Claim: There is valid information supplied by the images in the cave wall in the Republic
I've been long troubled by the image-theory of the Republic. Images can be analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, computed, combined, reasoned. There is no reason why reality -- the thing, from the silhouettes of which the images are cast -- can't be computed by correctly reconciling the images and their interactions. We ought to be able to build, therefore, the ideal Chair, or the ideal Face-Losing or any of the rest of the ideals. It may take some time, and some brains, maybe also a little luck, but theoretically it ought to be possible.
Would this be in line with Plato's - Socrates' reasoning, but of which the two did not think?
Would this be in line with Plato's - Socrates' reasoning, but of which the two did not think?
Comments (256)
What I am saying, is that Forms or Ideals are not impossible, according to Plato and Socrates; they are real, they exist.
If that is true, then all the chairs whose silhouette images we see on the cave walls, can be combined (properly) to produce the Form of a chair.
This ought not to be impossible, given enough data (observation of silhouettes) and combining power (human mind possibly with computer help).
My question remains, can you see this opinion of mine (once properly understood) as a way to get to the Forms of things, and Plato and Socrates just did not think of this approach?
Of course if there exists a proof that it is impossible to create the Forms, then the Forms don't exist, and the images on the cave wall are not a good analogy of how we ought to observe reality.
Obviously the wall shadows are not the only projections that we experience in life, but shadows of other Forms, which can't be projected as shadows.
How did Socrates or Plato deal with the Forms that must exist, yet they have no objects that form shadows?
The shadows on the cave wall are shadows of the things paraded in front of the cave fire. The image of the cave is “an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind.” (514a)
You are right that in each individual case the imperfections will not be eliminated; but you could be (notice the conditional) wrong, and my proposition is that you are wrong, when you say that cumulative images won't eliminate imperfections.
For instance, you have one image of a chair, and it's in one projection. From top of the chair. You get another image, from a projection from the side. You have a quantum difference in your knowledge of what a chair is; having the two projections combined you have an idea what a chair looks like,much more than having just one single projection. You a have a third projection, still at a different angle, you get much more information again.
Obviously having three projections is worth more in knowing what a chair is, than just one single projection.
The idea here is that CUMULATIVE COMBINATION OF IMPERFECT IMAGES OF A CHAIR WILL ELIMINATE IMPERFECTIONS OF THE INDIVIDUAL IMAGES.
Therefore it is NOT true what you claimed, your claim being that cumulative combinations of images will not eliminate imperfections in our knowledge of what the object looks like in reality.
I admit, this is not precisely what you claimed. But I see no reason why learning has to stop at three projections; I see no reason why enough projections still will NEVER yield enough knowledge, since knowledge accumulates, to arrive at the Form. This is, I feel, an arbitrary declaration by you, or by Plato and Socrates, if the two really said what you claimed.
Furthermore, your quote which I presume is from the Republic, (you did not indicate that) has nothing to do with your claim. It is not a backing up of your claim. The quote you used is irrelevant to your claim.
If Plato or Socrates really said this, I blame their inability to see the strength in combination of things and computing the differences into a combined difference.
Their inability to see the stength in combination was evident in the beginning pages of the Republic, where Socrates put forth the proposition: why does the Doctor charge money to cure a disease by giving the patient a tea from a certain weed, and why does the weed not get any money? Some in the crowd replied (sorry, the book is not in front of me, I can't quote his name) that the doctor is a combination of human, know-how and knowledge, and it is the combination that enables him to charge a fee. Socrates replied, no, there must be a SINGLE SOMETHING in doctors that enable them to charge money.
This demonstrates an inability or unwillingness to admit, that combinations are effective. Socrates denied the effectiveness of combinations.
Well, what? You tell us.
You are actually wrong, but I don't deem you worthy of explaining why you are wrong.
Quoting Fooloso4
I believe there is an 'eidetic realm' in the same sense of there being 'a realm of natural numbers'. In other words, 'realm' is here a metaphor, as is a 'place' or 'domain', but ought not to be interpreted literally to mean an actual place or realm. I say that because, in long experience, the idea of a 'ethereal realm' constantly haunts these discussions. But it's not located anywhere, it's not a realm in that sense.
Second - I don't know what 'the forms' really are. But I think in the Platonist view, geometric forms and real numbers are real in somewhat the same sense as the forms are - that is, as intelligible objects.
As for the relationship between ideal and particular, that would be the subject of many a book-length study. But I think some of Feser's examples help to understand the matter:
Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism.
That's close to the Platonic sense of an 'ideal object' (which actually is also close in meaning to the term 'noumenal', meaning, 'an object of nous'.)
Quoting Fooloso4
Certainly Platonism is not ‘the philosophy of Plato’ but I think that's too strong a description. Lloyd Gerson has a book, From Plato to Platonism, which addresses the distinction between Plato's philosophy and the broader philosophical movement
Quoting Fooloso4
The way I try and conceive of this - an heuristic, if you like - is to distinguish 'reality', 'being', and 'existence'. Generally speaking, I think of 'what exists' as 'the phenomenal domain' or the realm of existing phenomena. But then, the question arises, as per the above, what is the nature of the existence of such things as natural numbers, logical principles, geometric forms, and the like? I like to say that these are real but not necessarily existent. (Of course, in practice it is quite correct to say that 'the law of the excluded middle exists', but the point I'm trying to make is that this is something which is real only for a mind capable of grasping it; it's not existent in the same sense as phenomenal objects.) Think about the fact that 'all compounded beings are subject to decay' i.e. they're temporally bound and composed of parts. Whereas, mathematical objects do not come into or go out of existence - I think that is why, for ancient philosophy, they're regarded as being of a superior order to objects of sense.
So Tillich and other exponents of the via negativa, are, I think, talking about 'what is beyond existence', in other words, what transcends the phenomenal domain. When it is expressed as 'beyond being', I think this is confusing, because 'the One', no matter how conceived, is a being, or is being qua being, i.e. is not simply a force or object; but is not subject to the vicissitudes of existence/experience.
In the Phaedrus Socrates explains why he never wrote:
Plato's writing must be read in light of this problem. In other words, it must conceal itself from those for whom it is not fitting who read the book. The wily Plato does this by leading the reader to believe that he, the reader, has discovered some wondrous secret known only to those few who have ascended from the darkness of our ignorance to the light of truth.
From Plato's Seventh Letter:
And from Plato's Second Letter:
Aristotle says:
Aristotle too, contrary to the assumptions of many contemporary scholars, practiced concealment.
One example, of which there are many, Alfarabi says:
I prefer Husserl's way , grounding the ideaized shapes of geometry in historical constructive intentional acts of the life-world, out of which emerged reified abstractions which maintain themselves through existential acts. Nowhere here is there room for a non-exististential plane
"Galileo was himself an heir in respect to pure geometry. The inherited geometry, the inherited manner of "intuitive" conceptualizing, proving, constructing, was no longer original geometry: in this sort of "intuitiveness" it was already empty of meaning. Even ancient geometry was, in its way, removed from the sources of truly immediate intuition and originally intuitive thinking, sources from which the so-called geometrical intuition, i.e., that which operates with idealities, has at first derived its meaning. The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities. Yet such a pregeometrical achievement was a meaning-fundament for geometry, a fundament for the great invention of idealization; the latter encompassed the invention of the ideal world of geometry, or rather the methodology of the objectifying determination of idealities through the constructions which create "mathematical existence/'"(Crisis of European Science)
An extremely long-winded way to say that geometry is based on the practical techniques of tasks such as surveying?
It’s also because Greek culture at that time was partially literate - not everyone was able to read and write. The Buddha never wrote either.
Speaking of which, do you know the etymology of the Hindu word ‘Upani?ad’? It means ‘sitting up close’, referring to the relationship between guru and chela (disciple), which is taken to imply that the teaching of the Upani?ads was transmitted directly from one to the other. I think that’s exactly the principle that is being expressed by this ‘concealment’ - lest these matters of high philosophical import be seized upon by the hoi pollloi, to create something awful (like modern Western ‘culture’. ;-) )
Based on your description it sounds something like that. One point is that there is an art of reading corresponding to the art of writing. In other words, it does not require face to face transmission. Another is that although this was a common and well known practice it is no longer commonly practiced and not only is it no longer well known, claims regarding the practice are dismissed and denied.
The best contemporary book on this is Arthur M. Melzer's "Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing". There is an extensive online appendix from which I took the quotes in my previous post: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/melzer/index.html
The classic that inspired it is Leo Strauss' "Persecution and the Art of Writing", which I think was inspired by Nietzsche.
Strauss is definitely not a casual read. He does not waste words. I think you would find Laurence Lampert's "How Philosophy Became Socratic" more accessible. He has learned a great deal from Strauss but is more interested in bringing into the open what Plato concealed.
There is no such thing as the ideal chair. And not because ideal here means the most comfortable (that is not possible either). The ideal chair or the ideal apple is just the form, like a blueprint upon which reality is based. There are however ideal proper nouns. Monalisa is the ideal Da Vinci work, others are imitations. It isn't the ideal painting, because ideal painting here means the idea of painting.
Husserl isn't saying that geometry is just based on these activities. he's saying that such pragmatic embodied activities constitute its original meaning, and what is typically taught in textbooks is geometry as ready-made concepts.
"What sort of strange obstinacy is this, seeking to take the question of the origin of geometry back to
some undiscoverable Thales of geometry, someone not even known to legend? Geometry is available to us in its propositions, its theories. Of course we must and we can answer for this logical edifice to the last detail in terms of self-evidence. Here, to be sure, we arrive at first axioms, and from them we proceed to the original self-evidence which the fundamental concepts make possible. What is this, if not the "theory of knowledge," in this case specifically the theory of geometrical knowledge? No one
would think of tracing the epistemological problem back to such a supposed Thales. This is quite superfluous. The presently available concepts and propositions themselves contain their own
meaning, first as non-self-evident opinion, but nevertheless as true propositions with a meant but still hidden truth which we can obviously bring to light by rendering the propositions themselves self-evident."
Husserl explains the problem with this non-historical formal rendering of the meaning of geometry:
The progress of deduction follows formal-logical self-evidence; but without the actually developed capacity for reactivating the original activities contained within its fundamental concepts, i.e., without the "what" and the "how" of its prescientific materials, geometry would be a tradition empty of meaning; and if we ourselves did not have this capacity, we could never even know whether geometry had or ever did have a genuine meaning, one that could really be "cashed in." Unfortunately, however, this is our situation, and that of the whole modern age."
And what was the original meaning?
"In the life of practical needs certain particularizations of shape stood out and that a technical praxis always aimed at the production of particular preferred shapes and the improvement of them according to certain directions of gradualness. First to be singled out from the thing-shapes are surfaces—
more or less "smooth," more or less perfect surfaces; edges, more or less rough or fairly "even"; in other words, more or less pure lines, angles, more or less perfect points; then, again, among the
lines, for example, straight lines are especially preferred, and among the surfaces the even surfaces; for example, for practical purposes boards limited by even surfaces, straight lines, and
points are preferred, whereas totally or partially curved surfaces are undesirable for many kinds of practical interests. Thus the production of even surfaces and their perfection (polishing) always plays its role in praxis. So also in cases where just distribution is intended. Here the rough estimate of magnitudes is transformed into the measurement of magnitudes by counting the equal parts."
Is it possible to not be long-winded, though?
Husserl was frustrated that his attempts at introducing his brand of phenomenology had up till that point (he was already 75 when he wrote the Crisis) had not been successful. Meanwhile , he was aware of a general dissatisifaciotn among European intellectuals with the direction that scientific thinking was taking, such dissatisfaction manifesting itself in the popularity of existentialism,and Heidegger's project.
The consensus was that science (postitivism, neo-Kantianism) was alienated from the practical concerns of culture.
I think a good test of whether a discoure is long-winded is whether a more succinct, but accurate. version of it can be produced. Do you understand Husserl well enough to do this?
Contintental philosophers are often accused of long-windedness, and just as often, those who level this charge proceed to completely misread their work. I, for one, wish Husserl was more long-winded, particularly with regard to giving practical examples.
So would you say it's not possible in this case? I was just wondering whether you thought it was possible.
Please read these comments as those of a novice who is trying to understand (everything I say or write seems to come across as being critical). I have never got much from Plato and have always felt I was missing something (I guess at least I am not one of those who thinks they "have discovered some wonderful secret").
Quoting Fooloso4
So "it" can't be written or shouldn't be written?
I am sure I am one of those for "whom it is not fitting", but what would be the danger in writing it?
This reminds me of people who defend the science of the bible by saying that god explained it in a way that people who lived back then would understand. Why wouldn't he (god) or they (socrates, plato, etc) just write the truth and when people are capable of grasping it, they will know it is correct? I can't see the danger?
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems evidence that they might as well let the "truth" out, as the world just gets messed up anyway? Or is the modern world a mess due to mis-reading philosophy?
These are all deep and difficult questions and open to very different kinds of answers.
There's a political reading of Plato, which concentrates on the political implications of his philosophy. I think that is the most usual reading in today's culture.
But there's also 'the spiritual Plato' which was much emphasized by the adoption of Platonic principles by the early Christian theologians.
Each will give very different answers.
A traditionalist reading would probably answer 'yes' to your above question. So in that reading, what is preserved in writing is only one facet of a text, there is a kind of hidden meaning, or a meaning which is only able to be interpreted correctly by one who is suitably prepared.
Recall that above the gateway of the Academy, there was an admonishment, 'let nobody who is unlearned in geometry enter here'. In some ways, the Academy was almost like a guild or a secret society. Indeed that aspect of Plato is why Karl Popper regarded Plato as an enemy of 'the open society'. (It's no co-incidence that there's a relationship between philosophical traditionalism and reactionary political movements, as according to traditionalism modernity is basically a corrupt form of culture doomed to self-destruct (about which see Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick.)
However I was searching around recently for other interpretations of Plato and found this blog post. The blog owner says she is a professor of philosophy and published author, which I can't vouch for, but I favour the general drift of the interpretation given there. Also check out Lloyd Gerson's lecture, Platonism vs Naturalism.
I think what Husserl meant was that Gallleo took for granted, as a 'ready-made truth', the ideality of geometric concepts. Thus , he established an approach resulting from the invention of "a
particular technique, the geometrical and Galilean technique which is called physics. " What was concealed from Galileo was the practical activities of the life-world making possible the abstractions of modern science.
"In his view of the world from the perspective of geometry, the perspective of what appears to
the senses and is mathematizable, Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached to things in human praxis. The result of this abstraction is the things purely as bodies; but these are taken as concrete real objects, the totality of which makes up a world which becomes the subject matter of research. One can truly say that the idea of nature as a really self-enclosed world of bodies
first emerges with Galileo. A consequence of this, along with mathematization, which was too quickly taken for granted, is [the idea of] a self-enclosed natural causality in which every occurrence is determined unequivocally and in advance. Clearly the way is thus prepared for dualism, which appears immediately afterward in Descartes.
In general we must realize that the conception of the new idea of "nature" as an encapsuled, really and theoretically self-enclosed world of bodies soon brings about a complete transformation of the idea of the world in general. The world splits, so to speak, into two worlds: nature and the psychic world, although the latter, because of the way in which it is related to nature, does not achieve the status of an independent world. The ancients had individual investigations and theories about bodies,
but not a closed world of bodies as subject matter of a universal science of nature. They also had investigations of the human and the animal soul, but they could not have a psychology in the
modern sense, a psychology which, because it had universal nature and a science of nature before it [as a model], could strive for a corresponding universality, i.e., within a similarly self-enclosed
field of its own."
I mean, you could say that, or you could say that in general Kantian considerations are practically useless in modelling nature. The subject was never in the way of the world. Phenomenology seeking a primordial realm of practical coping, or the application of conceptual schemes, which renders scientific thinking derivative of that understanding will always miss that the subject is of the world and the world is of nature. The transparent veil erected by this wrongheaded thinking isn't really there; our senses are prisms more than prisons.
Quoting Joshs
Which describes the origin of modern scientific materialism. If you recall the thread on the Blind Spot it is no co-incidence that one of the two main philosophical sources quoted is Husserl, and it was on the basis of this analysis.
But they are invaluable in telling you what you miss out when you do so.
And the phenomenological emphasis on the inadequacies of the natural attitude, or harping on about how unsophisticated perceptual naive realism and scientific realism are, will never provide an account for why when they're all harmonising we end up with a successful understanding of nature. Something phenomenology rarely emphasises, or shows deference to, enough.
Edit: I don't mean to poo poo on phenomenology here, what I take issue with is Kantian critique being used to undermine science, then distance oneself from the undermining.
The subject is of the world and the world is of the subject. The subject enacts the world that it is 'of' . Our senses are interpretations. There is no nature outside of an interpreted world
Every understanding of nature is successful within its own terms and given the limits of its aims. Naive realism's unexamined presuppositions limit a priori the scope of its ciiteria of 'success'.
I’ve spent s reasonable amount of time reading Husserl (Crisis especially - keep in mind that work was incomplete as he died before finishing it).
The gist of what he meant was about how what is learned cannot be unlearned. This is of importance when looking at the ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ cosmological view of The World. Previously (“pre-scientifically”) the world was finite. After Galileo, roughly speaking, the cosmological view shifted - The World view became ‘infinite’.
How much of Crisis have you read? What source are you working from?
Husserl’s project was quite simple. He was a scientist trying to address, and bring about, a firmer grounding for the scientific endeavor by addressing ‘subjectivity’.
This is certainly no the case for Husserl - the ‘father of phenomenology’. He says the exact opposite. He praises the natural sciences and his quest was to further reinforce science and ‘poo hoo’ science deniers.
Heidegger took it down a path Husserl had absolutely no interest in as Heidegger was focused on ONE aspect of the larger phenomenological investigation.
The only time Husserl shows any hint of distain for science is in his analysis of psychology and how it has clung fastidiously to empirical science at the denial of the whole subjective experience of the human condition - it is a reasonable criticism of psychology and why, even today, there is s confliction between psychology and neuroscience, where psychology is being ‘reborn’ to some degree as the empirical sciences (in the form of neuroscience; or now coined ‘neuropsychology’) has pretty much supplanted the core of psychology and thus given psychology a stronger reason to differentiate itself from empiricism - this is quite obviously being shown in the current climate of ‘social sciences’ (not that it is much of a science and we’re finding rhetorical use of data as a large part of politics today on a scale previously unseen).
Dermot Moran's book on it. I find this summary illuminating:
From your very brief comments, I don't think you're seeing the point at all. Husserl was very much working from the Kantian tradition. Are you familiar with his criticism of naturalism? He wanted to devise a 'science' in a completely different sense from what I think you probably understand by the word.
Quoting fdrake
Crisis? What crisis?
If you don’t have a copy I’ll provide quotes if need be.
Dermot Moran’s book is an introduction to the text and includes pretty well the whole text, along with commentary. Those bullet points are abstracted from the text.
(2) Is not saying he has a negative regard toward science. He applauds science (see below) and was actually a student of physics and mathematics prior to his work.
(3) This is what I already referred to regarding the attitude of psychology in contrast to the empirical sciences. Psychology has been, to a larger degree today, subsumed by harder sciences.
The ‘positivity of sciences’ is more or less what he goes further into later regarding the ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ and ‘pre-scientific man’. If you’ve got that far into the book it may be worth considering this alongside his opening statements about the scientific endeavor and his attempts to outline a new ‘subjective science’.
Here is what I wrote over two years ago regarding Husserl’s opening and overall regard toward the natural sciences:
Husserl : Crisis Part I, §1-7
All quotes taken from "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Inrroduction to Phenomenological Philosophy" by Edmund Husserl, translated by David Carr.
This was an incomplete work and has been pieced together after Husserl's death so there is repetition and may well be use of terms that are unfamiliar if you've never read Husserl before.
In this thread will address Part I of the book which is about 15 pages long and cut into 7 sections.
So ...
"Part I : The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity.
§1 Is there, in view of their constant successes, really a crisis of the sciences?
I expect that at this place dedicated as it is to the sciences, the very title of these lectures, "The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology," will incite controversy. A crisis of our sciences as such: can we seriously speak of it? Is notnthis talk, heard so often these days, an exaggeration? After all, the crisis of a science indicates nothing less than its genuine scientific character, the whole manner in which it has set its task ans developed a methodology for it, has become questionable. This may be true of philosophy, which in our time threatens to succumb to skepticism, irrationalism, and mysticism. The same may be true of psychology, insofae as it still makes philosophical claims rather than merely wanting a place among positive sxiences. But how could we speak straightforwardly and quite seriously of a crisis of the sciences in general - that is, also of the positive sciences, including pure mathematics and the exact natural sciences, which we can never cease to admire as models of rigorous and highly successful scientific discipline? ...
... Physics, whether represented by a Newtonor a Planck or an Einstein, or whomever else in the future, was always and remains exact science. It remains such even if, as some think, an absolutely final form of total theory-construction is never to be expected or striven for. ...
