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So: I was mostly confused by yesterday morning's conversation. I'm happy to let go of truth; not so sure about knowledge (but then what do we know, if we don't know what is true?). I'd certainly like to understand more more (much more) about the relation between the expressible, the communicable, and the represented.

"Expressible" only makes sense to me if it is "communicable" (I'm thinking here of a concept in linguistics, the "basic economy of response" needed for a conversation to be socially functional: language is intelligible if speaker and listener "connect," if what one says is "not heard as a non sequitur" by the other). I think, however, that expressible communication only makes sense to me, as a concept, if it is also understood to be  "representative," if the words or numbers stand in for something, are signs for that which is not present....

Which gets us to the "non-representable," that which cannot be represented. Is that which is not representable not worth our bother? Or is it the only thing worth bothering about? Or is it simply that which we cannot handle--so we turn our attention, somewhat helplessly, to what we can manipulate? So we ask the questions that can be answered, and let the bigger, more important and pressing and real ones, go?

Wittgenstein's cryptic "Of that which we cannot speak we must remain silent" was evoked several times yesterday. In Goldstein's novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Professor Klapper invokes a less-cryptic passage from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, which gives a very clear answer to these questions: "Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. Whatever we have words for, that is already dead in our hearts. In all talk there is a grain of contempt."

Rebecca Goldstein got a MacArthur prize for her ability to "dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling." Having just finished her newest novel, I'd say that's not quite the case; she's George-Eliot-like in weighing her fiction down with philosophy and religion; as a novel, 365 Arguments for the Existence of God doesn't quite sing, though some of the arguments w/in it certainly do.

Speaking of which, here's one that brings us (@ least it brought me) back to another very compelling example of the limits of formal systems. The math prodigy @ the center of the text is also the son of the Rebbe of a Hasidic sect, whose life--as he himself describes it @ 16--presents this dilemma:

"I know the formula, but I can't see my way clear to the solution. I try out every permutation, and nothing comes out right. How can that be?  How can there be no solution? The only thing I seem to be able to prove is that there is no solution....If I leave...I break the heart of...a community that remade itself through the efforts of my grandfather....I break the heart of my father, whom I love more than anything in the world. So that has impossible consequences and can be ruled out. so I stay. But if I stay, then...I live among people who love me more than they love themselves...and I'll never be able to share a single thought with them. I'll live the life of my father, and of his father before him, and of all the fathers who lived only to repeat the lives of their fathers. Where's the sense in that? How can one chose such a meaningless life? So I leave. And so it goes. Going to a university is necessary but impossible. Staying...is impossible but necessary...."

He decides to stay, and is observed, years later, by another, once "astonished by a little boy's genius," and now "astonished by the way in which that genius has been laid aside....Still, if to be human is to inhabit our contradictions...to be unable to find a way of reconciling the necessary and the impossible, then who is more human....? And if [his] prodigious genius has never found the solution, then perhaps that is proof that no solution  exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence..."

What might doing justice look like, in such a context (which is, of course, our own!)?