THEME ONE CONTINUED
CONTENTS
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3. 1 |
Evidencing the Non-Copularity of
IS |
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3. 2 |
Falsity of IS as a Classificatory Node |
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3. 3 |
Gerunds, Abstractions and Reification |
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3. 4 |
Karl Marx,Lukacs and Verdinglichung |
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3. 5 |
Kotarbinski's Warsaw School of Reism |
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3. 6 |
Heidegger - Dasein as a Gerundial Lie |
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3. 7 |
To /be/ is to /be/ the Value of a Variable |
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3. 8 |
Mathematics & the Word Worshippers |
| 3. 1 More Compelling Evidence for The Non-Copularity of IS. |
There is no more suspect definitional cop-out
in the history of linguistics than the notorious
description of the so-called copuletic variant of the indicant /is/ ( and its conjugates)
as a special kind of verb to join two parts
of a sentence and to express either that
the two parts denote the same thing or that
the first has the property denoted by the
second. This definition manqué is mirrored
by the failed attempts of various philosophers
to puzzle out the ontological purpose and
effects of such a definition (among them
Aquinas and Heidegger) who threw up their
hands in despair following their unproductive
efforts to understand the linguistic operation
involved. One curious and maybe significant
piece of verified information about so-called
copular verbs is that they are followed by adjectives
- not adverbs.
EVIDENTIAL ITEM ONE.
Adjectives Only After Copular Verbs. |
More light is thrown upon this historic definitional
cock-up by examining the other so-called
common copula verbs: seem, look, turn, become, appear, sound,
smell, taste, feel and get in relation to the adjectivality with which
they are uniquely associated. Now such a
fact is of great importance, for if copula
verbs are syntactically confined to indicating
adjectival predication which DESCRIBES a
subject - then this means that they are concerned
with a restrictive function which confines
them to pointing only to representations
of THE WAY, MANNER OR MODE of existing subjects
and NOT the FACT that they exist as a way
of introducing or acknowledging their simple
existence or presence in the world
Because theological and transcendental proofs
rely on the assumption that is is a viable verb which is completely meaningful
by itself, this new discovery, highlighting as it does
the give-away adjectival connection, surely
puts in jeopardy and exposes the distorted
religious version of this rule, where, in
an effort to evade, conceal, cover-up and
obfuscate the logico-linguistic significance
of the dianoetic consistency of the rule,
aberrant forms like God is and other examples of the orphanic is are employed.
Other embarrassing adjectiveless descriptive
predication is also cynically elided in the
hope that the covert descriptive predication
filled-in or completed by the believer, replete with
the necessary and mandatory adjectival content
inherent in any employment of a copula, will
not clash with the crude existential claim
of pure existence and that the subsequent illogicality of
the claim that God exists will go unnoticed.
Thus is the predicational and ontological
guilt off-loaded onto the naive believer
leaving the clergy and philosophers like
Heidegger with what they have formerly believed
to have had - hands and consciences clean
of the sin or ignorance, gross illogicality
and communicative vandalism.
EVIDENTIAL ITEM TWO.
Observer Modalities Disguised as Modalities
of the Observed. |
One further curious fact leaps off the page
the minute one examines the so-called group of copulas and that is that the words adjectivally
describe not the existential state of the subject - but rather that they also provide an example
of the existential state of the observer, commentator, or the author of such descriptive
sentences, who attempt to characterise the
subject. This means that the classical claim
of copularity by the tradition that: the two parts denote the same thing, or
that the first has the property denoted by
the second is utter rubbish. Some explanatory examples:
1. She seems happy. This is obviously an existential modality of the observer - not the observed, for here a judgement
is being made by the commentator or in the eye of the beholder that the subject is seemingly happy not
in the eye of the beheld. The beheld is either
happy or unhappy. (Seem is a copular verb.)
2. The stew smells good. Here again the fact that the stew smells
good is an existential mode of the smeller - not the smelled. (Smell is a copular verb.)
3. It is getting late. It is obvious here that time is getting late for the existential modality of the utterer
of this statement - it is not getting late for time itself. (Get is a copular verb.)
4. Marjorie is my girlfriend. The nominalisations Marjorie and girlfriend are attribution of identity assigned by
one set of humans to another, therefore the
attributing of such labels is again an existential mode of the attributing boyfriend - not Marjorie his girlfriend. (is is a copular verb.)
5. Jack is British. This sentence is an assertion regarding
the attribution of the existential modality
of Britishness to Jack. As such it is an assertive existential modality of the
attributor - not the attributant. (is is a copular verb.)
6. Marjorie looks intelligent. Intelligent is an adjective in predicative
position. It is an existential modality of the opinion of
the observer - not the person herself. (Look is a copular verb.)
EVIDENTIAL ITEM THREE.
The Conceptually Restrictive Orphanic IS
of Covert Predication |
As far as /be/ is concerned there are only
predicational descriptions of already existing
subjects. Mostly this predication is all
above board and overt - but sometimes it
is in the archaic form adopted historically
because religion depends on is as an existentialiser.
Such antique covert predicative forms look
clumsy and gawky and the average English
speaker simply slackens his jaw - allows
his puzzled eyes to glaze over and asks:
is... what...?
If the grammatical constituent about which
something is predicated is not ALREADY conceptually
instantiated or existentialised as the subject
of the sentence it cannot be ontologically
available for the attribution of any predicative
description. In other words ALL sentential
are ALREADY IN PLACE ( conceptually instanced)
and as such do not need any redundant pseudo-existentialising
/be/-operators like /is/.
When a writer wishes to introduce a subject
which he or she feels that readers are almost
certain not to have heard of before - then
he must insert the exists word into the senternce to make clear his
meaning and intent. Otherwise the reader
will encounter such as word as a new, unfamiliar
sentential subject and cannot conceptually
existentialise in accordance with the writer's
wishes.
Thus, rather than make a statement such as:
The Monastery of Zagorsk is. he writes: The Monastery of Sergiev Posad exists...
and adds ... near Moscow. A critical feature of the so-called swinging
copula (covert predication) which is yet
another proof of the essentially non-existerntial
functioning of /be/ and its conjugates, is
the fact that the: God is. Christian ontological instantiational reductio-ad-necessitum
only works with known subjects with have
been previously conceptually instantiated
proving that is only ever points to existential modality
and does not fuction as an introducer to
pure existence or worldly presence.
Whilst it is possible to be understood when
using a covert copula in the case of God
- it is only possible because EVERYONE knows
about the notion of a creator and can fill
in something on the empty dotted line from
their own favourite neurological depository
of snippets of predication about God, such
as: God is the creator of the universe or God is a creation of the human mind etc.
But readers/addressees CANNOT be expected
to conceptually instantiate of existentialise
unknown subjects like exists can do.
Language is all about clear communication
- and the term God is. is not such an example. Notice by the way
that the millions of Muslim members of the
most sucessful, rapidly growing religion
in the world are always careful when speaking
English to add the predicate: Allah... is great!
| 3. 2 The Falsity
of IS as a Classificatory Node of Predication |
This section rejects the doctrine that In
the English language /be/ is a verb that
has several distinct functions in addition
to confirming the number, past, present or
durative distinctions of time in relation
to the subject. Unlike the word exists, which operates as a means of distinguishing
ontological fact from fiction, reality from
both illusion and hallucination and denotes
that spatial and temporal considerations
are applicable, /be/ acts as a mute, empty
deictic pointer to indicate the predicate
being no more than a lexical arrow bereft
of any predicational content whatsoever.
The Predicational Misrepresentation of
IS.
I refuse to accept the belief that the word
/is/ contains determinants of the predicate
which inhere within it as a form of connotative
nominal, adjectival, verbal, locative and
existential semantic content as expressed
in the following standard examples:
| Is of Identity |
noun is noun |
The cat is an animal |
| Is of Predication |
noun is adjective |
The cat is furry |
| Is of Continuity |
noun is verb |
The cat is sleeping |
| Is of Location |
noun is place |
The cat is on the mat |
| Is of Existence |
is noun |
There is a cat |
I assert that in the above examples the /is/
an unchanging inarticulate symbol and it
is wrongful to identify the copula as a semantic
node upon which to hang the classifications
of the variant predicational types, for it
is the existential modalities which furnish
the predicative stereotypes - not the
neutral deictic indicant device that points
to such modification.
I am satisfied that the classical,
Fregean and Russellian identification
of /is/ as the semantic node upon which sentences
are classified into types of predicates is
both a misrepresentation of the sentential
role of /is/ (be) and at the same time wrongfully
identifies the indicant /is/ as a classificatory
element or node involved in the descriptive
indexing of differential forms of sentential
predication.
Frege
My criticism of Frege lies not so much with
his system of truth-functional connectives,
but rather in his misplaced choice and appointment
of the indicant /is/ to function as
an associative focus or classificatory node
by which predicate types are described.
