Logic versus Experience

The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno was a paradox-spinning machine. He used his considerable skills to prove counter-intuitive claims like “there is no such thing as motion.”  One of his most famous paradoxes has to do with Achilles (a speedy runner) attempting to overtake a tortoise (famously slow). The tortoise has been given a head start. To  reach the tortoise and then overtake it, Achilles must, first, cover half the distance to the tortoise. By then the animal, however

slowly, will have moved forward. Once again, Achilles has to arrive at the half-way point before reaching his competition. But this “get to the half-way point” pattern will never end.  There will always be yet another, and still another, half-way point. Conclusion: Achilles will never catch the tortoise, i.e. common sense is just appearance. There is a deeper level of reality, accessible via logic. It casts doubt on much common sense.

In the area of food this would translate into something like Brian Wansink’s famous never-emptying soup bowl.  Wansink’s conclusions are now suspect, but his experiments were attention-grabbing. The bottomless bowl involved hidden tubes that gradually refilled soup as it was being consumed.  In that case, Achilles (soup eater) would indeed never catch the tortoise (empty the bowl of its contents). All of it, though, was rooted in trickery.

Regardless of what Zeno could concoct in the realm of pure logic and Wansink in the realm of rigged experiments, good old lived experience leads us to believe that Achilles would sprint right past his challenger, and diners could empty a bowl of soup. Careful attention to detail can indicate why Wansink’s bowl is never emptied.  Careful attention to logic seems to support Zeno.

Still, in life, both logic and experience need to be balanced off each other. The logic of Zeno may be impeccable, but surely his conclusion is flawed.  

Zeno succumbed to a  pervasive philosophical temptation.  It involves two steps:. (1) substitute a mental grid for lived experience. (2) make that grid one of granularism.  In other words, substitute isolated units for the continuum that is life experience. For Zeno this meant thinking of time as a series of discrete points.

So prominent is Zeno’s legacy that we  automatically think that, of course, time is composed of separate, discrete

instants. But lived experience, if we will attend to it, suggests otherwise: not granular units, but events and spans, entangled fluxes of experience.  Temporality is inherently linked, as Aristotle long ago noted, to activities and events. In this characterization time is not a separate, neutral counter but is correlative with events. Baseball still treats time this way. It is the activities on the field, not a separate clock, that determines the time of a game.  Post-Einstein physics moves in a similar direction.  If we could move at the speed of light, it suggests, we would never age.

The Zeno grid assumes that a photograph captures something basic--an instant, a moment, a discrete unit.  Experientially, however, discrete moments do not exist. Photographs distort experience, creating a singular instant as if it existed separately. There is no frozen instant. Temporality is continuous. The present is the past flowing into the future.  

Traditionally, this sense of time as correlative with events was taken for granted.  One of the characters in Dickens´ A Tale of Two Cities says he is tired

because he has worked through “two tides.”  It is, as we know, possible to impose a granular grid, one disconnected from specific actions. Such a time might even be necessary in an industrial world, one where whistles and horns signal the beginning and end of work.  

Still, natural time persists.  All biological entities (and even geological ones)  are

beings in time. This means that temporality is measured by spans associated with activities. Examples: Achilles racing the turtle;  working through one or two tides; the era lived at a specific address; a birthday party; the trip to Morocco; the high school years. In each case, temporality and activity are intertwined.  Time is not artificially cut up into discrete units. It is characterized by courses of overlapping activities connected by some thematic ordering.

Zeno, his descendants, and our dependence on clocks  have left such a legacy that we hardly question the granular understanding of time.  It may have once been quite natural to speak of time in terms of tides. Today, that way of speaking, instead of balancing clock time, has been totally occluded.

It does not have to be so. Experience and logic can serve as mutual self-correctives.  After all, Zeno, no matter what were his intentions, has taught us an important lesson.  If we start with the assumptions of a granular take on things, we will land ourselves in impenetrable paradoxes.

 

Eat/Die2

Robert Indiana’s Diptych highlights two words Eat and Die.  “Eat,” as we saw in the previous blog, is complicated. Yes, we eat in order to stay alive, but human eating tells us something about what it means to be fully human.

Something similar occurs with “die.”  Martin Heidegger, once again, leads the way.  He suggests that animals “perish” whereas humans “die.” Conscious awareness marks the difference.  Heidegger gets all worked up about this, referring to human life as Sein-zum-tode “being unto death.” On one level the phrase is a truism: we live in the awareness of our mortality.  As a result, prioritization about how to spend our limited span is forced upon us. At its best, it encourages  a more “authentic” existence.

So far so good, but there are limitations.

First, the “being-unto-death” focus is too individualistic.  Fastening on concern about my individual death ignores an important aspect of existence: sorrow and

grief. Grief at the death of others is often the earliest confrontation with mortality.  The experience of grief moves us away from the isolated subject facing his (this is the pronoun Heidegger would have preferred) own death. Grief means we have loved. The love/grief awareness, in turn, reveals something important about our cares, concerns and patterns of significance. Death experienced as grief diverts attention from the atomized subject and its authenticity. It emphasizes, rather, worthiness of a life lived in relation with others.

Second, we are not just “beings-unto-death.”  Our physiologies signal a pattern. Fully articulated, it’s a pattern of birth, puberty (because we do not live forever),

birth of others, then death.  Even if we do not have children of our own, we are attuned to the birth/puberty/birth/death/ cycle.This is where eating, and the mother imagery from the previous blog, come again to the fore.  The gestating mother, the one who is food for the fetus, is about to do something very important, something inseparable from mortality, give birth to a new human being.

