|
|
|
|
FRAGMENTATION OF BEING and the Path Beyond the Void by Kent D. Palmer
copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
Is there room for generalization and speculation in the midst of overspecialization and rational discourse that must be rigorously defensible? My training in sociology and philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas taught me two things which have been detrimental to an Academic career: First, from Professor C.K. Warriner I learned to write working papers. Second, from Professor Alfonso Verdu I learned to draw diagrams to represent lattices of concepts. Though these two skills led away from full prose presentations of my ideas within the confines of what is academically acceptable, they were exceptionally conducive to, thinking things through, thoroughly. These skills were applied as I became lost in the jungle of Western Sociology and Philosophy as I attempted to do my Ph.D. Dissertation at the London School of Economics under the tutelage of Professor D. Martin (L.S.E.) and Professor H.P. Rickman (City University). There I wrote a thousand pages of working papers which I could not condense into the smaller format of the dissertation. Thus I decided to write a shorter dissertation from scratch on subjects I knew less well in order to have a viable dissertation. Because of that I nearly failed the examination. In fact, I took the examination twice because the first External Examiner wanted to fail me, due to a single paragraph in my dissertation. Fortunately, I had two Internal Advisors who stood up for me. I was fortunate enough to pass the second examination, by the mercy of Allah. By that time I was beyond caring. My working papers, which a friend on return to the U.S.A. described as utterly unreadable, were full of diagrams and flights of ungrounded theorizing. They were left aside as I turned to the problem of making a living and learning a craft. The working papers were really travel diaries. After logging miles in the purely imaginary landscape which was a kaleidoscope of ideas, facts, viewpoints, paradigms, philosophies, etc., I have not even now freed myself from that chaotic morass. In fact I would say I am one thinker who has drowned in that quicksand. A few splutterings and bubbles perhaps rise up through the mud. These essays are those bursts of inspiration which arise when one discovers that what one thought was a morass of quicksand is really an intricate and delicate pattern of a cyclone around an empty vortex.
Speculation has gone the way of introspection, it is no longer judged to be a respectable way of approaching any topic. However, I would argue that sometimes speculation and introspection are the only means of access we have to the most difficult issues that confront us in the post-modern age. I advocate the methodology of Heuristic Research where the whole emphasis is on confronting and living in ones own thought instead of distancing ourselves from it. All the great disciplines of human science have attempted to introduce distance in order to make the study of who we are and what it means respectable. Structuralism, dialectics, hermeneutics, and phenomenology all introduce distance in one form or another. Heuristic Research goes to the other extreme and emphasizes a dwelling in the question. For me that question is: `How do new things come into existence?', which is summarized in one word made common coinage for these themes by G.H. Mead: Emergence. It is this theme that leads to an understanding of the phenomena called The Fragmentation of Being. Simply put, the Fragmentation of Being is a pervasive but subtle phenomena that marks our times. It is the break up of the most general concept, Being, into many different kinds of Being. This phenomena has only occurred since the turn of the last century, and with the approaching turn of the next, the so called post-modern age is inaugurated in which that break up is complete. It has been discovered that the different kinds of Being underlie all forms of emergence. We can only understand ontological phenomena through introspection and speculation because this kind of phenomena is central to our human beingness. The breakup of Being into different kinds of Being is traced back further and further in this study to the foundations of the Indo-european worldview. This most modern historical and cultural phenomena displays ancient roots. This book traces those roots and explores the nexus where profundity and creativity meet. The Western worldview, which has become the dominant view of things in the whole world, is seen as having emergence as its central core. That emergence may only be understood by tracing the fragmentation of Being back further and further and laying out the mythic underpinnings of our ontological concepts and their relations to each other.
The book itself is comprised of a large lattice of working papers which are blatantly speculative and full of the path of my thoughts rather than summaries of outcomes. It is a diary of the path of my own thought, an introspective journal which has unfolded as I have dwelled in my essential question on the origin of all things within the Western worldview. It breaks the mold of academic specialization because it dwells with so many texts and concepts from a wide variety of sources. But it revolves around a few basic questions such as:
These are some of the questions which I have attempted to pursue in the course of this series of working papers. I have advanced speculations on the answers through the course of my path of thought based on deep immersion in these questions. Others would come to completely different conclusions. This has been a journey of self-discovery which hopefully, if even only as an example, may help others toward the discovery of their own selves. We have lived at a distance from our selves too long. Many of the world's problems have opened out from that distancing. This is a first step back into the lost continent of the Western self-form. Only if many of us take this journey may we hope to rediscover who We, as a singular intersubjective cohort, are and why we do those awe-full things that leave such destruction in our wake.
|
|
|
|