The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego

When I rest as the pure and simple Witness, I notice that I am not caught in the world of time. The Witness exists only in the timeless present. Yet again, this is not a state that is difficult to achieve but impossible to avoid. The Witness sees only the timeless present because only the timeless present is actually real. When I think of the past, those past thoughts exist right now, in this present. When I think of the future, those future thoughts exist right now, in this present. Past and future thoughts both arise right now, in simple ever-present awareness.

The eternal Now, eternally self-present, is the eye of the storm of life, the frame of every picture, or perhaps the canvas on which it is painted. The past is memory. The future is fantasy. Or perhaps the past too is fantasy. Perhaps I have never actually slept (been unconscious) but only witnessed a sudden change in the lighting of the room, the conversion of silence to the sound of an alarm clock (or so I remember or fantasize.) If only The Subject endures, all else is unreal, for only the eternal is real.

Precisely because the ultimate reality is not anything seen but rather the Seer, it doesn’t matter in the least what is seen in any moment. Whether you see peace or turmoil, whether you see equanimity or agitation, whether you see bliss or terror, whether you see happiness or sadness, matters not at all: it is not those states but the Seer of those states that is already Free.

Changing states is thus beside the point; acknowledging the ever-present Seer is the point.

This is a bit of a tangent, but...what a remarkable claim !

Derrida (quoted below) might sometimes be said to exaggerate, but I think the pure witness (which is presented most boldly and directed by that metaphysics which is explicitly mystical) is an excellent crystallization of the priority of presence. That which is ever-present and enduring is 'The Subject,' which in the mystical context is not merely an intellectual but a spiritual goal, an ecstatic realization.
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The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk.In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier." The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism...

...absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning.We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with...the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/ essence/ existence / ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito...

The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic "science" cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified...without the difference between sensible and intelligible, certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to "take place" in its intelligibility, before its "fall," before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God.

Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at first of demonstrating the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently separated. The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth.

Another relevant quote.
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The voice is heard ( understood ) ­... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many ---since it is the condition of the very idea of truth... Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity --- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility --- as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word," the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in all language and...only this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense of being in general...Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word "being" nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language..., at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity...
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What is the relation of the self-present subject and language ? Or between being and language? Since the 'pure witness' seems to gesture at the 'thereness' of that which is there. 'It's not how but that the world is that's mystical.' Does each subject have ineffable private access to Being ? Should one be silent on such matters? Witt didn't mind saying at least his little piece. Or should one dissipate the glad tidings that thou art that ? Or found science on pure intuitions? Or challenge the intelligibility of such claims? Or live half-in half-out of the game? (I think Derrida sets Saussure ajar.)

When I rest in simple, clear, ever-present awareness, I am the Witness of the World. I am the eye of Spirit. I see the world as God sees it. I see the world as the Goddess sees it. I see the world as Spirit sees it: every object an object of Beauty, every thing and event a gesture of the Great Perfection, every process a ripple in the pond of my own eternal Being, so much so that I do not stand apart as a separate witness, but find the witness is one taste with all that arises within it. The entire Kosmos arises in the eye of Spirit, in the I of Spirit, in my own intrinsic awareness, this simple ever-present state, and I am simply that.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/

This sounds great, and I believe it describes a possible if probably unsustainable state of the heart. Conceptual rigor is not the point. That might be the best way to defend this variety of metaphysics. Calling it 'poetry' is too dismissive and might dampen its effect. But calling it 'science' flatters something that doesn't prioritize its own correction, confident already in its own completeness.

cf. Plato's Intelligible World (Being), consisting of:

1) First Principle (The Demiurge), having Intellect (Absolute Knowledge).

2) External Personhood (The Self-Mover), having External Intellect (Knower and Known).

3) Pure (Contemplative) Knowledge.

Reply to Galuchat
Perhaps you could expand on that?

All of modern philosophy, (....), breaking through in Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

Is it the specific wording in the quote, that makes Descartes not important enough to include with the others? Descartes was the first in modern, re: post-medieval, philosophy to separate the objective from the subjective, but Kant was the author of the transcendental ego as such. Just seems like ol’ Rene got left out for some reason.
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Quoting jas0n

The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning.

Absolutely, and should go far in making analytic language philosophy only that which is mere leftovers from the real philosophy already done.
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Quoting jas0n

calling it 'science' flatters something that doesn't prioritize its own correction, confident already in its own completeness.

While science as a doctrine, without regard to its objects, is complete in itself, it is logic that prioritizes its own correction. Now if there was a science predicated on logic, and that purely logical science could ground a metaphysical theory, there would still not be a transcendental ego given from it necessarily, but there may arise a purely speculative system by which it is represented, and that can be given to members of the public as an opportunity to look at themselves.
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Interesting topic, all in all. If I had a problem with it I couldn’t let go of, it would be including Hume. That guy was an card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant empiricist, with all the negative implications with respect to pure subjectivity that philosophy entails.

Quoting Mww

Just seems like ol’ Rene got left out for some reason.

Good point!

Quoting Mww

Absolutely, and should go far in making analytic language philosophy only that which is mere leftovers from the real philosophy already done.

So...would you say that reasoning is ultimately independent of language? Philosophy tends to be understood as that which should be especially translatable, while poetry, depending on the sounds of contingent signifiers, is on the other end. Is 'thought' a kind of content which is clothed in words? Or is an equivalence class of intersubstitutable strings a better approach?

Quoting Mww

While science as a doctrine, without regard to its objects, is complete in itself,

I was thinking in terms of a body of theories and conjectures that continues to grow. We had Newton. Then we also had Einstein. And so on.

Quoting Mww

that purely logical science could ground a metaphysical theory, there would still not be a transcendental ego given from it necessarily, but there may arise a purely speculative system by which it is represented, and that can be given to members of the public as an opportunity to look at themselves.

Care to elaborate? Do you mean the transcendental ego could be invented as a concept and shared?

Quoting Mww

If I had a problem with it I couldn’t let go of, it would be including Hume. That guy was an card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant empiricist, with all the negative implications with respect to pure subjectivity that philosophy entails.

Husserl is eccentric perhaps ?

Quoting jas0n

would you say that reasoning is ultimately independent of language?

Yes. Reasoning is what the human intellect seems to do, by its very nature, pursuant to brain machinations. Language, or objective signage in general, merely stands as representation of the intellect expressing the reasoning it appears to do.
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Quoting jas0n

Is 'thought' a kind of content which is clothed in words?

I prefer the doctrine that the human intellect functions in the private domain of images. In that regard, yes, thought, which is reasoning proper, is clothed in words, insofar as it is impossible to inform similar intellects by means of images.
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Quoting jas0n

the transcendental ego could be invented as a concept and shared?

Invented as an explanatory device in accordance with a theory from which its possibility arises, yes. No empirical theory is in principle provable with apodeitic certainty, but theories with purely logical predication at least obtain their own kind of “if this, then that necessarily” certainty, so sharing a purely logical conception presents its own difficulties. You get a whole boatload of blank looks when you say a guy’s entire rationality is determined by his transcendental ego. Hence, Berkeley’s “vulgar caste”, Hume’s “vulgar understanding”, Kant’s “most commonplace reason”.
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Quoting jas0n

Husserl is eccentric perhaps ?

Nahhhh....I wouldn’t say that. Ed just wanted to be a better Kantian than Kant. Or a more complete Kantian, perhaps. But he was never the metaphysical paradigm shift as Kant, even while presenting stuff for his peers and successors to think about.
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Question, if you don’t mind:

Quoting jas0n

The ruling metaphor here is the eye which can see everything but itself.

How would you translate the ruling metaphor into a definition? Or is the metaphor sufficient for a definition?

OK...two questions.

the ultimate reality is not something seen, but rather the ever-present Seer.

Have you thought about how this ties in with Taoism and other eastern philosophies. The ultimate reality in Taoism, the Tao, is not human or conscious. In a sense, consciousness creates our world, the multiplicity, from unspeakable oneness. This view seems contradictory to the one you describe.

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

The eternal Now, eternally self-present, is the eye of the storm of life, the frame of every picture, or perhaps the canvas on which it is painted. The past is memory. The future is fantasy. .) If only The Subject endures, all else is unreal, for only the eternal is real.

This is the absolute antithesis of phenomenology. To be self-present is to be altered in the very act of turning back to oneself. So there is no eternal present , no pure self-reflecting subject. The present , the ‘now’ does not exist outside of the tripartite structure of retention and protention. All three of these phases belong to the immediate now.

Heidegger argues:

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is
in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger’s unification of the components of time.
“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37)

Quoting Joshs

This is the absolute antithesis of phenomenology. To be self-present is to be altered in the very act of turning back to oneself. So there is no eternal present , no pure self-reflecting subject. The present , the ‘now’ does not exist outside of the tripartite structure of retention and protention.

I don't know if it's truly an antipode. You still seem to present an eternally present tripartite structure or primordial form of experience.

Quoting Joshs

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37)

Good stuff.

Quoting Mww

How would you translate the ruling metaphor into a definition? Or is the metaphor sufficient for a definition?

I think the transcendental ego is mostly a failure, or let's say it succeeds until it's looked at sufficiently closely. I emphasize the metaphor as a kind of seductive picture. To deduce the seer from the seen might be just chugging along in grammar. If you start with a given understood as seen (or as appearance), then 'of course' there's an intellectual eye and something 'behind' appearance. I think Witt is right on this one, that philosophy is largely a battle against language, and yet of and within it.

Quoting Mww

Reasoning is what the human intellect seems to do, by its very nature, pursuant to brain machinations. Language, or objective signage in general, merely stands as representation of the intellect expressing the reasoning it appears to do.

To me this is plausible and useful, but perhaps Derrida and others destabilize this position. In any case, it seems close to the physical/mental distinction. 'Meaning' is the essence of the mental, which, like a ghost, is only visible/objective when under the sheet of the spoken or written word.

Quoting Mww

Invented as an explanatory device in accordance with a theory from which its possibility arises, yes. No empirical theory is in principle provable with apodeitic certainty, but theories with purely logical predication at least obtain their own kind of “if this, then that necessarily” certainty, so sharing a purely logical conception presents its own difficulties. You get a whole boatload of blank looks when you say a guy’s entire rationality is determined by his transcendental ego. Hence, Berkeley’s “vulgar caste”, Hume’s “vulgar understanding”, Kant’s “most commonplace reason”.

I willing to think that 'pure logic' along with 'pure meaning' (stuff behind words) are something like points at infinity, elements within a transparent/white mythology. So-called necessity can often be interpreted instead as a shared habit or a social convention. The boundary is tricky. Philosophers sometimes argue from the purported fact that they can't imagine X or can't help but imagine Y. Building/founding a theory on such introspection strikes me as problematic. All of that said, I think the transcendental ego is alive and well in the thought of its critics in a modified form as 'tribal software' (habits of reaction and interpretation, especially linguistic-logical habits.) The 'subject' is a sign/concept of great importance in such a system but does not mark the origin or source. Something like a 'we-self' is understood as prior to the 'I' which can be understood as an additional module. Schopenhauer's notion of genius as a parasite on an otherwise generic man is analogous.

Quoting Mww

Ed just wanted to be a better Kantian than Kant. Or a more complete Kantian, perhaps. But he was never the metaphysical paradigm shift as Kant, even while presenting stuff for his peers and successors to think about.

That makes sense. He came too late, I suppose. Back to back to Kant...

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

I don't know if it's truly an antipode. You still seem to present an eternally present tripartite structure or primordial form of experience.

What does. it mean to say that the repetition. of change is ‘eternally present’? There certainly is no content or feeling here that is eternally present. If the now is a formal
structure, then it is one that is always filled with a different content. This is why Heidegger says that time is finite rather than infinite, becuase it is about an always unique meaning rather than a countable sequence.Not time as a ‘how long’ or ‘how much’ but as each
moment t a new way of being. And what about the alternatives to this notion of temporality within modern philosophy? They all posit , in different ways , an objective time associated with movement. This is also an ‘eternal’ notion of time, but conceived as an infinite succession of punctual nows.

Quoting Joshs

There certainly is no content or feeling here that is eternally present.

