of mysterious subject headings

Mysterious subject headings make more sense if one already knows the source of the LJ icon in the Byzantine mosaic of the Magi at Ravenna, that outlier of the Eastern Empire’s art and faith on the Italian peninsula in the early days after the demise of the Western Empire. I have never seen the originals, and now I am highly unlikely ever to see them.

I also realize that in my multicultural city, the Copts of Egyptian and Ethiopian persuasion both will be celebrating Christmas Eve tonight, with Epiphany to follow on the 19th, New Style.

Also that if I don't get round to renewing my LJ payment in less than a week, these images will cease to be supported.

and while I am at it

Someone long ago (I think it was C. F MacIntyre) translated the opening lines of Rilke’s Tenth Elegy as “May I someday, at the exit of grim understanding / Offer [“honor and praise”? Can’t remember how he translated “Jubel und Ruhm” if those are the right words] to assenting angels!”

It was that “exit of grim understanding” for “Eingang* des grimmigen Einsicht” that got me when I read that line at age twenty-one. (If that is the actual German; the beauty of not actually knowing any of the many languages I have failed to begin to learn is that I can “recall” phrases that are complete nonsense without being aware of it.) *I now realize after first writing that I have mixed up entrance and exit again; “Ausgang,” obviously.

I believed then in the possibility of ekstasis or intuitive understanding whereas now I believe in intuition as a more efficient form of understanding…as, in fact, the only possibility of understanding as distinct from believing that one has understood rather than understood in part.

That sounds like gobbledygook because it is. What I mean is that there is no such thing as a perfect match between the world and our picture of it; there is not even a perfect match between what we think we know about the world and what we actually know about the world within the generally agreed-upon framework of “things that can be known.”

But we generally adhere to the error that Wittgenstein eventually renounced that “Anything that can be known at all can be known clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly.” The truth is more nearly the opposite; unclarity is built into the fabric of knowing, and all we can do is get better and better at identifying the areas of blur. There will always be some area where we think we have gotten it exact at last, when we haven’t. (See, for example, the phenomenon of diminishing replicability that seems inbuilt into scientific tests that possess sufficient variables, meaning almost everything that is useful or interesting.)

I keep trying to confront my own unclarity where it all could be expressed or thought more clearly, even though my readership prefers to be entertained by my contortions.

It actually is difficult to understand what it is we don’t understand, because we so often don’t understand that we don’t understand it. This is one reason I have never felt able to teach; the difficulty isn’t in presenting the material, it’s in understanding why the students aren’t getting it right. Once you see what their problem is, you can explain it in terms that make sense to them, rather than the inherited terms that no longer make much sense to anybody, because the whole environing cultural context has changed so much.

And this is not at all the same as recognizing what it is that we don’t understand because we simply cannot grasp the basic insights, cannot reconfigure our minds to perform the operations necessary to make the systems work. The advantage of the mathematically grounded disciplines is that one can at least see that one can’t see. What one doesn’t understand may not be clear to one, but that one doesn’t understand is obvious.

Whereas the sciences involving large numbers of recalcitrantly hard-to-measure variables tend to make one think that one not only understands, but knows it all.

That leads me to the question of cognitive agnosticism and why hardly anyone seems comfortable with living for very long with the prospect that we are so limited by the terms of our engagement with the universe that we simply can’t eliminate the uncertainties that keep us from saying that we “know” certain things for sure. It isn’t that the topics are intrinsically ineffable; it’s that they involve phenomena that defeat standard methods of investigation. (This is a corollary of Gerald Durrell’s joke that when placed in a rigorous experimental setting designed to eliminate extraneous environmental and behavioral factors, an animal will do anything it damn well pleases.)