Well, IMHO, there is no way to do ontology that doesn't follow from consciousness.. Chris Doss
----------
Of course there is. Aristotle does not procede from conscieousness and neither do the pre-socratics, and of course neither do the mathematical idealists of any age. The centrality of conscieousness proceeds from the age of the individual or the Cartisians or what Jonathan Isreal calls the Radical Enlightenment... honest men of conscieous who fabricated the universe out of the substrate fruition of their own minds---the renaissance men. The root of ontology in conscieousness is more of a practical and historical necessity derived from the poverity of means, that is more than a compelling argument of force. They just had no other traditions to draw on...Descartes, Spinoza et al.
The need to found ontology on conscieousness is a modern western and deeply historically bound phenomenon.
The whole depth of the concept that the ontic arises from the indidvidual mind is the very core of a Christian universe. And Chris you said it yourself, when you noted the link between Luther and Heidegger. And there is also Kirkegaard as well as Husserl to consider. All these guys were Christian. I am not a Christian. I would like to think I am an anti-Christian. Most of us are not quite ready to abandon our individuality, which is the great addition of a Christian society to western history, that such entities as the individual soul exists.. .
It was at some time, that the metaphysical Cosmos was not imagned as the mirror image of the individual mind, but rather superceeded it as the manifold reality within which some sense of conscieousness was embedded and partially derived... as a transient being...certainly not as a founding being.
Fuck, am I drunk....
CG