Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
abstract
Conditions for the possibility of critical discussion cannot be rationally challenged without performative contradiction. Such conditions are therefore not only a sturdy foundation for further inquiry but ontologically axiomatic. Such conditions include a shared world one can be wrong about in a shared language. Another such condition is the participants willingly binding themselves to the coherence and justification of their claims, which is to say to being philosophers and not just daydreamers or mystics.
explication
I take ontology in in this context to be “critical” or “scientific” in its intention, as opposed to relatively irresponsible myth-making. Granted that we put on the heroic robes of the “scientific” (critical) philosopher, as opposed to the mystic who denigrates dialectic as a means to truth, what have we already assumed in so doing ? How do these assumptions affect the project of ontology ? As its enabling conditions, they must be included.
Any other ontological thesis depends on the conditions for the possibility of ontology, so the ontologist is justified in putting ontology itself at the center of reality –-- and not on the outside peeping in. The same kind of realization is intended in “theology itself is ‘God.’” My position might be called 'neorationalism.' I suggest that our normative conceptuality is irreducible. A critique of psychologism is implied here, which might be developed in the thread.
influences
...a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
questions
My hope is to fire up some conversational research. Does this OP make sense ??Do you see errors in my reasoning ? Can you share similar/adjacent foundationalist moves ?? Can you offer a skepticism that escapes this foundationalism ? To keep the OP shortish, I left out some ontological implications. Do any come to mind for you ? Is Descartes “fixed” by making the embodied-enworlded-'enlanguaged' rational community the thing that can’t doubt itself?
Conditions for the possibility of critical discussion cannot be rationally challenged without performative contradiction. Such conditions are therefore not only a sturdy foundation for further inquiry but ontologically axiomatic. Such conditions include a shared world one can be wrong about in a shared language. Another such condition is the participants willingly binding themselves to the coherence and justification of their claims, which is to say to being philosophers and not just daydreamers or mystics.
explication
I take ontology in in this context to be “critical” or “scientific” in its intention, as opposed to relatively irresponsible myth-making. Granted that we put on the heroic robes of the “scientific” (critical) philosopher, as opposed to the mystic who denigrates dialectic as a means to truth, what have we already assumed in so doing ? How do these assumptions affect the project of ontology ? As its enabling conditions, they must be included.
Any other ontological thesis depends on the conditions for the possibility of ontology, so the ontologist is justified in putting ontology itself at the center of reality –-- and not on the outside peeping in. The same kind of realization is intended in “theology itself is ‘God.’” My position might be called 'neorationalism.' I suggest that our normative conceptuality is irreducible. A critique of psychologism is implied here, which might be developed in the thread.
influences
...a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
questions
My hope is to fire up some conversational research. Does this OP make sense ??Do you see errors in my reasoning ? Can you share similar/adjacent foundationalist moves ?? Can you offer a skepticism that escapes this foundationalism ? To keep the OP shortish, I left out some ontological implications. Do any come to mind for you ? Is Descartes “fixed” by making the embodied-enworlded-'enlanguaged' rational community the thing that can’t doubt itself?
Comments (177)
I think this assumes there's only one rationality. If there are two, though, then you could rationally challenge the possibility of critical discussion on the basis of the rationality chosen without contradiction.
The OP makes sense to me though. Ontology is one of those disciplines that I generally view with skepticism, but from the perspective that our knowledge doesn't touch what the ontologist cares about. If the ontologist is more circumspect in not claiming knowledge, though, then that's where I think ontology begins to be interesting. However, in so doing I think the whole foundational approach is not only made harder, but also it loses its attraction: if knowledge is not necessarily clear and certain, but rather depends upon the kind of knowledge we're dealing with to understand it in its depths (math is clear and certain, but knowing-how to play jazz piano is not as clear), then there is no reason to suppose a general foundation is there -- rather we're just able to do some things that happen to be different from one another, and "knowledge" is the word we use to designate that a person is able (but it depends upon what they're able to do to be able to say anything about the knowledge).
That's my first stab! Basically I think I'd reject foundations, and also I'd loosen the love of certainty (but then the question is how do you maintain discipline such that we are not just daydreamers and mystics?)
Fascinating point, which touches on whether Enlightenment rationalism is truly universal or ethnocentric hubris.
Possible objection, your honor. From what perspective can someone claim there are two rationalities ? Only (I think) from a higher and truer 'actual' synthesizing rationality.
Can a unified subject believe in two, truly opposed 'rationalities' ? In opposed inferential norms ?
In any case, you've opened a juicy can of worms right out of the gate !
I may be an eccentric in my use of 'ontology,' but I'm hopefully within the limits of decency. I'm focused on ontology as the study of the basic structure of being (biggest picture stuff). I think it's finally the place where we don't cut corners (holism, useful reductive fictions finally pay up.) We can sweep all kinds of things aside in 'proper' sciences, but in ontology we face those gnarly issues of how or whether the subject exists or is entangled with the object. We figure out whether indirect realism is confused baloney or the one sure starting point. Then there's lots of beautiful Heidegger stuff that is tangential here.
As I see it, epistemologies usually depend on ontological assumptions. My own foundational offering is skeptical about skepticism. I'm interested personally in the 'presumption' of the Kantian project, but I'm doing a Kantian project myself about such projects. It seems to me that many humble-sounding 'skeptical' positions ( psychologism , pragmatism, relativism ) are actually bold ontological claims about the subject. They are 'credulously incredulous.' In other words, philosophy marries its gravediggers, because its gravediggers are confused philosophers in denial about their ontological ambitions.
My foundationalism is therefore weirdly skeptical about skeptics who show up and try to pretend they are inside and outside of the game at the same time. Deeper than whatever we may call it is the normative game of giving and demanding reasons. It seems that I'm either appealing to authority of rational norms (perhaps to problematically attack those same norms), or I'm an outright joker or sophist (who need not be taken seriously, which don't mean they can't be fun.)
What I get from Karl-Otto Apel is that we mostly need to disallow performative contradiction. But there's got to be some categorical imperative in there somewhere too perhaps.
:up:
I take that as a worthy ontological insight. Different regions of entities play by different rules.
I think the member of one community would have to regard the member of another community with a sufficiently different logic as insane. @Banno could maybe add something about our inability to recognize a radically other conceptual scheme.
Couldn't you do so from an emotive base?
Rationality is motivated in its actual use, after all.
It would have to be a "rational" emotion to count as a rational attack. But that's not too hard. I'd go to aesthetics for a place to think through emotions on the rational level, and there are certainly aesthetic values that can come into conflict with respect to an individual inference.
But then we might say that the aesthetics are not the truly rational rationality :D
But for that I'd just point out the differences between Descartes and Kant -- I'd side more Kant when it comes to the questions of ontology or metaphysics: knowledge requires a justification, and there are no justifications when it comes to ontology. Ontology presupposes its own justifications from the outset.
But I also don't put knowledge as the most important thing in philosophy, so that's why I'm open to ontology at another level. In a way ontology is more proper for philosophy than epistemology -- it's just harder to do well.
Hrmm I'm not sure about truly opposed rationalities, though that'd be an interesting case if so. I was thinking more orthogonal rationalities -- like one just doesn't really talk about the same things as the other. Then there's a choice with respect to which rationality one ought to appeal to with respect to the circumstances.
Take Gould's notion of non-overlapping magesteria -- you still have to judge what belongs to each magesteria even though there are different rules for the different kinds of things.
Quoting plaque flag
Only if they were a rationalist ;).
But, no, I'm not reaching for full on incommensurability or conceptual schemes here. It's always a thing in the background of my thoughts, but I pretty much take Davidson's argument on conceptual schemes, which @Banno introduced me to, as basically correct. Or at least in my attacks on it I've never been able to really get around the basic argument around conceptual schemes -- historical schemes, practical schemes, or just difference in general not-conceptual, but I find the argument solid and not easy to step aside.
So the question then becomes, in the case of two rationalities, if its not a conceptual scheme, what is it?
I'm tempted to become a parody of myself and just say "It's the ethical!" :D But I actually don't think rationality is an ethical matter. I think of it as instrumental to whatever it is the human heart wants. And sometimes it doesn't want the rational, and sometimes it wants the rational to be different. It's in this creation of the rational order for different purposes that we can come to have different rationalities, though I agree I'd be surprised if a single subject held two rationalities which are contradictory (unless, of course, they are exploring dialethism -- then, perhaps, there'd be a way to hold two contradictory rationalities at once -- but within a rational frame)
Quoting plaque flag
I think I'd say that your expression is that embodiment, worldhood, and language are equiprimordial, to use some Heidegger.
That sits well with me. It's the foundationalism that I'm questioning more than the ontology. I'd say we can just begin with this and go from there, but that there are any number of places a philosopher could begin from, and then that would serve as what appears to be a foundation to that philosopher. But I'd call it a jumping off point, or a point of return to home.
The 'special' rationality of the heroic philosopher is, in my view, exactly and particularly and essentially ethical. As philosopher (or scientist, basically the same ethic), 'I' hold myself to certain standards. I put on a costume and adopt an ethic.
Though there's also the usual instrumental rationality.
Above you might be (seem to be) collapsing the two. Now to me that'd be psychologism, which says that all rationality is really rationalization --- we are really just objects in the causal nexus, emitting adaptive concepts, with illusion of free will or responsibility, not to be trusted. But that would be (however tempting) the self-subverting false-skepticism that makes a profound ontological claim about the subject in order to disallow the authority of profound ontological claims.
Though your mention of heroism is a point of difference between us. I've come to a place in my life where I don't want the heroes journey. I'm just me doing my things trying to be happy. At this point part of me is being honest, and I like rationality -- but notice how different that is from heroism. Heroes face adversity. I just like these things.
It's a softer version of existentialism.
I think that'd basically be some version of mysticism. I love 'since feeling is first' from e.e. cummings, , for instance, but I couldn't justify it, I don't think, by appealing to my feelings. Now I don't have to justify unless I can't resist trying to be ontological. Think of 'transrational' mystics who (because of their consistency) never bother with philosophical debate. They 'win' the game by not playing.
To me, knowledge requires a justification is very much an ontological claim -- proposed as knowledge. (I'm not trying to be difficult, I swear.) Kant is precisely the kind of disavowed ontologist that I'm interested in. If he was quietly skeptical, no problem, but he did a weird super-metaphysics that looks very humble while making intense absolute ontological claims. Fascinating personality.
Yes, Heidegger is a huge influence, but it's fun to reach for synonyms, pull in Apel (who loves Peirce). I think Habermas is about this kind of thing too.
Quoting Moliere
Well the foundation I'm aiming at is the minimal foundation that is already implied in the role of the philosopher. I'm making a transcendent argument as described here (it'll help me to quote.)
As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/
So Y is 'I'm a philosopher,' and X is the stuff that makes Y intelligible -- basically what Apel said, but it's world, language, justification norms. Crucially, the details are left minimally specified. Because the foundation should be absolutely the least constraint that will work. Ontologists will fight over the details within that undeniable framework. [So I'm being Kantian in a way. ]
I hear you, but I like to think of the hero concept as very flexible. Yang heroes, yin heros. Even anti-heros. What I have in mind is any relatively stable ideal toward which the self tends.
And let me reiterate that I don't think people are existentially constrained by my proposed foundation. I'm just postulated that a certain role, optionally adopted, has certain implications.
If X is a 'scientific' / 'rational' ontologist (metaphysician, philosopher), then X cannot deny [ stuff ].
Yes, exactly ! But I'm assuming they are. And such rationalists are a weird little minority. I play one on TV myself, but I take off the costume now and then and play Uno instead.
Heh. You're speaking my honey, then. I love the transcendental argument. I'm pretty familiar with it.
I've come to criticize it though. I agree it is valid. It's definitely powerful. And in the frame of Kant's philosophy I think it's tempered through the deduction of the categories: you can make the argument, but it must be made to the court of reason, and the court will then decide accordingly. So make it a good argument! Or fail.
But it's so easy to use the form outside of an entire philosophy -- what I believe is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y -- Y=our conversation, therefore what I believe is the case.
Is what wales and dolphins do, with all that clicking and so on, a conceptual scheme?
My thinking to. Hence one logic.
Granted that transcendent arguments are tricky, what in mine works or does not in your views ?
You don't think that a robot will be able to play jazz one day?
There is no ideal rational community which binds our rational discussions, though. I think we can imagine an ideal community and aspire to such a community, but that we're not speaking to it as much as we're speaking with our fellows, all of whom are not ideal -- including myself. Rather we collaborate on what works for our group of seekers. Surely there's the demand to step outside of myself and not just spout my own opinion -- that wouldn't be very interesting after all, since we all have those. And in that demand we get the structure of rationality: but it changes from group to group. There are some generalities that seem the same, but the practices diverge.
Or, at least, this is what my first thought is -- pretty standard. Usually I'm overwhelmed by multiplicity, and find it difficult to generalize at the level of the transcendental. Further I think transcendental arguments, after they are accepted, become self-fulfilling in a way. Now that we know that rationality is such-and-such we can exclude this or that -- but the world changes, and with it so do our practices, and we need that flexibility. But with flexibility comes doubt of transcendental structures.
Or, at least, this is where my thoughts go.
