Most over-rated philosopher?
What would be your pick for the most over-rated philosopher? Of course, being over-rated does not mean the philosopher is shit. Please provide justification for your views.
My first pick would be Albert suave-as-fuck Camus. I mean, don't get me wrong, his novels are good and the idea of existential rebellion is helpful at times, but I don't think he's thorough enough (suicide is not the only truly important philosophical question - the question of starting a life is just as important as the question of ending one), nor do I think his idea of rebellion is sufficient to deal with everything an agent is faced with (for example, extreme, unrelenting, torturous pain or trauma - a problem picked up by many existentialist thinkers but never really tackled, in my opinion). Nor do I think it's possible to truly rebel in the first place, as any rebellion is going to be based upon a fear of death anyway. I understand Camus did not like to be called a philosopher or existentialist, but that doesn't mean he's not cited often as an influential figure in existentialism, so he's on the list.
My second pick would maybe have to be Nietzsche. I haven't read as much Nietzsche as I have Schopenhauer but I'd still throw my cards in for Schop rather than Nietzsche. If he wasn't as famous as he was, I'm not sure I would have read Nietzsche to begin with, although I do admit I am glad I have. Nietzsche comes across as one of those people you either really agree with or you vehemently disagree with. I guess I would say that I disagree with Nietzsche's conclusions in general but can definitely appreciate his writing style and his general destructive attitude.
My first pick would be Albert suave-as-fuck Camus. I mean, don't get me wrong, his novels are good and the idea of existential rebellion is helpful at times, but I don't think he's thorough enough (suicide is not the only truly important philosophical question - the question of starting a life is just as important as the question of ending one), nor do I think his idea of rebellion is sufficient to deal with everything an agent is faced with (for example, extreme, unrelenting, torturous pain or trauma - a problem picked up by many existentialist thinkers but never really tackled, in my opinion). Nor do I think it's possible to truly rebel in the first place, as any rebellion is going to be based upon a fear of death anyway. I understand Camus did not like to be called a philosopher or existentialist, but that doesn't mean he's not cited often as an influential figure in existentialism, so he's on the list.
My second pick would maybe have to be Nietzsche. I haven't read as much Nietzsche as I have Schopenhauer but I'd still throw my cards in for Schop rather than Nietzsche. If he wasn't as famous as he was, I'm not sure I would have read Nietzsche to begin with, although I do admit I am glad I have. Nietzsche comes across as one of those people you either really agree with or you vehemently disagree with. I guess I would say that I disagree with Nietzsche's conclusions in general but can definitely appreciate his writing style and his general destructive attitude.
Comments (242)
I was always kinda interested in his stuff, tho kinda skeptical - but then we did a reading group here a few months back, on his Voice & Phenomena*, and it felt like hardcore charlatanism to me. Which isn't to say he isn't smart, or capable- he is. But I think he sacrificed his talent totally for fashion and influence. Reading V&P, I got the sense he familiarized himself with the tradition just enough to cover his ass, to make a minimally plausible case for himself as a scholar. And, having done that, felt free to say whatever the fuck he wanted. His Glas is probably the single most self-indulgent piece of 'philosophy' ever written (at least the most self-indulgent piece taken seriously by others.) Really have no respect for the guy at this point. I think he's responsible for the worst excesses of us lit crit/cultural studies etc etc.
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* and V&P is the piece Derrida defenders point to when people criticize him. Supposedly, this is where he 'earns' all his later decadence, through serious scholarship and sharp argumentation. Which defense, if you actually read V&P, is mind-boggling.
Nietzsche's not so bad, but maybe we're in the same boat. I like some of his writing and some of his spirit, while not really feeling like he's some ultra-profound thinker. He's much more interesting on individual authors and passages, and the history around them, than he is on Big Ideas. He was trained a philologist and philology is where he actually shines. People like to say he registered the shocks of his time, like others, but that he alone was able to divine what those shocks would actually mean and where everything was headed. I kind of doubt that. I think a certain type of person NEEDS Nietzsche to be profound to justify other aspects of their life. Nietzsche himself was probably that type of person.
James Joyce - speaking of pretension - has a great treatment of a 20th century 'Nietzschean' in his Dubliners. It's pitch perfect. First quote is the 'hero' talking to a woman sincerely interested in him. Second is about his life after he pulls away from her. The two quotes are not consecutive in the actual story (called A Painful Case, totally worth checking out!) (In its way, its even a parody of Camus avant la lettre. Being schizoid isn't cool or profound or noble, it's just kind of sad.)
[quote=Joyce]She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?
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Four years passed. Mr. Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk. One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. He kept away from concerts lest he should meet her. His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired. And still every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening walked home from the city after having dined moderately in George’s Street and read the evening paper for dessert.[/quote]
[quote=Nietzsche]What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.[/quote]
At least you've read the guy and have specific criticisms to offer!
I would say anyone who votes for Kant as being 'the most over-rated philosopher' is in a very exclusive club indeed.
So for instance, you could knock someone like Derrida, but he's less overrated than Kant because there is a large contingent of people who do not take Derrida seriously, whereas the same isn't true for Kant.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Who? I agree /w regards to Berekely, but not with regards to Locke or Hume.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Albert Camus is interesting, but not a great philosopher. He isn't considered that great either, so... not very overrated.
Quoting csalisbury
Quoting Thorongil
Probably adequately rated actually. Nietzsche is a very deep and profound philosopher even though I think he's wrong in many regards.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Underrated.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Probably I disagree.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Maybe - though even Heidegger offers good insight, but probably overrated compared to the value of his insights.
Quoting Heister Eggcart
Quite possibly, though folks would accuse me of not having studied him enough... :P
Ehh, I would disagree. Descartes is indispensable to any student of the history of philosophy. Studying philosophy isn't just getting what's important and what's not, it's also understanding the historical context in which these questions arose. Even if Descartes was fundamentally wrong about everything, he was fundamentally important to the Enlightenment and modern philosophy as a whole. For better or for worse, Cartesianism transformed philosophical thinking, and was part of the reason epistemology became so much more prominent in philosophy (again, for better or for worse).
I get kind of miffed when hardcore traditionalists try to argue that Descartes fucked everything up and that we just need to go back to the Scholastics or whatever and everything will make sense. Even if Descartes did fuck everything up, it can't just be all his fault. Political and social issues made Scholasticism decline, and the failure to keep it alive can be seen more as a fault of the Scholastics than of those who came after.
Typically these neo-Scholastic traditionalists end up advocating the metaphysical system of a single person or group, like Aquinas or Aristotle. Regardless of its truth, I find it nauseating and oppressive, and kind of cringy at times. There, I said it: I find most metaphysics to be nauseatingly totalitarian and psychologically limiting. People hold metaphysical views not simply out of rational consideration but out of a deeply-entrenched need for the universe to be some way. The value of a metaphysical belief is not simply its factual correctness but its causal role in the psychological unity. If you take my view on metaphysics, then, Descartes is just another instance of making the world seem one way.
Quoting Agustino
Generally, I agree. I've spent hours at night reading Nietzsche's Zarathustra and simply appreciating how I can fundamentally disagree with many of the things Nietzsche says but find real beauty and value in his work despite the fact. I like to think that both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (and others) were tackling many of the same issues, but came to different conclusions. But mostly I just appreciate Nietzsche's obvious passion and mastery of language.
Descartes was my first unit of philosophy, in the course Modern Philosophy. He was 'the first of the moderns and the last of the medievals', and I think an under-appreciated genius, although there were some ideas of his that were catastrophically mistaken, first and foremost that animals are automata. But some of his contributions, not least algebraic geometry, were fundamental to the scientific revolution which could barely have proceeded with him.
But I don't understand why you keep downplaying Kant (who unfortunately wasn't on the curriculum for my two years of philosophy). The Critique of Pure Reason is often said to be the key philosophical text of the modern age, and I firmly believe that to be true. I think, overall, the two most influential philosophy texts in Western culture were The Republic, then the Critique. Why? Because Kant turned the focus squarely onto the 'conditions of knowledge', what it requires to say that we know something, what the conditions are for us to know anything whatever. I think hardly any scientific materialists understand the Critique - because if they did, I don't see how they could remain materialists.
I certainly don't claim any expertise of Kant, in fact I would think the effort involved in becoming expert in Kant would be roughly the same as getting a professional degree in any subject. But I think his 'copernican revolution in thought' is indubitably one of the fundamental philosophical insights of our day.
My two cents.
I think it's a reactionary text that systematizes the thoughts of more innovative thinkers, and in doing so reduces them to make room for more traditionalist Christian moralizing and speculation.
None of these accusations can be leveled at Descartes. He was a madman!
Quoting Wayfarer
Epistemology is an ancient discipline, and had always been concerned with these questions. It's a sort of historical revisionism to suggest otherwise, as it is to suggest Kant was a 'destroyer of metaphysics,' etc. None of these things are true.
It's kind of funny, I read an intro to the Critique once that made fun of some of its early reviewers who 'failed to grasp' how revolutionary it was and so on. But I tend to think, no, those early reviewers saw it for what it was, and of course once something becomes influential it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and its own influence spirals out of control, until all kinds of attributions of innovation are ahistorically attached to it in retrospect, because people read the Critique and don't read much of anything else.
Modernism is also a lie, btw!
such as?
Descartes was an idiot - probably the vast majority of his ideas are worthless (dualism, homonuculus etc.). I don't know of anyone else in the history of philosophy who has had no virtually good ideas, and so many terrible ones >:O
Quoting The Great Whatever
I agree - a lot of Kant is prefigured in the combination of Berkeley and Hume to a large degree. But Kant was original in the way he thought about space, time etc. Berkeley et al. didn't conceive of space as synthetic a prioris.
Quoting The Great Whatever
>:O
Don't get me wrong, I find myself almost always agreeing with Noam, but he is just too highly rated.
As a linguist, no he is not over-rated; he has set the bar regarding the philosophy of language. As an all around philosopher though (such as that which applies to morality and science) I don't see him really making any great strides. Don't get me wrong (again!), Noam seems pretty damn moral, but his ability to verbalize a clearly coherent moral foundation seems labored (at least from what i've been exposed to) or in other words not too refined.
Some have called him "a gatekeeper of the left", but I've not been exposed to any of his philosophies which pioneer any sort of social or economic reform. He is definitely a champion of many worthy causes, and that is entirely laudable, but he is not a philosopher of these causes as he is in the minds of many (or else, so too is Bono?). I think the main reasons why an appeal to Chomsky works so well in average discourse among the left are A, because we know that he is in fact a genius of language, and B, because his moral causes are very and laudably progressive.
Just to make this point again, I'm not here trying to say that Noam is by any means stupid when it comes to moral philosophy and politics (or even that i disagree with him on anything in particular), just that his astronomically high rating/status in philosophical fields other than his own makes him a good candidate for the most overrated philosopher.
WWR is probably deeper than CPR, in that it contains the same insights that CPR does, and more. CPR is more original and revolutionary but not the deepest. TLP is probably also superior, as is Spinoza's Ethics.
Quoting Wayfarer
So? Why is this so significant?
To each their own, but he certainly has a mighty high reputation in many circles. I like a lot o what he has to say.
In modern academic and popular culture circles, and I swim in none of those.
? >:O What's this supposed to mean?
Locke – Lockean substance is the thing-in-itself, reduction of traditional metaphysical categories to epistemological categories of man, project of dissection of the human mind to discover the conditions of the possibility of knowledge
Descartes – synthetic unity of apperception
Berkeley – ideality of space and time (Kant renounces Berkeley explicitly but ends up adopting his position almost exactly – he does apriorize them, but this is a rhetorical move to salvage metaphysics, not one that's argued for)
Hume – 'destruction of metaphysics,' analytic-synthetic distinction
His claims are debunked here and here.
In what sense are space and time ideal if they are not a priori? It seems to me that it is necessary to a priorize them à la Kant to prove them to be ideal...
But space isn't perceptual - you don't perceive space, you perceive objects in space.
The point was just that something being ideal, in the sense Kant uses the term, is not for it to be a priori. Or is this the distinction you don't understand? Ideality in Kant is opposed to reality, not to a posteriority.
:-} Yes obviously. Nowhere did I claim that. For something perceived to be ideal doesn't require it to be a priori - and space isn't perceived - things are perceived in space. So it could very well be that the objects and perceptions given in space are ideal, but not space itself. So I'd say that for something non-perceptual to be ideal does require it in some sense to be a priori - hence why space and time are called transcendentally ideal.
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Agustino
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Quoting Agustino
It's misleading to call space and time 'non-perceptual' in Kant's sense, because although they aren't objects of perception, they are conditions of perception, and so in this sense are not independent of perception (are not transcendentally real), which is precisely what Kant's point is.
My point is we tend to be ahistorical in discussing individual thinkers, because as single people we just don't read very much, so we don't understand that individual thinkers are not as original as they seem to be when read in isolation.
Conditions of perception are not themselves perceived - the eye does not see itself. Therefore, you can say that objects of perception are ideal - which is what Berkeley does - but to make the claim that space, time etc. are ideal requires making them a priori.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Who held them before Kant?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Well of course most of a thinker's ideas aren't original, even if he is a great thinker, like Kant or Schopenhauer - however, some of them are original insights. It would be strange to say that there are no original insights, and everything has already been thought before.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Sure he was reacting against Hume's skepticism of causality, I'm already well aware of that.
This strikes me as a verbal dispute. By 'not beyond perception' I did not intend to limit myself to 'objects of perception.' Though there seems to be no good reason to me to believe space isn't an object of perception.
And of course, the eye does see itself.
Quoting Agustino
Pretty much every rationalist philosopher prior to Malebranche and Leibniz and so on.
Quoting Agustino
It's not that I think everything has been thought before, it's just that in its milieu no purportedly original insights look very impressive. Their impressiveness is a function of ignorance of the surrounding historical context.
Quoting Agustino
But consider: how could Hume have been making a stride for Kant to react against, if prior to Kant, everyone had already thought causation was empirical (Hume's position)? Kant was trying to salvage an older position that Hume was attacking. If Hume had not been attacking it, no one would have thought Hume was making any point at all. Yet he could not have been attacking it, if there were nothing to attack.
Objects of perception are given in space. Space is a precondition of perception, and therefore cannot itself be perceived. You cannot hold space, touch space, etc.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yeah maybe if you're looking in a mirror.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I am unaware that they held them, if you have evidence of this please cite it.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Insight has to do with how one solves a problem provided by his context. It can be impressive if the way the problem is solved is spectacular, as in Kant's case with regards to causality.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No they didn't think everything was empirical, quite obviously. But neither did they think that causality was a precondition of any experience at all... that's Kant's original insight. And in fact, Hume's criticisms would have been irrelevant if philosophers had already thought of causality as a precondition to any and all experience - so Hume was certainly not acting against that position.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yes that's true. So what? The way he salvaged it is genius - that is original.
That is a (highly specific) philosophical position, not an ordinary uncontroversial fact.
Quoting Agustino
Yes. Yes, that's what I meant.
Quoting Agustino
There are literally too many examples to cite. But you can start with the Stoics – I'm no expert on this, but they believed that the necessity of causation was a necessary precondition for the rational intelligibility of the world (and therefore for its existence, since reality is inherently intelligible). Kant makes the same move: it is necessary for causation to be to literally hold the world together. He is slightly different in saying that this is more or less the same as holding experience together.
Quoting Agustino
"By means of a faculty?"
Quoting Agustino
OK, I see. I think maybe this is debatable, but the rationalist position has always been that causality is a prior necessary to hold the world together, as its precondition. Kant is doing the same thing, he just thinks the (empirical) world is in your head, something Berkeley already thought. So if you like he's resuscitating the rationalist position contra Hume to make it compatible with Berkeley. That is an innovation of a sort, but not quite the one that's attributed to him.
Ok so on this view, causality is associated with the intelligibility of the world, not with its possibility - the world could possibly not be intelligible, and indeed that is a different statement from that mentioned before, and requiring separate proof. Under Kant, the world simply cannot but be intelligible, since all experience is so structured.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Yes >:) just like opium causes sleep because it has sleep inducing properties
Quoting The Great Whatever
No... the rationalist position has been that causality is required to make the world intelligible - no rationalist held it that causality was required to be able to make the world possible - it was only with regards to the world's intelligibility that this was under discussion. So if they were wrong about the world's intelligibility, then obviously they could be wrong about causality. Causality wasn't certain in other words, which is exactly what Hume attacked. But Kant showed that they can't be wrong about causality, and showed why the world is necessarily intelligible - because it is structured, a priori to experience, by space, time and causality. This is a significant achievement, because it makes the question "is the world intelligible" redundant.
Can you please provide me with a citation for this? Has René shown that there is an unexperienced synthesis of self and world that occurs prior to experience and indeed makes experience itself possible?
I think a classical rationalist would deny this.
Quoting Agustino
In fact Kant didn't show that – he postulated it, but there's nothing to show that the way our faculties happen to be are necessary – it's only that given that we have faculties that enforce necessities within them, such necessities obtain – well, within them.
With regard to whether our faculties could be different, or if it's necessary that they function in such a way, his claim was that to know this, or to even raise it as a question that we can answer, is impossible. So there is a deeper contingency to Kant's system, even if you take his positing of such faculties as justified.
