Scott Wollschleger's Sunday Afternoon Delirium and Further Thoughts About...

by Scott Wollschleger

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Thank you for the Prof Moors posting on limits and boundaries. It reminds me of a puzzling indecent I had with a taxi driver who insisted that the time it took to get from one place to another was not a matter of how fast he was driving. He told me a long winded story about a similar encounter he had with an uninformed check-out clerk at a grocery store. The clerk's inability to know the price of things was made notorious one day when he apparently committed suicide and left behind a short note that said he had allways lived by the wisdom given to him by a very compelling parable told by a wandering local artist who "constantly declared that the very fact that he had no real home gave him greater power in the world".

Here is a rough version of the story he told me.

"The Long Necklace

In a grocery store a rich older lady with a large flashy adornment of pearls around her neck decides to buy some fresh oysters. Not seeing any price indication, she asked the clerk, how much each one costs. The clerk says that it is impossible to really know the true value because any one of them may have the most beautiful pearl inside of them and it would impossible to know without dissecting the oyster, effectively destroying it. And of course, that would then diminish the value of the oyster. There was really nothing he could do to help her.
The old lady explained to him not to worry about this problem any more because the marvels of modern science had permitted all oysters to now give way to having pearls inside of them. So, in essence, each pearl on her necklace was of the same value as a single oyster and that the value of pearls had become quite diminished from all this. The real difference in value between an oyster and a pearl was at best marginal. The clerk, still not swayed, told her his heart and mind would still remain undecided because given the years of small changes that will happen along the way, the possibility remained that one day something that no longer resembled what was around her neck may come about to be created inside the oyster. And that would then become what is to be called the most beautiful pearl and have the most value. The marginal differences in all this gave him hope. The lady then shook here head and reminded him that she was there to buy oysters and not debate economics. The clerk then shamefully lowered his head, found the correct price in a book on the counter and proceeded to process her order at the checkout...In the following week the clerk, recalling the humiliating encounter he had with the old lady, decided it was time to leave the grocery story and take to his true passions. But with the loss of his job and income he also lost his home and was left wandering the streets only finding himself telling this story to any person who wanted to know from where he found his power in this world. Eventually he lost all hope and took his own life. On his body the police found a small notebook which only contained some incomplete sketches for a short story entitled "It Is Because I have No Home That I Have the Greatest Power in This World"

Despite the morbidity of the tale, by the time the taxi driver had told me all this
I had arrived home.

It made me wonder what happens at the margin and its relationship to power.

Is the overcoming of internal limits the only way to greater powers?

Limit versus Boundary according to Prof. Martin Moors of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

by Corry Shores
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[The following is based on student notes.]

Within its very self, metaphysics discovers its own limits. It encounters its own finite limitations, but we must distinguish limits from boundaries.

Limit (German: die Grenze)

Limit is taken positively, because it implicitly or indirectly expresses what lies across it. Consider that for Kant, our rational understanding finds itself limited within the world of appearances. But "phenomena" is a term implying or pointing-to what lies beyond it, namely the thing-in-itself or noumenal world, which is not knowable from within our system of categories. Thus metaphysics or reason is limited within the realm of appearances, which nonetheless is positively linked with what abuts it. We cannot know what lies beyond the limit, but we can think about it.

Thus overcoming is limitation's dynamic.

Boundary (German: die Schranke)

Boundary is regarded negatively, because bounded things are isolated unto themselves. They do not refer to what lies beside them. They self-enclose. A boundary lacks reference to anything but itself, and for that reason is deficient or negative.

Reason or metaphysics self-renews and historicizes by discovering and overcoming its internal limits. Hence criticism does not keep its topic bound, but rather opens its limits to something else besides it.

[Taken from the first lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renowned metaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 1." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 25-Sept-2008.]