Reply to the response to Entry 55.

"I am not disputing that reason is a necessary part of knowing. However, some forms of knowing cannot be COMPLETELY reduced to reason. Take for example the part of self-knowledge that exists within and through the aesthetic experience. I would assert that there are PARTS of the aesthetic experience that cannot be completely subsumed under a rational schema, or maybe even reason itself. See Kant's analytic of the sublime (whose title is, of course, a grand irony in itself). The sublime reveals to us aspects of ourselves that interact with that which is absolutely, beyond all measure, great. It does not correspond with our reason; its pleasure, moreover comes from the tension created between our need through reason to understand the experience, and the consequent failure to do so. On another topic, self knowledge as a part of the religious experience. Now, while reason can, and in most cases should, be a part of one's religious life, it does not follow that every part of the religious experience can be reduced to reason. Again, we cannot get outside of ourselves, that much is true. But BEING ourselves necessarily entails parts of existence that do not always correspond with a logical proposition.

"All knowledge must entail a form of reasoning, no matter how limited" would depend upon how you define reasoning, and how WE as a community would define reason.

Perhaps, "we cannot have knowledge without reason, just as we cannot have reason without knowledge", but does that necessarily mean that all knowledge can be reduced to reason? That reason can, in itself, be seen as a sufficient condition for self- knowledge and that self-knowledge, or the way we understand self-knowledge, can be fully contained within the "proposition"?

I never really understood what you meant by "the limits of reason", could you please explain? Perhaps you meant that total self-knowledge is not possible simply because WE are continuously "becoming"--by being who we are. Is this so? We are constantly changing beings who cannot have the type of total knowledge gained by someone who can "step outside ourselves and view ourselves as a totality"? Does this not assume that we can exist at least epistemologically as a total individual outside of our "being"? Perhaps total self-knowledge is simply not possible simply because we do not exist as beings who can be understood in totality... Because again, as we both agree, knowledge of oneself necessarily entails being oneself, and not in the way that one cannot even begin to understand oneself without existing. But through existence itself, through the process of existence, we come to continually reinvent and become ourselves.

The filter of our analytical reasoning comes from an environment where analytical understandings are appropriate and necessary to a more complete understanding of oneself. I won't go into that topic because I really do not have the background necessary to argue the point sufficiently.

In terms of us existing through a praxis of being-in-the world from knowledge of ourselves or limited knowledge of ourselves, I would submit that we exist through both, though not always simultaneously. The limited knowledge we have of ourselves seems to be a necessary component of knowing ourselves and enacting that knowledge through "being in the world".

Roger Whitson June 3 2000

Response:

We disagree that some forms of knowing cannot be reduced to reason. By the mere fact that we know something, it has conscious meaning to us. If it does not have conscious meaning, then from our perspective there is no knowing.

Further, if the "sublime" and certain "religious experiences" reveal to us aspects of ourselves beyond reason, it follows that what they reveal is inexpressible or beyond knowing; and therefore, they really do not reveal anything, because there is nothing about them we can comprehend. As soon as you use the word, reveal, you use the notions of knowing and reasoning.

For clarification and in simple terms, we define reason as the comparison of conscious meanings.

Yes, just because knowledge and reason appear inseparable, does not mean that reason is the basis for knowledge. How could it, when reason is a form of knowledge?! However, because we cannot get outside of our minds and know that we are, it follows from our perspective that reason must be the basis for all knowledge, regardless of what concept we come up with. For instance, if we assert that who we are is the basis for reason and knowledge, we ignore that "who we are" is a concept with reason as its basis. In other words, we cannot get outside of our minds, thereby our reason.

The "limits of reason" refers to limitation of knowledge, whereby everything we know appears to be circular, or bottoms out into an unknown; so we are left with uncertainty, or certainty, regarding the validity of knowledge.

How can someone step outside of himself and view himself as a totality? If he stepped outside of himself, what he stepped out of would not be in totality nor would he exist outside of himself. Also, as soon as he returned to who he is, assuming he somehow acquired total knowledge of themselves, he would face the dilemma of how he can know who he is while being who he is. It appears that his knowledge would be in a state of oneness with himself, and therefore, it would be unknowable. In other words, how can he, or anyone, know without intrinsic separation from what he is?

