The Infinite Waltz of Socratic
Elenchus and Platonic Anamnesis
The Dialectic of Faith, Doubt and Rational Necessity
The Dialectic of Faith, Doubt and Rational Necessity
by Ryan Haecker
Thy legs
must move to conquer as they fly,
If but thy coats are reasonably high;
Thy breast - if bare enough - requires no shield;
Dance forth - sans armour thou shalt take the field,
And own - impregnable to most assaults,
Thy not too lawfully begotten 'Waltz'.
- The Waltz, Lord Byron, 1813
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If but thy coats are reasonably high;
Thy breast - if bare enough - requires no shield;
Dance forth - sans armour thou shalt take the field,
And own - impregnable to most assaults,
Thy not too lawfully begotten 'Waltz'.
- The Waltz, Lord Byron, 1813
Download full essay on PDF file at this link: http://bit.ly/VhKefX
The primordial simple matter of
abstract being is the most uniformly barren desert of monolithic reality, the
richest and poorest of truths, which potentially possesses all existence even as
it actually gives forth no existence. Intellective
apprehension of abstract being is "the fountain of life in which we shall
see light." (Ps. 36) Although it
remains ineluctably limited in time and space, the mind may conjure before itself all abstract worlds
of possible conceptual determination, as a microcosm of God's originary
creative Word. Judgment is the building block upon which all edifices of
thought are erected, for in judgment, the subject matter copulates with the
predicate form to generate the propositions and concepts of thought's universal
substance. In the order of knowing (ordo
scientiva) rather than the order of existence (ordo esse), judgment proceeds to weigh and measure the truth of all possible worlds of
thought. Each judgment is a further
determination of a concept that may possibly be concretized in the actual world;
for any predication is simultaneously the affirmation of some predicate; the
negation of its contrary opposite (i.e. what the predicate is not); and
determination is negation. Thus thought
begins in the purest generality of abstraction and, step by step; through
subject, predicate and conceptual determinations; turns around and around
until, in the utmost bacchanalia of its mutually coinciding centrifugal
rotation, it glides by its own inner necessity through the recursive
self-movement of the concept that ceaselessly interpenetrates, coincides with
and illuminates all truth.
The
philosopher escapes from the cave of ignorance to become the midwife whose art
is the birth of the concept, which may be either a genuine and true offspring
or an imposture and a false offspring: epigenetic thought cultivates the
genuine offspring and contradictory thought terminates the imposture. Each thought flutters about like birds in a
birdcage, and judgment reaches forth, perchance, to seize one among these, even
as others escape its grasp. This is the
psychic phenomena of the logical bivalency of positive and negative judgment;
of affirmation and denial; of truth and falsity; in which thought moves one
step forward and one step backwards. The
bivalency of logic generates all of the dualities of being and non-being from
the uniformity of abstract being: abstract being has already within itself some
modal potentialities which are implicitly negated when they possess contradictions
in-themselves or for-others. Hence, for
any possible world to become concrete requires both that it is intrinsically consistent
with itself and that it is extrinsically consistent with the actual world. Immanuel Kant described how philosophy
contemplates building a tower whose top may reach to heaven, but that this bold
undertaking is "bound to fail through lack of material"
(CPR B735) for antinomies of reason, in which inferences which begin with
different premises produce equally valid yet mutually contradictory conclusions,
sap the foundation of any tall edifice of systematic thought. When the cornerstone
is rejected, the foundation must crumble and topple the structures. So must the
task of philosophy fail when it raises judgments over judgments, in the merely
finite and external manner of discrete conceptual and propositional building
blocks, to reach the highest heights of truth. The book of Genesis describes
how God "placed a cherubim and a flaming sword turning every way to
guard the way to the Tree of Life" (Gen. 3:23). It is from such an
invisible necessity that contradictions invariably and imperceptibly confound
the languages of all finite thinking, as soon as any structure is raised to its
zenith, to prohibit mankind's return from exile to the native land of thought.

A more prudent architect will reflect upon these
previous efforts so as to determine a plan in conformity with the material
given to us; to design a method of logic which may stands over and determine
the exercise of thought itself. The copulation of subject matter and predicate
forms in judgment will then be negated so that the judgments themselves may
become the subject matter of thought: each judgment is then determined by the
form of a method; a logic of method, or a methodologism, which arrogates to
itself the form of their mutual predication. Yet in elevating methodologism to
be the judgment over judgments, thought conceals from itself its very own
judgment of methodologism, through which judgment is externalized from itself
just as its intends to regulate itself; and in not allowing itself to be
recognized as a judgment, thought presumes that methodologism, which stands
opposed to judgment, to be the inner truth of all judgment. This
externalization of judgment from itself, with the intention of determining
itself, results in the contradiction between a judgment that is supposed to be
inwardly united but is outwardly disunited and opposed to itself. The design of
all thought is destabilized in its very
beginning, reducing all philosophy to a Babel of tongues, in which every
thinker envisions a different edifice; designs thought differently from the
others and; upon reflecting on these differences, equally doubts that any
design may succeed in raising itself to the unity of reality and truth.

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