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Post-modernism

My friend Lumberjack wrote the following:

"The first one is because they did it to Bush innumerable times.

"But no, the second one has no meaning. Apart from obviously being a commentary on the first section of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that is. I get like that sometimes."

My response follows.

I, of course being a faddist, got caught up early with the idea of an ethical imperative. The idea that Kant attempted to express with the cited work was, can we know a priori of cases where we can know the rightness or wrongness of certain ideas?

It was apparent to me, that by the time we had moved to Kant’s last great work, “Critique of Pure Reason,” that we’d moved from any type of ontological analysis of priors into a metaphysic that didn’t rely upon ontological certainty. Kant attempted to create a “meta” physique that didn’t need to simply look to the way things are, but rather created instances of thought that were predicted by outcomes dependent upon those thoughts.

Dave Hume was my big guy. Pretty much Kant’s big guy, too.

But Hume didn’t attempt to interpret observations into moral questions. He drew conclusions upon observation and didn’t enter into the sphere of determining whether or not actions were morally correct of incorrect. That Kant was willing to so intrusive isn’t a necessary indictment of Kant. Again, I believe that there is, and remains, an ethical imperative. But there is a huge shift in the reason for interpretation of objective observation when one is attempting to say that “B” follows “A” and “B” is caused by “A”. 

If you’ve read Hume, you know that he was very unwilling to advance the notion of causality without advancing any notion of right or wrong. What Kant did was to advance that notion; that actions must be seen as being either right or wrong. By the time we get to Hegel, we’ve come full circle. Now we need to know that right and wrong are in apposition to each other, and the only normative alternative is to reduce both the right and the wrong into something new.

Ga-zots! Synthesis!

I, of course, being a faddist, got caught up early with the idea of synthesis. The idea that Hegel helped to express was, if you create an hypothesis, that there is an anti-thesis. As an advocate of a priori logic, there is a certain comfort zone inherent with anyone who posits that all ideas are knowable, in advance. Uncertainty only exists in things that aren’t knowable. So, there is a bit of avoidance of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc built into the a priorist.

Hegel offered a way for ontologists to move beyond the prior, into the post. What we didn’t find out until later was that there was a great deal of chasing of one’s own tail involved in Hegelian argument.

And, again, I will defend G. Hegel for a great deal of what we rely upon through Popper’s interpretation of testing. Where the world philosophique got off-center was the inclusion of certain French guys who really never were able to deduce whatever the hell they were thinking about. Infer? French infer. Knowledge? Fight with your feet, etc.

Now, I am unsure of what role Big Bird would play in this exegesis.

You view him as a recipient. But what if he was the source? A great number of things would immediately be solvable.

One is one. Two is two. And two is bigger than one.

N’est-ce pas?

Je t'aime

Parfait.

You can always tell when there is resonance between truth and beauty. 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

(W.B. Yeats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.)

"O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

"Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" (W.B. Yeats, "Among School Children", W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry: 127-130. Ed. by A. Norman Jeffares. London: Macmillan, 1968.) 

"My love

Evidently we knew
Of better ways to say goodbye
But whenever love is through
Hearts need to find a reason why
Lost inside the maze
I dreamed of you and I forgave
The things we do for love
When love is all
Repeatedly, it's true
The child in me would long for you
And readily you'd give
To set me free,you'd mother me
I crept into your soul
Before I knew that it was wrong
Lost for words and dreams
I'm gonna scream.

My love, my love
I love you innocently
Like a star upon a screen
My love, my love
I need you eagerly
Like the man I will never be
My love I love you so

So wrong to place in you
All of my dreams, all of the pain
Too late now to undo
I shoulda known there'd come the rain
Trapped inside the gates
We danced the night through satan's gaze
My love, oh how I yearned
To feel the burn of your caress.

Refrain

My love, my love
I love you innocently
Like a star upon a screen
My love, my love, my love, my love my world, my soul
I need you desperately
Like the man I will never be
My love I love you so
My love I love you so

Posting

I'm going to miss Hal's "A Hal of a Blog." 

If you don't hit my links on the right side of this page, you're harming yourself!

Dammit!

Do your job, hit a link!

I kinda wish I didn't have to pay the bills, so I could spend more time here. But I actually have clients who are substantive. We don't dick the rice bowl.

I've several posts that I'd like to finish. Especially as we move towards the election season in Oregon, and reconciliation in the United States Congress. One of those is titled, "Wu Who?"

Weather has been better than normal. So, I'm trying to take advantage of the weather as much as is possible, both for work and for play. When you can combine work and play, that, my friend, is nirvana. People who work for a living are scrambling for a fix. Those who work for a living are trying to figure out how to kill government without letting it be known that they hate government. My job is to help them to do both. 

So moving into an election season creates a bunch of opportunities. And yes, I am a capitalist. I try to make money off these opportunities. I've work to do. So do you. I'll post posts when they're done. Really.