Tag Archives: abstractions

I could go out and look at the hole that was dug across the street

Posted on May 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

Alright, I’m back at the table to write, now at about 5 p.m. I could go out and look at the hole that was dug across the street—but I also feel OK saying that it doesn’t matter, you know? That I can ignore it, let it go.

How realizing too that I don’t have to follow a link sometimes feels good, though often I do follow and read.

I was arguing to mom that simple formulas (like when school posters tell kids they should have goals) ignore that some of us don’t need, or are stressed by, such advice (and when adults tell you sh!t you don’t need, smart kids learn to ignore it, trust themselves, develop crap detector).

I realized last night that my back problems—one-sided as they are—may be coming from sitting in the recliner chair, which has lost a spring and sags to the right in the seat area. [My chiropractor] agreed it’d be a problem. He also told me not to sit today. I haven’t, much.

Writing—I sorta wrote about this a couple days ago, about what I want to write about. But I’m not sure I said this: that I don’t want to write so much about other writings, other ideas, other artworks—but that instead, I wanted to write about real things—including things people say. These keep me from getting too caught up in world of abstractions, abstractions-on-abstractions. But poems can be more about reality than news stories—not actually true, but directed at reality, or ideas about reality, than other ideas. News stories, op-eds, are often about other ideas. (I’m not sure I like that distinction.)

[From journal of Tues. 10 June 2014, Journal 195, page 231]

Leave a comment

Posted in From the journals

Tagged , ,

The past is not -7: Remembering to forget

Posted on January 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m not sure it helps to think of time in a linear way, as if time were on a number line (with the present at zero, the past as negative numbers, and the future as positive numbers). This seems to suggest that we could time-travel by jumping to some other spot on the number line. Maybe the past is only memories, the future is only conjecture, and the present is — is the only thing that’s real but even the present can’t be defined.

Hell, time may not exist outside of one’s consciousness at all.

But what I have in the present moment is a lot of pages of writings that seem to be in my handwriting (and those things that are not in my handwriting — those things I typed — do feel a little less mine, somehow). I’m glad I have these writings. Sometimes I can look back and read about things I said I did but no longer remember doing. Sometimes I’m surprised by how wise I was years ago, or that an idea that seems recent was in my mind several years ago. (Sometimes this makes me wonder if I’m really ever doing anything new, or just refining — or spiraling back over — things I first said 20 or more years ago.)

And I’m tempted, at times, to look through these older writings and get passages to write here on the blog. There are some reasons why I don’t do this more often, namely that doing this seems boring. I don’t feel like I really wanna go back over all those old things. A dip into the past, a glimpse back, are fine, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time typing up stuff I wrote when I was not the person that I am now.

Besides, I’m tempted to not be limited creatively by what I did in the past. I want to be doing new things, not thoroughly wringing out whatever life was in an ideas I had once. Ideas come all the time when I’m open to them, and I’d rather keep having new ideas than feel some obligation to a past idea just because I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I want to do what I want to do, creatively speaking, and what I want to do is keeping having new ideas — by “ideas” here, I mean new perspectives, new understandings, new points of view. But even modest ideas are new ideas.

I’m not explaining this well (a familiar feeling: words suck, and yet, they’re what we have, unless we also have other things).

But, hells bells, that’s OK, too. Why does every explanation need to be good? Eff that. I’m alive and I do stuff and I think stuff and that’s all. I mean, my writings are, in a way, just a by-product of my consciousness, anyway. My texts are by-products of the creative process, of the mind engaged in writing, of my conscious mind seeming to take dictation from the mind-voice that is the source of the words. It’s easy to think of the writing as the product, rather than as the by-product — it’s the writing that sells, that can be shared, not the experience of writing, and yet, the libraries and used book shops give away books filled with ink all the time. Empty books would have more value than a lot of the books filled with words. It’s easy to focus on the thing, the material object, rather than on the immaterial, subjective experience, and yet, why would anyone do something just to make a dead product.

