index

Tensions among these approaches

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No imperial overview (statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campidoglio in Rome)

Incomplete totalities (P.E.I.)

Incomplete foundations (D.C.)

There are tensions among the philosophical approaches. Hegel has a dynamic teleology towards totality and self-comprehension that is not in Heidegger, and not in Kant in the same demanding way. (In Husserl the dynamic appears in his goal of scientific knowing.)

In Heidegger such a dynamic is either impossible, or a manifestation of the kind of metaphysical thinking that should be rejected.

The Hegelian structural bias towards self-comprehension has a distant parallel in Heidegger's contrast between authentic and inauthentic existence, but Heidegger offers nothing like Hegel's cognitive emphasis or his assurance of success.

Heidegger's world cannot be totalized in a Hegelian manner, and it leads ultimately to the complex relation of Ereignis and Da-sein , a relation that has no exact parallels, though it has analogues, in the earlier thinkers.

Nonetheless, I want to argue that there is a normative or structural encouragement of fuller and complex and self-aware inhabitation with mediations and links known as such. But I can't affirm any automatic dynamic or dialectic to complexity, not even a la Robert Pippin.

My intent is to agree with Hegel that self-comprehension and a drive for wholeness is good (as long as the modes of unity are sufficiently flexible), but to argue against him that there is no purified knowledge of the process, nor any necessary drive for greater self-comprehension. But there is a finite and indirect knowledge of the general features of world constructing.

There is no final totalization of the world or horizon but there is an awareness of the process of inhabitation and meaning-giving.

Here is a large diagram summarizing how Kant and Hegel and others relate to what this project is trying to accomplish. The middle row shows theses from this project while the items above and below relate them to the various thinkers.