Philosophical Phoundations

So. I was thinking about it a little bit the other day during my Spanish Culture class when we were learning about Dalí, a famous Spanish surrealist. In the handout that we received, the professor said that Dalí “discovered” some artistic school of thought or style. I thought it was funny wording, but then I got to thinking about what this implied. This means that everything is already in the world and that we just have to discover it, which means that nothing can be our own. There is nothing in the world that we can claim we created or invented. It was there the whole time for all of us to see, and you just so happen to be the one to stumble upon it and reveal it to the rest of the world. It therefore seems that nothing can be created in the world. Interesting.

I have no idea how I got to the next topic, but then I started thinking about how everything seems to have some philosophy. Literally everything. Philosophy permeates to the core of our world. I really got to thinking and stretching this idea a lot, and I came to some interesting points of discussion. So long as you accept my idea that philosophy underlies all of our existence, the question is is there anything before philosophy?

I suppose first I should back up and provide a rough definition of what I am meaning here by philosophy. What philosophy and philosophical ideas and language gives us is a vocabulary through which we can express what we experience. Philosophy is a certain way of talking about the world. So when you say that killing is morally wrong, there is some philosophical foundation to this claim. The case is the same for virtually anything we say about anything. So if we accept the idea that philosophy's job in the world is to help us explain the world and ultimately understand it, then everything is philosophical. As I am writing this, it seems that this idea is really obvious and I should probably not be spending my afternoon writing about it, but maybe it is not as obvious as I think it is.

It seems that in the modern world we tend to think that philosophy is a useless enterprise and generally toss it to the side, saying that there are more important things than philosophy. Already we have a general conception of what philosophy is and we have deemed it to be useless, or at least not as useful as other enterprises in life. Maybe it will help to think about this in terms of academic majors or studies. We have separate departments in schools (English, Spanish, History, Sociology, Art, Music, and Philosophy) which means we think that they are fundamentally different areas of study. When someone studies English, they are not studying philosophy, and if they want to study philosophy, they ought to go to that department.

So we have separated and divorced all academic pursuits from others, which blinds us from the fact that philosophy serves as a basis for everything. In some areas it is relatively easy to see. For example, there are philosophical traditions (and the traditions that they come from) that serve as their own foundation. Similarly, religion is pretty philosophically based as well, even if you think otherwise. There is no doubt that philosophy has a lot of influence in religion, especially in ethics, cosmologies, cosmogonies, and metaphysics.

After I thought about these two areas, I thought about what other academic areas could be philosophical. Since I started this with art, I can talk about how art is philosophical as well, which is an area that is perhaps not as overtly philosophical as the other areas. Whenever someone paints something, they generally are considered to be part of a school of thinking within the discipline of art. There are some of these areas that clearly have a philosophy when they paint. Impressionism, for example, has general characteristics that they adhere to when they paint. Cubism has some rules as well, as they try to depict the world in terms of cubes and geometric shapes. Even Dalí and surrealism has some rules, though rules that seem to have lots of inherent difficulties and inconsistencies. Surrealism says that there should be no rules, that they should break the rules of classical art and paint what they want, without there needing to be some reason or meaning to the piece. However, each and every artist is painting with a specific set of rules or guidelines in mind.

Something that one would say is far from philosophy is mathematics or any of the sciences. Typically people like to think of these as entirely distinct from philosophy, perhaps even transcending it. However, I would like to argue that even mathematics is philosophical. There are certain assumptions about the world that one must accept if one wishes to engage in mathematics. One must accept the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You might argue that concepts are difficult to argue against since they can be demonstrated and proved so easily. This is definitely much tougher to get over, but it is not insurmountable, but we will hurdle over that later. First, sciences. I think the same could be said about science, that there are certain principles that must be accepted before doing science. One of these, which mathematics also adheres to, is empiricism. Who says that empiricism is the best and most accurate method? There are a lot of strong arguments, most which I tend to agree with, that state that empiricism is the closest thing we have to getting in touch with how things really are, but there are a lot of philosophical assumptions embedded in empiricism and science/mathematics.

