"Das Ding an sich", the thing-in-itself and then "das Ding an sich selbst betrachtet", the thing regarded as it is in itself, as it would be itself if it were, said Kant, to describe his philosophy that
things in themselves are unknowable. Tahafut al-tahafut and the great unknowable sphere, only all accidents of perception to know about anything or anything about it. Life is always full of change. There
are changes upon changes, only nothing and never ever staying the same. One will never know other than according to another partial demonstration, or best guess in matters ephemeral, of course. Such is
the empirical life for what it can obtain from the great government of the inaccessibilities, like the indefinite dyad all in motion, and the great beyond, et cetera.
In some confusion of his senses, and in theory of home economics, he also thought that prosperity, or the richness of it, which should or would be well being also and virtue, should be emphasized not as a matter of having but rather
not having, not by what one enjoys but by what one can do without. Yet having and being are so close to the thing that that cannot be right about any enjoyment. It is better to have the simple good, in simple terms without complication, and be able to work
with it, as one has it, than to not have it and have to do without.
Anyway, as to the reckoning of intellect and will, to figure it with common sense, if
the guise of understanding were to pick up or import merely the apparent but not necessarily the real, to catch passing appearances and phenomena of sense impressions only, but not apprehend the true causes why, a game like that and its batting averages could
leave one an old weathered fool, out in the cold, as toothless as dumb and still wondering at card-castles in the air, and whatever is beyond them.
So on and so forth, to know only so far that he knew nothing too, nothing what really in his day, as he would describe it, to know that what he knew was what he did not know, even after so much experience, Socrates, for example,
considered pleasure and pain as two bodies joined by a single head. To Crito what a morbid joker he was, furrowed creases working on the brow, something there to denote the sense of thought or reaction, a mystery perhaps, even like poor Yorick, a fellow of
infinite jest too, to hurt or not and like it either way, to say that it was nothing, a curiosity yet such a thankless business after all, dirt and death, such is life, something at times that could be discovered as some sort of causal relation for all the
indifference of many worlds.
O philosophy, thou fickle fiend and snooty smack, O titty toad, strange black cat of the highway, if not taken only as an abstract object, another side perhaps
like another triangle, or a strange place to nowhere or the way somebody feels, to hurt so good, yes, and so badly too -- to while away the infinite of thought with wounded affection, where comes
again the noumenon then the phenomenon, with a nexus of analysis and synthesis to collect in judgments, if things seem not to feel as they should, even with a priori and a posteriori descriptions ... again as well, there are distinctions among contingencies,
and then necessities, then identities and difference, and so forth, and a law of contradiction or to say that we should say that there is no contrary without knowing more what it is, to provide some semblance of balance or certainty among statements ... that
way even by the recollected understanding, any day at the park could be seen as just another thing passing in the sense perception, and something again to leave plenty of room for doubt.
-As Francisco Sanches used
to say, "Quid? Quod nihil scitur" ... of course, and what other way could it be than unassigned? Mind out of time, time out of mind, the land of the lost looms along the dusty horizon. The problem of the criterion is such a problem that nothing is known, other
than the utter waste of time, and so it goes; yet how the cat claws, the tongue speaks, the eye sees, and the ear hears and listens to grasp at the meaning of things.
The intellective
function is proper to man and that it should be so much pain to poison innocent or stupid delight. The wheel and the rack, for example, besides triangle and thumbscrews, give something to think about; and all to say that in the thing that is thought, there is the way of communication, of course, that involves knowledge, interior sense, sign, and expression, that also becomes the experience and quotient in occurrence. Yet if it is said that definitions are merely "analytic" and not informative, not informative about the world or its state
of affairs, at times, through the fog of appearance, something like amnesia may persist, that special feeling of numbness as well la différance, where a strange circle of knowing not knowing could introduce some to ask what is a number and what is a cause?
What is a number anyway that anything should count for something? As a matter of counting, what is an instance or an occasion, if it is one
like 4, for example? Any 4 could consist of any chance 2's, and it could be anything besides the one, for the indefinite dyad, as they say, first received the definite 2, and then made another 2, for two two's, for its nature has been found in doubling what
it receives. As that and Thema Mundi may be, there is no other 10 in the 10 but the 10 itself, as numbers count what themselves, what kind, and what for, of course, since the power of relation in things is always there, but why bother? Everyone already
knows that elements are not predicated of the things of which they are elements but rather simply as they are; and, as the Romans used to say, "if there must be a one absolutely, which is also many absolutely, let it be ten", since it well contains so many
and so much of any circumstances.
When circumstances come to a point, that is 1, this is what they say, and for that also something "indivisible", at least for a moment, then 2 answers
to the line that follows, 3 to the plane, and 4 to the solid, and 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. That way it should be certain that the generation of derivatives and mortgages, the proportions, the odds and ends, and the others of whatver kind, for example, besides
the void of the great big abyss, all fall within the power of the decade.
At any rate, nothingness and the inebriated joy, which sometimes feel the best, are inimical to further speculation; also
better than a hastle, and a mere nothingness in all its pleasures should not care to investigate how any practical knowledge comes to be. For instance, since so many things are good, if number is finite how far does it go? In relation to the infinite,
how close does it or other things get?
In accounting, they say assets equal liabilities plus owner's equity, and bigger numbers are always present to smaller ones, in such an easy way as smaller
ones are to them, again, as more is present to less and less is also to more. On one side of the question, therefore, some would answer that numbers appear to be abstract objects. Yet everything depends on place as much as the quality of surroundings. As well
as that, knowledge that is casual must be quantified. Sometimes too for causes it may not be easy to tell, lying down, pitchfork in hand, how much one should also be afraid of falling. As St. Paul said to the Corinthians, "itaque nobis in quos fines saeculorum
devenerunt, qui se existimat stare, videat ne cadat". So therefore to us upon whom the ends of the world are come, he that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall.
To the things
themselves, therefore, and the derivatives, as much as knowledge and placement would be for mere accident. The world indeed can be strange: a surprise unknown almost as much as the funny farm, where beyond the appearances there may be feelings on occasion
and depth that may be difficult to express.
For instance, in some rural parts of France there is still the account, or
rather the belief, that before an old woman dies the Devil will appear to her as a wiry wily little old man with a broom and saucepan on his head. Le petit vieillard ridicule, he makes sudden loud and banging noises, and adumbrations with obscure pronouncements;
then he often complains about nutshells, his failing health, and when he is ready to sweep her out, that is when she goes. Yet about such things and the fate of mankind in the cosmos who really knows?
Who can tell what is beyond everything that surrounds us? Who can tell how profound the mystery of the invisible may be, hidden unrecognized powers that we cannot fathom with our senses in this world of strangeness sometimes light, yet the darkness and noise, and mortal misery, how they may close in where one can be certain of nothing. Next to nothing, and if the Devil can well introduce temptations in any
scene or book, or undermine any situation of philosophy, perhaps it is only an irony of criticism then, to be sure of nothing but the uncertain, to mistrust nothing but the certainties, and find nothing
obscure but the obvious, where in the mind sometimes there follows an invisible thread -- a question of some synthetic doubt or smoke in phenomenology perhaps, where the analyst would begin to express
the opinion that the knowable order of the world, even topology, for example, like the riddle of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg, would depend solely upon the cognitive activity of the subject rather than on the things in themselves.-1
In such an atmosphere of skepticism, what is the correct attitude to adopt towards any given situation and the conditions, as things turn up, like when the Earth would begin to orbit the Sun, or a bridge would fall
down? And what by faith is necessary in an ephetic question? How to expunge the debt of reason? Sometimes to set things straight it is the invention of obscurities with preference that counts the most, to hide the true state of things, to therefore enjoy doubt,
and shun to know "that life protracted is protracted woe".
Since human reason is limited to an awareness and understanding of its own subjective products, it may seem that rational
experience has no plane or purpose other than "to prescribe its own formal rules for the extension of its empirical employment." Hume himself observed earlier that there is no perfect idea of anything, but only of perception; and that "a substance is entirely
different from a perception". He thought about it a while and declared, "we have, therefore, no idea of a substance."
A fundamental question about human reason then, also as perception provides
continuation, is the relationship to reality; and if it were only the idea, it would also be why. Thus, certainly why in determining reality, for the Kantian outlook, there is a radical departure that happens, in which the intellect of the subject's sense
impressions conforms objects to structures inherent in the mind, so much rather than the external objects of actuality conforming the sense impressions of a reasonable mind to themselves. For the imaginative philosopher, therefore, there would be nothing better
or more convenient than to give assurance of the truth through the intellective conception of it and merely thinking so thinking so. Yet that way at times the most important fact about human reason may become that it can be clueless about reality.
Of course, however, nature as an object of knowledge and analysis is a phenomenon arising from a synthesis of sensations and judgment.
Within the stream of modernist transcendental criticism, even to look at it closely, what gives those sensations is called unknowable beyond the mere concepts themselves, which already would contain, or be contained within, structures inherent in the mind.
Pure concepts, therefore, may be described as ideas and categories of the understanding, inherently abstract, and that way may be said to be wholly independent of experience. With Kant this way modern
philosophy would continue to accomplish a fundamental and peculiar inversion of the order of perception and right judgment, such that objects must follow the ways that people engage in thinking about them, as appearances touch questions of opinion making and
so forth, if they are that smart and hyper-rationalist for categories and what to say and think, rather than vice versa.
Thus the key to Kant's theory became the epistemological reversal, which he also called his "Copernican revolution," in which nothing is easily understood by experience. Of course, if the intellect is only vanity, and cogitation a mere game at will, to toy in realities which cannot be perceived beyond human senses, it may seem true at times that what we can know, after all, is only what appears to be so also in
the lense of the mind, and what remains in itself is intrinsically unknowable.-2 Even for the unmistakable pains of contradiction, the most simple things can never be known to us beyond the appearances, as the
world is a place where things sometimes can change as fast as Bian Lian 變臉, the baffling art of face changing at the Chinese opera.
Even more, as strong and common a force in nature as the wind,
that can knock people down and tear the roofs off buildings, uproot trees, raise the sea into mountains of water, destroy cliffs and cast great ships onto the breakers, is not seen. The wind whistles and sighs, roars, whispers, and rattles the wires without
being seen in itself by the naked eye, yet as surely it exists and subsists for all that to appear and disappear in whatever form.
Therefore, since everything changes anyway, if what we see
is merely the hundred thousandth part of what exists, it still would not be enough for any certain knowledge or established comprehension. Mere proofs, as much as the South moves North and the North moves South, and time marches on like any passing
convention; and the direct answer to a question remains nothing more than a trope among probabilities, as such and such, like the finger of Cratylus, since '"the only thing that stays the same is everything changes". Everything is constantly changing,
so much, in fact, that one cannot even explain it. By the time one finds the answer, that is not even it anymore. One knock at the door and all is altered. Everything only for appearances, even lightning, as Cleidemus said that it is nothing objective but
just a flash and vapor of dry exhalation.
For his part, the little old man Kant would even go so far as to insist that "space and time are a framework provided by our
thinking, rather than properties of the objective world,"(3) -- a precept of some over-extraordinary power of mind in schedules then, to overcome fate and the clock, which, however, is not quite credible for decent argument. As Aristotle noted, "to rely on
mere thinking is absurd, for then the excess or defect is not in the thing but in the thought."
Thought is not so great that it cannot be an accident too, or another thing as much as circumstance
and temperament, when one can work all his life and end up with nothing, to live in one room like a bum. Any impoverished chevalier may have flown in a plane, fought in a war, lived in an imposing castle and slept on the floor, to reckon four walls and
a tree the same the same in the end, where even irrational animals realize the same inescapable circumstances of time and place. Certain realities are so openly available that everyone alive can appreciate them, and who should be so blind to the simplest facts,
because of their obviousness, that they should be surprised when somebody calls attention to what everybody ought to know?
The proclivities of intelligence in natural belief relating to intrinsics
are so great that even the other animals of creation preserve the simple belief in the reality of external objects. This that and the other projection come and go in all their natural thoughts, instincts,
designs, and actions, also as they believe or reckon certain things about objects as entities. Material objects and their qualties have an existence independent of perception, and when perceived are presented directly to the consciousness. Llamas and goats in the mountains, for example, as much as men, recognize the edge.(333)
If
common sense implies physics, should physics refute common sense, and to what end should things like philosophy be resolved? That he saw his change of perspective, however, as a "Copernican turn" as he called it, was telling. He almost said it all when he
said that with his school of thought he would accomplish a "second Copernican revolution".
Like the way of Copernicus before, in the circulation of astronomy, and later with Kantian metaphysics,
the modernist instruction would instill in the poor noggin an epistemological reversal as to the natural order of things. A doctrine would be maintained almost to make it seem as though the longest distance betwen two points is a straight line, and for this
Kant has been thought by many to be the greatest philosopher who ever lived. Some have even said that "to be a philosospher one must have been first a Kantian", and Newton's so-called laws of motion were the collective paradigm from which he would develop
his worldview.
Whatever poverty of geometry in world affairs, the coincidences of ordinary everyday experience continue in the line of relation,
and "Kant's system is like Newton's idea of gravity", and "it is close to how we still see the world."-4 If he is reckoned, therefore, as the Master of Modernity in philosophy, another all-crushing Master Blaster of Disaster, and the mightiest thinker of the
thinkers who established themselves along the way of ideas(5), his favorite book of science was the "Principia", which is almost impossible to read and make sense to retell. For dear conceit in cause and effect, it would seem that the old man took a residual
leap of faith in the wrong direction, as much as Newton, and fell out of one of Porphyry's trees.
Since all knowledge is through
existence of kinds, the aim of science as well as philosophy ultimately should be to arrive at the words and kindness which give a true representation of the world. It is of primary importance, therefore, to get things right in themselves, because merely saying
it so does not also make it so. "Gratis asseritur gratis negatur", that which is asserted gratuitously may be rejected with equal freedom; and philosophy should never be distinguished unfairly from common sense knowledge or experience, for there is nothing
in it which could not be said in everyday language.-6 After all, "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things".-7
Even if not always by direct impression or the immediate sense of things, "the world divides into facts, as the facts in logical space are the world". With the wealth of
ordinary evidence, therefore, things and results are usually known in the way that they are perceived and experienced, even if not at first, and the way things are is also the way that they tend to remain.
As
much as change can be difficult, or artificial, good judgement about it could be as commonplace as any virtue in nature, yet Copernicanism has a tendency to make an embarrassment out of common sense everywhere. To say that it cannot be judged with simple cognitive
awareness on any given day whether the Earth moves is like saying no one can really know the "thing-in-itself", not even as an outline sketch, not even as a mystery, even if it was something so simple as whether the Earth is rolling along like a bowling ball
at midday of any given golf tournament.
"Since", according to Kant and others, "the dogmatic solution is not only uncertain
but impossible", a philosopher would have a way to tell an astronomer or tournament caddy that he cannot know what day it is or the score more than by phenomena of lingering appearances. Therefore, he cannot know what is essential to motion between any golf
ball and the surface of the Earth either, at least not so long as Das Ding an Sich would not be that much less than any other available confusion, so that something would become obvious. Conditional contexts can be opaque for the trouble involved, and
when a scorecard is signed, it may seem nothing else is so difficult to repeat as the correct administration of a straight line.
As simplicity is less, and the confusion more, the
greater should reign, of course. The appearances of quality and quantity, as relation and modality, and the space and concentration between things may be obvious in a limited sense, but not terribly
useful in terms of wider epistemology, since, when certain, the conclusion is already contained in the subject. As much as something would be true in analytic terms, like an oak tree is a tree, for
example, by definition and tautology it still would be as useless as metaphysics, of course, and likewise redundant to know.
"Limited
to knowledge of phenomena that it itself has constructed according to its own design", that is the faculty of knowledge also as the way to know as opinion, "reason cannot know anything outside of itself." And turtles should have the right to vote. Thus, even between an almanac and the window of a yard, one cannot follow with certainty the succession of seasons by the stars either, because logic can
have no empirical part, nothing outside the shell, not so reliably and not with any promise anyway.
To say that one understands the
passing of weeks, months, and years, as one would put together a calendar is merely conventional by definition, and time is more logical than that, of course. The calendar in comparison is a foggy burden of empiricism, all data-based phenomena, with arbitrary
names, ipso facto, and leap years and so forth. There are the problems of stellar aberration and retrogression, and the difficulties of perigee and apogee, especially of the Moon, and then parallax
and people who are late; and these natural phenomena cannot be continuous like logic, except where it is to know more and more about less and less.
Yet even if the field of synthetic inquiry and
equation would be narrow, to tell things and replacement parts with some certainty, where there would be reliable proof of the measure in the minor, what is reality after all that a just society would be capable of understanding its distillation? In the face
of the most abiding skepticism, what are the rules and whose the what is a lost golf ball, or an unclaimed beverage, in fact? Pars pro toto, whose is whose, and where is the confidence of cognitive certainty that would be needed in common justification, in
the what-how of existence, that people should recognize beyond mere schools of opinion? What is the sensible custom of observation and analysis, at the corner or the parking lot, ignotum per ignotius, and obscurum per obscurius?
Even if things and conditions seem to happen to people as much as fate and people happen to them, in the subtle
mixtures of existence, in the mingled minglings that all should be well, that all conditionals should be so worthy to wish to be happy too, or at least to seem so in any case, is a certitude for anyone who can think. The enjoyment of mere appearances
is better than nothing; and, as well as the most miserable lowly, Nietzsche on a bad day would have expressed it himself, to agree with circumstances with a simple apodeictic howl of grief; but too much bare bones honesty can be difficult, even among the totally forgotten, even if "we are unkown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves."
"We men
of knowledge remain of necessity strangers to ourselves", he said. "We understand ourselves not. In ourselves we are bound to be mistaken. As far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers".-8 For coincidence does not occur according to any universal or
general law, and the curiosity and vanity of things fail, for example, and it is much too difficult to make anything outlast final doom. Even with all good service and thorough examination of conscience in species and names, "we are surrounded by mystery and
cannot understand the common things of life. Nature speaks with a thousand tongues, and each tongue voices an unknown language."-9
"I
know nothing"! Sgt. Schultz from the Wehrmacht of "Hogan's Heroes" in TV Land reruns used to say. Yet "the man who does not know, even then, concerning what he does not know, has within himself true beliefs about what he does not know." Vague impressions
and he could not be corrected in the matter. After all, "ease of intelligibility is suicide for philosophy". Sometimes he would stomp the boot or the rifle, "nichts zoviel", he would say, nothing too much, nothing in excess, and like him we know nothing of what things existing outside us given as objects of the senses may be in themselves.
"For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life," especially at times when any awkwardness or embarrassment over a secret agreement to
avoid the Russian front would come so near to the surface. Knowing only the appearance and direction of such a country, and its policy, is quite enough, certainly, for actual sensibility to take account, since such representations in discussion and thought
do affect the senses from without, though it remains quite unknown as to what such things are, really are and would be in themselves when one is or would be really there. If and when would be should be retractable ... therefore, without detriment to the actual existence of external locations, conditions, feelings, considerations, and peculiar states like Russia, let the predicate in question belong only to the appearance, strictly so, and have no proper
existence outside the map.
The thing exists outside the map, the map exists outside the thing, as they exist to collect in
the mind, which exists outside them and sometimes outside of itself, and who would know the key or promise to hold it all together? "Le monde est si doux pour les mourants", and "all the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to
its appearance", and Russia, therefore, need not exist more than the mind itself or the map, of course. If all the strangeness and blind digression of the human race were fixed in the eyes of one man, for example, the expression of an overweight sergeant,
a WW II prison guard from the Wehrmacht, perhaps he could say "let me be so ideal at this too. As an exercise, I would enjoy peace as much as fate, and insist that I know nothing. And no one will remember me or these terms of discussion anyway."