Does the 'subject' always experience in terms of a tripartite structure? If Dasein 'is' time, then frame if not the canvas is ever-present. This 'problem' haunts all ambitious philosophy...any discourse that would conquer the future by imposing a structure on 'possible experience' or its analogue.

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

Does the 'subject' always experience in terms of a tripartite structure? If Dasein 'is' time, then frame if not the canvas is ever-present. This 'problem' haunts all ambitious philosophy...any discourse that would conquer the future by imposing a structure on 'possible experience' or its analogue.

Heidegger’s Dasein is not the frame , it is the in-between frames:

“Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon." "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar.” (Heidegger 2010)

“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence...Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.” (Heidegger 1995)

Quoting Joshs

Heidegger’s Dasein is not the frame , it is the in-between frames:

Good quotes! Perhaps I'm not choosing the right metaphor. The issue I'm getting at is that philosophy tends to search for and postulate deep structure. Physics gives us 'laws of nature,' and philosophy (often) gives us 'laws of reality' or 'laws of being a subject' or 'laws of meaning.' Clearly the world changes, people change. But we can find whirlpools in the chaos, shapes that are constant while their material or content changes. Braver paints Heidegger as setting us radically adrift. An era's 'understanding of being' or conceptual scheme just is reality. Or Foucault, similarly, can talk of one episteme being replaced by another. But the old criticism of relativism applies: what is the status of Heidegger's claim or Foucault's claims? Is it too a creature of its time? Will Heidegger remain true? Or is he just the barf of a moment, replaced by the next age's self-referential, self-defining barf?

Quoting Joshs

Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness.

Why make it fundamental?

Quoting Joshs

Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.

Sexy! To me this is as much poetry as philosophy...and maybe it gets a certain state of being right.

Quoting Joshs

Not time as a ‘how long’ or ‘how much’ but as each
moment t a new way of being.

Alluring. Many might agree that no moment (however smeared you prefer to conceptualize it) is like any other, that life never repeats itself exactly.

Quoting jas0n

I think the transcendental ego is mostly a failure.....,

Yeah, true enough. As long as transcendental philosophy fails, so too will the transcendental ego.

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

Braver paints Heidegger as setting us radically adrift. An era's 'understanding of being' or conceptual scheme just is reality. Or Foucault, similarly, can talk of one episteme being replaced by another. But the old criticism of relativism applies: what is the status of Heidegger's claim or Foucault's claims? Is it too a creature of its time? Will Heidegger remain true? Or is he just the barf of a moment, replaced by the next age's self-referential, self-defining barf?

But that’s the whole underpinning of ‘the ‘becoming-based’ thinking that took off after Hegel. That the barf of one age is replaced by the barf of the next is the basis of Nietzsche’s eternal rerun of the same, an endless parade of value systems with no ‘progressive’ direction.

Let me put it this way. Before Hegel, getting it ‘right’ in philosophy meant producing a scheme that conformed to the way things really, really are. While Kant deprived us of the ability to claim to know things in themselves, he assumed there was a real order independent of us that we could asymptotically approximate. But after Hegel , ‘getting it right’ was no longer about accurately mirroring and representing the furniture of the universe and their relations. Instead it became about capturing the nature of the becoming structure of experience. For Hegel this becoming structure could be totalized as a dialectical progression. Becoming was a ‘good’ progress with a specific logic that explained why things should get better and better as history unfolds, why social, moral, political and economic systems necessarily move towards improvement, why science can progress , even if not linearly. So there was still an element of ‘getting it right’ here , not in the capturing of the supposed fixed organization of a real universe , but in getting the dialectic logic of becoming right so that one could see history not as just any sort of random change but as a ‘good’ progress.

Nietzsche was the first to jettison the idea that there was anything to ‘get right’ about the structure of becoming, because he dumped the idea of a ‘good’ progressive direction to history. With Nietzsche and those whole follow him ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze)
one no longer critiques philosophies or sciences for ‘getting it wrong’. Instead, one can only do a genealogical analysis that sees any philosophical or scientific point of view as valid just as it is. That is, they all, in different ways, perform Husserl’s transcendental reduction. This leaves intact any system of values, beliefs , theoretical postulates, and burrows beneath it to reveal presuppositions and conditions of possibility hidden from those who espouse them. This is what deconstruction does, for instance. It is significant that , unlike earlier eras in philosophy, in critiquing each other, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault and others who follow after Nietzsche don’t use a language of correctness or incorrectness , truth and falsity , validity and invalidity, proof and falsification. Each doesn’t insist their philosophy is more ‘correct’ than their predecessors. Rather, they seek to explore becoming in richer and more intricate ways.

I would argue that we are past the era in which philosophy needs to make claims with a ‘truth status’ meant to conform to the way things ‘supposedly ‘really are’.

When people ask ‘how does a radical relativist know they are getting it right?’ they confuse what the relativist is doing with. They are inviting you to take a ride with them on a boat down the river as they act as guide. Everything you see from the boat, including yourselves and the boat , your guide will take as an example
of something that you might want to take as a fact, an empirical object , something that can be explained on the basis of laws and regularities. As guide, he doesn’t want to dissuade you from these claims , only to invite you to see if you can experience a mobile flow of change underneath your claims, not invalidating them but embellishing them in such a way that what you previously took to be simple, solid and self-identical now shows itself as harboring within itself a vibrant flow of change. Either you see this added downtime within the laws and facts or you don’t. If you don’t , your view is still valid and useful from the relativist’s perspective.

Quoting jas0n

The ruling metaphor here is the eye which can see everything but itself.

A curious metaphor, as there is no eye that sees anything, really. Our eyes don't see. We do. And we see ourselves with some frequency. So, just what is intended by this "metaphor"? What does it describe?

Quoting Ciceronianus

A curious metaphor, as there is no eye that sees anything, really. Our eyes don't see. We do. And we see ourselves with some frequency. So, just what is intended by this "metaphor"? What does it describe?

I don't think the 'pure witness' makes sense upon close examination. But the eye seems to refer to 'awareness itself' or some kind of pure consciousness that makes experience possible, a synonym for being. 'It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical.' It's what some folks seem to be trying to gesture at with 'the hard problem of consciousness.' Hard to know for sure, but it seems like what Heidegger is reaching for with being. It's noticing that 'there is a here here.' Or that 'the world worlds.' Or it's the notion of 'the given.' For some it's that which is most elusive and profound. For others, often more practically oriented, it's hysterical confusion. I'm somewhere in the middle. 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is not an empirical question. It might just be a lyrical expression of wonder, like a wolf's howling at the moon...

Quoting Joshs

in getting the dialectic logic of becoming right so that one could see history not as just any sort of random change but as a ‘good’ progress.

Yes, this is how I understand Hegel (or one interpretation that I find plausible/fascinating.) We organize our own history triumphantly, as a progress, an ascent.

Quoting Joshs

With Nietzsche and those whole follow him ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) one no longer critiques philosophies or sciences for ‘getting it wrong’.

I understand this, but I'm not sure that philosophers can really mean this, or at least it's hard to maintain such claims with the proper irony. 'No one is right or wrong, logic is a fiction, and I'll now prove this to you.' The quote below articulates some of my concerns.

[quote=Brassier]

Bruno Latour is undoubtedly among the foremost proponents of this irreduc- tionist creed. His Irreductions pithily distils familiar Nietzschean homilies, minus the anxious bombast of Nietzsche’s intemperate Sturm und Drang. With his suave and unctuous prose, Latour presents the urbane face of post-modern irrationalism. How does he proceed? First, he reduces reason to discrimination: ‘‘Reason’ is applied to the work of allocating agreement and disagreement between words. It is a matter of taste and feeling, know-how and connoisseurship, class and status. We insult, frown, pout, clench our fists, enthuse, spit, sigh and dream. Who reasons?’ (2.1.8.4) Second, he reduces science to force: ‘Belief in the existence of science is the effect of exaggeration, injustice, asymmetry, ignorance, credulity, and denial. If ‘science’ is distinct from the rest, then it is the end result of a long line of coups de force’. (4.2.6.) Third, he reduces scientific knowledge (‘knowing-that’) to practical know-how: ‘There is no such thing as knowledge—what would it be? There is only know-how. In other words, there are crafts and trades. Despite all claims to the contrary, crafts hold the key to all knowledge. They make it possible to ‘return’ science to the networks from which it came’. (4.3.2.) Last but not least, he reduces truth to power: ‘The word ‘true’ is a supplement added to certain trials of strength to dazzle those who might still question them’. (4.5.8.)

It is instructive to note how many reductions must be carried out in order for irreductionism to get off the ground: reason, science, knowledge, truth—all must be eliminated. Of course, Latour has no qualms about reducing reason to arbitration, science to custom, knowledge to manipulation, or truth to force: the veritable object of his irreductionist afflatus is not reduction per se, in which he wantonly indulges, but explanation, and the cognitive privilege accorded to scientific explanation in particular. Once relieved of the constraints of cognitive rationality and the obligation to truth, metaphysics can forego the need for explanation and supplant the latter with a series of allusive metaphors whose cognitive import becomes a function of semantic resonance: ‘actor’, ‘ally’, ‘force’, ‘power’, ‘strength’, ‘resistance’, ‘network’: these are the master-metaphors of Latour’s irreductionist metaphysics, the ultimate ‘actants’ encapsulating the operations of every other actor.
...
The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. (2.4.5). In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between ‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to toothfairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, wheth- er those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblem- atically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor.

This is reductionism with a vengeance; but because it occludes rather than illuminates differences in the ways in which different parts of the world interact, its very lack of explanatory purchase can be brandished as a symptom of its irreductive prowess by those who are not interested in understanding the difference between wishing and engineering. Latour writes to reassure those who do not really want to know. If the concern with representation which lies at the heart of the unfolding epistemological problematic from Descartes to Sellars was inspired by the desire not just to understand but to assist science in its effort to explain the world, then the recent wave of attempts to liquidate epistemology by dissolving representation can be seen as symptomatic of that cognophobia which, from Nietzsche through Heidegger and up to Latour, has fuelled a concerted effort on the part of some philosophers to contain if not neutralize the disquieting implications of scientific understanding.

Rather, Latour’s texts consciously rehearse the metaphorical operations they describe: they are ‘networks’ trafficking in ‘word-things’ of varying ‘power’, nexuses of ‘translation’ between ‘actants’ of differing ‘force’, etc. In this regard, they are exercises in the practical know-how which Latour exalts, as opposed to demonstrative propositional structures governed by cognitive norms of epistemic veracity and logical validity. But this is just to say that the ultimate import of Latour’s work is prescriptive rather than descriptive—indeed, given that is- sues of epistemic veracity and validity are irrelevant to Latour, there is nothing to prevent the cynic from concluding that Latour’s politics (neo-liberal) and his religion (Ro- man Catholic) provide the most telling indices of those forces ultimately motivating his antipathy towards rationality, critique, and revolution.

In other words, Latour’s texts are designed to do things: they have been engineered in order to produce an effect rather than establish a demonstration. Far from trying to prove anything, Latour is explicitly engaged in persuading the susceptible into embracing his irreductionist worldview through a particularly adroit deployment of rhetoric. This is the traditional modus operandi of the sophist. But only the most brazen of sophists denies the rhetorical character of his own assertions: ‘Rhetoric cannot account for the force of a sequence of sentences because if it is called ‘rhetoric’ then it is weak and has already lost’. (2.4.1) This resort to an already metaphorized concept of ‘force’ to mark the extra-rhetorical and thereby allegedly ‘real’ force of Latour’s own ‘sequence of sentences’ marks the nec plus ultra of sophistry.
[/quote]

I once 'defended'/asserted/advertised a view close to Letour's, so I 'get' it. I just think it's somewhat self-defeating, while containing various insights.

Quoting Joshs

This is what deconstruction does, for instance. It is significant that , unlike earlier eras in philosophy, in critiquing each other, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault and others who follow after Nietzsche don’t use a language of correctness or incorrectness , truth and falsity , validity and invalidity, proof and falsification. Each doesn’t insist their philosophy is more ‘correct’ than their predecessors. Rather, they seek to explore becoming in richer and more intricate ways.

