directions as the consequence of spontaneous, fresh, novel possibilities that have been, are, and will have been, awaiting their chance for emerging into the light of day; hence the Principle of Excluded-Middle limiting the future by a choice of either one option or another alternate option loses its grip, since the possible options are virtually unlimited, and;
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(3) possibilities that have been qualified and categorized according to the rules, standards, and practices (conventions) of some particular worldversion held by some community of sign-making and -taking organisms, generally follow classical logical imperatives. Consequently, the Principles of Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle can apply – though this is not always the case, given human frailty and fallibility. Taking a look at the Figure 6 lattice once again, it becomes apparent that (1) pertains to the lower tier (contradictory possible possibilities are nonetheless possible within different timespace contexts); (2) pertains to the upper tier (within a particular timespace context a viable alternative might be neither the one nor the other of a pair of options but something else); and (3) pertains to the middle portion (either/or categories generally manage to rule). I realize this is about as clear as mud thus far. I would ask of your patience, however, for, to repeat myself, I must properly prepare the terrain before attempting to elucidate the process entailed within the Figure 6. For the time being, an immediately pressing issue is popping up. If the Principles of NonContradiction and Excluded-Middle no longer necessarily rule, then how about the Principle of Identity? Do the subscripts in Figure 6 have a bearing on the reduction of classical logic’s parameters of application? Can all three of these principles be embraced within this radically nonlinear, non-bivalent field? In response to the first question: Yes! To the second: Yes also! To the third: In a manner of speaking, yes as well. But there is no easy answer; it is a matter of what I have labeled complementary coalescence, which must now be at least tentatively qualified.12 Complementary coalescence can be no more than tentatively qualified, since when we enter into the field of what has been actualized in the past – becoming, and taking its place within the world-version of some community – what can possibly be actualized in the present, and what will have possibly been actualized in the future, is indeed complex. Coalescence is a blending, mingling, merging, mutually interpenetrating union of two or more processes. Enough said in this regard, I would hope. But complementarity? A sticky issue. It might surface when speaking of Yin and Yang with respect to the Dao. It might come up when addressing balancing and harmonious pairs – wife and husband; teachers and students; religious principles and beliefs; business mergers; political concepts and practices; and in general, social and cultural interrelations. Relevant also to the 12
I develop the phrase ‘contradictory complementary coalescence’ more thoroughly in Entangling Forms: Within Semiosic Processes (2010), a book that, like this one, synthesizes much of my work over the past three decades. Here, I delete ‘contradictory’ chiefly due to a change in focus.
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issues at hand in this essay, as mentioned above in passing, the term is found in Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory in the guise of his Principle of Complementarity. According to anecdotal wisdom, supported by some documented evidence, Bohr got his inspiration from the Dao, the Yin-Yang principle. This conjunction might be the proper focus for the notion of complementarity as the term is used here. However, it enigmatically entails that… What apparently is, isn’t always what it seems
Physicist John Bell (1989: 363) draws from that ancient Buddhist form of complementarity when he writes that Bohr doesn’t use ‘complementary’ in the customary sense according to which an elephant, from the front is ‘head, trunk, and two legs’, from the back is ‘bottom, tail, and two legs’, and from the sides is ‘otherwise’, and from top and bottom, ‘different again’. These views ‘supplement one another, and they are all entailed by the unifying concept, ‘elephant’. In the Buddhist story, one blind man grabs the elephant’s tail and reports that he has a ‘rope’; another blind man puts his arms around a leg and says it is a ‘tree trunk’; and so on. All the while, like ‘ropes’ and ‘tree trunks’, the ‘elephant’ is what it is. But ‘rope’ and ‘tree trunk’ are local takes; consequently, each individual blind man would be incapable of including the entire pachyderm within his tactile grasp and naming it ‘elephant’. However, the blind men have other sensory channels. They might smell the elephant; they might hear it breathing; they might even kinesthetically feel a slight tremor of the ground when it moves – signs all! – and as a consequence they might conceivably label the lumbering mammoth ‘elephant’ in the global sense. This brings up the question of perspectivism, an alternate form of complementarity. According to Nietzschean perspectivism, the whole lies outside particular perceptual and conceptual grasps; each blind man is limited to local percepts and concepts. However, together they make up a community, and as individuals, they also have access to alternate sensory faculties. Combining individuals and their sensory faculties, as a community they can be capable of encompassing the whole (Nietzsche 1974: 336). Bohr uses something akin to this second notion of complementarity when he makes a distinction between an object, act, happening, or an utterance as seen from local and relatively limited perspectives (a fleeting subatomic state as either a ‘wave manifestation’ or a ‘particle manifestation’) and the object, act, or happening as seen from an encompassing view (a wave-particle event). Bohr’s complementarity, in this sense, has to do with interrelations between a global view, on the one hand, and diverse local views, on the CEEOL copyright 2020
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other (Havas 1993; for further, Murdoch 1987; Plotnitsky 1994). For example, the Necker cube, often used by psychologists to illustrate a pair of ambiguous local views (the face of the cube is either ‘up’ or ‘down’) included within the global view (a three-dimensional cube depicted on a two-dimensional plane, the extra dimen- Figure 8. The ‘Necker sion being constructed by the viewer), is a case in cube’. point (Figure 8). We take a gander at the ‘cube’ and locally we see the face ‘up’; we look away and then take another gander and locally the face might be ‘down’; and we globally know all along that it is not merely a set of lines on a two-dimensional sheet but a ‘cube’ depiction. But we could have taken it simply as a collection of 12 lines connected at certain angles to make a two-dimensional pattern; or, we could have taken it for an ice cube, a wire contraption, a glass box, or whatever. Each local perspective aids, abets, and complements a global grasp of the object; the collection of all the possibly possible local grasps composes that global conception. These possible possibilities are all there and waiting to gush forth from the ‘zero point’, at the lowermost tier of the upper diagram of Figure 6, to enter the dual level central portion of the diagram as an actualized local object (Oa, the Necker cube, either face ‘up’ or face ‘down’), interconnected with its respective sign (R a), and interpretant (Ia). The actualized local object may at some timespace juncture be replaced – as in the Necker cube flipping from one ambiguous image to the other – by some alternative, which is equally local (Rb-Ob-Ib) These two local objects assumed to be the sum of all possible actualizations (either face ‘up’ or face ‘down’) may be up for alteration when some other possibility makes its appearance (a global interpretation of the object in question as an ‘ice cube’, a ‘wire box’, or whatever), at the uppermost tier of Figure 6 (Ic). And the process can continue, toward If-1; that is, toward what Peirce calls the ‘final Interpretant’. End of story? No. There can be no story’s end. Because the process, as taken in by us finite and fallible knowers, cannot be more than If-1; because the process entails continuity on and on, without conceivable end; that is, it ultimately entails infinity (CP 5.447, 5.595, 7.78, 8.226). Notice that the lowermost area of Figure 6 lattice, the ‘zero point’, carries the implication of all possibilities, according to the nature of the timespace context as it appears during some moment of its becoming something other than what it was becoming. Within the field of these possibilities, both one and another otherwise contradictory possibility (cube face ‘up’, cube face ‘down’) can coexist with nary a problem, for, after all, they are no more than
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possibilities. As actuals, however, at one of the two levels in the mid-portion of the diagram, either/or principles, and hence bivalent classical logic, often remain intact. At the uppermost level of the diagram, what an object and its respective sign were originally taken to be (cube face ‘up’) might undergo a switch (to cube face ‘down’); or, in light of new evidence, perhaps there might be progression toward a new perspectival stance, and the object might be construed as something else altogether. In such case the new interpretation becomes neither the one nor the other but something else (a cake of ice, a wire contraption, a glass box, and so on). But, there is so much implied by the Figure 6 lattice, so much to say that can’t be adequately said, given the immediate objectives in this essay. How can I do justice to its complexity in no more than a few words? Complexity it is; yet under normal circumstances more often than not we do what we do in the blink of an eye, as though it were as simple as could be. But it isn’t. It’s complex. Yet, we sense and perceive complex signs on the spur of the moment, tacitly, and as though on automatic pilot; we interpret them, and we act on them almost immediately, tacitly, and apparently with the greatest of ease – recall Davidson’s notion of our interpreting Jabberwocky and comparable signs. What is the answer, semiotically speaking, to this remarkable capacity? Perhaps through a couple of stories about rapid-fire action that demands virtually instantaneous sign processing without allowing time for deliberate thinking or any calculated response. This strategy is of utmost importance, I would suggest, since the remainder of this inquiry involves tacit, intuitive, spontaneous, gut-reaction sign processing as well as contemplative, thoughtful, well-reasoned interpretation.13 How can you think and act at the same time?
The heading for this section is a rephrase of one of Yogi Berra’s notorious quips. According to folk logic it went this way. When asked what he thought about when deciding whether to swing or not at a baseball speeding toward him, his answer went something like: ‘Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?’ The same applies to most sports, and a host of other activities requiring lightning reflexes and dexterity as well. Speaking of baseball, Robert A. Burton (2008: 70–73) writes that professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities between 80 and 100 miles per hour, which means that the elapsed time from the moment the ball leaves the 13
It bears passing mention that these two complementary sign processes pattern what in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) psychologist Daniel Kahneman labels System 1 and System 2, processes I will discuss in terms of scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s focal and subsidiary knowing.
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pitcher’s hand until it reaches home plate is from 380 to 460 milliseconds (tennis serve by a world-class professional, by the way, takes approximately the same time to reach the other side of the court [Syed 2010: 26–28]). Minimum reaction time of the average batter is approximately 200 milliseconds, and the time it takes him to swing the bat is from 160 to 190 milliseconds (see also Adair 2002; Hammons 2002; McLeod 1987; Watts 2003). This means that the sum of reaction time and swing is about the time it takes for the ball to reach the point where it must come into contact with the bat! Obviously, once the ball is in flight, deliberate thinking is out of the question. The only strategy the batter has is: see the release and the beginning of the ball’s path and immediately go into ‘automatic pilot’. This sounds suspiciously like there’s an inner machine at the helm, some set of robotic neuronal clumps lodged somewhere in the brain that are responsible for hitters like Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Willy Mays, and Sammy Sosa. The skill is more than mere athleticism; it depends on considerable innate talent, practice, practice, practice, and years of taking mental notes about all the pitchers in the league. The task the hitter has before him is mind-boggling. We would tend to agree with Yogi Berra: How the hell can he think and bat in virtually the same instant? Yet, ‘each hitter develops a probabilistic profile of the speed, trajectory, and location of the next pitch. It is in this realm that great players have a greater accuracy than novice players’ (Burton 2008: 71).14 This is indeed remarkable. But for the skilled hitter, it appears as natural as can be. Semiotically speaking, it entails transition from feeling to sensing to perceiving to conception and interpretation, or from pure possibility, to iconicity to indexicality to symbolicity, or ‘0 √ + − … Signness’, in an instant. Remarkable indeed, and remarkably natural, this processual capacity. Shot-gun action of a more improvising sort But instead of baseball, I wish for a few moments to focus on the world’s most popular sport, what they call the ‘beautiful game’, soccer; that is, soccer, specifically Brazilian style. Traditionally, Brazilian soccer stresses reliance on individual ability and improvisation, coupled with faith in an almost magical relation between the player and the soccer ball that creates an atmosphere in which what would ordinarily be impossible seems to become possible, and it creates an overwhelming joy during a game shared by players and spectators
14
For experimental psychology regarding conscious experience and the perception of motion, see Gomes 1998, 2002; Hammons 2002; Kolers, Grünau 1976; Ramachandran, Blakeslee 1998; and in sports, Williams, Ward 2003; Ward et al. 2000.
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alike.15 The experienced Brazilian player believes he can invent new moves in every possible way, and that’s the way he will find success. If soccer in Europe could be seen as an Apollonian game, Brazilians have transformed it into Dionysian play: indeed, it has become ‘carnivalized’. As in the traditional carnival, crowds attending the major matches are not mere onlookers; they are co-participants; they contort their bodies with each and every move by the player who is dribbling the ball, they shout out advice, encouragement, orders, and their frenzy is whipped into an orgasmic climax when their team scores a goal. It seems natural that for Brazilians one of the chief reasons their teams have been able to win a record five World Cups is because they play with what they call Ginga (pronounced ‘jeenga’) rhythm. Syncopated, off-beat Ginga moves are basic not only to soccer but also to Samba, and that combination of ludic play, dance, song, instrument playing and acrobatic martial arts-like moves but without the contact, that theatrical performance, that philosophy of life, called Capoeira. As the popular story goes, both Samba and Capoeira had their beginning among African slaves, and both play a large role in Brazil’s national identity, along with soccer (Bruhns 2000). Ginga is the fundamental rhythm in all three activities. In soccer it involves leg and body swings from one side to the other for the purpose of deception. It is creative, playful, fluid and graceful, a far remove from rigorous mechanical soccer of the type customarily – though not always – played in Germany, Holland, England, and other European countries. Brazilian soccer has always had the magical ingredient of Ginga about it. Ginga enjoys an almost mystical, virtually indefinable quality, the visual manifestation of an attitude toward soccer play. When Brazilians play, they swing and sway, swivel and swerve, pedal and prance, pass from staccato jerks to whirling flow, quickly change from feigned passivity to a rush of passion, from anguish to euphoria. They play with such rich, vibrant enthusiasm that it seems only natural that Brazil’s national team could perennially continue to enter the field with the world’s best players. It is for this reason that Brazilian players unanimously – and with a telltale note of fantasy – proclaim that soccer play and Ginga are ‘in their blood’, that they are ‘born doing Ginga moves’, that it is a ‘gift from God to the 15
I write ‘traditionally’, for the Brazilian team under Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri, popularly known as Dunga, took a different and considerably more serious approach to the game during the World Cup series in South Africa in 2010. Many Brazilians were critical of his selection of team players over flashy stars and his focus on collective effort over individual brilliance. During World Cup competition Dunga appeared to be having his day, until the national team was eliminated in the quarter finals at the hands of the Dutch team, after which he suffered severe and scathing attacks back on home base, ending in his dismissal.
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Brazilians’. More soberly put, Ginga involves feeling, sensing, and intuiting the most appropriate spontaneous response to some momentary situation that has surged up; its action precedes thinking, for there is simply no time to think; it involves personal, often idiosyncratic ways of solving problems spontaneously (Risério 2007: 321). Brazilians all do a different dance when they play soccer, but Ginga is at the heart of their spontaneous, improvised moves. The Brazilians’ style of playing contrasts with European soccer because of a ‘combination of qualities of surprises, malice, astuteness and agility, and at the same time brilliance and individual spontaneity’. There is more than a ‘touch of dance’ that ‘marks the Brazilian style’ (Bellos 2002: 36). This renders Brazilian soccer a game in which ‘prodigious individual skills often outshine team tactics, where dribbles and flicks are preferred over physical challenges or long-distance passes. Perhaps because of the emphasis on the dribble, one moves one’s whole body’. This is why Brazilian soccer ‘is often described in musical terms – in particular as a samba’ (Bellos 2002: 34). Edson Arantes do Nascimento (internationally known as Pelé) puts it this way: ‘Our joyful way of playing game the rest of the world a taste for this marvelous sport […]. [W]e spread a real passion for football – a passion that seems to be passed on in the genes, as children are born with a love for this game already in their hearts’ (Nascimento 2006: 5; see also Browning 1995; Bruhns 2000; Foer 2010; Lewis 1992; Nascimento et al. 2005; Nascimento, Fish 2007). Whether one wishes to endorse Ginga theory or not, Matthew Syed contends that intensive ‘purposeful practice’ is of utmost importance for the development of all skills. It bears out the notion that Brazil’s success over the rest of the world in soccer is not necessarily found in genetics – as some proud Brazilians tend to assert – but in the fact that in the ghettoes, where poor kids play on vacant lots, and on small enclosed courts with hardwood floors, typically where middle-class kids play ‘futesal’ (‘court soccer’), close proximity to other players, to the ball, wherever it may be, and to the goal, requires quicker decisions and greater technique. Consequently their pick-up games and organized soccer sessions are more ‘purposeful’, because they exaggeratedly reinforce the type of decision making and rapid response that will be required of the players during actual soccer matches (Syed 2010: 89). Nothing certain In whatever case, if training for soccer – or any other team sport for that matter – is methodical and mechanical, always governed by basically the same rhythm, then each player and the entire team coordinate their moves in a
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linear and somewhat predictable way. As a result, each player’s skill should be cold, emotionless, and can even appear robotic (Badiru 2010). However, introducing a complex variety of rhythms for the players of a team to use ushers in an element of unpredictability. In fact, if a team consists of players who have been, are, and always will have been in the process of creating their own moves, their collective game can become so complex that during a match it can threaten to erupt into anarchy. And Brazilian teams have occasionally tended toward just that. This happens when the players, a customary collection of international stars most of whom play in European leagues, are all trying to do their own thing at the same time, and the team falters and falls into disarray. But when their individual rhythms become coordinated, almost entrained within the context of their individual diversity, their play is a beauty to behold, as they become well-nigh unstoppable. With the proper rhythm, the beat, the musicality, the melody and harmony and countermelody and apparently dissonant counterharmony – with a note of syncopation and Ginga – the game becomes well-nigh magical in its complexity. It can be a mood enhancer, a motivating instrument with rhythms and beats encouraging, inspiring, inducing and evoking novel and what sometimes appear as superhuman feats. That’s why fans in the stands come up with some drums and other instruments, and they sway and chant, egging their team along, keeping the fluid, ebbing and cascading Ginga rhythm going. And the players thrive on it. So, do they think and engage in Ginga and deceive their opponents and create new moves and kick the ball all at the same time? Of course not! They engage in pure unthinking spontaneity, creativity, on-the-spot improvisation. And rhythm is of utmost importance to this improvisation. Pelé writes of the importance of rhythm in Brazilian soccer in this way: In the bus from our hotel to the stadium [in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the 1970 World Cup] we had a little batucada [drumming] going; batucada is the Brazilian word for the Carnival rhythms beaten out on any object by any other object close at hand, such as fingers drumming against a matchbox, or hands slapping against a window sill, sometimes while one is humming a Carnival tune as accompaniment, sometimes not. Batucada has a beat to it; it is always morale-building to a Brazilian – and we needed all the morale-building we could get.’ (Nascimento, Fish 2007: 250)
The important point is that this form of spur-of-the-moment, unprompted play is nonlinear, multifaceted, and context-dependent, and all the moves are orchestrated with all the other moves such that they converge into and merge with one another; they mix and fuse; they coalesce, complementing one another in novel ways. In short, they are all interdependent, interrelated and CEEOL copyright 2020
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interactive: this exceedingly complex complementary coalescent process that is unfolding from the enfolded. Thus, if I may be allowed to repeat myself, the entire affair is complex. Yet, under normal soccer match circumstances, weathered, creatively improvising players more often than not do what they do in the blink of an eye, as if it were as simple as could be. But it’s complex. They sense and perceive the complex signs surrounding them on the spur of the moment, tacitly, and as if on automatic pilot; with lightning quickness they nimbly interpret them, and they act almost immediately. There’s no time to think. It’s simply done – like Davidson’s interpretation of Jabberwocky, but at an accelerated pace. In the blink of an eye and quicker than the mind can think, it’s: ‘0 √ + − … Signness’. Beautiful. Getting there Yogi Berra is also said to have once quipped: ‘You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there’. In a manner of putting it, truer words were never spoken, with respect to the topic at hand. Berra’s one-liner has to do with improvisation, when neither performer nor audience knows where the action is headed. This is the way of Ginga moves in soccer, Brazilian style. When maximizing Ginga moves, there can be a surprise at every step along the way. One might know where one was up to the present; one might more or less be in the process of becoming aware of where one is in that present; but one doesn’t know where one will have been in the process of going, but only when that ‘will have been’ is in the past, a ‘has been’. There’s no time to tarry. No dwelling on the ‘has been’ for there’s another present ‘now’ that demands creative maneuvering so that it can carry the process into the ‘will have been’. The process is ongoing; it’s nonlinear, multifacetedly multivalent, contextdependent, and complementing. Syed (2010: 36) writes of tennis professional Roger Federer that his ‘motor programs are so deeply ingrained’ that if you ask him how he is able to make split-second decisions he won’t be able to tell you. Why? Because he has practiced for so long that his decisions and movements are embedded, entrenched; they are ‘encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory’. Federer, like star athletes in other sports, chess masters, computer gamers, computer hackers, and standup comedians, ‘chunks’ large numbers of variables, compressing them into one compact information load so as to make decisions and act on them as if they were considering each individual bit of information in simultaneity. This isn’t something they are taught explicitly by some trainer or something they read about in a book; it isn’t simply something they are born
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with; it isn’t necessarily genetic; rather, it is the result of virtually countless hours of practice, practice, practice (Syed 2010: 45; also Neisser 1967). Syed calls it the ‘ten-thousand-hour rule’ the product of at least ‘one-thousand hours’ or more per year over a ten-year period of intensively purposeful, concentrated and dedicated training (Syed 2010: 92; also Gladwell 2008). Thus, during the heat of competition in a sport, it might seem that skilled athletes act and react as if they had all the time in the world, while for the spectators it is quicker than the eye can follow. Actually, they ‘chunk’ the signs in their surroundings, take them as meaningful wholes, process them in ‘blocks’, and respond to them in virtually automatic fashion (Williams, Ward 2003). In much of a Peircean vein, ‘chunked’ sign possibilities are tantamount to signs that have become possible through repeated actualization when one’s skill has been in the process of becoming sedimented, habituated due to repeated practice. Eventually, combinations (‘chunks’) of sign possibilities become ‘hyperdependent’ and ‘hyperrelated’ such that they can be actualized tacitly – spontaneously, impulsively, premeditatedly – and without their author’s consciously and purposefully bringing them into ‘hyperinteractive’ play. I write ‘hyper-’, since sign ‘chunks’ are above and beyond ordinary consciousness; it is as if they were in more than three dimensions such that we are somehow aware of them, at some tacit, perhaps intuitive, super-sensitive level, inaccessible to conscious mind. In Peircean terminology, the signs have become ‘degenerate’ – in the mathematical sense of the term as many signs ‘chunked’ into one condensed sign, not the term’s everyday connotation as something ‘deteriorated’, ‘corrupted’, ‘eroded’. ‘Degenerate’ signs are, in a manner of putting it, signs ‘out of mind’, ‘out of conscious awareness’. They are ‘unthinking’ signs, conglomerates of ‘chunked’ signs made and taken in a ‘flash’, and outside mind’s active intervention (CP 2.91–92, 3.360–62, 5.72–76; Freadman 1995; BuczynskaGarewicz 1978, 1998). I would suggest that it is a matter of our now familiar: ‘0 √ + − … Signness’. But instead of the possibility of some individual or ‘atomic’ sign, the possibility entails a ‘molecule’, a conglomerate sign, a ‘chunked’ sign, that has become ‘degenerate’ over time through practice, practice, practice. Saving a goal On this note, let us consider a soccer situation more akin to hitting the baseball: the attempt to score a penalty goal, or to block it if we focus on the goalie. But first, a few words on the goal itself.
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Goal
8'
24'
Goal area 36'
Penalty spot
Penalty area
Penalty arc Figure 9. The penalty area.
It is 24 feet wide and 8 feet high. The goal area is 20 yards wide and 6 yards deep, and the penalty area is 44 yards wide and 18 yards deep, the goal being at the front border of the goal area. The spot where the ball is placed for the penalty kick is 36 feet from the goal line (Figure 9). A kicker with a powerful leg able to get the leg in motion quickly and effectively can kick the ball such that in .01 second it will reach a velocity of between 102 and 105 feet per second. At this speed, since the goal is 36 feet from the spot where the ball is placed, it can take the ball as little as 350 milliseconds to reach the goal (Nascimento, Fish 2007: 344). This compares favorably to the 380–460 milliseconds it takes a baseball to travel from the pitcher to home plate. In any case, the goalie has little time to decide what he should do in order hopefully to intercept the soccer ball. Of course in baseball the pitcher has a number of options, but they are limited, since home plate is minute in comparison with the soccer goal, which is 8 feet high and 24 feet wide, and the kicker is free to kick the ball, 36 feet from the goal line, to the right or to the left or up high or down low. In addition, there is the matter of deception: a feign, a fake, a slight hesitation, or a fanciful Ginga move when approaching the ball, and so on. By ‘just doing it’ In baseball, the hitter’s going on ‘automatic pilot’ so as mindlessly and unthinkingly to connect bat with ball is feasible, and necessary, since the area where the bat must come into contact with the ball is relatively small. The goalkeeper’s task in soccer must take place in an entirely different context. The kicker’s (or shooter’s) and the goalie’s strategies are, psychologically speaking at least, exceedingly more complex. The shooter has a wide
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range of options: wide or slightly to the right or to the left, up high or down low or in between, a swift kick at the center of the ball or slightly offset in order to send a fast or relatively slow curve ball, hesitating slightly or a lot or doing a double hesitation, shuffling feet once or twice or more, looking directly where the ball will be going or averting the eyes to the right or to the left or up high or up low, and so on. And the goalie? After analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide, Michael Bar-Eli et al. (2007) conclude that goalkeepers usually choose their course of action before they’ve had a chance to observe the kick. Given the complex probability distribution regarding the ball’s trajectory, the goalie’s optimal strategy is to stay in the center, and at the proper moment jump to the right or to the left, because the norm is by all means to jump. Once the ball is headed toward its target, there’s no time to think and react, but since inaction is inacceptable, the goalie must act, so the decision must be made before the ball catapults from the kicker’s foot.16 Goalies fear appearing like they’re doing nothing and looking rather stupid. They want to act as if they knew exactly what they were doing. But they don’t. So they dive or jump up to one side or the other, even if it actually decreases the chance of their blocking the ball. This way they look decisive; otherwise they look helpless, as if they didn’t know what to do. Daniel Kahneman and Dale T. Miller’s ‘norm theory’ (1986) affords the implication that a goal scored produces worse feelings for the goalkeeper following inaction than following action; consequently the bias leans toward action. When mapping out an action strategy, the goalie’s most impressive move is toward the upper right-side or the upper left-side, since those areas are furthest from his crouching position at the center of the goal area. Options include a horizontal leap to the right or to the left, or a leap downward or upward in either direction. So the strategy? Pick a corner and a direction and leap toward it. He has a 50/50 chance of making a move in the right direction. How far to leap? As far as possible in order to impress the coach and the fans. But that’s not always the case, since a wildly dramatic leap in the wrong direction might make the goalie look silly. Nevertheless, by all means, leap. Paraphrasing Yogi 16
From the perspective of a kicker, the Wall Street Journal article declares that in ‘penalty kicks, tortoises fare better than hares’. The study concludes that: In measuring the time between when the ball is first put in place and when the player lets go of it the study found that players who took 11 seconds or less were successful 58.8% of the time, while those who took between 2.3 and 2.9 seconds scored 78.1% of the time. Those who began their rush forward immediately after the whistle (0.2 seconds or less) missed, or had their shots saved, at a much greater rate (42.6%) then those who waited for at least 11 seconds before beginning their approach (18.9%). (Kelley 2008)
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Berra, the goalie should beware if he doesn’t know why he leaps in the direction he leaps, because he might not connect with the ball. Yet, he leaps with the hope that, somehow, he might block the kick, and if not, at least he won’t look like a moron. With respect to baseball, the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand and the batter quickly decides where he thinks the ball will collide with his bat, then he goes on automatic pilot, and either swings or does not. If he swings, he could close his eyes and it would make little difference, since he’s on automatic pilot. But he swings, hopeful that bat and ball will collide. Such studies hold, whether one is considering ping-pong, hand-ball, squash, tennis, or boxing or martial arts. Or soccer. Where, given the frantic pace close to the goal, there’s no time for thought or analysis before action (Bahill, Watts 2000). In the case of baseball: [T]he batter is swinging at previously determined probabilities, not a closely observed ball. A fabulous hitter such as Barry Bonds is better at fine-tuning his swing in midair than your average batter, but this does not result from conscious perception, deliberation, and then a decision. There simply isn’t enough time. Yet Bonds, Williams, and Musial swear that they can gauge their swing to with a baseball diameter target, or less. A truly extraordinary feat when even the most advanced physics applied to the ball’s early flight path cannot make such a precise prediction. (Burton 2008: 72)
The act of hitting the baseball or intercepting the soccer ball basically entails two strategies: conscious appraisal prior to the event, and reliance on entrenched, tacit, capacities. The act can be divided into three parts: (1) the actor takes in sensory data ( Firstness, in interdependence with the entire context); (2) senses where the ball is likely going (… Thirdness, according to the interrelations present); and (3) acts accordingly ( Secondness, in spontaneous interaction – as if the act involved a set of ‘chunked’, ‘degenerate’ signs – with the situation that has suddenly presented itself). For sure, he can’t change his mind in the middle of the act. The most he can do is, after the fact, check the outcome. He is acting according to a set of probabilities, not to a conscientiously and closely observed ball in flight.17 17
Burton 2008: 71-72; also Gigerenzer 2000, 2007; and, in general, Gendlin 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1997. It bears mentioning that studies in psychology demonstrate that when expert golf players concentrate on their swing they don’t do as well as if they ‘just do it’, unthinkingly. This is comparable to the case of basketball: after a foul the opposing team calls a time-out to let the foul shooter ‘think about it’, thus lessening his chance of making the foul shots. ‘Thinking about it’ can pay dividends for novices, but for seasoned veteran athletes the advice should be: ‘just do it’ (Beilock et al. 2002, 2004).
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The relevance? ‘But why do I bring all this up? What is the relevance of hitting a ball or intercepting a ball and Ginga and the issues at hand in this essay?’ In the first place, I would like to think there’s method to the madness, because we process many, even most, and likely the vast majority of our complex concoction of signs tacitly, relatively unthinkingly, in automatic and almost robotic fashion – as ‘chunked’, ‘degenerate’ signs – while our conscious mind is attuned to other issues. Think of your movements when walking, driving a car, riding a bicycle, tapping away at a computer terminal, munching on some vittles at lunchtime with a friend, playing a game of ping-pong, engaging in a lively conversation, and any and all such activities. In the second place, I would submit that baseball and soccer phenomena effectively illustrate the complexity – mentioned in an earlier section when discussing the Necker cube – that is involved in our sensing normal everyday circumstances, perceiving and coping and interacting with them in the blink of an eye, and after the fact possessing the capacity at least roughly to conceptualize them and articulate them. If I may repeat myself, we ‘sense and perceive’ complex sets of signs within their particular contexts ‘on the spur of the moment’, tacitly, and as if on automatic pilot. And we do it all ‘apparently with the greatest of ease’. Remarkable, semiotically speaking, this capacity; we tacitly process signs, in a flash, without thinking; yet we’re thinking, that is, our body in collaboration with our mind is thinking, proprioceptively, kinesthetically, somatically. It’s who we are; it’s what we do, during our concrete everyday coming and going. For example, if during a morning walk your face brushes against a lowhanging limb at the same time that your left foot bumps against one of the tree’s roots, the sensory inputs from your cheek reach your brain quicker than those from your left foot that at the same time came into contact with an impediment, almost tripping you up. Your brain implicitly, tacitly adjusts for the time lags, however. The length of time it takes for the sensations to travel from cheek-to-brain and foot-to-brain is not apparent. The two sensations might have appeared to occur simultaneously. Without this adjustment, the delay between sensory inputs would have created a ‘present’ spread over time in contrast to the notion of an instantaneous ‘now’. You collect (‘chunk’) the sensations in one package as if they were a continuous whole. Likewise, batter and goalie take in a lightning quick ball, select a strategy faster than the mind can think, and act, as if it were a ‘chunked’, continuous whole, in an instant. Indeed, in this sense at least, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness are as far as feeling, intuiting, and sensing go, One.
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In other words, in sports, as in many activities during our everyday living, we feel and intuit and sense and perceive complex signs, ‘on the spur of the moment’, we interpret them, and we act on them, almost immediately, and apparently without thinking. Myriad streams of Seconds and Thirds bombard us during each and every moment. No problem. We condense and ‘chunk’ them, take them as if they were relatively simple matters, or as if they were Firsts (‘degenerate’ signs), and process them in the mere blink of an eye. Putting this process more semiosically, possibilities rapidly surge up (‘0 …’); then, in a split second, improvisingly and with lightning quickness, you make or take the complex set of signs you’ve confronted, nonlinearly of course (‘R O I …’), you almost immediately act on them, and you get on with it (recall the move from the lower level to the middle area in Figure 6). Signs of possibility become signs that, when mind is able to catch up with the process, you identify as either this or that. But if mind is sufficiently discerning and if bodymind is improvisingly nimble enough, there will be some acknowledgment that the signs in question are no either/or affair, but rather, there are other possibilities that in an unexpected moment might stand a chance of bubbling up. From another point of view What is the relevance of Davidson’s prior theory and passing theory to this split-second decision making and interaction? In our baseball and soccer and other comparable examples, there is no Davidsonian linear language; there is no deliberately thinking about what one will say or write, no purposeful interpretation of what is said or written; there is no time for prior theory and passing theory to hook up. There can be no more than spontaneous, tacit split-second decisions, and almost immediately, action or reaction. There can be no cool calculation, purposeful and intentional contemplation of what is said, like a close reading of what is written. There is no weighing the options before arriving at a decision; there is no contemplating the pros and cons of possible plans of action. For the action is well-nigh immediate; there is virtual presence; responses must be spontaneous, although there is no thinking and acting at the same instant. Yet, signs must be processed, right now! There must be, at one and the same time, proprioceptive, kinesthetic, somatic feeling, intuiting, sensing, and acting, all of which are pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic, iconic and indexical, and prior to symbolicity. There can be no more than ‘gut action and reaction’.18 18
For a psychological critique of intuitive gut judgments, Kahneman et al 1982, 1996; for a defense, Gigerenzer 2000, 2007; Gladwell 2005.
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However, in writing this I’m making distinctions! – albeit necessary distinctions for the most part. Actually, it’s all a matter of vagueness, fuzziness, imprecision, and ambiguity, at their elusive best; of fusion and confusion of lines of demarcation and of signs, of myriad possibilities that might or might not be in the process of becoming actuality for somebody within some context or other. Within the context of split-second decisions and action, there is no clarity, no distinctiveness, no sharpness of borders, no precise demarcations. One just does it; it’s just done. If I could jazz the process, sing it, dance it, or show it through Ginga moves I would. But, alas, I’m limited to torpid, lackadaisical articulation on two-dimensional pages, with no more than relatively stagnant, languorous, tepid words. In the next chapter I will at least attempt to pattern this entire process by suggesting that our sign processing is a matter of interdependency, interrelatedness and interaction, that signs are always in complementary coalescence, and that we as users and often abusers of our signs co-participate with them, with ourselves, and with our physical world (by way of our worldversions). Let me begin doing so with two concrete examples: physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s (1911–2008) variation of that familiar ‘20 Questions’ game, and his imaginary story about baseball umps, both of which, strange as it might seem, illustrate, to Wheeler’s way of thinking, important aspects of quantum theory.
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Chapter Four
From strange minutiae to concrete living Chapter Four. From strange minutiae to concrete living John Archibald Wheeler always pushed into the future, re-visiting past ideas in an attempt to clarify what troubled him in the present. He offered many of his ideas through down-to-earth stories, two of which are adapted to the present inquiry. A striking case of Wheeler’s two tales is presented in the 2009 swine flu buildup in Mexico and its consequences. Qualification of such concrete illustrations calls for a few words regarding what Peirce termed ‘objective idealism’, a philosophical posture further exemplified in that make-shift ideal in the history of science, ‘phlogiston’, which was later replaced by ‘oxygen’. These examples serve further to qualify interdependent, interactive interrelatedness through complementary coalescence, and to elucidate the process illustrated in Figure 6. It’s what you make it and you’re what it makes you
Wheeler gives us two remarkably commonsense illustrations of his co-participancy interpretation of the Bohr-Copenhagen version of quantum theory: (1) a variation of the parlor game of 20 Questions; and (2) a tale about three baseball umpires comparing notes in the local bar.19 In the latter, the first ump confidently proclaims, ‘I calls ‘em the way they is’. The second one counters, ‘I calls ‘em the way I sees ‘em’. The third one brashly proclaims, ‘Hell, they ain’t nothing ‘til I calls ‘em’. The first ump takes the world as what it is, in a naïve realistic sense, and what he sees is what is (or so he thinks), and that’s the way he calls a pitch, clearly and distinctly. The second ump is apparently aware that reality often plays tricks with the eyes, so he calls a pitch the way he sees it, whether or not the call coincides with what is. The third ump is more subtle. As far as she can tell, there is no is, at 19
Of course Wheeler’s story I am telling here at the outset appears to be a far cry from quantum theory. However, the beauty of Wheeler’s ‘thought-experiments’ involves his remarkable ability to illustrate complicated issues in quantum theory by way of concrete situations we have no problem identifying with. I use two of his stories for illustrating complex issues of consciousness, perception, human action and interaction, and sign processing.
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least until she calls it a ‘Strike’ or a ‘Ball’. Until the call, the pitch is neither the one nor the other. From the range of all possible possibilities, the pitch can be a ‘Strike’, it can be a ‘Ball’, the hitter might hit the ball but a fraction of a second too soon and the ball arcs to the left of the diamond and it is a ‘Foul’, or it might go to the right and it’s a ‘Foul’ of another sort, or his bat might collide with the ball at the upper portion of its curved surface and the ball goes flying off upward and backward as yet another type of ‘Foul’. But after the pitch there was no foul ball, so it has to be either a ‘Strike’ or a ‘Ball’, as one of two mere possibilities. Suppose the ump calls it a ‘Strike’. He has passed through ‘0 √ + ’ at the lower portion of Figure 6 to the tripod. There, the pitch must have been either a ‘Strike’ or a ‘Ball’. The ump called it a ‘Strike’. Now we know – even though a number of virulent onlookers scream out in protest, thinking it should be the other way round. The phenomenon (or sign, as it were) has becoming a registered or interacted phenomenon. It has entered into interdependent interrelationship with a previous couple of pitches to the same batter both of which were ‘Balls’, with all previous pitches in games past in this and other stadiums, and ultimately with the entire history of all baseball games and pitchers and batters and pitches and battings and audiences witnessing it, and all anticipated future pitches and players and games and audiences. The ump’s judgment has become part of that ‘reality’ called baseball; baseball has become part of that ‘reality’ making up a particular world-version. All people present during the time of the pitch and the judgment have co-participated with the entire universe of signs, objects, acts and events, and physical and mental world-versions, in order to actualize a minute aspect of it and bring about its emergence into ‘reality’. And, of course, we should bear in mind that all three umps in question must make lightning quick decisions not entirely unlike those of the batter – or soccer goalie – though they are allowed at least a split moment’s reflection before making a call. Rephrasing Yogi Berra, we might think ‘How the hell can they see where the ball’s going and think at the same time so they can holler out a call as quick as a snap of their fingers?’ And yet, they see, think, decide, and label (‘chunk’) the ball’s trajectory as if it were all as reflectively natural as could be. And it by and large is, after years of practice, bringing body and mind – bodymind – in tune with their venerable profession’s subtle tricks of the trade. The moral to the story, I would suggest, falls in line with Wheeler’s quantum theory-inspired concept of our relationship with our world. Our mindboggingly complex world is co-participatory through and through. Following Niels Bohr, Wheeler puts forth the idea that no aspect of ‘reality’ exists for
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someone until it has come into interdependent, interrelated interaction – yes, those familiar terms once again – with that someone and with some other aspect of ‘reality’ from within the four dimensional timespace manifold. Until the moment of interdependent, interrelated interaction, the world had not (yet) taken its place within some world-version to become properly ‘real’. During the baseball game in question, people in the audience waiting with eager anticipation for the first ump’s take on the world assume a strike, and the word ‘Strike’ qualifying it, already existed ‘out there’, independent of any and all acts of observation – as classical physics would have it. People with a mind-set coherent with the second ump’s conception of the world are aware of human fallibility regarding a sometimes deceptive world, but most of them – though perhaps not all – generally agree that, given his privileged perspective of the pitch’s trajectory, he must have been on the mark when he declared the pitch was a ‘Strike’. In contrast, people of the third ump’s ilk are aware that a pitch is not necessarily either a ‘Strike’ or a ‘Ball’ or anything else until she makes it so with her call. In other words, it’s as if the ump had put a question to the pitch, ‘Will you be the one thing or the other or something else?’ The pitch offers her an answer. She calls it. And the pitch enters a particular world-version. All people concerned co-participated to a greater or lesser degree in bringing about the actualization of that particular aspect of their world-version. Supposing the ump was not in the batter’s home stadium and the batter was playing before a less-than-benign public, dictating the pitch a ‘Strike’ creates relatively little ire or adverse consequences. Had the batter been in his home field before a supportive audience, the ump’s calling a ‘Strike’ could possibly be a dangerous move, especially if the game is tied and in the last inning. In such case there’s the possibility that she might have judged the pitch a ‘Ball’ instead of a ‘Strike’. And the world-version would have been slightly different. Or with greater confidence in the presence of thousands of adoring fans, the batter might have made a wild swing, the bat might have connected with the ball anyway, and a ‘Foul’ could have resulted, or perhaps by some stretch of the imagination a ‘Home run’. And the world-version’s process would have corresponded. It’s ultimately a matter of signs becoming signs
In this manner all of us, I, those who might be reading this page, and the pitcher and hitter and players witnessing the imaginary game of baseball, coparticipatingly collaborate with each other, with our signs, with our worldversions, and with our entire universe in the process of its becoming, in our process of becoming, in all our signs’ process of becoming. CEEOL copyright 2020
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Wheeler’s quantum universe is a meaning universe. It is a universe of questions asked of phenomena by way of signs (R) largely created intersubjectively, of answers given by way of the universe’s object signs (O), and of interpretations (I) that are neither objective nor subjective, strictly speaking, but signs becoming signs, that is, the universe’s co-participation with us and our co-participation with it to bring about the process of semiosic becoming (Wheeler 1980a, 1980b, 1990, 1994; also Skolimowski 1987). The watchwords, I cannot overemphasize, are: interaction, which implies the interdependence and interrelatedness of everything the universe has to offer, including ourselves. We co-participate with this ‘reality’ and pull it into existence, and without us, ‘reality’ remains at least partly unfulfilled, just as we remain unfulfilled without ‘reality’. Of the three umps, the first one is more keenly aware of her collaboration with her baseball world to bring some particular aspect of it into existence by her act of co-participating with it. Is she simply creating an illusion and interpolating it into the world? Yes, and No. ‘Yes’, because what she (thinks she) sees, she sees. What she sees, she has at least in part created, and it becomes that particular aspect of the world as she has so created it. Her world, in this respect, is often more concocted than merely encountered. At another time and place she might have seen her world in a slightly different way. Or, at the same time and place, perhaps somebody else might have created a slightly or radically different aspect of her world-version. But at the same time the answer to the question is ‘No’, because her creation of her world is not from some supreme, detached ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel’s, 1986, phrase). She co-participates with the world just as the world co-participates with her. They are interdependently, interrelatedly, interactively intertwined, entangled. In Wheeler’s words with respect to co-participation at the (microscopic) quantum world: ‘Measurement, the act of turning potentiality into actuality, is an act of choice, choice among possible outcomes. After the measurement, there are roads not taken. Before the measurement, all roads are possible – one can even say that all roads are being taken at once’ (Wheeler, Ford 1998: 339–40). On a complementary note, caught up in our (macroscopic) worldversion, we have myriad possibilities. We choose, in the act making and/or taking signs, and we enter the stream toward resolving the semiotic problem situations before us, whether hitting a baseball, blocking a penalty kick, driving a car, tapping on the computer terminal, interpreting a Davidson utterance, or whatever, and whether we are tacitly processing ‘chunked’, ‘degenerate’ signs, or consciously, conscientiously and deliberately processing carefully analyzed particular signs. All this, in our world-version of…
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Signs becoming ‘real’
In the 20 Questions example, we have a ‘surprise version’, which even more emphatically illustrates the semiotic nature of the world-version we make as co-participants rather than simply taking as passive receivers. Physicist Richard Feynman fell victim to this variation of the game when he was a graduate student, and his thesis advisor, Wheeler, remained fascinated by it since that time. According to the normal procedure for 20 Questions, one person leaves the room while everybody else decides on a particular object in the room. Then the person is invited to enter, and she has a total of twenty questions she can ask those present in order to ascertain what that person, place or thing is by their responses. She can ask only questions that can be answered with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’. It’s a rather simple affair. In the surprise version, suppose you are the person chosen to leave the room. At the proper moment you are invited to come in, and you begin asking questions. At first, the ‘Yeses’ and ‘Nos’ come quickly and easily to the questions you pose, but as the game proceeds, the pauses between your questions and their responses become more prolonged. There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to the responses; they are to all appearances random. And why do the respondents have to spend more time pondering over each question as the game proceeds? It’s all quite strange. You begin becoming suspicious, without knowing why. Finally, you have reached your twentieth question, and if you don’t come up with the right response, you will have to leave the room, rather embarrassed, and begin anew. You meekly and tentatively ask a question, for example, ‘Is it that a Don Quixote bust on the piano?’, with no expectation of solving the enigma, since there is apparently no logic to your question or to their last few responses. The respondent gives you a ‘Yes’, and in chorus the entire group bursts out laughing. What was going on here? While you were out of the room, the group picked nothing (or ‘0 ’ if you will) as the object of your questions. The only rule was that the person responding to one of your particular questions must have been some person, place or thing in mind when giving up her response, and that person, place or thing couldn’t be the object of any of your previous questions. Thus it is the responders, as well as you, who must keep all previous questions and responses in mind, and hence the increasing length of the pauses as the game was proceeding. Thus the person, place, or thing that was to be the object of the game could not be determined until the final question had been asked.
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There was nothing at all as the game’s object, but everything was there as a set of possibilities. Then gamers begin with emptiness, zero, utter voidness, with expectations that the game would have some world-version when it reached conclusion (‘0 √• + − Ψ Signness’). Then, as the game proceeded they all gradually teased the future object into the room. The gamers are in this sense co-participants on an equal level with all the possible objects, in interdependent, interrelated interaction. Without the co-participants, the object could not have emerged to see the light of day, nor could it have emerged without all the other possible objects in the room, whether mentioned or not during the game. This, metaphorically, is how Wheeler’s conception of the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum world works. Paraphrasing Wheeler regarding the quantum world in semiotic terms, no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a signified and interpreted phenomenon. The becoming of a particular phenomenon must be put in the future conditional: whichever ‘quantum reality’ happens to pop up, it is what will have been realized due to the co-participatory collaboration of the physicist. In comparable fashion, in the twenty questions variation, the object of the game cannot already be in the minds of the responders, but rather, it will have been becoming, if and when the co-participants pull it into its respective world-version. This is also the case of our third baseball umpire for whom the ball flying toward the catcher’s mitt is neither a ‘Strike’ nor a ‘Ball’ until it is seen, seen as either the one or the other, and called either one way or the other because the ump saw that it was of a such-and-such sort. (I would ask that you keep this notion of neither-nor in contrast with either/or in mind, for it will have a crucial role to play in future chapters.) The gist of it all So much for commonplace illustrations of quantum phenomena. What bearing does this have – if any, one would likely think – on our everyday coming and going within our world of signs? In the first place, like the baseball hitter and soccer goalie, much of what we do in our everyday existence we simply do, with no further ado, virtually processing our ‘chunked’ signs in an instant. We do it because that’s what we do and how we do it, with little need of any whys regarding our doing. Simply put once again: It’s what we do; it’s who we are. In the second place, we do what we do the way we do it because it has become the way of our doing, tacitly, spontaneously, now along well-worn entrenched, habituated pathways, now through improvisation, now almost in robotic fashion, now as if mindfully and with full confidence that we know precisely what we are about. In the third place, it stands to reason that in our daily coming and going we are many times as wrong as we are right; what we
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think we know without a shadow of a doubt is often up for radical revision or replacement; to our dismay our smug certainty is repeatedly thrown for a loop. In passing, let me mention two additional studies suggesting that just as at less-than-conscious levels we tend to operate in rapid-fire and often reckless abandon with our subliminal awareness on automatic pilot, so also in our concrete everyday life we act and interact more out of hunches and intuition, from the gut, without logically and rationally thinking things through, than we would like to believe. One of Malcolm Gladwell’s best sellers, Blink (2005), tells us how, instead of spending much time deliberating over a complex problem, we often filter a few bits from an overwhelming disarray of information packets to arrive at a decision and put it into action as though we knew exactly what we were doing, why we were doing it, what our purpose for doing it was, and the nature of the final outcome. We engage in the ‘power of thinking without thinking’. Rather than ponder over an issue, rationally analyzing it before judiciously arriving at a conclusion, in a ‘blink’, we just act; we just do what we do. (with respect to ‘chunked’ signs). Another bestseller, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (2008), studies what really influences our decisions in daily life, as opposed to what we merely think influences them. Ariely uses a wide range of scientific experiments, everyday examples, and anecdotes, and he contemplates the nature of eating, shopping, working, playing, and other life activities, to conclude that when all is said and done: [W]e are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires – with how we want to view ourselves – than with reality. (Ariely 2008: 243)
We might be irrational, the author concludes, but we aren’t simply helpless, if we succeed in becoming more vigilant, and at least a bit more aware of ourselves and our co-participation with others and our world.20 Wrapping it up, tentatively
Hitting a baseball, playing soccer by way of undecidable, free-wheeling Ginga moves, or intercepting a penalty kick, places us in a world where what there is, is nothing until we sense the signs before us, put ourselves on automatic 20
For alternate and highly readable accounts along these lines, both pro and con, see Burton 2008; Chabris, Simons 2010; Gigerenzer 2007; Gilovich 1993; LeGault 2006; Schulz 2010.
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pilot – after countless hours of concrete feeling and sensing and perceiving and conceiving and practicing playful moves. On automatic pilot, our signs are nothing until we and our signs are in the process of becoming, through co-participation. And some new aspect of a world-version emerges. Within this world we are at one with our signs; we are signs interpreting signs that in the process bring about interpretations of their interpreters, us, and in the process we are likewise re-interpreted. The bottom line, once again, is that we and our entire taken-for-granted worlds emerge from the range of all possible possibilities (‘0’) and begin becoming what we will have been becoming as a result of our concrete possibilities (‘ ’) that demand choices (‘ √• ’) and mediation (‘ ’) such that they might create, evoke, provoke, the becoming of signs that are from their very inception always becoming something other. This involves co-participation in the most concrete sense within the coming and going of life situations. Remove any aspect from this entire whole of things, and the process inevitably suffers change; everything is necessary, from the apparently most insignificant to the most important parts of the process, from our automatized moves to pure spontaneity and then to carefully contemplative and analytically conceived decisions. Nothing is for nothing, for it is potentially everything, and everything is at the outset virtually nothing, for what it is, it is not, for it is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. Now, for a radical tangential walk toward a view of concrete life situations, let’s take a brief tour through that feared, much publicized, and sometimes maligned, swine flu pandemic of 2009, whether it was ‘real’ or to a greater or lesser extent trumped up. Such a change, I would deem, is advisable, in order that we may re-enter the world of mere mortals after having contemplated the ethereal atmosphere where nimble athletes and bold physicists do their thing, and in order hopefully to understand how we tacitly as well as consciously process mind-numbingly complex issues and respond to them as if we were operating in automaton fashion. From split-second decisions, to deliberated, yet flawed, interpretation
John Ross, who passed away recently, lived in Mexico City for years and wrote extensively on the Zapatista (EZLN) movement, NAFTA, and the consequences of globalization. Returning to Mexico City in May of 2009 after a brief sojourn in the U. S., he checked in at a hotel where he customarily stayed when entering the city, and was met by a security guard in a surgical mask who proceeded to smear his hands with sanitizing goop as a precaution
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against the newly discovered swine flu. The guard apologized: ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s all a farce, but the boss gave us orders’ (Ross 2009a)21. The first swine flu death had occurred on April 13. Mexico had no facilities for isolating and testing the nature of the virus; so samples were shipped to Canada in order to obtain laboratory results. Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa had as yet issued no health warnings in his own country. And for a good reason. Admission to health problems would severely affect tourism, the nation’s third source of dollars. Fears of drug war violence had already hurt the economy enough. Barack Obama had traveled to Mexico on April 16, and he stayed overnight in the capital city, apparently uninformed of the health danger. He left the city shortly thereafter, but Dr. Felipe Solís of the Anthropology Museum with whom he was in contact, and a secret service agent accompanying him, later succumbed to the flu. In view of this turn of events, the Mexican government pushed the panic button. Schools were closed, bars and restaurants shut their doors, theaters remained empty, Catholic mass was canceled, soccer matches took place in empty stadiums, passengers dwindled in the Metro subway system, and many people took to wearing facemasks – influenced by what they had seen on TV. Calderón went on national TV warning citizens not to kiss or embrace or shake hands or come into any other form of physical contact. The much hyped swine flu soon crossed the border into the U.S., and on April 23 the first death was recorded in Texas. Back in Mexico, opposing political parties were taking advantage of the situation to launch scathing attacks on Calderón and his National Action Party (PAN). Some citizens remained frightened out of their wits, but many were becoming skeptical.22 By mid-May the panic was winding down. Comparison of swine flu to typhoid and Spanish flu epidemics of the past brought them to ask what the panic was all about. Some thought the pharmaceutical industry was involved, with the idea of reaping huge profits; others linked the hype to Obama’s visit, speculating that it was 21
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Ross 2009a is available as ‘The swine flu hype: Mexico’s shock doctrine’. Counterpunch May 25, http://www.counterpunch.com/ross05252009.html. Ross (2009a) writes in this respect that: The swine flu touched home just as the pre-lims to critical mid-term elections were heating up here. Senators, deputies, and candidates of the much-discredited PAN, PRI, and PRD parties became even more unintelligible when they sought to convince voters of their intentions through blue tapabocas [facemasks]. In Mexico City, supporters of arch-rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador from whom the right-winger is thought to have stolen the 2006 presidential election, refused the masks because they were blue, the PAN colors. López Obrador himself was threatened with a heavy fine by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) which stage-managed Calderón’s 2006 flimflam, after he allegedly violated public health edicts by holding a rally attended by 2000 supporters in his native Tabasco. Some accused the prudish PAN of trying to stamp out public kissing – Calderón’s party recently sought to round up exuberant young lovers in Guanajuato where the Street of The Kiss is a popular gathering spot (2009a).
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all a cover-up for the drug violence; still others saw it as an effort to avert attention from the devastating consequences of the recession. This is a remarkable study in nonlinear sign processing yielding multiple divergent, convergent, consonant, and disparate sign meanings, fit for the swirling process depicted in Figure 6. Contriving world-versions What was really going on in Mexico? Obviously there was an epidemic, of sorts. But the subsequent panic in retrospect almost seemed comical. There was rationality rather than rampant irrationality with respect to the reaction, for sure. But it was a flawed rationality, which was taken to rather absurd extremes. Instead of clear-headed information from those in control and those who were supposed to know, there was messy data that was now virtually random, now incomplete, now unrepresentative, now ambiguous, inconsistent, and secondhand. The people were trying to cope, but their behavior turned out to be absurd, hilarious, or even tragic, according to the perspective. It wasn’t so much that they simply didn’t know that got them into a logical logjam; it was a matter of what they (thought they) knew that wasn’t necessarily so, in light of other complementary perspectives (see Gilovich 1993). At any rate, Ross interpreted the epidemic – later labeled a pandemic – as so much ado about nothing, likely a political ploy. He ended his report thus: In 2009, Mexico has been visited by five horses of the Apocalypse – the plunge in oil prices, steep declines in moneys sent by Mexicans working in the U. S., the wreckage of the tourist industry, a grotesque and ghoulish drug war, and now the so-called swine flu. Whether generalized disdain for the political class will translate into more visceral rebellion remains to be seen. (Ross 2009a)
He went on to observe that, historically, the Mexican political system had exploded every hundred years on the tenth year of the century, most recently, in 1810 with the Independence Movement of Liberation from Spain, and 1910, with the Mexican Revolution. His query about 2010 revealed his gloomy skepticism regarding the politicians who were running the country: ‘With only 226 days left until 2010, the future is now’.23 23
As a matter of history regarding pigs and deaths, Spanish Conquistador Hernando de Soto (1469–1542), introduced pigs to North America when he did away with native peoples in a pillaging march through what is present-day Alabama and Georgia. Those pigs likely carried flu and a number of other European diseases against which the natives had little to no immunity. It likely produced an epidemic, that had been duplicated and was to be duplicated many times over in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies that ended up killing untold millions (Ross 2009b, available as ‘Making another world possible’, a talk given at the Havens Center, University of Wisconsin, March 27, http://www.havenscenter.org/vsp/john_ross)
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And the present? It is the product of ‘shock doctrine’, from the title of Ross’s internet entry inspired by Naomi Klein’s bestseller (2008). Klein observes that during a time of panic and even hysteria – terrorism, wars, economic upheavals, natural disasters – astute politicians and multinational corporations put policies in place that would never have had a chance of enjoying public appeal during less muddled times. The tactic? Prey on people when they are in the most confused, perplexed, and hopeless state, when they are looking for simple answers to complex, bewildering problems. Enlighten them with mind-soothing stories replete with anecdotes, parables and verbal litanies, calm their fears by convincing them their way is God’s way and all the others are evil and out to get them. Give them a simple guide to lead them out of their confusion; give them hope when they can’t see past their hopelessness; give them promises of a way out in the future when they can hardly make do from one day to the next. The confounded are thus offered free market therapies that, over the long haul, take on the countenance of shock indoctrination. The victims impetuously ‘blink’ and react before they have become aware of what is actually going on; they ‘predictably irrationally’ jump before they think and before they have any awareness of the consequences of their action. In other words, they slither along the semiosic path: ‘0 √• + − Ψ Signness’. In Ross’s disrespectful, politically incorrect, bitingly ironic prose, he shows how the Felipe Calderón government uses the ‘shock treatment’ to close eyes, soothe emotions, and lock down minds. He hypothetically asks if the ‘swine flu farfulla [gibberish]’ might be the ‘tipping point that pushes Mexicans to renewed revolution?’ The response must be an assured ‘No!’, if by revolution Ross is thinking of something comparable to the 1910 apocalypse. But if he has in mind an elevated level of consciousness on the part of the Mexican people of the sort Gladwell and Ariely suggest, then pressure by an increasingly skeptical public, largely nonviolent but inevitably punctuated by intermittent periods of violence, might with varying degrees of success ensue in Mexico and a host of other societies – the Iran protests after the reelection of Ahmadinejad mark a beginning in that direction. Manners of world-version making Putting Calderón, Obama, and Ross’s deviating interpretations of the swine dilemma within the context of Wheeler’s three umps story, imagine that it is as if Calderón were authoritatively saying ‘I interpret it the way it is’ – or at least that’s how he presented the situation to the Mexican people (this posture has been the Mexican political way since formulation of its one-party system under the present part name of the Institutionalized Revolutionary
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Party [PRI] from 1929 to 2000 and on up to the present) (Castañeda, Smithies 2001; Meyer et al. 2006). Imagine it is as if Obama were to say ‘I interpret it the way I sense it and rationalize it’ – which is in a nutshell the way he is able to maintain a modicum of charisma and at the same time a serious and sober-faced logical mode of argumentation. And imagine it is as if Ross, who is more rhetorically enterprising since he has virtually nothing to lose, were writing ‘It ain’t nothing ‘til I interpret it’ – that’s how he co-participates with Calderón and Obama and how they all co-participate with the entire H1N1 scene, given their particular world-versions.24 To put the matter bluntly, in composite form, these three stances involve ‘objectivism’ and ‘realism’ merging with ‘subjectivism’ and ‘idealism’. The first ump’s objectivizing the ‘way it is’, if elevated to dogma status, could become inflexible, authoritarian, and politically dangerous. The second ump’s subjectivizing or idealizing the ‘way I sees it’ introduces opinion and possible controversy, presenting the possibility of entry into the open arena of human dialogue. Paraphrasing the third ump, ‘it’s nothing, until there is co-participation with some interpreting agent’, increases the context a giant step. It complementarily coalesces ‘objectivism’ and ‘idealism’, while merging the interpreting agent and others and their world-version into an interdependent, interrelated interactive whole. To save face, Calderón would like to think he is a no-nonsense ‘objectivist’ with his feet firmly planted in ‘realistic’ responses to his country’s stubborn problems; if you don’t believe it, just ask him, and his answer will be motivated by a lot of customary Mexican political rhetoric. Obama is often considered a straight-talker who would like to think he ‘objectivizingly’ tells it the way he sees it; this tends to alienate him from those citizens who long for a Reaganesque personal touch. Of course Calderón and Obama are politicians, with their head always a few steps away from the chopping block, and they feel duty-bound to say whatever is most effective in order to impress their audience that their way is the right way. In contrast, Ross’s flaunting personal touches in his narrative by and large dissolve the customary virgules between ‘objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism’ and ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’, as well as between himself and his world-version in interdependent, interrelated interaction with other world-versions. His posture is a matter of both-and: he takes a host of verbal possibilities into account, and playfully selects those that best serve his irony, his sarcasm, his 24
Admittedly, this story about Calderón, Obama, and Ross is in part factual and in part imaginary. My motives are illustrative; the attempt is to place them within the timespace context of Wheeler’s umps and Peirce’s complementary coalescence of ‘objectivism’ and ‘realism’ and ‘subjectivism’ and ‘idealism’ into his philosophical posture he labels ‘objective idealism’. I trust my story will be taken in that vein.
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occasional parodying posture, his biting wit, mockery and cynicism, at least for the moment. At the same time, he is of neither-nor inclination: he lets his readers know that none of the responses to the H1N1 hype faithfully tells the full story, for the truth is always something else, and his rhetorical pyrotechnics serve implicitly to bear this out. In other words, Ross’s world-version is co-participatory through and through. The Calderón-Obama-Ross blend, moreover, illustrates that culture cannot but be in part political, and politics cannot be divorced from culture. The act of processing cultural meaning is in the arena of hierarchical political and economic contexts, and it will always impact the existing power configuration. Calderón, Obama, and Ross: politics and the smug certainty, yet absurdity, hilarity, and bizarre consequences it creates, are indelibly interdependently, interrelatedly and interactively. Calderón, Obama, and Ross – each in his own way whether he knows it or not and whether he likes it or not – are co-participants within the world-version with which they have collaborated, in their process of becoming coalescent (for comparable phenomena on the Latin American scene, see Alvarez et al. 1998, Yúdice 2003). This combination of Chapters Two and Three with the CalderónObama-Ross trio in this chapter in a roundabout way affords a vague implication of Peirce’s qualification of his thinking as ‘objective idealism’, about which at least a few preliminary words should be forthcoming, especially since it is linked to the idea of co-participancy. (I must also hasten to point out that by including Ross with two elected presidents I don’t intend to elevate Ross’s stature, for he doesn’t need it; nor do I wish to demean Calderón’s or Obama’s lofty status, for according to some onlookers they don’t deserve it; rather, I simply wish to elucidate the notion of co-participation through an introduction of ‘objective idealism’.) ‘Objective idealism’: more than meets the eye
‘Objective idealism’ must initially strike one as a strange blend indeed. However, Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom (1979) believe they have the key, labeling ‘objective idealism’ as a convergence of ‘ontological idealism’ and ‘methodological objectivism’. Let me attempt very briefly to elaborate, hopefully without doing injustice to the philosophical terms. Ontology (the nature of Being, the Beingness of the world’s ‘stuff ’) ultimately relies on faith, faith that what there is in the world is of essentially fixed nature. Methodology is a matter of concrete practice in the hard-knock physical world. Yet methodology in the final analysis relies on some tentative notion of what there possibly is. Which is to say that over the long haul, methodology relies
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on theory – itself ultimately based on faith – as I shall suggest in the following pages. And if we accept the post-analytic assumption that our entrenched theories, and our premonitions, presuppositions, proclivities and prejudices let us see what we see, then what we see is at least in part ‘ideal,’ an ‘idealism’ based on faith, ‘subjectivity’, and it is at least to a minor degree ‘real,’ a ‘reality’, presumably ‘objective’, governing practice. ‘Objective idealism’, I would suggest, is not merely a collection of apparently partly-to-wholly incompatible metaphysical postures, but rather, it entails their complementary coalescence bringing about the emergence of something new and different that is neither entirely commensurate with the one nor with the other nor with all the other possible alternatives. In short, it is in the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861–1947) ‘creative advance of nature’25 (Whitehead 1925). According to Peirce, ‘reality,’ that is, the myriad collection of all possible ‘semiotically real’ worlds, reflects ‘mind-stuff.’ Or perhaps as physicist Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) puts it, the ‘real’, as we’ve made it, is ‘mind-stuff ’ (1958a, 1958b). But since this ‘mind-stuff ’ is never static and never terminal, we must be satisfied with the admission that ‘reality,’ our ‘realism’ regarding ‘world-stuff,’ insofar as we can know it and insofar as we know it ‘semiotically’ at any given space-time juncture, has ‘many faces’ (Putnam 1987). These faces are incessantly changing, sometimes even without our consciously altering our ‘mind-stuff,’ and in spite of our concerted effort to arrest such change.26 Co-participation revisited The notion that we are more than simply actors, that we are co-participants on the world’s stage, appears to present no problem. Or does it? If we take Wheeler’s quantum cosmology at face value, we as actor-co-participants bring the world-as-meaningful-world into existence. In other words, the world as a whole lifts itself by its own bootstraps, we as the world’s contemplators included. This is tantamount to a Grand Interpreter saying what the world is as a Grand Interpretant, but in order that this may be made possible, 25
26
In addition to Peirce, and in general terms regarding my sources with respect to the following pages, on tacit knowing, belief and subjectivism, I’ve drawn from Michael Polanyi 1958; on methodology as ad hoc, make-shift, and in part improvised on the spot, I appropriate some of Paul Feyerabend’s (1975, 1981, 1987) ideas; I’ve gained insight from Ian Hacking’s (2004) views on ontology, regarding dissolution of distinction customarily marked by a virgule; I give a nod to Richard Bernstein 1983, 1992 on his ‘beyond’ Manichean pairs of doctrines; on postanalytic philosophy lurking behind the following words I especially owe a debt to Rajchman and West 1985; and for further on complementary coalescence, see merrell 2007, 2010. The remaining muddle, I must confess, is of my own making. For ‘realism’ linked to ‘idealism’ in Peirce, CP 1: 284-353, 5: 264-310, 388-405, 438-53, 6: 10263, see also Boler 1964; Dozoretz 1979; Hookway 1985; Rosenthal 1994; Smith 1983; and Turley 1977.