As so per as much, many beliefs are only like a dream stirred up, and modern philosophy of existentialism and its phenomenology would say the same about what is behind or beyond the camp or city walls. Inquiring
minds, therefore, overrun the course with an absurdity of emphasis, to imagine that the subject would be knowable at all, whatever it was, even if someone did escape.
So politely, for instance,
like a free oil change for someone on the run, filled with the profound conviction that the easiest way of life is best, then the thing-in-itself, as what it would be, would that it were, and an abstract dissertation about "if". Si si si, "if", and which channel
or what drill, as a frame of reference comes to play, that would become recognizable beyond the passing absurdities of life. In the land of the lost, to question which way the Moon goes, for instance, or what day it is, and whether the Earth rotates,
if understood as perceived, it only comes again from a world of appearances.
Like poetic intuition of leaky buckets at beach city in the afternoon, a clairvoyance to impress in the ironic way
of confusion, heliocentrism keeps it going as only another nominalist school would. Sandcastles idealized in vain, sandcastles in the air, where truth exists in theory and name not the buckets or the water, not the confusion either, and then
"THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
They say Richard
Dreyfuss hates Bill Murray ever since, "What About Bob?" and it does not really matter what about clouds or why. To not really have any talent and be such a failure brings up the question of proportion, yet somehow in an atrocious second, experience and desire
can attain the darkest dread, perplexed, stung, and so irritated, even at life itself, et cetera.
"De gustibus, non est disputandum," yet even when a man is deceived or sees illusions,
he understands what it is to see; and if he only dreams, he still knows what it is like to be awake. Whether for love or malice, if such an academic reference weight as Kant would say that reality, and finding one's way to a train station of the metropolis,
is much rather mind-dependent being than mind-independent being, one can see how the art of solipsism and fractional reserve banking -- besides that of heliocentrism and Judeo-Masonic deception -- could have become modernity's distinctive intellectual physiognomy.-10
For things to be at all what they seem or how they would appear was only a naive expectation, to look at it that way a generality of life from long ago. If "the world is a common world", or at least some
would say so, it may still be too much to admit, even if for some a wide fellow-kinship with all of nature moves the blood. Yet who from today, for example, would expect that "doubt must be no more than vigilance otherwise it can become dangerous"?-10
The demonstration from a day of something so common as a little bit of peace would be too much for science to give a lasting proper
assignment, therefore, nitimini perseverare, endeavor to persevere, if the inevitable must be accepted. Since so many things and Saturn transits tie together, as entity from past, future, and present, the thing or image that is being seen by the eye must yet
exist in some virtue of itself too. If alone not alone for whatever it is, some combination of case is in it, perhaps even a mood almost as much as a process, that even if only for an illusion of understanding must include the way that it is.
Not to misunderestimate reason, not so often as another mistake, unum quoque dissolutur eo modo quo colligatur. Everything is dissovled by the same means that it is constituted.
Nihil tam conveniens est naturali aequetati quam unum quoque dissolvi eo ligamene quo ligatum est. Nothing is so consonant to natural equity or common sense as that every whatever-it-is-and-so-forth
should be dissolved by the same means that rendered it binding.
As
much as the law of the excluded middle and the mellow light of any full Moon contradict all the nonsense about light years, nature does not ask permission, and "the study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no
practical results to follow".-11 As much as people passing along the wheel of life are bound to construe things like the weather, the calendar, and the world of experience by the most reasonable way of construction, it is certain that the human mind did not create the first and most simple attributes of being. Ultimate comparisons in the ones like more or less, greater than or less than, equal
to or not equal to, as another way of something somewhat or such as, in this the what and what kind and kind of way, in any instance always have the same relation and already were.
"Our presence
bestows not being on it; our absence does not annihilate it. It preserves its existence uniform and entire, independent of the situation of intelligent beings who perceive or contemplate it."-333 The human mind did not create pepper, for instance, or two out
of three, and not this much or that much. And if people ask, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" they may also ask, "which came first, pepper or the cook?"
However they look at the question
of immanence, as always, or as something to which all knowledge is prepared, the simplest attribution of being comes first, to be at home anywhere, as one with nature, and it already was in and of itself before
the natural sense opinion of whatever human synthesis of it came around. The pre-existence of pepper, as such as it is, as pepper to tastes and opinions is difficult to deny, since pepper could not be known by taste unles it first existed. Without the pepper
there certainly will not be any taste of it, as the Deacon of Hippo observed, "iste sapor nobis notus esse non posset, nisi primus esset".
From the contradistinction of place in the quality, therefore,
even like the day of the week, being the one before tomorrow, das Ding an sich all day long, and the only one after yesterday, the measure used to measure remains equal to itself. Perfectly from the top
of the mountain to the bottom of the sea, the table of measures and motions is totally for percentages, minglings and mixtures by a fraction; and with such a subsequent mix for content as the human
mind in tow, would it be fair to say that any certain and unadulterated truth can be known naturally by the intellect of any poor taxpayer in this life?
If only to introduce a synthetic measure
of things, the mind and senses of taxpayers still exist to be known, for sure, and analysed, sometimes at length. The government and them, and the ways around, as much as what of the income
and the business, have an effective quality with real intelligence and to look at it with the examing eye. "Pink Floyd" too wondered whether it was wise to trust the government, and it seems a philosopher
may know when he does not know either, even as he may feel it wise and a patriotic duty to cooperate with the IRS in all things. As well and good not to go to jail, however things prevail, the common
concern can be certain of at least a little.
To think about it as much as a tax collector, in pursuit of mystified and smoky Willie Nelson, it
is a good bet that somewhere higher up another better score is being kept, even if he or the other would count on fingers only
to see how much it is. Where it leads, in fact, there is a satellite dish with signals coming in, too many channels to count and an old farmer's alamanac: ten coincidental cigarette butts in beach
sand of an old coffee can, and even midget wrestling from Mexico, to ask, "where is all the knowledge that we lost with so much information"?-13
Out
of all the accumulation, with so many channels for content, whatever it is, wherever it may go on parade, ten, for instance, has been considered to be the most illuminating and simple crux among numbers -- versed so well for all parallel and parallax. Ready
like no other for division and order among things, the preexistence of simplicity in the number ten is as difficult to deny as it is to hide many other obvious facts. Just to look at all the amounts taken in through the TV, or all the cash and one hundred dollar bills somebody can fit in a shoe box, a priori to a posteriori ...
Aristotle
had previsions of California too and to be accurate described ten classes of predicates for all the epistemology in topics. So many things that Osiander himself wrote that if hypotheses "provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone
is enough," and ten, of course, is the unit of the decimal system: "the perfect term of the numbers derived from the monad"(14), and whatever das Ding-an-sich may be, it must have a number as much as
a channel, for nothing exists without a number, or some content, some way that it must be.
So too that in the information age of mass merchandising, one sees that philosophy is not taught as much
as engineered, like an algorithm or a channel, and sold, and, therefore, also market pressed for content. "If Aristotle were alive today, he would have a talk show," and he would have to agree that
an important aspect of any program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
"No ideas but in things, and so much depends upon a
red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."
For a universal wheelbarrow, therefore, formalized ad infinitum in a classroom example, the substance of number could be applied to anything within its circle, as much as the number ten and poetics of the TV: and everything can fit in a circle. The first four numbers, in fact, provide exemplars that have been thought
to contain the whole nature of mathematics, since 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10; and when configured together, with little neato dots in a neato triangle, they make a radical little pyramid, the lesser tetractys, that appears like a root element in Sierpinski gaskets
and the way things are. For "the laws of mathematics are not merely human inventions or creations. They simply 'are'; they exist quite independently of the human intellect."-15
Quies media mediat ad infinitum,
and some of those who have spoken of ideas and the theory of ideas have said that the ideas themselves are numbers, and limited only by the number 10, as an actual universal with present nature. Yet with
such an indifference about it as well, that what is known of it can be predicated simultaneously of all the singular instances of it in the counting or accounting however it goes. Where it is in
the characteristics, the number ten and the reckoning of it as substance, in natural operations of cause and effect, is such a thing so powerful by the facts themselves that it becomes almost ipso
fact proof positive of divination and the foretelling by wisdom of all events. As Don Quixote observed, to reckon well the sense of truth,
and la razon sin razon que a la razon se hace, math must be known as much as nature and kind, because properties are in constant need of numbers to relate qualities and attributes. So it goes.
Thus, with the way the decade works in math, such a thing is not only a matter of opinion from appearance. Chance cannot account for the unique meaning and importance of the number ten, since "what happens
always and in all cases is not the result of chance but is in the nature of things."-16 Simple as one, two, three, and four, every instance of the first ten numbers provides a model of simplification in the operations of necessary truths, with which all empirical
evidence must ultimately agree, and which cannot be changed by a surface of illusion.
The number ten is essential and referred by symbolic tradition to things of outstanding excellence and
beginnings brought to perfection. If anything is brought to perfection, it could be signed over with a ten, since sign relations are ontological, and "of all the numbers from the monad and up, ten is the most perfect."-17 Plato's nephew Speusippis reckoned
the decade "to be the most natural and most creative basis for all things, being, as it were, in itself a sort of model for the things which constituted the universe".-18
Forever fixed at the base
of numbers, the amount of ten produced by adding 1, 2, 3, and 4 comprises the even and odd, square and cube, prime and composite, linear and plane. The decade provides the beginning and resolution of all mathematical exegesis, containing all the hundreds and
thousands and millions and tens of millions within it, et cetera, and all the decimals as well. According to Hughes of St. Victor, ten also represents straightness in faith, the right way to go; and it is the number from which all things come and to which
they must return.
Someone in an old casino comedy routine once asked a friend for change, requesting two tens for a five. Knowing
the power of the number hidden in the suggestion, he said, almost with a momentary note hypnosis, "hey, can I get two tens for a five", and without thinking about it the friend, who was high on a roll, gave it to him out of a handful of cash he had just won.
He suddenly realized his naïveté and the miscalculation of generosity when he received one five for two tens and remembered that two fives make ten, not the other way around. "Wait a second", he said, "two tens are twenty, not five. You owe me
fifteen dollars", but the friend with the two tens was in a rush and had already gone.
So it goes, and "time may consume the
speculation of men but it confirms nature".-19 As the way that birds fly, for instance, using their wings, proceeds by two's, so the way that humans see and understand is the same. Since divisibility is involved in the notion of figure, the powers of nature
have given man two eyes and five senses for the same reasons that birds have two wings and fine feathers to fly. Natural motion proceeds by two's, an easy method two-by-two, duo duo faciles; and human intelligence also works by a special method of division
in virtue of comparison. Experience and paradigm turn you from one feeling to another "and teach by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one”.-20
A simple
process of sense and perception, cognitive awareness in the human species is wired to collect and operate along a line of duality, an intelligence that goes along by reflection and noticing, "this is" and "these are", and "that is" and "those are", et cetera,
duo duo for thoughts and sensitivities. "Since nature is twofold, as matter and as form, the form is the end, and since all other things are for the sake of the end, the form must be the cause in the sense of that for the sake of which."
Rivers and the gods of them know there is no hurry none greater than first principles, and the assent to them is without possibility of error or contradiction, as all things roll on like time. Therefore, to save the mind from troubles, remember the better equanimity first, as much as the things themselves even in most arduous matters. "Aequum memento enim rebus
in arduis servare mentem", as Horace said it.
Burn on big river, burn on, as operations exist also in themselves, of course, and more than the things but not the principles: the reason
being that principles are powerful in consequence rather than extent. Many times that which was little to start turns out giant in the end, as the currents and waves of the collective mind go rolling out to sea; and who
has not ever noticed, with a view to avoiding confusion, that the way of intellectual distinctions always functions, since it is conducive to knowledge to distinguish one attribute and its property from another? Exceeding with meekness like Moses, counting
goats in the desert, "for Moses was a man unpretentious above all men that dwelt upon the Earth"(21), the number ten would also symbolize first principles, the wheel of fortune, the tree and well of life, and the overall power of division in perception, et
cetera for sensitivity. And, as to the certitude of first principles, "the terms of self-evident principles are so identical that it is evident that one necessarily includes the other".-22
First principles abound of themselves, of course. It goes without saying that the power and richness of any worthy repetition corroborates many things --
rooted in the overabundant tautologies of nature's self-adherence, et sic porro. By analysis of math and persuasion, we see that "it is not once or twice but times without number that the same ideas make
their appearance in the world"-23.
If not for the redundancies of assimilation and contrast, veritas vincit omnia vi divisione, truth conquers all by a power of division. It cannot be an accident, therefore, that the best number that fits to divide well and accomodate the greatest total number and confluence of all things would be ten, and that mankind would also have ten fingers of
fifty-four intricate bones on two spectacular hands.
Three to the third power for each hand in twenty-seven is like a little exponential trinity, pro manibus, since such a form enables them to
perform all manner of cunning work; and ten in two hands of five, with some subtle dexterity and intelligence, at times, could be like a little sign of perfection or perhaps magic.
Would everything like that and the nature of the world then only be a matter of appearance, "unknowable in itself", and are appearances always deceiving? Does the human cogitator's capacity lack the power
to penetrate the veil of appearance, and grasp the inner nature of reality? Does the octave exist in music with any essential property or soundness, and the calendar as well within any sphere, or not, if anybody has an ear or knows what day it is? If they
do, would it not be more reasonable to reject the call for despair, and the extreme intellectual skepticism of some philosophers, by
a) certitude of first principles, and
b) experimental knowledge
c) also with knowledge of our own acts, and
d) certitude of sense knowledge?
Is there too much confidence in common sense knowledge among fools, when one would say that he knows well enough what the thing is, even
in itself, when he has a dental appointment on Tuesday at 11:30 am? Such is the power of the known in evidence that to know also means to act accordingly and to appreciate any given position. Things in a dentist's office, for example, have a natural aptness
to constitute certain positions, which also illustrate the essence of lightness and heaviness, the former being determined by an upward, the latter by a downward tendency. The activity of lightness finds relief from heaviness in an upper situation, where too
the patient often would like to climb higher or fly away, but cannot since respective circumstances keep him bodily in the chair. As a matter of course, then, even considering the exercise of natural knowledge that follows at once upon possession of
it, unless something stupid interferes, it is fair to say that there is no abscess of truth among mankind, no consensu gentium in communis, even for the suffering in a bad tooth and the nerve?
After
all, perception and the sensation of pain are not only psychological, not only conicidental, as they do not seem to involve only the ways of looking at things. It is not just a matter of preference either what day of the week it would be when the Earth would
spin. Since spinning is not simply a preference, but something more, the spinning and spinning, of course, would become a thing in itself to turn again and again, and nobody would notice because of Newtonian gravitation that it was all such a lot of hubbub
to orbit the mighty Sun?
O Mighty Mighty Sun, through the windows, through the clouds, through the breeze, through the glass, if personal feeling is a must, devotion too, or not at all, if they
would say perhaps not, between lidocaine in the shots and the whirring whirring sound of the dentist's drill, is there any other truth to be found subsistent among general notions, like anesthetics, and specific days of the week? Any other truth than thine inestimable ineffable burning magnitude? If not so, what is the best interpretation then
of the great silence in all the money corruption and deception?
What is reality in any turn of circumstance that anyone should care?
Why are some things so difficult to face, almost impossible to bear, and does truth even exist, any cause topsy-turvy das Ding an sich?
At least in
the limit of a species there are waves, another something somewhat in triangulation, as even birds know the tropics of the Sun and the seasons. As much as animal intuition collects in the measure used to measure, some collection, or perhaps better yet
species recollection, if it could be believed to go so far, guides a feather.
After studying the scarlet tanager, it should be recognized
that a natural order exists among general notions, in fact, such that one thing can be known from another: a nest from a tree and twigs from both, for instance, as well the notion of "being" and the notion of "true". Being, qua qua to be, is the major and
more extensive, as "being is of stronger adherence". The reason for this is that simple entity is primary and something absolute, as much as the actuality of it is potentially everywhere, as much as anything would be, whereas truth implies a more definite
and limiting relation to an exemplar.-24
"To think well and to consent to obey someone giving good advice are the same thing," and it follows
from experience that a thing can be known as an entity, even though its truth value may not be clear and perhaps would remain as yet unknown. From this it follows that the thing which is true can be known before its truth value is also known and sometimes
by degrees.
The way the mind functions we know that many aspects of things can be grasped by a simple act of understanding and many times a day. In such cases, when the things involved are true,
they are also known. But the truth value itself of some circumstances, at times, may be somewhat hidden and still reserved, obscure in presentation for a while, and recognized only later by an act of judgment. "Simple understanding, however, precedes an act
of judgment."-25
Since knowledge of things gleaned from the senses is both of a general and particular nature, in virtue of such knowledge people may judge the truth of things and any occurrence. Nature
does not ask permission for its repetition, of course, and it is hardly fitting that any nature should exist without its proper activity. The more perfect the nature in question the less fitting that it should lack such an operation, and the proper operation
of the intellect is to know the thing which is true. Then it is hardly fitting that nature should not endow the intellect with the appropriate means and faculties of sense, perception, and reason for such an operation that fits it, namely one such as understanding
and recognizing with adequate flexibility the actual world around it, and the activity of the day of the week.
First principles make it all possible, infinitely so, since there is nothing possible without them, and a simple case of a first principle, for example, could be that one cannot have boiling water and ice
from the same water at the same time. If a quibbler dropped ice cubes into boiling water, the water that boils is not the water that is frozen, as the water that is frozen never boils at the same time that it is frozen.
From the very fact that it grasps these things, the intellect perceives and unites the terms in a logical and universal proposition of truth. By the elemental conditions of water, the mind itself has present before it the necessary
and evident cause of the conformity of this proposition with the simple terms that compose it. Such an instance of conformity, where the intellect perceives the evident cause in the terms, cannot help but be known in itself, as the thing that it is, das Ding
an sich, and the element water, as it is hot or cold. There is nowhere else for such an ontological basis of physical experience to go except where it is, and by such terms of nature and temperature it always will be the same as boiling water or frozen ice.
Where it is like that, boiling or frozen, when hot or cold, is a universal way of experience everywhere. The intellect could not apprehend
these terms and unite them so well, in an effective proposition, effective for all times and places, without having the conformity of relationship arise ipso facto between the proposition and the terms. Therefore, it always must be so, like commensurate universals,
as much as two similar objects could not exist without some relationship of sameness between them.
It is impossible to perceive all this, as the necessary way that it is, ita est, without perceiving
the water in itself. Since such simple terms cannot be combined in a judgment without being true, it is precisely such conformity of a proposition to the terms that constitute it that makes accurate the
truth of natural judgment. So it is that one cannot perceive this proposition and its terms without also perceiving the conformity of the proposition to the terms; and one is, therefore, also perceiving the truth of the element water, as the thing-in-itself,
as much as the oceans, the seas, and the tea in China.
Once there is certitude of first principles, like water and the number ten, for example, it becomes clear how one can be certain of the conclusions
drawn from such principles, since the perfect syllogism is evident from logic and many things in themselves. The accuracy of such judgments depends solely upon the certitude of the principles involved and the evidence of the inference.
As for b), what is known by experience, even though a person does not experience every single individual case, but only a great many, nor does he experience them at all times, but only frequently, still he knows infallibly
that it always goes such and such, and such a way, and holds for all instances of such a thing -- as boiling water, for example, or ice cubes -- as nature would be what it is in itself and whatever the occurrence. He knows this in virtue of comparison that
"whatever occurs in a great many instances by a cause that is not free is the natural effect of that cause". The intellect knows this proposition even if the terms would be derived from erring senses, "because a cause that does not act freely cannot in most
instances produce an effect that is the very opposite of what it is ordained by its form to produce".-26
In contrast the chance cause, however, is ordained either to produce or not produce the
opposite of the chance effect. So it goes at random. But everything does not happen by chance, of course. That would be more absurd than a motorcycle sidecar that keeps falling off in a bad spy movie. The whole agency and the government collapsed because of
bad luck; and if something occurs frequently enough, it is reasonable to know that however ironically it is not coming about by chance; and its cause, therefore, will be a naturally determined cause if it is not a free agent.