I agree with you that all actual communities are not ideal. No actual circle is the perfect circle. But the ideal itself seems to me to exist, even if it's blurry. You might say this thread is primarily an attempt to get a better look at this ideal which was always there in the background as the condition of its possibility. We are all imperfectly living toward or into some always imperfect grasp of a horizonal ideal which is largely about autonomy. To me anyway the respect of others in their difference is part of that. I have to give reasons for my claims. I don't brutishly impose them. But I do not let myself be brutishly imposed upon.
So ethics is first philosophy here. You might say I'm sketching the end of history here in some quasi-Hegelian sense. Am I as a flesh-and-blood person optimistic ? Actually quite the reverse. Moloch demands a tower ! The world is a runaway machine, and the exponential primate cannot control itself. I might be lost without my coalblack gallowshumor.
I see us as having minor differences here. But in the spirit of the forum I thought I'd offer some criticism rather than just nodding along.
You don't think that a robot will be able to play jazz one day?
Quoting Moliere
So you concede your point?
Btw. I hope you don't mind, but I figured you might not understand (the concession) so I asked chatgpt for help...
Prompt: "They might be acknowledging that the example of robots playing jazz shows that complex tasks can be performed without necessarily having the kind of knowledge that humans possess."
sure but if they both can do it, then does he not concede his point that there is no foundation for knowledge? at this point he now has to start over to prove it
I'm saying that machine-knowledge is different from human-knowledge, where here we can use "knowledge" because both the machine and the human are demonstrating know-how in a very strict functionalist sense. We can functionally perform the same thing, but we don't do it the same way -- so there's not a common base between the common know-how, which suggests there's no foundation for knowledge (if we're being liberal enough with "knowledge" that we include machine-learning and such)
I think you are missing the central normative essence of rationality. You appeal to it without accounting for it.
I have some knowledge of neural networks, SGD, backprop. Cool stuff. But equating us with machines looks like psychologism, which is to say a self-subverting flavor of irrationalism.
Thinking of judgements as the outputs of algorithms is similar to thinking of all rationality as mere rationalization, so that this proposed equivalence itself is unjustified and unjustifiable.
Now this is definitely something which goes against my notions of rationality, given what I've said thus far. I tend to think of rationality as the tool, ala Hume.
Also it's fun and interesting and everything else that I've always loved about it.
But I've put down the rationalist charge. It's fine that we are not rational. There are some irrationalities that are harmful, and those are bad, but I don't know to what extent a rational ethic -- or theology? -- would really help people because at base I think we're pretty much irrational creatures.
However I think we can imperfectly live towards the horizon of autonomy. And that's certainly an ethical stance. And I'd even go so far as to say that rationality is a tool that can help in that project. I just don't know that I'd put autonomy as the rational -- in a way the rational is dependent upon the horizon you imperfectly live towards.
And if we're not a singular, simple subject, but a bundle (I'm still trying to think of a good way to express The Subject as multiplicity while retaining its coherency) we can even throw ourselves towards multiple horizons. Which is where I think we'd start to see conflicts in rationality, and when we'd have to start making choices between horizons when they come into conflict (if they come into conflict).
EDIT: Which, again, I'm kind of picking up the stuff that we can disagree upon because there's so much agreement that I expect this to be the more interesting avenue for exploration.
As a former pragmatist, I totally understand the charm of that view. But mere instrumental rationality, present surely in rabbits, misses the heart of Enlightenment humanism, which is autonomy. The reason claims have to be justified is because we are laws to ourselves. We are only [ ideally ] bound by authorities we recognize. Rationality in this higher sense is a framework of freedom and responsibility. Brandom even gets semantics from inferential norms ---and he seems to at least offer a chunk of the truth.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/
Despite our massive 'internal' complexity, I think we are singular as discursive subjects. At least in practical life we are. A philosophy forum might give each member two different avatars, expecting them to diverge. I do think Shakespeare, for instance, proves that we are internally multiple. [ I guess I should have started with my agreement, in retrospect. ]
Maybe it's just the word "rationality" that I'm taking umbrage to because it's frequently understood as something opposed to the passions, in the Enlightenment sense. I think we need to recognize how much we, as human beings, are not the Enlightenment's conception of Man as Rational Decider. Which doesn't mean, for me at least, that we should go back to the old ways. I think it's too late for that -- the future is all there is when it comes to decisions. But while we might at first want to be God, I think that our collective nature makes it such that becoming God isn't possible without also destroying that foundation of trust and connection with others. (the birth of class)
Also I don't think we can cast rationality aside. I'd say the sine qua non of philosophy is the appeal to the rational.
So, like I said, I think we agree on a lot. I'm just picking on the things we disagree on.
Again I think we're pretty close here. I think we're singular when we are healthy, but that we are often unhealthy. And that could only happen if we are not simple, ala Descartes' subject.
But I'm not sure how to put it. Shakespeare works wonderfully, but most wouldn't listen to theatrical sorts in a philosophical space -- that's just mere art and all that.
I can definitely agree that we are far more than merely conceptual beings.
Looking around the world today, I'd be tempted to say we are mostly crazy, but there is relatively robust tradition of relative individual freedom which I can't or at least shouldn't take for granted.
I agree with that
I've generally spoken in favor of the academy. I wouldn't have the understandings I do today without having gone. And I wouldn't be able to perceive the world as crazy unless I happened across these paths.
Perhaps we agree that such a rejection is not logically justified. The world is given to and through entire personalities. I'm aware of no evidence to the contrary. This makes personality a fundamental aspect of reality. But as you hint, it sounds too tenderminded and messy for some.
I depend on professors mostly for my translations of German philosophy, so the universities are not totally rotted out (I mostly joke, but I don't love stories of professors being hounded out of 'em for thinking.) But I had in mind the larger culture of a free society, to the degree that it's not rotted out by tribal fear and hatred.
There's something beautiful and difficult about being an individual --our strange mission in a freeish rational society. Do you know the song Nutshell by Alice in Chains ? Nice ambivalence.
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AzCj0b4MUU
lyrics:
https://genius.com/Alice-in-chains-nutshell-lyrics
Ah, sorry. (tempted to make a pun on "red" and "rot", since "red" is "rot" in German, and I'm a commie)
Quoting plaque flag
Yup! I heard it many times on the radio in my youth. Though I did not listen to the lyrics.
I agree that it's difficult to be an individual when your individuality goes against the current. And in a free society that ought not be the case. Which is, I think at least, the temptation of foundationalism -- if you're against everything, if you feel you know, if you want something other than what is then how else to pursue that than through a foundationalist philosophy? Or through something like a Marxist philosophy which reduces everything to some other conflict you're interested in?
I don't think you can. And I'd say that it's even a rational move to posit something otherwise, saying "this is rational!" -- after all I believe in more than one rationality, so I have no argument against inventing another one. In fact I believe we ought explore multiple rationalities, because we don't know what the future holds and so we do not know what thoughts will help us most as things change.
Overall our disagreement is very minor, I think though. I just noticed how no one else was picking at this good post, so threw in my 2 cents hoping to make it happen.
I've read this a couple of times and can make very little sense of what you're trying to say. You throw around some philosophical terms but that's about it. Why people think that have to talk like this is beyond me. When I write philosophically I try my best to keep it simple, I don't always succeed, but that's my goal.
Quoting plaque flag
What are you trying to say here? What does this statement even mean? It seems to be open to a variety of interpretations. I'm not going to list all of the problematic statements, but there are quite a few.
As for reasoning, I see very little clear reasoning.
Glad to have you aboard, @Sam26 -- criticism is the spark of life in these conversations.
Also given my warm responses I wanted to pipe up. Though feel free to correct me @plaque flag
Quoting plaque flag
Let's say "critical" means "rational" in the first sentence. If you challenge rationality on rational grounds then you have to find a way to not undercut yourself. Some skeptics have managed, or think they have managed, but the challenge here is to say that skeptics are using the resources of rationality without acknowledging it.
I think this states that ontology can only be pursued on a higher ground than myth. "higher ground" would be something like taking the Bible as literal truth versus taking the Origen of the Species as literal truth -- people do make a distinction there, in practice. Darwin is better than the Bible when we think about what's literally true.
I really don't mind be challenged in good faith, but you are saying at the same time (1) that you don't understand me and (2) that my reasoning is bad. Your entrance is hilariously boorish. I'm not exactly intimidated by your critique just yet.
:up:
So I'd call them (from this sketched position anyway) pseudo-skeptics who don't understand themselves. The 'true' skeptic doesn't show up or at least refrains from projecting claims about what others can know. Epistemological claims are implicitly ontological claims, typically about the 'universal' subject. One inspiration for my critique here is a quasi-Kantian pose that pretends to humility but makes a massive claim on what others can rationally hope to know.
I completely understand the temptation to psychologize foundationalism in general, and I tend to find something plausible in such moves. But the psychological sword is sharp on both sides, and the 'anarchist' is just as easily 'diagnosed.' Psychological claims have to be justified, right ?
FWIW, what interests me about this foundational project is its radical minimalism. I want nothing more than what's already implicit in the idea of autonomous-critical thought. What is the absolutely minimal constraint on 'scientific' ontology ? What conditions make it intelligible, coherent ? So that any rational challenge of it misunderstands itself ?
To me that's already in the framework. What we are doing right now is in that framework. It's cooperatively adversarial and the reverse, as if the community was somehow shrewd enough to run a different 'logic' in every individual on its existential-discursive stage.
Heh. Where do you think my inspiration comes from? This is a diagnosis of the anarchist! :D (which isn't the same thing as a rejection, from me at least) -- where "radical", as in "root" serves as a kind of foundationalism.
Quoting plaque flag
Fair. I like these questions. I think it's the last question is all I'm recalcitrant about, though for reasons already stated.
Quoting plaque flag
That I agree with. With Kant I know exactly what he meant by "metaphysics", but that's because he spent the time to spell it out. It took quite a few words to be able to rationally defend the belief that we cannot know such things, and many people even disagree with him on rational grounds after the fact in spite of all that effort.
But it's quasi-Kantian to pretend to humility while claiming everyone can only go this far. You have to write a book like the CPR to do that! :D Or at least spell out just what is meant by the limit and how it applies to not just yourself, but everyone.
What still attracts me to the Kantian limit on reason is Hegel's philosophy, which I think is a mess -- it's an interesting mess! But a mess. If we believe we can step outside of the limit of reason then you get the science of logic which is an utterly ridiculous book to me because it pretends to universality while clearly expressing European philosophical virtues. But there is a certain amount of gaminess to all this: like these imagined positions are attempting to undermine one another from the perspective of a minimal and necessary system but are just speaking past one another (after all, no Hegel, no Marx -- so there's value to Hegel's philosophy for me in spite of my protestations).
Which I think is what I like about the idea of a leaping off point, or a return to home, rather than a foundation. It acknowledges we have to start somewhere, that we all started somewhere, and for a coherent philosophy usually we'll return home to it (or find another home). And we have the aesthetic values of parsimony, elegance, and simplicity which can serve as a judgment of a home.
So I guess the perspective I'm coming from, to answer your original question, is the historical one. As a reader of philosophy we can compare and contrast philosophers. In so doing we see that different philosophers start from different places, some of which some of them call foundations. But the buildings they build, and the foundations they start from, are different from one another. It's this perspective which allows us to compare rationalities -- as a reader of philosophy.
Quoting plaque flag
Cool :).
Hegel is a beast. I think I've always had to settle for misreadings of him that make him more coherent by throwing some of him away. At the moment, I suggest interpreting him as intensifying Kant's project. We can interpret him as a direct realist who grasped the meaninglessness of talk about entities which are completely disconnected from other entities and the necessary centrality of the storytelling detective in the detective story and all this implies. 'Absolute knowledge' is (from this POV) just a collapse of indirect realism at a certain level of inquiry's self-explication. The key theme is us realizing what we are already doing. What we have and live in is 'just' our autonomous-rational-critical sensemaking in this world together. The 'other side' of this sensemaking (postulated untouchable-always-filtered Reality. ---with an Official (?) conceptual articulation) is a token within that adventurous self-unfolding sensemaking --- eventually seen as a kind of phlogiston. But this doesn't close off a return to 'alienated' mysticism and other flights from autonomy.
:up:
This touches on the marriage of art and science or the art that's already in science.
As the proverbial Irishman says on being asked for directions to - anywhere, really, "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here."
Critical discussion is all performative contradiction. Or to put it contrariwise, a philosopher is one who has become lost in language, and is trying to argue his way back to reality.
As much as I enjoy agreeing with you, I can only make sense of this by understanding 'philosopher' as 'failed philosopher.' And with you speaking as 'successful [anti-]philosopher.'
I reckon I'm a semantic structuralist, so to me it's not so much the magic word 'philosopher' as the role of the 'fundamental' truth teller. For instance, a philosopher is one who has become lost in language, and is trying to argue his way back to reality is very much a 'fundamental' claim.
How does it avoid being the same kind of lostness in language it points out ?
I suggest that such avoidance is partially achieved by presenting/grasping it ironically --as a kind of playful speech act that calls the theorist home for supper. The concept of bread is not as good with soup as actual bread. Conceptuality is merely one 'aspect' or 'dimension' of the world.
By being oracular, or poetic. Rationally, one cannot be lost in language or be anywhere else than in the real world. Therefore there is no problem in the first place of 'ontology'. It's all 'engine idling'.
Quoting plaque flag
That was my first response, self-censored; Dinner realism, I eat therefore I am, and try not to eat the menu.
Am I eating the menu here?
