The matter of philosophy
Some of most famous philosophers were anti-philosophers. They argued that philosophy has not matter. Aristotle suggested that the core science is physics. Kant fits the same opinion. Metaphysics is not knowledge and it led to paradoxical conclusions. More, Wittgenstein claimed that it is better does not talk about metaphysics, due to only the science language reflects truly the reality. Finally, Peirce and Quine suggested that there is not frontier between philosophy and science. Both of them, worked consequently on the development of logic. So, my conclusion is that philosophy needs to differentiate of science, but it at present moment has not been made. Logic is the matter of naturalized philosophers. What do you think about?
Comments (48)
Note: within linguistics the term “language” has a broad meaning.
Nice summary that you gave regarding the major philosophers. Thank you.
It's long been differentiated. Science and philosophy are mostly looking at the same things, just with different methodological approaches and slightly different focuses.
Science is experiment-oriented, focused on theorizing and proposing hypotheses that we then attempt to falsify via empirical experiments (whereupon, in lieu of falsification, we consider the hypotheses provisionally verified, at least so long as the experiment was well-designed).
Philosophy is not experiment-oriented. It's more focused on critically examining assumptions that we make, as well as trying to describe, account for and occasionally prescribe things about the world based on abstract structural relations.
Relevant empirical facts should be presupposed in Philosophical problem-solving. And, the coherence which logical investigation imposes upon Scientific description should serve to clarify current knowledge and guide further empirical investigation.
Quoting I like sushi
In my view, it is "semantic" matter, or linguistic one in general.
Quoting hks
Kant would not be agree that philosophy is contradictions free.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Science works on assumptions (theoretical side). The prescribing role could be interesting. Some philosophical accounts have turned to psychological theories (e.g. the mental files theory of Perner, grounden in Frege`s semantic). But it is (theoretical) science after all.
Quoting Galuchat
Again, it is science. Science is not just to make experiments, but to design the experiments, which is often the claimed matter of philosophy, contrarily to the common view of philosophers.
No idea what you're saying in any of that with respect to my comment.
2. For there can be no Religion more true or just, than to know the things that are; and to acknowledge thanks for all things, to him that made them, which thing I shall not cease continually to do.
3. What then should a man do, O Father, to lead his life well, seeing there is nothing here true?
4. Be Pious and Religious, O my Son, for he that doth so, is the best and highest Philosopher; and without Philosophy, it is impossible ever to attain to the height and exactness of Piety or Religion.
5. But he that shall learn and study the things that are, and how they are ordered and governed, and by whom and for what cause, or to what end, will acknowledge thanks to the Workman as to a good Father, an excellent Nurse and a faithful Steward, and he that gives thanks shall be Pious or Religious, and he that is Religious shall know both where the truth is, and what it is, and learning that, he will be yet more and more Religious. [The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus]
The underlined and in bold, seems to me, to refer to what philosophy is or what it attempts to achieve. I also came across the following definition (from an esoteric book whose name I can't remember), "Philosophy is the study of facts in their right relation."
If the proposed provenance of The Divine Pymander is true, then, Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus may well be the first philosophic writer. That aside, it seems that even in ancient times the significance of philosophy was well defined including its influence on other fields of knowledge and information.
Check out Heidegger. I don't really think the high idea of philosophy is dead. He's not the only name, but I think you'll find him at the roots of this kind of not-giving-over to science.
I think your post is based on a fundamental mistake about what philosophers, prior to modernity, thought that science was. Aristotle’s physics was not at all ‘scientific’ in modern terms, but was animated throughout by what we would now see as anthropomorphism. The Aristotelian conception of the Universe was that it was animated by purpose, and the crowning glory of the philosopher was the contemplation of the eternal ideas. Of course, Aristotelian physics was to be completely discredited by Galileo, in fact that was one of the milestones in the transition from medieval to modern science.
As for Wittgenstein, according to Ray Monk, who wrote a well-regarded biography of him,
Wittgenstein’s Forgotten Lessons
And indeed many 20th century, especially in the English-speaking world, fell thoroughly under the thrall of science as universal arbiter of truth. But regrettably to those with such an attitude, the difference between science and philosophy may be impossible to explain, as it’s a philosophical distinction.
[quote=Heidegger]
Perhaps [philosophy] cannot be determined as something else, but can be determined only from out of itself and as itself -- comparable with nothing else in terms of which it could be positively determined. In that case philosophy is something that stands on its own, something ultimate.
...
We are always called upon by something as a whole. This 'as a whole' is the world...This is where we are driven in homesickness. Our very being is this restlessness. We have somehow always already departed toward this whole, or better, we are always already on the way to it. ...We ourselves are this underway, this transition, this 'neither the one nor the other.'
...
Rather this urge to be at home everywhere is at the same time a seeking of those ways which open the right path for these questions. For this, in turn, we turn to the hammer of conceptual comprehension, we require those concepts which can open such a path. We are dealing with a conceptual comprehension and with concepts of a primordial kind. Metaphysical concepts remain eternally closed off from any inherently indifferent and noncommittal scientific acumen.
