Metaphor and Reality: From Homer to Kant

About this event

We’d like to be equipped to understand contemporary philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand twentieth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand nineteenth-century philosophy. But to do that, we need to understand Kant. But to do that, we need to understand the tradition from Homer to Hume (plus Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, and Rousseau, and Bacon, Kant’s role model WRT method). So we’re going to run through the entire tradition. Just kidding. That would be impossible. Instead, we will run through the entire tradition with an eye to certain things only. We’re looking for the things that will allow us to understand Kant perfectly, thoroughly, precisely, and to render his model with complete concreteness and clarity. There’ll be no vagueness, no fancy-sounding sentences containing famous terms that no one understands. We’re not going to allow ourselves to use words such as noumenon, thing in itself, a priori, and transcendental while still not understanding them. Instead of sounding smart and saying things that make us nauseous because we don’t understand them, we’re going to relive these astounding, epoch-making intellectual orgasms in their original historical context by means of actual trance induction. We will collect all the materials and methods we need to understand Kant by picking them up along the way only after our time machine has landed, in the actual contexts in which they were developed. If you can’t render the meaning of tech terms down to simple experiences that anyone can actually experience in the present moment, then your understanding has been “symbolic” all along, which is why you’re still frustrated and burned out even after your 100th Kant event. Think of the educational adventure at St. John’s (https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs): walking the history from Homer and Euclid up through Schrödinger and Heisenberg, reading actual texts, working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments (which they have in the classroom), and puzzling over the actual problems, yourself, directly, with real emotion. The Problem This “working through concrete demonstrations and experiments using the original antique instruments” has been missing from these online philo-learning salons for too long. That is the first thing we will remedy. The second is infecting SADHOnauts with genuine intellectual upset, so that we are all genuinely motivated to puzzle ourselves over the original problems in their original contexts. If we use an inherited term and don’t understand the original metaphor from which it was extracted, reshaped, disguised, renamed, and modified, we receive it in a peculiar condition. Like Nietzsche’s coin worn smooth through constant use, it has lost the stamping and engraving that would help us interpret it. We receive it as a natural, given, mysterious, opaque orb of ore. This is a nightmare situation and leads to much philosophical and life distress. As the great Nebraskan Gernsbachian Transcendentalist philosopher L. Ron Hubbard said to SADHO CSO Steven Taubeneck (met by chance in an elevator) at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in September 3, 1955 (held in the Manger Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio), “Steven, a bypassed definition gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed-out feeling. A not-there feeling and a sort of nervous hysteria will follow in the back of that." (This articulation proved to be so effective that it appeared nearly verbatim as official canon 15 years later in the HCOB of 25 June 1971 entitled “Barriers to Study.” See here for the actual historical document that Tom Cruise credits with transforming him from a dyslexic nobody into the most powerful Scientologist of all time.) We experience these unpleasant effects but blame the reading material instead of their failure to schematize abstract terms. And then we perform these vaguely understood philosophical sentences at Meetup events and receive