chaz wyman wrote:lancek4 wrote:But, to be fair, Chaz has not yet sufficiently explained how he is capable of coming to This truth without such basic referent. (Ask him about atheism - that one is great).
This is the problem you guys go in circles about. My question has been, first, do you see this circle ( which is most obvious in previous posts on this thread), and, second, how do you explain the vicious cycle, and third, how do we break the stalemate ?
I am reflecting on every example of truth that I know.
I think at least both Chaz and I understand the problem of Hegel. In coming to the contradiction inherent in discourse Hegel saw a 'world history consciousness' (if I have the term correct) where the all-inclusive-subject still is left with the an inability to reconcile the Truth of any matter in the face of the object. The object/other still insists upon itself, as itself, even with the rational reduction which proposes to explain the convolutions of existence and reality within knowledge. From this we cannot avoid the condition of causality and freedom which precipitates out from the determined rational system, and the 'overlap', the contradiction serves then to realize that there must be an underlying systematic upon which we are merely 'players'; there must be a 'determinator' which determines. And thus, having investigated with vigor the ends of reality of knowledge, Hegel is lead to his 'scheme' of History.
Sartre the comes along in time and adjusts for the apparent lack of Hegel's system, by exaplaining knowledge without positing such a universal referent, that is, without the 'out' of some 'findable' (knowable) or indicative universal basis - except what is known, which is, knowledge: he takes knowledge as a thing-in-itself and includes it in the scheme of possible knowable things.
( I am not too familiar with Hiedegger, except to say that he went the 'unmistaken' step unvoiced in Sarte, and spoke as well and candidly as one could and still be credible, considering the overwhelming tendancy for the subject to be fixed upon the object, and thus be 'fixed' in the subject: and said that reality is a 'mystery'. I have to read more Hiedegger.)
We have then the moderninst to the post-modernist move. In that we merely exist in a condition of knowledge, no such basic system can be known, only the contigent system that we are presented with at any moment, which eternally and internally argues itself.
Faced with this contradiction, where the Subject still presents itself against the object, we have the misunderstood existentialist "revolt" from this determined state of affairs. The revolt is then (mistakenly, commonly, ignorantly, unknowingly) seen as a returning to the systematic without posting some universal constant except in that such a constant wants to be known by the subject, and in effect, the subject becomes suspended in a nether-existence of Truth again propsed against the inability to have a basic truth: neo-modernism. Whereas, Sartre advocates a relinquishing of the sheme itself: a 'revolt' from that state of affairs that has brought us to this probelm. A 'throwing away' the ladder, a 'passing over in silence' that which has become metaphysical. Of course, we dont do this, because of the initial problem which is the subject's correspondence and discursive entanglement with the physical object.
Despite the knowledge of its own limitation, the subject of the knowable denies what has become apparent of itself, and thereby asserts a knowable reality, again, against the object as if this time, with knowledge of its fault, we now might be able to come to a truth of the object, and thus a "Truth" of the matter at hand.
Thus, when we resort to 'atoms' or some physical universal property so as to gain support for a proposition of truth in argument, we have suceeded in denying one knowledge (that knowledge which gives only itself) for the sake of another (that knowledge which is capable of knowing something else; the 'actual' object), as if the two are of different qualities of existance. Science thus seems to be the staple goto-guy for coming upo with this 'Truer' existence.
When I approach the question, "What is preventing us from seeing the truth", I see it as a 'paradigmical' probelm: for example: the rules of baseball only partially explain football or soccer, but we keep coming back and reasserting baseball as if some how the rules of baseball will one day be able to accommodate football.
Thus, we have the polemics of the problem: a thinking, knowledge based reality complimentary with a 'medatative', 'just Be' reality - which is: the object and the subject.
i ask not what sort of objective history (read: psychology) informs one's discussion, in that such psychology will want to leave out facts and indeed if such a 'history' was offered would distort the discusssion (again), and not some 'spiritual' planar zen mumbo-jumbo, but I ask, with all earnestness: what is being withheld in that we go in circles?
