The flag of ignorance

I heard this somewhere, I think, in a Christian apologist's podcast, arguing about absolute truth:

If everything is relative, then this statement is relative, too.

That stuck with me for the longest time because it is a solid shelter in the wake of Postmodernism.

But no, it's not about Postmodernism. I found that people I talk with (or others in a certain social media) are simply using Relativism because they don't bother to find out, really. 

A friend expressed his astonishment when I was reading a book related to Zen Buddhism:

"But, aren't you a Christian?"
"Yes, but what's wrong with finding out more about other beliefs?"
(Shakes head) "My other Christian friends simply wouldn't do that."

That, I don't understand. How can you defend your own belief if you don't know about others'? Now, I can only attribute that to laziness. Postmodernism is indeed one of those terms that is bloated beyond recognition and no one can offer a succinct definition of it anymore. It's a hand-waving, sweeping-under-the-rug thing. I don't bother to find out, so to cut the conversation short, I shove it to that trashbin of meanings, Postmodernism.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is a striking parallel with God of the Gaps thinking -- I don't understand and God is the totality of what's mysterious, what I don't understand. The danger of this, of course, your God would become smaller and smaller as you understand more, like Santa Claus is becoming less and less real when you are growing up.

Seekers of Truth, don't rally under the flag of ignorance.

On Kierkegaard's Repetition

So once again the girl was not an actuality but a reflexion of motions within him and an incitement of them. The girl has enormous importance, and he will never be able to forget her, but her importance lies not in herself but in her relation to him. She is to him, so to speak, the border of his being, but such a relation is not erotic. From a religious point of view, one could say it as if God used this girl to capture him, and yet the girl herself is not an actuality but is like the lace-winged fly with which a hook is baited. I am completely convinced that he does not know the girl at all, although he has been attached to her and she probably has never been out of his thoughts since then. She is the girl—period. Whether, more concretely, she is this or that, the loveliness, the loveableness, the faithfullness, the sacrificial love for whose sake one risks everything and sets heaven and earth in motion—that never enters his head.

...

He bit the chain that bound him, but the more his passion seethed, the more ecstatic his song, the more tender his talk, the tighter the chain. It was impossible for him to create a real relationship out of this misunderstanding; it would, in fact, leave her at the mercy of a perpetual fraud. To explain this confusing error to her, that she was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else that he attributed to her—this would hurt her so deeply that his pride rose up in mutiny against it. It is contemptible to delude and seduce a girl, but it is even more contemptible to forsake her in such a way that one does not even become a scoundrel but makes a brilliant retreat by palming her off with the explanation that she was not the ideal and by comforting her with the idea that she was one’s muse.

-- Repetition, S.A. Kierkegaard

The above extract is the crux of Repetition. It tells of a young man who is in love, yet agonises over it. But why? Yes, initially he fell in love with the girl, but thereafter he realised that the girl is a trigger of sorts, that awakened the 'motions within him', or what Constantin called it later, 'poetic awakening'. You can say that he fell in love with Love itself, namely the embodiment of all the poetic qualities of erotic love: the thrill and palpitations, the devotion, the sacrificial.

No one is ever safe from being in the young man's shoes. In fact, Repetition itself was written autobiographically to some extent. Be wary, then, of falling in love with love; it will only bring you agony.

Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe
Falling in love with love is playing the fool
-- Falling in Love with Love; Lorentz Hart, Richard Rodgers; sung by Frank Sinatra

Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom II

...in serving be free.
-- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, p.74

Freedom, then.

I held out writing this one to finish reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. One of their major themes is freedom, or more accurately, the paradox thereof.

Let's put aside free will aside for a moment. Let's deal with the more general concept of freedom first. The paradox, in Christian context, is this: We often speak of being liberated from the slavery of sin. But Paul called himself the slave (doulos) of Christ (Rom. 1:1). Certainly, no man can serve two masters (Mt. 6:24). Though the latter's context is about serving God or Mammon, we can see that we are under the slavery of sin or God, never neither. Some questions: Is there, then, true freedom? If the said true freedom means being free from sin and God, does that mean necessarily a good thing? Do we really want such true freedom?

What does freedom really mean? I find it necessary to quote at length (emphasis mine):

After the principal's address, while everyone was on the way to the bravely bedecked dining hall, Knecht approached the Master with a question, "The principal," he said, "told us how things are outside of Castalia, in the ordinary schools and colleges. He said that the students at the universities study for 'free' professions. If I understood him rightly, these are professions we do not even have here in Castalia. What is the meaning of that? Why are just those professions called 'free'? And why should we Castalians be excluded from them?"
The Magister Musicae drew the young man aside and stood with him under one of the giant trees. An almost sly smile puckered the skin around his eyes into little wrinkles as he replied: "Your name is Knecht, my friend, and perhaps for that reason the word 'free' is so alluring for you. But do not take it too seriously in this case. When the non-Castalians speak of the free professions, the word may sound very serious and even inspiring. But when we use it, we intend it ironically. Freedom exists in those professions only to the extent that the student chooses the profession himself. That produces an appearance of freedom, although in most cases the choice is made less by the student than by his family, and many a father would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free choice. But perhaps that is a slander; let us drop this objection. Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa. For the elite pupil and later member of the Order, everything is the other way around. He does not 'choose' any profession. He does not imagine that he is a better judge of his own talents than are his teachers. He accepts the place and the function within the hierarchy that his superiors choose for him–if, that is, the matter is not reversed and the qualities, gifts and faults of the pupil compel the teachers to send him to one place or another. In the midst of this seeming unfreedom every electus enjoys the greates imaginable freedom after his early courses. Whereas the man in the 'free' professions must submit to a narrow and rigid course of studies with rigid examinations in order to train for his future career, the electus, as soon as he begins studying independently, enjoys so much freedom that there are many who all their lives choose the most abstruse and frequently almost foolish studies, and may continue without hindrance as long as their conduct does not degenerate, The natural teacher is employed as teacher, the natural educator as educator, the natural translator as translator; each, as if of his own accord, finds his way to the place in which he can serve, and in serving be free. Moreover, for the rest of his life he is saved from that 'freedom' of career which means such terrible slavery. He knows nothing of the struggle for money, fame, rank; he recognizes no parties, no dichotomy, between the individual and the office, between what is private and what is public; he feels no dependence upon success. Now do you see, my son, that when we speak of the free professions, the word 'free' is meant rather humorously."
-- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, pp.73-74

Leverkühn suffers from the excessive freedom of post-Romantic subjectivity, which paradoxically has at this stage in musical history itself become an oppressive convention; and from a hyper-intelligent technical grasp which allows him instantly to see through every musical trick used by other composers – or hinself. What he craves is a compelling new order that will lift the paradoxical burden of freedom, and a new primitive simplicity that will be a refuge from his own sophistication.
-- T. J. Reed, Introduction, Doctor Faustus, p.ix

Germany is free, in so far as one may apply to a land prostrate and proscribed.
-- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, p.518

You can't miss the unmistakably contemptuous and Aristotelian-golden-mean tone everytime freedom is mentioned. Too much freedom can't be good. Freedom may just be an illusion of it.

