Nagarjuna uttered what Leopold said about ecosystems centuries ago. Here is
what he said;

"...nothing exists independently, everything exists through something else."

Karl Jaspers commenting on Nagarjuna said that "every man lives by signs
when he lives in the realm of appearance - whether he assumes that
'appearance is a sign', or that 'appearance is empty', when he lives in the
assumption "I live" or "I am conscious."

Living by signs is not living independently by dependently in a realm of
appearances. Okay so far. 

"...all categories can be taken absolutely valid, and then easily disproved." 

Since the written word is nothing else but a series of signs semantically
ordered on a white or blank page, a tabula rasa of consciousness, the
digital erasure of presence is established by writing and only traces are
left of what was intended. The idea has replaced the vanished object in nature.

I think Hegel was clearer about this 'unveiling' of meaning that cannot be
exhausted simply and forever on one reading. For sure. The ethical would of
necessity be precisely the absence of contradiction in an ethical community,
or so he thinks. So where contradiction arises there must be one principle
enactment: a higher principle that contradicts the lesser, or rather another
order installed! superceded! inveighed!

The bodily metaphor can be extended to many kinds of descriptions. The
metaphor is a 'detour to truth' (Spivak) and where there are metaphors used
in script, in texts, then the metaphor will detour the reader toward an
unveiling of the truth about something in ideation. By reinstating Leopold,
and agreeing with the metaphor of the body as it resembles the truth about
the land, then the image is extensive. Descartes apparently said that the it
was the light of reason that proved God exists. Remarkably Spivak comments
in her introduction to Grammatology that "Descartes proves God's existence
by means of the natural light (of reason), which, "as something
natural,...has its source in God, in the God whose existence has been put in
doubt and then demonstrated *thanks to it*"

The metaphor of the house

"Speaking of the metaphor of the house chosen again and again by
philosophical practice, Derrida suggests pervasiveness of the circular
project, and its articulation in Hegel: " ....the borrowed dwelling
(demeure)...expropriation, being-away-from-home, but still in a dwelling,
away from home, a place of recovery, self-recognition, self-mustering,
self-resemblance, outside of the self in itself [hors de soi en soi]. This
is philosophical metaphor as a detour in (or in view of) the
reappropriation, the second coming, the self-presence of the idea in its
light." 

Again the phenomenon of body is essentially a problem because if the body is
perceived, then something else must cease to exist. AThe body on the page is
simply a set of brackets ( ) and enclosure. M. Ponty:

"...to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp
all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it. But in so far as
I see those things too, they remain abodes open to my gaze, and, being
potentially lodged in them, I already perceive from various angles the
central object of my present vision. Thus every object is the mirror of all
others. When I look at the lamp on the table, I attribute to it not only the
chimney, the walls, the table can 'see'; the back of my lamp is nothing but
the face which it shows to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so
far as objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats
the others round it as spectators of its hidden aspects which guarantee the
permanence of those aspects by their presence."


Eco is house. The Universe is a body without organs; since it recycles its
wastes it needs no organs of elimination. No organs of perception are
required by the universe because there is nothing outside itself (Timaeus).
Spurious as it may seem, the universe is really like an onion with realms of
concentric meaning with archetypes that intersect to the core from periphery. 

Again this is how the metaphor works I believe.

"...the positing of one single object, in the full sense, demands that
compositive bringing into being of all these experiences in one act of
manifold creation.  Therein it exceeds perceptual experience and synthesis
of horizons - as the notion of a universe, that is to say, a completed and
explicit totality, in which the relationships are those of reciprocal
determination, exceeds that of a world, or an open and indefinite
multiplicity of relationships which are of reciprocal implication. I detach
myself from my experience and pass to the idea. Like the object, the idea
purports to be the same for everybody, valid in all time and all places, and
the individuation of an object in an objective point of time and space
finally appears as the expression of a universal positing power. I am no
longer concerned with my body, nor with time, nor with the world, as I
experience them in ante-predicative knowledge, in the inner communion that I
have with them. I now refer to my body only as an idea, to the universe as
idea, to the idea of space and the idea of time. Thus 'objective' thought is
formed - being that of common sense and of science - which finally causes us
to lose contact with the perceptual experience, of which it is nevertheless
the outcome and the natural sequel. The whole life of consciousness is
characterized by the tendency to posit objects, since it is consciousness,
that is to say self-knowledge, only in so far as it takes hold of itself and
draws itself together in an identifiable object. And yet the absolute
positing of a single object is the death of consciousness, since it congeals
the whole of existence, as a crystal placed in a solution suddenly
crystallizes it." [M. Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception] 



At 03:17 PM 8/23/00 -0500, Jim Tantillo wrote:
>Hi Maria-Stella, hi everyone,
>
>>M-S:
>>I think your analogy and that of the body parts is inappropriate. I think
>>your arguments
>>are weak, and not Leopold's theory:  (two dots)
>


"You never know where fish will go."




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