If a cake requires flour and water for its manifest presence, and the presence of `cake’ is `true’, but this only to the extent that the validity and efficacy of the cake’s definition-of-truth demands the exclusion of flour or water (thus negatively positing the necessities of cakes means-of-truth in counter-distinction to one (or many) of the necessary particulars/ingredients required for the cake’s efficacy as present/`real”), then we understand the constitutive relations of the cake to be incoherent and nonsensical; as in this want and postulate of an exclusionary “truth”, the cake cannot exist. In effect, any means of abstracting parts away from a whole leaves any remaining whole a simulacrum of truth; merely the ecological fallacy writ large (and with a form of epochal blindness). At bottom, such a method of comportment, a method deemed “valid” for over 2500 years, is a self-annihilating proposition which negates a necessary element of the contingent structure required for the ontological facticity of the cake’s constitutive (i.e., ontic) presence. Nonetheless, such is analogous to how mankind has traversed the last three millennia. Such a way-of-being, man’s mode of nihilistic sojourn as such spans the lacuna of nearly three millennia, is a prescription for non-being! One cannot have their cake and eat it, too! Too be sure, this is not a work which seeks favor as a lesson manual. Nevertheless, let me digress for a moment. Here it is the import of Heidegger that is paramount. As Heidegger properly develops, “truth” finds its most applicable sense with the Greeks. The term ἀλήθεια reflects the foundation upon which metaphysics bases its understanding of truth; and as such, the hermeneutic underpinnings of the last three millennia finds root in the will-to-truth as such is expressed in the `a’ privative relations of a duality’s exclusionary method of valuation. Just as “truth” speaks to the revealing and unconcealment of what `is, so too does it presuppose by inverse reciprocal identity an intertwining with what remains concealed and withdrawn. That which manifests comes relative to the background of that which previously withheld presence. Hence, the epistemic root of the term “truth” speaks to an underlying duality. This is why the ancients wrote the term as an a-privative (ἀ/λήθεια). It is important to stress that the entirety of the historicity of “western” thought is in no way peculiar or particular to the post-Hellenistic mind, nor to the secularization of the world via the turn into modernity and its concepts of progress, certainty, and aesthetics. Rather, the hermeneutic dynamic Nietzsche rightly exposes—this as a manifestation with an underlying nihilistic core—is a macro-foundational element of man’s conscious understanding (as both Jung, via his work on the collective unconscious, and Reich, through his work on the mass psychology of fascism, sense). The thread inherent to our collective epistemic (or more properly put, hermeneutic) history, a thread spanning from the archetypal images of mythological (i.e., our psychical projections, early efforts at symbolic representation, and cave paintings), and which in thinking spans from at least Homer and the Egyptians, to Anaximander, Heraclitus, the Persians, and Parmenides, through Plato, Aristotle, the Scholastics, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the Enlightenment, positivism and empiricism, to Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and the post-structural/antifoundational movements of the 20th Century, speaks to a means of comportment; to a way-of-being; to a kind of `turning or sojourn. The Greeks rightly understood the conflicting dynamic of “truth”. This conflict manifests first in the multiplicities of possibilities embodied by abstract polytheistic (psychical) abstraction. However, the fact that the disclosure of truth intertwines to the equanimity of an evidentiary otherness which is always privatively withheld from disclosure [ἀ/λήθεια], leads the concept of “truth” into a form of representative dyad; a dualistic dyad premised upon a relationship of the over-and-against. For the epoch now completing, either something is present as a form of evidentiary disclosure, or what is sought is concealed and held away through the propositional disjunction of non-evidentiary presence, thereby making it either “false”, or undisclosed in its absence. This mode of reason renders “truth” as a correlation of (and to) beings, thus making truth an objective relation for understanding. Truth becomes an empirical facet of what eventually comes to be termed a “proof”, and even the concept of “God” is rendered into a present participle, a proper pronoun and is written as a He. Propositions and ideas are deemed `true’ to the extent that they correspond to some apriori sense of representation. These representations may be purely psychical or empathetic, but one knows them as true nonetheless. The byproduct of such a way-of-being objectively renders beings into enframed and seemingly separated elements of a mysterious whole. Only insofar as such advents does the metaphysical project secure its trans-historical form of truth as meaningful. The extension is that what resides in alterity to the “given” certainties-of-truth, certainties now assumed whole by apriori elision, are lost and forgotten, rendered excluded and into absence. It is as such that alterities-of-difference are rendered into the language-game of oppositions over-against, thus codifying them as signets within the potential of the duality’s disclosure of hierarchically delimited parts of the whole. ((c) 2011 Lyrics of Bell; (P) ArtifexAstrum/MetaUnstable `A Single Star in Sight. All Rights Reserved; Use by Kind Permission.)
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 04:37:04 +0000
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