SUO: Re: natural lite of reason
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| The natural thinker is one who believes
| that everything that happens is natural.
| Those who extract small truths from the
| roots of words will tell you that "be"
| and "physical" are co-derivatives of
| the same urpflanze. I am now, and
| always have been a natural thinker,
| and one who extracts small truths
| from the roots (stems, leaves,
| flowers, and seeds) of words.
| So what? A natural thinker
| says nothing of substance
| until claiming something
| about the form and the
| structure of what is.
| And that is what
| makes all the
| difference.
Mike,
I really thought that this one was pretty plain.
Suppose that a person is a "hydroist" and thinks
that everything is made of water. Maybe that's
supposed to be a "substantial" theory, because
it commits itself, ontology-wise, to a single
substance that's supposed to "stand under"
and support every other essence of being.
But pretty soon the hydroist is forced to say:
Well, I know that the phenomena, that is, the
appearances, do not appear so uniform as all
that, but that is because this "water" is not
your ordinary water like you see in the salty
seas and the freshwater pools, but is a kind
of universal, polymorphic, protean water that
can take on the appearance of whate'er else
there might be to see. So we have the ever
fluid form of a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
The theory has no content, because it makes
no distinction, and thus determines no form.
The hydroist doctrine, I am forced to say,
just doesn't hold water.
A naturalism that says "everything is natural",
like a reism that says "everything is a thing",
has no more substance than that, and it is just
another form of nominal thiking, until it makes
some formal, informative, relational, structural
commitment to the shape and flow of what exists.
Jon Awbrey
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