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Interpreter and Interpretant must somehow be coterminous. They interdependently, interrelatedly, interactively merge, one into the other, to compose the vast, unthinkable Cosmic Sign (CP 6.185–222). As such, they simply cannot be separated – though Manley Thompson (1952) takes pains artificially to separate them in his critique of Peirce. On the one hand, how most appropriately can we reconcile the subjectivity-objectivity and idealism-realism problems? On the other hand, how can we account for the notion, propagated either implicitly or explicitly throughout this volume, of ourselves as re-enchanted navigators in semiosis, in a co-participatory universe? The very co-participatory idea involves perception, for sure. And the idea of perception seems to force involvement with a perceiver and that perceived, as well as presumably a knowing subject and the object known. The physical environment can only have an effect on the co-participant by way of offering it a combination of stimuli that are specific to the respective community of which that co-participant is a member. This is the subjective nature of co-participation regarding the co-participant’s perceived and conceived world-version. There is not simply a subject here and an object there and generation of meaning that takes its place somewhere else in some ethereal sphere with all meanings. Perception involves a loop; it is circular; it is feedback oriented in the nonlinear sense. It calls for a feeling and sensation on the part of the subject as meaning receiver, which leads to that subject’s creating anticipations from past experiences, a concept, and an interpretation, of whatever signs happen to have emerged. This falls in line with Bohr’s observation that: ‘All our ordinary verbal expressions bear the stamp of our customary forms of perception’ (Bohr 1961: 19). And, as if Albert Einstein (1879–1955) for some strange reason happened to harmonize with Bohr on this issue, we have from him the notion that: ‘It is the theory which decides what we can observe’ (Bohr quoted in Heisenberg 1971: 63). For a third voice in order to create a syncopated beat, Louis de Broglie (1892–1987) writes: ‘May it not be universally true that the concepts produced by the human mind, when formulated in a slightly vague form, are roughly valid for Reality, but that when extreme precision is aimed at, they become ideal forms whose real content tends to vanish away?’ (de Broglie 1939: 280). The upshot is that concepts, as (subjective, partly idealistic) free creations of the mind, let us (somewhat objectively and realistically) see what we sense, perceive and conceive. If what we sense, perceive and conceive is no more than vague and even ambiguous conceptual and linguistic windowdressing, then it might march to the tune of the Big Band going by the name of ‘objective reality’. However, language is not up to the task; it is always a
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little out of step, and at times it drunkenly stumbles about. That is, if language is passed off as of perfectly honed clarity and precision, then it will have taken its leave of the physical world to engender its own ‘ideal reality’. Putting this in terms of Peirce’s ‘objective idealism’, allow me to suggest that: (1) if methodologically ‘objectivist’ results are (erroneously) taken as rock-solid proof of the theory and the observations tied to that theory (in the guise of ‘I tells it the way it is’, or ‘I tells it the way I sees it’), then ontological ‘idealism’ exercises its force; (2) if methodology takes a back seat to the conception of a flowing, incessantly varying notion of some elusive sort of ontologically ‘real’ world within the context of a given community’s form of life, it is indication that the methodology has become flexible and hardly conducive to the rigors absolute clarity demands of it, and that ontology is not Being, but at most the Becoming becoming something other than what it was becoming (in the guise of ‘It ain’t nothing ‘til I tell it’). So, combining ontology and methodology, we become like Wheeler’s third ump: our world-version is the consequence of our co-participation with our universe; we, the others of our community, and the physical world we inhabit, self-organize, lifting ourselves up by the seat-of-our-pants, within the processual whole. A further example complementing previous remarks in this chapter is in order. For this example I turn to the strange case of ‘phlogiston theory’. When what we (think) is, is becoming something else
Phlogiston theory was a seventeenth century effort to explain what happens when a substance burns (or in today’s scientific jargon, ‘oxidizes’). The theory held that flammable materials contain a mysterious substance, ‘phlogiston’, which is devoid of color, odor, and taste. Strangely enough, phlogiston was also conceived to be of negative weight; thus when it was liberated from a flammable substance when burning, that substance gained weight (in contrast, according to oxidization, when burning, the substance combines with oxygen, of positive weight, and for this reason it takes on additional mass). Phlogiston ruled for some time as the only viable explanation for combustion. Then along came Joseph Priestley (1733–1803) and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Through their individual and litigious efforts and those of certain other investigators, oxidation theory emerged – Priestley originally termed oxygen ‘dephlogisticated air’ (Conant 1950). Taking these two theories into consideration within a time-dependent yet timelessly conceived context, there is one theory before (Phlogiston) and another theory after (Oxygen). Call Phlogiston theory ‘A’ and Oxygen theory ‘Not-A’,
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and we have a proposition and its negation. Before, Phlogiston was king; after, what it was not, Oxygen, took charge. This formulation entails the Principle of Non-Contradiction, and without expanding the context, we have the ExcludedMiddle to boot, since apparently there can be no third possibility. But sharpening our focus and expanding our context further, we note that prior to Phlogiston and Oxygen, both theories had been in principle equally possible (as possible possibilities), along with other alternate accounts of combustion. Thus, within the range of all possible possibilities, Non-Contradiction becomes slippery. We find ourselves conceding that what was possible and once became known as ‘phlogiston’ later gave way to another more convenient possibility, which became known as ‘oxygen’. But this ‘oxygen’ (let us call it ‘oxygen1’) is not the same as what was possible and we now know to be our ‘oxygen’ (oxygen2), after atomic and subatomic theory experienced various tremors of earthquake proportions. From this perspective, we can say that what was originally ‘oxygen1’ is now something else entirely. Thus the Excluded-Middle begins melting, since other possibilities can always stand some chance eventually of emerging and replacing today’s ‘oxygen2’, that, previously, was also no more than a possibility. In this light we have: ‘Today’s oxygen2 is neither yesterday’s oxygen1 nor is it phlogiston’ (neither ‘A’ nor ‘Not-A’ from within a broader context of knowing). In other words, what is now considered ‘oxygen2’ is by no means what used to go by the name of ‘phlogiston’; nor is it the same as what was considered ‘oxygen1’ up to the first decades of the twentieth century. This is a matter of neither ‘A’ nor ‘Not-A’, but now something else, something that was once a possibility – continuing to be termed ‘oxygen’ – that emerged as something else altogether. In other words, at a particular historical timespace slice the gas, now known as ‘oxygen2’ consisting eight protons and eight electrons, is neither ‘phlogiston’ nor ‘oxygen1’ as the terms were taken during certain times past, because these days we have a new theory of the atom – that was once a possibility with the field of possible possibilities including ‘oxygen1’ of old as well as ‘phlogiston’. Moreover, it is a safe bet that at some future time ‘oxygen2’ will be neither precisely what it is today nor what it was in the past, but something new and different. It’s a matter of process Putting these equations in one basket in view of Wheeler’s umps, we have: (1) ‘A’! (Phlogiston, and not ‘Not-A’, or Oxygen [‘like it is’]); (2) ‘Not-A’! (Oxygen, and not ‘A’, or Phlogiston [‘like I see it, but it might possibly be something else down the road’]); (3) Both ‘A’ and ‘Not-A’ (as timeless possible possibilities before either Phlogiston or Oxygen1 or Oxygen2 had emerged [‘it ain’t nothing, actually…’]); and (4) Neither ‘A’ nor ‘Not-A’ (but rather,
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something else that will have been at some future timespace juncture in the process of becoming [‘…‘til I say what it is’]). There is assertion of either the one or the other; there is negation either of the one or the other; there is inclusion of both the one and the other as possibilities; and there is assertion of neither the one nor the other, due to the (‘idealistic’) creation of something else was conceived (now ‘objectively’, now ‘idealistically’,…) as a plausible alternative conception of the world, it was put to the test (presumably ‘objectively’, as it were), and it subsequently took its rightful place among other ‘real’ (‘objective’) world-versions. In a Peircean manner of putting this, there is ontological and epistemological ‘idealism’, and there is theoretical and methodological ‘objectivism’ – and, to boot, Peirce’s ‘pragmatic maxim’ as well as Wheeler’s co-participation and Calderón-Obama-Ross are implied. Or in formal rendition: ‘0 ∅ √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’. In the Wheeler manner of putting this issue, ‘I tells it the way it is’ and ‘I tells it the way I sees it’ of phlogiston theory becomes ‘It ain’t nothing ‘til I say what it is’ of subsequent theories, and all other theories that, through their interpreters’ interventions, will at some timespace juncture enter into the process of becoming something other than what they were becoming, through complementary coalescence. All told, ‘objective idealism’, somewhat in line with Davidson’s ‘radical interpretation’ as described in Chapter One, isn’t simply a mere matter of incommensurability between world-versions and particular timespace contexts and co-participants in the process of communication. The rich processual complexity of signs and their meanings emerges to meet us at every turn, and we try to cope with them as best we can: coping, which flows along within some world-version or some new emergent world-version. Now for another syncopated, off-beat return to Calderón, Obama, and Ross. When interpretation is complementarily coalescent
In our imaginary world consisting of Calderón, Obama, and Ross, and in the section on phlogiston, we created a set of complementary ‘characters’ and their modes of interpretation that can help explain the upper diagram of Figure 6 more effectively. As described above, the diagram begins with the series depicting a merely possible sign: ‘0 √ + … Signness’. Then an actual sign emerges into the light of day, ‘R O I …’, as does its respective sign-maker (M) and -taker (T). But the process can’t stop there, since the sign, like all signs, is always in the process of becoming something other. During
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this process, the sign enters the same effervescent, undulating and slithering and flowing pathway from possible possibilities (both the one and the other … and … and … n), to become actualized from one possibility to the potential exclusion of all others (either/or), and finally it opens up to other possible alternatives (neither this … nor … nor … n). As described from within the historical context containing Phlogiston and Oxygen theories, this follows the combination of contradiction embracing through complementarity (at the lower portion of the Figure 6 lattice), Non-Contradiction or Contradiction barring according to bivalent either/or imperatives (at the middle portion), and Included-Middle adoption and tolerance that keeps the process alive (at the upper portion). In other words, we can remain within Calderón’s world-version, within Obama’s, or within Ross’s. Or we can try to hold both the one … and the other … and the other in our mental grasp. Or we can embrace the notion that the scene will always at some point incorporate neither the one … nor the other … nor the other, for there is always some alternative, or set of alternatives one or more of which is ready and waiting to take its place where and when they can. Figure 6 depicts an ongoing process that reveals no beginning and promises no end. For we, like Calderón, Obama, Ross, and all signs and their interpretations as in the case of phlogiston theory, are co-participatory through and through. In other words, all three umps are inextricably caught up in their co-participatory world, as are Calderón-Obama-Ross; and to boot, this co-participatory world includes both Oxygen and Phlogiston, ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’, ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’, ontology and methodology; it is all ‘objectively idealistic’. Qualifying the equation further I must mention, in retrospect, that the three individuals in question, Calderón, Obama, and Ross, are a study in contrasts. Felipe Calderón is a Harvardeducated lawyer and should have been, it would appear, a shoo-in candidate for the presidency. However, he was often dismissed as a hopeless case by many within the ranks of his National Action Party (PAN), and his victory for the presidential term from 2006 to 2012 was finally confirmed by the Federal Electoral Tribunal weeks after much political and legal wrangling. Short on charisma, and at odds with then President Vicente Fox (2000– 2006), also of PAN, who favored another candidate, Calderón nevertheless ran a ruthlessly aggressive campaign against Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), who was often touted as the next Hugo Chávez in the Americas. Calderón pledged an iron-fist
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fight against crime and drugs, a migration agreement with the U.S., a campaign against poverty, and expanded public health services and education in the poor communities – all of which were severely put into question in later months and up to the present. His bland countenance and dour approach to the public has been met with considerably less than wild enthusiasm. His direct, no-nonsense matter-of-fact articulation places him in the lower level of the mid-section of the upper diagram in Figure 6. This level consists of words ordinarily meant for literal meaning and direct interrelation with their respective objects, acts, and happenings. In contrast, we have Barack Obama, at the outset deemed Mr. Charisma personified, though this image met with somewhat less than universal acclaim later. During his campaign, Obama clearly had the edge when it came to that magical quality, comparable to a ‘rock-star’. Even the most jaded reporters wrote that he was something rare, endowed with magnetism much like that possessed by John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. This ‘star power’ is akin to that gift great actors have. Warren Bennis and Andy Zelleke (2008) write that, according to legend, ‘when Franklin D. Roosevelt was introduced to Orson Welles, he said graciously: ‘You know, Mr. Welles, you are the greatest actor in America.’ ‘Oh, no, Mr. President,’ Welles replied, ‘you are.’ What Welles recognized in Roosevelt is that political leadership is performance art as surely as is acting on stage or in films.’ In the beginning at least, when Obama spoke, he was able to turn a room of strangers into a tight-knit community, as if in a community of ticket-holders viewing an enthralling movie in the theater. Charismatic leaders are by nature often suffused with excessive optimism; they purvey not fear but bright future possibilities. And they do it with rhetorical language, language replete with innuendos, and accompanied by plenty of voice inflections and body language, all with a compelling flair. When Obama’s talents for charisma are combined with his capacity to unfold an impressive logically and rationally cogent argument, it might appear that there is a contradiction here. Not so, however; at least not usually. His multiple talents place him at the upper level of the sign becoming lattice of Figure 6, where the first word (R a) is transformed by its original interpretation (Ia) to yield a rhetorically and nonverbally enhanced word (Rb), with its respective object (Ob) and interpretation (Ib).27 27
You have undoubtedly noticed that this lattice is nonlinear in that there is no one-dimensional sequence from R a–Oa–Ia to Rb–Ob–Ib and beyond. The interdependent, interrelated interaction between all the actors in the lattice – vicariously, human co-participants as well – follows a non-bivalent, non-Boolean, nonlinear, context-dependent logic of complementarity of the sort that, due to time and space limitations in this essay, I will deal with in some detail in Chapter 16 (for further, see Heelan 1970a, 1970b, 1971, 1983; and merrell 1991a, 1995, 2007, 2010).
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Now re-enter John Ross. Author, poet, freelance journalist and activist residing in Mexico since 1985, he has written a vast collection of reports and a number of books on NAFTA, EZLN, and Mexico-U.S. relations. Born in Greenwich Village in 1938, his young years were surrounded by jazz, expressionist painting, Beat poetry, and radical politics. Who better than John Ross could exemplify the upper echelons of the Figure 6 lattice? His bombastic yet ironic style, his go-for-the-throat rhetorical creativity, his frequent mixture of colloquial Spanish words and phrases sometimes with parenthetical English equivalents and sometimes left for the reader to try and decipher, his tactical conceptual maneuvers and strategic leaps of imagination, create a linguistic environment within which the reader is never satisfied with either/or possibilities and ambiguities, but rather, the options are polymorphic in terms of both-and and neither-nor (Ross 2009b). Three sign makers, Calderón, Obama and Ross. Three complementary semiosic paths. Three interpretations (interpretants) mediating signs and their diverse objects, acts and happenings. Nonlinear process bearing witness to complementary world-versions engendered from diverse signs diverging and converging to make up one vague, ambiguous, ever-changing conglomerate sign leading onward and upward as depicted in Figure 6, bearing witness to the co-participating nature of semiosis. That is to say, bearing witness to the process’s emerging out of the field of possible possibilities, becoming mere possibilities, mediating tripodic interdependent, interrelated interaction, and actual signs co-participating with any and all sign takers that might be ready and willing tacitly or deliberately and conscientiously to process some minute portion of their possible meanings. It’s what we all do; it’s who we are. A view from within the lattice In sum, at the lowermost point of the Figure 6 lattice there are no more than possibilities, from which this,… and that,… and the other,… and… n, can enjoy virtually equal possible status. Then words and other signs emerge to take their place in the mid portion of the lattice; we find ourselves in the sphere or customary bivalent either/or imperatives; and we are nudged toward one of two possible choices. But things begin becoming loose and fluid, as other alternate possibilities never cease their emerging, and decisions and choice become increasingly difficult. Now we begin entering into the realm of figurative rather than literal language, which begins its subtle enchanting enticement and cajolery. Finally, at the upper portion, we come to realize that the possible choices
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are becoming mind-boggling in their variety and their nuanced intricacy and delicacy. Whatever choice we wish to make, it soon becomes something else, something that is neither this,… nor that, nor the other,… nor,… n, but something else – from the Included-Middle. On the one hand, we might be led toward an appreciation and even some sort of re-enchantment in view of this cascading rush of complexity; on the other hand, we might shrink back, in search of lost certainty and security, retreating into dogmatic postures of a variety of sorts, or perhaps even into nihilism. John Ross, of course, appears to take the former path, which leads out into the receding horizon, without end; yet his socio-political posture is adamant, to say the least. When interpretation must be virtually instantaneous
One might wish to contend that the Calderón-Obama-Ross case has no place among my examples from baseball and soccer. By a somewhat comparable token, Wheeler’s 20 Questions is a semiotic far cry from his three umpires’ story. Why the apparent conflict here? Actually, there is no conflict; rather, we’re dealing with radically diverse semiotic processes. The sports scenes involve extralinguistic signs and almost immediate, ‘chunked’, improvised on-the-spot, automatic pilot-like bodymind responses, that are basically of iconic and indexical nature, with hardly any apparent distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. The swine flu episode and its consequences, lending itself to Calderón-Obama-Ross rhetorical flourishes, allows for subtly crafted responses for the purpose of enhancing cultural iconic images and swaying public opinion by means of rhetorical flares and linguistic cajolery by prioritizing symbolic signs that can be conveniently labeled ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘realistic’ or ‘idealistic’ (much the same can be said of phlogiston theory as well). Sports usually require split-second decisions; the swine flu debacle involves Davidsonian prior theory – passing theory interpretations shrouded in linguistic window-dressing, accompanied by visual, auditory, and other iconic and indexical cues and signs. Yet, when reminiscing over the baseball performance when in the local bar, the umps can then enter into dialogue regarding their observations and general philosophy of the game, quite possibly with symbolic rhetorical aplomb approaching that of the presidents of Mexico and the United States and Señor Ross. By an inverse token, the loquacious purveyors of verbal messages, justification, and articulation, cannot operate effectively virtually without contexts, without equally interdependent, interrelated interaction within those contexts. Within these contexts,
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like umps and baseball and soccer professionals, they must proficiently engage in rapid-fire responses to whatever questions and problems that happen to pop up. They all begin with feeling and sensing and they end with perceptual judgment and conceptual and analytical self-confidence. All are equally co-participants in the complementary coalescence of signs becoming other signs. All signs and all sign-making and -taking include all other signs and modes of semiosic process. All is intimately interconnected. Moreover, the third ump’s statement, Wheeler’s 20 Questions co-participatory game, baseball and soccer plays, and the Calderón-Obama-Ross and phlogiston stories: all suggest that what (we think there) is, is often what there isn’t. For, emerging from pure possibilities, then suffering the frailties and fallibility of human decision-making – whether split-second or deliberative – and entering into the light of day as signs and mental and physical worlds and swarming, mind-bogglingly complex interpretations, we and our worlds usually manage to make our way along as best we can, usually rather painfully, and sometimes even pathetically, but we somehow get on with it, whether spontaneously and extralinguistically or through presumably careful analysis and perhaps discussion surrounding the possibilities before us (Gilovich 1993). In all cases, the process involves: ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’. The implications of Figure 6 and the following Figures, of Wheeler’s stories, of soccer and baseball, of phlogiston theory, and of the flu frenzy in Mexico, set the pattern for more elaborate stories along comparable lines, in the following chapters.
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Chapter Five
Is mind changing, or is it the world? Chapter Five. Is mind changing, or is it the world? If in view of the previous chapters we can’t know the world exactly as it is (or better, is becoming), and if our knowledge is invariably tinged with a note of fallibilism, then it stands to reason that our posture should evince a note of skepticism – and here, of course, with a respectful nod, we must take our leave from Davidson’s optimistic journey toward ‘truth’. This chapter briefly entertains skepticism as a philosophical mind-set by way of Roman philosopher Sextus Empiricus and Buddhist thinker, Nāgārjuna, in view of the suspension and unsuspension of belief and disbelief, while avoiding free-fall into nihilism. The complementarity of Nāgārjuna’s ‘conventional truths’ and ‘Absolute Truth’ enter the picture, in light of realism and relativism and objectivism and subjectivism, which ushers in Nāgārjuna’s ‘middle way’ between any and all contradictory alternatives. In order to render proper account of the ‘middle way’, discussion turns to Nāgārjuna’s interpretation of emptiness. This further reveals the inadequacy of holding exclusively to the tenets of classical logical principles, and it opens the door to additional meditation on ‘tacit knowing’ developed by Michael Polanyi. Confluence of minds
The traditional Western view up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has it that a disembodied mind senses an objective world as undisturbed, and in the best of all worlds, unperturbed. Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1734–1804) scrutinized this view and found it lacking. Kant reasoned that there must be some irreducible breach between the world as sensed, perceived, and conceived, and how it really is (is becoming) in and of itself. We can never know the world precisely as it is (is becoming), though we can acquire edited versions of it that have been filtered through the mind’s sieve that separates the wheat from the chaff. Kant eventually arrived at the idea that mind does something when it processes information coming from the outside world. Mind is not simply a detached, neutral contemplator of the world; it has a set of pigeon-holes into which sensations are
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packed. Kant’s verdict? Our world-version – our perception and conception of the world – is inexorably biased by the limitations of our sensations and perceptions. In order to make sense of many aspects of our world, it seems second nature for us to establish figure-ground relations. For example, there are lines of demarcation dividing Figure 10 into equal yet complementary black and white areas. The figure gives us two basic possibilities. Which area is figure and which is ground? Either the one or the other would be a legitimate response. Or, we can say that the imFigure 10. Complemenage can function as both figure and ground, but not tarity. at the same time. Or, we might wish to surmise that neither the one nor the other of the possibilities is necessarily either figure or ground, but that it is we who do the classifying; we construct either figure or ground regarding either black or white, according to our whims or our wishes. The same can be said of the Necker cube: its face is now ‘up’,… now ‘down’,… now ‘up’,… and so on. It is either the one orientation or the other, it is both of them, intermittently, and it is neither the one nor the other, for it is simply a set of 12 lines at various angles with respect to one another, all slapped onto a two-dimensional plane. What about the ambiguous rabbit-duck as in Figure 11 with which Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889– 1951) is often identified? Likewise. It is the one; it is the other; it is both; and it is neither. The whole of modern art, to a greater or lesser extent, has exploited this sort of ambiguity. Most particularly, op art uses the medium to create an effervescent, oscil- Figure 11. Rabbitlating, scintillating, dancing now the one,… now Duck ambiguity. the other,… effect. The brain might wish to see a static image, as is customarily the case (Figure 12). But it can’t help seeing it in perpetual movement; it moves, yet it stays the same; the more it moves the more it stays the same – the ‘Moiré effect’ (comparable to Image 1, or ‘’). The brain has a penchant for seeing the image in term of static space, and timelessly so. But in time, it seems to be in motion. It is static neither regarding timeless space nor spaceless time. Time isn’t the author of apparent Figure 12. Dynamicchanges in space nor does some silly putty form of static image.
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space bring about or cause changes in time. Yet in most instances the brain seems to want changeless three-dimensional space, and time ticking away in linear, chronometric order. The brain expends energy in its effort to see space and time in the customary manner, and also to get an idea of what goes as causality. Armed with a comparable sense of space, time, causality (and number and Euclidean geometry to boot), Kant posited that our brains are ‘hard wired’ to sense, perceive, and conceive the world in terms of innate, unalterable categories. We don’t learn to sense, perceive, and conceive in this particular manner by raw experience; they are the very ground of our experience. Regarding space, Kant held an abiding belief in linear Euclidean geometry; with respect to time, it could be none other than Newtonian chronometric time; concerning causality, once again, linearity dictates held true as far as he was concerned. Unfortunately, Kant’s choices didn’t pan out as expected, as neither did Euclidean geometry as a catch-all for scientific theories and practices, linear Newtonian time, or linear cause-and-effect sequences. Classical NewtonianEuclidean scientists generally thought concepts of space, time, and causality were not merely pre-programmed in the brain; they were of the very nature of the physical world ‘out there’. This scientific world-version was thrown for a loop during the first decades of the twentieth century. Relativity theory availed itself of other sorts of geometry, most notably, the curved, amorphous space of Riemannian geometry. Time became conceived as radically non-linear, and inextricably fused with space. And causality ceased invariably to yield pre-determinable and predictable effects; rather, an entire range of effects were expressed in terms of probabilities. To make matters worse, quantum theory, particularly of the Bohr Copenhagen variety, took its leave of strictly defined bivalent classical logical principles holding tightly and covetously to Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle. Needless to say, all this came as a blow to the confidence of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers who were wishing for immutable, crystal-clear absolute truth. Non-Euclidean geometry’s impact on the arts, especially painting, has been the topic of an outpouring of books and articles over the past decades.28 Most notably, many scholars write that the new geometries’ radically altering notions of space and time have inspired Cubism – although Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) occasionally denied it: 28
See especially Galison, Jones 1998; Hayles 1984; Henderson 1983; Robbin 2006; Shlain 1991; Szamosi 1986; Vargish, Mook 1999; Waddington 1970.
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Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot have been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it. (Chipp 1968: 265)
It isn’t so much that the sciences inspired painting and the other arts during the first decades of the twentieth century. Rather, in all aspects of the quest to know ourselves and our world, the Kantian ‘hard wired’ NewtonianEuclidean-Cartesian brain has made way for deeper human intuition giving rise to other possibilities that embrace ambiguity, vagueness, inconsistency, incompleteness, and multivalent rather than bivalent ‘logics’.29 The question bears repeating: Is mind changing, or is it the world? But first came skepticism
Yes, the very idea that mind changes or the world changes or both change ushers in what could be taken as a trivial or perhaps even an ominous note of skepticism, depending on the eye of the beholder. Roman physician and skeptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus (c. 160–210 CE) (1933) tells us we should suspend judgment with respect to any and all beliefs. We should neither affirm them as true nor affirm them as false. Solely in this manner can we hope to attain peace of mind. Otherwise, if we are honest with ourselves, we can’t help but oscillate between the either and the or, between the validity or the invalidity, of a given belief. This is one variation of Pyrrhonian skepticism. Yet, we have a propensity to think and act along pathways of least resistance due to entrenched habits, whether as individuals or in line with conventions sanctioned by the community to which we belong. When habits tend to govern thought and action, they are by and large outside sensations and outside the aware and self-aware mind. What is thought and done is thought and done as a matter of course. So, to the question, ‘How can we hope to suspend judgment with respect to that of which we are not consciously aware?’, a Pyrrhonian answer would be, ‘The best we can do is report that “It seems to me that this is the way things are”’. This, of course, doesn’t imply objective knowledge about ‘the way things are’. If I say ‘This lemonade is too sour’, my judgment is largely subjective. For somebody else, the lemonade might taste ‘Just right’. In both
29
From a diversity of perspectives, Barrow 2005; Kern 1983; Miller 2001; Priest 1987, 2006; Rescher, Brandom 1979.
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cases, no necessary truth is stated regarding the inherent nature of lemonade in general. Such a posture, it would appear, is in line with Wheeler’s second ump, though the Pyrrhonian would take his ‘It seems to me that…’ to a more extreme level of doubt, in contrast to the first ump for whom what there is, is what he calls, clearly, distinctly, and objectively. The Pyrrhonian would, however, still remain a long shot from the third ump, who holds that there is nothing until she interprets it. The Pyrrhonian remains skeptical about what there apparently is; yet if he could perchance manage correctly to interpret what there is – which he can’t, but let’s just suppose – then he would have what there is at hand. The third ump processually co-participates with what is becoming, thereby re-creating herself as she helps bring about the re-creation of what there will have been, somehow, somewhere, somewhen. Unsurprisingly, Peirce’s enigmatic blending of ‘objectivity’ and ‘ideality’ into ‘objective idealism’ comes into view anew. Back to skepticism for a few more moments. In a Pyrrhonian manner of putting the issue, we can, and we also can’t, ‘live within’ our skepticism, and at the same time ‘live within’ our physical world and the worlds of our thoughts (Burnyeat 1997). This both-and ‘logic’, in contrast to traditional bivalent either/or logic, will be further elucidated below. For now, it bears pointing out that Sextus lists 10 characteristics of his skepticism, the most noteworthy of which for the purpose of this essay are the following: objects don’t invariably produce the same sense impressions, due to differences regarding the senses and differences among human individuals and human communities; the same objects can thus appear different, due to varying perspectives from within particular frames of reference – that is, contexts, including other objects and their interrelations and conditions that ephemerally inhere within these contexts – and varying human dispositions when sensing those objects; since the appearance of all objects is relative, judgment regarding their nature should be held in suspension; objects that have become more common – and hence habituated – are those with greater capacity to grab one’s attention (but, of course that attention, if habituated, might not be elevated to conscious levels); the apparent nature of objects by and large emerges out of social rules and regulations of interpretation regarding sensations, thought, and actions and conduct, in addition to habits and beliefs.
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According to these characteristics, the appearance an object evokes in us arises out of interrelations with respect to the sensing subject, the object sensed, and interdependent interactions between the sensing subject and the object sensed. Sextus’s Pyrrhonism has it that skepticism shouldn’t become a matter of nihilism, but rather, a form of therapy – somewhat reminiscent of the later Wittgenstein’s treatment of philosophical problems as an illness – that might cure us of our penchant for thinking too much and unduly subordinating feeling to thinking. The counsel is that we moderate both thinking and feeling in order to settle down into the process of mental and emotional tranquility. This entails suspension of judgment, or in an alternate manner of putting it, suspension of belief and the penchant for judging on the basis of beliefs. Sextus Empiricus tells us: For the person who entertains the opinion that anything is by nature good or bad is continually disturbed. When he lacks those things that seem to him to be good, he believes he is being pursued, […] by those things which are by nature bad, and pursues what he believes to be the good things […]. On the other side there is the man who leaves undetermined the question of what things are good and bad by nature. He does not exert himself to avoid anything or to seek after anything, and hence he is in a tranquil state. (cited in Hallie 1985: 41)
Obsessively maintaining the distinction between good and bad and all other distinctions as well predisposes one toward dogmatism and the self-conceited idea that one knows what needs to be known. Serenity can be had by one’s suspending belief, refusing to take a position; yet one can become assertive when the proper occasion arises, while remaining indecisive and declining when it becomes prudent to do so. This is not to say that one should become passive, disengaged, inert, thus falling into apathy. It is an active, skeptical stance involving deferral of decision and action. John Ross’s witty, often acidic ironic posture as described in Chapter Four could offer us a striking example, though he would likely fail a passivity test.30 More apropos, we have Wheeler’s third ump for whom belief must be suspended, for there is no more than is not – nothing – until she co-participatingly decides what is. 30
I base this somewhat off-handed remark on my reading a number of Ross’s books, especially noteworthy among which are The Annexation of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the IMF (2002) and Zapatistas; Making Another World Possible: Chronicle of Resistance 2000–2006 (2006), where his biting prose reveals that he is constructing a story while putting his most profound feelings about Mexico and its people at stake; yet he judiciously leaves the final decision up to his reader.
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In contrast to suspension of belief, suspension of disbelief can serve to shift one into an attitude of taking things as the way they might have been meant to be, with tenuous confidence that one might somehow come to know what the way those things are. The danger is that an aggressively assertive mood might be the yield, and as one becomes increasingly certain one is on the right path, preconceptions, presuppositions and prejudices, and with them closure, dogmatism, and intolerance can threaten to ensue. Of course a willing suspension of disbelief of the sort propagated by Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834) was commonly accepted among literary scholars over a half century in the past, and it has recently become fashionable among film critics (Ferri 2007). Indeed, willingly suspending disbelief toward literary texts puts one in the context of sacred scripts, legends, myths, folk wisdom, and fairy tales and other children’s stories. One knows the story isn’t really true, but one willingly suspends disbelief and takes it as if it were true to life, and hence can learn from the story’s moral and ethical teachings and hopefully apply it to one’s everyday ‘real world’ living. In contrast, if one chooses to suspend belief in a story, one takes it as possibly applicable to this imaginary context or that one, but one suspends belief in the idea that the story holds some moral or ethical message of universal values applicable to any and all possible contexts. This sort of skepticism is a far cry from agnosticism that might say ‘I don’t know and can’t know; of that I have no shadow of a doubt, so I can’t say whether the story is of value or not’. Skepticism might say this story has a lesson to teach us in this context but not that one; that story has a lesson to teach is in that context but not in this one; and so on. The other skepticism
Skepticism is by no means a Western monopoly. Among other forms of the doctrine, there is Buddhist skepticism, especially in the Madhyamaka strain of Buddhist philosophy, that is, Mahayana Buddhism, most particularly and profoundly propounded by second century Indian scholar, Nāgārjuna (1967). Nāgārjuna’s enigmatic ‘positionlessness’ is the most radical form of suspension of belief and of judgment imaginable. It entails suspension between dogmatism as one position or belief and nihilism as the opposite position or belief. It can be qualified as non-assertiveness, serene composure, quietist self-control, placid equanimity, in what we might term a ‘third space’ between the two horns of the dogmatism/nihilism opposition. The one horn holds that there is one and only one pathway, along which the assertively
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arrogant dogmatist would have us go. The other horn holds that one should reject any and all paths; in fact, one should destroy them as soon as they place themselves before one as possible options. When confronted with these two extremes – or any other extremes limited to bivalent either/or imperatives for that matter – Nāgārjuna would have us opt for the ‘middle way’, an intermediate yet centerless ‘positionlessness’ – much in the order of the Included-Middle regarding Figure 6, as suggested above. Examples abound. The Hindu tradition, somewhat comparable to that of René Descartes (1596–1650), posits a fixed self. David Hume (1711–1776) and certain branches of Buddhism, as well as to an extent some recent strains of postmodernism, put this idea into question, suggesting that the very notion of a self is conventional. The ‘middle way’ accepts neither of them, holding them in suspension such that either of the two interpretations or both of them might possibly apply, given the contexts and the circumstances. Some contemporary physicists who posit an objective world ‘out there’ believe that the search for a ‘grand unified theory’ (GUT) will someday bear fruit; others, who believe there is no clear and distinct line of demarcation between subjectivity and objectivity, categorically reject the possibility of such an absolutely complete and consistent theory; the ‘middle way’ would tell us that both the one and the other can hold, depending on the frame of reference and the conditions, and that in all likelihood neither the one nor the other can hold for all times and all places, but rather, incompleteness or inconsistency residing in any and all theories allows for the possibility in the future of some creative new world-version emerging from the ‘middle way’ between a given set of contradictions, contraries or dichotomies. This posture would take Wheeler’s third ump to the extreme. She would hold all the options open as possible possibilities, becoming attuned to any and all suggestions in terms of the more viable possibilities, taking them into thoughtful consideration, and arriving at the conclusion most acceptable to the entire community – albeit while maintaining awareness that total consensus is too much to ask for. But, of course, this would require sensing and experiencing and thinking and concluding, along with careful dialogic deliberation, which is out of the question, for she must make her call with lightning quick certainty. Only in retrospect can she argue for her call or entertain other possibilities in dialogue with a reunion of coffee cup baseball connoisseurs. Or perhaps better, she will hold her opinion in suspension of belief, which puts her closer to Nāgārjuna’s ‘middle way’. Some aesthetes hold dogmatically onto the one and only valid and true concept of beauty, and defend it tooth and nail; others tell us beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it’s a matter of relativism; the ‘middle way’ says
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neither any absolute concept of beauty nor the truth of relative concepts of beauty can tell the tale, but rather, both of them can possibly find a way such that they can create something other than what so blindly occupied them and bring it into the light of day. And so on. In other words, unlike Pyrrhonism, the ‘middle way’ is considerably more a matter of process, of everything always becoming something other than what it was becoming, of creativity at virtually every bend in the ongoing processual river. Enigmatic, to say the least. The middle is where it’s all at, as possible possibility ‘So what, precisely, is this middle way?’ – one might impatiently wish to ask. Wrong question, I’m sorry to say. In middle way thinking there is no ‘is’, and for that matter there is no ‘what’ and there is no ‘it’. Moreover, there is no ‘when’ nor is there any ‘where’. The middle wayer, a sort of rebellious skeptic, enters into a process of doubting, rejecting any and all claims to absolute knowledge, and looking for no more than ephemeral relative certainty at best. Whatever offers any degree of certainty is no more than conventional, generally agreed upon by the community, constructed out of that community’s collective mind-set, and in harmony with its world-version. Within one’s community, one does what one does because that is who one is, and who one is, is a matter of what one does, because that’s the way of one’s doing. No more, and no less. Certainty is tenderly tenuous at best, because whatever is up for consideration could always have been other than what it is (or appears to be), and in the future it will surely have been something other than what it is becoming or what it could otherwise be in the process of becoming. Everything is becoming the way it’s becoming because that’s the way it entered into the process of becoming. In contrast to the middle wayer, the true believer maintains faith in a fixed self, whose identity she believes is what it is and can be nothing other than what it is; it must be either what it is or what it isn’t, for between what it is and what it isn’t there is no alternative. And she attributes the same fixity to everything else. She basically follows the tenets of classical bivalent logic. Whether she has a slight inclination toward skepticism or she’s a hard-core true believer, her decisions are generally of the either-this-or-that variety. She generally assumes that if others aren’t with her, they must be against her, and she is ready to defend herself to the hilt. An alternate way of qualifying these two postures – skepticism and true belief – involves another pair of terms: ‘relativism’ and ‘objectivism’ (complementary with ‘idealism’ and ‘objectivism’, or Peirce’s ‘objective idealism’ I would venture to suggest, with a debt to Rosenthal 1994). The middle wayer
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can be either a ‘relativist’ or an ‘objectivist’, as the flowing and fluctuating circumstances most conveniently seem to allow; or in an alternative way of putting it, she can be neither a ‘relativist’ nor an ‘objectivist’, for she is always becoming something other than what she was becoming, toward some slithering and sashaying new becoming. On the one hand, the middle wayer has no overriding problem with ‘objectivism’, for, after all, we must negotiate the objects, actions, and happenings in the world into which we’ve been thrown, pragmatically speaking; otherwise we have hardly any alternative but to slip and slide into nihilistic morass, giving up the very idea of ‘objective’ truth, and in that respect at least we would enter into agreement with the ‘relativist’. The middle wayer, consequently, has little use for ‘objectivism’ as a catch-all term, for there can be no embrace of the whole of all possible ‘objective’ grasps of the world that have been, are, and will have been. On the other hand, the middle wayer gives a somewhat hesitant nod to ‘relativism’, for, after all, we are part of some human community guided by conventions, and the presuppositions, predispositions, proclivities and prejudices they entail; but she shuns that radical form of ‘relativism’ propagating the ‘everything goes’ dogma. However, the middle way by no means constitutes any strong form of relativism, for no particular set of conventions can be capable of encompassing the whole of all possible conventions that serve to guide all possible communities. The relativist, assuming a grasp of all such possibilities, eventually enters into talk with respect to the ‘truth about relativism’, and in that respect at least she is hardly any different from the true believing objectivist. ‘Then what, in the final analysis, does the middle way consist of?’ Wrong question again, I’m afraid. There is no enduring consistency, no substance, no essence, regarding the ‘middle way’. According to the middle way, everything we would like to believe is, is not. But I must repeat: there is no is, no what, no it, only emptiness, the absolute, which is empty, emptiness of emptiness. Jay Garfield (2002) qualifies the middle way as ‘skeptical inversion’. The objectivist, having gone skeptic, has gravitated toward the extreme: nihilism. He tells us we can’t know without knowing the boundary between what is known and that which is unknown or unknowable, which we cannot know, so we must resign ourselves to no more than unknowing knowing: the paradox of knowing. The middle way can more or less buy into this idea. The relativist, always a skeptic, having gravitated toward the extreme where that pot of gold, the ‘truth about relativism’, lies, tells us we can know what is unknowable for all relativists who remain ensconced within their particular community, which flies against the very relativist premise: the paradox of
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unknowing. This is a form of ‘skeptical inversion’, in a manner of putting it (see also Margolis 1991). I would rather use the qualification ‘skeptical flow’, which implies process. ‘Skeptical flow’ is an alternative to ‘skeptical inversion’ – or something and its inverse – which implies that that something in question is just that, something, existing in counter-position to its mirror image. ‘But flow is still something’ – someone protests. Granted. But in the very least flow as process offers a sense that nothing simply is, but rather, it is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. Actually, there’s no need to dwell on the big picture obsessively
Following Garfield, she who opts for the middle way, embraces the conventions of her community as if they were the most natural way, while maintaining awareness that the natural way is the middle way, which denies any and all conventions as local ‘truths’ rather than global ‘Truth’. She maintains awareness that there must be some global ‘Truth’, but it has little to do with conventions constructed within a community charged with negotiating among relatively fixed substantive essences: global ‘Truth’, to put it bluntly, is empty; it is emptiness. Between local truths and global Truth there is, nonetheless, the middle way, flow rather than fixity, perpetual movement rather than stasis, scintillating possibilities rather than actualities. The middle way gives one a sense of Buddhist skepticism, a suspension of belief or judgment leading toward ‘positionless mental tranquility’. Garfield (2002: 12) points out that the ills Western skepticism aims to cure are ‘philosophical ills’ – specifically metaphysical and epistemological ones characterized by the obsessive search for ‘ontologically primitive foundations of knowledge, meaning, explanation, or morality that undergird our collective epistemic, linguistic, scientific, and moral practices’. Buddhist ‘skeptical flow’, in contrast, teaches a way of living, or a ‘form of life’, in the words of that enigmatic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (see the Appendix). In another way of putting it, ‘skeptical flow’ somewhat loosely follows the tenets of ‘objective idealism’ as suggested in Chapter Four; it is also portrayed in the tangentially diverging, converging, coalescing, process of the sort in that chapter with respect to Ross, Obama, and Calderón. In a roundabout way of putting it, the middle way is a recipe for everyday living, rather than ponderous philosophical speculations. The target is not a search for the whole (global) Truth and nothing but the Truth, for the one and only ideal form of living, but to cure us of our very quest for the Absolute, to
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prevent us from falling into a closed, immutable, dogmatic mind-set. This is openness to the extreme. Openness calls for grounding in the conventions of our community, but with awareness that this is not the only way; it calls for the premonition that there is an absolute way, for sure, but it cannot be had in our finite, fallible living and breathing world. Rather, it is no more than pure possibility; that is, it involves the range of all possibly possible conventions in all possibly possible communities that have been, are, and will have been, which is to say that all actual conventions and communities are empty of content regarding the Absolute Convention and some sort of ideal, ethereal Absolute Community, which is the emptiness of emptiness. Openness, I must also repeat, calls for a somewhat quietist suspension of belief and judgment; it calls for conformity within one’s community while resisting blind adherence to the customs, norms, behavioral patterns, rules and regulations of that community, and readiness to resist whenever the community veers off along undesirable pathways; it calls for embracing the community’s ways as if one were suspending disbelief in them, while in reality one is at the same time suspending belief, suspending judgment, at least until the time comes to resist some aspect of the community’s ways. In a manner of speaking, one engages in playacting; one takes on a role, suspending disbelief in one’s way of living within that role, while one unsuspends disbelief, or suspends belief as it were, with awareness that this is not entirely who one is – or better, is becoming. Significantly enough, I would suggest, Wheeler’s third ump is closest to the middle wayer’s playacting, with the assumption that her playacting becoming is a process of co-participatingly becoming, emerging into the light of day. Nāgārjuna, once again if I may
Nāgārjuna avoids concession to any conception of the nature of things, maintaining that in the final analysis, our conventions can’t be justified by demonstrating their correspondence to the physical world. Rather, he suggests, what we take as real depends precisely upon our conventions. Likewise, as we’ve noted, and will note in more detail below, conventions are never entirely sufficient. In the first place, they are not the necessary key to knowing in the bivalent sense of a world of fixed things, for conventions are always changing. That is the good news, since this essay radically departs from bivalent thinking – insofar as possible, given its author’s limitations. The somewhat bad news is that the prevalent idea of social convention involves basically a limited world and its local timespace cultural contexts common to a particular community and tends to avoid the range of all possible
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worlds available to the global socio-cultural scene. A three-legged stool of the sort farmers used in times past to milk their Holsteins is a ‘stool’, for sure, but it isn’t the four-legged contraption contemporary city folks ordinarily call a ‘stool’. In fact, height, size, weight, type and thickness of the material, texture, color and type of paint or varnish, padding or no padding, supports between the legs or not, rubber or steel caps at the foot of the legs or no caps at all, and so on, are variations of the term ‘stool’. (I’ll save myself from our getting bogged down in the Platonic swamp in this regard.) Given the range of all actual stools, past, present, and into the future, and the range of all possibly possible stools that could have been, might be, and potentially will have been candidates for ‘stoolness’, how is it possible to pin the concept ‘stool’ down using either/or thinking with respect to social conventions. A problem, to say the least. The earth was once the center of the universe; there were once three continents and three so-called ‘human races’ and no more; all swans were once white; colors can be three in number or a dozen or many more, depending on the social conventions; and so on. A problem. It seems that the more conventions change, the more we try to make them stay the same. Nāgārjuna would say of a universal concept, ‘stool’ or whatever, that it is empty. Someone continues resisting: ‘Empty of what?’ The answer: Empty of inherent essence, of substance, of fixed meaning, and empty of the very feeling and sense and idea of emptiness. This is not to say that a stool doesn’t exist, in some pragmatic sort of concrete sense: it exists, practically and conventionally speaking, but it lacks essence, absolutely or universally speaking. A particular ‘stool’ concept can’t incorporate all the possible qualifications of ‘stoolness’, past, present, and future. As a ‘stool’ in the particular sense, it incorporates a paltry few of them, but in the absolute sense, it incorporates virtually none of them; it is a particular ‘stool’ evincing the image of a few possible qualifications of ‘stoolness’, but as such it is a grossly incomplete manifestation of all possibly possible stools, of ‘stoolness’. So as a ‘stool’, it is a ‘no-stool’; it is what it isn’t; it is virtually nothing in comparison to everything (all possibly possible stools), and that everything is emptiness (with respect to a possible particular stool). British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) offers an argument that I rephrase in terms of this essay: for one to say ‘all possible stools’ one evokes the idea, suggested here, of a ‘set of all possibly possible stools’ (see Russell 1910). Each and every ‘stool’ is a member of the set, but the set, as all possibilities of ‘stoolness’, is not, itself, a member of itself – a member of the set. If for some strange reason we might wish to shoulder the project of counting and classifying all the stools in our entire community, quite
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obviously we will fall far short of the goal of reaching the ‘set of all possibly possible stools’. So how do we qualify that set? Nāgārjuna, in a renewed effort to convince us, would call it emptiness. It is empty, for there is virtually conceivable no end to the range of possible possibilities. This, of course, implies that hoary notion of infinity. In fact the notion makes for an adequate example of the notion of emptiness. Assume you have a book consisting of an infinite number of pages. How do you find page 5,706,948? Impossible. Whatever page you try to open, a flowing cascade of pages slides and slithers along your thumb toward the other side of the book ( Jorge Luís Borges [1899–1986] gives us a charming example of this exercise in his tale ‘The Book of Sand’, 1978). Giving up on your hopeless task of finding a particular number in your infinitely paged book, you turn it over and open the back cover to see what the last page looks like. And what do you see? Nothing, emptiness, zilch. It’s like zero standing between the series of all positive integers and the series of all negative integers. There is no last page of an infinite book! Each and every page has no more than some strange kind of hypothetical existence; the collection of all pages, the set of all pages, is devoid of essence; it is empty. Infinity is the empty mirror-image of zero. Every stool we counted during our futile search for the ultimate essence of ‘stoolness’ was an existent stool. But ‘stool’ itself, as the final product of for practical purposes an infinite hypothetical quest for the essence of all stools? But there’s no essence. There’s just emptiness. That’s all, emptiness. But actually, there is nothing corresponding to ‘all’, for there is nothing at all; and there is no ‘nothing’, no-‘thing’, for to say no-‘thing’ is to imply some negative sense of ‘thingness’. There’s just emptiness of emptiness. Still confounding. A matter of conventions and ultimate Truth
Garfield writes in this vein about the word ‘table’. Suppose we analyze the word table in order to find its emptiness. And: What do we find? Nothing at all but the table’s lack of inherent existence. The emptiness depends upon the table […]. It has no parts or conditions, and no properties. Though such a position might appear metaphysically extravagant, it is hardly unmotivated. For one thing, it seems that emptiness does have an identifiable essence – namely the lack of inherent existence. So if to be empty is to be empty of essence, emptiness fails on that count to be empty. Moreover, since all phenomena, […] are empty, emptiness would appear to be eternal
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and independent of any particular conventions, […] other, more real entity. It is to see the table as conventional, as dependent. (Garfield 2002: 38–39)
‘We at least have our conventions’, one might wish to retort. So we see tables and stools according to those conventions. And we get on in life. Well, yes, the tables and stools we’ve seen are empty, but in our daily coming and going emptiness hardly has any bearing, it would seem. Emptiness is a matter of the range of all possible tables and stools, devoid of essence, but that range remains beyond our grasp. We usually have no such problem with conventions. We handle them quite effectively within particular timespace contexts. They are in a word, a pragmatic matter; that is, our conventions and the conventions of others are interdependent, interrelated and potentially interactive; and yet, they arise from the range of all possible possibilities, which is to say that each and every set of conventions within each and every community, are equally empty. Indeed, the individual pages of Borges’s imaginary Book of Sand are empty: they can’t be grasped; they have no essence; they are just so much illusion. And the infinite collection of all the pages is empty: it is essenceless, nonexistence. But the sensation and perception of a book, the idea and concept book, the sign ‘book’, are concrete matters in everyday life; and, given myriad timespace contexts in our community and all communities would suggest that there are many truths. Thus there are many truths, or basically two truths, according to how we wish to look at the issue. Nāgārjuna tells us there is conventional truth, of which there are many, given diverse communities and their differing conventions, and there is ultimate Truth, which, of course, is one – emptiness, tantamount to the range of all possible communities that have been, are, and will have been.31 So there is an inherent identity between the two truths: the range of all possible interdependently emerging conventional truths, each and every one of them empty, is the Truth, the emptiness of emptiness (Garfield 2002: 40–45). I might add that Nelson Goodman (1978) has something comparable in mind when he writes that the sum total of all possible conventional world-versions is The World, which lies beyond the reach of all particular world-versions or any finite collection of world-versions.32 31
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Nāgārjuna’s conception of conventional truth flows along three confluences: (1) it is the outcome of general agreement or consensus among the members of a given community; (2) it is relative to the conventional truth of other communities or to the same community at a different time; and (3) it is nominally true, depending upon particulars and their qualification by way of linguistic conventions (Garfield 2002: 90). One might be prone to assume that Nāgārjuna’s two forms of reality and truth – the phenomenal realm and ultimate reality – are comparable to Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal. Garfield
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All this is not the same as asserting that because something is empty, it doesn’t exist; it is the assertion that because something apparently exists (as a conventional truth), it’s empty (by virtue of its having emerged from the ultimate Truth), the emptiness of emptiness. But ultimate Truth is also a conventional truth, is it not? Yes, it would seem. How can it be otherwise? In this sense, as tentatively qualified above: the range of all possibly possible conventional truths within the range of all possibly possible communities that have been, are, and will have been, as pure possible possibilities, is coequal with ultimate Truth. Ultimately, they are one and the same. What is, still isn’t
Allow me to put it this way, if you will. A conventional truth is like a Möbius band. A simple two-dimensional strip has two distinct sides with a line of demarcation, the edges, separating them. In contrast, the Möbius band, constructed by twisting one end of the strip and connecting it to the other end, demolishes this dualism. Now, we can say that there are two sides to the Möbius band from a local perspective, but there are not two sides from the global perspective. There are an infinite number of logical perspectives at each point along the band, but there is only one global perspective; so also, there are an infinite number of possibly possible conventional realities and truths. But let’s go further. We can also declare that the Möbius band sports both one side and two sides – when including both the collection of local views and the global view – and that it manifests neither one side nor two sides – from our view of the band, within three-dimensional space, which includes both the local views and the global view, the combination of which makes up a ‘higher’ view. It is significant that in order to construct the Möbius band a twist within a ‘higher’ spatial dimension was necessary, and now, the Möbius band’s existence depends on that ‘higher’ realm. We gaze at the band. There’s a one-dimensional edge enclosing the two-dimensional strip within three-dimensional space. A Flatlander on the band can travel round and round her world, thus confirming that it is two-dimensional, continuous, and infinitely expansive. But we know better. We can see that there is an arbitrarily placed discontinuous break in her world that is made possible in three-dimensional space.
(2002: 92) argues that Kant’s view isn’t Nāgārjuna’s view, since the emptiness of emptiness ‘means that ultimate reality cannot be thought of as a Kantian noumenal realm. For ultimate reality is just as empty as conventional reality. Ultimate reality is hence only conventionally real! The distinct realities are therefore identical.’
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However, let’s not be so smug. In our coming and going within everyday life we still tend to take our world in terms of classical Newtonian principles, assuming that it is continuous and self-sufficient. What we ordinarily don’t take into account is that from a four-dimensional view, our world is as limited as is that of the Flatlander from our three-dimensional perspective. Our three-dimensional perception and conception of the world marks the limit of our world, our conventional world, its reality and its truth, in interrelated interdependence within the field of all possibly possible conventional worlds, the collection of which makes up the ultimate World. This ultimate World contains the set of all possible conventional worlds, which, like Russell’s paradox, can’t be a member of that set, can’t be a member of itself: the ultimate World can be none other than empty. So once again, is the mind changing, or is it the world that is changing? Both, if we are speaking of conventional truths; neither, if we are thinking of unspeakable Absolute Truth. Gifted baseball and soccer players by and large follow the rules and share strategies with other players (the games’ many conventional ways), and they never cease improvising. Yet, when they accomplish some feat inaccessible to mere mortals, they are drinking from the fountain of that venerable dream, the perfect game, the Absolute Game (the Absolute Way). When we begin understanding a message with some tacit, implied prior theory (interpretive convention or strategy) and, as is most often the case, things don’t go exactly as planned, we apply some improvised, on the fly, off-the-cuff, seat-of-the-pants passing theory; we do so by tapping our creative juices and taking advantage of the flow; the flow, from the range of all possible possibilities patiently waiting for some propitious selection by some sensitive judiciously discriminating individual. We are changing, and as we are doing so, the world turns, and yields us, allows us to create, some new world-version, at each and every step along the middle way. Putting this in a different ball park, ‘objectivity’ is much like that of Wheeler’s first ump; Pyrrhonian ‘skepticism’ is that of the second ump, albeit with a varying element of doubt regarding the skeptic’s interpreting resources – thus by extension revealing a possible note of ‘relativism’, and a few tentative suggestions of the third ump. Nāgārjuna has his middle way, the fountain head of processual becoming, somewhat more akin to the third ump. There is co-participation of the 20 Questions sort on the part of the third ump’s own becoming and her world-version’s becoming: what will have been becoming with respect to herself and her world-version will always be something other than what has been becoming. This, I would suggest, is also of the nature of Peirce’s ‘objective idealism’. It must include bivalent logic; but
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it also entails a broader, more comprehensive ‘logic’, flowing away from bivalent principles in order to give process a liquid embrace. And yet,… and yet,… during our everyday living, we’re in the bivalently perceived and conceived and the bivalently demanding world we’re in, and we have to make the best of it, within our conventional truths, following the rules that have been put forth for us. We’re in our flowing unthinking world of the baseball hitter and soccer goalie acting and reacting with rapid-fire spontaneity; we’re in Ross’s and Obama’s and Calderón’s respective worlds; we’re now prudently, now carefully, now perhaps politically incorrectly, now improvisingly, saying and writing according to our inclinations, doing what we feel we should do. We’re in our flowing conventional world with its rules and regulations and customs and norms just doing what we do – much of it tacitly and in rapid-fire action also – because we are who we are here and now within our social milieu. And we’re in the world of our expectations (prior theories) and big and little surprises when our expectations don’t meet with our experience, so we find ourselves adjusting (as a consequence of passing theories) to new situations. In short, we’re always in the process of: ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’. Speaking of following rules, let’s take a turn for a few moments to Ludwig Wittgenstein on rules, with an eye on Michael Polanyi’s (1891–1976) ‘tacit knowing’.
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Chapter Six
On knowing how to do what we do Chapter Six. On knowing how to do what we do As implied in previous chapters, when just doing what we do, we by and large follow rules and regulations and customs and norms, without our mind having consciously to take them all into account. Mind just leaves body – or better, bodymind – to do what it does by way of Polanyi’s tacit knowing, which is in part the produce of implicit learning, in part perhaps learned by explicit instruction, and in part a matter of entrenched experience and practice – the case of ‘degenerate’ signs. Tacit knowing includes both focal attention and subsidiary attention on conscious and nonconscious levels, and their coalescence, which involves the five senses plus kinesthetic, proprioceptive, somatic behavior. Peirce’s fluctuating, flowing categories guiding everyday living and his basic sign types are germane to this process. But then,… something seems lacking, something that calls for further words on rule following, to be discussed Chapter Seven. Whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not
A praying mantis is a phenomenal creature. Her head is triangular, with the apex pointing downward and an eye at each of the two upper corners. That’s to get a better vision of the entire panorama. She can swivel her head at virtually any angle. That’s to hone in on her prey better – and also to get a look at her male suitor, who will become her next meal after he finishes copulating with her. When assaying her environment, she arches her body upward with head held high, and with her front two appendages cocked and ready to lash out. That’s for lightning quick action when it’s time to latch onto a succulent meal. And here comes an unwary victim. She spies it, and she calculates its momentum, trajectory, and the distance between it and her poised and ready forepaws. Then suddenly, faster than the eye can see, she lashes out, and her prey’s fate is sealed. All in a mere fraction of a second. If we ask her how she did it, her response would likely be that it’s as simple as can be. As far as she’s concerned, it’s just: ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’.
