[参考资料] 多个题目的思路借鉴 关于TRUTH PARADOX和SUBJECTIVITY

imongUID: 140258

原文来自http://www.escapefromwatchtower.com/truthequalsparadox.html  感谢原作者的劳动！

似乎对不少issue题目都有启发性，例如有一个we learn from comparison的？还有issue157 all observation is ... ，等等。大家不一定要认同他的观点，但不妨参考一下。

Authentic Truth Lives Only In Subjectivity & Paradox

In Circles & Contradictions,

Some Significant, While Others Empty
By Richard Schwartz




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Black is not white and white is not black, so we say. Yet all reality is perceived within the phenomenal limitations of human consciousness. It is impossible to venture outside the human conscious to empirically observe reality otherwise. If one sees black as white, while the other sees white as black and both agree that what they are seeing is the same, then there is no absolute way of determining differentially between the two, as both are in conformity within communicable definitions and absolute objectification. It is here that truth is relative.

The non-rational acquires being and meaning for us only through its connection with reason. Reason is the indispensable. Thus, I perceive ignorance itself through knowledge and perfect ignorance only through the maximum of reason. The universality of thought, insofar as it is not formalized but is engaged and filled with content, is reason itself. (1)

In order to define such truth as we observe, we must use our restrictions of empirical objectivity, yet all realty lives purely within subjective experience alone. To communicate the nature of subjectivity, it must be conformed to objectivity, or remain silent. To convey irrational essence of nature, rational objectification must be used. The explanation and concept behind such is always objective, unlike the incommunicable experience.

While all objectivity rests in relativity, submersion in relativism removes the distinction, however circular, needed for survival in empirical existence. The earth may revolve around the sun and not the other way around, yet even this is relative to perceptive capabilities of the human consciousness. Even so, this fact, as relative as it may be, is a closer truth than the former.

The heart of the matter rests in the colorless state of reality apart from human conscious formulative lucidity, in the neutral, nonpartisan, transparency of irrational being that grounds our foundations. It is here from this pool of empty formlessness, that the mind draws up form and structure in rational form. The paradox rests in that all rational thinking is grounded in irrational chaos. The power of reason is used to create form and arrangements, perceiving all in categorizations, which is needed for human survival. The crucial factor is to recognize the instability of the very foundation our rational logic is based on and to cease our trust in our values as absolute. Man loses himself in the picture he has formed of himself. If we can balance our convicted strength in value positing structure along with the chaotic relativity of it's very ground and true nature, we can then adjust ourselves to tolerance, to the higher good, and to the subjectivity within experience over objectification, erroneous literalization and false fundamental dependence of absolutes.

"Every form of truth must be shipwrecked in the world, and none can substitute itself absolutely for the truth." (2) Karl Jaspers

And yet in this shipwreck there is not the absolute; in and through the shipwreck something finally authentic appears for the first time. (William Earle)

The only place residing subjective existential truth lies within the recesses of the soul, the creative center of nonformative emptiness. devoid of conceptual formations and categorized structure. The moment such irrational foundational knowledge is accompanied with reason and subsequently communicated, all integrity, or depending on whether metaphorical, symbolic speech is used verses mathematical logistic analytical speech, most integrity is lost of the irrational truth, as the essentiality of being, of becoming, is noncommunicable. Communication is needed to convey thoughts, concepts are needed to understand such irrational being in rational, sensible terms, yet paradoxically the meaning, and most certainly the depth, is then lost. Anothewards, the truth of such irrational, existential meaning of existenz is in darkness, in emptiness and understood in nonrational, nonconceptual terms. Communication destroys such meaning and when men attempt to write in symbolic, metaphorical, poetic direction, they can point and transfer only under a mask of indirect terms. The perversion of literalists define such words of conveyance in literal, historical terms, destroying all such meaning of the irrational, existential, essence of being, or more appropriately, the concurring, movement of becoming, in forward, constant evolving mobility.


1.
I become bound to the depths of Being in its individual universal character, become existentially "historical," only if I enter into and accept the restrictions of my empirical existence.
One must enter the depths of solitude, in the center of one's being to fully grasp, if at all possible the existential meaning of subjectivity, only to submit to the limiting and devaluing form that must be taken to communicate under the historical observation of conceptual thinking and straight jacket imprisonment of linguistic definitions.

