Universal and Particular
22nd installment to my philosophical system.
One who exists cannot help but be struck by the immediacy of both the universal and the particular. Man is, in fact, the unification of both conceptions; he is the synthesis of that which is eternal and that which is temporary.
In the universal—(universal as a strict concept, I mean)—we have only a shadow derived from experience. It is typically conceptualized as that which is a whole totality: an utterly totalizing and encyclopedic mass of abstractions and concrete perceptions. God, for most of history, served as this universal. God was that from which none before could have sprung—He has aseity, along with all omni-properties.
Well, well—who could have supposed that such audacity on the part of human intellect could have given us such a monstrosity of abstraction and self-assuredness? Only man, of course, would be vain enough to predicate God and ascribe to Him properties which are supposed to be above him and, as a result, incomprehensible to him! So be it; man has never been one to pause in contemplation when logic so obviously refutes him if the thing refuted pertains to his heart. God bless them. Such ridiculousness is why idealism can only provide the shadows of these supposedly grand conceptions, while materialism provides the concrete prima materia (first matter) of reality—and this has its seeds in the particular.
If the universal is that aspect of reality which man can contemplate but never fully conceptualize in its totality, then the particular is that aspect which man knows absolutely but which he doubts from his inability to grasp it completely. This particularity is born in consciousness and is extrapolated from this consciousness’s engagement with itself as it moves through the world, as if a bodiless brain whose sole function is perception. Man is not bodiless, however, but rather a cyclical entity with extension, solidity, mutability, and all the other primary qualities you wish to label man with—and to think that kind of analysis served as the highest form of metaphysics!
From all this, one must forever find the dualism of Descartes a very natural conclusion to draw, though it be completely wrong in light of Kant’s Copernican revolution. The particular for man, brought into existence through his perception of the external world, is for his lived consciousness what the concept is for the universal—that which is abstracted from lived consciousness and turned into a concept.
What Kant recognized, from which all proceeding philosophy rightly follows and tarries with, was that man is both an a priori and a posteriori being. Perception of reality presupposes a reality to experience, and this reality itself presupposes an entity which is a part of, yet fundamentally distinct from, the reality it inhabits.
The a priori nature of man was found within those mental categories that preceded his a posteriori knowledge of them. At once was the nature of man apprehended and unveiled before the whole world in such staggering light as to cause all manner of confusion and misunderstanding. The advancement of learning never seemed nearer to hand than at that moment, but alas, man must always stumble when blinded whilst walking upon uneven ground beneath him.
What followed Kant was post-Kantian idealism, speculative philosophy, dialectical materialism, American pragmatism, Nietzschean perspectivism, Husserlian phenomenology, existentialism, modernism, post-modernism, etc.—most of it extremely influential in its own unique way, but which, like most ideas over time, distorted and changed to suit the needs of its interpreters. To me, everything after Hegel’s dialectical speculation of philosophy seems to be nothing more than a reaction against him; his absolute idealism is the Archimedean point by which all concepts, frameworks, methods, and schools of thought move around—where he stands, there the whole Earth moves.
Most of those philosophasters who claim to move past Hegel are really just ignorant of him or do not understand the notion of the Absolute as such. Everyone strives to square the real-unreal divide—reality as appearance and reality as tangible experience—but they fail to recognize that both are really one and the same thing: one is the shadow (the universal) while the other is the object (the particular) which casts it. Let us now analyze both more fully and see if we can uncover some esoteric contradictions that lie at the heart of them.
Starting with the particular, it is clear—or rather, at least not absurd to assume—that we exist as concrete beings capable of bringing into existence ideas which do not exist concretely, but which exist as their own particulars within abstractions drawn from our experience of being. The experiential realm is seemingly the only world which we, as conscious creatures, are aware of with any certainty; and yet, there always rests some doubt within the back of our minds that our deductions are in some way futile attempts at corroborating all our transcendental perceptions—transcendental because we conscious creatures synthesize the empirical (particular/concrete) with the rational (universal/abstract) every second experience is occurring.
This doubt must always haunt us. Doubt is the mother of all philosophy, for wonder only arises when confronted by that which is novel and peculiar to the senses; once a thing is known, it loses all interest for us and so causes no wonder at all. The particular is merely one facet of the universal, but man, being the self-conscious creature he is, makes for himself universals within particulars. Seen for the first time in self-conscious life, man becomes universal while striving after an infinity of particulars. The concepts blend together into one until differentiation becomes impossible and seemingly lock together forever as one category from that point forward. The only way to break from this rigid oneness is to recognize that this oneness is really a false perception of the nature of things themselves. It is not as Parmenides or Heraclitus thought—static or constant flux within the world—but rather a dynamic interplay of both universal and particular forces that we just so happen to experience as conscious creatures.