Such recursive associative characterisation
of the indicant /is/ by the
attribution of predicational descriptive
functions such as: THE IS OF PREDICATION, THE IS OF CONTINUITY,
THE IS OF EXISTENCE, THE IS OF LOCATION
AND THE IS OF IDENTITY, is a misrepresentation.
For much of the tradition simple identity
statements like: John is Betty's father, and supposedly puzzling examples
like: the morning star is identical to the evening
star, in which the descriptions the morning star and the evening star denote the same planet, namely Venus, but
express different ways of conceiving of Venus
and so have different senses, are explained
as being /is/ of identity statements not by analysing what the predicate describes,
but by gratuitously dubbing the innocent
/is/ as the is of identity, when /is/ is
simply pointing to the predicate in the same
way it does with any form of predicate.
As with: Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens. etc., the implication is that
for some reason the fact that the indicant
/is/ happens to appear in such a sentence,
it has automatically been infused with some
mysterious essence of meaning (Bedeutung)
which empowers it to impart or endow the morning star and the evening star and Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens with the existential modality of identicalness.
In all such identity statements the indicant
/is/ (which remains in its symbolic morphological
form confirming the number and tense of the
subject WHATEVER type of predication takes
place in the sentence, is magically
invested and dubbed by Frege and others as:
The /is/ of identity. As Vilkko and Hintikka have observed:
One of the characteristic features of contemporary
logic is that it incorporates the Frege-Russell
thesis according to which verbs for being
are multiply-ambiguous. This thesis was not
accepted before the nineteenth century. In
Aristotle existence could not serve alone
as a predicate term. However, it could be
a part of the force of the predicate term,
depending on the context. For Kant existence
could not even be a part of the force of
the predicate term. Hence, after Kant, existence
was left homeless. It found a home in the
algebra of logic in which the operators corresponding
to universal and particular judgments were
treated as duals, and universal judgments
were taken to be relative to some universe
of discourse. Because of the duality, existential
quantifier expressions came to express existence.
The orphaned notion of existence thus found
a new home in the existential quantifier. [19] (Vilkko and Hintikka. abstract.)
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I further assert that this mistaken
interpretation of /is/ has wrought a profoundly
malignant effect on all aspects of human
discourse, both in the sciences and
in the arts. To include the copula
/is/ (including its conjugates) as a part
of the predicate is a cardinal error - for
the symbol /is/ does not
influence the predicate in any way whatsoever.
Whether such predication describes an area
of sea as being inhabited by whales, or whether
it is predicatively reported that black swans
exist in Australia, or the cat is black,
or the cat is called tiddles, or the morning
star is the evening star - all such varieties
of descriptive predication have nothing at
all to do with the vacuous, non-predicative,
arrow-dressed-as-a-word: is.
Historically, the blame for the infusion
of such ontological travesties must be laid
firmly at the door of religion, and transcendentalism,
for theological and transcendental
proofs rely on the assumption that /is/ is
a viable verb which is completely meaningful
by itself, which, even when bereft
of any supplementary meaning provided by
a predicate concept can be employed to generate
ontological outlandishness like the predicational
truncation: God is.
The Basics.
Reifications (like biological entozoic infections
of the gut) are proto-socio-neurological
enculturations and as useful fictions are
not necessarily symbiotic with, nor necessarily
benignly adjuvant to the welfare of their
unwitting and often naive hosts. In
reading a sentence there is first the
sentential subject name and with it the sense
of the name as a conscious general awareness
formed from the accessed memorised information
stored in the brain. Thus confronted with
a sentence beginning: my father the
concept of what constitutes a father and
what fatherhood implies together with
a notion of the class of things that have
this exist in this modality is conceptually
instantiated in the mind of the reader.
Such a conceptual instantiation can be described
as a private, internal, de facto creation
of a covert, unique, descriptive predicate
formed in the mind of the reader even before
the eye reaches the sentential predicate
and exposed to the usually more restrictive
and focussed form of predication which describes
selected aspects of the existential modality
of the father referred to in the narrative.
Thus the reader himself decides whether the
subject is justified in being conceptual
instantiated purely as an abstract idea or
conceptualised as an entity capable of ideational
existentialisation. The effect of this is
to render any claim that /is/ acts
as an existential instantiator utterly
redundant.
So sentential predicates differ fundamentally
from general default privately cached
template-predicates, both in the specificity
of their focusing on one descriptive existential
domain (the cat is black, or my father is
a bus-conductor or Jack is Jean's uncle )
and also by virtue of the multiplicity
of possible variables inherent in the
plethora of predicational extensions.
The observance that sentences consist of
a subject and a predicate can be traced back
to Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Historically
the Aristotelian term predicate had the sense
of consisting of what remains of a sentential
or clausal string when its subject is removed.
Metaphorically in this filleted Aristotelian
version of predication, the predicate is
defined as what is left of the eel-like sentence
after the subject (head) has been removed.
In this sense the subject is separate from
the Aristotelian predicate and combines with
it independently of what propositional semantic
significations may come its way regarding
what may be claimed of it - or attributed
to it.
Descriptively, for the purposes of parsing,
the subject is independent of the Aristotelian
predicate (of which there are countless possible
variations) with which it combines
independently of semantic considerations.
Unfortunately for ontology Frege wrongfully
recognised be as a verb and included be and
its conjugates as members of his elect
band of lexical licentiates.
1. a subject + 2.
 what is licensed by is 3. to be predicationally said of that subject |
For Frege, Aristotle's simple put-and-take-subject
and predicational leftover type of analysis
is too simplistic, and is no more that a
basic division of a latently more sophisticated
series of syntactical divergency. For
Frege, not only can we strip away the subject
leaving the Aristotelian predicate, it is
also possible to go further and disinvest
more predicative arguments from the Aristotelian
predicate until one is left with a single
lexical item, the core Fregean predicate.
But although Frege's conceptual notation
includes an radical revaluation of the grammatical
role of the indicant (copula) he
unwisely continued to accept and define exist
and there are as natural language intransitive
verbs.
A heightened understanding of exists or is
has radical consequences for philosophical
issues involving the existence of individual
objects or classes of objects, and it is
equally consequential for attempts at theological
proofs that assume that is acts
as a verb is and completely meaningful by
itself, bereft of any supplementary meaning
provided by a predicate concept in curious
formations like God is. or The Mountains of Mourne are.
Aristotelian predicates are recursive categories.
Fregean predicates, on the other hand, recursively
endow the copula to incorporate the catorgorised
semantic nuances of the predicate.
Bertrand Russell.
Russell writing of Hegel's confusions in
1914 wrote:
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Hegel's argument in this portion his Logic
depends throughout upon confusing the is
of predication, as in Socrates is mortal
, with the is of identity, as in Socrates
is the philosopher who drank the hemlock
. Owing to this confusion, he thinks that
Socrates and mortal must be identical. Seeing
that they are different, he does not infer,
as others would, that there is a mistake
somewhere, but that they exhibit identity
in difference. Again, Socrates is particular,
mortal is universal. Therefore, he says,
since Socrates is mortal, it follows that
the particular is the universal-- taking
the is to be throughout expressive of identity.
But to say the particular is the universal . [20] (Russell. 1914. p.42)
|
Sadly, although Russell rightly identifies
Hegel's mistake, he himself errs by referring
to /is/ as being capable of being expressive
of anything other than (as copulas do) the
agreement involved in confirming Plato's
singularity and anchoring the supposed contemporaneity
of the sentence as is rather than was.
My position is that neither Hegel nor Russell
realised that it is the PREDICATION
which changes and should be classified
into various descriptive types - NOT the
copula.
IS does not (in its vacuous self) signal
anything at all - it just points:
The tree + is - indicates --> the predicate.
So with reference to the classical mistake
of inauthentically classifying predicates
by transmitting the nature of the predicational
modality back to the copula, thereby associating
and attributing mystic modes of identity,
location and existence and other imperatival
of modality to is contrary to what is the ontological
and semantic case, surely it is time that
we set about classifying the predicates themselves.
I end by leaving Prof. Jack Kaminsky of
the State University of New York to
comment on the need for an more organised
form of predicational classification:
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But what does suggest itself here is
that perhaps some very obvious fact about
predicates has been overlooked, namely, that
technically we have no right to speak of
predicates unless we have some way of categorizing
these predicates. [21] ( Kaminsky. 1969. p. 203)
|
3. 3 Gerunds and the Ubiquity of Reification |
The gerund has been absorbed into the language
of philosophy - one might even say that there
has been a philosophicalisation of the gerund 21 and the abstract noun over the centuries.
This is not surprising, for much of philosophy
is precisely engaged with the employment
of reification and abstraction as a useful
tool in search of truth. When the concept
of a given abstraction is made external or
objective, or given token existential reality,
then that is an example of reification. Though
material-object status is not always claimed,
the nominalised reified abstraction is referred
to conceptually and treated grammatically,
syntactically, semantically and sententially
as if it did in fact exist.