2.
I am only genuinely in communication if I can be alone before Transcendence in my limits and bases.
Truth, incommunicable and subjective rests only within transcendence apart from rational thinking. Here in the depths of the irrational self or transcendent base, lives higher limits, perhaps even limitless non formulations that are in complete aloneness and solitary being. It is only then where one can leave to the objective confining limits where communication reigns. To attempt to escape reality and remain in oneself in inertia and narcissistic quietism also negates transcendence into neurotic envelopment.

3.
In action, I truly accomplish something out of potential Existenz only if I am consciously prepared to accept its shipwreck.
Action requires the shipwreck of both leaving subjective existential authenticity to objective values of convicting foundations, yet always aware of the shipwrecked subjectivity of communicating one's values in rational logic, apart from the irrational being and existential base.

4.
I am genuinely rational only if my whole reason factually and for my knowing is grounded upon unreason. I believe only through doubting whether I believe.
Rationality is based on genuineness of such that only comes from authenticity. In turn, authenticity can only be derived from the the ground of one's existential being. That being is irrational, incommunicable essence that lives apart from logic. One must have values, must believe, all so is needed for human survival. Yet authenticity dwells from the center of doubt in perceptional limitations of the human mind and conscious filter of all reality.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




KARL JASPERS

Rational a-logic; the circle as a necessary form of genuine philosophy.
By Karl Jaspers

We shall start with a Kantian idea. Kant conceived all objectivity as a material formed by the categories of the subject which was consciousness as such. We live in a world of appearance produced by us not, to be sure, in its empirical existence, but in its general form. The thing in itself was absolutely hidden, a mere limiting concept implied by the phenomenally of empirical existence. Now the categories like unity, plurality, substance, causality, etc., were for Kant to be derived from the original unity of the thinking consciousness, the so called unity of transcendental apperception which bound whatever we might encounter into the unity of an object. But Kant said, "this unity which precedes a priori all synthesizing concepts is not at all the category of unity." Kant thus requires us in thinking by categories - and, according to him, we can not think otherwise - to grasp something which does not fall under the categories. This he had to do since he wanted to touch the origin of all objectivity objectively, that which grounds the categories, including that of unity, under the category of unity. We arrive thus in formal logic either at a circle; unity is explained through unity, or at a contradiction; unity is not unity.

In all genuine philosophies we find such circles and contradictions as the decisive point, whether it is metaphysics, transcendental philosophy, or the clarification of Existenz. And everywhere one sees the critics at work triumphantly exposing those discrepancies and imagining the criticized philosophy thereby destroyed.

But it must be shown that such forms of thought are necessary in philosophy by the nature of things. And, in order to do this, we will first look at the process by which these circles and contradictions arise, according to a purely logical interpretation. To be sure we shall not be interested in those many mistakes which can be corrected verbally without further change, but rather in errors which appear to be logically unavoidable and irresolvable.

Their are many striking examples from antiquity. Epimenides the Cretan said, "All Cretans always lie when they speak." Thus, that which Epimenides, a Cretan , said is not true; thus his proposition, "all Cretans lie," is not true, etc. Or there is the story of the sophist Protagoras and his pupil Euathlus who took lessons from him but was to pay only when he had won his first lawsuit. But Euathlus took no cases. When Protagoras brought suit for his money, Euathlus explained: "if I win this suit, I need not pay, for the judgment is against you, and if I lose the suit, I also need not pay since our agreement was that I must pay only on winning my first suit." Or there is the argument of the crocodile; a crocodile stole a child from its mother and told the mother, " I will give it back to you if you will give met he right answer to the following question: Will I give you back your child? The mother replied, "You will not return my child; and now you must give it back to me in either case. For if my answer was right, then you must return it according to our agreement. And also if it was wrong, for it would be wrong only if you did return my child," But the crocodile answered, "I can not return the child in either case. For if your answers is wrong, then the child is not returned according to our agreement, admit your answer is right, then it is right only if I do return the child."

Without going into the particularities and necessarily more precise conceptions in these examples, we find the general principle of the difficulties that in each case there is a so-called self-reflexivity. The lying Cretan says something whose content cancels the saying of it, which is then restored of infinitism. The object of the trial of Euathlus and the content of the mother's assertion are both condition and conditioned. But we can only think meaningfully and unambiguously if in the content of our thought we have two terms to be related, thus, in the relation of condition, the conditioning and the conditioned must be distinct, and in the relation of object, the thing and its properties must be distinct. The error lies, not in the individual conclusions, but in the premises where only a single term is related to itself. As soon as two are distinguished, al the difficulties fall away, as well as the wit in these oddities invented by the Greeks. These striking examples are so easily grasped that the solution is easy. But we are interested not so much in these examples, as in the principle to be grasped through them: of a limit to literal conceivability for us.