Yes he would obviously deny it, but he would have to provide additional argument for it. That's what it means when something isn't certain. Kant created a framework in which this was certain.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I think his analysis of experience shows that experience - as we find ourselves experiencing - necessarily will follow those necessities - we cannot even imagine it being otherwise. But of course, it could be possible.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I tend to agree with this. The contingency was well noted afterwards with the advent of modern physics. Our synthetic judgements, while a priori, aren't necessary. This may sound shocking but it basically means that we're in all cases, a priori, having a form of say space, imposed on our experience, but how we conceive of this space (Euclidean, non-Euclidean, etc.) can be different, and indeed can change. What cannot change is that we must have some sort of conception - ie space is an a priori form of experience. It's the necessity of a particular conception which vanishes.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I don't know who it was addressed to, but I do remember reading about Descartes not taking the cogito as a syllogism but rather as an intuition. Fine. So how does this show that "any thought that was had must be 'my' thought (which is the unity of apperception)"? How is 'any thought that was had being "my" thought' equivalent to:
Quoting Agustino
:s
As we find ourselves experiencing – but this 'finding ourselves' – the faculties we happen to have, for no discernible reason, are still potentially contingent, and Kant admits we can't even sensibly answer questions about what things would be like otherwise. This doesn't mean that he's showed such a necessity, only that he is committed to claiming we can't answer (or possibly even understand) certain questions.
Note that it's always necessary that given something is the way it actually is, it actually is that way.
Quoting Agustino
Are you wording this from the text itself? My memory of the unity of apperception has to do with the fact that it's only intelligible to have a thought insofar as one can at least in principle intuit that it is 'mine.' This is roughly the move made in the cogito as Descartes qualifies it.
A polysemous rejoinder I will leave you to ponder...or not..I don't want to take the fun out of it.
;)
Especially compared to all the geniuses on PF.
Kant responded to, and bettered, all of their work. And why? Because unlike them, he deeply analysed the processes of reason, knowedge, and thinking itself.
Before Kant, philosophers wanted to arrive at irrevocable truths of nature, either through intuition and reason (rationalism) or empiricism (perception). Descartes wants to prove that the foundation of knowledge is grounded in certain knowledge of one's own existence and the 'clear and distinct' ideas of mathematics, Locke and Hume that it comes from experience alone.
What Kant did was ask a different question. He didn’t ask “what is reality?”; he asked a much more profound question. What are the conditions by which I know the world, or what is good, or what is beautiful? Kant wanted to know how the human mind and cognitive structure was such that we know anything at all. And many of Kant's basic insights still stand; there are still Kantian philosophers of science, Kantian cognitive science, and so on.
Quoting The Great Whatever
He differentiated his view from Berkeley in a lengthy argument in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the 'Refutation of Idealism'.
Well I certainly prefer the smaller pond of reason, than the larger pond of bondage to lust, greed, etc. if that's what you mean :P
It's laughable to claim that philosophers before Kant didn't 'deeply analyze the processes of reason...' etc. 'Unlike them?' I'm sorry, this is just totally ludicrous. This is the kind of ahistorical nonsense I'm talking about.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, epistemology is ancient.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, I'm aware of the refutation. But it's not a refutation of Berkeley, even if Kant thought he was.
Yes, that's one possible interpretation.
Well I take it to be a response to:
Quoting Agustino
Since that's where I am mentioning swimming, hence the idea of a pond in your response. If so, then what other meanings could it have given this context?
Berkeley's idealism is utterly incoherent without God. Kant differentiated his philosophy from Berkeley's by attempting to show that God cannot be rationally demonstrated. If God cannot be rationally demonstrated, then Berkeley's idealist philosophy is refuted.
True, but that we cannot even possibly understand how it could be otherwise is an indication that we have no reason to think it could be otherwise.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Why did he call it synthetic unity of apperception then? I remember as being that which makes the self and the world possible.
It's interesting to note that, under that interpretation, reason can be seen as either a larger ocean or a smaller pond. When the whole tradition is seen dialectically, as Hegel saw it, then it is certainly a larger pond.
However, I suppose you being the smartass you so often are actually meant that as a way to mock my lack of knowledge with regards to Chomsky and my lack of desire to learn or study him :-* O:) :P
And so no proof of necessity has been given. Note that the Humean Pyrrhonist can say the same thing.
Quoting Agustino
I haven't read that section of the Critique in years. But the two are, as I recall, deeply related. The unity of the world is related to the unity of the self. That's all in tune with the general solipsistic tendencies of the time.
No he can't. A Pyrrhonist doesn't doubt in the absence of reason(s). He must have reason for that doubt, the mere logical possibility of it isn't a reason for doubting, because it's equally a reason for believing (and Kant has provided positive reasons in addition to that for believing it)
Quoting The Great Whatever
Sure, I can agree with this. But again - this has nothing to do with Descartes unfortunately... if it had, then Descartes would indeed have been worthy of the name genius ;)
But philosophical history ended with Hegel, so then Chomsky is irrelevant. Not worth studying, according to Hegel himself. So to study him would indeed be to stick to the smaller pond :-O
For Berkeley transcendental ideality consists in the mind of God. Kant believed this could not be demonstrated by pure reason, but should be understood to be an article of faith. The real situation for us is that we don't know in any propositional sense that there is a God; it is neither rationally demonstrable nor empirically verifiable.
What Hegel actually meant about "the end of history" is by no means uncontroversial. I don't believe he was stupid enough to think that no one would produce any significant philosophy after him. He opened the way for the phenomenologists, after all, with his own Phenomenology.
That's the paranoid interpretation.
Actually I wouldn't mock you for having little interest in Chomsky; I have little interest in him myself. Although I did listen to a podcast featuring him, while I was hard at work maintaining a garden a while ago. Sometimes i don't listen too closely when I am working physically, so I don't remember exactly what he was talking about, but I do remember thinking it was quite interesting at the time. I'll have to go back and listen again.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/noam-chomsky-on-the-hard-stuff/7974448
But read him? I don't think so.
Sure, if it's not too much trouble, I am curious as to what you are referring to.
How can you do that? :s I can never listen to philosophy while I do work - if I do that, then I don't understand anything of it. Is your work in the garden mostly planning work, or is it actual work in setting it up, or is it management work? If it's actual physical work, then maybe I can see how one can listen and understand something and do physical work at the same time. But for me, I tried many times to listen to philosophy lectures while writing, working, thinking, designing, and I end up not understanding anything of what I listened to afterwards >:O
Quoting John
I remember us having a talk with regards to Hegel and the end of history, and you telling me (after you told me I don't understand Hegel >:O ) that the end of history doesn't refer to an actual end of history, but rather to the completion of the revelation of Spirit in thought and in the world or something of that sort. But I may be wrong as well.
When argument fails, resort to hyperbole.
It's not 'laughable' that philosophers before Kant didn't deeply analyse the processes of reason. You simply don't find the kind of critical analysis of the inter-dependency of reason, intuition, perception, sensation and judgement that Kant undertook in the Critique, in earlier authors.
Quoting The Great Whatever
In actual fact, the word itself was coined in 1856. Of course all philosophy has been concerned with the nature of knowledge, justified true belief, and so on, but it was Kant who methodically and critically assessed the question.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Says you.
You're giving the distinct impression of not knowing what you're talking about.
Yes, it is.
My retort wasn't hyperbole; it was a response to yours. I mean, look at this:
Quoting Wayfarer
Kant was just one man. The whole discipline preceded him, and none of the questions he addressed were new. This is absurd.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm really not going to stand for this, man. Peddle elsewhere.
A Rationalist claim limited to intelligibly is actually right.
To say causality is a precondition treats it like an empirical state. Supposedly, before the world came to exist, this distinction of causality was present, which is what makes the world possible. Kant effectively claims causality predates the world. He is applying finite terms to the infinite of causality. Ironically, Kant is actually taking understanding away from causality as necessary and a priori.
Causality is not a precondition. It doesn't predate the world. Rather it is necessary to any part of the world. Pick any moment of the world and it's part of causality. Without the world, no states which are cause and effect, causality is incohrent. Causality necessary for the world to be intelligible, but it is not a precondition of the world. It's an expression of the world.
One cannot find the world without causality, but it's also true one cannot find causality without the world.
Yeah, it's just physical work. I often listen to lectures on various philosophical and religious topics when I'm doing repetitive physical work, trimming hedges, mowing lawns, weeding, when I'm laying bricks, cutting stone, planting shrubs; but not when I'm building, for example timber structures and detailed measurement and calculation is involved.
I think your memory is pretty good. That sounds like something I would have said. Perhaps the end of history can be equated with the completion of the dialectic. Steiner claims that this is the completion of rationality, but not of what he calls "extra-mental" understanding; in fact it sets the stage for the latter. Of course, Hegel would not have agreed with this, since he thought the "Rational is the Real".
There may be a sense in which philosophy since Hegel has consisted mostly in recapitulations of Kant's and his own philosophies. They have certainly been the biggest influences, along with Nietzsche, on French philosophy, and Hegel is resurging today in analytic philosophy. The advent of the extreme influence of science on philosophy is something else and I think it is arguably the beginning of the end of philosophy.
Actually one cannot fail to find the world at all; to find anything at all is to find the world, or at least can be defined as such; at least in our current condition.
Indeed, it is necessary. In that case, we are talking about us and the world in which we live.
No pre-dated causality required, nothing is needed to enable the possibility of the world. It's necessary. Clearly, it cannot be impossible.
Kant is just trying to account for things that are already accounted for in themselves.
You've given no reasons for anything you've said in this thread, beyond bald assertions, starting with:
Quoting The Great Whatever
Which is what I think ought to be considered 'laughable'.
You've shown no insight into why Kant is even discussed, when challenged, you resort to derision then go off in a huff.
I would say you are simply wrong if you think Kant thinks the idea of causality applies beyond the empirical world. He specifically denies that it can make any sense to speak of causality outside of that ambit.
Here's a really nice one-pager on the continuing signficance of Kant.
Hume doesn't think of causality, in the "aprioi"sense, is emprical. What he does is make the distinction between the states that cause (emprical) and the logic of causality (necessary). His point is the former is not dependent on the latter. States of the world are intelligible themselves, rather than being an inevitable outcome of a logical expression.What he destroys is the idea the necessity of causality determines the intelligibility of states that are caused.
You haven't read the thread, because if you did, you'd realize this was false. As well as how absurd it was to point out the existence of the Refutation when I led off by explicitly mentioning it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Read. the. thread. I'm not here to hold your hand for you.
Before you respond, read. the. thread.
Just as well for me.
Not the idea of causality per se, but the definition of our world. Kant treats the necessity of our world as if it were finite, as if its states depend on causality pre-dating them.
Rather than recognising our necessity, that we and they world are intelligible, Kant assumes we are not. For us to possibility exist, we (supposedly) need aprioi causality to pre-date us. He denies the world is necessary. When faced with it, Kant claims it makes no sense, that we are impossible unless aprioi causality predates us. Kant is trying to save the relevance of the infinite to defining the world.
Hume showed that the necessity of causality played no role in defining which states are caused (i.e. anything might happen at anytime). Causility, as envisioned by the Rationalists, is different to the emprical states which appear. The intelligiblity of any individual state is NOT dependent on the infinite of causality.
Kant is trying to rescue the link between infinite causality and intelligibility of individual states. He does so by denying any empirical state is possible without being specifed by the infinite of causality.
Previously, the Rationalist link between the infinite and empirical was logical. It was just thought an individual emprical state didn't makes sense without definition from infinite causality. Hume destroys this idea by pointing out each empirical state is its own logical entity.
Kant responds to this by ransoming the emprical world. He says we simply must have an infinite of causality which defines indivdual states, else those states simply couldn't be. Since the world, with all its individual states, is clearly here, the infinite of causality simply must be doing its work. It's the "the world would be impossible without God" circular argument.
I did read it, and I don't think you're an idiot. But my view is that, if anything, Kant is underrated.
Willow, answer honestly now; have you actually studied Kant's works or even secondary texts dealing with them?
Yes. It was some time ago though.
But I'm contextualising Kant with respect to others and wider metaphysical issues here, not arguing as Kant does. This is partly what I meant about your lack of imagination in our discussion the other week. When people take issue with something Kant says, for example, you act like they aren't even positing a different idea, position or significance.
It's like one has to argue as Kant does or else one isn't even making a relevant philosophical point. You act like Kant's metaphysics are the ground which required to make metaphysical comment possible (which I suppose is fitting).
I have no idea what you are talking about here, Willow. If you want to discuss the pros and cons of Kant's philosophy then you have to stay true to criticizing what he actually professed.I don't know what you mean by saying that when others "take issue with something Kant says" I " act like they aren't even positing a different idea, position or significance".
Firstly, they should be taking issue with something he actually said, and then they have to be really taking issue with it; which means laying out precisely why they disagree with it. If you can show an example of where you did that and received the response you claim that I (always, mostly, often?) manifest, then I'll be happy to consider it.
I am convinced that Kant was pretty much right about what we can claim to know about metaphysics. I don't believe Kant has a metaphysics in any traditional sense. I think in a way the clue to understanding Kant's implicit attitude to metaphysics may be seen in the way Heidegger adapted Kant, such that he pretty much rejected metaphysics, and subsumed ontology to phenomenology.
I agree. It's altogether too fashionable these days to indulge in Descartes-bashing. At least TGW, even though I think he is totally misguided in equating Kant's contribution with Berkeley's, is certainly not being fashionable with his particular brand of Kant-bashing.
Yeah I don't agree with the "extra-mental" part, which is extra-rational, simply because it doesn't make much sense to me what that would be or could be. So that's why I would agree with Hegel that everything that is Real must be Rational.
Quoting John
>:O
I personally don't see much in terms of valuable ideas in Descartes at all, and it has little to do with Descartes bashing. Maybe I just haven't read his Meditations carefully, who knows.
I think Descartes focused philosophical consideration of the mind/matter, subject/object (and by implication the rationalism/empiricism) dichotomies and 'supercharged' the question of priority, by being spectacularly wrong about it with his substance dualism which highlighted the 'interaction problem'; thus paving the way for Spinoza and Leibniz, and also for the British Empiricists, and ultimately the great revolutionary solution offered by Kant (which sees neither mind nor matter as prior, but something (discursively at least) unknowable which manifests as a world consisting of bodies and minds).
Although it could be said that Spinoza's system is a neutral monism that achieves the same outcome, his imputation of absolute necessity to deus sive natura, tends to objectify it and give priority to material existence; with mind understood as a secondary function, or even, really, as a phenomenal parallelism. It also involves an ultimate denial of the possibility of genuine freedom. This is inevitable because of Spinoza's denial of person-hood (which is so essential to a proper understanding of mind) to God, and by implication to nature, including the human; leading to seeing it (person-hood) as a kind of illusion.
I think Steiner's notion of the "extramental" is on the right track, but overblown, since he believed that mystical understanding could somehow be objectified as a science (this is the essence of his conception of 'anthropo-sophy'). But the 'wisdom of the human' can never become a science; it must rather become, as Berdyaev contends, a fully developed art. The reason it can never become a science is that the 'knowledge' obtained mystically can never be subject to intersubjective strategies of corroboration; verification and falsification.
So for being an idiot, he gets called a genius? :P
Quoting John
Kant wasn't as revolutionary as you and Wayfarer make him sound like, I lean towards TGW here. Of course I don't agree with TGW, because I think Kant was actually a genius, but certainly not as great as you guys make him out to be. As TGW said, a lot of Kant is prefigured in earlier thinkers. However, I do admire Kant and I've taken a few insights from him - the Kingdom of ends, treating others as ends in themselves (persons) instead of means to ends (objects), the a priority of space/time/causality, the co-dependence of subject and object.
Quoting John
Not only it could be said, this is actually the case.
Quoting John
No, priority isn't given to extension... I don't understand where you're taking this from. Also you misunderstand what Spinoza means by absolute necessity... Certainly he doesn't mean absolute necessity as it would be empirically understood.
In fact, Spinoza being an acosmist does quite the opposite - he gives priority to God, not to the empirical manifestations of the world. Priority is given to the unmanifest source of the manifest.
Quoting John
No, Spinoza doesn't understand mind as epiphenomenal if that's what you mean to say.
Quoting John
No, this doesn't follow. Absolute necessity is not incompatible with freedom. Absolute necessity is a metaphysical postulate of one reality - because it is one reality, it is absolutely necessary. Freedom exists because one has the power to cause other things, being an element within the causal chain, with its own powers. Determinism doesn't mean that there is no freedom - determinism isn't fatalism. Determinism simply means that the causal agent is embedded within the causal chain - within the same reality and hence not transcendent - this is the absolute necessity. But because the causal agent has powers which determine other things, he plays a role, and to the extent that he plays a role in determining what happens, he is free.
Quoting John
How can God be a person? How can the ground of person-hood be itself a person, except perhaps analogically in order to say that personhood merely emerges from it? Can the eye see itself? Can the conditions which make any experience possible be found within experience or must they be a priori? Can that which makes personhood possible be a person, or must it be prior to personality?
Quoting John
This doesn't follow, as I showed above.
Quoting John
But this isn't knowledge at all - merely finding a way for one to live in the world. Finding what to do with one's time until that time is up and death comes knocking on the door. That's a personal choice - something that is inherently subjective indeed. There's nothing objectively that has to be done. But since one has this time anyway, and suicide is pointless precisely because death is inevitable, what is one to do with their time, and how are they to choose this? That's the "art" that you speak of. But that's not theoretical knowledge, but practical application.
Only true geniuses can get things spectacularly wrong in ways that really matter. In any case, looked at dialectically he was not so much wrong, as the first to realize and actualize a particular phase of dialectical possibility. For that he should be despised and belittled? :-} To see him as "wrong" is simply another of the many conceits of modernism.
Quoting Agustino
A lot of any great and revolutionary thinker is prefigured in earlier thinkers.
Quoting Agustino
I agree it is not "theoretical knowledge"; theoretical knowledge is really possible only in relation to logical and empirical matters, and that is precisely what I have been saying. Call it "phronesis" if you like. I disagree though, that what is done makes no real difference to the spirit; what is done is 'objectively' right or wrong, 'objectively' conducive to spiritual development or not, just as great works are 'objectively' more or less great, only in this sense. I must say you seem to be slipping back into a kind of nihilistic slumber with this talk of killing time until you die.