:up:
Sure, but I'd say metaphysics has always been oracular and poetic, as discussed in Derrida's White Mythology. As I put Popper putting it, science is a second order oracular tradition that critically synthesizes a better and better Tale.
Quoting unenlightened
On some 'existential level,' I probably agree with you. But this is very close to a pragmatism that just identifies with truth with coping.
You say that :
Quoting unenlightened
This seems to assume that Reality exists independently of what we think about it, but surely we largely live in a web of our own historically generated conceptuality. I'd say that we actually enrich this web with metacognition (talking about talking about talking) that potentially helps us overcome a sense of alienation --- getting back to Reality in the sense of escaping the fear that Reality is hidden from us.
I don't know, but I like the phrase. I think we can at least strongly agree that it ain't all concepts out there. Though we need concepts to say so.
What are you referring to when you talk about "rationality" and "logic"?
You said in another thread: Quoting plaque flag
So, I'll add, can you explain what "truly logical thinking" refers to?
Yes, I think that looks like a foundational truth, sorry about that. And that which only exists dependent on what we think, I shall call a dream, a myth, an idea, or an image.
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Yes. So we have to avoid both typical mistakes --- magical independent object and magical independent subject. The world is not our dream, for we are flesh in the world, or 'subjectivity' could have no sense in our talk. But we only know our world, strangely, through this same flesh.
Let me add that I know such ontological niceties aren't primarily what flesh needs. But I'm reluctant to join the pragmatists in their collapse of truth and science into worldly utility. So think ontology is (or can be) 'scientific' in its intention. Like some of Cantor's work maybe, coherent and beautiful and what's for again ?
I wouldn't go that far. I think the reason Hegel's philosophy is a mess is because it's hard to say what a misreading of him even is. I've read fascists, anti-colonial communists, and liberals who all claim Hegel as their philosophical base. So clearly there's something inspirational in there for people -- but where you can go with the ideas is a very wide range of possibilities.
There are gross misreadings, of course, but making him coherent is part of what makes the journey with Hegel's philosophy what it is. So I wouldn't call it a misreading as much as one of the readings Hegel can inspire. (which is why I think his philosophy is an interesting mess)
I feel like he's ignoring Kant's project in order to do his own thing :D -- but it's an interesting thing so I don't mind. A messy interesting thing, but an interesting thing.
Human autonomy is where they agree, but human reason is where they disagree. This is important for the thesis that there is more than one rationality.
One thing that I find favorable about Hegel is he at least does not settle for a transcendental argument. He makes up his own way of reasoning to counter the transcendental move, and it revolves around the idea that thinking and the world are in motion together which is exactly the sort of thing you'd have to argue to undermine faith in transcendental structures: if even Logic and its categories are not forever-and-always concepts that become baptized in space and time through the Transcendental Subject -- but instead are time-bound then the categories are also subject to change just as the world and its objects are, and then we have a response to "If X necessarily Y" which is "not necessarily Y, possibly Y is false at such and such time". There is nothing to explain about a priori synthetic knowledge because there is no a priori -- rather there is the dialectic which the phenomenologist is able to see and explicate through training in philosophy.
Basically they disagree on the operations of logic with respect to the real, which I'd claim is a divergence in rationalities -- you can pick one or the other, and even both, but our understanding of the rationalities isn't derived from a super-rationality as much as it's our critical engagement with texts that allows us to see difference through comparison.
Hey now. That doesn't sound like disagreement. At least I meant to make clear that the real Hegel's authorial intention is even a fiction perhaps (Derrida, Foucault,...). I think we both grant the massive suggestiveness of his work. Let me share a passage full of organ music.
[quote=Hegel]
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
Yet absolute subjectivity as such would elude art and be accessible to thinking alone if, in order to be actual subjectivity in correspondence with its essence, it did not also proceed into external existence ... the Absolute does not turn out to be the one jealous God who merely cancels nature and finite human existence without shaping himself there in appearance as actual divine subjectivity; on the contrary, the true Absolute reveals itself and thereby gains an aspect in virtue of which it can be apprehended and represented by art.
But the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.
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https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1
In my view, he's saying that we are fucking God.Or we are baby potential God waking up and remembering we are God, overcoming our dizzy alienation/projection as emphasized by Feuerbach. Crucially we are flesh, and in that sense more Jesus than God -- but Jesus is a humanist superman, and God is maybe the software riding our bones, our timebinding conceptuality independent of any particular host but never of all of them.
Brandom also interprets Hegel as grasping our escape from (loss of) nonhuman authority and trying to address how such autonomous creatures could generate their own norms which are nevertheless binding. Neurath's boat, I think : reason is a self-challenging self-editing authority.
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Braver features Hegel as just this kind of liquifier of Kant's transcendental subject. He then has Heidegger push it even farther, leaving out any kind of goal for history.
This can only be taken so far without performative contradiction. In fact, Braver's A Thing of This World largely inspired my contemplation of exactly how far such relativisms could be taken.
The matrix itself must be atemporal. The denial of an aprior knowledge/structure is given as an apriori knowledge/structure. The earnest 'skeptic' is always (tacitly at least) an ontologist describing the unchanging 'Matrix' of our experience. Or so I claim (well, I strongly suspect it....)
Normativity is what matters here.
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. no person bears more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation modified)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/
My big point is that putting on the scientist's lab coat or the philosopher's toga is embracing a responsibility. Unlike mystics pontificating or thugs throwing dissenters in cells, we work together to synthesize better beliefs in a tradition of criticism and fallibility that does not hold any belief sacred --- except for the 'belief' in this rationality itself.
One of Kant’s revolutionary, revolutionizing ideas is that what distinguishes judgements and intentional actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is that they are things knowers-and-agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority: the authority to make oneself responsible, to commit oneself. Responsibility, authority, commitment — these are all normative notions. Unlike Cartesian subjectivity, Kantian subjectivity is not distinguished from physical objectivity ontologically, but deontologically. The overarching distinction is not between minds and bodies, but between facts and norms. Discursivity is the capacity autonomously to bind ourselves by norms in the form of concepts, rules that determine what we have committed ourselves to by applying them in judgement and the endorsement of 0practical maxims.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Some_Hegelian_Ideas_of_Note_for_Contempo.pdf
It's not :). I don't think you have a misreading -- it's far more appropriate when talking about Hegel, from my perspective at least, to talk of readings, and only the ones which are way off are misreadings (things like "if you think about it Hegel is basically a Cartesian" or something very obviously wrong to anyone whose read the texts).
But notice how your reading of Hegel contrasts with my reading of Kant?
With Kant we cannot know anything about God. So we could not make the inference that we are baby-gods or anything of that sort. That claim could not be justified by a Kantian rationality, but it can be justified in a Hegelian rationality.
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This is another point of departure for Kant, if we take Brandom's interpretation as stated. Kant embraces human autonomy, but then argues that it's rational to continue believing in the old (compared to the drives of the Enlightenment) ways -- at least within the bounds of bare reason. But it's also a point of consonance because Kant is very interested in the possible grounds for autonomous moral agents to live in accord with norms of their own creation. It's a funny thing in Kant that Nietzsche exploits -- he lays the intellectual groundwork for a total rejection of traditional morality in the name of defending traditional morality from the acid of Scientific Reason :D.
And that's probably a big point of divergence between Kant and Hegel -- the place of reason for Kant is not a universal reason in Hegel's sense as much as it is divided into different powers of human judgment. It's universal in that it holds for all experience, but it's not universal in the sense that it holds for all reality. Which is sort of what I was saying before in saying we have an example of two rationalities from the history of philosophy -- Kant and Hegel disagreeing upon the proper place of logic with respect to inferences about the real. (OK I started with Descartes, but since we're talking Hegel now I'm using him)
Quoting plaque flag
The Matrix must be atemporal, but is there a matrix at all? I'd say that Hegel's philosophy is anti-Matrix. Another credit to Hegel is he's definitely a post-Cartesian. The rejoinder there is that his solution is worse than the original problem, but he's post-Cartesian.
But note I was still playing Hegel-interpreting-Kant there. There's a way in which Hegel's philosophy is entirely a priori, but it's very different from Kant's notion of synthetic a priori knowledge. Or, at least, so it seems to me.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1
Spiritual reconciliation is only to be apprehended and represented as an activity, a movement of the spirit, as a process in the course of which a struggle and a battle arises, and grief, death, the mournful sense of nullity, the torment of spirit and body enter as an essential feature. For just as God at first cuts himself off from finite reality, so finite man, who begins of himself outside the Kingdom of God, acquires the task of elevating himself to God, detaching himself from the finite, abolishing its nullity, and through this killing of his immediate reality becoming what God in his appearance as man has made objective as true reality. The infinite grief of this sacrifice of subjectivity’s very heart, as well as suffering and death, which were more or less excluded from the representations of classical art or rather appeared there as mere natural suffering, acquire their real necessity only in romantic art.
....
I'll readily say there's a big tonal gap between them. It should be stressed that all of Hegel's godstuff is (for me anyway) best understood figuratively. Rationalized theology just uses the old pictures to channel feeling and maybe to fool the authorities. I take Hegel to be a flaming humanist. Feuerbach offers a mostly demystified version.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach
Yes, which we'd maybe both explain in Hegelian terms. For the record, I'm a liquid rationalist. The lifeworld evolves ceaselessly, and our own conceptuality is part of that evolution.
Quoting plaque flag
Is your thread basically just saying that to play tennis we need to abide by the rules of tennis?
One must subjugate themselves to the rules of philosophy to participate, I agree with that in principle.
Ah but is there not an structure behind or above all of the ringing changes ?
The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm#III
So far you and I have just been unfolding the concept of philosophy. My thread is about the conditions of possibility for philosophy. In short, I claim there are certain assumptions that philosophers cannot deny without performative contradiction. Anything that makes 'tennis' possible cannot be doubted or challenged within this game of 'tennis' without absurdity.
For instance : communication is impossible.
Or : there is no world.
I love Kant so it hurts me, but it's where the thinking takes me. Which is part of the philosophic spirit I'd say -- when reason is more powerful than you and forces you to think a new way.
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Kant seems to have pretty much dreamed up a meta-metaphysical 'psychology' from scratch. Hegel lets us just watch a 'system 'grow in the womb of trial and error, through various internal contradictions, stacking errors up into a spine, adding to its metacognitive vocabulary --- toward some overcoming of indirect realism.
everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well
To me consciousness is the just the being of the world from a perspective, but this world is only given perspectively. So far as we cautious philosophers can say. Mystics can say anything they want.
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I can agree with that.
The defining feature of philosophy for me is the universality of logic. We need to consider the greater repercussions beyond ourselves and beyond any single case. If I wouldn't be okay with my self-serving logic being used by others, then I must admit that I was wrong, stuff like that. If my logic doesn't best serve the group then it fails within the context of philosophy.
Here's where I think we actually disagree -- what I like from Kant's project is that there are limits to reason because I don't think human beings are rational. Even the philosopher is irrational, because the philosopher is a human being who loves rationality -- but as The Symposium points out the philosopher is only philosopher in that chase rather than when the chase is consummated. Today we might say when the chase is consummated that's when the philosopher becomes a scientist or a politician or a CEO -- anything more powerful and with authority. The philosopher's only authority is reason, and reason doesn't always speak the same to everyone.
And for the record, I am an ex-rationalist who still loves rationality. But I've come around to the idea that reason has its limits.
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Just to be clear, I'd also say the real is [math] \infty [/math]. It's absurd too, at least in an important sense. I might really be Schlegel's transcendental buffoon, an ironic transrational mystic, just playing the white pieces for a change. For years I mostly played the pragmatist / ironist, so it's fun to turn the board around and defend the castle of rationality, be a 'conservative.'
A big theme in Kojeve too, the seeker versus the one who has found. This is why I lean on the word ontologist as a little more precise for my purpose. Our ontologist doesn't typically claim to be finished or certain. The project is to 'rationally' (and so fallibly) articulate the basic structure of reality. The ontologist is possessed by this 'scientific' ambition, is, as you say, in love with philosophy. But the ontologist exists indeed by merely being on the way. The intention is foundation and existence enough, though this intention is part of what's clarified along the way.
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Exactly. And I go on to say that we need there to be a world for us to be right or wrong about for this project to make sense. As obvious as this is, many philosophers bury us in so much illusion that they can hardly make sense of how the philosophical conversation is possible. It's sort of like hey guys you gotta keep the lamp plugged in to play checkers.
Oh I very much agree that we are mostly savages ! I am extremely tempted by psychologism. It's only because it's paradoxical that I don't wallow in it. I find myself engaing in it all the time, as I think we almost have to do ---model one another as machines to be manipulated. I need the clerk to cash my check, like pulling a lever.
If we are not rational, then we cannot trust our judgment that we are not rational. I tend to think of free will as a sentimental illusion, but under the jesusbeard candycoating is the idea of responsibility, including that of keeping our story straight. So there seems to be a genuine tension between conceiving ourselves as dignified rational beings and mere primates whose beliefs are the mere outputs of goomachines. The classic challenge to relativistic irrationalism is finding a way to say that nazis are bad without universal criteria. Do we just contingently not like them and that's it ? Something like determinism with respect to our beliefs (we are just programmed by our environment in a highly complicated way that includes feedback) seems to undermine or demystify democracy, etc. So we go back to Thrasymachus. Power is knowledge.
