how to get at essence..
words have their meaning respective of their uses. the essential meaning behind a word is impossible to ascertain outside of culture. so the essence of a word is completely relative of the circumstance of its use. only the user can understand the essence being expressed, but doesn't understand the full essence behind its use because in communication there is the output and the input. the speaker can only know what's going on with the word on his side of speech. he can only guess how the listener will understand the word. so with words..essence can never be known by an individual.
but can distinct objects be understood essentially?
the essence of a specific dog is different than the essence of the concept of dog. the word dog represents the overall concept of all things in the category of dog - this is the essence described above as being relative to cultural use of the word. but my dog..rex..there's an essence to his being. i can't get at the full essence but I know that there is essential truth to his existence. the only essence i can realize is in my mind with respect to my subjective experiences of his being. nonetheless, outside of human experience, there should be some complete understanding of my dog's being. certainly not solely in Rex's mind..he can hardly form concepts.
are there any concepts that represent things completely essentially? is there a mind that understands all that is as it is?
this is god. this is the goodness that is. essence is goodness and clarity is known only by the whole of existence. the closer we come to understanding existence in essence, the closer we come to knowing goodness and the more suited we are to be good and act as best we can.
acquiring truth and opening the mind to understand multiple viewpoints can prove difficult. every one has only ever known the world from the view of the self..grasping reality from the ultimate perspective of all being requires taking a step back and forgetting about putting the self at the center. we are a part of something bigger and it's important we know our place.
everything has an essence and it can only be understood in its relation to the essence of all other things. to understand the essence of one requires an understanding of the essence of all. we can never attain perfect essential knowledge, but we can realize that there's always more to essence than what meets the eye and that realization can let us always strive to build a more substantial base of knowledge on the essence of reality
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Pretty interesting stuff here, I've thought a lot about this too. Kind of a similar idea is like with colors; if I say the word "red" then you know that I mean the color of a stop sign or something, but is the actual color of the stop sign you imagine the same as the stop sign I imagine? We can both call it red, because our experience tells us that THAT color is red, but we can be seeing in completely different spectrums and just recognize the color that we've associated with a particular word. If I say yellow and think banana, you might think banana too, but our interpretations of what that yellow physically looks like could be drastically different.
ReplyDeleteThis can get really tricky when it comes to words that have no tangible representation to trace it to. When you say Rex, I know you are talking about your dog, even though I can't build the specificities of his essence. But how about a word that you in particular are interested in: love. Whether familial love or falling in love, how can any one person's interpretation of it be remotely similar to another's? There is no concrete example or evidence of love that we can agree on, such as the banana or stop sign. So really it's just this word that has an understood meaning that is not understood by anyone, a mutual compatability between two people who could theoretically have completely different thought processes associated with the word love. Things like that scare me a little, because regardless of how hard we strive to be in a community, things like emotion that can't be understood any other way than internally, keep us isolated. Here is a clip from that movie "waking life" that I've told you about a lot. I really liked this clip when I first saw the movie and it got me thinking a ton about all this. Take a look.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=368363424688672759&hl=en#