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If we wish to explain her feat, we might resort to words like ‘momentum’, ‘trajectory’, ‘distance’, ‘angle of approach’, and so on. A physicist can put all this in mathematical equations according to Newton’s laws. And there we’ll have it all, on paper, in clear and distinct terms. We would know precisely what the praying mantis did. But how did she do it? That computer inside her we would call a nervous system: how is it capable of all these calculations in no more than a split second? Quite elementary, our physicist tells us. The praying mantis is simply following a formal set of rules regarding mass, motion, and vectors. Ah, yes. She simply follows rules. Naturally. In this manner the mantis, like our goalie, ‘instinctively’ and/or ‘intuitively’ as it were in each organism’s case, computes the trajectory of the moving object, and the appropriate strategy follows as a matter of course. But wait a minute. Whose rules, hers or ours? Rules from which she cannot deviate because they are innate and she can do no more than abide by them? Or rules derived from Newton’s laws of mass and motion and when plugging the facts into the proper equations everything is as clear as day? Or rules we have an aptitude for following, such as catching a speeding ball, which we can develop through consciousness, concentration, and much practice? All of the above, comes the answer, depending upon the frame of reference. Our praying mantis takes advantage of Newton’s laws, for sure. When and how did she learn them? She didn’t. She just did what comes naturally. Then is she somehow biologically endowed with the rules she uses? And does she do what she does in her environment and within specific contexts in basically the same way all members of her species do it? Yes, and Yes, in a manner of speaking. Her inborn capacity tells her how to do it, and her social make-up tells her at what moment she should do what she does. Roughly, that’s it (see Johnson 2002). We, unlike our mantis, often muddle things up when we systematically go about applying Newtonian mechanics in the physics classroom. Yet we can see her doing what she does, and we ordinarily take it all in, without giving her remarkable feat a second thought. And unlike our mantis, who does what she does ‘instinctively’, in our everyday living we can spend countless hours learning to juggle, ride a unicycle, touch-type on the computer terminal, and such. We do all this by following, theoretically, certain Newtonian rules and rules for acquiring the skills by some combination of entrenched behavior and thought, accompanied by our going through the motions over and over again until we get it more or less right. We do it through a confluence of conscious and tacit awareness, while processing relatively developed and sophisticated signs, along with an astounding number of what I have summarily called, following Peirce, ‘degenerate’ signs. We can afford to engage in these
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activities, because, unlike our nimble predator, the mantis, we don’t have to spend the vast majority of our time just trying to survive as best we can. That’s the bonus and the boon of us human animals; it’s also the source of countless blunders. Nevertheless, our complex combination of naturally embedded moves and thought, and our intentionally trying to do what we’ve never done before, is who we are. Qualifying knowing naturally, the human way Physicist James Jeans (1877–1946) once said the universe is more like a great thought than a humongous machine ( Jeans 1930). Well, to an extent it might appear that the universe operates as if it were a machine, and it customarily seems to behave as if it were mindfully and thoughtfully developing strategies, all according to the frame of reference from which we perceive and conceive it. We, likewise, to an extent tend to combine entrenched, rather automatized, somewhat machine-like behavior, and contemplative, disciplined, calculating mindfulness when we do what we do. But by no means is that all there is to our ways of doing. We also use a combination of presentiment, intuition, and predispositions and presuppositions and premonitions, as well as a bit of horse sense and a tad of gut feeling, as we grope, sometimes blindly, other times improvisingly, and often methodically, within the semiosic flow of objects, acts and happenings surrounding us, as if we were orchestrating the whole affair. Bob Dylan once sang out that when we follow our gut and horse sense and don’t give up, we can mystify those around us; Carl Jung wrote in so many words that intuition and premonitions are the widening of the mind to include some increased range of consciousness; Emily Dickinson once quipped that presentiment or premonition is that shadow on the lawn startling the grass to let us know without thinking that darkness is about to come. Gregory Bateson taught that we are either more or less in tune with or bucking against our world, but either way, we cannot free ourselves from our surroundings as if we were captains of our own ship, no matter how much we wished to do so, for we are part and parcel of this world. And on a comparable note Peirce occasionally asserted that there is no all-or-nothing demarcation between humans and nonhumans or between us and our signs and our physical existence. Concrete examples of these complex processes would be appropriate. With our mantis in mind, imagine a hefty high-school fullback rambling down the field along the sidelines, football tucked tightly into his right arm with a touchdown on his mind. A lithe cornerback is in hot pursuit. The geometry of motion tells the cornerback that in order to intercept the target of
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his pursuit he must tacitly focus on a point some 10 yards in front of the target at a vector angular velocity (measured in degrees per second of pursuit). His body must be slightly turned away from the target, as a function of the angle off center of the target’s image his retina is taking in, corresponding to approximately 1/10 of his vector angular velocity. His own velocity is greater than that of the fullback (he weighs a sprite 165 pounds compared to the fullback’s lumbering 200 pounds), and he takes that into account. He intercepts his target from an angle, tackles him, and prevents a touchdown, to his fans’ delight. How did he do it? Physics, biology, collective and individual training, entrenched experience and behavior, presentiment, presuppositions, horse sense, intuition, gut feeling? All the above, in varying degrees. Our mantis uses basically the same rules of physics, coupled with instinct and the consequence of going through comparable notions in the past when pursuing her next meal. And she is biologically and socially equipped to earn her meal quite handily, thank you. It’s all in a day’s hunt; it’s who she is and what she does. Add a dose of training, presentiment, horse sense, intuition, and gut feeling, and our cornerback does basically the same – and in addition, he’s always ready for some on-the-spot improvisation. Once again: ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’. The coach didn’t explain physical laws and rules of pursuit to the eager young cornerback. The instructions might have been: ‘Catch up with him, put your shoulder into his thighs, wrap your arms around his legs, and pull him down’. That doesn’t say much about the precise hows and whys of tackling a fullback according to Newton’s laws. Specifics are for the most part left to the apprentice cornerback. If he has the proper competence and training, and if he has a feel for the game, he just does what he does. Tacitly speaking, that is, for after doing what he does over and over, he does it as if it came naturally – or if I might say so, as if it were ‘instinctive’. In other words, he no longer intentionally and consciously goes about following the guidelines his coach drilled into him, and much less the rules of physics. He follows the rules and instructions with naturally endowed purposiveness, for sure. But he doesn’t actually set out to follow the rules and instructions; he has a disposition for, and much training in order to develop that disposition in order to, follow the rules and instructions with efficient dispatch. His disposition gives him the ability to act in accordance with them; his actions coincide with them. And his training gives him the ability to act in accordance with them insofar as his height and weight and speed and body coordination allow. What if instead of the cornerback we have a linebacker in pursuit of the fullback? And what if the linebacker is of weight, height, and speed
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approximately equal to that of the fullback? The angle would likely vary, and the linebacker’s performance when tackling his opponent would be different than that of the cornerback. The linebacker also takes account of the differences, tacitly, and as if automatically. Knowing it without (the wherewithal for) saying it
‘Tacitly?’ – one might wish to query at this point. Yes, the tacitness Michael Polanyi (1958) writes about. He calls ‘tacit’ this nonconscious form of knowing that is revealed in what we just do without having to think about it or will our body to do it. In a roundabout way it bears on Charles Sherrington’s (1940) ‘sixth sense’ (also Howes 2003, 2005), Mary Douglas’s (1975) ‘implicit meanings’, Wittgenstein’s (1953) ‘forms of life’, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1975) ‘horizons’, Bateson’s (1972) ‘grace’, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) ‘habit’, Peirce’s ‘feeling’ combined with ‘habit’, and it variously goes by many other names and takes other forms besides. It is that which is known without one’s necessarily being conscious of so knowing it. And what one does by way of this knowing one just does, as if it were second nature. And in a sense it is. Polanyi toiled for years with the idea that all of us, from the most humble human specimen behind the wheel of a car to Einstein, handle the affairs of our everyday living on the basis of a confluence of two different kinds of awareness: focal and subsidiary. For instance, if you grab a hammer and nail to pound in the wall for a picture-hanging session, you begin by holding the nail in one hand, trying to hit it with the hammer held in the other hand, and hoping to miss your thumb. In the process, you attend to both hammer and nail, but not in the same way. On the one hand, you maintain eye contact with the effect of your strokes on the nail as you wield your hammer. You don’t so much feel that the handle of the tool has put pressure the palm of your hand as you feel that the hammer has struck the head of the nail. On the other hand, you are alert to the feelings in your palm, your fingers and thumb on the nail, and your strokes, while striving to coordinate your actions. In Polanyi’s terms, regarding knowing how to put a nail into the wall, you are subsidiarily (tacitly) aware of the whole of your activity, which gives you a rather vague feel for what it is you are doing. This vague knowing occurs in conjunction with your eye contact focally directed toward the nail’s head, which is your act of knowing that the nail is in such-and-such a position, which is true to form or a little off the mark and either needs some adjustment or it does not. The vague feel or subsidiary awareness is not direct but indirect; directed focal attention is in contrast ordinarily quite precise and linearly directed in comparison.
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In another way of putting it, you focus your attention on the nail’s head, but at the same time you are subsidiarily aware of the whole of your moves. You possess subsidiary awareness of the whole of your movement, and focal awareness of your specifically driving the nail into the wall. Your general feeling is that of a whole taken in tacit, non-conscious fashion. Your direct attention is conscious: you are attuned to the hammer brought down with force on the nail. If the nail becomes slightly bent, your prior subsidiary attention switches to focal attention, and you adjust the force and direction of your blow with the hammer in order to correct the entry of the nail into the drywall. In other words, your focal attention compelled you to adjust your moves so as to coordinate them with your subsidiary feel for the general activity. Thus, you operate at conscious levels of knowing that, as well as non-conscious levels of knowing how.33 33
V. S. Ramachandran has conducted studies on the difference between his subjects’ acting spontaneously and, when asked, carrying out the same act intentionally. In one of his examples he writes: Consider […] the simple act of smiling, something we all do every day in social situations. You see a good friend and you grin [spontaneously, subsidiary attention]. But what happens when that friend aims a camera at your face and asks you to smile on command? Instead of a natural expression, you produce a hideous grimace [non-spontaneous]. Paradoxically, an act that you perform effortlessly dozens of times each day becomes extraordinarily difficult to perform when someone simply asks you to do it. You might think it’s because of embarrassment. But that can’t be the answer because if you walk over to any mirror and try smiling, I assure you that the same grimace will appear. The reason these two kinds of smiles differ is that different brain regions handle them, and only one of them contains a specialized “smile circuit”. A spontaneous smile is produced by the basal ganglia, clusters of cells found between the brain’s higher cortex (where thinking and planning take place) and the evolutionarily older thalamus. When you encounter a friendly face, the visual message from that face eventually reaches the brain’s emotional center or limbic system and is subsequently relayed to the basal ganglia, which orchestrate the sequences of facial muscle activity needed for producing a natural smile. When this circuit is activated, your smile is genuine. The entire cascade of events, once set in motion, happens in a fraction of a second without the thinking parts of your cortex ever being involved. But what happens when someone asks you to smile while taking your photograph? The verbal instruction from the photographer is received and understood by the higher thinking centers in the brain, including the auditory cortex and language centers [upward to symbolic signs and focal attention]. From there it is relayed to the motor cortex in front of the brain, which specializes in producing voluntary skilled movements, like playing a piano or combing your hair. Despite its apparent simplicity, smiling involves the careful orchestration of dozens of tiny muscles in the appropriate sequence [which you do because that’s what you do; you just do it]. As far as the motor cortex (which is not specialized for generating natural smiles) is concerned, this is as complex a feat as playing Rachmaninoff though it never had lessons, and therefore it fails utterly. Your smile is forced, tight, unnatural [the task is turned over to focal attention]. (Ramachandran, Blakeslee 1998: 13–14)
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When losing the mind’s knowing
When limiting ourselves to a consideration of what the body knows, we might begin by consulting Sherrington, as does Oliver Sacks (1987). Regarding the body’s doings – and by association the mind’s doings – Sherrington labels this hidden sense proprioception. Proprioception is indispensable for our sense of our self, and of our body, its position, its moves, some of which are involuntary or implicit. It has to do with kinesthetics, with motility, with somatosensory awareness. What our body does is of utmost importance, though usually we hardly give it any thought. It is comparable to a squirrel in my back yard knowing how and when to do what he does. He knows what to do and how to do it and does it, without hesitation and without a lot of idle speculation over the alternatives. Regarding us humans, in contrast, when mind intercedes in the doings of body (or bodymind, if you will), we often consider mind, our mind, in contrast to everything else. Perhaps it is in part for this reason we would like to consider our body in terms of some other. It is ‘my body’, ‘my leg’, ‘my arm’, and so on, as we say in English (though not in all languages). The body and body parts tend to be taken as Seconds. They are taken as if they were something other, other than the self, part of the self ’s possessions, with the self, in the most ideal sense, as a disembodied, disinterested bystander, a hollow shell, with hardly any tacit, embodied knowing to brag about. This is the Cartesian split in its most vicious form. This nature of the Cartesian split is why the person Oliver Sacks calls the ‘disembodied lady’, or Christina, is so disconcerting. Christina had a dream that she lost control of her body, and after awakening, sure enough, she began progressively losing control of her body. She was becoming ‘disembodied’. She eventually lost virtually all her proprioception. She could focus her eyes and keep tabs on a conversation, but while doing so, she had literally no idea what was happening to her body. In fact, if while ambulating across the room she closed her eyes, she could lose all control and fall into a heap. Her movements had to be consciously and very carefully monitored, perhaps because the body had forgotten what to do; that is, perhaps the mind had forgotten implicitly how to send directions to the body to tell it what to do; that is, perhaps the body has ceased taking orders from the mind in a silent act of rebellion. Or whatever – Sacks himself admits he is as confused as his readers. In another manner of putting Christina’s dilemma, signs she once processed without her necessarily having to be conscious of their so being processed – ‘degenerate’ signs – had to become part of her conscious semiotic activity. That is, it became necessary for her linear, sequential mental train of
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events to take in what had been her nonlinear, multiply parallel activity spontaneously carried out by her body. She was no longer capable of mindfully and consciously attending to some of the signs around her while leaving the body to do its thing – walking, sitting down, negotiating an escalator, driving her car, eating, or whatever. That is, mind had to take responsibility for what would otherwise be left on ‘automatic pilot’ – processing ‘degenerate’ signs. A sign is ‘degenerate’ if, through repeated use, and occasionally abuse as well, it has become entrenched, embedded, tacit, and virtually automatically actualized by the sign-maker and -taker. In a manner of speaking, it has become a sign created and processed by bodymind in addition to and in spite of what the active mind might consciously be doing (Gorlée 1990).34 Christina’s problem to a large extent involves bodymind’s having lost its capacity for doing what it normally does, while leaving mind free to attend to other issues; now, mind has to do it all, which is exceedingly taxing, and which accounts for her going about carefully and attentively, and with excruciating torpidity. From the Polanyi view Perhaps Polanyi’s terms regarding tacit knowing can help us get a better feel for Christina’s condition: focal (or proximal, specific) attention and subsidiary (or distal, a form of holistic) attention. The mind ordinarily focuses on the task at hand, while it remains subsidiarily – bodymindingly – aware of other activities that are left to take care of themselves. Armed with proprioceptive capacity, when hammering a nail into the wall, we are focused on the head of the nail. At the same time, our left hand holding the shaft of the nail, our right hand grasping the hammer, the tension in our biceps and triceps, the angle and bend of our elbow, the angle of the hammer and its weight, the nail now leaning slightly to the left with the third blow, and more remotely, perhaps some noisy kids outside playing, a car whizzing by on the street in front, a jet plane flying overhead: all this belongs to subsidiary attention involving chiefly ‘degenerate’ signs. These subsidiary activities are less mediated than the activities of focal attention; they are more a matter of habituated action-reaction (Secondness) than perceptually and 34
At this juncture it bears mentioning that the term ‘degeneracy’ is also used in quantum theory in certain applications of Erwin Schrödinger’s ‘wave equations’, as well as in considerations of the genetic code, where the third position in the triplet code creates the possibility of many different DNA sequences for specification of the same protein. Biologist Gerald Edelman holds that ‘degeneracy’ is, in addition, applicable to brain functions – and hence indirectly to cognition – when different ‘degenerate’ (‘habituated’) neural groups become capable of giving similar outputs (Edelman, Gally 2001; Edelman 2004; Edelman, Mountcastle 1978; Edelman, Tononi 2000).
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conceptually inferred responses (Thirdness) interrelated with their environment. They consist of signs in interaction with other signs in what has come to be taken as the most entrenched and most natural ways of signs. In both the focal and the subsidiary sense, it’s a matter of: ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’. Christina’s problem is that her subsidiary attention had become virtually null, and she was capable of little more than focal attention. Consequently, she had little body image, hardly any sense of the body’s interdependent interrelation and interaction with the signs in its immediate environment. At the same time, however, as compensation, she acquired especially acute hearing. Normally, while speaking, our own voice inflection and tone remain within our subsidiary awareness. In contrast, since Christina had fundamentally lost her capacity for subsidiary attention, she found it necessary focally to concentrate on every facet of this aspect of her speech. At first she had difficulty in doing so, but gradually she made progress, and her conversation took on a more ‘normal’ countenance. Christina applied this same type of retraining to her body. Since she had very little proprioceptive awareness, she found it necessary to compensate for this loss by paying close focal attention to her body’s posture and each and every one of its moves. She was eventually able to improve on the positioning of her body. But her pose appeared forced, willful, and histrionic, ‘like a dancer in mid-pose’. Nature having failed her, she resorted to artifice (Sacks 1987: 49–50). Doing it as if it were natural As a general rule, when we process the signs we make for others and take from our environment and repeat them over and over again, they begin to be made and taken tacitly, that is, subsidiarily. They have become part of our habits of thought and action; they have become ‘degenerate’. Christina, in contrast, could not afford the luxury of their becoming habituated: each actualization of virtually all her signs must be taken as if they were there for the first time, and she reacted accordingly. Her self necessarily remained apart from them. Ordinarily there is hardly any distinction between our self and our sign replications at this habituated level; we take them all in our stride, and act appropriately and proprioceptively. Christina, unlike us, felt that her body was ‘blind and deaf to itself ’, that it had ‘no sense of itself ’. It is as if while hammering a nail into the drywall we must pay focal and conscious attention to all our signs: hammer-sign, nail-sign, wall-sign, feel-of-hammer-on-palmsign, hammer-in-intermittent-contact-with-nail-sign, and so on. We wouldn’t
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be able to process all our signs effectively since the body’s sign processing couldn’t collaborate with mind’s sign processing. Christina, in short, was condemned to dwell in an indescribable, unimaginable world. It is a ‘non-world’ that Sacks (1987: 51) refers to as ‘nothingness’ – of course we’ve encountered this term before, from Nāgārjuna. Christina lost all sense of her identity with respect to her body; ultimately she had no body-ego. Whenever she wished to use her hand, for example, she must re-invent it as ‘her hand’, and then concentrate on using that otherwise alien appendage for a specific purpose. She succeeded in being able to ‘operate’ within her surroundings, but it was as if her signs had no past; they must be re-actualized in the present as if they were there for the first time. Yet she learned to survive, an indomitable, irrepressible, and impressive human being. In fact, it is natural, because it is part of bodymind’s doing
So, rules, and rule following. Focal rule following involves concerted attention and specific action, within some concrete timespace context, in an effort to bring the task at hand to closure: (1) ‘Fetch that succulent morsel and eat it’; (2) ‘Catch that fleeing fullback and tackle him’; (3) ‘Hit the ball flying in the direction of your bat’; (4) ‘Intercept the ball headed for the goal’; or (5) ‘Pound a nail in the wall and hang that picture’. In the most explicitly precise sense of physical laws, insofar as they are capable of accounting for completion of the task, the focal rules involve: (1) ‘Computing the distance, velocity and trajectory of that moving object, your next meal’; (2) ‘Calculating the distance and vectorial angular velocity of that scurrying body you hope to bring down’; (3) ‘Knowing where the ball will be so it will collide with your bat which will be swinging at approximately a 180 degree angle to the right of your body’; (4) ‘Effectively predicting the ball’s trajectory such that your outstretched hands can come into contact with it’; or (5) ‘Determining the durability of the drywall, the length, width, and sharpness of the point of the nail, the weight of the hammer, and the force required to perforate the solid matter with the nail’.35
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Davidson’s ‘prior theory’ and ‘passing theory’ ideas might enter the scene as well. However, I’m assuming Davidson’s radical interpretation involves relatively more deliberate, mind-driven appraisal and analysis than the activities under review here. Nonetheless, I would affirm that there can be no valid distinction between Davidson’s relatively mindful process and the unthinking processes I am discussing, but rather, they are complementary, with varying swerves and slides of mind-, body-, and bodymind-sign processing, according to the nature of activity.
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Focally, the subject must drill in on the core, where the action is, in order most effectively to get the job done. Subsidiarily, he is peripherally (tacitly) aware of the whole of the context: (1) where that morsel of food is, in which direction it is traveling, at what angle the mantis must stretch out and grasp it in order to consume it and stay alive for another day; (2) who the fullback is, his capacities and propensities, his approximate mass and the direction of his flight, at what angle he must be pursued in order to make a tackle and earn screams and applause from an appreciative public; (3) the pitcher’s nature and strategies and the probability of his projecting the ball toward home plate in a particular way; (4) who the penalty kicker is, his repertoire of kicks, and what strategy he will likely employ in this case; and (5) the material condition of the wall, how the nail is protruding it, at what angle and with what force the hammer should come into contact with the nail. At the same time, subsidiary awareness involves the entire context: (1) whether or not the enemy – some winged predator – is in the area, the wind factor; (2) whether a blocker from the opposing team is approaching, how that ankle sprained a week ago is holding up, the roar reaching a crescendo from the crowd; (3) whether there is a man or men on base, and where, and the inning and score; (4) the score, the time, the game’s progress at this juncture; and (5) whether there might be a soft spot in the dry wall due to years of humidity, if the nail is bending slightly or not. In concrete actual practice, of course, specific computations for carrying out a rule focally are unnecessary. Focally, the computations are carried out through an interdependent feeling between oneself and the task at hand, and indexical interrelated interaction with the objects in question ‘out there’, most at tacit levels. And it’s all done apparently as naturally as can be. Subsidiarily, if the task is carried out successfully, it was also accomplished at largely tacit levels. During the fact there was little time for linear thinking or talking or taking action. What was done, was done, with respect to the whole context within which the doing occurred. After the fact, the doer can think and talk and go through the actions regarding what had been done. But only to a certain extent. Neither the mantis nor the cornerback nor the batter nor the goalie nor the picture hanger is more than tacitly aware of the rules followed in accordance with physical laws. Yet they generally knew how to do what they did. They didn’t know that they did it because of ‘force’ and ‘velocity’ as a function of ‘time’ and ‘vectorial forces’, and so on, all computed to a few decimal places on our pocket calculator. They had no need of knowing that; they only needed to know how. And they did it: that is who they are and what they do.
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You follow the subsidiary rule not by carrying out the formal operations in order to achieve the task at hand, but rather, you follow your feeling for the rightness of things, you pay heed to your inclinations and hunches, you pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get on with it, you improvise, at times with cocksure certainty, at other times with doubts, sometimes not knowing where you are, and by and large you are usually able to muddle through it all. Subsidiarily, you know about white swans, green emeralds, and such things, and you take them all in your stride quite handily. If you are technically attuned to these objects, you can also focally and subsidiarily become aware of mutant azaleas, non-white swans, and not-quite-so-green emeralds. The relevance of Peirce
Notice that I have, implicitly as it were, alluded to three phases in the process of knowing (tacitly and subsidiarily) and putting what is known to use (consciously and focally), which patterns: (1) sensing, acknowledging what is sensed, and acting on it; (2) Peirce’s concept of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity as briefly discussed above; and (3) Peirce’s categories, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. For the purpose of economy, in this section I’ll use the word ‘seeing’ instead of ‘sensing’, while maintaining awareness that the general process of sensing actually pertains to all sorts of sense-data. Raw ‘seeing’, before there is any explicit interconnection between the seeing agent and what is seen or between that agent and the nature of that ‘seeing’, is basically a matter of iconicity, and most fundamentally of Firstness. An icon is such as it is insofar as it bears some resemblance with something else, and Firstness is what it is without (yet) having entered into interdependent interrelations and interaction with anything else. ‘Seeing’ something as such-and-such – say, a hammer – entails ‘seeing’ it as something other than and apart from the seeing agent, and that it is there for that seeing agent in some capacity or other. This is chiefly a matter of indexicality, or most basically Secondness. An index is such as it is insofar as it has entered, is entering, or will have entered into interaction with something other than what it is in some respect or capacity. Now that an iconic image or Firstness – the hammer – has taken on some function or other for the seeing agent with respect to something else – the hammer is becoming what it is insofar as it can come into contact with a nail for some purpose or other. At the same time, the seeing agent is becoming a co-participatory agent with the signifying process: she ‘sees’ that the hammer is what it is insofar as, along with a nail, it can be used to perforate the drywall over there. This is chiefly a matter of symbolicity, or Thirdness, most
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appropriate for linguistic expression and knowing. We now have a sign – the raw image of a hammer – that is ‘seen’ as so-and-so – a hammer, the object of the sign – and there is ‘seeing’ that it can be used to provide such-and-such a function – pounding a nail into the wall (as in Figure 3). It is a sign of something for someone in some respect or other. Shortly thereafter, with hammer in one hand, nail between the left hand thumb and index finger of the other hand, and adjacent to the wall, the operation begins. Taking the next step, the iconic process, or Firstness, in regard to human communication within social contexts and according to conventional rules of sign use within particular cultures, usually entails learning by sensing what others do and then doing what they do insofar as is possible. In a word, it by and large involves imitation. One senses how it is done, and does it like that; one gets an image with respect to how it’s done and then re-creates the image. Then one knows, more or less. Knowing without doing implies the possibility for doing within one of all possible cultural contexts. This is germane to Firstness: possibility. As possibility, one’s putting one’s knowing to use could actualize one particular aspect of what one knows (A), or something else (Not-A). As long as there is no more than possible possibility, both A and Not-A might be viable – as at the lowermost point in the diagram in Figure 6. When one uses one’s knowing within some specific context, one actualizes some aspect of that knowing. One puts one’s knowing into action with respect to one’s interaction within one’s mental world, one’s social world, and/ or one’s physical world; that is, within one’s ‘form of life’. One knows how, and does what one thinks needs to be done. This is basically Secondness: actualization. Now, either A or some other possibility, Not-A, was realized, but never both of them at the same time. Contradiction is more often than not barred, and the Excluded-Middle is in effect – as in the middle portion of Figure 6. However, mental, social, and physical world contexts are perpetually in the process of change. This calls for creative interaction in light of altered interrelations, and hence altered interdependency, between oneself and one’s particular context here and now. Creative responses bring in something new, something that didn’t belong to the range of possibilities contained within one’s knowing, something that would give rise to some actualization of one’s knowing that would be other than what that actualization would have been had the variation in one’s possibilities remained unchanged. Now, something novel, something different – a difference that makes a difference – will be in the process of emerging. This is chiefly Thirdness. It entails the ability to learn how to learn anew. It also involves symbolicity, language, communication by way of signs of
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convention, signs that can be used in other than normal ways. The emergence of novelty can in the most processually dynamic of all scenarios break with the Excluded-Middle, since something seeps up from within what has become, through the function of Thirdness, the mediating Middle-Way so to speak, the Included-Middle. Now, actualization of one’s learning is neither a matter of either A or Not-A, for something has arisen that is neither A nor Not-A but something else, something new – as in the upper portion of Figure 6. This is learning to learn and subsequently knowing anew. It involves knowing that one’s knowing how needs some shaving down here and there, needs some amendment or other, or in dire cases it needs to be thrown out altogether and replaced by some alternative. Yet something lies behind this nonlinear, multivalent, context dependent, complementarily coalescent process, as evinced in Figure 5. It is the nonlinearly flowing sequence: ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’. From emptiness (possible possibility), to the ‘empty set’ – noticed absence – to what possibly might become and its counterpart, to merely possible, to mediation and then to the formation of an actual concrete sign. Without this sequence, and in view of the implications of Peirce’s notion of the semiosic process, I would respectfully submit, there could not have been, there is not, and there will not have been, any becoming of signs, their respective objects, acts and happenings, or sign interpretants, all of which entails signs and their interpreters as co-participatory. To recap, Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowing’, entailing a combination of focal and subsidiary awareness, calls for one’s believing one knows what to do and engaging in the process of doing it. But the complementary coalescent nature of processual everyday living presents perpetually varying contexts and situations; one must alter one’s way of living, thus becoming ‘objectively idealistic’, taking on now a bit of ‘skepticism’, now processing one’s signs with a slight dose of ‘dogma’ and ‘belief ’, now ‘playacting’ as if one knew precisely what one is doing, now vacillating, revealing a tinge of doubt, now forging ahead, now contemplating where one might have been, where one is and how one might have arrived here, and what the future might have in store. There is confident uncertainty, suspicious wisdom, assured vagueness, hesitant poise; there are both-ands and neither-nors along with the eithers and ors. A turn more specifically to Wittgenstein’s notion of rule following might serve as an aid in more adequately understanding this process.
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Chapter Seven
Rules are made to be broken? Chapter Seven. Rules are made to be broken? Wittgenstein’s notorious paradox involving rule following comes to the fore. There is the need to bring up this paradox, since it bears on the idea of process. This idea in turn evokes variation on the transition from possible possibility to the merely possible to actual signness to signs becoming other signs as they cascade along the ever changing semiosic stream. Given such change, homogeny, virtual indistinctness within the range of possibilities, gives way to hierogeny – hierarchical distinctiveness, and hence hegemony never ceases to threaten – and the process moves along heterogenous differentiations that render differences more subtle as they become finer and finer, toward that hoary dream of a globalizing homogenous social world. However, the road to that dream veers off toward infinity: hence it is an impossible dream. In this vein, the very notion of infinity merits a further look – to be taken up in Chapter Eight. Mind, and its flowing in and through rules
When speaking, listening, writing, or reading, the common assumption has it that we must follow rules. We must follow them on conscious or focal and tacit or subsidiary levels. The correctness of my using the word ‘swan’ depends upon the context within which I use it and how I use it. I must consciously or tacitly – or some mixture thereof – follow the general rule as it applies to the proper object, act or happening within a particular timespace context within my linguistic community. Prior to Great Britain’s Captain James Cook’s (1728–1779) explorations, most Europeans would use the word ‘swan’ while tacitly assuming all swans are ‘white’, in accord with the conventional rule-bound premise regarding any and all swans. That premise was destined to be overthrown, however, and the particular rule for ‘swan’ use was subsequently altered.36 For, after Cook’s dis36
I write ‘was destined to be overthrown’ in view of Nacim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007), where he argues that we place too much weight on the odds that past events are destined to repeat themselves. Instead, the most important events are unpredictable, and more often than not they will at some catastrophic moment in the future radically alter what was thought to be immutable. Taleb calls such events ‘Black Swans’.
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covery of black swans in Australia, ‘black’ could also apply to swans within the range of all-possible-swans talk. Must there not be, then, a rule that we apply to rules that no longer apply? The apparent answer is positive, one must surmise. Such a rule might be this: ‘When evidence goes against the grain of proper word use attached to proper objects, acts and happenings within particular timespace contexts, change the rule according to this new evidence’. Well and dandy. What rule could be simpler and more intuitively obvious? But now, must there not be a rule for changing the rule when new evidence pops up? Well, logically speaking, yes, it might seem. And we eventually end up in a vicious circle merry-go-round. We might wish to insist that the rule tells us how to perceive and conceive and talk about objects, acts and happenings and the signs with which they interact according to the standard practices of our particular community. We internalize the rule, use it when communicating, both tacitly and consciously, and more often than not we are able to get along swimmingly. And when what we expected doesn’t jibe with what apparently is becoming, we alter the rule accordingly. But what’s to keep us from deviating from the rule for apparently no reason at all? Prior to Cook’s experience, why not ‘swan’ attached to ‘black’ things? We respond that we use our words the way we use them because it’s the nature of the conventions within our community. That’s all. There is no necessary similarity between our words and other signs and objects, acts and happenings in the case of iconicity; and there is no necessary natural connection such as part for whole, container for contained, cause for effective, or contiguity in the case of indexicality. We just put our rules into effect when we do what we do. Well, then, perhaps it is some particular state of mind associated with the rule that presumably ‘determines’ the meaning. Maybe the rule for the use of ‘swan’ conjures up the mental image of a swan (Davidson’s prior theory), and I simply match up the image with the object (Davidson’s passing theory). If we wish to follow Wittgenstein, however, many passages in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) bring home the fact that there is often no state of mind that inflexibly goes together with meaning something. We, body and mind, bodymind, just do what we do, and get on with it. Seeing a ‘white’ swan and saying ‘swan’ follows some tacitly assumed notion that ‘all swans are white’, or some equally tacitly assumed notion that ‘most swans are white, except for those that happen to be black’. Wittgenstein’s corollary? Following Cook’s discovery, the assumption that ‘most swans are white, but some are black’ bears on Wittgenstein’s notion that we are often surrounded
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by many possibilities for deviating from our customary ways of identifying our objects, acts and happenings and endowing them with meaning apparently as easy as we please regardless of whatever state of mind we might be in. This is because, given many and likely most conventions, there are alternate ways of making and taking our signs. Wittgenstein offers the example of a cube: [S]uppose that a picture comes before your mind when you hear the word ‘cube’, say the drawing of a cube. In what sense can this picture fit or fail to fit a use of the word ‘cube’? – Perhaps you say: ‘It’s quite simple; – if that picture occurs to me and I point to a triangular prism for instance, and say it is a cube, then this use of the word doesn’t fit the picture.’ – But doesn’t it fit? I have purposely chosen the example that it is quite easy to imagine a method of projection according to which the picture does fit after all. The picture of the cube did indeed suggest a certain use to us, but it was possible for me to use it differently. (Wittgenstein 1953: §139)
Imagine I mistakenly call a triangular prism a ‘cube’. It is just the product of a mental state (prior theory) that doesn’t coincide with the standard practices of my community (hence my prior theory was wrong). I committed a stupid error, that’s all. Or perhaps it is some strange counterconventional intention I have in mind when I use the word ‘cube’ when thinking of cubes that determines its application. For me the application is as reasonable as can be, for it fits with a host of other private, idiosyncratic intentional modes. Someone else might call the ‘cube’ image a ‘box’, a child’s ‘block’, or some such thing. In principle she’s as right as I am if I call a triangular prism a ‘cube’, though she’s in another mind-set. She apparently has some intention that doesn’t correspond to mine. At any rate, it goes without saying that she would have fewer problems communicating with members of her speech community than would I. (Notice, in addition, that I have reverted to some facets of Davidson’s radical interpretation, since he, like Wittgenstein, is more explicitly involved with symbolic, that is linguistic signs, most particularly processes involving Thirdness.) Still, the idea of intention doesn’t provide any satisfactory answer. For, what determines that ‘swans’ as a mental state necessarily interrelates with swans in the physical world, and not (mistakenly) with lions? Or that ‘box’ as a mental state interrelates with cubes and not with block. Interrelations between ‘swans’ and ‘cubes’, mental or otherwise, and with the physical world, need not always be motivated by any natural or necessary (intentional) correlation between a sign and its particular object, act or happening. In this manner at least, there is something to say in favor of Ferdinand de Saussure’s CEEOL copyright 2020
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(1966) notorious ‘principle of arbitrariness’ with respect to sound patterns in the air or marks on paper (intentionally) interrelating with objects, acts and happenings. In the beginning, ‘rectangular prism’ could have been adopted in place of ‘cube’ and vice versa, or swans could have been called ‘lions’ and lions could have been called ‘swans’, and communication could still go on quite handily, for we would all generally be of a comparable mind-set. However, contrary to Saussure, meaning is not simply a mental affair. It involves complex contexts within which signs are made and taken. As Hilary Putnam (1987) tirelessly argued, meaning is neither in the head, in the sign, in the object, act or happening, nor in the sign medium. In Wittgenstein’s words: ‘nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §593). Nor is meaning exclusively the product of an arbitrary sign activity, ‘caused’ in one form or another by objects, acts and happenings (Horwich 2006; Moore 1993), strictly a matter of cognitive (mental) processes (Feldman 2008; Strauss, Quinn 1998; Vega et al. 2008), or the medium through which information passes (McLuhan, Fiore 1967; Maturana, Varela 1987). What we take for meaning is ultimately the consequence of what we do and how we do it, tacitly as well as consciously within particular timespace contexts, during the coming and going of our everyday living. These sweeping assertions call for further remarks on rule following. Rules: out of sight and out of mind?
How do we know we are applying a word – or some other type sign – properly to some object, act, or happening? We generally assume that what is proper is what we’ve internalized according to some convention; then it becomes sedimented and entrenched (‘degenerate’), and we customarily use the word tacitly, largely without thinking, with no specific reliance on particular mental states. In comparable fashion, according to Wittgenstein, following a rule is simply ‘going on’ in a certain way. So we apply ‘swan’ to those specimens in the nearest city park or wherever, and not to any ‘lions’ that might happen to be around. In this respect Wittgenstein (1953: §217) writes: ‘How am I able to obey a rule?’ – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about justification for obeying the rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justification I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’
The very possibility of using and responding to language, or any other sort of signs for that matter, depends on: (1) our entrenched habits bringing CEEOL copyright 2020
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about our uses of and responses to signs within comparable coalescently complementary timespace contexts that are always becoming something other than what they were; (2) our interdependent, interrelated interaction with other people in the community to which we belong who share more or less the same habits of use; and (3) our world-version we more or less share with others in our community. The bottom line is: tacit, habituated use and response to signs is at the heart of communication; it is at the heart of rule-following. So we follow rules, often unthinkingly, and if and when we happen to begin pondering over those rules, or if we are called on to justify them, we can usually go only so far; then we reach ‘bedrock’, and our ‘spade is turned’; so our recourse is limited to our conceding that we do what we do because that’s who we are (see also Wright 1981). Once again, in Wittgenstein’s words: It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on. – To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions). (Wittgenstein 1953: §199)
Customs, tradition, making and taking signs as a cultural practice. This is what Wittgenstein means by obeying a rule blindly (‘degenerately’). When one obeys a rule, one doesn’t choose. One obeys, largely without bothering to think about it. Does this mean there is no conscious and conscientious process when following a rule? That there is no focal awareness operating in tandem with tacit subsidiary awareness? That there is hardly more than mere conformity? Not necessarily. Wittgenstein (1956 VII: 60) places these notions in question: ‘One follows the rule mechanically. Hence one compares it with a mechanism […]. “Mechanical” – that means without thinking. But entirely without thinking? Without reflecting’. David Bloor (1997: 51–52) writes that there is what he calls a ‘conscientiousness condition’ to rule-following: ‘Blind’ or ‘mechanical’ rule following, […] is not entirely ‘without thinking’. It is automatic in the sense of needing no reflection. When we say following a rule involves thinking you are following it, this needs to be interpreted minimally. All the ‘thinking’ required is the routine awareness of the average, competent member of a society who has been socialized into its customs and institutions […]. Here, then, is Wittgenstein’s reconciliation of the blind character of rule following with the conscientiousness condition. We can be ‘blindly conscientious’. We follow some rules automatically, but do so within a social framework CEEOL copyright 2020
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to which we are known to be responsive, and within which we operate according to acceptable standards of competence and awareness. In this way we can be said to ‘think’ or ‘know’ that we are following a rule, even though we are responding ‘blindly’.
Making and taking signs is a concrete practice, not fleshless abstraction. Consequently, virtually any rule can be ‘variously interpreted’. Putting a rule into practice is ‘not a repository from which the use unfolds or a logical machine that generates applications of its own accord’ (Baker, Hacker 1984: 17). New situations always arise, routines are disrupted, rule use and the consequence of its use change – the ‘black swan’ example. Awareness of such change ushers in new choices. Granted, when one obeys a rule ‘blindly’ one doesn’t choose. But from case to case, and in view of perpetually altering timespace contexts, rule use inevitably varies; rules are often fudged, even though so slightly as to seem imperceptible. However, tacit and relatively ‘blind’ rule use and meaning-making and -taking, along focal and subsidiary lines, is at certain junctures punctuated by moments of awareness, when the ‘conscientiousness condition’ kicks in. One becomes aware of the rule, of the varying timespace context, and of meaning variance. Then, one can say with confidence, ‘I do it because this is what I do’, for in part, the doing remains tacit, habitual, embedded, entrenched (‘degenerate’).37 All this involves the indeterminacy, the uncertainty, of rule-following, of the norms of rule-following. So,… 37
Robert Burton (2008: 154-55) writes of a study of a group of neurologists and psychologists (Chabris, Simons 2010) attending a lecture at a seminar. The lecturer shows them a 32 second video: there are two basketball teams, one in white t-shirts and the other in black ones; each team has a basketball, and they are passing it to one another while weaving in and out among the players of the other team; the viewers’ task is to count the number of times the players with white t-shirts pass the ball. When the 32 seconds are up the lecturer asked if anybody saw anything unusual. A number of smirks, and a lot of shaking heads. Then he asks: ‘How many saw the gorilla?’ Only a few hands went up. Actually, toward the end of the tape, a person in a black gorilla suit angles to the center of the court, pounds his chest for a couple of seconds, then walks off (see the article on the experiment in Simons, Chabris 1999). The instruction was: ‘Observe the basketball action’. They apparently followed their instruction. But on so doing, they were ‘blinded’ to what should have been startlingly noteworthy non-basketball action. Assume the culturally entrenched custom, which we usually tacitly take as a rule is: ‘Intensively watch the game’. We obey the rule, ‘blindly’ in a manner of speaking, but we are ‘blinded’ to other otherwise interesting action. We focus on the basketball action and ‘blindly’ (tacitly) follow the rule; our subsidiary attention takes in much of the basketball action that remains outside our focal attention; we remain ‘blind’ to much of the non-basketball action. The question that arises is: If we are ‘blinded’ with respect to much of what we do that remains outside our attention, and if we ‘follow the rule blindly’, then to what extent do we unintentionally – and ‘blindly’ as it were – diverge from the rule?
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Rules, from a somewhat skeptical point of view
Wittgenstein would have us believe there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but involves that tacit act of ‘obeying a rule’ and at the same time ‘going against it’ in its application to a greater or lesser degree. ‘Obeying a rule’ is a practice, and thus ‘to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule’ (1953: §202).38 As suggested above, during the ‘practice’ of obeying a rule we more often than not do what we do, giving our doing little to no thought. The doing is in this sense largely tacit, interrelated interaction of focal and subsidiary attention; the doing was in progress in the previous moment, it is now in progress, and it will have been in progress in the next moment. That is, it’s process. From within this framework Saul Kripke (1982: 55) notoriously summarizes Wittgenstein thus: ‘There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict.’ The verdict? Wittgenstein suggests with his down-to-earth examples that stringently prescribe pristine language yielding predetermined meaning and autonomous truth is impossible, and if it were possible, it would be virtually unintelligible, for in our everyday affairs our understanding comes within concrete fluctuating and flowing timespace contexts. Kripke’s response? We might as well forget about truth regarding interpretation and meaning and think about consensus and practices within the community of language users; we must think about timespace contextualized conventions. Skepticism, suspending belief, and judgment regarding truth, in Kripke’s view, is overcome at least in the sense that we can attend to conventional language practices regulating how words are made and taken, meant and understood. Such skepticism, in view of ‘objective idealism’ and the ‘pragmatic maxim’ as briefly outlined in Chapters Two and Four, bearing on Nāgārjuna’s concept of emptiness and the middle way, presents no real problem. We need not anguish over it or strive to overcome it, for we ‘suspend belief and judgment regarding truth’ as a matter of course; and ‘conventional language practices’ hardly set up any overwhelming strictures binding us. In other words, if and when we become comfortable with the idea that all that is, is becoming something other than what it was becoming: it is processual. 38
In light of Nāgārjuna as presented above, Wittgenstein’s words might be construed as tantamount to what it is that is involved in obeying a rule as emptiness without the rule’s process of becoming being obeyed by the rule-follower, who, without the what and the rule, is likewise emptiness. In other words, what, rule, and rule-follower are in the interdependent, interrelated process of becoming, along with their entire world, during their moment of arising from emptiness.
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More concretely considered It is becoming increasingly obvious that this essay focuses not exclusively on linguistic practices, but on sign practices in general – linguistic and nonlinguistic alike – and on interdependent, interrelated interaction between signmakers and -takers. In this more general sense, let’s tune in on the general idea of obeying and disobeying and of entering in accord and conflict with standard everyday practices and their semiotic implications on the Latin American scene from colonial times to the present. A maxim that was often put into practice during the Spanish colonial period, was: ‘Obedezco pero no cumplo’ (‘I obey but I do not comply’, that is to say in so many words, ‘I would like to obey and comply, appropriately paying due homage to God, King, and Spain, but the complex and often sordid affairs of everyday life here in the colonies call for other more pragmatic measures; so with due respect I’ll not always comply, thank you, and good day’).39 One of the chief problems that led to this maxim rests in the Spanish Crown’s desire, after the initial atrocities committed by the conquerors, and virtually countless abuses thereafter, to protect the indigenous people by legislating laws that, however idealistic and well-meaning, were hardly fit for rough-and-tumble frontier life. Another problem is that, given the vast distance between Spain and the colonies, coupled with the fact that Spain’s resources were dwindling and the country was continually at war with other European nations, enforcement of the impractical laws was well-nigh impossible. Thus sentiment gravitated toward ‘I obey but I do not comply’. ‘I obey’ brings along baggage of an idealized sort of Augustinian ‘City of God’ image (or Plato’s ideal realm of pure ideas, if you will). ‘I do not comply’ puts one in a cut-throat, in-your-face ‘City of Man’ environment (or perhaps Plato’s earthly realm of matter). However, things are not quite so simple. City-of-God/City-of-Man sets us up for yet another apparent dualism. But actually, there is no genuine dualism in a socio-cultural milieu of multiplicity, pluralistic, nonlinear and asymmetrical hierarchization. Between the eithers/ors of private and public life, there are both-ands and neither-nors offering an uncountable concoction of alternate possible behavioral flows, many of which are forthcoming in daily practices whenever and wherever. Consequently, customary polarities (colonizer/colonized, master/slave, lord/serf, 39
It bears mentioning that I am writing in broad general terms on the Spanish American colonial scene the details of which I cannot divulge, given limited time and space parameters in this essay, and given my effort to provide a specific and particular hypothetical situation based on a general historical context (for further, see Gibson 1966, and for studies variously suggesting this phenomena, Adorno 1986; Chaves 1973; Gruzinski 1993, 2001, 2002; Ramírez 1990; Schroeder 1998).
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private/public, home/street) can always be mediated by a ‘third term’ within a ‘third space’, within the ‘virgule’ or ‘border’, lurking behind the scene, at any moment willing and ready to make its appearance from within the IncludedMiddle (as illustrated through Figure 6), and disrupt the process, whether so slight as to be well-nigh imperceptible, or on a massive scale (for a complementary account of this concept see de Certeau 1984; DaMatta 1991, 1995). Both the one horn and the other horn of the apparent oppositions ordinarily appropriated for the purpose of accounting for the Latin American cultural scene are essential, for sure. Yet, neither the one nor the other can be absolutely prioritized. In the first place, the one term of the presumed binary needs the other one – they are codependent – and in the second place, a ‘third term’, in fact many possibly possible ‘alternate terms’ within the ‘third space’, can at some appropriate moment emerge and make their presence felt either explicitly or implicitly. What does this have to do with ‘obeying’ and failing to ‘comply’? Blending words ‘portmanteauingly’, if you don’t mind Allow me to enter into a play of word blending by way of ‘portmanteau’ rhetoric. I’m aware that my wrangling with orthography and engaging in portmanteau words will at the outset likely appear inordinately clumsy and outside what would ordinarily be deemed analytically cogent and properly articulated scholarship. But please bear with me, and I trust the madness of my method will become buffered. The notion of nothing but accord would cancel the possibility of conflict, and nothing but conflict would cancel the possibility of accord. In actual practice, however, if one is flowing along in the spirit of a prevailing rule, one obeys, or at least one puts on the appearance of and pays lip service to obeying, but not necessarily always in the absolute sense, for one doesn’t entirely comply. This seems to exist behind Wittgenstein’s words suggesting that there is accord, but there is also conflict, and there is both accord and conflict, and yet there is neither accord nor conflict, strictly speaking, since the one implies the other and the other the one – in other words, the terms are complementarily coalescent. In light of the premises underlying this essay, just as there is at least a tinge of vagueness in any and all generalities, and vice versa, so also there is a bit of conflict in any accord that might happen to come about, and vice versa. Thus in the Latin American case, accord doesn’t deny conflict but includes some aspect of it, and vice versa. At the same time, since there is purely neither the one nor the other, strictly speaking, there is something different, let’s call it ‘acclict’ or ‘conford’ – portmanteau words combining ‘accord’ and
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‘conflict’ – the process that will be the focus of succeeding chapters.40 Portmanteauing the process entails, and raises attention with respect to, the perpetual complementary coalescence of words and their attendant meanings.41 In this manner, assume that given a particular practice in the Spanish colonies, there is ‘accord’ up to time t0, but after that point there are subtle hints of ‘conflict’, due to entry of circumstances onto the scene that render blind, mechanical obedience to the rules and their practices quite unfeasible. Since the difference between ‘accord’ and ‘conflict’ is not always apparent, there is a glass ‘half full’ or ‘half empty’, depending on the eye of the beholder and the context. On the other side of the coin, there might be ‘conflict’ up to time t0, and after that point it becomes convenient to bring about a coalescence of such ‘conflict’ with what was considered ‘accord’. But the difference is well nigh imperceptible, such that it could go either way, also as in the glass ‘half full’ or ‘half empty’. In the first case there is chiefly ‘accord’, then it gives way to ‘conflict’, and in the second case there is primarily ‘conflict’, then ‘accord’ makes its play. But in both cases there is always a bit of ‘conflict’ in the ‘accord’ and ‘accord’ in the ‘conflict’: they are complementary, in a sort of coalescent sense. Portmanteauing the two processes, we might allude, synthetically, to the first as ‘acclict’ and the second as ‘conford’, having bubbled up from their respective ‘Included-Middle’ – the ‘middle way’, or ‘third space’ – since the ExcludedMiddle no longer has its way. Correspondingly, there can be strict ‘obedience’ and ‘compliance’; however, given the pragmatic affairs of rough, unruly, and unpredictable colonial life in Spanish America, it becomes necessary to both ‘obey’ and ‘comply’, on the surface, but underneath, there is ‘obedience’ but, with a twinkling of the eye, also ‘noncompliance’. In other words, one might ‘obey’ up to time t0, but after that point one does not strictly ‘comply’. This is to say that after t0 one is prone to ‘obly’ or ‘compey’ – neither ‘obedience’ nor ‘compliance’ but 40
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I must reaffirm the notion that with the portmanteau process we are dealing with signs that are chiefly symbolic in the Peircean sense, though, of course, they contain, by and large concealed within themselves, the makings of iconic and indexical signs. Thus the appropriateness of Davidson’s radical interpretation theory through cautious and deliberate mental input, while keeping in mind subsidiary attention and tacit knowing that come to bear on extralinguistic (iconic and indexical) and relatively nonconscious on-the-fly action and improvisation as illustrated in the examples from soccer, baseball, our safety on the football field, our praying mantis, pounding a nail in the wall to hang a picture, and even the phlogiston case in science and the John Ross-Calderón-Obama tale regarding socio-political issues. This portmanteauing process, I must add, is in large part inspired by Nelson Goodman’s (1965) ‘New Riddle of Induction’ where he creates ‘Grue’ and Bleen’ as strange portmanteau alternatives for ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’ (see Hacking 1986; Hesse 1969; Small 1961; Stalker 1995; for applications of this ‘riddle’ to topics germane to this essay, merrell 1995, 1997, 2004, 2007, 2010).
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a fused, portmanteauing, hybrid entailing the one in the other and the other in the one. Notice that from either/or imperatives that abide by classical bivalent logical principles, loose and limber both-and and neither-nor processes have emerged, violating the Principles of Non-Contradiction and ExcludedMiddle, respectively, as illustrated in Figure 6 (more on this later). Wittgenstein, again
With portmanteauing in mind, if we refocus on rule-following and Wittgenstein’s ‘paradox’ about which Kripke wrote at length, we seem to be left dangling, without a comfortable solution at hand. As Wittgenstein (1953: §201) puts it: ‘if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it’, and so there is ‘neither accord nor conflict here’. If we wish to follow bivalent logical principles, there is either accord or there is not. If there is accord, then there can’t be non-accord; if there is non-accord, then there can’t be accord. There must be some middle ground: Nāgārjuna’s middle way. However, with respect to the Spanish American colonial scene as briefly discussed, according to the maxim ‘I obey but I do not comply’, there is not, binarily speaking, either obedience or non-obedience. There is obedience but non-compliance. Obedience and compliance, of course, aren’t taken in synonymous fashion; they are put in complementary areas of meaning, which can at the proper moment coalesce to create a hybrid fusion, which is in varying degrees overdetermined. There can be obedience and non-compliance, or, portmanteauly speaking, one can ‘obly’ and/or ‘compey’, according to one’s mind-set and the circumstances. If one is ‘oblying’, one places priority on obedience; if one is ‘compeying’, one places priority on complying – perhaps for appearances sake, for the record, or simply because the European lord is watching and one doesn’t dare engage in non-compliance. Thus, just as there can be in the Wittgenstein sense neither exactly ‘accord’ nor ‘conflict’, so also there can be neither ‘obedience’ nor ‘compliance’ in the ordinary meaning of the words, for ordinary categories have been scrambled, reordered, and blended to give something new and different. There is not necessarily any ‘leap in the dark’, as Kripke puts it, but practical application, on tacit and/or conscious levels, of rules and regulations that have been fudged and fused slightly or moderately or radically, according to the circumstances, to yield newly emergent variations of what had been considered standard practices. (Whatever ‘leap in the dark’ one might wish to suggest, nevertheless, within rapid-fire cultural processes the likes of which we reviewed above – the batter, goalie, praying mantis, and combinations of focal
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and subsidiary activity such as pounding a nail in drywall – if mind and body, that is, bodymind, is properly prepared following virtually countless hours of intensive and purposeful practice, decisions are made and proper and proficient action is forthcoming, giving the appearance that it is all as natural as can be [see Syed 2010: 77–112]). The portmanteauing fusion of words and languages and practices bears on the process to which I have frequently alluded as complementary coalescence. Words and other signs, as well as thoughts and the physical world and customary practices that guide them, are intricately interconnected such that they complement one another – even though they may be ordinarily conceived as of contradictory nature – and they converge toward and merge with one another by way of coalescent processing. The idea of obeying and complying, usually considered as going hand in hand in the Spanish American colonies, took on new meaning and called for novel social practices. In terms of portmanteauing, the two words coalesce to form a pair of new words, ‘obly’ and ‘compey’, which involve both obedience and compliance, and obedience and non-compliance, and thus strictly speaking there is neither obedience nor compliance, depending on the frame of reference and the perspective. Complementary coalescence of ‘obey’ and ‘comply’ yields new meanings of signs and new practices: ‘obliance’ and ‘compedience’. What kind of complementarity, more precisely speaking? It might appear that I am dealing here with crude ambiguity rather than a subtle form of complementarity. In fact, William Byers in How Mathematicians Think (2007) prefers the term ‘ambiguity’ over ‘complementarity’. Here and elsewhere (merrell 2004, 2007, 2010) I opt for ‘complementarity’ of the sort illustrated in the Yin-Yang symbol, which inspired Niels Bohr in developing his Principle of Complementarity as a means for understanding the quantum world. In fact, complementarity seeps into mathematics and geometry from the very beginning, and it has become one of the main characters in physics for over a century. In mathematics, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem telling us that the length of the third side of a right triangle is equal to the square root of the sum of the other two sides squared can be easily computed for a right triangle whose two sides adjacent to the 90 degree corner are 4 inches and 3 inches. Simply add 42 and 32 and you have 25, and the square root of 25 is 5. But if the two adjacent sides are both 1 inch in length, 12 is 1, so the hypotenuse is the square root of 2. Compute the square root of 2 as far as you wish, and you never end up with an absolutely precise number.
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The answer remains with at least a tinge of vagueness. However, geometrically, the problem is easily solved. Connect two 1 inch lines at a right angle, and draw a third line at their extremities forming two 45 degree corners, and you can see the finished product apparently as clear as day. The mathematical solution remains just a little bit vague, and the coalescence of the mathematical and the geometric solutions are complementary: the geometric picture seems clear and distinct, but it isn’t, not really, because the vagueness inherent in the mathematical computation infects it with that selfsame smudge of vagueness. It reminds one of what Peirce once quipped: ‘It is easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague’ (CP 4.237). In physics, electricity and magnetism were taken as distinct, unrelated phenomena, until Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) brought them together into an interdependent, interrelated interactive package. It is now generally assumed that the two phenomena are different aspects of the same electromagnetic field – or might we consider them ‘elecnetism’ and ‘magtricity’? Albert Einstein’s equation from his Special Theory of Relativity, E = mc2 (1905) shows how mass and energy are two ways of thinking about the same process: the one can become the other and the other the one. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916) subtly fuses time and space into timespace. In all cases there has been complementary coalescence which, by way of portmanteau processing, fuses not only natural phenomena but also signs, since, in the Peirce sense, signs, objects, acts and happenings, meanings, and mental and physical worlds, are not distinct but intimately interconnected. Regarding such fusions, or what I’ve termed complementary coalescence, Byers (2007: 62) writes: The dominant Western tradition going back to Descartes is that there is a mind/body duality. I suggest that there is another possibility – an “ambiguous” possibility. I suggest that the mind/brain and subjective/objective situations are not merely dualities or complementarities but ambiguities. Calling them ambiguities makes all the difference because, whereas a duality may be seen to be a fixed and unchangeable aspect of reality, an ambiguity always allows for a higher-level unification. Thus one could say that there is one unified reality that looks subjective when we approach it in one way and objective when we approach it another […]. If reality itself has this ambiguous nature, then it is not so surprising to see the same ambiguous characteristics arising in both the “subjective” domains of mathematical and physical theory as well as in the “objective” domain of subatomic physics.
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Byers, as mentioned, prefers ‘ambiguity’ over ‘complementarity’. He links duality with complementarity which leaves things ‘fixed and unchangeable’, while ambiguity yields a ‘higher-level unification’. However, I interrelate complementarity with contradiction – which customarily implies unchangeability, paying homage to bivalent principles – and coalescence – which implies perpetual processual change wherein everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. Enough portmanteauing. The point, I would hope, has been made. So, on to an appraisal regarding where we’ve been. Coalescence: the universal mixer?
Complementary coalescence, the source of portmanteauing, involves nonlinear movement at higher and lower levels. But there is no transcendence, for the levels entail interdependence, interrelatedness, and interaction; hence labeling the levels ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ is no more than an arbitrary choice. These levels also entail possible possibility, mere possible possibility, three-way mediation, becomingness or actualization, and differentiation or nonlinear complexification of what has been actualized. First, as implied in Figures 3 through 6, there is possible possibility. Possible possibilities and their contradictories, many of them mutually exclusive and incompatible when they have become actualities, make congenial bedfellows. After all, they are no more than possibilities. As possibilities, the Earth can rest on an elephant’s back, it can revolve around the Sun, the Sun can revolve around it, its movement can be relative to the movement of the Moon and the collection of all other astral bodies, and so on. As part of a virtually unlimited range of pure possibilities, all the characteristics can be ‘true’ within different communities, given their respective timespace socio-cultural contexts. The very idea of contradiction loses its sting: Non-Contradiction doesn’t always apply; both one possible actualization and another can coexist. Call this the Both-And Principle. For example, a child in her mother’s womb, after birth, might carry the label Jane, June, Jill, Jamie, Jan, Jony, or whatever; prior to birth, they were possible possibilities, some of them of course more likely than others. Second, within some given timespace socio-cultural context, a minuscule portion of these possible possibilities, by way of mediated sign possibilities, can enter into the process of actualizing-becoming. As actualized objects, acts, or happenings, labels can enter into conflict. The ‘Earth as center of the universe’ can’t logically exist beside the ‘Sun as center of the universe’. One proposition must be deemed ‘true’, and if ‘true’, the other proposition
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must be ‘false’. Contradictions are a necessary part of the act of cutting out and labeling objects, acts and happenings within particular timespace sociocultural contexts. Objects, acts and happenings are considered identical to themselves: they are what they are and cannot be other than what they are: A is A. What is other than what they are cannot be anything else than something other than what they are: A can neither be nor can it become Not-A. And there must be what is and what it is Not; there is no alternative: either A or Not-A; either A or B. In this manner, within a given field of actualized objects, acts and happenings, classical bivalent logic inheres: Identity, NonContradiction and Excluded-Middle. Call this the Either/or Principle. Assuming the newborn child takes on a ‘Jane’ label, she is Jane and none other than Jane, and to call her by some other name is ordinarily deemed contradictory – though when calling her by any other name, she’s still the same Jane as far as those who know her are concerned. Third, within a given socio-cultural context, what has been labeled according to the prevailing either/or categorical distinctions never ceases to undergo minor or major changes; hence the socio-cultural context is also always in the process of becoming. Nothing is fixed; everything is changing; distinctions are customarily in the process of becoming successively differentiated into finer and finer differences such that the line of demarcation separating what they are from everything they are not becomes fuzzy, vague, and crisp either/or categories become hazy. Alternate possibilities between the eithers and the ors can possibly begin their process of emerging into the light of day, if conditions are conducive, and their emergence serves to more finely differentiate the eithers and the ors, which makes shambles of the very idea of Excluded-Middles and ushers in the Included-Middle. Call this process the Neither-Nor Principle. Jane is Jane, for sure. But at age one she might have been called Janie, while teen-age Jane is just Jane, middle-age Jane and senior citizen Jane (commonly called ‘Grannie’) is someone who has been, is, and will be until she passes away becoming someone other than who she was becoming. As ‘Jane’, she is never fixed, and as a human, she is in the process of becoming successively more completely definable as who she is, as a self-identical self, though specification of her identity will always remain incomplete in a finite world. Jane is always becoming neither who she was becoming nor one of the other possibilities for becoming, bivalently considered, but rather, she is becoming something other, from within the Included-Middle, something new, something that wasn’t previously in the process of becoming.
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The emergence of what (we think) is
In light of what was suggested in the previous section, Figure 13 offers an image of the processual nature of what elsewhere I have labeled homogeny, hierogeny, and heterogeny. I end these terms with the suffix ‘-geny’, since, of the same root as gene, it elicits the image of genesis, organicity, and process, and it falls in line with the processual nature of our learning-knowing. I use the trio of prefixes, ‘homo-’, ‘hiero-’, and ‘hetero-’, respectively, as: (1) ‘likeness’, ‘similarity’, ‘analogy’, all of which implies the possible notion of ‘sameness’; (2) ‘positioned’ or ‘ranked’, according to the conventions within a particular sociocultural timespace context, something is in contrast to what it isn’t’, with priority usually given to the is Figure 13. The sign’s processual nature. over the isn’t; and (3) ‘dissimilarity’, ‘successive differentiatedness’, ‘differences becoming increasingly finer’, allowing for something new to emerge into the light of day (see also merrell 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009). Homogeny is, as qualified above, the range of possible possibilities, or pure possibility wherein everything is similar to everything else in some way or other; hence it involves the Both-And Principle. Hierogeny, actualized possibilities, entails the becoming of consciousness regarding the thingness of things and their semiotic labels; this becoming of consciousness also entails awareness of distinctions, contradictions, inconsistencies, and the mutual exclusivity of labels in conflict, since this tier of Figure 13 abides by bivalent thinking, or the Either/Or Principle. The upper tier, including heterogeny, opens up the Excluded-Middle upon introducing the Principle of IncludedMiddles or the Neither-Nor Principle. While at the lower of the three levels there is acknowledgment of the inevitability of inconsistencies, at the upper
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level there is awareness of unavoidable incompleteness of any and all modes of description and explanation on the basis of conceptual schemes; thus the broken arrow from heterogeny upward toward the receding horizon. Homogeny is radically overdetermined: an indefinite number of possible possibilities are ready and waiting for the propitious moment to enter into the light of day at the beckoning call of some sign-maker or -taker. Heterogeny is in the final analysis underdetermined: it depends upon either/or distinctions emanating from hierogeny, and takes on the task of rendering those distinctions increasingly smoother such that borders fade and distinctions begin merging – portmanteauing – with one another. Consequently whatever happens to be qualified by a certain presumed legitimate label can be threatened by some other label that had previously been considered unfeasible, but that other label might eventually be deemed preferable – from within a slightly to radically different timespace socio-cultural context – and allowed to enter into the light of day: the ‘Earth as center of the universe’ is transformed into the ‘Sun as center of the universe’, and so on.42 The right side of Figure 13 indicates the constant threat of closure, and, ultimately, the globalizing dream of multinational corporations and other institutions consisting of homogenized societies and cultures. Fortunately, emerging economies with cultures of have-nots making up the major part of the population have been remarkably effective at resisting the global pressure to conform (‘I obey but I don’t comply’?), as Néstor García Canclini’s (1993, 1995, 2001) work aptly illustrates. According to all indications, the trend will continue, for the benefit of all, and especially have-not cultures. ‘But what happened to rules?’ – comes the query. The perpetually changing process of change Rule-following is still around, for sure, but, given the implications of Figure 13, in a somewhat altered form. In terms of information theory, perhaps unfortunately, perhaps not, the idea of rules is commonly conceived in a sort of algorithmic manner, as virtually interminable applicability, over and over. This is process, in a manner of speaking. But ideally it is the reiteration of the same thing, without conceivable end; it is usually construed as linear 42
At this juncture I should point out that implicit and often hidden sources for what I am about in this and following chapters are wide-ranging. For general ideas regarding nonlinearity – including complexity and chaos theory – and physical world and social world interconnectivity, see Barbási 2002; Capra 1996; Gleick 1987; Hayles 1990; Mainzer 1994; Peckham 1965; Prigogine, Stengers 1984; Watts 2003; for the notion of ‘swarm intelligence’ or ‘group wisdom’, Bonabeau, Théraulaz 2000; Borgo 2007; Bradlyn 1988–1989; Fisher 2009; Johnson 2002; Resnick 1994; Strogatz 2003; for emergence, improvisation and creativity, Bailey 1992; Casti 1994; Csikszentmihalyi 1991; Horgan 1995; Monson 1996; Murphy 1990; Nachmanovitch 1990.
