Into the arms of the air
![Piet Mondrian, De grijze boom [the gray tree], 1911](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/f6648eea-793d-41c2-badf-77a4d091573c.png?w=960&fit=max)
Pulling together three passages, without having much to add to them.
1) Plato, gesturing at a perspective "far superior to the things we know," unavailable to us "because of our weakness and slowness" and the obscurations of... the atmosphere.
Further, the earth is very large, and we live around the sea in a small portion of it between Phasis and the pillars of Heracles, like ants or frogs around a swamp; many other peoples live in many such parts of it. Everywhere about the earth there are numerous hollows of many kinds and shapes and sizes into which the water and the mist and the air have gathered. The earth itself is pure and lies in the pure sky where the stars are situated, which the majority of those who discourse on these subjects call the ether. The water and mist and air are the sediment of the ether and they always flow into the hollows of the earth. We, who dwell in the hollows of it, are unaware of this and we think that we live above, on the surface of the earth. It is as if someone who lived deep down in the middle of the ocean thought he was living on its surface. Seeing the sun and the other heavenly bodies through the water, he would think the sea to be the sky; because he is slow and weak, he has never reached the surface of the sea or risen with his head above the water or come out of the sea to our region here, nor seen how much purer and more beautiful it is than his own region, nor has he ever heard of it from anyone who has seen it.
Our experience is the same: Living in a certain hollow of the earth, we believe that we live upon its surface; the air we call the heavens, as if the stars made their way through it; this too is the same: Because of our weakness and slowness we are not able to make our way to the upper limit of the air; if anyone got to this upper limit, if anyone came
to it or reached it on wings and his head rose above it, then just as fish on rising from the sea see things in our region, he would see things there and, if his nature could endure to contemplate them, he would know that there is the true heaven, the true light, and the true earth, for the earth here, these stones and the whole region, are spoiled and eaten away, just as things in the sea are by the salt water.Nothing worth mentioning grows in the sea, nothing, one might
say, is fully developed; there are caves and sand and endless slime and mud wherever there is earth—not comparable in any way with the beauties of our region. So those things above are in their turn far superior to the things we know. Indeed, if this is the moment to tell a tale, Simmias, it is worth hearing about the nature of things on the surface of the earth under the heavens.—Plato, Phaedo, 109b-110b, trans. Grube/Cooper
2) Kant takes up the same question, and compares ambitious reason to a bird, which in wishing away friction wishes away its only air and falls.
Captivated by such a proof of reason's might, our urge to expand [our cognitions] sees no boundaries. When the light dove parts the air in free flight and feels the air's resistance, it might come to think that it would do much better still in space devoid of air. In the same way Plato left the world of sense because it sets such narrow limits to our understanding; on the wings of the ideas, he ventured beyond that world and into the empty space of pure understanding. He did not notice that with all his efforts he made no headway. He failed to make headway because he had no resting point against which-as a foothold, as it were-he might brace himself and apply his forces in order to set the understanding in motion. But [Plato is no exception]: it is human reason's usual fate, in speculation, to finish its edifice as soon as possible, and not to inquire until afterwards whether a good foundation has in fact been laid for it. Then all sorts of rationalizations are hunted up in order to reassure us that the edifice is sturdy, or, preferably, even to reject altogether so late and risky an examination of it. But what keeps us, while we are building, free from all anxiety and suspicion, and flatters us with a seeming thoroughness, is the following. A large part-perhaps the largest-of our reason's business consists in dissecting what concepts of objects we already have.
—Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A5/B9, trans. Pluhar
3) And here is Wittgenstein. Interested not so much in flight as friction. Back to the rough ground! [Zurück auf den rauhen Boden!]
105. When we believe that we have to find that order, the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called “sentences”, “words”, “signs”.
The sentence and the word that logic deals with are supposed to be something pure and clear-cut. And now we rack our brains over the nature of the real sign. a Is it perhaps the idea of the sign? Or the idea at the present moment?
106. Here it is difficult to keep our heads above water, as it were, to see that we must stick to matters of everyday thought, and not to get on the wrong track where it seems that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which again we are quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.
107. The more closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not something I had discovered: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming vacuous. We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
—Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 105-107, trans. Anscombe
From the starry dome to our animal air to the actual icy ground. The grit and the slip of it. Words. Did your spaceship by chance crash? Roadside assistance needed. Not sure that any of this will be of much help in knowing, flying, skating, but now at least we can understand what this song is about.
Long way to go, I guess. This should help more:
