Thursday, April 1, 2010

On Being and Action - Part Two

On a cosmological level, what would it mean for a constructive force to be ordered for the sake of a destructive force?  For this question to be answered, it is necessary for us to step back for a moment and consider the basic assumptions of the current discourse.  The first of such assumptions, which most philosophers and few laypersons would immediately recognize is a metaphysics of presence: the 'fact' or 'truth' of the existence of 'matter', of the 'universe', is assumed.  Second is the assumption that human thought has some access to the way in which all these things are: that is to say, it is assumed that human beings can properly know the way the universe is.  We must assume that the systems of knowledge by which we explain the "nature" of existence is accurate.  In order to come up with a theory such as the big bang and put any faith in it, we are required to assume that the universe is indeed something that we can make sense of, something that we can understand.  But there is at least one other assumption that overrides even these: by the very presence of our current discourse, we assume that some order of "human being" exists, that some movement toward the very ordering of words and concepts actually takes place in being. Not only that, but it bust also be assumed that this movement toward order that is inherent in the human activity of meaning-giving, in it's advanced form of discourse, is a movement that "we" ourselves control, and by the very fact that there are other wills that might object to this particular discourse, we must assume that there is more than one "will" that makes choices according to free will.  Discourse itself would not even take place if it weren't first assumed that there was first of all someone creating the discourse, and secondly others toward which the discourse is directed.  All of this indicates to us one general and useful idea: there are many (or, at least, more than one) wills directing the state of all existence. 

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