logic, the fundamentals |
Fundament seems to be ground or base, element a simple or integral part, and rudiment the beginnings, unformed or primitive.
Webster:
Simple explanations, very pointed. We can conceive the foot as a base from which we step, one foot forward, one grounded. Then the forward foot grounded and the back foot swung forward.
Why then do we start with our left foot consistently? Shows a lack of confidence and conviction, for our weak foot (the majority's) ventures on the unknown journey. Shouldn't faith and imagination adventure first? We do not begin life boldly! What one can expect of the military service, a lack of dash expected of those afoot, but civilians, free to choose, stereotyped and limited at birth? Crippled by habitual usage.
To make a 90° turn we stop and swivel on the facing foot and lead off with the other. Grounded at the point of the turn, making an angle. If we imagine that our body has made two planes instead of lines, then the junction of the planes has become a hinge or axis. The knee is a hinge. The rudiments of geometry described by the human figure. Introvert these. Perform them inside your head, first as a picture then as an abstract motion. Bases, points to turn on, angles made and how things hinge on one another, these form the elements of logic operation.
In a void there is nothing to hang on to. Similarly if everything is in motion without relation anything else, where do you hang your hat? We can state an axiom that you can't locate in nothing. (absolute space) Everything depends on something else. The world is going round and round. The sun is going round and round. The planet and stars are going round and round. The universe is going round and round. Multiverses (as far as we can guess) do likewise. We feel giddy watching the procession and thank goodness we have our feet on the ground. If we took off on a sudden trajectory losing touch with where we had stood, we'd soon be looking for something handy to align ourselves with. And yet, whatever we referred to as a ground or base, it would still be going round, in motion relative to something, but not necessarily relative to other things.
We assume that this motion, that of the great orbs has a purpose and the whole shooting match is in sync. Give or take several bits and pieces noticed in passing. Everything is in motion relative to something else, but relative to what we don't care unless it affects us. One item of use we learn fast: there are no fixed points except the local ones we establish and from them we make our references. The simple points, lines and angles we start out with, these are what every other frame of reference is established upon. Though bases become secure, standards are set, and measures are advanced and refined.
This notion of perspective, of seeing things with the inner or third eye, of pictures drawn from physical effects abstracted. We see as if with a feeling. The corkscrew motion can be imagined in our heads, stripped of its particulars. The essence seems to be left. We consult such inward perspectives at every turn. Logic is made up of them. We seek stability in a mobile world. Fix ourselves, Orient our sense of direction, assimilating our body's movements, using them as instruments, guides. Left, right, forward, reverse, one step forward, touch this, single it out, join it with that. All our senses combine to form an organic perspective on the world around, our sensesurroundings. These rudiments form the elements of what we determine knowledge by and with, creating stability in a seemingly chaotic environment. Order is the first order of business for a rational brain. Why rational? To control.
Judgment, balance and perspective, then. We discovered how to tally with our fingers. How to balance these tallies with each olauther, making pairs of our hands and apposing or opposing them. Predicables, predictions, subject and predicate. Equivalents weighed against identities (real values). After concerning point and line, we entertain angle and hinge, plane surface, volume, with detour through curve and circle and on to wave, rotations and revolutions. We visualize and control these operations by means of our third eye, abstractly, removed of their physical presences; the logic of the world and later the universe as we hubristically proclaim. A poor copy! A good copy for our purposes, which are not always good, and a far, far cry from the original which our ingenious wits, stretched to their rational limits cannot comprehend. For point, line and so on do not exist in the external world, they exist in our conception of that world. "They seem to fit". So they do. Because throughout our creatural striving we were and are of that external world. It is not extraordinary that we should develop out of its order, directed by it, that design, which we suppose to be ours, our copy of it. What that external world granted as perceptions to our sense-organs is like -- what it really is -- we cannot and shall not know by reasoning. The copy can never be what it represents.
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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