The first passage may sound socialistic. Let's not go into that, but you can watch this TEDTalk instead where the speaker talks, among other things, of freedom of choice in once-socialist countries.

I should just conclude this post in thoughtful tone with my opinion on free will and predestination:

Some might argue that predestination precludes free will; it is deteministic. This is not necessarily the case. It just happens that God has free will, too. You are free to choose, so is He. Men try all the time to turn the tides of history; if God chooses to dip His finger in the flow of Time, how would you argue that He can't? 

Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom I

Listverse has just released a list of paradoxes. They are excellent sources of philosophical discussion, but alas, when it involves religion, the paradox in question has to be resolved, or at least has its illusory contradiction laid bare. 

There are two paradoxes which may confuse the Christian. The first being the paradox of omnipotence, which is the first item on Listverse's list. The other being the paradox of freedom, not on the list.

I shall try to touch on them at length.

Of omnipotence:

A classical problem:

Can God create a rock so heavy He can't lift it?

Answering yes or no would imply incapability of either creating or lifting the stone, and assuming omnipotence is the "capability to do all things", this is a paradox.

As Utahraptor said here, this can be generalised like thus:

If you can do anything, then you can do things that prevent you from doing other things, and therefore, you can't do anything.

In simpler terms: if you have the powers to do everything, you would have the power to strip yourself of all powers included, then you don't have any power. Clearly, this has to mean that there is a fundamental error in our notion of omnipotence, because if we follow the logic of the paradox, omnipotence itself may lead to impotence.

Omnipotence, then, has to be redefined so as the definition is such that it excludes contradictions to itself, unlike our definition above. In turn, we have to narrow down the list of the powers of the omnipotent. This may sound absurd if we relate back that the omnipotent Being is God. This has to mean that God has limitations of what He can do.

Fair enough, but it is even absurder if you don't limit on what God can do, for instance: God can sin. Well, no, of course not. Does that mean God is not all-powerful? Quite the opposite. 

God cannot sin. If we generalise this, we can say: God cannot contradict himself. That would solve the rock problem. The answer is a simple 'no', simply because God cannot contradict himself.

Thus, the source of the paradox is on the inherently contradictory definition of omnipotence itself. The definition cannot be all-encompassing, because some powers would contradict others.

Paradox of freedom, in due course.

Monotheism and Causa Prima

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
-- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

When a friend ask me a while back: "Why can there be only one God?", I was taken aback a little. Sure, I am a Christian, believing in monotheism, but it had never crossed my mind why it is so. This was not ignorance but more like in my mind the inescapable conclusion is that God can only be one.

The argument I thus offered my friend was the causa prima argument: 

Look at the world as a series of causes and effects with innumerable branches. An event is preceded by a cause, which is in turn preceded by another cause, and so on. Up the branches, we inevitably have to come to a point where there is a single cause that itself is not caused. This cause, or entity if you like, is called Causa Prima, the first cause.

To me, the extrapolation until every event is reduced to singularity of cause is inevitable. Animals cannot extrapolate far enough. An old dog-and-cat joke: If a dog is taken care of, it would deem the one taking care of him the Master. If a cat is taken care of, it would deem itself the Master. 

Humans are then a little better. We see something greater than ourselves, then we extrapolate upwards to find God at the zenith of infinity. If we ever go along the way of arrogance of the cat, our rationale would tell us that a lot of things are beyond our control, therefore we ourselves cannot be gods. 

By the way, the causa prima argument provides answer to chicken-and-egg question:

A chicken originates from an egg; an egg, a chicken; and so on. Sounds awfully familiar to cause-and-effect picture? This obviously has to stop somewhere up the origination branches. Simply: God creates the first pair of chickens. If you cringe at the word 'God', fine, you can replace the causa prima as anything else that causes the first pair of chickens. Evolution from another species, for instance. You should note however, that this causa prima is not the Causa Prima. It only is as far as existence of chickens is concerned. Regarding the existence of everything, subsuming chickens, the Causa Prima can only be a Supreme Being, with intelligence and consciousness.

You may realise that our extrapolation to find God is quite feeble. We have the concept of 'infinity' but it so taxes our mind when we try to rationalise it. The picture of God is then a fuzzy one, One whose personage we can only deduce from the ramifications down the branches of cause-and-effect. Religions then, can be seen as the attempt to illuminate on the identity and motives of this fuzzy God. This definition may not apply to some religions, like Buddhism where there is no God. Again, it depends on what religion means. Some people do not classify Buddhism as religion, but merely a way of living. If you look at the world's religions, monotheistic ones are surprisingly scarce: Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Some might even group the latter three as Abrahamic religions collectively. 

I should highlight that most religions view this attempt to uncover who God is anthropocentrally. Do good deeds, accumulate enough points to gain the entry to Salvation. In Christianity the picture is a little different: God understands that Man's picture of Him is fuzzy, so He went and revealed Himself, his personage, purposes, and ultimately His authorship of Salvation in Jesus Christ.

If you say doing good is enough for salvation, you have gone the path of arrogance of the cat. Who are we to say that our moral standard is good enough, that our 'good' is truly good? The Bible mentions several discrepancies between our own moral standard and that of God. If someone slap you in the cheek, you would be entitled to retaliate with another slap, an eye for an eye, right? No, Jesus said, give him your other cheek. You are entitled to love your friend and hate your enemy, right? No, Jesus said, love your enemy. That illustrates how Man finds himself deep in the mud of corruption, even his own moral is already corrupted; he cannot hoist himself to the higher ground. The only salvation is to reach the outstretched Hand coming down from above. 

Doing good then is not the requirement of salvation, rather it is the consequence of it.

Fuzzy?

No such thing as free lunch

Was I really seeking good
Or just seeking attention?
Is that all good deeds are
When looked at with an ice-cold eye?
-- Elphaba in Wicked (No Good Deed)

This clichéd line reveals a question that always bogs the knower: Is there true altruism?

Put simply, every altruistic act may arguably be traced to selfish motive(s). You volunteer to feel good about yourself or to satisfy your superiority complex; you help a friend to invest in a future return of favour; you donate to make yourself look good; you treat the person you love well so that he/she will requite your love; you treat someone for lunch to curry favour; and the list goes on.

A friend of mine commented that, well, since an altruistic act is performed by self, it can never be separated from self. The self is always entangled with the act: they can never be separated, so one can never be truly altruistic.

I nodded to that at the time, but then it turns out it may not be that simple.