Ideally and oversimplifying perhaps, yes, but the drift and the targets are anything but random. I don't need an explicit valorization of unhip Truth to project myself as an enviably shrewd man, as one who deserves assimilation. 'Correctness' can be seen as a kind of mask for something deeper like priority or status, and another mask (like 'richness') can take its place. Who gets to name things? Whose names end up sticking? Whose innovations become the new convention? The dominant taking-as?

If we are embodied in a world, correctness is not so easily dispensed with. This is why it's important to remember that we are animals depending on one another to stay fed and make babies. Correctness is not just a verbal game, it's 'interesting' for practical reasons.

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

'Correctness' can be seen as a kind of mask for something deeper like priority or status, and another mask (like 'richness') can take its place. Who gets to name things? Whose names end up sticking? Whose innovations become the new convention? The dominant taking-as?

If we are embodied in a world, correctness is not so easily dispensed with. This is why it's important to remember that we are animals depending on one another to stay fed and make babies. Correctness is not just a verbal game, it's 'interesting' for practical reasons.

Priority, status and don t forget power. In fact, let’s focus on the concept of power that has become so fashionable and makes its way into all sorts of political discussions. Most of the left who are wielding that term as a weapon are understanding it moralistically, within a totalizing empirical discourse. Do you see the dynamics of power, status, priority and privilege as amenable to empirical analysis( we are animals who….)?

This seems to be the level at which you want to deal with notions like power and status, from some meta-empirical level that wants to be faithful to the real as the way to protect all of us from the effects of power. But ini doing so , is one escaping the problem of ‘ bias’ or is one instead institutionalizing it scientistically? Derrida once said the ethic of deconstruction wasn’t in the blurring of differences but in the multiplication of difference. Not the dream of a fusing of horizons but the intricate movement though differences.

Quoting Joshs

Do you see the dynamics of power, status, priority and privilege as amenable to empirical analysis( we are animals who….)?

Not in any simple way, no.

Quoting Joshs

This seems to be the level at which you want to deal with notions like power and status, from some meta-empirical level that wants to be faithful to the real as the way to protect all of us from the effects of power. But ini doing so , is one escaping the problem of ‘ bias’ or is one instead institutionalizing it scientistically? Derrida once said the ethic of deconstruction wasn’t in the blurring of differences but in the multiplication of difference. Not the dream of a fusing of horizons but the intricate movement though differences.

I understand your concerns, and note that I'm not pontificating on a political thread about the threat of Cultural Marxism or Jesus Freaks or ...

Probably best to understand me as a skeptical moderate...or a practical skeptic. I believe there's some kind of 'real world' out there in some never quite finally specifiable way. What is a body really and finally? Can't say. I confess more readily than others perhaps that I don't control my own meanings, don't 'grasp' them in some luminous fullness, never know exactly what I mean. I relate to Socrates understood as someone trying to make darkness visible. I have no settled system but only various principles that seem to get something right or at least less obviously wrong, without knowing exactly what it means to be right or wrong. (And without abandoning the pursuit for further clarification.)

You are 'rationally' concerned about institutionalized scientism and I am 'rationally' concerned about a solipsistic free-for-all that would forget the body in and through talk about that body. For me 'body' points to the world of biology and physics and the difference between the idea of bread and bread that keeps the brain functioning and makes the idea of bread possible.

Reply to jas0n

These are matters which don't yield to thought. Addressing them are tasks for the artist or mystic or the religious. What is sought is an evocation, a showing, a revealing rather than argument or demonstration.

Reply to Ciceronianus
I mostly agree, but the boundary is blurry.

Is the hard problem of consciousness nonsense? I tend to think that 'qualia' is a broken concept, a useless beetle in an unopenable box. Yet value arguably lives in that space as feeling. What is the goodness in a good cup of coffee? Maybe a silly question...

Perhaps you downplay the importance of showing/invention in philosophy. Concept creation seems as important as arguments in terms of such concepts. Then something like philosophy has to decide what belongs to art, to science, to mysticism, etc. It's within a particular type of conversation that we discuss the norms of conversation explicitly, or something like that.

Quoting jas0n

'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is not an empirical question. It might just be a lyrical expression of wonder, like a wolf's howling at the moon...

That's a nice line.

Reply to Tom Storm
Thanks!

Quoting jas0n

Probably best to understand me as a skeptical moderate...or a practical skeptic. I believe there's some kind of 'real world' out there in some never quite finally specifiable way. What is a body really and finally?

Indeed. I tend towards anti-foundational skepticism to use a rather grand term for my mostly quotidian outlook. I often find what Joshs writes absolutely fascinating but I don't really have a way to make use of such notions in life. Perhaps it seems overly academic to me.

Like a lot of people here, I generally hold that people come from a perspective that makes sense to them. The important question is how committed are they to reflecting on their presuppositions and how can this best be done?

Quoting Joshs

As guide, he doesn’t want to dissuade you from these claims , only to invite you to see if you can experience a mobile flow of change underneath your claims, not invalidating them but embellishing them in such a way that what you previously took to be simple, solid and self-identical now shows itself as harboring within itself a vibrant flow of change. Either you see this added downtime within the laws and facts or you don’t. If you don’t , your view is still valid and useful from the relativist’s perspective.

How do you see the average person taking on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection? We live in a world of great dogmatic divisions - big question - is there are approach which less educated folk can employ to enlarge their perspectives?

Quoting Tom Storm

Indeed. I tend towards anti-foundational skepticism to use a rather grand term for my mostly quotidian outlook. I often find what Joshs writes absolutely fascinating but I don't really have a way to make use of such notions in life. Perhaps it seems overly academic to me.

Our apparently shared general outlook allows us to enjoy lots of wild perspectives while keeping the rent paid. A few academics somehow manage to pay their rent precisely by forgetting they have feet, which actually sounds like a nice gig if one can get it.

I learned quite a bit from Rorty. He kept one foot on the ground and knew how to reel in the 'pomo' style that may be more off-putting than its content. But this content still tends to neglect the way it endangers itself. Derrida's style is grandiose/frustrating, but there's often an honesty about his dependence on the system of concepts he criticizes. Some notion of reality and truth , however vague and elusive, has to remain 'legible' or one is just Tristan Tzara.( I love Tzara, and maybe there's some kind of profound ironic mysticism to be had there, and maybe this plays an important role in one's life. )


[quote = Tzara]
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC to fulminate against 1, 2, 3 to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing— hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluffmadonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring. The love of novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je m'enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a cause.
...
I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles (half-pints to measure the moral value of every phrase too too convenient; approximation was invented by the impressionists). I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.
[/quote]

Reply to Tom Storm Quoting Tom Storm

How do you see the average person taking on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection? We live in a world of great dogmatic divisions - big question - is there are approach which less educated

Gene Gendlin’s Focusing offers a pretty cool way to learn to tap into the generating process.

Quoting Joshs

Gene Gendlin’s Focusing offers a pretty cool way to learn to tap into the generating process.

Thanks, I will mull over this. I am slightly familiar with his work and with Focusing.

Reply to jas0n
-"I'd like to talk about a central metaphysical idea, which has been called 'consciousness' and 'transcendental ego' and 'pure witness.' This is not the self-image or personality or empirical ego. The ruling metaphor here is the eye which can see everything but itself."
-Well it may be a central metaphysical idea but it has zero ties to Philosophy or connections to any verified knowledge claim.
We can fill pages of discussion on that topic but nothing originates from real knowledge and none of what it will be said can ever leave the metaphysical realm. This is a text book example of pseudo philosophy.

Reply to Nickolasgaspar

So....not a fan of abstract reasoning, huh? Science is the best way to do philosophy kinda guy?

You must be aware that our primary interests reside in what we don’t know, right? How can science inform as to what we don’t know, if we don’t ask of it questions it alone can answer? Science tells, it doesn’t ask, so....where do the questions come from?

Must be something above/beyond/outside science, that causes it to do the one thing it does.

Metaphysics is that philosophy that causes science to tell us what we want to know, which makes explicit metaphysics is the only way to do science. Except for sheer accident, no science is ever done, that isn’t first thought.

Embrace, and thereby revel in, your humanity, man!!!!!

Reply to Mww
-So....not a fan of abstract reasoning, huh?"
-No problem with abstract reasoning as long as the concepts are defined and they are real.

-"Science is the best way to do philosophy kinda guy?"
-Science is the second fundamental step in any Philosophical endeavor...so I don't know what is your point exactly. You can not do science without philosophy and you can can only do bad philosophy without science or epistemology as your foundation.

-"You must be aware that our primary interests reside in what we don’t know, right? "
-Correct and comforting our existential and epistemic anxieties is also part of our primary interests, so we need to be careful about our presumptions and our unfalsifiable conclusions.
There is no problem in being interested in what we don't know or easy our anxieties with unfalsifiable answers.....the issue is when people believe that these tactics qualify as philosophy!

-"How can science inform as to what we don’t know, if we don’t ask of it questions it alone can answer, Science tells, it doesn’t ask, so....where do the questions come from??"
-Science, previously known as Natural Philosophy, uses the same theoretical toolkit with any other Philosophical category. Science is Philosophy(part of philosophy) on superior standards of reasoning and with a set of methodologies able to expand the available body of evidence...

The issue here is not Science vs Philosophy but Philosophy vs Pseudo Philosophy on really bad abstract reasoning. I am not here to argue in favor of knowledge but in favor of wisdom. Claims that do not provide any wisdom or expand our understanding aren't Philosophical By definition.
Philosophy is the struggle to understand the world through wise claims founded on what we already know, not to make up answers on arbitrary presumptions that we can not evaluate.

-"Must be something above/beyond/outside science, that causes it to do the one thing it does."
-what causes it to do the one thing it does?? I don't get what you are implying.


-"Metaphysics is that philosophy that causes science to tell us what we want to know, which makes explicit metaphysics is the only way to do science"
-Again the issue is not with metaphysics but with pseudo philosophy parading as such.

-". Except for sheer accident, no science is ever done, that isn’t first thought."
-Actually you are wrong...all philosophy is triggered by observations and data first...but again as I pointed out, Natural Philosophy(science) is a philosophical category that can go further than just from wisdom and produce credible knowledge. This new knowledge can feed our philosophy and produce further wise claims about our world.

So again the issue here is not which approach is the best. Science and Philosophy are necessary to each other.
Without knowledge(science) philosophy could never know if its conclusions were wise while without philosophy science would never know what our data mean.

So the issue is with pseudo philosophy pretending to be philosophy.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

......a central metaphysical idea......may be a central metaphysical idea but it has zero ties to Philosophy.....

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Again the issue is not with metaphysics but with pseudo philosophy parading as such.

These two assertions do not have the same truth value.

A central metaphysical idea must only and always have ties to philosophy, and whether or not it is judged by a second party as proper philosophy or pseudo-philosophy, is predicated solely on the exposition its internal construction to which the second party has no access whatsoever. That which is deemed pseudo-philosophy may be merely proper philosophy misunderstood.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

How can science inform as to what we don’t know, if we don’t ask of it questions it alone can answer"
-Science.....uses the same theoretical toolkit with any other Philosophical category.

No, it actually does not. Empirical science uses validation from experience, whereas some categories of philosophy are not amendable to any experience, therefore cannot use that toolkit for its validation. As that famous Enlightenment adage goes, “....though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience....”.

Of course, this presupposes a mutual understanding and tacit agreement of what knowledge is, the relative validity of its possible variations, and how any of it accrues in the human intellect.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

-". Except for sheer accident, no science is ever done, that isn’t first thought."
-Actually you are wrong...all philosophy is triggered by observations and data first

Be that as it may, the doing of is not the same as triggered by. Observation and extant knowledge merely serve as occasion for the doing, and that only conditionally. Consider, as well, that philosophy which has for its validation no observation or data whatsoever, re: moral philosophy. I shall trust you not to mistake merely objective behaviorism for the subjective metaphysical principles of moral constitution.
————-

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Without knowledge(science) philosophy could never know if its conclusions were wise while without philosophy science would never know what our data mean.

Now THAT I like. I might say...... without empirical knowledge theoretical philosophy would never know if its conclusions were justified, specifically logic and mathematics, but that’s a hair that doesn’t need splitting. In the interest of technical precision, maybe, but, I get your point nonetheless.

