Being and Other Realities by Paul Weiss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Paul Weiss gives an interesting take on Being. He offers a content-level split on the domains of Being as a recognition that we cannot have a “flat” experience since so many facets of human experience today are incompossible, on different levels, that do not meet.
Nonetheless, he carries with himself a strong notion of Kantian transcendentalism as a mark on how to appropriate Rationality and Dunamis. What he calls Dunamis is simply contingency, the actualization of being itself. In a way, I think he misses a more elegant picture, one that doesn’t allow for a simple numbering of different domains through various kinds of relations, as he calls each marked by “Ultimates”: “Voluminosity, Coordinator, Affiliator, Assessor” In introducing these terms, Weiss leaves it very vague. Perhaps these are explained in past texts, but he lacks a direct explanation here, and I for one would have liked more direct talk.
It’s great that he wants to bring Being back into the world of humanity, with culture and science. In this sense, he works as a kind of heir to Heidigger. Unfortunately, wanting to say something and being too aloof to say it doesn’t help his argument. The main pull he makes that is different, I believe, to be his attempt to include agency: praxis, as one might call it. Much of what he says however is still too vague to be of use, and it’s simply a translation of what we already know about the world into the philosophic terms he wishes to utilize. In a way, I was at times embarrassed reading this book because he tries so hard to be deep, that he mystifies his relations a little too much. I don’t mind poetic language or mystification but I do not find it useful if you want people to utilize and fully embody the project as you wish to color it.
Weiss however is right, that philosophy is a deeply personal endeavor, one fraught with difficult and self revelation. A difficulty in writing a book like this is being able to effectively convey what you want to say. He doesn’t throw too much history of philosophy at you, or too much jargon, which comes at first as a relief, but very quickly becomes a failure of the book to explain itself better.
What I got out of it was merely a reinforcement of traditional philosophy as I understood it. He needs to demonstrate the feasibility of his terms more as they differentiate and influence one another. Having 4 terms named as he does doesn’t help, since he spends most of the book waxing about the different areas of human experience (nature, cosmos, individuation, culture and so on). His first chapter was very good, however.
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