There is plenty of evidence for such unity beyond reports of a higher level of consciousness

Andy Smith Says: May 3rd, 2007 at 5:14 pm Hi, Greg, I did read your article “Physics and Language…” and enjoyed it immensely. Though you didn’t really get into the question of the role of values in science till the very end, the parallels between language and physics from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein I found very interesting. As you probably know, there are other parallels between views in science and the humanities. Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point was an early attempt at this, more comprehensive but I would say much less sophisticated than yours. A case could also be made in the life sciences, though the correlations I would say are not as close as with physics.

If we accept your general thesis, we might ask, why? Why is there this parallel, and also why do these changes in our understanding of difference occur when they do? Is it just that as time passes, insight advances, helped by standing on the shoulders of previous generations? That’s surely part of it, but I suggest that another factor involved is simply increasing population. As societies become more densely populated, interactions among people become more numerous as well as more complex, and I think under those conditions people become more aware of context. One might almost say (I’m exaggerating a little here to make a point) that the postmodern understanding of language is truer for us than it was for Aristotle. We live in a much more heavily contextualized society than was the case in ancient Greece. Words have broader, fuzzier and more rapidly changing meanings, because language occurs at a more frenetic pace.

If we accept this idea, that raises the issue of where our understanding will go as the world evolves further. I am not going to get into a detailed discussion of holarchy here, but a broad evolutionary view indicates that life develops through levels, and that these levels themselves each develop from a unitary (atom, cell, organism) to a social (molecules, tissues, societies) phase, back to a new unity when the next level appears. From this point of view, we are at a highly social, intersubjective phase, and are acutely aware of how we are embedded in contexts. But if a new, higher level appears, I believe that would again be a unifying one.

Keep in mind that there is plenty of evidence for such unity beyond reports of a higher level of consciousness. The state we are in at birth approaches this kind of unity (not the same unity of higher consciousness, because it is at a lower level, but analogously unified). Even at birth a human being may not be totally removed from language, but pretty close. We can also see this unity in lower levels of existence, in organisms that do not have social organizations.

So my point here is that societies, and the perception they bring, are only one particular stage in one particular level of existence. Other forms of perception accompany other stages on our own and other levels of existence. The kinds of conclusions that Derrida makes may be appropriate for humans as most of us exist now. I would not say that they close off all possibilites for the future.

Greg Desilet Says: May 3rd, 2007 at 5:55 pm Derrida offers a view of reality/being. From that view an ultimate stepping out experience beyond language (understood broadly as arche-writing, trace), beyond presence/absence into full presence, is not theorized as possible. But Derrida’s view of reality/being could be wrong!

A statement like “the truth is there is no truth” or “it’s certain there is no certainty” re-inscribes the notion of truth in the very act of dismantling it. This shows how there is no escape from truth and this coincides with Derrida’s claim that there is no escape from metaphysics. And this still leaves open the question of the nature of truth, whether it is relative or absolute, or some paradoxical combination of the two (depending on how you want to theorize context). From here it’s difficult to sort out. Too difficult for me! Like trying to see thirty moves into a chess game.