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becoming, at best. The product involves rules put to use in the course of everyday socio-cultural timespace contexts. What I’ve been harping about in this chapter is rule fudging, faking, and occasional floundering. This entails a radically nonlinear process, from the range of pure possible possibilities to possibilities (homogeny) to actualities (hierogeny) to potentials for further change (heterogeny) (as in Figure 13). It follows the chant in this essay that everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. What I allude to here is the difference between relatively formal and fixed informational knowing and the flux and flow of practical knowing. The first is chiefly mind-oriented, linear, abstract, and uses strategies that are algorithmic in nature – repeatedly going through the same operation; the rules are considerably more fixed than fluid. The second is a matter of body as much as mind, of nonlinear, concrete, improvisation that creates new strategies at every step of the way; the rules are considerably more fluid than fixed. Improvising has its rules, of course, but they are usually not a priori. The rules are, so to speak, carried around within the organism; they are not mind-driven, but created out of a pragmatic process of designing make-shift rules and strategies out of what happens to be at hand, and making do on the spot (recall Davidson’s passing theory). However, improvisation of rules and strategies doesn’t begin with formlessness; the improviser builds on the forms and rules and strategies she has available. By way of this practical knowing, there is perpetual change – the improviser’s changing her means and methods, and her social community’s changing its collective, always flowing rules and strategies. Community change comes about not when there is complete accord – as if that might be possible, which it isn’t. It comes into effect when there is conflict, or better, some mixture of accord and conflict. In whichever case, there is always the process of becoming. As suggested above, first there is feeling and sensing, as yet devoid of consciousness of what is felt and sensed; it is raw feeling and sensing, of something emerging from the range of all possible possibilities (homogeny). Then there is sensing as such-and-such, upon entering into the socio-cultural world of qualified items of experience (hierogeny). Now, either/or bivalence generally applies. Then, there is sensing that such-and-such is the case because the item of experience in question sports so-and-so a set of characteristics within some context of that socio-cultural world, as if it were fixed – which it is not, for the context and characteristics are always changing. Finally, what is sensed, is almost immediately sensed as so-and-so, and sensed that it can be said as such-and-such, though always incompletely; and it can possibly be put to use within the socio-cultural context, also always
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incompletely. If there could be complete accord, then no problem, and rules would be blindly followed. But there is always some degree, however slight, of intransigent conflict, and rules stand a chance of rejection and replacement by other rules; as a consequence, the product of the rules dutifully followed is altered as well. If there is a mixture of accord and conflict then there is neither accord nor conflict, strictly speaking, and there is both accord and conflict, loosely speaking (Baker, Hacker 1984: 10–15). Both accord and conflict can live together as possibilities (homogeny), but when they come into conflict with one another (within hierogeny), and enter into agonistic struggle, something new (within heterogeny by way of the Included-Middle) often finds a way of emerging to make its presence felt. So, from an altered slant on the issue, there is neither accord nor conflict, but ‘acclict’, in case accord prevails over conflict, or ‘conford’, in the inverse case. This involves sensing, sensing as and sensing that, as if they lived in some alternate socio-cultural context. How does one cope with this as if hypothetical, conditional, apparently contrary-to-fact state of affairs? By suspending judgment and suspending disbelief, by taking it as if one were in the process of playacting (recall Sextus Empiricus’s counsel and Nāgārjuna’s special form of skepticism via the middle way in Chapter 4). Wittgenstein’s rules, from a slightly different angle
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein challenges the very idea of setting language in firm foundations. He strives to undermine rational and logical language use in obedience to the community’s standards of correctness and truth. His exposition, I should add, is highly controversial: it customarily brings either applause or knee-jerk reactions, but it is rarely met simply with a respectfully nod or a morose yawn. Wittgenstein, to put it baldly, slaps us out of our comfortable sense of conventionally coded, rule-guided slumber. If we follow him, his notion of following a rule implies that we have no solid ground upon which to construct a set of codes that govern independent normative standards for our practices. Nor do we have any explicit set of rules with which to specify the meaning of our words and our actions. Wittgenstein tells us that we don’t know what we are looking for when we look for standards and foundations. We don’t know what we are looking for, because in our everyday coming and going we more often than not do what we do and say with hardly any conscious and intentional regard for standards and foundations. Since we most commonly just do what we do and say according to the context and situation that happen to
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inhere, there is no knowing exactly when we might or might not deviate from our doing and saying. In other words, we are in part unaware of our motives, intentions, and reasons for doing what we do and say when we do and say it. That much said, I will surely be charged with oversimplification of a complex and sophisticated philosophical argument and the host of arguments that have spewed forth from it. My own purpose for doing what I am doing involves illustrating cultural phenomena. I make no pretenses about, nor am I qualified for, contributing to the mushrooming corpus of philosophical discourse on the matter. With that disclaimer, I venture toward Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘paradox’. When we think we’re thinking, we’re likely not thinking On one side of the fence we have one of Wittgenstein’s most notorious critics in Saul Kripke who accepts Wittgenstein’s skeptical argument almost wholesale, though he apparently remains somewhat anguished over its iconoclastic demolition of a host of philosophical principles, and Patricia Werhane (1992), who is willing to stomach Wittgenstein’s skepticism as long as it does not go off into the deep end. On the other side, we have vitriolic criticism from the likes of Colin McGinn (1983), among others, who are critical of Kripke and would like to defuse his interpretation.43 All told, we are left with Wittgenstein’s notion that we have no grounds upon which to construct a set of independent normative standards for our practices or for the meaning of our words and our actions. He tells us that there is no need to look for standards and foundations, because we more often than not do what we do and say with little regard for any standards and foundations. Since we just do what we do and say, as mentioned, there is no knowing when we might or might not deviate from our doing and saying. In other words, we are in part unaware of our motives, intentions, and reasons for doing what we do and say when we do and say it. This awareness and unawareness of our cultural practices bears directly on Wittgenstein’s controversial ‘paradox’ regarding rule-following, which, in its most notorious expression, to extend the quote from a previous section, is: This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can
43
On this debate, see Anscombe 1985; Baker, Hacker 1984; Bloor 1983, 1989, 1994; Coates 1986; Collins 1992; Gier 1980; Hacking 1986; Malcolm 1986, 1989; Millikan 1993; Phillips 1977; Read 2000.
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also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. (Wittgenstein1953: §201)
At the outset the ‘paradox’ appears as a veritable mind-bender. What we are apparently to make of it is that a rule does not rigidly govern our action, because when we follow the rule we are most often engaged in some culturally laden activity that has become sedimented in body and mind – such as, for example, driving a car, crossing the street on foot, tapping at a computer terminal, eating with friends or family or associates, lolling at the beach, shopping for groceries or clothes or appliances, waiting in line at the theater, and all forms of language games and their accompanying nonlinguistic gestures and nuances. If during these activities we are following rules – and in most instances we are in one sense or another – we do so in large part ‘blindly’, since our mind is attuned to things other than our entrenched language use and the mannerisms of our body maneuverings as we continue doing what we are doing and saying what we are saying. Just doing it, tacitly In terms of Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowing, subsidiary awareness qualifies our rule-following by way of what I have termed, following a host of social scientists, bodymind, of which we are not entirely consciously aware, while focal knowing is capable possibly of qualifying our conscious and perhaps conscientious doing and saying within a particular cultural context. For example, while driving my car, subsidiary awareness takes over my physical movements and leaves me a little space so my mind can focally wander about, daydreaming a bit, creating a possible scenario in the interview I will have tomorrow, speculating about the weather or the stock market or last night’s sport event, chit-chatting with a friend to my right, or whatever – or, I can recklessly throw all caution to the wind and engage in talking on my cell phone or texting a message. All the while, I am presumably following the rules of the traffic code quite conveniently, thank you. That activity was conveniently left to my body, or I should say, the tacit workings of a coalescence and collaboration of body and mind, of bodymind. It was put on automatic pilot so that I could free up my obsessively wandering mind for some serious thinking, for idle musings, or perhaps for some other dangerous focally driven activity (phoning or texting). This does not reinforce the body/mind split by any means. While body doing and mind doing operate at different levels of awareness, they remain in an intimate interrelated embrace with one another, as bodymind. They are one, though their various roles emerge and submerge.
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After Wittgenstein offers his ‘paradox’, he adds that the road to the paradox passes through a misunderstanding, since we – especially philosophers, I would presume – would like to believe that we (our self, our mind) are always in control of what we are up to. We would like to think that we are captains of our own ship. Wishful thinking, Wittgenstein says in so many words. He concludes that there is a ‘way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §201). He follows this observation with: ‘“obeying a rule” is a practice, and to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule’; hence it is ‘not possible to obey a rule “privately”’. Otherwise, ‘thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §202). Kripke takes Wittgenstein to say that a rule does not necessarily and irrevocably determine the actions one performs when following the rule by means of which the omniscient philosopher can provide a sound argument for the rule’s determining this proper course of action. On the contrary. If the rule is followed, it is more often than not followed tacitly – that is, if the follower is well entrenched or otherwise indoctrinated in her cultural form of life. As such, the rule is not intentionally and conscientiously followed. So it is not followed in the usual sense of following a rule of which philosophers are prone to speak. Hence the rule is not really followed at all, or perhaps better, it is followed blindly. Hence Kripke’s notorious skeptical interpretation of Wittgenstein according to which ‘there can be neither accord, nor conflict’, which evokes the Neither-Nor Principle. Unfortunately, he leaves out the Either/Or Principle and the Both-And Principle as outlined above and presented in Figure 13. In retrospect, particular doing or saying carried out tacitly is not in (explicit) accord with the rule, for the doer-sayer did not say what she would do by saying ‘I will now follow rule X’. She just did-said it, while within the flow of her everyday living. If what is carried out tacitly is not (necessarily) in accord with the rule, then neither is it (necessarily) in conflict with the rule. It is not in conflict, since if the doer-sayer perchance deviates from the rule without awareness of her so doing, it cannot be said – according to philosophical parlance – that she is in conflict with the rule, for her deviation was not conscientious or intentional. So each new application can be a ‘blind leap’ inasmuch as there is no absolute guarantee regarding what the next moment will bring. Yet, we want some modicum of security: thus we cling to the Either/Or Principle; and yet there is always some other ready and willing to begin its becoming, so we cannot avoid the Both-And Principle. Let me try to specify this process further.
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More on Wittgenstein’s strange scene Wittgenstein gives a mathematical example. A young pupil is taught to add 2 to the last number of a series after 1,000. Then one day, for some strange reason, he begins: ‘1,004, 1,008, 1,012 ...’ Wittgenstein writes: ‘We say to him: “Look what you’ve done!” – He doesn’t understand. We say: “You were meant to add two; look how you began the series!” He answers: “Yes, isn’t it right? I thought that was how I was meant to do it”’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §185). The young man learned, and now he just does what he does. If for some God-given reason or other that is presumably unknown to him he begins doing what he does in a deviant way, he has not effectively broken any rule, for he did not necessarily intentionally do what he did. He might have done what he did out of curiosity to see what reaction he might get from his instructor; he might have acted out of sheer boredom; he might have been simply joshing; his action might have been out of a rebellious streak; or perhaps he did it just for the hell of it. Of course, ignorance of the rule, like ignorance of the law, is no excuse. But the lad is not exactly ignorant of the rule. If he wished, he could rattle the number series off in much the way he learned it. But that is not the point. When he does what he does he does not say to himself: ‘Now let me see, which of my repertoire of rules must I apply here?’ He just picks up his problem and runs with it, doing what he does quite naturally. He does it largely tacitly. There are leaps, for sure. And there is no guarantee regarding future leaps, depending on his mood, his seriousness, sobriety, flippancy, or playfulness. Or whatever. Intentions? There may be, and perhaps not. Perhaps there was no more than inadvertent intention, purposeless purposefulness, chancy motivation, unpremeditated design. Concrete living experiences often suffer from unpredictability: the unexpected waits, at every bend in the stream. Where is the ethics, where are the standards, where are the morals regarding all this? Well, I would suggest they can be found within the application of the Either/Or Principle which gives us some comfort, that have emerged from the range of all possible possibilities and mere possibilities, the Both-And Principle. From rules to moral issues
Take David Hume’s example: ‘Suppose a person to have lent me a sum of money, on condition that it be restor’d in a few days: and also suppose, that after the expiration of the term agreed on, he demands the sum: I ask, What reason or motive have I to restore the money?’ (1978[1739–40]: 479). Hume’s
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character might have been feigning ignorance of his moral obligation in an attempt to squirm out of his responsibility, or perhaps he is simply immoral. Wittgenstein’s pupil might have simply made an honest mistake; either that or he had the intention of disrupting the mathematics session. In both cases the deviations from the rule can be largely unintentional and non-conscientious, hence it cannot be said that the rule has been broken in the ordinary sense of ‘breaking a rule’ (though, once again, ignorance of the law [rule] is no excuse). However, deviation can also be intentional, in which case the assumption might be that rules are made to be broken, either for subversive purposes or for no apparent reason at all. On rare occasions it may well be that the subject actually believes she is obeying the rule, whereas her interpretation of the rule is flawed. At any rate, every time a rule has been disobeyed, the subversive culprit can always have an obvious reason for her actions. For, ‘if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it’. So, Wittgenstein concludes, there is ‘neither accord nor conflict’. Neither accord nor conflict, because the Excluded-Middle Principle loses its oomph. Neither the one nor the other, since something else, some new practice emerging from a hitherto unavailable insight, might have entered the scene. Unruly order; haphazard reasonableness All this, of course, opens up a likely unwanted can of worms. If rules are disobeyed either out of ignorance or intentionally, it would seem that an irrational and illogical yardstick comes into use when disobedience occurs. It follows that there is no rhyme or reason why collective behavior would not fall into chaos, and anarchy would surely be the consequence. A rebuttal might be that whosoever fails properly to disobey the rule might be doing so by means of her own ‘reason’ and ‘logic’. And why not? It has become acceptable in some circles over the past couple of decades that there are many possible ‘styles of reasoning’ (Hacking 1984, 1985), and a host of possible ‘logics’ (Haack 1974, 1978). It would appear that the only conclusion – comparable to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – is that nothing is absolutely either true or false, but that ‘styles of reasoning’ and alternate logics can possibly make them so. And we once again run into our neither-nor friend with her bag of Included-Middle maneuvers up to her old tricks again. This apparently insane interpretation brings out more than a small degree of philosophical angst in Kripke, compelling him to provide his own skeptical solution. It is all a matter of community agreement, he argues, whether one’s acts are tacit and implicit or explicit. If someone tells us something or sends CEEOL copyright 2020
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some extra-linguistic signals, we can attribute meaning to her message by bringing it into interrelation with the conditions that brought about the message and with the agreement and practices of the community. Yet, Kripke’s solution persists. He rules out iron-clad reference between signs – whether linguistic or otherwise, I would add – and the cultural world. He leaves meaning up to our ability to discern the interrelations between our signs and the repertoire of community practices. Nevertheless, like Wittgenstein, Kripke holds to intrinsic meanings. In response to the above example from Hume, Thomas Reid (1710– 1796) attempts to present a logically coherent counterargument. Reid insists that Hume’s example is all awash. The scoundrel in Hume’s thought experiment who came up with the idea he didn’t have to make good on his promise to pay back the loan must be either right or wrong. There is no room for any middle ground. If Hume’s borrower is right, then, Reid believes, he must have found a loophole in the cultural convention regarding agreements, and if such a loophole exists, then the rules of the game should be altered. But most likely Hume’s borrower is categorically wrong, and if he is wrong, he is wrong, period. For Reid, humans are basically moral beings, and a society with conventions that don’t prescribe the obligation to make good on a loan is a society founded on erroneous grounds. It is predicated on a contradiction that ‘a man should lend without any conception of his having a right to be repaid; or that a man should borrow on the condition of paying in a few days, and yet have no conception of his obligation, seems to be to involve a contradiction’ (Reid 2005: 451). Lending entails a change of property from one person to another person, and when the second person does not live up to the terms of the agreement, the first person has the right to claim and retrieve what is hers. He who defaults on the loan must be made to pay for it and undergo some community established punitive measures. However, when social injustices are involved, does not the right to civil disobedience come into the picture? If the lender is the author of unjust usury practices, should the contract be honored, come what may? Rules are there to be obeyed, for sure, but they often become the brunt of ridicule, scorn, and contempt. They exist in order that they may be undercut in subtle ways such that the rich and powerful will have no inkling of their being so undercut. Accord or disharmony; or accarmony and dishord? Then if whatever one does can be made out to accord with a rule from some interpretation or other, then it would seem that rules are radically underdetermined. That is to say, with respect to Wittgenstein on rules, any given pair of interpretations of a rule might turn out to contradict each other, in spite of CEEOL copyright 2020
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the fact that, when considered in their own right and within their particular context, they are to all appearances legitimate. Moreover, for any contradictory pair of interpretations, there exists another possible interpretation that, given the interpreter’s preconceptions, presuppositions and prejudices, and her style of reasoned argumentation, might be deemed superior to the other two interpretations (within heterogeny in Figure 13). Hence each interpretation, if disconnected from all other interpretations, actual and possible, sort of hangs in the air. It doesn’t yield meaning unless there is some consideration of what it is not. What it is not consists of some alternative interpretation against which it can be judged. This might imply that there is an infinite regress operating here. Every interpretation is in need of further interpretation in order hopefully to render it a tad more complete. Yet no matter how far we go, incompleteness will eventually raise its ugly head. (It is becoming increasingly apparent that incompleteness is one of the chief foci of this essay; for this reason I should mention at this point that completeness of knowing is possible solely within an objective, materialist, mechanistic universe of Cartesian and Newtonian ilk [see de Quincey 2002].) No set of interpretations is any guaranteed royal road to truth. Interpretations cannot ground a community’s practice of rule-following. In the first place, if one follows a rule conscientiously – Bloor’s ‘conscientiousness condition’ – it is already interpreted. In the second place, if one has already interpreted the rule, then that very interpretation is also already operating within the practice of following the rule. So once again the infinite regress presents its mocking smile. We are damned if we do one thing and we are damned if we do some other thing. How can we hope to cope with this quandary? We can cope, I would suggest, by acknowledging the inevitability of complementary coalescence; that is, the manner in which concrete everyday practices are in part both of the one nature and its contrary, and that in part they are neither of the one nature nor the other, for there is always something else seeping, flowing, gushing or cascading up from the Included-Middles. Much controversial ink has been shed over the pros and cons, the virtues and vicissitudes, of Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘paradox’. However, not a small number of observers would tell us that it is not a paradox at all, but merely a dilemma over which we really need not lose any sleep. I must reiterate that by no means do I wish to enter wholly into this debate. I choose to drill in on the relevance of Wittgenstein’s problem to this inquiry with respect to the implication of infinity, as was briefly noted above. But questions arise. How does infinity enter into the equation? If it forces its way in, cannot it be extricated by logical means? Actually, infinity doesn’t really enter; in a manner of speaking, it was there all along, as we shall see.
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Chapter Eight. Never simply a ‘blind shot in the dark’: The mediating middle way
Chapter Eight
Never simply a ‘blind shot in the dark’: The mediating middle way Chapter Eight. Never simply a ‘blind shot in the dark’: The mediating middle way
Attention returns to soccer. Rule following regarding soccer, and other competitive and ordinary everyday activities, abide by some form of ‘logic’, for sure, but not of the ‘classical’ sort; it is a loose, limber and flexible ‘logic’. It follows that rules of thumb created by this ‘logic’ cannot be unambiguous and precise, given the flowing, fluctuating nature of particular circumstances, situations and contexts; they are always to a greater or lesser extent vague; they are more tacitly than consciously enacted; they are always becoming something other. In an effort to resolve this age-old conflict between general terms and their particular manifestations, Nāgārjuna saunters once more onto the scene. His Tetralemma entails the middle way, and reveals the enaction of rapid-fire decisions of which only feeling and sensing and tacitly acting and reacting body is capable, for mind – logical, reasoning mind – has no time for such split-second action and reaction. On the subtle art of preventing a goal
Soccer places primacy on complex footwork involving nimble moves, deceptive dribbling, deft passing, and impressive acceleration when necessary. Kicking the ball is especially complex, involving subtle variations of foot angle and the point at which the foot comes into contact with the ball. A kick transfers kinetic energy from foot to ball according to the following: kinetic energy equals one-half the leg’s mass times the leg’s velocity as it hits the ball, squared, or (k = 1/2m × v2). The point on the ball where the foot strikes it for about 0.01 second deforms the ball, causing it to travel away at an angle considerably faster than the velocity of the foot when it struck the ball. This is like a slingshot effect comparable to a space satellite that veers near the planet and is then shot out into space with increased velocity, which aids it in maintaining its orbit around its focal point, the planet. So much for mathematical formalities; let’s focus on practical issues. Among soccer fans, a common expression is ‘Bend it like Beckham’, with reference to the ball’s curling to the right or the left when heading toward
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the goal.44 The idea is to catch the goalkeeper off guard and score a point. To curl a ball, the shooter kicks the ball slightly off center, putting it into a spin in a horizontal direction with respect to its forward movement. The air around the ball moves more quickly around either the left or the right of the ball, bringing about a deviation in its direction forward. As the ball’s velocity slows, the deviation will become more pronounced, and the ball will ‘curl’. Kicking the ball at a low point creates backspin; consequently, the air moves quicker over the ball in turn creating more pressure underneath, and the ball rises as it travels toward the goal. So much for the shooter. They say where the goalkeeper walks, the grass never grows: he must maintain his duty as enforcer at all times. Contrary to much popular opinion, he is one of the most important players on the field. He is the first line of attack and the last line of defense. Playing the position requires special well-honed skills. In order to catch or at least deflect a ball headed toward the goal, footwork is the key, since if the goalie’s feet can’t get him close to the ball’s trajectory, his hands are useless. Proper positioning is of utmost important: it allows the goalie to cover the largest possible portion of the goal area. Rapid action after the goalie has intercepted the ball is equally important: he must get the ball to his teammates as quickly as possible. Saving the penalty by intercepting the kicked ball is an art, and it can be cultivated only over time and with much practice. The margin of error is thin; hence strong mental constitution is a must. As stated in Chapter Two, the goalie has no more than a split second to react to the penalty kick. In fact, the soccer penalty is actually ‘somewhat of a misfit’. The game of soccer itself is a free flowing affair between offense and defense. When the ball goes out of play it is quickly returned and the game resumes with little time lost. At no time other than a penalty kick is the game reduced into a one on one duel’ (DiCicco 2009)45. When a penalty is awarded, there is about a minute’s delay in the game, and then the entire audience is anxiously and with apprehensions and hopes focused on the penalty shooter and the goalie. Quite obviously, defending against a penalty kick is one of the most difficult and stressful tasks a goalie faces. Due to the short distance between the penalty spot and the goal (36 feet), there is very little time to react to the shot and try to make a save, no time to think or develop any strategy. As
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The phrase comes from soccer player David Beckham, whose skill at scoring from free kicks by putting ‘English’ on the ball, or ‘bending’ its trajectory around a well of defenders to score a goal was legendary. DiCicco, Tony 2009. Soccer Training Info – Penalties Shot Analysis, can be accessed at http://www.soccer-training-info.com/penalty_kicks.asp.
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mentioned, the tendency is to start diving before the kicker actually comes into contact with the ball. Rules, or mere ruse?
Regarding defense of the penalty kick, Charlie Cook (2008)46 offers some advice, as general rules of thumb, to the aspiring goalie, the most relevant of which are: watch the eyes of your opponent for flighty movements possibly in the direction he might kick; study your opponent while he sets up the ball. In most cases, he will make subtle gestures and moves that can provide you with info regarding where he will shoot; watch the plant foot. A general rule is that the ball will go where the foot of your opponent is pointing. However, at higher levels a smart shooter will deliberately throw you off by going to the opposite side of the plant foot pointing; at the shooting moment, pretend you are going to dive to one side or the other, but instead of doing that, hold your ground. This will make your opponent think twice. And if he tries to switch direction through his backswing, it will normally result in a poor kick which should be easier to block; favor one side or the other. If you slide to the right or left a bit, your opponent will often shoot in the opposite side, but you shouldn’t slide so much that you can’t quickly leap to the other side; intimidate your opponent. Show him you are confident. That way he might think you already know where he will shoot. It’s all a matter of how the shooter makes his signs and how the goalie takes his signs, according to the possibilities and fuzzy becoming of all signs involved, while they are striving to assimilate the both-ands, either/ors and neither-nors, within a combination of tacit and conscious, and spontaneous and deliberate, actions and reactions. If the shooter is looking down, there’s a 99% chance that the ball will not leave the ground. If he is looking straight ahead at eye level, the ball might come off the ground a little, but it’s mainly going to come straight, and hard. If he is kind of leaning back at the moment he kicks the ball, then the ball is 46
Cook, Charlie 2008. The Soccer Goalie Guide, can be accessed at Soccer Training Guide. (http://www.soccer-training guide.com).
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going to leave the ground. To block one of these potential goals, the goalie should stand in the middle of the goal, on his toes, and wait for the shot; then he will have to do his best to determine where the ball might be going. If it is headed to one side or the other, then he will have just enough time to make a dive for it, as a spontaneous reaction, without thinking. When he dives for it, he must stretch his arms out as far as he can, in readiness to intercept the ball. As he lunges to one side or the other, he shouldn’t close his eyes, and at the same time he should have no fear of bodily harm: the lunge is with reckless abandon; his body is stretched out almost horizontal to the turf, as he heads downward, landing on the full length of his ribcage. If he’s able to deflect the ball forward, there’s a good chance members of the opposing team will already have rushed up, and they’ll be ready and waiting for another chance to kick a goal. So, he must immediately set up his guard once again. The tactic, you have undoubtedly gathered, involves above all the goalie’s trying to psyche out his opponent. But actually, after the shooter’s foot has made contact with the ball there’s no time for psychology or any particular strategy chosen from a list of tactical maneuvers. This is why penalty shots are the most nerve-racking experiences a goalie faces. The goalie should never wait for the ball on his heels; he should be on his toes at all times so he can react quicker. Since the kicker will be able to run up to the ball, there’s a good chance the ball won’t stay on the ground; it will be headed upward, in a space with virtually an unlimited set of additional possible trajectories. Even though most shooters are right-footed, that is no guarantee that the ball will go to the goalie’s right-hand side. What set of rules can possibly exist to tell the goalie what to do, when to do it, and what particular strategy to use? How does he go about following some tacitly held rule at all in the sense of Wittgenstein and his critics? There’s no time to think; what is done, is done spontaneously. There’s no time to plan any strategy; it must be automatically enacted. Indeed, the action must spring out of ‘unthinking thinking’, so to speak. The body talks to itself and does the thinking while on automatic pilot; at the same time the mind is left to bring up the rear at what is in comparison a snail’s pace. Indeed, the goalie’s response to the kick is surely like a ‘blind shot in the dark’, one would be inclined to conclude. It must be ‘blind’, because the sign processing is for practical purposes ‘0 √ + Signness’ in the virtually immediate now. This is possible signs becoming actualized signs along the processual flow as if it were all done in a timeless instant. It is as if the entirety of Figure 6 were condensed to a timespace point.
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This instant of a decision presumably as a ‘blind shot in the dark’ merits further attention. Ordinary rule following
I would at the outset suggest that the decision isn’t exactly ‘blind’ in the sense of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, or a Kripke ‘shot in the dark’, for, although it is a moment of ‘unknowing knowing’, it is at the same time a moment of virtually instantaneous lucidity, however tenuous and inordinately vague in nature. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) writes about the individual moment as madness, total irrationality (Kierkegaard 1992). Rather than the moment’s irrationality, I would like to believe it holds rationality, but of another ‘logical’ sort.47 Kripke combines Wittgenstein on following a rule with Nelson Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ – summarily defined in footnote 39. I will expound on Goodman further in Chapter Ten. For now, I wish to interrelate ‘following a rule’ and Goodman’s ‘portmanteau process’, the ‘Grue’ dilemma – conflating ‘green’ and ‘blue’ to create ‘grue’ – with further words on the notion of obedience and the lack thereof, or non-compliance. A few initial assumptions must be forthcoming. First, decisions, choices, and selections, upon following rules, are not always, nor are they necessarily, the product of linear, bivalent logical procedures. Jacques Derrida (1992) tells us in so many words – too many for my taste, I’m afraid – that undecidability is not a matter of oscillation between two possibilities. It is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous (as in Figure 13), and outside precise calculability, nevertheless leads to a decision, however impossibly logical and rational, while more or less abiding by the rules. Such a decision outside calculability is by no means undecidable strictly according to the rules. Our goalie, who is who he is becoming, because that’s what he does – he makes a decision, almost instantaneously, tacitly, and spontaneously. His decision as a matter of choice from the vast range of possible possibilities and the selection of one of the alternatives is not strictly an iterative algorithmic step; it is not a step taken deliberately, determinately, and precisely, with no shadow of doubt. More by spontaneous body processing than by purposeful thinking and reasoning mind, our goalie virtually nonconsciously makes the decision, choice and selection, and in doing so he hopes he can convince the stadium full of boisterous fans that he knows exactly what he’s up to. 47
See Chiasson 2001, 2002 (Peirce’s Logic of Vagueness, available at www.digitalpeirce.fee. unicamp.br); Engel-Tiercelin 1993, 1993; merrell 2007, 2010; Nadin 1983; Pape 1999; Putnam 1983; Raffman 1994.
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A rule, like the law from a presumably authoritative source, is under ordinary circumstances intended for general, universal application in any and all comparable situations. But the fact of the matter is that rules and laws are applied in particular circumstances. The problem is that circumstances, situations, and contexts are always becoming something other. This renders them vague, at times inordinately vague, a blur of multiply ambiguous possibilities. Yet no circumstance, situation, or context is absolutely vague, lending itself to nothing more than a ‘blind shot in the dark’; nor is it absolutely precise and unambiguous, such that deliberate linear algorithmic iteration is inevitable, such that what occurs is identical to what has occurred and what will have occurred. Thus the two horns of the dichotomy, vagueness, on the one hand, and unambiguity or precision, on the other, scream out for mediation – through the middle way, a third space and a third time, a different timespace increment. Two stories that help tell the tale These two horns of the dichotomy are parodied by two Borges characters: (1) linear, bivalently minded abstractly cogitating detective Lönnrot, of ‘Death and the Compass’ (Borges 1962), caught in a morass of obsessively precise generalities of his own making; and (2) helpless and hapless Funes of ‘Funes the Memorious’ (Borges 1962), who can’t free himself from clearly delineated particulars, the whole jumbled collection of which he takes into his head like a vacuum cleaner, and he never for a moment forgets any of them. Lönnrot, whose blind faith in his generalities is invariant, follows the rule of physical and psychological laws as he sees them irrefutable; Funes, lodged within his particulars with no possible escape, is incapable of comprehending generalities, even vaguely. Lönnrot would likely wish to believe he is a faithful Platonic realist who sees his eternally fixed pristinely pure world as if from a God’s-eye view; Funes, is a hypernominalist – though he would be unable to conceive of himself in this manner – who sees no more than what he thinks is what it is, right here and now, and at each and every successive moment it is something entirely different; for him, it is another is. In ‘Death and the Compass’, Lönnrot thought he had things all wrapped up in a tidy package. By way of an intricately complex interplay of simples – a well-reasoned combination of threes and fours, a harmony of time and space symmetries, logical inferences derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the regularities of human behavior reduced to a minimum – he thought he had determined precisely when and where a fourth murder would occur, even though the assassin himself had predicted its non-occurrence. There,
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according to Lönnrot’s fine-tuned calculations, he would finally apprehend his antagonist, Scharlach. However, Lönnrot’s intractable ideals are given a slap in the face by the befogging, bewildering reality confronting him. He becomes aware that ‘reality’ flies against his world of ironclad logic. His concrete surroundings follow some unruly ‘logic’ beyond his timeless calculi; this ‘logic’ sports vague particulars and fuzzy generalities, which resist his foolproof formulaic reasoning; they are asymmetrical, multiply ambiguous, nebulous to the extreme. What is worse, he becomes aware that it is he who will become the fourth victim at the hands of Scharlach. In short, Lönnrot’s world offers him no precision without vagueness, and the vagueness is no more than mere muddle, according to Lönnrot’s bivalent logic. Some other ‘logic’ is at work. Funes can’t forget any of the particulars entering his consciousness, and yet he can generalize about none of them. From our vantage point, Funes’s world is a garbage heap. In fact, his method of numbering and of arithmetic has neither form nor order as we know them. For Funes, to know the number series is to know each individual numeral as just that, an individual, without any necessary relation to any other numbers of the series (in other words, there is for him no ordinality). Funes once invented an alternative system consisting of arbitrarily selected words that, given his unlimited mnemonic capacity, was as effective as our number system. He could in the blink of an eye multiply, say, ‘Plata’ (= 1,275) and ‘Quebracho’ (= 836) and respond with ‘Rosario’ (= 1,065,900). In other words, in contrast with our ordered number series, Funes’s numbers consist of an unordered system; yet, much like a so-called ‘idiot savant’, he is able somehow unconsciously to hold all of them in his mental surveillance in an instant. Funes’s language, like his conception of numbers, also consists of an unordered concoction of signs very loosely related, if at all, according to a rather haphazard sort of ars combinatoria. As far as we can tell, Funes’s perspective remains stringently limited. It consists of a haphazard series of perceptual grasps and their corresponding signs, in stark contrast to Lönnrot for whom there can be nothing at all other than his fixed, stringently defined order. His signs could easily have been one of an indefinite, and potentially infinite, number of other signs. Whether he knows it or not, Funes is caught up in an inordinately vague, multiply ambiguous hodgepodge of signs that prevent him from entering the world-version of any given human community; he is destined to live in his own private, solipsistic realm. Unlike the supersentient though painfully limited Funes, whose signs consist of nothing but jumbled particulars, can we hope to find some
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well-defined order, unambiguous precision, and relatively stable meaning in our own lives? And unlike Lönnrot, many of whose formulaic generalities were flawed, can we hope to avoid the virtually incomprehensible complexity and vagueness surrounding us and construct a world of classificatory concepts – generalities – so as effectively to get on with our feelings, sensations, experiences, and thoughts during our everyday living? Our guts most likely tell us we must respond with an emphatic ‘Yes!’, and ‘Yes!’. Unlike Funes, we would like to think we have no trouble at all classifying our experience into the nuts and bolts of our world, and with them we can function quite handily, thank you. And we would like to think that our generalities are far removed from Lönnrot’s blind, dogmatic reasoning. They are neatly and firmly tied up with the furniture of our world to which they refer. We see a lemon and properly classify it as a ‘lemon’ because we are familiar with ‘lemonness’, ‘yellowness’, and so on. Or at least our ability to so use language is one of our last great hopes that words can ‘correspond’ to the world: and we would like to fear not the possibility of our signs and our world becoming hopelessly chaotic. To see some-thing as a particular such-and-such instead of any one of a range of alternatives requires one’s distinguishing it from every-thing else and interacting and participating with it. Then to talk about it requires an ordered taxonomy of words and their use shared by other members of a community of individuals. Adequate precision of word use, avoidance of excessive vagueness, and dialogue in a community of like-minded – hence ‘right-minded’ – speakers is essential. Otherwise, what is ‘blue’ for one person might be ‘green’ for somebody else, and what is for that person ‘blue’ today might be tomorrow’s ‘purple’ for somebody else. What is a goose for one would be a gander for another. Each individual ‘I’ would be the measure of all things. Each individual would construct her own world. All individuals would live in a non-community made up of Funes-like people. Combine the worlds of a collection of such individuals, and there is no more than vague, ambiguous, and incomplete generalities at best, with no resemblance at all to Lönnrot’s ordered existence. Such solipsism at the individual level and garble at the community level is enough to elicit knee jerks in even the most tolerant postmodern traveler in her hopefully intelligible labyrinth: the universe. How can we properly articulate this problem? Where is some happy meeting ground between obsession with generalities and obsession with particulars, if indeed there may be some form or fashion of mediation between them?
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Possibilities for a response
Funes’s Hypernominalism and Lönnrot’s Grand Unified Platonic Universe: two opposing labyrinths, or one labyrinth consisting of the paradoxical Many and at the same time One, if you wish. Or, two extremes, and the twain shall never meet. But is there nothing but a gaping chasm between the two horns? Or an absolute and absolutely impermeable line of demarcation? Is it a matter of skepticism or universal doubt, on the one hand, and objectivism regarding universal generalities fixed for all time, on the other? If one says ‘Yes!’ to objectivism, it is based on belief, for there is no foolproof evidence for the doctrine – one cannot step completely outside one’s objectivism in order to ascertain whether it is the one and only valid doctrine (this is the tu quoque, to be exemplified in Chapter Eleven). If one says ‘Yes!’ to skepticism, then one suspends belief and judgment before a virtually chaotic world, and every decision, choice and selection is equally a throw of the dice. So one might strive to bring them together and create some sort of synthesis by saying ‘Both!’ Now, one can suspend disbelief and create imaginary possibilities and take them as if they might be what is, and try them out to see what consequences are in store; at the same time, one suspends belief but remains on guard, appraising all possibilities with an eye attuned to what consequences might emerge – after all, they are only possibilities, and one doesn’t (yet) have to believe, and much less judge. So, one resorts to saying ‘Neither!’, with the premonition that in a world where everything is becoming something other than what it was becoming, something different and new stands a chance of bubbling up at every bend in the stream; then, one can suspend belief or suspend disbelief, and take things as they come. Or, one might say ‘All the above!’, stemming from nothing more than the belief that whatever emerges will be as if it were what is, and it will have been what is, ephemerally, for it is always in the process of becoming. Or, one might say ‘None of the above!’, and disbelieve virtually anything and everything, holding any and all expectations in abeyance, maintaining absolute openness, and one finds oneself within ‘nothingness’, ‘emptiness’, with nary a fleeting sunbeam to grasp onto. ‘Where is all this apparent negativism taking us?’ – comes the retort. Rather than negativism, I would suggest that it foments child-like, wide-eyed curiosity, to openness, through… The middle way What I have presented in the preceding paragraphs in terms of ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Both’, ‘Neither’, ‘All the above’, and ‘None of the above’, is the Buddhist
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Tetralemma, authored by Nāgārjuna, whose writings account for the impermanence of all things (Many) and the Oneness of all things which, since they are interdependent, interrelative, interactive, and perpetually merging into one another, is ultimately ‘nothingness’, ‘emptiness’. The Tetralemma implies Nāgārjuna’s middle way – think along the lines of what I labeled Included-Middles in Chapter Five. The middle way brings a halt to oscillations between the eithers and the ors: the sea calms, the undulating waves that break at the cusp smooth themselves; tensions ease; and there’s an unstressful moment of decision, choice and selection. A moment of madness? No! Neither madness nor meaninglessness nor irrationality. For the circumstances are different, new. A blind shot in the dark? No! Just going with the flowing, fluctuating semiosic process, doing what one does, letting what is in the process of emerging loosen the reins of its emerging. God’s-eye decision from a totalizing view? No! Just letting it happen, letting the novel idea, the vague inkling, the conjecture, seep in. There’s neither indecision (out of skepticism) nor self-confident decision (through objectivism, an imperious view from nowhere). What will have happened is in the process of happening; there’s no identification, no identity, not yet at least; hence there is no generalization, no universality of the happening in question; there is no definite singularity, not yet at least, because there is no identity. What is becoming is becoming. It is the becoming of being, but since being is always becoming, the becoming cannot reach finality in a finite, fallible world. But decisions of one sort or another, and either tacitly or consciously deliberate, are forced upon us at virtually each and every moment. In most cases, given the circumstance, situation or context, we must act now, not later. We have no time for contemplation, pondering, speculation. This turns our attention anew to our goalie. He doesn’t know precisely what to do but he knows somewhat vaguely, and he acts, out of his feeling for the moment, and as a result of years of experience, and in part he does so as though he knew exactly what he’s about – even though he doesn’t – in order to save face. Our tacit, always varying ways of doing loosely follow the model of our goalie’s ways. So when going about our daily affairs much of our doing what we do involves ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’, while we hardly give it any mind. But what about obedience regarding social imperatives? Conventional laws, rules, and regulations set down by our community? Orders given from above, with the expectation that we will both obey and comply? Do we not, must we not, faithfully follow the rules handed down to us? These questions obviously call for considerably more input with respect to rules and our
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wavering tendency to slip and slide around them, and a search for shortcuts so as to avoid them, even though just a little bit, in order to make the best with that we have. In other words, there is often a note of… Disobedience, the sly way
A rule or law is set down, or an order is put forth. Do you ‘obey’ (‘I obey’) or not (‘but I don’t comply’)? Yes, and no. You obey, but you lithely skate around the rule, fudging it perhaps, ever so slightly, perhaps insubordinatingly and rebelliously. After all, it’s only a particular circumstance, not a general rule fit for invariant universal application; there’s nothing to get bent out of shape over. So you don’t comply, not exactly, not faithfully; you engage in a tad of noncompliance. You obey but you don’t wholly comply; you don’t completely obey but you comply. Every application of the rule is a slightly deviant to a radically divergent mis-application. Algorithm accomplished; algorithm altered; neither clear-cut algorithm nor non-algorithm; neither anything-goes as free-wheeling play, nor stringent limitations. It’s happening, it will have happened, somewhere, somewhen. The middle way entails what might be conceived as a gaping chasm, a horrific void, terrorizing absence. Or it might be deemed metaphorically like the eye of a hurricane: placid, calm, serene, tranquil, when the range of possible possibilities offers itself up to the unruffled, composed subject, neither skeptical and suspending belief and judgment nor blindingly faithful to absolute objectivism, but the musing subject, flowing, flowing, in suspension, in readiness for what will have been happening, if and when and where – implicitly, there’s ‘objective idealism’ and the ‘pragmatic maxim’ in all this, I would respectfully suggest. Let’s consider ‘I obey but I don’t comply’ from another perspective. Suppose you’re a fideist, a true believer, in your thoughts and actions. You believe the rule is a viable rule fit for universal application. Regarding a particular application of the rule, your response is a wholehearted ‘Yes!’ (‘I obey’ – this is like those conquered indigenous people of Mexico who chose to embrace the Spanish conquerors’ religious dogma). You’ve suspended disbelief in the rule’s nature and use. But what if you’re a skeptic with respect to the rule as a generality applicable in any and all particular occasions? You doubt the validity and practicality of the rule as a generality. Your response is a closely guarded ‘No!’ (‘I refuse to comply’ – like those intrepid indigenous souls who resisted the conquerors, and usually lost their lives for their efforts). You’ve suspended belief, but at the same time you’re putting yourself at risk.
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Now what if for survival purposes, to maintain appearances, to save face, or merely for convenience, you maintain the outward countenance of fideism while at the same time inwardly you garner skepticism? Your feelings, thought and actions say ‘Both!’ (‘I obey, overtly at least in order to escape the wrath of the powers that be, but covertly I don’t comply, for I also insist on paying homage to my ancient traditions.’) This is the crux of Anita Brenner’s Idols behind Altars (1929), where indigenous people in Mexico clandestinely carried on with their traditional religious practices while outwardly manifesting their Catholicism in order to avoid punishment at the hands of the colonizers. At one level you suspend disbelief while at another level you suspend belief. Does this not render you schizophrenic, so to speak, destined to oscillate between the ‘either’ and the ‘or’? Not to worry. The ‘Yes!’ and the ‘No!’ are not in mortal combat nor are they in competition with each other. They belong to distinct complementarily coalescent modes of application. The rule may be in a loose way generally fit for universal application, but, given the vast range of all possible particular applications within radically different contexts in the past and the present and unforeseen future context, there’s no knowing whether any particular context will merit rigorous application of the rule. If you take the ‘both-and’ strategy to heart, you may become inclined to hold your belief and your disbelief in abeyance, perhaps with the vague hope or anticipation of some other option. You suspend both obedience and compliance to the rule. There must be something else, something new that will offer a way out of the uncertainty within which you find yourself caught. Now you are simply in suspension, without knowing which way is up and which is down, which is forward and which is backward. You are waiting,… waiting, for something to surface, as you mosey along the stream, flowing along with the process that is incessantly becoming. It neither is nor isn’t Given the difficulty of describing this suspension, apparently devoid of a fulcrum point, take the example of the Standard Meter in Paris. Is it exactly one meter in length? ‘But of course!’, comes the no-nonsense response. Use it as a means for marking a one meter segment of a bookshelf, and you have no shadow of a doubt but that the segment is one meter in length. Here’s the Standard Meter, there’s the segment; they are identical; thus the segment is a meter in length. But what if you decide to apply the standard to itself? How long is it, really? In view of Relativity Theory, if I may, theory, its length is relative to the frame of reference and the relative momentum of the meter as it changes
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its position in the timespace continuum. This is to say that the meter at the North Pole and at the Equator varies ever-so-slightly in length if viewed from some external frame of reference. In this respect, you equally confidently state ‘No! – it isn’t exactly a meter long’. Stanley Cavell (1979: 52) writes along comparable lines with respect to Wittgenstein on rules: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, senses of humour and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation – all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life”. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.
Terrifying, because there is neither absolute assurance nor absolute nonassurance, neither invariant rule-following nor total non-following. Within a given community, within one’s self, within one’s world, in short, within one’s ‘form of life’, one has hardly more recourse but to say: ‘This is what I do where and when I do it’. It’s as though we were applying our own standard to ourselves, as in the case of the metric standard. We have no apparent alternative but to oscillate from one frame of reference to another as our contexts vary, as the interdependent interrelatedness between ourselves and our inner others, ourselves and our social others, and ourselves and our physical world others fluctuates. Yet, we usually get on. Given these fluctuating, alternate frames of reference, however, you are also of the opinion that ‘It is and it is not a meter long!–given the frame of reference’. But this seems to require both belief and disbelief, suspension and unsuspension, fideism and skepticism. It doesn’t satisfy your wish for some answer free of conflict, some more tensionless, harmonious, and serene state. So you find yourself in tune with silence, zero-degree, nothingness, emptiness, in pure suspension devoid of ‘eithers’ or ‘ors’. This zero-degree, between an infinite stretch of positive integers on one side and an infinite stretch of negative integers on the other, is pure emptiness of numerality; it is valueless, with neither positivity nor negativity; yet it contains the wherewithal for the engenderment of any and all valued CEEOL copyright 2020
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Chapter Eight. Never simply a ‘blind shot in the dark’: The mediating middle way
numbers. The zero-degree of pure suspension, likewise, is pure emptiness; yet it contains the immense unfathomable range of all possible possibilities for the emergence of whatever, wherever and whenever. It is a neither-nor affair, allowing for the Included-Middle From the zero-degree, nothingness, emptiness, possible possibility offers itself up to selection of one of a range of possibilities – through Nāgārjuna’s middle way – that can then be emerging from the Included-Middle. Within the Included-Middle, there is neither suspension nor unsuspension of either belief or disbelief, neither total context freedom nor context dependence, neither invariant universal applicability nor absolute absence of applicability, neither blind obedience to the rules nor ruthless, rebellious disobedience, neither faithful compliance nor sly and smirky non-compliance. Moreover, there is neither homogeny nor hierogeny nor heterogeny, as in Figure 13, neither either/or imperatives nor both-and mutuality. In sum, there is no linear iron rail along which one always obeys rules in the same way. Rather, there are varying degrees of nonlinear swerving and swaying, and a rippling, whirlpooling set of alternatives along the processual stream offering multiple possibilities of deviation. In other words, there is no simple clear cut-and-dried, unambiguous ‘Yes!’, and no emphatic categorical ‘No!’ Nor is there simply any ambiguous ‘Both yes and no!’, or any sly yet systematically enacted devious ‘Yes, I will obey, but underhandedly I won’t comply, whenever and wherever I get the chance’. For, nothing is clearly and distinctly what it is; everything merges with everything else; everything is complementarily coalescent. What is always within the process is the Included-Middle, presenting possibilities promising alternatives, something fresh and new, creating differences that make a difference. And life goes on, accompanied by incessant improvisation along the way. (It bears mentioning that shortly after the conquest of America certain indigenous groups among the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs, most notably the ‘Taquiongos’ in Peru [Graziano 1999: 111–15], and in recent times the Zapatistas [EZLN] movement in Chiapas, Mexico [Marcos 2001, 2004], took advantage of Included-Middle alternatives so as to improvise and alter their daily affairs in an effort to throw a monkey wrench in the colonial works, subvert twentieth-century bureaucratic operations, and deceive those in power by presenting a surface appearance of conformity while behind the scenes perpetuating seething resistance.48) 48
In general, regarding the Tetralemma of possible responses as outlined in the preceding paragraphs with respect to the clash of cultures in the Americas during and after the conquest, see the following: for the somewhat ambiguous ‘Yes!’ response on the part of the conquered, Bowden 1981; Caraman 1976; Greenblatt 1993; Ricard 1966; Taylor, Pease 1994; Ramírez
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To the creation of something new through improvisation by way of the Included-Middle – the fourth line of the Tetralemma – we must add, ‘All of the above’ (affirmation of the preceding four lines) and ‘None of the above’ (negation of the preceding five lines). This is a needed move, since if the Many are not accepted, then there is nothing; there is no world, no personal or communal set of objects, acts, and happenings making up some world-version or other. And if the many are not virtually in one and the same breath denied, then there is no One, no whole, no world-version capable of offering the possibility of myriad particular objects, acts, and happenings. With this in mind, a return to rule following, and tacit, spontaneous doing, might behoove us.
1990; for the indefinite ‘No!’ response, Adas 1979; Bowden 1981; Chaves 1973; Greenblatt 1993; Minge 1991; and Schroeder 1998; for the blending of ideas and social practices in the ‘Both-And!’ response, Gruzinski 1993, 2001, 2002; Taylor, Pease 1994, and for its effects in modern Latin America, Rowe, Schelling 1991; for the ‘Neither-Nor!, but rather, something else’ response, Adorno 1986; Haya de la Torre 1967; Martí 1977; Pike 1986. I must hasten to add that these references are all over the Latin American historical map, but in my estimation, in concert, they offer a valid and valuable global picture of the makings of the multiply variable Tetralemma as it is evinced in concrete local cultural practices.
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Chapter Nine
There’s more to following a rule than meets the mind Chapter Nine. There’s more to following a rule than meets the mind Our goalie briefly rejoins us, this time provoking further meditation on Polanyi’s focal and subsidiary awareness. Time, or timespace, both static and processual, also enter the scene in regard to homogeny, hierogeny and heterogeny, Both-And, Either/Or and Neither-Nor aspects of the semiosic process, and the notions of overdetermination and underdetermination. This calls for further specification of the nature of the triadic sign, the categories, basic sign types, and the concept of signs developing into other signs as their makers and takers become increasingly aware of them and more adept at articulating them. Interdependency, interrelatedness and interaction of complementary coalescent sign processes serve more adequately to illustrate the co-participatory nature of all signs, ourselves included, especially in view of the successively complexifying character of radically heterogenous signs within contemporary globalizing cultures, all exemplified through sign fusion – or portmanteauing, rhetorically speaking.
Natural born geometers?
The outfielder runs not where the softball is, but tacitly and spontaneously computes where it will be when she can reach it for a catch and win the game for her team. During football action, the cornerback tacitly calculates where the fullback with the pigskin under his arm will be so he can intercept him, hopefully for a nifty tackle. The cheetah knows at what angle to veer over toward the rapidly fleeing gazelle in order to score a meal for her hungry cubs. In doing what they do, they all enact: ‘0 √ + Signness’. Our goalkeeper does the same. But he is exceedingly more limited. He must move either to the left or to the right or high or low at 180 degree angles parallel with the upper bar of the goal. The goal, to repeat, is 24 feet wide and 8 feet high, and the penalty shooter is 36 feet from the goal, and the goalie has only about .350 second to detect the soccer ball’s trajectory, make a decision, and move on it. He focuses on the shooter and simultaneously on the CEEOL copyright 2020
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ball resting at the penalty spot. He has some natural competence for intercepting kicked balls: if you have it you have it, and if you don’t you don’t. The general rule with respect to this particular talent is: ‘When the ball is kicked, leap with outstretched arms and intercept it’. Yeah, lots of luck. To rephrase Yogi Berra, if I may: ‘How the hell can he become aware of the ball’s trajectory, thoughtfully follow the rule, and knock the ball from its course in a fraction of a second?’ Call this his focal awareness – in light of Polanyi’s focal and subsidiary attention (regarding this particular interpretation of Polanyi, see also Millikan 1993). The goalie has dedicated countless hours to practicing his craft, and he has developed a certain disposition for determining where he will be able to intercept the ball with somewhat more than mere random guesses. Call this his implicit subsidiary awareness, which follows the specific context-dependent injunction: ‘Block the shot’. Combining the goalie’s general rule with his context-dependent rule plus whatever strategy he spontaneously creates in his effort toward success, what he does and how he does it is the consequence of how he has done what he does many times over the years. This combination under most circumstances gives onlookers the idea that he knows his craft to the letter, even though he endures varying degrees of uncertainty each time he faces an opponent. Yet the combination involves considerably more than a ‘blind shot in the dark’. A set of dispositions that govern performance is certainly not the same as competence, somewhat in the manner in which Chomskyan linguistic performance must be distinguished from linguistic competence. The goalie has a given competence for intercepting shots toward the goal, but dispositions must be largely learned, developed, and performed as a consequence of considerable practice. Competence doesn’t imply some particular set of dispositions, and dispositions acquired on the basis of greater or lesser degrees of competence. Competence is for the proficient goalie basically timeless, while his dispositions change over time, and his performance depends on particular contexts – temperature, wind velocity, field conditions, screaming fans, the ref ’s eagle eye. Thus greater competence coupled with greater or lesser motivation and training, or lesser competence with lesser or greater motivating and training, make up an entire spectrum of possibilities with respect to a particular goalie. Compare this situation once again to the relatively mundane act of driving a car. Assume two people, A and B, learned to drive using a car with a manual transmission, and their current vehicles also sport stick shifts. A has greater competence (quicker reflexes, more ability to ‘think on her feet’, and so on) than B. Nevertheless, B is more conscientious about his driving and
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drives more frequently than A. All told, their driving ability is comparable. Their implicit subsidiary awareness entails the general rule, among others: ‘At approximately 15 miles/hour, apply pressure to the clutch while releasing pressure on the accelerator pedal, shift into second gear, release the clutch as you once again apply pressure on the accelerator pedal, and repeat the operation at 25, 35, and 45 miles/hour for shifting into third, fourth and fifth gears’. But A and B have been driving for over 20 years and take all this for granted; when they drive they tend simply to put body on automatic pilot and let it – through subsidiary awareness – do what it does, leaving the mind free for less tedious pastimes. It’s all part of their tacit knowing. Consequently, on some balmy day, with respect to A’s and B’s traveling from point x to point y, their subsidiary awareness might entail the injunction (or Rule1): ‘Proceed from your driveway to the shopping mall’. This relatively remote, implicit, subsidiary time-independent awareness is put into effect as they drive toward their destination. At the same time, their relatively explicit, focal time-bound awareness does its thing, attending directly to a few particular items along the way according to an injunction more attuned to focal awareness (or Rule2): ‘Keep an eye out for anything unusual that may cause an accident’, while allowing for a bit of daydreaming, or whatever. And before A and B know it, they’re safely in the parking lot at the mall. At tacit and conscious levels, they have enacted: ‘0 √ + Sign1, Sign2, Sign3…n’. Comparably, after a member of his team has committed a foul, the goalie’s subsidiary awareness and its corresponding Rule1 is: ‘Block the kick’. His focal awareness involves the strategic injunction (or Rule2): ‘Psych the shooter out, and react to the ball when you see it kicked’ (which, of course, is quicker that the focally aware eye can follow). Rule1, basically including competence, involves a state of readiness spontaneously to react to the virtually infinite number of possible variations or differences regarding the ball’s trajectory (high, low, right, left, field conditions, the kicker’s expertise or lack thereof, and so on). This is a static block rendition, a map of what might possibly transpire, what could have transpired or what has transpired. There is the situation before the kick and the resulting situation after the kick: Before/After, devoid of a transient now moving along the continuous rail from past to future through the present. There is a prior state and a posterior state, and nothing in between. No time, no change – Zeno in somewhat different garb. In contrast to the timeless Before/After map (Rule1), temporally speaking, a finite number of the variations emerge from the field of all possibilities at the moment of the kick. High, low, right, left, field conditions, and so on, fuse, coalesce and merge into one another, as the goalie spontaneously reacts
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to them to the best of his ability (Rule2). This is performance. It is process: Past Present Future, chiefly serving to guide tacit subsidiary responses. Flowing time thus comes into the picture, as does change. Genuine process entails such flow: … …. Becoming, in contrast to merely Before/After The processual scene is in perpetual movement; the block is immobile. The process involves focal attention and response to some problem situation; the block involves only what was before and what was after; it involves timeless subsidiary awareness. However, if there is to be any form or fashion of communication – linguistic, non-linguistic or extralinguistic – the process must have been ‘punctuated’ and put into signs. For example, if we make a series of ‘cuts’ in the process, we have: -n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2 ,…+n (a series of apparently static states, each state involving focal attention, and implying subsidiary awareness). Upon creation of a particular series of this sort, we have rendered the continuity discontinuous. But such discontinuity is artificial, an artifice of our own making. In the case of our goalie responding to a penalty kick, if we combine the transition from past to t0 to future, we have: before t0, after t0 (where the moment of the kick = t0). This static sequence might appear comparable to his artificially chopping up the continuum. But it isn’t, since the kick-process was too rapid for his capacity to punctuate it. In other words, process, or Past Present Future, was too rapid for his focal attention to follow. Only after the fact could he punctuate it to yield Before/t0/After, following subsidiary attention’s having made its play; then and only then could he become conscious regarding whether or not he succeeded in blocking the kick; then and only then could he think about it, conceptualize it, and report his reasons for success or failure as best he can (for further on these two interpretations of ‘time’, see McTaggart 1927). Regarding the processual emerging of signs from sign possibilities, or ‘0 √ + Sign1 Sign2 Sign3 …n’, the flow is: Past Present Future. Subsidiary awareness can take care of this process quite handily: it’s all tacitly done through sedimented, habituated complementary coalescent interdependent, interrelated interaction. Subsequently, when meaning has been conferred on the signs, it will have been punctuated: Before/t0/After. A penalty kick might possibly be blocked (Before); it is blocked (t0); the block will have been punctuated and endowed with thoughts and conceptualized and interpreted (After). Mere possibility becomes tacitness becomes conscious awareness becomes articulation.
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Hierogeny, heterogeny and homogenization
Now comes the time to reveal the interdependency of interrelated, interactive processual flux and flows, which are subjected to punctuations in order to construct meaningful discontinuities. I will begin doing so by combining Figures 6 and 13 into Figure 14. From possible possibility to possible signness to signs becoming signs as illustrated in the lattice moving from left to right, we navigate along the stream offering us a number of possibilities without their (yet) having become prioritized or hierarchized. The field bears a homogeneous countenance (there is, as possibly possible signs, both one alternative, and another … and another …). We move on, dutifully placing what we have at hand in what we would like to think is their proper pigeon hole, classifying and categorizing usually as conveniently as we please, within this hierogeneous field (a matter of either this, or that … or that …), much in the sense of the discontinuous Before/After as described in the previous subsections. (Taking this condition to the extreme, we have poor Funes, for whom there is an inchoate mess of particulars, nothing more, nothing less. Before, there was one thing, after, there was something else; just one damn thing after another.) However, surprises seem never to cease surfacing at unexpected bends in the waterway, some of them torrential, some menacing, with tricky whirlpools, and others offering gentle rivulets when there seems to be smooth going. We are forced to reassess diverse aspects of our world as we (think we)
Figure 14. The process generalized.
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know it, improvising, revising, and changing as best we can with what signs we have at hand. And we somehow get it on – as though we were navigating along a continuous stream allowing us past memories and anticipations of the future within our present moments, much in the sense of the continuous process: Past Present Future. The lattice from a more general glance This leads us into the field of heterogenies with respect to Figure 14. When some problem situations arise, what we take as our world-version can be subjected to certain adjustments, amendments, modifications and fine tuning. This is a matter of neither this, nor that … nor that … but some other alternative that might be emerging. All of which appears well and good. That is, assuming the only path, including the middle way, is along the lattice toward that infinite stretch: If-1 and beyond. That path perpetually opens out to new and unforeseen possibilities; there is more often than not something unexpected and new, whether enticing or unnerving, pleasant or threatening, which should under ordinary circumstances promise openness. Unfortunately, pride, power, and possessions, coupled with anxiety, fear, and occasionally panic can emerge to carry out their insidious roles. One looks around for more secure environs. Closure becomes attractive. There is an answer, usually of mind-numbing simplicity, unmenacing, non-hazardous, and with little risk, with respect to any and all problems. There’s nothing out there to perturb and intimidate one, for, after all, one is hermetically sealed within closure, in desiccated bliss. Moving toward closure opens up to homogeny, and there, security offers renewed hope. There, one confidently feels in control. As closure becomes more hermetic, and the moves become increasingly all-encompassing, pointing in the direction of global homogenization, for hardly anything unexpected jumps up to become a nuisance, a pain in the neck, or in the worst case scenario to create problematic situations, which are terrifying for those who want tensionless harmony in all things. Changelessness becomes the desired norm; petrification tends to bring cultural processes to a halt. It becomes like that Buddhist saying: ‘If you aren’t still busy experiencing birth, you’re already busy experiencing death’. (Lönnrot was definitely ‘experiencing death’. His preconceived world was perfect, in all its details, at least as far as he was concerned. There was no change, no Included-Middle. Why should there be, since as far as he was concerned he knew all that was needed to be known?)
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Signs of those times To the obvious question ‘What does this have to do with signs and communication?’ I would suggest attend briefly to those more basic signs that have just begun to set sail on their journey toward semiotic development: signs of iconicity of various sorts, and to an extent signs of indexicality. Iconic signs are chiefly of the nature of Firstness, of feeling and sentiment, of quality and sensation for the bare moment, without any impingement on the part of any other, at least not yet. Such signs highlight possibility, the interdependence of the possible sign with all other sign possibilities – their others or that with which they interact in the physical world or the world of the mind, and their respective interrelated meanings (mediatingly speaking, interpretants). Iconic signs of Firstness are what might be the case, though there is no certainty since nothing has been determined. These are signs of the vaguest sort, here, now, without interrelated interaction with anything else. Openness is the watchword, as it should be, for there is no closure (not yet at least). There can’t be closure, for there is not (yet) any determinately identifiable other that could threaten to enter into bivalent and hence fixed linkage with the sign. Closure comes later, for better or for worse. Indexical signs, chiefly of the nature of Secondness, involve consciousness becoming aware of some other – other than the sign and other than the sign coupled with its maker and/or its taker. This sign bears further development of the iconic sign; it is interdependent and ready for interaction with its other, with its maker and/or taker, and with other signs. Symbolic signs, chiefly of the nature of Thirdness, are signs capable of bringing signs of Firstness and Secondness, of iconicity and indexicality, to further development through their mediating them in the same way that they, symbolic signs of Thirdness, bring themselves into mediation with each of those other signs as signs of Firstness and Secondness. Symbolic signs entail conscious focal awareness of signs as such, ushering in ideas and thoughts, conceptualization and interpretation. Languages are paramount among these signs: languages of formal sort such as logic, mathematics, and computer language, as well as natural languages – English, German, Mandarin or whatever. Sign types becoming other Table 1, offering Peirce’s basic decalogue of sign types, sports subscripts (1, 2, 3) as Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, of sign Representamens, Objects (or Acts or Happenings) and Interpretants, respectively (CP 2.227– 434). Peirce’s obsessive knack – some would say obsession – for creating
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terms and neologisms is Table 1. Peirce’s 10 classes of signs. notorious, and the fruit of his creative aplomb is noto- Sign Common example riously technical, complex, and difficult to decipher, in R1 O1I 1 Feeling of ‘blueness’ Vague sense of a form or shape (a part because of their con- R2 O1I 1 spherical object) voluted density, in part be- R2 O2I 1 Vague awareness of something, but it is still indefinite (a sense of the cause of their multifaceted sphere of more or less billiard ball nature, and in part because size) Awareness that a spherical blue Peirce was never satisfied R2 O2I 2 object is on a flat green background) with his ideas when put R3 O1I 1 Consciousness of a white sphere coming into contact with the blue down on paper, and he sphere couldn’t keep from revising R3 O2I 1 A spontaneous evocation: ‘There!’ them. With this in mind, I R3 O2I 2 A commonplace expression: ‘Right on!’ will make a rather unortho- R O I A word: ‘Corner!’ 3 3 1 dox gesture, attempting to R3 O3I 2 A sentence: ‘I knew it was going in.’ An argument or text: ‘The cue ball put his tripartite concept of R3 O3I 3 hit it slightly to the right, then it the sign in down-to-earth angled to the left, and straight as an arrow, into the corner pocket. To be terms. I trust it will turn more specific,…’ out more elucidating than opaque, more clarifying than abstruse. First off, I must reiterate what was suggested in Chapter Two. Before there were signs, there were possible possibilities, mere possibilities, what possibly is and what possibly isn’t, mediation, and finally emergent signs: ‘0 ∅ √ + … Signness’. In other words, Table 1 offers an image of signness-becoming. In narrative form it goes like this: the sign Representamen streams from the feeling of a possibly might be (R1), to some sense of a sign and the possibility of some other with which it can come into interdependent interaction (R2), to the possibility of complementary interrelatedness of the sign and its other (R3); the semiotic Object (or Act, or Happening) moves from the feeling of a sign’s other (O1), to awareness of its possible value as otherness (O2), to possible interrelated mediation of the two emergent entities (O3); the Interpretant flows from the feeling of some possible value of a symbolic sign (I1), to an articulation of its meaning with respect to its other (I2), to a sense of that meaning’s becoming, as the sign and its object enter into interrelatedness such that their interconnections are becoming apparent, to some explicit articulation and justification – albeit to a greater or lesser degree tentative – in favor of the sign’s particular meaning (I3).
