Monday, October 29, 2007

Purpose.

[Philosophy exists to defend and disclose the shining of the world, and to help that shine speak to Power]

Philosophy, or something we can call philosophy, is radically distinct from analysis, and that's its ultimate justification. In a critical vein, it reminds us of the limitations of analysis, and the imposition within our analysis of presumptions that separate us from things in themselves. This isn't something that can be truly "corrected" out of importance, it's part of the nature of thought and experience. Thought is directed, intentional, and intentionality, attention moves towards those qualities in beings that it recognizes. Analytic thought attends to given qualities, dissects and organizes them, develops patterns for them, comprehends them as organized systems. Yet because it is drawn to those qualities of being it already recognizes, it does not tend to a full observation.

In truth, "full observation" of a being cannot be an instrumental act, it must begin with an assumption of a thing's indeterminacy and accept the permanence of its own chaos. Chaos in this sense simply means perpetually indeterminate. As critique, philosophy points out the limitations of will and thought for analyzing beings, for getting at the Being[s] of beings I suppose. [I mean that Being is just that quality of a thing, still particular to it, that evades the attention of our will and thought. So Beings for beings, not Being for beings, maybe...] As a constructive project, philosophy opens space for aspects of the world to continually present themselves to and assert themselves into discourse. It does this through the formation of concepts that enable communication between radically distinct beings and states of Being, allowing the presentation of Being through events. The ambiguity of event, the mutual determination of their character by entangled beings, discloses the Being in which these beings participate. [Truth of a thing is revealed in its action and what it produces in concert with other things, other beings, other people, etc...]

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