Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Tue, 3 Mar 1998 05:04:10 +0100
On Fri, 27 Feb 1998, Ant McWatt wrote:
>
> "Wisdom is almost as satisfying as good porridge, whereas
> knowledge has less body to it than tepid water poured over
> old tea leaves."
My friend Dr Van de Vate (now retiered from achademia) said in
responce to the growing specializing and sub-specializing in Phil. Dept.s,
"These clowns don't realize that you can't dilute water." You just
reminded me of that. :)
> "In the objective world there are no qualities, only
> quantities: sight-colours are various wavelengths of the
> electromagnetic spectrum; sound-music are air pressure
> waves; smell-odours are molecular configurations, as is
> taste and touches are pressure sensation. No where out
> there is quality (or values) to be found.
Let's be careful here about confusing two sense of the word
"quality." (P points out this distinction in ZMM) It can mean "good" or
"excelent" (this becomes the capital Q). But it also can mean "property"
-- like whitness is a property of my shirt, along w/ softness and (since
I've been wearing it) warmth. Whenever you see the quality-quantity
distinction it always refers to this sense of the word, and not "value."
The impacts on
> our sense organs are transmitted into electrochemical
> impulses travelling to the brain where it is translated
> back into our subjective perception. There is NO direct
> connection between the two realms ...if you start with the
> subjective/objective metaphysics (or the mind/matter idea
> if that sounds less "metaphysical")... subjectiveness is
> subjectiveness from here to eternity as is objectiveness;
> nowhere does the two overlap."
>
> (e-mail from Bodvar Skutvik to Anthony McWatt, September
> 30th, 1997)
>
> As can be seen from the diagram on SOM, quality is on one
> side of a metaphysical chasm and quantity is on the other.
> Quantity is perceived as inhering in substance, qualities
> are perceived as being non-substances. They are mutually
> exclusive and should therefore not be able to have an
> effect on each other. However, the fact that your mind can
> decide to move your little finger (a physical object) and a
> few pints of beer (a physical substance) can alter your
> mind totally dispels this idea. There is a serious
> metaphysical problem here."
And not remotly a new one! That's been the critique of Cartisan
M-B duality since he came up w/ the thing. That's why it's so populer to
flee to either M or B and call the other an illusion or some-such
(Idealism: Nothing is spacially extended. Positivism -- what I call
"science apolagetics": Nothing is not spacialy extended.) But this is the
same metaphysical delima that the German Idealist tackeled.
A problem when you read Aristotle, say, is that you look at the
poor guy through this vast distorting prism of 2000 years of Christian
interpritation. Well, the vast distorting prism between us (us
Anglo-Amaricans) and a guy like Hegel is British Hegelianism and two World
Wars (two German wars!). And you've got guys like Baillie who translate
*Geist* as "mind" which brings for us all our Cartisan M-B baggage, when
that's really not at all what Hegel had in mind ("in mind" --?). His
*Geist* actually means something like "reciprocity."
On w/ Kant.
First I want to review what analytic distinction means. That is a
statment that you know is T or F purly by knowing what the words mean.
They're usualy statlents of identity: "Bill Clinton is the President." If
you know who Clinton is and you know who the president is, that's all you
need. "Q is what really exists." Well if you know what Q is, and you know
what reality is...
An a priori-anylitic is a logical truth:
All men are mortal.
Socretese is a man.
Therefor Socrates is mortal.
Synthetic statments are true bacause of the way the world is: "In
1996 Bill Clintin was elected P of the US." See, you have to know some
fact about the world.
But Kant wants to make possible a catagory: the a
priori-synthetic, something you know about the way the world is (not a
"mear" logical truth) w/o learning from sensory exp. -- it's built-in
knowledge.
And we've seen how Kant responds to "What created time?" The only
sensable answer is "Nothing!" For, after all, creation is a process and
requires time. Time was never created. This is why Kant moves from Noumina
1 (The unknown cause of our experience) to N2 -- because he's placed time
(and also causality) firmly in the realm of experience, not in the
nouminal world. So we have N2: The thing in itself is the object of a
possible creative imagination. Most people think of God creating the
world. Hegel thought of the Greek polis.
