The F.E.D. "Meta-Platonian Proposition"

[Second of a Series]:

The F.E.D. "Meta-Platonian Proposition" --



Dear Reader,

This blog entry is the second in a series that began with blog entry # 38 --

"The F.E.D. Meta-Pythagorean Proposition" --

". . . As I see it, the F.E.D. <<oeuvre>> rises upon the foundation of a series of immanent critiques of a seminal succession of mythopoeic, religious, philosophical, scientific, mathematical, and psychohistorical previous contributions to human civilization -- to "The Human Phenome".

I plan to summarize these immanent critiques here in a series of blog entries, mostly in the chronological order of the contributions critiqued . . ."




This second blog entry in that series addresses F.E.D.'s immanent critique of the philosophy of Plato in general, and of its heart, the Dialectic of the Platonian <<Arithmoi Eidetikoi>> -- i.e., of Platonian 'ideo-systematics'; of the universal 'ideo-taxonomic' .../<<Genos>>/<<Species>>/... Assemblages of [purely-qualitative, hence unaddable -- <<asumbletoi>>] Idea-<<Monads>>, or of "Idea-Units" -- in particular.

In module # 194 of the first volume of their treatise A Dialectical "Theory of Everything", entitled " The Immanent Critique of '''Platonic Dialectic''' ", the F.E.D. collective wrote as follows --

". . . we find the actuality behind Plato' mis-perception and mis-location of [the] <<eide>> in the human phenome; in the human <<memes>>-pool; in that also "invisible", "intangible", but evolving & '''meta-evolving''' human 'idea-matter'; in "the matters of ideas", the inter-subjective-objective 'psycho-historical material' of human cultural and cognitive history. In Plato's time, our human phenome evolved slowly enough, perhaps, to have seemed eternal. But that is no longer so -- not at today's rate of 'temporal acceleration'!"


To my reading, F.E.D. sees Plato's claim, about the location of the fundamental categories, <<eide>>, or <<idea>>, that humanity has found to be necessary in order to render human experience intelligible/"think-able"/"ratio-nal"/"speakable", for humanity -- his claim that these <<eide>> reside in an immaterial, immutable, eternal, transcendental, causal heaven, perceivable only, for humans, by the human "mind-eye", and not by any [other] humans' senses -- as lacking in empirical, scientific foundation and justification.

Keeping in mind that human language -- spoken, and, later, also written -- forms the very heart of what F.E.D. terms 'the human phenome', I take it that they would agree with the position which Dirk Damsma, in his essay Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis in Systematic Dialectics [available for free download via the following link --

http://www1.fee.uva.nl/pp/bin/1071fulltext.pdf

-- ] attributes to Hegel, as follows [see pp. 3 though 4]:

"Hegel's main tenet is that all that can be known about the world is known in language.  Things that cannot be expressed in a form of language cannot actually be known at all. The upshot of this is that the basic structures of language are the basic structures of intelligibility of the world.  In other words: for the world to be represented in thought, it must be representable in language.  If so, the structure of language must be isomorphic with the structure of the world's knowability (a thought also expressed by Hofstadter, 1979) and by mapping the basic systematic relationships between categories in language, the systematic of the world's intelligibility and the fundamental interrelations between [better: among -- M.D.] everything we can claim about it, can be discovered.  Hegel provides an overview of this project in his Encyclopadie..."

The above seems generous to Hegel, describing perhaps the least-mystical, most-proto-Marxian mood of Hegel's thought.



However, Damsma goes on to extend [t]his view of Hegel's views to account for, and to at least partially excuse, the appearance of mysticism in many of Hegel's statements, in Damsma's footnote 2, as follows --

"Despite Hegel's remarks to the effect that the world is created or changed through our systematic dialectical representations or reconstructions of it . . . I take Hegel's philosophical claims to be epistemological rather than ontological in nature.

Hence, my stress is on intelligibility, knowability and on representation and expression of knowledge.

