Idea
16th installment to my philosophical system.
Ideas are the crown jewel of intellect. What is an idea? A thought dressed up in language and given a very pretty explication as to what it is in itself. Ideas are born in perception which has been elevated to the height of an abstraction. This abstraction is then made sacred by how well it agrees with experience.
You see at once the double aspect of an idea, which in truth is really a unity of both. The double aspect appears in the form of bodily sense and mental sense, but since sense refers to the whole organism—and I think it is quite ludicrous to assert a fundamentally different (metaphysical) aspect to sense as such—the dichotomy collapses the moment one accepts the fact that both are simultaneous within the organism. This simultaneity is born out of an abstraction which refers to the concrete experience; and so, to think one causes the other, or that one is necessary while the other is sufficient, is to cling to an antiquated notion of metaphysics that is too narrow to be useful and too dualistic to be accurate within the eyes of experience itself.
To say reality is a duality is false. To say, however, as the Pre-Socratics did, that all is one—that is a fundamental truth which holds for all thinking beings, but which (so far as we know) only humanity is able to bring into abstract consciousness.
Every sensation, every movement of life, is both mental and physical. These sensations, which are responsible for the entire phenomenal representation of reality—those appearances in the world which provide our every joy and misery (the songs of birds, the sights of mountains, the tastes of foods, the laughs of friends, the cries of children, the news of a deceased family member, etc.)—occur to us subjectively (mentally) at the same time they are experienced objectively (concretely). Two is one, and one is two. It is, in short, the doctrine of Schopenhauer, as well as being the fundamental perspective of many Vedanta traditions within Hinduism and holding a paramount place within the doctrines of Buddhism.
Dualism shall always persist so long as man finds it necessary to carve up the world of appearance with his blunt knife of logic and place it within his shallow box of abstract conceptions—abstractions which he mistakes for the true world, but which are only his narrow slice of the whole totality, which he is but one molecule of.
We cannot escape ideas even if we wanted to. They are as necessary to humanity as water is to fish. They arise in action, through a simultaneous correspondence of sense and reason. Again, this must be stressed: ideas are appearances in consciousness which have their existence in sense experience—the mental and the physical come together as one and shine forth with a splendor so palpable that all creatures with a nervous system take part in the recognition of that object with immense joy or dread, depending on the kind of experience it is.
A world without ideas would be a world without self-consciousness. As Galileo rightly said in The Assayer: “… if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds.” Here we have made explicit that Aristotelian distinction between the matter and form of an object: between that which is a primary (essential) quality and a secondary (accidental) quality.
This simple absurdity made great minds in late antiquity devote themselves to fruitless passions—arguing over distinctions and definitions about the “true” substance of reality, as if that kind of thing could be known in an absolute manner using logic; to say nothing of the whole scholastic tradition that type of philosophizing gave birth to: worthless, trite nonsense like nominalism vs. realism, or arguments over the nature of God, or whether the actus purus (pure actuality) could ever be known by man.
Consciousness is nature’s nightmare to man. It is this damnable capacity to see ourselves as fundamentally different from nature—thanks to our ability to abstract from it—that makes philosophy possible at all. Wonder is the prima materia (first matter) of all philosophy, and by extension all abstractions which relate back to the wonder in question; philosophy, then, is one continuous chain of unbroken abstractions that make the whole world its canvas, the paints of which are our conceptions of it. It is the recognition of that which is different that gives rise to thought, and from thought abstractions about what that difference is, or better yet, why it is so.
Abstractions exist for ideas. Ideas are different from sensations in the sense that they are abstractions from sense experience, not implicit within experience as such. A man may itch in the same manner a bear would, but the bear would have no concept of “itch” as a man would. The sensation is the same, but the conception of it is not. Both have consciousness, but only man has self-consciousness—the cradle of all our ideas. Ideas are sensations made abstract, hence why they exist for them; it is this aspect of man’s mind that makes him so intelligent and which has allowed him to dominate the Earth.