Now precisely in distinction from cognition of things in the world, in philosophizing something is thought which if it is to be touched upon, can permit nothing outside of its begin thought, since it is the fundamental origin; it may be being itself, or the condition of all objectivity as in the Kantian philosophy, or it may be Existenz. We always have something which the understanding can not grasp but which is decisive for our certainty of being, which is less before us than present in our thought. The difficulties of formal logic with respect to self-reflexivity must arise. If we make the content of such philosophical ideas one relative term alongside of others, which we must do when we make assertions, then, as so expressed, it is no longer of philosophical content. Therefore such assertions must be made reflexive. Thus, in general, the thinking of that which is inaccessible to the understanding takes on the appearance of a logical impossibility or insolubility, where what is asserted as the supposed cognition of something cancels itself out. Only thus can we reach the point where the essential sense of philosophical thinking is not displaced by a false insight of the mere understandings.

In this double fashion, we can now understand what we often experience in philosophical study. The result of philosophizing is no statable ultimate insight, but rather an accomplishment of thought in which our total consciousness the way in which Being is present to us, is changed.

And all philosophy which wishes to improve itself into an unambiguous communication of knowledge by removing its apparent circles and contradictions falls, so to speak, flat on its face and becomes totally empty.

The critique of philosophy therefore has as its task not the removal of its circles and contradictions, but rather bringing of them to light in order to see whether they are significant or merely empty circles. For the form of the circle in fact returns in every philosophy, be it ever so confused.

If, for example a materialist explains the external world as a creation of our physiological orgqanization, more particularly our brain, still the brain, including his own, is a part of the external world which can be observed under local anesthesia, with a trepanation and mirrors. Thus the brain becomes a creation of the brain formally the same mode of thought which describes God as causa sui.

But philosophical ideas no longer retain their total expressive power when reduced to these bare circles although they are still preserved in seed. They are dissolved in such a bareness as they are in objective knowledge which they are always on the verge of becoming for the mere understanding. We can speak objectively - and we men can not speak otherwise - about the absolutely non-objective only in forms which cancel themselves out as objective.

Examples of the a-logical drawn from the clarification of Existenz.

Existenz is something which according to its essence is incapable of being established as an empirical existent and which, therefore, can not be discriminated by any objective investigation. Thus it is as though it were not; it is not verifiable as a stable reality in this world.

If I should say, potential Existenz could truly be in an act which is not only not universal, but runs counter to it - such an act being willed out of historical grounds and entering into rationality by itself, i.e., not from the outside by some commandment of god - then what is thus said would be unverifiable. Objectively, one can not distinguish whether it is a case of a brutal will to live based upon itself in arbitrary stubbornness (which can also occur in a negative will to live, in a despairing negation of life), or whether it is an existential will arising out of the bases of concrete history, related to Transcendence in true freedom, and thus open to all rationality although unclear in itself.

Both of these two possibilities in their mere external appearance for the knowledge of consciousness as such look alike, and are to be distinguished only by Existenz which can see in them two things completely and essentially different.

In the same way, it is impossible to distinguish objectively the ability of Existenz to be alone, which is the origin of true communication, from the self-isolation of an empirical existent which will only enter into commerce with others under definitely settled conditions and not into authentic communication. The truth of my communication is decided by whether I can be alone before Transcendence in infinite loneliness yet not be destroyed, but rather keeping my potentialities ready. Man must be capable of being alone if he is to draw power and potentialities from the origins. On the other hand if I withdraw from the difficulties of the world in order to find escape in an impotent denial which is really a non-willing, then I pass into a self-isolation without Transcendence. I rotate about myself in the empirical existence of my feelings and empty boredom.

In the clarification of Existenz, there are necessary modes of expression which, in their paradox. touch indirectly - the only way possible - upon the truth of Existenz. What we have just discussed can then be expressed briefly.

I become bound to the depths of Being in its individual universal character, become existentially "historical," only if I enter into and accept the restrictions of my empirical existence.

I am only genuinely in communication if I can be alone before Transcendence in my limits and bases.

There are innumerable corresponding clarifications of Existenz which can be crystallized in the following:

In action, I truly accomplish something out of potential Existenz only if I am consciously prepared to accept its shipwreck.

I am genuinely rational only if my whole reason factually and for my knowing is grounded upon unreason. I believe only through doubting whether I believe.