To me his genius move was to take methodological solipsism to the species level. This was implicit in Kant and Descartes because the assumption was that we all had the same kind of soul or subjectivity. But we were stuck in little bubbles. Once we are all in the same bubble, the outside of that bubble loses its meaning and necessity.
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I very much agree there's much more to life than this game with concepts. And there's even more to be done with concepts that 'ontology.'
But I don't think of us as mere primates. I think of us as creatures with an ecological niche that happens to include language as an important part of that niche. And if I'm right about language it's basically the most important part of our ecological niche -- it's only because fewer of us have to die to change our ways that we are building the anthropocene (which, in turn, we are becoming aware of, will destroy us if we don't change). (OK this last paragraph is rambly in comparison to your question, but I wanted to include it anyways)
Yes. Now we optionally start walking on 'the dark side of God.' Tangent (?), but did you ever look at Blood Meridian ? Dark dark beauty.
Quoting Moliere
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Yes, I agree that language is the killer app, a sort of extra dimension of our environment --a timebinding cultural web that we endlessly enrich (Popper's World 3, Husserl's sediment, Heidegger's One.)
I walked with ye olde serpent Rorty for a number of years. Still love the guy, though I try to catch the little rat in my foundation trap. You may know all this too well, but: He presents something like a vision endless decentralized unjustified experiment with vocabularies grasped more as teeth or ladders than pictures of reality. We also just cling to democracy for no reason at all. No deeper justification. A frank ethnocentrism. We contingently arrived here and 'irrationally' should try to protect what we like about this place. Yet he ends up celebrating the same old ideal communication community. I like Derrida too. But I tend to think the wild thinkers can only wander so far. They'll all boot out the nazi. Or any tyrant that'd shut 'em up (excepting some hard left thinkers perhaps, like maybe even my beloved Kojeve if had been given the power.)
Nope. I haven't broached Cormac McCarthy because it just seemed way too dark for me. I have enough dark thoughts to occupy my mind! :D
Quoting plaque flag
My experience of reading Derrida is trippy. [s]Over time[/s] I started as a hate-reader and became a lover. I still need to complete the trilogy, though -- writing and difference is the one I haven't done the homework on yet. But I tend to interpret him as an uber-rationalist rather than a wild thinker, which is the point of this story.
I've mostly studied the earliest Derrida phonocentrism-targeting stuff, focussing on passages like these:
[quote=Of Gram]
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 --- but I shall elsewhere show in what it does delude itself. This illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. Within the closure of this experience, the word 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."
...
Declaration of principle, pious wish and historical violence of a speech dreaming its full self-presence, living itself as its own resumption; self-proclaimed language, auto-production of a speech declared alive, capable, Socrates said, of helping itself, a logos which believes itself to be its own father, being lifted thus above written discourse, infans (speechless) and infirm at not being able to respond when one questions it and which, since its "parent['s help] is [always] needed" must therefore be born out of a primary gap and a primary expatriation, condemning it to wandering and blindness, to mourning. Self-proclaimed language but actually speech, deluded into believing itself completely alive, and violent, for it is not "capable of protect [ing] or defend [ing] [itself]" except through expelling the other, and especially its own other, throwing it outside and below, under the name of writing.
[/quote]
https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf
This notion of the son who would be his own father is also in Joyce, and Derrida studied Ulysses.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Is Derrida trying to climb out of metaphysics ?
Is metaphysics trying to climb out of writing?
Is Derrida trying to climb out of trying to climb out ?
Does a regard for metaphysics still haunt this trying to climb out of trying to climb out ? So that silence or mystic babble in a black forest hut is the best one can do ?
The thrown project says : I am the history from which I'm trying to awake. The living past in my spiritual flesh. The living past leaps ahead. The living past is my pair of eyes lost.
Sartre is worthy too.
[i]I am my past in the mode of no longer being it.
I am my future in the mode of not being able to be it.[/i]
Speech dreams of being/becoming pure spontaneous autonomous ideality, ejecting/denying its dependence on and determination by what came before (its having been thrown?) [its enabling context] as its shadow writing. As someone else noted (random internet blog), there's some Sartre in Derrida, and we know young Derrida loved Sartre as one of his teenaged or precocious preteen heros (can't remember the bio well enough on this point.)
Man is a futile passion to be god, and Speech quests for the purity of a impossible flying nakedness. Writing represents of course deferral, ambiguity, negative elements that only signify structurally, pointing pointlessly to one another and never to the thing itself.
Derrida knew as well as anyone (White Mythology) that philosophy was oracular, mythical, metaphorical --and then that metaphoricity functioned metaphysically in such a statement and became thereby undecidable as the enabling center of a structure. I'm riffing a bit on beloved Derridean themes, but I can't help but glean 'positive' ontological theses from the work. He reminds me of a sunnier Nietzsche, and maybe he's sunnier because there was a place for him in the world.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jurgen-Habermas/Philosophy-and-social-theory
Quoting plaque flag
Quoting Moliere
Forgive me, the thread moves fast, and my Hegel rather Vaguel. But when God is introduced, reality is turned on its head. This world of flesh becomes the dream, and rationality and morality becomes the real.
As little gods, we become the architects of our fate, and time sees the realisation of our plans and ideas and dreams within the great dream which is God's Creation. And our nightmares. For little gods it is all-important to think happy thoughts. But then, talk of the real has to start to look like this: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1980/evidence-of-consciousness-surviving-the-body/p28
Or else we relegate ideas to mere infectious memes. Flesh or spirit – is it possible not to choose? I'm reminded of Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye.
To me Feuerbach is maybe the key figure here. God is roughly the projection of the species essence. You and I as individuals are small next to the infinity of the species. We are little tentacles of a giant squidlike beast with billions of such tentacles, linked through language in a kind of species-mind. One of philosophy's fundamental assumptions is the translatability of meaning ---which is to say the idea of idea itself as a flame that leaps from candle to candle, expression to expression. We both love Cantor, so I know you know what I mean.
Idea may depend on embodiment and may even be 'body' as a kind of aspect of flesh, but it's the freest and most 'contagious' part of our flesh. We are the supremely networked being --- so that private language is an oxymoron. The irreducibility of assertion hints also at a shared mind. If I trust the boy who cries wolf, I see the world through his eyes, thanks to 'ideality.' The whole tribe sees through the eyes of all its members at once. Feuerbach sees that 'Reason' has the attributes of God --- disembodied and yet subjective. But (as I've stressed in several threads) independence from any particular body is not independence from all bodies. This is where the fantasy of the independent object sneaks in.
Given that we are futural beings for whom imagined futures determine interpretation of the past and bodily action in the present, rationality and morality [hopefully] become the real in a good sense. How can I understand your own speech act except as an optimistic normative imposition ? Benevolent caution ? A push in the right direction ?
What is bare reason?
Quoting Moliere
Place of reason. Is that supposed to indicate a condition wherein the faculty of reason is suited to be employed? So Kant's place of reason means it is suitable for employment universally with respect to all experience, but not suitable for employment universally with respect to all reality?
So what grounds a universal reason in Hegel’s sense, such that its place is both with respect to all experience and with all reality? And if all reality is a possible experience, and in Kant there is a place for reason with respect to possible experience, isn’t that synonymous with Hegel’s sense of a universal reason?
————-
“….. in the expectation that there may perhaps be conceptions which relate à priori to objects.…we form to ourselves…the idea of a science of pure understanding and rational cognition, by means of which we may cogitate objects entirely à priori. A science of this kind….must be called transcendental logic, because it has….to do with the laws of understanding and reason…..only in an à priori relation to objects.
Quoting Moliere
Which is not to disbelieve in the pure thought that there may be conceptions which relate a priori to objects, but only disbelieve in the relating the conceptions to the objects, or, which is the same thing, disbelieve in cognizing objects entirely a priori given their antecedent conceptions.
Without a Kantian transcendental logic, how do space and time, purely transcendental conceptions, relate entirely a priori to objects? Apparently, Hegel has a way, himself a transcendental philosopher, so I’m led to think. Or at least a German idealist in some strict sense.
Hegel: the categories define what it is to be an object in general, such that it can be given, separating the immanent from the transcendent;
Kant: the categories define** the conditions for knowing what an object in general is, its being already given, separating experience from illusion.
(**not really, but for the sake of consistency…..)
So….it’s fine to disbelieve in Kantian transcendental logic, which presupposes a fair understanding of what it is, but how is Hegel’s logic any less transcendental?
Rhetorical. Again…..I just had nothing better to do.
As far as I can tell, your concern is that theological metaphors might lead to superstitious denials of personal death. FWIW, I think that the case in that thread for afterlife is pure sophistry, classic death-evading delusion. It's also just shallow for a philosopher to care so much about personal immortality. Our lives are ego-transcending in principle, directed toward an ideal community. This face on me, which is not so ugly, is also not so irreplaceable or important. What's worthwhile in me is pretty much what's worthwhile in everybody else.
We can't completely ignore tho the creative aspect of individuality. I may bring the tribe a gift that only I can bring. But even here I'm probably adjacent in the space of personality to others who'll bring an adjacent gift (in gift space) if I fail.
FWIW, I'm such a practiced atheist at this point that I can safely enjoy the symbols and tales that mystified my adolescence. That may be part of the charm for philosophers like Hegel --to handle those coals that once seemed so hot like tinker toys. Or to reframe that evil magic, now with both bare feet in the mud shit broken glass and flowers.
[i]If you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom[/i]
Nice link. New to me.
No, I think that is rather an evasion of my point. Think Plato's cave, since you seem to have an allergic reaction to religion. The scientific turn has had huge success, but at the cost of neglecting if not reducing to mere physics, subjectivity, rationality, and morality. For Plato, that world is analogised as the cave wall, a realm of shadows that is the illusory world of matter and bodies, as distinct from the real world of forms, the concern of the philosopher. Your project, as I understand it through many threads, is to marry the two worlds. I am pointing out a problem that Plato had and that you inherit. with or without gods or afterlife.
Whatever rationality is going to be in the scheme of things, if you want a monism, it is going to be problematic.
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You already have assumed both the body, and a moral and rational robe. And these garments cannot then be reduced to bodily functions, on pain of ceasing to be fundamental and disappearing into epiphenomena. So it looks like you need a non-physical realm, of forms, if not of gods and angels.
Or else this whole thread amounts to no more than 'we have to talk in language, get used to it.' And that certainly does not rule out afterlives and much else, except procedurally and dictatorially.
I don't know about that. I think we agree that philosophy is mythic and oracular. It's all religion in that sense. But is it a private esoteric brutal religion or a self-consciously open self-modifying religion ?
Humanism is an optimistic transformation of Christianity. I'm a bit of a pessimistic gnostic describing it from the outside to some degree, not exactly not a transrational mystic myself. The myth of the creator god publicly executed on a cross as an enemy of god (of himself) is sublime. It's a deep truth if properly understood. Humanism is the (recognition of ) Incarnation. The ideal communication community is Christ in a world that mostly belongs to Moloch. All that is beautiful and holy is hopelessly entangled with all that is cruel and disgusting. The cross is the matrix is the devouring mother.
But they are always already married. I'm with Husserl on categorial intuition. I'm anti-philosophical in the sense that I insist on the naked reality of the Lifeworld. I have to call the ordinary world the lifeworld just to avoid confusing philosophers who assume from the beginning that they are in unbreakable bubbles of magical sensation stuff.
I could have called what I'm about a radical pluralism. I admit every kind of entity with every kind of access to that entity. Even round squares. I merely point out that as philosophers we have to grab these entities by their inferential roles. So I am not celebrating the glories of rationality (except that I must do so implicitly in my friendly critical discussion with you) so much as (re-)presenting a stage of reason's self-explication. I'm probably just catching up with Hegel.
Tornados and mother's love and the axiom of choice and the ghost of William James in a story by a a fictional author are all very different 'intentional objects' that are equally welcome in my ontology. Your memory of a toothache is welcome, even though it's your toothache, because maybe you use it to make a case for some thesis. Even the ghost or purple alien somebody swears they saw is welcome, thought the nature or style or character of its existence is up for debate.
I think I've went out of my way in many posts to stress the irreducibility (for philosophers) of normativity. For any such reduction must be justified.
I've also stressed that disembodied subjectivity makes no sense.
I give, as a 'phenomenologist' who wants to describe more than speculate, a dramaturgical ontology with enworlded conceptmongering flesh at its center. The world has a conceptual aspect. It's just there, presumably because we are, given the ways of rabbits and insects.
If you are trying to get me to say I am not a physicalist, I've explicitly rejected scientific realism. The pure object is as semantically questionable as the pure subject. But it doesn't matter practically. Philosophers are fools who care more than worldlywise people about keeping their stories straight. They are the oracular-poetic cousins of the pure mathematicians.
That's a very strange reduction. Respectfully, I think you are reading it only for what interests you at the moment.
Let me summarize it:
The very idea or project of [critical / rational] ontology already tacitly involves some nonobvious ontological commitments. The ontologist as such does not start with a blank slate. This constrains any skepticism that 'earnestly' justifies itself through claims about the knowing subject --- through ontological claims, which are typically performative contradictions.
A different skeptic 'wins' by not playing the game. One does not reason against reason except as a troll perhaps. Or a zen clown.
This project might not interest you. But reading about Husserl's critique of psychologism got me thinking. When does humility become false ? When is 'Kant' a paradoxical dogmatist about what others can and can't know ? And the deeper motive is an aspiration toward integrity, toward the coherence of my personality, in particular in the conceptual dimension of the claims I make about the world.