Without this faculty within man, the origin of which is still unknown, there would be no primary aspect of existence by which to differentiate man from his fellow eukaryotes; for, without man, every idea we have about the world would collapse into a fundamental unknowability. Even the concept of knowability is an idea of man—it is an epistemological question which has yet to receive an answer. If there were not such a thing as idea, then it would have been necessary to create it—and such is exactly what man did.
The natures of man depart when questions of foundational importance to life are considered; this is why there can never be one truth, because every truth is an evaluation and thus only ever considered existentially, subjectively—which I feel is the glory of it. TRUTH is an a priori of the heart, but an a posteriori of the brain. That is to say, truth is first felt and then considered abstractly (in the mind). Its validity is prior to experience precisely because it can only be known after experience—after its embodiment in action, the drive of which is the emotions, which are given life in the heart. Truth is not action itself, but rather made so after the actions have been considered abstractly in the mind, always with respect to the concrete goal in question.
Truth is pragmatic, made for you, for your ideals and goals! It has no validity outside of how it affects you personally. It is not something which can be defined in a systematic manner because—like money being the abstract representation of all commodities (desires)—truth is the abstract representation of all abstractions. It is akin to Hegel’s idea of the absolute, but (in my view) seen from the perspectival, rather than objective, lens: reason makes known every particular which can be experienced empirically, from which every sensation can be rationally conceived and organized—made tangible in encyclopedias and tables containing every academic discipline—in order that it may reach a complete synthesis through a unification of not only all present experiences, but every possible experience.
Truth is the abstraction not to be undone. It is the final idea which represents all other ideas. It is the reserve currency within the globalized world of conceptual commerce. What we have in truth is an idea so powerful it has taken on a life of its own and has for nearly everybody become an unrecognized religion. Truth is even more powerful than Christianity, for even Christians are made to justify their belief to those who ask (1 Peter 3:15)—and if not asked, they must at least strive to make sense of it within their own hearts; for me, grace and faith in the elect is not enough! I want evidence: I want God himself to appear before me. In short, I want the truth of Christianity and everything else. I want the whole world. I want a complete and total harmony between myself and the world. I want every facet of experience—particularly those conceptions which fall under the banner of idea or concept—to manifest before me in an intelligible way, in order that I may make sense of this whole phenomenal world. Quid est veritas? Non in mundo, sed in meo mundo. (What is truth? Not in the world, but in my world.)
We affirm what we know because the concept of knowing is dear to us as an idea. We conceptualize to understand, and we understand only when we hear ourselves. The world makes sense no other way but through the self. Reality must be interpreted from the perspective of the self—the I, the singular individual. Das Ich setzt sich selbst (The self posits itself), says Fichte. This is not to say, however, that the self is fundamental, or necessary, or independent of reality; but rather that the idea of the self is born out of what we are as thinking, self-conscious creatures. (It must always be remembered that my philosophy is anti-metaphysical—rejecting all “final,” absolute claims about reality and abhorring above all else formalists and system builders.)
Man exists materially prior to his self-conception. I take this as a premise born out in experience, but which can never be justified on that basis alone, nor should it be; for those who require justifications for their beliefs do not see the necessity of contradiction within all ideas. Evidently, too, nobody lives according to strict necessity or logical coherence (we contradict ourselves all the time), but rather according to behavioral patterns which we adopt to more effectively move through the world. Knowledge is a type of adaptation, from which the world gradually gets cut down into various competing systems of thought that strive to place everything under their dominion.
There is no ethics in knowledge at present, no sense of subjectivity in any analysis. We are told in the present age to shun as much as possible all ideas that do not derive from reason; I wish to offer an alternative—a system of thought which is by no means new, but which very badly needs a return: pragmatism. Until ideas become ethical, until they truly turn to the subjective, man will always be at war with himself, up in arms about those things which he wishes to affirm but which the world tells him he cannot, all because it is not logical. Forget the world if that is the case, and remember that all stems from you in the first place. Ideas have, after all, only ever been abstract reflections of who we are, rather than what the world truly is. Toss aside the need for truth, and every truth shall suddenly become apparent to you.