Quoting Mww

These two assertions do not have the same truth value.

Last time I checked this was a philosophy forum, not a truth forum. How is this red herring useful?
By default, unfalsifiable claims have an unknown truth value.

-"A central metaphysical idea must only and always have ties to philosophy, and whether or not it is judged by a second party as proper philosophy or pseudo-philosophy, is predicated solely on the exposition its internal construction to which the second party has no access whatsoever. That which is deemed pseudo-philosophy may be merely proper philosophy misunderstood."
-Metaphysical Ideas don't automatically qualify as philosophical just because people accept them as central. That is a fallacy. Philosophical frameworks need to meet specific standards and follow a specific method which includes epistemology. The demarcation of philosophy is based on objective criteria.

Quoting Mww

No, it actually does not. Empirical science uses validation from experience, whereas some categories of philosophy are not amendable to any experience, therefore cannot use that toolkit for its validation. As that famous Enlightenment adage goes, “....though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience....

- you missed an important word in my point.
I was referring to the theoretical part of science, not the methodological part. Science like philosophy provides theoretical frameworks(scientific hypothesis, theories, interpretations). The methodological(empirical) part is there to provide additional evidence for our theoretical work.

Quoting Mww

Be that as it may, the doing of is not the same as triggered by. Observation and extant knowledge merely serve as occasion for the doing, and that only conditionally. Consider, as well, that philosophy which has for its validation no observation or data whatsoever, re: moral philosophy. I shall trust you not to mistake merely objective behaviorism for the subjective metaphysical principles of moral constitution.

-again .... observation and interaction are followed by philosophical pondering. One can't reflect on nothing/zero stimuli. Data and Information are needed in order to come up with wise conclusions. This is why "wisdom" comes with experience...and Philosophy is all about wisdom.

Behaviourism is irrelevant and morality isn't based on "subjective metaphysical principles". Morality is an evolutionary trait that increases the well being and survival of populations.
Secular morality is Necessary and Sufficient to explain why Situational ethics and well being allow us to come up with objective moral evaluations....but this is an other topic.

Quoting Mww

Now THAT I like. I might say...... without empirical knowledge theoretical philosophy would never know if its conclusions were justified, specifically logic and mathematics, but that’s a hair that doesn’t need splitting. In the interest of technical precision, maybe, but, I get your point nonetheless

-finally we agree on something. Science is nothing more than philosophy with the addition of a set of empirical methodologies. No need to split hair indeed.....BUT there was a really good reason why science was forced to split from Academic Philosophy.
The good thing about science is that it doesn't allow questionable principles to pollute our metaphysics and epistemology. Science subscribes to Methodological Naturalism and uses its principles as an acknowledgement of our epistemic and methodological limitations.
Academic philosophy , on the other hand, allow all kind of principles to pollute our syllogisms rendering most of the produced work pseudo philosophical.
Unfalsifiable principles are equally useless as doing philosophy without any observations to reflect upon.

Quoting Tom Storm

How do you see the average person taking on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection? We live in a world of great dogmatic divisions - big question - is there are approach which less educated folk can employ to enlarge their perspectives?

Why should the average person "take on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection"?
Why should the less educated folk "enlarge their perspectives"?

Seriously, can you answer that?

And is it even possible to answer that without sounding like yet another patronizing bourgeois?

Quoting baker

Seriously, can you answer that?

And is it even possible to answer that without sounding like yet another patronizing bourgeois?

Of course. Not everyone is a bitter cynic :wink: The question was to Joshs, who provided an answer which was not a patronizing bourgeois response. People are committed to growing and learning, Baker - even people from poor working class backgrounds like me. Or do you advocate a culture of low expectations for people from disadvantaged origins?

Reply to Tom Storm You didn't answer my question.
I want to see how you answer it.

Reply to baker I think you missed it.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

We can fill pages of discussion on that topic but nothing originates from real knowledge and none of what it will be said can ever leave the metaphysical realm. This is a text book example of pseudo philosophy.

FYI, You can highlight text and then push the quote button so that the quoted person is notified and the quote appears more readably in a bubble.

We could probably also fill pages with 'meaningless' discussion about all the failed (self-destroying) attempts to sharply separate meaningful from meaningless statements. I suspect your own concept of the 'metaphysical realm' belongs in this same realm by your own standards, and that you've just not recognized that yet. In any case, I challenge you to articulate the distinction so that your articulation is not itself on the wrong side of the line. Note that Popper was shrewd enough to offer his demarcation as a convention...not as itself a piece of science. The quote below sketches where I think you are more or less coming from?

The logical positivists' initial stance was that a statement is "cognitively meaningful" in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content only if some finite procedure conclusively determines its truth. By this verifiability principle, only statements verifiable either by their analyticity or by empiricism were cognitively meaningful. Metaphysics, ontology, as well as much of ethics failed this criterion, and so were found cognitively meaningless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism#:~:text=Cognitive%20meaningfulness,-Verification&text=The%20logical%20positivists'%20initial%20stance,procedure%20conclusively%20determines%20its%20truth.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

The issue here is not Science vs Philosophy but Philosophy vs Pseudo Philosophy on really bad abstract reasoning. I am not here to argue in favor of knowledge but in favor of wisdom. Claims that do not provide any wisdom or expand our understanding aren't Philosophical By definition.
Philosophy is the struggle to understand the world through wise claims founded on what we already know, not to make up answers on arbitrary presumptions that we can not evaluate.

I suggest you start your own thread on this issue (should have said this in my previous reply.)

Or please try to address the topic of this thread.

Reply to jas0n I am referring to metaphysical claims and discussions that have zero ties to established knowledge. I am not dismissing Metaphysical syllogism that originate from verified knowledge claims m speculating on what they imply for reality based on known rules that govern our world.
Those are two different things.

Quoting jas0n

I suspect your own concept of the 'metaphysical realm' belongs in this same realm by your own standards, and that you've just not recognized that yet.

-My metaphysics do not belong in realms. They are limited by Methodological Naturalism and that makes them meaningful because they can be evaluated or even if they are not falsifiable(yet) they do not need unknown realms to be assumed.

Quoting jas0n

I suggest you start your own thread on this issue (should have said this in my previous reply.)
Or please try to address the topic of this thread.

-I might do that but that is irrelevant to my remark. My short point wasn't to start a different topic inside yours. My intention was to point out that those ideas are not Philosophy.
Those are just declarations or unfounded statements that lack objective foundations. Without solid foundations(epistemology) we can not go much further from that starting point!

How can you enrich this conversation without any data...just with faith based claims!?
Philosophy, as I said before, is an exercise in frustration not the pursuit of happiness.
Concepts like the "Transcendental Ego" appear to be more of a product of a death denying ideology (orphaned by facts) than a legit philosophical topic that could allow us to arrive to wise statements about our ontology.

Without knowledge you can never be sure of how wise your conclusions are...and without wise conclusions(or questions) we don't have Philosophy!
i.e. The statement "use the window to exit your apartment" might be wise if the door is locked and you have misplaced your keys, but it can be a really idiotic suggestion if you ignore the floor of the apartment!!!
Again you can not produce wise claims without using knowledge as your foundation.
You can not call "philosophy" ideas that are set on shaky metaphysical assumptions and untestable (not necessary proven) principles.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

My intention was to point out that those ideas are not Philosophy.

I'm afraid that your eccentric use of 'philosophy' is anything but authoritative. You can do what so many have done before and try to impose a narrowing of the concept, but you don't get it for free. Capitalizing the word is rhetorically questionable (suggestive of mysticism, idolatry, etc.) It's just a word, a thing people do, not the name of the divine. Another poster likes to capitalize 'reason,' and sure enough personification followed, turns out she's a Lady.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

How can you enrich this conversation without any data...just with faith based claims!?

Have you not realized that I'm analyzing and criticizing the concept ? The real work is done not by repeating well-known mantras that fit on bumper stickers but down in the weeds with the details. So far I'm just picking up a garden variety scientism in your posts. I say that as an old atheist who thinks that even the 'self' and 'consciousness' are inventions, pieces of technology, culture not nature.

If you haven't looked into Popper, I encourage you to look into my other thread. Observation statements are philosophically nontrivial. Sellars also sees in his own way what Popper calls the swamp on which our knowledge is built.

Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.

...
The observational/theoretical vocabulary distinction, thus conceived, was taken to have ontological implications. We are committed to the existence of the given, for that is what ties thought to reality. Theories, however, are merely tools to enable us to explain observation-level empirical generalizations. Presumably, some empirical generalizations may be first derived with the help of a theory, but they are subject to more direct investigation and corroboration, so the theory is not essential to it. Thus, there is no ontological commitment to any entities that theories postulate; they can be viewed as convenient fictions, devices of calculation.

Sellars thinks that this instrumentalist picture gets almost everything wrong. In his view the observation vocabulary/theoretical vocabulary distinction is merely methodological and is, moreover, highly malleable; it therefore possesses no particular ontological force. There is no given, so it can play no semantic role. Meanings are functional roles in language usage, and nothing in principle prevents a term that might originally have arisen as part of a theory from acquiring a role in observation reports. The well-trained physicist “just sees” an alpha-particle track in a cloud chamber as directly and non-inferentially as the well-trained child just sees a dog. Furthermore, what is observable depends on the techniques and instruments employed, and these are often loaded with theoretical baggage. “Pure” observation uncontaminated by theory is outside our reach.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#ScieReal

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Concepts like the "Transcendental Ego" appear to be more of a product of a death denying ideology (orphaned by facts) than a legit philosophical topic that could allow us to arrive to wise statements about our ontology.

Now you are saying something, theorizing, and I think you are on to something. The 'pure witness' is a version of eternity. It is what is always there. It is like 'God' in that it makes experience possible. The mystical version offers spiritual comfort in the obvious way. 'You are really a deathless universal awareness.' The metaphysical version is part of a machinery that conquers time, allows us to discuss the form of all possible experience, provide the space where pure-exact language-independent and culture-independent meanings live, safe from the ravages of time and relativism. Kant and Husserl didn't want to only be talking only about nerdy European white dudes in this or that era. They needed the very essence of what it meant to be human and rational. And so it seems do you, with your implicitly universal notion of 'Philosophy.' As Marx might tell Stirner and that kid in the The Sixth Sense might tell Bruce Willis... the ego is a spook ! The ghostbuster is a ghost...

None of us can even imagine a state where basic awareness is not, because we would still be aware of the imagining. Even in dreams we are aware.

Imagination is a form of awareness (quiet assumption), so imagining the absence of awareness is a manifestation of awareness. Seems like an elaboration of hazy grammar, not an illumination of the interior. No mention of being out cold, not yet born, or dead.

Moreover, these traditions maintain, there are not two different types of awareness, enlightened versus ignorant. There is only awareness. And this awareness, exactly and precisely as it is, without correction or modification at all, is itself Spirit, since there is nowhere Spirit is not. The instructions, then, are to recognize awareness, recognize the Witness, recognize the Self, and abide as that. Any attempt to get awareness is totally beside the point. 'But I still don't see Spirit!' 'You are aware of your not seeing Spirit, and that awareness is itself Spirit.'"

https://www.integralworld.net/meditation.html

Clearly the goal is a recognition of Spirit. At the same time, this would just be more awareness, which is never enlightened or ignorant but just itself. Trying to 'see' or 'get' this awareness/Spirit is 'totally beside the point.' But the point of the text is obviously to help one 'see' or 'get' it...in the right way (try to not try so hard). The recognition is mediated conceptually. Since Spirit was always already there, it was never really the target. The myth/story of Spirit grasping itself is self-fulfilling, self-describing. The consumer/participant enjoys an identification with completed or self-grasping Spirit. But isn't my interpretation a further elaboration or self-grasping of Spirit? The game can be continued, surely. Was bare/pure awareness ever interesting in itself? An object eternal only through its vacuity? Or was it always about possession and hierarchy?

[deleted: sarcasm]

Quoting Wayfarer

A wonder that generations of mystics lack your insight Jason. Your work is obviously cut out.

If you think it's an unworthy example, say so. Show me the good stuff. But if you think it's a good text, then you should be defending it with more than sarcasm. I'm not even anti-mystical, and I don't resent when mystics also write/think (William Blake is great.)