... The scientific rigor of all these accomplishments, and their enduringly compelling successes are unquestionable. Only of psychology must we perhaps be less sure, in spite of its claim to be the abstract, ultimately explanatory, basic science of the concrete humanistic disciplines. But generally we let psychology stand, attributing its obvious retardation of method and accomplishemnt to a naturally slower development. At any rate, the contrast between the "scientific" character of this group of sciences and the "unscientific" character of philosophy is unmistakable. Thus we concede in advance some justification to the first inner protest against the title of these lectures from scientists who are sure of their method."
Hopefully these quotes will reassure the reader that Husserl is not out to destroy science, but to explore science and our humanistic attitudes towards theory and method in general.
§2 gives soem outline of the direction he goes in regarding subjectivity.
"§2. The positivistic reduction of the idea of science to mere factual science. The "crisis" of science as the loss of its meaning for life.
...
The indicated change in the whole direction of inquiry is what we wish, in fact, to undertake. In doing this we shall soon become aware that the difficulty which has plagued psychology, not just in our time but for centuries - its own peculiar "crisis" - has a central significance both for the appearance of puzzling, insoluble obscurities in modern, even mathematical sciences and, in connection with that, for the emergence of a set of world-enigmas which were unknown to earlier times. They all lead back to the enigma of subjectivity and are thus inseparably bound to the ..enigma of psychological subject matter and method. This much, then, as a first indication of the deeper meaning of our project in these lectures.
We make our beginning with a change which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of the sciences. It concerns notnthe scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence. (trans note: menschliches Dasein) The exclusiveness with which the tot al world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blind by the "prosperity" (trans. note : Husserl uses English word) they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. (Menschentum) Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.
...
In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world (Umwelt) and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself and his surrounding world. What does science have to say about reason and unresason or about us men as subjects of this freedom? The mere science of bodies clearly has nothing to say; it abstracts from everything subjective. As for the humanistic sciences, on the other hand, all the special ande general disciplines of which treat of man's spiritual (trans. note : geistig. The translating difficulties with Geist and its derivatives are too well known ... "spirit" ... "mental") existence, that is, within the horizon olf his historicity: their rigorous scientific character requires, we are told, that thex scholar carefully exclude all valuative positions, all questions of reason and unreason of their human subject matter and its cultural configurations. Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, andx human existence in it, truthtfully have a meaning if sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion, and if history has nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever will be so, that again and again reason must turn intfo nonsense, ad well-being into misery? Can we console ourselves with that? Can we live in this world, where historical occurence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment?"
There are points here I find important to how Husserl procedes. The main one being the extention of the human subject int o an abstract proposition of objective reality. Also, for those opposed to the use of "spirit" here please simply add "mental". And for those opposed to "mental" simply add "subjective experience".
I could copy and paste the rest of my brief analysis from two years ago, but I don’t actually disagree with the gist of the bullet points. I do disagree that Husserl eve said he was interested in a ‘solution’ - he has, on more than one occasion, explicitly stated his dislike of ‘solutions’ and the whole phenomenological position is about absconding from ‘solutions’. It is meant to be a manner of approaching human experience not a ‘solution’ ... but I imagine there is more context to what Dermot says.
Anyway, this seems to be veering a little off-topic and I’m not immediately interested in revisiting Crisis right now but I’d be interested to throw my thoughts in in a separate dedicated thread.
Dinosaurs called, they want their time back.
Yes, I'm reasonably familiar with the critique of naturalism, and Husserl's attempt to provide a foundation for science based on the structure of experience.
You always pretend that I don't understand the issue, whereas I just disagree with you very strongly.
Yes, I overall like Husserl's intentions, as far as I'm aware of them anyway. From what I understand of it, I disagree with the use of intersubjectivity as a foundational concept for regularities in nature (this may not be Husserl's own view, it is probably my limited experience with it from a few papers and snippets of his books over the years), but I like the emphasis on intersubjectivity as foundational for perceptual regularity.
Husserl is referring to the use of mathematics in ‘science’. Mathematics made nature ‘factual’. From what I understand it was Husserl main interest to address the inevitable conflation of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’.
Does Dermot bother to explain what Husserl meant by ‘genius’? I imagine he did. Basically it is what I said in my original response. What is learned cannot be unlearned, that is the gist. Galileo could not simply ignore what he learnt through his use of mathematics as a means of understanding natural phenomenon. This is something Husserl tended to refer to as ‘sedimentation’, meaning that once we see anew naivety is broken. Our new way of seeing The World - in the ‘measuring’ manner - necessarily covers up our previous disposition.
You could kind of say it is analogous (loosely!) to being in awe of a ‘magic trick’ and then being shown behind the curtains ... you will never be able to look at the trick in the same way again. Something has departed from the raw experience of the trick.
The difficulty I believe most people have with Husserl is extrapolating beyond this kind of crass analogy and applying it to phenomenon - or, in my view for Heidegger, OVER applying it and leaving more and more in the wake of one’s regard to the phenomenon.
I’d highly recommend reading The Vienna Lecture (only around 30 pages). It’s a more condensed overview of what he was trying to refine in Crisis - and remember it is NOT complete work, he died before he could finish.
There are many points Husserl talks about that I wish I had more time to dedicate to. His use of ‘poles’ is something quite bizarre and I do believe, as much as he seems to try not to, he does also step over the line too from time to time.
His ideas visibly change over time which is nice to see yet at the same time it makes it hard work to keep a grip of the appropriate meaning relating to the appropriate text - kind of funny if you appreciate the main ‘purpose’ of phenomenology as an endless exploration! Haha!
FYI those comments were directed at ILS. And, I'm absolutely fine with being disagreed with, that's why we come here after all.
Quoting I like sushi
I really hate to sound contrary, but I just don't think this hits the nail on the head. It's a big topic, and I am not going to have a lot of time these next few days, so a few brief remarks.
In respect of the statement ' 2. There is a crisis brought on by the positivity of the sciences' - I'm sure 'positivity' here refers to 'positivism'.
Finding instances of 'positivism' in the Moran edition of Crisis gives us these examples:
My bolds, and the main point.
So, I'm interpreting him as a critic of modern scientific method insofar as this claims to be an all-encompassing philosophy of the kind that positivism envisages. He completely disagrees with that, he's the polar opposite of the Vienna Circle, Logical Positivism, and everything of that ilk. In today's lexicon, he's a critique of 'scientism', of science mis-applied or misunderstood in respect of, as he says, 'the essential contribution of subjectivity'.
Husserl adopts what he regards as a rigorously scientific approach to phenomenology and psychology, but it is nothing like what the Anglo-American world would regard as scientific. The German university system has a marvellous word, 'Geisteswissenschaften', 'sciences of geist' (where 'geist' can be spirit or mind), which literally has no equivalent in the Anglosphere; both Husserl and Heidegger were professors within that family of disciplines.
Anyway, I'm going to be scarce for a couple of days, but look forward to picking it up later, and will do some more reading. ciao.
Not everything is said and what is is written in such a way that the reader must read between the lines, connect the dots, note and reconcile contradictions.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
On one hand, it could be dangerous to the author. Consider the fate of Socrates. The things that Socrates was accused of - atheism and corrupting the youth, are some of the things that Plato wanted to protect himself from being found guilty of; but, on the other hand, they are things he sought to protect the reader from. He recognized the importance of religious belief and so provided a salutary, exoteric, quasi-religious teaching that would be beneficial to the well-being of the soul and the city. At the same time it gives the appearance of harmonizing philosophy and theology. Then and now, rather than noting the absence of gods in the realm of truth, the theologically inclined conflate the Good with God.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Socrates was a skeptic. Knowing that he and everyone else does not know the truth of such matters poses a threat. If the truth is not known then everything and nothing can fill the gap. So Plato provides a salutary teaching in place of the unknown and perhaps unknowable truth. But in order for this teaching to be accepted it must appear to be the truth itself.
In the dialogue Phaedo, which takes place when Socrates is about to die, the discussion turns to the fate of the soul. Although he is not afraid to die, some of his friends are fearful of death and so he attempts, as he says, to "charm away their childish fears". Someone objects that what he want is the truth. He offers various proofs and stories about the immortality of the soul, and while the careful reader is led to see that all of them fail, to this day some still believe that here we find the truth of the soul's immortality. But no one knows the truth of what happens to the soul at death or even what the soul is. This leads to what is called "misologic". Socrates says that there are some who fall in love with philosophy because they believe it will make them wise, but when it becomes clear to them that philosophy is unable to answer such questions they come to despise it for what they see as its failure. Socrates did not, so to speak, want philosophy to die with him. Those who are to philosophize must eschew childish stories but must not expect philosophy to do what it cannot do.
I assumed you weren’t asking what ‘positivism’ means in general.
For my general perspective on the issue:
I think there's a shallow (but correct) way to take this, and an interesting (but harder to develop, but I suspect is right for the most part) way to take this. It's pretty clear that scientific methodology develops collaboratively, we check each-others' work. More fundamentally, we use each other's work. You can look at the capacity to use each-others' work as displaying an intimate relationship between concepts, interpreted non-psychologistically, and norms of language use. That the specific results of scientific studies interface with nature is trivially true in this line of thinking, being empirically realist, but the question of concept work (crystallised norms of language use which thematise nature) in science or scientifically influenced philosophy articulating our connection with nature gives us the radical prospect of a subtle transcendental realist project which underpins the 'mere' transcendental idealities of our conceptual schemes, or deep structure of our experiences.
It's not just that we look out on nature through the prism of our concepts, the prism adapts to nature and responds to the texture of ecological affordances . Or for @Joshs, the circumscription of regional ontologies actually takes its cue from their ontic structure rather than inheriting their ground from the existentialia they allegedly derive from.
Or for @Banno, just like the 'Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' in Davidson is undermined by the adaptive/physically abiding properties ('anomalism') of radical interpretation's relationship with truth (this doesn't fit super well, considering conceptual regularities are of questionable status in Davidson's account of mental events, but I thought it might interest you to see him referenced outside of his milieux).
"To describe the "world" phenomenologically means to show and determine the being of beings objectively present in the world conceptually and categorially. Beings within the world are things, natural things and "valuable" things. Their thingliness becomes a problem. And
since the thingliness of the latter is based upon natural thingliness, the being of natural things, nature as such, is the primary theme. The character of being of natural things, of substances, which is the basis of everything, is substantiality. What constitutes its ontological meaning? But are we asking ontologically about the "world"? The problematic characterized is undoubtedly ontological. But even if it succeeds in the purest explication of the being of nature, in comparison with the fundamental statements made by the mathematical natural sciences about this being, this ontology never gets at the phenomenon of the "world. " Nature is itself a being which is encountered within the world and is discoverable on various paths and stages. Neither the ontic description of innerworldly beings nor the ontological interpretation of the being of these beings gets as such at the phenomenon of "world. " In both kinds of access to "objective being, " "world" is already "presupposed" in various ways .
Terminologically "worldly" means a kind of being of Da-sein, never a kind of being of something objectively present "in" the world. We shall call the latter something belonging* to the world, or innerworldly. One look at traditional ontology shows us that one skips over the phenomenon of worldliness when one fails to see the constitution of Dasein of being-in-the-world. Instead, one tries to interpret the world in terns of the being of the being which is objectively present within the world but has not, however, even been initially discovered-in terms of nature. Ontologically and categorially understood, nature is a boundary case of the being of possible innerworldly beings. Da-sein can discover beings as nature only in a definite mode of its being-in-the-world. As the categorial content of structures of being of a definite being encountered in the world, "nature" can never render worldliness intelligible. But even the phenomenon "nature," for instance in the sense of the Romantic concept of nature, is ontologically comprehensible only in terms of the concept of world; that is, in terms of an analytic of Da-sein."
Heidegger, Being and Time
Quoting Fooloso4
Thanks @Fooloso4,
So the secret is that there is no secret? Regular people are just incapable of living with "I don't know"?
Seems reasonable, but I think this idea is more explicitly stated in eastern philosophies (even the horrifically indirect Tao te Ching seems to be more explicit, "the way that can be told is not the true way"). Why are there such high levels of respect for Plato's vague hints? Is it just because it had a big impact on western culture? Kind of like how Columbus was a jerk that did not discover anything, but he certainly triggered the exploration of, and spread to, the "New World"?
Quoting Joshs
Phenomena and a phenomenological description are not the same. A description of the shadows is a description of the phenomena on the wall. Plato points out there that there can be knowledge of such things in so far as repeated patterns, accompanying sounds, and so on, are identified. What is not known is that they are shadows.
We have phenomenal evidence of the existence of dinosaurs, but we would not have such evidence if dinosaurs never existed (in the ordinary sense of the term) - except perhaps if one thinks that this is the handwork of God or some evil genius or cave's puppet-masters.
Something like that.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
I think it is a bit more complicated. For a text that begins this way the Tao te Ching has a lot to say! The fact that there is even a text says a lot. I think that both Plato and the Tao te Ching are similar in that both deny that it is not a matter of what can be said. Despite everything Plato says about the Forms, they are presented as things that must be grasped by the mind's eye rather than via what one hears.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
There are many reasons for the respect that Plato receives, but none of them have to do with vague hints.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
That is part of it. He continues to have a big impart. Every year there are hundreds of books and articles written about the dialogues.
For me a large part of the value is as a guide to the practice of self-knowledge through reflective inquiry. In addition, he is a truly masterful writer with few peers. Much of this is not apparent until one begins to see how things connect and how the questions we ask of the text are answered.
For some the "theory of Forms" can be an attraction or a repulsion. It should be noted, however, that in the Theaetetus, the dialogue that explicitly inquires about what knowledge is, there is no mention of Forms.
And the idea that the thingliness of things can only be given an adequate account in terms of the existential hermeneutics of a late arriving structure in the universe doesn't make you want to throw up from nauseating reductionism?
People and animals like to be happy. If beings that make decisions (as opposed to those chained in someones basement) can discover what makes decision makers the most happy we can probably come almost to an optimal solution to any problem. The problem is like the Aztecs discovered, sometimes you can't account for all the decision makers that might be involved in the future.
We can always pretend that we have access to , or can make coherent, an account that bypasses "late arriving structures". The problem with that notion of time consciousness is that the past as we experience it is always already changed by our present. The earliest and most remote past is already an reinterpretation of 'what was' for present purposes. We dont want to and don't need to know how things 'really were' before we existed. That is a nonsensical notion. When we theorize about the past, whether cosmological, biological or cultural, what we want to know is what we can do with this understanding right now in relation to our current goals. Because our past is always ahead of us, our changing accounts of the oldest and most ancient is an expression of the cutting edge of our thinking(the latest arriving structures of thought). The universe isnt an independent outside for us to represent and mirror, it is a development whose transformation we advance by asking questions of it. When we attempt to 'go back' and revael things that were before , we are transforming the world anew.
How empirically realist, it isn't how the universe existed before humans which poses a problem here, it's that it existed at all. It existed non-relationally to humans for longer than there are humans, and it still exists non-relationally to humans. We might not be indifferent to nature, our understandings have a-prior structures, but those a-priori structures are still events in a timeline. We know they are not always operative, we know they are not always relevant.
Nature doesn't turn on human understanding, surely you can understand that. This fact alone, and our capacity to understand it, should perturb us away from any attempt to derive the ontology of this indifferent, inhuman nature, from the a prior structures of our experiences.
The only thing that is nonsense is this claim. The desire to know for the sake of knowing without regard to utility has motivated man for as long as man has been capable of inquiry. Plato acknowledged and addressed the well known claim that philosophy is useless. To this day there are those who claim that one or another mode of inquiry is useless.
You may not want or need to know how things 'really were' before we existed but there are many scientists who devote their lives to such questions. How those questions are answered changes over time but changes in our understanding of the past does not change the past.
The conceit of this attitude is that we are able to be sufficiently detached from our own human nature to declare that our science reveals something completely independently of our mode of knowing. Our conception of nature is constantly changing, constantly evolving (which is why it's conveyed through falsifiable hypotheses that are subject to continual revision.)
Scientific realism understands the chronology of the Universe and evolution of life, but again, the account is also a theory which implies the existence of an observing mind which provides a sense of scale and perspective. Science 'brackets out' the observer so as to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere', but it can't bracket out the requirement for perspective and scale, which only a mind can provide.
This is something that has actually been made explicit by science itself:
Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271.
Or, put more simply:
[quote=Niels Bohr] A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself. [/quote]
is inherently a pragmatic quest in that knowing is transformative interaction. The desire to know is the desire to adaptively reshape.
Keep in mind that Heidegger's Dasein is not a human being, He was adamant that it is not an anthropomorphisim. Husserl made the same argument about transcendental intentionality, and Derrida was just as clear that differance is not an anthropomorphism.
These are not structures that require human psyches or souls, rather they precede all thinking of humans as subjects or biological objects even as they make possible such conceptions. They are a starting point for the positing of any kind of existing entity. Their a priori status with respect to humans and all other objects and subjects might tempt one to think of them in terms of a pan-pychism, but this would confuse more that it clarifies, given the link between pan-pychism and subjectivism.
Another thing is Plato isn't denying your thesis as such. Isn't that why he even proposed the analogy. I've heard many people talk of the ideal circle (the form) represented in actual drawn circles (the shadows).
When my son was very young he was fascinated with dinosaurs. There was nothing pragmatic in his desire to hear about dinosaurs, to see pictures of them, to learn their names, and size, and the period in which they lived. Some people never loose that fascination. There are some who desire to know in the same way that others desire to create music or art or poetry. There is for them nothing pragmatic about it. It is, rather, aesthetic or spiritual, a sense of wonder.
You make it sound like if there were no humans there still would be Dasein in the human sense. This is terribly wrong. Nature existed without humans. We know this. Furthermore, far from being senseless, the indifference of nature to our concerns which it reveals is something utterly banal. Update your ontology with its effects.
I want to make sure I understand you. What is the relation between what you are arguing and, say, Thomas Kuhn or Paul Feyerabend's thinking about the connection between nature and our paradigmatic constructions of it? Or other social constructionist, sociological and cultural studies-based approaches to science ( Joseph Rouse, Foucault, Rorty, Latour, )? I get the sense its more that Heiddger's Dasein you're objecting to here. It seems to me you are opposing your realist stance to a large community of anti-realist philosophies of science( who apparently are not grasping what is 'utterly banal' to you). Would I be correct in surmising that?
Why do I have to explain myself in terms of Kuhn and Feyerabend and Rouse and Foucault and Rorty and Latour and Heidegger?
Quoting Joshs
Look, Heidegger made a big deal about distinguishing his project from merely anthropological reasoning. Still, you're claiming that there's never been an uninterpreted world, maybe that such an idea is senseless, and when I have the temerity to say "Dinosaurs existed before us", and that we can understand that, you with-hold understanding of the issue artificially as if I'm making something other than a completely boring observation. One that primary school kids are fine with, but apparently philosophy graduates are not! This is anthropologism of the highest order, centring our accounts on the human beings which make them. AFAIK this is something @Wayfarer acknowledges explicitly (even though I don't have much interest going through the 'observer effect' conversation with Wayfarer again).
The significance of the boring observation is that it reveals not only can we establish stuff about a nature indifferent to us, we have to be able to do ontology in a way which allows us to make sense of this fact. The a-priori structure of experience passes from non-being into being, and this is an observation which can be understood within the a-priori structure of experience, rather than some grand violence against experiential temporality, we already know this shit. We understand it, it has been demonstrated already. It is not a conceptual issue, it's a fact. Take off the Heidigoggles and go visit Jurassic Park.
Sorry for the late response. I noticed in a recent post you made reference to Badiou. If his approach to history is one you are comfortable with, then perhaps we are discussing a distinction between a structural marxist dialectical teleological understanding of history and what has been referred to as a radical geneological or historicist one. Clearly, a dialectical history would be incoherent without the ability to, as you say, make sense of a history indifferent to us. We have to be believe in empirical facts as based in the a priori structure of experience. You claim this is not a conceptual issue, but it is obviously a metaphysical issue , or there wouldn't be a dispute about it. Radical historicism does away with appeals to principles that lend necessity and unity to history. The result is a powerful emphasis on: nominalism, contingency, and contestability. Radical historicists reject the teleological narratives of developmental historicism, including those that are widely associated with Marxism and critical theory.
Radical historicists thus portray history as discontinuous and contingent. History is a series of contingent, even accidental appropriations, modifications, and transformations from the old to the new. As Nietzsche wrote, "there is no more important proposition for historians than: that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former meaning and purpose must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated." (Geneology of Morality).
"This emphasis on contingency may appear to suggest that change is inexplicable. Yet, radical historicists often describe and explain change; they just do so without appealing to overarching principles. Change occurs contingently as, for example, people reinterpret, modify, or transform an inherited tradition in response to novel circumstances or other dilemmas." (Mark Bevir, What is Geneology)
These methodologies and their respective ontological commitments concern human history, no? Giving a central role to class struggle in natural history really only makes sense if the destiny of nature is just to produce communism, which honestly I don't want to argue about.
Your Nietzsche quote nicely describes a lot of things humans do, too.
Quoting Joshs
And geneological methods trace the evolution of concepts.
You may make the argument that the history of concepts of nature is the history of nature, but I still have to wonder about that time when there was no thought. You're making the same methodological slip as before, the concept of the thing is not the thing, only now you're talking about it as if human history contains natural history, rather than as if human experiential temporality acted before the evolution of humans.
