aesthetico_epistemico_critique Ascolo Parodites Aesthetico-Epistemological Critique I “Am I not compelled to admit myself," says Goethe "insofar as the monas of life remains unknown, but not a mysterium? It is, rather, unknown and revealed to all, the primary revelation itself.” Indeed, the ‘consciousness of objectivity’ is but a manifestation of the infinitely cruder law of causality; and in this wise Fichte’s effort to deduce the non-ego from the moral law may be given simply as a pragmatist theory of knowledge, and Ludwig Klages’s doctrine of consciousness, wherein life can only find a way back to itself in the ecstatic destruction of Geist, interpreted along the same lines. In its finished form philosophy will, it is true, assume the quality of doctrine, will be superordinated to theology, but it does not lie within the power of mere thought to confer such a form that, in any case, would have us bound to repeat those noble dictums of Byron’s Manfred, that ‘Sorrow is Knowledge,’ and ‘The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life’ or that of Torquato Tasso, ‘Withouten veil heaven's secrets great doth see.’ The historical self-consciousness of mankind is never immediately given in the form of a historical narrative; and it is philosophical doctrine that is based upon the codification of historical knowledge. In short, it is philosophy that has been invested to the fulfillment of a historical self-consciousness. Pascal, in the beginning of his Pensees, makes the distinction between the mathematical and intuitive minds and, given the foregoing assertions, it must again be said that philosophy, if it is indeed philosophy, cannot be evoked in more geometrico, but must be directed interna immutabilitas. [Alexandri Baumgarten's Metaphysica. P. 358.] This is to say that, while the various disciplines make the effort to aquire knowledge, philosophy is concerned foremost with the representation of truth and, by corollary, the affirmation of human values. In other words, the two dimensions of philosophical thought are, respectively, epistemological and aesthetic; and rather than an ars inveniendi, or, in the strictest sense, inquiry, philosophy must be conceived of as a sort of reflection, in the Platonic sense of the word, viz. anamnesis, reminenscentia. II This is evident above all in the Phaedrus and Symposium, which contain several pronouncements of decisive importance in the present context. The one invites us to contemplate the relationship between Eros and recollection, between Eros and the fall and incarnation of the soul; the other offers a profound meditation upon the relationship of Beauty and Truth. To interpret their sentences in terms of the logic of their system, as no more than part of a time honoured eulogy on behalf of those great sages of the Socratic tradition, would inevitably mean leaving the sphere of the theory of ideas; which is where their existence is illuminated. Whilst every animal, although itself unique and with its own experience, invests itself unconditionaly to Life, like the Sæhrímnir, man has separated from this the law of mind. What for it, as the underpinning of Geist, of the ego and of the consciousness, which seems to be the superiority of discursive thought over the world, to the metaphysician, if he enters into the world deeply enough, and appears in the light of the subjugation of life under the yoke of ideas? Rather, if we are to understand the doctrine communicated in the Phaedrus and Symposium, we must consider it in terms of its own immanent presuppositions, we must return to the primal phenomenon in which it is rooted. Eros does not betray its basic impulse by directing his longings towards the truth; for Truth is beautiful not so much in itself, as for Eros. And so it is with human love; a person is beautiful in the eyes of his lover, but not in himself, because his body belongs to a higher order of thing than that of the beautiful. William Davis Furry, writing in the first chapter of his work on aesthetics, offers us a summary of the metaphysician's 'immediacy of experience.' This concept of ‘undifferentiated experience and mental content’ in the ‘experience equivalent with reality’ is appropriate for securing the epistemological basis for the modern approach towards a metaphysics, but for a philosophy that embraces both of the dimensions of its natural scope, aesthetics and epistemology, a basis must be established which is capable of securing for them alike a point of departure. A principle of ‘aesthetico-epistemological reflection’ must be grounded upon a ‘pure experience of expression,’ in the language of Plato, a ‘truth which is the content of beauty.’ This content however, which Klages calls the 'daemonically living reality of images,' does not appear by being exposed; rather it is revealed in what may be described metaphorically as a husk burning up as it enters the realm of ideas, that is to say a destruction of the work in which its external form achieves its most brilliant degree of illumination, as the Soul in Shelley's Epipsychidion: “my soul was as a lampless sea, and who was then its tempest; and when She, the planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost crept over those waters….” III In the great philosophies the world is seen in terms of the order of ideas. Yet, now that we have conceived of these ideas in forma formans, rather than as forma formata, and even though the conceptual frameworks within which these world views have been articulated has, in the passage of time, become fragile; these frameworks, such as Plato's theory of ideas, the aestimatio and mensuratio of Nicholas of Cusa, the Kantian deontology, and Bergson's duree vecue still remain valid attempts at a description of the world. The more intensely these respective thinkers strove to outline an image of the universe, the more were they bound to develop a theoretical order which, for latter interpreters, would be seen as serving that original depiction of the world of