Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Ken Armstrong <armstron AT ohiou.edu>]

At 01:37 PM 12/17/2002 -0500, James Piat wrote:

> I take the notion that things have
> a source or cause (or causes as Aristotle
> I think put the matter) to be a theory or perhaps an
> assumption.    I do not
> take it to be an established fact.  

  Jim,

 I won't barge in on this over every point; I just can't resist
saying something when I see "fact"  being held up as a
standard of judgement for all spheres of experience. What I would suggest
is that there are "things" in existence that are unique, that
cannot be duplicated or tested, and that trying to hold these essentially
non-thingy "things" to a standard of fact is the same as trying
to reduce them to a lower order of existence. There is no way to
demonstrate that the duplicative way to knowledge---so-called
fact---should be the standard against which all truths must be held. It
is only, to use your word, an assumption (granted, an appealing and
popular one in our culture), and one that does not hold up to logical
analysis. It is not that I am trying to take facts out of the equation; I
am trying to point out that there is no equation. Science is temporary;
we're looking for what is not bound by time.

 Symbols as representation are symbols as signs, i.e.
not really symbols. An understanding of "symbol" that does not
include in the nature of symbols that they participate in what they
"mean" misses symbolic function entirely. Symbols as signs,
denatured symbols, can be appropriated to dogs, monkeys, etc. But symbols
as symbols have no place in any but the human world. In the animal,
vegetable, and mineral worlds, there is no film at 11.

Ken Armstrong