syncrisis and logic |
The general idea is that of differing parts that together make up a whole, or are so put together, usually an integration. A lump of salt is not a compound, salt itself is.
Webster:I apologize for introducing a major authority. Do not fear, the expression is obsolete. Oxford Major quotes M. Lewis, 1674, Ess. Ed. Youth, 17: "All instruction ought to be by syncrisis, that is, comparing what we are to learn with what we know."
Isn't this induction? Though induction isn't comparing diverse or opposite things, except as they exhibit similarities. How can we compare diverse things except through relation? Makes us think. Examine what we already know. Putting one thing with another until we see the light. Ah, they don't have to be alike as long as they fit together. Constituent parts. As if it were organic, composed, fused, combined to begin with. Well, a chemical may not be organic, but it is put together from distinct parts. A product of combining various elements.
Syncritic, syncritical. Makes sense now. Not oxymoronical. Dividing to put together. Analysis brought to bear, not just with the wish to know but testing and questioning. With a feeling for the composition of things in our minds, their empirical relationship, how things are bound together as they are, immediately, in our experience.
Even today scientists perform experiments so as to get the right answer. Testing, getting feedback from reality, reality being what is as it is perceived (or observed). The answer to the question, the right answer, is licit. What we ask here is how different parts of a whole are related by composition. How they fit together. We divide the whole into parts to see how it is made up, but here we don't lose sight of the whole, we keep a strict eye on the relationship they exhibit rather than the singularity of the part.
A good analysis is like this, you say. And i agree. What we don't agree on, not at the moment, is the distinction between the logical operation we call analysis and what the broad world demands of analysis. To analyze is to reduce to parts. Parts of a whole. This is not deduction, the separation of one thing from all else, almost a mechanical act -- indeed, a habitual act -- here we separate the parts of a whole. In actual fact, analysis is forced on the subject, willy-nilly, whether it responds to the operation or not. Cut off your finger to see what it's made of. Wrong question. An answer, yes. Not what you were looking for. You can analyze the hand without cutting off your finger. By illustrations. Not firsthand, but less painful, and closer to the spirit of an inquiry into the nature of finger.
Some things are susceptible to pure analysis, others are incompatible. Simple as that. What things? Not firsts. Firsts by proxy or proximity. Because when you destroy something, tear it apart, something that can't be put together again, it's gone. As the child feels when it bursts the balloon. Oh dear, gone, irretrievable! There's lots more balloons in the world. "Here, dearie, don't cry, look at this lovely balloon." All's right with the world.
I don't need to push it further. Ridiculous. "How many atom bombs can destroy the world?" Pah! No, analysis as a logical operation has its place in the discipline of logic. We all use it. Incredibly useful. An act of the mind. Performed on our apprehensions of phenomena. Our experiences. When we look into our experiences, mentally pick them apart, those that have a constitutional or organic unity -- say, a dream, a flower, a city composed of people and buildings and so on, a musical composition -- we question how the subject is made up. We can get right answers which are licit, or wrong answers which are incompatible with the integrity of the subject. Just so. And to do this we employ all the operations of logic. We can't get new knowledge, which we are after, until we compare what we are to learn with what we know. Syncrisis. No more a hybrid than hypothesis and synthesis, for we can't ask one without the other. Logic is compounded. Parts put together so as to form a whole!
"Memory serves to locate us in space and time."
John Varley, "Steel Beach" P.107 Ace Books, N.Y, N.Y.
Paperback Edition '93
I am resolved to understand analysis, though it takes some resolving:
Webster:How is it that we suppose a complex notion breaks down into simpler ones? The influence of a deterministic attitude, perhaps?
WebsterIs the act or process of resolving clear and understandable now, separated into its component parts, broken up into a play of colour?
When i reflect on analysis i go back (in memory, in space and time) to my schooldays and the chemistry lab. When first introduced (age nine) i beheld a scene from a moving picture or a book about a mad alchemist (They were all mad, all mad and brilliant, all perverted geniuses). Pipettes, flasks, coils of glass piping, retorts seated over bunsen burners. An unknown solution bubbling at one end, gas vapour seething between, and drops of liquid emanating at the other.
Set up for our benefit? Probably. To impress the tyros. Bug out their little eyes. I didn't realize that then, i do now. They took the magic away. (I eventually flunked chemistry.)
We didn't get access to sophisticated equipment. Simple tests and experiments sufficed for us, in trios. Boring! Learning, if you don't understand what you are doing can be boring. Chemistry was mostly learning by rote, laws and hypotheses and formulas and tables. We took things apart, we never put them together. Nothing added up. Breaking down into smaller parts, that was chemistry. Meaningless division. And the parts, they were held together by numbers and inverse ratios. Even ratios divided by ratios. Or multiplied. I forget which. My memory conveniently forgot then, and does now, what it doesn't find relevant. An unfortunate trait, but memory does what it will and mine follows interest. Well, in the pursuit of knowledge.
We can see why analytical logic falls into this deterministic pattern. Grinding down. Dissolving. Reducing. All into simpler parts. So simple they become signs and cyphers. No content, no reference in space and time for the mind to take hold of and address.
The hawkbit (family, compositae) that irrepressible urchin flower of summer and autumn, it doesn't break down into simpler parts. Each component is a world in itself. Bonded together not by numbers and ratios (though we will find them exhibited, oh yes) but by wholeness: i am this individual flower, i live my individual life; the parts are not me, i am the parts. And i take root here, am nourished here, flourish here. Bonded where i live. Easy to dismiss as a weed of no account. A nuisance. An intruder.
A whole bound to its parts. General and particular. How can that logic fit here? The flower is a whole with parts. Determinable but not divisible. The parts are not the same as we conveniently assume in order to divide and count. Nor are the people of a city. As with the flower, there are influences beyond the thing itself that may have to be taken into account. The boundaries of the city are not its bounds. We can analyze the behaviour of the resident population as if we were dealing with a universal and its particulars. We can do that with the buildings. Taken altogether, city, people, neighbourhoods, buildings, streets, parks, dogs and cats, the whole kaboodle, the parts are not particulars. They behave as individuals, yes, they also belong to a whole which belongs to a greater whole. Intangibles intrude as they always will. Intangibles, that may or may not be known, that may or may not be determinable, that cannot be plucked out from their ground and identified by analysis, by reduction.
Obvious. Got to ask the right questions. To solve the insoluble you find a different solution. Another form of logic. A compatible form of logic. Doesn't that add up? Beating a drum won't work, i know that. People plug up their ears. Go about their business. One of the greatest compliments for a philosopher is to be heard, understood and ignored. The understanding has become the learner's own.
a licit inference, an intuition
So simple. So easy. The new knowledge becomes integrated with what was already known. There's no leap, no springboard, no blinding light, no Eureka. A licit inference becomes stepless, an intuition. "We knew it all along!"
"Memory is a funny thing It can't be as sharp as we'd sometimes like to believe it is. If it was, it would be like an hallucination. We'd be seeing two scenes at once...
"But now is fundamentally different from the past...
"Sure, there were those with eidetic memories, who could memorize long lists instantly. There were people who were better than i at recalling the relatively unimportant details of life. As for my belief that a recalled scene can never be as alive, as colorful, as sweeping as the present moment...(sic) while i will concede that a trained visual artist might see things in more detail than i, and recollect them better, i still maintain that nothing can compare with the present moment, because it is where we all live."John Varley, "Steel Beach" Pp.106-7-8. Ace Books, '93 (op. cit)
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
top
back
next
Title Page
home