Quoting Agustino
The powers of the "causal agent" are determined by other powers that are not under his or her control, according to Spinoza. That's why he makes the analogy with the stone rolling down the hill that would, if it was sentient, feel itself to be free, Spinoza believed that freedom is an illusion due to our inability to be aware of all the forces acting upon us to determine our every action, just as the stone feels itself to be the free source of its own movement. To be consistent Spinoza must believe that every single action is an absolutely necessary and actually predetermined manifestation of the absolute necessity of God's nature. Spinoza specifically says somewhere, if I remember aright, that God does not have free will. I understand that for Spinoza a kind of freedom consists in absolute acceptance of one's nature, but this is not the Christian understanding of freedom, the kind of freedom that can coherently ground the idea of true moral responsibility. That freedom is irreducible, though; a discursive account of it cannot be given, because such an account would necessarily be in causal terms as all our accounts are, and that would deny the very freedom it is giving an account of. The greatness of Kant is that he was the very first to recognize this.
Quoting Agustino
Where does personhood really exist except as a characteristic of persons? Sure you can say there may be a part of God that is absolutely unknowable, like the Kabbalistic notion of the 'ein sof', but how can the world of persons have their existence in God in His image, if God is not also a person. How is the personal relationship with Christ-as-God, as conceived in Christianity, possible, if Christ is not a person?
Well see, this is what I don't like about Hegel personally. I don't view history as having a direction - as being a dialectic headed somewhere. It's not headed anywhere - we and the rest of the world are going absolutely nowhere. I mean there's so many strange things that occur in history - so many unexpected twists and turns. It's always easy to read some story into the past if we don't look in detail... if we look just in big brushes... but then we eliminate the sea of differences and twists and turns which don't actually fit our story - we reject them, as anomalous points, and thus we truncate reality.
Quoting John
I see you're spying on what I'm saying in other threads :P
Nihilism in this sense is pure freedom. We can only be free if we're not compelled to do any particular thing - if all we're doing is killing time. If there's actually some goal - we can never be free, for we are always servants to that goal. And I'm talking empirically now. As I said morality still stands - but morality is self-chosen. We choose to be moral.
Quoting John
Yes, just like my birth is determined by things that aren't in my control. So? "My control" enters into the world through those things which give birth and power to it. I am given power from the outside. I don't give power to myself - I don't pull myself out of the water by my own boot straps - but that doesn't mean that once given power, I do not have that power, and I do not use that power to cause things around me. So yes, my powers aren't ultimately determined by me. But that doesn't make me a slave to those causes - for once I have the power, I can use it to cause other things, in accordance to my own nature (and hence my own freedom). There is only determinism, not pre-determinism.
Quoting John
No he didn't believe freedom to be an illusion. He attacked the traditional metaphysical idea of freedom and replaced it with another. Our freedom is limited - it's limited by the powers we have acquired and been bestowed with. But we do have freedom in-so-far as we have power. The rock also has freedom, but a lot less freedom than we do. Sure it is true that that power is ultimately not ours, and will in the end be taken away. But this isn't to say we don't currently have it.
Quoting John
Absolutely no - Spinoza is against predeterminism. Predeterminism means that we are puppets - we have no power at all, we're not causal agents at all. Things are settled regardless of what we do. This means that all we can do is watch what happens, but not influence it - we're not even causal agents within the chain, we're just observers. This was anathema to Spinoza - this is the homonuculus in the brain - Spinoza would be horrified by this (mis)interpretation.
Quoting John
Yes - God cannot create arbitrarily - by free will - he necessarily creates as a result of his infinite and overflowing nature. Contingency (creation) necessarily exists in other words. The only necessity is the necessity of contingency. That's what you're missing when you accuse Spinoza of absolute necessity - yes, it is a metaphysical and logical absolute necessity, which grounds the empirically real contingency. You treat his metaphysical and logical absolute necessity to be equivalent to empirical absolute necessity.
Quoting John
No, for Spinoza freedom consists in being true to one's self - being determined by one's own powers, instead of by powers external to oneself. If I wear a red hat because others wear a red hat, I'm not free, because my actions are determined by causes outside of myself. If I wear a red hat because I want to wear a red hat, and doing so is me being true to myself, then I am free - I am determined to act so by my own nature and powers.
Quoting John
Why do you think this freedom is irreducible? And why do you think moral responsibility must be grounded in such a freedom as this?
Quoting John
We are in "His image" because he is the source of our personhood.
Quoting John
I honestly don't know to tell you the truth :-O That's a theological, not a philosophical question. As I said before, I'm not very big on those things. I never think about them. The way you phrase these issues sounds very Barfield/Hegel like. I don't like it much lol O:) :P
Actually, I was just referring to this:
Quoting Agustino
Sounds to me that you are saying it doesn't matter what we do, and therefore we are just killing time until we die. Perhaps I misinterpreted your meaning?
I have to go to work, so the rest will have to wait.
:)
Ah I see, okay
Quoting John
Well yes, objectively it doesn't matter. Imagine for a moment you are Bill Gates, you are so rich, you don't need to work for another day in your life, and there's nothing that you have to do. What would you then do? Would you sit around doing nothing, just staring blankly at what is in front of you? Why wouldn't you? Likewise you probably wouldn't sit on the couch watching TV all day long day after day. Why not? Because you found something better to fill your time with. So we all have some limited time until we die that we fill in with whatever we deem and judge to be worth filling it with. Objectively, it doesn't matter. It only matters to us. Objectively, we're all just wasting time.
Why do I, or you, do the work we're currently doing? To survive. Why do we want to survive? Because again, we have nothing better to do. Why do we enjoy studying, learning, gaining knowledge? Because there's nothing better that we can do with our time. All of us are just filling time, waiting to die. As Democritus says in my profile - you came, you saw, you went away ...
To add a bit more about this - I think some thinkers were fundamentally right - maybe not right in the details, but fundamentally right, regardless of the time when they wrote. I think for example that Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer (to name just a few that come immediately to mind), were fundamentally right. So I disagree with Hegel - there is no world-historical dialectic going on. Plato/Aristotle are fundamentally right, and Descartes is fundamentally wrong, regardless of the fact that he came long after them.
I don't either, and I'm not convinced Hegel does. It doesn't have a determined direction, it unfolds creatively...or uncreatively. When it comes to ideas, though, do you not think there is a (more or less inexorable) logic inherent in the ways in which they develop historically? I mean, we are speaking about the history of ideas here, as it has been canonized, we are not concerning ourselves with the immense complexity of actual historical contingencies. We are always dealing with the "broad brush" in either case, because the arbitrary details are so many and and so irrelevant to the whole, and hence uninteresting.
Think about designing and building a garden. There is an overall plan, and the way in which the garden is constructed will probably never I insofar as it is a complex garden) turn out exactly to plan. The Spinozistic conception of God is that there is no overall plan. The Christian conception of God is very definitely that there is an overall plan; so the two are incompatible; they contradict one another. Now I am not a believing Christian, I have only been labouring this point because you have identified yourself as such, and yet claim to hold to a Spinozistic conception of God, and I am trying to understand how you resolve the contradiction.
Quoting Agustino
Determinism, in the sense of Laplace's Demon, I believe is the way that Spinoza conceived of it. Descartes also conceived of nature this way, and Spinoza was very much influenced by Descartes. He studied him very closely and departed form his philosophy, for sure, but I cannot see how his departure has any bearing on the question of determinism. IN fact it was the way that Descartes conceived res cogitans, as being different from, and not dependent upon, and even prior to, res extensa, that allowed for genuine freedom. Spinoza say every being and event, every detail of everything that happens is an absolutely necessary unfolding of Deus sive natura.
Think of Laplace's Demon; according to Laplace the demon, by knowing the position, momentum and direction of every particle could calculate precisely all future events. Now in this thought experiment all future events are precisely and rigidly determined by present conditions (there is thus not necessarily any God in this picture, but there is a Nature; which amounts to the same thing). How is this different than saying that future events are always predetermined by present conditions. What is the difference that makes a difference between this understanding of determinism and pre-determinism; and what is the difference between this and Spinoza? I can't see it, and you haven't explained it to me yet. The only difference I can see is the epistemic difference. We feel free because we don't know what all the forces are determining our actions. For us our actions are thus not rigidly determined; not pre-determined; but this is so only on account of our ignorance. If we knew everything we would see that our freedom is an illusion. I want to know what you think the ontological difference could be.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, just as the lightning is. And yet we do not hold the lightning morally responsible if it kills someone. Nor do we hold a snake or a tiger morally responsible. If persons can only act according to their natures in the same way that spiders, snakes, tigers and lightning do, then we can be no more justified in holding a person morally responsible for his or her actions than we can hold a spider, snake, tiger or lightning morally responsible. It's all very well to say 'Oh, but humans are capable of moral action, and animals are not". Yes, you or I might be capable of acting morally, but the murderer or rapist might not, and that is again determined by conditions beyond the control of any individual if Spinoza's kind of determinism is ontologically, as opposed to merely epistemologically, the case.
I agree to this.
Quoting John
I don't agree to this, and I think this is Spinoza's point with regards to absolute necessity - existence necessarily is creative.
Quoting John
I think every age re-appropriates the truth for itself, and hence re-appropriates it under terms that are usually somewhat different than the terms used by the previous age - the symbolisms change. But it is one and the same truth - we aren't more developed today (not speaking of technologically now, but in terms of philosophical knowledge), than we were 2000 years ago. Our knowledge can always be complete. Indeed, Spinoza makes this point in one of his letters, can't remember which, in which he says that there could be another philosophy different from his and yet saying the same thing. Concepts and symbols change, but what those concepts and symbols point to remains the same. What they point to is generally muddled up in every age - for example in our age reductive materialism is a giant confusion, just as dualism was a giant confusion in the time of Descartes.
Think about learning something. When you learn something - say the Theorem of Pythagoras - it is not sufficient to recite what it is to have learned it. Neither is it sufficient to apply it to particular cases to have learnt it. What you have to do is that you have to give an account for it - that account is your own - it's your own appropriation of the truth, that's where your creativity comes in. You may give a different account of it, and explain it differently than I do - because you have appropriated it differently. Teaching it to others - that's usually what shows that you have learned it yourself.
Quoting John
A large share of canonized history has to do with what works happened to survive, and with what works happened to be emphasised or available for political and social reasons at different times.
Quoting John
I don't think history can form a whole - history is always perennially incomplete, simply because it always repeats itself, but fails to close itself - nothing is stable and everything is contingent, and hence truth cannot reign supreme through time, and it must be obscured at points, and then show itself once again, and so forth. All we're doing is rediscovering the same old truth anew - we cannot discover anything new - but we must certainly rediscover it anew, because it is only by rediscovering anew - by appropriating - that we can learn.
Quoting John
A plan is a model of the garden, so yes, the real garden is always different than the model - the model never approximates it perfectly. The model is useful at achieving certain particular things at the neglect of others (these are the things that people happen to be interested in because of whatever purposes they have) - for example the model allows one to predict how much earth has to be removed, how much fill needs to be placed and where, what trees/flowers/arrangements are to be placed, where they will be placed, in what quantities, what irrigation/watering system if any the garden will use, etc. . But it obscures a lot of other things which are part of reality - how big will this individual tree exactly be? How many leaves will it have? (etc. - these questions are not addressed by the model - indeed they cannot be addressed - because they are not of interest).
Quoting John
With regards to history yes - if there was some plan, then where would be the place for creativity? Creativity is precisely that which goes unplanned. There's other things which also play a role - such that the truth is one, and always available at each point in time. So there cannot be a plan, because where would it be going? History by being history (and thus in-time) is bound to go up and down, sometime closer to that truth (which is always available) and sometimes further away.
Quoting John
Then I will clearly not interpret the Revelation and the Christian story as a story occuring in history - it is a spiritual truth, which is always and at all ages accessible. We're not empirically headed towards the Kingdom of God on Earth - that I disagree with. Like Voegelin, I think that's just immanentizing the eschaton.
Quoting John
But that isn't just determinism, that is already pre-determinism and fatalism.
Quoting John
Spinoza is a Cartesian <=> a wolf in the sheep's clothes. Spinoza, due to Descartes tremendous success, took over his terminology just like one would take the wine bottles of a popular brand, and then placed his own wine inside. He de-constructed Cartesianism from the inside, and returned to the old Scholasticism of old - of people like Avicenna and Averroës.
Quoting John
But according to Spinoza res extensa and res cogitans aren't dependent on one another either - that's what them being parallel entails. There is no causality between each other.
Quoting John
Yes - everything necessarily happens, but this particular thing doesn't necessarily happen. The former is a statement of metaphysics and logic, the latter a statement of what is actually the case in the world.
Quoting John
Right, it's not. That's why Laplace was really advocating pre-determinism.
Quoting John
The difference is that in pre-determinism knowing the conditions at time X is sufficient to predict the conditions at time Y while in determinism the conditions at time Y are an effect of the conditions at time X (which is their cause), but they cannot be predicted or known - they are necessarily contingent. Epicurus has this idea through the swerve of the atom - the atom swerves - indeed it NECESSARILY swerves. God cannot but create this contingent (and hence creative) empirical reality - reality cannot be uncreative. It is determined that the atom swerves, and the swerve itself is, empirically, contingent.
Quoting John
The knowledge you refer to doesn't exist though. Reality is necessarily creative. Spinoza doesn't deny contingency, he places it in its right place - below necessity. Contingency is logically and metaphysically grounded in the necessity of God. Indeed Spinoza would have quite a false philosophy - as would everyone else - if they deny aspects of reality, such as either necessity or contingency.
Quoting John
Lightning gets all of its powers from a source external to it, and the powers confer it no capacity of self-determination. Humans - by virtue of the rational part of the mind - are able to restrain their passions - humans are self-reflective, their powers reflect back on themselves and can alter themselves. Imagine this by analogy to the body. If the heart does something its not supposed to - such as go into atrial fibrillation - the brain initiates certain processes which generally cause the process to become self-limiting. Who determined you to stop yourself from so and so? You have - through a different part of yourself. But all of that is nevertheless determined.
So humans are morally responsible simply because humans have the capacity or power of self-determination by this reflexivity that I have described. There is no reflexivity in the lightning strike.
Quoting John
The nature of persons is self-reflective - the natures of spiders isn't (largely speaking - also there's no point of judging spiders. When we hold people morally responsible, it's always with the intent of judging them). There are cases when outside forces destroy or severely limit this capacity for reflexivity though - in such cases people are no longer held to be morally responsible, or at least they are held to be less morally responsible. For example, in many countries it is illegal to shoot an intruder in your house with a gun and kill him, if he attacks you with a knife (say). And yet someone could end up shooting them accidentally in the head (instead of in the foot) out of being overwhelmed by fear - their action will still remain immoral and they will still be judged, but a lesser sentence will be given than to the man who intentionally shot in the head the intruder in his home even though the intruder made no sign or intention of wanting to hurt them.
Humans and in fact all other beings. As well as events, relations, quantities and qualities, are like God in being necessary in the first sense, but unlike god in being contingent in the second sense.
There is no difference between those forms of necessity. Independennce of everything places something outside existing states.
God cannot be "personal" for this reason. If God were a distinct state of the world, God would depend on others, would have things which are not God build God's world.
The second sense which you are using "necessary" here, as a reflection of the necessary presence of the distinct state of God (whether in our world or a different realm), is incohrent. Spinoza removes the whole question of God as a distinct state, recognising it as a logic error-- taking with it speculation and doubt within metaphysics.
In this respect, Spinoza TAKES OUT the equivocation of the necessary (God, infinite) with the contingent (distinct state which may or may not be), which has charactertised most metaphysics. Since God is necessary, God is beyond doubt. The move which treats God as a presence that may or may not be (i.e. contingent) is shown to be partaking in the impossible.
Zizek remarks on the break here that takes place with respect to the metaphors employed when thinking of reason: "This is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while only with Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, "Night of the World," in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, i.e., the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being." (Zizek, The Ticklish Subject)
Deleuze too makes a similar assessment: "There is an even greater change when Kant shows that thought is threatened less by error than by inevitable illusions that come from within reason, as if from an internal arctic zone where the needle of every compass goes mad. A reorientation of the whole of thought becomes necessary at the same time as it is in principle penetrated by a certain delirium. .. In the classical image, error does not express what is by right the worst that can happen to thought, without thought being presented as "willing" truth, as orientated toward truth, as turned toward truth. It is this confidence ... which animates the classical image ... In contrast, in the eighteenth century, what manifests the mutation of light from "natural light" to the "Enlightened" is the substitution of belief for knowledge - that is, a new infinite movement implying another image of thought: it is no longer a matter of turning toward but rather one of following tracks, of inferring rather than grasping or being grasped. Under what conditions is inference legitimate? Under what conditions can belief be legitimate when it has become secular?" (Deleuze, What Is Philosophy)
That particular Kantian lesson, to this day I think, hasn't been fully absorbed yet.
I fail to see how this is anything more than a distinction without a difference. Whether something is an error because of a transcendental illusion, or something is an error because of the failure of thought, that seems merely two different ways of conceptualising the same underlying reality...
Don't we also conceptualise the nature of that which is doing the conceptualising? :s That which conceptualises also conceptualises its own nature. I don't see anything revolutionary here... That we look at errors as being internally engendered by the operation of thought itself, or we look at them as being the failure of thought - that really is the same thing to me, I can see no difference there. Perhaps I just don't understand what you mean, but that's how I see it anyway...
