BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE MONDAY DEC. 22, 2025) — Recently, THE PLANET  witnessed a political argument—actually, an idle discussion— with loon left and rabid right talking AT and not TO each other over         (fill in the blank)____ .

The issue and the details matter little. What struck us was the illogic we saw. Not only is the English language still in a bad way (Orwell) and getting worse, but people’s ability to make and support an argument has gone the way of the single-wing formation.

Head scratching is allowed.

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“Everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real” — Niels Bohr

Language unites speaker and listener, writer and reader. Content provides the direct link to the speaker’s and writer’s thoughts. We call this conceptual mystery “communication.”

As studied as communication is, we still don’t know how or why it works. On his 94th birthday, the great linguist Noam Chomsky asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to know how language works. After a lifetime of groundbreaking work, he still didn’t know. 

No one “invented” logic, but we can see the beginnings of reasoning with the emergence of civilization. 

Human gatherings in larger communities produced growing infrastructure and administrative pressures that in turn forced new modes of thinking. How could we convey abstract concepts in areas such as government, technology, science, philosophy, and religion? The answer turned out to be those strung links in chains of thought that came to be called logic.

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Medieval apocrypha tells us that Parmenides of Elea, a Greek philosopher, invented logic while living on a stone in Egypt. In the 5th c. BCE, Parmenides wrote a challenging, cryptic poem that introduced fresh insights with respect to modes of thought and manners of thinking. The poem, lengthy fragments of which have survived, describes an allegorical journey a traveler makes to the home of a goddess, where he learns about justice.

The goddess tells the traveler he needs to learn about the daily difficulties of life “and the notions of mortals.” Since such knowledge can’t be trusted, however, she advises an exploration of the underlying “ways of inquiry” necessary for learning about the truth of existence. This includes the ways of living creatures on earth to the working of the universe itself.

She then utters this strange sentence: “It is necessary to say and to think that What Is is; for it is to be, but nothing it is not.”

This is the pre-Socratic principle of acceptance,  the perceptions of things not as we wish them to be but as they are—“What Is is.” Moreover, “it is to be,” the acknowledgement  of people, objects, and things as imminent and not as emergent. If we can understand this stark, hard reality, then we can reject all that such being “is not,” which amounts to “ nothing.” 

This implies the reality of a conceptual existence, the truth of which can only lead to recognition and understanding. That is the birth of logic.

FROM SECTION XIX of Parmenides’ poem:

Thus, according to men’s opinions, did things come into
being, and thus they are now. In time (they think) they will
grow up and pass away. To each of these things men have
assigned a fixed name.

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To everything on earth and in the universe we have given words. The great advance in and of language echoes John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Later, in John 1:14, we have “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

There are many ways to interpret this passage. The English “word” comes from the Greek “logos,” an expression understood as the rational principle that governs the universe and gives meaning to creation—and to our daily activities. It also forms the root word for “logic.”

The irony lies in the fact that we have lost the ability to engage in rational conversations about politics. We have lost sight of logic, which in turn slays the ability for critical thinking. A pity,  since conversational grappling represents a key marker, a milestone, in human intellectual development. We have allowed the extreme politics that shut down reasoning to set us back, not move us forward.

Where it all end, no one knows. AI, though, casts an ominous shadow.

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“And now for something completely different” — Monty Python.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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