Language is the carrier of meaning. A source of useful contemplation for me of late has been the possibility of communication by meanings alone, dispensing with the carrier. Not that that’s possible in this dimension, but it may be possible in the Beyond. The thought here is that the carrier actually influences that which it carries. There is Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, The medium is the message. Supposing that we are awaiting the Dalai Lama. Here is this ornate pillared building and the crowd is on wide steps leading up to it, a wide boulevard below. And here comes the Dalai Lama—on a bicycle. The bicycle is his carrier. But suppose the Dalai Lama arrives in a long, sleek limousine. Three or four people stumble out first, not least the chauffeur, wearing a uniform. Finally the Lama himself clad in Tibetan robes. Yet another image. The Lama comes by helicopter—and the furious wind of his descent make people raise their hands to fend off the blast of air. The carrier modifies the meaning. — Abrupt shift. — For me the words “original sin” carry a very potent meaning. In many ways it is one of the most useful meanings for understanding at least human reality. But the words that carry it also carry extra baggage that causes many people to reject their meaning. We would agree on a whole lot more things if meanings came to us naked.
Showing posts with label Meaning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Meaning. Show all posts
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Sunday, October 17, 2010
I Blogged Before I Blogged
In a notebook I chanced across while doing some serious Fall Cleaning, I came across some brief writings—I called them notes. Lordy. I have notebooks upon notebooks just like the one I found—a lifetime’s entirely private effort of making sense of reality and/or capturing insights, never intended for readers. I will reproduce one from April 2005 here. Until today, no one has seen this; but I did read it to Brigitte just five minutes ago.
Carriers of Meaning
Formal systems do not carry meanings—but fairy tales do.
I assume that worlds full of meaning are actually real—in the conventional sense of the word, tangibly: touch it, taste it. By worlds I mean not only this one, but this one is a sample. I mean the others as well: heavens and hells, choirs of angels, vast imaginal landscapes and oceans of spirit with white ships and billowing red sails.
By formal systems I mean Aquinas’ Summa or Kant’s Critique. For that matter I also include quantum mechanics and Einstein’s two relativities, as mathematical formalisms. And so on.
All formalisms produce a kind of satisfaction, but no sooner do I feel the satisfaction than the formalism coils back on itself and causes me to question it; my satisfaction turns uneasy. My mind begins to probe the logic. Thoughts rise and flicker with exceptions. Invariably something won’t properly fit.
On the other hand the grand epics live on. They shimmer in memory like the events of my own life or true events of history. Tales are good carriers of meaning, but the meaning remains diffused. When I try to concentrate it, I start to build a formal system. Then, with Ross Perot’s vividly put “great sucking sound,” the life departs from it.
Formal systems are static. Reality is dynamic. To capture that dynamism, algorithms are simply not enough.
Our inner life is a constant swaying between polarities: the static certainties of structure and the dynamic movements of myth.
This is in part a comment on these very notes. They are effective because they’re organized disorganization. They are a net that captures meaning without formally reducing meaning to a system.
Much of this dilemma is due to complexity. We are capable of comprehending it as story, but it loses its coherence as a listing of relationships. I describe living by starting somewhere. Blood circulation, say. The heart seems central. I delve deeply into the muscles of the heart, the electrical triggering of the contractions.
I go on and build the whole system—the vast highways of arteries, the reflux of veins. I have to explain in turn lungs and respiration, capillaries carrying oxygen to feed the cells.
I go on. I am still at it, detailing various organs and then organ systems. Then I detail how they relate. I weary myself describing the central and the secondary nervous systems, the autonomic and the central one which gets its stimulation from “out there.” The eyes take me a day, the skin, the olfactory organs.
He took her on a walk, that first time. There was a park nearby. It was toward evening, but not quite dark yet. Fresh. It had stormed that afternoon but the sky was now clear and bright. They stood by the lake for a bit, hand in hand, and she told a funny story about the time when her Dad had carved a boat. It had a little mast and a sail fashioned of a silvery container top. And how the boat, being uneven, listed ever to the side. And how her Dad was down there on all fours, blowing at the little boat, but it wouldn’t go anywhere. It was too heavy… And he, with her, looked at her as she was telling this story, and she was all full of light and merriment, her eyes shining.
And they were out there, waiting for the sun to sink. And the lake got darker and darker, and the horizon bright, the trees and houses like black silhouettes across the lake, the sun sinking behind them.
