In describing the present moment, it's hard to top the "moving image of eternity," so credit to Plato.
I suppose it's like describing the "here" as the finite image of infinitude, or as a bounded image of the unbounded.
The point is, eternity is not an aggregation of moments, just as the infinite is not a stack of places. Rather, supposing you've been anywhere, you've been everywhere, man, and the Aphorist implies as much:
At any given moment, the most important place on earth can be a palace, a pigsty, or a cell.
In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.
But supposing these are true, how are they true? Easy: the world is temporo-holo-fractalistic-expialodocious!
Let's go through the steps, with Professor Harris as our guide. Or at least I hope he will guide us. All I remember is that he and I are on the same page, broadly speaking. And that few other thinkers I've encountered think about these things in the same way I do, for what that's worth. No one I think is in my tree. Or damn few, at any rate.
In short, he may be wrong. But he's my kind of wrong. Let's go:
If the world is to any extent intelligible its elements must constitute and must be comprehensible in some form of interrelated system constituting a single whole.
But the world is intelligible. Last I checked, anyway. Therefore, existence must be an interrelated system constituting a single whole.
The end beginning. Or both, rather.
Conversely -- to give the Devil his due --
If it is ultimately unintelligible, science and philosophy must in the final issue collapse and knowledge would have no sustainable grounds.
The end. This time literally.
And yet, the world continues going round -- not just the physical world, but the intelligible world. People keep thinking, even when they don't. But enough about the left. We'll get to them in due time. But as far as Bob is concerned,
the inescapable and fundamental presupposition of all knowledge, and ipso facto of all intelligent action, is the existence of a world at least in some degree intelligible.
Again, to put it bluntly, any knowledge presupposes all knowledge, i.e., an absolute intelligibility we call O.
But O is not a blob, rather, an ordered totality, a whole, a cosmos:
The arc of a circle must be the arc of a complete circle to be an arc at all, and the same is true of any part of any conceivable pattern.
I don't know if Harris mentions fractals, but that is what he is describing, for a fractal exhibits
similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales, called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry (wiki).
And this unfolding or developmental symmetry not only partakes of the spatial dimension, but of the temporal; both spatial (here) and temporal (now) parts reflect the whole existentialada.
On the one hand this may sound strange or obscure, but it is really quite obvious. IMO. No whole, no parts, whether in space or in time.
"Every manifold is a multiplicity of elements in relation, and every relation is a link." To say RELATION is to have said it all, for this is a relational cosmos (as is any conceivable cosmos, as we shall see).
I am tempted to just say that reality is irreducible substance-in-relation, but
A continuum, to be continuous involves heterogeneity of parts, for unless the parts are distinguishable they cannot continuously diverge. On the other hand, they equally cannot be totally heterogeneous and must be uniform and alike in some respect if they are to be continuous.
Hold on a moment -- I Blake for Visions:
To see a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.
And The of murphy bed of the now is the resting place of eternity (Cousin Dupree).
Anyway,
Continuity thus involves both identity and difference and what varies continuously is that same property which is universal to the whole....
Hence the universal essence, to be at all, must involve the gamut of its specific forms, without which it is nothing...
Bottom line:
if there is a relation between the mind and the world which it knows, they must both belong to one system.... Consequently, we cannot assume a break between the actual world and ourselves and we must recognize an inevitable continuity between the world and our minds.
That's all I'm saying, which is to say it all: "There can be no unbridgeable gulf between thought and existence," and the bridge is not a thing but a dynamic relation between terms. I AM is one term, and I am is another: Yours, Mine, and Ours.
To be "continued," because what choice do we have?
1 comment:
All I remember is that he and I are on the same page, broadly speaking. And that few other thinkers I've encountered think about these things in the same way I do, for what that's worth.
That's an interesting point, in the sense that you only talk about things that can't not be true, or that without which nothing is possible. In a weird way, it's ultra-logical, which you'd think would bring in more of the sort of people who also consider themselves extremely logical, but then too often the implications are things which people enslaved to logic prefer not to consider. Hm.
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