KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA63 (Leslie / Rees)

Commentary 8 (to C5, Benjamin)

FUNDAMENTALISM
by Greg Nixon
4 November 2003, posted 9 November 2003

For Benjamin, McCaffrey, & Leslie :

Fundamentalism is just what it says, an unquestioning belief in some first principle considered to be fundamental to all else. For the True Believer, it's the objective foundation on which further thinking begins. It is the non-rational faith in the fundament of a literal sacred book, doctrine, cult, or worldview (as in the scientific first principle of MIR objective, material Reality). Yes, the academy is running over with fundamentalists. Often it seems the higher one rises, the more entrenched one's basic ontology becomes. It is at unsettling (both to oneself & to others who have come to expect a certain stance from one) to chip away at the shoreline of one's little cay of truth to see what's beneath it, & the university is like an archipelago of such cays. Each academic is kept too busy defending the boundaries of her little cay to take the time to dig into it.

Even attempts at non-concepts like 0-D have some element of fundamentalism to them in that they must remain conceptually constructed from the world of experience. This is to say, that a state of 0-D in itself would have to be absolute nothingness, "void & without form", that is, no fundament at all - and nothing that can be thought, even here. But we still must think up concepts to indicate the non-concept, & anticipate a sympathetic reader who will sort of a hollow out of the referent, leaving only a negative space where once had been a sign.

In this way, radical constructivism, which literally claims to begin with nothing literal (or objectively real) at all is entirely the ·other· of fundamentalism. All the reality we know is the reality of our experience (including the experience of technically enhanced "measurement"). How else ? So how can we know of a (or ·the·) Reality-beyond-experience?

Without humans, there would be no human world, no world "as we know it". There may well be other worlds shaped & shaping in return other sorts of experience, though we can only speculate on any worlds beyond our own ken. But all "worlds" are experienced worlds. (And we do "speculate" often, having great fun picturing primeval landscapes like, say, the Jurassic, never noting that in the act of "portraying" or "picturing" it, we are seeing ·as though we there·. It is a world imagined, extrapolated from what we know from our life-world. But w/o that human perspective, what would the "Jurassic" (another human invention) ·really· be like on its own terms ? How can we see it in our "mind's eye" but not from our perspective?

You see what happens to one's fundament of truth, one's little "cay to the kingdom" ? It is only when one is back in the dynamic waters of creation that one can see how all the cays are connected by a similar subterranean source, & how they are each in process, one wearing away while another expands. Without the creative process or constructivist vision (that reality experienced is in reality experience itself) there would be no need for a term like "fundamentalist". The fundamentalist who just knows ·absolutely· that his island in the stream is the foundation of all the Truth ever to be known is the binary opposite, not of other such islands, but of the surging, shapeless, shifty stream itself. Fundamentalism is to space as constructivism is to time.

Fundamentalism - taking metaphor literally, process as entity, or word as object (or direct correspondence to it) - is probably the most pragmatic way to deal with daily life: Get on with the doing & don't worry over unanswerable questions. However, such a mindset makes communication between one cay of truth & another either superficial or hostile. Herbert Müller makes the important point not much considered that if we understood our life world cays as pragmatic metaphors ("as if" they were fundamentally real), we bellicosity would lessen while understanding (leading to cooperation) would increase. We would see that we are all part of the Great Cay Chain of Being.

As I say, an abstract idea over-used or misused (as often happens in the academy or press) soon becomes hypostatized into being treated as an actually existing entity. 0-D, for instance, must remain an abstraction with negative content if it is to be useful. If conceptual content replaces negative indication in the minds of some, it could become reified into a fundamentalism for those same minds. But for now if anyone (say, Benjamin, McCaffrey, or Leslie) still wishes to insist that creative dynamism or radical constructivism is a fundamentalism of its own, try walking in its shifty stream then point to the metaphoric water, the metaphoric motion, or the metaphoric pointer.

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

P.S. This is not to deny that fundamentalism is creative. Just look at Phil Benjamin's purposeful misunderstanding, misuse, & reapplication of the Eldridge-Gould evolutionary thesis of punctuated equilibria !

"That which is in opposition is in concert, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful harmony." [Herakleitos, frag. 25]

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

Greg Nixon