The 'pure witness' concept, which seems to be tied up with Heidegger's 'Being' and the hard problem of consciousness, is complex. I don't pretend to have figured it out. But the particular text critiqued is a disaster.

[I had pasted a response here, but then I checked the site the quotation is from, I have no wish to comment on it.]

A nice piece of Blake, showing a kind of fusion of the mystic and the metaphysical/philosophical.
[quote =Blake]
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passion or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The Price of Enterance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People’s by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo, Wo, Wo to you Hypocrites. Even Murder, the Courts of Justice, more merciful than the Church, are compell’d to allow is not done in Passion, but in Cool Blooded design & Intention.

The Modern Chruch Crucifies Christ with the head Downwards.

The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment & that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, that Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation; these People flatter themselves. I will not Flatter them. Error is Created; Truth is Eternal. Error or Creation will be Burned up, & then & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. ‘What’, it will be Question’d, ‘When the sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look through it & not with it.

[/quote]

Quoting Wayfarer

But there's so much more to it than is conveyed in that abstraction.

I'd say what really matters, to me and maybe everyone, is feeling, feeling, feeling. Some philosophers have suggested that concept doesn't grab the absolute, that maybe art is better. And some religious thinkers have put feeling first. In my opinion, that's the cleanest route. Let it be called 'feeling.' Or, if it's ineffable, don't even start to argue for it.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
From Leibniz, Lessing, Fichte, Jacobi and the Romantic school, Schleiermacher had imbibed a profound and mystical view of the inner depths of the human personality.
...
While ....we cannot ...attain the idea of the supreme unity of thought and being by either cognition or volition, we can find it in our own personality, in immediate self-consciousness or feeling.
...
At various periods of his life Schleiermacher used different terms to represent the character and relation of religious feeling. In his earlier days he called it a feeling or intuition of the universe, consciousness of the unity of reason and nature, of the infinite and the eternal within the finite and the temporal. In later life he described it as the feeling of absolute dependence, or, as meaning the same thing, the consciousness of being in relation to God.[7] In his Addresses on Religion (1799), he wrote:[38]

Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schleiermacher

Quoting Wayfarer

I notice that the source materials is from or about Ken Wilber. Personally I think in the transpersonal philosophy space, Bernardo Kastrup is superior.

I bumped into the term 'pure witness' in a Wilbur book, and I realized that Husserl and Kant maybe had similar starting points. I'd put Wittgenstein, Hegel, Feuerbach, Foucault, Heidegger, Norman O. Brown, Derrida, ... in the 'transpersonal philosophy space.' Philosophy pretty much just is transpersonal, if one takes something like a universal reason as a binding norm and tries to articulate the structure/truth of a shared world/reality.

I've glanced at Kastrup. He's sophisticated. I still think 'mental' breaks down without its other. But I respect any metaphysics that at least tries to give an account of our sharing in whatever this talk is and the world that it's about is...You and I agree that any good account has to account for itself too.

Quoting jas0n

I'm afraid that your eccentric use of 'philosophy' is anything but authoritative.

There is nothing eccentric about the use of the philosophy.
Philosophy is defined by its etymology (Love of wisdom).
The philosophical method is defined by Aristotle.
1. epistemology
2. Physika
3. Meta physika
4. Aesthetics
5.Ethics
6.Politics
From the moment someone chooses to ignore the first two steps he no longer "practices" Philosophy.
He is making speculations based on his personal goals and emotional needs.
This is known as religion or magical thinking.
Again you can not get wisdom from claims that aren't based on knowledge or verified principles.(i.e. Naturalistic).

Quoting jas0n

You can do what so many have done before and try to impose a narrowing of the concept, but you don't get it for free.

- Of course I can! This is what Natural Philosophy did and watch the result....a 500+ years of epistemic run away success while pseudo philosophy still struggles with unanswerable idealistic or supernatural questions.
Again Philosophy has a goal set by its etymology and the need it was created to address...our need to understand the world through wisdom....not to make a world that we would love to be real.

-"Capitalizing the word is rhetorically questionable (suggestive of mysticism, idolatry, etc.) "
-I only demand a meaningful use of the method for the production of frameworks that have real intellectual value, like this method was intended to do . Philosophy was not invented for us to pretend to know things we don't and can't prove. Its one thing to produce questions and an other to poison the well or beg the question.....Again we already have such tools , its called religion.

Quoting jas0n

It's just a word, a thing people do, not the name of the divine. Another poster likes to capitalize 'reason,' and sure enough personification followed, turns out she's a Lady.

-Words have meanings and descriptive powers. By the etymology of the word and the definition of what is wise we can see that NOT all things people do qualify as "philosophy".
Reason or better Logic is an essential tool for wisdom to be possible.

Distorting words doesn't affect what we value. Knowledge wisdom, truth are essential values for our claims. When a claim doesn't tick those values...then they are not philosophical.
You can call them philosophical all you want but that doesn't really make them.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Philosophy is defined by its etymology (Love of wisdom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

He is making speculations based on his personal goals and emotional needs. This is known as religion or magical thinking.

It might be that the worst form of magical thinking is the fantasy that one is free of it. The battle against magical thinking may itself be 'magically' motivated.

Do you think your aren't acting from 'personal goals and emotional needs'? Why do you want the truth so bad? Is knowledge valuable in itself or is science just a tool to get us what we want? Are you sure you don't just want to gloat above the poor fools who aren't as enlightened as you?

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

I only demand a meaningful use of the method for the production of frameworks that have real intellectual value

What is this value? Why all the fuss? Why the fear of magical thinking? Can you prove that magical thinking is bad? If not, it seems your fear of magical thinking is just magical thinking?

I'm down with critical thinking, I magically tell myself. I just think its only really exciting target is itself.

Quoting jas0n

Have you not realized that I'm analyzing and criticizing the concept ? The real work is done not by repeating well-known mantras that fit on bumper stickers but down in the weeds with the details. So far I'm just picking up a garden variety scientism in your posts. I say that as an old atheist who thinks that even the 'self' and 'consciousness' are inventions, pieces of technology, culture not nature.

-Again you dishonestly bring up scientism when I already have stated that Science is not the only source of epistemology and science can not answer everything (i.e. question of meaning and value).
So if you repeat this strawman you will prove your dishonesty to me and that your strawman is more of a ad hominem.

The real work is done by putting together bits and pieces of facts and reason without polluting them with unfalsifiable metaphysical assumptions!
You start by making unfalsifiable claims like.
-" In other words, the ultimate reality is not something seen, but rather the ever-present Seer. "
-How do you know that the ultimate reality differs from the reality we can observe. What are your objective facts that lead you to that conclusion?
How do you know and can prove this ever-present seer(whatever this deepity means) and on what evidential grounds to you equate an unobservable ultimate reality to a made up ever present peeping tom??
I can go on exposing all those unfounded deepities which prove my point on the pseudo philosophical nature of your statements.
YOU assume things that you NEED to prove. They need to be part of your conclusions not your presuppositions.
Making declarations that suit your narrative is an irrational and its more of a theology than philosophy

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

You start by making unfalsifiable claims like.
-" In other words, the ultimate reality is not something seen, but rather the ever-present Seer. "
-How do you know that the ultimate reality differs from the reality we can observe. What are your objective facts that lead you to that conclusion?

Are we on the same planet? I am criticizing the concept of the pure witness in this thread. If you can't see that, you are lost in a private dream. Take a breath. Go back and read. Or don't.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

I can go on exposing all those unfounded deepities which prove my point on the pseudo philosophical nature of your statements.

'Deepities' is the best thing you've contributed so far.

Quoting jas0n

If you haven't looked into Popper, I encourage you to look into my other thread. Observation statements are philosophically nontrivial. Sellars also sees in his own way what Popper calls the swamp on which our knowledge is built.

-You keep going to the extremes. From Observation statements(almost deductive tautologies) to metaphysical presuppositions and magical claims.
You do understand that there is a huge middle ground where philosophy lies, right?????
Science and Philosophy on Naturalistic principles is successful because it takes risks in its predictions because they product of induction/abduction.
You should ALSO arrive to probable conclusion from what you know!!!
Instead you start from things you don't know and you push a narrative as if it was right.
How on earth can you ever say that your conclusion is wise...thus Philosophical.
Sorry sir but your sophistry is part of theology and superstition, not philosophy.

Your claims following your opening lines gloriously prove that:
-"Things that are seen come and go, are happy or sad, pleasant or painful—but the Seer is none of those things, and it does not come and go. The Witness does not waver, does not wobble, does not enter that stream of time."
Zero skepticism for the made up agent or its qualities!

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

Are we on the same planet? I am criticizing the concept of the pure witness in this thread. If you can't see that, you are lost in a private dream, sir

-And what is the wise conclusion that is produced by criticizing this made up concept sir?
How this conclusion can add in our understanding, inform and affect our lives and expand our wisdom.
Metal gymnastics of concepts that are isolated from reality don't offer wisdom.
In this case it only sneaks in supernatural ideology since pure witnesses do not exist(as far as we can tell).

.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

And what is the wise conclusion that is produced by criticizing this made up concept sir?

It's a concept related to one you depend on. As I went on to suggest.

You are knee-deep in metaphysical assumptions that you haven't even noticed yet.

Don't worry. The machines work whether or not you believe in them or understand them.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

In this case it only sneaks in supernatural ideology since pure witnesses do not exist(as far as we can tell).

So the idea of the pure witness is basically just...consciousness. If you want to ghost story to attack, consciousness is a good one. Religion is such an easy target these days.

Quoting jas0n

Now you are saying something, theorizing, and I think you are on to something. The 'pure witness' is a version of eternity. It is what is always there. It is like 'God' in that it makes experience possible. The mystical version offers spiritual comfort in the obvious way. 'You are really a deathless universal awareness.' The metaphysical version is part of a machinery that conquers time, allows us to discuss the form of all possible experience, provide the space where pure-exact language-independent and culture-independent meanings live, safe from the ravages of time and relativism. Kant and Husserl didn't want to only be talking only about nerdy European white dudes in this or that era. They needed the very essence of what it meant to be human and rational. And so it seems do you, with your implicitly universal notion of 'Philosophy.' As Marx might tell Stirner and that kid in the The Sixth Sense might tell Bruce Willis... the ego is a spook ! The ghostbuster is a ghost...

1. The 'pure witness' is a version of eternity.
-so you are trying to validate a made up supernatural agent with an idealistic concept that we can not be sure if it is possible to begin with? Both concepts do not offer philosophical foundations.

2.It is what is always there.
- So you assume observing capabilities to what is always there. You need to demonstrate it ...not assume it. If not your foundations are pseudo philosophical.
You are polluting the narrative in order to introduce...wait for it....

3.It is like 'God' in that it makes experience possible.
-And we are finally at the crux of all this pseudo philosophical salad of assumptions and speculations.
The good old "magic does everything".
Again I will inform you that you are not in the correct forum. YOu need to be posting in a Theological forum.
What makes experience possible is you existing, not having your sensory system deprived of stimuli and your brain up an running and not deprived from metabolic molecules(food and oxygen).

Quoting jas0n

The mystical version offers spiritual comfort in the obvious way. 'You are really a deathless universal awareness.' The metaphysical version is part of a machinery that conquers time, allows us to discuss the form of all possible experience, provide the space where pure-exact language-independent and culture-independent meanings live, safe from the ravages of time and relativism.

-None of the above are legit philosophical ideas. They are comforting beliefs dressed up was philosopy.
Again I will state the important point about Philosophy.
The Philosophical Method is an exercise in frustration, not the pursuit of happiness.
Making up answers and assuming things you don't know ease our anxieties so you should be skeptical of your assumptions.

Reply to Nickolasgaspar

...on her breast is inscribed: you will die. This is her only remedy. Who still believes in doctors? I prefer the poet who is a fart in a steam-engine – he’s gentle but he doesn’t cry – polite and semi-homosexual, he floats...

https://391.org/manifestos/1920-dada-manifesto-feeble-love-bitter-love-tristan-tzara/

.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

The Philosophical Method is an exercise in frustration, not the pursuit of happiness.
Making up answers and assuming things you don't know ease our anxieties so you should be skeptical of your assumptions.

