Ockham’s Secret Manuscript 1

Ockham’s Epiphany ends with his murder, and the burning of the manuscript he read from by his murderer, so I thought a secret manuscript would fill out the Ockham perspective on Limitation Philosophy.

Ockham a legendary logician is the ideal writer for a systematic stating of Limitation Philosophy. There is much in Ockham published writings that point towards Limitation Philosophy, which played a large role in my choice of him as a character of historical fiction.

Today (5/24/2024), I had a very good idea for the first part of the secret manuscript. The following is the current first draft of this:

Nothing circumscribes God, and that includes Limitation Philosophy.

The purpose of this manuscript is to set forth the principles that are basic to Limitation Philosophy in order to lay the foundation for entailments that follow from these principles.

The very first principle is that we are bounded beings animated by limited personalities. We are heuristic creatures in every sense of that word, so we must be very definite in our use of the terms paradigm and heuristic.

Paradigms are invariable and because of this they operate in the boundless reality of God’s being. Many things that appear paradigmatic are not. The movements of the moon and sun appear to our shortsighted selves as paradigmatic but there was a time when these things did not even exist as they are now constituted, and they will at some future time cease to be. They belongs to the heuristic world of things. The underlying physical reality of God’s embodiment is the universal process by which these things and everything else came to be. The boundless being of Deity animated by the limitless personality of God is the sole paradigm in the boundless universe.

Heuristic processes because they are variable generate error. Some more than others but in the dynamic process of any heuristic- error will be generated. No mere unfortunate result that can perhaps be avoided by the application of wisdom. The application of wisdom itself is a heuristic strategy that will in turn generate its own errors. And so it goes with bounded beings animated by limited personalities, that we reach for paradigms but only ever grasp heuristics.

Limitation Philosophy came to be by this very dynamic. I conjured up the Limitation Paradigm, which says:

The Personality and Being of God is Limitless. The personality and being of human beings is not limitless.

It appeared so very paradigmatic. I reached for it but only ever grasped Limitation Philosophy. It’s a vast improvement on the blind following of perceptions and inclinations, but as a heuristic system of ideas it’s not at all paradigmatic. As a human philosopher I have needed to freeze the unstoppable universal process to draw my picture, and my unavoidable need to do that generates many errors no human wisdom can overcome.

This proves the wisdom of seeing the theology of Limitation Philosophy as incomplete and provisional. This view is the motivation for turning to the more difficult understanding of ourselves as bounded beings animated by limited personalities. The fundamental lesson of the theology is that we are not God.

We are not omniscient so all of the strategies we base our behaviors on will only ever be heuristic, and the behaviors themselves will without exception generate some form of error. The wisdom to choose mostly successful strategies and by wisdom to live with the errors they generate will be fruitful, while the insisting on ever further explorations of the finer points of theology will land us among the weeds.

Let’s revisit the structural realities the theology depends on, but only to serve as a springboard to a better understanding of ourselves, and how we may best live.     

5/24/2024 Thomas Laperriere
Writing as Anaxagoras Pen, in turn writing as William Ockham

NOTE: In the real chronology of writing, the Logic of Limitless had been written and essentially finished for over a year. Looking back it’s fortunate for the writing process that I only discovered the relative futility of Limitation Philosophy to furnish us with ‘perfect truth.’ I would not have called my work perfect truth but I operated like that was what I was in fact discerning. Not just ‘better than blindness,’ which is how I now see it. I reached for the paradigm, and thought I drew a perfect image of God, but grasped only a heuristic (this is better than blindness).

6/6/2024 Thomas Laperriere Note of Socrates as ultimate monotheist: Perhaps as intuition about the Socrates character in Logic of Limitless is agnostic about any sort of image of God. He is fascinated by the revelation of Eleazar’s theology but nowhere indicates he has adopted it or that it corrected his own. Characteristic of Socrates is his being the smartest of the bunch by ‘knowing that he doesn’t know.’ Socrates, unlike Eleazar and myself makes no positive statement about the character of God. He just points out, that in his opinion, ‘the gods need nothing from us,’ and as evidence points out, ‘show me one clear example of them ever asking us for anything.’ Better than blind without making the mistake of constructing a faulty heuristic image.

6/6/2024 Note 2: In the iconoclasm game, the other faith’s images are false but the breakers images are true. Statues are smashed by believers angered that the image they have constructed in their minds is the true one. Having seen my own theology as mere heuristic, and a faulty image of deity the wisdom that, “There is no place for self-righteousness in Limitation Philosophy” is apparent