In this article, we discuss some contemporary approaches towards how conciseness is conceptualized. We discuss the connection between philosophy and science in the light of 20th century developments mostly in science, semiotics and literature.
Metaphors
What are metaphors ? μεταφορά, refers to one thing by mentioning another. Metaphors may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are instruments of language, they do not exist in reality or nature or the world of objects. Then the question is, how do we use metaphors to represent things from nature ?
After Friedrich Nietzsche radically criticized what we call truth and objectivity, we should no longer be naive about how we use language as an instrument, in terms of what language reflects, but also about our languages’ ability to build a reality for ourselves. Nietzsche pointed at the limits of our language at that time :
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense(Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne), 1873
Beyond the tyranny of light
Since the dawn of civilization, light was the symbol of god, life and truth. Most of what we make of the world is transmitted through light. In the post Nietzschian world, when logocentric enlightenment is no longer our most up-to-date paradigm, should light still be the symbol of truth and enlightenment ? are people of our time in practice in terms of being up-to-date with the current zeitgeist ?
Newton was a prominent figure of the Cartesian enlightened paradigm. He developed a mechanical and causal model of the world, a so called non-abstract theory. Ether, according to Newton, is the medium that fulls the universe and carries light and gravity. After the Michelson–Morley experiment, we had to adjust the classical model of space and time. Einstein’s model of space assumes actio in distans, what we can describe as forces working without a medium – such as gravity in space. It is a non-mechanical, non atomist theory.
Newton would say that the human mind is like a mirror which reflects objects in the world, the mind is a reflection of nature. Newton assumed what we all see is what there is at the moment, time is non-particular and does assume an observer. If we asked Newton when he looked at the sun, at which moment of time is the sun we are looking at ? He would not understand the question (or just say: now), if you ask Einstein he would say the sun of 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago, because that’s the time that takes light to go from the sun to earth, and the minimal time (speed of light) which events can spread in space.
Einsteins system is not just relative, but lacking any kind of (unimagined) authentic objectivity, to say that objectivity / totality can be achieved through superposition is a fiction, because every perspective by itself logically contradicts another one in terms of causal events. Our understanding fails where the scale of objects and speeds become big, cosmological, because we can never grasp the whole, only fragments, when the microscale becomes small like the case of Eisenberg : the theory that matter is not stable and particles mix in a way that we can no longer distinguish between clear units – leads to the fact we cannot grasp a defined object anymore. We know that there are particles so small, that talking about grasping and tracking them is nonsensical.
If after Einstein, the speed of light is constant and absolute and not relative, we have to change how we think about time if we want to be progressive. The classical model is no longer valid (enough) and we have to accept new possible situations like the twin paradox. That means that theoretically and practically, time is not the same for every point of reference. This model is logical but non-intuitive, it contradicts our basic born notions of speed and simultaneity, as Piaget showed while conducting experiments with children exploring these notions.
The discoveries about light and time in the 20th century : time can only be thought about through an observer or a ‘center’, perspective, in which around it, time is relative. If we never experience now, everything around us has already happened. When we draw a mental map for the purpose of juxtaposition to explain relativity / simultaneity we are (again) assuming an all-knowing perspective, a totality, one might argue god, that perspective can never be experienced. Space-time and mass are not constant.
The deceitful mirror
Nietzsche wrote about not being able to access what we call nature. We have eyes, they have a certain prism, every living creature has different perception systems which describes quite a different universe. The human brain (actually, every brain) thinks about things in concepts. The brain is an organ which conceptualizes things, our perceptions becomes concepts. The brain cannot grasp and make a concept from infinite amount of fragments, therefore in that process the brain ignores a lot of data which is not relevant, we can say for evolutionary reasons, or psychological, to be able to focus and to make sense of things. To be able to be pragmatic in the task of survival or achievement of goals, the brain develops a perspective, a focus, a closed system of knowledge.
Trying to achieve totality is trying to draw one picture which applies for everyone and everything, that was the project of the enlightenment, and it failed. Instead, in the west, the occidental, we are trying to draw frames of a picture and to fill it in details. We always concept only fragments, they are discovered, and only a mind intelligent and creative enough can make a coherent bigger picture of all details. We cannot talk about the nature of the world like in the naive 18th century, because, the world, we see only through and senses and conceptions, therefore we see only the nature of ourselves. Every discovery is actually a meta discovery, one about the ability to conceptualize, one about ourselves, about the nature of being. Also, how we see ourselves, is only in the image of our conceptions, think about the model of evolution, if anything is true about that discovery is that we just are, that there’s no inherit meaning, only structure texture and patterns in being. That suits the model of our thinking, of language.
