Con & decon pomo continued

I will be referencing some sources in this post that were cited in the comments section from the last post, so check out those comments for the citations. And all of this comes from my posts at the IPS discussion forum on the topic.

More from Gare:

[criticizing Fichte] "it is inconceivable that an Absolute I could become conscious of itself, Schelling argued that the self-conscious I needs to be explained as the product and highest potentiality of nature....he claims, moreover, that the 'unconscious' stages through which consciousness emerges can only become conscious to an I that has developed out of them and realizes its dependence upon them" (34).

"Hegel's attack on Schelling provoked a sustained response from Schelling, who defended and elaborated his philosophy to expose the defects in Hegel's philosophy. He charged Hegel with producing a self-enclosed dance of abstractions dealing with essences without any place for existence. The crucial move made by Schelling was to show that a system of reason cannot explain the fact of its own existence" (38).

He does later on though note that process philosophers are in a better position to integrate early and late Schelling since they start from Schelling's early work whereas poststructuralists reject it (47). We'll see about that! Especially in light of the American pragmatists, one being Pierce who is cited as one of those process folks who adopted Schelling's early works.

The following are some excerpts from Schelling's entry in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy regarding his early work. Tell me this doesn't sound like Desilet's descriptions of Derrida as "not one, not two," I dare you! The latter rejects Schelling's early work indeed.

"The model is a magnet, whose opposing poles are inseparable from each other, even though they are opposites....the ‘principle of all explanation of nature’ is ‘universal duality’, an inherent difference of subject and object which prevents nature ever finally reaching stasis. At the same time this difference of subject and object must be grounded in an identity which links them together, otherwise all the problems of dualism would just reappear.

"One aspect of being, the dark force, which he sometimes terms ‘gravity’, is contractive, the other expansive, which he terms ‘light’. Dynamic processes are the result of the interchange between these ultimately identical forces. If they were wholly separate there would either be no manifest universe, because contraction would dominate, or the universe would dissipate at infinite speed because expansion would dominate. The result would be the same: there would not be a world....the One comes into contradiction with itself and the two forces constantly vie with each other. Differences must, however, be grounded in unity, as otherwise they could not be manifest at all as differences.

"This interaction between what is contained in itself and what draws something beyond itself is also what gives rise to consciousness, and thus to an inherent tension within consciousness, which can only be itself by its relation to an other."

(For some not familiar with Desilet, he participated in a couple of threads at the old Gaia forum. Here are links to two of those threads: Derrida and synergist spirituality. They are stored at Google documents which is sometimes slow in loading these large documents, and sometimes they don't load at all due to system overloads. Keep trying and eventually you'll get them.)

Here's what Mead said about Schelling, from Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Read Books, 2007):

“The antinomy in knowledge, instead of being the indication that we are trying to know something we cannot know, is the very process by means of which knowledge itself arises. The antinomy is a stage in the process of knowledge” (120-1).

He then goes into an examination of the Sophist tradition of ancient Greece, how they used “the dialectic” to trap opponents in contradictions. For when one sets up a universal definition there will always be particular instances that refute such “orienting generalizations.” Socrates was the champ at such sophistry but for him “it was a means for getting back to certain fundamental realities” (121). That fundamental reality is that there is no perfect, ultimate or universal category as such. Nonetheless, it is in positing such universals that we discover this through the process of antinomy, the process of differánce (not difference) as such! It is a postformal dialectical relationship between the universal and the particular that is not one, not two.

Mead went into an investigation of Kant as prelude to Schelling, given the former's influence on all subsequent philosophical investigation. So let's take a brief look of his critique of metaphysics from a concise, reliable source, the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. First off, K said that we cannot know the thing-in-itself by reason alone, but that reason and sensibility (experience) combined might enact such knowledge. Reason alone generates a "formal" dialectic and irreconcilable contradictions. This type of reasoning generates an a priori world of ideas from which the world of form depends. Sound familiar? (See real and false reason thread.)

Given this split or antinomy reason seeks to find ultimate or transcendental causes to ground all conditions, to find the ultimate generalization to ground all particulars, to seek "theories of everything." Which of course presumes an ultimate as already given to be found, the now infamous myth of the given. However, this propensity of reason to seek out the ultimate or unconditioned has its functional use if not taken metaphysically, "so long as they are construed 'regulatively' and not 'constitutively.'”

Continuing with Kant's SOP entry, what the author means by regulative use is "as devices for guiding and grounding our empirical investigations and the project of knowledge acquisition." To construe constitutively "is provide the concepts through which we might access objects that could be known through the speculative use of reason." Take away the literal belief in an ultimate but use conditional generalities (quasi-ultimates via metaphor) as categories to organize, manipulate and add meaning to events. Here we seem some roots of the American pragmatists and their offspring the cogscipragos in grounding reason is empirical events and embodiment sans the metaphysical commitments. And again, in this way the ultimate and the particular are in relation, not diametrically opposed, both and neither.

However it doesn't appear Kant went all the way to this conclusion, instead postulating a transcendental idealism (at least according to Mead) as the solution to the antinomies. It seems Fichte went along with this but it was Schelling that took the more "pragmatic" turn.

By transcendental idealism I mean that Kant thought the “categories” were not only inherent to the mind but also the objective world, that they were originary or causal. So even though one could not know the thing in itself with reason alone, one could apprehend it nonetheless because the categories were inherent in the sensible world and in our intelligible mind and this was the connection point. All of which transcended our reason because these ideal categories existed both within and without us. Kant started us down the postmetaphysical trail but this remnant of it remained behind to haunt his philosophy. A remnant we still see in Wilber's transcendental subject (that he got from Fichte and manifested in his transrational “states”) and mathematical models like the MHC with their ideal Platonic forms.

Now Kant was right that the categories are inherent to our mind but not like he envisioned. We know from Lakoff & Johnson (see real and false reason thread) that categorization is indeed inherent to the way or brain-mind works and it cannot be otherwise. But they do not extend this to the world in itself as a causal agency that we just apprehend. We certainly utilize our categorization to organize and manipulate the world for our benefit but they don't confuse this with this remnant myth of the given; they still maintain this every so small separation that we don't actually know the thing in itself but nevertheless well enough within our relationship with it to effect useful change. Recall they warned that because this gap is small it is easy to make the confusion that it is nonexistent which led us down the primrose path of false reason, i.e. metaphysicality.

In criticizing Fichte Schelling turns us back from the transcendental subject (object) by noting it is not originary but arises from the unconscious processes of nature and thus not transcendental in the sense Fichte intends. This was also his criticism of Hegel, who also maintained originary “essences.” While the early Schelling went along with this agenda, the mid- to late Schelling did not. Hence you get Wilber citing early Schelling, Fichte and Hegel as corroborating evidence for his own transcendentalism while ignoring later Schelling and the subsequent American pragmatism that sprang from it (e.g. Mead), and the cognitive science movement that evolved from that (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson). But Wilber himself was not “originary” in that, getting it from the likes of the constructive postmodernists like Griffin, who still retain (as Pedraja notes) a “centeredness” in Whitehead's philosophy.

And along came the likes of Derrida, who Hampson asserts is not strictly of the deconstructive variety but also constructive. The likes of Griffin and Wilber, themselves emphasizing one side of this coin with their essences and formalisms, cannot see like Hampson that Derrida combined both sides in his postformal dialectics. Recall above the quotes from Schelling's mid to late period on the relation of opposition and compare with Desilet's discussion of Derrida.