...
Above all...we shall have never have comprehended these concepts and their conceptual rigor unless we have first been gripped by whatever they are supposed to comprehend. All such being gripped comes from and remains in an attunement.
...
We ask anew: What is man? A transition, a direction, a storm sweeping over the planet, a recurrence or vexation for the gods? We do not know. Yet we have seen that in the essence of this mysterious being, philosophy happens.
[/quote]
from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
Heidegger made in my view metaphysics. He suggested that only Germanic people are humans due to they construct their existential project (consisting for Heidegger in killing Jews, due to they are calculators ...). More, he thought that irationalism is rational, so he was either Nazi or absurd.
Quoting Wayfarer
My point it that philosophy, as differentiate discipline, is not supported by several famous philosophers, including Aristotle, the only pre-modern in my list.
Thanks for the responses.
I thought you'd dig that. Philosophy as ultimate. I think that starts to do it justice. If something could grasp it from the outside correctly, then it wouldn't be philosophy in the strong sense.
[quote=W]
I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst. Man has the drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think, for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists [das etwas existiert]. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only,a priori, be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of language.
Kierkegaard also saw this running-up and similarly pointed it out (as running up against the paradox). This running up against the boundaries of language is Ethics.
I hold it certainly to be very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values [ob es Werte gebe , whether the Good can be defined, etc.
In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain: whatever one may give as a definition of the Good – it is always only a misunderstanding to suppose that the expression corresponds to what one actually means (Moore). But the tendency to run up against shows something. The holy Augustine already knew this when he said: “What, you scoundrel, you would speak no nonsense? Go ahead and speak nonsense – it doesn’t matter!"
[/quote]
TLP
It's also significant that this is the sequence of aphorisms that ends with the one that is often said to be reminiscent of Zen:
cf:
The Buddha
//ps// also relevant is Wittgenstein Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism, Philosophy Now. Contains a heading, Philosophy is not a Science.
Nice points. I always loved the ending part of the TLP, never really grokked the complicated stuff leading up to it, maybe because I had read criticisms of those details.
I think (as you imply) that he was attacking the idea that the highest things could be subject to a science. The 'unwritten' part of the TLP (passed over in conspicuous silence) was dearest to him, as I understand it. Only Wittgenstein could get away with talking 'nonsense' to Carnap.
[quote= Carnap]
When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.
[/quote]
It's interesting how positivism etc. can function as a kind of primer for negative theology. In its pursuit of a certain kind of purity, it actually abandons the 'spiritual' in a way that gives it space.
For Carnap, talk of God that claims to mean something non-empirical must refer to images and feelings and therefore have no meaning. This identification of meaning with the empirical has a kind of massive stupidity. What does Carnap himself mean by 'feeling' here? If reference to feeling has no meaning? As often happens, the flight from meaning within meaning collapses into absurdity.
https://philarchive.org/archive/TEOv1
I wonder how much we can agree on a few issues. What do you make of the idea that intelligibility itself is the fundamental mystery? an intelligible life-world? Also, to what degree would you limit the spiritual to the realm of feeling, concept, and sensation? In other ways, to a way of existing. Would you grant that the spiritual is maybe 'only' 'ordinary' life lived in a certain way? With no quasi-scientific claims to make but only reports of 'internal' experience? This 'internal' is tricky, because the higher thoughts and feelings have a universality in my view. All explicit formulations fail or have their blindspots, like every attempt to count the real numbers one by one.
And of course the ladder is beautiful. One way I like to interpret it is earnest conceptual analysis that finally leads to an aporia. Again and again perhaps until one has a grasp on something like semantic holism --and the grasp of the mystery of this 'thing' we are, a space for interpretation. Such a space requires an 'existential' in which things are articulated and clarified non-instantaneously.
I know you've never been that open to Nietzsche, but what of this portrait of Christ? So far no one has told me they are moved by it or find anything in it. But I think it captures a behindness-of-langauge that I relate to in high moments.
[quote=N]
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things.
[/quote]
I think climbing the ladder of concept allows one to see something about the relationship between concepts and [s]life.[/s] In this case the 'pure' ignorance would be a learned ignorance.
We see the 'destructive' or critical mind work through positive theologies one by one, climaxing in a negative theology of 'life' or 'light.'
This is lovely too. The idea for me is that words are a ladder to a state beyond words, or a state beyond any particular words. The 'point' of the particular words is that they can teach us the unimportance of the particular words used to get this point. It's like Kafa's Castle. For each man a door just for him, the ladder of his own strange and crooked life. And the particular words are therefore tangled up with the petty self that insists on its conceptual idols--usually in an attempt to control others, which reduces the spiritual to the political just as others would reduce it to science (which may really just be politics, a claim on the Real to ground political claims.)This is not to say that politics or science becomes wrong but only to open the possibility that we maintain in ourselves a sense of something higher than either (a mode of being that comes and goes, open to sinners and fools in other moments) . Those who reject that something can be higher than either already have their sacred on hand, whichever one they've picked.
*This is just the way I'm currently seeing things. I don't want to sound dogmatic. I just want to get it out in a clear way.
Quoting hks
Quoting BrianW
From the Wiktionary: philosophy n.
It seems "philosophy" is different things to different people. For me, it's just thinking about more or less anything. Thinking about thinking is probably the most fun, but thinking can address anything, and so philosophy can too.
But that's not to say that all thinking is philosophy. Thinking about whether I'll go to the pub quiz on Monday, or fixing the shed roof before winter; those aren't philosophy. But I think any kind of serious, considered, thought is probably philosophy. IMO, of course. :smile:
It's worth noticing that 'intelligibility' has a very different meaning in what we might call classical philosophy than it has in the modern world. The point about 'intelligible truths' was that they were immediate and apodictic in a way that facts about the world could never be. For the grand tradition, this was testimony that they belonged to a higher or deeper or more general level of truth, than did facts about the world. (And notice the resonances between that and 6.41 above.)
But, the idea of intelligibility is intimately linked to the theory of ideas. Again, the idea or form of something was grasped directly in a way that facts-about-the-world could never be.
[quote=Lloyd Gerson] Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. [/quote]
Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism, around 39:00
Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism
I think this is why universals are fundamental to the notion of 'intelligibility'. Get rid of universals, as nominalism did in the late medieval period, and intelligibility goes with it, with considerable consequences.
Quoting macrosoft
Not so much, in my book. But there's no representational mode that conveys it, other than the symbolic (which the N. quote actually alludes to). But the domain of 'being itself', if I may coin a phase, which is the domain of 'the spiritual', is the domain of 'realised being' - something which is implicit in all Eastern religions, and hardly comprehended in Western.
The problem, again, is that the cultural matrix in which our dialogue is conducted has no convention within which such a question can even be meaningfully discussed. That's why it must always be depicted in terms of 'poetry and religion' - vague, nebulous, ennobling perhaps, but in no way real. We have a collective construct of what is real, built around science, but science itself is also a construct, at least when it comes to being considered a world-view.
For me though the issue isn't about certainty but about intelligibility itself, the very existence of meaning or concept. For me epistemology is secondary to this mystery, since epistemology presupposes its own intelligibility. So does the solipsist, the radical skeptic. They mean something. In 'I think therefore I am' we have the link between concept and existence, but Descartes was too interested in a quasi-theological epistemological grounding of truth to be examine what makes truth possible --concept, meaning, intelligibility.
Quoting Wayfarer
As I grasp the matter, the world is grasped by means of the forms or concepts. Facts are made of concepts.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think what we already have (more or less explicitly) is a holism with respect to universals. Meaning is not assembled from a set of distinct universals. Instead distinct universals are plucked imperfectly from a living meaning which is continuous.
As far as consequences go, I agree. The denial of meaning is surprisingly common. But I'd say let's avoid this implicit shift into politics. Or by all means contextualize your thought in those terms. But for me (to contextualize my position) the shift into politics ultimately reduces philosophy to culture-war.
Quoting Wayfarer
Much of philosophy is indeed concerned with meaning (universals) though. Some philosophers are indeed 'scientistic.' Others (like the 2 seemingly most famous philosophers of the 20th century) were distinctly anti-scientistic, with Heidegger being the variable boogey-man, and not at all only because of his political stupidities. Wittgenstein has an ambiguous status, given his later tendency to avoid exact theses.
Beyond philosophy, I agree there are prominent intellectuals who consign the merely 'subjective' to the real of illusion. IMV they really don't speak to or for most people. They are the intellectual heroes of neckbeard theology -- a naive collapse of one handy way of talking among others into the one way of talking that gets it right. I won't attribute this view to you, but I did read some of the links in your profile. And I sometimes get the impression that what some culture warriors desire is to simply replace one positive theology (of dead junk) with another. In short, what is desire is the replacement with one authoritative science of the truly real with another. Again, I'm not saying this is your view.
Let's give this position its due. Science has prestige as far as I can tell because it appeals to the vulgar or universal desires. Our animal selves are dazzled by the utility of prediction and control. But there is also a desire in humans to transcend the merely human. IMV, this is how a base instrumentalism gets super-charged with metaphysical significance. The real is identified with public power. Bacon said knowledge was power. But this is best read as 'power is knowledge.' The question of power, however, seems inseparable from the question of value. That which is powerful is that which gives us what we want. As long as we want animal comforts and fun gadgets more than 'inner' illumination, there will be a temptation to read scientific discourse as metaphysical truth. So the position that opposes science-as-metaphysics can be understood to oppose a certain shallowness in the contemporary lifestyle.
