Skip to main content

Indisputable Truths

 
  Suppose for a moment that we could form a set of propositions that state today’s basic foundational assumptions about ourselves and the cosmos, that we could somehow agree on a set U of indisputable truths, ranging from ethics to physics, from mathematics to psychology and the arts. The Pi propositions of U can be dependent or independent among themselves. If all of them were independent, the human experience would be the addition of disconnected actions, but our vital experience, as well as our science, shows us that this is not the case. Then, at least some Pi are related. But if there is even one proposition totally independent of the others, such proposition would not be intelligible, for it would not have a referent. All Pi are, therefore, somehow related, and the relation is the thinking-living human being. Now, if all Pi are related, they could be expressed in terms of some meta-principles or meta-axioms. This would imply that our axioms are not final (and not axioms), i.e., that there are other axioms U’, which are not covered by our intuitions and social agreements. The set of meta-axioms U’, being independent of the set of the axioms which form system U, would be independent of experience and intuition, for if they were dependent, they would be part of U, part of our life experience. But how could we think about something which is independent of any action of thinking? Traditionally, this dead-end has been solved calling to the idea of a final ground for thinking beyond human intelligence, a Divine Intelligence, that operates in a wider realm. In any case, since we do not know such axioms neither can we express them in our intuitions (for then they would be reducible to axioms in U), we could never construct a formal system of knowledge of Indisputable truths. Indisputable truths can be constructed only as a narrative of domination, reached by agreements on the existence of an unprovable universal law, or based on human conventions. 

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...

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)....

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...