Ever since our mind fell, or rather, rushed headlong, into “die schlechte Unendlichkeit” (the bad infinity - Hegel) of empirical research and experimental science, and said bye-bye to any attempt to gain knowledge of the essence, there is no end of progress. There is always a discovery to be made at the cutting edge of the experimental sciences. Theoretical models have to be tweaked and modified to fit newly established empirical facts about movements begging for causal explanation, in which the sciences believe absolutely, even when some statistical fuzziness intrudes. Efficient causality, the bread-and-butter of science, works along the time-line, with cause preceding effect. Thus events are (conceived to be) generated causally into the future from behind. Some effects call for multiple causes. When all the necessary causal conditions are fulfilled, these are (conceived to be) sufficient to trigger the effect that is then effected. (Artificial neurons in today’s A.I. mimic this kind of additive causality that thus grotesquely models human intelligence.)
There is also always yet one more critically revealing story to be told about the empirical state of the world, as chaotic, unjust and gut-wrenching as it may be. Historiography and sociology continue to tell their factually based stories about how it came to be this way, to enlighten consciousness about how bad things are and what stories have been suppressed. They explain the world along a narrative time-line, drawing upon the facts gleaned from archives as proof of the story they tell. This event happened, then that happened. Some events call for multiple preceding events to explain them satisfactorily. Explaining the world narratively is never-ending. In our epoch, endless stories are told about capitalism, although the very different stories are essentially the same. Why this endless repetition? How can the truth of the essence ever be disclosed, since empirical knowledge can never get at it?
Explanations, whether they be causal or narrative or hybrid, presuppose that the world is understood, which amounts to how it is pre-conceived, i.e. conceived in advance, in an implicit interpretation, starting with the most elementary phenomena, the ones that do not presuppose any more elementary phenomena for their conception. The world only shows itself to the mind through its interpretation that consists, in turn, when laid out, of interconnected concepts that hang together for the mind. Thinking through this conceptual scaffolding of the mind’s interpretation of the world is what is called dialectical thinking that shows, first and foremost, how the most elementary phenomena hang together conceptually and thus how the world is built for the historical mind: an epochal hermeneutic cast of mind. This is the task of hermeneutic phenomenology: to disclose the world’s most elementary conceptual scaffolding.
Thus, everything depends upon how close the mind gets to interpreting the most elementary phenomena adequately through concepts. A misinterpretation of the most elementary phenomena leads to grave misunderstandings of more derivative phenomena, including their explanations by science’s theoretical models. Such models are built to explain movements in the world, starting with the physical, in order to predict and control them along linear time. The sciences, both natural and social, know only of linear time, along which they offer their explanations, both causal and narrative.
For hermeneutic phenomenology, however, that sets out to understand the world through careful conceptual interpretation, starting with its most elementary phenomena, the linear time of explanation cannot be presupposed and taken as self-evident. Therefore, efficient causality also cannot be taken as absolute. There are kinds of movement other than the physical, notably, the movement of the mind itself. The most elementary phenomena are being itself and time, and indeed, the very meaning of being itself is temporal, for we mortal humans are open to the world first and foremost through the openness of three-dimensional time (and not merely through sense perception in the present). To ‘be’ means to essence in the openness of three-dimensional time for the understanding mind as such-and-such which, in turn, is a faculty of the psyche. Our psyche belongs to, and resonates with, the shared openness of three-dimensional time. In this sense they are identical. Our resonating with the openness of time renders us mooded and thus musical; our psyche is attuned with the world.
Neither the sciences nor today’s philosophy know anything of this, but instead presuppose it implicitly, for we would not be human if we did not partake in three-dimensional time and ’see’, threefoldly ‘all at once’, into the three dimensions of time. We would be blind to any kind of movement as such whatsoever. Modern science and philosophy skip over apparently self-evident phenomena. The sciences deny that there is any deeper dimension to their causal explanations cobbled together by way of theoretical modelling. Such modelling is invariably judged by its effectiveness, i.e. its predictive power in explaining experience. They thus refuse to interrogate their pre-conceptions, by dint of which the phenomenal truth is covered up by correct empirical prediction as a substitute.
This is our predicament in the Modern Age, initiated above all by Descartes and Newton. It is the continuation of an historical trajectory that starts with Aristotle, who set up physics as the foundational science, providing the material-causal basis for our never-ending explanations of how the world moves. Physics has long since foundered on the rocks of quantum indeterminacy, owing to its misinterpretation of the phenomenon of time, that was stripped down to countable clock-time already by Aristotle. Even the most sophisticated, mathematized quantum physics and cosmology employ still this vulgar conception of time, suitably mathematized, or even try to eliminate the pesky time variable altogether from their equations of motion. The conundrums of quantum indeterminacy in mathematized physics are of its own making, by misconceiving, i.e. vulgarizing and spatializing, the phenomenon of time.
The conception of linear time first cast by Aristotle needs to be recast by going back to scratch. This is difficult and meets with savage resistance in the guise of complacency. Modern science and modern philosophy are too heavily invested in our reigning historical cast of mind to countenance such an unheard-of project. They continue to work instead at the cutting edge on the algorithmization of our mind and the world, i.e. on our self-abolition, through what is sold to us in our thoughtless gullibility as progress.
Neither empirically based science nor modern philosophy is able to fulfil any historical change of mind as articulated in the Greek phrase περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς, i.e. turning around the entire psyche. This the proper task of philosophy: to disclose the truth of the phenomena starting with the most elementary. But today’s philosophy has been thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by modern science; it serves as its handmaiden, entrusted condescendingly with ethical mopping-up that always comes too late.
Thus mathematization does make idiots of us all,
And thus the native hue of the phenomena
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of models,
And changes of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the urge of necessity.
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Movement and Time in the Cyberworld Appendix: ‘A demathematizing phenomenological interpretation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy’ De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.
Quantum indeterminacy and the will to precalculate motion.
Capitalocene & The global law of movement.
An Invisible Global Social Value.