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With respect to the examples in Table 1, the sign stages in the form of ruptures in the continuity are: first, there is some feeling of blueness against some background; the feeling is no more than that; there is not yet any recognition of some object that is blue, let alone identification; there is just the vaguest sort of feeling ( R1O1I1); next there is the becoming of some vague awareness of a spherical form ( R2O1I1 R2O2I1); and a contrast between the blue form against a green – or some other – background enters consciousness ( R2O2I2); in the next moment, the subject of the possible sign is becoming aware of some white sphere-like form coming into contact with the blue form ( R3O1I1); the subject of these feelings and sensations comes to an awareness of the interaction of the spheres and arrives at some still vague identification of them – tacitly acknowledging the semiotic scene as a game of billiards – and without thinking, she blurts out ‘There!’ ( R3O2I1); then, recognizing what has happened, the subject emits a familiar expression, ‘Way to go!’ ( R3O2I2); now, with focal attention on the game in process, she goes on to create a series of descriptive utterances regarding the action that just occurred ( R3O3I1 R3O3I2), and eventually, if she is so inclined, she can proceed by creating an entire text, narrative, or argument with respect to the nature and state of the billiards match ( R3O3I3); in synthesis, tacit, spontaneous, on-the-spur-of-the-moment sign processing much like that of the goalie sort includes the following, in a flash: ‘0 √ + R1O1I1 R2O1I1 R2O2I1 R2O2I2’. Subsequently, contemplation and thought and ideas and concepts and dialogic interaction about that virtually instantaneous sign processing includes: ‘0 √ + R1O1I1 R2O1I1 R2O2I1 R2O2I2 R3O1I1 R3O2I1 R3O2I2 R3O3I1 R3O3I2 R3O3I3’. In light of our discussion at the end of Chapter Six of the praying mantis, the cornerback pursuing a fullback, the baseball hitter at home plate, the goalie poised to block a kick, or our putting a nail in the drywall so as to hang a picture, all via Polanyi’s focal and subsidiary awareness, the same semiosic process inheres. From Firstness or feeling and the becoming of awareness to the Secondness and Thirdness or recognition of something as such-and-
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such that is of so-and-so set of characteristics, we enter mediated symbolic or linguistic expression, and spill out a (hopefully) coherent concoction of signs. The mantis does what she does in a flash, processing her more basic iconic and indexical signs spontaneously and almost instantaneously. So does the cornerback, and the batter and goalie as well. Hanging a picture demands a bit of careful deliberation, and perhaps some verbal dialogue, but with a little time we are usually able to carry out our task with efficient dispatch. Consciously and conscientiously articulating the whole affair is another matter entirely, involving a relatively carefully laid out set of symbolic signs. Indeed, sign processing, from R1O1I1 to R3O3I3, can follow a remarkably diverse set of nonlinear paths, and it can occur in virtual simultaneity, or it can be strung out over a relatively lengthy stretch of time. In sum,… Peirce’s ten sign types map out the sign-taker’s becoming of consciousness of the sign as sign along with its other and its meaning. In this manner the sign is no sign without co-participation with its maker and taker, and its maker and taker are, themselves, signs among the sign and all other signs they have interpreted, are interpreting, and will have been interpreting. As shall become increasingly apparent in the following chapters, the tripartite components of a sign, the sign and other signs, and those signs and their makers and takers, all interdependently, interrelatedly, and interactively co-participate in giving rise to the entire semiosic process. The process proceeds from bare feeling and sensation to the becoming of awareness of the sign, its other, and its meaning, to suggestive, descriptive and explanatory words, sentences and arguments or texts. But, I must repeat, this is not simply a list of relatively autonomous sign types each of which has its own pigeon hole. All signs, their makers and takers, and physical and mental worlds, are interdependent, interrelated and interactive, which is to imply that they are always in the process of complementary coalescence, which is to imply that they are always becoming something other. A question: How can we more specifically account for our goalie, our batter, our cornerback, and our own pounding a nail in the wall, with respect to the processual nature of the ten sign types? Our becoming aware This essay has suggested that what we do tacitly – spontaneously making and taking our signs – we just do, virtually without giving our doing any explicit, conscious and conscientious thought to the matter. This is processual, as a whole (Past Present Future). Then, the whole can be punctuated, the
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bits can be put in their proper pigeon holes, and thought about and conceptualized and talked about. This takes place as if the entire process were a static block (Before/After). The time-bound process is ongoing, as if it were unpunctuated; punctuation is as if the process were a timeless block. Process is as process does, from what was becoming to what is becoming to what will have been becoming; punctuation makes a slash between what, after the fact, was and what came later. Process is thus mutilated by artificial, often arbitrary punctuations. Communication, at best carrying subtle implications of the process from which it arose, relies on such punctuations. Process is the source of implicit, subsidiary feeling and sensing and spontaneous doing; effective communication, which can come about only after punctuations have cut and abused process, is chiefly the yield of conscious focal awareness in concert with subsidiary awareness (-n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2 ,…+n, that is, Past Present Future). Process is the fountainhead; punctuation, though undermining that very process, is nevertheless necessary for genuine sign-making and -taking. Yet, spontaneous sign-making and -taking providing the source for more explicit communication can become ineffective for one reason or another, when tacit, spontaneous, habituated behavior gets shunted and the maker and taker freeze up. Even top NBA players occasionally freeze when they find themselves having to make a critical free throw in a close game. At times like this, the brain typically goes into automatic pilot; but it can’t function because know-it-all mind insists on interceding. Though these athletes may have practiced the shot thousands of times, they begin to think about the magnitude of the moment; then, instead of relying on autopilot, mind switches it off, the player’s smoothly oiled technique breaks down, and he misses the shot (Beilock 2010). As briefly described in Chapter Six, this is the matter of ‘degenerate’, embedded, entrenched, habituated sign processing at tacit, subsidiary levels, that has gone awry and refuses to function properly. Under normal circumstances of ‘degenerate’ sign processing, a sign is taken and another sign is made ordinarily in a matter-of-fact manner, and things customarily go smoothly; the shooter kicks the ball and, by more luck than management, the goalie blocks it; the cornerback scurries where the fullback will be and tackles him, quite niftily; the batter swings, perhaps almost blindly, and hits a home run; and we manage efficiently to regulate the nail’s penetrating the plank. These signs of ‘degenerate’ processes ordinarily don’t proceed past sign 311, or perhaps 321, signs that remain attuned chiefly to subsidiary awareness. These signs are customarily processed by the sign-maker and -taker apparently as effortlessly and as efficiently as can be. Without conscious, conscientious
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and intentional mental input. Body just does it. Or better, it is the working of bodymind when at its best. The signs are taken as if they were no more than iconic images, and they are spontaneously indexicalized and interactively responded to; then, responsive signs are made, as if they were no more than iconic signs, and whatever audience of sign-takers might happen to be around initially and spontaneously sense them and feel them and indexically respond to them with a surge of emotion and then with perhaps a verbally evocative symbolic sign, ‘Yes!!!’ (sign 221 222 321). And finally, after the fact, with time, they can consciously and focally articulate them in the form of relatively simple phrases: ‘Did ja see that? Nothin’ but net!’ (sign 322). Free shot made, one more point toward victory. All virtually with hardly a single thought in mind. It’s a matter of: Past Present Future… (iconicity-becoming), then … -n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2,…+n (iconicity becoming indexicality-becoming), and … Before/ After… and After … and After, but always with variations … n (indexicality becoming symbolicity becoming) Past Present Future If-1. Continuity fractured and splintered into discontinuity; discontinuity differentiated ever-more-finely in the direction of re-stored continuity without a ghost of a chance of consummating continuity becoming in this finite, fallible world. Vagueness, ambiguity and inconsistency making hesitating, tentative bouncy, bumpy moves toward completeness; yet incompleteness always manages periodically to make its presence known. Signs. Nonlinearly speaking, there’s more to them than meets the mind and the eye and ear and nose and tongue and touch. Considerably more. Not merely more than we think, but more than we can think – and more than we should think even if we could think. These more-than-we-can-think signs include, most especially, those of the basketball, baseball, soccer, or football player when under pressure, or all of us when engaged in stressful everyday living for that matter. We tend to perform inadequately. We occasionally freeze. Because our brain, within bodymind, is temporally unable effectively to organize its resources, retrieve information from its memory, and respond to a machine-gun cadence of signs. Psychologists are prone to tell us that longterm intensive preparation is the key to preventing stress from cramping the ability to respond to such signs. In view of the premises underlying this essay, repeated attention to and co-participatory interdependent, interrelated interactive practice with pre- or extra-linguistic signs is imperative. Repeating myself somewhat, for emphasis’ sake, signs chiefly of iconicity (111, 211, 311) and indexicality (221, 222), give rise to the creation of spontaneous, often guttural responses (321) and commonplace expressions (322), which come largely from outside the field of conscious, conscientious
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and intentionally induced and articulated sign behavior (331, 332, 333). What does this say to the athlete or whomever who freezes when under pressure. If time permits, perhaps a deep breath, a calm moment, or a few fleeting thoughts about other things, all of which serves to ‘reboot’ bodymind – metaphorically like rebooting a computer when it jams – and with luck, the automatic pilot can once again make its play. Allow me to wax more general with respect to these signs in question, in order to render them compatible with the above observations on the lattice in Figures 6, 13, and especially 14. The nature of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs
Figure 14 evinces the notion of signs chiefly of iconicity, of indexicality, and of symbolicity, gyrating, swirling and undulating, about the eye of the vortex, which has itself developed from ‘0 √’; but the process doesn’t stop there; it moves on, from ‘ + … Signness’. Nor does it cease its becoming when a sign emerges, for with sign processing, time enters (‘Past Present Future’), which calls for punctuation (‘-n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2 ,…+n’ and Before/After), and then symbolic sign processing begins its becoming (‘ Past Present Future If-1’). Ideally, the process thrives on openness, as illustrated in Figure 14, within the swirls from ‘Both-And … And … And …n’ to the beginning of possible closure with hierogenous ‘Either/Or’, and on to successively more complex heterogeny with ‘Neither-Nor … Nor … Nor …n’, as the interdependent, interrelated interactive process of co-participating signs and their makers and takers proceed (it is becoming increasingly evident, I would expect, that I’m following notations comparable to those of Deleuze and Guattari 1983). What are the implications of this sign process openness? Openness ‘is’, as openness ‘does’ As long as openness prevails, the process stands a good chance of self-perpetuation. Unfortunately, as briefly delineated above, closure often threatens to raise its ugly head. The closed, intransigent mind: religious fanaticism, ideological radicalism, dogmatism, prejudice, intolerance, extremism of all forms. That is on the individual level. Nations, societies, political, economic, educational, cultural, and corporate organizations, occasionally have, and many of them will undoubtedly continue to have, basically the same characteristics on collective scales. Take the hoary, often venerated or maligned, concept of globalization. Economically speaking, Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo
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(1772–1823) envisioned a global ‘invisible hand’ keeping markets on a steady keel. Buying and selling, and production and distribution of goods and services would take care of themselves, given competitive market incentives. A rather cut-throat Darwinian struggle of the fittest. At first glance, the ‘invisible hand’ would appear as self-organizing and self-regulating at its most efficient. Over the long haul, it would also appear as an incessant push toward homogeny, since the ways of the fittest will dominate, and the products of their activity will become the norm. Processually speaking, however, the ‘invisible hand’ is amorphous and pliable, according to a given culture or combination of cultures each of which flows in and out of all others within ever altering contexts. As contexts change, so also economic practices and their products.49 However, speaking of cultures in general and the whole of their processes, including economics, the processual idea suggests that globalization does not simply homogenize human activity and thought. The globalizing push, rather, brings people of different cultures together. The people take in what they want (conformity), while rejecting what they find of relatively lesser cultural value (resistance); they use and perhaps abuse what they have adopted, changing it while upholding many practices within their own culture. In other words, they improvise, create, invent, making do with what they have as best they can. Radically diverse cities such as New York, Mexico City, Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro, among others, which are by many counts globalized metropolitan conglomerations at their best, are put up as the supreme examples of what is ultimately presumed to become the homogenization of the world. But while they offer a diversity of cuisines, performances, celebrations, art, and general styles of living, they take cultural diversity to the extreme. The people expect and want diversity, tourists demand it, those who service tourists thrive on it, and the rich, entrepreneurial, and political citizens try to cope with it. It isn’t the market that forms culture; culture changes market forces. In fact, market forces can’t effectively compete with cultural processes; cultural processes keep market forces in a pathway of fluctuating change. The people have to become adaptive in a changing environment; local, tacit knowing takes precedence over abstractly devised rules, modes, and means designed for the market. As cultures flow along, rising and falling, occasionally creating tidal waves, so also the markets, while attempting to maintain a tight ship, inevitably follow suit.
49
For diverse views, see Burbach 2001; Featherstone 1990; Featherstone et al. 1995; Lechner, Boli 2000; Mander, Goldsmith 1996; Stiglitz 2002.
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Process fuels openness This is to say that if all people involved go with the ebullient cultural flow, globalization will not invariantly prove tantamount to homogenization. Rather than flattening differences, multinational market pressures will meet with resistance with respect to the details of everyday living. Food styles are one of the most telling tales. While the French will undoubtedly not take to Cheez Whiz while sticking to their traditional varieties of cheese, the ‘Americanization of the world’ is in many ways nonetheless embraced yet resisted, adopted but transformed. McDonald’s is touted as offering the same menu throughout the world. So CNBC’s TV homage to the fast food giant informs us. However, the Philippines have McSpaghetti, Thailand has a Pork Burger, India a Maharaja McMutton Burger, Japan a Teriyaki Burger, Norway a Salmon Burger, and Uruguay and Brazil an Egg Burger. This is sameness with differences that make a difference. The culinary offerings are global by design, but how they are taken and what they are becoming is local in practice.50 Italian youth often – though these days certainly not always – take wine with their family at dinner, while U.S. teens eat dinner, wherever, and then go out with the guys and drink to get drunk. The Chinese drink because current wisdom tells them that in moderation it’s good for them; in the U.S. people drink to have fun – so much so that they often get plastered. In the U.S. many people consume Big Macs because they can get them and down them quickly and move on, and besides that, they’re relatively inexpensive. In other countries they are by no means cheap; their people consume them because of certain status it affords them51. In Salvador, Brazil – the city is commonly called ‘Bahia’ – a popular treat of Afro-Brazilian origin is Acarajé. It consists of white bean paste roughly the size of an English muffin with rounded edges, deep fried, sliced and filled with various mixtures of Afro-Bahian preparations, and topped off with some shrimp and finely chopped salad. It is prepared in small street stands, or at the beaches: the Brazilian equivalent of fast food. If McDonald’s decided to add McArajé to its menu in Salvador, the fast food establishment would no more become a ‘Bahian café’ than would a local family restaurant become American if it introduced hamburgers to its clientele. Both McDonalds’s and the local restaurant would, rather, complementarily coalescently become hybridized, along the cultural flow. Fast food within the globalizing scene – and all other eateries for that matter – is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. 50
51
Bird, et al. 1993; Esteva, Prakash 1998; García Canclini 1993, 1995; Gilroy 1993; Mignolo 2000. Kellner 1999; Ritzer 1996; Volkman 2006; Watson 1997.
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What openness does is keep the flow going, which is to say that it never is, strictly speaking; it is always in the process of ‘ising’, without fixity. Portmanteauing the process Recontextualizing the previous subsection, to the question ‘Could one classify McGyros or McArajé as both Greek and American and both Brazilian and American?’ the response would be ‘Yes!’ To the question ‘Could one classify them as neither Greek nor Brazilian nor American?’ the response would also be ‘Yes!’ How so? Globalization, according to an increasing circle of observers, is a swirling vortex of both homogenization processes creating apparent sameness and uniformity and heterogeny, difference and hybridity. It‘s hierogenizing, hegemonizing, constantly threatening closure, and at the same time it’s a tendency toward equalizing and democratic openness, yet heterogeny is always in play, to a greater or lesser extent. It’s both conformity and resistance, both imposition from above and subversion from below, both intervention and renovation, domination and conflict. As if this were not enough confusion, globalization is neither the one process nor the other, for it’s always in transition, always becoming something different without that process of becoming standing a chance of becoming static, fixed, petrified once and for all (Kellner 2002). Just as McArajé is neither of McDonald’s vintage nor is it of the Bahian cuisine, so also, within diverse Latin American contexts, the Mexican patron saint, Guadalupe, is neither the Catholic virgin, strictly speaking, nor Tonantzín, the ancient Aztec virgin-mother of deities among others in the pantheon: she is, portmanteauingly speaking, ‘Guadantzín’. She is neither the one nor the other but some alternate deity emerging. ‘Border culture’, at the Mexico-U.S. line of demarcation, is neither ‘Mexican’ nor ‘Gringo’ but always becoming ‘Mexingo’. Brazilian ‘futebol’ (soccer) is not English, in the good tradition, but, as Pelé describes the ‘beautiful game’, a matter of ‘ginga’, ‘jeito’, ‘samba’; in other words, it’s always becoming something else – such as the national team at the 2010 cup that became methodical rather than flashy for which Brazilian soccer players are notorious. And so on. Latin American ‘globalization’, one of the most ‘localizable’ among ‘globalized’ cultures, is neither exactly ‘global’ nor ‘local’, but ‘glocal’. Radical pluralism, for sure, or better, plurimorphism (for further, merrell 2010). Portmanteauing words by fusing otherwise conflicting terms into one might be construed as nothing more than a cute rhetorical device. Yet if taken in proper spirit, it gives a sense of neither homogeny nor hierogeny nor hegemony nor heterogeny, but what is always emerging from ‘0’, emptiness,
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the range of all possible possibilities. This is process, as suggested above: perpetual movement from past to present to future, along the time-line of which cuts are necessarily enacted so as to create what is (becoming) for the moment. Regarding what is time-bound ( closure) and what is slipping through the fissures ( change, openness), let us consider Nelson Goodman’s notorious paper on the induction problem anew.
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Chapter Ten
Coalescence processes in strange ways Chapter Ten. Coalescence processes in strange ways Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ pits us ‘Realworlders’ against his chimerical ‘Grueworlders’, whose perceptual faculties and classifying scheme play tricks on them as far as our ways of worldmaking are concerned. Goodman’s enigmatic imaginary construct merges with Davidson’s essay on malapropisms, and both are interpreted through the ‘Prisoners’ Paradox’, which returns us to Peirce’s ten signs. Peirce’s concepts of vagueness and generality flow into the scene insofar as they are interrelated with overdetermination and underdetermination. This brings us a step closer to some form of a nonlinear, context-dependent, complementarily coalescent, cultural-processual ‘logic’. The riddle begins making more sense, finally
The ‘New Riddle of Induction’, mentioned at the beginning of Chapter Eight, has those strange Grueworlders qualifying emeralds as ‘Grue’ – or what we would call ‘Green’ – before time t0, and thereafter continuing to qualify them as ‘Grue’ – but they now take them for what we would ordinarily call ‘Blue’. As far as we are concerned, emeralds are always and invariably ‘Green’; as far as the Grueworlders are concerned emeralds are unchangingly ‘Grue’. Stated in terms of our temporal series from the previous chapter, our emeralds are ‘Green’ along the entire series, ‘-n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2 , …+n’, while their emeralds are ‘Grue’ along the same series, but as far as we can tell, their ‘Grue’ emeralds change from what we would consider ‘Blue’ prior to time t0 to ‘Green’ after that time – as mentioned, our classification and the Grueworlders’ classification are symmetrical. While we consider their perception and conception of emeralds to be ‘schizophrenic’, they would think of our ‘Green’ emeralds in the same way. For, as far as they can tell, our ‘Green’ emeralds change from what they would consider ‘Grue’ prior to time t0 to what they would consider ‘Bleen’ after t0. The two emerald qualifications are symmetrical, relative to the frame of reference, and culture dependent (Rescher, Brandom 1979). To each her own.52 52
Georges Mounin (1963) gives account of ‘Grue-Green’-like phenomena that create translation nightmares. Of particular interest, the indigenous Navajos of Southwestern United States have only one word for both ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’, which might seem quite reasonable, give the prevalence of the ‘turquoise’ color in their culture (also relevant is Berlin and Kay’s work, 1969).
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What’s going on here? The problem is that we take emeralds to be ‘Green’, yesterday and into the distant past, today, and tomorrow and into the vanishing horizon. It is as if ‘Emeralds are green’ were a static category, just as ‘Swans are white’ was for any and all Europeans prior to Cook’s voyage to Australia. Actually, there are no absolute guarantees that generalities are cut in stone. That’s the induction problem Goodman addresses in his ‘Grue’ dilemma, the dilemma David Hume brought to the attention of Western philosophy and Popper (1963, 1972) went to great lengths to elucidate and resolve. Nevertheless, for scientific expediency, and in order to get on with our everyday talk, we would like to believe our generalities are by and large fixed. That’s why we ‘Realworlders’ take ‘Grueworlder’s’ talk to be rather ‘schizophrenic’, claiming emeralds are ‘Green’ before t0 and ‘Blue’ thereafter. We take his world to be a ‘Before/After’ discontinuous, mutilated affair, while our time-bound existence is a stable, continuous matter of: ‘Past Present Future’. I bring Goodman’s ‘Green/Grue’ dilemma up for the purpose of illustrating (1) how the atemporal ‘Before/t0/After’ (in line with Either/Or), and the time-bound ‘Past Present Future’ (including Both-And and NeitherNor) are interdependent, interrelated and interactive; and (2) the complementary coalescent portmanteauing process. Either/Or is a static block; Past Present Future is a temporally transitive process. The one basically has to do with competence, readiness lying in wait to jump into action; the other is chiefly a matter of action and reaction following spontaneous performance that is the consequence of living and learning. When Mrs. Malaprop uttered ‘epitaphs’ instead of ‘epithets’, in Davidson’s words, she ‘got away with it’.53 She did so, because her listeners were able to ‘read between the lines’ and discern what she really meant to say in place of what she actually said. Her listeners were not simply triggering a ‘blind shot in the dark’. From among many possible interpretations, they selected the one that appeared to be the most likely, and concluded that Mrs. Malaprop meant to say ‘epithets’. There was no need mentally to ponder over, think out, and construct a syllogistic procedure for arriving at their conclusion. They were in possession of linguistic competence, which was there, timelessly, in readiness to leap into action at the proper moment. At that moment, they spontaneously performed, and arrived at their interpretation: (Past Present Future) (-n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2) (Before/t0/After). 53
Regarding the speaker’s ‘getting away with’ her creating an erroneous utterance, Davidson (1986: 440) tells us: ‘The speaker may or may not […] know that he has gotten away with anything; the interpreter may or may not know that the speaker intended to get away with anything. What is common to the cases is that the speaker expects to be, and is, interpreted as the speaker intended although the interpreter did not have a correct theory in advance’.
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In our goalie’s case, he is ready and waiting. And there’s the kick (Past Present Future), after which in the blink of an eye he spontaneously reacts (-n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2 ,…+n, or), and then and only then is he able to become conscious of the consequence of his action (Before/t0/After). Focally he is able to do what he has done so many times in the past; or in a manner of putting it, in the first place it’s in his nature, and in the second place it’s in his physical and mental development. Subsidiarily, it’s the result of his years of experience and training. Basically, we have the same pattern. Timelessness and temporality combine to yield the entire process, viewed historically. Goodman’s scheme focuses chiefly on history in terms of a static ‘what happened before’ and ‘what happened later’: his nominalistic preference remains caught up in distinctions. Davidson’s radical interpretation places priority on process: his interpretation is a pragmatic, contextual affair, for sure, but it fails adequately to acknowledge tacit knowing in the timeless sense, which entails the very possibility of interpretation. And the goalie’s situation demands spontaneity, a split second, virtually timeless reaction to whatever situation happens to present itself. The nature of the paradox, temporally-atemporally speaking What is called the ‘Prisoners’ Paradox’ may help clarify the interdependence of timelessness and temporality. It is Sunday. The warden tells the prisoners on death row that they will be executed on one of the days of that week, but the designated day will be a surprise, since that day will not be known until it arrives. The prisoners found a quite astute lawyer. She reasons, after some deliberation, that assuming the warden to have told them the truth, they cannot be executed, for if the fatal day is to be Saturday, then it cannot be a surprise, since it will be the only day remaining. By this mode of reasoning neither can it be Friday, for Saturday now having been eliminated, Friday is no longer a candidate. The same can be said of Thursday, and so on down to Sunday. Therefore, rigorously speaking, they can’t legitimately be executed. There must be a flaw somewhere. And there is. But it has nothing directly to do with logic. The problem is that the lawyer’s reasoning is strictly by bivalent logical means: she can certainly afford to be logical, for her life isn’t at stake. In contrast, the prisoners’ very existence is in jeopardy: they are rightly concerned over how much time remains of their lives, and time is precisely the issue here. The lawyer’s logic is timeless, and within this framework the paradox springs forth in full force. But the prisoners, their emotions having understandably taken precedence over their reasoning faculties, exist in time; hence try as their lawyer may to convince them otherwise, they cannot
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reason away their fearful expectations of an unexpected moment announcing their death. Trapped inside their particular existential mind-set, they are condemned to temporality. Existentially speaking, the human organism cannot help but project into the future and carry within itself conglomerate memories of the past. The prisoners’ subsidiary awareness is: ‘On some unexpected day, you die’. Their focal awareness is, when the unexpected day arrives: ‘Today is the day’. Subsidiary awareness belongs to timeless ‘time’: ‘Before/t0/After’ (Either/ Or). Focal awareness is time-bound: ‘Past Present Future’ (from BothAnd to Neither-Nor). The lawyer’s logic lives in the first; the prisoners’ subjective sentiments and emotions live in the second. The lawyer’s reasoning is an either/or affair: a decision can be made or it can’t be made; it can’t be made, logically speaking; so it is not the case that it can be made. This is like Zeno’s Paradox of Motion embodied in Achilles and the tortoise: at strategic moments Achilles has covered either 50% or 25% or 12.5% or 6.25% or 3.125%, and so on toward infinity, of the distance between himself and the tortoise. But no matter by how many halves he reduces the remaining distance, in our discontinuously conceived material world he will have some spatial increment yet to cover, no matter how small it might be. In contrast, if the prisoners wish to walk from one side to the other of the cell within which they are confined, they simply walk, step by step, and they soon find themselves smack dab against the wall. Their awareness contains the past step, this step right now, and an anticipated future step. It implies a continuum, from past to present to future, with the present, wherever it may be at a given moment, cutting the continuous stream into equal increments. In other words, the prisoners, existentially put, niftily defy the lawyer’s ironclad timeless logic. Their problem is that at the end of their living and breathing material world, they continue to believe the warden has merely to make an arbitrary ‘cut’ in the continuum, -n…t-2 t-1 t0 t1 t2, when the designated time for the execution will have arrived. Goodman’s ‘Grue Paradox’ plays on language and epistemology: it’s a matter of how, context independently, we know what we (think we) know. This is much the manner of the lawyer’s thinking. The prisoners’ way of thinking is existential and processual: how we interdependently, interrelatedly and interactively know how to do what we (think we) know how to do, context dependently. This puts the prisoners closer to Davidson’s interpreters who largely tacitly arrive at the meaning of a word Mrs. Malaprop intended to utter but mistakenly uttered a different word. Goodman’s and our emeralds are either ‘Green’ or they or not; they are ‘Green’, hence they can’t be ‘Grue’, as far as we’re concerned. The lawyer reasons that the day must either
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come as a surprise or not; it can’t be a surprise; hence the execution cannot be forthcoming. The prisoners believe when the moment of execution arrived, it will have arrived, along a temporal continuum. Davidson’s interpreters are confident they can create a continuous bridge between Mrs. Malaprop’s intended word and the existent word, and they arrive at the proper interpretation of her utterance. Of course, the two modes, timeless logic (Secondness transformed into Thirdness) and time-bound feeling and sensing (Firstness, with a tinge of Secondness merging into Thirdness), are equally necessary. Without the one, abstract reasoning and classification of our concrete world into general categories could hardly be effectively put forth; without the other, we would get ourselves tied up in conceptual knots like those of the Lawyer and Zeno. Concrete living is in the best of circumstances capable of overcoming conceptual quirks; abstract thinking is theoretically capable of constructing a relatively stable world of general categories for our convenience. The relevance of Peirce, again In other words, as signs classified in terms of RaOaIa in Figure 14 develop through RbObIb and Ic, then toward their finality, If-1, in light of Table 1, the three sign components (R, O, and I) take on increasingly complex levels of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, and of signs of iconicity (chiefly Firstness), indexicality (chiefly Secondness), and symbolicity (chiefly Thirdness). They do so through their merging and mixing (portmanteauing), and their interpenetration, by way of the interdependent, interrelated, interactive process of complementary coalescence (as a rough visual metaphor of this process, see Figure 15).
Figure 15. Complementary coalescence.
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Signs of possibly possible categories fluctuate and flow from openness to become charged with particular and individual properties according to the classificatory and conceptual schemes of a given community and within specific timespace contexts. They continue fluctuating and flowing as they become more developed signs – with advances and occasional setbacks, of course – made possible by the Included-Middle, the middle way, hopefully perpetuating their openness. Unfortunately, as illustrated in Figures 13 and 14, fear of novelty, that which has remained unexperienced and unknown, can exercise its force, and closure threatens to take over. With this in mind, contemplate… The Tetralemma revisited
The form of non-bivalent thinking I wish to offer in this section includes bivalent Either/Or rules and their respective imperatives, and, in addition, it allows for Both-And and Neither-Nor modes of perception and conception and interpretation. Take the case of the prisoners and the lawyer if by chance they come into contact with a community of Grueworlders. In view of the Tetralemma, there are basically four reactions to the Grueworlders’ interpretation of emeralds: (1) ‘Green!’ (or ‘Yes!’) (Emeralds are Green, and they can be nothing but Green). (2) ‘Not-Green!’ (or ‘No!’) (For us, all Non-Green things are Non-Emeralds; in contrast, the Grueworlders erroneously hold that after t0 Emeralds are what we would term Blue). (3) ‘Green and Not-Green’ (or simply ‘Both!’ – as possible possibilities) (It all depends upon the timespace socio-cultural frame of reference: if our frame of reference holds, then for us, Emeralds are invariably ‘Green’; if the Grueworlders’ frame of reference holds, then for them, Emeralds can within some alternate socio-cultural timespace context, t0, become what is for us something other than ‘Green’, that is, ‘Not-Green’, or ‘Blue’). (4) ‘Neither Green nor Not-Green’ (or simply ‘Neither!’, as alternate possibilities) (Some alternative to ‘Green/Not-Green’ can be the case if we consider the Grueworlder’s color taxonomy with respect to Emeralds that undergo a radical switch from what we conceive as ‘Green’ to ‘Blue’ at time t0, and if at the same time they reciprocally consider that our color taxonomy with respect to Emeralds undergoes a radical switch from what they conceive as our ‘Green’ before time t0 and our
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‘Blue’ thereafter; hence the skewed ‘logic’ – from our view – of their stable color term, ‘Grue’). Enticing perhaps, but also somewhat disconcerting. How can the mind hold the Tetralemma in check and at the same time move in one of a numbing disarray of possible tangential paths? Certainly not exclusively within conscious, calculating, mentally deliberating, relatively detached focal attention. In view of numerous suggestions in the above pages, a massive amount of intuitive, entrenched, habituated, peripherally relatively free-floating tacit knowing must surely accompany whatever focal knowing might be on the surface. At any rate, with this in mind, and in an effort to clarify my assertions, take another look at the Figure 6 lattice (also patterned in Figure 14). Either/ Or imperatives hold in the mid-section. At the bottom of the lattice, BothAnd as pure possible possibilities can be in the process of emerging into the light of day to take their rightful place among existent Either/Or categories. At the top of the lattice, as Either/Or classificatory schemes become more sophisticatedly finer and finer, new alternate possibilities might be emerging as a consequence of inadequate or otherwise inefficient classificatory schemes becoming altered. Hence: ‘Either Green! or Not-Green!’ finds its place in the midsection; ‘Both Green and Not-Green!’ can live comfortably at the lower section of pure possible possibilities; and ‘Neither (exclusively) Green nor (exclusively) Not-Green, but Grue!’ can find a home at the upper section of alternate possibilities. It bears mentioning that the same process can be applied to ‘I obey but I don’t comply’, or to ‘All swans are white’ and ‘Most swans are white, with the exception of a subspecies in Australia that is black’, which became the case during explorations down under. Moreover, to cap it all off, if we wish to embrace the whole of the lattice in question, we must concede that: (5) ‘All the above!’ For, possible possibilities can always enter into the process of becoming, depending on the context, the conditions, and the frame of reference. And, (6) ‘None of the above!’ Since, the upper portion of the lattice cannot be fixed, but must remain open in order to allow for new alternate possibilities at the ripples, eddies, and whitewater rushes along the stream. ‘You are getting bogged down with esoteric sophistries once again. Please get down to brass tacks. For instance, what happened to your goalie?’ Yes. The rules of his game are presumably fixed, except in those relatively rare
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cases when the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Football Association Board (IFAB) decide on a change. However, suppose some upstart group of amateur soccer teams in Brazil decides to use a football of the NFL League variety in the United States in place of the standard soccer ball. This new game entails kicking the pigskin, whose shape is such that its trajectory can become wildly unpredictable, given the direction of the ball and the spot where the kicker’s foot comes into contact with it. Creation of this bizarre soccer game using a football instead of a soccer ball could involve portmanteauing ‘pigskin’ and ‘soccer ball’, perhaps ‘Socskin’. (Incidentally, along these lines, a variation of beach soccer actually occurred in Brazil some years ago when a volleyball net was set up in the middle of the field with soccer goals at each end, and futevolei [‘soccer-volley’] was created, wherein the players are not allowed to strike the ball with their hands or elbows but only with their feet and chest and head. The rules of this game consist of a combination of soccer rules regarding contact with the ball and volleyball rules with respect to getting the ball over the net and scoring a point when the opponents were unable to return it. So, my example is not too far out of line, I would expect.) Of course variations of the game, and of the game of life, are virtually unlimited, given the range of all possible possibilities that have emerged, are emerging, and will have been emerging. Over- and underdetermination, one more time In sum, with respect to the lattice, we have at the lowest extreme, pure possible possibility. It is, metaphorically speaking, like that artwork of Zen Master Hakuin consisting of a large ‘O’, nothing more than a circle, painted with one solitary stroke (Figure 16). It is nothing, a nothing that is corralling nothing, emptiness; it is a just a self-returning line, or, mathematically speaking, the same as an infinitesimally Figure 16. ‘Nothingness’. thin skin defining a minuscule portion of what is emptiness in separation from the vast unfathomable sea of emptiness. Stephen Nachmanovitch writes that such Zen artists, with their ‘O’, had a knack for concentrating the whole of Self into the simplest acts. The spontaneous ‘O’ is ‘the vehicle of Self, the vehicle of evolution, the vehicle of passion’ (Nachmanovitch 1930: 30). This unfathomable sea of emptiness, the fountain source of all that has been, is, and will have been emergent from the range of possible possibilities
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goes by many names: ch’i in China, ki in Japan, mana in Polynesia, prãṇa in India, axé in the Afro-Brazilian candomblé religion, and the word or verb in Christianity. It is the source of the virtually endless stream of creativity. As such, it is radically overdetermined. It is virtually infinite vagueness, this nothingness, this emptiness, this virtually ineffable, unthinkable nonessential nonentity, this indeterminate range of possible possibilities where inconsistencies present no problem, since contradictory possibilities have not (yet) entered into mortal conflict with one another – hence there are no bivalent eithers or ors. The lower portion of the lattice perpetuates this overdetermined (BothAnd) theme, from ‘ + ’, to ‘Signness’, while passing through the middle portion, wherein there is a social and individual effort to maintain objects, acts, and happenings in their proper place (Either/Or). The upper portion of the lattice is underdetermined (Neither-Nor alternatives become possible). It consists of the jumble of generalities roughly governing the perception, conception, and language – and extralinguistic signs as well – of a particular community. These generalities are incomplete, given their limited range of application with their respective frames of reference at best, and at worst, their conflicts, contradictions, and faults. Hence they are periodically subject to adjustments, or they are thrown in the trash bin and replaced by other generalities deemed more adequate, at least for the time being: ‘R aOaIa RbObIb RcOcIc … If-1’. All told, potentially there is an unlimited number of variations on the theme of generalities fit for perception, conception, and description and interpretation; hence the upper portion of the lattice’s perpetual openness. Between one and another possible interpretation of some sign and its other as generalities, it can be either the one or the other; yet there is no ExcludedMiddle, given the field’s openness; hence there can be neither the one nor the other, contextually speaking, for some new interpretation can be in the process of emerging from the Included-Middle. Globalizing homogenizing tendencies push toward absolute universality, undifferentiation, sameness, such that there are no differences that make an appreciable difference. Such a push would end in total determination, since there would be nothing but eithers and ors, and closure would have been realized (Crevoisier 1999). Hierogeny, or better, hegemony, would have triumphed over the range of overdetermined possible possibilities and over the process of underdetermined novelty arising from Included-Middle openness. But perhaps fortunately for us, such completeness remains in the receding horizon.
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Peirce on overdetermined vagueness and underdetermined generality Peirce offers one of the most enticing suggestions for those who hold openness dear. His most telling statement is this: [A]nything is general in so far as the principle of excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it. Thus, although it is true that “Any proposition you please, once you have determined its identity; yet so long as it remains indeterminate and so without identity, it need neither be true that any proposition you please is true, nor that any proposition you please is false. So, likewise, while it is false that “A proposition whose identity I have determined is both true and false,” yet until it is determinate, it may be true that a proposition is true and that a proposition is false. (CP 5.448)
As suggested above, whatever generality that might be at hand is never absolutely free of some possible amendment or overthrown at some future timespace context. There is always a third possibility between the erstwhile Excluded-Middles, and then there must be two possibilities between the pair of middles that have emerged, and then four possibilities will arise between the resultant middles, and so on. It is in this manner that distinctions become finer and finer so as to approach continuity such that there are relatively few discernable differences that make a difference – the flow toward open homogeny. But absolute continuity, pure homogeny, is not to be had in our fallible world-versions. A Zeno sort of quandary enters the scene, for, in a finite world, the middles will multiply, approaching infinity – the ‘asymptotic progression’, which can never reach the end of the line.54 Heterogeny there will always be, to a lesser or greater degree (flow toward If-1 in Figures 6 and 14). Pure open homogeny can dwell only in the field of absolute vagueness. But, of course, that field is populated with possible possibilities; there is nothing one can sink one’s teeth in. Peirce in the above quote makes allusion to determination, which yields some identity or other with respect to the sign and its other in question. Nothing within the homogenous range of possible possibilities can enjoy identity, for there is no more than possible possibility; and identity within the field of heterogeny is invariably incomplete, for within some timespace 54
In analytic geometry an asymptote can be illustrated by a hyperbolic curve that approaches one of the axes on a Cartesian plane by increasingly smaller increments, but as the distance between the curve and the axis approaches zero, it tends toward infinity, which will never be at hand in a finite world. In one of Zeno’s arguments, in order for an object to reach its destiny it must travel half the distance, then half the remaining distance, and so on, to infinity.
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context, it may be up for change. However, within hierogeny, something has been selected, pinned down, and attached to some category or other; some identity has at least tentatively been slapped on it. As such, it enjoys bivalent classification, and Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle can in the best of moments have their way. A problem with Peirce’s quote is that in the above quote he addresses himself exclusively to ‘propositions’. What about extralinguistic signs? Take another look at Figure 11. As possible possibility it is both a rabbit and a duck; identified, it is, hierogenously speaking, either a rabbit or a duck; as one of a host of heterogenous options it is neither a rabbit nor a duck but an imaginarily hybridized, portmanteauing ‘dabbit’ or ‘ruck’, or perhaps merely a jumbled combination of lines and hue variations. Of course a host of other extralinguistics signs of sound, sight, touch, taste and smell could have been used as examples. All told, a sign, as uninterpreted, offers two or more possibilities; after a decision and a selection have been made, there is at least tentative or provisional determination and identity. Once some determination has been made, there can be new timespace contextualizations, and new perspectives; hence the Excluded-Middle can become inapplicable. These slippery operations I’ve labeled as an alternate ‘logic’ might strike one as too much to stomach. If we give in to this ‘logic’, chaos could ensue, which should be deemed unacceptable. Indeed, that has been the assumption throughout Western history. The idea generally has it that coherence and consistency and Identity and Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle must prevail, for otherwise we haven’t a conceptual leg to stand on. In this vein, if I wish to make my case clearer, further consideration of rule following and rule bending and the problem of our knowing what we (think we) know, especially when such rule bending and knowing borders on chaos, would seem to be in order.
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Chapter Eleven
On what we (think we) know Chapter Eleven. On what we (think we) know Following seminal papers by Alan Turing, the initial stages of the computer revolution evolved from relatively simple binary logic to mind-numbing complexity, especially in recent years. This provides a basis for further discussion of rules and strategies with respect to human thinking, as well as our use and abuse of signs, and our physical world, which, after Henri Poincaré’s groundbreaking work, demonstrates that the universe doesn’t follow classical Newtonian laws to the letter. Chaos theory briefly comes into view, and with it uncertainty. Ultimately, whatever rules there may be, they cannot but remain to an extent pliable, and whatever strategies there may be, they are always changing. This flies in the face of bivalent logic, as presented in previous chapters regarding complementary coalescence, inconsistency, and incompleteness. Attention turns yet once again to the penalty kick, and then to the invention-creation-perception of change and movement, and its relevance for rules, strategies, and gut feelings for what needs to be done. Uncertainty grows, as the power of classical bivalent logic continues to wane. One of the problems with rules
Deep Blue, that computer once capable of outdoing Kasparov at his game of chess, used brute combinatorial power, evaluating billions of possible positions on the chess board and their possible moves in a matter of mere seconds, foreseeing as many as fourteen moves into the future. Kasparov, in contrast, reported that he thought only four or five (‘chunked’) moves ahead. The question is: Can computer logic surpass human thinking by a virtually unlimited increase of computer power? That question is bloated with controversy. A more manageable question regarding the thrust of this essay is: What is the relevance of computer ‘thinking’ to human ‘sign processing’? At the outset of the celebrated and at times maligned computer revolution during the 1940s and 1950s, the idea had it that disembodied computers would in a mere few decades be capable of human thought. Mathematical logician Alan Turing (1912–1954) believed the difference between carbon based and silicone based thinking machines was of little consequence. The
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end product would be virtually the same. From microchips to mice, apes to androids, Hal (of that innovative movie for its time, 2001: Space Odyssey 1968) to human, thought processes were one and the same, a matter of differences of degree in spite of apparent difference in kind. Computers, so the story went, would soon be able to generate poetry, music, art and architecture, of human quality; they would solve stock market uncertainties, predict the weather and other natural changes, and win the jackpot in any and all Las Vegas casinos. That dream still remains in the receding horizon, and it will undoubtedly remain so for some time (Bolter 1984; Leavitt 2006). Computers are programmed with rules for carrying out their operations, and normally they follow their rules to the letter. Computers programmed with ‘fuzzy logic’ are capable of coping with certain degrees of ambiguity; yet they still do so according to the set of rules with which they’ve been endowed. Take tit-tat-toe, consisting of a square divided into 9 equal squares. Player 1 puts a 0 in the upper right corner. Player 2 has 8 basic choices: an X in the center, in one of the other 3 corners, or in one of the 4 middles along the edges of the larger square. She puts her X in the center. Player 1 has 7 choices: in one of the other 3 corners, or in one of the 4 middles along the edges of the larger square. He puts a 0 in the upper left corner. Player 2 is left with 6 choices, but if she’s not daydreaming she’ll put her X in the middle square on the upper edge. And so on, until somebody wins or they reach a stalemate. The rules for playing? Two players, taking turns, one player marking a square with a 0, the other with an X, until one of the two is able to line up three of the letters in three squares, or until that becomes impossible due to an overpopulation of squares. The strategy? Try to line up three of your letters and at the same time prevent your opponent from doing so. Relatively simple. So simple the game ends in a stalemate when two experienced players show off their talents. But what about chess? Virtually infinitely more complex than tit-tat-toe in comparison. In 1950 Claude Shannon (1916–2001), mathematician and information theory wizard, calculated chess complexity: With chess it is possible, in principle, to play a perfect game or construct a machine to do so as follows: One considers in a given position all possible moves, then all moves for the opponent, etc., to the end of the game (in each variation). The end must occur, by the rules of the games after a finite number of moves […]. Each of these variations ends in win, loss, or draw. A typical game lasts about 40 moves to resignation of one party. This is conservative for our calculation since the machine would calculate out to checkmate, not
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resignation. However, even at this figure there will be 10120 variations to be calculated from the initial position. A machine operating at the rate of one variation per micro-second would require over 1090 years to calculate the first move! (Shannon 1950: 314).
How does a computer look at chess? It looks at all the initial possible moves for player 1. Then for player 2’s response it looks at all the possible moves for all those possible moves initially available to player 1. And so on. Obviously the program complexifies with accelerating rapidity. Yet, in his article ‘How Chess Computers Work’, Marshall Brain – an appropriate name, don’t you think? – develops what he calls the ‘minimax algorithm’, which alternates between maximum and minimum choices as it moves up the choice tree, and by ‘pruning’ the less probable branches of the tree, the algorithm can run faster, and to boot, it requires less memory. The process ‘is completely mechanical and involves no thought. It is simple brute force calculation that applies an evaluation function to all possible board positions […]. What is interesting is that this sort of technique works pretty well […]. The key thing to keep in mind, however, is that this is nothing like human thought’ (Brain 2000).55 Yes, human thought. Weaving, wavering, wandering, wobbling, waffling, hand-wringing, wrangling nonlinear human thought. Computers might be able in theory to catch up with humans, but they remain a few light years off the mark; still, regarding computer power, speed at picking up and putting down the possibilities in linear succession is astounding. For example, placing the figure, 10120, in its proper context, the total number of elementary particles (protons, electrons and neutrons) in the universe has been variously estimated at between 1075 and 1090, which is to say that the number pales in comparison to the possible chess moves. And yet, the possible chess moves in turn pales in comparison to the total number of brain states for an adult hu9 man, estimated at 109 (ten to the 9th power taken to the 9th power)! (Fraser 1982). So much for chess, according computer thinking. But complexity inevitably comes into the picture, especially in view of the magnitude of the numbers presented in this section? What happens when complexity borders on chaos? A return to the notion of rules, but in a non-Wittgenstein sense, appears on the menu.
55 Can be accessed as Brain, Marshall (2000) ‘How Chess Computers Work’ at http://electronics.howstuff works.com/chess1.htm).
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Rules, algorithms, and the road toward chaos
Strictly going by the rules, or at least what are taken to be the proper rules, is not always advisable, and will not always lead to the desired results, especially when complexity enters into the equation. We now know from ‘chaos physics’, in the guise of what are called ‘strange attractors’, that application of a rule (an algorithm repeated over and over again in this case) will cause conditions to spin out of control, because the matter in question is ‘sensitive’ to its environment – the notorious ‘butterfly effect’. This notion of ‘sensitivity’ owes its present fame to its founder, French mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), though almost a century passed before his groundbreaking work was duly acknowledged. Poincaré threw a monkey wrench into the works of classical physics even before Einstein’s relativity theories of 1905 and 1916. Up to that time, it was assumed that any chaotic disturbance in a system must be the result of some unwanted outside force; that is, if the system itself is in good working order. Poincaré demonstrated that slight perturbations within a system, even if they are virtually infinitesimal, can eventually lead to its collapse. Poincaré’s work involves the simple phenomenon of a three-body system. In regard to two-body systems, say the Sun and the Earth or the Earth and the Moon, Newtonian equations are quite effective. However, when all three bodies, Sun, Earth and Moon, are included, problems arise. The Moon’s revolving around the Earth affects the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and in turn the Sun is affected, however slightly, by the interaction between the Earth and the Moon. Interaction between any two of the three bodies is relevant to the interaction with the third body. The upshot is that Newtonian equations cannot be worked out with absolute precision with respect to the three-body system, but rather, due to reasons of formal mathematics, they can account for no more than a series of approximations. There can be no more than convergence toward an absolutely precise computation, since the absolute exists only at the infinite stretch. That is, if the measuring instruments were of infinite precision and the three bodies in question were absolutely perfect spheres moving in a complete vacuum, an accurate picture could be forthcoming. But nature and our instruments are inevitably to a degree flawed. What is worse, one cannot know the initial conditions of this or any other system to absolute precision, and even if one could, it would require one’s going back to the beginning of time itself. Poincaré’s discovery that the very slightest of perturbations causes some celestial bodies to wobble and weave drunkenly along their orbits in apparently random fashion bears sober tidings: prediction becomes impossible, even though the entire system may be guided by deterministic laws – and CEEOL copyright 2020
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by extension even though they, and we, may be led by certain rules. In 1908 Poincaré wrote: A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance. If we know exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws no longer had any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that is governed by the laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon. (Poincaré 1914: 68)
The behavior of such a system is not intrinsically indeterministic. It becomes indeterministic only in its relation to other systems, and those to others,… until the entire universe is taken in. The initial conditions, then, are tantamount to the primal instant of the ‘big bang’ itself. Given Poincaré’s seminal work, it becomes evident, however painfully, that the universe must be teeming with phenomena tending toward chaos. There is apparently no solution to systems and their conditions falling within the purview of ‘chaos physics’, short of absolutely final and spit-polished knowledge concerning chaotic systems. Chess, of course, leaves little doubt with respect to structure, the value of each piece, rules, authorized and unauthorized moves, and the endgame – though the state of the pieces on the board will invariably be in one of many possible variations when that endgame is reached. Everyday living is another matter entirely. Rules are many, and they are often pliable; they are fudged to a greater or lesser extent at every ripple, eddy, and bend in the stream of life; and at times they can be overthrown entirely. Strategies are usually in the process of changing even more so; quite often they are the sum of a combination of boot-strap operations improvised on the spur of the moment; for sure, they are never fixed. Variant rules and strategies make for ambiguity. Uncertainty is the yield, and in order to maintain a modicum of order, balance, and harmony, and to save face, players in the game of life often resort to deception, trickery, subterfuge, fraud, and diverse forms of dishonesty. It would seem that social rules are made to be broken, at least to a minimal degree, whether the social players like it or not and whether they know it or not.
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Like our everyday living, the world of the arts, and even that of the sciences during contentious times, are unkempt, unruly, boisterous, disobedient. They constantly refuse to kowtow to ideals of order, balance, harmony, and order. As philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright (1999: 1) tells us: ‘We live in a dappled world, a world rich in different things, with different natures, behaving in different ways. The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. They do not take after the simple, elegant and abstract structure of a system of axioms and theorems’. The consequences
What has this to do with our illusion that we are masters of our own agency? – even though we are caught within a world of such complexity that when we begin thinking about it we soon feel like throwing in the towel. Do we really, can we really, know what’s going on in our unruly world of signs incessantly becoming other signs? Is it genuinely possible for us to know how to go about? How, after all is said and done, can our mantis, the cornerback, the baseball hitter, the soccer goalie, or ourselves pounding a nail in a wall, know precisely what we are about? Are we truly endowed with our own free will? What about the rules we follow? The strategies we take up? Einstein suggests, with respect to this topic: If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord […]. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will. (in Home, Robinson 1995: 172; see also Wegner 1995)
On this topic also, Wheeler surprises us with a strange hypothetical situation with which we can easily identify. If we ask any molecule whether or not he has his own free will, ‘he will laugh at us. He does what he wants’. In this sense each event at the subatomic level is random. Nevertheless, by virtue of our dealing with very large numbers of molecular events at the molar level, we get a law, albeit statistical, ‘as accurate as any designer of steam engines could desire’ (Wheeler 1980a: 145). As far as each molecule is concerned, he is free to do his own thing. Yet a collection of gas molecules in an enclosed container faithfully follows a law of aggregates that is predicated on random rather than controlled molecular action. Established upon a foundation of apparently blind accidents, this law
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stipulates, however, that the accidental will ultimately prevail, and organization will be reduced to a minimum, with entropy at an all-time high. Mass destruction awaits the entire community of molecules, whether as individuals they will it or not. Tit-tat-toe, checkers, chess, and such games, as well as computerized games following bivalent Boolean principles, have well-defined rules that must be rigorously followed, over and over. The steps that can be taken are precisely defined, and the road to success is possible solely through strict conformity to the rules. In other words, they are intractable: a sequence must be followed to the letter, for if not, frustration and failure are the outcome. However, certain combinations create an interdependent, interrelated and interactive set of elements in transition such that, in spite of an algorithmic sequence’s reiteration, things will sooner or later go awry, and eventually disorder will overtake the system. A sequence of Chess moves by a relatively seasoned apprentice rigidly following the rules offers few surprises to the accomplished master. Through ‘chunking’, she’s aware of what transpired, what is in the process of transpiring, and she can map out what possibly will have transpired a number of moves into the future with remarkable precision. Things are not so cut-anddried in our physical world, which gets messy as larger and larger pictures are taken into account. In our everyday life situations, the rules generally acknowledged by most members of a given community are actually only partially known. They are fuzzy at the edges, more or less ambiguous, and vague. Uncertainty is always present, even in the smoothest functioning communities. Whoever presumably abides by the rules actually finds herself in a different context at every turn, and though she might think she’s obeying the rules, there is always some wavering, and often a tangential move off into a different direction, whether she knows it or not. In addition, there are those who intentionally deceive, lie, and break the rules to gain an advantage, or perhaps just for the hell of it. Consequently, the rules don’t always offer a fixed set of strategies for getting an education, courting a member of the opposite or same sex, doing business, taking a leisurely vacation trip, or enjoying old age. It seems that things always tend to come apart at the seams. All this unruliness swims against the current of bivalent principles dictating that what is, must be categorically distinguished from what it isn’t. Proper reasoning, tradition has had it, must follow this dictate, lock, stock and barrel. If not, reason breaks down, and everything discombobulates. This throws terror in the most stalwart purveyors of traditional logic and reason.
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Back to the central focus of this study ‘But wait a minute! Everything becomes disordered?’ Well, yes. According to prevalent knowing these days, order in our vast universe consists of relatively minuscule islands engulfed within a seemingly infinite ocean of chaos. That everything is in the process of falling apart is what we’ve become aware of regarding our physical world, and even more so in our everyday living. ‘Then do the world and living processes often fail to pay homage to classical logical principles?’ Yes again. ‘Then how can we avoid falling head first into the chasm of darkness and chaos?’ By ‘going beyond the information given’ (Bruner 1957), which, in view of the preceding chapters, implies our world of vagueness and ambiguity and contradiction or inconsistency; by becoming aware that our perceptual and conceptual modes of living and learning are invariably incomplete, because something is always lacking; by entering into the complementary world of somewhat fixed yet always slightly to radically changing generalities and rules that are always fudging into something other than what they were. Meanwhile, back in the lattice as developed in Figures 6 and 14, we see just that: vagueness and ambiguity, contradiction and inconsistency, incompleteness and complementarity. To repeat myself for emphasis, the mid-section of the lattice follows bivalent logical principles, when on its best behavior; the lower section entails the vast range of possible possibilities, hence it is inordinately vague, ambiguous, fraught with inconsistencies; and the upper section involves generalities and rule rendering and often bending such that any and all modes of perception and conception are incomplete. Which is to say, once again, that the upper and lower sections take their leave of bivalent logic. Virtually unlimited, overdetermined possible possibilities at the lower end, many of them mutually exclusive and in conflict, but a vast number of which can at some time and place be elevated to ‘reality’ status (the Earth on an elephant’s back and the elephant on a turtle and that turtle on another turtle, all the way down, the Earth as the center of the Universe, the Earth revolving around the Sun, which is the center of the Universe, the center of the Universe as dependent on the frame of reference, and so on). There, both one possible possibility and another,… and another,… and…n, can emerge and take on ‘reality’ status, according to the nature of the timespace conditions. Incomplete ‘real’ world-versions at the underdetermined upper end, where what enjoyed ‘reality’ status falls from grace and some alternative moves in to replace it (the Earth as center becomes the Sun as center, and so on). There, within a particular timespace condition, it became neither the case of the Earth on an elephant’s back nor the Earth as center but something else, the Sun as center. There, neither one possibility rules, nor another one,… nor
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another one,… but at some timespace juncture, there is some newly emergent hitherto unforeseen possibility, and so on. Both-and at one extreme and neither-nor at the other, with either/or imperatives generally managing to hold their own at the mid-section. Back again to penalty kicks, from a different point of view This, we saw, was in a nutshell the situation facing our goalie ready and waiting to attempt intercepting the penalty kick. After the kick, the ball can be headed in one of a virtually infinite number of directions. That’s the lower level from which emerged one of the myriad possible possibilities. The ball’s trajectory is now an either/or affair: it can be identified as one trajectory rather than any of the others. But this is no fixed identity. The ball is in flight, and, given the prevailing conditions at the moment (the ball’s spin, the air current, the ball’s air pressure and slight defections on its surface) at any instant it will be veering off, however slightly, from what would otherwise have been its trajectory. All in a mere split second! Overdetermination: an open network always offering a mind-boggling disarray of possible possibilities. The goalie leaps to the left and as high as his legs will spring him. His gut reaction happened to be on target. His extended arms are high, but the tips of his fingers are not properly positioned, for actually, the ball is headed for the upper right side of his belly section. The right edge of his belly is becoming determinately neither the ball’s target nor is its target determinately something else, for its spin is sending it curving ever-so-slightly upward (‘Bending it like Beckham’). The curve is becoming neither determinately one mere centimeter in height nor more nor less, for it is now also veering ever-so-slightly to the right. The goalie’s hands remain outstretched; they are moving neither slightly upward nor downward but in the process of becoming slightly retracted in a spontaneous reaction to the ball’s unexpected line of flight. And so on. The verdict? Virtually instantaneous sign processing, from R1O1I1 to R2O1I1 (in Table 1) and then onward, in the blink of an eye! Spontaneous intuitive, tacit, gut responses at iconic and indexical levels giving rise to the possibility, after the fact, of mediated, contemplative, thoughtful, calculative articulation, from R2O2I1 to R2O2I2, R3O1I1 and onward, evincing observations, assertions, and entire texts for future eyes to consider (from R3O2I1 to R3O3I1 to R3O3I2 and finally to R3O3I3). Sign processing following, as illustrated in the Figure 6 and Figure 14 lattice, nonlinear, converging, diverging, involuting and convoluting paths: overdetermination holding myriad possibilities becoming relatively deterministic; Either/Or matters eventually spilling into underdetermination fraught with variegated, to a greater or lesser degree
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feasible, alternatives; all within an open network always in the process of becoming something other than what it was in the process of becoming. Further goalie illustration, if I may. We process our signs because that’s who we are Once the ball is in flight, there’s no absolute determination or predictability. For, things tend to get unruly with nary a moment’s notice. The goalie senses the ball’s kick and the beginning of what appears to be its trajectory, and he spontaneously goes into automatic pilot, trusting his gut feeling. He depends on his athleticism, years of practice, knowledge of the kicker’s talents and habits and quirks, and extensive study of the game. Yet, he must also trust his gut feeling. He has no time to do otherwise. But that’s not the whole story about his inability to know what’s going on at virtually the exact moment it’s going on. His image of the ball approaching the goal (R1O1I1 R2O1I1) is not available to his consciousness until after his gut has compelled his body suddenly to leap either to right or to the left or high or low (R2O2I1 R2O2I2). Consciousness trails along behind the rapidfiring train of happenings, and reaction time to visual stimuli, at approximately 215 milliseconds, means that there is a lag from the instant the ball is at a certain spot and the instant he is able to respond. But by that time the ball will have covered over half the distance from the kicker’s foot to the goal. He will either save his team from giving a goal up to the opponent or he won’t. As perhaps more luck than skill would have it, the ball collides with his torso and he grabs onto it, to his relief, as his teammates joyously bound toward him, as euphoria breaks out in half of the stands. As far as he’s concerned – at least that is likely his claim, after the fact – he saw the ball coming, he reacted appropriately, and he helped win the match (R2O2I1 R2O2I2 R3O1 I1 R3O2I1). But actually, only after his feat, over a few beers with his teammates, can he give account, and agree or take issue with, their views (R3O2I1 R3O2I2 R3O3I1 R3O3I2 R3O3I3). But what’s in his ‘seeing’ the ball, actually? I would respectfully suggest that it has to do with sign processing, from the mere possibility of a sign (‘0 √ + ’), to tacitly ‘seeing’ something (signs R1O1I1, R2O1I1, and R2O2I1), mediatingly, to ‘seeing’ it as so-and-so via indexical consciousness becoming (signs R2O2I2 and R3O1I1), to ‘seeing’ that it is such-and-such via mediated symbol becoming (signs R3O2I1 and R3O2I2, leading to the possibility of articulation regarding them, as in signs R3O3I1, R3O3I2, and R3O3I3). Practically speaking, how does this come about?
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Is what we sense and perceive really what we get when processing our signs? Our perception of movement is due to processes both in the eye and in the brain. Light falls on certain receptors in the eye at one instant and on other receptors in the next instant, successively stimulating retinal points. Cortical cells in the brain then respond to these changes of light to create a sense of movement (Haber, Hershenson 1980: 208). This perception of movement, however, falls within certain thresholds. If movement is either too fast or too slow, we don’t detect it. At one extreme we can’t see a bullet fired from a gun, at the other we can’t detect the motion of an hour hand going round a clock face. Our brain can also be fooled into thinking there is movement where there is none. Phantom movement comes about if we look at something in constant motion, like a waterfall, and then look at something which is not moving. The stationary scene appears to be moving in the opposite direction to the waterfall. This phenomenon of apparent motion was initially given detailed study by Paul Kolers (Kolers 1972; see also Beck et al. 1977). The simplest example of apparent motion occurs when a spot of light flashes against a dark background, and after 10 to 45 milliseconds another flash momentarily appears a short distance away. If the time-interval is short, the two flashes are reported as simultaneous; if the time-interval is sufficiently long, only one light spot is reported as moving from point to another point on the background. Kolers’s studies examine apparent change of various sorts, including change in position, in shape, in size, and combinations of two or all three of them. Nelson Goodman (1978: 71–83) calls the apparent motion seen as running from the first flash of light to the second one ‘retrospective construction’. The first spot flashes, then the second spot, and retrospectively the brain creates the illusion of continuous motion from one spot to another. This phenomenon is exploited in the creation of motion in the brain as a result of a rapid sequence of static images in film production (Cook, D. 2004; Nichols, Lederman 1980). This is to say that the goalie’s brain is able to ‘compensate and project the image’ of the approaching ball ‘backward in time’. He smoothes out the discrepancy between where the ball is and where it was when he was last able to detect it by means of ‘backward projection’ (Damasio 2002). Otherwise, he would actually see the ball approaching the goal line after he had already deflected it. Robert Burton (2008: 73) explains the phenomenon this way: If you bump into a door, the sensory inputs from your nose reach the brain sooner than those from your big toe, yet you perceive hitting the door with your entire body all at once. The brain adjusts for these time lags. When I
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tap my foot, the motor movements are felt to be synchronous with my foot striking the ground. The length of time that it takes the sensation of my foot hitting the ground to reach the brain and be processed is not apparent. Without such adjustments, the varying delay between sensory inputs would create a kaleidoscopic sense of time, a present that is spread out over time (a ‘thick’ present), as opposed to an instantaneous ‘now’.