Quoting StreetlightX
But wasn't the model of the failure of thought produced by thought itself, and hence error was still internal to thought? :s This is absolutely puzzling and incoherent, precisely because there is no difference between the two.
Conceptualizes it's own nature how? Pre-Kant, the general tendency to posit an immediate link between the thinker and the thought (Descartes is paradigmatic here: I think therefore I am; yet one can also mention Hume's pre-established harmony between nature and thought, or even Socrates, for whom error is a case of mis-recognition, and evil a case of ignorance: in every case what maligns thought is external to it). Post-Kant, the thought and the thinker herself are split down the middle, without even immediate access to her own thoughts: the rigour of Kant's idealism means that not even the subject that thinks is excluded from the form of representation; the thinker is only ever a "I or He or It (the thing) which thinks" which only knows it's own thoughts through it's own representations of them.
Markus Gabriel puts it like this: "The constituting activity of experience is as a result put out of reach. We have no grasp of that which constitutes our world even though it is we who perform said constitution. The uncanny stranger begins to pervade the sphere of the subject, threatening its identity from within. Kant is thus one of the first to become aware of the intimidating possibility of total semantic schizophrenia inherent in the anonymous transcendental subjectivity as such." (Gabriel, The Mythological Being of Reflection.
Deleuze, attending to the manner in which temporarily is introduced into thought by Kant (against Descartes) puts like this: "The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination ('I think') obviously implies something undetermined ('I am'), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the 'I think' ... Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ... The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I - being exercised in it and upon it but not by it." (Difference and Repetition)
Zizek, also attentive to the passivity of the thinker inherent to Kant's conceptualization, frames it thusly: "if one reads Kant's reference to Copernicus closely, one cannot fail to notice how Kant's emphasis is not on the shift of the substantial fixed Center [i.e. from object to subject -SX], but on something quite different — on the status of the subject itself ... The precise German terms ("die Zuschauer sich drehen" —not so much "turn around another center" as "turn/rotate around themselves") make it clear what interests Kant: the subject loses its substantial stability/identity and is reduced to the pure substanceless void of the self-rotating abyssal vortex called "transcendental apperception." (Zizek, An Answer To Two Questions).
I cite this literature - and there's a lot more - to show that there is a rich and complex engagement with this question, and much of what is written traces out the not inconsiderable consequences that follow from such a conception of the subject. There's probably a bit too much to go into here, but the point is that your inability to see the difference is an issue that's largely, well, yours.
But again, how does this change anything? Before error entered from the outside, from something that wasn't me, that I wasn't conscious of. Now error enters supposedly from the inside, from my transcendental subjectivity - of which again I'm not conscious of. To what extent is this transcendental subjectivity anymore "inside" than the error that entered from the outside was? That's why I said that to me this seems merely as another way to conceive of the same thing that was previously conceived, and I don't see why it would be "better" to conceive of it this way (neither do I see why it would be better to conceive of it in the opposite way though... to me they are equivalent as they're saying the same thing in two different ways).
Simply put, if the error is external, then the mind simply has to make a better effort at knowing the world truly. But if instead the error is internal - the mind has to create the structure of its perceptions - then more effort may only put the mind at an even further distance from the thing-in-itself.
And this in fact fits with psychological science. It also ceases to be a problem once you give up rationalist dreams of perfect knowledge and accept the pragmatism of a Peircean modelling relation with the world.
So a striking fact of cognitive architecture is that consciousness is in fact "anti-representational". The brain would rather live with its best guess about the actual state of the world. It would like to predict away all experience if it could - as that way it can start to notice the small things that might matter most to it.
This would be Kantianism in spades. It is not just a generic structure of space and time, or causality, that we project on to existence. Ahead of every moment we are predicting every material event as much as possible, so we can quickly file it under "ignore" when it actually happens.
In this sense, we externalise error. Through forward modelling or anticipatory processing, we form strong expectancies about how the world "ought to be". And then the world goes and does something "wrong", something surprising or unexpected. The damn thing-in-itself misbehaves, leaving us having to impose some revised set of expectations that then becomes our new consciousness of its state of being.
(And until we have generated some new state of prediction, we are not conscious of anything for the half second to second it can take to sort out a state of sudden confusion - or in extreme situations, like a car crash, our memory will be of time slowed or even frozen with a hallucinatory, conceptually undigested, vividness. It is another psychological observation that childhood experience and dreams have this extra vividness because there is not then such a weight of adult conceptual habit predicting all the perception away and rendering it much more mundane.)
Anyway, as I was saying, Kant was right in understanding that the brain has to come at the world equipped with conceptual habits of structuration if it is to understand anything - in terms of its own pragmatic interests.
But Kant was still caught up in the rationalist dream of perfect knowledge. And so the gap between mind and world was seen as some kind of drama or failure. We have the right to know the world as it is - and yet we absolutely can't.
Peirce fixed this by naturalising teleology. Knowledge exists to serve purposes. And so what was a rationalist bug becomes a pragmatistic feature.
Oh goody! We don't have to actually know the world truly at all if the real epistemic aim is to be able to imagine it in terms that give us the most personal freedom to act. The more we can routinely ignore, the more we can then insert our own preferences into the world as we experience it. Consciousness becomes not a story of the thing-in-itself but about ourselves whizzing along on a wave of satisfied self-interest.
So Kant turned things around to get the cognitive architecture right. But because he still aspired to rationalist perfection, he wanted to boil down the mind's necessary habits to some bare minimum - ontic structure like space, time and causality.
This simply isn't bold enough. Brains evolved for entirely self-interested reasons. Which is why an epistemology of pragmatism - consciousness as a reality-predicting modelling relation - was needed to fully cash out the "Kantian revolution". The thing-in-itself is of interest only to the degree that it can be rendered impotent to the mind. The goal is to transcend its material constraints so as to live in the splendid freedom of a self-made world of semiotic sign.
(Of course, living beings can't actually ignore the world. They must live in it. But the point here is the direction of the desires. Rationalism got the natural direction wrong - leading to rationalist frustration and all its problems concerning knowledge. Pragmatism instead gets the direction right and thus explains the way we actually are. There is a good reason why humans want to escape into a realm of "fiction" - and I'm including science and technology here, of course. As to the extent we can do that, we become then true "selves", the locus of a radical freedom or autonomy to make the world whatever the hell we want it to be.)
I can see a clear distinction between the two ideas of necessity and the two ideas of contingency as Spinoza formulates them. You deny this distinction, you want to dissolve it, and yet you have given no rationale for your denial. If you lay your reasons for denial out clearly I will pay attention. What I have set out is straight from Spinoza. Are you denying Spinoza thought of it this way; if so provide textual evidence.
It's a long time since I studied the Ethics, so I thought I better go back to the text
Consider the following passages, quoted from the Ethics:
[b]4. The cause for the existence of a thing must either be contained in the very
nature and definition of the existent thing (in effect, existence belongs to its nature) or must have its being independently of the thing itself.[/b]
[b]PROPOSITION 24
The essence of things produced by God does not involve existence.
Proof: This is evident from Def. I . For only that whose nature (considered in itself)involves existence is self-caused and exists solely from the necessity of its own nature.
Corollary: Hence it follows that God is the cause not only of the coming into existence of things but also of their continuing in existence, or, to use a scholastic term, God is the cause of the being of things [essendi rerum]. For whether things exist or do not exist, in reflecting on their essence we realize that this essence involves neither existence nor duration. So it is not their essence which can be the cause of either their existence or their duration, but only God, to whose nature alone existence pertains (Cor. I Pr. 14).[/b]
God is the only necessary being in the sense that only God's existence is essentially necessary; the existence of all other other beings depends on conditions outside themselves, and, ultimately, on God. In that sense, because their essence does not involve existence, and because they are dependent on others, they are contingent beings.
[b]PROPOSITION 29
Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are from the necessity of the divine nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way.
Proof: Whatever is, is in God (Pr. 1 5) . But God cannot be termed a contingent
thing, for (Pr. I I ) he exists necessarily, not contingently. Again, the modes of
the divine nature have also followed from it necessarily, not contingently (Pr.
1 6) , and that, too, whether insofar as the divine nature is considered absolutely (Pr. 2 1 ) or insofar as it is considered as determined to act in a definite way (Pr. 27). Furthermore, God is the cause of these modes not only insofar as they simply exist (Cor. Pro 26), but also insofar as they are considered as determined to a particular action (Pr. 26). Now if they are not determined by God (Pr. 26), it is an impossibility, not a contingency, that they should determine themselves. On the other hand (Pr. 27), if they are determined by God, it is an impossibility, not a contingency, that they should render themselves undetermined.
Therefore, all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature
not only to exist but also to exist and to act in a definite way. Thus, there is no
contingency.
Scholium: Before I go any further, I wish to explain at this point what we must
understand by "Natura naturans" and "Natura naturata." I should perhaps say
not "explain; but "remind the reader," for I consider that it is already clear from what has gone before that by "Natura naturans" we must understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, the attributes of substance that express eternal and infinite essence; or (Cor. I Pr. 14 and Cor. 2 Pr. 1 7) , God insofar as he is considered a free cause. By "Natura naturata" I understand all that follows from the necessity of God's nature, that is, from the necessity of each one of God's attributes; or all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God and can neither be nor be conceived without God.[/b]
In another sense nothing is contingent because as a mode of the infinite attributes of God everything is necessarily just exactly as it is. It follows that everything is utterly determined by God, according to Spinoza, and that there hence cannot be any freedom of the genuine kind that would support the Christian conception of moral responsibility. This is because we could never have done otherwise than we have done under Spinoza's conception of reality. Any genuine ontological distinction between the actions of natural phenomena and human actions is thus dissolved.
[b]Corollary 2: It follows, secondly, that God alone is a free cause. For God alone
exists solely from the necessity of his own nature (Pr. 1 1 and Cor. 1 Pr. 1 4) and acts solely from the necessity of his own nature (Pr. 1 7). So he alone is a free cause
(Def. 7).[/b]
Quoting John
"Therefore all things have been determined from the necessity of divine nature, not only to exist, but to exist in a certain way, and to produce effects in a certain way. Thus there is no contingency"
Spinoza is dealing with logical structure here. Fire is determined by divine nature to exist in a certain way - as fire - and to produce certain effects - burning. If it wouldn't be so, then it wouldn't be fire to begin with. Atoms are determined by divine nature to necessarily swerve and produce such a range of effects. This isn't talk about what they empirically - and hence contingently - do. Spinoza is doing metaphysics in Book I, not physics.
The difference you're not seeing is that there is, for thought, post Kant, an ineliminable and inexpugnable indeterminable.
Your objection makes no sense to me. Spinoza makes no distinction between metaphysics and physics; between the noumenon and the phenomenon.
What do you think the distinction between metaphysics and physics besides the obvious distinction between the infinite and the finite, would consist in for Spinoza?
Is he not speaking in these passages about the relations between God (the infinite) and the world (the finite)?
That's the common misreading of Spinoza as a pantheist, where God is misread as the world. It's drawn from taking Spinoza's talk of necessay self-definition of existing states (e.g. the necessary logic expression of a rock , a tree, myself or you) as emprical comment, as you are doing in you latest objection.
Spinoza is actually talking about how the logical significance of existence is necessary and determined within causality. Contingent states cause something particular to occur (e.g. I push a rock off the cliff, which crushes a toy house), so while they are never necessary, they always have a necessary consequence in terms of logic. If there is a rock I push of a cliff, that logical significance is necessary. That meaning cannot be absent from the expression of the world.
This is actually how FREE WILL works. We and our decisions are contingent states. Any decision we do take, however, has a necessary expression, that is no other action or significance. If I choose to make this post, it is necessarily the choice to make this post. It cannot be any other choice or subject be to doubt (i.e. "How do you know if you really chose to make this post? Maybe and evil demon is tricking you? Spinoza's awareness of self-definition is basically the proper refutution of Descartes' doubt. Descartes only got part of the way there; he only grasped the self-definition of the concious entity).
If, for Spinoza, everything is an expression of the nature of God, and God is in everything and everything is in God; then Spinoza is either a pantheist, or a panentheist. I actually think his philosophy accords best with the latter, since he makes the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. But if he is the latter, then he allows transcendence which is what I have been arguing that his philosophy does all along.
[b]Panentheism (meaning "all-in-God", from the Ancient Greek ??? pân, "all", ?? en, "in" and ???? Theós, "God") is the belief that the divine interpenetrates every part of the universe and also extends beyond time and space. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical,[1] panentheism maintains a distinction between the divine and non-divine and the significance of both.[2]
In pantheism, the universe and everything included in it is equal to the Divine. In panentheism, the universe and the divine are not ontologically equivalent. God is instead viewed as the soul of the universe, the universal spirit present everywhere, in everything and everyone, at all times. Some versions suggest that the universe is nothing more than the manifestation of God. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "transcends", "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that 'All is God', panentheism goes further to claim that God is greater than the universe. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God,[1] like in the Kabbalah concept of Tzimtzum. Much Hindu thought is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism.[3][4] Hasidic Judaism merges the elite ideal of nullification to paradoxical transcendent Divine Panentheism, through intellectual articulation of inner dimensions of Kabbalah, with the populist emphasis on the panentheistic Divine immanence in everything.[/b]
You keep asserting that I am misreading in attributing the latter (transcendence) to Spinoza and at the same time, incorrectly claiming that I attribute the former (pantheism is, ironically, entirely in keeping with the notion of Spinoza as a philosopher of immanence) without offering any clear explanations for your objections or any textual evidence to support them. So, given that lack of clarity and relevance, and since you obviously pay little attention to what I say, why do you think I should pay any attention to what you say, Willow?
Another ramification has to do with the nature of thought itself: against the image of thought as the activity of a willing subject, thought equally becomes a matter of passivity with respect to the self (no different, again, from the way in which we are passively affected by things 'external' to me): "The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it." As Deleuze rightly notes, this is the key to Kant's 'Copernican revolution': not the banal change of perspective wherein the object must conform to the subject, but rather the radically changed status of the subject itself: "Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution."
This passivity in turn entails that thought can only ever take place by means of an encounter with what exceeds it: the imperative to thought only ever comes from beyond it: "Thought is entirely reliant on contingent encounters, which is to say, on events. Its necessity lies in its being forced by an event, which is to say by an encounter with the world, with something that does not depend upon us. Thought always implies a forced movement..." (Kieran Aarons, The Involuntarist Image of Thought). Contrary to the image of thought as something 'internal' to a thinker, the passivity of thought as recognized by Kant entails that thought itself is only ever guaranteed by such encounters; contra Descartes, it's not thought that guarantees the substantiality of the cogito as a thinking substance, but the encounter which guarantees the necessity of thought that happens 'to' a radically passive subject. The implications here can be explored endlessly, but I'll leave it at the above for now.
Another quirky implication of understanding error to be internal to thought is one with respect to the future of AI: if Kant is right, then any AI that can be said to 'think like a human' must have an 'in-built' risk of going mad. In fact, the whole question of the inherence of madness to thought has a huge literature in itself - there's a very famous debate between Derrida and Foucault on this, following precisely from the question of the Cogito in Descartes and Kant - and of course Zizek's whole oeuvre deals, in a sense, with precisely this problem (hence his constant linking of psychoanalysis to Kantian philosophy). There's more - a great deal more - that follows from Kant's conception of thought, but the above just captures a couple of points that follow. Again, if you don't see how 'this changes anything', I'd simply suggest that you pursue the literature here. There's plenty of it, and I would be careful not to mistake your unfamiliarity with these debates for a lack of significance.
Physics is what deals with empirical reality - with the series of on-going and particular causal events. Metaphysics deals with the logical structure which necessarily inheres in the said empirical reality (hence immanence), in each and every event from it.
Quoting John
Not in the way you put it. He's speaking of God's immanence in the world - the fact that God inheres at each and every point of the world.
Quoting John
Think of Plato. Every material thing has a form - a logical structure. That logical structure, which is infinite and perfect is an expression of the nature of God. The forms were the objects of knowledge for Plato, simply because only the forms allowed for certainty. Empirical reality couldn't be the object of knowledge, only the object of belief, because there was no certainty in empirical reality - empirical reality was contingent. But the form, contra Plato [well in the most common interpretations of Plato - there are also immanent interpretations I could suggest you some literature on it] (and as corrected by Aristotle - which is why I always claim that Spinoza is a certain kind of Aristotelian who follows on from Avicenna and Averroës), doesn't exist above and beyond the object in a separate and transcendent realm, but rather inheres within it. So yes, every existing thing has a form, and therefore is an expression of the nature of God. As Aristotle and Plato make it clear, it's the form - NOT matter - which has Being. Hence if there was something which wasn't an expression of the nature of God - ie didn't have a form - it really couldn't even exist. So everything that can exist must have a form, ie must be an expression of the nature of God QED. Furthermore, everything that exists is necessarily contingent because no particular thing can be God - no particular thing has Being because they are combinations of matter and form (and matter has no being). Hence every particular thing or state, by the necessity of its own finiteness, is contingent on the form - on God. Thus every finite thing necessarily is in becoming - the only necessity is contingency QED :-O In-so-far as one understands God, one becomes identified with God, and therefore one is eternal - by virtue of identifying with the eternal forms and not with their empirical manifestation. They are not eternal in the sense of infinite temporal duration, but in the sense of timelessness - one always exists as a possibility in God's mind - as a form. Thus there is a part of the mind which survives death, QED - or better said simply is unaffected by death, which always happens in time, but this part of the mind - the form - is timeless.
Quoting John
But Spinoza does not maintain the significance of both. Only God is real, the finite is illusory. The finite isn't pure form, and hence is ultimately illusory qua finite.