μεταφορά
The word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek term meaning to “transfer” or “carry across.” Metaphors “carry” meaning from one word, image, idea, or situation to another, linking them and creating a metaphor.
Light through the prism of language
Nietzsche elaborated that in the case of language, that in order for us for things to make sense, the brain has to adopt a metaphor. We can fit just part of reality in our mind for it to make sense, it is always only a fragment which is conceptualized to make sense. So Metaphors are instruments of language, but there are no metaphors in nature.
We arrange the world around metaphors. Usually a ready-made one. Most of us are not intelligent or creative enough to come up with our own metaphors, so, we adopt the metaphors of the time, the zeitgeist, culture, family, religion etc. In fact, Nietzsche claims that the main metaphor of the west, which is very powerful, is god, which is another term for totality. Goethe, in his play Faust, elaborated on that metaphor : the occidental human need for god and transcendence, the human desire for totality.
What do we actually grasp if we are always bounded to think and conceptualize in metaphors ?
Plato talked about the theory of forms (eidos), those are ideas which are not material, they are abstract, they are not part of space. Just like the Pythagorean theories, they exist only in a world of our imagination. Plato was crazy enough to attack his own theory in one of his dialogues, Parmenides dialogue (132a–b.) Parmenides beats Socrates in an argument which is more elaborated when we read Aristotle’s metaphysica 990-1079.
-“I suppose you think each form is one on the following ground: whenever some number of things seem to you to be large, perhaps there seems to be some one character, the same as you look at them all, and from that you conclude that the large is one.”
-“That’s true,” he said.
-“What about the large itself and the other large things? If you look at them all in the same way with the mind’s eye, again won’t some one thing appear large, by which all these appear large?”
-“It seems so.”
-“So another form of largeness will make its appearance, which has emerged alongside largeness itself and the things that partake of it, and in turn another over all these, by which all of them will be large. Each of your forms will no longer be one, but unlimited in multitude.”
-“But, Parmenides, maybe each of these forms is a thought,” Socrates said, “and properly occurs only in minds. In this way each of them might be one and no longer face the difficulties mentioned just now.”
-“What do you mean?” he asked. “Is each of the thoughts one, but a thought of nothing?”
-“No, that’s impossible,” he said.
-“Of something, rather?”
-“Yes.”
Parmenides dialogue (132a–b.)
The language of the third man
Aristotle* claimed : if we have a real table, and the eidos, idea of a table, how do we know that the real table resembles the idea of a table ? We say : they are similar. The term similar stands between the real and the ideal. Parmenides and Aristotle are pointing that there will be always an infinite amount of similar between the real and the ideas. The ideal form which we use to identify objects with does not exist. Every time we can think about a realized form of an ideal, there would be another step in between the real and the ideal, ‘the third man‘. Today we can think about it that, this is how language works, a definition (form) can never be specific, we should not confuse words when they are used as definitions or as properties (what is green ? The tree is green), when our thinking is associated to words by the senses (green, low pitch) or conceptualization (a Pythagorean triangle). Another way to look at it : every possible property or a trait of an object can be an object by itself, then what’s the hybrid mode of property and object ? That typology of finite-infinitum we don’t understand yet or not commonly use.
* (Metaphysics 990b17–1079a13, 1039a2; Sophistic Refutations 178b36 ff.) which is open for many interpretations.
Another interpretation, similar to the theories of language of Ferdinand de Saussure, it is the structure of language itself we reflect in the third man argument. The third man is the association, using the word /typology similar. Think about it like this : our language contain a network of words, and the links in between them are composed out of ‘similar to’ and ‘not similar to’ (Heidigger : we can only think and speak in tautologies). A tree is similar to plants and not similar to blue. Wittgenstein would call this typology family resemblance. This typology is not fixed, it is what children take in when they are being taught language. What determines the default language typology source, how we associate words, which kind of typology map we have in our head, is mostly cultural, and social, we are being educated to that.