Our goalie has a certain feeling that he knows, and he reacts to what he knows – in spite of the fact that his body is on automatic pilot and his mind is trailing along far behind – even if he doesn’t know. In light of the above words on our lattice, whether the goalie knows the ball’s trajectory or not, he is still caught up in an either/or matter; and he lucks out, for the ball collides with his mid-section. But there are myriad – vague, ambiguous, and mutually exclusive and inconsistent – possible possibilities that could have become either/or alternatives but did not. And once a bivalent set of eithers and ors have become actualized, there is always the possibility of some unexpected novel alternative seeping up ready and willing to take its place among all other options. In this sense what the goalie feels he knows is something that could always have been becoming something other than what it was becoming. In short, ‘seeing’ is a tacit, intuitive, gut response game of sign processing, from signs R1O1I1 onward; ‘seeing’ something as such-and-such rather than something else involves signs R2O2I2 and beyond; ‘seeing’ that it is what it appears to be because it is of so-and-so a nature is a matter of signs R3O2I1 and R3O2I2 giving rise to increasingly complex articulation, signs R3O3I1 to R3O3I3 (for further on ‘seeing’, ‘seeing’ as, and ‘seeing’ that, Hanson 1958, 1969). Back to concrete living
Extrapolating from our goalie’s situation, in our concrete everyday world-version of becoming, simply attending to the eithers and the ors is not enough. Bivalent principles simply don’t cut the cake; they’re too limited. Burton (2008: 99) once again puts it nicely: I cannot help wondering if an educational system that promotes black or white and yes or no answers might be affecting how reward systems develop in our youth. If the fundamental thrust of education is ‘being correct’ rather than acquiring a thoughtful awareness of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and underlying paradoxes, it is easy to see how the brain reward systems might be molded to prefer certainty over open-mindedness. To the extent that doubt is
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less emphasized, there will be far more risk in asking tough questions. Conversely, we, like rats rewarded for pressing the bar, will stick with the triedand-true responses.
Indeed. Vague ambiguities and inconsistencies at the lower level of the lattice; relatively ordered particularities categorized according to either/or principles at the mid-section; and paradoxes emerging out of incomplete generalities creating a vicious circle infinitely regressing into the horizon at the upper level, help fill out the hopelessly schematic either/or picture. Our goalie sees it, but he doesn’t really see it. He both sees it and he doesn’t see it,… and he now sees it as other than what it was,… and now it is something else, … and now…. And he neither sees it clearly and distinctly as what it is nor does he see it as what it was, for his sense of knowing now sees it as something else emerging,… and now as something emerging that is other than what was emerging,… and now…. A rat in some laboratory presses a bar expecting chow time. Food or no food is the consequence. An either/or affair. The goalie’s body, on automatic pilot, responds. Also an either/or affair. But, of course, there is a very basic difference between rat and goalie. The goalie’s conscious mind soon catches up. He becomes aware of his success, or failure. If success, a jubilant wave toward the cheers and appreciative hugs and slaps on the back. If failure, head hung in shame, and afterward, speculation about what he should have been doing when the ball was approaching as one of the possible possibilities that might have led to what potentially would have transpired as an alternative to what unfortunately turned out to be the case. Either/or imperatives are simply not up to the whole task. Rules of thumb, Heuristics, and Gut Feelings
Logic, bivalent logic, and reason, that reason commonly construed as the one and only legitimate form of reason; this isn’t what, as mentioned, Hacking appropriately labels ‘styles of reasoning’. ‘Styles of reasoning’ aren’t disembodied, in Cartesian fashion. They’re indelibly embodied. And mind is not master of the brain, nor is it in any form or fashion remote from the brain’s doing: the two are interdependent, interrelated and interactive. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999: 13) write in this regard: Cognitive thought is the tip of an enormous iceberg. It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought – and that may be a serious underestimate. Moreover, the 95 percent below the surface of conscious awareness shapes and structures all conscious
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thought. If the cognitive unconscious were not there doing this shaping, there could be no conscious thought. (see also, in general, Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Weiss, Haber 1999; and from the Eastern view, Nagatomo 1992; Yasuo 1987)56
This implies that, in Polanyi’s manner of putting it, we know more than we can say. We feel, we sense, we intuit, we know in the gut, something that we can’t quite seem adequately to articulate. There is always something left out, something left unsaid. Consequently, we know much of the nature and quality of our thoughts by way of feelings, sensations, intuitions, and gut reactions, not bivalent logic and reason. Our sense of certainty, of what is right and what is wrong, what is reasonable and what isn’t, what is appropriate and what isn’t, is in part based on our faith in our mental and physical abilities. But after all has been said and done, in regard to logic and reason there is what has been dubbed the tu quoque: belief in the hard-rock foundations of logic and reason, in the final analysis, depends upon a leap of faith just as any other belief. The atheist, likewise, needs a leap of faith outside uncompromising belief in God in order to become an atheist; the skeptic makes a blind leap outside reason so as to land outside that selfsame reason; the agnostic must know something before jumping outside the circle of knowing and declare that there is no absolute knowing; the chronic doubter must have something to doubt before he can take a groping step outside anything and everything that is accepted on the basis of belief. And so on. Burton’s (2008) ‘feeling of knowing’ might seem as certain as can be. But there’s no knowing if it is valid knowing until it is put to the test. In other words, I ‘feel I know’, as I come and go within my concrete everyday living. And then at some moment: ‘Hold on!’ There’s some surprising turn of events that takes me back a little. Something is out of the ordinary, out of whack, awry, out of kilter. This is a problem situation that screams out for attention and resolution. I conjecture, and make a guess, perhaps logically and rationally, perhaps by a wild flight of the imagination, that if such-and-such a situation were to be in effect, so-and-so might be the case, and if so, the problem might vanish. At this stage, everything is tenderly tenuous. Virtually nothing 56
Research has demonstrated that in a solitary second the senses can be taking in an astounding number of pieces of information, of which the conscious mind is capable of processing only around 40 pieces of information. The vast majority of the information is dealt with at nonconscious levels, if at all. Timothy Wilson (2002) calls these levels the ‘adaptive unconscious’, which is in charge of tacit, subsidiary, entrenched habitual thinking and behaving. This ‘adaptive unconscious’ has five defining features: it is nonconscious, rapid, unintentional, uncontrollable, and effortless. In contrast, consciousness control of the subject’s thinking and behaving occurs exceedingly more slowly.
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is certain. At any rate, it should be put to the test.57 So I think about it a little, and formulate a plan of attack. Then I try out my new-found hypothesis. If I succeed, I can go on my way, having altered my view of my world, however slightly, and having acquired some new expectation with respect to the way (I think) my world is. This train of events entails a method of arriving at the meaning of our signs and our world and of concrete living Peirce proposed with the ‘Pragmatic Maxim’ label, as briefly outlined in Chapter One.58 Strategies for getting it on
Richard Dawkins (1989: 96) writes in The Selfish Gene: When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.
We’ve become aware of this before, of course. When a praying mantis reaches out and grabs its lunch, or when the cornerback races from the backfield to tackle the fleeing fullback, they all manifest implicit or tacit knowledge of differential calculus. Especially regarding human knowledge, Gerd Gigerenzer (2007) proposes three principles involved in these and comparable processes: Rules of thumb, Gaze (Perception and Sensation, and implicit Estimation of the situation), and Gut feelings. ‘Rules of thumb’ are basically another name for Heuristics. This involves experience-based techniques for arriving at meaning and interpretation, and for learning, discovery, and problem solving. A heuristic method comes in handy for rapidly formulating what will hopefully be a proper response to some question one wishes to answer. I write ‘hopefully’, for the method doesn’t yield absolute proof; it only offers 57
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Surprise, or awareness of something unexpected, and a conjecture regarding an explanation and possible solution, involves Peirce’s concept of ‘abduction’, which, with ‘deduction’ and ‘induction’, make up yet another of his triads (see Anderson 1986; Burks 1946; Fann 1970; Harris, Hoover 1983; Hintikka 1998; Hoffmann 1999; Queiroz, merrell 2005; Staat 1993; Turrisi 1990; Wirth 1999). In summary form, the ‘pragmatic maxim’ combines ‘logic of discovery’ (logic of vagueness, nonbivalent logic) and ‘logic of justification’, or in other words, combines the lower and upper tiers of the Figure 6 and Figure 14 lattice with ‘logic of discovery’ – a conjecture in the rough, a vague possibility, comes from lower tier, and a hypothesis, and following it some hypothetico-deductive method, appears at the upper tier, and ‘testing’ for ‘justification’ of the conjecture and hypothesis takes place in the mid-section (Hanson 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965; Nickles 1980a, 1980b).
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what appears to be, given the context and the prevalent conditions, the most probable answer. Thus heuristics involves rules of thumb, following common sense, educated guesses, intuitive appraisals, and gut feelings. At a climactic point in the football game, the cornerback fixes his focal attention on the fullback. Quickly, and with remarkable precision, he runs not toward the piece of space his opponent occupies at this moment, but, having tacitly judged his speed, and the distance separating the two of them, he races toward the spot where the fullback will be, having implicitly calculated the proper angle of attack. He spontaneously uses the rule of thumb he has developed through knowledge of his body’s capability, the coach’s training and advice, and considerable hours of practice. Like a flash of lightning he estimates the situation, chiefly visually in this case – though all sensory channels can have a bearing in heuristics – and he follows his gut feelings, perhaps altering the angle of his attack slightly as he approaches the fleeing ball carrier, judging the proper manner of his attempting a tackle, depending on the height, weight and speed of the opponent, and appropriately reacting after the collision. All a complex set of differential equations! Formally speaking, that is. The cornerback knows it without knowing he knows it. He knows more than he can say. I repeat, a physicist can map out the entire train of events mathematically, and it all becomes explicit. But for practical purposes that’s unnecessary. The cornerback knows what to do by way of what Gigerenzer (2007) labels ‘unconscious intelligence’ – much in the order of Polanyi’s tacit knowing. The long story made short is, once again: ‘We know more than we can tell’ (Gigerenzer 2007: 16). We simplify; everything is made as simple as possible. The physicist can hand us pages of mind-boggling equations. That’s complexity, at least for the non-mathematician. The cornerback follows his heuristics. That’s apparent simplicity; but it entails myriad complexity. In spite of the complexity, his heuristics involves listening to the gut, which has a style of logic and reasoning of which the conscious mind remains largely oblivious. It ignores much of the available information, defies the principles of classical logic, and flies against what ordinarily goes in the name of reason. Our cornerback in pursuit of the fullback doesn’t think about what he did in the preceding moment, what he’s doing in the present moment, and the most logical thing he will have been doing in the next moment. His gut tells him: ‘Just do it’. So he spontaneously does what he does. If there is some unexpected turn – he enters a soft spot in the turf due to last night’s rain, the fullback suddenly changes course, stops so as to take off at a ninety degree angle, or sticks out his hand to stiff arm him – he spontaneously reacts. On so doing, our cornerback attends to the whole of the action, ignoring the vast majority of the details, and trusts the body to do what it does best. All in a flash.
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‘Just do it’. Easier said than done, of course. By the aspiring novice, that is, and the vast majority of the rest of us. Yet, perhaps Nike is on target – though not exactly as its promoters intended, and I by no means use the phrase for the purpose of giving the sports shoe corporation a favorable nod. The seasoned athlete, as well as the corporate executive, artist, musician, poet, architect, computer designer, or scholar and teacher, know more than they can tell; they know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, and they do what they do by availing themselves of their knack for perception and sensation and implicit estimation of the situation, their heuristic methods, and their rules of thumb. And they ‘just do it’. Unknowing doing
In fact, let’s go a step further with a Paul Kolers sort of concrete imaginary ‘thought experiment’. Suppose you are browsing the internet, and you run across an animated game consisting of two circular spots of light that are dancing about, apparently randomly, on the flat screen. The object is to try to keep the two spots separate, to maintain a distinction between them. When the two spots are in completely different quadrants on the screen, there’s no problem. But when they are close together and moving rapidly toward each other and veering away in the last instant, approaching from different angles and barely missing each other, then angling off in another direction, apparently passing through each other and beyond, you have trouble keeping track of them. They appear to lose their identity; they seem to become one circular spot for a split second; or they appear momentarily to become one oblong spot; or they appear to bend and curve. When far apart and their distinction could be maintained, you could easily identify them as spot A and spot B. But when they seemed to fuse into one another they tended to lose their identity; either that, or they became one compound spot instead of two. You wanted to maintain distinctions, maintain the two spots in bivalent order: here’s the one, there’s the other, before, one was here and the other was there, but afterward, the one was there and the other was here. There is definitely the one and the other, each with its own identity, and nothing more. Then the game speeds up. More confusion enters. Things become blurry. Then action slows down. Ah, success. You can easily maintain the necessary distinctions. The one, and the other. Are there really two spots or is there only one spot? Assuming the spots are of equal size, they are identical to one another, so they are one. But when you maintain them in distinction, they are two; yet they are still somehow
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identical. As two, their defining features can be accounted for as ‘here’ and ‘there’. Given two different time frames, they can be accounted for as ‘before, here’ and ‘after, there’. That’s analysis, breaking and punctuating time and space and one spot and the other spot into their constituent parts for their proper specification. That’s the Newtonian-Cartesian way. In terms of the simple two-spot system, there’s here/there and before/after. The system is ‘objectivized’, broken up into bits and pieces, made static, made bivalent for proper analysis, and the analyzing subject is ‘out there’, perhaps presumably with an omniscient ‘view from nowhere’. Actual experience on the part of the subject is of little consequence, for she has been removed from the system, abstracted from it. But what if we wish to include the subject? The conscious and self-conscious subject, that is? The subject’s consciousness makes its way through the otherwise Newtonian-Cartesian framework, from where its timespace context was in the past to where it becomes conscious of its timespace context in what has become its present, toward anticipation of its possible timespace contexts in some future. Past-Present-Future, or better, ‘Past Present Future’, since it is now a matter of process: what was becoming is now becoming something other than what it was becoming, and it will have been becoming something other than what it is now becoming. This is the way of concrete experience, which includes the experiencing subject and that which the subject is experiencing. This world of feeling and sensing and experiencing is definitely non-objectivized, since the subject has been integrated into the world it experiences, and that subject is no longer a mere spectator but a participant within the system in its unfolding process. There is no longer simply any ‘here’ and ‘there’ and ‘before’ and ‘after’. There are timespace contexts in the process of their becoming, from ‘past’ to the continuously transient ‘now’ and into the ‘future’. There’s no longer the matter of this/not-this or of now/not-now, no longer the matter of Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle. With respect to the two spots on your monitor, there’s what is (the one) and what it is not (the other), and there’s both of them as one, and there’s neither of them as either one or two, for the contemplating subject is now part of the equation. So there’s actually three, including the subject. And there’s the process of continuously changing timespace contexts.
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And yet, we insist on ‘objectivizing’
Let me try to attack this problem from anActualized possibilities other angle. Suppose we have a four-tier set (de-objectivized) up as in Figure 17. Notice, in the first place, that this diagram patterns Figure 6 insofar Actualized possibilities as it begins at the Zero-Point, Nothingness, (objectivized) Emptiness, Possibilities coincide with the lower section of the two lattices, Actualized possibilities (‘objectivized’) with the midPossibilities sections, and Actualized possibilities (‘deobjectivized’) with the upper sections. Figures 6 and 17 also pattern each other 0 (= Nothingness, Emptiness in that within the myriad range of possibili[possible ties, everything is interdependent, ‘entanpossibilities]) gled’, so to speak. Non-Contradiction has no effect, for, after all, there are only possibili- Figure 17. Levels of possibility. ties. Nothing has been actualized; thus contradictions can live side by side without any problem. Actualized possibilities are another ball game altogether. Here, interactive objects, acts and happenings are presumed to have some sort of Identity; this being the case, what presumably is, is just what it is, and it can’t be or become anything other than what it is. The objects, acts and happenings in the middle portion of the diagram must be appropriately ‘objectivized’. The experiencing subject is abstracted from her world in order properly to analyze, and discursively describe and interpret it. This has to do with what was discussed above as focal and subsidiary attention and knowing. Suppose you’re hammering a nail into a two-by-four. Your focal attention rests chiefly on the nail. You have hammer in hand, your shoulder and arm action brings the hammer down hard hopefully making direct contact with the nail’s head in order to drive it a quarter inch or so into the board. Everything other than your focal attention is relegated to subsidiary attention. Your focal attention is for the most part objective, while your subsidiary attention is primarily of subjective nature. Objectivity keeps you at arm’s length from the interaction in order that you can detachedly appraise your progress and make adjustments when necessary. Subjectivity keeps you concretely in tune with yourself within the entire context. Subjectively or subsidiarily, there is no either/or distinction between you, your hand, and the hammer, your bodily position and the ground underneath and the board and the nail, your eyes focused on the nail and the nail itself.
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At least for the moment, you are at one with your environment, subsidiarily speaking; focally speaking, you are set apart from your environment. In a manner of putting it, you are both one with your environment and you are not one with your environment, but other than your environment. In other words, focally, there is basically the hammer, the nail, and the board, and it is your task to bring them together interactively and in such a manner that the nail effectively penetrates the board. You, detached from your world, bring these actualized and distinctly separate objects together either in one way or another way, either the right way or the wrong way, and the nail either directly or indirectly penetrates the wood. Bivalence is the name of the game here. But things don’t always go as planned. Suppose you bring your hammer down on the nail at somewhat of an angle. The nail’s entry into the wood responds in an undesirable manner. You switch your focal attention momentarily on your hand’s grasp of the hammer when it comes down, but without taking your eyes from the nail in order to assess the results in the next moment. Objectivization merged into subjectivity, and then it returned to its previous status. Oops,… you goofed again. The nail is now bent slightly. Your focal attention reverts back and merges with subsidiary attention; your hand turns the hammer so that you can strike the nail laterally in order to put it upright as before; then focal attention retakes its rightful place, and you proceed. Uncertainties What you are bringing into effect is movement from the mid-portions of Figures 6 and 17 to the upper portion, merging ‘objectivization’ into ‘deobjectivization’, and back again. Moving to the upper portion, you are now aware of the imperfections, the ambiguities and vagueness, the fuzziness and occasional messiness, of your either/or ‘objectivized’ environment, and from there you are in a position properly to appraise the situation, clear things up a bit, make adjustments, or perhaps just toss the whole mess into the trash pile and begin anew. Here, either/or doesn’t reign supreme. There is no hardcore Excluded-Middle. From either/or poles, something new, freshly different, always stands a chance of seeping up from the Included-Middle to enter into the light of day. In other words, it is neither a matter of one pole nor of the other pole, for some alternate possibility – from the vast range of possible possibilities – is making itself known. If nothing is actualized, there’s nothing at all: there’s just emptiness, the complete absence of anything and everything, of even the very idea of emptiness and the word ‘emptiness’. Nothing actualized is no more than the range of all possible possibilities. Possible possibilities for what? For becoming
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actualized and ‘objectivized’, presumably with a certain set of properties according to the preconditions, presuppositions, proclivities and prejudices of the community of knowers and the context at hand lending itself to cutting and mutilation into categories of the world and of thought. But as long as none of the possible possibilities are cut out, sensed and perceived, and conceived and articulated, there is nothing, no-thing. It is in this manner that if from the range of possible possibilities two contradictory objects, acts or happenings are actualized and ‘objectivized’, there is a problem: they contradict one another; and since Non-Contradiction reigns in the actualized, ‘objectivized’ stuff of a given communal world, one must be tossed – the wrong one – and what has emerged as the other one – presumably the right one – retained. Then, and only then, the one finding its rightful place in the communal world can take on its proper Identity, and the ExcludedMiddle becomes the premiere enforcer. In other words, potentially conflicting possibilities coexist peacefully; contradictory actualities find themselves forced to engage in warfare with each other. Objectivizing’s amoeba effect: absorbing subjectivizing
Now, in a given culture what if that which was retained and endowed with a respectful degree of Identity is subsequently found lacking? Perhaps its counterpart that preceded it can be revived, polished off, and given the necessary cosmetics in order to enter into the community arena and displace that which is now judged inadequate. Or more satisfying, perhaps that which is deemed inadequate can be replaced by something entirely new. Roughly speaking, this is the historical case of the Western world’s idea of ‘space’. During antiquity and into medieval times, space had been construed as heterogeneous, especially in regards to the distinction between sacred space and secular space according to which the former is more concentrated and pregnant with meaning than the latter (Eliade 1961, 1969; Spicer, Hamilton 2006). When the scientific revolution was ushered in, and especially during and after the Renaissance, space became conceived as homogeneous. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion had all increments of space as equal to all other increments, in linear fashion according to Euclidean geometry (Koyré 1957, 1965; LeShan, Margenau 1982; Lowe 1982; Miller 2001). This strictly linear concept of space was eventually thrown out after Einstein bought about a marriage of space to time, and space took on Riemannian qualities of curvature, departing radically from the Euclidean picture of space. Concentrations of the timespace manifold creates matter, which becomes in the process interdependent, interrelated and interactive with
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timespace, such that, so to speak, matter tells timespace how to curve at the same time that timespace tells matter how to travel. In other words, space became once again conceived as heterogeneous (Kaku 1994; Pagels 1982, 1985; Penrose 2005). Examples of such conceptual swings abound, as would be expected, whether in the sciences, artistic movements of all sorts, sports and leisure, or business, law, government, and everyday cultural customs and norms. The upshot is that conceptual change comes about with focal attention prioritized, then, with time, what was focal gradually becomes subsidiary, as the conceptual change falls into entrenched, sedimented, tacit activity and reactivity. At some unexpected juncture, a problem situation emerges, focalization takes over, and the conceptual terrain is tilled in preparation of another change. Given the whole of this interdependent, interrelated interactivity, subsidiary attention is what makes focal attention possible, and vice versa; subjectivity is what makes objectivization possible, and vice versa. A moment’s reflection tells us that the line of demarcation between subjectivity and objectivity, focal attention and subsidiary attention, is fluid. There is no pair of poles each one of which is in proud possession of its own Identity and both of which exist in contradictory relationship, with no possibility of a third, for it is categorically excluded. As your nail-pounding adventure with hammer in hand carries forward, your attention can quickly swirl and switch from focal to subsidiary, and back again. If you wish, you can even shift your focal attention to your act of hammering, such that you momentary enter self-awareness; but then you must swing back, for the task at hand involves interdependent, interrelated interaction of your concrete subjectivity and your objectivizing the context in order to place yourself outside. Regarding broad, culturally comprehensive conceptual changes, in contrast, communities are involved, and sweeping changes come about. Yet, on a collective level, like the individual level, swings occur from focal to subsidiary and back again, and objectivity to subjectivity and back again. Such are the implications of Polanyi’s ‘personal knowing’ interpolated to include ‘community knowing’, and such are the implications, from a diversity of views, of Kuhn’s (1970, 1977) ‘paradigms’, Feyerabend’s (1975, 1978) culturally comprehensive ‘theories’, Mary Hesse’s (1966, 1980) ‘models’ and ‘reconstructions’, Norwood Hanson’s (1960, 1961, 1965, 1969) ‘logic’ and ‘discovery’ and its aftermath, Gerald Holton’s (1973) ‘themata’, and perhaps even Wittgenstein’s ‘(1953) forms of life’. With this in mind, combining focal and subsidiary awareness and knowing, objectivizing and de-objectivizing, and mind and body and mind and
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the physical world as well, we find it compelling provisionally to conclude that what we ordinarily consider concrete facts (or ‘reality’) are the objects, acts and happenings of our experience. That is Shimon Malin’s argument in Nature Loves to Hide (2001). He convincingly writes that the very idea of ‘reality’ is ‘merely an abstraction’. We live not in a world within which we can detachedly gaze on the objects, acts and happenings before us; we are always in the world of our concrete experiences (Malin 2001: 85). We would of course like to think of the outside world, of ‘reality’, as separate from ourselves, as determinately and indelibly objectivized, and that the boundary between ourselves and ‘reality’ is the surface of our skin. But once again think of yourself with a hammer in your hand diligently pounding on a stubborn nail. Your outside ‘reality’ begins at the surface of your grip on the hammer’s handle, does it not? Well, not really. The hammer extends out and away from your hand, where it comes into contact with the nail, and that’s where your focal attention rests. So your outside ‘reality’ begins somewhere between your focal attention and the nail. Your eyes are ‘here’ and the nail is ‘there’, obediently objectivized, and you are in the process of acting on this world consisting of you and the nail in order to bring about a change. But you do it with the hammer’s head, which is connected to the handle, which is wielded by your hand, which is not objectivized at all but subjectivized. What if you are wielding a sledge hammer and decide to break up some rocks that have protruded from your back yard for years. Now there’s over a meter’s length between you and the objectivized rocks, but your subjectivization plays a role. Or, assume you’re in a fighter plane and by use of radar you are honing in on a target miles away. The objectivized and the subjectivized are still interdependent, interrelated and interactive. In each case there’s no absolutely locating the demarcation line separating the objectivized and your subjectivizing self interacting with it. They are, so to speak, entangled. Entangled, in somewhat the sense of quantum entanglement, I would suggest, as Roger Penrose (2000: 66) puts it when he writes that ‘quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other’ (see also Aczel 2003; Clegg 2006; merrell 2010). This, in a nutshell, is also Malin’s argument. It calls for further consideration with respect to consciousness, tacitly or subsidiarily speaking and focally considered, and what conventionally goes as ‘reality’ (world-versions) according to individual whims and wishes and desires and thinking, and according to a community’s ‘form of life’. We are entangled within our signs, following bodymind’s inclinations, gut feelings, premonitions, presuppositions,
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proclivities, and prejudices, with a little bit of brute mind thinking mixed in whenever it can catch up with the action. Indeed, in co-participation with our signs, rather than captains, we can hardly do more than try to negotiate among the semiosic tide’s pushes and pulls and hauls and heaves, as best we can. And perhaps with more luck than management, we’ll find our way around.
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Chapter Twelve
Sinking into consciousness: De-objectivizing Chapter Twelve. Sinking into consciousness: De-objectivizing This chapter addresses ‘consciousness unbecoming’: the process of one’s actions and thoughts ‘sinking into consciousness’ such that one customarily does what one does without the need to maintain awareness of doing so – Polanyi’s subsidiary awareness through habituation, sedimentation, ‘degeneracy’ of signs – even though in many cases such doing can be ‘raised to consciousness’ in a moment’s notice. David Sudnow’s account of his learning spontaneously to create jazz illustrates this process. It involves, so to speak, ‘re-enchantment’ and at the same time ‘de-objectivation’. In other words, it is a move against our long-cherished ‘objectivism’. Erwin Schrödinger is consulted with respect to this issue, which also bears on consciousness as One and the Many contained by Consciousness (the ‘Number Paradox’) as well as certain facets of Asian thought. Further illustration of this issue comes by way of Wheeler’s 20 Questions demonstration.
Becoming entrenched
Judging from the previous chapter, we human creatures are largely unaware of much of what we do in the coming and going of our daily activities. These activities, repeated over and over again, tend to sink into consciousness and outside the mind’s willful doings. I write ‘sink into consciousness’ rather than ‘drop out of consciousness’ or ‘drop into unconsciousness’, since consciousness is, well, just consciousness. It is one, not plural, whether accessible to the awareness of the subject or not. It involves voluntary as well as involuntary, willful as well as willess, and mindful as well as mindless, doings. Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) says so much (Schrödinger 1967). He even attributes the involuntary workings of heart and lungs and liver and guts to this ‘sinking into consciousness’. There must have been in the beginning, Schrödinger writes, some drive that led to a collection of chemicals that eventually brought about life processes. These processes could be qualified by purposefulness emerging from some primitive sort of consciousness – that is usually dubbed subconsciousness or unconsciousness by psychologists
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and psychoanalysts and mainstream mind-spinning philosophers. Over time, much time, there evolved within these life processes heartbeats, lung heaves, liver garbage disposal, and gut peristalses. These functions were eventually left to vast collections of orchestrating cell-signs consisting of trillions of complex molecule-signs. Since these molecules had somehow learned to carry out their role without any intervention on the part of a mind, the organism as a whole was left to do what it did best. That is learning at the phylogenetic level. Do the heart, lungs, liver, guts actually make selections and choices? Not consciously and deliberately. That’s obvious. But selections and choices are made. Much like Wheeler’s molecule, they just do what they do. Selections and choices are deeply sedimented; they are signs of ultimate ‘degeneracy’. These processes are for the most part inaccessible to our conscious awareness, as are many of our spur of the moment judgments, feelings, and motives; yet they are necessary, since they can process information quickly and efficiently, a feat that would be impossible if left to the plodding deliberations of the mind (Wilson 2002). But perhaps our body’s organs did not always simply do what they do, even though it is difficult for us to conceive of their doing otherwise. Perhaps these organs somehow had to ‘learn how’ to do what they do. For instance, we are proud of our ability to maneuver about in our physical world. We can, to cite an above example, ride a bicycle with remarkable style, by subtly bringing about interdependent, interrelated interaction of focal and subsidiary awareness. We have learned to do so over the years. However, if while pumping along an accustomed bike lane some unexpected event occurs, we are startled, and our heart spontaneously beats faster. Or in a rush we rapidly climb up a flight of stairs, and without our necessarily becoming aware of the fact, our lungs respond to the occasion. Or our liver gets busy after last night’s party of blood-oozing steak and hard spirits and frantic dancing, and our intestines collaborate. Are there selections and decisions in all this? Perhaps at some very primitive level, yes. Perhaps also, these primitive functions were at a deep level learned in somewhat the manner of our learning to ride a bicycle. Eons ago, after simple organisms painfully pushed their way a few links along the evolutionary chain, perhaps they were learning at the phylogenetic level, very gradually to carry out basic biological functions in virtually spontaneous fashion. Now, our bodies just do what they do, often with no prompting whatsoever. Learning, as we ordinarily conceive the process, generally follows these same lines ontogenetically. Becoming adept at driving a nail in a board, tying our shoes, driving a car, speaking another language, or dancing or engaging in a sport, involves conscious mind acts in concert with habituated, sedimented
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moves of the body – largely by means of ‘degenerate’ iconic and indexical signs, tacitly made and taken. All these activities include an intricate range of selections and choices by body and mind – bodymind, focal and subsidiary awareness – that gradually become part of our activities we engage in as a matter of course, automatically so to speak, and without giving our doing much thought. Eastern practices take the learning of such activities to the extreme. Thus ‘Zen in the art of archery’ (Herrigel 1953) requires countless hours of mind’s letting go, ceasing its tireless effort to control body and world and just letting go, allowing body – or better, bodymind – to become one with the bow and the arrow and the target and the entirety of its surroundings, and do what it does. The process highlights how we select and choose and do what we do in our everyday life, though much of what we naturally do we do without giving it a bit of mind. Many activities we now carry out quite naturally required in the beginning much concentration and considerable practice. When we drive down the street we don’t consciously and intentionally guide our muscles through each of their moves. Trying to do so would virtually paralyze us – like the proverbial centipede who, when asked how he coordinated the movement of his many legs, thought about it, and could not move a single appendage. We now drive the way we drive because bodymind moves as an orchestrated whole. Yet, when we were in the process of learning to drive, mind found itself consciously interceding in the doings of body, as if mind and body were two, not one. Our present act of driving, like the fine art of Zen archery, involves, after years of practice, intensive interdependency, interrelatedness, interaction, and resonance between body and mind that in concert bring about bodymind rhythms. This involves no serene Cartesian ‘objectivizing’. It is ‘subjectivizingobjectivizing’ coalescence, a blending and fusion and co-participating collusion in the process of bringing about some aspect of our concrete world, the world of our focal and subsidiary and our tacit and conscious experiences. Speaking of rhythms, one of the most striking examples of bodymind doing outside focal consciousness can be found in…
Jazzing
Jazz pianist David Sudnow (1978, 1979) writes a couple of fascinating books on bodymind’s learning to do what it does when becoming proficient at jazz. He narrates how his teacher provided explicit instructions on such matters as chord production and constructional rules that could be mechanically obeyed, but which contributed very little toward the teaching of jazz.
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After having received the proper litany of linguistic instructions, and after having made a few exemplary moves, the young Sudnow tried to select and choose the proper keys at the propitious moment and play jazz. His teacher offered advice, but the advice fell on partly deaf ears, for it was inordinately vague and of little use or comfort. The apprentice wanted explicit guidelines. But they were not, nor could they have been explicitly, forthcoming. Following the counsel that he ‘get the phrasing more syncopated’, he responded in the only way he could, by fumbling and faltering. It was as if he had been told to go out in the world and speak Chinese after having been given a few grammar rules and a handful of words. Then the master showed him how it was done with a little of his own improvisation. His fingers flew over the keyboard. The aspiring apprentice saw how it was done. But he didn’t really comprehend it and he couldn’t do it. After a particular move by the master, Sudnow asked: ‘What was that?’ The master was puzzled: ‘What was what?’ Sudnow: ‘What you just did.’ The master: ‘Nothing really, you just do it.’ Sudnow: ‘Do what?’ How could the master respond? There was no what, no when, no that, no there, no how, no why. There was just doing, and in the doing, a little bit of vague showing. There was no jazzist here and fingers there in contiguity with a piano and melody that emerges and extends out somewhere else. There was only ‘jazzing’, which in its jazziest form consisted of a resonance of fingers, piano, melody, and the entire context. For the master, there was no conscious and intentional selection and choice of keys at a particular moment; there was no ‘0 √ + R1O1I1 R2O1I1 R2O2I1 R2O2I2 R3O1I1 R3O2I1 R3O2I2 R3O3I1 R3O3I2 R3O3I3’, running the entire gamut of signs from thoughts and ideas and concepts to the possibility of verbal dialogue with oneself or with others. There was only on-the-spot gut feeling and tacit, spontaneous ‘subjectivizing-objectivizing’ doing: ‘0 √ + R1O1I1 R2O1I1 R2O2I1 R2O2I2’. There were no ideas, no carefully collected thoughts, no obsessive stream of words, words, and more words. The master’s fingers just did what they did, like the heart, lungs, liver, guts, except that the jazzing mind – bodymind – was a more active monitor of the goings on. In contrast to his master, Sudnow was too much intervening mind and too little tacit bodymind. Too much deliberate thinking and reasoning and not enough ‘just jazzing’ as if it were the most natural process imaginable. As Sudnow very gradually learned the tricks of the trade, he tacitly picked up little bits and pieces of jazzing. These little bits and pieces slowly showed themselves to him, in-formed him, as they dis-membered him so as to allow
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for re-membering. Jazzing is an integrated practice, interrelating codependent facets of the jazzist’s entire bodymind in such a way that the sounds emerge. Thus Sudnow could eventually write that: ‘To define jazz (as to define any phenomenon of human action) is to describe the body’s ways’ (Sudnow 1978: 146). But, of course, to describe bodymind’s ways is to engage in the process of jazzing, or cycling or tennising or driving or thinking or writing or talking while at work or at play. Jazzing becomes sort of a nonconsciously extended self-consciousness. The process is self-reflexive, and selforganizing. There’s no clear-cut demarcation line between self and world, or in the objectivized self and the deobjectivized or subjectivized self. There’s the coalescing ‘subjectivizing-objectivizing’ process. Consequently, Sudnow reports that he can now sit himself at a piano and he is almost immediately oriented and ready to engage in jazzing. Before, he had to begin by shuffling himself around in his seat until he found the right spot, roaming the keyboard with his fingers, getting his mind properly attuned to the task at hand. Now he just does it, like the accomplished speaker who before an audience has a vague idea in mind and opens her mouth and begins speaking, confident that the most appropriate words will spill forth, as she makes up the sentences, one after another. Jazzing, like effective public speaking, took years to learn. It was not a simple matter of learning the chords and then listening to a few jazz pieces and then happily sitting down to improvise. There were years of listening, years of chording, years of roaming about with the fingers, years of tentatively selecting and choosing, before jazzing began emerging. Sudnow recalls Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in that movie, Modern Times (1936). The conveyor belt carries a stream of nuts and bolts to be tightened, with Chaplin falling further and further behind, missing a few nuts and bolts along the way, eventually becoming completely caught up in the machinery and then ejected in a spasmodic dance step. Sudnow felt the same way when he first began jazzing with a combo. Like Chaplin, he was within the jazzing but couldn’t quite keep up. He was ‘[…] a bucking bronco of my own body’s doings, situated in the midst of these surrounding affairs. Between the chord-changing beating of my left hand at more or less regular intervals according to the chart, the melody movements of the right, and the rather more smoothly managed and securely pulsing background of the bass player and drummer, there obtained the most mutually alienative relations’ (Sudnow 1978: 30). During that stage of Sudnow’s development, his hand jumped around from place to place, like Chaplin jerking about with a wrench in each hand. He felt there was little coordination, little flow, little continuity, only fits and starts and stops.
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Unknowingly, it begins
Then, at some point, Sudnow began jazzing, genuinely jazzing. Eventually, he found himself singing to himself while he was jazzing, talking to himself, dialoguing with himself. He found himself – that is, he found his fingers – carrying out various tasks simultaneously. His fingers were singing, talking, dialoguing. As the conversations with himself began taking form, he found himself: […] looking down at these hands of mine, their ways, my ways of employing them, seeking practically useful terms for conceiving ‘my relationship to their ways,’ reflecting upon how I could employ them, and what it meant, as manageable practices at the keyboard, to ‘employ them’ for this music to happen – a thoughtful scrutiny over such matters, and over the very consequences of the thoughtfulness itself, became a central part of what practicing the piano now came to involve. (Sudnow 1978: 84)
His hands have become, are in the process of becoming, jazzing hands. He is familiar with the sight of these hands, but not in the way he was before. Then, he painfully, hesitatingly, tentatively, had to will them to move along the keyboard, and as a consequence things often came out wrong. He tried to get them right, but to no avail. He knew his task was not to try intentionally and willfully to do it, but rather, to allow his fingers the freedom to just do it. So he tried gravely to try no more. And he failed, time and time again. It was like the aspiring Buddhist monk trying to try not to try. The proper moves should come spontaneously, but they resisted. Finally, they came. Now, his hands have their own way of which he is in large part unaware and control over which he has no inclination or desire. He gets a kick out of waiting for them do what they do, his hands, and he is often surprised that he is not surprised that what they do is of their own accord, without any prompting or reprimanding or correcting on the part of his willful mind. The subtle bodymind jazzing moves just emerge, as if out of the clear blue sky. It all now comes quite naturally. This is comparable to Stephen Nachmanovitch’s (1990: 6) words: ‘When I first found myself improvising, I felt with great excitement that I was onto something, a kind of spiritual connectedness that went far beyond the scope of music making.’ An interdependent, interrelated and integrated process A non-jazz pianist who one bright day decides to do some jazzing may think she’s making jazz. Sudnow knows better. He could never have decided to jazz, CEEOL copyright 2020
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try to jazz, and end up intentionally and deliberately jazzing, as simple as that. He knows that bodymind, piano, hands, conscious and nonconscious self, emerging sounds, all do the jazzing. No single thing is in control. In fact, there is no control. Not really. There is just jazzing. When it is happening it is happening because it was happening, it is happening, it will have been happening. Happening happens, that’s all: From an upright posture I look down at my hands on the piano keyboard during play, with a look that is hardly a look at all. But standing back I find that I proceed through and in a terrain nexus, doing singings with my fingers, so to speak, a single voice at the tips of the fingers, going for each next note in sayings just now and just them, just this soft and just this hard, just here and just there, with definiteness of aim throughout, taking my fingers to places, so to speak, and being guided, so to speak. I sing with my fingers, so to speak, and only so to speak, for there is a new ‘I’ that the speaking I gestures toward with a pointing at the music that says: It is a singing body and this I (here, too, so to speak) sings. (Sudnow 1978: 152)
Sudnow’s ‘so to speak’ testifies to the difficulty of articulating this process. It is impossible to articulate, because language is attuned to the mind’s workings, and mind is a sluggard in comparison to bodymind’s doing what it does naturally. Sudnow, or any proficient chess master or martial arts expert or basketball player, bodymindingly selects and makes choices so deftly and fleetingly that conscious mind has no chance of following the whole show. Bodymind’s moves are many moves along parallel and nonlinear pathways, while mind, much like spoken or written language, is pretty much limited to linear sequences. Conscious mind cannot hope to catch up, for it is always a step behind; there is a time lag from the instant bodymind makes a move until conscious mind becomes aware of it. Benjamin Libet (1981, 1985) gives experimental evidence of the time lag required for a stimulus to be made conscious. It’s a matter of about fifty milliseconds (see also Pöppel 1972, 1988). Consequently, conscious mind is always a small step behind bodymind. Try as it may to catch up, the task is impossible. (Recall the problem of the baseball batter and goalie, whose consciousness has no time to react to the situation that has instantaneously presented itself regarding the ball sizzling out to the pitcher’s hand and flying off the kicker’s foot.) But why should we want to catch up with ourselves anyway? Why cannot we live something like the way David Sudnow jazzes? Now that would be genuine co-participation. When he is on automatic pilot and jazzing, Sudnow and his piano and the music are one. In concert, they jazz. Jazz is
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going on. Jazz jazzes jazzingly. Sudnow – bodymind – piano, jazz, are the music while the music was lasting, lasts, will have been lasting. Why do we always feel compelled to exercise carefully calculated selections and choices? Why can’t we do what we do more naturally, spontaneously, ‘subjectivizingly-objectivizingly’? Like Sudnow? Why is mind so obsessed with control? Why can’t it just let go, so things can get done to the music of bodymind’s surroundings? Why cannot bodymind return to its role as participating consciousness? Or perhaps I should turn the questions around: Are we indeed better off in our ‘disenchanted’ world? Should we not give in to it and make the best of what we have made of our world and ourselves? In other words, perhaps we should become once again ‘re-enchanted’ with our world, our world-versions.59 Or as Schrödinger put it, perhaps we should strive to become ‘de-objectivized’. De-objectivizing, complementarily
Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity, John Archibald Wheeler (1963: 30) declares, ‘is the most revolutionary scientific concept of [the twentieth] century and the heart of his fifty-year search for the full significance of the quantum idea’. While the idea of complementarity is a brain-twister for Westerners, Asian scientists and philosophers can take it in their stride as a matter of course. Léon Rosenfeld was once discussing Bohr with the Japanese physicist, Hideki Yukawa (1907–1981), and asked him if he had difficulty with Bohr’s principle, and his answer was: ‘No, Bohr’s argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us; … you see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle’ (Rosenfeld 1963: 47). Rosenfeld (1963: 50) goes on to tell us that: While the great masters were vainly trying to eliminate the contradiction [for example light as wave and as particle or photon in quantum theory] in Aristotelian fashion by reducing one of the aspects to the other, Bohr realized the futility of such attempts: he knew that we had to live with this dilemma as with the others he had so deeply pondered over, and that the real problem was to refine the language of physics so as to provide room for the coexistence of the two conceptions of light with suitable precautions in order to avoid any ambiguity in their application. Of course, […] many years were to pass before it 59
See Bennett 2001; Berman 1981; Bordo 1987; Griffin 1988; Laszlo 2006.
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could be accomplished; but we see that the point of view of complementarity […] was a constructive one, preventing effort from being wasted in sterile channels and exhibiting much more sharply than the current view the true significance of the quantum of action.
Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler write that nobody took the apparent quantum paradox ‘more seriously than Bohr’. Nobody ‘worked around the central mystery with more energy wherever work was possible’. Nobody ‘brought to bear a more judicious combination of daring and conservativeness, nor a deeper feel for the harmony of physics’ (Misner et al. 1973: 1197). And Werner Heisenberg (1958: 44) himself appropriately tells us that Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory ‘starts from a paradox’. Bohr introduced complementarity into quantum theory in 1927. There are two equal but separate and mutually exclusive manifestations within the subatomic world: wave amplitude and particle. They are mutually complementary manifestations that together can (hopefully) provide a complete picture of what is going on, but each manifestation separately is inadequate to the task. In fact, it is impossible effectively to talk about them independently, for in order to give them any discursive account, their interdependent, interrelated, interactive nature must be articulated; so once again we’re back into the whole picture. The parts simply can’t be separated; they are separate and mutually exclusive and they are one, paradoxically. It is likely no mere coincidence that Bohr was inspired by the Dao and Yin-Yang complementarity in developing his quantum principle. Relating this to observations in above chapters, when we feel we know, we know the whole, but what we know in this respect we can’t tell, for we can only effectively talk about the parts making up the whole. Knowing the whole through feeling and sensing is subjectivizing knowing. Discursive thinking and reasoning the parts by way of language is objectivizing. This is comparable to Sudnow jazzing on his piano. While he – bodymind – is doing it, he is immersed in the music in the process of its unfolding through the instrument his fingers and feet are coming into contact with: they are one, de-objectivizingly. However, the moment he begins reflecting on what he is doing, he loses it; he separates the whole into some of its constituent parts; he is objectivizing them by breaking up the whole. Complementarity isn’t exactly a principle, customarily considered. Rather, it offers a means for understanding interdependence, interrelatedness and interactivity between apparent contradictions whose conjunction creates a paradox; it offers the notion of complementary coalescence. Bohr saw his
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principle as applicable not only in physics but also in the human disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Malin quotes Arthur Eddington, who interprets complementarity in terms of ‘symbolic’ or discursive, objectivized knowing and ‘intimate’ or subjectivized knowing: [L]et us consider Humor. I suppose that humor can be analyzed to some extent and the essential ingredients of the different kinds of wit classified. Suppose that we are offered an alleged joke. We subject it to scientific analysis as we would a chemical salt of a doubtful nature, and perhaps after careful consideration of all its aspects we are able to confirm that it really and truly is a joke. Logically, I suppose, our next procedure would be to laugh. But it may certainly be predicted that as a result of this scrutiny we shall have lost all inclination we may ever have had to laugh at it. It simply does not do to expose the inner workings of a joke. The classification concerns a symbolic knowledge of humor which preserves all the characteristics of a joke except its laughableness. The real appreciation must come spontaneously, not introspectively. (Eddington cited in Malin 2001: 140–41)
Analysis of the parts into objectivizing discursive talk sacrifices the whole: ‘0 √ + R1O1I1 R2O1I1 R2O2I1 R2O2I2 R3O1I1 R3O2I1 R3O2I2 R3O3I1 R3O3I2 R3O3I3 ... ... If-1’ (as in Figure 6). The ideal subjectivizing whole can at least in principle be felt and intuited, but in so doing it defies objectivizing discursivity: ‘0 √ + R1O1I1 R2O1I1 R2O2I1 R2O2I2 ... … ... (, or 0)’. As we shall note below, playacting creates a whole, within which we can subjectivizingly carry on quite well; we can do the same in our presumptuously presupposed objectivizing ‘real world’. While playacting we knew all along what we were doing in the back of our minds, but we didn’t have to objectivize it and bring it to our focal attention. We can say the same about our concrete coming and going in our ‘real’ world – walking, talking, driving a car, typing on the computer terminal, pounding on a nail, and such. And yet, putting the two together into one whole package, we can in most cases know it, subjectivizingly, but we can’t effectively say it, objectivizingly speaking. More on this later. For now, let’s attend to the process itself as One, which is Many, which is One, which is...
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All and nothing at all
The universe is One, but it manifests Many parts. Consciousness is One, but there are Many levels of consciousness and many minds. From Zero, numbers emerge: there is One, then Two, then Many, but the collection of the Many, infinitely Many, is One, and that One is Zero. Zero and Infinity – and regarding concrete affairs One and Many – are the Tweedledee and the Tweedledum of numbers, and indeed, of thought in general. In many respects they are the mirror image of one another. Multiply Zero by any number and you get Zero; multiply Infinity by any number and you get Infinity. The same equals the same. Dividing a number by Zero leaves you with Infinity; dividing a number by Infinity leaves you with Zero. Add Zero to any number and the number remains unchanged; add Infinity to any number and the yield is Infinity, unchanged. Zero and Infinity are two sides of the same coin, two sides of a sheet of paper. They are the Yin and Yang of all that is becoming; they are the beginning and the end of the process of becoming that has neither beginning nor ending. In both Zero and Infinity there is ‘the power to shatter the framework of logic’ (Seife 2000: 5). This observation brings Schrödinger onto the scene once again. He writes that our objectivizing world doesn’t exist ‘out there’ in eager anticipation of our interpreting it from a ‘view from nowhere’. Our world is a consequence of our processing it and of it processing us: Co-participation. But, the objectivizing process doesn’t exist ‘in here’ as an abstracting, analyzing act autonomous of our subjectivizing self, consciousness, or mind: they are complementarily coalescent. In this respect Schrödinger (1967: 136–137) writes: It is maintained that recent discoveries in physics have pushed forward to the mysterious boundary between the subject and object. This boundary, so we are told, is not a sharp boundary at all. We are given to understand that we never observe an object without its being modified or tinged by our own activity in observing it. We are given to understand that under the impact of our refined methods of observation and of thinking about the results of our experiments that mysterious boundary between the subject and the object has broken down […].
He then goes on: All this was said from the point of view that we accept the time-hallowed discrimination between subject and object. Though we have to accept it in everyday life ‘for practical reference’, we ought, so I believe, to abandon it in philosophical thought […]. It is the same elements that go to compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in
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spite of the unfathomable abundance of ‘cross-references’ between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. (Schrödinger 1967: 137)
Indeed, when Schrödinger tells us that the same elements ‘go to compose my mind and the world’, and that this situation ‘is the same for every mind and its world’, he is paralleling George Spencer-Brown’s (1979: 104–05) words when the latter writes: Now, the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particles he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying the general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
And: We cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself, but in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. (Spencer-Brown 1979: 101)
This act of ‘cutting’ the continuum of possible possibilities into seer and seen, subject and object, knower and known, is that original ‘cut’ that gives rise to the idea of mind, consciousness, self, other, and science. Schrödinger said so much. But – to continue with Schrödinger’s line of thought – our subjectivizing mind, consciousness, and self don’t exist ‘in here’, separated from all other subjectivizing selves ‘out there’ in that self ’s community of creatures of whatever sort. Rather, they all inhabit one objectivizing world, which is the consequence of the community’s presuppositions, proclivities, predispositions, prejudices, and norms and conventions. Rather than ‘selves’, Schrödinger writes about ‘minds’ and ‘consciousness’. In any case, they are all unified. Their multiplicity is no more than apparent, for there is only One Mind, One Consciousness: [C]onsciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world […]. [W]e are not able even to imagine a plurality of consciousnesses in one mind […]. Even in pathological cases of a ‘split personality’
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the two persons alternate, they never hold the field jointly; nay this is just the characteristic feature, that they know nothing about each other. (Schrödinger 1967: 140–41)
Moreover, mind and consciousness are always now. ‘There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations’ (Schrödinger 1967: 145). This is to say, mind and consciousness – and self to boot – are processual: ‘Past Now Future’. The formulation, which I’ve also used above, is what J. M. E. McTaggart (1927) calls the linearly progressive A-series consisting of movement from past to future by way of a knife-edge now. But there is no McTaggart B-series – simply Before/After – which, in contrast to the A-Series, is a static set of happenings either before some arbitrary point or after it. The subject within the now
The Oneness of mind and matter, self and other, individuals and consciousness, subject and object, and the notion of a processual now, is that of Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) masterpiece, Las Meninas (1656) and Maurits Escher’s (1898–1972) Gallery (1956). In Las Meninas there is an artist, Velázquez himself, who is facing us, the spectators. But we see only the backside of the canvas containing the work he is in the process of creating, with easel and brush in hand. His work is obviously the work in progress, Las Meninas, that we are now seeing as the finished product. The infanta and the meninas are to the painter’s left – and our right – facing either other people of the group within the painting, or us, outside the painting, while the painter can see no more of them than their backside or profile. Then how is it that Velázquez can be painting them if he isn’t facing them? First anomaly: heterogeneous spatial frames of reference. At the back of the room there is a mirror, which reflects two people, male and female, apparently the Royal Couple. The king and queen are imaginary spectators standing outside the painting, more or less where we are, reflected in the mirror, and obviously gazing at the work. To our right side of the mirror, a doorway is open, and a man is standing in it. His gaze, like the painter’s, is directed toward us, the spectators. Or is it toward the Royal couple imaginarily in front of or behind us that we can only see in the mirror? Of course we are ‘real’ spectators while the king and queen are merely imaginary. Velázquez’s gaze is focused on them. Or is it on us? No, it can’t be us, for our reflection doesn’t appear in the mirror, whereas theirs does. So that’s it! They are imaginary, part of the painting, but we, as ‘real’, must remain outside. Yet
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there’s Velázquez, looking squarely at us. So how can we remain simply outside? Second anomaly: spatial inside/outside fusion into a homogeneous whole. Escher’s Gallery could have been as simple as could be: a young man is standing in an art gallery looking at a picture. But it isn’t simple at all. Much in the manner of Velázquez, it is a self-contained timespace knot. The lad is gazing at the picture, which fuses into and becomes one with the city outside, and the city continues around in wave-fashion and fuses with the entrance of the gallery in which the prints are found, including the observer, so he is in a sense standing inside the same print he is looking at! Once again, a convoluted, involuted, reciprocally reflexive virtuously rather than viciously circular scene. We the spectators are also, as we were in regard to Las Meninas, sucked into the work. We are looking at the young lad within the print he is observing, a two-dimensional world, while he seems oblivious to the fact that he is actually within a three-dimensional manifold that is given a network of Möbius-band twists such that he is included within what he takes as his objective world ‘out there’. He apparently isn’t aware that, were he to gaze along the curved three-dimensional manifold, his gaze would eventually double back and meet his backside, while his front side remains concentrated on the scene before him. Both artists are ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, subject and object. And so are the subjects of the painting, and we as well, the works’ spectators. There is no all-or-nothing distinction; the Many is the One, and vice versa. Contrary to this condition, the scientific enterprise, and our philosophical tradition as well, have propagated and inculcated the dogma of our ‘cut’ and ‘split’ and ‘mutilated’ and ‘analyzed’ universe, the universe we’ve categorized so as to pack it neatly into our particular world-version. But where are we, where is our self-indulgent self, in this world-version? Schrödinger (1967: 138) answers that we, our ego-driven self, is that world-version. We are it and it is us. Peirceanly putting it, we are our signs making up our worldversion, and they are us. In his own allusion to a work of art by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Schrödinger (1967: 148) writes: ‘On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total effect’. Mind and artist are One, and they are One with the whole of the painting, and they are One with that which is painted, the Many. Schrödinger (1967: 148–49) laments the fact that science hasn’t been able to account for the One and Many problem:
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Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities […]. Most painful is the absolute silence of all our scientific investigations towards our questions concerning the meaning and scope of the whole display. The more attentively we watch it, the more aimless and foolish it appears to be. The show that is going on obviously acquires a meaning only with regard to the mind that contemplates it. But what science tells us about this relationship is patently absurd: as if mind had only been produced by that very display that it is now watching and would pass away with it when the sun finally cools down and the earth has been turned into a desert of ice and snow.
Playing out the role, then In a comparable vein, Wheeler offers a metaphorical conceit – or a parable or parody some might say – of the genuine subject-object fusion in his notion of our co-participation with the entire universe in its process of becoming: his variation of the 20 Questions game as described in Chapter Four. According to Wheeler’s subtle twist of the game, you’re asked to leave the room. While you’re on the other side of the door the participants inside don’t choose a word for some object in the room. They let your collaboration with them bring the object into the game’s world through your and their co-participation with the entire room, as One, and all the objects therein, including yourselves, as Many. You ask the questions and they respond with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, but with each response, the answer must be coherent with all the previous questions and responses. Finally, you tentatively venture to ask if some object in the room is the key. The response is ‘Yes!’ Game’s over. The game-world’s object didn’t exist, but through your questions and their answers all of you collaborated and co-participated with that world to bring it into existence. Mind and matter, self and other, that which consciousness is consciousness of, and subject and object, have practically speaking been One all along. Only when the game ends has something definitely been ‘cut’ from the whole, and now all the participants involved are objectivizing their world. Wheeler writes about parallels between the ordinary 20 Questions game and its variant and physics as it is commonly practiced, while revealing obvious differences. In the ordinary game the word for the final answer to the 20 Questions already exists ‘out there’, as classical physics would have it. But in the game’s variation the word was created, step by step, through the questions
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and answers as the necessary information emerged. If you had asked different questions, the game would have ended differently, and another world would have been the yield: hence the co-participation of the Many, that are One, to create the One, which is Many. Wheeler concludes: The comparison between the world of quantum observation and the game of twenty questions misses much, but it makes the vital central point. In the world of quantum physics, no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. In the surprise version of the game no word is a word until that word is promoted to reality by the choice of questions asked and the answers given. (Wheeler 1980a: 161, in Malin 2001: 214)
The role involves co-participation By a comparable token, in light of Wheeler’s allusion to the key ‘word’ interdependently, interrelatedly and interactively created in the 20 Questions, no word or signs of any other sort – is a word or sign until it is an interpreted word or sign by some individual who is One within a community, that is Many. And, no mind is a mind until as One it is One within Many of a community, which is One, and no consciousness is individual unless it is One with the Many of the community (keeping in mind, of course, that this Oneness is an ‘ideal’ that cannot become completely and consistently ‘objectively real’, given our fallibilism, and since we are always within this Oneness). We and our world are always in a co-participatory process. We are both players – we are peripherally or subsidiarily aware of the process of our play acting – and we are spectators in terms of our focal awareness (recall, once again, Sextus Empiricus’s skepticism and Nāgārjuna’s middle way). One might wish to assume that this is comparable to a dream condition. However, while within our dream, ordinarily we aren’t aware of our self in the process of dreaming. Norman Malcolm (1959) points out that for a sleeping person to say ‘I’m asleep’ is absurd, since from within her sleeping condition she cannot be aware of her waking state – although some people make the claim that they have been aware of themselves within their dream – and thus she is incapable consciously of making a statement about her status in the sleeping condition. In other words, while asleep, she cannot be consciously aware that there is a boundary between her sleeping condition and her waking condition, for to be aware of the boundary, she must be aware of what rests beyond her sleeping condition: her waking condition. Thus she can neither be lying nor telling the truth: she is simply spouting out an absurdity. Her utterance, ‘I’m asleep’, is that of her more immediate self, who, denied the benefit of the
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other, is not in control of any means by which to become aware that she is either dreaming or awake.60 It would appear that Malcolm remains influenced by the empirical positivist camp according to which any and all statements are either true or false, or they are meaningless. In contrast, I have alluded, here and elsewhere, to an alternate possibility: imaginary, following the work of Spencer-Brown (1979; also Kauffman, Varela 1980; merrell 1995). As a rough counterpart to this four-cornered set-up, consider numbers. There is zero, close cousin of ‘emptiness’. To the right we have the infinite series of positive integers and to the left we have the mirror-image series of negative numbers, counterparts to true and false assertions. Filling in between the integers we have an infinite number of irrational numbers (√2, ) whose precise specification cannot be known in our finite world, since the decimal expansion goes on and on. ‘But these numbers are not counterparts to meaningless assertions,’ one wishes quickly to retort. Of course. However, the very idea of meaninglessness is relative to the timespace context, and as the context changes, what is deemed meaningful and what is deemed meaningless can change, as can also considerations of truth and falsity (the ‘center’ of the universe example offered above). With this in mind, truth, falsity, and meaningfulness and meaninglessness have been, are, and will have been to a greater or lesser degree vague, as are real numbers – consisting of whole integers and irrational numbers. Inclusion of imaginary numbers (√-1) introduces ambiguity (the square root of minus one is neither +1 nor -1; yet in a manner of speaking it is both +1 and -1). Such ambiguity is also that of the Necker cube, which at one look might yield one of its orientations and at another look might sport the other orientation. Ambiguity is, in addition, germane to Bohr’s complementarity principle: the quantum phenomenon can have now wave characteristics, now particle characteristics. The imaginary, in this sense, introduces ambiguity into the vagueness equation. On being One: the problem ‘Nevertheless’, one might snap, ‘to say “I am dreaming”, just as to declare “I am lying” or “This sentence is false”, is unacceptable for, given its paradoxical status, it must be considered absurd, or meaningless if you wish, and that’s that. But this is supposing that the subject is in the dream, lock, stock and 60
There are what psychologists call ‘lucid dreams’, awareness that one is in a dream while dreaming; but, in the Malcolm sense one might ask if that awareness is within a dream, and if the answer is negative, the next question would be how can there be any certainty, and the possibility of a cantankerous infinite regress comes to mind. While discussing ‘lucid dreaming’, Thomas Metzinger (2010) implies so much.
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barrel, that ‘I’ am referring to myself as caught up in my claiming ‘I am lying’, and that ‘This sentence is false’ interrelates and interacts with itself and nothing but itself. It is, so to speak, as if we were playacting and unaware of the boundary between our playacting and our ordinary world, as if there were nothing more than the playacting world, or as if we were dreaming and entirely within the dream world with no possibility of any alternate condition. It is as if there were no possibility of a subjectivizing/objectivizing split, however artificial and false to itself that split might become. It would be as if we were caught up swirled ‘inside’ Wheeler’s 20 Questions game variation, totally oblivious as to any possible existence ‘outside’ that world. It would be as if the subjectivizing mind were One with all minds, and the possibility of a subdivision of the One into Many were entirely out of the question, hence objectivizingly impossible. We could conveniently ignore all these as ifs if we could get outside the One and the Many, with a ‘view from nowhere’. But we can’t. For, as Bohr, Schrödinger, and Wheeler tell us, and as Peirce implies throughout much of his writings on signs, we are within, and within we shall remain, as co-participating signs. Before I get myself into a pickle, I should attempt to clarify what I just wrote by turning to the topic of timespace contexts, in order more fully to outline the concepts I have been using in this essay.
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Chapter Thirteen
Are we nevertheless born to objectivize? Chapter Thirteen. Are we nevertheless born to objectivize? Various takes on the Necker cube reveal our penchant for objectivizing. But what if objectivation contains, at its roots, the implication of consciousness becoming, which, by its very nature, cannot be reduced to objectivizing – linearly bivalent – principles? This question provokes the Tetralemma’s emergence, once again, for further contemplation. The problem persists
I repeat: in spite of our moments of better judgment, we remain caught up in the act of objectivation. Consequently we are removed, excluded, from our physical existence; it is as if we were looking at our world through a window, as if we weren’t in the world at all, but extra-worldly. Focal and subsidiary attention model this contrived situation. If I may use that well-worn example yet again, when driving your vehicle you need not be consciously aware of each and every move. Bodymind does what it does, while you can focus on what you might think are more important issues. Bodymind is wherever you are, for sure. But where are you, on no uncertain terms? Wholly within bodymind? Or in some strategic parts of it? If so, what parts? Your mind? Your brain? Your sensory organs? Your pineal gland? Your heart beat or lung heaves? Your restless reproductive organs? Your gut? Your index finger? Or are you somehow somewhere else – like the Cartesian mind? If so, where? Somewhere ‘out there’, contemplating the scene before you, ideally with a ‘view from nowhere’? You see the problem? Which is also the problem of our signs, and ourselves as signs incessantly becoming other signs? Signs out of sight and out of mind, since we are unaware of the great majority of them – as ‘degenerate’ signs – yet we complementarily coalesce with them while we and they are interdependent, interrelated and interactive. Signs that in part we process while knowing neither why nor how. Signs without which those trifling few of which we are aware would hold little relevance for us. Signs we couldn’t live without; yet we don’t really know we live with them, as one of them, as one with them, co-participatingly speaking.