ideas which was really intended. The metaphysics of life does not, of course, shrink from this final consequence, but it must thereby, at least in this one point, itself enter into the sphere that it would close off for us, that of theory. The metaphysics of life must make use of the intellect's admininstration of judgments, which it rejects, and in doing so it indirectly accepts the use of judgment. The acceptance and recognition of such takes place whenever a metaphysics does not merely perceive and interpret but makes evaluations. A principle of ‘aesthetico-epistemological reflection’ would serve to articulate these perspectives which, by their very nature, abalienate the world; which displace and estrange it from the order of time, and reveal it to be as perverted as it will appear in the light of the forthcoming chiliasm: in the words of Luther, “All that God commandeth, therein that becomes both the Spirit and the Life.” [The Protest and the Conference. P. 385.] IIII When the God that the saint receives and suffers, liberates the mystic world from the world of Ideas, he then again and again finds himself subjected to the ‘victorious powers of life’ and falls prey to that world, whenever he calls out in search of his God, with Holderlin, non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo. Indeed, the path towards sainthood may have its lodgings, yet they must inevitably lead the pilgrim into Golgotha. If metaphysics is to enter the sphere of theoretical philosophy, then it must extricate itself from pure, discursive thought, that it may be relegated from the domain of dialectics and ontology to that of aesthetics and epistemology. Aesthetics and Epistemology can only be united in metaphysics for the former, in its affirmation of human value, implicitly denies, through it’s providing a proof of the ‘absolute actual existence of the ego,’ the theoretical distinction between subject and object, which is the very mechanism of epistemology, of the theory of knowledge. For a metaphysics which does not set out to be an ontology but which recognizes the phenomenon of expression in its peculiar structure, the self-representation of Truth, and which has been relegated to the domains of aesthetics and epistemology, the problem of the Soul and Body takes an entirely new form. The problem is revealed to be only another appearance of the epistemological distinction between subject and object, between the cognizing subject and the cognized object; a distinction which, being divorced from all conceptions of the ontic, reveals itself only within the structure of causality. The Soul, for this new metaphysics, would simply be the meaning of the body and the body a manifestation of the soul. Neither acts upon the other, for neither belongs to the ontic, to the world of things. Because action, either of the soul upon the body, or the body upon the soul, either in Aristotelian or Lockean terms, is inseparable from the interaction of things, the relation of cause and effect is merely a designation of separated parts of a relationship already thus analyzed, namely, of that relationship between meaning and appearance, between knowledge and Truth. Insofar as meaning and appearance, knowledge and Truth, are themselves a relation, or rather ‘the prototype of all relation,’ The Law of Causality, with all the relationships and structures which are derived from it, thus becomes a mere reconstruction of aesthetico-epistemological reflection. There is, and herein lies the Diana's tree for the forthcoming philosophy, a most intimate connection between that experience, the deeper exploration of which could never lead to a metaphysical truth, and which I have hitherto marginalized to the domain of the aesthetic, (insofar as it is conceived of in the Romantic sense, as an affirmation of human value) and the theory of knowledge, which has not yet been capable of determining, with any degree of sufficiency, the logical point of departure for a metaphysical research. It is by pure reason that metaphysics has been so obscured, made so dark and confused, and has been therewith fixed into the yoke of indifferentism, which is the ancient mother and theotokos of chaos and night in all the sciences of morals, religion, and law-giving, that the dew of a pure concept of experience can be born only from the dawn of the promised near regerneration of the Enlightenment. This old metaphysics, - Deus sive Natura? – seems to have been christened by antiphrasis, just as Hume, a most worthy philosopher, has maintained that abstract notions are but particular ones appended to a certain term, which exaggerates their signification, and causes them to remind one of other individuals, - who's ghost I might raise upon the Cabbalistic epithet of a Nizolius or Leibniz. This discovery, hailed by the Skeptic as one of the most valuable for all of philosophy, certainly preserves the soul of the Socratic reasoning, which is analogy, but where is the body of that reasoning, that is irony, of which the Causa Omnium itself must be asserted? V Iris, the daughter of mist, -- what better image is there to express the Truth? Truth, bodied forth in the saltations of represented ideas, just as she extends from one hemisphere in the skies to the other, projects itself in vis divinandi across the entire realm of knowledge. Yet it is precisely because the Truth has survived the birth and death of the προτον that it resists being projected into the representations of ideas themselves. Hence, it is not impossible to imagine a man come upon the world like an empty wineskin. It is this very absence which makes him all the more capable of enjoying the Truth through contemplation, of enjoying Nature through experience, and of preserving the community of his race through heritage. The rupture must be torn open in the kikayon , that it might burst, before the LAW which is hostile to the blood could arise in the spirit, that the tola’ath might feed. 081128 what's it to you? who go blather from