I never said that human experiential temporality acted before the evolution of humans. I said that temporality acted before the evolution of humans. If one can imagine an object, like a dinosaur, existing before humans, this presupposes a structure of temporality(as opposed to time in the classical sense) in that object implies change, change implies differential relationality and reference, which gives us the irreducible retentional, presencing and protentional elements making possible objectification.
That is to say , if we take the point of view of the object, the above features are implied in what it is in itself, apart from any talk of experiencing psychological subjects. Its not simply that human history contains natural history, its that contingent history contains natural history. Human memory and cognition can be taken out of the equation and one is still left with the necessity to found objectivity on relational structures of transformation (temporalization) that precede and are implied by them.
You liked my Nietzsche quote because you read it as making a distinction between human and natural history. I would agree that Nietzsche was not simply a social constructivist, reducing nature to language and culture. Like Deleuze after him, he considered the biological realm on its own terms as already
a kind of social construction. If the natural realm is already a contingently self-transforming process not amenable to a logic of cause-effect, then we dont need to reduce nature to human constructions in order to conclude that its history is discontinuous and contingent. All that is left to us is perspectival interpretation not due solely to language, but to the nature of nature itself as contingent self-transformation.
"As Nietzsche repeatedly argued, including in his most positivistic period, there is no independent nature in itself that could free it or us from our interpretations, interests, and evaluations of value. Our "nature" is to artfully pick and choose, value and devalue, and rank and transformatively order and reorder, even as "nature" is in itself neither good nor evil for Nietzsche. Nevertheless, this valuing does not occur out of free will or in the transparency of consciousness that Nietzsche deconstructed as fictional entities. Interpretation is neither arbitrary nor infinite; it is shadowed by an ape, and physiologically and social-historically circumscribed and conditioned."(Eric S Nelson)
I think this misinterprets my point. I'm trying to lead you to the conclusion that even transcendental subjects must emerge from an indifferent nature. An invitation to think of nature as anterior to the a priori structure of experience. Then there's the next point, which is that we're riddled through with nature, then there's the final point; that we can still use the a priori structure of experience to know stuff about nature as it is, not a purely symbolic nature which is simply our concept of it. We know molecular interactions happened before humans, we unfolded out of something. Now we have to have an approach which can grapple with these kinds of questions on their own terms.
One of the most frustrating things about the 'link it to the a priori structure of experience' machine is that you only end up ever talking about the a priori structure of experience, rather than the thing you're talking about. As I put it in another thread, we can actually weaponise the a priori structure of experience to 'carve nature at its joints.
Do you think human history contains 'contingent history'?
There are no transcendental subjects. What there is is a transcendental in-between, between the subjective and the objective. This is the space, the only space of experience and nature.This is not a transcendental in the Kantian sense of a beyond nature, but of nature as itself beyond itself in transforming itself valuatively moment to moment.
There is no indifferent nature. Apart from the necessity of a human to interpretively construct a valuative understanding of nature, The world in itself is contingent not in an empirical sense of a causal chain of history. That is a false contingency in that it already presupposes a world of objects in interaction. That is a metaphysical presupposition, Without realizing it, by carving nature at its joints via beginning from objective causality, you only end up ever talking about the a priori structure of experience. That is to say, nature ends up always being this indifferent history of casual relations between objects. Such an appraoch never escapes its grounding. Modern scientific empricism, far from being a free openness toward a contingent world, shuts itself off from the world's true conteingency.
The nature that is anterior to the a priori structure of the joints of objective causality is one that is always valuative in that it consists of patterns of relations in which its entities are not only defined only by their referential relation to other entities within the pattern, but that environment of relations is always in process of transforming itself valuatively(value here means a qualitative way of being) This cannot be reduced to a causal chain without wiping out this essential qualitatively valuative, perpsectival facet of nature. Nature is anticipatory, it always has its purposes, and these purposes are always in process of being reconfigured,Thus, values, change. This is what the arrow of time signifies. Its not simply a question of the difficulty of ascertaining initial conditions, because that still remains within an objective thinking of causality.
Every philosophical approach implies its own account of both human understanding and nature, since the two cannot be disentangled fro one another. Hegelian-marxist accounts have led to a rethinking of nature as self-organizing system organized according to a vector of increasing complexity .
Even physics will join this trajectory if physicists like Lee Smolen have their way. According to him, temporality must be brought back into physics and take on a central role. That way, cosmological and biological evolutionary processes can be seen as connected. This forms a nice dialacticalization of nature, in line with a dialectical thinking concerning cultural change. It is no accident that biologists like Lewontin and Rose who endorse self-organizing systems ideas in biology are also sympathetic to Marxism.
But just as a dialectical thinking implies a certain way of thinking about natural as well as cultural history, one has to understand how a radical geneological-historicist approach rethinks further the nature of nature as well as culture. You suggest that Nietzsche had in mind only a radically contingent thinking of culture while leaving nature to empiricism. That doesnt jibe. The two realms imply each other. If you believe that its possible to approach human history in a radically genealogical way, while leaving intact the modern objective realist approach to nature, then I dont think youre fully appraeciating the argument that is being made by post structuralists concerning the social construction of culture.
The bottom line here is that the things of nature only appear once in time.. Even if empirical representation were a mirror of nature rather than a perspectical interpretation, we could never recover what was for the reason that what was only existed for the fleeing moment of its instantiation. To argue that that doesnt matter for science since one can abstract common features still doesnt get the point that modeling particulars within a common category fails at the point where the category itself becomes valuatively transformed. Understanding natural history geneologically rather than empirically means that its developments cannot be reduced to law-bound causal explanation, only description. Likewise , the is no dialectical progression to human culture, only geneological unfolding, with no telos, no progression, no objectively causal basis.
Ok. I don't really care what you call it. There is a 'transcendental in-between', has it always been there? Or is it a uniquely human feature? If it's a uniquely human feature, it must not have always been there. Then something must be anterior to it... So nature is anterior to it. And this is easy to understand; dinosaurs, carbon dating, evolution... etc. The 'shadow of the ape' is also a call to think of humans as organically coming out of nature.
If you want a jargony gloss on this, the transcendental subject (in-between, Dasein, whatever) is a contingent event, and we gotta think this contingency without framing it in terms of the transcendental subject - since it wasn't there at the time, after all.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Can there be nature without humans? When someone says "the universe has existed for about 14 billion years", is what they say literally true?
Anterior means 'in front of'. I think you mean posterior 'behind'.
I'm using anterior to be consistent with the vocabulary in Meillassoux' argument on the topic in After Finitude:
I think anterior works, because nature emerges first. "Events posterior to the emergence of humans" would be "events after the emergence of humans", "events anterior to the emergence of humans" would be "events before the emergence of humans".
No. He's explicitly talking about dinosaurs and stuff.
Oh, you're right. He's using "anterior" to mean temporally behind or before. That's screwed up.
Guy's French. I imagine the translator used anterior to reference the tense thing. Passe antérieur is sort of like a "before before" conjugation, like "as soon as he finished (past), he left (past, but before the thing which was already declared as before)". It really fits the 'before history' theme he is playing with.
In the guy's argument, the nature of the change between one and the other plays less of a role than noticing that at some point, there was no consciousness, then at a later point, there is.
Edit: personally I think the 'continuum' or studying how one changed into the other is actually the more interesting question. But we still have a lot of ground clearing to do so that people can even think philosophically in these terms about these issues!
I was just reading a bit about this. Sounds interesting. From the little I read about the book, and not the book itself, would it be correct to say that he denies Parmenides' claim that thinking and being are the same? Does finitude have to do with the limits of knowledge?
The thinking and being are the same thing is kinda undermined by it. The thrust of the arche-fossil argument (in the first section of the book) strongly undermines this claim, at least in how I use it and remember it. I've been through it with @Wayfarer a couple of times and wrote non-technical summaries of it in places - which you can find in my post history if you can be bothered looking. Most recent time was in a quantum mechanics thread.
Though, I think I've seen people who side with Meillassoux for the arche-fossil argument and emphasise the 'negative' character of nature (or the Real) rather than its constituting role in our emergence; though I don't know any of the details of any approach like this. There's probably also a way of maintaining a sophisticated equation of the two without being a correlationist - maybe there's a Spinozist argument that could be made, since the attributes of thought and extension don't causally interact but mirror each other.
Yes, you and I have been on the same side of that argument.
But we don't know there has ever been a time without consciousness. We don't know what consciousness is.
So the conclusion of the argument is an assumption of one of its premises, right?
I would say that we do know first hand what consciousness is, although we cannot explain how it came to be, or, as some would argue, that it came to be rather than it being fundamental. We also know that at least some organisms have consciousness, but there is no evidence that less complex and inorganic things do. In addition, we know that there was a time without complex organisms, and so the assumption that there was consciousness requires evidence.
As some would have it, however, we cannot even speak of time in the absence of human beings, that 'before man' is an oxymoron. Such a view, in my opinion, is based on a theoretic construct of time. that attempts to dismisses time as a theoretical construct
Newton knew first hand what gravity is, while making it known that he didnt know what it is in the sense of having a theory for it.
Quoting Fooloso4
Sure. I'm not making any claims. I'm just pointing out that lacking a scientific theory of consciousness, there is nothing but personal bias and possibly contemporary fashion supporting the idea that consciousness had a beginning.
A good example in that with both we know that they work but not how the work.
Quoting frank
Actually, I think the contemporary fashion, at least in some quarters, favors panpsychism, and part of the fashion may be due to the appeal of being fashion forward; but I agree, the matter is far from settled. My own bias is a kind of theoretical modestness - don't build too much on theories unless we have good reason to think they are probably true. That is not to say they should be dismissed but unless there is good evidence that consciousness is not a property limited to sufficiently advanced organisms able to demonstrate consciousness, I won't rule it out but I won't rule it in either.
This strikes me as analogous to the "God question". Interestingly from the little I have read Meillassoux does not approve of the religious turn in philosophy. I don't know if he names names but I am guessing he has in mind Derrida.
I'm with you there. My impression was that theoretical modestness was being put to service as a metaphysical arbiter. You can't do that.
Quoting Fooloso4
Would he approve of Chalmers? I was thinking of him rather than religion.
I don't know. I was just introduced to him a few hours ago by @fdrake.
I don't think Meillassoux' research interests overlap with Chalmers, or even approaches in analytical philosophy of mind. He's mostly situated among the various 'realist' reactions against the dominance of post-Kantian idealisms (see some of @Joshs posts in this thread for various signifiers that such an idealism is in play) in various contexts. The arche-fossil is a kind of master argument that attempts to implode such idealisms from within their correlations of thought and being that human beings are invariably situated entirely within.
Edit: at @Fooloso4's request, a relevant quote:
I find it a persuasive undermining. I think the force of it might be summarised as; if we only have access to the correlation between thought and being, how are we demonstrably able to think (conceptualise, more precisely) being before thought emerged?
It's covered by what Kant describes as 'transcendental realism', that 'regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding (CPR, A369).' This doesn't deny the empirical fact of geological time, any more than it denies the empirical reality of the objects in your immediate vicinity. But it is the mind that provides the perspective of extension, duration, and scale upon which and within which all such empirical claims are grounded. By referring to the time 'before human minds existed', we're simply trying to posit a universe in which there is no such mind. But there is still an implicitly human perspective in that construction, as the sequence of time itself and its relationship to the present is provided by the mind of the scientist.
So, I'm deploying exactly the argument the quoted passage states. I think the argument against it is based on the conviction of naturalism, i.e. that the mind is a product of the geological and evolutionary processes that modern science has described.
But again, in order for science to attain any kind of coherency relies on a reasoned inference. The argument about the fossil record is based on the foundation of rational inference. In that sense, reasoned inference has a kind of epistemic priority, in that empirical claims rely reasoned argument. The circularity is that naturalism wishes to explain reason as a consequence of material or physical interactions, which, naturalism never tires of assuring us, are themselves devoid of anything that could be described in terms of meaning, purpose or reason. (As if by magic!)
Notice the 'able to think'. I rest my case.
Whether such a thing can truly take shape in the imagination (when all shapes are in fact ideas) is another question.
Deserves some pondering.
Thanks. That clearly states what has been at issue a a couple of recent discussions here. As well, of course, within the philosophical community at large.
A provocative claim from Meillassoux:
And at the risk of being unfair to Meillassoux without providing his defense:
I really like what this is gesturing in the direction of. But I don't actually know how to articulate it. Can you help me?
I agree with this. The science angle is to leverage the empirically realist and 'non-intervention in science' intuitions that correlationists like to have.
Geology and cosmology even more so. The fact that science says we evolved and depend on mindless processes to be here is good reason for thinking correlationism is somewhat misleading. Even the fact of your birth accomplishes that, although Meillassoux focused on death and the world after humans are extinct.
I was once staring at an object and I realized that the idea of the object was organizing my experience. I thought for a moment that I'm projecting ideas all over the place, but then I noticed: I am an idea. I exist in contrast to not-me. Take away that division and I would disappear. I am a product of the dividing nature of thought. Because of that experience and the way it changed my outlook, I can't come unprejudiced to the dinosaur argument. Not really. But I can try.
The question is whether we are really able to imagine a thoughtless world. Whatever world we imagine is going to be organized around ideas. Those ideas imply a thinker.
M's argument seems like this: I take a picture of the left side of a building and show it to you. I explain that this proves that left and right are independent because if they weren't I would have been bound to photograph the whole building.
Science doesn't actually say we evolved from and depend on mindless processes. Science doesn't have a working theory of consciousness.
You're blindly following exactly what Meillassoux is criticising. Though, exactly the same thing happened the last time we talked about it.
Edit: I should be clear, though. Rehearsing exactly the argument that he's criticising is as if it is a refutation is the thing which makes me not wish to go through this again with you. If you actually engaged with the argument and came out a correlationist anyway (as some old poster TGW did last time the forum had a speculative realist vs transcendental idealist moment) I'd have a lot more patience.
I did that. I wasn’t ‘blindly’ repeating the argument that M. criticizes, I was repeating it consciously and conscientiously for the reasons given.
No, but it is widely presumed. It is explicitly what Dawkins and Dennett believe and implicitly what many others believe.
And you're positing that there's a universe in which it makes sense to say things like "stuff didn't have location or size before the existence of humans"! You say:
which makes things like "the universe is about 14 billion years old" or "the Earth has rotated around the sun for most of its existence" literally false, as the space within them must have been the product of a human mind rather than the space concept which we understand space through.
You can't make extension, space and time merely perspectival while simultaneously saying you're fine with their empirical reality; because dinosaurs. Stuff existed before us, our concepts of stuff did not.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, not at all, I see a profound openness in his gesture, it recognises the "subjective pole" of our concepts without reducing being to thought. Much better than anthropomorphic just so stories.
Ok. Tell me where this argument goes wrong.
(1) A moving asteroid existed before humans. (premise)
(2) Its movement requires a residing space to move through. (premise)
(3) Space existed before humans. (from 1,2)
(4) Humans need to exist for there to be an a-priori concept of space. (premise)
(5) The space which existed before humans is not our a-priori concept of space. (from 3,4)
Substitute in transcendental apperception for 'a priori concept' if you want, the argument goes the same. This kind of argument is supposed to be senseless or unthinkable without performative contradiction, but it's actually very easy to understand and is consistent with its own articulation. IE, even when there is an a-priori structure of experience, we can still articulate other structures using that understanding.
Then develop that theme of space:
(6) The space which existed before humans did was not markedly changed by our coming to be.
and you wind up in a nature indifferent to us. Indifferent in the sense that our a-priori structures of experience are not determinative of the character of nature, nor do they 'ground' the structure of nature. What they do do though is ground our experiences (perceptions, sensory manifold, sensibility, whatever) of nature. This isn't hard.
Yes. Do you think a mindless world is conceivable?
Well, in the context of this particular discussion, I think that the argument begs the question i.e. it assumes what it sets out to prove.
Quoting fdrake
Are a priori or necessary truths dependent on there being humans? Did the law of the excluded middle come into existence as a consequence of evolution? I think not. I understand the basic laws of logic to transcend any particular or contingent facts - 'true in all possible worlds', I think the saying has it. We use our grasp of logic to determine what is objectively the case; hence the role of mathematics in the objective sciences. But a priori truths are not dependent on contingencies, by definition; they would be the case for any species that evolved to the point of being able to reason.
Quoting fdrake
But what do we know outside of experience (including experience augmented by scientific instruments such as telescopes and microscopes)? Remember it was just that question that Berkeley proposed to answer. Kant answered it differently again, by showing 'percepts without concepts are empty' - in other words, drawing on both experience and reason.
The problem is, you're actually investing the common-sense understanding of reality with independence, when actually it's dependent on the conceptual framework within which you declare what it is that exists. That goes as much for the facts of common experience, the proverbial 'cup in the cupboard' or 'tree in the courtyard' as much as 'earth before there were humans'. In all such cases, the mind is one pole of that described reality, but it is not perceived, as it is the subject, not the object, of experience.
I know this is an outrage to common sense, but it is also very much a consequence of 20th century science. Why do you think Einstein asked (exasperatedly!) 'Doesn't the moon continue to exist when we're not looking at it?' Why would he have to ask that question? What prompted it? My reading of the conundrum of the observer issue, is simply that nature has reminded us that we're not all-knowing, that our knowledge is situational and contextual. It's not wrong on that account, but it's also not omniscient, either.
Quoting frank
There are many possible answers. One answer is, that if you're not a philosophical materialist, then you don't accept that material reality possesses intrinsic reality.
This was in response to (1), are you denying that there was a moving asteroid prior to the existence of humans? This seems consistent with your response to @frank:
Quoting Wayfarer
I can respond to the rest of your post when I understand if you're actually coming out and saying that there were no moving asteroids prior to the existence of humans.
That doesn't really answer the question, though. I'm not asking about what you accept, but about what you can imagine.
Are you a panpsychist?
But can’t you see that the same principle applies to all empirical facts? Not simply what existed prior to human life, but anything that happened in the past. From a naturalistic perspective, of course there’s a temporal sequence within which the human species is a recent arrival (‘a mere blip’, as if often said).
What I’m arguing is that time itself, the sequential ordering of events along a specific scale, is grounded in the mind. That’s the import of the passage I quoted from Paul Davies:
I’m not saying, in the absence of humans, nothing exists, but whatever we say about ‘what exists’ implicitly assumes the framework provided by the mind. You can’t get outside that framework to see ‘what really exists’ in its absence. (I suppose this is actually similar to the point made by positivism although I don’t agree with positivism.) But generally what you will think is, the absence of mind nothing exists, as if it goes out of existence. But that is simply imagined non-existence, it too is a mental construct.
Quoting frank
The three philosophical traditions that I am slightly familiar with are Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist. None of them are materialist, but all of them would answer the question differently. My (tentative) answer to ‘what is mind?’ is that there is nothing objectively knowable as ‘mind’ but nevertheless nothing can be known outside of it. The consequence of Cartesianism was the reification of mind as a ‘thinking substance’ which is objectively incoherent; it is this attitude which gives rise to materialism generally. But it’s based on a kind of ‘false consciousness’. But unpacking all of that could take a book.
Please indulge me and answer the questions. Is it false that there was a moving asteriod before humans?
Do you agree that the fact entails that there was space before human minds? Because it had to move in space to move. It's an asteroid.
The problem with this question is a world without mind or consciousness would be a world in which you did not have mind or consciousness, in which case it is obvious that you could not conceive it.
But this should not be taken to mean that there is anything that prohibits a world without mind or consciousness. That there is mind or consciousness does not mean that there must be mind or consciousness or that there cannot be a world without mind or consciousness.
I guess I phrased that poorly. Can you conceive of a world that is devoid of consciousness? One in which there is no consciousness?
I don't think Wayfarer was going to answer it however I phrased it, tho. :)
I see panpsychism as a kind of pseudo-scientific claim - that consciousness (actually I prefer ‘mind’) exists as an attribute or potential within any and every object. But this doesn’t come to terms with the meaning of the ‘process of objectification’.
Quoting fdrake
All due respect, we’re talking past each other.
If you say my argument is question begging, and I've made it into something like a syllogism, you should be able to tell me precisely in what premise or inference I'm begging the question. If it's not in premise (1), I've moved onto premise (2). So I'll ask again:
Do you agree that the fact [hide](that there was a moving asteroid before the existence of humans)[/hide] entails that there was space before human minds? Because it had to move in space to move as asteroids do.
Premise (1) begs the question. The existence of "an asteroid" assumes the human spatial-temporal perspective which individuates and identifies something as "an asteroid". Therefore it is really impossible that there was such a thing as an asteroid before humans, because it requires a human to identify a thing as "an asteroid" in order that there is such a thing as an asteroid. Unless you believe that God identified things, and called them "asteroids" before there were human beings, there was no such thing as "an asteroid" before there were humans beings.
So, if by saying there were asteroids all that is meant is that whatever it is (apart from the human itself) that produces the human experience of asteroids pre-existed humans, then there would seem to be no problem. As I have said before, saying there were asteroids prior to humans just means that if we had been there we would have seen asteroids.
Davies is referring to the world, not mind, when he says, "... how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth."
The only reference to mind or consciousness is Linde's claim in the second-last line, but that doesn't follow from anything he or Davies said in that passage, the import of which is that time is reference-frame dependent. That is, time does not apply to the universe as a whole, it applies to subsystems.
For an explanation of how time vanishes for the universe as a whole, see Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement.
He explicitly states ‘an observer with a clock’.
In a physics context, an observer is "a frame of reference from which a set of objects or events are being measured", not a reference to mind.
It's useful to separate the idea of the reference frame of a system from the idea of the consciousness of a system. Time is reference frame-dependent, not mind-dependent. Which is why it is coherent to say that the Earth aged prior to the existence of human beings.
Definitions that are created by physicists. And measurement is a conscious process.
Scale and perspective likewise imply a point of view, because you can’t have either without a comparison.
Recall that we’re speaking about ‘things as they appear to us’, not ‘things as they are in themselves.’ That is the fundamental point in this conversation.
I'm puzzled as to why you detest naturalistic philosophies of mind so much! Is it because you feel they threaten your religious faith? I don't see why that should be.
You have said before that if reason is evolved then it is undermined. I don't buy this. In fact Hegel sees reason as evolving, and sees the real as being intrinsically rational. On this account logic would be expected to evolve and perfect itself via the "practice" of sensory experience most broadly conceived. Reason and logic are not bloodless transparencies.
You were quoting physicists as supporting your argument.
Quoting Wayfarer
So the Earth appears to be 4.5 billion years old but isn't really?
The human point-of-view is a relational one (i.e., between natural systems, of which a human is one) and does not depend on a Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction.
The problem is that you’re answering a philosophical question about the nature of knowledge with a scientific question based on the knowledge of nature. That's why we're talking past one another. (I've now answered AndrewM below about a similar point.)
Quoting Janus
I don't 'detest' them, and I try not to engage in inflammatory language; I criticize them.
Quoting Janus
But Hegel is hardly representative of modern evolutionary thinking or even current philosophy for that matter. Tielhard du Chardin and Henri Bergson are others who interpreted evolution philosophically, but they are generally ignored; outside places like philosophy forums you'd hardly hear of them. (For that matter, Alfred Russel Wallace differed completely with Darwin on the question of the evolution of h. sapiens, on similar grounds.)
My view is humans obviously evolved according to the outlines of evolutionary theory but that once the evolved to the point of language- and tool-using beings, they are able to 'transcend the biological', as it were. But because evolutionary theory stands in as a kind of secular creation theory, then all kinds of conclusions are read into it which are beyond its scope. Chief amongst them is that language and reason have a kind of Darwinian rationale, that they can be understood in the same terms as other adaptations (Dawkins says somewhere that language is like 'a fantastic peacock's tail' i.e. superb for propagating the genome). It's simply taken for granted, it's what everyone knows, or thinks they know.
Quoting Andrew M
Kant, as we may recall, professed to be both an empirical realist, AND a transcendental idealist. He himself was well versed in the cosmological science of his day and in fact his theory of nebular formation, adapted by LaPlace, is still part of astronomical theory to this day.
So how could he be both? Because the 'transcendental idealist' perspective is about the grounds of the possibility of knowledge itself. It is not about natural phenomena, but about the nature of our understanding, of how 'nature' is known to us (i.e. as phenomena) and how we must necessarily understand appearances in accordance with the apparatus of the understanding. This is the basis of his well-known Copernican revolution in philosophy, that 'things conform to thoughts, not thoughts to things'.
So how does this bear on the age of the universe? It is an empirical fact (unless of course disproven by some other discovery.) Whereas, what I have been debating with fdrake goes back to:
Quoting fdrake
The difficult philosophical issue here is the relationship between temporal and logical priority. The planet, living systems, and h. sapiens plainly evolved along the lines somewhat understood by science (again pending further discoveries). But I'm taking issue with the notion that the nature of reason herself - the a priori and necessary truths, and so on - can be understood along those lines. I believe that fdrake, along with the majority, believe that reason (etc) is an evolved capacity, and therefore can be understood naturalistically along those lines. To try and come to a point, this is the mainstream view of evolutionary naturalism, which is the subject of criticism in Nagel's book, Mind and Cosmos. (I say that, because it's a long and very acrimonious debate between a lot of heavyweights, and I don't have time to try and spell out all the intricacies.)
But, suffice to say, that I still believe that human beings are ultimately not simply reducible to biological or any other purely physical causes. We have a biological side, but what ultimately what our real nature is, is not something known to the objective or physical sciences, because it transcends them. The philosophical argument for that, is that logical and arithmetical truths transcend contingent facts; that's why, in Greek philosophy, you had the idea of the 'rational soul', which is that man, by the power of reason, could realise his identity as something 'transcending the biological' (which was ultimately merged, with uneven results, into Christian eschatology. It's tremendously non-PC nowadays, but fortunately, I'm only an amateur on a forum, not an academic having to defend such an outrageous idea in the Secular Academy.)
Quoting Andrew M
That distinction doesn't require the blessing of naturalism.
So it doesn't make sense to say that there were things called "asteroids" at that time, does it?
Quoting Janus
This is blatantly false in two distinct ways. First, it is the human being with its many systems, which produces the experience of an asteroid. I agree that there is something "extra" involved, but it is incorrect to say that this extra thing is what produces the experience. That's what separates the position I'm arguing from the brain in a vat scenario. The brain in the vat requires the evil genius to "produce" the experience, I argue that the brain produces the experience. I accept, on the basis of evidence, that there is something extra, but the extra thing is not necessary, therefore we cannot say that it is the cause of experience.
Second, if we assume the reality of this "extra" thing, the first thing that is evident about it, is that what exists at one time is distinctly different from what exists at another time. Whatever it is, that "extra" thing, which might contribute to a human experience of a asteroid today, or might have contributed to an experience yesterday, was not the same before human existence. So you have a faulty assumption of continuity, "sameness", which does not account for the reality of change. You need some principles to base this idea, that the same "extra" thing which contributes to a human experience existed prior to human beings, when the evidence indicates that we live in a world of change.
Do you agree that the (existence of a moving asteroid prior to the existence of humans) entails that there was space before human minds? Because it had to move in space to move as asteroids do.
Edit: you are absolutely fine leveraging scientific thinking whenever it serves your perspective, and I won't let you subject me to this double standard.
So humans did evolve from animal precursors? And this evolution occurred prior to the advent of the consciousness and reason that, according to you, constructs empirical reality?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is no experience of the asteroid without the asteroid, and the light that reflects from the surface of the asteroid that enables us to see it. In fact it is the conditions of the world, taken as a whole, including the human, that produces the experience of the asteroid, so the "something else" that produces the experience of an asteroid is nothing less than the whole world.
The problem is that you're giving two contrary answers to the same question. :-) You seem to be saying that space and time existed in a scientific sense prior to humans, but not in a philosophical sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
So the Earth conforms to thoughts of the Earth? If so, does that imply that without humans there would be no Earth?
Quoting Wayfarer
Understandably, since the Kantian distinction opposes a natural epistemology. The natural distinction is, for example, that there can be a straight stick that appears bent in water. The Kantian distinction is that the straight stick is itself "an appearance" and not what the stick is "in itself".
Quoting Andrew M
This is not at all true - Berkeley addresses the same point, and Kant in much greater detail. What Kant means by 'phenomenon' or 'appearance' is not mere phenomenon or mere appearance.
Quoting Andrew M
Empirically, it is obviously true, but the philosophical analysis is about how we know this (or anything!) to be true. Don't forget, philosophy is concerned with the nature of knowledge, the ground of knowledge, in a way that science is not. Naturalism assumes that the natural order is consistent and existent. A passage on Quine puts it like this:
But it's just that assumption which has been called into question by physics - that's why all of the controversy about the 'observer problem'. The many-worlds interpretation, which I believe you endorse, was only thought of as a solution to that problem, so it's some problem!
It's also called into question by philosophy. When we 'see the tree', what's actually going on? There's no 'light inside the skull'. The brain constructs the image on the basis of received sense-data combined with judgement; this is what's really happening. But when naturalism eschews 'first philosophy' it 'brackets out' all those considerations and says, more or less, 'let's start with what is "really there" '. And in doing that, the critical project of philosophy has been abandoned. Or, essentially, we're equating science with metaphysics.
Speaking of positivism, Bohr's well-known saying 'If you're not shocked by quantum physics, then you can't have understood it', was a statement made after he had given a talk to the Vienna Circle positivists. After hearing him, they all seemed positively sanguine - and that's what he said!
Quoting Andrew M
It's not so simple as that. It's about judgements of what is real, of the ground of the understanding. I know it's perplexing, baffling and an apparent outrage to common sense but I have good reason to argue it. (Actually, in this context, I've learned a lot from Buddhist philosophy of 'mind-only' and 'emptiness', which provide an interpretive framework within which these ideas make sense.)
But this is false. There could be an hallucination in which there is an experience of an asteroid, in which case there is the experience of that asteroid, the imaginary asteroid. Therefore there is the experience of the asteroid (the fictional asteroid) without any real physical asteroid. And this is not a small problem to be dismissed as nonsense, because in particle physics there are no real fundamental particles. There is something which is experienced, and the name "particle" is given to that experience, but there are no actual physical particles. So there is the experience of particles without any real physical particles.
Quoting Janus
How would you account for imagination and creativity then? Suppose that someone creates a tune, and hums it in one's mind, or someone creates an image of a fictional asteroid, or a physicist creates a fictional particle. Why would you say that "the whole world" produces this experience when it's really just the imagination of the creator? .
A mass hallucination of an asteroid is a highly dubious proposition to say the least.
Why would it have to be a mass hallucination? if one person hallucinates an asteroid, then that person can speak about that asteroid.
We weren't talking about seeing an asteroid, we were talking about experiencing an asteroid, and what it is which "produces" the experience. I think that it is the systems within the human being which produce the experience, though I agreed that there is something "extra " involved with the experience. But you were claiming that the extra thing produces the experience. That, I think is clearly false.
The point is that there is no direct chain of causation between the thing within the experience, and the sensible "extra" thing which you claim produces the experience, so it is false to say that the sensible thing produces the experience. In reality, the causal chain which produces the experience occurs within the human being, and the things which are sensed act as influences on this experience. This is evident in the reality of hallucinations, dreams, and imagination. You cannot just dismiss the reality of these experiences for the sake of supporting your claim that the sensible "extra" thing produces the experience. Then suggest that we were discussing "seeing" rather than "experiencing".
Consider for example, the experience of hearing someone play the piano. What you hear is a series of notes and chords, music. If you look, with your eyes, you see someone playing the piano, and the person's actions correspond with what you hear. Because of this temporal correspondence, between what you hear and what you see, you might conclude that the person's actions at the piano are causing you to hear music. But you'd be forgetting the role that the human body plays in selecting a very specific and minute part of the vast reality around it, the notes, and focusing on that very tiny aspect, to hear the music independent of sights, smells etc., and even other sounds. Likewise, when you look with your eyes, you must focus on a very tiny aspect of the vast environment, to see that it is the particular actions of the person at the piano which correspond to what you hear.
So it really is the human body which produces the experience, through a process of selecting from what is available in the environment. Each sense is designed to distinguish a very unique type of information, indicating that the body has developed ways of separating out, and focusing in on very tiny aspects of a vast world, creating an "experience" through this process of separating things from each other. The experience is created by this process of separating things out, which the senses do, distinguishing minute parts, along with the brain synthesizing all this distinct information into a unity. The "experience" is the unity, and this unity is synthetic, produced within the body, with information selected by the body..
I'd be keen to get to the bottom of this. From the SEP entry on Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 'Objects in space and time are said to be "appearances", and [Kant] argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves of which they are appearances.'
That is, according to Kant, the straight stick is an appearance and the things in themselves that give rise to the appearance of the straight stick are unknowable.
If you don't think that's right, how would you (briefly) characterize Kant's phenomena/noumena distinction?
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree with Quine about ordinary objects (and the rejection of sense data and positivism), but would put the inquiry issue like this: While physics is the study of nature, metaphysics is the study of the study of nature (which is itself a part of nature). So a natural metaphysics is reflective in a way that operational physics is not.
Quoting Wayfarer
What has been called into question by physics is an implicit assumption about ordinary objects, termed counterfactual definiteness. No interpretation denies that trees and persons exist.
Quoting Wayfarer
The phrase 'see the tree' is a language abstraction and implies nothing about the underlying natural processes. The role of science is to investigate the objects and processes involved. The role of philosophy is to sort out the conceptual problems that arise (such as 'light in skulls' and 'sense-data').
Quoting Wayfarer
Equally, I know that positing the reality of ordinary objects is perplexing, baffling and an apparent outrage to philosophical sensibilities but I have good reason to argue it. ;-) Observation and reflection on the natural world provides an interpretive framework within which these ideas make sense.
The logic is the same with either "seeing" or "experiencing".Hallucinating an asteroid is not experiencing an asteroid, but experiencing an hallucination. If an asteroid is experienced then it follows that the asteroid plays an essential part in producing that experience. The logic here is irrefutable.
Hasty answer as I'm on duty.
Note that the optical illusion example is often thrown at Berkeley, but he does have an answer to it.
Over and above that - after the first edition of CPR was published, many critics said Kant was simply repeating Berkeley. So in the preface to the second edition contained his 'critique of material idealism' aimed at Berkeley (which you can find an account of here).
My interpretation is as follows: to say that we have knowledge of only of phenomena is not to say we know nothing, as pragmatically speaking, the phenomenal domain exhibits all of the regularities and consistencies which natural science observes. So when I said 'not mere appearance', I'm saying that Kant doesn't regard the appearance of phenomena as a mere trifle or an optical illusion or something that can simply be dismissed.
The meaning of noumenal is derived from the root 'nous', so one meaning of 'noumenal' is 'ideal object'. There's a Platonic echo in that (which I'm not entirely sure Kant was aware of) but in the Platonist tradition (including Aristotelian realism) the forms were grasped by nous in a purely rational manner (as distinct from the material object which was apprehended by the senses). So in some ways our grasp of actual particulars is always deficient in some respects - reflecting the Platonic intuition about the imperfect nature of the sensory domain. I think in effect, the Kantian 'synthesis' of intellectual and sensory elements somewhat resembles hylomorphism (I guess there's a study of that somewhere out there.)
I find in discussions of the idea of 'things in themselves' that many people have a sense that the phrase implies we could 'pull back the curtain' and 'see things as they really are' , or that it implies some 'reality behind the reality' if only we could see it. Whereas it seems to me to indicate something about the inevitable limit of knowledge due to our sensory and intellectual limitations.
But the practical import for all of these discussions is that 'things only ever exist from a perspective'. That is, nothing has real 'self-existence' or exists in its own right. (It's this principle which is also found in Buddhist philosophy). In some ways, the 'atom' fulfilled the role of the ideal or ultimate object, but the upshot of 20th century physics has thrown that into doubt. But we are used to attributing inherent reality to the objective realm without understanding the way in which this based in our own mind. It is part and parcel of post-Enlightenment modernity.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, nonetheless the phenomenal domain is not the world of naturalism since the former is dependent on the perceiver (per Kant's "Copernican revolution"). That is, without human beings there is no phenomenal domain, and the Earth only exists within the phenomenal domain.
Quoting Wayfarer
Whereas the natural view is that things are only ever known from a perspective.
In terms of the blind men and an elephant parable, naturalism permits different descriptions of the elephant from different perspectives. Sans the blind men there is no perspective, but there is still an elephant.
However it seems on Kant's view that without the blind men (or anyone else), neither is there an elephant.
I equate 'the phenomenal domain' with 'the domain studied by the natural sciences', in other words, the realm of phenomena. (I don't think mathematics is included in that domain, but most modern naturalists tend towards the view that mathematics can also be understood naturalistically as in some sense a product of the brain which is in turn the product of evolution.)
But here's an interesting thing - that Wheeler paper we were discussing a few months back contains the statement that 'no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is registered' - that is, until it appears. The Copenhagen interpretation, generally, takes a similar view - that it is meaningless to speak of an 'unregistered' or 'unobserved' entity, and mistaken to believe that there is such a thing lurking there undiscovered. So, likewise, these interpretations support the original notion that the phenomenon is 'what appears' to us, and discourage speculation as to what it is that appears.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't think Kant would have agreed with that at all. That's basically extreme skepticism. (Incidentally that parable hails from India, and is found in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain literature.) Kant's 'refutation of idealism' presents an argument that we must have knowledge of a world outside our own ideas (linked above), so he was not at all sceptical in the obvious sense.
But I think it's important to make this point: that Kant's form of idealism emphatically doesn't say that 'the world disappears when it's not perceived'. (I don't think any serious idealist philosophers maintain that.) It is the kind of thing that realist thinkers presume must be entailed by what they understand 'idealism' to mean. But that criticism is based on the 'imagined non-existence' of the world - that things go in and out of existence, depending on whether they're perceived or not. But this is because the realist view doesn't grasp that everything we say about 'what exists' presumes an implicit order which already presumes an essentially human, or at least sentient, perspective.
We know a great deal about the physical universe and the vast aeons of time that existed before humans evolved, no question about that. But the sense of scale, duration, and perspective which are combined to make that judgement, are still derived from and grounded in human experience, but with the subjective or personal supposedly bracketed out, and only taking into account the aspects ('primary qualities') which may be quantified (which had been the stance of post-Galilean science generally although it is starting to change). That is why philosophical and scientific materialism wishes to land upon the ultimately real constituent represented by the fundamental particle ('the ultimate thing').
But try to conceive of anything from no perspective. If you were an intelligence that lived on the scale of an atom, then one of our everyday objects - a glass or a jug - might be a galaxy. If you were an intelligence that lived for 10,000,000 years - say, if mountains were sentient - then many things which humans are familiar with would be so ephemeral you wouldn't even register them. (You'd register rivers, because they are around long enough to make an impression!) And you can't see or know anything from all perspectives at once, and at all scales simultaneously - it simply doesn't make any sense. 'Existence' statements all presume a scale and perspective. And I think that's what Kant's sense of the 'primary intuitions' of space and time mean; space and time aren't entirely objective, because the mind provides the sense of perspective, scale and duration by which they're measured. (That is how I interpret the meaning of the Andrei Linde quote we discussed before. )
H. Sapiens' brain is the most complex entity known to science, and what it does, is generate a world. But when you ask, 'you mean, without the brain, the world would disappear?' the answer is, 'what world?'
When the tree falls in the forest ..... - which tree? You can't even try to answer without imagining it.
Someone else posted a paragraph in another thread which is pertinent:
So, it doesn't mean the universe doesn't exist when there are no observers, but the only universe we will ever know is that revealed in and by human experience. The error is to forget that, and to 'absolutize' scientific knowledge, as if it exists quite independently of humans. Basically that means, treating humans as objects, and leaving out the subjective nature of experience (and therefore reality). And we're all so embedded in that, that it is second nature to us.
The alternative to this is to suppose there is a structure to reality that human beings come to know about imperfectly. First through everyday experience and cognitizing that in whatever primitive fashion. And then later using the tools of logic, math and science.
The subjective nature of experience is how we experience the world as upright walking apes, but we can still kind of understand the structure of reality, even though it has taken a lot of trial and error.
Isn't this fundamentally what the debate over realism amounts to? Whether there is a structure to the world we can know about, or whether the mind imposes that structure?
What logic? It looks like a matter of begging the question to me, and that is a refutation Care to show me the premises and conclusion, to demonstrate that you are not begging the question? Your claim appears to be that "an experience" requires something sensed, the sensations play "an essential part in the experience". Is a dream not an experience? Suppose that the person was dreaming, and there was nothing "extra" acting as an essential part of the "experience". By what argument do you demonstrate that the person is wrong to refer to the thing in the dream as an "asteroid", and call this an experience of an asteroid in a dream. Clearly the person experiences "an asteroid", in a dream, and there is no "extra" playing an essential role in that experience.
“......The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called phenomenon....”
While it is true that without humans there is no phenomenal domain, it does not follow from Kantian speculative epistemology that the Earth **only** exists within the phenomenal domain. The Earth is named in accordance with conceptions belonging to it, so is known to exist as a determined object. Still, it is phenomenon only insofar as the immediate temporality of the human cognitive system passes it by rote to judgement.
(Judgement merely for logical consistency a posteriori, because understanding already thinks the phenomenal object as representation contains the manifold of conceptions experience says it should have)
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Quoting Andrew M
While this is true, it is a misinterpretation of the so-called “Copernican Revolution”, which is in its simplest form:
“.....I may assume that the objects, or, which is the same thing, that experience, in which alone as given objects they are cognized, conform to my conceptions—and then I am at no loss how to proceed...”
It is clear the use of the method used by Copernicus, in switching perspectives, pertains to Kant long after the phenomenal stage in his rational system espoused in the first critique. All he is doing is justifying a particular means by initially assuming an end. Then he goes back to establish the means such that the end is logically obtained as originally assumed. Combined with the part above about phenomenal domain being undetermined objects, and here objects are given in experience thus really determined, is shown the difference in the temporal placement.
Furthermore, the whole idea behind bringing Copernicus into the scene was to justify a priori cognitions, which obviously have nothing whatsoever to do with the world of naturalism, but only the possibility of knowledge with respect to it.