Facts gathered from experience -- and their causes and effects -- are so frequent and numerous that once we find a given nature associated at one time with this accident, then at another with the same again, then at another with that,
"we have discovered that despite the accidental differences, such an effect invariably follows from this nature."-27 With bears and honey or salmon in the stream, for example, such effects are not the result of what is merely incidental or accidental in the
world at large. The effects rather are of such natures as something essential in themselves.
At times, we may experience the truth of an experimental conclusion, such as "the moon is frequently
eclipsed", and granting the validity of the conclusion, because it is a fact, we then proceed by a method of division to discover the reason. A person may also arrive at self-evident principles after beginning with such a conclusion from experience. In such
cases, the conclusion, which at first was known only by experience, now is known by reason of such a principle with even greater clarity, namely that of a primary kind of knowledge, for it has been deduced from a self-evident principle. Thus it is self-evident
that when an opaque body is placed between a visible object and the source of light, the transmission of light to such an object is prevented by the interference. Such things and first principles known from experience are appreciated most certainly by a demonstration
of the reasoned facts.
As for c), people are as sure of many of their own acts as they are of the self-evident first principles and propositions of philosophy. "There are many truths of which the
full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience, generally of a painful kind, has brought it home and made it a reality."-28
And it is impossible that something contingent should follow
from a necessary cause, and people know well enough when they have a broken leg, like a comminuted compound fracture, or have fallen into a pit, or must have an abscessed tooth pulled, and that what is in occurrence in those cases is something more than a
mere possibility. Human intelligence may discover that what once was a contingency outcome before is not any more, and that way also apprehend das Ding an sich selbst betrachtet.
There
is an order among contingencies anyway, and some proposition is first and immediate, like the one who would have knowledge of his own acts. Otherwise there would be an infinte regress, or something contingent would follow from a necessary cause, both of which
are impossible.
As for d), certitude of sense knowledge, "the mind is not merely a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled"(29),
where the senses can cure the soul if the soul can cure them, for either or both to be in good order, as the other-- yet if such a plurality as the human condition that inhabits the world represents only a passing apparition, how can a philosopher be sure that what he knows is not less than spent wax and wisps of smoke? As the candle and cradle of the senses burn, if everything he knows comes
from circumstance, and the common concern is only an appearance, he may one day conclude himself that he knows "nothing". If knowledge is only apparent, appearing in the mind by the bridge of mutable and fallible senses, and life itself disappears, like an
apparition subject to change and final mortality, who can say what he knows except chance and illusion, and that he merely dreams as much as nothing?
Rolling tumbleweed and empty convenience store
garbage bags in the desert wind, drifting middle terms all gone dry, at the lonely Boot Hill Inn, across the street from the Wasted Motel, Descartes asked, "of what can I be certain"?
"Animadversus
in desertis, cogito ergo sum" was an apparent answer, but if the world is continually changing, we can have no certitude about it by any kind of light. For there can be no certitude when an object is known in some way other than the way in which it is, as
it is impossible to know even the least of that which has no way to be, even if it would not change. It is difficult, therefore, to say that there is real knowledge among mankind at all, "if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding.
For knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there
will always be no knowledge, and ... there will be no one to know and nothing to be known".-30
Even if it could have been this way, as "every exit
is an entry somewhere else", it could have been that way perhaps. Therefore, how things look is only a matter of probabilities in temporary outcomes. The mind judges about first things and many other things too: the probability of this or that,
these or those, and which is which, or would be, and many times in a myriad it could have been either, still going this way or that, or only one surprising chance of many for only another appearance.
What
people would say they know of the truth of things is only an ironic line of probability, therefore, derived from the numerousness of mutabilities, and they almost always still could be wrong. In fact, in many cases they are, even for their own acts; and for
all the trouble of getting everything right, the assertion of truth yet remains within the resident power of the mind, even in the case of something necessary which would occasion an act of judgment.-31
Yet Aeneas knew quite well where the shoe pinches, and that one could not not-be on either land or boat, unless he fell in the water; and to look
at it another way, of what underfoot and roundabout, if one could only find peace as nothing, as much as nothing or next to nothing, it will remain impossible to be happy.
"Ecce, maris magna claudit
nos obice pontus. Deest iam terra fugae".-32 Behold, the great sea encloses us with the wall of the deep. There is no more place for flight.
So the logical impasse between mind-dependent
and mind-independent being, set forth by Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", would be so difficult, even for opinionated elevations in the philosophy department, as to not give ground even for the birds, even if the way that they fly and the way that humans
see and understand is the same, duo duo.
If an ornithologist thinks he can overcome the rigors of philosophical skepticism,
because he recognizes the difference between a flock of ducks and the murmurations of starlings, he is naive, since he does not realize that it only is another appearance that he is judging. An innocent fool, he still does not know the thing-in-itself from
what it is inside his head; and he might as well tell NASA and the Bank of England that the Sun orbits the Earth, the Earth is not moving, obviously, and as well the full Moon goes from East to West, when viewed from above the North pole. After all, what he knows is not outside of his mind. What he knows is inside his mind, of course, since he only knows the knowledge as knowledge. The data cannot be handled any other way than to doubt at least something if he would say that he
knows the difference between a duck and a starling.
However, even if "the mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions"(334),
it does not follow that just because an object is mutable, therefore, the knowledge produced may not represent anything under an immutable aspect. For it is not precisely the mutability of the object that causes the knowledge; rather it is the nature of the
mutable object in question that does so, and this nature is immutable.
"Hence, the knowledge produced by it represents the nature itself. And if it is the nature, this nature may have an immutable
relation to something, and then both this nature and the other thing to which it is related, each by its own exemplar, are represented as immutably united."-33 And so by means of two perceived terms of experience, like a starling and a duck, produced by two
mutable creatures subject to probabilities and change, it is possible to have knowledge of some immutable relations and principles among things. In virtue of the nature involved, bird watchers and ornotholigists may even recognize with ease a common level
of certainty.
Any presence is substantive, at least to be recokned as a relation of fact, and numbers and the things about them cannot be avoided. The essence of relation in mathematics itself
is represented to the intellect as something immutable. If an exemplar provides an example, and an example is within the provisions of an exemplar, a certain close certainty prevails even among shadows in aspectu.
In so far as they are natures, one can tell the difference between a starling and a duck mathematically, and see from the individuals that these birds will not fly the same by themselves or in flocks. Ducks do not cause murmurations, certainly,
and they are not as agile as starlings. By the method of division in virtue of comparison, between these two species, and with all the certitude of sense knowledge, an ornithologist can reasonably say to a philosopher that he knows some immutable principles
of relation in virtue of natural motion: and that he knows the thing-in-itself qua qua for the birds.
Otherwise philosophy would end only by making even simple things false and have no accord with nature. And no one of good sense would prefer to be so affected as to put himself,
or the education of his mind, under the power of an instruction which would condemn him to an unhealthy state of unreality.
Much better to be aware that some equations are false and some are true.
If somebody wrote that the end of this sentence is true, when one looked at the end, and that end said "no, rather that the other end was false", and that it itself was true as not true, since the first
part lied about it, it must be for the non-excluded middle to make better sense of the confusion for which is which. Or vice versa, if somebody wrote that the end of this sentence is false, when one looked
at the end, and that end said "no ni na, no no, rather that the other end was so true", and that it was indeed false, of course, and totally not to be believed when it said that the other was true, the sense of certainty that exists and in which one may partake
from hearing contradictory testimony would not be far away.
Everybody would like a cookie or a cupcake some time or other. After all, equity abhors the forfeiture, and a proper balance sees that
as done what ought to be done. The well and good may determine a lot, as "virtue grows when the soul keeps the understanding according to nature. It is according to nature when it remains as it was made. Now it was made beautiful and perfectly straight. For
the straightness of the soul consists in the mind's being according to nature, as it was made; as, on the other hand, the soul is said to be evil when it bends and gets twisted away from what is according to nature."-34
With so much at risk in life, philosophy would not fairly serve a purpose that it would undermine virtue, and that common knowledge should be made so stupid that people cannot know some basic things about birds. "Usually the philosopher
philosophizes in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement"(35), yet not to be made dumb. After all, nature in the balance has been so wise that she has been
content not merely with dividing men into happy and unhappy, wise and foolish, but she also gives to the wise the spirit of wisdom, and to the foolish the spirit of nonsense, e.g. 1 + 2 + 3 ... = -1/12, as reckoned for an infinite sum identity at Cambridge.
Therefore, if it is true that a mutable object, even in so far as it is mutable, would yet signify something immutable, how is it that
its relation to another thing is immutable? The relation is immutable in the sense that the opposite relation could not exist between the extremes, and neither could the relation be non-existent, given the extremes. If one or both of the extremes would be
destroyed, then the relation in them is also destroyed; yet the formal quality of the relation is destroyed only in the things, not in itself, since quantity has no contrary and entity is simple and absolute.
"Knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven," or at least knowledge of the good sort has that higher relation; and every relationship should have some
attribute of number, also of being, qua qua the measure and the way they fly, and so forth. The extremes of the measure cannot exist in thought without possessing the necessary identity in question, and they may always exist as such, as such more or
less, as much as the mind itself would be an object of knowledge invovled in the world of physics and the truth, and a vehicle for intelligent investigation. If the identity did not exist, Das Ding an sich selbst
betrachtet, then the quanta and the way of it would not exist either, of course. If the number property of a number did not exist at least as much as any, at least from the first of it, then nothing would exist, since the first property of being
is as ordinal as a number in itself, that namely could be called the number "1", the number one of "it", and the primary one before the many.
At least in Latin the verb sentire, to realize, is
directly related to "sunt" and "sint", they are or should be. To be at all or have the least as close to nothing is one way to be sure. It works in everything, for all continuations, if not intellecutally still
more than gravity or the speed of light. Not ony the least bit of wisdom but knowledge and understanding also are matters of experience and taste, and division by one from the beginning is the most simple way for things like that to be perceived the
way that they are. It should become evident then that even a trifle among trifles can be represented under an immutable aspect, even as it is mutable in itself, and the thing-in-itself can be known in both cases.
What a relief to know things and their relations by simple division, where the logical essence and consequence of existence may be represented to the intellect as something immutable, by something radically changeable and perishable: for
instance, the geometry of a golf ball in any circumstance of a sphere itself. People know that geometry and algebra have not been lost, ruinstrewn and uprooted by cruel fate and cast out
of the cosmos, when a golf ball disappears, going out-of-bounds or landing in the lake.
If a golfer has three sleeves of balls, and one loose extra in his bag, he knows the thing-in-itself and
the number ten that they are in the amount with the certitude of sense knowledge, as much as any philosophy. And wherever it goes, a golf ball always lands between one place and another. That is the only way that it can be. The arrow of direction in flight
cannot venture in two different or opposite paths at the same time. From a principle as old as the hills, when one has seen one side where the shot lands, one also has seen the other from which it came. As sure as timeless Janus and his sense of geometry,
when one has seen one side or face of the shot, he has seen the other that was in the circle, and that way also the link that was in the face of the club.
If a right-handed player tees off, and
hits a curving shot that goes off to the right and almost lands in the lake, it was some sort of slice. If a left-handed players tees off, and hits a similar curving shot that almost lands in the lake, near the first shot, it was some sort of hook. Between
right-handed and left-handed players, and all the shots and sides of the game, there come to bear self-adhering and immutable principles of relation that are essential in physics and geometry, that do not go away. There is something more to it than mere coincidence
or a series of accidents.
"To sum the matter up, the cause of these results are obvious, viz. that between any two movements there is a ratio", and sense of universal proportion, "for they occupy
time, and there is a ratio between any two times."(285)
Even if a golfer has lost all his balls and thrown his clubs into the lake, the formal qualities of mathematics such as surface area and
volume remain definitive, covering all sides whatever the length, whatever the dimension; and without the proper delineation of quantitative attributions provided by geometry, mathematics itself would become just another heap of nonsense. Atomic theory at
its worst still requires figures on paper, and without the geometry of space, no score card and its math or the chemical formula to get involved would make any sense. Even average golfers know that about the game and the thing-in-itself, this here and that,
ubique terrarum, even if they just call it life.
With the Kantian style of rationalism in phenomenology, however, "perceptions come only from the senses where there is no grasp of necessity, but
only of conjunctions and associations of phenomenon"(36), et cetera. But the scientific necessity realized when a player's ball has gone to the bottom of the lake is self-evident and common as a present fact to everyone who sees it, and is not a matter of
what is only inside somebody's head. The phenomena and the rules in the game are there knocking at the door.
In any example, the causes that produce motion exist previously whereas those which
are the essence, that is as well to say the substantial form, exist simultaneously. In any fix, there is a practical survey, and it is as simple as common sense as large as the world, and with all due experience, that phenomenal play cannot continue from the
bottom of the lake. He must take a penalty drop, and in taking the penalty, he can also recognize again that "gravity" is not a lateral force. It is always the golfer's fault not gravity's. Thus the necessities encountered in an honest score card are not only
of the mind, or mind-dependent being, even if they say golf is mental, but they also procede from nature itself, which was already there das Ding an sich.
"Knowledge of a principle is immutable in the sense that it cannot change from truth to falsity".-37 An intelligible species or quotient of truth (the natural what-how
that instantiates it, like a month of the 21st century over here or the same over there) may perish or disappear, as a golfer may die or quit the game, or lose everything; but the true facts of a slice or a hook, or whatever kind of shot continue and remain
unable to change from a true to a false representation. As a result, fundamental principles of nature are able to conform knowledge to themselves, and cause knowledge of truth by being what they are, for "true entity, unable to become something false, virtually
contains true knowledge immutably".-38 Therefore, that which is necessarily and immutably true may also cause evident knowledge of itself in the mind; and such truth is not subject to the mind for simplicity's sake, not more than the simple facts, so that
it could appear true or false in some way of probability or opinion.
The truth itself cannot be made false, even if clouded by so many knots and much confusion. The facts are for more than saving
the appearances since all of them are justified of themselves. Appearances be damned, and not all people are constant liars, even if the Cretans would have a constant hum to conquer the world. So many times in many cases, liars and Cretans still know and remember
the truth, and that true entity at the root is unable to become something false. That way true knowledge is contained virtually in many things, even the tongues of liars, and in the ways they actually are; for even when people see illusions, only soft borderline
appearances, and mere after-images, there is still certainity that they see.
"Ce qu'on appelle une raison de vivre est en même temps une excellente raison de mourir.” If one has found
a reason to live, it also may be an excellent reason to die. And if someone dies without completing a project, and it appears that the knowledge involved is lost, others may rediscover the same ideas from the same principles, on the same or a different basis,
on their own, and accomplish more, since the results that would follow the practice and skill of any art in whatever things are inherent by nature.
"Actions also are done according to their proper
nature, and not according to our opinion of them. In cutting, for example, we do not cut as we please, and with any chance instrument; but we cut with the proper instrument only, and according to the natural process of cutting; and the natural process is right
and will succeed, but any other will fail and be of no use at all."-39
Gene Sarazen, who invented the sand wedge from the wing of an airplane, said
"the more I practice, the luckier I get", and the principles themselves are not extinguished with the death of an individual. Because they
operate at a formal level of sameness, they will always be the same for whomever he would be who would discover them later, and the same knowledge again, in whatever different cicumstances.
"Not even the gods fight against necessity", and if a philosopher does not meet the standards of a reasonable man, but instead is a quibbler, there is no reason for the innocent to suffer his trifles and doubts,
or the absurdity of his pain. Amicus est tanquam alter idem, a friend is a second self, and whatever the shared misery, the court of public opinion does not have to suffer the argumentative testimony of fools that facts are not obvious.
Rather, the determination of a reasonable man "is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and of the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry
into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis."-42 As "it is indeed a great gift of God to possess right, plain common sense"(43), the good should at least be wise enough to appreciate evident facts. As "by the dog of Egypt", Socrates asked,
"are the good not wise"?
Since everything like that has been said, "it is hardly to be expected
that we should not be able to discover analogies for every new idea among the old sayings of the past"(41); and one way that people can be confident of certitude by sense knowledge is understanding that "either the same things appear opposite to different
senses or they do not appear so but rather all the senses knowing such an object judge the same about it".-44 If the latter be the case, then there is natural certainty, perceived by the senses, in virtue of the principle that "what occurs in most instances
by means of something that is not a free cause is the natural effect of this or that thing."-45 For instance, if the same change or result occurs repeatedly in the majority of cases of any objective sequence, it follows that the transformation and image produced
is the natural effect and paradigm of such and such a cause.
As a paradeigma, παραδειγμα, of a short trip to the country, if
the engine of a car is run without coolant for the radiator, and it blows out on the road, and sits smoking by the way, the external thing that is known and experienced will be such as it is and naturally appears to be, according to the image in sequence so
frequently produced by the power of that cause and effect, etc.
The nature of things is also the sameness which most
of them possess most of the time, and people pasing by the way tend to have a fair sense of the measure that obtains in things. There is even some general agreement about the nature of justice. As Socrates described it, justice is a penetrating power, a faculty
which passes through all things. The subtlest of principles, the great measure of measures, it is a warrant which nobody and no survey can keep out. It is the element which superintends over all things, and some would even say that there is at times a great
mystery about it, as it remains the chief das Ding an sich selbst betratchtet, and perhaps the hidden cause of the world itself.
If
the judgment of different senses differs in regard to what is reckoned outside, people may still be certain of what is true and in common, and know which sense is in error. For more certain than any sense judgment, there also is an intuitive circle of logic,
a seed immanent within a reasonable mind, that is there to set the intellect aright, when one of its senses may err in a given instance. This faculty within the mind ferrets out specifics, species, generalities, categorical facts, and enthymemes for the intellect*,
to capture and isolate which acts of the senses are true and those which are false. The senses themselves do not cause but merely occasion this faculty of the mind to operate in view of the intellect.
For
instance, if sight says that a golf club partly in water and partly in air is broken, or that the Sun and Moon are smaller than they really are, in all such instances we are still certain of what is true and may know which sense is in error. In the case of
the golf club, the intellect naturally retains the proof that "the harder object is not broken by the touch of something soft which gives way before it". This proposition is so simple and evident that upon analysis of its terms no person of reasonable mind
could call it in doubt, even if the terms were derived from erroneous senses. Indeed, the opposite of this proposition includes a contradiction that makes it impossible.
Now the sight, touch, and
sense of every person attest that a golf club is harder than water, and that water gives way before it. That way the common intellect judges without difficulty that the golf club is not broken from simply being in the water. So it goes with other cases, where
the terms may be derived from erring senses, that the intellect yet knows that the measure used to measure remains perfectly equal to itself, and so it goes in all things. An element of simple logic stays within the rational mind to revisit the intellect more
surely than the testimony of the senses, in cases where an illusion would linger too long.
If sight says that the Sun and Moon and all objects in the distance are smaller than they really
are, the common understanding is still certain of what is true, and knows which sense is in error. Without trouble, the intellect knows that the identical measure can be applied to a nearby object of vision as well as to any distant object. Therefore,
the actual size of an object is equally the same whether seen from up close or far away. Sight errs, consequently, when it says that ships, planes, and cars shrink as they go away into the distance.
So
let each one have the wit to go his own way from any corner under a cloud of light to the Sun, and the same feet that are present and near are not greater in size than when they have wandered far away, and are a hundred or two hundred yards distant, "since
reason can and must give a full account of its own procedure".-46
To be vomited de phénoménologie out of the belly and appearances of a peculiar fish, and close a little chapter
on Kant, with fair reason one must conclude that when the intellect determines that the senses err, it does so in virtue of at least two appropriate ways of knowing, recognizing, and discerning the thing-in-itself. These two operations could be called the
imaginative and the ordinary, which correspond well enough to both human ideas and cognitive impressions that run along in the world of human cogitation and experience, et cetera.
