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Noah -> RE: Love. Actually? (10/22/2006 6:05:26 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
Explain what the human spirit is since you are an expert. Explain the transcendent reality of love. You are so nit picking about language and precision, 'human spirit' and 'transcendent reality of love' seem rather woolly terms to me. Define them.
Did I say anything about either language or precision?
I can define "water" for you meat. I can define "immersion" and "diving" and "floating" and "sinking". You still won't know fuck-all about getting to shore until you admit that the boat we were on sank five minutes ago, we're a mile past the breakwall and there are holes in both your floaties.
quote:
The human spirits sucks and needs examining.
I'm not sure what those words mean, but if it's true, it's true. Now what?
Yes. We might as well say that every word in my first post to this thread was wooly including the "and"s and the "the"s as they appeared in those necessarily wacky propositions.
I suspect that a lot of people didn't notice that and it is cool and frankly impressive that you did.
But language is a tool, meat. It does what it manages to do with great beauty and power but there are things which language can't adequately handle. When the tools you need are a measuring stick and a pot of glue, demanding a wrench of a specific size just isn't going to help you. On the other hand, a good eye and a wad of chewing gum might just patch things up enough to limp home on.
If you want to say: "I won't acknowledge (or explore, or what-have-you)any aspect of the human experience for which explicit and exhaustive, genus and difference definitions cannot given, that's your choice. Rock on. To me it seems about as advisable as deciding that you won't acknowledge any aspect of the human experience which you can't identify by smell.
Some things you can't pin down with your nose. Some things you can't pin down with your lexicon. This shouldn't surprise us, it seems to me.
It would be a very strange theory of ontology which posited that the test of existence of a thing is whether it can be pinned down in language (not that this one hasn't been published and not that all theories of ontology aren't strange.)
You offerred a tired old reductionist argument for the non-existence of Love. Okay.
The thing about reductionist arguments is that it is very easy to screw one together so that it will indeed stand on its own. Unfortunately, every reductionist argument which manages to stand up has exactly as much probative value as any other one. And for every reductionist argument that can be flung against a thing, another reductionist argument (of precisely equal probative value) can be a called upon to defend it. I swear that after years of trying pretty hard I have never found an exception.
Here's a really nice little accessory you can add to your personal bullshit detector (of which, no lie, I suspect you have a fairly good one, no doubt better than mine in some respects)
Look at the argument. Is it reductionist? If so then despite whatever aesthetic value it may have, however warm it may make you feel or what a wonderful object of meditation it may be, it is probably bullshit, or if it has to do with ontology it is more likely nonsense masquerading as an argument in the first place. And it it isn't bulshit it is almost certainly only trivially true.
Since the thing this thread is about is prior to language and reason and analysis those tools can only help us very awkwardly and incompletely on out little trip toward understanding. It is a trip one has to take by diving in and kicking and stroking. Even before that the trip also requires opening a certain door to allow the first step to be taken. The door which needs to open is on your heart. I know that is weird but, hey, so are quantum theory and girls. And I believe that each of them has its uses.
There are lots of ways of knowing. Analysis is a powerful and sublimely beautiful one, properly applied, Still, there are places it can't take you. Some times you just have to jump. Love is one of those places.
And yeah, it is scary as hell.
To the original poster I have just one word to say: Courage!
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