Conundrum

Here is a conundrum:
If we do not have an idea about the structure of the Western Worldview then we cannot understand the structures of immanence either. This is because within immanence we are projecting these transcendental structures. What the structure is of the transcendentals will determine the structure of the mechanisms within immanence needed to project them. It is in fact a scandal that we do not have a good hypothesis about the structure of the Western Worldview. Philosophers for all their work on esoteric topics have not produced one which is sufficiently complex yet finite to actually support what is going on within the worldview. The best we have are the categories of Kant and their elaboration by Hegel. But categories are not enough because we need to account for the meta-levels of Being and the Aspects as well. Both the Kantian and the Hegelian category schemes are present-at-hand, like most philosophical doctrines prior to Heidegger. My favorite category scheme is that of Ontological Investigations: An Inquiry into the Categories of Nature, Man and Society by Ingvar Johansson. But categorical schemes are not enough. We need to explain the difference between levels of posited transcendence. There are headlands above the world which we can see by the difference between the meta-levels of Being and the Aspects of Being which are both implied by Higher Logical Type Theory. The question is whether there are any other transcendence beyond those two.
Of course, Heidegger had the insight that we need the equivalent of categories for Dasein, and that the existenitals would be different from those that are needed to understand things within the world. Dasein is the eventity that projects the world and also lives within the world it projects. Dasein is the human being prior to the distinction between Subject and Object. But still there is the difference between Dasein and Mitsein on the existential side of the coin. We can see the existentials as corresponding to the large scale categories of Kant as mentioned in a previous post but more profoundly we can see their basic structure as based on the three ways of Parmenides and thus deeply embedded in our worldview. Heidegger posits Dasein (Being There) as being-in-the-world, i.e. as what we have called a ‘meta-system’ which is the inverse dual of the unified totality of the System of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception. Heidegger rightly says that philosophy has failed to realize that the human being as utterly contextual within the hermeneutic situation of the facticity of life has a structure of its own prior to the differentiation into faculties.
In the Kantian architectonic there is a priori synthesis of space and time separately. We now realize based on relativity theory that space and time cannot be separated. Then when we get objective scientific present-at-hand objects in space and time then we project the a priori synthesis of the categories on them in order to have something we can comprehend. Hegel expands the reach of these dialectically produced categories giving them their on temporal structure. This is more or less a continuation of the source forms of Plato that we see in the various categorical theories of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel. It is interesting that so little work has been done at the categorical level in philosophy over the years. One would expect more categorical theories to exist. But the transition between the a priori projected synthesis of space and time to the categories is not well explained by any of these theories. One good thing about General Schemas Theory as different kinds of intelligible organizations of phenomena is that we can think of the categories as the principles of organization operating across schemas. In effect by giving schemas structure it is possible to think of the categories as the intelligibility of that structure. Thus the categories themselves do not have to have their own transcendental plane. The transcendental planes can be reserved or the schemas, meta-levels of being and the aspects of being. But of course that begs the question whether three transcendental planes are enough in order to prove a context for the schemas.
Given that our tradition is basically idealist we would think that there would have been more work on distinguishing the various transcendental levels and attempting to show that they do indeed exist. The major work on this was of course Russell and his concept of the theory of higher logical types that attempted to get rid of all paradox by producing the rule against a class being a member of itself which might be thought of as the meta-rule beyond that of non-contradiction with excluded middle as set up by Aristotle. Higher Logical Type theory was the first time that a theory of the logical layers of the worldview were proposed. That theory posits that there must be meta-levels and types at each meta-level and thus it distinguishes two logical planes of transcendence that are orthogonal to each other and to everything within the world. The question is whether this is enough structure at the transcendental level to explain the structures of the worldview that we conceive idealistically.
Of course, following Nietzsche, and Deleuze and even Heidegger we do not expect that these structures are real in any sense, they are purely ideal projections, which means that there must be a projection mechanism that is immanent to provide that projection, so what we are really talking about is the structure of the projection mechanism within the world that allows us to think that we have a reflexive headland above the world from which to view the world. Of course, we think of this as an illusion. But it is a very potent illusion as it structures everything within the world. For potent illusions to exist there must be some real structures that are the basis of that projection and processes that enable that projection. In order to explain those structures and processes of projection it would help immensely if we had some idea of the structure of the worldview that is projected. How many transcendental levels are necessary to explain the structures and processes of projection within the world. And even more crucially can we think of a mathematical basis for those structures?
Remember our primary goal is to explain emergence within the worldview. The worldview is changing discontinuously and unexpectedly all the time at the level of paradigm according to Kuhn, episteme according to Foucault, and ontos according to Heidegger. The worldview in order to maintain its identity must conserve its structure despite these discontinuous changes within the world from epoch to epoch. So what we are really looking for is how the worldview maintains its identity, truth, reality, and presence across discontinuous emergent events. One way it does that is to bring the various meta-levels together as a face of the world in an emergent event. Thus what we think of as transcendental planes that are projected as scaffolding for the worldview are at the same time the levels of depth within the worldview by which it expresses emergent events but remains the same (belonging together) over time and within projected space. This view of the transcendental scaffolding from the point of view of understanding the emergent event makes them way more interesting. Immanently we may not be interested in transcendentals because we no longer believe in them but we are very interested in emergent events by which new orders are established within phenomena.
The fact that the worldview of the persists despite these deep discontinuous changes in the tradition is an amazing property. This was impressed on me when I realized that the difference between the gods in the Rig Veda were the same meta-levels of Being that were uncovered by Continental Philosophy (See The Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void). This persistence of the meta-levels of Being describing the caste structure among the Indo-Europeans from our earliest text to the present is nothing short of incredible. How does the worldview persist in this way in the face of deep discontinuous changes at all its levels:
Facticity — Historicity
Theory — Blum, O’Malley, Sandywell — Reflexive Sociology, Bourdeau, LaTour
Paradigm — Kuhn
Episteme — Foucault
Ontos — Heidegger epochs of Being
Existence — Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus
Absolute — Hegel
What is needed is a falsifiable hypothesis as to the structure of the worldview that explains some of the characteristics of the worldview hopefully based on some kind of mathematics. But unfortunately the tradition does not give us that. They are too immersed within it to see it, even though it is the very structure that allows the distance that makes the world visible to reflexivity. One interpretation of the existentials of Heidegger is the minimal structure necessary for reflexivity in experience. Dilthey was adamant that all experience was reflexive. Heidegger seemed to support this claim by giving an infrastructure of existential that would make it possible. In terms of space Dasein expresses itself as deseverence but in terms of time it provides the necessary distance from itself necessary for reflexivity to occur by the differentiation of the existentials based on the differentiation of the ecstatic horizons of time.