This lead me to think about what, if anything, is prior to philosophy. I briefly considered language. I thought that language was totally unphilosophical and therefore was something that did not have a philosophical foundation. However, upon further reflection, I thought about how words try to convey reality to the rest of us. That is to say, that every word is philosophically charged. Every utterance, even onomatopoeias, are representative of the world and therefore they tell us something about how we view the world. If we first consider onomatopoeias, such as “boom,” “crash,” “clack,” “pow,” “quack,” “woof,” etc, we find that even though they are representative of sounds and are not words with a linguistic history they still tell us how we experience the world. They tell us that when we hear a dog bark it phonetically sounds like “woof.” When we say a word that has more linguistic history, such as the word auditorium, it tells us something about the function of that word. It comes from the Latin word “audire” which means to hear, and so what do you do in an auditorium? Hear. Or the word benevolent, which comes from two different Latin words: “bene,” meaning well, and “volent,” meaning they may be wished. What does benevolent mean? Well-wishing. Incredible, huh?

However, language is something that is philosophical in and of it self, as when we say auditorium we are labeling a certain thing that we associate with a certain experience. Maybe this does not make sense, and this post is getting incredibly long, so I will cut it short here and get to the point of all of this. First, I think that it is incredible to consider everything as being philosophically charged and nothing can divorce itself from philosophy no matter how much it wants to do that. Secondly, it is my own conviction that the world would not exist without us. We give meaning to the world and so therefore, if there were no human beings, there is no world. Similarly, if we as an individual did not exist, the world therefore does not exist. Wow, right? It takes a lot to accept this premise, but I really think it is the truth.

Caution: Provocative Thoughts

Disclaimer: I do not necessarily subscribe to these thoughts, I just think that they should be considered. Considering all view points and opinions on an issue make for a more informed person.

Not to dishonor the memory or the day of Martin Luther King, Jr., but after seeing all of the posts about him, I got to thinking. One of his most famous quotes is that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Which implies that we must get rid of injustices everywhere so that justice may reign. I would like to argue that we should not get rid of injustices, as they help us in many ways.

Yes, I would argue that we should not get rid of injustices in the world. I think there are many good reasons for not totally getting rid of injustice in the world.

I think it is important to remember that without a concept of injustice, we would not be able to think of or discuss justice or what is just. Maybe there are some who think that justice exists outside of our earthly realm and it transcends our existence, but it seems to me that all of our judgements about justice and injustice come from experience and interaction with others. If we were to not be involved in the world from a very young age and we truly lived alone, with no human contact whatsoever, I seriously doubt that we would, by ourselves, come up with this idea of justice. We would have to had previously experienced injustice to come to make judgements about justice. 

For example, we would not be able to consider stealing to be unjust without having already experienced the effects of stealing. Until we see a robbery, we are not going to know or understand why it should or should not continue to occur. We could not, in my opinion, even fathom the idea of stealing if we were secluded from the world and never experienced it for ourselves. The same could be said about killing: we could not make any judgements about it until we first experienced it. This experience does not have to be personal (I am not saying that we should kill someone or have someone we know be killed), but we should just be able to hear about it or see it in order to discuss whether it is ethical or not.

So experience is crucial to making judgements about justice, because without it we could say nothing. Embedded in this experience, if I have not already made it already clear, is the other side. We must experience, I think, both justice and injustice. How are we going to make judgements about one if we have nothing to compare it to? I think that for this reason, injustice is a necessary part of experience and life. If we were therefore to eradicate injustice totally from our human experience, then what would be just? Nothing would be considered just because there would be nothing unjust to contrast the justice.

If we totally got rid of stealing in our world, if there were no more thieves, how could we say that not stealing is just and the right thing to do? I do not think that we could. Maybe in this example we would find other things that could be just or unjust while not stealing would merely not be thought about. That is to say, the world would take for granted that there was not a stealing issue in society and so therefore would focus on other things rather than the fact that there is not stealing. 

However, imagine if we managed to get rid of all things we currently consider unjust. (Just imagine. I understand that this may be difficult, but just go with me on this.) If everyone was treated the same, there was no stealing, no killing, nothing vicious ((I use this word in the sense that it is a vice and therefore bad). What would be considered just any more? Nothing could be, because everything would simply be. There would be no more just/unjust, no more ethics, no more ethical decisions to be made. There would fail to be any moral judgements. If this were to occur, think of all the ramifications this would have on religious institutions, philosophical traditions and therefore our world as we currently know it. Imagine that these things did not matter any longer and how different our world would look. I know that I could not imagine it. I think it would be a lot less interesting. 

