Jinan
You wrote:
"We are living in peculiar times where ‘knowing’ is more important than
‘being’."
I believe that "knowing" (true cognition) IS "being" ... that is the
difference between Dasein's 'knowing' and the 'knowing' that entails
striving towards Being
>
> "Communication’ gaining more importance than ‘cognition’ is then natural
> and that too the language aspect of it. That is the reason why someone
> with *insight* had to re assert ‘medium is the message’."
>
When there is no real cognition in communication, then the latter is mere
instruction ... if communication can be called that, then something has to
change, and that something has to do with our "being". On that score, the
'medium is the message' is true, if we can believe that the medium is
our/self ... the "medium" being the way we communicate plus what is being
communicated & how we communicate (i.e., the way we "listen"). We become
both the medium and the message.
> "What we hear is the language but what one cognizes or experiences or lives
> is the totality where there is no distinction between medium and the
> message."
>
Exactly ... !
>
> "The peculiarity of modernity is that the chance to ‘misunderstand’ is more
> than to ‘understand’. When one tries to understand someone else it is quite
> natural to misunderstand. Understanding takes place at the level of
> ‘being’. It seems that ‘ objectivity’ is taking us for a ride."
>
Well, true objectivity does not exist, and neither does 100% subjectivity
... our "understanding" (sometimes "creative misunderstanding") is always a
mixture somewhere between the two, somewhere between you and me.
Understanding takes place when something new is uncovered, when our "being"
is added to or changed in some way.
>
> "This box is the box of reason and language and reason has to have ‘known’
> to operate and the true out of
> the box situation can only happens in the realm of ‘unknown’."
>
I would recommend anyone to read Stephen Toulmin's "Return to Reason", and
my own take on this is that "reason" can only emerge in a "reasoned
argument" between parties, when common ground is found that is acceptable
to all (a new solution). To use "reason" that is written down and does not
change is downright wrong ... so, "reason" does in fact operate in the
realm of the unknown.
>
> "Please allow me to quote Friedrich Nietzsche *“But how could we possibly
> explain anything? We operate only with things that do not exist: lines,
> planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How should
> explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an
> image, our image!”*"
>
This is quite true ... and a seemingly impossible situation. However, [1]
you cannot "explain" anything to anyone, because that is mere instruction &
not understanding, but you can help them (e.g., students) to "explain"
things to themselves (or, better put, to find/uncover things for themselves
... I dearly love Socrates);
[2] most of what we have to work with is "invisible"/does not exist - there
is no such thing as objective knowledge, since we made that up in the first
place, and what can be made can be unmade, even the "truth". But, we are so
used to this made-up stuff that it works perfectly well, most of the time,
as long as we are all "reasonable".
[3] explanations (of what confronts us in any enquiry or observation) are
possible if we realise that explantion-to-self is also translation of what
confronts us, whether that something is the known or the unknown ... we
simply have to turn what we are hoping to understand into an image of
ourselves, since there is nothing else we can do. To understand anything we
first have to create a "model" of that something (an image or pattern),
which then becomes part of our own model/image/pattern of understanding ...
being is changed in the process of understanding.
Johann
>
>
>
--
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher
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