I agree w/ the last part...or do I? I mean I always assumed I was after the truth....

Quoting jas0n

I'd say what really matters, to me and maybe everyone, is feeling, feeling, feeling. Some philosophers have suggested that concept doesn't grab the absolute, that maybe art is better. And some religious thinkers have put feeling first. In my opinion, that's the cleanest route. Let it be called 'feeling.' Or, if it's ineffable, don't even start to argue for it.

[quote=Dean Inge, Christian Mysticism]Reason is still king. Religion must not be a matter of feeling only. St. John's command to "try every spirit" condemns all attempts to make emotion or inspiration independent of reason. Those who thus blindly follow the inner light find it no "candle of the Lord," but an ignis fatuus; and the great mystics are well aware of this. The fact is that the tendency to separate and half-personify the different faculties—intellect, will, feeling—is a mischievous one. Our object should be so to unify our personality, that our eye may be single, and our whole body full of light. [/quote]

Reply to Wayfarer
Well you know I love concepts on this side, but 'emotion and inspiration' is tricky there. I tend to understand inspiration as having more than just emotional content. To me inspiration is the unity of concept and emotion. I can recall a particular peak experience. It was feeling and concept together, a sort of grasping the world as a harmony. So I would have said maybe that the world was God was harmony or something.

Of course I agree with questioning the 'inner light.' But that just takes us back to where I already try to live, in the space of a thinking that turns back on itself, that understands itself to be essentially transpersonal. The ego (as opposed to the body) is a convention. And this is something 'I' try to articulate in detail, while responding to and incorporating criticism, an endless task....

Reply to jas0n I'm reading some of that Dean Inge text just to reconnect with a classical presentation of the subject. I read some of it years ago when I was studying comparative religion. He has a Platonistic bent which I didn't appreciate at the time, but I do now. He goes on to say:

Mysticism is not itself a philosophy, any more than it is itself a religion. On its intellectual side it has been called "formless speculation." But until speculations or intuitions have entered into the forms of our thought, they are not current coin even for the thinker. The part played by Mysticism in philosophy is parallel to the part played by it in religion. As in religion it appears in revolt against dry formalism and cold rationalism, so in philosophy it takes the field against materialism and scepticism. It is thus possible to speak of speculative Mysticism, and even to indicate certain idealistic lines of thought, which may without entire falsity be called the philosophy of Mysticism. ...The real world, according to thinkers of this school, is created by the thought and will of God, and exists in His mind. It is therefore spiritual, and above space and time, which are only the forms under which reality is set out as a process.

Those kinds of motifs can be traced back to Plotinus and Proclus.

//ps// I will also acknowledge that Inge had some pretty reactionary and repugnant political views, but his scholarship in this subject matter was peerless.//

Quoting jas0n

I agree w/ the last part...or do I? I mean I always assumed I was after the truth....

This is really hopeful. Questioning our presumptions is the only way we can Quoting jas0n

So the idea of the pure witness is basically just...consciousness. If you want to ghost story to attack, consciousness is a good one. Religion is such an easy target these days.

-No it isnt'.
Consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Organisms with a sensory system and a central process unit (brain) have the ability to process environmental and organic stimuli, produce emotions and affections, reason then in to feelings,meaning and purpose through their ability of symbolic language and arrive to conclusions, choices and decisions.
All those mechanisms and their connections to the Ascending Reticular Activating System and the Central Lateral Thalamus are observable, quantifiable and provide loads of information on how our conscious states arise and how they affect our biology and behavior.
This is the process that we label as consciousness in the real world.
By using the same word to refer to a vague ghost substance you just produce an Ambiguity that doesn't help our conversation. Maybe you could provide a description from your observations about this ghost and how I can reproduce the same observations.

Quoting jas0n

It's a concept related to one you depend on. As I went on to suggest.

You are knee-deep in metaphysical assumptions that you haven't even noticed yet.

.

You don't get it....how can you demonstrate that this concept you say it is related to an other thing that I depend on?
How can you DEMONSTRATE this contingency?Objectively!
I don't really need metaphysical assumptions . I have Pragmatic Necessity. i.e. I don't need to assume anything for the metaphysical ontology of a, lets say a wall. From Pragmatic Necessity I have to accept my emotions and feelings produced when crashing in a wall ...head first.
This informs my future actions. if my actions keep those feelings away (avoid pain by avoiding walls) then we can objectively say that I was informed wisely by them.

This is not true for your god like artifacts.

-"Don't worry. The machines work whether or not you believe in them or understand them"
-correct but that is part of my argument....I am the one that argue for Empirical Regularity, External Limitations detected by our Experiences and Pragmatic Necessity independent of our metaphysical biases.

Reply to Nickolasgaspar

If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom, I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom... the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with filters made of chicken manure.
...
The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us in a banal kind of way to the opinions we had in the first place...
...
But supposing life to be a poor farce, without aim or initial parturition, and because we think it our duty to extricate ourselves as fresh and clean as washed chrysanthemums, we have proclaimed as the sole basis for agreement: art. It is not as important as we, mercenaries of the spirit, have been proclaiming for centuries. Art afflicts no one and those who manage to take an interest in it will harvest caresses and a fine opportunity to populate the country with their conversation.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

This is not true for your god like artifacts.

I have a rotary phone and it's not plugged into the wall or anything but I can talk to God on it. My nurse likes to pretend I'm just imagining things, and I pretend to agree to spare her feelings, because she is scared of not being scientific. But me and God laugh together like mad when she leaves the room.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

The Philosophical Method is an exercise in frustration.....

......which disappears as soon as the limitations of it are realized. A central metaphysical idea.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Making up answers and assuming things you don't know.....

.....serves no purpose, as opposed to making up answers and assuming things that do not contradict that which is known, which does. A central metaphysical idea.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

What makes experience possible is you existing.....

.....which is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. The mere fact of existence does nothing to explain that by which experience obtains. A central metaphysical idea.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

.....start from things you don't know and you push a narrative as if it was right.....

Speculative metaphysics starts with things known, and uses that to arrive at logical arguments for that which is sufficiently explanatory in keeping with internal consistency and non-contradiction. Right or wrong is completely irrelevant with respect to proper philosophy, insofar as no one possesses the rational authority to know he is philosophically wise, while he may very well think himself to be.
—————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

.....criticizing the concept of the pure witness.....
— jas0n

(...) this made up concept....
(...) concepts that are isolated from reality don't offer wisdom....
(...)our understanding

If a made up concept isolated from reality, what is this “our” of which you so readily speak? In the affirmative, have you not displayed your own wisdom in not denying the validity of that very same made up conception, in the proper use of a derivative of it? And in the negative, how wise would you be, to deny the validity of that made up conception, when it is impossible to express your denial without using it? Understanding is itself a made up conception, which does nothing more than represent a speculative human cognitive faculty, while leaving open a congruently speculative methodology for its operation.

Caveat: I would have said critique rather than criticize, but that’s just another one of those split-able hairs.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

The metaphysical version is part of a machinery that (...) allows us to discuss the form of all possible experience, provide the space where pure-exact language-independent and culture-independent meanings live, safe from the ravages of time and relativism.
— jas0n
-None of the above are legit philosophical ideas.

I would have worded it a little differently, but still, I submit that’s exactly what they are.
—————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Without knowledge you can never be sure of how wise your conclusions are.....

Knowledge is always contingent, from which follows the surety of conclusions is just as contingent, which makes explicit I may be wise now regarding something I know but unwise later regarding that something I once knew. Wisdom resides more in judgement of difference, a logical relation writ large, than the knowledge of differences themselves.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Reason or better Logic is an essential tool for wisdom to be possible.

Exactly right. While wisdom resides in judgement, that wisdom is possible in order for it to be contained in judgement, is predicated solely on reason and logic, the real world being merely the occasion for the exercise of them. All three of which are antecedent to knowledge, or, which is the same thing, knowledge presupposes all three of those strictly human a priori capacities.

Point/counterpoint.....

Quoting Mww

......which disappears as soon as the limitations of it are realized. A central metaphysical idea.

-unfortunatelly people try to address their frustration by going over those limitations. (Magical supernatural claims). Removing frustration is not part of metaphysics. Metaphysics job is to provide frameworks that can be evaluated. The end of frustration (and not always) comes after the end of this evaluation.(falsification/verification).

Quoting Mww

.....serves no purpose, as opposed to making up answers and assuming things that do not contradict that which is known, which does. A central metaphysical idea.

those are not opposed practices. Making up answers without epistemic foundations is bad metaphysics...independent of our assumptions.

Quoting Mww

.....which is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. The mere fact of existence does nothing to explain that by which experience obtains. A central metaphysical idea.

-First of all you are promoting a red herring. We are addressing necessity. Sufficiency in the case of experiencing depends on the biological hardware.
Accusing existence for insufficiency in relation to a property that isn't shared by all existing things (experiencing their world) ...is like accusing your tuna sandwich for immoral judgments on slavery.

Why do you keep repeating this deepity "A central metaphysical idea."
everything with said are rooted in epistemology.
Existence is necessary for experience...that is a knowledge claim.(epistemology).
Existence is not sufficient for experience...because rocks exist........that is also a knowledge claim.

-"Quoting Mww

Speculative metaphysics starts with things known, and uses that to arrive at logical arguments for that which is sufficiently explanatory in keeping with internal consistency and non-contradiction.

"
-We agree on that...the question is are you following that? do you start with the most credible and available epistemology ?


-"Right or wrong is completely irrelevant with respect to proper philosophy, "
-Correct! Cherry picking your epistemology or ignoring it all together is what renders our philosophy...pseudo.

-"insofar as no one possesses the rational authority to know he is philosophically wise, while he may very well think himself to be."
-Again...... not the statement in question. "philosophically wise" refers to the conclusion.I am not addressing that. I am pointing people's insistence to skip basic steps of the method (Epistemology, Physika".

and here is an example of the problem I am talking about. you stated.
-"If a made up concept isolated from reality, what is this “our” of which you so readily speak? "
-not my problem. The side making the claim needs to provide the epistemic foundations so that we can accept this claim in his premises.
If he is unable to do that then he is practicing pseudo philosophy. Its not my fault that his assumption is unfounded.
Its like me going around dismissing your arguments because I am an all knowing agent with my knowledge source being ....isolated from reality so and you can not verify or falsify it.

You did so well in your previous paragraph.(Speculative metaphysics starts with things known, and uses that to arrive at logical arguments for that which is sufficiently explanatory in keeping with internal consistency and non-contradiction.)...but for a weird reason you fail to see why his "isolated concept" doesn't follow the path you described??
why is that?

Quoting Mww

And in the negative, how wise would you be, to deny the validity of that made up conception, when it is impossible to express your denial without using it?

- is this a serious argument? Our ability to reproduce a concept plays no role to its validity lol.
This is not how we evaluate claims of hypothesized concepts. We check the epistemic foundations. If they are absent then presupposing it in an argument renders the argument unsound. This means that me need to reject the conclusion.
I don't know why this is so difficult for you...you literally described the process.

Quoting Mww

I would have worded it a little differently, but still, I submit that’s exactly what they are.

Yes I know what you believe, the important question is why when a concept is epistemically astray

Quoting Mww

Knowledge is always contingent, from which follows the surety of conclusions is just as contingent, which makes explicit I may be wise now regarding something I know but unwise later regarding something else I know. Wisdom resides more in judgement than knowledge.

-Again...this is what you keep saying but you fail to practice when a concept isn't founded on knowledge....see your "concept isolated from reality".(as if you know that such a state is possible...an additional unfounded assumption in rescue of the first.)

Quoting Mww

Exactly right. While wisdom resides in judgement, that wisdom is possible in order for it to be contained in judgement, is predicated solely on reason and logic, the real world being merely the occasion for the exercise of them.

-Correct...but are you aware of a Non real world where we can not exercise them???? This is the problem with pseudo philosophy....it pollutes really good syllogisms!

Quoting Mww

All three of which are antecedent to knowledge, or, which is the same thing, knowledge presupposes all three of those strictly human a priori capacities.

-Obviously the dude who stated that has never studied other animals.