Isolating mortality from natality encourages insulated, self-directed, reflection on how to shape our life trajectories.  Admitting we are both “beings-unto-death” and “beings-unto-birth” encourages a more social set of concerns. It encourages us to reflect on the  kind of world we will leave behind for the offspring who will follow (whether we actually produced some or not).

Third, life-time should not be thought of as an unending sequence of instants. When time is envisioned as a line, it makes sense to envision life as possibly going on forever. This is what the 16th century philosopher Spinoza, did when he

asserted  that any finite entity strives to “persevere in its being.” Experience teaches a different lesson. Finite beings realize they are part of a finite cycle.

 

Time is every bit as much a cycle as it is a line. Perhaps, for lived experience, time is actually more periodic than linear. Even philosophers fascinated by an unending line recognize nature’s cycles of seasons and years. They realize how  the sun itself will, at some point, come to an end. Life-time is periodic, punctuated by  beginnings and an endings. For biological creatures, periodicity is marked by overlapping spans, with  newer generations always in the making.

Death may be untimely and thus appear as a dark-garbed, scythe-wielding assassin. But death itself is not opposed to life. It is a necessary constituent of any life-trajectory. Our path as organisms is to live a limited span, make a kind of mark, leave offspring and die.  Emphasizing only the impulse to live on, or thinking of death as a kind of enemy is, in an important sense, to deny our humanity. Contrary to Spinoza we should encourage finite beings to accept their finitude.

When we think mortality, grieving, and natality together, we can recognize how thoughtful reflection can move in a direction different from the existentialist emphasis on an”authentic” life. That

emphasis includes a few important elements: (a) Thinking mortality/grief/natality together encourages us to think in terms of “we” rather than “I.” (b) A fundamental concern moves from  “how shall I live authentically,” to “how shall we make a world for the next generation?” (c) Finally the mortality/grief/natality awareness encourages a shift in time-consciousness. We recognize ourselves as periodic beings, part of a particular span which will impact overlapping, subsequent spans. The emphasis is thus on generosity in terms of what we bequeath. Worthiness replaces authenticity.

Eat/Die. Both unavoidable. Both complicated. Both sources of philosophical reflection. The best reflection will hold them together. We are beings unto life and death. Isolating one from the other falsifies our condition and leads to faulty thinking.

The Hands of Time

The Culinary Institute of America has a wall full of hand prints.   Not just random prints but those of well-known chefs. That the CIA would memorialize chefs via their hands makes eminent sense.  Everything about the cooking process involves hands: planting, harvesting, cutting, peeling, handling skillets, cleaning up.   Before she got famous with Chez Panisse, Alice Waters worked at a Montessori school. “Montessori went straight to my heart, because it’s all about encountering the world through the senses. That how kids learn best. The hands are the instrument of the mind--that was how Maria Montessori put it.”

Sadly, when it comes to philosophers, the mind-hand couple linked by Montessori tends to be disconnected.  The general trajectory has been decidedly one-directional: moving away from the concrete realm of lived experience (hands) and toward the a more abstract, more simplified, more artificial one (mind).

Take time.  We still use expressions like “springtime,” “lunch time,” “having a rough time” or maybe the “time of one’s life.”  Such expressions remind us of an older, more concrete,  take on time:  a span defined by ongoing activities, permeated by a qualitative dimension.  

We might call this “baseball time.”  

The question “how long a time does a game last?” cannot be answered by referring to a fixed clock counting down the instants.  The “time” of a game, depends on the activities taking place on the field.  Similarly, on the more traditional take,  “noon” is not marked by a clock but by the sun’s position in the sky.  There is no separate, quantitative, “time” running independently of ongoing (qualitative) activities, the two are interwoven.

Our world is filled with phrases like “killing time,” “wasting time,”  “time is money.” To get there required a philosophical shift indicating a more artificial take on time. Instead of thinking time in terms of events, i.e. the day/night cycle, think of it on the model of a detached, homogeneous line composed of separate dots.  The dots, instants, keep disappearing and the line is quite separate from ongoing activities. Think, not of baseball, but of sports regulated by a clock. Springtime, summertime, wintertime, as qualitative markers, fade away. Instead, we highlight a  time-line that ignores the specifics of ongoing activities.  The newer take on time both creates and celebrates the world of 24/7.  In such a world there would, ideally, be no pauses, no suspensions of busy-ness, no limitations on the dominance of commerce in life. Instead of baseball time we now have Las Vegas time.  

Let’s say it’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So what?  The casinos, working 24/7, don’t differentiate between this day or any other.  Sunshine is fading, night is arriving.  So what?  Why sleep?  The gaming rooms are open 24/7.   The natural cycle of day/night, along with the cultural cycle of historical/political, religious celebrations become annoyances, frustrations, interruptions in the nonstop frenzy of Las Vegas time.

The 24/7 world of all commerce all the time, transforms many traditional activities associated with hands into  wastes of time.  The handprints at the Culinary Institute remind us of an area which has taken a special hit, cooking.  As mentioned in a previous blog, a Silicon Valley engineer has even invented a food substitute, the ready-made drink Soylent, that can be utilized in  lieu of meals.   Eating food that is the product of loving hands, the preparation and clean-up of which often involves the helping hands of others, becomes more and more an exception rather than the rule. 

  

The personal world of the hands has not disappeared. But, as philosophy goes so goes daily life, and much philosophy has taken us into the world of abstractions.  24/7, along with the outsourcing accompanying it, transforms key instances of natural and cultural time into annoyances and limitations.  How to resist? Well, humans are, after all, the only animals that cook.  They are also the only animals that engage in relaxed conversations. Perhaps using hands to produce meals, cooperating with the helping hands of others in preparation and cleaning up, all the while engaging in conversation, is one way to establish a beachhead.