Skip to main content

Transcendental Objects

   Kant talks about transcendental ideas as cognitions that are taken beyond any possible experience, i.e. beyond the boundaries of empirical knowledge, though still in connection with it. Those ideas are basic epistemological objects of the philosophical traditions of the world (not only Western) which express fundamental ways of the development of the human thinking. Kant noticed that precisely by their distance from experience they become problematic and shaky in their epistemological content. He proved that, in fact, when trying to prove them logically, they produce antinomies.
I understand those transcendental objects as conceptual constructions of the Überlebenswelt (the reflexive and formalized knowledge) which use as building blocks intuitions from the Lebenswelt (the knowledge of everyday life) containing at least one undefined concept (exomorphism). An example would be the concept of “implication”, a rather simple and basic intuition which in our everyday life means a relation between two things, one following the other which ultimately points out to a basic intuition of sequence, i.e. of time. We could hardly go in our explanations beyond such intuitional sequence, and in this sense, we say that is an exomorphism, a non-definable. Logic, as an Überleneswelt construction takes that concept as undefined and uses it to construct its scientific edifice.
   The first two Kantian antinomies use as basic objects two pairs of opposites: limited/unlimited and simple/complex. They correspond to basic intuitions of our thinking in everyday life. They are two of the opposites discussed by the Pythagorean School, the second one expressed in its equivalent form of the opposition one/many. They both work as basic determinations of life processes but when we project them beyond organic life we are just playing with old metaphysics.

   The other two antinomies deal with another opposition necessity/freedom and then with the idea of a necessary referent conceived as a chain of conditions which proceed from the unconditioned. The old chain of Ananke is an old philosophical monster which has its roots deeply grounded in our cognitive processes. Modern physics has finished with these ways of thinking although it is difficult to stop its inertia when thinking cosmological questions. On the other hand, the notion of freedom does not correspond to the same cognitive level, for it is a moral concept that cannot be put at the level of "necessity". Freedom is an ideal that has its grounds in our capacity for symbolical thinking. The n-aryzed symbolic worlds advance from the ludic buffers of thinking to a demand of autonomy for the full emotional world, a demand of the process of continuous rationality. It is linked to the development of the lyrical citizen.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rhapsodies of Anima Mundi: Fear of Death

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shamans and the development of Social Masks

  The growing dissociation of new social persons (social masks) from a single primitive mask that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions. From the mask of the shaman, compatible with the masks of man or woman, but not with the child mask, unfold the social masks of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king. The shamanic powers are either the result of a search or of a spontaneous happening within a human lineage, which from the point of view of the professionalism of the economic action of shamanism is irrelevant, since it is the work of a specialist for communication with the Anima Mundi. In fact, the lineage transmission of social persons is not exclusive to shamanic professional practice. The shaman is not an individual person any more than the social person of the old man can be. I...
Post a Comment
Read more