Victor Frankl wrote about 'transcendent quality of conscience' in Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. In essence, it means that the self can transcends itself and considers itself objectively. This is so deeply embedded in the language that we tend to overlook it: consider the reflexive pronouns (the 'selves') – say, myself. "I consider myself": 'I' is the subject and 'myself' is the object, right? Following that, we can argue that the transcendent self may then be fully removed from its selfish desires and be truly altruistic. This is what makes a person a person. The etymology of 'person' is per-sonat, literally: sounding through. Frankl goes on to point that what sounds through is the voice of transcendence.

Personally though, and I think most people would agree, that it does not matter whether one is truly altruistic or not. Is it so bad to love yourself? Jesus said, quoting the Law: "Love your neighbour as yourself." (Mark 12:31). It's true that you have to put others before yourself (and of course God before all), but the 'self' element is still there. Here we see another entanglement, albeit a slightly different one. 'Others' is always entangled with 'self', so there is no need to remove 'self' from the picture.

On a darker note, you just have to realise that people always have ulterior motives in things that they do, consciously or otherwise. You yourself also have selfish motives in everything that you do. When we play it out in the arena, we just have to be aware of those often invisible conflicts of motives and wade cautiously. Well, to be pragmatic: use and be used, needless to say, tactfully.

There goes my free lunch.
Update: Regarding loving for the hope of requital, there's a song blatantly saying exactly that.

Johari Window and Epistemology

                        Known to self    Not known to self
                     ---------------------------------------
Known to others      |      Arena      |     Blind spot    | 
                     --------------------------------------- 
Not known to others  |      Façade     |      Unknown      |
                     ---------------------------------------

Johari Window belongs to the field of psychology and the 'rooms' categorise aspects of personality as shown above. However, we can modify a little and apply this to the issue of knowledge, like thus:

                             Awareness         Unawareness
                        ---------------------------------------
Knowledge possessed     |        1        |         2         | 
                        --------------------------------------- 
Knowledge not possessed |        3        |         4         |
                        ---------------------------------------

Shall we dub this Epistemological Window? Now, this is going to get a little bit confusing, so read closely:

1. Things that you know you know

The body of your cognitive knowledge. Facts that you have learned, conscious reasoning, conscious perceptions from the senses. 

2. Things that you don't know you know

I believe that the thing we call intuition is the sum of subconscious reasoning. Somehow the vibes and nuances are too subtle, too weak to be picked up by the conscious, so it sinks underwater to the lower part of the iceberg. It stays there until somehow it floats up again changed, as an inexplicable feeling. Intuition, gut feeling, sixth sense, whatever you call it, I believe that belongs to this category. My sense of direction is not, though.

3. Things that you know you don't know

Gaps in your body of knowledge. Of course you don't really know in literal sense what the gap is, because that's missing. What I mean here is that you recognise from the context, or the surrounding information, that there is a missing part. Being aware of this niche is what I mean by 'knowing' it.

4. Things that you don't know you don't know

Ignorance, basically. 
Joking aside, these also include things for which the framework of knowledge around them has not been established (you cannot be aware of the gaps because there is a gaping abyss there).
These may also include things beyond the limits of our mind itself, like God. Sure, there are some things we know about Him, but there are things that we don't obviously. And for some of those, we don't even know that we don't.

Like the psychological Johari Window, classifying our knowledge and unknowledge helps to understand ourselves better. We are recalling and acquiring #1 and discovering #2 everyday. Scientists strive to fill in on #3 and uncover #4.

How is your Epistemological Window?

Nothing matters except knowing nothing matters.
-- Fiyero in Wicked (Dancing Through Life)

Wisdom is knowledge plus: knowledge -- and the knowledge of its own limits.
-- Victor E. Frankl 

Utopia (again)

Utopia should be this place of impeccability, of manifested ideals. Based on previous argument, where I said that dystopias lack something, then utopia must be this place of completeness, all things in a harmonious gestalt. But what is 'complete', really? Gandhi said that "[t]here is enough for every man's need but not greed". We always desire for something more. And there's another question: after the state of completeness is attained, what next?

Let's answer the latter first. Atwood has this to say:

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's now way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
-- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Her view is a morbid one. After we are in paradisum, that's it. The story stops. This is difficult for me to imagine. After all, they always say that the only thing that is constant is change. Or maybe there is another kind of perfectness where it is more dynamic, changing from perfection to perfection? I imagine it to be so because by definition, there is no such thing as 'boring' in a utopia, isn't there? So are we doomed to never reach there?

Moving on: What is 'complete'?

My picture of 'completeness' would be the Oneness that the Hindus are trying to find paths of enlightenment to. And that wouldn't be too far-off -- we can relate spiritual enlightenment here to the utopian state of perfection. This idea of Oneness as the highest state has also pervaded sci-fi. I have encountered a few stories whereby there is a running thread: the highest state of evolution is where we would abandon our physical bodies and spiritually become one single consciousness.

Summing up: Will we ever reach 'completeness' then?

Let's reword 'completeness' as 'fullness' here. In Avatar, Mo'at, Neytiri's mother and the shaman of the Omaticaya, mentioned a metaphor about empty and full cups. I'm borrowing that metaphor here: a cup fully filled is our 'completeness'. To be full, then, the cup has to be emptied first. And you can see how this fits very nicely with what Khalil Gibran said:

The deeper that sorrow carves onto your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
 -- Khalil Gibran

And William Blake echoes:

And when this we rightly know
Thro' the World we safely go.
Joy & Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
-- Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

I talked about this before under Dualism Paradox, so read the details there. So the first way to achieve utopia: suffer through dystopia first. Like Pandora's box, Hope tends to come the last, after the evils.

The second way -- and I have already dropped the hints -- is to follow the Hindus. Now, topos in Greek means 'place'. It doesn't mean that we've got to take it literally. Then we can interpret a utopia not as a place but a state instead. The Eastern spirituality seeks inward journey (compared to outward one in Western spirituality). So it's change-your-paradigm thing. Again I invoke William Blake, from the same poem no less:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-- Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

The journey inward, besides exploring the Self, also includes exploring other Beings. To see the perfections in the imperfections.

Final thought: If you see the Wikipedia entry on utopia, you would find an uncited reference to the humorous coinage of the word 'utopia' (probably factual, albeit uncited, since one of TED speakers mentioned that, too). It goes something like this: the etymology of 'utopia' is from Greek, as I already mentioned. This presumably comes from eu (good) + topos (place). But there is another Greek prefix which in English transliterates to the same spelling: ou (no) + topos (place). It is said that the coiner intentionally keeps the ambiguity as a joke. Good place; no place.

In conclusion: I think it is really your choice to attain 'the good place' or 'the no place'. We can strive towards the 'goodness', not necessarily perfection, or at least not the idealised one, by looking inwards and getting up stronger every time we fall down. Or we can keep it as an ideal, intellectual projection that can never be. 

