Philosophical Cryptotypes
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:10:00 GMT
Whorf introduces a concept he calls cryptotypes in talking about language. I don’t remember his exact examples, except that it has to do with when you can use “up” to strengthen a verb. You can stir it up but not swing it up or pour it up, etc. You can break it up or smack it up but you can’t explode it up. What’s the rule? It’s a big hairy complicated cryptotype.
I noticed a good one the other day. The official rules of a four way stop have to do with when you arrive and taking turns clockwise. As Jim Loy points out, in reality, it’s a big cryptotype. There is this supposition that if the oncoming driver is moving, you can go too. That doesn’t come from the law (it seems to come from common sense). Turning left is complex, because you have to enter the lane with your blinker on or you’ll fuck everything up, but you have almost no room at many 4-way stops. If you’re turning right, you have to stop and make sure you’re not going to hit anyone, but often, you can stop and then keep going. This is all messy and intimidating to the new driver, who is trying to adhere to the law but instead confusing and screwing everything up for other drivers.
A religious cryptotype I’ve been thinking about recently is the “G-d will reveal everything to us in Heaven” motif. Where did that come from? It’s a Jewish principle that anything which doesn’t affect halacha not be settled in Talmud, so to some extent I’m welcome to believe whatever I want, but where did this idea come from? I don’t see any precedent for it in Torah. Maybe it’s there but it must be fairly vague. None of the afterlife teachings are very firm in Judaism. But I’m also unaware of a Christian source for this belief. Yet most of my Christian friends take it for granted (as I do) that G-d will show us his cards in the hereafter.
It’s important for philosophers like myself to believe that G-d wants believers to be thinkers. As I said before, by voluntarily restricting his actions to those that can be reasoned about effectively, G-d is giving us the gift of reason. G-d certainly doesn’t need either to restrict his omnipotence or to use abstraction to help deal with the magnitude of the universe as we do. Would G-d would give us such a gift, especially with a corresponding hunger which can never be sated? I don’t have the answer.
We can support the doctrine from the First Letter of John:
“See what love the Father has bestowed on us in making us his beloved sons. Yet such we are. What we shall become has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”
Notice that the doctrine is still tempered with mystery. We don’t know exactly what we will be but we will be like Him.
We do also know that no amount of revelation can ever give us knowledge or wisdom equal to G-d’s. There’s a psalm I can’t find right now that says we would have to be infinite, like G-d, to know all His thoughts. And that, we think, will always be impossible.
I don’t believe that G-d needs to restrict his activity in any way to make it rational. Rational is what is real. G-d is the truly real. So He’s intrinsically rational.
Human reason is a limited partaking in Divine reason. So there are many things about G-d that we are unable to reason about. We can presume that those things make sense from the point of view of divine reason. Likewise, our love is a limited partaking of G-d’s love. Yet we believe that G-d’s love for a murderer, even if it is completely beyond our experience or capacity, is nevertheless a true love.
Even when we face a doctrine that goes beyond (human) reason, it goes beyond in a rational way. It can still be distinguished from irrationality. Consider our limited experience of personality. In our experience, one person is always one being. The doctrine of the Trinity says you can have one Being that is also three Persons. There’s no intrinsic contradiction there, but it does go completely beyond our experience.
Practically every heresy, on the other hand, is an example of something irrational pretending to be a mystery.
It’s the difference between “square circle,” which is intrinsically impossible, and “eternal creation”, which is self-consistent but beyond our experience. I don’t believe in it, by the way, but Aristotle did, because he didn’t have Genesis to correct him.