We think of government as a regulatory thing, a bundle of laws.
For the Greeks the polis (city-state) was a living thing -- an ideal w/
the power to embody itself in its people. Athens lives by creating
Athenians. A game metaphore can be pushed here: From the outside of a
single playing of the game we see enduring persons in temporary
combination. From the inside the view is different. There reciprocity
exists between players and between players and the rules. Each player can
put himself in every other's place, but each is at the same time a
representative of the rules -- that's what makes him a player. Pileing
metaphore upon metaphore, think of the game as a conversation where the
players have a voice only because the rules have a voice. The rules are
built into the players -- or rather, the life of the rules is the life of
the players. This is what Hegel is all about. He's totaly Greek in his
aproch. Our tradition leads us to think of abstractions as atemporal
literary tools. Hegel thinks they are alive; just as for the Christians
"to be" means to last, to predure in self-sameness; for Aristotle and the
Greeks "to be" was to be alive.
But more on Hegel later I think. (He's a brilliant metaphysitian
but not as directly related to Pirsig or the MoQ as Kant is.)
Kant now has this unity which sits over-against the manifold (the
flux of experience). Now he says, "Wait a minute; I've got another damn
duality going here. A unity opposed to the manifold?" The third form of
Noumina is: The thing in itself is the totality of conditions / the
unconditional. What that means is that it is the result of a synthasis of
the manifold. As I see it (and I stress again: I'm not a K expert) what
he does in this stage is reverse the course of N2. Insted of "Out of the
Tao (nothing, a no thing) comes the one / Out of the one comes the two...
he starts w/ the manifold and says there must be some synthasizing
mecanism the unity emposes (as if from on high) to pull itself together
from the manifold. He calls this faculty "Reason" (NOT to be confused w/
logical, left-brain thinking). I'm not sure if that really helps close off
his duality problem but it seemed logical to K.
The final (most mysterious) formulation of the N is The Moral
Self. K's philosophy is often characterized as, "he puts limits on
knowledge to make room for free will and faith," and the object of K's
faith is the Moral Self. Now here's how I understand this (though I've
never read it in a book put like this):
K was a huge fan of Rousseau; he read all R's books 3 or 4 times.
R's most significant contrabution to phil. (acording to Robert Soleman) is
bringing forth the "problem of the Self." The story is famous: R was
walking through the woods one day when he experienced something that
stoped him in his trakes and left him speachless. He felt like he
"expanded" and become one w/ all of his souroundings. It was a sudden and
single "enlightenment" ZAP! Then it was gone. R described the "force" he
experienced as "The Self." Now knowing this, and knowing how K loved R, I
think K's Moral Self is equivicable to R's Self, just that R "touched" it
and K has to approch it through classical thinking. K wants to limit what
is knowable, and posit this thing, which is equily unknowable because when
we approch it (as we see in the begining of time antinomy) we get slamed
by paradox -- but while we can't KNOW it, K also attempts to show that it
is reasonable to have faith in it -- to do so makes sense out of the world
(the phenouminal world, the manifold).
Okay so that's my best Kant, and highly condensed. But given this
understanding, it is here that I say, "ZMM and LILA are what Kant would
have said if he studied the Tao Te Ching and wrote like Mark Twain." Is
that a simplification? A characature? Of course. But I find it more
accurate than the claim that Kant is the great-grandaddy of S-O thinking.
Now if you want -- just for closure -- I can probly wrap up the
rest of German Idealism's life (Ficht, Schelling and Hegel) in two more
posts. Of course this would be ultra-ultra condensed but it might, sort of
let you see (or sense) what it was about Hegel that let him put such a
frighteningly original spin on metaphysics. Interested?
TTFN
Donny
-- post message - mailto:lilasqd@hkg.com unsubscribe/queries - mailto:diana@asiantravel.com homepage - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4670
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:42:55 CEST