asdjkl
@efilist
85 okur puanı
Kasım 2019 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
In the beginning, there was indeed a primal unity, a single universal substance, which was an undifferentiated, indivisible oneness. However, that unity no longer exists; its existence lies entirely in the past. The original unity of the world, the single universal substance, gradually split into a multiplicity of individual things; there is enough of its unity left for their interconnection, but not so much that they cannot be independent. The process of the world is therefore from unity to difference, from one to many, where that original oneness gradually and continually differentiates itself, splitting into many fragments, which are more independent units (94, 107). The individual is then partly free or independent, according to how much the original unity has dissolved, and partly interconnected and dependent, according to how much unity still remains. Freedom and necessity are partial truths, because the individual acts upon the world and changes it, just as the world acts upon the individual and changes it.
It is in this context that Mainlander introduces his dramatic concept of the death of God (108). This primal unity, this single universal substance, has all the attributes of God: it is transcendent, infinite and omnipotent. But since it no longer exists, this God is dead. Yet its death was not in vain. From it came the existence of the world. And so Mainlander declares in prophetic vein: “God is dead and his death was the life of the world” (108).
Reklam
If we hold that experience consists in nothing more than representations, as Kant and Schopenhauer say, then we cannot grant the reality of the suffering of others. Their apparent suffering will be nothing more than representations floating in our minds, and we will have no reason to grant them a reality equal to and independent of ourselves. Hence, Mainlander argued, Schopenhauer’s idealism undermines his own pessimism. 33
Mainlander maintains that Kant and Schopenhauer failed to recognize the objective or realistic dimension of experience because of their theory of space, according to which space is only an a priori intuition. This made them think that all spatial properties of an object are only the product of the mind, depending upon nothing more than the innate powers of our sensibility. Mainlander thinks that it was a great achievement of Kants Transcendental Aesthetic to have demonstrated that mathematical space and time are not properties of things-in-themselves, and that they are constructions of the mind. Yet he insists that all Kant’s arguments are valid only for mathematical space and time, i.e. space and time understood as homogeneous, uniform and continuous media. We construct such a space through the activity of synthesis, by extending a point in three directions (6). We construct such a time by drawing a line through all past and future moments of the present (15). However, particular spaces and times— the particular distances and intervals between things—are real and cannot be the creation of our consciousness alone. Particular spaces are marked by the limits of the efficacy of an object, i.e. its power to resist other bodies occupying its location (6-7, 446); and particular times are marked by movements, by how far something moves or changes place (15).
It is chiefly because the mind does not have the power to create particular spaces and times, still less the particular qualities of sensation, that Mainlander thinks we must introduce a realistic dimension to our experience. The a priori functions and forms of our mind consist in the activity of synthesis, which is essential to the constitution of our experience, just as Kant always argued. This activity is crucial for
A critical idealism is for Mainlander one that recognizes the subjective sources of our representations of space and time, and that refuses to ascribe mathematical space and time to things-in-themselves. A transcendental idealism is one that includes an empirical realism, though an empirical realism in a full-bodied sense, i.e. it assumes that experience gives us some knowledge of things that exist independent of our representations of them, namely, knowledge of
their extension and movement. Such idealism is “transcendental” in the sense that it gives us knowledge of the objective properties of a thing, i.e. properties that transcend our own consciousness of the thing, that exist in the thing itself, apart from and prior to awareness of it (12,21)
Idealism is indeed the basis for the immanence of the philosophy of redemption. Since idealism holds that we cannot jump beyond the powers of the knowing subject, it warns us not to transcend our experience and not to aspire to knowledge of another realm behind or beyond it (3).
Reklam