Sunday, February 10, 2019

Action and Copernican Revolution

At the beginning of Matter and Memory, Bergson describes the fundamental immediate scenario of Human individual experience--one as the origin of possible action on the surrounding world, into which cognition and other mental processes are incorporated.  But subsequently , like most of the Philosophical tradition, Bergson, subordinates Action to Cognition, in his case, Action qua Material to Memory qua Spiritual. Kant, too, briefly potentially incorporates Cognition into Action, under the rubric of subordinating Theory to Practice.  But it is only at the end of his trilogy that the meaning of that subordination becomes clear.  He begins the trilogy with a 'Copernican Revolution' in Cognition, and closes it with a concept of Human Moral experience as the Telos of Nature.  But that concept is nothing other than Anthropocentrism, a concept the repudiation of which is entailed by the repudiation of Geocentrism, which is a consequence of Copernican Astronomy.  In other words, Kant begins with a Copernican Revolution in Theory, and ends with a counter-Copernican Revolution in Practice, with the latter as ultimately prior in his system.  So, Kant does briefly restore Action to the center of the Human world, but only as constrained by a hope for the beneficence of a deity that inhabits an inaccessible encompassing realm.  As subsequent events have shown, that constraint has not prevented a sequence of Human actions that have led them into a celestial realm the presumed inaccessibility of which is debunked by the Copernican Revolution in Astronomy.

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