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

I have a rotary phone and it's not plugged into the wall or anything but I can talk to God on it. My nurse likes to pretend I'm just imagining things, and I pretend to agree to spare her feelings, because she is scared of not being scientific. But me and God laugh together like mad when she leaves the room.

-I have a program written in Atari basic that allows me to copy paste claims (like yours) and accurately informs me about their truth value. Yours failed...so I will reject it.

Since it is isolated from your reality you will need to accept it.....according to your reasoning of course!

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

-I have a program written in Atari basic that allows me to copy paste claims (like yours) and accurately informs me about their truth value.

//////////////////
“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Ideas 69).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free) as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm

Reply to jas0n
Another common error. People confuse Chronicling with Philosophy.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

People confuse Chronicling with Philosophy.

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_O._Brown

....indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse's verdict....

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm

I am speaking of a paper flower for the buttonholes of the gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, white cousins lithe or fat. They traffic with whatever we have selected.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf

Reply to jas0n your comments don't help this conversation or your points.
You need to decide. DO you recognize the importance of epistemology in philosophy or are you willing to cherry pick the cases where you can "do with out".

Reply to Nickolasgaspar

Since it reasoning value is isolated from according to your Yours failed informs me about their I will epistemology in recognize the importance You so you DO willing to cherry pick the cases where you can comments or your points Atari basic that allows me to copy paste claims need will need to accept it of course written in you your of to decide philosophy or are you (like yours) and accurately I your reality have a program don't help this do with out conversation reject it truth

You are missing the context. I'm being accidentally trolled and fooling around,

Quoting Ciceronianus

Was Helena Blavatsky a philosopher? What about Aleister Crowley? What about other kinds of thinking, e.g. religious, or New Age? Was Ram Dass a philosopher? The Dalai Lama? John Lennon?

If you wish, you can claim most anyone of these individuals or others who "think great thoughts" are/were philosophers.

Well I could offer up an opinion, but I don't think individuals legislate meaning any more than they can decide what five bucks is worth, and for similar reasons. 'Philosopher' is a token that bounces around in the world with other tokens, out there with telescopes and fire hydrants.

But no I'm not inclined to let everyone in.

Quoting jas0n

Why the fear of magical thinking? Can you prove that magical thinking is bad?

Wouldn't be more apt to ask whether magical thinking is philosophy?

Was Helena Blavatsky a philosopher? What about Aleister Crowley? What about other kinds of thinking, e.g. religious, or New Age? Was Ram Dass a philosopher? The Dalai Lama? John Lennon?

If you wish, you can claim most anyone of these individuals or others who "think great thoughts" are/were philosophers.

Quoting Ciceronianus

Wouldn't be more apt to ask whether magical thinking is philosophy?

I don't think so. I'm with Witt & Gadamer on this. We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way. Metaphors, pictures, myths. Is there a system without some unjustified master concept, some kind of grand narrative that's true for no reason? Look for an image of their hero, their ego ideal, their proposed what-we-should-all-be. I've never met/read anyone, including myself, without holes in their story, things they take for granted without noticing it, a roleplay of some version of the hero.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

unfortunatelly people try to address their frustration by going over those limitations.

Yeah, true enough. Funny thing about human reason, the ability to come up with fantastic stuff on the one hand, then turn right around and confuse itself on the other. Nature of the beast. Can only be guarded against, but never eliminated.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

All three of which are antecedent to knowledge, or, which is the same thing, knowledge presupposes all three of those strictly human a priori capacities.
— Mww
-Obviously the dude who stated that has never studied other animals.

Why would anyone study other animals when investigating strictly human conditions? Who gives a shit that dolphins appear to surf, when such appearance is a mere anthropomorphism anyway? Crows use tools? Big deal. No crow ever got himself to the moon.

Apple, meet orange.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

are you aware of a Non real world where we can not exercise them????

Yep. So are you. And not so much can not, but simply don’t. But we probably have differing ideas regarding what it means to be real.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

I don't know why this is so difficult for you...you literally described the process.

C’mon, man. If I literally described the process, how could it have been so difficult for me? But I didn’t describe anything; I just asked a question, which wasn’t answered.
————

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

you fail to practice when a concept isn't founded on knowledge.

Not sure what that means. Fail to practice? All that aside, a concept only arises in relation to what we don’t know, as a representation of it. You are confounding the inception of a particular from a general. It is equivalent to saying the conception of a thing arises because we know it isn’t that, and it isn’t that, and it isn’t that, ad infinitum, which is absurd.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

Our ability to reproduce a concept plays no role to its validity lol.

You laugh, but also think we have an ability that reproduces concepts. Why in the world would we need to reproduce a concept? Where did the original go? Produce, of course; reproduce.....nahhhh, I don’t think so. And the production IS the validity, otherwise there is no logical relation upon which a judgement could ensue. And don’t mistake validity for truth, for only experience can prove the truth of a judgement, and even that only contingently. It’s how we know we got something wrong if experience shows a false judgement. You know....like....lightning, a perfectly valid conception that still remains, doesn’t really come from angry gods despite the judgement of the time that it did.

A central metaphysical idea, intuition, sufficient to explain why no one has to reproduce concepts.

We could do this all day, but I got post-winter lawn duty. Not high on my list of pleasures, but duty nonetheless.

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

I don't think so. I'm with Witt & Gadamer on this. We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way. Metaphors, pictures, myths. Is there a system without some unjustified master concept, some kind of grand narrative that's true for no reason? Look for an image of their hero, their ego ideal, their proposed what-we-should-all-be. I've never met/read anyone, including myself, without holes in their story, things they take for granted without noticing it, a roleplay of some version of the hero.

Why are they in our way? How do we know they are i.our way except when we are ready to replace them? Aren’t these prejudices what Nietzsche called value systems? Heidegger says “ The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.”
Shouldn’t we hold onto the framework until it begins to fail us? It’s not as if there will be no warning signs. Thats what our emotions are for. Our anger, anxiety and confusion express in vivid colors our ability to function effectively within a crumbling frame of intelligibility.

Unless of course you believe we are just ‘conditioned’ to interpret events via a certain framing narrative. In that case our most deeply held beliefs would be arbitrary, unjustified, true for no reason. But don’t truth and justification follow upon pragmatic usefulness? Isn’t there a kind of reasonableness within pragmatic relevance, or is relevance itself the mere product of arbitrary conditioning?

Reply to jas0n Quoting jas0n

I utterly reject epistemology for strictly logical and philosophical reasons which I am not prepared to divulge at this time.

ok you admit you are a pseudo philosopher...that's good to know.

Quoting jas0n

We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way. Metaphors, pictures, myths. Is there a system without some unjustified master concept, some kind of grand narrative that's true for no reason? Look for an image of their hero, their ego ideal, their proposed what-we-should-all-be. I've never met/read anyone, including myself, without holes in their story, things they take for granted without noticing it, a roleplay of some version of the hero.

It strikes me that there's a point when the inclination to discount any assertion or argument because we can't really know anything since we're permeated with prejudices and "culture" should serve to end discussion as well as judgment. Why bother?

Quoting Mww

Why would anyone study other animals when investigating strictly human conditions? Who gives a shit that dolphins appear to surf, when such appearance is a mere anthropomorphism anyway? Crows use tools? Big deal. No crow ever got himself to the moon.

-because..they are not strictly human"conditions". Knowledge, wisdom and reason are mental abilities shared by other animals...in a lesser degree of course. Animals do gain knowledge from previous experiences and through basic reasoning they can take wise decisions thus inform their actions accordingly!
Why would anyone study other animals?....someone who is interested in Mental properties and how they evolved...like a scientist?

Quoting Mww

Big deal. No crow ever got himself to the moon.

-This is the demarcation point about knowledge, wisdom and reason? Of course you are kidding right?
Crows can survive without destroying their ecosystem...how wise and knowledgeable is that? They can survive without air conditioning, or a can opener or 3 meals a day and supermarkets. Modern spoiled "intelligent" humans fall in depression and die by depriving superficial things !
So we should first set the standards and metrics for this one....

Quoting Mww

are you aware of a Non real world where we can not exercise them???? — Nickolasgaspar
Yep. So are you. And not so much can not, but simply don’t. But we probably have differing ideas regarding what it means to be real.

-Unfortunately for you, your ideas on "real" can not be objectively demonstrated to be true.
Believing in a non real world is not enough and it is indistinguishable from a non existent reality.
So I will need to plead the Null Hypothesis and take the given value for your reality (which is zero) and NOT assume statistical significance....until you provide data that can prove it!

This is the point where you depart from reason.

Quoting Mww

C’mon, man. If I literally described the process, how could it have been so difficult for me? But I didn’t describe anything; I just asked a question, which wasn’t answered.

- You literary described the philosophical process and how it includes knowledge ...i quote:
-"Speculative metaphysics starts with things known, and uses that to arrive at logical arguments for that which is sufficiently explanatory in keeping with internal consistency and non-contradiction."
So why are you willing to make room for special pleading on specific assumptions?

Quoting Mww

All that aside, a concept only arises in relation to what we don’t know, as a representation of it.

-fractally wrong statement. Concepts are all based on what we know mixed with some magic, this is why we have anthropomorphic gods, Nature as a thinking agent...souls that resemble our conscious abilities etc etc.

Quoting Mww

You are confounding the inception of a particular from a general.

irrelevant statements. I am pointing out that concepts are nothing more than a phenomenon plus a magical claim for its ontology. Phlogiston, miasma,orgone energy , gods are some of the examples.


Quoting Mww

It is equivalent to saying the conception of a thing arising because we know it isn’t that, and it isn’t that, and it isn’t that, ad infinitum, which is absurd

- I have answered your false assumption.
We tend to make up magical agents with exactly the same properties that are displayed by the phenomenon we are try to explain...or we project our properties to invisible agent in order to explain phenomena in nature...those are our basic practices.

Quoting Mww

You laugh, but also think we have an ability that reproduces concepts.

Why in the world would we need to reproduce a concept?

-Its a survival advantage to be able to communicate concepts. i.e."its dangerous outside". the concept of dangerous communicates essential information. Those who were able to communicate and comprehend and reproduce concepts improve the chances of survival of their population.


Quoting Mww

Where did the original go?

lol dude...you are confusing the map with the territory. Concepts are mostly abstract ideas that include real properties. take god for example. We have the ability to thing of an absolute being who is the best version of us...bla bla bla.
There is no need for an original. Do you really think that the concept of a circle originates from an absolute circle ancient people saw in their environment? of course not.
Abstract thinking and conceptualization is our A game....and our curse. This is the sole reason why I have to talk to people with ideas like yours. (and our bad heuristics).

Quoting Mww

And the production IS the validity, otherwise there is no logical relation upon which a judgement could ensue. And don’t mistake validity for truth, for only experience can prove a conception valid. It’s how we know we got something wrong if experience shows a conception invalid. You know....like....lightning doesn’t really come from angry gods even though it was a perfectly valid conception that it did.

Quoting Mww

A central metaphysical idea, intuition, sufficient to explain why no one has to reproduce concepts.
We could do this all day, but I got post-winter lawn duty. Not high on my list of pleasures, but duty nonetheless.

assumptions assumptions assumptions and bad language mode.
Can you really provide evidence for those claims...can you prove our ability to produce concepts validates the existence of "originals".
You are posting metaphysical beliefs that aren't based on knowledge. Nothing of the above is relevant to a true philosophical discussion.

Quoting Ciceronianus

the inclination to discount any assertion or argument because we can't really know anything since we're permeated with prejudices and "culture" should serve to end discussion as well as judgment. Why bother?

Ye shall know them by their windmills?

Quoting jas0n

We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way.

/////////////////////////////////////
To a considerable extent customs, or widespread uniformities of habit, exist because individuals face the same situation and react in like fashion. But to a larger extent customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. An individual usually acquires the morality as he inherits the speech of his social group.

