Sunday, June 17, 2012

Microcosmos, Macrocosmos, Counter-Copernican Revolution

Copernicus' Heliocentrism entails that the Earth, and, hence, the humans that inhabit it, revolve around the Sun.  Thus, Kant's 'Copernican revolution', which results in the location of the human subject at the center of its universe, seems, in at least one respect, better characterized as a 'counter-Copernican revolution', i. e. because it undoes the Heliocentric displacement of humans from its Ptolemaic focal point.  Now, as Kant shows, the human subject inhabits two realms, which he variously characterizes as 'phenomena'-'noumena', 'nature'-'freedom', etc.  Here, as has been previously proposed, following Lebiniz' model of a Monad, that pair is also conceivable as 'microcosmos'-'macrocosmos'.  On that basis, Kant's 'Copernican revolution' actually consists in a deconstruction--a 'critique', in the most literal sense of the term--of the conflation of the two realms that is usually accepted as ordinary experience.

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