“....If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge......( )......Before objects are given to me, that is, a priori, I must presuppose in myself laws of the understanding which are expressed in conceptions a priori. To these conceptions, then, all the objects of experience must necessarily conform....”
It is the how they necessarily conform that is the ground of the epistemological theory itself, and where all those confusing terms and their temporal locations are to be found.
Or so it seems........
But this is not something we are entitled to claim tout court. We can say that "things only ever exist from a perspective, for us" or "nothing has real 'self-existence' or exists in its own right for us".
If you leave off the "for us", then you are making a claim that we can see things as they really are; a claim that contradicts the very basis upon which it is made; namely that we cannot know things in themselves.
The further point is that if, leaving off that critical "for us", you then want to go on to say that since "things only ever exist from a perspective" and " nothing has real 'self-existence' or exists in its own right", it follows that the Real must be ideal, that mind or consciousness must be fundamental, you are drawing an obviously unwarranted conclusion; a conclusion no more or less unwarranted than saying that because things appear to us as material, then the physical must be fundamental.
The point is, as I see it, to eschew fundamentalist thinking altogether; to admit the undecidable, and to leave it alone, by moving on to more interesting questions and ideas.
As Ashleigh Brilliant says, roughly paraphrased: "The biggest problem we have is what to do about all the things we cannot do anything about".
That could be changed to fit the epistemological context: "the biggest epistemological problem we face is how to know all the things we cannot know".
Humans are always implicated, that knowledge is always 'for us' or 'discovered by us'. The modern plight is to lose sight of this and presume that the world exists completely independently of our observation of it - but this doesn't acknowledge the role of the mind in constructing experience and so knowledge.
[quote=Frank, Gleiser, Thompson] Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.[/quote]
This leads to
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
There's a chapter on this topic in the book The Embodied Mind which (not co-incidentally) was co-authored by the same Evan Thompson who co-wrote the Blind Spot.
//ps// have just found Embodied Mind.pdf on the internet, and will re-read it now, haven't looked at it since just after it came out.//
Again, it seems to me that you are drawing an unwarranted conclusion here. Of course our knowledge is always "for us" by us, of us, in us and so on. On the other hand we are warranted in assuming that the world exists independently of our observations of it, just not that it exists in the same form as our observations of it.
So the mind is of course involved in "constructing experience and so knowledge", but so is the world in ways which must remain unfathomable to us, unfathomable at least apart from our scientific investigations of nature, human physiology and perception, and so on, which are all " for us" insofar as we are obviously involved in them.
We can see the world although we cannot see it but "through a glass darkly".
I don't see how you can argue this. If it is true that "things only ever exist from a perspective", then perspective is fundamental as the basis for the reality of existence. So unless you can separate perspective form mind or consciousness, the conclusion that mind or consciousness is fundamental to the reality of existence is clearly justified.
Quoting Janus
There is no such warrant. If the world as we know it is a construct of our minds, then the assumption that the world exists independently of our observations is clearly unwarranted.
Quoting Janus
I see no reason to assume the reality of what you call 'the world". Once you accept the reality of the principle you've stated, that what we see is "through a glass darkly", then you ought to recognize that there is no reason to believe that there is anything at all beyond the glass. The glass itself could be generating the impression that there is something beyond it. The "darkness" of the glass could be what you call "the world". "The world" is within the glass
The question now is is this true, what is the nature of the glass. If the mind constructs the experience with what is received from the glass, then what is beyond the glass, what you call "the world" is irrelevant. Our reality is the glass itself. One might ask, whether or not the mind itself has constructed the glass. If the glass is the human body, the thing we see the proposed "world" through, then I would argue that the mind does construct the glass. And if we ask what it constructs the glass out of, we cannot say "the world", because "the world" comes after the glass, as a proposition of what is on the other side of the glass.
This is the importance of the temporal perspective. We create a tool by which we can observe (sense), let's call this the glass (it's the human body). Through the use of this tool we create "the world", which is supposed to be what we are observing through the glass. To say that the glass was created from the world is a faulty temporal perspective because the glass was created before there was a world. What is on the other side of the glass is not unfathomable to us, it simply requires determining what the glass is made of.
I haven't said it is true that "things only ever exist from a perspective"; I have said that this is only true with the added caveat "for us". To say that things exist for us is to say they are known (by us). So the true formulation is "things are only known from a perspective". It does not follow from this that things (in the broadest sense of the term to include both determinate and indeterminate things) can only exist from a perspective.The tree as perceived and examined is a determinate thing; the tree in itself is an indeterminate, although (not exhaustively) determinable, thing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is nonsense. the principle I stated is that the world is seen "through a glass darkly". It follows logically that if the world is seen through a glass darkly, then there is a world which is seen through a glass darkly. If the world were nothing more than our seeing of it, then it would make no sense to say that we see it through a glass darkly. In other words you have it exactly arse-about.
You clearly said, "leaving off" the "for us", that this is unwarranted. And that is what I objected to.
Quoting Janus
What I said, is that if we leave off the "for us", and consider that things only exist from a perspective (and this can be derived from the special theory of relativity incidentally), then the conclusion actually is justified. You only make it unwarranted by adding "for us". But the "for us" only makes a useless tautology anyway.
What I said was:
Quoting Janus
The special theory of relativity won't help your case here because it is part of the "for us". The "for us" does not make "a useless tautology" because it highlights the distinction between knowing and the real. It is safe to assume that we and our perceptions are part of the real, but we and they are not adequate or sufficient to a complete revelation of the real, insofar as they will always remain partial (in both senses of that word).
You can't really equate the domains since naturalists and dualists conceptualize the world differently. For a naturalist, the natural world encompasses everything - for example, Aristotle's form and matter are immanent in the natural world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, everything we say about 'what exists' presumes a human perspective. So that isn't a point of difference between Kant's system and naturalism or realism.
Quoting Wayfarer
OK, so that seems a point of difference. For the realist, human beings (and their brains) are part of the world, not the generators of it. What exists (as opposed to what we say about what exists) does not depend on a human perspective.
Thanks for your comments.
Quoting Mww
Using the Earth as the example, what is the undetermined object here? Simply the Earth's referent (without its characteristics)? Also, on Kant's view, where else would the Earth exist? The noumenal domain? In one's experience or judgment?
It seems to me the model here is of an unfurnished object that acquires form when it is perceived. Is that correct?
Quoting Mww
So why would Kant be assuming we know anything of objects a priori? It seems he is inverting the 'conform' direction simply to reinforce that assumption.
As you probably know, the first critique is 700-odd pages and took ten years to compose, and included in there, in order to fulfill the.....
“...completeness and thoroughness necessary in the execution of the present task. The aims set before us are not arbitrarily proposed, but are imposed upon us by the nature of cognition itself....”,
.........are terminologies for every damn thing specific to it. That, in conjunction with the methodology to which the terms belong, leads one down the merry, albeit unabridged, path of theoretical human thought.
So skip to the chase: an object presented to sensibility is nothing but affect, lets us know there’s something for the mind to get involved with. Imagination takes the affect, synthesizes to it a bunch of intuitions. (The psychologists simply call this memory; neurobiologists call it activated neural networks; physicalists, brain states...etc, etc, etc). Now we have a phenomenon, an undetermined object. Object because it is now intuited as being external to us hence empirical, and undetermined because as yet no concepts have been thought for it, which is the job of the understanding. We cannot yet have any knowledge whatsoever of the phenomenon, not even that sensibility has been affected. Again, psychologists call this the unconscious; neurobiologists call it part of the autonomic nervous system, physicalists call it hogwash....etc, etc, etc.
All the above is relatively instantaneous, of course. In the case of Earth, which is nothing new, all the concepts pertinent to the phenomenon have been previously processed, so all that’s required is for judgement to give its blessing.....yup, that’s Earth all right.....we cognize logical consistency, and know we’re looking at, talking about, picturing.....whatever....a very specific object of common experience.
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Quoting Andrew M
Because the real object Earth affects sensibility, it’s physical location absolutely must be in space and time, an altogether convenient way of saying.....outside us, and serves as validation of objective reality. The representation of the empirical object that resides in the mind exists as a collection of determinant conceptions, thereby experienced, and referred to, as Earth.
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Quoting Andrew M
It isn’t that we know anything of objects a priori, it is rather that the means of knowing anything at all rests on principles a priori. Every cause has an effect; all bodies are extended; no two straight lines enclose a space....and so on. Some concepts we know a priori as ideas of conditions that have no object, round, singular, existence, necessity, to name a few, similar to Platonic Forms, Aristotelian predicaments (categories), even Hume’s passions.....which really aren’t, but ok.
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I do not acknowledge noumena. They serve no purpose other than to make people go where Kant himself refused to go and suppose for themselves things he never meant. It’s fine to understand how they were developed, but to use them for anything cannot be done.
Anyway......
But I’m not criticising dualism. I hold a kind of dualist view myself, as a kind of working hypothesis.
Quoting Andrew M
That is the basic point, that is where the argument hinges. That is there the whole recursive loop happens. Seeing through that is the task of philosophy as distinct from science.
Quoting Andrew M
We know 'ideal objects' a priori - that the triangle is a flat plane bounded by three straight lines, and a multitude of other similar facts. The thing that intrigues Kant is why the synthetic a priori, how we can derive conclusions from logical principles that are not simply contained in their premisses.
Your proposition is flawed because it assumes a "for us". Since we each have our own distinct perspectives, there is no such thing as "for us", when we are talking about perspectives. So you have just made up an impossible scenario, a premise based in the contradiction, that "we" have "a perspective".
We cannot proceed with this discussion until you relinquish the contradictory premise of "a perspective, for us". If we are talking about perspectives, there is no such thing as "for us", do you agree? Either we are talking about "for us", in which case the unity of "us" must be validated such that "us" might represent an existing enity, or we are talking about "perspective" in which case we each have our own.
So we're right back to the same point, if we remove the "for us", which is clearly warranted because the unity which creates an "us" has not been validated as being anything real, then we are left with perspective as the fundamental principle of what is real.
Wouldn't that apply to other humans as well as elephants? How do I know other people exist? The same way I know elephants exist. If that's just part of what appears to me, then solipsism is the logical conclusion. If that's what Kant meant.
This isn't to say Kant intended solipsism, only to show that this sort of view leads there. Why would other people be the one exception? Aren't they part of the world being perceived, just like elephants?
For that matter, don't elephants perceive?
We cannot proceed with this discussion until you address what I have actually said. It's an amazing level of stupidity you are displaying if this is not deliberate obfuscation. If it is deliberate then I don't want to converse with you anyway.
The whole solipsist dilemma is a strawman having sex with a red herring; it trades on the mere fact that we cannot prove deductively that the external world, other people or anything at all exists independently of our apprehensions (nor can we prove anything else that is not merely formally abstract, for that matter). When will people let this, and other vapid vacuities like BIV, "evil demon", p-zombie and so on, go, as they should, into the dustbin of intellectual history. They've been on the slaughterbench for long enough now for us to be confident that they are in fact dead ideas with nothing whatsoever to offer.
I agree with this.
Quoting Janus
It's a little bit more than that. Kant was responding to skeptical implications Hume raised with his empiricism, which were raised by ancient skeptics as well. Plato and Aristotle were also responding to skeptical arguments. And so did Wittgenstein.
It's substantial enough to attract considerable attention from major philosophers throughout history.
Quoting Janus
When a consensus has been reached that those arguments have either been refuted, dissolved or shown to be meaningless nonsense. Attempts have been made to do so, of course. But consensus is lacking.
You didn't mention the correlationist circle, which the continental realists have been struggling to get past. Their understanding of Kant, or those who followed Kant, is that it traps us into a world of how things appear to us such that we can't say there are things like mind-independent fossils.
I have a perspective, and you have a perspective. They are clearly not the same. What I am asking is how do you validate this proposed "human perspective".
Quoting Janus
The point is that your proposed distinction is unacceptable because there is no such thing as "the perspective for us". As I explained, that is impossible, contradictory, and therefore your division is unacceptable. A similar, and acceptable distinction would be between "in itself", and "for me".
Are you ready to dismiss "for us", and start with an acceptable premise, "for me"? Then if we manage to synthesize a "for us", by way of some agreement, you might acknowledge that the "for us" is a synthesis of a multiplicity of distinct "for mes", and not actually a true perspective. it is artificial.
Quoting Janus
The problem you have created is that you are designing "perspective" on the faulty base of "for us", and therefore you obviously have no clear understanding of what a perspective actually is. In other words, it is you who is actually displaying an incredible degree of stupidity. if you have no desire to proceed, and attempt to remove this fundamental stupidity from you argument, then so be it. You can live with that stupidity.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m not sure Kant outright rejects what is these days is considered a naive realist point of view, or, which is for practical purposes the same thing, the Hume-ian common sense empiricism of British Enlightenment. Empirical objects may very well exist in the same form as they exist in the mind. The problem isn’t whether or not they do, but the impossibility of proving whether or not they do. While it is true the Kantian speculative epistemology prevents any such knowledge, that doesn’t negate the possibility that the true nature of things and our understanding of them are congruent. Hence the force and power of the Law of Non-contradiction.
Are you not being a little harsh, perhaps? If there is at least one irrefutable commonality in human reason, wouldn’t the concept, or just the idea, of a human perspective be validated?
I must say, I find no irreconcilable difficulties in Janus’ assertion with respect to a general human perspective, albeit a very, very narrow domain. The addendum “for us” is tautological, as you say, but it isn’t necessarily impossible and certainly not contradictory.
OK, so as I understand it the object goes through various internal processing stages after which the person judges that he's talking about the Earth.
The person's mind synthesizes the phenomenal object that subsequently appears to him. So, logically, phenomena are at least partly dependent on mind. However in accordance with the a priori categories of time and space applicable to phenomena, the Earth is judged to be a distinct and several-billion-year-old entity - temporally prior to and spatially external to the person.
Does that capture it?
Quoting Mww
Is the purpose of noumena just to serve as a logical placeholder at the boundary of knowledge? That is, if anything were (or could be) known about noumena, then it wouldn't be noumena, it would be phenomena.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I know. What I mean is that for the naturalist, the natural world is all there is. Thus 'the study of nature' excludes nothing. Whereas for the dualist, the natural world is one part of reality that excludes whatever the other dual part is (noumena, mind, Platonic forms, or whatever).
If, as a dualist, you assume the natural and dualist conceptions of the natural world are the same, then you will conclude that the naturalist must be missing something important - the other dual part. But that's not how the naturalist conceives of the world. That other dual part is already integrated in the naturalist's conception of the world in some other form (likely in ways the dualist doesn't easily recognize, since it is not incorporated dualistically).
Quoting Wayfarer
OK, what would be the recursive loop and is it a problem?
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, so you can substitute something non-sentient instead, say, a tree. As I understand Kant's view, the precondition of something appearing to a person as phenomena is that it is situated in time and space. So that precludes solipsism since other people and things appear phenomenally. But if there were no sentient creatures at all, then there would be no phenomena, including trees. Just noumena which seems to be a placeholder for what can't be referred to or described.
Pretty much, with a couple minor caveats:
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, the mind synthesizes the phenomenal object, However, there is some controversy on the Kantian rendition of appearance. Some say it means what a thing looks like, others say it is mere presence, like, e.g., I made my appearance at the family reunion. I favor the latter, because to say what a thing looks like presupposes the very attributes conceptions are supposed to give it. This relates because “subsequently appears” is temporally misplaced; if there is an affect on sensibility, then the mind is aware of an appearance of something. This affect, or appearance, is also called sensation by materialists, and occurs antecedent, not subsequent, to any synthesis.
Quoting Andrew M
Time and space are not categories, they are “pure intuitions a priori”. From the previous quote, “intuitions to which all objects must conform” specifically means these two. There are no objects possible for human cognition that are not in space and time. This is not to say there are no objects, but rather there are no objects to which human cognition may apply. We can know nothing a posteriori that is not conditioned by space or time. There is no such thing as experience itself without those two conditions. There are two chapters....27 pages no less...... dedicated to just what those two intuitions are, what they do and how they do it.
As time and space belong to intuition, so too do the categories belong to understanding. As space and time are pure intuitions, that is, not derivable from any object of experience but belonging to any object of experience in particular, so too are the categories pure conceptions, that is, having no object of their own, but belonging to all objects of thought in general. Re: Wayfarer’s triangle, the category of quantity makes the thought of lines possible, the category of quality makes the thought of flat possible, the category of relation makes the thought of arranging lines in a certain shape possible, henceforth conceived as a triangle. Lines, flatness, arrangements are all mental images, called schema.
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Quoting Andrew M
Not quite. The logical placeholder for the boundary of knowledge, is the transcendental illusion. The placeholder for the logical boundary of understanding, are the noumena.
When we speak of phenomena, we tacitly grant a specific mode of intuition, we are speaking of a certain way things are done in the mind, predicated solely on the reality of empirical objects. But even granting the reality of empirical objects, it does not follow that the mode of intuition we use with respect to them is the only mode there is. From here, it also follows that understanding in general and the pure conceptions of the understanding in particular, pertain only to sensuous objects. It is, after all, the method by which we know them for what they seem to be. But just as there is no promise of only one mode of intuition, there is no promise that understanding cannot use its conceptions for that which is not sensuous, and can never be sensuous, or, in other words, that for which there is no object understanding can subsume under its conceptions. If there is no object for understanding to assign conceptions, there is no meaning, hence no possible cognition at all. Still, just because there is no object presented as phenomenon doesn’t preclude the possibility that understanding can think its own object and subsume that object under its pure conceptions.
No matter what, the next step is judgement, the determination of logical consistency with extent experience, or that of possible experience. If there is no phenomenon, yet understanding thinks it own object, that object is called noumenon. Herein lay the problem: what is there for judgement to determine, if there is no logical consistency to judge? We will never sense an object thought by understanding alone, we will never intuit anything, never cognize anything, never experience anything even remotely related to it.
But that’s not the real problem. Schema....remember schema? Where the HELL did schema come from? Well....I’ll be damned: understand thinks them. Holy crap, Batman!!! There are things understanding thinks. But wait, he said, with all due enthusiasm. How can something be thought by understanding, yet subsumed under the very category it is a part of? Schema apply to sensations, or...you know.....phenomena, as part of the categories, so they don’t count. We can intuit schema without contradicting the system. Things like numbers, succession/permanence in time, stuff like that.
Here’s the fun part, and what frosts my balls when people twist the Good Professor’s intent. The noumena, as opposed to schema, are thought as objects-in-themselves by some mode of intuition of which we are not informed. I mean, c’mon, man. It is easy to grasp that we can accept the real objects out there in the world as things-in-themselves, and all the brew-ha-ha that goes with it, so why not treat things thought by understanding alone the same way? Noumena are NOT things-in-themselves of the world, they are objects-of-themselves of the mind.
All that to say this: it is not the case that, Quoting Andrew M, because phenomena are derived from sensibility, and noumena are derived from understanding, so one can never be exchanged for the other. The reason we can’t know things-in-themselves is because the human cognitive system doesn’t permit it; the reason we can’t know noumena is because there isn’t anything to know. Things-in-themselves exist and are quite real so don’t need to be thought; objects-in-themselves exist but are not real so must be thought.
And no.....not a chance in hell I’m going to post the excerpt where Kant actually calls things-in-themselves as noumena. The context for it is too long and just shows where the common understanding of it is lop-sided at best. People get their philosophical kicks from saying, “ See? Right there!! He called it that himself, the crazy old fart!!” Sad, but true. That he said it, not that he’s an old fart.
Thanks for showing an interest in perhaps the epitome of paradigm-shifting philosophy.
And if anyone has a better understanding, please, by all means....correct me.
How does agreeing on something validate a common perspective? Suppose you and I agree to call something by the same name, how would this validate the claim that we have the same perspective of that thing?
Quoting Mww
It is only tautological if "us" refers to a number of individuals, each with one's own perspective. It is false and contradictory if "us" refers to a point of view called "human", with its own perspective.
If you and I, and by association you and Janus, can agree that the term “perspective” denotes a particular attitude or opinion about a thing, and we each as particular persons all agree as a matter of discourse that the fins on a ‘60 Cadillac were rather extreme.....wouldn’t we have a common perspective with respect to extremism? We’re not talking about how we came to our respective opinions, but rather the having of some perspective in common about something because of them.
If humans are known with absolute certainty to be entities with the capacity for perspective, then the concept of human perspective cannot be either false nor contradictory. If it is true every human ever has or had or will have a perspective, then it follows necessarily there is a human perspective. And “us” does refer to a number of individuals......all of them, in fact. The question remains, however, as to the possibility of a perspective common to us all as humans.
No matter what, I, myself, don’t see a loss of comprehension or intelligibility by using the term human perspective in a standard conversational format.
That would be the blind spot
Of course there is not a single perspective for all humanity and I haven't said there is. Why do I have to keep showing that you are misrepresenting what I have said? I shouldn't have to waste time doing that and if you read attentively I wouldn't.
So, there is no single perspective, but "for us" signifies perspective in general, the fact that all those different perspectives are examples of perspective, human perspective.