That was a long tangent, but I would like to make one more brief statement on why I think that injustice is beneficial to society. It is in the same vein of my previous statements. I think that in order to appreciate the good, the just, one must have some adversity, some bad stuff happen to them, some injustices done. Without experiencing the bad, how are we to become good, or at least better? How would people move forward without experiencing some injustices along the way to challenge them and propel them forward? I dunno, but I think that injustice might be an integral and necessary part of society and that its complete eradication would not necessarily be good. You cannot begin to understand the good until you have understood the bad.

One of my favorite bands, Rise Against, has some lyrics that are attached to this topic and that I think work nicely here. The song is called "Satellite" and is off of their newest album, Endgame. I think I have written about them before, but take a read and think for yourselves a little bit.

You can't feel the heat
Until you hold your hand
Over the flame
You have to cross the line
Just to remember
Where it lays
You won't know your worth now, son,
Until you take a hit

(chorus, and then later)

You can't fill your cup
Until you empty all it has
You can't understand
What lays ahead
Until you understand the past
You'll never learn to fly now 
Til you're standing at the cliff
You can't truly love
Until you've given up on it.

Language Pt. !!

I would like to follow up on a comment left on my last blog post, as I wanted to venture into a territory sort of like that, but it was too much to do in one post, I thought.

The comment concerned the fact that there are so many words to express different hues of the same primary color. For example, red. There is crimson, auburn, maroon, brick red, and burgundy. All describe different shades of red, but alter the red in either making it darker or lighter, with varying degrees of light and dark. It is astounding that there can be so many different names for the same idea. Why do we not just call everything the same? When we see the Minnesota Gophers' maroon, why can't we just call it red instead? I mean, the same idea is getting across, isn't it? Not entirely.

I am going to spit-ball many ideas with no real organization right now, so be prepared. I may or may not come back to organize it.

I think that one of the goals or objectives of language is to describe the world as we see it. Specificity in language means a more thorough and precise understanding of the world. I think that many people think that if we have a most precise vocabulary, that we will eventually or finally understand reality as it truly is. However, I would argue that there is no fundamental reality and that language is a testament to this fact. There is no common language, so there cannot be any common, objective Reality. Using the example of red, we see a fire truck and we see a Golden Gopher T-Shirt. When we see the first, we say that it is red (taking the stereotypical fire truck, of course) and when we see the t-shirt, we can say that it is also red. The red of the t-shirt, however, is not the same red as the fire truck, so we have to come up with a new way of expressing this new form of red. We could call it simply dark red and could move on with life. Then we would run into the following problem: we see the t-shirt and the truck but then a brick enters into our field of vision. We look at the brick and say that it is red. However, it is not the same red as the truck, as it appears to be a little bit darker than the truck. So we decide to call it dark red. By calling it dark red, we are then saying that it is the same red as that of the t-shirt, but we notice that this is not the case, as the hue of the shirt is darker than the hue of the brick. As the color of the brick is between that of the truck and the shirt, we could call the color medium red.

Ok. There we go, we have clarified this issue. But then a person enters the room. We notice that their hair is red, so we call it red. Upon further inspection, it turns out not to be actually red, as it seems to be a red darker than the red of the fire truck. So we agree that it is dark red. We look at this person some more and determine that it is not actually the dark red of the t-shirt, but is lighter in hue, so we call it medium red. We find that the hair is actually not the same color as the brick, as it seems to be darker than the medium red, but not as dark as the dark red. So what do we call it now? Medium-ish red? Medium-dark red? I suppose either of those names could work, but then when we have more objects in our mind, it becomes even further complicated because then we have to remember that medium red is like the brick, dark red is the shirt, red is the fire truck, and that this person's hair is medium-dark red. This seems, at least to me, to be quite confusing. This is part of the reason why we have so many different names for the different shades of red. We are trying to accurately convey how we see the world.

Sometimes (I would argue most of the time) these details are not important at all, as when we are told that something was crimson red, we do not make a very good distinction in our mind between crimson red and dark red or maroon or a shade close to crimson red. When someone says red or a color related to red, we think red regardless.