In my opinion Hegel made these remarks, because he felt that our knowledge of the world could never surpass our ability for thought, which in turn is limited by the language(s) at our command.

So, for all practical purposes ontology and epistemology may well be conflated.

If there are ontological structures out there that cannot be expressed in language they cannot be expressed or known at all (yet) and until they have been made expressible, talking about them is philosophically useless.

So, for Hegel, ontology only matters in as far as it can be borne out epistemologically and for this reason he just doesn't distinguish between the two."


Damsma then goes on to characterize the content-structure of Hegel's Encyclopedia per this view [p. 4] --

"Thus, Part I, the Logic ('the science of the Idea in and for itself'. . .), relates to the most fundamental (structural relationships between) categories in language, i.e. it consists of categories without which the world would certainly be unintelligible, distinctionless white noise (such as Being, Becoming, the One and its Other) without however considering the application of these to the world itself.

Next, Part II, the philosophy of nature ('the science of the Idea in its otherness' . . .) considers how the categories of logic are altered when one applies them to nature, that is, how they are expressed in the world. Since this involves leaving the sphere of 'thinking about thinking', this transition opens up the possibility of misrepresentation (whose occurrence is amply illustrated in the history of science -- cf. e.g. Bryson, 2003), i.e., the possibility that the structure of language is not entirely isomorphic to the structure of the world (yet).

In part III, the philosophy of mind, or, in Hegelian terms, the science 'of the idea that returns into itself out of its otherness' . . . the inherent freedom of thought is reconciled with the material restrictions of nature by showing how self-conscious humanity can impact on nature to understand, create and change human society."



The F.E.D. immanent critique of the ideology of Platonianism can be grasped heuristically, using the Q dialectical ideography, and using the step s...=...1 Triadic Seldon Function, as follows, to model the systematic dialectic of Platonianism from their perspective of today --

)-|-(0...=...

(Platonianism)^(3^0)...=...

(Platonianism)^(1) ...=...

Platonianism;


)-|-(1...=...

(Platonianism)^(3^1) ...=...

(Platonianism)^3...=...

((Platonianism)(Platonianism))(Platonianism)...=...

(Platonianism)((Platonianism)(Platonianism))...=...

Platonianism..+..

Contra-Platonianism..+..

Trans-Platonianism...=...

P..+..C..+..q/CP...=...

P..+..C..+..T..

[---)...

q/1..+..q/2..+..q/(2+1)

-- in which the "ideo-ontological category" P, or Platonianism, functions as specific "ideo-<<arche'>>", or "thesis"-category, and in which the "ideo-ontological category" C, or Contra-Platonianism, functions as "contra-thesis"-category, or immanent-/self-negation of P, or Platonianism, and in which the "ideo-ontological category" q/CP, or T, standing for Trans-Platonianism, functions as "uni-thesis"-category, i.e., as the reconciliation of, or "complex unity" of, Platonianism and Contra-Platonianism, or of C, and P.

In a sense, then, Hegel's <<Logik>>/<<Natur>>/<<Geist>> Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences can be seen as Hegel's embodiment of this immanent critique of Platonian mysticism, and thus as Hegel's attempt, with the corrective supplied by this immanent critique, to complete, single-handedly, an outline of the Great Project of Plato and of the Platonic Academy: the Great Project of a 'Universal Systematics' -- of a 'Universal Taxonomy', perhaps even in the diachronico-synchronic form of a 'Universal Meta-Genealogy' of the "Descent" of all "Being".

Similarly, to my reading, F.E.D. does not reject out of hand this Great Project of the Platonian Dialectic -- of the Platonian <<Arithmoi Eidetikoi>> -- or of the Hegelian <<Encyclopadie>>, but seeks to embody a corrected, Marxian/Engelsian actualization of both -- corrected by F.E.D.'s convergent immanent critiques of the mystic/idealistic, ideological momenta of both the Platonian Dialectic and the Hegelian Dialectical Encyclopedia -- in their own vast Encyclopedia Project: their Encyclopedia Dialectica Project.


Regards,

Miguel