Correlation

Consciousness and (again) dimensions

Reading this comment, I recall a very good description of pure consciousness that is independent of any platform.

"Look yonder," said my Guide, "in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions.
"Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the on-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen."
He ceased; and there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny, low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, as from one of your Spaceland phonographs, from which I caught these words, "Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is nothing else beside It." "What," said I, "does the puny creature mean by 'it'?" "He means himself," said the Sphere: "have you not noticed before now, that babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the world, speak of themselves in the Third Person? But hush!"
"It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!"
"Can you not startle the little thing out of its complacency?" said I. "Tell it what it really is, as you told me; reveal to it the narrow limitations of Pointland, and lead it up to something higher." "That is no easy task," said my Master; "try you."
Hereon, raising by voice to the uttermost, I addressed the Point as follows:
"Silence, silence, contemptible Creature. You call yourself the All in All, but you are the Nothing: your so-called Universe is a mere speck in a Line, and a Line is a mere shadow as compared with —" "Hush, hush, you have said enough," interrupted the Sphere, "now listen, and mark the effect of your harangue on the King of Pointland."
The lustre of the Monarch, who beamed more brightly than ever upon hearing my words, shewed clearly that he retained his complacency; and I had hardly ceased when he took up his strain again. "Ah, the joy, ah, the joy of Thought! What can It not achieve by thinking! Its own Thought coming to Itself, suggestive of its disparagement, thereby to enhance Its happiness! Sweet rebellion stirred up to result in triumph! Ah, the divine creative power of the All in One! Ah, the joy, the joy of Being!"
"You see," said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understand them at all, he accepts them as his own — for he cannot conceive of any other except himself — and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction."
-- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott was published back in 1884, so it is available at public domain because the property rights have expired. I mentioned it a few times, here and here, when discussing about dimensions.
This was written because Abbott wanted to introduce the concept of higher dimensions, more than three, but of course we as the denizens of Spaceland (3-D world) find it difficult to imagine. So what he did was to go down one dimension and took the point of view from a being in Flatland (2-D world), a Square. Later in the story, Square is visited by Lord Sphere, a 3-D being from Spaceland. Of course, at first he is skeptical about Sphere and dismissed him as simply a Circle, but in the end he realises that his world is simply a flat plane. To make his point, Sphere actually brings Square to Pointland, which is 2 dimensions less, that is, no dimension. Sphere then asked Square to convince the God of Pointland that the world is not zero dimension. So that's the part in the excerpt above.
And why are higher dimensions important, you ask? Perhaps Abbott already foresaw a future research in Physics. You would have heard all the buzz of superstring theory by now, what is it all about? It is a promising Theory of Everything, but there's a catch: the equations only work out if we have 10 dimensions of space. So we imagine that our world may actually have extra dimensions, albeit tucked inside the fabric of space-time, curling and intertwining upon them themselves. Physicist Brian Greene offers the analogy of the power cables to make sense of these extra dimensions. Cables, from afar, look like they only have one dimension, i.e. length. But if you go down the scale as an ant, you would notice that the cables have thickness; an existing dimension, but often too small to observe. Similarly, our world may have 7 extra dimensions that are too ultra-microscopic to observe. This is why the concept of higher dimensions is very important.
This is also one of the purposes of the Large Hadron Collider: to detect the extra dimensions. When particles collide in certain manners, some of the energy may be ejected to the hidden dimensions. We can measure the energy of the particles before collision and compare it to the energy after. If there is energy loss, we may be able to conclude the existence of the extra dimensions.
I highly recommend watching the TEDTalk by Brian Greene on superstring theory (2005), embedded below:

The Question of Identity

When I researched about The Recursive, I came across Ship of Theseus, thanks to Wikipedia effect, as aptly summarised by xkcd's Randall Munroe here. To be fair, they are not entirely unrelated.
Basically it's like this:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, Theseus

The question is, if the ship is recursively fixed until all parts have been replaced, is it still the same ship?
This reminds me of the famous notion about a man stepping into a river. The second time the man steps into the river, the river is not the same river; the man is not the same man. I always thought that this was said by a Chinese philosopher, but apparently it is Heraclitus.
Which brings us to the question: what defines identity?
Perhaps I should reiterate here how Heraclitus' man is not the same man. While the river is obvious for not being the same because of the continuous water flow, it's less obvious for the man. From biological point of view, some of the man's cells have died and have been replaced with new ones. He also has new memories, perhaps new ideas. And so on and so forth. In fact if we modify it a little, it can become close to the Theseus' paradox: if every one of a man's cells are replaced with a new one, is he the same man? Cloning debate.
The Wikipedia article poses a few solutions to the question, and to be honest, some of the solutions make my head spin. But in essence, we usually define what "the same" mean first. Aristotle differentiates between four causes: formal, material, final, efficient. Now the question is how identity is defined. According to design (formal, efficient) and purpose (final)? Yes, it is the same ship. But if the definition of identity includes material cause, then it is not the same ship. Perhaps the Japanese culturally exclude material cause as part of identity, since they can see no paradox in Ship of Theseus, as pointed out by the article.
I will skip "qualitative-numerical differences" and "four-dimensionalism" explanations. You can read them in the article. To me, those explanations are too pedantic to the point of being not useful. I prefer Aristotle's simple solution.
Perhaps by now you will have thought "What has identity of a ship got to do with me?". Then read on:

A: Who are you?
B: Huh? You mean my name?
A: See? Your eyes immediately turned right, using "the conscious side" to answer...I want you to answer what you feel. Who are you?
B: I don't want to say my name.
A: Not your name. I'm not asking the title your parents gave you, to distinguish you from other people. I mean, who, are you? Who?
B: A high school student.
A: Tsk, tsk, tsk. When you remove the status of "high school student", who are you?
B: A 17-year old... girl...
A: Not the labels of age or gender...Those are the labels that surround you yourself. Who?
B: A... human
A: And when all the labels are removed?
B: ... People, are all... labels.
A: If all the labels are removed from people like layers of an onion... Does that mean they disappear in the end? If you take off all the labels that surround your front with... Is there nothing left in the middle? Are you something that was created and molded...by your parents, society, the world?
B: No...
A: Then who are you?
B: I am...
-- Yamamoto Hideo, Homunculus v.4

So indeed, who are you? Remove all those layers of the proverbial onion, who are you at the naked core?
As for the girl's answer, you have to read the manga for yourself.
As for my own answer, I'm afraid that my own core at the middle is nothing much. I have to say that those labels imposed on us or otherwise, are undeniably a part of us, like our own limbs. But of course we are unique. We all have our own idiosyncrasies not found in other people. But that alone doesn't define who we are. It's like we need a foundation for it, like truth that cannot exist outside context. I'm human, I'm a student -- I need those labels otherwise my quirkiness means nothing.
Your answer?