The activities of the group are already there, and some assimilation of his own acts to their pattern is a prerequisite of a share therein, and hence of having any part in what is going on.
...
These associations are definite modes of interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form customs, institutions. There is no problem in all history so artificial as that of how "individuals " manage to form "society."
...
All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self.... They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity.
...
Ideas, thoughts of ends, are not spontaneously generated. There is no immaculate conception of meanings or purposes. Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction.
...
For thinking cannot itself escape the influence of habit, any more than anything else human.
...
The medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our perception and thought.
...
The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under special conditions, these express a way of behaving.
...
Every moment of reaction and protest, however, usually accepts some of the basic ideas of the position against which it rebels.
...
Habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency...They restrict its reach, they fix its boundaries. They are blinders that confine the eyes of mind to the road ahead....Outside the scope of habits, thought works gropingly, fumbling in confused uncertainty; and yet habit made complete in routine shuts in thought so effectually that it is no longer needed or possible.
...
The most skillful aptitude bumps at times into the unexpected, and so gets into trouble from which only observation and invention extricate it. Efficiency in following a beaten path has then to be converted into breaking a new road through strange lands.
...
Habit is however more than a restriction of thought. Habits become negative limits because they are first positive agencies. The more numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and foretelling.
...
For it is a commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconsciously it operates.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41386/41386-h/41386-h.htm#Pg014

Quoting Joshs

Shouldn’t we hold onto the framework until it begins to fail us?

Who ever suggested otherwise? But that's that viewing it too simply. We can think of a network of beliefs/habits with some more being more crucial (risky/difficult to modify) than others. We can think of exploratory tentacles. We can apply this to a personality or to a culture. A philosopher would be one who experiments with updates of various frameworks (of the how everything hangs together variety.)

The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

This seems like a good description of so much of life. We are immersed in what we are doing, our conventional identity (the idea of ourself as a named ghost responsible for driving the body) is just gone. And yet others will see us walk our usual distinctive walk, react in our idiosyncratic ways, so that the 'self' is something like the unconscious bodily style of this immersion.

Another helpful quote on the strange relationship of ego and language:
////////////////////////////////////////////
With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—"To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"...

...where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions—it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm#link2HCH0001

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

assumptions assumptions assumptions

Yep. So?

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

can you prove our ability to produce concepts validates the existence of "originals".

Yep. Logically.

Quoting Nickolasgaspar

You are posting metaphysical beliefs that aren't based on knowledge.

Yep. Your brand of knowledge anyway.

No apologies.

Reply to Mww Quoting Mww

Yep. Logically.

-"dude take care of that back...all this dodging might cause some issues..."
-I don't care about what on can do through logic. This is not how we verify existence. There is a good reason why Peter Higgs didn't receive the Nobel prize ~60 years ago but we waited the Objective verification of his mathematical syllogisms by Cern.....to do it.

Quoting Mww

Yep. Your brand of knowledge anyway.
No apologies.

-There is only one brand of knowledge.(A claim that is in total agreement with current available facts with instrumental value).

Quoting Joshs

How do we know they are in our way except when we are ready to replace them?

Glad you mentioned that. I love Gadamer on this.

Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood.
..
...all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue...
..
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.

This suggests that 'self'-knowledge is a necessary byproduct of interpreting the other.

The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
...
Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon in our existence.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre

Reply to Nickolasgaspar

Awww, shucks Mr. Bill. Y’all just too damn smart for me. I bow to your superior intellect, and hereby remove myself from further embarrassment.

Reply to Mww
Quoting Nickolasgaspar

can you prove our ability to produce concepts validates the existence of "originals".

well if your argument is that through logic you can prove the existence of "originals" in the world..then it doesn't take special mental skills or hard work for someone to be intellectually superior to you.

Existence has empirical qualities....you need to demonstrate them.
logic alone doesn't meet the standards. This is why we struggle with discredited substances and religious entities and spiritual forces...because others had the same idea with you....

Reply to Mww assuming what you need to prove is not reasonable and it isn't what philosophy is about. "NOT even Wrong" arguments are not enough to demonstrate the existence of made up entity. Logic can only take you up to validity. For soundness you will need evidence.

Reply to jas0n

I don't think Dewey ever maintained that habits, or customs, or culture or what have you (name your preferred source of prejudice) prevent us from making reasonable judgments, or preclude us from using what he called "inquiry" (which includes logic and the scientific method) to come to warranted conclusions. Quite the contrary, in fact.

I had the impression from your replies, which seem to me to be vague and perhaps even evasive, that you'd rather not commit yourself to any conclusion or make any judgment on what is the (admittedly unimportant, relatively speaking) matter at hand. That's fine. But I agree with Dewey that as significant as what he called "habits" may be, we have the capacity to judge and come to conclusions based on available evidence and consequences, which are not absolute and are subject to modification based on subsequent evidence and experience.

So I confess I'm less than fond of attitudes along the lines of "Any judgment or claim we make is tainted, so maybe this or that other judgment or claim is just as good if not better" and the ambivalence which results from them.

Quoting Ciceronianus

It strikes me that there's a point when the inclination to discount any assertion or argument because we can't really know anything since we're permeated with prejudices and "culture" should serve to end discussion as well as judgment. Why bother?

In its proper application, the analytical mind exhausts itself.

Quoting Tom Storm

I think you missed it.

No, you didn't answer my questions. You made a deprecating remark about some people (apparently aiming it at me), then stated the obvious, and asked a loaded question. But you didn't answer my questions.

Here, again:
Quoting baker

Why should the average person "take on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection"?
Why should the less educated folk "enlarge their perspectives"?

Can you actually spell it out?

Step out of your comfort zone (or off your high horse, as the case might be), and really spell this out.

Reply to baker If you can't work it out from what I wrote I'm not going to spend more time on it. And I think @Wayfarer may be right, your sarcasm and jibes are not helpful.

Quoting baker

In its proper application, the analytical mind exhausts itself.

I, for one, don't accept that analysis (reasoning) is inherently suspect, regardless of method or the results of its application, merely because it's engaged in by human beings. The analytical mind, properly applied, would make no such assumption.

Reply to Tom Storm *sigh*
It wasn't sarcasm, it wasn't a jibe, it was an honest question. Which you evaded, as if this were a watercooler conversation.
I want you to make an effort.

Reply to Ciceronianus The idea is that thinking about things properly makes an end to aimless, useless thinking.

Quoting baker

It wasn't sarcasm, it wasn't a jibe, it was an honest question.

I'd say honest questions don't read like this -

Quoting baker

Seriously, can you answer that?

And is it even possible to answer that without sounding like yet another patronizing bourgeois?

Quoting baker

You made a deprecating remark about some people (apparently aiming it at me), then stated the obvious, and asked a loaded question.

Seem like jibes...

You keep raising this:

Quoting baker

Why should the average person "take on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection"?
Why should the less educated folk "enlarge their perspectives"?

As I keep saying, this was answered and they were specific questions for @Joshs who, as an academic philosopher with a psychology background, often writes responses based on close readings of complex texts and theory.

Essentially I was asking for his views on how people outside of the academic world, who have an interest in personal growth could approach the sorts of ideas he was referencing. As you may be aware, Josh's has a commitment to people learning and enlarging their perspectives. (sorry Joshs if the language isn't quite right) This may well be the project of philosophy summarized. Perhaps you didn't see the answer because you are rewriting what I said as some kind of elitist nonsense. But the fact remains, people are interested in complex ideas but can't always understand or gain access to them. That's the background I come from, so it's personal.

Quoting Tom Storm

....people learning and enlarging their perspectives...may well be the project of philosophy summarized...

:up:

Quoting Tom Storm

Perhaps you didn't see the answer

But you didn't answer it.

[i]Why should the average person "take on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection"?
Why should the less educated folk "enlarge their perspectives"?[/i]

Will they be happier then?
Will they suffer less?
Will they completely stop suffering?
Will they be more caring then?
Will the world become a better place?
Will they be safer?
Will crime and wars stop?
Will they stop destroying the planet?
...?

If people want or should do something, then they must have a reason for doing so. I'm asking about this reason (or reasons). Merely being "interested" is trivial and doesn't inspire consistent and energetic action.

But the fact remains, people are interested in complex ideas but can't always understand or gain access to them.

Of course.

Quoting baker

Why should the average person "take on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection"?
Why should the less educated folk "enlarge their perspectives"?

Will they be happier then?
Will they suffer less?
Will they completely stop suffering?
Will they be more caring then?
Will the world become a better place?
Will they be safer?
Will crime and wars stop?

How would I know? I can't speak for others, but maybe you're on track with some of these, hey? Whys, as any child soon learns ends up in an infinite regression of answers followed by more whys.

Why should anyone seek to enlarge their perspective? Why not start a thread on this?

Personally for me, it's to be wiser, which I suspect will lead to better interactions with the world and others and in me being a better person. But why does that matter, Baker? It's whys all the way down.

Quoting Ciceronianus

...we have the capacity to judge and come to conclusions based on available evidence and consequences, which are not absolute and are subject to modification based on subsequent evidence and experience...

I just thought this was too obvious to be worth mentioning. Perhaps the fault is mine. Let me try again, summarizing some exploratory hypotheses.

(1) The 'foundation' of fancy metaphysics is 'pre-theoretical' worldly know-how, including ordinary language.

(2) Comprehensive metaphysical visions, which a cynic or commie might call intellectual luxuries, tend to 'break down' as they are elaborated/specified. (Consider the attempts to reduce the lifeworld to mind or matter. )

(3) Something like Freud's 'ego ideal' structures a personality, and one approach to this ego-ideal is through the shadow it casts, that which it defines itself against, its giant-or-windmill. For instance, a crude scientism can't help being haunted by the ghost of theology, while scientism is itself the shadow cast by an identification with lost spiritual wisdom. Your anti-skeptical position (if I read you correctly) may have inspired you to read too much skepticism into my posts above. I was just saying that inquiry is endless and historical, that it has a personal/mythic aspect, and that totalizing visions tend to have problems, whether or not their proponents will acknowledge these problems. Yet totalization (comprehensiveness and coherence) is what we strive toward.

Is the hard problem of 'consciousness' a confusion? Or an attempt to point at something elusive? 'Why is there something? Why is there anything?' Is this a search for answers ? Or something else, something that dimly grasps that it's not really a question ?

What is this thrust against the limits of language? Even granting that it's 'useless,' is it therefore meaningless? Does 'pure witness' aim at the thereness of the situation? For some it's stupid and empty. For others (Wittgenstein perhaps at one time) it's profound, important.


[quote=Witt]

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

... what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.

I am my world.
[/quote]
http://people.loyno.edu/~folse/WittCant.html#(4)%20the%20special%20mystical%20feeling%20%60that%20the%20world

But we share this world with others. We can leave marks on some shared space. Christopher McCandless could write down happiness is only real when shared before he died, and this message waited in some kind of 'physical' stuff unwitnessed before eventually reappearing in the 'microcosm' of its discover. Many are willing to put color on the side of the subject (as not 'really' there in the world), but where do we draw the line? Notions of elementary particles might also be thought of in terms of mediation added by the subject. The situation reminds me of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip

Quoting baker

The idea is that thinking about things properly makes an end to aimless, useless thinking.

Agreed.

Quoting jas0n

...we have the capacity to judge and come to conclusions based on available evidence and consequences, which are not absolute and are subject to modification based on subsequent evidence and experience...
— Ciceronianus

I just thought this was too obvious to be worth mentioning.

It should be obvious, but I doubt it is. So, I think it should be emphasized, lest we fall into the Never-Never Land of relativism or mere speculation and obfuscation.

Quoting Tom Storm

How would I know?

I assume that people are goal-driven, purpose-driven beings, and that therefore, they know why they do things, esp. when those things require concerted effort and resources. The way "taking on greater philosophical nuances and self-reflection" and "enlarging one's perspectives" require concerted effort and resources.
I assume, you, too, are goal-driven, purpose-driven as well.

Whys, as any child soon learns ends up in an infinite regression of answers followed by more whys.
/.../
It's whys all the way down.

Only for a child. The wise person knows how to think properly, thinks properly, and thus makes an end to aimless, useless thinking.

Quoting baker

I assume that people are goal-driven, purpose-driven beings, and that therefore, they know why they do things, esp. when those things require concerted effort and resources

I don't assume that. I see people make what they might call goals but these aims or 'ornaments' are often deflections and distractions from more significant needs - to be liked, to be in control... whatever.

Quoting baker

Only for a child. The wise person knows how to think properly, thinks properly, and thus makes an end to aimless, useless thinking.

Nice. How do you define think properly?