September 2 - 8

1. "Inherent in all things to be learned we should be able to find inherent connections." 
     -Mortimer Adler

• What happens when the "natural joints" are questioned or discarded all together?

 The quote by Mortimer is revealing as to his philosophical principles, specifically his allegiance to Aristotelian principles and ideals.  According to a certain school of thought, human beings are very capable of knowing about "objects" in a disinterested manner. This way of objectively knowing an object should be sufficient to give the Knower some privileged access to the nature of the object, and to place that object in some taxonomy according to its relationship with other objects of knowledge. 

This view is highly flattering of the human senses, in particular those basic five senses identified by Aristotle, as well as lending un-do credit to human rationality.  There are, however, many pitfalls to this standpoint, the sum of which make this sort of idealism feel highly outdated and imaginative.

• According to this viewpoint, there is a 1:1 ratio between human representations of the world and the world outside of us. 
• Humans are capable of knowing the world and the objects as they are.
• This way of thinking pretends that communication is such that one person is actually capable of representing their knowledge in some form to another human being; one who is then capable of consuming that communication in an identical manner. In other words, it overlooks basic problems with communication.
• It ignores biases and prejudices that exist in the creation of human knowledge.
• Generally commits the hubris of believing that humans are capable of knowing the order of the universe as was intended by God.
• Under this view we might think that knowledge is not something created by humans, but rather, that knowledge is something "out there" waiting to be observed and labeled. 

Around 1640, the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy. In this work, Descartes questions the biases of knowledge that he found had clouded philosophy for centuries in the European education system.  In this early break from Aristotle, Descartes posits his new methodology for truth exists in his own cogitos (his thinking stuff). A later Dutch philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard took Descartes ideas much further.

Kierkegaard wrote on subjectivity and negative communication, as well as heavy criticism of the Christianity being practiced in his time, and is now identified as a founder of existentialism. Existentialism inspired French philosophers and thinkers such as Sartre and his major work Being and Nothingness, as well as theorists like Derrida, and Foucault, and so post-modernism took off.

The point of this very brief (and highly selective) progression is to show how far we have come from accepting outdated notions of things having a natural order that is accessible to the knowledge man. Today, we tend to see views such as those held on to by Adler's as being highly Euro-centric, Christian, narratives of how man was able to rationally categorize all of the world's knowledge--as originally intended by the All Mighty.

Instead, the "natural joints" of the world are recognized as being convenient means of humans to communicate their own knowledge, as gained from a certain perspective, analyzed in a certain way, and thought about through a certain perspective. Humans create the categories and humans decide what goes in them. It is up to humans to debate over the subtleties of these systems we invent by our all too human means.

So, in the words of Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, we are far more likely to accept the notion that "my judgment is my own and you are not entitled to it."  Truth and knowledge is created in my own world and makes the most sense there.  It is in the communication of those truths is where problems tend to arise.

This is really just an effort to say that the relationship between objects ("the inherent connections," as Adler put it) only actually exist when we agree upon them. As long as we agree upon terms and divisions, this system works fine, but we should not mistake ideas and representations with the real thing.

2. The joints as I see them.

“I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself” (Kundun, 2007).

The above quote is from the character of the Dalai Lama from the 2007 Martin Scorsese film, Kundun.

The joints of nature are more like mirrors that reveal the connections (the "nature") of our inner-worlds.  When we find one of these joints for ourselves, our response should not be to be filled with a sense of enlightenment towards the world, but rather bewilderment at ourselves.  When another reveals one of these joints to us then we may begin investigating the differences of our two worlds.

These joints are areas of power and struggle, both internally and externally, and an examined life should never be too comfortable with where these joints are located or what it is they are reflecting.  The mistakes of settling for a finished product of knowledge is the focus of Kierkegaard’s vehemence towards Hegel and much of Christianity. Truth is a becoming and these joints are full of uncertainty.  It is an uncertainty that keeps us striving toward more truth, a greater understanding, a finer granularity of knowledge.  I think a scientific age could come to appreciate this take on the joints of nature every bit as much a spiritual one.

These joints are revealing of political affinities, psychological fitness, and spiritual make-up.  They are abstractions of things that we allow to represent the whole structure of our horizons. They are imbued with cultural ideologies, zeitgeist, and personal convictions.  They are our habits of thought and associations that provide an order and functionality to things.  They make it possible for a Master Signifier to exist at all.  But they are more like scotch tape than like duct tape--not only are they frail and lose their adhesiveness over time, but they can also be transparent to others.

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