Diagnosing Contemporary Philosophy with the Matrix Movies by O. Bradley Bassler
Author:O. Bradley Bassler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London
The world is too large if it has no beginning and too small if it has one; this is because the concept of successive temporal regression is inadequate both to the idea that this regression could be bounded and that it could be unbounded. In a way, paraphysics only attempts to turn Kant’s metaphorical language into something more resilient and to support it in a more methodologically direct fashion, avoiding the metaphysical return of the repressed that riddles Kant’s work in the form of the “two worlds” hypothesis— a world of phenomena, on the one hand, and of noumenal things in themselves, on the other. In comparison with Husserl, Kant’s program seems more philosophically “realistic” in the sense that it does not require us to commit to the assumption of some mysterious “other” attitude in which “nothing changes but everything changes” to engage in philosophical work.
Paraphysics would seek to emulate this Kantian reality-orientation. Indeed, paraphysical bracketing is the methodological application in difficult philosophical contexts of something we all do (or at least should do) all the time when we engage in controversial conversations: we work to identify what we can’t agree on, articulate it as well as we can, and then try to move forward. This, at any rate, seems to me a much more realistic attitude toward dispute than one that focuses on “resolving our conflicts and (only) then moving on.” 6 There are always too many conflicts, and the conflicts are too deep, for us to expect to resolve them before we move on. This is because, as Kant already recognized in the limiting context he considers, the conflicts are a matter of desire. The consequence is that when we preach such resolutions, we are consistently pushing some ideological program, generally fueled by our own needs and desires. Generally speaking, what we need to do is find formats for discussion in which we are able to float our conflicts rather than letting them dam up and/or explode. Let’s get real: the idea of “conflict resolution” is almost always a euphemism for “conflict management.” Conflict resolution is the wonderful exception that proves the rule. And when we do agree, we should really ask whether this agreement is the product of social conformity. But how do we figure that out?
This brings us back to what is most idealized in the methodology of doubt that Descartes enacts in his Meditations, and what has made him the proverbial whipping boy for all attacks on philosophical “foundationalism.” Archimedes said, “Give me one fixed point and I will move the world,” but the whole point is that there is no such external fulcrum for the world-as-totality. Did Descartes recognize this irony when he spoke of finding an “Archimedean point”? Did he in any way acknowledge that any Archimedean point would be located, and therefore less than a total, absolute vantage? While we should be less ready to saddle Descartes with such thoughtlessness, Descartes was insistent on the process of the Meditations as radical, going to the root, and establishing certain foundations.
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