Carrying the Effect Home
1)The Copernican effect clearly comes down to three rather different claims. A) there is a claim about the position of humans within knowledge. Humans are aloud to know things only be having a point or part in a system, the rest of which they do not (and cannot) understand. It is this position that is taken to define the conditions in which truth can occur truth. B) there is a claim about the importance and status of time in this process. Time is the adjunct of the effect. It is what and when one has the effect one does. Or rather it is the silent register within which the effect one does have is quietly and passively engraved, before one ever is. The Truth I perceive is therefore taken as the condition for the space I which I occur C) Finally there is an agency or holding function which can b called a self, in which and by which this engraving happens.. The is conscious whose one demand for the wholeness of being – that is for everything intermeshing is taken o be at the root of the other dimensions.
2)Thence of is triply caught within the prism of another (or oneself). One is set in the world of another (things in oneself, which can never be know); One is set if the world of being anothered (by an It); that is caught up in being passively created through time, by an agency which can only be inferred. One is Finally the another to what one self is . That is one is that moving gauze which places what one is (or a least he ensures that one is) in dialogue with all other things one is - stopping anything every finishing, as it define consequences of interconnections.
3)I am pitched within the world as a bloc of light; and yet I am pitched within that light as a passive creation of another and I am pitched within that passive creation, in an empirical self which is empirical to itself.
4) Perhaps the real creativity of this triple revolution lies in its creative power. one can quite literally start anywhere, with an of these three elements and attempt to arrange to others in consort with it. Here the game of the nineteenth century was to pull these elements into loops of being. The Aim of these lops including of course Kant’s own various loops) was to create in that very cycle a feed back that would be able to propel one beyond the effect itself.
5) At this point one needs a little care. Kant does not simply follow lops around and round. On the contrary he is careful to attempt to present three synthesis of the three effects,. The synthetic is characterised by the fact that one looses the ability to tell each thought or each effect apart from all the others. A good synthesis involves two rather distinctive elements of its on. A) A point of indiscernibly needs to be reached. That is a point where one thing suddenly turns around and becomes something rather different. A point were things were not as they were. B) and yet at this point a synthetic element is born. That is a point or part or flicker of light to time, which is capable of living the impossibility of this indiscernibility. A flicker whose ole is always to naturalise that which cannot be given as it was. The second of these elements is not strictly speaking necessary (Derrida seeks to avoid it, while Deleuze gathers ones tendency to create into as a principle of itself own).
6)Now one has to be very careful not to slip into a Kantian spin at this point. It would be easy (but wrong) to confuse the synthetic argument with the Copernican argument. One can therefore infer rather too quickly that each of the three Copernican effects relates to a synthetic position, and a critique. Now the first and third point is certainly the case, but the middle one is more problematic. A synthetic position is never simply the chairmanship of one faculty or even the adjunct of one Copernican effect. On the contrary the process is always in itself synthetic. On particular tumble of one effect into another effect is set up as the prism in which the whole is understood. Empirical selves pitching inside time or the eruption of the thing in itself within empirical understanding. Form the skewed centre of the fist two critiques, while the third is trebly focused.
7)Kant produces at least three different such move (one for each Critique). In the first critique itself, he argues that one can in the name of understanding create a clear occur. Starting (argubly) with the fact that empirical selves appear at once pitched within each other, and yet also orchestrated one amongst the other, he traces that orchestration back into the second effect ( Apprehension and recollection). Maybe he says this resulted from the fact that the self itself was a passive creation of another, call it the ‘It which thinks’, which endlessly completes and unpicks these selves within a medium, call it time. From this perspective the fact that each selves as it is empirical is able to define a relation with all the other (and is born in the knowledge of that relation) becomes at once critical and yet arbitrary: understanding itself is then only possible if something was already assumed, call then the categories of understanding. It is these elements which define a space in which each self is, and which also defines the way that that selves is and abuses all the others.
8)Once these two distinct elements are taken in one – as the passive creation of time for empirical selves whose driving agency is passive are so much easier to grasp at). Once this has happened then it follows that in the name of time one can define the sphere of light and its relationship to the darkness (that is the first Copernican effect). The light is the light of active understanding, and passive time. The dark is the real world of thing. From this move, one can complete the loop. Each empirical selves represents a created truth by which I grasp in one sphere(and yet orchestrates across all the others according to the rule of time) a set of truths for my mind. To Be an empirical selves is therefore also always to be also creating a local domain within which certain truths are active and real, while others remains potential, and lined merely to the entire mind as a whole. To learn about the world, that is to create limited spheres of light, is therefore to be at the same moment extending and searching both what each empirical selves does, and how that doing allows it be related to all the rest.
