Aporia

• Just quickly writing this page as this is grokked (as I’ve experienced aporia)
• Means “impasse”
• E.g., when an elenchus is used, to show that, although you confirmed that you believe X, and Y, X and Y aren’t compatible. Now what?
• You’re left in a state of confusion

The literal translation of aporia   
{{c1::without passage}} or {{c1::an impasse}}  
From the Greek  
{{c1::a- ("without")}}  
{{c1::poros ("passage")}}

The aporetic spur

• “Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn. It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good—now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.”
  • A salient, bedevilling open loop
  • Vs if you have double ignorance, certainty, then no curiosity, no open loop. Hedgehog (vs fog)

Aporia creates an open looped called
{{c1::The aporetic spur}}
|
What the aporetic spur feels like
{{c1::A salient, bedevilling open loop}}

Aporetic cleansing

• “Aporia may be seen as a necessary stage before real learning can happen. You realise that you’ve been pushing words around as if their meaning were obvious but that you don’t really understand them. Now you have a sense of something missing. Your confidence in your knowledge is gone. It needed to go to make room for something better.”

Why aporia can be viewed as the necessary stage before real learning can happen:
{{c1::You now have a clear sense that your wisdom was false}}

Aporia and the Ineffable

• Aporia, the ineffable, the Dao etc (page 134)
  • “A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths—that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable. Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words.”
  • It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition.
  • But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition.
  • Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought.
  • The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.”