The Great I AM

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

~ Albert Einstein

 

 

 

I had said earlier that all paradoxes are either paradoxes of the All-in-One, or of the One-in-All. I will restate that here: Identity and Persistency are the twin illusions that shape our world. It may not be clear how that is a restatement; today's discussion will begin an attempt to build that bridge.

 

We talked at some length a while back about what being means. We had said that something is in several senses, potentially several senses at once. The implication of this is that identity can mean several things simultaneously, as well.

 

Let's consider something with a fairly stable identity, as we'd naively consider it: Mount Rushmore. Chances are pretty good that you recognize that name, and that as you read it, your Cartesian Theater obligingly summoned up an image of it. You probably thought about the Presidents' heads carved into it. You probably feel pretty confident that you know how many Presidents there are up there... which ones... how they're arranged... what the rest of the mountain looks like...

 

Getting less confident, right? In fact, even people who've seen Mount Rushmore with their own eyes would probably be less than certain about those details. Even though most of the people who read this understand what 'Mount Rushmore' is, I'd venture a guess that every one of you has a subtly distinct, individual, subjective impression of 'Mount Rushmore.' So, while we can maybe agree that there exists an objective Mount Rushmore, it isn't as real to us as our subjective version. And the intersubjective Mount Rushmore is a strange beast indeed - it encompasses all these subjective versions, and the objective Mount Rushmore, under an umbrella that lets all of us recognize the same mountain (even though it's not the same mountain). What's more, without summoning that shorthand, I could offer you a vague description that nevertheless incorporated the necessary details for you to recognize the idealized Mount Rushmore. And that's before we get into Mount Rushmore as a symbol or an association for each of you personally.

 

The point is that, even with something that all of us think we know as an objectively real entity, it exists in many different ways, as many different things. Everything is both itself, and other than itself: this is the Parasimplicity Principle. The self-similarity Mandelbrot described in Nature's curves is another aspect of this: identity as a pattern of infinite recursion, Self as both self and self-concept and concepts of Self beyond the self, as many unique iterations as there are possible perspectives. Paradoxes of self-reference arise because of the essential dichotomy between the Self we are being and the Self of which we are aware in the process of Being. Russell's famous paradox - "this sentence is false" - arises because we erroneously view it as equivalent to "the sentence 'this sentence is false' is true." Truth, in this context, denotes positive Being - Being in a state of awareness. The truth that Self alters itself in the course of becoming aware of itself qua self makes it paradoxically impossible for Self ever to be truly self-aware; despite the inescapable truth that self-awareness is the hallmark, the necessary condition, of Self-being or Sein-in-der-Welt.

 

Persistency, it turns out, is just Identity viewed from another dimension - the dimension of Time - and that will be the subject of our next discussion.

Creatio ex nihilo

“Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.”
~ Robert Smithson

 

Zero is believed to have been invented as a number like other numbers by the Indians, somewhere between the fifth and ninth centuries. The idea of ‘null space’ or the ‘void’ was known and used by earlier cultures, but the Indians were the first to produce a symbol that could be utilized in mathematical calculations to represent the void. When we consider numbers today, it is appropriate for us to begin with zero as the unique numerical symbol for nothingness – indeed, when we derive mathematical operations from set theory this is exactly how we do start, with zero as the symbol for the empty set.

If the first number is zero, denoting nothingness, then the second number – one – denotes identity. In set-theoretic terms, it is the set which can have only one possible element (the set of the empty set, in fact). This set-theoretic interrelation between nothingness and oneness is mirrored in the symbolism of the taijitu, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – something out of nothing.

The existence of zero and of one as numbers generates the concept of category; a unitary entity having more than one component subentities. The simplest structure of category is duality – the category that has exactly two elements, as ‘one and zero.’ The numerical symbol for duality is two.

Three elaborates this concept of category further into the more general plurality. Where twoness denotes a paradigm of either/or, a binary system within which ‘one’ may acceptably and completely be defined as ‘not-zero,’ threeness opens a doorway – a Gateless Gate, indeed – onto countable infinities of paradigm in which each element is uniquely itself and cannot be defined in terms of any other element (although it can be defined in terms of all other elements, with reference to the established concepts of nothingness, identity, and duality).

Four, being both the sum and the product and the power of two twos, embodies divisibility. This is a further elaboration upon plurality – with the addition of fourness, we now find that there exist some plural entities which are both entities in themselves and unions of lesser entities. We can, of course, derive numbers along the real number line by defining mathematical operators that utilize this principle more generally – indeed, we could do that when we had only zeros and ones to play with – but fourness is the philosophical symbol that uniquely develops this concept.

These, then, are the numbers which symbolize the essential concepts of being: nothingness, identity, duality, plurality, and divisibility. You probably already realized this, but we have just derived another expression for the Law of Fives.

Ars gratia artis

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth”
~ Pablo Picasso

 

While I'm still being pretentious, let me talk a moment about what I think it means for art to be made. One can, with only a little exercise of the imagination, picture a rock formation which is a perfect or near-perfect analogue of some abstract sculpture - perhaps by Henry Moore - and then pose oneself the question: which of these is Art? We can skirt Paley and assume that the rock formation is not a 'made thing' in the sense of being the product of willed agency; we might then conclude that the sculpture is Art, while the rock formation is not, because of the artist. From that point, we can then, with only a very tiny further exertion of our imagination, conceive of a grilled-cheese sandwich, likewise made by the willed agency of that same Henry Moore, and assert that this would not be Art. This assertion would not necessarily invalidate our thesis; we could evolve it slightly to suggest that what makes an artwork is the willed intention of the artist to make Art. This concept achieves its apotheosis in the artist who makes Art simply by declaring of something that pre-existed that it has become Art - a clarifying elaboration of this concept actually won a Turner Prize for the artist Simon Starling a few years back, and will again be something to which we return (assuming, as I must no less than I assume your existence reading this in the metanow, that you are still with me when Starling reappears in this narrative). We could make different assertions concerning rock and sculpture and sandwich - we could imagine an aesthetic in which only the sandwich were Art, or in which none of these things were Art - and there might indeed be some profit in following these alternative aesthetics to their conclusion (and you can find counterparts to Starling for any of them, from Chris Ofili to Tracey Emin to Andres Serrano). But I will advance here, without at this point providing anything substantive by way of justification, the argument that Art is made by the intuition of the Artist in the eye of the Observer.

To really elaborate on that it's necessary to return to an earlier, and similarly unsupported, argument: I can only be, I said, without troubling to define any of those terms. I'm now going to embark on one of the more foolhardy quests available to the philosopher, and examine what I understand being to ... be. In doing so, I make no presumption of authority, nor even of adequacy to the task. I simply intend to express, to my own satisfaction and with my own nebulous appreciation of the broader form of my expression as a whole, what it may be to be a being: in what senses some entity may be understood to be.