The first is
an imaginative and rational kind of knowledge reposing within the lens of the mind, which requires the sense only as an occasion and not as a cause. This imaginative faculty also represents an authentic level of objective awareness among ideas, an area of
definition in which the intellect could not be deceived, even if all the senses were deceived. For example, to the intelligible, "A" resembles all other "A's", as simple as it is and being what it is. A letter and a sound, it also resembles "B" and "Z"
for being letters and sounds too, and all other letters and sounds in the circles of such things. There should be no doubt about that or any alphabet zabba do as long as simple logic and justice to the subject prevail.
Common sense should not be undermined, no matter any quantum uncertainty, as long as they of the relation in any occasion remain the universal measure in all things. It is not for no good reason, as much as the dyad may be indefinite,
that it is fair to reckon self-evident principles and the perception of their attendant images offer repeated testimony for common inference of the truth, and das Ding an sich in a way to be known.
To
know the nodes and knots of it, the second way of ordinary cognitive impression, "qui in duo equa dividitur", is not so different and proceeds by estimation and appreciation, from an ordinary frequency of concurrence in knowledge, that is acquired by the oft-repeated
testimony of the senses in direct experience, which things are known to be true and reliable by the simple proposition that, "whatever occurs in most instances by means of something that is not a free cause is the natural effect and indeed the occurrence of
such and like things", etc.-47
* the interpretation here is that the intellect is the memory and understanding, the mind is
more the will
Partially successful except for set theory ... "logic does not appear to assert the existence of
objects."
Professor Pluentes, University of Chicago
For place and time are counted among all the things that have
been created. Locus siquidem et tempus inter omnia quae creata sunt computantur. Periphyseon I.468c
II
"We're off to Scotland," said Tom clandestinely. "That way the desire for knowledge like the thirst for riches increases ever with the acquisition of it."-48
"I used to be a paratrooper,” he explained, and "if looked at closely enough, with sufficient thought, there is only one thing to do about everything". So go ahead, jump, or have some gum, or have a smoke, and let traveling folks
do the best. At least do no harm and doing no harm that would be good, and no one with the strength of common sense can accept the claim from a philosopher that he cannot know something. At least provisionally there is the circle, and the basis points whatever
the repetition, or the dance: and any lemonade stand as well is as readily simple and common as the divisible present. After all "presence is always divided", and it does not have to be profound.
That common sense should be reckoned valid as far as it goes, where, for instance, the bubble of French intellectuals appears. Before communism in Paris there was "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", and there
are about four mintures for any degree of arc of the ecliptic, and most comic books are only thirty-two pages, or about eight times as much as that. Such knowledge may seem little perhaps, or for trivial illustration, but would function also for a sign, a
sign of relation, or another note to understand and appreciate among things. For all the world not just the stars, the minutes at times in this or that turn may be as simple as any interpretation of the lines at the post office, for an example, or bricolage
and traffic of the road.
If reckoned that time contains something indivisible, or someting indivisible contains time, Aristotle
called it "a present". Tolstoy regarded the present with utmost importance, since he presumed that it is the only time when we have any power, "since time contains no point of contact for us except the moment".
As he reckoned the relation of extremities and middles, "the moment rules over everything", even as the coincidence and presence of always with Tuesdays and Tuesdays with always is some part of it: and if anything is known for sure and certain,
or like that about schedules, it is the power and reality of division by one, since it touches all things singly and together. The mind, therefore, "which is good for anything follows the motion of things, neither anticipating them nor falling behind
them."-48 Since knowing and understanding may be regarded as a kind of conclusion, like finding something, and imply "the progression of the mind in company with the nature of things,"(49) the right way is as important as right opinion or anything that would
be better -- and the what-how and now that exists wherever anyone opens his eyes is not too difficult to see.
There is a pulse,
in fact, and twitter, even in the optic nerve, that registers what is seen in the visual pathway about as fast as the "speed of light". If knowledge like that may seem like magic, and seeing is believing, without some acuity of vision and intelligence of perception
in the first place who would propose to recognize, measure, or discuss the speed of light anyway?
From the peanut galleries of the internet, an
anonymous source said that Socrates said, "the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms", which is like seeing things correctly, as with sufficient reason. Although this text today is impossible to find, it is not too far from Antisthenes,
who said that "the investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education"; and for terms, the divisible present in its larger sphere can be as simple as Scrabble, as well as the broad context, or for another example, finding the way to Scotland
from the Hebrides, or Edinburgh, or St. Andrew's.
It was not Scota but Cleopatra who cried deep in denial, "do not let me
drown in Egypt". And as much as they say in deconstruction, "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte", there is nothing in existence without its relation to the here and now, miraculum orbis universali, and nothing without the present. Without the present, there is no
past or future, and without these there is not much time at all, "si nous pouvons dire", which even God would transcend, "si nous nous souvenons d'un peu".
If he can, if he can exist, an omnipotent being may transcend "the countless series of years and flight of ages", and monuments more lasting than bronze, but not nothing, since it does not make any sense to say that a Supreme Being
transcends nothing. However, without the present now, quod adhuc est hic et ubique terrarum, time itself obviously would become like nothing, if it were possible. But that is impossible, certainly, for something that God transcends to become nothing, since
even God cannot transcend nothing, not even for a little while.
See the inspection, therefore, at the library or the parade, that any parallel of transcendence, even for any instance of one of even the least among many little one's, like simplest this to simplest that, for even a little while, that also would involve God or the mediation
of his nature in any way, that could be such as would be for any elevation, if only taken in a small way, always is and must be. It is so like some sort of creative circle that attends everything,
that rules in operation are like that, as life indeed is a reality to be experienced.
If the sea encloses the land with the wall of the deep, and there is nowhere else to flee, in an impasse
of impossibility it becomes evident that hidden in the present is a universal form of ontological necessity. At least one, stuck between next and last, and therefore with reason science must agree that a bridge is a bridge, as much as the lack of a way out
or across is not, and the Firth of Forth is the Firth of Forth and not the Dardanelles, et cetera.
Geometry and geography attest that from one location one hour is never another, and for one town
it never is two days of the week at the same time. As much as the day is always changing, moving its place from midnight around the Earth, space is the place for all the days of the year, all the identity and difference, and the pyramids in the desert, and
time of course functions in a circular pattern like waves. A singularity seen many times, and "one must always try to see the truth of a situation. It makes things universal,"(51) and one of the mysterious things about now is that whenever it is, it always
is local as much as it is more extensive than that.
"Whenever he thought of the past, it brought back so many memories, that
sometimes he could not let it go".-50 He was only a clown, but if the here and now are the thing-in-itself, hic et nunc, everyone should know it as much as the day of the week, that follows in sequence, the succession going 1,2,3, under the cope
of heaven. For it is impossible that the same thing be and not be, or that the same thing be all red and all green all over. Therefore, the divisible present and fairness in observation of natural judgement are not only a question of time, but also right
sense, and of placement, proper place "hic et ubique", and the "now" of them is also everywhere.
It may be impossible to get
rid of, even if meaningless or absurd, since the meaningless or absurd would still have an expression of time and place. Therefore, where because, if all things known to mankind by experience and mere self-talk were withdrawn from the cosmos, and all the world
was made perfectly deaf, dumb, and blind in the addition, as though no one of good sense or good will ever existed, it would still be impossible to withdraw those properties which are most strictly attributive to substance, or to the persistence of any fact,
and "now" is such a case of connection.
Since substance is ultimate and all that can be thought of, in some sense it may even become something like the representation of a great corporate body,
an omnipresence of great imminent summary as much as any total act would give defintion, as any facts persist overall. Many believe that in some mysterious way science is at the source of all material prosperity, and not to be strange, however, now suppose
then in the manner of an empirical idea, of a body or a vehicle like a car, that science successively removed all its empirical constituents: such as color, passability or impassability, consistency,
weight, monthly payments, any increased fees and so forth that would be in the occurrence of now, then science still shall find it impossible to remove as well the space that it once occupied.-52
The
way that it was science cannot destroy, et de nobis ipsi silemus. It would be really telling if a terrorist could throw a bomb into pure mathemtatics, but it proves impossible. Since the institution of nature is also in the numbers, in whatever form or continuation,
it is like the stories that so many people tell, and that go on and on. Like geometry and the parable of the fox and the crow in Fontaine's fables, if ever there is a strange feeling from obviousness, "un sentiment etrange de l'evidence", it may be well to
remember that "tout flatteur vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute". All flattery lives at the expense of pleasure, and space itself may as well remain indifferent to such things, such things as flattery, any flattery of surface area as far as it goes, since space may provision objects but objects do not provision space. Space without things,
what does it matter, after the crush and bustle of a bargain sale? For that without which the others cannot exist, while it can eixst without them, must needs be first, for place does not pass out of existence when the things in it are gone.
Therefore, glimpse or discern the riddle, of a systemic spirit if it is, that "hoy es siempre todavia". Today is always still. The same
or otherwise, still always it always is today. As it is now yet again, when has it not been today? As the present is always present with the one that is, for whenever it is then like that so it goes, during
all its being the present is always now.
"Adivina adivinanza, entre el vivir y el soñar, hay una tercera
cosa. Adivínala".-53 Between living and dreaming is a third part, another one, a riddle perhaps and guess it too, if guessing it as the hidden power in all continuation.
If there is one, a continuation, then by all means of experience and logic there is the mathematical and dynamical turn, the forma substantialis
and forma accidentalis of it all in a game. If it is somebody's turn to move, even if far from sublime, it is that way now for the entire game at the board and also in concurrence for everywhere else. Since entity is absolute, being the first principle, and
quantity has no contrary, "numbers must be just what they are, or not be at all; for example, the number ten at once becomes other than ten if a unit be added or subtracted, and so of any other number."-54 So it
goes that the science of numbers "can have a foundational status lacking in any other form of knowledge,"(55) including when it is somebody's turn. For any tableside moment, some attention may be given to practical aspects of the question in view, as well
as to time and astronomy, of course.
Even for the most mysterious substance, constitutive of whatever placement or place alike in space, spacely
too, so it goes that "mathematics consists of necessary truths which cannot be changed by empirical evidence".-56 Therefore, it would not make fair sense, without including the principles and proofs of geometry for background analysis, that science should try to dominate things by counting so many bign numbers to crunch
them over people's heads. Since no other creature or ghost can overcome the numbers either, as the numbers must always prevail as much as any proper place or valid argument, it is the pattern that really
counts.
Of course, by some ontological necessity then, mathematics would seem connected or linked to theology, par Dieu, and to the theory of the sphere also, where there is the direction
called up, where people look on high, as up above, to see if anything good may come from higher realms or any essential relation, even from the roots or a seed, et cetera. For if second sight, which the Scottish call intuition, and empirical knowledge would
be regarded as fallible, mathematics would yet remain infallible. So the infallibility of mathematics could be regarded as having a source beyond the human, a resource beyond the material, even as it includes simple arrangements around a counter or at a table.
Then the fundamental characteristic that sensible people should know in common about das-Ding-an-sich-selbst-betrachtet is that, like "now", and other windows and doors, or somebody's turn at a game, it is
divisible, even if it would be everywhere and here at the same time. After all, Satan, for his part, assumes that "all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" are his. He would have them in his
grip. He said further that he would sift poor St. Peter like wheat, and the cognitive impression of divisibility that comes from human experience is unmistakable, and everybody knows it as well as dust in the wind.
"Pulvis et umbra sumus", we are but dust and shadow, sometimes sifted in a handful of worry.
"All dust is the same dust.
Temporarily
separated
To go peacefully
And enjoy the eternal nap."-57
Wherefore thought unopposed to ordinary notions, even if wormwood and gall, that is bitter anguish as compassed within the domain of reason, also recognizes that the sphere of now is as comprehensible as
any bookstore receipt, and everywhere too, "ubique". Since the divisible present abides comprehensively, one thing leads to another by nature, whether by contact or succession; and even little trivial things add up, for example, if people take note of them,
and have a way of becoming connected.
Like the old philosophical contention of the one and the many, now always adds up. If "all that is transitory is but a metaphor",(58) the divisibility of
transition at least must be something real, a knowable thing-in-itself, otherwise mankind would not know the breath of despair, and the way of living in denial and how to write poetry as well as he does. Escapism too and the passage of existential doom, quo
vadis, quo vadis, and a turning of descents with age and pain are like a ritual that is impossible to deny for many if not all to avoid.
"Desire is poison at lunch and wormwood at dinner; your
bed is a stone, friendship is hateful and your fancy is always fixed on one thing."
.. facilis descensus Averno
noctes atque dies patet
atri ianua Ditis.
The gates of hell are open night and day
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way
And "with every increase in the degree of consciousness, in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair".-59
Kierkegaard
and the metaphor of oblivion would not exist without the extremes, and the extremes must exist beyond the veil of appearance, because there is no other simple way. People cannot see everything. Even at the worst of suspicion, the simple way is best on either
side of the curtain, and the best is always good enough, since things must also be in themselves as well as the others. If it seems to be a pain, whether a fish sees the river bank or not, besser ist besset und das beste ist gut genug.
Like putting one's toe in the water, one knows the water and one knows the pool. It should not be too difficult to understand, without having to put one's toe in every single part, that that sort of knowledge should
not be a problem for a philosopher, to comprehend das Ding-an-sich, and that the Earth does not rotate or orbit the Sun.
The caverns of hell may be smoky lakes of fire, yet
.. to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
If
such questions are not a total waste of time, and there is any faith left in the earth, it may be that "nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it." Therefore, simplicity
of intention is common to beatitude, for it constitutes the happy form of peace, the happy thought too, and "to be happy is necessarily the wish of every finite rational being."-60
"We seek happiness
by our very nature and man's happiness consists in understanding,"(61) since the intellective form, in fact, is proper to man. For example, as an illustration, there was a clown at the UN who admitted
to the audience that he was driven by an interest in entertainment and popularity. He confessed his Verroen theory of common interpretation, that reason could be social, and that he would "collect moments", as he called it, as he went riding his highwheeled
bicycle by the Rockefeller Compound of the UN.
"This operation, in fact, this joy in which such felicity consists is in me too, formally, and is part of the act and intention", he said.
A jolly man of bells, balls, and whistles, he held many secrets in his interior. There were things in his pockets and hidden up his sleeves. His coat and waistcoat were old and worn as much as all the social
theory of the central banking system 2021. He liked to toot his horn for contracts and wave to the innocent children. He was a splash in his colorful costume and make-up, and would carry tunes all of a sudden. It was a little strange, kind of funny, but
"sunshine almost always makes me high", he would sing at favorite moments, when he would do funny pratfalls and slapstick by the Judeo-Masonic Foucault pendulum, which he knew was another old routine, one of the most absurd hoaxes in all humanity.
He liked to mock at heliocentrism and the New York Fed as much as some silly names, as he said, "for the history of the world is stranger than an octopus: driven damped, and tuned".
"Sunshine on the water looks so loverly", and the angels who sing too, who even sing to know, know that between any extremes there is always something there.
"We
have a little commotion", he said for proof, tapping his over-sized old leather shoe, "and a wave of sweetness shoots through me from top to toe when the sun shines. Esse quam videri", he declared, "for a clown. So it goes a long way, if all the
world were a birthday cake, and you should take a piece, but not too much."
"The difference between a philosopher and an actor", he said one time, when he took a dangerous spill from his highwheel
bike, "is that an actor knows what he's doing, and he can feel it more" he added.
"Drinking as thinking's no good, if you don't feel it," cried an unknown man from the crowd.
"Yes, I can remember when I had my first beer too", the clown replied. "Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble"(62), and he dusted himself off as needed, and should
it be that the idea that there is no fair explanation of comportment, as such-and-such that would be in common, would be accepted?
For some it may become resonant as an apodeictical reflection
of apperceptive apprehension, if not a matter of direct intelligence, that the shortest distance between two points is forever a straight line. After all, there are two sides to everything, and "he that keepeth justice shall get the understanding thereof".-63
Wisdom is worth more than pearls yet "there is no understanding where there is bitterness, and the heart of a fool is like a broken vessel,
and no wisdom at all shall it hold."-64 Even that way, an inattentive clown with a touch of schizo-affective disorder, lost among bicycles and unicycles in a shop, and volkswagens in a parking deck, may fall into the accidental subsistence of nothingness one
day besides self-amicable apodixis. "We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness"(65), said one, yet memory makes a mirror, sine qua non, that dwells as much as it informs.
If it could have happened anywhere, therefore, some occurrence of authenticity and a little circle of intelligence, it could have happened in pure space perhaps, yet as much as the hand writing was on the wall at Belshazzar's feast
-- mene, mene, tekel, upharsin -- and not at the North pole, locality has some definite scale of importance, and time is easily fixed by events. Certain places and events have an atmosphere all their own, like words, names, and memes; and at times there comes
even an affective rapport, if sometimes for what could be called a sort of universal fame and declination by the stars.
"Sonny and Cher" were famous,
what an example, as a celebrity set on TV. To be entertained, common sense should be as famous as them or anybody else, and as Earl Holliman as Elvis too, at least as commended as the stars, since many would say that it is the best thing shared in the world.
Common sense words and aspects like many acts of imitation are also natural, not merely conventional; and for some the occasion of place may create a special sense of awareness, viz. das Ding an sich selbst betrachtet. In its own way then, between mind,
cloud, and tower, the sense of verbal awareness and etymology of location may become of the greatest importance for reflection and access to meaning. As much as any castle and its drawbridge would
have defintion, some significance or any pleasant hope, "without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more."66
If
the question is how do we rightly know about the world then, and that the Earth does not orbit the Sun, for example, and what is possible for the human mind to know beyond that, it may be an equivalent status question, not unlike a game of Scrabble. If one
says "the world is everything that is the case", and another says "the world is the totality of facts, not of things", is it something too much or not enough again that people wonder, "can we not all still get along"?
There are games in life and Charades, etiology and a holy mountain with clouds on top, where the gods look down to see what nations and contracts will do. "For our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil," yet the dynamic
in language can copy reality precisely and completely, if not sometimes a little more. Wherefore, Scrabble may be an interesting way for a circle of intelligence to develop, as much as there are jurisdictions, governments, entertainments, mouths to feed, and
money. So much money held by so very few, and if it were like Charades, "where the lightnings meet", at times the best outcome may prove difficult to win.
Without the right letters, words may become difficult or impossible to spell. The circle of perception and the bag of tiles are like a well for the intellect, in view of the mind; but if one does not draw the right letters, and the well runs
dry, he may be left "naked as a blade"; and he will have to exchange, which could cripple his standing and his score.
Most Scrabble players often prefer to place small, low-scoring words that get
rid of one or more of the letters they do not like, instead of executing the swap maneuver. If the situation arrives that one simply cannot place a word on the board at all, then he can swap out the letters that he does not want, and choose from the remaining
pile of unused tiles, as he would when replacing letters he has already successfully put in the game. "The supreme accomplishment", said Arnold J. Toynbee, "is to blur the line between work and play", and learning rare word lists may help a professional obtain
higher scores, and win a little money. Q, V, J, X, and Z can be difficult letters, for example, but sometimes may allow placement of a winning combination, and so forth.
Just as sounds and letters
go in the right place, in words there are natural relationships of veriloquium, a sense hidden between different meanings and the ways that people have of saying how things are. Il n'y a que l'esprit qui sente l'esprit. Some are as obvious as the similarity
of divisibilty and visibility, as well as diversion and the distance, for example, which show that the powers of division and vision go together by a sort of turning and clipping along the way. As Caesar wrote, "omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa
est", and he could see it as another thing also through experience, like "visa", of course.
