Truth or Viewpoint? A challenge to Dianna West

Beginnings are not important except for the divine. For men it’s foundations. In other words foundations are not beginnings or historical. Human foundations refer to what constitutes order. Order is transcendent meaning the element of time, History as a second intention, is not substituted for it; for order, as it is in our times. {“History” is the concept intending Time where this object, Time, is order. But the order of History as Time is only a concept, viz., “History.” This is as if Kepler were to say the Order of the heavenly bodies is the Law of Nature. But because the actual order of the heavenly bodies is not order –all bodies are equal according to the new science applied by Kepler, that is, all the bodies are a single non-order – it was decided early (by Descartes) to call this order the “Law of Nature.” This law differentiates among the otherwise disordered bodies according to their differences measured by Time}.

And so, in the present case of human foundations where History is substituted for clarity about our own foundations, we immediately learn our foundation is the future. The future is what  Descartes hoped would become the Enlightened conception of order. And it was made this by Hegel. Still it was in largest part Descartes’ “order” of equations and findings that made Time order. Today the Redirection of Western societies is an historic progress. The effect of it is we cannot get to foundations, perhaps ever or at all. This is our challenge. But this is only to say the challenge is simple and apparent. It is science.

Time as second intention is the order of the heavens and in the affairs of men. Sighted in the future, Enlightenment is constituted by equations, one of which is always certain, and the second, the analytic or algebraic one for figure presupposing extension as a species of magnitude, is found according to symbolic intentionality. Every proved or correct equation is a progress with respect to this correct finding; and this is only to say the end of this progress (“end” is the English of the Greek term telos) is correct equations. In other words, Certainty is Telos. This is simple.

What is apparent is the order of Certainty is Telos has the meaning, overall, of the “Principle of Elementary Disorder.” This is how the scientist Planck described one of our prominent Laws of Nature called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But how could men even know such a law of order?  It would mean all of Speech is incoherent. It’s as if we were all to obey and follow a law of human affairs in which the highest good or best thing were to be the abandonment of reason simply!  Would we obey a Law of Nature equivalent to the absence of discrimination or indiscriminacy?

This would be like seeking the truth about Muslims in the West from a typical British university intellectual, for example Eric Hobsbawm, at the same time we knew it was he who had famously answered Mr. Blair’s ghastly query if the Russian Revolution’s many millions of terror victims, including the successor regime of Stalin, were undertakings justified in the results, knowing his answer was “we’ll have to wait and see” ?   Dianna West reports today regarding Mr. Hobsbawm on Muslims in England. She writes that he and  “Philosopher John Gray…recently said on British television that even the word "Islamist" was "unfair" because "it implied a strong link to Islam." But her report is found in another by her about an argument with “Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to our forces in Iraq….”

Dianna West, saying this well-known advisor on limited war “wondered in an e-mail whether I  ‘may not like Muslims, and that's your choice.’” Of this she wrote: “It was a long e-mail — one of several — but even these few words convey the viewpoint….” [italics mine]   Viewpoint?  In other words, Certainty for Telos or what is simple is apparent as follows.

Another historian, this one of Descartes and of science (Jacob Klein who admires both), and from whose essay “The World of Physics and the ‘Natural’ World” I have taken some of the points in this short commentary about science and Speech, quotes Eddington on the apparent. “’There are duplicates of every object about me –two tables, two chairs, two pens.’” It is the scientific table, the one not apparent, that is the truth of existence. The hidden table “’consists…, mostly of emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electrical charges rushing about with great speed.’” This is the true and the real table. The table we experience is the apparent table; in fact the not true or real table.

Now this is our challenge. It too is simple and apparent. No reasonable man at any time but our own could come to Eddington’s conclusion of preference for the hidden table over the apparent table.  We do not think this, I know. We would not even say it if we knew it. On the other hand we suppose Eddington understands, as Klein does, the foundation of science in the Cartesian mathesis universalis [universal knowledge] is what drives mathematical physics and is driven by it.  Although it permits one to say –or for many even requires anyone to say “science works,” I can tell you it is not a strong or coherent foundation.

Science works because it is a transformation of the truth or reality of existence. This is  effected by symbolic intentionality.  Our foundation as science in the truth or reality of existence (Self Society World) is literally in nothing. First, our foundation in symbolic intentionality is  “beings of reason.” Second it is our Self. Our automatic external sense experience of figure, apprehended as that which is “pure and without body” comes to us in this way:  “our senses apprehend…nothing in external objects beyond their shapes, sizes and motions.”

The transformation, the formulae I already set down, about “equations”, is then brought about by figure. In a nutshell it works this way. The automatically or “passively” apprehended figures or what is pure and without body are “generalized” {transformed to a visible second intention, a concept or “being of reason”} for all possible figure on account of the ratios and proportions found in figure in existence. No body is ever seen or is any thing true or real until it is found. What is always found is these relations in equations abstracted for magnitude on the analogy for figure having extension, and where the original generalizations just mentioned may not refer directly to bodies. They refer, but only to figure, insofar as it presupposes body which presupposes extension. This, in a nutshell, is why science works. Although it is rocket science it is equally the case that it is not rocket science after all. And so this is our challenge –also in a nutshell.

Dianna West’s challenge is to distinguish truth from viewpoint by coming to realize indiscriminacy is false for reason as a contradiction  in terms. This is proved by telos or that which halts an infinite regress in speech. I speak of telos properly so-called. The challenge, this is to say, is to find it within herself to discover that Certainty is not Telos.

RJL

Printer-Friendly Version