KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA33 (Mancuso)

Commentary 6 (to TA32 R11)

( OUT THERE IS OUR DOING )
by David Herman
27 Feb 2001, posted 6 March 2001

Morse Peckham, in his book EXPLANATION AND POWER: The Control of Human Behavior, in Chapter III, "Culture and Social Institutions", the section, "The Culture of Homo Scientificus", page 155, writes:

"For human beings, the world consists of signs, and it is impossible for human beings to consider the world, or themselves from a meta-semiotic point of view or position. The world is an immense tapestry of innumerable threads, emerging and disappearing in the presentation and evanishment of indefinably innumerable designs, and human beings themselves form some of those same threads and patterns. We are figures in the tapestry we observe, and respond to, and manipulate. The old notion that the world is an illusion is sound, for no sign (configuration) dictates our responses. But it is sound only up to a point, because the physical character of the world limits the range of our responses. We can do lots of things with water, but as yet we have no way to build a skyscraper out of it, though the possibility has its charms; nor can we walk on it without doing something either to ourselves or to the water. Or to use another notion, the world is Idea, our Idea, but it is also Reality, Actuality, Factuality. The mind transcends the world, but then it does not transcend the world. Plato's demiourgos did not create the reality he set about ordering; he set about ordering a chaos, a recognition that human behavior works on material that is really there. Or, to put it in somewhat newer terms, the world is object, and man is subject, and the subject is different from the object but, nevertheless, somehow the same."

------------------------------

David Herman