The universal is born out of a desire from the particular to really know itself in itself—a total knowing for itself only to be found within itself. Here, the dialectic is an indispensable tool for making sense of, and definitively moving past, that which seems contradictory but really is just one aspect of a progressive movement towards the knowing of all aspects of reality. Every thought is really a universal and a particular. The aspect of thought which is universal is that which is comprehensible but without concrete tangibility, while the particular is that which makes itself known in the concrete but which is only one aspect. What the dialectician ultimately strives for is a unification between the universal and particular: this is only to be found in man, and thankfully so, because from this we get the whole spectrum of thought which encompasses all plurality and unifies all division.
If one had access to the true nature of things, there would be less philosophizing and more actualizing, for every abstraction would find its place in the actionable realm of concrete, material particulars. Man finds himself totally absorbed into the excellency of his own thoughts and confuses what is thinkable with what is real. If only it were possible to be satisfied with not knowing.
Since the dawn of human intellect, philosophy has been upon the minds of all mankind; every particular has striven to be actualized, but not every conception has the opportunity to be brought to fruition. What there has only ever been is a constant cyclical continuation of becoming and not-becoming; nowhere is this more fully seen than in the failed attempts to achieve eternal happiness, or in the very obvious emptiness which permeates all reality—the scale of the universe, the differences in thoughts regarding the nature of things, the diversity of languages and rank orders of men—all such things serve as the mortar which keeps together the indelible mistake that is existence. Oh, how lamentable all particulars seem when confronted by the universal. Grand totality, that which is all things: to you we obey, whether we want to or not.
Doesn’t everyone rhapsodize about concepts which they fail to understand but love because they do not understand? Man takes delight in his ignorance, while philosophers delight in providing their false truths on the whole. The more abstract an idea is, the more it is likely to be abused and mangled by those who really seek only its clarification. If an idea were clear enough, it wouldn’t need exposition, and yet that is precisely what all thought is treated as by seekers of “truth”; in reality, they are only falsifiers and bunglers of abstract conceptions which demand sufficient respect from those of intellectual integrity.
I have often wondered what is the best way to write about something complex while holding to a dialectical type of analysis—and I’ve come to the conclusion that brevity beats all else, without doubt, even at the expense of some clarity should the topic be sufficiently complicated. The nature of the subject (the matter) is what determines the words written, more or less, while the mental state of the author determines how it is written (the form). In thought, matter trumps form in the same way life beats death—until it doesn’t, of course. It is hard enough to sustain a consistent line of thought without eventually becoming prosaic or redundant. Being redundant is really saying too much, while being prosaic is saying what isn’t necessary. Both are sins of the trade of ink, but are in some cases necessary. An author should never say more than they have to—they should only say what they think pertains and what may be useful in the end.
The end of all particulars is to return to the absolute universal. Whether concepts such as particulars or universals help man in his quest of self-discovery is something which only the subjective can affirm or deny ultimately. My task as a philosopher is merely to write sentences which reveal a part of me in them. I’m more literary than anything else. I only got into philosophy in order to understand the development of intellectual history. If I wanted to write prettily, I would have read more Tolstoy or William Hazlitt. No. Instead, having been influenced most by Emerson and Nietzsche, I thought it best to write in a systematically unsystematic way: to plan what I’m going to write, but not to actually know the structure of it.
The freest thought, which I feel is closest to the universal in its Notion (notion being the embodiment of movement in the process of thinking), is that which overlaps with the process of becoming itself. It cannot be disputed, I believe, that Joyce really had the most dynamic, the most dialectical, style in literature—a style that has its roots in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—really reflecting the universal within man, the single individual as found within the infinite, rather than merely being an anti-personal narrative of a single idea unraveling itself before the reader.
How contradictory Schopenhauer seems when he claimed his whole philosophical system was merely the unfolding of a single idea, turned over and over again revealing its various forms; one can say his kind of philosophizing was λιθοστρέφης (lithostrephēs), that is, one who turns over rocks. Indeed, you may find many interesting things under one, especially one of size, but to claim that the whole world—universal and particular—is revealed merely by interpreting it through a single domineering lens which is slavishly adhered to with a dogmatic consistency is folly of the highest regard.
Nobody knows how difficult it is to describe the indescribable until they have tried it themselves. Damn all universals and particulars, for they compose man but never with harmony. The world disproves a consistent man by revealing to him the correctness of the inconsistent man. So long as you stick to rigidity in thinking and consistency in all conceptions, you shall soon enough find yourself master of every thought but slave to every difference; difference is, in fact, something the consistent thinker fears, for he still conceives the world in binaries and false dichotomies.
Nothing shall ever come of a stable man but wretched stability—no love for sensitivity or the chance for passions to override the logical side of the mind. It is all too much to ask for a change in one who thinks they are right, no evidence to the contrary able to overthrow their wrong ideas. For them, only the particular is real, and the universal bears no meaning whatsoever. The confessions of the world, however, bear this one truth in mind: the universal is in the particular’s mind, and every flux of time is in the universal’s shine.