One of the questions you didn't address is whether such shallowness can be said to be 'cured' in terms of conceptually mediated feeling. Another question might be whether the individual can/should seek salvation in non-political terms, accepting the shallowness of the world as a sort of cocoon from which individuals emerge if they are sufficiently passionate about higher things, 'gripped' by an attunement.
For me the 'spiritual' issue is indeed higher than any kind of culture war or the speaking of what ought to be. 'God' exists within 'sinful' morality. From this perspective, positive theologies are a denial of the incarnation. That's where the cleansing flame of nihilism comes in as a dark night of the soul. We might say (symbolically) that this dark night of the soul is a suffering of the crucifixion, a realization that all our hopes and intuitions of the divine are nailed to a dying body in an unjust world that cannot be rationally grounded. This world in which we feel the divine in the context of mortality and injustice is a brute fact.
(I don't think we agree on all of this. I would like it if you would engage with some of the other points in my original post --if you feel like it, of course.)
The point I’m trying to articulate is a very general one. As I said, I think ‘intelligibility’ had a specific meaning, and a different meaning, in pre-modern philosophy. The fact that the meaning has shifted, actually means that we no longer have the same sense of what 'intelligible' means. And I don't think that the reality of universals is at all accepted in modern philosophy generally - about the place you'll find it, is in neo-Thomism, as they have kept it alive (which I have learned from reading a smattering of neo-thomist philosophy from the likes of Gilson, Maritain and Feser.)
Quoting macrosoft
Are you familiar with the expression 'cartesian anxiety'?
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
So, a 'cure' for that, involves coming to some understanding of how modernity is itself a kind of mindset or state of being, and understanding the cultural dynamics that drive it. That is the sense in which my orientation is basically counter-cultural. You actually have to jail-break yourself out of the Western mindset which is no easy task, if you're living in it, as we all are.
Quoting macrosoft
:up:
Quoting macrosoft
The narrative of those references revolves around the 'new atheism' (which is already old), but which is what got me interested in forums 10 years ago - 2 and 3 are critical reviews of Dawkins and Dennett; 4 and 5 are about Nagel's book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. So, those links address a coherent theme, which is the attack on religion (broadly conceived) by neo-darwinian materialism, of which Dawkins and Dennett are representatives; and Nagels' book, which is a counter-argument against the same, not from the perspective of a religious apologist, but from a secular academic.
My 'meta-narrative' is about how the secular-scientific attitude became so entrenched in Western culture. So I don't see it in terms of 'replacing one theology with another' but trying to understand the underlying dynamics and how they have unfolded over history. (Actually had I had any kind of career in academia, it would likely have been more suited to history than philosophy per se.)
Quoting macrosoft
There are some domains of discourse in which that is true - for example, Soto Zen, which is very much oriented around how the 'ordinary mind' is itself extraordinary ('Chop wood! Draw water! How marvellous! How mysterious!'. 'When hungry I eat, when tired I sleep, fools will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.') But the point is, that school of Zen was itself the culmination of more than a thousand years of dialectic, starting with the Buddha, and then unfolding through the subsequent centuries, millenia even, to find expression in the writings of Dogen (who some have compared to Heidegger.) And there's an awful lot of implicit depth in that tradition, if you actually encounter it; their 'ordinary' is far from the 'ordinary' of the 'ordinary wordling'.
But overall, my 'perennialist' leanings are such that I really do think there's an underlying 'topography of the sacred'. Of course the 'parable of the blind men and the elephant' always bedevils such an analysis, but this is the general drift (courtesy Ken Wilber):
E. F. Schumacher laid it out.
I agree that the theory of universals is not accepted. I'm saying that it has been replaced by the problem of meaning. And I find it plausible that we don't have the same notion of intelligibility. But how would we know? If you, for instance, have access to this notion, then it's not really lost. Personally I think semantic holism is far more plausible.
This is one the big themes in Heidegger. Descartes encouraged us to read our own existence as a present-to-hand object, a kind of rock with consciousness stapled to it somehow. Deconstruction AFAK started with Heidegger's dismantling of this encrusted taken-for-granted ontology that obscures the phenomenon of being-in-the-world-with-others. We are always already in the world with others in a pre-theoretical way. This being-in-the-world-with-others is why solipsists immediately want to tell folks about their discovery. This is why people can argue about which theory of truth is true without having settled on a theory of truth. The obsession with epistemology obscures the paucity of meaning in the very terms we argue about. Whether something exists obscures what we even mean by 'exist.' IMV, hermeneutical phenomenology was exactly the kind of opening philosophy was right to take. Whether one likes Heidegger, his general approach seems to be neither science nor literature and aim at something like wisdom.