We disagree that through the existence, and its process, we become ourselves. From our perspective, we cannot help from being us ourselves. There is nothing to become, and everything to be. The notion of continually reinventing ourselves, and thereby becoming ourselves through the reinvention of ourselves appears to be a product of the world and our minds, in which paraphrasing Shakespeare, everyone is on the stage of the world, acting out their part(s). The part(s) are not really who we are.

How can we have any true, complete, or partial understanding of ourselves (ie. our fundamental level of being)?

What environment are you referring to, which apparently allows to use our analytical reason to understand ourselves the most? How can we understand us ourselves, or at least partially, through analytical reason, when we are the ones behind our analytical reason?

How can we know ourselves through the limited knowledge of ourselves?

58. Entry:

"I think this proposition has something to do with the one which is written in Paulo Coello´s book the Alquimnist that says "Since the very first moment you speak about love you are losing the opportunity to LOVE. In the limits of the ego (self) you lose your own identity and starting to be engulf by the NOTHINGNESS you feel like Santa Teresa de Jesus when says "I live without living inside of me". In this situation everything needs the rest of the things to be defined, so nothing has ITS own meaning inside. Like in Goedel´s theorem always there is a metatheorem which gives consistence to the theorem, which gets its consistence thanks to a metametatheorem and so on. So reason has to be humbled and let other way of thinking come up. In this situation (as said in Camus´ book "The Myth of Sisifo") you can express the way you feel but not the very last reasons of things, because you are part of the WEB OF LIVE without intrinsic meaning, knowing at the same time that if you want to know who you really are, you need to fade away yourself into the others, and REASONS starts the journey but after falling in his own tricky games lets the REAL SELF take over, and this is pure activity, like the very essence of the universe (Energy-Nothingness), and in this situation is when you(the ego) could really BE, but the problem is that there is no real ego to think that IT really IS, in this situation the ego has become the unnamable, and THE UNNAMABLE only can be what IT really IS."

Jose Maria Hernandez Roca June 4 2000

Response:

How can other ways of thinking transcend reason, if reason is the basis for all thinking? In other words, how can anyone think without at the same time reasoning? In our view, it is impossible. So if we are correct, reason and all thinking must be "humbled". Though we used reason and our thought to make this conclusion, which takes us to the dilemma that everything we reason and think is neither certain nor uncertain. Our thought appears to be an empty form in our minds through us ourselves asserting its existence through imagination. Though we cannot really know whether this conclusion, or any other, is valid or invalid. From our perspective, it is up to each one of us as reasoning beings to decide for ourselves what we believe or do not, without apparently having the support of truly knowing something. This point takes us to another dilemma of how we can be guided by reason and yet be selective in what we believe through it? Can we base the world and our preservation on ideas that are contradictory and invalid in relation to other reasonable ideas? We come to the "Challenge the Philosophy" competition in which to be consistent and true to our reasoning, we must have the most sound and consistent beliefs in relation to all others we know, or detach from reason and thought, and possibly detach from them from our beliefs.

We do not label "you (the ego)" unknowable, because it implies that "you (the ego)" could be known without us knowing that it is. We use the label "inexpressible", which means that "you (the ego)" cannot ever be known, and even without us knowing that it is. In other words, if we cannot express something (ie. express it in thought), it follows that we cannot know it or know what it means.

59. Entry:

"Your proposition is easily refuted.

As in the Epimenides paradox, or the theorem Kurt Godel your proposition executes itself.

If the proposition is true, then there is no way of knowing it, because it is itself an example of the self knowledge that we can't know. On the other hand, the very act of knowing that it is true refutes it, for the same reason.

Many philosophers, Wittgenstein and A.J. Ayer among them, would go on to say that if a proposition cannot, even in theory, be verified, it is essentially meaningless.

I am inclined to agree."

Jefferson Bronfeld June 5 2000

Response:

Your argument refutes itself because since we know the proposition, it follows that it cannot be "true", just as your act of knowing it is "true" throws into question your act of knowing, and not the proposition as you claim. You may reply that since the proposition is not "true", it must be false. Though in what sense is it false, since there is apparently no absolute truth we know? In our view, if the proposition is false, and thereby refuted, on grounds of not being a truth, it follows that every proposition we know is refuted on the same grounds. However, you may believe that there are absolute truths, with no system restrictions, we know. If so, how can you know something that is absolute? What is an example of it?

For a similar entry as your own see Entry 32.

Finally, if all knowledge is circular, and thereby uncertain, how can any proposition be truly verified, especially when we are uncertain what we are verifying? Again, verification like truth appears limited and relational, not to mention temporal.