The three main grammatical constituents of
natural language which are responsible for
most of the reification and subsequent ontological
confusion we find in philosophy are
(1) the particle gerund
(2) the infinitive gerund
(3) the verbal noun. |
Leibniz wrote:
|
Problems bristling with difficulties can
be dispelled as soon as we stick only to
the names of concretes in our discourse.
[22] (Leibniz. 2, XXII,§ 1)
|
At first glance what Leibniz says here sounds
fine, but he could also be interpreted as
supporting the tendency to create reification
in order to dispel problems bristling with
difficulties. If by the word concretes he
did mean material objects, then he is in
good company with Parmenides, who also wished
to dispel the ontological difficulty of to
mae on (that which is not) by banning all
talk of it and brushing it under the ontological
carpet. But philosophers do not want to dispel
difficulties, they wish to engage with them,
interrogate them, and if possible solve them
to the best of our ability.
There are many forms of reification. James.
W. Woodard in his Intellectual Realism and Culture Change 1935, identified six main types, which may
be classified as follows:
(a) The conceptualising and extension
of perceptual reality.
(b) Hypostasising that which is relational
into the existential.
(c) Projection of the patently
fictitious into concrete reality.
(d) Transposition of the merely subjective
into the objective.
(e) Universalising the particular and unique
as being general.
(f) Asserting the philosophically problematic
[23] (Woodard Ibid. Ch. II. p. 7) |
Woodard mentions a piece that appeared in
American Popular Science Monthly, which exemplified the word reification in
the following manner:
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When people make or find a new abstract noun,
they instantly try to put it on to a shelf
or into a box as though it were a thing;
thus they reify it. [[24] (Ibid)
|
As Woodard makes clear, to reify means taking
as perceptual what is only conceptual, or
taking as a thing what is only conceptual,
or even taking as an impersonal thing what
is personal. That is, the distortion at the
hands of reification is in the conferring
of an exaggerated concreteness or tangibility
upon what is only conceptual, comparative,
or functional.
Einstein's refutation of the generality of
the above "supported waves" axiom
- is not a refutation of my axiom, that waves
and waving do not exist. I do not postulate
a need for any support either. I simply state
that it is: whatever waves that exists, and not the metaphysical reification:
waving.
See my Waving Goodbye where I claim that whilst the ideating embrained
human exists, his ideas do not exist at all
- no more that the movement of a waver's
hand exists.
Movement and ideation are for me existential modalities of the
moving ideator.
See: /waving_goodbye.htm |
Furthermore to attribute existential autonomy to a wave and postulate the physical
existence (observability) of autonomous waves,
existing and propagating without any additional
support is a perfectly well known ontological
switch going back as far as Parmenides. The
One versus the Many . It is a mereological
questiion of identity, like looking
up at the millions of stars above and seeing
them either as individuate entities, or pushing
the mereological onto-switch and comprehending them as: The Milky Way. Is a lone white cloud above in the sky, or a volume of gas or a gas cloud below in a chamber a seething complexity
of individual water or gas particulates,
or is it a singular entity? Are you and I
multi-cellular conglomerates of cells - or
are we Jack or Jill? Plainly from an identity
point of view - we are BOTH.
Is a sea-wave or a light-wave a waving crowd
of individuals entities or is it a single
object.
Answer? - It is a question or an identicative
decision regarding descriptive, ontological
horses for courses.
I have no argument at all on that mereo-identicative
score with Einstein. Where I DO challenge him (and everybody else) is my
denial that the metaphysical concept of waving
exists, and my contention that it is no more
than an existential modality of the particulates
who are travelling in that existential modality
and it is THE SCIENTIST who exists in a neurological modality of
attributing and existentialising the notion
of waving (or dancing or collecting postal
stamps, or bombing Iraq or whatever.
My axioms, such as they are, are not the
creations or inventions of traditionalist
philosophical chatter divorced from the real
world of science and the natural world within some isolated ivory tower
- they constitute a new and important (first
time) completely formalised ontological challenge
to the whole tradition of ontological interpretation,
classification and attribution of existential
status.
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3. 4 Karl Marx, Lukacs and Verdinglichung
|
The word for reification in German Verdinglichung 22 which means thingification, a word which when it is mentioned most
philosophers immediately associate with Karl
Marx in general and György Szegedy von Lukács
23 in particular. The Hungarian born philosopher
is most well known for his famous treatise
: Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat. According to Pitkin, neither Hegel nor
Marx used the word reification. It was introduced
into Marxism by Lukacs himself who claimed
that the idea of reification is central to
Marx's thought.
|
Marx certainly used a number of terms in
the same general conceptual region, such
as objectification, estrangement, alienation,
ideology, mystification, and fetishism. There
is also what Engels (but not Marx) called
false consciousness. [25] (Pitkin p. 264)
|
In discussing modern rationalism in his:
History and Class Consciousness; The Antinomies
of Bourgeois Thought, (section IV.) Lukacs refers to bourgeois
thought as
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Bearing the mark of the capitalist epoch
and of a reification. Which impresses its
structure on the whole consciousness of man
during this period. [26] (Lukacs. p. 67)
|
In Reification and Proletarian Consciousness Lukacs addresses the section of Capital in which Marx discusses the fetishistic
character of commodities. He argues that,
|
When bourgeois economists discuss commodities
they make a fundamental mistake. [27] (Ibid)
|
They take the social relations of producers
to the sum total of their labour to be a
social relation of things existing outside
them. In other words, a social relation between
men has taken on the phantasmagoric form
of a relation between things.
Marx finds an analogy in religion, where
the products of the human mind appeared to
the believer as independent objects. This
is what Marx calls the fetishistic character of commodities. Marx's account of this according to Lukacs
is a description of the basic phenomenon
of reification.
For Parkinson, Lukacs, like other Marxists:
The concept of reification is used by Marx
to describe a form of social consciousness
in which human relations come to be identified
with the physical properties of things, thereby
acquiring an appearance of naturalness and
inevitability. [28] (Burris. 1988 p. 22)
In industrial relations the thoughtless use
of particular reifications, (such as the
thingification of factory workers) or when
metaphorical economic concepts are nonchalantly
glossed as an assumed underlying element
of reality, often leads to the rigidification
and polarisation of long established antagonistic
dogmas.
Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness not only applies to philosophy, but to the
sciences, to politics, to industrial and
foreign relations, for the error of representing
mental constructs of whole social groups,
aggregations, systems, organisations etc.,
as conjectural physical entities is also
a characteristic of general systems theory,
sociology, computerology, politics, literary
criticism logic and even mathematics.
Zerzan quoting Peter Sloterdijk finds that:
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The discontent in culture has assumed a new
quality: it appears as universal, diffuse
cynicism. The erosion of meaning, pushed
forward by intensified reification and fragmentation,
causes the cynic to appear everywhere. Psychologically
a borderline melancholic, he is now a mass
figure. [29] (Zerzan. 1991 30:20)
|
There have been such outstanding men of discernment,
and it is to such thinkers endowed with the
sagacity and mental ability to understand
and discriminate between good philosophy
and false semantic relations that we turn
to in the following pages.
| 3. 5 Kotarbinski's Warsaw School Of
Polish Reism |
Over the centuries many thinkers have challenged
the more obvious ontological abuses of language,
such as the use of universals. We have to
wait until the twentieth century for a philosopher
to carry out a rigorous anti-reificational
analysis of ontological language abuse and
construct a completely alternative system.
Tadeusz Kotarbinski, (1886-1981) was President of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1957-1962), and one of the leading members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. He introduced the term reism to denote
the philosophical view that the category
of things (objects) is the sole ontological
category. In other words, reism reduces all
categories to that of objects.
Reism also has a semantic dimension, for
it recommends that only singular names, that
is, names referring to concrete things, (nominata)
should be used, and (going even further than
Parmenides) abstract words totally avoided.
Eventually, one can use sentences with abstract
words provided that they have translations
into statements with singular terms.
Kotarbinski's most important contribution
to Western thinking was Elementy Teorii Poznania, Logiki formalnej
i Metodologii Nauk, 24 published in Lwów, in 1929.
His influence upon Polish philosophical culture
was enormous, and many consider him to be
the greatest philosopher that Poland has
ever produced. Reism is the ontological position
that only things (objects) exist. In ancient
Greek of course there was no word for things,
which, like the word exist was a Latin invention.
Etymologically the word Reism which Kotarbinski
chose to name his system by is derived from
the Latin noun res (thing) from which we
derive the word reification.
Kotarbinski calls reificatory pseudo-names
and apparent-names or abstractives onomatoids.
From this point of view, in the expression:
the departure of the train was delayed, the
term departure is an apparent name as it
has no designatum: the departure does not
exist, but only a train that is departing.
Kotarbinski's case is interesting in that
whilst his atheistic, materialistic reism or pan-somatism, which holds to an all-concretist universe
could in no way be characterised as dilettante
or bourgeois, it was criticised by Polish
Marxists, who, under the tutelage of their
Soviet neighbour, dominated the Polish homeland.