I would say that "considerable attention" is an exaggeration. How many philosophers, ancient, medieval, modern or postmodern can you name who have given serious attention to solipsism as it is often trotted out and argued over ad nauseum in philosophy forums?
Quoting Marchesk
Consensus? Again how many philosophers have taken these arguments as being of significance. Descartes was concerned with the evil demon, but never really considering it as a possibility; more as a preamble to asserting the benevolence of God and the belief that He would never deceive us. A few modern philosophers may have used BIV, but again only as a thought experiment to illustrate epistemic limits or rather the limits or lack of deductive certainty. P-zombie has been used by a few to argue that consciousness may be an illusion, but I think the idea that consciousness could be an illusion, on account of the incoherence of such an idea, has been pretty convincingly refuted, and again how many modern philosophers can you name who have actually concerned themselves with such questions?
I think the "anti-correlationsists" are more or less irrelevant, anti-correlationism is a storm in a teacup, insofar as their arguments seem to be based on a misunderstanding of Kant's arguments; the outline I gave of which you agreed with above. I think that pretty much (dis)solves the "dilemma".
The problem is that the naive realist insists that objects do, totally independent of all minds, exist in the same form (whatever that could actually even mean!) as they do in our perceptions of them. Kant pointed out that we have no justification to believe that or indeed any metaphysics taken as absolute. The way I see it he paved the way for metaphysics to be undertaken as phenomenology as it was in different ways by Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.
The other issue, which I see as being implicit in Kant, and made explicit in different ways by Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and others is that to say that objects exist just as we perceive them is to say something incoherent, insofar as we do not know what that could even mean. It could only mean something on a presumption of absolute or objective idealism pace Hegel, where the Rational just is the Real..
Philosophy after Kant could be said to consist in various attempts to find consistent ways to think the real while maintaining the realization that the map can never be the territory, our models can never be, or at least can never exhaustively represent, the real. Even if a model partially represented the real, that it does could never be known with deductive certainty, but rather the question as to whether it does must be groundlessly decided for or against.
PRECISELY!
I agree with the distinction, the thing in itself is not precisely coterminous with noumena. The noumenal is like the formal abstraction of things in themselves, presented as an unknown object-X. The noumenal is, in other words, a more general category.
The thing in itself is more specific; the tree for us appears on account of the tree in itself. The naive realist imagines that the tree in itself looks just like the tree for us; but this is incoherent because a thing cannot look (or feel, sound, smell or taste) like anything unless it is being sensed. So,the idea of the tree in itself is a formal (or in another sense, formless) abstraction, something in the general category of noumena.
Agreed, that is a major problem.
On the rest.....we see the same thing with different eyes. Nothing remarkable about that.
I don't see how agreement constitutes a common perspective. Care to explain? That we agree to refer to things using the same words does not mean that we have a common perspective.
Quoting Mww
I think this is seriously faulty logic. That distinct human beings each have a perspective, does not produce the conclusion that there is one human perspective. That's some sort of composition fallacy, or a category error.
If there is something that is specifically the property of individuals, perspective, and not the property of a group of individuals, then to say that it is the property of the group is contradictory.
Quoting Mww
Fallacy of composition, text book case.
Quoting Janus
OK, let's start with this then. "For us" signifies that there is such a thing as perspective. Further, "the world" is something created, constructed, from a perspective. The concept "the world" only has meaning from a perspective. Therefore perspective is fundamental to this thing, the world, which is signified by the concept. Furthermore, we could replace "the world" with "existence", to say that the concept "existence" is something created or constructed from a perspective, therefore perspective is fundamental to existence. Do you not recognize that there is no such thing as the thing represented by a concept, without that concept?
Please explain why you believe that such conclusions about the fundamentality of perspective are unwarranted. When "the world", and "existence" are concepts which are created from a perspective, and there is no such thing as the thing represented by a particular concept without that concept, what makes you think that there is such a thing as the world, or existence, without a perspective?
As I have already said the fact that the world of human experience, which is what we all experience, insofar as it is experienced and judged by humans has perspective as fundamental, does not logically entail that the world "as it is in itself" has perspective as fundamental. In fact logically it cannot have perspective at all, inasmuch as it is explicitly defined as the world absent human perspective.
I reject that a fact of the matter implicates a logical fallacy. Maybe I just don’t know how to write about it fault-free. Every human ever, otherwise capable of it, reasons; all perspectives are opinions; all opinions are a result of reason; therefore every opinion derived from human reason and expressed as a perspective must be a human perspective.
It appears that you’re treating perspective as an object (there is no one human perspective), whereas I’m treating it as a subject (all perspective is human). We’re both correct.
You are making the same unwarranted generalization as Mww, assuming that we all experience the same thing. Quite obviously, we do not all experience the same thing, So there appears to be no basis to this claim that there is one world of human experience. Each person has one's own experience, and no two people have the same experience. There is no such thing as the world of human experience.
As I've told you, over and over now, you're starting from a false premise. Will you please dismiss this false premise, and start from the reality that each person has one's own experience which is very distinct from every other person's experience, then we might be able to properly discuss the role of perspective in relation to reality.
Don’t know that Kant referred to naive realism or transcendental realism; he may have used different terms for those things, because technically speaking, neither of them as such were in vogue in his time. He was more concerned with general common-sense physical empiricism, which he accepted, and purely subjective idealism, which he squashed like a proverbial bug.
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On illusion: absolutely.
“....Logical illusion, which consists merely in the imitation of the form of reason (the illusion in sophistical syllogisms), arises entirely from a want of due attention to logical rules. So soon as the attention is awakened to the case before us, this illusion totally disappears. Transcendental illusion, on the contrary, does not cease to exist, even after it has been exposed, and its nothingness clearly perceived by means of transcendental criticism (....) There is, therefore, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason—not that in which the bungler, from want of the requisite knowledge, involves himself, nor that which the sophist devises for the purpose of misleading, but that which is an inseparable adjunct of human reason, and which, even after its illusions have been exposed, does not cease to deceive, and continually to lead reason into momentary errors, which it becomes necessary continually to remove....”
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On noumena: because taking from the actual book is so much mo’ better.....
“....The critique of the pure understanding, accordingly, does not permit us to create for ourselves a new field of objects beyond those which are presented to us as phenomena, and to stray into intelligible worlds; nay, it does not even allow us to endeavour to form so much as a conception of them. The specious error which leads to this—and which is a perfectly excusable one—lies in the fact that the employment of the understanding, contrary to its proper purpose and destination, is made transcendental, and objects, that is, possible intuitions, are made to regulate themselves according to conceptions, instead of the conceptions arranging themselves according to the intuitions, on which alone their own objective validity rests. Now the reason of this again is that apperception, and with it thought, antecedes all possible determinate arrangement of representations. Accordingly we think something in general and determine it on the one hand sensuously, but, on the other, distinguish the general and in abstracto represented object from this particular mode of intuiting it. In this case there remains a mode of determining the object by mere thought, which is really but a logical form without content, which, however, seems to us to be a mode of the existence of the object in itself (noumenon), without regard to intuition which is limited to our senses....
.....Before ending this transcendental analytic, we must make an addition, which, although in itself of no particular importance, seems to be necessary to the completeness of the system. The highest conception, with which a transcendental philosophy commonly begins, is the division into possible and impossible. But as all division presupposes a divided conception, a still higher one must exist, and this is the conception of an object in general—problematically understood and without its being decided whether it is something or nothing. As the categories are the only conceptions which apply to objects in general, the distinguishing of an object, whether it is something or nothing, must proceed according to the order and direction of the categories. To the categories of quantity, that is, the conceptions of all, many, and one, the conception which annihilates all, that is, the conception of none, is opposed. And thus the object of a conception, to which no intuition can be found to correspond, is nothing. That is, it is a conception without an object, like noumena, which cannot be considered possible in the sphere of reality, though they must not therefore be held to be impossible...”
I would never be so presumptuous as to call your interpretation......er......misguided, but I will say in all confidence that I cannot find anything in each of my three separately translated, physical volumes, that corresponds with it.
In addition......because I’ve never been mellow enough to just let things be......your response to the “if noumena were known they’d be phenomena, being “PRECISELY!!!”, is actually addressed at the end of the first division of Transcendental Logic, where Kant says, “...The object of a conception which is self-contradictory, is nothing, because the conception is nothing, therefore is impossible, as a figure composed of two straight lines...”
There cannot be a figure of two straight lines, hence the self-contradiction; if noumena were known is its own self-contradiction in the same way as a figure of two straight lines, insofar as noumena cannot be known. Both impossible conceptions. And, obviously, an impossible conception stands no chance of being transformed into something knowable. The aforementioned logical illusion writ large.
Writ huge.
Writ bigly. (Sorry.....just trying a little levity in the furtive hope you won’t stomp all over me for proving myself more right than you. Or maybe I just shot myself in the foot by using a Trump-ianesque soundbite. Maaannn.....life is SUCH a bitch, innit????)
On the other hand......and there’s always an other hand......maybe you meant “PRECISELY” in conjunction with noumena being the limit of knowledge, but that’s just as Kant-ianesque wrong, which can be proven just as easily, but I’ve sudden, inexplicably, become mellow enough to let that one be.
In the immortal words of Jon Bon Jovi......have a nice day.
I haven't read much of Kant for quite some time, but I was pretty certain that he used terms which are translated as "transcendental realism" and "transcendental realist", which would make sense, given that he certainly uses a term which translates as "transcendental idealism", and the idea this latter term represents is the dialectical negation of transcendental realism.
Anyway sure enough, searching through the Transcendental Dialectic, I found these two passages:
By an idealist, therefore, one must understand not someone who denies the existence of external objects of sense, but rather someone who only does not admit that it is cognized through immediate perception and infers from this that we can never be fully certain of their reality from any possible experience. Now before I display our paralogism in its deceptive illusion, I must first remark that one would necessarily have to distinguish a twofold idealism. I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility).The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. It is really this transcendental realist who afterwards plays the empirical idealist; and after he has falsely presupposed about objects of the senses that if they are to exist they must have their existence in themselves even apart from sense, he finds that from this point of view all our representations of sense are insufficient to make their reality certain.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. A369
Thus the transcendental idealist is an empirical realist, and grants to matter, as appearance, a reality which need not be inferred, but is immediately perceived. In contrast, transcendental realism necessarily falls into embarrassment, and finds itself required to give way to empirical idealism, because it regards the objects of outer sense as something different from the senses themselves and regards mere appearances as self sufficient beings that are found external to us; for here, even with our best consciousness of our representation of these things, it is obviously far from certain that if the representation exists, then the object corresponding to it would also exist; but in our system, on the contrary, these external things - namely, matter in all its forms and alterations - are nothing but mere representations, i.e., representations in us, of whose reality we are immediately conscious. Now since as far as I know all those psychologists who cling to empirical idealism are transcendental realists, they have obviously proceeded very consistently in conceding great importance to empirical idealism as one of the problems from which human reason knows how to extricate itself only with difficulty. For in fact if one regards outer appearances as representations that are effected in us by their objects, as things in themselves found outside us, then it is hard to see how their existence could be cognized in any way other than by an inference from effect to cause, in which case it must always remain doubtful whether the cause is in us or outside us. Now one can indeed admit that something that may be outside us in the transcendental sense is the cause of our outer intuitions, but this is not the object we understand by the representation of matter and corporeal things; for these are merely appearances, i.e., mere modes of representation, which are always found only in us, and their reality, just as much as that of my own thoughts, rests on immediate consciousness. The transcendental object is equally unknown in regard to inner and to outer sense. But we are talking not about that, but about the empirical object, which is called an external object if it is in space and an inner object if it is represented simply in the relation of time; but space and time are both to be encountered only in us.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. A372-373
Quoting Mww
A bit of humour in these, oh-so-important matters is always appreciated! :grin:
Now, as to noumena "being the limit of knowledge"; not sure that sounds right, more like 'beyond the limit of knowledge'. I understand that 'noumena' may not be precisely coterminous with 'things-in-ithemselves', but to invoke the dialectic again: I think it's fairly safe to say noumena is the dialectical negation or opposite of phenomena. These are general terms, so it would seem to follow that a particular phenomenon, or 'thing for us' is the dialectical negation or opposite of a particular noumenon, or thing-in-itself.
That's about the best I can do given my current lamentable level of scholarship, but hey, wtf does how I think about it matter in the larger scheme of things? I have no doubt there are other, possibly more informed, interpretations that are beyond my simple ken.
Quoting Mww
So on your view, would it be more accurate to say that the mind subsequently determines what first appears in the senses?
Also where you say 'if there is an affect on sensibility, then the mind is aware of an appearance of something' is that 'something' the thing-in-itself?
If so, does Earth also refer to the 'raw' thing-in-itself (that appears phenomenally) or only to the phenomena (as a separate thing)?
What I'm getting at here is whether the Earth is thought of as a presentation of things-in-themselves or a re-presentation of things-in-themselves. (Albeit a synthesized or 'cooked' presentation or representation.) As an analogy, you could present at the family reunion in a clown costume but it's still you, or you could send a robot replica as your representative, which is not you.
Quoting Mww
Got it.
Quoting Mww
So to clarify, what is the relationship between schema and noumena? Are abstractions like triangle and number schema or noumena or both?
Didn't we already go over that ? ;-)
Quoting Janus
I think our opinion has been overruled...
Ah, but has it been justifiably overruled?
We went over it, but I still regard it as an open question.
Found another snippet on Platonic realism, from Augustine, again.
He's talking about 'the principle of intelligibility' i.e. things are only intelligible because of their form which emanates from the divine intelligence and then manifests as particular beings.
//ps//At least I got forms back into it.//
As much as I’d like to have a good reason (I spend all my time and draw all my quotes from the 1787 B edition, in which none of that appears) for not being familiar with those terms, I can come up with nothing but poor excuses (I know the 1781 A edition just as well as the B, but being interested only in the philosophy, as soon as he called them psychologists I found no use for any of it).
At any rate, thanks for the enlightenment.
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Justified, yes; over-ruled, not necessarily.
If the mind determines what first appears, we would know everything of every experience. The simplest way to look at it might be that the mind determines if an appearance relates to experience. In other words, the mind doesn’t determine what first appears (phenomena = undetermined object), but rather, determines the relationship of what first appears, to something else. The determinant faculty is judgement, in affairs with empirical content.
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Quoting Andrew M
I suppose one could say that a “thing-“ that affects sensibility necessarily brings the “in-itself” with it, but the claim is that we can never know the thing-in-itself even though knowledge of a thing is quite possible. Therefore, it must be that “thing” and “thing-in-itself” are distinct, and therefore separable, or, that which is known, is nothing but a representation of the thing-in-itself, in which case there is no need to separate the thing from the -in-itself.
Personally, I think the “-in-itself” signifies a real, physical existence completely independent of us. Nothing completely independent of us can comprises an appearance, for such would never be met with perception, and at the same time serves as a parsimonious support for the claim that we can never know with certainty what it truly is. The “thing” of “thing-in-itself” can nonetheless still be the real as yet undetermined phenomenon.
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Quoting Andrew M
It may be safe to say Earth refers the to the raw thing-in-itself, for “refers to” simply denotes a conformity of relation, where the manifold of conceptions understanding brings to the table supports the intuitions imagination initially assigned to the thing way back at its perception. In effect, our knowledge claim is grounded in this conformity, which we call experience, not knowledge of the thing that made its appearance.
It is just as safe to say “Earth” refers to a particular phenomenon as well, but only when examined at a much lower level than conception from which the name arises. Everything of empirical content passing through the human cognitive system is at one instance a phenomenon. But once experienced, reason pretty much rockets right through this part, relying more on the faculty of judgement than the faculty of imagination for its conclusions.
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Quoting Andrew M
Differences in perspective. To another, the appearance is of a clown, and the judgement will be with respect to a clown and clown will be cognized. Even with knowledge beforehand of the person presenting the clown, if clown as disguised person is observed, induction is the only means to claim knowledge of the person, and we all know the inherent dangers of inductive reasoning. In effect I know it is me with absolute certainty; any one else has the certainty only of clown.
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Quoting Andrew M
I must admit to not being aware of one. Schema are pure a priori conceptions, but they can be reproduced as empirical objects. Noumena are not, so cannot. Our kind of rationality is the only one we have on which to base any philosophy of knowledge at all. But our kind of rationality does not have to be the only one there is. Another kind of rationality may very well incorporate noumena specific to its methodology, in fact, it must, otherwise it would be indistinguishable from human rationality, hence would not be another kind after all. We cannot deny noumena, but we also cannot claim anything with respect to what they might be.
Finally, as an aside.....one opinion cannot over-rule another, if the opinions reside in separate subjects.
Nice job speaking about something very difficult to speak about!
I think a little differently about this; for example, I would not say that the "in-itself" is necessarily brought along with the affect. I would say everything about the affect is collaborative, a relation between the thing, the percipient and the world conditions. "In -itself" then refers to everything about the thing that is not collaborative in this specific sense, that is not related to any percipient. I agree that thing and thing-in-itself are are therefore distinct because the thing is specifically related to perception and the thing-in-itself not; however they are not separate entities, but are separate functions or conceptions of the one indeterminate "entity". (This is OK provided you allow that indeterminate entities can be coherently spoken about).
Quoting Mww
I personally agree with this. Some philosophers would identify this as a kind of transcendental realism, though, and that's where this kind of talk gets real tricky real fast. :wink:
.
You spoke before of naive realism. Are you suggesting the modern rendition naive realism, is the same as the Enlightenment rendition transcendental realism in A369?
Real tricky real fast is well-spoken, no doubt. Kant speaks here of “outer appearance” and elsewhere as just appearance by which one can assume he means inner, which seems to be an entirely different kind; “effect in us” in juxtaposition to “affect on us”........and on and on.
I wish I knew if there were margin notes, or scribbles somewhere, about why he changed this section so drastically from A to B.
Anyway......it was fun.
But there are not two things - there’s simply ‘how things appear to us’ as distinct from ‘how they really are’. The whole point of making the distinction is to draw attention to something inherent about knowledge.
Incidentally in hylomorphic dualism, what is really known is the form, because the form is something like an archetype. I don’t think Kant comments much on that, I’d like to look into it.
Understood, and agreed in principle. The basic premise remains that if we grant a distinction between how a thing appears to us and how it actually is regardless of us, we tacitly grant the possibility of a difference, however remote such possibility may be. My take on speculative epistemology is that the human cognitive system does not avail the subject in possession of it, and by means of it, to determine what the difference may be. It’s like being stuck on one side or the other of a mathematical equality, insofar as we have no means to make the jump across the operator in order to prove the universality and absolute necessity the meaning of the operator demands.
On the other hand, and by far the less controversial, is just to assume what appears to us and what is irrespective of us, to be the same under any condition, right up until it is shown that it isn’t.
(Did you know Kant used “quanta” in the modern sense 100 years before Einstein? I don’t mind saying that Kantian epistemological dualism is remarkable similar to preliminary quantum mechanical interpretations, albeit the latter being rather more extended, with respect to the ubiquitous “observer effect”. Re:, in the former nothing is known until it is experienced; in the latter nothing exists until it is observed. A stretch? Perhaps, but not negligible, methinks.)
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On form(s).
Kant does use the concept of form repeatedly, and grounds his theoretical metaphysics with:
“....That which in the phenomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its matter; but that which effects that the content of the phenomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its form. (...) It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us a posteriori; the form must lie ready a priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation....”
But as to an archetypal conception, Kant went more with Platonic “Ideas”, rather than forms. He exposes them up with......
“...Plato employed the expression idea in a way that plainly showed he meant by it something which is never derived from the senses, but which far transcends even the conceptions of the understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in experience nothing perfectly corresponding to them could be found. Ideas are, according to him, archetypes of things themselves, and not merely keys to possible experiences, like the categories....”
......and subsequently honors him and them with.....
“....Setting aside the exaggerations of expression in the writings of this philosopher, the mental power exhibited in this ascent from the achetypal mode of regarding the physical world to the architectonic connection thereof according to ends, that is, ideas, is an effort which deserves imitation and claims respect....”
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On dualism, Kant spent more time elaborating Cartesian rational dualism at the expense of Berkeley, than the hylomorphic dualism of Aristotle and Aquinas, mostly, I think, in order to expound on the idea that all dualism is intrinsic to reason rather than the granting the necessity of invoking any divine influence. I personally have little experience with Aquinas, and hold with no supernaturalism of any kind, so am at a loss in discussions of his philosophy.
Taking what seem to be the relevant parts of Kant's account there: "The transcendental realist regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility)."
So, I would say that is in accordance with what I understand to be contemporary naive realism.
As is this: "The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding."
except for the last bit about "pure concepts of the understanding"
Quoting Mww
Yes, it is intriguing as to just why he either changed his mind, or felt that what he said in A could be liable to misinterpretation. Fun indeed!
:up:
I agree that induction is not useful here. However hypothetico-deduction can be. For example, on the hypothesis that the clown is you, one prediction is that you and the clown won't be observed at the reunion at the same time. So it's a testable and explanatory hypothesis.
It would seem that a similar approach can be taken with things-in-themselves. For example, while we may not be able to observe non-Euclidean spacetime, we can construct a model that posits it and use it to make predictions about what we do observe.