9)To understand, that is to grasp at the world as if it did contain truth, becomes synonomous with being and time. I understand to be ME . This understanding does not allow me to be free (as it would for earlier thinkers). On the contrary what I understand is that I am caught. Or better how I am already being created within a process: and transfixed into being. And yet in this transfiction a condition for freedom is also given. unless I can understand, unless I can locate how I am being constructed within a process, then I will never able to articulate then world 9oy each empirical selves) as a separate element, and will be caught up in a truly passive mind (the mind is active as it understands the world therefore, and not merely in recollection).
10)The Copernican effect of being in another as time has the critical, the synthetic position. It welds together the other two. That is in demanding that all the empirical selves coalesce in time, in forms as a series of temporal rules their networks of interconnections. The rules then allow one to understand how the empirical selves are what defines the small circle of light of the first effect. The Selves are what are, but the rules ensure, in the name of understanding, the manner of that being, and its articulation with all the rest. The Light becomes what I understand, the dark, the thing it itself, what is beyond any understanding.
11)This last move then defines the relationship of passive time and sphere of light, it is worth here emphasising the paradox involved here. To be pitched as a zone of light is to illumine something of the world, and yet to be caught up in what one is not- the that mysteries world beyond the light. A world which then matters – as from it the unexpected falls. In contrast to be pitched as passive time which is pitched within an It to do the thinking, is at every point to know the world which one inhabits through time, and yet to know that world on the condition that ones very zone of light itself, is textures, and doing something of it own. The two left to themselves are near opposites and it is only the alchemy of the synthesis that allows them to be given together. In grasping the world, in empirical selves which inhabit the It, one is giving in understanding what I was to be it time, as the light source for the world. The one ac of understanding that is pulling empirical elements into time through the agency of an IT) becomes therefore the synthetic element, which allows one to make process that are theoretically rather different be given in the same through, and indeed properties of the same agent.
12) The Second Critique starts elsewhere, with this problem of freedom, an it link to the things in itself. How then is the mind also a thing of itself, and what would that thing look like? As a thing it will breed principle which are powerful enough to criss cross all the empirical selves it also is. It will breed therefore active elements which emerge as maxims cutting across each selves, erupting from within them, and making then from within also accord with what is beyond them . These lines then naturally orchestrate as a living sores or fireline the rules by which the selves fill into the passivity of time.
13) This move turns those rule as around. They are no longer the way the empirical selves is caught up in another, but rather the way that morality, in the guise of the thing in itself can harry the gates of time (and thereby assert the rights of the eternal). The empirical selves will then make demands (based upon this harrying)upon the apparently self contained world of passive time. This world must yield a results : There ought to be a God in it, good ought to be rewarded -Or ELSE.
14) The Darkness of the world of things in themselves thereby invades the world of light- or rather forces that light to dance according to the tune of another light or better according the ‘darkness’ which illumine light itself. this darkens-as-light is give at the synthetic fault line of thing its itself erupting into empirical selves, as that-which-inhabits-there collapse. This positions, this inhabiting then defines a process for harrying passive time, and allowing it to be different. This harrying thereby allows one to once again grasp at the difference between the world for things in themselves and passive time. Things in themselves invade time as eternity- pulling it and disrupting it, in demanding that the rules of empirical understanding create blistering new fault lines
15) This far the first two critiques have had amongst many other thing a tit for tat element. Passive time lauds it (in the form of understanding) over the t thing in Itself. the thing in itself replies, as best it can. It is left to the third critique to move beyond the tit for tat, and attempt rather a different approach
16) The third critique will start not from the straight Copernican effect , but rather from the different elements in any effect that cannot be simply rumbled into one another. It starts then in the paradox of that synthetic element which defies simply ready synthesis. And yet this is a synthetic position in that it is seen from the side of the Copernican effect which is defined, and not simply from the side of defiance. His move is of course critical.-for what price a synthesis that is pitched on the side of defiance? And what price the Copernican effect if it includes that which by defying it, forces the mind to be in something (else)? The power of the of the third critique is therefore to it takes very seriously the debt Kant owned to his own effects- the debt which sort t take the fact that one was unable to grasp everything in another seriously .