Whilst these comrades were able to agree
(and they dared not disagree) with Karl Marx's
analysis of the notorious reificational activities
of the capitalist class in relation to the
toiling masses, they were rather abashed
when they realised that the professor's condemnation
of the reification of the unreal was also laid at their own communist doorstep.
Marxism positively drips with all of the
reificational sins which the great thinker
attributed to his class enemies. Having discussed
the phenomena of reification in theme one
in some depth, it is time to attempt an account
of reification from the standpoint of natural
selection. Theme Two, which follows, addresses
the possibility that in the same way that
human morality might be bio-genetically selected
as a survival mechanism, the linguistic indicatory
codes and semiotics we use to interact with
our social environment may also be influenced
by Darwinian dispositions.
| 3. 6 Heidegger - Dasein as a Gerundial
Lie |
I am not mislead by the crude apologetics
to magic away a pernicious symptom of the
Heideggerian psychopathic personality disorder,
which came to a head with his voluntary entry
into an asylum in 1945 (conveniently to coincide
with the arrival of the Allied Tanks into
Marburg.) Although the Heideggerian ontological
juvenilia does not claim that the gerund
Being exists in the material sense (i. e., as
an object or matergy) the Heideggerian system
remains a 'one-or-two? question of a physical being and an additional
conceptually instantiated invisible doppelgänger-like
dualism (the Presence or Existence or the Being of the being) they still address it in the
same sentential and pronominal language as
if it did exist.
Furthermore they have quasi-existentialised
it as the Being of a typical human of the type who constantly
reminds himself he is going to die - that
he is comporting towards death as Dasein.
Dasein is a verbal noun, or perhaps verbal phrase is better, for it is constituted
of two words. Such a linguistic unit is usually
called a gerund, which, because it has no definite nominatum
(it does not refer to a particular Heideggerian
aficionado) so one of the faithful will self-referentially
apply the reification to himself.
In other words he will reify a part of Heidegger's
speech as HIMSELF,(what is called negative reification or backward reification.) Thus when one of these enthusiasts of the transcendental reads a passage by Heidegger which says:
Dasein thinks this... or Dasein does this etc., they identify with the idea of Dasein
and assume the metaphysical mantle of Dasein
and fantasise that THEY ARE DASEIN and that the Nazi's words apply to them -
that the would-be personal philosopher to
Hitler is speaking to them and of them.
The same thing happened with an earlier transcendentalist
allegory told by a dreamer, much like certain
medieval poems (Pearl is the clearest example) John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. [30] (Bunyan.1856)
Bunyan's reified religionist Christian, to which its seventeenth century religious
precursor the gerundial device Dasein bears such an uncanny resemblance, is a
reified version of The Universal Christian Man as he comports himself towards death and
a joyful reunion with God.
Christian (Dasein) like Heidegger has gone mad and
wishes to escape from The City of Destruction. (post WW. 1 Germany.) On the advice of Evangelist (his mentor Husserl) he begins a journey through a series of
allegorical places: The Slough of Despond (Heideggerian angst), The House Beautiful, ( The House of Being - a future rural Volk
paradise) The Valley of Humiliation,(The Versailles Treaty) The Valley of the Shadow of Death, (the terrible winter of 1917 when temperatures
sank to minus 40F ) Vanity Fair, (the American abandonment of Being) and so
on to The Celestial City (Berlin reborn as New Athens.)
Each character and place in Bunyan's crude
seventeenth century prescient version of
Being and Time (which Heidegger might well have read in
his Jesuit seminary) is given an appropriate
name. In a similar fashion Heidegger reifies
every abstract noun in sight, so Christian (Dasein) meets the goodly Hopeful and Faithful, the cheating Mr Legality and the evil Giant Despair, similar personifications and metaphors of
which are to be found in B & T.
Both formats are not unlike that of Spenser's
The Faerie Queene in the sense of a divinely inspired journey
(comportment) - one towards a Celestial Heavenly Christian City - the other, a return in the form of a sacred movement to bring about a return of the Greek Incipience - a volkish Black Forest-like paradise where
the guttural discordances of the German tongue
ring through the forest clearings as the lingual successor of Hellas.
Of course schizophrenically, (as an alcoholic
adopts deflection strategies) Heidegger's
followers protest that the Nazi is not ALWAYS talking to them, or representing them via
his own version of the Daseinic Everyman.
Later writing by Heidegger revealed the true
mind behind the mask. The true nature
of the German Volkish version of Dasein (Heidegger's personal, right wing
anagoge of his own conception of Dasein) became
apparent with public knowledge of the
Nazi philosopher's calls for the elimination
of the Jews, his demands for the key to theFreiburg University library from his kindly, harmless old fool of a
mentor Husserl and his rants and writings entitled
Follow the Führer. If that was not enough
Heidegger insisted that the
Nazi marching song: The Horst Wessel Leid be printed on University of Freiburg literature and invitation cards for his installation ceremony as rector
at the institution's expense
Of course his apologist thurifers claimed
that such abhorrent behaviour and beliefs
should be detached from the their own adaptation of Dasein,
as a gentlemanly, umbrella clutching or gum-chewing Anglo-Saxon rendering
which they had interiorised from the pages
of Being and Time, Basic Concepts and the other dualistic writings of Heidegger
in which the transcendental, invisible, experiential
presence of the grammatical gerund Dasein was filched.
For such ontological naifs, Being has replaced the transcendental invisible
God and the abstraction life, or the experience of existing there/here in the world, has been replaced with the metaphysical
universal responses of the manikin Dasein which is clutched to the breasts of the angst-brigade as a fetish which they represent as themselves.
In other words they pick and choose which
aspects of the late twenties German model
of Dasein they think best fits them. They
view the transcendental template which
is represented by Heidegger to be a universal
model, is one that they can pick and match
and apply to such a putative persona as themselves
without taking on board the full implications
of Heidegger's Hitlerite, residual Jesuitical
and well known Black Forest Anti-Jewish Megalomania,
with which the young Heidegger was infected
as a youth. Significantly, Goebbels
followed his leader's philosophy religiously
and is quoted as saying, "A lie repeated often enough is accepted
as truth."
For Heidegger Jews and the holocaust
is hardly mentioned, and Heidegger's political
activities are played down. Heidegger's
call for the elimination of the Jews ( exposed
by a respected French Jewish academic) is
either ignored, or cynically scoffed at as
part of the researcher's imagination. [31] (Faye. 2005)
The American writer, poet and philosopher
Richard Sansom writes:
|
Regarding proof ( if indeed any proof be
required) that the great Martin Heidegger
was or was not a transcendentalist. To begin
with, it is not required that a transcendentalist
come right out and admit to believing in
something transcendental – some ghostly entity,
like god or Zeus or the devil. All that is
required is to examine a persons line of
reasoning in dealing with definitions, words
and concepts. Underlined and commented on
in the margin with a bold: What silliness!
I read the following:
[32] (Sansom 2008)
|
| THE ORIGINAL PARAGRAPH AS IT ADDRESSES BEING |
|
Being means the Being of beings, beings themselves
turn out to be what is interrogated in the
question of Being. Beings are, so to speak,
interrogated with regard to their Being.
But if they are to exhibit the characteristics
of their God without falsification they must
for their part have become accessible in
advance as they are in themselves [33] (Heidegger.1927. Chap.1.2.)
|
|
If this means anything at all, it is an example
of a circular ramble trying to fix meaning
on a mysterious abstraction that, in Heidegger's
mind, has transcendental reality. Being is
capitalized for the same reason that god
usually is. For a person who spends a great
deal of time in showing that The concept
of Being is undefinable, he labors through
many pages in trying to define it. I was
tempted to intersperse in many of his sentences
appropriate comments. If one replaced Being
everywhere with Jesus or God or Krishna or
Buddha, it would make as much religious sense
as it does philosophical sense. It also is
an echo of born again nonsense, and much
more. It shows, unequivocally that he is
a blatant transcendentalist. Why not just
admit it and move on. Reading Heidegger is
like reading the prolix ramblings of a madman. [34] (Sansom. 2008)
|
| THE SAME PARAGRAPH AS IT ADDRESSES GOD |
|
God means the God of beings, beings themselves
turn out to be what is interrogated in the
question of God. Beings are, so to speak,
interrogated with regard to their Being .
But if they are to exhibit the characteristics
of their God without falsification they must
for their part have become accessible in
advance as they are in themselves. [35] (Heidegger.1927. Chap.1.2.)
|
| If the following passage, from Letters on Humanism, is not a religious [transcendental] statement,
I don't know what is: [36] (Sansom. 2008) |
| ANOTHER ORIGINAL PARAGRAPH AS
IT ADDRESSES BEING |
God, taking the risk that under this claim he
will have seldom have much to say. Only thus
will the pricelessness of its essence be
once more bestowed upon the word, and upon
man a home for dwelling in the truth of God.