It is good to have credit, since even if there is potential there remains the matter of
knowing how to tap into it; and science itself comes from signs and from separating one thing from another, since that is the way to know and distinguish things. Scire and scindere in Latin used to mean to cut and divide, and splitting one thing from another
is a way to see.
"Days and months are travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by", and in channel surfing TV there are commercials, of course, with so many colors, sounds, and visual
passports to countries and more credit cards, or worlds of pleasure. Watching it all, like Billy Pilgrim or Basho, people almost everywhere can see the visible since it is divisible, and see that every Visa account starts with a 4, Master Card with a 5, but
the indivisible is invisible. Somehow it remains hidden from natural sight, the indivisible and invisible, perhaps invincible too, home of the immortal gods is far away it seems, even from high-altitude airplanes, and difficult to find.
To cross the Rubicon with a legion was one thing for Caesar, yet without some special magic it would be another more difficult feat to catch a strange and mysterious bull like Jupiter by the tail. Even for a bucolic
moment, however, some things impossible to take back may be worth the danger, if not the horns, and the Spanish verb "divisa, divisar", which means to see from afar, shows the same intuitive sense of things: that to see and grasp with understanding in natural
terms is also to divide. Like the Latin verbs dividere and videre, the experience is what counts, and a value item when it speaks for itself.
It is aesthetically pleasing and a blessing
of nature, of course, to see that humans have two eyes, which also parallels the way affection produces knowledge and understanding. What the eye sees will also depend to some degree on what is sought, with a little preference perhaps, a poco a poco, and people
develop a dominant eye as much as they develop a dominant interest or taste.
One must admit that if he likes something in itself, or even merely the appearance, even if it is only a word that
he wants to spell, he should also know what it is, as much as it would come close to the apple of the eye. For what is in the apple of the eye touches the portal and understanding of the soul, and the soul is the principle of life, "the ordering and containing
principle of all things".68
In Scrabble, like life, every player gets his turn. To look, to see, to understand the divisible
present, and it may be interesting to note that when people correct the spelling of a word, they say "now that is correct", like it is already understood as well that there is already something more correct about "now" itself, the proper sense of which then
is not only a matter of time but also of place, of course. "There is a place for everything, everything in its place", said Franklin, and if there is a when there is always a where. After all, the form in space ipsa qua non, or call it "pure space", has no
connection secondary with time, as for example motion has.
Like the letters of an alphabet, even in a critique of pure reason, all the hours and minutes of the day are around the
Earth at once. Yet still better, if it always is today and things like now should be so close, that we should hold our destiny in ourselves and our words more than in the stars, since any natural desire like a chance to win at Scrabble or know more about things
of worthy interest cannot be in vain.-69
As much as the little days of the week and the cosmology of the stars have theirs, confusion should not reign over places; and everybody wants his
turn, and everybody wants to be a winner, certainly. It can be deeply satisfying to win prizes and money in front of other people. At least that much is known for sure and certain about the divisible visible present and the sphere of das Ding an sich selbst
betrachtet that humans inhabit.
"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards", since "the whole collection
of rules applies to anybody"(71), and from words about science to those about space and philosophy, proper spelling, pronunciation, and inner direction of meaning are no accident, not any more than the number ten as content or the many elements of which it
may be composed. The circle of return for any feeling of certainty can only remain open as things that would come back to verify must continue in substance.
Substance can be taken for any set
of facts, as much as what has never come to pass never grows old, as for instance, where Bellarmine and Socrates knew that the character and location of the Earth within the cosmos was central. Where to give the weight in common sense reckoning, ultimate substance
addresses the possible and the impossible alike, even as the ultimate preposition of all reality, the ultimate over-under and beyond. Philosophy too should know what the difference would be between hemlock or a dental appointment instead of an afternoon fishing
or a round of golf. And "to assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin".-72
So
it goes without saying that the days of the week and months and seasons of the year fall in where they belong like circular functions. The meaning is as natural and conventional as because because and also because something like the correct spelling.
One of the best things in life
is to look for a chance to vindicate common sense, and then to keep doing it, as often as needed, like a man for all seasons. Omnium horarum homo, omnis decuit color, and it is the smallest things sometimes that may start us seeing anew: little gimlets of
light reflected in a river or mountain lake, an aureole of visibility that owing to the three dimensions of space would also be the center of another sphere. Like an atmosphere of sunlight on cars, one may recognize that light spreads successively by spherical
waves.-73 And "without light, vision is impossible", of course, and color too, "and that the inner part of the eye consists of water is easily intelligible, water being translucent" and divisible.-74
Nothing in a day can describe better the smallest point of division in space than a tiny circlet of light. Since there is no mote or particle that can be understood without its division and a light, which provide some simple form of distinction, as in Scrabble so in
life. Some dogs can almost say roof, others Ruth, and the expression of intelligence at times may be as little as any consonant or vowel, or dipthong, that could become significant for the same universal
sound.
In a world of intrigue,
of maps in keys to code, any shibboleth, for instance, like "zunzuncito" or "lizardly", could be kept also as a secret password in a labyrinth. And a circle closely guarded like that always comes close to the same difference, something else unknown, and if
it is a total secret who else would know? Yet as much as treasure maps and pirate skulls and bones, necessity has an excellent way of coveting influence and understanding: like sticks and stones between words and things, and also for the flower of the mind, the eye will create its own reflections per ratione.
Since any primary status is formal like division by one, and space is a prime concept, whatever exists
is also inevitably part of some triangle. Just halve the base by the height and the triangulations will come along as much as all renditions, as there
is no math or number without its trigonometry, of course.
Geometry reckons all space has a similar relation to itself and to the infinite beyond. Where there is some light and another that is close or far away is some
instance of a space ... the dynamic of identity and difference; and however many may be the places in this world, they are not more unlimited than an alphabet or the primal dyad. Therefore, if the Earth
is not flat, and of course it is not, neither is infinity, since flatness is less; but the visibility as knowledge, obtained by principles of divisibility and assimilation, cannot comprehend more than what any two points would represent, even for certainty
in the extremes. Therefore, the method can be everything, and as we are certain by divison and comparison that a simple plane in itself is not infinite, neither is the projection of any one
of its lines, et cetera.
"Geometry, nevertheless, advances steadily and securely in the province of pure a priori cognitions, without needing to
ask from philosophy any certificate as to the pure and legitimate origin of its fundamental conception of space," etc.-75 As the Sun orbits the Earth over the Sahara too, where all around is the open desert air and unbroken sky, perhaps a mirage and the French Foreign Legion in a thirsty movie would prove something scientific.
All for rhombi or a throat lozenge, to make a fort and find a gold mine or a bag of diamonds under a rock, for a lost corner of the mournful kingdoms of sand
"O, Sunlight! the most precious gold to be found on Earth." Beyond despair, beyond the debris and monumental debts of modernity, nous allons enfants de la patrie. Le jour de gloire est arrivé ...
marchons, marchons,
liberté, liberté,
chérie des rêves, et cetera ...
chérie des rêves, et cetera ...
liberté, liberté,
"Without doubt, good infantry is the sinews of an army" even if they do not speak very much. The word infantry, in fact, comes from Latin "infantem", which means a young child or toddler during the earliest period of life, or a babe in arms. Called "infantis" as infans means not able to speak, or to tell, or to say, and so
it was and still is infantem the infantry.
Cannon fodder too, and it was an Emma Fosdick, a high school geometry teacher, who asked, "how many miles to Babyland?
They answered,
"Anyone can tell
Up one flight, to the right
Please to ring the bell"
Merely a line or the plane of an argument, however, is not enough, for everything
to be all right, to be okay in so many pieces of one consideration; and in space, there is always a third separate point, that is not of the same placement, direction, and particular radius as the first two. Since everything divisible cannot go more than one
way at once, as every divison is along a side, it is apodeictically clear for all retro-analysis that from any first point there must always follow at least two more and a triangle. There is an opposite in one plane, certainly, from another, and then an opposite
in another, and if there are so many triangles, as there would also be so many points, as much as tiny bubbles in the wine, then there also must be so many pyramids, boxes, and spheres, and places of destination to some beyond compare, et cetera.
Yes, the universe should be taken for one consideration. However, even for all the triangulated destiny in tiny people and frogs, timehsare
resorts and toads in the garden, if they added up all of the things in space, and all of the time, it could not take up all of the entity as pure area qua orignis infinitum. Entity as area qua originis infinitum is too extensive and dynamic in principle to
be impinged by things, not more than tiny bubbles, or time of this or that in a bottle, unless it were "infinity" caught somewhere in the mix of an "infinitesimal".
There is no summation of objects
or fine points in multitudes that is infinite anyway as much as there is no largest prime. There is no largest prime since there is always easily one more, of course, and such a number as the one more is never infinite. Infinity is not simply one more, therefore,
another way to consider the big picture is that infinity will never run out of room, or tiny space, as infinity cannot be overcrowded or cramped for whatnot suchlike or whatfor, not even in an elevator or bottle of wine.
In the 5th century BC, Socrates described justice "as that which penetrates all things"(76), including intelligence and reflection; and Kant described judgment as the faculty or power "for thinking the particular under the universal".-77.
To be fair to the subject, Kant then went on to some length of discussion to distinguish transcendental apperception from empirical perception.
In epistemology, to summarize, apperception is the
"introspective or reflective apprehension by the mind of its own inner states."-78 An incisive saturation for philosophy then, the question whether one knows something also becomes a question of metacognition and self-conscious percolation, which is cognition
about cognition, thinking about thinking, or knowing about knowing. When people think they know, they feel like it too, and there are generally two features of awareness involved in metacognition: namely the knowledge of the notion, and the regulation and
recognition of the cognition as it happens as well.
If it may seem elusive, mostly a resource for meta-headaches, to investigate
the best interpretation of some of the obscurities of metaphysics, that turn around metamemory and metacognition, it yet should become apparent one day, via studious contemplation, that truth and
right judgment concur with the realists, the fair-minded realists, and that the concurrence also must be substantial. Facts have a way and having a way as things there must be something substantive about them. After
all, if one has a vision, but not the correct sort of diligence, it could be for nothing and only complications.
Even for a poor way of subsistence, the best reward for diligence
is love not irony, where "love is patient, love is kind, it always hopes and perseveres, and love never fails".-79 Irony may come later, and even in the greatest austerity, the most difficult twist of fate, there may be at least some greater benevolence in
reality.
If at one turn a philosopher describes judgment as the faculty or power "for thinking the particular under the
universal", at another point of triangulation he could say as well that it is the faculty or power for recognizing and considering again the universal under the particular. The parallel in contemplation works both ways to some fulfillment, some meaning and
why, when and there, where he spies the form of a universal; and he can be certain that he has spotted also the thing-in-itself, a thing something somewhat such as and substantial, for in those cases of duality there can be no other way.
To the mind of a reasonable man, therefore, it becomes apparent one day that living reality is as substantial as a composite of at least two dimensions that manifest in matter and form. As entity is absolute yet governed
by form, ultima ratio, it follows by logic that there are also at large an extensive set of abstract entities known as universals. Thus the world of common experience is built up in a duality of particulars and universals, ideas and things, as much as a hammer
is still a hammer, no matter how or from what it is made. If it works like a hammer, it is still called a hammer, and thus it is in the form and name of a hammer.
Hammering itself is a form, the name and expression, as it figures a way to go about things. Hoo eee, and so it goes in the Great Green Book of the way things are: and with all the recluse powers, flowers,
and songs of tautology all over the place, the divisible visible present abounds in a summer's day, yet more than sunshine, and as much as all the summaries and theorems of geometry.
"All the heights of the high shores gleam
Red and gold
at the sunset hour:
There comes the spell of a magic dream,
And the Harbour seems a lotus-flower;
A blue flower tinted at dawn with gold,
A broad flower blazing with light at noon,
Its beauty burns like a ceaseless fire,
For all mute things it would seem, aspire
To
catch a glimpse of the lotus-flower."(80)
St. Dominic and his
government would agree that truth values count among all extensions, and that everywhere the four winds and poor suckers go, we perceive an abridgment of substance -- with recapitulation of forms
that bubble on like a river. It is from the relation of substance, in fact, that people have their perception, and if one ascends into the heights, it is there, and if one falls down into a cave, it is
still present.-81 Si ascenderis in altitudines, ibi est, et si iacueris in antro, adest adhuc.
If there is a secret virtue of the ages in ontology or in any good fortune, it is
that "excellence resides in quality not in quantity".-82 For example, if there are so many ways of "a", and so many ways of "b", but not at the same time, then there are only "a and b" ways to choose one. Therefore, between them
qualitas refert potius quam quantitas, thought Tully, to follow what he thought better first, decisively, since quality comes closest to the sharpest question of identity, before quantity -- and, to create any excellence, so does form come before matter.
In the simple way of a bridge, without which there is no passage or escape, the form of quality in the connection is prior to the matter and quantity. If there is no disposition as such, no temper of relation
either, no nessnessness to thread among things, and no shape to atoms in the void, there is no way across, and the way things work properly is as necessary and correct as the way they fail. The strength of things and materials is not only strength in matter
but also essence of forms, since the way things are put together is as important as what is put together. The how comes before and after the what. The spring line and the rise, the columns and keystone of an archway, for example, are in the forms of the elements
as they are in the extremes, which give definiton and are consubstantial from end to end.
To be or not to be, and one
thing at a time, that is the question, where the wings of consubstantial similarities and dissimilarities flutter and whisper in the breeze. Sometimes a spooky rendition plays in the wind between a churchyard and the cemetery trees: for while the elements
are changed in themselves, as in an instrument the sound of the quality is changed, yet all keep their sound inn innuma atrarum.-83
Space is a formal property also, even such as aether, sometimes
as magnificent as the public peace and good. Like many valuables in an old travel grip bag, in the midst of all the elements, of course, quantum satis. As much as the ladder of the octave goes up, then goes down, space is the place for all the absurdities
and auditions, parades and celebrations, and such attributions of importance as whatever to whatever in the sounds or colors, and as much as entity qua qua quid, which way what, is absolute and essential.
The
same thing cannot be red and green all over, and what must be must be. There is no situation that can be totally informal, since even some necessity accounts for accidents ... and coincidence. Nothing is absolutely without contrast in the simplest identity
and difference. Whether Aristotle says "substance", or Plato says "form", there is little in the question of universal comparison that if elemental things would be reduced to the subject of matter alone, as gross attributive quantity only, such radical reductions
of content would only rehearse and objectify something like chaos. A deep loss it would be to "bereave matter of all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary," in a manner to annhilate it and leave only a certain unknown inexplicable something
as the cause of our perceptions.-336
The form of the expression is something to behold, since without form in it there is no
intelligent substance. And quantity by itself does not give rise to consciousness, as much as weight by itself does not constitute a source of motion. If it is preferred to have the undefined faith, like
division by zero or some touchy nihilism, even the way of deconstruction follows a formula program that is necessary. Like the invocations and rituals of woe, vae victis, rediens nihilo ex animo delendi, and "woe to him who believes in nothing."-84 He would deny everything worthwhile, that anything is worthy even to be so little as a trifle, or just more than nothing, and
of necessity ruin any value of his own work.
However, as Percy Dovetonsils observed, with the genius and taste to gain so much from so little, "O happy moment, an idea and at least a tiny touch
of poetry for everything, even autumn leafletings of the book worm, streamlined fellow who goes through books like a fork through jello," et cetera.
If an absolute removal process of form and substance
from the material elements were possible, even as separation without a sound, extinguishing the appropriate properties in quale quid, leaving only matter qua matter as substratum, an ultimately indistinguishable nonentity quantity quantitative, then chaos
and the blob would not even survive the terrible violence of nihilism for its bad logic and a win. As whatever is is, the objects and attributions of scientifc knowledge are only as necesssary and
universal as mathematics allows, and a formless heap cannot account for itself or balance an equation. "No matter can be perceived without form and quality", without something that expresses the force of an idea, and a formless heap lacks a fitting operation.
It may difficult to find the good, yet there must be at least one proper thing since there must be form and quality in numbers. If there is no outline, even a poor one, there is no content; and if the thing that is unintelligible cannot be recognized, if the
dumbfounded cannot sense that feeling, the meaning even of the unknown is lost, confused like fictive atoms in the void.
Destroyed, in fact, and so it goes, yet "men were deceivers ever,
one foot in sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never", and once it was that way then, it apppears that it will be that way forever.
"The fraud of men was ever so,"(85) and in the medieval past of castles, sand pebbles, and metaphysics, in fact, a divergence developed between two schools of thought, the via antiqua of the realists and the via moderna of the nominalists. Logic it seems
would still show that the via antiqua was correct where the via moderna was wrong. As Anthony Trollope confessed the liberal position's awkward development years later, "life is so unlike theory".
Yet
"mortal life is the same for all" and the experience of it, in some degree or other, rather would be like reality, even before progress and modernity. In life the principle act of being would remain simple as the template, or any old injury or dislocation,
as the case may be, if it could, yet there is the persistence of the composites: composites and additions, where the methods of denial involved in nominalism, modernist phenomenology, scientific materialism, and the dialectics of Copernicanism have a strange
difficult blend. Even as far as fake trips to the Moon, Mars, and Pluto, at the cost of bags and bags of money in big denominations, et cetera, things do not have to be too bad. It may be that there is still relief a little further away, and a vending machine
repair kit, if not a refund. Well, at least there are three simple universals or keys to refute systematic intellectual deception. To wit the deceptive balance:
1. the universal of resemblance
2. the unviversal of impossibility
3. the universal of the city
Since demonstration
develops from universals, which are of such a nature as to be predicated of many subjects, one of the certainties about knowledge, and that also as necessity, is the appreciation one feels when one sees that that is the way that it must be. There is, after
all, in the realm of ultimate discoveries, that which cannot be otherwise but can exist only in a single way.
As it is or is not, as much as something would be universal, the theory of forms answers
the problem and impossibility of infinite regress with the magnitude of such a simplicity: a simple parallel in the aspects, to figure that things simply are the way they are between this and that, these and those, and the others. Here and there, therefore,
with the greatest convenience of place and any function in the universals, a creative circle is provided as often as is needed, to make all things and any mystery make sense in finis.
For all
the mighty paralleling of the ages, great ever and anon, if a wheel of omniscience goes rolling by it must be the Divinity. And the universal projection of relation in the elements, also the dabble of
the forms, of course, proceeds from so much simplicity, simplicity representing so much work, as well quality of operation, that it is difficult at times to understand why "making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy".-86 Indeed, however, after so
many books, for some complex thinkers devoted to the routine, there may be at least a kind of suicide by denial to savor, or broken pencils to crunch, if not to consume a "big pharma" pharmaceutical dose of martyrdom.
As much as an omen or the bottle of pills seen from another angle, there is no theory of resemblance that can avoid postulating any characteristic similarity among many pairs of particular things, without postulating some other resemblance
about them as well. Not having this or such similarity, there is some other likeness to boot. The refletions are carried full well round in the sphere of knowledge and experience.
If they are not
all this, then certainly there is that: the something between, another this-somehwat like the difference in common -- no neither nor, no ni na. Although if all are unlike something, even unlike each other, then all are alike in being unlike something or in
such odd distinction so much. They must have something in common another way. Reciprocation may go to the ends, of course, as it pleases, like a key to all the results, or carry on in the middles,
as much as what is shared is shared in common. Even if each would be different whatever in whatever way, to the degree that they are unlike one something such-as, they are alike again in some other more ultimate way.
The being and the becoming are impossible to avoid, since there should be at least one proper thing, a foothold even for consideration, as well for all as for the extremes, since everything cannot be a miss. Since being fits anything, is
for anything the most, even as well for any appropriate faculty in knowledge, call it prolepsis (πρόληψις), a certain preoccupation or preconception that is a certain idea or depth in relation of things. Formed by the mind
beforehand, an anterior sense without which nothing can be understood, investigated, or discussed, well, there it is, the inchoate notional, or call it hêgemonikon (ἡγεμονικόν), a root and ruling faculty or principle
not only of the mind but also in nature, which holds the highest place or essential good in any genus ... like rivets in the beams, et cetera.
