@Holiday20310401,
Holiday20310401;142790 wrote:
If all is ineffable by default -just pretend- then perhaps truth is that which is required only when the ineffable needs to be communicated. If there is no need to communicate it, if there is no need or use to be attached to it, then truth is not necessary, and nonexistent?
For me, the ineffable is also the unthinkable. For me, thought itself is lingual. Now I'm not denying that experience is often ineffable/unthinkable, but then I think we often do feel an urge to communicate this same "unthinkable," and often do so by means of music, gesture(aka dance,acting, etc. ), painting, sculpture, .......murder, suicide, mountain climbing.
It just occurred to me. Why is smothered mate (in chess) so satisfying? A person can give reasons, but can the subject be exhausted? Form is form, and it exists in different formal dimensions. What is the redness of red? This doesn't seem effable, or is only effable in the practical sense.
---------- Post added 04-06-2010 at 11:44 PM ----------
PappasNick;147507 wrote:Human beings - many of them, at least - care about how they are perceived when they are the objects of perception. Do they just continue on being what they are when perceived, as you describe for an object, or can they / do they somehow change? What is the truth about a person - what he is when he is unobserved, what he is when observed, or both? I'm inclined to say that it is both and that many people can and do change when they are the objects of perception.
I agree that we are both. To use a math metaphor, you might describe a person as a function of their environment. I see the notion of an individual as a useful abstraction. But the "truth" seems to be that we are utterly immersed on our world-experience. Where is the border between the seen and the seer, the doer and the done? It's all conceptual and this concept is indeed an evolving system. This is all quite Hegel. No finite thing has genuine being. The self and the other are one. The self and the world are one. And yet it is still useful and justified to talk as if the opposite were true, for the opposite is true, depending upon the purpose of a sentence in its temporal context.
I agree with Hegel that what makes us human is our desire for desire. We want to be recognized by an other. Our animal or lower selves are satisfied with food or shelter, but our spiritual cultural selves desire a living community, in which we are recognized as free, unique, and worth, etc.
This explains duels. Men will sacrifice/risk their animal life for cultural-spiritual recognition. This also explains the starving artist, the unmarried priest, etc.