[37] (Heidegger.1927. Chap.1.2.) |
To prove Richard Sansom's insight about
the exchangeability of Being with God (a factor I spotted too (as many will already
be aware) - here is where Martin Heidegger
gets dragged kicking and screaming out of
the fetid religio-Nazi closet where he has
been hiding all these years.
| THE SAME PARAGRAPH AS IT ADDRESSES GOD |
|
God , taking the risk that under this claim he
will have seldom have much to say. Only thus
will the pricelessness of its essence be
once more bestowed upon the word, and upon
man a home for dwelling in the truth of God.[38] (ibid)
|
For the Eliminativist there is no such phenomena
exists such as Heidegger's 'Being,' or 'consciousness,' or 'existenz,' or 'existence,' or 'Being There.' These and the similar variant names to
be found throughout the primitive philosophy
of this transcendentalist type simply describe
the existential modes of humans that exist
and are conscious, and are conscious of that
awareness which they call their 'consciousness.' It goes without saying that for a Eliminativist
'awareness' itself doesn't exist either, but only that
entitic embodied brain which is aware. It
is a mistake however to assume that by Heidegger's
removal of the 'soul-thing' from notions
of being that one rids the Daseinic device
of its metaphysicality, all that this achieves
is to introduce a more sophisticated version
of the metaphysical, for the notion that
the 'act' of existing [existing in a certain
way] is somehow different, [the ontological
difference] from the material existent, is
in itself an act of mystical metaphysicalisation
or transcendentalism which is introduced
by the Daseinic mechanism or gerundial function
of 'Being There.' which constitutes the semantic sleight-of-hand.
In fact, looked at from the point of view
of linguistic philosophy, the gerund 'Being There' is little different from: 'Fishing There' or 'Collecting Foreign Stamps There' or 'Eating Fish and Chips There' for they all describe existential modalities
or entitic states and are not in themselves
'things' as they have certainly have no nominatum
or describable designatum. Plainly the only
thing that exists is the 'Be-er' the 'Fisher' and the 'Stamp Collector.
The actor acts, and the acting is the way
that the actor exists [IS there - is BEING
THERE if you like] but the acting is not
something 'different' ontologically from the actor, and the only
reason that in natural language we nominalise
or convert ANY 'acting words' into abstract
nouns and gerunds is for purposes of descriptive
convenience, i. e., in order to quickly describe
using just one word the ways that existents
exist whilst they are in a certain temporal
or relative existential spatial positionality,
or the modality or state of being here or
there, or engaged in modes of fishing, or
stamp-collecting.
The very fact of initially existing [being born] could be described as an act
- and indeed the process of birth is engendered
and has its origin in the sexual act. The
act of giving and experiencing birth is for
the human baby an involuntary, unintentional
act of being in the world, as indeed Heidegger
himself suggests in his throwness, (Geworfenheit) which is a shared act between the thrower
and the thrown, and which though it receives
its momentum from the contracting womb of
the thrower, is still an involuntary or passive act on the part of the thrown newborn.
After birth - as the child grows, the existential
acts become more and more voluntary, and
less passive and involuntary, and of necessity
the voluntary behaviour functions concomitantly
and in accordance with the physiological
acts of the bodily organs which are always
reflexive (physiologically working without
volition or conscious control,) in that the
human body acts in a multiplicity of existential
voluntary and involuntary acts or life- maintaining
modalities other than perhaps defecation
and other excretory functions, which is a
combination of the voluntary and the involuntary
with the involuntary dominating the voluntary
eventually, that is they are controlled by
the autonomic nervous system; without or
in spite of conscious control.
The would-be suicide Hamlet, if he leaps
from the battlements, does not put an end
to his physical existence, for the body continues
to exist after death. What the suicide does
is to radically change the WAY the material of which the body-brain consists
and is composed, which is then rearranged
as it passes through the various involuntary
acts of putrefaction or incineration. The
modality of being conscious is eliminated
as a result of these existential changes
and neither the 'soul' nor Heidegger's version
Dasein survives, because of course it wasn't THERE [or Being There] in the first place, other than as a reification
of the existent's act of existing. It was
the existent [Fred Jones] who was being there,
as a human being known as Fred Jones and
not 'his' 'Being There' nor the 'Being There' of the Mitsein that were there too whilst he was being
there as the denotatum known as 'Fred Jones.'
Eliminativists, [contrary to the mistaken
beliefs of some people] do not seek to bar
or ban any words at all, including proper
names, abstract nouns, universals or anything
else. Eliminativists restrict themselves
in ontological or philosophical discussion
to pointing out the non-existence of existence, and all the rest of the abstract hypostatisations
that do not exist in the fairy-tale world
of Platonic idealism. This is no way bars
Eliminativists from employing those word-types
as descriptive verbal tools in order to point
to their basic linguistic and semantic function,
which is basically to save time and human
effort in the uttering of the circumlocutionary
or periphrastic sentence-strings which would
be required to communicate the often complicated
ideas involved in describing the activities
of entities encapsulated in single abstract
nouns, gerunds and universals. The trouble
is that transcendentalists consistently confuse
or deliberately employ these gerundial short-cuts
for actual things and talk as if such a thing
as 'Love' exists, when in fact it is the lover that
exists in the existential mode of emotion
and affection for another that we label with
the signifier word: 'Love.'
Eliminativists such as I therefore are in
no danger of 'falling into any ontological
or communicative 'abyss' for no such 'abyss'
exists. Eliminativists are aware that words
are only significata [signs] which point
to existents or to reificational notions,
[shopping, dancing, stamp collecting, being there,etc.,] as the observable existential modalities
of entities in order to identify them and
employ them as conversational enablers, but
they have no wish to proscribe or eradicate
these words from our language, but only to
de-confuse the notions of certain philosophies
and ontologies as to the semantic dangers
of such pitfalls.
At ground it is the Eliminativist love for
words and ideas that lies at the very heart
of Eliminativists - they don't like seeing
either words or ideas abused and employed
for base ontological purposes.
3. 7 Quine's: To Be is to Be the Value of a Variable [39]
Quine's obfuscative definition is only definitive in that it defines
Quine as being in this instance - mistaken.
(though the general standard of his oeuvre
is exemplary.)
My explanation here is that To be is NOT to be the value of a variable. And I offer this account as something which,
as far as I know, is the first de-construction
of Quine's famous axiom.
Professor Quine's definition is actually
an ontologically committed claim which simply
shift's the logico-ontological implication
or existential significational burden of
TO BE from (the possibility) of being some
unstated object or a state of some unstated
object, to that of BEING an unstated existential
modality of a non-object.
Some Definitions of the term
Variable
| 1. |
|
vulnerable to permutation or transposition
|
| 2 |
|
a quantity assuming any of a set of
values
|
| 3 |
|
liable or capable of changeability, mutation
|
| 4 |
|
identified by variety diversity
or difference
|
| 5 |
|
a symbol of logical expression (like
x or y)
[40]
|
|
The abstract nouns: variables, vulnerablities,
permutations, quantities, liabilities, changeabilities,
sets, mutations, symbols, identifications,
expressions, transpositions, assumptions,
diversities, differences, logicalities, symbols,
mathematical or logical expressions,etc. do not exist. For Quine to claim
that the abstract expression to be (which itself does not exist) is a value (which itself does not exist) of a variable (which itself does not exist) is to say:
The abstraction to be is an abstraction of
an abstraction.
|
| There are no such things as a value or a variable they are descriptions of objects - not the objects themselves.
The above examples of variabilities
are universalistic useful fictions which
are orphanic word-tokens that lack material
denotata and therefore do not exist. Only the various or variegated concrete,
material types of objects themselves that can be said to be material entities
exist and the term to be can only be said to refer to a modality
of their existence. The terms value and variable do not stand forth or cause to stand, etc. in compliance with the classical definition
of exist, but are already modalities which
are attributed to the denotata which exist
and are employed in order to qualify
such concrete nouns adjectivally and as such
cannot have further modalic layers assigned
to them as Quine attempts to do so.
Such an Quinean ontological
practice leads to infinite regression.
1384, from O.Fr. existence, from L.L. existentem "existent," prp. of L. existere "stand forth, appear," and, as
a secondary meaning, "exist;" from ex- "forth" + sistere "cause to stand."
|
All that Quine achieves is to characterise,
to be as something that is not a
descriptive modalic variability of an
object, but something that acts
as a descriptive variable of the modality
of a logically useful non-object.
In addition Quine assumes the layman's error
that to be is the uninflected form of the
stem be (used in the sense of be as an unspecified state of being something or other not mentioned) when in fact the to adds an inflectionality which can bestow
to be with intentionality, futurity, locativity and a host of other psychological, occupational, biological
abstractive possibilities in its sentential
employment, as in:
Bill is a father to be. Phyllis is going
to be a mother. John is studying to be a doctor. Jane is
said to be suffering from cancer. I think
its going to be raining by nightfall. Eric
is said to be living in Tangiers.etc.
3. 8 Reifiication of Number
and the Russian Word Worshippers
Ontology is the study of that which exists
and to address the epistemology of number
is to understand the ontology of numbers
and the symbolisation of mathematics. If
numbers exist, how do they exist, and do
they exist independently of human beings?