Indeed. A brute fact then of the human world? It's necessary to our discourse. It's necessary probably to our social life.
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Well in a sense, yes. I am trying to make sense of something that sounds at times interesting, and then at other times seems a bit thin. I have myself argued very simply here many times that language functions as communication and depends on the prevalence of truth. Aesop illustrated this very clearly with the fable of the boy who cried "Wolf". without a commitment to truth language loses meaning and function and becomes empty 'sound and fury'.
But how do I, or you, get from there to an ontology? It seems to me that nothing in what you have said here entails anything ontological. What am I missing?
Am I not supposed to assume that what there is (apart from our dialogue) does not depend on our dialogue taking place or coming to a conclusion?
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I'd say we only have 'practical fictions' (reductive maps) within the normative lifeworld that abstract/ignore this normative dimension. We tend to forget ourselves, lose ourselves in the object, become transparent as subjectivity.
I read Husserl's bracketing as an attempt to remind us of the way the objects are given, so that we can see [notice] our seeing of them. But we are still seeing the world and not the inside of the bubblescreen. We lose the way in the what, because the what is more practical.
Our commitment to the truth is not quite enough. The prophet also intends the truth. Gods can whisper truths in the ear of the chosen. The missing ingredient is justification, which is implicitly about Enlightenment autonomy, at both the personal and communal level. The critical-rational ontologist embraces a second-order critical-synthetic oracular tradition. 'We the rational' articulate the real together, fallibly, against a kind of horizon. It's implicitly adversarially cooperative. We each ideally see around the other's biases. I can disagree with you but not with me. At least I am ideally or aspirationally coherent. Our community as a whole is also ideally coherent, for sure enough we work toward a consensus in our co-articulation of the conceptual aspect of the lifeworld.
I can of course be challenged on my unfolding of the concept of rationality, but it's likely that such a challenger will ask me to justify my claims in terms of communal inferential standards.
So we've already got persons in a world and language together. And they can be wrong about this world individually. Is it funny to work so hard to end up with common sense ? Yes. But methodological skepticism was on to something. It works (maybe) at the species level, which was probably the confused intention anyway, given the assumption that subjectivity had a trans-personal structure. [ Your bubble was supposed to be structurally just like my bubble. So Kant could magically talk about my bubble from within his. ]
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf
It's been a minute since I read it, but that's the text I was referencing.
Yup! That sounds about right to me.
Exactly!
The dialectic. He makes some, what I consider to be, off-hand remarks on Kant's philosophy, but it's his invention of the dialectic which overcomes Kant (at least, this is how I read Hegel's intent)
I think the big conceptual difference between Kant and Hegel is their respective use of the concept "time". Hegel challenges the law of the excluded middle on the basis of time, where Kant accepts it because he believes Aristotle started a science of logic, and he's picking up that torch to further the project of a science of logic. Hegel builds a logic which "contains" or at least allows contradiction at certain points of time in the name of sublation, due to his reading of the history of philosophy (which, in its expression in The Phenomology of Mind/Spirit, isn't even chronological!)
I'd emphasize the popular quote "The rational is real, and the real is rational" -- where Kant would deny our knowledge of the real in certain respects (explicitly: God, Freedom, and Immortality).
Heh. You're asking the wrong person. @Tobias would be a much more sympathetic voice if he's willing to pipe up on Hegel.
Hegel is certainly a German Idealist.
I'm flattered and glad to have you along :)
Oh wait!
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What is this? A map the size of the territory with every feature marked would be unwieldy. Sometimes one draws a map of a cell, maybe, larger than life, and sometimes one draws a map of Narnia. We, I hope, but now I am worried, understand that the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory... Don't we? In general a map is reduced to "salient features". The reduction is not a fiction any more than the failure to say everything that is true all at once is a fiction
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Yes moral and rational beings with language in a world together. So ontology has to account for all that in some way.
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But here, I think is where I start to become deviant. Because this is exactly what science has claimed to be doing since Descartes or Newton or thereabouts, that arrived at a mechanical world devoid of meaning. Fallibly, indeed! And what they have left out is what you are still leaving out, which is the tradition of meaning.
To be a bit more specific, critical-rational ontologists do not appear fully formed, but arise out of that tradition that questions its own moral worth, which is the religious tradition. That aspiration to the ideal community is the religious aspiration in modern dress.
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Yes. Of course. But fundamental ontology is where we finally tell the essence of the whole truth. Others can sweep the embarrassing/difficult aspects of subjectivity under the rug. But unworldly ontologists aren't satisfied with the usual shortcuts. Hilarious pompous word: 'ontologist.' Pure 'mathematicians' of the big picture, laughed at by 'chambermaids' ( nursing students ?) who hear their big words and see their 'economical' lifestyle. Actually some of us know better than to talk about Hegel with regular folks. But if we did, we'd be clowns. Maybe lovable, but clownish.
Conceptuality is not sound or shape or smell. I can see the mountain and not just reason about it. The mountain as mountain is 'organized' perhaps by my 'conceptual' (sensory 'transcendent') intention. I can see the same mountain from many perspectives. I can step in the same river day after day, though never the same water.
I would personally not equate the the failure to say everything at once to inferior ontologies that, while taking their time, still leave out something crucial. Note that I've already indicated the horizonal-infinite nature of the project. We are never done clarifying. But part of that clarification is the recognition that early versions of our story of HOW IT IS are inadequate.
This gets a little more complicated maybe. Concepts intend the world. The map is not the territory.. is presumably about the territory ?
If say there are apples on the table, I intend apples that I can go see and pick up. Husserl is great on this issue. Categorial intuition. An empty intention occurs when the apple is not around and we make the claim, but it can be fulfilled by the apples being on the table when we go check. We see that-apples-are-on-the-table.
Actually ontology (I claim) takes that for granted. But then goes on to clarify that blurry taking-for-granted. Actually ontology often has to first figure out, painfully slowly, what it's already committed itself to. Hence Brandom's title : Making It Explicit.
Newton said : fuck it ! I make no hypothesis ! A mere mathematical pattern is good enough for me.
That mechanical world devoid of meaning is (I hope you see) a big part of what I'm challenging in all of my recent threads. It's a reductive 'fiction.' As fundamental ontology, it sucks. But we are practical primates dazzled by gadgets. Whatever smells of tech must be right. Hence my futile critique of a pragmatic irrationalism that'll always be with us.
Funny thing is I'll be misread initially by scientistic 'rationalists' who'll think I'm selling Mystic Kool-Aid when I'm trying to tell the minimal internally coherent beginning of the truth. Explicating the mere starting point. Some of 'em don't even see the 'field of normativity' yet that gives their 'skepticism' meaning.
Good. Thank you. A response not loaded with useless metaphors, just straight answers to direct questions. ‘Preciate it.
On “Religion Within the Limits….”, I must confess to not including it in my favored field of study. Religion, donchaknow. (shudder).
But I do have it already under the title “…Limits of Reason Alone”, Greene, 1934, which might explain why I didn’t recognize “bare reason”: re: the limit of religion in Bennet 2017, among others. Despite all that, I’ll look for a dedicated reference to it, see what all the fuss is about.
Carry on.
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Yes !
Hence my love for Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec00.htm
I'm not endorsing every ounce of tone, etc., but showing him as a self-consciously transitional figure.
OK I thought I was crazy. That's originally what I wanted to say and then I wanted to check myself on google, and so I changed my phrasing to match what google would say. "Limits of reason alone" is the phrase that I wanted to express before checking myself.
Ahhh. All’s well that ends in reason alone.
Still….bone of contention, due to my lack of sufficient study perhaps….seems odd Kant would declare it rational to behave in accordance with the old ways, but declare sapere aude in keeping with the new-fangled Enlightenment philosophy in which behavior would definitely not be in such accordance.
I'm at least earnest so I think I'm saying true things of Kant. Though I'd read his answer to What is Enlightenment? as a challenge to the traditionalists. He's an interesting philosopher because he engages so many perspectives and then goes on to invent a logical form which justifies and denies the two sides he perceived as being in error -- the rationalists and the empiricists, with an emphasis on Hume because Kant thought Hume a really good philosopher.
Acute. Celebrated. Ablest, most ingenious, of skeptical philosophers. A few of one’s accolades for the other.
If only he’d taken that one last step……
I cannot see "the field of normativity" as consisting in anything more than the principle of consistency. This applies as much in theology as it does in science. in metaphysical speculation as it does in psychology. There really is no one "field of normativity" beyond that; there are, rather fields of normativity, as many as there are fields of enquiry, sense and ideas, and the normativity governing those fields seems to consist primarily in the principle of consistency coupled with the demand that if you are going to participate you must be minimally acquainted with the current state of the art, or risk being irrelevant.
I said earlier I thought we had reached the "end" of our disagreement, by which I didn't mean there was no remainder, but rather that the remainder had become crystal clear. I want to repeat that I think that disagreement is over the "in itself' that dialectical counterpart to the "for us" that you seem intent on restricting us to in all domains.
I come back to this because I think the only publicly available "for us" lies in the fields of empirical inquiry, where publicly available and confirmable observations are possible, and in the domains of mathematics and logic. But there are many other fields of inquiry, where the more or less indeterminate nature of the subject matters of speculation only exist because they stand in the shadow of the "in itself".
These are the fields of sense, realms of discourse, where ignorance, unknowing, tears open the horizons for the imagination and intuition to play at will. Fields of faith, if you like. More could be said, and no doubt will be.
No doubt that's a crucial part of it, but we can't forget the attitude of fallibility and a willingness to learn from others --- the second-order synthetic-critical tradition. I mean we can't do so as philosophers.* Humans have proven themselves very capable of burning witches. The 'rule' (the monster child in us and our heritage) is a dogmatic refusal to debate. Internal consistency is a tribal norm. One is one around here. If a superbaby from Krypton could materialize its own food and vaporize whatever annoyed it with an angry glance, it might never develop a coherent personality. It would never have to negotiate or compromise.
* As individuals in the larger sense we can 'consistently' be mystics, ironists, quietists, thugs...
And, I'd think, with a willingness to meet challenges, elaborate, edit, comment on others' work. A young Wittgenstein may occasionally get away with oracular bad manners, but that's against a background of 'non-geniuses' adversarially cooperating, putting in the time.
I insist tho that I am 'existentially' humble. Maybe the mystic is on a better path. I don't preach my suffocating & claustrophobic* ontology to anyone who isn't preaching their own brand, looking to criticize and synthesize with me.
But within the serious game or foolish science of 'ontology,' I take a strongly anthropomorphic position, perhaps (if I may reduce/ignore/subvert my responsibility for a moment ) because of a sense of duty to know what I'm talking about. My 'ego ideal' is a certain kind of cognitive hero. I tend to dig for the cognitive treasure. My mystical tendencies have always been more psychoanalytical and immanent than transhuman or astral. I love thinkers who make the mundane glow, who unveil the 'miraculous' in the rule rather than the exception.
*I had a friend once react as if mildly suffocated by my way seeing things.
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I don't stand opposed to that stuff. In fact, I think anything potentially experienceable is part of the lifeworld, which is essentially 'horizonal' and infinite. My ontology includes anything that could possibly be discussed, given the minimum grip of some kind of inferential role.
I'm not even opposed to intense investment in esoteric mysteries. I do criticize the performative contradiction of those who can't make up their mind about whether they are transrational or not. If it's beyond mundane reasoning and open critical-synthetic discussion, then so be it. Seriously. But some people argue that logic is spiritually futile --- that they have nothing to learn from others, in other words. They show up anyway presumably because humans crave recognition, which is maybe one reason why the critical-synthetic tradition was born. Some of the prophets got bored of being ignored by one another and decided to work together on something that they could all find themselves in.
I agree with that. Part of the challenge is attaining the self-knowledge we spoke about earlier; seeing if an attitude or belief I hold is on account of what I want to be true rather than motivated by what I believe to be, in a disinterested fashion, most plausible. I think it also must be acknowledged that the assessment of what seems most plausible to different individuals, assuming that they have equal access to all the facts that bear on the case, is always an individual matter.
I agree with this in the sense that anyone who experiences anything is obviously a part of the lifeworld, but I don't think it follows that everything experienced is available for public scrutiny and assessment in the way that. for example, the observations of the natural sciences, mathematics and logic are.
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I think one of the problems is that some think that their own faith-based beliefs must be amenable to being rationally argued for. If someone comes on a philosophy forum and tries to argue for such beliefs, they commit a category error and are fair game for rigorous critique. On the other hand, if people come on just to express their own personal beliefs without providing anything resembling a rigorous argument, well, that quickly becomes uninteresting, and such people usually double-down and start to interpret their interlocutors tendentiously or simply flee the discussion when they feel the heat.
I agree except I don't hold with the idea of "genius" especially the stink of authority it always seems to carry. I think so-called geniuses are often simply suitably obsessed people who put in much more thought and effort into their pet subjects, and they are no less, simply on account of the complexity of their thought, prone to error than the rest of us. I think the cult of the "genius" is something that we can do without, and arguably often holds back progress.
Absolutely. So rationality is just a way of harnessing collision the collision variety.
Quoting Janus
Just to be clear, I agree. My ontological inclusion of anything we can talk about only works by acknowledging an infinite variety in the way such entities are accessed. In the mundane case, we can both talk about your pain, but you have different access to that pain. You suffer it.
