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On this day in Round and Square History 23 October 2012—Rural Religion in China (25)
23 October 2011—Hurtin' Country: He Stopped Loving Her Today
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| [a] Appearing to consciousness RF |
Our attaintment of enlightenment is something like the reflection of the
moon in water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water cleft apart...
The whole moon and the whole sky find room enough in a single dewdrop...
—Dōgen, Conversations
We continue today with one of the best explanations I have ever read of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
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| [b] Apparition busters RF |
It is embedded in Brian Magee's superb autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher. As we head toward the Husserlian Swirl, let's continue to unpack the Kantian underpinnings of phenomenology.
And, as before, we'll consider it our Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenology.
Yesterday, Magee finished with Kant's own view that his approach was a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. Magee expands upon this point, and it is worth pondering.
For thousands of years, it would seem, most human beings took it for granted that the earth was the very centre of the cosmos and the planets moved round it. It is, of course, perfectly possible to persist in seeing things this way, but it makes the actual motions of the planets so complicated as to be virtually impossible to imagine, and terribly difficult to compute mathematically. [He was misunderstood and denounced...] Yet against all obstacles...the idea eventually established itself that the moon was revolving round the earth but the earth, and the rest of the planets, round the sun. And once our planetary system was looked at in this way...the difficulties melted away. Everything fell into place and made self-evident sense...
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| [c] Moon riveter RF |
On the level of lived experience, though, all this remained deeply counter-intuitive. To us human beings it went on looking, as it always had, as if the sun were going round the earth, and to this day we find it impossible to feel ourselves (even though we know for a fact that we are) hurtling through space all the time at thousands of miles an hour on the surface of a revolving ball. This knowledge, even though it is knowledge, remains for us abstract, and is not at all contained, not even hinted at, in any of the experiences that we actually have—in fact the first people to say it publicly were dismissed as cranks or lunatics.
Now Kant claims that all these things apply mutatis mutandis to the revolutionary approach to knowledge proposed by him. For thousands of years human beings had generally taken it for granted that material objects possessed an independent existence in a space and a time that possessed also an independent existence. But from this seemingly self-evident starting point they had found it permanently impossible to explain how we could acquire knowledge of those objects or, if we had knowledge, to know that we had it.
Ponder that. It will explode with intellectual excitement tomorrow.
Notes
[1] Brian Magee, The Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Random House, 1997), 147-148.
Bibliography
Magee, Brian. The Confessions of a Philosopher. New York: Random House, 1997.
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