Concept of world-philosophical syncretism. By syncretism I mean global concrescence, the endeavor to unite cross-cultural ideas in a comprehensive system. (..) Jasper's existential tropes do not maximally promote cross-cultural and inter-textual thought. (..) Philosophy today has a need to be global, reflecting contemporary human civilization that is being transformed by a worldwide networking of political, economic, and cultural forces. (..) In the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer and Emerson were the two most original world-philosophical theorists. (..) Emerson and Schopenhauer were the two main influences on Nietzsche, whose thought so greatly impacted Jaspers. (..) Dilworth regards the 'science of review' in his 1989 book as parasitic on the genuine first-order "research sciences," which in this context comes down to the original theoretical vistas created by the Great Philosophers themselves. (..) comprehensive principle: assuming the possibility of cross-cultural encompassment of great ideas in their essential networking (..) evaluative methodology: distinguish between the first-order seminal classics (which I call the "wholesalers") and those that reenact - often hybridizing and popularizing - the deeper and denser first principles of those first-line classics in attenuated versions (the "retailers"). (..) The world-history of philosophy must be, and can be, learned and relearned out of the primary sources in their essential cross-references. (..) Kant: philosophers as the 'lawgivers of reason', mathematicians and logicians as the 'technicians of reason' (Critique of Pure Reason). (..) Jasper's 'groups of Great Philosophers: 1 those who transcend 'philosophy proper': Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus 2 philosophers proper 2a Perennially Seminal Founders of philosophizing 2b the Visions of Thought 2c Creative Orderers / Great Systemizers 2d Great Disturbers 2d1 Probing Negators 2d2 Radical Awakeners 3 Disseminators of philosophical thought. (..) D: Jasper's classification of the Great Philosophers exhibits a principle of arbitrariness that appears explicitly to block a systematic rationale. (..) In proto-postmodern fashion, his approach negates the possibility of discovering generic and specific networkings of great ideas. (..) his agenda seems mainly to consist in its political trajectory, which is anti-"modern." (..) In the current schools of contemporary academicians we run into the current waves of deconstructive multicultural studies which promote nominalistic, historicistic, relativistic, skeptical agendas of interpretation, often explicitly impugning the "historic" classics as hegemonic or obsolete. (..) D: There is only philosophy, - philosophia universalis - as articulated paradigmatically by Kant's concept of "cosmical concept." (..) To some degree, I think, Jaspers has added his prestige to the academy's tendency toward multicultural psychologism. (..) Jaspers proves to be no genuine syncretist at all, rather offering chauvinistic interpretations of them from his own European standpoint. (..) Emerson's and Peirce's view is less bound by the anthropocentric and psychologistic exigencies of Jaspers' concept of Existenz. (..) D: the bottom-line metaphysical concept, I submit, must be Nature ("God or Nature" in Spinoza's sense, or more precisely Natura naturans/naturata without the mechanistic implication). (..) Jaspers has joined the company of the Great Philosophers in his own version of the principle of the Encompassing - the comprehensive principle of the plasticity and potentiality of the universe, which underwrites the metaphysical freedom of the scientific, artistic, and philosophical geniuses as well as of any living creature that has any glimpse or living embodiment of the "Flying Perfect." On the whole, however, Jaspers accomplished this in a too conservative and negative tone, compared to the more progressive and affirmative metaphysics of Nature in Emerson and Peirce. |