From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 17:26:07 EST Subject: Over the Top --part1_77.9114016.2b7197ff_boundary Content-Language: en Over the Top. Just a few more thoughts from me on what I think about us thinking about the nature or unnaturalality of reality. I consider it is fair game for anybody to think about whatever he or she wishes to think about that can possibly be thought about, and yes - it is important to respect and take cognisance of what "the tradition" or "current thinking" thinks about the question as long as they ('they' of the books that we read, or they of the dry-bank positionalist podiums) don't try and ram it down your/our throat/throats and try to tell us what it is "clever " or "unclever" to think about - but don't let that deter you. I urge you to continue with your investigations/speculations about the way the world was out there before the arrival of our thinking species was able to peer over the trench-top and think about it, the way it is out there now whilst we (and the "theys" of the books that we read, or they of the dry-bank positionalist podiums) are here thinking about it - or not thinking about it, and the way it will be after we individual humans or homo sapiens in general are gone and are no longer able to think about it anymore. Anyway any attempt at anti-anthropocentricity gets my full support, particularly as much of my thinking-time is spent in the existentialist hot-house (mad-house) of self and species-specific self-regard, even though (ironically) even an attempt at ab-anthropocentrism could be said by some to be anthropocentrically motivated. To be frank it is an area which has always fascinated me, and much of my personal beliefs or interpretations of philosophy are based on an attempt to jettison the reifications that man has created [particularly the primitive and juvenile transcendentalist jargon which people like Heidegger have tried to revivify and foist upon us] in trying to understand and describe the universe in which he finds himself, (he is thrown) and which reifications have IMO returned like a squadron of obfuscatory semantic boomerangs and hit him on the back of the head blurring his vision even more rather than clarifying it. What I mean is that in his effort to get to grips with his thigh-deep-Neitzche-waterlogged-over-the top-of-the trench version of the way things are, man in his whimpering, subjectivist, (judgement based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions of what's happening on the dry-bank rather than external facts,) protean theologistical stage has created in his language a myriad of blind alley significands that continue to survive, and in doing so still contain fuzzy and blurred meaning for some humans, which correspond 'out there' to absolute zilch with a capital zed entity-wise. For me any attempt at a coming to terms with any concept of TWTWI requires a radical pruning of all the more obvious abstractions, for the world out there is abstractionless, cold, uncaring, and language-less and like the "environment" here on earth, doesn't give a monkey's f--- about man's attempts to lumber it with ontological Greek-based howlers, or for that matter whether it is despoilt or not. Of course people will laugh at me and answer that ALL language is abstraction and that to attempt to communicate in a language shorn of abstraction is to become dumb. My answer to that is that language comes in varying levels or depths of engrossment, which ranges from the designatory rigidity of proper names (a la Saul Kripke) to the laughable ontological dead-end words like "Existence and "Being" that provide the basis of so much waste of inter-synapsal activity, ink-black, trees of the forests of Brazil, and the suffering taxpayer's money. I find this area of philosophy (the attempt to see ourselves as an outsider looking in) as one of the most exciting and inspirational activities of the thinking mind, and is in a sense the last major intellectual challenge that is left, for as the subject matter of philosophy has been gradually stripped of its mainstays which have hived off into independent disciplines - what is there left for philosophy to philosophise about? IMO there only remains ethics and wondering about TWTWI out there. I have often fantasised about what it would be like if some religious or transcendentalist nut succeeded in wiping out the population of humans on this earth as those Japanese religionists tried to do during their poisonous essay in the Tokyo underground railway. The twittering parrots perched on a branch would no longer be: "parrots," or even "birds," and they would no longer be "twittering" they would simply exist as entities, except of course they wouldn't even exist as the recipients of the designator 'entities' and any language that we chose to describe them in their new de-humanised landscape would have no referentiality, because there would be no humans around to pick up on the signifier-referendal links. Bearing in mind all that, is possible to even speak of such a world? I think that it is, and whilst there is no escape from the descriptional language that both liberates and at the same time imprisons us, I am personally confident that most of the stuff that we see around us exists, and that it is possible for us, on the basis of our experience, to imagine such=20a world as it would be if we were not part of it. Making all the necessary allowances for the fact that an object only appears to us as" blue" because of the nature of our optical equipment, and that a surface feels rough or smooth as a result of our skin sensitivity etc., that does not say that we cannot be absolutely confident that such an object would be crushed or smashed to smithereens if it was hit by a falling gravitationally motivated rock. In other words there are certain truths about the nature of reality as it affected our biological forbears and would continue to affect the other sentient and senseless objects of the world should human beings ever be removed from it surface. Feinburg in " The Meaning of it All" writes: "It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate the universe without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing -- atoms with curiosity -- that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it was all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate." I realise that some of what I have written above is rushed and ill thought-through, and is more of an emotional response to the question of TWTWI than of a carefully and deeply considered one. To those who say: =E2=80=9CWhy bother thinking about it, when there is no chance of ever finding out whether any of your speculations regarding its accessibility as knowable "knowledge" criteria are possible, or whether it even exists independently of the human mind?=E2=80=9D I would respond that those words were probably very similar to the words that were said to Columbus and his crew before he set sail to discover the new world, and that if he had listened and aborted his project you wouldn't be sitting there in California reading these words and I wouldn't be sitting here typing you this message. Regards, Jud. Cheers, Jud. <A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY. <A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A> --part1_77.9114016.2b7197ff_boundary
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