Transcendental idealism and the Land

Book 2 of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

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thewormoftheworld'send
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Transcendental idealism and the Land

Post by thewormoftheworld'send »

I took it upon myself to move this topic to a forum where there is less risk of spoilers. Perhaps a mod would like to move the entire thread here and merge it with this post?
Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:I don't think TI is solipsistic. I wouldn't tend to think first of the Ritual of Desecration when applying the concept of radical evil to TCoTC. I didn't know Donaldson explicitly cites Plato and Jung as philosophical inspiration for his work (that's what you're saying, yeah?). The real world would be "a product of intellectual intuition" too if it were created by divine forces, regardless of its relation to us as an object of empirical consciousness. (The critical philosophy's theory of knowledge doesn't rule this out, just our knowing whether it's true.) I don't think you quite got my reference to instability (I was talking about how wild magic can generate stuff like caesures, not... entropy...).
.

I'm not saying that SRD cites Plato and Jung, I quoted from the Gradual Interview in which SRD himself states that he has those influences. I do admit, however, to the advantage of having read the GI in its entirety regarding the Chrons. (In order to avoid spoilers, I had to brush over everything in the GI which discussed his other works.)

I don't think Kant would deny that our real world is a product of intellectual intuition, only not from the human viewpoint but, exactly as you said, from the divine viewpoint.

The use of wild magic, by its very nature, corrupts Time, because every act of wild magic is a violation of the laws of sequence and causality.

Entropy is a natural part of the world, whether our own or the Land's. However, the presence of wild magic in the Land tends to hasten the inevitable end. Caesures are one product of both wild magic and entropy, and at one time, at the apex of the Land's beauty, Caesures, the violation of Time itself, would not have been possible unless wielded by Foul himself. But a person such as TC or Joan would never be able to generate them, unless if possibly aided by some other force. Joan is only capable of producing Caesures because of the Land's natural decay which was hastened by earlier uses of wild magic. And with the coming of the Caesures, the Land's death has also been accelerated greatly.

There may be an analogy with a psychological addictive cycle such as alcoholism, a progressive disease that accelerates until it eventually kills.
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Mighara Sovmadhi
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Post by Mighara Sovmadhi »

I know you're not *just* saying it, I meant that you're, uh, reporting it or something. It's in there (the GI), I just didn't read it myself.

But at any rate, I suppose my point was off the mark even before it was made, as I just realized that time travel is totally contrary to the concept of causation and temporality spelled out in the Critique of Pure Reason. Or so I would surmise from short reflection on the question.

I know how to write down what the first critique has to say about the difference between empirical reality and transcendental ideality, it's just I don't think that it's rightly understood (maybe by its author but almost surely by most of us) when explained in terms of subjectivity and objectivity, at least as these are normally understood. I've been off and on working on an attempted summation of TI that leans very, very heavily on the theory of modality that underlies (if not outright, though not explicitly, constitutes) it, a summation that would have space and time exist, in a way, outside of actual human (or human-like) consciousness, just not as actual objects (but instead as possible objects--but then we get into the land of actual possible objects, possible actually possible objects, and any kind of iteration of these operators that we can conceive of--hence some of my problems with my train of thought...), and this account of TI would be at odds with even a purely intersubjective description of space and time as transcendentally ideal (in a way--I *think*). My point here is not first or any other critique exegesis, though, so... With much thanks to you, The Worm of the World's End, for correcting me on this subject (more or less), I think I'm too psychically exhausted to keep going over this right now. I always get zapped arguing with anyone (and I've taken on Allen Wood and Christine Korsgaard, plus got a strange reply from Susan Neiman one time) about it, and while I might take it up again in the future, for a while I'll give it something of a rest.
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