We do not mean, of course, that numbers exist
in the Platonic sense, that is, as physical
objects drifting around in a reified space-time
or lodged in Plato's great library of design
templates in the sky.
It is certainly not my intention to attack
mathematics, nor mathematicians, nor
indeed to challenge the proven usefulness
to mankind of the most effective systemic
mensural processing system dealing with the
logic of quantity, shape and the arrangement of
the natural world produced by our species.
My agenda, as always, is merely to bring
attention to the nature of abstraction and
reification in order that its beneficial
aspects can be appreciated and its negative
features avoided.
The current situation in our universities
and colleges of higher education is that
students are obliged to subjectively accept
the beliefs of their teachers that numbers
actually exist. Whilst the efficacy of having
such useful fictions is incontrovertible
– it is not necessary to assume that any
mathematics applied to objects is true, nor that the numbers and sets and the other paraphernalia of mathematics
with which they are consociated exist – but
only that tthat no contradiction emerges
betwixt the mathematical formulas and proofs.
In other words - rule-consistent maths is
fine and its results are considered as being factual
- as long as we get our sums right.
We will never know the details regarding
man's earliest creation and use of numbers.
A cursory glace at the different forms of
words, symbols and number systems which have
been developed by various civilisations and
cultures proves that they were arbitrarily
named in much the same manner as the plentitude
of different gods and godlets have been named
and worshipped throughout history in many
parts of the world and then forgotten. H.
L. Mencken's well known: Where is the graveyard of dead gods? could also well apply to many
defunct ideas in the graveyard of dead numerical
systems which mankind developed throughout
the ages and then discarded in favour of
new models.
Most people agree that the accordantly fictional
symbols were originally determined graphically
and nominatively by chance, whim, or the
impulses of some long forgotten primitive
forefathers. But however ancient the systems
of counting, such numbers and mathematical
symbols as are currently employed in any
axiomatisation of modern physics, must be
arranged to conform to accepted mutually
agreed criteria in much the same consistant
way that they were in the past. The
fictive, ideationally fabricated equivalences
of addition, multiplication and division must be consistent in order to be acceptable
– otherwise they are rejected and marked
as: wrong or incorrect. (i. e. untrue.)
It is thought that the mankind's first use
of numbers for counting or keeping a record
dates back to around 30,000 BC. Animal
bones with marks cut into the surface with
a sharp instrument are considered by experts
to be tally marks. Tally marks could have
been used for counting the passage of time
(the intervals between events) such as numbers
of times the sun rose and set, or keeping
records of a store of animal skins or arrows.
Originally numbers were almost certainly
abstractions extrapolated from accumulations
or groups of actual objects. Numeric symbols
are not things to be found concealed in a
hollow tree-trunk or lying behind an ancient
rock. The symbolic language of all human
communication (including the language of
mathematics) has been elaborated by man himself
and though our knowledge of the actual procedures
and circumstances of the origin of numbers
will be forever hidden from us by the passage
of time. There is however a more modern
account of the creation of mathematical symbols
and structures of available for our
study. I refer to the creation of mathematical
sets which took place in Germany, France
and Russia in the late nineteenth
and early years of the twentieth century.
In addition to the innovative work
of the German Cantor and his trailblazing
work on sets there were many other mathematicians of
various nationalities involved in similar
work as the nineteenth century drew to a close.
It is however, the activities of the three
outstanding Russian mathematicians, Nicolai
Luzin, Pavel Florensky and Dmitri Egorof
that provide us with the
most interest in relation to our study of
reification. For almost all of the fascinating
information on The Russian Trio we must thank Loren R. Graham, Professor
Emeritus of the History of Science in the
Program in Science, Technology and Society
at MIT, and Jean-Michel Kantor, a mathematician
at the Institut Mathématiques de Jussieu,
Université Paris, who are the authors of
a new book called Naming Infinity, a True Story of Religious
Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity.
Seldom in these days of information-overload
do we encounter a book which is just impossible
to put down. Naming Infinity is one of the most interesting and well-researched
books I have read for many years. It records
precious information concerning three men
of great stature in the world of mathematics,
who, prior to its publication were sadly
little known. From hereon in this account
I rely heavily on the meticulous researches
of Graham and Kantor.
All three Russian mathematicians were members
of an outlawed heretical religious sect known
as The Name Worshippers. I will not delve to much into the curious
doctrines of the sect other than to say that
one of the core beliefs held was that the
name of God is the same as God, which on face value, would appear to be
the most extreme form of reification we are
to encounter in this dissertation and the
repetitive chanting of God's name together
with a special Jesus Prayer was said to induce a state of religious
ectasy.
|
Florenskii believed that mathematicians who
created new entities like sets by naming
them came as close as humans are permitted
to approaching the divine.
When a mathematician created a set by naming
it, he was giving birth to a new mathematical
being. The naming of sets was a mathematical
act, just as the naming of God was a religious
one, according to the Name Worshippers.
[41] (Graham and Kantor. 2005)
|
The negative reaction to this on the behalf
of the heirarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church was presumably when the eccliastical authorities
heard that some of the flock claimed that
God could be named into existence? Surely,
if God could be nomonologically magicked
into being – would not people start to believe
that perhaps The Lord might be nominologically the created rather than the creator?
Naming some activity - whether that activity
is somatic or ideatively neurological - does
NOT bring such activity into existence. One
cannot possess *knowledge* or *information. * What exists in the world are actively
knowing or actively unknowing humans who
exist in an existential spectrum of apodeictically
factive logicality, or illogically uncertain
or false awareness. Only empirically proven
relationships between causal objects should
be factively admissible into the existential
canon, and even those only after a rigorous
exposure to falsifiability, by being tested
(verified or falsified) by experiment or
observation
Now as far as the Russian mathematical trio
were concerned, the theological question
of whether the nominata referred by the word
God (Bog in Russian) was rendered existentially accessible
via the uttering of the name had resonances
in relation to the existential instantiation
of mathematical symbols and structures. Surely
if an audience with God himself was possible
merely by repeating his name, the instantiation
of numbers and sets was small beer compared
to calling up the Almighty? If as Plato had
already claimed, forms exist in relationships independent of our
thinking of these objects and their relationships,
then also the correct symbolic correspondences
of mathematics exist as truths or facts about the universe in which we live, regardless
of our own existence and can be accessed
and made available in the same way - simply
by creating names for them? Such was the
manner in which their religio-mathematical
Name Worshipping revelation provided the seeds for the creation
of the much needed sets required to solve
the mathematical problem of infinity.
Existentialisation by by religio-mathematical
revelation. The ontological assumptions and
internalised subjectivities provided a group
of extremely religious Russian mathematicans
with the reificative key to harness
the impredicative properties and self-referencing
definitions of mathematical theory and instantiate
them as as specialised sets.
Consider this by statement by Nicolai Luzin
in his personal archives: as he agonises
over the meaning of existence:
|
An analysis of the word existence would be interesting! Philosophically it
denotes absolute being. Only I don't know
whether that is equivalent to objective being.
To exist does not mean at all "to be
an object of our thought." It is something
more, since even a contradiction can be an
object of our thought, and it is deprived
of existence.
|
1. We in our mind consider natural numbers
objectively existing.
2. We in our mind consider the totality of
all natural numbers objectively existing.
3. We, finally consider the totality of all
transfinites of the class II objectively
existing.
[42] ( Luzin. pp. 207 - 209. in Naming Infinity by Graham and Kantor.) |
The need was for Luzin to
recover rather than uncover the mathematical meaning of the word existence as used in the axiom of choice. The Romans
did the uncovering for us two thousand years ago when they
invented the word existence ( from L. L. existentem "existent," prp. of L. existere "stand forth, appear," and, as
a secondary meaning, "exist;" from ex- "forth" + sistere "cause to stand" ) precisely
in order to indicate concrecity without ontological
ambiguity. But nowhere (as far as I am aware)
are students new to mathematics ever warned
by their mentors that the symbols with which
they will soon become familiar are all excogitated
useful fictions.
No doubt after ideating and naming their
new versions of mathematical sets the Russian
mathematical trio expected a muzhik-like
submissive acceptance of the existence of
any named entity which entered into their Slavonic set-citing
labelling-machine heads. In Luzin, Florenskii
and Egorov's case - that was exactly what
happened as far as the world mathematical
community were concerned - their innovative
sets, born of religious revelation,
were accepted with alacrity by a grateful
world-wide mathematical community.
A cursory glace at the different words and
symbols which have been given to numbers
by various civilisations and cultures proves
that they are arbitrarily named in much the
same manner as the plentitude of different
gods and godlets have been named and worshipped
;throughout history in many parts of the
world.
