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Harry Nimbus's avatar

I think it was Freud who said that nothing is one hundred percent true, just as there's no one hundred percent proof alcohol. Or maybe one hundred percent truth does exist, but is inaccessible to the human mind. Either way, reading your weekly essays I've come to understand that every internally coherent metaphor may present a partial view of something true, expanding our knowledge but never completing it. And the language we learn to use to describe certain phenomena contains within it some evidence of the true nature of our perceptions. For instance, you asked what "fertilisation" means in the context of procreation. That really got me thinking because my eight year old daughter recently asked me what "barren" means. She'd heard it in a movie in reference to a character who couldn't get pregnant. So that opened a long, winding conversation about barren women and barren landscapes and why we use a word that conjures up an image of limitless space and silence, where life is sparse and stunted or where only death resides, to describe a woman who can't make babies. What does that show us about ourselves? What does that show us about where we find meaning in life? It's having conversations like this with my daughter that makes me feel that maybe I'm doing something constructive for the next generation.

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Allen Frantzen's avatar

I am wondering how analogical understanding relates to Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman's Tale,” a text about alchemy appearing near the end of The Canterbury Tales. It includes a dialogue about secret knowledge between Plato and one of his disciples (CYT, ll. 1452-62). The disciple asks for the name of a powerful secret stone. Plato answers that it is Titanos (or Thitarios, Greek for gypsum). What is that? the disciple asks. Plato replies that it is the same as magnesia. “But that is to explain the unknown by the more unknown” (“ignotum per ignotius”), protests the disciple, who then asks, “What is magnesia?” Plato replies that it is “a liquid made of four elements.” The disciple asks, “And what is the basis of the liquid?” Plato replies that he cannot tell him because alchemists have sworn that they would “reveal it unto no one, nor in any book write it in anyway.” God himself does not want the information known unless he were to reveal it himself. So, it seems to me, the analogical process fails. Two things are alike because they share a common property: so far so good, through a chain of analogies. But in the end there is no analogy for the last item in the last analogy. This means that there is no way to create knowledge by comparison. There is only Revelation, with a capital R, the end of knowledge. The text makes an expected medieval Christian point. I wonder what the text implies about what we think of as scientific knowledge.

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