Aristotle claimed that only the artist, as a dramaturge, as a narrator, can show and really teach us – subjects from the field of ethics, hubris, arete. The scientists use schemes, axioms, generalizations, formulas, which do not reflect reality in a concrete way. Writers present us the things we come across in life, to say, they only can present us with what will make us emotionally and meaningfully involved, they can change our lives in a non-pragmatic way.
The original meaning of the term εἶδος (eidos), “visible form”, and related terms μορφή (morphē), “shape”, and φαινόμενα (phainomena), “appearances”, from φαίνω (phainō), “shine”
Every time with think about ‘something’ we do not establish a direct connection with ‘something’. We use our thoughts, our fixations, our metaphors, our current way of conceptualization to build ‘something’ through that. When we come across people, objects, tasks we immediately start tagging and associating these, only with things we already know, in a way that we also know, and we know it first by imitation from the time we were kids. When kids play, they are actually being trained to use the right categories when ‘making sense of the world’. Since an indication of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for a kid at play can only come through emotional encouragement, as adults, the default might be that deep inside everything that what we call ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is based on a childish fixation.
World views
The true liberalism we experience today is a liberalism of metaphors. Each person can have its own metaphors, whether we inherited it from education, of from reading books, playing video games, reading philosophy etc. These metaphors can be presented, and almost every person today can access countless metaphors where information is free and accessible, they can be taught and self-taught. But, these metaphors are not universal truths, they are not reality and not in any way what we call objectiveness. Objectiveness is a metaphor by itself, identification of singular objects could be considered just an occidental projection of the ‘self’.
Wittgenstein (and others) will claim that there could be no real dialogue between two metaphors. Dialogue can be possible only between two people who share or agree or believe the same metaphor. That resulting dialogue can then be considered as an attempt to agree about minor interpretation of the same para metaphor.
The Newtonian world of view is a mechanic world view, the world is a clock, which works only in a liner casual way. In this model there is only one reality which we all share and therefore, from this perspective, there is no reason for disagreement about facts, about truth. But, it is this perspective which created what we consider facts, so in this way we are trapped in its metaphor like Wittgenstein’s fly in a bottle, or Nietzsche’s faith in grammar. In this metaphor we, just like flies, are trapped in a transparent bottle, which is language, and we keep smashing our head against it because we fail to conceptualize it from an ‘external’ perspective, the external perspective being the bottle itself, we are trapped in our finitum, time, space, language, ratio, ding an sich, god are all just names for it. We can concept a boundary to define an interior, a reflection, but never exterior – they are all work of imagination and fiction.
Language and the mirror of nature
Richard Rorty (1931-2007) in his book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (1979), explains how the western philosophy, beginning in Plato’s philosophy and so on, used the mirror as its core metaphor – there is a world, and our mind is its mirror of nature. Through our sciences we are always looking directly into nature, the reflection in our mind is of nature. The mirror symbolizes our fixation on the deceptive reflection, our anthropomorphic tendency to see the world only in our own image. It is common to link the development of western consciousness as rooted in monotheism, in the totality of the concept of god. Truth and god (and the reflection of nature) are one and the same says Nietzsche, when we give up god, we also give up one universal truth. God is the reflection of man in the way that its conceptualized totality becomes a destination – telos τέλος, for man – a system of rules, ethics, its a potential which can be reached and realized.
The reason why monotheism and its totality took over the world, it is because it reflects our human desire, our desire for totality (anthropomorphically : the primal state, the uterus, Where all are needs were taken care of). In that sense, says Nietzsche, Newton’s classical mechanics are not (that) different from religion, they both reflect the same desire for totality, but both approaches try to get there through different practices, both anchored in language – mathematics vs. the scriptures. The total package of religion or science gives us the comfort in deceitful hubris of totality, the illusion of safety and control, the ability to repress our acknowledgement of death finitude and entropy through conceptualizations.
If one is to acknowledge the realization that we never had a safety net (Nietzsche’s rope-dancer), that everything is not part of a bigger plan, it is traumatic, what Heidegger called “Geworfenheit”: we are thrown into this world. Religion and psychology share the same natural / existential narrative, from our point of view today : we are born from a state of needlessness into the order and hierarchy of the father, and we have to face the consequences of that discovery, a meta process of Anthropomorphism, everything repeats in its own pattern. When Nietzsche talked about the eternal return, he was talking about the limited amount of anthropomorphic rooted phenomena that each of us experience through our life cycle, being limited to and within one’s consciousness.
Another point to make about our existential anxiety : there could be an equilibrium between coming to terms with the meaningless inherited in our existence and our self-deceit and repressions.
