(esoteric / exoteric 7)

             Darwinian incrementalism has become the new mode of analysis. Within fifty years of the general accreditation of his evolutionary theory, this new mode of analysis became, historically, the genetic basis for analytical philosophy. The analytical philosophers claim their lineage from Kantian critical philosophy, but the critical philosophy is necessarily based in the absoluteness of subjectivity in the order of experience, a subjectivity in which, precisely, the thing-in-itself, as a philosophical premise, can have no necessarily independent subsistence. If we engage in any attempt to deflect or obviate this essential subjectivity, we have not only violated the critical philosophy, we are involved in a covert denial of solipsism, the only true sacrilege in philosophy after Berkeley. Kant’s validation of analysis itself depends on the whole of the transcendental dialectic. Remove any piece, and the structure falls; as the analytical philosophers themselves discovered when they tried to validate enquiry from the basis of ‘pure’ logic. Any but an analytical philosopher would have seen that this is a bootstrap or tautological operation from the outset.
             The only real validation, finally, of analytical philosophy is the residual historical force of the incrementalist analysis first made popular by Darwin’s metaphysical methodology. Therefore, we must see analytical philosophy as the derivative and not the primary stream in the historical efflorescence of this analytical method. And the proof of this assertion lies in the fact that incrementalist analysis has now become both the metaphysical and linguistic touchstone for all academic discourse. For example, while there is a spreading Idealist resurgence in academe, it is hampered by the requirement that any research still express itself in incrementalist dialectic. Nowhere can it directly revert to the holistic premises which are the very basis of Idealism, both historically and metaphysically.

             The problem, of course, is that when the pretense of a basis in the critical philosophy falls away, we are only left with logic as defined analytically, the last bastion of which is a premise of cogency, a tacit or overt reference to the principle of non-contradiction: the assumption that we are dealing with a self-consistent and therefore closed system. But, of course, the analytical philosopher cannot acknowledge this ground, since even his own ‘logical’ researches have shown, at this point, that cogency is essentially ‘empirical’ or experiential and not a priori or self-validating. At its height in the middle of the last century, analytical philosophy therefore found itself in a profound state of denial, simultaneously asserting and denying its own grounding in this ‘pure’ cogency; insisting on the self-validating primacy of logical enquiry while simultaneously asserting that all other approaches are ‘monistic’ and hence anathema. Only the residual historical force of the incrementalist approach sustains the apparent validity of this method of enquiry, but its hollowness is everywhere evident. The moral consequences of this paradoxical anti-foundationalism are now self-evident in a predatory greed at the top and the all-pervasive lawlessness on the streets.