Skip to main content

The Aporiae of Platonism

According to Putnam’s Platonic ontology, reality is not a part of human mind, rather the human mind is a part -and a small part at that- of reality.[1] It is fascinating to see how the ancient proclamations of a universal and transcendental law keep still all their strength in our society. Ontological assumptions cannot be discussed in terms of formal logic, for they are the very grounds of any possible discussion. Concepts such as whole, part, reality, are pre-valued in our acritical Lebenswelt knowledge, and even at a more basic neurophysiological level. It is obvious that we are a small piece within a huge scenario, but the cosmos is not something independent of our thinking: if it were we could not place ourselves in any relation to it. When we read Putnam’s words, we confound the experience of our life in an historical community (with a given scientific knowledge) with the concept of reality, as he himself does. In fact, such a proposal pretends to be a declaration of soundness of mind: is it not evident that we are but a small part? But human mind is not a part in a whole, but the condition of possibility for the concepts of part, whole, reality and many more.
Platonism is utterly nihilistic and aporetical, for if our mind is such a small part, our concepts cannot grasp reality [using Platonic (Cantorian) set theory], any finite set of true sentences is negligible in an infinite set of sentences which express transcendental wisdom], so why bother?
We do not need to sink anymore in man-made cosmic oceans. We do not need anymore philosophies  of the universal law which confound linguistic operations, such as the construction of general concepts (cosmos, reality, god, etc.) with mythological beings independent of our thinking. The whole cosmos fits in one single of our thoughts, needs our thoughts to be a cosmos.



[1] Hilary Putnam. Mathematics , Matter and Method. Cambridge University Press 1980. p.vii.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Metalanguages are formal metaphors

  In a logic class, the professor tells his students: "Yesterday, while talking with my Sufi gardener about happiness, we ended up talking about metalanguages, because he said that orchids are 'chambers where light plays between amorous encounters.' I told him: 'You have to be a poet to talk about poetry.' He replied: 'You just have to be human.'" In what way can we say that my gardener is proposing that every metalanguage is a formalized metaphor for its object language and what would be the metaphor for arithmetical addition? Furthermore” -he asks-how does this little narrative show that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist? One student answers: “The gardener uses orchids as a metaphor for biological reproduction, and from this he makes a second-order metaphor at the human level, calling reproduction a loving encounter. The gardener is a Sufi; in Sufi ontology, the word 'encounter' is used as equivalent to 'existence,' a double meaning (Wujud)....
Post a Comment
Read more

Rhapsodies of Anima Mundi: Fear of Death

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...
Post a Comment
Read more