THE PRESENCE-AND-ABSENCE MINDED PROFESSOR

I've also recently encountered one messboard-poster who fervently believed that if you didn't agree with his Empiricist screed, then you must be (horrors) a Rationalist. This naturally overlooks the fact that thinkers like Kant, Schopenhauer and Cassirer were (albeit in different ways) trying to forge a bridge that might join the best aspects of Rationalist (i.e. Plato) and Empiricist thought into a coherent system.-- "Ain't Essentializin,'" ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE.

Recently I participated in another argument with the above-mentioned poster, during which he made the interesting claim that his fervent advocacy of Empiricism came down to rejecting the "theology of presence." He didn't define this, but from the gist of his argument I believe he meant the tendency of human beings to project the images in their minds upon the world and to imagine said images as potent real-world presences. I replied that this empiricist view of the world reduced all of reality to fit into an "empiricist lockbox" and came down to nothing but a "theology of absence." To this notion my opponent did not reply, though we did butt heads over other arcane matters of philosophy.

Now, the invocation of "presence" and "absence" bring to mind another essay, "The Unbearable Fullness of Emptiness," in which I suggested that both the literary quest for presence (or "fullness") and the literary assertion of absence (or "emptiness") were both essential to the human spirit, using two authors suggested by a work I reviewed there, as examples:

It seems demonstrable to me that language is always in a continuous process of "breaking down" and "building up," much like the concepts of "War" and "Love" in Empedocles. Thus Carroll's "empty set" take upon fantasy is simply his apprehension of its potentiality in the "breaking down" of seemingly fixed concepts, while Tolkien's "full set" take shows an awareness of how language, and any structure created by language, also has the propensity to "build up" associations and connections of all kinds.

And what goes for literature goes equally for philosophy, with Empiricism preaching the gospel of emptiness/absence and Rationalism the credo of fullness/presence.

Now in the "essentializin'" essay I also cited an anonymous online critic who opined that while Kant essentially separated the world of natural science from the world of what Cassirer calls "cultural sciences", Cassirer reunited the two aspects:

...whereas intersubjective or objective validity in the natural sciences rests ultimately on universal laws of nature ranging over all (physical) places and times, an analogous type of intersubjective or objective validity arises in the cultural sciences quite independent of such universal laws. In particular, although every “cultural object” (a text, a work of art, a monument, and so on) has its own individual place in (historical) time and (geographical-cultural) space, it nevertheless has a trans-historical and trans-local cultural meaning that emerges precisely as it is continually and successively interpreted and reinterpreted at other such times and places. The truly universal cultural meaning of such an object only emerges asymptotically, as it were, as the never to be fully completed limit of such a sequence.

Now, I would tweak this a little to add that in the natural sciences, the pattern of "emptying" is inevitable by the very nature of human history. My opponent was to an extent correct to say that Primitive A might have well projected upon the physical sun the image of a sun-god in order to make the sun comprehensible to him. This sort of identification is intolerable to the physical sciences, as Cassirer often pointed out. However, though the image of the sun-god may not tell the physical sciences anything noteworthy about the sun, the image does tell the cultural sciences many noteworthy things about what Primitive A saw and how he saw it, in precisely the "trans-historical and trans-local" manner described above. Physical science then must seek to empty out the physical world of its human perceptors, while cultural science must seek to fill it up again.

The situation may sound like a task assigned to the Danaids of Greek myth, but the conflict is not that dire. In addition to Cassirer, the myth-scholar Theodor Gaster suggests an interdependence of the "emptying" and "filling" modes in man's culture which is expressed through the periodicity of seasonal rituals.

In AN OPEN QUEST PART 2 I wrote:

Gaster introduces two Greek terms that identify how the respective rites work. Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.

Literature, philosophy and the sciences all require this interdependence. To choose presence over absence at all times, or vice versa, is an error that leads into dogma. Or, to quote Aleister Crowley from THE BOOK OF THE LAW:

“Explain this happening!”

“It must have a natural cause!”
“It must have a supernatural cause!”

Let these two asses be set to grind corn!