From Homer to Kant — Part II: Ratios and Rivers

Last time, in Part I: Metaphor Trumps All Comers, we began with Homer and his royal road to understanding causality. Divine agency is the most intimate explanation of events: we know from our own experience what it's like to want something and act to bring it about. We can use that familiar interior model to understand the workings of changes that don’t flow from self-will.

Then systematicity begins with Hesiod organizing the gods into a genealogy, giving them origins and family relationships.

Then the shock of the year—we unanimously agreed that Pherecydes was the the true GOAT of Western philosophy and the greatest religious reformer of all time and hero for all humanity by being the first to both debug religion AND rewrite it as prose. The debugging was astonishingly blatant: Zeus, Kronos, and Gaia were just reinvented as three always-existing divine principles, Zas, Chronos, and Ge! The Great Work is formal-causal, by Zas; the stuff or matter, Chthonie; the power and process field, Chronos (Time). Kronos used to be a child-eating giant. Now he was the field of time. Unbelievable, and more radical even than the reinvention of Yehveh from a sadistic war god into a tender and suicidally love-sick baby.

The Great Pherecydes

Oh Pherecydes! We hardly knew ye!

Oh, and he was the first to write ontology in prose. By writing facts down in textbook style, this GOAT invited readers to co-theorize (co-fabricate) with him and let better modeling take priority over the cultural imperatives of hi-fi story transmission and entertainment.

We wondered what kinds of explanatory difficulties might have motivated these revisions. They were the ones that motivate children to endlessly climb up the PSR ladder and lead one and all to antimonies. But sometimes simple is best. The first problem:

P1: If everything has an ancestor, what about the first ancestor?

P2: And once the ingredients of the cosmos exist, what makes them into this particular organized world?

And Pherecydes answer … was right! His model is the same one we use today.

The Great Thales

Then came Thales and his magnificent, childish answer to the problem of the One and the Many. The way to ruin student enrichment here is to leap to the answer and then talk about it. That’s not thinking. Thinking means chewing on the problem and excavating hidden assumptions until the solution gets squeezed out as a side-effect.

We looked at system, systematicity, and our love of projecting unity onto the unbaked sensations that are the first-born of alert consciousness. “All that there!” is something we could say, and it seems meaningful and successfully referring. If our meaning refers to being, what does this tell us about being?

(We saw the successive childish answers to these questions to be fun at the start, and true at the end. Each theory, each model, is true. That was an astonishing result.)

My experience isn’t homogeneous. There are bursts of high-emotion experience spans, and long (long) spans of jack-sheeuh. And yet I place everything in order on top of the long, steady bass note of time, which is my trans-temporal identity. As P. F. Strawson used to say, “Time is the accusative-case version of mine.”

Now, this evenly spread out bass note, the spread-out identity of the knower’s consciousness, what’s the simplest and most pleasing way to schematize this into ontology (that is, into the fantasy that we inject through and across our experience, into the being of outer things)?

The Best Method: ELY5 (Explain it like YOU’re five)

So the outer appears like many—nay, worse, a changing many. That’s many^3, because we have outer plurality qua many positions in space, outer plurality qua many qualities filling space, and many “states” or “property instances” over time.

That’s a good model. It takes true things, distills essences, identify these with acts of perfect knowing that we can self-consciously perform under self-consciously applied rules, and so build perfectly known versions of things, aka mechanical models that let us pre-know outer facts by operating the machine aka calculus. It just means you have a chess board, pieces, and rules already perfectly known, so that you can calculate new chess-piece-arrangements from old ones.

Phenomenological Experiment #1: Sweep your arm diagonally and intend, “All that!”

So what’s does the curious five year-old, or Dustin Hoffman (when related to Tom Cruise), say about our ability to wave our arm, say, “All that,” mean it as if both (a) truly referring and (b) gathering the bewildering many into one act of reference?

Well, where could we look to find out? The manifestly given options are: inward or outward. The gesture has already shown us what we intend: I wave my arm, say “All that!”, and gather a bewildering plurality into one act of reference. The act itself gives us the inner intention and meaning. (Thus apperception is a free lunch—it’s given along with the effort to know.) That would motivate the steadfast investigator to look outward.

So I turn outward and ask: What, if anything, in the things themselves corresponds to the unity I've just enacted through my act of gesture-judgment?

And so, moving slowly like this, with Beginner’s Mind, we saw the answer just pop out before us:

Step 1: The projection of referential unity into ontological unity

• Because I can think the many together as one, I suppose there must be something in the many themselves that makes them one. And then comes the second move, familiar to self-helpers and Catholics:

Step 2: Substantialization

• I identify this supposed objective unity with one underlying material. My “all” gets its grip on the outer many and even sees past them and into the one stuff that is the real beyond them. This is a major moment that needs to be appreciated. It seems simple so we miss all the riches to be found there.

In other words, if we asked Rain Man what he was doing, he would say that all that out there can be unified—minimally, “under” our “all.” And if we then asked him how this could happen (by which we meant, “How does that outer stuff have to be to allow my little ‘all’ to hook into it?”), his answer, which is true, would be: “’Cause it’s all stuff.”

Now, a normal person would blow that response off and change the topic. But a mystic, an occultist, a yogi, a masochistic examination lover—this person would stop and have a staring contest with “stuff.”

