From: pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU (Stephen Grossman)
Subject: Obj/Exist
Reply-To: pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU
Organization: UMASS DARTMOUTH, NO. DARTMOUTH, MA.
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 20:42:11 GMT

    [Sorry for the delay in replying to Sep.16-28 messages. This message should
bring me up to date with others in this thread]

    It seems that Kant has done an all-too-good job of convincing people that
nothing exists. Some study the exact nature of nothing while others seek the
correct words with which to express nothing. Yet others search for the perfect
experience of nothing. It's certainly tempting to say that this is much ado
about nothing. If I shove an apple in front of somebody's eyeballs, saying,
"This is existence," they might recognize that, indeed, the apple exists. Or
they might search for something which allegedly "gives" existence to the apple,
be it words, society, consciousness, experience, or some version of Plato's
transcendental Form of the Good. There are, I assume, an infinite number of ways
to tell oneself and others that one does not and should not recognize that the
apple exists. But it does exist and all the phony and intellectually absurd
technical apparatus of contemporary philosophy will not cause the apple to cease
existing. I am not, for the moment, clear about how many more ways there are to
recognize existence beyond that contained in my messages over the last few
months. Probably something will occur to me and I will transcend my writer's
(metaphysician's?) block. In the meantime, please consider Objectivist Leonard
Peikoff's wisdom in _Objectivism_:

    "Plato and the medievals denied Existence in the name of a fantasy, a
glowing super-reality with which, they believed, they were in direct, inspiring
contact....
    Kant is a different case. He denies Existence not in the name of a
fantasy but of nothing; he denies it in the name of a dimension that is, by his
own insistent statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. The mind, he says,
is cut off not merely from some aspects of "things in themselves," but from
everything real; any cognitive faculty is cut off because it has a nature, any
nature....
    Occasional fig leaves aside, Kant offewrs humanity no alternative to the
realm of that which is, and no reward for renouncing it. He is the first
philosopher in history to reject reality, thought, and values, not for the sake
of some "higher" version of them, but for the sake of the rejection. The power
in behalf of which his genius speaks is not "pure reason," but pure destruction.
    The result of Plato's approach was a form of adoration. The result of Kant,
in Ayn Rand's words, was 'hatred of the good for being the good.' The hatred
took shape in the culture of nihilism.
    Modernist intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for
kicks. They seek the thrill of the new; and the new, to them, is the negative.
The new is obliteration. obliteration of the essential in every field; they have
no interest in anything to take its place. Thus the uniqueness of the century
behind us: philosophy gleefully rid of system-building, education based on the
theory that cognition is harmful, science boasted of its inability to
understand, art which expelled beauty, literature which flaunted antiheroes,
language 'liberated' from syntax, verse 'free' of meter, nonrepresentational
painting, atonal music, unconscious psychology, deconstruction in literary
criticism, indeterminacy as the new depth inphysics, incompleteness as the
revelation in mathematics-a void everywhere that wassa acclaimed by the
avant-garde with a metaphysical chuckle....
    In a Kantian reality, nothing else was possible....
    Kant is dead in academic philosophy: the subject has effectively expired
under his tutelage. He is dead among the intellectuals, whose world-view is
disillusionment (they call it the 'end of ideology'). He is dead in the realm of
art, where nihilism, with little left to defy, is turning into its inevitable
product: nihil (this is now being called 'minimalism' and 'postmodernism')....
    The collapse of a negative, however, is not a postive. The atrophy of a
vicious version of unreason is not the adoption of reason. If men fail to
discover living ideas, they will keep moving by the guidance of dead ones; they
will keep following, by inertia, the principles they have already
institutionalized.
    
    
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta