Random Notes 20150203

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Random Notes

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The Flip Side of the Coin

It is well known that many people who have posited things in the first half of their lives turn around and repudiate, abandon, or refute these same things in the second half of their life.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most important examples.  He was perhaps the towering genius of philosophy in the 20th Century.   Simply, in his life’s first half, he had solved philosophy’s problem with the examination of the underlying logic of propositions and sentences.  The second half of his life, he insisted that all language was word games, and at the root of things, we could not get to the logic or structure of things on a fundamental level.  

Rhetoric Versus Truth

It is often said that there is a difference between Rhetoric - say, the things of rousing speeches and perhaps advertising where others attempt to seduce our emotions and feelings to either vote a particular way or purchase something - and Reality - the substrate of Truth: things as they really are.  However, this depends upon personal preferences, stage of life, and experience.  For some people, Rhetoric is Reality.  Emotions and feelings are the substrate of reality for these people, and the material construct of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics merely provide background support for feelings and emotions.  For many, a movie, a novel, or literature is the path to Truth, while Science is only entertainment.  Those of us well-trained in science, mathematics, and technical subjects need to understand that we perform our craft on only a subset of the reality experienced by humanity.  There is more out there - a lot more out there.

Spirituality and Commerce

McDonald’s is the symbol of the Lack of Spirituality.  When you consider the physical difference between coffee at McDonald’s versus coffee at Starbucks, the Chemistry is probably not that different.  However, the spiritual significance of the places are worlds apart.  One is a place to feed animals: exchange money, and put something in your belly.  One is a place to linger, contemplate, and meet others of like mind with the smells, atmosphere, and architectural layout that seeks to evoke lingering, study, and something more than shallow conversation; exchange money, a smile, or a joke, and get a product delivered with style and with a flourish.  Go slower to achieve quality of experience rather than fast Chemistry merely to feed the stomach.  There is an attempt to feed the soul, too.  This is why poverty can debase us: exchange the lowest cost for the barest essentials for the belly.  It is also why spiritual poverty debases us, too: cut pennies and go meet your friend at McDonald’s over coffee instead of Starbucks.  At what price of spirituality does one forego when going to McDonald’s?  The Good Book said that “Man cannot live by Bread alone,” which means, we are not animals that can live merely by some mixture of chemicals called “food” that we can ingest without the Ritual of a Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner.  Humans need rituals, or we will not Live.  It has to be more than just Materials (merely animal feed); it has to be Materials plus Meaning.  Someone once said that Man can life without almost anything, except, he cannot live without meaning.  This is essentially what the Good Book is trying to tell us.  We must assign meaning to material things or we will die spiritually.

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Freddy Martini