by Herbert I. London
When the president of the United States says we have to control expenditures and then advocates dramatic increases in the budget, it is perplexing.. When we are told the economy is in recovery, but according to recent reports the unemployment rate has ballooned to over 9 percent, it is confusing. When we are told we must win the war against radical Islamic forces but we will be withdrawing our troops from the Middle East, it is baffling.
This is not merely Orwellian double-speak; something else is at work. Words create a picture, but It is a picture obscured by reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent his life trying to show how language can be useful in understanding the world, while still remaining inexact. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," he noted. We are presumably imprisoned by what we can say.
The mathematician Godel spoke of the "incompleteness theorem": "a statement cannot be proven," he said. In other words, there is a truth outside the limits of words and logic.
What this suggests for those who are trying to make sense of the contradictions in the political world is that language is imprecise and truth is evasive. Invariably politicians use metaphors or word pictures to convey impressions. President Obama, during the course of his presidential campaign, relied on a tabula rasa -- a blank slate -- onto which his constituents could project anything they wished he would embrace.
Citizen searching for truth realize at some point that truth cannot be final: there is always a next truth. Francis Fukuyama may discuss "the end of history," but history cannot have an end. Ultimately people try to assemble an understanding of life through the thickets of specialized terminology, political propaganda and conceptual coinage, searching for a moment of revelation.
Emerson noted that "consistency is the hobgoblin of fools;" however, inconsistency in the political realm leads inevitably to cynicism. What can you believe, what confidence can you have in leaders, when one action contradicts the next? Politics by its very nature consists of metaphors on steroids; impressions are what count. Facts give impression texture, but it is what lies beyond the logic that enters our imagination. Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus characterized this well by noting: "All that one may well call vast, strange, extraordinary magnificent, without thereby giving it a name because it is truly nameless." This vast space ocean of the unknown, kindled Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream in which Bottom says, "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream."
There is much that we know without knowing it. And there is much we would wish to explain, without explication. Alas the world is confusing, but our politicians have an obligation at least to make the metaphor provide us with impressions that are sound.
Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2353/political-discourse-imagination
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment