[with an ongoing polemic against the simplistic rationalism of the Enlightenment]

            I finally picked up a copy of a book I acquired a year or more ago, a book of papers on Fichte, and began to read the introduction. And there, at last, I found articulated what I have essentially known since I was an undergraduate, although without the formal qualifications. 'In the United States,' the author avers, the primary bar to Fichte - apart from the intrinsic nature of the work, the lack of translations and the difficulty of his German - is 'the widespread bias against the history of philosophy.' By now, I had understood that the bias against the history of philosophy was a function of the English speaking world. But I had not understood that it was basically limited to the United States - a fact, however, that does not surprise me. Pursuing Fichte, for example, I had discovered a vibrant, if insurgent, present day movement toward 'transcendentalism' of one sort or another, not only in Europe, but here as well. And European philosophy has never abandoned the residual force of Idealism and other modes of 'speculative' philosophy. My fleeting contacts with Nietzsche over the years only recently touched back into the secondary texts, so I cannot be sure how much scholarly acknowledgement there is of Nietzsche's debt to Idealism, as much as he seems to reject it. But the Nietzschean insistence on value proceeds directly from the heart of Idealist thought. And the vector of his positive search persists with a force equal to the residuum of his analytical nihilism, at least within the frame of continental philosophy.

            The United States, it seems, is the last bastion of the simpleminded rationalism that started the Enlightenment. Perhaps, initially, the isolation of linear thinking had its merits, since it was the first clear focus on the process of the rational. As such, it began the actual investigation of the nature of thought and experience, and an analysis of experience that opened the modern sense of self and individualism, and hence grounded the modern concepts of freedom and democracy. We try to project these things back beyond the Middle Ages. But rationalism is a modern phenomenon, as are our ideas of self and political freedom. But linear rationalism is a degenerate form of the analytical experience from which these notions derive. As I say, its artificial simplification into the syllogistic sequences of Aristotle and later logicians perverts the actual analytical experience at its core. True 'reason' cannot be reduced to linear rationalism, a fact of which we should have become aware by now.
            Obviously, I am repeating things I have said before in this blog. But the urgency is absolute. The study of the history of philosophy makes it clear that the history of philosophy is the living core of the culture. Whether we call it 'theology' or 'philosophy' or find some other name for it is irrelevant. How we define our experience predicates our experience. If we define our experience as strictly linear, our experience will be strictly linear. When Bertrand Russell and George Moore rejected anything non-linear as 'metaphysics' and metaphysics as balderdash, the linear consequences were simple enough. We can draw a direct line from them to fast food restaurants, cheap construction and extravagant but empty profitability in the credit markets. We are not linear beings. To reduce us to linear beings is to reduce us to linear beings. In such a 'light', even television becomes universally sophisticated. Fast food and brand name sodas become legitimate 'cultural' exports. I am only surprised that Andy Warhol used soup boxes and pinups instead of soda crates and burger wrappers.

            I have hammered David Hume so much in so many of my writings that I am not sure whether I have pounded him in the blog. But even if I have, it's worth doing again. Hume is the core moment in the modern fixation of the linear. Hence it is imperative to destroy him. And, contrary to Russell, he is eminently destructible. Russell said that 'hell is filled with philosophers who tried to disprove Hume.' But we are all living now in the hell that Russell created and certified by counteraction. How Hume 'proved' the linear was an exquisite shell game. If we assume the linear nature of consciousness and experience, the linear nature of experience and consciousness is eminently provable by default. But the 'by default' is important here. The problem that Hume confronted is the problem of perception. With the recognition of solipsism - the recognition that all of our experience is an appearance in consciousness - how do 'objects' become possible? Hume is credited as a skeptic. But he is only a half-skeptic. He stops at a point which leaves linear logic untouched while theoretically dispossessing all our standard grounds for establishing a metaphysical base to experience. If all is appearance or 'representations' in consciousness, then we have no basis for asserting either mind or substance 'outside' the representations.
            Now this is all well and good. But then we are thrown back not only on the question of how we experience 'objects', but how we differentiate values in experience. Locke had shown that all our experience 'of the world' is based on sense data. But even he assumed that sense data was 'associated' according to our experience of the external world. But George Berkeley pointed out that our only 'experience' of the external world is the sense datum. Therefore sensation supplies no prior associative principle. Hume is supposedly a skeptic because he insists that we only have the 'representations' in consciousness. But he insists that these representations, when they are 'objects', are necessarily 'matters of fact' What certifies them is sensation or sense data. But how does he go 'outside' the representations to certify that they are 'matters of fact', and not simply illusions, hallucinations or dreams. In other words, he, too, is positing an 'external' foothold that is obviated by solipsism - by the fact that we only have representations, of which 'sense data' are a subsequent analytical category.
            By the same token, Hume simply assumes 'number' as axiomatic. And, while he does not draw the inference, his 'number' apparently includes both language and the analytical possibilities of consciousness. That is, 'number' is his synecdoche for the analytical range of consciousness. But since analysis is not something involving the tangible content of 'sense data' - his touchstone for all validity - how number and language, as well as all the analytical functions and properties come into being or find their ground becomes thoroughly problematic. Hume tacitly recognizes the problem by largely denying the analytical function. A concept is a specific experience with a 'general term' attached. But he never considers the question of a 'source' for 'term' itself.
            Thus, by 'proving' his axiomatic assumptions as if they were conclusions, Hume arrives at his famous results - characterized, sardonically, as 'no matter, never mind'. Nothing can be posited as 'external' to the representations and their immediate alterations. And while, under the circumstances he adduces, this is true enough, it is equally true that he has given us no certification for his assumptions outside the assumptions themselves. All 'perceptual objects', whether illusions, hallucinations and dreams, or putatively 'actual' objects contain 'sense data' in one form or another. So what is the difference? Where does the difference of our experience of their validity come in? And as soon as we deny a prior organism in the function of experience not only as analysis but as an awareness of experience itself, we have obviated the last possibility of experience. But, as I say, the conclusions were inherent in the assumptions. They solve neither the problem of solipsism nor the question of validity. Hume only admits validity where he assigns validity by prior assumption. If he had been a true skeptic, he would have had to admit, finally, that all he had done was establish the final limit of solipsism, the abnegation, not only of experiencer and experienced object, but also of experience itself.
            In fact, Hume ultimately took us no further than Descartes. He was a rationalist, and not an empiricist. Experience is grounded in validity and not sense data. But, by making sense data the artificial touchstone for experience, Hume essentially removed reason from the frame of doubt and discussion. He proves his thesis, not empirically, that is, by experience, but by reason. His is a rational argument against experience. And therefore, while formally and technically he leaves no real ground or basis for reason, pragmatically, he leaves nothing but reason - and simple, linear reason at that.

            But, of course, we are the American heirs of this peculiar bias, this peculiar prejudice against the history of philosophy - perhaps precisely because it would force us to consider the possibility that awareness and experience are as holistic, global and ambiguous as the nature of matter as we understand it since Einstein. In other words, the nature of both reason and experience would not necessarily be something we could assume that the most arrant freshman would understand.

            All of which is to say that Hume was not a skeptic. He was a rationalist - a simple, linear rationalist - bent on proving his simple linear rationalism at any cost, which is what he did by default.
            But these are precisely the issues that the German Idealists finally confronted. They finally annihilated the Humean artifice of rational skepticism. But they themselves were caught in the toils of the rationalistic language of logic.


            I finally downloaded the first part of Spinoza's Tractatus, something looming in the background that I had never read before. Spinoza, arguably, is the ultimate godfather of linear rationalism in the west. And the Tractatus was his first significant work. While the opening argument targets the 'irrational' in religion, it is also clearly an early expression of the pure rationalistic consciousness.

(1) Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. (2) The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for mastery, though it is usually boastful, over-confident and vain.

While, shortly thereafter, Spinoza characterizes all these influences under 'fear', it is clear from this opening passage that he sees them as a range of forces, of stressors, fears and passions. In other words, he assumes that it is only the negative emotional forces in human psychology that obscure the basic rationality, which is consciousness itself.  In other words, he assumes, tacitly and pervasively, that 'rationality' is the ground condition of 'mind'. And this is the assumption of rationalism and 'the Enlightenment' throughout. If we could only free the mind from artificial or arbitrary emotional concerns, rationality would be its natural medium.
            But, of course, this was the basic premise of rationalism, namely that thought and linear reason are synonymous, a premise that has remained essentially unchallenged up to this day - at least amongst the heirs of rationalism and 'the Enlightenment'. If we cannot 'certify' logic, if we cannot establish its own validity, this does not obviate its validity, and, by tacit extension, does not discount logic as the ground of thought, even if logic itself has been driven into the structural corners of language. Hence the heirs of the analytical philosophers still tend to consider language as the necessary equivalent of thought, without considering the evolutionary question of how language emerged, or only considering it as a technical and not a basic philosophical question. 'What was thought before language?' is a meaningless question to them, even though we still have a great deal of thought which is essentially prior to language - and particularly creative thought.

            As I have said repeatedly, linear rationalism found its equivalent and partial justification in Newtonian physics. Newtonian mechanics is the physical equivalent of linear rationalism. And again, as I have said, we have failed to recognize (as much as 'new agers' have played with the concepts of relativity) that Einsteinian physics is as much a direct statement about the actual global conditions of thought as about the nature of the material world. Global thought reopens all the questions that linear rationalism had purportedly 'answered' as null and irrelevant - just as Einsteinian physics answered linear Newtonian physics with a global formulation encompassing paradox. Such being the case, we should perhaps begin searching for the global description of consciousness and mind that will express this peculiar equivalency. And we shall find that the groundwork, for western philosophy, was already established by the German Idealists.

            The problem, of course, when we recognize that our present field of consciousness is apparently established entirely within the frame of consciousness, is to realize that a 'direct' response to 'the world' is necessarily involved, but the structure of our perceptions, as well as our thoughts, are also grounded in wholeness. Both 'number', or thought, and 'objects' as perceptions are necessarily holistic responses within the frame of 'ordinary' awareness. The problem apparently established by Locke is actually not the question of how 'sensations' are 'assembled' into 'objects' in perception, but how the immediate or direct value response which has its roots in evolution, produces our present sense of 'object', which, even as a perception, carries an abstractive potency. In other words, the real issue is the reflective activity in awareness that produces our present interpretive responses which we consider as 'immediate' perceptions.

            Perception cannot be divorced from the body and from the wholeness of the body. The proponents of 'scientific philosophy' who hold that evolution somehow validates linear thinking have it backward. Evolution validates the global nature of thought. The only way for thought to arise is from the immediate, as if 'thought' itself as immediate were the a priori condition for evolution. When we understand self-awareness, we understand that it cannot be the other way around. Evolution cannot precede the possibility of perception, because perception is necessarily functionally immediate. That is, it is literally 'without mediation' in terms of the received nature of the perception. 'Sensation' cannot justify it. Therefore it must justify sensation.
            Self-awareness proves it because self-awareness proves the essential independence of consciousness. Self-awareness is the validating moment of the independence of consciousness. At the same time, consciousness is also necessarily an a priori condition for evolution, in the sense that consciousness or awareness was necessarily a potential within 'matter', whatever 'matter' may be. Evolution is the mutual 'emergence' of matter and consciousness as coequal. But self-awareness is both the assertion and the proof of the final independence of consciousness. At the same time, it is an assertion of independence against what? When we arrive at the Theory of Relativity, what dissolves is 'matter' and not consciousness. This is not to go into the false idealism of saying that we 'create' the material world in its actuality. But what the material world is becomes moot. Consciousness attains independence. But 'matter' becomes an ambiguous concept. The inertial nature of the world certifies the independence of the world. But what the world is in essence or in substance becomes ambivalent.

- Jeremy