The number system is like human life

"The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?"
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of the small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?"
He adds cream and some drops of orange juice to the soup.
"The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce the rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers."
He warms French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill.
"It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers."
I've stepped into the middle of the room to have more space. It's rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me.
"It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand real numbers with the imaginary ones, square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it's possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head towards them and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that's what I can't be without! That's why i don't want to be locked up."
I wind up standing in front of him.
"Smilla," he says, "Can I kiss you?"
-- Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, pp. 101-102

After hearing that kind of that beautiful metaphor, I think I want to kiss her also. The excerpt is my favourite among others in the TOK textbook. It's a very good example of an allegory, an extended metaphor.
Why post this now? Because I just finished the book and the movie. The former is highly recommended, the latter not at all.
Despite that, this is the scene from the movie, although it is significantly different from the book:

The Recursive

Repetitive words or ideas are indeed one of a writer's and a philosopher's favourite toys. But why would you want to repeat what you have just said? There are many reasons:

1. To make clear
This is quite obvious. When someone you talk to don't understand, you will repeat your statement. On a related note, in literature there is something we call motifs, which are recurring elements in a literary work that help to develop themes. This is more intangible, since motifs can be anything from prop, setting, words, sentences, ideas, characters, etc. Human minds always look for patterns to make sense of a coherent whole. One of the reasons we can't stand randomness.
(Notably, the Hindus chant their mantras repetitively over and over. Since their purpose is to attain enlightenment, I see it as they savour the meaning of a statement over and over. Every possible meaning, every possible nuances, until every possible essence is considered and eventually the teachings become clear to them. So I put this under this section.)

2. To emphasise
Related to #1 but goes a step further. Rather than making unclear things clear, we are making things already clear clearer. A rather clear example is this very statement and the one before -- clear?

3. To deliver impact
Still related to #1 and #2. My favourite is a line from Churchill's speech:

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.
-- Winston Churchill

Note the emphasis on we and fight. Try to remove the repetition and you will see that the impact is much lesser. By repeating the active voice, Churchill infused sense of belonging and raised the morale of the British in the war against the Germans.

Another example is by Wilfred Owen in Disabled:

Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He drought of jewelled hills
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.
-- Wilfred Owen, Disabled, lines 30-36

Although the syntax is deceptively similar to #6 (later in the post), 'fears of Fear' doesn't indicate the superlative 'fear'. Rather, the repetition enhances the effect of the personification 'Fear'. Let me explain:
When the first letter of a word is capitalised, it is like a name of a person, so we say that the word is personified. Other notable examples would be 'Mother Nature' and 'Death'. Think of those two words carefully -- if you are imaginative maybe you will conjure images of benevolent mother and grim reaper. So you see, personification firstly changes the status of the intangible to the tangible. Fear, nature, death -- those are abstract concepts and are difficult to picture. What personification does is giving them bodies -- embodying them in real objects, bringing them from imaginary to real plane. What's more, they are not just tangible objects, but persons. With personalities, with emotions, with will, with mind; it's a Being. So, personification, when used appropriately (like what Owen did), is a very powerful tool.
Owen refers to the ultimate form of fear in the battlefield. This is perhaps one of the things that people who never experience war, including myself, understand. But if you read Owen, you would somewhat get a glimpse of it: the graphic enormity of war. The soldier in Disabled didn't understand this also, until it was too late. The ultimate Fear, which should be feared for your own good.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
-- Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est, lines 17-24

There is another way of making impact: make a monotony first so that a sudden break from it would be blatant. It is indeed a dualism paradox where something exciting requires something boring first.

4. To indicate recursive property
What do you call your grandfather's father? Great-grandfather? How about moving up a hundred generations? Easy: Great-(101x)grandfather.
What do you call a square of a number? A zenzic. What do you call a square of a square of a square of a number? Zenzizenzizenzic. I'm not pulling your leg -- it's the word which has the most z's in English.
On a similar note, speed is the rate of change of distance, acceleration is the rate of change of speed. So acceleration is the rate of change of rate of change of distance (one of my students was very amused by this). It's a pity the physicists didn't have the sense of humour like the mathematicians to coin a similarly recursive term for acceleration.

Let's take a detour and see about other languages:
5. To express plurality
Certain languages, instead of modifying their nouns, prefer to repeat them to indicate amount of more than one. For example, in the Malay/Indonesian language, the word 'person' would be translated 'orang' while 'people' would be 'orang-orang'. A very regularised modification, unlike a certain language in which the modification follows a rule but not always consistent.

6. To indicate the superlative
This should be quite a known fact to Christians. In the Hebrew language, it is one way to express superlative as such: X of Xs. So for instance 'the wine of wines' means the wine superior to any other wines. This syntax may seem logical when we say 'king of kings' and 'lord of lords' but befuddling when we say 'people of peoples'. This is because nouns like 'king' and 'lord' already imply superlativity in their meanings, so this Hebrew syntax works when such nouns are used but otherwise sounds strange in English.

Now, for the reasons less obvious:
7. To confuse
'Huh? Isn't this contrary to #1?' you ask. Actually to be more exact, it is to prompt people to ponder about things but sometimes if you think too much you get confused. A fine line between philosophical musings and clueless rants indeed.

Since this is an area of philosophy, let's have Plato:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
-- Juvenal

Plato questioned Socrates "who will watch the watchmen?" in The Republic. This is a very common question when we are talking about society structure, morality and laws. This invites us to think: those who ensure adherence to the law -- who will make sure they themselves adhere to the law?

Moving on to epistemology. Look at the following dialogue:

A: Some people don't know what they don't know.
B: But if something is unknown, how can you possibly know it?
A: What I mean is, you know certain things -- those form the body of your knowledge, correct? You should realise that there are gaps missing here and there in your body of knowledge. Those are those that, when you learn of them, you would know that they will fit the gaps.
It is like a game of jigsaw puzzle. When you almost finish it, you don't know what the missing pieces look like, but at least you know their shapes. And when the pieces fit snugly in the gaps, you know that those are the missing pieces.
B: Ah, so you mean that there are people don't even realise that there are gaps in their understanding?
A: Precisely. That's why the quest for knowledge is neverending. The gaps are always there, getting finer and finer, too microscopic to the untrained eyes. But I hope someday our understanding will be complete, not even a sliver of truth excluded.

Makes you think twice, doesn't it? Perhaps another one?

In the above dialogue, B knows that A knows that B knows that A knows...that B already knows what A means.

