How Are There Questions?

Especially that one.

Slept late this morning, so just a brief cosmic update, because it just doesn't feel right to start the day without a dip into the radiant ocean of being. It's not just the refreshment, rather, the penance, like justifying my otherwise frivolous existence or something. 

I want to begin with an aphorism from the end of yesterday's post, that

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

Now, if we're going to try to pin down the Ground Aphorisms of a universe composed of them, this one comes close to being absolutely necessary, if not sufficient. It's a punchline that punches way above its weight, that's for sure.

You could equally say that the world is made of language or of stories or of myth or math, but the very existence of language presupposes certain ontological conditions that cannot be denied on pain of instantaneous soph-refutation and eternal banishment to the lowest ring of tenure.

One wishes, anyway.

What I mean is, to say anything at all about the universe is to have said a great deal indeed; but that's not the end of it, because then we have to enquire or even inquire into the meaning of this "great deal" of implicit meaning, which no one ever does except for poor unheralded Bob. 

Rather, people go on exchanging invisible information from head to head as if it's not the weirdest thing ever. At least ants touch heads to pass along information, but we do so through the ether. And from what to what? I mean, we're doing it right now, and what's going on? 

Well, first of all, what is language, anyway? We'll go with this: communication through a system of arbitrary signals. It's somewhat tautological, because what is communication, and how is it possible? 

Appropriately enough, the first chapter of Stanley Jaki's Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth goes into this question, because truly truly, it is the first question -- which is to say, how and why do we ask questions, and, weirder still, how and why are there answers?

Of course, there are never enough philosophers and always too many people who philosophize. And yet, from the wise to the tenured, they all share one thing in common, to such an extent that if they were true philosophers they would be in agreement instead of engaged in a 2,500 year food fight.

for all their differences, philosophers are at one in a crucial and fundamental respect, be they skeptics, dogmatists, realists, idealists, rationalists, empiricists, positivists, phenomenologists, deconstructionists, materialists, or what not.

We'll bite.

They all use tangible means for the delivery of their respective messages. The means may be the spoken word, a clay tablet, a scroll, a parchment, a codex, a broadsheet, a book, an email projected on the monitor..., but it has to be a means, that is, something tangible.

This is at once trivially true, since it is something we can't not know (and do) and still presume to communicate. And yet, it is so profoundly true as to evoke the ontic WTF?! as soon as we explicitly think about it.

"If philosophers are logical" -- admittedly a big if -- then

their strictly primary concern should be about the extent to which their particular philosophy justifies the use of any such means, indeed its very reality and all the consequences, both numerous and momentous, that follow from this (Jaki). 

Now, to say "numerous and momentous" is to say quantity and quality, which is a whole 'nother can of wormholes, but I think I've communicated the bare minimum to justify my existence for one more day. We'll continue tunneling tomorrow.