This scene, described as system, as sensations, as hormonal movements, as the firing of trillions of brain cells, as blood circulating, as skin sensing a light breeze, as metabolic states mirroring brain messages and brain cells responding by triggering deep sighs, as uncountable sense impressions flooding in, as heat issuing from uncountable pores, gushing from ears and mouths and other openings, would describe nothing of meaning. Yet all of this, this vast machinery, is there. To understand it is important.
It is a puzzlement. That which permits us to understand something in close detail destroys the phenomenon. That which we experience hides the details. We have a devil of a time disentangling the vehicle and that which it carries, form and substance, structure and function.
The map is not the way and not the destination, but you cannot get there without a map. When you get there, the destination is a big brick structure painted white in reality and on the map it is a red star on the screen and a black star on the print-out.
And this all makes perfectly good sense.
A cosmology—an orientation—is like a map. And little more than that. A really great map has artful figures at the corners, the four winds; their lips are puckered up to indicate that they are blowing. And in the map’s artfully drawn oceans frolic unlikely dolphins spouting bright streams.
In other words the map is trying to tell a story by way of excusing its own inadequacy of being a mere formalism.
Carriers of Meaning
Formal systems do not carry meanings—but fairy tales do.
I assume that worlds full of meaning are actually real—in the conventional sense of the word, tangibly: touch it, taste it. By worlds I mean not only this one, but this one is a sample. I mean the others as well: heavens and hells, choirs of angels, vast imaginal landscapes and oceans of spirit with white ships and billowing red sails.
By formal systems I mean Aquinas’ Summa or Kant’s Critique. For that matter I also include quantum mechanics and Einstein’s two relativities, as mathematical formalisms. And so on.
All formalisms produce a kind of satisfaction, but no sooner do I feel the satisfaction than the formalism coils back on itself and causes me to question it; my satisfaction turns uneasy. My mind begins to probe the logic. Thoughts rise and flicker with exceptions. Invariably something won’t properly fit.
On the other hand the grand epics live on. They shimmer in memory like the events of my own life or true events of history. Tales are good carriers of meaning, but the meaning remains diffused. When I try to concentrate it, I start to build a formal system. Then, with Ross Perot’s vividly put “great sucking sound,” the life departs from it.
Formal systems are static. Reality is dynamic. To capture that dynamism, algorithms are simply not enough.
Our inner life is a constant swaying between polarities: the static certainties of structure and the dynamic movements of myth.
This is in part a comment on these very notes. They are effective because they’re organized disorganization. They are a net that captures meaning without formally reducing meaning to a system.
Much of this dilemma is due to complexity. We are capable of comprehending it as story, but it loses its coherence as a listing of relationships. I describe living by starting somewhere. Blood circulation, say. The heart seems central. I delve deeply into the muscles of the heart, the electrical triggering of the contractions.
I go on and build the whole system—the vast highways of arteries, the reflux of veins. I have to explain in turn lungs and respiration, capillaries carrying oxygen to feed the cells.
I go on. I am still at it, detailing various organs and then organ systems. Then I detail how they relate. I weary myself describing the central and the secondary nervous systems, the autonomic and the central one which gets its stimulation from “out there.” The eyes take me a day, the skin, the olfactory organs.
He took her on a walk, that first time. There was a park nearby. It was toward evening, but not quite dark yet. Fresh. It had stormed that afternoon but the sky was now clear and bright. They stood by the lake for a bit, hand in hand, and she told a funny story about the time when her Dad had carved a boat. It had a little mast and a sail fashioned of a silvery container top. And how the boat, being uneven, listed ever to the side. And how her Dad was down there on all fours, blowing at the little boat, but it wouldn’t go anywhere. It was too heavy… And he, with her, looked at her as she was telling this story, and she was all full of light and merriment, her eyes shining.
And they were out there, waiting for the sun to sink. And the lake got darker and darker, and the horizon bright, the trees and houses like black silhouettes across the lake, the sun sinking behind them.
This scene, described as system, as sensations, as hormonal movements, as the firing of trillions of brain cells, as blood circulating, as skin sensing a light breeze, as metabolic states mirroring brain messages and brain cells responding by triggering deep sighs, as uncountable sense impressions flooding in, as heat issuing from uncountable pores, gushing from ears and mouths and other openings, would describe nothing of meaning. Yet all of this, this vast machinery, is there. To understand it is important.