Quoting Mww
OK, though I'm still not clear on what noumena specifically refers to. Are they ideas that are beyond human capability to understand (or even conceive of)? Just as things-in-themselves are beyond human capability to sense?
What would be examples of noumena?
Quoting Mww
Agreed. I appreciate that you and Janus are referencing the source material here and pointing out when interpretations differ.
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to be forgetting that Aristotle inverted Plato's ontology. For Aristotle, what is fundamental, and thus primarily known, is the particular. Hylomorphism is not a dualism, it is an abstraction over particulars. What is known about particulars (by way of experience) is isomorphic to how they (really) are.
Yeah....but it is odd. Naive realism from a psychological perspective emphasizes cognitive bias; naive realism from a philosophical perspective denies representationalism. If that be true, and one rejects naive realism from a philosophical point of view because he holds with representationalism as absolutely necessary, then by definition he could be deemed a naive realist from a psychological point of view.
What a tangled web we weave.........
There are none. The prerequisite for noumena is a kind of intuition, and by association, a kind of understanding, we don’t have. They are nothing but logically or intelligibly possible conceptions, but can never be conceived as something cognizable. And if we cannot cognize a thing, we have no means to give an example of it.
Hidden in the weeds of Kantian epistemic speculation is the contra-distinction to it. If the theory expounds how it is that we know things, it is well advised to give at least some account of how it is that we do not know things, because, obviously, there are things we don’t understand, hence cannot know. The primary tenet of the theory is that reason itself must be curtailed from its own cognitive extravagances, called illusion, and one of the ways that curtailment may arise is to curtail the understanding, from which all cognition evolves. Kant may have invented his brand of noumena for no other reason than to provide an argument sufficient to do just that. If that should be the case, it follows logically that the reason we cannot know some things is because understanding is attempting to wander into territory in contradiction to that which the positive nature of the theory had already proclaimed as valid.
Another reasonable conjecture, mine own, to be sure, may be that given the times, where publication and even professorships required the blessing of a beneficiary, in Kant’s case in his critical period, Fredric II, King of Prussia, and, given the religiosity of the general population at the time, perhaps the mental restrictions attributed to noumena were a subtle nod to the....er......”Supreme Author of the Universe”. An Omni-everything outta be able to conceive noumena, right? Just because we weakling human agents can’t think beyond ourselves shouldn’t restrict supersensible beings.
I believe it is, I think this is based on a faulty grasp of the kind of duality involved. Forms only manifest as particulars, but the forms are what grasped by the active intellect so as to enable us to determine what a thing is.
I really think this is mistaken also. The root of ‘noumenal’ is ‘nous’, so the noumenal are ideal objects, things that are known by reason or by nous. What is not intelligible is matter - here again is the snippet from Augustine:
Kant diverges from this, but there are still echoes of it in what he says.
The idea, greatly elaborated in Neoplatonism, is that the forms are really ideas in the primordial intellect of which individual types and things are emanations or instantiations. And I believe that it’s a philosophically sound intuition.
I accept your comment as stated. While I understand the Greek origins of noumena, and Kant’s intimate knowledge of the classic Greek metaphysicians, I am nonetheless responding to my interrogatives from the way Kant used the Greek concept in his own way. That is to say, it may very well be the case that my interpretation of noumena is mistaken from the Greek perspective, or even St. Augustine’s, but I’m not arguing from there. I would certainly appreciate a critique of my interpretation, but it would seem rather apropos to receive that critique from the same context from which the interpretation was initially given.
I will say, with respect to your quoted passage, that any particular indeed may not be grasped by the bodily senses, which are passive recipients of affectations, but “considerations of the mind” can be simply Kantian a priori manifestations, which *DO* allow “grasping” the particular, all without the need for noumena.
Test for Echo?
In any case, the 'bottom line', as they say in the modern world, is that ideas are real, they're not simply the output of a meat brain adapting to the exigencies of survival. 'The world', said some physicist, 'looks much more like a great mind, than a great machine'.
It's truly a tangle web we weave, but do we practice to deceive?
Oh, I suspect your smatterings and inklings are rather more substantial than you’d admit. That, or my readings of you hereabouts are grossly over-rated, which I would never admit.
Sir James Jeans, Cambridge lecture, 1930, published subsequently in “The Mysterious Universe”. Family library, growing up. I remember because the image of the Universe in the shape of a brain, but pulsing like a heart. Freaked me out. Then made me laugh.
For Aristotle we can't know the form of the particular because we know through universals. This leaves a gap of separation between the form of the particular, with all its accidents, and the form which a human being knows, the essence of the thing. Since "form" is the actuality of things, there is two distinct actualities and therefore dualism. One actuality is substantiated by the form of particular material things, and the other actuality is substantiated by the form of "the soul"..
A naive realist has this factual edifice going for.....her, in that no matter what’s actually happening between our ears from which our abstractions are created, it has something to do with the brain. Never was a tautology so ill-conceived, I must say, and presupposes the naive realist holds with some sort of materialism supporting his realism.
I regard myself as a superficial empirical realist, inasmuch as the inconceivable complexity of the human brain seems to be sufficient in itself for grounding our abstractions, but I’m strictly a transcendental idealist inasmuch as even if such is proven with absolute certainty how such physicalism should be the case, my “I” as representation of my intrinsic subjectivity, will remain undiminished. And I challenge anyone to relinquish........his, and at the same time adhere to the primacy of determinism.
If the physical mechanisms of the brain are fully determined, I submit that at the same time will be discovered the biological animal cannot function as the human without an epistemic void, for then arises the reality of “incongruent counterparts”: the left hand of determinism will never match the right hand of rationalism, although both hands are absolutely necessary for satisfying the requirements for a complete body.
......so ends the of Spiel of the Day.
Quoting Janus
I think naive realism and representationalism are two sides of the same metaphysical coin here. Do our senses reveal the world as it is (as if our eyes were windows) or is there a veil between mind and the world (and thus an obstacle or limit to knowledge)?
A different approach is to say that we decide what we mean by "the world" in our use of language. So, pragmatically, what we point to - the objects of everyday experience - constitute the starting point for natural investigation and knowledge.
Forms only manifest in particulars and are how we perceive those particulars. That's a difference that determines whether you see particulars as imperfect representations of ideal forms (per Plato), or instead as exhibiting form (per Aristotle).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's not my reading of Aristotle. It is always and only the particular that exists and acts. A form(alism) without matter is merely an abstraction and thus not able to act.
I’m sure your depiction of the contrast between them on the question exaggerates the difference, but I really need to hone in on some writing about it. I’m thinking ‘Aristotle and Other Platonists’ by Lloyd Gerson.
What's to exaggerate? Aristotle famously rejected Plato’s theory of forms and proposed his own theory in its place.
Quoting Wayfarer
Note that his conclusion is not that Aristotle didn't reject Platonism but that, in spite of that, Aristotle was a Platonist anyway. (Which he then argues for, unconvincingly in my view.)
Now, that is funny! What an imagination! :lol:
I have downloaded a copy of the book I mentioned, but it is a pretty substantial text and I haven't made a lot of headway with it yet. But one thing that Gerson says is that Aristotle is in no way a nominalist, i.e. he doesn’t accept that only particulars are real. They are intelligible only because of their forms, regardless of whether the forms can be conceived as existing in their own right (which is where he differs with Plato). So I think the issue is that in your reading, Aristotle comes across as being more like a modern empiricist, when in reality his 'forms' may (according to Gerson) quite plausibly be understood as 'ideas in the divine intellect'. But I will keep reading this text, although it's a slog ;-)
There is nothing within Aristotle to deny forms without matter, nor that such "Forms", if they exist, are actual. That is why Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians maintain consistency with Aristotle's principles, despite Aristotle's difference from Plato. Plato is confused and full of changing views on this matter, as he learnt through his experiences. Aristotle denies matter without form, but not form without matter, and anything eternal must be actual. "Form" in Aristotle is actual, and this includes, essence, and formulae, which you call abstractions. These are the forms by which human beings actively change the world through intention, final cause.
What Aristotle denies is the eternality of these "forms". They are actualized by the human mind, and so if they existed prior to human beings, they could only exist as potential. Then he shows, with the cosmological argument that anything potential cannot be eternal. This creates a distinction between the forms of particular things, which may be eternal as the eternal circular motion is, and the forms which are activated by the human mind, which are not eternal because they are dependent on the human mind for their actuality.
This position is derived from the later Plato, Timaeus for example, and it is the means by which dualism escapes the problem of how the eternal may interact with the non-eternal. Matter, in the realm of "becoming", serves as the medium between the two types of actualities. Plato is famous for exposing the need for such a medium between the eternal and the temporal. Aristotle does not deny dualism, he simply clarifies the principles which make dualism reasonable.
Quoting Andrew M
What Aristotle proposed is a duality of forms. And, "form" is very clearly defined as what is "actual". Therefore we have within Aristotle a duality of actuality, hence "dualism". To deny this, and deny that the soul is a form, within Aristotle's writing, is to deny a major part of his work. The assumption that essences, abstractions, are not actual within Aristotle creates a huge inconsistency making it impossible to understand how human beings act to change the world, through intention and final cause. Once you realize that these forms (intellectual objects) are properties of the soul, which is an active form itself, then you can make sense of the activities of living beings.
I've noticed a trend in modern metaphysics which is to attempt to create consistency between the principles of modern science, and the principles of Aristotle. This is done principally through a misrepresentation of Aristotle's principles, as you are doing. The reality is that science broke from the principles of Aristotle many years ago. So, we ought to be looking at the differences between modern science and Aristotle, created by this break, rather than misrepresenting Aristotle to create the appearance that modern science is consistent with him. The most obvious difference is that Aristotle's principles support dualism, and modern science has rejected those principles. So to present Aristotle, and simply leave out those principles which support dualism, because one wants to show Aristotle as supporting monism, is very distasteful.
Can you provide a reference in Aristotle's writings where he asserts this position (that these forms are actualized by the human mind)?
Also, perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but you seem to be denying that particulars (say, ordinary objects like trees) have form prior to the existence of human beings. If so, I'm curious whether you also deny that particulars exist prior to the existence of human beings.
I suppose the best reference here would be Metaphysics Bk.9 Ch.9.
Quoting Andrew M
No, clearly I am not denying that, I am citing that as the reason why Aristotle must be understood as dualist. There is a duality of form, the form of the particular material things, which may be prior to human beings, and, the form which you call the abstraction. These are two distinct types of "form". Since forms are actual, having active existence, a dualism is described by Aristotle. But what Aristotle has done, is switched the positioning of the "Forms " in relation to Pythagorean Idealism. Human abstractions, which are forms in the sense of essence, universals without the accidentals, cannot be eternal, their actual existence is only produced by the human mind. However, the form of the particular may be prior to the temporal existence of material substance which expresses that form to us.
Here's a point he makes earlier in the Metaphysics, and this is tied in to the logic of his law of identity, which applies to particulars. A thing cannot be other than the thing which it is, otherwise it would not be the thing which it is. Also, a thing's existence is not random, it is what it is, and not something else, for some reason, or reasons. This he describes as the first question of metaphysics, not 'why is there something rather than nothing?' (which doesn't make sense to ask because we have no approach to answering it), but 'why is a thing what it is rather than something else?'. Now, we can apprehend that the form of the thing is necessarily prior to the material existence of the thing, otherwise the thing, when it comes into existence, could be other than it is. To ensure that the thing is the thing which it is, and not something else (which would defy the law of identity), the form of the thing, what the thing will be when it comes into existence, must be prior to the material existence of the thing. Otherwise the thing could be other than it is (defying the law of identity), or else it's existence would be completely random.
This is the principle which is expressed by Plato in the Timaeus (in not so clear terms), and is taken up by Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians (cosmological argument), which establishes Form as necessarily prior to material existence. Notice, that in his later work, Plato turns from independent Ideas (associated with the theory of participation, and Pythagorean Idealism), to "Forms", which are more closely related to Aristotle's "form". When we deny the possibility that material existence extends backward in time (toward the beginning) indefinitely (infinitely, as if there is no beginning to material existence), then we must accept that there is immaterial Form which is necessarily prior to material existence, in the beginning of material existence. Otherwise, the material things which exist would not be the things which they are (defying the law of identity), or material existence would be purely random (which is inconsistent with empirical observation). To maintain the law of identity, as well as the validity of empirical observation, we must allow that form is prior to material existence.
Thanks. The issue has motivated me to dig more into the literature on Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics. The relevant passage in the chapter you reference is where Aristotle discusses geometrical constructions:
So to take the first example ("Why is the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equal to two right angles?"), the parallel line is drawn by the geometer. The "act of thinking" does not mean that the construction is in the geometer's mind, it means that drawing the line is an intelligent act (by the geometer). Once drawn, the question about the angles can then easily be answered. Similarly for the second example.
What Aristotle is showing here is that mathematical (and thus universal or eternal) truths can be discovered by acting intelligently on sensible objects, in this case the geometrical drawing of a particular triangle and a particular line. The geometrical figures (as geometrical) are neither located in a separate Platonic realm nor in the mind, they inhere in sensible objects either as potentials (before construction) or actuals (after construction) and thus are a legitimate source of knowledge. A mathematician properly considers mathematical objects separately from sensible objects (i.e., in abstraction), since that is just what distinguishes mathematics from the physical sciences. As Aristotle later says, "The best way to conduct an investigation in every case is to take that which does not exist in separation and consider it separately; which is just what the arithmetician or the geometrician does." (Aristot. Met. 13.1078a)
Right, now we have here what you call "an intelligent act". This is an act with a purpose, its purpose is to demonstrate the angles. The cause of such an act, in Aristotelian terms is a final cause. In Aristotle's biology, the existence of such acts is accounted for by the soul. And this is why he is dualist.
Quoting Andrew M
But his demonstration goes deeper than this. Notice that he is arguing in this section, that actuality is prior to potentiality, in all senses of the word "prior". So he turns this against Pythagorean idealists, and those Platonists who adhere to Pythagorean idealism, to show that it is impossible that such mathematical "Ideas" are eternal. This is his famous refutation of such Idealism, known as the cosmological argument. It is impossible that potential is eternal. That is, looking back in time, it is impossible that potential is prior to actual. Converted to look ahead in time, this becomes the principle of plenitude, given enough time any potential will be actualize, so potential cannot be eternal in that way either.
Quoting Andrew M
Let's assume that the geometrical figures inhere in the sensible world, prior to being actualized by the human mind, as potentials. According to Aristotle's cosmological argument, there must be something actual which is prior to these potentials. This is because if the potential was prior in time to the actual, it would not have the capacity to actualize itself, so there would always be only potential without any actuality. Something actual is needed to actualize a potential. And what we glean from observation is that there is something actual, therefore actuality is prior to potential. The Neo-Platonists, and Christian theologians take up this argument for Forms (actualities) which are prior to material existence (material existence having the nature of potential).
Dualism doesn't follow from Aristotle's examples. The soul is not separable from the body - it is always the particular that acts (and thus is the locus of causality, including final cause). That is standard hylomorphism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Logically, but not temporally. Which is what Aristotle says in the last sentence of the Chapter 9 quote.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In Aristotle's examples the geometrical figures were not actualized by the human mind (which is a form), they were actualized by the human being (the actor). It's essential not to reify mind here. What is actual are the particulars.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We agree that something actual is needed to actualize a potential. However the Aristotelian position is that that thing must be substantial, not merely formal. That is what we observe.
Aristotle denies that matter can exist independent of form, but not that form can exist independent of matter. And, when you understand the earlier part of his Metaphysics, which I referred to earlier, you'll see that the form of a thing is necessarily prior (in time) to the material existence of that thing. This necessitates a dualism between the immaterial form and the material form.
Quoting Andrew M
He clearly argues that actuality is prior to potentiality temporally at the end of Ch 9, Bk 9, "so that the potency proceeds from an actuality". That's why potential cannot be eternal. I think you ought to read the entirety of Bk. 9, especially Ch. 8 where he explains in what sense actuality is prior to potentiality in time. 1050b, (5) "...one actuality always precedes another in time right back to the actuality of the eternal prime mover.".
Quoting Andrew M
For Aristotle there are two senses of "substance" primary substance and secondary substance. One can be said to be material, the other formal. He provides the principles to deny that there can be material substance without form, but there are no principles to deny a substance which is form. without matter. This is why the Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians who posit independent Forms as substance, maintain consistency with Aristotle.
For Aristotle, form is the correlate of matter and they are not separable from particulars. You can only consider them in separation which is a different issue. For example, as quoted earlier, "The best way to conduct an investigation in every case is to take that which does not exist in separation and consider it separately; which is just what the arithmetician or the geometrician does." (Aristot. Met. 13.1078a)
If you disagree, can you provide a specific quote where Aristotle would distinguish and refer to "immaterial form" and "material form"?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm well aware of the senses in which actuality is prior to potentiality but that is not what I was referring to. The temporal sense in which actuality is not prior to potentiality is discussed by Aristotle where he says, "... for the individual actuality is posterior in generation to its potentiality." (Aristot. Met. 9.1051a) [italics mine]
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Primary substance is particular such as Socrates or an apple. Secondary substance is formal, such as man or fruit. To suppose that man or fruit are separable from particulars comes from Plato, not Aristotle. This is what Aristotle's rejection of Platonic forms was about and it is why Platonism and hylomorphism are not consistent with each other. Though, of course, Aristotle is fine with "taking that which does not exist in separation and considering it separately" (Aristot. Met. 13.1078a) [italics mine].
the one sort is intellect (nous) by becoming all things, the other sort by forming all things, in the way an active condition (hexis) like light too makes the colors that are in potency be at work as colors (to ph?s poiei ta dunamei onta chr?mata energeiai chr?mata).
This sort of intellect [which is like light in the way it makes potential things work as what they are] is separate, as well as being without attributes and unmixed, since it is by its thinghood a being-at-work, for what acts is always distinguished in stature above what is acted upon, as a governing source is above the material it works on.
Knowledge (epist?m?), in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time.
This does not mean that at one time it thinks but at another time it does not think, but when separated it is just exactly what it is, and this alone is deathless and everlasting (though we have no memory, because this sort of intellect is not acted upon, while the sort that is acted upon is destructible), and without this nothing thinks. [/quote]
Quoted in Wikipedia entry on Active Intellect
I had the idea it was ontologically rather than temporally prior i.e. the idea is real whereas the particular is only an instance of the eternally-existing idea. This is why Platonism is ‘objective idealism’ - ideas have a reality of their own. Which is not comprehensible to modern thought as the evolved brain has to precede the ideas which can only ever be its product.
The point is that Aristotle does not disallow the possibility of form without matter, as he does disallow matter without form. He does not say specifically "immaterial form", but he refers to Ideas, essences, Forms, and intelligible objects throughout his Metaphysics, and clearly determines that essence is substance in Bk.7. Remember, in his Categories there are two distinct substances, primary and secondary substance. In his Metaphysics he looks at being qua being and determines that it is necessary to conclude that essence is substantial, this is Ch.6.
Now, in Ch.7 of Bk.7 he explains "agency", this is what is necessary for the coming to be (becoming) of any thing. It is necessary that the form of the thing, what the thing will be when it comes into being, is prior in time to the material existence of the thing, in order that the thing will be the thing that it is, and not something else. This is explained earlier, and supported by his law of identity. A material thing is a particular composition of matter, with a particular form, not other than it is, and not something random. So the form of the thing (what it will be) is necessarily prior in time to the material existence of the thing. In the case of a thing produced by art, the form comes from the soul of the artist. So in Ch.8 it is stated that form is put into matter. I had a long discussion about this section of A's Metaphysics with dfpolis in another thread. Df argued that the form (as the source of actuality, what a thing actually is) of a thing came from within the matter, but this is inconsistent with Aristotle because matter is potential, and Aristotle clearly describes here that the form is put into the matter. This necessitates that the form of a particular thing exists independently of, and prior in time to, the material existence of that thing.
Quoting Andrew M
I cannot see how this is relevant. The potential for a particular material actuality precedes that material actuality in time, this is clear. However, to actualize that particular potential, rather than some other potential (because potentials consist of multitudes) requires an act of agency. It is this actuality, the act of agency, which is necessarily prior in time to the existence of any particular thing, which is being discussed here. The need to assume this form of "actuality" is what necessitates dualism. There is an act of agency which is necessary for the existence of any material thing, this is what accounts for the actual existence of a contingent thing. Since there cannot be an infinite regression of material things backward in time, one prior to the other infinitely, there is the need to assume an actuality (Form) which is prior in time to the existence of all material things. That is the cosmological argument.
Quoting Andrew M
"Substance" is substance, whether it is primary or secondary substance. It appears like you haven't read Metaphysics Bk.7.
What evolves in later Platonism (Timaeus, Aristotle, Neo-Platonism), which is inconsistent with modern day representation of "Platonism", is a distinction between the Ideas produced by the human mind, and the true separate Forms. This separation is necessary to account for the imperfections of human Ideas. Human Ideas are created through abstraction, and appear to be posterior in time to sensible, material existence, while the separate Forms are necessarily prior in time to material existence. Aquinas provides a very coherent description of this difference. The forms of the human intellect, abstraction, conceptions etc., do not have separate existence, they are dependent on the material existence of the human being, and this material existence accounts for the deficiencies of these forms. However, there are separate Forms, property of the divine intellect, which are not dependent on material existence, material existence is dependent on these Forms.
