Immanence without Givenness
摘要
In this chapter, drawing on Sellars, I suggest that immanence can provide an illuminating account of the relation between mind and world only if it goes hand in hand with a complete rejection of the Given. I also explore the consequences of resolutely rejecting the Given for ontology and the nature of our access to the world through thought. I argue that the rejection of Givenness implies that, at the level of semantics, thinking attempts to grasp the world as such: there are no fixed limits to thinking—for example, transcendental conditions of possibility of experience—that prevent it from being semantically about the world as it is in itself. Yet it also implies that the form or content of the world as such are never themselves Given to thinking in its semantic dimension and are always subject to self-correction. I also focus on the anti-representational implications of the rejection of Givenness in our conception of the mind-world relation. It is argued that a resolute rejection of Givenness entails anti-representationalism in semantics and ontology and a post-Kantian, critical and transcendentally informed metaphysics. In this spirit, it is suggested that a Sellars-inspired non-representational semantics coupled with a Deleuze-inspired non-representationalist ontology can provide a viewpoint from which we can launch a positive critique of traditional representationalist (substance-property) metaphysics, by constructing an evolutionary process metaphysics with anti-representationalist yet realist implications.