And one of my older ideas is that my completed journals feel dead to me. Once I’ve filled all the pages with my writing, the notebook goes on a shelf and I get a new one that feels more vital. Of course, the words I wrote even moments ago are already past, and dead to me. This is how we live, of course, with every moment being new; revision pretends that things can be done over, re-lived. I understand that writing is not speech, can’t always be compared to speech, and yet writing that is worried over is dead in a way that speech never is — and how weird it’d be if we went back and revised our conversations. Sure, sometimes we wish we hadn’t said a thing, but, eh, life goes on. Apologies can be good. But we don’t get to revise our lives, of course; those continue. Each moment is new.  (However one defines “moment,” which is awkward of course. I like the metaphor of a mind crystallizing, coming into focus, around a feeling, idea, or perceived pattern, say, like recognizing a face, either a real person’s face or a face in a cloud). Living is fluid, is an act, is a process — we often will talk about a life, or one’s life, as if it were a thing, an object, when of course it is nothing but an abstraction.

All is fluid, is act, is process — or I should use verbs here and say, flowing, acting, processing (and these verbs are, of course, as abstract as the nouns are). And these labels we use are, of course, our own mental shorthand — these labels are not anywhere in nature, in physical reality (unless some human has written them there).

And I’ve said this before. But that’s OK, too. It’s a funny thing to be alive. I’ve long thought that there can be no statement of a meaning of life — statements are inadequate. We experience. We can think about what we see, and then we can think about it again. We do things whether we understand what we do or not. Maybe we never know why we do a particular thing. Maybe that’s OK.

And I think it’s fine that we try to understand things through words and labels and concepts and models and such, just so long as we remember that all of this has very little purchase on or intersection with our experiences, our bodies, and the things our bodies interact with. So long as we remember to forget all we think we know.

Leave a comment

Posted in Nonfiction, Philosophy, Thought of the Day

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Reality’s ‘weiners’: Words point beyond words

Posted on December 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

From a notecard I wrote Weds., 27 Nove. 2013, after shopping at Woodman’s, a big grocery store in Rockford:

I was in the refrigerated food section, in an aisle with cheese to my right and O.J. to my left. I came up behind a cart where a boy was sitting in front and the gate was down and he was swinging his heels and kicking the gate below him. As I passed this cart, I saw a package labeled “weiners” in the cart behind the boy. These may have been in the yellow-red Oscar Meyer package, but what I remember seeing was “weiners.”

I thought how, of all the things I could have noticed — the other shoppers, the boy, the cheese, the O.J., I noticed “weiners” — I saw this, processed this visual as a word, read it, got the meaning, and what I got out of that moment was “weiners.”

I’m posting this because — well, I’m not sure. I’m posting this now maybe because I want a post that has “Weiners” in the title — or maybe I want to post something since I’ve been trying to write this post for over an hour now and I feel like I’m spinning my wheels — I’ve had some ideas but I feel like these wouldn’t do much for anybody but me.

I earlier wanted to claim that this moment described above was valuable because it was real — and because my mind somehow made me aware at the time of that present moment (“moment” implies that boundaries had been drawn around a specific duration or experience, and maybe my mind did that, too, at about the same time as it observed and read “weiners”). I was aware of myself having awareness — I was conscious of my conscious perception of “weiners.”

But now, in describing this experience, I’m relating an abstraction. I’m claiming that I really did have the experience described above, but of course, I could have made it up. It could be fiction. Either way, as fiction or nonfiction, the description above is a product of my mental experience, my inner voice that picks the words.

Lately, I’ve been wondering why I tend to value nonfiction more than fiction. Perhaps it’s because I read a lot of fiction as a young person, and I grew up with relatives that were good storytellers, but as I got into my later 20s, I started to question the value of the stories I’d been told. I started to sense that Jack Kerouac’s adventures may not have been as fun to experience as they were to read, and that my family’s stories may have unfairly characterized certain family members.

