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To: betty boop
more-or-less stable significations that are at least roughly, mutually intelligible to the communicating parties

Yes, as for example the U.S. Constitution, or the O.T. Law. There is no irony involved in the fact these "stabilizing significations" are now hotly disputed. I enter the conversation above pointing to the fact that too many do not understand why because they are hanging on the pendulum swing of ignorance, which now claims the word as absolute (or, Constitution is king) and now as ultimate irrelevance, in resignation to the lost center: "the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

This is why the first primer in this matter is to understand the bankruptcy of rational-ism which makes claims beyond measure in the simplicity of its naivete: A is A. But that is merely a relation of identity. One must go beyond that identity to give it meaning. One must go beyond the Constitution to give it meaning. And those who merely accept the requirement of "stabilizing significations" are not strong enough to defend it. "Stabilizing significations" only get their stability in a meaning that transcends it. If that cord is broken, then shattered is the pitcher at the well.

Thanks for your response. As I'm sure you understand, I am quite earnest about the wholescale ignorance that shows in our popular parlance and I am grieved as well to be unable to have others see with new eyes.

125 posted on 11/29/2001 1:50:47 PM PST by cornelis
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To: cornelis; Son of Liberty; logos; PatrickHenry
"Stabilizing significations" only get their stability in a meaning that transcends it. If that cord is broken, then shattered is the pitcher at the well.

Amen to that, cornelis! The positivists/materialists have been holding court for more than two hundred years now; and look at the devastation they have wrought. If the logical outcome of their nonsense -- the evidence of which we see all around us in personal disorder and social breakdown -- isn't proof-positive of the bankruptcy of their fundamental premises about the structure of reality as they play out in the "real world," then I don't know what is. Mankind needs to do a whole lot better than that.

Maybe we should just start with the obvious: Just because you can't see a thing with the "naked eye" doesn't mean it isn't there.... All meaning transcends the (immanent) objects and relations it seeks to explain; and thus, is necessarily intangible, "invisible" in the naked-eye sense.

Hey, it's not much; but it is a start. All my best -- bb.

131 posted on 11/30/2001 10:07:07 AM PST by betty boop
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