<![CDATA[For the past couple years, beginning during my prolonged medically enforced quietude and continuing to this day, I have been reading and rereading philosophers from the pre-Socratics through modern Continental and Analytic philosophers. The explanations for, and of, existence, its meaning and the consequences for thought have been deeply troubling to me for a long time, because the people providing those explanations have demanded that almost anything be justified by fragmented, fractured thinking. As a thoughtful person, I have been confused by the riot of claims made for and by "reason," "science" and "experience." But I was not a philosopher, because I did not endeavor to put the house of my reasoning together for anyone other than myself to occupy.
Edmund Husserl, echoing René Descartes, wrote in his Cartesian Meditations, a series of essays based on lectures he delivered at the Sorbonne in 1929, that “we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically: that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences” so that we may build upon thoroughly examined principles a foundation of ideas on which we can construct a life in thought.
Husserl prefaced the transcripts of his lectures with the comment that, while philosophers can meet, their philosophies do not, because they cannot share a common mental space. Throughout my reading I have been impressed by the writers’ unwillingness to communicate in a language not laden with jargon. Even in the Greek age, Aristotle began to adorn his ideas with language that required specialization. Socrates, speaking through Plato, presented his ideas plainly enough to please anyone listening with their clarity. Parmenides, too, when he argued that “The same, itself, is both thinking and being.”
Modern philosphy, of course, began with Descartes, who arrived at the Parmenidean idea through the application of doubt to the question of existence. Only when he was able to confirm that he himself was conscious of his being through thought could he accept as axiomatic his Being: Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Rigor-plus-Parmenides, in that Descartes took the general statement that thinking is being and, by eliminating the potentials for external manipulation that might create the illusion of being, reduced it to the fundamental issue of one Being knowing itself.
Beyond that individual experience of Being qua Being, in the most literal and undiluted sense of Being being itself, there is nothing but controversy. Philosophies cannot agree what is being Being, nor how they can know that experience, let alone what can be Being. Descartes split the world “in two,” creating the mind-body problem and the so-called objectivity of science, which has bent philosophies into pretzel logics to explain what, if any, difference exists between Being and non-Being. Kant, Schelling and Hegel attempted transcendence to navigate that chasm. Spinoza, Leibniz and, critically to 20th Century philosophy, Nietzsche’s notion of an eternally returning fusion of substance and time, argued for a unity that exists in multiplicity, as do many Continental philosophers today.
Whatever it is that is regarding its own Being in the cogito, plurality of substances or a unity, it is the very notion of Being that becomes confused because of the differing approach to language in describing the world and what is in—or part—of it. Subject and object confront one another in experience or, in the case of most analytic and many Continental philosophers, through language, which, as the conveyance of thought, claims to be thinking and, as such, Being. In either case, thought dissolves into objects (in the simplest sense, that of a thing external to minds, such as a table, a rock or the Moon), because these things become repositories for thought, through design and interpretation, and meaning. And the result is a world in which Being becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend qua Being, in and of itself.
If, as Alain Badiou claims in Being and Event, Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher, we are confronted with the indecipherable problem of teasing apart Being from our civilizations, technologies and our experience of those things. Heidegger’s approach to thinking thoughts is a gnostic kind of existentialism, in which realization of Being instantiates Being while simultaneously introducing undecidable questions and the requirement that the thinker acknowledge an inconceivable void, which has a very great beauty, but remains primarily a form of literature rather than science. Likewise, Wittgenstein, the doyen of Analytic philosophy, advises his readers about the inability to talk about things they cannot put to words, leaving an unknowable knowledge at the core of existence. Ultimately, both schools have failed to adequately address the meaning of Gödel’s Theorem in the application of pure or practical reason.
Gödel confronts the philosopher with the immanent limitations in any axiomatic system. Rather than suggesting that any axiomatic system is hopeless, this opens the way to constant discovery of what is presently unknown, but only if we restore doubt to the place it occupied in Descartes’ thinking, as well as amplify its application to future judgments based on a priori concepts. The practical rule is “take nothing for granted.” We can only begin and end in doubt, which is not to say that we can never know the truth of Being, but that we make progress toward greater insight. As Husserl wrote: “the idea of science and philosophy involves an order of cognition, proceeding from intrinsically earlier to intrinsically later cognitions; ultimately, then, a beginning and a line of advance are not to be chosen arbitrarily but have their basis in ‘in the nature of things themselves. (emphasis in original, bold added)'”
None of this is to say that I know I exist, that I have justified my confidence that I am not typing this text into a virtuality with no one to observe, know and argue my conclusions with me. That’s for the next time. In the meantime, I hope I have laid out the questions I must confront in making the claim that I exist, that you, who reads this, also exists, and that the world is not a projection of my making, nor of some evil genius wishing to deceive me, or you.]]>
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