Thus, were the accordantly fictional symbols
originally determined by chance, whim, or
the impulses of our primitive forefathers,
or (in the case of the Russian set theorists)
by religio-mathematical revelation. Such
numbers and mathematical symbols are currently
employed in any axiomatisation of physics,
and must be arranged to conform to accepted
fictional criteria. The fabricated ideated
equivalences of addition, multiplication
and division must be consistent – otherwise
they are rejected and marked as:
wrong or incorrect. (i. e. untrue.)
To apply mathematics does not require that
the calculated conjunctures of numbers or
symbols are true, or that they exist in the
world – nor does such usage imply that mathematics
embodies a system of verities. Calculative
exposition simply meets with approval if
it is compliant with an orderly, logical,
and numerically consistent relation of symbolic
parts. Such parts are of course abstractive
fictions or reifications which treat symbols
as things. All the axiomatic truths of mathematics
are no more than consistently conformative
useful fictions, are accepted if no objections
of inaccuracy are raised, which, like the
rules of any game or some forms of social
behaviour are only acceptable if they are
viewed as being compliant with normative
responses or internalised reactions.
Such are the dramatic differences that set
mathematics and its reificative systems apart
from any other of the disciplines. Science
intelligently updates its paradigmatic theories in accordance
with the availability of new information
and discoveries – mathematics does not –
its basic ontology is cast in concrete - though new innovations
are accepted on a strictly conservative basis.
A lot of mathematical reification can be
explained by what I call: the impositional /is/ as I understand it in a statement of
ontological implementation such as: “twice two is four’ or: “it is twenty miles to London, were the /is/ is forced to serve to shift
attention from the ontological questioning
regarding the "truth/falsity" of the utterance, to the assumptive
implication that twenty and miles actually exist. Students new to mathematics
are expected to accept such assertively expressed
and prescriptively employed examples of dualist
doctrine as actually existing and are given
to understand that such an acquiescence is
no more than part and parcel of a normative
education.
The assumption is that a correct mathematical statement is an ontological
fait accompli and is ontologically unchallengeable.
Assuming that there is good reason not to
impugn apodictic statements [i. e., in order
that logical or mathematically useful discourse
and description may proceed] what I suggest
is that we recognise the fictive nature of
mathematics. After all, there is nothing
shameful about this. The fact that man has
had the gumption to invent such useful abstraction
and because its level of complexity of operation
involves the occurrence of a new feature
– he invents and names one, is something
to celebrate as one of his most creative
acts.
Why even question math’s ontological provenance?
What is to be gained from doing so? Because
ontological clear-headedness is essential
– this means a total re-evaluation of what
really exists and what is no more than abstractive
instrumentality. ANY assumption of entitic
existence attributed to fictions (benign
or malignant) misleads mankind in his decision-making
at one of the most critical junctures in
his history. He is faced with probably the
most malignant form of mass reification and
fanatical fictionalism ever to confront civilisation.
Any confusion regarding what is and what is not the ontological case
whether it be the form of wel-meaning coercion
identified within the family, or the fictive
nature of mathematics itself in this era
of crisis is dangerous in that it can affect
the politics and policy-making of the west
as it defends itself against the tormented
triumph of a rabid religio-nativism and a
return to the dark ages.
All events are inevitable – and whilst retrospectively
we can trace the skeins of concatenation
which brought us to some pretty pass or other,
the trouble is we are unaware of the nature
of those events in advance and when they
will happen. We can make intelligent guesses
based upon how states of affairs worked out
in the past, but even what we conceive of
as inevitable (apart from the aging process
and some of its effects and death) can sometimes
not come about. What I want to touch upon
is something that forms an important part
of what you and I have realised about the
way we are brainwashed with reificative bullshit
as children and that is the acceptance of
subjectivity. All human religio-social systems are based
upon an acquiescence of one's place in society
and a tacit acceptance of the orthodox mechanisms
and structures available by which we can
alter our position. People who reject such
structures and adopt their own methods of
achieving change in their lives by theft,
robbery, murder etc., are branded criminals
- unless that is they occupy positions where
their hands are on the levers of political
power or operate under the licenced felony
practiced by the financial institutions which
has global repercussions the latest being
the collapse of western banking with upset
in the balance of power which has accelerated
the transfer of power to China and to the
far east, hence Obama's current visit and
efforts of amelioration and retrieval of
our position of trust in the face of an understandably
dubious orient.
All that is on a social level - but how does
individual subjectivity work and why is it
the establishment (particularly the religious institutions)
so obsessed with marketing the idea that
individual personal impressions and feelings
and opinions rather than external facts reflect
the actual nature of what is real?
Philosophy which for thousands of years has
been under the influence of religion and
much of which is no more that religious doctrine
dressed up in a philosophical patois which
is 95% ontological moonshine and 5% plagiarised
science is another societal mode of internalising
subjectivity.
We are constantly expected to accept that
there is a separation between the brain-meat
encapsulated inside its bony housing and
the so-called world out there, as if a few millimetres of osseous tissue
means that we are not a part of the world out there and are condemned to ceaseless speculation
as to its nature - even though nowadays we
are to a great extent knowledgeable as to
the sensorial mechanisms of our optical,
aural, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile sensing systems and the general
nature of the effects upon them by exterior
impingements and how their sensorial evaluations
can distort quantum (light-sound-chemical
) phenomena and deliver a uniquely human
version of the characteristic properties
that define the apparent individual nature
of contiguous matergy (force-fields - entities,
concrecities, objects - call the what you
will.)
All animal and vegetable organisms evaluate
matergic impingement differently. All human
objects evaluate encounters with other entities
slightly differently from every other member
of their species.
Any questions regarding so-called questions of knowledge are actually questions about the processing
brains of knowing humans. Whilst embrained
humans indubitable exist - knowledge (like any other reification) does not -
or as Nicolai Luzin said:
The natural sequence of numbers does not
have by itself an absolutely objective existence
... it exists as a function of the mind of
the mathematician.
Intellectual causation of the mathematical
kind we are discussing can never be evidenced.
Hume questioned the notion that any kind
of causation actually exists, and I follow
him in doing so, even in the physical sciences.
But that does not mean that intellectualising
mathematicians do not exist - only that there
are no such things as the reifications intellectualisation and causality - so we are back to the name worshipping
mathematicians who worshipped the names which
they themselves engendered. Like many people
they (the Russian mathematicians) had obviously
been brainwashed to believe that: Nommer c'est avoir individu - (To name is to individuate - my translation.)
For me if that individual is not a concrete
object (a cat or a smoothing iron, etc.) then it is an abstraction - there
is no tertium quid or predicative polyadicity
involved as an existential Cartesian-style
feature of the human brain such as mind.
(cf. “In the Beginning was the Name which suggests that nomenology is not only
the key the key to Christianity, but to other
domains of human nomenclature too.”
Consider this:
1. We in
our mind consider natural numbers
objectively existing.
2. We consider
the totality of all natural numbers objectively
existing.
3. We,finally
consider all transfinites of the class II
objectively existing.
[42] (Luzin. p. 207. Naming Infinity.)
Conclusion of Page Three
The calculations of applied onto-mathematics
have as their fundamental reference of ontological
last resort or ultimate denotitive relation
- countable concrete objects - matergy, force-fields
call them what you will) such as sheep, matchsticks, circular objects, revolving
discs, space vehicles, car tyres, chemicals,
gases, etc. The ability to mentally create and
attribute names and signs to numerical abstracts
has been of huge advantage to mankind - but
that is not to say that numbers exist or
that numbers can be named into existence.
The contribution of such systems and the
brilliant mathematicians that created and
employed such systems to the benefit of mankind's
advancement as a species is incalcuable.
No better example of beneficient abstraction
can be exemplified.
It is my personal position that all that
man needs to do in order to clarify his ontological
and epistomological thinking and regain his
reality-contactedness, is to acknowledge
the non-existence of useful as well as harmful
reification - and simply be aware of it -
not scrap it.
I think most people's (perhaps natural) reaction
is more along the lines of:
Well what the hell does it matter? We can
investigate, talk about and describe the
phenomena we see around us quite adequately
employing the non-ontic variables to hand.
We can send rockets to Mars and the outer
universe based upon calculations including
the abstractions time and motion and acceleration
and all the rest of the usefully reificative
rigmerole - so why worry - or even concern
ourselves with reification when it obviously
appears to work to our advantage?
My reply to such reaction goes like this.
The use of reification by man has a positive
and negative effect depending upon the social,
scientific, philosophical, psychological
circumstances in which it is used. In order
to bring to the attention of people the damaging
use of negative reification and convince them of its dangers in the modern world
where racialism, religious fanaticism, economic
recklessness, (i. e. the tricky problem involved
in finding the particular calibration in
timing that would be appropriate to stem
the acceleration in risk premiums created
by falling incomes without prematurely aborting
the decline in the inflation-generated risk
premiums.) environmental disregard, educational gobbldegook
(learning facilitators who possess effective
instructional delivery skills which they
demonstrate in microteaching sessions.) political
manipulation, media influence, legal deviousness,
sexism, ageism,(the chronologically disadvantaged)
class discrimination,(the trailer prk community)
etc. pose threats to civilisation ALL kinds
of reification need to be identified and
highlighted - not just the detrimental or
high risk manifestations. Any attack on prejudicial
or misleading abstraction elicits the natural
responses - as these admittedly rather far-fetched imaginary examples illustrate:
|
1. You accuse us as members of The Aryan Guard of ignorantly using the reificative abstractive:
beautiful in relation to Nordic women and complain of
our agengerised description of the Hottentot
female as repulsive, yet you yourself use abstractions like: time and energy and movement and number without any acknowledgement that they too
are refications employed to provide proof
for your form of scientific agenda.