A profound spiritual experience might also come up in a conversation as an explanation for why someone quit drinking or got rid of most of their property. A listener would not have the same access to that experience, but they could still discuss it in the space of reasons. 'My friend had a realization , so he got rid of all his stuff.'
To me the 'real' esoteric stuff, which is important to me, is properly a secret in a circle of trust. I find clues and hints in certain texts, as if the authors were (maybe) leaving a trace for those who could read between their lines. I'm not at all against an extra esoteric layer, even here, but I think we should mostly decide what game we're playing.
The Crying of Lot 49 is good on this stuff. Undecidable conspiracy theory of an alternative postal system.
I agree there's a dark side of the concept. To me thought it's also a pretty good label especially for people who are way too young to be so good at what they do. Blake wrote that true religion was the 'worship' of great human beings. But where we probably agree very much is that this 'worship' cannot be 'alienated.' If I truly appreciate and value Einstein, then I seek to understand him by becoming him.
You can probably see how this fits with my general rejection of what I can't experience and therefore can't give definite meaning to. The genius for the alienated beginner is a vague hope, a promise shining in the distance, a magical father figure, a gleaming token in the fallacy of argument from authority. But we hopefully grow out of this vain and confused game (which I'd say is conceptually close to Heidegger's idletalk, a gossip from the outside .) [ Hopefully I've demonstrated how much I also dislike cheap appeals to fame and mystique. ]
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My only hesitation is that we may have evolved hero worship for a 'good reason.' In my dramaturgical ontology thread, I try to argue that the human entire personality is absolutely ontologically fundamental. The world is only given, so far as we know, to the hopefully harmonious system of such a personality. So me taking a hero is me taking on something that is already partially harmonic --- a proven, battlehardened life approach system. Very tempting for the young --- or at least my youth is full of my emulation of heroes, but not without the anxiety of influence. We resent/envy the dead less, and we can use them against living rivals. And we must make it new. Pound and Eliot were two of my earliest heros. Doesn't this from Eliot sound like Heidegger ?
I'd go further and say that absent rationality there could be no notion of collision in the first place.
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Of course that's true, but the experience itself cannot be definitively explained.
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For me the esoteric can be, has been, interesting, but I think it is mostly, to distort Shakespeare, full of secret unsoundness and innuendo, signifying nothing. The ideas, as exercises of the imagination are useful only insofar as they are exoteric, out there.
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I think that's right. I like to misinterpret Bloom's notion of the "anxiety of influence" to explain why I don't like to read much into the complexities of others' thoughts: I am fearful of filling the mind with the thoughts of others. As per the quote you provided from T S Eliot, I acknowledge the importance of tradition as a repository of key ideas, allegories, possible worldviews...
I think the importance of major thinkers consists in just a very few insights central to the human condition, and the rest, all the arguments designed to justify those ideas are relatively tedious, obsessively driven filler. Of course, I am speaking only for myself.
When I read, and I do read a lot, but in a very scattered fashion, I read mainly for aesthetic pleasure. I need a story, rather than a complex argument, to hold my attention; I just have little confidence that following along, sloggin' it, with a complicated argument will yield any fruit worth the effort in the end. Life is short...
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This is very interesting to me. I tend to read to catch up with things and I think my reading for aesthetic pleasure is over for the time being.
My view of complex arguments and 'high theory' is that they make almost no difference to how I live my life. I am not an academic, nor do I feel the need to remain up to date. I also don't have the disposition to follow complex arguments across scores of intractable pages. I find I'm more interested in people's presuppositions rather than the vast edifices they often erect upon these foundations.
I completely agree. I'm tackling a related issue in Sensational Conceptuality. The idea is just that the inferential handles on concepts --- the kind that make a private language impossible from a structuralist point of view (beetles and boxes) --- aren't the entire referent. The inferential handles, which are indeed necessary for public sense, make a private referent 'exceeding' this handle possible. So 'my ecstatic vision' has a 'truly private' aspect, and that private aspect is likely to be by far what matters most to me. But this is also as mundane as the feel of hot water in the bathtub which is not itself just concept.
I think we have a somewhat different conception of the esoteric. I'd include heraldry. I'd include stars-and-stripes, hammers-and-sickles, swastikas, muted post horns, any kind of excluding symbol. Even sexism has an esoteric aspect, brilliantly emphasized in Lynch's version of Dune. Race is often (usually?) discussed/experienced esoterically. My genitals, my skin, is a 'magical' organ, giving me transrational access to Insight ---at least for some who tilt this lance against universal rationality. So to me the esoteric is as big as the shadow cast by the ideal communication community, which is to say that it's the rule rather than the exception.
A little playfully but also seriously, I'd say the world itself is most entirelessly without substance.
To me the justifications are scaffolding that we can be rebuilt as needed. The main thing is to get it said.
I think you are right that there aren't that many necessary insights. 'Spiritually' I peaked (found all I really needed) at around 30. But I experience myself as a painter or composer in the world of concept, so I treasure the variety and the complexity. To me the web gets more and more vivid and fascinating with every new connection.
I also read to catch up on things; mostly science and issues like resource depletion, global warming, ecology, cosmology...The interesting difference between much of philosophy and science (and of course fiction) seems to me to be that the latter consists in stories. So, I can read a whole book about cosmology, ecology or natural history and some fiction, but I have always had difficulty sticking with major philosophical texts that are so systematic that the whole must be digested in order to understand the parts, or at least to see where they all fit in the greater scheme. I find the most salient parts interesting in themselves, and they can always be related to the body of my own experience it seems, even if only at the risk of misreading.
So, I like philosophical texts I can dip into; much of Nietzsche and some of Wittgenstein is like this for example.
I also like to read some poetry. Like you I am not, nor do I have any aspirations to be, an academic. I studied philosophy at the undergraduate level as part of an Arts degree, but I lost interest as soon as I had completed the courses that interested me and I had no use for the piece of paper, so I dropped out about half-way through...without regret.
I agree with you completely about the presuppositions and basic insights to be found in philosophical works being more interesting than the vast edifices...although I do understand that some people find those vast edifices aesthetically engaging, and may enjoy the challenge of mastering them...different strokes...
I can relate to that. All experience is really non-dual and cannot be adequately explained in (necessarily) dualistic language, So, our explanations are actually paltry tokens compared to what they attempt to explain...but I think that is so only provided we can be actively present to experiences...and for that I need an empty head rather than a full one...but that's just me and I acknowledge it can be different for others.
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I think we are speaking about different things. I have in mind the idea that there is hidden knowledge which can be transmitted from master to acolyte. That said, I don't deny that people can, to a certain degree, be schooled in techniques that may assist in the art of waking up and becoming more present.
I think I can relate to the idea of "transrational insight"; if you mean that the ordinary sensual experiences may open up previously hidden doors and corridors of the imagination.
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As a great comedian once said, "I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less".
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I can relate to that, too. There have been times in my life where I felt the attraction of the purely conceptual, and I can well understand how mathematicians may see their craft and its investigations as an art form. For me it's poetry, painting and music, all of which I see as being more sensorially and feeling oriented.
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Yes, your version is more prototypical, and mine is a generalization. To me the main is idea is the closure and exclusiveness.
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I do think statements like God is love intend a truth about the world. I wouldn't call such a statement esoteric so much as ambiguous. What metaphor is isn't easy to say.
I do write some crazy stuff in a project with a friend inspired by Finnegans Wake. The main idea is to smash several layers of meaning together into an intentionally ambiguous-suggestive text object. It's like Dali's paranoiac-critical method in prose. The reader is encouraged to project their personal concerns/suspicions, be entangled with the text, etc.
To me so much of the good stuff is just that, and then the next person tries to go even deeper or more zoomed out...
It's interesting you say "closure and exclusiveness" because as you have also said, my everyday sensual experiences are exclusive to myself and closed to others. So, my focus in thinking about the esoteric is that my experience can be transmitted to others through touch or shock or befuddlement of the mind resulting in the shutting down of the internal dialogue; Zen exemplifies these kinds of ideas. So, enlightenment is seen as a state that an enlightened one can definitively, without any doubt, recognize in others. I am skeptical of that,,,although I acknowledge that it may be so, but even if it were, such a thing could never be demonstrated to be so either empirically or logically, so it would seem to be discursively useless.
Have to go and do some framing now, so will have to leave any further responses until later...
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I can't make sense of a simple binary state. And it can't be proven. And any kind of marketing or indiscriminate recruitment (for funding, say) speaks even more against such things. I don't believe in the free lunch. I might believe in some ladder in the internal abyss, but I'd only talk about it with some irony.
I like that.
I mentioned in this in passing once before, but I continue to find it resonant. All is vanity is a translation of all is hevel. This Hebrew word is already richly metaphorical. One of its more literal shades of meaning is vapor. But it's close to emptiness and fog and ambiguity too.
To me this is fucking hilarious and beautiful. Hevel itself, as a concept/metaphor, is foggy and undecidable and elusive, empty of substance in the sense of definite center. So we have an infinite horizonal metaphor here. Performing its metaphoricity on two levels.
To me a certain transcendence is hard to distinguish from nihilism. To say all is hevel is like grasping the entire world as a dream with nothing behind it. It's all of reality, but we are the animal that can compare all of reality with some kind of nothingness. A show moist entirelessly without substance. We don't just see entities there. We see the there itself as the there. Anyway, a less unfolded version of omnia vanitas was what I settled on at around age 30. It didn't mean that things in the world were worthless. I didn't know exactly what it meant, but it expressed a sense of transcendence. It occurred to me earlier that the philosopher is a lucid dreamer. But all of reality is that 'dream.' (So dream is no longer dream but substanceless hevel.) This transcendence is a thin film of nothingness between the philosopher and the world.
I have not read all of the thread, actually only this question because of Moliere's mention. I do not know if it is relevant and if not just ignore the spam. There is a big difference between Kant and Hegel though. Kant considers that the world we see is a world shaped by our mind in the sense that the mind holds the categories by which we mould the manifold intuitions granted by sensibility. We do get these intuitions from somewhere though, even though we have no access to it. This 'noumenal world' remains hidden to us, it is the thing in itself.
Hegel on the other hand is an absolute idealist, meaning that there is no 'thing in itself', that is itself a contradictory idea. There is nothing laying 'behind' our sensibility and the distinction sensibility and understanding cannot be made. Instead the world as it is necessarily confirms to the world as we understand it. The understanding is what is the world (The rational is the real). That is oftentimes read as something very exalted or esoteric, but I think it means nothing less than that something can be a certain something at all is because the way we understand, perceive, handle, interact with that certain something. Saying for instance that a door knob is not really really a doorknob, but instead a bundle of intuitions from some noumenal world, is nonsense for Hegel. A doorknob is a doorknob is a doorknob. There are just no god given doorknobs, they are a product of our interaction with the world. That is not a transcendental but an immanent logic.
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It's a relief that someone else gets it.
Zahavi interprets Husserl and Braver interprets Heidegger in this same general way, tho of course there are fascinating differences.
Husserl's discussion of how the spatial object is given, which Sartre paraphrases to kick off Being and Nothingness, is the whole idea, seemingly taken from Hegel, in a nutshell.
The so-called Münchhausen trilemma—that is, that all attempts to discover ultimate foundations result in either logical circularity, infinite regress, or an arbitrary end to the process of justification—can be overcome by moving from the level of semantic analysis to the level of pragmatics and recognizing that some presuppositions are necessary for the very possibility of intersubjectively valid criticism and argumentation. Similarly, he argues, even the "principle of fallibilism" (which holds that any claim can, in principle, be doubted) is only meaningful within an "institution of argumentation," where some pragmatic rules and norms are not open to question. Thus, contrary to the claim of critical rationalism, the principle of fallibilism does not exclude the notion of philosophical foundations and, Apel argues, certainly could not replace it as the basic principle of rational discourse (1998, chapter 4).
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
Thank you. I knew you'd be better at it :D
@plaque flag I'd note that the door knob example could be interpreted differently depending upon how we're setting Kant out --as a two-world theorist or a two-aspect theorist, and what we mean by both of those. The main thing I'd say is there is no doorknob-in-itself as I understand Kant's philosophy, that this is an empirically real object, and the transcendental object serves as a limiting concept for determination -- we only get to the two-aspect/world through the deduction of empirical reality and how it is we can know things a priori synthetically.
Which is to say that I've agreed that there is a kind of lazy Kantianism which relies upon the phenomena/noumena distinction, but I'd caution against attacking the distinction as much as the way Kant gets to the distinction.
Because then there'd be a reason to make a choice between two kinds of rationality -- one which relies upon a transcendental logic, and the other which relies upon Hegel's logic.
I wouldn't rely upon the trilemma as much as the method I've already proposed -- we can come to see that philosophers start from different places through the humble method of comparison and contrast after having read the philosophers. And that's why I have doubts on ultimate foundations: seems like there's a lot of possible foundations to go around claiming as ultimate foundations. The task of the foundationalist, then, is to set out the ultimate foundation persuasively.
I should reiterate that I think Kant is a hero. The theory of the subject is, in my view, the essence of philosophy, and Kant pushed it even slightly beyond its limits. I don't pretend to be an expert on Kant, and it's clear that there are better and worse interpretations, but he occasionally writes very clearly.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm
...the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that 'all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.' You will say: Is not this manifest idealism?