Confused enough?
There's a poem titled 'thinking I think I think' by Charles Bernstein. Before you click the link, brace yourselves, for the poem is discombobulating as the title is ungrammatical.
Bordering on that delicate tipsy tightrope walk between, how about:

And the biggest self of self is, indeed, self; that sin is, in fact, grounded in this notion of what is it that I want as opposed to somebody else?
-- Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, addressing his extramarital affair on June 24, 2009, as transcribed by Federal News Service. (Source)

And what is that supposed to mean? I'm as clueless as the next guy.
Next, reverse psychology. In one passage I read, a villain is having a monologue: "What can you do to make a person doubt a truth?" He answered himself, "Simply tell the truth."
Essentially, this is reverse psychology. The villain is perceived as someone who is not likely to tell the truth, thus his words are doubted. But this kind of assumption is utilised by the villain.
To complicate matters, there is reverse-reverse psychology, where the hero is as clever as the villain and expects the villain to use reverse psychology. In this case the villain may try to speak as such that he sounds like using reverse psychology, while in fact he is not. He simply lies.
Taking the mind game further -- the pattern should be clear by now -- there is reverse-reverse-reverse psychology and so on, but alas, I'm getting recursive.
8. To entertain
While repetition is a proper rhetoric device, linguists are wary of redundancy. To what extent is a repetition redundant? I'm not answering that question, instead I will mention repetitions that are clearly redundant but funny.
Put up your hands: Who among you are guilty of using redundant 'ATM machine' and 'PIN number' in daily conversations? Oh my, we are all suffering from RAS syndrome. As you can read in the Wikipedia article, RAS syndrome is a mockingly funny, yet most suitable, name for the phenomenon.

9. To make a pun
Homonymic pun is a perfect excuse for repetition; words that don't mean the same thing but look the same or at least similar. So at the heart of it, it's not really repetition per se, since the meanings of the words are different. See comment section for example.

Finally, if you're still not clear on recursiveness, click here.

Pun 101

When talking about context, I couldn't help but think of puns. Let me start off by saying that there are a lot of theories about why funny things are funny. What I'm focusing here is puns, which is just a subset of all things funny (or lame -- depends) and what role context plays. Again, language and philosophy hand-in-hand.
Puns basically makes use of ambiguity. This is where context comes into play. If you remember about ambiguity between lambda and rù (λ), you will see that we need to choose the right context to ascertain meaning. What makes puns humorous is the confusion of this choice of contexts. let's have an example:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Now, the quote says exactly what it says: if you don't understand binary, you won't get the joke; the joke is on you. Of course, the first time reading this you will establish a context, like it or not (since we already argued earlier that for something to have a meaning, it has to rest on a context plane). Well, the context that we established is that "10" is ten, in base ten, as is commonly the case. The pun here confuses the context of base ten and to understand the quote we have to change our context to base two, as hinted ("binary"). Ah, now it makes sense -- "10" is actually two if we convert it to base ten.
Most theorists agree that this unsuspecting element is one of the core elements of all things funny. So: several contexts exist, we chose the most likely one, but oh no, actually it is the other context. This "oh no" part is the surprise element, the unexpected, making connections between contexts that are previously not usually thought to be connected. Daniel Dennet argued that as a reward for making this connection, we fall into fit of laughter. This is certainly an interesting theory since laughter has been proven to have physiological benefits, so it is not far-fetched to call it a reward. I would like very much to address the many theories of humour, but that is another story.
Let's have another pun:

When Mozart passed away, he was buried in a churchyard. A couple days later, the town drunk was walking through the cemetery and heard some strange noise coming from the area where Mozart was buried.
Terrified, the drunk ran and got the town magistrate to come and listen to it.
When the magistrate arrived, he bent his ear to the grave, listened for a moment, and said, "Ah, yes, that's Mozart's Ninth Symphony, being played backwards."
He listened a while longer, and said, "There's the Eighth Symphony, and it's backwards, too. Most puzzling."
So the magistrate kept listening; "There's the Seventh... the Sixth... the Fifth..." Suddenly the realization of what was happening dawned on the magistrate; he stood up and announced to the crowd that had gathered in the cemetery, "My fellow citizens, there's nothing to worry about. It's just Mozart decomposing."

You can immediately see that the punchline is the two meanings of "decomposing": rotting away and the opposite of composing a symphony. It should be noted that the contexts surrounding the two meanings are not really confused -- more like they are fused. Of course the correct course of nature is for a human to rot away in a grave, but a strange phenomenon happened: the backward playing of Mozart's works; both ultimately point to the word "decomposing".
In this light, you can see that rebus puzzles are a kind of pun, too.
Here are few examples (source):Mouseover for answers. Again, there are two meanings, those represented by the arrangement of the visual cues on the puzzle and the other is a common phrase/sentence -- both should point to the same phrase/sentence. Do you see it?
Now, let's talk about categorisation. Language is not only spoken, but written; so it should be no surprise that besides homonymic puns, there are homophonic ones. Homonyms are words with the same spelling but different meanings, like "decomposing". Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently. Example for a homophonic pun:

A: What is the difference between a prince and a ball?
B: A prince is heir to the throne; a ball is thrown to the air.

Needless to say, this is about the similar pronunciations between "heir" and "air" as well as between"throne" and "thrown". There are several other categorisation, such as the rebus puzzle case, in which the arrangement of the visual cues are not really "words", so it cannot be categorised under homonymic -- but in principle, puns revolve around ambiguity of meanings -- this can arise from the same spelling, the same sound, etc.
On a related note, there is a category of homophonic puns called mondegreens. Perhaps they should not be called puns, because mostly, they are not intended. Basically a mondegreen is a misinterpretation of a line because it sounds similar to something else. Sylvia Wright proposed this term because as a child she hear a poem which has a line "And laid him on the green" but she misinterpreted it as "And Lady Mondegreen". So you can see that Mondegreen itself is a mondegreen (this is kind of recursive, isn't it?). I can recall a recent example, which perhaps should be called reverse mondegreen or intended mondegreen. In other words, it's a genuine pun. Language Log dubbed it the worst pun of all time, even. Here it is:

Lastly, let's have puns about puns that I shamelessly plagiarise from Wikipedia:

"The pun is mightier than the word." — original source unknown
(Pun and word: plays on "pen" and "sword", in the saying "The pen is mightier than the sword".)
"A pun is its own reword." — Dance Drier, British comedian
(Reword: pun on "reward", from the saying "Virtue is its own reward".)
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." — Fred Allen
(Quoted: pun on "quartered", an old form of capital punishment.)
"Immanuel doesn't pun; he Kant." — Oscar Wilde
(Kant: play on "can't", in the name of philosopher Immanuel Kant)

So punny.