Yes he refers to all of those things. However I'm asking for specific quotes that would demonstrate your claim that they are separable from particulars. Without that, you're assuming dualism without basis in your reading of Aristotle.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Thank you. It is relevant because you seemed to deny it in your last two posts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You regard the form as the agent whereas I regard the particular as the agent. The form of the geometer (somehow separate from the geometer?) didn't actualize the geometric construction, the geometer did.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A true but cryptic response. Do you think fruit would exist without particular fruit such as pears and apples?
I was wondering when the discussion would bring in the unmoved movers or active intellect. There's nothing like an excursion into theology or philosophy of mind to clarify things! ;-)
So as you no doubt know, both the interpretation and perceived centrality of those passages are controversial. As Sachs says, it's "the source of a massive amount of commentary and of fierce disagreement".
My interpretive principle for Aristotle is his consistent application of hylomorphism as inseparable form and matter. That, I think, best captures Aristotle's thinking about the natural world and makes sense of his rejection of Platonic forms. Now as suggested by your quote perhaps Aristotle did not always consistently apply it, and naturally the judgement of that depends on the textual evidence.
So the other interesting question to me is whether that general hylomorphic model has application today, and whether it can be consistently applied in respect to modern science and metaphysics. In that sense Aristotle (as Plato before him) can potentially provide insight into the specific problems of our era.
I think I've provided you with all that. The formula for the material existence of the particular is necessarily prior in time to the material existence of that particular. What does "dualism" mean to you?
Quoting Andrew M
I surely didn't deny it, it's a principal point of the cosmological argument. What we observe is that the potential for a given thing precedes the actual existence of that thing. This is the case with every particular, material thing. However, the potential for a thing does not necessarily produce the actual existence of that thing, it requires another actuality as a cause of its actual existence. Since we cannot accept an infinite regress (without beginning), there is necessarily an actual existence which is prior to all material existence. This position, that the actuality of formal existence is prior to potentiality of material existence is reinforced by the logic that if there was ever a time when there was only potential without anything actually, there would always be potential without anything actual, because that potential could not actualize itself. However, what we observe is that there is actual existence. Therefore it is necessary that the actual is prior in time to the potential, in an absolute sense. And this is why Aristotle insists that no potential could be eternal, and he refutes Pythagorean idealism on this basis because they posit eternal ideas which Aristotle has demonstrated exist only in potentia.
Quoting Andrew M
Under Aristotelian terms, form is actual, matter is potential. A particular thing is a composite of matter and form. However, there must be some sort of form (agent) to act as a cause, in order to account for the actual existence of any particular material object. That form, (agent), as a cause, is prior in time to the material existence of the particular thing. The particular cannot be the agent, as this would mean it is the cause of its own existence.
Quoting Andrew M
The geometer's action is accounted for by final cause, intention, what later became known as free will. So it's true, as you say that the geometer, as a physical object, did act to bring about the geometrical construction on paper, but the cause of that act was a final cause, intention. This is where we see that Aristotle's principles support dualism, in the concept of "final cause", which is distinct from material, formal, and efficient cause. The intent, the form of the construct within the intellect of the geometer (the intellect being a property of the soul such that Aristotle says the form of the construct is in the soul of the artist) is the active cause, "agent".
Quoting Andrew M
The point for Aristotle, is not so much whether the universal form is prior to the particular. That is more of an issue for Plato in the Timaeus, and the Neo-Platonists, who describe this as a progression, or emanation. The One, being most universal is first, and imparts itself to the less and less universal, with the form of the individual being the last. What Aristotle demonstrates is that the form of the particular thing is necessarily prior in time to the material existence of that thing.
The Neo-Platonists took this principle much further to speculate about how the form of the particular, which is necessarily prior in time to the material particular, comes from a more universal form. This is more like the relationship between the part and the whole.
I find your question is badly worded. I do believe there was fruit before there was pears or apples. So the wording of your question is clearly devised so as to be pointed toward a desired answer.
Quoting Andrew M
As I said, Aristotle clearly denied matter without form, but he did not deny form without matter. In fact, the principles of his Metaphysics necessitate it, as is evident in his cosmological argument. Understanding Aristotle's cosmological argument is very important to understanding his metaphysics, because it unlocks the door to understanding the consistency between Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, and Christian theology.
Quoting Andrew M
I think the problems that underlie this point start with Descartes, who, because of the way he conceptualised ‘res cogitans’, made it appear as ‘disembodied spirit’ which made it susceptible to Ryle's 'ghost in the machine' criticism.
The Cartesian view tends to reify the mind as an objective entity; and it's no coincidence that this is at the beginning of modern philosophy proper which seeks to understand in objective terms. It really amounts to a form of consciousness or a way-of-being which is inextricably bound up with individualism and the reliance on science as a cognitive mode.
I contend that the pre-modern mentality was very different in this respect, as it didn't conceive of the world as being essentially machine-like but as animated by intelligence. (After all, Aristotle's 'de anima' is translated as 'On the Soul'.) So the whole conception of the human's place in the universe was different, in ways that we generally don't understand, because of the incommensurability of these orientations; much more of an 'I-thou' relationship (Martin Buber's term) than 'I see it'.
So I think, overall, I'm tending to agree with MU
If you read carefully Aristotle's principal definition of "soul" (Bk2, Ch1) in De Anima, you'll see that the soul is a "form" of a body, the actuality of a body, and that this is a body with life potentially in it. I believe it is important to recognize that the soul for Aristotle is a form. It is not a composition of matter and form, which would be a body, it is just the form. Further, "actuality" is used here in the sense of possession of knowledge, rather than exercising the use of knowledge. So it is a possessive actuality, the body itself manifests as the knowledge possessed by that form. If you read further, you'll see that within the material body itself are the various potencies (potentials) possessed by the soul. These are the powers of the soul, power of self-subsistence, self-nourishment, self-movement, sensation, intellection, etc.. The key to understanding that these powers are all potentials, is Aristotle's description that each of these powers is not always active, as the being might be asleep, so the potencies must be actualized, brought into action.
Andrew M insists that the separation between matter and form can only be made in principle, in theory, but it is not a real separation. I argue that Aristotle gives reason to believe in a real separation. First, as I've argued above, he demonstrates that the form of a particular material object is prior in time to the matter/form composite of that object. Now, here in De Anima, the description of the potencies (powers) of the soul, as remaining inactive, in potencia, while the soul is active as the animal lives, requires such a separation between the actuality of the soul, and the various potentials. This separation between the actual and the potential is not just a separation in principle, it is necessarily very real, and is most evident in the case of a seed. The seed may lie dormant, as potential, for a long period of time. The knowledge within the seed is possessed by the soul, but is not actually being used by the soul, so there is a real separation here, between actuality and the potential.
As for the Aristotelian sense of 'potential' - another interesting subject. I'll come back to that.
In Aristotle's Physics, the principles of change are matter and form. Form is what is actively changing, and matter is the underlying aspect of a thing which does not change, allowing us to say that it is the same object which has been changed. In Metaphysics, form is actual and matter is potential. This is derived from De Anima where matter which is the substance of the body gives form which is the substance of the soul, its potencies, potential.
I look at "substance" as primarily a logical term for Aristotle. It is defined in his Categories, and doesn't play a big role in his Physics or his De Anima. I look at substance as what substantiates logic, it's almost like what gives a true premise. Primary substance is the particular thing, what we would call the object, and secondary substance is what we would call the logical "subject". In ancient Greece there was an issue (which is actually prevalent today) with sophists assigning identity to the logical subject. This is probably why "ousia" was associated with the subject. But as a subject, is simply how an object is represented within logic, so if there is a problem with this representation, it's like a false premise, and the logic which follows is unsound. This is why Aristotle moved to put identity directly within the thing itself ( a thing is the same as itself), instead of the identity which we give it, what we say about it. So for instance, "Socrates" refers to a particular man, an object, and that object referred to is the primary substance. But if we make "Socrates" a subject of logic, and state the proposition "Socrates is a man"., then the identity of "Socrates" is not the object itself, but what the proposition says about Socrates, "is a man". This is substance in the secondary sense, it substantiates the logic, as the premise. Notice that within the logical system being employed, "Socrates" cannot refer to anything other than a man, this is fixed by the premise, and this is the stipulated identity of "Socrates". But if there is a problem with this initial identification, identifying the object which is referred to as "Socrates" as a man, then the soundness of the logic is off.
That is why Aristotle moved to put the identity of the object right into the object itself (primary substance) rather than what was traditional in the logic of the time, which was to make the identity of a thing, what we say about it, (secondary substance). Notice that what we say about a thing is formal, our descriptions are of the thing's form, what the thing is. But a thing always changes, it's form is changing, while the human description is fixed. So he uses the concept of "matter" to account for that changingness (the potential for change). Then "matter" accounts for that aspect of the object which the human mind cannot grasp, and the difference between the object in its own identity, and the object as identified by human beings. We identify the essence, but the thing itself contains accidents which are associated with the matter.
Dualism assumes there are entities that have a reality independent of particulars. In this context it's the Platonic Forms (which Aristotle rejected).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but as an actual particular, not as an independent form. Adapted to a modern scientific context, the universe is that grounding existent and, in its reference frame, is the unmoved mover (with nothing external to it). Note the parallels with a modern scientific analysis:
Quoting Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The final cause was the geometer himself, who acted intentionally. You seem to be reifying intention here - it is the particular that acts (in this case, an intelligent human being), not the form.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The universe is as universal as it gets and it is the precondition for the (particular) subsystems for which change and time are applicable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is a Platonic form that Aristotle rejected. For Aristotle, fruit does not exist in separation from pears and apples, but it can be considered separately (i.e., in abstraction). We might see the potential for fruit in prior particulars, just as a scientist might see the potential for life in earlier states of the universe.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I've addressed the cosmological argument above. Aristotle's rejection of Platonic forms just was his denial of form without matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
For a non-dualist take on the unmoved mover that is sympathetic to what you say above, you may find this essay interesting.
Quoting Andrew M
I read The Theological Origins of Modernity (Michael Allen Gillespie) a few years back. One of the underlying arguments of this book is precisely that modern culture has tended to equate the cosmos itself with the totality of existence, therefore, in some sense, the cosmos ('all there is', according to Carl Sagan's well-known aphorism) has displaced God. (Although the remark about time being observer-dependent seems a re-statement of the claim made in the post about Andrei Linde above.)
I think a natural theologian would be quite justified in arguing, however, that the source of the underlying order which manifests as stars, matter and atoms is not itself disclosed within the cosmos; that whilst science can identify (at least to some extent) the order of the Universe, in the form of universal laws, their source may not be something disclosed by science.
Notice in the blog post above, it is said of the 'unmoved mover' that 'For something to be eternal, it is neither created nor destroyed, but always has and always will exist.' I wonder if there is anything corresponding to this, on a very high level, in current scientific discourse? Because it seems, if the big bang cosmology is true, that it doesn't apply to the Universe as a whole.
I look at this as contradictory. An entity is by definition a particular. I find this to be a common problem with modern day philosophers, they define "dualism" in such a way as to make dualism impossible, then they frown on dualism as if no rational individual would ever accept it.
Quoting Andrew M
The universe, as it is understood in modern cosmology, does not qualify as an unmoved mover according to Aristotle's principles. In Bk. 12, Ch.7 of Metaphysics he describes the unmoved mover as a thinking which has as its object, the same thing as the object of its desire, such that the apparent good is the same as the real good. This is a final cause, as motion is caused by "being loved". Many commentators refer to this as a divine thinking, thinking on thinking, This produces eternal circular motion such as the motion of the planets. Circular motion is eternal because the perfect circle can have no beginning point nor end point. I admit that the no-boundaries theory of the universe is similar to Aristotle's eternal circular motion, but it does not contain the final cause, which is an essential part of "unmoved mover", as the cause of the motion. This is why Aristotle is very clearly dualist, the cause of motion of material objects is a 'thinking'.
Quoting Andrew M
The "universe" is not necessarily the precondition for particulars. We observe particulars, and we can conclude the reality of particulars, from empirical evidence, but we need a principle of unity to conclude that all the particulars are part of a whole, "the universe". Empirical knowledge brings us to assume the reality of particulars, but it gives us nothing to validate "the whole", because we do not see that which causes unity. Without the principle of unity, 'the universe" is an untenable concept, and this is exactly what has happened in modern physics resulting in "the multiverse". Prior to special relativity, "time" was regarded as an absolute, and this was, for practical purposes, the principle of unity, every particular shares the same "now" in time, thus a unity of "what is". This is represented in The Old Testament as God, 'I am that I am', and Plato's Parmenides, 'the Idea is like the day, no matter how many different places partake of the day, it does not affect or change the day itself. Unity is ideal.
That may have been fine with Aristotle who had a natural theology and located his unmoved mover within the universe. As he wrote, "the things nearest the mover are those whose motion is quickest, and in this case it is the motion of the circumference that is the quickest: therefore the mover occupies the circumference." (Physics 8.10.267b.7-8)
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, they are talking about the same thing.
Quoting Wayfarer
The Wikipedia page for the Big Bang has a discussion including the emergent time option ("Certain quantum gravity treatments, such as the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, imply that time itself could be an emergent property.")
Also Sean Carroll canvasses various options and some of their philosophical implications in this paper (for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics).
However, he also says it is 'clear that it is indivisible and is without parts and without magnitude' (which is the basic argument of the whole section); so rather difficult to imagine the sense in which the unmoved mover is 'located within the universe'; for without parts or magnitude, how can something be located?
Don't think I'll trouble with Sean Carroll, I'm not much impressed by his efforts at philosophy, thanks all the same.
The context here is Aristotle's hylomorphic particulars. Aristotle rejected the existence of anything separate from hylomorphic particulars - and specifically Platonic Forms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The thinking is not a Platonic Form, it is the thoughts of the unmoved mover. If the unmoved mover is the universe itself then the universe is also the final cause of the changes that occur within it (in any observer's reference frame). Also scientific theories wouldn't normally reference a final cause as they are usually represented in a Humean framework rather than an Aristotelian framework - a separate philosophical issue to dualism. Sean Carroll briefly discusses the theory framework choice here:
Quoting Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing? - Sean Carroll
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A reference frame provides this (see the experiment I linked earlier). The universe is an inseparable and unchangeable unity (in the universal frame of reference). Whereas in our frame of reference, the universe is separable and changeable.
Just my quick thoughts here, but if the unmoved mover is identified with the universe itself then, from the universe's frame of reference, it would have no location. Location (like time) would have no meaning in that reference frame. However from each of our reference frames, the universe does have parts and magnitude.
Sure, Aristotle rejected Plato's form of dualism, to introduce one which he thought more reasonable. Rejecting Platonic Forms does not make one monist. I reject Platonic Realism but I am still dualist.
Quoting Andrew M
But the unmoved mover is not the universe itself. It cannot be, for the reasons I've given. And a final cause is an intentional act, which is completely inconsistent with our conception of "the universe". Some people say that the universe was created by a final cause, but it is impossible that "the universe" as we understand it, is a final case.
What is said in BK.12, Ch.7, is that the unmoved mover is a final cause, and the type of motion caused by this final cause is circular. Notice the distinction between cause and effect at 1072b: "The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things are move by being moved." (4) "For motion in space is the first of the kinds of change, and motion in a circle the first kind of spatial motion; and this the first mover produces."(9).
What Aristotle has argued, consistently throughout Metaphysics, is that the form of the particular is necessarily temporally prior to material existence of that particular, as a cause of it. His cosmological argument shows that the form of the universe (as a particular material thing) is temporally prior to the material existence of the universe. This means that it is necessary to interpret Aristotle as dualist, because the form of a particular exists independently from the material existence of that particular, prior to that material existence. To insist that Aristotle does not allow the form of the material particular to exist independently of the material particular (as you and dfpolis do), in order to make it appear as if Aristotle's Metaphysics is consistent with modern science, is a seriously mistaken interpretation.
Quoting Andrew M
But a reference frame is artificial, and must be supported with valid principles to be other than arbitrarily chosen. To say that "X" reference frame will give us a unified universe requires that "X" reference frame be supported. There is no theory of everything, so such a reference frame does not exist.
Quoting Andrew M
This is a good example of such a misinterpretation. What he describes here is a problem with locating the unmoved mover as within the universe. He says that things closest to a mover move the quickest, but with circular motion the quickest is the circumference. This leads us toward the conclusion that the unmoved mover is not within the universe.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's right, Aristotle at this point is arguing that the unmoved mover is not within the universe. This is the point where dfpolis and I had extensive disagreement. Df argued that Aristotle taught that the principle of actuality of a thing (its form) came from within the matter of the thing. But this is clearly inconsistent with Aristotle, who argues specifically at Metaphysics Bk.7 Ch.7, that the form of a thing is given to that thing from something else, whether it's a thing produced by art, or by nature
Perhaps you could specifically quote where you think Aristotle argues this. If you simply mean that there is potential for things in prior (actual) states of the universe, then that is not at issue. But neither does that imply dualism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Aristotle doesn't say or imply anything about the unmoved mover not being in the universe. You're ignoring his natural cosmology.
We've been through this already, and I referred you to some of the sections. If you still don't get it, pick up the book and read it from beginning to end. As I said, it's consistent throughout the book.
Going back to this. Is your claim that this temporally prior form is itself separate from particulars? If so, then why would that not be a Platonic form on your view?
It is a particular, but it's prior to and therefore separate from material particulars. It is better understood as a Neo-Platonic Form, because Plato was rather confused in his efforts to relate the universal to the particular (Timaeus). But the Neo-Platonists manage to do this with the fundamental unity "One". See, "One" is both a universal and a particular. It is a Platonic form and a particular. Plato's Parmenides actually leads in this direction.
Quoting Wayfarer
If the form is "realised" in the perfection of the particular, then the form is necessarily prior in time to the particular. It's like when you try to draw a perfect circle, the form, the perfect circle, exists in you mind, prior in time to the one you draw, acting as a cause (in the sense of final cause) of the less than perfect circle which you will draw.
The "Ideal", (in the sense of "the perfect"), is a particular because it cannot be anything other than perfect as this would make it less than ideal. The Ideal is therefore a unique thing, a particular. In the sense that we strive to produce the ideal, the ideal is a cause, and therefore prior in time to the multitude of less than perfect things which we produce in that effort. The vast multitude of the less than perfect circles which we draw may be classified under the universal category of "circle", but this is only because we allow the universal to be less than the Ideal, which is a particular.
This is where Plato was confused in Timaeus, he wanted to put the universal first, and have the particulars emanate from the universal. But Aristotle turned this around, and showed how the particular must be prior, so the Neo-Platonists proceeded with the One as first. We can understand the One as the Ideal.
Yes, if the forms are immanent and inseparable from their particulars, they obviously cannot be temporally prior.
If the forms are transcendent, then logically they are eternal, not temporal, in which case a claim of temporal priority would be incoherent. So, either way, no temporal priority.
Now, Aristotle demonstrated that the Ideas of Pythagorean idealism (the Forms of Platonic realism), cannot be eternal. But that does not force the conclusion that forms are inseparable from material particulars. There is another option, the one which Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians prefer, and that is to conceive of Forms as particulars. Apprehending Forms as particulars is the source of our notion of perfection, the Ideal.
This puts "matter" in an awkward position conceptually, because matter is now not necessary for the existence of the particular. The particular, as a form, the Ideal, is independent from any material particular. Prior to Aristotle, the defining feature of the particular was that it was a body, material. After Aristotle there was the conceptual structure available to conceive of the particular as a pure Form. The pure Form, as a particular, is validated by the good (Plato), what is intended, a particular object (goal), in perfection. The material existence of the particular, however, what comes about as a result of an attempt to produce this perfection, is always deficient. This is the fact that no act is perfect, there is always some degree of mistake.
For many, this points toward matter as the root of evil and mistake. It is assumed that faults inherent within matter itself are responsible for the privations of material objects, and consequently our own failures. I believe that a principle similar to this is fundamental to Manichaeism. Christian theology, on the other hand, teaches that privation is formal, and therefore not intrinsic to matter. It is not the fault of matter, that we cannot produce the perfection desired, but a problem with the form which the human mind apprehends (the form is less than Ideal). This points right to the concept of Original Sin, which might be an attempt at reconciliation between the principles of Christians and Gnostics. In dualism, the cause of evil is a difficult question. Is the cause of sin inherent within the soul of the human being (form), such evil is a necessary product of the free will, or is it produced by the material aspect of the human being, and necessitated in this way?
It's not an easy question, because the human body is already a composite of matter and form, so we have to look toward the principles which produce this composition, and this is beyond what is evident to the human experience. This is why it is a mistake to limit epistemology to what is empirically known, because this would exclude the possibility of knowledge in moral issues. Appropriate mental training, discipline, is required in order that one may proceed logically and coherently within this body of knowledge which is not grounded in empiricism. This is the top section of Plato's divided line.