3/23/11

Summary/Paraphrase of The Age of the World Picture

Summary of Age [Era] of the World Picture:

This essay is an exploration of the essence which holds sway in the phenomenon of the “world picture”, which is to say the historical advent of “world views”. This might be described as the phenomenological experience of the world as a relatively accurate representation of an external existence, or object. This way of experiencing the world, as with all others, derives from a metaphysical reference system. What metaphysical reference system does this phenomenon originate in? Essentially, it is the splitting of the world into the subject and the object. This means the subject, or the “I”, is experienced as the ground of everything, the reference point for truth and interpretation, for immediate validity. This simultaneously necessitates a setting up of the world as an other, over/against the subject, or a representation by the subject of the world. But latent in this division is ultimately the total primacy of the subject, for with the subject as ground, all study of the object is truly only a study of the subject’s representation, and therefore of the subject. Hence, as the essence of the modern age qua the era of the world as representation manifests in the modern age as the acute exaggeration both of the subjective and of the objective, for they are two sides of one division. To wit, the very age in which the world stands before man almost entirely as an object at man’s disposal, to be stored up and used, etc, he finds in himself occurrence of subjectivism in the sense of individualism [“post-modern”-ism]. This essence holds sway as early as Plato, in his understanding of the being of that which is in being as Idea and finds explicit articulation in Descartes’ Meditations, and near-consummation in modern sciences and humanities, wherein the objects of study almost disappear, becoming instead “anthropologies”, or essentially studies of man’s study of those objects. To explain how this comes to pass: science, in setting up the world as picture over/against the observer, employs methodologies which are the parameters of its way of observation, and adheres to these stands rigorously. But these standards become normative of the world because, while they do not apprehend the world for what it is in its fullness, they rigorously pursue a framing of the world into their parameters. Thus the specialization (the progression towards a more and more exact study of object as representation and therefore of the study of the representation itself) of the sciences in intrinsic, is an outworking of the essence of science, which is the same essence as that of the age of the world picture. Being that this essence holds sway as early as Platonic thinking, the era of the world as representation is not new in its setting up of the world as picture, but rather in its taking up of this representation as mans calling and the foundation for his enhancement.

I abstain from summarizing the very ending for now. It’s weird. Below is a page-numbed paraphrase of the essay.

115 – The metaphysical framework of an age determines it phenomenological experience of the world

116 – Five essential phenomena of the modern world

117 – Understanding the essence of science will yield an understanding of the essence of the whole modern age

117 – Neither Greek nor medieval science was “exact”, because of a different interpretation of beings

118-124 – Modern science starts from the assumption of a “fixed ground plan”, or a set of anticipatory expectations of in what way the world will appear, which obligates the observes to inquire into nature in only those terms, which as the becomes more absorbed, become idiosyncratic. Hence, specialization. This ground plan differs from science to science but the normativeness is essentially the same

124 – The self augmenting normativness of the essence of modern science

125 – Precedence of methodology over that which is (nature, history)

126 - Projection and rigor, methodology and ongoing activity, mutually require each other, constituting the essence of modern science, aka “research”

127 – The correspondence theory of truth is an expression of the objectification of nature, which is latent in all of metaphysics from Plato to Descartes to Nietzsche

128 - The enlightenment may correctly be understood as the time when man was freed from previous epistemological obligations (like church authority) to his own intellect, and therefore the rise of the predominance of the subject. But questioning after the essence of this situation leads us to see that this is simultaneously the acute rise of the object and the objective as well

128 – This means the subject becomes the ground and the standard, in the sense that is alone is what stands before ready and unconcealed, true and certain, as immediately valid.

129 – “World picture” indicates, not “picture of the world”, but “that the world is represented as picture”. It indicates that the world, all that is in being, is understood to be, only inasmuch as it is represented by man to himself as over/against himself, being set before him as an identifiable coherence

131 – For the Greeks man was beheld by the world, borne along by it. Modern man set the world up as over/against himself and as something to be observed by him. For the Greeks, to apprehend was to gather, save, catch up, preserve the presencing of truth, rather to forcibly extract it. As early as Plato’s understanding of beingness as idea, the subject/object distinction can be seen.

132 – What is new about the modern age is not this objectification of that which is, the essence of which originates at the beginning of metaphysics. Rather it is how this objectification has been taken up as man’s calling and as his foundation.

133 – Subjectivism in the sense of individualism is only possible in a mode of being in which man is a subject within the objective world. Indeed, the subjectivism becomes more acute inasmuch the world becomes more objectified, comes to appear more as something at man’s disposal to be conquered. The consummation of this, as in quantum physics, is that all sciences become “anthropologies”, that is to say, philosophical interpretation of man and in relation to man only. World-pictureness is identical with this.

Note Appendix 13

134 – The absence of being in the modern world, the shadow which indicates the concealed presence of light, takes the form of the gigantic and of the incredibly small (which are qualitative transformations resultant from quantitative change at a certain scale), which in its concealed-informativness calls out to us the concerning being.

136 – Genuine reflection is the key to understanding the essence of the world as picture.

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