The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 9

So far we have walked through the first and second rungs of the ladder. Before moving further, it is worth stepping back and asking whether the trajectory we have been tracing has a shape.

The history appears to climb. The Milesians began with the lowest rung and worked on matter; Plato moved to concepts; the medievals and the German idealists developed the second rung at increasing depth; phenomenology and mathematical logic refined it in the twentieth century. The ladder is ascended step by step as philosophy matures. This reading is attractive and partly accurate, and it is also a trap, because it invites the Hegelian inference that the ascent is necessary and the later positions supersede the earlier ones by virtue of their position on the ladder.

A glance at the actual record complicates the ascending picture immediately.

Pythagoras ontologized the fourth rung in the sixth century before the common era, more than a hundred years before Plato ontologized the second. Parmenides reached the sixth rung with his One-Being at roughly the same time as Pythagoras. Heraclitus installed a version of the third rung with his Logos in the same period. The Indian Upanishadic tradition used concepts of the sixth rung (Brahman and Atman) by the eighth or seventh century, earlier than any named Greek philosopher. Laozi's Dao is a sixth-rung move.

A pattern is visible once the individual cases are examined. The sixth rung is almost always occupied first. This is surprising only if one assumes that the sixth rung is the most abstract and therefore the most difficult. It is neither. This is the subject's projection of its own meta-position, which is what it is closest to.

One who notices that it stands behind every distinction does not have to travel anywhere to find the sixth rung; it has to turn around.

The first rung is the most available, because matter and qualities impose themselves on perception without requiring reflection. Pythagoras worked on a fourth (the numerical regularities in music, astronomy, and geometry) and on-39

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tologized it by responding to a phenomenon that insists on itself. Wherever the material presses on the subject, ontologization happens early.

The rungs that require more work are the ones where the material has to be dug out of practice. The second rung is the clearest case. Concepts as a distinct domain are not given in perception or in reflection; they have to be extracted from the operations in which they are used, accepted as a separate kind of thing, and then installed as an ontological region. The third rung, language, waited for the twentieth century to receive systematic ontologization, although Heraclitus glimpsed it. The fifth rung, laws of nature, required the development of physics and the scientific revolution before it could be filled out.

The history then has two movements running simultaneously, meeting in the middle.

The first route runs downward from the sixth rung. Once a tradition has ontologized the meta-position, it has a fixed point from which to organize everything else. Neoplatonism is the paradigmatic case: the One at the top, and the rest of reality articulated in emanations downward. Indian philosophy did the same with enormous sophistication, producing the layered cosmologies of Vedanta and the categorial systems of Samkhya. Both traditions spent centuries refining the downward movement and the techniques of ascent that reverse it.

The second path runs upward from the first rung. Once materials and qualities are ontologized, the subsequent work consists in figuring out what stands above them. The Greek materialists after the Milesians, the atomists, and eventually the scientific realists of the modern period form one long line of upward ascent.

The concept as a rung above matter is reached by Plato; language, mathematics, and laws are developed in stages over the following two millennia.

The two movements meet on the second and third rungs, and this is where the most intense and sustained work has happened.

Pythagoras remains the anomaly in this picture, as his ontologization of the fourth rung happened early and did not fit the two movements. Isolated high-rung jumps happen when the material is exceptionally vivid. Then it usually fails to develop into a tradition until the surrounding rungs have been filled

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in. Pythagorean mathematics waited for Platonic philosophy to give it a metaphysical framework and for the scientific revolution to offer it a physical one.

Heraclitean Logos waited for Stoic and Christian theology, Anaxagorean Nous awaited Plotinus.

The historical sequence was not necessary. Different civilizations pursued alter-nate routes through the same material. Indian tradition developed the downward movement from the sixth rung to extraordinary depth and largely left the upward movement from the first rung underdeveloped. Chinese tradition, particularly in its Daoist branch, complicated the sixth rung in a way that resists further systematic ontologization and put less weight on the construction of the middle floors than either the Indian or the Greek line did. The European tradition offered the most elaborate middle floor. Each was one way of running the ontologization across the same ladder under different cultural and material conditions.