change and value

    

Thinking this morning about the value of denoting immediate experiences.   With an object like a painting one tends to denote the first or immediate impression and the parcel out what follows or develops to reflective phases of the experience.    

Then there is the famous Thoreau hike.

But consider "making music".   Or "rock climbing".   There's  a flow of immediate experiences,  each that needs to be appreciated in terms of "continuity" of,  and also for a variety of "immediate qualities".   These are not qualities understood reflectively.  They are the nature (they are integral to)  the transactional experience of the live creature and the environment.    

The continuity of these qualitative grasps gives us a record of change or lack of change that we can call "the history of an event".

And this is our grasp of "how we think now".   How we played the piece of music.  How we got to the top of the cliff.    And in both cases we would understand that those performances were not "final ends".   We expect to play other pieces of music and climb other cliffs.   Or to repeat the same pieces and cliffs, differently.   And within each sequence of experiences that makes up the "whole" of a later described experience....there is a precarious set of possibilities within each moment.  

These experiences are not the same as looking at pictures in a museum.  Qualitatively the possibilities and limitations of each moment of each performance (playing a music or climbing a cliff) are present now.   The quality of those minute particulars and likewise, the quality of our capacity and capability of grasping them (as they are) are the ingredients that suggest possible changes for future particulars.      

But our senses of what we did, given our cultural predispositions, are to congeal the record of what we did (the continuity, succession, sequence of experiences qualitatively had) into something harder and seemingly more portable called knowledge.

And it's this knowledge that would then inform a subsequent performance (shorthand for playing and climbing here).

But, what's at stake, in part I think is the nature of what we call "knowledge".     The fullness of a different concept of knowledge begins in keeping the conceptual usage of "knowledge"  tied or tethered (as an indicator toward) the qualities of actually being (there).   These cannot be dropped out if we want to call this "reality".   This grasp of the moving immediate (does Emerson call it the "flying moment"  or something like that) has to be integral to the conceptual portability we need when using a concept to "stand for" particulars.   

Our use of language tends to lack this kind of perspicuousness and we wind up accepting things "not as they are" but "things as we think they are" and this most often results from mistaking language that "stands for" for the actual qualities of the particular and the contextual wrapping in which the particular was an event.   

An effort to invest our use of language with eventfulness (is this not the emphasis on "emergent" that is currently in vogue?) is a possible outcome from reading Dewey and Wittgenstein.   But to be honest.....  "emergent" is too far removed from the demands and needs peculiar to the particular. 

The practice here is not philosophical in the traditional senses but rather in how we use language everyday.  All our assumptions and generalizations and abstractions and contradictions are embodied in our everyday use of language hooked to a particular reality we seem doomed to humbly fumble.  The landscape of our language use shows us in a topographic sense (not a deep mining) "how we are thinking now".   And philosophy that is doing is eventually about how we grasp things in the making, perhaps like writing a sentence.   Like writing this sentence.   

Emerson from the opening of his essay "Circles"

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.