And from my memory: in the fall of my freshman year of college, I went on an after-dark hike on a trail through the woods, and my friends and I were talking about reading Tolkien, and I remember feeling excited to find other Tolkien fans, and somehow I had a feeling that night of the dark woods being linked with the glory of Bilbo’s adventures, and I remember later that same year that I wanted to write a story that could capture and convey, or recreate, that sense of specialness, an idea mixed with an experience (as if, perhaps, I was interpreting the experience as I was having it). And this is a story I now hold and am using here to explain and/or justify an attitude I’ve taken.

Maybe I don’t like fiction in that I feel nonfiction is fascinating enough — that I don’t need superheroes or fantastic plots in order to find things interesting. Just looking at a real thing — say, my cell phone that is on the desk before me — is pretty interesting. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. It’s not some great action movie, and yet, this is true, whereas everything in a Spiderman movie is not.

Real life is fascinating in its “there-ness” (I’m not sure if this is what Heidegger meant by “Dasein” — probably not — but it comes to mind that I should point it out). And even as I write here and now, I’m using conventions like “I” and “is” and “now” and “there” that are words — quite abstract words — referring to things (and “things” is abstract as hell too) that are obvious in one’s experience but hard to prove or convey. “I” is the word that I use as the source of words that I write — it’s the name for whatever is doing the experiencing that seems private to me (and here we go with the linguistic run-around, how we can define words only in terms of other words, and we can’t break across that idea/reality divide, so that everything that I think about reality is itself an idea, not reality.

“My phone is there in front of me”: “phone” is a label, sure, referring to some physical object; “My” and “me” again refer to this idea of “me-ness” (And Heidegger, in creating or redefining “Dasein,” is just again pointing out the frustrations of using language — defining his way out, which is not a solution.); “in” and “of” show relations; but “is” and “there” both seem to refer to, to make claims  of, reality — but reality (whatever “reality” the idea actually refers to) doesn’t make or need claims. The phone is there — duh. I can see and feel that it’s there without even forming that statement (unless Descartes’s evil genius is deceiving me — but I have no reason to doubt the proper function of my senses. I’ll take what seems real AS real).

And yet, there is some kind of unique value to claims made about real things. For instance, a claim about my phone made now will one day become a historical record, in a way that an old fiction cannot. Historians use, for instance, probate documents to tell us about the lives of past people such as Shakespeare. But then, statements about past people and things are merely ideas and not reality any longer.

So I can’t defend nonfiction texts as necessarily being any more real than a fiction text. We educated Westerners are trained to think of nonfiction texts as having evidentiary, and thus, argumentative, value that fictions don’t have, but then most of what we call education is training students to process abstractions in the same way teachers do.

But perhaps I value nonfiction — or, let’s say, writing about reality, writing about what’s really in front of me, and/or what thoughts really come to mind — as a way of simply coming to pay more open-minded attention to what is before me, near me. The language fails to reach outside of the realm language — language has no purchase on, cannot grip, physical things — but using language is a sign that I’m still alive (as Descartes said, roughly), and somehow consciousness seems the greatest mystery. Being alive is fascinating — and that to try to convey this through language fails utterly, of course, pointing me away from words, back toward living.

And now I realize I’ve written hundreds of words explaining why words fail to describe particular things, and I’ve ended up by detailing a hearty abstraction about why words fail to describe particular things. Distinctions fall apart, too.

I am writing this; I’m alive, and writing what I see and hear and think, these remind me I’m alive — something I don’t really need to be reminded of at all.

POSTSCRIPT, a day later: A couple following-up thoughts.

1. Maybe what seemed so odd about seeing the word “weiners” on the food packaging isn’t just that that particular word (of all the things I could be looking at) stood out to me, but also that once I had seen it, that word fully occupied my mind. I hadn’t been thinking of weiners at all, but once I saw that word, that word was in my mind, and I considered how I could call that noisy boy a weiner. The word occupied — or even, became — my mind, my crystalized thought (see here for another reference to thought crystals).

2. The post above seemed to end with me saying that the priority is to know you’re alive. Today, I’m not sure I’d defend that idea. I might instead say that simply being alive is the priority.

3. On the drive home from work tonight, I thought that the mentions above about “there-ness” could also be explained this way: that sometimes (and not always), I see something is near me, and I’m struck by that thing being there. Not surprised, exactly, but struck — like tonight, a particular leafless tree’s shape drew my attention, and I was struck by that tree being there. It wasn’t a weird or strange tree; it was just that tree. It was there. It seems dumb to use such simple words, but as the post above says, sometimes those are the deepest words, the hardest to understand.

Or last Wednesday, before I went to the grocery described above, I was eating at a fast-food restaurant and facing the low-angled southern light, and I noticed a glint of light, a perfect little speck of sunlight, coming to me from the slug of ketchup in a paper cup. It was striking — not that it was so beautiful (in the usual sense of aesthetic beauty), but that it was there, that I had noticed it, and maybe that the world is so intricate that there can be glints on ketchup.

Another time, I might not have noticed it. I see things all the time and treat them merely instrumentally, particularly when I have a task or goal as an overriding thought. At these times, I may see objects as things to step or drive around, and I may look to use a certain object to achieve an end (for instance, I may grab my keys to unlock a door) — and I may not be actually paying attention to these objects. I probably identify the car, person, or key at some basic level and I respond to each as is proper for me to accomplish my task.

But when my mind is not so task-occupied, or particularly when I am in a place I don’t often find myself, I may pay more attention to things that are (somehow I feel the need to write “are there,” but both “are” and “there” mean “exist”). And when I’m, say, visiting a friend whom I haven’t seen in a long time, his person, his presence, may not feel real at first [and “presence” itself is a whole weird thing, since it’s not directly sensible] — this is what people say, too, when something startling, like an accident, happens.  But eventually we accept these new things as real.

This question of whether something is real — whether my mind is really seeing what I think I’m seeing — plays a particular role in my obsessive checking of things: Is my stove off? I can touch the burners, and they feel cool, and I don’t see any flames, and the knobs point to “Off” — yet I tell myself to be careful, to not leave home until I’m sure the stove is off. Or when checking for traffic: if I see a car coming toward my left or right, OK. It’s when I don’t see a car that I feel I have to check multiply and to clear my head, make sure I’m really paying attention, etc.

P.P.S.: After writing the previous paragraphs, I read a link on The Dish tonight about research suggesting that brain stimulation can change a  viewer’s mindset “from a habitual mode of identifying objects to adopt an aesthetic perspective.”

Leave a comment

Posted in Nonfiction, Philosophy, Transcribed from life, Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Not nihilism, but creative possibility

Posted on November 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

After I write a post like the previous one, in which I argue that there are limits on our knowledge, or that there are many things that can’t be known, I feel like I may be taking a nihilistic position that denies the possibility of solid knowledge. This feels like a negating-other-ideas position that can’t really make positive, content-ful statements or ideas.

But I don’t really see it that way. By pointing out limitations on what we know and can know, how much more one experiences one’s own subjectivity, one’s consciousness, rather than the experiencing any objective reality, I feel like I’m opening mental space for new possibilities. I’m making the case that we don’t have to think in the ways we’ve thought before, the ways we’ve learned to think.

And further, by pointing out that we may want to be skeptical of all stories, all ideas (as I said before, we may want to look at every narrator (and every person) as an unreliable narrator), I’m also hopefully pointing out that there is a world of experience beyond that which can be symbolized and abstracted, beyond any medium (whether that medium is a video screen or just the abstractions of words). I remind myself to let go of all ideas, to just lie down and let go of all ideas (as much as possible).

There’s no name for what exists beyond thinking (we could call it “external reality,” or “the world,” or whatever, but using these labels bring us back to ideas). But we don’t have to think all the time.

