Cosmic Whataboutism

I was thinking about aboutness when up popped this post by Spencer Klavan, which touches on the aboutness of art, in reference to Magritte's famous painting of a pipe that denies it is one. This is not the painting, because the original is in French:

Klavan correctly points out that

every painting is two things: a wall and a window. As a flat panel of oil and canvas, it’s just an object. But as a depiction of something else [read: about something else], it draws the mind into the world it symbolizes -- the world of the landscape, the portrait, the pipe. 

I say Magritte’s painting is diabolical because it denies the reality of that second world. Or at least, it denies that you can ever get from this world to that, from paint to pipe, from flesh to spirit. The mind leaps toward the picture, expecting to pass through a window, and crashes instead headfirst into the wall: “This is not a pipe.”

In short, the painting denies being about what it is about, which is as good a definition of postmodernism as I can think of, since the latter severs the link between words and reality, thus denying us any escape from the closed system of language. The consequence is vertical asphyxiation. 

It reminds me of what we are seeing play out on our TV screens here in southern California: once again the media is brazenly denying what we can see with our own eyes: This Is Not a Riot, These Are Not Criminal Illegals, This Is Not Nullification of Federal Law, This Is Not Funded by America-Hating Monsters, etc. 

Klavan continues: "If this is not a pipe, if this wall is not also a window, then words are just sounds and paint is just slop": nothing is about anything, much less about perennial truth and vertical reality. Likewise, for the intellectual demon Jacques Derrida, "the connection between written language and conscious thought was a cultural and historic convention," meaning that postmodernism is literally about nothing.

Except power.

Correct. Power is what is left when language is no longer about reality, both horizontal and vertical, temporal and timeless, terrestrial and celestial, local and nonlocal.

Back to the question of what about is all about, and how anything can be about anything else. If you think... about it, it's far from obvious. 

I have thought about it, and I say we take aboutness for granted because it is an ontological primitive without which this universe would be a totally incoherent. In fact, it wouldn't be a universe -- a cosmos -- at all, because nothing would be connected to anything else. It is only because things are about other things that we live in an intelligible universe that can be known by the intellect.

Take the laws of physics. What are they about? Obviously they are about the material world, but that's not all, because -- as referenced in yesterday's post -- they are so minutely fine-tuned for the existence of life and mind, that one can't help suspecting that they are ultimately about us, but also about another intelligence, one infinitely vaster than ours. 

Or take DNA. What is it about? Apparently it is about organisms and their traits, but it must also be about the environment in which organisms will find themselves. Obviously, Darwinism must assume a universe in which some things can be about others. 

Which is a good segue into the next chapter of All Things are Full of Gods, called Concepts and Reason. Hart rightly affirms that

a merely mechanical material system could never, out of some pre-conceptual void, produce so much as a single abstract concept. There's no feasible series of steps..., even over vast epochs of time... that could cause conceptual abstractions to arise from concrete sensory encounters.

So, how do abstract and immaterial concepts get into a concrete and material cosmos? This fundamentally goes to the question of how things -- in this case concepts -- can be about other things.

Again, this aboutness must be implicit in the cosmos, in that abstract concepts are just waiting for intellects to come along and explicate them: "the mind is capable of really interacting with these strictly immaterial entities," e.g., mathematical and logical principles, "none of which can be grounded" in the physical. 

Nevertheless, here they are, various necessary truths that are "true in every possible reality, and would be true if there were no physical reality at all."  The simplest mathematical equation or syllogism is "utterly unlike any kind of physical event." 

Where are we on the word count, Petey?

700+.

Time for one more chapter, this one on Free Will and Purpose. How did these get into the cosmos?  Free will is always ordered to -- i.e., about -- a purpose, but the skeptic in Hart's dialogue calls this "the oldest illusion of all." 

We say, if man weren't free he could never know it. In other words, supposing we don't have free will, this would constitute knowledge of a truth that transcends physical cause and effect, and thereby proves the existence of free will. Or, expressed more pithily,

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist.

Thus, 

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right.

Coming full circle, Hart alludes to the "arbitrary fundamentalist belief in the causal closure of the physical," for it is "a purely metaphysical commitment, with no logical or empirical warrant, or any warrant at all other than want of imagination." 

Again, the postmodern perversion consists precisely in this, i.e., the enclosure of man in language, which is in turn closed off from reality, such that we cannot really have knowledge about anything. And what is knowledge if it is not about reality?

To be continued....

In essence, the text builds a case for "aboutness" as a foundational aspect of reality, arguing that its denial, as seen in postmodernism, leads to a fragmented and ultimately meaningless existence, where "nothing is about anything, much less about perennial truth and vertical reality." The author suggests that the only thing left when "aboutness" is denied is "power."

"The image depicts a surreal painting of a pipe with the words 'This is not a pipe,' set against a fragmented and chaotic background, symbolizing the loss of connection between words and reality."