17) In the case of beauty that element is simple enough. What defies understanding in imagination is the beautiful . Beauty is therefore the endless shift of imagination is presenting and defying understanding. Understanding feels itself to be joyful as it is pitched within this beauty. The joy, and the beauty to empirical selves themselves, but to the world of passive time, which grasps an empirical self, which nethereless eludes its power to fix. It feels joy and fascination – it in entrapped as it reaches out to grasp what still eludes it. Now (and here the synthetic element really starts to bite) from the perspective of understanding its time, that is the fact that it operates in grasping things across the passive synthetic of time starts t have a new sense. as that passive cannot encompass empirical selves, as the lines conecting them fail to fix those selves, (which are still tangibly in front of it), the time in which it operate, the time is exists within is bought into focus. It is caught in the delight of continued duration. It delights in what it is, is the face what it cannot grasp: If that failure it is what it is: it feels its being across time . Or perhaps better the empirical selves it also is (according to the third Copernican selves, be simply being present and vibrant in the mind which cannot understand them, lends their own being to time, the medium in which that being is normally transfixed. That is they synthesize their own being with the medium of time, making time take on the feeling of that being.
18)It is then in this guise that the beautiful object inspires one to goodness. A lily is never itself good for is our failure to grasp it. But the reverse temporal engineering, involved in that grasping – that is the given of a being to the process of time, lifts us beyond any one context, . this lifting beyond it then synonomous with the oughts of morality (which of course left to themselves run in the opposite direction: They thereby give in their own way the missing link- the being of that which was only moral. A lily makes one think of beauty, as in ones failure to grasp its beauty, one gives passive time a being of itself – and does so in the face of understanding, and in a way that awakens ones mind to the thoughts of morality, which runs in the opposite way (from empirical selves into harried passive time).
19)The argument of course remains of the level of analogy a this reverse direction cannot be guaranteed logically. There is no real reason why one thought makes the mind think of the other. All there is in the mind is that form the perspective of the directions, that they are opposite to and for one another. …
20) Likewise the sublime is immersed firmly on the side of the empirical self. The sublime is the moment that the empirical self (understood now as comprehension, so as being in the same voice as understanding) fails to grasp what is emerging from the domain of thing in themselves. It is therefore the moment that thing punches through time, and forces it asunder. The Thing it itself is then that which erupts makes the empirical world of selves pulls itself part. It thereby of course reveals its own true nature. This pitching was exactly how the Copernican effect pitched these selves in the fist place.
21) The difference is now of course that this pitching is set up in a world independent of understanding or strictly speaking morality. The free standing nature of each element each grasp is therefore allowed and not simply encased in others. The agony is therefore very direct, and very real, as it the empirical selves feels the failure of consciousness to ever simply encompass all that they are. That is they feel the sense that in their pitching and repitching or relation one amongst the other, they cannot be simply and directly reconciled to time: they need far order extra connections than that- one caught be the eternal, and not the strictly chronological.
22) Thus far in the third critique the cinderellas of the first to critiques Copernican/synthetic argument have been allowed voices. The world of thing in itself can indeed pull the empirical self otherwise than consciousness might want it to go: While the world of passive time need not condemn the being of empirical selves to nothing understanding – it too can be given a being of its own. There of course remains that other fault line, the one between the thing it itself ant passive time.
23)This finally fault line is addressed with the teleology, which allows the thing in itself (and its purpose) to resonate across passive time, but only so long as that resonating was itself the product of empirical selves. Empirical selves then in giving us the world, define the sole access within which the thing in itself, call it God’s will or whatever can be allowed in the world as something active. That is the second and the first Copernican effect can be, in teleology turned into a problem by the third effect, and understood accordingly (as the provision hypothesis of successful empirical selves). Teleology becomes then the uniting force for the empirical selves themselves, and therefore an allowable hypothesis .Man is united again with his world.
24)It is a mistake to understand try to locate in Kant a single Copernican effect or any too easy solution between the different effects and the different synthesis associated with these effect. On the contrary Kant presents us with a sustained and tireless (until right at the end) attempt to identity different ways three very different effect might synthesis a reality between them . Perhaps his only mistake (in jumpy eventually to teleology and so to God) was that being old he wanted to finish an unfinishable process. I for one, think it is kind to allow an old man that gift.