metonymy4u

when i suggest that we view tacts and mands as features of a relatively more heterogeneous or homogenous verbal context, i’m suggesting that we make the same move we recommend to our clients: to view the world contextually instead of categorically. to describe our context and its features rather than trying to track down “cause and effect.” the idea is to try to edit less and be more.

kant returned to the age old question of “what sort of resting place can we discover for our sense of certainty in a world of uncertainty?” the form of this question for him was “what place can we find for morality in a world of science?” or “what place does freedom have in a world of contingent events?” which is nothing more than the question of the teleological suspension of the necessary and the conditioned. one might as well redescribe it as the question of “where does the individual fit in with other people?” his answer was that since our sense of freedom is at odds, experientially, with our sense of contingency it must therefore be separate from it. reason is taxonomized into a dialectic divided against itself—into speculative, constrained, aesthetic categories and practical, creative, moral categories. indeed, he made the same move plato did when plato assumed that if some pattern in the world, such as the consistent ratio of the hypotenuse to the rest of the triangle, was present to our senses, it must therefore have a real cause, expressed in that case by a mathematical relationship. for both plato and kant, mathematics and deduction were the paradigm for the discovery of the real. kierkegaard on the other hand chose to approach from another path. the question for kierkegaard was how to build a world in which both aesthete and ethicist could live in harmony. the aesthete is the one constrained by ecstatic inspiration, nietzsche’s dionysian spirit if you will, and therefore subject to contingency, not free. the ethicist on the other hand is the manifestation of kant’s free, apollonian, a priori rational good will which gives the law unto itself. except that for kierkegaard, neither of these individuals takes priority, neither wins the battle. each is constrained to live their lives as they are thrown into them, trapped within the facticity of a leap unto faith that wanders out and about themselves with every breath. don’t you know that yet?

Nietzsche suggested that we view Kant’s work not so much as an a priori generality, but as the product of his particular journey through life. Still useful and beautiful and necessary for him and perhaps for us as well, once we have understood the process that we are calling “us”….

Both Freud and Skinner followed Nietzsche along this path, encouraging the rest of us to see our words as part and parcel of our experiences. The difference between them, as I experience it, is that Freud also followed Nietzsche into an inverted Platonism and Skinner did not.

Since our institutions have become more important than the individuals whom they serve, we have, in deference to this inhumane system, been forced to suppress our shared humanity. Will we ever learn to put a stop to this runaway monster, before it grinds us to shreds in the gears of cruelty and greed?