(Maybe that’s not a problem for everybody, but it’s something I try to remind myself. Perhaps in this I’m like the philosophers discussed here who think as a way to cope with a world they don’t find easy to live in.)

So it’s kinda funny that I do as much thinking (abstracting) as I do, in these blog posts and elsewhere, especially since I’ve said that the ideas I come up with may not be all that real or valuable. And yet, this is what I do.

Leave a comment

Posted in Philosophy, Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The Iliad, consciousness, reality: How I get tired this evening

Posted on October 30, 2013 | 1 comment

I’m tired tonight, so I’m not sure how coherent this post will be, but I’ve been waiting for a chance to post some things, so here goes:

I’m reading selections from Homer’s Iliad (in a recent translation, though the translator’s name escapes me just now) and as we’re reading, I’m finding lots of weird and wonderful things that I point out to my students, and things I’d also love to talk to other adults about. For instance, there are moments in this serious work about war and grief that seem to me to be just plain funny, as when Hector says he will fight Achilles and kill him, or he will die an honorable death — and then when they meet, Hector turns and runs around the city of Troy, three whole laps.

It occurs to me that discussing artworks is one of the few things in life where many people can share the same experience and then discuss it. We can all read or watch the same book or movie, and then compare our experiences of reading or viewing. In much the rest of our lives, we have experiences separately (for example, even if two friends are each parents, they are parenting distinct children, in different houses, etc.), and while we can discuss our separate experiences, we cannot directly compare our experiences, the way we can when we experience artworks.

I experience subjectively — that is, even if you are standing next to me, you do not know what I experience. At best, I can communicate through words what I experience, but of course, that’s not direct experience. You can get my symbolic interpretation/representation of my experience, but you do not see through my eyes, or sense my mind.

So, when we experience, we are sensing (seeing, touching, etc.) and we are processing/interpreting what we sense. Much of what we experience, we forget. We may remember certain sights and smells, etc., but what links those senses to meaning is the stories we form from our experiences. For me, at least, much of what I know about my past is in the form of stories — that is, abstracted experiences, ideas of connected interpretations that often describe not the experience that was had but the world itself. These stories tend to compress time and ignore the moment-by-moment nature of our lived experience.

These stories may help us to structure and remember our experiences, but these stories may also be complete bullshit. Our memories are often faulty, but even if they are not, our stories edit out moments from continuous time. It’s so easy to look back at our own lives and think that all we were thinking about was the experience at hand — but I don’t seem to experience my waking moments that way; I’m often doing one thing now but also aware of what I should do, or would like to do, next.

I realize it’s sorta futile to discuss, in words and ideas, the limitations of words and ideas, and how words and ideas are always at best a kind of (what physical metaphor to use here?) layer, a kind of overlay, on top of physical reality.

Another of my classes is discussing the definition of “real,” and so far we have “something that exists or is proven to exist” and so far we’ve spend many minutes discussing what a “thing” is and what we’ve come up with is that a thing is a boundary we imagine around a piece of matter so that we can talk about the physical realm one piece at a time. We notice that a certain piece of matter, a fork, can be separated from another, a table. To simply be able to see pieces of matter as separate is an abstraction — and of course even words like “matter” and “physical realm” are abstractions.

No words exist outside human consciousness (or so it seems — it’s quite a generalization to make there). Or, perhaps some animals — like apes who use sign-language — can think symbolically. But the point remains — a fork can never declare itself to be a fork.

But to see how arbitrary the label of fork is, is also to see how hard it is to keep talking about the physical realm without the help of differentiating labels. We revert to “object” and “thing” and “this thing” and “that thing.”

So maybe we can’t escape words, but we can, through the ongoing process of thinking, become aware how loosely our ideas about the world are connected to the world itself (even such a loose term as “the world” starts to feel like bullshit and the word wilts, somehow — “wilting” is a pretty good metaphor).