I don't see it that way. Physics reflects the logical structure which inheres in our understanding of the "said empirical reality", and metaphysics is the attempt to explicate the logical structure of our understanding. This is exactly what Kant arrives at with the phenomenal/ noumenal and empirical/transcendental distinctions. It is physics/ immanent and metaphysics/ transcendental. But it might also turn on how one uses those terms.
Quoting Agustino
But what it means for God to "inhere in every point of the world" just is "the relations between God (the infinite) and the world (the finite)' that Spinoza is attempting to explicate. The way I see it, though, is that being the supreme rationalist, he mistakes the logic of our understanding of the world for a logic inherent in the world itself. This kind of mistake is exactly what Kant's philosophy corrects. Actually, good ol' Schopenhauer correctly notes this about Spinoza in a passage about his philosophy in the first part of On The Fourfold Root of the Prinicple of Sufficient Reason.
Quoting Agustino
Can you provide a passage where Spinoza explicitly states that the finite is illusory? I have never come across that idea except in definitions of acosmism, and to be honest the idea of acosmism, regardless of whether Spinoza professes it, makes absolutely no sense to me. Finite things are ( by definition) limited and transient, to be sure, but those facts are no grounds for calling them "illusions". I don't even know what that could mean.
I have been re-reading the Ethics a little to refresh my memory of it, and I'm afraid I cannot agree with your interpretations at all. But it doesn't matter anyway because scholars who spend their lives disagree on interpreting Spinoza, so it's not going to be settled on PF. I think if we continue we will just go around in circles repeating ourselves and coming form such different presuppositions that we will only succeed in talking past one another and wasting a lot of time and energy.
To be honest I just don't really care enough about this issue to continue discussing it, but thanks anyway for your input so far. You're in a good position here, Agustino; you're poised to have the final say, if you want to, since I most probably won't respond further.
In any case, thanks for making an effort, Agustino. We've even managed to remain civil with one another!
:)
Well yes, you should thank yourself for that, for not making any derogatory remarks and for being respectful. I always am respectful when others are respectful :P O:)
Well I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that I don't exactly see it that way. But nevertheless...
Right, the logical structure of OUR UNDERSTANDING is physics. The logical structure of REALITY is metaphysics - and metaphysics explains our understanding by mere fact that our understanding is also real, and thus falls under the domain of metaphysics. But our understanding can be mistaken - which is why physical theories change all the time.
Quoting John
Yes, which is why I said not the way you put it - not in the way you mean it. But the sentence can be read correctly, with the correct meaning.
Quoting John
Take the principle of non-contradiction. It's not a principle simply of our understanding. It's a principle of reality itself.
Quoting John
I remember something vaguely about that, and I wrote a critique of it on the previous PF, which of the Spinoza-knowledgeable people there agreed with.
Quoting John
The finite consists of modes right? Modes are not Substance itself, and hence are illusory - impermanent.
Quoting John
Hegel read Spinoza as an acosmist as well. How do you square that with your own reading of Spinoza as a panentheist?
Quoting John
Well I've read a vast majority of contemporary Spinoza scholars, and I think the disagreements are more in their way of conceptualising Spinoza's system, and how deep they each penetrate. But those who go the deepest subsume all the others under them. I've even read some whose works aren't even translated in English comme Le Bonheur avec Spinoza par Bruno Giuliani ;) Nadler, Negri, Curley, Hampshire, Deleuze, Yirmiyahu Yovel etc.
Can you cite a reference for that? Even if it were so, what makes you think I could not disagree with Hegel?
https://archive.org/stream/lecturesonphilo03hegegoog#page/n351/mode/2up/search/spinoza
One of the few I remember being cited.
"Spinoza says what is, is the absolute substance, what is other than this are mere modi, to which he ascribes no affirmation, no reality" - Yours Truly, Georg Hegel :P
But isn't the madman the only one who lives in a self-made world of semiotic sign?
Quoting apokrisis
So the direction of desire is towards madness and the mad is the most successful of us all? :s
Quoting apokrisis
:s
Why do you have to drag Trump into every conversation? But yes I guess.
>:O
Quoting apokrisis
So you really believe madness is the telos of the human being? The fulfilment of our desire lies in madness? I think that's quite a mad philosophy.
And I find your replies trivial.
It seems that you have already reached the end-point of your philosophy :P
Why do you say that?
If you find my point trivial that is an indication that you have already gone mad - ie reached the end point of your philosophy. You yourself have said:
Quoting apokrisis
So presumably if human beings could actually ignore the world - by say, implanting their mind within a simulation - they should do so, as this is what their desires are ultimately aimed at. And clearly the madman does exactly this - the madman is mad because he ignores the world and lives only in his head.
Are you talking paranoia or bipolar mania or what? A primary symptom of schizophrenia is a breakdown of perceptual predictability. So a loss of control over experience rather than a gain.
I defined madness in the sense I was using it: living entirely in your head, completely broken off from the external world. The mad person, who walks naked on the street screaming, shouting, yelling, talking to himself, etc. lives entirely in his head, that's why he doesn't respond to any of the cues he receives from his society. I'm not sure how such people would be labelled in medical terms, but they certainly do exist.
I do agree that we live in our head - most of our life is actually in our head. Most of our synapses for example 99.99% are not connected to or affiliated with our sense organs, such as the eyes, etc. So it's clear that our brain produces a model of the world, and then navigates mostly using that model. However, there must still be a link with the world (however small) - if that link is lost, the result is madness.
:-} Well what have you actually said? How is what you said different from how I've rephrased it? Instead of being all arrogant and so forth, you could actually correct my (mis)understanding of your position.
Quoting apokrisis
But what is being said by Hegel here is not as clear as taking it out of context in this way makes it appear to be.
"With Parmenides that which is known as determinate Being is no longer present or existent at all. By Jacobi, on the contrary, determinate Being is regarded as affirmative, although it is finite, and thus it is affirmation in finite existence. Spinoza says, What is is the absolute substance; what is other than this are mere modi, to which he ascribes no affirmation, no reality. Thus it cannot perhaps be said even of the Substance of Spinoza that it is so precisely Pantheistic as that expression of Jacobi, for particular things still remain as little an affirmative for Spinoza as determinate Being does for Parmenides, which, as distinguished from Being, is for him mere Not-Being, and is of such a character that this Not-Being is not at all.
If the finite be taken as thought, then all that is finite is understood to be included, and thus it is Pantheism. But in using the term finite it is necessary to draw a distinction between the finite as represented merely by this or that particular object, and the finite as including all things, and to explain in which sense we use the word. Taken in the latter sense, it is already a progressive movement of reflection, which no longer arrests itself at the Particular; “all that is finite” pertains to reflection. This Pantheism is of modern date, and if it be said that “God is Being in all determinate Being,” this expresses a form of Pantheism found among Mohammedans of modern times, especially the Pantheism of the Dechelaleddin-Rumi. Here this everything as it is is a Whole, and is God; and the finite is in this determinate Being as universal finitude. This Pantheism is the product of thinking reflection, which extends natural things so as to include all and everything, and in so doing conceives of the existence of God not as true universality of thought, but as an allness; that is to say, as being in all individual natural existences."
Even if it is accepted that the modes or modifications of substance are somehow other than, distinct from, the being of the substance itself, insofar as the being of the substance is eternal and infinite and the being of the modifications are temporal and finite, I don't see how this warrants a conclusion that the modifications are "illusions", which is apparently the central claim of acosmism, rather than merely a conclusion that the reality of the modifications is finite as opposed to the infinite reality of the substance. I asked you earlier to cite a passage from Spinoza where he claims precisely that modes are "illusions".. You haven't provided it and nor have you made it clear what you think "illusion" could even mean in this context.
This is the salient issue that needs to be resolved in our disagreement. Involved in this issue is also the corollary (as I see it) that if the being of substance is distinct from the being of the modes (which it must be if one wants to say that the former is real and the latter an illusion) then how could it be thought to not be the case that the being of the substance is transcendent of the modes, just as reality is transcendent of illusion?
Now, I said I would probably not respond further, and yet I have responded, but I only want to deal with this one issue until I am clear on exactly what you have to say about it and what you think Spinoza has to say about (although I don't really care too much about the latter). It seems to me that you have a tendency to evade difficult issues like this by changing the subject or mentioning how many books you have read. I am not interested in any of that; I just want to address this one issue to see whether you can give a coherent and consistent account of yourself. If you can give a clear and consistent account, then good; I will then be able to discover whether I can agree with it. If I find I cannot, it won't matter, because at least then I will know exactly what I am disagreeing with, and why. Otherwise, frustration ensues and I might become cranky again; which I want to avoid at all costs.
THE PROPER VIEW
I would rather look at past (and present) philosophers as those who made noble attempts to elevate the deplorable mental states of their times. If I had to pick one, I'd pick a current philosopher, such as Daniel Dennett, who perhaps 'rode to prominence' on media's need for sensationalism (they needed someone to sensationalize, and he was a good fit). In his partial defense, however, he does embody what a current (and future) philosopher should be - i.e. one who pursues philosophical answers to the Big Questions of Life (and the biggest, I have independently discovered, is "Why Bother?"), and one who realized that, in identifying an Ultimate Objective Value with which to base a life-guiding philosophy on (which we do not have in adequate form yet - hence continued vanity, hate, war, aimlessness, depression, and suicide, to name a few) (enter me), one must be familiar with all branches of science (which is our sole source of verified knowledge). He is familiar with many relevant branches of science, but he has done nothing with that knowledge yet (enter me again, with my mental sleeves rolled-up).
So the separation isn't maximised by breaking the connection? Is this what your claim consists in?
Again, close reading will show that I stress that this is about "directions" and "extents", and so the intrinsic relativity of a logical dichotomy is presumed. Your pretence otherwise is just trolling.
To be finite is to be illusory, as I will explain below.
Quoting John
Modes are illusions simply because they aren't Substance, and only Substance necessarily exists and can only be conceived as existing and not otherwise. Only to Substance does existence belong to as essence. There is no relevant passage to cite because it just has to do with the relationship between modes and substance. If you understand what both are - then you will see that modes are contingent on Substance, and thus ultimately illusory, unreal, if eternal and unconstrained existence belongs only to Substance (which Spinoza claims in the first book).
Quoting John
Illusion means lacking being. Something that becomes lacks being, it never is, it is always in becoming. That's what philosophers starting with Plato have pretty much meant by the word.
Quoting John
The modes have no being, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Only Substance has Being.
Quoting John
Except that reality isn't transcendent to illusion, but inherent within it. A dream may be an illusion, but that illusion is constituted by reality - the dreaming is real, even though the dream is illusion.
Quoting John
The modes have no being, they are the particular/temporary manifestations of Becoming. Where is Being? In Becoming - it is the essence of Becoming (of the process of Becoming to make that clear, not of its temporary and illusory manifestations). Being is thus immanent in Becoming. In addition, particular manifestations (modes) of Becoming never have Being, because they are always ceasing to be and becoming something else, and are thus never what they are - they are non-Being
Quoting John
Well I certainly didn't mean to evade any issue, I only cited the books in reference to your opinion that there is (significant) disagreement among Spinoza scholars over Spinozism.
Quoting John
Ok, well I think I have given a consistent account above (especially the underlined bits). If you find difficulties and inconsistencies in it, please specify them so that I can address them clearly.
Apart from one other passage, I am only going to address what I have quoted here because the rest of your post consists in just making the same assertion over and over.
The problem with this is that the notions 'real' and 'existence' derive from our experience. Be-ing is becoming; we cannot even begin to conceive how something could be and yet not become. So, reality, for us, is becoming, consists in becoming. The notion of substance, as an absolutely static eternity or eternailty is a purely logical, formal notion; it is essentially exactly the same as the notion of identity which we use to understand ourselves, and others and in fact all things as 'something that persists despite changing through time'.
So, Aristotle considered substance to be manifold. The substance that is a temporal entity can persist as its identity for the duration of its existence. IT is only in a purely abstract logical or formal sense that the identity or substance of a thing does not change, unless it is something like what we think of as a real soul.
Would a real soul need to be immortal? Aristotle apparently didn't think so, but I don't want to go into that here. The point is that Spinoza does not provide a convincing argument for why there cannot be multiple substances, but only provides an argument for why there cannot be multiple substances as he conceives substance, which is an entirely circular argument that does no more than assume its own conclusion.
So, as I see it , we are back to the same point we were in an earlier discussion where I asked you and/or Willow to tell me what kind of existence an utterly changeless eternal substance could be thought to have, above and beyond its being a purely formal notion of identity or being, a mere abstraction which is used as a tool by us to make sense of our experience.
So what kind of existence can an utterly undifferentiated, absolutely changeless, infinite and eternal substance have other than as an abstract idea which is conceived by virtue of being a negation of the differentiated, changing, finite, temporal world we unarguably experience everyday?
If you cannot answer that, and yet want to maintain that only such a "substance" is Real, then you will be admitting that the one Real Substance is unknowable except apophatically, known, that is, only as a negation of everything that we do know. This would also be to admit that substance is transcendental because it cannot be positively conceived in terms of our experience but only as 'something' absolutely other to it.
Quoting Agustino
Here you contradict yourself, because on the one hand you say that waking existence is an illusion, and only substance is real, and on the other you say that it is real: "the dreaming is real". This demonstrates what I have claimed; that we derive our idea of reality from waking life not from thinking about some changeless substance, which we cannot even do in any positive sense.
Even in relation to a dream, what does it means to say the dreaming is real? How do you think you could you know that you had actually been dreaming? It could only be known if your memory that you had been dreaming was of something real, right? So, when you wake you say the dreams were an illusion in relation to the reality of your waking life. Two things you can remember (you are relying entirely on the reality of your memory here); your moment of waking where you remember the dream, and the dream itself are compared, and one is deemed to be an illusion in relation to the other. But the analogy does not hold in relation to any purported reality of substance in relation to waking life (conceived as modality) because you are not comparing two things you remember, but you are comparing one thing you remember (waking life) and its merely formal negation, and without any rational justification deciding that the latter, which can be literally nothing to you beyond being an empty formal motion is the Real.
It seems to me this is nothing but the typical Hegelian critique. But this is not the correct notion of Spinozist Substance. Substance is not an absolutely static eternity...
Quoting John
Spinoza is operating with the notion of substance that he adopted from the medieval Scholastics and from Descartes. If you look for Descartes' definitions of Substence, you will see that they are very similar to Spinoza's. So I don't think Spinoza pulled the concept of Substance out of his ass :P lol Certainly he did change its use though.
Quoting John
And you keep fighting against an image of Spinoza - I already told you that the utterly changeless and eternal substance is Becoming itself. Becoming - the act of becoming - is eternal and changeless. There is no static Substance. Now it seems that you want to discuss Hegel's conception of Spinoza's Substance. I'm just informing you that that isn't Spinoza's actual conception.
Quoting John
The dreaming isn't the dream. The dreaming is the ACTIVITY which constitutes the dream - which makes the dream possible, in your Kantian/Hegelian parlance. This activity is very real - you are actually dreaming. The dream however is an illusion - it isn't permanent or fundamental, but rather it is constituted by the activity of dreaming (which is what is actually fundamental)
Quoting John
You are mistaking the analogy. I'm not speaking empirically. I'm using an empirical analogy to drive a metaphysical point. The analogy is as follows - dreaming is real (in other words the activity which constitutes the dream - this has nothing to do with whether or not I perceive it as constituting the dream, just as it has nothing to do with whether I perceive Becoming as constituting the illusory world around), but the dream is an illusion. In similar fashion Substance - that activity which constitutes the modes - is real - while the modes are an illusion.
In the sense you are asking, none. Substance is not a state of the world or presence of a transcedent realm. Rather it is a necessary expression of existing states rather than one itself.
This is what pantheist and panenathiest readings of Spinoza get wrong. Both argue God is in the world (in addition to anything else). Spinoza point is this contention is wrong. We might say "God is in" or "God is the Soul of the world, " but this does not entail God is something in existence, as the pantheist and panenathiest argue.
God is beyond any finite state, an infinite-- defined as the changeless which is not any existing state.The Real (infinite) as opposed to the illusion (finite). To ask what existing state it is doesn't make sense.
What exactly do you think it is in Descartes' own notion of substance that makes his substance dualism inconsistent?
Quoting Agustino
Can you site a passage from Spinoza where he states that substance consists in becoming? The modes are the becoming of substance, but if the modes are not real, then the becoming of substance is not real, and then what are we left with?
Quoting Agustino
You are mistaking my critique of the analogy. You and Willow both often bring in the "empirical" as a red herring it seems to me. Forget about the empirical, Spinoza never spoke specifically about it. You are just repeating the same contradiction. You say dreaming is real and yet you say modality is an illusion. Which is it to be, you cannot have it both ways? You haven't even attempted to deal with the difficulties involved in your "analogy" that I pointed out. If you're not prepared to exercise good faith and charitability and make a decent effort then why should I continue to respond to your posts? You often seem like you are just trolling.
It's obvious that substance is not a "state of the world". What do you mean by "presence of a transcendent realm"? How could a transcendent realm be present; since that is a contradiction terms?
It's not that "pantheist and panentheist readings of Spinoza" are wrong, rather that your understanding of pantheism and panentheism is inadequate. Neither argues that God is in the world in the sense of being phenomenal, as you suggest. Pantheism posits that God is the world, and panentheism posits that God is not identical with the world, but inheres in every part of it. For pantheism God is wholly immanent, for panenetheism God is both immanent and transcendent. So, to repeat again, neither position claims that " God is something in existence"; this is simply a misunderstanding on your part.
I think Spinoza's philosophy best fits panentheism, and that is why have been claiming all along that to read Spinoza's philosophy as a philosophy of the wholly immanent is both inconsistent and incoherent.
