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Journey in Being Precision and Immanence of the Ideas as Poetry ANIL MITRA—JANUARY 19, 2012 The Universe has no limits This is the Principle of Being (PB), demonstrated later Being is used as a term that refers to the world as such rather than to mere illusion but that is otherwise neutral This neutrality is a seat of the power of the idea of Being—it permits openness and commitment as natural rather than forced and this enables and has enabled an ultimate understanding of the world Other meanings and shades of meaning of Being may be found and used but in this narrative they are overlay. The narratives retains the root and neutral meaning …and developed into a powerful system of ideas—an understanding that has ultimates with regard to depth and breadth of the Universe as finite and definite in depth but ultimate in extension, duration and variety of Being PB implies: The Universe is unlimited in
variety, extension and duration of Being; Realization of this identity is a
‘Journey’ in endless variety of Being with summits of endless variety and
unlimited elevation: The Journey is therefore on in ideas and transformation of Being These aspects of the Journey—Ideas and Transformation—are necessarily present in interaction. Since transformation includes ideas it may be referred to as a journey Ideas and Journey are therefore the main divisions of the narrative The narrative naturally derives inspiration from the traditions of human culture which include our modern culture It is a further development based in thought and experience It is self contained to an unanticipated degree Its development includes methods of demonstration (and development) Because its understanding has an ultimate character (PB), the contents of the narrative have and ultimate and independent character Therefore the narrative has an ultimate character for knowledge of the Universe and Method for or Demonstration of that knowledge (and understanding) The narrative has an absolute character with regard to content and demonstration The narrative develops this ultimate or absolute character It is not the case that ultimacy is claimed for all content and method The narrative makes clear these distinctions and marks the various developments according to degree of necessity It is positive that both method and content (and journey) have openness and lack necessity in the direction of variety It is thus that the journey—discoveries in ideas, transformations in Being—shall be ever open, an unending adventure The openness is one of excitement and of engagement in Being but also one of difficulty and pain; PB requires that it must be so; and challenge is a source of meaning to adventure and accomplishment … If the claims so far are true it would not be unreasonable to expect that the narrative shall touch the major aspects of [Human] knowledge and endeavor and to have immense moment for many of these—for [Human] endeavor as a whole However, it is perhaps more effective to let the narrative speak for itself … The path to the developments has been circuitous. It involved much study, much experience, much reflection in intellectual and many other pursuits I have come to think of the process as a personal journey This is a source of the idea of a Journey The individual is important However, even though it may be of interest, I have not indulged the merely personal in this narrative The discussion of transformation covers approaches of individual and group transformation in a Journey in Being. These have some sources in tradition but tradition has been taken further, understood and illuminated and taken to their limit of possibility in light of PB I have covered a range of approaches and have emphasized what now seems most promising … Experience is the name for what is felt… for the subjective However, experience does not refer only to mere feeling. When I think I simultaneously experience the content of my thought. Put another way, the range of feeling is far greater than that of ‘mere’ feeling There is Experience The world is the welter of Experience There is precisely one world Being is that which Exists—that which is ‘Unicorns do not Exist’ Ask what it is that does not Exist. This is said to show up a problem for Existence, for what are we saying does not Exist? As if, however, ‘tigers Exist’ is not problematic Without a concept or symbol or prototype of ‘tiger’, ‘tigers Exist’ is neither true nor false for under the circumstances ‘tigers Exist’ has no meaning The error is that a purely abstract sign can refer to anything other than itself It is by association that abstract signs refer to other things. However, an abstract sign with an association amounts to more that a merely abstract sign ‘Tigers Exist’ means ‘there are definite things that correspond to the concept of ‘tiger’ ’ ‘Unicorns do not Exist’ means ‘there are no things that correspond to the concept of ‘unicorn’ ’ ‘Exists’ may be regarded as a name for what is there More precisely, it is a name for the quality by virtue of which what is there is there The distinction is significant but once it is made, the imprecise use is permissible There is Being This follows from the assertion that there is a world It cannot similarly be concluded that ‘there is matter’, ‘there is mind’, or even ‘there are tigers’ But this does not assert that there is no matter or no mind It says that to know that ‘there is matter’ requires more than knowing that ‘there is Being’ And this is because the concept of matter is more particular than that of Being Matter, should it exist, would be a particular kind of Being That there is Being follow because the idea of Being abstracts from the thing only the property or quality of Being In this meaning ‘abstract’ is most immediate. It has diametric opposition to another meaning of ‘abstract’ as remote Because ‘Being’ is a name for what is there, this is not circular That there is Being is seen to follow from an analysis of the concept of Being Analysis of concepts is an example of Being Applied to things, Being is neutral. If something is there, no further check is required to ascertain that it has Being In the case that a concept that is not known to refer to material things but does refer to Existing things, no further checking is required to be certain that those things have Being. Further checking would be required to know that those things are material It is this neutrality of Being (the concept) that is a source of immense power of the idea The idea is simultaneously trivial and powerful It is an example of the trivial and obvious having power It is not, however, inherent in the trivial and the obvious that they have power The power of Being lies in something more particular than that of triviality It lies in the fact that it names the given—without saying what this given is It lies in the neutrality of the idea of Being When the trivial and the obvious are powerful, their power lies in the founding of the deep and the non-obvious and the non-trivial in them Although the idea of Being is trivial, the process of arriving at the idea in its most powerful form has been far from trivial No demonstration is required to know that ‘there is Being’ ‘There is Being’ is not an axiom Being is not a substance In the naming of the given we begin see and will develop he idea that it is an error to think that there are no significant, even perfect, systems of thought without undefined terms, unproved axioms, unfounded rules of thought (derivation). We will develop significant positive systems and their mesh with axiomatic and hypothetical system In beginning to understand the world via Being, there is no prejudicial commitment to special kinds (e.g. matter, mind, spirit, essence, God or not-God…) … Abstraction, Neutrality while allowing Emergence, and analysis of meaning are three important aspects of method These do not exclude the empirical. Abstraction is abstraction from Experience. Neutrality allows the empirical to enter. And while meaning already has Experience built in, analysis is not intended to be immune to further Experience and incorporation and correction Apply the idea of neutrality to itself—neutrality with regard to neutrality This may be interpreted ‘Openness is and should not be commitment to eternal openness—i.e., to indecision’ or ‘When the time comes we shall be ready to commit’. What is that time? It depends of course on context. The context here is understanding and knowledge that we have understanding (it is not some practical context in which action requires some suspension of deliberation.) It is not predetermined by expectation or pre-fabricated criticism (i.e. criticism which may have been valid in some topics or to some methods but may have been overly generalized in its potential application). The time will have come when (and if) we can look upon our deliberations and see there validity of content and method. However, even in understanding we may have to forego perfection if we find out that the context of understanding indicates the need. This is not decided in advance. Neutrality of neutrality may turn out to have the occasional interpretation ‘If sufficient reason arises we shall be ready to commit even to perfect knowledge’ Reflex analysis is another aspect of method. In the idea of neutrality with regard to neutrality the example was the application of a principle to itself. It was self-reflex. It will generalize to cross-reflex. Any piece of content or method may apply to itself or to any other. Not all cases will be fruitful There is an interaction among creation and criticism of concepts. This is clear. We create a concept. It is subject to criticism. However, as we build up the critical faculty it may enter an intuitive level and guides imaginative creation in such a way that too much effort is not devoted to sterile ideas (this intuitive critical aspect may also and reflexively be held in abeyance according to situation and understanding of situation). Similarly, imagination is important to developing the critical faculties and critical approaches Reflex analysis is suggestive to the imagination and, at times, necessary to reason Thus we see that method and content arise together They are after not so different. A first meaning of ‘content’ is that it is knowledge of the world. A first meaning of ‘method’ is that it is knowledge of development of knowledge. However, ‘development of knowledge’ is part of the world and therefore method is a kind of content Method descends from its often height in the mists of the a priori The apparent a priori aspect of method arises in part from the fact that it may have been built into practice by trial error—by adaptive selection. Thus aspects of the behavior of the world and of logic are already built into language That method is not a priori does not imply that it is not ever necessary. We will develop some methods and show to what extent they have perfect foundation. We have already seen