metaphysics

Leave a comment December 18, 2024 Steve A. Wiggins

Please don’t read too much into this! I read a lot of professors who spend their careers trying to understand a previous scholar’s thoughts. I suspect this happens quite a lot in philosophy, but it fits pretty well in religious studies also. And I wonder, what of those intellectuals where were grappling with pure ideas? Did they know they’d become adjectival? In other words, did Immanuel Kant know that he was Kantian? Or was he just writing stuff, trying to explain how he understood being in the world? Now scholars dedicate themselves to understanding Kant. Or in more recent times, Derrida, Lacan, and Bakhtin, or whoever’s the flavor of the day. The ones who were too busy being Derrida, Lacan, and Bakhtin to figure out what someone else was saying about things just wrote.

Image credit: Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

I often wonder about how higher education has shifted the way we do scholarship. It’s not really a place to test out ideas that the world can evaluate, but more a place where specialists can discuss possibilities and what someone else might’ve thought of something. I guess that’s why I tend to think of my last four books as being non-academic. I’m not using the tired formula of reacting against what some theorist has said about my subject. I’m simply observing and drawing inferences. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t raised in an academic environment. I remember reading Nietzsche for the first time. How he didn’t footnote. How he didn’t argue against what some prominent others had said. He simply wrote. And he did so brilliantly.

Perhaps it’s yet another example of having been born early enough. Tech has made it remarkably easy (for those without families to feed) to become writers. No agent or editor required. And things like Book-Tok can make those who publish outside the Big Five famous. What would Kant have done? That’s a nice Kantian question. In fact, the whole reason I began this post was that I’d run across James C. Taylor’s A New Porcine History of Philosophy and Religion on my shelves. Just seeing it reminded me of the Kantian pig refusing to lie to an axe-wielding maniac. That got me to thinking of Kant and what it must’ve been like to see him being Kantian. I’m no expert. I took a lot of courses in philosophy and religion back in the day, but I have a book about philosophical/religious pigs on my shelf. Somehow I suspect Kant wouldn’t have appreciated his page in this book, even though it gave me philosophical thoughts to start the day.

3 Comments April 5, 2014 Steve A. Wiggins

Science is more than meets the eye. Even since I was a child I’ve tried to follow what I can of science without a real microscope or telescope and a doctorate in some incomprehensible subject like chemistry. I guess that’s why I’m a fan of popular science—the kind that is written so a layperson might understand, or at least pretend to. Indeed, one of the complaints from scientists and others alike is that science has become so complex that only a specialist can really understand. I suspect that’s one reason religion continues to thrive; anybody can be an expert in religion, even a scientist. Nevertheless, science is based on empirical observation, now with instruments fine tuned to receive data better than human senses. So I sometimes watch Through the Wormhole to find out what is happening in the realm of pure knowledge. Although simplified to the digestibility level of the laity, Through the Wormhole tries to stay on base with interviews with mainstream scientists who are working at the cutting edge of what’s out there. I recently watched the episode entitled “Is There a Sixth Sense?”

I have no way of knowing what scientists think of such things, but I was glad to see the everyday experience of normal people addressed in this particular episode. Who hasn’t felt that weird pre-cognition from time-to-time, or felt like they were being stared at only to learn that they were? These might be the spooky effects at a distance that so unnerved Einstein, but they are part of human experience. We all go through it, but mainstream science comes up with a convoluted scheme whereby our brains project what actually happened back in memory before it happened so that it just seems like we knew something was about to transpire. Of they point to false positives—how many times did we think something was about to happen and it didn’t? We just don’t remember those. Still, this particular show brings together mainstream physicists and theorists usually considered outsiders, such as Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake (strangely omitted from the IMDB cast list). Several smart people, it seems, wonder if we are really all connected.

Mainstream science has grown terrified of metaphysics. The suggestion that anything might be remotely like the world of religion is frightening to those who believe we just need more precise calipers and higher resolution imagery to explain an entirely physical universe. This little universe we carry around in our skulls, however, is attuned to what we might just have to call the “spiritual” or some such moniker, just to differentiate it from the particles that we are told make up everything. Or is it strings? Don’t ask me; I couldn’t tell an up quark from a down quark. Interestingly, one is even called a “charm.” And then there’s the God particle, the Higgs’ boson that briefly reminded the world that Edinburgh is a top-rate university, although, as we all know, there’s no place like Harvard. For the rest of us, however, there’s the everyday business of work to face. And if I try to read a blog while on the clock, I definitely have a sense of being stared at, even when I’m alone in here.