‘Our contemporary age is bringing into popular discussion the Metaphysics of Adjacency under various names-‘post-metaphysics,’ ‘post-correlationism,’ ‘the end of philosophy,’ ‘the death of the subject.’ A major function of these signpost is to reflect the widespread shift in our sense of truth. It loses its fixity, centrality, independence. It becomes interactive, contextual, adjacent.’-and so Layman Pascal opens his essay, “Almost Is Good Enough,” and I couldn’t agree more. For me, though arguably Hegel is one of the most influential philosophers of all time, rivaled only by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, strangely at the same time I’ve come to feel as if The Science of Logic was passed over. Hegel’s masterwork feels like it is a text of “Post-Metaphysics” before Modernism, which is to say that philosophy in the 19th and 20th Century missed a turn. For me, The Science of Logic can generally be viewed as a powerful critique and advancement of Aristotelian logic, which ultimately comes to claim that we cannot derive our understanding of the world from a place where we don’t take into account the subject and our historic moment. This brings to mind the debates of Whitehead and Bergson against Einstein, who warned that we cannot simply replace our “common sense experience of time” with the notion of “a block universe” where time is ultimately relative and even illusionary. For Whitehead and Bergson, Einstein was not wrong, only incomplete, and for them Einstein’s oversight could prove extremely consequential. Indeed, it could contribute to the mistake of “autonomous rationality” which I critique throughout my work, inspired by David Hume.
"The Science of Logic" is not a text I feel mastery in, and I would turn readers to the work others for a deeper and better reading. Still, I feel comfortable to claim that what I call “The Modern Counter-Enlightenment” algins with Hegel, and that thinkers like Maurice Blondel, Alfred Korzybski, Benjamin Fondane, Paul Feyerabend, Pavel Florensky, Peter Geach, Alfred Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Michael Polanyi, René Guénon, and the like basically following Hegel’s critique of Aristotle and “hard objectivity.” Layman Pascal and Alex Ebert are two individuals I would consider as part of “The Modern Counter-Enlightenment,” which I believe is still occurring, for the line of thought has mostly been ignored. I would also associate the movement with “The Kyoto School,” Nietzsche, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” and Phenomenology, as well as some theological projects like that found in Balthasar-but those are claims I would have to defend. As brought to my attention by Dr. Terence Blake, Francois Laruelle also seems critical, whose “non-philosophy” strikes me as very much aligned with my thinking on “nonrationality.” For Laruelle, all philosophy requires a decision and orientation that comes prior to philosophy, which indeed sounds like my ideas on how we must ascent to a truth before we organize a corresponding rationality. For me, this is the “pre-move” and/or “dialectical move” arguably at the heart of all A/B-thinking...
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16 сен 2024
