Cosmology

In the history of the world/ there has never been a "true cosmology" that was ever anything more or anything less than . . . an anthropology.  (St. Augustine demonstrated this. . .)

Literature

Literature deals with the most difficult and important problems of existence/ and/ therefore/ litterateurs consider themselves the most important of people.  A bank clerk/ who is always handing money out/ might just as well consider himself a millionaire.  The high estimate placed upon the unexplained/ unsolved questions ought really to discredit writers in our eyes.  And yet these literary men are so clever/ so cunning at stating their own case and revealing the high importance of their mission/ that in the long run they convince everybody/ themselves most of all.  This last event is surely owing to their own limited intelligence.  The Roman augurs had subtler/ more versatile minds.  In order to deceive others/ they had no need to deceive themselves.  In their own set they were not afraid to talk about their secrets/ even to make fun of them/ being fully confident that they could easily vindicate themselves before outsiders/ in case of necessity/ and pull a solemn face befitting the occasion.  But our writers of to-day/ before they can lay their improbable assertions before the public/ must inevitably try to be convinced in their own minds.  Otherwise they cannot begin.

--Leo Shestov

Grammar

Take the assertion that a noun sometimes can be said to refer to an object but that a conjunction never does.

No one would construe that statement for a scientific or a metaphysical assertion.

But if I said that if we pay careful attention/ that sometimes when I use a noun in a sentence we can see that it stands for an object/ but at other times/ no such object can be found (even though it is a noun).

It might sound as if I was making a scientific or metaphysical claim.  Like if I said that in order to use the verb "to think" meaningfully in a sentence/ there would have to be subject/ but that we might not be able to establish who the subject referred to.

The Stumbles of the Philosophers

You had it all backwards.

You wanted us to believe that the mind is the mirror of the world.

Instead/ it appears that the soul is the mirror of God.

Isn't the sensible always the best picture of the insensible?

Then how did you conceive very clearly and very distinctly that the invisible could picture what is visible?

O Humanist! O Naturalist!

O Humanist! O Naturalist!

You trickster!  You say you have accomplished it/ have you?

You have succeeded at unmanning man without the need for a physical operation.

You have taken away his spirit. . .

You offer a spiritual circumcision/ not a physical one. . . as if this present era were the first time that had been tried. . .

And to whom do you offer this sacrifice?  Before the image of what?  For are you not the denier of images? After all/ if the image actually stands for something/ we can't very well say it is merely an appearance. . .

Is your offering a real sacrifice/ or is yours only an empty gesture?  But how could you of all people make a distinction here?

The King

In ancient times/ to have order/ you had to have a King.

The King brings order to the unruly kingdom.

But what is a king?  Its merely a role in a system of meaning.  There is nothing about the physical properties of a person that necessarily makes them fit to be king.  There have been tall kings and small kings and fat kings and skinny kings.  To be king/ you just have to be coronated by the right crowd.

The world still has a King.  He is called the second.

He is defined as follows:

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

The King is an arbitrary physical process.  But there is something special about the King: the subjects of the realm are forbidden from measuring how long this physical process takes.  We can measure every other physical process in the world/ but not our King.  Further/ if we want to measure any other physical process in the world/ we have to use the King (or one of his governors) to measure it.

With respect to all the other physical processes in the world/ we can construct testable hypotheses and theories relating to those physical systems.  We can't construct a testable hypothesis about our King.  He exists by definition: he is exactly one second.  He cannot be measured.  He exists outside the scientific description of nature.  But without our King/ there would be no kingdom/ no order in the world.

The King is the physical picture of Time.  He is an Icon.  The Word made Flesh.

Without the King/ we could not measure the temporal extension of physical processes.  Without the King/ we couldn't translate between a physical world and our mathematical symbolism.  Through him/ all empirically measurable things can be translated into a mathematical representation in time.

Don't worry.  Some day he will be deposed.  But then we will get a new King.

How to Find God

The expression of necessity can only be the form of an arbitrary rule.

A one-way sign tells us in what direction we have to go.  A mathematical rule tells us the results of the next number in the series.

There is no necessity in the world/ only in the grammar of our expressions.

Everything in the world can either be or not be.  Everything is possible. 

We observe and measure fragments of the world and we make generalizations.  Yet there are no real causes observable in nature.  The past is gone: it cannot act in the present.  We generalize from correlations based on repeated observations.  Yet in this process a mathematical structure is revealed.  Mathematics is not the language of the universe/ mathematics is a language that we invented.  However/ perhaps we can view the universe as an expression of mathematics?

If we are to regard the universe as the expression of a language/ then we are saying that the universe has a meaning.  If the universe has a meaning--even only a mathematical meaning--then there would have to be a source of that meaning.  Otherwise/ science is like attempting to crack a coded message/ only to find that it is not a code at all/ but random nonsense that the printer churned out.

But this is only a way of seeing the world/ not a scientific description.