Metaphor and Reality: From Homer to Kant

We’d like to be equipped to understand contemporary philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand twentieth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand nineteenth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand Kant. But to do that, we need to understand the tradition from Homer to Hume (plus Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, and Rousseau, and Bacon, Kant’s role model WRT method).

So we’re going to run through the entire tradition.

Just kidding. That would be impossible.

Instead, we will run through the entire tradition with an eye to certain things only. We’re looking for the things that will allow us to understand Kant perfectly, thoroughly, precisely, and to render his model with complete concreteness and clarity. There’ll be no vagueness, no fancy-sounding sentences containing famous terms that no one understands. We’re not going to allow ourselves to use words such as noumenon, thing in itself, a priori, and transcendental while still not understanding them.

Instead of sounding smart and saying things that make us nauseous because we don’t understand them, we’re going to relive these astounding, epoch-making intellectual orgasms in their original historical context by means of actual trance induction. We will collect all the materials and methods we need to understand Kant by picking them up along the way only after our time machine has landed, in the actual contexts in which they were developed.

If you can’t render the meaning of tech terms down to simple experiences that anyone can actually experience in the present moment, then your understanding has been “symbolic” all along, which is why you’re still frustrated and burned out even after your 100th Kant event.

Think of the educational adventure at St. John’s: walking the history from Homer and Euclid up through Schrödinger and Heisenberg, reading actual texts, working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments (which they have in the classroom), and puzzling over the actual problems, yourself, directly, with real emotion.

The Problem

This “working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments” has been missing from these online philo-learning salons for too long. That is the first thing we will remedy. The second is infecting SADHOnauts with genuine intellectual upset, so that we are all genuinely motivated to puzzle ourselves over the original problems in their original contexts.

If we use an inherited term and don’t understand the original metaphor from which it was extracted, reshaped, disguised, renamed, and modified, we receive it in a peculiar condition. Like Nietzsche’s coin worn smooth through constant use, it has lost the stamping and engraving that would help us interpret it. We receive it as a natural, given, mysterious, opaque orb of ore.

This is a nightmare situation and leads to much philosophical and life distress. As the great Nebraskan Gernsbachian Transcendentalist philosopher L. Ron Hubbard said to SADHO CSO Steven Taubeneck (met by chance in an elevator) at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in September 3, 1955 (held in the Manger Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio),

“Steven, a bypassed definition gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed-out feeling. A not-there feeling and a sort of nervous hysteria will follow in the back of that."

(This articulation proved to be so effective that it appeared nearly verbatim as official canon 15 years later in the HCOB of 25 June 1971 entitled “Barriers to Study.” See here for the actual historical document that Tom Cruise credits with transforming him from a dyslexic nobody into the most powerful Scientologist of all time.)

We experience these unpleasant effects but blame the reading material instead of their failure to schematize abstract terms. And then we perform these vaguely understood philosophical sentences at Meetup events and receive nods and appreciation from others, making matters much worse.

The Final Solution

So we’re going to do what many people think is impossible. We’re going to render the tradition from Homer to Kant completely comprehensible and simple for anyone. This is better than “explain like I’m five.”

We will explain like you’re an amoeba.

This extreme measure lets us make this promise:

If you hear the words and do the exercises, you’ll be transformed into a philosophical butterfly, and cry tears of regret over all the lost years you spent performing for others and deceiving yourself through the trap of pretended knowing—so eagerly acknowledged, affirmed, and appreciated by other pretended knowers.

Stand by for infinite joy and excitement as we begin with the simplest possible things and journey toward the infinitely mysterious and universally misunderstood, and find that these things are actually quite simple, understandable, and—best of all—actually true.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s fun mini video from THIS PLAYLIST.
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.