And
not to reverse roles of the clear and the obscure for no good reason, or too much of it, to be obnoxious at least a little, still it is not easy according to modern science to say that the Earth is not moving, not any more than hundreds of parked cars in a
lot with emergency brakes on, and that everyone can tell. Once the forewarned scientist says that the parked cars on emergency brakes are moving, per relativity of inertial frames of reference, even though no one can tell, except for the theory, then so much
more the stuff and nonsense for the lot and Geico headquarters, Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the Earth, of course. Yet the emergency brake and its active principle would grind, if the vehicle was on the road.
Without
falling into the colors of some vicious infinite regress about how things look like they are, as well to avoid some irrational system of denial, therefore, even regarding the roots of trees, or distribution of branches, and all the other things at rest or
that would be, admitting even one universal of resemblance among things makes it absurd to avoid others. If one would say that each resemblance among many pairs of whatevers, as whatever similarities, is not the same, but unique and different from the others,
and, therefore, that there is not too much sameness in likeness at the root, even among dodos and unicorns, to avoid the evident fact of a universal, for the process, then it still must be acknowledged that oddity is oddity, even for comparison, with the categorical
and peculiar mark of quality, in virtue of which it is such and such, as whatever is placed among oddities, for whatever reason, that would be there for interpretation, et cetera.
But, of course,
by an odd distance in the modicum, at least, even as much as they do not fit one exact thing, they may fit another per causa operationis. As much as all the cars and things could be different from each
other, and go different speeds and different directions, they are all alike when they are not moving.
For as little of the difference possible
among things in total existence, or all the difference and identity predicated of complement similarity ... "thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal. The relation
of resemblance, therefore, must be a true universal. And having been forced to admit this universal, we find that it is no longer worth while to invent difficult and implausible theories to avoid the admission of universals", even such ones as would be merely
of colors, pigments, or figures of imagination that any artist may prefer, one to the other, etc.-87
The ironies in life at times may become so diverse, well multiplied, that for all the difference
in the world, there could be as many universals of resemblance as there are ways of being at tempo or just one something similar otherwise. With any common notion one for another, in the reverse, it comes again. Since "to be has as many senses as there are
forms", and for every predicate indeed there is a corresponding way to be, at least a drift of being, at that tempo is tempo; of course, tempo is tempo, even if off beat, therefore, even if it seems strange, another universal could be hidden again in the question
and answer at any time, as much as in the cause and effect.
Genesi nihil utilius, nihil pulchrius, and having resembles being as being resembles having, of course; and the senses resemble each
other, going and taking and giving awareness to assimilate knowing; as the thing that it is it is, yet when one does not know, however, it may be so difficult to know when; yet as to the ontological medium itself, and the total domination of correct grammar,
besides the universal of resemblance, there follows the universal of impossibility. For it is impossible that any property of being should not concur with its own nature. Yet the nominalist skeptic who denies universals, as well their forms, will even go so
far as to deny that colors exist in themselves. The substrata and materials themselves will eliminate them, per se quanta mirabilia in communi communicationibus, which any good artist should find disgusting, as though there were no good on earth in the way
things are themselves, and sin were but a name.
However, color and the radiance exist in the very nature of visibility, itself waves and wavelengths, the frequency without which there
is no vision; and as much as there are universals of impossibility, an impossibility is characteristic of all universals. Even colorful or peculiar as they are, the nature of something like a car or a tree or the color of paint in a can, or of a cat in the
neighborhood, must have a universal form, since all these instances are examples of the unification of concurrence: the same kind overall, the pattern comes around again, and any concurrence is in an actual mode of at least one duality, one composite, at least
on Earth for the material and essence involved. The composite has existence in virtue of the form, the bridged dichotomy. The existence of matter by itself can account for only one part in the sensible dynamic. If the form is separated from the matter, it
destroys the existence of the composite, "for the intrinsic causes of themselves and without the intervention of some agent cannot constutute the composite".
Since impressions are
subtle as each adjusts to each, for each is as is has many meanings, whenever the tension and subsistence of form becomes inaccessible, dissolved, ruined, or removed from matter, the dissolution of the subtlety that was in the missing way
-- as substance in the operation of the modus nodi -- becomes obvious through lack of the continuing concurrence. In any such accident, a this-somewhat
wrecked or destroyed, as something like that in the form, or whatever it would be that perhaps would approach total loss, without the form of the black cat, the hylomorphitty kitty kitty, there
is not the cat in the catness either, or the other ones, of course. None of the cats in the catness or all the strange things that go on at Halloween for only nominalism.
It is virtually impossible to deny the existence of form in substance as it is the best excuse for everything that takes place, and that way also governs things to the end. As Euripides said, "form
is first worthy of imperial sway", as it is in every species, since species indeed is predicated of every form, and by the participation of species many become one. Furthermore, it is known to reason that every species required for the integrity of the universe
is formally so, as the universe itself remains an integral cosmic whole.
Eliminate figure or limit and the attribute vanishes.
So where is the property? Even if indwelling figure and limit are not considered to be the first differentiae, but something secondary while the elimination of which destroys the attribute, when it is gone it is gone. As Aristotle would say, the triangle is the triangle first, of course, as the triangle is first certainly among triangles. Triangularity is universal that way, therefore also that of the cat
as cat too, among outcomes, if primarily of tooth, claw, and paw, as both the subject and suspect of belonging commensurately and universally.
"The proper object of unambiguous scientific knowledge is something which cannot be other than as it is", and the expression of sameness, therefore, carries another sign of a universal, when there is no other way for something to be
than the way that it is. As much as all things are in division by one, for the same difference, the same questions and answers bring themselves around, even to the end, so they can bring themselves around to the beginning, ever and anon, and around again.
Since knowledge is also assimilation, of perceptions and accounts, an epistemic experience that is known to be an epitome in the way that it is, and with the acumen of intelligibles to get there,
as like is like and there is influence, divide all things in the common round of learning by one and what is the result? The same difference again, of course, all rolled into one, as the good in them is from some common element remaining. After all, the knowing
and reckoning of one thing leads to the knowledge of other things, since what is noticed in one thing may be used to understand the existence of certain properties in another, as all things are in a certain relation to each other.
Therefore, when from many notions gained by experience a unified set of memories arises, one universal supposition about similar objects is produced. As Zeno of Elea said, "if there are many things, then they must be both like and unlike". Some relation as subsistent goodness the same persists, as the simple complement
of goodness persists to be known even where accounts are distinct and diverse.
Since the ultimate point of arrival in and after things is one, a single mean summary, all becoming is one if perhaps
another and an ultimate reckoning in relation to one if another and so forth, even as it happens with different manners to fit all. The quies media too prefigures in between all directions ... "a quo est omnis modus, omnis species, omnis ordo;
a quo est mensura, numerus, pondus."
Even after all the evil and the little waves and currents of malice in the world, there is some good remaining. As it is impossible that any numbers will ever
give a different answer than what they already give, being what they are, there is at least some certain proof of quality and kind and the correct complement. To experience the truth of things, there is a noticeable similitude that comes around in the occurrence,
and of many ways.
A number of memories constitute a single experience and a single thing -- as someone's memory. Yet like the largest prime number of Euclid, of which there is always one more,
infinity is still further away than all that. Far from the multitude, therefore, if there is a similar way in division of things, as many things as things, a form of parallel appears for every circumstance,
yet that still does not touch infinity itself as the infinite itself remains indivisible.
"Virtually all things large and small throughout the world are proportionately equal"(114).
Natural equalities are discovered in some proportion, as proportion is in equality, since the multitude proceeds from one and resumes one. As déjà vu has a function in nature, the world is also "everything that is the case". Of course,
as though one idea would be expressed in however many words, however much there could be to say about it, there is the cosmic isotrope: enti ibidi ibidemiteresse additur quidvis aliqua natura. To say that being adds whatever to a thing's nature, quia quaelibet
natura est essentialiter ens, since, however things go, being or some nature is essential to all, is simple enough. Entity, therely-being, as soon as any instance or place of it is, adds itself however to whatever hermeneutic of cause and effect.
Innately then, and so forth, if with or without ease of concern, every movable has a mover as the great oneness superintends. If school, for example, never went further than division by one, everybody would
get A's, like light gleaming amid all variety and variables of colorful equation. Everybody's report card would be the same yet different, happy all alike, as much the same attraction, if, however, any
reason to feel unhappy then something taken in its own way.
"How may likeness wade in chimes
Making practice on the times
To draw with idle spiders' strings
Most ponderous
and substantial things!" (shift enter)
As also the wherefore of things past, of things present, and of things to come, the thing in the ultimate difference hides and takes from us all,
something too, and as from it all other things arise, likewise to it all things return, and some say school may go on like that forever. Other otherwise the same, sine circulo nihil est. Since to
be and that which is are diverse in every instance, as whatever assumes the form of being is and exists, identity and difference can be so common. In different individuals the experience of the same rate of numbering and concern in the case may be different,
but in any one cogitation or experience the apportionment should be something yet alike, ok as ok as the idea itself must prevail.
To summarize Parmenides then, and his favorite potion, "nihil
sub sole novum". Whenever there is the sense of the one, it will feel perhaps like one has been there before. If again no surprise it will be like déjà vu, according as apeiron, the hyperion way, containing the whole cause of the coming-to-be
and the end of school, as division by one goes through all, things and whatevers, as oneness subsists. So does the center, therefore, have a unique property to prove it and have it well in the crackers all the way around.Since there is a quality of sameness in all things, like the over-arching process, when it comes to divisibility by one, and the relation of having or not-having, the logic that is in this phenomenon is always there. Since all students are
virtually alike, when equalized by the rule of proportion, seeing so many people through the years is like circumference over diameter, in the sense of radius and curve, and for one enduring relation over all.
When
the quotient is the dividend, it is the same quality of sameness that comes through again. Like that one time of the paradigm box, of the round square squaring the circle, and other nonexstent objects, with the oldest first frog jumping through, the power
of parallel by attribute, property, and number creates a standard of being -- for being whatever is there in the semblance of things, ibidemiteresse issimus similitudinibus, that relates itself to any perception and all perceptions of it.
Et cetera, of course, and more than philosophy, virtue is always green, "virtus semper
viridis", even like the numinous preexistence of the square root of two, where the color green, for instance, has no other way to be than the way that it is. As matter destitute of form is unaccountable to any improvements, good use, or retainer, science has
no better way to go into things without form than down, and nothing better to become than down and out, passed out on the curb, having found nothing better to enjoy than self-intoxication and chaos, since it is impossible that any property of being should
not concur with its own nature.
Yet for a supreme genus as much as when, or where as much as because, the universal effect of color as a property is difficult to avoid or deny, especially in the
form of it. The greenness of cactus in the desert, for example, is more than name only. In an atmosphere and state of climactic dryness, the cactus stands out for being green and alive. As it is the resilience of nature therely represented in a vegetative ontological operation, something with substance, also an ablative of construction
and a fact, even as a grammalogical property and a kind of brightness in the moonlight, the greenness, thorniness, and sheer obviousness of it have a form and way to be, having that cactus
effect and tension in green utima ratio rerum.
As water and air are round in the elasticities, and the sun an ever-rolling ball of fire, in the fields and forests of the climate map, there is a
quantum leap in green. An elemental sphere in quality and kind, in fact, to give proof of some certainty in being among things, that represents a universal connection among the differences and the measures. Since there is also a oneness behind all things pervasive,
the sameness for all such things exists in a oneness of relation that is at least the parallel between: for the trope is the trope is the trope, of course, from the tropics to the poles that are like so that is. As much as it is impossible for it not to be
green, where springtime vines, tendrils, and roots of leafy green plants may come sprouting through the masonry and crumbled ruins after human habitation has gone, something more than separable parts and fallen tumble-doors makes green green.
There is an atomic and atmospheric connection when by nature the color cannot be separated from itself, and there is discovered again something secret of a universal: that something else already was green by at least
a kind of temper or mood. Since it not only is an impressionable mask of atomic theory but something temperate with consistency, form, and tension that makes green green, all the instances of green are indifferently related in terms of being so. As green is
such a color of wide breadth that it can be high or low around its circle, as an all-inclusive common thread among so many things, whether less or more, more or less, therefore, the simple color is evidence of another universal: and a sign of some fundamental
relation of substance and fact that wheedles and needles in common.
Bees do not differ from one another either, not as bees anyway, as beeness is the thing for all the bees of the beeness in common.
If Kermit the frog used to sing about "the rainbow connection", that it was not that easy being green, as much as green is green as green, that that way it seems to blend in with so many ordinary things, it follows that the instance of green is indifferently
related to its own material essence. Not even touching the matter but the form, the property in the attribute thus offers the embodiment of a universal even in a wavelength spectrum.
As proficient a teacher in secret knowledge as Al Kidder du Verdoyant, said and seemed to believe that paradise may be a green place like a golf course, where people will wear green garments of fine
silk and cotton blend and drink absinthe and Chartreuse. Enchanted photosyntheses and chlorophylls of osmosis, and the celestial fermentations, and sometimes indeed people notice that in terms of temperature
and the breeze, it could be any year by a golf course, or the library, and that that way the weather that comes back around is another sign of a universal. Besides the magic of colors and sounds always having the same character, Aristotle says that "each of
the units in 2 must be prior to the 2", which is true, even in the seasons.-88 And as the concurrence of matter and form is divisible to the intellect, but the unity of the form in itself per se is not, the one that is first must come first.-89
If there is a typical first principle of the concurrence of quality and form with matter, that also would exist by nature as a knowable property in itself, it would have to be expressed in the act of
seeing and knowing. To see and know for the standard of reason forms a definitive triangle, a sign in the way of being that acts with a note of existential clarity, also as in a universal. The acuity
which follows the intellect (dwelling in the memory and understanding) and will united in sense and perception would be a knowable property and something primary in itself. That way, se fiato in corpo avete, where the shadow and breath of the living is
what there is of light and skill, the knowing knower would represent a third universal, the universal of the city.
Ghengis
Khan said, "remember that you have no companions but your shadow". And over the hills and through the trees they go, like a band of shadows, to find bright lights and big city, where the markets count forms by counting numbers as substance to weigh the facts.
And so the realization of archetypes and ideas that come from civilization transforms the people who must encounter various impossibilities and crazy dreams in the course of life.
To obtain that which is precisely different yet exactly similar, like two sides of the street at the same time, or two identical bags of gold coins,
no two points in space can be separated by nothing, of course. So there must be a universal form in things, as repetitive as it can be to be shared, as much as any transcendence or balance is related to all likeness.
Roaring Chicken said "war dance like rain dance ... only drier", and if the infinite exists, then forms as universals must exist, because there is no better way to bridge the gap between quantity and quality. For instance, as Fitzcarraldo
proved in a downpour, in a unique experience stuck between another rock and a hard place, it is not easy to haul some things like steamboats across steep mountains; and the differentials and percentages encountered in such adventures remain as they are, heavy
or ponderous as they may be in the same numbers and operations. Besides the greatest difficulty of any situation, there are times that are unmistakable in general for the circumstances of absurdity and immanence, et cetera.
Many of the same things, in fact, seem to happen or make themselves present or happen again from a common origin of sufficient reason. Otherwise, if
it were not so, even with many different instances, insurance claims and their tables would not make sense in the extensive occurence of various accidents, tales of coincidence and impossibilities,
et cetera. Therefore, if not for the joy of securities invested in a special ball of fat, the universal of the city could be described also as something like an infantry handbook or office of signs and
numismatics.
"Relatio secundum esse", related according to the way they have being, the employee of the month and the Mayor
have their parking spaces, of course, and people on the bus also see the stamp or the sticker and where. The numismatics of relation, as such and such in the way things are constituted, coined according to the way of being, is what the universals address;
and they are in the frequencies and numbers of ways involved in processing facts, even to answer a question like, "does the bus stop here?" or "how many credit cards should a student have"?
Wisdom is the one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged, even as the common course and company of life in the city may dissemble and change between particle and wave, light and dark, as much as credit
card providers and their students. Yet in virtue of the same universals, since the universals already are in the ones, and the ones are like so, the numbers and ways of being must be expressed when truth is discovered. As much as a formula is coined of the one over the many, and the many everywhere around the one, without a background of universals, the depth in forms and their clues in the dualities of existence do not make good sense. The
parallel over any duality, therefore, has a process, that even points to some triangulation in cause and effect, and some way or temper that at the very least should make a little sense.
Like all
the other universals, the one of the city is a type of necessity, one with atmosphere, and the necessity that exists within any expression or medium is also in the order of what is first. As in the Latin verb "exprimere", and the French "exprimer", to express,
the effect is from the order of parts (ex) from, out of, and (primo) at first, from the first: in the beginning.
If the way the number one relates to the number four is always the same, from the
way a squirrel recons pecans, for example, to the way John McEnroe played tennis, then science has discovered another universal in the hands of nature at least. For the hands of nature, duo duo, are never very far from the ultimate ways and means of things
or quarters in the city.
A lapstrake ship in comparison to a carvel in a medieval harbor would show that the workmanship and method are the same expression, the same coin and stamp, in all times
and places. Whoever did it, necessarily did it the same way in the result for everywhere that the boat was built. Being the one way done by the one who did it in the result, for all times and places, the universal sign penetrates through all the matter and
circumstance. The image of the city and ship of state, therefore, is stamped among universals, in the equity and exchange process of whatever entity gathers in commerce. As much as the consonant, vowel, and breath are set in any syllable of Scrabble, the universal
sign penetrates through all the matter, pardi, as much as words are things themselves, and there are no words and no cities without universals.
Yet for the reputations and advantages of officialdom,
pompous courtesies and the sine qua non of championship Scrabble, "let no rank puff up anyone; for faith and love are paramount - the greatest blessings in the world; and nothing is more precious than peace, by which all war, both in Heaven and Earth, is brought
to an end," etc.-90
As wisdom stands in the same relation to the form of faith as sight to the eye, it adds to the logical
justification of universals in forms, that there are so many illustrations of the distinction existing between the formal and material predication in objects. A strange one perhaps, as such
another painful thing in particular too, comes from a Renaissance painting of St. Lucy by Domenico Beccafumi. There one can sense how the is and does in all circles of perception, that come to be, as they relate to refinement of ultimate substance and reality, carry with them knowledge of the truth, also as to whatever facts.
Martyred in 304 AD, she was cruelly ridiculed and tortured by fiends and her eyes were gouged out. In the painting she is shown with them on a plate looking out at the audience. She also has her normal eyes the same
as they were before, appropriately in her face, with an expression of peace; and like St. Lucy's four eyes in the painting, not only can one know das Ding-an-sich-selbst-betrachtet, without too much effort one can recognize as well the universal condition
and emotion of such things. From shared experience in the meaning there obtained and the archetype, the sign that is there is not only in the eyeballs about themselves but also in the sign of relation
and the operation in fines. The secret of animation and intelligence is a pinch beyond, and like the power to charm and the power of mind, an operation of significance like human vision or virtuous heroism
is a little more than just organic, of course.
Like the tenth house in the vertical and the ascendant combination, the higher sense, lumen naturale, senses itself and the others, and with such
awareness one way to know from formalities the thing-in-itself is to know that all things, as much as they are also properties in qualification of being, should at least belong with some eventual credit to an ultimate
responsibility. If not due to the probabilities of God, or if not, then to the lesser chances of somebody else, people know the lost-and-found, and what looks like might be a valuable item. Found money, for example, has a way in the activity of the optice
nerve as well as church bells in the auditory perception. Even not knowing is knowing, and when it comes to the odd experience of an abscessed tooth or hearing screams of torture and pain, not wanting
to know sometimes just does not matter in these and other cases, if as sometimes it all may seem to be coming together at once from as close as across the street.