Quoting Wayfarer
I very much agree on this goal of a 'jailbreak.' I'd say that individuals vary widely in terms of how much they are caught up in it. Of course one starts in the common consciousness more or less. Then one spends a lifetime trying to get brighter and freer.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thank you. That is clarifying. I also find that fascinating. One theory is that Plato himself got that in motion. Scientism offers a debased leading-out-of-the-cave as its gimmick. The human world (maybe consciousness itself) is an illusion. The truth is dead stuff and randomness. While there are some who publicly tout these ideas, I don't think anyone can live by them. Dawkins is a neckbeard's theologian.
We might talk about the schism between artificial theories and life as it is lived.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks. I underlined the part that echoes the notion of learned ignorance. I speculate that Pyrrho and other skeptics have been caricatured. For me there is the notion of getting behind language. As I understand it, this comes from a mastery of concepts, not their neglect. It's the apotheosis of trying to trap the real in finite expressions. You mention the 'thousands of years of dialectic' this required, which is also an extremely Hegelian idea. Following this logic, the spiritual possibilities for individuals are caught up in time. On the other hand, I think existence is justified in terms of feeling. Presumably our affective structure is sufficiently constant for the same enjoyment of the 'absolute' through varying conceptual lenses over the centuries. Or we might say that the 'absolute' takes different forms, where feeling is grasped in better and better concepts to hold it fast. Or just to light up the concept system with passion. The 'absolute' or 'God' could just be a word that gets used again and again for related but somewhat different states of mind (peak experiences). I find this last one most plausible.
The topology of the sacred I find most plausible is in terms of primordial images. These images just keep on working, despite our time-bound conceptualizations. I do like Wilbur's hierarchy, and I was pretty impressed once by his Brief History of Everything. I should check it out again after all these years. I know that he mentioned Hegel (before I had read any Hegel), and I would probably like his holons more now that I'm more of a holist. (Some might say A-holist.)
It could be demonstrated with reference to the texts - that’s what I tried to do with those two quotes from Gerson and Feser. I’ve read some books on the idea, but it’s hard to explain.
There’s book by a professor of English at Uni of Chicago called ‘Ideas have consequences’, Richard Weaver. It is exactly about the dissolution of a real metaphysics and its pernicious consequences for Western culture. (Unfortunately, it is a book that is now mainly associated with American conservatism. But then I also agree with much of the analysis in Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, which is archetypal New Left, so I hope that balances it up a bit.)
But in any case, the really key point, the crucial fact, is the nature of the reality of ideas. They’re not real because they’re generated by some piece of meat that grew in the Petri dish of evolution; they’re real whether anyone knows them or not.
Quoting macrosoft
Husserl’s critique of Descartes in Crisis of the European Sciences anticipated that. In any case, it is true - it is the consequence of treating ‘res cogitans’ as a ‘that’ (whereas in reality it is always unknown.)
Have you heard about the purported relationship between Pyrrho of Elis and Buddhism? Also see Katja Vogt.
I agree Hegel’s conception of dialectic is profound.
Thanks for the reference to E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed. I had not known about it and will give it a read.
The "'topography of the sacred' along with the diagram reminds me a lot of Plotinus mapping out forms of experiences. It also reminds me of some of the Gnostic "maps" that Plotinus opposed.
On the matter of " Cartesian anxiety", it may be worth considering that Spinoza wrote his Ethics with the intent of belaying perplexity of this kind. Not just in saying that all substances (including our minds) are in God but by noting that men can only see will and intent as a means to an end whereas it is very unlikely that God suffers the same limitation. Along the same lines, Spinoza distinguishes looking for causes of finite things as necessarily looking for something outside of the caused thing where infinite things cause themselves.
In this register, Descartes would have to be infinite to be the source of verification he claims he is.
Your rhetorical question is a meaningless taunt.
I think also that the meaning of ‘substance’ is very different in Spinoza than what we take it to mean currently, in that it also has a sense of ‘subject’ or perhaps ‘being’; it’s not something objective in the way we would nowadays expect.
Quoting Valentinus
Neo-platonism is very much concerned with that. So too were the gnostics, although as you say, Plotinus was critical of them, but from our perspective both sides might seem to have much more in common than either of them do with us today.
It is the loss of a sense of there being a 'vertical dimension' that I take to be one of the cardinal signposts of modernity. Post Descartes' 'new science', it was felt that literally everything knowable should be able to be represented through algebraic geometry. One of the pernicious consequences of his ‘objectification’ of ‘res cogitans’ was precisely to transform it into a kind of ghost (hence the ‘ghost in the machine’ criticism in Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind, which is viewed as one of the most influential books in modern philosophy of mind.)
Regarding Schumacher’s book - I don’t know if I could hand-on-heart recommend it as a book, it’s more that the abstract of it makes a very clear point about ontology and the shortcomings of scientific materialism. But it’s significant that Schumacher ultimately converted (dragged kicking and screaming, some say - see here) to Catholicism, because really what that book does is recapitulate in very summary form the idea of an hierarchy of being, which is, again, what has largely dropped out of modern philosophical discourse.
