Back to Proper Philosophy
Back to Proper Philosophy
Error’s Rainbow.
i)The trouble philosophy is also a damp squibble about the nature of origins. Where oh where do I being?
ii)The problem here is not that one begins at the beginning and alone needs to do is find the beginning. It is rather that each and every beginning that one finds assumes others beginning. Or rather assumes the pre-begun.
iii)This is true of course for science and history. And yet in the former case the pre-begun has a very clear dual relationship with a tradition to be confirmed or challenged and a world, to be altered in some way. Science exists at the stream or in the dialogue of pre-beguns. It begins in setting out those things that are begun, and re-working as its beginning what those others starts, the ones it has assumed means.
iv)History is in itself the manifesto of the pre-begun, orchestrated now into a discipline (and so begun anew). Every event is therefore always already interpreted, in (and often before) is inception. The stream of history is the stream of shifts in this interpretation . To Begin to write a new is to strike an attitude to those elements that are already begun in the narrative (an in ones mind). It is to take these elements up and rework their weave.
v)Philosophy however fatally oscillated here. It would so like to claim, you see that it was (somehow) the origin itself – and is prepared for endless subterfuge to ensure that this appears aright.
vi)Philosophy is therefore more than happy to eat itself up, just so long as it can appears to be the rules of thought. Analytical philosophy all too frequently devours or botches or ignores or simply fails to comprehend pretty well most of the philosophical tradition in its desire to be the rules of thought. That is the rules everyone must already be thinking by to think – or at least to think well. Or at least to thinks hw the we do in the west, or at least to think how we do is philosophy. …oh bugger.
vii)An alternative is to set up the philosophical charabanc on the landscape of perception. An d yet here one get caught up in a problem of the status of the pre-beguns to perceptions.
viii)Or those pre-beguns real things – in which case does perception allow one some degree some axis point on a world beyond it (which of course does not mirror it), but is related to it in some way.
ix) Is there perception allowing one in someway to swim into a world where truths (however they are conceived) matters. A world where tings really are even if I only imprison them in myself in perceiving).
x)The pre-beguns remains beyond the perceived, in a world which tumbles into the mind. Perception is therefore that which allows one to begin as a certain and in a certain relationship to what was already there.
xi)The problem is of course that philosophy almost invariably think Kant Hegel and Schopenhauer) to explore this landscape of the pre-beguns
xii)It invents pretexts, to allow it and IT alone to investigate his hidden world.
xiii)It is very much the case then that philosophy wants here to have its cake and eat it. Not content wit mapping out a supreme world of the pre-beguns, it then once again wants to explore this world.
xiv)Or is perception really the genuine founding ct of the mind, and therefore not related formally to an external world of truth at all.
xv)If so the pre-beguns will simply be what is given within things as a perception is by definition the pre-given). Life or the world or the self or God for that matter is then construction of the mind of elements that were always begun elsewhere (and therefore always might b otherwise)
xvi)The problem then comes about the status of perceptions. That is the problem of whether one can really rest here. Philosophy has such itchy fingers you see….One can here answer from within the hypothesis in terms of a maximum or minimum hypothesis.
xvii)The maximum hypothesis has the advantage of simplicity. One might with Hume assume that a god was doing it. That is that one need the ‘God’ hypothesis to explain why peoples perception accorded with one another, and ultimately where consistent with the world itself.
xviii)Alternatively one also might with Hume speculate about the hidden springs of nature. Such spring have the advantage of plausibility., and yet will by definition be almost impossibly complex to unpick.
xix) The former explanation jumps to the deep problem of accord with others and wit the world; the second to the problem of the kind of agency in the world that allows perceiving, within bodies to be, and to change and re-challenge what a mind is, and what it can do.
xx)This of course creates that beautiful tension in empiricism, which needs to construct hypothesis from within the pre-given of elements that were necessarily pre-begun for it to be at all.
xxi)This is not a formal ‘problem’ for the sceptical mind, which simply accepts the profound uncomfortable ness of philosophies position at this point.
xxii)It is the science of being within the pre-given and speculating about the nature of the pre-begun which gives that given. And yet it can says the sceptic only do this, that is only have a right to such speculation from within the world of the pre-given.
xxiii)The only way one can have a right o look at the world beyond is to either dare a perpetual hypothesis (Say a Godhead) who is known in a perpetuating (but contingent) effect, and to so do so in the interest of a perceived perpetuation amongst perception or and peoples.
xxiv)Or to pose a shared impossibly small and vanished point of un-ion between perceived and the world, which were as one in a hidden point of spring of the body, from which ones perception is downstream (and yet while it itself is of course caught up in un-ions of it own).
xxv) The Pre-begun is therefore placed beyond all thinkable thought, as that which must be forever affirmed within what one shares with others, and ourselves; or eluded and placed at a point before real thinking occurs (and yet which then oscillates across other thinking).
xxvi)At this point however Hume who never believed in this much scepticism would no pipe up that one was trying to nail him down into the wrong type of reality here.
xxvii)That is one is reve(a)ling in the philosophical tradition, which reality bothers, when all he carried for was that unsung heroine vivacity. What as real to our ideas, and to the world was the vivacious, in which we and it are given together (and given by the pre-begun).
xxviii)Rationalism and Empiricisms was sin was not the desire to excessive certainty, so much as the fact that in the quest after truth they ignore the strangely lively conditions which allow all truth to be at all. Indeed they imprison these conditions, as the very pre-thought which allows then to begin the science of the prebegun (this is Amy’s position in Little Dorrit…).
xxix)It is then left to rationalism to actively develop the prebeguns which Hume deliberately, and with careful reasoning rejects.
xxx) And yet rationalism as it is commonly understood (or rather as the eightieth century left it) is a mess, in that it utterly confuses or rather inverts the links between the distinct empirical hypothesis outline above.
xxxi) The Godhead is therefore confused with the hidden springs of reality. God becomes the gaze that sees all things, and creates of the level of the littlest spring or being.
xxxii) A fuzzy God of details, who endlessly gets in the way of possible research and exploration becomes all too easy to envisage rather than Hume’s wonderful broad brush GOD).
xxxiii)God therefore undermines the very status of the begun –by allowing it to be readily and fussily explained. It becomes not the world of hidden springs, known only after they have sprung, but the something God intended to do or make (to be fair to the eighteenth century this argument was prevalent in the seventeenth)
xxxiv) This was not the case for the two greatest of the c seventeenth century, rationalists. Both Spinoza and Leibniz were very clear with their God did not interfere with the world of hidden springs, the world of matter.
xxxv) Leibniz God did all his interfering in one move, and on the level of the whole of the universe. He chooses then the best. In making that choice necessarily creates a world of matter. Indeed given the best and the world of matter are both always pitched between the differing monad , they reflect each other.
xxxvi)The best of world is the world of richest in ‘hidden springs’ that is richest in the connections that fall in between monads and matter.
xxxvii) Leibniz makes as I examine elsewhere) the very starling claim that matter an morality are synonymous.
xxxviii)Morality chooses the richest of world. Matter express that choice in it endless eddies and constant ability to create a thing differently.
xxxix)The delightful consequence here is that Leibniz matter exists (as all good hidden springs should) in the absence of causality, matte is what could if only times were different always reweave the world otherwise…
xl)The pre-begun is then genuine pre-begun, and not merely pregiven. That is matter determined nothing, while still being a substrate for everything . Each part of matter therefore always contains other possibilities, other options for a monad to choose.
xli) Leibniz in making this move of course defined rather neatly the links of these hidden springs to perception.
xlii)Perception is what takes up the moves of the body (whose advent la in moves before the body, but only become perceptions with that body), and resolves all these moves into a life, and beyond that life a world.
xliii)That is moves, in tumbling into bodies become caught in the prism of perception, and dragged into actuality-
xliv)God then exist as that which prefigured the entire process: that is that which must have been for this world to be, and that which guarantees the links between matter both matter an perception 9hidden springs) and all monads (city of God).
xlv)In this move of course the rubric or formula the Best of all possible world, is of vital importance. I is this formula that gives asses to why the monad are all caught up in the same world, and how the world relates to why they are all caught up in matter Topics considered in very great detail in other places.
xlvi)The point here is hat his best relates also to a world of the pre-begun. God judges world in the sense that they all infinitely intermesh with one another. each world is therefore bottomless in itself (it as matter is always a locus of the prebegun) and yet will at each and ever point be the pre-begun for many worlds (and so is never simply pregiven).
xlvii)Trouble of course with all of this, as a sceptic would point out, is that it is only as good a the single point of pre-given in the system. That is that a God would and indeed must choose the best of all possible worlds. God’s mind is then an axis of the pre-given (that which a divine mind must be, in order to be at all).
xlviii)In therefore imports into God, the empirical hypothesis, and element whose nature could (if true) only relate to the hidden spring (that is to the secret working of God’s mind. These need uniquely to be pre-known to set the whole process rolling.
