Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Centrism, Centripetal, Centrifugal

It seems unarguable that one always finds oneself physically at the center of a world.  Hence, Physical Egocentrism seems to be an undeniable fact that is the basis of Epistemological Egocentrism, as well as of Psychological Egocentrism, and of Moral Egocentrism.  However, proponents of these rarely seem to consider that they all have a further foundation.  To begin with, none of them seems to recognize the ambiguity of any Centrism--Centripetal vs. Centrifugal--and the concepts are each varieties of the former.  So, typically ignored is Centrifugal Egocentrism, i. e. that one is a center of Action in one's world, and, hence, rarely considered is that this is the foundation of the Centripetal Egocentrisms, e. g. that Perception is a function of Action. Indeed, Modern Philosophy is primarily the product of the falsification of Centrifugal Egocentrism as Centripetal Egocentrism, e. g. Descartes, who is self-evidently at a desk writing the Meditations, presenting himself instead as gazing at a fire, and likewise for all the major works of the era.  But one possible exception is the Ethics--in which a Mode is an instance of a divine Emanation, i. e. a center of Action--an exception that is typically obscured by the inclusion of Spinoza as part of a sequence of Rationalists, in opposition to a sequence of Empiricists.  Nevertheless, Spinoza is distinctive among them as acknowledging and exploring the epochal change in human history that is a consequence of the Copernican discovery--a transition from Centripetal Geocentrism, i. e. in which the Earth is the arena of a cosmic drama of which humans are the protagonists, to Centrifugal Geocentrism, in which the Earth is the starting point of the human exploration of a previously impregnable cosmos.

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