Oh, hello “underlying.” How nice of you to exist without showing up and getting in the way of actual things. Perfect.

And that’s how we progressed last time.

The Truth of Water as Under-Reality

Never mind how the hell water can be water yet also non-water; we can skip that and jump to its qualities. Whether this one understuff is hiding inside, behind, before, under, or in an occult other dimension—doesn’t matter. No matter what, we still know something about it. Even if its very existence is empirically or logically impossible, we still know something. (Cf. “There is no God, and Mary is his mother.”)

What do we know about this underlying stuff? Well, if it's to remain one and the same through all the changes we see, it must be changeable—capable of assuming different forms without losing its identity.

How do we think that within the stuff idiom? Pliable. Soft. Moldable. Clay pressed into a mold. Molten metal poured into one. Mud, pudding, putty. But why stop there? Liquid! Water flows into whatever container receives it, obediently assuming its shape. The form changes; the stuff remains.

And now we've found our ideal metaphysical chameleon. “My natural shape is nothing,” says Water. “Give me any shape you like, and I'll still be me. That's why you love me! Because you say ‘I’ for me. You say ‘I’ for me!”

But this solution doesn't survive its own success for very long.

• Problem 1 — Water can take a thousand shapes—true. But … it cannot take any nature whatsoever. Water has this fatal flaw: it is still water. It has determinate properties of its own, properties that distinguish it from the very things it's supposed to explain. Fire isn't wet; stone doesn't flow. Our wonderful universal stuff turns out to be one particular kind of stuff among others.
• Problem 2 — And even granting that it could become everything, **what makes it become this rather than that?**Being capable of transformation doesn't explain what determines a transformation.

So our solution has generated two problems: the obstinate specificity of its underlying substance, and the absence of any account of how that substance produces its different manifestations.

What we accomplished together was to discover these difficulties by working with the small handful of concepts we'd allowed ourselves: one, many, same, different, stuff, form, change, under. We didn't begin with a theory of substance and its modes, or a ready-made account of physical causality. We just gave the simplest baby answers to the simplest baby questions and let things unfold auto-logico-organically.

Our preliminary brainwashing and trance-induction exercises evidently paid off. We managed to think inside the metaphor, allowing underlying stuff to serve as our perfectly natural explanatory language. But we could also pull the metaphor out into the open, turn it into an object of inspection, and stare at the ridiculous thing we'd made. There it was: our magnificent One, disguised as a puddle, pretending to be the whole universe.

The Great Anaximander: Inventor of the Variable

Its wonderful plasticity only goes so far. Water has its own determinate character. Fire isn't wet. Stone doesn't flow. If everything is really water, how does water manage to possess these decidedly non-watery properties? And what determines which transformation happens?

We'd enjoyed the explanation so much that we had created a new problem.

We tried solving it ourselves.

Anaximander's apeiron suggested a marvelous escape: retain the underlying source but dispense with water's inconvenient specificity. We played with an imaginary transparent, qualityless gel, something that could become anything because it wasn't already committed to being one particular thing.

That sounded promising until we asked how this stuff was supposed to become something definite. David couldn't make a chair out of it. And without some account of differentiation, our wonderful all-purpose source threatened to explain precisely nothing.

The Great Anaximenes: Genus of Parameterized Transformation

Then Anaximenes brought back a determinate material—air—but added a crucial ingredient: a way of variation.

Rarefaction and condensation. One material, one dimension along which it can vary, and different qualities associated with different degrees of density.

Now we've acquired something new. We can imagine a control knob that changes the state of the system. The explanation begins to tell us how differences arise.

That was approximately where we left our philosophical machinery, except that we also had a tantalizing glimpse of Pythagoreanism.

——— THIS IS TOO LONG ———

And that brings this long recounting to its end. This announcement is a failure—both incomplete and too late for the mail-out. The main part isn’t cleaned up yet; the above was just a recap of Part I.

Part II: Ratios and Rivers

Next time we cover the most exciting of all topics: the mystery of intelligibility as such.

Consider a vibrating string.

Shorten the string, change its tension, or compare its vibration with another string, and we discover something extraordinary about musical intervals. Their intelligibility depends upon numerical relationships that can remain identical across different instruments and performances.

What if those relationships are more important to the explanation than the stuff they're realized in?

And what if the world hangs together through the proportions and relations among its different constituents?

We'll pursue that Pythagorean possibility, then turn to Heraclitus.

A river remains the same river while its waters continually change. What exactly persists? The water? The banks? The organized process of flowing?

Now we're collecting rather different kinds of unity: common substance, common source, invariant mathematical structure, organized process, enduring identity.

Which One are we talking about when we say that understanding requires unity?

We'll continue following one selective route through these inventions, using the philosophers' own images and arguments wherever we can, and trying out their explanatory moves ourselves.

The early theories leave many things unspecified. That is part of their fascination. We can enter the metaphor, find out what it permits us to think, discover what it doesn't explain, and see whether we can construct the missing operations.

And perhaps we'll discover why some of these primitive pictures remain irresistible thousands of years later.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s fun mini video WHICH WILL REALLY BE POSTED BY SATURDAY.
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here BUT NOT UNTIL SATURDAY: 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.