Editorial notes:
The Evernote journal entry written on this day contains material (see the second paragraph in the post below) that is fundamental and pivotal to understanding Shai’s life philosophy. I decided to deviate from one of my editorial principles and highlighted it for ease of reading.
While the point has been raised in the ‘Editorial notes’ elsewhere, the core of Shai’s phenomenological and intellectual journey is brilliantly and succinctly summarised in this post, and thus, warrants a special elaboration.
Shai’s journey includes two main components, as he is looking to achieve two separate outcomes:
1. To acquire knowledge, not for its own sake, but rather for the purpose of placing it within his own devised value system. Shai alludes to this as he uses the analogy of money. Not all areas of study are born equal (so to speak). They are not all of the same ‘value’. To discern their relative value you have to compare them to each other so as not to make the mistake of inadvertently placing one above or below the other.
As you read through the volumes of data, analysis and research in this compilation, bear in mind that most of it is the product of this process. It is the progressive collection of data, in a systematic and elaborate manner, progressing from one domain of knowledge to the next, all according to a plan, the core and principles of which are outlined in this Journal entry.
2. To self-study – and I can’t describe it better than Shai has:
“We have to study ourselves experiencing before we can dissect the elements that make it possible”.
Shai ascribes great importance to exploring his own experiences and extracting their meanings. The space is too short to elaborate on this here but if you knew Shai, you would see a pattern of behaviour and a pattern in the choices he made that fit this model perfectly. For Shai, the world was his laboratory and he used people, places and events as his lab apparatus..
Before I attempt any other project, I want to continue in my attempt in the one I barely started a few hours ago, but that was yesterday. I was aiming any type of write-up which incorporated the points I had numbered by my system, overlapping the numbers 2 through 4 and subsets.
- I note that this exercise will help me establish the very tools needed to complete it.
- For instance, I think it’ll be helpful first to summarise independent segments (e.g. all the sub-points within “2”).
- It also provides an opportunity to meditate or conduct thought exercises and explorations on any of the points already mentioned (i.e. if those opportunities had not already been availed).
Now to begin:
- Re. (1): These were written earlier, and covered a larger number of subpoints than the members here. I will undertake this task later.
- Re. (2): In trying to understand our understanding of the world, we are placed in a strange position where we know what to do, but we don’t know how to do it. Thus we have to study ourselves experiencing before we can dissect the elements that make it possible. We can do this in the same way that we dissect a language we already speak. But another analogy reveals the issue differently; we have notes from a new currency, and thus we must test its potential for exchange against each other currency to determine which ones allow and which don’t. The point of this second analogy (which poor as it is, is also my own) is that we cannot know which categories (cf. exchanges) are viable, first without testing, but secondly, we have no instinct to know when we are attempting a comparison that is illegitimate. Let me try and describe that situation in three ways. I. Kant would call it going beyond appearances. II. Per the language analogy, idiosyncratic uses of language could generate apparently idiosyncratic grammars. And III. Not only will not all currencies be available for exchange with the new currency, but furthermore, we might make the mistake of exchanging the new currency with other stuff (e.g. stocks) and in doing so presume rates of exchange which are incommensurate with earlier ones.
- It’s interesting to use a language analogy, since what happens in linguistics is that studies of wildly differing languages suggest the scope of human language (what Chomsky would call the Universal Grammar). And thus, if we reflect the analogy back again, we can speculate that the differences (and commonalities) between wildly differing experiences are what might suggest the scope of human experience. Whether or not this is applicable to Kant now becomes questionable. It is clearer in the case of the latter phenomenologists. But Kant doesn’t really use the range of experience to generate its categories. He prefers to depend on a logical basis.
- One place where perhaps Kant does use the range of experience for explaining the categories is when he is using the Antinomies. Perhaps (I say) when the human experience is capable of paradoxical opposites (and I include here the thought-experiment type experiences of the Antinomies) that reveals something relating to its underlying structure. Kant of-course has said that it shows the categories to have been applied beyond their legitimate scope. But this might be another way of saying that “categories are those tools of synthesis whose limits are the limits of experience”, and thus contrasts with any “concept which can indeterminately applied to anything”, i.e. a category of perception must have a limit in perception, suggesting that a limit in perception is also the host of a category of perception.
I am reminded here of Borges quote on searching for unrealities that confirm the ideality of nature. Perhaps we can do the same thing, almost, here. Can we seek concepts that generate impossibilities according to their application? What about concepts that have become contradictory or transgressive across periods of time and their respective paradigms. One of my goals here is not just to explain Kant (and in particular where he is concerned with the derivation of the categories), but to take Kant as an exercise or thought module. And in that regard, let me repeat myself:
Kant’s ‘Principle of Concepts by Limits’ (my label): Concepts are the cognitive tools we use to synthesize information to create the world. We are aware of many concepts by their names, though others remain preconscious. Concepts can be studied to test for a premier role in perception. Only those that reach a point where their integrity breaks down (and ‘paradox’ is but one type of incoherency) can be candidates for the conditions of experience.
5. Finally (3): Since appearances are the product of consciousness acting on an unsynthesized manifold, everything can be divided according to whether it is a product of experience, versus the manifold that pre-experience. This is called the phenomena/noumena dichotomy, and when we say that it applies to all experience/pre-experience then we are including all sources of experience. Here it is useful to turn to Locke who made a great effort to break down the hierarchy of Ideas, which he said could be derived either from the mind/reflection, or matter/sensation. The application of the transcendental divide to the latter (matter) is obvious.
Less obvious (perhaps) is the application of the transcendental divide to things of mind/reflection. Kant does describe its application to the will or freedom (which will be important for his explanation of the transcendental ego). But he does not, insofar as I’m aware, discuss it in terms of other aspects of mind/reflection, e.g. memory, emotion, calculations/considerations.
When discussing will, Kant describes how a single act can have a dual explanation. And this is even though one side of those explanations will be temporal and the other without form. I bring that point up to highlight the radical difference (comparable to Spinoza’s dual attributes for a single substance that parallels dual mechanisms which are yet irreducible to each other by any other means).
It is possible that the other aspects of mind (e.g. memory, emotion, consideration) can also be given dual explanations on each side of the transcendental divide.
6. Now (4) – noting that I may have more subsets to add to this section which is currently in progress.
It is partly reiterative to state that knowledge has its limits and fails when it attempts to reach beyond them. What’s more, when considering knowledge qua appearances, then we are admitting that any attempt at knowledge is successful, at least insofar as it generates appearances.
