systematic philosophy or the One
Isuppose, as an alternative to my critique of analytical philosophy, I have to make some positive statement – even though analytical philosophy emerged, precisely, from the purported failure of all alternatives – the apparent failure of all attempts to validate analytical philosophy itself notwithstanding. But the only answer to analytical philosophy, finally, is a positive philosophical statement that finds validation, if not in logic itself, at least as a logical answer to analytical philosophy. And since the attempts to validate analytical philosophy have resulted in the death of formal logic, and particularly the death of logic as in any way connected with validity, the only validation that remains is empirical, that is to say, experiential.
But when confronted by the issue of a response to analytical philosophy, I think I have some of the same feelings as a classical Zen teacher when asked the usual question about the essence of Zen: ‘I’m very tired. Go ask someone else.’
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anyone else to ask.
Part of the reason I’m tired is because I’ve spent my whole life confronting not only analytical philosophy, but also its cultural fallout, which, at this point, is nothing less than the death of culture. I had wanted to say ‘the death of culture as we know it’. But I’m not sure I know who the ‘we’ are who know ‘it’. Culture is hamburgers and soda. Television gropes toward meaningful writing, since, relatively, television is a cheaper medium than cinema, which is now as bland and journalistic as contemporary prose. Historical culture cannot define us if it has no real residue in the present, that is, residue as real culture. No doubt, pseudo-van Gogh makes wonderful dinner plates and mugs, at least for those who don’t care too much.
But part of the reason I’m tired is that everywhere in my reading I encounter the answer. I’m reading Kant now, and he begins from the basis of unity, among other things. That is, unity is axiomatic. At the same time, he doesn’t simply take it for granted, in the sense that he explicates its place and importance in terms of both its empirical and a priori necessity, although his references are brief and unemphatic. But I’m not necessarily following Kant, although his take on unity grounds the 19th century directly and the 20th century by reaction. But who cares about that?
Unity is the lump we cannot get around. Nothing in the ‘external world’ isthe basis for unity. So where did it come from?
We can’t get around it because it’s the basis of experience. Without cogency, there’s neither self nor object. It’s not just the Humean ‘no matter, never mind’. It’s the necessarily superadded ‘no ideas, no experience’. Without unity, no experience.
If we begin from anything other than unity, unity is the first question. But, as soon as we begin from unity, we have to presuppose something prior to unity. If there were only monolithic unity, solipsism would require that we are creators of the world.
To pause here for a moment, solipsism is the necessary condition of experience that says that all experience takes place in consciousness. While experience tells us that there is ‘something out there’, what we see in experience is a construct in consciousness. The ‘substance’ of ‘objects’ may be external, but the substance of the perception is consciousness itself. This is the great nail on which ‘modern’ philosophy has impaled itself. While the analytical philosophers consistently ignore it, it is ultimately the only historical justification for analytical philosophy: the presumption that solipsism is a wall that cannot be penetrated, therefore we must just deal with the incremental links we can discover in what we have.
The question of how any links are possible, whether analytically or descriptively, remains an open and increasingly remote question. One could have hoped that this might result in the slow fade of analytical philosophy and its influence, but such, apparently, is hardly the case.
So, if we want to find any foothold, we have to revert to the basic questions. Unity is most basic, since it is the presupposition inherent in experience itself. But as soon as we address unity empirically or experientially, it’s monolithic nature falls away. If we suppose that the external enters consciousness in the form of the sense datum, the tiniest bit of sensory information, which contains nothing except that tiny bit of information, undefined by anything else and containing absolutely no other information or implication, then the whole process of assembling perceptions is necessarily a function of consciousness. ‘Objects’ do not ‘appear’ spontaneously in consciousness.
But, in this case, the question of the nature of unity is almost as paramount as the question of how unity arises. The latter is relatively easy to answer in terms of self-awareness. Unity, as a formality, inheres in the moment in which we become aware of ourselves as witnessing beings. Self-awareness is, in part, the imputation of unity to the self.
But the fact that both unity and self-awareness apparently arise from the context of a field of sensory information which, as pure sensory information, has no inherent unity, means that unity is inherently an act of consciousness. But if unity were strictly a function of consciousness, we would be born self-aware, since we are born conscious.
The answer to this dilemma resides in part in the simultaneity ofconsciousness and sensory in the ‘field’ of awareness. Apparently this ‘extent’ or ‘mass’ implicitly contains value points, since, prior toself-awareness, the infant makes value judgments, that is, makes distinctions and choices based on the recognition of values. These value points cannot be explicitly identified either with ‘subjectivity’ or with the 'objective’ since subject and object have not yet been differentiated by self-awareness. It is precisely in the moment of self-awareness that integrity or unity emerges and is assigned to both self and object.
There are many things we can say about this moment, and, at the very least, a wide array of dimensions through which we can approach it. But for our purposes here, it is enough to notice that self-awareness pivots on one of these value points and actuates through the identity of point and whole. If the whole were not a cogency, the moment of identity that ‘produces’ self and object could not be enacted.
This is the basis of Kant’s assertion concerning the necessity of systematic philosophy, and it is as good today as it was when he made it.
But this also means that, experientially, unity is grounded in paradox, a paradox that is to some extent implicit in the nature of unity or the One. Unity cannot exist in isolation. That is, we cannot assume that unity takes priority over all other experience. This is true experientially because unity itself is a created function. But it’s also necessarily true of the One as the unit or integral in the abstract. The One involves a distinction, and therefore is necessarily posited over against something else. Moreover, this differentiation is also integral in the nature of the One itself : as an integral, it begs differentiation.
The empirical aspect of this – the experiential aspect – is that the One is both the whole and less than the whole. If the whole were not integral, the One could not emerge; and, in its emergence, the One is the comprehensive equivalent of the whole. But, as an emergent form, it is less than the whole.
And the One bears this paradox throughout the range of its functions, whether we consider it as the basis of the empirical in terms of both self and object, or in the range of its functions as abstraction.
Systematic philosophy is both possible and necessary. It’s just that formal logic has nothing to do with it. Perhaps we can rewrite formal logic in terms of the nature of the One and its functions at the core of self-awareness. But we cannot arrive at the One or its functions from formal logic.
At the same time, then, that systematic philosophy is grounded in the nature of experience, it also participates directly in the paradoxes of the One. Hence it becomes the mirroring corollary of modern physics.
One of the biographers of Einstein notes that, while Einstein was still considered ‘slow’ when he was 11, he started reading Kant when he was 13. But, in the context, the anecdote is simply the stale truism about his misperceived development. Apparently nobody has been able to point out that Einsteinian relativity theory is a direct consequence of his reading of Kant.
When we make that connection, perhaps we can restore systematic philosophy to its appropriate place and start the post-post-modernist, post-nihilist task of reconstructing culture.
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