Part 5 of the theory:

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six

Part 5:


Ok. So what's all this about Agence?

Well, let's revisit our set of truths again, shall we? Remember those?

Let's imagine that the set of truths contained in it a fairly wide array of truths. In other words, let's suppose that it didn't merely contain "objective facts" but that it contained examples of as many different kinds of truths as possible. Let's say that having reached this point in our work, we go back and add to the set based on our new understandings.

The set will now contain mathematical truths, musical truths, true images and other visual truths (ie, images that resonate as true art and declarative statements about color and luminence) and of course observational truths. What are observational truths? Observational truths are either mathematical or visual truths. They take the following forms: This dog is bigger than that peach. Or, Carrots are orange. The former is mathematical and the latter is visual.

But there remains a type of truth that has heretofore been left undiscussed. Namely, moral truth. This is one that has confounded thinkers for ages. This is the one that causes all the trouble. The fact is that there are moral truths. Undeniably so. The culturalist - the moral relativists who assert that moral truths are merely varying but fundamentally equal cultural standards - are wrong. And their really obviously wrong. No matter what your culture, or my culture might say, it's immoral for me to grab your infant from your arms and throw it against a brick wall.

Moral truths are usually expressed through language. At least that's the intent. Many truths have a language equivalent. Two plus two equals four is as true as 2+2=4. Neither is the real mathematical truth of two objects in space being grouped with two other objects in space to make a set of four objects in space. Both are symbolic representations of that truth, just as saying that a flower is orange is a symbolic representation of seeing orange. Music has assorted symbolic representations of it's truths as well. They include things like sheet music notation and the image of a wave form. There are also auditory symbols for these things. By this I mean that I can speak the names of notes and rests and such. I can speak the color of an object.

What I'm getting at here is that language is how explicit meaning becomes portable. It is the way in which entities communicate with one another. It is not the meaning itself, however. The meaning itself isn't contained with the mortal manifestations of truth at all. A song doesn't contain meaning. It describes the immortal, intangible meaning of the musical truth that it manifests into mortal form. Language, then, describes the description of a musical truth. It is twice removed.

But there are some matters about which language is only once removed. Are these matters are moral truths?

Wikipedia says:

"In linguistics, a grammatical agent is an entity that carries out an action."

And it is in this sense that I use the word "Agence" and "agent." Agence is as fundamental a building block of the universe as time, space and light. Agence is what distinguishes entities from objects. Do plants have it? I'm not sure. But things that move - things that have volition - certainly do.

Now it seems like Agence is less necessary - less fundamental - than time, light or space. After all, you can imagine time, light, and space existing without agence, but not vice-a-versa, right? No. You literally can't imagine anything without agence. Agence is the source of all imagine-ing. This is not merely a semantic ploy. Any conception of reality is predicated on our ability to conceive. There's just no getting around that fact.

Heretofore, all known agents have been alive. But there is no reason to believe that only living things can possess agence. AI may yet prove that, in fact, non-living things can be agents. Hence we don't use the word life, which falls short in other ways too. We use Agence.

Here's an arbitrary fact. There can never be just one agent. There has to be at least two. I don't know why. But I do know that it is so. Because the characteristic that each agent necessarily possesses is the will to interact. Light refracts. Agents interact. It's what they do.

The highest form of interaction between agents is language. And the truths of Agence are moral truths. They are the truths of interaction between agents. The art of Agence is text. Text is closer to it's immortal truth than any other medium. Because visual distractions aside, text is really embodied "voice." Actual voices have built in duration. The are presenting the truths of agence in the media of space (sound traveling across particles) and time.

Text, on the other hand, has no duration. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but it is true. The reason that text will never be replaced as the primary communicative mechanism between people is because it is the only medium that allows "scanning." I can flip through a given piece of writing and find the bit I want to read. I don't have to listen to the whole thing, or risk not hearing the part I'm looking for by fast forwarding.

Text exists all at once, with no beginning, middle or end. A live speech does not. It can only be experienced as a linear path from point a to point z. Even when recorded, it can only be dealt with that way. Why? Because sound is the currency of time. And time must be dealt with on time's terms.

Human limitations are such that most of us can't process text in sentence or paragraph sized chunks. But speed readers, apparently, do exactly that. That's how they can read so fast. They've trained themselves to transcend the human HABIT of linear processing. The reason that they are able to do that is because text has no fundamental duration. The reality is that text exists in the domain of Agence. Just like light, space and time, Agence can't be pinned down by any of the other articles.

It is communicated through each of the other articles. Brail, speaking, sign language, and text each use either time or light or space to convey language. This is no different than sound using particles as a medium through which time conveys it's truths to humans.

There are other manifestations of Agence besides text, of course. Physical affection is one, for example. It too has no duration, or math, or color. True, it can only exist in time and space
and with light. But "inter-dependent" does not mean "indistinct." And one can argue that physical affection ought to be considered an art of Agence. Certainly, it manifests the truths of the article.

But not every manifestation of the currency of an article is an example of an art of that article. Noise is not the art of time. It is sound, but it is not art. Because noise is not an entity of time. A true melody is such an entity. I know this bit is troubling, logically. I'm just going to leave it as is, though. Maybe I'll get back to it at some point.

Is the love between two people, as made manifest by a hug, an entity of agence? Let's get back to this later.