Not to be difficult, but anything less than direct experience would seem to be a talking about what is finally not understood, a difference as difference without further specification.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a bold thesis, a theological thesis even, assuming these ideas are of central significance. For me this is hard to make sense of in the same way as mathematical platonism is hard to make sense of. We have access to 'intersubjectivity' (a non-neutral word), which provides the phenomenon that might be interpreted in terms of a faculty that 'sees' an otherwise invisible realm. For me, though, the phenomenon in its being is the 'reality' of the situation. Attaching additional concepts to this direct experience of the intuitions (they exists 'outside' us) would just be contexualizing the experience among other experiences. This is not to say that experience must be interpreted in terms of a subject having experience. The word 'experience' points at what is given, that which we try to describe and understand.
Or which it itself (experience) tries to understand as an embodied, self-clarifying field of meaning.
Quoting Wayfarer
I take your point about 'unknown,' but maybe 'elusive' is better? Something always unknown is arguably not worth troubling ourselves about. The 'pure witness' gets some of what's important. Existence is its there. But the pure witness (subject as bare possibility of experience) is outside of time, and this implicitly freezes being out of time, since such a subject must be being itself. Or being in the sense of that which lights up or discloses or gives beings. I'd say an immanently historical stream of meaningful experience that experiences itself as experience is not too far from the situation. We might also talk of a 'thrown open space' that 'worlds.' Hegel seemed to be pointing at this in a lingo that was either insufficiently dynamic (crystalline as in shard of conceptual glass) or just too hard to understand (is the concrete concept continuous?).
Quoting Wayfarer
No, but that is what I had in mind. I suspect that some dialectical/argumentative/epistemological thinkers had breakthroughs and got 'behind' language, 'behind' an objectifying grasp of existence. To speak of an elusive becoming at the ground of beings is not enough, since those in the objectifying mode must take this becoming and this ground as one more being and not as the thrown open space for beings. IMV, Wittgenstein's ability to be shocked that the world exists is a becoming-aware of this thrown-open-space. Any purported ground of this space must be yet another object within this space and not its ground. That's why I suggested that intelligibility itself (the space of meaning) was the great mystery. All other explorations, questionings, and explanations presuppose this space. Man is the biological foundation of this space and simultaneously this space itself in which he roams for a ground apart from himself., his own mortal abyss-for-ground. Cue the organ music.
Your point is well taken that what Spinoza was saying by "substance" cannot be easily associated with contemporary meanings. I am only adding the observation that his idea was also at odds with his contemporaries, including a certain guy from France. I read Spinoza as also directly challenging Anselm in regards to "what can be conceived." I will save that argument for another day.
Quoting Wayfarer
For sure. And I brought up Spinoza partly because he is part of the exclusion or prison escape you are talking about. Not because he shares something essential to the the others that I could prove as a matter of principle.
It is more along the lines of checking out who Dante put in the pagan lobby in the Inferno. Nice crowd.
I understand the limitations of your regard regarding Schumacher. It is similar to my regard for Ivan Illich. I don't agree with Illich for many particular reasons (maybe most of them) but love him for what he took upon himself to struggle with.
[quote =Kiesel interpreting/translating Heidegger in 1919]
Since the grasp of concepts intercept life and 'still the stream,' phenomenology must find less intrusive, more natural ways to get a grip on its subject matter, which remain in accord with 'the immanent historicity of life in itself.'
...
It involves a phenomenological modification of traditional formalization in order to efface its proclivity toward diremption. All formally indicative concepts aim, strictly speaking, to express only the pure 'out toward' without any further content or ontic fulfillment.
...
The conceptual pair motive-tendency (later the pair thrownness-project understood as equiprimordial) is not a duality, but rather the 'motivated tendency' or the 'tending motivation' in which the 'outworlding' of life expresses itself. Expression, articulation, differentiation arises out of a core of indifferentiation which is no longer to be understood in terms of subject-object, form-matter, or any other duality.
...
Experienced experience, this streaming return of life back upon itself, is precisely the immanent historicity of life, a certain familiarity or 'understanding' that life already has with itself and that phenomenological intuition must simply 'repeat.' And what is this understanding, whether implicit or methodologically explicit, given to understand? The articulations of life itself, which accrue to the self-experience that occurs in the 'dialectical' return of experiencing life to already experienced life...Once again, life is not mute but meaningful, it 'expresses' itself precisely in and through its self-experience and spontaneous self-understanding.
...
The full historical I finds itself caught up in meaningful contexts so that it oscillates according to the rhythmics of worlding, it properizes itself to the articulations of an experience which is governed by the immanent historicity of life in itself. For the primal It of the life stream is more than the primal I. It is the self experiencing itself experiencing the worldly. The ultimate source of the deep hermeneutics of life is properly an irreducible 'It' that precedes and enables the I. It is the unity and whole of the 'sphere of experience' understood as a self-sufficient domain of meaning that phenomenology seeks to approach, 'understandingly experience,' and bring to appropriate language.