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Searching for some sort of answer
You aren’t consciously aware of the majority of your moves in order to keep your car in proper motion. But as you ponder over the last Red Sox game while you’re driving, you can become aware of some thought or other, if only slightly after the fact of that thought having popped into your head. Well, then, where did the thought come from? You created it – at least that’s what you would like to believe. But if you created it and you are becoming aware of it, then where’s the ‘you’ of the becoming of awareness? Still ‘out there’? The subject that is systematically excluded from your coming and going in your physical world? It’s objectivization. It’s our heritage, beginning with the Greeks and flowing through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and to the present, stimulated by Newton’s physics and Descartes’ metaphysics. Suppose a Necker cube enters your vision. You look at it and think ‘cube’. That’s your focal attention constructing what isn’t there: a three-dimensional object. Over the years you’ve learned to three-dimensionalize certain twodimensional images; they have become tacitly processed ‘degenerate’ signs. In this case, unlike bodymind going through driving motions while your focal attention is elsewhere, your focal attention is on the ‘cube’, which isn’t actually a ‘cube’ but the yield of your habitually constructing ‘cube’ from such a conglomeration of one-dimensional lines on a two-dimensional plane. Of course your subsidiary attention might be vaguely aware of the images’ actual two-dimensionality. But if so, such attention is rarely elevated to the center of your focal attention. Poke a stick through the surface of the water in the nearest swimming pool. You experience a bent stick. But you don’t think ‘bent stick’, because your focal attention knows better. Perhaps you remember from high school physics that the light rays are refracted from the water’s surface at a different angle than that of the light rays entering your pupils from the part of the stick that’s not submerged, making it appear that the stick is ‘bent’. Perhaps not. At any rate, you know the stick isn’t ‘bent’. What do you actually see then? A straight stick. A mind-driven construct, a sign whose tacitly processed interpretant belies appearances: a ‘degenerate’ sign. But let’s attend more specifically to the Necker cube for a moment. Specifying what is: the problem deepens We might wish to get rid of all the excess baggage and simply say that the image is a ‘cube’, and let it go at that. We assume it is what it is. It is identical to itself: A = A. And that’s that; we’re done with it (Figure 18).
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We’ve accounted for the object of our focal mind, our consciousness; we’ve properly objectivized it. But the fact remains that it isn’t a ‘cube’. It isn’t a ‘cube’, for, given its two-dimensional set of onedimensional lines and its background, there is no ‘cubeness’ to be found. So if we wish to end the selfdeception and come clean, we will be forced to admit Figure 18. It is what it that the ‘cube’ is what it isn’t. But this can’t fly, that is, is: a ‘cube’. if we wish to abide by Non-Contradiction: A NotA (hence A but not Not-A). Yet, the ‘cube’ is what it isn’t; it isn’t a ‘cube’, not really, if we include the two-dimensional background. The ‘cube’ is what it is, but only as a mental construct against the background that can only give rise to a ‘non-cube’, in light of the context within which it finds itself. Thus Figure 19. Confusing, to say the least. For sure, the ‘cube’ is what it is, as self-defined, self-identical, and according to our focal attention, but at the same time as a combination of 12 lines on a plane, it is not a ‘cube’ as part of our focal experience plus our subsidiary experience. We construct ‘cubeness’ from a medium that cannot allow for it, given its Figure 19. It is what two-dimensionality. Yet we construct ‘cubeness’, in it is not. spite of the contradiction. ‘Cubeness’ is constructively abstracted from ‘non-cubeness’. So the ‘cube’ is not merely what it is but also what it isn’t. The ‘cube’ enjoys its identity, but at the expense of tacit, subsidiary possible acknowledgment of what it is not. The ‘cube’ can be a ‘cube’ only with respect to its co-participating ‘otherness’, its background and ourselves as its co-participating ‘otherness’, that is, what it is not. If the ‘cube’ could properly possess ‘cubeness’ without the ‘otherness’, it would simply be what it is, period. As such it would be identical to itself, permanently; it would be properly three-dimensional; it would be in possession of fixed essence, in a state of timeless bliss. Indeed, we go to any extreme to make our otherwise perplexing world as simple as can be by unthinkingly objectivizing it. But the cube is by no means fixed. As a three-dimensional mental construct on a two-dimensional plane, it is ambiguous. Its orientation can be either one way or the other: face-‘up’ or face-‘down’. Imposition of three-dimensionality on flatness creates this ambiguity. We have ‘cubeness’, we have a planar background, and we have either one possible ‘cube’ or the other one. Each ‘cube’ is what it is, and it is not what it is, because (1) as threedimensional, it has been artificially and abstractly pulled out of its planar
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background; and (2) it can become its enantiomorphic or mirror-image twin at the blink of an eye. There must be more to the issue at hand than simply what the ‘cube’ is and what it is not, because the ‘cube’ is, so to speak, ‘schizophrenic’. It can oscillate from one manifestation to the other and back again. A ‘cube’ is ordinarily sensed and seen, seen as a ‘cube’, and it is so seen because it is seen that the ‘cube’ is a cube because it consists of 12 lines making up 6 squares of equal size connected along 6 planes at 90 degree angles so as to form a three-dimensional object. That’s what a ‘cube’ is all about. It is not ordinarily experienced in terms of what it isn’t, a ‘non-cube’. Seeing a ‘cube’ as well as all other objects in our world in terms of what they are not is too cumbersome for comfort. What a ‘cube’ or anything else is not can’t effectively be experienced, if at all. We would hardly experience a ‘cube’ as a ‘cube’ by virtue of its being a ‘non-cube’. For that reason Figure 19’s background is characterized as blackness. There’s nothing to see, except the ‘cube’, which is what it is. And yet, it is what it is by virtue of the fact that it can be what it is only with respect to what it isn’t. In this manner, the ‘cube’ is both what it is and what it isn’t (Figure 20). In other words, Non-Contradiction is disrespectfully violated: both A and Not-A. The entire field becomes a plenum. The ‘cube’ is, but everything that it isn’t also is, so combining Figures 18 and 19, we are left with a continuous field of blackness. The black background of Figure 19 and the black lines Figure 20. It is what of Figure 18 have become One. Figure 20 is both the it is and what it is not background and the lines; it is not what the lines are (as mere possibility). when distinguished from the continuous black background (Figure 19) and what they are when distinguished from the white background (Figure 18). Figure 20 is Many, as a field of possible possibilities ready and waiting to become a sign along with any and all signs becoming signs: ‘0 + ’. In a manner of putting it, everything possible can become a ‘subjectivizing-objectivizing’ item of experience, of focal attention, along with possible subsidiary attention – everything else upon which attention can possibly rest. If we take the blank field as a continuum, then it is infinite in regard to its details, which is to say that there is nothing but detail. There are no cracks; everything is there; the field is full in the fullest sense. Our mind shrinks back at the thought of such confusion. Everything? Yes. All experience in terms of making distinctions is shut down; there is nothing but undifferentiated, unmoving darkness; consciousness can do no more than fall into deep sleep, ultimately passing into oblivion. How can we cope with this bleak situation, if
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in order to bring order out of our madly chaotic world we must construct the bits and pieces of a world picture within which we can comfortably live? The very thought of ‘everything’ as a collection of experiential items must go. For, everything is ultimately nothing, emptiness. How so? It’s Tetralemmic in nature OK, then. Let’s do away with ‘everything’, toss it all in some imaginary cosmic trash can, get rid of the darkness, so we can once again bask in the ethereal light of a world picture we can know and with which we can feel secure. What do we have? Figure 21. This is a rape of the Excluded-Middle dictating either A or Not-A, for according to this principle there Figure 21. It is neither what it is nor can be nothing else. But now, in Figure 21, we have what it is not (It is neither A nor Not-A, which doesn’t inspire much secu- possibly something rity. It’s no more than a barren plain containing noth- else becoming). ing at all, sections of which can possibly condense into something. Within this barren plain, there is neither a ‘cube’ nor a ‘non-cube’. Nor is there any background from which what was formerly a ‘cube’ could evince its ambiguous nature. There is nothing in the background which the ‘cube’ is not, its ‘non-cubeness’–polygons of all other stripes, and an infinite variety of topological forms, as well as horses and pigs and white and black swans and mountains and streams and apples and oranges and everything else imaginable. I’ve suggested that Figure 21 allows for the Included-Middle, the middle way, that can give rise to the emergence of something new, fresh, hitherto unknown and virtually unimaginable. The loss of security ushered in by Figure 21 gives us process whereby what there apparently is, is becoming something other than what it was; hence the loss of security is precisely what makes life interesting. Now, if we take a further step we find ourselves in Figure 22. There is nothing at all; there is only emptiness, zero, zilch, the inverse face of infinity: possible possibility that ends in mere possibility, then the plus factor and the negative factor, which are mediated potentially to offer us some alternative precisely by way of the Included-Middle implied by Figure 21. In other words: ‘0 Ø Signness’. ‘Good Lord! We really must get real, get out of this nonsense’ – one is prone to exclaim. Well, then, let’s try to formulate the above in a different manner. Figure 18 depicts what is as it is, no if ’s, and’s or but’s. But according to the premises of this essay, what is, is interdependent, interrelated and interactive
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with everything else, what that which is, isn’t. So what is, is not simply what it is, for it can be what it is only with respect to what it isn’t. But what it isn’t, if divorced from what it is, is its ‘otherness’; yet that alone cannot account for what is. What isn’t can possibly be a square, or six squares on a plane, or it can possibly be anything else, anteaters or aardvarks or zebus or zebras or whatever. Virtually anything is possibly possible. This doesn’t satisfy us either. We wish to stick with simplicity: a ‘cube’. But the ‘cube’ is interdependent, interrelated and interactive with everything it isn’t. So we put them together, and we have both what is and what it isn’t. Too populated. So populated that nothing can be clearly and distinctly foregrounded. There can’t even be proper interdependence and interrelatedness, for there is no interactivity since in the plenum, stasis must surely reign. Frustrated, we go to the other extreme (Figure 22). Now there is nothing but the possible possibility for anything and virtually everything. It is analogous to zero. Zero is not, properly speaking, a number. It is empty of all integers, it is emptiness. Nevertheless, it is the fountainhead for all possibly possible numbers. Thus we have a positive integer, which is what it is only Figure 22. Pure with respect to what it isn’t, its negative opposite, its possible possibilities enantiomorphic twin, so to speak. The positive integer (emptiness). is what it is and it is in interdependent, interrelated interaction with what it isn’t. It is both what it is and what it isn’t. And it neither is what it is nor what it isn’t; that is, it is something else: zero. How do we go from here? Do we not find ourselves… On the brink?
No, not really. By way of numbers as models, consider the process beginning with zero and ending with our world-version as we have constructed it. Rational numbers are whole integers: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Irrational numbers are expressed in terms of infinite decimal expansions – such as 2. Imaginary numbers, -1, are those undecidables – amphibians between being and nonbeing, as Leibniz once put it – that were hidden in the attic for centuries because mathematicians were not sure what to do with them. They were a nuisance, because they allow of no solution. Best we ignore them. Now, however, they find their way into our world-version. With this in mind, comes the time more properly to account for what I all-too-enigmatically termed the ‘Zero Point’ (in Figure 5, and elsewhere). Actually, to remain faithful to the concept of the ‘Zero Point’, there must be
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acknowledgment that everything must begin with emptiness. Zero or emptiness is pure nothing; yet it contains the wherewithal for engenderment of the infinite variety of all numbers, or the virtually infinite variety of everything that was, is, and will have been – all possible possibilities – which in the most absolute sense is absolutely ineffable, fathomless. From that ‘point’, the range of mere possibilities arises. What is the difference between the range of all possible possibilities, and the range of mere possibilities? As suggested, the former can be labeled ‘0’ or ‘emptiness’ and the latter as the ‘empty set’, ‘Ø’. As unspeakable and unfathomable and incomprehensible, within the context of discursivity, ‘0’ has nothing to say to us. We need something concrete that we can put our mind and hands on. That something is the ‘empty set’. Then what, more specifically, is the difference between ‘0’ and ‘Ø’? Zero is zero, emptiness of anything and everything. The ‘empty set’ is ‘absence’. It is ‘noticed absence’. It is acknowledgment that there was something there but it no longer is, or that there was nothing there but there could have been something, or that there is nothing there but within some future timespace context there will have been something. The ‘empty set’ allows for the notion of some ‘there’, there, and it allows for the possibility that there was, is, or will have been some ‘is’. This is a massive move from ‘0’ or emptiness. The next giant step takes us to the ‘point’ at the center of the tripod in Figure 5. The ‘point’ is not merely a dot. It is a swirling, rippling, scintillating effervescent collection of possibilities for signness: it is the range of mere possibilities that has arisen from the range of all possible possibilities (‘0’ or emptiness). Thus Figure 22 must be totally blank, or better, ‘diaphanous’. It is ‘0’ or emptiness; yet it is the source of Figures 18 to 20. So Figure 21 holds a light hue of grayness, because what is neither what it is nor what it isn’t entails the instant of awareness that there must be some alternate possibility – from the range of mere possibilities arisen from the range of all possible possibilities – that can emerge and take its place among the actualized possibilities making up Figures 18 to 20. In sum, you see the Necker cube and think ‘cube’ (Figure 18). It is what you think it is because of and in conjunction with what it isn’t (Figure 19), and hence it is both what you think it is and what lies behind what you think it is – what it isn’t (Figure 20). Fine, so it’s a ‘cube’. And an ambiguous ‘cube’ at that. It is what it is and it is its alternate, its enantiomorphic twin. You can alternate between one ‘cube’ and the other one, and in so doing you pass through the whole range of alternate possibilities (Figure 21). And then you take another glance at the figure and pluck out the other ‘cube’. All this is possible, thanks to that virtually infinite range of all possible possibilities (Figure 22), which is to say that there is quite possibly an alternative, in fact an
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indeterminate number of alternatives, other than the complementary pair of ‘cubes’. You look at the Necker cube again, and,… what’s this? It has changed! You’ve changed! By the grace of the Included-Middle! You now imagine a cake of ice, or a wire contraption, or a glass box, or a clear plastic ‘cube’ making up part of a child’s set of geometric objects to play with, or perhaps something else. In each case, ambiguity inheres, because you tacitly and without giving it a moment’s thought see a three-dimensional ‘cube’ in a drawing that has actually been flattened to a plane. You see it in this manner because throughout your life-experiences this and other such drawings have become embedded, entrenched, ‘degenerate’ signs. You could have seen the figure as merely a two-dimensional set of lines on a sheet of paper – yet another alternative. The number of possibilities, those foreseen and those unforeseen, is virtually indeterminate, given the range of all possibly possible timespace contexts. But,… I sense that I really should more adequately qualify this range of possible possibilities. Allow me to attempt doing so with what at the outset appears to be just another bivalent pair of terms – finite games and infinite play – but the terms can’t be bivalently conceived, for infinity will have nothing to do with either ‘isness’ or ‘itness’.
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Chapter Fourteen
Playacting, as living knowing Chapter Fourteen. Playacting, as living knowing After contemplating James Carse’s apparent dichotomy between infinite playing and finite gaming, it becomes more satisfying to construe them as complementary. Infinitude is the range of all possible possibilities, the ‘emptiness’, that gives rise to the possible emergence of one, two, three, and many, toward the end of the nonlinear semiosic stream; but it can never arrive at its destination in this finite world. The two terms, infinitude and finitude, are mutually exclusive, and yet they resist categorization as binary opposites, for they need one another; they are intertwined; they interdepend, interrelate and interact with one another. A variation of the Figure 6 lattice serves to illustrate this by way of Peirce’s notion of musement, free play with possible ideas about one’s self, one’s others, and one’s physical world. Finity and Infinitude
James Carse (1987) writes a charming book on finite games and infinite play. His premises uncannily pattern many of the premises in this essay. Specifically:
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Aristotelian, bivalent classical logical Principles of Identity, NonContradiction and Excluded-Middle govern finite games (and the mid-portion of the Figure 6 lattice); infinite play knows of no fixed, immutable logical principles, rules, or strategies, but rather, perpetual improvisation is the name of the process (at the lower- and upperportions of the Figure 6 lattice); finite games entail either winning or losing (‘0 √ + Signness … … Closure’); winners enjoy fame and fortune and they bask in the spotlight of their triumph, and losers hang their heads in shame; infinite play produces neither winners nor losers, for the fun is in the play itself; the play exists for its own sake (‘0 √ + Signness … … If-1 [NonClosure]’);
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players of finite games must dedicate themselves to winning; if they win, the game comes to an end, and they go home the proud victors; infinite play involves players who play for the sheer enjoyment of playing; finite games are allonomous, needing governance and control from outside; infinite play is autonomous, self-contained, self-reflexive, self-sufficient, and self-perpetuating; world time, that is, chronometric, irreversible time regulates finite games; infinite play creates its own time, imaginary time, and since the boundary and horizon of infinite play is in incessant expansion as the play unfolds, the improvisational creativity within imaginary time is always becoming something other than what it was becoming; the codes and rules that govern finite games set limitations on the players’ freedom to improvise and create, for the play is closed; infinite play knows of no fixed ‘codes’ or ‘rules’; it creates perpetually alternating and deviating strategies – or perpetually variant ‘rules’ and ‘codes’ if you wish – as it goes along; these strategies are what they are for the moment, but they are always in the process of becoming something else becoming; rules of a finite game determine the nature of the outcome; rules – or better, flexible, always changing strategies – of infinite play are in the process of alteration in such a way that the play can have no definite outcome; engaging in finite games, the subject knows she is in a game, and that it’s only a game, even though she often takes it as seriously as she takes life itself; engaging in infinite play, the subject disregards any possible borders between play and non-play, play and life, for all that is in the process of becoming is play; finite games can be organized and played within infinite play (like the mid-portion sandwiched between the lower- and upper-portions of the Figure 6 lattice); hence infinite play has no problem with ‘codes’ and ‘rules’ within finite games; ‘codes’ and ‘rules’ can have their place in complementarity with infinite play; finite games are abstract; they construct life/death, rule/obey, authority/subservience, titled/untitled, power/submission, respect/ deference, value/worthlessness, conformity/resistance, and so on. Infinite play may allow for such bivalent clashes, but they must remain in their proper place, within finite games; finite games are theater, within borders, and with ‘rules’ and ‘roles’ for acting out the game; infinite play knows no such ‘roles’ and
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‘rules’, for it is life itself, with no borders within life, for a border cannot be set until death overtakes life; finite games of life are serious; infinite play of life is joyous. ‘Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of [Nietzchean] laughter. It is not laughter at others … It is laughter with others …’ (Carse 1987: 31); finite gamers strive to anticipate the future in order to maintain control, hence they are surprised when the unexpected occurs; infinite players expect the unexpected, hence they are not surprised that they are not surprised when they would otherwise be surprised, for they know surprise is necessary to keep the play going; surprise for finite gamers marks a failure of the past to determine an inevitable future; surprise for infinite players is recognition that the past is always changing and the future is never pre-determined.
In sum: Culture, […] is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture – anywhere and at any time. Because a society maintains careful temporal limits, it understands its past as destiny; that is, its course of history lies between a definitive beginning (the founders of a society are always especially memorialized) and a definitive ending […]. Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open […]. Society is a manifestation of power. It is theatrical, having established scripts […]. It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces […]. Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. (Carse 1987: 52–55) From within the lattice
Cultural deviation is not a return to the past. Deviation from conventions and norms continues what was begun in the past and remains unfinished – i.e. conformity and resistance, as described above. Societal conventions and norms themselves, on the other hand, demand that the past be repeated in the future. Society has all the seriousness of immortal necessity; culture responds with laughter in the face of unexpected possibilities. Society encourages and rewards the accumulation of abstractions; culture cultivates concrete living.
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If-1 Ic
Ob
Ra
Horizon Concrete, Strategy deviating
Ib
Rb
Ia
Oa
0
Finite games Concrete, rule driven
Infinite play
Possible possibilities giving rise to the play of musement
Figure 23. Complementary coalescence generalized.
While this culture-society distinction might appear as just another case of binary thinking, it is not, for just as play can allow for subtle hints of gaming as a subset, so also culture includes allusions to society; hence culture and society, like play and game, are complementarily coalescently interdependent, interrelated and interactive, rather than merely bivalently contradictory, as is illustrated through Figure 23. As suggested in the above synopsis of Carse’s work, the entirety of this lattice entails finite games at the midsection; these games, governed by rules, entail society, which would prefer to remain selfcontained, but it is not; it is contained within culture, and the boundary between society and culture is permeable. Infinite play, including the upper and lower portions of the figure, is, in contrast, the ultimate culture: strategies without fixity, everything always becoming something other than what it was becoming; strategies always in their process of off-the-cuff and on-the-fly improvisation, with the future veering off in one of a nonlinear, indeterminate number of possible directions. Within finite games, authoritarianism, dogmatism, imperialism, repression and oppression, can dominate. Linearity is the name of the game. Thus ‘alphabetic cultures’ whose societies are best qualified in terms of linear, sequential, reductionist and abstract thinking, aid and abet a patriarchal outlook. Consequently, cultures within societies that are dictated by strictly coded laws, often guided by monotheistic theology, customarily have the upper hand over cultures that place priority on nonlinearity, multiple perspectives, holistic mind-sets and concrete sensibilities (Goody 1977, 1986, 2000; Logan 1986; Shlain 1998). CEEOL copyright 2020
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Granted, ‘non-alphabetic cultures’ can and have been equally as war-like as alphabetic cultures. To mention merely one example, the Aztecs (Mexicas) of Mexico, having created ‘writing without words’, nevertheless organized a complex array of diverse cultures under the umbrella of a dominant military state.61 The Aztecs’ dominant image was that of game, rather than play. Thus they conquered; they forced other cultures into their social mold; many of those cultures conformed to Aztec society’s obsession with linear thinking and dominance through the permeable membrane, the boundary that would separate them. And those cultures lost, for the name of the societal game demands winning at whatever cost. Aztec society constructed boundaries, distinguishing features, dictating those born to dominate and those born to subservience. The subordinate cultures lost their processual flow toward an indefinite future whose horizon knew no clearly and distinctly delineable parameters. In Carse’s words, ‘where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon’ (Carse 1987: 69). The equation, in a nutshell, is this: Society linear, bivalent; Culture nonlinear, polyvalent. Society sets boundaries, and boundaries create contradiction, opposition, conflict, antagonism, bias, discrimination, ethnocentrism, racism. Culture, when at its best, dissolves boundaries; yet it allows for a permeable membrane between culture and society, giving rise to paradox. Society propagates fear of paradox; paradox must be eliminated at any cost; culture, joyously embracing paradox, becomes a candidate from the vantage point of society for derision, denigration, and discrimination. Society is on the surface; it places priority on closure. Culture is deep, in comparison; it allows for openness, and receding horizons. Horizons ideally have no beyond, no boundary. You can’t reach out and touch them, for there is no there, in the horizon; nor is there any then, but only now. This is to imply that there is perpetual incompleteness, and possible possibilities; contradictions and inconsistencies can have happy meeting grounds wherever and whenever. Where there are established boundaries, as in society, any and all contradictions and inconsistencies, and suggestions of incompleteness are categorically barred, and completeness is often assumed to be just around the corner. Speaking of incompleteness and inconsistency, it behooves us to entertain possible cultural implications regarding Kurt Gödel’s (1906–1978) incompleteness theorems revealed to the world in 1931. I write ‘possible cultural implications’ because when alluding to such implications one is venturing into controversial territory. But first, in order to prepare the terrain for a few 61
See Boone, Mignolo 1994; Gruzinski 1992; Leon-Portilla 1990; Mignolo 2000.
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outlining Gödel’s theorems, some words on the notion of playacting, as a complement to Sextus Empiricus’s skeptical posture and Nāgārjuna’s holding commitment in abeyance (see also the Appendix on ‘playacting’ within Wittgensteinian ‘forms of life’). It’s no game
Playacting is hardly a game – though it might contain game elements – for in the world of playacting, if you win you lose, and if you lose you win; that is to say, you both win and lose; that is to say, you neither win nor lose (Wilden 1987). So in the final analysis is it gratuitous play or is it a disguised game? Is it open or closed, spontaneity or rule following, infinite or finite? Playacting. It’s like that song of some decades in the past: I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I was looking back to see…n. There’s no boundary because there’s no completion; there’s no completion because there’s no boundary; in the absence of boundary, there’s a hint of inconsistency because there’s quasi-paradox; there’s quasi-paradox because there’s a hint of inconsistency. ‘I don’t (finalizingly) look back to see if you were…; you don’t (finalizingly) look back to see if I was…n’, or in other words, ‘I don’t (yet) see; you don’t (yet) see…’. It’s not genuine paradox of the ‘This sentence is false’ sort. It’s no more than quasi-paradox, because there’s a ‘you-me’ complementarity; genuine paradox must entail a full-blown contradiction entailing inconsistency, vicious circularity, and infinite regress. Playacting, when open, is quasi-paradoxical, but since it’s open, it’s virtuously rather than viciously circular. Years ago I heard the basketball phenomenon, Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, say in a TV interview: ‘We’re just playing around for the hell of it’. Russell played an intensively competitive game, and at the same time he was one of basketball’s most playfully creative players in his day; his play brought about changes of the rules of the game. Russell also once quipped: ‘It’s only a game’. Now at the outset that certainly appears as a misnomer. Nobody played the game with such gusto and concentration and such an obsession for winning. It was definitely a game for him. But more than a game, it was play: game within play, and vice versa (Russell 1991). In this sense, and in spite of my ongoing paraphrasing of Carse’s apparent play-game binary, in the final analysis, there’s no crisp border between them: like the presumed culture/society binary, the demarcating line between them leaks. It’s all paradoxical, or quasi-paradoxical, as you wish. At any rate, play and game, ‘just for the hell of it’, coupled with tight-lipped earnestness, improvisation, and at the same time a nose to the rules, entails openness, and yet, closure.
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That supreme fabricator of fictions, Jorge Luis Borges was playful. And he was also dead serious. He occasionally remarked that creating fictions was like controlled dreaming. Control is gaming; dreaming, like play, is for all intent and purposes spontaneous. Put the two together and you have apparent opposition and even inconsistency, vicious circularity, and infinite regress, or paradox, and at the same time you have infinite closurelessness, free-wheeling play. This is paradox (game) within quasi-paradox (play) (the Figure 23 lattice). The challenge, then
An undeniable fact about our lives is that, like play, we don’t and cannot know what will happen tomorrow, or for that matter, in the next moment. The unexpected awaits us at every turn. The future is a vast, unexplored temporal-spatial expansion. It perpetually recreates the mystery of learned ignorance regarding life, and the more we go on, the greater the mystery. Moreover, the unexpected throws us into the present. When the blinders of our unknowing fall, and we are in the present moment of awareness, that’s just what we have: the moment, the whole moment, and nothing but the moment. What to do with the moment? On the one hand, I would suggest that if we dwell, genuinely dwell, on the individual moment, we eventually enter into continuous surrender of our desire for gaming, giving up our expectations and our wish for control. We give up our safe cultural wrapping that has so comfortably endowed us with the secure sense that we are who we are. We are willing to concede that we can more or less know what might happen in the next moment and perhaps even in the next day, but we cannot know what will happen without a shadow of a doubt. On the other hand, if we are not inclined to make these concessions and continue smugly to think we are by and large privy to what will happen, do we not artificially crystallize the future and insulate ourselves against the unexpected? And if so, does this not at least create a more comfortable situation for us? Perhaps, but such security would be more detrimental than beneficial, because the unexpected is what awakens curiosity, wonderment, enchantment of the world, and puts us in a playful mood. If we take this playful mood to the extreme, we have what Peirce calls ‘pure play’, the ‘play of musement’. In Peirce’s words, if I may quote him at length: There is a certain agreeable occupation of mind which, from its having no distinctive name, I infer is not as commonly practiced as it deserves to be; for
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indulged in moderately […] it is refreshing enough more than to repay the expenditure. Because it involves no purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose, I have sometimes been half-inclined to call it reverie with some qualification; but for a frame of mind so antipodal to vacancy and dreaminess such a designation would be too excruciating a misfit. In fact, it is Pure Play. Now, Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of one’s powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation […]. I will call it “musement” on the whole […] If one who had determined to make trial of Musement as a favorite recreation were to ask me for advice, I should reply as follows: The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; […]. It begins passively enough with drinking in the impression […]. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give and take of communion between self and self. If one’s observations and reflections are allowed to specialize themselves too much, the Play will be converted into scientific study; and that cannot be pursued in odd half hours. (CP 6.458–59)
The musing mood challenges some of our most basic assumptions. It tells us that our intuitions, feelings, spontaneity, our delight in the ephemeral sensations of the moment, and our indifference to prestige, riches and power, are all of the nature of the muser. Thus Peirce counsels us: I should say, “Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.” It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments. (CP 6.461)
For sure, those who have a penchant for the play of musement in this day and age are swimming against the current, at odds with the standard norms. Even so, recently there have been few serious studies in psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and literary and cultural studies on musement solely for the sake of contemplating oneself and one’s place in the world (but see Sebeok 1981).62 Like Carse’s play, musement involves a state of pure indifference, with no particular purpose or end. It is a moment of purposeful purposelessness, mindless awareness, passive indeterminacy, all-embracing nothingness. It is, 62
I should mention at this juncture that the topic of musement and creativity had a bearing on previous work in merrell 2010, evolving out of inspiration from, among others, Csikszentmihalyi 1997, 2007; Gardner 1984; Michalko 2001; Pope 2005; Root-Bernstein, Root-Bernstein 1999; Rothenberg 1990; Sawyer 2006; Sternberg et al. 2004; Weisberg 2006; and West 1997.
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in the words of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), suspension between zero and infinity. For Peirce it is the ‘lively exercise’ of detached contemplation, when there is neither affirmation nor denial, and at the same time there is both affirmation and denial. There’s everything and there’s nothing; there’s neither choice nor non-choice, only floating dreaminess. It is imagination entering into a make believe world that calls for playacting. Belief in the customary world is suspended, so there is no need for suspension of disbelief in the make believe world. Imagination oscillates between the play world and the customary world, between what there is and what there might otherwise be, between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’, ‘objectivism’ and ‘relativism’ (Raposa 1999: 89–102).63 The musing mind What are the implications of the muser’s now? First, she will have a totally different attitude toward work. She will not merely work; she will strive to get in tune with working, as act, action, or better, as acting process. Work is for her an ongoing process, a doing for the sake of doing rather than to be done with it, pick up the check or reap the rewards, gain power, fame and fortune, and realize success. If the doing isn’t meaningful in itself, she simply won’t engage in it. Second, the muser’s respect for the acting process is characteristic of the musing attitude. She will cultivate a plant, for example, but cultivating it is meaningful in itself; it is ennobling regarding the very process of acting, which is like playing, or playacting. While creating complementation between herself and the plant-becoming, she is in the process of herself-becoming (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). She is becoming nature and nature is becoming her. She is completing the playacting when she ingests the plant, literally becoming it at the same time that it is becoming her. This playacting is of the nature of the musing process. When she is musing, she is nature-becoming and nature is herself-becoming. The same can be said of her cultivating and her playacting. Third, she processually coalesces with her working, her playacting, and she has little regard for the product of her work. She entered into the process of playacting for the sake of that process itself, and not for what might come of it. There was no act as a means to some end. Her playacting was comparable to a dancer in the process of dance-becoming which is in the process of dancer-becoming, or comparable to a musician’s instrument-becoming 63
The notion of play, playacting and make-believe as put forth here and elsewhere in this essay also draws from Caillois 1961; Csikszentmihalyi, Bennett 1971; Combs 2000; Huizinga 1950; Nachmanovitch 1990; and Walton 1990.
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and the instrument’s and musician’s jazz-becoming at the same time that the jazz is musician-becoming and instrument-becoming – recall David Sudnow. This is to say that she forgets herself, loses herself in her playacting: she is selflessness-becoming. Becoming is what becoming is becoming, and the self is what selfing is becoming. This is not to say that there is no consciousness. The muser is conscious, for sure, but her consciousness is processual: she’s in the process of consciousing-selfing. She’s like the total process of a Japanese tea ceremony, where each act is an organic part of the whole process. In sum, the muser’s play activity is neither selfish nor utilitarian nor the product of mindless rule following. She acts under neither compulsion nor obligation. She is driven neither by the desire for immediate rewards nor for power and notoriety. So what motivates her? A desire, from deep within, to go where she’s never before gone, where perhaps few before her have gone. Thus musing play involves multiple levels of pluralistic playacting with the appropriate modes – within perpetually changing contexts – of a suspension and unsuspension of belief and disbelief, as suggested above, and by way of whatever is emerging from the Included-Middle, with a nod to Nāgārjuna. How can this process be accounted for more transparently? Perhaps by revisiting focal and subsidiary, vagueness and generality, incompleteness and inconsistency, characteristic of Peircean signs, and also interrelated, I would suggest, with Kurt Gödel’s masterful but earthshaking incompleteness theorems.64 So…
64
I’ve been trying to develop this topic for over a decade, perhaps with a modicum of success – at least I would like to think so – in merrell 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2010.
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Chapter Fifteen. Playacting, from a different point of view
Chapter Fifteen
Playacting, from a different point of view Chapter Fifteen. Playacting, from a different point of view From a semiotic point of view, the implications of Kurt Gödel’s proof can in a roundabout way be construed as suggesting freedom and limitations within everyday living, from concrete experience and pragmatic everyday coming and going to invariably incomplete knowing and the formal affairs of science, logic, and mathematics. Brief discussion of the relevance of these implications to certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought leaves us with a note of vagueness, ambiguity, and indefinite closure, especially given Wittgenstein’s criticism of Gödel’s theorems. But after all, this is to be expected, since the very ideas of incompleteness, inconsistency, contradictory complementary coalescence, and the undesirability of closure, have been proposed throughout this essay, as the final two chapters will bear out further.
Attempting to render the terminology a bit more specific
Gödel’s proof makes a statement – devastating according to some observers, liberating to others – about formal systems. The logical-mathematical tradition had it until 1931, when Gödel wrote his proof, that viable axioms must be indubitably true. They are the founding propositions upon which mathematics proceeds, edifying increasingly complex and expansive formal edifices. An axiomatic system begins with a set of undefined and presumably undeniable terms making up the founding propositions and rules for deriving new propositions, and the formal edifice is constructed, brick by brick, onward and upward. As this system grows, ideally (1) it becomes tantamount to a compact description of the bricks used in constructing the edifice, the propositions, such that the entire construction can be compressed into a blueprint, which unfolds as construction of the edifice proceeds; and (2) given the abstract nature of the system, what has been constructed specifies, according to the founding axioms and initial set of rules for combining successive series of propositions, what can be constructed in the future.
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In principle, everything is all there, as that which has been unfolded, and that which remains to be unfolded. For a down-to-earth example, an axiomatic system describing kinship would begin with the founding proposition ‘Let there be two parents, one of each sex’, and a rule, ‘Two parents will engender either male or female children’. An axiomatic system is ideally consistent and complete. It says all it needs to say regarding construction of the formal edifice, and it should not engender propositions that contradict one another. However, in today’s concrete everyday situations, genderly speaking, there is obviously a problem with this example: it reveals the rift between concrete living and the capacity of formal systems to account for it – and which mathematics as a formal system up to 1931 ignored. With this in mind, and before discussing Gödel, I must make a very emphatic disclaimer: I by no means wish to use Gödel’s proof to validate, verify, legitimize, or otherwise give some sort of formal and respectable theoretical credence, to the topic I am in the process of displaying in this essay. What I do wish to suggest is that, as I have intimated often in many of my previous writings, the implications of Gödel’s theorems: (1) have a bearing on much of Peirce’s concept of the sign, his papers on mathematics, logic, and science, and his philosophy in general; (2) can aid us in understanding our place as signs among all signs; and (3) can give us insight with respect to the limitations as well as the openness of human thought. In brief, Gödel’s ground-shaking proof tells us that: (1) a formal system of the richness of number theory cannot avoid some statement, somewhere, that cannot be proved either true or false (this suggests the first incompleteness theorem of the proof); and (2) the consistency of the formal system cannot be proved from within the system (this suggests the second incompleteness theorem of the proof) (Gödel 1962). In a cryptic way of putting it, if the system is deemed complete, there must be an inconsistency somewhere that cannot be resolved within the system, hence it is incomplete; and if the system is deemed consistent, there cannot be any proof of its consistency within the system: it is likewise incomplete. I should mention at the outset that in place of incompleteness and inconsistency, Peirce uses the terms generality and vagueness: no general sign (or sentence, as it were) can be so general that the nature of its generality cannot be extended a bit further (the generality is incomplete; it inevitably bears a tinge of vagueness), and no vague (ambiguous or bivalently logically inconsistent) sign (or sentence) can be made so non-vague (as a generality) that it is absolutely devoid of vagueness, and as such it also remains incomplete (CP 5.447–50; Hardwick 1977: 81–82).
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In a further attempt to put this tenderly sophisticated issue, Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem tells us that any adequately rich and consistent account of a formal system must leave out at least a bit of itself, for it is incapable of encompassing the whole of itself and at the same time express what it, itself, is, or is not. In informal language this is somewhat comparable to a sentence saying of itself ‘I am not provable’. If it is true, then it isn’t provable, in which case there’s no knowing whether it is true or false. So the sentence is incomplete insofar as it can’t give any validly truthful account of itself. The sentence cannot but manifest underdetermination (according to Peirce any and all generalities are to an extent underdetermined) since, within some alternate timespace context, some further specification of the sentence can be forthcoming – which is what I did in making judgment about the sentence’s validity – hence the sentence’s determination was incomplete. The second incompleteness theorem tells us that no adequately rich and consistent formal system can prove itself to be absolutely self-consistent. The sentence is self-referential, self-contradictory, and it entails an infinite regress, since, if provable, it is false, and if not provable, its truth cannot be known, but if its truth cannot be known, then it is not provable, but if not provable, then it must be true, and so on. Thus, the sentence cannot help remaining overdetermined (according to Peirce any and all vague signs are to a greater or lesser extent overdetermined; they present an indefinite number of possible meanings), since it embraces at least a pair of inconsistent statements or an inconsistent self-referring statement. Morris Kline (1980: 320) writes in this vein that mathematics is by no means ‘free from contradiction; non-contradiction appears as a goal to be achieved, not as a God-given quality that has been granted to us once and for all’. A different take Here’s another slant on the issue: Bertrand Russell’s set theoretical paradox. There are virtually uncountable ways to fill the empty set: the class of all socks, stars, swans, soccer players, and so on. Is the set of all sets a member of itself? Many sets are obviously not members of themselves. The set of all maps is not a map, the set of all women is not a woman (recall the words on Russell in Chapter Five). What about the set of all sets that are not members of themselves? Is it a set of itself? If we say it is, it would contain itself, but it can’t, so it shouldn’t really be considered the set of all sets. If we say it isn’t, then as the set of all sets, it should be a member of itself. Russell turned the abstract notion of sets into a concrete puzzle: the Barber of Seville. The barber shaves every man in town who doesn’t shave himself. Does he shave himself? If he does, he can’t;
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if he doesn’t, then he must. Thus, one of the most basic ideas in mathematics, set theory, winds up in contradiction. Formally, that is, or abstractly, if you wish. In one way or another formal abstractions bear on the idea of infinity, either explicitly or implicitly. In contrast to such formalities, concrete experience lives in finitude. Zeno’s paradoxes of motion imply space cut up into an infinite number of infinitesimal increments. So, if we start walking from one side of a basketball court to the other, we’ll never reach it, because before we get there we have to cross an infinity of spatial segments. As far as concrete experience goes, there’s no problem: we simply walk from one side to the other as easily as can be. Another example. ‘All swans are white’ might have once carried the assumption that throughout all eternity, the statement would hold. But eternity embraces infinity. In our concrete world the statement, like all generalities, can prove to have been incomplete. ‘All swans’ in our finite world might give us a comfortable sense of order and completeness; ‘All swans’ in an unlimited, and chaotic, world, stands a good chance of hitting us up with a surprise at some unexpected bend in the stream, revealing the assumption’s incompleteness. Our orderly finitude is no more than a minuscule island within an overriding, inordinately vague sea of chaos, which carries an unforeseen and unimaginable number of inconsistencies. Or as Heinz Pagels (1988: 71) puts it, the universe ‘is a roll of dice, but they are slightly loaded, producing small strings of order’. Within the inordinately vague and unlimited range of possible possibilities, both poles of a contradiction can make congenial bedfellows; both horns of a dilemma can live together quite comfortably: overdetermination. This range is timeless; or, so to speak, its time is formal, logical, imaginary. Within our temporal, concrete, and finite world of generalities, a statement can be deemed ‘true’ within one timespace context, and then it can be deemed ‘false’ within another one. Thus from a broader view it has, timelessly speaking, demonstrated itself to be neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’, because the timeless range of possible possibilities has revealed itself through the Included-Middle, the third space, the middle way, to bring about the emergence of something new: underdetermination. To repeat myself for emphasis once again, in the Peircean sense the meaning of no sign can be so complete, within its given timespace context, that it can’t be completed a bit further within some other timespace context such that it can be more reliably known – thus revealing the sign’s underdetermined nature. And the meaning of no sign can be so non-vague and consistent, within its timespace context, that there could be absolutely no tinge of vagueness and inconsistency – thus revealing the sign’s overdetermined nature. The generality
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of any and all signs cannot be devoid of vagueness, hence their generality will have been proved incomplete; and the vagueness of any and all signs cannot be entirely free of some element of generality, which potentially reveals the inconsistency concealed within their vagueness. Evoking my discussion of the previous chapter, the arena of linear, bivalently determined finite games is terminal, for within gaming, the goal is to end with a winner and a loser. But not for the player. She keeps her play open. In this sense she exemplifies Figure 23. The emergence of what is in the process of becoming, from ‘0’ upward, is overdetermined, and it liberally allows for what might otherwise be considered inconsistent, given the range of all possible possibilities within ‘0’, or emptiness. Thus the player is always moving away along nonlinear tangents toward the receding horizon, mindful that whatever there is, within her present timespace context, is susceptible to adjustment and change, given its underdetermined and perpetually incomplete nature. What bearing does this have on Gödel’s proof? A few more words on the proof are in order before addressing this question. Outlining the argument How, in simple terms, does Gödel construct his proof? Well, it ain’t simple at all, to put the matter bluntly. A description of Gödel’s method and his final proof severely taxes the non-mathematical mind – I bear personal witness to my despair upon attempting to follow Gödel’s mind-boggling enterprise. For the purpose of this essay, I will attempt to present the essentials, with appreciation to Feferman et al. 2010; Goldstein 2005, Hintikka 2000; Hofstadter 1979; Nagel, Newman 1958; and Wang 1990. Gödel replaces the propositions of an axiomatic system by a different string of symbols (from a ‘metalanguage’, so to speak). If we represent ‘0’ by ‘’, ‘1’ by ‘a’, ‘2’ by ‘b’, ‘+’ by ‘’, ‘−’ by ‘’, ‘=’ by ‘’, ‘(‘ by ‘/’, and ‘)’ by ‘\’, then what might be called the ‘Gödel number’ could be ‘1 + 1 = 2’, the alternate string of symbols for which would be ‘aab’. We can now write specific propositions about the propositions in the axiomatic system. We can also write self-referential propositions, that is, propositions that include the ‘Gödel number’. For example, we could rewrite ‘2 – (1 + 1 = 2) = 0’ as ‘b/ aab\’. To make a long story short – the details of which are as I wrote mindnumbing in their complexity and admittedly they exhausted my feeble capacities to the limit – Gödel showed, by means of his creating a string of self-referring symbols ‘talking to themselves’, that for any and all axiomatic systems, there is either an inconsistent proposition somewhere, or if all propositions
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are considered consistent and undeniably true, then the system is incomplete; hence the truth of the set of propositions, from ‘inside’ that set, is undecidable. Such propositions that are undecidable are called ‘Gödel sentences’. If the system containing these propositions is inconsistent, it can be made consistent solely by some clarifying proposition, or ‘axiom’ as it were, from ‘outside’, which can be forthcoming by the system’s creator or by some knowledgeable reader. Which is to say that the system was incomplete, and now, it has presumably been rendered complete However, now, the revised system’s completeness cannot be determined without a shadow of a doubt short of some further addition from ‘outside’. So if you win, you lose, and if you lose, in the best of all possible worlds you don’t know you lost, consequently, you can smugly assume you won. Thus any and all self-contained, self-referential, presumably self-sufficient formal systems are either inconsistent or incomplete, or in the worst of all worlds, they may be both inconsistent and incomplete. ‘This sentence is false’, rather than ‘I am not provable’, is the common natural language example often put forth as illustrative of Gödel’s argument – after all, it’s considerably easier to handle. If the sentence is true, it is false, and vice versa; hence an answer is undecidable, and hence it is incomplete. To say, from ‘outside’, ‘The sentence “This sentence is false” is false’, doesn’t adequately solve the problem, for, the sentence ‘The sentence … is false’ framing the sentence ‘This sentence is false’ tells us that the framed sentence is false, but if false, then it is true, and the framing sentence must be false, but if it is false, then…. Is it a boon or a bane? Gödel’s proof has inspired some observers to evoke a common but questionable conclusion: that it imposes limitations on human knowledge, as if all knowledge were a matter of linear, algorithmic, context-free, and classical bivalent logical principles. Where does this idea come from? Why, from undying faith in the idea that the whole of human knowledge can be reduced to an axiomatic system. Faith? If faith, then it lies ‘outside’ any and all axiomatic systems. If it lies ‘outside’, then it can presumably be, itself, both consistent and complete. If this is the case, then the limitations of Gödel’s proof are vanquished, and we are free! But our purported freedom comes from ‘outside’ the proof, and it is predicated on faith, so it is not axiomatic; hence it can’t be the product of linear, algorithmic, context-free, bivalent logical principles. Undying faith in knowledge as axiomatic is itself so inconsistent that it isn’t even funny. And that is the crux of the issue. What is funny, a joke for example, begins by conveying a set of assumptions (Davidson’s prior theory) that are linearly
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developed up to punch line, at which point the assumptions are trashed (by Davidson’s passing theory) and replaced by another set of assumptions, and the abrupt inversion provokes laughter over the surprise. To wit: A woman enters the pharmacy and asks if they have Viagra; the (male) druggist responds in the positive; the woman then asks ‘Can you get it over the counter?’, to which he responds ‘Only if I’ve taken at least two of them’. ‘Get it over’, given the assumed context, involves the possibility of purchasing the item in question; ‘get it over’, re-contextualized, is another matter entirely, which puts the druggist’s sexual accountability in question. Understanding the joke entails a pair of linear, algorithmic, relatively context-free, contradictory and mutually exclusive assumptions. Putting these mutually exclusive assumptions in the same bag entails nonlinear, context-dependent contradictory complementary coalescent awareness. And that’s the point. Human knowledge is more than a question of formal language, logic and mathematics. Howard Gardner, among a host of scholars, has argued vehemently and effectively for non-formal human knowledge for almost three decades. Another argument has it that Gödel’s proof tells us artificial intelligence is an impossible dream, because machines will never think, and, like humans, attain contradictory complementary coalescent awareness and selfawareness.65 Gödel’s proof is of ground-shaking importance in mathematical logic, the physical sciences, and perhaps the life sciences. Nevertheless, this doesn’t necessarily shake up the idea that human intelligence is multiple, including our basic five sensory channels of information plus proprioceptive, somatic and kinesthetic awareness, and intuitive and creative capacities as well as focal and subsidiary attention as described above, all of which, fortunately, is not jeopardized by Gödel’s results. Yet, there remain… Questionable ramifications Quite unfortunately, interpretations of Gödel’s proof in the social sciences and humanities extend far beyond the stringent formalities of mathematical logic to include such fuzzy issues as certainty and human knowledge, the nature of truth, and broad cultural values. Some postmodernists occasionally go so far as to induct Gödel in an effort to support their idea that whatever is taken to be objectively valid and true is no more than ‘socially constructed’, and that knowledge is no more than the product of social power struggles (but see Hacking 1999). Others, 65
See Gardner 1984, 1993a, 1993b, 1997, 1999. While I won’t enter into this heated debate, defense of the ‘Brain Computer’ argument, from two opposing directions, can be found in Dreyfus 1972, 1986, 1992; and Penrose 1989, 1994.
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from John Lucas (1964) during the 1960s to Roger Penrose (1994, 2005, Penrose et al. 2000) in recent decades, have argued that Gödel’s proof demonstrates that our brains cannot be described as if they were digital computers reduced to mechanical programs. Rebecca Goldstein points out that while the postmodernists take mathematics as just another socially constructed enterprise, Penrose and others take mathematical knowledge as completely viable – especially Penrose, who as a mathematician is an inveterate Platonist (Penrose 2005: 24–25).66 At any rate, one must wish to assert that for practical purposes there can be no proof that we know all we think we know or that all we know is all we need to know and hence what we know is viable, valid, and ‘true’, for all of we think we know can’t be formalized. To formalize all we know would take us outside all we know; to know whether what we know is viable, valid, and ‘true’ or not, we would need to know the boundary separating what is viable, valid, and ‘true’ from what is not; but to know that boundary we must know what lies beyond it, which is to say that we must go beyond all we know. This suggests the inevitable incompleteness of what we know, and from one vantage point it is why we can’t formally and rigorously prove it, though when we become aware that what we thought we knew is insufficient, we can hopefully ‘disprove’ it – or ‘falsify’ it, as Karl Popper would argue. In this manner we can at least push at the boundary separating what we think we know from what there is that we need to know in order to adjust what we know or replace some of it with something now deemed more viable, valid, and ‘true’. While this might give us the smug idea that our minds are capable of something lying beyond a machine’s capacity, it is nonetheless no iron-clad proof that we will always be superior to what machines might be capable of becoming in the future. Moreover, if we replace ‘think’ with ‘believe’ and talk about what we believe we know, we land in another quandary. How can we get ‘outside’ our beliefs in order to determine whether they are viable, valid or ‘true’? And how can we know whether our beliefs are reliable and rational? In order to believe, 66
It bears mentioning that postmodern scholars occasionally use Heisenberg, Einstein and Gödel, among others, to support their ideas regarding uncertainty, relativity and incompleteness: as far as uncertainty is concerned, they have a point, but then, Heisenberg was in the Copenhagen camp, which propagated the inevitable subjectivity and observation participation, while Einstein and Gödel never gave up the concept of an objective universe and objective knowledge. Thus we occasionally have proclamations the likes of ‘everything is relative’ (which is not the case, for that is by no means what Einstein meant), and ‘everything is socially constructed’ (which is comparable to formalist mathematics, but Gödel was against such formalism; he used the rules of formalism to demonstrate that formalism couldn’t be complete and consistent; in other words, he was a confirmed Platonist).
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we exercise a leap of faith, we unsuspend our disbelief and enter belief, and then we think we know what we know is viable, valid, and ‘true’. But is it really ‘true’, or better, is it reliable and rational? On what grounds do we take reliability and rationality when we attempt to answer this question? Why, we make a leap of faith in the very idea our society holds for reason. Reason is predicated on no lesser a leap of faith than any other belief. This is the tu quoque argument, mentioned above in passing. Thus we cannot confirm or disconfirm our beliefs or our belief in reason – our ‘styles of reasoning’ (Hacking 1985) – unless we push at the boundaries, and, once again, pushing at the boundaries entails our knowing where they are and what the boundaries are boundaries of and what lies beyond them. All this has to do with our limitations, and the perpetual incompleteness, and often also the inconsistency, of what we (think we) know. Faith? Believing? Thinking? Knowing? Reasoning? We are now a far cry from Gödel, it would seem. But not necessarily. Gödel has convinced mathematicians that their enterprise holds insoluble problems in store, so mathematics can’t be completely and consistently formalized. In William Barrett’s words, mathematicians ‘now know they can never reach rock bottom; in fact, there is no rock bottom, since mathematics has no self-subsistent reality independent of the human activity that mathematicians carry on’ (Barrett 1963: 39). Almost a half century ago, Barrett wrote about existentialism, but expressed himself much like a contemporary postmodernist. If he wrote of mathematics having no self-subsistent reality independent of human activity, he wasn’t writing of Gödel the incorrigible Platonist (Kleene 1976; Parsons 1995). His allusion to the lack of any mathematical ‘rock bottom’ was addressed to the contemporary ‘loss of mathematical certainty’ (Kline 1980). In other words, he was writing, ‘existentially’, of the loss of faith, belief, thinking, knowing, and reasoning. He was also writing like Wittgenstein when he alluded to the absence of any ‘rock bottom’, involving subjective and intersubjective human thought and interdependent, interrelated interaction in addition to formal principles. Gödel, and Wittgenstein Wittgenstein held the idea that our concepts are shaped by the nature of our human condition, they cannot be justified but must simply be accepted. Ultimately, something must be accepted as a ground, a basis, a fundamental, beyond which inquiry cannot go. According to Wittgenstein, such givens are not the truths that we predicate of our world or the concepts we use to express them or the language games that shape their grammar, but the conditions that produce all of these – the
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basic ‘forms of life’. ‘What has to be accepted, the given is … forms of life’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §226). We cannot explain our ‘form of life’ and give reasons to justify its particular form. All we can do is accept that this is the way we do things as human beings. ‘Here one can only describe and say: this is what human life is like’ (Wittgenstein 1979: 63). Certain things are simply done; we simply act in such and such ways. To repeat Wittgenstein’s words: ‘I have exhausted the justification I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say, “this is simply what I do”’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §217). The danger, I believe, is one of giving some sort of justification regarding our procedure, where there is no such thing as a justification, so we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do it (Wittgenstein 1956: §74). Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ involve a note of ineffability: what we do while participating with others within our socio-cultural world we do, and that’s it. We can’t be aware of the totality of what we do when we do it; our doing can be no more than incompletely available to our awareness and that of which we are aware can be no more than incompletely described. So much for Wittgenstein’s informal, tacitly embraced ‘forms of life’. Regarding formal systems, Gödel of course offers his two incompleteness theorems. At least he and Wittgenstein have the notion of incompleteness in common, even if along other lines they are on a collision course with each other. In both Gödel and Wittgenstein, incompleteness, inconsistency and paradox are at issue, though not in the same way. Wittgenstein tells us we should take them with a grain of salt, cope as best we can regarding whatever comes up, and we shouldn’t meet with insurmountable problems – the product of his philosophical therapeutics. Gödel tells us that inconsistencies – and paradox perhaps we can surmise – are by and large unavoidable. They are unavoidable within the ethereal realm of formal systems; yet, within those systems, completeness is seriously compromised. But Gödel was never prone to offering advice regarding inconsistencies and paradox confronting us in our everyday living within our respective form of life. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s counsel would not be amiss in this respect. He held that completeness – that is, final articulation of our world-version and our coming and going within that world – is out of the question; so we should let go of our obsession with completeness and consistency and get on with concrete living. If we include Einstein’s (1949: 5) observation that the universe is like a ‘great, eternal riddle’, we could contemplate the idea that the world itself is paradoxical, especially if the Bohr Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory enters into the equation. Gödel and Wittgenstein; Einstein and Bohr. Charismatic Wittgenstein always put on a show, constantly playacting for his audience (Malcolm 1958).
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Gödel, strangely sober, somber, and gravely serious, with hardly any sense of irony or ambiguity in human relations, was just the opposite: there was virtually no playacting; yet he created the consummate expression of logico-mathematical ironies, ambiguities, and paradox (Dawson 2005). Bohr, assuming a paradoxical universe is all we have, was at his best when surrounded with colleagues against which he could bounce off his ideas (Purvis et al. 2004). Einstein, after failing in his effort to dislodge the Copenhagen interpretation, spent the remainder of his years in solitude at Princeton, often in the company of Gödel – the consummate odd-couple? (Yourgrau 2006). Einstein certainly had a penchant for irony, but Bohr’s irony went more deeply into philosophical problems, particularly that of complementarity (Manjit 2010). Playacting: tacit incompleteness and inconsistency
After this brief summary, the task at hand involves the idea of Gödel – and to an extent Wittgenstein, Bohr and Einstein – creating a situation that in formal systems is comparable to playacting in ordinary language and everyday living. In doing so, I will focus on Rebecca Goldstein’s allusion to Gödel’s theorems as speaking ‘from both inside and outside mathematics’ (2005: 26). Regarding formal systems, Gödel’s proof was a monumental accomplishment the likes of which the world has rarely seen. The mechanics involved in the proof is mind-boggling; yet, regarding playacting in ordinary language and everyday living, the operation can seem as natural as can be (recall Carse on play and game). Goldstein observes that ‘Gödel numbering allows some propositions to engage in an interesting sort of double-speak, saying something arithmetical and also commenting on their own situation within the formal system, saying whether they’re provable’ (Goldstein 2005: 176). The Gödelian theorems’ ‘double-speak’ is comparable to a staged drama presenting actors as characters, ‘with their own “real-life” relationships, and then presents these characters as actors in a play within a play’ (Goldstein 2005: 176). In his small book on Gödel, Jaakko Hintikka provides an analogy for understanding this ‘double-speak’. Perhaps it can help us get a handle on Gödel’s proof that as a purely formal technique appears understandable but the strategy of which taxes the mind with a vengeance. The Gödel technique, Hintikka writes, can be articulated in a more commonsensical way: it is like playacting: The actors have their normal life outside the play, but they also have a role in the tragedy or perhaps the farce in question. As a consequence, what one of
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them says can typically be taken in two different ways, either as it would be understood in his or her everyday life outside the play or else as a line in the play. Likewise, [in Gödel’s proof] one and the same arithmetical proposition can now be taken in two different ways, either as a proposition about numbers in their everyday life as numbers, or as a statement about the formulas that these same numbers represent when they play different characters in their Gödelian play. In neither case, neither in a stage play nor in a metamathematician’s skit, need there be any real danger of confusion. Indeed, understanding the technique of Gödel numbering thus need not cause any greater difficulties than understanding playacting. (Hintikka 2000: 31–32)67
Playacting. Indeed. This notion entails open, infinite play (including musement), rather than closed, finite, rule driven, competitive, cut-throat games. It entails the play of signs and of life on the world’s stage. Whether viewing a staged play or trying to make headway regarding Gödel’s technique, we must ‘suspend our realistic attitude’ in the play that is in the process of unfolding, taking the playacting or the numbers in terms of their imaginary role ‘as if they were acting an artificial role’ in a Shakespeare play or in a logician’s ‘play’. That is to say, we must both ‘suspend and unsuspend our disbelief ’, construing the play as life itself and at the same time as a play, as an imaginary construct, and in the Gödel sense do the same with the numbers. We must keep everyday living and the imaginary construct together so that we may be able to muse over and contemplate them both. But, like the famed particle-wave problem in quantum theory, we can’t in principle have both of them in mind at the same instant, though we can oscillate back and forth between them in order that we might avoid taking the play (or Gödel’s numbers) for the real thing. While this double entendre requires certain sophistication, Gödel numbering actually need not be any more perplexing than watching a play. We are always in the play
Regarding playacting further, Hintikka writes: [ J]ust as in the same way as in a play the actors and actresses normally speak the same language as they speak in ordinary life, with the same literal meanings and the same logic, just in the same way the same logic applies to arithmetical statements on either way of construing them. The same statements 67
On children’s learning playacting and engaging in playacting, which in ‘adult’ logically and rationally precise language would appear incoherent and even paradoxical, but within the parameters of this inquiry are germane, see Cohen 1987, and Paley 1987.
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are of course logically true no matter whether we are speaking of numbers or formulas. The difference in both cases is that this common language can be given two different interpretations, relative to two different classes of individuals (ordinary folk vs. characters in a drama or ordinary numbers vs. numbers as codifications of formulas). This implies that the same statements are logically true in the two cases, for it was seen that logical truths are precisely the truths that are independent of the interpretations of the language in question. (Hintikka 2000: 32)
Here’s a take on the playacting analogy. Just for kicks? Perhaps. To be taken seriously? Perhaps also. It’s entirely up to you. As for myself, I’m just playing around with a few possibilities. Suppose Sean Connery (SC) is making his first post-James Bond ( JB) movie by playing yet another James Bond type of role as Stan Katz (SK). He meets up with his counterpart, a spy from the customarily enemy nation intent on carrying out its imperialistic plan, who just happens to be a beautiful, sexy woman, Melody Bunn (MB). But our Secret Agent is not meeting with much success, since this enemy agent and her cohorts manage to outwit him at every turn. After Katz has met with yet another failed attempt to better his opponent, both in the spy game and in the game of sex, he remarks to his lovely rival: ‘If I were James Bond I’d have had you in bed a month ago’ (obviously, in this post-Bond movie, women are becoming wise to SK’s outmoded sexist tactics). This is Sean Connery speaking of himself as James Bond in the James Bond movie series and of himself as Stan Katz in this non-Bond movie. Sean Connery is who he is and he is a post-Bond actor alluding to himself as a Bond actor. This, of course, creates no insurmountable problem at all (especially if we evoke Davidson’s radical interpretation). We become privy to both JB’s and SK’s worlds through SC. The play within the play reveals ‘real-life’ interrelations. The revelation creates ‘doublespeak’ in ‘imaginary-life’ regarding JB and SK; they are the source of ‘double-speak’ that includes SC, in ‘real-life’. We make the connection, through SC and JB, within ‘real-life’ while we are suspending disbelief in the present SK situation and recalled JB situations in past movies, while at the same time we are suspending belief in order to bring ‘real-life’ SC into the equation, and we suspend judgment regarding SC as JB or as SK; in fact, we must suspend judgment, for the interrelations between them, while interdependent and interactive, for sure, they are also undecidable. SC is both JB and SK, and at the same time he is neither of them: an undecidable affair that can do no more than oscillate between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘is’ and ‘is not’. Gödel’s proof, like a play within a play, reveals the interrelations at one level and the other of the ‘double-speak’; it also reveals ‘real-life’
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SK x
x
y
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x y
JB Figure 24. Complementary coalescence specified.
mathematical-like interrelations. In our movie we have SK within one context, JB within another context, and both of them mediated by SC, who spans and mediates the two contexts, thus making way for the possibility of ‘double-speak’. A playacting equivalent of the ‘Gödel sentence’, ‘I am not provable’, is found in SC, who can be either JB or SK, but when including ‘double-speak’ within all levels, he is both JB and SK and at the same time he is neither JB nor SK. This set of interdependent, interrelated interactions between levels and languages is like the Necker cube that offers the possibility of ‘face-up subjectivity’ or ‘face-down subjectivity’, both subjectivities entailing two possible ambiguous meanings of the cube, both of them either ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, and at the same time neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’ but both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. In Figure 24, we have a ‘zero point’ (‘nothingness’, ‘emptiness’) at the imaginary center of the cube as the ‘middle ground’, with agents JB and SK at the ‘outside’ points looking in. It is like a complex concoction of Davidson ‘triangles’, the combination of which creates multiple ambiguity – illustrating the incompleteness and inconsistency, from a strict bivalently logical point of view, of the ‘triangle’, at least from the Peircean perspective. In fact, the whole of Figure 24 offers an ambiguous ‘double-speak’ regarding the form. It is as if the ‘zero point’ engendered the space through the dotted diagonal lines, then it engenders the twelve lines creating the cube’s six planes, all of them now open to JB’s and SK’s gaze, oscillating from the two planes-as-faces – from Z1 to Z2 and back again – which is informally and metaphorically comparable to oscillations of the Gödel sentence as ‘provable/not-provable/provable/not-provable…n’. It is also like oscillations between the two SC characters, ‘JB/SK/JB/SK…n’, neither of which is CEEOL copyright 2020
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‘provable’ (made meaningful) in its own right, for it needs the other, and it needs the mediator to span the gap between them. Figure 25 depicts a setup along the lines of the curved-boundaried lattice in Figures 6, 14 and 23, but with angular boundaries in order to bring them into conformity with the Figure 24 cube for comparison. The initial representamen, R a, a Sean Connery image (SC1) on the silver screen, conjures up Oa, or JB1, the object-sign playing its customary role in one of Ian Fleming’s international spy thrillers. The blended, Figure 25. Complementary coalescence or contradictory complementary within the lattice. coalescent yield of the two sign components is Ia, or SJCB1, combining Connery and Bond. Stan Katz, Rb or SK1, evokes JB1, whose object-sign has now become Ob or SJCB2, which, in conjunction with SK1, enjoys mediation by way of Ib or JSBK1. The mediation of this three-way combination at the second tier of the lattice yields Ic or SJSBCK1, the resultant process, including the interdependent, interrelated interaction of all prior processes. Notice how SC1, SJCB1, SJCB2, SK1, JSBK1, and SJSBCK1 are blended much in the manner of Davidson’s malaprop, Goodman’s ‘Grue’, and other portmanteau processes brought up in this essay. This, I would suggest, is germane to the general semiotic process of signs becoming signs (merrell 1991b), of bodymind sign sensing (merrell 2003), of complementing socially constructed borders (merrell 2004), for sign entanglement, ourselves included as signs (merrell 2010), and of processing coalescently blended cultural meanings (merrell 2007, for blending see also merrell 1995, 2002) (I really should apologize for all the self-indulgence, but if you’re interested… you might take a look at the references). In this manner, JB and SC, SK and SC, and JB and SK, are all complementary, when one term in each pair of terms takes its place in the lattice along with the other terms. They are complementary, and they are playfully ‘Gödelian’ in the sense that, in concert, SC addresses himself to SK and JB, just as SK and JB address themselves to each other and to SC. Specifically within the lattice, SJCB1, upon mediating SC1 and JB1, becomes SJCB2 as the object
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of the SK1 sign, and, by mediation, it becomes JSBK1. And they all in turn mediatingly fuse with one another to become SJSBCK1. Of course SK could have said ‘Sean Connery’ instead of ‘James Bond’ when addressing himself to MB; if so, the characters in question would have taken alternate places in the lattices and the blended sign-components would have flowed along other streaming processes. Who is actually doing the addressing and who is the addressee depends on their positions within the lattice – or on the Figure 24 cube, as it were. In a manner of putting it, taking the whole of Figure 25 into account, ‘JB is SC’ is both true and false, and it is neither true nor false, for ‘JB is SC only insofar as he is taken as if he were SK’. The utterance, ‘JB is confronting MB’ is both true and false, and it is neither true nor false, for ‘SC is SC insofar as he is taken as if he were SK confronting MB’. Delightfully entertaining. There’s no irresolvable quandary that bends us out of shape at all, but an amusing twist of the sort we run into quite often. Coping with such twists is in principle as easy as walking from one side to the other of the basketball court, thus throwing a concrete-world monkey wrench in the works of Zeno’s tightly knit argument. Implications of the play Gödel’s proof at the outset was devastating to the minds of some mathematicians, while others reveled over the possibilities, revealed by the proof, for expanding the field of mathematics into indeterminately expanding horizons. In this respect, and in view of playacting and double-speak, we ordinarily take the likes of our ‘real-life’ JB-SK-SC complex as neither devastating nor infinitely expansive. It hardly creates any ‘double-bind’ at all; it puts us in no irresolvable quandary; it is no more complex nor is it any more perplexing than most of our everyday life puzzles we are able to resolve quite handily, and without further ado. As Wittgenstein occasionally observed, we learn to take such ‘real-life’ situations – their ambiguities, their inconsistencies, their paradox – in our stride. We are usually quite nimble at suspending disbelief, and we suspend belief when we need to, thanks to the possibilities that Nāgārjuna’s middle way and the ‘zero point’, offer us. We intermittently tend to become skeptical or believers, according to the situation and the timespace context; we take pleasure in the ironies before us; we gloat over what we take as our subtle interpretations; we learn how to use them in resolving our own ‘real-life’ situations; we cope, and more often than not we usually get along swimmingly. That is, unless we obsess over being absolutely right and never wrong, over ‘our way’ as the only way, over imaginary conspiracies and those who are out
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to get us, unless we have a penchant for mental closure, for constructing and nurturing a dogmatic mind. Indeed, Gödel is reported to once have said in a conversation: ‘The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other’ (Feigl 1969: 635). Gödel, reclusive, introverted, virtually uncommunicative except when in the company of a small circle of friends; Gödel, with hardly a sense of irony, intolerant of ambiguity, in quest of the ultimate Platonic ideal certainty in all things; Gödel, believer of conspiracies and in paranoid fear of those who he thought were out to get him. It is no wonder that he had trouble understanding how people could communicate using ordinary language; it is no wonder that he had trouble coping in the Wittgenstein sense. What are the consequences regarding everyday living?
