Sunday, July 17, 2005
Speaking - and living
The Taoist understands that there is in nature a profound intelligence that the rational mind can never comprehend. Even as a horse cannot run beyond the borders of its corral, so the rational mind cannot venture beyond the limits of language and the categories of thought.Laurence Boldt
Zen and the Art of Making a Living (40).
When Wittgenstein wrote, "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence," he was an imposing a limit on the knowable world and our ability to systematically define it. But whether that limits the world, just us, or something more subtle is another question. Boldt is hinting at what Wittgenstein might have admitted: Nothing worth knowing can be definitively known. We can experience it, and we can talk around it, but we cannot capture it as a set of ordered facts subject to our manipulation.
It is interesting that Boldt tossed in a reference to "categories of thought." He does evoke Kant throughout his text, and here the reason is clear. Our brain, like our existence, argues Boldt, stands not in contrast to nature but within it and emanating from it. What we can know definitively is limited not by logic, per se, but by our natural ability to reason.
What Boldt is saying, and what we're inferring, is not new and has doubtless been better said elsewhere. Still, it merits succinct formulation: Rationality is a trait as natural to man as claws to a cat. As such, his rationality does not differentiate him from nature, only from other parts of nature.
Those who separate man from nature, be they church fathers or environmentalists, fail to understand that in our application of rational thought, we are neither sophisticated computers nor divinely inspirited golemns, but rather are at once animal and divine, containing within us the possibility of making and shaping worlds internal and external, yet constrained by the limits of our natural or God-given abilities where action in the physical - and in a different way, intellectual - realm is concerned.
In Wittgenstein's formulation, our abilities as logical and rational beings limit our ability to experience the world, with our choices constrained to absolute rational comprehension and the nullity of silence. Let us reformulate: That of which we cannot speak, we must be content to live.
posted by gbarto at 10:31 PM