[/quote]
Here it is again:
I bolded the last, because it’s key to the point. I think that we nowadays instinctively understand the nature of such things in terms of ‘what brains do’. But
Thoughts are Real
Platonic idealism basically affirms that ideas are real - not only by virtue of their being in individual minds. But of course the immediate objection to that - one that Plato himself didn’t have an answer for - is ‘where or in what sense do they exist?’ What I argue is that they precede and inform existence; that they subsist at a different level to phenomenal objects. Russell says:
So the view that I am developing is that universals in this sense, are constitutive of our experience and knowledge of the world. They provide the conceptual foundations of reason itself. But since the advent of nominalism, this is no longer understood; instead, reason is seen in Darwinian terms, as an adaptation. And that is where my other pinned article comes in, Maritain’s criticism of empiricism. But that is more than enough for one post.
I think maybe you are misunderstanding me. IMV, thoughts are extremely real, even perhaps the essence of the human as human. I've been harping on the field of meaning for awhile.
IMV, the triangular argument doesn't get us beyond inter-subjectivity. I agree that we have some sort of geometric and numerical intuition. My point is that this intuition is just there for investigation. Is it just what brains do? I don't know. How do we see around our own cognition to check? My default position on this is quasi-Kantian. The universality of such intuitions suggests that they just come included with human cognition in general. That this is connected to the brain is of course highly plausible. But for me the brain issue is not central, since I think the denial of consciousness is simply absurd.
It seems that our views overlap in some important ways (the objection that philosophy be scientism). On the other hand, I have the sense that you prefer something beyond or behind experience (?). When you quoted Wittgenstein, I initially interpreted you in terms of doing so along my own lines. Now that seems unlikely. Correct me if I am wrong here. For me the revelation of the mystery is itself the thing. I'm not sure, but I get the impression that you may be working from the sense that revealing the mystery is only a clearing to answer that mystery. In other words, the mystery (that there is a meaningful world) only serves to indicate the limitations of physical science and not some other, higher science (metaphysics.)
I welcome that. It is philosophy that aspires to the heights. In my lingo, that would be a kind of positive theology. Not that it has to by any means, but it doesn't speak to me like the open space of the [s]question.[/s] The question is under erasure because it seeks for a ground, and yet the ground it seeks must be a groundless ground or yet one more object in the field to be grounded. IMV, it's the human abliity to get behind this nexus as a whole that constitutes transcendence. To perceive groundlessness is to be struck with wonder and/or terror. We are thrown back on our own mortal meaning-making in the space of the mystery.
In contrast, I think your view (?) involves the grasping of particular ideas? The grasping of a true ground that is not also an abyss? I do hope I don't offend you by coming out and saying so shamelessly how I see things. They say to never talk religion or politics. I can give up politics, but philosophy/religion is just too much keep down.
Quoting macrosoft
Sure, but real in what sense? The example of a triangle is trite, but it’s just an illustration of a broader principle. What’s at stake is the ontology of ideas in a general sense. You see, I think modern culture generally has a sense that the nature of ideas, and, as you say, the ground of meaning, can be understood through the perspective of biology and neurology. Not saying you believe that, you obviously don’t, but I would think it’s the consensus view. Challenging that view is what Nagel was pilloried over. (I don’t know if I mentioned Meaning and the Problem of Universals by Kelly Ross, but he talks about exactly the link between universals and meaning.)
Of course the ability to think and abstract is inextricably connected with the brain, insofar as it is the advanced hominid forebrain that enables it. But my argument is that the advent of language, reasoning, and myth-making, is precisely where h. Sapiens transcends the (merely) biological. And that is in large part because she is able to intuit that which is *not* simply the product of chance and necessity.
Regarding Wittgenstein, I think that positivism routinely misinterpreted him. When he ended his masterwork with ‘that of which we cannot speak’, he wasn’t saying, like Carnap and Ayer said, that metaphysics is merely nonsensical or ‘otiose’ (one of Ayer’s favourite words). It’s simply that it concerns subjects which can’t be meaningfully conveyed through discursive thought. But for anyone who has become familiar with Eastern non-dualism, that is hardly a radical idea. (Again, this is the sense in which W. is sometimes compared to Buddhism.) But I think the thrust of the work was to ‘take you to the border’ as it were, so as to sense the vastness beyond.
Quoting macrosoft
Your posts are a model of courtesy.
And, my train is about to arrive......
Can you? :chin: :chin: :chin:
Regarding the IEP article, it does a good job of describing the differences between how substance is described in Spinoza and Descartes but doesn't reflect Spinoza's emphasis on our limits to explain causes or investigate them.
I will look for a short bit of Spinoza that touches upon this.
I posted one dictionary definition, along with a number of poster's' definitions, to show that we don't agree on a definition. I don't think I have referred to God or Aristotle at all, have I? :chin: What's your issue?
