Ding an Sich?

[randall patrick]

John Marmysz from, Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism:

"In accordance with Kant's 'Copernican Revolution', Nietzsche conceives of our phenomonal world as arising out of the relationship between our minds and the 'Ding an Sich', which for Nietzsche is 'chaos'. By imposing order on chaos, humans 'falsify' the 'objective' world, producing an unfaithful representation of the reality that surrounds them. This representation, in its static and comprehensible appearance, does not really correspond to the chaos that underlies it, but nevertheless what we call 'knowledge' is just the outcome of this imposition of structure on the world of disorder."



We will almost certainly never grasp "ontologically" and/or "teleologically" the Ding an Sich. It is, after all, an inextricable and inexpressible manifestation of primodial questions [philosophical antinomies] that are simply mindboggling. So much so we don't even know how to frame the questions about it "logically" let alone encompass reasonable answers. What does rational thought even mean when you contemplate the universe or human existence "in itself"?

But it is not true that when we seek to enompass an intelligible relationship between "in my head" and "out in the world" we are necessarily imposing our own static order on chaos. That depends on what aspect of "reality" we are talking about. Natural science describes natural law in a reasonable manner. And there is no way we can assume that when we do so we are just imposing our own rules on that which is inherently chaotic. It would seem to be [essentially] nonsensical to talk about cosmogenic reality in terms of either order or chaos. We can only become more or less knowledgable about how those relationships [between, say, matter and energy or time and space] "work"...how they work "in reality". Reality as it is construed from the teeny tiny persepective of a mere mortal negociating his or her cosmological blink of an eye trajectory from dust to dust.

Where the true impositions prevail is in our discussions of everything else. Particularly In our debates over moral and political values. For example: was the American assault on Fallujah order being imposed on chaos...or chaos being imposed on order? Well, it depends on how you understand the meaning of the words...on how you understand it in the context of the American occupation and/or liberation of Iraq. And that is merely a manifestation of how you impose an intellectual [moral and political] agenda on human history. And that is merely an adjunct of the evolution of life itself. And that is merely a infinitesimal speck in the context of All There Is.

In other words so much that we propose by way of explaining the world around us would just be shadows and fog from a perspective that really did approach the Ding an Sich.

Randall Patrick