perfection in abstraction from Experience. We will find that perfection is possible in certain significant directions. As developed here, method derives—as is most likely—from classical method. However, it will go significantly beyond classical method in some directions The ‘descent of method from the a priori’ is intuitive from the examples However, we have also shown necessity to the descent Knowledge has Being As an aspect of knowledge, method has Being … Metaphysical knowledge is knowledge that depends only on the Being of something We have seen examples of metaphysical knowledge Metaphysical knowledge is therefore as perfect as knowledge that there is Being I.e., metaphysical knowledge is perfect In general, knowledge may have a projective component. In many cases, knowledge has such a component Therefore the concern is not merely with erroneous knowledge of definite objects The very meanings of ‘object’ and ‘knowledge of object’ are in question But metaphysical knowledge is perfect knowledge of a definite object …and has followed (so far) by or from abstraction The meaning, here and so far, of ‘perfection’ in knowledge due to absence of distortion or contamination by projection and other impediments to perfect reconstruction in mind A reminder that we have found such knowledge is not out of place A note that such knowledge will be developed to an unanticipated and profound degree is similarly not out of place This kind of perfection or quality is rooted in knowledge-as-replica It is knowledge based Such perfection and quality may therefore be called ‘epistemic’ Epistemic perfection is stringent However, it will permit construction of an ultimate metaphysical system of knowledge of the Universe—The Universal Metaphysics Since epistemic ‘imperfection’ brings into question the meaning of ‘object’, the suggestion follows that metaphysical knowledge is the only knowledge Since the time of Kant the possibility of metaphysics has been in doubt (this is because it has been taken that Experience is invariably distortion) Therefore, in the modern period true knowledge has been doubted altogether We now see the epistemic error behind this nihilism Other than epistemic criteria for perfection may (and will) be developed Anti-nihilism spreads beyond metaphysics But this is not an achievement. Nihilism is the luxury of ultimately lazy intellectualism. It is lazy because it rests satisfied with criticism as blunt instrument and therefore sees no need to risk saying anything positive. It has given up before the undertaking These other criteria will free us from slavery to the epistemic perfection which Western Thought significantly though implicitly regards as the only knowledge (criterion) Such luxuries abound in schools but they also infect the ethos of the time Because of projection, knowledge has widely though implicitly (and explicitly) been regarded as impossible in west and east. Though not held universally, projection is widely considered to plague knowledge so that even when alternate, e.g. pragmatic approaches, are considered epistemic perfection remains the tacit measure of success of the alternate approach In finding other than epistemic criteria it is necessary to give up the epistemic criteria That will not imply giving up justification altogether. And we will see that where epistemic criteria reign, the other criteria will reduce to the epistemic Two such criteria are the implicit but adapted ‘sufficiently good’ and the moral as the property of Being that enhances quality of Being … The knowledge that ‘there is Being’ is objective Being is an object Being is not an object in the common concrete sense in which a ball is an object A broader sense of object will be developed later There can be one and only one metaphysical knowledge of a metaphysically definite or perfect object This knowledge may have different modes of expression and degrees of detail We will see immensely important examples including one, knowledge of ‘All Being’ (understood in a sufficiently abstract sense) that transcends the idea of example The term we will employ for ‘All Being’ is Universe The metaphysics of All Being will be a Universal Metaphysics It will enable development of general cosmology (not the physical cosmology of this cosmos) and an articulated but uniform theory of objects There is precisely one Universal Metaphysics … Later when we develop alternate modes of perfection these will cover practical knowledge ‘tainted’ by epistemic imperfection Such practical modes are important As we take up content beyond the metaphysical we will give up epistemic for other perfection. The need for perfection may be criticized however the meaning of perfection will change A mesh of modes will be developed This mesh may be called ‘Applied Metaphysics’ while the epistemically pure part may be called pure metaphysics Applied Metaphysics may be conceived as extended metaphysics The extended form will be seen to be an immensely extended form of our primal, traditional, and modern cultures. It will be one that satisfies drives to purity and practicality. At the far reach, purity and practicality merge … The final place of metaphysics is participation and immersion Metaphysics is Being … We have introduced and defined Being, epistemology, method, metaphysics, Universe, object, cosmology, ethics in pure and extended senses These and other significant and related ideas—including science, natural and social sciences, and religion—are developed in what follows |