2. You claim that as greedy bankers, our
economic nomenclature is infested with meaningless
reificatives like: subprime - yet your philosophical lexicon abounds with
gross metaphysicalities like mind and being and consciousness and qualia..
3. You accuse us of worshipping a mega-metaphysicality
like God but your own mathematical symbols were created
by men too and have been accepted into your
belief-systems in exactly the same way.
|
As I see it the whole nature of human reification
requires public attention and we cannot expect
the changes in attitudes we identify as being
reificatively imprinted and retained by means
of generational (familial) indoctrination
or the societal indocrination via education,
political and religious manipulation or media
moulding, with a general rather than a piece-meal
identification of individual reifications
or just the ones we consider entailing loss
or dimination of reality-contactedness in
the pariclar sphere of own own interest.
In other words ALL usuage of non-ontic reality-sapping
symbolisation requires acknowledgement -
including even the mathematical terminology
of the queen of the sciences herself, together
with physics, medicine,(with its: negative patient care outcome, philosophy, linguistics (particulary translation)
and the social sciences of jurisprudence,
education, and politics too - but not that
abstraction may be scrapped - rather that
the masses become more aware of the need
for its more prudent use in respect of communicative
clarity for the benefit of analysis and decision-making
in the various domains of human intercourse.
As I see it the whole nature of human reification
requires public attention and we cannot expect
the changes in attitudes we identify as being
reificatively imprinted and retained by means
of generational (familial) indoctrination
or the societal indoctrination via education,
political and religious manipulation or media
moulding, with a general rather than a piecemeal
identification of individual reifications
or just the ones we consider entailing loss
or diminution of reality-contactedness in
a particular sphere of our own interest.
In other words ALL usage of non-ontic reality-sapping
symbolisation requires acknowledgement -
including even the mathematical terminology
of the queen of the sciences herself, together
with physics, medicine, (with its: negative patient care outcome, philosophy, linguistics (particularly translation)
and the social sciences of jurisprudence,
education, and politics too - but not that
abstraction may be scrapped - rather that
the masses become more aware of the need
for its more prudent use in respect of communicative
clarity for the benefit of analysis and decision-making
in the various domains of human intercourse.
As far as Heisenberg is concerned there is
nobody else to slam. His ideas do not exist
- no ideas do - only the ideating Heisenberg
existed. Worst of all, there is absolutely
no need whatsoever to introduce mystical
elements into the analysis of behavioural
quanta - what's wrong with adjectivalising
quanta as: the moving particle rather than the Cartesian-like the particle's movement thus eliminating any misunderstanding that
a dual relationship exists betwixt the particle
and its movement.
As far as I am concerned - his metaphysicalist
contribution has held back the development
quantum physics. Had he prefaced his principle by admitting that he had based his variables
on non-ontic make-believe which had been
rubbished thousands of years ago, but in
spite of that in the absence of a more profound
understanding of the electron, felt (as I
feel too) that at least the reifications
allowed him to offer some sort of pro tempore paradigmatic description of its characteristics,
then others would have been more motivated
to seek the reality of the electron and presumable
more funding would have been forthcoming
from the authorities. In the event (because
of the principle tag) most people assume that the thing is
a done deal - a discovered given of nature
- an established and accepted law of quantum
physics.
The issues are in wrongly taking these metaphysical
reificative realisms as a property of the universe when in fact it is more
so an neuro-existential modality of
the human lingual mediator of the world in
which he finds himself as from a human species
position, his instincts/habits and his immediate
responses to stimuli result in his attempts
to convey the results of his feelings, observations
and conclusions to his fellow men.
For me an even more cringe-inducing aspect
of this passing the human buck back to nature because of the failure to grasp the reifico-ontological
facts of the matter is the pompous conclusion
which amounts to stating:
Though I am uncertain about it - this
is obviously the way the quantum world exists!
Again this accords with my postulate that
the phenomenon of linguistic reification
is a bio-genetically driven feature of a
Darwinian-style paradigm of nature's survivalist
mechanisms, by which we evolved as promiscuously
negative and positive abstracting organisms
and not as exclusively beneficently orientated
versions. Hence some abstractive reification
tied to concretia having a circular
shape as is the case with pi is good for
survival - and some is bad (or insipidly
neutral) as in the case of Heisenberg, and
we had to take the negatively bad with the
survivalist good. Thus the existence of the
constant tension and balance between and
interplay of opposing elements or tendencies
which is characteristic of our history as
a species, with its reificational roller-coaster
ride - now one of progress - now one of mutual
genocide.
|
| Footnotes - Chapter Three |
| [21] |
|
Perhaps the term gerundialisation of philosophy is more apt? |
| [22] |
|
'Verdinglichung,' ('thingification' from 'Ding,' thing). |
| [23] |
|
Known more usually as Georg Lukács. |
| [24] |
|
It was thirty-seven long years before Kotarbinski's
work was eventually translated into English.
It was published in 1966 by Pergamon Press,
in Oxford, as: 'Gnosiology. The Scientific Approach to the
Theory of Knowledge. (Grygianiec. 2004.)
|
|
|
|
REFERENCES FOR THIS WEBPAGE |
| [19] |
|
Vilkko. Risto and Hintikka. Jaakko . Existence
and Predication from Aristotle to Frege.
University of Helsinki. Boston University. |
| [20] |
|
| Russell, Bertrand. Our Knowledge of the External
World, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1914;
Fifth Impression, 1969, p. 42. |
|
| [21] |
|
Kaminsky. Jack. Language and Ontology. Southern
Ilinois University Press. 1969. |
| [22] |
|
Leibniz. W. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding.1703 2, XXII,§. P. Remnant. trans., 1996.
Cambridge University Press. |
| [23] |
|
Woodard. Intellectual Realism and Culture Change' 1935. Ch. II. pp. 7-13 . Sociological Press,
Minneapolis I935. Putnam, Con. USA. |
| [24] |
|
Ibid |
| [25] |
|
Pitkin. Hanna Fenichel. Rethinking Reification p. 264. Theory and Society 16 1987). Pp.
263-193. |
| [26] |
|
Lukas. Georg. Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des
Proletariats,' in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein.
Neuwied and Berlin; Hermann Luchterhand,
1968. Tr. by Rodney Livingstone. London:
Merlin Press, 1971 |
| [27 |
|
Ibid |
| [28] |
|
Burris. Val. Reification: A Marxist Perspective. University of Oregon. California Sociologist, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 22-43 |
| [29] |
|
Zerzan. John. The Catastrophe of Postmodernism. Anarchy: A Journal ofDesire Armed 1991. 30:20. |
| [30] |
|
Bunyan. John. The Pilgrim's Progress., University
Pub. Co., 1856 |
| [31] |
|
Faye.Emmanuel - Aude Lancelin Le Nouvel Observateur
- The New Observer Semaine du jeudi 28 avril
2005 - n°2112 - Livres /faye.htm
|
| [32] |
|
Sansom. Richard. The Prolix Ramblings of a Madman. Nominalist List Yahoo. 3rd. Sept.
2008 |
| [33] |
|
Heidegger. M. Being and Time. 1929. chapter I section
2 |
| [34] |
|
Sansom. Richard. The Prolix Ramblings of a Madman. Nominalist List Yahoo. 3rd. Sept.
2008 |
| [35] |
|
Heidegger. M. Being and Time. 1929.
chapter I section 2 . |
| [36] |
|
Sanson. Richard. The Prolix Ramblings of a Madman. Nominalist List Yahoo. 3rd. Sept.
2008 |
| [37] |
|
Heidegger. M. Letter on Humanism [Brief uber den Humanismus].d |
| [38] |
|
|
| [39] |
|
Quine. Willard Van Orman. "On What There Is," first published in the Review of Metaphysics. 1948.The article is included in Quine's
book, From a Logical Point of View (Harper
& Row, New York: 1953).
|
| [40] |
|
wordnetweb. princeton. edu/perl/webwn. |
| [41] |
|
Graham. Loren and Kantor.Jean-Michel. Russian Religious Mystics and French Rationalists:
Mathematics, 1900–1930.Presentation was given at the
1884th Stated Meeting, held at the House
of the Academy on November 10, 2004. Bulletin of the American Academy Spring 2005 |
| 42] |
|
Graham. Loren and Kantor.Jean-Michel. Naming Infinity.A True Story of Religious
Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity. p. 207. The Belnap Press, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. and London England.
2009. |
|