Gödel’s proof suggests that the human mind is incapable of formulating absolutely all its mathematical intuitions. The mathematical mind has succeeded in formulating some of them, but a vast number of other possibly possible intuitions remain. This bears witness to the incompletability of mathematics, for infinitude resists capture in finite terms (the infinite richness of arithmetical truth is beyond the reach of any finite collection of arithmetical axioms). In our everyday world of communication, the meaning of an expression is a matter of how it is used. But this does not mean that meaning can be simply reduced to use, as the oversimplified interpretation of Wittgenstein goes. Rather, meaning permeates use. We manifest our understanding of expressions in our use of them. We communicate with others by shared access to one another’s use of them. There is nothing here to suggest that we should always be able to ‘pin down’ what an expression means. The implications of Gödel’s proof can help us understand something about meaning which is there to be acknowledged anyway, something that deserves to be called the ‘infinite variability’, of meaning. My point is this. The meaning of an expression has in principle virtually infinite possibilities woven into it. Any expression can be applied in indefinitely many ways, for indefinitely many purposes, and it can lead to indefinitely many effects, whether literally, metaphorically, poetically, analogically, precisely, roughly, or whatever. Nothing that we can describe in finite and non-question-begging terms is ever able to determine that virtually infinite potential. There is no legislating in advance for the possibilities of (creative) language-use that the infinitude of meaning affords. Such is the open-texturedness and versatility of meaning of all our signs, not just language.
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How, then, do people manage to grasp such loose and limber meaning? Davidson has one answer, Wittgenstein another one which at least to an extent merges with Davidson’s answer. At one point in Wittgenstein’s writing, he imagines an interlocutor suggesting that when he grasps what an expression means, then in a ‘queer way’ its future use is in some sense already present. Wittgenstein replies that of course it is, in some sense; the only thing wrong with what the interlocutor has said is that he has said it ‘in a queer way’. The ‘way’ may be ‘queer’, but whether we think ‘queer’ or simply interpret the signs before us while hardly thinking a whit about their ‘queerness’, we ordinarily just do it and ‘get away with it’. This beautifully captures the way in which we must stop finding mystery in what is in fact quite mundane. When somebody grasps the meaning of an expression, he simply – yet usually not so simply – comes to understand it. He does not, mysteriously, gain insight into the future, even though the meaning of the expression is displayed in its continued usage, including its often unpredictable future usage (Wittgenstein 1953: §195). Wittgenstein tells us in so many words that we do not learn meaning by seeing its full infinite potential being played out. That would be to say that we are privy to the entire range of possible possibilities, which, of course, lies beyond our finite grasp. What we see is always a minuscule portion of the possible possibilities by way of a paltry few mere possibilities. What we must try to do is understand our signs, and as we do so, our interpretations become part of the diverse timespace contexts within which we sense things; it becomes us, as we become our signs. We usually manage to take the Sean Connery movie in our stride, chuckle a little over the cute but rather expected twist, and continue on. There is no transcendental leap here, for everything’s within Sean Connery the actor, the actor in Bond movies, the actor in the post-Bond flick, and ourselves, within the context where we are, wherever that might be, whenever it might be.
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Chapter Sixteen
When the lattice includes itself Chapter Sixteen. When the lattice includes itself In this chapter the complementary coalescence of the lattice repeatedly under discussion enjoys more formal qualification than it has been endowed with thus far. Such qualification comes by way of ‘logical multiplication’ and ‘addition’ of the lattice’s terms according to a nonlinear, context dependent, complementary featured alteration of customary bivalent principles. This brings about interplay between ambiguity and complementarity to highlight semiotic uncertainty, thus illustrating the perils of holding dear to bivalent thinking. Wheeler’s variation of 20 Questions once again enters the mix, affording a sense of the incompleteness and/or inconsistency of our coming and going, our thinking, and our knowing – suggested by the lattice, that stretches upward and downward without end. Finally, a three-way Yin-Yang sort of image gives a sense of our self-perpetuating living within our culture world. The lattice
Consider Figure 26, as further qualification of the Figure 25 lattice. If we try a few ‘logical operations’ on the lattice, we soon discover that, as a whole package, its nonlinear, context dependent, complementarity-oriented nature manifests radical deviation from the bivalent Principles of Non-Contradiction – at the lower level – and the Excluded-Middle – at the upper portion. At the same time, the middle portion of the lattice holds to bivalence, quite conveniently, for us, since it offers a degree of soothing certainty. ‘Logical multiplication’
You’ve likely noticed that the lattice enjoys no direct, linear link between R a– Rb, Oa–Ob , R a–Ob , and Oa–Rb (Figure 26). This is to say that: (1) there is either some form of coalescence or no coalescence of these three components of the Peircean sign when considered from within different, complementary, perspectives; and (2) their combination – ‘logical multiplication’ – that is, what they have in common, following the arrows ‘downward’, approaches ‘0’. In other words, when combining a representamen (Ra) and the semiotic object (Oa) of the same triadic sign, the yield is ‘0’, because there
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If-1
Neither-Nor ... Nor ... Nor ... n, as likely alternatives
Ic
Ob
Ib
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Ra
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Either/Or according to the context (classical Either/or principles)
Both-And ... And ... And ... n, from the range of all possible possibilities
Figure 26. Complementary coalescent nonlinear context ‘logic’.
has not (yet) been any mediation; that is, there is not yet any interpretant (Ia) on the scene, and hence, semiotically speaking, they do not (yet) have anything in common. Multiplication, this is to say, takes the elements of the lattice along their possible pathways ‘downward’ until they meet, such meeting indicating the common semiotic features. For example: 1. R a x Oa = 0 2. Ib x R a = R a 3. Ob x Rb = Ia And so on (for more detail regarding the lattice’s ‘logic’, see merrell 1991a, 1995, 2007). Zero, as has been illustrated in this essay, is absent, purely speaking; yet it is always implicitly present, semiotically speaking. Many accounts have it that mystical experiences border on the implications of ‘0’, though it does not exactly dwell within it (Huxley 1945). At any rate, during what I have summarily qualified as everyday living, the lowermost point of Figure 26, ‘0’, remains inaccessible to our aware and self-aware experience. At this lower portion of the lattice, anguish and nail-biting regarding Non-Contradiction has waned. There is peaceful coexistence of virtually everything, including combinations that otherwise would – if they were to become actualized – ordinarily enter into conflict. But then, this is no problem, since they are no more than possible possibilities, that can be actualized within distinct timespace contexts, and need not effectively come into agonistic contact with one another. Thus, within ‘0’, both one and another of two ordinarily contradictory possible possibilities can get along quite congenially. The process of becoming, from the possibly possible to the merely possible to the actual at the middle portion of the lattice, obviously involves
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a minute temporal increment. This process of becoming, in time, puts us in this middle portion of the lattice, where a minute number of the possible possibilities have become actualized as either such-and-such or something else. However, the phrase ‘have become actualized’ by no means dictates that what has become is now fixed. Nothing is at a complete stand-still; nothing is unchanging; everything is always moving along, either ‘up’ or ‘down’ the lattice, metaphorically speaking. What has become actualized is now there and waiting for our sensing it, experiencing it, classifying it as such-and-such, and giving it an acknowledging nod that it is such-and-such because it manifests a certain set of culturally entrenched perceived and conceived properties – along with a few new characteristics, of course, since there is no enduring permanence. Properly classified as an object, act, or happening, it has now entered into the domain of bivalent logical and/or culturally conventional imperatives; it is, ephemerally speaking, an either/or affair. Here, what is, is taken for what it is, with no apparent possibility for the inclusion of something other than either what it is or that which is conventionally and customarily considered what it is not. But actually, when in the either/or mode, we are already in the past. That is, as soon as we become aware of what we have sensed and experienced as an object, act, or happening, and acknowledged that it is such-and-such, we are now consciously aware of it. But our becoming of awareness is time-bound, and once awareness has dawned, that of which we have been becoming aware is now that which was becoming something other than what it was becoming in the past moment. We, our conscious awareness of ourselves, other selves, and our world, is never in the ‘now’, within absolute presence. Derrida (1973) made us properly mindful of this limitation with his critique of ‘the philosophy of presence’. Take the quantum theory example – or quandary, as some would put it. A ‘wave amplitude’ is present, in interdependent interrelatedness with the range of all ‘wave’ possibilities. It can also be either in the process of becoming a particle by a virtually instantaneous ‘collapse’, or ‘decoherence’ of the ‘wave’ possibility, when it interacts with some other ‘collapsed’ entity, or it can continue enjoying its ‘wave’ character.68 In the event that there is interaction, it becomes a ‘particle’; in the event that there is no interaction, it remains a ‘wave amplitude’. This is an either/or, Yes or No, affair. If to the question ‘Has the “wave amplitude” collapsed’, the answer is ‘No!’, there has been no 68
The term ‘collapse’ with respect to what happens when a ‘wave amplitude’ becomes a ‘particle’ manifestation has been criticized, for there is nothing that can ‘collapse’ (Walker 2000). Some theorists prefer ‘decoherence’, since the ‘wave amplitude’ qualified as ‘coherence’ and its transition to a ‘particle-event’ comes about by ‘decoherence’ (Tegmark, Wheeler 2001).
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interaction. If the answer is ‘Yes!’, then there was interaction, and a ‘particle’ made its presence known. There is either a ‘wave amplitude’ or a ‘particle’, or putting it in another way, there can be now a ‘wave amplitude’, now a ‘particle’, but not both in the same instant (‘wave amplitude’ and ‘particle’ are complementary with one another). Allow me to place this example within our Figure 26 lattice before moving on. Quantum chromomorphology, semiotically and qualitatively speaking If ‘Green’ is the case of an ‘Emerald’ at R a (the sign), and if it is still the case at Rb, then there has been no appreciable semiotic – or rhetorical – switch, and entrenched imperatives can maintain their dominance over our perceptual mode. Thus we can confidently assume the assertion, ‘This Emerald, like all Emeralds, is “Green”’, is valid, yesterday, today, and into the future. But what if Rb by some peculiar switch happens to bring on ‘Blue’ in place of ‘Green’, at R a? Then the nature of ‘Green’ retroactively undergoes a degree of meaning change, for there is now another property, however odd, that has entered into competition with ‘Green’. Thus ‘Emeralds’ are no longer what they were, for we have become aware that, ‘This Emerald, strangely enough, is for that confused alien from another land what I would ordinarily label “Blue”’. Now, our consternation of Emerald properties has compelled us to look at Emeralds in a rather jaundiced manner, and this new take on Emeralds will continue on into the future insofar as we haven’t lost all memory of ‘Blue Emeralds, as that confused alien so experienced them’. ‘Green’ is no longer the only possibly possible qualification for ‘Emeralds’. There was from another bizarre possible possibility, ‘Blue’, within ‘0’, that impudently made itself manifest with the Grueworlders’ entry onto the stage of human perception and conception. In other words, logical ‘multiplication’ of R a (‘Green’) and Rb (‘Blue’) has taken ‘Emeralds’ along their most economical path ‘downward’, where they meet at ‘0’. There, both the one and the other, ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’, find themselves enjoying equal status as empty, unactualized possible possibilities. When the ‘Emerald’ in question is actualized, it has been qualified as either ‘Green’ or ‘Blue’, within different contexts, but not in the same context at the same time. Within some possible timespace context – that of the alien – apparently for some unexplainable reason ‘Blue’, a complementary possible possibility along with ‘Green’, was actualized, and at some unexpected point in time the ‘Emerald’ in question somehow became perceived and conceived as ‘Blue’ instead of ‘Green’ – that is, by way of the Grueworlders’ conception of emeralds as timelessly ‘Grue’.
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Of course our Grueworlders’ vocabulary contains the chromatic equivalent of ‘Grue’ as the color of all Emeralds – and perhaps the color of other ‘Green’ things as well – that we would in agreement take as ‘Green’ up to time t0, but thereafter, the color they attach to Emeralds is what for us would be ‘Blue’. ‘Logical multiplication’, in this sense, reveals how the Grueworlders can possibly bring about coalescence of what we would consider contradictory colors within the field of possible possibilities and interject them into their world without creating any contradiction at all, while for us it is just that. We, within the middle zone of the Figure 26 lattice, take ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’ as contradictory colors, and usually strive to prevent their coalescence at all cost regarding those things we attach ‘Green’ to and those things we attach ‘Blue’ to. The upshot would seem to be that there are no absolutely intractable contradictions over time, given the field of all possible possibilities, but thinking, within different timespace contexts, can possibly make them manifest. Now for… ‘Logical addition’
Moving ‘up’ the lattice involves ‘logical addition’. It entails a coalescent blending of two or more sign components by means of their following the most economical path ‘upward’ until they meet. For example: 1. R a + Oa = Ib 2. Ib + R a = Ib 3. Ob + Rb = Ic And so on. With respect to our chromomorphological ‘Emerald’ example, R a and Oa taken as ‘Green Emerald’ (Ia), is at the first level of the lattice’s mid-portion, while Rb, in interaction with Ob to yield ‘Blue Emerald’ (Ib), takes its place at the second level. ‘Green’ is the ordinarily entrenched, culturally customary and expected nature of all Emeralds, at least for us. But ‘Blue’ somehow intervened within a new timespace context to sludge up the works. This follows the path of interrelatedness, R a + Rb = Ic, thus yielding the Grueworlders strange interpretation, ‘Grue’. Now, it isn’t the case that ‘All Emeralds are “green”’, for, if we try to put ourselves in the Grueworlders’ place, it would nonetheless probably appear to us that ‘It appears that at least one Emerald, and perhaps many, are “blue”’, after time t0. So maybe we should prefer to assume that Emeralds can be either ‘Green’ or ‘Blue’, according to varying timespace contexts, but they can’t be both the one color and the other color at the same time within the same context. Now, it would seem that if we are to have a qualifying term for ‘All Emeralds’, it can be neither strictly ‘Green’
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nor ‘Blue’, but some alternate qualifier should be attached to them. ‘Why, it’s quite elementary, since all Emeralds are “Grue!”’, our Grueworlders patronizingly declare in unison. How could we deny them their moment in the spotlight. This gives the implication that at Ic there will have been neither ‘Green’ nor ‘Blue’, strictly speaking, but some other possibility must have been in the process of emerging. I write ‘will have been’, in the future conditional, in view of Wheeler’s thought-experience outlined above, appropriately endowing in us the character of co-participancy with our signs, with the signs of others – the Grueworlders’ – and with our world of becoming, wherein everything ‘will have been’ in the process of becoming something other than what it was becoming. Of course ‘An emerald is an emerald is an emerald’, when in the raw, in spite of how we might perceive and qualify it and in spite of what we might wish to think of it. An emerald became, is becoming, will have been becoming, such-and-such and so-and-so as a consequence of its interdependent, interrelated interaction with us and we with it. It is we, in collaboration with the emerald, who make it what it is becoming in our inner and outer social world and according to how we take our physical world-version. So, what is the alternate qualification of ‘Emerald’? ‘Grue!’ – at Ic, the third interpretation, as we reluctantly given a concessionary nod to the Grueworlders. A portmanteau word, capable semiotically of accounting for the becoming of something that would otherwise not have been becoming had ‘Green’ endured throughout the two tiers of the either/or portion of the lattice. In this manner, the second tier of the lattice can bring about, retroactively, an alteration of the first tier. There is a ‘delayed choice’, that is, a ‘delayed becoming of awareness’, after the fact of the initial process involving seeing and seeing as, when entering into the process of seeing that the object, act, or happening is so-and-so because of certain characteristics it evinced within its particular timespace context. It is in this manner that everything is always to a greater or lesser degree becoming other; from the present, to the present now past – what was – and to the future conditional – what will have been – which merges present and present past with future becoming. In short, ‘0’ is what is possibly possible. The middle portion of the lattice consists of life as we conveniently cut it up and classify it; it is what we do – much in the Wittgenstein sense. But the second tier of this middle portion entails the possibility that what was seen and seen as such-and-such and that it is so-and-so enters into the becoming of awareness of an alternate possibility that was up to that moment unimagined, unknown, and unacknowledged, which can retroactively affect the first tier such that it is becoming something
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other than what it was becoming. And the process goes on, entering Ic and then moving on toward the uppermost portion of the lattice, If-1, where interpretation of objects, acts, and happenings goes more or less according to customary, habituated, conventional and normal pathways, or if not, it undergoes a slight to radical variation, and a portmanteau-like process makes its play. (Arkady Plotnitsky [1994: 119–20], by the way, writes complementarity entails a different logic, a logic of ‘neither, nor’ or ‘either, or’ or ‘both, at once’. This is the ‘alternate logic’ of the lattice under discussion, I would submit.) Bivalent ‘Green/Blue’ can thus become neither ‘Green’ nor ‘Blue’ but something else: ‘Grue’. In Lewis Carroll’s ‘jabberwocky’ ‘Slimy/Lithy’ becomes ‘Slithy’; in everyday talk ‘Smoke/Fog’ becomes ‘Smog’, ‘cellophane’ is a combination of ‘cellulose’ and ‘diaphane’, ‘humongous’ combines ‘huge’ and ‘monstrous’, and ‘napalm’ is a blend of ‘naphthene’ and ‘palmitate’; language blends give us ‘Spanglish’, ‘Portunhol’, and ‘Frenglish’; in quantum theory ‘Wave/Particle’ becomes ‘Wavicle’ (at one time this was actually proposed, by the way); recent webspace has given us ‘Blog’ (web + log), and ‘Webisode’ (a TV show that can be viewed online). Obviously the possible possibilities are virtually unlimited. More on complementarity
At least two tiers in the mid portion of the diagram are necessary, since, from the quantum world through the vast array of levels of complexity culminating in our cultural world within which we live and breathe, ambiguity pervades. At the most basic level, Einstein always held true to ‘realism’, which included the commonsense assumption that a single model is sufficient to account for the physical world. Bohr argued tirelessly against Einstein that this is simply not the case: ‘reality’, from the quantum world up, is indelibly ambiguous, hence complementarity is the consequence. Heisenberg, most often siding with Bohr, generally convinced the scientific community that precise values of different aspects of ‘reality’ – specifically, position and momentum of subatomic particle-events – cannot be known simultaneously, so uncertainty inevitably prevails. Putting ambiguity, complementarity and uncertainty into one package, we are left with the idea that what we can know emerges from gut feeling, corporeal sensations, numinous experience, and intuitive insight, the yield of which affords the ethereal notion that what there is, is not what it is, yet it’s both, and it’s neither. This is a far cry from the bivalently functioning mind, entrenched in linear thinking, which customarily puts objects, acts, and happenings into either/or pigeon-holes. A problem arises when bivalent mind
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tries to express feeling, sensations, experience and intuition in dualistic language. How can this problem be solved? It can’t, clearly, distinctly and determinately in strict binary terms. But it can at least be in part solved, ambiguously, complementarily, and with a conceding nod to uncertainty. How so? By repeatedly tapping into the range of all possible possibilities in order to create new possible options and bring about their emergence as actuals. By co-participatingly keeping the process going by way of interdependently, interrelatedly, interactively engaging in operations metaphorically comparable to Wheeler’s 20 Questions variation. During this game, once an asker asks a question from the answerer, that asker has no control over the response: it will be either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Yes, I know. It’s a bivalent operation. But, after all, we are now in the mid section of the Figure 26 lattice, where classical logical principles can have their day. Another question surges into view. From the range of possible possibilities, two possible options emerge, a response is actualized, and then we know. But in the next step yet another problem bubbles up. The options that present themselves are not simply dependent on the present; they are interrelated with all past questions and responses, which must interact with the present options to bring about the creation of a response that will have been actualized at some future moment. The future conditional alters what had been co-participatingly created in the past, and it colors what is now being co-participatingly created in the present by implication of another future conditional – what will have been becoming. And so on. In this manner, future conditionals engender more future conditionals, creating an increasingly complex cultural world (world-version), such that uncertainty prevails, ambiguities become deemed worthy of tolerance, and apparent inconsistencies raise what would usually be called their ‘ugly heads’ – which are really not ugly at all, for they are essential to the very process that gave them birth. Not to worry, however. Given the nature of complementarity, and the inevitable incompleteness of any and all world-versions, other possibilities are always ready and waiting for their actualization into the light of day. There can be no effective line of demarcation between possible possibilities, mere possibilities, actuals, and their interdependent, interactive interrelating with what will have been becoming. Thus the nature of the lattice. Thus our world-versions, which are the outcome of all of us in interaction with our inner other selves, with other selves within our community, and with our physical world. This is not simply a consequence of logic, reason, discursive expression, and action, which have their place in the mid-portion of the lattice; it is also a consequence of feeling, sensation, experience, and intuition and contemplation.
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On a more modest note
I will be the first to concede that in this chapter I’ve presented the lattice as if it were a catch-all and explain-all diagram on no uncertain terms, fit for proper bivalent, linear thinking. This would be its interpretation from within the mid-portion of that selfsame diagram. But that isn’t the whole picture. There are the two extremes in Figure 26, which stretch out along that receding path ‘upward’ and ‘downward’, toward somewhere and somewhen. Ultimately, the uppermost portion engenders increasing differences that make finer and more subtle differences with the tendency to fuse into the continuum, curve, double back, and ultimately meet the lowermost portion of the diagram. Thus, admittedly, the diagram itself carries the implications of self-containment, self-reflectivity, and self-sufficiency. That would encompass the whole picture, which seems beyond the pale of our imagination, helplessly limited as we are within our world of tentative, consistently vague particulars, and incomplete and/or inconsistently skewed generalities. We humans are amazing creatures, for sure, but painfully limited. We are always somewhere around the middle portion of the lattice, with a few feelers slithering upward and a few others prodding around down below, while the whole remains far beyond us. Indeed, the lattice is no more than a model, and it must be taken in that vein. Yet, we would still like to think we’re masters Our creations, within the lattice so to speak, are not acts of replacing nothing with something, or of making patterns from chaos. There is no chaos, because the range of all possible possibilities remains inaccessible; all we can have is a few mere possibilities from which to make a choice. In other words, our creations can never yield cosmos – emerging from chaos – because that, once again, is the ultimate whole of all that possibly was, all that possibly is, and all that possibly will have been remaining inaccessible for us. What we have is a vast living world consisting of ourselves, others within our community, and the whole of our physical environment. Within this living world there is always novelty to be had. It’s once again like a joke. As we listen to it, possibilities arise (along the stream of passing theory) and we create an idea about what is happening and what will happen; then the punch line explosively reveals that our hypothesis (prior theory) was completely out of line and that we should have chosen an alternate path, a different frame of reference; and now we know, we’ve become privy to the surprise that satisfies, ending in a boisterous burst of guffaw.
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But the satisfaction doesn’t last. We want more, whether we are in a joke telling marathon over a few beers, at work and having to turn to the task at hand, at home where our daughter told us the joke and now we must interest her in her homework, or whatever. The process was punctuated by a joke, the joke telling was punctuated by a surprising switch, and life is punctuated by countless twists and turns, some provoking a yawn, some a mild change of mind or heart, and once in a great while some compelling us radically to alter our world-version. All within the lattice, so to speak. On the nature of the process Within the lattice, what comes up might be construed as the product of statistical probability, like a throw of dice. Figure 27 shows the utterly vague, uncertain, cloudy image, the background, against which the sta- Figure 27. Background = Possible possibilities tistical probability, or either/or (outside timespace). Foreground = Actuality actuality, has emerged, at least (probability, within time and space). for the moment. The customary belief is that product is the yield; and it is an unambiguous, precise and distinct product at that. There is no uncertainty, no room for doubt. What needs to be there is there, bivalently speaking. In contrast, Figure 28 suggests that creativity is the ongoing process of development into ephemeral manifestations, but with time they phase in and fade out. Feelings, sensations, experience, and thoughts are gradually shaped into a hard copy that is worked over and revised, and form begins appearing. It is now there, for all to behold. It might remain for future posterity, intermittently phasing in and out of the spotlight, or it might virtu- Figure 28. Background = Possible possibilities ally fade away, a distant cloud of (outside timespace). Foreground = Actuality forgetfulness, and subsequently (creative process, within timespace). a variation of it might be revived and find itself in the spotlight once again. In whichever case, it was, it is, and it will have been what it has been becoming: the creative process. Figure 28 contains the model of a three-way, or triadic and tri-colored, variation of the Yin-Yang symbol, which contains the traditional Yin-Yang
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image. The number three is commensurate with Peirce’s three categories, and the primary colors to boot, for from threeness come all possible colors – and, I am compelled to add, from the tripartite make up of Peirce’s concept of the sign, all possible signs can be engendered. The entire image, like YinYang itself, is in perpetual motion, always in the process of becoming. Process isn’t that bivalent, linear, cause-effect, incessant hell-bent-for-leather drive forward as evinced in the Figure 27 image; it involves coherent coupling through complementary coalescence along a tangential swerving, nonlinear pathway of becoming as in Figure 28. That is the way of all signs; that is the way of feeling and sensation and experience and thought; that is the way of the world, I would venture to suggest. The way is an invitation to improvise, to create. Its arena is the present. The past is past, and cannot be changed, though it lends itself to multiple interpretations. The future is unknown, because it arises out of present moments the only dependable notion about which is that they are always different than what they were: spontaneously surprising, freshly flowing into feeling, sensations, and experience. We cannot know in advance precisely what will have happened, nor can we know exactly the nature of the objects and acts that will have met our senses. The unexpected awaits us at every bend in the stream, with every breath. Thus the perpetually innovative, creative life is also a perpetual risk. It can pattern carefree play, but occasionally it can be frightening, which is not of the nature of play at all. It can be delightful freewheeling poetry, but it can be stringently demanding injunction. Nevertheless, every moment is unique, and more often than not music and dance, a sunset and an early opening crocus, a parable and a joke. In short, the lattice is not fixed, it’s flow; it is not product, it’s process; it is not a catch-all, it’s a cataract of effervescent, ebullient change; it offers no promise, but myriad possibilities; it does not establish rules chipped in granite, but suggests viable strategies. It is spontaneous creativity. It is life.
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Chapter Seventeen
Becoming: The way of all forms of life Chapter Seventeen. Becoming: The Way of all forms of life Further meditation on the Tetralemma by way of the Necker cube brings ambiguity to a screaming pitch of uncertainty, especially in light of complementarity and its implications. A few words on Borges’s ‘Aleph’ serve as illustration of the One-Many paradox behind any and all world-versions. Yet, upon reviving the theme from Chapters Eleven and Twelve, we, as human navigators within the universe’s becoming, and in spite of our better judgment, cannot but ‘objectivize’ as we go along. Notwithstanding our obsession with ‘objectivization’, the coveted subject/object barrier doesn’t exist: they are coalescently one. Consequently, what is left for the subject is musement, briefly discussed in Chapter Thirteen. The importance of interdependent, interrelated interaction comes through, full force. Schrödinger has some timely words in this regard, giving further support to the idea that everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. How can it become what it’s becoming?
In Chapter Eleven there was talk about the Necker cube as a mental construct with four characteristics: (1) It is what it is; (2) It is what it isn’t; (3) It is both what it is and what it isn’t; (4) It is neither what it is nor what it isn’t. Nāgārjuna, of course, offers the same sequence of affirmations and negations; then he goes on to affirm them all, and negate them all. The first four assertions are all embraced, since all the statements of the Tetralemma are necessary to give account of what something is, or better, what it isn’t, but is becoming. Yet, they must all be cancelled, precisely because they are, themselves, always changing. Cancelling them leaves pure emptiness. This pure emptiness (illustrated especially in Figures 5, 6, 14, 17, 23, 25 and 26) has no boundary, because there can be no boundary. If there were a boundary then there would be something against a background specifying what that something isn’t. Pure emptiness will have nothing to do with something and what it isn’t. Because just as there is no is, neither is there any isn’t. There is absolutely nothing, not even the very idea of what nothing is, because there is only pure emptiness.
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The Necker cube is a convenient metaphor with which to pattern this process and make it at least somewhat intelligible. But it is an all-too-convenient metaphor: it is by nature ambiguous. What about some unambiguous mental construct? Think of a tether ball connected to the top of a pole and ready for action. If we are walking toward it on an expanse of grass out of the context of children’s playgrounds, we might take it as some sort of pendulum. This initial construct has all the features of a disk. Its nature appears to be that of ‘flatness’. We continue walking toward it. The disk takes on a convex appearance as a three-dimensional object, not a two-dimensional circle. Second construct: it is a ball, a tether ball to be specific. The object is rarely construed as ambiguous: a ball is a ball, and if it’s tethered it’s tethered, nothing more, nothing less. Yet according to two different frames of reference, our mind fabricated two distinct, incompatible, mutually exclusive constructs within two different dimensionalities. So is it our mind that’s ambiguous? Are we all perceptually and culturally ‘schizophrenic’? – if I may put it in this manner. Or is it really us at all? Given Bohr’s complementarity, in the final analysis is it not that’s ‘schizophrenic’. If this is the case, and indeed, if we take the findings of contemporary physics seriously, then when we artificially place our digitalizing, abstracting, objectivizing, analyzing selves at a far remove from our world-version, we construct our world from frames of reference that take on different countenances according to varying perspectives (disk or tether ball). This world-version from our set of frames of reference is slightly to radically different from other world-versions in our own cultural in times past, and it will have been different in times future (to reiterate, it’s the Earth as center of the Universe, the Sun as center, and so on). And to boot, our world-version is slightly to radically different from world-versions in other cultures, past, present and future (the periodic table of the elements versus a collection of merely four elements, monogamy versus polygamy, Western medicine versus alternative medicine, and so on). ‘Schizophrenia’ becomes generalized to include the range of all possible possibilities that have become actualized wherever and whenever. Such is the yield of our obsessively constructing Western mind, having been the victim of a massive, totalizing exclusion from everything that is now ‘out there’, so that it can properly go about constructing a linearly conceived, logically, rationally and discursively articulated, rigorously abstracted, objectivizing world-version. We make it the object of our constructive mind, and we convince ourselves that it is simply what it is, and that’s that. After all, how could it be anything else? – at least so we would like to think.
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We must ask the question, however: ‘What, who, am I, such that I am apparently “here” and my world is “out there”? What is my world, such that it can be what it is in my absence, and what it is in the absence of all those other subjectivities in my community whose world-version is more or less coterminous with mine?’ We’re inside, and inside we must remain, so there is no God’s-eye view This situation might remind us of that remarkable tale by Borges, ‘The Aleph’ (1970), where Carlos Argentino Daneri has the opportunity to take a look at the entire universe, past, present and future, condensed into the golfball-size, blindingly luminous Aleph. At that moment Daneri is outside the Aleph, the universe, but if the Aleph is complete, it must contain Daneri. Daneri is inside, and he is not inside but outside, and in a manner of speaking he is both inside and outside; but this can’t be so; it must be the case that he is neither inside nor outside. But we should in unison say ‘All of the above’, and in the same breath ‘None of the above’: the Tetralemma in a different guise. The world, in conjunction with Daneri’s cosmic frame of reference, indeed appears ‘schizophrenic’. We have, once again, the paradox of One and Many. Daneri is One, and he is, at the moment of his gazing at the Aleph, which is One with the entire universe. And the universe is One, but it includes Daneri and everything else as well, so it is Many. Moreover, Daneri and the Aleph are always becoming something other than what they were becoming: they are Oneness becoming Manyness becoming Oneness, that is Manyness; but Oneness cannot reach the ultimate, the end of the line stretching out toward the infinite horizon; so there is never actually Oneness but mere Manyness; yet Manyness, however incomplete, is One. Daneri, presumably a premiere objectivizer, is in a quandary, whether he knows it or not and whether he likes it or not. And so are we, regarding our constructed world out there and our fellow constructors in our community helping us keep our world-version properly constructed. We are all interdependently, interrelatedly and interactively interconnected with each other, and we are all interdependently, interrelatedly and interactively interconnected with our world through our world-version. We are part of and within our world-version – and hence all our signs – but we would like to think we maintain ourselves apart from it – and from our signs. We are part of our community (and of our signs) but we would like to think we are individuals, masters of our own destiny and free to do what we damn please and nobody had better tell us otherwise.
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Objectivization
But the ‘I’ and all the individual ‘I’s’ within a human community? What, who, is this ‘I’? What, who, are these other ‘I’s? They are not merely the object of my gaze; I am not merely the object of their gaze. The condition is exceedingly more complex. We are subjects; we aren’t merely subjects but also objects; we are both subjects and objects; we are neither subjects nor objects – in the ordinary sense – but something other, also in the process of change. The space around me is the timespace of my objects; the space around others is the timespace of their objects; it is the same space and the same timespace objects; it is not the same space and the same timespace objects; it is neither the same space nor the same timespace objects, for the objects are in the process of becoming. They will and will not find me in this timespace context because I’m not merely a fixed object; I will and will not find them in this timespace context because they are not merely fixed objects. Yet, I am ‘objectivizing’ them, and in a manner of speaking they are reciprocally ‘objectivizing’ me. My mind constructs them, while my mind is elsewhere, as if it were an outside subject of the construct; they construct me, while their mind is elsewhere in the same sense. We exclude ourselves from the timespace contexts and objects in question, and they exclude themselves. We are all both excluded and included, and we are neither excluded nor included, for we are flowing along with the entire process of becoming. And now, they, as actors, are characters in a book, and I, as author and coparticipator, am a character in the same book, this book. I am interdependently, interrelatedly interacting with them and they with me. And, you, the reader, are most likely ‘objectivizing’ us, as characters, actors, and co-participators. But are we all not also ‘objectivizing’ you as an anonymous co-participant and actor? And at the same time are we not in the act of excluding ourselves from that which we are ‘objectivizing’? In other words, are we all not playacting? Me, my timespace contexts and the stuff I ‘objectivize’, they, their timespace contexts and the stuff they ‘objectivize’, and you, your timespace contexts and the stuff you ‘objectivize’, are all, when everything is said and done, One – whether we’re aware of it or not and whether we like it or not. This timespace and stuff, ‘objectivized’ within timespace, make up the world picture we’ve constructed, as if we, our minds, were outside, aloof, abstracted, as if we were contemplating the entire scene, ‘from a God’s-eye view, from nowhere’. But we are not ‘nowhere’, like Daneri of the ‘Aleph’, alone in some colorless, soundless, tasteless, odorless and intangible transworldly realm. We are One, with the Whole, we are in the Whole and it is in us; we are it and it is us. Indeed, is this the way of all signs? Including ourselves as signs?
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Objectivization, from Schrödinger’s view Schrödinger told us in Chapter Eleven that the mysterious barrier between subject and object hasn’t broken down as a result of quantum theory implications; it hasn’t broken down, for, simply put, it doesn’t exist. And yet, we persist, obsessed with the hoary idea of ‘objectivization’, fracturing and mutilating our world as we please so it will fit into our preconceived notions with the belief that we are maintaining our obstinate ego at a remove from our world such that we may hold to the idea that we enjoy a privileged ‘view from nowhere’. But we enjoy no such privileged view, for, to repeat Schrödinger’s words: ‘The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it’ (Schrödinger 1967: 138). I repeat for emphasis: the subject/object barrier doesn’t exist; it never existed and it will never exist. Its existence is a process of mind, mind creating a world-version that places undue priority on abstract linear, logical-rational, mechanistic discursive thinking. But this discursive thinking is not the whole story. The story actually combines discursive thinking with wonder, contemplation, moments when the mind doesn’t seem engaged at all, when it is wandering about without purpose or motive – purposeless yet utterly vague purpose, motivelessness liquidly embracing flowing, ephemeral moments.69 As we’ve noted, Peirce calls it ‘musement’, the mere beginning of the way of all signs, the topic to which I now briefly return. Just doing what we do
The future is not what it used to be; what we used to think of it. It is a vast, unexplored temporal-spatial expansion. It perpetually recreates the mystery of learned ignorance regarding our life, and the more we go on, the greater the mystery. Moreover, the unexpected perpetually throws us into 69
In this spirit a somewhat different take on ‘objectivization’ comes from Wheeler’s three umps. He who sees the calls ‘the way they is’ remains lodged in both empiricism and rationalism; he’s ‘out there’ looking ‘in’, and mind is doing the proper judging on virtually no uncertain terms. He for whom they are ‘the way I sees ‘em’ follows the lines of perspectivist construction, yet it remains ‘objectivist’ all the same. She for whom they are ‘nothing ‘till I calls ‘em’ relies on ‘consciousness’ in co-participation with the world, although Wheeler holds that ‘consciousness’ is no ‘cause’ of the world’s becoming, but that it is ‘co-participatory’. All told, bodymind creates and thus ‘objectives’ the world out of its own ‘bodymind stuff ’; but it could hardly cope with the world’s complexity and resorted to accomplishing the task by excluding itself from what is ‘out there’ – thus Daneri’s dilemma when gazing upon the ‘Aleph’.
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the present. When the blinders of our unknowing begin to fall, and we are in the present moment of awareness, that’s just what we have: the moment, the whole moment, and nothing but the moment. The moment of wonderment, re-enchantment of the world, puts us in a playful mood, as suggested in Chapter Fourteen. The musing mood. Musement flattens the hierarchical distinctions between mind and body, mind and physical world, private ego and community, language and all other communicative forms, and culture and nature. Musement is a multiply ambiguous concept. As self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-reflexive, it is its own purpose. It cannot be controlled or manipulated in order to gain something that is other than what it, itself, is. It is not a step toward something else; it has no other-oriented intentionality. It demands a sort of naïve innocence; it is a completely free act, unconditioned except by its own impulse. In a word, musement simply is; it is what it is. But jumping to the conclusion that the formula, ‘It is what it is’, entails hard-rock Identity is like the dog barking up the wrong tree. What the animal honing its hunting skills thinks there is up there, there isn’t. What is, is what it is in interdependent interrelationship with what it is not. Ultimately, it is all ‘emptiness’. However, like pure play or musement, there’s no telling what the future holds, so what is not in the next moment is becoming something other than what it was becoming to ephemerally take on the countenance of what is, and then in the next moment it will have passed into what it was not. Always somewhere, somewhen The muser slows this rush of time, often almost to a standstill. But since temporality can’t be simply stopped in its tracks, it folds back onto and into itself, and there is attunement solely in the now. Even when past and future are contemplated, interest remains absorbed in the present. Each moment is full in and of itself, and then in the blink of an eye it begets the next moment. Each moment is a crossing that contains the past because, having expired, it has re-emerged, and it contains the future because, although that future hasn’t yet dawned, it is ‘there’, as ‘0’, within the field of all possible possibilities. There is mutual interpenetration of past and future into present; hence the moment of the now is not the absence but the fullness of time. What are the implications of the muser’s now? The now is comparable to the dancer in the process of dance-becoming, which is in the process of dancer-becoming, or comparable to the musician’s instrument-becoming and the instrument’s and musician’s jazz-becoming at the same time that the jazz is musician-becoming and instrument-becoming. This is to say that the
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muser loses herself in play: she is selflessness-becoming. Becoming is what becoming is becoming, and the self is what selfing is becoming. This is not to say that there is no consciousness. The muser is conscious, for sure, but her consciousness is processual: she is in the process of selfing; she is selfingbecoming. The now is where the interaction is. It is the musing moment giving rise to the emergence of something spontaneous, and different, from the IncludedMiddle, somewhere, somewhen. When rules falter and fall Combining discursive thinking with wonder, contemplation, musement, reveals the futility of attempting to establish cultural rules with which to account for contextualized behavior, because contexts are incessantly changing, becoming something other, and they are the repositories of perpetual improvisation, through musing and playacting as described above, through assimilating and accommodating oneself to changing contexts, and through makeshift maneuvering on the spur of the moment with whatever happens to be at hand, in order to survive, in order to get on with it. Rules devised to govern all possible combinations of cultural objects, acts and happenings within everyday living contexts and situations stand nary a chance of remaining intact – we became aware of this in our Wittgensteinian discussions. Rather, as Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990) writes, we, as bodymind, are repositories of complex sets of interdependencies, interrelations and interactions – my terms used to paraphrase Bourdieu – within contexts, situations, and environments. We make our way through them focally and subsidiarily, through sedimented, entrenched ways and means (while processing ‘degenerate’ signs), as a consequence of our predispositions, presuppositions, proclivities and prejudices, and most importantly, by on-the-spot improvisation. Our agency lies in our improvisations, our creative responses, to whatever happens to be in the process of emerging. In this manner, we are always engaged in playacting in one way or another; we are always imagining ourselves caught up in the flow of some alternative rivulet such that we must respond in some manner other than what would otherwise have been our response. And what might otherwise be taken as rule-driven conduct wanes. Bakhtin (1981, 1990), as if in collaboration with Bourdieu – albeit more focally attendant to linguistic practices – tells us that we respond as we do in our attempt to make sense of the contextualized objects, acts and happenings that are emerging within our surroundings. We do so by improvising, using whatever resources might be at hand. Indeed, improvisation is the predominant form of our agency, our penchant and our capacity to interact with our
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own other, our social others, and with our physical world other (Holland et al. 1998). When improvising in this manner, we enter into the process of recasting ourselves in terms of these others; we see ourselves as other – our own other, some social other or others, our physical world other – as ‘outside ourselves’; we assume Bakhtin’s ‘outsidedness’ or ‘transgredience’ (Holquist 1990). Of course this ‘outsidedness’ can be no more than another barrier, provisionally and ephemerally separating what is outside from what remains inside, what is objective from what is subjective. It cannot be genuine ‘objectivizing’, but at least it is enacted in order to bring the self, the ego, into some form of playful yet serious, lively yet sober-faced, contradictory complementary coalescence through interdepending, interrelating and interacting with others (including their inner, social, and physical world). In other words, once again, we playact. We playact, much like Stan Katz imaginarily in the process of James Bond-becoming while at the same time both of them are Sean Connery-becoming while he is Stan Katz-becoming, all within situatedness-becoming within the dilemma presenting itself in the forming process of Melody Bunn-becoming. It is, if you will: ‘0 √ + (Interdependency of all possible Signs) Sign1 (Objectivizing-Interacting SC-SK Becoming) Sign2 (SK Subjectivizing MB-JB Interacting Interrelating Becoming) Sign3 (SC Subjectivizing JB-SK Interacting Interrelating Becoming) Sign4 (Objectivizing Becoming Subjectivizing Becoming, and Vice Versa)…n’.
We imagine ourselves playactingly as otherness in order to make ourselves over into someone who is becoming other than the person we were in the process of becoming; we imagine ourselves as One with the entire process, One but Many, Many but One. We are complementarily coalescently becoming along with the Many, which is One, but it’s Many. The flow: more than we can say
So, musement: outside abstract linear, logical-rational, mechanistic, discursive thinking. But, if I wish to remain faithful to the premises underlying this essay, I cannot propose an either/or distinction between discursive thinking and musement. They are interdependently, interrelatedly interactive; in concert, they reveal the Tetralemma’s assertion and negation; they suggest the very possibility of musement. Reformulating the lower and middle portions of Figures 6, 13, 14, 17, 23 and 26 might help (Figure 29). I begin with possible possibility as the zero CEEOL copyright 2020
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degree, or emptiness, as the fountainhead of all that is becoming; I write in gerunds, hopefully offering a sense of process; I complete the diagram with an arrow at the end of a broken line to suggest that the process is ongoing. Musing occurs within the open field of possibilities where both one option and another can have virtually an equal chance of bubbling up; experiencing takes place inside the closed doors of either/or imperatives (taxonomizing, according to how the world presumably is); and discoursing says what the world presumably is, often, and quite unfortunately, on no uncertain terms. The broken arrow phasing away toward somewhere and somewhen suggests future possible possibilizing when what is, becomes neither what it is nor what it was not supposed to be, for there is something else seeping up from the Included-Middle (and a ‘black swan’ happens to show up, throwing an aspect of the presumed world in turmoil). Gerunding what we would otherwise wish to conFigure 29. strue as a world of relatively fixed essences, or sub- Synthesizing stances, proudly in possession of an identity that is the process. theirs and theirs alone, throws, in conjunction with the previous figures, the heralded Principle of Identity for a loop. If Identity melts into the vast flow of becoming, contradiction and self-contradiction become tolerable, and even expected, somewhere along the flow. Establishing a modicum of stability in order to maintain a helpfully tenuous balance of all rivulets within the vast flow, there is acknowledgment of ever novel possibilities always tending to arise from the Included-Middle. Gerunding the process begins by dissolving Identity. Writing of the demise of Identity or Sameness in its most basic, Schrödinger (1951: 17) tells us that: The ultimate constituents of matter have no “sameness” at all. When you observe a particle of a certain type, say an electron, now and here, this is to be regarded in principle as an isolated event. Even if you do observe a similar particle a very short time later at a spot very near to the first, and even if you have every reason to assume a causal connection between the first and the second observation, there is no true unambiguous meaning in the assertion that it is the same particle you have observed in two cases. The circumstances may be such that they render it highly desirable and convenient to express oneself so, but it is only an abbreviation of speech; for there are other cases where the “sameness” becomes entirely meaningless; and there is no sharp boundary, no
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clear-cut distinction between them, there is a gradual transition over intermediate cases […]. It is not a question of our being able to ascertain the identity in some instances and not being able to do so in others. It is beyond doubt that the question of “sameness”, of identity, really and truly has no meaning.
The assumption that (1) causality is mind-driven, a construct and not necessarily any solid fact of nature; that (2) there is no unambiguous meaning for the idea of Identity; that (3) it is ‘highly desirable and convenient to express oneself ’ and one’s world-version as if it were the only self-contained, selfsufficient, self-identical world that is; and that (4) there is no sharp boundary between anything and anything else; (5) not only does away with the Principle of Identity, but the second and third classical logical Principles as well, whether we’re speaking of Schrödinger’s quantum world or the concrete world of our everyday living. At the bottom of Figure 29, light years beyond our impoverished discursive capacity, the journey begins toward the top, toward that infinitely receding horizon. At the bottom, possible possibility and possibilizing cannot be experienced, concretely speaking, but musement can hopefully tap some minuscule portion of it. Actualizing the objects, acts and happenings in our concrete world can be experienced and more or less effectively put into words, but there’s always the threat of incompleteness or inconsistency, or in the worst possible scenarios, both. At the top, there’s some comfort in the concrete world through which for the time being we can navigate quite conveniently; but there’s no knowing what the future holds in store; yet after a surprising turn we hopefully can, through musement or some on-the-spot improvising, delete something here and add something there, and with a few adjustments maintain our craft afloat and continue to navigate, wherever and whenever we are. Yet, we are always navigating within what from our limited set of possible perspectives is an incomplete world. In short, there is no subject/object distinction because there is no sharp cut between possibilizing and musing and actualizing, and actualizing and experiencing and discoursing, and discoursing and experiencing unexpectedness and musing and improvising anew, while drinking from the fountainhead of possible possibilities. Our doing must remain open ended
At the lower portion of Figure 29, the timeless range of overdetermined possibilities allows for manyness, virtually unlimitedness. At the upper portion, underdetermination offers the possibility of replacing certain aspects
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of a given world-version with something else, or of a broad overhaul of the world-version, or even replacing one world-version for another one that is judged preferable. In the mid portion where bivalent principles by and large remain in force, there is the possibility of Identity becoming exacerbated to the extent that not only is everything within the realm of the known taken to be clearly and distinctly what it is, but knowers accentuate and play up their knowing as rugged individuals; their identity becomes wrapped up in their own world; their identity and their world become virtually autonomous. In such case the collection of all identities runs the risk of suffering from what I will label the Solipsistic Subject Syndrome (SSS): each presumed identity is an island unto itself; all identities are an archipelago of isolated islands; communication is lost, as identities talk past identities and no talk from outside any identity is allowed to enter. Of course I’m taking what might be considered a natural tendency inherent in all of us to the extreme. Yet it can illustrate an important point: without overdetermined possibilities of novelty and underdetermined offerings that can inject novelty into a world-version parts or all of which have become complex and caught up in perplexing problems threatening degeneration into chaos, there can be no change in a largely bivalently perceived and conceived world. Gravitation toward SSS, if not a real threat, should in the very least suggest that the idea of relatively fixed identity entails the presumed horror of ambiguity, contradiction, inconsistency and paradox, and resistance taking musing dips into the apparently fathomless sea of possible possibilities. Yet, identity there must be, somehow, although ephemeral, within the mid portion of Figure 29: the whole of the figure is necessary. Perhaps we should give in to musing, possibilizing, thinking, and discoursing ‘multiply schizophrenically’ (in the SSS mode), with our mind at each and every turn veering off along multiple possible lines. Dwelling in a comfortable largely bivalent world-version with perpetual acknowledgment that it is only one world among many alternate worlds, there is thinking and discoursing in our convenient customary ways, with awareness that we could always have been thinking and discoursing in some alternate mode and that we will always have been thinking and discoursing in a mode that is becoming different from the mode that is now becoming something other as we go along thinking and discoursing. But,… nothing is cut in granite, in spite of our wishes to the contrary. No linearly conceived, sequentially generated, reductionist, abstract discursive proclamation can stand for all time. Subtle interdependent, interrelated, interactive, synthesizing, and concrete feeling and sensing and experiencing through the musing and contemplating process is necessary to temper that
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rigid form of discursivity designed to clearly and distinctly say what is, on no uncertain terms. And yet,… if we take the SSS and ‘schizophrenia’ metaphors seriously, they don’t apply to the whole of Figure 29. The range of possible possibilities, the fountainhead of all that can be in the process of emerging, cannot be tossed in the same bag with musing, possibilizing, thinking, and discoursing, for these processes exist in time, whereas the range of possible possibilities is outside time. Timelessness gives rise to temporal becoming? But timelessness and temporality are incompatible, mutually exclusive, are they not? So it would seem. And yet, Plato’s timeless ideal forms and temporality evince this incompatibility, as do the writings of St. Augustine, Nicholas Cusanus, Hegel and even Kant, and more recently, Whitehead – to mention only a few eminent candidates. More relevant to the tenor of this essay, Einstein’s universe, finite but unbound, is at one and the same time a static, timeless ‘block’; yet Einstein himself left the door open for the idea of an expanding universe – which he later regretted, calling it his biggest mistake. As the story goes, the block is timeless, and it is up to consciousness to create the ‘illusion’ of time. In Hermann Weyl’s words, the Einsteinian universe ‘simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the lifeline of my body, does a section of the world [dubbed a “timespace context” throughout this essay] come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time’ (Weyl 1949: 116). However, the role of consciousness continues to be heatedly debated in quantum theory. There are those such as Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) (Wigner 1967, also Walker 2000) who argue that consciousness brings about the ‘collapse’ of a wave amplitude, with the concomitant appearance of a particle or a ‘quantum event’. Others, Wheeler (1980a, 1980b) and Colin Bruce (2004) for example, maintain that consciousness has nothing to do with the ‘collapse’; in fact, there is no ‘collapse’, properly speaking, but ‘decoherence’; nonetheless, we, as co-participants with the world’s becoming must glean ‘information’ from microlevel quantum phenomena according to how we are situated within our macrolevel timespace context, process that information, and derive meaning from it; for, without such processing the phenomena will not have been fully realized or actualized. Other onlookers, such as David Bohm (1917–1992) (Bohm 1980; Bohm, Hiley 1993), like Einstein, hold that the world ‘out there’ is ‘real’, in spite of how we would like to process it or interpret it; hence it is ‘objective’. And still others, one of the most litigious of whom is Ilya Prigogine (1927–2003), would have it that time is ‘real’, and
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the universe is headed irreversibly along a path wherein everything is always changing (Prigogine 1980). And yet,… and yet,… we somehow manage to continue on, toward that receding horizon, by way of possible possibilities (0) and mere possibilities (Ø), which have no place in temporal-spatiality, but from within which actualizing emerges in time ( √ Signness); and actualities occupy timespace contexts that, themselves, are always in the process irreversibly of becoming something other than what they were becoming. This, then, is my humble offering (after all, I’m no more than a sign among signs). If perchance you find yourself becoming of kindred spirit in concert with what I’ve suggested, you might tell others; if not, please tell me ([email protected]).
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Appendix
Appendix Appendix What Wittgenstein calls forms of life entails human ways of concrete living within timespace contexts according to the general world-version held by a human community. It also includes what I have alluded to as playacting, which takes up a generous part of one’s waking life. Given the assumptions underlying this essay, to understand a form of life is to get a feel for the process of human interdependent, interrelated interaction. Our interacting with our other selves, others within our community, and with our physical world by way of our world-version implies our taking for granted certain processes within our form of life. This taking-for-granted in turn implies a degree of certainty. When we do what we do we just do it, often unthinkingly, as though it were as natural as could be and as though we knew exactly what we were doing. I would suggest that forms of life are not inflexibly guided by fixed laws and rules; they spring to life through loose and limber rules of thumb. They are not limited to linear, bivalent logical imperatives; they perpetuate themselves through nonlinear heuristic methods – guides for interpreting ourselves, others within our cultural world, and our physical world. They don’t always abide by conventional rules of conduct; they spontaneously create on the spot strategies according to the conditions and the context. This is not to say that forms of life consist of unruly maelstroms with no apparent rhyme or reason, with neither configuration nor order. They are in a process of constant change, for sure; but this change emerges from a relatively stable background. In On Certainty (1969), Wittgenstein uses a river metaphor. On the surface, the river is permanent flux, from flowing, gentle eddies, to whitewater rushes. The river bed guides it along and gives it stability. But the river’s rebelliousness never ceases to bring about changes in the river bed, depositing a little extra silt here, taking some away there to leave only bed rock, cutting into the bank somewhere else, and occasionally changing the contours of the river entirely. Everything is in relative movement. The multiple lives flowing along within a human community make up the river; the community’s form of life as a whole makes up the river bed. The background form of life holds the community’s history; the lives within the community come and go, as the community’s history unfolds. CEEOL copyright 2020
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We engage in acting and playacting of one form or another within our community, and in so doing keep our collective form of life alive: this entails our individual bottom-up input regarding our form of life. Our community is a river perpetually altering, to a greater or lesser degree, the river bed, our form of life, which in turn exercises a greater or lesser degree of influence on our playacting within our community: this entails our community’s topdown input regarding our personal sense of our communal form of life. In the best of all worlds, our form of life affords us the belief that we, within our community, are on the right track; hence we have a degree of certainty with respect to our interdependent, interrelated interactive playacting; this allows us a degree of certainty that we know who we are and what we are to do according to past conditions and contexts, those of the present, and those of the anticipated future – a future that, it hardly needs saying, never turns out exactly as planned. However, Wittgenstein tells us that we can reach a state of somewhat smug, self-contained and self-sufficient knowing, for there are no foolproof reasons for trusting what we think we know, nor can we fall into a state of unknowing, with the incapacity to think there is something we know. What we know, we know, largely tacitly, and when we act and playact our knowing unfolds itself. Much of what we know we can’t explicitly articulate, nor can we give any reasons for the whats, the whys and the hows of our knowing. This unstated and nonarticulable, tacit and nonconsciously presumed, unknowing knowing, guides much of our acting and playacting. What we do we just do, unthinkingly. In a manner of speaking, we hardly have any choice in the matter. Do we follow rules? Yes, in part consciously and in part tacitly, we follow the conventional rules of our community, sedimented within our community’s river bed. But these rules are by no means crystallized; they are always becoming something other. So the rules we are following are never exactly what they were. And we fudge on our rules, given our changing strategies for acting and playacting within ever changing conditions and contexts. So we follow rules and we don’t; our rules are what they are and they aren’t; we can use our customary strategies and we can’t. Our form of life is what it is and it is always becoming other than what it was becoming. In a certain sense Parmenides was right, and he was wrong, and Heraclitus was right, by and large, but certain rather vague reservations remain, because he hardly allows for the middle portion of the lattice, where we are in obsessive quest for certainty; consequently we are inclined to give a nod to Parmenides. Given the ebb and flow, coming and going, rising and falling, swinging and fluctuating nature of forms of life, the number of varying forms of life within a culture is virtually equal to the number of individuals within that
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culture. This is to say that if our acting and playacting can be variously understood by others, and if we can understand their acting and playacting, our cultural form of life as a whole contains our form of life insofar as it complementarily coalesces with their form of life, and their form of life complementarily coalesces with ours. It is also to say that only within the condition and context of other forms of life can the conditions and context of our form of life be in the process of becoming what it will have been becoming. If there were no other forms of life within our culture, then our form of life could have relatively little meaning. It is solely through the coalescence of all forms of life within a given community that any individual form of life can be in the process of becoming what it will have been becoming; and the community form of life can’t be in the process of becoming what it will have been becoming in the genuine sense without each and every individual form of life in its own process of becoming. United, all individual forms of life make up the communal whole; divided, they cease their communal becoming. And,… we communicate, with greater or lesser degrees of success within our respective forms of life, our general views of ourselves, of others, of our cultural world, and of our physical world. And we communicate, with lesser and hopefully greater levels of effectiveness, with individuals coming from different cultural forms of life, whether we are speaking the same language or different languages – and here, nonverbal communication consisting of signs issuing forth and becoming interpreted using all types of sensory channels, becomes paramount. Differences of forms of life within the same community and among diverse communities involving varying levels of communication and understanding are never so great that they are simply mutually incomprehensible or incommensurable. Donald Davidson tells us so much in his radical interpretation. If such incomprehensibility or incommensurability happened to be in play, then there would be no complementary coalescence between our form of life and that of others; hence the very idea of ‘our form of life’ would hardly have any meaning, since there would be nothing other with which to gauge it; we would be no more than empty monads, hollow shells devoid of the wherewithal for genuinely understanding ourselves, others, our cultural world and our physical world. As long as some sort of communication is possible, we have something in common with others, however minute it may be. This commonality is already presupposed by the possibility of coincidence in acting and playacting – by the very fact that we can somehow act and playact in interdependence and interrelationship with one another. The possibility of communication across different forms of life rests on just such commonality of acting and playacting. We may say, more directly perhaps, that it is our acting and
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playacting and our capacity for such along the river of life that provides the authentic background, the river bed, which allows us to bring about a confluence of the differences between ourselves and others. Among humans, natural language – English, French, German, Mandarin, Spanish, Papiamento, Portuguese, and so on – is the primary mode of communication. Problems of communication, interpretation and understanding thus often revolve around language. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s forms of life are often taken as chiefly linguistic in orientation. However, as implied time and again in this essay, much of our knowing is taken for granted, and when seeping into conscious awareness, it by and large remains extralinguistic, much of it inarticulable. Nevertheless, among Wittgensteinians – and many poststructuralist and neo-pragmatist and post-analytic scholars as well – the assumption often has it that forms of life are a matter of ‘language games’, and ‘language games’ are just that: ways and means humans go about verbalizing themselves according to standard practices. I would suggest that a Wittgensteinian language game is an interwoven complex of verbal and nonverbal action from which neither the verbal nor the nonverbal components can be categorically distinguished. This is because the verbal and nonverbal components of language games are themselves complementarily coalescent. If one learns the meaning of a word within a language game, or the significance of a particular instance of behavior – acting and playacting – within that game, one has no alternative but to co-participate and learn to play the game. In this manner, language games mirror forms of life, and vice versa. Both include verbal and nonverbal forms of communication. So a language game is not a game at all: it is play, playacting, without end; it is always in the process of playing itself out, wherever we are, whenever we are. Learning to play involves sensing (iconic), sensing what was initially sensed as such-and-such (indexical), and that it is so-and-so for such-andsuch a set of reasons (symbolic) because it is presumably of some recognized nature. Playing as if it has become a matter of course involves doing what one does – what has been internalized in the past, coupled with what appears feasible and advisable in the present, and what might lead to desired consequences in the future. Living within a form of life entails embedded practices, possibilities in view of what is happening that wasn’t exactly as expected, and anticipated future conditions and contexts. Playacting isn’t performed in a vacuum; it reveals itself from within a particular form of life, and a form of life is bound to a communal aspect of language that in large part makes us aware of the fact that we are part of a tradition. The form of life that we have acquired is rooted in our community. This
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community follows certain standards, conventions, norms and customs, as well as certain habits and regularities, which shape and mold both language games as well as forms of life. As members of a community we come to realize that the tradition and presuppositions, proclivities and prejudices of that community already began shaping and molding our language and our playacting from the very first day we entered into it. We also deviate, to a greater or lesser extent, from the standards, conventions, norms, and customs. Living – playacting – never reaches absolute closure; it is never final.
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