1.2 Foundational Assumptions: Concepts, Theories, Doctrines, and Paradigms
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A Quote From Plato
I think a man's duty is one of two things: either to be taught or to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life and take the risk; unless he could have a more seaworthy vessel to carry him more safely and with less danger, some divine doctrine to bring him through. -- Simmias, from The Phaedo, The Death of Socrates, Great Dialogues of Plato
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Let me take a page or two out of my memory of my General Semantic (Korzybski, Hayakawa) lessons from the 1970s....and then expand from this into my basic theory of theories on both epistemology and evaluation -- or in Schopenhauer's words -- 'representation' and 'will'.
Let's quickly start with 'The Kantian Split'. Immanuel Kant -- the first of the great German Idealists -- conceptually divided the world into two parts: 1. The 'Noumenal' (Objective) World; and 2. The 'Phenomenal' (Subjective) World. For simplicty's sake, and hopefully to avoid confusion, I will turn Kant's technical terms from 300 years ago -- 'noumenal' and 'phenomenal' -- into terminology that is, as I say, hopefully easier to work with today: 'objective' (noumenal) and 'subjective' (phenomenal).
Now Kant's key premise was that we 'Kant Know' our objective world because it is beyond the scope of our senses. In fact, anything belowing to the subject of 'metaphysics' -- i.e., 'above physics' (like 'the existence or non-existence of God') -- is beyond the scope of our senses, and therefore, essentially 'unknowable'....(unless you want to enter into the 'slippery slope' of 'faith' -- as in I believe that my husband or wife will be 'faithful' -- which, has little or no value in the realm of 'rational-empiricism', which, ideally speaking, is based on a combination of 'sensory experience' and 'rational logic').
In fact, when you come right down to it -- even my desk, which is staring me right in the face, is, in Kant's view, as 'the thing in itself', essentially 'unknowable' in the strictly 'objective' sense because, our objective world, strictly speaking, is the part of our world that is beyond the scope of our senses.
However, this is point at which all three of Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer -- as well as my at least partly idealized Hegel -- made crucial epistemological errors.
Firstly, what Kant should have said rather than 'We Kant Know our objective world.', is 'We Kant Know everything about our objective world.' The latter statement is much more logical, accurate, and functional in terms of its 'practical believabilty' factor and 'where we can go with it, and what we can do with it'. In contrast, Kant's radical assertion and premise 'drove almost all of the academics and philosophers of the time to do 'crazy things'.....like real estate investors would do in the case of a 'collapse of the real estate market', or 'stock market investors would do in the case of a 'collapse of the stock market'....For, with Kant's new at the time 'Kantian Split', it certainly seemed to all academics and philosophers that 'the epistemological world had come to an end'.....As Nietzsche would eventually say that 'God is dead!', so too was Kant, years before Nietzsche, essentially saying -- or at least seeming to say (there's that 'subject/object' differentation again...) -- that 'Epistemology is dead!
From there, Fichte 'flew into a world of subjectivity and said essentially that there is no noumenal-objective world -- or at least that it doesn't matter!'); whereas Schopenhauer laughed at, and ridiculed Fichte for being so stupid as to believe that there is no 'real, noumenal, objective' world....but then, seemingly paradoxically, Schopenhauer went off to create his own 'cosmic thing in itself' in the form of a 'Cosmic Will to Live/Survive' -- a Copernican switch from the 'cosmic world of objects' to a 'cosmic wold of impulsive desires'. (Can you hear Nietzsche and Freud coming?)
Everyone in this time period seemed to be obsessed with creating some form of 'collective or cosmic idealism' -- or in Schopenhauer's case -- an 'anti-thesis' in the form of a 'cosmic, collective, and individual narcissistic pessimism'.
Ironically or paradoxically again, Schopenhauer who hated Hegel with a passion and called him a 'clumsy charlatan' (See a summary of Schopenhauer's life on Wikipedia.); indeed, Schopenhauer disagreed with all 'the German Idealists' in his 'anti-idealistic' stance pertaining to man's individual and collective 'will to survive' and 'will to fulfill his innermost narcissistic desires'. (My use of the term 'narcissistic' here does not come from his use of it, but rather mine, in that the term hadn't been created yet while Schopenhauer was alive (except as the ancient Greek myth), and wouldn't be created until the arrival of Havelock Ellis and then Sigmund Freud at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.
It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer's ideas about a 'will to live or survive' pre-date the work of Darwin, although there was a point where they were both alive together -- Darwin more likely to be influenced by the older Schopenhauer than the other way around. Schopenhauer died (1860) a year after Darwin published 'Origins of The Species (1859). Schopenhauer finished his most important work, 'The World as Will and Representation' in 1818 when Darwin was 9 years old, and published it a year later in 1819. Schopenhauer was born in 1788, Darwin in 1809.
There are parts of Schopenhauer's work that I find very attractive. You can see the Thomas Hobbes influence in his work, as he describes what I will call the 'Narcissistic Shadow' in human behavior that generally seems to find its way to the top of the human personality from the bottom... Nietzsche and Freud jumped all over this aspect of Schopenhauer's work -- Nietzsche intentionally, Freud vicariously, and/or more directly later in his life. According to Freud, Freud didn't read Schopenhauer until later in his life and I believe there is a Freudian quote out there somewhere that says something to the effect of, 'I fear my work is starting to look more and more like Schopenhauer's (presumably Schopenhauer's pessimistic view of human nature).
Schopenhauer's critique of Fichte's work is compelling, basically accusing Fichte of 'losing touch with reality' when he got rid of Kant's 'noumenal world' (Google, Fichte, Wikipedia). Paradoxically however, Schopenhauer's work has a partly similar feel to it as Fichte's work in its 'cosmic narcissistic determinism' (Schopenhauer) as opposed to Fichte's 'cosmic idealistic determinism'.
I love the title of Schopenhauer's main work: 'The World as Will and Representation', and if I was critiquing his work and re-writing it, I would call my own work, partly in tribute to Schopenhauer: 'The Mind as Representation and Will: A Study of Epistemology, Narcissism, Ethics, Conflict and Choice in Man's Evaluation and Health Cycle.' This would be my final extension and conclusion to what I started in 1972 and 'left unfinished' in my 1979 Honours Thesis, entitled more simply: 'Evaluation and Health'.
There were a lot of 'Grand Narratives' being written in the 'German Idealism' and 'Post-Idealism' period: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer...Nietzsche and the rest of the 'Post-Modernists' and 'Deconstructionists' basically ridiculed 'Grand Narratives'....and I say, "Hold on, wait a minute -- without 'Grand Theorists, Grand Constructionists', we have nothing, we have no architecture, we have no culture, we have no political or economic or legal idealism, we have no 'philosophical idealism', we have no 'schools of psychology'..."
We have no 'TOEs' -- 'Theory Of Everythings'....
Being the 'Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential, Deconstructionist-Reconstructionist' that I am, 'I dance between different dualisms, bi-polarities, and dialectics....I engage them and challenge them to interact with each other in a creative, constructive manner...that brings something new and exciting to the table...'
'Synergy -- and The Creative, Innovative Synthesis'...
I have a TOE -- a Theory of Everything -- and I am proud of it...
It might read something like this:
'The world -- being a subset of the cosmic universe -- is comprised of the endless dialectic collisions and engagements -- both positive and negative, co-operative and aggressive, creative and destructive -- between life and death, health and sickness, opposite personalities, opposite sexes, testosterone and estrogen, yin and yang, good and bad will, narcissistic and altruistic, concreteness and abstraction, theories and counter-theories -- and probably a million or billion bi-polarities like this....some dominating, some retreating into 'The Shadows' -- or 'The Apeiron' -- in the words of one of the oldest and wisest philosopher in Western History -- Anaxamander. With due respect to Hegel, this 'Grand Narrative' that I am writing here is built first and foremost on the words of Anaxamander; not Kant or Fichte or Hegel...In this regard, I have thought numerous times of re-naming this philosophical treatise of mine -- 'Anaxamander's Hotel' or perhaps 'Anaxamander's Axiom' -- as opposed to 'Hegel's Hotel'....but so far I have refrained, perhaps largely because 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' remains my favorite philosophical work, even if I have only read small pieces of it, and interpretations of it....Still it remains the 'idealistic centrepiece' of my work surrounded by as many of my favorite works, philosophers, and psychologists as I can 'synthesize' into one creative whole: Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Plato integrated with Aristotle, Alexander the Great integrated with Diogenes, Epictetus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith integrated with Karl Marx, Diderot, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Montasquieu, Jefferson, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Russell, Wittgenstein, Korzybski, Hayakawa, Rand, and the psychologists....Freud, Jung, Adler, Fromm, Perls, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Guntrip, Ellis, Rogers, Beck, Branden, Strachey, Bird, Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler, and Masson....
Oh yes, back to Korzybski and Hayakawa....Here is a theoretical problem that I have mulled over in my head for a while....How do you combine the rather straight-forward epistemological work of Korzybski and Hayakawa with the dialectic theory of Hegel?
I am starting to find ways on how to do this...
We will make that the object of our sole attention in the next essay....
-- dgb, Nov. 22nd, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain...
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