And I asked my students how we can talk about things we don’t have labels for, and they suggested we talk about relative terms, and that we make comparisons — a platypus has a beak like a duck’s, but a body like a beaver’s, for example. So our ideas connect one to another, from these we can build whole systems of ideas, and yet, …

And yet, it seems to me lately that whole systems of ideas — Hegel’s metaphysics, histories of World War II, mathematics — start to seem deflated, as if they were held up by hot air that, once it escapes, leaves the idea-systems flat on the ground, unimpressive, step-on-able.

Taking a bit of a leap here, but it makes sense in my head to do this (and what are all writings, all texts, if not signs that there was a consciousness that produced them?), to say that fiction works and nonfiction works have in common that they are both ideas. Sure, nonfiction purports to be about the real world, but if the “real world” is itself an idea, a construct … and further, there are no facts in nature — there is no tree or rock on which facts are discovered. Facts are made by people, in the form of words, ideas, symbols, and these are what we are comparing nonfiction or fiction to.

But we have a notion of what the real world looks like. As my class has read The Iliad, I’ve become aware of how careful the story is to make most of the human-god interactions believably subjective, so that the story could be read in two different ways: as a fantasy-tale featuring personified gods who intervene directly in human activities, or as a realistic tale of human-only activities (and where the gods speak to only one person at a time, or in the guise of a human, so that the gods could be said to be the product of a particular person’s subjective experience).

That The Iliad can be approached in two ways, or as two distinct stories, seems very subtle, very wise, and it suggests that we can approach any text and decide whether it’s fiction or not based on what the text contains. I mean, if there is no truth “out there” — and where, exactly, would that be if there were? — but all ideas are products of human minds, then what exactly are we asking for in a distinction between fiction and nonfiction (or in any distinction, really — guilty/not guilty, here/there, up/down, etc.)

I’m not quite sure what I’m getting at, which to me is the beauty of the writing process — if I knew what I was saying, I wouldn’t need to say it. Sometimes I have ideas, and they seem cool, and I start to think I should write them up — but then I think that maybe they are just so much inert deflated ideas (as described above). But then I think, eh, what I write is just the byproduct of my mind’s ongoing function, and perhaps somebody else will have some of their own ideas provoked by something here.

One of the earlier discussions my class of sophomores had before we started The Iliad was about where the world began, where everything came from. I gave the case from science, that there was a Big Bang from which all matter and energy and life descend, and we also discussed the Bible’s Creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world. But science can’t know what came before the Big Bang (because how could there ever be evidence before there could have been evidence?), and Judaism and Christianity can’t explain how God came to exist, and so both the religion and science accounts are just stories, are sets of ideas. Yes, the science account has more physical evidence to explain the physical realm, and religion can go beyond what has evidence, but both science, in its generalizations called facts and theories, and religion, in its formal structure of creeds and theology, have little to say to inform my personal, particular, subjective experiences.

After all, my mind contains ideas from many external sources, but whatever it is that gives rise to my mind, to my thoughts, my words, my experiences — whatever it is that is me feels like its beyond explanation, beyond theory, beyond labeling. I am complete in every moment, in every thought, continuously the same through the years I’ve been alive but I experience my consciousness discontinuously, leaping from crystallized thought to the next crystallized thought, each thought whole-born. I exist only and wholly now. And now. And now again. (And even talking about “now” or “the present moment” feels inadequately abstract.)

But in my thinking, I’m attracted to discovering the limits of ideas, the boundaries of what can be known. I’m not sure why this feels more important and interesting to me than other sorts of thinking. This, too, is part of the mystery of where ideas come from. (See here for related post.)

And now, I really am getting tired, and I’m feeling that in my attempt to distance myself from abstraction, I’ve gotten quite abstract. Ah, well. Such is a mind and its chatter. The ideas come and go but the thinking goes on.  Living is more than merely figuring stuff out abstractly, of course. Living is also falling asleep in my comfy bed.