So, if you want to continue to claim that Spinoza's position is neither that of the pantheist or the panentheist then explain clearly exactly how it differs form both of those positions.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
If you think this is Spinoza's understanding of God or substance, as I do, then you disagree with Agustino, who seems to think that substance is not static, but becoming.
Your objection to the analogy relies on misreading it. Agustino isn't claiming that existing dreams are real and that modes (which includes existing dreams) are an illusion. He's point out there are many truths (the dream's presence, its self-definition, its meaning, etc.), even though the dream illusion.
So with respect to Substance and modes, there is a truth (Substance) even though the modes are an illusion. The point is Substance doesn't rely on existing as something (i.e. it is a mode) to be true.
My objection to Agustino's analogy was nothing like what you say it was, so I'm not going to bother responding to that.
What exactly is the "truth of Substance" and what exactly does it rely upon, in your opinion? You haven't yet made either of these clear.
Spinoza's point is that God is outside the world. God cannot be part of the world nor inhere in the world without being, on God's own terms, finite. (i.e. "God is here, not there" and "There and not here" ). In both pantheism and panenetheism, God is "something" which changes, which is a distinction of existence.
Under pantheism, we point out a distinction of the world claim it's God. With panentheism we point out points of the world and "Ah yes, God inheres THERE." In either case, we are pronouncing were God begins and ends, inconsistent with God as infinite.
Panentheism does not fit with Spinoza because it makes God into a distinction of the world. Instead of being an infinite, God becomes split and discrete across all states of existence. We look at separate objects and say "God inheres THERE," as if God were at that point in the empirical world. Spinoza's point is God is nowhere in the finite world.
In both pantheism and panentheism, God is something in the world. Not an empirical state per se, but logically of existing states, such that they say empirical states amount to God or that God specifically manifests in states if the world. If the question of "What's is God?" is asked, both give worldly answers. The pantheist says: "All the world," the panentheist says: "That which inheres in every individual state."
Spinoza rejects both these accounts. God is only God to Spinoza, Substance, the infinite of becoming. In worldly terms, Substance is nothing at all. The "What is it in existence?" question makes no sense.
[quote=John]If you think this is Spinoza's understanding of God or substance, as I do, then you disagree with Agustino, who seems to think that substance is not static, but becoming.[/quote]
I don't. Remember, Agustino said becoming was changeless.
[quote=John]What exactly is the "truth of Substance" and what exactly does it rely upon, in your opinion? You haven't yet made either of these clear.[/quote]
I've told you this many times now, in one form or another. Substance is the infinite, the changeless, the self-definition, the becoming (or Being). It doesn't rely on anything. Such a notion is absurd. It would be say that God relied on something else to be, as if God were a finite state of causality.
That is a meaningless contradiction. There is no general "act of becoming" as Agustino suggests there is; rather there are infinitely many acts of becoming. If all that is meant by becoming being changeless is that, (as a generalization) becoming never ceases, then that would be fine, but then it really tells us nothing beyond what we experience everyday.
So, are you claiming that God is real in some sense beyond being an apophatically derived abstract notion? This is where you never give a straight answer because you know you cannot say anything that will not fatally contradict your own position.
More or less the opposite. The infinite is Real, rather than the world.
It's sort of an inversion of how we usually think about things. Usually, we think of the Real as "the world as it is," the empirical, what's happening around us, the (in Spinozian terms) the modes (particularly that affect us). Spinoza turns on its head in the context of metaphysics.
How can these finite modes, that which change and die, amount to the Real? They are only here for a moment before they pass out of existence, contingent states, never to be again. None of these modes could amount to Being, to the infinite, to that which is necessarily so. To say these were Real would be like claiming a man was God, to claim that God was born and would die.
For God to be infinite, it's the finite which must be a illusion. Modes must be a falsehood. They must masquerade as Being, only to die as the necessity of change moves-- think how any state we encounter appears present, but then is gone in a flash. The Real cannot be a measure of the world. It can only be a measure of what is other to the world, what is true regardless of modes.
The Real can only be logical (i.e. not a mode, and I suspect, in you terms "abstract"), else the infinite of Being is reduced to the finite.
I can't see how time is relevant to the reality of something. You and I are modulations and we might be here for eighty or ninety years, or even more. If you want to say the infinite is Real, then you should be able to say how it is Real, otherwise it becomes an empty claim in a rational context, unless you admit that the Real is unknowable and the claim is not propositional, but merely expresses an intuitive or faith-based belief.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
If the Real is only logical does the logical then have any existence other than as thought? If you want to say it does then what kind of existence could that be.
And don't say again that I am asking for an empirical explanation of its existence; I am asking for an explanation of what kind of existence you think it has other than the merely logical, where the logical is considered to itself have no existence beyond thought. To repeat it for emphasis: if you want to say the logical does have an existence beyond thought, then you should be able to explain just what that existence consists in, or else admit that you believe in something unknowable.
Trying to get an honest straight answer from you on this is "like trying to get blood out of a stone".
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Come on! If God or Substance or Nature or whatever you want to call it is really nothing then what difference could it make to us and why would we even bother to think about it. The question I have been asking is if it should be thought of as being real in any sense beyond our thoughts. IF the answer is 'no', as you seem to be saying then you have been arguing for nothing at all, and to no purpose, because everyone already knows that Substance or God can be thought about in the way Spinoza does, and you follow him in doing.
But the fact that we can think about God or substance that way is of utterly no import if it is considered to have no ontological relevance. God or substance can be consistently thought about in many other ways, too, as the history of philosophy amply shows. If none of the ways we think about God or substance can be shown to be inherently superior to any of the others, because their differences are due merely to different starting presumptions, definitions and premises, then the whole argument becomes a big "So what?". Unless it is presumed that there really is a God beyond our thoughts, and that our thoughts might more or less approximate to God's nature, then it becomes just a word game, and nothing more.
"Substance: A thing whose existence is dependent on no other thing"
- This is virtually the same as Spinoza's definition of substance, and therefore entails the same conclusions when worked out. Descartes however (incoherently) postulated Created Substances apart from this one Substance - these were what his dualism consist of in fact. Mental and Physical Substances are created substances, and depend ultimately on the One infinite Substance - God. In fact, Descartes states this clearly:
"Created Substance: A thing whose existence is dependent on nothing other than God"
These are subsumed under Spinoza's modes - as expression of Substance.
Quoting John
Again, as this has to do with the system as a whole there is no particular passage which comes to mind. I don't have the Ethics close at hand at the moment, but regardless, the idea is that Substance is generative, and the modes are not. Hence there can be no becoming of modes if there is no Substance. You have to understand how the elements of Spinoza's system define each other, and how they are related together - in other words you must understand Spinozist logic - to draw these conclusions. Without Substance the modes do not occur - they are in fact inconceivable.
In relation to your Hegelian reading of Spinoza, have you read Macherey's Hegel ou Spinoza? (PS: it comes out in favor of Spinoza :P - and I can tell you that it covers EXACTLY this ground that you're asking me to go over in a lot more detail than I can go over here)
Quoting John
The becoming of Substance is an activity - in fact, that's all that Substance consists of - it is the Being of Becoming. The modes exist because of Becoming. The modes are things - particular states - they require some underlying activity to make them possible. Think like waves in an ocean... what is the underlying activity that makes waves possible? The current. The waves are nothing but a manifestation of this underlying activity.
Quoting John
It is an analogy - drop it once you have climbed up on it. You cannot step on the other side of the river if you don't let go of the raft. Analogies are of course always imperfect. However, it seems to me that you have missed the point of the analogy. The point was to show that things (dreams) are constituted by activities [dreaming] (even at lower levels of explanation), and that modes, being things, are constituted by God - the underlying activity which alone is Real and makes them possible. Now in what does God's Reality consist? In Becoming - in the eternal coming and going of these illusory and transient modes. God depends on the modes but not on any particular mode. Indeed it is incoherent to think God without thinking the modes - Substance cannot be thought without its modes, since Substance is an activity, and there can be no activity without its products. HOWEVER - no particular mode, or set of modes is necessary for God to exist; ie the only necessity is that there is no necessity.
By the way this is a good review of the book:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/32325-hegel-or-spinoza-2/
Read it, and then if you're interested, buy the book if you haven't already! :P And don't get too scared by the "materialist" reading of Spinoza lol :P
And Spinoza actually corrected this by not calling Substance a "thing"... ;)
That book is actually on my shelves, I picked it up cheap somewhere I imagine, and yet I have never opened it. Since Spinoza and Hegel have one thing in common; that they arguably have produced the most interesting and ambitious attempts to 'immanentize the noumenon', and since I am currently quite fascinated by this topic, I am going to read that book. After I have read it, time permitting, I will start a thread on this very topic, or if you have already started a thread, then i will participate once I have adequately refreshed my memory of Spinoza's philosophy and given sufficient thought to what Macherey has to say about its relation to Hegel's philosophy.
:)
That's just missing the point. To even ask whether the logical has existence doesn't make sense. It doesn't. Logic is true regardless of existence. You're doing worse than asking for empirical explanation of existence. Your approach are taking is trying to account for logic by claiming it exists. The objection just misses the entire context of my argument.
I say logic does not exist at all, but it is true (and knowable).
Our thoughts (like any other mode of our world) are not Real (they are finite states). The Real can only be beyond (the existence) of our thoughts. It is no state of the world, including us.
Metaphysical relevance. Any other conception of God is shown to be a contradiction with an infinite nature. If we want to avoid logical incoherence (and so believing falsehood) in our metaphysics, God can only be Substance. Any other conception reduces God to a mere finite entity, be in our world or the transcendent realm.
Yes but is it true or knowable beyond the human domain? If you say "No' then it is just logic as understood by us, and it may have no significance beyond the fact that our brains happen to work that way. In that case why would we think we should be constrained by logic when it comes to metaphysical musings, rather than say imagination, or intuition? If you say "Yes" then you are positing transcendence or at least the transcendental.
You don't seem to be able to give any adequate answer to any of my questions, but just keep repeating the same assertions based on your apparent misunderstanding of what I am asking you.
You haven't shown that at all, you have merely asserted it.
The question of "domain" of knowledge or logical doesn't make sense. The infinite allows no such distinctions. If there was a split between "human logic" and "God logic," it would become finite. Our supposed infinite would end, would not be true, depending on who was thinking about it.
In one corner we would have human logic. Somewhere else, inaccessible to humans, we would have God logic. Rather than being the infinite without distinction, we would have a distinction, a starting and stopping place for both human logic and God logic.
The whole conflict of "logic constraining the world" is born from approaching logic and knowledge in empirical terms, where a logic rule acts (usually, unimaginative empirical accounts of future states, as specified by a popular tradition of the time) as a constraint on what can happen in the world, such that it is drawn into conflict with "intuition" or "feeling."
Spinoza's point is to eschew this approach. The distinction between intuition and thinking isn't present. Anything "rational" is, by definition, intuited-- understood be the expression of thought (e.g. the meaning of a falling rock) in our extension (our existing experience of a falling rock). Any knowledge or observation we make is formed by out intuition or "feelings."
The question you are asking doesn't make sense. Logic is not a constraint. When we use it, we are practicing our imagination and freedom, holding and understanding that which is not a state of existence. We literally imagine logical truths. They are not present objects in front of us. In this respect, there is only logic, which is why it cannot be broken. No matter what we imagine, it's always going to be itself. A truth not defined by a constraining force (e.g. "logic says you cannot to that" ) from the outside, but from the thing-itself. No matter what is true, whether it be a miracle working god in the sky, a cold universe or distant realms we cannot access, each is always itself.
How can the standard of truth (Logic) be itself true? That would be a category error. Rather, the standard of truth inheres (is immanent) within truth itself.
Spinoza states "even as light displays both itself and darkness, so is truth a standard both of itself and of falsity"
Thus falsity is either a half-truth (in that it is an incomplete truth - which is only revealed by the Truth) or it doesn't even exist. This is very important - falsity doesn't even exist metaphysically speaking.
Quoting John
No. The human domain (phenomenon) is part of the world (noumenon), and therefore being knowable in the human domain (phenomenon) is being knowable in the world's domain (noumenon). In fact, there ultimately is no gap between the noumenon and phenomenon.
The "materialist" supposition sees to the truth of this. The working of the brain cannot fail to be real - because our brain is embedded within reality itself - its working cannot be distinct from reality. Part of reality (us) is knowing a different part of reality (the tree in front of us). There is no schism between humans and the world as Kant postulated - no thing-in-itself looming beyond our knowledge - because both ourselves and the world are constituted by this very thing-in-itself - constituting us and the world is exactly what the thing-in-itself does
This is all fine, it is just the realist presupposition. I am basically a realist myself. But the point is there is no need at all for substance or the absolute in this picture.
I have begun reading the Macherey book and I have found early on that Hegel's criticism of Spinoza's notion of the absolute is exactly the point I raised earlier; that is is not conceived by Spinoza as an absolute personality or subject. It is a static non-entity, a nothing, an indifference. Of course, Macherey is going to try to show somehow that this view is mistaken. I am very interested to see how he will attempt this seemingly impossible task.
If the answer is going to be along the lines of the one you gave earlier, that the personality of God consists only in the personality of its modes, then this would not amount to saying anything more than that personality has emerged and evolved as a mode of being in a material world. But we already know this; it is a mere truism. So, if not an Absolute Personality, I cannot see how God is not become useless; a nothing, a merely formal difference that makes no difference, a non-entity that could never be a source for any motivation for us.
So the issues I have at this point with what I understand to be your, Willow's and Spinoza's conception of God, or Substance, or the Absolute, or whatever you wish to call it, are:
Yes, that's why I recommended you the book. Let me know what you think when you finish it. Even if you disagree you'll at least understand the interpretation.
Quoting John
Why do you think God needs to be an absolute personality (in the same sense that you are a personality) for God to have significance to us?
Quoting John
But the interpretation isn't of God as merely a formal logical entity - but rather as the noumenon itself which gives rise to the modes... It is an activity - certainly not a non-entity or a formal logical entity. It is dialectical - Spinoza is more dialectical than Hegel himself, which is one of the points that will be made. However, in my opinion Spinoza's dialectic is hidden. It's not overt, like Hegel's...
Quoting John
Not if you conceive of Substance dialectically, which is implied in Spinoza's notion. I also suggested this a little to you by saying that Substance needs the modes and the modes need Substance... :P When I said I found Spinoza harder to read than Hegel this is what I meant. Spinoza you can't take for granted - you actually have to understand the relationships within his system. It's not enough to know the elements which make it up. That's merely formal and abstract knowledge. You need to understand the relationships between the elements, because it is those relationships which make the elements what they are ultimately - truth is its own standard. Hegel may be hard to read, but he guides you through the dialectic himself, doesn't leave it to you. So if you take the time to follow him, you can understand by just reading. At least I found it to be so in my readings of him.
Quoting John
First there is disagreement over what infinite means with regards to the attributes. Is it infinite in a quantitative sense or a qualitative sense? In addition to this, granting it is quantitative (I'm not sure about this myself, we spoke of it before, and I just argued based on the idea that it is quantitative, but this is questionable), since the attributes are necessarily parallel, as I've argued before, there is no new knowledge that can be gained by having access to a different attribute - it would be only seeing the same thing from a different perspective - nothing would be gained in terms of knowledge.
There is a lot of misreading of Spinoza, and there aren't many Spinozists around either. Even at old PF it was just dunamis, and 180 who had good knowledge, and out of them two, only dunamis identified as a Spinozist.
Think about entities in the world. An entities can have significance for you only insofar as it is either useful, beautiful, or you can have a personal relationship with it. In the last case it is a person or at least an animal with some personality.
But since we cannot say what that activity is it is not really an activity at all for us. It is a purported, and yet incomprehensible, 'activity'; so it ends up being 'no-activity', an unknowable X, a formal identity.
If you understand something that isn't stated by an author then you have no way of knowing whether that understanding is truly a reading of or a reading into.
Also, until you have read, and can summarize the main points of both the Phenomenology and the Logic I would not believe that you have understood Hegel. This is a monumental task; I don't claim to have achieved it myself.
That's wrong. We do know what the activity is: self-definition. The activity is comprehended. Metaphysics for us (or anyone else for that matter). Your objection is based on the idea only presences in existence are anything to us. Spinoza's point is knowledge extends beyond merely the finite states we encounter in our everyday lives. It is both useful and beautiful; one understands meaning extends beyond existing states and the necessary truth.
Ok, but why must I be engaged with it in a personal relationship in order for it to have significance to me?
Quoting John
We can say what that activity is - it is the constitutive activity of everything around.
Quoting John
It is stated, between the lines. That's what makes Spinoza's Ethics rich - that's how he designed the system. His geometrical method was chosen precisely because the objects of geometry are not things, but spatial relationships - likewise existence consists in relationships and movement - not in static things. Each element is built by its relationships with every other element - that's in fact what it consists in. Spinoza is teaching you a dialectical logic beneath the simplistic and naive mask on the surface. The geometric method is actually meant to illustrate relationships - it's the relationships between the propositions which matter most, not only their content. They all cling together.
Quoting John
What use would summarising be? Didn't Hegel himself say precisely that philosophy cannot just give its conclusions without working them out, because if they are so given, then they are false? In this he distinguished philosophy from mathematics - mathematics can say just the conclusion. If philosophy states just the conclusion, and neglects the process of getting there, then it has stated a falsehood, because it is the active process of getting there which is significant, and which actually confers truth on it. This is again something that cannot be stated in words - its an insight, just like Spinoza's Ethics.
Yes, I have thought this myself. But the way it is stated in the Ethics certainly makes it seem that Spinoza has a quantitative sense in mind. And I don't understand what you mean by saying that the attributes are "necessarily parallel". Unless you can describe exactly how they are parrallel that just seems like playing with words to me.