60. Entry:

Reply to the response to Entry 59.

"How do you know that "verification like truth appears limited, relational, and temporal" is true? You assert that all truth is limited and relational, and there are no absolutes. If that is true, then it is absolutely true, thus contradicting itself. If the truth of your assertion is not absolutely true, then your assertion may be sometimes not true, and when your assertion is not true, it means that maybe sometimes truth is not relational but absolute."

Jefferson Bronfeld June 12 2000

Response:

When we assert something like there are no absolute truths, we are only doing so from the limit of what we know.

Yes, if the assertion that "there is nothing absolutely true" may not be true, it follows that there may be an absolute truth(s). Yet, we could assert that "there is an absolute truth", and when it is not true, there is no absolute truth, or when it is apparently true (ie. there is an absolute truth), we have no way of proving it due to the circularity of knowledge. Hence, it appears that we cannot assert anything absolutely, as if our knowledge is neither true nor untrue. Perhaps, it is an empty form.

In terms of the validity of the challenge proposition, it may be a truth and not one at the same time, because although we may not be able to know who we are, we can never know for sure due to the limit of what we know. In other words, although we may not be able to know who we are, the challenge proposition, or "who we are" only represents whoever we are without actually being it. Therefore, we can never know if the proposition is true or not, even though it may be in a limited sense. All we can do is rely on our reason to guide us. It leads to the dilemma of how we can know anything without intrinsic separation from it?

61. Entry:

Reply to the response to Entry 57.

"If reason is the comparison of conscious meanings, and as you said you cannot have knowledge without conscious meaning, would reason not have a conscious meaning and therefore need a meta-reason in order to examine the reason of reason? And so on and so forth, into an almost infinite progression of reasonings--one that is so detached from the original experience of being human that it knows little or nothing about being?

Mustn't we experience reason in order to use reason? If this is necessary, wouldn't knowledge apart from ourselves about ourselves necessarily involve some sort of transcendence, one that may not be bound to the usual rules of "reason"? For total knowledge of ourselves may not have conscious meaning to us, and therefore we might not want to seek total knowledge of ourselves in the first place. hm? For this total knowledge, I am hard pressed to use the word "objective" knowledge because it may not be complete knowledge of ourselves, since it obviously does not entail the knowledge that is a part of actually BEING oneself.

When you state that sublime and religious experience cannot reveal anything beyond our minds, are you asserting that comprehension is only measured by expressibility? Have there not been times when you understood something, but was not able to express it? Now, revelation might inform the individual of things that he can know (being revealed)--but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be fully contained within reason, nor does it mean that which you come to understand through revelation might not point towards some realm where reason is not fully applicable anymore.

Are stating that since we cannot get outside of ourselves, reason is the only form of knowledge we can know? If we can only know the form of knowledge we term as "reason", how can we consider it as A form of knowledge rather than THE form of knowledge? If we only knew reason, then it seems that we would use the terms reason and knowledge interchangeably, having no other form of knowledge to name.

When you define the "limit of reason" by the limitation of knowledge, I am not sure if you are using reason and knowledge interchangeably or if you are seeing reason as a form of knowledge.

I don't think stepping outside of oneself would lead to knowledge of oneself--simply because stepping outside of oneself, giving what seems to be a strange part of human nature (that is BEING)--would not give one MORE knowledge about oneself. I am arguing, here, against your notion that to get knowledge of oneself, one has to stop BEING oneself. That type of knowledge is not possible, I would agree with you. But, perhaps you need to rephrase what you mean by "knowing who you are"...

Even if the reinvention of ourselves is a product of the world and our minds, is the self not a part of the world and the mind and vice versa, are not the world and the mind parts of the self? Being, in my sense of the word, IS becoming. Our being necessarily entails evolution and change. Without this change, there would be no being. That is why I don't think your characterization of self-knowledge is quite accurate.

I think when you assert that we are the ones behind our analytical reason, you are assuming, here (and please correct me if I am wrong) that we completely "made up" reason. Reason, I believe, is a finely tuned (that is experientially tuned) faculty of the mind. We did not completely create reason, nor does reason simply exist within us. We interact with reason and the world even as reason and the world interact with us. Analytical reason gives us knowledge that is made of propositions, solutions, logical truth tables, etc. We come to understand those parts of ourselves when we study logic, analytics, etc.