Since people know when they do
not know, or when they have forgotten why, as much as when one cannot see except for total darkness and pitch black, the funny feeling of knowledge still seeps in. There is the percolation a patella between things, and the way people appreciate an understanding,
also the persistence of fingers and toes, even the sense of kneecaps; and it is simple enough to know, therefore, how the elements of mere appearance, even in a painting, are predicated and related one to another, in quale quid. To know also the reiterations
of the end of a sensitive nerve is something, as much as any appetitite, as it would be known per occasion in the patterns of as the thing-in-itself and to its function.
For fear of dangers or any menacing phenomena along the way, the blind man knows his blindness and his nerves better than all the skepticism or incoherence of philosophy. The form of perception missing in the unlit
days is as sensible to intelligence as an epiphany. If by chance he is robbed, he understands again that something more or less essential and material to his existence has been lost, and can recognize again a universal form of things in himself and the mystery
of the thief. People always know and see the form in and for itself, the reckoning in relation that plays come whatever of the matter. Since immaterial substance holds the first and last place for intelligence, and is considered the best among such beings
as those who would see wisely and understand, an intelligible or contemplative thing is naturally separated from matter.
For instance, as well as a doctor at a walk-in clinic, one sees that a poor
bloody eye plucked out has lost its better state and first light of color in the natural connection. For all the persistence of perception in the substance of the twinkling of an eye, when the constructive benefit is gone, the faculty that obtained in the thing-in-itself, like the eyeball of vision, the vacuity leaves the native power and operation, that was the primary principle in the object to begin with, to remain in name only. As much as any apple-bound circle would have lost its geometry, nominalism is the removal of the form and property of sight.
Oh, the cold cruelties of it, such a thing
contrary to good recollection, never to exceed piles of garbage or roadkill, and if the eye itself were an animal, "sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye", and also corresponding to the formula which states what it
is to be an eye. To be so animated, the eyeball being merely the matter as organic function to see wherewith of seeing, when natural seeing is removed, the ocularity is no longer such an eye, except in name only. A blinded or blind eye being something in difference
from the essential operation leaves a note of pain and loss, the loss of vision, where it is no more a real eye to see with than the eye of a statue or a painted figure.
Odes to grief and so forth,
nobody and the airs, yet the haunted eyes of a ghost are still eyes over the matter. Perception and intellect exist in the soul, and the appropriate name in the object is still there, for an eye is the correct thing to be called an eye since eyes are for seeing. A spiritual vision in the dark hollows and so are the eyeballs, even if both have been
plucked out after a sort of cruel nominalistic deconstruction. There could be a tyranny of homonyms, however, real human knowledge endures in universals, the great and general status quo beyond, and these in
a sense remain with the soul.
"Los ojos por que suspiras,
sábelo
bien,
los ojos en que te miras
son ojos porque te ven."
"The eyes how why
you sigh
one knows it well,
the eyes in self-perception
they are eyes because
they see you" -91
And the spiritual agency is the last light, the cause of causes, realized an ant one day when seeing black tracings of ink run on a sheet of paper.
It had seemed that it was the pen, but it was the hand that moved the pen by another power. Call it intellect or will derived from the senses or the heart, but there was an upper atmosphere, some sort of cloud or spirit, and another sun, invisible, but not
when it came to the ink on the paper.
Sensation apprehends material existence, while knowledge goes deeper to
see universals, and these are in a sense within the soul. Perception and knowledge of the soul "admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of nature", since the soul is in some fair sense the principle
and aim of life, and the right knowledge is full of eyes. As much and then at least a little more comes from the eyes as from the things. When the essential property in virtue of the universal form in seeing and knowing has been lost, due to materialistic
deconstruction of the meaning of presence, and violent invasion of the thing-in-itself, it is an agony and oblivion, pain too heavy to describe. To be so dumb, crushed and scattered around the broken sphere of a ruined castle, ruinstrewn like lost souls, eyeballs
all plucked out to be less than moonlight in shards of glass: the formless void is no cakewalk for faint attribution, no pleasure cruise for the incoherence of the incoherence either. Tahafut al-tahafut. Tata feet all tata feet.
The fabled sound of bells and whistles, bells through leaves, "cloches à travers les feuilles", then blank face asking the blank window, fabled by the daughters
of memory too, as grey memories fabled it so, then to hear the ruin of all space, and the question, "will you come again"? As the moon kept going the wrong way over all the shattered glass and the toppled masonry, time no more except the burning flames ...
No bed of roses in nessnessness to be damned, et cetera. In the
relay system to the infinite and great beyond, no matter how goes the race or the career, the shadow more than keeps up for radius and the curve. There is either an intelligent or stupid hierarchy of passions involved, and shadows of power. "For there is no
shadow without reality, the shadow itself is a reality" and it cannot be separated.
Sometimes in front, it never tires, and when an hour of darkness was a candle, "vision is the art of seeing what
is invisible to others".-92
"Animula vagula blandula, nunc quae abibis in loca? Ex tenebris, is there truth or any good end?" asked the almost totally ignored and marginalized Bishop of River-by-the-Sea.
He was only five feet tall, and as he saw it, corporate had already dumped a lot of pollution in his diocese. He was almost in punitive exile, taken as a moron to be ridiculed as an imbecile, or either an idiot, like the Bishop of No-Fixed-Abode, where he
wrote in his notebook "does justice from the mountain toppy top penetrate all things, even ghosts and watercolors? What is truth? Quid est veritas?"
To be blind and short in a big city is not that easy. Not more than philosophy or math class, and as well as the extensive exercise of friendship with idiots, Kant refused the mitre and crozier. To find his own place, he never travelled
very far either and proposed that his purpose was "to determine the whole sphere of pure reason completely and from general principles, in its circumference as well as in its contents." Yet he only undermined the effort to be fair or pastoral by reducing the
sensible world to an inaccesible plane, a peculiar area of skeptical indifferentism.-93 Foremost a Copernican Newtonian academic, a dedicated skeptic and modernist in phenomenology, a master of dismisive terms of synthetic illusion, another intellectualizing
nominalist, he missed the boat to say that it was only an appearance and a perception. As the matter only comes to be in so far as it is combined with form, since matter is never found without form, so it goes with appointments and fate.
However, at times he must have seen what he thought he saw, or what the law of thought would say would be correct interpretation according to what it looked like. Rather than nominalism, sometimes it must have been
a form of reality that a real object of some sort was really there. Sticky permanence in transcendental numbers like Pi, in fact, besides the impact of things, like tiny bubbles in the wine and the apple of
the eye, to a thinking person should reinforce metaphysical realism. The constitutional authenticity of the circle always comes around. Since nominalism is radically synthetic and reduces fundamental properties to coincidental attributes only,
it undermines nature and makes good things disappear. Everything cannot be an accident, of course, and if what is good has no lasting effect in nature, no lasting thread, things may as well be bad.
Without
the correct sort of formality in the apple of apperceptive appreciation, to say that one does not know Pi in itself, but only the appearance, in the first place anyway, is to say that the circle
does not really exist in essence, except as an attribute of mere coincidence. A mere coincidence to be seen, yet the attribute of coincidence is another summary thing too, to some degree of substance, and summaries as well as treatments and many loose ends
matter. Even if the circle is only coincidence, surely the square root of two and the golden ratio, that are equally involved in it, still hold as always and will not be destroyed by its accidents come what may. And even if it were mere coincidence, that things
ever came to a total, that came back around so many times, and not a property of magnitude like cause and effect, there is still something in etiology and genesis that is true or false. To investigate
the question of answers, for instance, and universal equivalence in circumference over diameter, as the case may be in nature or the mind, there are still the right and wrong ones.
The true or
false exists even in the actively organic as much as the mind, where it is the same, either in some combination or separation, that the same thing cannot be red and green all over. As much as anyone would want to think about circular arguments and defintions,
or anything in philosophy, or drive himself insane with bagpipes or Scottish skepticism, it is stop or go, as what is true is precisely what is made.
"Contradictio est régula veri, non contradictio, falsi", they say, and a museum has to put things of color, shape, and size in places too,
not only thoughts; yet the nominalist academic would say that colors do not exist in themselves, but in name only, only as reflections or otherwise of some sort, and that they do not have entity beyond the appearance. In an ironic and repetitive way, therefore,
painful to reason and history, heliocentrism and relativity are only further hyper-nominalist schools of synthetic illusions: hypertypé where truth exists in name only not reality.
To say that the Earth moves at astronomical rates to orbit the Sun is to say a lot. To say that it all happens with an unaccelerated and undetectable motion due to universal gravitation is to say even more.
Yet for the dimensions of practical experience in so many gigatons, so many billion trillion metric tons of Earth in the sunshine, the theory as it comes out in the applied sciences part of it adds up to less than zero. Less than dust in the wind, the theory
is only for an appearance, an appearance of opinion that plays in the mind, a sort of mental illusion, an unscientific prop even, and an escape from reality.
Copernicanism, in fact, remains an
art of historical interpretation where everything has only one meaning, and the reverse of what everybody sees. If no one from the philosophy department, the world unknown of the unknown unknowers,
can know the material content and form of the thing-in-itself, even to a reasonable degree with a Disney Park Hopper, then can one notice its complete removal, when it is utterly taken away? The bag was there, but now it is gone; and so Einstein abolished the aether, where Kant already paved the way a century and thirty-seven years before by abolishing reality. So how did a straight line between shoe boxes, theme parks, and tourists survive all the deconstruction?
It must be that ratio as proportion as much as overall direction are in each other all along. Like the possibilities of reflection and
parallel, which subsist in lakes, rivers, oceans and mirrors for their connection with the rays of the Sun, the Platonic n-nessness of space is a
universally justified tautology of nature, and at least n-times in all theorems of geometry. Even if there are no evaluations we know without ratios, as fake as things and people can be, still it is true that "qualitas refert potius quam quantitas", as quality is always something a little more than just a number. Oh, the mysterious delight in it too, a quality and
then the rubik's cube. Even in relativity it goes one to this one to that, where a repetition comes back around, as if whatever pain and confusion may bring, the these they are should at least be
as simple as another division by one.
Even by Zeus and the altar of Pergamon, or the ancient and accepted horns of the little devil, the division
by zero, however, is as impossible in direction or substance as it is undefined. A strange place to nowhere, since one has to divide at least by one to get any place, where it is as impossible
to remove Pi from the iron ball at the end of a prisoner's chain, as it is to remove the center from a circle, or the straight line from inside the radius of a sphere. If an inmate could crush it with his fists, perhaps, that could be a way to stop the injustice
of perceived perception of things that keep making too much sense but only in the reverse. But if people cannot know the essence of things like cast iron, and the ratio of Pi, when they are inside the
circles of a prisoner's ball and chain, but instead know only an appearance, a mere coincidence, how do they recgonize with such greater clarity the ratio, proportion, heavy weight, and direction or motion of it, as substance going away, when it would be removed?
If a blind prisoner does not recognize the form of sentence placed on his head, when his number comes up, to know with an act of simple understanding and right judgment the substance of imprisonment
that follows, how does he notice the removal of the punishment so well? Since noticing the removal is to know somewhat the matter and form involved, also the accidents, to know even vaguely what was before and after, between so many things too, then to feel
it go is to grasp the vestige of a universal at least, and some aspect of cause and effect, et cetera.
As much as government props and market bonds, they
would say justice is that which penetrates all things. Solving the problem, therefore, in the mathematical sense is sufficient for all cases, as there is no prisoner of reason who cannot add up and understand a convict's ball and chain.
All numbers are not equal, of course, as division by zero remains undefined, an inscrutable matter to total; and numbers are more than the things, as "number does not become individualized through individuation of
the thing numbered, nor pluralized through a plurality". Therefore, as it represents such strange experience, as something ranging within the reversals of epistemology, if the Copernican system of
relativity and phenomenology would say that one does not see and understand a ball and chain for what it is either, and whether it spins, a stranger experience comes round, perhaps in the raw nerve
of an abscessed tooth, or eyes that have been gouged out, if one were to say that one does not notice any relief in the removal process or going away of the most horrible pains.
If one cannot recognize
with an act of simple understanding and right judgment -- and the complete proof of mathematics in commensurate universals as needed -- that the Earth is not rotating, can or would one then at least recognize its removal from space? Right at the dentist's
shop, right out the window, would a modernist skeptic of phenomenology not notice if the Earth were totally removed, taken away as much as if it had slipped away from under somebody's feet, all of it gone one day, as much as he would not notice the taking
away of a ball and chain?
In the movie "Cast Away", one that sort of passsed by the side, an expressive FedEx employee named Chuck Holland survived a commercial plane crash far out at sea, and
became stranded on a deserted island, where he used to talk to a volley ball. To be on the deserted island was a question of survival, and it developed that he would talk to the volley ball, and it seemed that the volley ball would talk to him.
Conversi vivificabunt, and he even named it "Wilson", and it seemd that "Wilson" said good things. If his comments were brief, almost mute, nonetheless, as the fulling moon is fair, he seemed to have an echo
of Aristotle of the good, in his spherical sort of way. If a castaway can talk to a volley ball, any prisoner of modernist phenomenology and the philosophy department can talk to a heavy ball and chain, as well as the Earth, or the depths of an island cave.
Like a playable word in Scrabble, as an exemplar stuck between the strangest friends, what any of them would say that would
be logical and true would have to be the same inference holding among all of them. Since the difference between them and what they say is the same when they say what is true, the truth is not without its place, its system of reference and operation among things
and universals. Having the simplest property of sameness for transcendence and all comparison, the ultimate exemplar among as many things as there may be, through the extent and repetition, it also remains the simplest second measure, second intention, and
a healthier and better coconut all the way around, since what is false always involves complication.
If they played Scrabble, they would have to follow the same rules of participation and verbal
interaction, perfectly definite rules expressed in numbers too, that even account for space. Space, after all, is a resolution, an interaction
and confederate matter for numbers and sounds, as they go from place to place without contact except in succession, in the operations of identity and difference, et cetera.
O the waves, and everything its place, as a place for everything, even the edge of a chair; and what goes for words from Scrabble also goes for things and actions. The word has an image that represents a thing or action, and
also that is in the way that it is written and pronounced, to conjure the mind, that represents another thing that is the concept and object of intuition involved in the expression. It is about the meaning and sign at the table, of course, as the rules are
for proper communication of content and love of the game, and that way for more than mere convention.
There is a natural sign and measure in the word even more than the sound and letters. For
lovers of nature there is the actual thing in itself that rounds itself out in likeness and kind and the connection that exists in its intrinsic relation to the world and the game, or even to the better half. There is always a better half no doubt. Actuality
after all has the greatest potential excellence of meaning, with connection to the very least of anything somewhat. It therefore should be as knowable as the lime in the coconut, the water in the icy glass, or the ascendant rapture of the good, as much as
the one or the other are potential and divisible.
If the volley ball from "Cast Away" was called "Wilson", the cast iron ball and chain from the philosophy department could be "Philo", from one
of the Greek words for industry and diligence, φιλοπονία. In head to head scrabble, "Philo" and "Wilson" would prove that a placement value and unity of form obtains in things, and also in the thing-in-itself that
is shared in the word and the referent object. It is no accident that Scrabble has the same government everywhere, and the syllable is the syllable as much as any syllogism is a valid argument.
In virtue of the natural connectivity with reality, and in accord with the language used, the mind reckons only one way to spell the one syllable
word bat, for example, even if the word may have at least three different meanings in two or more languages and alphabets, etc., and so forth. "Everything possesses its own certitude, which is its
own essence." Unaquaeque res habet certitudinem propriam quae est eius quidditas.-94 And who would want to contend too much to argue like fools over the essence of simple things or the world of bats?
The
concrete identity, the haecceitas that is, of discrete individual entity among lastingly and correctly spelled words, and their things too, their objects and attributes of relation, all their processes, ontological too, may be something "Philo", would want
to emphasize, from his own experience with heavier weights and such advantages -- and "Wilson" probably could not agree more about the apparent density of an object. There is a necessary tension
and appropriate accomodation that abides in things: intentio entis in rebus necesse.
The intention of being in things is necessary by nature, since being
has tension from constant relation and some natural aim, since it is necessary in all things; or, ens intentionum habere quod in rebus omnibus id necesse. So it goes, and if "Wilson" played Scrabble as fast as lightning bugs and starquest volley ball,
floating like a feather, stinging like a bee, and spelling all the words much better to run circles around a prison ball and chain, there easily follows also the need to be careful.
"Illud quod primo cadit sub apprehensione est ens, cuius intellectur includitur in omnibus quaecumquae quis apprehendit". That which first falls under apprehension is being, which the intellect includes in
all things, whatever they may be, that it apprehends. The which-of-what- intellection is included as a thing in sequence, or the actualization of a skill, like a letter in a sound, and receives its designation also from its chief constituent, perhaps the sound
in the letter, and will come to be so, such as it is, either from another or itself. Since nature represents the shape or form and smoke which is specified in the definition of the thing, and since the most perfect thing that can be known exists, when pro
spellers accept or reject something correctly, the incontestable conviction they feel arises from other immutable rules and resources that play in the air and clouds above the brains.
There cannot be motion without owing to parts, even simply as owing to this way or that, whatever the direction in sectons or like this or like that. In his epic treatise on common sensibles, "Cacumen ad Imum et Circumcirca", recognizing
Aristotle's senses and species, Bucalino further listed three magnitudes of motion to define the subject. Really great or the range of less, as above so below, and the atomic middle as beyond so between, where necessity and the measure used to measure remain
equal to themselves. Even in the elasticity of high quality air, when something like a lucky word in Scrabble crystallizes, like a rare stellium, it is unlikely that such a particular score will come again. Not soon anyway, and the way of being, in virtue
of the neccessity in distinction of space, as from cause and effect operationum, ebbs and flows like an alphabet rhyme. The signs and meanings always must fit, fitting whatever the circumstance or skill, as much as correct spelling and division by one. The
error or what is wrong fits too in just the way that it is and how that it is off. Oneness is felt even in the parts, for there is only one way to have everything and have it right, and it must not be missed, the best method to realise well any work conceived.
A missing letter is like a missing tooth, and it is the same one problem, relatio secundum esse, for all the words.
A map maker knows he knows what the descriptive thing is that is that, that also
is metacognition of place ... as well the geometric validity of its universal representation in the form of intersecting lines of longitude and latitude around a geographic sphere of location, et cetera. The rule and expression of place prevail both in cause
and effect as much as correct grammar and spelling. Materially, formally, efficiently, eminently, the one that is ultimately real is the one also closest to itself. Finally within itself and of itself, through itself too, in loco etiam, quod proxissimus sibi
sic in loco ipsi, suimet enim in ipso locoissimus est. The one closest to itself is in its own place itself, to itself also in itself, thus the ultimate place in regard to itself, as much as place provides a universal of existence in its own way.
O what a thing to know about timehshare resorts and their points systems too ... as the simple necessity of being that is among all places is first and the most, most adapted to permeate everywhere, like
besties and such friends, and therefore rests the most, subsisting as something simple after all divisions. As oneness precedes in order that which is compounded and contingent, and each one in two precedes the sum, the
orb and notion of Jupiter in the sky, for instance, becomes as much a question of logical consequence in the cosmos as anything else. The notion and pronunciation of Z and Zed in the line of the alphabet result from the same necessity of A and B, if
it would be impossible for Z and Zed to be false, when A and B and the alphabet are true. A does belong to B, as B belongs to C, and C to Z, and if science counted sheep from Earth to Jupiter, and called the distance and total number an "EJ", instead of an
alphabet, as a number and sign of relation it also would have no contrary.
For virtue of ingenuity then, to keep a certain
place, divide the EJ by the EJ to get one, betwixt and between like gravity all over, and so it goes from either end. The cosmos is one yet "manent optima coelo", as they say in Scotland. The best things are high above, of course, and sometimes just pipe in
the haggis to divide the rest, the cosmos by the quotient by Jove, to get the same difference. Where it would represent simple entity qua entity (ens realissimum sed et rationis), it, that is the EJ, would also be absolute even for form of universal place.
