So, is it possible that these 'space' battles've been fought, won, lost, and
re-won before, Christopher?  <g>
Yea, and nothing has passed, meaningfully, since Plato-Aristotle.
We're still looking at the immutable fact that there is no time and there is
no space.  Otherwise we reject what we've come to 'know', scientifically.
 Further, we come to know---not as if it were some cave-dog loping up
ignorantly behind our scientific arses, but as an overarching 'partner' to
our scientific 'knowing'---the Spiritual.

Scientific.  Spiritual.  One mode, power, unit, energy, knowing.  We
prioritise them, now, as Scientific....and then Spiritual.  We forget that
the man who informed us that there is no Time and no Space [Einstein],
believed---as did most of the philosopher-scientists before him and within
his lifetime if not beyond it---that Spiritual precedes Scientific.

That precedence makes sense for them and for us, if only because we who must
partake of both the Spiritual and the Scientific, must, logically, be able
to understand to some degree both Spiritual and Scientific because we
partake of both.

All that philosophers have been debating for some time now, therefore, which
they do increasingly hilariously, is How does the Spiritual, engaging the
Scientific, decide what to do?  Or, in other words, Is there a Grand Design,
in which case we're part of it whether we like it or not.......or Is
Spiritual 'above' Grand Designing.

That second question is logically impossible, as most epistemologists have
concluded.  Spiritual cannot have an 'Above Itself' or an 'Outside Itself'.


We have had to come, then, back to square one:  Spiritual exists, and it
includes us, naturally, and Grand Design exists, naturally, whether or not
we apprehend any part of it, some part of it, most parts of it, or all parts
of it.

The less one knows of Spiritual and its Grand Design, the less fun it is.
 Like playing cards without having learned what they look like, where to
place them relative to other players' hands, and how to evaluate their
worth, as well as not knowing the process or the ultimate aim of the game.
 Not the most satisfactory of playing-positions to be in.

For those who may still be huffing and internally raging at my match-up of
Spiritual to Grand Design:  If we have an ONLY---yes, really, an ONLY.  And
if that ONLY has no OTHER, how can ONLY know anything but ONLY?  Even the
least logical of us would have to conclude that ONLY means NO OTHER.  Hence,
all of us and our knowings, as well as the interdependences of us, are known
by the ONLY.  Some of us could argue, futilely, by any handy analogy, that
there're circumstances allowing the ONLY to _not_ know ITSELF [which
includes 'Us']; to wit, my leg might just decide to seize up and do its own
thing as I walk to the garage.  It might be part of me and dependent for its
movement upon my subtle direction, but it could also act independently.
 Yeah, already you've seen that analogies make great simplistic and helpful
explanations, but by definition, an analogy lacks all the 'logic sprockets'
needed for pure running pure argument.  Analogy compares two dissimilar
things about which a _few bits_ are similar and deliciously helpful to
explain and explore.  And that's, as they say, as far as it goes.

Poetry, _the musical conveyor of analogy_, tweaks our ONLY receptors just
about as effectively as any transport does.  I've often thought that opera
which would include all the other art forms besides music, would be the
ultimate art form.  The notion, alone, that several folk can, musically,
'have their say' at virtually the same time, blows my mind!

When my 18 year old sister said to me [my being 13]:  "Hey, have you noticed
that we're always up there in our heads and figuring things out behind our
eyeballs.  It's our permanent position.  Brain behind eyeballs."

That probably advanced me as much in epistemology and teleology as the
simple explanation of how we apprehend Dimensionality [1D, 2D, 3D, 4D, 5D,
and so on].

We have left to us, then:  How can we 'taste' the ONLY and how will we
decide to ride that 'taste'?

Hon. joodles



2008/9/12 Christopher C Jones <[log in to unmask]>

> Distortions of perspective it may be? It may well be the position from
> which I pose such a query but could it be said that the question of
> space is the big question that spans the 20th century?
>
> I was just interrupted by a telemarketing cold call which I then
> immediately hang up on so have forgotten the question.
>
> >From Husserl and phenomenology on to Heidegger and beyond to Deleuze's
> metaphysics it appears that philosophy seems to make a claim for space
> as the big question of the 20th C. The claim that these philosophers are
> concerned with time it seems to me would be to misplace the question?
> William James questioning transcendental philosophy, without reading
> again, also seems a question of space. Einstein, no doubt, makes a new
> claim for space in theoretical physics and mathematics.
>
> Rightly or wrongly this seems, for me, to return again and again to
> questions of form. Poetic forms in free verse, prose novels and art
> photography... all with a big question of space hanging over them?
>
> Some years back on this forum there was a discussion of open form and
> New Poetry and not wishing to start another war it does seem that the
> big differences were again questions of space. This could be a question
> of open and closed spaces with ethical questions of one over the other?
> (It could be said that closed forms allow an immanent critique
> foreclosed to open form?)
>
> At the risk of a short circuit, it could be said that against a
> pragmatics of time which occupies the greater part of my formal
> education in poetry writing, poetics and aesthetics and many others, it
> could be said that a pragmatics of space is yet to find any solutions.
> This would include a pragmatics of affects with such illuminating names
> as William James and Silvan Tomkins? Are we still in the arena of space
> and affects and still without time?
>
>
> Just some URLs of articles I have been reading and found using google
> search: haptic space perception
>
>
> Remembrance of places past: a history
> of theories of space
>
> http://www.cognitivemap.net/HCMpdf/Ch1.pdf
>
>
> Noninformative vision improves haptic spatial perception
>
> http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13964253
>
> article on haptic computer interfaces
>
> http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/mags/mu/2006/03/u3022.pdf
>
> (There are other articles on jstor and ingenta but I no longer have
> research library access to these thanks to illness.)
>