xlix) Spinoza by contrast fixing perception firmly within the world. I consider elsewhere (and in very very great detail) the position of this perception, which is very carefully nuanced after the infinite immediate moves which create the world of infinite modes, and yet ‘before’ the world of causal chains which these modes the fashion.
l)Moreover human (and indeed all living things) then fit into the system at a very special conjunction of formal and objective thought.
li)These two moves allow Spinoza to separate in the Godhead at least the world of immediate common notions, known to all, from the various order of more select common notions one of which pertains to humans alone (those started in reason), while others hook up complex subsets of humanity and animality .
lii)Spinoza therefore articulates two distinct world of the pre-begun (common notions are always eternal, and therefore always already there even as they are creative), and humans only in altering what they are (in beginning anew) find the nature of this pre-stating.
liii) As with Leibniz, Spinoza is anxious to set perception within the pre-beguns, whose role is to erupt with differing perception and transport them otherwise.
liv)Hume however would still worry way at this. He likes the separation, and the fact that the issue in sense is coming down to matter of sharing. The Pre-begun (by it hidden springs or God) is what explores and explains the mutuality of perceiving.
lv)And yet he worries that the drive into a hard reality gas lost sight f the power of vivacity to be reality. Is there not a danger that reality itself is lost in this drive toward mutuality.
lvi)At this point Spinoza would need to reply that it all came down to the way one understands the third type of knowledge, at which point I doubt Hume would listen anymore….
lvii) Be that as it may, it is clear that Kant and his Copernican revolution produce a profound shock in the gentle science of the pre-beguns.
lviii)He demands, in the name of truth, that these beguns are caught within the prism of time. Time becomes the agency in which the world of pre-beguns is given to me (and me alone).
lix)Kant therefore absolutely demands the rights of philosophy to define and then occupy the world of the pre-beguns, and to do so with a beefy confidence which is quite new.
lx) That is in this occupation Man matter more than nothing else. Humanity is for Kant the creator of the prebegun and therefore it is to man alone one looks to explore it.
lxi)Now of course this jump to humanity was stripped out of philosophy by the time of Marx, and yet the parallel jump to time as the one and only science of the begun (and therefore the very special domain of philosophy) is a problem we remain fixated within.
lxii)The problem is, as Hume would know so well, hat this problem ignores the real transforming power of vivacity, which dances to a rhythm not directly thought in time (Hume always uses the present but also tense: to be lively is to strike a relation to a tense). .
lxiii)He and Leibniz and Spinoza would likewise worry about what is lost in a too easy jump to time. Namely the difference between what is share (and therefore requires God to explain that sharing) and what is always personal and distinct (the complex hidden springs, which make matter matter)
lxiv)Time, the creation of the human spirit or mind or soul or whatever, simply asserts the rights of the sharing (we are all humans don’t you know), and the rights of the hidden spring in one graft.
lxv)Worse that this it ,makes the latter (those blind silent imaginative servants of the soul; apprehension and recollection) turn on the former (on what we all share as humans).
lxvi) We become collective and able to understand things by a right as we exist in time.
lxvii)Kant thereby simply occludes what was for Leibniz Spinoza and Hume the very problem – that is the deep problem of how these accords happened and why.
lxviii) Kant merely states there is a problem ( first Copernican revolutions); then hypothesis an agent of carrying a solution to that problem in time (the second Copernican revolution); before finally hypothesis agencies, in the categories, which capable of ensuring that that time is capable of forcing an accord with all the disparate empirical selves each individual soul divided into(according to the third Copernican revolution).
lxix) Kant therefore invents solutions where before there were the most creative of problems . in the name of the pre-begun of man (the Copernican revolution), he replaces or better guts the pre-begun of earlier times, transforming it into a stale set of pre-givens.
lxx)Our problem now in philosophy is that that version of time with its claim to be the real pre-begun, is one whose mirror we remain caught by, even if we have lost faith in the man who is capable of establishing that pre-begun.
lxxi)Or to put it otherwise]. Kant recanted on the heroic efforts of Hume, Leibniz and Spinoza to resist the poisonous charms of philosophies claim to be the science of the pre-given. Once this cup was offered again to philosophy, it was unlikely ever to surrender the privilege.
lxxii)Scepticism and Rationalism were quietly drowned in favour of ‘critical thought. The challenge of philosophy today is of course whether we are brave enough to resuscitate them…