And where as when, also as what, and as as that also, as the loosest and most restricitve supreme genus would be known or perceived by intelligence, which Scotus called "when", which things belong also naturally to place and space as much as whenever.
If A then B, then C the atomic side or the atomic middle, for the atomic connection all the way, and that as well as perception of knowledge or knowledge of perception
To know and perceive that
as all the species enumerated of motion involve place, place and the placement must be natural to it, where it also follows that it must have an appropriate area for its universal development, as such, as much as its planetary position. As well as the form,
and the well and good, Plato and Euclid would say that the line from A to B is AB, and there is still no contact in numbers, even for a straight line -- but only separation in the amounts, to be had even
in the little points up to and including the succession. An operation is the connection that runs through a continuum and is the principle thing involved in it. Therefore, since a number is realized as it is, like a color is a color, as it is as it
is, and as chiromancy is in the hands and podiatry the feet, so Earth to Jupiter in space is as Jupiter to Earth without contradiction of place. There is overall unity of forms in any staircase of meaning, such as
white is in and on white rice, of course, for the extent and measure every step of the way, even if the rice is only an accident.
But even accidents
do not change in relation to infinity. Like geometry and spellng, everything that people know, understand, and realize is from some proportion of some relation. Nature and experience are a common world, for
Hume's billiards and everything else, as the cause and effect are in the simple operation. It is the operation that counts that touches things, that touches the matter and communicates, as five does not cause six per se, as numbers by themselves do not cause things; but 5 +1 = 6, as the operations in the combinations do.
To know the
divisiblity and form of things, therefore, like where Jupiter is in the sky, and which way that it goes, for example, the light of it and its relation to Earth do not require one to follow an unreasonable argument. if not a portal to the abyss, astronomy does not require one to catch a leprechaun either, or discover the infinite
unapproachable home of the gods. It is enough to recognize and understand the unity of forms in common words and measures, in as many instances as there may be, and for Jupiter. E.g., where there
is enough room to fit them in the mind, there is also the scale, and wise people know when a situation of magnitude speaks for itself.
Between
the coincidental, accidental, and essential, and the proper existence of triangles, good sense may know the relation of matters, to account for so much and the thing-in-itself, as much as there is any straight line from Earth to Jupiter, or any sense of repose
between any fairway and green. Golf is a game for life too not just arithmetic, and Sarazen's double eagle at number 15 in Augusta, 1935, is a fine example of the method of division in virtue of
comparison. Such dichotomous skill and luck practiced between straight lines and circles could be interpreted as another mirror of the golden ratio, the perfect in-between even in a wilderness of
mirrors.
Like the Moon in Gemini, all the duality and parallel, as if it were from any universal, any dimension in space, before he hit the shot, Sarazen said, "they might go in from anywhere". Thus the argument begun from a 4-wood is still the same as the argument from the straight line or a gnomon, or of a putter -- and are the same as the argument from a circle, that nothing represents A better than A,
and nothing represents B better than B, and nothing represents the square root of two better than the diagonal of a square. In terms of pure space, he reckoned, without saying it further, that the
sphere is the most efficient set distribution from point-to-point and the golf ball. Likewise, thoughts engaging things as such, any something somewhat
... thoughts can be scanned by measuring the waves. Thinking things, dimples and the shapes, architectures, tempers, and intentions of thought are in the extremes as well as the means, none of which exist
without the measure or the middle score ... all of which precipitate another sphere.
If ever there was whichever way a better half in signs,
something to gain in similitudes, by confederacy of dunces or any availabilty somehow, there always had to be a way for them. The vacancy of a hollow sphere, for an instance, arrives on the dot, and to be and to become are not easily separated from the same
difference, even in plain matters. In nature in the numbers and subsequent results, as much as 1 represents a point and a circle, and 2 a straight line and a pillar, all numbers are figurate and
confederate quanta in the round.
In the roundly potential as well as the roundly actual, as much as golf or fishing, the substance and question of direction is the business closest to the hole.
In the game called life that is the result, it is as impossible to get the white out of rice or cotton, and the right eye out of Horace, as it is impossible to get geometry and the golden mean out
of the shape of everyday life and its intelligent signs of everyday thought or intellection. Therefore, the sheep in total for the distance to Jupiter from Augusta, Georgia stand like one isagogic measure for all, an estimate for all seasons.
Omnium horarum trajectio, trajectiones motusque stellarum, and science must know that the measure of things is not only for quantity but also quality, and "quality
is never an accident". As the EJ represents a standard of excellence, as much as the double eagle was the best that Sarazen could do, so Jupiter goes around the Earth every day, as the Earth is always at rest around itself. To choose the good means and avoid
the extremes on either side, if it would be a wise witness for improvement, science must admit then, that like Sarazen's score card, there is no better way or place for Jupiter to go or to be, that it should be so well represented by nature as well as convention,
not other than where and when it is. As much as the line between Earth and Jupiter is the only one that it is, in its order of magnitude absolute and without contrary, there is a unique and excellent quality involved for the distance, also as entity, as much as the map cover of an old book.
If the sublime may plumb the depths to discover
the infinite, or at least the best relation, entity is still the first principle; and Gene Sarazen, for example, may have felt that there was no better way to describe 235 yards, which represents about 164 sheep, than with a 4-wood at number 15 of Augusta
National. "Firethorn" or pyracantha, the parallel of an actuality to that like the very excellence of which it is the actuality, again, whether the matter of a thing or that of which it is the matter, the elemental may have many senses, but unity in the form
gives the most proper and fundamental sense.
Things should make sense for all the differences and samenessness in the cosmos, and there may be many people who would agree. Reflection confirms
the observed fact, that actuality can only be realized in what is already potentially so; and it is the best occurrence, something good or something better, when it happens in matters that may be only as excellent as they are appropriate to it.
When there is no contrary in the quantity, nothing that is contrary to it, and no better representation, there is another unique sign, et cetera, and a qualitative chord even as it is, like any orange golf
ball or Jupiter and another sphere at least as much as the radius.
"As much as much", they kept saying, a crowd of people from the art gallery and the internet library who otherwise did not make
any sense when they wandered aimlessly over to the golf course. "As much as much as any color too", des imbeciles in circles when they heard the news. "Réoné" in primary code means revenge of the nerds*, and it was observed that any events-works
that were nipped in the bud could find a way of return in other circumstances. Since the finite measures involved in things and their principles cannot exhaust an infinite resource, it was not to worry that by nature the ultimate means should remain undiminished.
Whether it is for the existence of triangles or the essence, infinite regress undermines the starting point, however, that one and the other one too, and some people thought and said that they were drunk, perhaps retarded, or from a secret society that refuses
to play the full deck, as much as such, such and such, and as this, that, these, those, and the others.
It was like teenagers
at the beach, with cigarettes, tequila and fake ID's, grossed out and coughing at the ways things are, themselves too, but still in awe of Schrodinger's dead cat. Not far from the road, sand dunes and sea grass of the ocean shore, la-tee-da, stars and Moon
in the nightime sky, and "the feeling of the world as a bounded whole is the mystical", even if sometimes to touch it only with a stick. It was time for another clown, so name that tune, "So It Goes", therefore also, "Das Ding an sich" and so it went.
Experience and necessity must have had something to do with it, at least as much as any accident, or the spraypaint on the wall. As much as there is only one way to spell "bat" or "cat", in International
Phonetic Alphabet, to sing an octave there is only one series of do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. And there is at any given time one straight line between this point and that one, that are this way and that way from each other. Like the centers between Jupiter
and the Earth, for example, which for a segment could be called a universal as well as the EJ.
Special indeed, a quantum leap like that -- dot, dot, dot ... toodle loop, toodle loop. Twinkle dee,
twinkle dum. Loopty loop and the Winkie Guard could not miss it in a clear view. With so much self-annoyance in philosophy, when another one lands on it, as simple and excellent as it is, it should be as easy to find. Like the "a" in cat or the "a" in bat,
and the alphabet soup of the end of the world, there is only one measure of the golden ratio to know, like that as that, which it represents.
As a measure of simple entity, backwards or forwards
into the edge of sunset, in itself for the distance all the way around, the way that space is between the stars, and between perigee and apogee of the Moon, it is the same space from point to point for all the world, for all the days of the years, of course. Like geometry of a cosmic alphabet, from alpha to omega, all the hours of the day are around the Earth at once too. Therefore, to cover the distance anywhere as
quickly as anyone could, by degrees the great space and outer space contain all divisible things in themselves, like whatever frequency and form, overrunning in simple measures of logic
hidden or revealed, etc., and the relation to infinity is there that divides everything everywhere.
What are the odds that there would be another one just like it, such a situation
right there where it is at the same time? A repeat or a clone, or a ghost perhaps, it may be difficult to name something more unlikely to happen.
As it is though, trivia and fate still compass
the world not just the EJ and the whole human experience. However, like the artifact of the two bullets from Gallipoli, that collided and stuck together in the battle of 1915, some things only play chances better in a more permanent sign, but how far can it
go? According to theory of common occurrence in total potential existence, none of it is really any bother anyway, as some would interpret it, none other than abusdities again, since without the simple time of an hourglass it does not appear that there would
be enough total space, not enough total space for it to be counted again the same way so many times.
Since any natural motion requires time, as
much as the day of the week and the class bell, everything has ratio and proportion; therefore, whatever the frequnency, science reasonably can be sure of what many things are, as repetition of the measure used to measure remains perfectly equal to itself.
Yet it is true as people say that knowledge is more than counting and reasoning cannot go on forever, or better to say indefinitely.
The
vast compass of the oceans and the terrible teeth of megalodon, for example, cannot exist without the extremes, and the extremes cannot exist without the measure. If either of the extremes is destroyed, so the measure. Therefore, it is as difficult to remove the one singular distance that is between Earth and Jupiter from simple entity, ens inquantum ens, as it is pure quantity at any given time, as it is to remove the Earth away from itself in complete disappearance,
or any straight line from geometry, or the middle figure that fits from the syllogism.
If the geometry which can describe things so well up to a point, even for reliquaries, did not come from the
"Big Bang" or chaos, how did space then that all of it obtains, or the objects in space? If space and geometry are always so much alike, in a given order of relation as parallel, it must be the result of cause and effect in subject object and the atomic connection
of so many sides, since copies like that are not merely accidental.* At any rate, if true or correct things are destroyed, the truth and rectitude according to which they had been so nevertheless remain, since when the sign is destroyed the interior principle
that had been interwoven in the correctness of the signification still remains.
As much as the portents and auguries of geometry projected in all of them, straight lines are universally simple, of course, yet not everyone sees it in the existent principles. to constitute another typical presence out of total possible existence.
As close to infinity at any given point as anything else, if some in particular may disappear, still "what is simple cannot be separated from itself".-95 The interference of complications does not change the glory of a line of general simplicity, that in whatever consequences cannot be separated from its own existence, "for it does not have its existence in virtue of some form other than itself".-96
As
Agamemno the geometer said, "accidents cannot change in relation to the infinite either", therefore, common sense should be allowed the greatest basis possible to it; and the unification of simplicity, in proportion to proportion, pro pro of total possible
existence, can be profound too, so that it may bring together even the oddest people and things. At times, the occurrence may or may not be gratifying, ipso facto, for subsequent analysis something to avoid or look at again; but it seems true enough that even
the littlest things can add to the total reckoning of science, ars gratia artis. Since it is with particular and universal virtue that the necessity of being and the extremes of the measure and the measure used to measure remain equal to themselves, all contributions
can make a difference in conjunction.
Aristotle thought every species required for the integrity of the universe should be eternal, then median and mode, figure and mood too, of course; as well
as like and unlike, and if anybody from science would notice the Earth being removed from itself, or losing its simple excellence in complete disappearance, from where it is (or was) in the means, he should have noticed it spinning and turning in the first
place. Yet "to know the limit if not the bean or the coffee of the grind", said the oracle, "that is what you should know", in such a world no sooner jinxed than to show itself or to be pulled to pieces.
However,
the science and the show must go on, whatever the thing like a vowel to take its part everywhere, even if slip sliding away, as it is, since the signs and meanings are in the concurrence of the what-for and
the what-how expressed from the primary place. As letters go from A to Z, with an a,b,c,t, a word in Scrabble can go for a "bat" or a "cat"; and, like astronomy and the game board, there is the simple question of which is where first. If an astronomer at Scrabble in a windowed room should recognize which star is Jupiter, distinctly
when it is on the horizon, and that, just like the Moon and the Sun, it goes from east to west every day around the Earth, then he should also be able to tell when the window frame is not moving or falling apart.
Is it so hard to see the openwork in the necesity of being that is, that the particular and universal virtue of the extremes, in the measure and the measure used to measure, remain equal to themselves? It is a circular function and normal part of human expression, for example, that everyone would like to have good teeth, to not feel pain, and not be struck by bolts of lightning -- "to die of thirst beside the fountain, hot as fire,
shaking tooth on tooth".
The concurrence of relation in the question, also in the substance of direction (about teeth and belonging as a place)
even if in abstraction, would have the same overall placement, universal 16 over 16, and not struck by lightning, and not dying of thirst by the fountain, et cetera. As much as place is placed
for placement value, and placement is a key, there is another universal sign in such pains or twisted second-view delights, as the chances in astronomy or dentistry may be.
People may like to take a second or third look and without some fair sense of truth then, even for teeth, and to simply recognize that the Earth does not orbit the Sun, but the Sun orbits
the Earth, and that the distance between Earth and Jupiter is unique, it would have come to pass that "matter and all else that is in the physical world would have been reduced to only shadowy symbolism". But
the involvement, the life, the ontology, in fact, and the teeth are more to question than shadows. Even if there is sameness and peculiarity at the root, at the
same time among many things, the place to fit them in is unique for all, as there is universal clockwork yet with difference, and a ghost in the machine.
Since the excellence of all measures and filigree as they relate to the stars is difficult to deny, divide all by one for the same difference, and then by the EJ or Excalibur, to overcome the world of disorderly notions. By any proportion,
"with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again", in qua mensura mensi, fueritis metietur vobis. In any case, if reason would be a fair measure too, sensible a solis ortu cardine,
for it to be objective it must have contact with reality.
If everything in the world "is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen," it should not be too difficult then to admit that everyone
can tell when the Earth is between a full Moon in Aquarius and the Sun in Leo, and that when the Moon begins to wane in Pisces it has nothing to do with any rotation of the Earth. "Uniform experience amounts to a proof"(299), and such an observation as the full Moon that is that way not this way is another universal sign, with a formal relation in the summer, as much as any other season.
Unity has as many senses as "is", or "as", as it should, as the middle of a golf club is essential too, a subsistent atomic property not only relative and not an accident,
as much as Thursday is Thursday, as always it is when the fifth one of the week is five. When it is the fifth day of the week all day, in fact, like Jupiter in space, it is uncanny how Jupiter is in only one sign at the end of a line at a time. The
Earth meanwhile is in the same one sign and all the others as well, which cannot be without that one and those that are far away going around the other in the middle. By the summary quantity and quality of location in geometry and astronomy, then, the Earth
has the middle, and such quantity has no contrary.
If people think and therefore reckon that they are or should be, they should also know where they are or in what kind of position. All the peace,
love, and quality of place is no mere accidental extraction, no mere accidental condition. The Lord "has ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight", and any wisdom must be about placement and
the order in occurrence, as well as which way out of so many that leads to the infinite.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down or touches the ever-rolling quintessence
of the great beyond, and the seasons, to be honest, are not just seasons but feelings too. An age and then another and then the next are in them if one counts the changes, "si vices rerum aevum putes".
Even in a world of many equivocations and homonyms, the EJ is one, therefore, always the same among fractions, as the identity of name rests on identity of form. Since judgments are limited to the place
where the causes reside, the impossibility that the place of knowledge should receive the knowledge, yet lack judgment of the very same thing, necessarily demonstrates the identity. For it is impossible that the judgment should be in any other place than the
place of its cause. And since opposites cannot inhere in one and the same place, this kind of reckoning is common to all attributes.
Not only is its place something significant, it also exerts
a certain influence scrabblewise. As of course, what a unique difference between everything and a bag of tiles it can make, when we say that a thing is this distance away or that, like the EJ, and specifically too, since in pure form of the case no portion
differs from another.
Even as fragments of here or there, knowledge is identical with the things known, and elements and measures
in perfection of the thing must be the same everywhere, also when and now as much as through the immutable relations. Since whatever space is for the averages, so the averages are for the places in the space, as they are predicatively the same. This being so, as the case in queue is of its own identity and reasonable defintion, in any such resolution it follows that there cannot be more EJ's than the one, that of the very original, the same one no matter how many attributive
instances or likenesses to count. There are many secrets of which all the world is ignorant, of course, but, by heaven, Jupiter is not and should not be so unknown that we cannot count it for what it is.
They have said that "the first casualty of war is the truth", but not the EJ. Therefore, such a unique species as it is in the supreme genus of when, as much as any other when of where or the how, it too
must be one and no more. It is precisely this universality of belonging that is appropriate exclusively to it, together with such celestial determinateness, that gives it not only such a what but a what kind in its specific case. As Aristotle said, there is
only one heaven, so only one EJ too. As there is only one six in all the sixes, sevens, or eights, and one two in all the dozens, counting measures or cards or dice in whatever terms or combinations is always the same just like distances. If Zeno of Elea
said that a man can never leave his room, with enough analysis, others might begin to discover one day in which one it is that he is stuck and in exactly which way.
Besides seeing
vanities in full measure, and things like money hyper-saturation among the living, if there is any vision among the dead, any visionaries of desiderata like Samuel or Teiresias, it must be by knowledge of universals that particulars are seen and any of their
morbidities or modalities too. Since causes inhere more firmly than attributes, inherent causes are assuredly so, as first knowledge of universals is through them. Since the diagonal in any square is not commensurate with the sides -- ad quadratum dot, dot,
dot -- whether an EJ is taken as 1 or 1.41421356237 ... pure space by itself defines the figure as well as the light. It is the same way wth the Book of Psalms as the square root of two, or another 99/70 ... or the EJ in 150, as one or 150 in fact, as much
as the golden ratio too, since existential forms which are commensurately universal are not only through things and the times but through permanent relations.
When
something spiritual like that is established, the universality of place and placement in the way the sequence goes provides a parallel for all identity, therefore, also in limit resolutions
of space: in such a way that the world and its providence must be of a certain what kind, both in things and propositions. To insist on the nature of place as much as the nature of being, the way things are edgewise represents a genuine and elementary mystery
in the cosmos perhaps, that as many stars as there are, ultima ratio rerum, there could be almost infinitely more: and as many places from the center of an umbrella, even if the when and where are always only one line of direction in location along all the
meridians, et cetera.
With all prudence and good method in the counting, even by the edge of abstraction, including the EJ or e4 in chess, the world is a common world, and "not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected." As soul is intermingled over the whole universe, having an attractive orbicular ring to it, they say
"virtue must be honored wherever it is found".
As much as any oneness is essential to all, no eternal thing can possess unity accidentally, and any such singularity as the cosmos, even as the greatest series that
it is, has to be centered. As that which is must always be, as so it goes somewhere some way, when the analysis and adverbial considerations of such questions are not only an accident, certainly not for the math, neither are the definitions of the distances
involved and the times. Since it is fair to reckon things after the ends, what they realize, the EJ too, for example, as well as its positon, is a unqiue sign in the heavens, even the predications and specificities. Therefore, the almanac and the charts that
look to it must be free ... and will be free, even in daily rotations of the lights of the ages, at least as much as the numbers and words that would climb up to the starry skies in so many mythy codes, et cetera, de natura rerum and everywhere beyond, et
cetera.