[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

Hi Ian/Matt/DMB

A very good essay in Philosophy Now this month by Rebecca Glass
called Climbing the Real Mountain. Here's a quote about how Nietzsche
describes a six stage history of the fall of the Plationist error:

"First the idea of a 'true' world beyond our everyday world of
appearances is born as a 'relatively reasonable' equating of the
sage with truth. "I Plato, am the Truth" Nietzsche writes, pointing
through the Platonic Forms at the second stage - the full  "insidious"
strength of the idea of the Christian Heaven, promised to those who wait
with chastely downcast eyes. The third stage is Kant's noumena, unknowable
and yet still used by Kant to justify his ethics. The unknowable 'true' 
world is
taken to its logical extreme by the Positivists in the fourth stage, in 
which the
'true world' is finally meaningless for us. Nietzsche predicts another two 
further
stages beyond these four historically-attested stages: Fifthly, since the 
really
real world is now meaningless for us, it is "superflious - consequently, a 
refuted
idea: let us abolish it." There is only this world left. The projected 
history does
not end here, however, because this world is only this one in reference to 
some
other world. Thus in the sixth and final stage, "with the true world we have 
also
abolished the apparent one." There is left only reality as it is.

End quote

I think pure empiricism is about reaching this approach to 
reality-experience
that has cast off the de-valuing of experience caught up in the 
Plato-Descartes-
Kant dualisms. But Glass goes on to point out that having overcome this 
error
we continue to evaluate experience. How are we abkle to do this. Well, as I
have suggested before, we need to be able to see that there is more to
experience than what is given, that it is possible for things to be 
different
(this is the very meaning of DQ for me), and that we can participate in
this dynamic process.

David M