Question of Intent

By Brian Matthew Kessler

 

 

Anything I might write to you, concerning my objectives or intentions, is – without any exceptions and beyond any doubt -- a lie.

 

Of course, the above statement, being concerned with my objectives and intentions, therefore reflects upon itself.  If we were machines, we might get stuck in the binary logic whose trap is infamous, even used in an old Star Trek episode.

            If we take the above statement as the lie which it claims to be, we might interpret the truth as “Anything I might write to you, concerning my objectives or intentions, is . . .  the truth”.  But if this were true, then the above statement becomes true again and the cycle repeats itself infinitely.

            But we are not machines and there is a way out: The Half Truth.  We can transmute several other words or terms in order to create a true state; and the necessity of doing such proves that the original statement itself is in fact true.

            However, you must be asking yourself, “What else can BMK say for himself about his intentions and how are they true?  And why can’t he just plainly state them without any need of such a preposterous introduction?”

            Let us begin by looking at the relatively simple and innocuous statement, “BMK has an intention”.  Is this true?  Well, before we can determine this, there are three questions we must answer:

 

1. Who or what is BMK?
2. What is an intention?
3. What does it mean for BMK to have an intention?

 

The first is a rather complicated question that, for the moment, may best be avoided by pointing the finger at the man who typed this essay.  Should we for a moment take the more adventurous route and ask him directly “Who are you”?  You could, but you might be lucky if he merely gives you his name, or some part of it, and doesn’t start driveling about how useless and unfitting this label is.  Of course, between us, we both believe BMK is self-referential to me, but the name “Brian” is one of the twenty most common in the United States and if one searches the Internet for “Brian Kessler” one can come up with a list several hundred long (one already wrote to me informing me “I don't know if the 'net is ready for two Brian Kesslers. Hell, maybe one is one too many”).  But of course you are interested in the intentions of this BMK and not merely any or every “Brian Kessler” who may or may not have an intention. [1]

      This leads us to the second question, for which, for “simplicity’s sake”, I shall defer to dictionary.com [2]:  A concept arising from directing the attention toward an object.