We can't completely "know ourselves"--but we can have limited knowledge OF ourselves. Those parts of the world we interact with give us, in turn, greater knowledge of ourselves (as we "be" by "becoming"). Limited knowledge necessarily entails some category OF THAT knowledge (whether it be analytical in theme, religious, aesthetic, scientific, business, etc.)"

Roger Whitson June 21 2000

Response:

From our perspective, reason is a conscious label, which refers to the dynamic behind the comparison of conscious meaning(s), and which results in different meanings depending on our definition of our meanings, and our use of reason. To examine reason through reason does not result in a "meta-reason" for a reason, because no matter what our examination comes up with, it would be defined by the comparison of different meanings.

We do not necessarily need to experience reason to use it, because we appear to experience and use reason simultaneously. For example, our language appears impregnated with meanings, and thereby reason; and since all we can know is what in our minds, language, knowledge, and reason must all occur simultaneously. We cannot have language without knowledge and reason, just we cannot have knowledge without language and reason, and reason without knowledge and language.

If total knowledge does not have conscious meaning to us, it follows that we do not know total knowledge of ourselves.

Yes, our knowledge, like a revelation, may not be produced by reasoning, but we can only express the revelation, in intelligible form, through reason.

How can a revelation point to a realm beyond reason, since we have no way of knowing what the realm is or even if there is another realm? In such a situation, it appears that we are tricking ourselves through our minds, or our inability to express the source of our revelation, into believing that there is another realm. In other words, a revelation cannot point, through our reason, to something beyond our reasoning. There is no basis for the conscious pointing.

Since we cannot get outside of our minds and know that we are, reason appears to be the basis for all knowledge, while at the same time being the fundamental form of knowledge. Other forms of knowledge, like intuition, empirical, and a priori, all rely on reason for their expression. So knowledge and reason in terms of phenomenology and epistemology, appear interchangeable. In other words, from our limited perspective, we cannot have a form of knowledge without having reason as the basis for it. Our different meanings for the form of knowledge may trick us into believing that we can separate reason from other forms of knowledge.

How does one get knowledge of oneself if we cannot do it while being oneself or not being oneself?

Yes, who we are appears to be a part of the world and our minds, and vise versa; though the critical question is in what sense is who we are part of the world and our minds? We claim that who we are is intrinsically separate from our minds themselves and the material creation of the world, while at the same time the basis for the creation of our minds and the world.

We agree that our being appears to be in a state of becoming, if we associate change in body with change in being. Though if do not make this association, our being may be in a fixed, infinite state. Yet it does not make sense how our being could exist without change. However, since our being appears beyond our minds, we cannot know anything directly about it.

How can we have any true knowledge of our beings?

We do not assume that we completely "made up" reason, we show that our invention of reason, through an unconscious assertion that conscious meaning exists, is the only feasible explanation for the origin of reason and knowledge.

If we did not create reason (ie. the label and the comparison of different conscious meanings), where did reason and knowledge come from?

How can we through limited knowledge of ourselves know our being? Could it be that what we know of ourselves is mere fabrication which appears true, because both we exist through it, and what we know of ourselves is true within our fabricated existence?

62. Entry:

"The energy that created life has placed human beings with language to communicate. That energy goes forward regardless of our intentions. Just because we get a great idea doesn't mean that other humans will honor it, but we should place value on the inspiration and see what happens with our human attempts to go toward the ultimate wisdom; conquering our mental limitations, and understanding our physical ones."

Gary Parrish June 24 2000

Response:

Just because "the energy that created life has placed human beings with language", it does not follow that the energy would carry on indefinitely with us communicating through language. In other words, the energy will likely go forward, though it does not follow that it will always place human beings with language.

Our "intentions", from the "energy that created life", may represent a redirection of the energy behind our lives. Is it not true, within limits, that all things come to an end? If so, what grounds to we have to assume that our language will go on indefinitely?!

What does the "ultimate wisdom" mean? What grounds do we have to go forward, striving to know the ultimate wisdom?

How can we conquer our mental limitations if they are an inherent part of us? We assert that there is no ultimate wisdom to strive for because of the apparent empty nature of thoughts themselves. Moreover, we assert that because our fundamental metal limitations are part of who we are, we can only understand them, within limits, rather than conquer them. If you think otherwise, tell us how we can know without intrinsic separation from what we know?

Entries 51-56 Entry 63-65