So even space itself is 'nowhere but in our thoughts.' They are 'mere representations in us.'
I am not in the world, the world is in me.
...things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses.
Kant takes the function of the sense organs for granted (a tacit-disavowed direct-realist foundation), yet the sense organs we can know anything about (the familiar eyes and ears of mundane life) are only given as appearance, and yet this appearance is made the source of ...this appearance and the world itself.
If space is 'just in our head,' why would we think sense organs mediate/represent an 'outside' (things-in-themselves, presensuous urstuff) ?
I'm pretty solid on Kant. @Jamal and @Mww have taught me much, but I done some reading on the guy.
It's not in the head, it's in the mind. At least, again, as I read it.
The Mind here isn't even necessarily human -- Kant speculates about other minds like ours from other creatures. The defining element of our mind is its possession of a sensible intuition which is defined with respect to the concept of an intellectual intuition.
"intuition" has a special meaning in Kantian philosophy, just to make things worse.
But what I intend by this is that the sense-organs are mere objects in the world of the sensible and as such are clearly as real as doorknobs, and that these are questions, at least according to Kant, for empirical psychology. With respect to the possibility of knowledge -- that's where his philosophy operates. How is it possible to know that the sense-organs are related to such-and-such an experience? Well because experience and the sense-organs are a part of the empirical world which is given to us through the combination of the categories through the schematism into the sensible intuition which we all share.
Which is to note, at least, it's not in your head as much as it is in our mind -- at least the transcendental necessities of our mind.
Just to be clear, I don't at all question your knowledge of Kant. I'm just pointing out what I find problematic in his work. I hope you experience the challenge as an opportunity for fun.
Quoting Moliere
My gripe against a tendency in Kant and a certain tendency in Husserl is what I see as their unwitting semantic cheating. What is sensible intuition supposed to be if not the 'input' of the sense organs ?
I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality, and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this, that they represent in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves...
So the worldly experience of sense organs, along with the worldly social experience of normative-discursive subjectivity, making a unified stream of experience meaningful in the first place, are smuggled in to a theory that thinks it can construct the world from inside out. Hence my OP which makes the ICC* our glorious fundamental ontology's 'necessary being' --an enworldled community of 'ontologists' sharing its founding intention.
*The notion of an “ideal communication community” [ICC] functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the “unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jurgen-Habermas/Philosophy-and-social-theory
Yeh :)
And cool. I just realized I was about to say things that were different from what you said of the man, so I wanted to note I'm not entirely ignorant in so saying. I could certainly be wrong! But I wanted to note that I was coming from a place of having-read.
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This is something I wonder about a lot: what is the relationship between language and Kant? And I don't think there's much there. In a way I'm tempted to update Kant by saying "Language is the categories", but I also doubt Kant and I know that this would make things yet even harder to point out so I don't.
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At the very least I think you'd have to say it's what all our sense-organs do with respect to a sensible-intuition. You've mentioned some of the ways we interact with the world that differ like color blindness. The sensible-intuition would still hold for people who have individual organ-sense differences. Which, given that color-blind people can use "red" and "green", has a certain appeal.
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It's important to remember that Kant begins in knowledge -- at least on paper. He has some cases of knowledge, namely math and physical science, which do not fit in with the problem of induction. They're simply better than what the problem of induction would indicate. And in favor of that I'd say Newton's Laws are still used in spite of finding exceptions. "How is it possible for the rules we make up to be true over time?" -- or more directly with respect to the text, how is it we know 7 + 5 = 12?
He's constructing the world from cases which don't make sense when he considers the philosophical problems of what he terms the rationalists and the empiricists, and attempting an explanation for both of them while at the same time securing a place for the sacred outside of scientific knowledge.
But I don't think he's as guilty of stepping out to construct the world as much as Hegel is.
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I don't think what I've said would go against this, actually. Philosophers start somewhere, and I generally prefer collective efforts so it makes sense to say that collectives of philosophers start somewhere.
It's just the "foundations" part I'm questioning.
In case it's unclear (and to further the conversation on fun stuff ) I'm a nondualist direct realist. I 'believe in' our sense organs. They are related inferentially and casually to all kinds of other entities in the one inferential nexus of a community's practice of demanding and offering reasons. To be clear, even prescientific communities give reasons, make excuses, promises, apologies. So the normative discursive self has been here since we started jabbering. It only obtains selfconsciousness progressively. Philosophy is a big part of that.
I should stress that I am miles away from being an orthodox Hegelian. But I love certain passages in him, but I largely enjoy him transformed and in some ways purified by Kojeve, Brandom, and Heidegger. Braver's A Thing of This World is a tale of the journey of ICS, the impersonal conceptual scheme, at it set sail from Kant and only got freer and looser and finally fused with the world, so that this conceptual scheme was simply the conceptual aspect of the lifeworld, not some mediating image internal to a person or even a community. In Hegel, who managed the fusion mentioned above, it was evolving toward a goal. In the later Heidegger, the fusion is maintained, but it (now the lifeworld's way of being) drifts aimlessly.
Understandable, but who said you could question things ? I'm joking of course. The point is that autonomy really is almost apriori. Will you ask me to justify my claim that justification, in a context of freedom, is necessary or foundational ? Is this not merely enacting an ICC ? Is the state of peaceful tolerant conversation another way to put it ? Are we afraid to begin to explicate dogmatism (defining the ICC is the same as defining its negative) ? Will we dogmatically forbid such articulation ?
Sure. To me what you are missing is your agreement with me. Which is to say that you yourself are offering a founding assumption. 'We should apiori rule out foundationalism.' The ICC is just a vision of maximum freedom, right to the edge it shares with potentially brutal esoteric anarchy. @Joshs seems to share your concern that any attempt to sketch rationality is somehow oppressive, but that itself is just occult superstition if not rationally supported.
The metaphor of foundation is, in this context, a metaphor for that which enables.
One of my motives for writing Against Method was to free people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators and abstract concepts such as “truth”, “reality”, or “objectivity”, which narrow people’s vision and ways of being in the world. Formulating what I thought were my own attitude and convictions, I unfortunately ended up by introducing concepts of similar rigidity, such as “democracy”, “tradition”, or “relative truth”. Now that I am aware of it, I wonder how it happened. The urge to explain one’s own ideas, not simply, not in a story, but by means of a “systematic account”, is powerful indeed.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#AgaiMeth1970
In my view, we can either drag along the current notion of rationality uncritically, or we can make it explicit and refine it. Feyerabend shouldn't have felt bad about reaching for freeing concepts. Having no method at all is a fantasy that, in my view, evaporates with a grasp of our being as thrown projection. Reality is given perspectively to historically discursive beings. I 'am' the 'living past' that 'leaps ahead' as a set of interpretive habits/prejudices.
Thanks.
I'm at least a realist. And I like direct realism in the phenomenological sense, but I wonder what's so direct about it if all I mean is that indirect realism is false?
The phenomenological argument is a hard one to pull off persuasively, and depending upon the phenomenologist we may not even be doing metaphysics but rather attempting to articulate the question of metaphysics as a kind of propaedeutic to the task of metaphysics. With Heidegger I like to point out that the original plan for Being and Time was this huge multi-book plan, but he wasn't able to get to a full articulation of the question of the meaning of being. He articulates the meaning of Dasein by equating Dasein with time, but never back to the original question. I say it's because he gets lost in his own hermeneutic circle, and then the romantic aspects of his philosophy got along all too well with the fascists for his and his philosophy's and his mentor's own good.
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I'm not forbidding articulation as much as pointing out that it's likely that we're not articulating an ultimate or singular foundation, even within an ICC. More like there are a multitude of communities which are bound together in various different ways. There's a sedimentation or a point of return, but it changes as we move to different communities. One of the distinctions for which I'd say this is clear is between academic scientists and academic historians. These two communities are already bound by rational norms and even in a kind of production of knowledge within the same institution, but the forms of the argument, what counts as evidence for what, what are the worthwhile questions to ask and how we answer them -- these differ between historical and scientific inference. And then if you throw philosophy into the mix we have yet another rationality within the same rational institution.
So we can legitimately ask -- which rationality? We can choose in a given conversation or at a given time, but there's a choice to be made. In which case we can rationally challenge rationality on the basis of choosing one of these rationalities -- do we accept the historical tale of human beings, or do we accept the scientific tale that we're creatures driven by evolutionary pressures? We can choose both and make a reconciliation, but there are certainly communities that don't try to choose both, that prefer, say, science over history as the more rational rationality.
It's that sort of thing that I'm dubious about. I'm not so sure there is a most rational rationality. We can, by appeal to the rational, make the case -- but there's something question begging about appeal to the rational to provide a foundation to the rational.
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A posteriori -- only after reading and comparing. I certainly think we should read and compare philosophers in order to train our ability to think philosophically. Is it correct to say that reading philosophy books is foundational to philosophy, though? Maybe. And maybe I'm just reacting to "foundations" with its various associations.
But then there was Socrates, who was clearly a philosopher, and he didn't bother with all this.
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"That which enables" gets along with my notion of a multitude of rationalities. I think I can go with that: there are enablers to rationality, and what differentiates a rationality from another is the difference in enablers, or what I've been calling a jumping off point.
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It's important to remember the context of Feyerabend's statement that anything goes in science -- in the face of asking for a total philosophy for all of science that is normative and able to discriminate between science proper and non-science from a single criterion we can note, through comparison of historical periods of science, that there's no single criterion between science proper and non-science.
But creating language-games with fellow researchers (methods)? Sure we need that! It's just not up to the task of the ontologist's concerns, I think. Which in a way gets along with the spirit of Kant: We have knowledge of the empirical world, but that knowledge doesn't touch upon the metaphysical totality which grounds it. Or, in knowledge's multiplicity, they're all self-grounding projects which we are free to take up or leave, but which we're not really sure how to relate that to ontological claims. Or, at the very least, I'm not sure how to relate knowledge, scientific or historical, to ontological claims.
I was wonderin’…..like…..why should we attribute to our minds a defining element given from our senses, when it is certain other animals have senses? If we grant other animals have senses, we cannot immediately deny they have sensible intuitions of some kind. It would appear some form of sensible intuition is merely one element for any animal with sensory apparatus, hence not so defining an element for just our human mind.
So….what is a defining element of a human mind, implying that which belongs to no other animal, insofar as none of them offer any indication they possess it.
Without a comprehensive catalogue of what and how many elements there are in a human mind, it defies possibility for picking out a defining element. And if possibility is defied, what chance does certainty have? As well, being human, how to alleviate the privileging associated with examining our own minds, carrying the inclination to vainglorious elemental composition.
So not only is it being asked what element is definitive, but what are the choices for it, and given the choice, how is it the case it belongs solely to humans.
Care to bid on another defining element?
I was drawing a distinction between senses and sensible intuition there, and noting how "sensible intuition" is defined with respect to "intellectual intuition", which I think can be most easily read as the mind of God whose very thinking creates reality: the human mind is free to create concepts but our intuition is sensible in that we have to make our concepts fit the objects if we want the concepts to be true. God, on the other hand, thinks reality into being. It's that intuition which "sensible intuition" is being defined against, rather than animal knowledge
Now maybe we could say animals have a sensible intuition, but lack the creative aspect of reason which humans have -- the old quote about concepts and intuitions needing one another to make sense.
The other side, still explicating Kant here, is the conceptual -- the categorical. (In the background I always wonder about the imagination -- it's funny in Kant in that it's hard to place it in relation to the other mind-things.) But the categories form one part of the mind, where the sensible intuition forms the other part, and the schematism is what binds them together into a proper cognition.
I usually think of Kant's philosophy as a kind of flow from the Transcendental Ego ("I think...") to cognition, and from the Transcendental Object (...A is X) to cognition, and cognition is where our experience of "the manifold" and knowledge comes from. There are two functions of the mind which operate in parallel to produce cognition, which is how we come to know about the empirical world. We can only come to know about the transcendental conditions, though, from the deduction of the categories, and an absence of a better explanation for our possession of a priori synthetic knowledge.
Rejecting indirect realism is a big move with the little unworldly world of metaphysics. Do we start doing philosophy trapped and isolated in a bubble, referring to private 'representations' ? Or do we start together in a single world, referring to objects in that world, the bridge over the river?
Quoting Moliere
If it helps, Heidegger is no infallible oracle for me. I only endorse certain parts of his work. The key for me is phenomenology's uncovering of the lifeworld and it's refusal to be seduced --- it's unhip willingness to question -- a counter-empiricism that pretends to be empirical in its reduction of the fullness of the world to what is convenient for its mere technical intentions. To me it's a truly scientific ontology that challenges scientistic ontologies. It's the true empiricism -- not the stuff full of posits like sensedata taken for granted.
We need only pay more attention to see the world as such a 'blanket.' Neutrinos and marriages and nostalgia and premises are all part of this same single involvement network. Entities are radically semantically and practically interdependent.
But who ever claimed there was ? I've stressed that it's a fundamentally infinite project. As an ideal, it's always on the horizon. We will never live the 'perfect circle' of its arrival except in the sense of our being 'haunted' by it. We will never stop clarifying concepts like justice, freedom, and rationality.
As I see it, it makes more sense to challenge the details of my explication of rationality then try to argue for the apriori impossibility of such an articulation.