We might say we know that thought and extension are interdependent if it seems to us that there can be thought without extension and no extension without thought. But then if there is no thought without animals and humans and all animals and humans had not yet arisen or had become extinct, would we want to say there is no extension? Perhaps extension is not dependent on thought. Extension however cannot be totally annihilated it would seem, and so absent a transcendent realm where thought could be absent extension, it would seem that extension is primary and that thought is dependent on it, rather than the other way around.
They are parallel by describing the same thing and being correlated in the same way - if I know serotonin is released in someone's brain, then I know they are feeling happy - there needs to be no corroboration, since the one just is the same thing seen one time from the attribute of thought, and another time from the attribute of extension.
Quoting John
This is wrong, because Substance always has a thought attribute even if no one perceives it. It's not perception that causes things to be as they are. For example, a series of sound waves can be described by a musical score, even if there is no one to think this or write it. Indeed, humans could not be aware of thoughts, if thoughts weren't already inherent in Reality.
For Spinoza, thought is not existing experiences. It's logical meaning. Without experiencing entities, it is still around. Thought can be around without the extension of "minds." It's a necessary activity. Like extension, it cannot be annihilated. Take away one state of existence, it defines the presence of another. Stop using one logical truth, another is defined. One cannot find the world without thought. Neither are primary.
This is why the fact that existing experiences are extension is so important. If we misread them as thought, if we think logic cannot be without experience, we reduce the infinite of meaning and logic to our finite states of experience-- we are a reductionist who says there is no meaning beyond how we exist.
If all we can say about Substance is that it is self-defining; that it's definition is simply that it is self-defining; then that is really no definition at all, because we don't know what it could mean for something to define itself.
And it is not correct anyway, as I have already pointed out. the infinite is defined not "through itself", but negatively against the finite. Substance is defined, not though itself, but negatively against modes. The absolute is defined not through itself, but negatively against the relative. What we don't understand and cannot positively define is thus apophatically understood and defined in contrast to what we can understand and define; and not really "in itself" at all; except in a purely empty, formal sense.
Absent its relationships with all other elements from the system yes. But if you truncate the system, and take it apart in separate parts, that is a mistake. You must look at the Ethics as one WHOLE - the truth is in the whole, didn't Hegel use to say something like that? :P
That's what you are getting wrong: we do know what it means for something to define itself. Rather than "meaningless" because it doesn't specify a phenomena, it is significant metaphysical point. In it we know, for example, that it doesn't take something else to define the possible existence of anything. We know any state is defined on its own terms, rather than being dependent on some other state or being for its logical definition and potential to exist.
I said something must be useful, beautiful or personal to you in order to be significant. I could have added other categories like good, admirable, and probably come up with many more. But the point is that something must be something to you in order to be significant. What can an undifferentiated substance, or even a substance that is an activity you cannot understand be for you? You might say that substance is something for you because you can understand its modes; because you experience them. But you do not experience them as the activity of substance, you just think of them that way, even though you cannot really comprehend what it means. So, it is really the modes that mean something to you; substance can be left out of the picture altogether if it can be nothing for you in itself, independently of its modes.
All you have done in pretending that we know what self-defining means is to repeat in different words, that we know it defines itself. We define it as defining itself. Very illuminating!
Alas, I cannot pus an image in front of you that can do the work of your intuition or imagination.
What else would self-defintion be? Defining someone else? Not defining anything? Any answer other than: "it defines itself" produces a contradiction with self-defintion.
But I have read the Ethics, and Spinoza cannot explain how substance produces its attributes and modes. The whole thing has intuitive appeal for sure, except for the depersonalization of substance; well really the whole notion of substance; I think it is better thought as spirit. The danger even with Hegelianism is that spirit is objectified and identified as rationality.
But the whole point is that when we come to this absolute we have exceeded the limits of our comprehension; and are better to rely on our God-given faculties of imagination and intuition, of poetry, of mythos rather than trying to push logic beyond its limits into trying to determine the indeterminable; which is to say into absurdity and emptiness, into "pouring from the empty into the void", as Gurdjieff used to say.
No-one said otherwise. We've never claimed to be Substance. If Substance matters to us, it is a state of our experience, it is a mode we care about. We can, indeed, leave it out of the picture. Anyone can get on with their life without understanding Substance, just as one can get one without understanding just about anything.
But this is no longer talking about Substance itself. Now we are talking bout us, how Substance matters or does not matter to us, the truth of what we think and feel at a given moment, rather than the truth of self-defintion.
The point is there is no "how." Nothing creates God. Self-defintion. There is no "how" to understand. It would mean claiming God was defined by something other than itself.
The point is Willow, that we can coherently define things only in terms of other things. To say that something can only be defined in itself or through itself is really just to say that is is indefinable to us. It might be able to define itself in itself, but if it can then it is a personality. The finite can define itself only in terms of something other, and only finite personalities can do this. If it is a case of "in God's image" or "as above so below" then the infinite can define itself in terms of itself because for it there is no other, but then it must be, to compete the analogy, an infinite personality.
We can say that the infinite defines itself, but we have no idea what this could really mean. We do know, however, that it is an empty formulation if we think substance does not have its own infinite experience and self-reflection; that is if we do not think of substance as a personality.
Then why should we care about substance one way or another or spend any time thinking about it? As I have pointed out before the idea of substance as identity is obviously very useful, even indispensable to us in making sense of our experience. But that useful way of thinking substance is the Aristotelian way of thinking substance as multiple.
I don't even know what that could mean unless it means that substance is infinite personalty.
Anyway, I am enjoying the book. I do find this a fascinating area of thought; and I am interested to see if Macherey can convince of something new about Spinoza's philosophy, so I thank you for mentioning the book and being a catalyst spurring me to take it from the shelf, where it had remained unread for far too long.
:)
I know that. It's that very point which is gravely mistaken.
It's just the opposite. There is no finite state which is defined in terms of another. Self-defintion is infinite. It can never not be expressed. Not in a computer, a car, a person, a film, a instance of happiness or a falling rock. Substance cannot be undone, stopped or limited at any point. Whatever the world does, Substance maintains, is expressed by the world, with any finite states that are present. All finite states express an infinite personality.
Each finite state, no matter how it is caused , no matter how it is symbolic or parasitic with others, is it's own. No finite state has the power to terminate or end Substance, such that it would on longer be true it was its own. At no point can we take one finite state and say it is defined by another.
This is absolute nonsense, Willow; any finite entity is defined in terms of its attributes and relations to other entities. These definitions are formulated in terms of general categories involving similarities and differences.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
So the infinite is personal then? I doubt Spinoza will agree with this. Does God have infinite experience of His own, just as we have finite experience?
Aside from the metaphysical point itself, to understand self-defintion and avoid the metaphysical errors thinking otherwise produces, there is no reason. As always, one is only ever seeking an outcome itself. if metaphysical coherency or Substance doesn't matter, then there is no point in thinking about it. We don't gain anything but itself, just as it is for any goal. There's no point buying a car unless the point is to get a car. Writing a post is pointless unless you that itself is the goal. And so on and so on.
In terms of coherent metaphysics, this is why the Aristotelian way of thinking substance as multiple is a terrible. It has us thinking that, logically, actions are about achieving something other than themselves, about accessing something beyond what we end up knowing or doing.
Yes. The infinite is knowable. Anyone might understand Substance, might realise how thing as defined in-themselves. The question here is not whether God has infinite experience (in the sense you are asking that doesn't make sense, as God is not an entity of extension), but rather whether we, in our finite experiences, have experience of the infinite. That's what makes it personal to us.
We experience or comprehend the infinite. Our personal relationship is knowing the infinite, our finite intuiting of the infinite, of the necessary truth.
That's what many of the metaphysical traditions say: your self is given by this other thing, by this idea, by this rule. Spinoza's point this gets it backwards. General categories come out of the self rather than creating the self.
The general of "tree," for example, is formed out of many individual selves, many objects expressing a similar meaning, rather than being a rule which forms existing trees. General categories are formed by the similarities and differences expressed by individual selves.
But you're not understanding anything that is not purely tautologous; that self-definition is self-definition, in other words.
Sure, anything is defined as itself, but to say the finite is defined only through itself is really just to say it cannot be defined. To define is to make definite, and only the finite can be definite; to be definite is to be 'set within limits', and the infinite cannot be set within limits, so really it cannot be defined at all, unless we say that it is defined against what it is not; the finite. Its only limit consists in the self-evident fact that it is not the finite, and thus it is really an empty formulation that say it is defined in or through itself.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is completely wrong-headed as I see it, since it is only the understanding of substance as identity, which means substance as multiple, that is actually useful to us in understanding our experience.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It doesn't matter how we define our experience; whether we call it experience of the finite or of the infinite. We do not enjoy infinite experience, that is for sure. It might be said that our experience, insofar as it always exceeds what we are able to determine it to be, and is thus to that extent is indeterminable, is in-finite, but this is a matter of quality, not quantity.
Anyway as usual you didn't give a straight answer to the question. If there were no experiencers; which there were arguably not prior to the advent of any animal or human life; would God nonetheless have infinite experience? You say the question makes no sense, that it is logically possible that an entity without extension could have experience any more than it is logically possible that it could have existence. I say we just cannot conceive what that existence and experience could be is all, since we are finite creatures and our logic is necessarily a logic of finitude.
If God cannot exist or experience then God is literally nothing; and thus could be of absolutely no import to us.
For sure, and it's that point of tautology which most metaphysics doesn't understand. In the traditions of metaphysics, the necessity of self-defintion is usually treated as either incoherent or incomplete. Say, for example, that mind and body are independently defined and parallel, and you are accused of not explaining "how" either can possibly be. Idealism, reductionism and correlationism all deny the tautology of self-defintion. Logic significance on its own, without something else, without us, without a presence of God in terms of existence, is considered nonsensical. At every turn, the challenge: "But how God ?" is issued. God in-itself is rejected. In a sense, the correlationist metaphysical tradition is the hardest form of atheism there has ever been. For them, God must always be given in something else, in us, in some finite state, rather than just being its own thing. For the correlationist metaphysician, we actually have to bring God into being, to bring the presence of God by imagining it, else that infinite isn't there or is incoherent.
The point here is tautology is significant. It is not, as the correlationist metaphysicians would have us think, meaningless. It's it own positive significance. In understanding the tautology, we intuit or imagine the necessary meaning. I know, for example, that I am Willow and you are John, without becoming confused by metaphysic impossibilities, such that I am really John too (e.g. solipsism), that I'm not really Willow (e.g. evil trickster demons) or that there are really no such people as Willow or John (e.g. nihilism, the "hard problem" ).
In the sense God experiences (i.e. the infinite), for sure. God is not limited to knowing one or a few things in one distinct experience at time. God is infinite, all at once, without any pause or distinction. It, by definition, cannot be a distinction of existing experience.
You aren't wrong that one cannot conceive infinite experience as anything in particular. That's the point. To be infinite is to defy being anything in particular. We cannot conceive what this experience or existence would specifically because the nature of the infinite is to be beyond such limits. There is literally no infinite to know in those terms. Your objection there is a "mystery," that somehow a hidden limit or distinct within the infinite, is incoherent. The infinite doesn't do such limits.
This scholar is like John, he sides with Kant. But even he, somehow underhandedly, understands that for Kant, God / or the noumenon is a DREAM, and has no reality. Thus he actually does read Kant as an atheist. This is inevitable because if the noumenon's existence is known phenomenally, then the noumenon must be phenomenal. Spinoza undermines this - the phenomenon is the dream, and the noumenon is real.
Self-definition is the only way to escape foundationalism. Only if you presuppose foundationalism does self-definition become incoherent, for the mere reason that the two are mutually contradictory. However, this very fact illustrates the superiority of self-definition dialectically - from the system of thought which adopts foundationalism, its self-definition demands that it negates self-definition as incoherent - this is in fact part of its self-definition.
If there is a foundation, then everything has to be reduced to that foundation which is a brute fact (of course, then it becomes incoherent when you try to explain the foundation - it necessarily remains unexplainable, just like Kant's "presupposed noumenon" - it remains a dream). However, if there is no foundation - and all that exists are relationships - networks - then truth is rightly seen as self-defined by the network (and its sub-networks) themselves. Truth ceases to be correlationist in other words - and becomes a matter of coherence in the network, not a matter of correspondence, since there is nothing outside of the network for it to correspond with (no noumenon/phenomenon distinction). Truth becomes a function of the Whole, not of the part - indeed the part is seen as illusory, because it is actually constituted by the Whole - it's nothing but a relationship within the Whole (even Kant arrives at this - the phenomenon must be generated by the noumenon - that's why it presupposes it). The Whole is self-defined - defined by itself and its inner relationships (hence we do know the noumenon). There is nothing outside of it to define it - there is no foundation. All definition is immanent - hence self-definition. This heals the divide between thought and reality - thought is always already real. Again, all this starts making sense, when you become properly dialectical :P - that's why Spinoza's criticism of Hegel would be that Hegel simply wasn't dialectical enough. When you stop seeing the Whole as being formed of parts (Objective Logic for Hegel) and start seeing the Whole as being formed of relationships (Subjective Logic for Hegel - although this needs to be emptied from its reference to personality - Subjective Logic is merely a certain kind of Logic, where things are constituted by relationships - dialectically), then you have performed the gestalt shift.
To shed more light on this: truth empirically is in the necessary correspondence of the attribute of thought with the attribute of extension (extension always has meaning). Truth metaphysically is in the internal coherence of Substance itself. Thus Spinoza dialectically does justice to both correspondence theory of truth, and coherence theory of truth, and welds them into his system - the two theories end up mutually supporting and defining each other, and thus defining Substance. Hegel's triangular dialectical Subjective logic is here.
But Substance is beautiful, admirable and loveable in and of itself. That is why the intellectual love of God is the highest man can aspire to, according to Spinoza. There is no case of Substance being "undifferentiated" - all difference is dialectically contained within it - aufhebung. Substance is a critical totality, critical in the Hegelian sense. Substance isn't something I cannot understand - indeed Substance is more like the light which makes both itself and the darkness intelligible. Substance is more myself than I am - it's the closest thing to me, it's the logically first idea vera, without it, I cannot know anything. So if I make use of it in all my acts of knowledge, in what sense is Substance "unknown"?
Quoting John
Yes he does actually explain it. It's between the lines. You read Spinoza's propositions individually as standing and falling on their own - as things, which try to form a Whole, instead of reading it as a Whole which forms the things - that's why his meaning remains hidden from you. Substance does not produce its modes, because Substance is not prior to its modes. It's not like first there is Substance, then there are the modes - it's not a temporal succession between the two at all. Rather the modes and Substance are temporarily simultaneous - self-defining. Book I doesn't come prior to Book V for example - they are simultaneous. It seems to me that you are confused by the temporal reading of Spinoza - reading it mechanically, as if the elements introduced first, constitute the elements introduced later. This is wrong. The elements introduced later, constitute the elements introduced first in-as-much as the elements introduced first constitute the elements introduced later, and cannot be understood or indeed even conceived without each other - hence self-definition. Spinoza is the Cartesian devil dressed in Cartesian clothes - but he undoes Descartes's mechanical understanding of philosophy and mathematics from the inside. It's ironic - he shows this mechanical understanding to be precisely what is false in philosophy and mathematics - indeed it shows itself to be false, hence why the Ethics is a dialectical text. Indeed I would go as far as saying that I think it to be the highest achievement of philosophy - an achievement which has still, in fact, not been realised, and I don't know if it will ever be realised. Spinoza is still far ahead compared to our current world, despite the tremendous advances we've made since Descartes's time.
Spinoza in fact used this false reading as a way to let people dismiss his philosophy as incoherent very easily - to avoid the charge of heresy, which he still didn't avoid ultimately - and because he understood that the masses of people are too entangled by biases and preconceived notions to reach up to it. But beneath it lies the Spinozist irony. The naivety that some read into him, is their own reflection. Spinoza's Ethics is one of the few texts which acts as a mirror - the DaoDeJing is similar in these regards - in that if one approaches it with a bias, they will find their bias confirmed in it. The more a biased person looks in the mirror of the Ethics, the more they see themselves reflected back unto themselves. But the more one removes bias from oneself, the more one becomes like a mirror staring into another mirror, and thus having a glimpse of the infinite in themselves - in-so-far as they do that, they reach true freedom, and [s]see[/s] know themselves as eternal - as Spinoza aptly puts it in the last book of his Ethics.
Substance is literally nothing except its modes. Why should I love nothing? In accordance with Spinoza's philosophy, God's experience is nothing without experiencing beings; necessarily fragmented into all the individual experiences, because there is no experience that unifies them unless God is an experiencing being. How would you conceive that all those individual experience could be unified into one in God if God is not thought as a divine person?
Quoting Agustino
You can say whatever you like is between the lines. Why would I be motivated to believe it? I go only by what I find in the text, and I assess that.
No I don't think you can. You have to look for it, you can't pull it out of your ass :P
Quoting John
This is just false. The modes are things, Substance is an activity.
Quoting John
Strawman
Quoting John
Why do you think all these experiences should be unified into one? :s I don't even know what you mean by that. They are - in truth - one experience, which necessarily sees itself from an infinite number of viewpoints.
Yes, and there is no experience beyond all the many experiences of individuals. These experiences and the individuals are what Spinoza refers to as 'modes'. They are activity itself, they are not "things", first and foremost. The identity of things is the very notion of substance. That which remains changeless through all the modal changes. But that formal notion of identity or substance is nothing to us beyond its usefulness in enabling us to make experience intelligible. Even non-sentient hings have such formal identities, and these non-sentient things are some of most substance like (in the sense of changeless) entities, things such as stones, mountains, grains of sand.
