The Ontological Boy

DIRECT REALISM

Find my book at www.theplatonicprairie.com. It is part prose-poem, part ontological analysis, visions of Platonic realism as you climb the steps of the Scala Paradisi. Eros Uranos. Madness and an incarnation descending. I have not tried to avoid philosophical perplexity by jumping into science. I am not mesmerized by science as are almost all of the others. I have not been afraid of the whirlwind. Things separate. The roaring river is overhead. Words are overheard. The rhythm is maintained.

To "understand" these writings you must pay attention to the form and timing of the sentences and not so much to the content or the concepts embodied in them. In other words, your awareness must be on the external appearance and not the internal idea. The movement, the rise and fall, the gradual lengthening and retreat of the phrases. The repetition of sounds and the changing. It is that that gives substance to the paragraph. It is that that the meaning rides on. This is performance. The spirit is present in that, or it is not.

The certain good of diction strongly names the basic elements – these are the sonorous Forms - I listen and I build them into a steady movement. The reader will have to catch the flow and drift of the slow timing. His freedom of movement will be severely restricted. His feet will be nailed to the floor of the drone. His breath will be taken and controlled. If he fights the rhythm, all is lost. If he ignores the proper movement, the spirit will not come and the idea will not hold.

Protestant plainness has totally taken over scholarly writing and all discussion that takes place near its watching eye. Sobriety, seriousness and fact. The color and splash of idolatry must not be allowed to contaminate its pure limpid sweetness. The clear forehead of thought must shine. The gentle gesture of liberality must go with the smile of concern. Reason, good sense and pristine order. And the powerful truth of plain speech. Or so it is supposed to be instead of this natural dullness that has settled in hard.

Nonetheless, this blog is gay Christianity unabashedly in love with the old metaphysical style.

Socrates: What we shall see is something like a Battle of Gods and Giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality.

Theatetus: How so?

Socrates: One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands; for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.

Theatetus: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew, I have met quite a number of them before now.

Socrates: Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless Forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps.

English has high and low register. The first is Latinate and the second is Anglo-Saxon. Elevated, cultured analysis, gentle meaning, intellectual contentment, ascends in the French/Latinate aerial structures of Modern English. Hard facts, however, bare things, up close feelings, the pieces, this and that lying near, are other. Latinate words are considerate and sweet. They are the distant leisure of educated reflection. The Anglo-Saxon is down in the windy chaos, the push and the grabbing of stiff thought. I entangle the one register with the other. And in that I have made, perhaps, a fine rhythm, or a horny briar. The reader must be aware. And en garde.

I don't sing like nobody.

Elvis Presley

The differences among some of the several existents are very great indeed. I, for one, would not hesitate to call them momentous, or enormous. That, I submit, is a major source of the resistance serious ontology has always met. For these differences are much greater than most are prepared to face.

Gustav Bergmann

But elaborate rhythmical arrangement is quite evidently one of the things which are not wanted in scientific discussion, and which, if anybody is in the unfortunate mood to do so, may be stigmatized as “beautiful deceits.”

George Saintsbury

Get the same thing but without the pictures - The Platonic Prairie Here And The Ontological Nexus Here

Cut up my writings a la William Burroughs here - Cut It All Up

Wait – my stats counter tells me that you have probably come here just to look at the pictures, but I hope you would also …… never mind. It’s hopeless.

A warning to scholars – even though the thoughts lovingly delineated on this site are touchingly right up your alley, you must not stay here long. If one of your fellows or your professors or any one of the philosophical blog superintendents finds out that you have come here and lingered, you will be severely (but joyfully) reconsidered, maybe deconsidered, even knocked down a notch in the collective academic mind. Remember your high standing and tend to it warily.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

5561 Wittgenstein and Husserl are the two greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. The former famously and stumblingly wrote:

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

What might such a meaningless philosophical statement be? And why is it a part of such a high expression of thought? Bergmann, who so admirably follows Wittgenstein, referring to ‘green is not a relation’ and ‘or is different from not’ wrote: “It seems that we know very well what these sentences purport to stand for. Yet, since they stand for nothing, we can in fact not think (intend) “it”. … discrepancy, excess and the limits of thought. The latter separates what can be thought (and therefore in this world exists) from the excess…. In some cases … the discrepancy between what we seem to intend and what in fact we intend is not so large that the gap could not be bridged, phenomenologically as well as otherwise. … But there are other cases … {that] will lead us to a gap that is unbridgeable. Or, with a twist, the excess of the ontology of logic over its phenomenology is in this world very large and of a very striking nature. One who see that clearly cannot but be disturbed. For he finds himself … faced with the question which, in an obvious sense, is the biggest of all. Just remember the image of the ladder that must be thrown away. Mathematical logic may be left to the mathematicians. But does not what goes for the ontology of logic also go for all of ontology; and it if does, is not all ontological talk excess?”

It seems that ontology for the most part is not phenomenologically presented. If I say ‘the nexus of exemplification exists and it is different from the nexus of intentionality’, I seem to be talking about what I do not “see”. Are ontological things and ontological facts presented or not? I have said that they are. It seems that Bergmann and Wittgenstein and Husserl have said they aren’t. Does it make a difference? I contemplate Ontological Things. What is that contemplation? Can I make a connection between that and the Platonic Vision of transcendent Forms? I have said that such Vision and that contemplation are the same. Whether or not I am historically and philologically justified, I shall ignore. I see the Forms. Whether or not that seeing is phenomenological, I shall try to ignore; though that may not be wise.

The Ontological Boy