So this post may not satisfy — but writing it felt good.

1 Comment

Posted in Nonfiction, Thought of the Day, Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Stereotyping & Profiling: Wrong-thinking about plurals

Posted on September 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

An addendum to this post.

When we group together a number of unique, particular things as being members of the same category, we are subtracting the unique qualities of each particular entity, and asserting that each particular is, in some essential way, the same as each other entity in the same categorical group.

That’s abstract language. Here’s an example: When we gather 20 apples into a container, we are ignoring particular marks on each apple, the tastes of each apple, the history of each apple, etc. We may then be surprised when some apples taste better than others, or rot before others, but we shouldn’t be surprised by that.

Likewise, in any grouping of people (such as the school “class” mentioned in the prior post), the group-label erases the individual, unique qualities of each person.

This is why racial profiling or stereotyping is wrong-thinking.

To group people by race or ethnicity is itself problematic, as “race,” “ethnicity,” and particular group identities are not easy, or even useful, to define. How much Swedish ancestry must one have to be considered Swedish? Does a one-drop rule for racial or ethnic definition even make sense?

But even once a group — for example, Swedes — is defined, assigning other attributes to that group — saying that a certain group of people like to wear sweaters, say — is usually B.S. because these new attributes are not part of the definition.

But even if a certain characteristics of a group have a statistical significance, it does not at all mean that every member of that group has that characteristic. Surely there are Swedes who prefer turtlenecks to sweaters for warmth-keeping?

And this is the problem with racial profiling. Whenever someone tries to justify using racial profiling by asserting crime stats that show certain groups as overrepresented, this makes the mistake of confusing a particular person being profiled with the stats about the group. Profiling defines all members of a group as being essentially indistinguishable; it is ignoring the differences in particular people, which differences are defined away by seeing that person as a member of a group.

It is wrong thinking to identify any particular person as having those traits commonly (and often weakly, or wrongly) associated with that person’s group-inclusion. Such wrong thinking, not surprisingly, will lead to inefficiencies and personal violations, and will one day be recognized as wrong-thinking.

And this wrong-thinking, I want to suggest, is a result of the basic mathematical/philosophical logic of abstracting: defining groups and assigning individuals to those groups, without being aware that the abstractions of definitions and categories and even plurals aren’t physically real and are arbitrary. We choose how to see the world when we choose our definitions, labels, and distinctions, and we may find these abstract ideas useful or not-useful, but these ideas aren’t true.

We ought to be aware that we ourselves, we human thinkers, have done this choosing, and that we can let go of the old definitions and make new ones whenever the old ones become problematic. Ideas are for us to use, and not for use to abuse.

Leave a comment

Posted in Nonfiction, Philosophy

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Word World’ and the problem of plurals

Posted on August 28, 2013 | 41 comments

“It’s time to build a word. Let’s build it. Let’s build it now.”

So incant the various animals-made-of-letters-that-spell-out-the-English-word-that-names-the-animal in the PBS animated show “Word World,” and upon that incantation, familiar-looking 3-D sans serif letters morph into the new shape of the thing the letters spell. In the clip below, the letters P,I, and E form a pie.

So, OK, I can accept the operating principle of this fictional world, even if it has some metaphysical problems (see “Notes” below). What concerns and interests me philosophically is the problem of plurals.

When there is one pie, it can be accurately labeled pie. However, Pig needs multiple pies. Ant advises, “when you add the letter ‘S’ to the end of a word, it makes more than one,” which is sorta backwards as to how we use the language, but OK, I’ll play along. So Pig adds an “S”:

word world pies1And the transmogrification happens and results in this monstrosity,word world pies2which can never be. This is a lie. There is clearly one pie here, not multiple pies.

Here’s the thing: any plural is an abstraction. It is a grouping together of things that of the same category. Declaring a plural is drawing an invisible tether around several things and labeling that grouping.

