Pickstock critiques my post on represention and the thing in itself

So now that I have a pretty good handle on the Kantian conception of representation and synthetic imagination, Catherine Pickstock goes and messes everything up for me by telling me that this is attached to a nominalist conception of ideas, which thinks being univocally, rather then analogically, and which devoids the space between subject and object of divine participation (mathesis):

“In so far as the “real” is now determined by the intellect, and the first object of the intellect is now Being, it seems that Scotus anticipates the modern invention of the object and its distinction from the subject. …In consequence, the object is now defined on the basis of the concept, as representation. This departs from Aquinas’ Aristotelian theory of knowledge, whereby the form of a thing disengages itself from its matter and becomes a thought or “species” in our mind…[Scotus] opens up the possibility of an empiricism which thinks of material reality in terms of isolated atoms of information streaming in from the outside world, which the mind must then synthesize, since they act upon the mind in the mode of merely efficient causality. This involves a departure form the traditional hylomorphic view that the form of a thing is already synthesized before it “informs” the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence), and that the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode. Knowledge, for Aquinas, is therefore akin to an ontological event. In contrast to this, post-Scotist representation is equivalent to a de-ontological process, for the perceived object is reduced to an empirical exigency which simply happens to facilitate or occasion an act of cognition”. (After Writing, 130-1)

So instead of composing the cat from a bunch of sense data, Aquinas would encourage me to see the cat as a form already composed before it “informs” my mind. Now that it is in my mind, the active intellect must bring it to full coherence. When the “species” is formed in my mind (the ‘cat’ of Chloe, I’m suspecting), it is an event, not unlike being itself. This is how Aquinas demonstrates that knowledge is divine participation. In a way, God forms the cat as a whole, and sends it into my mind, at which point I must use my intellect to fully reveal the cat to myself (I suspect this is the inward light of Christ that fully reveals the cat as Chloe). And this revelation is an event, like a party. Have a beer. No, I insist.

So where Kant’s process emphasizes the assembly of the whole only by observance of the parts, Aquinas tells us that God creates the whole, which we must reveal to ourselves. I suspect this has more to do with waiting for the Polaroid picture to reveal itself, then it would connecting the dots of the image. Aquinas is a proponent of Gestalt psychology…and Kant believes in constructivism. I hadn’t realized that these 20th century debates fell along realist-nominalist divides.

Okay, here is something to think about: How does this relate to pointillism (and the TV colour matrix) and the previous preference for whole forms, say in a painting by Delacroix, or David? How does this relate to Alex Colville’s method? Is pointillism Kantian painting?

Now think about the camera. The camera doesn’t expose an image to parts. It captures the whole image. Even when the composition is of a part, say half of a face, the whole is presupposed, and it asks us to fill in the rest of the image, such that we are active viewers. Why would the mind assemble parts, if the film doesn’t? Is reality (what ever that is), really as partial as Kant suggests? Or is there a deeper order running through it all?

And a final thought: I can see that structuralism was a type of heuristic that sought out the logos, but which did so on univocal terms. I think we can revive the search for coherence, the logos, on analogical terms, without ever thinking that we have the logos cornered with any type of positivism.