I hear you on the multiple logics issue, and this is bit like the private language issue. I'd say that every human being has a sort of private language and private logic, but going too far in this direction (trying to argue for it) is paradoxical. If we are lost in choose-your-own-logic and choose-your-own-meanings, there is no point in even discussing or claiming precisely such lostness.
'Communication/rationality is impossible' but let's talk about this anyway is a performative contradiction.
'Communication/rationality' is completed/perfected so shut up and listen is a performative contradiction.
'Communication/rationality is never perfect or final,' so let's continue to try at least to make it better is reasonable.
Yes, I get that, but the ask is….what is a defining element of the mind.
I guess I don’t get how something every human mind can do, or there is something for which every human mind has the capacity, is a defining element. Just seems more apropos to claim for a defining element as not found anywhere else, rather than found everywhere else.
Anyway….idle thought, while remaining in a non-collapsible box.
If one accepts that the world, so far as we know, is given perspectively, then the being of the world is always for (ignoring other animals) an entire human personality. This world is always already meaningfully structured (for instance, the network of involvements above).
I myself, as an ontologist, even as an informal ontologist who 'hates philosophy' doesn't know the word 'ontology,' have to clarify the totality of the meaningstructure of the world as it is given to me. How does science fit within the grand scheme of things ? How do real numbers exist not only as tokens in a specialist games for me as a total personality ? Are electrons more real than marriage or even than my own thought of electrons ? Is there an afterlife ? Is there a truly truly true truth somewhere?
All this squishy stuff is just established empirically by refusing to take a useful fiction (view from anywhere/nowhere) as an ultimate ontology because it helps with making smartphones -- though we'd be silly to ignore what it gets right.
Quoting Moliere
If you are talking as Husserl might about the ignorance of science about its own rootedness in the lifeworld, then I agree. But the mention of Kant hints of something that I'd suspect of being more necessarily and therefore uselessly indeterminate in its disconnection from the inferential-semantic nexus. There's our blanket of involvements and sense, and within this blanket we can construct phrases like 'round square' on 'reality from no perspective' and 'this statement is false.' Embracing Kant as possibility rather than substance (in his best intention), I challenge the confusion in such phrases. We all too easily make phrases that only confuse us. We write checks that can never be cashed, except as a kind of mystical-emotional currency. It is of course difficult to perfect a criterion for excluding such stuff, so we just need the apriori freedom to challenge claims. 'What do you think you can even mean by that ? '
Heh, it seems so small to me. It's like removing saran wrap that you put around your face: what on earth was that saran wrap for?
The former, so I believe, is a falsehood. But it's important to highlight some differences in interpreting and translating Kant -- for some interpretations he's a representationalist, and for some he's a presentationalist. In both, however, there's certainly only one empirical world. So even for Kant, with the distinction between phenomena/noumena, we start together in a single world (and end up together in a single mind).
Basically I'd note that the Transcendental Ego isn't something which every individual possesses, but is rather a structure of The Mind At Large, or in a less grandiose picture it's a necessary feature for cognition to take place however the Mind At Large is (or isn't). But basically the interconnected themes of Hegel is already somewhat in place with Kant -- Kant is no solipsist or skeptic -- the difference has more to do with their respective arguments on reason and logic.
Which is all to highlight how we can reasonably have more than one rationality.
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For me what I keep going back to in Heidi is the present-at-hand/ready-to-hand distinction -- first as a clear example of what the phenomenological argument even is and how its performed correctly, and second as a lovely little needle that pops a lot of idle speculative wonderings with a single distinction.
Plus his philosophy is fundamental to understanding Levinas and Derrida. So he's "in the cannon", like old Hegel too: necessary readings.
I didn't think you were treating any philosopher as infallible. I think it's just the word "foundations" that I'm being a stickler on because I tend to think there's more than one rationality, and I also like to think of thought as more of an ecology rather than as a building: the architectonics will build their buildings, but not all philosophies even aim at building buildings; some are more like gardens. Further "foundations" are associated with "certainty" in my mind due to Descartes, and I tend to think that the desire for certainty is far too played up in philosophy. We like certainty, sure, but a lot of what's interesting isn't certain so there's only so far one can go while requiring certitude.
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I think I'm mostly just reacting to "foundations" -- "articulation", like below, seems to work for me. Same with "enablers".
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A clearer way to say what I'm saying is that the cardinality of the set of rationalities is greater than one. It must be possible to articulate a rationality in order to believe this, else I wouldn't be able to count the members of the set, and reading the books from the canon wouldn't make a good basis for my inference that there's more than one! It's in comparing and contrasting philosophers that I base the inference, given that philosophers are the ones who articulate the rational and, even among the genius and best among them, they disagree on even really basic things like the correct application of logic or on fundamental distinctions or their priority and emphasis.
And I think that disagreement and difference is part of what makes philosophy stay alive, and that philosophy staying alive is a good thing, so I even believe this to be a good thing.
It's just been done successfully more than one time.
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Is the world given at all? :D :naughty:
I agree with refusing to take a useful fiction as an ultimate ontology. The microwaves might utilize less joules of electricity per joule of heat absorbed by our food, but something about that just doesn't seem to say very much about reality. Lowering the cost of producing toasters doesn't tell me much about Being, though it certainly took some scientific workings to help that along.
I'm not sure I'd qualify as an ontologist. If anything a lot of my doubts have to do with uncertainty on how to properly even make an ontological case to someone. It seems to me that ontology is always begging the question, which is why "the given" is tempting: there's a part of the world that's not conceptual, that's not derived from a logical structure. What else to call the there-is than "given"?
But it's there that I see room for the growth of a multitude of philosophies, different gardens on different plots. Some of them are relatively stable like rock gardens, and others overgrown and virulently taking over a part of the forest of thought, no longer contained by a single gardener or anyone at all -- the metaphor of Philosophy as gardening. And where you jump off from is like the seeds you plant at the beginning. Surely you can lay out the structure of how you planted to seeds, but the philosophy will grow and take a life of its own after that.
Heh. I'm not sure that I could climb to those heights. I have an interpretation of Kant, but I'm not sure if it's better to focus on what all human minds can do or what the domain of the set even is. Kant is fascinating because he gives a lot of straightforward** answers to questions that are hard to even define enough to be able to have a set of things to compare!
**Ya'know, relatively speaking to the subject matter.
:up:
Hence 'the worldly foolishness of philosophy' and the 'sophistry' of non-understood gear for a primate who needs bread more than a intensified (luxurious, esoterically elaborated) coherence of identity. We don't need the difficult strong poet either, and really such a strong poet was never for everyone. We need the engineer who need not know or even care what his terms mean beyond marketable functionality. Pragmatism is a tempting vulgar flight from serious inquiry, and I say this as someone who learned much from Rorty and once found this flight more sophisticated than I currently do.
We might also talk of the accidental elitism of higher math with obvious application (advanced set theory) and the 'technical' 'niceties' of ontology embraced as a serious discipline. Maybe it's better to wail on the saxophone or do astrology charts, but I like this game, where the choice of a founding metaphor is indeed significant. 'Existentially' (to me) it's all hebel/hevel (vapor, mist, vanity). But it's a good way for dust that woke up to spend its little moment, seems to me.
Note that I agree with this ontological claim. Only a few wacky philosophers forget that concept is merely one 'aspect' of the world. But I don't see any begging of the question.
I can only surmise that you insist on understanding ontology and rationality as I intend them as something weird or intricate or hidden ? For me phenomenology goes down and into the mundane. A person's ontology is just their big picture understanding of life/world/existence and understanding itself. Holism is the essence here. People study all kinds of things, specializing in this or that. But there's a mode of thinking which tries to synthesize a general understanding of reality, probably always with an emphasis on the role provided for this person to whom the world is given.
I see from the emojis that you are joking. But as a serious question, I'd call it incoherent. It's self-defeating madness to call the obvious and given unreal in the name of a reality which is (by definition) nowhere to be found. Kant is both a cure for nonsense and its inspiration, depending on which side of the coin one looks.
Oh, me too. I certainly don't caution against the game. I am a lover of philosophy, if not a full on philosopher. And in a way sometimes philosophy becomes more than a game. It's serious play, but the masters of the art manage to make philosophy into something more. Those moments of "something more", when the game starts to grasp some kind of wisdom are the best parts of philosophy, and I believe we and others will continue to be able to accomplish that.
More and more I think I'm just fixating on "foundations" as a word for its connotations more than denotations, given everything you've said to qualify the word.
To me it's fairly obvious that Kant must have expected to be interpreted in a 'sane' way. So my own suggestion that the species is the real transcendental ego is an attempt to clean Kant up. But others got there before me, so I'm just catching up with the conversation.
So my issue is whether you can defend these claims with the texts. I don't blame you if you aren't in the mood to dig thru the texts. No problem. But I did quote clear passages and explain problems with them, and so far not a single Kantian on this forum has actually addressed them. The sense organs are used as real to argue that they (and everything else) is mere appearance ---radically unlike the real they merely represent, radically undermining methodological skepticism.
I really hope I don't sound grouchy. I just get into the spirit of the game.
Heh, not at all. You're among friends here who like to be grouchy! :D
:up:
To me it's a bunch of metaphors, some of which have hardened into literality. Bottom, up, first, last, before, after. Embodied metaphoricity (Lakoff).
This is the opening paragraph of the Transcendental Aesthetic in the CPR as translated by Pluhar
"In whatever way and by whatever means a cognition may refer to objects, still intuition is that by which a cognition refers to objects directly, and at which all thought aims as a means. Intuition, however, takes place only insofar as the object is given to us; but that, in turn, is possible only -- for us human beings, at any rate -- by the mind's being affected in a certain manner. The capacity (a receptivity) to acquire presentations as a result of the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Hence by means of sensibility objects are given to us, and it alone supplies us with intuitions. Through understanding, on the other hand, objects are thought, and from it arise concepts. But all thought must, by means of certain characteristics, refer ultimately to intuitions, whether it does so straightforwardly (directe) or circuitously (indrecte); and hence it must, in [human beings], refer ultimately to sensibility, because no object can be given to us in any other manner than through sensibility "
That is -- it's not the sense organs, which are a subject matter for empirical psychology, but sensibility, which is a part of our mind described at a very abstract philosophical level which founds knowledge on cognition.
"Presentations" is Pluhar's translation of Vorstellungen, which is what Norman Kemp Smith, and others, translate as the more familiar "Representations"
One thing to note is that Kant believes we have a direct cognition of objects due to our sensibility, just from this paragraph. So the notion that he's an empirical realist isn't just a kind of defense -- he's a Transcendental Idealist, which means the empirical world is fully real.
Oh I understand that. My point is that my ability to understand that (and Kant's) is parasitic on my everyday knowledge of sense organs in relation to objects --hence 'sensibility.' Semantic smuggling. It's sci-fi. Like the human idea of God, a daddy without a body. The whole notion of a single unified mind (a monologue in the bubble of experience) is likewise parasitic on our normative discursive participation in a community that trains us to be responsible as a 'free' body (or really the virtuality that haunts it) for that body's sayings and doings. One is one around here.
Great to hear !
But that contradicts what I've already quoted. I do think that his living intention is closer to what you say. It had to be. But he wrote some wild sci-stuff that, were he not the great famous philosopher, who lots of brilliant related stuff, would be mocked as post-DMT babble.
Note that he inherited the trope. This is Hume.
We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.
If you believe there's a heirarchy to texts, however, then the CPR will "trump" the prolegomena. That's why I quoted it in opposition to your prolegomena quote.
I don't think there is a 'final' or 'authorative' perspective on Kant. He himself is a like a 'transcendent' spatial object, seen differently by all of us. No 'pure' or trans-perpsectival access.
I accept no authority whatsoever except good ol' rationality itself, an ideal on the horizon. So it's not a scriptural issue but more about whether we are in a bubble. Much bigger than Kant is the bubble issue itself.
So the reference can sit alongside, at least. I'm no Kant scholar, I'm just a nerd who likes the guy.
I think it's great to steelman a beloved thinker. That's roughly equivalent to sharing what one thinks are good beliefs for possible adoption.
I'm really much more interested in the bubble issue itself, as I said above. Kant is just a symbol for that. But so is Hume. Methodological solipsism was always trying to say something profound. So I haven't abandoned what's good in it. I just believe in progress.
This is the advantage of abstract position terminology like direct realism. None of our sentimental attachments (which we all have) get involved in the same way.
No heights. Depths. My thought for defining element was the intuitive use of pure reason.
Step down: subsuming a possibility under a principle;
Step down: the possibility of mathematics;
Step down: the construction of conceptions a priori to validate the object of the possibility;
Step down: the construction of objects a priori representing the constructed conceptions;
Step down: intuit the phenomena representing the constructed conceptions;
Step down: create the objects the phenomena represent, which is the intuitive use of pure reason.
Divisions of time, same thing. Quantities of space, yep…same thing.
Something only the human mind can do, hence a defining element of it, as far as we know. Added bonus, because you asked a couple days ago….it’s how we know 7 + 5 =12.
Anyway…just to put this to bed.
What's weird is that I don't agree with him, I just think his philosophy is amazing . :D So in defending him it's really more like "Look, you're not disagreeing with him *in the right way*" which is just the most asinine position to hold, but there it is.
Quoting plaque flag
Heh, so this is the downside of the historicist approach -- if they're just a symbol then me bringing up this or that thing about them won't speak to the issue, it'll just bring things back to hermeneutics, which is what I try to avoid -- but it's an old habit.