For example, on a bookshelf, there are many elements of the set named “books.” But each physical book may have different title and text and size, etc. And even if there are two copies of the same title, these are unique, particular entities: one book may have underlining or tears that the other doesn’t. So we can call all these objects together “books” only by ignoring their particularities.

And this is what we do when we label 20 students in a classroom “a class.” There is no class, I tell my students. There are 20 individual people, each with their own minds and concepts, and I can teach them all as a class by, more or less, ignoring their individual differences and teaching to what I imagine as some abstract “average student” — or teaching to particular students in class and hoping that if they understand, others do, too.  Of course, we teachers are often told to “differentiate instruction” to every particular student, a lovely idea but a practical impossibility in a classroom setting.

(Of course, there’s a further issue with identifying and labeling any given entity by comparing the given particular thing against one’s abstract concepts, and so there may not be any particular necessary term for anything: For instance, what is a chair? How define it? At the edges of the definition, we will likely be judging, essentially arbitrarily, what is and what isn’t a chair.)

And perhaps this is the biggest misconception we teachers see in the entire endeavor of having a common curriculum and standardized testing. We work with individual students as best we can, and we see the frustration of asking every student to be able to do the same exact skills as every other student. We know that not all students have the same interests, abilities, motivations, etc. It may be admirable to suggest that every student can achieve great things, but surely not every high school senior needs to write narratives with “multiple plot lines, to develop experiences.”

(There are those who have said that the standards movement should have been implemented as individual goals set for each particular student rather than universal dictates for all, but there was never enough time to make the former happen, and the latter is way too convenient to those who wish to make all the students standardized so the entire function of education can be quantified. This urge to quantify, and teach only what can be quantified, is a problem, as Stanley Fish recently pointed out.)

By the way, after Pig makes the singularity of the “pies” pie, the instability of the situation leads to a modest explosion into individual pies

word world pies3and we viewers are left to group each individual pie into “pies” — which is what we abstract thinkers do to our physical reality all the time.

Notes on metaphysical ambiguities of “Word World”:

There would seem to be three categories of physical reality in “Word World.” One, there are characters and objects made of letters that approximate the shape of the entity named. The character Pig has ears and a snouted face sticking out of a puffily drawn “P,” and the “I” and “G” follow as the thorax and hindquarters, respectively.  But these letters spell “PIG” only if Pig is viewed from its left side — from the right, it’s one letter short of playing for Notre Dame.

Two, there are three-dimensional letters, such as “S” in the video clip and image above, which can transform into something that absorbs the qualities of the word it spells. (And in some other episodes, the objects will break apart, returning the letters to initial sans-serif form, and the object’s physical properties (like the ability of Duck’s “BAT” to confer momentum on a ball) are gone. Thus, somehow the complete spelling of a word makes the letters more than just letters, more than the sum of their parts, like adding the magician’s hat to Frosty turns him alive. In this way, correct spelling is a way of conjuring, or perhaps even giving life. One wonders what would happen to the physical incarnation of things spelled incorrectly — would terrible things be given existence — as when Bart Simpson created the creature who said his every moment of existence is torture (here)?

Third, not all objects are made from letters. In the video above, the window frame isn’t made out of “window frame,” nor is glass “glass,” nor is the table “table.” This suggests some kind of horrifying arbitrariness to the whole physical realm. Are only important things spelled out, so that if I awoke in that realm and found out that I was not spelled out, I would know that I was not a Main Character, not one of the Chosen Ones?  Such a world would make the picking of leaders laughably easy, but then such a world would imply the existence of an involved, caretaking Creator, no? And so the characters in “Word World” turn out to not have free will — as we who are aware of the show AS a show know that they do not? Thus, it’s perhaps not possible to watch “Word World” as a show, but only as a meta-show?

So perhaps an animated, metaphysically ornate show about spelling reveals something foundational about the nature of representation?

UPDATE: See also this post.

41 Comments

Posted in Links, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Teaching, Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,