Consciousness as mise en abyme
Joshua Royce (1855 – 1916), an American philosopher, in his book from 1899 “The World and the Individual“, asked us to imagine our cognition, episteme ἐπιστήμη, ‘map of knowledge’, as a real map – we now must draw this map of our knowledge. In our general knowledge map (city), we also have the knowledge of ourselves (our home), and there we have ourselves drawing maps of our knowledge.
We have a picture of us, drawing a drawing, of ourselves in a mise en abyme loop. And what can it say about how we perceive events from our lives or other lives as perceived in our cognition from the inside or presented as stories or any other media from the outside ? It says that we can only talk about schemes, never ‘raw reality’ – something that is reduced through the form of its conceptualization and language (through or perception or cognition) or a medium, we only get a picture in the form of a picture, we never get totality. The content is always within the shape of the frame, which is a part of the content. This is possibly how the mind intertwines infinitum with finitum, the two are part of each other which cannot stand without the other, the structure of language itself as much as It is wise to call it structure. This can be considered an alternative to the dual negative/positive- logocentric lingual structure.
The boundary
In modern science, the search for a theological essence is still in pursuit. We want to find the secret for eternal life, the theory of everything, singularity. In short : we still want to achieve totality. But this totality escapes and stays outside the picture and the frame, so we can keep on looking deeper and deeper into images, through philosophy, literature, poetry and even microscopes, but the essence (which is another name for totality), the Faustian object of desire, will never be found. The definition of essence, as reflected in Plato’s symposium, should be perceived as deceptive : The essence which is desired for but can never be found, or disappears once it is reached. The essence is the object of desire – desideratum.
Will we ever be able to grasp the ungraspable ? No, that’s a nonsensical question. We can see in the ancient Greeks, a culture who drew boundaries in the scale of human proportions in order to live in balance with their desires, and to avoid hubris, having such Faustian ambitions which cannot be realized. There is evidence for example, that the ancient Greeks refused to develop mechanically and technologically.
When science investigates phenomena in quantum or cosmological scales it becomes nonsensical, the discoveries we will make will be lacking any kind of value for us that’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. When it comes to essence, even when we think are dealing with the tangible we are only dealing with self-deception, we never deal with nothing except our own images, not the universe. One of the reasons why the ancient Greeks appear in all of our texts in one form of another, is that they oriented themselves towards Ratio – human proportion and scale, they did not have Faustian ambition at all, they tried to impose limits through wisdom, wise philosophical ethics. Nietzsche (The gay science) in a way shared the Greek view about sophistication (sophistikos). Sophistication is only another form of self-deceit, the more elaborated things are, the more non-essential they get, the most elaborated image of nature is just a mirror to our human all too human play with language. Although this is only if we are too serious adults to believe the mirror is real and not to stay forever children that treat everything as an open game without any idolization of our desires. To embrace the unknown as a game : “Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können”.
Metaphors in the hands of evolution
Do we structure on education upon metaphors that we believe that would keep holding us alive ? do we educate only because we believe only these metaphors can keep the next generation safe ? in terms of survival ? does it mean that we must be emotionally engaged with the meraphors in the base of our conceptualizations ?
are we so busy with predictions because they guarantee our safety, which guarantee our survival ? isnt the most special magical ability of man is being able to foretell and predict the future ? Isn’t deception and self-deception a key element in that system, as part of the illusion of control ? As part of a group, whether it is psychology or family or our institution that lie to us even in order for us to have order in the first place ?
The mind as a picture machine, which always produces images of frames with more images within, cannot reach beyond the picture. Pictures are emotional, perceptional, psychological, physical, religious, cognitive : heat, cold, pain, envy, love, respect, justice, democracy – are all images. They are never part of reality and can never have meaning outside what Wittgenstein called ‘a community’. These pictures are part of bigger pictures which reflects the main upper metaphors of our communities. This means, a lot of our limitations are self-imposed through the determinisms of our culture, whether they are based on morality or ideology we choose to believe.
For more reading :
Carlo Rovelli – Helgoland, 2020
H. Bergson – Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889
F. Nietzsche – In relation to this article, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense 1873, some parts of the will to power II
J.W. Dunne – An experiment with time, 1927
L. Wittgenstein – Philosophical investigations, 1952 (posthumously)
R. Rorty – Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979
J. Baudrillard –