Six Degrees of Separation

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find that extremely comforting, that we're so close, but I also find it like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names—it's anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tierra del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound—you are bound—to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought: how Paul found us; how to find the man whose son he claims to be, or perhaps is, although I doubt it. How everyone is a new door, opening into other worlds.
-- John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation

I'm just a single voice
What can I do to erase

All this misunderstanding
All this anarchy
Six degrees of separation
Sometimes it's so hard to see
That we are not alone in this
-- Corrinne May, Free

"Six Degrees of Separation" is a concept that everyone in the world is linked to at most six degrees. As the Wikipedia article mentions, Frigyes Karinthy proposed this notion back in 1929.
When I ponder on why people find this concept appealing, I think it can be summarised concisely as thus: the notion of shrinking 6.5 odd billion people to 6 degrees -- what a dwindle! Our enormous globe, suddenly implodes to network of no more than six connections between the nodes. This big shrink, this oversimplification can be understood without taxing the minds. There is no need to imagine how do billions of people crowded together look like, like the spell of dizziness when you look up at the vast expanse of the sky, whose boundaries you cannot fathom.
However, while offering a concept even a child can understand, it is also almost impossible to prove or disprove this notion.
Let's scrutinise this concept closely:
As of 2006, the estimate for the global population stands at 6.53 billion. Now, let us assume one-way network. This means we zoom at one person and view the network of acquaintances around him. If we let average numbers of a person's acquaintances to be n, then
n^6 = 6.53 x 10^9
Solving for n, we get roughly 43. So, on average, a person only needs to know 43 people for the whole world to be interconnected. So few?
We have to take a look at some assumptions:
Firstly, this assumes that there is no social barriers. Anybody is free to mix around with anybody. With the current globalisation era, the reality is becoming closer to the assumption. Still, special circumstances like cultural isolation, geographical restraint, language barriers, etc. may come into play here.
Secondly, society is dynamic. Relationships are broken, created, renewed; and we are always moving about, geographically or otherwise, as in births and deaths. The figure 6.53 billion is a frame freeze, which vacillates across space and time. While it is true that statistically speaking population size doesn't vary that much, we are talking about the dynamism of the exchanges of communication, which cannot be easily included in the equation.
Thirdly, we assume that all relationships are on acquaintance level. In actuality, we have stronger and weaker relationships than that. You see, if we have strong relationship, say family, we tend to stick more to the stronger relationships, while the assumption suggests that you stroll in the park and make acquaintances to strangers along your way.
Fourthly, we assume that on average we have the same amiability level. In truth, there are introverts and extroverts and the spectrum in between. And this is of course related to the previous assumption. Our personalities influence on the combinations of strong or weak relationships that we have.
...
In the end, even with the assumptions laid bare, it is still impossible to see whether the fact that everyone is separated by at most 5 people in between, is true. In the end it is just romanticisation, an idealisation, like a pretty gift wrapped in fancy ribbons, but without utility whatsoever.
I believe what the world unity can not only be achieved by merely an ideal. When we get right down to it, we have to eliminate prejudice, promote equality, educate the people, help one another in need, play a joke on each other a little,
while keeping in mind that we are all tightly connected, every two of us having no more than five people in between.
Update: How about taking a look at the Internet itself to picture the complexity of connections? Wait patiently for it to load...

Context is all

“Context is all” (Margaret Atwood). Does this mean that there is no such thing as truth?
The above question is one of the ten prescribed topics for TOK essay, IB Nov '07 session.
I don't know why but I have since regretted not picking this question for my TOK essay. It is one of the shortest -- it gives a lot of space of interpretation. That's the tantalising part. And the difficult part, too.
Enough wallowing in regret, then; let me try to tackle this, without the restriction of the mark scheme.

To comprehend such a statement, it is only appropriate for us to be acquainted with the context surrounding this statement.
This statement appears more than once in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Set in dystopian post-nuclear age , the novel gives a glimpse through the eyes of Offred, a handmaid. For Offred, what utterance of "context is all" could mean? I believe for the bulk of it, she demanded context to make sense of her surroundings. You see, Republic of Gilead where Offred lived in, was still in the midst of transforming to a dystopia. Offred could recall her life before in (presumably) the United States. The sudden change in situations confused her. Life didn't used to be like this, so what now? That is the state of mind Offred is in. When her old life, her 'context', has been snatched away, she needs a new one.
But, what exactly is context? We have the vague idea of it. A bigger picture, a larger body of knowledge, the plane on which we define things. Let's extend the metaphor about the picture a bit more. Say you have a jigsaw puzzle. Take a piece. Describe. Well, it has interesting shape and fancy colours, but otherwise it is a piece of crap. Assemble the whole thing and tadaa...! You've got yourself a clear picture (Disclaimer: depends on your jigsaw puzzle picture. If you bought an abstract picture then not my fault). Same thing with pixels: A pixel means nothing but with other pixels on the screen, then you have some meaning to it.
One way to look at it is to differentiate between two things that may make up a context: the laws and the facts (or truths, if you like, but that word is so philosophically loaded that one is reluctant to use). For example, let's look at Euclidean geometry. The "laws" are the five axioms postulated by Euclid. Those are the rules of the game. Now, restricted by these rules we can construct infinite geometrical shapes -- these are the "facts". So you see that the laws provide the plane of existence (pun on Euclidean plane geometry intended) on which it supported the existence of the objects, the facts. You could immediately see how this explanation makes perfect sense to mathematicians and scientists: Yes. Precisely because they deal with laws and objects governed by those.
Another way to look at what context really is, is back to our jigsaw puzzles. Coherence is the keyword. Mismatched jigsaw pieces can only mean that there are other pieces form other set contaminating yours (of course there alternatives like your or the manufacturer's stupidity, but well you don't want to consider them, do you?). This approach is clearly different from the previous one. Some facts that agree with each other can make up a larger body of knowledge. For instance, two facts: "A attended Dr. X's class yesterday" and "There was Dr. X's class yesterday". Coherent, isn't it? Let's say we change the second statement to "Dr. X's class was cancelled yesterday", then the first statement must be false; a mismatched jigsaw piece, or something else entirely.
To unify the above two approaches, picture it this way: there are laws which are the foundations of all truths. But these truths are interconnected in intricate way with one another, like a mesh; they are not beads neatly arranged on a plane; picture the beads in a kind of neural-level-intricacy network. Now, for convenience, sometimes it is easier to take a look at a bead by zooming at few beads surrounding the one being viewed. This is our jigsaw puzzle. Or look at the more fundamental, in the truest sense of the word: the laws. (To complicate matters, these laws are actually are layered cakes also. For example, in Euclidean geometry we have 5 axioms, then we still derive a whole lot of theorems, which in a sense, are also laws.)
It is worth reiterating here that contexts come in different sizes. You choose how big or small it is according to practicality. Actually, we can classify people according to how they use the above two approaches. Natural scientists look at the physical laws that govern physical bodies. Human scientists limit their scope of context to society and history. Psychologists restrict it even more to human minds and interactions. Mathematicians also look at the fundamentals like natural scientists; but then they go and create their own contexts (e.g: imaginary plane).
By now you should have already understood that the word 'context' also carries hefty epistemological weight.
So: context is all. Without context, independent "truth" cannot be considered truth. There must be a framework surrounding it, supporting it, then the "truth" is construed. Here is a good example:

What is this? (Warning: trick question)
The answer? You've guessed it. Depends on the context.
To Greeks and physicists, it is clearly a lambda, as in λόγος 【logos】 isn't it?
But my Chinese friends beg to differ. It's rù as in 进入【jìnrù】 (enter; get into).
Who is correct? Both are correct in their respective contexts, aren't they?
Lastly, let's address that old philosophical question:
If a tree in the woods fells and no one is around, does it make a sound?
Assessing from utility and usefulness point of view, the answer is: it doesn't. Or more precisely: I don't give a damn, because it makes no difference whether it does -- there is no added value whatsoever. This sounds like a jest, but anthropocentric view like this is actually more common than what most people think. To simply limit one's context to what are useful to humans is certainly practical, but it is dangerous when one is unaware of it.
To a physicist, the answer is quite clear: it does. Sound waves travel through the medium of air. Our ears are just detectors of these sound waves. If there are no human ears around, then just use other kind of detectors to confirm the vibration in the air that is the sound wave.
Do you see how the above example make use of the different scopes of contexts?
Back to our heroine Offred. She desperately needed context: to construe things around her; to glean truths from lies.
I believe we also desperately do.

Physics Lecture

I had this lecture sometime ago and I spotted two interesting things.
1) The lecturer was explaining about science and how it is about the cycle of hypothesis, theory and experiment. That was all fine and well, but then the example he gave really made me straighten up in my seat. You see, he was giving an example about hypothesis:
"So, let's say we have hypothesis about speed; that it is distance over time. We test it, and the experiment agrees, so we have a theory that speed is distance over time."
The fatal mistake here is that speed is a concept that we devised to substantiate the notion of rate of change of distance. Speed is by definition distance over time; it is self-contained truth that is indisputable.
To be fair, the lecturer has that 'things that I regret almost as soon as I said it' look. He realised his fatal mistake but went on without rectifying it to avoid confusion.
2) The lecturer has this interesting quiz: "Is this true or false: an object with non-zero acceleration can never stop and stay stopped."
Again, the key lies with definition. Since the object's movement is already defined as non-stationary (non-zero acceleration), of course it can never stop, neither can it stay stopped. So is there a point of asking the question, unless it is epistemology class and/or the absurdity is intended?

Oh well.

Dream

Hero king warrior --
fantasticality.
Airy-fairy kind
or The same --
ordinaricality.
Alternate world
maybe Strangeness of circumstances --
Freudian symbolicality.
Interpretation please
Nevertheless It's
Surreality, phantasmagoricality
-- At-the-moment Reality
Then the alarm rings, congeniality
Thoughts come rushing in
Rationality, reasonability
Welcome back to reality

Likening

Association, parallelism, metaphor, analogy, parable.
I guess the appropriate hypernym would be 'likening'.
(Even the concept of hypernymity can also be considered as one, but never mind.)
I always wonder at the sheer number of literary devices that uses 'likening'. Perhaps the keyword here is 'connection'. Human brains like to connect, to associate. Conditioned reflex, for example, associate a certain stimulus with a certain response.
Other examples. Visual learning associate images with concepts and this actually makes recalling more effective. Others may find it easier to memorise a song than a paragraph of the same length. On physical level, intelligence is said to rely upon the number of connections that neurones make. Is it not evident that the brain makes connection?
Association can be made on more or less equal level or different ones.
Generalisation, for instance, is associating a certain common characteristics of a member of a body with that body itself. Contextualisation can also be seen as one since a concept resides in larger body called the context. Of course these two sound more distant than association of things at more or less equal level.
Parallelism juxtaposes a certain event with another event, for instance.
But actually the degree of equality of the levels of things being likened does not matter.
The impact does.
Take Personification which likens dead objects to living things. The matter lies in the impact on the mind. If a pencil is said to dance on the paper, the mind recalls not only writing but also the concept of beauty, of grace, of efficiency, of nimbleness.
Metaphors achieve similar impact. When time is likened to a river, the mind recalls the quality of a river and try to attach it to time. How it is a flow, how it is continuous series of events, and so on.
There is also another kind of impact. Understanding. Take analogies. Analogies may not be full representations of the concepts being analogised but they help in understanding the concepts. The concept of the Trinity, for example, can be analogised to a triangle. The mind recalls the understanding that a triangle is not a triangle without three sides. So the concept of Three-but-One can somewhat be better understood. The metaphor example above also shows that time that is abstract can be partly explained using river that is non-abstract, thus is understood better.
Isn't it interesting? We all are familiar about this, aren't we, since the brain is all about connections anyway, so this knowledge is at the back of our minds but not really thought or spoken deliberately. It is kind of learning epistemology. When I first learned about the knowledge of knowledge, I feel familiar and I had thought about it or kept it at the back of my mind before but now it has form. It is written in words, it is conveyed in language. I feel overjoyed.

God of the Gaps

Scientific pursuits reveal answers to many questions mankind asks. While fresh facts are amassed by seconds, it is arguable whether science has brought us closer to the truth.
What is truth? Back to the ancient philosophical question.
A Christian scientist once remarked that scientists are climbing their way to the top of a mountain. They overcome the obstacles one by one - but when they are about to remove the last obstacles near the summit, they find theologians have been sitting there for centuries awaiting them.
Assuming that science is bringing us closer to the truth, the peak of the mountain, they may never reach it since at the summit it is God - and God is not supposed to be comprehensible since He is God; Christian philosophers would say.
While this speaks about the greatness of God and such, scientists then may counter it with the accusation that Faith is simply filling out the gaps that science has not yet been unable to fill. This may be true to both believers and scientists but the problem lies in whether Science is eventually able to fill those gaps?
If it is able to, then Faith turns out to be a deception and is merely a temporary filling of the gaps, waiting for Science to push it out of the gaps and replace it.
If it is not, then Faith is valid; it explains the unexplainable - it is supposed to be.
Yet another problem arises: How would we know whether Science is able to fill those gaps?
Exactly. We wouldn't know. We don't even know whether we are at the right track to approach the truth in the first place.
On this issue pure scientists and believers are still divided. Yet many people simply embrace Science and Faith. Indeed, if seen another way, the two can be thought as complements. One explains the explainable and the other explains the unexplainable. I personally think that Science can only done up to a limit and the rest it is up to faith. Science is human tool after all. Humans are limited. It follows that so is Science.
On another note, the concept of 'god of the gaps' is sometimes misused. At times things unexplainable are quick to be dismissed as part of divine knowledge. It is true that we are limited but where that limit is we are still uncertain.
So we have to be aware that it is a spectrum. You just have to choose where to stand. The wise will of course choose "everything in moderation".