What's interesting about text is that it is the form, not the meaning, that is true. Lies can be faithful manifestations of the truths of Agence. In fact, such a faithful manifestation of a truth of Agence is essentially indistinguishable from the truth itself. With text, you can get it exactly right.

But again, it isn't about meaning. A poorly phrased, but highly moral, sentence is not true, artistically. In fact, it isn't art at all. Art is the manifestation of immortal truth. There are partial arts. Most writings work in spots and don't work in other spots. And there are not arts - work that manifests no truth. And there are perfect arts. Some writings are perfect.

Here's an example, by the poet Tim Steele:

FAE

I bring Fae flowers. When I cross the street, She meets and gives me lemons from her tree.
As if competitors in a Grand Prix,
The cars that speed past threaten to defeat
The sharing of our gardens and our labors.
Their automotive moral seems to be
That hell-for-leather traffic makes good neighbors.

Ten years a widow, standing at her gate,
She speaks of friends, her cat's trip to the vet,
A grandchild's struggle with the alphabet.
I conversationally reciprocate
With talk of work at school, not deep, not meaty.
Before I leave we study and regret
Her alley's newest samples of graffiti.

Then back across with caution: to enjoy
Fae's lemons, it's essential I survive
Lemons that fellow-Angelenos drive.
She's eighty-two; at forty, I'm a boy.
She waves goodbye to me with her bouquet.
This place was beanfields back in '35
When she moved with her husband to L.A.

By Tim Steele

But wait a second. Get back to that thing about meaning, right? Right. Ok. It's like this. What we are talking about here are the truths of Agence. The currency of Agence is interaction – communication – not morality. Perfect manifestations of Agence are perfect communications. Evil communications can be perfect just as easily as Good communications can be perfect. It doesn't mean that there are not moral truths. Indeed there are. And they can be pointed to by the art of Agence, text. “I love you” points to a moral truth. “We should love one another” also points to a moral truth. Neither is artistically true, at least, not necessarily. But depending on context – the surrounding text – either might be artistically true. In fact, presented as they are above, I dare say that both phrases are wholly true art.

An earnest embrace of a loved one manifests a moral truth far better than any words can, but it might not be art.

The bottom line is that moral truths are not manifested in language. At best, they are pointed to. Language can contain no truth. It can faithfully represent communicatively true form, or it can fail to do so. But morality is a different matter. Morality can't be manifested in language. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.

Here's the problem. Whenever two agents interact, there exists moral truth. Each SHOULD interact with the other this way or that way. It is entirely between the two agents; the truth does not generalize beyond the scope of the interaction. The guy who dropped the bomb on hiroshima? He had a hundred thousand individual interactions. Each one was between him and one other person. And he made a hundred thousand horribly wrong, immoral choices. Each of which was absolutely wrong, but each of which was applicable to exactly that individual situation only.

But humans don't like that. We have an urgent desire to make those truths portable. And language is the only mechanism available with which to accomplish that. So we end up with a situation that is destined to cause more problems than it will ever solve:

1. Absolute moral truth exists.
   
2. It exists between two agents and is applicable only to them.
   
3. We don't want to accept that reality.
   
4. Language conveys meaning.
   
5. We use this quality of language to ascribe a portability to a moral truth that it just doesn't have.
   
6. Each linguistic attempt to represent a “portable form” of a fundamentally unportable moral truth is doomed to fail.
   

Even worse than 6, though, each attempt is destined to make immorality even more common. The very worst acts that humans commit are born of a failure to understand every action as an interaction between one other being, and every action that effects many beings is really a series of actions effecting each in turn – a series of specific interactions with specific individuals.

The absolutists are right. Moral truth is absolute. But what they don't understand is that absolutely anything that they might say will fall short of that truth. It has to. Not only can language not contain moral truth, it can't even manifest it. It can't even represent it. It can, at best, point towards it.

So we find ourselves in this situation where individuals are codifying morality between individuals in the name of “portable versions” of fundamentally importable moral truths. Thus we bomb Iraq. Thus the muslim extremists behead some random American. Thus we feel passionate disapproval of gay marriage.

More importantly, thus does red become blue and tall become short. Thus does doublespeak occur. And we end up with the fiercest opponents of liberty invoking the word in all of their rhetoric. It happens because meaning is not how the truths of Agence express themselves. They express themselves via communicative form, not via communicative content.

This is why relativists must come to embrace absolute truth.
Absolute truth is far to important to entrust to stupid absolutists.

Now form, though, is a different matter. Any successful writer will tell you that there is absolutely a right way to phrase a sentence, or a series of sentences, and a wrong way. There is absolutely a single correct diction choice, and every other choice is incorrect. This is so. This is the business of the art of agence. Nothing else.

But what about the fact that the "true" phrasing a hundred years ago might no longer be the "true" phrasing today? The question is an attempt to pin down the truths of Agence with time. Agence won't be pinned down any more than Time, Space, or Light will be pinned down.

So do moral truths have an art? Well, moral truths are definitely under the domain of Agence. And they are definitely manifested in the actions of one agent within the context of an interaction with one other agent. But it's a stretch to call "action" the art of morality. I mean, what's the medium? The fact is "art" needs portability if it is to mean anything useful. And morality precludes portability. So I'd have to say no. Immortal, absolute, moral truth has no art. It's just two people being good to one another.

Just the cleanup left to go... Until then,

eric.

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six