It is a puzzlement. That which permits us to understand something in close detail destroys the phenomenon. That which we experience hides the details. We have a devil of a time disentangling the vehicle and that which it carries, form and substance, structure and function.
The map is not the way and not the destination, but you cannot get there without a map. When you get there, the destination is a big brick structure painted white in reality and on the map it is a red star on the screen and a black star on the print-out.
And this all makes perfectly good sense.
A cosmology—an orientation—is like a map. And little more than that. A really great map has artful figures at the corners, the four winds; their lips are puckered up to indicate that they are blowing. And in the map’s artfully drawn oceans frolic unlikely dolphins spouting bright streams.
In other words the map is trying to tell a story by way of excusing its own inadequacy of being a mere formalism.
Monday, May 4, 2009
A Well-Worn Phrase
I used one yesterday to round out the rhythm of a sentence: “Be in the world but not of it.” The phrase has the smooth, comfortable feel of a very well-worn tool obtained from one of the two main sources for such things in English: the Bible or Shakespeare. It comes from neither. Its logical structure is ambiguous at best, but the meaning is accessible. It illustrates wonderfully how far we really are from mere collocations of atoms. The phrase suggests that we may have a choice: in the world or out. We don’t. And if we opt to be in, it suggests that we may in some sense be of it, in another sense not. But what do these options mean? I’d hate to be the one assigned to teach a computer, destined to serve in Artificial Intelligence, exactly how to handle this string of words, how to parse it, how to apply it in actual life situations. People have no such problems. What a piece of work is man…
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Sensate Reflex
A while back I read again certain portions of Carl G. Jung's book entitled Synchronicity. The word is of Jung's own coinage and refers to the phenomenon we ordinarily call "meaningful coincidences" or, with a slightly more romantic toning, serendipity—that word, in turn, derived from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. Synchronicity, meanwhile, has taken pretty deep roots in the circles that concern themselves with borderline phenomena.
Jung's very choice of a neologism to label a relatively common, usually pleasant, but also mildly wonder-rousing experience that people have reflects what I call a kind of sensate bias, a word to which I'll return in a moment. The essence of the experience is its meaningful quality; in Jung's treatment of it, however, the emphasis shifts to the coincidence of something, presumably X and Y, in time. Meaning is introduced, but almost with a kind of timidity. Quite a few people, straining to reach once more a holistic stance toward reality, but wishing to be thought orthodox by Science capitalized, exhibit sensate bias. Jung illustrates this tendency in the present context rather neatly. Now to the substance.
The part I was rereading is the account of a very interesting and, indeed, classical near death experience (NDE) reported by one of his lady patients. She had the experience in the wake of giving birth under difficult circumstances. What struck me in reading the account this time—and reading beyond the case itself—was the curious bias that seems to have held back even a figure like Carl Jung from reaching the logical conclusions that the case that he reported clearly demanded.
The very essence of Jung's book is to show that synchronicity is evidence for meaning in the universe. In making room for meaning, Jung created a quaternity of principles supposedly underlying the cosmic design. He arranged these, initially, in the form of a cross as follows:
Later, in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he modify this scheme further to yield the following:
Note that the word meaning here receives a set of quote marks around it, almost as if to signal that we must not take the word too literally. Jung is striving for a scientific flavor here even though what he is saying transcends the category of science as usually understood.
I can’t help but see this as what might be called a reflex by all those reared in the atmosphere of a sensate culture. That term comes from Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist, who classified ages such as ours as totally focused on sensory experience whereas religious ages focus on internal, spiritual processes and look "upward" as it were, rather than "outward" at the world. Members of the sensate culture live in flatland. They cannot quite internalize the fact that the moment meaning is seriously contemplated to be part of the cosmos—wherever it may be found—the picture is immediately transformed. It becomes hierarchical.
Jung’s whole career had a transitional flavor. I myself strongly suspect that part of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth century were times of another renaissance, thus periods of transition between ideational/spiritual and sensate/materialistic ages—or the other way around. The period we call the Renaissance was the transition between Christian spiritualism and the great era of materialism that is now crumbling all around us. Such periods are outwardly oriented. The reverse motion is inwardly directed. In the chaotic times that always follow when materialism collapses by its own weight are dramatic in another way and do not leave the same kind of grandiose impression. Throughout his life Jung kept reintroducing his audiences to the ineffable dimensions of spirit and mind, but he tried so hard to remain part of the scientific caste that his creations were highly ambiguous at best, an example of which is the Collective Unconscious. It has a strong flavoring of divinity. His archetypes, which live in the Collective Unconscious, are reminiscent of Plato's eternal ideas. And, finally, his synchronicity reintroduces “meaning,” albeit in quotes.
I’m glad that Jung labored as he did. For many members of my generation, he was among the most important guides leading us out of the wilderness of materialism toward the new world that approaches, as it were, both from the future and the past. For many of us the old order was decadent beyond retrieval. At the same time, in my generation (although I may only be speaking for myself) the sensate bias that caused Jung to hesitate did not prove to be much of a barrier. I myself wave it off as mere hesitation to make the break clean.
Jung's very choice of a neologism to label a relatively common, usually pleasant, but also mildly wonder-rousing experience that people have reflects what I call a kind of sensate bias, a word to which I'll return in a moment. The essence of the experience is its meaningful quality; in Jung's treatment of it, however, the emphasis shifts to the coincidence of something, presumably X and Y, in time. Meaning is introduced, but almost with a kind of timidity. Quite a few people, straining to reach once more a holistic stance toward reality, but wishing to be thought orthodox by Science capitalized, exhibit sensate bias. Jung illustrates this tendency in the present context rather neatly. Now to the substance.
The part I was rereading is the account of a very interesting and, indeed, classical near death experience (NDE) reported by one of his lady patients. She had the experience in the wake of giving birth under difficult circumstances. What struck me in reading the account this time—and reading beyond the case itself—was the curious bias that seems to have held back even a figure like Carl Jung from reaching the logical conclusions that the case that he reported clearly demanded.
The very essence of Jung's book is to show that synchronicity is evidence for meaning in the universe. In making room for meaning, Jung created a quaternity of principles supposedly underlying the cosmic design. He arranged these, initially, in the form of a cross as follows:
| Space | ||||
| Causality | Synchronicity | |||
| Time |
Later, in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he modify this scheme further to yield the following:
| Indestructible Energy | ||||
| Constant Connection Through Effect (Causality) | Inconstant Connection Through Contingence, Equivalence, or "Meaning" (Synchronicity) | |||
| Space/Time Continuum |
Note that the word meaning here receives a set of quote marks around it, almost as if to signal that we must not take the word too literally. Jung is striving for a scientific flavor here even though what he is saying transcends the category of science as usually understood.
I can’t help but see this as what might be called a reflex by all those reared in the atmosphere of a sensate culture. That term comes from Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist, who classified ages such as ours as totally focused on sensory experience whereas religious ages focus on internal, spiritual processes and look "upward" as it were, rather than "outward" at the world. Members of the sensate culture live in flatland. They cannot quite internalize the fact that the moment meaning is seriously contemplated to be part of the cosmos—wherever it may be found—the picture is immediately transformed. It becomes hierarchical.
Jung’s whole career had a transitional flavor. I myself strongly suspect that part of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth century were times of another renaissance, thus periods of transition between ideational/spiritual and sensate/materialistic ages—or the other way around. The period we call the Renaissance was the transition between Christian spiritualism and the great era of materialism that is now crumbling all around us. Such periods are outwardly oriented. The reverse motion is inwardly directed. In the chaotic times that always follow when materialism collapses by its own weight are dramatic in another way and do not leave the same kind of grandiose impression. Throughout his life Jung kept reintroducing his audiences to the ineffable dimensions of spirit and mind, but he tried so hard to remain part of the scientific caste that his creations were highly ambiguous at best, an example of which is the Collective Unconscious. It has a strong flavoring of divinity. His archetypes, which live in the Collective Unconscious, are reminiscent of Plato's eternal ideas. And, finally, his synchronicity reintroduces “meaning,” albeit in quotes.
I’m glad that Jung labored as he did. For many members of my generation, he was among the most important guides leading us out of the wilderness of materialism toward the new world that approaches, as it were, both from the future and the past. For many of us the old order was decadent beyond retrieval. At the same time, in my generation (although I may only be speaking for myself) the sensate bias that caused Jung to hesitate did not prove to be much of a barrier. I myself wave it off as mere hesitation to make the break clean.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)