USEFUL FICTIONS

conversation with the dead simone weil

mc escher remix

“To love the truth is to endure emptiness, and therefore to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.”

simone weil, gravity and grace

Mysticism eludes, it is silent about the ineffable, it shines in its enigmatic physiognomy, but it also drives before it a flow of meanings about the inscrutable.1

Pure consciousness2 in the space of mystical experience has an analogy to space without time.

Aesthetically, this paradox can be translated as a recursive mirroring. A recursive mirroring can also refer to a central corpus of mysticism in the context of the creative implementation in a spatial installation: infinity/eternity.

1 Ciglia Francesco Paolo, 2017: Sinn oder Nicht-Sinn? In: Das Heilige – eine grundlegende Kategorie der Religionsphilosophie. Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie. Langthaler/Hofer (Hg.), Band XLIX| 2017, Seite 51f.

2 Metzinger Thomas, 2020: Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, The authors.

venus in recursive mirroring

Detour logic can lead to the edges of thinking

Conversation With The Dead Simone Weil is a scenario in which the “as-if” is a useful fiction: we address open-ended questions to Simone Weil.

Atoms, just like God and soul, Hans Vaihinger explains in his philosophy of as-if as useful fictions. They attain meaning “as if” they were true, even if they consciously contradict the construction of thought.

Useful fictions get their legitimacy from the practical purpose of life. We borrow this as-if criterion from Vaihinger’s logic of fiction for our purposes.

As an introduction to the topic and as a foil for the artifice of formulating besides, we enter into dialogue with Simone Weil by means of the as-if.3

3 useful fictions in vaihingers philosophy of the as-if. Cf vaihinger hans, 1919-23. annals of philosophy with special consideration of the problems of as-if-consideration. Cf. “besides” in linguist Gerd Simon’s fictionalism research. puplic domain university tübingen.

 


A concept that has Simone Weil’s philosophy as its theme led us to the task:

theology in a multiple choice test.

 

autumn/winter 2023/24