The same can go for video games, another example provided in a comment of the previous post. We have different names for different consoles so that we do not have to explain to a person that when we say "Pong" we do not mean the "Pong" of the 1970s, but rather the "Pong" of 2012, with the remote controls that are wireless, requiring nothing but a small sensor bar connected to the console and that is moved by your relation to the sensor (I tried to explain Wii here). So I think that having different words for distinct things is to provide precision and be efficient. As you can see, there was a lot of qualification to the second "Pong" that was necessary to distinguish it from its original. If we used the same word for both, then we would have to do a lot of talking, and humans are always trying to do more with less, right?

Language is beautiful for many reasons, but one of the most impressive things is that it can convey so much with so little. Each word has a very specific function and superfluous words are laid at the wayside. We no longer use Thee and Thou in common parlance, as we found a way to get around using these and instead just combined them into one word, "you."

I have always found Spanish to be a very efficient language, conveying many things in a single word. For example, the verb tenses of Spanish indicate (obviously) the meaning they are trying to get across, time (when the action occurred), person (I, You, He/She, etc.), number (singular or plural), and mood (something doubtful or unsure, or a command). Take, for example, the word "comí." By saying this we can find out so much about what the speaker or writer is trying to convey. We understand that it happened to the speaker, as it is in the "I" form, and so therefore this person was acting alone (number). We can understand that what the speaker was doing was eating (as this is the definition of the word). We can understand that there was no doubt about it, they were definitely participating in the act of eating. As well, we glean that it happened to them in the past. So, with one word, a Spanish speaker can say "I ate." This may not seem too bad, but note that the following does not happen as much in Spanish as it does in English: "I read" and "I read." The two are written exactly the same, but one indicates a time in the past while the other indicates the present. English would have to provide more context clues for a reader to fully understand and realize the original intention of the speaker whereas Spanish can do it with one word. Spanish words are powerful, providing a lot of information in four letters.

I think there was more, but my mind is tired. More later.

Language

So, after a long time, I have decided that I am going to try to revive this blog of mine, considering I have a lot of free time in Spain to contemplate life and stuff. So if you are a trooper and begin reading both this blog and my other one, wow. You fall into at least one of the following categories: (a) really love reading, and particularly love reading my stuff (b) have nothing better to do (c) read these only to make me feel better. In any case, thank you. It means a lot. This blog is meant to be more conducive of discussion, so go at it, y'all.

The topic today: language.

This is something that surrounds us and we encounter on a daily basis. By virtue of reading this, you are interacting with language. We are language-based creatures and need to express ourselves through words, movements, pictures, something. However, I want to here focus solely on the languages that are written (in turn read) and spoken (in turn heard).

Language and the theory or philosophy of language is an area that I have long wanted to delve into and explore, but have never had sufficient time to do so. Given this, all that follows is uneducated (for the most part) and has not been researched at all, unless mentioned. What follows are merely the things swimming around in my head at the moment or that have been doing so for some time.

This past semester I took a course in the philosophy department that was concerned with the history of ancient philosophy. We began with the first "philosopher," Thales, who believed that everything was water [ponder that for a moment...seems a little crazy, but give it some time to digest] and progressed to the biggies, Plato and Aristotle. In one of Aristotle's texts on logic (if I remember correctly, for those interested, it was in his work entitled De Interpretatione, or Of/On Interpretation), Aristotle discusses what a synonym, homonym, and other linguistic terms actually mean. Clearly articulating and revising definitions is something characteristic of Aristotle and his texts. After I read what he had to say about language, I stopped to think for a moment or two. What he said made a lot of sense on the surface and prompted more thoughts (I have not delved into the specifics of his thinking on these topics...that is for another day).

Think about how arbitrary language is.......

There is nothing within an object that clearly states what it is, its essence is not immediately tangible to us. Starting with something natural, think of an apple. There is nothing in the apple itself that says its name is "apple." None of the components of an apple, like the seeds, its skin, the flesh, the stem do not have printed on them "Hello, My name is Apple." The only way we can define what is an apple and what is not an apple is by its characteristics. We can say that apples are red, round, grow on trees, have seeds in the middle, and are generally sweet. I am not saying that this is what makes an apple an apple, but it is a rough definition of what we could consider to be an apple. For these characteristics to be defining of an apple, one has to have a group of followers or at least others who would tend to agree with your definition.

To complicate matters even further, think about the definition we provided for the apple: round, red, grows on trees, sweet. Embedded within these characteristics is another whole world of definitions, with the same issue of lacking a tangible, overtly obvious name. When you say something is red, for example, what does it mean to be red (if we get rid of all the shades of red that are and stick with a typical red, which itself is a problem because what is a normal red, but just go with it for now, huh?)? You could say that for something to be considered red, it has to have a certain hue, but hues are subjective. You could get a little more specific and claim that red falls on the shorter side of the visible light spectrum. This would be the empirical approach, but again the definition of red relies on a consensus of opinions. Therefore "Red" does not actually exist objectively, but only within our experiences and within this earthly realm.

You can do this exercise with just about any word and can never get to the objective reality of what it really means to be that thing without relying on human opinion and observation.

That is one fact of language that just totally blows my mind. Nothing objectively is what it is. Things are only things in so far as there are people to observe and describe them. Maybe, and probably most likely, I am making too many assumptions, but it seems to me that there is no foundational axiom, building block, grounding of being, foundational reality from which we derive all other things. I think I may have bugged this last part here up a little bit, making it confusing with all of my terms and phrases, but hopefully the point I was trying to make came across.

Another facet of language is the Babel problem. The Babel problem, of which many are already aware, deals with and tries to address the issue of the diverse and numerous languages we have on earth. The number of languages in the world is somewhere around 6,000 (and decreasing because some are very small and have only a few speakers left, and these few speakers are dying), but how did we come to have so many? Was there ever a time when we all spoke the same language? Why can someone from Taiwan not speak with someone from sub-Saharan Africa if they do not have language in common? How did this come to be?

This is something that has captivated my mind for many years. If we take, for example, the word "red," for example, and look at the way it is spelt and pronounced in different languages, it is amazing the wide variety that exists. Spanish: rojo. English: red. French: rouge. Albanian: i kuq. Finnish: punainen. Hungarian: piros. Get the picture? All of these words express the exact same concept, red, but all vary wildly in their pronunciation and pronunciation. I think this is even more evidence that there exists no universal language, that the entire world is subjective to our experiences and interpretation. If we all had the same experiences, would we not all express something the exact same way? I understand that language is more complicated than this, as it involves evolution of other languages, influences from these languages, etc. But just stop and think about this idea for a brief moment. It does not have to be too long, but think about the diversity of expression that revolves around a single word or concept. It is astounding.

It further amazes me that we can make sense of these scribbles on paper. I know that it may be difficult at the beginning to step outside of your upbringing and education and see these letters as nothing but scribbles, but try it some time. I think that you can appreciate it once you study a language with a script other than the Roman alphabet. For example, take Arabic. To those of us that speak a Western, Latin-based language (or at least written in the Latin script), Arabic looks like nothing but a bunch of lines and scribbles on a piece of paper. We wonder who would be able to understand that a line that has a dot on top is an "n" sound and if it has two dots underneath it it is a long "i" sound or a "y." But there are millions of people who read Arabic with no problems. They do not, presumable, think that their language is nothing but randomly drawn lines on a piece of paper. To them, it means something, it conveys their interpretations of reality, it gives them a common ground with those around them to discuss what happens to them and how they believe their world to be. To those whose primary language is Arabic, English probably looks like a bunch of lines as well. English lines look very different from Arabic lines, so one whose main language is Arabic probably thinks the same that English people think about Arabic; that English is a bunch of non-sense lines that no one could possibly understand. Yet we do. This observation astounds me at humankind's capacities. We are able to scribble something on the piece of paper and it means something to us. Imagine a complete alien were to come to planet Earth and look at what we do. That alien would have no idea what all of these lines mean. Where we see the letter "E" they see (assuming they have some sense of geometry and direction) a vertical line with three horizontal lines protruding to the right of this vertical line. It means absolutely nothing to them. To us, it is an essential building block of our understanding of the world.

If this has blown your mind, or it is too much for you to wrap your mind around, believe me, you are not alone. I have been thinking about this for a while and I still do not know what to make of it. It is a very large territory, language, and it is incredibly scary. Yet, at the same time, it is something that fascinates me. So take a break, and so will I, and think about these things, but not to the point of madness.