Pascal looked at the eternity that came before him, the eternity that will succeed him, and asks these questions, "Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?" These are natural questions to ask. A more durable response, however, would be to ask them, and then to ask, under what jurisdiction am I asking? And to consider, what kind of a lunatic would expect an eternal response, let alone a global one? A King?
In reading philosophy, I've come across the term "a priori" at least a thousand times now, each time further confusing what I had thought it meant, to the point of the idea's oblivion. Finally I can take a step back with Gilles Deleuze, in his lecture on Kant. "A priori" simply means "independent of experience". "A posteriori" means "given or givable in experience".
Because of our capitalist world, where the will to proceed to progress has shifted to the seat of the individual, the perceptual eye has followed. Is it possible to do what Emerson believed, to sit before the universe and receive an intuition about it whole?
Yesterday I saw a remarkable phenomenon I had never seen before. Sitting on the seawall of the Intercoastal Waterway, which sits about a quarter of a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, I was reading thoughts on justice like these from Pascal. I have a place I like to sit underneath a tree. No coconut has bopped me on the head yet. The yachts and speedboats occasionally come by left and right. I was watching a couple of yahoos on a smaller boat speed much faster than the speed limit, then slow down as they approached the Atlantic causeway bridge. There was no chance for the wake to have made it to my position by the seawall yet. And yet on the surface of the placid water, about five feet away from the barnacled cement, a circle broke on the surface like a smoke ring. And then another just beyond the rim of the circle. And then another, approaching the seat where I sat. The physical motion of the puffsmoke-like circling reminded me of a Slinky, where the coils gather energy and then proceed. I thought it might be a manatee breaking the surface of the water for some smelly breaths. But no, just an underwater water phenomenon, probably from the boat. And then the waves from the wake of the boat began breaking against the seawall, eliminating the rings.
Zhou Luyun's (Irene Chou's) painting called 長壽 (Longevity).
"To the question: does the whole of possible experience mean something? No meaning at all if we remain in an a posteriori approach, because in an a posteriori approach I am led to make an addition: the roses, the flowers other than roses, the plants which are not flowers, the animals, etc.... I could go to infinity like that and nothing tells me that I have a whole of possible experience. On the contrary, experience is fundamentally fragmented, it is opposed to a totalisation. If Kant launches this very very new notion of a totality of possible experience it is because he is in a position to define, to say: yes, there is a level where the whole of possible experience takes on a sense, it is precisely because there are universal predicates which are attributed to all things, which is to say are attributed to any object whatever. Thus it is a priori that the notion of the totality of possible experience will be founded."
Obviously there is a totality of experience. It's now; it's there. Everyone is creating it. Everyone is contributing to it. But can it be researched? Can it be caught in a flash? Can the individual mind meditate on it in totality? And if not, do you then take a lowest common denominator approach, with the simplicity of a pop tart? Or try and take the pierce of a poet to heart? There is no such thing as a purely stoical approach. Actions are observed and we act. It would be nice not to have a creative instinct and just enjoy life for what it is, especially if we're all contributing to the totality in our own, silent ways. Unfortunately for some of us, this is a completely dissatisfying approach to life. I love art too much to ignore it.
At another point in the lecture, Deleuze makes a funny aside about how Kant is always breaking things down into threes. Maybe not so funny, because at the time Kant was writing at the end of the 18th century, democracy was taking shape, breaking justice down into Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches. At some point I'm going to have to take another look at Kant's What Is Enlightenment? (published one year after the close of the "American Revolution" and five years before the French one began) because I swear his obsession is with an awareness of the loss of privacy, not with the "faculties" of the mind. Emerson read Kant badly, thinking that "transcendent" equated with "universal".