A dictionary definition is often a convenient starting point. It's no more than that, and philosophers often need a bit more than this simple convenience. But is that any reason to get sniffy about dictionaries? I don't think so.
An excellent question, and that is where meaning holism comes in. All I can possibly offer you is just more words. And how are those words intended exactly? For me this holism angle is crucial. Most philosophy has been trying to concentrate all meaning into a few words. Some basic set of words say what is really there. But what is really there is largely just this very saying, just this questioning. Reality is self-questioning. Reality is made of questions. Holy cow, I never thought of it just that way, though that has been implicit. I think this is Hegel meant. The dialectical process is chasing for the real that lives beyond it. At some point BANG! it realizes that it is and has been the intelligible structure of a self-exploring self-interpreting substance-subject worldling. Reality is made of questions, and theology itself is God. Is that the final name? I can't claim that. I do think this position is a few rungs up the ladder of self-consciousness. Is this the ladder to climb? It has always just felt right to me.
Philosophy wants to know what philosophy is. 'What is this, this philosophy?' Reality, through us, wants to know what's real. And there it is: reality is that which wants to know what's real. This brings in the future, the unknown. Perhaps the space is held open by our questioning. We temporarily sink to animal immersion in the business of practical life now and then. We forget we are there. We are the-washing-of-dishes, the-editing-of-emails.
Quoting Wayfarer
I do see that lots of intellectuals think that, but they tend to be on the hard science side. Maybe a large number of ordinary folks treat them with reverence, seduced by gadgets, not realizing the leap from gadget making to philosophy. And definitely there is a common-sense vague Darwinism out their in terms of explaining behavior. Biology is one of my weaker subjects, so I am tuned in to this vague common sense. Fortunately I have scientific training elsewhere, so I am aware of how lazy my grasp is. Anyway, our self-image is in a weird place right now as a species. Our biologists talk a lingo right out of Mein Kampf (to wildly exaggerate for effect) and our politicians are as 'sensitive' as can be. Are we just codes that want to replicate who mistakenly think we exist? Then TV and literature sends another message --at its best a more honest message. Fiction just emphasizes our situation, intensifies it, mirrors it back to us along with interpretations of what we are in their tangled and combative plurality.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am quite open to this view. That's why I object to the monkey talk as not 'realistic' talk but a metaphysical talk posing as science. We have the same animal foundations as the chimp, etc., but I agree that the cultural realm stands above all that. I am weak in biology, but I find it very unlikely that biology concerns itself much with the realm of meaning. It's strange that this highest realm is also so elusive with respect to our most practically effective form of knowledge. On the other hand, science starts with the de-worlded a-historical subject. To be a scientist is (seemingly) switch into a mode where all meaning is purely formal and quantitative. Both Hegel and Heidegger talked about this most certain science (math) also being the easiest, since it can be made perfectly explicit. Even a dead computer can check a proof.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that they misinterpreted him. But I think Carnap had to have seen some weirdness and still couldn't help being impressed, which does credit to Carnap as a human being responding against his own ideology to sincere inquiry. DIdn't W read some kind of famous mystical writing to the circle? So they figured it out at some point. Their hero was not exactly on their team.
I agree also about this 'vastness of the beyond.' And I agree that what is pointed at is non-linguistic. As W said, questions exist only where an answer is possible. As I read it, it is in really questioning the questioning that we discover a lyrical cry of wonder. We can't ask for the source or meaning of the whole. It is not an intelligible question. Explanation is only 'between' objects within the space of meaning as a whole. By definition there is nothing beyond the whole, nothing to put it in relation to. If hidden entities are invoked, we have merely expanded our notion of the whole. For instance, angels would be one more kind of being that we could talk about. Traditional notions of God offer also just one more object to be explained. Physical theories of everything become themselves brute facts.
[quote=W]
The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
...
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
...
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.
...
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.
[/quote]
Clearly we all find what appeals to us in text. As I mentioned before, I had an intense 'vision of contigency' as a teenager. I had grandma's old typewriter and laid out my own amatuer TLP on some fancy paper from Walmart. 'Color is a miracle. Space is a miracle. Thought is miracle.' I was also shocked once as a boy on Easter, of all days. The existence of a rushing creek after a heavy rain screamed at me in its beauty and its 'thereness.' Off and on I'd have lesser versions of this kind of thing, but they got rarer as I aged. Nevertheless, these experiences surely inform my leaning-toward a 'mysticism of being' that is more or less wordless as a mere pointing. The attunement is everything, and it's not in power to control that attunement. On the bright side, philosophy maintains some quiet ember under the ashes for me. This is aesthetics-as-ethics is some ways. One wants to be kind (when possible), but for me there is no explicit law to be had or recognized. I have to improvise, often regretting things that should/could have been done better, with more kindness-openness-grace.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks. Yours too.
Your concern for my philosophical mental hygiene is touching, but I shan't be needing it again, thank you.
If you have an ignore-list, I think it would suit us both better if you put my name there.