rational perspective, its origins |
When you don't know where you are, what are your prospects? Suppose you have no viewpoint to establish directions. If the mind is a tabula rasa, empty of directions, where does it obtain a sense of place? If there is a map or representation of reality stored in our heads, where did it come from? I mean, if we can intuit what we know before we know by means of an abstract or absolute set of germane ideas, how did they get there? More to the point, how do we apply them?
Not altogether irrelevant. We are, however, insignificant, copies of what surrounds us, our womb and cradle. The order we apprehend out there, which is commensurate with the order we comprehend in here -- not one and the same, for our capacity if finite -- is intelligent, has a design, as we perceive it, of an order we can find no purchase on. Idle as it may seem, it is in the back of a philosopher's mind, this mystery.
What i do know is this: in the world of circumstance where place and the establishment of position are of vital importance, a necessity, we negotiate from what is known, either directly or by inference. Brash guesses are bad karma.
In the rude bush when a scotch mist has settled, no landmarks lying in sight and the cattle you sought drifted off like human vanities, you listen. The sound of water perhaps, or the bell of one of the cattle. Any familiar sound you can place. Scouting the lay of the land for a reference point. Bringing into perspective the frame or grid you hold in your head. Teasing it with possibilities. The straying cattle can rely on senses we don't know of: are not sensitive to. We on our part have developed a special gift, an introvert sense, the inner eye of the mental imagination.
We do inside our heads what we do on the outside (in a manner of speaking); we manipulate and control the data our senses receive, turning the information into a facsimile of what is presented to the senses, much as the camera performs with the lens, or optical glass, and a light-sensitive film, focussing and getting different angles. The prospect is put into perspective. The external world is internalized selectively. We operate this robotic eye as by remote, imagining and projecting things seen as objects subjectively, commanding viewpoints we could not possibly obtain otherwise. Inaccessible. What we can now project on a computer screen when we manipulate schemata in space.
Reality, what is, admitting no dimensions, we put them there. Charts of reference. Interpreting so it can be got at, readily understood. Assigning properties of place, distance and direction to what is ultimately irrational, a void with no perspective. Our senses' putative determinations and definitions. Oh, yes, something exists out there, but thinking won't get us any closer than models.
We locate ourselves in irrational space by rational means. Clamp hold of something and begin from there. Doesn't matter what we clamp on to, as long as it's predictable, won't go away. Just hang on. The void seems to stop swirling. Phenomena settle down. We lose the bewilderment of a dizzy prospect. Everything is in motion, or motion of change, but we have adjusted ourselves to the constant motion of our base; we are stable. Then we anchor our base to another. Variables rendered constants. A framework for further orderly arrangement. Now what we need is a third eye, the ability to imagine. An eye that doesn't feel the distress of disequilibrium. Rationality is born -- or conceived. The capacity to view things in respect to their relative distance and position, subdued by mensuration, discrete and continuous magnitude. The control of spacial arrangements, no less. In our heads. Internally visualized and codified. That's where our internalized blueprint of reality came from.
Note. I have skipped over primitive or judgmental rationality, cavalierly, for it is traced elsewhere.
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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