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.
This is a fun and thoughtful comment. Very much in the spirit of analogy. Thanks, Allen. I wonder if Chaucer is communicating an allegory about the point at which knowledge must stop. One of the themes here has been what Jeffrey Donaldson calls the metaphorical imperative. Since language is fundamentally an exercise in analogies, all referents point to another level of analogy until we hit a wall. The written word is an analogy for the spoken word, which is a host of analogies to the sensate or sensible world (i.e. the phenomena), which according to Plato at least, is an analogy to the great, original logos (i.e. the primary phenomena represented to us only in part via our senses)... the language of God, as it were.
The scientific response to this predicament, I'm sure you're aware, has been to set this issue aside as purely philosophical and metaphysical and therefore unnecessary to our investigations. This approach has proven productive in many ways. The trouble I keep pointing to is that, in time, ignoring the metaphysics has given rise to ruinous inconsistencies in scientific thinking, and to our cultural understanding of knowledge. By ignoring the metaphysics, science has drifted into scientism, inserting an incomplete metaphysic in its place, one arrived at by deductive reasoning. It starts with the proposition that only natural phenomena exist, that is, that supernatural phenomena do not exist. This assertion starts up a circular system of reasoning in which only the things science can consider are real and true Truth. These are metaphysical first principles, rather than limitations, say, that science might set up around its disciplines. As I've been pointing out, science doesn't in fact hold steadfastly to these limitations and winds up violating its own metaphysics when it introduces unverified hypotheses, theories, and narratives. At this stage, the whole affair is a muddled blob of what I I consider to be fraud, though I don't think the folks perpetrating it are in the least bit aware that they're operating in spheres of nonsense, often dangerous nonsense.
A very good synopsis of the problem and the development you are working against. I see that science itself is fraught with contradictions and gaps. Put something this "muddled," as you say, in the hands of politicians and we all know what happens next. Science is reductive enough without politicians "weaponizing" it, as they now love to say.
Hi Les. Thanks for weighing in. I'm not sure we have a say in the matter, nor do I think advancement is a capitalist invention. Everywhere we look, we find growth, maturation, evolution... These seem to be built into time itself. So, while I too would like to stop the clock, we are pressed ineluctably forward.
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.
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.
This is a fun and thoughtful comment. Very much in the spirit of analogy. Thanks, Allen. I wonder if Chaucer is communicating an allegory about the point at which knowledge must stop. One of the themes here has been what Jeffrey Donaldson calls the metaphorical imperative. Since language is fundamentally an exercise in analogies, all referents point to another level of analogy until we hit a wall. The written word is an analogy for the spoken word, which is a host of analogies to the sensate or sensible world (i.e. the phenomena), which according to Plato at least, is an analogy to the great, original logos (i.e. the primary phenomena represented to us only in part via our senses)... the language of God, as it were.
The scientific response to this predicament, I'm sure you're aware, has been to set this issue aside as purely philosophical and metaphysical and therefore unnecessary to our investigations. This approach has proven productive in many ways. The trouble I keep pointing to is that, in time, ignoring the metaphysics has given rise to ruinous inconsistencies in scientific thinking, and to our cultural understanding of knowledge. By ignoring the metaphysics, science has drifted into scientism, inserting an incomplete metaphysic in its place, one arrived at by deductive reasoning. It starts with the proposition that only natural phenomena exist, that is, that supernatural phenomena do not exist. This assertion starts up a circular system of reasoning in which only the things science can consider are real and true Truth. These are metaphysical first principles, rather than limitations, say, that science might set up around its disciplines. As I've been pointing out, science doesn't in fact hold steadfastly to these limitations and winds up violating its own metaphysics when it introduces unverified hypotheses, theories, and narratives. At this stage, the whole affair is a muddled blob of what I I consider to be fraud, though I don't think the folks perpetrating it are in the least bit aware that they're operating in spheres of nonsense, often dangerous nonsense.
A very good synopsis of the problem and the development you are working against. I see that science itself is fraught with contradictions and gaps. Put something this "muddled," as you say, in the hands of politicians and we all know what happens next. Science is reductive enough without politicians "weaponizing" it, as they now love to say.
Is not the notion of (scientific, etc) advance one of the metaphors
that form the substrate of our perceptions ?
Why do we have to advance ? Is a 'return' to The Dreamtime really
retrograde ?
We extract knowledge from Nature, thus knowledge is a part of
the extractive economy ("Take. Take. Take." - capitalist accumulation)...
Science, meaning: to split off... The 'pursuit' of knowledge deepens
the separation, the cleavage, between ourselves and Nature; and
isnt Total Control over Nature (especially our own nature - the
head Vs the body) really what the pursuit of knowledge is all about ?
Hi Les. Thanks for weighing in. I'm not sure we have a say in the matter, nor do I think advancement is a capitalist invention. Everywhere we look, we find growth, maturation, evolution... These seem to be built into time itself. So, while I too would like to stop the clock, we are pressed ineluctably forward.
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.