Furthermore - experience is always from a point of view - a point of view always implies partiality, but God - being the Whole - can't have any partiality, and hence has no point of view, and it would indeed be incoherent for God to have one, for then God would be particular and empirical...
Yes, you keep saying that, but I am yet to find a coherent account of an alternative view. Maybe I'll discover one when I get further into the Macherey book. But you have read the book and you have not managed to articulate any coherent and consistent alternative that I have noticed.
In relation to the idea that God's view must be from nowhere; I think this is wrongheaded, it must be from everywhere. It is from nowhere only insofar as it is from nowhere in particular. If all the individual experiences of all the percipient creatures (modes) are experienced by God, then they cannot be experienced as a fragmented chaos, just as our own experience would not be experience at all if it were a fragmented chaos. The finite unified individual experiences of all beings must be unified in God into a unified infinite experience, which is necessarily incomprehensible to us. This is the hermetic principle of "as above so below"; the diverse elements of each individual experience are unified by the transcendental ego into an intelligible whole unity.
This process of unification is necessarily transcendental for us because we can never know how it is done, for the simple reason that we only know from within its having always already been done. Only God, if there is a God, could know how it is done. According to the gospels God knows all things in heaven and in earth. Such a God is incomprehensible to us, but there is no other God worthy of the name. Impersonal, deistic gods can be nothing to us but logical fictions. We either choose to accept or reject that God; and that acceptance or rejection is entirely a matter of faith; of intuition, imagination and feeling, not a matter of logic or reason. It is a matter of art, not a matter of science.
I didn't listen to the Rohr lecture except for a bit, because I was turned off by his manner of presentation, but I agree with the idea of "unknowing'. It is the space of unknowing that surpasses dualistic reasoning, and allows the creative and mystical imagination and intuition to work. But I don't expect anyone to be convinced of this except by their own experience; argument will never do it.
The point is God [I]is[/i] everywhere. Since the "whole" is necessary, the expression of all knowledge, all experience, all things, etc., God cannot have a beginning not end. God cannot be particular. God must be all at once, no matter the time. For God to be a viewpoint, to be a distinct moment such that we can say "God is X view but not Y view, " removes the infinite-- God becomes limited rather than limitless.
Sure, it can only come from the mind; the arse (corrected spelling, yours means a donkey) produces only shit. The mind is an organ of interpretation; so what you read between the lines (or even in them for that matter) will not necessarily, or even likely, be what I read.
God is never merely "a viewpoint"; God always experiences every possible viewpoint, and no one of them in particular. So, you are incorrect, no limitation is involved. Indeed, there would be a limitation in being a view from nowhere; the most extreme limitation in fact.
...the point was your account violates that. Where God has a beginning, a "how," is a causal actor (causing unification), God becomes a limited finite state, a mere viewpoint. At one point, God is only that which has not unified, at another God is only that which has unified-- a contradiction with a God that is everything all at once.
Where did I state or imply "God has a beginning"?
When you claimed God created unification-- that specifies God changes, turns from someone who has not created something to someone who has. God becomes states that are born and die. Rather than everything at once, at any time, God is limited to a mere viewpoint.
At one point, the God who is only not the creation of unification, at another poiny, the God who only has created unification.
This is a nonsense reading of what I said. You are trying to understand the infinite, eternal process of unification in finite and temporal terms. In short, you are doing the very thing you often erroneously accuse me of of doing: imputing the empirical nature to the infinite. It is not surprising that you impute your own mistakes to others, because you simply cannot think beyond the point your own mistakes allow you to.
What is incoherent in the view that I have outlined?
Quoting John
From everywhere is identical with from nowhere though.
Quoting John
I disagree with your interpretation of this principle. I agree with this principle, in-so-far as it postulates that reality is fractal or holographic - the whole is found within each of the parts. But this doesn't mean that God has a personality the way you have a personality - that's just absurd. That's a very literalist, philosophical caveman like reading I think :P
Quoting John
What do you mean how it is done? Do you expect an explanation for this like A goes here, B goes her, and together they form the process of unification, or what are you imagining?
Quoting John
We have nothing to guide ourselves by except reason though. If you take some hallucinogen you may have a mystical experience, and yet you understand what caused that mystical experience, which was merely the effect of the drugs on the brain. If you start imagining that it wasn't the drugs, and it was something different, you're only deluding yourself. Reason is all we have in order to navigate the world. If you want to restrict our reliance on reason, then there is nothing beyond reason to hold us.
Coherent alternative. What is it then? Surely you don't mean this?:
Quoting Agustino
I've already dealt with that.Quoting Agustino
This is utter garbage, Agustino, and I suspect you know that, or else you are very stupid. So cut the disingenuousness.
Quoting Agustino
And this is a very poorly disguised straw dog. Where have I said that God has a personality in just the way humans have? We have finite thought, extension, love, goodness, knowledge, understanding, experience, personality and existence and God has infinite thought, extension, love, goodness, knowledge, understanding, personality and existence. Or else God doesn't exist; as I said before no other God is worthy of the name. Deistic Gods inspire no worship.
This is something that can merely be felt, intuited, and held in faith; it cannot be rationally understood in terms of some detailed explanation, because it deals with the infinite, and the infinite is incomprehensible to us except as a negation of the finite' it is 'understood' only apophatically. It is understood as being in itself, and as conceived in itself, but it is not conceived in itself for us. You haven't provided any cogent arguments against any of the objections I have raised against Spinoza's rationalistic claim to be able to know the nature of God through pure reason. All you do is keep the straw dogs and tired ad hominems pouring forth. Its becoming boring, man; you need to do much better than this if you want me to continue discussing with you.
Now, I am saying this from the position of someone who is not, by any measure, a firm believer, but who merely hopes to be open to the experience of God. I am not going to believe in God for merely rational reasons. Spinoza basically rehearses the Ontological Argument in the Ethics, and I was convinced long ago that the Ontological Argument has no teeth, so I don't find anything more in his philosophy than a very creative exercise in logical deduction from a set of definitions.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, reason guides us in remaining consistent to our presuppositions; it cannot start form a presuppositionless point and provide the axioms on which to build a philosophy. It regulates only the forms of our arguments, it cannot provide the content; that must come from personal experience. People choose different metaphysics not because some are right and others are wrong; all metaphysical systems are nothing more than inadequate models. Spinoza's dream of adequacy is just that: a dream.
What's worse, Spinoza's philosophy is inconsistent with any claim that God is wholly immanent, because he says that God has infinite unknowable modes. Also neither you nor Willow have been able to address the objection that if God has no experience of His own, independently of the individual experiences of all sentient creatures, then he is literally nothing beyond the modes but a formal entity. If he is an "activity" that gives rise to the activity which is nature (the modes) then what exactly is that activity beyond the activity of the modes themselves, and if it exists or is real rather than being merely formal, then how would that not constitute a transcendence? Stop playing with words and casting bullshit aspersions, and start coming up with cogent arguments, or I really am done with you, Agustino.
That God has infinite modes does not mean God is the modes. This is the point you are missing. God is not the modes (including experiences like ours). It's the infinite itself, Real and not any finite state (mode)-- or to borrow from conversation in another thread, the truth of the infinite set that is none of its members.
Indeed, for the very reason it fails to make Spinoza's separation between the necessary and contingent.
The problem with the Ontological Argument is it tries to justify the presence of contingent state (in one realm or another) through the logic. Obviously this doesn't work, as it is only true if it's contingent premises are true (e.g. God is good, God is a mode) and they are properly defined (e.g. what constitutes the mode of God, what amounts to greatness, to ethical action, etc.).
Agutsino claims God is an activity. I haven't said that God is the modes: I have asked what He is over and above the activity ( the only activity we know) that is the modes. You accuse me over and over of saying that God is empirical or is the modes; when I am saying precisely the opposite; God is not anything we can identify because He is infinite.
You also say God is the infinite. Fine, we already knew that. But the infinite is unknowable, so it is not, on any coherent definition, immanent. What it is supposed to mean to say that the infinite is immanent in the finite is never explained. It is not explainable, and so the infinite is transcendental for us. You might say that the infinite is immanent for itself, but what could that possibly mean to us? And what could it possibly mean to God if he is not a Person?
[quote= "John"]...God is an activity.I haven't said that God is the modes:[/quote}
...you say the opposite, that God (activity) is the modes, in the next clause.
God is activity and NOT the modes. God, the activity, is over and above modes. Activity is not modes.
The point is the infinite is knowable. Being self-defined, the infinite means, unsurprisingly, the infinite. To say the infinite is immanent is the finite is described-- it means, within the finite, the infinite is expressed: modes express unity, each moment expresses the infinite, within the finite world, logic has significance (e.g. states of the world have form, express meaning, are something in thought).
What are modes if they are not activity? Spinoza, I seem to recall, refers to the modes as "affections of substance", thus he sees them not as general categories but as particular modifications, and modifications are changes, which means that they just are activities.
Um, modes.
Things are self-defined in Spinoza's philosophy. It doesn't use the correlationist account where everything must be logically defined by something else.
And yes, Substance has modes. That doesn't mean the modes are Substance or that Substance is the modes. It's like the infinite set. It has members, but none of the members are the infinite set and vice versa.
You're just playing with words.
No. I'm making a logical point.
The infinite set has members (... a,b,c,d...). Take any particular member, let's say "a", which is the mode of John's experience reading this post.
Is this mode the infinite set? No. Your experience reading this post is certainly not the set of infinite modes. It's but one mode. Clearly, one mode is not infinite modes.
Now what about the infinite set? Is it the mode of your experience reading this post? Again, the answer is no. Your experience is only one mode. The infinite set cannot be this single definite mode alone.
Either of these approaches would reduce the infinite set to a finite member, so they are therefore impossible: an infinite set cannot be any of its members and any member cannot be the infinite set.
Reading a post is an activity. You say it is a mode, and yet you denied modes are activities.
:s
You're not paying attention to the terms being used. We aren't using "activity" to describe someone acting in the world.
You do this a lot. When you have a disagreement with someone on metaphysics, you ignore what they are saying and throw in some other definition which confirms your own position. Could you be honest for once and actually address the concepts being argued?
The definition of "activity" used here refers to becoming. Since the infinite set never ends, there are always more and more members, an endless stream of modes (not a mode, but the changing of modes that never ceases), such that the only constant of the infinite set is this becoming-- "activity" which can't be specified in terms of any particular mode.
You are the person being dishonest here. You said:
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
You are saying here that my reading a post is a mode; so I am saying 'right, then, it is an activity, a modification of substance'. Previously you said that a modes is not an activity, but I will leave that aside.
Previously Agutsino claimed that the activity of substance is not the activity of modes. Fine, so I am asking what it is over and above the activity of modes; in what sense can it be an "activity" that is not any kind of activity we can experience? And you won't answer that, you keep deflecting the question into other red herrings like "Clearly one mode is not infinite modes", when I haven't questioned that.
I have asked you what the difference is beyond merely saying that one is finite and the other infinite. Saying that tells us nothing, it is just playing with words.
No. That's not what I'm saying.
Substance doesn't get modified. Activity doesn't get modified. It's always the same. It never changes. The infinite set is always activity: the endless formation of new modes.
We can experience it too-- we may understand the infinite of becoming, that the infinite set never ends and the only constant is the formation of new modes. (it's just this is activity (of Substance) known, rather than us, a mode, being activity of Substance itself).
Your objections aren't addressing being argued. By definition activity of Substance (the infinite set) is other to activity of modes (the members of the infinite set) and it can be experienced.
The difference between saying one is infinite and one is finite is metaphysical. When I point out one mode is not infinite modes, I'm not only saying there are the finite and infinite, but also that it's impossible for the finite (a mode) to be infinite (the infinite set of modes).
In metaphysics this is a critical (and frequently heretical move)-- it means the transcendent is shown to be incoherent. The transcendent functions by the infinite also being finite. It is the infinite realm which nevertheless acts upon the finite, to make a difference in the finite world. Unity (the infinite set) is supposed to be this definite state, an activity of mode, which makes finite states happen one way. The infinite set is posed a member of itself.
In distinguishing activity of Substance, this is denied. Since activity of Substance cannot ever be activity of mode, the transcendent cannot function. If something is engaged in activity of mode (e.g. causing a state), it cannot be activity of Substance. There can be no infinite that defines the presence of a particular mode. "Infinite" and "finite" are fully specified. We aren't just saying "infinite and "finite." We understand them as their own positive concepts with logical significance.
The constant formation of new modes is known only in the formation of the modes themselves. The constancy of this formation of modes is known only finitely as constant change over some finite period. This is extrapolated as a never-ending constancy, but that never-ending constancy is known only as a generalization, as an abstract idea.
But this is only the extrapolated endless constant formation of finite modes of existence. No infinite mode of existence is known in this. The only infinite quality of finite modes is the in(de)finite quality that consists in the fact that our determinations are not the thing-in-themselves, but models. Things are in-finite only insofar as they are ultimately indeterminable, or better insofar as they are understood to ultimately exceed any possible determination.
And yet Agustino had said it is activity and that it is differentiated. Now I know you are not Agsutino, but you both claim to be representing Spinoza's views.
In any case you are wrong, because activity does get modified. My activity is never the same from one moment to the next. Of course we can say that God's activity which is not temporal but eternal, never changes; He is always 'doing' everything that has ever been done, is being done, or will be done.
We can say that, but we don't really comprehend it; and this means that the principle of eternal and infinite activity is incomprehensible to us; we can comprehend only temporal activity, and even that imperfectly. So, eternal activity is transcendental to both our experience and understanding; it is nothing more from the purely rational point of view than an 'empty' abstract notion which is arrived at apophatically by negating our understanding of temporal activity.
BUT, and this is a big 'but', the idea of eternal activity can also be a deeply intuitive, profoundly inspiring poetic, religious or mystical idea, and if it is not any of those then it is literally nothing to us but a vacuous formulation.
That's wrong. The constant formation of new modes is not known in the modes themselves. Knowing some particular mode doesn't tell you about the infinite of modes. If I notice the computer in front of me, I don't realise the constant of becoming. All I have is awareness of the computer. In that experience, I do not know there are never ending modes. Even modes aren't known in themselves. When someone knows a mode, they do so in thought (i.e. meaning and logic) as expressed by a different mode (i.e. an existing experience).
The constant of becoming is known to exceed all modes, for it is no matter the mode and modes are infinite. It's not a constant change over a finite period at all.
Indeed, a constant change over a period of time is activity of mode-- it specifies particular modes, and where they begin and end. The constant of becoming is never such a change. It is not a generalisation or extrapolation of the finite all, but being all on its own. Rather than abstraction, there is a grasping of the infinite itself.
The constant formation ( if constant is taken to mean 'unceasing over some period of time) of new modes is known in our experience of the modes. If constant is taken to mean 'never-ending, then of course that constancy is not experience. But I already explained this! That is what is so frustrating about trying to engage in discussion with you; I find myself constantly having to correct your mistaken readings of what has been said.
And now you contradict yourself again in saying that modes aren't known in themselves. If you mean by this that they are known only as phenomena, well yes, of course; but that would be to assert the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, a distinction which you explicitly deny.
The infinite is either an empty abstraction or it is a real infinite existence; we can say that, even though we have (from the viewpoint of pure rationality) no idea what an infinite existence could be: we can say that just because they are, logically, the only two possibilities.
Yours and Spinoza's position is fatally flawed by inconsistencies; why not just own up to it?
You can say that, and I would agree that there is an intuitive "grasping"; but you can't give an explanatory account of what that grasping consists in. You can only allude to it, you cannot rationally explicate it. Spinoza thinks he can, he is the arch-rationalist; he is, however, sadly wrong.
Constant formation doesn't mean unceasing over some period of time. It means without beginning or end. There is no "period" of time because the infinite never begins nor ends. You not correcting what's been said. You're blatantly ignoring the definition I am using.
I don't mean that. Nothing is known in the mode itself. Knowledge is a different state to what is known. Experiences of knowledge are always different self-defined states to any modes which are known. For the phenomenal (i.e. modes), knowledge by the mode itself impossible because any knowledge of a mode is obtained through a different mode. In the case of the noumenal (i.e. logic), knowing in the mode itself is impossible because it is not mode at all.
And yet you said this:
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I'm tired of your contradictions, misreadings, and evasions, Willow: time for you to find someone else to annoy. You and Agustino are two of a kind when it comes to that although at least you are not insulting and obnoxious.
I'm not interested in conversations unless they consist in genuine engagement which means good faith, charitable reading and honest acknowledgement of mistakes and inconsistencies when they are pointed out.
Yeah... I was juxtaposing constant change over a period of time against the the constant formation I'm talking about. The point being that constant change over time is what I am not talking about, as I'm referring to formation without beginning nor end.
The constant formation I'm about talking involves no period of time. It cannot be change over a period of time.
Yeah...the problem is its always about what YOU are talking about and never about what the other is talking about, and hence is not really a conversation.
Quoting John
Then you have the audacity to claim that my thought is incoherent. When I tell you the tree is red, you say my thought is incoherent because the tree is blue - well done! When you decide to stop straw-manning and want to discuss respecting what I'm actually claiming, please let me know. Until then, there's little point discussing on this subject, if you are determined to continuously misrepresent Spinoza's and my position.
But I seem to recall I've already explicitly, or if not implicitly, asked for an explanation as to what a "thing" could be over and above modal processes (activities) and I haven't seen a coherent answer to that. If anything, it seems most consistent and coherent to think that the 'thing-ness' of a thing is its substance, identity or being; which would seem to be the very opposite of what you are claiming.
So what are you, Agustino, over and above your being a mode, which consists in activity; the welter of processes that is your body and its interactions with other modes?