KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA63 (Leslie / Rees)

Commentary 30 (to C22, van der Meijden)

( ALPHABET LETTERS )
by Glenn C Wood
18 January 2004, posted 21 February 2004

<1>
Found it interesting that M's comment demonstrated a point by referring to the Jesuit's question "Do you believe in God" and Huxley's sonorous "agnostic" which he took credit for coining. Prior to reading M's comment while pursuing a line of research I came across an author who said of Huxley's claim of having invented the word agnostic, that the idea is not new and was expressed by the Biblical Paul who said that the world "knew not God." G. P Fisher (Professor of ecclesiastical history, Yale) said: "the agnosticism to which the Apostle referred commonly had a stock of beliefs of its own in regard to the world unseen, therein differing from the agnosticism of which Professor Huxley has the distinction of being the godfather." It seems here we have a root word, used in the context of a couple theories, that is bountifully incommensurable to the Biblical reference mainly in Huxley's claim to originality.

<1.2>
Huxley was probably more aware of what was needed for academic survival than we are because we're removed from the more than as-if real assumptions made vague by timely distance. Huxley knew how to answer Jesuit forces. He knew that historically Gnostic thinkers were good at keeping traditional Greek and Jewish traditions and philosophies rolling, and this constituted a threat to the historic development of Roman Church traditions. Huxley knew what he was doing by using and qualifying the term gnosis, for he was saying to the threat: "Don't worry fellows, I'm no threat but rather my stuff can be adapted to the cause of your Catholicity." However, the new word only appeared to be incommensurate with gnosticism, for evolutionism was involved in the Gnostic-like complex system of intuitive knowledge sophistically manipulated dialectically. It was abundantly not incommensurate with Gnosticism within which system was contained the essence of evolutionism.

<1.3>
It seems to me that academics and want-a-be book authors are most adept at laying claim to something original. If it's not an unwitting use of an old word, it's the most sophisticated efforts at cultivating ground for the growth of the extraneous.

<2>
Painting greener looking pasture for budding authors is attempted for instance in the idea that terms in one theory are...incommensurable with the like terms in another theory. Abundant room is made for material from the most minute difference. That's suppose to justify disregarding the similar use of terms and ideas by predecessors or even contemporaries. It seems to me Feyerbend was very good at this with regard to Popper, etc., so popular one can use F as support for anything novel. From what I've read he had expressed appreciation for Hitler's oratorial style. He appears to have experienced the power of terms firsthand, for he was in and injured for life in the German military during WW II. I'm simply wondering if out of some glimmering of hope from guilt feelings one can more easily see that having commenced to partake of a theory like fascism, one ought to defend the conduct by emphasizing, with a novel caption, the need for engaging the critiquing faculty without suppressing uncomfortable memories.

<3>
HM has at least a somewhat novel term if "0-D" can be used frequently enough to distract from the religious implications of the idea of zero derivation. But the idea is not new neither in part nor whole. Fortunately HM has moved away from a negative slant toward mind-independent reality by the use of an as-if-mind independent reality. But even here the as-if for science is incommensurate with faith when used to try to identify the unknowable with an as-if nothing. Here, though incommensurable, it does not mean there's even a little bitsy identity. There truly is some as-ifness in faith from a wholly-other perspective, but with faith one proceeds with an appreciation for a providential-fateful as-ifness coming from beyond rather than from an in-depth conjured formula. With faith the as-ifness can still be affirmed if one is burning to death for the as-if goal (though there is a "bad Faith" such as burning others or being burnt as a means to an end; the end here though is not as-if but a well defined commitment to an exclusive worldview).

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Glenn C Wood